Ticketing the British Eighteenth Century: "A thing ... never heard of before"

Abstract

During the long eighteenth century, an apparently minor and ephemeral object proliferated in Britain: the ticket. A significant and increasing proportion of the population encountered tickets of admission, lottery tickets, and pay tickets. Novel types emerged, including pawn tickets and Tyburn tickets; philanthropists discovered their potential for investigating and relieving poverty. Historians have not brought different instances together, but new applications of the term "ticket," and, more importantly, processes of elaboration and consolidation, suggest a variety of uses that bridged different registers and social settings. This extended early-modern capacities to express contractual obligation, affection, or allegiance through material objects and gave new form to techniques of identification. Crucial was the ticket's potential to flow, to encapsulate and then release information, access, possession, or chance. Study of charitable activities, plebeian experiences, and Methodist practices suggests how people learned to recognize and use tickets. Lower-class women and men were proficient agents as tickets intensified and shaped social interactions. These histories cast fresh light on eighteenth-century modes of social existence and the broader historical narratives constructed around them.