Reigned ten years: 1820-1830.

Born 1762. Married, 1795, Caroline of Brunswick.

Out of the many fashion books of this time I have chosen, from a little brown book in front of me, a description of the fashions for ladies during one part of 1827. It will serve to show how mere man, blundering on the many complexities of the feminine passion for dress—I was going to say clothes—may find himself left amid a froth of frills, high and dry, except for a whiff of spray, standing in his unromantic garments on the shore of the great world of gauze and gussets, while the most noodle-headed girl sails gracefully away upon the high seas to pirate some new device of the Devil or Paris.

Our wives—bless them!—occasionally treat us to a few bewildering terms, hoping by their gossamer knowledge to present to our gaze a mental picture of a new, adorable, ardently desired—hat. Perhaps those nine proverbial tailors who go to make the one proverbial man, least of his sex, might, by a strenuous effort, confine the history of clothes during this reign into a compact literature of forty volumes. It would be indecent, as undecorous as the advertisements in ladies’ papers, to attempt to fathom the language of the man who endeavoured to read the monumental effigy to the vanity of human desire for adornment. But is it adornment?

Nowadays to be dressed well is not always the same thing as to be well dressed. Often it is far from it. The question of modern clothes is one of great perplexity. It seems that what is beauty one year may be the abomination of desolation the next, because the trick of that beauty has become common property. You puff your hair at the sides, you are in the true sanctum of the mode; you puff your hair at the sides, you are for ever utterly cast out as one having no understanding. I shall not attempt to explain it: it passes beyond the realms of explanation into the pure air of Truth. The Truth is simple. Aristocracy being no longer real, but only a cult, one is afraid of one’s servants. Your servant puffs her hair at the sides, and, hang it! she becomes exactly like an aristocrat. Our servant having dropped her g’s for many years as well as her h’s, it behoved us to pronounce our g’s and our h’s. Our servants having learned our English, it became necessary for us to drop our g’s; we seem at present unwilling in the matter of the h, but that will come.

To cut the cackle and come to the clothes-horse, let me say that the bunglement of clothes which passes all comprehension in King George IV.’s reign is best explained by my cuttings from the book of one who apparently knew. Let the older writer have his, or her, fling in his, or her, words.

Really this little fashion book is very charming: it recreates, for me, the elegant simpering ladies; it gives, in its style, just that artificial note which conjures this age of ladies with hats—‘in the charming cottage style, modestly tied under the chin.’ They had the complete art of languor, these dear creatures; they lisped Italian, and were fine needlewomen; they painted weak little landscapes: nooks or arbours found them dreaming of a Gothic revival—they were all this and more; but through this sweet envelope the delicate refined souls shone: they were true women, often great women; their loops of hair, their cameleopard pelerines, shall not rob them of immortality, cannot destroy their softening influence, which permeated even the outrageous dandyism of the men of their time and steered the three-bottle gentlemen, their husbands and our grandfathers, into a grand old age which we reverence to-day, and wonder at, seeing them as giants against our nerve-shattered, drug-taking generation.

As for the men, look at the innumerable pictures, and collect, for instance, the material for a colossal work upon the stock ties of the time, run your list of varieties into some semblance of order; commence with the varieties of macassar-brown stocks, pass on to patent leather stocks, take your man for a walk and cause him to pass a window full of Hibernian stocks, and let him discourse on the stocks worn by turf enthusiasts, and, when you are approaching the end of your twenty-third volume, give a picture of a country dinner-party, and end your work with a description of the gentlemen under the table being relieved of their stocks by the faithful family butler.

POWDER AND PATCHES

‘The affectation of a mole, to set off their beauty, such as Venus had.’

‘At the devill’s shopps you buy
A dresse of powdered hayre.’

From the splendid pageant of history what figures come to you most willingly? Does a great procession go by the window of your mind? Knights bronzed by the sun of Palestine, kings in chains, emperors in blood-drenched purple, poets clothed like grocers with the souls of angels shining through their eyes, fussy Secretaries of State, informers, spies, inquisitors, Court cards come to life, harlequins, statesmen in great ruffs, wives of Bath in foot-mantles and white wimples, sulky Puritans, laughing Cavaliers, Dutchmen drinking gin and talking politics, men in wide-skirted coats and huge black periwigs—all walking, riding, being carried in coaches, in sedan-chairs, over the face of England. Every step of the procession yields wonderful dreams of colour; in every group there is one who, by the personality of his clothes, can claim the name of beau.

Near the tail of the throng there is a chattering, bowing, rustling crowd, dimmed by a white mist of scented hair-powder. They are headed, I think—for one cannot see too clearly—by the cook of the Comte de Bellemare, a man by name Legros, the great hairdresser. Under his arm is a book, the title of which reads, ‘Art de la Coiffure des Dames FranÇaises.’ Behind him is a lady in an enormous hoop; her hair is dressed À la belle Poule; she is arguing some minute point of the disposition of patches with Monsieur LÉonard, another artist in hair. ‘What will be the next wear?’ she asks. ‘A heart near the eye—l’assassine, eh? Or a star near the lips—la friponne? Must I wear a galante on my cheek, an enjouÉe in my dimple, or la majestueuse on my forehead?’ Before we can hear the reply another voice is raised, a guttural German voice; it is John Schnorr, the ironmaster of Erzgebinge. ‘The feet stuck in it, I tell you,’ he says—‘actually stuck! I got from my saddle and looked at the ground. My horse had carried me on to what proved to be a mine of wealth. Hair-powder! I sold it in Dresden, in Leipsic; and then, at Meissen, what does BÖttcher do but use my hair-powder to make white porcelain!’ And so the chatter goes on. Here is Charles Fox tapping the ground with his red heels and proclaiming, in a voice thick with wine, on the merits of blue hair-powder; here is Brummell, free from hair-powder, free from the obnoxious necessity of going with his regiment to Manchester.

The dressy person and the person who is well dressed—these two showing everywhere. The one is in a screaming hue of woad, the other a quiet note of blue dye; the one in excessive velvet sleeves that he cannot manage, the other controlling a rich amplitude of material with perfect grace. Here a liripipe is extravagantly long; here a gold circlet decorates curled locks with matchless taste. Everywhere the battle between taste and gaudiness. High hennins, steeples of millinery, stick up out of the crowd; below these, the towers of powdered hair bow and sway as the fine ladies patter along. What a rustle and a bustle of silks and satins, of flowered tabbies, rich brocades, cut velvets, superfine cloths, woollens, cloth of gold! See, there are the square-shouldered Tudors; there are the steel glints of Plantagenet armour; the Eastern-robed followers of Coeur de Lion; the swaggering beribboned Royalists; the ruffs, trunks, and doublets of Elizabethans; the snuffy, wide-skirted coats swaying about Queen Anne. There are the soft, swathed Norman ladies with bound-up chins; the tapestry figures of ladies proclaiming Agincourt; the dignified dames about Elizabeth of York; the playmates of Katherine Howard; the wheels of round farthingales and the high lace collars of King James’s Court; the beauties, bare-breasted, of Lely; the Hogarthian women in close caps. And, in front of us, two posturing figures in Dresden china colours, rouged, patched, powdered, perfumed, in hoop skirts, flirting with a fan—the lady; in gold-laced wide coat, solitaire, bagwig, ruffles, and red heels—the gentleman. ‘I protest, madam,’ he is saying, ‘but you flatter me vastly.’ ‘La, sir,’ she replies, ‘I am prodigiously truthful.’

‘And how are we to know that all this is true?’ the critics ask, guarding the interest of the public. ‘We see that your book is full of statements, and there are no, or few, authorities given for your studies. Where,’ they ask, ‘are the venerable anecdotes which are given a place in every respectable work on your subject?’

To appease the appetites which are always hungry for skeletons, I give a short list of those books which have proved most useful:

In addition to these, there are, of course, many other books, prints, engravings, sets of pictures, and heaps of caricatures. The excellent labours of the Society of Antiquaries and the ArchÆological Association have helped me enormously; these, with wills, wardrobe accounts, ‘Satires’ by Hall and others, ‘Anatomies of Abuses,’ broadsides, and other works on the same subject, French, German, and English, have made my task easier than it might have been.

It was no use to spin out my list of manuscripts with the numbers—endless numbers—of those which proved dry ground, so I have given those only which have yielded a rich harvest.

BEAU BRUMMELL AND CLOTHES

Those who care to make the melancholy pilgrimage may see, in the Protestant Cemetery at Caen, the tomb of George Bryan Brummell. He died, at the age of sixty-two, in 1840.

It is indeed a melancholy pilgrimage to view the tomb of that once resplendent figure, to think, before the hideous grave, of the witty, clever, foolish procession from Eton to Oriel College, Oxford; from thence to a captaincy in the 10th Hussars, from No. 4 Chesterfield Street to No. 13 Chapel Street, Park Lane; from Chapel Street a flight to Calais; from Calais to Paris; and then, at last, to Caen, and the bitter, bitter end, mumbling and mad, to die in the Bon Sauveur.

Place him beside the man who once pretended to be his friend, the man of whom Thackeray spoke so truly: ‘But a bow and a grin. I try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur coat, a star and a blue ribbon, a pocket handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt’s best nutty-brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth, and a huge black stock, under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing.’

Nothing! Thackeray is right; absolutely nothing remains of this King George of ours but a sale list of his wardrobe, a wardrobe which fetched £15,000 second-hand—a wardrobe that had been a man. He invented a shoe-buckle 1 inch long and 5 inches broad. He wore a pink silk coat with white cuffs. He had 5,000 steel beads on his hat. He was a coward, a good-natured, contemptible voluptuary. Beside him, in our eyes, walks for a time the elegant figure of Beau Brummell. I have said that Brummell was the inventor of modern dress: it is true. He was the Beau who raised the level of dress from the slovenly, dirty linen, the greasy hair, the filthy neckcloth, the crumbled collar, to a position, ever since held by Englishmen, of quiet, unobtrusive cleanliness, decent linen, an abhorrence of striking forms of dress.

He made clean linen and washing daily a part of English life.

See him seated before his dressing-glass, a mahogany-framed sliding cheval glass with brass arms on either sides for candles. By his side is George IV., recovering from his drunken bout of last night. The Beau’s glass reflects his clean-complexioned face, his grey eyes, his light brown hair, and sandy whiskers. A servant produces a shirt with a 12-inch collar fixed to it, assists the Beau into it, arranges it, and stands aside. The collar nearly hides the Beau’s face. Now, with his hand protected with a discarded shirt, he folds his collar down to the required height. Now he takes his white stock and folds it carefully round the collar; the stock is a foot high and slightly starched. A supreme moment of artistic decision, and the stock and collar take their perfect creases. In an hour or so he will be ready to partake of a light meal with the royal gentleman. He will stand up and survey himself in his morning dress, his regular, quiet suit. A blue coat, light breeches fitting the leg well, a light waistcoat over a waistcoat of some other colour, never a startling contrast, Hessian boots, or top-boots and buckskins. There was nothing very peculiar about his clothes except, as Lord Byron said, ‘an exquisite propriety.’ His evening dress was a blue coat, white waistcoat, black trousers buttoned at the ankle—these were of his own invention, and one may say it was the wearing of them that made trousers more popular than knee-breeches—striped silk stockings, and a white stock.

He was a man of perfect taste—of fastidious taste. On his tables lay books of all kinds in fine covers. Who would suspect it? but the Prince is leaning an arm on a copy of Ellis’s ‘Early English Metrical Romances.’ The Beau is a rhymer, an elegant verse-maker. Here we see the paper-presser of Napoleon—I am flitting for the moment over some years, and see him in his room in Calais—here we notice his passion for buhl, his SÈvres china painted with Court beauties.

In his house in Chapel Street he saw daily portraits of Nelson and Pitt and George III. upon his walls. This is no Beau as we understand the term, for we make it a word of contempt, a nickname for a feeble fellow in magnificent garments. Rather this is the room of an educated gentleman of ‘exquisite propriety.’

He played high, as did most gentlemen; he was superstitious, as are many of the best of men. That lucky sixpence with the hole in it that you gave to a cabman, Beau Brummell, was that loss the commencement of your downward career?

There are hundreds of anecdotes of Brummell which, despite those of the ‘George, ring the bell’ character, and those told of his heavy gaming, are more valuable as showing his wit, his cleanliness, his distaste of display—in fact, his ‘exquisite propriety.’

A Beau is hardly a possible figure to-day; we have so few personalities, and those we have are chiefly concerned with trade—men who uphold trusts, men who fight trusts, men who speak for trade in the House of Commons. We have not the same large vulgarities as our grandfathers, nor have we the same wholesome refinement; in killing the evil—the great gambler, the great men of the turf, the great prize-fighters, the heavy wine-drinkers—we have killed, also, the good, the classic, well-spoken civil gentleman. Our manners have suffered at the expense of our morals.

Fifty or sixty years ago the world was full of great men, saying, writing, thinking, great things. To-day—perhaps it is too early to speak of to-day. Personalities are so little marked by their clothes, by any stamp of individuality, that the caricaturist, or even the minute and truthful artist, be he painter or writer, has a difficult task before him when he sets out to point at the men of these our times.

George Brummell came into the world on June 7, 1778. He was a year or so late for the Macaroni style of dress, many years behind the Fribbles, after the Smarts, and must have seen the rise and fall of the Zebras when he was thirteen. During his life he saw the old-fashioned full frock-coat, bagwig, solitaire, and ruffles die away; he saw the decline and fall of knee-breeches for common wear, and the pantaloons invented by himself take their place. From these pantaloons reaching to the ankle came the trousers, as fashionable garments, open over the instep at first, and joined by loops and buttons, then strapped under the boot, and after that in every manner of cut to the present style. He saw the three-cornered hat vanish from the hat-boxes of the polite world, and he saw fine-coloured clothes give way to blue coats with brass buttons or coats of solemn black.

It may be said that England went into mourning over the French Revolution, and has not yet recovered. Beau Brummell, on his way to Eton, saw a gay-coloured crowd of powdered and patched people, saw claret-coloured coats covered with embroidery, gold-laced hats, twinkling shoe-buckles. On his last walks in Caen, no doubt, he dreamed of London as a place of gay colours instead of the drab place it was beginning to be. To-day there is no more monotonous sight than the pavements of Piccadilly crowded with people in dingy, sad clothes, with silk tubes on their heads, their black and gray suits being splashed by the mud from black hansoms, or by the scatterings of motor-cars driven by aristocratic-looking mechanics, in which mechanical-looking aristocrats lounge, darkly clad. Here and there some woman’s dress enlivens the monotony; here a red pillar-box shines in the sun; there, again, we bless the Post-Office for their red mail-carts, and perhaps we are strengthened to bear the gloom by the sight of a blue or red bus.

But our hearts are not in tune with the picture; we feel the lack of colour, of romance, of everything but money, in the street. Suddenly a magnificent policeman stops the traffic; there is a sound of jingling harness, of horses’ hoofs beating in unison. There flashes upon us an escort of Life Guards sparkling in the sun, flashing specks of light from swords, breastplates, helmets. The little forest of waving plumes, the raising of hats, the polite murmuring of cheers, warms us. We feel young, our hearts beat; we feel more healthy, more alive, for this gleam of colour. Then an open carriage passes us swiftly as we stand with bared heads. There is a momentary sight of a man in uniform—a man with a wonderful face, clever, dignified, kind. And we say, with a catch in our voices:

‘The King—God bless him!’

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND

Transcriber's Note

Hyphenation has been made consistent. Minor errors in punctuation have been corrected.

The following items were noted by the transcriber:

Archaic spelling is preserved as printed. Variable spelling has been made consistent where there was a prevalence of one form over the other, and typographic errors have been repaired, as follows:

The frontispiece illustration has been moved to follow the title page. Other illustrations have been moved where necessary so that they are not in the middle of a paragraph.