On his first day in England, in 1726, Voltaire went to Greenwich Fair. He was
struck by the elegant costume of the young girls in cotton gowns racing
across the grass and the fashionable young men on horseback. That evening,
he was presented to some ladies of the Court “who were stiff and cold and
took tea and made a great noise with their fans”. To his astonishment, they
told him that the beau monde would not dream of demeaning itself by
attending such a fair, and that “all these good-looking persons, in their
calico dresses, were maidservants or country girls; that all these
resplendent young men, so well mounted and caracoling round the race-course,
were mere students or apprentices on hired horses”. Other foreign visitors,
both earlier and later, were taken by how well dressed the English poor
were. At the end of the seventeenth century, Henri Misson expressed surprise
that “the very peasants are generally dressed in cloth”, that is, wool. Half
a century later, Madame du Bocage found that in Oxfordshire cottages “the
poorest country girls drink tea, have bodices of chintz, straw hats on their
heads and scarlet cloaks upon their shoulders”. By contrast, in Ireland in
1777 Arthur Young found the country people often wretchedly dressed and
going barefoot. The American Quaker Jabez Fisher saw the same in Scotland
two years earlier. Yet as soon as he crossed the border back into England,
he found “the dress and manners totally different”. Even runaways were often
described, in newspaper advertisements for their return, as wearing
stockings, silk neckerchiefs, brass or silver-plated shoe buckles, and,
before they went out of style in the 1780s, wigs. As a shop assistant on
London Bridge in the same period, the young Robert Owen every morning had
“the hairdresser to powder and pomatum and curl my hair”. Nor was it only
the employers who expected high standards of dress. Keeping up appearances
was certainly not confined to the middle classes. Young men like the
stocking-frame knitter’s apprentice William Hutton saved hard “to raise a
genteel suit of clothes”, both to improve his own situation in life and to
appeal to the girls. An eyewitness of the Peterloo Massacre (1819) recorded
of the marchers who were cut down by the Yeomanry that “the majority were
young persons in their best Sunday suits”.
How does this square with E. P. Thompson’s condescending conclusion in The
Making of the English Working Class that the share of the average working
man in “the benefits of economic progress” was paltry, consisting of “more
potatoes, a few articles of cotton clothing for his family, soap and
candles, some tea and sugar, and a great many articles in the Economic
History Review”? Some modern historians tend to regard pictorial evidence of
a well-dressed working class as a sentimental distortion. In exhibition
catalogues you will often see the genre scenes of George Morland and Francis
Wheatley dismissed as “idealized”, with their sturdy peasants in spotted
kerchiefs and brass-buttoned waistcoats and the women with sprigged
petticoats and overskirts and silk scarves. Or take Stubbs’s Haymakers, with
their blue and canary breeches and their white cotton stockings, not to
mention the women with their spotless aprons and black silk-covered hats,
all described by John Barrell in his book The Dark Side of the Landscape
(1983) as “dressed well above their station” and “quite impossible to
believe in as labourers”; are these not creations as artificial as the
Wedgwood biscuit ware on which they were reproduced? There is a puzzling
conflict of evidence here. John Styles, in The Dress of the People, tells us
that the first thing to grasp is that reliable evidence is extremely hard to
come by. Clothes are crucial if we are to judge the standard of living of
the poorest over the course of the eighteenth century, since for the huge
mass of domestic servants – one in ten of the population by some estimates –
for unmarried labourers and for those serving in the army and navy (swollen
to 186,000 in the War of Spanish Succession and to 400,000-plus in the
French Revolutionary wars), clothing was all they had. And it has all
disappeared. Virtually the only garments that have survived from the
eighteenth century belonged to the elite or their house servants. General
economic surveys, inevitably as unreliable as the statistics on which they
are based, cannot make up for the absence of the warp and woof.
John Styles, formerly a costume scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has
squirrelled together a remarkable, and often poignant, heap of evidence of
what the poor actually wore. There is, for example, the inventory of the
clothes lost in the terrible fire at the Suffolk market town of Brandon in
1789. The fire consumed the homes of rich and poor alike, so that we can
contrast the total wardrobes (apart from the clothes they had on their backs
at the time) of the surgeon and the postmaster with those of the blacksmith
and the cordwainer and their families. By value, the losses range from £88
to less than £3, which reflects huge differences in the quality and number
of the garments lost, but not in the type. Even the poorest usually had a
change of shirt, shift, stockings and gown (the outerwear by then usually
made of cotton, the underwear still mostly linen). Nor did the styles vary
greatly between classes. Even great ladies had taken to wearing aprons, even
servant girls wore silk kerchiefs.
Labouring men would spend several weeks’ wages to buy a watch, often
silver-cased rather than brass. Thompson famously claimed that these
purchases were enforced by the grim disciplines of industrial mass
production. The natural rhythm of work in the field had been supplanted by
the tyranny of the clock. Styles argues that the prestige and decorative
value of the watch and its potential with the pawnbroker were at least as
important as its timekeeping value. Court reports of theft cases (another
fertile source, since the reports often identify the thief or victim by what
he or she was wearing) suggest that watches were seldom stolen at
workplaces, except from coachmen and Post Office guards who did need to keep
accurate time, and were often left at home hanging on the bedpost, only to
be taken out and shown off at the pub – and then nicked. Watches in
eighteenth-century England were items of conspicuous consumption as much as
the Rolexes and Patek Philippes that now sparkle on President Sarkozy’s
wrist. Two of the handsome illustrations that crowd Styles’s sumptuous
volume show Lord Nelson and a very common sailor each sporting watch chain
and seals dangling from his fob pocket.
It was this similarity which drove elite commentators to denounce the lower
orders for aping their betters. In a curious way, modern historians have
broadly accepted the truth of the complaint. “The mill girl who wanted to
dress like a duchess” has been identified by Neil McKendrick as one of the
forces propelling the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the century,
sartorial upward mobility got it in the neck, from Defoe at the beginning
who said that female servants ought to wear livery to stop their
extravagance (an argument still heard today but in relation to school
uniform) to the London Magazine, which lamented in 1783 that “every servant
girl has her cotton gowns, and her cotton stockings, while honest grograms,
tammeys, linsey woolseys and many other articles of wool, which would be
much more becoming their stations, lie to mildew in our mercer’s shops, are
seldom enquired for but by paupers and parish officers”. Sociological
inquiries, such as The State of the Poor by Sir Frederick Eden (1797),
lamented that the poor in the South of England no longer spun their own
clothes: “within these twenty years, a coat bought at a shop was considered
as a mark of extravagance and pride”. As Styles mischievously puts it, “the
modern morality tale of social bonds weakening as choice and
individualisation intensify reproduces many of the anxieties expressed by
eighteenth-century commentators about the perceived rise of plebeian
participation in fashion”. He also demonstrates that this
healthy-homespun-to-passive-consumer model is a gross oversimplification.
For one thing, cotton was simply preferable to wool or coarse linen, because
it was washable, more comfortable to wear next to the skin, not to mention
prettier.
The most heart-rending of the illustrations are of the little swatches, mainly
printed cottons, which were cut from the clothes that infants were wearing
when they were brought into the Foundling Hospital. These tiny pieces of
cloth were then pinned to the child’s documents as a means of
identification. They are often beautiful, the sprigged and flowered patterns
as beguiling as the early Laura Ashley prints, the stripes and checks very
much like those you find today in Ian Mankin’s pattern book. Looking at all
the finery on the mercer’s shelves, one feels a twitch of sympathy with
Elizabeth Wild, who stole three pairs of silk gloves worth 13s 6d from a
London shop in 1716. All she could say in her defence was that “she long’d
for them, and that she knew not why else she did it, not having any occasion
as she knew of for them”. Female overspending led to the kind of fibs and
concealments that two centuries later provided the leitmotif for the
newspaper cartoon The Gambols. A late eighteenth-century shop ledger from
Penmorfa in North Wales includes several marginal notes on purchases of
clothes on men’s credit by wives or maidservants such as “handkerchief . . .
wife, not to tell” and “hat 11s 6d, to tell 8s”.
Devices of modern retailing such as buying on credit and newspaper advertising
were already well developed. Far from cash becoming the dominant mode of
exchange, the poor often ran up debts as high as their annual income, either
to shopkeepers or their employers. Smuggled or stolen goods were sold cheap
in town markets with a fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry wink. The textile trade
was slowed by the protectionist Acts of 1701 and 1722, but these were easy
enough to evade by producing linen/cotton mixtures which were not covered by
the ban on imports of printed cotton. The Acts were repealed in 1774, by
which time Manchester was printing enough cotton to fill the gap. Big
business was not always able to manipulate the market. Not even Sir Philip
Green could have exceeded the ambition of Josiah Child, the Governor of the
East India Company, who in 1682 ordered his factors in Madras to make up
200,000 cotton shifts and shirts – roughly one for every two adults in
London. He claimed this was “the onely way I know to introduce the using of
Callicoe for that purpose in all these Northern parts of the world”. This
flooding of the market was a humiliating flop. The Company’s stock list
three years later showed 100,000 shirts and shifts still sitting in the
warehouse, with “send none” written alongside.
Sales patter was well worn too. A cartoon of 1791 depicting “Snip’s Warehouse
for Ready-made Cloathes” has a caption of suit-you-Sir prattle: “Oh yes sir
– it sits to a charm – ’tis Ease & Elegance itself” –
“Yes but don’t you think it too full?” – “Not at all your Honor, you
wouldn’t wish to be pinch’d to be sure – And Sir, I hope the Young
Gentleman’s breeches will be quite to his satisfaction, tho’ to be sure they
comes on a little stiffish at first but you know Sir everything gets easier
in time”. The swerves of fashion defy the notion of a simple linear
progression dictated purely by economic trends. There was, for example, a
strong countercurrent, driven first by the Quakers and then by Wesley, in
favour of decorum and restraint in dress, women being urged to give up
necklaces and earrings, ruffles and ribbons, men to abandon coloured
waistcoats and glittery shoe buckles.
Quite distinct from this there was also the intriguing trend for elite fashion
to follow plebeian styles, rather than the other way about. Rustic round
hats percolated upwards to replace cocked hats in the 1770s, and ladies took
to wearing milkmaids’ aprons, to the despair of Beau Nash who told the
Duchess of Queensberry to remove hers at the Bath Assembly. A French visitor
in 1747 was bewildered by all this dressing down: in London, “masters dress
like their valets, and duchesses copy after their chamber-maids”. Unlike the
peruked exquisites of Versailles, the English dandy affected “a short bob
wig without powder, a handkerchief round the neck instead of a cravat, a
sailor’s waistcoat, a strong knotty stick, a rough tone and language, an
affectation of the airs and manners of the meanest populace”. Most striking
of all these reverse trends was the gradual adoption from the 1780s onwards
of the seaman’s gear of jacket and loose trousers or “slops”, first by other
working men and then much more slowly by the elite. This was the greatest
revolution in men’s dress since the end of doublet and hose, and it
foreshadowed another pleb-to-toff introduction in the twentieth century, the
universal spread of blue jeans, originally worn only by cowboys and French
workmen.
John Styles never underplays the piercing poverty that the worst off endured.
Nor is he claiming that eighteenth-century England was a fully fledged
consumer society. But what he does show conclusively is that while the poor
did not have a huge choice at the best of times, they did have some, and
what they had they grasped with both hands. What is hard to detect in the
condition and buying habits of the English poor over the period is any
qualitative change sharp enough to deserve the name of consumer revolution.
Nor does it seem sensible to try to construct a single model of “plebeian
culture”, as Thompson did. His happy-go-lucky “picaresque” proles who have
no notion of time and never plan their futures or save up for anything seem
just as much a sentimental exaggeration as Stubbs’s haymakers; in Styles’s
pages, we meet thrift and ambition just as often as nonchalance and
fecklessness. What in particular seems off beam is Thompson’s central
contention that in the eighteenth century “capitalist process and
non-economic customary behaviour are in active and conscious conflict, as in
resistance to new patterns of consumption”. On the contrary, Styles argues
that part of what made the customary fairs and festivals so delightful was
the opportunities they offered for retail therapy. Presents bought and given
at fairs were, after all, known as “fairings”. At a fair, maidservants and
apprentices could show off their new clothes, buy adornments for them, and
look for a new job or a new lover:
O dear, what can the matter be?
Johnny’s so long at the fair.
He promised to buy me a fairing shouldpleaseme,
And then for a kiss, oh! He vowed he would tease me,
He promised he’d buy me a bunch of blueribbons
To tie up my bonny brown hair.
Reading Styles’s book, one is continually struck by the resemblances, on a
much smaller scale of course, to today’s patterns and institutions of
consumption, and also by the similarities in the way elite critics then and
now purse their lips and sigh for a more homespun age. Quantitative change
over the period there certainly was. Now that economic historians have
fought themselves to a standstill, it seems clear that the standard of
living of the poorest did rise steadily throughout most of the eighteenth
century, then fell off badly during the French wars and the agricultural depressions
of the first four decades of the nineteenth century – E. P. Thompson’s
selected period – to rise again in the mid-Victorian years. But what strikes
one throughout is the variousness of working-class experience and the
determination of people to be agents rather than patients whenever they had
a chance. Now and then in The Dress of the People, the minutiae of calico
and camblet and kersey, of cherryderry and linsey-woolsey threaten to
overwhelm the reader, but then it is part of John Styles’s purpose to
reclaim the complexity of the world as it really was. And there can be no
doubt that he has succeeded. He has attached his patiently gathered shreds
and patches to the documentary evidence as painstakingly and unforgettably
as the foundlings’ swatches were pinned to their entry papers. The book is
also for its size one of the most abundantly illustrated that even Yale has
ever produced. And by the end of it we become less rather than more
confident that we know exactly what we are seeing. Those haymakers, for
example, might they not simply be rigged out in their Sunday clothes, like
the Peterloo marchers or Voltaire’s day trippers, to look their best for Mr
Stubbs?
John Styles
THE DRESS OF THE PEOPLE
Everyday fashion in eighteenth-century England
432pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $50).
978 0 300 12119 3
Ferdinand Mount’s most recent novels include The Condor’s Head,
published last year. Cold Cream: My early life and other mistakes is
published this month.
