The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

‘Ordinary people often succeeded in owning changes of at least some items of clothing. Many possessed a mix of clothes, some of them coarse and inexpensive, but others costlier and more decorative. Regional variation was muted’ (p. 55). Such are the conclusions of John Styles's investigation into the dress of working men and women who formed the bulk of the population in the eighteenth century. These painstaking conclusions, arrived at from a wide variety of sources, should change our understanding of everyday, non-élite experience. Styles writes from the perspective of an historian who has worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum: his book is sensitive to the crucial questions of economic and cultural history, but it is not monopolised by them. So he is interested in the sartorial choices of individual men and women, ‘their expectations and preferences as consumers’, however they came about, and whether or not they drove the industrial revolution (p. 8). One of the book's most notable features is the huge number of images which begin to retrieve rarely-surviving ‘ordinary’ clothing, its subtle distinctions of quality obvious at the time but elusive now. The evidence which Styles uses is strikingly novel: instead of the inventories beloved of studies of consumption—these mainly relate to those of higher social status and in any case rarely list clothes—and the views of social commentators, he analyses trial records, household accounts, pictures and swatches of cloth. As a result his book reveals life-cycles of individual and familial consumption in a way that more temporally static sources cannot. And he sews his piecemeal sources together into a pragmatics of dress—how clothing was washed, its rates of wear, how and when it was worn, how it formed the texture of everyday life. Against the often dense details of different cloths and cuts, the images are even more shocking: an old woman trying to maintain her fire stares directly out of the back cover in William Bigg's ‘Poor old woman's comfort’, and the numerous swatches of tiny pieces of clothing left with orphans at the Foundling Hospital for identification carry on an implicit emotional argument about plebeian dress.