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It is a noteworthy sign of the times that between 1841 and 1857 the specific references to the dress of men in the text of Punch are much more numerous than those dealing with the vagaries of female attire. The balance inclines in the contrary direction in the pictures which, when tested by old daguerreotypes and the contents of family albums, form a substantially correct and illuminating commentary on the evolution of fashion in women's dress. So we begin with the ladies, with the double proviso that Leech and Doyle and their brother artists on Punch were not fashion-plate designers, and that the charms and extravagances of the modish world which they depicted were drawn mainly from the Metropolis. Punch was a Londoner, even a Cockney, and throws little light on the social life of the provinces.

The Breadth of the Fashion

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

Master of the House: "Oh, Fred, my boy—when dinner is ready, you take Mrs. Furbelow downstairs!"

GRAND CHARGE OF PERAMBULATORS—AND DEFEAT OF SWELLS

ILLUSTRATION FROM AN UNPUBLISHED NOVEL

Aids to Beauty

To speak roughly, fashion in women's dress is subject to two great alternating influences—in the direction of elongation or of lateral extension. In the 'forties and 'fifties the tendency was steadily in the second direction and away from the slim elegance which has been the aim of the modistes of recent years. Long, "mud-bedraggled" dresses are, it is true, condemned in 1844, but width rather than length was the prevailing feature. It was the age of flounces, and this expansive tendency culminated, in the mid-'fifties, in the reign of the crinoline, against which Punch waged for many years a truceless but, as he himself admitted, a wholly ineffectual warfare. The first indication of the coming portent is to be found in the annus mirabilis of 1848, when an "air-tube dress extender" is shown in a picture. This, however, was a single hoop and comparatively modest in its circumference. The crinoline, in its full amplitude, did not invade London until 1856. Thenceforward, hardly a number is free from satire and caricature of this exuberant monstrosity, and the inconvenience caused in theatres, drawing-rooms, in the parks and public vehicles, and in the streets. What with the bath-chairs of invalids, the ladies' dresses, and the children's perambulators, we read in 1856, that "it amounts almost to an impossibility nowadays to walk on the pavements." People were now dressed "not in the height, but the full breadth of the fashion." The structure of the machine, with its whalebone ribs and inflated tubes, was revealed in all its mammoth dimensions. It was denounced alike as an absurdity and as a danger, but satire and warnings were equally powerless to abate the nuisance. But the crinoline was only the most conspicuous and culminating example of a tendency to superfluous clothing and a semi-Oriental muffling-up of the female form, against which Punch has lived to see a most acute and wholesome reaction. A sentimental "Buoy at the Nore" writes to put on record a protest against the enormous sunbonnets which covered up the "dear heads" of beauties on the Ramsgate sands. In those days the use of cosmetics and pigments was far less general; veils and bonnets and sunshades, notably the projection aptly nicknamed the "Ugly," were in great demand. The resources of civilization were employed to preserve complexions rather than to supply artificial substitutes. So we find Punch in 1855 describing with much gusto a young lady at the seaside wearing: (1) A huge, round hat doubled down to eclipse all but her chin, (2) an "Ugly" of similar magnitude, (3) a veil, and (4) a parasol. These huge, round hats, like shallow bowls, were worn by little girls, who were often dressed like their parents with flounces and voluminous skirts. But extremes meet, and along with the monstrous seaside hats—big enough to be used as a substitute for an archery target by undisciplined younger brothers—small bonnets, worn on the back of the head, and tiny parasols were in vogue in 1853. A certain masculinity of attire was affected by young ladies of sporting tastes—in the way of waistcoats and ties for example—but the fashionable world set its face as a flint against anything in the way of rational dress reform. In 1851 we find one of the earliest instances in Punch of the use of the word "æsthetic" in connexion with costume, where in an imaginary dialogue Miss Runt, a strong-minded female, speaks of "our dress viewed as sanitary, economical, æsthetic."28 Mayfair had no appreciation of any of these aspects of millinery, and "Bloomerism" never caught on with the fashionable world.

WHAT MUST BE THE NEXT FASHION IN BONNETS

PLAIN

RINGLETS

This was the age of flounces and crinolines; it was also the age of ringlets. Bands and braids and hair nets are features of early Victorian coiffure, but ringlets were undoubtedly the favourite mode for full dress occasions. The fashion lasted for a good many years. You will find it in the ballroom scene depicted by Leech in 1847, and Leech illustrated Surtees's novel Plain or Ringlets? in 1860. Of the "plain" variety of hairdressing there are several good examples in Punch, notably the head given above, with which we couple the ringleted belle illustrated at the foot of the same page.

ÆSTHETIC PIONEERS

Mrs. Turtledove: "Dearest Alfred! Will you decide now what we shall have for dinner?"

Mr. Turtledove: "Let me see, poppet. We had a wafer yesterday—suppose we have a roast butterfly to-day."

Coiffures in the Fifties

In the mid-'fifties, it may be noted, it was the fashion for women to wear gold and silver dust in their hair. In 1854 it was often dressed à l'impératrice in imitation of the Empress Eugénie, and Punch satirizes as an absurdity the general adoption of a coiffure unsuited to people of certain ages, features, and positions—a wide scope for his wit. Tight lacing is seldom noted, and in one respect the ladies of the time were exempt from censure: high heels had not yet come in, or, if they had, they escaped Punch's vigilant eye. In the main Leech, on whose pencil the burden of social commentary fell, was a genial satirist of feminine foibles. Whether they were dancing or riding or bathing, walking or doing nothing, the young women he drew were almost invariably comely to behold. And that reminds me that the decorum of sea-bathing in the 'fifties was promoted by the apparatus known as the awning, attached to bathing machines. Children were handed over to the rigours of old bathing-women as depicted in the terrifying picture below.

Bathing Woman: "Master Franky wouldn't cry! No! Not he!—He'll come to his Martha, and bathe like a man!"

MERMAIDS AT PLAY

Fashions for Men

Turning to male attire we have to note that the main features of men's dress as we know it was already established, though in regard to colour, details, and decoration the influence of the Regency period still made itself felt. Trousers were first generally introduced in the Army (see Parkes's Hygiene) at the time of the Peninsular War, but pantaloons—the tight-fitting nether garments which superseded knee-breeches late in the eighteenth century, and were secured at the ankles with ribbons and straps, were fashionable in the 'forties. You will see no trousers, as we know them to-day, in the illustrations to Pickwick, and in the early 'forties pantaloons appear in Punch's illustrations of fashionable wear at dances. The cut of the "claw-hammer" dress-coat does not differ from that of to-day, but it was often of blue cloth with brass buttons; shirts were frilled, and waistcoats of gold-sprigged satin. The bow tie was larger, resembling that worn by nigger minstrels. "Gibus," or crush hats, did not arrive till the late 'forties—they are mentioned in Thackeray's Book of Snobs, and gentlemen always carried their tall hats in their hands at evening parties, and habitually wore them at clubs. For morning wear blue frock-coats, with white drill trousers and straps, were fashionable in 1844. Stocks and cravats and neck-cloths had not been ousted by ties. The dégagé loose neck-cloth of the "fast man" in 1848 is ridiculed by Punch, who traces its origin to the neck-wear—as modern hosiers say—of the British dustman. Amongst overcoats the Taglioni, a sack-like garment, called after the famous dancer, is most frequently mentioned; the Petersham, a heavy overcoat named after Lord Petersham, a dandy of the Waterloo period, still held its own. The Crimea brought Alma overcoats, Balaklava wrappers, and Crimea cloaks, and about the same time Punch caricatures a long garment reaching nearly to the heels, which gave the wearer the appearance of a toy figure from a Noah's Ark. There is a mention of the "Aquascutum" waterproof ten years earlier. One Stultz was the fashionable tailor of the time. The chief hatter, however (according to Punch), was Prince Albert, whose continual and unfortunate experiments with headgear have been mentioned elsewhere. Punch speaks of his obsession as a monomania; he only abstained from calling him "the mad hatter" because that engaging personage had not yet emerged from the brain of Lewis Carroll. But Punch himself was much preoccupied with hats. There was a certain elegance about the tall beaver hat which tapered towards the crown. There was none in the rigid "chimney-pot" or cylinder silk hat, the ugliest of all European head-dresses, with its flat, narrow brim, which was "established" by 1850. Punch warred against it almost as vigorously and as ineffectually as against the crinoline. Indeed, in 1851 he even went to the length of suggesting the form and materials suitable for an ideal hat:—

The Ideal Hat

Take an easy and well-cut morning jacket of the form no longer confined to the stableyard or barrack room, but admitted alike into breakfast parlour and country house, or the hanging paletot with a waistcoat, not scrimp and tight, but long and ample, and wide and well-made trousers of any of the neutral-tinted woollen fabrics that our northern looms are so prolific in; and we assert fearlessly that a broad-leafed and flexible sombrero of grey, or brown or black felt may be worn with such a costume, to complete a dress at once becoming and congruous.

WHY, INDEED!

Perceptive Child: "Mamma, dear! Why do those gentlemen dress themselves like the funny little men in the Noah's Ark?"

A MOST ALARMING SWELLING!

The resources of modern newspaper enterprise were not then available to enable Punch to realize his ideal, but he continued to tilt at the "chimney-pot," though he never succeeded in dethroning it. High collars are caricatured in 1854. At first they were wide as well as high, but the "all round collar" of which Punch has a picture in 1854 approximates to the lofty cincture worn by the present Lord Spencer when a member of the House of Commons. The monocle was not uncommon; but the caricature of Colonel Sibthorp, one of Punch's favourite butts, shows that the square shape was still used. White waistcoats were noted as the emblem of the blameless life of the "Young England" party. For the grotesque extravagances of fashion Oxford undergraduates, forerunners of little Mr. Bouncer, are singled out for satire, but if we are to believe Mr. Punch, caricature was unnecessary.

"SIBBY"—

1843

If this was the age of ringlets for women, it was the age of whiskers, short but ambrosial, for men. The long "Piccadilly weepers" of Lord Dundreary were a slightly later development, but Leech's "swells" all wear whiskers in the 'forties and 'fifties. (Is not the habit immortalized in the mid-Victorian comic song: "The Captain with his whiskers cast a sly glance at me"?) They wore small moustaches, too, and occasionally chin-tufts. Under the head of "Moustaches for the Million," Punch, in 1847, ironically suggests the placing of sham moustaches on the market for the benefit of seedy bucks, swell-mobsmen, inmates of the Queen's Bench prison, and all impostors who affected a social status to which they had no claim or which they had forfeited. But what he calls the "Moustache Movement" in the early 'fifties was undoubtedly inspired by military example, and was followed by the fashion of growing beards. The necessity of campaigning became the adornment of peace, and in 1854 and 1855 we find pictures of tremendously bearded railway guards and ticket-collectors, whose appearance terrifies old ladies and gentlemen.

Proctor (to Undergraduate): "Pray, Sir, will you be so good as to tell me whether you are a member of the University, or a Scotch terrier?"

Uncomfortable Uniforms

The vagaries of military uniforms—apart from the intrusions of Prince Albert—call for separate treatment. The new and very skimpy shell-jacket introduced in 1848 evokes imaginary protests alike from stout and lean officers. The short, high-shouldered military cape is guyed in 1851. In 1854 Punch throws himself with great energy into the movement for the abolition of the high stock and the adoption of more rational and comfortable clothing—witness the verses, "Valour under difficulties," depicting the sufferings of a half-strangled militia-man; the caricature of the "New Albert Bonnet"; the cartoon in which Private Jones in a bearskin, black in the face from the strangulation of his stock, is afraid that his head is coming off; the ridiculous frogged tunic with a very low belt; and the comments on the Army Order, issued by Sidney Herbert in 1854, providing white linen covers for helmets and shakos as a protection against the heat. The sufferings endured by soldiers owing to their heavy packs and marching kit are not forgotten. But these abuses, like the story of the bad and rotten boots provided by contractors for the Crimea, do not belong to a chronicle of fashion, but to the scandalous history of commerce. Did history repeat itself in some measure in the Great War?

Rude Boy: "O, look 'ere, Jim!—If 'ere ain't a Lobster bin and out-growed his cloak!"

28. "Æsthetical" was noticed as early as 1847 in a dig at New Curiosities of Literature, and in 1853 we read of an "æsthetic tea," at which "the atmosphere was one of architecture, painting, stained glass, brasses, heraldry, wood carving, madrigals, chants, motets, mysticism and theology."