THE WOMEN
‘What fashion will make a woman have the best body, tailor?’
‘A short Dutch waist, with a round Catherine-wheel fardingale, a close sleeve, with a cartoose collar, or a pickadell.’
I think, with a little imagination, we can see the lady: add to our picture a feather fan, a man’s beaver hat with a fine band round it stuck with a rose or a feather, shoes with ribbons or roses, and jewels in the hair—and I think the lady walks. Yet so difficult do I find it to lead her tripping out of the wardrobe into the world, I would remind myself of the laws for servants in this time:
‘And no servant may toy with the maids under pain of fourpence.’
It is a salutary warning, and one that must be kept in the mind’s eye, and as I pluck the lady from the old print, hold her by the Dutch waist, and twirl her round until the Catherine-wheel fardingale is a blurred circle, and the pickadell a mist of white linen, I feel, for my prying, like one who has toyed under pain of fourpence.
There are many excellent people with the true historical mind who would pick up my lady and strip her in so passionless a way as to leave her but a mass of Latin names—so many bones, tissues, and nerves—and who would then label and classify her wardrobe under so many old English and French, Dutch and Spanish names, bringing to bear weighty arguments several pages long over the derivation of the word ‘cartoose’ or ‘pickadell,’ write in notebooks of her little secret fineries, bear down on one another with thundering eloquence upon the relation of St. Catherine and her wheel upon seventeenth-century dressmaking, and so confuse and bewilder the more simple and less learned folk that we should turn away from the Eve of the seventeenth century and from the heap of clothes upon the floor no whit the wiser for all their pains.
Not that I would laugh, even smile, at the diligence of these learned men who in their day puzzled the father of Tristram Shandy over the question of breeches, but, as it is in my mind impossible to disassociate the clothes and the woman, I find it difficult to follow their dissertations, however enlightening, upon Early English cross-stitch. And now, after I have said all this, I find myself doing very nearly the same thing.