If there be one thing more remarkable than another in the visible condition of the people of Great Britain, it is the universality of useful, elegant, and cheap clothing. There is very small distinction in the ordinary coat and trowsers of the peer and the best dress of the artisan; and not a great deal more in the gown and shawl of the high-born lady and those of the handmaid of her toilet. Perhaps the absence of mere finery, and the taste which is an accompaniment of superior education, constitute the chief difference in the dress of various ranks. This feature of the present times is a part of our social history.
For several centuries the domestic trade of the country was hemmed round and fettered by laws against extravagance in dress, which had always been a favourite subject for the experimentalizing of barbarous legislation. An act of 1463, recites that the Commons pray their lord the king to remember that in the times of his noble progenitors, ordinances and statutes were made for the apparel and array of the commons, as well of men as of women, so that none of them should use or wear any inordinate or excessive apparel, but only according to their degrees. However, we find that all these ordinances had been utterly fruitless. The parliament makes new ordinances. The nobles, according to these, may wear whatever they please; knights and their wives were to wear no cloth of gold, or fur of sables; no person under the state of a lord to wear any purple silk; no esquires or gentlemen and their wives any silk at all; no persons not having possessions of the yearly value of forty pounds, any fur; and, what is cruel indeed, no widow but such as hath possessions of the value of forty pounds, shall wear any fur, any gold or silver girdle, or any kerchief that had cost more than three shillings and four-pence; persons not having forty shillings a-year were denied the enjoyment of fustian and scarlet cloth; the yeoman was to have no stuffing in his doublet; nor servants in husbandry, broadcloth of a higher price than two shillings a yard. The length of gowns, jackets, and cloaks, was prescribed by the same statute; and the unhappy tailor who exceeded the length by the breadth of his nail, was to be mulcted in the same penalties as those who flaunted in skirts of more than needful longitude. The men and women of the mystery and workmanship of silk prefer their piteous complaint to parliament, that silk-work ready wrought is brought into the realm. If it had occurred to them to petition that the gentlemen and their wives might be permitted to wear satin, as well as the lords, their piteous complaint of want of occupation might have been more easily redressed than by foreign prohibition. Sumptuary laws have long been abolished; but to them succeeded the laws of custom, which prescribed one sort of dress to one condition of people, and another to another. We cannot doubt which state gives most employment to manufacturers, the law of exclusiveness or the law of universality. If the labourer and artificer were still restricted, by enactment or by custom, to the wearing of cloth of a certain price per yard, we may be quite sure that the manufacture of the finer cloths would be in no flourishing condition; and if the servant-maid could not put on her Sunday gown of silk, we may be equally clear that the silk-trade would continue to be the small thing that it was half a century ago, when it had the full benefit of restriction, instead of being, as it is now, one of the great staple trades of the country.
When the frame-work knitters of silk stockings petitioned Oliver Cromwell for a charter, they said, "the Englishman buys silk of the stranger for twenty marks, and sells him the same again for one hundred pounds." The higher pride of the present day is that we buy seven million pounds of raw silk from the stranger, employ a hundred and fourteen thousand of our own people in the manufacture of it by the aid of machinery, and sell it to the stranger, and our own people, at a price as low as that of the calico of half a century ago. In 1853 the exports of silk manufactures, including those of silk mixed with other materials, silk-yarn and silk-twist, amounted to the enormous sum of two millions sterling, having doubled since 1849. In 1826, when the ruin of our silk-trade was boldly prophesied as the sure result of the reduction of the prohibitive duties on foreign silk, the exports of our silk manufactures did not reach two hundred thousand pounds. William Huskisson, the great statesman who produced this mighty change, was then denounced in parliament as "an insensible and hard-hearted metaphysician."
Hanks of silk. a, Bengal; b, Italian; c, Persian; d, Broussa.
Egyptian winding-reel.