Making the Bed in Later Stuart and Georgian England

Abstract

As you make your own bed, so you must lie in it.Early modern English proverb This is a chapter that deals with perhaps the most important item of furniture and its soft furnishings that any early modern probably invested in and owned.In 2001 Roger Ekirch suggested that the 'elusive realm of sleep' had been long ignored by historians of most stamps; only now are we 'waking up' to what he calls the 'profound role pre-industrial sleep played in the lives of ordinary men and women' as being of concomitant importance as investigating what they did in their waking hours.1And yet this is not a chapter about sleeping or dreaming or conversing with God or sexual congress, in bed.2It is rather an examination of the material making and maintaining of the bedfrom frame to cord to 'bed' or mattress, linens and 'furniture' or curtains and valences -and their routes into and out of the consuming lives of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century householders.The bed as a material entity has had peculiar, partial coverage in histories of decorative arts, interior decoration and furnishing, with one or two excursions into the 'meanings' of bed decoration.The state bed, the pinnacle of the upholsterer's art and indeed more art object than place to lay one's (even royal) head, has attracted enormous attention in recent years, from the conservation and reinstatement of the state bed from Melville House, Fife, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to dedicated conferences and exhibitions.3The symbolism of the English Renaissance bed was explored in the work of the late Sasha Roberts, while the middling bed has also had its champions: Lorna Weatherill's inventory-based study of British material culture between 1660 and 1760 noted that beds, bedding and associated linens could represent as much as half the value of all household goods in non-elite appraisals, while Amanda Vickery has attended to the bed as a key investment site in the genteel Georgian interior.4And yet, as Weatherill also noted, and which is still the case today, specialist studies of the material culture of the early modern bed and bedding are still wanting, once we move beyond the spectacular confines of those state beds.5The only other bed in British history to have achieved the same level of material attention as the surviving group of state beds is the great Bed of Ware: as much because of its Shakespearean fame, as its historic, and much-altered, material being.6There is, however, a material culture of the 'middling' bed that lies between that of the unslept Melville Bed and its ilk, and the ragged Hogarthian bed, that telling symbol of domestic and moral desuetude.7This material culture, while not surviving extensively in its original material forms, can be investigated through documentary sources: not only inventories and personal papers, but also the now easily accessible records of the central London and suburban criminal courts, Georgian newsprint and other eighteenth-century publications.Two central aspects of bed-making will be explored here.Firstly, through examining the means of assembling and maintaining the bed and its furnishings, I will point to the costs (in time and money) of the material assembling of those beds so central to conceptions of the idealised married household.Secondly, I will explore how the idea of the bed as a significant 'cost centre' in many households fed into the availability of used beds and bedding for purchase; and how this second-hand circulation was crucial in domestic processes of assembly/maintenance. Work on the pre-modern significance of circulation of used clothing by the likes of Beverley Lemire and John Styles has been seminal in opening up the field of historic second-hand circulation, now afforded its own multi-national studies.8Yet this dominance of clothing in the scholarship for English used goods distribution has occluded the place of other domestic textiles in such circuits.It has also overshadowed the associated but shifting values, from thrift to cleanliness, with which such textiles were invested, and which influenced their resale value in such markets.In twenty-first century

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