by Daniel Pool
We think of afternoon tea as being an English practice of long standing, but in fact the habit began in the 1840s. Before that, tea was frequently offered after dinner, when the ladies and gentlemen had gathered together in the drawing room. By the 1860s or so, five o’clock tea was a recognized social ritual, company sometimes being formally invited to partake, and by 1877 there was even a special costume—the tea gown—with which ladies could grace the occasion. Tea was customarily served in the drawing room, although, at a country estate, if the weather were good, it might be served outdoors on the lawn à la Portrait of a Lady.
DRINK AND THE EVILS THEREOF
The Englishman liked his alcohol. It seems you cannot turn a page of Dickens or Eliot or Hardy without someone reaching for his gin or port or wine or beer or rum. This was true to life. Throughout the century, the English consumed annually about thirty gallons of beer per capita.
In part this was because alcohol was generally safer than untreated water, which, at least in urban areas, gave rise to the cholera epidemics of the century. Alcohol and boiled beverages like tea or coffee were the only sure ways of getting a drink that would not endanger your health. But tea was expensive owing to high import duties and the East India Company’s virtual monopoly on its importation until 1833. On the other hand, the materials for brewing or distilling liquor lay ready to hand. England’s agriculture was based on corn—oats, wheat, and barley—and the barley was grown for malt and ale. Indeed, there was something of an “alcoholic-industrial complex,” given the volume of malt consumed in the country and the countless farm workers for whom it provided a living. “What’ll we do about the barley?” angry farm workers shouted at temperance lecturers, pointing out that drinking produced jobs as well as drunkards.
Brewers, in fact, were respected figures in the countryside. Many made their fortunes by acquiring local alehouses through which they distributed their product. They owned some 14,200 of the country’s 48,000 licensed alehouses in 1816, and controlled many more whose owners owed them money for advances on their stock. Brewers were sufficiently respectable for their daughters to be suitable marriage partners for the landed quality. Pip explores with interest the old brewery on the grounds of Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations. “Well! Mr. Havisham was very rich and very proud. So was his daughter,” Herbert Pocket tells Pip of the ancient would-be bride, pointing out that her father was a brewer. Indeed, the wealthy Miss Crawley laments of her young relative Rawdon in Vanity Fair, “What a pity that young man has taken such an irretrievable step in the world!,” adding, “with his rank and distinction he might have married a brewer’s daughter with a quarter of a million.”
There were inns for the traveler to drink in and taverns for the casual drinker (these were the public houses, or “pubs”). The former were natural gathering places because they were where the mail and newspapers were delivered—what could be more natural than to stop for a glass as you came to claim your letter from Aunt Fanny? And the bone-shaken traveler always wanted a glass or two when he clambered down tired, cold, and hungry from his jolting, long-distance stagecoach ride. Less exalted was the village alehouse, which generally sold no spirits. In Far from the Madding Crowd Sergeant Troy forces the rustic laborers to drink brandy at the harvest home, imperiling the hay crop since, as Hardy points out, they had “from their youth up been entirely unaccustomed to any liquor stronger than cider or mild ale.” Beerhouses appeared in the 1830s, places where any ratepayer could sell beer for an annual two-guinea fee, the government having become concerned about the rising consumption of spirits among the lower orders. “Gin palaces” were a product of the same era, flourishing in urban areas when for a brief period the absence of import duties made gin as cheap as beer.
The class distinctions of English life were reflected in where and what the different classes drank. In Silas Marner, for example, we learn that the Rainbow tavern was divided into the “bright bar or kitchen on the right hand, where the less lofty customers of the house were in the habit of assembling, the parlour on the left being reserved for the select society in which Squire Cass frequently enjoyed the double pleasure of conviviality and condescension.” Such parlors were frequently furnished with pictures on the wall, decent chairs, and so on, while what would be called the “tap room” in a grander establishment than the Rainbow would have been set aside for the humbler customers and perhaps furnished with settles and wooden tables around a large fire. In The Return of the Native “the large common room of the inn” boasts “seats divided by wooden elbows like those of crude cathedral stalls . . . [a] long table before the sitters,” and a fireplace with a chimney corner large enough to conceal Diggory Venn. The customers were served by a barmaid or potboy who brought drinks to their seats. Notwithstanding the case of the Rainbow, the bar in the early 1800s was neither a room for customers to gather in nor a counter to drink at, the notion of stand-up drinking being an innovation borrowed from the counter takeout or stand-up-and-drink “dram shops.” Rather, the bar was generally a small room near the entrance to the pub with a table and, perhaps, fireplace, where the landlord could greet customers as they entered and keep an eye on things. “Miss Potterson, sole proprietor and manager of the Fellowship-Porters, reigned supreme on her throne, the bar,” in Our Mutual Friend, which seems to have been halfway between the old and new model bar. “The available space in it was not much larger than a hackney coach; but no one could have wished the bar bigger, that space was so girt in by corpulent little casks, and by cordial-bottles radiant with fictitious grapes in bunches, and by lemons in nets, and by biscuits in baskets, and by the polite beer-pulls that made low bows when customers were served with beer, and by the cheese in a snug corner, and by the landlady’s own small table in a snugger corner near the fire, with the cloth everlastingly laid. This haven was divided from the rough world by a glass partition and a half-door with a leaden sill upon it for the convenience of resting your liquor.”
Except for the gin, brandy, and rum favored by the urban poor and lower middle class, only the rich drank spirits and wines, port being the favorite drink for after dinner. James Crawley is knocked out of the running for his rich relative’s wealth in Vanity Fair when she discovers he’s been drinking gin with the riffraff at a local establishment. “Had he drunk a dozen bottles of claret, the old spinster could have pardoned him. Mr. Fox and Mr. Sheridan drank claret. Gentlemen drank claret. But eighteen glasses of gin consumed among boxers in an ignoble pot-house—it was an odious crime.” By mid-century, there was a whole variety of wines that were supposed to be set out for a proper dinner party—“sherry with soup and fish; hock and claret with roast meat; punch with turtle; champagne with whitebait; port with venison; port or burgundy with game; sparkling wines between the roast and the confectionery; madeira with sweets; port with cheese, and for dessert, port, tokay, madeira, sherry and claret.”
The crinoline and its covering.
WOMEN’S CLOTHING
It was filmy, gauzy, and virtually transparent at the beginning of the century. “Mrs. Powlett was at once expensively and nakedly dress’d,” wrote Jane Austen with her customary acidulousness of a dinner companion to her sister in 1801. The lady in question wore a dress of the then-fashionable variety: thin muslin with only light stays, if that, and a chemise underneath. The dresses were frocks—that is, they buttoned down the back. They were cinched up high just under the breasts to suggest a high waist. They had no pockets, and personal items had to be carried in a small bag or “reticule.” The more daring damped down their chemises underneath for a more revealing effect—the idea being to capture the “natural look” that had come out of France with the revolution. At the same time everyone looked innocent and girlish, in part because most frocks were white. Sometimes a sleeveless top called a pelisse was worn over the dress, going about halfway down the thigh or to the knee, and sometimes a shortish, waist-length jacket called a spencer was also worn. Headgear was always worn—caps could be worn indoors; bo
nnets invariably when outside. When it rained women walked on pattens, which were metal rings on small stilts that they strapped to their shoes that kept them an inch or so off the ground.
There was a gradual movement during the succeeding era to a more bell-shaped figure. The line of the waist on dresses descended to something approximating its anatomical location, and dresses became much fuller as petticoats were added underneath. Dress material became heavier and richer as velvets and silks became popular, and camisoles were worn between the dress and the corset to protect the dress as the loose, gauzy look vanished and the dress became tighter and tighter. A good deal of ornament was worn—feathers, jewelry, and the like. The richness of the fabric and the bluish hue of many of the colors may seem extreme unless it is borne in mind that until the 1890s lighting—whether by candle or gas—was dimmer and also yellower than it is now. Blue was needed to counteract this yellow light, and some of the accessories whose colors seem to us a bit too much would have looked a good bit softer under a subdued, nonelectric light.
The 1850s and 1860s saw the rise of one of the great gifts to the century’s cartoonists—the crinoline—as women abandoned the five or six layers of petticoats in favor of this stiff horsehair material that could support the new heavier dress fabrics. Alas, the crinoline was bulky and unsatisfactory, too. In the 1850s the answer seemed to have arrived—the “cage crinoline,” an apparatus that looked like an inverted, cone-shaped trellis designed for a rather large creeping plant. The cage dispensed with layers of petticoats but created other difficulties and inspired more jokes than perhaps any other women’s fashion except the miniskirt. It was difficult to fit through doorways in the crinoline, hell to sit down in, embarrassing on windy days if the wind caught it underneath, and you could fall down steps in it if you weren’t careful. When maids insisted on wearing it, they had an unfortunate tendency to sweep all the bric-a-brac off the tables they were supposed to be dusting, and it bobbed up and down like a large, swinging birdcage when you walked unless you took short, careful, mincing steps. It could get also cold outside in the winter now that you were wearing only a big birdcage and a light petticoat and chemise underneath, so a fashion for red flannel petticoats developed. (These were also protection against the consequences of a crinoline wearer’s overturning in a public area, perhaps a reason why the new undergarments, drawers, became standard equipment.)
And then the crinoline and the big round skirt along with it promptly began to dwindle away, leaving only the back of the big round skirt—the bustle. In addition, except among the poor, the bonnet gave way to the hat, and indoor caps shrank away. The bustle vanished in the 1870s, only to reappear again in the 1880s. In the meantime, the tea gown had been introduced, serving notice of a new elaboration of dress, and sporting costumes for activities like archery and bicycling and tennis were beginning to put in an appearance for the new, more active young woman. Things could get quite complicated. The Habits of Good Society noted that its female readers would need at least a walking dress, a country dress, a carriage or visiting dress, an ordinary evening dress, a dinner dress, and a ball dress.
For most of the century, ladies always wore gloves outside (so did gentlemen). In addition, they wore them for the most part indoors as well (always at balls, for instance). Coming down to breakfast (though they were removed for the meal), ladies wore gloves, too, and in the schoolrooms in the sixties and seventies proper little girls wore them doing their lessons.
Special circumstances demanded special attire—weddings, for example, where white was not a universal color. Colors were sometimes favored, and a twenty-three-year-old wore gray silk in 1871 because she was “too old to wear white.” For mourning, on the other hand, elaborate black costumes were required of women, with precisely prescribed periods during which they were to be worn.
MEN’S CLOTHING
Like women, men revolted at the end of the eighteenth century against the artificiality of the mannered clothing associated with the royal court. Instead, the new style of dress was to be natural, unartificial—it was modeled after the riding costume. This consisted of a linen shirt, a stiff neckband (a stock) or a cloth square that had been folded into a triangle and was tied around the neck (a cravat). The pants were tights, with tall boots worn over them, and for the upper body there was a vest (a waistcoat), standard with all suits until the end of the century, and a “dress” riding coat, cut high up and double-breasted with large lapels in the front over the waist and long-tailed in back.
This was the costume that would have been favored by Jane Austen’s heroes. In the 1820s the dandies modified it. Cinched-in waists, sometimes achievable only with a corset, became fashionable, and breeches basically disappeared. We hear of gaiters being worn with tights shortly thereafter. Pickwick, being a would-be sportsman, wears gaiters to keep his legs free from mud and dirt, and Dickens tells us that Marley’s ghost wears tights. So tight were the tights, in fact, that a purse had to be carried separately to put money in; there was no room for it in the skintight pants. Also, the new fashion dictated a change in material; ordinary material was insufficiently “pliable” and body molding for the new pants so buckskin began to be used instead.
By the 1830s colors grew darker, at least for men’s coats: thirty years later, the standard color would be black. It would remain so for the rest of the century. As a sort of last sartorial gasp, however, splendidly colored silk cravats and ornamented waistcoats of dizzying hues put in a brief appearance.
Meanwhile, the dress coat was less and less the uniform of everyday wear. It was relegated to the evening, where it turned black and became the standard “white tie and tails” outfit that is worn formally to this day. During the day, meanwhile, men now wore the frock coat, a long, almost-to-the knee garment of black that was cut to a uniform length all around and in which prime ministers and other sober folk appeared until the end of the century.
By mid-century men in society wore gloves (preferably not cotton or worsted, but often colored) in the street, and they wore white gloves for dinner parties—they could be removed for the actual eating—and for balls. Except for buckskins, all outer garments were generally made of wool, which meant that they wrinkled terribly without extraordinary care. There were no pants presses until the 1890s, and Beatrix Potter recorded of Prime Minister Gladstone that he looked “as if he had been put in a clothes-bag and sat upon. I never saw a person so creased.”
Shirts and underwear were of linen. It was cool, long wearing, and easily washed; in fact, for shirts it had snob appeal because it dirtied so quickly that if you could wear clean linen all the time you obviously had enough money to be a gentleman. The upper classes wore linens made to a thin consistency, like lawn or muslin; the poor wore garments of thicker varieties. All men customarily wore boots. Shoes were considered somewhat less than formal, and in the first part of the century a gentleman was never without his top boots (boots turned down—or made to look as if they were—at the top), Hessians (with a tassel in front), or Wellingtons (they came up to a uniform height all around). Given the condition of roads and streets and the need to ride horseback frequently, boots were quite practical. Ornamental strings of seals and small gewgaws were often worn attached to a watch chain, as we are reminded when the ghouls are haggling over Scrooge’s personal effects in the rag-and-bone shop in the grim future that the Spirit of Christmas to Come foreshadows for him.
As to whiskers, men were usually clean-shaven until the 1850s, when the soldiers returned from the Crimean War with beards. Do not “sneer at modern literature to a man with a beard, for if he is not a Crimean officer, he is sure to be” a literary man, wrote the author of a somewhat lighthearted contemporary etiquette book. Soon, however, every respectable man sprouted one. Which meant that thirty or forty years later aesthetes like Aubrey Beardsley (we find his contemporaries Yeats and Wilde also lacked whiskers) adopted a clean-shaven look as a specific mark of protest against the middle-class Philistines.
And th
e cane, of course. No gentleman was ever without one or its doppelgänger, the tightly furled umbrella. These were the descendants of the sword, which any eighteenth-century gentleman of consequence habitually carried about with him as a sign of gentle birth. The sword, along with knee breeches, was part of the required male dress at court well into the 1800s.
SERVANTS
He must be respectable—he keeps a man-servant,” says a nervous lady apropos of Mr. Pickwick when he is found in dubious circumstances.
But, of course.
If you could afford one in the 1800s, you had one. Or more. Sometimes, indeed, you had more than you needed just to show off—and to keep ahead of other people who might be catching up to you socially.