Victorian Material Culture
Tatiana Kontou, Kara Tennant, Tatiana Kontou, Kara Tennant
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Victorian Material Culture
Tatiana Kontou, Kara Tennant, Tatiana Kontou, Kara Tennant
Información del libro
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.
Preguntas frecuentes
Información
PART 1 Embodying Fashionability
1.1 Context
1.1 Context
[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
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
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.”