Fashions for April 1824

Loretta reports:

From Ackermann's Repository Vol III 1824

London fashions for April 1824

Dress of emerald green gros de Naples; corsage plain, and bordered at the top with a satin band of the same colour, and a narrow tucker of tulle:  the sleeve is very short and full, and composed of crèpe lisse; the fulness regulated by pyramidal bands of gros de Naples, and finished in a double satin band round the arm.  A very novel kind of flounce ornaments the bottom of the skirt, which is cut nearly a quarter of a yard up, and a fullness of crèpe lisse introduced, and formed into a regular row of demi-bells, the lower part kept extended by two statin pipings, and the top of each surmounted with a double satin circlet and a triplet of satin leaves appliquée.  Fichu of crèpe lisse, edged with satin piping, and trimmed all round with narrow blond, confined at the shoulders with corded leaves, and arranged in front to form a stomacher, the points coming below the ceinture, which is also edged with satin and blond, and unites behind in a leaf rosette with the corner of the fichu.  The hair is separated in front, and a pearl comb confines it on each side from the temple; round the back of the head it is arranged in large regular curls.  Ear-rings and necklace of rubies.  White kid gloves; white satin shoes; India shawl.

I find quite a bit to like in every fashion era.  One thing I like about the early-mid 1820s is the move to a natural waistline, while retaining the hip-skimming skirt of the previous era.  In a few years, the sleeves and skirt will start to pouf out, the prelude to the exaggerated shapes of the 1830s.  For now, though, women are showing off their natural shapes.

What Every 18th c. Aristocratic Child Is Whining For This Spring

Susan reports:

There's nothing children like more than tooling around in their own set of wheels. Just as today's kids have their miniature cars (can you believe that that American-made classic, the Cozy Coupe, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year?), so the lucky children of affluent parents in 18th c. England and America had their own tiny carriages, too.

This splendid toy chariot, made by the carriage builder of Colonial Williamsburg, is a replica of an 18th c. riding toy. It features a padded leather seat and the same turning mechanism being used for full-size carriages. The bench-style seat is slung on leather straps for an easy, rocking motion that's similar to the springs used in coaches. The red-painted wheels were high-fashion, and on the side of the seat is painted a pineapple, the same kind of family emblem that would have decorated carriage doors. This little chariot would not have been pulled by an animal, but by other children, and the handle is covered with leather for a good grip.

To be sure, this was not a common plaything. Ordinary folk didn't own carriages or coaches, and their children didn't have miniature chariots, either. But for the fortunate children who did, riding toys like this must have been a blast.

Because the chariot is a replica and not an antique, it's been road-tested by countless children visiting CW. You can see the chips in the paint and the wear on the wheels; in fact, when we took this photograph, the chariot was in the stables, waiting for a seasonal tune-up. But by spring, I'm sure it was back out on the grass, ready for another year of pushing, pulling, and squabbling over who gets to ride and who has to pull. Somethings never do change, do they?

The trouble with educated women

Loretta reports:

A short while ago, we learned that the French arranged marriages long after the English gave up the practice, and each side believed their approach assured more happy marriages.

This was before the days of marriage therapy, couples counseling, etc.

Let's move on to the U.S. in the 20th century.

I had heard about Eugenics but was startled to learn that Paul Popenoe, the man behind The Ladies Home Journal ongoing feature, "Can this marriage be saved?" (launched in 1953)—and the man who seems to have started the marriage counseling business— had been a leader in the Eugenics campaign "to sterilize the unfit and urge the fit to marry."

I am indebted to a fascinating article by Jill Lepore, "Fixed: The Rise of marriage therapy, and other dreams of human betterment," (New Yorker 3/29/10--you can listen to audio here ) for sending me to a piece of early 20th century "scientific" writing that made my jaw drop: Applied Eugenics.

Among other things, Popenoe wrote, in 1918, that a college education rendered women unfit for marriage.

"The causes of the remarkable failure of college women to marry" he breaks down into two categories: avoidable and unavoidable. Among the "avoidable reasons"--(1) They desire not to marry, due to a preference for a career, or development of a cynical attitude toward men and matrimony, due to a faulty education." For those who desire to marry but can't, reasons include "(b) Their education makes them less desirable mates than girls who have had some training along the lines of home-making and mothercraft."

Further on he declares, as Lepore quotes, "Many a college girl of the finest innate qualities, who sincerely desires to enter matrimony, is unable to find a husband of her own class, simply because she has been rendered so cold and unattractive, so over stuffed intellectually and starved emotionally, that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company."

Good thing my husband never got around to reading that book.

Photos at top and center left courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
Top:  The bride's prayer: "Make thy face to shine upon me.  Make my life a life of love." c 1905
Center:  College for Women of Western Reserve University c1913

More about Corsets: Baleen Ho!

Susan reports:

Whenever the word "corset" is mentioned in a historical context, it's almost always described as being "whalebone." Yet this is something of a misnomer: corsets weren't stiffened with whalebone, but with another part of the whale called baleen.

Baleen is the feathery, comb-like feature in the mouths of whales, screening and trapping food as they swim through the water. Baleen is made of keratin, a flexible material that's more akin to cartilage and fingernails than bone. But in the past, the definition - and the whale's anatomy - was blurred, and baleen and whalebone were used interchangeably. Baleen was harvested by whalers, and sold in strips such as those above left, on display in the milliner's shop in Colonial Williamsburg.

As a material, baleen is strong and stiff but yielding, and can be cut, filed, and shaped. Many things that are today fashioned from plastic were made from baleen in the 18th c., including eyeglass frames, the spokes of umbrellas and parasols, and the blades of folding fans.

And corsets. As soon as fitted, stiffened corsets

became the fashion in 16th c. France and Italy, baleen was the stylish choice for the stays - the long, narrow pieces that were forced into the corset's vertical channels. Baleen didn't crack like reeds or wood splints (other popular and less expensive options.) Baleen was strong and pliable, and it could be split to make the very thin stays that were necessary for sophisticated shaping.

A stylish 18th c. corset was a work of art, or at least of very high craftsmanship and engineering. Here are a few examples: from the Boston Musem of Fine Arts, the MMA's Costume Institute, and the Victoria & Albert.

There could be dozens of baleen stays in a single corset, each carefully cut, tailored, and finished to size. Nearly all corset makers were men, simply because few women possessed the hand strength necessary to force the baleen into the narrow channels. Of course, this also led to lots of salacious prints from the era, such as this one, lower right, with the leering corset maker fitting the young woman while another gentleman watches. Why do I doubt it's her husband?

But by the middle of 19th c., steel boning began to replace baleen in corsets. Steel was equally flexible, but far easier to manufacture and use, and considerably less expensive than baleen. Just as the development of oil drilling and the petroleum industry in the 1850s spelled the end of the whale oil market, so, too, did metal corset stays do the same for baleen.

Fortunately for whales, the days of Captain Ahab are as long gone as corsets. Today the harvesting of baleen and all other by-products of American whale fishing is strictly regulated by the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, and profits from the sale of baleen are limited to Alaskan Aleuts, Indians, and Eskimos (which is the source of the baleen used at Colonial Williamsburg.)

For more information (and lots of photographs) about the sociology as well as the history of corsets, I recommend The Corset: A Cultural History by Valerie Steele.

Dept of Quotation: Hones Every-day book 6 April

Loretta reports:

From The Every-day Book; or, Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements, etc. 1827, by William Hone

April 6.
OLD LADY-DAY.

CHRONOLOGY .
1348. Laura de Noves died. She was born in 1304, and is celebrated for having been beloved by Petrarch, and for having returned his passion by indifference. He fostered his love at Vaucluse, a romantic spot, wherein he had nothing to employ him but recollection of her charms, and imagination of her perfections. These he immortalized in sonnets while she lived; Petrarch survived her six and thirty years.

Francis I., who compared a court without ladies to a spring without flowers, caused Laura's tomb to be opened, and threw verses upon her remains complimentary to her beauty, and the fame she derived from her lover's praises.

1803. Colonel Montgomery and captain Macnamara quarrelled and fought a duel at Primrose-hill, because their dogs quarrelled and fought in Hyde-park. Captain Macnamara received colonel Montgomery's ball in the hip, and colonel Montgomery received captain Macnamara's ball in the heart. This exchange of shots being according to the laws of duelling and projectiles, Colonel Montgomery died on the spot. Captain Macnamara was tried at the Old Bailey, and, as a man of honour, was acquitted by a jury of men of honour. The laws of England and the laws of christianity only bind honourable men; men of honour govern each other by the superior power of sword and pistol. The humble suicide is buried with ignominy in a cross road, and a finger-post marks his grave for public scorn; the proud and daring duellist reposes in a christian grave beneath marble, proud and daring as himself.

FLORAL DIRECTORY.
Starch Hyacinth. Hyacinthus racemosus.
Dedicated to St. Sixtus I.

Above:  Portrait of Petrarch's Laura, in the Laurentian Library, Florence

That Foreign Curiosity the Fork

Susan reports:

A Venetian nobleman sitting down to sup with King Henry VIII in 1530 would have at once noticed something missing from the English table. Each guest would have a silver spoon for pottage, sauces, and jellies and a knife for cutting meat, but no forks. Like most other Englishmen, His Majesty believed that fingers would suffice to carry food to the mouth, and anyone who thought differently was considered over-nice, or maybe just Italian.

While most of the courts on the Continent had been using forks for years, the English were very slow to pick up this particular dining refinement. Charles I's Queen Henrietta Marie brought them from her native France in the 1620s, and Charles II, too, favored them after his lengthy exile in Europe. By the end of the 1600s, diners of the better sort had begun accepting the two-tined fork (a smaller version of those used for carving meat) as a useful invention, and often carried their own with them. Not until the 18th c. did fashionable English forks acquire that extra tine or two, and receive the graceful bend to help carry food. Still, the two-tined variety remained in use into Victorian times in rural areas of England and among those who saw no use in tossing away perfectly good cutlery.

But it wasn't a refinement easily won. Like most Englishmen, traveller Thomas Coryat regarded forks with the greatest suspicion when he first encountered them in 1608 in Italy (perhaps at a grand banquet like the one above), and of course made fun of them – after, I suspect, he was "brow-beaten" himself for using his fingers.

"I observed a custom in all those Italian Cities and Townes through which I passed...The Italian and also most other strangers that are commorant in Italy do alwaies at their meals use a little forke when they cut their meate. For while with their knife which they hold in one hande they cut the meate out of the dish, they fasten their forke, which they hold in their other hand upon the same dish, so that whatsoever he be that sitting in the company of any others at meate, should unadvisedly touch the dish of meate with his fingers, he will give occasion of offence unto the company, as having transgressed the lawes of good manners in so much that for his error he shall be at the least brow-beaten, if not reprehended in wordes....The reason of this curiosity is, because the Italian cannot by any means indure to have his dish touched with fingers, feeling all mens' fingers are not alike cleane."

-- Thomas Coryat, Coryat's Crudities, Hastily Gobled up in Five Moneths' Travells...,vol. 1

Above: Detail from The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese, 1563, The Louvre

Below: Silver filigree knife with steel blade and fork, late 17th c. French

They do it differently in France

Loretta reports:

I had occasion to reopen my yellowed copy of Fanny Trollope’s  Paris and the Parisians recently, and was reminded what a delightful account she offers of Paris in 1835.  I suggest you read the entire Letter XXXV —which I have had to hack up mercilessly below.  It points out a very interesting cultural difference.

By this time, in England, arranged marriages were a thing of the past, but not in France.  This led to some interesting differences in social behavior.  In France, Fanny tells us, the unmarried girls are the last to get dancing partners.  It’s the married women—and many of them no spring chickens—to whom all the young gallants flock.  She discusses this oddity with an unnamed French woman of her acquaintance, who asks, "Will you then have the kindness to explain to me the difference in this respect between France and England ?"

Fanny: " The only difference between us which I mean to advocate is, that with us the amusement which throws young people together under circumstances the most likely, perhaps, to elicit expressions of gallantry and admiration from the men, and a gracious reception of them from the women, is considered as befitting the single rather than the married part of the community."

 " With us, indeed, it is exactly the reverse," replied she,—" at least as respects the young ladies. By addressing the idle, unmeaning gallantry inspired by the dance to a young girl, we should deem the cautious delicacy of restraint in which she is enshrined transgressed and broken in upon. A young girl should be given to her husband before her passions have been awakened or her imagination excited by the voice of gallantry.…When a girl is first married, her feelings, her thoughts, her imagination, are wholly occupied by her husband. Her mode of education has ensured this; and afterward it is at the choice of her husband whether he will secure and retain her young heart for himself. In no country have husbands so little reason to complain of their wives as in France ; for in no country does the manner in which they live with them depend so wholly on themselves.”

After politely debating which country has got it all wrong, the Unnamed Lady concludes:  “…as we go on exchanging fashions so amicably, who knows but we may live to see your young ladies shut up a little more, while their mothers and fathers look out for a suitable marriage for them, instead of inflicting the awkward task upon themselves?* And in return, perhaps, our young wives may lay aside their little coquetries, and become mères respectables somewhat earlier than they do now. But, in truth, they all come to it at last."

*Italics mine.

Above is Frances Trollope.  Below is an 1835 French Lady, Marie J. Lafont-Porcher