by Paula Byrne
In France, the new dress carried dangerous political connotations, due to its disrespect for the supremacy of courtly tradition. The adoption of imported muslin also meant that the Queen was denounced by the French silk industry. Lebrun’s beautiful portrait was criticized for being an irreverent and informal portrayal of royalty and was withdrawn from public display. The chemise seemed to epitomize Marie Antoinette’s romantic ideal of a simplified life, an ideal that would have damaging and far-reaching consequences. In fact, Marie Antoinette was actually reflecting a trend that was emerging across Europe, whereby clothes and hairstyles were becoming more simplified on the model of ancient Greek statuary. This movement in fashion was of a piece with the gradual relaxation of feminine restraint that occurred in the course of the eighteenth century. There had been protests against the harm done to women by restrictive clothing, tight-lacing, and hoops. The new muslin tube was especially popular for pregnant women, for obvious reasons. Freedom of dress was a form of women’s liberation and Mary Robinson would become an ardent subscriber to the theory that hoops and stays represented a kind of female imprisonment.
In the summer of 1784 Marie Antoinette sent samples of her new dress to some of her aristocratic admirers across the English Channel, such as the Duchess of Devonshire. After initially objecting to the garment’s immodesty, Georgiana – always an arbiter of female taste – helped to popularize the style and has been credited by fashion historians with its introduction into England.2 But it was Perdita who initiated the craze for the muslin chemise nearly two years before.
The dress, indeed, became known as ‘the Perdita chemise’. ‘An amateur of the Cyprian Corps,’ the Morning Herald informed its readers, ‘recommends to our fair countrywomen a total abolition of the large hoop and long petticoat, and to adopt the PERDITA, a system of elegant simplicity and neatness, which has ever so conspicuously marked the dress of that celebrated leader of the wantons of the age!’3 This is a perceptive comment: even before her visit to France, Mary was always noted for her taste for simple lines of dress that showed off her figure to best advantage. Her adoption of the chemise was the natural conclusion of a style that was already her own.
The sexy loose muslin dress, which clung to the figure (especially when it rained), appealed to both men and women, and continued to occupy the minds of the beau monde. For three days running in November the Morning Herald gave news of the chemise’s progress. ‘Ladies of the first style adopt it, and gentlemen patronize it. The Chemise de la Reine, in which Mrs Robinson appeared at the Opera, is expected to become a favourite undress among the fashionable women, who are either by necessity or inclination put to their shifts, the ensuing winter!’4
The idea of a woman from the trading classes, and a member of the ‘frail sisterhood’ to boot, dressing in the style of the Queen of France prompted questions about propriety. A long article in the Morning Herald discussed the strife that the dress was causing between the factions of the ‘impure’ and the ‘chaste’ women:
The Chemise de la Reine, promises to be the fashionable apparel for the ensuing season … It is supposed that the female fashions will this winter undergo various revolutions, as the Ladies of the ton, amongst the chaste circles, have determined never to appear in public in similar uniforms with the Cyprian Corps; a resolution which reflects credit on the lovely Duchess, who is said to have proposed it, and to keep which, will find full employ for the continual exertion of her Grace’s elegant taste and decorative fancy.
The Perdita is to lead the fashionable Paphian Corps, at the express desire of certain milliners, who have ‘to be disposed of for ready money only’ large quantities of gauze trimmings, which, like Edmund Burke’s speeches, are ready cut and dried for immediate use!5
The ‘Duchess’ mentioned here is Georgiana: it is ironic that posterity has given her credit for introducing a garment to which she was initially so publicly hostile. To begin with, aristocratic women tended only to wear the dress in the privacy of their homes, not daring to be seen in it in public. The Rambler’s Magazine noted that a certain Lady B—‘made one of silver muslin to see her friends after her lying-in, but never appeared in it out of her own home’. As one modern critic wryly remarks, ‘Robinson invaded aristocratic bedrooms in more ways than one.’6
Even the usually staid Morning Chronicle, which prided itself on not reproducing town gossip in the manner of the Morning Herald and the Morning Post, entered the debate about the new garment: ‘The Queen’s Chemise is the most unbecoming dress that was ever projected among the vagaries of fashion, except for those whom nature has distinguished with a slim and elegant form.’ Unless the wearer had a figure like Perdita Robinson, she would ‘look better in a linsey-woolsey nightgown’.7 The fashion correspondent of the Lady’s Magazine, meanwhile, charted the growing popularity of the ‘Perdita chemise’: by the spring of 1783 it was ‘universally worn’ and by the summer it was being imitated (‘the Waldegrave levette … trimmed in the fashion of the Perdita chemise’). It was a new fashion that remained fashionable: five years after Perdita introduced it, the Lady’s Magazine noted that ‘all the Sex now, from 15 to 50 and upwards … appear in their white muslin frocks with broad sashes’.8
The trend endured over the next decades, with waists rising to the Empire line and dresses becoming more transparent and figure-hugging. A fashion that had begun with the French Queen became associated with liberation and the revolution that cost that Queen her head. One of Jane Austen’s letters, written in 1801, notes that a Mrs Powlett ‘was at once expensively and nakedly dressed; – we have had the satisfaction of estimating her Lace and her Muslin’.9 The word ‘nakedly’ highlights how the Perdita chemise and its mutations drew attention to the body. Having made a name for herself through the cross-dressed comedy roles that revealed the shape of her legs, Mary found a way of continuing to celebrate her body after she left the theatre. In so doing, she freed her fellow women from restrictive dress for two generations. It was not until the beginning of the Victorian age that waistlines dropped, female bodies were cinched with tight boned stays, skirts were hooped again, and the freedom in dress which women had obtained over the last half century was gone.
Mary Robinson’s status as a leader of fashion caused controversy because she was blurring the distinction between ladies of virtue and the ‘impures’. As the newspapers pointed out, it was members of her own sex (and invariably highly born ones) who berated her for daring to steal the fashion mantle from them. A Mrs Robinson who was better dressed than a duchess raised troubling questions about class and status. For centuries, clothing had been a denominator of rank. When fashion was open to all, it became hard to identify people’s social standing from their appearance. Mary Robinson later wrote of this phenomenon in an essay on London life that was one of her most astute pieces of writing:
The public promenades, particularly on the sabbath, are thronged with pedestrians of all classes, and the different ranks of people are scarcely distinguishable either by their dress or their manners. The duchess, and her femme de chambre, are dressed exactly alike; the nobleman and his groom are equally ambitious of displaying the neat boot, the cropped head, and the external decorations, as well as the quaint language, of the stable-boy. The dapper milliner, and the sauntering female of slender reputation, imitate the woman of fashion, in their choice of their cloathes, and the tenour of their conversation.10
Mary’s sense of how instability and topsy-turvy in rank and status were fuelled by sartorial innovation was of a piece with her background in the theatre: class confusion was a central motif of eighteenth-century comedy, and the basis of many a plot twist in several of the plays in which Mary achieved success, as well as such classic comedies as Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, in which the gentleman-hero Marlow, who is terrified of high-born ladies, only falls in love with Kate Hardcastle because she dresses like a barmaid.
Mary Robinson developed a reputation as a fashion icon that was unique among non-aristocrat
ic women. She was noted for her ability to wear strikingly different clothes. She would dress up, cross-dress, or wear gowns that were beautifully made but extremely simple in style. The greatest honour in the world of fashion was to give a name to a new design of gown or hat. The Lady’s Magazine frequently listed the ‘Fashionable Dresses’ for the new season. A typical article was that for March 1784: it cited five members of the female nobility and their garments: ‘the Rutland Gown’, the ‘Westmoreland Sultan’, the ‘Stanhope Bonnet’, the ‘Spencer Cap’, and the ‘Waldegrave Hat’. But it gave pride of place to two items named for the only non-aristocratic woman on the list, the ‘Robinson Vest’ and the ‘Robinson Hat’.
The first was lavishly described as the ‘most beautiful half-dress that has been invented for many seasons’. It was ‘either pale-blue, or straw-coloured satin for the petticoat, the sleeves and train white crape, edged with blond, worked with chanelle; the body fastened before with small buckles of diamonds or pearls’. The dress ‘will serve as a spring suit, by changing the satin to a demi-saison silk’. The ‘Robinson Hat’ was just as innovative: ‘plain black transparent crape, and ornamented with carmelite ribband; a curtain, which if up, serves as a band round the crown; but if down, as a veil, this is an excellent invention for the ensuing spring, and will be very excusable (notwithstanding its peculiar appearance), where beauty gives a sanction to taste’.11 With creations such as these, Perdita outdid even such leaders of fashion as her patron Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. The numerous paintings and engravings of her ensured that the image of her trademark hats – of chip and straw, large with broad sweeping brims bedecked with trailing ribbons and bows – circulated widely in polite society and beyond.
In the course of 1783, the Lady’s Magazine detailed a luscious array of Robinsonian creations, among them the ‘Perdita Hood’ (‘made of Italian lawn … tied under the chin, in a large double bow’), the ‘Robinson hat for Ranelagh’ (‘a white chip, very large, trimmed with a wreath of white roses, and a panache of white feathers’), and the ‘Robinson hat’ of white crape, transparent, ‘bound at the edge with black velvet and a band of black velvet round the crown, edged with a broad flounce of crepe in small plaits and fastened in the front with a diamond buckle’. The Hoppner portrait shows a splendid example of a diamond buckle on a different Robinson hat. Other innovations were the ‘Perdita handkerchief’ – worn like a ruff, but weather-dependent and ‘will only suit a fine form’ – and the ‘Robinson gown’ (‘universally worn, a chocolate coloured poplin, with plain cuffs of scarlet silk’). And it was thanks to Mary that in the summer of 1783 riding habits were ‘much worn in the morning’: ‘the most fashionable are the Perdita’s pearl colour, with jonquil yellow facings, and the dark brown with a scarlet waistcoat’.12 As she said herself in her Memoirs, she set the fashion and others followed ‘with flattering avidity’.
Late that same year, ‘the amiable Duchess of Devonshire’ was ‘confined by the lovely duties of her nursery’, while ‘the beautiful Mrs Robinson’ was indisposed. The result was that ‘the evening dresses are as yet unknown’.13 In the absence of Georgiana and Perdita no one knew what to wear. In terms of her influence on taste, the ex-royal mistress was as important as the celebrated Duchess. Perdita created an extremely awkward dilemma for well-to-do ladies: if they wanted to be fashionable they had to imitate her, but if they imitated her they were allowing a courtesan to establish the rules of taste.
In later years, when Mary remade herself as a serious poet who cared more for the beauty of the mind than that of the body, she wrote satirically of the obsession with fashion. Writing in the Morning Post under the nom de plume Tabitha Bramble, she enumerated the tasteless excesses of ‘Modern Female Fashions’:
Cravats, like towels thick and broad,
Long tippets made of bear skin;
Muffs, that a Russian might applaud,
And rouge to tint a fair skin.
Long petticoats, to hide the feet,
Silk hose, with clocks of scarlet;
A load of perfumes, sick’ning sweet,
Made by Parisian VARLET.
A bowl of straw to deck the head,
Like porringer, unmeaning;
A bunch of poppies, flaming red,
With tawdry ribbands, streaming.14
In a companion poem published a few days later she poked fun at male fashions:
Crops, like Hedge hogs, high-crown’d Hats,
Whiskers like Jew Moses;
Collars padded, thick Cravats,
And Cheeks as red as roses.
Faces painted deepest brown,
Waistcoats strip’d and gaudy:
Sleeves, thrice doubled, thick with down,
And Straps, to brace the body!
Short Great Coats, that reach the knees,
Boots like French Postillion;
Meant the lofty race to please,
But laugh’d at by the million.15
Tarleton was famous for his ‘crop’ (very short) hairstyle – it was affectionately mocked by Fox in a rhyme that is now preserved in the Tarleton family papers. Like his lover, the Colonel was an innovator in fashion, whose outfits were noted in the papers: ‘The fashionable morning dress, introduced by Colonel Tarleton, is a horseman’s coat, that looks, when on, very like a bed gown.’16
Mary’s carriages caused as much of a sensation as her clothes. Like cars today, carriages were status symbols, the ultimate luxury item (in Jane Austen’s class-ridden novel Emma, the upward mobility of the apothecary Mr Perry is signalled by the fact that he is considering buying a carriage). The papers reported the traffic jams in Hyde Park where the carriages brought the higher and the middling classes together. The park was a place of spectacle and theatre, especially for courtesans who would slide down the windows of their carriages and jostle elbows, or spit or sneer at their rivals. Mary was constantly associated with her carriages, in caricatures and newspaper accounts, though what started out as a symbol of her wealth and social status achieved a more practical significance later in her life after her accident. In a letter of 1794 she referred to her carriage as a ‘necessary expense’: it was necessary not because she was anxious to keep up appearances, but because her legs were not strong enough to allow her to walk any great distance.
In her heyday, though, each new carriage was a glorious luxury. In December 1782 newspaper readers learnt that ‘Mrs Robinson now sports a carriage which is the admiration of all the charioteering circles in the vicinity of St James’s.’ Designed by the prestigious Mr Benwell of Long Acre, its chassis was in ‘carmelite and silver, ornamented with a French mantle, and the cipher in a wreath of flowers’; the bodywork of the carriage was scarlet and silver, the seat-cloth richly ornamented with silver fringe. The Robinson livery was green, faced with yellow, and trimmed with broad silver lace; the elegantly finished harness was ornamented with silver stars; the interior was lined with white silk and embellished with scarlet trimmings. ‘The Perdita,’ concluded Henry Bate’s Morning Herald, ‘has set a very splendid example to her impure sisters in the charioteering style, which few of them will be able to follow!’17
The following day it was reported that ‘Yesterday the Perdita sported her new carriage in various parts of town, accompanied by the gallant Tarleton. The Perdita seems determined to preserve her Sovereignty over the female frails; she has commenced her Winter campaign in a very bold stile, and her standard is already honoured by the presence of would-be ministers of state, martial heroes, amorous Lords etc. etc.’18 The latter allusions are, of course, to Fox, Tarleton and Malden, though by this time Mary had broken with Malden and Fox was involved with Elizabeth Armistead. Knowing the fickleness of fashion, Mary ensured that her carriage remained in tiptop condition: only a few weeks after its first appearance, she returned it to Long Acre ‘to be new gilt and painted’.19
Just before Christmas there was a false report, swiftly followed by a public denial, that Mary and Thomas Robinson were reconciled. It
emerged that though a ‘total separation’ had long since taken place between the Robinsons, Thomas was in Italy, working for Mary’s brother.20 It was the Colonel, not the husband, who had been seen with Mary at the opera. They were now inseparable. They spent Christmas and New Year in Old Windsor, where they were spotted riding in the Great Park. The proximity to the royal residences inevitably fuelled rumours. One day Mary was returning from her morning ride when the Prince came through Old Windsor on his return from the chase. They met near the marketplace, both on horseback. The Prince stopped, pulled off his glove and shook her by the hand. As he did so, ‘the blushing Perdita’ held her other hand across her face. Was this a sign, the Morning Herald asked, in the eighteenth-century equivalent of a modern newspaper horoscope, that Venus was once again in transit over the Georgium sidus? A couple of days later the paper reported to the contrary that ‘The once-admired Perdita seems now nearly approaching the horizon; whenever she sinks below, not even the Man of the People [i.e. Fox] can raise her again!’21
The question of whether her star was falling or still rising was picked up by one of Mary’s defenders the next time the paper appeared: ‘A Correspondent cannot help observing, that an article in the Herald of Saturday contains a very ill-natured remark on the lovely Perdita – So far from approaching the horizon, she may be said from her display in public scenes, her equipage, her stile of living, and undiminished beauty, to be in the very zenith of her power of making conquests!’22 She continued to be celebrated for her risqué verbal brilliance as well as her physical beauty: ‘The Perdita is allowed to have wit as well as beauty: She paid a fine turned compliment to her gallant Colonel a few days ago. The Colonel observed to her, that she looked divinely in a riding-habit; she assured him she would always wear that dress, provided he would always be in a riding-habit when he came to visit her.’23