The Great Undressed

Courtesy Library of Congress.

Traditionally, English fashion followed Parisian modes. The French Revolution (1789) overturned fashion as well as society and ladies abandoned the courtly styles of the ancien regime. They adopted a simple ‘Grecian’ or ‘classical’ look with bare arms, and gowns as straight as a wax candle. 

Lady's Monthly Museum, Dec 1798.

La Belle Assemblée (September 1807) recalled this startling change, led by the daring Mme Tallien of Paris: ‘Nakedness, absolute nakedness, and nothing but nakedness, was therefore seen at the play-houses, at the opera, at the concerts, routs, and in public walks as well as in private assemblies. When one lady left off a fichue [a piece of linen pinned or tied across the bodice], another laid aside a petticoat.  When one uncovered her arms, another exposed her legs or thighs.  Had the progress of stripping continued a little longer...French ladies would in some months have reduced themselves to be admired, envied, or blamed, as the Eves of the eighteenth century’. Mme Tallien’s rival, Mme de Beauharnois, wore ‘flesh coloured satin pantaloons, leaving off all petticoats’ under a ‘clear muslin gown’. 

White muslin gowns were a fashion staple: the elegant Miss Tilney in Austen’s Northanger Abbey ‘always wears white’.Dresses with trains were worn for morning and full dress: heroine Catherine Morland and her friend Isabella ‘pinned up each other’s trains for the dance’. However, a few years later trains fell out of favour even for full dress as gowns became shorter.

Courtesy Library of Congress. Note the short gowns.

The train’s disappearance had an unfortunate side-effect because of the diaphanous gowns in fashion. One's bottom was practically on show, so fundamentally modest ladies wore an ‘invisible petticoat’ to hide their nether regions.  This was a band of very finely knitted material, tightly fitted so that it did not slip down, but it made walking difficult. Luckily by the winter of 1807 trains trimmed with broad lace reappeared for evening dress, although petticoats were now so short that ladies' ankles could be seen by admiring gentlemen.

Down On The Farm

Steventon Rectory

In Jane Austen's day, the dining-tables of well-to-do rural families were supplied with fresh food from their farms and estates: grain, meat and vegetables for the table, and fodder for the horses.  Any surplus farm produce was sold to provide extra income.

The Dairy, Cogges Manor Farm.

At Steventon Rectory, George Austen had a glebe farm (i.e. belonging to his church living), but it was quite small, so he rented nearby Cheesedown Farm to supplement the family’s supplies. Mrs Austen kept an Alderney cow to provide milk and butter. In later life, when living at Southampton and Chawton, the Austen ladies grew fruit like apricots and currants in their kitchen garden.

Butter pats for shaping butter.

Jane’s brother Edward kept pigs. In a letter to Cassandra from Steventon (1 December 1798), Jane wrote, ‘My father is glad to hear so good an account of Edward’s pigs, and desires he may be told…that Lord Bolton is particularly curious in his pigs, [and] has had pigstyes of a most elegant construction built for them, and visits them every morning as soon as he rises’.

An elegant pig in an elegant pigsty.

Rich landowners like Pride & Prejudice’s Mr Darcy had hothouses for growing tender fruits like grapes, nectarines and peaches.  In season, they also enjoyed game from their estates. The Knight family sent game to the Austens from Godmersham. The killing of game by using dogs or a gun was restricted by law to members of the landed gentry, providing they owned estates worth at least £100 p.a., or leased land worth at least £150 p.a. Although the countryside was plentifully stocked with fish and game, a poor man who helped himself to a hare or salmon to feed his family faced jail or transportation.  

Ox Byre, Cogges Manor Farm.

In the towns, households were supplied by farms and market gardens; produce was brought in by waggon or canal boat, or on the hoof.  In London, hundreds of animals were driven to Smithfield market each day. 

Cogges Manor House (17th century).

All photos © Sue Wilkes. These photos were taken at Cogges Manor Farm, Witney, which was used for filming some scenes for Downton Abbey - it was the setting for ‘Yew Tree Farm’.

Beside The Seaside

My latest feature for Family Tree magazine is on the history of the British seaside and its health benefits. When Jane Austen was a little girl in the late 1770s, very few of our ancestors had a bath in their home. During the eighteenth century sea-bathing was recommended for many types of ailments (the ‘sea-cure’).

The patronage of the royal family made sea-bathing very fashionable at places like Brighton, Sidmouth and Margate. Long-established watering-places like Bath, which was famous for its hot springs, fell out of fashion.

Fanny Burney.

People did not necessarily bathe on hot sunny days. In late November 1782, the novelist Fanny Burney (later Madame D’Arblay) went bathing at 6am at Brighton by moonlight : ‘We had bespoke the bathing-women to be ready for us, and into the ocean we plunged. It was cold, but pleasant'.

Fairlynch Museum.

As Austen joked in her unfinished novel Sanditon, great claims were made for the coast’s briny benefits: ‘Sea air and sea bathing together were nearly infallible, one or the other of them being a match for every disorder of the stomach, the lungs or the blood. They were anti- spasmodic, anti-pulmonary, anti-bilious and anti-rheumatic’.
Images:
A Regency belle on a donkey at Worthing – the donkey is refusing to come out of the sea. With a poem by Robert Bloomfield. I. Cruikshank, 1807. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-03595.

Fanny Burney. Collotype after the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale, T.N. Foulis, 1910. Author’s collection.  

A cottage orné at Budleigh Salterton (now the Fairlynch Museum and Arts Centre). © Sue Wilkes.

Waterloo 200

The Iron Duke at Waterloo.

On the morning of the battle of Waterloo, Marshal Soult dared to question Napoleon’s plans. Napoleon snapped, ‘Because you have been beaten by Wellington, you think he is a great man.’ But he’d finally met his match. Bonaparte’s decisive defeat by coalition forces at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 ended his career, and decades of war.

The Duke of Wellington was a national hero, but Waterloo had a massive human cost; over 11,600 British and Hanoverian troops died in this battle alone. Relief funds were set up to aid the widows and orphans of British soldiers killed during the war.

Many special events are planned to remember this landmark battle. You can watch live re-enactments of the main battles on the internet (subscription payable) - tickets to see the events in person are sold out. 

However, if you can't make it to Belgium, there’s a guide to the battlefield here, and the National Army Museum is commemorating the bicentenary with a series of events and exhibitions across the UK (some free) And if your ancestor fought at Waterloo, you may be interested in the Waterloo 200 Descendants Book. 

Images from the author's collection:

The Duke of Wellington on the Field of Waterloo. Cassell’s Illustrated History of England Vol. VI, (Cassell, Petter and Galpin, c.1864).

Napoleon, from an old engraving of a picture by Bouillon. Napoleon: Warrior and Ruler, (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893).

Formation of the Lines of Battle at Waterloo. Napoleon: Warrior and Ruler, (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893.)

Fashionable Fabrics

I'm a guest on the lovely Catherine Curzon's eighteenth-century blog this week. You can read my post on fashionable fabrics in Jane Austen's day here.
This lace collar on display on the Jane Austen's House Museum at Chawton was worked by the novelist herself. The Museum is trying to raise funds to buy a rare letter written by Jane Austen's sister Cassandra - there's more details on its website.
Image © Sue Wilkes.

Marks of Genius

Jane Austen's novels on display - Marks of Genius.

I recently visited the new Weston Library's Marks of Genius exhibition at Oxford. It features some wonderful Austen-era treasures. The poet Shelley's notebook, which contains a draft of his poem Julian and Maddalo, is on display, and the travel journal written by Percy and his wife Mary. A miniature portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and one of the young Shelley, are on view, and a draft of Mary's landmark novel Frankenstein.


An early set of Jane Austen's novels is tantalisingly close to the visitor, and you can also see the manuscript of Jane Austen's unfinished novel The Watsons, and Volume the First, part of her juvenilia (her early works are full of fun).

Austen's Volume the First.

I very much enjoyed the exhibition, which is not limited to Austen's time - you can explore many other fabulous masterpieces from the Bodleian Libray collections, too.

Austen's The Watsons

This free exhibition runs until 20 September 2015, so do make a point of dropping in if you can. If you can't visit, you can buy the exhibition catalogue here.

A Cheshire Cinderella

In a letter to Cassandra (8 January 1801), Jane Austen mentioned that their sister-in-law Eliza Austen had met Lord Craven at Barton, and found his manners ‘very pleasing indeed. The little flaw of having a mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him’.

 

Although Jane does not mention it in her surviving letters, the adulterous love affair with Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton caused a sensation even in a society which often turned a blind eye when a married man kept a mistress. 

Emma’s story began in rural Cheshire. The daughter of a blacksmith, Henry Lyon, she was baptised Emily in the spring of 1765. Henry died when Emily was very young, so she was brought up by her grandmother at Hawarden (on the Welsh border) while her mother Mary went out to work. 

At some point Emily changed her name to Emma Hart, and her mother took the name Mrs Cadogan; they both moved to London. According to a scurrilous, anonymous early biography, Emma found work as nursery-maid to a respectable family in Leicester Square (Memoirs of Lady Hamilton, 2^nd edition, 1815). 

By the early 1780s, Emma’s amazing beauty procured her a less exceptionable role at Dr Graham’s infamous Temple of Health ‘in the Centre of the Royal Terrace, Adelphi’ in London (Dr Graham, Medical transactions, 1780). Graham’s ‘Celestial Bed’ purported to help couples achieve healthy offspring. Emma was one of the exhibits. She displayed her figure draped with fine gauzes, posing as the Goddess Hygeia. (Although fencing master Henry Angelo later loyally asserted in his Reminiscences (1830) that Emma was not the female in question).

Sir William Hamilton.

After a brief spell as the mistress of Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh of Uppark in West Sussex, Emma was befriended by Sir Charles Greville, the Earl of Warwick’s son. She had a little girl (probably Greville’s) who was sent to Hawarden to be cared for by her great-grandmother.  Greville, a parsimonious gentleman, settled down with Emma in a house on the Edgware Road. Her mother was housekeeper and kept the accounts with strict regularity. Greville allowed Emma to visit her daughter in Wales now and again, but to her grief, refused to let her stay in London. 

Two years later, Emma was introduced to Greville’s uncle, Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador at the court of Naples, and a noted collector of antiques. Greville hoped to inherit his estates.

Emma loved the cold, calculating Greville with all her heart. She had no suspicion of his real motives when he suggested she and her mother visit his uncle’s residence at Naples for a holiday. Emma had a fine singing voice; she could have the benefit of the best Italian masters there.

  

But Greville wanted her out of his life. He was on the lookout for a respectable bride. When Emma realized that Greville had sent her to Naples to warm Sir William’s bed, she was completely heartbroken. But Sir William courted her with kindness.

Marylebone Church.

Emma behaved like a woman of spirit. Reader, she married him – although it took her several years. Sir William and Emma wed at Marylebone Church on 6 September 1791. The newlyweds went to Naples, where two years later, Emma met a dashing naval Captain Horatio Nelson, commander of the Agamemnon. And the rest, as they say, is history. You can find out more about the very public love affair between Lord Nelson and Emma in my latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World.

Images

Emma, Lady Hamilton. Heroes of the British Navy, Frederick Warne & Co., c. 1900. Nigel Wilkes Collection.

The Cheshire seaside resort of Parkgate, where Emma Hart stayed in 1784. Illustration by Roger Oldham for Picturesque Cheshire, Sherratt & Hughes, 1903. Author’s collection.

Old Marylebone Church, c.1750. Emma Hart married Sir William Hamilton here on 6 September 1791; her daughter Horatia Nelson was baptised in the same church in 1803 (the present structure on Marylebone Rd dates from the following decade). Old and New London Vol. IV, (Cassell, Petter & Galpin, c.1890). Author’s collection.

Sir William Hamilton. An elderly Sir William Hamilton inspects his antiquities, all of which refer to his wife, Lady Emma Hamilton and her lover, Lord Horatio Nelson. Courtesy of Library of Congress: LC-USZC4-8796.