‘Fashion in undress’: Clothing and Commodity Culture inHousehold Words

Abstract

The miscellaneous clothing of the Marshalsea poor is marked by dis possession in a way that thwarts the establishment of identity. The haphazard combination of patched and misshapen garments produces a scene of undifferentiated poverty. While Mrs Clennam’s worsted gloves and widow’s dress serve to express her cold and embittered selfhood – ‘There was a smell of black dye in the airless room, which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and stuff of the widow’s dress for fifteen months’ (27) – the marginality of the Marshalsea go-betweens is ironically emphasized by the fact that their clothing is so worn-out as to be beyond resale in the cast-off market. Not only do they lack a coherent ensemble, their garments are imbued with the traces of other lives, and their lack of ‘sartorial existence’ is a measure of their social occlusion. Dickens’s description assumes a continuity between clothing and identity as normative only to call that assumption into question as part of the narrative’s social critique. The idea of ‘sartorial existence’, or the lack thereof, in Little Dorrit, points to the more general function of clothing as a symbolic ex pression of identity in Victorian culture, as well as to its particular use in the nineteenth-century novel to define fictional character. Dress is a sign