PLATE 51.
(Fig 1): Costume of a gentleman of the time of Queen Anne and George I. (Fig. 2): A clergyman’s hat (1745), from Hogarth. (Fig. 3): A fashionable cock, as worn by merchants and well-to-do Londoners, known as the Ramilies cock, with the Ramilies wig. (Fig. 4): Costume of a gentleman of the time of George I. (1720). (Fig. 5): Costume of a gentleman of 163the time of George II., from “The School of Venus, or the Lady’s Miscellany,” 1739. He wears a small wig and hat, and a long wide-skirted coat. (Fig. 6): A plain and decisively cocked hat, which was in fashion in 1745, and a bag-wig beneath it. (Fig. 7): The Kevenhuller hat, of extravagant proportions, as worn by military men, or bullies about town. (Fig. 8): Costume of a gentleman, from a print dated 1744.
[FEMALE COSTUMES.]
At Anne’s accession little change was made in the costumes of ladies, as the Queen was of too retiring a disposition to introduce any originality in that direction.
In 1711 Addison, in the “Spectator,” devoted a whole number to the subject of ladies’ head-dress, commencing with a declaration “that there is not so variable a thing in nature,” adding, “within my own memory I have known it rise and fall about 30 degrees. About ten years ago it shot up to a very great height, insomuch that the female part of our species were much taller than the men” (allusion to the Commode). “I remember several ladies that were once very near seven feet high, and at present want some inches of five feet.” After about fifteen years the high Commode again came into fashion, but the startling novelty was the hoop-petticoat. It widened gradually from the waist to the ground, the gown being looped up round the body in front and falling in loose folds behind (Pl. [52], Fig. 1.). A writer of the time says of this fashion: “Nothing can be imagined more unnatural, and, consequently, less agreeable. When a slender woman stands upon a basis so inordinately wide, she resembles a funnel, a figure of no great elegancy.”
About this time, ladies, particularly in their riding costumes, imitated the costumes of the men, wearing a cocked beaver hat and feathers, hair curled and powdered and tied like a man’s, coat and waistcoat like a man, with a petticoat below the waist. Sir Roger de Coverley, when looking at a young sporting lady, was about to address her as “Sir,” until he cast his eye lower and saw her petticoat.
In contrast with the extravagance shown in the quantity and quality of the materials used for ladies’ dresses, how cheaply the poor could dress at this time may be gathered from an entry in some parish accounts in Norfolk in 1719: “Paid for clading of the Widow Bernard with a gown, petticoat, bodice, hose, shoes, apron and stomacher, 18s. 6d.”