The Latin terms for ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’ had been used interchangeably in medieval and early modern writings and by the beginning of the eighteenth century, ‘the construal of experience as “experiment” … had acquired a wide and influential currency’.¹ As Étienne Chauvin argued at the turn of the eighteenth century, ‘reason without experience is like a ship tossing about without a helmsman’.² Taken together, observation and experiment were fundamental to the scientific developments of this era, and both required direct and personal experience of phenomena and the ability to record that process. As mentioned in the previous chapter, observation and experiment often went hand in hand, and the examples discussed here reveal elements of both. Alongside a recognition of experience as a route to understanding came the acknowledgement of artisanal knowledge as important to scientific enquiry and, with it, a greater value placed on ‘useful knowledge’ as part of the larger search for truth.³ Much of what follows draws on the records of societies dedicated to developing such useful knowledge. However, as these case studies show, the home was also a primary space for experiment.

The main focus of this chapter is on the experimental work of breeding silkworms, and the central examples include a postmistress in Kent, an apothecary in Pennsylvania and a range of other working and leisured women – all of whom conducted their experiments from home. Mary Terrall has explored the use made by naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757) of domestic space for experiment and observation, noting his dependence on the capacities and personnel of his two large residences.⁴ Here, elite domestic space is considered alongside homes of a much more modest scale – revealing that the large homes of the propertied classes were not a prerequisite for active domestic enquiry.

Mrs Wyndham’s scientific life

To begin, however, here is an example that raises more questions than it answers, especially in terms of gender, class and intellectual agency. In 1796, Elizabeth Wyndham won a silver medal from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London under the category of ‘Mechanicks’ (see Figure 5.1). Her innovation was a cross-bar lever, which she had designed to help resolve her workmen’s difficulties in moving large and heavy rocks – or, as the Society put it, ‘her ingenious contrivance of a method of using to the best advantage, the power applied to the Cross-Bar Lever, for raising large weights’.⁵ On 28 October 1795, Wyndham sent a drawing of the lever and a model (which was then stored in the Society’s Repository for the Inspection of the Public) alongside her explanatory correspondence. She wrote, ‘I have sent you a Model of a mechanical invention of my own, which you will laugh at, as every body here did at first; but I assure you, it has proved of great use, and the workmen all approve of it very much.’⁶ However, when Wyndham had first observed the men making use of her lever, she noticed that they did so

Figure 5.1 Mrs Wyndham’s cross-lever. Courtesy of Royal Society of Arts, London. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

She explained how her invention was intended to be operated, cross-referencing the drawing and model showing how her design ‘inclines backwards, which increases the power’, and included ‘a cross-bar for the workmen to hold by’ and another for them to stand on – both ‘additions are made to take on and off, and are only to be used when the strength of the rocks require an increase in power’.⁸ Fortunately, once corrected in its usage, Wyndham noted that ‘The workmen all agree that it is of very great service to them.’⁹

Elizabeth ‘Wyndham’ was actually Elizabeth Ilive, the mistress of George Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont of Petworth House in West Sussex, whose household accounts were discussed in Chapter 1. It is worth briefly exploring the life history of Elizabeth Ilive (c. 1770–1822). Whilst she was known in the household as ‘Mrs Wyndham’ and this is how she signed her correspondence with the Society in 1795, she did not marry the Earl until 1801. By this time, Ilive was over thirty, the Earl nearly fifty and the couple already had seven children. An article by Alison McCann, former archivist of the West Sussex Archive, first sketched out this woman’s unusual story back in 1983.¹⁰ What McCann had spotted in the Petworth House Archive were records that suggested a laboratory had been established in the house towards the end of the eighteenth century. Whilst it was not uncommon for rooms in large households to be adapted for scientific purposes, these operations tended to be undertaken by the master or mistress of the household and it is interesting that in this case a woman of modest origins and in an insecure position as a mistress, not a wife, nonetheless exercised her will to make her home a haven for scientific enquiry and discussion.¹¹ Indeed, at a neighbouring estate, Goodwood House in Sussex, Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond (1735–1806) took the initiative to create his own laboratory in 1790. However, in the case of Petworth House, it is Ilive’s work that is visible in the records.

Relatively little is known about Elizabeth Ilive’s background, and she has been reported as being either the daughter of a librarian at Westminster School or the daughter of a Devon farmer. It is thought that she met the Earl when she was a teenager in 1786 and her first child by Egremont was born the following year in 1787. Owing to her long-term position as an unmarried mistress, Ilive’s life at Petworth House had to accommodate inherent difficulties of status and authority. When the company was composed of family and visiting artists, Ilive was permitted to dine downstairs, but when visitors of higher social standing were received she would not form part of the gathering.¹² The flow of artists and writers that came through Petworth House provides further evidence of Elizabeth Ilive’s active encouragement of intellectual discussion within the household; she was – for example – the patron of several artists including William Blake, who dedicated to her his painting The last judgement.¹³

Ilive clearly maintained her own artistic and scientific interests at Petworth House, but the Earl was also motivated by intellectual concerns. As discussed in Chapter 1, Petworth household accounts reveal considerable resources put to the service of art and science. Egremont is known to have supported J. M. W. Turner with his patronage and, like many great landowners of his era, he followed scientific developments in the field of agriculture and husbandry particularly closely.¹⁴ Examples of the Earl’s purchases in the 1770s and 1780s point to wide-ranging interests: he acquired Joseph Priestley’s The history and present state of electricity (first published in 1775) and a few years later he bought some electrical machines for the estate. He also secured a two-foot telescope from an optical and mathematical instrument-maker; he was a patron of the Vaccine Board and established a surgery and dispensary at Petworth between 1789 and 1790. The Earl’s adaptations to the Petworth estate also included the creation of a museum in the late 1790s, which he put in the hands of a naturalist, Reverend Robert Ferryman (1753–1837).¹⁵

Despite the prominence of the Earl’s intellectual concerns, the household accounts make it possible to determine Ilive’s purchases of this nature. In many cases, she used prestigious London suppliers for instruments, glassware and chemicals. An iron furnace was also ordered especially and sent from the Norwich Iron Foundry of J. Peckover and fitted in the week of 24 March 1798.¹⁶ Subsequently, a chimney was raised and fires put in to service the laboratory. Many of the instruments, vessels and materials ordered for the laboratory were likely to have been used in the demonstration of the powers of vacuum – a phenomenon that could easily have been shown to others visiting the house. Other retorts and chemicals recorded in the accounts might have been used for chemical experiments, although it is difficult to be specific about the exact experiments that Ilive conducted in her laboratory.

It has not been possible to locate where exactly the laboratory was built in Petworth House, although a collection of eighteenth-century scientific equipment remains in a cupboard in the household.¹⁷ To date, no evidence has even been uncovered of the furnace, which would have had the largest footprint on the space. In fact, one of the only qualitative records of Elizabeth Ilive’s contribution to matters scientific remains the silver medal from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce discussed above.

Ilive’s work in the laboratory was to be short-lived. After her marriage in 1801, the couple’s relationship deteriorated sharply, and they lost their only legitimate child the following year. In May 1803, a deed of separation was drawn up and Elizabeth, now Countess of Egremont, moved out of Petworth House – she would not return. Little is known of her life thereafter. Whilst Ilive herself remains a relative enigma, the fragments of evidence point to scientific activities conducted on an extraordinary scale, especially considering her marginalised position within an aristocratic household. Although very little of her own testimony survives to place alongside the evidence of account books and glass vessels, other curious women were voluble on the subject of their own intellectual activity, as what follows will show.

Silkworm breeding

An activity that sat at the juncture of naturalism and commercial interest, silkworm breeding was taken up by many women across Britain and Ireland in this period. Championed by learned societies, institutional records attest not only to widespread participation in this pursuit but also to the intricacies of observation and experiment as they took place at home.

In the eighteenth century, silk was produced almost entirely abroad but remained in high demand by consumers at home who acquired this product at considerable expense. As such, silk production offered an opportunity for innovation that could lead to the development of a new and profitable domestic (in both senses) industry. Since the early 1600s, there had been an appetite in England for this venture but it had been slow to develop.¹⁸ In fact, seventeenth-century settlers in North America had been cheered by the recognition that the preferred food of silkworms, mulberry bushes, grew well in this region. As a consequence, they had foreseen a flourishing silk industry, but it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that efforts became more coordinated to plant the correct variety of mulberry plants for this purpose.¹⁹ The cultivation of mulberry bushes extended across the British Empire, with a J. Marten of Palamcotah, Madras, in India noting in 1791 ‘they are not uncommon in this country’.²⁰

In Britain and Ireland, meanwhile, silk weaving alongside other textile production had become well established in the Liberties area of Dublin and Spitalfields in East London, although the raw material was still mainly imported.²¹ Two new eighteenth-century organisations, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London and the Dublin Society took up this cause.²² The Dublin Society was granted its royal charter in 1820, becoming the Royal Dublin Society, and the London Society became the Royal Society of Arts in 1908 – these are the names the societies go by to this day. Both societies were focused on promoting ‘useful knowledge’ in a dizzying array of domains. To this end, prizes were offered for submissions by members of the general public that could shed light on all manner of questions, from the domestic production of chip hats to the planting of turnips.²³ There were two types of prize: ‘premiums’ for entries that responded to a call issued by the Society and ‘bounties’, which were awarded to unsolicited submissions. The categories were:

The London-based Society was not the first of its kind and its establishment was prefigured by the Dublin Society, in 1731, and also the American Philosophical Society, which was initiated in 1743 by the polymath, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), who later became one of America’s founding fathers. All three societies built on the work of smaller philosophical associations that had proliferated across the British world since the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and which often attended to the ways science could be applied to practical problems.²⁴

Like many of the other subjects of interest to these societies, the production of silk was really about import substitution. Where Britain and Ireland remained dependent on expensive foreign products, efforts were made to produce substitutes at home. However, in many cases efforts were thwarted by the variables of climate, ingredient or technique. The London Society’s records note that whilst ‘propagating Silk Worms, and obtaining Silk in England, was an early Subject of the Society’s consideration’, sourcing sufficient mulberry leaves to feed silkworms remained a major challenge.²⁵ In 1768, the London Society offered premiums for activities relating to silk production, including for ‘the greatest quantity of merchantable Silk’, ‘an account of the best method of breeding and treating Silk Worms, in order to the obtaining Silk, verified by experiments’ and ‘For raising the greatest number of white or black Mulberry Trees’.²⁶ Between the years 1768 and 1790, there were nine formal calls for submissions relating to silk, which would have been advertised in the print press as well as through the Society’s own communications and publications.²⁷

By contrast, the Dublin Society published papers on the subject but did not issue any premiums, instead relying on ad hoc submissions that they might choose to reward. Nonetheless, works of advocacy for domestic silkworm experimentation were published in 1750 and 1799, revealing the longevity of the Dublin Society’s interest in this topic.²⁸ On both islands, the domestic cultivation of silkworms capable of producing silk for the home market was enthusiastically taken up by interested individuals.

When householders ventured on this task, they engaged with zoology, botany, technology and matters of business, considering the cultivation of both worms and the mulberry trees upon which they depended alongside issues of equipment and labour that would affect the scale and profitability of this enterprise. As Reverend Samuel Pullein commented to the Dublin Society in 1750, it was thought that ‘many thousand Spinsters of a more curious Nature, without the Expence of Wages’ could become the workforce for this new silk manufacture and by doing so ‘be of publick Good to their Country’.²⁹

The mission of putting ‘useful arts’ to the service of the national good was at the heart of both of these eighteenth-century institutions. The Dublin Society was established to conduct philanthropic work ‘to promote and develop agriculture, arts, industry and science in Ireland’ and was founded by members of the Dublin Philosophical Society, principally Thomas Prior and Samuel Madden. The London Society was founded by the drawing teacher and inventor William Shipley to encourage creative thinking that could be put to public use. Both societies distinguished themselves from other intellectual institutions, such as the Royal Society, through their focus on the practical application of new knowledge. The Dublin Society emphasised the mission to provide ‘useful’ knowledge as opposed to ‘laboured speculations’ or the enrichment of ‘the learned world’.³⁰ They wished instead ‘to direct the industry of common artists; and to bring practical and useful knowledge from the retirement of closets and libraries into public view’.³¹

Whilst the founding members of both societies were drawn from the landed, professional and merchant classes, the memberships they amassed were more diverse.³² By 1764, only 10 per cent of the London Society’s 2,136-strong membership were individuals with titles and under 10 per cent were designated as medical, clerical, naval or military in background. Many more members were artisans, manufacturers, farmers or traders, including substantial representation from watch-makers and printers.³³ The Dublin Society had a much smaller membership numbering 267 in 1734. Not all of those named on the membership list played an active role and so a limited membership of 100 committed individuals was established thereafter.³⁴ Beyond the membership was an even wider section of the population who submitted proposals and designs to the societies, including those whose literacy was extremely basic.³⁵ Women existed within their number and a recent analysis of the London Society’s holdings (1755–1852), across all categories (excluding the Polite Arts which incorporated premiums intended for women), found just over 3 per cent of submissions were penned by women.³⁶ Both societies were certainly committed to making their calls for submissions accessible to as many as possible and some of their ventures were explicitly aimed at women.³⁷ In fact, the societies’ archives trace the remnants of a large, international network of correspondents. These diverse submissions provided ‘rich particularity and local detail’ – a feature of the London Society’s work that was both valued and criticised in this period.³⁸ The work of these geographically and socially disparate individuals survives in part as original letters sent to the London Society (unfortunately none survive for the Dublin Society) and as recorded within the organisations’ proceedings, minutes and transactions.

Female home experimenters in Britain and Ireland were drawn to the challenge of silkworm breeding, perhaps encouraged by the pamphlets of Pullein and others arguing that this was a pursuit that could be conducted by women in domestic settings.³⁹ From the Dublin Society’s Proceedings, it is possible to determine that Elizabeth Cortez of Co. Cork, Elizabeth Gregg of Co. Clare, Mrs Campbell and Martha Charlotte Menzies of Dublin and Miss J. Fitzgerald were all involved in rearing silkworms between 1765 and 1804. On 19 December 1765, Cortez sent the Dublin Society ‘A considerable Quantity of Cocons and raw Silk’ from her home in Inishannon.⁴⁰ The Society had the specimen examined by a dealer, who declared the cocoons ‘fuller than usual, and the Silk perfectly good in it’s [sic] Kind, and worth 1 l. 3 s. per lb’.⁴¹ Although the original letters do not survive, Cortez’s correspondence with the Society lasted several years and her efforts were rewarded with sums of money on at least three occasions.⁴² A Huguenot who settled in Inishannon, Cortez formed part of a group of refugees who were helped to establish businesses by La Société pour les Protestants Réfugiez. Support of the Inishannon textile manufactory, for which Cortez’s raw silk was intended, was an important focus of this initiative.⁴³ On 10 March 1774, it was reported that she had also furnished the Society with a copy of her ‘Memorial of her Observations on the breeding of Silk Worms’.⁴⁴

Other women were less successful in securing a cash reward for their work. Elizabeth Gregg, also writing in the 1760s, tried several approaches to gain the notice of the Dublin Society. In 1768, she sent ‘A considerable Quantity of raw Silk produced by Silk Worms in the County of Clare’, which was judged ‘perfectly good in its Kind’ but a proposed bounty of twenty guineas was ultimately rejected.⁴⁵ Unperturbed, Gregg’s work came in front of the Society less than a year later when a wealthy patroness, Lady Anne O’Brien, presented ‘a Piece of Irish flowered Silk’ made from Gregg’s raw product.⁴⁶ Unfortunately, despite the bounty of twenty guineas being re-proposed and the decision twice postponed, it was still rejected on 10 May 1770 by a majority of two-thirds.⁴⁷ Similarly, in 1804, all Miss J. Fitzgerald could secure for her specimen of raw silk ‘equal [in quality] to any imported’ was ‘the Society’s thanks for her patriotic exertions’.⁴⁸

Two women based in Dublin achieved more than Gregg and Fitzgerald both in the scale of their operations and the recognition they were able to extract from the Society: Mrs Campbell and Martha Charlotte Menzies, both writing in the first years of the nineteenth century. Campbell worked on this project with her daughters from 45 Charlemont Street and on 9 July 1801 she applied for funds to ‘purchase machines and procure hands to assist, by which means she has no doubt of becoming a complete silk glove manufacturer, and be able to sell silk gloves much cheaper and better than they can at present be bought in Dublin’.⁴⁹ Similarly, Menzies of Pembroke Quay in Dublin had studied ‘with the strictest attention and perseverence’ both ‘the feeding and manageing [sic] of Silk-worms, and the proper method of winding and preparing the silk for the weavers’ use’.⁵⁰ However, she needed the Society’s help to ‘enable her to carry on the raising of the worms in an extensive manner’, specifically by affording to take on two or more child apprentices.⁵¹ Both women secured significant contributions to their enterprises: Campbell ten guineas in 1801 and a further five in 1802 and Menzies twenty guineas in 1802. The emphasis they placed on the need to teach others the techniques they had learned was echoed in the earlier submissions of Elizabeth Cortez who had, likewise, stated her willingness ‘to instruct [a] young Person in the Management of Silk Worms, and the Art of winding Silk after the Manner practised in France’ and ‘taught her Art of Raising Silk Worms to Mrs Anna Bell, who was now so well experienced therein, as to be able to instruct others’.⁵²

It is difficult to trace the social status of all of the women mentioned in the Dublin Society’s Proceedings, but it is clear that Martha Charlotte Menzies was a member of the landed gentry.⁵³ Elizabeth Cortez was part of the Huguenot community and while French Calvinism had found believers amongst all ranks of society, this form of Protestantism was particularly prevalent amongst literate craftspeople, hence the Huguenots’ reputation for bringing technical expertise to Ireland and Britain. It is likely, therefore, that Cortez hailed from this section of society. It also seems significant that both Cortez and Elizabeth Gregg sought the support of members of the landed class in putting their case to the Society – Gregg gained the support of the wealthy O’Brien, and the MP and landowner, Thomas Adderley, was enlisted to present Cortez’s work, suggesting both of these women stood to gain from this elite endorsement.⁵⁴ This practice of lower-status individuals securing a guarantor for the quality of their work is also recognisable in the records of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.⁵⁵

In the English sources, two avid silkworm experimenters stand out: Mrs Ann Williams who lived in Gravesend in Kent and Miss Henrietta Rhodes (1756–1817/8) of Bridgnorth in Shropshire.⁵⁶ Both women submitted many letters to the London Society describing their home experiments in cultivating silkworms, which offer detailed descriptions of their activities and motivations – these form the focus of the analysis below.⁵⁷ At the time of her writing, Williams was the postmistress at the Gravesend Post Office; she lived alone – her father having died several years earlier – but she made use of at least one servant.⁵⁸ The manner in which Williams conducted her experiments suggests that her domestic environment was relatively confined as she adapted key living space to serve experimental ends. Prior to embarking on this venture, Williams had published a volume of her own poetry, which she dedicated to the Postmaster General, H. F. Thynne (later Lord Carteret).⁵⁹

Henrietta Rhodes lived at Cann Hall, a sizeable mansion dating back to the sixteenth century most likely occupied by the lower gentry.⁶⁰ She never married and, over her lifetime, undertook a number of literary and intellectual pursuits, publishing several works.⁶¹ Henrietta Rhodes referred more frequently to re-deploying domestic servants to her silkworm project, suggesting greater access to this resource, although she conducted a large amount of the work herself.

Whilst Williams was concretely middling sort, with a job to hold down, Rhodes was a leisured gentlewoman with considerable time and space to put to the task of rearing silkworms. As The annual biography and obituary informed its readers, ‘although never successfully wooed herself, yet she wooed the muses’.⁶² In this volume and an obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Rhodes was acknowledged as having published three works, including poems and essays, a novel and an account of Stonehenge. Both obituaries were agnostic on the quality of her literary output, suggesting that whilst she ‘possessed a comprehensive mind’ her novel divided public opinion and her poetry ‘did not rise above mediocrity’.⁶³ That said, her eighty-page Poems and miscellaneous essays (1814) was funded by subscription, revealing an extensive network, including ‘many of the first nobility and gentry of the land’ and, as the Gentleman’s Magazine observed, ‘such a profusion of illustrious names is rarely to be seen, being principally obtained through the interest and connexions of a few particular friends in the higher circles, who were much devoted to her welfare’.⁶⁴

The societies in London and Dublin might have provided an impetus for women to develop their domestic investigations and – importantly for historians – report upon them, but these observers and experimenters were rooted in their local contexts and this institutional apparatus only provided one dimension to their endeavours. As David Livingstone’s seminal work has shown us, ‘Each site provides repertoires of meaning’ and as social and material interactions shape discourse, so ‘scientific knowledge bears the imprint of its location’.⁶⁵

Home experiments

In 1778, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce gave a bounty of twenty guineas to Mrs Ann Williams and, seven years later, a silver medal to Miss Henrietta Rhodes for her efforts in rearing silkworms and producing silk. Both women were engaged with literature concerning the production of silk and discussed this project with others, and Rhodes referred directly to Williams’s earlier submissions to the Society, revealing that she was also a reader of its Transactions.

Establishing a colony

On 14 October 1777, Williams sent her first letter on this topic, reporting that she had ‘forty-seven Silk worms spinning, which were but one month old yesterday; the first span on Friday last, and are in fine cocoon; those of Saturday, Sunday, and yesterday, are forming them’.⁶⁶ Whilst Williams thought she could have hatched more, she declared this a sufficient ‘specimen of what may be done by a watchful attendance and industry’.⁶⁷ She also offered to ‘send my Silk up next week by a friend, under three different classes, that of my first brood, that of my second, and some reeled off the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of November’ for inspection by Society officials.⁶⁸ Similarly, when Henrietta Rhodes began to write to the Society in 1784 she provided details of her practice, which had started in the summer of 1782 when a friend sent her ‘a dozen and half of Silk-worms’.⁶⁹ Rhodes admitted to being, at this time, ‘totally ignorant of the method of treating them’, but by the following May of 1783:⁷⁰

The naturalist and entomologist, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, thought it crucial to have a great number of live specimens to watch at home.⁷² Whilst the motivation for Rhodes was, partly, the quantity of silk that could be produced, large colonies were considered advantageous from the point of view of natural history. Rhodes also enclosed a sample of her own silk, the evidence required to be considered for a prize, claiming that ‘many good judges’ had declared it ‘superior to any that has, yet been manufactured in England, and equal to that which comes from Italy’.⁷³ In this way, both women used a combination of reported experiments and samples of their product to provide evidence of their enterprise and prove their eligibility for the Society’s notice.

Throughout these letters, the pressing need to secure a reliable supply of food for the worms was apparent. During the several years that Rhodes had been rearing silkworms, her colonies had grown rapidly and she was forced to harvest mulberry tree leaves in a ten-mile radius of her home and employ the help of friends to secure sufficient quantities: ‘I sought after Mulberry-trees with an anxiety I cannot describe, and the discovery of a new one was a real acquisition.’⁷⁴ Ann Williams tested a number of locally available options, including lettuces and blackberry leaves, as ‘food for my little family’, finding the latter ‘they eat surprisingly, and grew amazingly’.⁷⁵ However, Williams’s ‘researches … did not stop here’; she ‘Next presented them with the young and tender leaves of the Elm, which they devoured with great avidity. Cowslip leaves, and flowers, they are very fond of’.⁷⁶ Once Williams was able to procure mulberry leaves, she found that her worms ‘would not touch’ any of these other foodstuffs.⁷⁷

Later, Henrietta Rhodes would criticise Williams’s approach, commenting that ‘Mrs. Williams’s observations on the various kinds of leaves they will eat, admitting their truth, can never be of the least utility, unless to gratify the curiosity of the speculative philosopher.’⁷⁸ Williams was certainly more concerned with observing the processes she put in motion than making her activities immediately profitable, identifying herself as one of ‘those who love to pry into the secrets of nature’.⁷⁹ To this end, Williams pondered the reasons for the worms’ preferences, writing on 19 October 1777, ‘It is worthy [of] remark, they will not touch a red flower; … and they seemed to avoid them with a kind of horror. I suppose nature debars their feeding on them, as it might hurt the colour of the silk.’⁸⁰ Whereas Williams reflected broadly on the workings of nature, Rhodes was more practically focused – trying ‘most of the different leaves to be found in a large kitchen garden’ when a ‘scarcity of food … threatened me’ but remaining intent on procuring ‘sufficient quantities to serve a manufactory’.⁸¹

Domestic material culture

Both Williams and Rhodes adapted spaces in and around their homes to cultivate their colonies. In her second letter, written just five days after the first, Williams described the conditions in which she kept her worms and the attention she paid them on a daily basis:

Imaginative re-purposing of existing household objects allowed the enterprise to fit neatly into the spaces offered by her home environment, which no doubt formed part of the Post Office premises she ran during this time. When Williams was concerned about the temperature of her brood affecting their hatching, she ‘put the papers with the Eggs, into a pidgeon-hole in a Cabinet, nearly opposite the fire. As soon as the frost set in, I covered the hole with paper several times double, to keep out the night air.’⁸³ Furniture of everyday use was promptly re-purposed as a home for silkworms, as the need arose, revealing that investigators like Ann Williams found the tools and affordances she required amongst the material culture of her domestic space. In pressing these objects into the service of science, Williams’s colony came to nestle at the heart of her household, next to the fireside.

Unlike Williams, Rhodes cultivated her silkworms in a space specially designed, which she referred to as a ‘manufactory’. Living in this place, Rhodes’s silkworms were ‘so situated that they were exposed to all the sounds incidental to a country town, from the barking of dogs, up to a family concert; and I am sure they never were visibly affected by either’.⁸⁴ So, whilst this was a space external to the main house, the manufactory was certainly near to home, most likely a domestic outbuilding, and situated close to her local community in Bridgnorth. However, like Mrs Campbell of Dublin whose enterprise outgrew her household, leaving her with ‘the necessity of destroying multitudes of these valuable creatures for want of room’, it seems that Rhodes’s earliest endeavours had been conducted in the main house.⁸⁵ Her own home offered sanctuary once again when disaster struck her colony during an unseasonal cold snap:

When faced with calamity, it was the technology of home that could rescue the situation as the fireside, once again, proved the place most likely to preserve the remaining silkworms and keep them spinning. With reference to a manufactory, a ‘former apartment’ within the main house and a kitchen garden in which emergency food could be found, the household space open to Rhodes was more extensive than that of Williams and flexible in terms of its use. This description certainly accords with the evidence that Rhodes lived at Cann Hall, an old and substantial home considerably remodelled in the nineteenth century.

Regimes of labour

Henrietta Rhodes made a point of relaying details of how her work with the silkworm manufactory fitted into her day. Rhodes ‘fed them three times a day with leaves which had been gathered in the morning’ and once a week ‘the pans were to be cleaned’ and ‘in that office I was assisted by a servant’.⁸⁷ She was happy to report that this regime was not so onerous that it kept her from ‘other avocations’ or ‘amusement’.⁸⁸ Indeed, obituaries of Rhodes referred to the full intellectual life she had led, taking on her own writing projects and contributing to those of others.⁸⁹ Williams, on the other hand, found herself more pressed for time, complaining in earlier letters to the Society that her Post Office duties kept her from preferred pursuits, comparing the work to ‘Egyptian Slavery’, offering ‘no rest night or day’.⁹⁰ Nevertheless, by the time she embarked on her silkworm project, Williams was able to feed her worms three times a day (at 10 am, 4 pm and 11 pm), collect the leaves upon which the worms sat (first thing every morning, preferably with the dew still on them) and use these to replace the existing leaves.⁹¹ In addition, there were periods when the silk required collecting and measuring and Williams also spent time observing the activity of the worms.

The routines outlined in these letters hint at the rationale for cultivating silkworms in domestic environments and for the role of women in this cottage industry. The worms required attention for short bursts of time at fairly regular intervals and multiple times a day. They thrived in warm, dry environments – easily accessible to the cultivator – that were common in a well-heated household. Dubliner Martha Charlotte Menzies also considered the work of silkworm rearing to be compatible with other domestic work when she planned to take on apprentices, committing to ‘instruct not only in the silk business in its season, but also in all kind of domestic and useful work, which would give them the means of obtaining by industry, a comfortable living’.⁹² Silkworm rearing and silk harvesting were thus easily accommodated by the rhythms and routines of domestic labour. However, to maximise productivity and satisfy curiosity, silkworm breeders were drawn into practices of close observation and experimentation – concerning themselves with the interplay of the insects’ characteristics and the particularities of domestic and neighbourhood environments.

An American venture

Since the early seventeenth century, great hopes had been invested in American soil for the cultivation of silkworms and the mulberry bushes upon which they fed. King James I (and VI of Scotland) even sent bushes and silkworm eggs directly to the colonies for that purpose. By the eighteenth century, there was frequent communication between writers in England, Ireland and America about this enterprise. For example, in April 1756, an anonymous correspondent wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine, noting the interest of both the London and Dublin societies in the subject and the particular suitability of America for the raising of silkworms.⁹³ Commenting on how silk production had gifted the ‘vast riches of China’ and the ‘extraordinary treasure for the king of Sardinia’, the author remarked upon the similarities in climate between Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia and ‘Nanking’, China.⁹⁴ The article emphasised the advantages of cheap land, ‘a great number of hands’ ready for the task (including enslaved peoples), the profitability of the enterprise and the potential for a range of grades of silk to be produced in the varying climate and conditions of the southern Atlantic seaboard, which produced two different species of mulberry bush and, possibly, different kinds of silkworms.⁹⁵

In 1770, Samuel Pullein’s guidance was re-printed in Philadelphia by the Quaker printers, Joseph Crukshank and Isaac Collins, with a preface ‘giving some account of the rise and progress of the scheme for encouraging the culture of silk, in Pennsylvania, and the adjacent colonies’.⁹⁶ Moreover, the Preface to volume one of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1769–71) noted Pennsylvania’s climate and conditions as particularly promising in respect of the cultivation of a silk industry.⁹⁷ The American Philosophical Society has been established in 1743, twelve years after the founding of the Dublin Society and eleven years prior to the London-based Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Like these other societies, the raising of silk was a topic of concerted interest, with a ‘Silk Society’ initiated under the auspices of the Committee on Husbandry and American Improvements.⁹⁸ These eighteenth-century efforts did indeed result in silk manufacture becoming established in Pennsylvania by the early nineteenth century.

In the first volume of the American Transactions, descriptions of home experiments with raising silkworms were printed and their author was Moses Bartram. Bartram (1732–1809) was the second son of the well-known Anglo-American botanist and horticulturalist John Bartram (1699–1777). As such, he grew up among his father’s botanical gardens and, alongside his brother Isaac, became an apothecary and man of considerable social standing in the city of Philadelphia.⁹⁹ In 1766, Moses Bartram was elected to the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge and he had wide-ranging interests including the effect of lakes on the climate, sleep-walking and locusts.¹⁰⁰ However, his observations on silkworm breeding act as a helpful comparison with Williams and Rhodes and underline that the home was a space of experimentation for men as well as women.

As the Preface to the first volume of the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions had revealed, there were some particularities to silkworms in Pennsylvania. First, in ‘this part of America, different kinds of Silkworms are found upon different trees and shrubs’.¹⁰¹ Not all the American silkworms fed primarily on mulberry, and ‘those that feed on the Sassafras, are larger, and the Silk they produce, though not so fine, is much stronger than that of the Italian Silkworm’.¹⁰² Moses Bartram’s account begins with a personal encounter with these ‘wild silk worms’ and his silkworm-collecting ‘excursion along the banks of Schuylkill’ yielded a ‘lucky’ five cocoons with live ‘nymphæ’ within.¹⁰³

When Bartram got his five cocoons home, he placed them ‘in my garret opposite to a window, that fronted the sun rising’, explaining that ‘the warmth of the sun might forward their coming out’.¹⁰⁴ Unfortunately, when the first fly emerged ‘it made its escape’, the window having been left open.¹⁰⁵ A week later, another fly hatched ‘out of a large loose pod’ and ‘began to lay eggs’, the next two – males – ‘grew very weak and feeble and unable to fly’ and within two days they had both died. After a full week of laying ‘near three hundred eggs’ the female fly also expired. Six days later, the fifth and last pod produced ‘a large female fly, of the brown kind like the rest’.¹⁰⁶ Like the first female, this fly laid hundreds of eggs but Bartram doubted the likelihood of success, given the absence of a male to fertilise. In the end, both the eggs from the first and second female ‘began to shrivel and be indented in the middle’ and failed to produce live offspring. Nonetheless, Bartram ‘folded them all up in separate papers and laid them by, to see if any would hatch the spring following’.¹⁰⁷ Disappointingly, the following year the eggs remained bereft of worms ‘from whence’ Bartram ‘concluded they had not been impregnated by the males’.¹⁰⁸

Despite the manifold failures of this first attempt, Bartram was ‘determined to make another trial’ but this time ‘with more caution and circumspection’.¹⁰⁹ He foraged further afield for the cocoons, gathering specimens from swamps and uplands and from several different kinds of trees.¹¹⁰ However, he persisted with the positioning of them in the sunny spot by his garret window. This time, he took no chances with escapees and ‘tacked course cloths up against the windows on the inside’, which also prevented them from damaging themselves in colliding with the glass, which Bartram thought might have ‘prevented their copulating’.¹¹¹ His efforts were not in vain; this time no flies escaped and between late May and June fertilised eggs hatched and produced worms. The abundant offspring gave Bartram the challenge of sourcing food and, similarly to Williams, he tried out several kinds of leaves and vegetables – the worms settling on alder as a preferred meal despite the availability of mulberry leaves.¹¹² The experimentation with food was not without its losses, with several being killed in the process of ‘shifting them from one kind of food to another’.¹¹³ Later, Bartram reflected ‘From sundry experiments, I found the worms averse to changing their food. On whatever they first begin to feed, they keep to it.’¹¹⁴ However, many of Bartram’s worms stopped feeding altogether, ‘shrunk up short, and seemed motionless’, which caused him to worry that ‘all my hopes of raising them were frustrated’ and conclude that ‘they would perish’.¹¹⁵

However, this second trial was a success and Bartram was ‘agreeably surprized [sic] to see the little animals … creeping out of their old skins, and appearing much larger and more beautiful than before’.¹¹⁶ Bartram’s account takes on the naturalist’s concerns with detailed physical description, including the ‘beautifully spotted’ appearance of the large brown fly that emerged from one of his ‘pods’ and the observation that male flies were smaller but with much brighter ‘and more beautiful’ colours.¹¹⁷ Bartram used anthropomorphic language, commenting that the worms ‘devouring their old coat … seemed a delicious repast to them’.¹¹⁸ His descriptions of their appearance acted similarly: ‘It is remarkable every change they undergo adds fresh beauty to the worms, and in every new dress, they appear with more gaudy colours and lively streaks.’¹¹⁹ Having conducted one fruitful trial, Bartram remarked that, despite the worms being hatched within three days of one another, the interval between the first and last worm commencing spinning was ‘no less than nineteen days’.¹²⁰ Using empathetic language, he wondered whether ‘this was owing to the weakness or strength of the vital principle in some more than others’, the switching from one food to another, or to ‘their being frightened, and thereby prevented from feeding’. He concluded that ‘Farther experiments may possibly explain the matter.’¹²¹

Despite the successes of Bartram’s efforts, disaster struck on 20 June, when one worm ‘was destroyed by a kind of bug armed with a long bill with which it pierced the side of the worm, and sucked out its vitals’.¹²² In general, Bartram’s account emphasises the particular suitability of his region for breeding silkworms and argues that only the native species should be reared on account of their amenability to this local environment and its available foodstuffs. However, this episode also shows that there were also well-adapted predators which posed a threat to the local silkworm varieties:

In this instance, Bartram had made the mistake of bringing in the bug with the leaves that would feed the worms. However, the rest of his account focuses in some detail on the ways in which he augmented the silkworms’ space in order to keep them safe and encourage the all-important task of spinning.

Much like Ann Williams, Moses Bartram used materials ready to hand in his domestic space to improve the colony’s living conditions and to aid its productivity. Initially, when his worms were ‘in search of a proper place to spin’, Bartram ‘got sticks, in which I fixed a number of pegs for the greater conveniency of the worms’, although he noted that ‘they can spin in any place, where they can form an angle for their webs’. Indeed, one of Bartram’s number did use the angle of the corner of the garret window to do so.¹²⁴ As the silkworms were inclined to wander about a great deal before deciding on a place to spin, Bartram took his construction of sticks in the form of a rack and fixed them ‘in glass bottles to prevent the worms from getting off’.¹²⁵ Bartram’s homemade solutions also extended to feeding the silkworms, which required the leaves of trees that did not grow in abundance in the city of Philadelphia where he lived. He arrived at a ‘method … with the least trouble to myself’ whereby:

Finally, Bartram proposed a more elaborate system of narrow troughs, with notched edges, to allow ‘pieces of straight wood [to] be fixed, so that the branches, on which the worms are to feed, may lie in the notches, and their ends be fixed under the piece of wood at the bottom’.¹²⁷ The formation offered the silkworms direct access to food and water and the caretaker the ability to easily refresh the water supply so that it remained ‘sweet and clean’.¹²⁸ This more elaborate apparatus further developed the improvised version that Bartram had devised iteratively over the course of his initial ‘experiments’.¹²⁹

In addition to the troughs and racks for cultivating silkworms, another box design was advised for the process of extracting the silk from the cocoons. Again, the boxes were constructed of common materials, ‘strips of wood’ and nails, and ‘washed with a solution of gum Arabic, or cherry tree gum’.¹³⁰ Whilst gum Arabic was not necessarily a domestic essential, its binding properties made it useful in the making of some common household products including iron-gall inks and it was also put to use in the sizing and dyeing of silk, cotton and other textiles.¹³¹ Bartram advised his reader in this prescriptive way because he was ‘persuaded’ that silkworms ‘might be raised to advantage, and perhaps, in time, become no contemptible branch of commerce’.¹³² He boasted of his robust, native silkworms that their seasonal schedule of hatching and spinning ensured that ‘they are not subject to be hurt by the frost’ and that ‘they lie so long in their chrysalis state, the cocoons may be unwinded at leisure hours in the ensuing winter’. Unlike ‘foreign worms’, ‘Neither lightnings nor thunder disturb them’, and the cocoons were at least four times larger than their counterparts overseas, thereby offering a greater yield of silk.¹³³ Thus, with a method developed through close observation, experiment and the everyday materials and spaces of home, Moses Bartram offered those ‘who have leisure’ the encouragement ‘to make further trials’.¹³⁴ His hopes for this enterprise included a profitable industry in his home county in Pennsylvania, but he also recognised the potential to put idle or leisured hands to work in a task that could fit, neatly, into a sunny attic corner.

Conclusion

Whilst British and Irish silkworm breeding advocates emphasised the leisured, the idle and the female in their characterisation of the workforce for this new industry, the examples discussed here also include men and working people.¹³⁵ Ann Williams offers a striking example of a working woman with relatively limited domestic space engaging fully with this complex endeavour and being formally rewarded for her efforts. In other parts of the world, where the practice was long-established, silk production was associated with domestic space and this, no doubt, shaped the ideas of British, Irish and American promoters of the industry. Those who wrote about their own home experiments and sent samples of their work to formal institutions often emphasised the ease with which this pursuit fitted into the home and its existing regimes of labour.

However, as the more detailed descriptions discussed in this chapter show, the precise spaces and approaches varied considerably. In some cases, peripheral areas of the household, such as outhouses or garrets, offered accommodation for these colonies. Elsewhere, silkworms were kept close to the hearth. Tensions existed between modes of writing that emphasised a scalable and profitable industry of interest to a national society and approaches that aimed to share the natural history observations that were key to keeping silkworms alive and producing the greatest amount of silk. The testimony of Ann Williams, Henrietta Rhodes and Moses Bartram offers a combination of both, although Rhodes was especially concerned with maintaining a business-oriented narrative.

Clearly, synergies existed between the temporal rhythms of domestic labour and the schedules of feeds required by silkworms. On a larger scale, the seasonal changes felt by households, in terms of heating and provisioning, were mirrored by the cycles of silkworm reproduction and spinning. Rather than seeing this activity as something that fitted neatly with an existing domestic regime, one might just as easily see it as emerging from that regime. The individuals discussed here, most especially women with responsibility for the labour of home (by hand or order), were well positioned to experiment with silkworm rearing, in terms of their skills, schedules and command of household space and material culture. The multi-faceted nature of silkworm breeding, in terms of its relationship with natural history, manufacture and commerce, is revealing of the interrelated nature of these different pursuits, especially as they came to pass within the context of the home.