INTRODUCTION

Discussion has thus far focused primarily on descriptions by the owner of an item or items of clothing, though the previous chapters have demonstrated that authorship was not always straightforward. However, throughout we have also encountered women whose clothing was described by someone else, whether by mistresses, mothers, family members, employees, or even strangers. To further explore this, this chapter moves beyond descriptions authored by owners to trace material literacies across the records of the old poor law. These records have been successfully mined for details about the quantity and cost of clothing issued by parishes, but there has been far less exploration of the textual and descriptive practices evident across the sources themselves. However, this chapter argues that these practices are in themselves significant. Drawing together accounts and other records across a range of parishes, it therefore looks at the description of poor women’s clothing from three perspectives: that of suppliers; that of overseers of the poor; and that of the poor themselves. This demonstrates differences across texts and in descriptive practices which highlight ambiguities surrounding the description of an individual’s clothing by someone else, shaped by the relationships involved in the provision of poor relief. As outlined in the previous chapter, records such as accounts could be both reflective and constitutive of relationships of power and authority, and this was certainly the case for those generated by the day-to-day administration of the old poor law. Description played a key role in this context, with descriptions of the clothing issued to paupers functioning as a record of their dependence on the parish. Drawing on a comparison with the descriptive languages for women’s clothing traced across Chapters 1 and 2, this chapter also demonstrates that there may have been social or financial barriers to certain forms of material literacy, even in the context of an ever-expanding descriptive landscape for clothing and textiles across the eighteenth century. This was of course intimately linked to the material reality of everyday life for those living at the margins of society, as the records of the old poor law suggest a very different world of goods to that traced in previous chapters.