Hidden fashions in 1859

This is one of a series of entries are drawn from chapter 7 of my book, Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, and they all deal with life in that era. For background on the book, see the first entry in the series, Life in 1859, but if you just want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry.

The problem with writing social/domestic history is that all too often, people at the time did not record the details of their everyday activities. We cannot always get the details we need to understand everyday life, even two life-spans in the past. William Perkin’s mauve, discovered in 1856, was new and different enough to draw attention, so we know it came into production in a major way in 1859, giving ladies a new (and safe) fashionable colour, even if it was derived from the noxious remnants of coal gas and coal oil production.

Sometimes an industrious journalist filled in the background while earning his fee, as when Septimus Priesse wrote about making and colouring bonnets. He described mordanting straw bonnets with an ounce of iron sulfate in two gallons of water, boiling them for an hour, then hanging them out to dry, adding that chip or leghorn straw needed less mordanting. Next, the bonnets were boiled in 2 gallons of clean water for an hour with half a pound of broken nutgalls and half a pound of logwood, two common dye sources of the time.

Then, he said, leave two ounces of best glue in two quarts of water overnight before boiling to dissolve it and straining the glue, now referred to as size. The next step was to soak the bonnets in the size, one at a time, before removing them, sponging off the excess size and drying before carefully shaping the hat, or placing it on a block to dry. The result will be a nice black bonnet. A few details might be deemed too intimate, but more often, they seemed too ordinary, so we sometimes have to rely on inference, or unpublished sources.

Diaries and letters are useful. Because Eliza Edwards’ letters described life in Hawaii to her family in New York, she included ordinary matters like donning rubber boots to walk through knee-deep rushing water. In her diary, Caroline Cowles Richards, a young girl in upstate New York, revealed how a friend pierced her ears for her so she could wear ear-rings — as well as revealing the fashion influences she experienced:

Mary Wheeler came over and pierced my ears to-day, so I can wear my new earrings that Uncle Edward sent me. She pinched my ear until it was numb and then pulled a needle through, threaded with silk. Anna would not stay in the room. She wants her’s done but does not dare. . . . It is nice, though, to dress in style and look like other people. I have a Garibaldi waist and a Zouave jacket and a balmoral skirt.

Not everybody agreed with fashion. Empress Eugénie of France had pioneered the crinoline, but she declared in 1859 that she was giving it up. Unmoved by the edict of a mere empress, the style held on. It was claimed in the press that in Istanbul, the Ottoman sultan had, by decree, imposed a limit upon the luxury of the Turkish women of high position, and ordered certain changes in their costume.

This does not ring true: perhaps it was put about by somebody annoyed by the challenge of trying to pass crinolined ladies on a narrow street, or to fit them into a pew, a doorway, an omnibus, or a carriage.

On the other hand, the crinoline was good for business. It had sparked 100 patents in France in four years: 4 in 1855, 16 in 1856, 30 in 1857, 37 in 1858, and 13 by July 1859. Covered steel crinoline (wire) sold at 50 cents a pound, and about three quarters of a pound was needed for one hooped skirt. The estimated usage in 1859 was 5 million pounds. At the end of the November, Scientific American reported that in Derby, 950,000 hoop skirts had been made since April 1, using 9,100,000 yards of tape and 445 tons of steel.

A Mr Wappenstein in Manchester received a patent in 1859 for making artificial whalebone from animal horn. This would be cut in long helical strips which were then flattened and heated before being coloured. They were suitable for use in both umbrellas and crinolines.

According to cricket lore, round-arm bowling was developed by a cricket player’s sister, who found that her crinoline got in the way of conventional underarm bowling. She is usually named as Christine or Christina Willes, but she is alleged to have come up with her innovation in the early 1800s, half a century before the crinoline. Her dress may not have been embroidered, but it appears that the story was.

An advertisement in the Victorian Cricketer’s Guide of 1859-60 offers batting gloves, wicket-keeping gloves, and “leg guards” but no protective boxes for the male players. There was no real call for them at the time, as the umpire would call ‘no ball’ if any bowler raised his arm above his shoulder.