Prices were a bit higher in America. It was held that better wigs were made in England than in America or France; so the letter-books and agent’s-lists of American merchants are filled with orders for English wigs.
Imperative orders for the earliest and extremest new fashions stood from year to year on the lists of fashionable London wig-makers; and these constant orders came from Virginia gentlemen and Massachusetts magistrates,—not a few, too, from the parsons,—scantly paid as they were. The smaller bob-wigs and tie-wigs were precisely the same in both countries, and I am sure were no later in assumption in America than was necessitated by the weeks occupied in coming across seas.
Throughout the seventeenth century all classes of men in American towns wore wigs. Negro slaves flaunted white horsehair wigs, goat’s-hair bob-wigs, natural wigs, all the plainer wigs, and all the more costly sorts when these were half worn and secondhand. Soldiers wore wigs; and in the Massachusetts Gazette of the year 1774 a runaway negro is described as wearing a curl of hair tied around his head to imitate a scratch wig; with his woolly crown this dangling curl must have been the height of absurdity.
It is not surprising to find in the formal life of the English court the poor little tormented, sickly, sad child of Queen Anne wearing, before he was seven years old, a large full-bottomed wig; but it is curious to see the portraits of American children rigged up in wigs (I have half a dozen such), and to find likewise an American gentleman (and not one of wealth either) paying £;9 apiece for wigs for three little sons of seven, nine, and eleven years of age. This lavish parent was Enoch Freeman, who lived in Portland, Maine, in 1754.
Wigs were objects of much and constant solicitude and care; their dressing was costly, and they wore out readily. Barbers cared for them by the month or year, visiting from house to house. Ten pounds a year was not a large sum to be paid for the care of a single wig. Men of dignity and careful dress had barbers’ bills of large amount, such men as Governor John Hancock, Governor Hutchinson, and Governor Belcher. On Saturday afternoons the barbers’ boys were seen flying through the narrow streets, wig-box in hand, hurrying to deliver all the dressed wigs ere sunset came.
No doubt the constant wearing of such hot, heavy head-covering made the hair thin and the head bald; thus wigs became a necessity. Men had their heads very closely covered of old, and caught cold at a breath. Pepys took cold throwing off his hat while at dinner. If the wig were removed even within doors a close cap or hood at once took its place, or, as I tell elsewhere, a turban of some rich stuff. In America, in the Southern states, where people were poor and plantations scattered, all men did not wear wigs. A writer in the London Magazine in 1745 tells of this country carelessness of dress. He says that except some of the “very Elevated Sort” few wore perukes; so that at first sight “all looked as if about to go to bed,” for all wore caps. Common people wore woollen caps; richer ones donned caps of white cotton or Holland linen. These were worn even when riding fifty miles from home. He adds, “It may be cooler for aught I know; but methinks ’tis very ridiculous.” So wonted were his eyes to perukes, that his only thought of caps was that they were “ridiculous.” Nevertheless, when a shipload of servants, bond-servants who might be stolen when in drink, or lured under false pretences, might be convicts, or honest workmen,—when these transports were set up in respectability,—scores of new wigs of varying degrees of dignity came across seas with them. Many an old caxon or “gossoon”—a wig worn yellow with age—ended its days on the pate of a redemptioner, who thereby acquired dignity and was more likely to be bought as a schoolmaster. Truly our ancestors were not squeamish, and it is well they were not, else they would have squeamed from morning till night at the sights, and sounds, and things, and dirt around them. But these be parlous words; they had the senses and feelings of their day—suited to the surroundings of their day. In one thing they can be envied. Knowing not of germs and microbes, dreaming not of antiseptics and fumigation, they could be happy in blissful unconsciousness of menacing environment—a blessing wholly denied to us.
Andrew Ellicott.
When James Murray came from Scotland in 1735 he went up the Cape Fear River in North Carolina to the struggling settlements of Brunswick. The stock of wigs which he brought as one of the commodities of his trade had absolutely no market. In 1751 he wrote thus to his London wig-maker:—