BAUBLES AND BOOKS: LONDON & THE CONSUMPTION OF GOODS IN CLASSIC MODERNITY
BAUBLES AND BOOKS: LONDON & THE CONSUMPTION OF GOODS IN CLASSIC MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: Part of the “urban revolution” underlying the long and complex processcalled modernity, our contemporaneous consumption-of-goods type of society saw theforeshadowing of its success in Classic Modernity, aka the Enlightenment. That wasa time when the public sphere emerged as a public of private subjects, pre-eminentlyin big cities, where sociability became the saving grace of urban and urbane protocolssubsumed to the catchy concept of civility. It was the time of definitory spatial(re)negotiations like the public-private one in institutions like the coffee-house, theliterary society or the circulating library.Starting from the reading of the 1781 drawing of a Lady coming from a CirculatingLibrary and the 1782 one of Beauty in Search of Knowledge, this paper proposes ananalysis of baubles and books, of fashionable and intellectual manoeuvres intertwinedin the space of the capital city – London, in this particular case. It assesses thecirculating library as a utopia or paradise on earth for the expanding femalereadership legitimating themselves by books, as well as a eutopia, a microcosm offashionable items capable of promoting social repute. After interpreting another fewillustrations of the time, it focuses on the 1776 Vis a Vis Bisected, or the Ladies Coop,in which a closed fan and an open billet-doux hold the same symbolic dialogue ofbaubles and books. The amorous imbroglios implied in these visual representationsconfirm the early century’s Rape of the Lock, in which Pope provides a paradigmaticdefinition of the prosperous capital as the centre of domestic consumption of colonialgoods.

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