The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England
Product Description
The material lives of ordinary English men and women were transformed in the years following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Tea and sugar, the fruits of British mercantile and colonial expansion, altered their diets. Pendulum clocks and Staffordshire pottery, the products of British manufacturing ingenuity, enriched their homes. But it was in their clothing that ordinary people enjoyed the greatest change in their material lives. This book retrieves the unknown story of ordinary consumers in eighteenth-century England and provides a wealth of information about what they wore.
John Styles reveals that ownership of new fabrics and new fashions was not confined to the rich but extended far down the social scale to the small farmers, day laborers, and petty tradespeople who formed a majority of the population. The author focuses on the clothes ordinary people wore, the ways they acquired them, and the meanings they attached to them, shedding new light on all types of attire and the occasions on which they were worn.
The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England
Written by admin under Fashion Books.
J. F. Wakefield
October 7, 2010 at 12:24 pm
This book is currently one of my favourite books on the history of the era, because it tackles an area that has been very neglected: the clothing of the poor, the working class and servants in the long 18th century.
Jane Austen gives us some ideas of the puritanical attitude some held towards servants clothing in Mansfield Park : Mrs Norris and her sister, Mrs Price, share the opinion that servant girls ought not to show any extravagance in dress. Surviving costumes as worn by the poor etc in the long 18th century are , of course, very rare .They were worn, re worn and adapted till they fell apart into rags. That makes a study of them very difficult. John Styles, the Research Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire, has tackled this problem head on and resolved it by referring to various sources of information.
Unusual written primary sources are used by him in this book: criminal records, which are invaluable as the theft of clothes and clothing material was one of the most frequently prosecuted set of offences in the criminal courts during the long 18th century. Newspaper advertisements for fugitives inevitably contained descriptions of the clothes the fugitive was wearing when last seen. For visual and material sources, Professor Styles refers to the prints and paintings of the era, and for evidence of the type of materials worn by the poor he refers to the magnificent but sad collection of textile scraps preserved by the London Foundling Hospital.The hospital’s admission or billet books which were meticulously kept form 1741 to 1760 contain the worlds largest collection of everyday fabrics. Professor Styles uses them very carefully, describing the type of cottons and linen the preserved scraps represent and describes the type of clothes from which they came.
It all makes for an absorbing and facinating read.
The book is published by Yale and it is sumptuously and carefuly produced, the illustrations are clearly reproduced, an important point other publishers may have fudged.
I thoroughly recommend it, not only for its history of plebeian clothing in our era, but for its examination of that part of society which,is certainly referred to by Jane Austen but is not usually covered in social history books in any great detail.
Rating: 5 / 5