Clothing and Landscape in Victorian England

Working-Class Dress and Rural Life

Rachel Worth

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786723451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

In the context of this rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. Rachel Worth explores ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. Her compelling study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian period.

1

CHANGE AND TRANSITION IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND

The rural context

The changes that took place in England in the decades from 1840 to 1900 were profound. While we must not over-generalize in considering their effects, we can be certain that the impact on social and economic structures, and on people’s lives, of the transition from rural to urban living over the Victorian period was enormous. Indeed, England was so dramatically transformed during these six decades that historians have written of ‘complete breaks with the past’.¹ The move from village to town could be perceived as something to be aspired to, with its apparent promise of employment and perhaps greater freedom, but simultaneously, and subsequently, rural life would be seen as something that was being lost. As Mark Freeman observes, the realities of rural life were ‘hidden behind a series of pastoral conceptions of the countryside that accorded rurality a status superior to that of urban cultural life’.² This chapter sketches the broad social and economic context out of which emerged the representations of working-class dress that are the subject of this book.

The 1851 census provided the quantitative evidence that, for the first time, the English population was more urban than rural.³ However, this point needs some clarification: Alun Howkins points out that the census returns show the population as divided almost exactly between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas, but, since an administrative definition of ‘town’ was used, rather than one based on size, the ‘urban population’ included many people in towns like Lewes in Sussex or Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire that were predominantly rural in character.⁴ But if the balance in the 1850s was only just tipped in favour of an ‘urban’ population, by 1911, a decade after Victoria’s death, 80 per cent of the population of England and Wales resided in towns, however defined. While the population of England and Wales rose from 17.9 to 36.1 million in the period from 1850 to 1914, the number of people living in rural districts fell from 8.9 to 7.9 million.⁵ However the term ‘rural’ was defined, a story of great change is revealed.

As the title of Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City reminds us, the dichotomy between rural and urban values, often represented so vividly in literature and the visual arts, was not new in the second half of the nineteenth century: the ‘contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times’.⁶ In eighteenth-century England, as new ideas about ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’ were being formed in terms of aesthetics on the one hand and agricultural ‘improvement’ on the other, poetry and prose, for example, were preoccupied with both realistic and mythologized consideration of the relationship between the rural and the urban. However, in the nineteenth century it was the scale of social change that fuelled well-known radical critiques of industrial society, such as those of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), A. W. N. Pugin (1812–52) and William Morris (1834–96). For many, including Morris, this became a quest for an idyllic rural society: the frontispiece of his News from Nowhere (1890) was an image of his own rural retreat from the urban chaos of Victorian London, Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. The idea of the countryside as an escape from the pressures of modern life is familiar to us in the twenty-first century, but in the nineteenth century it was the reality of their own lived experience that, for so many people, added a particular poignancy to representations of the rural.

The census enumerators found it challenging to define precisely the boundaries between the rural and the urban, and there is no easy demarcation in geographical or cultural terms, partly because these boundaries were shifting so rapidly. Contemporaries, however, offer fascinating glimpses of their own experience of change from around the middle of the century, and of the ways in which, more and more, the countryside offered refuge in a rapidly changing world. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the increasingly industrialized north of England. In her novel Mary Barton (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell describes the way in which the growing industrial town of Manchester rubs shoulders with its still rural environs:

There are some fields near Manchester, well known to the inhabitants as ‘Green Heys Fields’, through which runs a public footpath to a little village about two miles distant. In spite of these fields being flat and low, nay, in spite of the want of wood (the great and usual recommendation of level tracts of land), there is a charm about them which strikes even the inhabitant of a mountainous district, who sees and feels the effect of contrast in these common-place but thoroughly rural fields, with the busy, bustling manufacturing town, he left but half an hour ago.⁷

If you could walk from the middle of Manchester to a landscape of ‘thoroughly rural fields’ in half-an-hour in the 1850s, things had altered dramatically by the latter years of the nineteenth century in areas where the tentacles of cities, and of a growing suburbia, spread forever outwards, drawing in any hitherto isolated rural pockets that remained. As a counterpoint to this process, however, the ‘countryside’ became increasingly accessible to the town- and city-dweller, if not by foot, then, as the railway network expanded, by train. So as Tim Barringer observes, ideas about ‘nature’ changed radically as early as the 1840s and 1850s, as a result of increasing urbanization on the one hand and the new accessibility of the countryside by rail on the other, and this was expressed in the renewed demand for agrarian landscape paintings and a shift in cultural values among the urban middle class – to which artists and the majority of their patrons belonged.⁸ It was arguably this proximity between town and countryside that fuelled an awareness of the contrasts between them, so that they were frequently perceived precisely in terms of their respective ‘otherness’. Published just after the end of the Victorian period, and set in the places where he himself grew up on the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border, D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow (1915) repeatedly contrasts the beauty of the countryside with the ‘corruption’ of the urban and its ‘modern’ buildings: to him, ‘it was a violation to plunge into the dust and greyness of the town’.⁹

By the 1850s, the countryside had earned an identity entirely distinct from that of the urban and increasingly industrial centres that is reflected, for example, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855).¹⁰ In Mary Barton, Gaskell had focused on the conflicts between factory owner and factory worker, arguing that these could be resolved if it were recognized that their interests were actually the same. In North and South, she turns to another conflict that was created in industrializing society – that between the new, thrusting urban–industrial class and the older, rural–agricultural communities. She represents this as a conflict between the north and south of England. Gaskell’s world is framed in terms that might not stand up to the historian’s scrutiny.¹¹ Nevertheless, she provides a contemporary perspective that has influenced our own and still has a resonance today. Likewise, in the writing of Thomas Hardy, whose Wessex is both a literal and a figurative representation of ‘a vanishing life’,¹² the urban and the rural are juxtaposed in a way that recorded and at the same time shaped a particular vision of that dichotomy. For Gaskell it is the northern industrial city that is the antithesis of the southern rural village, and of the countryside in which it nestled. In southern England itself, as we shall see in Hardy’s novels, the urban, as well as being intimated through a brash ‘northern’ character such as Alec d’Urberville (whose real family name is of course ‘Stoke’), is also associated with the metropolis of London, geographically not so far away and anyway now linked to his Wessex by the railway, in stark and sprawling contrast to what appeared to be a disappearing rural England.

A SOUTHERN LANDSCAPE OF ENGLISHNESS

The construction of the railway network from the 1840s, combined with rapid developments in agricultural technology, led to large-scale rationalization of the English landscape into the two broad regions that broadly persist today: a more arable and intensively farmed south and east and a largely pastoral north and west.¹³ Published in the year after the 1851 census, James Caird’s English Agriculture in 1850–51 (1852) defined what has become the classic geographical division of England and Wales. This division was the result of many factors, including climate, topography and geology, which have all played a part in determining settlement and farming patterns over thousands of years. In this context it is useful to be reminded of W. G. Hoskins’s thesis in The Making of the English Landscape, his pioneering account of the historical evolution of the landscape: ‘everything is older than we think’.¹⁴ Caird’s division followed an imaginary, roughly diagonal north-east to south-west line from the Scottish border in West Northumberland to the river Exe: the area north and west of this line (including Wales), which has a more maritime climate, he described as upland and largely pastoral, given over to grazing and dairying, while the area south and east of the line, with a drier climate, he defined as lowland and largely arable – the chief corn districts of England; these geographical ‘zones’ therefore determined different types of farming. Caird’s divisions in fact conceal many regional variations and are therefore something of an oversimplification.¹⁵ Even so, the upland areas were, predominantly, areas of scattered homesteads, while the lowland regions were characterized by village settlements.

The type of farming and land-use in turn corresponds to distinctive patterns of settlement and social organization. While ‘living-in’ farm servants were a regionally important occupational group, in most of arable England the land was worked by men and women who were hired for relatively short periods and who lived away from the farm where they worked, either in villages or small towns: ‘farm labourers’ made up about 80 per cent of those who worked the land in England.¹⁶ These groups of workers were more mobile and therefore arguably more receptive to new ideas, for example with regard to clothing styles and the adoption of what some contemporaries would have termed ‘fashionable’ – often synonymous with ‘urban’ – dress. Significantly, it was the adoption of such ‘new’ styles that from the 1870s and 1880s drew attention to the fact that the more traditional, ‘rural’ styles were vanishing.

The ‘southern’ landscape identified by Caird became the ‘landscape of Englishness’ – the world of village England, and this is frequently the landscape represented in literature.¹⁷ Regional variation notwithstanding, the dominant cultural image of rural England was a southern one.¹⁸ The poet Edward Thomas used the idea of ‘The South Country’, a term he borrowed from Hilaire Belloc, in his prose-poem of that name (1909). For Thomas, the South Country included the counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and parts of Somerset. The focus on the south was reiterated by social commentators in the Victorian period.¹⁹ Furthermore, the tendency by historians to concentrate their attention on southern England is partly explained by the particular economic patterns of farming prevalent in the south and south-east: these areas were associated with low wages in the nineteenth century as well as deep-seated agricultural unrest arising out of poor and depressed conditions of employment. As a result, there is a greater body of evidence of the activity of the agricultural labourer. For example, the Swing riots of 1830 took place predominantly in the corn-growing areas of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, most of Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, parts of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Dorset. In many of these counties, an increasing pool of agricultural labour had the effect of depressing wages, and what alternative employment there was in local rural industries was adversely affected during the second half of the nineteenth century by mechanization and a consequent decline in the number of workers required for these occupations. Conversely, economic and social conditions for those working in rural and/or agricultural employment in areas with alternative employment opportunities resulting from industrialization and urbanization (generally speaking to the north of that same imaginary line that runs from the mouth of the river Exe to that of the river Tees) were better. Social commentators at the time, and historians subsequently, have tended to concentrate on the counties of Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, where wages were particularly low and the condition of the labourer appeared to be in most urgent need of redress.²⁰ Indeed, it was the Wiltshire labourer in the Avon valley near Salisbury that William Cobbett described so despairingly as ‘the worst used […] upon the face of the earth’.²¹

It is true that ‘agricultural historiography in Britain has always been shot through with southern English insularity’,²² and it is therefore this southern contextual landscape that frames here the representation of dress – both the garments found in museum collections and the clothing represented by artists and writers in a variety of literary and visual media. And together they cast refracted light on perceptions of a vanishing world, alongside an emergent urban and suburban culture.

THE DECLINE OF AGRICULTURE

Interest in rural issues between 1840 and 1900 was informed by concern not only that, as a proportion of the total national income, agriculture was declining, but that, not unrelated to this decline, by the 1870s the plight of the agricultural labourer was particularly acute. Despite this overall pattern, however, England supported a diversity of regional economies, each with their own distinctive social structure. To complicate matters further, change over the period was uneven: during the six decades covered by this study, the ‘decline of agriculture’ was gradual at some points and more rapid at others. For example, the late 1840s and early 1850s were relatively prosperous decades, often referred to as a period of ‘high farming’. There then followed 20-or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Change and transition in Victorian EnglandThe rural context
• 2 Women’s work, education and the domesticity of dressSurveying and documenting the rural (I)
• 3 Clothing and its acquisition in a changing societySurveying and documenting the rural (II)
• 4 Painting nostalgiaDress and the vision of a vanishing rural world
• 5 Photography and rural dress‘Work of art’ or documentary realism?
• 6 Clothing and the ‘counter-myth’ in images of rural England
• 7 Thomas HardyTradition, fashion and the approach of modernity
• 8 Rural working-class dressSurvival, representation and change
• Conclusion: Clothing and landscape
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plate Section