Woman’s Dress as a Polemical Object in the Mid-Victorian Period

Abstract

This chapter considers woman's dress as a material object, one among thousands displayed in the 1851 Great Exhibition, itself an indicator of first-class British industry and creativity. It examines the social role played by dress in the Victorian era. The chapter explores the question of woman's dress in the context of domestic life and working conditions, dress itself being the expression of woman's desire for independence. Woman's dress will therefore be analysed as an example of the symbolical value of a specific Victorian object not to be exhibited in one's domestic environment only but in the public sphere as well. In the context of Victorian social history, it had become a polemical subject considering the extravagant fashions raising a number of questions related both to women's financial autonomy and capacities health hazards. Dress affords an interesting viewpoint from which to observe habits and mentalities at any given period of history, perhaps even more so in the nineteenth century.