CHAPTER XI
PERUKES AND PERIWIGS
“As to a Periwigg, my best and Greatest Friend begun to find me with Hair before I was Born, and has continued to do so ever since, and I could not find it in my Heart to go to another.”
—“Diary,” JUDGE SAMUEL SEWALL, 1718.
A phrensy or a periwigmanee
That over-runs his pericranie.
—JOHN BYRON, 1730 (circa).
CHAPTER XI
PERUKES AND PERIWIGS
o-day, when every man, save a football player or some eccentric reformer or religious fanatic, displays in youth a close-cropped head, and when even hoary age is seldom graced with flowing, silvery locks, when women’s hair is dressed in simplicity, we can scarcely realize the important and formal part the hair played in the dress of the eighteenth century.
In the great eagerness shown from earliest colonial days to acquire and reproduce in the New World every change of mode in the Old, to purchase rich dress, and to assume novel dress, no article was sought for more speedily and more anxiously than the wig. It has proved an interesting study to compare the introduction of wigs in England with the wear of the same form of head-gear in America. Wigs were not in general use in England when Plymouth and Boston were settled; though in Elizabeth’s day a “peryuke” had been bought for the court fool. They were not in universal wear till the close of the seventeenth century.