The Material Landscapes of Scotland’s Jewellery Craft, 1780–1914

Abstract

Jewellery is used to adorn the human body, to mark wealth and status, and to build and mark personal and emotional ties between individuals. The role of goldsmiths and jewellers in manipulating materials to fuse symbolic and monetary value in precious and deeply meaningful objects has seen their skill command a high level of respect across time and place. Yet the making of jewellery during the modern era has received very little scholarly attention. The Material Landscapes of Scotland’s Jewellery Craft, 1780-1914 challenges the tired but persistent notion that industrialization, by replacing the human hand with the machine, destroyed skilled craftsmanship by exploring the neglected but rich area of Scotland’s jewellery craft during the long 19th century. It demonstrates that industrialization was, in fact, the driving force behind a deeper engagement with hand skill and nature that is more closely associated with goldsmiths of the early modern period. The book explores the material, visual and symbolic dimensions to jewellery through a craft-based reading that considers these sources by fusing social and cultural history methods with approaches drawn from art, design and dress history. The making and wearing of jewellery are considered as embodied cultural practices throughout, forging a new methodological approach that can be applied more widely to the study of material things. By placing producers and their skill in cultural context, the book reveals how attending to the materiality of even the smallest of objects can offer new and multifaceted insights into the wider transformations that marked British history during the long 19th century. With its focus on the relationship between materials, making processes and the social and cultural meanings of things, the book offers a novel approach to the history of material culture.