Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature ed. by Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin (review)

Reviewed by: Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature ed. by Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin Emily M. West Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds. , Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 280; 2 b/w and 32 color illus. 99. 99 cloth. In her chapter in this engaging collection, Freya Gowrley introduces us to the term "joineriana, " used by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in a letter to her brother John Aikin to imagine a group of literary fragments sewn together to produce a new whole. Gowrley theorizes the joineriana capaciously as any form in which small parts are brought together in an assemblage that materializes new connections and meanings—a description that encompasses Small Things in the Eighteenth Century itself. The volume assembles a panoply of tiny things (coins, buttons, hazelnut shells, quotation marks, and ants, to name a few) into a vivid bricolage that offers new insight into the material, aesthetic, and political affordances of smallness in historical context. In their introduction, Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin reflect on how small things have frequently been overlooked in scholarship that assumes the equivalence of the minute and the minor. By contrast, Small Things attends to how such things make unique, insistent demands of those who encounter them, often through the means of their seeming insignificance. The joineriana the editors have fashioned (which includes work from art historians, literary scholars, curators, and historians) offers multiple points of connection and shared meaning that resonate across the collection, a few of which I trace across the rest of this review. Unsurprisingly, many chapters dwell on questions of scale, such as Abigail Williams's exploration of how miniature books used their size to grapple with problems of knowledge, offering their readers the promise of access to vast fields of information (such as national histories or biblical doctrine) by making them "possessable" through the tiny text's material form (25). Such texts were significant not for the information they contained (which was necessarily minimal) but instead as signs of a claim to knowledge. While such aims seem consonant with children's literature's pedagogical project, Katherine Wakely-Mulroney finds scale a much more flexible and contingent property in this context. Books such as Thomas Boreman's Gigantick Histories, less than three inches high, render young readers comparatively enormous, offering a sense of physical mastery and allowing the book to serve as a portable, possessable companion of the kind described by Williams. Yet Barbauld's influential Lessons for Children series thematizes inversions End Page 395 of scale through its interactive lessons, which stage both the child's command over small items like pins, coins, and eggs and their insignificance in the face of the larger world they encounter progressively as the series moves from addressing a child of two to a child of four across its four volumes. In its textual mapping of childhood development, Barbauld's work suggests the relationship between spatial and temporal scales, a relationship a number of the volume's essays explore across broader spans of time. Kate Smith considers domestic items that offered tactile encounters with "deep time" in her chapter on Staffordshire teapots decorated to mimic crinoidal limestone teeming with fossilized marine animals, opening the tea table to "a scale beyond the singularity of a human life" (107). Crystal B. Lake traces how the smallness of numismatic objects was believed to enable their endurance by numismatists like John Evelyn, who saw ancient coins and medals as the tenacious remnants of a past he could textually reassemble. Robbie Richardson's excellent chapter draws on Gerald Vizenor's work to locate wampum beads and belts as sites of "survivance" across time, focusing on how wampum continues to "actively shape meaning" rather than being stripped of it through British uses and representations that misunderstand and deliberately deny its complex significations (126). While Lake and Richardson explore how small things can preserve and endure, other chapters in the collection consider how their affordances can enable radical remakings. Anna McKay's compelling essay tracks how prisoners incarcerated on British. . .