Textile orientalisms: cashmere and Paisley shawls in British literature

Britain imported a vast number of cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were largely male garments in India at the time, which became popular dress accessories for British women. The demand for these shawls was opportune for textile manufacturers at home – particularly in Edinburgh, Norwich, and Paisley, who launched a thriving industry of shawls, ‘made in imitation of the Indian’. There has been considerable scholarship on cashmere shawls and their European copies in textile history. However, it has enjoyed no such prominence in literary studies. This PhD thesis examines Cashmere and ‘Paisley’ shawls in works of literature. Indian shawls are mentioned in a number of literary texts, including plays, poems, novels, opera, and satire. A wide variety of writers such as Richard Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Wilkie Collins (to name a few) depict these textiles in their works. For these writers, I argue, shawls provide a means to explore Britain’s changing social and imperial identity through the prism of material culture. The sheer incidence of ‘shawls’ in printed discourse furthermore suggests that they went beyond the realm of everyday fashion to constitute one of the important narratives of nineteenth-century Britain. In emphasising the significance of material culture and recovering new historical contexts, this investigation raises important questions relating to the links between industry and trade, and literary production. I rely on literary criticism, scholarship on India, and textile history to examine the phenomenon of cashmere shawls. In the wider context of postcolonialism, the research suggests that instead of the Saidian model which viewed the East as an abject ‘Other,’ colonies actually exerted a reverse and important influence on the imperial centre. A new emphasis on Indian things in literature, this work hopes, will contribute a fresh strand of thought to studies of imperialism