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The Duchess, the Court, and the City in Gustavian StockholmThis article analyses the everyday urban sociability and the staging of politics of the Swedish duchess Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte in the years around 1790. The cultural and social life of the Gustavian court has been the focus of much scholarly attention. However, the main aim of these studies has been to examine court life as a reflection of Gustavus III's personality and political ambitions. This article, however, integrates Gustavian court sociability in a broader European pattern by focusing on the monarch's sister-in-law. It aims to give a detailed account of social practice through a vast selection of the Duchess's personal remains: her political journal and letters, informal notes to friends, and household accounts showing the sums she spent on charity. It also takes into account royal theatre box subscription lists as a way to identify the composition of the theatre audience. The claim of this article is that the Swedish royal family maintained their authority through their daily urban presence, such as their walks in the public gardens and main streets of Stockholm, their attendance at weekly balls at the Stock Exchange (Börshuset), or their visits to the royal theatres. Through a carefully ritualized sociability, the court preserved their social exclusivity in their urban encounters.

When Anna Johanna Grill travelled from Sweden to England in 1788, she was impressed by the vast array of consumer goods in shops. In her travel diary, she writes how the shopkeepers displayed goods in myriad of ways that fooled people into shopping. How did shops look like in Anna Johanna Grill's hometown Stockholm in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century? Were there distinctive shopping streets? Who sold goods, who shopped them and what goods were available? How were goods displayed in shops and marketed? How households act in organising their purchases and consumption?
From a microhistorical case studies, this richly illustrated anthology widens the perspective to social, economic and cultural practices in everyday urban life. The chapters demonstrate how shopping streets and shops with their range of silk fabrics, accessories, fashion plates, blacksmithing, wigs and hair pomades not only met the desires of consumers, but also enabled dreams of novel identities and social accession for themselves and their families.