T.H. Breen on Franklin's love of Fine China (and Beer)
[from Breen, T.H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford UP 2004]
No one grasped better how Americans communicated claims to social status through possession of the newest fashions than Benjamin Franklin. In his Autobiography he recounted the manner in which market novelty first entered his own Philadelphia household. The culprit in this consumer confession was Franklin's wife. She was the one who wanted to acquire the fashionable objects she had encountered in the homes of her neighbors. But instead of whining about Franklin's failure to provide the family with the goods that would properly reflect his rising social status--after all, he had become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania--she cleverly manipulated her proud husband. Despite his mild protest, Franklin seems to have been fully complicit in this utual experience of self-fashioning. As Franklin remembered the moment,
[here Breen quotes from the Autobiography, in our text the top paragraph of pg.65]
However developed Mrs. Franklin's sense of fashion may have been, it did not come close to matching her husbands's. He knew that correctly interpreting the cues of this new material culture was a key aspect of social mobility. One had to be self-conscious about one's buying habits; consuming British goods could be hard work. In a marvelous letter that Franklin wrote from London to his wife soon after the "China Bowl" incident had occured, he gave an account of his frantic efforts to keep up with or, in this case perhaps, keep ahead of his provincial neighbors. Describing the contents of two large shipping crates dispatched to America, he explained that since he wanted "to show the Difference of Workmanship[,] there is something from all the China Works in England." An itch for "Fancy" compelled him to purchase a china basin "of an odd Colour" as well as four ladles of the "newest, but ugliest, Fashion." Just think, he seemed to suggest, how friends and rivals in America would react when they saw the "little Instrument to Core Apples" and "another to make little Turnips out of great ones." Franklin admitted that he could not resist picking up "56 yards of Cotton printed curiously from Copper Plates, a new Invention." But the central piece--an example of eighteenth-century schlock--was a china jug for beer. "I fell in Love with it at first Sight," Franklin told his wife, "for I thought it look'd like a fat jolly Dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white Calico Gown on, good natur'd and lovely, and [it] put me in mind of--Somebody." One wonders whether Mrs. Franklin appreciated her husband's consumer joke (Breen 154-155).
No one grasped better how Americans communicated claims to social status through possession of the newest fashions than Benjamin Franklin. In his Autobiography he recounted the manner in which market novelty first entered his own Philadelphia household. The culprit in this consumer confession was Franklin's wife. She was the one who wanted to acquire the fashionable objects she had encountered in the homes of her neighbors. But instead of whining about Franklin's failure to provide the family with the goods that would properly reflect his rising social status--after all, he had become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania--she cleverly manipulated her proud husband. Despite his mild protest, Franklin seems to have been fully complicit in this utual experience of self-fashioning. As Franklin remembered the moment,
[here Breen quotes from the Autobiography, in our text the top paragraph of pg.65]
However developed Mrs. Franklin's sense of fashion may have been, it did not come close to matching her husbands's. He knew that correctly interpreting the cues of this new material culture was a key aspect of social mobility. One had to be self-conscious about one's buying habits; consuming British goods could be hard work. In a marvelous letter that Franklin wrote from London to his wife soon after the "China Bowl" incident had occured, he gave an account of his frantic efforts to keep up with or, in this case perhaps, keep ahead of his provincial neighbors. Describing the contents of two large shipping crates dispatched to America, he explained that since he wanted "to show the Difference of Workmanship[,] there is something from all the China Works in England." An itch for "Fancy" compelled him to purchase a china basin "of an odd Colour" as well as four ladles of the "newest, but ugliest, Fashion." Just think, he seemed to suggest, how friends and rivals in America would react when they saw the "little Instrument to Core Apples" and "another to make little Turnips out of great ones." Franklin admitted that he could not resist picking up "56 yards of Cotton printed curiously from Copper Plates, a new Invention." But the central piece--an example of eighteenth-century schlock--was a china jug for beer. "I fell in Love with it at first Sight," Franklin told his wife, "for I thought it look'd like a fat jolly Dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white Calico Gown on, good natur'd and lovely, and [it] put me in mind of--Somebody." One wonders whether Mrs. Franklin appreciated her husband's consumer joke (Breen 154-155).
posted by John Garcia at
9:45 AM
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