Overview

The Artful Pocket is the first extended study of women's tie-on pockets -specifically female accessories in the shape of bags suspended on a tape tied around the waist, often under, and always independent of, other garments. The book covers the period of their commonplace usage from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. The book registers the full material range of the object at its heart, from elaborately embellished to humdrum, patched and stained examples. It does this by drawing on pioneering research and documentation of three hundred and fifty surviving pockets in thirty museum collections across the country. Identifying what is unique about its material evidence and object-attentive approach, the book engages extensively with traditional historical and literary sources in order to establish how the object is integrated within social and cultural practices and to map discursive and dynamic relations between the material object and the social world - sources such as fiction or drama where pockets are represented in use but also family papers, shop inventories and court records of criminal cases involving pocket-picking to name but a few. The book combines meticulous attention to the object with the analysis of written but also of visual evidence - such as paintings and satirical prints - to bring the lived experience of girls and women of the past into intimate focus.

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9781409439363

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