Friday Video: Hints for Making a Quick Evening Dress, 1926

Isabella reporting,

Thriftiness and making-over aren't traits associated with modern fashionistas, but in this silent clip, a resourceful mother and daughter from the 1920s demonstrate exactly how to remake a morning dress into one fit for an evening out. Of course, they're helped by the straight lines and simple constructions of 1920s fashions; I can't imagine many at-home seamstresses would have been able to achieve the same speedy transformation with a dress from a generation or two before, like these from the 1870s.

The clip is from a 1920s British how-to series called "Hints and Hobbies" that offered quick suggestions for everything from driving etiquette to ballroom dancing to amusing your guests at dinner with sugar cubes. These were shown in movie theaters as entertaining information (aka filler) along with more general newsreels before the main attraction. I wonder if anyone in the audience actually thought the hints offered useful, usable ideas, or if they were viewed strictly as amusement. I find it hard to imagine a woman watching this and going home to take her scissors with such vigor to a perfectly good day dress for a dinner party. Or am I being too sensible?

Waterloo Bridge 1826

Prospect of London 1826

Loretta reports:

Online you can find many editions of Prince Pückler-Muskau’s account of his travels in the U.K.  Open any one at random, and I think you’ll be captivated.  I have no idea what his writing was like in the original language, but Sarah Austin gives us a very lively and very readable translation.  “Readable” is not something you can always say of the majority of early 19th C English prose works.

Many of the sites he writes about exist today, but in a very different setting.  This painting of Waterloo Bridge captures a part of the London he would have known.

 

— Hermann Pückler-Muskau , Tour in England, Ireland, and France: in the years 1826, 1827, 1828, and 1829. With remarks on the manners and customs of the inhabitants, and anecdotes of distinguished public characters. In a series of letters. (1833)

Image: Alexander Nasmyth, A Prospect of London, seen from the Earl of Cassilis' Privy Garden, with Waterloo Bridge, 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.

Hair care in 1918

1914 hair extremes & normal

Loretta reports:

The Two Nerdy History Girls have blogged extensively about hair styles, hair washing pros and cons, and other top-of-the-head matters.  (You'll find a couple of examples here and here; for more, please search "hair").  To add to your collection of historical attitudes about hair care, I present some excerpts from Mary Brooks Picken’s book, The Secrets of Distinctive Dress (1918).

Hair Care

 

Image:  Just to be conspicuous (edited), Puck Magazine, February 1914, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

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.

Jane Austen's Surprising Aunt Philadelphia

Isabella reporting,

Because my newest book features a heroine who was born in India and came to England, my last few posts (here and here) have featured the English in 18th c. India. But it wasn't only younger sons who went out to India in search of fortune and adventure. English women also made the arduous journey in the hopes of finding fortune, adventure, and, most importantly, husbands in a male-dominated land where the odds would be much in their favor.

One of these adventuresome women was Philadelphia Austen Hancock, who in her later years became a favorite aunt to novelist Jane Austen. As a child, however, Philadelphia was no one's favorite. Born in 1730, she soon lost her mother in 1733, and her father in 1737. Her stepmother had no interest in raising either Philadelphia or her younger brother and sister, and as was common at the time, the three young siblings were separated and sent to live with other relatives.

While the two younger children were sent to Austen family members, Philadelphia was given to members of her mother's family, the Hampsons. The Hampsons had both money and position - Philadelphia's uncle was a baronet - but they seemed to have shared little of it with the inconvenient little girl. While Philadelphia's brother George was sent to Oxford to become a clergyman, Philadelphia was apprenticed at fifteen to a London milliner named Hester Cole. No doubt the Hampsons considered their familial obligations done.

Some modern Austen-fans choose to interpret Philadelphia's occupation as a euphemism for prostitution, jumping to the conclusion that because many milliners (and seamstresses, and mantua-makers, and parlor-maids, and just about every other trade that a young woman might attempt in 18thc. London) were so underpaid that they turned to prostitution to support themselves. The fact that Mrs. Cole's shop was in Covent Garden also makes it tempting to speculate about Philadelphia's real trade. But however disinterested the Hampsons may have been in her, it seems unlikely they'd send her to a bawdy house, nor is there any historical proof of Philadelphia earning her living in any less-than-honorable way.

Whatever the case, Philadelphia must not have found millinery to her taste, because at twenty she sailed for India, her passage paid by a relative. No one knows if she went boldly on her own, or was perhaps sent away by the Hampsons (another hint of scandal?) Either way, it must not have been an easy decision, and it's hard to imagine a young woman making such a desperate journey alone, and without any real prospects or friends waiting for her in a very foreign land. Without a dowry, her face really would have been her only fortune.

But Philadelphia's gamble paid off.  After a short time in India, she did marry, quite respectably, to Tysoe Saul Hancock, who was a surgeon with the East India Company. They had one daughter, Eliza. Again the centuries-old whispers appear, hinting that Eliza's real father was her wealthy godfather Warren Hastings, the future Governor General of India. Again, too, there is no real proof to substantiate the rumors, but Philadelphia had chosen her daughter's godfather - or her own lover - well: Hastings provided Eliza with a substantial legacy of £10,000.

In any event, Philadelphia and her daughter returned to London, while Hancock continued to toil in India. Eliza was raised as a lady, with a full compliment of lessons in dancing, French, and the harp, and all the advantages that Philadelphia hadn't had for herself. When Dr. Hancock died, the two women found London too expensive for the fashionable life they wished to live, and they went instead to Paris, where they were quickly swept up into the gay life of the French society in the last days before the Revolution. Wanting the security for Eliza that she couldn't provide herself, Philadelphia urged her towards a marriage with a French count, who died on the guillotine. (Eliza's second marriage, to her cousin Henry Austen, was both longer and happier.) While Philadelphia's decisions might not always seem today to have been the wisest for her or her daughter, she made them as a woman of her time, with limited options and resources.

Regardless of the shadows in her past, Phila (as she was known in the family) was welcomed at the home of her brother George, now a clergyman, and she was with George's wife when their daughter Jane was born. It's easy to imagine why Aunt Phila became Jane's favorite aunt: not only was she a trusted member of the family, but she also carried with her that hint of mystery and scandal, along with the exoticism of India and the sophistication of Paris - all in short supply in the home of a country clergyman.

When I look at the little miniature of Philadelphia shown here, I see only an elegantly attractive lady, with a fashionable hairstyle and a genteel smile. That little half-smile only makes me long to know the truth about her personal history, and to fill in all those scandalous gaps that time (and perhaps the well-meaning and more respectable George) have glossed over. Ahh, Jane, if only you'd written your aunt's story!

Top: Miniature portrait ring of Philadelphia Austen Hancock, by John Smart, c1768. Private collection. Photograph copyright Rowan & Rowan.

Breakfast Links: Week of March 2, 2015

Fresh for your weekend reading - our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, gathered for you via twitter.
• Some strikingly modern faces in this collection of Victorian cartes de viste.
• The gorgeous typeface that drove men mad and sparked a hundred-year-old mystery.
• Don't spare the rum: 18th c. summer punch recipe for fortifying gentlemen in South Carolina.
• A glimpse into the not-so-secret diary of two-year-old Victor Cavendish, late 9th Duke of Devonshire.
• How to invent palindromes.
• Early 20th c. posters that warned of the horrors of a world with women's rights.
• Here piggy, piggy: George Washington's hogs at Mount Vernon.
• Beware the fish mousse: how all the food on Downton Abbey gets made.
• Image: Elegant, finely crafted Balmoral boot, c. 1900-1910.
• Mary Driscoll, the "matchgirl" who fought for workers' rights.
• Smugglers, spies, and privateers: the Isle of Jersey during the Napoleonic Wars.
• Zounds, how you scrape! Being shaved in Georgian Britain.
• Ravages of war: what a spruce British soldier would have looked like at the beginning of the American Revolution, and what he looked like at the end.
• When Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris in 1778, women rushed to his house to be put under his spell.
• First lady Louisa Adams, social charmer.
• Retro fails: ten unhealthy advertising campaigns - and a hoax or two - from (thankfully) times gone by.
• Mrs. Sarah Siddons, the greatest tragic actress of the Georgian stage.
• Image: Red and gold glamour: embroidered coat from 19th c. Turkey.
• The tragic and heart-breaking history of Victorian "murder bottles" for children.
• Unfinished portrait of Wellington by Lawrence to be shown for the first time.
• The sham ghosts of the Georgian era.
• "My servants really live like kings & queens": below stairs intruding on above stairs, 1774.
• Image: London poster from WWI admonishing women against extravagance in dress.
• Magnificent 16th c. pendant of a swan, whose body is a single baroque pearl.
• Royal reputations rise and fall, but King John's deserves to remain at the bottom as England's worst king.
• Treadmills for prisoners, 1823.
• Image: 18th c. French box for storing wigs.
• Seventeenth century widow Lydia Scottow's wardrobe as described in her estate accounts.
• An 18th c. boxing match between two women for the hand of a farm lad.
• Which of these foods were available in 15th c. England?
• The ancient Greeks lived in a world of limited colors: black, white, metallic, with flashes of red or yellow.
• The fur trade in North America: observations of an 18th c. traveller.
• Image: Medieval London in a manuscript, c. 1500.
• War of the Roses skeletons, possibly of executed soldiers, unearthed in York.
• A tragic catalogue of a hundred mostly-miserable 19th c. marriages.
• Just for fun: the Mean Girls of Wolf Hall.
• More just for fun, or perhaps a SERIOUS WARNING: the dangers of reading romance novels, 1858.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.