1Among the “small things forgotten” (11) which have largely vanished from memory and from mainstream history, the ubiquitous tie-in pocket, hidden from view by the petticoats worn by British women from the Restoration to the late Victorian era, has now been salvaged from oblivion thanks to this brilliant and fascinating book co-authored by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux. Eloquently enough, the book concludes with a close study of one of the many pockets investigated by the authors, an 1851 piece which belonged to one Margaret Deas and which speaks powerfully of the mnemonic value of pockets. The owner embroidered her name, several hearts as well as the motto “forGet Me not”, stitched with human hair (presumably her own), while she was in prison.

2If this specific example offers a tantalising glimpse into the deeply personal, intimate and emotional meanings invested by contemporary women in their pockets and in their contents, such humble objects yield also much valuable information beyond the level of the individual and beyond the realm of the history of emotions. The role played by pockets in the process of collective, not just personal, identity building for women of all social classes over a quarter of a millennium was obviously crucial, multifaceted and sometimes ambiguous and/or controversial. At the nexus between social, economic, cultural and material history, these inconspicuous artefacts (the inherent nature of which was to be indeed hidden from sight) “provided women with a means to situate themselves and anchor their identity in relation to loved ones, family and community” (215).

3Especially in the first of seven chapters making up their study, the authors show how fluid the perception of the pocket, both as an object and as a metaphor, was at that time. They also analyse very convincingly the explicit or implicit link between this seemingly mundane object and broad issues of sexual politics as well as construction of femininity and of gender roles. In particular, the pocket reveals much about women's relation to ownership. Under the legal doctrine of coverture, which was officially abolished by Parliament only in the 1880s, a married woman did not any legal existence and was denied access to any form of separate property. In such circumstances, the pocket and its complex, multifarious uses throw much light on women's consumption habits as well as on their relationship with things and material possessions. Indeed, in spite of their detachability and thus their vulnerability to loss or theft, "pockets could be an instrument of female empowerment, granting [women] mobility, autonomy and agency" (18). In this sense, standing as it does at the intersection between various fields of research and various epistemological approaches, the work not only firmly situates itself in the realm of women's history and gender history, of course, but also in the ever-expanding territory of studies devoted to the rise of a consumer culture in Britain in the 18th century and its dramatic expansion in the next one. This is made manifest throughout the book, but especially in its fifth chapter, which focuses on the uses women from the middle and upper strata of the social hierarchy made of their pockets. The exploration of the links between the pocket and fashionable sociability in an age of blossoming consumerism is particularly stimulating, as is the analysis of how the pocket was commodified by élite women as a receptacle for sundry items that allowed them to negotiate their relation to the world they lived in.

4As befits the multidisciplinary approach, the sheer physicality of the pocket is not neglected and is indeed exhaustively treated by the two authors. This leads them to question the chronological rigidity of sartorial history, which has claimed that, following a clear-cut evolutionary pattern, the pocket was supposedly superseded by the handbag overnight. Such a neat chronological narrative stands in need of flexibility. They unveil a more fluid chronology, with the pocket and the handbag coexisting for decades. Incidentally, the vast historical scope of the book, merging the long eighteenth century and much of the long nineteenth century, allows the authors to point out long-term continuities rather than drastic, sudden change. Of course, over a large historical chunk of approximately 250 years, the general social and economic structures of the country, women's legal and political status as well as fashion and sartorial practices considerably evolved. Yet the overall pattern of change did accommodate continuity somehow, as testified by the remarkable resilience of the pocket from the Restoration to the Edwardian era. The insistence on long-term perspectives is inseparable from the hybrid nature of the approach adopted by the authors, who provide an excellent and fruitful example of the ongoing trend consisting in bridging the gap between antiquarian object-centred scholarship and social history focusing on practices and their meanings, but tending to neglect the material dimension of things. As such, the work is thoroughly grounded in what might be called the “material turn,” the recent upsurge of interest in objects and material culture in various academic disciplines, especially history.

5Such an ambitious project could not have been carried out without the bringing together of a huge array of vastly different sources, which echoes the variety of angles and approaches adopted by the authors. Apart from the expected textual sources and those drawn from visual culture, one of the centrepieces is a corpus (richly illustrated throughout the work) of nearly 390 actual tie-in pockets which have been preserved in museums and private collections and which had laid in obscurity until now. Another cornerstone of the research undertaken by the authors is quite unexpected: they have analysed 572 court cases to be found in the Proceedings of London’s Old Bailey criminal court. The use of such a type of source mentioning pockets, sometimes only tangentially, results in a vivid and quite moving narrative of the lives of humble women, fragments of which are thus rescued from obscurity and utter oblivion. For indeed “the material testimony of these damaged yet expressive objects is irreplaceable if one is to approach the lives of women whose voices are often otherwise absent from the written historical record” (185).