Material Matters

The titles reviewed here represent some of the finest examples of one of the fastest growing and, for many of us, most exciting areas of eighteenth-century scholarship: material culture studies. As Amanda Vickery notes in Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (2009), "the material turn in historical study is gaining popularity," but its struggle for respectability has been a long one (vii). The privileging of written evidence has proved to be a difficult obstacle to overcome, as has the reluctance to treat what has traditionally been considered ephemeral and superfluous as worthy objects of intellectual enquiry. Even in the field of art history, which has always embraced a wide variety of sources, these latter problems have run deep, as Marcia Pointon elucidates in Brilliant Effects (3). Although devoted to very different commodities—cosmetics, plebeian dress, and jewels in diverse settings—and attentive to the particularities of the objects of their enquiry, the works of Martin, Pointon, and Styles collectively attest both to a new confidence in the cultural, political, and affective significance of the material and to the intellectual gains to be made by analysis of objects and the subjects they adorned. By dealing "seriously with that which is understood as superfluous" and presenting "as mainstream material evidence that is generally understood to be minor" (Pointon, 3), all three authors complicate established histories of the consumer revolution and enrich our understanding of commodities and the systems of value and communication they encoded for their makers and consumers.

Selling Beauty reassesses the "radical shift in fashion away from visible artifice" (1) to the "aesthetic of the natural" (53) that occurred between the reign of Louis XV and the Restoration. The "story" of paint's "downfall" during this period in France might be a "compelling" one, Martin concedes, but it masks the development of a more interesting phenomenon: "the development of a complex and expanding beauty culture" (2), which targeted elite and nonelite men and women and promoted the use of cosmetics as exotic luxury items and aids to health. In the process, Martin opens up the consumer revolution to a wider constituency. She argues that the transformative potential of cosmetics afforded men and women of different classes "a cheap and available way" to participate in this developing marketplace (31). In making these claims Martin confronts the dilemma of writing about objects that leave little material trace; in response, she draws upon a range of printed evidence, including advertisements, beauty manuals, periodicals, medical treatises, satires and tracts, and visual evidence. The first three chapters use this evidence to demonstrate the emergence of a "distinct culture of advertising" and a new and shared "language of publicity" (53) that targeted an ever "broader base of consumers" (31) and produced a new breed of entrepreneurialism in cosmetic producers as they vied for position in an overpopulated and highly competitive market that extended from the homes of the aristocracy and high-end shops to the streets. Martin's overview of the highly "complex system of interrelations between producers and sellers" in this period is masterly in its economy (39). But the book is most engaging when it lingers on specific case studies, such as that of Antoine-Claude Maille, a figure better known to this reader as a producer of mustard, but who was also a vinegar guild member responsible for some 180 medicinal and cosmetic vinegars, which he sold in ever more creative ways for a variety of prices to a diverse clientele (47–8).

The anticosmetic movement that grew, in part, in response to the "flowering of a cosmetics market" is the subject of chapter 4 (72). Criticisms of makeup were hardly new in 1750, but Martin contends that they became more pervasive and that...