Sateen corset from the Montgomery Ward catalogue, 1895. Montgomery Ward sold this model at a price of 50 cents each, or $5/dozen.
What did that represent in terms of buying power? Not very much, really: the catalogue’s own brand of complexion soap cost 10 cents per bar (3 for 25 cents or 95 cents/dozen).
Businesses such as Britain’s R. & W. H. Symington & Company manufactured bodies on a vast scale. According to Christopher Page’s Foundations of Fashion, their collection of antique corsets—preserved in the Leicestershire Museum—includes an 1895 corset that retailed for only ten pence!2 “[T]he factory-made corset . . . brought fashion within the reach of the whole female population, not only of Britain, but of many other parts of the world as well3.” By 1880, the Symington company alone (one of the many hundreds of different manufacturers producing corsets) employed more than 1,600 workers using 500 sewing machines4. A number of corsets—many of them patented designs—were specifically marketed toward working women and featured corded supports and extra reinforcements in strategic areas to help them stand up to the strains of bending and stooping to which housemaids and cleaning women would subject their garments. The garments were actually designed to help support their wearers’ backs during these tasks. The corset’s utility for working women could even be seen in the names of certain models, such as the Pretty Housemaid, a popular mass-manufactured body marketed toward working women.5
Unlike the stereotyped image of modern, exploited laboring workers (e.g., the popular image of ragged-clothed diamond miners who could never afford to own a diamond), the nineteenth-century factory girls who sewed corsets benefitted directly from their industry. An early photograph of workers at the Symington factory shows rows of girls and young women with corseted figures beneath their working dresses6. Actually, once one has become accustomed to noticing the appearance of a corseted woman, it is difficult to locate any nineteenth-century pictures where the women are not wearing stays, regardless of social class. They were completely ubiquitous.
My own great-grandparents: Helen and Harry Boothby, pioneer farmers in Alberta, Canada (prairie country). I had seen this photo every day of my life until I went off to university, but it wasn’t until I started wearing a corset myself that I noticed the spoon busk of Great-Grandma Helen’s corset is visible through her dress, underneath the bow at her waist.
As I continued to read and research, more of my long-held beliefs fell apart, like rotten stitching holding together a patchwork of mythology. Broken bones had been a fashion annoyance; the perceived symbol of upper-class authority had, in fact, been available to all; and it was actually seen as a healthful helpmate. My curiosity and interest became bound in this intriguing garment just as tightly as my waist had been laced on that very first day of my wearing it—and the adventures were just beginning to draw me in.
3
A Step Backward in Time . . .
and a Knotty Problem
Port Townsend, WA.
As the setting for the romantic movie An Officer and a Gentleman (starring Richard Gere), Port Townsend is familiar to most Americans who were alive and cognizant in 1982. To locals, however, it is slightly better known as a sweet little Victorian-era town, which has retained its original main street and a number of beautiful buildings from the days when it was the second busiest port in America (New York being the first). Every year, city officials organize the Port Townsend Victorian Festival, a weekend-long event featuring a grand ball, tea parties, and numerous participants wandering about the town in period attire. I had wanted to attend for ages, but something had always come up to prevent it. The first time I learned of the occasion, I had just missed that year’s event. The next year I couldn’t get the weekend off work and the year after that I was teaching English in Japan. Then Gabriel was preoccupied, but my mother promised to go to the festival with me—only to cancel on the very morning we had planned on beginning our travels.
This year, the festival was scheduled for the third weekend in March—a scant week and a half after my birthday—and I was determined to go. I had specifically requested it as part of my birthday wishes, and Gabriel had made reservations months ahead of time. As the date grew near, I became increasingly excited. I was particularly looking forward to the highlight of the weekend: a Victorian Grand Ball.
We arrived in town in high spirits with almost our entire collection of antique clothing crammed as gently as possible into the back of a borrowed car. (Our own car, a DeLorean upon which Gabriel doted, lacked sufficient trunk space to hold so much luggage, even if Gabriel had been willing to drive his precious automotive baby on an overnight trip in the temperamental month of March—which he wasn’t.)
We were to stay at The Swan, one of the most beautiful hotels in Port Townsend. A century seemed to melt away beneath our feet as we stepped onto the sunlit wooden porch. As we hauled our many bags, we joked that we now understood the Victorian affinity for steamer trunks and porters. My first action when we entered our room was to plunk down, spread eagle, onto the king-size feather bed. “Ah!”
Gabriel laughed, watching me sinking into the billowy depths. “Nice?”
“Nice!” I affirmed. I rolled over, smiling up at him. “And look!” I pointed at a distinctive bull’s-eye-within-a-square design carved into strategic places on the walls.
“Yep,” Gabriel nodded. “Port Blakely Mill.”
We had previously lived a few miles from the old location of the Port Blakely Mill. It was once the biggest sawmill in the world, back in the days when forest giants had slid along the muddy paths of Skid Road in Seattle, when the Evergreen State had breathed in money and breathed out timber. The Swan was built in Port Blakely’s heyday and still proudly bears its signature corner pieces. It was a small detail, but life—and by extension, history—is in the small details, and these little touches intensified the feeling of being in the past.
Illustration from an article describing the bounty of the Pacific Northwest.
There were, however, two rather noticeable elements within the room that were unquestionably modern: ourselves. As soon as we’d finished carrying in the bags, we helped each other get changed. Gabriel helped me with my corset, and I helped him with all the incredibly fussy little elements of a Victorian gentleman’s outfit: cuff links, shirt studs, removable collar, collar buttons, collar tab, waistcoat, frock coat. . . . I tried to help with the tie, but in the end I proved somewhat hopeless at that item and he had to finish the job himself.
The element of my clothing that worried me the most was not the corset, which I had established on my birthday would not actually kill me, but the shoes. For years, I had pined after kitten-heel boots. A quintessential Victorian element of footwear for ladies, the kitten heel arches ever so slightly forward, balancing its wearer’s weight under the instep. It is sometimes called a French heel; in fact, it was in France where I first saw them, displayed elegantly in the front window of a shoe shop, as sweet and as tempting as the bonbons laid out behind the glass of the candy shop next door. Their heels arched downward like the necks of twin black swans, and their leather was glossy as swans’ wet feathers.
I had never learned to walk in any sort of high heel (the only pair I had ever owned was secondhand with broken straps, for playing dress-up, when I was five), but from the moment I saw those boots, I wanted them as I had wanted no other footwear in my life. Much to my chagrin, I could not afford those lovelies in the Angers shop, but the yearning had persisted, and now, years later, I finally had a pair.
An example of a French heel can be seen on Montgomery Ward’s “Sunbeam” shoe. Price: $2.25.
Unfortunately, I also had a broken toe. A few days before my birthday, I had been taken down in judo practice by a quick side-sweep that had snagged my left pinky toe so far out of line from the foot that its longest phalanx bone had snapped. It was the second time that same toe had been broken in exactly the same way, by exactly the same sparring partner—a scrappy little guy with a hear
t of gold who once, while choking me with my own arm, pointed out in a voice as calm as it was cheerful, “Now, this is suboptimal!”
Since then, I had been walking around with medical tape splinting the broken toe to its neighbors. I kept my sneakers fastened loosely and favored my left side as much as I could. Careful scrutiny revealed a slight limp in my gait as I leaned my weight onto the inside of my left foot to relieve the pressure on the broken toe.
My coveted kitten-heel boots weren’t towering, nor were they particularly needle-toed, but even so, I didn’t relish the idea of cramming my swollen, sore foot into pointed boots that I knew would specifically throw my weight forward and onto my toes. Still . . . the beautiful boots beckoned. I lifted one out of its box, stroking the soft leather and inspecting the tool-work.
Here goes nothin’.
I lifted my ugly-duckling foot to my curvaceous, swanlike shoe. I pulled out the laces as far as they would go and gently worked in my foot, wincing and shoving.
I sucked in air as the broken toe sent out little hot waves of pain in complaint, but the foot was in. I relaced the boot; it felt about twice as tight as its counterpart, but this seemed a minor point of discomfort. The real issue on my mind was what it would feel like when I stood on it.
Gingerly, I raised myself from the edge of the bed, keeping nearly my full weight on my good right foot. Gabriel watched anxiously. “Are you going to be okay?”
With caution, I set my left heel against the floor and leaned forward, testing.
“It hurts,” I said, assessing. “But I think it’ll be okay.”
In judo practice, I had endured worse pain and gone on sparring, being thrown head over heels by men twice my size. What Gabriel and I had planned for the afternoon was a leisurely stroll around downtown. The literal walk in the park would wait for the next day.
Had I been paying less attention, there would have been a limp in my step, but I kept it carefully under control. I asked Gabriel to walk slowly and, with a conscious deliberation of gait, kept pace beside him, grateful for the level ground of Port Townsend’s main street, which sat at sea level. The broken toe certainly overwhelmed any discomfort from my corset. Not that the toe was unbearable, just . . . inconveniently noticeable. By the time we returned to the hotel room, I was honestly happier to be removing my shoes than to be getting out of my stays.
The next morning we were up with the sun, eager to get the most out of our mini vacation. We helped each other into our antique outfits, just as we had the previous night. Getting into the corset was growing easier with practice, but Gabriel was still having significant difficulty with the smaller bits of his outfits. As he tied my laces and I helped with his shirt studs, we speculated about the importance of help with clothing as a constant way of cementing relationships in Victorian society. It was rare for people to live alone in that era, and nearly everyone had someone to help them dress: Those who could afford it had servants to dress them, but the servants would help each other for free. Husbands helped wives to dress (and vice versa), unmarried sisters helped each other, daughters helped mothers . . .
Comparatively, modern people are astonishingly alienated from each other. Frequently, individuals feel the need for electronic mediation for communication with someone right in front of them. I know a young lady who has actually become a fan of the Facebook page titled something similar to “Texting a person in the same room as me.” How many more levels of separation could be possible? In this instance, first there is the refusal to interact directly in the first place, and then there is the further step backward of joining a virtual club to, at a remove, encourage others to do the same. That a virtual social group could not only replace true contact but actually encourage isolation is a rather sad commentary on the loneliness of twenty-first century life.
What a different culture it must have been when people’s entire lifestyles forced interactions. They not just had to talk, but actually touch each other to get dressed in the morning. They were close enough to smell soap, feel warmth, taste the tang in the air of esters given off by their bodies’ chemical reactions. How would society, and relationships, be different in a world with such closeness? How would one’s thoughts of someone change if every morning they were close enough to smell the sweat of each others’ dreams? we wondered.
Pondering all this, we got hungry and turned our feet in the direction of our favorite restaurant in Port Townsend. A sweet little place of tight corners and generous portions, what the Salal Café lacks in elbow room, it makes up for in copious quantities of food so delicious it is hard to leave any of it behind. I knew this, and I knew that I’d generally leave the place with a stomachache even when my abdomen hadn’t been actively compressed, but I still wanted to go there. Breakfast is their specialty, and this experience was all part and parcel of the special weekend.
When the friendly waitress delivered my sizeable omelet and mountain of fried potatoes, I dug in with vigor. I specifically didn’t drink any water because I didn’t want it to take up space in my stomach. I knew that this was somewhat of a bad idea (I’m prone to nausea-inducing migraines when I get dehydrated), but I ignored my better judgment as I managed to cram in most—not all, but most—of that delicious breakfast. I can always drink some water later, after things have settled a bit, I reasoned. I forgot to take into account exactly how long starchy fried potatoes and cheesy eggs take to digest (compared to, say, lettuce—something a person can eat in large quantities and still feel empty five minutes later). Potatoes and eggs had certainly been common foods in the Victorian era, but then as well as now, it was not a particularly well-advised move for someone of my stature to devour them quite so ravenously as I did that morning.
I was still acclimating myself to the habit of eating smaller, more manageable portions, and subsequent events would have gone better for me if I had followed a piece of advice from 1891: “It is of the utmost importance, if the individual would enjoy health . . . that all the personal habits be perfectly regular. . . . Do not let visiting, traveling, or business interfere with them. You must be regular in sleep, in evacuation of the bowels, in bathing, and in eating. Nature will not be cheated. She requires perfect attention to certain duties. If you attempt to violate her requirements you will certainly be punished.”
The subject of nineteenth-century food is one that could very easily fill an entire volume on its own, and it deserves a separate book to do it justice. As a passing note of interest, however, I might say that the expansion of portion sizes is a subject that comes under discussion whenever Gabriel and I look at plates, bowls, or other dishes. Holding up antique china to equivalent modern pieces often feels like comparing household goods between Gulliver’s Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. In a great many nineteenth-century dish sets I have seen, the only plate big enough to hold my breakfast that morning would have been the serving platter. I’ve actually met people who collect or have inherited antique china and specifically use the serving platters as their everyday plates, claiming, “The other pieces just aren’t big enough!”
“Oregon Pattern” dish set: Montgomery Ward, 1895.
After breakfast, we went for a promenade along the main street of the town. Water Street is a name that fits the thoroughfare quite literally; it is laid out right at sea level, at the base of a bluff that separates Port Townsend’s commercial Downtown from its residential Uptown (whose name is, again, quite literal: Uptown, the old heart and hearth of the city where permanent residents lived in its heyday, is up at the top of the bluff). (Incidentally, Downtown and Uptown are actually named districts in Port Townsend, like Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, or Manhattan in New York.) It was a beautiful day, but tremendously windy, with strong, salty gusts blowing in from Puget Sound. I worried about the plumes on my antique hat in the vicious blasts, so we ducked into shops as often as we could, as much to spare our irreplaceable antique clothes as to see everything possible, and to enjoy the day to its fullest experience.
Even in Port
Townsend, where dress-up events are fairly common, people were fascinated to see our authentic Victorian clothing. We had seen replicas—cheaply made clothes of gaudy synthetic fibers—all over town while we walked. The residents of the town were used to seeing those, but in our outfits they saw something else entirely, and they were intrigued. The silk and the wool, the pleats and ruffles and tucks, set the real garments apart from the imitations, and people kept stopping us to ask questions about these details.
Gabriel and I love antique clothing for its beauty and its history, but most of all we love what it teaches us about the past. We acquire discarded items in need of repairs, and mending them not only gives us the joy of saving endangered pieces of history, but also tells us the stories of the ghosts lingering within them. One of Gabriel’s suits from the 1880s is constructed of good-quality fabric everywhere except the trouser pockets, which are rough sailcloth. We could tell from that detail alone that its former owner had a tendency to wear through his pockets.
Wearing the clothes on special days taught us more still: about the posture held by the cut of the garments, about the intricacies of fastenings that have become obscure, about the differences in antique and modern materials. We loved learning all these things and sharing our discoveries with those who were interested.
When people made inquiries of us that weekend, we told them about how clothing was a mark of status in Victorian society; about how all the little embellishments and added touches—beads and trim, fancywork, and fine stitching—showed off the wearer’s wealth and displayed that they had the time and money to pay attention to the little things in life. We talked about how Victorians would do their best to dress as highly as they could and about the pride of presentation they took in themselves. The townspeople with whom we spoke were extremely friendly and positive, and we were having a grand time of things. With anything, however, there are always exceptions.
Victorian Secrets Page 3