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

loose ‘frocks’ until, at around six years old, gender differences were acknowledged, when they would take on miniature versions of their parents’ costumes.
    Instead, in light of growing awareness of the links between health, hygiene and activity Rousseau advocated that:
    …the limbs of a growing child should be free to move easily in his clothes; nothing should cramp their growth or movement; the French style of dress uncomfortable and unhealthy for a man, is especially bad for children … the best plan is to keep children in frocks as long as possible and then to provide them with loose clothes, without trying to define the shape... Their defects of body and mind may all be traced to the same source, the desire to make men of them before their time.
    His concept of childhood as a fleeting era of happiness and freedom to be enjoyed before it was all too quickly lost, struck a chord with the Romantic sensibilities of the time. Where children had previously only been painted as part of a family scene, they became the subject for portraits, their transient beauty captured, promising renewal for old dynasties, holding new hope for the future. Childhood began to be cherished, even emulated as sports and games became acceptable pastimes and the reforms in children’s fashions began to influence adult fashions.
    One of the first children to appear wearing a distinct child’s outfit was John Charles Viscount Althrop, painted in 1786 at the age of four. He wears simple ankle-length trousers and a low-necked short jacket with an open shawl collar, in a plain buff fabric suitable for play. This ensemble with the trousers buttoned onto the jacket just above the waist became the ‘skeleton suit’ and the staple of a little boy’s wardrobe until the late 1830s, when it began to be superseded by the sailor suit. ‘Breeching’, the term used for the ‘promotion’ from frock to breeches, was a key transitional moment in a boy’s life and keenly anticipated by relatives as it was the first step towards manhood, marking that he had successfully passed his formative years when at the greatest risk of infant mortality. In 1801 Jane writes to ask for the pattern of ‘the jacket and trousers or whatever it is that Elizabeth’s boys wear when they are first put into breeches’.

    The Graham Children (Hogarth, 1742) look beautiful but constrained in miniature versions of adult clothes – even the infant is wearing stays.

    Master Henry Hoare as The Young Gardener (C. Wilkin after Sir Joshua Reynolds, c . 1789). Proving the virtue of the frock as a practical garment, he also wears shoes with latchets.

    Boy in a Black Hat (Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1786). Viscount Althrop in one of the first outfits specifically for children, rather than for infants or scaled-down adult clothes.
    Older boys were reluctant to give up the comfort of trousers for the more restrictive breeches and from the skeleton suit came the trousers and short jacket combination that, with a plain linen collar added in about 1820 became the Eton suit. A more comfortable and active childhood did nothing to encourage young men to don the stuffy breeches and stockings of their fathers, and just as the young men of the jazz age would do a century later, they set their own styles.
    There were fewer changes for girls. They were not emancipated from their infant frocks into adulthood through an equivalent to ‘breeching’ because they were never expected to be emancipated at all – not even by Rousseau. He had almost completely neglected women in his philosophies, and they were the only group for whom he did not advocate freedom. It was lamentably clear to Jane that even though the world was changing with unprecedented rapidity, it was doing so without women. As she acknowledges in Emma , schools for girls were little more than places ‘where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity’. Education was almost entirely geared towards