David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America ends with the cultural phenomenon whose emergence it explains: the Victorian parlor, described by T. S. Arthur in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1849 as a sort of Daguerreian Gallery stuffed with mass-produced goods from Hitchcock chairs and bronze shelf clocks to colorful, machine-woven carpets and illustrated books. Each of these commodities, Jaffee demonstrates, “took its meaning from the ensemble” (323). Contrary to what one might expect, he argues, this emergent middle-class aesthetic had its origins not in the city but in the New England countryside—a claim he persuasively advances through myriad, interwoven, historically situated case studies that amount to a consummate (if at times over-stuffed, confusingly discontinuous) digest of recent scholarship in the many intersecting fields that together constitute contemporary material culture studies: the histories of trade, technology, consumption, the book, popular aesthetics, artistic and design practice, style and taste, all here related to the ways entrepreneurs made and marketed, and aspirants to secure middle-class status used and arranged, objects in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

“In the wake of the Revolution’s destruction of the aristocratic and hierarchical colonial regime,” Jaffee explains, “the new middle ranks, eager to advance their social claims in the bustling, mobile, commercial society of late eighteenth-century America, allowed their pretensions to swell. They wanted objects to satisfy their cultural authority, and a host of artisan-entrepreneurs were only too happy to oblige by creating new forms at increasingly affordable prices” (45). The “forms” treated most attentively—clocks, chairs, portraits, and books—take on new life as evidence of patterns of response to consumer demand in shifting socio-economic and cultural contexts shaped by the ingenuity and business acumen of individual makers.

These entrepreneurs inhabited a rural world transformed by “the erosion of a hierarchical structure of authority” (48). The control of local culture by clerics and college graduates, professional men who literally represented received wisdom, was “supplanted” by an ever-greater access to “printed sources of practical information and personal insight” (52) both generated and endorsed by a host of local scientific and literary institutions. Merchants subverted old patterns of commercial exchange similarly, acting as middlemen between local and broader trading networks. New England, in fact, was “dotted with small-scale commercial enterprises initiated by local entrepreneurs” (100) well before large-scale industrial communities like those at Lowell or Lawrence were established. Jaffee works hard to recover this relatively disregarded, decades-long moment in American cultural history when alternative styles of commodity production were in play.

He begins his third chapter, “Cosmopolitan Communities,” with a description of a globe-making operation in economically and geographically remote Vermont in the 1790s. Among the factors helping to account for this phenomenon was the marked propensity of skilled artisans to move outside metropolitan centers. We meet those who solved the technical problems of production and follow the history of the trade. These are excellent stories, well recounted. Jaffee treats his human subjects with an understanding often bordering on admiration communicated through telling anecdotes unencumbered by a yet impressively thorough scholarly annotation. Other case studies tracing developments in furniture and clock manufacture tell a related story of entrepreneurial innovation and adjustment to changing market conditions. Jaffee is careful to treat his nonhuman subjects—globes and grandfather clocks—with similar care. His descriptions, grounded in skillful formal and technical analysis, offer imaginative cultural analysis of what he helps readers to see. His description of a mahogany sideboard made in Vermont for Allen Hayes in 1798 (115–16) carefully balances its tenses, sensory observation serving historical insight. Jaffee sometimes reads objects overcautiously. A few pages later he ventures yet distances himself from a fairly obvious anthropomorphic reading of a standing clock. In the end, despite a few occasional passing claims to the contrary, Jaffee cares less how a given clock (or, more abstractly, time itself) was imagined than what its design and manufacture signified and signify. Globes, for instance, served as archives of new knowledge for users while structurally and literally modeling the idea of a “rational and orderly society” (145).

The next three chapters trace the revolutions in manufacturing and marketing responsible for these changes. Itinerant peddlers, key players in this process of commercialization, receive lengthy and fascinating treatment, developed in such detail that the modalities of business exchange based on advance orders, partial payments in unstable currencies, risky investments in labor and raw materials calculated to meet at best approximate demand, and unreliable delivery often at considerable distances come admirably to life. An accumulation of sometimes poignant, situated narrative vignettes help readers imagine a lost rural world “not static or conservative but a seedbed of improvement and change” (55). Jaffee treats this privileging of “invention” both in technical terms, when discussing inventions themselves, and in larger socio-economic terms, following given inventions through the processes of manufacture, marketing, and distribution.

Chapter 5, “A Tale of Two Chairmaking Towns,” for instance, traces the different paths toward capitalist manufacture taken by Sterling and Gardner, neighboring communities in central Massachusetts, favoring small workshops on the one hand, substantial factories on the other, divergent approaches to similar opportunity offered by the combination of abundant wood, available water power, sufficient skilled labor, and demand. Such “multiple configurations”—others in the chair industry involved style and design—are, for Jaffee, evidence of a provincial “cosmopolitanism” that he follows through at times interpenetrating, always mutually reinforcing further case studies in the manufacture and sales of books, chests of drawers, and cabinets (208–13).

Rural portrait painters represented another self-inventing class of entrepreneurs. Jaffee sees in the broad market for their wares indication that the value they provided lay less in the quality of their mimesis than in the fashionability of the practice itself. Participation was itself a “genteel indicator” of “newfound middle-class status” (227). The new “middling” aesthetic, American Fancy, featured bold colors and ornamental patterns in imaginative, original designs: a stylized, non-illusionist art. Provincial artists like Ammi Phillips and Erastus Salisbury Field, Jaffee argues, developed compositional and iconographic formulae and means to speed production in order to meet expectations of a “pleasing likeness” (256) in cost-effective fashion.

The Village Enlightenment of the 1790s, followed by the Era of Itinerants and Innovators of the 1830s, led to industrial-era Victorian Parlor Culture. Where village founders had turned for their portraits to the Connecticut painter Ralph Earl, for whom provincialism was a chosen style, their descendants, the beneficiaries of commercialization, turned to Phillips and Field. By the late 1840s, the demand itinerant portraitists had created had been largely satisfied by a new industrial form, the daguerreotype, practiced by a largely new wave of itinerants. Incredibly, the 1839 invention was commercialized within the year, and in rural America, by artists Jaffee describes as leading the charge for consumerism in the countryside (281). The portrait market had tightened up considerably a decade later as a result of product saturation, consolidation, and a growing professionalization marked by the appearance of specialty journals, schools, manuals, and national supply houses. Cultural authority shifted to professional “artists” possessed of nice studios and knowledgeable about pictorial conventions.

The 1840s saw comparable consolidation in the manufacture of clocks and chairs, and similarly widespread business failures in the 1850s as a result of higher costs and competition. Jaffee describes the new culture of domesticity (and rise of the parlor) with some sadness as inadvertent, in ways counterintuitive products of an earlier age of rural innovation: “Once singular objects lost their unique stature and became mere elements of a standardized and commodified design vocabulary” (325). The body of the book concludes in this way; an epilogue recounts the stories of some of those left behind by these developments: Chauncey Jerome, maker of clocks; Ebenezer Merriam, compiler and publisher of dictionaries (a business at which his heirs succeeded); Rufus Porter, inventor of flying machines and editor; Erastus S. Field, painter.

Here and throughout, the stories Jaffee tells skillfully illuminate individual lives as well as manufactured objects. The cost of reliance on these mini-narratives, some loss in overall cohesiveness, seems fully compensated in the end by the weight of accumulation, though A New Nation of Goods asks a great deal of the reader obliged to keep track as well as make sense of a sometimes frustrating breadth of data organized, even within chapters, with little narrative or analytic continuity. These idiosyncrasies of style and structure can be explained, of course, and in the end, I think, justified by the scope of the work’s ambition. Jaffee, who teaches Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture—with access to an embarrassment of riches, the fruit of decades of research—presents a broad claim concerning processes of cultural transformation perhaps best understood comprehensively and inclusively. It is a bit hard at times to understand why particular discussions appear where they do. The authorial voice shifts here and there from the third to the first person, perhaps a vestige of prior appearances by particular passages (though the lack of a bibliography in combination with multiple-source, paragraph-at-a-time notes sometimes aggravatingly difficult to sort out can make it difficult in places to distinguish Jaffee’s own research from that he cites). There are occasional lapses into jargon (e.g., producers and consumers said to “participate in processes of cultural integration and hybridization” (144)), most often in concluding paragraphs of given chapters also marked by sudden shifts in voice and agenda. And there are editorial lapses, from verbatim repetition of passages (e.g. “Wooden clocks had brought about this great change” (186, 187)) to oddly non-idiomatic phrasing (“burgeoning amounts” (201)); but, in truth, the book, given its length and deliberate meanderings and chronological doublings back, would have been difficult to copyedit and wins the reader over progressively. Elegantly designed, with well-chosen, carefully reproduced illustrations and a thorough index, this volume makes a noteworthy contribution to Early American Studies.