The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives, 1660–1900 by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux (review)

Material culture is an interdisciplinary enterprise that has been re-invigorated in recent years by archival studies of "things" previously deemed insignificant; there is also a renewed confidence in the articulation of complex social, political and cultural narratives that allow objects to speak to modern observers. The cross-fertilization of archaeology, anthropology, museum studies, social and economic history and cultural studies has led to the composition of biographies of common objects and even commodities such as cod, salt, sugar, coffee, and pineapples. In this regard, a considerable body of influential research has emerged from Arjun Appadurai's The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986). Strangely, studies of things have shown that objects have voices and sometimes narrate their strange social circulations. Veering off into the surreal, objects start to have their own life as It-narratives (especially during the eighteenth century). In the domain of material culture, the object's voices are in a sense ventriloquized by the cultural critic and the historian.

The renewed interest in things is evident in various influential studies: Sherry Turkle (2007), Mark Blackwell (2007), Julie Park (2010), Christopher Douglas (2016), Jonathan Lamb (2016), and Lynn Festa (2019). Sometimes entire collections have been devoted to one class of object, such as the Northampton Shoe Museum. Increasingly, however, the museum object is more than its measurable proportions, its provenance, and its defined space within the taxonomic regime. Pioneering studies such as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Vintage, 2001) have eloquently revealed that objects can be theorized within larger frames of ideological construction and nation building discourses.

In The Pocket, Burman and Fennetaux have created more than a museum of pockets. At the start, however, they note the limitations of their research on pockets, which did not include "fibre testing and dye analysis (costly and intrusive)" (15). It is also conceded that many of the pockets they investigated did not have a specific provenance. Nonetheless, Burman and Fennetaux have undertaken an impressive study of the topic, having meticulously documented 390 pockets, which involved field work across "more than thirty museums and private collections" (15). They have also examined 572 cases reported in The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913, which variously amplify the criminal aspects of the topic, while also enabling more nuanced reflections on aspects of women's social history that have been poorly documented. In addition, this lavishly illustrated study includes 161 prints, paintings and photos of pockets. By drawing on stories and novels that mention pockets, as well as polemical and satirical works, the authors fulfil their promise to offer "social practices and materiality" (16). In summary, pockets are examined through chapters that analyze production, consumption, possession, mobility and sociability, work, privacy and memory.

At various points throughout this book, a dense layer of data springs from what pockets contained (prior to the arrival of the fashionable reticule, or "ridicule," a type of handbag). Although lists of seemingly miscellaneous objects are often presented, the authors argue that they stand in for the character of their owners and that they are more than chaotic abundance, given that pockets were spaces wherein "women could practice an intimate order for their things" (113). The alternative view, represented by Adam Smith, is also mentioned: women's pockets merely overflowed with trinkets. Accordingly, in this study pockets are defended against the misogynistic representation of them as overstocked reservoirs of ephemera. In more general terms, Burman and Fennetaux contend that tie-on pockets were aligned with "benevolence, good housewifery and orderliness" (43) as so many of the objects listed are associated with their practical use. In support of these claims, the authors provide evidence for pockets within pockets, secret pockets, and multiple compartments. Moreover, small boxes were frequently recorded, which indicates another example of a closed...