| <The Saturday Review September 12, 1863>
| <Dress>
| <pb n="351">
| The period of the year has come round again when 
| the leading journal finds some difficulty in filling its 
| ample columns, and is driven to many ingenious 
| devices for the purpose.  Among others, is that of 
| starting hares for volunteer correspondents to hunt.  It 
| is curious to watch the failure or the success of the 
| various subjects which are suggested in this way.  
| Sometimes it makes a great find, and discovers 
| something which lasts it, in leaders and paragraphs, 
| and letters in big print and letters in small print, for a 
| month or six weeks ~~ like that famous discussion 
| upon the art of dining which interested so large a 
| number of distressed dinner-givers, or that other upon 
| the possibility of marrying on three hundred a year.  
| But these are only the prizes of the lottery.  The large 
| majority turn out blanks.  Full many a topic is born to 
| blush unseen in the remote corner where it is at first 
| modestly introduced.  The reception which these 
| successive ventures meet with from the public is not a 
| bad index of the current opinion of the hour.  Among 
| the most recent failures was a well-intentioned effort 
| to get up a discussion upon the prodigality of the 
| expenditure which women are accustomed to make in 
| dressing themselves in the present day.  It was not a 
| bad topic, and was skillfully introduced.  It came in 
| the form of a letter from an indignant lover, real or 
| apocryphal, complaining that he had just been refused 
| by a young lady living in Clapham Road because he 
| could not afford her a hundred a year for her dress, 
| and enclosing the young lady's letter in proof.  But it 
| did not seem to take.  The only response it evoked 
| was a reply from another, apparently less youthful, 
| lady at Croydon, who professed that she and plenty of 
| others would be willing to do it for half the money.  
| Undoubtedly this ready rejoinder was a proof of the 
| economical law that demand will always call forth 
| supply.  Whether the two have been brought together 
| in the private room of Printing House Square is a 
| point which the public are not likely to receive any 
| information.  But, as everybody is not strong-minded 
| enough to confide his matrimonial aspirations to the 
| <hi rend="italic"> Times, </hi> it would be 
| convenient if the long-sighted and calculating 
| damsels of the present day would settle upon some 
| other plan of letting their suitors know the exact 
| figure of pin-money at which they are to be secured.
| In the meantime, it is evident that there is no public 
| inclination to join in the indignant lover's protest 
| against the great millinery movement of the age.  In 
| other movements there is reaction, or pause, or at 
| least an abatement of zeal among men just now.  But 
| no such laggard spirit infests the women of England 
| in pursuing the great object of their lives.  They have 
| resolved, with a unanimity which shames the divided 
| counsels of their husbands and brothers, that 
| dressmakers' bills have increased, are increasing, and 
| ought never to be diminished.  We do not pretend to 
| say a word against a decision to which the whole sex 
| seems to be committed.  That passion for extended 
| territory which fills whole nations with madness 
| appears to have communicated itself to them.  Skirt 
| vies with skirt as to the area of ground it shall occupy, 
| and each fair female nucleus seems to stake its whole 
| credit upon extending the width of its borders further 
| than its neighbours.  There is no resisting a manifest 
| destiny of enlargement whose future is plainly written 
| in providential characters.  We can only try ~~ as it 
| used to be the fashion to say when the extension, not 
| of the petticoat, but of the suffrage, was in vogue ~~ 
| to furnish it with a resting-place at which it may be 
| retained for a considerable number of years.  Finality 
| is out of the question.  We can only hope for a 
| temporary pause.  The ears of those to whose lot it 
| falls to pay these milliners' bills were mocked in the 
| summer with reports that some such boon had been 
| conferred by the autocratic rulers of Parisian fashion; 
| but as yet fulfilment lags far behind the promise.  It is 
| obvious, whatever the fashion of this year or next 
| may be, that the cost of ladies' dresses must go on 
| increasing.  To whatever type of funnel, or bell, or 
| dome, or slopbasin it may please them to assimilate 
| one half of their fair forms, the self-multiplying 
| virtues of a milliner's bill spring from causes too 
| powerful to suffer more than a temporary check.
| The truth is, that this mania for expensive dressing is 
| only a step in the feminine march of intellect.  It is a 
| phase in the progressive history of female culture.  It 
| is an indication that the sex, as a whole, has risen 
| sufficiently to the level of man to be ambitious.  It 
| shows that mutual rivalry, that desire to acquire an 
| outward token of having excelled, which universal 
| experience recognises as the condition of all human 
| progress.  It is not, perhaps, a very exalted 
| subject-matter which ladies have chosen for the display 
| of their emulation.  But it is always a gain that they 
| should try to excel each other in something.  The 
| present English taste for dress, it must always be 
| remembered, is not that common exhibition of vanity 
| with which, in all ages it has been the habit of satirists 
| and moralists to twit the sex.  There is a barbarous 
| love of dress, common to both sexes, which it would 
| be unjust to impute to the Englishwomen of the 
| nineteenth century.  The Kafir chief delights in the 
| charming simplicity of a costume consisting of 
| Wellington boots and cocked hat.  Queen Pomare 
| took pleasure in exhibiting her tattoo, in obedience to 
| the same human instinct as that which makes a child 
| strut about and show its new scarlet sash.  But this 
| feeling, it is obvious, could not have received a 
| special or exceptional development in the middle of 
| the nineteenth century.  Woman cannot be more a <f> 
| </f> now than she has been in every generation since 
| the taunt was first uttered against her.  Nor, again, is 
| the English taste for dress altogether similar in 
| character to the French fashion from which it 
| apparently takes its origin.  With a Frenchwoman, 
| dress is a means to an end.  It is the instrument for 
| procuring male admiration, and to secure to herself a 
| sufficient quantity of this necessary of life a 
| Frenchwoman will forego a great many luxuries and 
| even comforts.  But then, having got the instrument, 
| she uses it.  She does not hide her light under a bushel, 
| or wear her three or four gowns a day merely to 
| impress those of her own sex.  It is obvious that she 
| does dress for the sake of securing the admiration of 
| men, because she is constantly trying to secure it in 
| other ways.  But in England the passion for dress 
| appears to extend itself far beyond the circle of those 
| who can be accused of aiming at conquests.  With the 
| women of the upper classes, where Milly Nisdale 
| flourishes and matrons "frisk," there is probably a 
| tincture of flirting in most cases of extraordinary 
| passion for dress.  But the women of our middle 
| classes do not, as a rule, flirt; and yet their 
| expenditure in dress has risen much on the same scale 
| during the last few years as that of their more 
| fashionable neighbours.  It is clear that, to a great 
| many women, dress has become something more than 
| either an expression of vanity or an aid to flirtation.  It 
| has become a token of caste.  Wealth practically 
| measures rank in England, especially among the 
| classes where there are no titular distinctions to 
| modify its influence; and the simplest way in which a 
| woman can advertise that she has more wealth than 
| others, is by carrying as much of it as she can upon 
| her person.  This was the feeling expressed with great 
| <hi rend="italic"> naivete </hi> by the young lady 
| whose refusal was published by her distracted lover in 
| the <hi rend="italic"> Times. </hi>  <q> </q>, 
| precisely expresses the state of feeling upon the 
| subject among the sober uninflammable type of 
| womanhood that inhabits a suburban villa.  She feels 
| degraded unless she can carry about with her the 
| insignia of the social rank to which she pretends.  If 
| she could by any other means proclaim to the world 
| that her income was adequate to an expensive style of 
| dress, the actual clothes would be of less importance.  
| But the customs of society will not allow her to pin 
| upon her back a certified statement of her husband's 
| balance at his banker's; and so she must try to make 
| known the fact by the less satisfactory evidence of an 
| expensive trimming.  Nor is it quite certain that a 
| banker's certificate would answer all the purposes in 
| view.  It might be a little too truthful.  In the English 
| hierarchy of <hi rend="italic">  pounds, shillings and 
| pence </hi> people generally make a struggle to take 
| rank as being two or three degrees richer than they 
| really are; and the principle of ascertaining female 
| rank by dress is conveniently elastic in this respect.  It 
| is always open to any woman who is unusually 
| ambitious to leap at once to the rank which she 
| desires to occupy, by the simple process of keeping 
| her husband and children a little short, and putting the 
| savings into her milliner's bill.
| So long as our social grades are to be measured 
| principally by
| <pb n="352">
| wealth ~~ and that seems to be more and more the 
| tendency of modern society ~~ there are a good many 
| advantages in concentrating all the show which the 
| family can afford upon the wife's dress.  It is superior 
| in many ways to the other modes of competition 
| which have hitherto been in vogue amongst us.  Some 
| of them will still survive in a modified degree.  The 
| passion for putting all your available means upon the 
| walls of your house, in the shape of hangings and 
| carvings, which appears to have ruined poor Mr. 
| Wolley, will remain as the advertisement of wealth of 
| the wealthier class.  It is probable that the difference 
| between <p> "carriage money" </p> and <p> "foot 
| company" </p> is too deeply engrained into the 
| substance of English society to be effaced by any 
| change of fashion.  But there is some ground for 
| hoping that the competition in men-servants will 
| become less warm.  It will be a great social reform 
| when pages shall give way to petticoats as tests of the 
| respectability of a household.  Grandeur as revealed 
| by the possession of flunkeys is one of the most 
| pernicious forms of social self-glorification that have 
| been discovered in England.  It has created what, by 
| the universal testimony of all who know the lower 
| classes, is not far from being the very worst class in 
| the population of London.  They live under a 
| collection of all the most favourable conditions for 
| developing whatever of evil can be found in man.  
| They have nothing to do, abundance to eat, plenty of 
| opportunity for stealing, are not married, and are 
| driven to the betting-houses for sheer want of some 
| occupation to fill up their spare time.  But though they 
| are the curse of the neighbourhood, and the plague of 
| their masters and mistresses, they are part of the state 
| by which men of various conditions proclaim to the 
| world the amount of wealth with which they desire to 
| be credited.  It would be a great gain to society if any 
| fashion should come in which should relieve the 
| richer classes of the conventional necessity of 
| maintaining this horde of fattened scamps.  It would 
| be a much better plan if the mistress of the house, as 
| she got richer, instead  of adding another useless lout 
| to her establishment, were content with taking it out 
| in endless stores of lace, or with wearing five gowns a 
| day instead of the four to which she had previously 
| restricted herself.  The new lace or gown would be 
| pleasanter to look at than the new flunkey, and would 
| serve quite as effectually to acquaint all beholders 
| that its possessor was a little richer than before; and 
| the world would, as a rule, be better by one rascal the 
| less.
| Of course, there remains the consideration which 
| originally prompted the despairing lover to address 
| himself to the <hi rend="italic"> Times. </hi>  If 
| young ladies insist on dressing so much better than 
| their mothers, they must have a much richer class of 
| husbands; and rich husbands are, unfortunately, not as 
| common as might be desired.  In the meanwhile, the 
| poorer suitors, who would have been able to marry 
| them but for the price to which inordinate distension 
| has carried their gowns, pine in celibacy, or dispose 
| of themselves in other ways.  The subject 
| undoubtedly has a grave moral side; and one of its 
| aspects ~~ the most revolting one ~~ is a good deal 
| under discussion just at present.  But the question is a 
| much wider one than that of class.  The disinclination 
| of both sexes for matrimony is not to be accounted for 
| simply by the increase in the woman's demand for 
| pin-money.  No doubt, in the long run, the 
| economical law will work, and the demand for cheap 
| wives will create its corresponding supply.  An 
| abundance of a maidens warranted to dress on fifty 
| pounds a year will sooner or later find their way into 
| the market.  But the evil which the Julian Law was 
| designed to remedy will continue to plague society 
| for many a long year yet.