Ceramics, Furniture, and Distributed Agency of People and Things in 19th-Century Cottages of Western Britain and Ireland

The dresser and its ceramics formed a highly significant cultural marker in 19th-century western Britain and Ireland. Excavated transfer-printed, painted, and spongeware vessels recovered from excavations can be contextualized using ethnographic and illustrative material, together with dressers and their contents in museums, to consider ceramics in a range of dynamic relationships. This paper applies the theoretical perspective of Actor Network Theory (ANT) to consider the role of ceramics within western British and Irish 19th-century cottages. Networks of people and things create, in Latour’s terminology, actants they are made to act. Ceramics were not merely passive reflectors of function and status but were active in the negotiations of value and meaning not only in middle class homes but also within even the most impoverished rural cottage.