Materializing the Eighteenth Century: Dress History, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Study Chloe Wigston Smith* University of Virginia Abstract Drawing on an interview with Linda Baumgarten, curator of clothing and textiles at Colonial Williamsburg, and recent interdisciplinary studies, this article considers how eighteenth-century scholars use the history of dress in literary history and cultural studies. It explores how the study of material culture can illuminate and complicate literary history, but also how dress history comprises its own language and ideas. In his 1711 address to vain wits, An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope proclaims that “Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still / Appears more decent as more suitable” (lines 318–19), an analogy that conveys, with brilliant precision, the conceptual and cultural intersections between words and clothing during the eighteenth century. From the East India Company to crumbling sartorial hierarchies and the cotton gin, the role of dress in eighteenth-century culture has long fascinated literary scholars. Classic studies such as Terry Castle’s Masquerade and Civilization have taught us that the study of clothing discloses the inner workings of a period fascinated by the kinds of dressing up, dressing down, and cross-dressing that violate the decorum, whether verbal or visual, that Pope encourages. Following Castle, scholars such as Laura Brown, Felicity Nussbaum, Joseph Roach, and Kristina Straub, to name just a few, have incorporated the study of clothing into their discussions of gender, race, and class. 1 In 2005, full-length studies by Jennie Batchelor and Tita Chico, scholars both based in the field of literature, have positioned representations of dress, the dressing-room, and gender at the crossroads of eighteenth-century interdisciplinary work. Contemporary views, such as Pope’s analogy between words and clothing, suggest how clothing constitutes a particularly ripe subject for literary inquiry. In this brief gallop through dress history and some eighteenth-century inter- disciplinary studies, I consider how the discipline of dress history presents its own obstacles, as well as cultural riches, for literary scholars by drawing on an interview with Linda Baumgarten, curator of clothing and textiles at Colonial Williamsburg. 2 Like the literary canon, the canon of material culture divulges as many insights into the complicated history of collecting as it yields glimpses of © Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 3/5 (2006): 967–972, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00369.x