Soft Materiality: Dress and Material Fiction in T.S. Surr's A Winter in London

As against a recent tendency of material culture scholarship to gravitate towards hard objects, I argue for the special significance of the "soft materiality" of dress, as both a category of material life and a dimension of literary fiction. To do so, I explore both the general theoretical background and the specific case of Thomas Skinner Surr's bestselling novel A Winter in London (1806). Unlike all other kinds of objects in the novel, Surr's remnant clothing is highly materialized, with a uniquely clear sense of meditation on the different possibilities of transformation and use available via dress. Most pointedly, the novel turns what Surr calls the "wreck of a wardrobe" into a plenitudinous graveyard testifying to the surprisingly resilient life of dress materials. In this way, the text suggests the special significance of a late-eighteenth-century encounter with a newly softened regime of clothing for a much longer epoch of material perception and imagination.