Fashion In The Time Of Jane Austen Read Online Free PDF Page A

precise. In his biography of Brummell, Captain Jesse recalls:

    Brummell as a Young Man (engraved by J. Cooke). Tying the perfect cravat could take hours, and many attempts, each starched neckcloth discarded if it did not tie correctly the first time. Captain Jesse saw Brummell’s valet ‘coming downstairs one day with a quantity of tumbled neckcloths under his arm, and being interrogated on the subject, [he] solemnly replied “Oh, they are our failures.”’
    The collar which was always fixed to his shirt, was so large that, before being folded down, it completely hid his head and face, and the white neckcloth was at least a foot in height. The first coup d’archet was made with the shirt collar, which he folded down to its proper size; and Brummell then standing before the glass, with his chin poked up to the ceiling, by the gentle and gradual declension of his lower jaw, creased the cravat to reasonable dimensions, the form of each succeeding crease being perfected with the shirt which he had just discarded.

    Lieutenant Henry Lygon, 4th Earl of Beauchamp (miniature by John Smart Junior, 1803). Thought to have been painted shortly after he matriculated from Oxford and gained the rank of officer in the 13th and 16th Light Dragoons. The dashing uniforms of the Prussian Hussars were a huge influence on the uniforms designed for the British military, not least the increasingly fancy designs contributed by the Prince Regent.
    Brummell’s dress ethos was the first step in social mobility allowing for those like Pen’s father in Thackeray’s Pendennis to slip up a class from moneyed trade to the middle class of minor gentleman. Otherwise social mobility was through the Navy where there were opportunities to gain wealth from the ‘prize money’ divvied up between the crew when an enemy ship was captured, or the Army, where officers were invited to mix with the best families in England and had unprecedented opportunities to make money in foreign lands.

    A Gentleman’s Toilet (Lewis Marks, 1800). Women were not the only ones to wear falsies; men resortd to their own artifice, and ‘false curves’ were popular to make a puny leg more ‘poetic’.
    With two brothers serving, Jane’s affiliation lay strongly with the Navy, who were rapidly redeeming their seamy reputations through victory and heroism. With the Navy protecting England with an ‘impenetrable wooden wall’, the militia were left to keep order within. Aside from a few locally contained riots there was not too much to do, and the militia quite swiftly earned a reputation for being more interested in drilling and parties than any kind of action.
    Where Naval uniforms in trusty blue were generally still cut from a pattern designed in the 1780s, the glamorous bright red uniforms of the militia were up to date, with tightly fitted trousers, short jackets and hessian boots. The Navy needed more than eight hundred crew for each warship and thousands of men were far away at the front line, whereas the men in the militia (like Wickham) were at home partying and using their military splendour to turn young girls’ heads, especially those rather superficial like Lydia Bennet. Older women were not immune, however, as Jane wrote for Mrs Bennet: ‘I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very well…

    Second Dragoons 1812. This soldier’s tall shako hat is attached to his jacket by a lanyard to avoid it being lost in battle and his sabretache hanging behind his knee would be more easily accessible when on horseback. He is wearing grey trousers as part of battledress. Known as ‘overalls’, they probably serve to keep his white pantaloons clean.

    Riding costume (1798) with military inspired shako hat.
    I thought Colonel Forster looked very becoming the other night at Sir William’s in his regimentals.’
    In The Post-Captain John Davis wrote: ‘Women, like mackerel ... are caught with a red bait ... the blue jacket stands no chance.’ It was not