Friday Video: Getting Dressed for a Dickensian Christmas

Susan reporting,

Perfect timing for the Christmas holidays - our friends at Crow's Eye Productions have just released this splendid video in their "Getting Dressed" series. The maidservant's clothes are wonderfully presented, and the candle-lit atmosphere of a winter's night in Victorian England is gorgeous. Plus there's a guest appearance by a very special celebrity....

Many thanks to Pauline and Nick Loven for sharing these videos with us all this year!

If you received this post via email, you may be seeing an empty space or black box where the video should be. Please click here to see the video.

Genevieve Hamper, the Most Beautiful Face on Earth

Loretta reports:

My husband, who recently debuted his own nerdy history blog, has acquired some fascinating material in the way of postcards. Thanks to him, I discovered Genevieve Hamper (1888-1971) and Robert Mantell (1854-1928).

A search brought me to advertisements and reviews of their first motion picture a “surpassing Photo-Play debut of Robert B Mantell America’s foremost Tragedian and Genevieve Hamper Most Beautiful Face on Earth in a stirring arraignment of Society’s Sins The Blindness of Devotion.”

The quote is from a publicity ad in New York Evening Telegram November 1915. It’s here in Rex Ingram, Hollywood’s Rebel of the Silver Screen. There’s more concise coverage on the Turner Classic Movie page for the film.

However, as the ad indicates Ms. Hamper and her husband Mr. Mantell were already highly regarded stage actors. Though, apparently, they never made it big on Broadway, they traveled all over North America, putting on a series of plays—not one play, for a week, but, as the post card shows, eight performances of different “Shakespearean and Classic plays.” Obviously, these were greatly abridged.

My impression was, this was rather like the traveling theater troupes Dickens portrayed in Nicholas Nickleby, but quite a bit smaller. From all I’ve been able to discover, there were three players at most in the performances. Not that this means they didn’t put on a good show. As I described in a blog post some years ago, I saw a splendid one-man performance of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I suspect the audience at the Worcester Theatre got their money’s worth, too.

To give you an idea of how famous they were, the Theatre Magazine of 1921 devoted two pages to photos of their place in N.J., where they spent summers rehearsing

Though they continued to make films after The Blindness of Devotion, it seems that these, like so many of the era, did not survive.

Thanks to Larry Abramoff, our dear friend, who donated his amazing collection of post cards to my husband’s project.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it. 

Dickens and the Cratchit Family's Christmas Pudding

Mrs. Cratchit by Arthur Rackham

Loretta reports:

I haven’t yet seen the movie The Man Who Invented Christmas, but no one needs another movie to associate Charles Dickens with the holiday, thanks to his story, A Christmas Carol.

This past summer, while in London, I spent a few hours touring the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street. Among many items claiming my attention was the kitchen, because we Nerdy History Girls are always curious about everyday life. This house, which reflects the author’s lifestyle when he was just beginning to be famous, is very much a middle-class household, considerably upscale from that of Mr. Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit.

I offer some images from the kitchen, and leave you to imagine the process of making a Christmas pudding, even in this comfortable household. Then, please imagine what it might have been like for Mrs. Cratchit in her humbler abode. As a museum sign pointed out, “The Cratchit family had only one small pudding, but in a household such as 48 Doughty Street, there were often many spare puddings, cooked and stored for use at other celebrations throughout the year. Filled with spirits, old ale and spices, the puddings were well preserved on larder shelves and were even believed to improve in taste as they aged.”

Yes, that's the kitchen sink

But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone—too nervous to bear witnesses— to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough 1 Suppose it should break in turning out ! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose—a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid All sorts of horrors were supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam. The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding ! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered—flushed, but smiling proudly —with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding ! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing. At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up.
—“A Christmas Carol,” from The Works of Charles Dickens, Volume 13

Hedgehogs used for insect control

Photos of Charles Dickens Museum copyright © Loretta Chekani 2017
Illustration of Mrs. Cratchit carrying in the pudding by Arthur Rackham for 1915 edition.
Please click on images to enlarge.

Pulvermacher's Hydro-Electric Chains to Cure Whatever Ails You

Pulvermacher's Electric Chain

Loretta reports:

My vacation reading included Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. You’d think, after all this time, all the bios, all the scholarly papers, there’s nothing new to learn about Dickens. Au contraire.

Maybe I overlooked it elsewhere, but, among other things, I discovered that Dickens’s health was worse than I'd supposed, and he suffered from gout (which he pretended was something else—there was a lot of fiction in his life as well as his books). And to treat his painful foot, on the night before he died, he ordered “a ‘voltaic band,’ a type of electric chain that had become a fashionable all-purpose cure, recommended to him by the actress Mrs. Bancroft and supplied by Isaac Pulvermacher, Medical Battery Maker.”

And yes, of course I tracked the thing down for our readers’ edification.

You can read about it in this detailed pamphlet.  And this pamphlet explains all the ailments it supposedly cures. And you can read the the Wikipedia overview, with illustrations. And  Hand-Book of Natural Philosophy 1856 explains some more here.

Puvermacher's advertisement 1859

Please note the impressive list in the ad, of those endorsing the device.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Hackney Cab vs. Hackney Coach

Cruikshank, “The Last Cabdriver"

Loretta reports:

My characters in Dukes Prefer Blondes spend time in hackney coaches and hackney cabs. You will often find the terms used interchangeably, as though they were the same thing. However, a hackney cab was quite a different article from a hackney coach. The cab was a two-wheeled, one-horse vehicle. It held only two passengers, and seemed to be generally regarded as a mode of transportation for those who liked to live dangerously.

Leigh’s New Picture of London for 1834 briefly explains the difference here. You can read about them here in Omnibuses and Cabs, Their Origin and History, which includes excerpts from Dickens’s lively descriptions.

I’ve written a bit more about hackney coaches here, and you can read Dickens’s full version (which originally appeared in Bell’s Life in London in November 1835) here in Sketches by Boz.

1823 Hackney Cab

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

The Cost of Fashion

Loretta reports:

In response to a recent fashion post, a reader asked, “What class of women could afford this cape? What was the cost of fashion and what fabrics were used to create the cape?”

High fashion was expensive then and it’s expensive today. La Belle Assemblée, where those plates came from, was aimed at upper class women. A very rough analogy would be today’s Vogue or Harpers Bazaar. The fashions are mainly for wealthy women.

The Regency History site provides some LBA prices in the Regency era here. And Mike Rendell has info here. On my own, I found that LBA in 1826 cost 3 shillings. Ackermann’s Repository cost 4s. In 1833 The Royal Lady’s Magazine sold for 2s 6d.

Compare this to the Ladies Cabinet of Fashion which sold for 6d. The Lady's Pocket Magazine, the source of the fashion plates on this page, was another low-priced magazine. These were smaller, and the plates weren’t cruder. But the low price indicates readers at a lower economic level, who still wanted fashionable clothing. Basically, this would mean using less expensive material, since labor costs were negligible.

In Nicholas Nickleby,* a seamstress’s terms of employment are as follows: “Our hours are from nine to nine**with extra work when we’re very full of business, for which I allow payment as overtime ... I should think your wages would average from five to seven shillings a week; but I can’t give you any certain information on that point until I see what you can do.”

But a seamstress is a lowly position. How about this ad from The Sheffield Independent, and Yorkshire and Derbyshire Advertiser for February 1835?

Wanted.

A widow and her daughter, Members of the Church of England, to undertake the Management of the GIRLS’ CHARITY SCHOOL, in this Town, and the Instruction of the Children. Piety, Ability, and Activity are necessary qualifications; and references as to these must be given, as well as to general Respectability of Character ... Salary. £ 52. 10s. a year.

I also happened on this:
“Ladies fashionable Side-laced Boots, Black and Coloured, 4s 6d to 5s6d per pair.”—Brighton Patriot and Lewes Free Press etc. Tuesday, August 18, 1835

A pair of those shoes would take a sizable chunk of Kate’s weekly wages.

I couldn’t track down Luxmore. What I did find was:
"Luxor—A soft, ribbed silk satin: used as dress fabric: also an obsolete French woolen dress goods."— Louis Harmuth, Dictionary of Textiles.

Since this post is already too long, I'll continue with fabric costs and wages at another time.
*Dickens, who was a journalist at heart, tends to be pretty reliable in terms of living and working conditions.
**Six days a week.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.

Dressing like Dickens's Dolly Varden, c1870

Isabella reporting,

Fashion is always on the hunt for inspiration, and often that inspiration comes from popular culture. In the 1970s, the movie Annie Hall sent women borrowing neckties and over-sized trousers from the men's department, 1950s brides wore Juliet caps inspired by Shakespeare's heroine, and the Twilight books launched the pale skin and smokey eyes of vampire chic in the early 21st century.

This is hardly new, of course. A favorite character from a Charles Dickens character inspired a flirtatious fashion craze with an 18th century flair in the 1870s.

Dolly Varden is the winsomely pretty daughter of a locksmith in Dickens' 1839 historical novel, Barnaby Rudge. Set in 1780 against the background of the Gordon Riots,  the book is not one of Dickens' most popular today, but 19thc. readers were captivated by Dolly: "a pretty, laughing girl; dimpled and fresh, and healthful - the very impersonation of good-humour and blooming beauty."

What's surprising, however, is that Dolly's style of Georgian clothing didn't become a fad when the book was first published in 1839, but after Dickens' death in 1869. Among his belongings that were sold after his death was a portrait, right, of the character painted by Dickens' friend, the artist William Powell Frith.

This image sparked new interest in Dolly, and dressmakers and milliners happily obliged with their own interpretations. An overdress with full, looped-up skirts similar to a Polonaise, layers of patterned fabrics and ruffles, and an exaggerated hat tipped low over the face were all features of the style, and offered plenty of room for individual taste.

Women dressed in Dolly Varden attire seemed to have been everywhere, inspiring popular songs and dances (like the cover of the sheet music, lower left) as well as the expected satires. The somewhat melancholy young woman in The Fireplace by James Tissot (never an artist to miss an opportunity to paint extravagant bows and ruffles) wears a spectacularly striped version, Georgian dress as interpreted by the Victorians.

Yet in the fickle way of fashion, the craze was short-lived. By the late 1870s, Dolly's role as a style-setter seems to have passed - but there's no denying she had her fashion moment, no mean accomplishment for a fictional character.

Upper left: The Fireplace, by James Tissot, c1870, private collection.
Right: Dolly Varden, by William Powell Frith, c1842-9, Tate.
Lower left: Sheet music for the Dolly Varden Quadrille, published in Philadelphia, 1872.

Coaching Accidents Will Happen

Coach Accident

Loretta reports:

We historical romance writers frequently make use of coaching accidents and drunken coachmen in our stories. Unlike the number of dukes we’ve created—which at this point must far exceed the total of all noblemen in 19th-century Great Britain—coaching accidents are, unfortunately, not an exaggeration. They occur frequently in Dickens’s novels because they occurred frequently. He experienced several.

Isabella/Susan sent me a link to Geri Walton’s recent post on the subject, at the History of the 18th and 19th Centuries blog. Ms. Walton explains the many ways carriage and coach travel could go wrong. One method she doesn’t mention is the following, apparently based on an actual incident:

“Heads, heads—take care of your heads!" cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. "Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children —mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch— crash—knock—children look round—mother's head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!”

Coach Accident

—Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (more commonly known as The Pickwick Papers)

Look into any book about coaching, and you’ll read about accidents.

The clipping at right comes from the 1819 Annual Register* for 13 August.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Image: C.B. Newhouse, "A Passing Remark," from Thomas Cross, The Autobiography of a Stage Coachman (1904), courtesy Internet Archive.


*Account of the year 1819, published in 1820.

The Fox Under the Hill

Fox Under the Hill

Loretta reports:

Continuing my nerdy history tidbits about The Last Hellion*—

The characters appear in a number of London eating and drinking establishments, most of which I discovered in the works of Charles Dickens. One interesting place is the Fox Under the Hill. This tavern (not to be confused with others of the same name) was at No. 75 in the Strand, and vanished when the Victoria Embankment was built.

Fox under the Hill

You can read more about it here and here.  More images here and here.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

*Recently released in audio format

Convict Ship Statistics 1826

The Discovery as a prison ship

Loretta reports:

Some months ago, I offered crime statistics for 1830s London.

One surprising statistic was the low number of executions.  If you look at the original sentences, you see that hundreds of people were sentenced to death, for small crimes like stealing a loaf of bread or a handkerchief.  However, very few of those convicted were hanged.  A number would be pardoned, but in the majority of cases, the sentences were reduced, sometimes to a prison term, and sometimes to transportation to Australia. 

But first the convicts would spend time on a prison hulk. If you’ve read Dickens’s Great Expectations, you’ve encountered the hulks and their denizens.  Here’s a set of statistics from the February 1826 Annual Register.

Image: The Discovery as a Prison Ship at Deptford.  Launched as a 10 gun sloop at Rotherhithe in 1789, it served as a convict hulk 1808-12 and 1820-34.

Winter in London 1893

British Museum

Loretta reports:

Every year near the holidays, I either re-read A Christmas Carol or one of Dickens’s novels, because the London of my imagination is his, mainly, as is my sense of a 19th century Christmas.

But recently I came upon this interesting quotation from Henry James’s Essays in London and Elsewhere.  His love of London comes through in evocative images of the British Museum as he paints a picture of London in winter.

Henry James's London

British Museum image ca 1852 courtesy Wikipedia

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Crime in 1830s London

Oliver Twist scene

Loretta reports:

Isabella and I were talking recently about the differences in London crime fighting in the times of our respective books.   One of the things I’ve found so interesting about the mid-1830s is the evolution of London’s police.

The Metropolitan Police came into existence in 1829, in an unfriendly environment.  In 1830, when the first policeman was killed trying to break up a drunken fight, the coroner’s verdict was justifiable homicide.  The history of the force

Crime statistics 1838

is fascinating—and I’m likely to acquire way too many books on the subject—but for today, I only wanted to give you an idea of what they were dealing with. 

Crime statistics 1834-39

Some readers may be surprised at the number of executions.  Others may be unfamiliar with the name of the penal colony.  New South Wales I was aware of.  But I had to look up Norfolk Island.


Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the captions will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

The Hackney Coach in the 1830s

Hackney coach

Loretta reports:

My characters often take hackneys.  It wasn’t a classy way to travel, but the vehicles were ubiquitous, as one of the links in this post indicates. Also, it’s a preferred mode of transport for someone who's traveling incognito.  But what were hackneys like?

Here’s Charles Dickens’s description, from Sketches by Boz.*

"There is a hackney-coach stand under the very window at which we are writing; there is only one coach on it now, but it is a fair specimen of the class of vehicles to which we have alluded - a great, lumbering, square concern of a dingy yellow colour (like a bilious brunette), with very small glasses, but very large frames; the panels are ornamented with a faded coat of arms,** in shape something like a dissected bat, the axletree is red, and the majority of the wheels are green. The box is partially covered by an old great-coat, with a multiplicity of capes, and some extraordinary-looking clothes; and the straw, with which the canvas cushion is stuffed, is sticking up in several places, as if in rivalry of the hay, which is peeping through the chinks in the boot. The horses, with drooping heads, and each with a mane and tail as scanty and straggling as those of a worn-out rocking-horse, are standing patiently on some damp straw, occasionally wincing, and rattling the harness; and now and then, one of them lifts his mouth to the ear of his companion, as if he were saying, in a whisper, that he should like to assassinate the coachman. The coachman himself is in the watering-house; and the waterman,*** with his hands forced into his pockets as far as they can possibly go, is dancing the 'double shuffle,' in front of the pump, to keep his feet warm."

Hackney cabriolet

At this time, there were two different varieties of hackneys.  The other is a hackney cab (or cabriolet), which looks a bit more like the hansom cabs that appear later in the century.  Dickens distinguishes between the two, but elsewhere the hackneys seem to be lumped together as a mode of public transportation.

 *First published November 1835, in Bell’s Life in London.



**many of the coaches were vehicles previously owned by aristocrats.
***more about watermen here.
Images are from Henry Charles Moore, Omnibuses and cabs, their origin and history 1902, courtesy Internet Archive. 
Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source.

Paying Charles Dickens

Dickens in his study at Gad's Hill

Loretta reports:

A commenter on one of my recent posts wrote:  “Paid by the word, that was done in my youth when I wrote a newspaper column. Are you saying that it wasn't done in Dickens' time, or that it was not done with Dickens?”

The idea of Dickens being paid by the word may be based on misunderstandings about his career as well as the 21st century view of his prose style.

Dickens started out as a freelance reporter, and these men were penny-a-liners, often viewed as hacks.  He was soon hired, though, for a regular salary.

His fiction followed a different route.  For his first few published fictional pieces—which eventually became part of Sketches by Boz—his only pay was the delight of seeing his work in print.  But not long thereafter he was paid an extra two guineas a week for these sketches.

He received one hundred pounds for the copyright to the Sketches by Boz printed to that point, then £100 for the second edition, then £150 “for a new volume of previously uncollected sketches.”  For The Pickwick Papers, he was to provide 1-1/2 sheets (16 pages of finished product) per month at 9 guineas per sheet.  The rates soon went up.

By the 1840s, he received an advance of £1800 for American Notes. In 1863,  “he proposed that [his publishers] pay him £6000 for the half copyright throughout and outright" for Our Mutual Friend. 

As to his verbosity: We 21st C authors are expected step briskly into the story, and to keep digressions and subplots to a bare minimum.  Not at all the case in his time.  Readers had longer attention spans; they wanted big stories and lots of detail.  But he told big stories and conveyed detail in a lively way, and his style seemed fresh and vibrant and modern to his readers.  His early newspaper pieces sometimes make fun of the over-ornate style of the time—and it’s a joke he uses again and again in his fiction, especially in portraying hypocrites, humbugs, and windbags.


While there seem to be an infinite number of Dickens biographies, I relied for the above information on two I had close at hand, Fred Kaplan’s Dickens: A Biography, and Peter Akroyd’s Dickens.

Image courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the information page there.

The Victorian Hair-Guard

Bradley Headstone & Charley Hexam

Loretta reports:

During my recent re-enactment of sickbed scenes from La Bohème—with less fatal results, in that I did not, actually, die—I whiled away the time reading, among other things, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, his last complete novel and one of my favorites.

Seeking an edition for my eBook reader led me to a review claiming Dickens had been paid by the word.  This concept makes sense to people who (a) never read a reputable biography of Dickens, (b) never had to read Victorian literature in general, and/or (c) can’t imagine a world in which television and radio—let alone the Internet—didn’t exist, and where entertainment was something you read, heard read, went to see/hear, or made for yourself.

Some people have trouble with Victorian writing because it’s …wordy.  It had to be.  People needed detail. Many had never seen the scenes or people novelists described.  Many lived in a world so small we can’t imagine it.  There were Londoners who’d never seen the sea and knew next to nothing about places outside their immediate neighborhoods.

They probably knew what a hair-guard was, though.

“Bradley Headstone,* in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty.”  —Our Mutual Friend
 
Though I’ve studied fashion, the finer points of Victorian male attire are not in my repertoire.  Hair-guard?  Try Googling it.  Yikes.

My OED merely listed it, without definition.  My copy of The Dickens Index said:  “superfine neck-cord made of hair for ensuring the safety of pocket watches, spectacles, etc.”  Having found occasional mistakes in this book, I proceeded to Google.  Filtering to 19th C Books led me to many examples, (here, here, here, here, here - item 71- and here) whose context offered clues, i.e., it is a sort of chain or rope.  But changing my search terms showed me it wasn't necessarily "superfine," as this page of examples demonstrates.

Now we all know.

*Pictured above, courtesy The Victorian Web.  Please click on the caption for a larger image in which the hair-guard is easier to see, and to learn more about the image.
The Doré illustration, "The Organ in the Court," of street children's entertainment, is scanned from my copy of Doré's London, edited by Valerie Purton.