INTRODUCTION

This chapter continues to focus on detailed description by exploring the act of accounting, looking at individual, family, and household expenditure. Chapter 3 considers accounting in an institutional context. Looking across the accounts kept by seven women spanning 1705 to 1803, this chapter first considers how women’s clothing appears in and across their account books as well as those belonging to family members, and then offers an in-depth exploration of how women’s clothing was described in these sources. These books, like many surviving account books, can be found in collections of family papers belonging overwhelmingly to men and women of the middling and gentry classes, and so speak principally to their experiences. While detailed description in accounts has sometimes been interpreted as unnecessary for the accurate keeping of accounts, largely as a result of an emphasis on rationality in histories of accounting, this chapter demonstrates that the very frequency with which it was used demands reconsideration of this. By drawing on a comparison with the language used to describe clothing and textiles in bills issued by retailers, it also demonstrates how descriptions might be moved across and between texts during the accounting process, which has important implications for our understanding of description, authorship, and meaning. Indeed, it shows how the issue, payment, and recording of bills contributed significantly to the broader circulation of descriptive terms and material literacy surrounding clothing and textiles.

Accounting became increasingly widespread after 1650, and there is ample evidence to suggest that many eighteenth-century women were competent accountants. Indeed, Kenneth Charlton and Margaret Spufford have suggested that early modern women’s training in ‘ciphering’ may have been given little space in sources like journals precisely because ‘it was so necessary and obvious that it was assumed’. Amy Froide has conducted a more thorough investigation into levels of female numeracy, showing that it was a discipline cultivated across the social hierarchy. How and when women acquired these skills, however, is more difficult to determine, though it has been suggested that it was a skill acquired primarily in the home. As Beverly Lemire has suggested, surviving accounts show that women’s shift to ‘numeric record-keeping’ was a gradual process which took place at a slower pace than men’s, but the very fact that eighteenth-century women’s manuscript accounts exist in as-yet uncounted numbers in archives across England demonstrates that many were able to acquire competency in accounting from somewhere.