Rev. J.P. Dabney when a Child.
I read with horror an advertisement of John McQueen, a New York stay-maker in 1767, that he has children’s packthread stays, children’s bone stays, and “neat polished steel collars for young Misses so much worn at the boarding schools in London.” Poor little “young Misses”!
There were also “turned stays, jumps, gazzets, costrells and caushets” (which were perhaps corsets) to make children appear straight. Costrells and gazzets we know not to-day. Jumps were feeble stays.
“Now a shape in neat stays
Now a slattern in jumps.”
Robert Gibbes.
Jumps were allied to jimps, and perhaps to jupe; and I think jumper is a cousin of a word. One pair of stays I have seen is labelled as having been made for a boy of five. One of the worst instruments of torture I ever beheld was a pair of child’s stays worn in 1760. They were made, not of little strips of wood, but of a large piece of board, front and back, tightly sewed into a buckram jacket and reënforced across at right angles and diagonally over the hips (though really there were no hip-places) with bars of whalebone and steel. The tin corsets I have heard of would not have been half as ill to wear. It is true, too, that needles were placed in the front of the stays, that the stay-wearer who “poked her head” would be well pricked. The daughter of General Nathanael Greene, the Revolutionary patriot, told her grandchildren that she sat many hours every day in her girlhood, with her feet in stocks and strapped to a backboard. A friend has a chair of ordinary size, save that the seat is about four inches wide from the front edge of seat to the back. And the back is well worn at certain points where a heavy leather strap strapped up the young girl who was tortured in it for six years of her life. The result of back board, stocks, steel collar, wooden stays, is shown in such figures as have Dorothy Q. and her sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth Storer, on page 98 of my Child Life in Colonial Days, is an extreme example, straight-backed indeed, but narrow-chested to match.
Dr. Holmes wrote in jest, but he wrote in truth, too:—
“They braced My Aunt against a board
To make her straight and tall,
They laced her up, they starved her down,
To make her light and small.
They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,
They screwed it up with pins,
Oh, never mortal suffered more
In penance for her sins.”