Heritage Assistant Mary Strickson shares her passion for history.

  History has many different interesting areas to study, but one era that I keep coming back to time and time again is the long-eighteenth century. One approach that has only emerged in the 1970s and has gained more traction in recent years from scholars is gender studies. Regarding the eighteenth century, I find myself returning to study gender, women, children and the home within 1650-1850, both within my History BA and my Art History MA, both degrees working cross-disciplinary by working closely with museum stores, objects, art and visual culture.

National Archives.

My undergraduate dissertation involved an extended trip to the National Archives where I studied original eighteenth-century inventories, reading the fragile ink-scrawled rolls of parchment before using a database to gather quantitative data from this first-hand research. My mission was to explore the effect that the great fire of London had on changing the inner contents of the eighteen-century London home. A lot of work has been written on how the fire affected the physical structure of buildings and how it affected the elite, but little has been studied on how the fire affected interior and the home.

For my postgraduate dissertation I focussed closer to my own home and utilised Derby Museum and Art Gallery’s exhibitions and resources. I first studied eighteenth-century art and visual culture in my undergrad and was still deeply interested in this historical art. For my MA dissertation I studied the work of Joseph Wright closely, specifically how his work explored the gender roles of women, children and the home. Joseph Wright’s work has been studied and written about extensively, but most of these conversations centre around his use of light, his depiction of science, enlightenment or landscape. I also wanted to continue to use cross-disciplinary approaches and explore how literature, his contemporaries and societal ideals influenced his depiction of gender and the home within art.

It’s been four years since I left university and my passion for eighteenth-century art and culture as well as gender studies continues. I love to read and my history and art book collection is constantly growing (is there anything better than browsing the history and art section of your local Oxfam bookshop?!). I also love to regularly attend exhibitions, visit museums and galleries. Highlights from the last few years include my trip to Bath where I visited the Holburne Museum which has a wonderful collection of eighteenth-century portraits, including (you guessed it) work by Joseph Wright. I also enjoyed seeing the wealth of Georgian architecture and design in the Jane-Austen-obsessed city.

Just before the pandemic I visited a fantastic exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery called ‘Trading Station: How hot drinks shape our lives’. There was a spectacular array of eighteenth-century coffee pots and drinkware. It showcased how tea, coffee and hot chocolate began as luxury items for the elite in the eighteenth century and how the equipment and social ideals around drinksware changed over time, tracking the journey until now. This is something we also studied during my degree in the Sheffield Museums stores, handling various sugar tongs, tea equipment, silverware and earthenware and learning about the ideals that became attached to these objects in the eighteenth century such as gendered spaces in the home, femininity and luxury. These also show us changing styles, fashions and materials as well as how racial stereotypes, empire and expensive imports influenced western material culture.

 It’s now been eleven years since I first started studying this personal passion subject. The lines have blurred between this being academic study, spare-time hobby and ongoing career interest. You can never stop learning and I think that is what makes history, art, heritage, visual and material culture so fantastic, there is such a wealth of material and ideas to explore and new thinking emerging all the time. Even within a small, niche area of study there is so much left to uncover and discover, which is what makes history and art so exciting. It can also reflect and educate us today about important issues like race, gender, sexuality and elitism, which can in turn help create real change in belief systems inherent within our own societies.

Mary Strickson is a heritage assistant at Culture Syndicates http://culturesyndicates.co.uk