The Influence of Literature, and other Oddments

Per blessed Susanna’s request, shortly I shall be posting some renderings of day gowns – having capitulated to my fancies and completely gone off modern dress. This is not a new experience; it has been with me since I was a small child, as my sainted mother could attest.

When I was in high school we had copies of Norah Waugh’s ‘The Cut of Women’s Clothes’ and I pored over it, making tracings, patterns, and my own designs, mostly from the 1630s-1840. It was the inner portions of garments which fascinated me (and continues to do)- tapes, hooks, manner of linings, and minute stitches. I was in heaven. I annoyed my Home Economics teacher by making a shift and mid-18thC day gown, when everyone else were making tops and trousers. She didn’t know what to make of me, and couldn’t critique what I was making because she knew nothing about it, so I failed the course!

When I was in college, we had all of Janet Arnold’s ‘Patterns of Fashion’, which I likewise devoured. I became quite a dab hand at pattern draughting, of necessity, if one can call an obsession with pre-Civil War garments a necessity. I annoyed my cohorts in the Costume Department of our theatre with my tiny machine stitches (20-30 per inch) – but it was the only way I could replicate the fine stitching of the past – and the requisite ‘bought items’ 8-10 stitches per inch I thought hopelessly vulgar and coarse.

I was enthralled with PBS, which in those days actually presented good quality programmes – from The Six Wives of Henry the VIII to The Mill on the Floss (and yes, Upstairs Downstairs) I was enchanted. Being a voracious reader, I had already run through all of the Brontes (including Patrick’s ‘lost novel’), Jane Austen, George Elliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Swift, Sterne, Hawthorne and Cooper. And through all, the clothing fascinated me. I wanted to wear it, because I felt ‘at home’ therein – in dress or undress clothes.

Withal, it is no wonder that I ended up as a Person of the Past at Colonial Williamsburg and made many of my own pieces (we were allowed to do, but they had to be approved.) It had been my dream to work there since I was a child – in the heyday of ‘hostesses’ – what a vulgar come-down since! – but my dear Lady Washington said then and since that it was a good thing I never was shunted away in the Costume Design Centre, for I would have been frustrated, and wasted.

I saw what she meant, for I did have my run-ins with them – over a dark green petticoat with a fine flowered muslin gown, over the binding of a 1780 pair of stays (both of which I had the documentation for), and, for my part, over the ‘coarse and vulgar’ stuffs used for caps. Of the latter, in period paintings, one sees caps gossamer and exquisite – why could they not be made thus? ‘Not durable’ I was told; ‘too difficult’ I was told. But I wanted what I wanted – the beautifully made pieces my fancy conjured from the pages of period literature, reinforced by extant examples of period garments.

Was I insane? Possibly. But if so, I was in good company, as the commitment to authenticity was about to become a huge issue in the insular world of re-enactment. Such attention to authenticity is now a given, and farby ‘impressions’ are not widely tolerated, except as Hallowe’en costumes. We have come a long way. But not far enough, to my taste. As a friend of mine at Williamsburg (the Rev, Mr. Henley) once said ‘every year our modern life grows farther from the everyday life of the 18th century, and what we represent becomes ever-increasingly incomprehensible to visitors.’ It is true of any period prior to the supersonic age.

What I find myself wanting, in the midst of cell phones and computers, iPhones, email, and telemarketers, is to switch off, live simply, write letters, bake bread, boil water, hang the washing on the line. John Donne once wrote complaining of the noise of a fly in the room in which he was writing. S’truth! Would we even notice now? I want life not to fly by in ‘information age’ nanobites. I want peace and quiet and the pleasure of an hour’s stitching, of reading an old book, of actually waiting 6 hours to have bread from wild yeast.

Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more – everything presses on – whilst thou art twisting that lock, – see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.
-Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy