The Duke of Queensberry.
GEORGE THE FOURTH
Reigned ten years: 1820-1830.
Born 1762. Married, 1795, Caroline of Brunswick.
Out of the many fashion books of this time I have chosen, from a little brown book in front of me, a description of the fashions for ladies during one part of 1827. It will serve to show how mere man, blundering on the many complexities of the feminine passion for dress—I was going to say clothes—may find himself left amid a froth of frills, high and dry, except for a whiff of spray, standing in his unromantic garments on the shore of the great world of gauze and gussets, while the most noodle-headed girl sails gracefully away upon the high seas to pirate some new device of the Devil or Paris.
Our wives—bless them!—occasionally treat us to a few bewildering terms, hoping by their gossamer knowledge to present to our gaze a mental picture of a new, adorable, ardently desired—hat. Perhaps those nine proverbial tailors who go to make the one proverbial man, least of his sex, might, by a strenuous effort, confine the history of clothes during this reign into a compact literature of forty volumes. It would be indecent, as undecorous as the advertisements in ladies’ papers, to attempt to fathom the language of the man who endeavoured to read the monumental effigy to the vanity of human desire for adornment. But is it adornment?
Nowadays to be dressed well is not always the same thing as to be well dressed. Often it is far from it. The question of modern clothes is one of great perplexity. It seems that what is beauty one year may be the abomination of desolation the next, because the trick of that beauty has become common property. You puff your hair at the sides, you are in the true sanctum of the mode; you puff your hair at the sides, you are for ever utterly cast out as one having no understanding. I shall not attempt to explain it: it passes beyond the realms of explanation into the pure air of Truth. The Truth is simple. Aristocracy being no longer real, but only a cult, one is afraid of one’s servants. Your servant puffs her hair at the sides, and, hang it! she becomes exactly like an aristocrat. Our servant having dropped her g’s for many years as well as her h’s, it behoved us to pronounce our g’s and our h’s. Our servants having learned our English, it became necessary for us to drop our g’s; we seem at present unwilling in the matter of the h, but that will come.
To cut the cackle and come to the clothes-horse, let me say that the bunglement of clothes which passes all comprehension in King George IV.’s reign is best explained by my cuttings from the book of one who apparently knew. Let the older writer have his, or her, fling in his, or her, words.