Political and sartorial styles: Britain and its colonies in the long nineteenth century 9781526153081

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Political and sartorial styles

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To buy or to find out more about the books ­currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/ studies-in-design-and-material-culture/

general editors Sally-Anne Huxtable, National Trust Elizabeth Currie, Royal College of Art/V&A Livia Lazzaro Rezende, University of New South Wales Wessie Ling, London Metropolitan University founding editor Paul Greenhalgh

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Political and sartorial styles Britain and its colonies in the long nineteenth century Kevin A. Morrison

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Kevin A. Morrison 2023

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The right of Kevin A. Morrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 5307 4  hardback First published 2023 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, ­accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Caricature of Henry G. C. Gordon-Lennox from Vanity Fair, 30 July 1870. Wikipedia / Public Domain.

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Contents



List of plates List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements



Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo – Kevin A. Morrison

page vii ix xii xv 1

Part I: Between metaphor and materiality   1 Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical? Political interpretations of one garment in nineteenth-century England – Alison Toplis

29

  2 A delicate balance of power: Victorian tailors and their gentlemen clients – Christopher Kent

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  3 Second-hand clothes, second-hand politics: sartorial exchange, social reform, and the work of the novel in Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon – Peter Katz

78

Part II: Reading appearances   4 ‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’: manliness, power, and politics via the top hat – Ariel Beaujot

99

  5 Dressing for disinterestedness: Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and John Morley – Kevin A. Morrison

126

  6 Sartorial subversion and the House of Commons: political identities, meanings, and the responses to MPs’ dress, c. 1850–1914 – Marcus Morris

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vi Contents   7 Dressing for the vote in Ford Madox Brown’s Work – Janice Carlisle

171

Part III: Global connections and entanglements   8 Spectacles of grandeur and fabrics for the brave: the West India Regiments’ dress until 1900 – Steeve O. Buckridge

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  9 ‘The philosophy of clothes’: politics and dress in Melbourne Punch, 1860s–1870s – Shu-chuan Yan

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10 Gertrude Bell, femme impériale – Elizabeth Bishop

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Index

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Plates

  1 William Heath, ‘Farmer Giles’s Establishment – Christmas Day – 1800’, published by T. McLean, 1830. Coloured etching. © Science Museum Group.   2 A man’s top hat is blown off over a cliff on a windy day by the sea, 1883. Diary in the Andrew Besley Collection. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.   3 Herbert Spencer by Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (‘F.C.G.’), published in Vanity Fair, 26 April 1879. Watercolour. © National Portrait Gallery, London.   4 John Stuart Mill by Sir Leslie Ward, published in Vanity Fair, 29 March 1873. Chromolithograph.   5 John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, by Walter William Ouless, exhibited 1891. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London.   6 Bobus’s election campaign, detail of Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65. Oil on canvas. Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.   7 Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65. Oil on canvas. Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.   8 The beer man’s shirt, detail of Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65. Oil on canvas. Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.   9 A Private of the 8th West India Regiment, 1803. Artist unknown. Oil on canvas. Public Domain / Courtesy of National Army Museum, UK, Study Collection. 10 Toussaint Louverture on horseback, Paris, 1803. Artist unknown. Hand-coloured etching. Public Domain / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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viii Plates 11 ‘A Private of the 5th West India Regiment’, 1812. Aquatint by J. C. Stadler after Charles Hamilton Smith, 1812. Public Domain / National Army Museum, UK, Study Collection. 12 Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, 1770s. Oil on canvas. Public Domain / Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 13 West India Regiment, 1874, by Colonel A. B. Ellis in The History of the First West India Regiment (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885). Public Domain / via Wikimedia Commons. 14 R. Sinkin, The West India Regiments. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. 15 Vincent van Gogh, The Zouave, 1888. Oil on canvas. Public Domain / Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Van Gogh Foundation).

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Figures

0.1 ‘Colored Waiting Room’ sign at the bus station in Durham, North Carolina, USA, 1940. Photo by Jack Delano. IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo. page 3 0.2 Print (lithography) by George Edward Madeley showing Thomas D. Rice wearing the costume of his character ‘Jim Crow’, full-length portrait, facing left, with right arm raised and a little skip in his dance step. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, USA.  4 0.3 Civil rights demonstration in a Parade for Victory by the Detroit branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 1944. Six African American men are shown in top hats and tails. Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo.  5 0.4 ‘Jim Crow’ as sung by Thomas D. Rice (1832–60), also known as ‘Daddy Rice’. Adelphi Theatre advertisement. Contraband Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.  7 0.5 John Doyle (‘H.B.’), ‘Fancy Ball – Jim Crow Dance & Chorus’, printed by Alfred Ducôte, published by Thomas McLean, 17 April 1837. Lithograph. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 8 0.6 John Tenniel, ‘The Political Tailors’, 1867. The Print Collector / Alamy Stock Photo. 14 1.1 John Tenniel, ‘The Pig and the Peasant’, Punch, 19 September 1863. Author’s collection. 31 1.2 John Leech, ‘The Agricultural Question Settled’, Punch, 18 January 1845. Author’s collection. 41 1.3 ‘Agricultural Labourers’ Union at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon-Street: Delegates Signing Petition’, Illustrated London News, 3 June 1876, p. 16. Author’s collection. 44

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x Figures 1.4 Detail of ‘The Result of the Roll’, Illustrated London News, 5 December 1885, p. 20. Author’s collection. 2.1 ‘Offensive Modesty’, Punch Magazine, 1 December 1883. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library. 2.2 Anthony Trollope by Sir Leslie Ward, 5 April 1873. Chromolithograph. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 4.1 Victorian gentleman in top hat. Unattributed engraving published by Baily Brothers. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library. 4.2 John Tenniel, ‘Question Time’, Punch, 10 May 1884. William Gladstone, Liberal Prime Minister, speaks in the House of Commons hatless while members sitting behind him wear top hats. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library. 4.3 Keir Hardie, Labour Party leader, wearing a cloth cap, 18 August 1899. Unattributed photograph. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library. 5.1 Herbert Spencer by John Watkins. Albumen carte de visite. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 5.2 John Stuart Mill by John and Charles Watkins or by John Watkins, 1865. Albumen print, partially over-painted in ink wash. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 5.3 John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, by Alexander Bassano, November 1886. Albumen carte de visite. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 7.1 After John Tenniel, ‘The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition’, Punch, 20 May 1865, p. 203. Wood engraving. Yale University, Sterling Library. 8.1 Louis Delarochette, ‘A General Chart of the West India Islands: With the Adjacent Coasts of the Spanish Continent’, 1896. British Library. Public domain. 8.2 Scene at Up Park Camp, from Joseph Bartholomew Kidd (1808–89), Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Town Harbors and Scenery (London and Kingston, 1840), plate 48. Lithograph. Public Domain / Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 9.1 Frederick Grosse, ‘The Philosophy of Clothes’, Melbourne Punch, 8 November 1855, p. 121. Author’s collection. 9.2 Tom Carrington, ‘Trying On the Old Free-Trade Clothes’, Melbourne Punch, 20 May 1875, pp. 195–96. Author’s collection. 9.3 “Gape, Sinner, and Swallow!”, Melbourne Punch, 13 June 1861, p. 109. Author’s collection. 9.4 Tom Carrington, ‘The Political “Moor”’, Melbourne Punch, 20 February 1868, pp. 61–62. Author’s collection.

46 57 70

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227 229 232

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Figures 9.5 ‘The Warming Pans’, Melbourne Punch, 27 September 1860, p. 77. Author’s collection. 9.6 ‘The Same Old Fight’, Melbourne Punch, 8 January 1874, pp. 13–14. Author’s collection. 9.7 Tom Carrington, ‘Oh! Gemini’, Melbourne Punch, 5 August 1875, pp. 305–06. Author’s collection. 10.1 Gertrude Bell on horseback, Baghdad, Iraq, c. 1910–14. Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo.

234 238 240 247

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Contributors

Ariel Beaujot is a professor of public history at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. A historian of fashion, Beaujot focuses on the ways in which fashionable objects reveal the beliefs, values, and prejudices of British Victorians. Her book Victorian Fashion Accessories (Berg, 2012) argues that gloves, fans, parasols, and vanity sets were much more than finishing touches of a woman’s wardrobe: they were accessories that helped a woman fashion her marital, gender, class, and racial identity. Elizabeth Bishop joined Texas State University’s History Department during 2008 with a PhD from the University of Chicago. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in her areas of her scholarly expertise: the history of the Middle East, postcolonial Arab history, and the history of a global Cold War. Her contributions regarding Iraq’s Hashemite history include “‘Indemnity against the Government”: Prisons and Prisoners in Hashemite Iraq during the Cold War’ (2017), ‘Wearing Balmain, Dior, and Schiaparelli: Foreign Escorts in Hashemite Iraq’ (2016), and an article on Alı¯ al-Wardı¯ (2014). Her contributions to digital history are via @HashemiteB. Steeve O. Buckridge is Professor of African and Caribbean History at Grand Valley State University. His pioneering book The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 was published by the University of the West Indies Press in 2004. In 2014 he was awarded a Visiting Scholar in Residence Fellowship at the Center for British Art at  Yale University, where he used photography, paintings, and other forms of visual representations to analyse dress in Victorian Jamaica. His  latest book, African Lace-Bark in the Caribbean: The Construction of Race, Class and Gender, was released by Bloomsbury Press in 2016.

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Contributors With Kevin A. Morrison, he co-edits the book series Studies in the Global Nineteenth Century. Janice Carlisle is Professor Emerita of English at Yale University. She is the author of The Sense of an Audience: Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot at Mid-Century (University of Georgia Press, 1981); John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (University of Georgia Press, 1991); Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2004); and, most recently, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2012), a book on art and politics from the 1830s to the 1860s which treats the wood engravings of illustrated journalism in their relation to both Victorian painting and extensions of the franchise. Peter Katz is Assistant Professor of Humanities at California Northstate University, where he teaches and researches ethics and the history and philosophy of science. His book Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction explores the intersection between Victorian science, the popular reader, and the ethics of empathy. Peter’s other work examines the history of Victorian popular readers and their relationship to the academy, the ethics of empathy, and environmental ethics. Outside Victorian studies, Peter practises martial arts and is working on an academic project on martial arts and affect. Christopher Kent is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is currently completing a study of nineteenth-century gentlemen’s (and ladies’) clubs, to be titled West-End Clubland: Sociability, Status, and Gender in London, 1815–1914, and has commenced research on Gentlemen and their Tailors: Clothing the Male Body, 1840–1914. His recent essays on Victorian men’s fashion have appeared in the Victorian Review, The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press (Palgrave, 2009), and Sexing the Look in Popular Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Marcus Morris is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research is centred on the labour and socialist movements in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he has published on a wide variety of themes in relation to the movement. He also examines and has published on broader issues in the period, in particular class, gender, and national identity, with a particular emphasis on their cultural histories. Kevin A. Morrison is Provincial Chair Professor, University Distinguished Professor, and Professor of British Literature in the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University. He is the author of Victorian Liberalism

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xiv Contributors and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), which won a Modern Language Association award, as well as A Micro-History of Victorian Liberal Parenting: John Morley’s ‘Discreet Indifference’ (Palgrave, 2018) and Study-Abroad Pedagogy, Dark Tourism, and Historical Reenactment: In the Footsteps of Jack the Ripper and his Victims (Palgrave, 2019). He is editor of the journal Global NineteenthCentury Studies and, with Steeve O. Buckridge, edits the book series Studies in the Global Nineteenth Century. Alison Toplis is currently an honorary research fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. After completing her MA in the history of dress at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, she worked for several years as a dress and textiles specialist at Christie’s auctioneers before completing her doctorate in the area of nineteenth-century working-class dress. She has since lectured and published widely, including her books The Clothing Trade in Provincial England 1800–1850 (2011), and The Hidden History of the Smock Frock, published by Bloomsbury in May 2021. Shu-chuan Yan received her PhD in English from the University of Manchester. She currently teaches in the Department of Western Languages and Literature at National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Her work has appeared in Fashion Theory, Women’s Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Popular Culture, Victorian Periodicals Review, Journal of Modern Craft, and Textual Practice.

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Acknowledgements

This edited collection unfolded over a five-year period and involved work undertaken at multiple institutions. I am grateful to the contributors for their patience and diligence and to the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, which welcomed me as a visiting professor in spring 2020, and the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore, where I served as a visiting fellow in autumn 2018, for providing material support and intellectual camaraderie. Under the leadership of Dean Chaojun Yang and Vice-Deans Taotao Zhao and Fu Jiangtao, the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University, where I have been based since 2018, has supported this project in every conceivable way. Jianyuan Hong has helped this linguistically challenged expat navigate life in China. I thank him for his ongoing assistance and friendship. At Manchester University Press, Emma Brennan patiently shepherded the proposal through a gruelling but exhilarating review process. Alun Richards saw the completed manuscript through review and was a source of encouragement and support as I wrapped up the project. I thank the four anonymous reviewers for their many suggestions. Several of the reports were models of engagement and generosity. A version of Ariel Beaujot’s chapter, ‘“If you want to get ahead, get a hat”: manliness, power, and politics via the top hat’, appeared in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 25 (2) (2014), pp. 57–88. I appreciate the opportunity to reprint it in slightly altered form. Elizabeth Bishop wishes to thank Barbara Harlow and Anthony Hopkins for their helpful comments on a previous version of her essay, which she shared at the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality held at the Department

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xvi Acknowledgements of History, University of Texas, in May 2005. Parts of Peter Katz’s essays are drawn from his Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). I wish to thank Robyne Calvert, Beatrice Behlen, Timothy Long, and Jayne Shrimpton for discussing the finer points of men’s fashion, which informed the writing of my chapter, ‘Dressing for disinterestedness: Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and John Morley’.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo Kevin A. Morrison

What relevance does a volume that focuses on political and sartorial styles in Britain and its colonies during the long nineteenth century have for the contemporary era? How might a personification, emerging in the nineteenth century as a dressed caricature and widely used today as a figure of speech, link diverse political actors across borders and nationalities? Can the parallels or precedents offered by nineteenth-century antecedents enable one to become a better reader of political messaging in the twenty-first century? In his initial floor speech in the United States Senate Chamber on 17  March 2021, Raphael Warnock  – who defeated his Republican Party opponent in a special run-off election in the state of Georgia to become only the second African American to be elected from the South since the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War (1865–77) – drew a parallel between the efforts undertaken by Southern Democrats in the era before the civil rights movement and the contemporary exertions of the Republican Party, greatly accelerated by Donald J. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.1 Over the course of the twentieth century, numerous changes led to a seismic realignment of African American political support. From the 1890s to the 1970s, more than six million African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North and West (Grossman, 1989; Wilkerson, 2010). Although they faced housing and employment discrimination, everyday racism, and de facto segregation in these new environments, African Americans were able to vote. Until the Great Depression, they remained steadfastly loyal to the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, which championed emancipation. By contrast, the Democratic Party in the mid-nineteenth century styled itself as a bastion for White men who ran on a pro-slavery platform (Lynn, 2019, pp. 96–118) and later fiercely upheld segregation. But African Americans began to switch their allegiance to the

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo Democratic Party during the first presidential term (1932–36) of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal economic policies attracted support across the political spectrum.2 Roosevelt, whose electoral coalition included White Southerners and African American Northerners, did little to champion racial equality overtly. Yet many of his decisions solidified support for a party that had opposed the enfranchisement of African Americans in the South.3 Southern Democrats increasingly found themselves disillusioned by their party, which extended these efforts under Harry Truman, whose tenure as president (1945–53) followed Roosevelt’s. Sensing an opportunity, the Republican Party began to develop a Southern strategy – explicitly foregrounded by Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964 – to win over these voters. This strategy, which included the use of racially coded language (‘dog whistles’) to tap into White angst over legal changes, such as the desegregation of schools following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), began over time to harden into ideology (Haney-López, 2015; Maxwell and Shields, 2019). After losing the White House in 2020, Republicans in nearly all states introduced hundreds of bills containing restrictive voting provisions. These bills included stipulations that limit early in-person and mail-in voting; narrow the permissible criteria for absentee voting; reduce the hours of poll stations on election day; and implement strict onsite ­voter-identification requirements (Gardner et al., 2021).4 ‘We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era’, Warnock argued in defence of the For the People Act of 2021 (H.R. 1), which, among other measures, would have enabled Congress to expand voting rights and would have prohibited partisan gerrymandering (the process of drawing the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favour a single party or type of voter). Of the measures introduced by Republicans, he concluded: ‘This is Jim Crow in new clothes’ (C-Span, 2021). Condemning efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict voting rights in the states, Warnock employed a sartorial metaphor that invokes a complicated transatlantic figure in the history of racial injustice. Legislation that enforced or permitted racial segregation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century became colloquially known as Jim Crow laws. In 1865 a majority of states in the Union ratified the thirteenth constitutional amendment, which abolished slavery. Three years later, the states ratified the fourteenth amendment, which granted citizenship and civil rights to everyone born or naturalised in the United States – thus to African Americans everywhere, including those formerly enslaved. In 1870 the fifteenth amendment, which extended the franchise to all adult males, regardless of race, was ratified. In the post-Reconstruction era, Southern states were required, as a condition of their reintegration into the Union, to modify their constitutions to be consistent with these values. Because the enfranchisement of African Americans had the potential to fundamentally remake the

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo

political map in the South, Democratic leaders sought to ‘deprive the voter of the right to vote’ by restoring the electorate ‘to its ­pre-Reconstruction form and composition’ (Perman, 2003, pp. 14, 17). Thus Democratic elites in the South after Reconstruction engaged in a two-pronged strategy of ‘organizing political support’ while simultaneously ‘demobilizing opponents’ (Redding, 2010, p. 2). From the mid-1870s until the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, a system of racial apartheid operated throughout the former Confederate states. Schools, shops, hotels, restaurants, and a variety of other facilities were either segregated by race (‘whites only’, ‘exclusively for coloreds’) or mandated to provide separate entrances that militated against racial mixing (Figure 0.1). Through various forms of violence and intimidation – from lynchings to poll taxes to strict voter registration laws to specious literacy examinations – White Southerners sought to disenfranchise African American males. Many of the voters who delivered Warnock’s electoral victory in Georgia had lived through this period of disenfranchisement. It was only in 1965 that a federal Voting Rights Act prohibited the discriminatory and intimidating practices that kept African Americans from exercising their right to vote. In fact, the run-off election is itself one of the last vestiges of the segregationist era. Introduced by South Carolina Democrats in 1896 and subsequently adopted across the Southern states, run-offs require a candidate to win a majority rather than a plurality of the vote in either a primary or a general election. Much like gerrymandering, the run-off has

0.1  Colored Waiting Room’ sign at the bus station in Durham, North Carolina, USA, 1940.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo been a technique to dilute the political power of minorities (Kousser, 1999, pp. 177–78; Blauner, 1989, p. 165).5 The appellation ‘Jim Crow’ stems from a song-and-dance routine that that was highly popular in the 1830s and 1840s. Written by the White playwright Thomas Dartmouth Rice and performed by him in blackface, Jim Crow was a caricature of the enslaved Black male (Figure 0.2). Rice appeared on

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0.2  Print (lithography) by George Edward Madeley showing Thomas D. Rice wearing the costume of his character ‘Jim Crow’, full-length portrait, facing left, with right arm raised and a little skip in his dance step.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo

stage in frayed and patched breeches, ‘an old coat forlornly dilapidated, with a pair of shoes composed equally of patches and places for patches on his feet, and wearing a coarse straw hat in a melancholy condition of rent and collapse over a dense black wig of matted moss’. To members of the audience, Rice was an ‘extraordinary apparition’ whose appearance – as much the clothes on his body as the burnt-cork paint on his face  – ­engendered an ‘instant’ and ‘electric’ effect (Nevin, 1867, p. 609). Almost overnight, Jim Crow became a lucrative theatrical persona for Rice. He was not the first White actor to perform in blackface or to play to stereotype (Marshall, 2012, pp.  111–12). Rice’s theatrical success, however, ushered in the era of minstrelsy, when White audiences could satiate their curiosity about Black lives without actually encountering someone of another race (Lott, 1993, pp. 111–35). Thus while the term ‘Jim Crow’ was generally used in the 1830s to 1870s as shorthand referring to African Americans, by the post-Reconstruction era Jim Crow was also a personification of Southern segregation. Hence, on multiple occasions in the twentieth century, American civil rights activists and supporters repeatedly declared Jim Crow’s demise, including staging funeral processions for him (Figure 0.3).

0.3  Civil rights demonstration in a Parade for Victory by the Detroit branch of the NAACP, 1944. Six African American men are shown in top hats and tails.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo The genesis of Rice’s act, a parody and mimicry of Blackness, is lost to history. Many of his contemporaries as well as subsequent historians of minstrelsy have attempted to identify the impulse for the Jim Crow character.6 According to one frequently repeated anecdote, Rice modelled the movements and lyrics of his song and dance on the movements and tunes of a physically disabled African American who worked in a stable yard behind a Midwest theatre at which Rice was performing (Ludlow, 1966, pp. 392–93). In a different account, Rice came across a street performer in Cincinnati whose ‘voice ringing clear  … in an unmistakable dialect’ gave him the idea for ‘a school of music destined to excel in popularity all others’ (Nevin, 1867, pp. 608–09). Some scholars have pushed beyond such narratives to argue that, as W. T. Lhamon Jr, contends, ‘[n]o single man authored Jim Crow; no single stable hand made up or taught the song’ (1998, p. 181). Born into a racially mixed community in New York City, Rice would have been exposed to Afro-diasporic music, folklore, and dance from an early age. In touring the South as a young actor, he may have also learned about a folk trickster named Jim Crow, popular among the enslaved, who frequently outwitted the ‘masters’.7 Whatever the origins of Rice’s caricature, audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were mesmerised.8 By 1836 his Jim Crow routine was so well established and so highly successful that in June he set sail for Liverpool to conduct a year-long tour of the United Kingdom, along with a brief stint in Paris (Cockrell, 1997, p. 65). Combining onstage capering and sprightly movements with a lyrical monologue in vernacular speech, Rice’s signature song, ‘Jump Jim Crow’, would bring the house down. He performed to English Morris dancing music, with its loud rhythmical hornpipe and snake drum, and punctuated the end of each refrain – ‘Weel about and turn about and do jis so, / Eb’ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow’ – with a distinctive move that blended ‘the hops of the Irish jig with a jump and shuffle’ (Hill, 2010, p. 8).9 ‘The jump came from the custom of the broom jump’, Constance Valis Hill explains, ‘which took place when black slave couples were about to get married on the plantation (they would jump over a broom, backwards; if they kicked the broom, they could not marry)’. She continues, ‘The shuffle was the plantation slave’s creative substitute for dancing without crossing the legs, which was forbidden’ (2010, p. 8). Rice would perform in London on several occasions over the following decade. At the peak of Rice’s career, virtually everyone seemed to be familiar with the movements and lyrics of ‘Jump Jim Crow’. ‘From the nobility and gentry, down to the lowest chimney-sweep in Great Britain’, Rice’s contemporary James Kennard, Jr, proclaimed, ‘and from the member of Congress down to the youngest apprentice or school-boy in America, it was all[:] “Turn about and wheel about, and do just so, / And every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow”’ (Kennard, 1848, p. 108). After Rice’s rousing performances at the Adelphi Theatre in London, the phrase



Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo

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‘Jump Jim Crow’ entered British political parlance and popular caricature (Figure  0.4). In 1837 the cartoonist and caricaturist H.B. (John Doyle) depicted some of the leading British politicians of the day dressed in worn waistcoats, breeches, low-heeled shoes, and an array of hats and

0.4  ‘Jim Crow’ as sung by Thomas D. Rice (1832–60), also known as ‘Daddy Rice’. Adelphi Theatre advertisement.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo caps, dancing Jim Crow (Figure  0.5). In the centre of ‘Fancy Ball: Jim Crow Dance & Chorus’, Doyle portrays Prime Minister William Lamb, the second Viscount Melbourne, shrinking from the Irish Catholic MP Daniel O’Connell. Other politicians on either side and behind the pair include former prime ministers (Arthur Wellesley, Charles Grey) and cabinet officials (John Russell, James Graham, Thomas Spring Rice). In his Illustrative Key to the Political Sketches of H.B., Doyle’s publisher Thomas McLean offers a gloss of the ‘Fancy Ball’ sketch. Lord Melbourne, appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland by the Tory prime minister George Canning in 1827, ‘made several speeches against reform in Parliament’, McLean notes, before becoming ‘a member of Lord Grey’s cabinet, by which reform was carried’. In the role of prime minister, Lord Melbourne ‘went to much greater lengths towards democracy than … Lord Grey … would venture to go; and, finally, if he did not actually make, yet consented  to enjoy the advantage of, an alliance with Mr. O’Connell, the sworn enemy of the Protestant Church in Ireland, and the advocate of a repeal of the union’ (McLean, 1840, pp. 328–29). Doyle captures Lord Melbourne in a moment of recognising that his U-turns on policies and positions have brought him close to an embrace of O’Connell. Whatever one may think of the artist’s characterisation of these politicians, the sketch’s point is to underscore ideological inconsistency when such reversals benefit the self.

0.5  John Doyle (‘H.B.’), ‘Fancy Ball – Jim Crow Dance & Chorus’, printed by Alfred Ducôte, published by Thomas McLean, 17 April 1837. Lithograph.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo

When Raphael Warnock used the occasion of his inaugural speech in the United States Senate to describe Republican efforts to restrict voting rights as ‘Jim Crow in new clothes’, he intended to activate a specific chain of associations in his listeners’ minds. Just as Southern Democrats had once employed a variety of means to deliberately suppress the African American vote, Republican state lawmakers had been engaged for more than a decade in an effort, especially following Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, to pass legislation that, while seemingly impartial in regard to race (such as voter identification laws), has been or was intended to be used to target minority populations (Bentele and O’Brien, 2013). But insofar as Republicans were calling for the elimination or roll-back of some of the very initiatives to expand voting that they once supported, contemporaries representing their party might be superimposed on Doyle’s political cartoon. His depiction of the prime minister, cabinet officials, and others on a stage – an ‘infinite variety of style … observable in the dancers’, McLean notes, ‘each variety strikingly appropriate to the character of the performer’ – highlights the performative nature of politics. This is particularly salient in the age of social media, when elected officials use misleading or false evidence and apocryphal stories as the basis for theatrical displays of outrage over voting irregularities. Directed towards a partisan audience, such displays, widely dispersed and endlessly looped, can be used as a justification for predetermined actions. The sartorial metaphor often functions as a node at which different strands of socio-political discourse converge. I begin with Warnock’s invocation of Jim Crow because it illuminates the material traces as well as the global-historical entanglements of contemporary sartorial metaphors that might otherwise appear to be merely domestic or nation-specific concerns. Indeed, arguing a need for electoral integrity, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government introduced the Elections Bill 2021 to the Parliament of the United Kingdom in July of the same year. Among other measures, the bill made it mandatory for an individual to show photo identification before being issued with a ballot at a local polling station. Opponents argued that the Act would disproportionately impact Black and minority-ethnic voters. Although Winston Churchill’s cabinet pushed a bill through Parliament that allowed the United States government to segregate its troops on British soil during World War II (Smith, 1987), discriminatory practices in the United Kingdom have been less overt than American state and local statutes legalising discrimination, if often just as insidious. Yet, as the Labour politician Clive Lewis pointed out during Parliament’s debate on the Elections Bill, the Johnson government ‘produced a piece of legislation straight out of the far-right playbook from the United States to look for a problem that does not exist’. Lewis continued: ‘Their voter suppression laws have been and are being used to reinstate Jim Crow-era mass disenfranchisement via the back door’ (Parliamentary Debates, 2021).

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle may not have attended Rice’s Jim Crow performances at the Adelphi Theatre, but he was nevertheless familiar with and helped to perpetuate the minstrel figure. His pumpkin-eating Quashee, who occupies a central place in his ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849), is an invidious stereotype of formerly enslaved West Indians. Quashee sings, dances, and is generally merry in his lazy refusal to work. Although Carlyle saw the pumpkins that West Indians devour as well as ‘the finery they wear’ as signs of gluttony and excess, they were to John Stuart Mill, who wrote a rebuttal to Carlyle’s essay, indications of earned prosperity through labour (1850, p. 27). For Carlyle and Mill, therefore, the consuming body is the site of conflicting interpretations. This volume focuses on the long nineteenth century, which witnessed a particularly serious effort to theorise the links between political and sartorial styles and also established concepts with which scholars today continue to work. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle was perhaps the first intellectual to offer sustained consideration of the social dimensions of clothing. Serialised in Fraser’s Magazine between November 1833 and August 1834, and subsequently published in several distinct book versions in the United States and Britain between 1834 and 1838, Sartor Resartus proved highly influential in shaping an understanding of the semiotic function of clothes. In Carlyle’s philosophical-cum-satirical novel, readers are introduced to the work of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor of Things-inGeneral at the University of Weissnichtwo, by an unnamed English editor of Fraser’s  Magazine. Tasked with writing a review of Teufelsdröckh’s Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence), the editor attempts to expound on its peculiar ‘Clothes-Philosophy’. On  the one hand, every symbol can be grasped in sartorial terms. According to Teufelsdröckh, all emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven. Must not the imagination weave garments, visible bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our reason are, like spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful; – the rather if, as we often see, the hand, too, aid her, and (by wool-clothes or otherwise) reveal such even to the outward eye?’ (Carlyle, 1837, pp. 77–78)

Even the human body is simply ‘an emblem; a clothing or visible garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a light particle, down from heaven’ (p. 78). ‘Nature’ and ‘Life’ make up what the professor calls ‘one Garment, a “living garment”’ or symbol of God (p.  210). On the other hand, all clothes function semiotically as material or cultural status signifiers or are otherwise communicative: ‘Clothes, from the king’s mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning

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victory over want.’ Thus an individual may be ‘said to be clothed with authority, clothed with beauty, with curses, and the like’ (pp. 77, 78). For Teufelsdröckh (as for Carlyle), humanity has, since its inception, endeavoured to find the right garments to give shape to and embody what, at any given point, it recognises as universal truths.10 A recognition of the semiotics of clothing is also an acknowledgement that the dressed body participates in a network of cultural signification. As Elizabeth Wilson usefully puts it, the peculiarity of clothing derives in part from its role connecting ‘the biological body to the social being, and the public to private’ (2003, p. 2). In the historical account of clothes that Teufelsdröckh provides, humanity first begins to dress itself not simply for functional reasons, such as the need to keep warm or the desire to appear modest in front of others, but for ornamental purposes. As soon as basic needs such as air, water, food, and shelter have been met, humans seek to satiate the ‘first spiritual want’, which is ‘decoration’ (Carlyle, 1837, p. 44). Therefore, the editor explains, Teufelsdröckh ‘undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand proposition, that man’s earthly interests “are all hooked and buttoned together and held up by Clothes”’. Or, as Teufelsdröckh himself puts it, uncharacteristically succinctly, ‘Society is founded upon cloth’ (p. 56). Thus garments function as the external manifestation of humanity’s sociability. ‘[M]an is a spirit, and bound by invisible bonds to all men’, Teufelsdröckh writes, and ‘clothes … are the visible emblems of that fact’ (Carlyle, 1837, p. 66). Indeed, polity depends on sartorial differentiation. A judge stripped of the ‘emblems’ signifying one’s judicial position  – ‘a horsehair wig, squirrel skins, and a plush gown’ – becomes interchangeable with members of the populace (p. 66). Social distinctions are maintained through dress as well. At ‘pompous ceremonials  … [and] royal drawingrooms’, rank and station (‘how Duke this is presented by Archduke that, and Colonel A by General B’) are understood or recognised through visible appearance (p.  66). For the average person, clothes serve as an external indication of one’s identity. They are or can be expressive of one’s individuality (p. 45). Nevertheless, for Teufelsdröckh, the inward and the outward are not necessarily related. External appearances may very well be superficial, lacking in substance, or even deceptive. If, as Teufelsdröckh proclaims, garments ‘are threatening to make clothes-screens of us’ (Carlyle, 1837, p. 45), the apparel most associated with a lack of meaning is that worn by the dandy. ‘A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing man; a man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes’, the editor explains. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well; so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress’ (p.  275). In fact, precisely because what most people ‘do reverence’ are clothes (‘Who ever saw any

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo lord my-lorded in tattered blanket, fastened with wooden skewer?’), there is an ever-present danger of outer garments having no necessary relation to inward essence (p. 244). From this perspective, the buyers of second-hand clothing in the shops of Monmouth Street in London can be seen as mere bodies that ‘appropriate what was meant for the cloth only’ (Carlyle, 1837, p. 244). Yet Teufelsdröckh concludes of his era that even garments befitting an individual’s station or occupation, such as the vestments worn by a clergyperson, may ‘become mere hollow shapes, or masks’ when spirit is evacuated from them (p. 221). Because Teufelsdröckh affirms the importance of clothing to social life, he cannot countenance the implicit arguments advanced by some of his contemporaries that humanity, in its nakedness, is equal. As a ‘Sansculottist’, Teufelsdröckh is sympathetic to the revolutionary impulse of stripping away visible symbols of distinction. When reading historical accounts about ‘the Anointed Presence’ and the ‘dukes, grandees, bishops, [and] generals’ who would gather around him, Teufelsdröckh admits to imagining that ‘by some enchanter’s wand, the – shall I speak it? – the Clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps’, and all are left without ‘a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep’ (Carlyle, 1837, pp. 65, 66). Nevertheless, he rejects the ‘Adamite’ stance of being ‘an enemy to Clothes in the abstract’ (p. 63). Instead, Teufelsdröckh’s clothes philosophy obliquely calls for new forms of dress that meet the historical moment and, in so doing, properly and authentically align the inward spirit and the outward vesture. If the body is a biological fact rooted in nature, dress – ‘an assemblage of modifications of the body and/or supplements to the body’ (Eicher and Roach-Higgins, 1992, p. 15) – is culturally mediated and historically ­variable (Entwistle, 2000, p.  6). It is foundational to human sociality. In turn, one’s political commitments are, necessarily, aimed at stabilising, modifying, or radically transforming the social world. Hence, a wide range of Victorian political thinkers, influenced by Carlyle, assumed that self-­ presentation and politics are linked. The political theorist Herbert Spencer recognised a direct correlation between attire and political ideology that, he believed, necessitated analysis: ‘Whoever has studied the physiognomy of political meetings, cannot fail to have remarked a connection between democratic opinions and peculiarities of costume’ (1858, p.  109). When Walter Bagehot, the mid-Victorian journalist and Liberal Party economic advisor, wanted to explain changes in the operations of parliamentary government that had produced what he claimed to be contentment with the status quo among his contemporaries, he likened the ‘dignified’ and ‘efficient’ parts of the political system to well-fitting clothing. ‘Thirty years ago’, Bagehot writes in The English Constitution, recalling the era of the Great Reform Act, when changes to the British electoral system were

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adopted, ‘[t]he nation had outgrown its institutions, and was cramped by them. It was a man in the clothes of a boy; every limb wanted more room, and every garment to be fresh made’ (2001, p.  113). Published serially in the Fortnightly Review between 1865 and 1867 against the backdrop of debates about a second reform bill, The English Constitution was not alone in making a link between the constraining nature of garments out of which one has grown and the written and unwritten political arrangements of the United Kingdom. Indeed, analogies of political reform to tailored clothes filtered into popular culture. The 11 May 1867 edition of Punch, or The London Charivari depicts the Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, then leader of the Liberal opposition, and Edward Smith-Stanley, Lord Derby, immediate past prime minister, as ‘political tailors’ (Figure 0.6). Disraeli and Gladstone are in the foreground: the former stitches a reform bill while the latter looks down at the pile of scraps, which symbolise the many amendments to the bill on which he had been voted down. Lord Derby wields a large pair of scissors in the background. In referring to costumes and garments, Spencer and Bagehot evince a concern with dress. By contrast, John Morley – one of Britain’s premier politicians and John Stuart Mill’s leading disciple (Morrison, 2021) – was principally concerned with fashion. Writing more than a decade later than Bagehot, Morley, in his study of Diderot and the philosophes, analogised political change to stylistic trends: ‘Form of government is like the fashion of a man’s clothes; it may fret or may comfort him, may be imposing or mean, may react upon his spirits to elate or depress them’ (1878, p. 121). If fashion is defined as ‘rapid and arbitrary changes in clothing style over time’ (Carter, 2003, p. 8), then this was not Morley’s specific concern. His larger point, however, is that styles of garments, or fashion, like forms of government, are subject to change.11 Despite the prominence of sartorial metaphors in the political thought and popular culture of the nineteenth century, especially concentrated in the mid-Victorian period when debates about the extension of the franchise reached a fever pitch, little attention has been paid by cultural historians to the links between clothes and political culture. Taking observations by Bagehot, Morley, and Carlyle as points of departure, this volume further develops the notion of fashion and clothing as a language. This concept has a significant intellectual history that generally reflects two schools of thought. Some thinkers have used a sender/receiver model to understand clothing as conveying messages transmitted from an individual to another individual or group (Rouse, 1989; Eicher, Evenson, and Lutz, 2000). Others have suggested the meanings of garments are, instead, culturally negotiated. The latter school includes foundational contributions by the economic theorist Thorstein Veblen (1994) and the sociologist Georg Simmel (1956) on fashion as a signifier for socio-economic status and

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0.6  John Tenniel, ‘The Political Tailors’, 1867.

subsequent work by the fashion theorists Caroline Evans (2003), Malcolm Barnard (1996, 2007), and Elizabeth Wilson (2003). What the two groups have in common, however, is the belief that clothes and dress are forms of non-verbal communication. As such, they can be harnessed to craft

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political messages that, in their rhetorical, material, and visual instantiations, assert or reinforce political identities at least as much as the written or spoken word does. This volume also shares with Bagehot, Morley, and Spencer a concern with the intersection of political and sartorial styles. To the extent that style can be understood as ‘self-telling’, an exercise of agency in which an individual discloses autobiographical details through ‘the assemblage of garments, accessories, and beauty regimes’ (Tulloch, 2010, p.  276), political commitments can be affirmed by and expressed through one’s self-presentation. Communities also coalesce around styles. The rhetorician Barry Brummett has argued that style must be understood as ‘socially held sign systems composed of a wide range of signs beyond only language, systems that are used to accomplish rhetorical purposes across the cultural spectrum’ (2008, p.  3). Style, therefore, consists of ‘movement, gestures, speech, vocabulary, decoration, and the like’, with ‘cohesive clusters of style’ proving readable, as Spencer had observed of the apparel worn in political meetings (Brummett, 2008, p. xii). While alluding to the contemporary relevance of studying nineteenthcentury dress in varied political contexts, this volume also brings together two twenty-first-century turns in historical and contextually oriented literary scholarship: material culture analysis and performativity. Since the 1990s, literary critics and historians have been re-examining late modern political culture with a particular interest in Victorian liberalism as a social and cultural formation.12 The 2010s saw ‘a surge in the historiographical use of performance as an analytical category’ in political history, with especial attention paid to the theatricality of popular politics (Yeandle and  Newey, 2016, p.  2). Yet the Victorian visual satirist John Doyle ­recognised as much when, in ‘Fancy Ball: Jim Crow Dance & Chorus’, he  depicted politicians  inhabiting a theatrical space and  – with their ‘infinite variety of style’ – appealing to various constituents as perceived members of an audience. The performative nature and theatricality of clothing in nineteenth-­ century Britain and its colonies has not received nearly as much attention as discussions of politics and style with respect to other periods and national contexts. Much fine work, including edited collections by Djurdja Bartlett (2019), Beverly Lemire (2010), Justine de Young (2017), and Wendy Parkins (2002b), has ranged across periods and cultures to examine the ways in which fashion has intersected with and responded to a variety of social and political forces and occurrences. Studies by Kate Haulman (2011) and Regina A. Root (2010) have linked fashion to revolutionary aims. Other works, including a study by Marie Grace Brown (2017), have examined the relationship between dress and civic engagement. An edited collection by Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin, and Caroline Cox (2002) includes essays on dress in terms of late modern national identity.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo An analysis of dress as a facet of late modern political cultures necessarily requires a predominant, although not exclusive, focus on men and masculinity. Of course, from the nineteenth century onwards, gender politics intensified, with women’s groups engaged in various forms of activism. Campaigns for dress reform were often connected to the organised suffragist movement (Steele, 2001; Cunningham, 2003). As Kimberly Wahl has compellingly shown in a pair of related essays, so too was ‘fashion … a crucial and yet largely unacknowledged factor’ in the rise of and debates over ‘“New Women”, Suffragettes, and Bohemians’ (2017, p. 207). Wahl demonstrates that the colour white ‘became a fundamental and central keystone in the symbolic language of the British Suffrage Movement’, playing an ‘integral role in the daily activities of campaigners  … [and] functioning on a number of levels to define and inform the motifs and iconic signifiers of suffrage ephemera and print culture’ (2016, pp. 21, 22). Whereas historians of an earlier generation tended to characterise early twentieth-century ‘suffragette fashion as a psychologization or trivialization of politics’, Wendy Parkins has shown that ‘it should rather be seen as a component of feminist agency, which deliberately drew attention to the suffragette body in order to contest the legitimacy of the masculine political subject’ (2002a, p. 120). Yet insofar as the movement for women’s suffrage contested legal norms and regulations maintained by an all-male political system, a reconsideration of the behaviours, ideologies, and dress of men is warranted (Griffin, 2012). To be sure, women are not absent from this volume. The final chapter examines the career of Gertrude Bell, the British government’s ‘Oriental Secretary’ in the Middle East during the early twentieth century. Fluent in Arabic and Persian, Bell travelled the region on horseback multiple times, and her knowledge of the geography, languages, and cultures of the Middle East made her indispensable to the Foreign Office and the War Office in the lead-up to World War I. In contrast to nineteenth-century institutional and party politics, which were the preserve of men, Bell represents the increasing political influence of women in the early twentieth century. The purported legitimacy of the nineteenth-century masculine political subject was rooted, in part, in an ideology of separate spheres. As an ideal of a feminine private domain of the home and a masculine realm of work and politics took shape in the eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth century, a close association among women, fashion, and style was forged. When suffragists took to the streets, they were seen to transgress a powerfully imaginative line (Rolley, 1990, p.  50). Although scholarship in the past few decades has called attention to the many ways in which separate spheres were, in fact, unrealised in practice, nevertheless contemporary scholarship discusses fashionable dress and stylised forms of self-presentation primarily in relation to women and dandies.13

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Because histories and theories of fashion and style in relation to men remain an under-represented area in scholarship, this volume’s emphasis on masculine dress is one of its distinguishing characteristics. Men’s appearance in the nineteenth century was once widely considered so unremarkable that scholars had relatively little to say about it. The ‘great masculine renunciation’ thesis promulgated by the psychologist J. C. Flügel – in which men disavowed their ‘claim to be considered beautiful’, delegating to women various forms of ornamentation, and ‘henceforth aimed at being only useful’ (1930, p.  111)  – was once a commonly accepted means of accounting for men’s uniform appearance in the period. The notion of masculine renunciation continues to inform some approaches to men’s wear (Kutcha, 2002), but most scholars now accept this premise as entirely too simplistic (Wilson, 2003; Shannon, 2006). Indeed, as Ulrich Lehmann has remarked, men’s ‘apparel did not cease being beautiful; it was the concept of beauty … that changed’ (2000, p. 411 n. 47). Several decades before Flügel advanced his theory, Thorstein Veblen (1994) sought to provide his own account of the increasingly funereal appearance of men’s dress. In contrast to men’s wear, which symbolised power, Veblen argued, women’s dress indicated their prescribed leisure. Thus for women of the non-working classes, their clothes were about display, not function. Yet as Christopher Breward has observed, this argument tells us very little about ‘the typical consumption patterns and aspirations of the middle- and lower-middle-class male’ (1995, p.  171). The politics of consumption is at the heart of other work by Breward (1999) as well as by Brent Shannon (2006). Their studies have broadened scholarly discussions of consumer behaviour and preferences to include men and have, therefore, placed dress firmly within Victorian masculinity studies. While scholars have considered the connections between fashion and politics in the broadest sense of the term, there are few studies on the place of dress in nineteenth-century political cultures. Following the pioneering work of James Vernon (1993) and Patrick Joyce (1994), cultural historians of British politics have focused on the linguistic and rhetorical dimensions of political identities by investigating oratory and tracts. In so doing, they have persuasively demonstrated the centrality of shared and contested languages to the practice of politics but have left material forms of political communication unanalysed. Essays published in the last decade, including those by Katrina Navickas (2010), Mark Nixon, Gordon Pentland, and Matthew Roberts (2012), Simon Morgan (2012), and Marcus Morris (2015; 2016), a contributor to this volume, have begun to redress this omission. Building on these efforts, this volume offers robust consideration of several aspects of the nineteenth century. To arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the communicative dimensions of dress and the performative nature of politics, individual chapters explore the materiality of metaphor

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo in artistic and prose works, as well as actual historical appearances, which can be gleaned, however problematically, from catalogues, reminiscences, illustrations in periodicals, paintings, and photographs.  Alison Toplis’s essay, which focuses on the political implications of a single garment, considers the metaphorical instability of the smock frock in political identities (Chapter 1). Christopher Kent investigates the relationship between tailor and customer through a single political metaphor: balance of power (Chapter  2). By the end of the century, Peter Katz argues in his reassessment of Walter Besant’s popular novel of 1886, Children of Gibeon, clothing goes beyond metaphor to become – and, therefore, to anticipate theoretical accounts of garments as – a second skin (Chapter 3). Through analysing metaphors and analogies in political novels, treatises, and other texts, the contributors seek to understand the role of clothing in the political imagination. Other chapters explore, through the study of historical personages and the artistic renderings of enfranchised voters and unenfranchised individuals, how clothes and other aspects of self-presentation defined and displayed political identities. Ariel Beaujot delves into the performative functions of the hat as one of the Victorian gentleman’s most characteristic accessories (Chapter 4). Examining the writings of three nineteenth-­century political intellectuals who were, to differing degrees, stylistic nonconformists, my essay contends that the burgeoning interest in the embodied dimensions of liberalism has largely failed to consider the intersection of self-presentation and the body (Chapter 5). Excavating the sartorial expectations that governed the appearance of MPs in the House of Commons from the middle of the nineteenth century to World War I, Marcus Morris’s essay focuses on meanings of and motivations behind the subversions of those norms (Chapter 6). Janice Carlisle unravels Britain’s complicated election law before the Second Reform Act (1867) by examining the figures depicted in the painter Ford Madox Brown’s Work (Chapter 7). The chapters in Parts I and II, ‘Between metaphor and materiality’ and ‘Reading appearances’, consider the rural and urban settings of ­nineteenth-century British politics while gesturing  – in their analyses of caricature and ‘domestic imperialism’ (Chapter 1), the self-presentation of an imperial administrator and a cabinet official charged with oversight of Ireland and India (Chapter 5), and the uniform of a Royal Army officer (Chapter 7) – beyond the island nation’s shores. The contributors to Part III, ‘Global connections and entanglements’, foreground this dimension in their analyses of the colonial contexts of political and sartorial styles. Thus this volume adds to the growing body of scholarship in the disciplines of history, literature, and fashion studies that question Eurocentric perspectives on historical dress, styles, and fashion.14 As M.  Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik have argued, there is an urgent need for scholars to adopt more varied and inclusive approaches to the study of dress and

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo

fashion that do not reinforce such binaries as ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ appearance (2016, p.  3).15 Careful attention to varied cultures of dress, in fact, complicates such crude binaries. In the nineteenth century, textiles, beads, furs, and fashions  – as could be gleaned from the plates in various periodicals disseminated globally  – circulated widely. As Steeve O. Buckridge has shown in his study of enslaved and freed women in preand post-emancipation Jamaica between the mid-1700s and the end of the nineteenth century, dress in colonial settings was a dynamic socio-cultural apparatus. It ‘narrated style, or the space where one could conform, contest, confront and resist’ (2004, p.  3). Within the Jamaican plantocracy, women used dress ‘to maintain and nurture expressive African cultural characteristics’ (Buckridge, 2004, p.  3). At the same time, some mixedrace women, he notes in examining the visual record left behind, achieved ‘an interesting synthesis in dress customs’, such as wearing a straw hat on top of a headwrap, that imitated ‘the European high style of some years before’ (2004, p. 94). Tracing transnational flows of textiles and clothes to dress imperial armies, Buckridge’s essay in this volume focuses on forms and styles of military clothing endorsed by British colonial ideology for the West India Regiments stationed in the Caribbean and the types of modifications undertaken by colonised servicemen (Chapter 8). Shu-chuan Yan sifts through the pages of Melbourne Punch, a periodical launched in 1855 and modelled on the weekly published in London, to reveal how essential sartorial narratives were to its satirisation of the governance of colonial Victoria (Chapter 9). Bringing the volume to a close, Elizabeth Bishop analyses Gertrude Bell’s self-presentations to consider aspects of formal and informal empire (Chapter 10). Just as formalised imperialism has existed alongside, and often been supplanted by, informal empire, the abolition of slavery in the United States did not end the exploitation of African Americans. Many, including Raphael Warnock’s mother, Verlene, worked as sharecroppers for White landowners throughout the South. As Warnock put it in paying tribute to his mother on election night, African American sharecroppers ‘used to pick somebody else’s cotton’ (quoted in Bella and Elfrink, 2021). Indeed, ‘the decline of West Indian cotton’ in the nineteenth century, Giorgio Riello has noted, corresponded ‘with the emergence of a new world area of cotton production, an area with a productive potential as enormous as its territory: the southern states of the United States’ (2013, p.  203). Harvested first by enslaved people and subsequently by poorly remunerated workers like Verlene, cotton from the southern United States has been a central component of the global economy for more than 200 years (Ownby and Walton, 2020). Among clothing manufacturers, cotton is one of the most sought-after natural fibres: from a production standpoint, it is easy to process, while, from a consumer’s viewpoint, its comfortability

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo and durability make it highly desirable. Jim’s Crow’s new attire may not be made of cotton from the South. Nevertheless, the ‘tuxedo of … voter integrity’ (Ura, 2021) in which American legislators have attempted to dress Jim Crow, a style increasingly adopted by John Bull as well, is cut from a fabric of political oppression with a long history that takes for its name a mid-nineteenth-century instance of sartorial and racial mimicry.

Notes   1 Raphael Warnock is also the first African American from the Democratic Party to have been elected to the upper chamber of Congress from the former Southern Confederacy. Two African Americans, Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche Bruce, were elected by the Mississippi state senate during Reconstruction to serve in the United States Senate. After Bruce’s retirement in 1881, no African American would serve in the deliberative body for nearly ninety years. The election of two African Americans from Mississippi to the United States Senate in the 1870s was facilitated by significant changes to the country’s constitution, which this introduction addresses.   2 As Nancy J. Weiss puts it, ‘the New Deal paid only the most limited attention to blacks, and yet it was in response to the New Deal that blacks moved into the Democratic fold’ (1983, pp. xiii–xiv).   3 These decisions included the appointment of progressive justices to the Supreme Court as well as an attorney general who established a civil rights section in the Justice Department, which sought ‘to reshape judicial interpretation, particularly with regard to the rights of African Americans’ (McMahon, 2010, p. 113).   4 At the time when Raphael Warnock addressed the Senate, the Republican Party had proposed more than 250 laws across forty-three state legislatures (Gardner et al., 2021). Within a few months, this effort had expanded to include 389 bills in forty-eight states (Brennan Center, 2021).   5 As the authors of one study observe, ‘It is attractive for the Republican Party to suppress minority voting because [of] minorities’ growing loyalty to the Democratic Party’ (Epperly et al., 2020, p. 764).   6 See, for example, Cockrell, 1997; Ludlow, 1966; Nevin, 1867; Saxton, 1996; Wittke, 1930.   7 ‘Particularly on the sea islands of Georgia’, notes W. T. Lhamon Jr, ‘but also elsewhere, people danced out Jim Crow’s gyrations. There were songs about him’ (2003, p. vii).   8 The earliest playbill for a performance of Jim Crow by Rice advertised a show on 22 September 1830 in Louisville, Kentucky (Cockrell, 1997, p. 64). Two years earlier, however, Rice was already experimenting with the character, including ‘singing and dancing Jim Crow’ between acts of other plays in which he was performing (Miller, 2007, p. 88).   9 See Lhamon for the complete text of the original Jim Crow act (2003, pp. 95–102). 10 As Morse Peckham, in glossing the novel’s title, noted decades ago: ‘Man’s clothes are symbols. In creating those clothes, he is a tailor. But his clothes wear out. He must, therefore, retailor himself, make himself new clothes. At certain periods in history his most important clothes, the ones he sews to symbolize the self, are in rags’ (1981, pp. 184–85). 11 A point Morley derives from his reading of Carlyle. Michael Carter has argued that fashion is ‘remarkable for its almost complete absence from Sartor Resartus’ (2003, p.  8). Yet, as Richard Salmon points out, ‘Carlyle does incorporate a not entirely dissimilar understanding of the term into Teufelsdröch’s [sic] philosophy.’ Quoting

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo Teufelsdröckh, he continues, ‘For Teufelsdröch [sic], the changing nature of fashion is indicative of an inexorable “Law of Progress”: “in Clothes, as in all other external things whatsoever, no fashion will continue”’ (Salmon, 2020, p. 140). See, for representative examples, Collins (2019), Morrison (2018), Hadley (2010), Anderson (2001), Joyce (2001), Goodlad (2003), and Biagini (1992). To the extent that the display of finery and the beautification of the body were increasingly seen as feminine activities by some people in the nineteenth century, men’s undue interest in clothing and appearance could appear unnatural – in various works Carlyle dismissed the dandy as a ‘cloth-animal’ – as well as effeminate and unmanly. Elke Gaugelle and Monica Titton (2019) have observed that, although fashion studies and postcolonial studies emerged coevally in the 1980s, there have been few attempts to correlate them. Indeed, taking up a different but related binaristic polarity, Emma Tarlo has argued in her study of Muslim dress practices and identity in contemporary multicultural Britain that ‘if we want to understand the significance’ of garments such as hijabs, niqabs, jilbabs, and abayas, ‘we need to move beyond well-worn debates about whether or not it [the hijab] is liberating or oppressive’ and instead attempt ‘to comprehend what clothes mean to the people who wear them’ (2010, p. 5).

References Anderson, A. (2001). The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barnard, M. (1996). Fashion as Communication. New York: Routledge. Barnard, M. (2007). Fashion Theory. New York: Routledge. Bartlett, D. (2019). Fashion and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bagehot, W. (2001). Bagehot: The English Constitution [1867]. Ed. P. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bella, T. and T. Elfrink (2021, 6 January). ‘Warnock, Georgia’s First Black Senator, Honors Mother and “the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton”’. Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/06/r​a​p​h​ a​e​l​-​w​a​rnock-mother-cotton-georgia-election/. Accessed 15 July 2021. Bentele, K. G. and O’Brien, E. E. (2013). ‘Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies’. Perspectives on Politics, 11 (4), pp. 1088–1116. Biagini, E. F. (1992). Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blauner, B. (1989). Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brennan Center (2021, 28  May). ‘State Voting Bills Tracker 2021’, www.bren​ n​ancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-voting-bills-tracker-2021. Accessed 1 August 2021. Breward, C. (1995). The Culture of Fashion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Breward, C. (1999). The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Breward, C., Conekin, B., and Cox, C. (eds) (2002). The Englishness of English Dress. Oxford: Berg. Brown, M. G. (2017). Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo Brummett, B. (2008). A Rhetoric of Style. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Buckridge, S. O. (2004). The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890. Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. C-Span (2021, 17 March). ‘Senator Raphael Warnock Maiden Floor Speech’. Video, C-Span, www.c-span.org/video/?c4952332/senator-raphael-warnock-maide​n​-​ f​l​o​o​r​-speech. Accessed 1 August 2021. Carlyle, T. (1849). ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’. Fraser’s Magazine, 40, pp. 670–79. Carlyle, T. (1837). Sartor Resartus [1833–34]. 2nd edn. Boston: Munroe. Carter, M. (2003). Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes. Oxford: Berg. Cockrell, D. (1997). Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, S. (ed.) (2019). Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cunningham, P. A. (2003). Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art. Kent: Kent State University Press. De Young, J. (ed.) (2017). Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 1775–1935. London: I. B. Tauris. Eicher, J. B., Evenson, S. L., and Lutz, H. A. (2000). The Visible Self: Global Perspectives on Dress, Culture, and Society. 2nd edn. New York: Fairchild.  Eicher, J. B. and Roach-Higgins, M. E. (1992). ‘Definitions and Classifications of Dress: Implications for Analysis and Gender Roles’, in Barnes, R. and Eicher, J. B. (eds), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Context. Oxford: Berg, pp. 8–28. Entwistle, J. (2000). The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Epperly, B., Witko, C., Strickler, R., and White, P. (2020). ‘Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching, Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution of Voter Suppression in the U.S.’, Perspectives on Politics, 18 (3), pp. 756–69. Evans, C. (2003). Fashion at the Edge. New Haven: Yale University Press. Flügel, J. C. (1930). The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogarth Press. Gardner, A. et  al. (2021, 11  March). ‘How GOP-Backed Voting Measures could Create Hurdles for Tens of Millions of Voters’. Washington Post, https://www. washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/voting-restrictions-republic​a​n​ s​-​s​t​ates/. Accessed 1 June 2021. Gaugelle, E. and Titton, M. (eds) (2019) Fashion and Postcolonial Critique. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Goodlad, L. M. E. (2003). Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Griffin, B. (2012). The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture, and the Struggle for Women’s Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grossman, J. R. (1989). Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hadley, E. (2010). Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haney-López, I. (2015). Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Rein­ vented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Haulman, K. (2011). The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hill, C. V. (2010). Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jansen, M. A. and Craik, J. (eds) (2016). Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion. London: Bloomsbury. Joyce, P. (1994). Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joyce, P. (2001). The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso. Kennard, J., Jr (1848). Selections from the Writings of James Kennard, Jr., with a Sketch of his Life and Character. Boston: Tickner. Kousser, J. M. (1999). Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kutcha, D. (2002). The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lehmann, U. (2000). Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lemire, B. (ed.) (2010). The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society: Global Perspectives from Early Modern to Contemporary. Farnham: Ashgate. Lhamon, W. T., Jr., (1998). Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lhamon, W. T., Jr. (2003). Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lott, E. (1993). Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press. Ludlow, N. M. (1966). Dramatic Life as I Found It: A Record of Personal Experience [1880]. New York: B. Blom. Lynn, J. A. (2019). Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Marshall, H. W. (2012). Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old Time Fiddlers in Missouri. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri. Maxwell, A. and Shields, T. (2019). The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. McLean, T. (1840). An Illustrative Key to the Political Sketches of H.B.: From No. 1 to No. 600. London: McLean. McMahon, K. J. (2010). Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mill, J. S. (1850). ‘The Negro Question’. Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 41 (January), pp. 25–31. Miller, T. L. (2007). Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Morgan, S. (2012). ‘Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England’. Journal of Victorian Culture, 17 (2), pp. 127–46. Morley, J. (1878). Diderot and the Encyclopaedists. New edn. New York: Scribner and Welford.

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo Morris, M. (2015). ‘“The Most Respectable Looking of Revolutionaries”: Sartorial Identities, Class and the Politics of Appearance in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’. Cultural and Social History, 12 (3), pp. 315–30. Morris, M. (2016). ‘Class, Performance and Socialist Politics: The Political Campaigns of Early Labour Leaders’, in Yeandle, P., Newey, K., and Richards,  J. (eds),  Politics, Performance, and Popular Culture: Theatre and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 259–75. Morrison, K. A. (2018). Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Morrison, K. A. (2021). ‘A “Less than Enthusiastic” Friendship: John Morley, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes’. English: Journal of the English Association, 70 (268), pp. 66–86. Navickas, K. (2010). ‘“That Sash will Hang You”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–1840’. Journal of British Studies, 49 (3), pp. 540–65. [Nevin, R. P.] (1867). ‘Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy’. Atlantic Monthly (November), pp. 608–16. Nixon, M., Pentland, G., and Roberts, M. (2012). ‘The Material Culture of Scottish Reform Politics, c. 1820–c. 1884’. Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 32 (1), pp. 28–49. Ownby, T. and Walton, B. (eds) (2020). Clothing and Fashion in Southern History. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Parkins, W. (2002a). ‘“The Epidemic of Purple, White and Green”: Fashion and the Suffragette Movement in Britain 1908–14’, in Parkins, W. (ed.), Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship. Oxford: Berg, pp. 97–124. Parkins, W. (ed.) (2002b). Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship. Oxford: Berg. Parliamentary Debates (2021, 7 September). Fifth series, vol. 700, col. 233, https:// hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2021-09-07/debates/D24D6DE7-5D1446F1-B2C5-A0B756B94249/ElectionsBill. Accessed 1 January 2022. Peckham, M. (1981). Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perman, M. (2003). Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Redding, K. (2010). Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina’s Road to Disfranchisement. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Riello, G. (2013). Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rolley, K. (1990). ‘Fashion, Femininity and the Fight for the Vote’. Art History, 13 (1), pp. 47–71. Root, R. A. (2010). Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rouse, E. (1989). Understanding Fashion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Salmon, R. (2020). ‘Fraser’s Magazine and the Instability of Literary Fashion’, in Egan, G. (ed.), Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century. Cham: Palgrave, pp. 129–54. Saxton, A. 1996. ‘Blackface Minstrelsy’, in Bean, A., Hatch, J., and McNamara, B. (eds), Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 67–85.

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Shannon, B. (2006). The Cut of his Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914. Athens: Ohio University Press. Simmel, G. (1956). ‘Fashion’. American Journal of Sociology, 62 (6), pp. 541–58. Smith, G. (1987). When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Spencer, H. (1858). ‘Manners and Fashion’, in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 1. London: Longman, pp. 109–57. Steele, V. (2001). The Corset: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tarlo, E. (2010). Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. London: Bloomsbury. Taylor, L. (2002). The Study of Dress History. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tulloch, C. (2010). ‘Style-Fashion-Dress: From Black to Post-Black’. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 14 (3), pp. 273–304. Ura, A. (2021, 9 April) ‘Texas Republicans Say their Proposed Voting Restrictions are Color Blind. But Many See “Jim Crow in a tuxedo”’. Texas Tribune, www.t​e​x​ astribune.org/2021/04/09/Texas-voting-GOP-suppression/. Accessed 1 August 2021. Veblen, T. (1994). The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899]. New York: Dover Publications. Vernon, J. (1993). Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wahl, K. (2016). ‘Purity and Parity: The White Dress of the Suffrage Movement in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Faiers, J. and Bulgarella, M. W. (eds), Colors in Fashion. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 21–33. Wahl, K. (2017). ‘Silencing Fashion in Early Twentieth-Century Feminism: The Sartorial Story of Suffrage’, in De Young, J. (ed.), Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 1775–1925. London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 21–34. Weiss, N. J. (1983). Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wilkerson, I. (2010). The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House. Wilson, E. (2003). Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Wittke, C. (1930). Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yeandle, P. and Newey, K. (2016). ‘The Politics of Performance and the Performance of Politics’, in Yeandle, P., Newey, K., and Richards, J. (eds), Politics, Performance, and Popular Culture: Theatre and Society in NineteenthCentury Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–15.

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PART I

Between metaphor and materiality

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1 Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical? Political interpretations of one garment in nineteenth-century England Alison Toplis

During the first half of the nineteenth century, many men, including smallscale farmers and agricultural labourers, wore the smock frock. This chapter will examine the symbolism embodied in this garment, particularly its associations with the rural, and how this played out in the politics of the period as agricultural labourers moved towards the possibility of enfranchisement in 1884. During the Victorian era agriculture remained a major source of employment for English men: the 1851 census recorded over 1.4 million men working as agricultural labourers, farm servants, or shepherds, agriculture remaining the largest single employer until the 1901 census. Land was of enormous political significance; rents of tenant farmers were the mainstay of incomes for many of the nobility and gentry, and ownership of land a necessity for people to be able to sit both in the House of Lords and in the Commons. The newly rich sought land for social prestige and local influence, as well as national political power, with tenants returning their landlords and their landlords’ candidates, as MPs (Payne, 1993, p. 6; Howkins, 1991, pp. 7–8; Wordie, 2000a, pp. 1–2). Agricultural landownership maintained the proprietor’s stranglehold of political power and the rural hegemony over national politics until the late nineteenth century. While historians have investigated textual representations and the characterisation of the landless labourer working for these proprietors, presented in often derogatory terms so that he became the all-­ encompassing ‘Hodge’ or ‘Lob’, their research does not often consider the significance of his typical smock frock (Freeman, 2001, p. 173). How people used clothing, particularly working people who left few traditional archival records in an era when many were illiterate, should be part of the social analysis of history rather than a purely aesthetic consideration, and its study also reveals details about economic status and political ideals.

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Between metaphor and materiality Especially with the smock, there is a need to overcome its later representation as a cypher of a lost rural idyll and an example of a ‘peasant’ craft. Many nineteenth-century working men wore the smock, a usually cheap utilitarian ready-made overall, as workwear. By sampling the online searchable archive of nineteenth-century newspapers held by the British Library for key words such as ‘smock frock’, this chapter will shed light on this neglected area and investigate how contemporary politics influenced what putting on a smock meant for both observers and wearers. It will show how the representation of a smock could be read differently: as a symbol of ‘otherness’ and of being outside the mainstream, potentially denigrating smock wearers as odd and sub-human, as well as, simultaneously, an exemplification of solidarity that working men could use to articulate their engagement with the political process and lobby for change and ultimately enfranchisement. Firstly, the chapter will briefly discuss the disparagement of the rural labourer through language linking to the strong visual representation of this degraded labourer in a smock. The smock was also the defining characteristic of the ‘smock frock farmer’, in contrast to the fashionably dressed ‘new’ farmer. It will examine how political changes during the 1830s and the steep economic deterioration in the situation of rural labourers during the 1840s affected the symbolism embedded within the smock as farmers and labourers became increasingly isolated from each other. An exploration of the take-up of the smock by Chartists and labourers as a symbol of their plight and their desire for political change and enfranchisement will follow before a discussion of how the smock became a cypher of a lost rural peasantry for the artistic liberal elite by the end of the century. As Jesse Collings, radical MP and a trustee of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union (NALU), stated in 1883: ‘Perhaps there is no section of the community so little known to the average Englishman as that of the agricultural labourer … He is a cipher in rural society and a political pariah in this free country of ours … condemned to silence and subjection’ (quoted in O’Hara, 2005, pp.  109–10);1 this lack of understanding also encompassed misrepresentations of his smock. Outside observers used various nicknames to collectively describe the rural labourer, summing up this denigration. The name Hodge was a diminutive of Roger, used in the medieval period as a common name for a countryman and first written down by Chaucer (Howkins, 1996, p. 218). Ian Dyck has traced how the caricature of Hodge, the rustic idiot, appeared in seventeenth-century Restoration London as the spheres of town and country became increasingly differentiated. Hodge was a stupid and plodding boor, but the mockery was more than just teasing: this was now a mean-spirited stereotype of rural workers, reductive and generic, erasing the individual and used to justify the superiority and civility of urban, particularly London, life (Dyck, 1996, pp.  90–91). By the early nineteenth century, the word

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

‘Hodge’ thus immediately summed up backwardness and lack of sophistication, a ‘primitive race’, the stock yokel, and a butt of urban humour, unchallenged by contemporaries and to some extent still prevalent today. The use of what Alun Howkins calls ‘Mummerzet’ also indicated rural stupidity, as an accent with a burr was written down phonetically in order to induce a mocking humour and helplessness (Howkins, 1996, p. 218); for an example, see Figure 1.1. This ‘domestic imperialism’ was not particular to the rural labourer, for the Irish were similarly caricatured and stereotyped, usually detrimentally.2 However, the widespread use of Hodge and other descriptors such as ‘clodhopper’ and ‘clown’, charted by Howkins in the period between the 1780s and 1830s, was symptomatic of a deterioration in the status of farm labourers as their economic situation rapidly worsened. In order to reclaim any standing, a labourer had to leave the land, cast off his smock frock, and enter the urban realm (Howkins, 1996, pp. 219–20).3 Many urban commentators saw those who remained as an inferior species, stupid, unimaginative, undertaking simple repetitive tasks, and thus lacking ambition, as well as ill-clothed in odd garb. The wearing of the smock frock, common from the late eighteenth century onwards, directly correlated to the declining economic position of the agricultural labourer. The smock was a cheap, often ready-made, garment, in

1.1  John Tenniel, ‘The Pig and the Peasant’, Punch, 19 September 1863.

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Between metaphor and materiality the 1790s costing from around five to eight shillings, less than coats and jackets sold in the same shops, and essential for an agricultural labourer to be able to undertake employment (Styles, 2007, p. 28; Toplis, 2021, p. 62). By 1810, Dyck identifies a change in language used to describe agricultural roles, from the inclusive countryman and husbandman to the more divisive labourers and farmers, the latter being categorised as new or old-fashioned (Dyck, 1992, pp.  53, 74–75). The gulf between farmer and worker expanded, the farmer leaving the cheap smock frock to the increasingly impoverished and bitter workers whom he employed and at whose expense he flaunted his wealth (Styles, 2007, p. 185). Farmers were now a superior class, no longer sharing the toil of the land or living under the same roof as their workers; this new class consciousness was epitomised by their dress and, in particular, by their no longer wearing the smock frock (Dyck, 1992, pp.  64–65). A different type of farmer emerged, the jobber, who was interested only in making money from a farm, not in the welfare of his labourers. The formation of large, profitable farms denied rural families a way to make a living as they formerly had, becoming one of the themes of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (Cobbett, 1985, p.  266).4 With the disappearance of the paternalistic system and farm service, workers were no longer employed on a year-by-year basis but by the week, thus also preventing settlement in a parish and possible additional cost to ratepayers, as well as winter employment (Snell, 1987, p. 70). These ‘new’ farmers focused on buying luxury commodities with their profits, such as glassware, sofas, pianos, and carpets. With rituals such as gleaning eroded in the interests of commercialism, farmers were also now too genteel to sit with their workers, Cobbett calling them ‘mock gentlefolks’ (Payne, 1993, pp. 12, 17–18; Cobbett, 1985, pp. 227–29; Snell, 1987, pp. 87–88). Cartoons, for example by James Gillray, appeared ridiculing the pretensions of ‘Farmer Giles’; these also sought to soothe the authentically fashionable about the presumptions of the upstart farmers and the rapid disappearance of differences between farmers’ dress and that of the modish (Lemire, 2006, pp. 131–32).5 Protest ballads, such as ‘Times are Altered’ from around 1820, complained about the breakdown in living-in farm service and particularly about the new fashionable clothing that farmers’ families bought, their sentiments foreshadowing the rural unrest of the 1830s.6 Much of this shift in priorities was blamed on the influence of the farmers’ wives, for whom a nice home, social pretensions, and fashionable dress were supposedly the most important things. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, with continuing deterioration in social relations and segregation, the smock-­ wearing Hodge stereotype had reached its acme (Snell, 1987, pp. 69–70, 87–88, 101). As Barry Reay has pointed out, there was an idealisation of the live-in servant relationship in which labourers inhabited the farmer’s house and, for example, ate meals together. Yet there was always a degree

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

of distance in this inherently unequal relationship, usually reinforced by the greater age of the farmer, alongside the labourers’ poor living conditions with shared beds and cramped quarters, and the often thinly masked contempt for the system among the workers, rather than mutual goodwill and bonhomie (Reay, 2002, pp. 145–47). The emergence of the ‘smock frock farmer’ played upon this false memory (Lee, 2005, p.  123). The ‘smock frock farmer’ became held up as a paragon of virtue, the inheritor of the lost golden age of rural life, pre-enclosure and pre-New Poor Law, located somewhere in the second half of the eighteenth century, a mythical time increasingly sought after and bound visually to the smock. In Plate 1, a caricature produced in 1830 looks back to Christmas 1800 when farmers were prosperous, with hams and Christmas pudding on the table, and farmer, labourers, and servants celebrated together, unified by everyone wearing smocks.7 Cobbett maintained the ‘old ways’ on his own farms, lodging his workers in his house and stipulating that they had to come from the country and wear smock frocks and nailed shoes, ‘so that they were all clod hoppers’ together (quoted in Ingrams, 2005, p. 224). His traditional, conservative instincts, that things were not how they once were but could be again, unusually combined with his radical opinions with the wish to improve the lot of rural labourers (Ingrams, 2005, pp.  199, 309). For Cobbett, the smock when worn by both farmers and labourers was a symbol of rural cohesiveness, seemingly typifying his ideal rural society. The smock could thus signify the values of simplicity, honesty, and hard work, along with fairness and social responsibility, consistent with sentiments found in popular ballads of the time and in opposition to the moral decay of the ‘new-fashioned’ farmer. These ballads celebrated the agricultural labourers’ simple, hard-wearing dress, the now impoverished labourer looking back to a time when things seemed fairer and everybody, farmers included, dressed appropriately and worked together. This material self-memorialisation asserted the labourers’ hostility to this change and their ‘otherness’, so they ‘embraced plain dressing as a kind of customary, oppositional identity, worn in defiance of enclosing landlords, opulent farmers and oppressive parish vestrymen’ (Styles, 2007, p. 201).8 The smock was actually a signifier of the current crisis, a cheap garment, widely available ready-made, and covering up impoverished labourers’ poor clothing beneath it (Styles, 2007, pp. 199–200). The use of low-status everyday dress by agricultural labourers to make a specific political point about the need for a fairer settlement included the smock as a symbol both of their decaying cultural and economic circumstances and of what life could be (Jones, 2006, pp. 32–33).9 From the 1830s, after violent protests such as the Swing Riots, widespread anti-Poor Law unrest (Reay, 2004, pp.  150–52),10 Chartism, and early trade unionism, the rural poor were seen instead as a dangerous

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Between metaphor and materiality sub-class that it was necessary for commentators to further denigrate and ridicule in order to protect the elite status quo. Rural workers were spoken  of as a different race and increasingly isolated from sophisticated urban culture, the focus falling on the West Country, East Anglia, and southern England, where wages were lowest and living conditions were the worst. This included the derogatory use of the word ‘peasantry’, meaning a distinct and degraded class of persons who should be kept in their ‘proper’ place. Although a few reporters mentioned continuing rural unionism and parallel socialist doctrines, this politicisation contradicted the Hodge stereotype and so was largely ignored.11 Thus contemporary commentators continued to portray agricultural labourers as dependent, deferential, and politically conservative despite the gradual erosion of their customary rights (Freeman, 2001, p. 174).12 Any alliance between labourers and farmers over the question of tithes in the early 1830s dissipated later that decade with the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, as farmers’ interests were increasingly bound up with the class above rather than the one below. Many farmers had the vote for the first time with the 1832 Reform Act, and after the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act they often became members of boards of guardians (Lee, 2005, pp.  20–22). Their ideas and aspirations were no longer the same as those of their labourers: they were the governors and elite of their neighbourhoods, promoting good conduct, industry, and fidelity among workers on the other side of the economic and social divide from them (Lee, 2005, pp. 36, 123). The hegemonic group in rural society, farmers were the power brokers, the link between classes, ‘the little kings of village life’ (Reay, 2004, pp.  12–13). As farmers differentiated themselves as a local elite, labourers responded, becoming more radical and denouncing the ‘new-fashioned’ farmer, the smock serving as a symbol both of their solidarity and of their relative poverty (Dyck, 1992, p. 210).13 However, until the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘smock frock farmer’ continued alongside the ‘new-fashioned’ farmer. In a debate in the House of Commons on 11 May 1846 about the third reading of the Corn Importation Bill, it was stated that although MPs might desire farmers with large capital to better cultivate the land, the majority were ‘hard-working smockfrock farmers: many of them, or their immediate predecessors, had been labourers, who, by persevering industry and the accumulation of small savings, had risen to the class of small farmers’ (Yorkshire Gazette, 1846).14 Removing Corn Law protection would harm them.15 Here the ‘smock frock farmer’ was painted as a grafter, wanting to better himself through work and savings, the ideal Victorian. He was honest, hard-working, and conservative. In the Buckinghamshire county elections of 1837, the ‘honest smock frocks’ became equated with Conservative voters and candidates (Bucks Herald, 1837). The character of the ‘smock frock farmer’ came to represent integrity and a nostalgic, traditional vision of the countryside.

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

Nonetheless, despite their detailed knowledge of the countryside,16 ‘smock frock farmers’ were increasingly seen as intransigent, stuck in the past, and not open to progress or betterment. A farmer from Newbury in Berkshire railed against the conservatism of expecting a return to conditions before the (Napoleonic) war when ‘everything was as it ought to be  … bread and cheese, smock-frock, and ignorance’, not advancing in science or general knowledge but ‘… ignorance is bliss’ (Reading Mercury, 1845). At the annual dinner of the Vale of Evesham Agricultural Society held after its show in 1863, the after-dinner speeches discussed the need for a superior class of men as labourers to protect and maintain the farmers’ machinery and therefore their capital: ‘There was a total incapacity for the work by the old labourer of 20 years ago, who, in his smock frock which looked very much like a garment without a crinoline – (laughter) – was very much in the way.’ The old labourer was outdated, cumbrous, and even feminised, and could never work a steam plough. The new specialised labourer had a status that the old farm labourer never had, learning new mechanical skills to survive and signalling this modernity by abandoning the smock frock (Worcestershire Chronicle, 1863). During the mid-nineteenth century, recently formed agricultural ­societies frequently discussed the advances that farming had made and speculated about the future, such as importing animals from the colonies. The mechanisation of farming was part of this progress. Steam ploughs, introduced during the 1830s, needed larger fields, consequently affecting whole farms and their workers: ‘Now the son of the nobleman and the squire occupy the land which the smock frock farmer once farmed  … Farming … the art of bringing machinery and the sciences to the aid of cultivated nature’ (Chelmsford Chronicle, 1863). ‘Smock frock ­farmers’ had no place in this new world of science and the futuristic progress promoted and debated by agricultural societies. Capital, education, and thus increased status were required.17 The Shropshire farmer Mr Bowen Jones, a member of the Council of the Royal Agricultural Society of England and the author of an article entitled ‘The Farm that Pays’, repudiated the idea of ‘resuscitating’ the ‘smock frock farmer’ and suggested that from a commercial viewpoint it was a mistake to have little capital and no labour. Modern farmers needed capital to obtain the maximum produce, and skilled labour with practical expertise to exploit this (Derby Mercury, 1885). A farmer who used sewage to help farm clay soils around London shared similar sentiments: ‘It has often occurred to us that it was high time to throw aside the old “smock-frock” and heavy hobnailed “highlows”, with all their associations of the past, for something more in accordance with the utilitarian go-ahead spirit of the age’ (Leamington Spa Courier, 1864). Paradoxically, the mass production of smocks was a catalyst for modern ready-made clothes manufacturing (see Toplis, 2021, pp. 37–60).

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Between metaphor and materiality Ironically, the smock was increasingly given to labourers at local agricultural societies’ prize-givings, with the objective of ‘the reward and encouragement of industrious and well-conducted labourers’ (Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 1846). For rural elites in general, the smock fulfilled a particular purpose representing labour, subservience, working-class rural respectability, and usefulness. Given out for a specific reason as part of a broader movement of elite largesse which sought to alleviate, at least on the surface, the poverty of the workers, the smock also visibly and publicly reinforced social distinctions and the dominant economic and political power of the elite donor. This type of prize-­giving came under increasing scrutiny; an article in Punch argued that it was demeaning and patronising, treating workers unfairly with only small ‘rewards’, such as boots and smock frocks, in order to create ‘a happy peasantry – “their country’s pride”’. The author saw this as akin to tipping a waiter or footman for twenty-five years’ labour (quoted in Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 1846). In 1846 in Ryme, Dorset, it was satirically reported that prizes were still popular: the happy effect of the system of rural rewards to turn matters of complaint into matters of boast and emulation. There was a time when people grumbled at having to bring up families on 7s. or 8s. a week; they now come forward to claim prizes for the exploit. The farmer or the landlord gets his labour cheap, and he liberally gives a smock-frock or a pair of high shoes, to encourage the saving to his own pocket. (Preston Chronicle, 1846)18

A report in The Times likened the prizes given to labourers to those awarded to animals in country shows (Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 1858). For the elite donor, the smock was still useful for promulgating the myth of a stable, conservative, and ordered rural social hierarchy, despite the move towards scientific progress and commercial agriculture (Payne, 1993, pp. 29, 31). Misunderstanding the practical reasons why and how labourers generally obtained and used smocks, which included their cheapness and durability, social commentators during this period conflated all smock wearers into a pejorative mass grouping. William Howitt’s The Rural Life of England of 1838 classified the ‘smock-frocked straw-hatted, anclebooted’ labourers ‘as simple, as ignorant, and laborious a creature as one of the wagon-horses that he drives’. The labourer was illiterate, uncurious, parochial, and unimaginative, an ‘animal’ and unrespectable, with no desire to access libraries and newspapers as his working-class peer, the urban-based mechanic, did to expand his mind (Howitt, 1840, pp.  113–14). Howitt portrayed the labourer as the architect of his own fate, unwilling to engage or seek out new experiences and skills, preferring the monotony of wielding a flail or digging a drain. In 1849 a Morning Chronicle special correspondent reporting on ‘Labour and the

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

Poor’ detailed the ‘Intellectual and Moral Condition of the Labourer in the Southern and Western Counties’: it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance in which they live … You cannot address one of them without being at once painfully struck with the intellectual darkness which enshrouds him … The whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man … In his very dress he seems not to belong to the century in which he lives. The smock frock was never the garb of active labour, and it certainly but ill beseems the labourer of these bustling and competing times. Fieldwork requires a great deal of stooping, and perfect freedom of the limbs. The frock is neither adapted for the one, nor allows the other … he is attired in the robe of centuries gone by … awkward, cumbrous and mechanical in his actions  … As he was generations gone by, so he is now – a physical scandal, a moral enigma, an intellectual cataleptic. (Morning Chronicle, 1849b)19

Thus when the American Frederick Olmsted completed his walking tour of England in 1850, mainstream society had successfully dismissed and excluded rural labourers as subservient ‘others’ in their distinctive dress. Olmsted accordingly saw them as indifferent to, and seemingly only spectators of, what was going on, ‘most degraded, poor, stupid, brutal, and licentious’. In a tap room, three men wearing smock frocks would only discuss beer and girls, apparently having no other interests (Olmsted, 2002, pp. 353, 368–69).20 For Olmsted, farm labourers were ‘beasts of burden’ ‘whose tastes were such mere instincts, or whose purpose in life and whose mode of life was so low, so like that of domestic animals [sic] altogether’ (pp.  353–54). Categorising labourers by their dress, their characteristic smock frock, could subsume men into this animalistic mass, Olmsted noting that their ‘utter want of curiosity and intelligent ­observation  … is remarkable’ (p.  400). Such stereotyping served a particular political function, showing them as unsuitable as a class for enfranchisement, their identifying marker their smock frock (Morning Chronicle, 1849b).21 This increasingly derogatory signposting of rural labourers, embodied in the smock, shifted the meaning for labourers themselves, the garment becoming a political symbol and visual device to indicate their downtrodden status. Indeed the fustian jacket and the smock frock became two metaphors for the working class in the 1830s and 1840s, the smock frock representing aggrieved rural workers whose conditions had arguably got worse than those of people working in manufacturing, where ­increasing amounts of legislation were beginning to control working conditions. Fustian clothing was loosely cut and ranged in colour from white, buff, yellow, brown and blue, and thus had a similar visual appearance to smocks, this type of cotton textile also associated with working clothing (Richmond, 2013, pp.  39–40). The ‘otherness’ of the smock frock worn by working-class men signalled the breakdown of any moral economy in mutual obligation and particularly the deteriorating relationship between

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Between metaphor and materiality labourer and farmer (Lee, 2005, p.  125). By wearing this cheap readymade overall, working men conveyed their connection to those with similar grievances, at the same time as visually distancing themselves from the farmers and other local elites (Andersson, 2013, p. 12). Thus during an election campaign in Cirencester in 1847, ‘smock-frocks’ and ‘fustian jackets’ were now metonymies for labourers attending the first meetings of the Anti-Corn Law movement (Gloucestershire Chronicle, 1847a). In addition to being a practical necessity, wearing a smock frock could therefore be a symbolic choice informed by cultural, moral, and, increasingly into the 1840s, political considerations (Jones, 2006, pp. 17–19). It moved from being a disguise used by political agitators in the 1830s to equalise appearance with little chance of identification, to being perhaps more of a conscious choice to express radicalism, albeit un-noted by political commentators. By the mid-nineteenth century, rural labourers described themselves as slaves and beaten down, and the farmers as ‘close-fisted’, their resentment of the social pretensions and authoritarianism of farmers increasing. An ambiguity in response to social superiors became characteristic in rural social relations; this included those investigating rural life, such as Olmsted, who misinterpreted such interactions (Snell, 1987, pp. 101–03). As disengaged, ignorant Hodges wearing smocks, labourers showed a dignified but sullen attitude which could mask a hatred of a situation but maintain outward decorum so as to benefit from elite charity and prize-giving.22 Historians such as Peter Bailey have examined this idea more fully in an urban context, suggesting that the superficial practice of a respectable and deferential role offering a veneer of conformity for some kind of benefit was a performance, and that social peers would understand the deceit.23 The use of clothing in this context to create the right image seems obvious: this charade protected a ­divergent cultural identity and underhand political views from the elite gaze. Those who were dissatisfied with this situation migrated towards expanding urban areas to take up overt protest, and thus many of those in towns, including prominent Chartists, had a country background (Thompson, 1984, p. 173). The relationship between rural and urban communities was constantly in flux, and the two were never isolated or separated, despite the caricature of ‘Hodge’. During the 1840s political tracts were published for a penny each, appealing to the ‘Fustian Jackets & Smock Frocks’ and covering subjects such as ‘Goody Goody, or State Education a National Insult’, and ‘Radicalism an Essential Doctrine of Christianity’ (Gloucester Journal, 1848).24 This potentially radicalised and highly politicised interest is somewhat at odds with the image of a ‘smock frock’ as boorish, illiterate, and uneducated. Indeed, during the late 1830s the education of the lower orders was itself contentious, some claiming that literate working people might read inflammatory tracts with which they could corrupt

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

others, causing unrest. Others saw education, particularly through church schools, as a way of teaching deference and subservience to uphold the social order.25 Both the smock frock and the fustian jacket were visible differentiations from the mainstream dark male suit, reflecting the wearer’s downtrodden status (Pickering, 1986, pp. 160–62).26 However, they could also become a public means of communication, a symbolic shorthand for solidarity with working-class radicalism and the fight against the oppression of working men (Pickering, 1986, pp.  155–60).27 At a meeting of the Birmingham Political Union in 1836, ‘whity-brown aprons, smock-frocks … and fustian jackets, were the prevailing costume of this enlightened auditory’ (Royal Cornwall Gazette, 1836). Participants attending reform movement meetings and demonstrations often dressed up, either in clean clothes or in their Sunday best. This clothing expressed their dignity, respectability, and worthiness, and, by implication, the moderateness of the participants seeking to join in the political process, distinguishing them from the disorder of underground seditious and violent groups. The smock was worn as Sunday best too, and the wearing of white in large groups was likewise seen as a communal expression of collective identity (Navickas, 2010, p. 556). During a Chartist meeting in Wiltshire in 1841, before the food crisis of the mid-1840s, the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor was urged not to forget the ‘Jim Crow hats and smock frock labourers of Wilts, as well as the fustian jackets of the north’ (Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 1841). In a letter published the following year in the Northern Star, O’Connor noted that he passed through Bilston, near Wolverhampton, where five hundred Chartist members lived on one street; he closed his letter with the flourish, ‘Long life to the dear, good, and brave fellows, I call those smock-frock fellows, O’Connor’s own’ (Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 1842; italics in original). The smock frock and the fustian jacket were shorthand for class confrontation, reflecting joint grievances across the country and a developing popular radicalism which emerged from the conflicts of the 1830s. At a Chartist meeting on Clerkenwell Green in 1848, ‘a poet orator’ named Duncan, a teetotaller and vegetarian, spoke to the crowd while clinging to a lamp-post, and ended by reciting his new song in praise of equality, ‘The Smock Frock and the Fustian Coat’, complete with theatrical gestures. The crowd was then asked to quietly disperse as the police moved in (Evening Mail, 1848). Like Cobbett, O’Connor tended towards a nostalgic, pre-enclosure view of rural life, a ‘brave old world’, into which the smock frock fitted well. His Land Plan aimed to restore dispossessed labourers to their rightful land. Among both conservatives and radicals, there was an admiration of a mythical rural past, this former ‘rightly’ ordered society having wide appeal for many different reasons (Ingrams, 2005, p. 308).28

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Between metaphor and materiality Despite the fact that agricultural labour was the largest sector of employment during the first half of the nineteenth century, agricultural labourers were rarely recorded on the committee lists of the National Charter Association or as arrested Chartists. Therefore commentators have supposed that, on the whole, agricultural labourers assumed deference and acquiescence, outwardly at least, to maintain the status quo rather than engaging in obvious dissent. The countryside was clearly not immune to protest movements: it saw the Swing Riots and rick burning, protests about the introduction of the New Poor Law, and the famous Tolpuddle Martyrs during the 1830s (Thompson, 1984, pp.  173–74). If they were not members the National Charter Association, labourers could join the ‘Land Company’, although membership required access to the Northern Star newspaper and involved paying a subscription of a small sum into a fund in the hope of eventually gaining a smallholding in a ballot and therefore ultimately self-sufficiency (Thompson, 1984, p. 178). However, farmers in insular village communities apparently dismissed from employment labourers who were seen reading the Northern Star, so the labourers walked into larger towns to read it instead (Thompson, 1984, p. 174). This alertness on the part of farmers and landowners to signs of class antagonism, including Chartism, possibly due to their experiences during the 1830s, made it very difficult for the association to penetrate the countryside in any organised way (Thompson, 1984, p. 175).29 Trowbridge Chartist leader, William Carrier, spoke in April 1839. A local farmer dismissed all his workers who had attended the meeting, depriving them of their housing as well as their income. Others were offered bribes of feasts or extra potatoes to stay away from such meetings by farmers and landowners. There were reports of men being given, paradoxically, new smock frocks if they went and beat the Chartists up, as well as additional pay and beer allowances (Operative, 1839).30 James Leach, bookseller and leader of the Manchester Chartists, linked agricultural workers with factory workers and outworkers in his defence during his 1843 trial. All were bound in the ‘slavery of the industrious classes of England’. Agricultural labourers ‘are pining and getting a very scanty portion of food, in the midst of the vast accumulation of the produce of their own labour … they are … in want, woe and sorrow’ (Thompson, 1984, p.  177). The countryside, although politically suppressed, was as alienated and class-divided as the towns (Thompson, 1984, pp. 175–76; Payne, 1993, pp. 42–44). In a letter to the Northampton Mercury in 1842, the writer signed himself ‘Smock frock’ and warned that the agricultural labourers were in a ‘much worse condition that it [the class] has been for several years’. ‘Smock frock’ urged landowners to promote full employment to prevent a crisis, pointing out that labourers would rather starve than enter the workhouse, where ratepayers would be obliged to pay for them anyway (Northampton Mercury, 1842). Their lot had not improved, whereas there



Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

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had been some progress for manufacturing workers in just three or four years (see Figure  1.2).31 The smock was blamed for disguising the real situation: ‘The rich knew nothing of the misery which they endured. They thought if they saw the labourers with a decent smock frock on that there was no distress among them’ (Bury and Norwich Post, 1844). Indeed, elites

1.2  John Leech, ‘The Agricultural Question Settled’, Punch, 18 January 1845.

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Between metaphor and materiality used the smock themselves, for example as workhouse guardians, buying them for paupers to wear. The smock could conceal ragged clothing and starving bodies beneath its capacious folds. As the plight of agricultural labourers became more extreme, newspaper reports began to focus on the realities of their lives. In 1845 an article appeared in the Leeds Times entitled ‘The Envied Class’ which examined the situation of labourers in south Wiltshire and the comments of their ‘representative [sic]’, their MP, Mr Benett, who had declared in a speech to ‘one of those exhibitions of prize labourers, which the landed gentry have recently so much indulged in’ that he would rather be ‘one of you’ than in the highest position in the land (Leeds Times, 1845).32 Six months later fifteen hundred people attended an outdoor night-time meeting at Bremhill village cross, near Calne in Wiltshire, despite local elite attempts to stop the gathering. Working men and women discussed the reality of their ‘slow starvation’; the ‘women were hungry as well as men’. Here they could freely speak their minds without a ‘ducal pint of beer’. As the reporter wrote: ‘Who would have thought, a year or two back, of men in smock-frocks – the hedgers and ditchers, the wielders of spades and hoes  – meeting together; not, unhappily, over good dinners, but in the bleak air of a winter’s night  – to denounce protection  – to accuse it of keeping them hungry  – to call the Corn Laws “accursed?”’ (Sheffield Independent, 1846). Job Gingell, a labouring man from Lyncham, wearing a white smock frock, opened the meeting and then read a statement about his condition, detailing his circumstances and his wages of eight shillings a week on average. He could not afford cheese or meat and saw himself as worse off than convicts in transportation hulks, concluding that the Corn Laws had brought hunger and distress (Wiltshire Independent, 1846).33 The villagers in nearby Goatacre, another small hamlet, held a related night-time meeting, congregating at a crossroads. The speakers were mainly labourers, their purpose being to draw attention to their condition and petition for relief of their extreme distress. One speaker, Charles Vine, noted about the crowd: ‘almost all of ’em wear smock-frocks and poor old hats as I do’, and no one had ‘full bellies’ (Western Times, 1846). The smock frock unified men, binding them together visually for a common cause. Following the meetings in Wiltshire, one was called in Hampshire for similar reasons. Around fifteen hundred people also met by torchlight at a farm in Shirrell Heath, near Waltham Chase. The crowd were ‘chiefly dressed in smock-frocks, denoting their calling’ (Gloucester Journal, 1846). An article describing the living and working conditions of labourers in Ryme, Dorset, stated: ‘Our wonder is that they remain quiet; that privations so shocking do not provoke incessant violence and outrage, and stir up incendiarism.’ It pointed out that the ‘lords of the soil’ ironically thought that they alleviated this distress by offering prizes through their agricultural associations (Leeds Times, 1846). Deliberately excluded from ‘high’ politics, this

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

localised politicisation seems to have passed most contemporary commentators by, possibly as the meetings did not throw up any new radical leaders or actually lead to violent unrest (Freeman, 2001, p. 175). On the surface, ‘Hodge’ continued to remain deferential, placid, and ignorant in his smock. In Whitby in 1858, when a Methodist preacher appealed to the working classes, they were ‘the smock frocks and fustian jackets’ (Whitby Gazette, 1858), two arms of the same body. On the Holkham estate in Norfolk, Rev. Napier argued in a talk titled ‘Respect the Labourer’ that all labourers deserved an education ‘when one thinks of what the fustian jackets and smock frocks have done for us’. Thus men from a humble background had changed the country and brought immense prosperity to all. Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning jenny, ‘wore a smock frock’, and George Stephenson was a cow boy from a mud cottage. So it was a duty and a privilege to raise the social conditions of labourers through education and, by implication, allow them, whatever they wore, to be part of the democratic political process (Bury and Norwich Post, 1858). However, in the Parliamentary Commission of 1867, a survey of Horsham in Sussex revealed the prevalence of small farms, ‘imply[ing] a less intelligent race of farmers’, the occupiers being ‘what is called “round-frock” farmers, with little capital and working the land in great part by themselves and their family’ (Commission on Employment, 1867, p. 8). With the Second Reform Act before Parliament in 1867, the franchise was extended to some working men, while the denigration of small-scale farmers and rural labourers continued through the cypher of their dress. The NALU, founded by Joseph Arch in 1872, harnessed a desire for self-improvement, social equality, education, and self-governance, as also fostered by Methodism, to promote independent action by the rural poor (Lee, 2005, p.  127).34 In 1873 a meeting of the south Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire branch of the NALU was held in Bedford, the main speech discussing the lack of cottage accommodation available for labourers; ‘150 or so wearers of smock frocks’ were present in the audience (Northampton Mercury, 1873). Arch himself, as the son of a shepherd, recalled going to school in the 1830s in a smock frock and hob-nailed boots, which were also his working clothes, whereas the sons of tradesmen were wearing cheap clothes made from shoddy (Arch, 1898, p. 31). However, although ‘smock frocks and fustian jackets’ appeared in the audiences of his addresses in the early days of the agricultural union, Arch wore his own ‘work clothes’ of corduroy trousers, a corduroy vest (waistcoat), and an old flannel jacket to speak (Arch, 1898, pp. 69, 86).35 Suggesting rural ‘otherness’ and oddity, the smock had an image problem for those such as Arch who needed to ingratiate themselves into mainstream politics, where the sombre dark suit held sway. As depicted in the Illustrated London News (Figure 1.3), those who wore smock frocks were still seen as actively participating in politics; here they were taking part in a NALU conference to help the Liberal

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Between metaphor and materiality

1.3  ‘Agricultural Labourers’ Union at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon-Street: Delegates Signing Petition’, Illustrated London News, 3 June 1876.

MP George Trevelyan with his Household Franchise (Counties) Bill for electoral reform. Sympathetic newspapers, such as the Labourers’ Union Chronicle, fought against the superficial characterisations still given to rural labourers by other correspondents, often on the basis of their appearance and smock wearing (Freeman, 2001, pp. 176–77).36 In the franchise demonstration of 1884 in Hyde Park, reports claimed, even some years afterwards, that men from Whitechapel were dressed in smock frocks and carried placards announcing themselves as ‘Hertfordshire Labourers’ to demand the right for agricultural labourers to vote.37 Another article suggested that genuine agricultural labourers were also imported for the demonstration, although they were paid four to ten shillings for their attendance (Gloucestershire Echo, 1884). However, there were also disappointed viewers of the procession that preceded the Hyde Park meeting: ‘I hoped for smock-frocks and knee-breeches, but no such thing was visible … it was not easy to distinguish between the rustic and the townsmen, either by their garb, or figure or complexion’ (Suffolk and Essex Free Press, 1884). The smock frock was thus seen as desirable, a

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

synecdoche of rural identity; Joseph Arch urged his audience in Hyde Park that if another demonstration was required, ‘eight or ten thousand labourers in smock-frocks and billycock hats’ should come (Lichfield Mercury, 1884). A respectable worker created an image of assurance, a man who would agitate in an unthreatening way for a political voice and could be trusted with a vote.38 The smock suggested that wearers would be reasonable and accepting of their lot, as they had been for the last fifty years, at least on the surface. It conferred respectability for their cause, and, as a representation of rural labourers that onlookers also expected to see, it redeemed the demonstration from cries of urban ruffianism. However, disreputable demonstrators from the East End also wore the smock to achieve such a portrayal and to gain political traction, although they were denounced as frauds and for being dishonest (Gloucestershire Echo, 1884). As enfranchisement came closer, the smock itself became part of a largely invented tradition, reaching back to the ‘free’ Anglo-Saxon past (Toplis, 2021, pp. 21–22). Commentators increasingly saw smock wearers as the guardians of an apparently rapidly disappearing rural arcadia, knowledgeable about the old ways. Articles by writers such as Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies in the early 1880s attempted to explain the unknown to their middle-class readers and ignored ‘Hodge’ as the approach of their enfranchisement became imminent and the need to know about agricultural labourers became imperative. Their fitness to be British citizens and part of the electorate was interrogated as well as their possible political allegiances (O’ Hara, 2005, pp. 103–04, 108).39 Writing for an urban readership, Jefferies promulgated the myth of a backward ‘Hodge’ in his influential book Hodge and his Masters (1880), which was also serialised in the Standard newspaper. Pieces in the press likewise expressed doubt about the seemingly politicised rural labourer; the Ipswich Journal in 1885 published an article, ‘The Agricultural Voter’, attempting to determine how the newly enfranchised men might vote. The men were still categorised as a mass, and their character was not thought to be easy to ascertain quickly, ‘For they are by nature slow in thought, and still more slow in speech. It seems very doubtful whether, in every instance, they are aware that they now possess a vote’ (Ipswich Journal, 1885). Conservative elements continued to portray it as absurd that wearers of such strange dress might be politically literate, adhering instead, once more, to the caricature of the ignorant and comically stupid yokel. For political commentators, rural workers were difficult to understand, and there was an assumption, following the tenor of previous reportage, that they knew nothing of and desired little of politics.40 However, the  newly enfranchised agricultural labourers were a prominent part of the electorate, making up around a third of voters in many counties (Clarke and Langford, 1996, pp. 123, 126–27). The Liberal Party and the NALU, both with nonconformist influence, were closely aligned in 1885,

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Between metaphor and materiality contributing to the ‘rustic belief’ in William Gladstone. The Liberal victory demonstrated the misplaced assumption of the elite in supposing that the submissive way in which the labourer had always ‘acted’ with deference to landed interests (the Conservatives) would be maintained under the new franchise (see Figure 1.4). Favours such as the granting of winter coal or occasional smocks might no longer secure an agricultural labourer’s vote (Clarke and Langford, 1996, pp.  120–21, 129–30). Some rural working men were now able to actively seek change through politics. Despite concern about the effect of rural depopulation during the 1880s and particularly during the 1890s, those who stayed in the countryside, notwithstanding now compulsory education and sometimes a vote, were still seen as backward and ignorant, continuing the trope of ‘Hodge’. Concurrently, the artistic liberal elite expressed alarm about the demise of rural ‘folk’ traditions due to the ‘pernicious’ influence of the urban on the rural: for instance, the spread of music hall songs instead of traditional songs and the adaption of country speech patterns to ape urban accents, along with the popularity of urban mass culture. Ironically, the enfranchisement of rural working men, in making them like any other men rather than ‘others’, helped to stimulate romantic and sentimental evocations of past village life and traditions, the smock playing a major part in the visual depiction of this (Blaxill, 2005, p. 97). The need to collect survivals from

1.4  Detail of ‘The​Result of the Roll’, Illustrated London News, 5 December 1885.

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

this apparently decaying and fast-disappearing culture, married with a nostalgia for such a way of life, from folk songs to smock frocks, was now a matter of urgency.41 The smock, as ‘folk’ dress, became associated with an idealised rural past, just out of sight, disguising the poverty that it signalled for many working men. Politically, this romanticised countryside was subordinate to urban notions, with the injustices to rural workers ignored and glossed over for the sake of the aesthetic (Burchardt, 2002, pp. 33–34, 108). Labourers often remained uncooperative for investigators of this vanishing ‘rural life’ in the late nineteenth century, leaving them to report only ‘observable externalities’ such as appearance, including the smock frock, although from the 1880s this was generally worn only by elderly men or young boys. With this lack of information, such aged labourers might be lionised as enigmatic and the keepers of an evocative nostalgia. However, the political assimilation of rural working-class men continued with the creation of parish councils in 1894, giving a degree of local governance and further overriding the ‘Hodge’ stereotype (Freeman, 2001, pp.  184–85). Reports about and photographic portraits of wise elderly men in their smocks, ‘the smock frock veterans’, date from the early twentieth century. For example, Thomas Pitkin, who was described as such, was a farm labourer as well as a Primitive Methodist preacher and the first district councillor for his parish, Swanbourne, Buckinghamshire. He also took part in the Royal Commission on Old Age Pensions in 1884, where he was examined by Edward, Prince of Wales, about bringing up a family on eight shillings a week (Luton Times and Advertiser, 1910, p. 7; Bedfordshire Mercury, 1910, p. 3).42 The ‘veterans’ presented the respectable and unthreatening face of the newly enfranchised voter to newspaper readers. Wearing a smock almost as a battle trophy, some were happy to recount their life struggles to reporters, including survival during the ‘hungry forties’, their wisdom and experience gained in the intervening years making them the equivalent of village elders, and they were often still active for the civic good.43 Despite a long-term crisis in agriculture during the last decades of the nineteenth century and subsequent threatened wage cuts, a letter printed in a newspaper reminded farmers that ‘The labourer is not now Hodge, who wears a smock frock … he is now a citizen who has a vote’ (Tamworth Herald, 1887, p. 5). In 1891 agricultural labourers looked like well-to-do shopkeepers at a ‘rural conference’ in London for the ‘National Union’, presumably the NALU, and were no longer definable by their dress (Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 1891). Labourers could now take a leading role in managing community affairs and in local politics, needing to be cajoled and flattered to vote for a party.44 Following a degree of land reform, including the Allotment Act of 1887 and the Smallholdings Act of 1892, the rural labourer could gain a small piece of land to cultivate, allaying the need to support further land reform. By the 1890s, with

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Between metaphor and materiality the continuing decline of agriculture and perceived need to uphold what remained, the Conservatives gained support across all sections of the population in rural areas (Clarke and Langford, 1996, pp. 133–34). ‘Hodge’ and his invariable smock demonstrated visually and textually the social and economic distance between the rural labouring classes and those who undertook to describe them, often after only fleeting superficial contact, a gulf that was maintained and deepened throughout the nineteenth century (Freeman, 2001, p. 186). The smock frock was an inversion of elite respectability and mainstream dark-suited ‘proper’ masculinity, being loose, skirted, and often light-coloured. As late as 1914 farm workers who were on strike in Wiltshire for better working conditions attended a mass meeting in Swindon dressed in smock frocks. Sounding much like speakers of the 1840s, a spokesman said that the farm workers were tired of their children being insufficiently fed and clothed, although they now had no objections to the number of ‘motors’ that farmers had. The smock became a powerful political weapon, used as an indictment of village elites, the workers’ appearance of ‘otherness’ expressing visually their political discontent with the status quo (Gloucestershire Echo, 1914, p. 5). As a descriptive term, ‘Hodge’ was used most regularly in the mid-­ nineteenth century as the economic fortunes of the agricultural labourer hit their nadir after the crisis of the 1840s. Summed up by a commentator in 1871 as ‘unimaginative, ill-clothed, ill-educated, ill-paid, ignorant of all that is taking place beyond his own village, dissatisfied with his position and yet without energy or effort to improve it’ (quoted in Freeman, 2001, p. 173), this caricature continues to condition certain models of agrarian history that bypass the expressive culture of rural labourers, seeing them as static and uninterested in politics or class consciousness. The smock is often glossed over or elevated to a craft or a folk status which it never really had (Dyck, 1992, p. 191). Examining why labourers wore smocks reveals a different picture, showing that smocks were actually symptomatic of the parlous political and economic state in which most rural labourers lived. There was no rural idyll for smock wearers. A politically active working-class man might wear a smock for many reasons. It could suggest his poverty and oppression in the face of a worsening agricultural environment. It was also his normal clothing, so in an era when overt political symbols and badges might be banned, for those in the know the smock could show his allegiance to his fellow workers and his opposition to the ‘new-fashioned’ farmer, a symbol of ‘otherness’, submerged conflict, and division.45 Rural labourers have been seen as offering little support for movements such as Chartism and Anti-Corn Law protests, remaining passive and leaving the articulation of any grievances to the middle-class and urban leaders (Wordie, 2000a, pp. 11, 21, 23–24). These organisations did draw working men into the political arena, changing their perception about their political potential and their ability to be part

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

of the political mainstream (Wordie, 2000b, p. 44). The smock could also be used as a non-vocal sign to visually display this. That is not to say that everyone who wore a smock did so politically, but the garment could be enlisted for this use. An everyday object made political, the smock worn among a crowd of similarly dressed men gave an appearance of standing together as one at political meetings, a mass of white, enforcing collective meaning and strength for that cause.46 As the smock was inherently not an official uniform or sanctioned as such, the wearer could melt away afterwards without reprisals. When agricultural labourers voted for the first time in 1885, many commentators assumed that they would be uninterested or would vote Conservative, but newly enfranchised rural workers initially showed support for radicalism at the ballot box (O’Hara, 2005, pp. 109, 111). Although this soon dissipated into rural conservatism, the smock remained a symbol of ‘otherness’ and an expression of discontent. During the course of the nineteenth century, the smock frock thus embodied both class-conscious radicals and traditionalists opposed to ‘progress’, such as ‘smock frock farmers’. The dichotomy between the two stances makes the metaphor of the smock frock in political identities fluid and often contradictory. Alongside this, by the 1880s middle-class anxieties and sentiment, as well as elite urban concern about the changing nature of the countryside, partly due to electoral and educational reform, used the smock-wearing labourer as a cypher. Such smocked countrymen became representative of the nation, wearing timeless ‘folk’ dress, an idealisation of the wholesomeness of the English countryside, although very much drawn from southern England.47 The smock was appropriated by the artistic liberal elite and then turned into something specifically rural and ‘folk’, ignoring the material object’s correlation with poverty and degradation. The everyday smock worn by a working man could be an expression of respectability and/or poverty, collective identity and/or radicalism and discontent. It allowed the unrepresented to become part of the political discussion without overt risk or expense. The smock also epitomised an idealised past, firstly in the early nineteenth century when the ‘smock frock farmer’ embodied disappearing working practices and their subsequent way of life, and then again in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as rural life per se came under threat, the smock wearer being rendered as part of country ‘folk life’. Aside from this nostalgic view, for the men who actually wore it as workwear the smock could be politically infused, if not radical, attire. A complex garment with political symbolism on many levels for various facets of rural life during the long nineteenth century, its interpretation depends upon who is reading it. With fluid meanings, a single interpretation of the garment across the period is no longer viable. By reassessing the smock, a different way of accessing the otherwise unrecorded political culture of the agricultural labourer is also revealed.

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Notes   1 Originally from the Fortnightly Review (1883).   2 This term is used by O’Hara, 2005, p. 112. See also Blackman, 2014, p. 217. For the categorisation of people by their physical characteristics relating to the pseudo-­ science of physiognomy, see Hamilton, 2001, pp. 93–94.   3 See also Freeman, 2001, p. 173; Snell, 1987, pp. 6–7.   4 See also Wordie, 2000a, p.  15, who suggests that large farms predominated on country estates by 1815.   5 See, for example, Gillray, 1809.   6 Reproduced in Dyck, 1996, p. 59. See also ‘My Old Hat’, ‘What will Old England Come To?’, and ‘The New-Fashioned Farmer’, for similar sentiments, Dyck, 1996, pp. 57, 149, 163.   7 The caricature for 1829 showed the farmer in a debtor’s cell, his children in the workhouse. See William Heath, coloured etching, ‘Farmer Giles's Establishment – Christmas 1829’, published by T. McLean, 1830, https://www.britishmuseum.org/ collection/object/P_1868-0808-9136, accessed 18 July 2022.   8 The smock was not usually embellished with embroidery until the mid-nineteenth century; see Toplis, 2021, pp. 32–33.   9 Quakers and Methodists, whose working-class following grew steadily in the nineteenth century, also advocated such plain ways of dressing. See Styles, 2007, p. 202. 10 Cobbett saw continuous denigration as a factor as well as food shortages; see Ingrams, 2005, pp. 227–28. 11 See Morning Chronicle, 1849a, in which the special correspondent notes the ‘Socialist doctrines prevailing amongst the rural poor’, namely the principles that they have a right to live comfortably and that land should be held not as property but as a trust. See also Snell, 1987, pp. 8, 386–87. 12 See also Humphries, 1984, pp. 158–61 for submerged local conflict. 13 The smock remained a symbol of poverty into the mid-nineteenth century. See, for example, Salisbury and Winchester Journal (1849), in which farmers protested about the free trade agreement. 14 See also Parliamentary Debates, 1846. 15 For explanation about the arguments around the Corn Laws see Payne, 1993, p. 13. 16 See, for example a letter from ‘One who has worn a Smock-frock’ who complains about the lack of knowledge about ploughing techniques shown by the aristocratic judges in a ploughing competition. Morning Chronicle, 1842. 17 This conflict was expressed in a traditional verse at a meeting of the Dunmow Agricultural and Labourers’ Friend Society, an association also criticised for its annual prize-giving; see Chelmsford Chronicle, 1848. 18 See also Leeds Times, 1846, for an article about labourers’ conditions in Ryme and the rural truck system. 19 See also Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 1850. 20 See also Reay, 2004, p. 144. 21 See also Snell, 1987, pp.  6–8. This attitude continued into the twentieth century, with Percy Grainger, the composer, suggesting that Lincolnshire labourers in 1906 had ‘animal-like goat-bearded faces’ (quoted in Reay, 2004, p. 3, with other derogatory comments). See also Freeman, 2001, pp. 173–74. 22 Shows of deference were not always sincere but were used as a way to get things done while resisting and rebelling internally, see Reay, 2004, p.  158. See also Freeman, 2001, p. 181, who cites the commentary of Henrietta Batson, a Berkshire parson’s wife, on the matter of behaviour manipulation. 23 See Andersson, 2013, pp. 14–16 for a summary.

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Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical?

24 See also Gloucester Journal, 1847, for another similar example. These were apparently published by the Rev. B. Parsons of Stroud, who had participated in a recent election there; see Gloucestershire Chronicle, 1847b. 25 See Lee, 2005, pp. 41–42, who notes that some did not believe in any education for labourers as they would not use it in their working lives and it was therefore a waste of time. See John Leech, ‘The Educational Question’ (Leech, 1847), for a cartoon about this rural education reform. 26 See also Navickas, 2010, p. 543. 27 Pickering notes O’Connor’s effective use of wearing a fustian suit to suggest solidarity with working-class labourers, for example on his release from York Prison in 1841. 28 See also Payne, 1993, pp.  41–42, who suggests that Friedrich Engels, William Morris, and Robert Owen also reflected this vision, Owen’s cooperative schemes, for example, based on the idea of the village. 29 Campaigns were mounted in 1838 in Norfolk to remind people that rural protest and unrest earlier in the decade had brought them nothing; see Lee, 2005, p. 40. 30 See also Leicestershire Mercury, 1839, which reports that Mr Tucky of Lavington gave men new smock frocks if they would go and beat up the Chartists. 31 See Richmond, 2013, p.  296, who notes that the consensus among nineteenth-­ century officials was that agricultural labourers fared worse economically than urban and industrial workers. 32 Punch also featured Mr Pip’s diary satirising a visit to the North Gruntham [sic] Agricultural Society’s annual dinner at Grumbleton, held at the Plantagenet Arms, where labourers received clothing including smock frocks for honest service. See Bell’s New Weekly Messenger, 1849. 33 He had six children living at home, and his expenditure included a smock frock for three shillings plus one for his eldest son for 1s 6d. A similar anti-Corn Law meeting was reported by Alexander Somerville at Upavon, Wiltshire, in 1845, the men in the crowd mainly wearing smock frocks or fustian coats and the speaker, David Keele, in a ‘clean white smock’. See Somerville, 1852, pp. 381–82. 34 See also Scotland, 1981, particularly pp. 22, 42–55, 89, 175–79. 35 He was elected a Liberal MP in 1885, the first agricultural labourer to enter Parliament. 36 The spread of education and newspapers has been seen as the main reason for the development of the NALU. 37 See, for example, Cork Constitution, 1884; Bristol Times and Mirror, 1884; and Worcester Journal, 1891. 38 See Begiato, 2020, pp.  14, 179, 184, 189, for perceptions about working-class respectability in an era of expanding political demands. 39 The Representation of the People Act 1884 (48 & 49 Vict. c. 3) gained royal assent on 6 December 1884. 40 Commentary from 1885, cited in Clarke and Langford, 1996, p. 119. 41 See Freeman, 2001, pp.  179–83; Howkins, 1996, pp.  230–33. See also Howkins, 1986, and Toplis, 2021, pp. 11–20. 42 For his 1894 portrait see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_an_ old_man_wearing_a_smock_1.jpg (accessed 6 January 2021). 43 For example, see North Devon Journal, 1910, p. 7; Northampton Mercury, 1915, p. 6; Bucks Herald, 1916, p. 7. 44 See Verdon, 2017, pp. 4, 6–10, 78–79, for the agricultural crisis. See also Lincolnshire Free Press, 1881, and Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 1893, for reports about agricultural poverty. 45 See Navickas, 2010, p. 552, for the prohibition of political symbols in this period. 46 White was used similarly by the suffragettes. See Navickas, 2010, pp. 541, 544. 47 See Toplis, 2021, pp. 14–16 for more about this preservationism and its relationship to Englishness.

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Between metaphor and materiality

References Andersson, P. K. (2013). Streetlife in Late Victorian London: The Constable and the Crowd. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Arch, J. (1898). The Story of his Life, Told by Himself. London: Hutchinson & Co. Bedfordshire Mercury (1910, 8 July). Begiato, J. (2020). Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bell’s New Weekly Messenger (1849, 2 December). Blackman, C. (2014). ‘Colouring the Claddagh: A Distorted View?’ Costume, 48 (2), pp. 213–35. Blaxill, L. (2015). ‘Joseph Chamberlain and the Third Reform Act: A Reassessment of the “Unauthorized Programme” of 1885’. Journal of British Studies, 54 (1), pp. 88–117. Bristol Times and Mirror (1884, 19 July). Bucks Herald (1837, 25 February). Bucks Herald (1916, 29 January), p. 7. Burchardt, J. (2002). Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change since 1800. London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Bury and Norwich Post (1844, 11 December). Bury and Norwich Post (1858, 12 October). Chelmsford Chronicle (1848, 29 September). Chelmsford Chronicle (1863, 6 November). Clarke, P. and Langford, K. (1996). ‘Hodge’s Politics: The Agricultural Labourers and the Third Reform Act in Suffolk’, in Quinault, R. and Harte, N. (eds), Land and Society in Britain 1700–1914: Essays in Honour of F. M. L. Thompson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 119–36. Cobbett, W. (1985). Rural Rides [1830]. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Commission on Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women in Agriculture (1867). First Report of the Commissioners, with Appendix, Part 1, Parliamentary Papers, 4068-1, vol.  17, p.  8, https://archive.org/details/cu31924002402133/ page/n71/mode/2up. Accessed 12 January 2021. Cork Constitution (1884, 24 July). Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough (1893, 28 October). Derby Mercury (1885, 20 May). Dyck, I. (1992). William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dyck, I. (1996). ‘The Town and Country Divide in English History’, in Chase, M. and Dyck, I. (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison. Aldershot: Scolar Press, pp. 81–113. Evening Mail (1848, 2 June). Freeman, M. (2001). ‘The Agricultural Labourer and “Hodge” Stereotype, c. 1850–1914’. Agricultural History Review, 49 (2), pp. 172–86. Gillray, J. (1809). ‘Farmer Giles and his Wife, Shewing off their Daughter Betty to their Neighbours, on her Return from School’. H. Humprey, No. 27 St James’s Street, 1809, Yale University, Beinecke Library, 4001260, https://findit.library. yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:4001260. Accessed 16 January 2021. Gloucester Journal (1846, 28 February). Gloucester Journal (1847, 28 August).

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Gloucester Journal (1848, 6 May). Gloucestershire Chronicle (1847a, 31 July). Gloucestershire Chronicle (1847b, 18 September). Gloucestershire Echo (1884, 21 Jul1). Gloucestershire Echo (1914, 18 July). Hamilton, P. (2001). ‘Policing the Face’, in Hamilton, P. and Hargreaves, R. (eds), The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, pp. 57–107. Howitt, W. (1840). The Rural Life of England [1838]. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans. Howkins, A. (1986). ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Colls, R. and Dodds, P. (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920. London: Croom Helm, 1986, pp. 64–84. Howkins, A. (1991). Reshaping Rural England: A Social History, 1850–1925. London: Harper Collins. Howkins, A. (1996). ‘From Hodge to Lob: Reconstructing the English Farm Labourer, 1870–1914’, in Chase, M. and Dyck, I. (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison. Aldershot: Scolar Press, pp. 172–86. Humphries, S. (1984). Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth 1889–1939. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ingrams, R. (2005) The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. London: Harper Collins Publishers. Ipswich Journal (1885, 24 September). Jefferies, R. (1880). Hodge and his Masters. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Jones, P. (2006). ‘The Clothing of the Poor in Early-Nineteenth Century England’. Textile History, 37 (1), pp. 17–37. Leamington Spa Courier (1864, 26 November). Lee, R. (2005). Unquiet Country, Voices of the Rural Poor, 1820–1880. Macclesfield: Windgather Press Ltd. Leech, J. (1847). ‘The Educational Question’. Punch, 12 (January–June 1847), p. 159. Leeds Times (1845, 6 September). Leeds Times (1846, 10 October). Leicestershire Mercury (1839, 6 April). Lemire, B. (2006). The Business of Everyday Life, Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600–1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lichfield Mercury (1884, 25 July). Lincolnshire Free Press (1881, 4 October). Luton Times and Advertiser (1910, 8 July). Morning Chronicle (1842, 4 November). Morning Chronicle (1849a, 7 November). Morning Chronicle (1849b, 1 December). Navickas, K. (2010). ‘“That sash will hang you”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–1840’. Journal of British Studies, 49 (3), pp. 540–65. North Devon Journal (1910, 13 January). Northampton Mercury (1842, 8 January). Northampton Mercury (1873, 26 April). Northampton Mercury (1915, 15 January). Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser (1841, 8 May).

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Between metaphor and materiality Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser (1842, 19 March). Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser (1850, 18 May). O’Hara, P. (2005). ‘Knowing Hodge: the Third Reform Bill and the Victorian Periodical  Press’, in Brake, L. and Codell, J. F. (eds), Encounters in the Victorian  Press: Editors, Authors, Readers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103–16. Olmsted, F. L. (2002). Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. Amherst, MA: Library of American Landscape History. Operative (1839, 7 April). Parliamentary Debates (1846, 11  May). Third series, vol.  86, col. 395, https:// hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1846-05-11/debates/c0476e3e-4257-4d068b84-11ef0832d122/CommonsChamber. Accessed 6 January 2021. Payne, C. (1993). Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England 1780–1890. London: Yale University Press. Pickering, P. A. (1986). ‘Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’. Past & Present, 112, pp. 144–62. Preston Chronicle (1846, 17 October). Reading Mercury (1845, 8 March). Letter to the editor. Reay, B. (2002). Microhistories, Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reay, B. (2004). Rural Englands. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richmond, V. (2013). Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Royal Cornwall Gazette (1836, 29 January). Salisbury and Winchester Journal (1849, 12 May). Scotland, N. (1981). Methodism and the Revolt of the Field: A Study of the Methodist Contribution to Agricultural Trade Unionism in East Anglia 1872–96. Gloucester: Alan Sutton. Sheffield Evening Telegraph (1891, 17 December). Sheffield Independent (1846, 14 February). Snell, K. (1987). Annals of the Labouring Poor, Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Somerville, A. (1852). The Whistler at the Plough and Free Trade. Vol. 1. Manchester: James Ainsworth. Styles, J. (2007). The Dress of the People, Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Yale University Press. Suffolk and Essex Free Press (1884, 30 July). Tamworth Herald (1887, 3 December). Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser (1846, 21 October). Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser (1858, 3 November). Thompson, D. (1984). The Chartists. Hounslow: Maurice Temple Smith. Toplis, A. (2021). The Hidden History of the Smock Frock. London: Bloomsbury. Verdon, N. (2017). Working the Land: A History of the Farmworker in England from 1850 to the Present Day. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Western Times (1846, 10 January). Whitby Gazette (1858, 1 May). Wiltshire Independent (1846, 12 February). Worcester Journal (1891, 19 December). Worcestershire Chronicle (1863, 30 September).

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Wordie, J. R. (2000a). ‘Introduction’, in Wordie, J. R. (ed.), Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, pp. 1–32. Wordie, J. R. (2000b). ‘Perceptions and Reality: The Effects of the Corn Laws and their Repeal in England, 1815–1906’, in Wordie, J. R. (ed.), Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, pp. 33–69. Yorkshire Gazette (1846, 16 May).

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2 A delicate balance of power: Victorian tailors and their gentlemen clients Christopher Kent

‘My dear Sir, don’t hurt me by mentioning that’, says Mr Trabb the tailor in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations when Pip tells him that he can pay ‘with ready money’ for the ‘fashionable suit of clothes’ he needs to begin his passage to gentility (1965, p.  177). With these cryptic words Pip is introduced to the mysteries of the relationship between the gentleman and his tailor. While Dickens does not pursue that intimacy, it is central to the Liberal political novelist George Meredith’s semi-autobiographical Evan Harrington, completed only a few months before Dickens began writing his novel. Two years before that, in his semi-autobiographical The Three Clerks, Anthony Trollope, in describing how young Charley Tudor’s failure to pay his tailor’s bill puts him in the grasp of a rapacious money-lender, drew on his own early experiences. This essay will discuss the hostility towards tailors evidenced in both Victorian fiction and the actualities it illustrated. The rhetoric of scorn that Meredith (himself the son of a tailor) so fully displayed in Evan Harrington – ‘nine tailors to a man’ (1910, p. 177) – impugned the tailor’s masculinity and masked the anxiety behind the admission that, notwithstanding the elaborate ideology of gentility, it was by virtue of the tailor’s art that the gentleman was recognised as such (Figure 2.1). This essay will also consider that aspect of the power relationship between tailor and client enmeshed in the debtor–creditor nexus and the tailor’s relationship with the male body. Meredith makes light of the intellectual pretensions of ‘tailordom’ in referring to the tailor Goren’s ‘Balance in Breeches’ theory, comparing it to the diplomatic concept of the ‘Balance of Power’ (1910, p. 13). Yet the political metaphor ‘balance of power’ in fact offers a useful way of conceiving the tailor–gentleman relationship. Dickens the hero-worshipper of Thomas Carlyle was familiar with Sartor Resartus, a work whose ironic attribution of social authority to

A delicate balance of power

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2.1  ‘Offensive Modesty’, Punch Magazine, 1 December 1883.

tailors made it ambiguously gratifying to their self-esteem. Dickens’s discomfort with his own relationship to the category of gentleman may well have found solace in Carlyle’s reflections on the power of dress. But the dandy, an object of scorn for Carlyle, had a fascination for Dickens, as his dress  – notoriously his flamboyant waistcoats  – testifies. When Carlyle first encountered Dickens in March 1840 he saw ‘a small compact

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Between metaphor and materiality figure, very small, and dressed à la D’Orsay rather than well …’ (Froude, 1884, pp.  177–78). The arch-dandy Count Alfred d’Orsay, a close friend of Dickens, was honoured by the name of his fourth son, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens (1845–1912). His youngest son, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens (1852–1902), was named after another close friend, the author of Pelham; or the Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), ‘the hornbook of dandyism’, which devotes several pages to expounding the proper relationship between the gentleman and his tailor (Moers, 1960, p. 83; Bulwer-Lytton, n.d., pp. 145–49). Dickens famously had a problem with black, the defining colour of Victorian gentility, and particularly with its centrality to the Victorian cult of death and mourning. It was remarked that he attended the funeral of Thackeray dressed in checked trousers, his frock coat open to reveal a coloured plaid waistcoat (Ackroyd, 1990, p. 938). He meant no disrespect to his great rival. His instructions for his own funeral explicitly directed that ‘no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band or other such revolting absurdity’ be worn (Forster, 2011, appendix). Dickens’s antiblack edict was itself an unintended ‘hurt’ to tailors, particularly provincial tailors like Mr Trabb, whose only other appearance in Great Expectations is at the funeral of Joe Gargery, where he supervises the ‘mummery’ and supplies the paraphernalia which was an important source of income for tailors (1965, pp. 298–301). The more significant ‘hurt’ that Pip’s ready money inflicted on Trabb was that of reducing their relationship to Carlyle’s cash nexus and depriving him of the ability to seal that relationship with the bond of credit, debt being a demonstration of the tailor’s trust and the client’s pledge of future patronage. Credit was expected by the gentleman who ordered clothing from his tailor. Not just a mark of status, credit was an important convenience, given that middle- and upper-class income was often ‘lumpy’, salaries and investment income arriving monthly or even quarterly. Household goods were commonly ordered by women or even servants not empowered to pay for them, and delivered by agents not authorised to collect payment for them. Grocers rendered their accounts to the head of the household and were paid at intervals. But the case of the tailor was somewhat different. Bespoke clothing could not be bought through servants. Ordering custom-fitted clothes for future delivery was an intimate transaction of mind and body. The tailor had to make quick judgements of a new client’s financial situation. In a widely reported case in 1853, a West End tailor sued Dickens’s friend Douglas Jerrold for £19 6s, the cost of two suits he had made for Jerrold’s son-in-law Henry Mayhew some four years earlier when he was temporarily flush thanks to his popular articles titled ‘London Labour and the Poor’ in the Morning Chronicle. Mayhew had shown the tailor a letter of introduction from Jerrold, who had an account with the tailor. Knowing that Mayhew was notoriously unreliable when it came to money, the tailor approached Jerrold who, according to the tailor, said that

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he would accept financial responsibility for Mayhew’s order, but declined the tailor’s request to put that assurance in writing, declaring that his word was as good as his bond. In court Jerrold disputed the tailor’s testimony and denied assuring him that he would accept liability for Mayhew. The judge raised a laugh when the question of parental responsibility came up. The forty-two-year-old son-in-law, by this time in debtors’ prison, was only eight years younger than his father-in-law. The jury accepted Jerrold’s word over the tailor’s, rejecting his claim. Nobody mentioned the passage in Jerrold’s popular play Nell Gwynne (1833) where a witty courtier tells King Charles that morality forbids him to pay his tailor, as ‘Tailors were brought into the world by sin: ergo, to pay a tailor is to respect the origin of tailors. – A tailor I never pay’ (Jerrold, 1854, p. 15). Liability for tailors’ debts contracted by a minor was something Dickens became familiar with as a father. He made very clear to the feckless Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens’s tailors the extent of his liability for his son’s orders. When the more propitiously named Henry Fielding Dickens (1849–1933), the only son who made a real success of his life, entered Cambridge, his father sent him a guilt-inducing letter stating the terms of his financial support  – ‘I never had money help from any human creature after I was a child’ – and enjoining him to keep meticulous accounts down to the last farthing: ‘We must have no shadow of debt. Square up everything’ and  – a significant exception  – ‘take credit for nothing but the clothes with which your tailor provides you’ (2002, pp. 698–99). When the physicist J. J. Thomson (2011) entered Cambridge a few years after Dickens’s son, it was ‘very unusual’ for an undergraduate to ask the price of a suit before ordering it; paying cash was equally unusual. Bills still unpaid three years after a student had left the university were written off and their amount distributed among the bills of other customers (Thomson, 2011, pp. 72–73). Such practices were obviously  conducive to extravagance. This was explicitly noted in an 1834 Court of Chancery decision against the attempt of a Bond Street tailor to collect over £3,000 from the estate of a young guards officer in payment for clothing he had ordered while under the age of twenty-one. Knowing that he was a minor with an ample allowance, the tailors had offered him credit for extravagant expenditures, including thirty-six white waistcoats. Rejecting the tailor’s claim, the vice-chancellor denounced ‘tradesmen who are unprincipled enough to enter into such transactions with young men’ (Lennox, 1878, vol.  1, pp.  60–63). On his own account Dickens patronised several tailors, including the prestigious firm of Henry Poole, which still proudly displays a cheque dated 1865 from Charles Dickens for £15 – about the price of a frock coat. The scarcity of mentions of tailors in Dickens’s novels is perhaps a reflection of his discomfort with gentlemanly transactions. Dickens died owing money to Poole’s (Howarth, 2003, p. 56).

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Between metaphor and materiality Thackeray by contrast was notably attentive to gentlemen’s dress in his novels and generally sympathetic in his frequent references to and representations of tailors. Viewing snobbery, which he defined to include himself, as an inevitable part of a class society, he saw tailors as both its practitioners and its victims. The reigning tailor of the era in which most of his novels were set was George Stultz, tailor to Beau Brummell and the Prince Regent, whose name recurs in Thackeray’s writings, most memorably in The Newcomes as the maker of the durable if somewhat outdated coat in which the worthy Colonel Newcome returns from India. ‘“A man must have one good coat”, says the Colonel: “I don’t profess to be a dandy; but get a coat from a good tailor, and then have done with it”’ (1901, p. 94). The colonel’s words capture the timeless promise of highclass tailoring  – clothes of cut and quality that transcend mere fashion. Stultz made an enormous fortune, though probably as much from shrewd money-lending as from expensive tailoring, and left large sums to charities in his native Germany and to an almshouse for journeyman tailors in London. His name survived him in the tailoring firm that was patronised by John Ruskin, a careful and tasteful dresser, and was commended by Kingsley in Alton Locke (1850) for treating its journeymen fairly. A recurring figure in Thackeray’s writings is the tailor Mr Woolsey ‘of Stultz’s’. In Vanity Fair he is the ‘gentleman in a gig accompanied by a servant’ who comes to measure Georgy Osborne three days before his sixth birthday for his first suit of clothes (1994, p. 563; my italic). Woolsey is the most sympathetic character in ‘The Ravenswing’, where the ‘gallant little tailor’ is the unsuccessful but faithful suitor of the beautiful singer whose stage name is the title of that comic novella, supporting her professional career and even her scoundrel husband. Woolsey reappears, retired and happily married to the widowed Ravenswing, in Thackeray’s last completed novel The Adventures of Philip. Here its blustering eponymous hero, another version of the author, is rude to the tailor and his clever but low-born wife at a party, but later repents of his snobbery. The tailor is invoked to illustrate a characteristically Thackerayan observation about the perverse psychology of indebtedness: ‘If I never paid my tailor should I be on good terms with him? I might go on ordering suits of clothes from now to the year nineteen hundred, but I should hate him worse year after year … Kindness is very indigestible. It disagrees with very proud stomachs’ (1879, p. 373). Earlier in his career Thackeray had proudly demonstrated his own capacity to digest the kindness of tailors by dedicating, in his persona of Mr M. A. Titmarsh, The Paris Sketch Book to M. Aretz, a Parisian tailor who lent him a timely thousand francs. Indebtedness to tailors is a topic that gets frequent attention in his writings. Fashion, amply reflected in the silver fork novels of his time as well as demonstrated in actual courts of law, taught that tailors’ bills held the lowest priority among a gentleman’s debts. Thackeray denounced this notion on various occasions. A notable

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instance occurs in The History of Pendennis, where Warrington reproves young Pen for pitying the shackled genius of the feckless journalist Captain Shandon, who carouses with his cronies in debtors’ prison: ‘If an author fuddles himself, I don’t know why he should be let off a headache the next morning, – if he orders a coat from the tailor’s, why shouldn’t he pay for it?’ Instead he drinks while ‘poor snip … goes to jail and his family to ruin’ (1972, pp. 355–66). Thackeray further developed this theme in subsequent chapters which would figure prominently in the so-called ‘Dignity of Literature’ debate over the issue of literary pensions and state support for authors, in which followers of Dickens claimed that Thackeray was disparaging the literary profession with his references to irresponsible authors (Howes, 1986, pp. 283–85). Thackeray, familiar with the doings of Jerrold and Mayhew as fellow members of the Punch brotherhood, might well have had the delinquent Henry Mayhew in mind as an example of Shandon’s irresponsibility. In October 1860, shortly before the first appearance of Philip and Great Expectations in serial form, the final instalment of George Meredith’s Evan Harrington appeared in Once a Week. Both Dickens’s Pip and Meredith’s Evan Harrington want badly to be gentlemen; indeed ‘He Would Be a Gentleman’ was the subtitle of the serial version of Meredith’s novel. Both know, though in quite different ways, that tailors have something to do with it. Like Thackeray’s Pendennis and Philip, Pip and Evan are also to a significant extent the alter egos of their creators, neither of whom was so confidently a gentleman as Thackeray. But there is more Meredith in Evan than Dickens in Pip. And while tailors are interestingly peripheral to Dickens’s novel, they are central to Meredith’s. George Meredith was the son and grandson of tailors and painfully conscious of the fact. Although he was anxious that it should not be known, Evan Harrington is remarkably faithful to important details about his family and background, and reads like a sort of self-exorcism in which the author attempts to master an uncomfortable legacy. Like his novel’s hero, Meredith succeeded in becoming a gentleman on his own terms: he was by all accounts a fine figure in dress, manner, and appearance. In his novel he skipped a generation, leaving out his father, an unsuccessful tailor, and made his alter ego the son of his own grandfather Melchizedec Meredith, on whom the ‘Great Mel’, Evan Harrington’s father, is based. This anchors the novel in tailoring’s golden age, the age of the Napoleonic Wars, the age of gorgeous military uniforms and of that definitive dandy, the ex-hussar officer Beau Brummell, whose elegantly restrained and masculine civilian ensemble belied the image of the gaudily overdressed dandy denounced by Carlyle. The historical Melchizedec Meredith was remarkable enough. He was Portsmouth’s leading naval tailor and outfitter in the age of Nelson. Though ‘in trade’, he kept horses, was a fox-hunting man and an officer in the Portsmouth Yeomanry Cavalry, was initiated into Freemasonry as a

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Between metaphor and materiality ‘gentleman’, and shook hands with his gallant customers including Nelson himself. He was, in short, the complete antithesis of the tailor of popular mythology: the effeminate weakling, the ninth part of a man, falling off a horse, sitting cross-legged on a table all day brandishing nothing deadlier than a needle. And if Melchizedec’s son Augustus Meredith, the novelist’s tailor-father, was ‘a muddler and a fool’ in his son’s opinion, his four ­beautiful daughters married very well. George Meredith’s aunts became the models for Evan Harrington’s sisters, who are key players in the snakes and ladders game of Evan’s ascent to gentility (Ellis, 1919, p. 42). Both Pip and Evan are discontented apprentices. Pip’s trade, the blacksmith’s, is manly, independent, unintellectual, and dirty. Evan’s trade, the tailor’s, is unmanly, dependent, intellectual, and clean. Unlike Pip, Evan is a gentleman in his own mind from the start. Being born into high ‘­tailordom’ – a favourite coinage of Meredith’s – he is familiar with the codes of gentility that tailors serve to uphold. His problem is that he cannot gain recognition as a gentleman from those whose society he seeks, and particularly from the snobbish Rose Jocelyn, the counterpart of Pip’s desired Estella. Distanced from autobiography by his knowingly ironic third-person voice, Meredith has more fun with his alter ego than does the anguished Dickens writing in the first person. In the course of his novel Meredith rings the changes on all the insults and contumely, ancient and modern, directed at tailordom. ‘Snip’ was the commonest of them, so common that the young Evan, not yet aware of its pejorative charge, tells his earliest schoolmates ‘I’m the thon of a thnip’ and is duly pelted in the playground (1910, p. 542). Forceful women surround Evan, particularly his desired Rose and her mother Lady Jocelyn, his sister the buccaneering Countess de Saldar whose social ambitions mesh with his own, and his iron-willed mother Mrs Mel who wants him to follow in the distinguished footsteps of his father, become a successful tailor, and uphold family honour by paying off the extensive debts that the Great Mel left behind him. Meredith opens his novel by describing this notable who has just died: ‘He was a tailor and he kept horses; he was a tailor and he had gallant adventures; he was a tailor and he shook hands with his customers. Finally, he was a tradesman, and he never was known to have sent out a bill’ (1910, pp. 1–2). We are not told why he never sent out a bill, just as Dickens doesn’t tell us why Mr Trabb is hurt by Pip’s mention of ready money. Meredith invites us to assume that Mel didn’t consider it gentlemanly to bill his customers. Some would have died bravely in debt. Others would pay their accounts when they could if they were honourable. That a number could not, or were not, explains why he left behind debts approaching £5,000 (p. 15). Seemingly the Great Mel, unlike the Cambridge tailors, thought it dishonourable to ‘distribute’ his bad debts among his other customers’ accounts. Evan Harrington is certainly no defence of tailors, and Meredith (himself a meticulous dresser) barely mentions his characters’ clothes.

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A delicate balance of power

He invokes Carlyle as one would expect, being an ardent Carlylean at the time he wrote it. Echoes of Sartor Resartus are heard at several points in the book, but he does not deploy that work to exalt tailordom. ‘Material enough for a Sartoriad’, comments a local swell on learning about the legendary exploits of the Great Mel. ‘I sing the Prince of Snobs … The man’s an Epic!’ responds Lady Jocelyn, who had admired him in her youth (1910, p. 230). Mel is clearly one of a kind: his heroic exploits have little relevance to the everyday reality of tailordom with which Evan the reluctant tailor’s apprentice becomes briefly acquainted, and over which his story is one of triumph. Meredith gently mocks the intellectual pretensions of tailors and their penchant for inflated rhetoric in describing the practice of their profession (Kent, 2009, pp. 196–97). The worthy Mr Goren, to whom Evan is apprenticed to learn ‘the science of Tailoring’ (Meredith, 1910, p. 266), believes he has discovered the ‘Balance of Breeches: apparently the philosopher’s stone of the tailor’s craft, a secret that should ensure harmony of outline to the person and an indubitable accommodation of the  most difficult legs’. Meredith comments that Goren ‘spoke of his Balance with supreme self-appreciation. Nor less so the Honourable Melville, who professed to have discovered the Balance of Power at home and abroad. It was a capital Balance, but inferior to Mr Goren’s. The latter gentleman guaranteed a Balance with motion: whereas one step not only upset the Honourable Melville’s but shattered the limbs of Europe. Let us admit that it is easier to fit a man’s leg than to compress expansive empires’ (p. 164). Goren’s hobbyhorse was not Meredith’s invention. Thirty-five years earlier, pondering ‘The Balances of Nature’, Obadiah Lapstone had declared: ‘I leave to some scientific snip to instruct the world by a learned descant on the balance of breeches’ (1825, p. 13). The male leg interested Meredith not only as an ardent pedestrian but also for its sexual associations (Kent, 2010, p. 204). Notoriously, one of the most delicate moments in the balance of power between tailor and gentleman is the measuring of the inner leg. Here the tailor has to bow down or go to his knees. Tailoring lore to this day emphasises the importance of never being in front of the client when taking measurements, but rather at his side (Breward, 1999, p. 160). In her untiring campaign to dissuade Evan from becoming a tailor, his sister the Countess delivers her most crushing blow when she says, ‘“Oh, Evan! The eternal contemplation of gentlemen’s legs! Think of that! Think of yourself sculptured in that attitude.” Innumerable little prickles and stings shot over Evan’s skin’ (Meredith, 1910, p.  354). Yet making breeches, especially close-­ fitting buckskin riding breeches, was one of the most skilled and profitable branches of the trade. The short gentleman’s coat exposed the full extent of a man’s breeches before the advent of the long frock coat, followed by the suit jacket, which concealed the crucial area of the trousers down to midthigh or lower. The tailor’s traditional sewing position also has negative

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Between metaphor and materiality sexual associations: ‘at the root of the tree of tailoring the novitiate must sit no less than six hours a day with his legs crossed and doubled under him cheerfully plying needle and thread’. The irony becomes very heavy when Mr Goren informs Evan’s mother that unless her son undergoes this probation ‘all hope of climbing to the top of the tree and viewing mankind from an eminence must be surrendered’ (p. 397). Though Mrs Mel fails to make a tailor of her manly and gentlemanly son, we are left in no doubt about her own forceful character. She keeps a pet monkey who squats ‘with his legs crossed, very like a tailor’ (p. 15). Finally, it is with an ironic compliment to the power of tailordom that the supercilious Lord Laxley decisively ruins his chance of winning Rose Jocelyn’s hand. He refuses to join her in calling on Evan, who has quixotically renounced a large inheritance in her favour, with the words ‘Quite impossible! My London tailor’d find me out and never forgive me’ (p. 558). Meredith’s completion of Evan Harrington coincided neatly with a widely reported libel case in November 1860. William Stockbridge, a solicitor’s clerk and junior officer in a volunteer regiment, sued London’s Daily Telegraph for libel over a maliciously placed newspaper advertisement that hinted he was a tailor. In advising the jury, the judge remarked: ‘I think there would be a vast degree of insolence on the part of a man who would say “You libeled me because you called me a tailor”’ (‘Stockbridge v. Ellis’, 1860). The jury rejected the libel claim. Meredith, himself a journalist, probably noticed this case. He certainly noticed the even more widely reported February 1862 case Haldane v. Landseer in which the celebrated animal painter Sir Edwin Landseer was sued by the West End tailoring firm Haldane for £28, the price of two coats which they had made for him and which he returned claiming that they didn’t fit him properly. The celebrity lawyer Serjeant Ballantine, thought to be the original of Trollope’s Mr Chaffanbrass (Schneider, 2016, p. 68), represented Landseer, an aging and increasingly irascible dandy who claimed that the coats made him ‘hot and uncomfortable’ and that their collars ‘rubbed his hair’. The tailors made several alterations which according to Landseer made the coats even worse. Finally the tailors demanded payment, stating that it was his own fault that the coats were uncomfortable: ‘the coats when first tried on fitted remarkably well, but if you will place your body in unreasonable positions it will require something more than human science to fit you’. Under cross-examination the tailors declared, ‘we are rather famous for our trousers’. ‘But not coats (laughter)’, interjected Ballantine, explaining that Landseer had been advised by a friend that ‘he might trust the lower part of his body to Messrs. Haldane but he was by no means to trust the upper part of his body to them. (laughter)’. Landseer tried on the offending coat ‘and amid roars of laughter presented his back to the Jury, leaving the impression that he was going off in a plethora’ (‘Haldane v. Landseer’, 1862). In Ballantine’s words, ‘The tableau was truly amusing:

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the indignant plaintiff looking at the performance with mingled horror and disgust.’ One of the jury being ‘a little Hebrew slopseller’ from London’s East End, the judge requested his opinion of the coat’s fit. The tailor declared that it was ‘poshitively shocking, my lord; I should have been ashamed to turn out shuch a thing from my establishment’ (Ballantine, 1898, p. 276). The jury sided with Landseer. Meredith, who in 1860 became a staff writer for the Ipswich Journal, couldn’t resist commenting on this case in a leading article that reads almost like an epilogue to Evan Harrington. He wrote: ‘Sir Edwin, we know, is consummate in his mastery of the delineation of the brute creation: so likewise are Messrs. Haldane in the cut of their trousers. Man is Sir Edwin’s failing point: Messrs Haldane succumb to the mystery of coats. Thus the two artists are seen in their strength and weakness.’ It was therefore wrong of Landseer, ‘the more illustrious artist (if he may be said to be more illustrious who exhibits animals in their native beauty, instead of legs in their sartorial splendour), to order coats of the Messrs. Haldane. Why, of course they would not fit!’ His pen dripping irony, Meredith gleefully accused Landseer of humiliating a fellow artist by publicly exposing his weakness. ‘Sir Edwin had little occasion to try on the offending garment, and turn around and round like an agonised puppet in the witness box, while the sympathetic few shed tears at the sight, and some few irreverent ones, we regret to say, laughed.’ Meredith continued: ‘As a moralist, we must protest against the conduct of Sir Edwin’ in encouraging Haldane’s sartorial ambitions. It would have been ‘manlier and more sensible’ of him simply to say ‘No! I can do a dog, and you can fit a leg.’ He concluded: ‘The Jury preferred to arrest the ambitious upward course of the renowned firm of Haldane, who are henceforward confined to legs for the term of their natural lives, and probably while their names endure’ (1862, p. 5). In fact the firm of Haldane subsequently took to advertising itself in the press as ‘HALDANE, LEATHER BREECHES, TROUSERS MAKER, Tailor, etc.’ (1879, p. 22). Another distinguished ironist with a particular interest in coats also commented anonymously on this case. Karl Marx, London correspondent for Vienna’s Die Presse, made it the occasion for a brief disquisition on the English character. Marx observed that although continentals believe eccentricity and individuality to be the distinctive marks of John Bull, the reality is quite the contrary, as class consciousness, division of labour, and public opinion have produced a ‘monotony of character’ in England that would dismay Shakespeare. Fortunately, however, English individuality has one last refuge: the courts of justice. Here ‘the Englishman still appears as a being sui generis’ – witness Haldane v. Landseer. Marx’s account of the trial follows Meredith’s in making play with the tailor-as-­artist conceit. He notes Serjeant Ballantine’s claim that in agreeing to make alterations to their coats the tailor failed the test of the great artist: ‘Would a great

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Between metaphor and materiality artist ever remodel his work? He must stand or fall on his feeling of its excellence. But Haldane did not stand up for the excellence of his work. He acceded to alterations  … .’ Marx closed with the ‘comical summing up by the judge who stressed in particular that English comfort should not be sacrificed to the artistic ideals of the firm of Haldane’ (Marx, 2001, pp. 163–66). Interestingly, Marx did not use this occasion to introduce his Viennese readers to the coat as the exemplification of commodity, soon to be revealed to the world in the first chapter of Capital. Nor would he have wanted them to know about his own coat. As Peter Stallybrass shows, Marx at this time possessed an all-too-real coat that, far from being the custom-tailored item joked about in Haldane v. Landseer, was a shabby garment bought from a tallyman and paid for in weekly instalments rigorously collected even when it was in a pawnshop (1998, pp. 184, 193). It was this very material and essential coat that enabled Marx to appear respectable enough to enter the British Museum and pursue his research on commodity fetishism. ‘Shop! Shears! Geese! Cabbage! Snip! Nine to a Man!’ The Countess of Saldar frustratedly fires off this fusillade of ‘all our titles’ – all the insulting epithets commonly directed at tailors – when Evan appears destined to tailordom (Meredith, 1910, p. 446). Virtually meaningless today, they would have been recognised by most Victorians. Articles about tailors were an unfailing resource of Victorian journalists, who would gloss these various insults, discussing their meaning and origins. Carlyle rehearses several in Sartor Resartus, including Queen Elizabeth’s apocryphal boast of having ‘a Cavalry regiment whereof neither horse nor man could be injured; her Regiment, namely, of Tailors on Mares’ (2000, p. 212). Of course they are all false libels, he assures us, as most writers regularly did while nonetheless keeping them alive by frequent repetition. No Victorian novelist took a greater interest in tailors and the anti-­ tailor mythology than did Anthony Trollope, who often lived in close proximity to them. Early in his civil service career at the Post Office, Trollope fell into debt to a tailor for clothing costing £12 and a loan of £4. Needing cash (and not knowing he had a future successful author on his books), the tailor sold the debt to a professional money-lender, who pursued the young clerk relentlessly and eventually squeezed £200 out of him (Trollope, 1946, p. 59). Trollope later profited from this transaction at least to the extent of incorporating it into his semi-autobiographical novel The Three Clerks (1858), where an unpaid tailor’s bill puts the feckless young civil servant Charley Tudor, Trollope’s alter ego in certain respects, in the clutches of a money lender and leads to his arrest for debt. In his next novel, Doctor Thorne (1858), Trollope ventilated some of the stock anti-tailor libels. In a lively chapter Trollope clearly enjoys himself describing the Barchester election in which the unsuccessful Liberal candidate Gustavus Moffat is humiliated on the hustings by anti-tailor heckling: ‘Go back to your goose,

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Snippy; you were never made for this work’ (1980, p.  234). But Moffat ‘isn’t even a tailor’: he is a rich tailor’s son (p. 231). Presuming himself a gentleman, he seeks the hand of Squire Gresham’s daughter, jilts her, and is further humiliated by a horsewhipping from her brother on the steps of his London club. Despite these early novels, Trollope often challenged the common attribution of unmanliness to tailors. He observes in Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65) that ‘Of all tradesmen in London tailors are, no doubt, the most combative – as might be expected from the necessity which lies upon them of living down the bad character in this respect which the world has wrongly given them’ (1973a, p.  123). After John Grey kicks his assailant George Vavasor down the stairs, Grey’s landlord, a tailor who is ‘something of a fighting man’ himself, suggests that they ‘polish him off’ (p. 128). In Lady Anna (1874) the tailor Thomas Thwaite, ‘a powerful, sturdy man’, knocks the Earl Lovel to the ground on learning of his ill treatment of Lady Lovel (1990, p. 7). His son Daniel Thwaite, also a tailor and the lover of her daughter, is frequently commended by Trollope for his manliness. Trollope’s fascination with politics brings tailors into play on several occasions. Tailors (like shoemakers) were widely viewed as the intellectuals of the working classes, a view they didn’t discourage, and Trollope would certainly have known of two notable radical tailors, Francis Place (1771–1854) and William Cuffay (1788–1870), both of whom rose from trade union leadership to national politics. Having learned much about class – and tact – as well as making a lot of money from making gentlemen’s breeches, Place became a leading organiser of the agitation for the First Reform Act. Cuffay, the son of a freed West Indian slave and a White Englishwoman, was a journeyman tailor who became an advocate of ‘physical force’ on the national executive of the Chartist movement. Convicted of arson in 1848, he was transported to Tasmania, where he spent the rest of his life. However, most of Trollope’s political tailors are cut from smoother cloth, as for instance Mr Hart in Rachel Ray (1863), a rich, clever, affable Jewish tailor from London who comes within a single vote of beating the son of the local squire in rural Baslehurst. The one tailor in Trollope who actually makes it into the House of Commons is the unnamed and unedifying tailor in Marion Fay (1882) who sits for a borough controlled by the Marquess of Kingsbury to gratify that peer’s radical pretensions (1899, p. 12). Unfortunately this ‘glib-mouthed tailor’ does his patron no credit. He turns up drunk on the hustings, but when the Marquess wants to get rid of him, his son Lord Hampstead shows no interest in occupying the seat, so the embarrassing tailor stays. Like his father, Hampstead indulges himself with radical fancies. Hopelessly in love with Marion Fay, the daughter of a Quaker clerk, he complains to his sister, who is also in love with a clerk (who fortunately turns out to be the son of an Italian duke): ‘I ought to have been a tailor. Tailors, I think, are

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Between metaphor and materiality generally the most ill-conditioned, sceptical and patriotic of men. Had my natural propensities been sharpened by the difficulty of maintaining a wife and children upon seven and sixpence a day I really think I could have done something to make myself conspicuous’ (p. 59). Trollope found tailors good to think with about politics and social mobility. In both Ralph the Heir (1871) and Lady Anna, they illustrate the possibility of ascent through marriage. In the earlier novel Thomas Neefit is a West End breeches maker whose business is so prosperous that he considers expanding and ‘degenerating into a tailor’. Instead he simply increases his prices, which makes his perfectly fitting leather breeches even more sought after by horsemen. No Meredithian leg-humiliation for tailordom here. It is rumoured that he ‘would not condescend to measure a retail tradesmen’, and some even doubt ‘whether he would lay his august hand on a stockbroker’s leg’ (1878, pp. 34–35). When one of his hard-up gentlemen customers, Ralph Newton, falls heavily into debt to him, the socially ambitious Neefit conceives the idea that in return for a debt writeoff and a £30,000 dowry, Ralph should marry his pretty daughter Polly. Ralph agrees but Polly Neefit doesn’t, preferring to marry the radical bootmaker Ontario Moggs, an ardent trade unionist and unsuccessful radical candidate for the corrupt parliamentary borough of Percycross. This gives Trollope the opportunity to exorcise his own recent experience as an unsuccessful Liberal candidate for the corrupt Yorkshire borough of Beverley, where he addressed the hustings from the balcony of a Liberal tailor. In The Duke’s Children, which reflects the anti-corruption legislation passed since 1868, the local Conservative candidate Frank Tregear owes his victory to a shrewd local Conservative tailor whose political acumen prevents his rich opponent from using his wealth to buy votes (1973b, p. 447). The theme of Lady Anna is a socially unthinkable marriage between an aristocratic woman and a working man. Daniel Thwaite is an emblematic figure, close to being a cold-blooded abstraction to whom Trollope might have given any of several humble trades. That he chose to make Thwaite ‘a foul sweltering tailor’ who comes ‘reeking from his tailor’s board’ was an act of both sartorial vindication and authorial coat-trailing (1990, pp. 386, 392). The novel was appropriately serialised in the radical intellectual Fortnightly Review. Trollope enjoyed the outrage his novel aroused among such readers as the Saturday Review critic who frothed: ‘This is the sort of thing the reading public will never stand, except in a period of storm and ferment’ (Review of Lady Anna, 1874). ‘The best novel I ever wrote! Very Much!’ Trollope responded (1983, p. 622). Although the word ‘tailor’ recurs in the novel with numbing frequency, ‘snip’ never appears. Trollope pointedly challenges the popular notion that tailors used their occupational association with gentlemen and their knowledge of how to dress and act like gentlemen in order to pass themselves off as gentlemen.

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A radical working man proud of his own order, Daniel Thwaite wishes to have as little to do with gentlemen as possible. The love between him and Lady Anna developed when she and her mother were social outcasts, dependants of his father, who devoted all his resources to supporting and defending them with little expectation of reward. When circumstances make Lady Anna a rich heiress Daniel is even willing to allow her to break their engagement if she wishes to marry Lord Lovel, her poor but handsome, if somewhat effete, cousin (1990, pp. 437, 478). His dream of emigrating to a land uncontaminated by aristocracy is finally realised when he reaches the promised land of Australia – enriched by his bride’s inherited fortune, which he manfully appropriates to himself as the law enjoins. In April 1873, just as the serialisation of Lady Anna began, Trollope was accorded celebrity status by the publication of his caricature by ‘Spy’ (Leslie Ward) in the society weekly Vanity Fair (Figure 2.2). Its full-frontal portrait angered him. His wild and woolly beard being within the bounds of acceptable exaggeration, it was probably the artist’s affront to his dress that upset him most. Ward gave his frock coat a ridiculous cutaway that framed a bulging belly and exposed a preposterous pair of trousers. Ward paid particular attention to the dress of his subjects and was rarely so unkind in depicting it. Though he boasted of having been ‘of service to a good many tailors in my time’ by making his subjects aware of their ‘habilatory shortcomings’, in this case he may have upset Trollope’s tailor even more than his client (Ward, 1915, p. 127). Trollope had no illusions about his own body, mocking himself in Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65) as  Mr  Pollock ‘the sporting literary gentleman’ who has only two cheap horses and weighs fifteen stone: ‘No one ever knew how Pollock did it, – more especially as all the world declared he was as ignorant of hunting as any tailor’ (1973a, pp. 178–79). Trollope often remarks on the dress of his male subjects, though rather than describe it in detail he is more likely to comment on its appropriateness and general effect. Much of Trollope’s thinking on the subject of gentlemen’s dress is captured in his description of Frederic Osborne, the aging but still good-looking Lothario in He Knew He Was Right (1869) who is ‘fond of intimacies with married ladies’: ‘Colonel Osborne was always so dressed that no one ever observed the nature of his garments, being no doubt well aware that no man over ­twenty-five can afford to call special attention to his coat, his hat, his cravat, or his trousers; but nevertheless the matter was one to which he paid much attention and he was by no means lax in ascertaining what his tailor did for him’ (1869, vol. 1, p. 13). The exemplary young gentleman Frank Tregear in The Duke’s Children (1880) ‘was always well dressed and yet always so dressed as to seem to show that his outside garniture had not been a matter of trouble to him’ (1973b, p. 20). The dodgy financier Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister (1876) is ‘never … dressed otherwise than with perfect care’. Even his own tailor considers him ‘extravagant in the number of his coats and

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Between metaphor and materiality

2.2  Anthony Trollope by Sir Leslie Ward, 5 April 1873. Chromolithograph.

trousers’. But, Trollope significantly notes, ‘No one of those around him knew how much care he took to dress himself well, or how careful he was that no one should know it.’ Crowning Lopez’s sartorial cleverness, he let it be thought that ‘he paid his tailor regularly’ – a cunning trick that deflected suspicions about his financial condition (1973e, pp. 6–7). In his short story ‘The Turkish Bath’, the editor of a journal, Trollope’s alter ego, while undressing ‘beneath the gaze of five or six young men

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A delicate balance of power

lying on surrounding sofas’, notices that one of them, whom he knows, ‘looks almost as fine a fellow without his clothes as he does with them’. The editor is deceived by a would-be author who sits down beside him in the Turkish bath. ‘Men do depend much on their outward paraphernalia’, remarks the editor. ‘And why?’ responds the genial stranger, who turns out to be a ­lunatic – ‘Because they can trust their tailors when they can’t trust themselves’ (1870, p. 12–13).1 It was in Thackeray (1879), his short study of his great patron, that Trollope issued his much quoted obiter dicta on men’s dress: ‘I hold that gentleman to be best dressed whose dress no one observes’ (1887, p. 200). Interestingly its purpose is to illustrate the transparent excellence of Thackeray’s writing style. That as a gentleman Trollope tried to follow his own strictures about the importance of being unnoticeably dressed made the Vanity Fair caricature particularly wounding. Trollope was fifty-eight at the time the caricature was published. The relationship of dress and age is a prominent sartorial concern particularly in Trollope’s later novels. Sharp-eyed women pass judgement on elderly suitors. The old Duke of Omnium, moving with slow dignity and an upright carriage, ‘had not been long under Madame Max Goesler’s eyes before she perceived that his tailor had done a good deal for him’ (Phineas Finn, 1973c, vol. 2, p. 172). ‘After touching up his grey hair, but not too much, and padding himself with care and looking carefully to his trousers’, Maurice Maule proposes marriage to Madame Max and is rejected. ‘He’s a hundred and fifty years old; – and what there is of him comes chiefly from the tailor’, comments Glencora Duchess of Omnium (Phineas Redux, 1973d, vol. 2, pp. 71, 265). ‘Welcome, first of all, mine ancient friend, my tailor’, wrote the sixty-five-year-old Trollope in his essay ‘The Tailor’ (1927, p. 1). What follows this genial opening is decidedly barbed. The tailor has finally overcome the old calumnies and risen to the dignity of the cheesemonger. He is ‘gentleman-like’, being of course well dressed, but bears the stigma of the shop. He underpays his employees and overcharges customers, who are made to cover the unpaid bills of his posher clients. If you don’t like that, Trollope advises, you should buy your clothes at the cooperative stores for 25 per cent less. But, he concedes, if you want the best clothes money can buy – he is your man. Trollope may well have had a particular tailor in mind when he wrote this: the firm of Henry Poole & Co., London’s, indeed the world’s, leading tailor. His name appears on Poole’s books, as do those of Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and a host of aristocratic and royal personagess led by the first gentleman of England, the Prince of Wales. Trollope also knew Henry Poole socially: they were fellow members of the Moray Minstrels, an elite coterie of higher Bohemians led by the fashionable draper and haberdasher Arthur Lewis. Henry Poole (1814–76) appears in Disraeli’s last novel, Endymion (1880), where the very rich tailor Mr Vigo (later Sir Peter Vigo, MP) is an amalgam of Poole and the fraudulent railway promoter George Hudson

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Between metaphor and materiality (1800–70). This nostalgic semi-autobiographical fantasy, set in the 1840s when Disraeli’s political career was just beginning, was published five months before his death. In it the civil service clerk Endymion Ferrars is spotted by the rich sporting tailor who likes to bet on rising young men. Vigo gives Endymion/Disraeli sartorial advice and unlimited credit, promising not to bill Endymion until he becomes a privy councillor. Endymion of course becomes prime minister. Henry Poole the Savile Row tailor was just entering a period of remarkable success in the 1840s. Disraeli’s description of Vigo’s lifestyle captures the opulence of Henry Poole in his heyday. Poole backed Louis Napoleon when he was a French prison escapee living in London and was rewarded by being appointed tailor by imperial warrant to Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. Understandably, he failed spot the rising young Disraeli, who eventually becomes a client of Poole’s – after becoming a privy councillor (Howarth, 2003, p. 56). When Disraeli first entered politics he was a fashionable novelist and flamboyant dresser with a taste for living beyond his means and a talent for juggling extensive debts. Surprisingly few references to tailors appear in his early novels, and none at all in his first and most dandyish, Vivian Grey. The ‘Young England’ hero Harry Coningsby wears a coat made by Stultz, like all his fellow Etonians (1870, p. 150). But Disraeli couldn’t yet afford one. His tailor was Richard Culverwell of Great Marylebone Street, who not only clothed him on credit but also lent him money and acted as his financial go-between. Disraeli’s letters to him offer a fascinating window into their relationship. Culverwell made the outfit in which Disraeli dazzled the hustings at Taunton, ‘showily attired in a dark, bottle-green frock coat, a waistcoat of the most extravagant pattern, the front of which was almost covered with glittering chains, and in fancy-pattern pantaloons’ (O’Kell, 2014, p. 146). He relied on Culverwell to fend off pressing creditors, plying him with praise, promises of payment, and orders for more clothing. When Culverwell eventually baulked, Disraeli was ‘excessively hurt’ by the tailor’s lack of faith in his future, as he notes in a letter dated 8 May 1837 (Disraeli, 1982, p. 263). Interestingly Culverwell at this time was lending money to another upstart and future Tory minister, John Rolt, who in 1866 would become a fellow minister with Disraeli in the government of Lord Derby. Rolt, the antithesis of Disraeli in financial prudence, was a poor young clerk who borrowed £200 from Culverwell to finance his legal education, assigning to him as security an insurance policy on his own life (Rolt, 1939). Disraeli’s letters of 1844 show him still using the services of Culverwell, whose later court appearances indicate that his money-lending activities combined ingenuity and illegality. He financed an illegal and crooked West End gambling club, and acted as a ‘bonnet’ or shill at its table as well as providing gentlemanly dress and officers’ uniforms for other shills (‘J.B.’, n.d., pp.  24–25; ‘Douglas v. Culverwell’, 1862). As his political career progressed Disraeli toned down his dress:

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A delicate balance of power

‘if it erred, it was on the side of monotony’, noted an admirer (Fraser, 1891, p. 149). Unlike Dickens, Disraeli liked black, especially black velvet, which went well with his pale complexion. Defying Trollope’s dicta, he made efforts to look young, dyeing his hair and wearing stays. His devoted wife instructed a tailor who came to measure Disraeli at home to ignore her husband’s stoop and ‘make the coat as if for a young man who stands upright’. The inevitable consequence, to the tailor’s dismay, was an ill-­ fitting coat (Aldous, 2007, p. 134). That particular tailor was not Poole but Jackson of Cork Street. Mr Vigo and Henry Poole shared the social skills necessary for success in tailordom. The fictional tailor was ‘neither pretentious nor servile, but simple and with becoming respect for others and for himself’ (Disraeli, 1881, p. 66). So too was Henry Poole, who was withdrawn at the age of fifteen from an ‘Academy for Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Sons’ and brought into the family firm, where, unlike Evan Harrington, he accepted his fate and duly became an adept in the mysteries of tailoring. He also became a keen horseman, cultivating fox hunting and racing circles and making the firm’s premises a congenial clubhouse where rich young men could drink fine hock, smoke the best cigars, and, of course, order smart, well-fitting, expensive riding dress and uniforms. Like Melchizedec Meredith, he came as close as a tailor could to being a gentleman. A critical observer, Sir William Fraser, who ‘despised [Poole] as a tailor’ because he did nine fittings for a uniform he made for him so as to get into the barracks of the Life Guards where Fraser was an officer in order to attract custom, nevertheless acknowledged that ‘with consummate tact’ he always drew up his handsome carriage behind the Officers’ House – at the tradesmen’s entrance. Once when Fraser, briefly mistaking the impeccably dressed Poole for a fellow Old Etonian, instinctively held out his hand, Poole recognised Fraser’s mistake, ‘raised his hat most respectfully, bowed and passed by’. Henry Poole knew how to behave like a gentleman, but never forgot that he was a tailor (Fraser, 1891, pp. 418–19). By the 1860s Poole held royal warrants from most of the royal families of Europe. He was the Rothschilds’ tailor. J. P. Morgan became a client at the age of twenty. The British aristocracy patronised him extensively, and most importantly the Prince of Wales, fast becoming the leader of gentlemen’s fashion, placed his first order with Poole at the age of eighteen and soon made him his chief tailor. Poole regularly drove his phaeton in Rotten Row behind the finest team of horses in London. Another Rotten Row regular was the legendary horsewoman and courtesan Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters, who displayed her form in skin-tight riding habits that she made known, doubtless for a consideration, were made by Poole. Like Disraeli’s Vigo, Poole was an unabashed celebrity hound. On his deathbed he implored his closest associates to convey to the prince ‘the deep feeling of gratitude and (if the expression may be used) the respectful affection he

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Between metaphor and materiality entertained towards His Royal Highness for all the many kindnesses and condescensions he had experienced through so many years’ (Howarth, 2003, p. 2). Seemingly at the summit of its fortunes, his firm was in fact in serious financial trouble at the time of his death. Like the Great Mel, Poole was lax in collecting debts, especially those of some slow-paying or non-paying clients whose patronage he was most eager to attract and hold. His firm teetered precariously in the delicate balance between a ‘gentlemanly’ and a businesslike attitude towards its debtors. Fortunately control fell into the hands of businesslike relatives who were determined to rescue it. They liquidated Henry Poole’s personal extravagances, including the Thameside villa over which Disraeli rhapsodised in Endymion, and adopted a more hard-nosed attitude towards debt collection that extended even to the Prince of Wales, who was notorious for using his position to his financial advantage. ‘The Prince of Wales paid up, though apparently not very promptly and in considerable chagrin, then withdrew his custom’ (Howarth, 2003, p. 73). But the prestige of Poole’s survived and the firm maintained its position as the top gentlemen’s tailors. The diminishing presence of tailors in the later Victorian novel is an indication of their changing place in the social landscape. Who notices that the father of Bathsheba Everdene, heroine of Far from the Madding Crowd, was a ‘gentleman tailor’? (Hardy, 1874, p. 71). That the sociologically rich novels of H. G. Wells, born in 1866, and of John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, both born in 1867, show scant interest in tailors is indicative of the era in which their authors grew up. What made a gentleman remained a matter of interest, but the tailor ceased to be an interesting figure. Contributing to this were the democratisation of the suit and the proletarianisation of the tailoring trade. To possess a suit became a normal attribute of the urban male thanks to the sewing machine, cheaper fabrics, and factory production that put it within the means of the masses. Mass production in standardised sizes meant that a reasonably fitting suit could be bought ‘off the peg’ with little or no alteration. As early as 1864 the astute Mary Elizabeth Braddon in her sensation novel Henry Dunbar sends a shabby ruffian into the shop of a ‘tailor and general outfitter’ in the morning to emerge in the afternoon ‘as well dressed and gentlemanly-looking as any man in Southampton’ for only £18 12s 9d– cash (1864, vol. 1, p. 84). The swelling ranks of exploited men and women who made this possible were difficult to envisage as a threat to gentlemanliness – except perhaps as a source of contagion. In 1892 there was a flurry of concern in the press when a tailoress who made the trousers of the Duke of York, the future King George V, told the Trades Union Congress that they might be harbour diphtheria from an infected sweatshop. An investigation by the Association of London Master Tailors officially determined that the Duke of York’s trousers posed ‘no danger whatever’ to his health (‘The Tailors and the Duke’s Trousers’, 1892).

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A delicate balance of power

Gentlemen’s tailors responded to the democratisation of the suit by claiming that discernment was needed to appreciate the superiority of bespoke clothing in fabric, construction, detail, but above all, fit. Only by a number of expert measurements and fittings could the best be made of the customer’s unique body, which included suppressing or concealing its defects or irregularities. This doctrine is expounded by the Tailor and Cutter, the weekly organ of the high-class tailoring trade – or ‘­profession’ – along with ‘style’ and ‘taste’, the subtly ever-changing yet somehow timeless ideals of gentlemanly sartorial elegance that were not dictated by tailors but were determined by gentlemen themselves. Tailors were merely respecting the judgement of the taste-making gentlemen depicted in the pages of Tailor and Cutter, led by that insatiable clothes-horse the Prince of Wales (Kent, 2009). This idealised version of the tailor–gentleman relationship is captured in No. 5 John Street (1899), Richard Whiteing’s semi-­satirical condition-of-England novel whose conscientious gentleman narrator undertakes a survey of English society. He samples slum life in the hovel of the book’s title where he encounters one of the tailoring proletariat, a scrawny intellectual radical. At society’s high end he is fascinated by Seton Ridler, a buff young nouveau riche Etonian who spends much of his time discussing his wardrobe with Settles, his fashionable tailor. ‘Sir, what a tailor you’d have made!’ Settles exclaims in response to Ridler’s sartorial expertise (p. 174). Ridler takes no offence at the tailor’s compliment: ‘Self-preservation Settles. I’ve got to wear the clothes. Besides, I haven’t spent half my life in your shop for nothing.’ Settles’s response, ‘It isn’t merely knowing how to make clothes, sir: it’s knowing how to put ’em on’ (p. 174), captures a shifting balance of power.

Note 1 On the phenomenon of Turkish baths in the Victorian period, see Shifrin, 2015. On Trollope’s short story, see Spooner, 2012.

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Between metaphor and materiality Dickens, C. (1965). Great Expectations [1861]. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Dickens, C. (2002). The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 12, 1868–1870. Ed. Madeline House et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Disraeli, B. (1870). Coningsby, or The New Generation [1844]. Longmans, Green. Disraeli, B. (1881). Endymion [1880]. London: Longmans, Green. Disraeli, B. (1982). Benjamin Disraeli: Letters, vol.  2. Ed. J. A. W. Gunn et  al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ‘Douglas v. Culverwell.’ (1862, 3 March). Evening Standard (London), p. 7. Ellis, S. M. (1919). George Meredith: His Life and Friends in Relation to his Work. London: Grant Richards. Forster, J. (2011). The Life of Charles Dickens [1872–74]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Sir W. (1891). Disraeli and his Day. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. Froude, J. A. (1884). Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 1834–1881. London: Longmans, Green. ‘Haldane, Leather Breeches, Trousers Maker, Tailor, etc. to Her Majesty The Queen, H.R.H. The Prince of Wales, the Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards’ (1879, 8 February). Sporting Gazette, p. 22 [advertisement]. ‘Haldane v. Landseer’ (1862, 3 February). Morning Post, p. 7. Hardy, T. (1874). Far from the Madding Crowd. London: Smith, Elder. Howarth, S. (2003). Henry Poole: Founders of Savile Row. Honiton: Bene Factum Publishing. Howes, C. (1986). ‘Pendennis and the Controversy on the Dignity of Literature’. Nineteenth-Century Literature, 41 (December), pp. 269–98. ‘J.B.’ (n.d.). Scenes from the Lives of Robson and Redpath [1857]. London: W. M. Clark. Jerrold, D. (1854). Nell Gwynne, or The Prologue: A Comedy [1833] in Comedies and Dramas. London: Bradbury and Evans. Kent, C. (2009). ‘Depicting Gentlemen’s Fashions in the Tailor and Cutter, 1866–1900’, in Brake, L. and Demoor, M. (eds), The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press. Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 184–200. Kent, C. (2010). ‘The Victorian Gentleman and the Pleasures of Dress’, in Gentile, K. J. (ed.), Sexing the Look in Popular Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 194–212. Kingsley, C. (1850). Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography. New York: Harper. Lapstone, O. (1825). ‘Views of Life. No. VI. The Balances of Nature’. Newcastle Magazine, 4 (5) (February), pp. 11–16. Lennox, Lord William Pitt (1878). Fashion Then and Now. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall. Marx, K. (2001). The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 19, General Works 1844–1895. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex. Meredith, G. (1862, 6 February). ‘The Week’. Ipswich Journal, p. 5. Meredith, G. (1910). Evan Harrington: A Novel [1861]. New York: Scribner’s. Moers, E. (1960). The Dandy. London: Secker & Warburg. O’Kell, R. (2014). Disraeli: The Romance of Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Review of Lady Anna (1874, 9 May). Saturday Review, p. 598. Rolt, Sir J. (1939). Memoirs. London: Inner Temple. Schneider, W. E. Engines of Truth: Producing Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

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Shifrin, M. (2015). Victorian Turkish Baths. Swindon: British Heritage. Spooner, C. (2012). ‘Modes of Wearing the Towel: Masculinity, Insanity and Clothing in Trollope’s “The Turkish Bath”’, in Boehm, K. (ed.), Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Culture. London: Palgrave, pp. 66–83. Stallybrass, P. (1998). ‘Marx’s Coat’, in Speyer, P. (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. New York: Routledge, pp. 183–207. ‘Stockbridge v. Ellis – “The Daily Telegraph” Alleged Libel’ (1860, 1 December). Morning Post, p. 7. ‘The Tailors and the Duke’s Trousers: An Official Statement’ (1892, 26 September). Glasgow Evening Post, p. 4. Thackeray, W. M. (1879). ‘The Ravenswing’ [1843], in Catherine, Men’s Wives, etc. London: Smith Elder & Co. Thackeray, W. M. (1899). The Adventures of Philip [1861–62]. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Thackeray, W. M. (1901). The Newcomes [1853–55]. London: Macmillan. Thackeray, W. M. (1972). The History of Pendennis [1848–50]. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Thackeray, W. M. (1994). Vanity Fair [1847–48] New York: Norton. Thomson, J. J. (2011). Reflections [1936]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trollope, A. (1864). Rachel Ray [1863]. London: Chapman and Hall. Trollope, A. (1869). He Knew He Was Right. 2 vols. London: Strahan. Trollope, A. (1870). ‘The Turkish Bath’, in An Editor’s Tales. London: Strahan. Trollope, A. (1878). Ralph the Heir [1871]. London: Chapman & Hall. Trollope, A. (1887). Thackeray. London: Macmillan, [1879]. Trollope, A. (1899). Marion Fay [1882]. London: Chatto & Windus. Trollope, A. (1927). ‘The Tailor’, in London Tradesmen [1880]. Ed. Michael Sadleir. London: Elkin Matthews and Marrot. Trollope, A. (1946). An Autobiography [1883]. London: Williams and Norgate. Trollope, A. (1952). The Three Clerks [1858]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trollope, A. (1973a). Can You Forgive Her? [1864–65]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trollope, A. (1973b). The Duke’s Children [1880]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trollope, A. (1973c). Phineas Finn, the Irish Member [1869]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trollope, A. (1973d). Phineas Redux [1874]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trollope, A. (1973e). The Prime Minister [1876]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trollope, A. (1980). Doctor Thorne [1858]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trollope, A. (1983). Letters of Anthony Trollope. Ed. J. N. Hall. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Trollope, A. (1990). Lady Anna [1874]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, L. (1915). Forty Years of ‘Spy’. London: Chatto & Windus. Whiteing, R. (1899). No. 5 John Street. New York: Century.

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3 Second-hand clothes, second-hand politics: sartorial exchange, social reform, and the work of the novel in Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon Peter Katz

This chapter considers gifts of second-hand clothing and social reform in the late nineteenth century. Victorian moralists, Stefan Collini writes, have ‘a tendency to look upon altruism as the heart of all moral virtue’ (1991, p.  66). As the economic expression of altruism, gifts potentially subvert exploitative economies; as Vincent Pecora puts it, Marcel Mauss argues that gift exchange is ‘the unchanging anthropological ground of reciprocity in human society as a whole and thus the only sound basis for more egalitarian or utopian dreams of social harmony’ (Pecora, 1997, p. 228). At the same time, however, Mauss acknowledges that gifts are never truly altruistic, but rather are ‘given and reciprocated obligatorily’ (1990, p. 3). Every gift entails expected reciprocation, whether in the form of a subsequent gift, social standing, or a later favour, and so on. Even an expectation of thanks or gratitude is nevertheless an expectation. And so, while gifts offer the Victorian reformer a potential means to fix competitive systems, they in fact saddle recipients with obligations they may struggle to repay. The Liberal social reformer Walter Besant’s 1886 novel Children of Gibeon is in part an attempt to think through the complex politics of gift-giving. Throughout the text, Besant uses second-hand clothing to critique exploitative modes of production. At the same time, second-hand clothing serves as a metaphorical framework in which to investigate the second-hand politics of socialism and ‘give-and-forget’ charity. As an act of social reform, gift-giving imposes a series of obligations the recipient must fulfil: to improve her social standing, to change herself and her culture. Second-hand clothing accentuates the decided lack of altruism entailed in gifts, for these obligations redouble the personal and social markers that clothing always entails. Most importantly for Besant and late nineteenth-century reform, gifts of clothing reduce their recipients to mere labourers marked by their work. Through its fixation on clothing, Besant’s

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Second-hand clothes, second-hand politics

novel distinguishes between modes of social reform in the 1880s: from charity, socialism, and benevolence that deliver their politics ­second-hand, to Besant’s politics of individual care that acknowledges labourers as people. One of the core preoccupations of Children of Gibeon is the degree to which social interaction manifests itself as sartorial exchange. The central plot of Children of Gibeon follows Valentine and Violet Eldridge, a pair of wealthy heiresses. One of the girls is in fact adopted from a working-class family, but only their ward knows which girl is which. The novel opens with Lady Eldridge’s announcement that when the girls come of age, their true identities will be revealed. Valentine, convinced she is the working girl (she is not), goes to live with her ‘siblings’ in the East End. She stays with her sister Melenda and two other girls, Lotty and Lizzie, who work as seamstresses. Dress epitomises the social condition of these women: they labour in the piece-work production of dresses, but cannot afford to wear anything but rags. These rags mark them as labourers and reduce their bodies to mere markers of labour, to mere machines. The novel follows Valentine’s political development as she devotes herself to the improvement of the working girls’ lives. Given her access to wealth, Valentine might well begin with a model of charity, but she rejects this option out of hand. Instead, her endeavour to help the workers begins with socialism. Valentine first encounters socialism as a kind of second-hand politics handed down to her by one of her brothers, Sam. Like gifts of second-hand clothing, though, Sam’s socialism only covers up rather than resolves the problems, and exists primarily to aggrandise the socialist himself. Valentine then proceeds to a model of benevolence. This model, too, overlooks the workers, and because it places the onus of improvement on clothing itself, it unintentionally dissolves working-class community. Valentine finally learns what Sam cannot: that like ­second-hand clothing, political reform will fail to elicit change if it addresses only the surface conditions of labour. Instead, she learns that while she must see the dirty rags her sisters wear, she must ultimately look beyond them through an ethics of personal care that acknowledges workers as individuals.1 Clothing in Children of Gibeon is not only metaphor. Rather, the physicality of dress enables Valentine to create a materialist ethics. Materiality offers a means to resolve the ostensible tension between Liberal emphasis on individuality and the systemic social structures that harm the dressmakers of the novel. In ‘From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood’, Vicky Cheng and Haejoo Kim argue that Children of Gibeon ‘addresses the practical necessity of fulfilling working-class material needs by pursuing communitarian values’ instead of ‘individuality obtained through the propagation of middle-class culture’ (2019, p.  188). While Besant’s earlier works like All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) emphasise ‘the cultivation of individual happiness’, in Children of Gibeon, Besant instead

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Between metaphor and materiality recognises the ‘importance of universal community: a sisterhood that supersedes familial kinship and class distinctions’ (Cheng and Kim, 2019, p. 190).2 To make this change, I argue, Besant recognises that to debate between communitarian (e.g. Socialism) and individual (e.g. Liberalism) politics is to mistake the aetiology of inequality; ideological contest subordinates labourers’ embodied experience to a contest of ideas. To address the suffering of the East End, Besant turns to an ethics of care rooted in the physical; while he aims to acknowledge the individual personhood of each labourer, his use of second-hand clothing in Children of Gibeon reveals that feelings, embodiment, personhood, and ideology – individual or ­communal – begin and end in materiality.

Charity Pragmatically, the importance of the second-hand market to the economy is that it allows the maximum amount of capital to be generated from the labourer and the commodity the labourer produces.3 But the exploitation inherent in the exchange is troubling: the dressmaker makes money from the seamstress’s work when she sells the dress to the client; the second-hand salesperson then makes a profit when he sells the dress at a slightly higher cost than that at which he purchased it from the client–and he sells it back to the seamstress who made it. The second-hand garment points out the exploitation inherent in the system of production, consumption, and resale. And so the Victorians produce a discourse that makes the second-hand market palatable: charity. Second-hand sales are not merely an attempt to recoup some of the exchange value of a commodity, and in fact, any good member of the leisure class would deny monetary motive. Rather, when one sells old clothes, the economic capital regained matters far less than the sense that one has accomplished good. For the original owner, part of the allure of the second-hand market is the idea that she has somehow contributed to a need within the system of distribution – in this case, the need of the poor labourer. One of the great ironies of Children of Gibeon’s seamstresses is that they spend all day working to produce clothing they themselves probably could not afford. Variance in pricing makes it all but impossible to pin down the price of a dress in 1886, but a bit of estimation demonstrates the alienation between the worker and her product. The girls in Children of Gibeon are ‘outdoor hands’  – seamstresses who work from their own quarters rather than in a shop. Such labourers work piecemeal for the dressmaker, who interacts directly with clientele at the shop.4 Melenda and her friends make buttonholes, which means they are not milliners, who would perform some of the finer work on clothing. According to F. Mabel Robinson in an 1887 Fortnightly Review article, a skilled milliner could make £1 to £3 per week, while ‘second-class outdoor hands’ like

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Second-hand clothes, second-hand politics

Melenda, Lizzie, and Lotty made between 15s and 18s per week in 1887 (1887, p. 52). In Children of Gibeon, however, the girls’ earnings are at the whim of the Law of Elevenpence Ha’penny, a reference to David Ricardo’s argument that wages will stay as close as possible to the lowest cost ‘which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution’ (1817, p.  90).5 Altogether, the three women manage to make 17s 3d per week (Besant, 1886, vol. 1, p. 148). Whether this discrepancy between Robinson and Besant lies in miscalculation or exaggeration, the point remains that, practically speaking, there is little difference in spending power behind Robinson’s estimation (2s per day) and Besant’s (17d per day). To put this in perspective: an 1888 article in the Nineteenth Century estimated an annual cost of £35.8s 4d for a middle-class woman’s clothing, or a little more than the annual pay of all three girls after rent (Layard, 1888, p. 243). An advertisement for C. Hayman’s clothing store in 1885 lists dresses costing from 20s to £5; the women who made these dresses would probably have needed anywhere from one to five weeks’ pay in order to purchase them. Valentine encounters a woman who uncannily prices out the cost of the young philanthropist’s clothing: her dress is £3 3s, her boots £1 1s, and her gloves 4s 6d (Besant, 1886, vol. 2, p. 63). This is particularly upsetting for Valentine because it reminds her that her dress would cost her sisters four weeks’ pay. Valentine’s consternation offers a crucial insight into the Victorian representation of the seamstress. The seamstress’s work is particularly alienating – and particularly upsetting for the middle and upper classes – because she can afford neither the time to sew her own clothing nor the capital to purchase the clothes she makes. The need for a second-hand market to clothe labourers translates exploitation into a charitable service provided for workers. Particularly in the late nineteenth century, creative writers and philosophers alike referred to the second-hand market as a need, and an opportunity for the  upper classes to fill that need.6 In an 1880 issue of the Saturday Review, one author writes that ‘it is certain that many of the respectable lower classes must always dress themselves in cast-off apparel’ (‘Old Clothesmen’, 1880, p.  170). In the face of this inevitable need, to sell ­second-hand clothing is to ‘render useful service to the poorest class of all, the purchasers of this rejected gear, which is better than no clothing at all’ (‘The Old Clothes Exchange’, 1882). Henry Mayhew repeats this discourse when he relays a story from an old shoemaker who also understood ­second-hand markets as a service for the poor: [S]uch places as Rosemary-lane have their uses this way. But for them a very poor industrious widow, say, with only 2d. or 3d. to spare, couldn’t get a pair of shoes for her child; whereas now, for 2d. or 3d., she can get them there. (1861, p. 221)

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Between metaphor and materiality It is important to note the language of virtue embedded in this quotation. This is not merely a woman, but an ‘industrious widow’  – and she does not buy shoes for herself, but ‘for her child’. Modifications like these emphasise the charitable service of the second-hand market over the pragmatic exchange of money. The shoemaker goes on to add that ‘[t]here’s a sort of decency, too, in wearing shoes’ (p. 221). The shoemaker’s simple, ­genuine-sounding reflection is in fact a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it validates the notion that to sell one’s old shoes provides decency to a worker in need; on the other, it points out the indecency of a system that reduces a class of people to something less civilised. Together, the emphasis on virtue and need creates a market in which the upper classes do not simply sell undesirable commodities to recuperate a fraction of the money original spent; instead, they impart virtue or ameliorate a need. For Besant, second-hand clothing merely covers up exploitation, and provides the giver with a sense that she or he has accomplished some sort of good – all at the expense of the worker’s body. The best example of this exploitative charity economy in Children of Gibeon comes from the gift of a handkerchief. One of the working girls, Lizzie, has a paramour, Jack Conyers, who imagines himself a man of ‘Art, Culture, and the Higher Criticism’ (Besant, 1886, vol.  2, p.  145). Jack’s desire to be a man of art requires him to have a beautiful, Pre-Raphaelite model. He chooses Lizzie as his model, and tells her that he ‘desire[s] above all things to get that face and those beautiful eyes into his own studio’ (vol. 2, p. 110). This not entirely romantic declaration fetishises Lizzie’s body piecemeal. She is not a living body; rather, she has two useful parts, and they are useful only insofar as he can gain social (and potentially pecuniary) capital from them in a painting. To further underscore the way Jack dissociates Lizzie’s parts from her body, the narrator tells the reader that Jack believes the painting’s ‘hands … would have to be chosen from another model’ (vol. 2, p. 111). Jack rejects her hands because ‘making button-holes in thick coarse shirts does really pull the fingers into all sorts of shapes’ (1886, vol. 2, pp. 112–13). But it is not simply that her hands are unpleasant; they are unpleasant because of the labour they perform. For Jack to gain the social status of an artist, he must obscure the labour that Lizzie embodies. To accomplish this mystification, Jack turns to clothing. He obsesses over the clothing Lizzie wears, for her rags mark her as a physical embodiment of the street. Despite Lizzie’s beauty, ‘her ulster still covered a ragged frock and her hat was shabby to the last degree’ (Besant, 1886, vol. 2, p. 110). And so when he attempts to beautify her, Jack insists that Lizzie ‘want[s] nothing but a little better dress to outshine them all [higher class models]’, for the new clothing would replace the markers of exploitation (vol. 2, p. 116). He finds her ‘a bright-coloured kerchief, one of the cheap things in jute which look so pretty’, and:

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Second-hand clothes, second-hand politics [W]ith a dexterous hand, … he twisted the kerchief round her neck, and over her shapely head, so as to let the curls of her fringe play about the folds and to set off the singular beauty of her eyes with a frame rich and full of colour. (vol. 2, p. 116)

The addition of the kerchief allegedly brings out Lizzie’s beauty, and makes her a worthy, Pre-Raphaelite model. In a rare moment of insight, however, Lizzie sees through Jack, and ‘shudder[s], because it seem[s] to her as if all her beauty l[ies] in the crimson handkerchief’ (vol. 2, p. 117). To Jack, this is true: Lizzie remains marked by the shabby dress, and cannot take on the beauty that to him exists independently of her body, outside the reach of her class. This alteration disembodies Lizzie; the handkerchief supplants her body. Jack’s interaction with Lizzie’s clothing is a critique of charitable gift economies more broadly. Charity fails because it does not acknowledge Lizzie as anything more than a labourer to cover up. Moreover, Jack is charitable only for the social and pecuniary gains he will secure with his painting and act of charity. When one sells clothing in a second-hand market and feels as if one has done good, one has simply acquired virtue at the further expense of the labourer’s body. Nothing about her condition has changed; she is merely, for a moment, covered in something cheap that might obscure her labour – something like Jack’s scarlet kerchief. For the Victorians, clothing is intimately bound up in identity. Seth Koven writes that ‘clothing was both a metaphor and a marker of class and sexual identities’ for the Victorians (2006, p. 19). But in Children of Gibeon, clothing goes further than metaphor to supplant the bodies they cover. An 1877 article in the London Reader best summarises this idea: the clothes people wear become almost as closely identified as their skins.  … [T]he garments so express the character of the person, that by a stretch of fancy one might be tempted to speculate whether the individuality has not itself been so absorbed by the clothes, that in another dress the individuals, to use their own expression, ‘would scarcely know themselves’. (Anon., 1887, p. 570)

Second-hand clothing is a sort of sloughed-off skin; the cloth all but literally embodies the person who once owned it. The ‘cast skins’, as the London Reader calls them, ‘expres[s] the characteristic peculiarities of their wearer’ so that they connote or even are the bodies they cover. Second-hand boots and shoes invite one to ‘speculatively associat[e] them with the people who have stood, or are again about to stand in them’, and ‘[a] pair of “second-hand” trousers hanging at the door of a pawnbroker’s shop are sometimes more indicative of humanity than an anatomical preparation’ (p.  571). In other words, clothing can become a more real body than a real body. Clothing – put over one’s body so it becomes a ‘cast skin’ that supplements flesh – is so intimately bound up with the individual

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Between metaphor and materiality that others interact with it as though it is part of another body even once it is sold, and perhaps especially once it is sold. With such an intimate relationship between clothes and their wearers, a gift of clothing exposes the social relations bound up in things. Marilyn Strathern writes in The Gender of the Gift that ‘“Gift economy”, as a shorthand reference to systems of production and consumption where consumptive production predominates, implies … that things and people assume the social form of persons’ (1988, p. 144). The equivalence between persons and things is reinforced in the interchangeability of cloth skins and the bodies they cover. This means, however, that when gifts of clothing transgress social boundaries, they implicate the bodies they cover in that transgression. When Jack gives Lizzie the handkerchief, he in some sense offers to transform her into a higher-class body. But Lizzie cannot exist in her second-hand form; her labourer’s body marks the handkerchief as out of place. And here is where Besant’s novel exposes a paradox in the logic of charity: if second-hand clothing is given with the intent to aggrandise the giver, then the item handed down in charity can never truly be the labourer’s own.

Socialism Besant’s critique of charity is based in capitalism’s self-absorption. By tracing this self-absorption in socialism, Children of Gibeon uses the charitable model that hands down from above to critique socialism as a kind of second-hand politics.7 This section explores second-hand socialism through the radical socialist Sam Monument, one of Valentine’s assumed siblings. Like Jack’s handkerchief, socialism is a political system handed down from on high, with the specific intent of deriving symbolic capital for its proponents. Crucially, socialism as Sam presents it overlooks the suffering of individuals in favour of a focus on systems and materiality. Like charity, it elides workers’ bodies and reduces them to mere markers of labour. Egoism is central to Besant’s critique of socialism, for the socialist’s selfishness belies its claims of egalitarianism in contradistinction to liberal reform’s altruism. In response to Valentine’s scepticism about socialism, Sam warns Valentine that ‘[t]he working men are the masters of the country, and we are the masters of the working men. They are looking to us already. We are going to be their leaders’ (Besant, 1886, vol.  1, p. 199). Sam’s rhetoric of socialism establishes an equal society, with the schoolmaster above that equality. A government of schoolmasters will surpass Parliament, because the government knows nothing about ‘the working man’ – but, ‘[a]s for us [schoolmasters], we do know him’ (vol. 1, p. 200). The resonance of the word ‘know’ in this context speaks beyond academic knowledge, and even beyond material conditions of existence.

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Sam claims an intimate, thorough understanding of the working man’s existence as such. However, his version of knowledge abstracts the working men’s bodies from their material conditions, and reduces them to mere labour. And this is socialism’s primary foible in Besant’s novel: it focuses on systematic change rather than people, and thereby ignores individual suffering. Socialism reduces labourer’s individual bodies to a collective because it resists capitalism as a system. Though the word ‘system’ appears first when Claude describes Sam’s nemesis, he attributes the word to Sam (Besant, 1886, vol.  2, p.  49). Valentine implores Claude, ‘think of those poor girls working every day and all day long, and for so little! Is it just and right? Who is to blame for it, Claude?’ He responds, ‘The system, I suppose, is to blame – whatever the system may be’ (vol. 2, p. 49). In this early conversation, Claude translates the ‘poor girls’ – by which Valentine means Lotty, Lizzie, and Melenda  – into a collective mass oppressed by the collective ‘system’. Valentine finds this proposal initially attractive, and adopts socialism as her new creed. She declares that ‘if we cannot help her [Melenda] in any other way, we will help her by altering the System, even if we have to call in Sam, and all become Socialists’ (vol. 2, p. 56). Though she intends to ‘alter’ rather than ‘overthrow’ (Sam’s word) the system, Sam’s monolithic ‘system’ proves an attractive target for Valentine’s budding concern for the working class because it offers a single project for her to fix. Besant critiques socialism for its wilful disregard for individual suffering. And indeed, Valentine’s time as a socialist crusader is rather shortlived. She finds herself confronted with Lotty’s impending death; the seamstress will not live to see the collapse of the old system and the rise of socialism. Valentine begs Sam, ‘Never mind the Competitive System: that will take a good many years to destroy’ (Besant, 1886, vol. 2, p. 124). Instead, he should ‘[t]ry and find some readier way to help those girls. Consider, one of them is dying slowly; we can’t save her; we can only make her easier: the other two are wasting their lives in the most terrible poverty’ (vol. 2, p. 125). When Sam resists, Valentine responds: ‘Think, Sam, oh, think … of their rags and their misery and try to help them.’ ‘I do think of their rags. Good God! … I think of their rags and their misery for weeks together after I have seen Melenda.’ ‘Then I wish, Sam, that you saw her every day.’ ‘If I did I should only hate the system more and more.’ (vol. 2, p. 125)

This passage is full of rich moments, but I draw attention to one key element: Sam’s insistence on abstraction over the lived experience of the bodies in front of him – embodied by their clothing. When Valentine implores him to ‘think … of their rags and their misery’, his first response is that he does ‘think of their rags’. Crucially, he drops ‘their misery’; he

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Between metaphor and materiality thinks only of their material conditions as evidence of economic wrong, and disregards their emotional distress. He analyses systems; he does not sympathise with individuals. Valentine’s dismissal of Sam carries surprising emotional resonance: ‘I ask you for advice, and you offer me the chance of a new System. Go away and rail at Competition, while we look after its victims’ (vol. 2, p. 127). This recognition of individuals rather than generic classes is crucial in Besant’s politics. Kevin Swafford argues that ‘Besant believed that the typical, sensational depictions of the East End were not simply narrow and prejudicial … but also unethical’ (2019, p.  175). Besant sought to represent the labourers as individual people rather than a mere mass because he recognised ‘in the actualities of everyday life a subjective and collective sense of identity is inextricable from the social, cultural, and political dynamics of recognition’ – of being acknowledged as a person (1886, vol. 2, p. 177). Socialism as Sam practises it cannot care for individuals, for it cares only for its principles and abstractions. Most importantly, because socialism cares only for labour and not labourers, Besant understands it as a system external to the working people. While Sam understands socialism as a kind of gift offered by the schoolmasters to the working people, Claude recognises the social exploitation inherent in such a gift. He says: I am certain there is no System, or Institution, or code of laws, whatever, which can be imposed upon a people, unless they are ready for it, and desire it for themselves. … [I]t will be always impossible to make the men of ability, who are the only men to be considered, desire a system in which they themselves shall not be able to [do] good to themselves first. (Besant, 1886, vol. 3, pp. 186–87)

While socialism remains an external imposition, it will remain a gift in the most exploitative sense of the word. Sam expects authority in the system to come as recompense for his commitment to the war against exchange, and the labourer remains merely that: a labourer. But Sam’s socialism demonstrates a crucial paradox in Valentine’s quest. Sam sees his sister’s rags, but he does not see her misery. Valentine must answer for both: she seeks to improve both the working girls’ material conditions embodied in the rags and the emotional condition of misery. The rags offer a material handhold for Valentine to begin to understand the seamstresses’ feelings. In his ‘Art of Fiction’, Besant characterises ‘Sympathy’ or the ‘Enthusiasm of Humanity’ as a ‘power of vision and feeling’ (1884, pp. 13–14). Sam’s sympathy, if he is in fact sympathetic at all, is solely a sympathy of sight. In other words, when he sees the rags of the working girls, Sam is not looking in the wrong place; he is merely short-sighted in that he only sees.8 This is the paradox of the rags: Valentine must look first to the rags, for the rags lead

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her to sympathise with the seamstresses – but she must also look beyond them in order to feel. Second-hand clothing is not mere ‘representational displacement’ that produces simplistic charity (Swafford, 2007, p.  26). Rather, it is a technology of sympathy that begins as representation, but ultimately becomes material as Valentine cultivates her materialist ethics of care.

Benevolence Even as materiality offers her a more effective politics than socialism, Valentine finds she must transition beyond the rags to acknowledge the bodies beneath them. Both Sam’s socialism and naïve charity fail to acknowledge the workers’ embodied navigation of their material conditions. In other words, they embrace materiality, but abstract it from lived experience. In apparent contradistinction to Sam’s socialism, Children of Gibeon offers an alternative gift economy I will call benevolence, which focuses specifically on improving the material conditions of the individual. I take this term from the novelist Dinah Mulock Craik’s essay ‘Benevolence – or Beneficence?’, which appeared in her 1875 Sermons out of Church.9 In her analysis of gift-giving from social reformers to the poor, Craik opposes these two terms to argue against benevolence, which consists in mere kind feeling; doing good certainly sometimes, but in a vague and careless way, and more for its own pleasure than for another’s benefit; giving, because to give is agreeable, but taking little pains to ascertain what has been the result of the gift. (1875, p. 152)

Benevolence, in short, is naïve gift-giving. The intent behind benevolent gifts may be noble, but such motives are merely virtuous rather than effective. Benevolence provides a stepping-stone forward for the would-be reformer in that it replaces egoistic charity, and focuses on the individual rather than the system. But, as Valentine’s gift of second-hand clothing to her sister Melenda demonstrates, benevolence does not solve the problems it attempts to address. While benevolent second-hand gifts of clothing in Children of Gibeon are superior to charitable gifts, they do not escape the exploitative logic of exchange, for they fail to acknowledge labourers’ individual feelings as well as material conditions. For the Victorians, gift-giving offers a potential escape from the exploitation of capitalism, and a means to alleviate the suffering of ­poverty  – but Besant challenges this ideal. Pure altruism motivates the ideal or perfect gift, which neither requires reciprocation nor metes out obligation. In reality, though, the perfect gift is ‘[t]he very figure of the impossible’, for there always exists some kind of social obligation in return, even if that obligation is merely gratitude (Derrida, 1992, p.  7). Though idealism itself is not usually a problem for social problem novels,

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Between metaphor and materiality the naïve gift does not provide a pragmatic solution for poverty. In fact, the attractiveness of the idealised gift is even more dangerous than Jack’s self-serving charity. Where Jack’s gift obviously comes from an ulterior motive, the most problematic gift in the novel is an even more idealised form: a gift between sisters. Early in the third volume of Children of Gibeon, the seamstresses’ work angers their employers. And so, when Melenda goes to retrieve payment for past work and accept new work, her employers ‘drill’ her (Besant, 1886, vol. 3, p. 58). She must stand and wait for her money and new work. If she leaves, she will be ‘told when [she] come[s] back that the work’s come down and been given to another girl’ (vol. 3, p. 63). Melenda stands without food or water until the evening, when she returns home physically weakened from her ordeal. On the third day, Valentine finally goes to the shop to intervene – and loses Melenda her job in the process. Valentine attempts to spin this as a liberation that lifts Melenda to a better circumstance, and so announces that her sister’s change in social relations necessitates a change of clothes: ‘Do you think I am going to have my own sister go about in such shocking rags as these any longer? … Everything has got to be changed’ (vol. 3, p. 93). She dresses Melenda in some of her own clothing, so that after the third day of her drill, Melenda is resurrected, transfigured into a new woman. Traditionally, gift-giving has been understood as an inherently feminine form of exchange. At its anthropological roots, this appears to be because women themselves were often given as gifts. Claude Lévi-Strauss writes that women are the ‘supreme gift’, in that the giving of women between families inscribes new bonds of kinship in patriarchal societies (1969, p.  65). Anthropologists connect this claim to qualitative data that suggest women give and receive more gifts than men, so that even when they acknowledge that ‘[g]ift giving by women is embedded in a network of social expectation, norms and rules regarding their society rights and duties’, there remains a sense that gifts are fundamentally feminine, and that the feminine has fundamental ties to gift-giving (Komter, 1996, p. 120). Of course, the gender of the gift is a theoretical effect, rather than an essential cause. Any model that places women outside capitalist exchange will fetishise women as much as if they remained the supreme gift. As it applies to the nineteenth century, the logic is seductive: if capitalism is a masculine, public exchange with inequality and competition built into it, and gift-giving is the opposite of capitalist exchange, then gift-giving must be feminine and therefore ‘resis[t] an economy based on the exchange of commodities’ (Miller, 1995, p. 41). And indeed, as Jill Rappoport argues in Giving Women, Victorian women’s ‘gift exchanges radically reconstructed [their] private relationship and public activism’ (2012, p. 5).10 As Valentine is Melenda’s sister both (Valentine assumes) by blood and by spirit, it makes sense that she would use a gift economy

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to subvert the exploitation of the capitalist production that threatens Melenda. But the argument that the gift economy is separate from capitalism nostalgically ‘presupposes (individual and collective) misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the reality of the objective mechanism of the exchange’ – that is, the social shifts and obligations that the gift demands (Bourdieu, 1977, pp.  5–6). When Valentine gives Melenda new clothes, she evokes imagery of the ideal, sisterly gift between women, but in fact, the novel recognises the onerous demands and obligations that she places on her sisters.11 In the context of reform, the gift obliges one to change oneself. On the first day of being drilled, Melenda rejects Valentine’s help. When she finally gives in to Valentine’s offers of help, she surrenders that independence, particularly the distinctiveness of her body. The distinction between the narrator’s physical treatment of the drill and Valentine’s analysis of Melenda’s body is telling, for where the narrator emphasises the embodied distinctiveness of the seamstress, Valentine subsumes Melenda’s experience into her own sense of embodiment. The narrator writes an anatomical treatise: the girl feels first of all grievous pains in her limbs; she shifts her weight from one foot to the other, her feet swell, her back and shoulders ache, her head becomes an aching lump of lead  … after an hour or two, her cheeks have become flushed, her lips tremble, her hands shaking, and her eyes are unnaturally bright. (Besant, 1886, vol. 3, p. 69)

Close attention to the physical effects of the drill offers an avenue, however second-hand, into the experience itself. Most importantly, the narrator acknowledges the seamstress as an independent body with distinct sensations; the acute physicality of the description demands that the reader acknowledge the seamstress as a body. Valentine’s actions, however, insist that to move outside her suffering, Melenda must become a body like her own. As she dresses her sister, Valentine elides the differences between them: ‘You are not quite so tall as I am, but the frock is short for me. … The frock is a little loose in the waist, but you will fill out very soon now’ (Besant, 1886, vol.  3, p.  93). While she acknowledges their differences in height and girth, the frock itself becomes a cover that will eventually make their bodies similar. Most crucially, she evades Melenda’s suffering with a compliment: ‘Artists would give anything to paint that beautiful dead gold hair’ (vol. 3, pp. 93–94). The correlation with Jack’s fetishisation of Lizzie deliberately challenges the benevolence of Valentine’s charity, for even if she does not seek to paint Melenda herself, Valentine nevertheless obscures her presumed sister’s body behind a façade of second-hand clothing. Even the clothes themselves emphasise the correlation, for she gives her sister a ‘gray dress … with a red handkerchief in front, with a white collar and white cuffs’ (vol. 3,

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Between metaphor and materiality p. 94; my italic). As with Lotty, it seems as if all Melenda’s upward mobility is tied up in the red handkerchief. Where the charitable giver sees the labourer as a machine for capital production, the benevolent giver unwittingly reduces the labourer to an empty frame, devoid of individual value and communal connections. The broader ramifications of Melenda’s makeover emphasise the danger of benevolence that gives without thinking of the ramifications. Melenda’s employer insists that Valentine ‘take her protégée elsewhere’ for work – and in fact, Melenda never finds work again in the novels (Besant, 1886, vol.  3, p.  80). Valentine’s gifts of clothing in fact cause the drilling, for the ‘glimpse of the better life’ that Valentine offers Lizzie ‘made her  … careless in her work’ – and for this, Melenda is drilled (vol. 3, pp. 60–61). Moreover, as Valentine re-dresses Melenda, ‘[n]o one, unfortunately, noticed Lizzie’, who leaves the house out of fear that Valentine will leave her behind. Lizzie flies to Jack, who takes her shopping for the red handkerchief mentioned above. In short, Valentine’s gifts indirectly cause Melenda to be drilled, loses the girls their work, and inspires Lizzie to fall into temptation. All these ills derive from obligation: to change oneself, and ultimately to shift allegiance to a new community. When Valentine gives Melenda her gift, she obliges her to change herself and abandon the working community. Valentine intends her gift of second-hand clothing to establish a new community, a sisterhood that reaches across class boundaries to connect the labourer and the aristocrat. As opposed to charity, which reinforces the inability of the recipient ever to pay back the giver, benevolence is meant to circumvent obligation. But this dissolution of the working girls’ community underscores the reality that ‘within social systems where possession and control of the transfer of goods reside predominantly with a privileged group … gifts participate in the reinforcement of the status of that group and the power to control others through binding obligation’ (Murphy, 2006, p. 203). So, while Valentine’s gift offers a new degree of kinship to Melenda, that offer dissolves Melenda’s kinship with other workers. When Melenda walks outside in her new clothes, ‘for the first time in her life, she did not like the crowd. She left the street, therefore, and went back to her own room’ (Besant, 1886, vol. 3, p. 100). Lizzie feels that her family has fallen apart, and so seeks out her exploitative lover. Where Jack’s charity demands recompense in the form of social and symbolic capital, Valentine’s gesture is admirable in that she asserts a universal sisterhood with her gift and invites Melenda to leave off being a labourer and join her as a sister. But as we have seen, the ‘invitation’ of a gift is often an obligation that devalues both Melenda’s autonomy and her community. And this is the critique Besant makes of benevolent politics: it does not acknowledge the value of the labourer’s current life. Benevolence, like socialism, addresses labourers as labour rather than individuals, and so

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cannot help but replicate the same dehumanising mechanisms of the very system it seeks to replace.

Faces Against socialism and benevolence, Besant offers the Sense of Humanity – a politics of individual care that allows people to help themselves. This model surpasses both revolution that focuses on rags and gifts that bind all social mobility up in the gift itself, and instead acknowledges and sympathises with the suffering bodies behind the rags. Sympathy drives Besant’s model of social reform, and intimate, physical experience catalyses sympathy. Children of Gibeon is the spiritual successor of Besant’s first social reform novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men. In fact, their plots are so similar, their politics so mirrored, that one might read Children of Gibeon as a second draft of All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Besant himself says that Children of Gibeon ‘touch[es] a note of deeper resonance’, and is ‘the most truthful of anything that I have ever written’ (1902, p. 247). The key difference between the composition of the two novels, Besant writes, is that before he wrote Children of Gibeon, he immersed himself in the East End: ‘I knew every street in Hoxton; … I had been about among the people day after day and week after week’ (1902, p.  248). Saturated with images and memories from his time among the workers, including a room with three girls ‘stitching away fore bare life’, Besant says: ‘All these things and people I saw over and over again till my heart was sore and my brain was weary with the contemplation of so much misery. And then I sat down to write’ (p. 248). This intimate knowledge of the people and places provided Besant with the means to sympathise with their experiences, for his model of sympathy depends on proximity: ‘First I drew what I saw; then my sympathy went out towards my models; the next step was to write for them, to work for them, to speak for them’ (1902, pp. 260–61). Here, social action is a trajectory: from proximity, to seeing ‘things and people over and over again’, to sympathy, and finally to advocacy and action. When Besant uses Valentine to work through this process, she serves not only to explore the genesis of sympathy, but also to challenge and rework alternative models of social action. Initially, Valentine believes that socialism is the best mode of social action; she then moves to benevolence; finally, she arrives at embodied, direct sympathy for the working girls. Here, again, the paradox of the rags emerges. Physical objects like the working girls’ rags ground Valentine in the reality of the labourers, and prevent her from abstracting the labourer into a mere sign of work. But when the time comes to reveal which sister was born into the working class, her mother claims that ‘Valentine is not an artist; she neglects the rags, whether they are picturesque or not, and looks for the man below

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Between metaphor and materiality them’ (Besant, 1886, vol.  3, pp.  234–35). Though she must begin with the rags, Valentine must also move past them. When she ‘neglects the rags’, Valentine circumvents the exploitative second-hand systems that fill Children of Gibeon: the production of clothing itself; the benevolent offering of second-hand clothing; the exploitative second-hand gifts of the socialists like Sam and social climbers like Jack. By connecting individuals and their clothes, Valentine learns to acknowledge the bodies behind the rags, to feel for them, and to tell their stories. For Besant, to acknowledge the personhood of the labourer is to acknowledge the exploitation of the gift economy. As a person, the labourer does not need an externally imposed political revolution or an unasked-for red handkerchief; instead, she can help herself. Craik writes that, where benevolence does not care about the results of its gifts, justice ‘aims less at helping people than at enabling them to help themselves’ (Mulock Craik, 1875, p.  153). Shared sorrow, in turn, might enable the reader to transcend the exploitation of charity, socialism, or benevolence; instead, through sympathy, readers might become like Valentine and care for the person rather than the rags. As Valentine prepares to leave the East End just before her coming of age, the narrator adds: There is a Sense which lies dormant with most of us. … Let us call it, if you please, the Sense of humanity. It is not philanthropy, nor benevolence, nor sentimentality; it is a thing much fuller and wider than any of these. … It is a Sense by means of which one is enabled to separate the man from his clothes, whether they are rags or gowns of office. (Besant, 1886, vol. 3, pp. 161–62)

The recognition of the person is central to the Sense of Humanity; it is a politics of personal care, built on the acknowledgement of the labourer as a person, rather than a marker of labour. When she returns for the final time to her home, Valentine looks back on her experience with the working girls in language that Besant would later replicate in his autobiography: ‘These faces haunt me. … I shall carry home with me a ghostly crowd of faces. How many thousands of faces have I seen here and none of them alike’ (vol. 3, p. 193). These faces, and the irreducible differences between them, take the place of rags. Of course, the notion that liberalism is a politics of individuals is hardly surprising. What is most interesting about Besant’s liberalism is not that it turns away from the rags, but that it needs them to begin. Children of Gibeon fixates on models of second-hand clothing exchange precisely for the same reasons it critiques them. Liberalism needs the obligation of charity, because it hopes to give the labourer an opportunity to improve herself; it needs the materialism of socialism, because it seeks to ameliorate working conditions; and it needs the utopian vision of benevolence to motivate sympathy. This strange materialism requires the rags in order to reject them.

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Coda: strange materialism At the heart of the novel lies another paradox: Besant hopes to critique second-hand clothing and second-hand politics through a fictional representation of suffering bodies. The novel can only be second-hand knowledge at best. But in fact, according to Besant, the novel’s capacity to inspire its readers to feel real sorrow and real sympathy means that readers are encountering bodies that they acknowledge as bodies. That they are representations does not matter so long as the readers feel sympathy. In fact, fiction provides the perfect kind of materialism, for represented rags are real enough to inspire feelings, but ephemeral enough to fade away and leave behind only sympathy. Sympathy is central to Besant’s politics, and so too is it central for his theory of the novel.12 If readers can sympathise, that sympathy justifies the contents of the novel as socially valuable. Besant published an essay entitled ‘The Value of Fiction’ in the November 1871 issue of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s magazine Belgravia. The purpose of the essay is to enquire ‘what is likely to be the real gain from reading or writing works of fiction’ (Besant, 1871, p. 48). He answers in accordance with an ethics of altruism: ‘the chief gain is, that it is good at times to get our minds away from ourselves’ (p. 48). If a fictional text accurately depicts others’ lives, it enables readers to ‘share in sorrows and joy alien to [their] own experiences’ (pp. 48–49). To step outside one’s self and to share in others’ experiences, even second-hand, should be enough to inspire one to social action. The strength of fiction is that it enables one to sympathise with individuals one would otherwise never encounter: Ladies who read Belgravia do not often penetrate into the slums of the Eastend.  … It is not, however, bad for ladies to know that such things exist. A knowledge of evil quà evil is not to be desired; but a knowledge of these forms of evil which can be remedied … is surely a good thing; and this the novel gives us. (p. 49)

Besant celebrates representations of suffering and sorrow that have roots in lived experience, like his own exploration of the East End before he wrote Children of Gibeon a decade later (1871, p.  50). If a writer uses material – the word’s theoretical resonance is fortuitous – taken from the annals of the world, then the knowledge passed on may manage to awaken something more than merely second-hand.

Notes   1 Throughout, ‘acknowledge’ refers to the work of Stanley Cavell, who posits an ethics that acknowledges the complex humanity of others’ lived experience rather than seeks reductively to know about others. Kevin Swafford argues that ‘for Besant, the fundamental ethical act of perception in regard to others is to see them (as oneself)

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  2   3

  4

  5

  6

  7   8

  9 10 11

12

in their unique subjectivity’ (2007, p. 182). I prefer Cavell’s language for its emphasis on feeling in opposition to mechanical knowledge, which avoids the thorny rationalism of ‘subjectivity’. Cheng and Kim refer to Simon Caney’s argument that ‘Community is not antithetical, but rather coexistent with the liberal idea of individual rights’ (Caney, 1992, p. 277). In the Leisure Hour, ‘Old Clothes and What Becomes of Them’ describes the process by which clothes become second-hand, then are translated into other clothes, then into rags, and finally into ‘shoddy’ and ‘mungo’ – the bare wool used to make new clothes. The author makes the fascinating claim that ‘No man can say that the material of the coat he is wearing has not been already on the back of some greasy beggar’ (1865, p. 174), emphasising that as much capital is extracted from the commodity as possible before it becomes a commodity again. While ‘dressmaking was considered more genteel and respectable than working in a textile factory or mill’, the distinction between ‘dressmaker’ and ‘seamstress’ is crucial. According to Christine Kortsch, ‘dressmakers were portrayed as malicious tyrants who overworked the fragile, corruptible young seamstresses in their employ’ (2009, p.  112). See also Nicola Pullin’s chapter in Beth Harris’s Famine and Fashion for the way the middle-class dressmaker is obscured in needlewoman narratives (Pullin, 2005). Besant refers to this as the ‘Law of the Lower Limit’. The term ‘lower limit’ seems to have been a common reference to this law at the time, as it appears in texts such as Simon Nelson Patten’s 1885 Premises of Political Economy to refer to Ricardo’s principle (1885, p. 37). On top of all this, even in the second-hand market, these girls would be hard pressed to purchase the clothing they made. A short play in an 1886 issue of the Argosy priced a discounted gown at £6 6s or nine weeks’ pay for all three girls in Children of Gibeon; even a second-hand skirt for each girl at 5s, which one of the characters in the Argosy rejects as a waste of 5s, would take an entire week’s pay (‘Arabella at the Sales’, 1886, p. 208). I want to clarify that my critiques in this section apply specifically to ‘Sam’s socialism’, or socialism as the represented character Sam Monument articulates it in Besant’s novel, and not to socialism as a broader political movement. Tanushree Ghosh (2017) insightfully explores the ethical spectator in Besant’s work. While it may be true that Valentine practises sympathy by vision only for much of the text, I argue that her trajectory through the novel leads her to emphasise embodied feeling over spectatorship. Besant himself presents the political solution of Children of Gibeon in opposition to what he calls ‘benevolence’, so while it is unclear if he is responding directly to Craik, the word has a similar meaning for both of them. See especially chapter 5 of Rappoport, 2012, ‘Service and Savings in the Slums’, which spends a great deal of time on the women of the Salvation Army, whom Besant held in high regard (Besant, 1902, p. 257). Some Victorians seemed acutely aware of the similarities between gift-giving and capitalism. Margueritte Murphy explores how ‘in Daniel Deronda, George Eliot demonstrates the imbrication of gift and commercial economies in British and Judaic culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century’ (2006, p.  203). Ilana Blumberg’s analysis of The Moonstone suggests that Wilkie Collins understood that ‘[g]ift-giving can function like robbery as an uninvited, unilateral act whose consequence is a demand or claim’ (2016, p. 165). For more on Besant’s theories of fiction, see Çelikkol (2019) and Ginn (2019).

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References ‘Arabella at the Sales’ (1886). Argosy, 42, pp. 205–10. ‘Cast Skins’ (1887). London Reader, 2 (754), pp. 570–51. Besant, W. (1871). ‘The Value of Fiction’. Belgravia, 16, pp. 48–51. Besant, W. (1884). The Art of Fiction. London: Chatto and Windus. Besant, W. (1886). Children of Gibeon, vols. 1–3. London: Chatto & Windus. Besant, W. (1902). Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant. London: Hutchinson & Co. Blumberg, I. (2016). ‘Collins’s Moonstone: The Victorian Novel as Sacrifice, Theft, Gift and Debt’. Studies in the Novel, 37 (2), pp. 162–86. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caney, S. (1992). ‘Liberalism and Communitarianism: A Misconceived Debate’. Political Studies, 40 (2), pp. 273–89. Cavell, S. (2002). Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Çelikkol, A. (2019). ‘Workers as Artists: From Copyright to the Palace of Delight in Besant’s Writings’, in Morrison, K. A. (ed.), Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 131–50. Cheng, V. and Kim, H. (2019). ‘From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood: Affective Reforms in All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Children of Gibeon’, in Morrison, K. A. (ed.), Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 187–204. Collini, S. (1991). Public Moralists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, J. (1992). Donner le temps. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ghosh, T. (2017). ‘Witnessing them Day after Day: Ethical Spectatorship and Liberal Reform in Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon’, in Christianson, F.  Q. and Thorne-Murphy, L. (eds), Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature, 1850–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 162–89. Ginn, G. A. C. (2019). ‘Altruism and The Monks of Thelma: Ideals and Realities’, in Morrison, K. A. (ed.), Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 151–70. Komter, A. (1996). ‘Women, Gifts and Power’, in The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 119–31. Kortsch, C. B. (2009). Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and Activism. London: Routledge. Koven, S. (2006). Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Layard, G. S. (1888). ‘How to Live on £700 a Year’. Nineteenth Century, 23 (132), pp. 239–44. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Ed. Rodney Needham. Trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press. Mauss, M. (1990). Essai sur le don. Trans. W. D. Halls. London: Routledge. Mayhew, H. (1861). London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 3. London: Griffin, Bohn, and Co. Miller, A. H. (1995). Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Between metaphor and materiality Mulock Craik, D. (1875). ‘Benevolence  – or Beneficence?’, in Sermons out of Church. London: Daldy, Isbister, & Co., pp. 139–70. Murphy, M. (2006). ‘The Ethic of the Gift in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’. Victorian Literature and Culture, 34 (1), pp. 189–207. ‘Old Clothes and What Becomes of Them’ (1865). Leisure Hour, 690, pp. 172–74. ‘The Old Clothes Exchange’ (1882). Illustrated London News, 80 (2229), p. 66. ‘Old Clothesmen’ (1880). Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 50 (1293), pp. 170–71. Patten, S. N. (1885). The Premises of Political Economy: Being a Re-Examination of Certain Fundamental Principles of Economic Science. London: J. B. Lippincott. Pecora, V. P. (1997). Households of the Soul. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pullin, N. (2005). ‘“A Heavy Bill to Settle with Humanity”: The Representation and Invisibility of London’s Principal Milliners and Dressmakers’, in Harris, B. (ed.), Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge, pp. 215–28. Rappoport, J. (2012). Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricardo, D. (1817). On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation. London: J. Murray. Robinson, F. M. (1887). ‘Our Working Women and their Earnings’. Fortnightly Review, 42 (247), pp. 50–63. Strathern, M. (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Swafford, K. (2007). Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and its Representation. Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press. Swafford, K. (2019). ‘The Ethics of Perception and the Politics of Recognition: Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men’, in Morrison, K. A. (ed.), Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 171–86.

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PART II

Reading appearances

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4 ‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’: manliness, power, and politics via the top hat Ariel Beaujot

Why were hats so important to upper- and middle-class men in British Victorian society? If fashion was supposedly such a trifling feminine concern, why is there extensive evidence in the periodical and parliamentary presses of men bothering themselves with the intricacies of hats? This chapter focuses on a certain type of hat – the top hat – variably called toppers, castors, silk hats, beavers, stove pipes, chimney-pots, and high hats (Figure 4.1). Though the names are diverse, they were all essentially the same thing: a felted and shellacked cylindrical high hat with a short brim.1 Top hats were worn primarily with morning dress, which was the daytime formal wear sported by upper-class men (Storey, 2010, pp.  73–84). The base materials used to felt top hats were beaver fur, rabbit fur, and wool (Ginsburg, 1990, p. 85). The best-quality hats had a silk-like sheen. The high-gloss look was achieved in the early part of the nineteenth century with well-polished fur, but, by the 1830s, many top hats were made of silk plush that was sewn over a stiff calico base (McDowell, 1992b, p. 14; Ginsburg, 1990, p. 86; Amphlett, 1974, p. 143). Silk hats were light and flimsy, faded in the sun, and became spotted in the rain. To be kept looking smart hats had to be brushed daily, occasionally taken to hatters for buffing, and regularly replaced. There was also an extensive second-hand market in top hats. A second-hand hat that was out of fashion could be re-blocked to fit the new owner’s head, but as hats moved down the social scale their pile, colour, shape, and fit could indicate whether or not the man sporting it was or was not its original owner (Ginsburg, 1990, p. 86). Top hats were introduced to England as an elite fashion accessory at the end of the eighteenth century. They reached their peak of popularity in the mid-nineteenth century and were rivalled by other sorts of hats by the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century (Clark, 1982, p.  38). Other elite hat fashions included deerstalkers for hunting,

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4.1  Victorian gentleman in top hat. Unattributed engraving published by Baily Brothers.

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

wide-awakes for beach wear, and flat straw boaters for boating, but in the city the top hat was the norm. The bowler, a hard-felted hat with a shorter, rounder crown that was invented for gamekeepers in 1850, was worn by progressive elites in the 1860s, and became acceptable day wear for gentlemen in the city by the 1880s, topping off the informal lounge suit (Storey, 2010, p. 141; Clark, 1982, p. 42). These hats were well known to be worn by men lower on the social scale; the bowler tended to be the best hat of the working man, while the top hat continued to distinguish middle- and lower-middle-class men with higher social aspirations (Clark, 1982, pp. 40, 43).2 Always, a fashionable, shiny, well-maintained top hat was a marker of upper-class dress and status. The top hat continued to be the only acceptable accompaniment to frock coats and tail coats (Clark, 1982, p. 43). If classes were definite, definable, and self-evident social categories, then men would not need clothing to make their status known. This was further complicated by a second-hand clothing market which allowed many beyond the originally intended social group to use elite fashions. But why would people want to represent themselves as members of a group they were not part of? One way to answer this question is to think of classes as fluid categories that were partially performed. Class has been understood and defined in many ways: as a relationship to the means of production (Thompson, 1963), as a material category (Banks, 1954; Musgrove, 1959), and as an identity (Bourdieu, 1984; Davidoff and Hall, 1987). I argue here that class was an ongoing accomplishment and that Victorians used clothing and consumption, along with social codes and signifiers, to perform their class roles on a daily basis according to the values espoused, whether middle-class, aristocratic, or working-class (Gilmore and Dimock, 1994, pp. 2–3; Beaujot, 2012, p. 4). Class was defined by a man’s choice of headgear and the adoption of the mores that accompanied it; the antithesis of the urban elite top hat was the cloth cap worn by workers in the north. In this chapter we will see men’s struggles to align their performed class status with their top hats. Some men proved oblivious to the hat’s meaning, to their peril; others tried to challenge the hat as a status marker, to no avail; and still others used the top hat in an effort at class-passing. It is worth considering how the top hat helped men consolidate their elite gender status as well as define their social class. Middle-class and aristocratic men were engaged in performative acts of gender construction; they chose and manipulated masculine objects as a way of creating their elite male identity.3 But they did this always in opposition to and in fear of those outside their class and gender status; they consolidated their hegemonic power by monitoring their own behaviour. In other words, through surveillance of what other men wore and how they acted, ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ were formed. The maintenance of hegemonic masculinity was accomplished only partly through formal structures of

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Reading appearances force, wealth, and written rules (Connell, 1995, p. 77). It was also through informal and unspoken rebukes that this type of power was consolidated and maintained. We will see this in the case of the top hat and its use in Parliament. Men who did not observe the hat rules were ridiculed until they conformed, or they were forever relegated to an out-group separated from the elite masculinity and power in the House. The consolidation of hegemonic masculinity was accomplished through what seemed like minor incidents concerning fashion. Victorians and early fashion theorists alike saw fashion as a women’s domain, a frivolous thing to which the more rational men paid little heed (Flügel, 1930). In fact, men were obsessed with their own fashion. Men were constantly eyeing one another, able to detect subtle signals like the shape, fit, or nap, and the coded ways in which a hat was used to perform masculinity. With these signs men could decipher whether or not others were part of their group. Victorian men were reluctant to divest themselves entirely of decorative practices because clothing helped to reflect the amount of power that certain men held in that culture. Thus the top hat helped to create and reinforce elite identity in a period of democratisation. Toppers also played a role in the performance of the values of hegemonic, gentry masculinity, such as intelligence, reason, professionalism, and moral uprightness. It is difficult for the historian who exists outside the sign system of the era to understand the meaning of Victorian clothing. Looking at photographs, cartes de visite, and fashion plates gives few clues to the meaning of the fashion pictured. Reading memoirs is equally unproductive because people tended not to write about what they wore on a day-to-day basis, much less the meaning of what they were wearing. It is thus necessary to find a place where the meaning of dress is translated, such as newspapers (Barthes, 2006, p.  99). Reporters often described violations of etiquette and noted exemplary behaviour when it came to hat etiquette. Newspaper articles have been supplemented by work in Hansard (transcripts of parliamentary debates), where violations in top hat protocol were often noted. The sources for this chapter span a sixty-year period from the 1830s until the 1890s. The first half explores the symbolism of hats by focusing on the ways in which they depicted and reinforced elite masculinity and status. The second half looks at the particular arena of the House of Commons, where several sartorial issues were tested and resolved.

The symbolism of the top hat: status, power, masculinity Men who wanted to get ahead in Victorian society had to wear a topper, and yet they complained bitterly about this tyrannical accessory. Their main complaint was that hats were devices of torture that rendered men uncomfortable by squeezing their craniums and overheating their brains,

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

resulting in headaches and allegedly contributing to baldness.4 Hats were accessories of bodily discipline and a prerequisite of elite Victorian masculinity, as corsets were for Victorian femininity. We might ask ourselves how the most powerful men in the world could be held hostage by something as insignificant as fashion. This chapter explains how and why fashion that was uncomfortable and difficult to manage became reinforced and socially ingrained. Complaints that top hats were harsh, foul, hideous, repulsive, and ugly spanned the nineteenth century, but the outcry against hats reached a crescendo in the 1850s and again in the 1890s (‘To My Hat’, 1875; ‘What Are You, Hat?’, 1863). Some, frustrated with their toppers, thought it best to do away with the accessory altogether. In 1849 and 1850 a series of letters to the editors of the Freeman’s Journal, the Caledonian Mercury, the Liverpool Courier, the Morning Herald, and the Globe called for a hat-reform committee to be struck. One idea was to have a hatless march; another was to call for new hat possibilities to be displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851; and, if that did not work, one writer jokingly proposed that men could adopt women’s bonnets as a more comfortable headdress (‘The Hat Reform’, 1850).5 By the end of the nineteenth century, as the tyranny of the topper began to subside, readers were regaled with stories of brave men who attempted to throw off these hats, but whom social convention shamed into resuming the fashion.6 One man who, in 1886, admitted to having worn a ‘light Holland hat’ in the city explained that strangers, who found his defiance of norms refreshing, congratulated him. But the disapproval he found in his boss ‘was too much for [his] courage’ and he exchanged his straw hat for a topper once more (‘The Chimney-Pot Hat’, 1886b). In another article entitled ‘Why I Wear the Tall Hat’, the author explained that conductors and page boys respected him less when he did not wear the proper attire (Gubbins, 1892). The consensus was that if only a person of note would take up the cause, others would gladly follow. One of the people who suggested addressing the top hat annoyance was Keir Hardie, who, indeed, did contest hegemonic masculinity through his refusal to wear the top hat entirely.7 Unfortunately for them, urban men of the upper and middle classes were such slaves to the fashion that they shamed each other into wearing ‘unyielding towers of pasteboard’ (‘The Hat which Makes Bald-Headed Men’, 1893) even when most would agree that it was a nuisance – too hot to wear in the sun, sensitive to rain, heavy in the snow, and easily blown off in the wind.8 Given that the problems of the top hat were so widely acknowledged, it is worth delving more deeply into the reason why the topper was worn throughout the nineteenth century. Historians can infer that there were three powerful influences which ensured that the top hat maintained its status as a symbol of upper-class masculinity: the meaning of the suit, the meaning of the head, and the opposition to the cap. If men threw off the

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Reading appearances top hat, they would be neglecting the powerful cultural symbols embedded in what clearly was more than just a head covering. One way to answer the question of why upper-class men had to wear toppers, despite their dislike of the accessory, is to look at the rest of men’s clothing in this period. The hat was, after all, designed as an accessory that complemented the larger and more prominent apparel that covered men’s bodies. Fashion historians agree that men of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries underwent a change in dress style. Men’s clothing became increasingly modest and subdued (Entwistle, 2000, p.  154; Amphlett, 1974, p. 144). ‘The great masculine renunciation’ was the term coined by the psychologist John Carl Flügel in 1930 for this phenomenon. He asserted in The Psychology of Clothes that men began to reject brighter, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation and instead chose clothing that was plain, sober, and inconspicuous, leaving ornamentation to women. Using psychoanalytic theory, Flügel claimed that this change in clothing came from the bourgeois, who believed that simplifying dress was akin with the democratic spirit of the age. Rather than differentiating clothing on the basis of class, the new sartorial representation was for men to dress alike (Flügel, 1930, pp.  111–12). Resultantly, men adopted the three-piece suit as the modest form of dress. And what better than a top hat to finish off the look of the long narrow frame covered in dark fabric? The historian David Kuchta questions the validity of this proposed watershed moment in men’s fashion.9 He pushes the origins of the masculine renunciation back to the later seventeenth century and argues against Flügel’s idea that the suit was used to represent the democracy of the age. Instead, Kuchta convincingly argues that aristocratic men donned the suit after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in order to show themselves as industrious, frugal, and able to properly run the nation (Kuchta, 1996, pp. 55–62).10 Modesty in aristocratic dress came to represent independence from frivolous concerns about fashion, vanity, and luxury. This redefinition of upper-class masculinity and clothing came at a price for lower- and middle-class men and women, who were labelled vain for their luxurious displays. They were supposedly under the controlling influence of their conformity to fashion and therefore were politically tainted, unable to see past their pursuit of luxury to do what was best for the nation. This same set of rhetorical devices, this time aimed at excluding the lower classes and women, was later used by the middle classes during the nineteenth century when they, in turn, began to wear the suit in order to claim political legitimacy. The move away from Flügel’s thesis of the suit representing democracy is important to note. Here the suit became the physical embodiment of powerful hegemonic masculinity and was used as a way of excluding unworthy classes and women from Parliament. The top hat, being a part of the suit, could hardly have been changed without a major shift in the relations of power.

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

By looking at a single article of apparel and observing men’s everyday interactions and thoughts about the top hat, we see that the renunciation of fashion was neither so thorough nor so sobering as scholars originally thought. Far from denouncing fashion as a show of democracy, men were acutely aware of their hats and what they signified about themselves and others. While men’s apparel became more sombre, men continued to be well informed and highly focused on fashion, insisting on conformity and on distinguishing themselves from the classes beneath them by means of attire. The details of their dress presented subtle forms of differentiation that elite and middle-class Victorians were taught to decipher. The material culturalist could conjecture that most men’s clothing choices, while less conspicuous than women’s fashion, were nonetheless designed to make a series of social statements that revealed (or did not reveal) to onlookers their elitism and unwillingness to share power. So the top hat was the finishing touch on the much larger sartorial statement about masculine authority denoted by the suit. But the special place that the hat occupied – upon men’s heads – assigned it further symbolic significance. And this brings us to the second part of the answer as to why the topper was so avidly worn by elite men in the nineteenth century. According to the theories of humoural medicine examined by Merry Wiesner in her survey Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, men had more heat in their bodies than did women. Heat was considered the most positive of the humoral qualities. Male heat was the basis of reason and it rose towards the heaven and towards the brain, thus making men more intelligent (Wiesner, 1993, pp.  26–27).11 In the nineteenth century the idea that men were brainier than women was solidified by the sciences of physiognomy and phrenology, which shared the belief that the head bore the outward signs of the mind contained within (Finkelstein, 1991, pp. 24–26). According to Joanne Finkelstein’s The Fashioned Self, all one had to do to prove men’s superior rationality was to measure their larger skulls. The head held a special place in the economy of the body and, as a consequence, was imbued with powerful symbolic values. Some argued that not only the head represented a man’s brain, but his hat could as well. There was a belief that a man’s hat could reveal significant details about his thinking; an act of character assessment that Punch jokingly termed ‘castor-ology’ in 1849 – castor is another name for beaver, the base felting material for expensive top hats (‘Look a-Head!’, 1849). When George IV wore a new hat to the Ascot horse races in 1827, its shape was interpreted as a sign that his political affiliations were leading Britain down a dangerous path. The Ultra Tories and the High Churchmen blamed George Canning for forcing upon the ailing king a radical hat.12 ‘Do not you observe … how he has lowered the crown? … Has he not, too, given [the brim] a curl never seen before, which indicates plainly the intention of turning over a new leaf? And then what does the size of the ribbon signify,

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Reading appearances but that the head of the State is encircled … by the broadest of all bands – a people’? (‘The King’s Hat’, 1827). Though this newspaper article was probably a spoof, it spoke to important concerns of the time. In the historical moment, eight years after the Peterloo Massacre and five years before the Great Reform Act of 1832, the idea of basing decisions on the will of the people was a radical suggestion. In this article, the Ultra Tories and the High Churchmen used the stylistic oddities of a hat to remind readers of what might be the intentions of the man who wore it. The hat had become a window into the mind of the king (‘The Murderer’s Hat Band’, 1912). The idea that hats could be observed as a way of gauging the mind beneath it was so believable that Victorians even penned poetry about it. Consider, for example, this poem, entitled ‘The Grand Old Hat’ (1883), which poked fun at the growing size of Prime Minister William Gladstone’s head: When this old hat was new My head was smaller – yes! Now I’d have much ado To get it on, I guess. The cause I cannot tell, I only know ’tis true; My head has seemed to swell Since this old hat was new. Perhaps, as some maintain, My cranium may have grown, Owing to stretch of brain, Or thickening of bone. ‘The hat has shrunk?’ eh? what? That nonsense will not do! My head has grown, a lot, Since this old hat was new. (‘The Grand Old Hat’, 1890)13

This poem poked fun at the Grand Old Man of British politics, who by the end of his tenure, had become quite dictatorial, especially with respect to issues like Irish Home Rule that ended up splitting his Liberal Party. In this case Gladstone’s too-small hat became representative of his enlarged head/ego. Henry Melton, a haberdasher from Regent Street writing in 1867, went one step further in his assessment of head shapes through hats, suggesting that the shape of a hat could actually change the phrenological makeup of the man who wore it. He argued that brains could be altered as a result of the fit of a hat. A politician might change his decision, a philosopher might switch his views, and a bishop might become a deist, all because of the shape of their hats (Melton, 1867, p. 83). The relationship of the brain to the accessories that sat on the head was not a new phenomenon to the nineteenth century. The predecessor of the top hat was the long white wig

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

worn by elite men of the early modern period. The art historian Marcia Pointon demonstrates that wigs were used by men to construct their identities and were read as an index of their faithfulness to their wives as well as their social power and masculine authority (1993, pp. 114, 122). The third reason why the top hat resonated with elite Victorian men was that there was a parallel object  – the cap  – that acted as a foil to the topper, giving it even more ideological meaning by presenting an opposing force. The fashion historian Fiona Clark convincingly argues that there had been a certain symbolism associated with low and high hats since the 1600s. She suggests that low-crowned, soft, and broadbrimmed hats were allied with informality, unpretentiousness, rural life, artists, intellectualism, evangelicalism, and revolution. Tall stiff hats meanwhile were representative of formality, engagement with certain guilds, moral uprightness, professionalism, orthodoxy, and the bourgeois (1982, p. 9). Indeed, the low hat, called a bonnet rouge, was adopted by the sansculottes in France during the first French Revolution as a potent symbol of liberty, republicanism, and disregard for wealth and aristocratic privilege (Harris, 1981).14 As James Epstein tells us, the red cap re-appeared across the channel at Peterloo in 1819 as a revolutionary symbol (1994, pp. 70–99).15 Eric Hobsbawm argues that by the 1890s the cap formed part of working-class cultural representation (Hobsbawm, 1987, pp. 287–88). In opposition to working-class caps, top hats were generally associated with upper- and middle-class urban men when dressed in formal day wear or evening wear. Certainly the black, erect topper gave the sense of earnest behaviour and staid respectability that was popularly understood as the prevailing attitude of bourgeois men. In sum, elite men’s consumption and wearing of top hats had specific effects for themselves and those around them. Upper-class men participated in a performance of masculinity in which they represented themselves as part of an in-group to the exclusion of women and other men who did not want to or could not afford to keep up with this demanding fashion. But the hat itself held meaning because of its associations with the threepiece suit, which was the sartorial spectacle used to consolidate political power from 1688 onwards; because of its association with the head that held cultural significance for men as the rational sex and was engrained in earlier understandings of medicine; and because it was part of an exclusionary matrix where the cap represented working-class radicalism and the top hat represented elite status quo. Bourgeois men suffered various indecencies for their headgear in order to prove that they had the self-restraint required of their class. Things that were difficult to wear required discipline, and this discipline was what was needed to be part of the aristocratic and bourgeois classes. Some of the troubles men went through to maintain the correct appearance were the humiliation of having to run after toppers when a stiff wind

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Reading appearances arose – with the alternative of attaching their hats to collars with a cord, whereby they risked being choked (‘The Hateful Hat-Guard’, 1886); constantly having to preen and stroke hats to keep the nap flush and strait;16 having to suffer its heat in the summer; having a red ring around the forehead when the hat was removed; having to risk losing it in cloak rooms or having it crushed at busy social occasions;17 and having to carry it in a cumbersome box when travelling. It was difficult to preserve and wear a topper (Plate 2). This constant vigilance did the work of maintaining the image of power and hegemony necessary to distinguish one class from the others. ‘Without going to the extent of saying that a man cannot get on in the world without a silky, glossy, fashionable hat, there is little doubt that the pot hat rules as with a rod of iron.’ As an anonymous author in Reynolds’s Newspaper explained in 1892: When men begin to run down in the world they get seedy at the extremities. They become shabby as to the hat and boots. … If his headgear is shabby and worn and battered, we harden our hearts and prepare to listen to a request for the loan of half-a-crown, or we expand our sympathies in anticipation of a tale of misfortune and distress … If a man, on the other hand, beams upon us with a ‘tile’ of silk, black, glossy, and well brushed, we say that the world is going well with him. (‘The Worship of the Pot Hat’, 1892)18

The top hats served to communicate that those who wore them led a life of non-strenuous and non-manual labour. The more dysfunctional the hat, the more effective it was at creating class cohesion through conformity. Men were willing to suffer under this annoying and uncomfortable accessory rather than endure the humiliation of representing themselves as a part of the masses. ‘Now and again someone has the courage to wage war against the common nuisance [of the top hat] and to appear in a comfortable bowler or felt. If he is rich he is dubbed “eccentric” and forgiven. If he be in indifferent circumstances he is called “vulgar”, and is snubbed accordingly by the devotees of saint pot hat … What a funny race of beings we are, when our social status depends upon the shape and make of our hat’ (‘The Worship of the Pot Hat’, 1892).19 This no-pain-no-gain attitude was also self-perpetuating. Being aware of their own discomfort and the need for constant consciousness of the state and whereabouts of their hats, men came to regard each other’s headgear as an embodiment of character and rank. According to the Yorkshire Herald, hats were ‘the one feature of our clothing which, more than any other, according to its shape, material, size, condition, colour, decoration, and style in which it is worn, indicates the rank, profession, social position and even age of the wearer’ (‘The Hat in Politics’, 1892). Within nineteenth-century newspapers, there are countless examples of men inspecting each other’s hats and making judgements based on their observations. Henry Melton, hatter to His Royal Highness the Prince

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

of Wales, explains that all can tell when a hat does not suit the man: ‘Wholesale hat-fitting leads to general unfitness and that snobbish inappropriateness in the hat which is observable, even to the uninitiated’ (Melton, 1865, pp.  83–84).20 The dual action of hat wearing and hat surveillance helped to hold the top hat’s place in society as an object that demonstrated to men whether or not they were in the same club and could handle the same responsibilities. ‘We instinctively go for the hat first in running our eye over a newcomer’, admitted an author from Reynolds’s Newspaper in 1892 (‘The Worship of the Pot Hat’). Given the cultural resonance of the topper, it is understandable that men who lost their hats or had them stolen felt it cost them their dignity. A man without – or with an improper – hat could not appear in public. He was therefore unmanned, and this accounted for the extreme personal attachment men showed for their hats. In 1843 an author from the Preston Chronicle mused that hats possessed an independent spirit that sought to embarrass their owners by forcing them to run after their toppers in public. These hats attempted to escape from their proprietors and behaved as if they had minds of their own: Having made a rush of a hundred yards or so in a straight line, and with great regularity of movement, it suddenly bolts up against a wall, and there reposes, apparently as quiet and harmless as when on the head of its owner. … Sometimes, too, it squats down with the same treacherous appearance of a willingness to allow itself to be taken, right in the mud over which it has been a moment before rolling with a mischievous delight; stopping suddenly in mid careen, for the express purpose – as no reasonable person can doubt – of deceiving its pursuers into a belief that it has repented its conduct, and is willing to atone for it by submitting to capture. (‘Hat-Hunts’, 1843)

On a more serious note, men sometimes risked their lives for their wayward hats. An attempt at regaining social status may have been one reason why men put themselves at peril for this simple accessory. Papers reported stories from the 1840s to 1900 featuring men drowning when they went after hats that fell into rivers, lakes, and quarries;21 others were struck by trains in pursuit of hats that flew off in stations.22 The fact that men were willing to risk death for their hats reaffirms the fact that the topper held meaning beyond the simple accessory it first appeared to be. The top hat signified an elite social status and authoritative masculinity that seemed to many men to be well worth chasing. At risk when a man lost his hat or had it stolen were his sense of self, his social standing, and perhaps his virility. Since the top hats in any given decade looked similar, they were often accidentally exchanged. In some instances men were unmanned and ridiculed because they were in the possession of another’s hat that did not suit them (‘Mr. John Morley’s Hat’, 1892). A story from the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent explains

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Reading appearances the anguish of an older gentleman who accused his young beautiful wife of having an affair upon observing a fashionable hat on his hat stand. He thought himself cuckolded and therefore unmanned when in fact he had simply taken a younger man’s hat from the cloak room (‘The Story of a Hat’, 1887). Tales about hats taken by acquaintances demonstrate that having a top hat was not enough: men felt an attachment to their specific hats. The story of Mr John Morley, a parliamentarian, proves this point. In this story, the ‘philosophical essayist’ pulls off his hat and examines it, as ‘if he hoped to find in the nap or in the lining a solution of the problem that was vexing his brain’. He consults his friends Chamberlain and Gladstone, who become embroiled in the controversy as well. After much speculation on the part of the press as to what might be the problem, the punchline of the story is revealed: Mr Shaw-Lefevre had accidentally taken Mr Morley’s hat, and Mr Morley, so disturbed by not having his proper headgear, could not concentrate on the parliamentary proceedings: ‘Mr. Shaw-Lefevre looked guilty but the problem was solved, and to Mr. Morley’s perfect content, for he sat at ease once more under his own hat. Thenceforward Mr. Morley was an appreciative, nay, even a radiant listener to the ponderous periods of Sir William Harcourt’ (‘Mr.  John Morley’s Hat’, 1892). From a material culture point of view, the idea that men might be attached to their particular hats makes a lot of sense: a man’s hat was sized for his individual head, and he often had his name stitched in the lining.23 However, court cases show that men found hat-exchanges disturbing for other reasons as well: fears of dirt or shabbiness, insecurities about head sizes, and even a sense of sexual disruption drove men to the law to regain their hats. Cases of substituted hats appeared at Liverpool Borough Court in 1846, Shoreditch Country Court in 1857, the City of London Court in 1883, and Cardiff County Court in 1894. The stories were remarkably similar: gentlemen who had lost what they claimed were larger and ­better-kept toppers sued others for allegedly stealing their hats and leaving less-desirable ones in their place.24 The men in these cases argued that it was an affront to their sense of self to put on a hat other than their own, and they felt naked and vulnerable if their hats were damaged in ways that did not allow the hats to be worn in public.25 The hat could be a loathsome object since it was not washable and therefore accumulated human sweat and dirt, and was a carrier of lice. Understandably men were reluctant to wear the not-so-nice hats left behind for them.26 There could also be some underlying concern that if a man wore the used hat, he might be interpreted by onlookers as having a debased social status. The constant reference to hat size in these cases is not surprising in a culture that prized a large head as the container of the fully developed mind, but it could also indicate a concern about male virility. Bareheadedness has sexual implications, according to the historian Marcia

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

Pointon. Writing about the wig of the previous century, Pointon suggests that the exchange or loss of a head covering was synonymous with exposure, causing a breakdown of social order and the threat of sexual disturbance (Pointon, 1993, pp. 117–22). Artificial covering of the head was a sign of virility. The tall hat could certainly be interpreted as phallic, and the hatless man as exposed to the castrating gaze of public scrutiny.

The top hat in the House of Commons: fears of democracy as seen through the protocols of Parliament All these general cultural meanings of the top hat could be observed at work in a particular environment: the House of Commons. Nowhere was the hat a more obvious index to social power than in Parliament. The solidarity of this particular group was emphasised by the standardised garb of politicians in top hats. There were many disturbances in the House concerning hats. These illuminate the concerns over the democratisation of Parliament. No matter how radical their views, in the nineteenth century, MPs had to subscribe to the norms of gentility and class represented by the top hat (Bauman, 1972, p. 209), or they suffered hazing and ridicule until they conformed. These gatekeeping devices were used to secure solidarity within the House and maintain an insider group of elite men. According to the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle etc., the top hat played a leading part in the House of Commons. During the first session of the 1898 Parliament, a new member walked out of the House in the ordinary way men did when leaving a building – fully dressed and with his hat securely in place on his head. To his confusion the men in the chamber jeered at him: ‘hat, hat’. He stopped in the middle of the floor and looked around ‘with a mingled expression of fright and perplexity’. But his fellow members persisted with their cries of ‘hat, hat’, rendering him all the more embarrassed. In response to these exclamations, and surrounded by his laughing brethren, the new MP checked his trouser pockets, coat tails, and even his feet but found nothing amiss. An Irish MP took pity on  the discomfited man, perhaps because he was an outsider himself, politely taking off the hat of the baffled legislator and handing it to him ‘with a courtly bow’ (‘The M.P.’s Hat’, 1898).27 But what was the issue that caused all this fuss? This new MP was following the ordinary custom of men attending public assemblies – like the theatre or a reception – where one wore a hat when entering and exiting the premises and took it off when seated.28 The problem was that the custom in the House of Commons was reversed. MPs were expected to take their hats off when entering and exiting the chamber, and put their hats on when they sat down, although some members did not observe this last rule (House of Commons, 1978, p. 7).29 This was perhaps done to show the difference between lawmakers and ordinary citizens: by placing their

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Reading appearances hats back on their heads only when they left the parliamentary complex, members were signifying the shedding of their political identity and a return to their ordinary identity as Victorian men. Most MPs, having graduated from English public schools, would be accustomed to receiving and doling out hazings  – as in the case of our unfortunate MP. As a protest about new unknown members, elected by the ever-expanding voting public, long-serving members often used the reversal of the ordinary rules of conduct particular to the House to embarrass and chastise newly elected MPs, as if they were at Eton with new boys. ‘In these more democratic times’, explained the anonymous author of ‘The Great Hat Question’ (1882), ‘in an assemblage such as the House of Commons is, or is in the way of becoming, the barriers of ceremony cannot be guarded too carefully. For, once they are swept away, the rules of good breeding will act as feeble restraint on those whose rough manners are even now becoming rather embarrassing’ (‘The Great Hat Question’, 1882). In other words, hats in Parliament had to be carefully regulated in the interest of the body politic. The hegemony of the ruling class was eroding, so these members used hat etiquette to stop working-class attitudes from surfacing in the House. According to R. W. Connell, the masculine hegemony of the gentry appeared in the period between 1450 and 1650, and was formed alongside and because of the modern capitalist economy. This system of masculinity began to be eroded with the increasing bureaucracy of the state and the rise of the industrial economies characteristic of the nineteenth century.30 The House of Commons was perhaps one of the last places where gentry masculinity was performed, enforced, and maintained. In another example of gatekeeping by MPs, reported by the Morning Post the Preston Chronicle, and the Penny Satirist in the later 1830s, an Irish MP was chastised for the state of his hat and made to buy a new one. In the story, the MP received a note allegedly from Lord Morpeth asking him to get a new topper as the state of his hat was sullying the good Liberal name.31 In this note, Morpeth encouraged his fellow MP to pay attention to his self-presentation and show that he was part of the Liberal Party and indeed of its insider group. One can see from the MP’s reaction that he had never given much thought to his hat and how it represented his participation in an exclusive club of parliamentarians: ‘Having read the letter with attention, [he] took up his chapeau  … he turned it over and over and carefully inspected it in all its parts. There was no denying that it was the worse for wear. There were sundry bruises in the crown; the brim was cracked in various parts; the pile was worn bare in several places; and it … assumed a whitey-brown complexion’ (‘A Shocking Bad Hat’, 1840). The fact that this MP was Irish established him immediately as an outsider in the British House of Commons. The Irish had become part of the institution only in 1800 with the Act of Union. Furthermore they

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

were forever seen as the backward group within the United Kingdom; the Irish were  sometimes even seen as a different race, one not as evolved as the Anglo-Saxon Englishmen. In this story and the previous one about the confused new MP, newer MPs were singled out as lacking sartorial gentility and institutional knowledge. Certain groups of men lacked the background and social education to recognise the distinctions of taste that acted as important distinguishing markers within certain communities.32 In the end the MP spent 32s in an attempt to solidify his position as part of the in-group (‘The Shocking Bad Hat’, 1837). Hats appeared often in the Rules of Procedure of the House of Commons where no other item of clothing was mentioned. Whenever a member was speaking, he was on his feet without his hat. But to receive answers, he sat down and put it on (House of Commons, 2010, p. 10).33 And men came into the House and left the House with their hats off. So in general the rule was to take one’s hat off when standing in the House. But there was an exception: if a division was called in the assembly and a vote was therefore to take place, and a minister wanted to challenge the ruling of the chair, he had to sit with his hat on to make his statement. To the delight of the press, on 3  June 1881 Prime Minister William Gladstone found himself without his hat during a division when he wanted to make a point (Figure 4.2). Feeling that it was very important that his opinion be heard, Gladstone was forced to borrow the solicitor-general’s hat, ‘which was at once too small for him and too stylish’ (‘Gladstone Forgot his Own Hat on Friday’, 1881). This delighted his fellow MPs, and journalists reported on the incident for the next decade, poking fun at the prime minister who had to balance the hat on his head while attempting to make a political argument.34 Clearly, the proper uses of hats were tantamount to the proper conduct of gentlemen. Another moment when the House of Commons was preoccupied with hat manners was on 21  March 1882 (Parliamentary Debates, 1882). On that day the speaker read a royal message from Queen Victoria asking for funds in support of the upcoming marriage of Prince Leopold and Princess Helen. Some controversy surrounded the message. Gladstone wanted to consider it, and his fellow Liberal MP Henry Labouchere sought to oppose it. But this debate was not what preoccupied the House. After hearing the royal request, Charles Lewis, a Conservative MP, asked the chair if it was standard practice to take hats off out of respect when there was a reading of a royal message. He then accused ‘a cabinet minister’ of having left his topper on while the queen’s message was read. H. B. Samuelson, a Liberal MP, piped up that he had observed MPs frequently disobeying the proper decorum and accused Sir Assheton Cross and Sir Hicks-Beach, both Conservative politicians, of not having taken off their hats during a reading two weeks earlier (Parliamentary Debates, 1882).35 Eventually the chair put the issue to rest by explaining that MPs must take off their

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4.2  John Tenniel, ‘Question Time’, Punch, 10 May 1884. William Gladstone, Liberal Prime Minister, speaks in the House of Commons hatless while members sitting behind him wear top hats.

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

hats while royal messages were read, but could wear their hats as they responded to the issue. As we have seen, hats held power because of their location on the head/brain/mind, so taking off one’s hat to the queen’s message was an opening of the mind, an acknowledgement of hierarchy, and a humbling of the listener all at once. Given that the queen had requested money from Parliament, not taking off one’s hat at that moment could have been meant as a sign republicanism. Journalists from the Standard, the Newcastle Courant, and the North Eastern Daily Gazette picked up on this point by suggesting it was radicals – John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain – who had tried to represent themselves at the same level as their monarch.36 But because of the lack of discussion of the meaning of the gesture in Hansard, I would argue that this was more likely to have been a case of politicians chastising each other to maintain the status quo. It is in this sort of political pettiness and gamesmanship that we come to see how hegemonic masculinity functioned and was maintained. While the top hat was the focus, here the underlining issues were conformity, power, and the maintenance of an in-group. If men did not use this accessory properly, their status as parliamentarians and as elite men would be at risk. It was in these types of performances that class distinctions were ‘made real’. It seems as though all they were arguing about was their hats, but in fact they were reinforcing and reiterating the importance of their gender and class status. But this re-establishment of the proper sartorial order was not to last long. Five months after the incident of the royal message, in August 1882, Keir Hardie entered Parliament as the first Labour member wearing a cap rather than a topper (Figure 4.3). Hardie was Scottish ethnically but had won his seat in the working-class constituency of West Ham South (which was then in Essex and is now in Greater London). By this time, some of the Lib-Lab MPs wore bowlers, but none were so brazen as to don a cap (Hughes, 1956, p.  56).37 Hardie became known as ‘the man in the cloth cap’, and his attire was heralded by the Conservative and Liberal presses alike as symbolic of the coming of a new era in British politics. When Hardie first entered Parliament in untraditional garb, the incident was reported by the Daily Telegraph in angry tones: ‘The House is neither a coal store, a smithy, nor a carpenter’s shop; and, therefore, the entrance of Mr. Keir Hardie … left a painful impression which the workman’s tweed cap was powerless to subdue’ (quoted in Reid, 1978, p.  211). The cap resonated with Hardie’s working-class constituents and the tweed with his Scottish roots. Regional differences lurked beneath press and MPs’ opinions on Hardie’s attire that probably had to do with both his political and his labour associations. A Northumbrian writing to the editor of Reynolds’s Newspaper reported his delight in the coming change of clothing in the House:

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4.3  Keir Hardie, Labour Party leader, wearing a cloth cap, 18 August 1899. Unattributed photograph.

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’ I, for one, rejoice exceedingly that Keir Hardie has had the courage to make a pioneer effort to break down the caddishness of the House of Commons. That assembly is no longer the first club in Europe. It must henceforth be a meeting place for all sorts and conditions of men who may be chosen by the people to represent them. Working men candidates do not want to pose as country squires, and miners from the pit’s mouth do not want to undertake the role of men of fashion. Their mission should be made of sterner stuff. I, therefore, hail with unfeigned pleasure the advent of the cloth cap. (‘The Worship of the Pot Hat’, 1892)38

Here we see that the changes wrought by a series of Acts to broaden the franchise were beginning to break down the hegemonic masculine control of the elite. The symbol that showed this shift more than any other was headgear. In another letter to the editor, this time in the Glasgow Herald, Cunninghame Graham argued that the top hat was an emblem of Liberalism: ‘Had Keir Hardie but adopted the hat, his fate were sure. I see him … first getting stouter, then changing his corn-cob pipe for a two-penny cigar, [taking up a] black frock coat, and then speaking of himself as being vested with a deep responsibility by his electors, and finally, [becoming] an inspector of factories … For with the hat cometh honor, heritage, and humbug’ (‘Letters to the Editor’, 1893). Here the top hat represented the dishonourable Liberal MP who had little concern for his constituents and was more talk than action. The hat signified the mind beneath the headgear, and these quotations suggest that had Hardie taken up the top hat, his mind would surely have followed. At issue here was working-class manhood and its ability to withstand the pressures of Parliament that required conformity to an aristocratic and middle-class norm. Hardie’s biographer Fred Reid tells us the behind-the-scenes story: while Hardie chose not to wear the high hat, he did not begin his political life in a worker’s cap either. Hardie’s hat was a deerstalker cap – a hat he had adopted during his open-air campaign in West Ham because it was practical in all types of weather (Reid, 1978, pp. 140–41). The deerstalker hat would have been familiar to his fellow MPs. Nonetheless, journalists and MPs aggravated Hardie’s breach of etiquette by saying it was the peaked flat cap worn by industrial workers. In changing the imagined image of Hardie’s hat they implied the radical intentions of the new MP. When interviewed about it, Hardie said: ‘I had always worn a tweed cap and homespun clothes and it never entered my head to make a change. My wife in Scotland had thought about it and had sent on a soft felt hat, but it had not arrived.’ After the ruckus of having appeared in the House of Commons wearing a cap, Hardie ‘received eight or ten top hats from good-hearted people in the country’ (Hughes, 1956, p. 56). He wore none of them. Once Hardie realised the cultural resonance of this headgear, he acquired a worker’s cap and was photographed with it in the Labour

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Reading appearances Prophet in 1893 (Reid, 1978, pp. 140–41). The author of the article ‘The Worship of the Pot Hat’ summed up the situation nicely by saying: ‘so much attention has been attracted to Mr. Keir Hardie’s style of dress and headgear since the opening of the new Parliament that one would almost come to the conclusion that there must be some very intimate connection between politics and pot hats, and a close association of brains and broadcloth’ (‘The Worship of the Pot Hat’, 1892). And indeed there was. In the story of Hardie’s headgear we see a culmination of the various layers of meaning of the hat in politics. First, as the last quotation suggests, the head held the intellect, and the hat, as an extension of the head, could be a phrenological object used to interpret the mind. Second, MPs and journalists focused on the hat as a way of gauging the results of increasing democracy: the cap represented, in particular, the coming of the working-class influence on the House. And thirdly, as Hardie found out, nonconformity to House attire was met with ridicule, chastisement, and exaggeration in the hopes of forcing MPs new to the House to maintain the status quo. Given the pressures Hardie had to endure for his hat, it is no wonder that many a powerful nineteenth-century man took to heart the idiom ‘if you want to get ahead, get a hat’. Top hats were far more than simple accessories; they were objects that demonstrated power embroiled in the controversies of the day. This accessory acted like a lightning rod for larger social issues, such as the weakening of elite masculinity in traditional locales of power and the fear of an ever-increasing consuming and voting public. At a time when the gentility was under siege, top hats allowed elite men to continue to perform their gender and class status, thereby maintaining an impression that the old power structures remained alive and well. Along with wearing the top hat, elite men used the accessory to pressure those who strove for elite status to do the same. An analysis of press accounts of men’s sartorial violations, and especially the use of headgear in the House of Commons, tells us about the delineations of power in the nineteenth century. Through clothing, seemingly so incidental, we find elite men obsessively watching one another in order to reinforce the parameters of elite status and masculinity. Despite claims about the democratic spirit of the age, clothing such as the top hat was used as an exclusionary device both to create an in-group of elite men who understood the distinctions in taste well enough to sport the hat properly, and to exclude those who were part of an out-group, in this case women and lower-class men. Those who came into the House without knowing the hat rules were unable to wield these accessories or use them to their own advantage, and instead they were ridiculed until they toed the line, first through fashion and then presumably by other means as well. It took a change of attitude in the new democratically oriented parliamentarians, refusing to play by the old rules, in order to break the tyranny of

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

the top hat bemoaned by elite and bourgeois men alike. In studying the top hat we see class struggle through a garment. The system of clothing examined here is constructed on top of the gender and class paradigms of the period. It is through the study of clothing that we see these intangible cultural phenomena become concrete, allowing us to make a study of the minute ways in which hegemonic elements of class and gender were performed and maintained.

Notes   1 Top hats changed shape and height according to the decade. The ‘Wellington’ had concave sides to the crown and was popular in the 1820s and 1830s; the ‘Cumberland’ was tall and narrowing towards the top popular in the 1830s; the ‘Chimney Pot’ and ‘Stove Pipe’ had narrow brims and very tall crowns, the ‘Stove Pipe’ had totally straight sides, and the ‘Chimney Pot’ slightly convex sides. The latter two varieties were both popular in the 1850s. In the 1890s the typical form of the top hat was slim and waisted. See Clark, 1982, pp.  39–40, 43, and Amphlett, 1974, p. 143.   2 Class status is much more complex than it seems at first glance. Some ­working-class men wore toppers as well. Photographs from the 1840s and 1850s indicate that those engaged in working-class professions wore top hats when going about their duties, for example railway engineers, funeral mutes, coachmen, policemen, and workmen atop the Crystal Palace.   3 The theoretical framework that I am adopting was pioneered by Butler, 1993.   4 Most top hats had some sort of airing device, usually consisting of a small mesh hole at the top of the crown to let out hot air. Suggestions were made to improve the ventilated hat: ‘A Ventilated Hat’, 1889; ‘The Chimney-Pot Hat’, 1886b. There is a series of cartoons and funny articles about the policeman’s ventilated hat: ‘The New Police Hat’, 1844; ‘The Policeman’s New Ventilating Hat’, 1844; ‘The New Ventilating Hat’, 1865; ‘The New Hat for the Police’, 1844. The fact that men suffered for the sake of fashion may give pause to scholars who argue that uncomfortable fashion was just another form of women’s oppression brought on by the patriarchy. For examples of this perspective, see McDowell, 1992a; Veblen, 1953.   5 See also ‘The Hat Nuisance’, 1850; ‘Hat Reform’, 1849a; ‘Hat Reform’, 1849b. In the sixteenth century and earlier, caps and hats were called ‘bonnets’. This word became uncommon in English speech in the seventeenth century but was retained in Scotland (Byrade, 1979, p. 172).   6 Newspapers indicated that men did not wear top hats in the country but only in the capital: ‘The Oppressive Tall Hat’, 1895; ‘The Chimney-Pot Hat’, 1889.   7 See ‘A Revolt against the Tall Silk Hat’ 1896; ‘The Top Hat Doomed’, 1889; ‘The Oppressive Tall Hat’, 1895.   8 See ‘His New Hat’, 1889; ‘The Drowned Hat’, 1859; ‘April: Or, The New Hat’, 1881; ‘A New Hat’, 1875.   9 Historians other than Kuchta argue that the origins of the suit are in the seventeenth century. See also Hollander, 1994, pp. 65–66, 79; Amies, 1994, pp. 2–3. 10 See also Kuchta, 2002. 11 According to humoral theory, there were four humours contained within the body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. These regulated people’s health and determined their gender condition. The humours had the qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry. Men were thought to be hot and dry. When men’s heat was particularly strong, a rational attribute, they went bald, burning up their hair with their heat. This also could explain why the tall hat with ventilation was favoured by the elite, as

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its male members were considered to be more intellectual and needing more room for their heat to rise out of their heads than the labouring men, who wore caps and generated less heat. Canning had been appointed prime minister by George IV instead of the more obvious choices of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. When he accepted the position, the Tory party split. He was also a supporter of Catholic emancipation. See also ‘The Hat that Braved’, 1883. When King Louis XVI went to the Théâtre Français before the states general met, George Danton refused to stand and remained with his hat on so as not to give the king honour (‘The Significance of the Hat’, 1895). This meaning also appeared in a poem about a straw hat: ‘The cap of Liberty, forsooth! / Though art the thing to be in truth, / For slavish passion ne’er can break/ Into the green paths where I take / My old straw hat’ (Cook, 1860). Those who could afford it brought their toppers to hatters who could iron them, give them a new lining and ribbon, or even re-shape the body of the hat by putting it on a block and re-sewing. A new ribbon helped to keep the part of the hat between the brim and the crown looking neat, as this was the most difficult area to keep trim once the nap was distorted. Those who were thriftier, or could not afford such a service, kept their silk glossy by sponging it with warm water and ammonia and carefully brushing with close-hard bristles in the direction of the nap. Hats lasted about three months before they ‘show incipient signs of shabbiness’, but most men dry-brushed their hats as they shined their boots: daily. See ‘The New Hat’, 1894; ‘The Vicissitudes of a Hat’, 1864; ‘Silk Hat Bands’, 1910; ‘Felt Hat Renovating’, 1908; ‘Keeping a Silk Hat Trim’, 1909. Many a true story, punchy poem, and quick joke were penned about the trouble men felt when they lost their hats at social functions. ‘The Churchgoer’s Hat’, 1894; ‘The Hat and Coat Scramble’, 1859; ‘The Last Hat’, 1870; ‘The Inconvenience of Bringing’, 1848. See also ‘The Hat, which has Always Played’, 1888. See also ‘The Chimney-Pot Hat’, 1886. See also ‘A Shocking Bad Hat’, 1840; ‘Look a-Head! What ah! Your Hat!’, 1849. See ‘Drowned in Recovering a Hat’, 1892; ‘Fatality on the Humber’, 1892; ‘A Swim for a Hat’, 1849; ‘Fatal Chase after a Hat’, 1897. In what could be considered a tasteless joke, considering how many fatalities there were involving top hats, one newspaper suggested that one might use a hat as a life preserver: ‘The Use of a Hat’, 1841. ‘A Life for a Hat’, 1900; ‘Near Kingsbridge-Road Station’, 1885. An amusing story from the Penny Satirist demonstrates that hats were personalised with the owners’ names: ‘a lawyer wrote “rascal” in the hat of a brother lawyer who, on discovering it, entered a complaint in open court against the trespasser, who, he said, had not only taken his hat, but had written his own name in it’ (‘A Lawyer Wrote “Rascal”’, 1838). See ‘A Lawyer in a Dilemma’, 1846; ‘A Miserable Old Hat’, 1894; ‘Claim for the Loss of a Hat’, 1883; ‘Going to Law about a Hat’, 1857. Similar cases of damaged hats due to negligence on the part of some other person were brought to court: ‘A Damaged Hat’, 1887; ‘In the City of London Court’, 1897; ‘Amusing Action to Recover the Value of a Hat’, 1885. There is a similar story repeated in the press, though this one did not make it to court, about a man who brought his new hat to a bar. Someone played a joke on him by placing some cheese in the lining; the man believed because of the smell emanating from his head that he was very ill and might soon die: ‘A Remarkable Hat Story’, 1880; ‘A Diseased Hat’, 1881. See also ‘Scandalous Scene in a Church’, 1896; ‘That Hat!’, 1895. An editorial cartoon demonstrates the hat exchange nicely: a man down on his luck exchanges his top hat with that of Colonel Swellings as he sleeps. Later that night

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’ people notice the disparity of the hats and clothing of both the swell and the meanderer. See ‘The Colonel’s New Hat’, 1895. The fact that an Irish MP was the one that saved the new MP from further embarrassment is an important detail in this story. The Irish had only been part of the British Parliament since the Act of Union in 1800. From the 1870s until World War I, there was a strong Home Rule movement within Ireland, and most of the elected MPs from the region were Home Rule supporters by the 1880s when this episode took place. Furthermore, the Irish were forever seen as the backward group within the UK; they were sometimes even seen as a different race, one not as evolved as the Anglo-Saxon Englishmen. The fact the Irish MP, who did not care to be part of the British Parliament, knew the rules of the House  better than a Briton was particularly embarrassing. A similar story was told by the Weekly Gazette of Middlesbrough, England, where Mr Blumer, a member of the town council, wore his hat when speaking to the council. He was stopped from speaking with cries of ‘hat off’ and was prevented from having his say because he did not obey the etiquette of the assembly to which he was speaking (‘Mr. Blumer and his Hat’, 1877). Similarly in Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now, Mr Melmotte, the unscrupulous financier, gets up to make his first speech in Parliament, but he does not know the proper etiquette. One of his fellow Conservatives tells him that ‘[y]ou should take your hat off’ (Trollope, 1875, p. 220). The rule in theatres was for men to take off their hats when seated. This caused some resentment because women, who according to fashion sometimes had quite large hats, were not required to take off their hats during a performance. See ‘The Hat, which has Always Played …’, 1888; ‘The Hat Problem Solved’, 1910; ‘The AntiTheatre Hat League’, 1895; ‘The Hat Difficulty Solved’, 1887. See also Thorne, 1980. Some MPs treated the House not unlike a home and did not wear hats at all, preferring to leave them in the members’ cloak room. See ‘Members’ Cloak Room’, 1880, woodcut, Mary Evans Picture Library, London, Picture No. 10018648 (originally from the Illustrated London News). For further information on how the House of Commons was designed and the special rooms it contained, see Port, 2008. For more information about the shift of hegemonic masculinity away from gentry values, see Connell, 1995, pp. 186–99. ‘Curious Take Respecting’. For information on how gentlemen’s clubs regulated the behaviour of their members, see Milne-Smith, 2011, pp. 59–86. Members raised their hats when they were alluded to in a speech by another parliamentarian and when another minister answered a question posed by a first (‘The M.P.’s Hat’, 1898). See ‘The M.P.’s Hat’, 1898; ‘Literary Extracts’, 1892. This was not the only time that Gladstone made a stir with his choice of hat. On a particularly hot July day in 1900, the Leicester Chronicle and Leicestershire Mercury reported that Gladstone appeared in the lobby of the House of Commons in a straw hat (‘Straw Hat in the Lobby’, 1900). By the end of his tenure Gladstone’s hat had become so famous that Punch jokingly reported that it had been put on display at the Museum of Curiosities in Nice, France (‘The Hat that Braved!’, 1883). Another debate over hat etiquette appears in the Hansard records of 1837, when Lord John Russell read a royal message. Sir James Graham was reluctant to take off his hat, again inciting comment in the press and within Parliament (Parliamentary Debates, 1837). ‘Hat Customs, Honours, and Worship’, 1882; ‘The Great Hat Question’, 1882; ‘The Hat Question’, 1882. Lib-Labs were a group of parliamentarians who ran for Parliament with the support of the Liberal Party and the Labour Representation League. This non-­formal

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Reading appearances arrangement fell apart when the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee were formed. 38 Similarly in The Modern Man it was stated, ‘about a year ago, one used to associate the soft hat with the Socialist shouter …’ (‘Popularity of Felt Hats’, 1910).

References Amies, A. (1994). The Englishman’s Suit. London: Quartet Books, 1994. Amphlett, H. (1974). Hats: A History of Fashion in Headwear. Chalfont St Giles: Sadler. ‘Amusing Action to Recover the Value of a Hat’ (1885, 22 July). North-Eastern Daily Gazette. ‘The Anti-Theatre Hat League’ (1895, 19 December). Era. ‘April: Or, The New Hat’ (1881, 16 April). Punch. Banks, J. A. (1954). Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Class. London: Routledge & Paul. Barthes,R. (2006). The Language of Fashion. Trans. Andy Stafford. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Bauman, Z. 1972). Between Class and Elite: The Evolution of the British Labour Movement. A Sociological Study. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Beaujot, A. (2012). Victorian Fashion Accessories. London: Berg Publishers. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge, 1993. Byrade, P. (1979). The Male Image: Men’s Fashion in Britain 1300–1970. London: Humanities Press. ‘The Chimney-Pot Hat’ (1886a, 13 August). Daily News. ‘The Chimney-Pot Hat’ (1886b, 18 August). Daily News. ‘The Chimney-Pot Hat’ (1889, 13 August). Daily News. ‘The Churchgoer’s Hat’ (1894, 22 September). Isle of Wight Observer. ‘Claim for the Loss of a Hat’ (1883, 28 April). Berrow’s Worcester Journal. Clark, F. (1982). Hats. London: Drana Book Publishers. ‘The Colonel’s New Hat’ (1895, 13 April). Illustrated Chips. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Berkley: University of California Press, 1995. Cook, E. (1860, 11 February). ‘The Old Straw Hat’. Huddersfield Chronicle & West Yorkshire Advertiser. ‘Curious Take Respecting the “Shocking Bad Hat” of an Irish Member of Parliament’ (1838, 2 June). Preston Chronicle. ‘A Damaged Hat’ (1887, 30 November). Huddersfield Daily Chronicle. Davidoff, L. and Hall, C. (1987). Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Classes. London: Hutchinson. ‘A Diseased Hat’ (1881, 8 January). Bristol Mercury and Daily Post. ‘The Drowned Hat’ (1859, 16 June). Melbourne Punch. ‘Drowned in Recovering a Hat’ (1892, 18 April). North-Eastern Daily Gazette. Entwistle, J. (2000). The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Epstein, J. A. (1994). Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

‘Fatal Chase after a Hat’ (1897, 4 January). North-Eastern Daily Gazette. ‘Fatality on the Humber’ (1892, 18 April). Yorkshire Herald, and the York Herald. ‘Felt Hat Renovating’ (1908, 19 December). The Modern Man. Finkelstein, J. (1991). The Fashioned Self. Philadelphia: Polity. Flügel, J. C. (1930). The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogarth Press. Gilmore, M. T. and Dimock, W. C. (1994). Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. New York: Columbia University Press. Ginsburg, M. (1990). The Hat: Trends and Traditions. London: Barrons Educational Series. ‘Gladstone Forgot his Own Hat on Friday’ (1881, 4 June). Moonshine. ‘Going to Law about a Hat’ (1857, 17 January). Lady’s Newspaper. ‘The Grand Old Hat’ (1890, 22 March). Punch. ‘The Great Hat Question (1882, 23 March). Standard. Gubbins, N. ‘Why I Wear the Tall Hat’ (1892, 16 July).Sporting Times. Harris, J. (1981). ‘The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans, 1789–94’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14 (3), pp. 283–312. ‘The Hat and Coat Scramble at St. George’s Hall’ (1859, 29  January). Liverpool Mercury and Lancashire, Cheshire and General Advertiser. ‘Hat Customs, Honours, and Worship’ (1882, 31 March). Newcastle Courant. ‘The Hat Difficulty Solved’. (1887, 29 January). Punch. ‘Hat-Hunts’ (1843, 1 July). Preston Chronicle. ‘The Hat in Politics’ (1892, 1 September). Yorkshire Herald, and the York Herald. ‘The Hat Nuisance’ (1850, 5  October). Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser. ‘The Hat Problem Solved’ (1910, 3 December). Penny Illustrated Paper. ‘The Hat Question, (1882, 24 March). North-Eastern Daily Gazette. ‘Hat Reform’ (1849a, 15 January). Caledonian Mercury. ‘Hat Reform’ (1849b, 18 January). Caledonian Mercury. ‘The Hat Reform’ (1850, 12 October). Punch. ‘The Hat that Braved’. (1883, 17 February). Punch. ‘The Hat, which has Always Played so Prominent a Part in our Social Observances, is About to Figure as the Central Feature of an American Lawsuit’ (1888, 10 December). Standard. ‘The Hat which Makes Bald-Headed Men’ (1893, 1 August). Ladies’ Treasury: A Household Magazine. ‘The Hateful Hat-Guard’ (1886, 31 July). Funny Folks. ‘His New Hat’ (1889, 19 January). Pick-me-up. Hobsbawm, E. (1987). ‘Mass Producing Tradition: Europe, 1870–1914’, in Hobsbawm, E. and Roger, T. (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 263–308. Hollander, A. (1994). Sex and Suits. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. House of Commons (1978). Official Dress Worn in the House of Commons. House of Commons Library Document No. 4. London. House of Commons (2010). Some Traditions and Customs of the House. Factsheet G7, General Series. Revised August 2010. Hughes, E. (1956). Keir Hardie. London: Allen & Unwin. ‘In the City of London Court’ (1897, 15 August) Liberty Review: A Monthly Journal of Politics, Economics, and Sociology.

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Reading appearances ‘The Inconvenience of Bringing One’s Hat into a Crowded Party’. (1848, 9 September). Punch. ‘Keeping a Silk Hat Trim’ (1909, 22 May) Modern Man. ‘The King’s Hat’ (1827, 8 July) Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle. Kuchta, D. (1996). ‘The Making of the Self-Made Man: Class, Clothing and English Masculinity, 1688–1832’, in de Grazia, V. and Furlough, H. (eds), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 54–78. Kuchta, D. (2002). The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity England, 1550–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press. ‘The Last Hat’ (1870, 18 March). Judy. ‘A Lawyer in a Dilemma  – A Shocking Bad Hat’ (1846, 26 February). Brandford Observer & Halifax, Huddersfield, and Keighley Reporter. ‘A Lawyer Wrote “Rascal”’. (1838, 8 December). Penny Satirist. ‘Letters to the Editor’ (1893, 29 November). Glasgow Herald. ‘A Life for a Hat’ (1900, 15 September). New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal. ‘Literary Extracts’ (1892, 12 November). Cheshire Observer. ‘Look a-head! What ah! Your Hat!’ (1849, 14 July). Punch. McDowell, C. (1992a). Dressed to Kill: Sex Power and Clothes. London: Hutchinson. McDowell, C. (1992b). Hats: Status, Style and Glamour. New York: Thames & Hudson. Melton, H. (1865). Hints on Hats: Adapted to the Heads of the People. London: Hotten. Milne-Smith, A. (2011). London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘A Miserable Old Hat’ (1894, 11 January). Western Mail. ‘The M.P.’s Hat: And the Leading Part it Plays’ (1898, 26 February). Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, and General Advertiser for Hants, Sussex, Surrey, Dorset, and Wilts. ‘Mr. Blumer and his Hat’ (1877, 26 May). Weekly Gazette. ‘Mr. John Morley’s Hat’ (1892, 18 May). Huddersfield Daily Chronicle. ‘The Murderer’s Hat Band’ (1912, 22 June). Penny Illustrated Paper. Musgrove, F. (1959). ‘Middle-Class Education and Employment in the NineteenthCentury’. Economic History Review, 2nd series, 12, pp. 91–111. ‘Near Kingsbridge-Road Station’ (1885, 25 May). Standard. ‘A New Hat’ (1875, 31 July). Funny Folks. ‘The New Hat’ (1894, 1 August) North-Eastern Daily Gazette. ‘The New Hat for the Police’ (1844, 4 April). Morning Post. ‘The New Police Hat’ (1844, 20 April). Punch. ‘The New Ventilating Hat’ (1865, 16 September). Punch. ‘The Oppressive Tall Hat’ (1895, 5 February). Fun. Parliamentary Debates (1837, 23 June). Third series, vol. 38, cols 1581–82. Parliamentary Debates (1882, 21 March). Third series, vol. 297, cols 1442–43. Pointon, M. (1993). Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. ‘The Policeman’s New Ventilating Hat’ (1844, 13 April). Penny Satirist. ‘Popularity of Felt Hats’ (1910, 5 November). Modern Man.

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‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat’

Port, M. H. (2008). ‘“The Best Club in the World?” The House of Commons, c. 1860–1915’. Parliamentary History, 21 (1), pp. 166–99. Reid, F. (1978). Keir Hardie: The Making of a Socialist. London: Croom Helm. ‘A Remarkable Hat Story’ (1880, 11 September). Preston Guardian. ‘A Revolt Against the Tall Silk Hat has Again Broken Out in London’ (1896, 7 July). Friend of India and Statesman. ‘Scandalous Scene in a Church: The Story of a Hat’ (1896, 3 November). Dundee Courier and Argus. ‘The Shocking Bad Hat’ (1837, 14 July) Morning Post. ‘A Shocking Bad Hat’ (1840, 14 November) Penny Satirist. ‘Silk Hat Bands’ (1910, 7 May). Modern Man. ‘The Significance of the Hat’ (1895, 5 June). Pall Mall Gazette. Storey, N. (2010). History of Men’s Fashion: What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing. Barnsley: Remember When. ‘The Story of a Hat’ (1887, 25 August). Sheffield & Rotherham Independent. ‘Straw Hat in the Lobby’ (1900, 21 July). Leicester Chronicle and Leicestershire Mercury. ‘A Swim for a Hat’ (1849, 6 June). Derby Mercury. ‘That Hat!’ (1895, 2 February). Cycling Saturday. Thompson, E. P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Random House. Thorne, P. (1980). Ceremonial and the Mace in the House of Commons. House of Commons Library Document No. 11. London: House of Commons. ‘To My Hat’ (1875, 21 August) Funny Folks. ‘The Top Hat Doomed’ (1889, 23 March) Funny Folks. Trollope, A. (1875). The Way We Live Now. Leipzig: Chapman and Hall. ‘The Use of a Hat’ (1841, 11 September). Penny Satirist. Veblen, T. (1953). The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: The Macmillan Co. ‘A Ventilated Hat’ (1889, 10 August). Weekly Star and Vegetarian Restaurant Gazette. ‘The Vicissitudes of a Hat’ (1864, 15 December). Fun. ‘What Are You, Hat?’ (1863, 21 February). Punch. Wiesner, M. E. (1993). Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘The Worship of the Pot Hat’ (1892, 28 August). Reynolds’s Newspaper.

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5 Dressing for disinterestedness: Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and John Morley Kevin A. Morrison

In recent years, historians and literary critics engaged in reappraising Victorian liberalism have increasingly focused their attention on its embodied dimension. Scholars have long argued that liberalism’s repudiation of the significance of bodies elides its dependency on the White male in its conception of the universal liberal subject. But this now commonplace assumption, some contend, has produced its own blindness: to the ways in which liberals attempted to give critical reason ethical weight by figuring it as an ideal of temperament (tact, moderation, composure) and of character (sincerity, conviction, impartiality), and also to the modes of embodied life that are essential to liberal subjectivity.1 Despite the now burgeoning corpus of scholarship on lived liberalism, none of these studies consider the intersection of self-presentation and the body. By contrast, researchers interested in the social and cultural dimensions of fashion have been engaged in robust analyses of the experiences of sartorial embodiment. Elizabeth Wilson (1985) argued long ago that clothing stands at the complex intersection of the biological body and the social domain. Jennifer Craik further contended that the body is never simply biological but always constructed through acculturative forms, such as fashion, which normalise and codify ‘the display of the body and its comportment’ (1993, p.  9). Building on these insights, Joanne Entwistle sought to bring together sociological perspectives on the body, which have tended to discount fashion and dress, and valuable explorations of garments as material objects, which largely have ignored the corporal dimension. One’s clothing, Entwistle argued, ‘cannot be separated from the living, breathing, moving body it adorns’ (2000, p. 9). Although many studies published since these foundational works have explored the varied cultural meanings of clothing within embodied (and increasingly spatial) contexts,2 Victorian liberalism is either largely absent or, to the

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Dressing for disinterestedness

extent that it is present, serves as a backdrop rather than as a focal point of consideration. Pursuing a synthesis between work on Victorian liberalism and on approaches to fashion and embodiment, this essay is about three ­nineteenth-century political intellectuals who were, to varying degrees, stylistic nonconformists. Friends and fellow political liberals who engaged with one another’s work, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and John Morley each thought deeply about fashion. Through distinctive outward appearances, they also sought to signify their individuated subjectivity. In essence, they styled themselves as disinterested, logical reasoners rather than as perpetuators of received ideas. However, no effort has yet been made to situate the three in a comparative study, although Morley was influenced by Mill (and Spencer, to whom Mill had introduced him) and Mill by Spencer. Intellectually, Spencer’s brand of liberalism, informed by the physical sciences, differed from Mill’s and Morley’s more philosophical conceptions.3 All three happened to be known among their contemporaries for their idiosyncratic appearances, but Mill’s and Morley’s distinctiveness has been all but forgotten. Although Mill is generally credited with the liberal call to eccentricity, which makes lack of attention to his distinctive mien particularly odd, in fact Spencer preceded him in both word and deed. Spencer, in an essay entitled ‘Manners and Fashion’, written in 1854, five years before Mill published On Liberty, noted a link between democratic opinions and peculiarities in self-presentation. In the 1850s, as recalled by his amanuensis, Spencer was notorious for attending dinner parties without a tie and with an unbuttoned shirt and a long-flowing, untrimmed beard (Royce, 1904, pp.  190–91). He persisted in such unconventional behaviour throughout his life. Neither Mill nor Morley flouted conventions as freely. Yet, as  I  will  show, there were limits to Spencer’s unconventionality even as there were, for Mill and Morley, evident divergences from prevailing customs. Indeed, Spencer has often been seen by biographers and historians as an eccentric. By contrast, Mill and Morley are often portrayed as sartorial conformists. The biographer Nicholas Capaldi, for example, has noted that Mill arrived each morning at London’s India House, where he was employed for thirty-five years as an imperial administrator, wearing his signature ‘black suit with necktie’ (2004, p. 38), in keeping with the professional business attire so common in the city. The historian Christopher Dawson argues, analogising Morley’s appearance, that he ‘managed to clothe atheism in the frock coat and top hat of Victorian respectability’ (1998, p. 119). Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, two essential items in the wardrobe of any gentleman were the frock coat, which had skirts to the knees and was buttoned down to the waist, and the top hat, which was the dominant and most prestigious form of headwear.4

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Reading appearances By characterising Mill and Morley as conforming to fashion, scholars have associated them with the very groups against whom they protested in ways both similar to and distinct from Spencer and from each other. In fact, Mill and Morley worried that accepting the views of others on fashion as the premise of one’s own choices fatally compromised one’s capacity for self-expression. In order to illuminate the tensions and reciprocal relations between thought and practice, as three noted liberal intellectuals worked out their conceptions of individuality through sartorial metaphors and correspondences between fashion and political opinion, I begin with an examination of Spencer’s ‘Manners and Fashion’ and juxtapose this essay with accounts and visual evidence of his self-presentation. I then proceed to investigate Mill’s and Morley’s writings on fashion and individual liberty. Analysing photographs and paintings of these three thinkers, I show how they navigated  – in ways both similar and distinct  – the world of men’s fashion and how that world contributed to their philosophies.

The eccentricities of reformers Thomas Carlyle may have been the first British intellectual to deal, in his influential Sartor Resartus (serialised in 1833–34, officially published in book form in 1836), with the link between clothing and broader socio-­ political and philosophical themes. The impetus for the novel, written while he was simultaneously working on a study of the French Revolution (about which I will have more to say shortly), was the derisive ascription by aristocrats of a sartorial term sans-culottes (‘without knee breeches’) to ­lower-class republicans. In an act of linguistic reclamation, the working men adopted this term for themselves. Carlyle ruminates on the ways in which humanity has always sought to find, in his phraseology, a vesture (or outward symbol) worthy of its beliefs. But Carlyle positioned himself as the chief antagonist to the cadre of mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals, including Spencer and Mill, for whom the connection was vital. Published in the April 1854 issue of the Westminster Review and subsequently (with revisions) in collections of his essays, Spencer’s ‘Manners and Fashion’ begins with an observation: ‘Whoever has studied the physiognomy of political meetings, cannot fail to have remarked a connexion between democratic opinions and peculiarities of costume’ (1858, p. 109). In Spencer’s view, those who hold democratic opinions  – whether participants in Chartist rallies, attendees at socialist lectures, or supporters of the Italian Risorgimento who gathered at Friends of Italy association events – all incline towards unusual styles in dress and appearance. At one of these gatherings, therefore, one might notice open shirt collars, exposed necks, felt hats, or, at a time when facial hair was not yet prevalent, moustaches and full-grown beards. Nonconformity in hair

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Dressing for disinterestedness

and dress, he believes, are directly linked to discontent with extant social and political arrangements. Indeed, Spencer sees fashion as one of the many forms that control human behaviour. Law, a constellation of rules governing individual actions, and religion, an institutionalised set of attitudes, practices, and beliefs, determine ‘behaviour in its essentials’ (1858, p. 130). The social rules constituting a given system of manners determine the nature of civility within a society and, therefore, control behaviour ‘in its details’ (p. 130). Fashion, he contends, is ‘a class of social observances’ based on ‘copyism’ and conformity (pp. 135, 139). Unlike manners, which concern ‘our minor acts in relation to other persons’, fashion is chiefly concerned with the individual because it ‘dictates our minor acts in relation to ourselves’ and affects others ‘only as spectators’ (p. 135). Because it prescribes aspects of self-presentation that should be chiefly personal, however, fashion, like other forms of control, impinges on individual liberty. For Spencer, fashion is, like manners, derivative. ‘Manners’, he writes, ‘originate by imitation of the behaviour pursued towards the great; Fashion originates by imitation of the behaviour of the great’ (1858, p. 135). In later life, Spencer (1879) would elaborate on this point by contending that such imitative acts stem from either of two motivations: paying respect towards one’s betters and asserting equality with the person imitated.5 However, in his earlier work, Spencer chiefly regarded fashion as theoretically promising ‘continual progress towards greater elegance and convenience’ – in so far as those ‘who have got to the top’ possess ‘will, intelligence, and originality’, which suggests that they demonstrate solid ‘judgment in their habits and tastes’  – but instead delivering imitation (1858, p.  136). This is because fashion, like the other forms of rule that he discusses with concern in the essay, deteriorates. People who tend to be emulated are not, in fact, ‘the truly great’ or ‘the really best’. They are the ‘sham great’: ‘the self-elected clique who set the fashion’ because of ‘their unchecked assumption’ rather than ‘by their force of nature, their intellect, their higher worth or better taste’ (p. 136). From mid-century, the ruffles and bows, vibrant colours, and dainty fabrics of the Regency era had largely, but by no means exclusively, given way to starched white shirts, suits in dark fabrics, and ties in muted colours.6 Numerous upper-class gentlemen made their way through the teeming streets of London in solemn black jackets. However, they were not alone in donning the colour: bankers and stockbrokers, parliamentarians and tradesmen, the omnibus driver and the omnibus passenger, all wore black jackets. For a philistine man of business carrying a copy of The Times under his arm, black signified his trustworthiness. For members of the aspirant classes, black provided ‘good cover’ as they sought to improve their individual or familial social standing (Harvey, 1995, p. 147). For many intellectuals, black signified respectability, restraint, and rationality (Hollander, 2016).

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Reading appearances Surveying the urban landscape, an 1846 article in the Quarterly Review complained that men’s dress had become ‘as ugly as the staunchest Puritan could have desired’ (‘Art of Dress’, 1846, p. 374). In ‘Manners and Fashion’, Spencer inveighed against what he considered one of the current whims: the ubiquity of black. Top hats, which, according to prevailing custom, were part of genteel masculine attire throughout the nineteenth century, were ‘the black cylinders which tyrannize over us’ (1858, p. 110), and one might be immersed in a perpetual sea of black, even during periods of leisure. ‘[A] century ago’, Spencer argues, ‘black clothes would have been thought preposterous for hours of recreation’ (p. 140). At the time he wrote his essay, however, they were considered de rigueur. Although the often indistinguishably funereal appearance of men was not Spencer’s main target, this aspect of his argument was singled out for rebuke by his contemporaries. Characterising Spencer as ‘foaming against the tyranny which obliges us to wear black clothes of an evening’ and ‘against the society which submits to have its usages regulated’ according to whims, an unsigned article in the Universal Review cheekily declared that, ‘after a severe study’, the point seems to be that Spencer wants ‘permission to leave off the costume of an undertaker’ (‘Literature and Life’, 1859, p. 20). To be sure, for Spencer, black – the colour of choice for the working man, the middle-class professional, and the upper-class gentleman  – is itself incidental. If everyone wore red, he would have found this trend equally repellent. But because he was against tyrannical forms generally, and the repulsive monotony of enslavement to fashion specifically (Spencer, 1858, p. 141), which at the time happened to make black omnipresent, black became one of his many targets. His larger interest, however, was to show that the forms that control human behaviour have distinct commonalities. As a result, these ‘decline together and corrupt together’ (Spencer, 1858, p.  137).7 Surveying the progress of humankind rather than speaking specifically of his own historical moment, Spencer avers: ‘we have a reign of mere whim, of unreason, of change for the sake of change, of wanton oscillations from either extreme to the other’ (p. 136) – of which, surely, the contemporaneous predilection for black attire represented one end of the spectrum. As his subsequent comment suggests, however, black was by no means the only fashion trend with which he was concerned. Summing up his concerns with various fashions in clothes, manners, and behaviours, Spencer opines that life is ‘regulated by spendthrifts and idlers, milliners and tailors, dandies and silly women’  – that is, those various social groups who have, at various moments, established the manners, dress, and forms of entertainment imitated by others. Thus life is not ‘conducted in the most rational manner’ (p. 136).

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For the reform-minded Spencer, therefore, modish styles in hats and coats, as well as fashion colour cycles, must be opposed just as one contests any other system of control. Of the reformer, he insists: ‘The tyranny that would impose on him a particular style of dress and a set mode of behaviour, he resists equally with the tyranny that would  … dictate his creed’ (1858, p. 138). Moreover, overthrow the top hat and the tyranny it symbolises might also come to an end (Francis, 2014, p. 93). Consequently, the peculiarities of dress and style that one might observe among reformers are neither ‘accidental’ nor ‘mere personal caprices’ but part of the inevitable tension between conservative and progressive forces (Spencer, 1858, p. 137). On the one hand, ‘[a]we of power … defends despotism and asserts the supremacy of laws, adheres to old creeds and supports ecclesiastical authority, pays respect to titles and conserves forms’ (p. 138). On the other hand, ‘love of freedom  … achieves periodical instalments of political liberty, inaugurates Protestantism and works out its consequences, ignores the senseless dictates of Fashion and emancipates men from dead customs’ (p. 138). Subjecting even fashion to the principle of ‘equity’ and the faculty of ‘reason’, ‘the true reformer’ insists that ‘each man’ has the ‘liberty to pursue his own ends and satisfy his own tastes’ and ‘consents to no restrictions on this, save those which other men’s equal claims involve’ (p. 138). Nevertheless, there are those who single out for opprobrium any dissent from prevailing fashion. Spencer argues that this is wholly inappropriate. One’s dress does not impinge on others in the way one’s hygiene or mannerisms – say, speaking loudly or wildly gesticulating – might. It does not offend ‘men’s senses, or their innate tastes’, but instead challenges ‘their bigotry of convention’ (1858, p. 140). Therefore, he contends, no one can claim that the man ‘who presents himself … in brown trousers instead of black’ is dressed in a manner ‘less elegant or less intrinsically appropriate than the one prescribed’ (p. 140). He is simply ‘breaking through others’ forms that he may establish his own’ (p. 139). Yet, Spencer argues, for many nonconformists the challenge is maintaining one’s ‘resolution’. Most sartorial eccentrics are not ‘altogether at ease’ in living by their precepts (1858, p. 154). Nonconformity in self-­ presentation produces a variety of results on which the reformer had not counted: He had expected that it would save him from a great deal of social intercourse of a frivolous kind – that it would offend the fools, but not the sensible people; and so would serve as a self-acting test by which those worth knowing would be separated from those not worth knowing. But the fools prove to be so greatly in the majority that, by offending them, he closes against himself nearly all the avenues through which the sensible people are to be reached. Thus he finds, that his nonconformity is frequently misinterpreted; that there are but few directions in which he dares to carry it consistently out; that the annoyances and disadvantages which it brings upon him are greater than

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Reading appearances he anticipated; and that the chances of his doing any good are very remote. Hence he gradually loses resolution, and lapses, step by step, into the ordinary routine of observances. (p. 154)

Spencer’s point, of course, is not that dissent against prevailing fashions is useless. Rather, it is exceedingly difficult to sustain. Persistence, he suggests, is key, because over the long term one may identify others with shared views, and, once a certain critical mass is obtained, real change may be effected. In daily life, Spencer apparently flouted social and sartorial conventions in ways that left many of his family members and contemporaries either dumbstruck or uncomfortable. In 1874 Lady Derby, whose husband was foreign minister, invited Spencer to a small dinner party in honour of Tsar Alexander II, who was visiting London. Responding in the third person, Spencer averred: ‘The necessity of wearing a levee dress, to which Mr. Spencer has an insuperable objection, compels him to decline the offered pleasure’ (quoted in Duncan, 1908, p. 185). When he did accept invitations to dinner parties throughout the 1850s, Spencer would reluctantly wear a frock coat, which was standard formal wear. He adopted the swallowtail when this dress coat, which was once worn during daylight hours, was consigned to optional evening wear in the 1860s. He steadfastly refused, however, to wear the expected white necktie that would accompany either coat. According to his amanuensis, Spencer pronounced that his hosts ‘must take him as he chose to come’ (Royce, 1904, p. 191).8 More eccentrically, Spencer had a special suit made that he would wear only when angry, although he could be in this state for extended periods. The one-piece suit, which was laced together at the centre, was made of a soothing fabric that was supposed to have a calming effect on him. But when wearing the odd-looking costume in public, Spencer became a spectacle, which only further irritated him and inevitably led him to return to his usual attire. This cycle repeated itself on multiple occasions.9 Yet when it came to his own self-presentation in photographs, Spencer eschewed the unconventionality he had no qualms about displaying to close friends, associates, and, on occasion, the anonymous public. Because cartes de visite – photographic portraits, approximately two and a half by four inches, that were a significant aspect of social exchange in the 1860s – are staged images, they provide insight into the sitter’s self-fashioning.10 In his sepia-toned carte de visite, photographed by John Watkins, Spencer appears in the fashionable mode of the upper middle class (Figure 5.1). He wears a generously cut black frock coat, which men at this time donned for both business and social occasions. The deep V-fronted waistcoat, a small portion of which can be glimpsed inside his coat lapels, reveals, in an entirely characteristic manner, an expanse of starched white shirt. His silk tie, in a neat horizontal bow, was the most common style of contemporary neckwear.

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5.1  Herbert Spencer by John Watkins. Albumen carte de visite.

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Reading appearances There is nothing particularly odd about his grooming either. The contrast between the flatness of his receding hair, worn somewhat longish, and the jutting curls on each side is striking only to the extent that it emphasised that he was going bald. Although top hats are reputed to have had had the effect of flattening hair and thereby accentuating any curly hair below the hat, Spencer, who repeatedly declaimed the tyranny of top hats, was instead partial to wearing caps  – available in dozens of styles (Francis, 2014, p.  36).11 An 1879 illustration in Vanity Fair rather cheekily depicts him wearing the object he so despised (Plate 3). When he sat for the photograph, facial hair was the norm, and this particular style was quite fashionable. Clean-shavenness had experienced a precipitous decline from the 1840s, while the popularity of both beards and moustaches had increased exponentially (Robinson, 1976, pp.  1135–36). By  the  mid-1850s, when Britain was engaged in the Crimean War, Victorians embraced martial values and pedestalled soldiers, who, newly permitted to forgo shaving, were seen to exemplify manly ideals (Oldstone-Moore, 2005; Walton, 2008). Associating facial hair with a virile energy that, he believed, the clean-shaven men of the early Victorian era lacked, Thomas Carlyle decided to grow a beard in 1854 (Kaplan, 1983, p.  403). Spencer had entirely different reasons for growing his own facial hair. In ‘Manners and Fashion’, he notes that moustaches and, even occasionally, full-grown beards could be frequently spotted at democratic political meetings, although they were not typically seen in the wider culture (1858, p. 109). He opted to grow his beard at a time when it was unconventional, probably as an expression of solidarity with political nonconformists he admired. By 1858, and thus well before he sat for his carte de visite portrait, however, men’s facial hair had become highly fashionable.12 By contrast, neither John Stuart Mill’s nor John Morley’s appearance would seem to have invited comment. To modern eyes Mill and Morley appear to have been far less inclined to flout prevailing conventions. Yet, as the subsequent sections will show, they dissented in their own ways from prescriptive fashions while also differentiating themselves from each other as well as from Spencer.

Mill, the professional John Stuart Mill spent the majority of his professional life as an employee of the East India Company in its Office of the Examiner of Indian Correspondence at India House, Leadenhall Street, London. The unit was responsible for drafting authoritative policy statements and providing official guidance to the governing bodies in India. Hired when still a teenager, Mill ultimately held the second-highest position in the company’s home service.

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Once he became a senior administrative officer, Mill was known to arrive at the company’s headquarters each workday in a tailcoat and silk necktie. The philosopher and psychologist Alexander Bain, whose acquaintanceship with Mill endured for more than three decades, notes that Mill’s choice of colour ‘to the end’ was black (1882, p. 64). His appearance, in other words, was entirely in keeping with the position he occupied. What David Harvey refers to as ‘professional black’ (1995, p. 140) was the principal colour of the managerial class to which Mill belonged. For professionals, black – which has long associations with priestly power – symbolised their putative self-overcoming. The ideal of self-denial and objectivity, to which medical and scientific men as well as, apparently, imperial administrators aspired, found its colour and form in the dark-hued suit. It is, however, hard to reconcile Mill’s preference for black – a colour that, Spencer believed, contributed to the ‘repulsive monotony’ of his times – with his famous call to eccentricity in On Liberty. Mill began writing On Liberty from his office at India House in 1854 and finished much of it before his retirement in 1858. Among his primary targets are those whom Spencer saw as conformists and whom Matthew Arnold later called philistines: those whose staid social norms pervaded British culture, impeding critical thought and enlightened debate. Mill warns that the excessive pressures they exert to obey their social fashions stifle individual difference: ‘Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time’ (1977, p. 269). To counter this state of affairs, Mill argues, it is important for a society to give wide latitude to the expression of uncustomary practices. He insists: ‘it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric’ (p. 269). He does not encourage eccentricity for its own sake but rather for the glimpse of alternative modes of living and being that it affords, and he assumes that these experiments will ebb as the greater number of them – those commonly recognised as suitable ‘to be converted into customs’ (p. 269) – are implemented. Actions and behaviours that diverge from convention, however, ‘are not solely deserving of encouragement for the chance they afford that better modes of action, and customs more worthy of general adoption’ may be identified (Mill, 1977, p. 270). Mill posits a more basic reason for eccentricity: Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the

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Reading appearances shape of their feet? If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. (p. 270)

By insisting that humans are not sheep, Mill contrasts the great variety of differences among humans with those of a mammal generally known for its similarity of appearance and its flocking behaviour. Although a number of critics have discussed portions of this passage, most have ignored its sartorial dimensions. Thus Stewart Justman, who examines the euphemisms, allusions, and asides in On Liberty, focuses on the first sentence – seeing the reference to sheep as an implicit nod to John Milton (for whom sheep represent a forfeiture of political ­capacity) – and consigns Mill’s discussion of clothing to ellipsis (1991, p.  79). Alert to the text’s many references to plants and animals, including sheep, Christopher Cosans argues that for Mill ‘individuality reaches its highest level in humans’ (2009, p.  74). But the analogy to dress is itself worthy of further consideration. In making his point, Mill begins with fit – each person’s body differs in height, weight, girth, and other considerations – before taking up the question of taste and style. If the only way to obtain a properly fitting coat or pair of shoes is to have those items custom-made or selected from a vast array of options, does it not stand to reason that humans should be similarly free to tailor their own lives according to what is best for them or to be presented with a vast array of options – hence the need for experiments in living – from which they may choose? Even if individuals were all similarly shaped and sized, they would still possess ‘diversities of taste’, which should be given the freest scope for expression. Yet, one might argue, there is no greater evidence of convention than similarity of dress. Given Mill’s famous plea for eccentricity, for reasserting individuality through ‘the trial of new and original experiments in living’ (1977, p. 281), why does he look so very similar to the group he denounces? At first glance Mill’s black-and-white carte de visite of 1865 does not seem particularly remarkable (Figure 5.2). He is pictured in a stately frock coat, which had replaced the tailcoat so prevalent earlier in the century. Instead of sloping or cutting away, the front edges of his coat are likely to have been straight, although this is difficult to discern because he is seated. An illustration in Vanity Fair a decade later shows him once again sporting a frock coat; Mill was, as I will shortly discuss, partial to certain looks that he consistently maintained over decades (Plate 4). The skirts of the coat in the carte de visite are pushed back so that the photograph emphasises the double-breasted body of the garment. The fit is generous, with characteristically wide lapels. Beneath the coat, Mill wears a matching double-breasted waistcoat with a stylish shawl collar. The waistcoat is cut in the typical V-shape of the time, which reveals an expanse of white shirt. The monochromatic image makes it difficult to determine the colour of his silk tie, which is worn in a horizontal style popular until at least 1870,

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Dressing for disinterestedness

5.2  John Stuart Mill by John and Charles Watkins or by John Watkins, 1865. Albumen print, partially over-painted in ink wash.

although it is probably black. In short, his attire is entirely in keeping with the expectations of a man occupying his social position. Yet if one scrutinises the self-fashioned image more closely for cues to Mill’s stylistic sensibilities, rooted in his political philosophy, certain atypicalities become apparent. Although formal business wear by the 1860s tended to consist of a coat made of one fabric and trousers of another, with

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Reading appearances coats and waistcoats often slightly varying in shade or even colour,13 Mill wears matching trousers in a stylistically coordinated manner that lends gravitas to the look. Of course, Mill would not, by any means, have been the only one to wear such a sober combination. Other elements of the image, however, affirm his nonconformist tendencies. When he sat for this portrait, fashion dictated that shirt collars were ordinarily lower and turned down in front. The width of ties was generally less than an inch. Bow ties were certainly common, but men increasingly wore them knotted and fixed with a pin. Bows were, as the earlier image of Spencer documents, expected to be small and flat (Buck, 1962, p. 192). The bow of Mill’s cravat is unusually large: somewhat longer and floppier than the more customarily rigid versions worn by his contemporaries. At roughly the same time, as Robyne Erica Calvert has pointed out, men working in the creative arts were often adding ‘subtle touches’ to their costume, such as a floppy tie, ‘to signify “artist”’ (2015, pp. 240, 227). Rather than aligning himself with creative circles, however, Mill was enabled by his own artistic flair to express individuality, even eccentricity, at a time when most ensembles emphasised black. Others might choose a coloured or patterned tie, waistcoat, or braces. Another distinctive feature of Mill’s appearance in 1865 is his lack of facial hair. Although his long, full sideburns are on display, Mill eschewed both the moustache and the beard. When Spencer was writing in 1854, facial hair symbolised political and social discontent. Eleven years later, however, it was the clean-shaven look that suggested a departure from convention. Although I have been unable to uncover any explicit statements by Mill indicating that he was able to grow a beard and chose not to, evidence suggests that this was a conscious choice.14 One can only speculate on the reasons why he might have eschewed the hirsute fashions of his day. Because John Morley (about whom more shortly) also remained clean-shaven and had, in forming a friendship with Mill (Morrison, 2021), patterned his life in part on the latter’s philosophical precepts and example, I am inclined to believe that the reasons were intellectual as well as aesthetic. In the 1830s Mill undertook an intensive study of the philosophical origins of the French Revolution. Because his English compatriots blamed Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Denis Diderot, and their ilk for producing the circumstances in which the ideology of the French Revolution emerged, Mill planned to counter these views by writing a history of Enlightenment thought. Unable to complete it, Mill turned over his notes to Thomas Carlyle (Mill, 1981, p. 134). To Mill’s chagrin, Carlyle determined in his three-volume work that the philosophes peddled dangerous nostrums that led to the guillotine. As sympathetic students of the French Enlightenment, Mill and Morley, who took up the task of refuting Carlyle later in the century, were both well aware that the declining

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prevalence of facial hair in the late 1600s coincided with the emergence of the age of reason. These developments were ‘not directly linked, nor were they mere coincidences’, Christopher Oldstone-Moore notes. ‘As the ­mastery of nature now seemed more necessary and possible, it was fitting that authoritative masculinity was being redefined as a matter of refinement and education’ – that is to say, culture and reason – signified by a clean-shaven face (2016, pp. 130–31). It is, perhaps, for this reason that Mill and Morley both preferred to shave, whereas Carlyle, the antagonist, chose to grow a beard. In his recollections, Alexander Bain does not discuss Mill’s facial hair. In addition to revealing Mill’s unfailing preference for black clothing, however, Bain observed particularities in his friend’s dress. When Bain visited Mill at India House in 1842, Mill wore a ‘dress-suit with silk necktie’ (Bain, 1882, p.  64). Bain’s use of the term ‘dress suit’ surely refers to a dress coat, or early nineteenth-century tail coat, with trousers. By the 1840s, it was uncommon to wear a dress suit at all, except in the evening. Bain’s comments suggest a certain resistance on Mill’s part to changing fashions. Nonetheless, a decade later, the frock coat, which Mill has donned in the carte de visite photograph, was standard day wear. Textual sources, when they recount a person’s actions, may also serve as evidence of the embodied experience of clothing. Bain, one of the few to write about Mill’s career at India House, notes that Mill’s spacious office functioned as his carpeted ‘promenade’: as he read letters and contemplated his official responses, Mill paced back and forth along the length of the room (1882, p. 65). George Birdwood, a staff member of the India Office in the last three decades of the century, was told by one pensioner of the East India Company, whose recollections he recorded, that Mill’s restlessness was akin to a hyena’s (Birdwood, 1890, p. 47). ‘When particularly inspired, before sitting down to his desk, he used not only to strip himself of his coat and waistcoat, but of his trousers’, according to the pensioner, ‘and so set to work, alternately striding up and down the room, and writing at great speed’ (p. 48). Because the waistcoat was considered semi-­underwear, with the back always obscured in public by the coat, even having stripped down a layer would have been considered unusual. That Mill took off not only his coat but also his waistcoat and trousers – and that this was witnessed by at least some employees – suggests, if not an experiment in living, then certainly an experiment in writing.

Morley the parliamentarian From the 1860s, John Morley, Mill’s most prominent disciple, engaged in his own compositional experiments. As part of his preparation to write, Morley would follow, as he explained to the clerk to the Privy Council and literary figure Arthur Helps, the practice of the eighteenth-century

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Reading appearances French naturalist Buffon, whose work he had studied. He would shave and put on ‘clean linen’ before taking up his pen (Helps, 1917, p.  294). This reference to male underwear, certainly unusual for the time, also evokes a phrase from the Bible – ‘in fine linen, clean and white’ (Revelation 19:8)  – that Morley, whose upbringing was significantly shaped by the Evangelical revival, would have known well (Morrison, 2018b, p.  166). Buffon saw a connection among orderly appearance, self-possession, and rational thought: ‘Writing well is thinking, feeling, and expressing well; it is having at the same time wit, soul, and taste … The style is the man himself’ (Buffon, 1992, pp.  28, 30; my translation). The freshly shaved Morley – conscious of ‘fine linen’ in the Bible signifying righteousness and the adjectives ‘clean and white’ denoting purity – engaged in various forms of writing, including historical studies, literary analyses, editorials, and biographies, that he recognised as forms of virtuous political activity. This was, perhaps, particularly true of his extensive studies of the major thinkers of the French Enlightenment, which he undertook to refute Carlyle’s highly influential account. Morley’s habit of shaving, dressing himself in clean underwear, and then writing from within the solitary confines of his library may serve as evidence for Elaine Hadley’s argument (2010) that Victorian liberals valorised private cognition over public engagement. But while welcoming isolation for the purposes of clear thinking, Morley never thought of himself as retreating from public discussion and debate. Civic engagement was a central republican political ideal that, although it persisted well into the mid-Victorian period that Hadley analyses, must be muted in order for her to make this claim. In essence, Morley dressed and groomed for this particular form of civic engagement, a type that is not generally recognised, in discussions of self-presentation, as inherently social action.15 One of the forms of writing in which Morley was prominently engaged in the 1860s was the periodical essay. Between 1863 and 1867 he published dozens of essays on a range of topics in the Saturday Review and subsequently collected them for Modern Characteristics (1865) and Studies in Conduct (1867). In his later years Morley distanced himself from these essays by implying that they were mere copy, written to deadline (Hirst, 1927, p.  48). Critics interested in Morley’s thought today tend to follow his lead by paying them little attention. In Patrick Jackson’s view, they are ‘ephemeral’ (2012, p. 27), and in Jeffrey von Arx’s assessment, ‘light and innocuous’ (1985, p. 127). Yet they show Morley fully engaged in a vibrant public debate among mid-century Victorian liberals about the relationship between politics and fashion, and thus are worth closer scrutiny.16 In ‘Social Salamanders’, published in the 1 January 1865 issue of the Saturday Review and reprinted in Modern Characteristics, Morley affirms Mill’s argument in On Liberty that one should be free to pursue one’s own conception of the good life so long as it does not impinge on others.

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Yet he notes that ‘very few would find life endurable without a fair share of the approval of their neighbours’ (1865a, p. 35). He terms those who flout conventions without regard to what others think ‘social salamanders’. Like the various objects used in fires, which are capable of withstanding great heat, these individuals seem ‘to pass through the fiery furnace of mortification or disgrace without suffering a pang’ (p. 31). He notes that this ‘same kind of power of bearing social fire without pain or discomfort is often exhibited in minor matters’ (p. 35). He recalls Spencer’s having enjoined ‘every lover of individual freedom not to go to dinner-parties in a dress coat, and to wear a beard’ (p. 35). Writing a decade later, Morley avers, ‘The latter injunction has now indeed lost its point, but there are plenty of equally powerful devices for showing the world that you do not mean to be its slave’ (p. 35). He then provides several examples: People still think it pleasant and decorous to wear tailed coats and white ties at evening parties, and we fancy that anybody with a passion for making a social martyr of himself might easily gratify it by going out to dinner a few times in a dressing-gown or a tweed suit. Some men vindicate the right of free expansion in the human mind by leaving their hair to grow to any length it pleases, or by wearing strange head-gear, and coats fearfully and wonderfully made. They do not feel the least uncomfortable in being singular. The grins and starings with which they are greeted by a world sunk in commonplace and conventionalities move them not a jot. (pp. 35–36)

The tone is critical. As he elsewhere writes, ‘Mr. Herbert Spencer  … ­intimates in one of his essays, that nobody is likely to construct a sound system of psychology who conforms to the ordinary usage of going out to dinner in evening dress.’ Morley continues, ‘But why should swallow-tails thus become, as it were, intellectual cerements, or why should a white tie deaden the moral sentiments?’ (1865b, p.  176). In Morley’s view, it remains entirely unclear what these ‘innovators in trifles’ hope to gain (1865a, p. 36). What is clear to Morley is that ‘[i]n by far the majority of cases, contempt for public opinion is a sign either of consummate impudence or surpassing shallowness’ (1865a, p.  37). If he thought Spencer impudent or shallow, Morley does not say. Among historians and literary critics, statements such as these have earned Morley a reputation for priggish censoriousness. But his point is rather more complicated than that individuals should not defy social conventions simply to exhibit their own audaciousness and originality: If a man wants to make the world more tolerant of speculative or theological differences, or to make it accept new social doctrines which he has come to preach, surely he is not likely to gain a more willing audience by outraging their habits in the sheerest trifles. Is a saint in a tailed coat twice a saint in a tweed shooting-jacket? On the contrary, people would listen all the more readily to a man who differed from them in great matters if he did not flout and snub them in small ones. The identification of all uncommon and unpopular

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Reading appearances views with strange manners and uncouth attire is a fatal course for any one to pursue who wishes such views to become common and popular as speedily as may be. (Morley, 1865a, p. 37)

Spencer acknowledged in ‘Manners and Fashion’ that nonconformity in dress and grooming could considerably narrow the number of people receptive to differences in ideas. He urged reformers to persist, however, believing that, as greater dissentients work in concert, the public would recognise that such opposition to prevailing fashions flowed from principle and was not simply the result of ‘ignorance or disrespect’ (Spencer, 1858, p.  156). By contrast, Morley insists that eccentricity of self-presentation fatally compromises the reception of unconventional social, religious, or political ideas.17 This is not to say that, in Morley’s view, one should be a stylistic conformist. In ‘The Uses of Dignity’, which appeared in the 29 July 1865 issue of the Saturday Review and in Modern Characteristics, he lauds the ‘secondary adjuncts of grace and dignity’ that give to life much of its pleasure (1865c, p. 15). To be sure, he points out, ‘graces of the mind and dignity of character are a great deal more important that graces and dignity of exterior’, and one does not necessarily depend on the other: ‘A man may write polished and sonorous sentences which have not an atom of thought in them  … And he may be well dressed, without necessarily possessing either a sound mind or a sound body’ (p. 16). Yet precisely because there is no firm connection between dignity in lesser and in weightier matters, he laments, ‘many people have failed to recognise the existence of dignity in non-essentials as a substantial and independent merit’ (p. 17). Some, Morley says, perhaps referring to Spencer, even yearn for a ‘primitive simplicity’, in which ‘cumbrous etiquette’ and expectations of dress and appearance are abolished, so that individuals may freely engage with one another and live their own lives without fear of censure or hope of approbation (p. 17). ‘To be obliged to live in dingy rooms, and to have no pictures nor flowers nor music, and to fare coarsely, and wear bad clothes’, he protests, ‘all this is a deprivation which the most philosophic of men would be all the betI for not having to undergo’ (p. 19). While ‘[s]tyle … demeanour, and attire, are all mere outsides’, yet they may have value for their own sake as contributing to ‘the ornamentation’ of one’s life (p. 16). As the preparatory rituals in which he engaged before writing indicate, Morley placed great importance on dress and grooming and took care to craft his public presentation. Photographed by Alexander Bassano, Morley’s portrait for an 1886 carte de visite shows him cleanly shaven with his hair cut in the short, clipped style typically favoured in the late 1800s (Figure 5.3). Regardless of his intentions, about which I have already speculated, the eschewal of a moustache or beard, at least in the circles within which he moved, was considered striking. ‘His face is unlike that

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5.3  John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, by Alexander Bassano, November 1886. Albumen carte de visite.

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Reading appearances of anyone else in the House of Commons’, observed one commentator at the beginning of the twentieth century (Gould, 1904, p. 732). In other respects, however, Morley appears quite fashionable. Although only a small glimpse of his clothing can be seen here, the open top garment is very likely to be a lounge jacket  – forerunner to today’s business-suit jacket – rather than a frock coat, which, although it grew slightly shorter in length during the 1870s, remained a leading symbol of respectability (Breward, 1995, p. 174). Worn with matching waistcoat and corresponding trousers, the three-piece lounge suit first emerged in the 1850s as a less formal alternative to the frock coat. By the 1870s, tailoring had become narrower and sleeker, and the more fitted ‘suit of dittos’, so-called because trousers, jacket, and waistcoat were all made of the same material, was prevalent throughout metropolitan society (Shannon, 2006, pp. 161–62). Morley’s stiff, starched shirt collar exhibits the high standing points that were common between the later 1880s, when he sat for the image, and the early 1900s. He would have been quite at home on London’s Strand, the street that functioned as something of a promenade for men’s fashion during this period (Breward, 2004, p. 70). Yet, for all his fulmination against eccentricity, Morley’s ensemble includes two rather distinctive elements. Although his long narrow necktie may seem to resemble the typical knotted four-in-hand, which was fashionable from the 1870s and persisted until the end of the century, Morley has slipped the ends of his tie through a gold ring. The ring is also observable in Walter William Ouless’s portrait of Morley in oil (1891; Plate 5). This was a peculiar mode of wearing one’s tie in the 1880s and 1890s. Fashion plates, although in no way indicative of styles adopted, suggest that it was more common at mid-century. Ouless’s portrait also reveals what cannot be discerned from Morley’s albumen carte de visite: the colour of his large silk square, folded to make a cravat, which is red. The contrast between it and Morley’s dark suit is striking. By the late 1870s, the decade in which Margaret Oliphant characterised middle-class men’s dress as ‘monotonous livery’ (1878, p. 41), fashion came under heavy criticism by those propagating new aesthetic ideals. For them, women’s and men’s dress ought to be both attractive and functional. Morley would have been receptive to these new ideas. As early as 1873, he demonstrated a marked affinity for aestheticism. In that year he published in the Fortnightly Review – the leading liberal periodical, for which he was then serving as editor – a review of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Although Pater does not write specifically about dress, he does make a case for beauty. Ouless’s portrait manifested just how responsive Morley was to this emphasis. Indeed, in his review, Morley argues that while Pater ‘has no design of interfering with the minor or major morals of the world’ (1873, p. 475), and therefore Paterian aestheticism may seem trivial to the periodical’s

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readers, he dealt an important blow against middle-class philistinism. ‘The prodigious block of our philistinism needs to have wedges driven in at many points’, Morley avers (pp. 476–77). Much as Morley had focused, a decade earlier, on the ‘secondary adjuncts of grace and dignity’, Pater is concerned ‘with what we may perhaps call the accentuating portion of life’ (Morley, 1873, p. 475). This portion, Morley argues, is vital. Indeed, aestheticism represents ‘a craving for the infusion of something harmonious and beautiful about the bare lines of daily living’ (p. 476). While acknowledging the potential dangers of the movement (‘It has an exaggerated side’: p. 475), he welcomes its focus on beautifying oneself and one’s surroundings. In the last two decades of the century, a tie in black or another neutral colour was commonly worn. When aesthetic dress began to take off, around the time when Morley entered the House of Commons in 1883 as a newly elected MP from Newcastle, he was predisposed to embrace many of its elements.18 After Prime Minister William Gladstone appointed him Chief Secretary for Ireland, a cabinet position he held in 1886 and again between 1892 and 1895, the distinctive red silk tie was all the more prominent. It ‘attracted the wandering glances’ of MPs (‘John Morley by a Parliamentary Hand’, 1896, p. 801). The ‘warm tint of the tie’ contrasted with the ‘pale, grave face of its owner’ (p. 801). Morley’s use of an accent colour characterised as warm, rather than, say, vibrant, suggests that the pigment was derived from plants rather than synthetically produced through aniline dyes. This was the mode of colour production that the proponents of aesthetic dress espoused. There is a common misperception that primary colours were anathema to aesthetes. Yet aesthetes did not dislike primary colours. Rather, they favoured natural dyes. Red is a colour that can be achieved with natural dyes through the Turkey red process.19 After all, aesthetic dress is typified by its sunflower tones (yellow is, of course, a primary colour), and blue was the principal colour of a variety of accessories for the body and the home. Many aesthetes were particularly fond of red: G. F. Watts was partial to the Titian hue, and a range of adherents to the aesthetic movement were known to don crimson Turkish caps. Yet it was unusual to see anyone wearing a red tie in late nineteenth-century portraiture, let alone in the halls of Parliament, and Morley’s doing so points to his sympathy with the dress-reform movement and the principles of aestheticism on which it was based. This sympathy was persistent. After losing his seat in 1895, Morley was returned to Parliament in the February 1896 by-election representing a new constituency, Montrose Burgh. But his trademark look remained, and it persisted through his terms as Secretary of State for India (1905–10, 1911).20 This look included diverging from expectations regarding the use of colours in one’s choice of lounge suit. At the turn of the century,

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Reading appearances suits and overcoats continued to be relatively sombre. Black was still the colour most commonly worn, but dark blues, browns, and greys were also prevalent. Morley did not depart from this palette. What was distinctive about Morley’s appearance, however, at least to some observers, was that he did not avail himself of the full range of colours to which he had access. He almost always wore blue and brown suits. T. P. O’Connor, an Irish politician, writing for Cassell’s Magazine, wondered if this choice of colour reflected the lingering influence of the French Revolution (1900, p.  130). The two were parliamentary colleagues who shared republican tendencies. In any case, people of different political persuasions could agree that ‘Mr. John Morley has a certain individuality of taste in dress’ (O’Connor, 1900, p.  130). This individuality may not be readily apparent to the modern eye. But, like Mill, Morley sought to dissent from the tyranny of custom while avoiding the fate of being, as Spencer feared of stylistic nonconformity, ‘to be in a complacent minority of one’ (Morley, 1865a, p. 37).

Notes   1 On liberalism as an ideal of temperament and character, see Anderson, 2001. On the forms of embodied life that are essential to liberal subjectivity, see Hadley, 2010. On the relationship of bodily practices to the quotidian production of knowledge, see Morrison, 2018b. Other recent revaluations of liberalism include Levine, 2002; Goodlad, 2003; Thomas, 2004; Malachuk, 2005; and Macleod, 2013.   2 See, for example, Potvin (2013) and Myzelev and Potvin (2010).   3 From a scientific standpoint, Spencer had challenged aspects of Mill’s theory of knowledge as expounded in his A System of Logic (1843). Accepting the validity of the critique, Mill revised aspects of his argument (Capaldi, 2004, p. 304). Morley, who was Mill’s leading disciple, had little faith in the physical sciences, but he recognised Spencer as a leading proponent of individualism. Focusing narrowly on this point of agreement between the three men and its intersections with dress, this essay must, necessarily, bracket their many differences.   4 The term ‘gentleman’ is notoriously complex, and the Victorians themselves could not agree on its precise meaning. Certainly, aristocrats and the gentry were gentlemen by birth. Others, including the clergy, senior members of the armed forces, and MPs became gentlemen through their occupations. This was the case for Mill and Morley. But by mid-century, men of the middle class who had obtained a grammar school or public school education and who evinced strong moral character (as dictated by social norms) were usually referred to as gentlemen as well. Because I am concerned with the latter half of the century, I will use the term here in its broader sense.   5 This argument would be picked up and adapted by subsequent theorists of fashion in the twentieth century: from Georg Simmel (1904), who further developed its democratising potential, to J. C. Flügel (1930), who – forcefully asserting that in the aftermath of the French Revolution, European men increasingly gravitated towards a uniform appearance – recognised its implications for uniformity.   6 Uniformity was not absolute, and even in these decades, middle-class ‘gents’  – ‘rather flashy, middle-class types, fond of the sporting life, and  … certainly not gentlemen’ – dressed in garish colours (Ribeiro, 1986, p. 125).   7 In later versions of the essay, Spencer replaces ‘corrupt’ with ‘decay’.

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  8 When Thomas Huxley, John Tyndall, and Alfred Russell Wallace gently teased Spencer for not being true to his principles when he showed up to dine with them in a frock coat, he retorted that ‘the coat was a relic of his unregenerate days’ and that, in any case, he had refused to wear it with the customary white tie (Wallace, 2011, p. 33).   9 On Spencer’s anger suit, see Nicholson, 1938, pp. 36–38. 10 On cartes de visite, especially their exploitation by politicians and celebrities, and the cabinet cards that largely replaced them from the 1870s onwards, see Linkman, 1993, especially pp. 64–69, 74–76. 11 Much later, on Spencer’s 1882 trip to America, when his appearance was discussed at length in the press, he wore a black polo cap (Chalcraft, 2010, p. 134). 12 Indeed, Spencer had not anticipated this change when writing ‘Manners and Fashion’. Thus from 1858 he appended to his discussion of men’s facial hair the following note: ‘This was written before moustaches and beards had become common.’ 13 Over a decade had elapsed from the time when Spencer had written ‘Manners and Fashion’. While he was lampooned for suggesting that the colour of trousers might be different, this was, by the 1860s, perfectly acceptable. On differences in texture, pattern, and shade, see Kent, 2009, p.  186; Nunn, 2000, p.  110; and Hollander, 2016, p. 80. 14 See, for example, ‘John Stuart Mill’ (1873), written by a contemporary who was in the position of observing him up-close on a daily basis and describes him as having a shaved face (p. 368). 15 To be sure, one undertakes these acts ‘in order to participate in society’ (BiddlePerry and Cheang, 2008, p. 3). 16 I undertake a thorough analysis of these essays, although focused on Morley’s interest in parent/child dynamics, in Morrison, 2018a. 17 This was equally true for Morley in the realm of speech and literature. He objected to G. H. Lewes’s boisterous bohemian reminiscences and Algernon Swinburne’s lascivious poetry for the same reasons. 18 Precisely because this was a ‘rather nondescript’ period in terms of men’s fashions (Whife, 1968, p.  16), elements of aesthetic dress, which sought a greater level of naturalism and emphasised expressive individuality, would have appealed to Morley. 19 For an overview of the Turkey red process, see Tuckett and Nenandic, 2012. 20 I have found only one reference to Morley’s tie as vibrant: a ‘bright tie  … [that] flashed on the sombre-clad assembly’ (‘John Morley by a Parliamentary Hand’, 1896, p. 801). When evaluated against the visual evidence of Morley’s dress, including Ouless’s portrait, however, this statement appears to be contextual. Against a sea of black, Morley’s tie would have seemed bright.

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Reading appearances Breward, C. (1995). The Culture of Fashion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Breward, C. (2004). Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis. Oxford: Berg. Buck, A. (1962). Victorian Costume and Costume Accessories. New York: Nelson. Buffon, G. L. L. (1992). Discours sur le style: suivi de ‘L’art d’écrire’ du même et de ‘Visite à Buffon’ d’Hérault de Séchelles [1753]. Castelnau-le-Nez: Climats. Calvert, R. E. (2015). ‘Manly Modes: Artistic Dress and the Styling of Masculine Identity’. Visual Culture in Britain, 16 (2), pp. 223–42. Capaldi, N. (2004). John Stuart Mill: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carlyle, T. (1836). Sartor Resartus [1833–34]. Boston: Monroe. Chalcraft, D. (2010). ‘Herbert Spencer’s Dangerous Pilgrimage: In America 1882’, in Schrecker, C. (ed.), Transatlantic Voyages and Sociology: The Migration and Development of Ideas. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 129–46. Cosans, C. E. (2009). Owen’s Ape and Darwin’s Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and Creationism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Craik, J. (1993). The Face of Fashion: Studies in Fashion. London: Routledge. Dawson, C. (1998). Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson. Ed. G. J. Russello. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Duncan, D. (1908). The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. London: Methuen. Entwistle, J. (2000). The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Flügel, J. C. (1930). The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogarth Press. Francis, M. (2014). Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life. Abingdon: Routledge. Goodlad, L. M. E. (2003). Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gould, F. C. (1904). ‘Politicians and Caricaturists’. Booklover’s Magazine, 4 (5), pp. 730–35. Hadley, E. (2010). Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, J. (1995). Men in Black. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Helps, E. A. (ed.) (1917). Correspondence of Sir Arthur Helps … . London: Lane. Hirst, F. W. (1927). Early Life and Letters of John Morley, vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Hollander, A. (2016). Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. London: Bloomsbury. Jackson, P. (2012). Morley of Blackburn: A Literary and Political Biography of John Morley. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ‘John Morley by a Parliamentary Hand’ (1896). Woman at Home: Annie S. Swan’s Magazine, 5 (July), pp. 800–11. ‘John Stuart Mill’ (1873). Popular Science Monthly, 3 (July), pp. 367–68. Justman, S. (1991). The Hidden Text of Mill’s Liberty. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kaplan, F. (1983). Thomas Carlyle: A Biography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kent, C. (2009). ‘Depicting Gentlemen’s Fashions in the Tailor and Cutter, 1866–1900’, in Brake, L. and Demoor, M. (eds), The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press. Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 184–200.

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Levine, G. (2002). Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Linkman, A. (1993). The Victorians: Photographic Portraits. London: I. B. Taurus. ‘Literature and Life’ (1859). Universal Review, 1 (March), pp. 1–22. Macleod, J. (2013). Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism: Politics and Letters, 1886–1916. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Malachuk, D. S. (2005). Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Mill, J. S. (1977). On Liberty, in Essays on Politics and Society, part 1, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol.  18. Ed. J. M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 212–310. Mill, J. S. (1981). Autobiography [1873], in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 1. Ed. J. M. Robson and J. Stillinger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morley, J. (1865a). ‘Social Salamanders’, in Modern Characteristics: A Series of Short Essays from the Saturday Review. London: Tinsley, pp. 31–40. Morley, J. (1865b). ‘The Theory of Life from Below-Stairs’, in Modern Characteristics: A Series of Short Essays from the Saturday Review. London: Tinsley, pp. 175–85. Morley, J. (1865c). ‘The Uses of Dignity’, in Modern Characteristics: A Series of Short Essays from the Saturday Review. London: Tinsley, pp. 11–20. Morley, J. (1873). ‘Mr. Pater’s Essays’. Fortnightly Review, new series, 13 (76), pp. 469–77. Morrison, K. A. (2018a). A Micro-History of Victorian Liberal Parenting: John Morley’s ‘Discreet Indifference’. Houndmills: Palgrave. Morrison, K. A. (2018b). Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Morrison, K. A. (2021). ‘A “Less than Enthusiastic” Friendship: John Morley, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes’. English: Journal of the English Association, 70 (268), pp. 66–86. Myzelev, A. and J. Potvin (2010). Fashion, Interior Design, and the Contours of Modern Identity. Farnham: Ashgate. Nicholson, H. (1938). Small Talk. Leipzig: Tauchnitz. Nunn, J. (2000). Fashion in Costume, 1200–2000. 2nd edn. Chicago: New Amsterdam Books. O’Connor, T. P. (1900). ‘The Inky Cloak: Legislators and their Garments’. Cassell’s Magazine, 32 (December), pp. 127–30. Oldstone-Moore, C. (2005). ‘The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain’. Victorian Studies, 48 (1), pp. 7–34. Oldstone-Moore, C. (2016). Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Oliphant, M. (1878). Dress. London: Macmillan. Potvin, J. (2013). The Places and Spaces of Fashion: 1800–2007. London: Routledge. Ribeiro, A. (1986). Dress and Morality. London: Batsford. Robinson, D. E. (1976). ‘Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842–1972’. American Journal of Sociology, 81 (5), pp. 1133–41. Royce, J. (1904). Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and a Review. New York: Fox, Duffield, and Co. Shannon, B. (2006). The Cut of his Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914. Athens: Ohio University Press.

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Reading appearances Simmel, G. (1904). ‘Fashion’. International Quarterly, 10 (1), pp. 130–55. Spencer, H. (1858). ‘Manners and Fashion’, in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, pp. 109–57. Spencer, H. (1879). Principles of Sociology IV: Ceremonial Institutions. London: Williams and Norgate. Thomas, D. W. (2004). Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tuckett, S. and Nenadic, S. (2012). ‘Colouring the Nation: A New In-Depth Study of the Turkey Red Pattern Books in the National Museums Scotland’. Textile History, 43 (2), pp. 161–82. Von Arx, J. P. (1985). Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth Century Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallace, A. R. (2011). My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, vol.  2 [1905]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, S. (2008). ‘From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the 1850s in England’. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 30 (3), pp. 229–45. Whife, A. A. (1968). ‘Sartorial Facts and Fashions of the Early 1890s’. Costume, 2 (1), pp. 16–20. Wilson, E. (1985). Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: Virago.

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6 Sartorial subversion and the House of Commons: political identities, meanings, and the responses to MPs’ dress, c. 1850–1914 Marcus Morris

Certain sartorial expectations governed the appearance of MPs in the House of Commons in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. To be taken seriously, to convey their suitability for office in a changing political landscape, and to demonstrate that they conformed to accepted notions of respectability, character, and masculinity, MPs were expected to don the uniform of the House: a sombre black frock coat, silk top hat, and morning suit. Most did, and this was ubiquitous in both Houses – especially the Commons – throughout the period. Yet others chose not to, consciously (and sometimes unconsciously) subverting the Commons’ sartorial norms, eliciting predominately critical responses from within and without Westminster. It is these challenges to sartorial expectations that form the focus for this chapter. Clothing was recognised as an important form of political communication and culture, as well as a visual clue to the political identity of the wearer. It thus reveals much about the values of a specific time and place. Of course, not all sartorial choices had political meaning, and some were born out of eccentricity or contrariness rather than political difference. Many, however, were contrived and had political consequences. The reactions of fellow MPs, the political classes and wider popular culture, therefore, tell us much about political attitudes broadly and more specifically about an evolving political culture and system. The British parliamentary system from the mid-nineteenth century onwards went through multiple changes and faced myriad challenges, evoking similar fears in different generations of politicians. The franchise was extended in a series of Reform Acts, labour representation was growing, radical politics was gaining in strength, and nationalist agendas were at the centre of debate and discord. Moreover, as a body the House of Commons changed in composition and more or less in its social makeup.

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Reading appearances Yet it remained central to the British political system. Leslie Stephen concurred, writing in 1867 that ‘the English Parliament is, in a degree quite unparalleled, the centre of all the political discussion of the country’ (1867, p. 90). As such, Parliament became, as Stefan Collini has noted, ‘the focus both of national political attention and of individual ambition’ (1991, p.  33). Thus the Liberal statesman John Morley suggested that ‘nearly every Englishman with any ambition is a Parliamentary candidate, actual or potential’ (quoted in Collini, 1991, pp.  33–34). Given this continued importance of Parliament, historians have examined its changes from a multitude of angles, offering various explanations as to why they occurred, and have taken a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to the period. Traditionally, structural developments had underpinned historians’ assessments, but more recently the focus has shifted to the multiple influences that have shaped popular politics, political cultures, and personal political identities (Joyce, 1991; Biagini, 1992; Lawrence, 1998). This has given rise to and seen the ascendency of ‘new political histories’, which have closely analysed the role of language and rhetoric in forging political cultures and identities, relying on text-based sources as a result.1 Such studies have deepened our understanding of political culture, increased sensitivity to the language of politics, and helped to avoid deterministic explanations for political change. Nevertheless, when the written and spoken word are privileged, other important forms of political communication can be downplayed or lost from view. Reflecting such historiographical developments, then, very few historians have examined the significance of clothing as a form of material and visual culture in the context of Britain’s shifting political and parliamentary landscape, thus missing its significance as a site of change, a form of political communication, and a barometer of parliamentary and societal feeling. This chapter, therefore, suggests that MPs’ dress can give an illuminating insight into Britain’s changing political landscape in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Sarah Parker has argued, more broadly, ‘throughout the 19th century, dress was a battleground on which a number of key debates were fought and contested’ (2014, p.  583). In particular, the chapter will demonstrate how the invariably negative responses to those who did not conform to parliamentary norms were a comment not on fashion but on the challenges – and associated fears  – that shifting political identities and cultures presented for traditional politics and its elite. Such responses reflected a perceived connection between ­sartorial subversion and radical politics; Paul Pickering has noted how ‘symbolic appurtenances, colours and modes of appearance performed several important communicative functions in radical political culture’ and especially in the eyes of those outside that culture (1986, p.  155). They also revealed wider concerns about a dumbing down of British politics as a result of its widening social base, about the social

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suitability of those outside of the established political order to serve in Parliament, and about notions of respectability and character. MPs were thus keen to anchor parliamentary politics in a more comfortable past, with its accepted values, traditions, and hierarchies, in this ever-­ developing (and not just in the political) world.2 To be sure, there is a growing focus on material and visual cultures and the practice of politics in the nineteenth century. Partly inspired by these ‘new political histories’ historians of British politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, including pioneers such as Frank O’Gorman and James Vernon, have sought to demonstrate the link between material and visual cultures and popular politics (O’Gorman, 1992; Vernon, 1993). In focusing on politics as a public affair, some historians have emphasised the importance of material culture (Navickas, 2010; Nixon, 2012; Morgan, 2012). Others, meanwhile, have sought to demonstrate the continued importance of visual political culture throughout the nineteenth century (Thompson, 2007; Roberts, 2013; Miller, 2015). Moreover, historians of other political cultures, especially Revolutionary France, have illustrated the link between the material, the visual and the political (Hunt, 1986; Wrigley, 2002). Most recently, an excellent collection of essays has sought to examine the links between material and visual cultures and the essentially performative nature of British politics in the nineteenth century and its performative spaces (including Parliament), with clothing (or costume) a key component of such performances (Yeandle, Newey, and Richards, 2016).3 As Henry Lucy, the leading political journalist of the Victorian period, put it: ‘though the Palace of Westminster is not licensed for theatrical performance, it is upon occasions a successful rival of other houses that are. The House of Commons has its stage, upon which strut the most famous actors of the age’ (1908, p.  277). However, the focus for the majority of studies has remained the political world outside the House of Commons.4 This study, then, builds on the recent work on material and visual cultures and shifts the focus to parliamentary politics and what clothing as a form of material and visual culture can reveal about Parliament in this period. In part, the links between sartorial identity and parliamentary politics have received so little attention from historians of popular politics because they do not fit with their assumptions about mid- and late Victorian politics. Thus our understanding of such links has predominately come from historians of fashion and other disciplines. As a result, sartorial identities have been analysed alongside consumer cultures in order to articulate the complexities of class and the shifting social hierarchies of mid- and late nineteenth-century politics.5 Clothing in this context carries symbolism, acts as a form of symbolic practice and social action, and makes statements about identity. Dress and the sartorial presentation of self can express numerous identities, revealing much about the wearer without

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Reading appearances the need for alternative forms of communication.6 In this, the wearer is ‘bodying forth’, with clothing ‘inextricably linked to a remodelling of material form and, with it, of cultural sensitivity’ (Bryden, 2011, p. 29). For historians of fashion, the key identities and the social and cultural codes that clothing affirmed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were gender, social status, and political. It is the relationship between MPs’ clothing (as a cultural form and medium of material and visual communication) and these codes, cultures, and identities that is the focus of this chapter. This focus reveals a greater complexity to that relationship than is traditionally presented; it illustrates the importance of clothing as a form of political communication and demonstrates that the reactions to that communication are reflective of wider concerns about the identities and codes displayed. Historians have seen clothing as the guarantee and symbolic tool of social status and gender. It is a system of signs or a ‘language’, a non-­ verbal form of communication that articulates social, cultural, gender, and political hierarchies in the most immediate and visible form. Clothing is thus a form of cultural production, and is understood as a practice and institution by which social relations and differences in rank, gender, and politics are made meaningful. As William Keenan has argued, it is a ‘summarizing symbol, [that] comes to stand for us and our standing in society’ (2001, p. 181). Of course, as James Epstein has highlighted, clothing is ‘set within a field of signs and complementary meanings’ that emphasise and contextualise the significance of dress (1989, p.  95). Moreover, Malcom Barnard has claimed that clothing ‘is used to make the differences in power and status that exist between lower classes legitimate and proper’, suggesting it has the ‘the function of making them appear to be legitimate, right and almost the work of nature rather than people’ (2002, p. 43). It is for this reason that ‘in every [historical and cultural] setting, there are to be found bodies conforming to their local dress codes, whether these be adopted voluntarily’, whether they are ‘self-imposed as a signal of group, cult or movement membership’, or whether they are ‘formally decreed by governing bodies and regulatory officials’ (Keenan, 2001, p. 180). MPs in the House of Commons certainly conformed to local dress codes and played on class tropes in their sartorial choices – alongside tropes of respectability, suitability, character, masculinity, and nationality – yet the distinctions were not quite as simple as some suggest. Clothing can be used to confirm or naturalise differences, but it can also be used to draw attention to differences, as we will witness in the sartorial choices of some non-English MPs below. It is important as an act of conformity and subversion, the relationship between the two being the focus of this chapter. It can illustrate differences between other social groups less easily categorised and between levels of respectability. It can also express differences between generations and illustrate the changing nature of society. In her

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study of clothing in rural Victorian England, Rachel Worth has thus highlighted how it ‘became a focus for debates around tradition and modernity’. As a result, ‘the association of the past with stability and perceptions of traditional modes of dress came to be contrasted with the evolution of newer, fashionable styles. In other words, dress was an indicator of cultural change’ (Worth, 2018, pp. 1–2). Dress acts, then, as a rhetorical device, a form of non-verbal communication, and was one of numerous forms of political communication open to MPs. Its place in symbolic ritual and action, something central to the daily life of the Commons, meant that it was (and still is) used as a tool of inclusion and exclusion. It can be used to both uphold particular ideologies and oppose those of competing groups. Clothes are thus often embedded with political symbolism and significance, acting as a political indicator  – as well as a personal, social, and group indicator – and a means of developing and strengthening political solidarity. They are neither culturally nor politically neutral. In consciously adopting a certain attire, politicians of every hue were seeking to appropriate the social, cultural, and political symbolism of clothing as a means of visual communication for their own ends, while also consciously conforming to certain expectations. As a form of material and visual culture, dress is a socio-cultural phenomenon that reveals much about the values of a specific time, place, or institution. In illuminating political culture, its significance lies in its ability to convey multiple ‘silent meanings’. Moreover, those meanings are immediate and visible, a fact which was particularly important in Victorian Britain. As Brent Shannon has argued, ‘the quickening pace and increasingly visual nature of late-Victorian London both emphasized the need for visual codes that enabled people to read one another quickly and exacerbated their reliance on a mobile form of social status display – namely, clothing’ (2006, p. 148).7 Contemporary commentators were fully aware of the significance of clothing, especially in the political context. In this, many took their cue from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (serialised in 1833–34, officially published in book form in 1836). The Leicester Chronicle suggested in 1889 that ‘there appears to be quite a revival in what Thos. Carlyle called the philosophy of clothes, or “clothes worship”’ (Leicester Chronicle, 1889). Indeed, according to one writer, he had ‘proved, beyond a doubt, that there is a philosophy of clothes’. This writer noted that to the ‘student of human nature a peculiarity in dress is a clue to the character of the wearer’ and that ‘it is not an ordinary character that can be peculiar’ (Hull Daily Mail, 1903). Samuel Pearson concluded in Week Day Living that ‘dress is a passport through society’, for ‘it is the first thing that makes an impression on outsiders’ (quoted in Breward, 1999, p. 96). James Sully, meanwhile, developed on this, noting how ‘the art of dress … is not something apart from the whole social life, but is organically connected with it by numerous

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Reading appearances nerve-like filaments’ and ‘that the history of costume in its main features is one index to the growth of a people’s manners, ideas and emotions’ (1880, pp.  567, 572–73). The Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald made such observations about individual items of clothing, stating that the hat ‘is the one feature of our clothing which, more than any other, according to its shape, material, size, condition, colour, decoration, and style in which it is worn, indicates the rank, profession, social position, and even the age of the wearer’ (Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald, 1892). For Victorians it was clear that clothing served a personal function, and it was equally apparent that it served a political function. As an article in the Daily Telegraph noted in 1862, ‘the maintenance of the British constitution is to a great extent dependent on the provisions of a pattern card’, while ‘“measure” is quite as important as “men” in our political system’ (Daily Telegraph, 1862). Of the hat, for instance, the Preston Herald noted how it was regarded as a ‘badge of freedom’, while ‘the hat has often been made to serve political purposes’. However, ‘even more significant than the hat  … at expressing political opinion, has been the wearing of distinctive colours’. More generally, the newspaper concluded that it was a ‘fact that the expression of political opinions in dress is perennial, only requiring the stimulus of popular excitement to become really portentous’ (Preston Herald, 1889). Another Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald article from 1890, meanwhile, highlighted the ‘importance of personal appearance in politics’, expressing the opinion that inappropriate sartorial choices could ‘tell against him [the candidate in an election] in the minds of the elector’ (Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald, 1890). If it could tell against a parliamentary candidate, it would definitely tell against him once he entered the House of Commons. As one MP put it in Men and Manner in Parliament, ‘I cannot help forming some opinion of a man’s sense and character from his dress’, and sartorial subversion reflected a ‘constitutional vulgarity of mind’ (Observer, 1874). In H. G. Wells’s novel The New Machiavelli (1911), when the central character is elected to Parliament in 1906 he is given the following words of wisdom: ‘little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could name one man who spent three years living down a pair of spatterdashes. On the other hand – a thing like that – if it catches the eye of the Punch man, for example, may be your making’ (1911, p. 281). The newly elected member would do well to heed such advice. As a Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald article also pointed out, clothing ‘has an important relation to an expectant member as well as to one duly elected’ (Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald, 1892). Furthermore, as T. P. O’Connor, an Irish MP and the parliamentary correspondent for the Pall Mall Gazette, commented, ‘it is one of the curious things about Parliamentary life in England, that the smallest detail of personal habit attracts the all-searching gaze of the entire world. Let a man change the shape of his hat, the colour of his

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clothes, the style even of his stockings, and the world knows it all before he is himself conscious of the change’ (1893, p. 201). Indeed, the Tailor and Cutter ran a regular column to this effect, leading the Daily Mail to remark that ‘legislators will be relived to be assured on the authority of the very candid critic of the “Tailor and Cutter” that they appeared … “generally well dressed”’ (Daily Mail, 1904a).8 However, the politician was reminded by others not to follow fashion advice from the likes of the Tailor and Cutter too carefully, with The Times informing its readers that: The unthinking multitude are always governed by fashion, and politicians who only want to trim their sails to the breeze of the moment naturally take the prevailing fashion as their guide. But effect follows cause with a higher degree of regularity than these gentlemen suppose, and he who aspires to be a statesman must always remember that there are results of human thought and experience which cannot be upset by the caprice of the moment. (The Times, 1894)

With sartorial choices communicating much, MPs’ appearance in the Commons mattered, and it is unsurprising that so many chose to adopt what would become the ‘uniform’ of the House. The member would ‘put on his Parliament dress’ to uphold the ‘severe’ and ‘unwritten law of the House of Commons with respect to dress’ (Worcester Journal, 1868; Peterhead Sentinel and General Advertiser, 1894). The ubiquity of the black and sombre frock coat, silk top hat, and morning suit among MPs in the Victorian and Edwardian periods resulted from the need for an identifying uniform for politicians, which conveyed their suitability for the House, their respectability, and their character. The House of Commons was seen to be ‘fastidious  … in the matter of dress’, with ‘the appearance of a member in any other style of coat and hat than the regulation frock and topper’ causing ‘quite a sensation’ (Beverley and East Riding Recorder, 26 February 1910). As the Daily Mail noted, ‘there was no assembly in the world where etiquette with regard to dress was more punctilious’ (Daily Mail, 1904b). T. P. O’Connor thus concluded that ‘the ordinary tendency of the Parliamentary man is towards the sombre black, and the solemnity of the long-tailed frock-coat’ (1893, p. 201). Some welcomed any sort of subversion in sartorial norms, with one article from the Bystander declaring that in their dress ‘there are always a few – and may Heaven bless them – who relieve the monotony by being unusual, quaint, almost grotesque, and therefore welcome’ (Bystander, 1904). By the twentieth century, there had been a ‘sartorial evolution of the House of Commons’, with many welcoming changes, which meant that it was ‘not so fastidious in these days as it used to be in the matter of dress’ (Aberdeen Daily Journal, 1911; Beverley and East Riding Recorder, 1910). These changes were seen to stem, in particular, from the growing number of Labour members. Nevertheless, ‘most [Labour] members … [were] very careful not to make themselves in any way peculiar, and certainly cannot

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Reading appearances be distinguished by their dress from members of the two great parties’ (Beverley and East Riding Recorder, 1910).9 As a result, you were still more likely to see members donning the uniform of the House or a version of it, with ‘veterans of the House’ still adhering to ‘the conventional garments’ (Bristol Mercury, 1899). Indeed, many members were concerned by these sartorial developments and what they might have reflected about the changing nature of British politics. That the uniform prevailed is unsurprising when the reactions to those who did subvert sartorial norms are considered. One member, Colonel Saunderson, looking back on his time in the Commons, remembered how ‘when I first entered Parliament a black hat was looked on as of first necessity. A member with a white hat was an object of grave suspicion’ (‘A Comparison of the Personnel’, 1904). It was understood that your sartorial choices had meaning, with the Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald reporting that when the member for Stokeupon-Trent, Dr Kenealy, wore an inappropriate hat ‘he must be conscious that the wearing of this article of attire in Parliament is regarded as a sign of the independence of the House’ (Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald, 1875). Dr Kenealy was thus viewed with grave suspicion. Furthermore, subversion could result in sanction. As T. P. O’Connor noted, ‘there have  been times when if a member of Parliament did venture to enter the  House of Commons’ in inappropriate clothing, ‘he would have been called up to the Speaker’s chair and as severely reprimanded as though he had committed the most atrocious offence’ (1893, p. 201). It was seen as an offence on a personal level. The uniform of the House demonstrated MPs’ suitability to sit in Parliament, that they took the office seriously, that they were respectable enough, and that they had sufficient character. To subvert sartorial norms brought all of these into question. Moreover, it was an offence to the traditions and symbolic rituals of Parliament. Subverting these norms was construed by some as dangerous, and thus the negative response to such sartorial choices reflected the personal and broader fears arising from the rapidly changing political landscape and its social base, the threat to the established order, and doubts about the suitability to rule of a new political class that was rising to prominence in British politics. In 1869 ‘an old squire’ wrote to the Derby Mercury to express his concern at the state of parliamentary politics after the 1867 Reform Act and what he called the ‘present degenerate condition of the Lower, I may say the Lowest, House of Parliament’. It is noteworthy that he chose to illustrate this through clothing. ‘In former days’, he noted, ‘it was the custom … with members of the House of Commons to dress like gentlemen’, and ‘even in the last Parliament, I can remember a fair average of decently-dressed and tolerably clean members. But now, alas! we have what is termed a more direct representation of the people; and the people, I can attest  – so far as vulgarity, dirt, and the Amberley-beloved smell

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go – are directly represented’ (Derby Mercury, 1869). That the ‘old squire’ had such concerns in the wake of the 1867 Reform Act is significant. Historians have emphasised the ‘relatively conservative character of the post-1832 [Reform Act] electorate and political system’, a character that the likes of the ‘old squire’ wanted to preserve (Hall, McClelland, and Rendall, 2000, pp.  12–13). Parliament was changing and its social base expanding, and many were fearful of what this meant for British politics and the established order. Some welcomed reform (though often with qualification), especially after the 1867 Reform Bill. R. H. Hutton, for instance, noted that ‘while the working class show undoubtedly less intellectual range than the so-called “educated classes”, they show … a more sure instinct as to which are the great political ideas of the day, and a more unwavering fidelity to them, which will be of the greatest use in increasing the efficiency of parliament’ (1867, p. 43). Both the aristocracy and a growing plutocracy, who according to Richard Cobden and John Bright ‘had become seduced by the dominant aristocratic system’, saw reform as an attack on their domination of Parliament (Parry, 2017, p.  47). Others, however, questioned whether the working classes had a place in Parliament. In his highly influential The  English Constitution, Walter Bagehot argued that ‘I do not consider the exclusion of the working classes from effectual representation a defect in … our parliamentary representation’, for they ‘contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion’ (1873, p. 139). Reflecting Bagehot’s view, Disraeli commented in a speech that ‘I doubt very much whether a democracy is a government which would suit this country’ (Jennings, 1892, p. 328). Indeed, some feared where this might lead. Jon Lawrence has noted how widely established ‘the belief that upper-class men needed to restrain rather than encourage the unruly instincts of the masses’ was in the wake of reform (2009, p. 34). Such developments, therefore, meant for many in Parliament and outside that now more than ever the upper classes needed to dominate parliamentary politics. As an upper-class character in George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical puts it, ‘If the mob can’t be turned back, a man of family must try and head the mob, and save a few homes and hearths, and keep the country up on its last legs as he can’ (1980, p. 31). For many, within and without Parliament, the 1867 Reform Act resulted in a strong desire to see the status quo in parliamentary politics maintained. In part, this meant finding solace in its traditions: ‘the same Mace is on the table; the Speaker … [wears] the same wig and gown that generations of members have known; “the Clerk will now proceed to read the Orders of the Day” in precisely the same unemotional manner as they have been read since George the Third was king’ (Lucy, 1892, p.  20). Perhaps it was for this reason that it was regularly noted that ‘the bestdressed men in Parliament are the young Tories’ (South Wales Echo, 1893), while the author of Men and Manner in Parliament (1874) concluded that

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Reading appearances those who did not match sartorial conventions displayed a ‘constitutional vulgarity of mind’ (Observer, 1874). Thus customary sartorial standards were a reflection of those traditions and associated political loyalties. They were, in the words of Marc Baer, ‘codes or cues within political discourse’ (2012, p.  84). Furthermore, they also illustrated the elitism of the social class that dominated British politics. T. P. O’Connor, in his Sketches in the House, concluded that it is ‘a House where wealth and fashion are very largely represented’ (1893, p.  201). Parliament often became the means by which rich men advertised their social power. As one MP remarked in 1884, ‘before he became a member he had understood that the House of Commons was the best club in London, but he supposed that was because it had the largest entrance fee’ (Jennings, 1892, p. 670). The parliamentary uniform was one way of ensuring that the Commons remained an exclusive club. Thus, for instance, when ‘Mr Mill and Mr Bright objected to attend the Speaker’s dinner in the prescribed costume’, they were refused admission (‘Democracy and Court Dress’, 1867). The 1867 Reform Act resulted in only limited short-term social change in Parliament, and, as Jonathan Parry has noted, ‘the power of wealth and property seemed as strong as ever’ (2017, p. 63). Electoral reform in the 1880s was more significant and, it has been argued, resulted in a ‘changing of the political guard’ and further broadening of Parliament’s social base (Blaxill, 2011, p.  348). With this, the fears illustrated in the desire to maintain sartorial standards were diminishing (though not fully dissipating) and responses to those not wearing the uniform of the House softening. Thus one newspaper article from 1899 noted how ‘great changes are imperceptibly, but nevertheless rapidly, taking place at Westminster. For instance, men are now daring to appear in clothes there which twenty years ago, or even ten, would be laughed at so heartily as to make the wearer rush off in confusion.’ The article, though, also pointed out that ‘the veterans of the House still, however, adhere to the conventional garments’ (Bristol Mercury, 1899). Some claimed that ‘the sartorial evolution of the House of Commons’ was ‘the natural consequence of the advent of the Labour politician’ (Aberdeen Daily Journal, 1911). In this, though, a social elitism often still prevailed, with one reporter concluding that ‘there is no doubt that in the House of Commons dress has deteriorated in recent years’ (Derby Daily Telegraph, 1912). A new fear had emerged in the form of the sartorial subversion of the Labour politician and what this illustrated. Reflecting on this new fear, the Daily Telegraph suggested that unless a Labour member had a good amount of nerve and self-possession he was inclined to think that, though he was in the House of Commons, he was not of it. Sitting in his humble fustian, side by side with an elegant personage in faultless costume … the Labour representative could not fail to realise that

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Sartorial subversion and the House of Commons Parliament had its distinctions. Now all that is gone by. The Labour men are numerous enough to make up a small parliament by themselves, and they will not be tempted to alter a jot … (Daily Telegraph, 1906)

Sartorial subversion was still threatening for many, as it represented a further growth of Parliament’s social base and an ever-growing danger for the political elite, with its desire to maintain its position in the face of recent reform. Labour politicians ‘from humble backgrounds destabilized the simple social hierarchies of Victorian electoral politics’ and ‘challenged election [and parliamentary] rituals which presupposed that the candidate [or MP] was a man of status, wealth, and usually local influence’. It was thus no coincidence that when John Burns stood as a socialist candidate in 1885 he declared that ‘Frock coats and high hats had had their time’ (Lawrence, 2009, pp. 94–95). Nevertheless, it was with some delight that the Tailor and Cutter reported that ‘the House of Commons is improving in its sartorial aspect; even the representatives of the proletariat seem unconsciously to have been influenced by the traditions of the place during the Sessions they have spent there’ (quoted in London Daily News, 1908). Moreover, through demonstrating such influence in their choice of attire, they were also expressing their increasing suitability for Parliament. By the Edwardian era, a number of articles were appearing which bemoaned how sartorially ‘the House looks monotonously respectable’ (Burnley Express, 1910). One complained that ‘there are not many eccentricities or individualities of style’, suggesting that ‘a few young dandies are welcome in the House. They are bright figures in a rather dull groundwork’ (Graphic, 1910). Nevertheless, in 1904 the Bystander noted how ‘of the 670 gentlemen who are known as his Majesty’s faithful Commons more than 600 are quite ordinary in appearance and demeanour’, for ‘they dress in a decorous and conventional style’ of Parliament (Bystander, 1904). That so many MPs still adhered to the conventional style, or uniform, of the House stemmed from observations such as that made by an MP in 1874: ‘I cannot help forming some opinion of a man’s sense and character from his dress’ (Observer, 1874). This mattered in Victorian and Edwardian politics, for character (and visual displays of character) defined respectability and determined for fellow MPs and wider political culture whether a man was suitable for Parliament. Indeed, in many ways, it defined parliamentary politics more generally in the period. Thus Herbert Spencer argued that ‘the end which the statesman should keep in view higher than all other ends is the formation of character’, while John Stuart Mill contended that ‘the problem of character is the determining issue in the question of government’ (quoted in Collini, 1991, pp. 93–94). The Liberal prime minister John Russell, meanwhile, claimed that ‘there are qualities which govern men, such as sincerity, and a conviction on the part of the hearers that the Minister is a man to be trusted,

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Reading appearances which have more to do with the influence over the House of Commons than the most brilliant flights of fancy and the keenest wit’. He also stressed that ‘the House of Commons likes a man who can be trusted; that is to say, whose honesty is not questioned, and whose common sense can be expected to guide him at a moment of difficulty’ (1875, pp. 298, 300). Thus Leslie Stephen, writing in 1867, claimed that MPs’ ‘characters should be so pure as to place their sincerity above doubt’ (1867, p.  90). It was in such a context that the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, complained generally about those who did not ‘take life in earnest’. He wanted ‘a sign … that a man knows what he is about in life’, and ‘in what cause he is engaged’. As John Tosh has argued, this ‘became the characteristic mind-set of many in public service and political life’ (2002, p. 457). Sartorial subversion thus brought into question whether an MP could be trusted and whether he was sincere or earnest. Discipline, or self-control, in conduct and appearance was also important to character. Indeed, Gladstone remarked that the House was ‘a school of discipline for those who enter it’ (Jennings, 1892, p. 367). Walter Bagehot suggested that this was because ‘a Parliamentary Minister is a man trained by elaborate practice not to blurt out crude things, and an English Parliament is an assembly which particularly dislikes anything gauche or anything imprudent’. Thus he claimed that ‘the mass of a Parliament ought to be men of moderate sentiments, or they will elect an  immoderate ministry, and enact violent laws’ (1873, pp.  27, 133). The uniform of the House symbolised such moderation, prudence, and  respectability. That MPs would conform was expected within and without the House. It was stressed in Victorian and Edwardian election manuals, and as one newspaper noted, ‘even the most democratic ­audience resents anything like shabbiness or meanness of appearance on the platform … shabby clothes were looked on as unworthy’ (Tatler and Bystander, 1910).10 In the Commons, sartorial indiscipline would lead to MPs being considered to be neither serious politicians nor suitable for Parliament. For instance, T. P. O’Connor remarked that though Randolph Churchill wore a frock coat, ‘it was not in the sombre black then of almost universal wear, but of a beautiful blue’. Thus, he concluded, ‘he was a young man of fashion rather than a serious politician’. He also noted of Lord Spencer that there was ‘something essentially child-like about his  … manner, and dress, and people would never take him seriously’ (quoted in Griffin, 2012, pp. 189–90). It is noteworthy that O’Connor, in identifying MPs’ sartorial – and therefore more general – unsuitableness for Parliament, was using language that seemed to question their manliness. As Ben Griffin has highlighted, masculinity was central ‘to making sense of parliamentary life’, and the governing classes ‘shared a set of ideas about masculinity that helped to define them as a class’ (2012, pp. 167, 168).

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Sartorial conventions in the House, then, served an important function in demonstrating MPs’ manliness in a setting where such a category denoted one’s suitability for office. As Cal Murgu has noted, ‘evaluation of manhood often manifested itself through a direct critique of what was on display; mainly, one’s character and deportment’. Thus ‘body language, rhetoric, dress, actions and demeanour were visible traits under constant scrutiny’ (Murgu, 2017, p. 315). For this reason, the Irish politician John Redmond suggested that ‘the House of Commons is  … actuated by a sense of manliness’ (Silvester, 1997, p.  97). However, for many MPs, it was actuated by a performance of manliness through respectable clothing, which also implied self-control, manners, and good character.11 In part, this reflected some of the societal and political changes noted above. As James Eli Adams has demonstrated, new ideals of manhood were developing in the first half of the nineteenth century, as aristocratic ideals were replaced through ‘a distinctively middle-class ascendency in British culture’ (1995, p. 21). Thus sartorial subversion that suggested an unmanliness in the House, in the words of George Mosse, ‘provoked perhaps the deepest anxiety among those who were part of normative society [which was ­increasingly middle class], and who, while possessing all the traits of outsiders, in addition seemed to have crossed the barrier of gender’ (1996, p. 66). To mark oneself out in clothing was to mark oneself out from parliamentary norms and hark back to older aristocratic forms of government. Change could invoke fear, but so could subverting change. As Ben Griffin concludes, ‘the authority of parliament rested on its appearance’; thus ‘MPs who obviously fell short of the expected standards of manliness, at least publicly, represented a threat to the legitimacy of the whole political structure’. They ‘presented a problem that needed to be covered up, explained away or condemned if the House’s reputation was to be preserved’ (Griffin, 2012, p. 194). The final subversion of sartorial expectations covered in this chapter is that by nationalist politicians (especially Irish MPs, but also those from Scotland and Wales), which played on a number of the fears discussed above in an era of heated debate on the issue of Home Rule. For many nationalist MPs in Wales, including Lloyd George, the ‘political power of the landowning classes’ had been ‘shattered by the emergent voice of the Welsh nation’ by the mid-1860s (Cragoe, 1998, p. 113). Such a shattering had led to a significant change in the social status and loyalties of the Welsh members. As the Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald put it, ‘Wales for once is truly represented by her own sons, and the voice and moral power of the Welsh constituencies have been asserted’ (quoted in Cragoe, 2000, p. 121). The appearance of such MPs represented one way in which they could visually mark themselves out in this supposedly new era for Welsh politics. Similar sentiments were also being expressed in Scotland. Calls for ‘legislation for Scotland [made] in Scotland’ were on the increase,

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Reading appearances because, according to Gavin Clark (president of the Scottish Home Rule Association), Scottish MPs had ‘so few opportunities’ for ‘expressing the opinions of those we represent, and because, when we do so, our votes are of no avail’ (Lloyd-Jones, 2014, pp. 864, 873–74). A new generation of MPs, then, motivated by a developing nationalism, patriotism, and a sense of isolation from what the legislative process represented, were yet another threat to those who feared the changing nature of the House of Commons. In the words of Lloyd George, they often felt ‘an object of contempt in a house of snobs’ (quoted in Jones, 1997, p. 468). As a result, sartorial choices that emphasised such change and eschewed parliamentary traditions were criticised. Thus when two MPs threatened to wear a kilt in the House when a Scottish bill was being discussed they were reproached by fellow MPs. It was noted that ‘if it fell to the lot of an officer of a Highland regiment to move or second the Address, a kilt would be quite the correct thing in the House of Commons’, but not as expression of an independent identity (Daily Telegraph, 1899). Furthermore, equally threatening to the English elite was ‘the view that the Celtic nations faced common foes, and oppressors’ had ‘gained widespread currency’ (Jones, 2014, p. 450). Those who felt most oppressed were clearly the Irish, which is unsurprising when the reactions to Irish MPs and their sartorial styles are considered. In 1892 the parliamentary sketch-writer Henry Lucy noted that ‘time and circumstance have wrought grievous gaps in the representation of Ireland in the House of Commons’. He chose to illustrate this with George Errington, an Irish MP no longer in office, ‘who cast an air of cultured clothing over the somewhat ragged ranks of his compatriots’ (Lucy, 1892, pp. 84–85). The Irish members were considered ragged not only in clothing, but also in character. Sir Wilfrid Lawson, a Liberal MP, thus said of them that ‘many of them [are] unlearned and ignorant men’ (Russell, 1909, p.  158). More than that of any other group in Parliament, their clothing was the subject of scrutiny by those within and without the House. In particular, their willingness to subvert sartorial norms was taken as evidence of their desire to subvert parliamentary traditions more generally. When reflecting on one MP’s choice of clothing that brought a rebuke from the Speaker for breaking ‘an unwritten law of Parliament’, one newspaper tellingly noted that he ‘belonged to the Irish party, Parliamentary sapeurs to whom nothing is sacred’ (Peterhead Sentinel and General Advertiser, 1894). Indeed, for Lawson, such MPs ‘acted on [Charles Stuart] Parnell’s advice, who told a new Member who asked him the best way to learn the rules of the House – “By Breaking Them”’ (Russell, 1909, p. 158). There was some truth to what Lawson said. John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1900, remarked to the House that ‘the Irish members, brought as they are to this house, are a foreign element in this house … a body to whom the ancient glories and the great traditions

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Sartorial subversion and the House of Commons

of this house have no meaning’ (Parliamentary Debates, 1901). Thus Irish MPs’ sartorial subversion took on a further significance and reflected those MPs’ particular sense of injustice. When discussing Parnell’s appearance, one newspaper commented that ‘Members of Parliament generally dress in suits of sober colour … but here came the representative of “centuries of wrongs” made conspicuous by sporting the colour of “Saxon’s cruel red”, with bushy ragged whiskers, long matted hair, and seedy black coat’ (Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 1887). Another, indulging in what it called ‘sartorial deduction’, noted in response to the wearing of red socks by one MP that ‘it will be remembered that the Government was about to wade through gore in Ireland’ (Funny Folks, 1881). Such ‘sartorial deductions’ reflected not only particular anxieties around Ireland and growing concerns around nationalism, but also the broader issues discussed above. Sartorial subversion from nationalist MPs was a challenge not just to parliamentary traditions but also to the institution and its traditional members by a new generation of Labour and nationalist MPs who felt removed from it. As we have seen, by the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly after 1906, the uniform was beginning to be relaxed, a development which was welcomed by some and lamented by others. The Daily Mail, for instance, bemoaned change, noting that ‘in recent years all these traditions have been trampled under foot’ (Daily Mail, 1904b). The MP Claude Hay, though, writing in 1907, suggested that it illustrated the changing nature of Parliament. There had been a ‘considerable loosening of the rigidity of that code of manners on which Parliament has prided herself and the supersession of its ceremonious correctitude by a casual and almost bohemian habit of conduct. This change is most visible even in the trivial matter or dress’ (Tatler and Bystander, 1907). Reflecting on this change, some concluded that ‘the House of Commons dress has deteriorated in recent years’. Nevertheless, it was suggested that there were ‘some welcome changes’ and that ‘most people are heartily glad that the frock coat has gone out of fashion’ (Derby Daily Telegraph, 1912). What is clear, though, is that it was not trivial. MPs’ dress thus provides an illuminating insight into Britain’s changing political landscape in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. MPs’ clothing and the reactions of fellow members, the political classes, and wider popular culture to what MPs wore in the House of Commons tell us much about political attitudes broadly, and more specifically about an evolving political culture and system. To be taken seriously, to convey their suitability for office in a changing political landscape, to demonstrate they conformed to accepted notions of respectability, character, and masculinity, and to show their respect for parliamentary traditions, MPs were expected to don the uniform of the House. Sartorial subversion therefore mattered and was invariably met with negative responses.

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Reading appearances Such responses to those who did not conform were a comment neither on fashion nor on style, but on the challenges and associated fears that shifting political identities and cultures, including the social makeup of Parliament, presented for traditional politics and the governing classes. They also revealed wider concerns about a dumbing down of British politics as a result of a widening social base, the social suitability of those outside of the established political order to serve in Parliament – including nationalist MPs from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales – and notions of respectability, masculinity, and character. Thus, in this ever-changing political culture, many MPs were keen to anchor parliamentary politics in a more comfortable past, with its accepted values, traditions, and hierarchies. The uniform of the House, as a form of material and visual culture, became a physical marker not only of individual conformity, but also of politics more broadly in a hugely significant period.

Notes   1 For recent surveys of ‘new political history’, see Wahrman, 1996; Readman, 2009; Gunn and Vernon, 2011; Feldman and Lawrence, 2011; Blaxill, 2013.   2 For more on this desire to anchor popular politics in its past, see Hawkins, 2015.   3 See also Lawrence, 2009.   4 For one study of clothing in British politics from the perspective of Labour politics, see Morris, 2015.   5 The best overview can be found in Aindow, 2011.   6 This presentation of self can be seen in other ways too; for instance, see OldstoneMoore, 2005; Walton, 2008; Eyben, 2019.   7 See also Shannon, 200.   8 For other examples like this see Gloucester Citizen, 1895; Daily Mail, 1896.   9 For the particular sartorial challenges facing labour politicians, see Morris, 2015; Lawrence, 2011; Owen, 2007. 10 See Lawrence, 2009, pp. 9, 75. 11 For more on this, see Emig and Rowland, 2010.

References Aberdeen Daily Journal (1911, 12 October). Adams, J. E. (1995). Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Aindow, R. (2011). Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870–1914. Farnham: Ashgate. Baer, M. (2012). The Rise and Fall of Radical Westminster, 1780–1890. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bagehot, W. (1873). The English Constitution [1867]. 2nd edn. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Barnard, M. (2002). Fashion as Communication. London: Routledge. Beverley and East Riding Recorder (1910, 26 February). Biagini, E. (1992). Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Blaxill, L. (2013). ‘Quantifying the Language of British Politics, 1880–1910’. Historical Research, 86 (232), pp. 313–41. Blaxill, L. (2011). ‘Electioneering, the Third Reform Act and Political Change in the 1880s’. Parliamentary History, 30 (3), pp. 343–73. Breward, C. (1999). The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bristol Mercury (1889, 27 July). Bryden, I. (2011). ‘All Dressed Up: Revivalism and the Fashion for Arthur in Victorian Culture’. Arthuriana, 21 (2), pp. 28–41. Burnley Express (1910, 26 February). Bystander (1904, 6 April). Collini, S. (1991). Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘A Comparison of the Personnel of the House of Commons Now and Twenty-Five Years Ago’ (1904, September). Strand Magazine, pp. 289–94. Cragoe, M. (2000). ‘George Osborne Morgan, Henry Richard, and the Politics of Religion in Wales, 1868–74’. Parliamentary History, 19 (1), pp. 118–30. Cragoe, M. (1998). ‘Welsh Electioneering and the Purpose of Parliament: “From Radicalism to Nationalism” Reconsidered’. Parliamentary History, 17 (1), pp. 113–30. Daily Mail (1896, 21 May). Daily Mail (1904, 12 February). Daily Mail (1904, 19 July). Daily Telegraph (1862, 8 September). Daily Telegraph (1899, 20 June). Daily Telegraph (1906, 26 January). ‘Democracy and Court Dress’ (1867, 13 April). Saturday Review. Derby Daily Telegraph (1912, 7 September). Derby Mercury (1869, 4 August). Eliot, G. (1980). Felix Holt the Radical [1866]. Ed. F. C. Thomson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Emig, R. and Rowland, A. (eds) (2010). Performing Masculinity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Epstein, J. (1989). ‘Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England’. Past & Present, 122, pp. 75–118. Eyben, R. (2019). ‘“The Moustache Makes Him More of a Man”: Waiters’ Masculinity Struggles, 1890–1910’. History Workshop Journal, 87, pp. 188–210. Feldman, D. and Lawrence, J. (eds) (2011). Structures and Transformations in Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Funny Folks (1881, 12 February). Gloucester Citizen (1895, 24 May). Graphic (1910, 12 March). Griffin, B. (2012). The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Cultureand the Struggle for Women’s Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunn, S. and Vernon, J. (eds) (2011). The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hall, C., McClelland, K., and Rendall, J. (2000). ‘Introduction’ in Hall, C., McClelland, K., and Rendall, J. (eds), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–70.

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Reading appearances Hawkins, A. (2015). Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hull Daily Mail (1903, 25 March). Hunt, L. (2002). Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Hutton, R. H. (1867). ‘The Political Character of the Working Class’, in Rutson, A. O. (ed.), Essays on Reform. London: Macmillan, pp. 27–44. Jennings, G. H. (1892). An Anecdotal History of the British Parliament. London: H. Cox. Jones, J. G. (1997). ‘Michael Davitt, David Lloyd George and T. E. Ellis: The Welsh Experience, 1886’. Welsh Historical Review, 18 (3), pp. 450–82. Joyce, P. (1991). Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keenan, W. (2001). Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part. Oxford: Berg. Lawrence, J. (1998). Speaking for the People: Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, J. (2009). Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth toBlair. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawrence, J. (2011). ‘The Culture of Elections in Modern Britain’. History, 96 (4), pp. 459–76. Leicester Chronicle (1889, 16 February). Lloyd-Jones, N. (2014). ‘Liberalism, Scottish Nationalism and the Home Rule Crisis, c. 1886–93’. English Historical Review, 139 (539), pp. 862–77. London Daily News (1908, 8 February). Lucy, H. (1892). A Diary of the Salisbury Parliament 1886–1892. London: Cassell & Company. Lucy, H. (1908). Memories of Eight Parliaments. London: William Heinemann. Miller, H. (2015). Politics Personified: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, c. 1830–80. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Morgan, S. (2012). ‘Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England’. Journal of Victorian Culture, 17 (2), pp. 127–46. Morris, M. (2015). ‘“The Most Respectable Looking of Revolutionaries”: Sartorial Identities, Class and the Politics of Appearance in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’. Cultural and Social History, 12 (3), pp. 315–30. Mosse, G. (1996). The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press. Murgu, C. (2017). ‘“Innocence is as Innocence Does”: Anglo-Irish Politics, Masculinity and the De Cobain Gross Indecency Scandal of 1891–3’. Gender and History, 29 (2), pp. 309–28. Navickas, K. (2010). ‘“That Sash Will Hang You”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–1840’. Journal of British Studies, 49 (3), pp. 540–65. Nixon, M., Pentland, G., and Roberts, M. (2012). ‘The Material Culture of Scottish Reform Politics, c. 1820–c.1884’. Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 32 (1), pp. 28–49. O’Connor, T. P. (1893). Sketches in the House: The Story of a Memorable Session. London: Ward, Lock, and Bowden. O’Gorman, F. (1992). ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–1860’. Past & Present, 135, pp. 79–115. Observer (1874, 6 December).

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Oldstone-Moore, C. (2005). ‘The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain’. Victorian Studies, 48 (1), pp. 7–34. Owen, N. (2007). ‘MacDonald’s Parties: The Labour Party and the “Aristocratic Embrace”, 1922–31’. Twentieth Century British History, 18 (1), pp. 1–53. Parker, S. (2014). ‘Fashion and Dress Culture’. Literature Compass, 11 (8), pp. 583–91. Parliamentary Debates (1901, 7 March). Fourth series, vol. 90, col. 861. Parry, J. (2017). ‘1867 and the Rule of Wealth’. Parliamentary History, 36 (1), pp. 46–63. Peterhead Sentinel and General Advertiser (1894, 19 June). Pickering, P. (1986). ‘Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’, Past & Present, 112, pp. 144–62. Preston Herald (1889, 15 June). Readman, P. (2009). ‘The State of Twentieth-Century British Political History’. Journal of Policy History, 21 (3), pp. 219–38. Roberts, M. (2013). ‘Election Cartoons and Political Communication in Victorian England’. Cultural and Social History, 10 (3), pp. 369–95. Russell, E. J. (1875). Recollections and Suggestions, 1813–1873. 2nd edn. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Russell, G. (ed.) (1909). Sir Wilfrid Lawson: A Memoir. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Shannon, B. (2004). ‘Refashioning Men: Fashion, Masculinity, and the Cultivation of the Male Consumer in Britain, 1860–1914’. Victorian Studies, 46 (4), pp. 597–630. Shannon, B. (2006). The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Sheffield Evening Telegraph (1887, 7 June). Silvester, C. (ed.) (1997). The Pimlico Companion to Parliament: A Literary Anthology. London: Pimlico. South Wales Echo (1893, 18 February). Stephen, L. (1867). ‘On the Choice of Representatives by Popular Constituencies’, in Rutson, A. O. (ed.), Essays on Reform. London: Macmillan, pp. 85–126. Sully, J. (1880). ‘The Natural History of Dress’. Cornhill Magazine, 42 (November 1880), pp. 560–72. Tatler and Bystander (1907, 13 February). Tatler and Bystander (1910, 26 January). Thompson, J. (2007). ‘“Pictorial Lies”? Posters and Politics in Britain c. 1880–1914’. Past & Present, 197, pp. 177–210. The Times (1894, 22 March). Tosh, J. (2002). ‘Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12, p. 455–72. Vernon, J. (1993). Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wahrman, D. (1996). ‘The New Political History’. Social History, 21 (3), pp. 343–54. Walton, I. (2008) ‘From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the 1850s in England’. NineteenthCentury Contexts, 30 (3), pp. 229–45. Wells, H. G. (1911). The New Machiavelli. London: Lane. Worcester Journal (1868, 17 October).

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Reading appearances Worth, R. (2018). Clothing and Landscape in Victorian England: Working-Class Dress and Rural Life. London: I. B. Tauris. Wrigley, R. (2002). The Politics of Appearance: Representation of Dress in Revolutionary France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeandle, P., Newey, K., and Richards, J. (eds) (2016). Politics, Performance and Popular Culture: Theatre and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald (1875, 3 March). Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald (1890, 23 October). Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald (1892, 1 September).

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7 Dressing for the vote in Ford Madox Brown’s Work Janice Carlisle

In a well-composed vignette in the background of the epic painting Work (1852–65), Ford Madox Brown depicts a parliamentary election in progress. In the foreground of that detail (Plate 6) are men and at least one woman and one child who are carrying sandwich boards that enjoin their viewers to vote for a candidate named Bobus: ‘Bobus for Middlesex / Vote for Bobus’. Further back a man stands on an embankment, on the wall of which he is posting preliminary election results that show Bobus with twice the votes of his next competitor. The election is clearly an object of amusement, and surrounding it are other comic images: a little girl on the railing in front of the election results is turning a somersault that reveals her bare bottom; to the right is a Punch-like image, supposedly funny, of a policeman harrying a female street-seller of oranges. The name ‘Bobus’ is itself a joke. An unlovely combination of Booby and Bogus, Bobus is the name created by Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present (1843) for a ‘Sausagemaker on the great scale’ who stupidly thinks that there is an ‘Aristocracy of Talent’ for whom one could wisely vote (2005, p. 33). Carlyle demonstrates his increasing disdain for all kinds of electoral politics when he resurrects Bobus in the Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). In that iteration, the sausage maker is even more directly linked to parliamentary politics when his adulterated food products provide a metaphor for all things political: both are commodities, into the process of whose making it is best not to enquire. In Work Brown goes one better than Carlyle by turning Bobus not into a foolish voter, but into one for whom others foolishly vote. Signalling a contempt for the messy, even dirty, arena of political life is one more detail, this one among the signs on the left side of the painting: a small placard on the wall, in the same colour as the sandwich boards opposite, also urges its viewers to vote for ‘OBUS’, but it is covered in mud (or worse), torn, and partially obscured by the tiny but emphatic word ‘Don’t’.

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Reading appearances Such humour, as well as the placement of the election in the background and to the side of Work (Plate 7), suggests that taking seriously its representation of a parliamentary election might be quite literally beside the point: the central subject of Work is not institutional politics, but what the Illustrated London News called the commonplace ‘actualities of our workaday life’ (1865). The massive canvas, some six and a half feet wide, is crowded with people on a summer day as they engage in their characteristic activities on a street in Hampstead: taking exercise, selling flowers or oranges, talking, drinking, resting or sleeping, delivering baked goods or the mail, promoting a political candidate, distributing charity, policing the streets, tending the young, and, most prominently, digging a trench for a water line. In what I call comparative encounters, the social distinctions that set one figure apart from another are evident in immediately meaningful material signs. In Work, as in everyday life, these differences manifest themselves in the textures and colours and cut of clothing. Brown notes all such physical phenomena meticulously, and they signal at a glance the material inequalities that distinguish, among others, the well-off from the impoverished and manual from mental labourers.1 These differences, I argue, also indicate which figures in Work are enfranchised and which disfranchised, a distinction that can be judged by paying attention to what the figures in this painting are wearing. Developing such an analysis depends on adopting a peculiarly Victorian way of looking at graphic art, one in which Brown indulged in the descriptive catalogue that he wrote for the one-man show in 1865 that introduced Work to the public. In his commentary on this painting, Brown told elaborate stories about its figures. By doing so, he was treating Work as a visual incitement to narration – a popular, if not the most popular, way in which his contemporaries looked at paintings, which were, like Victorian novels, better for being crowded with characters and plot (Cowling, 1989, pp. 2–4; Barringer, 2005, p. 35). Like the large canvasses of W. P. Frith, Brown’s painting arranges its most prominent figures in groups that seem to demand the greatest attention from the viewer because of their narrative possibilities: the two ladies to the left; the excavators or navvies in the centre; two of the most prolific writers of the day, Thomas Carlyle and Frederick Denison Maurice, who appear in full-length portraits on the right; the two genteel horse riders in the shade; and the four siblings in the  foreground, whom Brown described in his descriptive catalogue of 1865 as ‘my group of small, exceedingly ragged, dirty children’ (1998, p. 153). Also given centre stage is the beer seller, who can be identified by the tools of his trade, pipes and a copy of The Times. Lastly, there are many other smaller figures worth consideration, some not easily spotted in even the best reproductions of Work.2 In his exhibition catalogue, Brown allowed himself to spin tales about their lives that involve a great deal of speculation: the beer man, for instance, has a black eye as a result of his

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Dressing for the vote in Brown’s Work

‘doing the police’ by ejecting ‘some huge ruffian’ from his employer’s ‘palace of gin’ (1998, p. 154). To develop a political perspective on the sartorial choices that Brown made when clothing his characters,3 I will allow myself to speculate about them as freely as he did in his catalogue. The illustrative value of such an approach to Work depends, moreover, on situating the painting in a specific historical context; and the clothes that its figures wear identify the temporal setting of the scene as the 1850s. Yet the central question of this essay deals with how Brown’s contemporaries in 1865, viewing the painting in a gallery in Piccadilly, might have read its narratives as a visual commentary on the nature of the mid-Victorian franchise. The electorate depicted in Work was legislated by the Great Reform Act of 1832, which was still in place, with relatively minor revisions, at three dates significant to the understanding of Brown’s painting: 1852, when Work was first being ‘designed’, 1863, when it was largely completed, and 1865, when it was first exhibited. That Reform Act increased the electorate to an estimated 20 per cent of the men in England and Wales. Focusing on the intricacies of Victorian election law in the years before 1867, when the Second Reform Bill was passed, is one of the best ways, I think, of gauging the political meanings woven into the clothes that Brown depicts. My authority for linking clothing, the franchise, and painting comes not from Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and its enunciation of a ‘Clothes Philosophy’, but from Punch. In May of 1865 it published a fullpage cartoon after John Tenniel titled ‘The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition’ (Figure 7.1). In that wood engraving four prominent MPs are reimagined as artists at a Westminster version of a Royal Academy exhibition, and they have painted portraits of their very different conceptions of ‘The Working-Man’, each one of whom is presented as qualified or not qualified for the vote by the clothes in which his creator has dressed him. The greatest distinction, both politically and sartorially, is between the parodically tidy, water-drinking carpenter in the upper-left canvas painted by the radically pro-reform MP John Bright and, diagonally below him, the shabby, beer-drinking carpenter depicted by the furiously anti-reform MP Robert Lowe.4 Yet the political meanings of the attire represented in Brown’s painting are not as immediately clear as they are in the cartoon ‘The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition’. A deeply mysterious painting, Work opens itself to more incompatible and unsettled readings than even the most complex texts, visual and verbal. And that fact is never more evident than when one asks what politics are on view in Work: answers to that question have ranged from claiming that its agenda is disturbingly ‘depoliticize[d]’ or ‘reformist’ rather than ‘revolutionary’, to identifying it as a visual depiction of ‘the politics of 1789’.5 A definitive conclusion on that subject would be hard to reach. Yet narrowly defining the historical context pertinent to the interpretive options offered by Work is a way of

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7.1  After John Tenniel, ‘The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition’, Punch, 20 May 1865. Wood engraving.

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at least sharpening one’s sense of what those options were for Brown’s contemporaries. Which characters in Work, then, are dressed to vote, as others are dressed to stroll on a footpath or dig a ditch? Unremarkably, the first division is between those who wear skirts and those who do not. The wording of the Great Reform Act makes this point clear when it refers to the potential voter as ‘every Male Person of full Age, and not subject to any legal Incapacity’ (‘An Act to Amend’, 1832, p. 161). (In 1867 the then-MP John Stuart Mill made a predictably unsuccessful move to enfranchise women by proposing to change the word ‘man’ in the current reform bill to ‘person’.) Women were so obviously excluded from the national electorate that they were sandwiched between ‘aliens’ and ‘idiots’ in the oft-repeated summaries of those not eligible to vote: ‘minors, peers, aliens, women, idiots, lunatics, except during a lucid interval, [and] persons convicted of certain crimes, such as treason, felony, [and] bribery’ (Power, 1847, p.  57). Yet the lavish attire of the two ladies in the left foreground of Work is relevant to the nature of the mid-Victorian electorate as it is depicted in Brown’s painting because their clothes suggest that their husbands have suffrage. The political interests of such women, according to James Mill (whose sins his son might have been trying to expiate in 1867), were already served by the votes that their men were eligible to cast. Or, as a popular misogynistic joke put the case, such women were already enfranchised because during bedtime ‘curtain lectures’, they told their hen-pecked men how to vote. It was becoming harder and harder in the 1850s to use clothing as a reliable way of identifying the middle or the upper middle classes (Cunnington and Cunnington, 1966, p. 442). Yet there is no mistaking the relative gentility of the two ladies in Work and, therefore, the likelihood of their husbands’ qualification for suffrage. Every item of their fashionable dress strengthens that probability. Brown in his descriptive catalogue identifies the figure in the front as ‘the lady whose only business in life as yet is to dress and look beautiful’ (1998, p. 153); but even if the slightly older lady behind is engaged in the ‘business’ of distributing religious tracts, they are both attired expensively in the height of 1850s fashion. The lady in red is so well off that she can afford to dress her elegant greyhound, which has escaped her grasp, in the same fabric that she is wearing. Highly conscious of style, she has donned a bonnet tied with a large ribbon whose colour matches that of her parasol; and she wears white undersleeves and a white cloak over her dress. The older woman behind her is equally aware of the fashion trends of the day: the circumference of her skirt is widened with flounces, and her dress is in a discreet floral pattern, set off by lavender-coloured ribbons, a matching bonnet,6 and a shawl of black Chantilly lace. More frankly speculative, however, must be the identification of the kinds of fabrics that, along with their de rigueur gloves and in accordance with the requirements of their status, cover these ladies

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Reading appearances during the daytime from head to toe. Both of them may be wearing dresses made of silk, which was increasingly in vogue at mid-century (Cunnington and Cunnington, 1966, p. 450); and the heat of a summer’s day might justify the wearing of a light cotton, particularly a fine muslin. Yet cotton was a fabric reserved for one’s informal attire at home in the morning or for one’s servants. Thus, along with silk, the ladies of Work might be wearing a light wool such as delaine or cashmere, the latter a blend of wool and cotton or wool and silk (Greene, 2014, pp. 59, 542). Whatever the fabric they have chosen for their dressmakers to sew into new grarments, the fashion sported by these two ladies indicates their enjoyment of the dubious privilege of an indirect franchise. That is not true of any other female figure in the painting. By contrast, how might one identify which men in Work are wearing clothes that imply their eligibility to vote? It is easier to say which of them is disfranchised, but even to answer that question, one has to confront the mindnumbingly entwined rat’s nest that was mid-Victorian election law. Because the Great Reform Act, like those that it amended and those that amended it, divided England and Wales into boroughs (cities or towns) and counties, it legislated two sets of qualifications for suffrage, with two different forms of economic test. Even more daunting to anyone who wants to understand Victorian election practices – and at the time that included a good number of confused Victorians – are the effects of the anomalies created by the existence of 15,535 parishes in England and Wales, each of which had its own distinctive practices. Frequently, therefore, qualifications could vary so widely from one side of a street to the other that one man was able to go to the polls while his neighbour across the street with exactly the same qualifications had to stay at home (Seymour, 1915, p. 297). The implementation of statute law was often based on case law reflecting the adjudications of hundreds and hundreds of claims that had been determined to be ‘Vote good’ or ‘Vote bad’. How all these intricacies applied in practice was often left to the fecklessness or guile of local election officials. For the guidance of such officials, often revised and reissued tomes dealing with Victorian election law grew to the size of Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.7 In speculating on which men in Work are enfranchised, however, I will try to do some justice to these apparently endless technicalities without, for instance, treating more than four of the approximately 1,200 ways in which a man could qualify for the county vote (Brock, 1973, p. 326; Seymour, 1915, pp. 20–21). Some of the male figures in Work are disfranchised by what seem today to be capricious exclusions, their so-called ‘legal liabilities’. At the Victorian mid-century, uniforms often did not bode well for their wearers’ electoral prospects. The policeman in the middle distance to the far right of the painting, by virtue of the job he does, suffers from a legal liability, as does the letter carrier (Warren, 1852, p.  160; Wolferstan, 1865,

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pp. 171–72), whose tiny red-clad figure in the background can be glimpsed between the two horses to the rear. In the middle distance of the painting between the girl on horseback and the beer-drinking navvy, there is another uniformed figure, this one on horseback, whose black uniform and white belt suggest that he is another police officer. A tiny figure who has no uniform to reveal his official responsibilities is the man posting the election results, and his status as enfranchised or not is unclear. Some of those working ‘in some capacity for the purpose of [an] election’ were disfranchised, but others were not: town clerks, parish clerks, and door keepers had no vote; but bandmasters and bellringers enjoyed ‘Vote good’ (Rogers and Wolferstan, 1859, pp.  cclvi, 164 fn.). If the viewer of Work in 1865 was tempted to weave a narrative around this tiny figure as, say, someone whose next duty was to ring the town bell or to stand watch over the entrance to a building, this poll worker might land in either category. Other uniforms do not clearly indicate their wearers’ eligibility to vote. The officer walking on the embankment, dressed in the scarlet of the Royal Army, probably would have suffrage (Wolferstan, 1865, p.  135); but not necessarily so the two men to the left of him, both dressed in the grey uniforms of volunteers, men who enlisted as amateur, part-time soldiers in response to the threats of invasion posed by Napoleon III. Their corps came to include large numbers of working men; but they were led by a significant contingent of middle- and upper-middle-class men who might have met the economic test for the franchise in either a borough or a county.8 Of the remaining male figures of Work, many are disfranchised by the kind of labour that they are undertaking and by the amount of money that they earn. Here the intricacies of Victorian election law become more ornate. Hampstead, the suburb in which the election of Bobus is taking place, is obviously in the county of Middlesex, but Middlesex included five boroughs, and in one of them, Finsbury, one of the major figures in the painting lives, so the franchise requirements in both kinds of constitutency are relevant here. Men in counties had to qualify for a possession franchise; those in boroughs, for an occupation franchise. As one historian summarises the simplest of the county requirements: ‘men over 21 [were] qualified … if they held a 40s. freehold, or a £10 copyhold, or a 60-year leasehold at £10 or a 20-year leasehold at £50 a year’ (Smith, 1966, p. 19). ‘Holding’ in this instance means long-term possession, either by absolute ownership (freehold), tenure of land recorded in the court of a manor (copyhold) or by tenure based on a contract (leasehold). In boroughs after 1832, the economic qualification was the single sum of £10; but as the language of the Great Reform Act suggests, that was no simple matter: ‘every Male Person’ otherwise qualified would have to ‘occupy … as Owner or Tenant, any House, Warehouse, Counting-house, Shop or other Building … of the clear yearly Value of not less than Ten Pounds’. Such requirements were

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Reading appearances meant to ensure that only settled men living in boroughs would have the franchise, but for such a man in, say, 1865, it was not easy to know what the words ‘occupy’ and ‘house’ and ‘value’ might mean. All the men in Work who are clearly excluded from the electorate are the ones doing or hoping to do manual labour. The Great Reform Act required stable residency ‘for Twelve Calendar Months next previous to the last Day of July’ in the year of qualification if one was to have any chance of gaining the borough suffrage; in the case of counties, the requirement for possession was itself a way of ensuring an elector’s stable residency. The agricultural labourers in the declivity to the right of the painting – the man sitting against a tree, the one dressed in green fustian, and the man at the right margin of the painting who wears a brown jacket covering the traditional linen smock of a farm labourer – are all, by definition, itinerant. They are on the tramp, stopping in Hampstead as they search for work. It also goes without saying that the seven male figures at the centre of Work have no place at the polls: the three principal navvies, along with those on the margins of that group, including the man with a pipe in the shade to the right, the hod carrier emerging from their diggings, and the two navvies whose hand and shovel are just visible behind the red-coated greyhound. They are as rootless as the agricultural labourers and, despite the reputation for skill and diligence that they earned in the 1850s when building railways in the Crimea, a far sight less respectable.9 Navvies lived and worked in gangs that moved from one dangerous job to another as railways and bridges were being built. Often drunken and violent, such men inspired fear among their more settled contemporaries by setting up camps outside towns and defying conventional expectations about so-called civilised behaviour. That was particularly so when they literally went to town to spend their earnings in a drunken ‘randy’ until their money was gone, often four or five days later (Coleman, 2015, p. 125). As Brown’s descriptive catalogue and their placement at almost the centre of Work reveal, however, its painter valued the navvies who modelled for him as ‘serious, intelligent men’; and he both followed tradition when he clothed them in ‘their manly and picturesque costume’ (1998, pp.  155, 152) and diverged from it to give them unmistakable visual appeal. What is apparently the earliest known photograph of a group of five navvies from 1853 shows them wearing garments almost as various as those in Work.10 Yet the outstanding feature of a navvy’s attire was its filth. Dirt and sweat saturated navvies’ clothes; and they were known for their pride in such grime, one man boasting that he was sewn into clothes that he did not change until they fell off his body, another saying the same of his boots (Coleman, 2015, p.  111). Yet Brown’s navvies are anything but dirty, despite their work under a bright sun. The fact that they are digging trenches for new water pipes, not sewage pipes  – a misreading that Brown was quick to point out – contributes to his idealised depiction

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of them. The painter invested them with all the visual interest that his imaginative recreation of their work-a-day dress could afford. A triangle of reds – the principal navvy’s cloth belt, the front panels of the waistcoat of the navvy bending below him, and the bright handkerchief and tie of the beer-­drinking navvy – defines the men as a group. Yet no two of these figures wear the same kind of shirt – the chief navvy in printed cotton over a roughly woven singlet, the one opposite him in a smock probably made of linen. The trousers on the principal navvy are corduroy, the texture of its raised welts clearly visible, while those of the man in front of him are moleskin tied, in the traditional way, at the waist and knee. Headgear is similarly distinctive and individualised: one navvy is in the customary striped, knitted brewer’s cap;11 another has a brightly coloured handkerchief tied around his head; and a third wears a narrow-brimmed hat made of cloth or perhaps straw. These details put on display Brown’s love of the textures and colours of various fabrics. More important, they invite viewers of Work to think about the status of these men, as if to suggest that any franchise law that overlooked such workers, capable of ‘working’, in Brown’s words, ‘at useful work’ (1998, p.  152), might not be worth as much respect as navvies are due. This accounting still leaves a good number of men who might be enfranchised and who are clearly not so. The man standing against the central tree in the shade has been identified as a criminal (Curtis, 2002, pp. 89–90) – a shady character – so if he has been convicted of a felony, he suffers from a legal liability. The barefoot herb-and-flower gatherer, looking out suspiciously from under the torn brim of his hat and dressed in a tattered smock and trousers, is disfranchised by virtue of his obvious destitution, as is any man so poor that he is employed in carrying sandwich boards. The gentleman on horseback in the middle distance has a more certain electoral status. Brown identifies him in his descriptive catalogue as a gentleman who is ‘evidently very rich, probably a colonel in the army, with a seat in Parliament, and fifteen thousand a-year’ (1998, p. 154). Yet this man might feature in another sort of narrative. His attire no doubt declares his wealth: his fine clothes – his double-breasted waistcoat, trousers and coat in two colours, monocle  – all accord with the dictates of 1850s fashion (Cunnington and Cunnington, 1966, pp. 199, 226). If he is a peer, he has no vote in parliamentary elections. Or if, as Brown imagines, this gentleman is also ‘probably’ an officer in the Royal Army, he would not be disqualified as a voter (Wolferstan, 1865, pp. 135, 179). Moreover, a ‘very rich’ man who can afford horses and a stylishly dressed daughter would qualify for the vote, whether he resides in a borough or a county. This tally does not include three important figures: the beer man, Carlyle, and Maurice. One of them poses great challenges, and one no challenge at all. Again clothes tell the story. The brown of Carlyle’s trousers aligns him with the central navvy, as is not surprising given the

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Reading appearances writer’s life-long respect for his father, a stonemason; but even more revealing is the brown of Carlyle’s coat and of the felt wide-awake on his head. His waistcoat, also brown, is casually unbuttoned almost to his waist, and although he sports a tie and the raised collar of a gentleman’s attire, Carlyle’s clothes resemble those of a peasant more than they do those of a renowned author. Brown’s depiction of Carlyle’s attire, like that of his famous grimace, accurately captures this distinctive feature. Early on in his career, impelled by his fiancée Jane Welsh’s gift of a black hat, Carlyle ‘bought a suit of fine clothes to match’, but it was his first and last foray into the world of fashion. Subsequently, he ordered his clothes from a tailor in the tiny Scottish village of Ecclefechan (Moers, 1978, p. 181). Perhaps not coincidentally, Carlyle, a disfranchised peasant in spirit, was disfranchised in fact. At the time when Brown was pestering him to sit for the photographs used for his portrayal in Work, Carlyle had been living for many years in Chelsea, then part of Middlesex county. His annual rent of £35 is therefore not high enough to grant him the vote: according to one major requirement, Carlyle’s lease does not meet the minimum length of time, sixty years; and according to another, it does not meet the minium yearly cost, £50.12 The clothes of the gentleman standing at Carlyle’s side declare his status as an elector because they bespeak his profession as a clergyman. F. D. Maurice’s long black frock coat and black trousers, made of woollen broadcloth, were distinctive features of the attire worn by priests of the Church of England, a style that set them apart from clerics of other denominations (Mayo, 1984, p.  93). Reputed to be, in Brown’s words, a clergyman who was ‘never weary in well-doing’ (1998, p. 152), Maurice founded the Working Men’s College, where Brown taught art from 1857 to 1861. Maurice stands hatless, perhaps as a mark of his well-known humility, and he holds his accessories behind him, his top hat and Bible. At the time when Brown was painting Maurice’s portrait in Work, Maurice was living at 5 Russell Square in the parish of Bloomsbury, but his eligibility to vote did not depend on his residence in Finsbury or on the value of his house there. By virtue of a significant convolution of election law, men with freeholds in boroughs qualified as electors in counties (Brock, 1973, p. 326). Because Maurice has a position as perpetual curate at St Peter’s, Vere Street, Marylebone, he ‘possesses’ a ‘freehold benefice’ that allows him to vote in Middlesex; and his name appears, year after year, in the official ‘List of persons … entitled to vote’ there ‘in respect of Property situate … within the parish of Saint Marylebone’ (Census Returns of England and Wales, 1861; Electoral Registers, 1862). Much less certain is the beer man’s eligibility for the franchise. He is, in my narrative as well as in Brown’s, ‘a prosperous’ individual and ‘a sort of hero’ (1998, p. 154). Of all the men in Work, his dress is the most elaborate. Brian Maidment, in his study of Victorian dustmen, characterizes

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the beer man’s clothes exactly when he analyses the ‘foppish element in dustman dress’, describing such working-class attire as a combination of ‘rather effete dandyism’ and ‘almost parodic brawny maleness’ (2008, pp. 95, 130). The beer man reveals his ambitions to be the kind of dandy that Carlyle excoriates in Sartor Resartus: ‘as others dress to live, he lives to dress’. What the dandy most desires is that others ‘admit him to be … a visual object’: ‘he solicits … the glance of your eyes’ (2000, pp. 200, 201). The beer man does indeed solicit the visual attention of anyone examining Work: in his own way he wears the attire and accessories that identify him as, in the tradition of Beau Brummel, the ‘top of male ton’ (Moers, 1978, p. 18). In his exhibition catalogue, Brown stresses the beer man’s ‘town pluck and energy’, his having risen above a childhood during which he was ‘starved’ and ‘stunted’. For my purposes, however, most pertinent is Brown’s characterisation of him ‘in all matters of taste, as vulgar as Birmingham can make him in the nineteenth century’ (1998, p. 154), ‘Birmingham’ – or, more derisively, ‘Brummagen’ – here being shorthand for everything cheap and showy. And the beer man is gorgeously showy, Brummagen or not. An embodiment of the fact that in the nineteenth century ‘young working men had a separate, more flamboyant fashion system’ than those of more elite men (Levitt, 1991, p. 181), the beer man sports a two-tone cap of loosely woven fabric, probably wool, complete with a jaunty visor and an elaborate tassel. His trousers, not fully covered by his capacious apron, are of a fashionable check. But his chest exhibits the greatest dandified care that he has taken with his garments. His waistcoat, in two shades of red set off by flecks of blue, looks to be made of brocade or velveteen; and it is adorned with a reddish neckerchief tied in a bow. The ornaments that bedeck this garment bespeak his pretensions to superior dress: he has a gold or, more likely, a gold-plated watch chain across his chest, which he has decorated with flowers, some now wilted, some still fresh, and from which dangle gold seals – all items, except the wilted flowers, that were the mode for Victorian gentlemen in the 1850s (Cunnington and Cunnington, 1966, pp. 206, 226). Yet the garment that most emphatically announces the care with which the beer man does his shopping is his shirt (Plate 8). Fashioned from printed cotton, it has narrow red stripes that go down his arm, stopping short of his shoulder; and there the fabric has been turned at ninety degrees and attached by a small decorative patch of the same cloth. Serious sewing has gone into the creation of this shirt. Although some working-class men could afford some items of bespoke clothes (Richmond, 2013, pp. 77–78; Rose, 2014, pp. 1, 109), the beer man has probably purchased his ready-made. And handmade was what ‘ready-made’ meant during the time when Brown was painting Work: such garments, shirts in particular, were still sewn by the hands of impoverished seamstresses

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Reading appearances doing arduous, unremitting sweated labour (Harris, 2005, pp.  115–37). The beer man could have found such a shirt in one of the first readymade clothing stores that were opening in London during the 1840s and 1850s. I can imagine him sauntering into the ‘mechanics’ department of the largest such emporium, the ‘show-store’ of E. Moses and Son at the corner of Aldgate and the Minories in a grand building composed of twelve formerly separate houses.13 The accoutrements of this store were as eye-­ catchingly gorgeous and even gaudy as the beer man’s shirt: it had floorto-­ceiling plate glass windows, a three-storey portico, chandeliers lit with gas, gleaming brass hardware, and piles and piles of clothes. As one of its distinctive, pamphlet-length advertisements boasted, Moses and Son sold ‘ready-made suits that a Beau Brummel would have been proud to wear, at prices that a mechanic can afford to pay’ (E. Moses and Son, 1860). Nonetheless the most irrefutable proof of the beer man’s desire to be seen as fashionable is on the placket of his shirt: printed down it are two images of ballet dancers, each displaying her legs in an exaggerated arabesque. So-called ballet girls were objects of both artistic appreciation and open lust among Victorian gentlemen and ‘gents’, those lower-­middleclass men identifiable by their pretensions to fashion, the Guppys of the  Victorian world. By the time Brown was painting Work, the heyday of the Romantic ballet and its greatest ballerinas was largely in the past: Marie Taglioni had brought her creation of the role of La Sylphide to London in 1832, and Carlotta Grisi had done the same for the title role of Giselle in 1844. At mid-century, however, lithographs of such dancers were still widely distributed; and the gent, according to The Natural History of the Ballet Girl, ‘considers it “fast” to have “Pets”, coloured and framed, hung up in his rooms, to induce a belief in the breast of the visitor that he is on very intimate terms with the originals’ (Smith, 1847, p. 6). Evidently the beer man desires to be considered ‘fast’. Brown was not being at all fanciful when he painted ballet dancers on a beer seller’s shirt front. In 1850 a writer for the Journal of Design and Manufactures voiced his outrage at ‘the designs’ that ‘offensively riot … in shirtings’, in particular ‘sprawling opera-dancers and sporting subjects … oftentimes carried to the most absurd extremes. The very idea of a score of Carlotta Grisis straggling over the body is horrid, and is an utter perversion of propriety’ (‘Review of Patterns’, 1850, p. 83). Viewers of such sartorial details in Work in 1865 might have found vulgar the parade of even two ballet dancers down the front of the beer man’s shirt. Yet perhaps here Brian Maidment’s views on his dandified dustmen again become relevant. Writing of the urban picturesque, he notes that it tends to portray ‘street trades’ as ‘both socially heroic and aesthetically pleasing’ (2008, pp. 43–44). Brown’s depiction of the figure whom he calls ‘a sort of hero’ might have had such an effect. This most unattractive instance of a social type – with his black eye and open mouth as he cries ‘Beer ho!’ – becomes the most visually interesting

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character of all those worthy of inclusion in Work: not possessing any of the traditional ingredients of beauty, the sartorial results of his dandified ambitions do make the beer man ‘aesthetically pleasing’. Can such a man, having enough money to attire himself so fashionably, fulfil the pre-1867 requirements for suffrage? And here matters become very tricky. Even if the discussion is limited to the borough franchise, that question reveals the irrationality and unpredictability of the franchise in effect after 1832. Beyond the stipulations that a man ‘occupy’ a ‘House’ of ‘the clear yearly Value of not less than Ten Pounds’, there were further limitations. As one historian has summarised them, men were eligible to register for the franchise ‘if they had not been in receipt of poor relief in the preceding twelve months, paid the poor rate and assessed taxes  … for at least the past twelve months, and occupied his premises for twelve months … and resided for six months from the beginning of the calendar year within the parliamentary borough, or within seven miles of its limits’ (Smith, 1966, p. 18). The intricacies of these qualifications require more than a little explanation. The premises that a voter would have to occupy were identified not as a home, but as a ‘house’, any structure that could house people or animals or things, including all sorts of buildings, law chambers, reading rooms, a detached dairy, the flimsiest of sheds, a room in a factory (Wolferstan, 1865, pp.  70, 58, 65; Warren, 1852, p.  98). A ‘tenant’ eligible to vote was defined by case law as a man who had a key to the outer door of the house; if not, his vote was ‘bad’. Moreover, a man was required to prove that he had paid his full poor rates and taxes as evidence of his financial stability, and the requirement that he reside within seven miles of the borough for at least six months of the year demonstrates that a man did not have to live in the premises that he occupied, much less in the borough where it was located (Warren, 1852, pp. 97, 101–02; Wolferstan, 1865, pp. 58–59, 94). Most confusingly, ‘clear yearly Value’ was not clear at all. Most election manuals tried unsuccessfully to include all the possible ways of calculating that amount – with or without rates, taxes, and charges for furniture or insurance (Saunders, 2011, pp. 161–62). The registration system created by the Great Reform Act could be and often was for the potential elector time-consuming, arduous, and costly. Particularly difficult were the obstacles created if the landlord of a man residing in his ‘house’ was ‘compounding’ his tenant’s rates by paying them directly to the parish, thus keeping his tenant off the registration lists (Brock, 1973, pp.  84–85). Since any voter could question the eligibility of any other voter in the published registration lists or claim a place on those lists, his case would end up in front of a revising barrister, one charged with amending those lists; and his decision could be appealed to the Court of Common Pleas and eventually, in some few cases, to the House of Commons (Warren, 1852, chapter 6; Wolferstan, 1865, chapter  3). Even Lord John Russell, the chief architect of the 1832 Act, admitted that the

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Reading appearances problems created by the registration system made the borough franchise ‘in many respects illusory’ (quoted in Seymour, 1915, p. 141). These requirements, furthermore, were subject to variations in all the parishes within a borough. Some statistics clarify – if only roughly because Victorian statistics are misleadingly precise and notoriously unreliable  – how the practice of election law might apply to the beer man. If he lives in, say, Finsbury, a borough in Middlesex whose population was 423,560, the numbers are against him when it comes to going to the polls: there were 25,461 electors, of whom 13,127 voted in the election of 1865 (Electoral Returns, 1866, p. 125). Because Finsbury is located about five miles from Hampstead, the beer man can easily make a daily journey to his work by travelling on foot or by omnibus if he wants to pay one to three pence for the ride. Maurice’s location on a summer day in Hampstead also makes that point: he has travelled there from Finsbury or Marylebone, a parish only slightly closer than Finsbury. Let’s assume, then, that the beer man occupies in Finsbury a compounded ‘house’ rented for at least £10 a year. That fact could yield either ‘Vote good’ or ‘Vote bad’ because each parish or union of parishes in a borough calculated ‘clear annual Value’ according to its own statutes and customary practices, and there were nine such precincts in Finsbury. In general, the electoral prospects of a compounder in that borough were not good. In the Holborn Union of parishes, ‘no compounded Occupier’ is on the register; and there are only a few or ‘scarcely any, if any’ in St Mary, Islington, and St Giles, Bloomsbury. The beer man would be well advised to live in Clerkenwell, where requirements are unaccountably generous: local statutes ignored the Great Reform Act by putting ‘even occupiers of houses of £8 rental on the Register of Voters’, and ‘compound householders are entered by the Collector on the Register’ (Electoral Returns, 1866, p. 126). Yet the beer man, without access to the electoral registers published by Parliament, would have no way beside word of mouth to figure out that that is the case. Instead of paying the rates due on his compounded house directly to the parish collector in St Mary or St Giles, as he is allowed to do by an 1851 statute,14 the dandified beer man would be better off spending his money on entry to a theatre, where he could see flesh-and-blood members of the corps de ballet dancing on stage, rather than as images on the placket of his shirt. So what does my catalogue of male figures and their attire reveal about the pre-1867 franchise? What might a viewer of Work at Brown’s 1865 exhibition – a gentleman in his fashionable tweed trousers or a lady in her gown of strongly contrasting colours, au courant in the 1860s – have thought about the political implications of Work in its depiction of the clothes worn by the many men in Brown’s representation of an election? If asked, such a viewer could scan the attire of the men depicted in Work and recognise immediately, as if by nature, how few of those men might find their way to the polls on that July day. Only one of them, Maurice,

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is beyond any doubt entitled to the franchise, while two others, the gentleman on horseback and the beer man, might or might not be. The rest, including the navvies and the herb gatherer, along with more minor figures such as the men carrying sandwich boards for Bobus, surely are not. Of the twenty-eight male figures that I have considered here, the proportion of the enfranchised is pitifully small, approximately 8 per cent, at a time when approximately 16.4 per cent of the working-class men in Finsbury had the franchise (Electoral Returns, 1866, p. 13) – so pitifully small that it might indicate that institutional politics, epitomised by the election going forward in Work, really is a joke. And it is a joke much more serious than the implications of the silly name ‘Bobus’ would suggest. The risible ratio of the enfranchised to the disfranchised in Work would have become a little more encouraging if Brown had included in his pictorial account of Victorian social organisation the kinds of workers who do not appear in his painting: superior clerks, well-to-do artisans, physicians, barristers, and tradesmen both wholesale and retail (including Bobus, who is definitely offstage in Work). In that sense one might say that Work itself is undemocratic: by not including more enfranchised men, it remains more exclusive than parishes like St Mary, Islington. Similarly, the 1832 franchise, even as it was amended in the two following decades, is so limited, so hedged around with impossible demands, that participating in an election might easily seem ­pointless – too arduous, too discriminatory to count as a form of civic life. Yet I do not in any way want to suggest that I am overlooking the views of the thousands and thousands of Victorian workers who were outraged by their lack of inclusion in the electorate created by the 1832 Act and who continued to voice their support for reform in the following decades. To examine another of the various options for the interpretation of the politics of Work, however, it is necessary to look not back to the Great Reform Act, but ahead to the ways in which Brown’s painting foreshadows the Second Reform Act of 1867, the Act that enfranchised the majority of working men in the boroughs of England and Wales, the Act for which workers organised and rallied and marched with great dedication and determination. At his exhibition in May of 1865, Brown was delighted when W. E. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, came to view his artworks. The politician offered Brown a congratulatory handshake (Thirlwell, 2011, p. 23), and what that gesture might have signalled depends, as does the interpretation of Work, on the precise historical context in which it is understood. By 1865, the question most widely debated in and outside Parliament was whether a new reform bill would enfranchise working men; and since 1859 MPs of all political stripes had agreed that passing some kind of reform was necessary (Saunders, 2011, p. 7). During a speech in 1864, Gladstone had surprised his listeners, not to mention his fellow MPs, when he boldly announced that, he believed, a moral test ought to be the

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Reading appearances primary qualification for the franchise: ‘Every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.’ According to Gladstone, ‘self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors’ are ‘the qualities which fit a man’ for the franchise (Parliamentary Debates, 1864). That standard was so capacious that even a few of the navvies at the centre of Work might qualify – if their attention to their tasks could pass as ‘self-command’ and ‘respect for order’. Perhaps, therefore, the congratulatory handshake that Gladstone gave Ford Madox Brown suggests that the politician saw in Work a visual version of the argument for a very generous extension of the franchise that Gladstone had voiced in 1864. His earlier proposal of a moral test for the vote, however, was ultimately a standard too inclusive for even Gladstone, and by May of 1865 he was voting for yet another economic test, in this case one set at £6 rather than £10 (Parliamentary Debates, 1865). Perhaps, therefore, Gladstone was congratulating Brown for visual confirmation of his own current, more limited ambitions for reform, those that he advocated in 1865 rather than in 1864. There is, tantalisingly, no way to know  – just as, at this distance in time, it is hard to evaluate, though not hard to imagine the different ways in which other viewers in the Piccadilly gallery would have understood the politics of Work. Since Punch published its ‘The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition’ in May of 1865 when Work was still on exhibit, would the viewers have thought of the two images as comparable contributions to current reform debates? If they had consulted Brown’s descriptive catalogue, would they have been tempted to label the creator of this painting a ‘rugged democrat’ (Brown, 1998, p. 154), the term that he used there to anthropomorphise and politicise the scruffy dog that accompanies his ‘ragged, dirty children’? However one chooses to answer such questions, speculating about the ways in which the painting might offer a visual argument claiming that clothes make the voter does, I hope, illuminate the state of the franchise when Work was being painted in the 1850s and early 1860s, as well as the prospects for reform when it was exhibited in 1865. By doing so, Work puts the franchise, at times the dominant and most rancorous political question during those years, not on its humorous peripheries, but rather at the centre of attention.

Notes   1 For comparitive encounters, see Carlisle, 2004, pp.  10–13, 19–20, and Carlisle, 2012, pp. 17–21.   2 For good reproductions of details, see Walker, 2006.   3 Asking about the politics of Work has become distinctly unfashionable, as evidenced by a special issue of Visual Culture in Britain, in which a number of the authors reject such a question as reductively ideological, proposing that Brown’s work be valued

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  4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14

Dressing for the vote in Brown’s Work instead for its ‘representation of dynamic lived experience’ (Trodd and Sheldon, 2014, p. 229). I hope my analysis suggests that neither focus necessarily excludes the other. Punch, 1865. For a more detailed analysis of this image, see Carlisle, 2012, pp. 55–60. Dart, 1999, p. 89; Walker, 2006, p. 19; Newman and Watkinson, 1991, p. 120. See Cunnington and Cunnington, 1966, p. 444; Goldthorpe, 1988, pp. 39, 40, 43. The dates of the two manuals that I repeatedly cite correspond to the beginning and end of the period when Brown was painting and exhibiting Work: Warren, 1852; Wolferstan, 1865. For volunteers see Carlisle, 2012, pp. 152–73. See Coleman, 2015, chapters 6 and 12; Barringer, 2005, pp.  37–41; Dart, 1999, pp. 82–84; Klingender, 1947, pp. 136–41. The group of navvies is reproduced in Coleman, 2015, p. 30. See Coleman, 2015, p. 30; Williams-Mitchell, 1982, p. 70. See also Cunnington and Lucas, 1976, p. 79; de Marly, 1986, p. 93. From 1834 Carlyle held an initial lease on 5 Cheyne Row (now number 24) that was renewable from year to year at £35. In 1852 it became a thirty-one-year lease at the same cost (Carlyle’s House, 1907, pp. 16–17). On Moses and Son, see Levitt, 1991; Chapman, 1993; Mendelsohn, 2014, pp. 104–11; Jones, 2018. See Brock, 1973, p. 325; Warren, 1852, pp. 104–05; Wolferstan, 1865, pp. 80–84.

References ‘An Act to Amend the Representation of the People in England and Wales’ (1832). 2 Will. 4, c. 45. The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. London: His Majesty’s Printers, vol. 72. Barringer, T. (2005). Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brock, M. G. (1973). The Great Reform Act. London: Hutchinson University Library. Brown, F. M. (1998). The Exhibition of WORK, and Other Paintings by Ford Madox Brown [1865], in Bendiner, K. The Art of Ford Madox Brown. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, appendix 3. Carlisle, J. (2004). Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carlisle, J. (2012). Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carlyle, T. (2000). Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh [1833–34]. Ed. R. L. Tarr and M. Engel. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carlyle, T. (2005). Past and Present [1843]. Ed. C. Vanden Bossche, J. T. Brattin, and D. J. Trela. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carlyle’s House: Illustrated Catalogue, Chronology, and Descriptive Notes (1907). London: Carlyle’s House Memorial Trust. Census Returns of England and Wales (1861). National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, Public Record Office. Chapman, S. (1993). ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs in the British Ready-Made Clothing Industry’. Textile History, 24, pp. 5–25. Coleman, T. (2015). The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men who Made the Railways [1965]. London: Head of Zeus.

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Reading appearances Cowling, M. (1989). The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Character and Type in Victorian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cunnington, C. W. and Cunnington, P. (1966). Handbook of English Costume in the Nineteenth Century. London: Faber and Faber. Cunnington, P. and Lucas, C. (1976). Occupational Costume in England. London: Adam and Charles Black. Curtis, G. (2002). Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dart, G. (1999). ‘The Reworking of Work’. Victorian Literature and Culture, 27, pp. 69–96. de Marly, D. (1986). Working Dress: A Study of Occupational Clothing. New York: Holmes and Meier. Electoral Registers: Register of Voters for the Parish of Saint Marylebone (1862). London: Printed by John Smith. Electoral Returns: Boroughs and Counties, 1865–66 (1866). London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode. E. Moses and Son (1860). The Growth of an Important Branch of British Industry. London: E. Moses and Son. Goldthorpe, C. (1988). From Queen to Empress: Victorian Dress, 1837–1877. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Greene, S. W. (2014). Wearable Prints, 1760–1860: History, Materials, and Mechanics. Kent: Kent State University Press. Harris, B. (2005). ‘All that Glitters is Not Gold: The Show-Shop and the Victorian Seamstress’, in Harris, B. (ed.), Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 115–37. Illustrated London News (1865, 18 March), p. 266. Jones, L. A. (2018). ‘E. Moses and Son: The Tailors who Pioneered Mass-Market Men’s Tailoring?’ Fashion, Style, and Popular Culture, 5, pp. 97–113. Klingender, F. D. (1947). Art and the Industrial Revolution. London: Noel Carrington. Levitt, S. (1991). ‘Cheap Mass-Produced Men’s Clothing in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’. Textile History, 22, pp. 179–92. Maidment, B. (2008). Dusty Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen, 1780–1870. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mayo, J. (1984). A History of Ecclesiastical Dress. New York: Holmes and Meier. Mendelsohn, A. D. (2014). The Rag Race. New York: NYU Press. Moers, E. (1978). The Dandy: Brummel to Beerbohm [1960]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Newman. T. and Watkinson, R. (1991). Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle. London: Chatto and Windus. Parliamentary Debates (1864, 11 May). Third series, vol. 175, col. 324–25. Parliamentary Debates (1865, 8 May). Third series, vol. 178, col. 1706. Power, D. (1847). The Law of Qualification and Registration of Parliamentary Electors in England and Wales. London: S. Sweet. Punch (1865, 20 May), p. 203. ‘Review of Patterns’ (1850). Journal of Design and Manufactures, 3, p. 83. Richmond, V. (2013). Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Rogers, F. N. and Wolferstan, F. S. P. (1859). Rogers’ Law and Practice of Elections, Election Committees, and Registration. 9th edn. London: V. and R. Stevens and G. S. Norton. Rose, C. (2014). ‘Evaluating the Manufacturing and Retailing Practices of H. J. & D. Nicoll through a c. 1860 Boy’s Suit’. Textile History, 45, pp. 99–118. Saunders, R. (2011). Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act. Farnham: Ashgate. Seymour, C. (1915). Electoral Reform in England and Wales. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, A. (1847). The Natural History of the Ballet Girl. London: D. Bogue. Smith, F. B. (1966). The Making of the Second Reform Bill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thirlwell, A. (2011). ‘The Game of Life: Ford Madox Brown – A Character Study’, in Treuherz, J. (ed.), Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer. London: Philip Wilson, pp. 23–35. Trodd, C. and Sheldon, J. (2014). ‘Introduction: Ford Madox Brown and the Victorian Imagination’. Visual Culture in Britain, 15, pp. 227–38. Walker, J. A. (2006). Work: Ford Madox Brown’s Painting and Victorian Life. London: Francis Boutle. Warren, S. (1852). A Manual of the Parliamentary Election Law of the United Kingdom and Ireland. London: Butterworths. Williams-Mitchell, C. (1982). Dressed for the Job: The Story of Occupational Costume. London: Blandford Press. Wolferstan, F. S. P. (1865). Rogers on Elections, Election Committees, and Registration. 10th edn. London: Stevens and Sons.

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PART III

Global connections and entanglements

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8 Spectacles of grandeur and fabrics for the brave: the West India Regiments’ dress until 1900 Steeve O. Buckridge

De skirt dem an de trousers an de hats wat dem had awn! Me never se more different uniform from ah was born! Red an black, wite, gole an yellow, green an blue in every shade, jus a-blen an shine an pretty up De VICTORY Parade! …1

From the seventeenth century onwards, the expansion of the British Empire prompted the need for ever-larger armed forces to secure and protect British interests abroad and its colonial possessions. These imperial forces along with a vast colonised population generated an unprecedented demand for clothing and accessories that ultimately engulfed and transformed the clothing industry in Britain (Lemire, 1997, pp. 1–8). Such phenomena contributed to the further globalisation of material goods such as textiles and the emergence of a large consumer population beyond the metropole. The military and civilian dress customs across the British Empire were characterised by enormous variety and complexities born out of the commingling and migration of diverse groups of people. In Jamaica and the wider Atlantic region, dress customs depicted differentiation and overlapping cultural influences that were by-products of local and global trade systems connecting people across several colonial empires. Many colonies relied on large imports of Indian cottons, which were also traded in West and Central Africa in exchange for slaves needed to provide labour in the plantation zones of the Americas. North African zouave dress was worn by troops recruited in Canada, the West Indies, and Brazil, and military fashions around the world copied French designs. Khaki-coloured uniforms that developed in India among Indian British soldiers and military guide corps in 1846 were popularised and adopted by the British military and eventually spread to other armed forces beyond the British Empire (Abler, 1999, pp.  114–16). Consequently, the Caribbean became

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Global connections and entanglements ‘a new world created by encounters, fusions, and transformations of old worlds; an entity particularly characterized and joined by intercontinental and transnational flows of people, objects, and concepts’ (Duplessis, 2016, p.  17). These defining factors influenced the politics of the region and shaped the fashion sensibilities of colonised people and altered the sartorial style of the British army uniform in the West Indies. The transnational flow of material objects included vast quantities of different textiles and clothes to outfit imperial armies. Bales of textiles were needed for uniform apparel, military accessories for colours and regimental flags, footwear, ceremonial and pageantry regalia, and protective headgear, to name a few. These material goods were essential for military success abroad and simultaneously conveyed a sense of sartorial grandeur and might of empire, especially in the colonies. Hence the British government turned to garment manufacturers and subcontractors along with numerous clothing suppliers, including legions of tailors, seamstresses, retailers, tanners, milliners, button makers, and recyclers of apparel to fill this demand for military clothing. Among the forces that relied on supplies from London were the West India Regiments stationed in the Caribbean. The West India Regiments were British army units that were, at one time, one of the largest official corps of Black soldiers in the Americas, and had the longest continuous period of uninterrupted service, from 1795 to 1927 when the corps was disbanded (Lambert, 2018a). This chapter examines the development of military and British imperial uniforms among the West India Regiments until the end of the nineteenth century and the role of military dress as a visual representation and conveyer of class, status, power, and identity. The British colonial rulers had long believed that ‘proper’ dress, regardless of location or climate, was required for the task of governing subject people. I explore cultures of differences and the politics of representation within the West India Regiments that policed the British Caribbean colonies. I examine how military dress shaped sartorial communication through the varying need for identification, the challenges of visibility, and the changing requirements of the regiments’ role (Joseph, 1995). My aim is to develop an understanding of how these representations were conformed, contested, and appropriated in relation to cultural space, power, and the body surface. Several questions are central to this study. Did ethnic dress influence military styles? Was there a link between material forms, social structures, and symbolic vehicles such as dress? What sort of race, class, and masculinity issues impacted on the making and use of military dress in colonial Jamaica? How did military dress contort and re-image the Black man’s body within the confines of colonial society? I take an interdisciplinary approach and focus on forms and styles of military clothing endorsed by the colonial ideology and the types of modifications undertaken by colonised men in the regiments. I use written

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

sources and visual records such as paintings, lithographs, postcards, magazines, cartes de viste, and portrait photography to develop an understanding of the colonial military and imperial uniforms. I argue that the relationship of military dress to Black men’s identity and Black masculinity was more complex than has previously been considered, and that the military dress of the British West India Regiments was transformed over time into meaningful designs that not only influenced and shaped identities, but also served as a visual reminder and symbol of privilege and elitism that emphasised White dominance and British colonial rule. Among early colonial settlers of the West Indies, as well as the Indigenous people and enslaved Africans, dress and adornment mattered. Beyond the personal use of dress as social expression and utility, diverse communities saw colonial officials in several areas controlling populations by restricting sartorial fashions and their dress practices (Braund, 1993, p. 3). Furthermore, dress and cloth were not only valuable commodities, but highly desirable among colonised people. African slaves in particular became the largest consumer market for textile manufacturers and clothing distributors (Lemire, 2018, p.  126). I use archival sources related to military dress to move the discourse around the militarised body to the actual material of clothing, in order to see the clothed and uniformed Black body not merely as a discursive analysis, but in particular as a material one. This is essential, as dress, including uniforms, in all societies is inextricably connected to the body, in that ‘dress and the body exist in dialectic relationship to one another. Dress operates on the phenomenal body; it is a very crucial aspect of our everyday experience of embodiment, while the body is a dynamic field which gives life and fullness to dress’ (Entwistle, 2002, p. 134).2 The investigation of military dress within the colonised society requires us to adopt the perspective of symbolic interaction theory, particularly in the area of visual representation and the construction of identity. Basically, identities are conveyed by dress, as it reveals the social position of the wearer to both wearer and observer within a specific interaction situation (Roach-Higgins, Eicher, and Johnson, 1995, pp. 12, 19, 134–35). As I have often argued, material belongings or objects such as military uniforms are semiotic because they reveal meaning within social and cultural contexts and function as signifiers in the creation of meaning (Buckridge, 2004, pp. 1–15; Glassie, 1991, p. 256). As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains, ‘We give things meaning by how we use them or integrate them into our everyday practices …’ (1997, p. 3). The analysis of any type of dress, such as a military uniform, requires a three-step process. First, it is necessary to examine the dress and engage in careful analysis and reading of the object or a descriptive account of the clothing; this is followed by reflection on the embodied experiences and contextual material, and lastly by an interpretation linking the observations

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Global connections and entanglements and reflections to theory (Mida and Kim, 2015, pp. 26–27). I use the term ‘dress’ because it includes not merely garments, jewellery, badges, hats, and hairstyles, but also body decorations such as tattoos, dyed skin, scarring, and even branding or any sort of ‘assemblages of modification added to the body’ (Roach-Higgins, Eicher, and Johnson, 1995, pp. 7–8). All of this constructs a full picture of the self. Given that this chapter is about a distinct form of dress  – military ­uniforms – some clarification of the term ‘uniform’ might be useful. In general, a uniform is an organisation’s visual marker or sartorial communication of a permanent differentiation from other groups or the wider society. The uniform was the army’s trademark and symbol: a distinctive dress that immediately set the soldier off from everyone else. While civilian dress is a personal declaration of identity, the military’s carefully constructed image was a matter of regulation and command, and dire punishment could result if ordinary soldiers strayed in any way from the correct appearance (Myerly, 1996, pp.  8–10). I use the terms ‘Caribbean’ and ‘West Indies’ interchangeably to mean the same region: a tropical zone consisting of a chain of islands stretching in an arc from Florida to Venezuela. The islands are nestled between the North and South American continents, and they enclose the Caribbean Sea (Figure 8.1). Today, while much of the region self-identifies as the ‘Caribbean’, the term ‘West Indies’ remains popular

8.1  Louis Delarochette, ‘A General Chart of the West India Islands: With the Adjacent Coasts of the Spanish Continent’, 1896.

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

in the English-speaking Caribbean (Knight and Palmer, 1989, pp. 1–19). The subjects of this chapter are enslaved and freed African men and their descendants who served in the West India Regiments in Jamaica. There is some reference to White colonial officers and their uniform because the dress customs and sartorial style of the West India Regiments can be understood only within the context of their relationship with each other and between racial groups. Although the field of military history has expanded in recent years, the focus on military dress still lags behind. Perhaps the analysis of dress is considered too ephemeral for serious analysis. Sometimes, official dress regulation of military uniforms appeared late, as in the case of British troops in the West Indies after 1822, with very little evidence of what was worn previously (Tylden, 1962, p. 46). Although some full dress for ceremonial duties has survived and is now found in museum collections, many uniforms worn in battle or on the campaign, as well as stable dress or drill clothing, are unlikely to have survived from centuries ago. Thus early visual representations of military personnel that provide a glimpse into the past and evidence of how soldiers dressed prove most useful in this context. As contemporary interest in military dress is often limited to the role of collectors of militaria, makers of military models like toy soldiers, and military video gaming, historical re-enactment, and costume designs for theatre production, by and large more scholarship is needed on military dress (Abler, 1999, pp. 17–19).3 Similarly, much of the work on the West India Regiments have focused on successful military campaigns in support of British expansionism and the political conflicts between the imperial government in London and West Indian legislatures surrounding the regiments’ founding and identity of service personnel. Some scholars have relied heavily on regimental histories by Major Alfred Ellis and Colonel James Caulfield for a microscopic view of the regiments’ frontier wars and punitive expeditions, especially in West Africa throughout the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the rich cultural history and contributions of the West India Regiments to Caribbean society have been largely overlooked. A few early foundational studies on the West India Regiments include those by Roger Buckley (1979), Michael Duffy (1987), Peter Voelz (1993) and Brian Dyde (1997). Scholars such as Major G. Tylden (1962) and W. D. Cribbs (1992) examined the regiments’ dress and provide important descriptions of the uniform and campaign attire. This chapter builds on these pioneering studies and more recent work by scholars who have broadened the scholarship on the West India Regiments and moved the trajectory beyond the battlefield, among them David Lambert (2018), Elizabeth Cooper (2018), Rosalyn Narayan (2018), and Melissa Bennett (2018), to name a few.4 My focus here is to demonstrate the significance of the West India Regiments’ military dress within the colonial society and its role in shaping a Caribbean identity.

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Global connections and entanglements

West Indian military slaves as guardians of empire The British West India Regiments were founded in the eighteenth century against a backdrop of revolutions, invasions, rebellions, and political conflicts between colonial powers. British troops sent to the Caribbean were faced with the daunting task of securing British West Indian plantation economies that relied on slave labour to produce plantation goods for British consumers, but the task proved devasting. British forces in the West Indies often suffered poor health due to inadequate sanitation on transport ships and squalid campsites, in addition to poor diet and inappropriate clothing for the warm climate. Several local published reports from the island of Trinidad in 1838 affirm this and describe the conditions of British troops in the West Indies as follows: ‘the diet of the soldiers is unsuitable to the climate … they are clad and accoutered too heavily for the latitude of Trinidad: they wear the same dress and appointments that soldiers use in Canada, although the latter is colder than Russia’ (quoted in Dyde, 1997, p. 17). However, the greatest calamity was the onset of deadly diseases. During the invasion of Saint Domingue, British forces were decimated by a new and deadly strain of yellow fever that killed some 20,000 White soldiers and left many more hospitalised. British commanders soon recognised that slaves from West Africa were immune to the disease and called on the British government to recruit Black troops for reinforcement as an expedient measure to secure the colonies. Across the British West Indian colonies, local legislatures reacted with outrage and refused to provide slaves for the new force. The Jamaican Assembly, for instance, declared that such a force would ‘entertain notions of equality, and acquire habits pernicious to the welfare of the country’ (quoted in Dyde, 1997, p.  25). Colonial settlers saw the formation of a Black force as a threat to White supremacy and the institution of slavery. Furthermore, many slave owners were unwilling to give away their slaves, as the loss of labour would impact on sugar production on their estates and cut into their profit margins (Dyde, 1997, p.  25). Many pro-slavery practitioners remained steadfast in their opposition to the creation of a Black force and could not fathom the idea of using slaves to protect them and defend the slave economy (Lockley and Cooper, 2017).5 Consequently, contracted recruiters were granted permission by the British government to purchase healthy and fit enslaved African men directly from slave ships for military service. Between 1795 and 1807 the British army bought more than 13,000 men from slave ships for twelve West India Regiments at a cost of £1 million (Lockley, 2017a).6 Although the involuntary recruits had to serve as soldiers until they were too old for active duty, it seemed that life as a soldier was far better than enslavement on a sugar plantation, where conditions were harsh and labour-intensive. The regimental provisions for soldiers included housing, food, a rifle, and

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

wages. Military service provided some opportunities for advancement, but not beyond non-commissioned rank. Black soldiers received an impressive military uniform that represented permanent differentiation from the wider colonial society and signalled their regiment and rank as British soldiers. After the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, some former slaves were recruited from within the region and from among freed men who were rescued by the British navy from illegal slave ships in the middle passage. Eventually, the British army moved recruitment to the colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa, and the Mutiny Act of 1807 issued by the British government granted the slave soldiers their freedom and required that they be treated like other soldiers in the British army (Lockley, 2017b). At the time of their founding in 1795, the West India Regiments were a British infantry unit consisting of twelve regiments, reduced to eight in 1802. During the Napoleonic Wars, between 1815 and 1820 five West India Regiments were disbanded and the best soldiers drafted into the remaining regiments, and the rest settled in Sierra Leone, Trinidad, and Honduras. By 1825 only two regiments were left: one based in Barbados and the other in Jamaica. The lithograph of Up Park Camp by the artist Joseph Bartholomew Kidd (1808–89) provides a visual representation of a military base during this period (Figure 8.2). Up Park Camp was the British military headquarters in Jamaica and later the base of the West India Regiments. The soldiers’ barracks are portrayed in the background, and three British soldiers can be seen riding their horses to the base.

8.2  Scene at Up Park Camp, from Joseph Bartholomew Kidd (1808–89), Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Town Harbors and Scenery (1840), plate 48. Lithograph.

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Global connections and entanglements In the foreground, a European man and a woman are both dressed in civilian riding dress typical of the period. The scene is peaceful and tranquil, and the usual hustle and bustle of a military base is absent  – perhaps a deliberate attempt on the part of the artist to present a rather aesthetically pleasing British imperial landscape of the islands and simultaneously an idealised colonial space beyond the metropole. Despite the troop reduction, the West India Regiments proved their worth and capabilities. Every British commander under whom they served praised the Black soldiers for their gallantry and discipline. In 1796 Sir John Moore, speaking to the newly formed corps, said ‘They are invaluable’, and other commanders remarked that ‘They were the best troops for the climate’ and the ‘Efficacy of the West India troops was, and is, unquestioned’ (Ellis, 1885, p. 8). Overall, Black recruits were considered good soldiers, and as public opinion shifted during the post-Emancipation period, White racial anxiety and fears surrounding the West India Regiments slowly diminished. Throughout the regiments’ long history, the force was engaged in regional and local military operations to subdue rebellions and restore order in the West Indian colonies, for example by putting down the Demerara Rebellion of 1823 and the Jamaican Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865. By the mid-­nineteenth century, West Africa had become the major arena for the West India Regiments’ military campaigns, particularly in suppressing anti-colonial resistance among native people such as the Ashanti of the Gold Coast.7 Military slavery has a long history, and enslaved individuals have been used in numerous armed forces around the globe dating back to the period of antiquity; indeed, some Europeans also used military slaves. In the Atlantic region during the colonial period, the French and Spanish used slaves in their armies in the Caribbean, and the British armed slaves during the American Revolution. In several regions of Africa, Islamic rulers and the African elite had few reservations about using slaves as soldiers – unlike in the Americas, where colonial settlers were often reluctant to utilise slaves in this manner (Laband, 2017).8 It is possible that some of the African men recruited to the West India Regiments during the early years came from communities that owned military slaves or were already familiar with military slave labour and therefore had readily accepted their fate as new recruits in the West India Regiments. However, this requires further study. Regardless, the West India Regiments represented a remarkable achievement for the British army and were established as a permanent military whose soldiers were ‘uniformed, armed, and trained along European lines’ (Lambert, 2018b). The sartorial communication of their uniform was essential in fostering a British military culture among troops which reflected an Orientalist and ornamentalist interpretation of empire and the subaltern. While the military attire was meant to foster cohesion among soldiers

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

through similar dress for all service personnel, the  perceived impression of unity was deceptive. The slave soldiers mirrored the wider slave society in Jamaica, one that was divided by class, ethnicity, and even occupation. Creole or local-born slaves and freed persons in the military viewed themselves as a superior group, distinct from the newly arrived enslaved African recruits. Of the Black soldiers, Major Ellis reported that ‘The West Indian Negro [creole] has so much contempt for his African cousin, that he invariably speaks of him by the ignominious title of “bushman”. In fact, the former considers himself in every respect an Englishman …’ (Ellis, 1885, p. 11). The sartorial communication devised for the West India Regiments produced racial stereotypes, exoticised and stylised natives, and military fashion trends. Ultimately, the uniforms, along with the insignia and colours of the West India Regiments, transformed them from mere ‘slaves in red coats’ to honoured members of the British milieu.

Military dress and spectacles of grandeur Between 1795 and the 1850s, the ordinary soldiers and officers of the West India Regiments dressed in uniforms similar to those worn by most soldiers recruited in Britain. The painting by an unknown artist entitled A Private of the 8th West India Regiment (1803) gives us a good idea of how the West India Regiments’ soldiers dressed during this early period (Plate 9). The soldier is wearing a brightly coloured uniform in a tropical coastal setting with coconut trees, suggesting somewhere in the West Indies. The uniform appears to be the full dress, the most elaborate military attire of the regiment worn during the period for ceremonial occasions (Tylden, 1962, p.  46). The full dress reflected the most differentiation between units, although fewer distinctions existed between service, barracks, and campaign dress (Tylden, 1962, p. 46). Bright colours both served practical purposes and provided some gratifying aesthetics. Military uniforms, for example, made possible greater visibility on the smoke-obscured battlefields and were essential for the identification of officers by couriers with tactical messages from commanders. When  opposing armies wore uniforms of the same colour, inevitable errors occurred on the battlefield (Joseph, 1995, pp. 183–84). As depicted in the painting, the uniform of the West India Regiments during the period consisted of the red coat, called a coatee, that became the trademark of the British infantryman’s uniform. The close-fitted coat has a short skirt or tail in the back, while the front is cut square across the waist. The coatee was designed to conform to the sealed pattern agreed by the military board and was lined with contrasting colours; after this the garment is reversed to reveal distinctive regimental facing with lapels, cuffs, and collars. The coat shoulders are ornamented with thick epaulettes, which sometimes served as a badge of rank, and the chest is accentuated with white cross-belts centred with a shoulder belt

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Global connections and entanglements plate to help distribute the weight of loads and maintain balance (Lawson, 1969, pp. 47–48).9 The uniforms were made with meticulous precision to accentuate various parts of the soldier’s body in order to convey current attitudes to what constituted the masculine form. As in other branches of the British army, the red coat was the basis of the West India Regiments’ uniform and drew attention to the most important site of the military dress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the torso. This was where medals were pinned; hence jackets were sometimes padded to enhance the chest (Peoples, 2014). The coat was made in Britain from livery or uniform cloth lined with bays, a worsted warp or woollen weft cloth made in East Anglia. Later on, Yorkshire broadcloth was used by most military uniform contractors. Broadcloth was obtained directly from the Leeds firm of Sheepshank and Company. Some other contractors for British military dress included the Dewsbury firm of Hague, Cook, and Wormald in the eighteenth century, and Benjamin Gott in the nineteenth century. The best and most refined broadcloth was reserved for officers.10 The coat in the painting is complemented by a form-fitted white ­pantaloon-trousers extended below the calf and ankles and strapped under the foot to illuminate the contours of the subject’s muscular physique and create a most striking image of sartorial elegance. The popularity of trousers occurred within an imperial context, hence forging new types of masculinity reinforced by the style of the dress and uniform they wore. Breeches and hose, once embodying affluence and ordered hierarchy, were now replaced, and trousers became the symbol of maritime strength and imperial prowess (Lemire, 2016). Subsequently, trousers became the new norm for ordinary colonial soldiers and respectable colonists. Enslavers who sought to control the slave population with sumptuary laws hoping to differentiate race through dress were unsuccessful, as enslaved persons used their dress to contest and transgress the boundaries of the colonial plantocracy. Although slave masculine dress throughout the West Indies included some short trousers, numerous depictions in early West Indian art and literature portrayed slave men clad in both short and long striped or plain trousers (Lemire, 2016, p. 14).11 It is most likely that some slave men emulated the dress style of their White enslavers. Other slave men who engaged with the regiments’ soldiers or observed them on duty may have been influenced by the military’s fashion sensibilities and found the new image of colonial masculinity appealing. The long trousers proved quite beneficial and functional in the tropics for both the West India Regiments and the colonial male who had the means to obtain the garment. It provided protection from the cold in winter, against insects, especially mosquitoes, during the rainy season, and against serpents in the summer while men were marching through swampy terrain and ­heavily forested regions (Lemire, 2016, p. 14).

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

In the painting, the uniform assemblage is completed by a military pouch, a bayonet, and an elaborate hat called the shako, a tall, cylindrical, or thimble-shaped hat sometimes larger at the top than at the bottom, usually with a peak and a cockade affixed and centred on the crown. The shako was very heavy, even though the head is the most vulnerable part of the body. From the late eighteenth century to 1900, the headgear increasingly developed into one of the most flamboyant articles of military dress. The elaborate ornamentation and size of the headgear were symbolic of military might, and the garish design accentuated the appearance of power. Since much attention was given to outward appearance, the height of soldiers was emphasised along with proper posture and gait. Not only did the shako elongate the male form, but its weight, combined with the tight-fitting garments, made it difficult for soldiers to move freely. Consequently, limited muscle movements became regimental and wereassociated with military culture to produce a particular heroic masculine look (Abler, 1999, p. 46).12 The military dress of the West India Regiments did change over time, with some slight variations during the first part of the nineteenth century. By 1812, for instance, the shorter Waterloo shako, which included a festoon of twisted or plaited decorative gold cords suspended in front of the hat with tassels on the right and cockade on the left, came into style (Rankin, 1976, pp. 2–20). At the same time, new trousers had been introduced, albeit still form-fitted (Plate 11). Although the uniform of the period looked smart and aesthetically pleasing, it was not designed for comfort but for utilitarian purposes and to communicate sartorial symbolism about power and empire. The martial attire of 1803 illustrated in Plate 9 was very uncomfortable and created numerous challenges for soldiers. The heavy shako strained the neck, and during rainfall its cylindrical shape created an incessant stream of water that trickled down the neck. It also provided little protection from harsh weather and created an unsteady aim in battle. The headgear was cumbersome and could be easily blown off, leaving the head unprotected (Myerly, 1996, p. 23). Meanwhile, the trousers were kept white by painting with pipeclay, a source of superficial cleanliness,13 which damaged uniforms and came off in clouds of dust. The pipeclay made it difficult for the soldier to move about freely without soiling or brushing against an object or person in the usually busy and overcrowded barracks. In addition, the soldier’s close-fitting garments restricted movement and diminished mobility on the battlefield. The red coat, designed for visibility on the battlefield, was not durable, because of its poor-quality fabric, and was often too warm for the tropics; moreover, after getting wet it shrank or its colour bled (Myerly, 1996, p.  24). Displeasure with the poor design and quality of the West India Regiments’ uniform material was echoed in rhetorical comments published in 1838: ‘Let anyone look at the soldier’s blanket of a coat with

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Global connections and entanglements its heavy trimmings, his portable pillory of a stock, and his apoplexy-­ causing helmet with its brass weights, and say if these be fit for a British soldier in an island where the mercury rises to 90 in the shade[?]’ (quoted in Dyde, 1997, p. 17). The expense of producing uniforms for the British troops such as the West India Regiments was a hefty sum, and the regiments’ commanders were responsible for ordering the garments necessary to clothe their troops. In 1801 the commander-in-chief for Jamaica paid £32,600 (over £2  million today) for 272 enslaved African men purchased from slave ships for service in the regiments, along with clothing for the new recruits. The bill of sale included duck trousers, frocks, large blankets, hats, and woollen capes for each recruit (‘Account Detailing the Cost’, 1801). The ­document provides some tantalising clues as to the types of clothing that the soldiers of the West India Regiments received during this early period. The military command distributed minimal Europeanstyle clothing and cheap cloth to differentiate officers from the lower ranks of slave soldiers and at the same time forced slave recruits to conform to the limited styles provided. Military officials sought to civilise their new African recruits, using garments of civility in order to control them. Thus the 1801 bill of sale serves as a stark reminder of how African bodies were perceived as objects for manipulation and reinforces the undeniable relationship of the  slave trade and the commodification of Black bodies. Although enslaved Africans were dehumanised and objectified for European exploitation and for the purpose of empire building, their European clothes and military uniform symbolised a new beginning and fostered new raiments of self.14 Several scholars have acknowledged the use of Black slaves in European armies in the Americas, but little attention has been paid to the uniform of slave resistors. During the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture and his officers transformed themselves through military dress to convey their legitimacy, rank, and strength as commanding officers of a revolutionary army. In Plate 10, the Haitian leader is portrayed in regimental dress including a general officer’s cocked hat, displaying a degree of sartorial elegance equal to any European military hero or White general. The Jamaican resident and owner of Glenbirnie Sugar Estate, Bernard Senior, reported that the ringleaders of the 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica ‘wore scarlet jackets’ (1835, p. 186). Roach-Higgins and Eicher explain that ‘The fervor of a political campaign or a popular uprising or protest of some political act or policy may result in an individual’s flaunting of political affiliation by use of pins, badges, armbands, and other forms of identifying dress’ (1995, p. 14). However, the rebel leaders’ dress not only reflected group ties and status, but also served as a collective statement of resistance that rejected the colonial authorities’ attempts to delegitimise them as mere ‘rebels’ while simultaneously conveying their

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

level of organising and sophistication. It is likely that the resistors in red jackets were influenced by the uniform of the West India Regiments who suppressed the revolt. Slaves could have received red jackets through several means. Perhaps some were made from red cloth purchased in local textile markets (Plate 12) with money saved up from selling their ground provisions and produce, or were received as second-hand clothing from their enslavers. As mentioned earlier, clothing was a featured commodity in the Atlantic trade system, and soldiers in far-flung ports and garrisons routinely arranged for shipments of garments in bales from British suppliers. Occasionally, goods sent to them were inadequate for their needs and therefore sold locally. At times, clothing ordered for the military and considered to be of poor quality or substandard was supplied to slaves (Lemire, 1997 pp. 32–34).15 In addition to the official uniform of the West India Regiments, there were other dress items worn by some Black soldiers that ignited the wrath of the military command. Africans, whether recruited for the West India Regiments or as members of the wider slave society, brought their sartorial customs to the Americas, in particular religious symbols fashioned from various materials, including beads. African religious practices, which had much influence on the soldiers, were dismissed by JudaeoChristian communities and colonial authorities as witchcraft and fetishism. According to Major Ellis, ‘Ridiculous as this practice must seem to every educated person, it sometimes produced the most serious effects upon the credulous Africans’ (1885, p.  13). Ellis further revealed that among the soldiers, ‘The professors [specialists] of fetishism likewise drove a good trade in amulets which rendered the wearer invulnerable’ (1885, p. 13). Throughout the Caribbean, free and enslaved Africans used their knowledge to create charms and amulets of support, healing, resistance, and power to help them cope and survive in an oppressive society, as their ancestors had done in Africa. Amulets and charms were made from a variety of materials, including pierced coins, wood, beads, cloth, and ­thimbles.16 Among diasporic Africans, the use of amulets as personal adornment for protection was widespread and demonstrated the survival of an African sartorial aesthetic and the power of African faith systems that gave quality to their lives in an alien environment. The visible display of Indigenous religious practices and symbols among troops was viewed as a threat to the moral order, and any deviation from the uniform regulations was not tolerated. Therefore ‘fetishism’ was declared a military crime in the West India Regiments, and those accused and convicted were severely punished. Major Ellis reports that these practices soon disappeared as the number of African-born slave soldiers in the regiments declined and recruitment strategies changed over time (1885, p.  13). Evidently, the practices were submerged more deeply beneath the military culture, and some soldiers became more discreet with their faith symbols. The army’s

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Global connections and entanglements attempts to eradicate African religious concepts failed, as they survived and remain a vibrant feature in many areas of Caribbean society.

The exoticised and stylised native Queen Victoria’s ascension to the British throne in 1837 ushered in a new age in expansionism and empire building that impacted many lives worldwide. The democratisation of fashion took shape as the Victorian reign unfolded, while important technological advances, such as the development of photography as a visual record, the invention of the sewing machine, and innovative methods in textile manufacturing, occurred during this time. These innovations had a significant impact on dress customs across populations and transformed the iconography of style throughout the British Empire – including military dress (Buckridge, 2018). Imperial domination, with its divide-and-rule policy, was full of military spectacles, rituals, parades, and pageantry that fostered patterns of discipline and order best displayed by appropriate military dress (Buckridge, 2004, pp. 153–54). In 1856, the order was issued to change the West India Regiments’ uniform, and by 1858 it had been replaced with the zouave-style military dress (Plate 13) at the behest of Queen Victoria.17 Even though the new uniform was credited to the queen, there is no clear documentation to substantiate this claim (Cribbs, 1992, p.  180). Nevertheless, such a request would not have been unusual, as some sovereigns were obsessed with exercising their right to oversee military dress. Queen Victoria’s own interest in military matters was reflected in her sartorial style and dress sensibilities. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854, she devoted herself to military matters and often appeared at military inspections and reviews wearing a female version of the Windsor uniform; she continued to don military-style attire for subsequent reviews. Just before her death in 1901, her final act of devotion to the military was her request for a military funeral (Myerly, 1996, p.  32). Aesthetics was always a strong consideration for royal decisions about uniforms, and the practice of borrowing martial styles has long been a widespread phenomenon among European states (Myerly, 1996, pp. 34–35). In earlier decades, some states had been known for specific sartorial skills. For example, it was the French style that military tailors across Europe keenly watched and followed. However, it was the advances in the sartorial techniques developed by the English that were sought after throughout Europe (Peoples, 2014, p. 13). The zouave dress originated in Turkish North Africa among the Berbers of Zouaoua in present-day Algeria, who were previously employed by the Turks and later recruited for service in the French military (Abler, 1999, p.  101). The French Zouaves’ successful campaigns and colourful uniforms, combined with extensive press coverage of their battles, attracted

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global attention – and the admiration of Queen Victoria. Eventually, this North African style of dress became widely known as the zouave uniform and shortly afterwards was adopted by other armies who emulated the French military fashions (Abler, 1999, p.  102). Interestingly, the British did not clothe their soldiers in Britain with the zouave uniform, but instead considered such military dress more suitable for the colonies, most notably the West India Regiments (Abler, 1999, p. 107–08). It is not clear why, but the historian Thomas Abler has suggested that this could have been a reflection of Europe’s own cultural biases and a tendency to see all native people as similar, if not alike, which led to the assumption they should be similarly dressed (1999, p. 17). All organisations, such as the military, shape sartorial communication according to their need for identification and greater visibility, and to meet the changing requirements of the organisational role (Joseph, 1995, p. 182). It should not be assumed that military uniforms never change. In fact, military dress is continually modified over time to conform to military ideals of smartness and discipline and to reflect changing military fashion, in some cases appropriating ‘exotic’ fashions and becoming ‘stylized natives’ (Abler, 1999, p. 9).18 The appropriation of ‘exotic’ dress was successfully completed after the uniform had been continuously modified over time, until it was transformed into a military style that was no longer associated with its place of origin. Thus the zouave uniform in the West Indies became identified with the West India Regiments and no longer with the Zouaves of North Africa (Abler, 1999, pp.  8–9). This type of cultural cross-dressing has a long tradition in the Americas, where early European settlers donned Indigenous dress for political and functional reasons, such as the need for fast travel through dangerous terrain (Lemire, 1997, p. 8). Similarly, in the late nineteenth century dress customs of Asians and Middle Eastern immigrants to the Caribbean influenced Black West Indian dress.19 Such cultural mixing of material culture was routine in the colonial context, and material objects like dress took on new meaning according to the cultural context. Breeches, for instance, once despised, and trousers, endorsed as a revolutionary symbol in France, emerged later in several variations and were retained in the contemporary period for various types of formal dress and sportswear (Cumming, Cunnington, and Cunnington, 2010, p. 30). Britain’s decision to adopt the North African zouave dress for the West India Regiments was seemingly contradictory. Many Europeans had long believed the racist propaganda of the period, which claimed that African people were all savages, and for some Whites, non-European dress was a sign of backwardness (Buckridge, 2004, p. 25). The zouave dress, though not of European origin, evoked a sense of the exotic, with its OttomanTurkish design that appealed to the public’s fanciful imagination of the ‘Orient’ and of Middle Eastern eroticism as depicted in popular art and perceived as harmless. Abler asserts that ‘Orientalism is prone to use

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Global connections and entanglements culturally specific signs [like dress] in a capricious way that philosophically, at least, does not temper with the ideology of the Western identity and power’ (1999, pp. 99–110). Several armies around the world adopted the zouave uniform, and it was worn in the American Civil War, as in the case of the Louisiana Zouaves of 1861 (Abler, 1999, p. 103). In colonial territories in British West Africa, zouave trousers were replaced by khaki shorts, but the zouave-style jacket continued as full dress throughout the colonial period. The zouave uniform was also used by other colonial powers, for example by the French to dress their sub-Saharan African colonial troops (Abler, 1999, p. 108). Nevertheless, it was the West India Regiments in their brightly coloured zouave uniforms who attracted the most attention. The zouave uniform was used for full dress in the West India Regiments and included an elaborate scarlet sleeveless over-jacket with frogged and looped vertical braiding and piped edges to reinforce the garment’s style lines. The jacket was worn over a white-sleeved waistcoat with chevron for facing colour or on top of a shell jacket that was braided down the front and bedecked with twenty brass ball gold buttons. In the 1885 illustration by Colonel A. B. Ellis (Plate 13), three solders of the West India Regiments are depicted in a tropical coastal setting, dressed in the zouave uniform and looking soigné and impressive in their colourful get-up. The pose and composition of the subjects in the painting suggests they were in training or engaged in target practice. The long trousers from decades earlier have been replaced by mid-calf-length dark blue voluminous breeches piped with two yellow stripes down the front and rear of each trouser leg. The billowing breeches became less baggy over time. Leggings were worn with white gaiters, which covered the remainder of the legs to the boot, and were complemented with military accessories including a rifle and a military bag (Cribbs, 1992, p.  180; Tylden, 1962, p.  47). The shako was discontinued, and a red fez hat wrapped with a white turban cloth became the new headgear, called a puggaree, with a large tassel hanging from the hat. The puggaree did change, and in 1886 some soldiers received fez hats with white cotton turban cloth rolled into a long narrow cane and wrapped around the base and sides.20 There were variations in the zouave dress to reflect rank. Several illustrations from the Illustrated London News and Graphics of the period offer visual evidence of the new uniforms. Sergeants’ sashes were not worn with zouave dress, and company sergeant majors had three chevrons and a crown. Meanwhile, White officers in the tropics wore the tropical line uniform of the British army and usually white colours.21 By 1907, White officers adopted the white helmet and white tunic with sword belt under the tunic and black trousers, plus a waist sash for company officers (Tylden, 1999, p. 47). The uniform of the White officers both distinguished and separated them within the larger force and, simultaneously, signalled

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

their status as elite leaders whose dress was meant to inspire their men. Such distinctive insignia marked each individual White officer as the ­leader-hero, rather than the entire group (Joseph, 1995, p. 184). Even though the zouave uniform was colourful and comfortable, the soldiers were still too heavily clothed and accoutered (Cribbs, 1992, p.  181). Moreover, this flamboyant sartorial style was unsuitable for campaigning in forested terrain, and during campaigns in West Africa it attracted attention as a ‘showy one’ (Henty, 1874, pp. 60–62). Therefore a new campaign dress for the West India Regiment in West Africa was created, consisting of an Elcho-grey tweed accompanied by a new tropical helmet (Henty, 1874, pp. 60–62). The new dress was approved by the medical officers as more suitable for battle, but the design was aesthetically disappointing. The correspondent G. A. Henty, of the Standard newspaper, described the campaign dress as follows: ‘The uniform was unbecoming enough for White men, but the Negro so dressed looked like a convict who had been hung until black in the face, and cut down!’ (1874, pp. 61). The analogy, though disturbing in view of the history of lynching Black bodies, does convey the importance of an aesthetically pleasing military dress not merely as a symbol of national identity, but as a representation of power both visually and tangibly. So spectacular was the West India Regiments’ zouave uniform that many Europeans praised it as being among the best attire of the British army. In 1874 a British correspondent wrote in the Kingston Gleaner, ‘In appreciation of their loyalty  … the West India Regiments [are to] be brought to England and reviewed by the Queen. In their handsome zouave uniform they will bear comparison with any regiment in the service’ (Kingston Gleaner, 1874). This opportunity materialised in 1897 during the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee marking sixty years of rule. The huge celebration included parades, and on 22 June of that year, a number of soldiers of the West India Regiments took part in a ­spectacular military procession in London. The West India Regiments received much public attention and praise for the resplendence of their military uniform. Soldiers from across the empire marched side by side in full dress, creating an extravaganza of sartorial grandeur and opulence. The military spectacle was watched by thousands of people and received huge press coverage in British and international newspapers (Lambert, 2017). Although the military parade was a symbol of Britain’s power, at the same time vast numbers of spectators experienced vicarious feelings of honour, valour, glory, and national pride at the sight of gleaming brass and brilliant colours featured in the military show. Soldiers from the colonies, including the West India Regiments in their stylised dress, ­marching in unison, provided a window into far-flung corners of the empire for British spectators unable to travel, and enabled them to experience a bit of the exotic world of colonised people and their

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Global connections and entanglements domains through the spectacle of military cavalcades and colourful dress (Callaway, 1995, p. 200). Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee occurred at the height of empire and imperial domination, which embodied armies, industries, economic exploitation, and cunning political strategies of divide and conquer – all of it held together by elaborate ceremonies, patterns of order, and regulations that dictated appropriate actions and allegiance to the crown. Metaphorically speaking, subjected people became manipulated puppets on a stage within the theatre of empire (Woolf, 1986, p.  25). As Hellen Callaway rightly points out, within this theatre the ‘choreography of empire, the display of dress in all its forms carried a heavy weight of symbolic meanings’ (1995, p.  201). Imperial ceremonies in Britain were transplanted to the West Indies in the form of dazzling military parades featuring the West India Regiments. Local newspapers in Jamaica regularly published information on monthly brigade drills on parade grounds at Up Park Camp and Race Course, where many spectators admired the marching soldiers. On one such occasion in 1897 the Daily Gleaner reported that ‘Brigade Parades with as many as 1,000 men under arms … was a fine sight’ (‘Brigade Drill at Camp’, 1897). The highlight of many public celebrations and parades was an appearance by the governor of the colony. He had a unique power combining the roles of administrator and personal representative of the British crown, and exercised more power in the colony than the monarch in Britain. He appeared amid imperial ritualism and colourful pageantry where women were ultra-feminine and men ultra-masculine. In the West Indies, power, rank, and class were not only rendered visible in dress, but became a significant means of displaying authority in the colonies. In 1887 at the opening of Jubilee Market in Kingston, the governor appeared in his Windsor uniform, one that commanded great respect and distinguished him from all others present. Many of the officers and gentlemen wore their navy and army uniforms, while others wore sashes and aprons trimmed with gold lace to reflect their authority and affiliations with specific social orders and regimental clubs (Moore and Johnson, 2004, pp. 287–301).22 In the theatre of empire, the difference between the West India Regiments’ officers and the Black privates was stark. The juxtaposition of the subjects in Plate 14 reflects the rank in file, or those who enlisted, and distingishes them from their leaders on the basis of their dress and alludes to the racial divide within the military. The life of a White officer in Jamaica was one of leisure to the point of boredom – including a routine of social events and sporting activities such as sailing in the harbour, tennis, and polo after drill at midday. The officer’s social and relaxation activities modelled the behaviour of an English gentleman: trying to ‘manage’ in the colony, followed by ‘two hours between four and six in the club house or mess smoke-room [to] tinkle with the music of many glasses’ (Henderson,

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1909, p. 32). Unlike the Black soldier, the officer was granted social and political acccess by his race and privileged status, and he devoted himself to the needs of the elite society in Jamaica. On some occasions, for example, ‘when the governor is one guest short at dinner or at a luncheon or tennis function, an officer is requisitioned from the nearest garrison or camp; when a bewildered hostess is hard up for men at one of her select dances … he receives a dainty invitation’ (Henderson, 1909, p. 32). Plate 14, with the Black soldiers dressed in their ostentatious uniforms standing apart from the White officers of the regiments, illustrates the maintained hierarchies of race and class within the military. This racial divide mirrored the wider colonial society and the privileged life of White settlers in the West Indian colonies (Callaway, 1995, p. 201). The governor was the commander-in-chief of the West India Regiments in the colony, and on special occasions he wore full ceremonial dress, which included a white military uniform decorated with military distinctions, sword, and medals, and white and red plumes in his colonial helmet. On parade grounds and at special celebrations, the governor reviewed the guard of honour of the West India Regiments while the national anthem played (Moore and Johnson, 2004, p. 297).23 Although the governor was at the centre of the pageantry, the West India Regiments played a key role as actors in the choreography of empire. At public ceremonies and on parade grounds in their brilliant uniform, their performance reinforced the royal sartorial aesthetics of the dominant power they defended and simultaneously demonstrated a justification for empire.

The West India Regiments and Zouave masculinity The art historian Sharon Peoples has argued that it is difficult to separate masculinity from the military uniform, as dressing is an embodied activity located in specified temporal, spatial, and hierarchical relations. Therefore military uniforms contributed to what became the hegemonic shape of the modern male body (Peoples, 2014, pp. 7–8). Since fastidious attention was given to outward appearance, the soldier’s body and posture were considered important features of military dress practices and obedience; hence military regulations on dress practices were published and circulated within the ranks. There was no improvisation, and the script was to be adhered to. This was the official code of military masculinity – and deviance was punishable (Peoples, 2014, pp. 7–8). In this regard, the military played a key role in shaping masculinity through representation. Michel Foucault affirmed this idea when he stated: ‘Military institutions have ultimate control of representation, determine the bodies [of soldiers] and enforce power through dress’ (1997, p. 113). For centuries, military tacticians were inspired by Greek and Roman battle training, and depictions of male nudes in classical art to help shape

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Global connections and entanglements soldiers’ bodies for field engagement and to define masculinity (Peoples, 2014, p.  15). Dress was a key part of this process. Throughout history, women have manipulated their body shape using bustles, corsets, high heels, and padded bras, which were fit into the clothing style of the time and convey its social ideals of femininity. Similarly, some soldiers contorted their bodies for the ideal masculine look. From the codpiece of centuries earlier to the English ‘stay’ (a type of corset for civilian and military men alike) and the exaggerated epaulette for broad shoulders, all were associated with masculinity and strength (Peoples, 2014, p. 13). As meticulous attention to appearance and bodies increased, the military style – from marching in unison to synchronisation of movement in ­uniform  – captivated audiences and fostered new constructs of masculinity (Peoples, 2014, p. 15). Virginia Woolf understood the appeal of the masculine form in uniform and, reflecting on marching soldiers, declared, ‘Ceremonies men perform together, always in step, always in the uniform proper to the man and the occasion. These costumes with their symbolic traditions draped the male in mantles of social prestige’ (1986, p. 23). Like Woolf, who was fascinated with military dress, vast numbers of colonised people were also enchanted. Young Black men were lured by dashing figures in military dress on parade grounds and by the promise of social acceptance and mobility that would otherwise not be possible within a society that established its priorities on the basis of White supremacy. By the end of the nineteenth century, Black servicemen of the West India Regiments were very popular among colonised people in Jamaica. At local fairs soldiers were admired for their uniform, and some citizens donned the zouave dress as fancy costume. Such was the case in 1899 at the fancy fair at Clovelly, where ‘Miss Hallowes was dressed in the uniform of the West India Regiment and looked quite a dashing zouave’ (‘Fancy Fair at Clovelly’, 1899). One traveller, John Henderson, explained this popularity among the public: ‘He [the soldier] is the idol of the populace, especially on the afternoon of the sabbath, when, after church is over, he is permitted to parade at large in the brilliant full-dress uniform of his regiments’ (1909, p. 33). Henderson provides a clear sense of the affection in which the Black soldier was held by the church community because of his ornate dress. Despite the fact that the soldier in uniform was off duty, he was ‘permitted to parade’ and remained a figure of constant admiration. Like an idol on stage, the soldier was expected to perform, to engage with the church crowd in his splendid attire and simultaneously attract potential recruits. Many church communities held the West India Regiments in high esteem and even expressed praise for the soldiers and their uniform in prayers published in the local newspapers. The St James Gazette stated, ‘We call them our defenders and we bless their uniform’ (St James Gazette, 1892). The soldier’s presence at church was a subtle way to maintain a ‘friendly’ check on the pulse of society, and dressed with in his sartorially

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

impeccable uniform, the soldier sustained support for imperial rule among subjugated people. It was his grandeur and sartorial elegance that contributed to his popularity. Henderson adds that ‘He is popular among men and women alike, since the civilian men are conscious of a reflected grandeur when in the company with a soldier in full dress’ (1892). The splendour of the West India Regiments’ zouave uniform fostered comparisons with the local uniformed colonial police forces and created new constructs of identity for law enforcement based on perceptions of their dress. In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian ethos subscribed to the belief that physical beauty and moral excellence were firmly connected. Hence for the missionaries and promoters of Europeanisation and the civilising mission, a presentable appearance was considered paramount, especially since ‘purity ruled appearance and piety ruled thought’ (Buckridge, 2004, p. 127). Furthermore, a fine sartorial appearance was a marker of progress and civilisation. These concepts of Victorian morality were taught in missionary schools, churches, and religious organisations. While the dress of the West India Regiments was celebrated for its brilliant colours and pleasing aesthetics, from a sartorial point of view the uniformed police dress was unflattering. Reporting on the comparison, Henderson revealed that ‘The Jamaican police are not popular with the people of the island. The uniform they wear is not sufficiently striking; there is no great blaze of colour, no suggestion of power, or rank, or beauty … It is impossible for a negro to respect such a costume, or to be proud of police so uniformed’ (1909, p. 33). The critique of the police uniform reminds us of the old adage ‘clothes make the man!’ Thus Henderson asserted that the police were unpopular because their uniform was widely considered not good enough to represent the beauty of the island, ‘for the sake of ornamenting a country already bright and picturesque enough!’ (1909, p.  33). For many colonised people in Jamaica, this matter was viewed as an important issue for the country. Unlike the dress of the West India Regiments, which was alluring and attracted crowds, the drab police uniform became an emblem of unpleasantness, and inevitably a member of the police became ‘a person to be avoided, even feared’ (Henderson, 1909, p. 33). While the West India Regiments basked in the glory of their popularity and their image of heroic colonial masculinity, the police were emasculated and relegated to the realm of the unredeemable. The zouave uniform transformed and reimaged normative categories of identity and masculinity. The officer Major-General McClellan recognised this fundamental role of the zouave uniform in constructing the masculine soldier. Speaking of the European Zouaves in their outfit, he stated that ‘The Zouaves … have certainly proved that they are what their appearance would indicate – the most reckless, self-reliant, and complete infantry that Europe can produce. [Yet] with his graceful dress, soldierly bearing and vigilant attitude, the Zouave at an outpost is the beau-ideal of

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Global connections and entanglements a soldier’ (quoted in Abler, 1999, p. 99). In spite of the soldier’s recklessness, the zouave uniform, or ‘graceful dress’, denoted the ideal soldier. The transformative nature of the zouave uniform had a profound impact on a Black soldier’s sartorial style. African bodies were targets of attacks from racist Whites who fostered stereotypes about the Black body and myths about sensational sexual attributes. Such racist attitudes contributed to the drive to civilise Africans and the insistence that African people be clothed in European garments as a sign of progress. The zouave uniform of the West India Regiments, with its loose-fitting trousers and zouave jacket, gave rise to a new type of heroic masculinity for the Black West Indian soldier. The new uniform had no epaulettes to exaggerate the shoulders, no padded jacket for a pigeon chest, nor a bulging outline to draw attention to the crotch. Instead, the uniform concealed body imperfections with extra folds of fabric and a loose-fitting jacket. Further, physical movement was less restricted, and orchestrated movements not as rigid, as knees and thighs were heavily cloaked by the voluminous zouave trousers. In his flamboyant zouave uniform, the soldier of the West India Regiments was reimaged into a new version of the nineteenth-century dandy, with enduring traits applauded by the colonised populace; yet among White colonists, he had become somewhat more civilised and less threatening to White phallocentric supremacy. Dress as performativity in Victorian Jamaica was complex and contradictory. While the Black soldier was popular, his recognition relied on his participation in the theatre of empire in an exotic display choreographed by the promoters of empire through a process of ornamentalising and displaying the Black body as an object of manipulation (Miller, 2009, p. 49). Undoubtedly, the status of ‘soldier’ provided some privileges and social elevation, as well as prestige within the colonised community, but regardless of the soldier’s popularity among colonised people, his fate and progress were hampered by the reality of racism within the colonial context. In fact, no level of recognition, regardless of fancy dress, could protect the soldier from the hostilities of White racism. While some colonists viewed the soldier of the West India Regiments as an object of ridicule, some members of the colonised population saw the zouave uniform as a tool of seduction. According to the costume curator James Laver, the evolution of military dress included the so-called seduction principle. Laver argues that a smart uniform can influence relations between the sexes, while focus on dress with attention to the erotic aspects of the uniform enhanced the sexual attractiveness of the soldier (Laver, 1945).24 Indeed, Henderson’s travel report alludes to the  erotic aspects of the West India Regiments’ uniform: ‘The black soldier[s] in Jamaica while on leave for the afternoon, lounges into Kingston and plumes himself on the sidewalks to the admiration of the black and yellow girls’ (1909, p. 33). Henderson explains further that the West India soldier

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The West India Regiments’ dress until 1900

in his zouave uniform was ‘King of feminine Jamaica’ (1909, p. 33). He might appear foolishly attentive to and vain about his appearance, but the self-consciousness of his display was important. The soldier’s pluming of the Black body signalled an awareness in which identities were reimaged. In this scenario, the soldier became a theatricalised spectacle who performed in public. Such performance is reminiscent of the nineteenth-­ century dandy obsessed with image and appearance; however, the soldier’s action was also symbolic of ‘redemptive narcissism’ (quoted in Miller, 2009, pp. 246–47), in which self-love became a form of resistance to the tyranny of mediocrity within the colonial society that had long denigrated Black bodies and African achievements. In this context, the chivalrous soldier in his colourful uniform was emboldened with pride, and his dress became an agent of seduction to enhance his relationship with an admirer.

Conclusion The French zouave uniform was copied by fashion designers, and a zouave jacket was produced for civilians. Zouave jackets were adopted by French women in high society as early as 1860, and the fashion spread beyond Europe. So popular did the zouave dress become in Europe that Vincent van Gogh immortalised the zouave jacket in its original design in 1888 in his painting Le Zouave (Plate 15). In the West Indies, there were similar developments. The fashionable upper-class and middle-class West Indian women who followed the latest fashions donned zouave jackets, which having become the latest rage in Victorian society were further popularised by the West India Regiments through their colourful dress parades and drill competitions.25 Fashion magazines and local newspapers such as Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner routinely advertised zouave-inspired fashion trends, while major department stores in Kingston, such as Nathan and Sherlock, and Alfred Pausey, carried clothing and accessories in the style of the West India Regiments  – from helmets to drill suits, jackets, and boots – for local customers and the growing tourism industry.26 The public’s fascination with the West India Regiments uniform fostered new roles for the soldiers and their image as exoticised and stylised natives and was manipulated for the purposes of empire building. Whether on postcards or in physical attendance at world fairs and exhibitions, the soldiers became the new face of the West Indies and the embodiment of imperial success. Melissa Bennett explains: ‘Participation in imperial exhibitions conveyed through their physical and photographic presence that those of African descent could be civilised and made loyal to the crown’ (2018, p. 561). Nonetheless, the role of the West India Regiments in the colonies was rather paradoxical. Perhaps David Lambert puts it best: ‘The West India Regiments occupied a series of ideological thresholds – between

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Global connections and entanglements enslaved and free, colonized and colonizer, civilized and savage, friend and foe’; what he termed ‘martial liminality’ (2018b, p. 635). Be that as it may, it was the extravagant uniform of the West India Regiments that attracted so much attention. The regiments served the British crown with distinction and through their fine appearance became the criterion by which civilisation, progress, and instrument of power were judged. At the same time, the West India Regiments constructed new images of masculinity, and as military dress practices spread when soldiers retired or left the service and travelled across regions, they took with them their customs in dress and grooming habits, which spread to civilian populations. In contemporary society, numerous dress customs and styles have preserved the military look of past centuries, including lapels, cuffs, straps, pocket flaps, extra buttons, boots, hats, badges, jewellery, and some traditional decoration elements in tailored formal wear for both sexes.27 The zouave uniform of the West India Regiments gradually lost its popularity when the regiment was disbanded. However, the regimental band has survived in Jamaica and has kept the zouave uniform to this day; it continues to play at national and ceremonial occasions, especially events hosted by the Governor General, the British monarch’s representative in Jamaica. The West India Regiments were an integral part of Jamaican and West Indian history, and much has been written about their role in slavery and colonialism and the question of whether or not they should be celebrated. Some critics argue that the regimental band’s zouave uniform is a relic of the colonial past and should be replaced with a more suitable form of dress to reflect the sovereign nation-state. This debate will continue and is beyond the scope of this chapter. Undeniably, however, the sartorial grandeur and opulence of the West India Regiments’ uniform brought the West Indies much international recognition and fame. Meanwhile, the politics of the regiments’ performativity in the theatre of empire were processes that moulded the Afro-diasporic experiences and contributed to the construction of a Caribbean identity.

Notes   1 Louise Bennett (Jamaican poet), ‘De Victory Parade’, poem in Jamaican patois. ‘The skirts, and trousers, and hats that they had on! I never saw so many different uniforms from I was born! Red and black, white, gold and yellow, green and blue of every shade just blend and shine to make a pretty victory parade.’   2 See also Entwistle, 2011.   3 The term ‘full dress’ refers to uniforms designed for wear on gala occasions or ceremonial duties.   4 These recent works emerged from a conference organised by David Lambert at the University of Warwick in 2017 on ‘Africa’s Sons under Arms’, a project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, and resulted in a special journal issue containing the presentations.

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  5 See also Lockley, 2017a and 2017b, for more on recruitment and reduction of regiments. See also Lambert, 2018b.   6 £1 million would be equivalent to £70 million today.   7 See Lockley and Cooper, 2017, for a summary. See also Ellis, 1885, for campaigns in West Africa. In 1888 all soldiers and officers of the West India Regiments were combined into a single unit. They fought in World War I against the Germans in East Africa and later the Middle East (Lambert and Cooper, 2017).   8 See also Willis (1985). For more on military slaves and slavery in Africa, see Thornton, 1998; Pipes, 1981; and Robertson and Klein, 1983.   9 See also Holmes, 2002, p. 184. 10 See also Barnes, 1972. 11 In some paintings by the artist Agostino Brunais, such as St Vincentian Villagers Merrymaking, c. 1775–1779, both long and short trousers are donned by village men. 12 See also Myerly, 1996, pp. 18–20, and Peoples, 2014, p. 13. 13 Pipeclay is a fine white pure clay used in the manufacture of tobacco pipes and pottery and for whitening leather and other materials. 14 Term taken from Foster (1997). For more on slave dress and clothing distribution in Jamaica, see Buckridge, 2004, pp. 1–66. See also Miller, 2009, p. 314. 15 Some British manufacturers of military dress, such as the warehouse of Richard Dixon in the eighteenth century, also supplied textiles or what was commonly called ‘negro cloth’ for slaves in the colonies. 16 For more on amulets see Beckwith, 1969, p. 144, and Loren, 2010, p. 62. 17 See also Cribbs, 1992, pp. 180–81. 18 Abler, 1999, is credited with using the term ‘stylized native’. 19 See Buckridge, 2004, pp. 174–93 for more on immigrant influence on local dress. 20 See Cribbs, 1992, p. 180; Tylden, 1962, p. 47; and a puggaree object at the National Army Museum, UK, accessible online. The spelling of ‘puggaree’ varies. 21 ‘Tropical line’ refers to a variation of military dress worn in the warm tropics, and white colours were worn for parades in warm climates by those of high rank. 22 The authors use concepts of empire and theatre imagery. See also Buckridge, 2004, pp. 152–55. 23 Local newspapers from the period carry photographs of the governor’s imperial military uniform. See, for example, The Gleaner (1926), reporting on the valedictory service for the West India Regiments at the Kingston parish church. 24 See also Laver, 1948. 25 Dress parades and drill competitions included vast numbers of women as spectators. 26 See, for example, Daily Gleaner, 1893. Many local papers carried store advertisements for zouave dress and the latest zouave fashions. 27 In some cases, their military connotations were lost after the early atrophy of their function. The zouave trousers and jacket were revived as recently as the 1970s by the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and again in 2013 for New York Fashion Week. See Menkes, 2012.

References Abler, T. S. (1999). Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and Exotic Uniforms. New York: Berg. ‘Account Detailing the Cost of Buying and Clothing 272 African Slaves in Jamaica for the Service in the 5th and 6th West India Regiments’ (1801, 31 March). Jamaica. National Army Museum, UK, Army Gallery, https://collection.nam. ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1975-08-55-3. Accessed 26 August 2021.

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Global connections and entanglements Barnes, R. M. (1972). Military Uniforms of Britain and the Empire. London: Sphere Books Ltd. Beckwith, M. W. (1969). Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life [1929]. New York: Negro Universities Press. Bennett, M. (2018). ‘Exhibits with Real Colour and Interest: Representations of the West India Regiment at Atlantic World’s Fairs’. Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 39 (3), pp. 558–78. Braund, K. E. H. (1993). Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with AngloAmerica, 1680–1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ‘Brigade Drill at Camp’ (1897, 12 January). Daily Gleaner, p. 3. Buckley, Roger (1979). Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815. New Haven: Yale University Press. Buckridge, S. O. (2004). The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Buckridge, S. O. (2018). ‘“Black Skin, White Mask?” Race, Class, and Politics of Dress in Victorian Jamaican Society, 1837–1901’, in Barringer, T. and Modest,  W. (eds), Victorian Jamaica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 557–601. Callaway, H. (1995). ‘Dressing for Dinner in the Bush’, in Roach-Higgins, M. E., Eicher, J., and Johnson, K. (eds), Dress and Identity. New York: Fairchild Publications, pp. 198–211. Cribbs, W. D. (1992). ‘Campaign Dress of the West India Regiments’. Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 70 (283), pp. 174–88. Cumming, V., Cunnington, C. W., and Cunnington, P. E. (2010). Dictionary of Fashion History. Oxford: Berg. Daily Gleaner (1893, 15 May). Duffy, Michael (1987). Soldiers, Sugar, and Sea Power: The British Expedition to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France. New York: Clarendon Press. Dyde, Brian (1997). The Empty Sleeve: The Story of the West India Regiments of the British Army. St John’s: Hansib Caribbean. Duplessis, R. (2016). The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dyde, B. (1997). The Empty Sleeve: The Story of the West India Regiments of the British Army. Antigua: Hansib. Ellis, A. B. (1885). The History of the First West India Regiment. London: Chapman and Hall. Entwistle, J. (2002). ‘The Dressed Body’, in Evans, M. and Lee, E. (eds), Real Bodies. London: Palgrave, pp. 133–50. Entwistle, J. (2011). ‘The Dressed Body’, in Welters, L. and Lillethun, A. (eds), The Fashion Reader. 2nd edn. New York: Berg, pp. 138–39. ‘Fancy Fair at Clovelly’ (1899). Daily Gleaner, December 7 1899, p. 7. Foster, H. B. (1997). New Raiment’s of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South. New York: Berg. Foucault, M. (1997). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Glassie, H. (1991). ‘Studying Material Culture Today’, in Pocius, G. L. (ed.), Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture. St John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, pp. 253–66. Gleaner (1926, 15 November).

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Hall, S. (ed.) (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Open University. Henderson, J. (1909). Peeps at Many Lands. London: Adam and Charles. Henty, G. A. (1874). The March to Coomassie. London: Tinsley Brothers. Holmes, R. (2002). Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. New York: W. W. Norton. Joseph, N. (1995). ‘Uniforms’, in Roach-Higgins, M. E., Eicher, J., and Johnson, K. (eds), Dress and Identity. New York: Fairchild Publications, pp. 182–84. Kingston Gleaner (1874, 10 June). Knight, F. W. and Palmer, C. A. (eds) (1989). The Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Laband, J. (2017). ‘The Slave Soldiers of Africa’. Journal of Military History, 81 (1), pp. 9–38. Lambert, D. (2018a). ‘Introduction to Journal’. Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 39 (3), pp. 451–58. Lambert, D. (2018b). ‘“[A] Mere Cloak for their Proud Contempt and Antipathy towards the African Race”: Imagining Britain’s West India Regiments in the Caribbean, 1795–1838’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46 (4), pp. 627–50. Laver, J. (1945). ‘Fashion and Class Distinction’. Pilot Papers, 1, pp. 67–74. Laver, J. (1948). British Military Uniforms. London: Penguin. Lawson, C. (1969). A History of the Uniforms of the British Army, vol. 1, From the Beginning to 1760. London: Kaye and Ward. Lemire, B. (1997). Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800. New York: St Martin’s Press. Lemire, B. (2016). ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress, c. 1600–1800’. Cultural and Social History: The Journal of the Social History Society, 13 (1), pp. 1–22. Lemire, B. (2018). Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lockley, T. (2017a). ‘Creating the West India Regiments’. West India Regiments: The Life of a Soldier in the West India Regiments. British Library, www.bl.uk/ west-india-regiment/articles/mutiny-the-story-of-the-8th-west-india-regi​ ment. Accessed 26 August 2021. Lockley, T. (2017b). ‘Mutiny! The Story of the 8th West India Regiment’. West India Regiments: The Life of a Soldier in the West India Regiments, British Library, www.bl.uk/west-india-regiment/articles/mutiny-the-story-of-the-8th-west-​ india-regiment. Accessed 26 August 2021. Lockley, T. and Cooper, E. (2017). The Life of a Soldier in the West India Regiments. British Library, www.bl.uk/west-india-regiment/articles/the-life-of-a-soldierin-the-west-india-regiments. Accessed 21 August 2021. Loren, D. D. (2010). The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Menkes, S. (2012, 10 September). ‘Death of the Dress’. New York Times, www.nyti​m​​ e​s.com/2012/09/11/fashion/the-death-of-the-dress.html. Accessed 26  August 2021. Mida, I. and Kim, A. (2015). Dress Detective: A Practical Guide to Object-Based Research in Fashion. London: Bloomsbury.

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Global connections and entanglements Miller, M. (2009). Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moore, B. L. and Johnson, M. A. (2004). Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Myerly, S. H. (1996). British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Narayan, Rosalyn (2018). ‘Creating Insurrections in the Heart of our Country: Fear of the British West India Regiments in the Southern US Press’. Journal of Slavery and Abolition, 39 (3), pp. 497–517. Peoples, S. (2014). ‘Embodying the Military: Uniforms’. Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, 1 (1), pp. 7–21. Pipes, D. (1981). Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rankin, R. H. (1976). Military Headdress: A Pictorial History of Military Headgear from 1660–1914. London: Arms and Armour Press. Roach-Higgins, M. E. and Eicher, J. B. (1995). ‘Dress and Identity’, in RoachHiggins, M. E., Eicher, J., and Johnson, K. (eds), Dress and Identity. New York: Fairchild Publications, pp. 7–18. Roach-Higgins, M. E., Eicher, J., and Johnson, K. (eds) (1995). Dress and Identity. New York: Fairchild Publications. Robertson, C. and Klein, M. (eds) (1983). Women and Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Senior, Bernard Martin (1835). Jamaica, As It Was, As It Is, and As It May Be. London: T. Hurst. Smith, D. J. (1983). ‘Army Clothing Contractors and Textile Industries in the 18th Century’. Textile History, 14 (3), pp. 153–64. St James Gazette (1892, 5 May). Thornton, J. (1998). Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2nd edn. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tylden, G. (1962). ‘The West India Regiments, 1795 to 1927, and 1958’. Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 40 (161), pp. 42–49. Voelz, Peter (1993). Slave and Soldier: The Military Impacts of Blacks in the Colonial Americas. New York: Garland. Willis, J. (1985). Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa. London: Frank Cass. Woolf, V. (1986). Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

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9 ‘The philosophy of clothes’: politics and dress in Melbourne Punch, 1860s–1870s Shu-chuan Yan

A cartoon by Frederick Grosse, ‘The Philosophy of Clothes’, appeared in the 8 November 1855 issue of Melbourne Punch, a colonial version of Punch, or The London Charivari, in Melbourne, Australia.1 Grosse’s cartoon conjured up the visual image of a tailor’s endeavour to adjust a gentleman’s suit for a better fit. Its caption reveals a stout gentleman’s concern about his ‘Rather tight’ suit as the tailor comforts him by saying ‘that’s the way they’re wore’ (Figure 9.1). In effect, Grosse’s cartoon alludes to a specific context in which two influential politicians, Sir Charles Hotham and William Haines, assisted in drafting the Constitution Act endorsed by the British Parliament in 1855. It depicts Hotham, Governor of Victoria, as a tailor helping Haines, ‘a gentleman’ at his side (Rusden, 2011, p. 31) and the colonial secretary, make his first entry as premier under responsible government. By resorting to the tailor image, Grosse’s cartoon provides visual satire on the political scene in the colonial history of Australia at large. It implies a satirical narrative of the earliest stage of the Australian parliamentary system that was tailored, but not customised to exact measurements. The ‘frail and jittery’ Hotham (McKenna, 2001, p. 55), with his poor ‘tailoring’ technique, handled the inauguration of the new constitution clumsily when he formed the first government under Haines with haste on 28 November 1855. The cartoon’s title, then, makes an important link between Hotham’s preparation for colonial self-government and Thomas Carlyle’s ‘philosophy of clothes’ in Sartor Resartus (serialised in 1833–34, officially published in book form in 1836). Institutions, legal systems, and Magna Carta, for Carlyle, are forms of apparel to ‘dress’ a government (Seigneuret et al., 1988, p.  271). Thus clothes can make a point about current events and articulate different forms of powers: ‘Political dress fulfills multiple functions: it can express and consolidate power  …’ (Marzel, 2015, p.  10).

Global connections and entanglements

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9.1  Frederick Grosse, ‘The Philosophy of Clothes’, Melbourne Punch, 8 November 1855.

Equally, Roland Barthes aligns clothing with a written text to be ‘described, transformed into language’ (1990, p. 3). Central to Barthes’s argument is that clothing, coupled with its own sartorial grammar, is the equivalent of speech, a sequence of spoken words (pp. 17–18). Thus it is not surprising that Grosse’s cartoon for Melbourne Punch is intertwined with the metaphorical meaning of clothes philosophy, providing a visual vocabulary of

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‘The philosophy of clothes’

signifiers for us to examine the political, economic, and cultural aspects of colonial society in the experiences of the British Empire. Punch, a weekly magazine of humour and satire founded in London in 1841, introduced the term ‘cartoon’ to the language in 1843.2 Inheriting this British legacy, Melbourne Punch was launched in 1855 to cast a humorous and satiric eye on the colony of Victoria by means of graphic contents and visual jokes. Melbourne Punch’s political cartoons, in general, operated rhetorically to address changes in geopolitical situations within an imperial-colonial framework. Political cartoons, according to Janis L. Edwards, can be studied as ‘artistic work, historical documents, forms of humour and satire (analogous to literature), and as artifacts of journalism history, as well as rhetorical texts’ (1997, p. 20). Of particular interest is Edwards’s view of political cartoons as narratives that employ visual metaphors to tell stories. From a rhetorical perspective, cartoons function as a sequence of visual narratives to convey meanings within a specific context: they ‘are rhetorical in what they say and in how they say it’ (Edwards, 1997, p. 31). The cartoonist, like an implied author, communicates a variety of discourses through the metaphorical stories they tell so as to provide visual commentary on government policy in print media.3 The cartoon ‘The Philosophy of Clothes’, as described above, speaks through two characters, a tailor and a client, to convey the intended meaning of sartorial politics embodied by Hotham and Haines. Primarily, Grosse’s pictorial expression of the two noted public figures draws an analogy between narrative and rhetoric, imaging clothes as a visual form of mass communication to the reader. His political cartooning indicates how clothes make a statement and function as artefacts of colonial culture, and it is essential to our understanding of the visual mode of graphic-­textual journalism in a settler society. An examination of ‘The Philosophy of Clothes’, therefore, gives rise to two important questions. How did the rhetorical dimension of clothing play a key role in Melbourne Punch’s appeal to its audience? And what sartorial narratives, with their non-verbal performances, were told in response to the changing political landscape that was especially brought about by the rapid turnover of ministries in colonial Victoria? Implicit in these questions is the idea of how Melbourne Punch cartoonists employed languages of attire, combined with illustrated styles and satiric texts, to tell different metaphorical stories of changes in a political climate. Taking Melbourne Punch as a case in point, this chapter investigates the way in which clothes operated as a non-verbal language for cartoonists to develop a critical perspective on political institutions, parliamentary reforms, and fiscal policy in colonial Victoria in the 1860s and 1870s,4 a key period that witnessed a burgeoning market for illustrated magazines and newspapers. It aims to explore clothing as a socio-political and ideological fabric of colonial Victoria, on the basis of the assumption that the

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Global connections and entanglements journalistic representations of politicians’ sartorial styles fed the public taste for graphic humour within a colonial context. The significance of the sartorial satire lies in its ability to communicate to the Melbourne Punch reader a sense of political ideology imbued with rhetorical strategies. I argue that the magazine exploits three major rhetorical devices  – the tailor metaphor, literary and cultural allusions, and the trope of sport – as idiomatic metaphoric expressions to construct its clothing languages as a common ground for discussion.5 These rhetorical devices, I contend, form a sartorial grammar sharing the lexicon of the political economy of colonial Australia. They, as an embodiment of referentiality and intertextuality, supplement the visual elements of clothes with illustrated humour and, to quote Edwards again, facilitate the development of ‘characterizations, situations, and narrations’ (1997, p. 10) within the pictorial frame. My point is that by combining true events with imaginative settings from popular cultural and literary references, Melbourne Punch cartoonists succeed in creating a drama or metaphorical story within the rhetoric of ­sartorial practices as they assign cultural inscriptions to emigrant politicians’ clothed bodies. This, in turn, prompts one central question: how does Melbourne Punch ‘dress’ and ‘ornament’ its political celebrities as tailors, clowns, maidservants, sportsmen, and Shakespearean characters so as to mock and ridicule their lack of skills in parliamentary management? The periodical press, at this point, provides a medium through which the reading public can gain awareness of how one’s political image is closely bound up with the complexities of sartorial description and becomes a frequent subject of satire in the colonial imagination. The case of Melbourne Punch demonstrates that the entertainment function and satiric commentary within ‘the allusive image-textual interplay’ (Jones and Mitchell, 2017, p. 12) allow for a subtle engagement with the development of politically oriented cartooning during times of crisis in the Parliament of Victoria.

Fabricating a tailor-made political economy in colonial Victoria The 3  October 1861 issue of Melbourne Punch featured a cartoon, ‘The First Lesson in Political Economy’, which presents a graphic narrative of a conversation between a political constable and a boy. The cartoonist dresses Richard Heales, a London-born protectionist and fourth Premier of Victoria, as a political constable talking about the idea of ‘duty’ with a boy, the incarnation of the Argus (Melbourne’s conservative daily newspaper known for its support for free trade). The caption calls attention to the constable’s equation of free trade with ‘taking the duty off’, which prompts the Argus boy to react wittily by saying: ‘I wish they’d take you off duty.’ Figuratively speaking, the cartoon appropriates the sartorial language of a constable’s uniform to hint at Heales’s first lesson in promoting protectionism during his government’s confrontation with a serious budget deficit in

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‘The philosophy of clothes’

colonial Victoria. The ‘First Lesson’ cartoon provides a convenient starting point for discussing the interaction of politics and economics in Victoria in the 1860s and 1870s, the second stage in Australia’s fiscal history during which each colony was enabled to determine its own tariff policy (Segal, 1937, p. 59). Victoria, after its separation from New South Wales in July 1851, adopted a protectionist policy while making moves towards the establishment of a responsible self-governing colony. Two reasons might explain Victoria’s adoption of high protective duties: first, the decline of gold output in 1865 and the subsequent increase in the unemployment rate and migration to the other states, and second, David Syme’s advocacy of the protective tariff in 1866 (Segal, 1937, p. 59; Arnold, 1973, pp. 265–83). On the promise of cheap and abundant raw materials, the second stage of development of Victoria’s protective tariff system was built on secondary industries, such as ‘butter, soap, leather factories, tanneries, brickworks, quarries, jam factories, furniture factories, etc.’, as well as ‘clothing and boot factories’ whereas its neighbouring colony New South Wales adhered to the principles of free trade and low-revenue tariff (Segal, 1937, p. 60). Victoria played a leading role in the industries of textiles, clothing, and footwear, which were largely boosted by protection. Victoria’s tailoring industry, in part, helps raise our awareness of how skilled workers in the clothing trade managed to fulfil the needs of male emigrants in colonial Australia. Tailors and colonial politicians are often conflated in the pages of Melbourne Punch. On several occasions, Melbourne Punch utilises the tailor metaphor as a rhetorical device to wittily summarise the controversy over the political and economic conditions of colonial Australia or strategically present the strife between protectionists and free traders and the bicameral conflict between the Houses.6 The tailor metaphor, so to speak, offers one avenue for addressing colonial policy-making within a sartorial context. The intersection of tailoring and colonial policy-making finds expression in ‘The Song of a Whip’, a parody of Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Song of the Shirt’. The parody, printed in Melbourne Punch on 8 June 1865, begins with a description of an exhausted tailor sitting at the top of Bourke-Street, at the Parliament House of Victoria in Melbourne. The tailor is unable to think of his ‘needle and thread’ while singing: With mouth that was yawning wide, With eyes that were sleepy and red, A tailor sat at the top of Bourke-street, Forgetting needle and thread. ‘Vote! vote! vote!’ He murmured – unfortunate snip; And still, in a voice of dolorous note, He sang this Song of a Whip: – (‘The Song of a Whip’, 1865)

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Global connections and entanglements Noticeably, the word ‘whip’, derived from a fox-hunting expression, is associated with a member of Parliament appointed by a political party to help manage legislative business. One of the party whip’s responsibilities is to ensure that party members show up and vote as the party leadership desires. Thus the whip is an important political actor for attracting sufficient backbench support. In the parody, the whip is compared to a tailor exerting some influence on party voting in the political scene of Victoria. This is made clear in the repetition of the words ‘sit’ and ‘vote’, which emphasises the tailor-whip’s job of maintaining the party’s voting strength. Meanwhile, the repetition of the word ‘whip’ at the beginning of the third stanza tells us that the tailor-whip has to move quickly and forcefully: ‘I’m always at beck and call.’ The fourth stanza provides a fuller picture of the tailor-whip’s engagement of political affairs – ‘I a House must keep’ – during James McCulloch’s first term of ministry. The tailor-whip is given a seat to undertake the business of Parliament House and to resolve the dispute between the Assembly and the Council over the Tariff Bill of 1865. ‘The Reversible Coat’, a cartoon appearing in Melbourne Punch in August 1868, drew a comparison between tailor and politician to illustrate how the confrontation between protectionists and free traders remained a major problem during McCulloch’s second term as Premier of Victoria. The humorous piece is largely concerned with a young tailor falling in love with ‘POLLY TICS’ (politics), a fickle maid who has befriended two females, ‘sweet Protection’ and ‘fair Free Trade’. The tailor intends to ‘prosper in his suit’ and thus makes himself a reversible coat to ‘bamboozle’ POLLY TICS’s friends. He cries to Miss Protection: ‘You are a beauty; / O make me but an M. L. A., / And you shall have my duty.’ Then the tailor, in his reversibly arrayed coat, ‘sallied forth to take by storm / The heart of fair FREE TRADE’ and subsequently ‘cuts with POLLY TICS / A ministerial caper’. The parody ultimately concludes about the tailor’s betrayal: ‘Now POLLY TICS and both her friends / May recognize the traitor; / And see beneath the lion’s skin, / The base dissimulator’ (‘The Reversible Coat’, 1868). For the most part, the metaphor of a reversible coat aptly describes the two-faced politician as a tailor trying to please whomever he meets, a manifestation of his insincerity and deceitfulness. The parody employs a sartorial rhetoric to offer an analysis of political hypocrisy. Its textual satire exemplifies how the two opposing forces – free trade and protectionism – shaped the changing pattern of the colony’s economic history in the late 1860s. Tom Carrington’s 1875 cartoon ‘Trying On the Old Free-Trade Clothes’ is another salient example of using the sartorial image to illuminate the colonial ideas of ‘tailor-made’ political economy in Victoria (Figure 9.2). The humour of the cartoon derives from its sketch of James McCulloch as someone trying on old, tight clothes, an embodiment of free trade. McCulloch, a protectionist representing the Legislative Assembly for Warrnambool, is surrounded by two free traders: James Service, a

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9.2  Tom Carrington, ‘Trying On the Old Free-Trade Clothes’. Melbourne Punch, 20 May 1875.

convinced free trader and treasurer in George Kerferd’s ministry, on his right, and Edward Langton, former treasurer in the James Goodall Francis administration and ‘the most outspoken Free Trader in the Assembly’ (Turner, 2011, p. 162), on his left.7 As we can see, Langton is adjusting McCulloch’s clothes and holding a free trade flower at the same time. He solaces McCulloch by saying: ‘They are a little tight, certainly, but when I’ve given them a brush, and taken out the grease spots, you’ll be able to go down Collins Street as jolly as ever!’ Literally, Langton’s words reveal his own idea of fashioning McCulloch for a suitable sartorial style to shop at Collins Street, a district famous for arts and fashionable retail trade in Melbourne.8 Metaphorically, they invite the reader’s investment in parliamentary history in Victoria. Langton’s idea of tailoring the political economy of colonial Victoria with McCulloch and Graham Berry formed an opposition to the measures of the free trade Kerferd ministry that was defeated in August 1875. How the tailor metaphor is entangled with power in the political imagination can further be seen in the cartoon ‘Eel Skin Clothing’, in the shape of a dialogue between a tailor and a hunting man. This 1877 cartoon may be understood within the framework of sartorial fashion featured by a craze

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Global connections and entanglements for the eel skin model linked with the idea of excessively tight trousers. In the cartoonist’s portrayal, the eel skin clothing is ‘stiff’ for the hunting man (perhaps John Alexander MacPherson, former Premier of Victoria, who had been laid up by a hunting accident) but ‘moderate’ for the tailor (the premier) (‘Eel Skin Clothing’, 1877). In terms of sartorial politics, the eel skin clothing functions as a signifier to be read within the visual narrative of Berry’s second ministry. The cartoon implies Berry’s adoption of a stiffer land tax to cope with the budget deficit. However, Berry’s proposed tariff changes failed to find favour with the radical members of his government, ‘who hungered for a more punitive approach to ‘bursting up’ the large estates’ (Strangio, 2006, p. 58). Overall, the journalistic representation of a tailor’s business or work is instrumental in facilitating a discussion of a colonial politician’s sartorial image: tailoring for the masses is credited with fabricating the ‘tailor-made’ political economy.

Cultural and literary stereotypes of clothing and political costumes Dress, as Sylvia J. Cook remarks, is a reference point in the literary representation of the ‘metonymic and metaphorical relationship between characters and ideas’ (2013, p.  2). Following Cook, we may begin to understand how Melbourne Punch plays on the connotation of a verbal or non-verbal signifier interconnected with an emigrant politician’s sartorial image. In various ways, Melbourne Punch plays on its readers’ familiarity with popular cultural references as used in daily life and blended with visual and verbal signifiers, including idiomatic metaphoric expressions derived from a variety of common knowledge and literary allusions. With this framework in mind, we may consider how Melbourne Punch cartoonists incorporate popular cultural and literary allusions into their philosophy of clothes so as to construct pictorial narratives of iconic figures in the political discourse of colonial Australia. The cartoon ‘Gape, Sinner, and Swallow!’, for example, draws on associations with Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering, or, The Astrologer (1815) to create a non-verbal text of parliamentary practice in colonial Victoria in 1861 (Figure 9.3). Intertwined with the cultural reference to Meg Merrilies and Dominie Sampson is the metaphorical story of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, an Irish-Australian nationalist and free trader,9 and Richard Heales, the sixth Premier of Victoria and ‘a man of the people’ who was ‘popular with the masses’ (Turner, 2011, p. 85). In the cartoon, Duffy is in a costume as Meg Merrilies, a wild-haired Gypsy woman in Guy Mannering, whereas Heales is dressed as the sentimental tutor Dominie Sampson. In Scott’s novel, Meg pours out ‘Gape, Sinner, and Swallow!’ as she commands Dominie to eat the stew sitting in front of him. But in Melbourne Punch, the Meg-like Duffy forces the kneeling premier to drink Harvey’s sauce, an anchovy-based savoury sauce and a popular condiment in

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9.3  “Gape, Sinner, and Swallow!”, Melbourne Punch, 13 June 1861.

Victorian homes. Harvey’s sauce may be used for boosting Heales’s health and for keeping his mind active as a result of his deficiency in ‘strength of character’ and his ‘weak health’ (Turner, 2011, p. 85). It may also be a comfort for Heales after his defeat on a parliamentary no-­confidence motion in June 1861. More importantly, Harvey’s sauce, an object of everyday life in imperial Britain, epitomised colonial Australia’s affinity with

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Global connections and entanglements its mother country. It reinforces Duffy’s adherence to British free trade principles in contrast to Heales’s proposed land reform and protection to industry. Despite the support of the Protectionist League and goldfields electorates, the Heales ministry was defeated in November 1861. Meg Merrilies, one of Scott’s celebrated charismatics (Nord, 2006, p.  25), has her own archetypal role to play in popular culture. She has inspired a variety of paintings and the literary texts like John Keats’s 1818 poem ‘Meg Merrilies’ and Charles Lamb’s 1829 poem ‘The Gypsy’s Malison’. ‘This ‘Meg-mania’ in general ‘underscores the powerful, imposing, and exotic visual qualities’ of a Gypsy woman (Nord, 2006, p.  26). More generally, Meg’s garment and personal appearance both speak to her supernatural energies and wild outlook. Scott’s description of Meg’s garment shows that ‘there was in her general attire, or rather in her mode of adjusting it, somewhat of a foreign costume, artfully adopted perhaps for the purpose of adding to the effect of her spells and predictions, or perhaps from traditional notions respecting the dress of her ancestors’ (quoted in Brown, 1979, p. 33). Meg’s Gypsyhood is intimately bound up with ‘her garb, which combines “the national dress of the Scottish people with something of an Eastern costume”’. ‘Neither wholly female nor wholly male’, Meg is ‘a woman of “masculine stature”, with a voice whose “high notes were too shrill for a man  … the low  … too deep for a woman”’ (quoted in Nord, 2006, p. 26). Most vital of all, Meg is ‘Hybrid in a variety of ways – male and female, Scottish and “Eastern”’ (Nord, 2006, p. 26). As a result, Dominie turns out to be ‘Meg’s mirror image: a feminized and sentimental male’ (Nord, 2006, p. 183). The political visual satire on the character of Dominie-like Heales is thus revealed in the ‘Gape’ cartoon. From a rhetorical perspective, Duffy’s wearing of Meg’s costume bridges fact and fiction, reality and imagination within the cartoon frame: Meg is a literary figure, while Duffy is a real-life politician. By offering a playful visual narrative of Scott’s fictional characters, the ‘Gape’ cartoon invites the reader into the political and economic realities of colonial Victoria. In addition to referencing Scott, Melbourne Punch resorts to Shakespearean characters for its political cartoons to make a metaphorical link between public figures’ non-verbal bodily performance and literary clothes. Similar to the characters in Shakespeare’s plays, the public figures in Melbourne Punch put on their theatrical costumes and act out their stories through their sartorial languages, an extension of their hidden political messages. In these terms, ‘Performance is a process of simulation, of make-believe, of storytelling and impersonation’ (Lennox and Mirabella, 2015, p.  1). Shakespearean costumes, an index of Melbourne Punch’s use of clothing languages, increase our understanding of Australian colonial politicians’ identity performance. ‘Costumes’, as Aoife Monks has observed, ‘contain the power to clothe, to shape identity and form bodies; they “reconfigure what the actor is made of”’ (quoted in Lennox and

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‘The philosophy of clothes’

Mirabella, 2015, p. 1). Readers can thus capture the performative dimension of public figures’ literary clothes through Melbourne Punch’s employment of ‘Shakespeareanity’, a term coined by Douglas Jerrold to refer to the devoted work of strolling players (Dávidházi, 1998, p. 6), for political inscriptions. One illustration of this is ‘The Political “Moor”’, an 1868 cartoon by Carrington, in which readers capture a sense of Duffy’s political acts through the visual elements of a typical ‘Othello’ costume – the long robe, for example (Figure 9.4). This full-page cartoon utilises the Shakespearean costume as a means of sartorial communication to lampoon Duffy’s likeness to Othello. As an allusion to Act V Scene ii of Othello, the cartoon sketches how Duffy O’thello, out of his suspicion of her adultery, smothers his wife Desdemona with a pillow in a bedchamber. Metaphorically, the references to Othello’s costume and his criminal behaviour enable us to decipher the meaning of Duffy’s theatrical performance as an IrishAustralian politician in the McCulloch government. Duffy O’thello, as pictured in the cartoon, is dressed as Shakespeare’s swarthy Moor of Venice trying to murder his sleeping wife, a symbol of ‘the constitutional party’. Such an inharmonious relationship between husband and wife typifies the confrontation between Duffy’s free trade principles and McCulloch’s protectionist policy. The confrontation, as suggested by the repetition of the word ‘fool’, illustrates Duffy’s imprudence of opposing the government for constitutional reforms. Meanwhile, reading Othello as a tragic hero reminds us of Duffy’s links with the Irish Catholic group in the colony of Victoria. To some extent, the idea of Catholic tragedy pinpoints the unhappy ending of Duffy’s ‘domestic’ drama – particularly his disagreement with the inclusion of the Darling grant in the Appropriation Bill – in colonial Australia. Othello’s costume, in this case, draws readers into a narrative of conflict and crisis and increases their understanding of Duffy’s dilemma about how to break the deadlock over fiscal matters. The idea of Shakespearean costume provides a focal point for discussing the visual representations of public figures’ sartorial politics. ‘Alarming Spectre of Free Trade’ is another full-page cartoon combining its visual narrative with Shakespearean allusion and quotation. It makes reference to Act I Scene v of Hamlet, in which Prince Hamlet addresses his dead father’s ghostly apparition: ‘Where wilt thou lead me? Speak. I’ll go no further.’ In the cartoon, Edward Langton, a free trade propagandist and treasurer under James Francis, is depicted in Hamlet’s costume, while the premier James McCulloch is in full dress of the dead King Hamlet (Carrington, 1874). When it comes to the visual image of Langton/Hamlet’s clothing, a much more political commentary emerges to ridicule the presence of a tragic element of the government’s fiscal policy. Langton’s intention to follow McCulloch is, indeed, an expression of their political alliance

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9.4  Tom Carrington, ‘The Political “Moor”’, Melbourne Punch, 20 February 1868.

with Berry for tariff reform in the history of colonial Victoria. The cartoon shows the politicians’ scheme to oppose the successive ministry of George Kerferd, a conservative free trader, who is lurking in the background of the cartoon along with his future treasurer James Service. The Kerferd ministry’s ‘gross incapacity’ and ‘infantile weakness’ (Waugh, 2006b, p. 43) were ridiculed in the periodical press. Kerferd, for

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‘The philosophy of clothes’

instance, was associated with a Shakespearean clown in ‘Which Shall It Be?’, one of Carrington’s 1875 cartoons for Melbourne Punch. The cartoon’s graphic content carried certain connotations concerned with the cartoonist’s endeavour to dress Kerferd as Launcelot Gobbo, servant of the Jewish money-lender Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. As we can see, the cartoon takes advantage of Gobbo’s garment to satirise Kerferd’s theatrical performance as a clown politician. Like Gobbo, Kerferd has two conflicting modes of mind when tackling the problems caused by the implication of his fiscal policy. He wonders whether he should be ruled by conscience (‘the free trade road’) or by the fiend (‘the thorny highway of protection’). Yet unlike Gobbo, who takes the fiend’s advice when considering leaving the service of Shylock, Kerferd makes his final decision to ‘take the more friendly counsel of [his] conscience’ (Carrington, 1875). Apparently, the visual rhetoric of Gobbo’s literary clothes is incorporated with Kerferd’s bodily performance as a foolish political entertainer, unprofessional and untrustworthy. What is more, the pages of Melbourne Punch are replete with references to cultural stereotypes and common knowledge of daily clothing to form idiomatic metaphoric expressions about political ramifications in colonial Australia. The cartoon ‘The Warming Pans’ (1860) is typical in this regard (Figure 9.5). It takes issue with the controversial Land Act to ridicule William Nicholson, the third Premier and Chief Secretary of Victoria. The cartoon depicts Nicholson as a woman dressed in the outfit of a maidservant to narrate the illustrated story of land reform in 1860. Nicholson’s female servant costume is metaphorically linked with his position as a government servant for colonial Victoria’s domestic policy. The caption reads: ‘It’s well I aired the Lands and Survey for the Doctor. Now I’ll have to keep the Public Works warm for the next man.’ These words indicate Mrs Nicholson’s past and future work concerning the use of warming pans to air and warm her masters’ beds, which simultaneously draws an analogy between keeping a house and managing a Parliament House. The ‘Land & Survey’ bed clothes are for Dr Augustus Frederick Adolphus Greeves (as shown on the lid of the warming pan in Nicholson’s left hand), a physician acting as President of the Board of Land and Works and Commissioner of Crown Lands and Survey in September–October 1860. The lid of the warming pan in the maidservant’s right hand presents a picture of Vincent Pyke, an English-born Australian who became Commissioner of Public Works and President of the Board of Land and Works under Nicholson in September 1860. Such a graphic joke, at a certain level, is reminiscent of the Victorian Land Act that came into force in September 1860 as Nicholson took office as the third premier. The Nicholson Land Act, the first piece of land registration, was designed to open crown land for free selection and to provide farmers with opportunities for small-scale settlement. Nicholson’s land

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9.5  ‘The Warming Pans’, Melbourne Punch, 27 September 1860.

settlement schemes found favour with the selectors (small-scale farmers) in the Legislative Assembly, but they were obstructed by the squatters (those who occupied crown lands under a lease or license) in the Legislative Council (Waugh, 2006a, pp. 21–24). The Nicholson Land Act, though despised by the conservative landowners, reveals an important aspect of the premier’s intention to provide access to land in the wake of social and political unrest in the colony. The politicians’ affinities with the clothing of a clown, on the other hand, register part of their foolish and ridiculous intentions for reforms under an uncertain political climate. We may consider a cartoon, ‘The Irrepressible Higinbotham’, and its accompanying textual satire ‘The Political Jack-inthe-Box’, which appeared on 15 August 1867. Both image and text encouraged the reader to make a humorous link between George Higinbotham, the attorney-general in the McCulloch government, and Jack-in-the-Box, the popular children’s toy clown. The Irish-born Higinbotham arrived in Victoria as a free trader and became a leading radical, or ‘the general of the ministerial army’ (Waugh, 2006b, p.  34) assisting in tackling the financial impasse and constitutional irregularities in colonial Victoria. Nevertheless, Higinbotham ‘had shown a complete want of diplomacy

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‘The philosophy of clothes’

and tact’ (Bennett, 2004, p.  108) in his political career, a frequent subject of Melbourne Punch’s satires. Higinbotham is compared in the satire to ‘that confusing old toy, / Whose motions, erratic, are apt to annoy’. As Higinbotham tells the reader in the short piece, his pop-up actions account for his uncontrollable thoughts and behaviours: ‘To keep me fast down you may try, but in vain – / You turn, and – hey, presto! I’m up once again.’ He acts with his reforming zeal ‘in a box’ (or in a very difficult or restrictive situation) because ‘Discord’s my hobby, confusion my aim, / And the dodge – “conscientious” – is my little game. – Up, down, &c.’ (‘The Political Jack-in-the-Box’, 1867). Following ‘The Political Jack-in-the-Box’ is ‘The Irrepressible Higinbotham’, a cartoon by Carrington (1867), which makes fun of Higinbotham as a clown-like doll, playful and childlike. Noticeably, the Jack-in-the-Box costume that Higinbotham wears serves as a cultural stereotype to ridicule his foolish attempt to keep the government ­operational – ‘a foolish childish ambition to mimic small parliamentary customs without consideration of whether they were good or bad – to mimic little defects with the hope of attaining to general resemblance  …’ (Bennett, 2006, p. 26). Higinbotham’s clown costume, along with his exaggerated face and pop-up gesture, typifies part of his sartorial politics. He is irrepressible because of ‘his illogical order of thought and action’ and ‘dogged pertinacity and fight-till-I-die sort of obstinacy’ in the arena of political discourse (‘Punch’s Political Biographies’, 1866). Thus the Jack-in-the-Box outfit allows the cartoonist to play upon Higinbotham’s presumed lack of the skill of reducing the strife between the two Houses.

Sporting attire and political entertaining The rhetorical dimension of Melbourne Punch’s clothes philosophy directs further attention to the way in which the graphic representation of sporting attire is of significance to the display of a political figure’s performative nature. The trope of sport provides an arena for the investigation of politicians’ public entertaining in relation to their administration of colonial affairs of the day. Similar to boxing and circus acts (equestrian, rolling globes, and the like), political action contains the elements of competition, bodily vigour, and physical strength within the larger context of colonial Australia. In a sense, the visual language of sporting attire points to the metaphorical relationship between athletic performance and political practice. Consider, for example, the cartoon ‘The Ministerial Ducrow’ of 1864, which takes its inspiration from Andrew Ducrow (1793–1842), a celebrated English circus equestrian.10 It offers a compelling image of James McCulloch, the fifth Premier of Victoria, in an equestrian costume, which brings the pictorial representation of ministerial management as a

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Global connections and entanglements sporting event and circus spectacle into sharp focus. Using the sartorial language of equestrian apparel, the cartoonist makes fun of McCulloch’s political practice concerned with the implementation of his protectionist principles. With its verbal and non-verbal texts, the cartoon ‘The Ministerial Ducrow’ speaks to a combination of visuality and textuality. Textually, its caption shows the reader a newspaper extract from the Argus of 7  September 1864. The Argus was in favour of free trade and therefore argued against the McCulloch government’s new ministerial manifesto: ‘The tariff, we are informed, must be revised because of “the action of New South Wales Government.”’ ‘Yet the tariff is to be strictly according to the principles of Free Trade’, the Argus continued, ‘and the duties are to be laid on articles “which will produce the greatest revenue at the smallest cost of collection, having in view the general interests of the colony”’ (Argus, 1864). Visually, the cartoon demonstrates how McCulloch’s public entertaining in a circus setting is interspersed with the slapstick antics of Mr Punch, the satiric persona and fictional editor, in the disguise of a circus clown holding a ring labelled ‘general election’ for the premier to jump through. Like Ducrow, who was renowned ‘for acrobatic riding on horses without visible restraint’ (Tait, 2015, p. 106), McCulloch performs his feats on the riderless galloping horses, ‘a performance of wildness that aligned with social ideas of madness as loss of control’ (Tait, 2015, p. 109). Accordingly, the cartoon stresses McCulloch’s inability to tackle the ­problems  – ‘free trade’, ‘revision of the tariff’, and ‘protection’  – as shown on the saddle cloth. McCulloch’s circus-style horse acts, a symbol of his adoption of a protectionist economic policy, reinforce the incongruity between Victorian and neighbouring tariffs. Ducrow’s skills could dazzle the spectators at Astley’s Circus. McCulloch’s equestrian performance, however, ‘would puzzle Oedipus himself to read the riddle of the Ministerial fiscal policy’ in association with ‘an exposition of his protectionist policy’. The visual representation of McCulloch costumed as an equestrian satirises not only his circus-like political performance but also his athletic horsemanship linked with ‘dexterous bit of juggling in regard to the Customs duties’ (‘The Ministerial Ducrow’, 1864). Another visual-textual interaction for an interpretation of the trope of an athlete-politician finds its embodiment in a short piece entitled ‘The Same Old Stupid Fight’ and its accompanying cartoon ‘The Same Old Fight.’ Both image and text are largely concerned with the free trade and protection issues arising out of the long-standing battle between ‘protectionist’ Victoria and its neighbour state, ‘free trade’ New South Wales. ‘The Same Old Stupid Fight’ told its reader on 8  January 1874: ‘PROTECTION and FREE TRADE seem going’, which is ‘Personified by PARKES and FRANCIS’ to have a fight. This explains the dispute between New South Wales and Victoria, which were governed by different fiscal

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conditions, represented by Sir Henry Parkes and James Goodall Francis respectively. Parkes, five-time Premier of New South Wales, is dubbed the father of federation and the ‘Cobden of Australia’ (Howe, 1997, p.  109) for his adherence to the British policy of free trade and laissez-faire. The spirit of protection is incarnated in the person of Francis, a leading advocate of protection and the ninth Premier of Victoria, who had a zest for constitutional reforms. We may recall the early stage of settler self-­ government in Australia when the long line of land frontier between New South Wales and Victoria made it difficult for the two eastern colonies to solve the problems of border duties brought about by the trade across and along the Murray River (Rusden, 2011, p. 644). In 1867 Victoria and New South Wales signed a five-year free trade agreement under which the former agreed to pay the latter duties. The agreement expired in 1872, and Parkes, with his ascent to the position of premier in May 1872, made arrangements to deal with inter-colonial trade among Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia across the Murray River (Coghlan and Ewing, 2011, p. 86). The way in which Parkes pushed his negotiations with the other colonies prompted the Argus to criticise his contradiction: ‘He has come with union in one hand and separation in the other, and we are not even to have a choice, for we are expected to take both’ (quoted in Wright, 1978, p. 280). In January 1874 New South Wales accused Victoria of ‘fickleness of policy and instability of purpose’ (quoted in Wright, 1978, p. 279), which led to the abrogation of the Border Treaty between Victoria and New South Wales at the end of January. Through his obstinate attachment to protection, Francis made himself an object of satire in the periodical press. Thus ‘The Same Old Stupid Fight’ mocks Francis’s ‘stupid whim’, ‘vision dim’, ‘fame for ignorance’, comparing him to ‘a fiscal ass’. And ‘His wit as Mr. PUBLIC thinks, / Much like his wine, when stirred it stinks, / Making this colony seem cranky, / About Protection hanky panky’ (‘The Same Old Stupid Fight’, 1874). The border customs issue is continued in the subsequent cartoon, ‘The Same Old Fight’, which visually presents a common conceptual ­metaphor – a boxing match – as a combat sport to demonstrate the contest between Parkes and Francis (Figure 9.6). The two colonial politicians are both clothed in boxing apparel in an attempt to settle the continuing quarrel between Victoria and New South Wales over the question of border duties. The fighter on the right of the cartoon is Parkes, whose boxing clothes tell of his consistent adherence to free trade. Francis, the fighter on the left, puts on his headgear and boxing outfit for ‘protection’. Noticeably, his boxing gloves are marked with the border duties arrangement; that is, the increase in tariff on merchandise to 20 per cent. The ‘BORDER’ line in the cartoon indicates that Francis maintains distance between himself and his opponent Parkes who takes his stance for the fight. One such border line

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9.6  ‘The Same Old Fight’, Melbourne Punch, 8 January 1874.

reinforces the irreconcilable differences between the Francis ministry and the Parkes government in light of their divergent fiscal policies during the pre-federation period. A hidden message – ‘My dear, I never doubt the result’ – also attracts the reader’s eyes, together with the blurred titles of two newspapers, the Argus and The Times. As always, the Argus was doubtful of Victoria’s protectionist policy, proclaiming on 19 May 1874:

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‘The philosophy of clothes’ Our chief hope of a return to right principles and to reason in our fiscal policy, lies in the lesson which New South Wales appears to be likely to read us, and in the emulation which her example will provoke; for the practical benefits which are accruing to her from her wise and prudent reformation of her tariff in the direction of free trade, are obvious and indisputable. (Argus, 1874)

The Times, on the same subject, remarked earlier that ‘even if Victoria, finally stirred to emulation by the prosperity of her rival, should foreswear her economical heresies, the latter will still have made solid gains. She will have developed the system of internal communications, and so strengthened all her interests and consolidated all her resources’ (The Times, 1874).11 The dress-effect of boxing apparel offers an illustrative example of sartorial communication underscoring the politicians’ endeavours to resolve legislative deadlocks. We cannot forget James Francis’s plan for constitutional reform, especially the ‘Norwegian Scheme’ to settle disputes between the Houses by joint sittings in April 1874, which gave rise to his confrontation with McCulloch, who used to be in favour of the government’s measures. As reported by the Ballarat Star in April 1874, McCulloch’s ‘speech at Warrnambool will be violently opposed to the government scheme of reform … personally he and Mr. Francis are as warm friends as they ever were …’ (‘Melbourne’, 1874). This is satirised in ‘In Training for the Fight’ in Melbourne Punch: When ’twixt two men who once were friends The need for what’s called friendship ends, And circumstances bring about A wish to fight, and fight it out, ’Tis wondrous how the late allies Will fiercely dee each other’s eyes – (‘In Training for the Fight’, 1874)

The Scots-born McCulloch, ‘from the land of thistles’, is ‘known as Jemmy Bristles’, whereas Francis, ‘Jem of Richmond’ representing Richmond in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, is ‘thought a dunce’. In the short piece, McCulloch and Service are both referred to as ‘rival Jimes’ who ‘fight like brutes’ over the one-House system. The political meaning of sporting dress is conveyed in ‘In Training’ (1874), a diptych following the verbal text of ‘In Training for the Fight’, which appropriates the boxing metaphor to comment on McCulloch’s objection to the Francis government’s Upper House reform. By turning the parliamentary venue into a boxing arena, the diptych finds humour in the antagonism between the two boxers, McCulloch (left) and Francis (right). Each of them becomes a suspended punching bag for his opponent’s boxing training in a metaphorical way. One last example of the trope of athlete-politician can be seen in ‘Extremes Meet’ (1875), a piece emblematic of the affinity between Berry and Langton: ‘Now that the friends of Free-trade and Protection / Join

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Global connections and entanglements hand in hand to seal their new connection.’ Supplementing the piece is Carrington’s cartoon ‘Oh! Gemini’, which sketches Berry and Langton as twins in form-fitting acrobat costumes for the performance of spectacular gymnastics feats (Figure 9.7). The belts on the acrobats’ waists help to confirm their identities: Berry, representing West Geelong in the Legislative Assembly, is standing on the right, and on the left is Langton on behalf of West Melbourne. The cartoon offers a clear picture of the two colonial politicians

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9.7  Tom Carrington, ‘Oh! Gemini’, Melbourne Punch, 5 August 1875.

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‘The philosophy of clothes’

as public entertainers in a circus setting. What makes it fascinating is Berry and Langton’s performance of circus tricks featured by a trio hand balance act for the ‘walking globe’ or ‘rolling globe’ show. The flags in Berry's and Langton’s hands support the two politicians’ different economic policies: while Berry advocates protectionist economic policy, Langton is in favour of free trade. Equally revealing is the inscription on the globe, ‘Opposition Division 36’, which refers to the defeat of the free trade Kerferd ministry’s financial proposal in the Assembly. During the process of affirming his government’s financial commitment, Kerferd encountered strong opposition from the Legislative Assembly. As summed up in the Australasian for 7 August 1875, ‘the 36 who voted against the Government comprise members who have expressed the most opposite and extreme opinions on the subject then under consideration’ (‘Parliament’, 1875). This refers to one of Langton’s alliances with Berry and McCulloch in the Opposition when Kerferd was about to step down from his ­position as Premier of Victoria.

Conclusion The editorial and pictorial contents of Melbourne Punch, as discussed earlier, bring together aspects of fiscal policy, historical events, and metaphoric stories to emphasise public figures’ political performance within a sartorial context. This calls attention to George Higinbotham’s view of the entangled relationships between ‘[t]he Constitution, the Supreme Court, the Legislative Council, and the Press … in the turmoil of political strife’ (1865), the subjects of considerable attention during the rapid turnover of ministries in colonial Victoria. In particular, through the visual-textual forms of political cartooning, Melbourne Punch creates a colonial version of sartorial philosophy in which dominant social and cultural values are exposed. The rhetoric of dress, combined with textual commentary and visual narratives, facilitates our understanding of how the periodical press makes use of sartorial communication to develop a critical perspective on the political mythology of colonial Australia. In a similar vein, the journalistic construction of the sartorial identity of colonial Australia engages with questions about the establishment of the migrant press in the age of nation-building. In their study of the minority printed press, Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully have both noticed the ideological formation of ‘defiant voices’ and ‘narrating voices’ as a way of displaying the diversity of Australia’s cultural heritage (2020, p. 8). This provides a vehicle for understanding how Melbourne Punch offers visual manifestations of the process of change in Australia’s political landscapes, especially through the conceptualisation of sartorial politics as a narrative mode. The public forum of the periodical press provides a compelling framework in which to understand the contact point between political connotations and sartorial satires in the field of comic journalism.

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Notes   1 In August 1855 the first issue of Melbourne Punch appeared. The weekly magazine ‘was very much established as a ‘self-governing Dominion’ of the London Charivari’ in the imperial context (Scully, 2019, p. 157).   2 In its modern sense, the word ‘cartoon’ is defined as ‘a simplified drawing intended to represent a more detailed object or idea’ (Edwards, 2014, p. 112).   3 For more information on the storytelling aspect of cartoons, see Conners, 2007; Refaie, 2003; and Medhurst and DeSousa, 1981.   4 For further details, see Labilliere, 1878; Segal, 1937; Shann, 1948; Deakin, 1957; Scott et al, 1988; Clark, 1993; Boucher and Russell, 2015; Woollacott, 2015; and Lloyd, 2017.   5 The literary/cultural allusion is one of the four major topoi used by cartoonists for visual rhetorical analyses of political cartoons. Medhurst and DeSousa (1981) define literary or cultural allusions as ‘any fictive or mythical character, any narrative or form, whether drawn from legend, folklore, literature or the electronic media’ (p. 201) within the context of popular culture.   6 For a more detailed account of how Victorian colonial politics were featured by the intensity of bicameral conflict, see Strangio and Costar, 2006.   7 Both Langton and Service supported free trade in principle. Langton, a prominent free trade propagandist, founded a free trade journal, the Spectator, in 1865. He wrote an article entitled ‘On Taxation in Victoria’ for Melbourne Review in 1877.   8 Nicknamed the Paris End, ‘Collins Street had already come to be regarded as the most fashionable street, where the leading drapers, jewelers, and music and book sellers were located, and shops then remained open until 9 p.m. every night and until midnight on Saturdays. Ladies attired in their latest crinolines would gather to gossip, or to be seen “doing the Block”’ (Arnold, 1973, p. 367).   9 Duffy, a leading Young Irelander, was the first editor of the Nation magazine. He assumed office as the eighth Premier of Victoria in June 1871. See Duffy, 1898. 10 The cartoon appeared in print in 1864. It was the year that saw the policy of incidental protection proposed by the treasurer Saul Samuel and inaugurated by the colonial government of New South Wales (Goodwin, 1966, p. 16). 11 The 3 September 1875 issue of The Times also included one R. Adams’s staunch criticism of Protectionist Victoria’s ‘miserably slow progress in manufactures’ (Adams, 1875).

References Adams, R. (1875, 3 September). ‘Free Trade v. Protection in Australia’. The Times, p. 4. Argus (1864, 7 September), p. 4. Argus (1874, 19 May), p. 4. Arnold, V. H. (1973). Victorian Year Book 1973: Centenary Edition. No. 87. Melbourne: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Barthes, R. (1990). The Fashion System. Trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, J. M. (2004). Sir William Stawell: Second Chief Justice of Victoria, 1857–1886. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press. Bennett, J. M. (2006). George Higinbotham: Third Chief Justice of Victoria, 1886–1892. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press. Boucher, L. and Russell, L. (eds) (2015). Settler Colonial Governance in NineteenthCentury Victoria. Canberra, ACT: Australian National University Press.

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Brown, D. (1979). Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Carrington, T. (1867, 15  August). ‘The Irrepressible Higinbotham’. Melbourne Punch, pp. 53–54. Carrington, T. (1874, 28 May). ‘Alarming Spectre of Free Trade’. Melbourne Punch, pp. 213–14. Carrington, T. (1875, 13 May). ‘Which Shall It Be?’ Melbourne Punch, pp. 185–6. Clark, M. (1993). A History of Australia. 6 vols. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Coghlan, T. A. and Ewing, T. T. (2011). The Progress of Australasia in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conners, J. L. (2007). ‘Popular Culture in Political Cartoons: Analyzing Cartoonist Approaches’. PS: Political Science and Politics, 40 (2), pp. 261–65. Cook, S. J. (2013). ‘Reading Clothes: Literary Dress in William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell’. Southern Literary Journal, 46 (1), pp. 1–18. Dávidházi, P. (1998). The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Deakin, A. (1957). The Crisis in Victorian Politics, 1879–1881: A Personal Retrospect. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Dewhirst, C., and Scully, R. (2020). ‘Australia’s Minority Printed Press History in Global Context: An Introduction’, in Dewhirst, C. and Scully, R. (eds), The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press, ed.. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–17. Duffy, Sir C. G. (1898). My Life in Two Hemispheres. 2 vols. London: T.  Fisher Unwin. Edwards, J. L. (1997). Political Cartoons in the 1988 Presidential Campaign: Image, Metaphor, and Narrative. New York and London: Garland. Edwards, J. L. (2014). ‘Cartoons’, in Salvatore Attardo (ed.), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. London: Sage, pp. 112–16. ‘Eel Skin Clothing’ (1877, 2 August). Melbourne Punch, p. 394. ‘Extremes Meet’ (1875, 5 August). Melbourne Punch, p. 304. ‘The First Lesson in Political Economy’ (1861, 3 October). Melbourne Punch, p. 240. Goodwin, C. D. W. (1966). Economic Enquiry in Australia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Higinbotham, G. (1865, 28 September). ‘Prenez Garde!’ Melbourne Punch, p. 112. Howe, A. (1997). Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ‘In Training’ (1874, 30 April). Melbourne Punch, pp. 173–74. ‘In Training for the Fight’ (1874, 30 April). Melbourne Punch, p. 172. Jones, A. M. and Mitchell, R. N. (2017). ‘Introduction: Reading the Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Palimpsest’, in Jones, A. M. and Mitchell, R. N. (eds), Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, pp. 1–36. Labilliere, F. P. (1878). Early History of the Colony of Victoria: From Its Discovery to Its Establishment as a Self-Governing Province of the British Empire. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low. Lennox, P. and Mirabella, B. (2015). ‘Introduction’, in Lennox, P. and Mirabella, B. (eds), Shakespeare and Costume. London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–8. Lloyd, P. (2017). ‘The First 100 Years of Tariffs in Australia: The Colonies’. Australian Economic History Review, 57 (3), pp. 316–44.

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Global connections and entanglements Marzel, S.-R. (2015). ‘Introduction’, in Marzel, S.-R. and Stiebel, G. D. (eds), Dress and Ideology: Fashioning Identity from Antiquity to the Present. London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–15. McKenna, M. (2001). ‘Building “a Closet of Prayer” in the New World: The Story of the “Australian Ballot”’, in Sawer, M. (ed.), Elections: Full, Free & Fair. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, pp. 45–62. Medhurst, M. J. and DeSousa, M. A. (1981). ‘Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse’. Communications Monographs, 48 (3), pp. 197–236. ‘Melbourne’ (1874, 13 April). Ballarat Star, p. 4. ‘The Ministerial Ducrow’ (1864, 15 September). Melbourne Punch, p. 93. Nord, D. E. (2006). Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930. New York: Columbia University Press. ‘Parliament’ (1875, 7 August). Australasian, p. 14. ‘The Political Jack-in-the-Box’ (1867, 15 August). Melbourne Punch, p. 52. ‘Punch’s Political Biographies. Mr. Higinbotham’ (1866, 30  August). Melbourne Punch, p. 66. Refaie, E. E. (2003). ‘Understanding Visual Metaphor: The Example of Newspaper Cartoons’. Visual Communication, 2 (1), pp. 75–95. ‘The Reversible Coat’ (1868, 27 August). Melbourne Punch, p. 67. Rusden, G. W. (2011). History of Australia, vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘The Same Old Stupid Fight’ (1874, 8 January). Melbourne Punch, p. 12. Scott, E. et al (ed.) (1988). Australia: A Reissue of Volume VII, Part I of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scully, R. (2019). ‘Britain in the Melbourne Punch’. Visual Culture in Britain, 20 (2), pp. 152–71. Segal, V. M. (1937). ‘The Development of Tariff Protection in Australia’. Australian Quarterly, 9 (2), pp. 58–67. Seigneuret, J.-C. et al. (eds) (1988). Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs, vol. 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Shann, E. 1948. An Economic History of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘The Song of a Whip’ (1865, 8 June). Melbourne Punch, p. 185. Strangio, P. (2006). ‘Broken Heads and Flaming Houses: Graham Berry, the Wild Colonial’, in Strangio, P. and Costar, B. J. (eds), The Victorian Premiers, 1856–2006. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, pp. 51–73. Strangio, P. and Costar, B. J. (eds) (2006). The Victorian Premiers, 1856–2006. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press. Tait, P. (2015). ‘Acrobatic Circus Horses: Military Training to Natural Wildness’, in Orozco, L. and Parker-Starbuck, J. (eds), Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 97–116. The Times (1874, 20 February), p. 9. Turner, H. G. (2011). A History of the Colony of Victoria, vol  2, A.D. 1854–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waugh, J. (2006a). ‘Haines, O’Shanassy, Nicholson and Heales: The Old Guard, 1855–1863’, in Strangio, P. and Costar, B. J. (eds), The Victorian Premiers, 1856–2006. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, pp. 12–29.

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Waugh, J. (2006b). ‘The “Inevitable McCulluoch” and His Rivals, 1863–1877’, in Strangio, P. and Costar, B. J. (eds), The Victorian Premiers, 1856–2006. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, pp. 30–50. Woollacott, A. (2015). Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, D. (1978). ‘The River Murray: Microcosm of Australian Federal History’, in Hodgins, B. et al. (eds), Federalism in Canada and Australia: The Early Years. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, pp. 277–86.

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10 Gertrude Bell, femme impériale Elizabeth Bishop

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE (14 July 1868–12 July 1926), was an English administrator, archaeologist, and political officer who mapped the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I. Her knowledge of and contacts in the region made her invaluable to the British Foreign Office and War Office and essential to British imperial policy. Along with T. E. Lawrence, Bell supported the Hashemite dynasties, and she played a major role in establishing modern Iraq. Bell’s feminised body’s unseen but effective gestures – the boot heel that slips behind a girth, gloved knuckles tighten around reins, a spur’s bite  – intrude unexpectedly into civil authority’s pageantry.1 The most striking among published images of Bell as an imperial administrator capture her as equestrienne (Figure 10.1). The British military officer Gerald de Gaury recalls that a swift gesture intercepting the military salute offered civil authority: a single mounted figure in a dark habit, riding side-saddle in a masterly fashion on a prancing Arab mare. Drawing level, I saw the Union Jack, and the High Commissioner seated in the car, and saluted. Miss Bell put up her ­riding-whip vertically to the brim of her tricorne in reply and, setting spur to her mount, went forward at a hand-gallop, followed by a pair of bounding salukis, to direct the sowars. (1961, p. 21)

External to masculinised hierarchies, Bell’s body transgressed them. Building on Sara Suleiri’s observation that ‘[t]o study the rhetoric of the British Raj in both its colonial and postcolonial manifestations is  … to attempt to break down the incipient schizophrenia of a critical discourse that seeks to represent domination and subordination as though the two were mutually exclusive terms’ (1992, p. 112), this chapter considers the ways in which Bell’s political and sartorial styles provide an opportunity to discuss Britain’s commerce and empire.

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10.1  Gertrude Bell on horseback, Baghdad, Iraq, c. 1910–14.

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Global connections and entanglements Even in her obituary, Bell’s embodied talents provided topic for discussion: ‘one could well imagine her firm seat and light hand as symbolic of that Heaven-sent combination of strength and tact which makes great leaders of men’ (Leslie, 1926).2 Bell’s skills in the saddle became ‘embarrassing’ only when displayed in close proximity to the Arab revolt’s military commanders: ‘Once at an inspection of the troops she made an unforgettable sensation. The King [Faisal I of Iraq], in khaki uniform on a white horse, had ridden slowly out of palm gardens surrounding the parade ground to take up his position at the saluting base. As he did so there appeared, at full gallop, reining to a halt at his side, a slim figure in white habit on a black mare, Miss Bell’ (de Gaury, 1961, p. 44). While Rosi Braidotti argues that characteristics of the ‘feminine’ bear little on real-life women, either directly or immediately, Bell was too visible an agent of imperial power not to threaten this new public patriarchy (1990, p. 363). Might Bell’s sartorial style be read as imperialising? While her body has been read as liberated (with writers noting her education, international travel, and political activism),4 a contribution to such a discussion might also call into question her agency in the genesis and ­perpetuation of coercive systems, her place in a move from spectacle to intrusion.5 As Elizabeth Grosz suggests, ‘although feminists have frequent struggled around issues involving women’s bodies – abortion, contraception, maternity, reproduction, self-defense, body image, sexuality, and pornography, to name a few  – there is still a strong reluctance to conceptualize the female body as playing a major role in women’s oppression’ (1995, p. 31). While Grosz specifically discussed women’s oppression of other women, the observation might be extended profitably to imperialism, engaging Gertrude Bell’s sartorial style and its signification among flows of credit, material goods, and weapons. My goal is not so much to expose new information – which will emerge only with detailed examination of public and private sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish  – as it is to raise compelling questions about sartorial styles of empire. As bell hooks has warned: ‘paradigms of domination that call attention to women’s capacity to dominate is one way to deconstruct and challenge the simplistic notion that man is the enemy, woman the victim; the notion that men have always been the oppressors’ (1989, p. 20). To suggest women’s contributions to early twentieth-century imperialism, we might begin with ornaments for women’s bodies and end with these bodies’ militarisation. A response to the question ‘What forms of gendered embodiment made imperialism’s powers universal?’ might require a discussion that ranges from hairpins to aerial bombardment. For many, men embody the set of practices that are imperial authority. For Frantz Fanon, authority rested in the male body: ‘in the colonies, it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official instituted go-­betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression’.

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Gertrude Bell, femme impériale

Denied agency under imperialism and its successors, females served as prizes in the struggle for national self-determination (Fanon, 1963, p. 38). Joseph Massad identified colonial oppression with the male, militarised body of John Bagot Glubb. Acknowledging a debt to Chandra Talpade Mohanty (in that just as White masculinity defined the nation-states’ citizens in Europe, so also did this same masculinity serve as norm for civil subjectivity in the empire), Glubb marks the institutionalisation of White colonial masculinity in modern militaries, educational institutions, and labour relations. With suitable irony, this empire’s productive role eventually yields an anti-­colonial agency (Massad, 2001). A woman, Miss Bell ‘was noticeably thin, and when she rose held herself very erect’, a contemporary wrote, mentioning diplomatically an ‘unusually long, thin, straight nose, of the kind traditionally held to show unusual intelligence’ (de Gaury, 1961, p.  21). A less-than-sympathetic Virginia Woolf described Bell as having ‘a very long nose: she is like an Aberdeen terrier; she is a masterful woman, has everyone under her thumb, and makes you feel a little inefficient’ (Woolf, 1975, p. 235).6 Gabrielle McIntire differentiates between men and women under ­imperialism  – as well as among women in service to imperialism – by their embodied endowments. McIntire reads Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) as discriminating between men’s ‘empirical’ knowledge of the world and women’s ‘conceptual’ knowledge, which was limited either to Africa or Europe (McIntire, 2002, p. 262). The text shuttles between the two extremes of a gendered bifurcation separating men, who are mobile in the service of empire, and women, confined to their continent of origin, with their authority in native political communities. In this novel, men have names; women, without names, scarcely speak. As gender sets men apart from women, proximity to capital was as significant in dividing women from the global south and north. Embodiment serves to mark the subordination of African women. Without their own language, European women’s phrases were intelligible to the male protagonists. Women proximate to imperial capital were characterised by slim bodies unmarked by physical beauty, warrior-like posture, and martial clothing. European women inhabit bodies clothed with meanness and angularity and just about as appealing as factory-made consumer goods. Their faces, like their garments, lack beauty. Conrad describes the body of ‘the slim one’ as covered by a ‘dress as plain as an umbrella cover’; the ‘old one’ was characterised by ‘a wart on one cheek’ (2018, pp. 13–14). The theme of Miss Bell’s body’s European adornment  – that she chose garments so as to emphasise her affinity with nineteenth-century modernity – is prevalent in her texts as well as others’. Among post-war Europeans, she appeared an anachronism, hopelessly recherchée: her correspondence includes perhaps twenty references to gloves, about eight to hats. More mondaine than mundane, to the end of her life she referred to

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Global connections and entanglements her hats by nicknames (such as ‘Quangle Wangle’ from the Edward Lear poem). ‘Always beautifully dressed’ (Leslie, 1926) and ‘in ‘irreproachable frocks’ (Chirol, 1927, p.  332), ‘she certainly had the dress-sense’ (Courtney, 1931, p. 53); ‘her evening dress was made of cream lace, heavily flounced’ (de Gaury, 1961, p. 22). As Vron Ware (1992) notes, dress is not only a common index of women’s subordination; it also serves as a means to accomplishing that subordination.7 One of the most political issues confronting women of the era was whether or not to wear a corset, while the Rational Dress Society (founded 1881) offered specific criteria under its ‘Requirements of a Perfect Dress’, including ‘freedom of movement, absence of any pressure over any part of the body’ (Kortsch, 2009, pp. 77–78). Suggestions in Miss Bell’s correspondence indicate that she experienced pressure over parts of her body for decades, a joke which someone else told in French: ‘Are corsets discussed frequently in England? Yes, once a year, with one’s corsetiere’ (Bell, 1902). Miss Bell mentioned ‘very thin washing stays for hot weather’ in another letter to her stepmother (1916); in 1917 she wrote to her father that she had not had these controversial articles ‘for a year or more’ (1918). Educated and privileged, Miss Bell was politically active. She was as interested in what covered others’ bodies as she was in her own. Describing a present for her niece, she wrote: ‘it is a complete Bethlehem costume, with the high hat and the veil and everything. She can wear it at the next fancy dress ball if she likes. It was made for her by a dear little Bethlehem woman who comes to the Consulate to do the washing’ (1900a). While comfortable mobilising labour across markets, among Arabs she tried to look as foreign as possible. Bell, who climbed the Alps at the risk of becoming ‘sunburned and wild looking’ (McKenzie, 2012, p. 10), committed to print that a male traveller should not adopt Arab garments: ‘it would be the wiser if he does not seek to ingratiate himself with the Orientals by trying to ape their habits, unless he is so skilful that he can pass as one of themselves. Let him treat the law of others respectfully, but he himself will meet with a far greater respect if he adheres strictly to his own. For a woman this rule is of the first importance, since a woman can never disguise herself effectually’ (Bell, 1907, p. xxii). Even though she had embraced the mountaineering habits of the ‘New Woman’ (Stockham, 2016, p.  99), her enthusiasm for the anti-suffrage cause has not received the attention it merits.8 While she rejected extending votes to women, she also advocated the value of women’s participation in government; like many female imperialists, she embraced gender difference to serve the empire alongside men (Bush, 2000, pp. 172, 179). Violet Markham (Gertrude Bell’s protégée in the Royal Geographical Society) referred to separate but equal public roles for men and women when she told a crowd of 10,000, ‘We are here to affirm that a women’s citizenship

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Gertrude Bell, femme impériale

is as great and as real as that of any man, that her service is as vitally necessary to the state … we believe that men and women are different – not similar – beings, with talents that are complementary, not identical, and that, therefore, they ought to have different shares in the management of the state …’ (quoted in Bush, 2000, p. 173). For many female suffrage opponents, non-confrontational gender politics was linked to social class. Taking confidence from the ‘antis’’ wide appeal – in Bell’s words – ‘a territorial army of Amazons … will, indeed, be needed to retard the progress of a society so successful as the Anti-Suffrage League has proved itself to be’ (G.B., 1908).9 The ‘antis’’ appeal was that they were easier to live with than their opponents; female suffragists embodied danger. ‘Last night I went to a delightful party at the Glenconners’ and just before I arrived (as usual) 4 suffragettes set on Asquith and seized hold of him. Whereupon Alec Laurence in fury seized two of them and twisted their arms until they shrieked. Then one of them bit him in the hand till he bled. And when he told me the tale he was steeped in his own gore. We all advised him to go at once to Pasteur’ (Bell, 1913a). Self-determination was an infection that would only spread its violence unless measures were taken: such politics found expression in dress. Morag Bell and Cheryl McEwan consider political commitment to the ‘antis’’ to have been particularly well represented in the Royal Geographical Society (1996). Dianne Sachko Macleod notes that British travellers’ cross-dressing across culture indexed women’s attempt to approximate men’s social liberties (1998, p. 67). Bell’s refusal to cross-dress across culture served as a means by which she could wear her domestic politics on her sleeve (Bell and McEwan, 1996). Over the winter of 1914, John Dickson, the British Consul in Jerusalem, told Bell that Mark Sykes and his wife Edith (née Gorst) were staying nearby. Mark Sykes’s Dar ul Islam: A Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey was published in 1904, following his Through Five Turkish Provinces of 1899, which came out after Bell’s Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (1897); her Safar Nameh: Persian Pictures (1894) had been published anonymously. Mark Sykes’s description of the Ottoman imperial school for tribes may prove instructive as to which possible points of difference underlay any subsequent divergence of opinion: The various dormitories and eating-rooms were scrupulously clean and wonderfully well appointed. When I though of the young Bedawi Shaykh folding his clothes up on his bed-head and sleeping on a spring mattress between sheets under a snow-white counterpane, I laughed aloud … The principal of the establishment told me that while the Arabs outstripped all their comrades in intelligence and aptitude for work, the Kurds were more capable of originality. So much for the Ashiret School, and may each of the ninety boys in it go forth and help the empire to work out the foreordained but unknown. (1904, pp. 256–57)10

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Global connections and entanglements Miss Bell’s and the Sykeses’ travels draw attention to Europeans’ ­nineteenth-century mobility. In spite of Bell’s marked reluctance to entrust her safety to authorities as she moved from town to town, the long reach of the Ottoman census kept records of the number of foreign citizens resident in the empire’s cities. The 1897 census noted 2,783 foreign men and 2,674 women in Jerusalem, which can be compared with the 1,596 men and 511 women in Aleppo, and 1,483 men and 1,259 women in Beirut (Behar, 1996, table 2.25). The Yorkshire party in the Levant was atypical (with two girls for every boy), since the numbers of European men exceeded the number of European women in each Ottoman city. The previous year, throughout the empire, the largest numbers of non-Muslim foreigners carried the passports of Russia (5,229), Greece (1,315), Austro-Hungary (1,024), and Romania (949); Muslim foreigners were predominantly of Russian (3,537), Greek (1,428), and Persian (668) nationality (Behar, 1996, table 2.26). The Sykeses’ and Bell’s travels in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire must not detract our attention from the multiple directions for ­nineteenth-century populations’ movement. The imprecision of Britain’s censuses here was such thus that those reported as ‘foreigners’ with Ottoman citizenship were slotted into a number of different categories by ‘birth-place’, attesting to the conceptual difficulties introduced by imperialism’s extra-territorial legal order: ‘Of the 233,008 persons born in foreign states, 34,895 declared themselves to be British subjects, leaving 198,113 who were presumably foreigners both by birth and nationality’ (Census, 1893, p. 65). While Bell and Mark Sykes claimed ‘scholarly research’ as their primary task in the Levant, most foreigners explained that capital brought them to the imperial centre: ‘the greater part of the foreigners in England and Wales are there for business purposes, or as sailors on board ships trading with this country’ (Census, 1893, p.  65). Of 1,241 Turks nationwide, 169 were self-employed merchants or brokers, 72 worked as commercial clerks, and 41 served on board the merchant marine (Census, 1893, p. 69). While Ottoman nationality law (1869) provided a single citizenship for Turkish-speaking residents of Anatolia, as well as Arabicspeaking residents of the east Mediterranean and Nile valley, Britain’s census distinguished between Turks, Arabs, and Egyptians. In the 1891 census, the West Midland counties noted 14 males and 7 females from ‘Turkey’, 1 female from Asian ‘Arabia’, and 6 males and 3 females from African ‘Egypt’; Gloucestershire registered 4 male and 4 female Turks, with 2 male Egyptians; Warwickshire noted 5 male and 2 female Turks, and 2 male with 1 female Egyptians; and Staffordshire 3 male Turks, 1 female Arab, and 2 male and 1 female Egyptians (Census, 1893, table 10). Miss Bell agreed to spend an evening meal with the newlyweds. ‘Their dinner in Jerusalem, it seems, became an exercise in showmanship, each trying to outdo the other in Oriental learning, knowledge of routes and the

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Gertrude Bell, femme impériale

prices of animals and guides, with Mrs. Sykes, Edith, trying stoutly but ineffectually to keep the peace’ (Winstone, 2003, pp. 97–98).11 Mark Sykes subsequently referred to the red-haired guest as a ‘flat-chested, manwoman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blithering ass’ (quoted in Adelson, 1975, pp. 108–09). Mark Sykes – a close neighbour of her family, perhaps best known for negotiating with Georges Picot the division of predominantly Arabic-speaking Ottoman populations between British and French administration  – also described Bell as a ‘bitch’ and ‘an infernal liar’ (quoted in Adelson, 1975, p. 109). Miss Bell, for her part, described the evening she passed in the Sykeses’ company in quite different terms. She wrote to her stepmother, Florence (Mrs Hugh Bell), that her hosts received her ‘with open arms, kept me to dinner and we spent the merriest of evenings’ (1905). Perhaps Bell wrote in the expectation that this polite text would actively engage her reader. After all, Florence Bell contributed her expertise on personal comportment to the empire’s journal of opinion, observing that ‘If urbanity were persistently taught and practiced in the home there would not be so much to learn, and especially to unlearn, with regard to intercourse with the world at large. People would not then have two manners – one to use in public, and one in private. There would be less self-consciousness and less affectation …’ (F. Bell, 1898, p. 289). Referring to that evening passed in the Sykeses’ company as ‘the merriest’, Bell splintered her observations, scattering the shards throughout travel observations through Ottoman provinces, to yield a private code suitable for public discussion but nonetheless understood by its addressee (Adelson, 1975, p. 312 n. 7). Miss Bell’s prose turns our attention to inexpressible dangers, as Sara Suleri suggests in a discussion of Anglo-Indian women’s painted and literary sketches. Following Edward Said’s observation that the ­nineteenth-century novel synchronised domestic with international authority (1994, p. 87), Suleri notes that imperial womanhood occupied a difficult position in the conceptual order. A European woman was undistinguished by gender from the native woman who – through her seclusion, through her embodied observance of ‘tradition’ – represented a moral challenge to modern imperial government. The European woman ‘brings both amelioration and conversely an intensification of cultural fear, since the domesticity of her presence further signifies how much protection is required to keep her aesthetic separated from native tradition’ (Suleri, 1992, p.  78). Suleri asserts that the empire’s women bore the strains of self-censorship, which many sublimated in the pursuit of the picturesque indicative of women’s physical insecurity. Imperial womanhood manipulated the picturesque’s visual vocabulary to endow fragility as both denial of violence and awareness of danger. This preference for the anecdotal over the historical may, as Suleri proposes, serve to dilute masculinist historiography (Suleri, 1992, p. 82).

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Global connections and entanglements Perhaps this would be an appropriate moment to acknowledge not only how gender-aware histories struggle to identify the gender of danger, but also how Whiteness and patriarchy establish alliance agents across race and ethnic difference (Ware, 1992;).12 Miss Bell was no sketching woman: Herbert Richmond drew a caricature of her as a woman seated on a carpet in the midst of seated males. Bell’s kneeling figure is reduced to the organic shapes of covering skirt and jacket; like her body, her head is invisible beneath a helmet. Only her hands are visible; the right holds a baton like an orchestra conductor’s, and the left holds a cigarette to match the water pipe and cigarette being smoked by the figures to her (and the viewer’s) left. For indeed she is surrounded by native informants: two Muslims on her left (Nubian and Kurd) and two non-Muslims on her right (Han and South Asian).13 To the left of the carpet stands a clean-shaven Turk, wearing fez and frock coat and carrying a cigarette (multinational empire’s urbane cosmopolitanism); to the right of the carpet, a bearded Greek armed with musket and pistol (militarised national particularism). An Astrakhan hat and Russian boots mark the character seated across from Bell as her adversary in the Great Game.14 Apparently calm in the midst of these men, Bell seems oblivious to danger. The caricature is captioned, ‘From Trebizond to Tripolis / She rolls the Pashas flat / And tells them what to think of this / And what to think of that’ (see Goodman, 1985, p. 37).15 Miss Bell thrilled when her conversations with Ottoman notables turned to free trade. Liberal economics were her family politics: her father acknowledged that his economic views were formed in the 1860s on the principle that ‘the best bargain is not the bargain out of which either one party or the other gets the best, but that from which each draws his advantage, and will therefore desire to repeat the process. There is trade enough for us all, and the more prosperous each is, the more prosperous we all are’ (H. Bell, 1916, p. 27). Her letters home report such evenings in 1921 such as ‘We didn’t talk politics, but Ja’far Abu Timman, who is a merchant, told us about the Persian trade which led us into a discussion on free trade and other things – just as if it had been a London dinner party’ (1921b).16 While visiting Aleppo, Gertrude Bell was invited to a social gathering for members of the Committee of Union and Progress political party: We sat down and drank tea, and they asked me what I thought of Aleppo … We then went into a committee room where some twenty persons were engaged in considering what steps should be taken to promote the commerce of the town. They all got up, and I was put at the head of the table, presiding over this strange company of Turks, Arabs, Jews, Christians, sheikhs in turbans, doctors, merchants and heaven knows what. One after another they took up the word, sometimes in French and sometimes in Arabic, and told me how much they owed my country, and finally they all got up and cheered me and England. It was absurd and touching, a little false and a little genuine, but

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Gertrude Bell, femme impériale whether they were really pleased to see me or not (there was an old sheikh on my right hand whose expression was not smiling!) I had a real sense of exhilaration. (1909a)17

For Miss Bell, the state’s function in a liberal universe was to extend markets, not restrict international trade. Describing the approach to Baghdad in 1911, she wrote that the plains ‘are now coming back into cultivation as the merchants of Aleppo acquire and till them, or enter into an agricultural partnership with their Arab proprietors, and if the Baghdad railway is brought this way, as was confidently expected, the returns from them will be doubled or trebled in value’ (1924a, p. 34). Among her papers is an account of Bell’s discussion with an archaeologist colleague, one Dr Rosen, about the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway in terms of two different points of view on the allocation of wealth under nation-state modernity. ‘G.B. “I can’t see where the money is to come from to complete it.” Dr. R. “It would be quite easy to get money if we might raise the customs”’ (Burgoyne, 1958, p.  229). With the war, the Committee of Union and Progress reasserted the Ottoman state’s right to tax foreign citizens and their investments,18 until the Sèvres treaty restored nineteenth-­century imperialism’s legal forms.19 Bell later committed her assessment of the Committee of Union and Progress to the pages of The Times, with the observation that ‘Fanaticism and ignorance are dangerous allies’ (1913a).20 Miss Bell was the child of a wealthy family. A way was ‘at first largely made for her by inheritance and by family connections’ (Courtney, 1931, p. 58). Her grandfather was the industrialist and researcher Isaac Lowthian Bell, to whom ‘Gertrude owed her vital qualities of mind and will, and the vast fortune that was her sheet-anchor’ (Winstone, 2003, p.  2). Bell Brothers merged with its leading competitor, Dorman Long, and ‘as a result, the Bells became exceedingly rich in terms of liquid cash overnight. Part of the money was invested in new family estates. Part was distributed to grand-children, nephews and nieces, all of whom received £5,000. The residue went to Gertrude’s father’ (Winstone, 2003, p.  94). With supplementary income from publications, Bell planned a journey across the Nejd desert to Hayil, capital of the Rashid family, just as Charles Montagu Doughty had described in his Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888). Punch in 1893 published this witty aside: A Lady an explorer? A traveler in skirts? The notion’s just a trifle too seraphic: Let them stay and mind the babies, or hem our ragged shirts; But they mustn’t, can’t and shan’t be geographic. (Punch, or The London Charivari, 1893)

In November 1913, at the age of forty-five, Miss Bell asked her father for £400 and purchased twenty camels (1913c). When she left Damascus, she and her party of attendants had their reasons for staying away from the

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Global connections and entanglements railway line; in freezing weather, she reached her destination in forty days. ‘Hayil as it stands today is of comparatively recent date, but it preserves a traditional architecture which goes back, I make no doubt, to very early times. Arab princes before the Prophet must have received their poets of the Age of Ignorance in just such palaces as those in which the Sheikhs of Shammar hold their audiences’ (quoted in Hill, 1977, p. 24). Bell’s references to architecture and antiquity aside, her expectations were strictly modern: she was running out of money and planned to collect £200 due to her since she had left a cheque with the Rashidi Amir’s Damascus representative. ‘I spent eleven days in the Shammar capital. The Amir [Sa’ud Ibn Rashid] was away, raiding the Ruwalla, and though I was well received by his representatives, they were either unable or unwilling to allow me much liberty’ (Bell, 1914c, p. 77). Miss Bell described and photographed Turkiyyeh, who offered conversation and companionship during the winter days in Hayil. ‘Under her dark purple cloak – all the women are closely veiled here – she was dressed in brilliant red and purple cotton robes and she wore ropes of bright pearls round her neck …’ (Bell, 1914c).21 A stranger in a market town, Bell saw her debtors using Turkiyyeh’s chatter to instruct her not to leave the house without permission, leading to ‘doubt and anxiety’. Bell sold six of her camels; even these proceeds did not yield enough to allow her to move. She wrote in her diary on 2 March 1914: ‘They both say they have no knowledge of my money and it is clear they won’t give it up. I have just £40, enough if Ibrahim lets us go. I am to see him tonight’ (1914b). Yet Bell was under the impression that her finances were not held captive by a man, but rather by the Amir’s mother. ‘The general opinion was that the whole business was the work of Fatima but why, or how it would end, God alone knew. If they intend to let me go I was in their hands’ (1914d). Only after her forthright speech did Fatima open the treasury and send Bell the cash she sought with instructions that she abandon any plans to travel south.22 Bell took the money, photographed all of Hayil in daylight, and arrived in Baghdad in March. As Bell committed to her travel notes, I am suffering from a severe fit of depression today – will it be any good if I were to put it into words, or shall I be more depressed than ever afterwards? The depression springs from a profound doubt as to whether the adventure is, after all, worth the candle. Not because of the danger – I don’t mind that; but I am beginning to wonder what profit I shall get out of it all. A compass traverse over country which was more or less known, a few names added to the map – names of stony mountains and barren plains, and a couple of deep wells – and probably that is all. It’s nothing, the journey to Nejd, so far as any real advantage goes, or any real addition to knowledge, but I am beginning to see pretty clearly that it is all that I can do. There are two ways of profitable travel in Arabia. One is the Arabia Deserta way, to live with the people, and to live like them, for months and years. You can learn something thereby, as Doughty did; though you may not be able to tell it again as he could. It’s clear

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Gertrude Bell, femme impériale I can’t take that way, the fact of my being a woman bars me from it. And the other is Leachman’s way, to ride swiftly through the country with your compass in your hand, for the map’s sake and for nothing else. I might be able to do that over a limited space of time, but I am not sure. (1914a)

Before leaving London, Miss Bell had taken lessons in surveying techniques and map projection. With a three-inch theodolite, she took latitude sightings as she travelled. As she had left Damascus without securing internal travel documents, the Ottoman wali and Britain’s ambassador in Constantinople were absolved of responsibility for her safety. An otherwise unidentified ‘D.G.H.’ recalled Bell’s Hayil stay as the basis for her subsequent work in military intelligence, a reconnaissance trip without danger: ‘being detained in Hayil in a sort of honourable captivity for a month while the Emir remained absent on a raid, she saw the place inside and out, and notably the Emir’s haremlik. Thus when Arab Intelligence manuals had to be compiled in the war, she showed startling knowledge of the relationships, regular and irregular, and also of the domestic crimes, of the bloodguilty Rashid House’ (‘Miss Gertrude Bell: An Appreciation’, 1926). The Royal Geographical Society’s president later observed: ‘in addition to half a dozen latitude observations, Miss Bell took her bearings and kept her marching times, also daily readings of barometer and thermometer, without a break, from one end of this journey to the other. These bearings and readings she noted and recorded in such workman-like fashion that little difficulty was found in plotting her continuous route from and back to Damascus – a total march of about 1500 miles’ (Hogarth, 1927, p. 16).23 Before she published in its pages, Bell was cited in the Royal Geographical Society’s journal (Hogarth, 1908, pp.  556, 559).24 She also received an award from the Royal Geographical Society before the society’s by-laws permitted her to be received her as a fellow.25 As Bell’s mapping exercises were external to academic hierarchies, so too were commercial transactions in Hayil as much on the margins of modern Ottoman sovereignty. Bell wrote to a friend, ‘you will find me a savage, for I have seen and heard strange things, and they colour the mind’ (quoted in Asher-Greve, 2004, p. 158).26 Contemporaries remarked on the feminine qualities of Miss Bell’s disembodied prose. As Janet Courtney noted, ‘her books have also one individual excellence characteristic of her as a woman. She is intensely and instinctively interested in all the little personal details concerning her Arab hosts and friends’ (Courtney, 1931, p.  71). ‘A.T.W.’ eulogizsd that ‘with unwearying diligence she indexed and cross-indexed, collated and checked, wherever possible by personal interviews, every scrap of available information, making the dry bones live by her enthusiasm and the charm of her literary style. Her “office notes” were vivid, accurate, but feminine withal’ (‘Miss Gertrude Bell’, 1926).27 Bell’s embodied reticence,

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Global connections and entanglements her games of ‘hide and seek’, might also be noted in her prose. For example, her initialled contributions to the Arab Bulletin listed local political notables, their locations, and their interests. Without dissenting from her stepmother’s counsel to avoid ‘self-consciousness and affectation’, Bell’s signed submissions to the Arab Bulletin hardly represent the sum total of her contribution. In 1917 Bell contributed five articles (initialled ‘G L.’ or ‘G.L.B.’) to the Arab Bulletin; seven unsigned articles also appeared on Ottoman payments and exchange rates; in 1918, three signed articles with three unsigned articles; in 1919, one initialled article and one unsigned article.28 A biological woman, Miss Bell was frequently read as masculine. Certainly, she encouraged this ambiguity when she chose a masculine saddle or a European man’s garments (Bell, 1900b; Bell, 1900c). In the  formal service of empire, Bell exceeded the category ‘European woman’. A reviewer describes her as ‘an honorary man’ (Fleischman, 2002). Leo Amery noted, ‘she served as a major on the Intelligence Staff, the only woman, I believe, to hold a full Army commission’ (1953, p. 309).29 The Iraqi statesman Nuri es-Said was alleged to have said of her, ‘we objected to her not as herself, but in her role as a man’ (de Gaury, 1961, pp.  43–44). Interestingly, Bell’s correspondence contains a very similar observation: ‘Until quite recently, I’ve been wholly cut off from [the Shi’as] because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don’t permit me to veil – I think I’m right there, for it would be a tacit admission of inferiority which would put our intercourse from the first out of focus. Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women – if the women were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man …’ (Bell, 1920). Mindful of the winding trails that gender left through language, Bell informed her father that an interlocutor confessed he loved her ‘more than a sister, he says, because I am a man – if you understand this confused statement’ (Bell, 1911). Miss Bell’s self-reflections exceeded the male/female binary’s capacities; she was, as she concluded, ‘too female for one sex and too male for the other’ (Bell, 1920). Steven Caton reads cinematic representations of Bell’s contemporary T. E. Lawrence as portraying a Sartrean existential hero, a man whose masculinity derives from his free choices, taking full responsibility for his actions (1999, p. 204). Like Bell and Caton, Catharine MacKinnon also finds binary terms such as male/female inadequate to describe bodies’ relations: The domain of the sexual is divided into ‘restriction, repression and danger’ on the one hand and ‘exploration, pleasure and agency’ on the other. This division parallels the ideological forms through which dominance and submission are eroticized, variously coded as heterosexuality’s male/female, lesbian culture’s butch/femme, and sadomasochism’s top/bottom. Speaking in role terms, the one who pleasures in the illusion of freedom and security within the

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Gertrude Bell, femme impériale reality of danger is the ‘girl’; the one who pleasures in the reality of freedom and security within the illusion of danger is the “boy.’ (1989, p. 324).

MacKinnon’s observations may prove useful for considering Bell as one who moved between the opposite positions, danger and security, notwithstanding the sexed identification of her biological body. In her service to empire, Miss Bell pleasured in the realm of security and freedom. From November 1917 onwards, Britons were able to tax Mesopotamia’s international trade as they saw fit: ‘Baghdad had always been the main customs house, and I was suddenly called upon to organize a rudimentary customs service. Caravans of carpets and skins were beginning to arrive. Security, and also money, were involved and we needed money badly. I knew, and know, nothing about customs and duties, but I found some old Turkish regulations and also some ex-officers of the Turkish régime, and got something going’ (Wingate, 1959, p.  48). Over the following years, Miss Bell’s letters to her father describe her body’s pleasures and the forms of security that made them possible: next evening, Lady Cox, the Slaters and I and one or two more went out to swim and dine  – the place where we swim is exactly opposite Feisal’s new house and as we landed, there was Feisal trailing over the sand in his long robes with his ADC’s and [Prime Minister] Ja’afar [ibn Tuman] looking incredibly huge in Arab dress. There wasn’t room for me to dress in the launch so I went up to a familiar dressing room in the willows above the sand, and coming back barefoot was hailed to Feisal’s dinner, spread on the sand, where as they had all taken off their kerchiefs and abbas I wasn’t out of place with my bare feet and wet hair. (1921a)

Now that we are alerted to the security of Bell’s body, we note note that she found such securtity in close proximity to the modern nationstate’s authority, as well as in modern markets’ informal hierarchies. The Times noted: ‘On 1  August last, excluding the railways, there were 507 British, seven Indian and 20 Arab officers of the civil administration drawing Rs600 (about £42) and over per month. Of the officers drawing less than that sum, 515 were British, 2,209 Indian, and 8,546 Arab’ (‘Our Costly Adventure’, 1920). While her letters to her father may have traversed long distances, Bell was never far from Daddy or from his approval of the democratising effects of free trade. As she wrote to her father, It was the Naqib to his huge delight  – he’s by every instinct an aristocrat and an autocrat if ever there was one  – who gave currency to the word by announcing in the council that Faisal should be king of a constitutional democratic state. He did this with his tongue in his cheek, you understand, in order to catch the public. The other day a Shammar sheikh up from Hail [Hayil] troops in to call. ‘Are you a Damakrati?’ says the Naqib. ‘Wallahi, no!’ says the Shammari, slightly offended. ‘I’m not a Magrati. What is it?’ ‘Well,’ says  the Naqib, enjoying himself thoroughly, ‘I’m a sheikh of the

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Global connections and entanglements Damakratiyah, the Democrats.’ ‘I take refuge in God!’ replied the sheikh, feeling he had gone wrong somewhere. (1921a)

For her father, Gertrude explicated the principles she and Cox established for Iraq’s modern state: that Shi’a majority interests were to yield to those of Sunni Muslims – particularly landowners and tribal leaders – even if such a polity required repressing Shi’a clergy in Najaf, Kerbela, and Kazimain. Under no circumstances was Bell’s ‘democracy’ to be confused with an inclusive franchise. She explained, ‘the big sheikhs should be regularly subsidized and made responsible for sections of the road. The guards over them would be of the sheikh’s people and if incidents occurred the subsidies would be cut off and reprisals made’ (Bell, 1909b). A Kurdish minority was incorporated into the borders of modern Iraq so that the mountains in which they lived might protect Mesopotamia from Turkish and Russian armies (Batatu, 1978). After the 1920 revolt, ‘military’ was the leading category of expenditure in the budget of a state seeking to govern a heavily armed population. The Hashemite state’s policy was an army of conscript property-owners loyal to Faisal and his entourage, not an inclusive political community; for the Mandate’s advisors, a conscript army invited mass rebellion. Given such divisions, air power became a useful substitute for governance. Air power served Iraq’s mandatory state as a technology of control; as Toby Dodge (2003) argues, air power reversed the extant weapons balance in favour of the state. As Miss Bell wrote to her father of an RAF air show: They had made an imaginary village about a quarter of a mile from where we sat on the Diala dyke and the two first bombs dropped from 3,000 ft, went straight into the middle of it and set it alight. It was wonderful and horrible. Then they dropped bombs all round it, as if to catch the fugitives and finally fire bombs which even in the brightest sunlight made flares of bright flame in the desert. They burn through metal and water won’t extinguish them. At the end the armored cars went out to round up the fugitives with machine guns. ‘And now,’ said the A[ir] V[ice] M[arshall] wearily, ‘they’ll insist on getting out and letting off trench mortars. They are really no good, but the men do love it so that I can’t persuade them not to.’ Sure enough they did. I was tremendously impressed. It’s an amazingly relentless and terrible thing, war from the air. (1924b)30

As Bell describes it, military command could be very accommodating to the desires of the rank and file. This brief discussion closes with an attempt to insert modern bodies into John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s arguments regarding informal empire during the nineteenth century. Just as empire established its structures of governance through female as conveniently as through male bodies, local sovereignty and the expansion of empire were not mutually exclusive, since ‘one device was to obtain guarantees of free trade and access as a reward for recognising foreign territorial claims, a device which

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Gertrude Bell, femme impériale

had the advantage of saddling foreign governments with the liability of rule while allowing Britons the commercial advantage’ (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953, p.  15). For Robinson and Gallagher, empire’s borders were extra-­ territorial and co-extensive over time and space with faith in free trade. Between its coverings and its performances, Gertrude Bell’s sartorial style provides the opportunity to consider formal and informal empire. Under imperial rule, property provides possessing bodies with security and subjectivity; capital was necessary and sufficient to bring foreigners’ bodies to the imperial centre. Of course, empire did not require European bodies, male or female, for its continued domination; Europeans were just as subordinate to markets’ dictates and the embodied regulations of modern nation-states as subject populations. Even in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, where access to credit meant access to mobility, conversations turned towards free trade. Nor did modern control require the intervention of militarised bodies: other forces were quite suitable for yielding that ‘combination of strength and tact which makes great leaders of men’ (G.  P.  Leslie, quoted in Thomas, 1992, p.  62). London’s ‘willingness to limit the use of paramount power to establishing security for trade is the distinctive feature of the British imperialism of free trade in the nineteenth century’ (Offiong, 1982, p. 63). Eschewing the ‘incipient schizophrenia’ of representing domination and subordination as though the two were mutually exclusive, we note that even the most mundane bodies’ desires could be satisfied in the imperial system of credit and mobility.

Notes   1 Condoleezza Rice inspired this research project when she visited Wiesbaden army airfield wearing a black military coat and knee-high boots (See ‘Condoleeza Rice’s Commanding Clothes’, 2005).   2 See also Willcocks: ‘Mr. Watts, one of the engineers, was surveying in the deserts near the oasis of Shetata, when he saw in the field of his telescope an Englishwoman riding with a number of Arab horsemen. Great was his surprise when Miss Lothian Bell rode up with her escort and he learnt that she had ridden across the deserts forom Damascus. She pitched her tents at El Khedar and surveyed and measured the ruins’ (1935, p. 262).   3 See also Moore, 2015.   4 See Asher-Greve, 2004; Birkett, 1989; Chubbuck, 2001; Howell, 2010; and Winstone, 2003.   5 See Foucault, 1978, p. 136. See also Bush, 2007, and Satia, 2004.   6 Elizabeth Burgoyne’s Gertrude Bell: From her Personal Papers 1889–1914 (1958), with Vita Sackville-West’s foreword, has been published in Arabic translation as Elizabeth Berguin, Jirtrud Bil: min awraqiha al-shakhssiyah, 1914–1926 (2002) without Sackville-West’s foreword.   7 See also Shapiro, 1994. I’m grateful to Martina Rieker for drawing this to my attention.   8 For a notable exception, see Wallach, 1996.   9 Note that the pro-suffrage Women’s Freedom League’s promoted G.B.’s name as candidate for national honours (see ‘Titles for Women in Britain’, 1926).

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Global connections and entanglements 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

See also Rogan (1996). See also Adelson, 1975, p. 108. See also Shapiro, 1994. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes: ‘I think of the “native informant” as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man – a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation’ (1999, p. 6). See Goodman, 1985, p. 37. ‘The Russians refusal to hear of free trade, and the British inability to force them into it, caused efforts to develop the grain of the Ottoman Empire instead, since British pressure at Constantinople had been able to hustle the Turk into a liberal trade policy.’ Gallagher and Robinson, 1953, p. 13. See Willcocks: ‘Two years afterwards I was working in my office one evening when Miss Bell walked in. She had been in the saddle for twelve hours, and she had been turned back again and again by the Tigris, whose floods were over the country, and she arrived at Baghdad to find that the bridge of boats had been swept away. As there were only men’s quarters in my house, we crossed the river in a coracle and went to the Residency, where we found every room occupied. We then went to the hotel, but found every room taken up except one which was full of furniture from floor to ceiling. No hotel servants could be found, and Miss Bell’s own caravan-men were lying stretched and sleeping all over the yard. To have gone across the river and brought over my men would have entailed a great waste of time, as the flood was now running like a mill-race, so Miss Bell undertook to get her tired-out men to empty the room and put in her belongings. She went up to one of the stretched out figures and said in her best Arabic, which she talks with a pleasing and musical accent, ‘Hassan, O Hassan, don’t you think I should sleep more comfortably in that room if some of the furniture were taken out?’ ‘Certainly, lady,’ said the man, jumping up and rousing his fellow servants …’ (1935, p. 262). See also Kasaba, 1987. See also Khalidi, 1984. Abolition of capitulary rights, 9 September 1914. See Ballobar, 1996, and S¸eyhun, 2002, pp. 170 ff. Treaty of Peace (also known as the Treaty of Sèvres), 10 August 1920, part ix, articles 261 ff. On tobacco taxes, note also Shaw, 1975. See also ‘The Rise of Arab Aationalism’, 1922. Bell’s photograph of Turkiyyeh is among her papers at Newcastle University Library, Album X. I’m grateful to Rashid Khalidi for drawing this to my attention. Bell, 1914d, does not specify how many days or weeks she spent in Hayil. See also Heffernan, 1996. See also Sykes, 1904, p. 557. Bell published her first essay in the Royal Geographical Society’s journal in 1910 (Bell, 1910). Bell received the Royal Geographical Society’s Gill Memorial Award in 1913 ‘for her many years’ work in exploring the geography and archaeology of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Turkey in Asia’ (The Times, 1913). See Domosh, 1991; Bell and McEwan, 1996. See also Winstone, 2003, p. 144; Goodman, 1985, pp. 62–63; Wallach, 1996, p. 128. Compare with Wilson, 1930, p. 158. See also Pamuk, 2000. See also Wingate, 1959, p. 44. See also Gregory, 2004, and Khalidi, 2004.

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Index

Abler, Thomas 207 Adams, James Eli 163 Africa and Africans 19, 193, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200–01, 204–09, 214–15, 249 African Americans 1–3, 5, 6, 9, 19, 20n.1 agricultural labourers see attire: smock frocks Alfred Pausey 215 American Civil War 1, 208 Amery, Leo 258 Anti-Corn Law movement and protests 38, 48 Anti-Suffrage League 251 Arch, Joseph 43, 45 Arkwright, Richard 43 Arnold, Matthew 135 Association of London Master Tailors 74 attire black (colour) 58, 73, 107, 108, 117, 127, 129–30, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 145, 146, 147n.11, 147n.20, 151, 157, 158, 162, 180, 208, 261n.1 boots 36, 43, 81, 83, 108, 135, 178, 225, 246, 254 bowler hats 101, 108, 115 breeches 5, 7, 44, 56, 63 cotton 19, 37, 176, 179, 181, 193, 208

flamboyance 57, 72, 181, 203, 209, 214 frock coats 58, 59, 63, 69, 72, 101, 117, 127, 132, 136, 139, 144, 147n.8, 151, 157, 161, 162, 165, 180, 254 fustian jackets 37–39, 43, 51n.27, 160, 178 gloves 81, 175, 246, 249 handkerchiefs 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 92, 179 shirts 82, 127, 129, 132, 136, 179, 181–82, 184, 225 shirt collars 128, 138, 144 shoes 7, 36, 81, 82, 83, 136 smock frocks 18, 29–49, 50n.16, 51nn.31–33 derogatory symbols of rural labourers 36–37 ‘smock frock farmer’ 30, 33–35, 49 military see West India Regiments and masculinity neckties 127, 132, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 144, 145, 147n.20 top hats 99–119, 120n.16, 127, 130, 131, 134, 151, 157, 161, 180 trousers 43, 58, 63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 74, 83, 131, 137, 138, 139, 144, 147n.13, 179, 180, 181, 184, 193, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208, 214, 217n.27, 228

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268 Index attire (cont.) tweed 115, 117, 141, 184, 209 waistcoats 7, 43, 57, 58, 59, 72, 132, 136, 138, 139, 144, 179, 180, 181 see also dandies and dandyism; second-hand clothing; tailors attire and politics 12–13, 15, 34, 38, 43–44, 45, 47–49, 105, 151–66, 176 attire as non-verbal communication of class, character, masculinity 13, 14–15, 16, 20n.10, 33–34, 36–39, 42, 45, 48–49, 83–84, 101–11, 115, 118–19, 153–55, 161, 165–66, 195, 203, 210 Baer, Marc 160 Bagehot, Walter 15, 159, 162 The English Constitution 12–13 Bailey, Peter 38 Bain, Alexander 135, 139 Ballantine, Serjeant 64–65 Barnard, Malcolm 14, 154 Barthes, Roland 222 Bartlett, Djurdja 15 Bassano, Alexander 142 Bell, Florence 253 Bell, Gertrude 16, 19, 246–61, 262n.15 Committee of Union and Progress 254–55 contributions to the Arab Bulletin 258 liberal economics 254–55 opposition to female suffrage 250–51 Poems from the Divan of Hafiz 251 Safar Nameh: Persian Pictures 251 sartorial style and empire 261 Bell, Morag 251 Bennett, Arnold 74 Bennett, Louise 216n.1 Bennett, Melissa 197, 215 Berry, Graham 227, 228, 232, 239, 240, 241 Besant, Walter 78–93, 94n.10 All Sorts and Condition of Men 79, 91 Art of Fiction, The 86

Children of Gibeon 18, 78–93, 94n.9 critique of socialism 84–87 ‘Value of Fiction, The’ 93 Birdwood, George 139 Birmingham Political Union 39 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 93 Henry Dunbar 74 Braidotti, Rosi 248 Breward, Christopher 15 Bright, John 115, 159, 160, 173 Brown, Ford Madox enfranchised and disfranchised 172–86 passim Work 18, 171–86 Brown, Mary Grace 15 Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) 2 Brummell, Beau 60, 61, 181, 182 Brummett, Barry 15 Buckley, Roger 197 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de 140 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman 58 Burns, John 161 Callaway, Hellen 210 Calvert, Robyne Erica 138 Canning, George 8 Capaldi, Nicholas 127 Carlyle, Thomas 10, 11, 12, 13, 21n.13, 56, 57, 58, 61, 63, 66, 128, 134, 138, 139, 140, 171–72, 179–80 Carlyle’s attire 180 Latter-Day Pamphlets 171 ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ 10 Past and Present 171 Sartor Resartus 10–12, 20n.11, 56, 63, 66, 128, 155, 173, 181, 221 Carrier, William 40 Carrington, Tom 233 ‘Irrepressible Higinbotham, The’ 234–35 ‘Oh! Gemini’ 240 ‘Political “Moor”, The’ 231, 232 ‘Trying On the Old Free-Trade Clothes’ 226–27 ‘Which Shall It Be?’ 233

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Index 269 Caton, Steven 258 Caulfield, Colonel James 197 Chamberlain, Joseph 110, 115 Chartism and Chartists 30, 33, 38, 39–40, 48, 67, 128 Cheng, Vicky 79 Churchill, Randolph 162 Churchill, Winston 9 Clark, Fiona 107 Clark, Gavin 164 Cobbett, William 33, 39 Rural Rides 32 Cobden, Richard 159 Collings, Jessie 30 Collini, Stephen 78, 152 Collins, Wilkie The Moonstone 94n.11 Conekin, Becky 15 Connell, R. W. 112 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 249 Conservative Party 34, 45, 46–47, 48, 49, 68, 113, 115 see also Labour Party and Liberal Party Cook, Sylvia J. 228 Cooper, Elizabeth 197 Corn Importation Bill 34 Corn Laws 34, 42 Cosans, Christopher 136 Courtney, Janet 257 Cox, Caroline 15 Craik, Dinah Mulock ‘Benevolence – or Beneficence?’ 87 Sermons out of Church 87 Craik, Jennifer 18, 126 Cribbs, W. D. 197 Crimea 178 Crimean War 134, 206 Cross, Sir Richard Assheton 113 Cuffay, William 67 Culverwell, Richard 72 dandies and dandyism 11, 21n.13, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 181, 182, 184, 214, 215 Dawson, Christopher 127 de Gaury, Gerald 246 Demerara Rebellion (1823) 200

Dewhirst, Catherine 241 de Young, Justine 15 Dickens, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson 58, 59 Dickens, Charles 56–59, 61, 62, 71, 73 Bleak House 176 Dickens’s attire 57–58 Great Expectations 56, 58, 61 Our Mutual Friend 176 Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton 58 Dickens, Henry Fielding 59 Dickson, John 251 Diderot, Denis 13, 138 Disraeli, Benjamin 13, 14, 72–74, 159 Disraeli’s attire 72–73 Endymion 71–72, 74 Vivian Grey 72 Dodge, Toby 260 D’Orsay, Count Alfred 58 Doughty, Charles Montagu 256 Travels in Arabia Deserta 255, 256 Doyle, John (pseud. H.B.) 7, 8, 9 ‘Fancy Ball: Jim Crow Dance & Chorus’ 15 Ducrow, Andrew 235–36 Duffy, Michael 197 Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan 228, 230, 231 Duke of York (later George V) 74 Dyck, Ian 30 Dyde, Brian 197 East India Company 134, 139 Edward, Prince of Wales 47, 71, 73, 74, 75, 109 Edwards, Janis L. 223 Elections Bill (2021) 9 Eliot, George Daniel Deronda 94n.11 Felix Holt the Radical 159 Ellis, Colonel A. B. 208 Ellis, Major Alfred 197, 201, 205 E. Moses and Son 182 Entwistle, Joanne 126 Epstein, James 107, 154 Errington, George 164 Evans, Caroline 14 facial hair 69, 127, 128, 134, 138, 139, 141, 142, 147n11

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270 Index Faisal I, King (of Iraq) 248, 259, 260 Fanon, Frantz 248 Finkelstein, Joanne The Fashioned Self 105 Flügel, John Carl 17, 104, 146n.5 The Psychology of Clothes 104 Foucault, Michel 211 Francis, James Goodall 227, 237, 239 Fraser, Sir William 73 French Revolution 107, 128, 138, 146 Frith, W. P. 172 Gallagher, John 260 Galsworthy, John 74 George III 159 George IV 105 George, Lloyd 163, 164 Gillray, James 32 Gingell, Job 42 Gladstone, William Ewart 13, 14, 46, 106, 110, 113, 121n.34, 145, 162, 185–86 Glorious Revolution (1688) 104 Glubb, John Bagot 249 Goldwater, Barry 2 Graham, Cunninghame 117 Graham, James 8 Grainger, Percy 50n.21 Greeves, Augustus Frederick Adolphus 233 Grey, Charles 8 Griffin, Ben 162, 163 Grisis, Carlotta 182 Grosse, Frederick ‘The Philosophy of Clothes’ 221, 223 Grosz, Elizabeth 248 Hadley, Elaine 140 Haines, William 221–23 Haldane v. Landseer (1862) 64, 65–66 Hall, Stuart 195 Harcourt, Sir William 110 Hardie, Keir 103 Hardie’s attire 115–18 Hardy, Thomas 45 Far from the Madding Crowd 74 Harvey, David 135 Haulman Kate 15 Hay, Claude 165

Heales, Richard 224, 228–30 Helps, Arthur 140 Henderson, John 212–14 Henty, G. A. 209 Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael Edward 113 Higinbotham, George 234–35, 241 Hill, Constance Valis 6 Hobsbawm, Eric 107 ‘Hodge’ (stereotype of rural labourer) 30–31, 34, 38, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48 Hood, Thomas ‘Song of the Shirt, The’ 225 hooks, bell 248 Hotham, Sir Charles 221–23 Household Franchise (Counties) Bill 44 House of Commons 18, 67, 102, 151–66 top hat 111–19, 161 Rules of Procedure 113 parliamentary uniform 151, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166 see also attire as non-verbal communication Howitt, William The Rural Life of England 36 Howkins, Alun 31 Hudson, George 71 Hutton, R. H. 159 Hyde Park franchise demonstration (1884) 44–45 imperialism and imperial rule 19, 135, 193, 197, 200, 206, 210, 213, 246, 248–49, 252, 253, 255, 261 domestic imperialism 18, 31 imperial uniforms 194–95, 202, 217n.23 Jackson of Cork Street (tailor) 73 Jackson, Patrick 140 Jamaica see West India Regiments Jansen, M. Angela 18 Jeffries, Richard Hodge and his Masters 45 Jerrold, Douglas 58–59, 61, 231 Nell Gwynne 59 Jim Crow 2, 4–5, 6–8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 39 ‘Jump Jim Crow’ 6–7 Johnson, Boris 9

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Index 271 Joyce, Patrick 17 Justman, Stewart 136 Keats, John 230 ‘Meg Merrilies’ Keenan, William 154 Kenealy, Edward 158 Kennard, Jr, James 6 Kerferd, George 227, 232–33, 241 Kidd, Joseph Bartholomew 199 Kim, Haejoo 79 Kingsley, Charles Alton Locke 60 Kuchta, David 104 Labouchere, Henry 113 Labour Party 9, 115, 122n.37, 157, 160–61, 165, 166n.4 see also Conservative Party and Liberal Party Lady Derby 132 Lamb, Charles ‘Gypsy’s Malison, The’ 230 Lambert, David 197, 215 Lamb, William 8 Landseer, Sir Edwin 64–65 Langton, Edward 227, 231, 239–40, 241 Laver, James 214 Lawrence, Jon 159 Lawrence, T. E. 246, 258 Lawson, Sir Wilfrid 164 Leach, James 40 Legislation Act of Union (1800) 112 Allotment Act (1887) 47 Constitution Act (1855) 221 For the People Act (2021) 2 Mutiny Act (1807) 199 Nicholson Land Act (1860) 233–34 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) 34 Reform Act (1832) 12, 34, 151, 159, 173, 175–78, 183, 184, 185 Reform Act (1867) 18, 43, 151, 158–60, 173, 183, 185 Smallholdings Act (1892) 47 Tithe Commutation Act (1836) 34 Voting Rights Act (1965) 3 Lehmann, Ulrich 17

Lemire, Beverly 15 Lewis, Arthur 71 Lewis, Charles 113 Lewis, Clive 9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 88 Lhamon, Jr, W. T. 6 Liberalism 15, 18, 78, 80, 92, 112, 117, 126–27, 152 Liberal Party 12, 13, 43, 45, 46, 56, 66, 68, 106, 113, 115, 117, 161, 164 see also Conservative Party and Labour Party Lincoln, Abraham 1 Lord Grey 8 Lord Melbourne 8 Lord Morpeth 112 Lord Spencer 162 Louis Napoleon 72 Louverture, Toussaint 204 Lowe, Robert 173 Lowthian, Isaac 255 Lucy, Henry 153, 164 MacKinnon, Catharine 258 Macleod, Dianne Sachko 251 MacPherson, John Alexander 228 Maidment, Brian 180, 182 manhood and manliness 62, 64, 65, 67, 117, 134, 162, 163, 178 see also masculinity Markham, Violet 250 Marx, Karl 65–66 masculinity 16–17, 48, 56, 61, 88, 107, 109, 112, 118, 139, 162, 194, 195, 203, 211–13, 214, 216, 258 colonial masculinity 202, 213, 249 hegemonic masculinity 101–04, 112, 115, 117 masculine renunciation 17, 104 Massad, Joseph 249 Maurice, Frederick Denison 172, 179, 180, 184, 185 Maurice’s attire 180 Mauss, Marcel 78 Mayhew, Henry 58–59, 61, 81 McClellan, Major-General 213 McCulloch, James 226–27, 231, 234, 235, 236, 239, 241 McEwan, Cheryl 251

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272 Index McIntire, Gabrielle 249 McLean, Thomas 9 Illustrative Key to the Political Sketches of H.B. 8 Melbourne Punch 19, 221–41 ‘Alarming Specter of Free Trade’ 231 Argus 224, 236, 237, 238 ‘Eel Skin Clothing’ 227–28 ‘Extremes Meet’ 239–40 ‘First Lesson in Political Economy, The’ 224–25 ‘Gape, Sinner, and Swallow!’ 228–30 ‘In Training’ 239 ‘In Training for the Fight’ 239 ‘Irrepressible Higinbotham, The’ 234–35 ‘Ministerial Ducrow, The’ 235–36 ‘Oh! Gemini’ 240 ‘Philosophy of Clothes, The’ 221–23 ‘Political “Moor”, The’ 231–32 ‘Reversible Coat, The’ 226 ‘Same Old Fight, The’ (cartoon) 236–38 ‘Same Old Stupid Fight, The’ 236–37 ‘Song of a Whip, The’ 225 tailors and politicians in colonial Australia 225–28 ‘Trying On the Old Free-Trade Clothes’ 226–27 ‘Warming Pans, The’ 233–34 ‘Which Shall It Be?’ 233 Melton, Henry 106, 108–09 Meredith, Augustus 62 Meredith, George 61, 62–63, 64, 65 Evan Harrington 56, 61, 62, 64, 65 Meredith’s attire 62 Meredith, Melchizedec 61–62, 73 Mill, James 175 Mill, John Stuart 10, 13, 126–46, 160, 161, 175 Mill’s attire 127, 135, 136–39 On Liberty 127, 135, 136, 140 System of Logic, A 146n.3 Milton, John 136 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 249 Monks, Aoife 230 Moore, Sir John 200 Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) 200 Morgan, J. P. 73

Morgan, Simon 17 Morley, John 13, 15, 110, 126–46, 147n.20, 152 Modern Characteristics 140, 142 Morley’s attire 140, 142–46 ‘Social Salamanders’ 140–41 Studies in Conduct 140 ‘Used of Dignity, The’ 142 Mosse, George 163 Murgu, Cal 163 Napoleon III 72, 177 Napoleonic Wars 35, 61, 199 Narayan, Rosalyn 197 Nathan and Sherlock 215 National Agricultural Labourers’ Union (NALU) 30, 43, 45, 47, 51n.36 National Charter Association 40 Navickas, Katrina 17 New Poor Law 33, 40 New South Wales 235–39 Nicholson, William 233–34 Nixon, Mark 17 O’Connell, Daniel 8 O’Connor, Feargus 39 O’Connor, T. P. 146, 156, 157, 158, 162 Sketches in the House 160 O’Gorman, Frank 153 Oldstone-Moore, Christopher 139 Oliphant, Margaret 144 Olmsted, Frederick 37, 38 Orientalism 200, 207–08 Ottoman Empire 246, 252, 261, 262n.14 Ouless, Walter William 144 Parker, Sarah 152 Parkes, Sir Henry 237–38 Parkins, Wendy 15 Parnell, Charles Stuart 164, 165 Parry, Jonathan 16 Pater, Walter 145 Studies in the History of the Renaissance 144 Pearson, Samuel Week Day Living 155 Pecora, Vincent 78

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Index 273 Pentland, Gordon 17 Peoples, Sharon 211 performative nature of politics 9, 17, 153 performativity 15, 18, 38, 214, 216, 231, 235 Peterloo Massacre (1819) 106, 107 Pickering, Paul 152 Picot, Georges 253 Pitkin, Thomas 47 Place, Fancis 67 Pointon, Marcia 107, 110–11 Poole, Henry 59, 71–74 Punch 13, 36, 61, 105, 121n.34, 156, 171, 173, 186 Pyke, Vincent 233 Queen Victoria 113, 115, 206, 207 Diamond Jubilee 209, 210 Rappoport, Jill Giving Women 88 Rational Dress Society 250 Reay, Barry 32 Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction 1–3, 5 Redmond, John 163, 164 Reid, Fred 117 Ricardo, David 81 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth 4–5, 6 see also Jim Crow Rice, Thomas Spring 8 Richmond, Herbert 254 Riello, Giorgio 19 Roberts, Matthew 17 Robinson, F. Mabel 80 Robinson, Ronald 260–61 Rolt, John 72 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 2 Root, Regina A. 15 Rothschild family 73 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 138 Royal Agricultural Society of England 35 Royal Commission on Old Age Pensions (1884) 47 Royal Geographical Society 250, 251, 257 Ruskin, Charles 60 Russell, John 8, 121n.35, 161–62, 183

Said, Edward 253 Saint Domingue 198 Samuelson, H. B. 113 sartorial differentiation, 11 sartorial metaphors 2, 9, 13, 128 Saunderson, Edward James 158 Scottish Home Rule Association 164 Scott, Walter Guy Mannering, or, The Astrologer 228, 230 Scully, Richard 241 second-hand clothing 12, 78–93, 99, 101, 205 benevolence 87–91 charity 78, 80–84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92 exploitation of the gift economy 92 socialism 84–87 political reform 79 segregation 1–3, 5, 9, 32 self-presentation 16, 19, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 140 and politics 12, 15, 18, 112, 142 Senior, Bernard 204 Service, James 226, 232 Shakespearean characters 224, 230 Shakespearean costume 230, 231 Shakespeare, William 65 Hamlet 231 Merchant of Venice, The 233 Shannon, Brent 17, 155 Shaw-Lefevre, George 110 Simmel, Georg 13, 146n.5 slavery and enslaved individuals 1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 19, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 216 Smith-Stanley, Edward (Lord Derby) 13, 72 Spencer, Herbert 12, 13, 15, 126–46, 161 ‘Manners and Fashion’ 127–32, 134, 142 Spencer’s attire 127, 132–34, 147n.8, 147n.20 Stallybrass, Peter 66 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn 162 Stephen, Leslie 152, 162 Stephenson, George 43 Stockbridge, William 64

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274 Index Strathern, Marilyn The Gender of the Gift 84 Stultz, George 60, 72 Suleiri, Sara 246 Sully, James 155 Swafford, Kevin 86 Swing Riots 33, 40 Sykes, Edith 251–52, 253 Sykes, Mark 251–52, 253 Dar ul Islam: A Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey 251 Through Five Turkish Provinces 251 Syme, David 225

Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 138 Tylden, Major G. 197

Tailor and Cutter 75, 157, 161 tailors 13, 18, 56–75, 130, 144, 180, 194, 206, 216, 221, 223, 224–28 bond of credit with client 58–60 sexual associations 63–64 stereotypes, epithets, libels 62, 66–67, 68 Thackeray, William Makepeace 60 Adventures of Philip, The 60, 61 History of Pendennis, The 61 Newcomes, The 60 Paris Sketch Book, The 60 Thomson, J. J. 59 Tolpuddle Martyrs 40 Tosh, John 162 Trevelyan, George 44 Trollope, Anthony 66, 71, 73 Can You Forgive Her? 67, 69 Doctor Thorne 66 Duke’s Children, The 68, 69 He Knew He Was Right 69 Lady Anna 67, 68–69 Marion Fay 67 Prime Minister, The 69 Ralph the Heir 68 ‘Tailor, The’ 71 Thackeray 71 Three Clerks, The 56, 66 ‘Turkish Bath, The’ 70–71 Vanity Fair 60, 69, 71, 134, 136 Way We Live Now, The 121n.27 Truman, Harry 2 Trump, Donald J. 1, 9 Tsar Alexander II 132

Wahl, Kimberly 16 Walters, Catherine ‘Skittles’ 73 Ward, Leslie (‘Spy’) 69 Ware, Vron 250 Warnock, Raphael 1, 2, 3, 9, 19, 20n.1 Warnock, Verlene 19 Watkins, John 132 Watts, G. F. 145 Welsh, Jane 180 Wellesley, Arthur 8 Wells, H. G. 74 New Machiavelli, The 156 West India Regiments 193–216 Caribbean identity 197, 216 uniform defined 196 uniforms described 201–03, 208–09 zouave uniform 193, 206–09, 211, 213, 215–16 see also slavery and enslaved individuals West Indies 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 207, 210, 215, 216 Whiteing, Richard No. 5 John Street 75 Wiesner, Merry Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe 105 Wilson, Elizabeth 11, 14, 126 Woolf, Virginia 212, 249 Worth, Rachel 155

Up Park Camp (Jamaica) 199, 210 Vale of Evesham Agricultural Society 35 van Gogh, Vincent Le Zouave 215 Veblen, Thorstein 13 Vernon, James 17, 153 Vine, Charles 42 Voelz, Peter 197 von Arx, Jeffrey 140

Zouaves see under West India Regiments

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1  William Heath, ‘Farmer Giles’s Establishment – Christmas Day – 1800’, 1830.

2  A man’s top hat is blown off over a cliff on a windy day by the sea, 1883.

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3  Herbert Spencer by Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (‘F.C.G.’), published in Vanity Fair, 26 April 1879. Watercolour.

4  John Stuart Mill by Sir Leslie Ward, published in Vanity Fair, 29 March 1873. Chromolithograph.

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5  John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, by Walter William Ouless. exhibited 1891. Oil on canvas.

6  Bobus’s election campaign, detail of Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65. Oil on canvas.

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7  Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65. Oil on canvas.

8  The beer man’s shirt, detail of Ford Madox Brown, Work. 1852–65. Oil on canvas.

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9  A Private of the 8th West India Regiment, 1803. Artist unknown.

10  Toussaint Louverture on horseback, Paris, 1803. Artist unknown. Hand-coloured etching.

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11  ‘A Private of the 5th West India Regiment’, 1812. Aquatint by J. C. Stadler after Charles Hamilton Smith, 1812.

12  Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, 1770s. Oil on canvas.

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13  West India Regiment, 1874, by Colonel A. B. Ellis in The History of the First West India Regiment (1885).

14  R. Sinkin, The West India Regiments.

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15  Vincent van Gogh, The Zouave, 1888 Oil on canvas.