“To dress a room for Montagu”: Pacific Cosmopolitanism and Elizabeth Montagu’s Feather Hangings

On 6 June 1791, the businesswoman and critic Elizabeth Montagu held a breakfast reception. The party was lavish even by her high standards, and was intended to display the extravagant renovation of her Portland Square townhouse in London. Among the new decorations was a set of enormous panels covered with thousands of feathers sewn into colourful floral wreaths and festoons. Montagu showed these feather panels off to several hundred guests, including Queen Charlotte and five of her daughters. They were described in detail in the next day’s newspapers. In Montagu’s “feather-room,” noted a breathless report on this “elegant fête” printed in more than half a dozen London papers, “the walls are wholly covered with feathers, artfully sewed together.” The feathers were “from all parts of the world,” marvelled another writer, and had “been ten years in collecting.” Their colours had “wonderful effects on a feather ground of a dazzling whiteness,” and the “numerous and splendid company,” it was concluded, “expressed the warmest approbation of the taste and magnificence of Mrs. MONTAGU.” This was presumably all very satisfactory for Montagu and her friends, although less than a month later the walls of the feather room had to be covered in paper and linen “to preserve it from moth and the summers dust.” The panels disappear from the written record around this time, and may have been dismantled before Montagu’s death in 1800. It is clear that these ephemeral and now-forgotten objects were a means for Montagu to publicise her own status and wealth, and to promote her ‘bluestocking’ circle within fashionable London society. This article suggests, additionally, that the feather panels embodied Montagu’s cosmopolitan embrace of material objects and cultural influences from around the world. Contemporary responses to the panels, most famously a poem by William Cowper, were mostly celebratory of the resulting exotic objects, and their peculiar beauty. Nevertheless, I argue in conclusion, Montagu’s unusual decision to use feathers as her raw material opened the way, both then and now, to more critical readings of the Enlightened cosmopolitan values encoded within the surface of the featherwork. It was reported at the time of their unveiling that Montagu had designed and made the panels herself. This would have represented a rare venture into the ladylike crafts of “featherwork misses” she did not generally enjoy. Rather, Montagu mostly acted as the commissioner and collector of the project: roles for which she was unusually well-qualified. The panels required not only funding and organisation, but a vast network of social connections in Britain and abroad from whom rare coloured feathers could be requested. Following a barrage of correspondence with this network, feathers began in 1781 to arrive in small packets from around the world at Montagu’s country estate at Sandleford in Berkshire. There they were sorted, trimmed, and sewn together, in a dedicated workroom, by a small army of servants supervised by the forewoman, Elizabeth Tull. Visitors were admitted to admire the spectacle of the featherwork’s construction. The first public account was published in the Edinburgh Magazine in 1788, long before the panels were complete. It took until 1791 for the work to be finished and sent to London. Three years before this, the poet William Cowper had decided to try to win Montagu’s patronage for himself and his friends. To this end he had written a poem, “On the beautiful Feather-Hangings, designed for Mrs. Montagu,” and sent it to be published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. These verses seem, as Scott Hess notes, “unsqueamish” in their compliments to Montagu (whom Cowper did not know well, but admired as a writer) and the feather …