Nobody and New Materialism: Understanding Agency and Fragility in Eighteenth Century Britain

This paper, entitled ‘Nobody and New Materialism: Understanding Agency and Fragility in Eighteenth Century Britain’, was presented in March 2025 to the Cambridge Workshop for the Long Eighteenth Century.

My talk centered on a lambeth-delft figure of ‘Nobody’ in the Fitzwilliam Museum, one of six extant British and Chinese examples I have been able to locate so far. It explored the resuscitation of the Nobody imagery in Britain at a key point of change in the materiality of the kitchen and table. I argued that as a figure of eternal blame, they were a personification of the way ceramics acted out compared to pewter or treen — apt as they are to chip and shatter unexpectedly and totally.