Victorian Material Culture

Tatiana Kontou, Kara Tennant, Tatiana Kontou, Kara Tennant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781138225381
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315399966
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Manufacturing
• Index: Business

From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This collection brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material and culture. This volume, 'Fashionable Things', will focus on Victorian fads and fashions ranging from chatelains to insect jewellery.

PART 1 Embodying Fashionability

1.1 Context

DOI: 10.4324/9781315399980-3

1.1 Context

The Victorian female experience was inextricably linked with that of clothing, but, as we outline in our Introduction, this often proved a tricky relationship. While too marked an interest in fashion was often seen to represent a damaging character weakness, dress was also interpreted as a ‘reflection’ of the character and social status of the wearer, and frequently became the subject of close scrutiny, commentary and criticism.

These ideas are conveyed within our selections for this volume, which demonstrate how the materiality of dress was ‘translated’ into social concerns. They capture tensions that ran through Victorian dress discourse and, in some cases, that still resonate in modern fashion media. This is certainly the case for our first selection. Enigmatically titled ‘A Complaint’ and written by a woman whose acronym, H. R. H., echoes royalty, this letter appeared in The Lady’s Newspaper of January 1847. It raises a very modern problem: H. R. H. writes to the magazine’s editor that its fashionable images feature only ‘elegant’ women ‘on whom dresses cannot choose but look well’.¹ Claiming that her own ‘dumpy’ form does not reflect these body shapes, she owns that she feels ‘constantly mortified’ that there is ‘nothing to suit [her]’. The magazine’s editor gives an equally modern response. Disregarding the woman’s candid self-deprecation, they urge that she ‘wrongs herself cruelly’, and furthermore, that with a little effort, she might modify the styles so as to flatter her own figure. In this way, the female body is figured in itself as artefact, functioning as a symbol of material disappointment, and failing to concord with the ideals represented by both fashionable clothing and images – themselves realised in material form.

Our next extract is an article by the ‘multi-skilled Victorian intellectual’ Mrs Mary Philadelphia Merrifield,² who, as Caroline Palmer writes, ‘exploited her considerable knowledge of art and science in order to validate the study of fashion and to raise it in seriousness as a topic’.³ Entitled ‘How Far Should the Fashions Be Followed?’ and published in The Lady’s Newspaper around eight years later in 1855, this article advises readers on how to navigate the balance between the perceived social need to follow the general direction of contemporary fashion, while adapting this to the particulars of the wearer’s own body.

This is followed by a column from The Ladies’ Treasury of June 1857. Named ‘Conduct and Carriage’, this formed part of a series that presented the reader with a set of ‘Rules to Guide a Young Lady in Points of Etiquette and Good Breeding in her Intercourse with the World’. Written in the form of scripted dialogues between an idealised mother and daughter, the columns focus upon the young Geraldine Vernon’s navigation of London ‘Society’, fashionability, courtship, bereavement and, in a subsequent series, motherhood.⁴ What is interesting about this article is that, like Mrs Merrifield two years earlier, it advised cautious adherence to the prevailing modes: Mrs. Vernon urges the young Geraldine to ‘[b]e always in the fashion, but never in the extreme of the fashion’, emphasising that ‘[s]ingularity in dress is always to be avoided’.⁵ Nonetheless, however ‘odious’ or ‘ridiculous’ her daughter might consider the fashions,⁶ she is instructed to obediently follow the example set by ladies of her own social status. Our next selection, entitled ‘Thoughtfulness in Dress’ and attributed to Caroline Stephen, continues to treat the ‘problem’ of how to dress the female body.⁷ While the approach verges into the philosophical and the more abstract nature of beauty, the advice is nonetheless rooted in materiality. Readers are advised, for example, to be mindful of the moral necessity to avoid ‘sham or deceptive imitation’ and even cautioned to avoid supposedly ‘unnatural’ fashions, such as wearing artificial flowers out of season.⁸ Wider issues of class and social status are also raised, whereby female dress should not only reflect ‘the social position which one actually holds rather than the next above it’, but also maintain consistency if one should come into contact with others of varying status.⁹

Our next source, which appeared in the lively periodical London Society of 1869, addresses an apparently pressing and ubiquitous matter, namely, ‘A Lady’s Question: What Shall We Wear?’. Posed from a specifically gendered perspective, this article addresses issues of class, economy and taste, acknowledging the stereotype that Englishwomen supposedly dressed in a less stylish manner than their French counterparts.¹⁰ Here the article light-heartedly pinpoints a central conundrum of Victorian fashion, as the social pressure for economy results in ‘an inferior arrangement “made to do”’, and the embarrassment of knowing that the wearer ‘is not well dressed after all’.¹¹ But the article also touches upon a growing contemporary fear that was expounded in Mrs Linton’s much-cited ‘Girl of the Period’ article of March 1868, namely, that a woman might be mistaken for being ‘fast’, a term used to denote a woman whose dress, appearance and deportment was troublingly forthright, forward and direct.¹²

With these fears in mind, it is hardly surprising that our next selection, ‘The Tyranny of Fashion’, appeared in The Cornhill Magazine around ten years later. Attributed to Emily Pfeiffer, this piece details the social dangers of those women seemingly trapped by ‘the fantastic dance of fashion’.¹³ Noting that men had already felt ‘relief’ from its ‘foolish oppression’,¹⁴ the writer laments the social expectations exerted upon women, linking these directly with the technical requirements of contemporary dressmaking. Referring to the close fit of the garments of the late 1870s, which had moved far from the expansive crinolines of twenty years earlier, the writer points out that,

[t]he manufacture of the simplest-looking modern gown, closely sheathing two-thirds of the body […] has become an affair demanding not only an inordinate degree of skill in the fitter, but a ruinous amount of time, patience and money on the part of the person fitted.¹⁵

From here, Pfeiffer passionately likens the female form to that of an inanimate plaything, ‘bound and trussed until it looked as dead as a wooden doll’,¹⁶ allowing herself to speculate about a world in which simpler, more comfortable and less costly garments were both available and socially accepted.

We then move to a more overt and detailed treatise, an extract from the author Mrs Haweis’ 1878 The Art of Beauty. In this text, Haweis proclaims the importance of dress when articulating identity, asserting the importance of individualism when presenting dress as an art form. While much of the work focuses upon such areas as colour, detail, form and proportion of dress, this extract is concerned with its wider ideology. To this end, Haweis addresses the concern raised by the London Society writer about the supposed lack of sartorial discernment demonstrated by English-women, who apparently preferred to defer to their milliner rather to rely upon their own judgement. Haweis also poses a bold and deceptively radical question: ‘[w]hy is one’s individuality, so clear within, to be so confused without?’¹⁷

Our final extract, taken from The Rational Dress Society’s Gazette, is derived from a publication specifically geared towards dress reform.¹⁸ Taking up concerns previously raised by Haweis, this editorial unambiguously opposed garments that it perceives as threatening to health, or those which undermined either movement or the body’s natural form. To this effect, fashionable items like the crinoline and crinolette, narrow, tiny boots, heavy clothing and stiff corsets – the very materials of a fashionable lady – are deemed cumbersome, ‘ugly and deforming’.¹⁹

Notes

• 1 H. R. H., ‘A Complaint’, The Lady’s Newspaper, 9 January 1847, p. 26.
• 2 C. Palmer, ‘Colour, Chemistry and Corsets: Mary Philadelphia Merrifield’s Dress as a Fine Art’, Costume, 47(1), 2013, pp. 3–27 (p. 4).
• 3 Palmer, abstract to ‘Colour, Chemistry and Corsets’, p. 3.
• 4 See K. Tennant, ‘Female Space, Feminine Grace: Ladies and the Mid-Victorian Railway’, in K. Hill (ed.), Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Texts, Images, Objects (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 53–72 (p. 58), for further consideration of this series. In this chapter, a different instalment is discussed from that which we include in this volume, namely, that published in August 1857. It is also worth noting that there was some inconsistency within the ‘Conduct and Carriage’ series in other installments; while in our selection on Mourning attire, the series’ young protagonist is named Gertrude, elsewhere she is called Geraldine.
• 5 [Anon], ‘Conduct and Carriage; Or, Rules to Guide a Young Lady on Points of Etiquette and Good Breeding in her Intercourse with the World’, The Ladies’ Treasury, June 1857, pp. 119–120 (p. 120).
• 6 [Anon], ‘Conduct and Carriage’, p. 120.
• 7 [C. Stephen], ‘Thoughtfulness in Dress’, The Cornhill Magazine, September 1868, pp. 281–298. The article is attributed to Stephen by sources including S. D. Bernstein, ‘Designs after Nature: Evolutionary Fashions, Animals, and Gender’, in D. D. Morse and M. A. Danahay (eds.), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2017 [first published in 2007 by Ashgate Publishing]), pp. 65–79 (p. 68).
• 8 [Stephen], ‘Thoughtfulness in Dress’, pp. 287, 292.
• 9 [Stephen], ‘Thoughtfulness in Dress’, p. 290.
• 10 For a brief consideration of ‘the much-revered style’ of French ladies, see K. Tennant, ‘“Buying in Style”: sartorial sensibilities and Victorian popular fiction’, in J. Hatter and N. Moody (eds.), Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals (Brighton: Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019), pp. 87–100 (p. 90).
• 11 [Anon], ‘A Lady’s Question: What Shall We Wear?’, London Society, May 1869, pp. 410–414 (p. 412).
• 12 [Anon], [Mrs Eliza Lynn Linton], ‘The Girl of the Period’, The Saturday Review, 14 March 1868, pp. 339–340 (p. 340). This article is introduced and reproduced in Mitchell, pp. 65–70. Linton’s article is discussed in K. Tennant, ‘The Discerning Eye: Viewing the Mid-Victorian “Modern” Woman’, in I. Parkins and E. M. Sheehan (eds.), Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011), pp. 103–123 (p. 107); this chapter also addresses the concept of ‘fastness’, pp. 106–111. Tennant also very briefly addresses ‘fastness’ in ‘Female Space, Feminine Grace’, p. 59. For further discussion of Linton and ‘The Girl of the Period’, see H. Fraser, S. Green, and J. Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 21–26, as well as V. Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 128–130.
• 13 E. P. [Emily Pfeiffer], ‘The Tyranny of Fashion’, The Cornhill Magazine, July 1878, pp. 83–94. As Rosy Aindow notes, the article is generally agreed to have been authored by Pfeiffer. See R. Aindow, Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870–1914 (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), p. 57.
• 14 [Pfeiffer], ‘The Tyranny of Fashion’, p. 83.
• 15 [Pfeiffer], ‘The Tyranny of Fashion’, p. 84.
• 16 [Pfeiffer], ‘The Tyranny of Fashion’, p. 85.
• 17 Haweis, Mrs. H. R. [Mary Eliza], ‘Importance of Dress’, in The Art of Beauty (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1878), p. 16.
• 18 Mitchell’s anthology includes an illuminating section on dress reform; see R. N. Mitchell, Fashioning the Victorians: a Critical Sourcebook (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), pp. 61–64, as well as for an article by Florence Pomeroy, who was President of the Rational Dress Society (pp. 77–83).
• 19 [Anon], Statement and ‘Editorial Note’, The Rational Dress Society’s Gazette, January 1889, p. 1. Also included within this extract is an ‘Editorial Note’ that refers to Miss [Lydia] Becker, advocate for women’s suffrage and editor of the Women’s Suffrage Journal. Yet, as Christine Bayles Kortsch notes, Becker ‘took a conservative stance on dress’, opposing the abolition of the corset, directing women to ‘stick to [their] stays’ [corsets] and, as our extract details, only advising against tight-lacing. See C. B. Kortsch, Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2016 [originally published by Ashgate Publishing in 2009]), p. 91. See also V. Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 59.

1 H. R. H., ‘A COMPLAINT.’ The Lady’s Newspaper, 9 January 1847, p. 26

DOI: 10.4324/9781315399980-4

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LADY’S NEWSPAPER.

“SIR, – A point to which I would call your attention is this: – In nearly all books of fashion, the ladies are represented as tall elegant figures, on whom dresses cannot choose but look well. Now, I belong to the “dumpy” class, and am constantly mortified at finding nothing to suit me. Again, my hair is not of the graceful, redundant and flowing character, so prettily described in your pages; I have lost much during severe illness, but as it is growing again, and as I[]want yet three years of thirty, I am unwilling to begin to wear caps, but I should like to see a neat, ladylike, morning head dress, equally opposed to the formal seoigné, and the tawdry compound of laces, ribbon, and bugles, with which our shop windows are ornamented. May I hope to find in your paper a satisfactory reply to these queries?

“Your’s [sic] obediently, “H. R. H.”

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We beg to assure our fair correspondent that in the art of dressing well, one of the most important points is the just adaptation of the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Introduction to Volume V: Fashionable Things
• Part 1 Embodying Fashionability
• Part 2 Dressing Up
• Part 3 Animal and Insect Accessories; Home Decoration
• Part 4 Handicraft
• Index