Georgian England was characterised by a buzzing consumer society in which advertising played a progressively important role when it came to the (linguistic) value construction surrounding material goods. Increasingly, the perceived value of goods was not only determined by the intrinsic quality of the goods, but also by the socio-commercial discourse used to characterise them. Linguistic modi昀椀ers, such as adjectives, must have played an important role in this process - re昀氀ecting these socio-economical trends in text while also reinforcing them. Here, we focus on a diachronic corpus of over 5,000 pages of London auction advertisement pages, digitised via automated transcription and divided across four sample periods between 1742-1829. Prime methodological challenges include: (1) the noisiness of the available data because of imperfect transcription; (2) the coarseness of the available time stamps, and (3) the lack of suitable NLP so昀琀ware, such as lemmatizers or (shallow) syntactic parsers. Through the use of word embeddings, we try to alleviate the issue of spelling variation with reasonable success. We 昀椀nd that, over time, subjective or 'evaluative' modi昀椀ers have become more prominent in these advertisements than their objective or 'descriptive' counterparts - but there are di昀erent temporal patterns for di昀erent types of advertised objects In Georgian England, a certain group, known as thbeeau monde, procured their place in society by publicly demonstrating their ties to one another, both in personal relationships and material expressions1[7].1 They are considered the trailblazers of a new, fast-paced consumer society, although volumes have been written discussing the time, place and pace of consumer (r)evolution(s) 2[4, 36]. In any case, the interaction between people and their possessions altered on an unprecedented scale in eighteenth-century England. This translated into many
changes in terms of how people behaved in and thought about the empire of things they lived in. Language immediately followed – or might even have preceded – these shi昀琀s; a whole new repertory emerged to name the new material world and to distinguish between quality and rubbish, luxuries and necessities, and between what was fashionable and what was no4t0,[ 19]. This was especially important when assessing the intrinsic value, i.e. material, and extrinsic value, i.e. design of objects.
Previous research has shown the rising importance of design rather than material when
acquiring, for example, silverware, a household staple that had lost many functions due to
chinaware’s rising popularity7[]. It makes sense to favour design over material durability when
buying goods meant for display rather than intensive usage. However, this does not explain
both the popularity and centrality of design as the decisive factor in an inherent breakable and
yet daily used household good such as chinaware. This may be because the value of objects
went beyond their external features: much value can be derived from how it was used by
particular owners, known in certain circles for their good ta1s7te, 1[
Research into the ever-growing language of consumption has already shown that the
emergence of advertising, in general, played a crucial role. Newspaper content, including adverts,
created an imagined community of all stakeholders in the world of goods, from producer to
seller to consumer4[]. Unlike nowadays, the language in advertisements re昀氀ected consumer
sensitivities in this imagined community rather than instilling in readers what they should
consume [22]. The language in notices became increasingly specialised39[], communicating
about and valuing luxuries in order to consume them appropriately (i.e., so that they would be
recognised and appreciated by peers). This implied that advertisers tapped into a vocabulary
directly linked to dominant consumer values. Sellers had limited space to convey what set their
wares apart from others on the market; for new products, this meant introducing what they
did and why one needed to buy it. Second-hand household goods up for auction, however,
needed little to no introduction, which allowed auctioneers to focus on the unique qualities of
the goods: intrinsic material, certain fashionable 昀椀nishings or the previous owner, who would
have been recognised as a tastemaker by peers3[
As opposed to present-day publicity, the tone of eighteenth-century adverts was above all,
polite. Criticism of false promises in advertisements almost exclusively applied to those for
new products, which is also quite plausible since one did not have to explain to anyone what a
chair was for, unlike the latest silver bullet for the “French dise4a2se,”13[]. On top of that, a
good reputation was a seller’s most prized possession; it ensured long-term client relationships
and, thus, their livelihood. The notices tended to focus on the professionalism and knowledge
of the retailer and were mainly informative to underline this to potential custom9,er2s2][.
In turn, potential buyers put their best foot forward to show that they could pay, on the one
hand, and had enough knowledge to value the goods, on the other. Tapping into the
appropriate language repertoire, from the initial contact through an advertisement to any subsequent
interactions between buyer and seller, was the ideal way to assure the other party of your
good intentions [
This paper’s source material mainly consists of advertisements from Dthaeily Advertiser and the Morning Chronicle. These are supplemented by pages from other London newspapers, which also contained auction advertisements and were available for the same period. The used auction advertisements were manually selected from 5 newspapers in the Burney Collection 2This was due to rising duties on speci昀椀c goods and changing market functioning because of an oversupply a昀琀er the French Revolution amongst other reasons, which made solely selling one type of good less pro昀椀t2a1b]le[ and the British Newspaper Archive across four sample periods: 1742-1743 (SP1), 1773 (SP2), 1799-1800 (SP3) and 1828-1829 (SP4). Pages contain one to 51 advertisements, and the corpus comprises∼9.6M tokens (∼640K of which are unique).
Figure1 shows a typical auction notice where “elegant furniture” that belonged to a gentleman was o昀ered for sale by Mr Postan in theMorning Chronicle. The advertisement started and ended with practical information such as the time and place of the sale and where further information like catalogues could be found. The actual listing of the goods always occurred according to a rigid scheme, usually starting with a formulaic sentence such as “elegant household furniture, plate”, followed by what were considered the showstoppers of the upcoming auction, “昀椀ne linen, an eight-day chime table clock by Mitchell, 昀椀ne toned harpsichord by Kirkman”. This could be followed with information about the previous owner, as is the case here, the goods belonged to a gentleman from Richmond. The main course of every auction advertisement was the listing of other goods o昀ered for sale and their descriptions; we can read that “capital dome bedsteads, with elegant chintz cotton furnitures; mahogany four-post and tent bedsteads, with rich cotton furnitures, three sets of French window curtains to correspond; prime goose feather beds and bedding” are going under the hammer at 11 o’clock the next day.
We collected the data by manually browsing through all available digital issues of seven volumes of the newspapers mentioned in the tables above (Tabl1esand 2). We selected the pages with advertisements from each issue and manually cropped them, so they only contained auction advertisements. These were quite straightforward to single out as all auction notices started with “for sale by auction”, “to be sold by hand”, “to be sold by the candle”, or other markers such as mentioning “auction room”, “catalogues”, etc., as the example above clari昀椀es. This was done in the Burney Collection for the 昀椀rst three sample periods, 1742-1800, and in the British Newspaper Archive for the last period, namely 1828-1829.
Sample periods were chosen based on the availability of the core newspapDerasi,ly Advertiser and Morning Chronicle, to have some consistent data to account for newspaper-speci昀椀c variations. We opted for three sample periods in the eighteenth century and one at the beginning of the nineteenth to pinpoint which developments can be traced back to the eighteenth century. It is well attested that this was a crucial century for newspapers due to many changes in printing techniques, amongst other developments, and we can see this manifesting in a rise of advertisements before the true boom in the nineteenth centur3y2][.
The 5,176 advertisement pages were automatically transcribed into (unstructured) plain text using Transkribus with a model trained for eighteenth-century printed English texts. This CITLAB HTR+ model was trained on 13,083 words and reached a character error rate (CER) of 0.15 % on the training set and 1.89 % on the validation set. The base model was an HTR model called “French18thCPrint1”][, which was trained on 38,487 words with a CER of 0.09 % on the training set and 0.74 % on the validation set. However, the data proved extremely noisy, as there was no segmentation between individual adverts, no distinction betwe<en >/< Ā > due to marginal di昀erence between a printed< > and < Ā > as shown in Figure2, and spotty layout analysis. A manual check of the 583 pages of thDeaily Advertiser in 1742-1743 brought to light that there were more signi昀椀cant layout issues (e.g., erroneous column detection) in 8% of the pages and 316 instances of more minor layout issues (e.g., one or two lines in the wrong order).
In our analysis, we distinguish between ‘objects’, i.e. material goods that were put on sale in the auctions represented in the corpus, and ‘premodi昀椀ers’, any elements that can occur before objects to describe – or ‘modify’ – the m3.Put simply, the phrasecolourful glass shards, we can identify one object (i.e. shards) and two premodi昀椀ers (i.e. colourful and glass). We designed and applied a custom classi昀椀cation scheme for both premodi昀椀ers and objects. First, for the premodi昀椀ers, we manually constructed a list of 282 commonly occurring premodi昀椀ers in the material. Each of these premodi昀椀ers was identi昀椀ed through a unique headword (type) in a normalised, modern spelling, but collapsing the di昀erence between the charact<ers > and < Ā >, e昀ectively treating them as allographs. Two annotators then independently categorised the premodi昀椀ers along as either ‘evaluative’ (E) or ‘descriptive’ (D). If the premodifying element functioned as a classi昀椀er (e.g. kidderminster carpet is a type or class of carpet) or an “objective epithet” (e.g. large, enamelled, woollen), whereas “subjective epithets” (e.g. antique, fashionable, valuable) were marked as evaluative1[0]. 4 In other words, modi昀椀ers that either do or do 3While this study focuses on premodi昀椀cation; it should be noted that not all modi昀椀cation is premodi昀椀cation. Still, premodi昀椀cation is expected to be more common in light of the language-external context of advertising. The price of placing an advertisement was based on conventions of “moderate length”, which ties in with what we see in the source material: there was little to no length variation throughout the research p3e2r]i.odTh[ is obviously had implications on the word choices that advertisers made. They had to convey what goods were for sale, why they were worth buying and when and where this was all happening, all without exceeding the customary word limit. This is presumably why Mr Postan (Figu1r)eopted to print “satin-wood and mahogany drawing-room and parlour chairs” and “elegant pier and pembroke tables” instead of using postmodi昀椀cation, as in “drawing-room and parlour chairs made of satin-wood and mahogany” and “pier and pembroke tables that are elegantly fashioned”. 4Note that in some linguistic literature, the objectivity-subjectivity of epithets is considered a cline: while ‘goodlooking’ is a clear example of a property assigned to people or objects in a subjective manner, properties such as ‘clean’ are “more collectively assessable”. Still, they are not as objectively assessable as properties like ‘blue’ or ‘wooden’ 1[0]. For simplicity’s sake, we chose to work with a binary annotation system where any degree of subjectivity was classi昀椀ed as evaluative. not apply to an object –- for example, a table is either made mofahogany, or it is not –- were considered descriptive. This o昀琀en applies, for instance, to words referring to textiles, such as chintz and serges, which appeared as modi昀椀ers for upholstered furniture. Furthermore, words such as looking, which only appeared in 昀椀xed combinations such aslooking glass, are considered descriptive because they specify the type of object. Evaluative modi昀椀ers, by contrast, are modi昀椀ers that express a particular, more subjective evaluation of an object. Unlike descriptive modi昀椀ers, they cannot be de昀椀ned through a straightforward yes or no question: whether or not a chair is elegant is a matter of personal taste and di昀케cult to prove objectively. Similarly, it is di昀케cult or even impossible to provide an objective de昀椀nition that helps determine whether an object is commodious orvaluable is true or false.
A昀琀er manual annotation by two annotators, we applied the established metric Cohen’s[
Second, we repeated a similar procedure for a set of relevant and common objects of
modi昀椀cations in the data, i.e. goods mentioned in the advertisements. We started from a set of 139
objects that were categorised into nine categories: ‘NA’ (for Not Applica5bl),e‘clothing/fabrics’,
‘furniture’, ‘appliances/utensils’, ‘tableware’, ‘animal accessories’, ‘haberdashery’, ‘animal’,
‘instrument’, ‘accessories’, ‘decoration’, and ‘real estate’. This categorisation system was based
on prior work in consumption history and aimed for reasonably balanced groups in the object
set. Categorising objects is a widespread practice in material culture studies, which are
usually centred around the function of objects in order to gauge the use, practices and meaning
behind certain (clusters of) objects. Common categories for the eighteenth-century consumer
society are, for instance, kitchenware, tableware, seating and table furniture, hot-drink-related
5NA was assigned when the noun phrase was not an object, a word like ’assortment’, a street name or a nonsense
word.
objects, interior decoration, sleeping furniture, and so o35n, [
The headwords were again independently categorised by two annotators. In this case, the test yielded =.8182, indicating a lower but still substantial agreement, especially when considering up to 12 categories. The confusion matrix in Tab4ledisplays the initial disagreement between the annotators. In an adjudication phase, cases of disagreement were again resolved. The resulting distribution of object labels was as follows (a昀琀er excluding the NA class): real estate (46), furniture (25), decoration (18), clothing/fabric (10), appliances/utensils (9), tableware (6), accessories (5), instrument (4), animal/accessories (4). To enable the pragmatic approach outlined below, we made sure that there was no overlap between the sets of object and modi昀椀er headwords; ambiguous cases were not included. The objects are also listed in the appendix.
The materials under scrutiny contained a considerable amount of orthographic variation, which is partially due to naturally occurring historical spelling variants. The bulk of variation is, however, caused by artefacts from the imperfect digitisation procedure (see above for the automated transcription procedure followed). An example of a noisy single ad entry from the corpus is shown in the illustration above (Figu2r).eThis noise impedes the straightforward identi昀椀cation of the headwords from the modi昀椀er and object sets described in the previous section. In spite of English’s current dominance in the world of natural language processing, we are working with a historical language variant, which generally tends to be under-resourced. We decided to apply a pragmatic normalisation routine based on word embeddings in combination with straightforward string distance heuristics. FastText word embeddin6g]so[昀er an advantage over the earlier generation of embeddings, such as Word2v2e5c],[ in that they do not represent words as an atomic, symbolic index but that they take into account a token’s subword information, in the form of the token’s constituent n-grams. This makes them more 昀氀exible in the face of out-of-vocabulary items (in which our material can be expected to abound). FastText word embeddings could therefore o昀er a baseline for identifying super昀椀cial spelling variants (and in昀氀exions) of the objects’ headwords and modi昀椀ers we aim to stud6y.
We 昀椀rst applied a lightweight naive preprocessing to the material, restoring hyphenated
words at line endings, removing all non-alphabetic characters and splitting the entire corpus
into space-free character strings or tokens. We divided the materials into 100,762 segments
of 100 consecutive tokens we fed as sentences to a reference implementation of the FastText
algorithm in Gensim3[
We evaluated the e昀ectiveness of this spelling normalisation procedure on a manually corrected sample of advertisements (amounting to 3,545 tokens in total), which contained random selections from all four periods in the corpus. Note that we collapse all instances of nonreplacement into a single class for this purpose (‘NA’). Also, because of the transcription routine adopted, we treated the character<s > and < Ā > as allographs and mapped all instances of < > to < Ā >. Tables5 and 6 show a random sample of examples of concrete replacements, both for correct and incorrect interventions. The conventional classi昀椀cation statistics are reported in Table7. We achieve an encouraging macro-averaged F1 score (0.877) in the upper eighties while maintaining a reasonable balance between precision (0.907) and recall (0.862). For instance, the random sample of incorrect replacements mainly concerns unusually noisy spelling variants for which the correct headword was not properly retrieved (‘NA’). That precision is higher than recall seems acceptable for our application that involves su昀케cient material: in this context, we favour the correct replacement of spelling variants over missing a few others.
We applied this spelling normalisation to the entire corpus before proceeding. Before this 6For an example of a study showing the potential of FastText and Word2vec Skipgram embeddings in identifying di昀erent types of spelling variants, see [28]. 7For this reason, our method may be better suited for mid- to high frequency (rather than low-frequency) words and spelling variants, as the quality of word type vectors is a昀ected by frequency. procedure, the four time periods amounted to unique 661,117 word types, distributed over 10,076,512 token instances – meaning that each type occurred on average about 15.24 times in the corpus. A昀琀er the normalisation, the number of types was reduced to 521,516. In the normalised corpus, the average type would therefore have a token frequency of 19.32, suggesting that we were indeed able to reduce the orthographic noise in the material.
To test our main research hypotheses, we calculated the relative frequency of each item from our modi昀椀er set for each of the four time periods in the data. We normalised the per-headword frequencies via standard scaling (mean subtraction and dividing by unit variance) to ensure that more common items would not dominate the analysis. We produce boxplots for the two categories of modi昀椀ers per time period. Based on Figure3sand 4, we see that there is a considerable diachronic variance over time in both the evaluative and descriptive catego8riHeso.wever, the evaluative set of modi昀椀ers seems to display a more consistent increase in frequency over time than the descriptive modi昀椀ers, which show a pronounced drop in the second time period, with surprisingly many outliers (SP2). 8For a more detailed view on whether temporal e昀ects di昀er depending on the type of object being advertised, we refer to Figure7 below.
To obtain a more quantitatively informed assessment of this situation, we calculated the perword Kendall statistic for each individual time series: this is a non-parametric rank correlation coe昀케cient test that can be used the measure the consistency in the increase or decrease of a scalar over a series of time points. With only four time points, however, it is impossible to reach statistical signi昀椀cance, so we focus on the primarily as a metric. This statistic will output a scalar in the [-1, +1] range, with large positive values indicating a strong increase, large negative values indicating a strong decrease and values relatively closer to 0 indicating a stable result (neither increase nor decrease). The resulting distributionvoalfues is shown in each category in (Figure5).
The average statistic (cf. Table8) is positive for both categories =(0.076 for descriptive, =0.285 for evaluative), indicating that linguistic premodi昀椀cation grew relatively more important over time in this material. However, the range of values seems notably higher for the evaluative modi昀椀ers indicating that these gained even more prominence over time. To compare the range of values in the two categories (which are both not normally distributed), we applied a non-parametric Mann-Whitney test to verify the (directed) hypothesis that the evaluative -values are indeed larger overall than the descriptive ones. For this dataþsÿeýt (= 182; ÿ =100), the resulting test statistic ( =7189.5) and the associated -value ( =0.001) o昀er reasonable grounds not to reject this hypothesis. We conclude that premodi昀椀cation grew more important over time, and this was relatively more true for the set of evaluative modi昀椀ers considered here than their descriptive counterparts.
We applied analogous measurements to the frequency of normalised tokens in the object categories we distinguished and recorded their scaled relative frequencies across the sample periods SP1-SP4. Next, we calculated Kendall’sfor the time series associated with each normalised token and aggregated them at the category level. Figu6rsehows the distribution of the ’s across these categories. The category ‘clothing/fabric’ is the only one to display a negative trend, indicating that its prominence in the advertisements decreased over time. Next, the median presence of ‘appliances/utensils’, ‘decoration’, and ‘furniture’ remained stable. The rest of the categories have a mean that is more outspokenly positive; goods belonging to the following categories have clearly gained prominence over time: ‘animal/accessories’, ‘tableware’, ‘instruments’, and ‘real estate’.
We now turn to h4, the hypothesis related to ‘modi昀椀er stacking’: did instances of premodi昀椀cation become longer in this material and thus gained complexity over time? Because we lack a proper syntactic parse of the data, we adopted a pragmatic approach and collected all instances of an object mention that was directly preceded by an uninterrupted series of modi昀椀ers (i.e. series of at least one modi昀椀er in front of an object). We gauged their length across the four time periods and presented a number of relevant summary statistics in Tab9l.eA clear majority of the premodi昀椀cation instances has a length of one, and longer series are much less common. Interestingly, we found no clear diachronic trend regarding these length measurements, and we must therefore refute h4 for the time being. This suggests that the increase in evaluative modi昀椀ers is not due to a simple stacking process, where evaluative modi昀椀ers simply supplement descriptive modi昀椀ers. Rather, these numbers suggest that the descriptive modi昀椀ers were more likely replaced altogether by more evaluative ones. 0.00075 0.00050 0.0004 0.0002
Above, we presented preliminary evidence that the use of evaluative modi昀椀ers would have
increased over time in the corpus. However, this trend will likely show a di昀erent development
across the various categories of objects we distinguish in the corpus. To verify this hypothesis,
we extracted a subset of the corpus containing all instances of modi昀椀ers immediately preceding
a headword from one of the object categories. This makes it likely that the modi昀椀er was reigned
by the adjacent object.9 For each instance in the subset, we record the original token of the
modi昀椀er, the normalised headword, the category of the ensuing object and its headword. This
resulted in a data set of 168,417 modi昀椀cation instances, of which a random sample is presented
in Table10. This subset contains a much simpli昀椀ed and partial view of the data set but apart
9Note that, at present, reliable deep or shallow parsers are not readily available for this period – though progress
may be underway [
Using a conventional Generalised Linear Model (of the binomial family), we apply a
statistical model that aims to predict whether the modi昀椀er will be evaluative (i.e., we applied the
coding: 0 = descriptive; 1 = evaluative). For each instance, we have two predictors available as
main predictors: time period (0-3, encoded as an ordered, categorical factor) and the type of
object it modi昀椀es (categorical factor). We ran three versions of the base model, each of increasing
complexity1.0 We compare the variants of the model using their AIC score and Akaike Weights
(i.e., conditional probabilities which indicate how much statistical importance we should attach
to di昀erences in AIC values [
We note that the subsequent models always yield a better 昀椀t of the data, as indicated by the decreasing AIC scores. The weights in Tabl1e1 indicate a very high probability (of 1.0) that model 3 outperforms models 1 and 2 (both of which were assigned a weight of 0.0). Each subsequent model is, moreover, invariably a signi昀椀cant improvement over the previous, according to the Anova test. The simplest model (1), where the time period is the sole predictor, predicts a solid increase in the probability of encountering an evaluative modi昀椀er. This was probably to be expected based on the previous section, but the additional experiments show that this simple view is naive. Adding the object type of the modi昀椀er’s head (model 2), for instance, yields a better 昀椀t of the data in which, surprisingly, the e昀ect of time reverses: this indicates that the evaluative trend probably played out di昀erently in di昀erent modi昀椀cation contexts. Model 3 concretely models this interplay as a statistical interaction between time period and object category: the interaction model proves to be an improvement concerning the additive model, urging us to include the interaction and disregard the e昀ect of the individual predictors.
The previous paragraph contains important insights: apparently, the object categories invited di昀erent levels of evaluativeness in their modi昀椀cation, and this association can only be properly modelled by taking the interaction with the period properly into account. In F7i,gure we plot the e昀ect of time period conditional on the object category of the modi昀椀er for the most complex model 3. This lattice plot shows that the increase in evaluative modi昀椀ers has been relatively stronger for speci昀椀c object categories, such as accessories, clothing/fabric and instruments. In other categories, this evolution was less outspoken (e.g. decoration) or even negative, such as for real estate and tableware. This suggests that linguistic developments in consumer trends showed di昀erent rationales in speci昀椀c market segments. One caveat, however, is that under our approach, many multiword units in the real estate and tableware category would be of the typeglass bottles, where we treatedglass as a descriptive modi昀椀er and bottles as the headword. This might explain why we should expect no surge in the use of more evaluative modi昀椀ers in this position, and why some object categories are more strongly associated with, e.g. descriptive modi昀椀ers. At the same time, this situation also does not explain why one should see such a consistendtrop in the use of evaluative modi昀椀ers.
Object categories such as ‘decoration’, ‘furniture’ and ‘utensils/appliances’ were continually
o昀ered for sale in the adverts because their socio-cultural worth (i.e. the previous owner)
head.cat = instrument head.cat = real estate
head.cat = tableware
remained more stable 1[
It is not surprising that changes in modi昀椀er usage are object-speci昀椀c, i.e. descriptions which highlight the material properties remained more important for structural goods such as real estate and fragile goods such as tableware where materiality de昀椀ned functions, e.g. silver for cold- and porcelain for warm drink5s].[Other furnishings such as accessories, clothing/fabric, instruments and - to a lesser extent - decoration, where a signi昀椀cant part of the allure lay in their outward appearance, were increasingly evaluative. These goods were material culture items that peers noticed in a drawing room and where design mattered the most to the wellheeled middling sorts.
In the end, we draw the following conclusions. Regarding h1, we indeed see that some object categories become more prominent throughout the research period (‘animal/accessories’, ‘tableware’, ‘instruments’, and ‘real estate’), mainly due to the growing practice of selling houses with their household goods, stables etc as well as fashion changes. When it comes to h2, we see that modi昀椀cation was on the rise overall; we even 昀椀nd con昀椀rmation for h3, stating that evaluative modi昀椀ers grew relatively more frequent over time than descriptive modi昀椀ers. Finally, we could not 昀椀nd evidence for the hypothesis regarding modi昀椀er stacking (h4): this indicates that evaluative modi昀椀ers must have replaced descriptive modi昀椀ers across the board (instead of supplementing them). These results tie in with the rising importance of design in literature, with noted exceptions in some categories. This was precisely the case when the evaluative modi昀椀ers were employed to describe object categories whose value relied on their unique properties and design to emphasise their worth and thus construct their value linguistically. The adverts ultimately served to draw potential buyers to the viewing and auction where consumers could gauge the true value of the goods by feeling, smelling and interacting with the objects o昀ered for sale beyond the linguistic constructions that were examined in this paper.
The authors would like to thank Bruno Blondé, Enrique Manjavacas, Wout Saelens, Bas Spliet, the anonymous reviewers for their help and comments and the Research Council of the University of Antwerp for supporting the project: Fashioning ’old and new’. Secondary markets, commodity value conventions and the dawn of consumer societies in Western Europeth(-18 19th centuries).
Descriptive adapted - ebony - white - turky - sedan - wilton - couch - domestic - elbow - library madeira - chintz - scotch - silk - double - golden- - green - plated - servants - writing - dimity - carved - glass - window - red - steel - moreen - household - blue - bronze sleeping - hollands - housekeepers - private - brussels - mohair - brick-built - four-post - royal - cotton - brass - french - muslin - parlour - nankeen - tin - bowed - built - irish cheney - metal - repair - four-stall - check - dresden - eight - walled - card - gilt - printed - enamelled - leasehold - bordered - attached - culinary - damask - satin - arched - several - winged - public - english - 昀椀eld - german - farming - furnished - dwelling - goose serges - walnut-tree - wainscot - sconces - crimson - pembroke - double-key’d - bay detached - various - snu昀 - harrateen - three-stall - standing - kitchen - yellow - toned - persian - stained - brilliant - glazed - single - genoa - copper - inlaid - sundry - calico - camblet - iron - indigo - jamaica - circular - pier - general - japan - fowling - eightday - pewter - breakfast - drawing - musical - pearl - japanned - marseilles - womens worsted - brown - carpeting - grey - velvet - wrought - dressing - chestnut - mahogany horse-hair - wood - lisbon - india - spanish - nag-tail - marble - uphol昀琀ery - pair - livery woollen - looking - wearing - stage - cornices - coloured - four - black - chelsea - foreign - singularly - ornamental - oval - cabriole - broad - eating - coach- - silver - copyhold singular - stone - russia - 昀氀emish - miscellancous - diamond - dutch - feather - draught shaving - complete - variety - drinking - dining - panned - italian - oriental - rosewood worsted-damask - chinese - billiard Evaluative fancy - extensive - useful - requisite - celebrated - antique - splendid - old - lady’s modern - improvable - beautiful - truly - richly - clean - very - cheerful - great - plain exceedingly - well-chosen - large - scarce - valuable - convenience - comfortable - wellbred - superior - neatly - pleasing - long - spacious - genteel - larger - neat - 昀椀tted - light - compact - highly - easy - condition - elegant - pleasure - remarkable - 昀椀ne - proper airy - convenient - masters - strong - prime - 昀椀nished - important - improved - capital new - superb - taste - commodious - noble - well-built - excellent - select - fashionable - 昀椀ne-toned - curious - suitable - eminent - original - little - admired - magni昀椀cent exceeding - stout - lo昀琀y - genuine - ladies - narrow - eligible - common - numerous desirable - necessary - seasoned - handsome - roomy - principal - arable - new-built clever - quality - super昀椀ne - gentleman’s - much-improved - substantial - rich - exquisite - family - grand - ancient accessories jewellery - bracelet - locket - trinket - earring animal/accessories horse - saddle - harness - pony appliances/utensils barrel - butts - hearth - pistol - chimney - mangle - utensil - 昀椀re-arm - stove clothing/fabric counterpane - matress - mercery - shawl - habderdashery - handkerchief - sheet - clothes - hose - drapery decoration boxes - chandelier - pillar - picture - lamp - lustre - candelabra - globe - plant - carpet cut-glass - vase - shell - screen - books - frame - chimney-glass - candlestick furniture settee - cellarets - drawers - desk - bedstead - cabinet - chair - couch - library-case pantry - cabinet-work - sideboard - bureau - dining-tables - furniture - canopy - secretaire - commode - wardrobe - closet - chaise - chest - bookcase - press - sofa instrument instrument - harpsichord - piano - pianoforte real estate cistern - dining-room - lawn - out-building - estate - garden - buildings - farm-yard - villa - chamber - drawing-room - staircase - orchard - hall - stabling - wash-house - timber land - house - bedchamber - farm-house - brewhouse - residence - premises - mansion dwelling-house - lots - cellar - stable - pipe - cottage - garret - court - coach-house - bath - tenenement - warehouse - bed-room - messuage - attic - counting-house - apartment farm - stall - cellaring - mansion-house tableware dish - china - bottles - decanter - porcelain - glasses