DEAR DEAD WOMEN '
English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. By C. Willet Cunnington. (Faber and Faber. £3 3s.) Tins is a lovely book. It is not cheap, but buy'it or get it bought for you if you can. It is as generous and rewarding a three guineas worth as you will find among all the books of the season. Within its pages is matter to suit every taste. Not only will it appeal to the expert on dress ; not only will its admirable technical drawings enable a theatrical or film producer to dress a part with historic accuracy, the collector of costumes be enabled to date a given specimen to a year, almost to a month : it will refresh and people with enlivening images many a solitary evening after toil, or add vastly to the luxurious longueurs of a convalescence. To the winter hostess it will be invaluable, for its immense range of information and fascinating illustrations will provide conversation and enter- tainment for as many guests as can get their heads over it. There is matter for the historian, the economist, the student of social conditions. Poet and artist will be kindled. The child will pore over the pictures, frequently laughing aloud, choosing favourites from the ravishing colour-plates, and planting the seeds of heaven knows what fixations. The mass- observer will be enabled to enlarge or modify his notes by the study of innumerable extinct taboos and outworn rituals. The average woman will observe the cages, the armoury of stays and supports, the horsehair, the flannel, the ties, belts, loops which confined her ancestress with amazement at the fortitude which endured them in the name of etiquette, and horror at the conventions which required them. Perhaps, too, she will feel a pang of longing for an age when no considerations of independence and self-respect checked her taste for exuberant romance or tender sentiment; when unbridled exhibitionism was commie it Taut, and good taste an affair of being a decorated pyramid, a garlanded pagoda, a votive shrine, a Christmas tree, a pavilion with streamers waving, a sailing-ship in Carnival week, a fabulous full-plumaged bird. Might not the spare straightforward reasonable amenities of a room of one's own be well lost for a mirror which reflected such gratifying ambiguities, such reassuringly magnified forms, such variety and complexity of texture, colour, ornament ?
As for the average man, he will doubtless feel a resentful nostalgia for these curves, these inspiring mysteries, and mourn the lost delights of his ascendancy. For, Dr. Cunnington tells us, the nineteenth century saw the final prolific flowering of the day when sex-attraction was the primary object of fashion ; and, according to him, we learn here for the last time what were the features that attracted the man of the period, and get insight into man's mentality from the study of the clothes of his chattel, woman. Man, he says, prescribed the menu for the season ; woman with meek assiduity set herself to garnish the table and supply the rich and often indigestible fare.
Yet I venture to suggest that such an interpretation is open to query. Though doubtless the increasingly pros- perous Victorian rentier dominated his females to an extent unknown (in England) before or since, and encouraged their costliness and parade as factors adding to his self-esteem and pleasure in property, surely then, as in all other ages of fashion, man proposed, it may be, but woman—increasingly self-conscious, rebellious and dissatisfied—disposed. Human nature does not essentially change, and let woman ring the changes as she (or man) will, from classical to Gothic, from pure to decadent, from flaunting exuberance through modest reserve to nondescript uniformity, man will continue to be allured, fascinated, provoked. No doubt people do dress to attract attention, do symbolise in their dress one psycho- logical attitude or another ; but sex remains a force funda- mentally unaffected by fashion, as it is by beauty. No matter in what envelope, the human race conceals, reveals the same usually plain fact and bare liecessity.
However, it remains true that as an expert in the art of sex- attraction, the nineteenth-century woman was probably unrivalled. But of an immense and heterogeneous mass of material, arranged with scientific order and precision and enlivened by a dry malicious wit, Dr. Cunnington has said the last word on the clothes of that absorbing epoch, so near, so far, so fertile m every sense for women. He analyses his subject under many headings, relating it to psychological, scientific, aesthetic, historical and economical phenomena. All the aspects are important ; but for one to whom the psychological is of first interest, Dr. Cunnington has illumined a whole new world of information and speculation.
Through successive fashions, he traces down the century that long arduous advance of woman which ended in her free- dom. He sees symbolised in her clothes her growing sense of her importance, and notes the complex cycles into which this falls. Her trumpet calls, her shock-troops, her tactical with- drawals, her skirmishes, ambushes ; her occasional nervous hesitations and failures of morale ; her periods of trench warfare and deadlock ; the devices by which the pace of progress was seemingly checked and the male sex reassured : all are deal; with.
It seems strange—or was it logical ?—that she should have arrived at her goal, after the Great War, in a kind of shape- less untrimmed chemise, a flat box cynically cut towards the sexual regions by a draped sash, or belt with a flower stuck in it. The legs, the megalomaniac legs, were bared to the knee, and the whole thing said blatantly : " Here we jolly well arc. Bipeds. These are what we marched on. Take us or leave us." It was the last, the ultimate weibliche protest, charged with the hostility of victory and exhaustion.
Dr. Cunnington traces the history of the corset, the evolution of underclothes in general. Not till the end of the century, it seems, could these be artistic or at least costly without a moral stigma attached ; and for decade after decade the dazzling facades of ladies were cemented and buttressed with the most unglamorous of utilitarian substructures. He tells us in pass-. ing that the eminent Professor Huxley held the belief that women were biologically incapable of using the diaphragm in breathing. He shows how the Gothic dominated the period in dress as in all other contemporary spheres of consciousness, and defining Gothic as " a habit of mind which induces a person un- consciously to rearrange phenomena at :the: expense of truth in order to produce an emotional reaction," sees in it a spirit which the English are particularly adapted by temperament to express. Indeed a blossoming of its [magnificent distortions and illusions seems always to have coincided with periods of great national prosperity.
What is most striking in the illustrations is the beauty of the stuffs, the astonishing look of costliness, the daringness of the colour schemes : (" Dress of drab silk ; mantle of bright ruby velvet ; bonnet of greea velvet lined with rose-pihk satin "), and the hand-made quality which, as in Victorian jewellery, gives to every garment something of the individuality and originality of a work of art. As for the names of some of the materials and colours in the appended glossary, it needs the labyrinthine evocative pen of a Sitwell to do justice . to them : London smoke, Prune de Monsieur, Rosaniline, Tour- terelle, Orphelian, Cendre de rose, Red lilac, Dust of Paris, Dust of ruins, Barbel, Aventurine, Oiseau, Palisandre. . They read almost like lines from one of Miss Edith Sitwell's poems.
With such hair, too ; such braids, tresses and ringlets ; with such pins, ribbons, flowers, feathers, fruit in them, such caps and bonnets upon them. Surely never before in history was such extravagant inventiveness, anything half so idiotic or so pretty. And beneath these demented profusions, the fashion-paper face abides, page after page of it, blank, bland, fixed in a simper, enormously pleased with itself, seeming to say with deadly playfulness : " Look what I've done now— and now. • All my own idea, too."
To swallow this book at a draught is to be visited by a morbid melancholy ; the sadness of the voluptuary after the orgy. There are too many women. All is vanity. And one is haunted by the obverse side of the spectacle ; by the limita- tions implied in these extravagances, by the rigid compul- sions and enslavements expressed by these decorated shackles. One thinks of governess and companion, of the half-dozen spinster lady daughters, disappointed, fading bitterly all together, to whoth all this proved of no avail, and who were forbidden other uses. One feels, too, disturbances of another kind : a stirring of memories buried long ago under conscious- ness, a desire for the comforts, the mysterious amplitudes of skirts one had forgotten about, or perhaps only known from the family albums—those volumes which make, as it were, 3 tribal memory—the skirts of one's grandmother and great-
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