Widow Pratt's World of Goods: Implications of Consumer Choice in Colonial Newport, Rhode Island

The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part of on-the-ground mechanisms through which individuals propagated complex and contingent early modern transformations, in particular those associated with social values and the material culture of daily life. This study of Elizabeth Pratt has considered dressing the body; dining and drinking; and experiences of landscape and architecture as active engagements by an individual with a material world. Interdisciplinary study of Pratt's possessions and decision making suggests that she did not emulate well-to-do neighbors, nor did she make the same choices as other middling property owners in the town. Pratt's choices speak to developing middling discourses of consumerism, class, and gender. This study proposes that "piecemeal" refinement was not an epiphenomenonal paradox. Rather, it was the norm in the eighteenth century and constitutive of social values in the long term.