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Abstract
This article presents a study of dress worn by women living in Canada West, now called Southern Ontario, as seen in daguerreotype photographs from the late 1840s until about 1860. This rich medium chronicled not only a woman’s appearance, but also her values, sartorial tastes, and family’s relative wealth. As well as the physicality of the sitter, photographic images projected how her appearance was constructed with signs and symbols that were part of the philosophy of early Victorian Canada. Daguerreotypes captured images of women in all stages of their lives: as young adults, through marriage and the birth of children, and as older women. Analysis of selected images of Canadian West women in each stage helps catalogue dress during a relatively short period and serves as a basis for further investigation.
Notes
1 Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Sculery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995); Errington, Women and their Work in Upper Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historial Association, 2006); Frances Hoffman and Ryan Taylor, Much to Be Done: Private Life in Ontario from Victorian Diaries, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2007).
2 The larger survey and analysis from which this article was developed was the main research project for my Masters of Arts in Fashion degree from Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 2012, entitled “Through the Lens of Fashion: An Analysis of the Clothing Styles in Early Victorian Ontario.”
3 Robert Lansdale, “Eli John Palmer: Toronto Photographer, 1849–1878, Part Two,” Photographic Canadiana 36, no. 4 (2011): 14.
4 The following Ontario institutions have daguerreotypes that have been useful: the Dundas Museum; Whitehern Museum, Archives of Ontario, Toronto Reference Library; Art Gallery of Ontario; Wellington County Museum; Queen’s University Library, Library and Archives Canada; and Royal Ontario Museum.
5 For work on the technology and meaning of the daguerreotype, see Richard Rudisill’s Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society, published in 1971. The photographic historian traces daguerreotype photography as a cultural phenomenon in this book. See also Mary Warner Marien’s Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839–1900, published in 1997. Christina M. Johnson’s article “Each Button, Every Hole, and Every Fold,” published in Dress in 2004, was a starting point for my interest in daguerreotypes. For a Canadian perspective in photographic history, see Graham W. Garrett’s Citation2008 publication of a CD-ROM entitled A Biographical Index of Daguerreotypists in Canada, 1839–1871. This work includes historic information, a biographical list of daguerreotypists, finding aids, a chronological list of items about daguerreotypes in newspapers, and examples of significant Canadian daguerreotypes. It is a definitive collection of references, which is invaluable to the current study. See also Ralph Greenhill and Andrew Birrell’s Canadian Photography: 1839–1920, published in 1979. Another contemporary Canadian author, Joan M. Schwartz, approaches the daguerreotype as an object in material culture research in her chapter, “Un Beau Souvenir Du Canada: Object, Image, Symbolic Space,” in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart and published in 2004.
6 Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America, 3rd ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1975), 26.
7 J. W. Draper, “The Daguerreotype: On the Process of Daguerreotype, and its Application to Taking Portraits from the Life,” The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 17 (1840), 223.
8 Joan L. Severa, My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), xvi.
9 Graham W. Garrett, “The Mirror of Nature: Early Daguerreotype Photography in Canada,” Canada's History 5, no. 6 (1995): 11.
10 Many daguerreotypes in Severa’s books do not have good provenance. For example, claims that individuals are slaves or servant class sometimes are assumptions that could be problematic in assigning status.
11 Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 141.
12 Errington, Wives and Mothers, 28.
13 Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal, 140.
14 Hugh Stowell Brown, Twelve Lectures to the Men of Liverpool (London: Partridge, 1858), 47.
15 Errington, Wives and Mothers, 15.
16 Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 169.
17 “Fashions for June,” Peterson’s Magazine of Art, Literature, and Fashion, June 1848, 230.
18 Alana West, “Eli John Palmer: Toronto Photographer, 1849, Part One,” Photographic Canadiana, November 2011, 7.
19 Severa, My Likeness Taken, 111.
20 Mike Robinson and Helaine Silverman, eds., Encounters with Popular Pasts: Cultural Heritage and Popular Culture (New York: Springer, 2015), 245.
21 Errington, Wives and Mothers, 26.
22 Canadian Census 1852, accessed June 27, 2016, http://automatedgenealogy.com/census52/SurnameSearch.jsp?surname=eberts.
23 Census 1851 (Canada East, Canada West, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), Library Archives Canada, accessed June 27, 2016, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/census-1851/index-e.html.
24 Jan Noel, “Canada West, 1841–67,” in Loyal She Remains: A Pictorial History of Ontario (Toronto: United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada, 1984), 244.
25 Vanda Foster, Bags and Purses (London: B. T. Batsford, 1982), 56.
26 Margaret Angus, “At Home Days: The Status of Women in Kingston Before World War I,” Historic Kingston 36 (1988), 48–58.
27 David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 86.
28 Kingston Branch UEL Members’ Stories, accessed June 28, 2016, www.uelac.org/Kingston/stories.html.
29 Garrett, A Biographical Index of Daguerreotypists in Canada.
30 Ida Reed, Wesleyan Methodist Baptismal Register, Ancestry.com, accessed June 25, 2016, http://freepages.geneology.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wjmartin/wm-d_74.htm.
31 Draper, The Daguerreotype, 224.
32 John H. Young, Our Deportment: or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society (Detroit: F. B. Dickerson, 1888), 337.
33 Marien, Photography and Its Critics,76.
34 West, Photographic Canadiana, 7.
35 Quoted in Marien, Photography and Its Critics.
36 Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 122.
37 Peterson’s Magazine, April 1875, quoted in Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840–1900 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 302.
38 H. J. Rodgers, Twenty-Three Years Under a Sky-Light: or Life and Experiences of a Photographer (Hartford: H. J. Rodgers, Citation1872), 52.
39 Severa, Dressed for the Photographer, 83.
40 The term fossilized fashion was coined by Beverly Gordon in “Fossilized Fashion: ‘Old Fashioned’ Dress as a Symbol of a Separate, Work-Oriented Identity,” Dress 13, no. 1 (1987): 49–59.
41 For an overview of the sources and study of dress in Canada, see Christina Bates, “Evidence about Dress in Canada,” in Berg Encyclopaedia of World Dress and Fashion, vol. 3, ed. Phyllis Tortora and Joseph D. Horse Capture (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 35–41.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
M. Elaine MacKay
M. Elaine MacKay trained as a tailor and pattern maker, and combines these skills with academic experience as the basis for research into and re-creation of historical dress. She has investigated and written about the clothing of sixteenth-century Basque whalers in Labrador, Canada, the wedding suit of King James II of England, early British climbers on Mount Everest, and Victorian women in Ontario. She continues to work as a special skills costumer for films and museums.