At its heart, scientific practice drives to grasp the elusive and make it tangible. This process often involves the codification of material and embodied ways of knowing. To understand the diverse engagements a wide variety of eighteenth-century people had with the world around them, the central role of experience must be acknowledged. Experience was, of course, central to eighteenth-century methods of scientific research, such as observation and experiment. The processes by which experience was conditioned and extended, the ways it worked through practices and how it was ultimately converted into evidence require examination. The aim here is to move between the mess of bodies, materials and processes and the clean and conclusive words on the page. What follows explores examples of techniques and tacit knowledge commonly employed by those who engaged in the productive work of the home. In doing so, the chapter elaborates on a range of specific domestic practices that offered householders the skills and ways of knowing that could facilitate scientific enquiry.

One of the reasons for the persistence of the false binary of hand and mind in understandings of intellectual work has to be the challenge of putting some manual processes into words. The uncomfortable relationship between forms of knowing that are based on physical manipulation and those that are based on wordy reasoning is strongly reflected in histories of intellectual life. Ideas that are primarily expressed in words, understandably, commonly find themselves in books whereas those that do not lack that ‘body of work’ to explain them. As art historian T. J. Clark has eloquently articulated, ‘Writing automatically aims, or pretends, to be attentive. It likes details … False vividness gives way abruptly to clever summing up.’¹ It follows that the writing down of some ideas might even distort them, make them something else, something more certain.

The household was a place of work for domestic servants, undermining the twentieth-century associations of home with cosy retreat and personal privacy. The home was often the primary place of work for masters and mistresses too, especially when a shop or workshop formed one part of the site. The record-keeping discussed in this chapter builds on the preceding one by considering a wider variety of domestic writing, including letters, recipe books and journals. What follows documents examples of the tacit knowledge necessary to run a home and investigates the ways that individuals accessed, exchanged and communicated these practice-based forms of knowledge. It also tracks the role of record-keeping as a domestic practice in these spheres of knowledge-making.

The notion of tacit, as opposed to explicit, knowledge was developed by the philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), who argued that knowing is an art and that any art is learned by practice.² For Polanyi, learning involved both doing and being shown how to do. Moreover, learning and knowing relied upon the social and cultural dynamics of an individual’s environment and a belief in a particular phenomenon usually prefiguring any understanding of its workings. For Polanyi, all knowledge was personal and required personal participation to materialise.

With Polanyi’s theory of knowing in mind, histories of science have dwelt substantially on the embodied, material and culturally embedded aspects of early modern knowledge.³ Since the 1920s and 30s, the role of the artisan in the making of ‘scientific’ knowledge has been contemplated and debated and this question enjoyed renewed scholarly interrogation at the close of the twentieth century.⁴ However, there remain varied interpretations of knowledge learned by doing.⁵ For the purposes of what follows, knowledge learned at home was invariably of the kind that grew from practice, experiment and repetition, through learning at an expert’s side, and responded to both the needs and affordances of domestic space and material culture. These were characteristics that were shared by scientific enquiry, which also often relied upon personal experience and repetition, typically in the form of observation and experiment.

Many forms of tacit knowledge did not make their way into text on the page. Nevertheless, practices of record-keeping were ubiquitous and quotidian in this period, both in the home and elsewhere. In some of these surviving texts, aspects of technique and tacit knowledge are visible. Sometimes silences in these records indicate the understanding that writers assumed readers had. All too often, the recipes that appear in domestic collections gloss over the intricacies of the process, assuming a range of competencies that are alien to the twenty-first-century reader. This chapter examines two kinds of record-keeping – domestic manuscripts concerned with provisioning and examples that document the natural world. Whilst each category is itself heterogeneous, important continuities exist across these forms of keeping a note.

Managing or conducting the many and varied tasks of home oeconomy demanded a wide range of skills and specialised knowledge. Historians have begun to identify the home as a site of experimental practice.⁶ In applying the language of experiment to domestic processes, it is also worth noting Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin’s characterisation of ‘experiment’ as being comprised of many strains of experimental thinking rather than being one definitive practice.⁷ In looking at domestic practice and knowledge in this way, two issues emerge. First, it has been difficult for historians to detect much of the unwritten tacit knowledge of home and, therefore, to fully value it in histories of knowledge.⁸ Moreover, the large-scale societal change brought by processes of innovation and industrialisation in this era were steeped in the skills, techniques and tacit knowledge learned by doing. This is, of course, a well-established observation.⁹ However, by bringing the details of those elusive but significant features of tacit knowledge to the typed page, a broader spectrum of knowing and a more diverse cast of intellectual actors become visible.

‘Her doctrine and practice’: bread-making in an elite Irish household

One vital domestic commodity that demanded especially careful treatment was the starter or ‘barm’ used in the leavening of bread. This substance consisted of flour, water, bacteria and yeast and often involved the transfer of material between brewing and baking – two important facets of home production in this period. Barm was a much-discussed product in eighteenth-century Ireland. The Dublin Society recorded the subject many times over in their Transactions and a Mrs Baker of County Kilkenny noted taking the Society’s advice on keeping a large stock of barm in her 1810 household book, revealing the connections between domestic record-keeping and national debate.¹⁰ The following example reveals the ways tacit knowledge about complex material processes was shared in person and, with difficulty, in writing.

The letter-writer was the Church of Ireland Bishop Edward Synge (1691–1762), and what follows is drawn from a large collection of published letters addressed to his daughter, Alicia Synge (1726–1807) penned between 1746 and 1752.¹¹ The collection is dense with detail on matters of the household and estate and Synge was clearly proud of his home production, commenting in July 1751 on his ‘Fresh pleasure from the improv’d state of my Corn; which led me on to imagine it reap’d, safe in the haggard, and bread and drink from it in abundance.’¹² Synge had overseen the building of the episcopal palace at Elphin, County Roscommon, taking particular interest in planting the gardens and grounds with imported plants and trees.¹³ His zeal for matters of domestic production saw him rely on the expertise of his domestic servant, but he also cast doubt on the reliability, quality and depth of her knowledge.

On 16 July 1751, Synge opened a letter with a detailed re-telling of the process of creating, maintaining and using barm. That morning, he had ‘a conference … with Jane about Bread &c.’ in which she emphasised that ‘the main thing is the Barm’.¹⁴ Synge was interested in his servant Jane’s technique because, in his own words, ‘her Bread is Excellent, and almost constantly so. Her worst is better than the best We had last Winter.’¹⁵ Synge was keen for bread of this high quality to be produced by the staff at his Dublin townhouse, where his daughter Alicia was resident, and hoped that she might oversee this project. However, the inherent difficulty in describing in words, rather than showing in person, was immediately apparent. Only a few lines in and Synge broke off: ‘For fear of writing wrong or imperfectly I stopp’d here, and sent for Jane. My caution was not amiss.’¹⁶ Synge had the steps in the wrong order, realising after consulting with Jane for the second time that ‘the straining must be, when the Barm and Water are first mix’d’.¹⁷

The first revelation of Jane’s practice was that the ‘Best Barm is that which works out of the Vessels of Ale when drink is tunn’d [stored], the first twenty four hours.’ Jane would use no other kind ‘when she can help it’.¹⁸ Once acquired, Jane kept the barm ‘in a Vessel by it self unmix’d with any thing’ and took a quantity from that pot on a daily basis.¹⁹ The extracted barm was mixed with cold water, stirred and left to ‘pitch’, meaning settle, thus ‘All dirt, and dross … falls to the bottom, from whence she pours it off clean into another Vessel.’²⁰ Synge’s retelling of Jane’s method noted that barm taken from ‘Ale or Small Beer, she holds equally good’ and that this substance would keep a ‘good Week or ten days’.²¹ In this way, bread-making made use of the staple brews for the household, revealing the transfer of materials and material knowledge from one office of home production to another.

Jane’s guidance also highlights the temporal connection between brewing and baking, the schedule of brewing providing material that could last up to ten days for the purposes of baking, before a fresh quantity would be needed.²² As discussed below, some home bakers developed strategies to preserve their barm, making them less dependent on the brewing schedule. However, the Synge letters indicate the complex overlapping timeframes for domestic tasks. Householders and servants charged with producing everyday consumables had to bear in mind the time of gathering, accruing, preparing, making, finishing, preserving and the necessary punctuation of waiting for organic processes to do their work. Waiting time was, no doubt, swiftly reallocated to a shift with another form of production, eyes and hands regularly moving from one process to the next to make the most of each day’s potential.

Preparing and maintaining the barm was an iterative process (‘What she uses one day, she prepares constantly the day before’) and responsive to the changing needs of the household (‘Her quantity is in proportion to the Bread intended’).²³ Some effort was applied to ridding the barm of detritus associated with its previous life in the brew tun: ‘she … strains immediately to get clear of Hop-Seeds &c. then she lets it pitch [settle] for a quarter of an hour or thereabouts, not longer’.²⁴ This process of allowing the liquid to settle was partly responsible for the clarity of the barm, but the method also included the pouring of ‘blended liquor … very carefully off into another Clean Vessel, so as to leave all dross behind’. The new vessel of barm would then be left overnight, resulting in ‘the clean Barm [settling] at the bottom, from which she pours the Water off. With this thus purify’d, she makes her Bread.’²⁵ Having been shown the practice in person from beginning to end, Synge returned again and again to specific aspects, offering a more comprehensive description of the qualities of the materials involved, the signs of success and the elements that required personal judgement.

Tips and pitfalls in the handling of barm are identified in the next tranche of the narrative. Synge warned, ‘When she pours off the liquor first from the dross, it looks as if there were little or no Barm in it.’ However, this impression is misleading, and Jane reassured her audience that ‘a quart of foul usually gives the next day a pint purify’d, and subsided to the Bottom from the Water’. Besides, exact quantities were not required: ‘A little more or less makes no difference in the Bread.’²⁶ Some attention is also given to Jane’s equipment, such as her use of ‘Glaz’d Pans and Crocks’ that ‘she had for her dairy’ and a vessel with ‘a shallow pan, of size proportion’s [sic] to the Liquor’ into which she strained her barm and water such as ‘the Dirt may pitch’.²⁷ Interestingly, in a subsequent letter dated 23 July, Synge requested, ‘You should send back Mrs Heap’s [the cook’s] Vessel in which the late cargo of flow’r went up. Such things are Scarce here.’²⁸ Despite the episcopal residence in Elphin offering a substantial three-storey central building with the addition of two-storey wings, individual vessels were still valued and ‘scarce’ enough to be requested back, having travelled from country seat to townhouse. Jane’s decision-making was necessarily responsive to a wide range of factors and, as such, having the right vessel to hand, was doubtless important to the smooth-running of her routine of home production.

Edward Synge’s retelling of his domestic servant’s practice expresses the levels of material literacy Jane required to make appropriate judgements at the many junctures in this cyclical process. For example, her description discussed how much time was ‘enough for the dross and dirt to sink to the bottom, while the clean Barm continues in a floating state’. The description here is aimed specifically at enabling Synge’s replication of the process. Confidence was needed in the next moment, as leaving the mixture any ‘Longer time would occasion it’s [sic] falling again to the bottom, and mixing with the dirt’.²⁹ Moreover, the barm harvested from the brewing process was not a uniform product. After ‘another conference with her on the Subject’, Synge reported Jane’s response: ‘Indeed, My Lord, says she, I get Barm sometimes as red as a Fox, sometimes black, full of Hop-leaves, Bog-bane, Wormwood, Artichoak leaves, and a long &c. of other like ingredients. By straining I get rid of all these.’³⁰ This list of ingredients is fascinating; whereas hop leaves and bog-bane were ingredients commonly used in brewing beer and ale, the others are less obvious candidates. This comment suggests that a much broader range of liquors were home-produced at Elphin or, otherwise, that Jane sometimes relied upon other kinds of fermentation to produce the barm she needed for baking.³¹

According to Synge, Jane described her use of barm as a ‘doctrine and practice’, highlighting both her belief in her own methods and their refinement through repetition.³² Throughout the retelling of Jane’s method, the profoundly unequal power relationship between Synge and his servant emerges, as Synge finds himself both reliant on her expertise and sceptical of her intellectual capacity to really ‘know’ of what she speaks. Typically, comparison and description are Jane and Synge’s allies in conveying the tacit knowledge of her experience. The ‘purify’d’ product with which bread can finally be made is repeatedly referred to as ‘white as Starch’.³³ In the second of the two letters, the comparison with starch is taken a step further, revealing Jane’s sense that not only the colour compared, but also the material properties: ‘barm as white and as tough as Starch’.³⁴ Clearly, a familiarity with the characteristics of other common domestic products and ingredients is invoked by this description. Rather than describing the barm in abstract terms, Jane relies on her audience’s own material literacy as a prerequisite for carrying out the practice she describes.

Jane’s own words make occasional intrusions in Synge’s narrative and her pleasure at being credited for her knowledge is noted: ‘I have made her very happy already, by giving her thanks from you and Mrs J for her instructions about Barm.’³⁵ A glimpse of a diverse palette of household ingredients emerges from the descriptions of purifying and clarifying barm: bog-bane and artichoke leaves and barm that is white as starch or red as a fox.³⁶ Synge notes where Jane’s vocabulary departs from his own: ‘Sheering, so she calls pouring’, but it is hard to say whether ‘the great dross, which remains in the bottom’ was described as ‘red like brick-dust, or darker’ by Synge or by Jane herself.³⁷ Synge, this time using his own words, describes Jane’s judgement honed by experience: ‘In pouring off the first, As soon as she sees any dross rise, she stops, and leaves what remains to settle more, then pours again.’³⁸ He is forced to account for the responsive quality of Jane’s approach, commenting, ‘Sometimes she puts more Water to the dross when she thinks any good Barm is among it, and stirs agen, and after a quarter of an hour pours agen. I suppose this is when Barm is scarce.’³⁹ Only experience can tell Jane that there is ‘good Barm … among it’; this is her tacit knowledge and Synge is left to wonder if additional stirring is the adjusted response to a lack of barm in the pot. Distressingly for the novice, there is ‘No niceity as to Quantity’, in other words, no precise amount is given, and whilst Jane ‘likes a good deal’, Synge must discover for himself what that quantity might be.⁴⁰

The role of knowledge in the development of Jane’s technique is something that Synge certainly recognised. Nevertheless, he cast doubt on the quality and basis of that knowledge: ‘To this [the whiteness and toughness of the barm] she chiefly ascribes the goodness of her Bread. How that may be I know not.’⁴¹ Synge reported Jane as saying, ‘With this, My Lord, I make all your bread, and Many a hard shift I make to get it’, but criticism of her speaking too much immediately followed: ‘Thus she run on, till I was tir’d.’⁴² Whilst Synge took great care to make a written record of Jane’s method, ultimately, he neither enjoyed hearing her speak nor entirely trusted her words, commenting, ‘Either [what] she says [is] true, or the goodness of Bread depends less on Barm than We imagine.’ So, despite the fact that Synge admitted ‘better [bread] never was, than I have almost constantly’, he was not certain that the reason for this quality was as Jane described.⁴³ The predictable power dynamics of class and gender operated just as firmly in this realm of knowledge-making as any other.

Ultimately, Synge urged his daughter to ‘Continue therefore your Experiments, till you unravel this great mistery.’⁴⁴ This was not an idle suggestion, Synge intended to ‘send you by John’s Mule a Couple of Barrels of Wheat, which John is to sell. With the money you may buy more flowr for more trials. A little at a time will be best, tho’ you pay more for it. A bag will be too much.’⁴⁵ Thus, for Edward Synge, his servant’s ability to create delicious bread consistently was firmly believed, through personal experience of the results, but her knowledge of the reasons for this success was doubted. Seeing for oneself, through experimentation, was considered the only reliable route to better understanding, personal experience counted.

Next, the discussion moves to consider a broader range of examples of this kind of domestic practice. Synge’s detailed and extended communication with his daughter about the acquisition of tacit knowledge is an unusual archival survival. However, regular glimpses of these modes of tacit knowing, sharing of techniques and use of experiments can be identified in other household records.

Record-keeping

Domestic record-keeping generated a fine-grain understanding that afforded householders a greater level of control over their own domestic environment and finances. It is also a complicated source material, varied in its presentation and purpose, often misleading in its promise of unfiltered documentation of past actions and accumulations and simultaneously alluring as a genre that might – obliquely – speak of the self.⁴⁶ Household documenting offered the record-keeper the space to perform certain aspects of their role in terms of gender and class. Male authority was constructed through everyday domestic tasks and, especially, through the documentation of those activities. In this way, astute record-keeping was one method of maintaining patriarchal authority and enabled men to fulfil their roles as household managers and keepers of accounts.⁴⁷ Many wives also took control of domestic accounting and whilst female authority was constructed differently, many women gained power and agency through this process. The sequence of daily tasks of production, consumption and documentation shaped people’s lives, demanding their attention in particular forms, trained on individual tasks and at specific moments in time, week by week, year by year. Fragments of these rhythms are captured in domestic record-keeping and offer insight not only into power relationships and the strictures of oeconomy, but also into eighteenth-century knowing and doing. The simplest forms of keeping a note can reveal the organisation not only of things and money, but also of ideas.

Home provisioning

Recipe books of this period are increasingly recognised for the evidence they contain of experimental knowledge alongside the glimpses they provide of social networks and relationships.⁴⁸ One such recipe book is that of Mary Farewell, described on the inside cover as ‘her book’ and begun in 1721.⁴⁹ Whilst recipe books are a diverse genre of writing, there are common characteristics and Farewell’s conforms to many of these. For one, this parchment-bound book presents a mixture of culinary and medical recipes, added in no discernible order, suggesting that the book’s information was accumulated over time. Farewell recorded directions ‘to make Cheese Cakes’, ‘How to make a rice Poden’, ‘To make sauce for Greene Geese’, ‘To make a Orange Gelly pudding’ and instructions for making ‘Elderflower Wine’ and ‘Ginger Wine’. Amidst these items for the dinner table, she included a remedy ‘for a weakness’ and ‘A Receipt to Cure the Biting of a Mad Dog’.⁵⁰ Names are added to record the origin of the recipe, a ‘Mrs Phill Balgury’ appears next to both ‘An Orange Puding’ and instructions on how ‘To Dry Cherryes’.⁵¹ Delicacies for special occasions sit alongside everyday staples and treatments for the sick or injured. Recipe books of this era record not only the practical knowledge acquired and preserved by their owners, but also the predominantly female social networks that shared and corroborated that knowledge.⁵²

Another smaller, unattributed book is enclosed with Farewell’s in the Derbyshire Record Office collection. It is inscribed with the impersonal title ‘Receipts’, meaning recipes, and comprised of lined paper folded in half, so that the lines run vertically. These features suggest a makeshift construction using materials available at hand. Nevertheless, the small pages are full of information, listing savoury and sweet dishes, condiments and remedies for a wide range of disorders for both humans and livestock.⁵³ The author noted many of the names of those who had offered her the recipes, sometimes in the title of the recipe itself as with Doctor Cook. However, the harvesting of recipes drew on multiple sources beyond this mistress’s personal social circle. For example, ‘Dutchess of Devonshire Rect for Tea Cakes’ was unlikely to speak to a personal relationship with the aristocrat and more likely a recipe in popular circulation. Elsewhere, the Derby Mercury newspaper of 11 May 1786 is credited with a recipe to help tackle consumption, revealing access to local periodicals and a resourceful approach to gathering borrowed knowledge.⁵⁴

Whilst the sourcing of such inclusions offers insight into networks of knowledge exchange, this chapter is concerned with what people did with this information. The role of trial and error and the need to apply well-honed judgement are obvious in the text. For example, the book admits that a method for alleviating smallpox was arrived at by accident when in 1793 a ‘plaster’ made of leather coated with ‘unguentum hydrargyri Fortius’ ‘was apply’d thro mistake instead of another that had been ordered by the physician’.⁵⁵ When instructing the reader on making ‘Stale Ale Mild & wholesome’, the recipe advises that if ‘half a Tea spoonful of salts of Tartar … is not sufficient’ then ‘put a little more in till it ferments’. Thus, the judgement rested on the maker either observing signs of fermentation or knowing through experience the amount that would produce this effect.⁵⁶ Recipes usually assumed the reader had the requisite tacit knowledge to interpret and enact on the basis of limited details. As this recipe shows, the ability to extend the life of consumable goods was crucial in domestic settings with little access to refrigeration (besides a cool cellar) and a reliance on the seasonal production of everyday foodstuffs.

Whilst recipe books aimed to instruct, letters often revealed the anxieties of home producers about the efficacy of their methods. On 31 January 1701, Sir John Mordaunt wrote to his second wife Lady Penelope Mordaunt about her efforts to pickle pork. Pickling, as opposed to curing, meat was a popular method of preservation by the mid-eighteenth century and pork was the favoured vehicle, although mutton and beef were also treated in this way.⁵⁷ Pickled pork was referred to as ‘tubbed bacon’ on account of the technique of setting the meat in a dish to pickle and its associations with traditional cured meat. On this topic, Mordaunt worried that it was ‘so fatt there is scares [scarce] any lean upon it’, admitting that his investigation went only as far as looking ‘upon yor Tubbd Bacon, but not tasted it’.⁵⁸ Mordaunt feared ‘it is not done right’ because he observed that the bacon was ‘All drye except one of ye Hains at [the] bottome wch is cover’d wth Pickle’. Further, he concluded that the ‘Tubb is too bigg for it’ and he believed that ‘it must be salted over again & ye Ham that was at yee Bottome laid at ye Topp’.⁵⁹ It is not clear whether John Mordaunt had any hands-on experience in pickling pork himself, but he felt able to identify possible errors in his wife’s work. Nonetheless, the letter also communicated his optimism that the process could be repeated, with mistakes corrected and the potential for an edible result remained. In this way, through trial and error, observation and correction, serviceable ‘tubb’d bacon’ might be achieved.

A century later, in 1810, another household recipe book was begun by Mrs A. W. Baker of Ballytobin House, County Kilkenny in Ireland. Mrs Baker, like Mary Farewell, put particular store in knowledge that had been tried and tested by others. This example reveals that authority played a role within these texts and was highlighted for the reader. Baker’s text makes frequent references to her grandmother’s recipe book, referring the reader to that book for a method to ‘Clear any Distilled Water that may be Muddy or Milky’, and noting that a recipe for pickling walnuts was ‘Strongly recommended in My Grandmother’s Book’.⁶⁰ The trust put in her grandmother’s methods helps us to understand a value system that emphasised authority through association with trusted sources and through personal experience. On the one hand, this process of recycling older recipes might indicate a conservatism within these documents, but recipe books also attest to a common understanding among their authors that local variables in equipment, ingredients, tastes, domestic affordance, climate and family needs all required consideration, experimentation and adaptation.

Baker’s book, like many of its kind, includes a good range of pickling, preserving and potting recipes to make perishable goods serve year-round and she boasted that her recipe for ‘Catsup [ketchup]’ would ‘last 20 years’.⁶¹ For example, Baker’s directions for pickling lemons advised that after quartering and salting, the lemons require a thorough drying out ‘in the oven after the great heat is out, or in the sun’.⁶² Ensuring the longevity of pickles and preserves was paramount, and the much-valued pickled walnut recipe suggested the double sealing of the ‘pot’ ‘first with a Bladder, and outside that with Leather, that no air may get to them’.⁶³ Yet another pickling recipe noted the potential for cucumbers to masquerade as a more exotic ingredient: ‘If you would have them taste like Indian mango put in Garlick instead of Shillots.’⁶⁴ Here, again, a preoccupation not only with the preservation of goods in the first instance but also with the revitalisation of a domestic product gone bad is clear. Moreover, the process of pickling was a creative one, allowing the cook not only to diversify her store cupboard year-round, but also to transform everyday ingredients into rare luxuries.

Mrs Baker, like Bishop Edward Synge, took an active interest in barm and her recipe book records six different entries on the subject. The importance of this material resource to the Baker home is further underlined by the Household Account Book for Ballytobin House, which identifies ownership of ‘1 Barm keg’, revealing either specialised equipment for this purpose or – otherwise – the habitual use of a generic keg for barm, earning it that name.⁶⁵ Baker’s book offers a range of options for preserving barm: for the usual week to ten days, for up to six weeks and a more elaborate method to preserve it for several months.⁶⁶ Her notes advise that it is possible to keep barm ‘for Brewing without art’ but for the purposes of baking, it required more care. However, the ‘Method to Keep a Large Stock [of] Barm for either Bread or Cakes’ marked a departure from the cycle of combining and cultivating mixtures of flour, water and barm and offered the baker something more akin to an active dry yeast.⁶⁷ As mentioned above, Baker discovered this method amongst the pages of a Dublin Society publication.

Throughout the recipe, Baker calls upon the reader to use their judgement and prior knowledge in deciding ‘When you had good Barm a plenty’ and determining what is ‘a good Quantity’ or when ‘you have sufficient Quantity’.⁶⁸ However, the text also provides helpful descriptions of techniques; for example, in asking the reader to ‘work it [the mixture] well with a Whisk’, the recipe advises ‘until it becomes liquid’. Essentially, thin layers of barm were painted with a brush onto the inner surface of a large tub or platter, which was then set upside down so ‘that it May receive no dust but so that the Air may go under it to dry it’. The process was repeated until the layer was two or three inches thick and would ‘serve for several months’.⁶⁹ Whilst devised for use in baking, this large stock of barm could still be applied to the purpose of brewing; in this case, the reader was instructed to cut off a piece, stir it into warm water and then ‘take A large Handfull of Birch’, dip it into the barm and hang it up to dry, taking care that ‘no dust comes to it’. The next step is to ‘Whissk it about in the Wort & then let it lye, when your drink works well take out the Broom & dry it & it will be fit for the Next Brewing.’⁷⁰ This dried barm was clearly a versatile product that saved the baker or brewer some of the work of maintaining a live culture day-to-day. In her guidance on ‘The French way of Making Leaven’, Baker emphasised that ‘From Xperience I know that six ounces of Leaven are not more than sufficient for A Quart of Flour’, noting that ‘If you are in a hurry or the Weather is cold you will require more.’⁷¹ This comment demonstrates that the circumstances of a particular room were influenced by the environmental conditions of that region or season. Baker’s book provides an exceptional level of guidance on matters of technique, but she ultimately confirms the importance of personal experience in the development of this tacit knowledge. The domestic records discussed here are unusually explicit in terms of technique and material knowledge and in this sense, like the Synge letters explored above, they are atypical archival survivals.

Weather diaries

Domestic habits of keeping a note extended well beyond the kitchen, and the recording of natural history was an increasingly widespread activity in eighteenth-century life. The greater accessibility afforded by the arrival of pre-formatted and printed journals for field notes in the 1770s was a significant factor in bringing a broader range of people to active natural history record-keeping. This development coincided with the sale of portable, pocket-sized guides to flora and fauna and the dissemination of ‘user-friendly scientific classification systems’ rendering a wider range of people capable of categorising and extrapolating from their own records.⁷² It also reflected the increasing production in the later part of the century of small pre-formatted notebooks which were primarily used for the purposes of keeping notes of social engagements. In this way, wider trends in record-keeping and print culture are visible within the particular realm of natural history and reveal the connections between different cultures of journal-keeping.

Of course, there is no clear distinction between acts of record and those of observation, especially as they are made manifest in the archive. A handwritten list of birds sighted locally speaks not only of documentation but also of the act of live observation and the list itself represents a recognition of the relatedness of individual birds collected on the page and thereby categorised as a group. The keepers of natural history journals regarded the recording of things as a form of empiricism, a contribution to knowledge.⁷³ In these cases, making a record was both the means and the end. So here, it is proposed that habits of recording information about both domestic life and nature were overlapping and mutually supporting. Much like technique and tacit knowledge, they could be transferred and adapted from one context to the next. As such, practices of domestic record-keeping played an important role in shaping cultures of curiosity in this period.

Whilst natural historical record-keeping moved with the times, it also drew on a long history. Manuscript commonplace books, which prefigured other ephemeral formats such as the scrapbook, offered a place for individuals to compile knowledge.⁷⁴ Typical inclusions were extracts of favourite poems or proverbs, but commonplace books were heterogeneous by their nature, and their contents reflected the interests of the compiler. As such, commonplace books – like minds – were repositories of diverse kinds of knowledge, but they formed part of ‘a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that dated back to the classical period’.⁷⁵ By the turn of the eighteenth century, common-placing was still being used as a form of information management that could facilitate the structuring of natural historical systems.⁷⁶ Thus, considerable overlap existed between ubiquitous forms of domestic record-keeping and scientific methods in this period – the latter drawing on characteristics of the former to concretise emerging systems of natural knowledge.

Here, the role of recording in histories of enquiry is discussed through two weather diaries. This was an enduring format of personal record-keeping and one that found expression in popular print culture. For many eighteenth-century observers, the weather revealed cosmic connections and formed one component part of an astrological worldview. For others, the weather brought signs of God’s favour and displeasure and the documenting of its expression sat easily with the mode of providential accountancy and self-reckoning common to spiritual diaries of the early modern period.⁷⁷ More than anything else, the weather affected everybody and especially those whose livelihoods relied on crops. Careful record-keeping offered the individual the possibility of greater familiarity with the patterns of nature and, potentially, the elusive power of prediction. As Edward Synge, Bishop of Elphin, anxiously commented in a letter to his daughter on the subject of his crops, ‘Nothing is certain, but uncertainty.’⁷⁸

The personal weather diary had a significant relationship with periodicals like the Gentleman’s Magazine and almanacs regularly carried weather-related features.⁷⁹ In the late seventeenth century, periodicals represented a quarter of all published titles and were a growing and accessible format of print.⁸⁰ Moreover, they relied heavily on reader response (whether real or fictional) as a means of generating interest in their varied offerings. Almanacs offered an incredible range of topics, including – among many others – information on the weather, astrology, astronomy, agriculture, tides and medical advice.⁸¹

Crucially, the weather diary was a format that could be read in a cheap almanac or the prestigious Transactions of the Royal Society and many outlets in between. The well-known cleric and naturalist, Gilbert White, had his own weather diary printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine.⁸² As ‘B. M.’ of Somerset wrote to the Magazine in late December 1781, the printing of ‘Meteorological Journals … were very much in repute’, especially in the 1750s and 60s.⁸³ ‘B. M.’ insisted that the printing of such weather diaries sourced from across the country would reveal important data on ‘the variation of the atmosphere’ which, he argued, ‘is certainly the principal cause of most of the epidemic diseases incident to our climate’. He mused upon whether ‘experimental philosophers of this time think it beneath their notice to attend to such trivial matters’ but submitted his own diary to the Magazine in the hopes that sense would prevail. Unfortunately, the editor noted that whilst they were grateful for the submission, its length and format (dissimilar to those ‘kept at London’) precluded its inclusion. Half a page was the most the Magazine could run to, but perfectly adequate for ‘a comparison … between two stations, and … to judge the general state of weather in the southern part of the island’.⁸⁴ This episode reveals an active public discussion about the printing of these materials, an expectation of seeing them in outlets like the Gentleman’s Magazine and a recognition of the collective nature of such record-keeping. The weather diary was a format that permeated eighteenth-century print culture whilst also representing a domestic, manuscript practice familiar to many. Whether conducted in pen and ink or perused in print, the weather and its patterns sparked widespread curiosity and diligent commitment to observation and record.

Here, Isaac Butler’s manuscript Dublin weather diary (1716–34) and Richard Townley’s 1791 publication A journal kept in the Isle of Man, giving an account of the wind and weather, and daily occurrences, for upwards of eleven months: with observations on the soil, clime, and natural productions of that island are examined up close. Butler and Townley’s writings offer two views of the weather diary: Butler’s manuscript is explicitly thus, containing nineteen years of near-complete daily weather records. Townley’s book, on the other hand, is a publication based on a personal journal documenting the Isle of Man, but ‘wind and weather’ are the first in a sequence of subjects listed in the book’s title. Both documents reference other occurrences, but Townley’s piece encompasses a very diverse range of interests from natural phenomena to descriptions of cultural norms and man-made antiquities. Townley’s inclusive approach was probably guided by the book market, where sellers aimed to offer something for every reader on their frontispieces, encouraging authors to cover an eclectic range of subjects.

Isaac Butler (c. 1691–1755) began his weather diary in 1716.⁸⁵ A Parish Constable of St Nicholas Without in Dublin, Butler was also a well-known almanac writer with encompassing interests in meteorology, botany, mineralogy, archaeology and astrology.⁸⁶ Unsurprisingly for a compiler of almanacs, Butler relied heavily on astrological explanation and his diary notes relevant details about the status of the moon and the position of planets – making connections between celestial bodies and the patterns of terrestrial weather.⁸⁷ However, Butler’s interests in the natural sciences and antiquity were furthered in his role as an ‘inquirer’ for the Physico-Historical Society, for whom he collected and reported evidence on a variety of subjects concerning Ireland.⁸⁸ In its inaugural year of 1744, the Society noted Butler’s efforts travelling through the counties of Dublin, Meath, Westmeath, Longford and Louth where he mapped the local geography, observed and collected samples of ‘diverse rare plants’ and compiled information regarding local historical artefacts, buildings and fossils.⁸⁹ These activities and institutional affiliation suggest that Butler’s weather diary formed one part of a wider set of intellectual commitments.

Butler was not alone in this endeavour; a rich culture of weather observation existed in Ireland with at least 750 records being taken before 1850, some under the auspices of societies and many others taken by individuals across the island.⁹⁰ The vast majority were observations taken without the benefit of an instrument of measurement and records were reproduced in the pages of Irish societies’ publications alongside cheaper print productions.⁹¹

Butler’s vocabulary for describing the weather was applied consistently over time. For example, sunshine was ‘fair’, ‘pleasant’, ‘hot’ and sometimes ‘serene’. Rain could be ‘misling’, ‘driving’, ‘dropping’ or come in ‘showers’. Alongside the commentary on daily weather conditions, there are also notes on the moon’s status, such as it being in the ‘latter degrees of Scorpio’, which was connected to the likelihood of ‘Clouds and rain’. The planets and astrological signs attracted plenty of mentions, such as the ‘sextile of Jupiter and Venus’ and ‘Saturn and Mars in opposition from Libra to Aries’. The integration of terrestrial and celestial observations and the explanatory power of astrology are key features, revealing the longevity of these ideas among educated civic officials in this period.

Another inclusion is a monthly record of unusual occurrences in Ireland or from around the world. For example, in June 1717, Butler noted that a mountain ‘beyond Rathfarnum [Rathfarnham]’ in Co. Wicklow had ‘bursted open from whence issued a great irruption of Waters with a prodigious Noise, it bore down stones of incredible Bulk, and form’d in a Valey beneath a piece of Natural pavement not to be parallel’d’.⁹² In December 1717, a series of dramatic weather events were recorded across the continent, which became known as the Christmas Flood of 1717. The diary recorded ‘2500 bodies of persons drowned’ in the Dutch city of Groningen, adding, ‘Melancholy are the Accounts from the North parts of Holland and Germany of the great Damages and Losses sustain’d there by the great storms.’⁹³ These monthly entries did not confine themselves to weather-related occurrences, noting other phenomena including political events.

On 19 February 1719, Butler noted that ‘A Meteor or Ball of fire’ was sighted.⁹⁴ This focus on celestial matters was, of course, in keeping with his astrological perspective. The meteor appeared ‘southward of Dublin its altitude did not exceed 13 deg’. And it ‘gave so great a light as to efface that of the Moon and stars which then shone’; moreover, ‘in its progressive motion from east to west it left a great train of smoak behind it, and all of a sudden Extinguish’d’.⁹⁵ Butler noted that the same meteor was seen in Paris, but other records from the period reveal that astronomers in Bologna also recorded its occurrence and attempted to measure its altitude, describing the meteor as the same size as the moon and as bright as the sun near the horizon and throwing out sparks and smoke.⁹⁶ The fact that Butler made mention of a measurement of the altitude suggests that he either accessed information on astronomy through Dublin contacts or print culture or that he made the measurement himself. In Chapter 4, a community of Dublin astronomers operating in the mid-century will be discussed in more detail, revealing the accessible nature of this scientific pursuit at this time.

The second diarykeeper, Richard Townley, served as a sheriff of Lancashire from 1752 to 1753 and died at Ambleside in 1802. The family were of the gentry class and the Journal speaks to the kind of leisured life that could accommodate a long-term enquiry pursued away from home. Townley’s two-volume Journal made an account of the wind and weather as part of a broader exploration of the natural and cultural features of the Isle of Man. As a visitor to the island, Townley drew on traditions of travel writing and the practices promoted by intellectual societies that sought to map, record, collect and capture the important natural historical and antiquarian characteristics of different regions.

Townley offered the reader ‘an easy, novel mode of information’ about ‘a sister island; being now, in great part, a member of the British Empire’.⁹⁷ He promoted his publication as the product of an informal process of information-gathering as opposed to a ‘formal history’ that might have required a more structured approach. He urged, therefore, that his readers ‘must not expect, accuracy either in design, method, or language; but a mere piece of patch-work’.⁹⁸ The Gentleman’s Magazine ‘Review of publications’ was unimpressed with the Journal, describing it as ‘a dull journal of uninteresting events, intermixed with a meteorological diary, and interlaided thick with hackneyed quotations’.⁹⁹

The vast majority of entries begin with a comment on the weather. For example, ‘a fair morning’ in June offered a sought-after chance for ‘a scramble amongst the rocks, round Douglas-head’, and Townley ‘judged this morning, as free from fog and any appearance of rain, a very favourable opportunity for undertaking it’.¹⁰⁰ However, the weather often comes between Townley and his exploration of the Isle, such as on 6 June 1789 when he ‘was obliged to turn about, and make a retreat from my favourite walk in order to preserve my eyes from the sharp sand, that was driven so furiously against them’.¹⁰¹

The Journal documents many different facets of island life, but with a substantial local fishing industry, sea life looms large in this account with regular references to the prospects of the fishing boats, the daily catch and the fluctuating price of fish and other commodities at market.¹⁰² Observations of nature are often driven by an interest in its value from a subsistence or commercial perspective. For example, a boat trip to Calf Island revealed a colony of ‘sea-parrots’ (puffins). When treated to ‘a dish of cold parrots’ by the ‘very civil old lady’ who lived with her husband as the only inhabitants of the island, Townley found them ‘uncommonly good and nourishing’.¹⁰³

On another occasion, when observing the breeding habits of local herring shoals, Townley chooses to believe the evidence of his own eyes over the descriptions given by experts. On arrival on the Isle of Man, Townley had ‘received with great caution’ the stories of herring breeding ‘in the different bays and channels about the island’ on account of having been informed ‘by naturalists, and other writers upon the subject’ that this fish ‘bred in very high northern latitudes’.¹⁰⁴ In fact, in 1786, the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society published an article by a Mr John Gilpin in which he acknowledged that the location of spawning ‘remains a query for naturalists’ and made the argument for the ‘bays, rivers, creeks, and even small streams’ of New England.¹⁰⁵ However, Townley adjusted his view when ‘two or three times’ he ‘had an opportunity of seeing, and observing, considerable shoals of young herring, that, from their diminutive size could never have journeyed from shores very distant from this small island’.¹⁰⁶ Here it is clear that Townley had not only engaged with published natural historical writings but was willing to diverge from the view of specialists when he could see the evidence for himself.

Like other keepers of nature journals, Townley adhered to an ethos that recognised both the value of observing and recording but also the partial nature of that record. On 15 June 1789, he reflected on this point, noting that ‘Wise and humble men’ will ‘confess their inability to develop the secret workings of nature which do, and ever will, serve to puzzle and confound the most improved understandings, thereby effectually humbling the pride of science’.¹⁰⁷ However, it is in these paragraphs referring to the unknowability of God’s creation that Townley delivers some of his most detailed observations, in this case of seaweed.

One ‘species of sea-weed’ is introduced in terms of the ‘most wonderful manner’ in which it arrives on the beaches of one of the island’s bays ‘constantly at this season of the year’, ‘dragging after it a stone of forty, fifty, or (perhaps) sixty times its own weight’.¹⁰⁸ The grip of the seaweed is articulated with care: ‘They are furnished with roots, or rather stoles’, and when first washed ashore ‘and are fresh and vigorous, there is no separating them from their new-adopted friends, but by acts of strong violence’.¹⁰⁹ Townley appears to have tested the strength of the seaweed’s attachment to the rocks in various ways: ‘I have several times brought a stone along with me, of five or six pounds weight, for many hundred yards, by the adhesion alone of a plant not two ounces in weight.’¹¹⁰ The description of the attachment is unusually thorough by the standards of the Journal, and uses close observation (‘From those stoles, several short crooked roots branch out on every side, resembling the hooks of the ivy, and other creeping plants’) and everyday examples to elaborate the physical features of the seaweed’s roots (‘exactly resembling those pliant pieces of leather, which boys use as take-ups’).¹¹¹ Seaweed was a troublesome object of enquiry in this period, on account of the difficulty of observing it underwater and its fast deterioration once washed up on shore.¹¹² Despite Townley’s commitment to observation as opposed to analysis of natural phenomena, his entry on seaweed offers some supposition:

Here, he offered something more than a record and demonstrated a confidence developed through first-hand experience.

Townley positioned himself as an inquisitive observer who took up the concerns of the naturalist or antiquary but who did not claim that title. However, he held a sceptical view of travel writing as a reliable source of information. For example, he took issue with ‘Voyagers, to various parts of the world’ who ‘speak very confidently of flying-fish’.¹¹⁴ In Townley’s ‘own poor opinion upon the subject’, it seems that on the contrary, fish are merely jumping out of the water.¹¹⁵ As something of a travel writer himself, this disquisition on truth-telling and the recording of natural history underlines the ambiguity of Townley’s own text – which regularly shifts in style between a range of genres of journal.

Although Townley’s published journal is not principally a weather diary, it uses the rhythms of that format to anchor its lengthy daily narratives and invokes several other diary forms alongside. This hybrid text illuminates the comfortable familiarity of the author with a range of genres that were commonly found in manuscripts and print in this period. Potential diary writers did not need the example of Fellows of the Royal Society as an inspiration; they needed only draw upon the facets of their own local and domestic environment to take pen in hand. Moreover, the search for patterns and predictability which were inherent in many of these forms of record-keeping had a strong relationship with the power and control offered by household accounting and also with modes of autobiographical or life-writing that were also common in this period. In this way, eighteenth-century individuals might easily keep account, simultaneously, of themselves and their environments – taking practices, habits and motivation from one written form to the next.

Conclusion

The record-keepers and letter-writers discussed in this chapter offer a glimpse of the range of skills and tacit knowledge needed to run and provision a home in this period. Account books and inventories speak to the material and spatial affordances of households, but recipe books and letters illuminate specific features of material knowledge and also the networks of social connection and rhythms of repetition that allowed that knowledge to be accessed, exchanged and, ultimately, trusted. An empiricism forged in record-keeping blossomed in the eighteenth century.¹¹⁶ By exploring how a variety of domestic processes conditioned and extended understanding, it is possible to see how knowledge worked through practices and also how experience could be converted into evidence.

Whilst historical analysis of the home has incorporated a sense that household accounting was highly prevalent in the eighteenth century, acts of keeping a note are not always viewed as specifically domestic in character. Both weather diaries discussed here show their authors’ aspirations for knowledge creation through record-keeping, but they also reveal the influences of contemporary domestic habits of keeping notes and older traditions of common-placing, diary and travel writing. Given the sheer quantity and range of household record-keeping at this time and individuals’ familiarity with these forms and modes, this chapter has argued that record-keeping was implicitly domestic in character and that the demands of home shaped these written practices as they were put to the service of science. The next three chapters shift focus to examine specific domestic practices themselves (collecting, observing and experimenting) – practices that this book argues were rooted in the domestic environment in this period.