Supporting Harriette

Susan reports:

Reading Loretta's blog yesterday, I was struck not so much by the white muslin gowns themselves, but what was happening beneath them.  This high-waisted style must have been truly shocking.  For the first time in hundreds of years, the curves of a woman's breasts were on display.

European ladies began reshaping their bodies for fashion in the 15th century or so, via stays, corsets, busks, boning, even iron.  Weirdly, their goal didn't do nothin' for feminine attributes.  The ideal was a long, pointed, straight front that bound the breasts almost flat. Check out these two examples below left: the  first is mid-16th century, the second is two hundred years later in the mid-18th century, but the silhouette is almost exactly the same.

All this changes in the last decade of the 18th century. Whether it's a classical inspiration, the French Revolution, or just the ever-swinging pendulum of fashion, suddenly it was stylish to show the actual shape of both breasts.  Yes, there are caricatures of the time showing dubious "ladies" going completely au natural, but most women turned instead to the newest in corsetry (above left) for support, separation, and enhancement.  Divide and conquer, indeed.  

As fashion/art historian Aileen Ribeiro notes in her excellent Ingres in Fashion, "It is interesting how many portraits of this period exploit the sexual appeal of the early nineteenth-century equivalent of a Wonderbra and depict women leaning forward in this way; Lawrence's portrait of the Countess of Blessington [below right] exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1822 is an example."

So are the portraits of Madame Recamier and Harriette Wilson. Can you hear those early 19th century men still cheering?

Little White Dress

Loretta reports:

Off and on, Susan & I have been discussing those ubiquitous white muslin dresses of the Regency, and trying to decide whether it’s a romance myth that this was the standard attire for the innocent Regency miss. Madame Récamier (note the bare feet--there’s another blog) seems to contradict that concept, but then, she’s French.

Reading Frances Wilson’s The Courtesan’s Revenge, a biography of the famous Regency era ho Harriette Wilson, I came upon this sentence: “It was now that she began to dress in her trademark white muslin and to ensure that she was seen everywhere.”

Trademark white muslin? I’ve read a lot about Harriette, including two versions of her memoirs, but never realized that white muslin was her trademark. Does this mean it was unusual for a young woman to wear it? Are we mistaken to send our Regency misses to Almack’s dressed in white muslin dresses? Or it was she unusual in wearing white muslin exclusively?

Or does this simply tell us something about Harriette? She wasn’t married, after all, at least not during the period of her fame, so she’d qualify as a “miss,” albeit no virgin. She did like a joke, and while her substantial bosom (emphasized in many caricatures) was certainly an attraction, so was her sense of humor.

Maybe, when she adopted the white muslin dress, Harriette was just being funny.

What do you think?

Department of Quotation: Condoms

Susan reports:

London, 1724

From The Machine, or Love's Preservative (anon.)

By this Machine* secure, the willing Maid

Can taste Love's Joys, nor is she more afraid

Her swelling Belly should, or squalling Brat

Betray the Luscious Pastime she has been at.

*an 18th century term for a condom

Left: "Retail Traders Not Affected by the Shop Tax", 1787, from the British Cartoon Collection of the Library of Congress.

Department of Quotation: Flashman

Loretta reports:

1845

"Mai Jeendan wants to marry you! There now!"
....

After all, it’s one thing to win a maiden heart, and very fine, but when a man-eater who’s sampled the best from Peshawar to Poona cries “Eureka!” over you, it’s no wonder if you glance in the mirror. At the same time, it’s quite a facer, and my first words, possibly instinctive, were:

“Christ, she ain’t pregnant, is she?”

Harry Flashman, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, George MacDonald Fraser.

Gentlemen & Horses & the TNHG

Susan reports:

While the memory of Loretta’s footmen and their brawny thighs still glows warmly in our Dear Readers’ hearts, we’d like to add a little confession, and give you all something else to look at, too.

First, the confession: after our now-legendary visit to Colonial Williamsburg, we have developed a major, uh, interest in 18th century gentlemen on horseback.

These guys were completely at ease on their mounts, one fluid movement of man and horse with a healthy serving of swaggering confidence, too. It’s that whole centaur thing. They’re everywhere in CW, those elegant gentlemen riding slowly through the town, or acting as dragoons drilling on the green –– which adds gorgeous uniforms and flashing swords to the mix. And breeches, and boots, and cocked hats low across their brows, and the way the skirts of their coats fall over the backs of the saddles.

In other words, Fantasyland for the TNHG.

Here are a couple of our pictures. See what we mean?

New buck-skin breeches

Loretta reports:

By the 19th century, wearers of the plush breeches referred to in my last blog tended to be, as I indicated, servants, public and private. A comment from Michelle Buonfiglio of Romance B(u)y theBook reminded me that of the private servants who wore livery (and breeches), the most glamorous were footmen.

They were, generally, hired for their looks. They ought to be tall and good-looking, and of course their snug breeches and stockings must show off well-muscled legs. Mrs. Beeton wrote, “When a lady of fashion chooses her footman without any other consideration than his height, shape, and tournure of his calf, it is not surprising that she should find a domestic who . . . considers the figure he cuts behind her carriage and the late hours he is compelled to keep a full compensations for the wages he exacts, for the food he wastes, and for the perquisites he can lay his hand on.”

One perquisite might be one of the ladies of the house. Or--as in the case of the heroine of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the boss’s mistress.

Fanny Hill, annoyed with her lover, Mr. H--, (who's paying the bills) turns her attention to the young manservant Mr. H-- has just hired: “a very handsome young lad, scarce turn’d of nineteen, fresh as a rose, well shap’d , and clever-limb’d; in short a very good excuse for any woman’s liking.”

She takes careful note of his livery and how well it becomes him: “new buck-skin breeches, that clipping close,* shew’d the shape of a plump,”** well-made thigh, white stockings, garter-laced livery, shoulder-knot . . .”

Fanny, like Mae West, could resist everything but temptation.

*fitting snug
**muscle-ly

Flea Market Find

Susan reports:

One of the questions that writers are always asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" For the TNHG, this is easy to answer. Where history lies, so do our ideas, scattered so thick that sometimes we have to watch where we walk.

Which is not to say that our inspiration comes only from the mustiest of tomes, or even in museums or via the internet. Sometimes it appears in far more humble places, like a flea market.

Last month at the weekly flea market in Sandwich, MA, I was poking about the boxes on the grass, hunting through the cheapie jewelery. I have a weakness for gaudy Bakelite bangles, and One never knows what One might find. As I looked, a vendor dropped another box beside the cartons of jools, a large flat box filled with...feathers.

It was a sales rep's sample box from the first decade or so of the 20th century. I suppose it was meant to entice milliners, for the feathers had all been fashioned into little cockades and curled bunches and pretend roses. Sadly, most had disintegrated over time, rootless quills and barbs and drifting scraps of down. But what amazed me was how, a hundred years later, the ones that survived still wore their original tags, pinked edges and gold borders pinned in place and waiting to be filled out with a customer's order.

I looked, and touched, and thought of who might have sold them, who might have bought them, and what circuitous circumstances had brought them to my feet in the grass. Why hadn't the samples ever been used? What had become of the rep? Had he (or she) quit the business, eloped, won the Irish Sweepstakes, or been run over by a horse-drawn streetcar? Or had the box been bought by a single milliner who intended them for hats she'd never made? Oh, Dear Readers, the melancholy shades of doomed Lilly Bart!

"I'll make a deal for the whole box, if you want it," the vendor said. "End of summer, y'know."

The whole box was somehow too much. I took only one, this beautiful curling black feather, with two more at the base. Cost me a dollar.

But you can't put a price on what I got with it.