Widow Pratt’s World of Goods Implications of Consumer Choice in Colonial Newport, Rhode Island CHRISTINA J. HODGE Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Boston University abstract The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part of on-the-ground mechanisms through which individuals propagated complex and contingent early mod- ern transformations, in particular those associated with social values and the material culture of daily life. This study of Elizabeth Pratt has consid- ered dressing the body; dining and drinking; and experiences of landscape and architecture as active engagements by an individual with a material world. Interdisciplinary study of Pratt’s possessions and decision making suggests that she did not emulate well-to-do neighbors, nor did she make the same choices as other middling property owners in the town. Pratt’s choices speak to developing middling discourses of consumerism, class, and gender. This study proposes that ‘‘piecemeal’’ refinement was not an epiphenomenonal paradox. Rather, it was the norm in the eighteenth cen- tury and constitutive of social values in the long term. OBJECTS, TEXTS, AND THE WIDOW PRATT In the middle decades of the eighteenth century the patterns of daily life changed dramatically for Britons of all social stations and localities. What scholars call the Consumer Revolution brought mass production, global markets, and increased consumer choice, whereas what they call the Geor- gian Revolution propagated a transformative suite of social and aesthetic values. 1 Broadly, new ways of being in the world and new uncertainties were 1. T. H. Breen, ‘‘The Meaning of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993), 249–60; Richard L. Bushman, Early American Studies (Spring 2010) Copyright  2010 The McNeil Center for Early American Studies. All rights reserved.