 Mother
in Morning Dress with Infant, 1814. This morning dress has two rouleaux trimming the
bottom of the skirt. Note how the baby sucks on a part of the dress, suggesting but not
depicting breast feeding.
From John Bell's La Belle Assemblee, or Bell's Court and
Fashionable Magazine Addressed Particularly to the Ladies, 1806-1868. http://locutus.ucr.edu/
~cathy/morn3.html |
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'In Loco Parentis: Who’s Looking After The Children?'
~William Christie
Presented to the JASA meeting 17 October 1998
Late in Persuasion, Anne Elliot re-evaluates her decision to defer to Lady
Russell and renounce Captain Wentworth the first time around:
‘I have been thinking over the past, and trying impartially to judge of the right
and wrong, I mean with regard to myself; and I must believe that I was right, much as I
suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will
love better than you do now. To me, she was in the place of a parent. Do not mistake me,
however. I am not saying she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those
cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides ... But I mean, that I was
right in submitting to her, and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more
in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have
suffered in my conscience. I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human
nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is
no bad part of a woman’s portion.’ (Persuasion, II, xi, 232)
To me, she was in the place of a parent’: in loco parentis. This
surrogate parental relationship of Lady Russell’s to Anne Elliot is hardly unusual in
Austen’s novels because this sort of relationship was not unusual amongst the people
with whom the novelist mixed and about whom she wrote. From her first published novel, Northanger
Abbey, in which Catherine Morland quits the common bonds and common sense of her
mother and father to embark upon her journey to adulthood via a sequence of parent
substitutes - Mr and Mrs Allen, primarily, but also Mrs Thorpe, certainly General Tilney,
and arguably Henry Tilney - Jane Austen the novelist embarks upon a sequence of characters
who, for various reasons and more or less officially, are asked to perform this important
role and who, when it devolves upon them, acquit themselves more or less responsibly. But
like Austen herself, I have a hidden agenda: I want to use this commonplace but
significant relationship to talk politics, and to talk about the way in which Austen talks
politics. Not being a novelist, however, but a scholar, I want to start by reminding the
reader of the historical period through which she lived - and, as I would want to argue,
which lived through her.
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 These ladies are out for a morning drive in a
high-perch phaeton. They wear plain calico morning dresses and ribbon and feather-trimmed
bonnets. Note the striped dye on the ostrich feathers of the lady on the left. The
high-perch phaeton was extremely dangerous – no doubt one reason why it was so
fashionable! It was also very expensive to keep, so only the most wealthy and daring lady
would be seen out in a London park tooling in such a vehicle.
From The Gallery of Fashion, August 1794. http://locutus.ucr.edu/
~cathy/morn.html |
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'Equipage & Artistry: A Study Of Coaching In Jane Austen’s Novels'
~Yvette Field
A talk given to JASA, 17 April 1999
Jane Austen’s novels span an era of growth in coach and horse transport. It is
therefore natural that there are as many references to coaches in her fictional world, as
any modern novel would have to cars or buses or trains. Coaching itself is a subject to
interest us because it evokes an era gone beyond recall, although occasionally seen in the
pageantry of a great and royal state occasion. You will not need to look far back in the
annals of our society, in fact, only to the June 1994 issue of Sensibilities
to read the paper that the late Roy Walker gave on ‘Travel in Jane Austen’s
Time’. He describes the roads, the tolls, the almost bewildering variety of
carriages, both public and private, of the late Georgian era and makes many delightful
references to Jane Austen’s fiction for illustration. This paper will attempt a
different focus: how the author uses carriages in the novels to further her artistic
purposes. To do this, first I will look at coaching in general as used in the novels and
then focus on some readings from two novels in particular.
I would like to begin with one of Roy’s references: to a short piece of juvenilia
called the Memoirs of Mr Clifford. This extract shows the young Jane having fun
with the array of carriages that were available to the moneyed classes.
He travelled in his Coach & Four, for he was a very rich young Man & kept a
great many Carriages of which I do not recall half. I can only remember that he had a
Coach, a Chariot, a Chaise, a Landeau,(sic) a Landeaulet,(sic) a Phaeton, a Gig, a Whisky,
an italian Chair, a Buggy, a Curricle & a wheelbarrow. (MW43 in Walker 1994)
This spirit of fun with coaches, no doubt appreciated by her brother, Charles, to whom
the piece was solemnly dedicated, continues with the mature author. The novels have many
references to specific types of carriages – when it suits her purpose to set a scene
or to imply a certain grandness or dash in her characters, or, indeed, the opposite.
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An evening of entertainment at the Court of George II was described in these terms:
‘Last night there was dice, dancing, crowding, sweating and stinking in abundance as
usual’.
Lord Hervey, 1739
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'Cosmetics & Personal Silver'
~ Ruth Pope
From a talk to the JASA meeting 20 February 1999
Our first knowledge of the history of cosmetics comes from Ancient Egypt, discovered in
the excavations of Tombs.
In the British Museum is a Toilet Box from Egypt which dates from the 13th century BC.
It is complete, in that it has - a pair of indoor slippers; a pair of outdoor sandals;
scrapers for removing surface oil and cosmetics from the skin; little boxes and jars for
unguents and scented oils; two tiny cushions, on which to rest each elbow when applying
cosmetics; and a mirror made of polished metal.
Portraits of Elizabeth I, particularly in her later years, show her wearing a great
wig, with a very white face. Once more they were using the dreadful white paint made up of
white lead and vinegar (ceruse). At this time, smallpox was rampant in Western Europe, and
the paint was used to cover the cavities left on the face from this disfiguring disease.
By the 16th century they were also using perfumes and posies of flowers called Tussie
Mussies, and ladies and gentlemen of wealth and position wore Frangipanis – soft kid
leather gloves impregnated with perfume, intended to ward off pestilent airs – an
idea that gathered tremendous force during the Great Plague.
In the 17th century, cosmetics and perfume had a set back because of the Puritans,
Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War. With the Restoration in 1660 of Charles II to the
throne of England came many ‘fast’ French customs, picked up from the courts of
Europe during his exile. Portraits of Charles II show the great curly black periwigs
favoured by Charles and his court. Again they filled in all the smallpox pitting of the
skin on the face, with paint; and used heaps of perfume. They also reintroduced the custom
that had become very fashionable in England towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I of
a receding hairline, considered a sign of a great intellect and beauty. How did one
‘recede’ the hairline? Of course the hair could be plucked out, but this was
very painful and did not last very long. It was better still if the follicle of the hair
could be killed and for a permanent cure one could apply a forehead band well soaked in
vinegar in which cat’s dung(!) had been steeped. This method receded the hairline
permanently.
Once the hairline was receded, the eyebrows looked out of place in their normal
position, so they had to be repositioned, either being removed with vinegar and cat’s
dung or plucked, and false eyebrows made from the skins of mice. The eyebrows were put on
with mastic, a gum which exudes from the bark of a bush growing on some of the
Mediterranean Islands and was used in the second half of the last century as a basis for
chewing gum. The word masticate comes from the word mastic. Mastic was also used for
patches, introduced at the end of the 17th century. These were always black and were
either small square, round or rectangular pieces cut out of soft Spanish kid leather, or
from silk, taffeta or velvet, and were used to cover up the blemishes that could not be
covered with the paint.
Samuel Pepys’ fascinating diaries in 1667 - the year after the Great Plague -
record his observations of a Lady Newcastle at a court function, wearing many black
patches, because (he said) of the pimples around her mouth. Although this seems most
unkind it does illustrate how these patches were used.
Patchboxes in the 18th century were quite small, and were carried in pockets, first
introduced in 1680. Until then, anything that was applied to either the face or the head
had to be done in the bedroom. The pockets were on the outer flaps of the men’s long
coats, or for ladies, carried on the wrist as little drawstring bags, known as reticules,
so anything that was carried had to be relatively small. By the last quarter of the 18th
century, the Industrial Revolution had produced steam driven machines which could roll
sheet silver, so there were lots of small things made in Birmingham that could be carried
in pockets or in reticules.
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'Visual Prejudice: Jane Austen’s Protagonists On Screen'
~ Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario
Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario is a member of the JASA. Her article was submitted
through and approved by our Referee Board.
When Jane Austen was adapted for television and cinema in the mid-1990s, contemporary
audiences were re-acquainted with the classic author through popular drama and its lively,
visual presentation. This new era of adaptation provided Austen’s characters with
physicality and the ability to enact Austen’s narratives not solely through the
words, but through the actions, expressions and material paraphernalia of life that would
make her characters uniquely believable in contemporary society. Her heroines were
emboldened with their feminine perspectives and the screen dominance of their domestic
power base. Her heroes became objects of desire, assessed visually through sometimes
rose-coloured camera lenses. The adaptations stirred a revolution in the interpretation of
Jane Austen’s novels, removing the stigma that they were dusty classics by
metaphorically shaking the dust from the shoulders of the characters on screen.
The screen adaptations of the mid-1990s include the 1995 BBC television production of Pride
and Prejudice and the 1996 ITV television production of Emma, both adapted
by Andrew Davies; the 1995 films Clueless (a contemporary translation of the
novel, Emma) written by Amy Heckerling; Persuasion adapted by Nick Dear;
Sense and Sensibility adapted by Emma Thompson; and the 1996 film, Emma,
adapted by Douglas McGrath. What these films and television productions have in common is
both a sense of timing, which, adaptations coinciding, produced the media phenomenon
commonly known as ‘Austen-mania’, and a sense of Austen as popular drama, which
meant youthful, popular casts and high quality screenplays and production values.
Austen’s novels are regarded as classics, and while classics like A Room With
A View and Brideshead Revisited have enjoyed popular screen success, the
classics themselves have generally been alienated from popular culture, perceived as the
attributes of a literary education. Emma Thompson, who adapted Sense and Sensibility
for the screen, says:
It’s really a disaster how writers like Shakespeare and Austen are taught in
school. Everything that’s good about them is somehow drained away because one is
required to analyse them. They’re so brilliant about human nature and so contemporary
and yet, somehow, that study of them relegates them to some awful, dusty library with dead
flies on the windows! (Kirkland 1995)
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