Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live - Antiques - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, June, 2002 by Wendell Garrett

John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643

The eighteenth century in England was above all a period of rapid economic expansion that stretched the social fabric. Luxury and refinement seemed within the reach of even the relatively humble, and indeed prosperity was widespread. Contemporaries were struck with the apparently inexhaustible demand for superior manufactured goods, and it was one of the main aims of the government to ensure that consumers were supplied by English sources.

Strenuous efforts were made to restrict the flow of foreign textiles even when they came by way of the East India Company. Pattern books drew heavily on Parisian sources, but the fabrics were overwhelmingly the product of English hands. The mass production of the Staffordshire pottery industry supplied the household needs of lower- and middle-class England for generations.

Access to tropical raw materials was important to satisfy sophisticated tastes, and in 1721 the government of George I abolished the heavy import duties imposed on nearly all timber, including mahogany, from the British colonies in North America and the West Indies. The purpose was to increase the supply of timber for shipbuilding, but cabinetmakers took advantage of the lower prices as well, stimulating the trade in mahogany, which gradually replaced walnut as the fashionable furniture wood. Mahogany had a beautiful patina that improved with use, and a strength that had a considerable effect on furniture design in the rococo style toward the middle of the century. The wood came in an attractive range of colors and very wide boards, which made it ideal for tabletops and cabinet doors.

The physical surroundings of the upper and middle classes improved markedly. Cheap floorboards gave way to superior deal covered with carpeting. Plaster was concealed behind wainscoting. Stone hearths were replaced with marble, and flimsy doors gave way to hardwood doors with brass fittings. Leather, damask, and embroidered seats replaced cane and rush.

Between the 1720s and the 1780s cities and suburbs rose where there had been only villages, and the landscape became threaded with commercial waterways. The generation of Richard Boyle, Lord Burlington, would have been astonished by the Gothic revival, middle-class tourism, Puritans and Methodists, collective philanthropy, political radicalism, and critical interest in the status of women, children, slaves, and animals.

The British Empire in 1783, the year of the Treaty of Paris, and 1727, the year of George II's accession, was quite different. Englishmen themselves were hardly the same people and, indeed, were much less certain about who precisely they were.

Wendell Garrett