The Closet

The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy

Danielle Bobker

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691241876
  9780691198231
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691201542
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Architecture
• Index: Literature

A literary and cultural history of the intimate space of the eighteenth-century closet—and how it fired the imaginations of Pepys, Sterne, Swift, and so many other writers

Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the closet was one of the most charged settings in English architecture. This private room provided seclusion for reading, writing, praying, dressing, and collecting—and for talking in select company. In their closets, kings and duchesses shared secrets with favorites, midwives and apothecaries dispensed remedies, and newly wealthy men and women expanded their social networks. In The Closet, Danielle Bobker presents a literary and cultural history of these sites of extrafamilial intimacy, revealing how, as they proliferated both in buildings and in books, closets also became powerful symbols of the unstable virtual intimacy of the first mass-medium of print.

Focused on the connections between status-conscious—and often awkward—interpersonal dynamics and an increasingly inclusive social and media landscape, The Closet examines dozens of historical and fictional encounters taking place in the various iterations of this room: courtly closets, bathing closets, prayer closets, privies, and the "moving closet" of the coach, among many others. In the process, the book conjures the intimate lives of well-known figures such as Samuel Pepys and Laurence Sterne, as well as less familiar ones such as Miss Hobart, a maid of honor at the Restoration court, and Lady Anne Acheson, Swift's patroness. Turning finally to queer theory, The Closet discovers uncanny echoes of the eighteenth-century language of the closet in twenty-first-century coming-out narratives.

Featuring more than thirty illustrations, The Closet offers a richly detailed and compelling account of an eighteenth-century setting and symbol of intimacy that continues to resonate today.

INDEX

Note: Figures are indicated by italicized page numbers.

absolutism: court architecture and king’s two bodies, 28–29; decline of, xii, 46, 71; and divine right of kings, 48; in the family, 62; and favoritism, 46–47, 48; and female agency, 70; philosophical rejection of, 34; secrecy under, 230n97; Whitehall as symbol of, 52. See also favoritism

Absolut Out campaign, 200, 201

Acheson, Lady Anne, xii, 79–80, 103, 232n41, 235n99. See also “Panegyric on the Dean” (Swift)

Acheson, Lord Arthur, 79, 108–9

Addison, Joseph, Spectator no. 138, 193; Spectator no.10, 177

Andreadis, Harriette, 58, 59

Anne (queen of England), 46, 52, 102, 226n3

anonymity: in author/reader relationships, xi, 40; of booksellers, 122; celebration of, 167; in libel against Pepys, 163; of printed texts, 101, 143; of readers, 123, 147; and social rank, 187; in stranger sociability, 174

Anspaugh, Kelly, 80

anthologies: textual closets and cabinets as, 121; changing frequency of use of term, 115. See also textual closets

the Ark, 16, 18, 18

Astell, Mary, Reflections on Marriage, 62

Aubrey, John, 86–87

The audi filia (Doctour Auila, 1620), 127

Austen, Jane: on changing meanings of closet, 195; Pride and Prejudice, 195

author-reader relationship: patrons and, 102; shifts in, x–xi; and social difference, 40, 147; Sterne and, xii, 157–58, 159, 189; Swift and, 157–58; as virtual favoritism, xii, 58, 71, 73–74; and voyeurism, 67, 142. See also virtuality

authors: closets’ appeal to, x–xi; relationships with nobility of, xii, 36, 59, 125–26; and support from subscriptions, 157, 240–41n14. See also patrons and patronage

authorship: and copyright, 35, 73; professionalization of, 35, 101

Bacon, Francis, 47, 48, 133, 230n93; Novum Organum, 130

Barlow, Frederic, 227n41

Baruh, Lemi, 114, 236n3

bathing closets: associations with courtliness, xi–xii; and cleanliness, 66, 229n80; compared to water closets, xiv; and favor, 61; improvements in, 65–66; and orientalism, 66–68, 70; an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Rooms for improvement
• Favor
• Houses of office
• Breaking and entering
• Moving closets
• Coda: Coming Out
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Closets without Walls, 1550–1800
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index