If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Page B
Authors: Lucy Worsley
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stacks,protruding themselves upon the Spectator … you would have shrunk almost as with horror’ at the sight of them. Yet a low-slung bosom was essential to the Edwardian ‘pouter-pigeon’ look. The bottom was also something that came and went: indeed, the late-nineteenth-century craze for the bustle sent it off into the realms of outsize fantasy.
The secrets of the perfect figure revealed, c .1810
Shaping the body is not just a feminine phenomenon. In the mid-eighteenth century, Richard Campbell mockinglydescribed Londoners’ dependence on what he called their ‘Shape Merchants’. Men of fashion had no ‘Existence than what the Taylor, Milliner, and Perriwig-Maker bestow upon them’. Stripped of their clothes, they appeared to be ‘quite a different Species’, rather like ‘Punch, deprived of his moving Wires, and hung up upon a Peg’. George IV – brandy-swilling, bewigged, heavily made-up and slightly mad – was likewise a constant wearer of corsets. His baby corset, designed to encourage a straight figure, remains in the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace. His adult corset, which doesn’t survive, was designed to hold in his fat and to help him to walk. (The idea that medieval knights wore corsets, sadly, is based on the mistranslation of a Latin word. They didn’t.) In the generation after George IV’s, chest padding created the silhouette favoured for a gentleman seen in profile. This discreet addition to the manly chest was even adopted by Prince Albert, and can be seen inside a military outfit of his at the Museum of London.
But ladies’ shapes gave away so much more about their status. A country girl, arriving fresh off the stagecoach in Georgian London, quickly found new friends suspiciously keen to ‘help’ her lose her bumpkin ways:
An awkward Thing, when first She came to Town;
Her Shape unfashion’d, and her Face unknown:
She was my Friend, I taught her first to spread
Upon her Sallow Cheeks th’Enliv’ning Red.
Of course, the naive country girl ended up working as a prostitute, like her friend who narrates the poem. A Georgian prostitute in prints and cartoons – and presumably in real life too – indicates her availability by lifting up one side of her skirt and showing her ankle.
The tight-laced stays necessary for eighteenth-century female costume were difficult to put on alone; in fact, one wonders how working women without maids managed. But there were short cuts. For a start, you might simply sleep in your stays ratherthan going to the trouble of taking them off. Also, it is actually possible to lace yourself up by running one string down from the top, and the other up from the bottom. You can tighten yourself at the mid-point by reaching over your right shoulder and under your left, grabbing the two strings and pulling them in a diagonal movement.
It was Victorian ladies who suffered the tightest lacing. A book of Advice to a Wife (1853) suggests that one should not lace to fewer than twenty-seven inches; to go down to the widely desirable twenty-one was to sacrifice ‘comfort, health and happiness’. It was hard to persuade women to take off their stays, even under the most extreme conditions. The same writer makes the point that ‘ the stays should not be worn ’ during labour. (Women in childbirth nevertheless expected to wear a chemise, petticoat and nightgown, with a ‘broad bandage’ round the abdomen.)
Stays for women can be excruciatingly painful, and Victorian ladies’ manuals make recommendations for treating flesh rubbed raw and other superficial wounds. Archaeologists at the Museum of London have studied the malformation of the skeleton caused by Victorian tight lacing. They have also noticed that shoes had a crippling effect on the bones of the feet before shoes specifically designed for the left and right feet were introduced in the early nineteenth century, when shaped cobblers’ lasts came into use.
The invention of the
The secrets of the perfect figure revealed, c .1810
Shaping the body is not just a feminine phenomenon. In the mid-eighteenth century, Richard Campbell mockinglydescribed Londoners’ dependence on what he called their ‘Shape Merchants’. Men of fashion had no ‘Existence than what the Taylor, Milliner, and Perriwig-Maker bestow upon them’. Stripped of their clothes, they appeared to be ‘quite a different Species’, rather like ‘Punch, deprived of his moving Wires, and hung up upon a Peg’. George IV – brandy-swilling, bewigged, heavily made-up and slightly mad – was likewise a constant wearer of corsets. His baby corset, designed to encourage a straight figure, remains in the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace. His adult corset, which doesn’t survive, was designed to hold in his fat and to help him to walk. (The idea that medieval knights wore corsets, sadly, is based on the mistranslation of a Latin word. They didn’t.) In the generation after George IV’s, chest padding created the silhouette favoured for a gentleman seen in profile. This discreet addition to the manly chest was even adopted by Prince Albert, and can be seen inside a military outfit of his at the Museum of London.
But ladies’ shapes gave away so much more about their status. A country girl, arriving fresh off the stagecoach in Georgian London, quickly found new friends suspiciously keen to ‘help’ her lose her bumpkin ways:
An awkward Thing, when first She came to Town;
Her Shape unfashion’d, and her Face unknown:
She was my Friend, I taught her first to spread
Upon her Sallow Cheeks th’Enliv’ning Red.
Of course, the naive country girl ended up working as a prostitute, like her friend who narrates the poem. A Georgian prostitute in prints and cartoons – and presumably in real life too – indicates her availability by lifting up one side of her skirt and showing her ankle.
The tight-laced stays necessary for eighteenth-century female costume were difficult to put on alone; in fact, one wonders how working women without maids managed. But there were short cuts. For a start, you might simply sleep in your stays ratherthan going to the trouble of taking them off. Also, it is actually possible to lace yourself up by running one string down from the top, and the other up from the bottom. You can tighten yourself at the mid-point by reaching over your right shoulder and under your left, grabbing the two strings and pulling them in a diagonal movement.
It was Victorian ladies who suffered the tightest lacing. A book of Advice to a Wife (1853) suggests that one should not lace to fewer than twenty-seven inches; to go down to the widely desirable twenty-one was to sacrifice ‘comfort, health and happiness’. It was hard to persuade women to take off their stays, even under the most extreme conditions. The same writer makes the point that ‘ the stays should not be worn ’ during labour. (Women in childbirth nevertheless expected to wear a chemise, petticoat and nightgown, with a ‘broad bandage’ round the abdomen.)
Stays for women can be excruciatingly painful, and Victorian ladies’ manuals make recommendations for treating flesh rubbed raw and other superficial wounds. Archaeologists at the Museum of London have studied the malformation of the skeleton caused by Victorian tight lacing. They have also noticed that shoes had a crippling effect on the bones of the feet before shoes specifically designed for the left and right feet were introduced in the early nineteenth century, when shaped cobblers’ lasts came into use.
The invention of the
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