The Wigmaker
in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg
Illustrated capital
Richard Gamble, barber and perukemaker of Williamsburg in the middle years of the eighteenth century, appears to have remained a bachelor all his life. Other than this he seems to have been no more improvident than the average craftsman of his time. That is to say, he came—or was brought—into court with startling frequency in an endless round of suits to collect unpaid debts.
He was in good company. Going to the law was part of the colonial way of life in Virginia, and everyone from a town’s least citizen to the colony’s greatest planter engaged in it. In fact, suing and being sued had some of the aspects of a game: the plaintiff in one case might shortly be defendant in another and witness in a third—and keep right on doing business with the other parties in all three cases!
Court records abound with evidence that Williamsburg wigmakers were just as impecunious and as contentious as any of the rest. Mr. Gamble, however, had an additional distinction—of a sort. While most debt cases reached settlement out of court or ended in judgment for the plaintiff, Gamble actually went to jail for debt. In the Virginia Gazette of May 8, 1752, appeared this announcement to the public:
BEING prevented carrying on my Business as usual by an Arrest for a Debt not justly my own. I hereby give Notice, That I have taken into Partnership with me Edward Charlton, late from London, who will carry on the Business, at my Shop, next Door to the Raleigh Tavern, in Williamsburg. Gentlemen, who please to favour us with their Orders for Wigs, &c. may depend on being well and expeditiously serv’d and oblige
Their very humble Servant Richard Gamble.
N. B. All Persons who are indebted to me, are desired to pay the same to Mr. Alexander Finnie, who is properly impowered for that Perpose.
Alexander Finnie, co-defendant with Gamble in at least one large suit for debt—perhaps the one that led to Gamble’s “Arrest”—was himself a wigmaker who had abandoned the craft for the arduous pleasures of innkeeping. He was proprietor at the time of the Raleigh Tavern, Williamsburg’s largest and most famous hostelry.
When Gamble died, Edward Charlton, late from London, succeeded to the business and became in time Williamsburg’s leading barber and wigmaker. His livelihood—as perhaps he foresaw—was already doomed when he retired from business shortly before the Revolution: the wig fashion was on the way out in England and would soon be dropped in America. And in any case his former clientele would vanish from the streets of Williamsburg when the capital of Virginia was moved to Richmond in 1780.
Charlton, Gamble, and Finnie were only three of some thirty men concerned with barbering and wigmaking in eighteenth-century Williamsburg. Once or twice between 1700 and 1780 the town apparently had to struggle along for short periods with but a single active practitioner of the craft. Usually there were at least two or three, and for a time in 1769 as many as eight plied their trade in the little capital city.
About some of these thirty or more men we know nothing today except their names. About others quite a few facts survive in one place or another, chiefly the records of the York County Court and the columns of the Virginia Gazette. In addition, Edward Charlton’s account book of sales made and payments received during the years 1769 to about 1775 (there are some later entries) was found in the attic of a Williamsburg home only a few years ago. It helps immensely to round out our knowledge of his craft and clientele, and makes him almost inevitably the “representative” of his fellows in this account.
Two customers and seven workers in an eighteenth-century French barber-wigmaker’s shop. From left to right: a man (partly obscured in the shadow) prepares hair in the hackle; another sews weft to the peruke on the wig block in his lap; before the window a girl weaves strands of hair on the frame to make weft; a customer, standing, protects his face with a cloth as he dusts his head with powder; an apprentice shaves a second customer; in the background two workers heat curling irons in the fire; another apprentice dresses what appears to be a Ramillies wig on the stand. DIDEROT
All of these Williamsburg barbers and perukemakers performed at least one, but not always all three, of the craft’s basic services: (1) making, selling, and dressing wigs and false hair pieces for men and women; (2) cutting and dressing men’s, women’s, and children’s natural hair; and (3) shaving men. Before we go into more detail on these aspects of the craft in colonial days, however, it may be well to peer briefly still further back into history.
