The Hidden History of the Smock Frock

Alison Toplis

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350126138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Modedesign

Winner of the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2022 Traditionally associated with rural ways of life in England, often hand-crafted and held up as one of the only items of English folk dress to survive into the 20th century, the smock frock is an object of curiosity in many museum collections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from surviving garments to newspapers and photographs, this book reveals the hidden history of the smock frock to present new social histories. Discussing the smock frock in its widest contexts, Alison Toplis explores how garments were handmade and manufactured by the ready-made clothing industry, and bought by men of different trades. She traces the smock frock's usage across England as well as in export markets such as Australia. Following the garment's decline in the late 19th century, the book investigates how this essentially utilitarian style of workwear came to be held up as an example of disappearing 'peasant' craft in an emotional response to urbanisation, and how it was preserved by collectors under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. Around the turn of the 20th century, the smock frock was reinvented as both women's and children's wear and is now regularly revived in fashion collections by the likes of Molly Goddard. Drawing together extensive visual and material cultures, Alison Toplis unravels a new history of the smock frock.

1 The smock and rural England

Today ‘smocks’ are most commonly connected with children’s wear, artists or perhaps coastal life, with the sailing and fisherman’s smock. For artistic and marine wear, the smock is a plain ‘non-fashion garment’ that allows the adult wearer, male or female, to concentrate on higher purposes or physical activity, signifying a lack of interest in appearance.¹ However, if you talk about ‘smock frocks’, often the first thought is of a rural ‘yokel’ dressed in one, wearing a hat, chewing straw, often with unkempt facial hair, and drinking a flagon of cider. This image is usually located somewhere in the past, often combined with other rural clichés such as cottage doors, folk traditions and bucolic farmyards.² The smock and smock frock have been differentiated to evoke different feelings; one still a useful and practical garment, the other picturesque, unpractical, and so often comic, quaint and obsolete.

As discussed in the introduction, the nomenclature of the garment has historically been fluid, slippery and difficult to grasp. During much of the nineteenth century, at the peak of the smock trade, the smock and the smock frock were one and the same thing. However, during the late nineteenth century, the smock frock began to be associated with both a very specific type of garment and a particular wearer. While this iteration is as valid as any other, the aim of The Hidden History is to dispel the notion that this is the only version and, in doing so, to open up the complexities and multidisciplinary approach needed to fully analyse working dress across an extended period. This chapter will therefore first establish how this representation emerged so completely to subsume and hide how men used to wear the smock/smock frock earlier in the nineteenth century. There is a large body of research into the representations of rural England, including why the idea of Englishness and the countryside of southern England became so closely associated. The Hidden History will instead focus on how the smock became part of this symbolism, principally through its categorization as folk dress and the feelings that the garment induced. It will conclude by considering if surviving smocks in museum collections have also coloured our understanding of how they were used by the majority of men during the nineteenth century.

From the late 1870s, as crisis hit contemporary agriculture,³ a version of a rural idyll deeply rooted in the past emerged centred on a southern vision of England, particularly the ‘Home Counties’, what has been called ‘deformed nationalism’.⁴ Parallels were drawn between the degeneration of urban life, particularly in London, and the fall of a debauched ancient Rome, country people uncontaminated by such vices and false values.⁵ Country Life magazine (founded in 1897) illustrated the unattainable rural idyll that urban elites yearned for. With the ‘back to the land’ movement of the 1890s as rural depopulation became a problem, value was given to aspects of rural life such as folk songs, as collected by Cecil Sharpe,⁶ and the vernacular architecture of the cottage. Popularizers, for instance, Helen Allingham, Edward Lutyens and Ralph Vaughan Williams, broadened this reach to a wider audience. With seemingly less physical countryside now in existence, writers such as George Sturt in the early twentieth century, eulogized about the passing of an old order, where self-sufficiency and industriousness were the virtues of an idealized peasant community.⁷ The smock thus began to gain a symbolic significance, incorporated into the construction of a mythologized and sentimental rural existence, a ‘simple’ life, with a strong folk culture, particularly appealing to urban elites, offering consolation in a time of change, but which, in reality, perhaps never existed.⁸

This late Victorian and Edwardian idea of ‘Englishness’ – rural, anti-modern and traditional – however, remained very much a minority view of the artistic, articulate and literary elite, an attempt to recapture an apparently threatened way of life, and for both those on the left and right of the political spectrum, to find a better way to live.⁹ For the mass of the population, who moved from the countryside to be urbanites, often within living memory, traditional rural society was class-ridden, hard, anachronistic and often feudalistic. By the late nineteenth century, rural working-class youths regarded ‘the smock frock as an abomination, and farm work as a nuisance’, with working on the land something to be ‘despised’. There was a new aspiration for higher education which conservative factions saw as destroying ‘Those idyllic days of which we get a glimpse in romance and ballad’.¹⁰ Manners were changing in rural villages too, with youths no longer doffing their hats or bowing to parish priests as they had when wearing smock frocks.¹¹ A change in clothing, which certainly visually closed the status gap, at least at first glance, also equated with the disappearance of expected deference to the elite.

During the nineteenth century, there was a decline in the hegemony of the countryside as power shifted to the commercial and urban middle classes. With overspill house building and railways for example, the countryside itself was increasingly built on and accessible. What remained of the ‘rural’ began to be perceived as an exotic ‘other’ life, removed and isolated from the ordinary. Visiting this ‘park’ became a popular urban pastime, an escapist retreat from the stresses of modern town life.¹² The accessibility and comfort of rural images, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, reinforced this visually, with landscape artists portraying views untouched by modern improvements, the emphasis being on the natural or the countryside as a site of recreation accessed via the railway.¹³ A long tradition of writers, from the classical period onwards, also mythologized the idea of people in the countryside being happier and more virtuous, creating the notion of a lost paradise, or arcadia, verdant and blossoming.¹⁴ Often this is the lost rural past of the writer’s childhood or of tales passed down through the family.¹⁵ Typically, the writer may have moved to a town to pursue a career and remembered their childhood as William Cobbett did in his Rural Rides. William Howitt is another example, the son of a yeoman farmer, he describes the farmer living ‘like a rural king’ and wistfully remembered the social harmony needed for events such as the harvest.¹⁶

Thomas Hardy too, although credited with realistic portrayals, was writing for a middle-class audience with a distinct whiff of nostalgia for the perceived rural idyll of his youth in the 1840s and early 1850s. He created an ideal of a timeless rural social order pitted against increasing changes derived from urban culture visually expressed through clothing, including the disappearance of the smock as working clothing for men.¹⁷ For example, in Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy compares fast-changing urban modernity with the timelessness of the countryside where ‘Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, [or] the embroidery of a smock frock, by the breadth of a hair.’¹⁸ Discussing the ‘Dorsetshire Labourer’ in his essay of 1883, Hardy ignores disagreeable conditions and seething discontent to romanticize elements, suggesting that rural labourers were not revolutionary or antagonistic about class differences, but content, unthinking and harmless, thus deliberately ignoring the political reality and pandering to the views of his urban middle-class readership.¹⁹ Hardy used the smock frock as a construct to reflect contemporary ambivalence about urban values overtaking those of the idealized unchanging countryside.²⁰ Then, as now, scenes of traditional agriculture appeal to our nostalgia for the pre-industrial, supposedly unpolluted world, where life was thought to be simple and stable, with social harmony in accord with nature, albeit often in a man-made landscape. With a further connection to a remembered perfect rural childhood, and the emotional experience of recalling this lost time and place, that is nostalgia, the smock began to take on a different meaning.²¹

With urbanization, industrialization and mass consumerism enveloping British society at an increasing rate, there was a scramble to preserve cyphers of rural and popular, or folk, art.²² The smock, then fast disappearing as everyday wear, became categorized as one of the only English examples of ‘national peasant costume’ or folk dress, ossified and preserved for special occasions, such as traditional rural events.²³ It became particularly associated with southern England and Sussex, obscuring its history elsewhere. Folk ‘is a four-letter word’, difficult to pin down and fluid in its meanings, including the vernacular, rural, naïve, self-taught and indifferent to change.²⁴ These seem, at first glance, appropriate descriptions for the smock. Often at times of collective crisis, in the 1880s, 1910s and 1930s–50s, the necessary reassertion of national identity used the smock frock as a concept, and, to a certain extent, reinvented it for that era.²⁵ It was ‘quaint, primitive, picturesque, and serviceable garb’,²⁶ and smocking ‘one of the few peasant crafts which we have in England’.²⁷ A century earlier, in 1821, a report recorded that ‘there is nothing very distinctive in the dress of any of the lower classes’, and no British or English costume as such.²⁸ Although worn in the 1820s, in the intervening century the smock gradually filled this gap by becoming ‘folk’ dress, associated firmly with a particular place, the pre-industrial rural England of yesteryear, countering the modernity of contemporary fashions which supposedly alienated working people from their often recent rural origins. This perceived loss of rural identity through a change in dress formed part of the elite collective memory of England’s golden past and led to the smock’s preservation by them.²⁹

During the interwar period, alarmed at the contemporary cultural poverty of rural life, artists and designers seized upon the spontaneous freshness of traditional primitive or ‘peasant’ work.³⁰ There was a nostalgia for such things, made slowly by hand to last a lifetime and, on these, rich narratives could be constructed beyond the object’s humble usage. As Tanya Harrod points out, the recurring paradox of the period was that an important part of being modern was to be anti-modern. There was an anxiety about the quality of objects, the essence of things, threatened by synthetic materials and mass production. To counter this, the lost simplicity and plainness of crafted objects remembered from childhood were evoked.³¹ The stories of smocks and their embroidered patterns, published in books such as one by Alice Armes in 1928, were part of this.³² In search of the pre-industrial rural world, collectors and artists harked back to the eighteenth century, to an unenclosed English landsc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Form and definition
• 1 The smock and rural England
• 2 Histories of the smock frock
• 3 Making
• 4 Selling and buying
• 5 Appearances
• 6 Into the twentieth century
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page