looking good, billy ray

From a review in the Times Literary Supplement of The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England by the appropriately named John Styles:

Some modern historians tend to regard pictorial evidence of a well-dressed working class as a sentimental distortion. In exhibition catalogues you will often see the genre scenes of George Morland and Francis Wheatley dismissed as “idealized”, with their sturdy peasants in spotted kerchiefs and brass-buttoned waistcoats and the women with sprigged petticoats and overskirts and silk scarves. Or take Stubbs’s Haymakers, with their blue and canary breeches and their white cotton stockings, not to mention the women with their spotless aprons and black silk-covered hats, all described by John Barrell in his book The Dark Side of the Landscape (1983) as “dressed well above their station” and “quite impossible to believe in as labourers”; are these not creations as artificial as the Wedgwood biscuit ware on which they were reproduced? . . .

. . .  John Styles, formerly a costume scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has squirrelled together a remarkable, and often poignant, heap of evidence of what the poor actually wore. There is, for example, the inventory of the clothes lost in the terrible fire at the Suffolk market town of Brandon in 1789. The fire consumed the homes of rich and poor alike, so that we can contrast the total wardrobes (apart from the clothes they had on their backs at the time) of the surgeon and the postmaster with those of the blacksmith and the cordwainer and their families. By value, the losses range from £88 to less than £3, which reflects huge differences in the quality and number of the garments lost, but not in the type. Even the poorest usually had a change of shirt, shift, stockings and gown (the outerwear by then usually made of cotton, the underwear still mostly linen). Nor did the styles vary greatly between classes. Even great ladies had taken to wearing aprons, even servant girls wore silk kerchiefs.

Labouring men would spend several weeks’ wages to buy a watch, often silver-cased rather than brass. [E. P.] Thompson famously claimed that these purchases were enforced by the grim disciplines of industrial mass production. The natural rhythm of work in the field had been supplanted by the tyranny of the clock. Styles argues that the prestige and decorative value of the watch and its potential with the pawnbroker were at least as important as its timekeeping value. Court reports of theft cases (another fertile source, since the reports often identify the thief or victim by what he or she was wearing) suggest that watches were seldom stolen at workplaces, except from coachmen and Post Office guards who did need to keep accurate time, and were often left at home hanging on the bedpost, only to be taken out and shown off at the pub – and then nicked. Watches in eighteenth-century England were items of conspicuous consumption as much as the Rolexes and Patek Philippes that now sparkle on President Sarkozy’s wrist. Two of the handsome illustrations that crowd Styles’s sumptuous volume show Lord Nelson and a very common sailor each sporting watch chain and seals dangling from his fob pocket.

I remember reading Barrell's book on landscape about 12 years ago and recognizing it as a serious work with a lot of truth in it that nonetheless made me rebel against all of its conclusions (his book on the political theory of painting I found much more congenial, as it unknowingly connected with issues in other fields that I was interested in, though I doubt Barrell would have approved.)  Thompson isn't really any concern of mine, though I've read The Making of the English Working Class and admired it.  Nonetheless, I am delighted to read of Styles' book, as nothing could please me more than a good, empirical, rebuttal of what's become to some degree a one-sided argument.  That it takes the form of argument built from patiently assembled and colorful details accompanied by plenty of images, as it evidently is, makes it sound even better.

Not having read it, I don't have much more to say (other than it's on the wishlist), but the watch example does stir my mind a bit.  As the review goes on to say, some of the arguments find parallels in our time, and this seems to me to be one of them.  I can't help but think that there's an element of truth in both sides as presented.  After all, consider how we treat certain updated new versions of similar technology: the complaint that, with laptop computers and cell phones, no one (or rather, no one of certain professions) even is truly free from the office, must be among the most commonplace of observations, whether offered bitterly or with a smile.  Yet when it comes to these instruments of our supposed enslavement, how many are looking at advertisements and visiting stores to find the most up-to-date models with the coolest features and latest designs?  E.P. Thompson may be lucky he didn't live to see the iPhone.