A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (30 page)

Shoes also began to change. The pumps of the Regency, which had been in a multitude of colours and with round or pointed toes, became predominantly black, with toes square or chisel-shaped. Still flat-heeled and flimsy, they were now commonly tied with long laces that criss-crossed over the instep and were wound around the ankle. Worn with white stockings, the effect was extremely attractive.

These had disappeared by the sixties, as had the poke bonnet, and were replaced by elastic-sided boots, which were
de rigueur
for women and girls during the middle decades. Like the male version, they were flat-soled or built up with a slight heel. For ladies they were made in many disparate shades, though black, white and pearl-grey were perhaps the most commonly seen colours. They might be of leather
(kid leather was especially popular), silk or satin, and were often given a pretty two-tone effect with toes of patent leather. On an adult woman, the tips of the toes would be the only part of a shoe visible under her dress.

In the seventies high-heeled, slip-on shoes became widespread, as did the lace-up boot. Having spent several decades in flat shoes, Victorian women went almost to the other extreme, for by the nineties such boots had slender lofty heels and sharply-pointed toes. Some versions, especially those seen in pictures of showgirls, came up to the knee. Most were ankle-length or laced up to the shin at the front and were shaped around the calf at the back. These may have been useful for negotiating muddy town streets, but the heels could easily become stuck in tram-lines or fall foul of similar obstacles. Nevertheless they had about them an undeniable elegance that has caused this type of boot to enjoy several revivals. It can still be bought today, which cannot be said for other types of Victorian women’s footwear.

Though some Victorian men’s styles have survived into the present, female clothing of the era has aroused little envy, or desire for emulation, among women today. Most of it seems absurdly clumsy and uncomfortable, as well as unattractive, to modern eyes. With its emphasis on respectability rather than comfort, and on showy, superficial ornament rather than simplicity – but also because its very elaborateness provoked reactions that took taste in altogether different directions – it is a perfect reflection of its time.

While a Victorian shopping street might be dominated by the plumage of fashionable women, any business district was the province of men. Even later in the century, when increasing numbers of female ‘typewriters’ appeared, they were significantly outnumbered in the streets by the dark suits and top hats of their male colleagues.

Clothing made up so much of the Victorian human landscape that it is worth examining in detail. Male fashions – as is usually the case – changed much less than those of women during the era, but a man of the nineties would nevertheless have looked very different from his grandfather. In every era but our own, costume was an important indicator of social status, income and circumstances. The Victorians would have
marvelled at our abundance of affordable, quality garments, but been appalled by the perverse desire of many well-off people to wear casual or scruffy clothing. Though often impractical and seldom comfortable, the dress of their own clerical and professional classes lent them an undoubted distinction.

Men’s clothing was not as sober in the early and mid-Victorian periods as it had become by 1900. The top hat, which dominated the entire nineteenth century, could be grey or white (or even, in summer, of straw!) as well as black. By the end of the reign only the latter was respectable. Waistcoats, an essential garment that no one could think of leaving off even on the hottest day, were of all shades and patterns. Their vivid hues were as much the product of newly available artificial dyes (‘chemical colours’) as were those on the crinolines of ladies. Loud checks, stripes and designs of fruit or flowers were unremarkable. Gloves were a matter of fashion and not simply for keeping the hands warm in winter. A glimpse of stylish young men at the turn of the sixties is provided by the journalist George Sala, who observed City clerks travelling to work through Ludgate Circus. His description deals with the accessories that indicate their wealth and (questionable) taste. He does not mention that their coats might be of sky-blue and their trousers of pale yellow – a display that would be unthinkable by the time their sons occupied office stools thirty years later:

These are the dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirt-studs, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, death’s heads, race-horses, sunflowers and ballet-girls; the horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern-plate, and knife and fork pins. They are the glasses
of City fashion, and the mould of City form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen, and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented, and warranted, are made; for these ingenious youths coats with strange names are devised, scarves and shawls of wondrous pattern and texture despatched from distant Manchester and Paisley. For them the shiniest of hats, the knobbiest of sticks, gleam through shop-windows; for them the geniuses of ‘all-round collars’ invent every week fresh yokes of starched linen, pleasant instruments of torture.
¹

Coats went from the cutaway ‘swallow-tail’ to the knee-length frock coat. Trousers underwent many changes in the course of the reign. At the beginning, styles were essentially still those of the Regency. Trousers had ‘understraps’ that buckled underneath the instep and were thus kept taut. There were also ‘tights’ – skin-tight leggings that buttoned just above the ankle and could be worn with a swallow-tail coat (Dickens’ Mr Micawber is described – and usually shown in illustrations – as wearing these). From the late thirties, trousers began to have a single opening at the front – as is universal today – instead of a wide flap that let down. Though ‘flies’ seem an obvious convenience to us, their introduction caused some outrage among ladies, who felt that this reminder of the male anatomy was indecent. By the 1860s the fashion was for ‘peg-top’ trousers, and these are particularly evident in pictures of military uniforms, for the shortness of jackets emphasizes their shape. They were tight at the waist and narrow at the ankle, but baggy in between, giving men of that period a somewhat odd outline. In the seventies and eighties trousers became narrower, and might still – following the fashion for ‘shepherd’s plaid’ that dated from the mid-century, be of loud check. It was also not unusual to have the incongruously
military touch of a wide black stripe down the leg. The fore-and-aft crease was unknown, but there was at this time a fashion for having perfectly cylindrical trouser legs, and it was possible to buy wooden sets of legs to place in a garment overnight to ensure that they kept this shape. By the end of the reign the cuff or ‘turn-up’ had come into vogue, though these were not yet a tailored feature of trousers, and men simply turned up the legs themselves – which is why their trousers often look ridiculously short in photographs. George V, whose taste in clothing was formed during the Queen’s reign, for the whole of his life wore his trousers with creases at the
sides
.

By the nineties much of the colour noticed by Sala had departed, for sobriety rather than flamboyance had come to be regarded as appropriate for those who handled the nation’s funds or ran its government. Black, dark grey and dark blue were the shades favoured by all but the wantonly eccentric. In London’s financial quarter:

every City man [is] strapped into a frock coat one size too small and let into a pair of trousers one size too large. There are collars – four inchers – that lap the whole way round with the neat 4s 6d black silk tie (‘all cut from the Spitalfields square’) sometimes restrained by black-headed pins. There are top hats that have to be seen to be believed, for each of them is a shining mirror to reflect the virtue beneath and is sent to the hatter’s each morning to reflect it. If you buy one, it runs you into one guinea if you want one of the best, although there is an inferior quality at 15s 6d, much affected by office-boy adolescence. For the silk hat means a certain ‘five bob a week rise’. It is the insignia of success.
²

As for coats, the same account states that ‘if you are an employer, you wear the frock coat’, and that if you are a clerk, you wear a blue lounge suit, ‘Navy serge, all indigo-dyed’, with a bowler. If you were somewhere in between, you might wear a ‘morning coat’ – the tail coat still seen at weddings – which was a descendant of the Regency swallowtail. These too were uniform in colour, though they might vary in style:

Some morning coats have tails which cling like the wing-cases of a beetle to the waists and nether parts of the wearers, finishing at the bend of the knee. Some, however, the very smart Johnnies, have their tails coming nearly half-way down the calf, and look rather like out of work waiters. But all wear black or grey mixture for the coat, whether frock or morning, and all wear the grey striped or dark mixture of nondescript trousers.
³

The only brief touches of colour might be found in small accoutrements such as ties:

A few of the ultra-ultras have ‘bandana’ ties, yellow horrors with red erysipelas spots; they wear their striped cashmere trousers turned up about three inches; and their buttoned boots are varnished, not polished, every morning. Over their arms they carry umbrellas, bamboo-handled with gold or silver studs. And for gloves, they wear lavender or pale yellow kid.
⁴

The author concludes by describing the remaining articles in the gentleman’s wardrobe. Since he specifies that this is summer costume, we can only wonder how wearers survived the heat of August:

And, of course, what with the impervious vests of thick white linen, the strait waistcoat of a shirt that has a front and cuffs like armour plate (the soft shirt is yet unknown except by ‘low workmen’), and the thick woollen undershirt and underpants – every male walks about in a bath of perspiration.
⁵

Before the advent of central heating it was necessary, during the cooler seasons, to wear this much clothing to keep warm in an office.

Footwear was as prone to change as any other item of clothing. In the thirties men still wore pumps, with buckles or laces, as they had in the Regency, though ‘Wellington boots’ of the kind worn by military officers were also widespread. By the middle of the reign, boots had gained ascendancy. They were often square-toed and, as readers of
Tom Sawyer
will know, there was a fashion in the forties for having the toes on these curl upwards. Vain young men who wanted to achieve this effect had to force their footwear into the required shape by sitting for long periods with their toes pressed against a wall. The most ubiquitous type of boot, from the fifties to the nineties, was the ankle-length, elastic-sided model. This – revived in the 1960s as the ‘Chelsea Boot’ – could have either a flat sole or a heel. By the ‘nineties, lace-up boots, or boots with buttons up the side of the instep, had become extremely common, and were worn in preference to shoes by millions of men (pictures that show the roadways of Victorian cities, with their heaps of horse dung, will explain why boots were more popular). Buttoned shoes, which were even more commonplace among women and children than men, were very laborious to put on, requiring a ‘button hook’ for the fiddly task of doing them up.
Nevertheless, they had their devotees. Winston Churchill, another man whose tastes were formed by a Victorian upbringing, continued to wear them until well into the 1930s.

Among men, those who were clearly gentlemen wore the top hat. Others, whether gentlemen or not, might wear any one of dozens of type of cap. From the Regency and the Napoleonic Wars had been inherited a number of semi-military forms of headdress – caps with chin straps and peaks and cocked hats of hardened felt. By the middle decades another style had arrived: the round, flat-topped pork-pie hat. A version of this with a small peak that sat flat against the forehead was much more common, and was called a ‘cheese-cutter’. These were everywhere during the forties and fifties. They were worn as part of both naval and military officers’ uniform, and appear in photographs of Crimean soldiers, though they were even more associated with civilians. They were extremely popular with boys, whether barefoot urchins in city streets or the Queen’s children photographed at Osborne. David Livingstone was pictured with one, as was Colin Campbell of Indian Mutiny fame. After Queen Victoria began to spend holidays at Balmoral, her sons were often shown in pictures wearing Highland dress, and this led to another fashion in headgear. Many Sassenach children might not have been willing to put on a kilt, but the Glengarry bonnet with its trailing ribbons became eminently wearable. It was worn, as part of uniform, even for English soldiers. It was popular with men as an informal hat to wear when bicycling, fishing or walking in the country. It was deemed especially suitable for small boys, and became part of childhood for millions of them. It made such an impact that it is still worn by some members of that
most Victorian body, the Boys’ Brigade, which was founded in 1883.

There were, of course, many other styles. The shovel hat, which was shallow-crowned and broad-brimmed and which was much seen on clergymen, was for some years known as a ‘Pickwick’ because Dickens’ hugely popular character wore one. At the other end of the reign, in the nineties, the ‘Trilby’ – a brimmed hat with an indented crown – was named after another fictional character, though Trilby was a young woman and the hat got its name through being worn in the 1895 stage production of the novel.

The top hat maintained its dominance throughout the century. It had first been worn in London in 1797, causing such outrage by its strange appearance (no less than four women fainted on seeing it in the street) that its owner, John Hetherington, was charged with breach of the peace and ordered by a magistrate not to appear in it again. Within a very few years it had become universal both in Britain and abroad. The version worn by gentlemen was of beaver pelt – which was prohibitively expensive – but by the start of the Victorian era hatters had discovered the secret of using hardened silk instead. Prince Albert popularized the silk ‘topper’ which, over a decade or so, effectively killed off the beaver hat.