Female Crafts: Women and Bricolage in late Georgian Britain

Bricolage 

WOMEN AND THINGS.indb 89 20/07/2009 15:40:33


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Female Crafts: Women and Bricolage in 

Late Georgian Britain, 1750–1820 

Ariane Fennetaux 

The recent upsurge of research on the gendered relationship to objects 1 

has paid particular attention to the eighteenth century as the period that 

witnessed both the emergence of “a world of goods” and the definition 

of increasingly separate spheres. 2 The so-called separation of the spheres, 

which emerged out of the eighteenth century, 3 indeed also corresponded 

to some extent to the allocation of the world of things to women. In charge 

of the home and its day-to-day running, women were responsible for the 

material world, as they purchased, managed, mended, arranged, and 

decorated the objects of the interior, while men’s preserve over public affairs 

but also abstraction and intellectual pursuits was thereby reasserted. But 

if scholarship has by now well charted the territory of women as shoppers 

in the long eighteenth century, it is only very recently that some have 

started to show an interest in an equally interesting, if neglected, aspect of 

women’s engagement with the world of things, that is, their involvement 

in the domestic fabrication of objects in the form of crafts and other “polite 

and useful arts.” 4 

Ann Bermingham has underlined the rise of female amateur arts at 

the end of the eighteenth century. 5 Together with the more traditional 

embroidery, middle to upper-class ladies increasingly turned their hands 

to japanning, gilding, fancywork, filigree, and shell-work. Neglected by 

historians and art historians alike, these activities are often regarded 

as mere pastimes that enabled women to while away their time while 

gilding the cage in which they were expected to reside. 6 But crafts should 

not be dismissed as unequivocal expressions of women’s boredom in the 

domestic interior; they are rich in ideological undertones which should be 

embraced. Unlike the morally suspect activity of shopping, these forms of 

engagement with objects were seen as virtuous and their encouragement 


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women and things, 1750–1950 

participated in the promotion of domesticated femininity. Yet, far from 

being expressions of women’s mute acceptance of the gender role which 

these practices seemed to ascribe to them, crafts could be subverted and 

used by women to their own ends. In the absence of precise concurring 

biographical information on their authors, ascribing specific meanings 

to the productions left by individual women from the past can prove 

hazardous. 7 This does not mean, however, that these crafts should not or 

cannot be subjected to interpretation. In this essay the spread of female 

crafts in late Georgian Britain will be studied in socio-anthropological 

terms and read in terms of the Levi-Straussian notion of bricolage, 8 that 

is, not as evidence of a base, mindless, adherence to the material but of 

a meaningful process whereby women not only expressed themselves as 

individuals but above all organized, appropriated, and made sense of the 

world around them. 

In this chapter, I first examine the spread of female crafts in Britain and 

highlight how these were often contrasted to potentially dangerous activities 

like shopping as a sort of moralized version of women’s engagement with 

the material. The ideological agenda that underlay those crafts will then 

be further explored and the encouragement of female crafts dedicated to 

decorating domestic objects will be shown to participate in the promotion 

of domesticated femininity. Yet despite this ideological construction, crafts 

such as japanning or shell-work allowed women to experiment with fields 

and ideas that were traditionally associated with masculine pursuits. As 

such they should be seen as material strategies developed by women 

to appropriate through bricolage concerns not usually associated with 

femininity or domesticity—thereby belying any simplistic term to term 

opposition between private and public, male and female, but also between 

the material and the intellectual. 

Women and Objects in Georgian Britain 

Needlework was the cornerstone of female education in the early-modern 

period. Young girls were taught to sew, stitch, and embroider from an early 

age and these skills were then practiced all through a woman’s life. Even if a 

gentlewoman was not expected to make the household’s linen with her own 

hands, she was still supposed to be able to supervise the work of her servants 

in that field and to take on decorative needlework such as embroidery. 9 

Eighteenth-century sources thus abound in examples of elite women being 

admired for and taking much pride in their needlework. The courtier 

Mary Delany was an expert at her needle, embroidering the petticoats and 

stomachers of her court mantuas in intricate polychrome designs, while she 

also decorated footstools and chairs for her house or as presents to friends. 10 


Ariane Fennetaux 93 

In the eighteenth century, the domestic production of middle-class and 

elite women was not restricted to dress or to embroidery. Techniques such 

as japanning, gilding, fancywork, filigree, and shell-work were but a few 

of the useful arts that Georgian women practiced alongside the traditional 

activity of needlework. Mrs Delany, who was particularly prolific, practiced 

japanning as well as shell-work with which she decorated picture frames or 

brackets, but also completed more ambitious projects like grottoes and the 

decorations of whole rooms using shells in imitation of stucco or carving. 

Her private correspondence testifies to her relentless industry: “I have 

worked like a dragon this week at my lustre and completed it on Thursday,” 

Mrs Delany wrote to her sister in 1750. 11 She was not alone. Lady Hertford 

similarly wrote of women’s industry: “within doors we amuse ourselves 

… in gilding picture frames, and other small things, this is so much in 

fashion with us at present that I believe if our patience and pockets hold 

out, we shall gild all the cornices, table and chairs and stool about the 

house.” 12 Characteristic of Georgian women’s dedicated involvement in 

domestic production was the scene witnessed by Lord Aldoborough on 

his return to Belan House where he found “Louisa Wingfield at work, 

Martha painting a card table, Emily at other work … [and] the grotto going 

on … [with the arrival of shell] from Waterford.” 13 In the first decades of 

the nineteenth century, this indefatigable production could reach almost 

silly extremes according to some. In a letter written in 1826, Caroline Anne 

Bowles expressed her bewilderment at the unremitting industry of her 

female contemporaries: 

Heaven have mercy on us! All womankind is whirling around in a vortex 

of religious dissipation … One lady’s drawing room is full of little charity 

boxes, placed here and there amongst the ornamental litter; another keeps 

a stall of trumpery knick-knacks—“ladies’ work”—to lay her visitors under 

contribution; another asks you to work for her (audacious!) and then a whole 

bevy of damsels sit congregated together, pasting and painting, sewing 

and gilding and what not to get up a booth for the next religious fair. 14 

The success of those crafts is also evidenced by the growing publication of 

manuals helping women to master those techniques. Books instructing women 

into the art of japanning started to appear at the end of the seventeenth century. 

A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing by John Stalker and George Parker, 

published in 1688, thus contained tips as well as a series of prints to be used 

to decorate objects such as “the lid of a powder box,” “the lid of a patch box,” 

“a Standish for pen, ink and paper,” or “a frame for a looking glass.” 15 In the 

course of the century, various manuals specifically addressed to ladies were 

published telling their readers how to paint and cut prints, glue or transfer 

them onto any object before varnishing it. The Accomplish’d Female Instructor, 

published in 1704, thus had a whole chapter on the art of japanning in which 


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could be read: “and by this rule you may … paint landskips [sic] with woods, 

cottages, rivers, trees, hills, sun, moon, stars or the like on tables, stands, 

cabinets, scrutores [sic], looking glasses, chests of drawers, or any smooth 

thing as you shall see fit.” 16 A manual published in 1730 under the name of 

Mrs Artlove “at the request of several ladies of distinction” was specifically 

dedicated to “the art of Japanning, varnishing, pollishing [sic] and gilding” 

and had all sorts of recipes for glues, varnishes and colors. 17 The introduction 

to The Ladies’ Amusement or the Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy, published in 

1760, shows the peak of success that such feminine pastimes had reached by 

the second half of the century: 

The art of japanning and decorating with various designs has prevailed 

so much of late from the superb cabinet to the smallest article of toilet, 

that it is needless to apologize for the publication of a work, which seems 

calculated at once to serve every purpose of compositions for this use. 18 

“How-to” manuals multiplied, diversified, and democratized as the 

eighteenth century went on: women could not only learn to prepare glues, 

varnishes, concoct all sorts of tints and dyes, decorate objects with prints 

or gild, but they also became instructed in filigree, shell–work, and could 

even learn how to make wax or gum flowers. The Young Ladies’ School of 

Arts, Containing a Great Variety of Practical Receipts in Gum Flowers, Filligree, 

Japanning, Shellwork, Gilding, Painting …, published by Hannah Robertson in 

1767 in Edinburgh, is typical of such manuals. It gave tips on how to decorate 

with filigree “pictures or glass frames,” provided recipes “to make varnish 

of any colour for the dressing boxes etc.,” and explained how “various sorts 

of flowers may be formed from shells” to make “beautiful festoons, brackets, 

picture-frames etc.” 19 All the tips for such pastimes were also included in 

advice literature which compiled recipes for anything from gilding and 

japanning to making jellied eels or preparing cosmetics and physics. 

Indeed, rather tellingly in some manuals, Japanning, shell-work, and 

filigree were often bracketed with traditional domestic arts such as cooking 

or making preserves. The conflation is symptomatic of the ideological 

agenda that underlay these activities. As opposed to women’s fateful 

profligacy, home production was a socially acceptable, morally endorsed 

expression of women’s materialism. If eighteenth-century women’s role as 

shoppers made them a prime target for satirists and moralists alike, who 

derided their supposed materialistic acquisitiveness and often portrayed 

them as threats to the good economy of the household, and indeed of the 

country, their involvement with the material upkeep and beautifying of 

the household in the form of making up, embroidering or decorating was 

seen as commendable and virtuous. Because of the desirable values which 

these crafts encoded, they were encouraged and therefore participated in 

fostering domesticated femininity. 


The Gilding of the Cage? 


Embroidery has been shown to be openly associated to the inculcation of 

feminine virtue. 20 In the eighteenth century, samplers, meant to train young 

girls in the various stitches of embroidery, often did so by setting them to 

embroider moralistic or biblical scenes extolling the values of obedience. 

Virtuous mottoes, quotes from the Scriptures or the Lord’s Prayer 

were thus embroidered by young girls instead of alphabets or rows of 

decorative stitches as in the previous century. 21 Unsurprisingly eighteenthcentury 

domestic conduct books praised needlework and contrasted it to 

gambling or going to assemblies, as it kept women in their proper spheres: 

that of home. James Fordyce, the epitome of such ideological discourses, 

encouraged women to carry out needlework and be “simple enough 

… to be in love with home and seek their happiness in their duty.” 22 In 

her Practical Education published in 1798, moralist Maria Edgeworth has 

a whole chapter on female accomplishments in which she wrote that 

women: 

should rather be encouraged, by all means to cultivate those tastes which can 

attach them to their home and which can preserve them from the miseries of 

dissipation. Every sedentary occupation must be valuable to those who are to lead 

sedentary lives; and every art, however trifling in itself, which tends to enliven and 

embellish domestic life, must be advantageous, not only to the female sex, but to 

society in general. As far as accomplishments can contribute to all or any of these 

excellent purposes, they must be just objects of attention in early education. 23 

Crafts, whether they be fancywork, shell-work, or japanning, were thus 

regarded a woman’s proper ambition: the house was the place for female selffulfilment. 

In an essay published in 1810 and in which he extolled fancywork 

(another name for Japanning), Rudolph Ackerman insisted on the supposed 

“good consequence” of such useful pastime: 

Let us for a moment reflect on the good consequence, which a fondness for fancy 

work is calculated to produce in future. Ladies who have once engaged in this 

innocent and amusing occupation, which daily affords such abundant scope for 

new inventions, will never relinquish it, from ornamental subjects they are led 

imperceptibly to the making of useful articles so that it is no uncommon thing 

to enter a drawing, breakfast or dining room, where the fire screens, card racks, 

chimney ornaments, boxes, picture frames and a variety of other objects are made, 

painted, and decorated by the ingenious mistress of the house or her daughters. 24 

The equation between feminine virtue and home-made objects was inscribed in 

the very production of those objects since it often encapsulated the paramount 

values of domesticated femininity such as a woman’s supposed superior taste 

in home decoration but also thrift, patience, and discipline. 


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In manuals, crafts were sometimes presented as the thrifty alternative 

to buying overpriced ready-made objects from shops. The author of The 

Ladies’ Amusement or the Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy thus wrote: “the 

following directions well attended to, will not only furnish an agreeable 

amusement but enable any one … to embellish a plain surface with 

ornaments superior to those we purchase at so great an expense from 

India and elsewhere.” 25 Instead of giving in to their potentially ruinous 

acquisitiveness and what was seen as women’s inordinate desire for 

always more objects, such transformative crafts (plain pieces of material 

were embroidered, prints were made into snuff-boxes, shells into picture 

frames or brackets) tamed women into good domestic economy based on 

industry and thrift. 26 

Rozsika Parker has shown that the minuteness of needlework, the 

patient stitch-by-stitch copying into the drawn pattern of the embroidered 

design, made the practice of needlework intrinsically disciplining. 27 Similar 

concentration, patience, and order were required by the other female 

crafts. Filigree, for instance, demanded many different delicate operations 

since sheets of paper had to be first tinted in several colors, glazed, cut in 

tiny strips that then had to be carefully rolled up and delicately pinned 

onto the object to form intricate designs. For all these, as for japanning, 

it was “necessary to be very particular and careful in each operation” as 

a manual warned. 28 Shell-work was no less particular: cleaning shells, 

sorting them according to type, size, or color, varnishing or painting them, 

and gluing them to make flowers or other decorations were delicate, timeconsuming 

tasks that required attentiveness and dedication. The shell vase 

of flowers made by Mrs Bonnel and her daughter in 1779–81, kept in the 

Victoria and Albert Museum, gives some idea of the time and minuteness 

of some undertakings (see Figure 5.1). Some creations took several years. 

The Duchess of Richmond’s shell grotto, for instance, took her and her 

daughter seven years to complete. So all female crafts to some extent can 

be regarded as encoding the values of discipline and order associated with 

the domesticated woman. Essentially home-ground, these activities kept 

women at home for long hours and thus physically contained them in the 

privacy of the house. Some of the artifacts created were even a sort of mise 

en abyme of this domestication, as they represented houses and sometimes 

included female figures. Together with virtuous mottoes on obedience and 

piety, eighteenth-century samplers were often embroidered with visual 

motifs such as houses, pets, and well-maintained gardens that symbolized 

domesticity, fidelity, and controlled nature. 29 In a typical example of such 

work dating from 1789 (see Figure 5.2), the little girl has embroidered 

some pious verse praising dutiful obedience to and imitation of her 

mother—in particular as regards needlework—while the bottom part 

shows an eighteenth-century house, a tree cut in a perfect triangle, potted 


5.1 Mrs Bonnel Beal and Miss Bonnel Harvey, shellwork vase, circa 1779–81 

(89 × 54 × 36 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, inv: W 70. 1981. 

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Reproduced by permission 


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5.2 Mary Ann Body, Sampler. Wool embroidered with silk, 1789 (35.6 × 31.75 cm). 

Victoria and Albert Museum, inv: T. 292-1916. © Victoria and Albert Museum, 

London. Reproduced by permission 

plants, a couple of parrots and a pet dog. 30 Some shell-work creations 

similarly represent female domesticity. In 1757 Anne Reckless Emlen, a 

Philadelphian woman, built a miniature house surmounted by her initials 

and the date (see Figure 5.3) using shells, gum, and paper. 31 The long hours 

it must have kept its author at home, the identification of the house by 

the woman’s initials inscribed on its pediment, and the presence of three 

female dolls about the house turn the piece into a powerful representation 

of the domestic reality of eighteenth-century women’s lives. 



5.3 Ann Reckless Emlen’s House. Shell, gum and paper, 1757, Stenton. Courtesy 

of the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of 

Pennsylvania at STENTON. Reproduced by permission 

Yet, although they were centered on the aesthetization of objects in the 

domestic space, female crafts did not quite confine women to the house 

since procuring the materials needed for their various projects took women 

outside of the domestic sphere. A real market for amateur arts appeared in 

Britain towards the end of the eighteenth century. 32 “The Nine Living Muses 

of Great Britain” that opened in London in 1779, or Rudolph Ackerman’s 

famous Repository of the Arts that was situated on 101 Strand, were two 

examples of such specialty shops in which women could buy inks, varnishes, 


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gum Arabic, brushes or prints for their various artistic endeavors. 33 Also, 

even though domestic creations were sometimes contrasted to ruinous 

acquisitiveness for ready-made objects, some of the materials involved in 

the crafts were actually rather costly: the shells required for shell-work 

in particular were very expensive. Mrs Delany made several comments 

on the cost of shells in her correspondence. 34 The grander projects such 

as grotto work or the à la ronde house built by the Parminster sisters in 

the last years of the eighteenth century required thousands of shells and 

were therefore extremely costly ventures. 35 Moreover, these arts actually 

enabled women to escape the confines of the house since some productions 

received public recognition when grottoes attracted curious visitors, for 

instance, or when the productions of some women were shown in public 

exhibitions, as those of a woman named Mrs Dards who had two exhibitions 

in London in 1800 and 1802, for which catalogues were published and 

sold. 36 

So the female crafts that developed at the end of the eighteenth century 

should not merely be seen as a sign of women blindly adhering to the 

values of good economy and domesticity that gender constructions were 

ascribing to them. Indeed, crafts could be appropriated by women, often 

allowing them to trespass into fields not traditionally associated with 

them. 

Women and Bricolage 

Rozsika Parker’s research on needlework has shown that despite its openly 

pedagogical and disciplining agenda, embroidery could be subverted 

by women to their own ends. An 1830 sampler kept in the Victoria and 

Albert Museum provides a vivid illustration of this subversion. 37 Although 

the piece of embroidery contains references to obedience and piety, 

these are not formulaic and impersonal but are integrated in a poignant 

autobiographical narrative of its author’s ill treatment when in service, 

where she expresses in heartfelt terms her moral and spiritual sufferings. 

Similarly, the female crafts that developed at the end of the eighteenth 

century could be appropriated by their authors to express things that 

went beyond conformity to gender constructions. But if they did provide 

a means of personal expression to women, the non-verbal quality of these 

crafts makes interpretation of individual pieces but tentative. 38 What can 

be approached are the wider social issues at stake in those activities and in 

particular how crafts could be ways for women to gain access to spheres of 

activities that were not otherwise readily open to them. 

Indeed, not restricted to the socially acceptable idea of women’s interest 

for tasteful interior decoration, needlework, shell-work or Japanning were 



also indirect ways for women to trespass into a traditionally male preserve, 

that of science, especially the apparently benign area of natural science. 

Needlework and botany are a good illustration of this: because a knowledge 

of flowers was encouraged in women whom it provided with pretty, varied 

subjects for embroidery, botany was one of the earliest fields of science 

in which women started to gain some kind of public recognition for their 

endeavors. 39 Priscilla Wakefield’s 1796 An Introduction to Botany, which was 

based on Linnaeus’s classification of plants, is an example of the way this 

branch of science was becoming acceptable for women by the end of the 

century. 40 Despite discourses pitting the aesthetic (female) approach against 

the scientific (male) approach to flowers, crafts could overlap into science, 

as acknowledged by the great eighteenth-century naturalist Joseph Banks 

himself who thought that Mrs Delany’s cut paper flowers were so exact that 

they could be used by the naturalist to describe and classify specimens. 41 

As with flowers, there seems to have been the same attempt in some 

discourses to maintain a dichotomy between the aesthetic and scientific 

qualities of shells: Griffith Hughes, who wrote The Natural History of Barbados 

in 1750, thus somewhat ambiguously defended shell-work against accusations 

of uselessness by praising its artistic value, thereby also reasserting masculine 

preserve on the scientific knowledge of shells. He starts his chapter on shells: 

“It may be expected that I should here consider these beautiful productions 

in a physical light, and as they are a curiosity belonging to the cabinets of 

the Virtuosi: yet I shall beg leave to speak of them, as they contribute to the 

amusement of the ladies”; 42 while pitting one against the other, he still writes 

his scientific description of exotic shells, hoping that not only “the inquisitive 

philosopher” but also “the female artificer” will benefit from it. 43 Of course, 

men’s conchological pursuits, although considered as serious and scientific, 

were not devoid of ambiguity themselves as far as the decorative, aesthetic 

aspect of shells went, as illustrated by the plates of the catalogue of Dutch 

apothecary Albert Seba’s impressive collection of natural curiosities published 

between 1734 and 1765, in which shells are sometimes found arranged in 

festoons and figures that are very reminiscent of shell-work (see Figure 5.4). 44 

The scientific and aesthetic could overlap. Conversely, women showed an 

interest in shells, not only for the aesthetic quality of their shapes or colors, but 

also as naturalists who collected them in cabinets like their male counterparts, 

appreciated their infinite variety, and sometimes knew their scientific names. 45 

And as with needlework that opened the door to botany, shell-work can be 

seen as having provided a socially acceptable interest in shells that enabled 

some women, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, to gain access to 

conchology. 46 

Needlework, shell-work or indeed japanning, some of whose plates 

included entomology illustrations, 47 could thus combine an aesthete’s interest 

and a naturalist’s curiosity and they were thought by some to be as valid as any 


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5.4 Albertus Seba, Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio, et 

inconibus artificiosissimis expressio, per universam physices historiam, vol. 3, plate XXXVI. 

© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 43.K.3. Reproduced by permission 

heroic (and therefore also masculine) pursuit. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 

thus wrote in 1759: “I confess I am woman enough to think the naturalist who 

searches after variegated butterflies, or even the lady who adorns her grotto 

with shades of shells … throw away time in a more rational manner than any 

hero, ancient or modern.” 48 

Although somewhat offhandedly, some women went as far as actually 

comparing their shell-work endeavors to the feats of arms of military 

commanders. In 1757, after the glorious victories of Prussia over France 

and Austria at the outset of the Seven Years’ War, Mary Delany wrote to her 

sister: 

The prince of Bevern’s success following the King of Prussia’s has raised all 

our spirits. I wish to god our own countrymen made as good a figure. 

Lady Andover and I have entered on a piece of work to surprise the Duchess of 

Portland on her return, which is flourishing. It is a frame of a picture, with shell 



work in the manner of the frame to your china case; and we are as eager in sorting 

our shells, placing them in their proper degrees, making lines, ramparts, as the 

King of Prussia in the midst of his army, and as fond of our own compositions. 49 

Although the comparison between the battalions and the rows of shells may 

strike us as a somewhat flippant piece of witticism not to be taken at face 

value, it draws attention to another way in which female crafts intersected 

with traditionally masculine concerns: both japanning and shell-work were 

closely linked to the country’s foreign affairs and more particularly to the 

expansion of Britain’s overseas empire. 

Most prized among shells were exotic specimens that had unusual shapes 

and vivid colors. These were imported or brought back from the Caribbean 

by friends and relatives, in particular, navy officers. In her correspondence, 

Mary Delany thus rejoiced to have been introduced in Bath to “a seafaring 

captain called Edwards who has promised me a box of shells from Guinea, 

Jamaica etc,” 50 while the splendid specimens found on the grotto of the 

third Duchess of Richmond in Goodwood depended for a great part on 

her links to officers in the British navy. 51 In 1739, Captain Knowles of HMS 

Diamond brought a shipload of shells back to the Dukes of Richmond 

and Bedford from one of his trips to the South Seas which provided shells 

for the splendid grotto. 52 Thus although apparently trivial, feminine, and 

domestic, the fashion for shell-work that spread in Britain in the eighteenth 

and nineteenth centuries cannot be separated from the country’s imperial 

expansion. 

Japanning can similarly be linked to the expansion of Britain’s empire as 

the technique was inspired by lacquer objects first imported into the country 

by the East India Company. Many prints provided in japanning manuals had 

an exotic feel to them since, as a treatise explained, with those Chinese and 

Indian designs “greater liberties may be taken because luxuriance of fancy 

recommends their production more than propriety.” 53 Thus collections of 

prints featured countless oriental-looking birds, dragons, pig-tailed characters, 

and fantastical pagodas. 54 Of course these designs fell into the category of the 

chinoiserie rather than that of the authentically oriental. They were Britain’s 

interpretation of Chinese patterns: their exaggerated, bizarre quality can be 

seen as evidence of the country re-interpreting and appropriating oriental art. 

As recently argued about exotic wallpapers produced in England in imitation 

of Chinese ones, this coming to terms with otherness was linked to emerging 

notions of empire building. 55 That this re-interpretation should take place in 

the supposedly feminine, private sphere of the home not only contradicts the 

traditional claim of strictly gendered spheres but also the idea that these crafts 

were futile, meaningless activities. Beyond giving women access to natural 

science, Japanning and shell-work were also ways for women to domesticate 

the exotic. Turning West Indian shells or Chinese-looking prints into brackets, 


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dressing boxes or fire-screens to decorate the interior of British mansions, 

these crafts in effect invited Britain’s colonial expansion home. 

I would argue that this domestication was effected by women through what 

Claude Lévi-Strauss calls bricolage and which the anthropologist contrasts 

to “engineering” as two different, yet equally valid, ways of approaching 

and understanding the world. Unlike engineering which is abstract and 

dematerialized, bricolage rests on a “science of the concrete” which “builds 

up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets, but by using the 

remains and debris of events, in French ‘des bribes et des morceaux,’ or odds 

and ends in English, fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or 

a society.” 56 Female crafts such as japanning or shell-work indeed can be 

seen as Lévi-Straussian bricolages, that is, techniques of assemblage that used 

material debris of Britain’s imperial history such as exotic shells or printed 

chinoiseries to make decorative objects for the interior. Cut and pasted, colored, 

varnished, and arranged according to personal taste, these were introduced 

into the domestic sphere by women who thus appropriated these “oddments 

left over from human [here also masculine] endeavours,” this “sub-set of the 

culture.” 57 

So that shell-work or japanning were not just by-products of the country’s 

colonial expansion, in their own ways, they also took a direct part in it. In these 

female crafts, colonization, which rested on exploitation and the negation of 

indigenous culture or context, took a material, almost literal, expression. Decontexualized, 

prints and shells were incorporated into specifically British 

socio-artistic practices. 58 Glued on brackets, festoons or frames, shells were 

re-contextualized, arranged to please the shell-worker’s fancy, and could 

be combined with others that, in nature, might not be found on the same 

coasts or even in the same oceans. Just like chinoiseries that were a British 

interpretation of Chinese designs that betrayed the gradual prevalence of a 

British re-interpretation of the foreign, shell-work was an aristocratic practice 

that was underpinned by colonialist visions of the exotic. Although women 

did not take a direct role in their country’s imperial expansion, their artistic 

endeavors, through bricolage, manifested the ideological agenda that underlay 

Britain’s colonial enterprise. 

Conclusion 

About women’s special relationship to domestic objects, Amanda Vickery 

writes: “A gentlewoman’s skills were characteristically embodied in that 

‘unskilled’ arena, the household. Small wonder if, in consequence, she turned to 

personal and household artefacts to create a world of meanings and ultimately 

to transmit her history.” 59 What I would like to suggest is that feminine 

engagement with the world of things in the form of crafts was not only a way 



for women to transmit their personal histories, but was also a way in which 

women commented upon, made sense of, and appropriated that of their sex 

and more broadly that of their country. Lévi-Strauss insists that bricolage has 

always a limited “repertoire” which it “has to use … however, whatever the 

task in hand, because it has nothing else at its disposal.” 60 Similarly, domestic 

objects often represented the only “repertoire” women had at their disposal. 

Like the bricoleur, women found in things a means of personal expression, 61 

but they could also use them to reflect on their domestication through mise 

en abyme and miniaturization, as we have seen in the case of embroidered or 

shell-work houses. 62 Finally, crafts could be a way for women to dabble with 

fields that were not traditionally associated with femininity or domesticity, 

while this “science of the concrete” also offered them a means to appropriate 

and take part in the history of their country. 

Notes 

1. To cite but two trans-historical studies: Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough, The Sex of Things: 

Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); 

Katharine A. Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames, eds., The Material Culture of Gender, the Gender of 

Material Culture (Winterthur, Delaware: Winterthur Museum, and Hanover: University Press of 

New England, 1997). 

2. The phrase is borrowed from John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods 

(London: Routledge, 1993). On women and objects, see, for instance, Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, 

Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia 

University Press, 1997). More recently, see John Styles and Amanda Vickery, eds., Gender, Taste and 

Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University 

Press, 2006); and Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, eds., Women and Material Culture 1660–1830 

(Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 

3. The late Georgian period corresponded to the period from which the contentious book by Hall 

and Davidoff dates the apparition of gendered separate spheres: Catherine Hall and Leonore 

Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: 

Hutchinson, 1987). 

4. The phrase “polite and useful art” is borrowed from Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in 

the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 

The AHRC project led by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art in London, 

dedicated to the study of the domestic interior in the modern period, is an example of such recent 

interest (see, in particular, the focus group led by Amanda Vickery). For recent articles on the 

subject, see Lisa L. Moore, “Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships,” Eighteenth- 

Century Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 49–70; and Clive D. Edwards, “‘Home is Where the Art is’: Women, 

Handicrafts and Home Improvements 1750–1900,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 1 (2006): 11–21. 

5. Bermingham, Learning to Draw. 

6. With the notable exception of Ann Bermingham’s book on drawing, most books dedicated to 

women’s crafts are mostly descriptive. See, for instance, Jane Toller, The Regency and Victorian 

Crafts: The Genteel Female – Her Arts and Pursuits (London: Ward Lock, 1969). 

7. See the recent interpretation of Delany’s cut flowers as indicative of possible homosexuality, in 

Moore, “Queer Gardens.” 

8. The concept of “bricolage” is borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ La pensée sauvage, in which the 

French anthropologist challenges the Western-centered dismissal of the concrete, unscientific, 

apparently non-rational approach to the world evident in some cultures. He argues that bricolage, 

although “hands on” and grounded in the material rather than the intellectual, is not mindless but 

leads to meaning construction. 


106 


9. Thus Dr John Gregory wrote in 1774: “the intention of your being taught needlework, knitting and 

such like is not on account of the intrinsic value of all you do with your hands, which is trifling, 

but to enable you to judge more perfectly of that kind of work and to direct the execution of it in 

others. Another principle end is to enable you to fill up, in a tolerable agreeable way, some of the 

many solitary hours that you must necessarily pass at home,” Dr Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his 

Daughters (2nd edition, London, 1774), 51. 

10. On Mary Delany, see Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany, Her Life and Her Flowers (1980; London: British 

Museum Publication, 1992); and Lady Llanover, Specimens of Rare and Beautiful Needlework Designed 

and Executed by Mrs Delany and her Friend, the Hon Mrs Hamilton Photographed from the Originals 

in the Possession of Lady Hall of Llanover (London: Dickinson, 1860). See also her correspondence 

in Mary Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, with Interesting 

Reminiscences of King George III and Queen Charlotte, ed. Lady Llanover (London: Richard Bentley, 

1861–62), and the second series published a year later, Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary 

Granville, Mrs Delany, Second Series, ed. Lady Llanover, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1862). 

11. Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence (first series), vol. 2, 604. 

12. Quoted in J. Cornforth, and J. Fowler, eds., English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century (London, 

Barrie & Jenkins, 1974), 219. 

13. Dana Arnold, The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society (1998; Stroud: Sutton 

Publishing, 2003), 93. 

14. Letter from Caroline Anne Bowles Southey to Robert Southey, April 18, 1826, The Correspondence of 

Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co, 1881), 104. 

15. John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, ed. H.D. Molesworth (1688; 

London: Alec Tiranti, 1960). 

16. [R.G], The Accomplish’d Female Instructor or a Very Useful Companion for Ladies, Gentlemen and Others 

in Two Parts (London: J. Knapton, 1704), 168. 

17. Mrs Artlove, The Art of Japanning, Varnishing, Pollishing [sic], and Gilding being a Collection of very 

Plain Directions and Receipts (London: T. Warner, 1730). 

18. Anon., The Ladies’ Amusement or the Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy Illustrated in Upwards of 15,000 

Different Designs on 200 Copper Plates (London: Robert Sayer, 1760), 3. 

19. Hannah Robertson, The Young Ladies’ School of Arts, Containing a Great Variety of Practical Receipts in 

Gum Flowers, Filligree, Japanning, Shellwork, Gilding, Painting … (Edinburgh: Mrs Robertson, 1767), 

5, 17, 18. 

20. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: 

Routledge, 1989). 

21. See, for instance, the 1752 sampler in the Victoria and Albert Museum which is embroidered with 

the Lord’s Prayer (inv. 288.1886). 

22. James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women (London: D. Payne, 1766), vol. 1, 115. 

23. Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1798), vol. 2, 523. 

24. Rudolph Ackerman, “Observations on Fancy Work as Affording an Agreeable Occupation for the 

Ladies,” Repository of Arts 8 (March 1810): 193. 

25. Anon., The Ladies’ Amusement, 4. 

26. Michael McKeon has underlined how economy and domesticity had the same etymological 

root, both coming from the Greek word Oikos (house). Michael McKeon, The Secret History 

of Domesticity: Public and Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins 

University Press, 2005). 

27. Parker, The Subversive Stitch. 


29. See, for instance, the 1785 sampler embroidered by a young girl named Elizabeth Brain in the 

Victoria and Albert Museum that shows a house in an idealistic garden (inv: V&A T. 750-1974); 

some also have figures of authority such as the 1800 sampler in the Victoria and Albert Museum 

that reads “this is my dear father” and shows a man in uniform standing next to a house (V&A 

1373-1900). 



30. The embroidered text reads: “Dear Mother I am young and cannot show such work as I unto your 

goodness owe. Be pleased to smile on this my small endeavour. I’ll strive to learn and be obedient 

ever. If all mankind would live in mutual love this world would much resemble that above. Mary 

Ann Body, her work in ye 9 year of her age, 1789.” 

31. The house is discussed in Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of 

Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 20. 

See also Laura Keim Stutman, “Two Philadelphia Shadow Box Grottoes,” Antiques, March 2002: 

104–7. 

32. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 127–81. 

33. Ibid., 138. 

34. About a visit to a collection of shells she goes to see with the Duchess of Portland in Pall Mall, she 

wrote: “There were ten small drawers full—the number of shells inconsiderable; not to be called 

a collection as many shells were wanted but the shells were perfect of their kind, and some rare 

sorts, and so they had need be for the price set on them is three hundred pounds!”, in Hayden, 

Mrs Delany, Her Life and Her Flowers, 102. 

35. Thus William Shenstone noted that a lady’s grotto cost three times as much as her house. Quoted 

in Arnold, The Georgian Country House, 98. On “A la Ronde,” see Christopher Hussey, “A la Ronde,” 

Country Life 83 (1938): 448–52. 

36. Mrs Dards, A Catalogue of Shell-Work, &c. by Mrs Dards (London: H. Fry, 1800). Another catalogue 

was published in 1802. Both are in the British Library. 

37. The sampler was embroidered by a woman named Elizabeth Parker circa 1830. V&A T. 6-1956. 

For more on this piece of embroidery, see Maureen Daly Goggin, “One English Woman’s Story 

in Silken Ink: Filling in the Missing Strands in Elizabeth Parker’s circa 1830 Sampler,” Sampler 

and Antique Needlework Quarterly 8, no. 4 (December 2002): 8–49; and Nigel Llewellyn, “Elizabeth 

Parker’s Sampler: Memory, Suicide and the Presence of the Artist,” in Material Memories: Design 

and Evocation, eds. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsle, 59–71 (Oxford: Berg, 

1999). 

38. See note 7. 

39. On women and botany, see Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters 

and Botany in England 1760 to 1860 (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Patricia 

Fara, Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (London: Random House, 

2004). 

40. Priscilla Wakefield, An Introduction to Botany in a Series of Familiar Letters (Dublin: Messrs P. Wogan 

and P. Byrne, 1796). 

41. On Delany’s flowers, see Hayden, Mrs Delany, Her Life and Her Flowers. On Joseph Banks’ comment, 

see Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, 44. 

42. Griffith Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados (London: printed for the author, 1750), 267. 

43. Ibid., 269. 

44. Albertus Seba, Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio, et inconibus artificiosissimis 

expressio, per universam physices historiam (Amsterdam, 1734–65), vol. 3, plates XXXV, XXXVI and 

XXXVII. 

45. On collecting, see Beth Fowkes Tobin, “Collecting Shells, Femininity and Science,” paper given at 

the Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830 conference held in Chawton House in July 2004. For 

an example of women’s multi-faceted interest in shells, see the letter to her niece, Mary Dewes, in 

which Mary Delany thanks the girl for her mother’s present of a beautiful shell for her collection 

whose “name is Helix Arbustorum,” she writes. Letter to Mary Dewes Port, January 22, 1778. 

Autobiography and Correspondence, Second Series, vol. 2, 345. 

46. See Vera Norwood, “Shells and Women: The Philadelphia Conchological Illustrators,” in Martinez 

and Ames, The Material Culture of Gender, 393–410. 

47. The Ladies’ Amusement or the Whole Art of Japanning thus contained a series comprised of 

entomology plates with a key giving a description of the insects illustrated. 

48. Lady Mary Pierrepont Wortley Montagu, letter to James Steuart, July 19, 1759 in The Letters and 

Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Lord Wharncliffe (London: Richard Bentley, 1837), vol. 3, 

286. 


108 


49. Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence (series 1), vol. 3, 469. 

50. Hayden, Mrs Delany, Her Life and Her Flowers, 102. 

51. Hussey, “A la Ronde,” 451. 

52. Hazelle Jackson, Shell Houses and Grottoes (Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 2001), 11. 


54. See, for instance, John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, or George 

Bickham, “a set of japanning prints” in The Œconomy of Arts or a Companion for the Ingenious of 

Either Sex (London: Bickham, Mays Building, Covent Garden, 1747). 

55. Ellen Kennedy Johnson, “The Taste for Bringing the Outside in: Nationalism, Gender and 

Landscape Wallpaper 1700–1825,” in Women and Material Culture 1660–1830, eds. Jennie Batchelor 

and Cora Kaplan, 119–33 (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 

56. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962; London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1966), 21–2. 

“Le propre de la pensée mythique, comme du bricolage sur le plan pratique, est d’élaborer des 

ensembles structurés non pas directement avec d’autres ensembles structurés, mais en utilisant des 

résidus et des débris d’événements: ‘odds and ends’, dirait l’anglais, ou en français, des bribes et 

des morceaux, témoins fossiles de l’histoire d’un individu ou d’une société,” Claude Lévi-Strauss, 

La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), 36. 

57. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 19: “le bricoleur s’adresse à une collection de résidus d’ouvrages 

humains, c’est-à-dire à un sous-ensemble de la culture,” Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, 33. 

58. In this regard, shell-work functionned in a similar fashion to collecting exotic plants as studied 

by Beth Fowkes Tobin in Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters 1760–1820 

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 168–97. 

59. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter. Women’s Lives in Georgian England (London: Yale 

University Press, 1998), 194. 

60. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 17. 

61. Lévi-Strauss writes that the bricoleur: “‘speaks’ not only with things … [but] also through the 

medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between 

the limited possibilities. The bricoleur may not ever complete his purpose, but he always puts 

something of himself into it.” Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 21. 

62. Lévi-Strauss insists on miniaturization as an operation involved in bricolage that enables 

domestication; about reduction in scale, he writes: “being smaller, the object as a whole seems less 

formidable … [it] can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance,” Lévi-Strauss, The Savage 

Mind, 23.

Female Crafts: Women and Bricolage in late Georgian Britain

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