Among the shop’s other patrons were innkeepers, blacksmiths, a saddler, a silversmith, printers, clergymen, physicians—indeed, from wealthy planters like Robert Carter, Ralph Wormeley, and John Page to such unglamorous persons as Humphrey Harwood, plasterer and brick mason, Charlton made wigs for them all.
THE MOST POPULAR PERUKES
The French Encyclopédie Perruquière listed 45 styles of wig in its 1727 edition, 115 styles in that of 1764. While a complete catalogue is impossible here, some description in words and pictures of the most frequent varieties may assist gentlemen of the twentieth century to choose (in their mind’s eye) the style that would suit them best. The wigs pictured and described do not presume to share the amazing characteristics claimed by a London maker of 1760. His advertising avowed:
to ecclesiastical perukes he gives a certain demure, sanctified air; he confers on the tye-wigs of the law an appearance of great sagacity and deep penetration; on those of the faculty of physick he casts a solemnity and gravity that seems equal to the profoundest knowledge. His military smarts ... [give] the wearer a most war-like fierceness.
As for color, any style might be made up in any of the several colors favored for wigs: black, white, grizzle (an iron-gray mixture of black and white hair), brown, and flaxen are mentioned most often in surviving accounts. Less popular shades included milk white, light natural, yellowish, pale, chestnut, auburn, piss-burnt, and gray. Red was deemed a “disagreeable colour” for hair and was rarely if ever used in wigs.
The styles here shown were all popular at some time during the eighteenth century, though perhaps some of them were worn more often in England and France than in the colonies. On the other hand, a popular colonial style, the “Albemarle” wig, is not in our catalogue because nothing has been found to tell what it looked like.
No eighteenth-century illustration of a bob wig, so labeled, has been found. This picture, from Diderot’s Encyclopedia (like all the others in this group) shows a “bonnet” or “short wig.” The brown dress bob favored by so many of Edward Charlton’s customers must have been very similar. A plain bob presumably had fewer curls, but neither it nor the dress bob would have had any queue or hanging side curls.
This “brigadier wig” shows what a few of Charlton’s patrons ordered from him. It was known also as a major wig and a military wig. The “tye wig” mentioned in Charlton’s accounts must have looked very much like this (again we lack any clear contemporary illustration) except that it had more than two curls tied at the nape of the neck.