At Home - Bill Bryson [162]
America’s small internal market and problems of distribution over such a large area meant that Americans couldn’t compete even when they dared to try. Several fairly substantial glass-making operations were set up in the 1700s, and some even prospered briefly, but by the time of the American Revolution no glass was being made in the colonies. In most households a broken window stayed broken. Glass was so rare everywhere that immigrants were advised to bring their own window glass with them. Iron, likewise, was in chronic short supply. Paper was often so scarce as to be effectively nonexistent. Only the most basic pottery was made in America—jugs, crocks, and the like; anything of quality, like porcelain and bone china, had to come from (or, even more expensively, through) Britain. For Jefferson and other Virginia planters the problem was compounded by the absence of towns. It was easier to communicate with London than with other colonies.
The consequence of this was that practically everything had to be ordered through a distant agent. Every wish had to be made known in exhaustive detail, but ultimately one had to trust to a stranger’s judgment and honest devotion. The scope for disappointment was vast. A typical order from George Washington (this one in 1757) gives some sense of the innumerable things Americans were unable to produce for themselves. Washington asked for six pounds of snuff, two dozen sponge toothbrushes, twenty sacks of salt, fifty pounds of raisins and almonds, a dozen mahogany chairs, two tables (“4 ½ feet square when spread, and to join occasionally”), a large Cheshire cheese, some marble for a chimney, a quantity of papier-mâché and wallpaper, one cask of cider, fifty pounds of candles, twenty loaves of sugar, and 250 panes of glass, among much else.
“N.B. Let it be carefully pack’d,” he added just a touch plaintively, but futilely, for nearly every shipment came with goods broken, spoiled, or missing. When you have waited the better part of a year for, say, twenty panes of glass, only to find half of them broken and the others of the wrong size, even the most stoic temperaments tended to unravel.
From the merchants’ and agents’ point of view, the orders were sometimes mystifyingly ambiguous. One from Washington instructed his London agent to acquire for him “two Lyons after the Antique Lyon’s in Italy.” The agent correctly surmised that Washington meant statuary, but could only guess the types and sizes. Since Washington had never been within an ocean’s breadth of Italy, it is likely that he wasn’t entirely sure himself. Washington’s letters to his London agency, Robert Cary & Co., constantly asked for items that were “fashionable” and “in the latest taste” or “uniformly handsome and genteel,” but his follow-up letters indicate that he only seldom felt that he had got what he’d asked for.
Even the most carefully drawn instructions were dangerously susceptible to misinterpretation. Edwin Tunis, in Colonial Living, relates the story of a man who enclosed with his order a drawing of the family crest that he wanted on his dinner service. To make sure his directions were fully understood, he appended a bold arrow to emphasize some detail. When the plates arrived the man discovered to his horror that the arrow had been faithfully copied onto every piece.
It was easy—and for many agents irresistibly tempting—to offload onto Americans clothes and furnishings that were unsold because they were no longer fashionable in England. “You cannot really form an idea of the trash that is to be found in the best shops,” an English visitor named Margaret Hall wrote home to a friend. A cheerful catchphrase of English factories became: “It’s good enough for America.” Being overcharged was a constant suspicion. Washington wrote