Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Judith Flanders
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007347629
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in its entirety, to vast warehouses farming out jobs to smaller workshops, who in turn hired cheap pieceworkers to produce slops at home—the foundation of the mass-production system that would develop in the nineteenth century.20

      By the beginning of the nineteenth century many of the working and lower-middle classes bought their clothes (either new or secondhand), both at the cheaper end of the retail market and at weekly or regular fairs, and this increased throughout the century. A large number of police reports throughout the period dealt with the matter of stolen clothes, which showed how strong the secondhand market was: there is no point stealing something that has no resale value. In good times workers bought new suits or dresses; when work disappeared they pawned or sold the items to tide them over. Clothes were not just pleasurable frivolities, but an investment, a protection against hard times. New fashion items could be acquired for relatively little outlay—well within the means of a servant or other member of the working classes paid in cash. In 1871 Daniel Kirwan, an American journalist in London, visited the Rag Fair, held every Sunday morning in Petticoat Lane in the East End. He was told by one customer:

      I had no other togs but them as I was wearing, and they were so wore out I was ashamed to be seen in ‘em. So…I said to myself, ‘Blest if I don’t go over to the Fair…and moult the mouldys, and buy a tidy suit to wear…’ I had made up my mind to do the thing to rights while I was about it, and while I had the money in my pocket. I moulted to my very shirt and socks. I gave seven and six for a light suit, and half a dollar for a pot hat, and eighteen pence for a sky blue neckerchief, and likewise bought a shirt with an ironed front to it, and afore I came away I put ‘em all on…and here I was, all a toff, up’ards and down’ards.21

      Kirwan was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the market, with its

      These are the customers you see at a glance, whom the resplendent wares in the hosiers’ shops attract…These are the dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirtstuds, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, deaths’ heads, racehorses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls; the horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern-plate, and knife-and-fork pins. These are the glasses of city fashion, and the mould of city form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen, and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented, and warranted, are made.23

      By the mid-century, men’s clothes in particular had becoming standard, ready-made, and were being heavily advertised. For this to have happened, items we take entirely for granted needed first to be invented. At the Great Exhibition, Charles Cattanach from Aberdeen, who listed himself as ‘Inventor’, showed an ‘apparatus for measuring the human figure, and for transferring the measure to cloth so as to produce an exact fit of garment’24—or, as it is known today, a tape measure. He was one of many claiming ownership of this useful invention, which seems to have first appeared around the beginning of the century, and to have been in more general use from around 1825. Once this was available, treatises like Dr Henry Wampen’s The Mathematical Art of Cutting Garments According to the Different Formation of Men’s Bodies (1834) could be written, giving guidance on how to create clothes without an actual, specific body in front of the tailor.25

      For standardized sizes had not yet arrived. Men’s clothes led the way: over the century they moved away from the earlier skintight fitted breeches and jackets, towards the loose, tube-like shape of modern dress. Women’s clothes were more difficult to standardize: bodices were expected to fit so tightly to the figure that the stays underneath showed through. By the 1840s shops were advertising ‘Sewed’ dresses, but they may have been only partly finished, for the purchaser or her dressmaker to alter to fit her own measurements. Challinier of New Bond Street stocked this type of half-and-half item: ‘Muslin Bodices…can be completed for wearing in a few hours’ notice.’26 Twenty years later Jay’s Warehouse was still attempting to find a way to combine the fashion for skintight bodices with a desire for ready-made clothes, coming up with a ‘self-expanding’ bodice. But the spread of women’s ready-made clothing lagged behind men’s and children’s for some time.

      John Barran, a retail tailor in the local high street in the late 1840s, had sold cheap ready-made clothes for men and children in exactly the pattern we have seen above. In 1856 he set up a manufacturing works; his great innovation was to develop with the engineering firm of Greenwood and Batley the first mechanical cutter, a bandsaw that could cut through several layers of cloth at once. This mass cutting machine forced Barran into further technological and organizational changes, for the bandsaw produced many more cut-out pieces than his tailors could process. So he subcontracted these out to a tailor with a workshop, who in turn passed them on to others as piecework. For the first time in the clothing industry, production was divided into two parts: cutting, via new technology, at the factory, and then a division for the sewing—outwork for the more complicated jackets and coats, while Barran’s own sewers dealt with the trousers and waistcoats, which required lesser skills. And for these workers he had equipped the works with the new sewing machines.29