Cultures of Ceramic Mending in the Long Eighteenth Century

My thesis examines British cultures of earthenware, stoneware and porcelain repair between 1660 and 1830. A plethora of inventive mending technologies sprung up in the period, as householders and professionals began to pin, lace, burn, cement, bind, tip, re-handle, rim, bandage and rivet ceramic goods. This change was underpinned by the suffusion of new brittle eating surfaces throughout the home from the late seventeenth century, the quantitative nature of which has been thoroughly explored by Lorna Weatherill and Darron Dean et al.

These practices have long been obscured by an emphasis on the whole in museum collection and academic study; where they have been examined by cultural historians, curators and conservators, they are most often taken purely as acts of thrift or sentimentality. Adopting Sarah Pennell’s perspective of mending as ‘how consumers actually came to consume’, my research challenges this framing. I instead explore repair as a disruptive, boundary pushing set of practices. My central thesis is that mending was a long-making; that the line between maintenance and production was fluid and permeable.

This research has been grounded in two and a half years of object focused work with the Fitzwilliam Museum’s J.W.L Glaisher ceramics collection, which has provided an invaluable bank of heavily repaired objects in addition to other public and private caches. Other archive work has focused on the Bemrose Collection, the Heal collection, Sun Insurance Records, Chancery Master’s exhibits, the Wellcome Collection, the National Art Library, EEBO, Cambridge University Library and innumerable other collections. Repair, as David Edgerton opined, ’lives in a twilight world, hardly appearing in the accounts societies make of themselves’, and hence an agile research approach has been demanded. This draws together small references to repair from probate inventories, catalogues, prints, workbooks, account books, trade cards, diaries, insurance records, bills, recipe books and chemical manuals.

In addressing the silences in these sources, my thesis relies heavily on a blend of cross-disciplinary methodologies. Scientific analysis — XRF, micro-computed tomography, X-ray, microscopy — and active collaboration with conservation colleagues has been essential to the investigation of repairs with no documentation. It also embeds my work within the remaking of objects in the museum environment, enabling an interior, practice informed perspective. I also employ reconstructive methodologies to explore both the materials and embodied knowledge employed by repair people, which has been supported by a three-month fellowship with the DURARE project at Utrecht University. This approach seeks to encounter materials like glues and fillers in their flowing, colourful, viscous states, as opposed to the desiccated forms extant in museum stores.

This work is supervised by Professor Melissa Calaresu and Professor Victoria Avery, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. It is conducted in association with the Fitzwilliam Museum.