References
- This is the slightly modified text of an after-dinner lecture given at the Pasold Conference; it claims to be no more than a jeu d’ésprit.
- French court dress, established in the 1670s, consisted of a fiercely boned bodice, a hooped skirt, and a long, detachable train. Although worn all over Europe where French fashions were the reigning mode, it was rarely worn in England except by royal ladies on occasions of exceptional formality, such as royal weddings.
- J. Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations, 2 vols (Dublin, 1747), 1, p. 13.
- Leads were tiny weights (about the size of today’s 20p. coin) sewn into the short wide sleeves of early eighteenth-century dress to keep them from rising up.
- C. L. von Pöllnitz, Travels from Prussia thro’ Germany, Italy, France, Flanders, Holland, England, & c, 5 vols (London 1745), III, p. 287. I have used the third edition; the first was published in 1734.
- Ibid., III, p. 288.
- See A. Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (London, 1986 ), and the same author’s ‘Dress and Undress: Costume and Morality in the 18th Century’, in Country Life, 11 September 1986.
- B.-L. de Murait, Lettres sur les Anglais et les Français (Cologne, 1725), p. 160.
- Ibid., p. 113.
- T. Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (London, 1766), 1, p. 95.
- Abbes, often the younger sons of nobility without any real vocation, attracted the censure of many French and foreign commentators. Among them was L.-S. Mercier whose Tableau de Paris of the 1780s is scathing about such ‘drones [who] serve neither the church nor the state’.
- Smollett, op. cit., I, p. 114.
- Ibid., I, p. no. ‘Meal’ here refers to hair powder, and the ‘queue’ is a pigtail.
- Ibid., I, p. 98.
- P. J. Grosley, A Tour to London, trans. T. Nugent (London, 1772), I, p. 106.
- France and England were on opposite sides in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48 ) and the Seven Years War (1756–63).
- S. Jenyns, A Collection of Poems (London, 1748), p. 250. This poem, entitled ‘Fashion A Satire’, is of 1742.
- See J. J. Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants in Eighteenth Century England, Smith College Studies in History, XL (Northampton, Mass., 1954).
- K. Fiquet du Bocage, Letters Concerning England, Holland and Italy (London, 1770), 1, p. 16. Although it seems that the English were more civil to foreigners in the streets by the end of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, anti-French caricatures proved big business in the print shops. Louis Simond in his Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain during the Years 1810 and 1811 (Edinburgh, 1817), noted that ‘my countrymen never fail to be represented as diminutive starved beings of monkey-mien, strutting about in huge hats, narrow coats and great sabres’ (1, p. 27).
- H. Walpole, Letters, ed. P. Toynbee, 16 vols (Oxford, 1903 –15), IV, p. 230.
- L.-S. Mercier, Parallèle de Paris et de Londres, ed. C. Bruneteau and B. Cottret (Paris, 1982 ), p. 61. According to Mercier the French were blamed for the vices which more correctly derived from Italy and Spain. Regarding the anti-French sentiment in England, Mercier attributed its origin to William III in the late seventeenth century.
- Pöllnitz, op. cit., III, p. 289.
- Gray’s Inn Journal, quoted in C. W. and P. Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1972 ), p. 17.
- Jenyns, op. cit., p. 196.
- Grosley, op. cit., 1, pp. 253, 255.
- A. Adams, Letters, ed. and intr. C. F. Adams (Boston 1848 ), p. 190.
- Grosley, op. cit., 1, p. 45.
- Place MSS, BM Add. MS 27827, p. 167, quoted in A. Ribeiro, ‘Men and Umbrellas in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (1986).
- For example, see: M. Decremps, Le parisien à Londres (Amsterdam, 1789); F. Lacombe, Observations sur Londre [sic] (Paris, 1777); J. Marchand (ed.), A Frenchman in England, 1784, being the Mélanges sur l’Angleterre of François de la Rochefoucauld (Cambridge, 1933).
- Madame Roland (later to be a leading figure in the Girondin Party, and guillotined during the Terror) visited England in 1784. She found English women attractive enough in their white muslin gowns (which she notes they wore à la polonaise, i.e. with the back drapery puffed up into three swags of material), but ‘except in a very small number, there is not to be found an elegance and taste anything like ours’. See The Works of Jeanne-Marie Phlipon-Roland (London, 1800 ), p. 184.
- Rochefoucauld, op. cit., pp. 28, 57.
- L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 8 vols (Amsterdam, 1782–88 ), VII, pp. 45–46.
- Walpole, op. cit., VI, p. 309.
- A. Young, Travels in France and Italy during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, ed. and intr. T. Okey (London, 1915 ), p. 325.
- The German pastor Carl Philipp Moritz visited England in 1782 and was amazed to find MPs at the House of Commons dressed in greatcoats and boots, lounging on the benches eating nuts and oranges. See C. P. Moritz, Travels in England in 1782, intr. P. E. Matheson (London, 1924 ), p. 53.
- See A. Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (London, 1988).
- The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. J. Hemlow (Oxford, 1972 –82), v, p. 290. She herself, at the age of fifty, decided that the fashions of 1802 were far too youthful for her, and kept to her stays and petticoats, as a ‘Gothic anglaise’.
- The following are useful, if occasionally highly coloured accounts: F. W. Blagdon, Paris As it Was and As it Is, 2 vols (London, 1803 ); E. J. Eyre, Observations made at Paris during the Peace (Bath, 1803); J. D. Paul, Journal of a Party of Pleasure to Paris (London, 1802); An Englishman in Paris 1803: The Journal of Bertie Greatheed, ed. J. P. T. Bury and J. C. Barry (London, 1953). Not all the reporting, however, was done at first hand, and a number of visitors — without acknowledgement — eked out their own impressions with extracts taken from Mercier’s Le Nouveau Paris of 1798.
- The Farington Diary, ed. J. Greig, 8 vols (London, 1922 –26), 11, p. 20.