The layout of a 19th C coaching inn

Hatchetts-The White Horse Cellar

Loretta reports:

Those of us writing books set during the coaching era often puzzle over coaching inns.  Even when we actually visit coaching inns in England, we may not feel enlightened.  We don’t see the horses or the stablemen.  The once-bustling yard is often converted to an eating area, with picnic benches and flowers.  Sometimes the interior has been redone to look more ye olde than is quite authentic.  Here’s the basic layout, courtesy H.D. Eberlein & A.E. Richardson, The English Inn Past & Present.

~~~

Custom had decreed the arrangement of an inn plan.  There was the usual courtyard with its arched or beamed entry.  There was a hall for receiving guests, a main staircase, a coffee room and a dining parlour.  Some inns could boast a special apartment for dining coach passengers only.  In addition there were smaller apartments known respectively by the names Sun, Moon, Star, Crescent or Paragon.  From 1700 to the year 1760 the arched entries were low, for until the latter date outside passengers were not encouraged.  After the accession of George the Third, when outside travelling became more general, the inside passengers were treated as belonging to an inferior order.  Not only did landlords show increased respect to the outside passengers, but a subtle compliment was paid to the coach proprietors by the landlords when alterations to the arched entries were made to their respective inns.   ...

Bull & Mouth Inn

No definite system of planning seems to have been adhered to through the centuries for inns other than to provide a yard around which were grouped sets of lodgings and a further yard for stabling and wagons ... The old inns of London consisted in the main of a block facing the street with an entry to a courtyard within, the front part of the house being reserved for sitting-rooms and eating parlours. The problem of the Georgian buildings was to provide easy ingress though an arched entry for coaches, which made their way out through a gate in the further yard.  To right or left of this entry, which varied according to circumstance, there was generally a large room where coach passengers could dine; to the left was the coach office and a passage connecting with the bar and the coffee room.  The drawing room was on the first floor.  This arrangement was generally followed in all parts of the country.

~~~

Images:  Pollard, Hatchett’s, the White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly (from which my hero and heroine set out in Scandal Wears Satin).  From Denver Art Museum collection.  T.H. Shepherd, The Old Bull & Mouth Inn, from London and Its Environs in the Nineteenth Century (1831 ed), courtesy Internet Archive.


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.

How (Not) to Dress a 17th c.Puritan Maiden

Isabella reporting,

Historical clothing is one of our favorite topics on this blog, and readers of both our posts and books will know how hard we try to get things *right* when in comes to what people were wearing in the past. Yet I'm also willing to concede that there can be considerable wiggle-room when it comes to theatrical costumes (no one really expects Cinderella to wear a perfect replica 18th c. gown, do they?) and other artistic expressions of past fashion.

But what happens when that artist's vision becomes such a potent image that it wipes the real thing clear away?

That was my thought yesterday while reading one of my favorite blogs, historian Donna Seger's Streets of Salem. Her most recent post featured the 19th c. Anglo-American painter George Henry Boughton (1833-1905), and how his paintings of 17th c. New England Puritans have influenced how we today imagine those early settlers. (Read her post here.) She's right: Boughton's paintings have illustrated countless school history books, and his version of Puritan dress is still widely accepted as the real thing. In fact, when I did a search for the painting, left, the Google best guess that comes up is "Puritan fashion", followed by links to a teaching site that labels this as an example of "colonial clothing."

Except that it isn't. Like most history-painters, Boughton's intentions were the best, but what this young woman is wearing bears no more real resemblance to 17th c. clothing than the sturdy stone walls and substantial brick buildings in the background do to mid-17th c. architecture in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Boughton painted his Puritan maiden in 1875, and to me her expression and posture seem more akin to a fashionable lady of that era; compare her with the lady in James Tissot's Portrait, also painted in 1875.

But it's the costume that Boughton contrived for his model that fascinates me the most. I'm guessing that, like many artists, he had a collection of antique and fancy-dress clothing in his studio, and he assembled an outfit from bits and pieces that looked right to him. To be fair to Boughton, he was trying to create an artistic mood, a somber, thoughtful reverie set in the past, rather than a 17th c. fashion plate. In 1875, people regarded historical clothing as old clothes to be worn to masquerades (no one loved fancy-dress more than the Victorians), and the academic study of dress and fashion was in its infancy.

Still, I'd like to offer a challenge to you. Among our readers, there are many art historians, re-enactors, costume historians, historic seamstresses and tailors, and others of you who know your historical fashion. How many different elements and eras can you see represented in this young woman's costume?

Above: A Puritan Maiden, by George Henry Boughton, 1875, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute.

Fashions for January 1888

January 1888 Evening Fashions

Loretta reports:

We return to the later Victorian era for today's January fashion parade. You may be sure that, unless they lived in a warm climate, the ladies came to the party draped in furs.  Images are from Peterson's Magazine for 1888.

Fashion description

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.

Breakfast Links: Week of December 29, 2014

We're back from our holiday break with a super-sized serving of our fav links of the week to other web sites, blogs, articles, and images, all collected via Twitter.
• Seriously cool: Dr. May-Britt Moser accepted her Nobel Prize for Physiology & Medicine wearing a gown covered with sequin versions of the neurons that she discovered.
• Lost and found: toys, tears, and the Thames.
• A brief history of 17th c. women's make-up.
• A unique early 19th c., double-sided paisley-style shawl, woven in Russia.
• A deceased mother's 1739 brocade wedding dress poignantly repurposed for her daughter's wedding shoes in 1773.
• Gowns, illustrations, and more from Gone with the Wind, one of the most iconic costume movies of all-time.
• What a treasure: Bodelian Libraries receive gift of Charles I's traveling library.
• Image: 1860s photo of tollgates, the Old Kent Road, Southwark, London.
• "A festival...held sacred by good eating and drinking": the Christmas season in the 18th c. Lady's Magazine.
• Charles Goss' vanishing London: evocative early 20th c. photographs of a city now gone.
• Autumn comes to Abney Park, one of London's "Magnificent Seven" Victorian cemeteries.
• Burn your corsets: 19th c. anti-corset propaganda and their curious use of "science."
• How the Waterloo Medal came about.
• Image: Swedish Queen Kirstina's hat in purple velvet, made in Paris c.1650.
• The smells of a Shakespearean playhouse: early modern recipes for the stage.
• The purpose of perfume in the 18th century.
• Fleeing to Great Dismal Swamp, slaves and other outcasts found freedom.
• Nota Bene: the top ten most important notebooks in history.
• Image: Unusual early 20th c. composite postcard includes real hair.
• Strong constitutions: phenomenal bar bill run up by George Washington and other Founding Fathers.
• The Kitty-Trot, a 1919 dance sensation.
• Montpelier Hill: the mysterious abandoned home of Ireland's 18th c. Hellfire Club.
• Image: Hush! by James Tissot, 1875, Manchester Art Gallery.
• Three-Fingered Jack: the story of Victorian actor Richard John Smith.
• Was Sir Isaac Newton homosexual - and does it matter?
• "Where I See Fashion" tumblr juxtaposes visually striking photographs of art with clothing.
•  Image: According to 1950s magazine, a Man's Life looked pretty terrible.
• Searching for the original color of the Queen's Staircase at Hampton Court Palace.
• Spectacular video links: flying over the Middle Ages.
• Lavishly reimagined interiors in the now-lost NYC house of architect Stanford White.
• Depending on your POV, this is either enlightening, depressing, or confirming all your worst fears: new map reveals Americans' taste in art state by state.
• A long-hidden (and tragic) legacy of the American Civil War: did soldiers 150 years ago suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder?
• Image: Gorgeous detail of the bodice of an 1890s ballgown.
• Unraveling the mystery of a sampler made by a 10-year-old liberated African slave in 1831.
• Etienne-Gaspard Robertson and the 19th c. phantasmagoria.
• A not-so-brief history of American cheerleading.
• Image: So much detail in all those missives! Portrait of a Merchant, by Jan Gossaert, c1530, National Gallery of Art.
• A bestiary of bobs, 1930s.
• "I should apologize...for being absolutely carried home upon a man's shoulders... to be desposited like a dead log": Charles Lamb's unapologetic letter of apology following a night of drunken excess.
• An elegy for London's famed White Hart tavern - seven hundred years of history destroyed for a modern office building.
• The best quotes regarding cats from Mark Twain (who was a fervent cat-lover.)
• Looking for a challenge for 2015? Learn to play the game of piquet - 1892 on-line book: The Laws of Piquet as Adopted by the Portland and Turf Clubs.
• Image: Covent Garden Market by Balthazar Nebot, Tate Gallery.
• Anne Brontë's ghost turns up in a house on Long Island looking "pensive....She seems content just going up and down the stairs."
• Just for fun: Congratulations to 16-year-old Jack Magee, U-18 Cartoonist of the Year, for this beauty about Richard III.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.

Friday Video: Beautiful Music from an 1890 Music Box

Isabella reporting,

We're not officially done with the holiday season until Twelfth Night on January 6, which is reason enough to share this video. According to the YouTube caption,

This is a coin-operated Polyphon music box (c. 1890) in the collection of the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Here, it plays a rendition of Oh Come, All Ye Faithful on a pressed metal disk. As the disk rotates, projections on the back turn wheels which pluck the teeth of the comb. Listen for the sound of the coin dropping at 1:10.

It all makes for a beautiful sound from the past, and one to relish before the craziness of the new year begins all over again.