The Rise of the English Mantua-Maker in the Long Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis charts the rise (and fall) of the mantua-maker, from the emergence of the trade in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, to the arrival of the fashionable dressmaker in the 1790s. Although mantua-makers were a major force within the needle trades of the eighteenth century, producing both physical garments and shaping women’s fashions, the trade has received relatively little scholarly attention. Unlike their French counterparts, English mantua-makers did not form guilds, nor did they have public facing shops like milliners. Consequently, there is limited documentary evidence or contemporary comment on the trade. This thesis therefore adopts a blended approach, which combines a wide variety of archival sources with the examination of garments made by mantua-makers, resulting in the recording and analysing of stitches, materials, cutting practices, stylistic and technical developments. This object-based investigation is complimented by innovative practice-led research, interrogating the material properties of mantuas and other eighteenth-century gowns to further understand the development of the trade. The skills and techniques of the mantua-maker are contextualised within the practices of the trade, including training, advertising, workshop practices and fashionable influence. This thesis therefore makes a significant contribution to the history of dress, as well as other historiographies including social, economic, theatre, and women’s work, thus emphasising women as producers within the commercial world, especially that of London. Yet, at its heart, this thesis argues that a simple garment made from two straight pieces of cloth, effected both significant fashionable change, and also production changes which allowed the formation of a new female occupational trade identity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".