“Becoming Head-gear Is of the Utmost Importance”: Gender Performance, Social Differentiation, and the Codes of Hat Etiquette in Dombey and Son

Abstract

“Becoming Head-gear Is of the Utmost Importance”: Gender Performance, Social Differentiation, and the Codes of Hat Etiquette in Dombey and Son Chen Houliang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution “Profound Cogitation of Captain Cuttle,” by Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”), frontispiece to Dombey and Son, London, The Caxton Publishing Co., 1910. [End Page 138] In Everyday Etiquette: A Practical Manual of Social Usages (1905), Marion Harland and Virginia Van De Water spill much ink on hat etiquette. Although the heyday of hat wearing was waning to a close when the book was published, the authors still admonish their readers: “Becoming head-gear is of the utmost importance” (168). Indeed, hat wearing is so central to the nineteenth-century British schemas of identity performance and social differentiation that, as Michael Paterson notices, “[n]o man or woman during the whole of the nineteenth century would have dreamed of going out with their head deliberately uncovered if they could afford not to–indeed to be seen hatless in the street would be considered a sign of eccentricity if not downright madness” (190). For the Victorians, hat wearing was anything but a trifling matter, and one could never be too careful about hat etiquette. Knowing what type and style of hat one should wear, as well as where, when, and how it should be worn, constitute key points of Victorian propriety. If the significance of hat wearing in the Victorian era is difficult for us to appreciate today because we no longer deem hats an essential part of dress, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848–49) provides for us a window into Victorian people’s everyday practices of hat etiquette, and more importantly, their function in the Victorian codes of gender performance and social differentiation. References to hats and other headgear abound in the novel: from Captain Cuttle’s hard glazed hat to the Welsh wig worn by Sol Gills, Mr. Toodle’s oilskin cap, and Mrs. Skewton’s peach-colored velvet bonnet. Sometimes they are depicted in detail, sometimes only mentioned briefly, but always they are imbued with gender and class implications. As Clair Hughes argues, these “significant trifles” can be used as “a key to the ‘whole,’ [End Page 139] a way into the life of the past” (119). In her essay “‘It Is the Hat that Matters the Most’: Hats, Propriety and Fashion in British Fiction, 1890–1930” (2017), Charlotte Nicklas “examines the ways in which British novelists used references to women’s hats to explore issues of etiquette, character and social change” (90). While Nicklas’s work is inspiring, it does not cover fictions that predate 1890, among which Dombey and Son deserves special attention, not only because of the ubiquity of references to hats in the novel, but also because of the centrality of hat performance in Dickens’s representation of the gender and class schemas of Victorian society. In “Dickens’s Immaterial Culture of Hats and The Pickwick Papers” (2011), Mark M. Hennelly has made a comprehensive study of hats in Dickens’s novels, including Dombey and Son, particularly hat moments related to Florence and Captain Cuttle, but still there remain a lot of issues regarding hats in the novel untouched by Hennelly and deserving further exploration. While Hennelly provides an overview of “a ‘diffusion of hats [and] bonnets’ that perform proverbial, idiomatic and slang, class, gender, moral, psychological, and popular-culture roles” in the Dickensian world (77), I will focus on details in Dombey and Son that are related to hat etiquette, so as to explore how the Victorian cults of bourgeois masculinity, feminine respectability, as well as class identity are exposed by Dickens through his realistic, though sometimes melodramatic, dramatization of everyday practices of hat wearing. I argue that, while hat etiquette is generally performed to regulate gender and class division, and hence works to reinforce the Victorian cults of bourgeois masculinity and feminine respectability, it also creates emotional and cross-class links between people. Particularly, I commend Mr. Toots, whose performance of bourgeois hat etiquette, though outwardly clumsy, actually indicates more democratic codes of dress. Captain Cuttle’s Glazed Hat and the Victorian Ideal of Bourgeois Masculinity The Victorian era...