Fashion In The Time Of Jane Austen (7 page)

Lieutenant Henry Lygon, 4th Earl of Beauchamp (miniature by John Smart Junior, 1803). Thought to have been painted shortly after he matriculated from Oxford and gained the rank of officer in the 13th and 16th Light Dragoons. The dashing uniforms of the Prussian Hussars were a huge influence on the uniforms designed for the British military, not least the increasingly fancy designs contributed by the Prince Regent.

Brummell’s dress ethos was the first step in social mobility allowing for those like Pen’s father in Thackeray’s
Pendennis
to slip up a class from moneyed trade to the middle class of minor gentleman. Otherwise social mobility was through the Navy where there were opportunities to gain wealth from the ‘prize money’ divvied up between the crew when an enemy ship was captured, or the Army, where officers were invited to mix with the best families in England and had unprecedented opportunities to make money in foreign lands.

A Gentleman’s Toilet
(Lewis Marks, 1800). Women were not the only ones to wear falsies; men resortd to their own artifice, and ‘false curves’ were popular to make a puny leg more ‘poetic’.

With two brothers serving, Jane’s affiliation lay strongly with the Navy, who were rapidly redeeming their seamy reputations through victory and heroism. With the Navy protecting England with an ‘impenetrable wooden wall’, the militia were left to keep order within. Aside from a few locally contained riots there was not too much to do, and the militia quite swiftly earned a reputation for being more interested in drilling and parties than any kind of action.

Where Naval uniforms in trusty blue were generally still cut from a pattern designed in the 1780s, the glamorous bright red uniforms of the militia were up to date, with tightly fitted trousers, short jackets and hessian boots. The Navy needed more than eight hundred crew for each warship and thousands of men were far away at the front line, whereas the men in the militia (like Wickham) were at home partying and using their military splendour to turn young girls’ heads, especially those rather superficial like Lydia Bennet. Older women were not immune, however, as Jane wrote for Mrs Bennet: ‘I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very well…

Second Dragoons 1812.
This soldier’s tall shako hat is attached to his jacket by a lanyard to avoid it being lost in battle and his sabretache hanging behind his knee would be more easily accessible when on horseback. He is wearing grey trousers as part of battledress. Known as ‘overalls’, they probably serve to keep his white pantaloons clean.

Riding costume (1798) with military inspired shako hat.

I thought Colonel Forster looked very becoming the other night at Sir William’s in his regimentals.’

In
The Post-Captain
John Davis wrote: ‘Women, like mackerel ... are caught with a red bait ... the blue jacket stands no chance.’ It was not surprising that all the girls – and women – liked a man in uniform because most regiments in fact selected their recruits for their tall slim stature and youthful good looks. Some colonels actually found reason to discharge their veteran officers despite their obvious value in the melee because they wanted to replace them with younger more attractive men to improve the look of their regiment and therefore its prestige. Even so, Jane’s loyalty remained with her brothers and William Price, who was ‘complete in his lieutenant’s uniform, looking and moving all the taller, firmer, and more graceful for it’ in
Mansfield Park
.

Most found military glamour to be the height of chic; the towering shako hats, the gleaming gold braid, and flashing sword sent a clear message of indomitable strength. Many ladies in support of their officer beaux wore a feminised version of their uniforms with hussar jackets, pelisses, and Spencers with braid and frogging, whilst for civilian gentlemen there was an interchange of fashion from military to civilian dress and back. Pantaloons and Hessians became hugely popular at least partially because they were part of the heroic military image. Pantaloons were officially sanctioned for military campaigns in 1803, but even before that officers wore them at home – ‘very proud of ourselves when at outquarters, we could thus dress, as it looked so like service’.

The Regency ‘Buck’ or ‘Blood’ so beloved of Pierce Egan was the bold, loud contrast to the waspish dandy. To the Buck, dress was only an adjunct to winning, whether racing horses, betting, or cards. They had also adapted the English country gentleman’s look but their colours were brighter, their cut less artful, and their waistcoats were patterned. Their boots were allowed to get dirty and they would never dream of wearing the dress shoes and stirrup pantaloons that dandy Londoners had adopted for half dress.

The new style of male dressing certainly had its detractors – in 1803 the
General Evening Post
reports of a ‘Brighton Blood’ starting his day by ‘endeavouring to give [himself] a slovenly appearance’. Jane was also less than enamoured: although Tom Bertram in
Mansfield Park
is something of a Buck his costume remains with the gentlemanly norm, but it is strident and odious John Thorpe in
Northanger Abbey
whom she characterises as:

…a stout young man, of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form seemed fearful of being too handsome, unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.

Military inspired styles were very popular, like this
French Carriage Dress
(
La Belle Assemblée
, March 1818) adorned by military style braid ‘frogging’, the braid made into knots and loops to be used as fastenings.

Gentleman’s Garrick greatcoat. Lady Lyttelton writes of the Barouche Club gentry in a letter in 1810: ‘a set of hopeless young men who think of no earthly thing but how to make themselves like coachmen … have formed themselves into a club, inventing new slang words, adding new capes to their great-coats and learning to suck a quid of tobacco and chew a wisp of straw …’

Sarah Barrett Moulin: Pinkie
(Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1794). Although her muslin gown – very similar to Jane Austen’s in
The Rice Portrait
(page 11) – is very much a girl’s dress, it heralds the changes imminent in women’s fashions.

R
OUSSEAU’S PHILOSOPHIES
had a particularly profound effect upon the lives of children. Prior to the publication of
Emile
in 1762, which extolled the child’s right to freedom, childhood was considered to be at best an inconvenient preface to adulthood, and at worst an uncivilised state that had to be strictly controlled to avoid the inherent risks of original sin. Children were first tightly swaddled, then dressed identically in loose ‘frocks’ until, at around six years old, gender differences were acknowledged, when they would take on miniature versions of their parents’ costumes.

Instead, in light of growing awareness of the links between health, hygiene and activity Rousseau advocated that:

…the limbs of a growing child should be free to move easily in his clothes; nothing should cramp their growth or movement; the French style of dress uncomfortable and unhealthy for a man, is especially bad for children … the best plan is to keep children in frocks as long as possible and then to provide them with loose clothes, without trying to define the shape... Their defects of body and mind may all be traced to the same source, the desire to make men of them before their time.

His concept of childhood as a fleeting era of happiness and freedom to be enjoyed before it was all too quickly lost, struck a chord with the Romantic sensibilities of the time. Where children had previously only been painted as part of a family scene, they became the subject for portraits, their transient beauty captured, promising renewal for old dynasties, holding new hope for the future. Childhood began to be cherished, even emulated as sports and games became acceptable pastimes and the reforms in children’s fashions began to influence adult fashions.

One of the first children to appear wearing a distinct child’s outfit was John Charles Viscount Althrop, painted in 1786 at the age of four. He wears simple ankle-length trousers and a low-necked short jacket with an open shawl collar, in a plain buff fabric suitable for play. This ensemble with the trousers buttoned onto the jacket just above the waist became the ‘skeleton suit’ and the staple of a little boy’s wardrobe until the late 1830s, when it began to be superseded by the sailor suit. ‘Breeching’, the term used for the ‘promotion’ from frock to breeches, was a key transitional moment in a boy’s life and keenly anticipated by relatives as it was the first step towards manhood, marking that he had successfully passed his formative years when at the greatest risk of infant mortality. In 1801 Jane writes to ask for the pattern of ‘the jacket and trousers or whatever it is that Elizabeth’s boys wear when they are first put into breeches’.