Part 18

He tells me that in Norfolk, where he has come from, the hoop has not come into fashion; that ladies there dress much as they did before Queen Anne came to the throne. The fontage is lower, perhaps, the waist may be longer, but skirts are full and have long trains, and are gathered in loops to show the petticoat of silk with its deep double row of flounces. Aprons are worn long, and have good pockets. Cuffs are deep, but are lowered to below the elbow. The bodice of the gown is cut high in the back and low in front, and is decked with a deep frill of lace or linen, which allows less bare neck to show than formerly. A very observant gentleman! 'But you have seen the new hoop?' I ask him. Yes, he has seen it. As he rode into town he noticed that the old fashions gave way to new, that every mile brought the fontage lower and the hair more hidden, until short curls and a little cap of linen or lace entirely replaced the old high head-dress and the profusion of curls on the shoulders. The hoop, he noticed, became larger and larger as he neared the town, and the train grew shorter, and the patterns on the under-skirt grew larger with the hoop.

I leave my gentleman from the country and I stroll about the streets to regard the fashions. Here, I see, is a gentleman in one of the new Ramillies wigs--a wig of white hair drawn back from the forehead and puffed out full over the ears. At the back the wig is gathered into a long queue, the plaited or twisted tail of a wig, and is ornamented at the top and bottom of the queue with a black bow.

I notice that this gentleman is dressed in more easy fashion than some. His coat is not buttoned, the flaps of his waistcoat are not over big, his breeches are easy, his tie is loose. I know where this gentleman has stepped from; he has come straight out of a sampler of mine, by means of which piece of needlework I can get his story without book. I know that he has a tremendous periwig at home covered with scented powder; I know that he has an elegant suit with fullness of the skirts, at his sides gathered up to a button of silver gilt; there is plenty of lace on this coat, and deep bands of it on the cuffs. He has also, I am certain, a cane with an amber head very curiously clouded, and this cane he hangs on to his fifth button by a blue silk ribbon. This cane is never used except to lift it up at a coachman, hold it over the head of a drawer, or point out the circumstances of a story. Also, he has a single eyeglass, or perspective, which he will advance to his eye to gaze at a toast or an orange wench.

There is another figure on the sampler--a lady in one of those wide hoops; she has a fan in her hand. I know her as well as the gentleman, and know that she can use her fan as becomes a prude or a coquette. I know she takes her chocolate in bed at nine in the morning, at eleven she drinks a dish of bohea, tries a new head at her twelve o'clock toilette, and at two cheapens fans at the Change.

I have seen her at her mantua-makers; I have watched her embroider a corner of her flower handkerchief, and give it up to sit before her glass to determine a patch. She is a good coachwoman, and puts her dainty laced shoe against the opposite seat to balance herself against the many jolts; meanwhile she takes her mask off for a look at the passing world. If only I could ride in the coach with her! If only I could I should see the fruit wenches in sprigged petticoats and flat, broad-brimmed hats; the ballad-sellers in tattered long-skirted coats; the country women in black hoods and cloaks, and the men in frieze coats. The ladies would pass by in pearl necklaces, flowered stomachers, artificial nosegays, and shaded furbelows: one is noted by her muff, one by her tippet, one by her fan. Here a gentleman bows to our coach, and my lady's heart beats to see his open waistcoat, his red heels, his suit of flowered satin. I should not fail to notice the monstrous petticoats worn by ladies in chairs or in coaches, these hoops stuffed out with cordage and stiffened with whalebone, and, according to Mr. Bickerstaff, making the women look like extinguishers--'with a little knob at the upper end, and widening downward till it ends in a basis of a most enormous circumference.'

To finish. I quite agree with Mr. Bickerstaff, when he mentions the great shoe-shop at the St. James's end of Pall Mall, that the shoes there displayed, notably the slippers with green lace and blue heels, do create irregular thoughts in the youth of this nation.

GEORGE THE FIRST

Reigned thirteen years: 1714-1727.

Born 1660. Married, 1682, Sophia of Brunswick.

THE MEN AND WOMEN

We cannot do better than open Thackeray, and put a finger on this passage:

'There is the Lion's Head, down whose jaws the Spectator's own letters were passed; and over a great banker's in Fleet Street the effigy of the wallet, which the founder of the firm bore when he came into London a country boy. People this street, so ornamented with crowds of swinging chairmen, with servants bawling to clear the way, with Mr. Dean in his cassock, his lacquey marching before him; or Mrs. Dinah in her sack, tripping to chapel, her footboy carrying her ladyship's great prayer-book; with itinerant tradesmen, singing their hundred cries (I remember forty years ago, as a boy in London city, a score of cheery, familiar cries that are silent now).

'Fancy the beaux thronging to the chocolate-houses, tapping their snuff-boxes as they issue thence, their periwig appearing over the red curtains. Fancy Saccharissa beckoning and smiling from the upper windows, and a crowd of soldiers bawling and bustling at the door--gentlemen of the Life Guards, clad in scarlet with blue facings, and laced with gold at the seams; gentlemen of the Horse Grenadiers, in their caps of sky-blue cloth, with the garter embroidered on the front in gold and silver; men of the Halberdiers, in their long red coats, as bluff Harry left them, with their ruffs and velvet flat-caps. Perhaps the King's Majesty himself is going to St. James's as we pass.'

_The Four Georges._

We find ourselves, very willingly, discussing the shoes of the King of France with a crowd of powdered beaux; those shoes the dandyism of which has never been surpassed, the heels, if you please, painted by Vandermeulen with scenes from Rhenish victories! Or we go to the toy-shops in Fleet Street, where we may make assignations or buy us a mask, where loaded dice are slyly handed over the counter. Everywhere--the beau. He rides the world like a cock-horse, or like Og the giant rode the Ark of Noah, steering it with his feet, getting his washing for nothing, and his meals passed up to him out by the chimney. Here is the old soldier begging in his tattered coat of red; here is a suspicious-looking character with a black patch over his eye; here the whalebone hoop of a petticoat takes up the way, and above the monstrous hoop is the tight bodice, and out of that comes the shoulders supporting the radiant Molly--patches, powder, paint, and smiles. Here a woman passes in a Nithsdale hood, covering her from head to foot--this great cloak with a piquant history of prison-breaking; here, with a clatter of high red heels, the beau, the everlasting beau, in gold lace, wide cuffs, full skirts, swinging cane. A scene of flashing colours. The coats embroidered with flowers and butterflies, the cuffs a mass of fine sewing, the three-cornered hats cocked at a jaunty angle, the stockings rolled above the knee. Wigs in three divisions of loops at the back pass by, wigs in long queues, wigs in back and side bobs. Lacquer-hilted swords, paste buckles, gold and silver snuff-boxes flashing in the sun, which struggles through the mass of swinging signs.

There is a curious sameness about the clean-shaven faces surmounted by white wigs; there is--if we believe the pictures--a tendency to fat due to the tight waist of the breeches or the buckling of the belts. The ladies wear little lace and linen caps, their hair escaping in a ringlet or so at the side, and flowing down behind, or gathered close up to a small knob on the head. The gentlemen's coats fall in full folds on either side; the back, at present, has not begun to stick out so heavily with buckram. Aprons for ladies are still worn. Silks and satins, brocades and fine cloths, white wigs powdering velvet shoulders, crowds of cut-throats, elegant gentlemen, patched Aspasias, tavern swindlers, foreign adventurers, thieves, a highwayman, a footpad, a poor poet--and narrow streets and mud.

Everywhere we see the skirted coat, the big flapped waistcoat; even beggar boys, little pot-high urchins, are wearing some old laced waistcoat tied with string about their middles--a pair of heel-trodden, buckleless shoes on their feet, more likely bare-footed. Here is a man snatched from the tripe-shop in Hanging Sword Alley by the King's men--a pickpocket, a highwayman, a cut-throat in hiding. He will repent his jokes on Jack Ketch's kitchen when he feels the lash of the whip on his naked shoulders as he screams behind the cart-tail; ladies in flowered hoops will stop to look at him, beaux will lift their quizzing glasses, a young girl will whisper behind a fan, painted with the loves of Jove, to a gorgeous young fop in a light-buttoned coat of sky-blue.

There is a sadder sight to come, a cart on the way to Tyburn, a poor fellow standing by his coffin with a nosegay in his breast; he is full of Dutch courage, for, as becomes a notorious highwayman, he must show game before the crowd, so he is full of stum and Yorkshire stingo. Maybe we stop to see a pirate hanging in chains by the river, and we are jostled by horse officers and watermen, revenue men and jerkers, and, as usual, the curious beau, his glass to his eye. Never was such a time for curiosity: a man is preaching mystic religion; there is a new flavour to the Rainbow Tavern furmity; there is a fellow who can sew with his toes; a man is in the pillory for publishing Jacobite ballads--and always there is the beau looking on.

Country ladies, still in small hoops, even in full dresses innocent of whalebone, are bewildered by the noise; country gentlemen, in plain-coloured coats and stout shoes, have come to London on South Sea Bubble business. They will go to the Fair to see the Harlequin and Scaramouch dance, they will buy a new perfume at The Civet Cat, and they will go home--the lady's head full of the new hoop fashion, and she will cut away the sleeve of her old dress and put in fresh lace; the gentleman full of curses on tavern bills and the outrageous price of South Sea shares.

'And what,' says country dame to country dame lately from town--'what is the mode in gentlemen's hair?' Her own goodman has an old periwig, very full, and a small bob for ordinary wear.

'The very full periwig is going out,' our lady assures her; 'a tied wig is quite the mode, a wig in three queues tied in round bobs, or in hair loops, and the long single queue wig is coming in rapidly, and will soon be all the wear.' So, with talk of flowered tabbies and fine lutestring, are the fashions passed on.

Just as Sir Roger de Coverley nearly called a young lady in riding-dress 'sir,' because of the upper half of her body, so the ladies of this day might well be taken for 'sirs,' with their double-breasted riding-coats like the men, and their hair in a queue surmounted by a cocked hat.

Colours and combinations of colours are very striking: petticoats of black satin covered with large bunches of worked flowers, morning gown of yellow flowered satin faced with cherry-coloured bands, waistcoats of one colour with a fringe of another, bird's-eye hoods, bodices covered with gold lace and embroidered flowers--all these gave a gay, artificial appearance to the age; but we are to become still more quaintly devised, still more powdered and patched, in the next reign.

GEORGE THE SECOND

Reigned thirty-three years: 1727-1760.

Born 1683. Married, 1705, Caroline of Anspach.

THE MEN

Just a few names of wigs, and you will see how the periwig has gone into the background, how the bob-wig has superseded the campaign wig; you will find a veritable confusion of barbers' enthusiasms, half-forgotten designs, names dependent on a twist, a lock, a careful disarrangement--pigeon's-wing wigs with wings of hair at the sides, comets with long, full tails, cauliflowers with a profusion of curls, royal bind-wigs, staircase wigs, ladders, brushes, Count Saxe wigs, cut bobs, long bobs, negligents, chain-buckles, drop-wigs, bags. Go and look at Hogarth; there's a world of dress for you by the grim humorist who painted Sarah Malcolm, the murderess, in her cell; who painted 'Taste in High Life.' Wigs! inexhaustible subject--wigs passing from father to son until they arrived at the second-hand dealers in Monmouth Street, and there, after a rough overhauling, began a new life. There was a wig lottery at sixpence a ticket in Rosemary Lane, and with even ordinary wigs--Grizzle Majors at twenty-five shillings, Great Tyes at a guinea, and Brown Bagwigs at fifteen shillings--quite a considerable saving might be made by the lucky lottery winner.

On wigs, hats cocked to suit the passing fashion, broad-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, round, three-cornered, high-brimmed, low-brimmed, turned high off the forehead, turned low in front and high at the back--an endless crowd. Such a day for clothes, for patches, and politics, Tory side and Whig to your face, Tory or Whig cock to your hat; pockets high, pockets low, stiff cuffs, crushable cuffs, a regular jumble of go-as-you-please. Let me try to sort the jumble.

Foremost, the coat. The coat is growing more full, more spread; it becomes, on the beau, a great spreading, flaunting, skirted affair just buttoned by a button or two at the waist. It is laced or embroidered all over; it is flowered or plain. The cuffs are huge; they will, of course, suit the fancy of the owner, or the tailor. About 1745 they will get small--some will get small; then the fashions begin to run riot; by the cut of coat you may not know the date of it, then, when you pass it in the street. From 1745 there begins the same jumble as to-day, a hopeless thing to unravel; in the next reign, certainly, you may tell yourself here is one of the new Macaronis, but that will be all you will mark out of the crowd of fashions--one more remarkable, newer than the rest, but perhaps you have been in the country for a week, and a new mode has come in and is dying out.

From coat let us look at waistcoat. Full flaps and long almost to the knees; but again, about 1756, they will be shorter. They are fringed, flowered, laced, open to show the lace cravat fall so daintily, to show the black velvet bow-tie that comes over from the black velvet, or silk, or satin tie of the queue. Ruffles of lace, of all qualities, at the wrists, the beau's hand emerging with his snuff-box from a filmy froth of white lace.

In this era of costume--from George I. to George IV.--the great thing to remember is that the coat changes more than anything else; from the stiff William and Mary coat with its deep, stiff cuffs, you see the change towards the George I. coat, a looser cut of the same design, still simple in embroideries; then the coat skirts are gathered to a button at each side of the coat just behind the pockets. Then, in George II.'s reign, the skirt hangs in parallel folds free from the button, and shapes to the back more closely, the opening of the coat, from the neck to the waist, being so cut as to hang over the buttons and show the cravat and the waistcoat. Then, later in the same reign, we see the coat with the skirts free of buckram and very full all round, and the cuffs also free of stiffening and folding with the crease of the elbow. Then, about 1745, we get the coat left more open, and, for the beau, cut much shorter--this often worn over a double-breasted waistcoat. Then, arriving at George III., we get a long series of coat changes, with a collar on it, turned over and standing high in the neck, with the skirts buttoned back, then cut away; then the front of the coat cut away like the modern dress-coat.

In following out these really complicated changes, I have done my best to make my meaning clear by placing dates against those drawings where dates are valuable, hoping by this means to show the rise and fall of certain fashions more clearly than any description would do.

It will be noticed that, for ceremony, the periwig gave place to the tie-wig, or, in some few cases, to natural hair curled and powdered. The older men kept to the periwig no doubt from fondness of the old and, as they thought, more grave fashion; but, as I showed at the beginning of the chapter, the beau and the young man, even the quite middle-class man, wore, or had the choice of wearing, endless varieties of false attires of hair.

The sporting man had his own idea of dress, even as to-day he has a piquant idea in clothes, and who shall say he has not the right? A black wig, a jockey cap with a bow at the back of it, a very resplendent morning gown richly laced, a morning cap, and very comfortable embroidered slippers, such mixtures of clothes in his wardrobe--his coat, no doubt, a little over-full, but of good cloth, his fine clothes rather over-embroidered, his tie-wig often pushed too far back on his forehead, and so showing his cropped hair underneath.

Muffs must be remembered, as every dandy carried a muff in winter, some big, others grotesquely small. Bath must be remembered, and the great Beau Nash in the famous Pump-Room--as Thackeray says, so say I: 'I should like to have seen the Folly,' he says, meaning Nash. 'It was a splendid embroidered, beruffled, snuff-boxed, red-heeled, impertinent Folly, and knew how to make itself respected. I should like to have seen that noble old madcap Peterborough in his boots (he actually had the audacity to walk about Bath in boots!), with his blue ribbon and stars, and a cabbage under each arm, and a chicken in his hand, which he had been cheapening for his dinner.'

It was the fashion to wear new clothes on the Queen's birthday, March 1, and then the streets noted the loyal people who indulged their extravagance or pushed a new fashion on that day.

Do not forget that no hard-and-fast rules can be laid down; a man's a man for all his tailor tells him he is a walking fashion plate. Those who liked short cuffs wore them, those who did not care for solitaires did without; the height of a heel, the breadth of a buckle, the sweep of a skirt, all lay at the taste of the owner--merely would I have you remember the essentials.

There was a deal of dressing up--the King, bless you, in a Turkish array at a masque--the day of the Corydon and Sylvia: mock shepherd, dainty shepherdess was here; my lord in silk loose coat with paste buttons, fringed waistcoat, little three-cornered hat under his arm, and a pastoral staff between his fingers, a crook covered with cherry and blue ribbons; and my lady in such a hoop of sprigged silk or some such stuff, the tiniest of straw hat on her head, high heels tapping the ground, all a-shepherding--what? Cupids, I suppose, little Dresden loves, little comfit-box jokes, little spiteful remarks about the Germans.

Come, let me doff my Kevenhuller hat with the gold fringe, bring my red heels together with a smart tap, bow, with my hand on the third button of my coat from which my stick dangles, and let me introduce the ladies.

THE WOMEN

I will introduce the fair, painted, powdered, patched, perfumed sex (though this would do for man or woman of the great world then) by some lines from the _Bath Guide_:

'Bring, O bring thy essence-pot, Amber, musk, and bergamot; Eau de chipre, eau de luce, Sanspareil, and citron juice.

* * * * *

In a band-box is contained Painted lawns, and chequered shades, Crape that's worn by love-lorn maids, Watered tabbies, flowered brocades; Straw-built hats, and bonnets green, Catgut, gauzes, tippets, ruffs; Fans and hoods, and feathered muffs, Stomachers, and Paris nets, Earrings, necklaces, aigrets, Fringes, blouses, and mignionets; Fine vermillion for the cheek, Velvet patches a la grecque. Come, but don't forget the gloves, Which, with all the smiling loves, Venus caught young Cupid picking From the tender breast of chicken.'

Now I think it will be best to describe a lady of quality. In the first years of the reign she still wears the large hoop skirt, a circular whalebone arrangement started at the waist, and, at intervals, the hoops were placed so that the petticoat stood out all round like a bell; over this the skirt hung stiff and solemn. The bodice was tight-laced, cut square in front where the neckerchief of linen or lace made the edge soft. The sleeves still retained the cuff covering the elbow, and the under-sleeve of linen with lace frills came half-way down the forearm, leaving bare arm and wrist to show.

Over the skirt she would wear, as her taste held her, a long, plain apron, or a long, tucked apron, or an apron to her knees. The bodice generally formed the top of a gown, which gown was very full-skirted, and was divided so as to hang back behind the dress, showing, often, very little in front. This will be seen clearly in the illustrations.