From the extremely naïve and interesting ‘fan-shop’ fan belonging to Mr. Messel we are able to gather some idea of what these shops were like. The inscription on the shop sign is ‘Fanmaker, London,’ showing that the district represented was within the London boundary of this period, c. 1745.
During the comparatively brief reign of Queen Anne fans were again made large. Sir Roger de Coverley, upon his courting the perverse widow, declared that he would have allowed her the ‘profits of a windmill for her fans.’[123]
With the proverbial fickleness of fashion, however, this vogue lasted but a short time; the fan lessened its proportions in the second and third decades of the century, when, during the forties, its size once again increased, following the lead of France. ‘Ventosus,’ writing in the London Magazine for 1744, quotes, with some amusing comments, an epigram by Dr. Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, originally written upon a white fan borrowed from Miss Osborne, afterwards his wife, and referred to by Steele in the Tatler for October 19, 1710:
‘Flavia, the least and lightest toy
Can with relentless art employ:
This Fan, in meaner hands, would prove
An engine of small force in love;
Yet she, with graceful air and mien,
Not to be told, or sagely seen,