Dressing the British: Clothes, Customs, and Nation in W. H.

Pynes The Costume of Great Britain

CHLOE WIGSTON SMITH

n his preface to The Costume of Great Britain (1804), W. H. Pynes publisher, William Miller, declares that a book devoted to domestic dress will help to contextualize the Manners, Habits, and Decorations of several highly interesting Foreign Countries.1 Pynes folio concludes Millers series of costume books on Turkey, China, Russia, Austria, Spain and Portugal, Italy, and the city of Rio de Janeiro, published at the end of the long eighteenth century. Similar to early modern examples of the genre (well-established by the eighteenth century), the series focuses on foreign apparel, perhaps accounting for Millers description of British style as a useful postscript to international dress.2 The publication of Pynes costume book corresponds with the popularity of Microcosms as a genre, whose pages often illustrated an encyclopedic collection of domestic trades and scenes; Pyne himself was working on a Microcosm while he gathered the plates for his costume book, and his text anticipates the small flood of domestic costume books published at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Towards the end of the long eighteenth centuryas Britain consolidated its strengths in textile manufacturing and as the country was gripped by the Great Terrorthese costume books document a growing interest in the national and regional dress of Britons. This essay examines how British

143

144 / S M I T H

costume booksa genre that favors everyday dress and customs over cutting-edge styleattempt to imagine national habits. While the national focus of The Costume of Great Britain suggests the volume seeks to depict a coherent portrait of British identity, the volume instead conveys the difficulty of doing so. This diverse national portrait reflects the aesthetic fluidity of the text, as well as its emphasis on social variety. The shifting landscape of dress in The Costume of Great Britain is linked, I demonstrate, to its exploitation of competing artistic conventions, as well as to the tensions between text and image that crisscross its visual and verbal portraits of customs and class. Pynes costume book pictures the attire of a range of social classes, not merely the apparel of the urban elite. In doing so, the volume imagines costume as a form of national habit, a collection of customs materialized through familiar activities and rituals. Although the conflation of clothes with custom underwrites many costume booksin contemporary French examples, the same slippage occurs between costume and coutume, and earlier German examples, such as Christoph Weiditzs Trachtenbuch (1529), devote attention to occupational wearI argue that Pyne complicates the interlacing of dress and custom by articulating national style through images of rural and urban labor.3 The Costume of Great Britain theorizes dress as rooted in manual work and economic productivity, revealing how British identity grows from the labor of ordinary women and men. Just as Pyne casts a wide social net for his study, he also exploits a range of eighteenth-century artistic traditions. Pynes work contributed to the library of drawing manuals aimed at amateur artists from the 1790s onwards, such as Microcosms and collections of rural figures and landscapes (which Pyne also produced). While Pyne has been primarily associated with the picturesque aesthetic popularized by William Gilpin and others, his costume book draws on conventions such as fashion plates and urban street criers in addition to the picturesque.4 Pynes costume book, however, resists each of these aesthetics, producing an incoherent portrait of national identity during wartime (as I discuss in the first section of this essay). With its longstanding commitment to representing a variety of apparel, the costume book, as a genre, is wedded to diversity rather than to continuity, often depicting figures across time, space, and class. Pynes contribution to this genre, as my second section shows, constitutes the first sustained attempt, in Britain, to represent contemporary habits a move that distinguishes his work from earlier British examples. In the end, as my third section reveals, the social variety of Pynes costume book, and the tensions between text and image that emerge in its treatment

Dressing the British / 145

of elite figures, opens the possibility of social commentary during a period of heightened patriotism in Britain. In its own time, the Costume of Great Britain was perceived as unsuitably patriotic, and its efforts to include a variety of laboring men and women appeared as a slight to the countrys upper classes. Pynes muted, though palpable, critiques of the elite and of his governments treatment of working people emerge more sharply when juxtaposed with British costume books published at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 181415. As this essay reveals, the tension between verbal and visual representation across Costume of Great Britain paradoxically produces the portrait of a divided nation, in a volume focused on domestic habits. Pyne, the Picturesque, and Urban Habits At the turn of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, Britain, like the rest of Europe, looked to Napoleonic France with fear and loathing. Linda Colley describes the year 1803, during which Pyne worked on the plates for Costume of Great Britain and his Microcosm, as the height of British panic about an imminent French invasion: villages prepared to evacuate women and children, and recruiting parties roamed the countryside enlisting volunteers for homeland defense.5 Coupled with the years 179798, the invasion crisis of 180205, or the Great Terror, marks a period of intense franco-phobia and fervent patriotism within British shores.6 Pynes work during the Napoleonic wars looks inwards to Britains landscape and peoples; together the Microcosm (1803, 1806, 1808) and Etchings of Rustic Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape (1815) present picturesque views of rural laborers and cottagers, offering the amateur artist suitable figures with which to populate landscape drawings. Pynes costume book, however, exploits other aesthetics, in addition to that of the picturesque, incorporating urban street criers and fashion plates into its national canvass. Pyne resists these different aesthetics, even as he exploits them; internal divisions, expressed by the gaps between text and image in the volume, lace the edges of Pynes plates. These tensions produce a disjointed portrait of national identity in a text, whose devotion to the costume of the nation might at first imply a unified picture of domestic customs. During the Great Terror, Pyne composed his costume book and engraved the plates for a two-volume Microcosm, the work for which he is best remembered today. Pynes Microcosm, A Picturesque Delineation of the Arts, Agriculture, Manufacture, &c. of Great Britain, in a Series of above a Thousand Groups of Small Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape has received substantial attention for what its introduction calls

146 / S M I T H

its presentation to the student and the amateur [of] picturesque scenery of active life in Great Britain.7 Pynes encyclopedic rendering of largely outdoor laborthe two volumes feature 121 plates crowded with small groups of figureshas been described as a patriotic response to the Napoleonic wars. Ann Bermingham, for instance, links Pynes celebration of rural productivity in the Microcosm to the years of the Napoleonic blockade when rural agricultural productivity was essential to the war effort.8 Likewise, Christiana Payne cites the Microcosms many scenes of military life as indicative that it was self-consciously patriotic.9 In Pynes Microcosm, patriotism limns the picturesque, an aesthetic which, as John Barrell argues, prioritizes the eye of the artist and viewer over the experiences of the rural figures depicted and attempts to reform the rural poor through visual representation.10 Labor is valued for its aesthetic appeal, and as Barrell shows, the prose essays (composed by C. Gray) and the patterning of the plates in Microcosm, invite us to understand these different stages of a productive process as together composing not just a coherent story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, but a unity.11 According to Barrells reading, Pynes Microcosm, through its double object to please and instruct, struggles to unify labor via the picturesque aesthetic, but also resists the totalising aspirations of the division of labour by representing occupations (such as gypsies) that embellish the landscape rather than contribute to the nations wealth.12 Barrel concludes that the opposing aims of Pynes Microcosm ultimately produce the representation of a society irretrievably atomised and dispersed.13 Pynes lesser-known costume book stages a similar struggle in its representation of the variety of the British people. Like the Microcosm, the plates and text of The Costume of Great Britain betray a vested interest in the productivity of British professions and trades; this professional interest delivers a work in which costume invariably means custom and in which little attention is devoted to the clothes depicted (some plates do not depict any clothes at all). The Costume of Great Britain, however, departs from the Microcosm in several key ways.14 While the subtitle to Microcosm promotes its function as a Picturesque Delineation of the Arts, Agriculture, Manufacture filled with Groups of Small Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape, apart from the publishers presentation of British dress as a postscript to foreign dress, the aims of the costume book are far less clear. Pyne includes many illustrations of laboring men and womenjust as he does in Microcosmbut he also depicts the functionaries and officials of the upper classes, whose economic productivity he tries (but fails to) to defend. Unlike the laborers of Microcosm, such figures would have occupied higher stations than Pyne (who experienced periods of financial trouble)

Dressing the British / 147

and perhaps enjoyed higher status than most of his readers. The generic differences between Microcosm and Costume of Great Britain render it impossible to assess the costume book solely through the lens of the picturesque, and make it equally difficult to read the text as a prescriptive vision of labor that offers a clear narrative of the laboring classes, or of the nation. These differences also encompass the organization of both works. In Microcosm, Pyne arranges his figures in small groups, clustered four or even six to a page. In the costume book, by contrast, each illustration expands to fill its own folio page; the engravings are hand-tinted with bright color washes. Pyne composed his own text for the costume book, whereas the text for the 1806 and 1808 editions of Microcosm was penned by C. Gray. In the Microcosm, illustration is separated from the text. In the costume book, the text faces the accompanying image; this proximity, as we shall see, heightens the discrepancies between text and image. Most importantly, the costume book exploits several artistic traditions, interweaving the aesthetic conventions of the picturesque, Cries of London, and fashion plates and juxtaposing images of agricultural production with those of urban markets. The emphasis on usefulness echoes the Microcosms patriotic invocation of national productivity, but the social and generic diversity of Costume of Great Britain renders narrative unity impossible to achieve from the outset. Rather than drawing on the work of other artists, and in contrast with earlier costume books on British dress, Pyne created 60 original aquatint plates of British trades and professions.15 Each plate is accompanied by a textual explanation, ranging from a paragraph to two pages. In addition to illustrations of public functionaries, Pyne offers views of working apparel; he records the appearance of potters, brick-makers, shrimpers, fishermen, tanners, coal-heavers, lamp lighters, and watermen. As his publishers preface reveals, the variety of costumes reflects the diversity of the British nation:
In a country presenting such an infinite variety of interesting subjects, the only difficulty has been to compress the Volume within moderate bounds. In making this selection, it has been attempted to include all classes of society; and delineations are therefore given from the most elevated ranks of public functionaries, to the lowest gradation of mechanic and laborious avocation.16

148 / S M I T H

While Pynes Microcosm largely depicts outdoor manufacturing, his costume book incorporates multiple figures of urban street sellers and public functionaries, positioning them alongside the lowest gradation of mechanic and laborious avocation.17 The first platePottery (fig. 1)provides several important insights into Pynes understanding of costume as custom and establishes the volumes emphasis on labor. The subject of the plate is a tradeas opposed to a personand the image depicts a group of potters at work, portraying three generations of men (probably family members) gathered around a mechanical wheel. The seated man rotates the wheel as the elderly man shapes a bowl. The boy pats a large round of clay as he looks out at the viewer. The plate emphasizes the labor behind the manufacturing of ceramic wares, from the engrossed expressions of the elderly and middle-aged men to the rows of pots set out to dry on the table on the right. These men do not wear elite garments, and their clothes are granted secondary status, visually and textually, to their work. The composition sketches in the ground, setting, and furnishings of the potters workspace. Moreover, their labor finds visual expression in their muddied aprons, vests, and boots. Whereas earlier costume books tend to use text as a place to expound on the details of fabrics, laces, ribbons, and jewelry, Pynes text delivers a historical account of pottery. Taking the long view, he begins: THE useful and elegant art of pottery is of great antiquity.18 Pyne describes the history of clay-making in antiquity, China, Europe, and England, concluding with praise for Josiah Wedgewoods wares. The text offers no information about clothing at all; indeed, few of Pynes descriptions do. We glean some kernels of information about the plate from the rather perfunctory concluding sentence: The subject of this plate is employed in making the red pottery, and was selected, in preference to any other, from the picturesque simplicity of the wheel, &c.19 Pynes selection of the most picturesque kind of pottery seems to affirm Barrells contention that the picturesque overwrites labor, transforming manual work into the materials of visual ornamentation. Yet the entrys emphasis on the usefulness of British trades, rather than on the composition of the plate or the clothes of the figures, undermines Pynes rare reference to his aesthetic choices. For Pyne, British costumes are produced through labor and ritual. Indeed, all of his subjects are defined by occupation, suggesting the correlation between costume and work, apparel and function throughout his costume book. The bulk of his text pairs historical background with contemporary facts about the economics of production. In the case of the Milk Woman, Pyne lauds urban milk peddlers for their difficult work: The London milk carriers are a hardy set of people, their employment

Dressing the British / 149

Figure 1. Pottery, William Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain (London, 1804), Photo Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

being extremely laborious.20 Pyne then reports that milk women together sell 481,666 of milk per year and notes the exact number of cows in London neighborhoods (for example, 150 cows supply Hoxton). He positions his Woman Churning Butter (plate 13) as a vital supplier of the 50,000 tons of butter consumed in London each year. For Tanning, Pyne stresses the global importance of this industry, proclaiming that the manufacture of leather is a branch of business, by which the English have acquired reputation in foreign markets.21 Pyne includes the exact numbers of skins, including fox, sable, wolverine, musquoah, and rabbit, sold in one day to America. In his entries for the manufacturing trades, he consistently extols the physical exertion and manual labor of his subjects, admiring, for example, the essential work of Coal Heavers: Among the many laborious avocations essential to the support of society in a high state of civilization, perhaps none can be found that demands greater bodily exertion, than various departments of the coal trade.22 Pyne celebrates British trade through his facts and figures, applauding physical labor and positioning ordinary women and men as the backbone of British culture. The range of classes Pyne depicts suggests an inclusive portrait of the nation, one that encompasses both urban and rural workers, the laboring poor and elite officials. But what roles do public officials play in shaping

150 / S M I T H

national identity? Pynes images of government officials foreground the problem of representing non-manual labor. On the whole, Pyne applies less textual praise to the public functionaries he represents in comparison with his admiration of the labor of ordinary British subjects. The text for these figures, in general, rehearses the history of the position before moving to an explanation of its role in contemporary society. For his figures from the upper echelons of societyin which no women are includedPyne lets the visual speak for itself. The composition conveys the grandeur of the station. In plate 21 (fig. 2), for instance, the Alderman stands with his back to the viewer, surveying London from the south bank of the Thames; his hand points across the river towards St. Pauls Cathedral. The perspective of the plate suggests that the alderman, in his bright red, fur-trimmed cloak towers over the skyline. In a similar manner, plate 22, Bishop, uses the composition to translate the figures extensive dominion. Westminster Abbey looms in the background of the plate, its spires framing the bishops head. Whereas Pynes illustrations of urban workers and rural laborers enclose their figures in closer perspectives, Pyne widens the view for his plates of public functionaries to include the visual landmarks of the nation, via prospect views of London or a single grand building in a recessed background. On the one hand, this visual technique suggests the public, civic, and social agency of these officials in contrast with the narrow frames of Pynes working subjects; the composition might even suggest the artists own dominance over his poorer figures, a position unavailable to him in the portraits of elite officials. On the other hand, Pyne offers far more extensive verbal praise for the labor of the poorespecially as it engenders British dominance in global marketsthan he does for that of public officials. Thus Pynes text works against the narrow visual scope of illustrations of labor, just as it downplays the productivity of the elite. The lack of textual praise for these public functionaries suggests Pynes ambivalence towards the fundamental usefulness of elite officials. These ambiguitiesor gaps between text and imageinflect the volumes different aesthetics. The Costume of Great Britain, like Pynes Microcosm, adopts the picturesque mode, but Pyne distances his book from this aesthetic even as he invokes it. On the surface, The Grass Roller (plate 40) stands as a straightforward iteration of the picturesque. Pyne places his farmer in a pleasing landscape, complete with a range of low hills in the recessed distance on the left. The farmer, accompanied by his dog, stands in the foreground of the composition on a green plateau, pausing in front of his grass roller and four horses. The group is framed by the soft foliage of a stand of trees in the middle ground. The farmer wears generic dressred breeches, white shirt, white waistcoat, and blue neck handkerchief (a

Dressing the British / 151

Figure 2. Alderman, William Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain (London, 1804), Photo Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

152 / S M I T H

common plebeian accessory)remarkable only perhaps for the pristine whiteness of the fabric brightened by its juxtaposition with the brown horses and cart.23 His garments follow a fashionable line and his white stockings, worn here for work, suggest a degree of sartorial refinement, even if Pyne does not offer any textual details on the quality of the fabric. The farmers dress joins style with rural work: the plain fabrics reflect the vogue for simple textiles in mens dress in the early 1800s, while the red and bluecolors associated with the dress of rural womenreinforce the country setting.24 The engraving captures the farmer in a moment of respite: he has laid his blue coat on the edge of the grass roller and glances towards a prospect view that lies beyond the right edge of the plate. The accompanying text makes no mention of the farmers apparel; instead it focuses on the importance of agricultural improvement.25 At first glance, Pynes resting farmer, in his clean clothes and with his four well-fed horses, confirms Barrells emphasis on how images of rural life both prescribe virtuous industry and resist representations of actual labor.26 Taking a didactic tone, Pyne argues that the practice of grass rolling should be widely adopted by British farmers and should extend to all corners of the realm. The first paragraph praises the scientific study of agriculture, describing a process of agricultural improvement in which the good examples of the higher orders are imitated by the other classes of the community.27 Pyne proceeds to advocate the culture of pasturage in the second paragraph, celebrating, as he does in scenes of rural labor in his Microcosm , what Bermingham calls the new patriotic aesthetic of agricultural labor.28 According to Pyne, the rollers work contributes to agricultural improvement and increases the productivity of the English pasture, a patriotic act during the Napoleonic wars but one that glosses over the acceleration of the enclosure movement during this period. But the lack of hard factsnumbers and listsabout agricultural production jars with Pynes standard explanations of the bounty and utility of British trades. In his description of the plate, Pyne explains how the picturesque has informed his decision to depict wood rollers rather than those of cast iron or stone because no rollers accord so well with the picturesque as those rollers which are made entirely of wood, echoing his earlier preference for the picturesque simplicity of red pottery.29 But does this reference to the picturesque undermine the texts emphasis on productivity? Pynes closing comment on the wood rollers implies that he sees iron or stone as more productive. Pynes text thus compromises the aesthetic of the plate by drawing attention to the friction between the picturesque and productive agricultural practice.

Dressing the British / 153

Besides bearing the influence of the picturesque, Pynes plates reflect the aesthetic of fashion plates in the 1790s and early 1800s, which increasingly sketched in settings for their figures. Pyne generally fills in the backgrounds for his figures, in contrast with the blank spaces of earlier examples of costume books, as we shall see in the next section. This composition corresponds with images of women in periodicals such as Nicolaus Heideloffs The Gallery of Fashion (17941803) which portray groups of fashionable figures conversing at the tea-table, promenading in the park, and enjoying a seaside view while dressed luxuriously. In a 1795 illustration of riding dressA Lady going out on horseback (vol. 2, fig. 55)Heideloff sets a female figure in front of a horse, whip in hand, as though she has just dismounted from the saddle. In the recessed space behind the woman and her horse, Heideloff places a male figure on horseback. He fills in the entire page with bucolic park scenery: green grass blankets the rolling hills, and shrubbery and trees dominate the right side of the plate. Heideloff matches the figures fashionable dress to the setting, showing how the latest riding habit might look and perform in actual practice. The female figure rules the composition. The bright red folds of her riding habitas well as her placement in the centeroverwhelm the softer greens of the park and the pale browns applied to the male figure, creating a visual hierarchy that declares the allure of fashion. The colors of the womans dress are brighter and richer than the washed-out shades of the picturesque scenery. Heideloff demonstrates how the composition of fashion plates blends realism with fiction by creating scenes that simultaneously suggest ordinary activities and fabricate visual hierarchies. As we have seen, Pyne uses composition to similar effect, supplying his figures with prospect views or the furnishings of a workspace. Pynes plates, however, resist the aesthetic of fashion plates by representing figures in generic dress. Although his figures wear clothes in the cut and design of early-nineteenth-century fashions, none of the figures is adorned in the newest gowns or suits from London or Paris. Judges, barristers, yeomen, and peers dressed in ceremonial robes and adorned with emblematic ornaments wear professional uniforms, rather than display the fashionable garments of their non-ceremonial lives. Thus while his designs borrow from the compositions of fashion plates, Pyne creates a timeless image of British customs, in keeping with the costume-book genres interest in habits, broadly conceived, rather than the seasonal trends of fashion. Pyne further anchors his national customs to ritual by drawing on the genre of urban street criers, popular in London since the seventeenth century.30 He includes familiar figures such as the milk woman (fig. 3), who simultaneously evokes the everyday practice of milk selling and May

154 / S M I T H

Figure 3. Milk Woman, William Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain (London, 1804), Photo Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

Dressing the British / 155

Day celebrations. As Sean Shesgreen notes, Londoners worshipped milkmaids as pastoral characters.31 Poised between the festive and the plain, Pynes illustration interlaces ritual with economy; the milk woman carries her pails in the urban streets, while behind her two carriers transport the ornate milk pyramid used in May Day celebrations. Although the two pyramid carriers don matching liveries, the milk woman wears rather ordinary apparel composed of simpleand sturdy lookingred and brown fabrics. Her short sleeves and the relatively high waist of her gown follow the fashionable cut of womens gowns, while her matching pink handkerchief and ribbon brighten her plain attire. Many laboring women of the period wore bedgownsa shorter, loose gown tied with an apron but the bulk of the brown fabric around the milk womans hips suggests that she has used her apron to tuck up the edges of her dress, possibly to protect it from city streets.32 Her straw or chip hat brings her outfit closer to the common wear of rural women, although her white stockings and delicate shoes (she eschews the pattens or clogs associated with milk women) evoke urban styles.33 Other contemporary views of milkwomen present far more sentimentaland picturesquevisions, inscribing milk women in ideologies of female charity. Francis Wheatleys Milk below Maids (1793), for instance, depicts a beatific milk woman from the front; she wears a pastel pink petticoat, a pale blue gown, white apron, and a straw bonnet ornamented with a pink ribbon. In comparison with the practical clothes of Pynes milk woman (graced with a few fashionable touches), Wheatleys milk woman wears fashionable dress. She hands a large cup of milk to two children, a boy and a girl, clustered around her skirts. Shesgreen describes Wheatleys image as sweetening Laroon, noting how the milk woman constitutes a model of altruism, for she does not sell milk to servants but donates it to the deserving poor. 34 The composition of Pynes plate, by contrast, emphasizes the labor of the milk woman, even as it acknowledges the folkloric allure of the figure. The composition foregrounds her labor by shunting the May Day pyramid to the background of the plate. Moreover, the rear view of her clothes prevents a full interpretation of her garments (unlike Wheatleys version). Although we see her only in profile, Pyne places another market woman (carrying a basket of greens and walking with a small child) directly in her path; her loose attire suggests that she wears the working womans bedgown. This fellow street seller and her child look up at the milk woman who, standing at the top of the stairs, dominates the composition. The milk womans pose echoes that of the alderman, and by doing so joins the working woman with elite official. Moreover, the composition both directs our attention to the focus of the plateordinary work rather than May Day festivities

156 / S M I T H

and suggests a community of female street sellers: Pyne encloses the bodies of both women in a triangle in which the milk womans head forms the apex. In his text, Pyne delineates the history of milk selling, focusing on the milk womans productivity rather than on her contributions to May Day celebrations. Together text and image de-sentimentalize this familiar figure by highlighting economic productivity. Pyne begins by praising the retailing of milk about the streets as one of the many useful accommodations of our great metropolis.35 He closes by tallying the number of cows in 21 neighborhoods in the metropolis before moving onto the number of cows in Kent and Surrey. He thus enfolds the conventional figure of the milk woman within the contemporary productivity of the urban economy, elucidating the national importance of small-scale industries to British life. Such descriptions of the economic efforts of laboring women and men cut across Pynes costume book. The volume ultimately produces a mixed picture of national costume, one that embraces a range of classes, forms of work (both selling and manufacturing), and aesthetic conventions. The diverse figures inscribe the infinite variety of interesting subjects within British shores alluded to in the preface, but the focus and organization of Pynes costume book distinguish it from eighteenth-century examples of the genre.

Costume Books and Domestic Dress Although costume books of foreign dress were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Londonand many travel narratives incorporated accounts of foreign apparel and cultural practicesno history of British dress exists before the mid-eighteenth century.36 Pynes costume book draws on the conventions of the genrepromoting diversity over unity, defining dress as custombut the few treatments of British dress prior to the publication of Pynes book neglect contemporary habits. The first British costume book to devote some attention to national dress was Thomas Jefferys A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern: particularly Old English Dresses: after the Designs of Holbein, Vandyke, Hollar, and others (175772). Jefferys stresses the visual over the textual and in several places he pits image against word. With text in both English and French, Jefferys collects 480 plates in four volumes (a visual windfall compared with Pynes 60 plates). The first volume opens with a four-page introduction to the collectionincluding a Description

Dressing the British / 157

of such Particulars of the HABITS, as a Print cannot perfectly express which establishes the division between text and image that dominates the organization of each volume.37 Despite this promise to amplify and fill in what the illustrations cannot perfectly express, the introduction provides scant details about the plates to come. Instead, Jefferys offers some general comments on the origins of dress and fashion. He rehearses familiar period views on the correspondence between clothes and character, such as the Habit is become a kind of Index to the Mind, and the Character is in some Particulars as easily discovered by a Mans Dress as by his Conversation.38 Over the course of just a few pages, Jefferys travels from the dawn of clothing to the present day, closing with some brief thoughts on the evolution of British style and stage costume. With its general history of dress, the introduction does little to anticipate the enormousand almost freneticvisual variety and detail of the plates. Aileen Ribeiro has suggested that Jefferys conceived of his collection as an aid to masqueraders, drapery painters, artists, and stage designers, as opposed to a robust history of dress.39 British dress constitutes just one facet of Jefferys dizzying selection of nations, which includes China, Turkey, Natolia, India, Poland, Sweden, Russia, Kamtschatka, and North America, in addition to plates of theater costume and classical gods.40 As his subtitle indicates, Jefferys borrows from the works of other artists, past and present (Pyne etched original plates for his volume). For his image of a Lady of Constantinople, for instance, he reproduces a portrait by the Swiss artist Jean-Etienne Liotard, who often painted his sitters in Turkish dress.41 Throughout his heavily illustrated volumes Jefferys emphasizes the visual over the textual; the first volume, for instance, devotes 47 pages to the table of contents and 119 to the plates (each volume is divided between the table of contents and plates). In places, the text for the plates conveys the barest of details, noting simply the source for the image.42 On occasion, Jefferys describes the costume on display or the cultural function of the figure. For example, he offers a lengthy description of the garments for Imoindas costume from Thomas Southernes stage adaptation of Aphra Behns Oroonoko (this costume is collected alongside authentic examples of foreign dress that conceivably would have inspired its design). The text describes the colors and specific fabrics used to create each garment and the writing echoes that of fashion journalism: The Robe is of pink Sattin puft round with Silver Gauze, and tied before with a Sash or pink Sattin, that terminates in two Tassels; the false Jacket and Sleeves which is only sewed to the Robe is of white Sattin covered with a Silver Gauze; and the Petticoat is white Sattin covered with a Minionet.43 The detailed text is reinforced by the two plates devoted to

158 / S M I T H

the costume, in which the figure is shown both from the front and from the backonly one of three figures shown in double views in the four volumes.44 The visual and verbal details suggest both Jefferys intimate knowledge of the costume, and how the text might enable dressmakers to replicate the costume as fancy dressin sharp contrast to the financial lists and descriptions of manufacturing that dominate Pynes text. Throughout Jefferys costume book, the lines between authentic and fictional dress are blurred. In the case of the Imoinda costume Jefferys notes the false Jacket and Sleeves which is only sewed to the Robe, suggesting how theatrical dress merely imitates the construction of actual garments.45 More suggestively, Jefferys own plates alter the designs of the original Holbein, Van Dyck, and Hollar sources advertised by the subtitle. Jefferys, for instance, reproduces Hollars early 1640s engravings of English women.46 In the originals, each woman stands on a raised ground, with a low skyline behind her. The prospect views depict estates, parks, and London streets, similar to the prospects found in Pyne. Jefferys, however, removes the background scenery of the original etchings, showcasing the clothing of his figures on a blank page. He also paints in the color of the fabrics, or what he imagines them to have been: Hollars black and white engravings are transformed by bright washes of red, blue, green, and gold. These alterations convey the importance of line and color in representing dress; the composition suggests that background scenery would only distract from the apparel on display. With its comprehensive attention to visual detail and minimal text, Jefferys collection positions the costume-book genre as visual entertainment. While Jefferys collection overflows with fashions from around the world, Joseph Strutts late-century text focuses exclusively on the history of British dress. Like Jefferys, Strutt sources his material from other artists.47 A Complete View of the Dress and Habits of the People, from the establishment of the Saxons in Britain to the present time (179699) concentrates on historic costume. His most recent examples date to the seventeenth century, whereas Jefferys includes a few images of English women from 1755, just two years before the publication of his first volume. In contrast with Jefferys and Pyne, Strutt offers a much more comprehensive history of fashion. His extensive commentary elaborates on the colors and weaves of fabric and cloth production and also draws on historical documents to describe changes in fashions. The changes are then illustrated by a large number of plates. Like Jefferys, Strutt divides his volumes between the textual and the visual, though there is greater balance here between the two: volume 1 includes an introduction and five chapters (228 pages) and 210 plates; volume 2, eight chapters (293 pages)

Dressing the British / 159

and 75 plates. Strutts rich descriptions of the history of British dress and textile manufacturing reveal how his costume book presents national dress as deserving of solid and extensive scholarly research. A former history painter, Strutt strives for sartorial accuracy. In his Address to the Public, he promises to deliver authentic costume history, assuring his readers that the engravings are faithfully copied from the originals, without any additional fold being made to the draperies, or the least deviation from the form of the garments.48 This authenticity is buttressed by the lengthy lists of source materials and manuscripts from different libraries, including the British Museum and the Bodleian. Drawing on ancient decorative arts, illustrated manuscripts, architecture, and effigies, Strutt depicts men and women of rank, religious dress, military armor, the apparel of state officials, masquerade dress, the costumes of jesters, and the garments of artisans and laborers. He includes lively images of fifteenthcentury beaux adorned in bright cloaks and feathered hoods (plate 122), but he is also interested in extending his historical lens to working people such as artisans, farmers, and stonemasons who are shown holding the tools of their trade (plate 70). His costume book presents a far more inclusive swath of British society in contrast with the largely aristocratic focus of Jefferys collection, anticipating Pynes combined attention to the laboring classes, military ranks, and public functionaries. Strutt, in contrast with Jefferys, preserves the settings for his figures; this pictorial strategy reflects his efforts to faithfully [copy] from the originals in contrast with Jefferys removal of the original backdrops.49 In the case of plate 70, which he titles Rustics &c. of the 14th centy, artisans and laborers are shown wielding the tools of their trade. The stonemason kneels next to a mound of earth which forms a pedestal for his slabs of stone. These gestures towards setting and landscape constitute a striking distinction from Jefferys costume book and reveal Strutts interest in the overlap between costume and custom. Like Strutt, Pyne fills in the background for his figures, but his costume book reimagines both the pictorial and verbal representations of Strutt and Jefferys. Pyne substitutes the scant textual detail on fashions and fabrics in Jefferys for longer treatments of British professions, which rarely reference the clothes or fabrics on display (despite the fact that Pyne was the son of a weaver). He takes Strutts attention to artisans and laborers a step further by focusing his attention on the usefulness of each of his figures, whether elite or not, and expands the representation of laboring men and women. These changesas well as Pynes emphasis on contemporary dressallow more textual space for social commentary and political critique.

160 / S M I T H

Costume and National Identity In contrast with Jefferys and Strutt, Pyne offers a current portrait of British costume. His images do not represent the latest fashions from London or Paris, but his figures wear contemporary rather than historical garments or stage dress. Pynes emphasis on costume as work and his wide range of classes irked an 1808 reviewer from The Monthly Review. The reviewer praises Pynes artistic execution, but attacks his selection of subjects, noting that few persons . . . will be entirely satisfied with the choice Mr. Pyne has made.50 In his review, the critic attacks Pyne for failing to include enough figures from the upper classes:
According to the publishers preface, it has been attempted to include all classes of society . . . : but has this aim been accomplished? When the reader comes to peruse the list of plates, will he be contented that this volume, expensive as it is, shall travel into foreign countries as an adequate representation of British Costume? In the Costume of Turkey, we had a delineation of the Grand Signor; and ought not our Sovereign, in his coronation-robes, to have found a place in a Costume of Great Britain? Will not the foreigner, moreover, expect to meet with an English Lady and Gentleman, with a Clergyman, Barrister, &c.? 51

Just as the publisher Miller invites readers to do in his preface, the reviewer reads Pynes production alongside its sister titles on foreign dress, but finds it lacking. Studying Pynes text through the comparative lens of national difference, he concludes that it fails to offer a suitably refined image of British costume, suggesting that in focusing on non-elite workers, Pyne offers an incompleteand unpatrioticpicture of the nation. His critique suggests that Pynes costume book contributes to what Colley has described as the calling into question of the very legitimacy of the power lite in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.52 The reviewer also attacks Pynes description of pottery, citing its neglect of the exact types of domestically produced china which rival imported wares.53 Articulating his critique in patriotic terms, the reviewer conveys his conservative response to Pynes imagining of British identity as rooted in ordinary habits, rather than in images of monarchial opulence. Although Pynes text emphasizes, again and again, the useful productivity of the British people, by linking national identity to manufacturing, his costume book opens opportunities for muted forms of social critique, even during the height of the invasion crisis. In some plates, Pyne positions

Dressing the British / 161

his costume book as a mechanism for social reform, imagining that the representation of workers might bridge class distance by revealing the interdependence of rich and poor. In his entry for Woman Selling Salop (a hot drink of milk and sassafras), the text barely mentions the subject of the plate, but instead describes market sellers who begin work in the early morning hours. These workers remain unseen by the affluent still in their beds, but Pynes costume book uncovers their toil: He who wishes to study the manners, and note the modes of life of the inhabitants of this great metropolis, must extend his observations beyond the court, the bar, the theatre, or the Exchange. A mutual dependence binds the society together; and the honest exertions of the meanest member is of consequence to the whole.54 Pyne describes himself as a kind of social geographer who ventures into urban territories, inspired perhaps by the city georgics of Jonathan Swift and John Gay in early eighteenth-century London. In this same passage, the industry of urban workers is set against the leisured lifestyles of the rich: the infant chimney-sweeperperhaps evoking William Blakes chimney sweeperbegins his ignominious drudgery when the nobleman is still engaged at the gaming-table, and the lady of fashion is stepping into her sedan, to be carried home to her couch.55 Here Pyne attacks the social hierarchies that force an infant to work by juxtaposing his ignominious drudgery with dissipated aristocrats. Moreover, the image of the youthful chimney sweep setting out before dawn suggests that the future of the country lies in the working poor; the waning elite, by contrast, are both wasting financial resources and about to fall asleep. In other plates, the absence of people undermines attempts to visualize the elite, as longed for by the critic of The Monthly Review, who complained, Besides, the Royal State Coach, Mail-Coach, and a Waggon, do not properly belong to the subject; and if they did, why was it necessary to give the Lord Mayors State Coach.56 More so than in Pynes other plates, these illustrations of non-human subjects are marked by even greater tensions between the visual and the verbal. Such fissures follow W.J.T. Mitchells argument that the tensions between visual and verbal representations are inseparable from struggles in cultural politics and political culture.57 In the description for the Royal State Carriage (fig. 4)an illustration that falls between Life-Boat and Lottery WheelPyne describes materials not seen in the image (his two-page entry constitutes the longest description in the book). Although Pyne refers to George III as our present beloved Sovereign, he does not represent the king, but rather his carriage.58 While the illustration depicts the gilded carriage led by a liveried footman and eight white horses, Pynes text details the manufacture of the carriage, explaining the allegorical meanings of its carvings, ornaments, and panels

162 / S M I T H

Figure 4. Royal State Carriage, William Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain (London, 1804), Photo Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

with careful attention to how the carriages design symbolizes the glories of the nation. After describing the structure and meaning of the coachs four supporting tritons who announce the approach of the monarch of the sea, Pyne sums up: This allegory all nations must allow to be prophetic.59 Such emphatic declarations, however, are obscured by the gaps between text and image. The text fills in what the loose washes of the illustration obscure, as if the plate cannot quite encapsulate the full meanings of the object on display.60 In the plate, the paintings on the coachs panels are vaguely suggested by disjointed lines and pale pinks and blues. In the text, by contrast, Pyne describes at length the painting of Britannia on the front side before he proceeds to describe the back panel of the coach; he even notes that the inside of the coach is lined with crimson velvet richly embroidered with gold.61 In addition to describing visual details neglected by the plate, the text lingers over the costs of productionvia an inventory of the payments for the carver, gilder, bit-maker, milliner, and saddlerfor a total expense of 7,562 pounds, 4 shillings, and 3 pence. The cost of the coach is typographically set off in its own table in the middle of the page. The royal coach thus exemplifies how monarchial consumption subsidizes a number of smaller trades, some of which are represented elsewhere in the costume book. At the same time, the substantial gaps

Dressing the British / 163

between text and image suggest the difficulty of presenting a unified picture of regal opulence, a problem made all the more significant by the absence of the monarch himself. Whereas the image displays the picture of gilded glory, Pynes text emphasizes his interest in illuminating the smaller players the carvers, mercers, milliners and saddlerswho contribute to the material construction of the royal state carriage. While the fissures between text and image undermine the grandeur of the Royal State Carriage, in another example of his non-human subjects, Prison Ships (plate 50), Pyne critiques government oppression, documenting the human costs of war. Bookended by more congenial views of a Highland Shepherd and the Lord Mayors State Coach, Prison Ships depicts the practice of impressing seamen for navy service.62 The plate shows three large ships anchored off the Tower of London, each vessel topped with a flag. Eight small boats in the water transport impressed seamen towards the navy ships. The image barely depicts clothes at all. Viewed from afar, the blue, brown, and black garments worn by the small seated figures in the boats echo the hues of the ships for which they are destined. The three flags introduce isolated spots of color in the image, but on the whole the plate is dominated by grey shadows. Pyne pairs this image with a short account of the practice of press-gangsbriefer than most of the descriptions in the collectionin which he condemns the practice as illegal. He then urges reform:
Nothing can be more distressing than to reflect, that the brave fellows who are idolized by the country, should be liable, through state necessity, to be torn from their homes, when every other subject of his Majesty, in this country, so justly renowned for its liberty, has his personal safety protected by the laws. Nothing could be done by the legislature in the way of reform perhaps, more grateful to the feelings of the people, than the doing away the practice of impressing seamen.63

Pyne finds consolation in the knowledge that these prison ships, according to his entry, are cleaner and more comfortable than those of the past. But on the whole, the dark hues of the illustration, coupled with the text, confirm how his conceptualization of costume as practice allows visual and textual space for political critique. Elsewhere in the volume, Pyne intersperses illustrations of willing combatants. At first glance, the inclusion of military figures during a period of extensive recruiting efforts throughout the countryside evokes Paynes description of the patriotic overtones of scenes of military life in the Microcosm.64 In his costume book, Pyne heaps visual and verbal praise on

164 / S M I T H

military figures. In plate 41, for instance, we see a general in full uniform charging forward on a horse on a hill top (as troops gather in the background). Pyne, in his text, admires the generals heroism, closing with this rousing piece of patriotism: Of generals possessing as many of the high qualities, so essential to a commander, as can be united in one person, Britain may with justice boast of having exhibited upon the great theatre of the world her fair proportion.65 But at other moments, Pyne abruptly departs from his emphasis on the most elite classes of commanders and heroes. In the text that accompanies plate 27 Waterman to a Coach Stand and in the midst of a peripatetic description of the history of coaches in city centers, Pyne proclaims in mid-thought: Modern history has evinced, that the banner of war is as readily unfurled, and as bravely defended, by those who are nursed in the bosom of elegance and ease, as by the hardy bands of unlettered barbarians.66 In times of war, as Pyne suggests, national unity and bravery trump the differences between those who belong to the bosom of elegance and ease and those who water their horses. Such statements revisit the sentiment, evinced in Woman Selling Salop, that mutual dependence binds the society together. But if his costume book reveals anything about national identity, it is that variety and diversity overwhelm any attempt to imagine a unified national canvass. In effect, war divides the country, turning some men into generals and dooming others to prison ships. Pynes social critique surfaces in greater relief when compared with later publications on British dress, which attest to the influence of his work. In the years leading up to the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, several costume books on British dress appeared, including Hamilton Smiths Selections of the Ancient Costume of Great Britain and Ireland (1814); George Walkers Costume of Yorkshire (1814); William Alexanders Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the English (1814); and Samuel Rush Meyricks Costume of the Original Inhabitants of the British Islands (1815).67 Alexander, in particular, owes substantial debts to Pynes work: he duplicates many of the figures from Pynes costume book and in his larger costume series, repeats several countries (such as China, Turkey, and Austria) from Millers costume series in which Pyne appeared. For his fifty figures, Alexander repeats most of Pynes subjects, with some crucial differences. He includes fewer images of rural workers and urban street sellers, replacing them with images from the upper classes and the military. As though he is taking cues from the critic of The Monthly Review, Alexander opens his volume with a plate of the sovereignGeorge III in his coronation robes, scepter in hand; he later provides an image of a Lady in her Summer Dress (plate 25). Whereas Pyne offers nothing

Dressing the British / 165

but praise for working men and womenapart from a single reference to the low dissolute people who live by attending statues, fairs, &c. in The Round-AboutAlexander repeatedly critiques the behavior and speech of female workers such as the Billingsgate Fish-Woman: Like the same description of characters in other ports, their manners and language are of the lowest and most brutal kind.68 George Walker in The Costume of Yorkshire also conceives of the low manners of Lowkerswomen field workers responsible for weedingas indicative of the behavior of working people at large: It is perhaps unnecessary to add that these, in common with most other work people, require the frequent eye of the master.69 In contrast with Pynes praise for the honesty and labour of working women in Welsh Peasants Washing (plate 9), Alexanders study depicts agricultural workers as in need of moral reform. In Etchings of Rustic Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape (published by Rudolph Ackermann in 1815), Pyne provides a coherent and didactic narrative for the rural figures he imagines will dot the landscapes of amateur artists. The title page to the volume notes that Pyne is the author of The Costume of England. Like his Microcosm, the Etchings manual crowds several figures to a page; the collection includes 60 plates of individuals and groups of rural laborers and cottagers, often posed in convivial family scenes. The introduction to the volume lauds the British interest in landscape painting and praises amateur artists from the polite classes for their pursuit of picturesque scenes, emphasizing the class difference between the artist and the object of representation.70 Pyne assures his readers that they will derive much improvement . . . by the application of such colours as are usually exhibited in great variety by persons whose attire is regulated by no rules of taste.71 The drawing manual thus conceives of the garish fashion choices of laboring people as a tool for technical improvement; in this collection, rural figures constitute useful ornaments for the polite student and Pyne remains silent on the specific meanings and value of their work and habits. In 1815, with the Napoleonic wars finally at an end, Pyne substitutes the usefulness and productivity of average Britons for their aesthetic ornamentation of the landscape. Etchings of Rustic Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape corresponds with the aesthetic and narrative unity of the 181415 costume books, despite the general national depression that gripped the country after the victory at Waterloo.72 In his costume book, however, Pyne fails to wrench his habits into a unified narrative, a symptom both of the genre in which he is working, and of the verbal and visual tensions that dominate the volume. The varied collection illustrates urban types, rural laborers, ceremonial costume, and military practices. But there is no order to the

166 / S M I T H

series of images; the book lacks a structure or sequence. Unlike the earlier costume books of Jefferys and Strutt, the fissures here between text and image, urban and rural, ceremonial and ordinary life produce a disjointed account of British habits. Pyne offers no solutions to how national clothing might be worn, imitated, or adopted in contrast with the garments on display in Jefferys and Strutts costume books; rather, he theorizes national costume as physical practice. By wedding costume to habit and work, Pyne prioritizes the labor of working people, revealing how British dress originates in the labor of ordinary women and men. The costume books aesthetic tensions, in turn, provide the touchstones for Pynes social critique. Pynes extensive textual efforts to inscribe and ascribe value to British costumeto produce a domestic costume book that could compete and perhaps rival the reading publics interest in foreign dressinstead produces an untimely and unfocused snapshot of the nation.

NOTES
Research for this essay was supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (2004) and the Yale Center for British Art (2005). I am grateful to Linda Zionkowski, the readers of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and audience members in the Theorizing Fashion panel at ASECS 2007 for their thoughtful responses to earlier versions of this essay. 1. William Miller, Preface, The Costume of Great Britain (London, 1804). 2. Some early costume books include Nicolas de Nicolays Les quatres premiers livres des navigations et peregrinations orientales (1567), Bartolomeo Grassis Dei veri ritratti deglhabiti di tutte le parti del mondo, intagliati in rame (1585), and Cesare Vecellios De gli Habiti antichi e moderni, di Diverse Parti del Mondo (1589). By costume books, I mean books that illustrated actual garments and accessories generally of foreign countries (as opposed to theatrical costumes, although costume books were often used as inspiration for stage costume and masquerade dress). For a discussion of the intersection between costume books and antiquarianism, see Aileen Ribeiro, Antiquarian AttitudesSome Early Studies in the History of Dress, Costume 28 (1994): 6070. 3. On the shift from histories of moeurs et coutumes to costumes et coutumes, see Joan de Jean, Man of Mode: Watteau and the Gendering of Genre Painting, in French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Philip Conisbee, Studies in the History of Art 72 (New Haven: Yale University

Dressing the British / 167

Press, 2007), 3947. Publications such as Sylvain Marchals Costumes civils actuels de tous les peoples connus (1788) and Sauveur S. Grassets Voyages pittoresque dans les quatres parties du monde (1806) refer to both costumes and moeurs in their subtitles. 4. Several of Pynes figures draw on the urban genre popularized by Marcellus Laroon in The Cryes of the City of London (1687). See Sean Shesgreens extensive study of the genre, The Criers and Hawkers of London (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990). 5. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 17071837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 283; 306; 307. On military recruitment during the invasion crisis, see Norman Longmate, Island Fortress: The Defence of Great Britian 16031945 (London: Hutchinson, 1991), 284300. 6. See Stella Cottrell, The Devil on Two Sticks: Franco-Phobia in 1803, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, vol. 1: History and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1989), 25974. See also Simon Bainbridges work on war poetry during the invasion crisis in British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 99119. 7. C. Gray, Introduction, Microcosm, vol. 1 (London, 1806). Quoted in John Barrell, Visualising the Division of Labour: William Pynes Microcosm, in The Birth of Pandora (London: MacMillan, 1992), 92. In the last 25 years, a large body of scholarship has uncovered the political and social agendas of the picturesque, an aesthetic with which Pyne is engaged in The Costume of Great Britain, but deploys more extensively in his other works such as Etchings of Rustic Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape (London, 1815). For comprehensive discussions of the politics of landscape painting and the picturesque, see John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); The Politics of the Picturesque, eds. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Land, Nation, and Culture, 17401840, eds. David Simpson, Nigel Leask, and Peter de Bolla (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 8. Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 111. 9. Christiana Payne, Calculated to gratify the patriot: Rustic Figure Studies in Early-Nineteenth Century Britain in Prospects for the Nation, eds. Christiana Payne, Michael Rosenthal, and Scott Wilcox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997): 6178; 72. 10. In The Dark Side of the Landscape, Barrell elucidates how the aesthetic both represents and attempts to reform the rural poor: it is not a description only, but a prescription; the poor must be shown at work, not only because that is what they do, but because that is what they ought to do (77). In reference to Pynes Microcosm , Barrell describes how the picturesque eliminates all sentimental and moral reflection. It is thus also absolutely hostile to narrative; and when it depicts figures it attempts to do so in such a way as raises no

168 / S M I T H
question about their thoughts or feelings or their interactions with other figures (Visualising the Division of Labour, 104). 11. Barrell, Visualising the Division of Labour, 105. 12. Barrell, Visualising the Division of Labour, 114; 11316. 13. Barrell, Visualising the Division of Labour, 117. 14. The Costume of Great Britain was published in 1804 and reissued in 1808 and 181920 (Harris Myers, William Henry Pyne and his Microcosm [Stroud: Sutton, 1996], 59). For a comprehensive picture of Pynes work in watercolors, his career as a drawing master, and his participation in sketching clubs, see Myers, William Henry Pyne, 2681. 15. Millers preface emphasizes the authenticity of Pynes representations: By presenting to the eye a series of judiciously selected and well executed pictorial representations, forming striking portraits of single subjects, accurately finished in the colours of the original, and aided by short descriptive essays, they give more pleasing and definite ideas of the external character, style of dress, and peculiarity of occupation, than can be acquired by any other method, except actual personal observation (Preface, ii). 16. Miller, Preface, iiiii. 17. See John Barrells breakdown of the occupations in Pynes Microcosm (Visualising the Division of Labour, 89118). 18. William Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain (London, 1804), plate 1. 19. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 1. 20. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 24. 21. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 2. 22. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 14. 23. See John Styles on the neck handkerchiefs of working men and women in The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 44. 24. See Anne Buck on the red and blue cloaks of rural women in Dress in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979), 13031. 25. Payne notes that in its preference for the old rather than the new, Microcosm was typical of the Picturesque; its emphasis on work, however, extended the boundaries of what could be seen as picturesque (Calculated to gratify the patriot, 64). 26. Barrell, Dark Side of the Landscape, 77. 27. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 40. On increases in agricultural productivity, see Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 15001850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10532. 28. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 111. 29. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 40. Elsewhere in his writing Pyne admires the picturesque qualities of other occupations, such as plate 20, Knife Grinder, and plate 49, Highland Shepherd. It is possible that Pyne was familiar with Wieditzs Tratchenbuch, which includes some images of

Dressing the British / 169

laboring men and women plowing, threshing, and cleaning corn. See Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance: All 154 Plates from the Trachtenbuch (New York: Dover, 1994). 30. Laroons Cryes of the City of London first appeared in 1687 and illustrated iconic peddlers such as milk maids, dustmen, chapmen, and fishmongers. In Costume of Great Britain, Pyne includes a number of street seller types such as the Fireman (plate 4), Knife Grinder (plate 20), Milk Woman (plate 24), Waterman to a Coach Stand (plate 27), and Rabbit Woman (plate 33). 31. Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 120. Barrell sees the shift from images of shepherdesses to milkmaids as indicative of the shift from the pastoral to the picturesque: A milkmaid is more of a country girl, and less a courtier, than is the silken shepherdesswe can imagine her working a little, even if she cannot often be portrayed squeezing the cows udders (The Dark Side of the Landscape, 51). 32. See Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England, 14546. 33. See Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England, 126; 132. 34. Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast, 119; 179. 35. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 24. 36. The earliest costume books appeared in the sixteenth century on the continent. Well-known examples such as Cesare Vecellios De gli Habiti antichi e moderni, di Diverse Parti del Mondo, published in Venice in 1589, combined woodblock illustrations with commentary on the fashions of antiquity, European, Eastern, and African countries and regions. For his more than four hundred entries, Vecellio either faces or backs each image with a textual description, detailing the fabrics and colors of his figures garments. Vecellios expansive collection, as Aileen Ribeiro notes, was used as a source book by artists for decades after its publication; see Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 143. Some early examples of travel narratives also served as costume books. The French traveler Nicholas de Nicolay, for instance, seems as interested in documenting dress as in recording his journeys in Les quatres premiers livres des navigations et peregrinations orientales (1567), a text that was translated into English in 1585. De Nicolay punctuates his travel accounts with woodblock illustrations of men and women and full descriptions of their apparel and accessories. 37. Thomas Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern: particularly Old English Dresses: after the Designs of Holbein, Vandyke, Hollar, and others, 4 vols. (London, 175772). 38. Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses, 1:4. 39. Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 183. 40. In vol. 2, English dress falls between a section on Scotland and one on Habits of the English Stage; here Jefferys covers clothing from 1537 to 1755. He returns to Great Britain in vol. 4, with images of Ancient Bretons and Picts, closing with Hollars mid-seventeenth-century engravings. 41. Ribeiro, The Art of Dress, 222.

170 / S M I T H
42. See, for instance, plate 43, LADY of CHINA, from Du Halde, in Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses, 1:27. 43. Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses, 2:83. 44. See vol. 3, plates 56 and 57 of Habit of a Moor of Morocco in Winter in 1695 and vol. 3, plates 58 and 59, Habit of a Moorish Woman in 1695 in Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses. 45. Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses, 2:83. 46. Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses, 4:187, 188, 189, 190. 47. Ribeiro credits Strutts publication as the first detailed, illustrated, and thoroughly sourced history of dress in England (Antiquarian Attitudes, 63). She also notes that he relied on the manuscripts drawings of Randle Holme, a seventeenth-century author of illustrated guides to armor and heraldry (60). 48. Joseph Strutt, A Complete View of the Dress and Habits of the People, from the establishment of the Saxons in Britain to the present time, 2 vols. (London, 179699), 1:iii. 49. Strutt, A Complete View of the Dress and Habits, 1:iii. 50. Article 6, The Costume of Great Britain, The Monthly Review, 56 (1808): 26569; 265. 51. Article 6, The Costume of Great Britain, The Monthly Review, 56:265. 52. Colley, Britons, 152. 53. The full critique reveals the reviewers patriotism: This account is neither so full nor so correct as we expected to find it. When we were informed that the English China manufacturers have rivalled the foreign, we imagined that we should hear of our Chelsea china , and that our present most celebrated manufactories of the elegant and ornamental kinds, viz. at Derby, Worcester, and Colebrook-Dale, would have been specified ; even if the author had not chosen to enumerate those places at which the common blue and white ware, which has superseded the use of Nankin, is produced (Article 6, The Costume of Great Britain, The Monthly Review, 56:268). 54. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 5. 55. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 5. 56. Article 6, The Costume of Great Britain, The Monthly Review, 56:265. 57. W. J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3. 58. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 56. 59. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 56. 60. Jennie Batchelor notes a similar rhetorical struggle at work in fashion plates in womens periodicals; she argues that the tension between plate and text expresses anxiety about the ability of the written word to truly accommodate fashion (Dress, Distress, and Desire [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 114). 61. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 56. 62. On press-gangs in the early 1800s, see Longmate, Island Fortress, 266. 63. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 50. 64. Payne, Calculated to gratify the patriot, 72.

Dressing the British / 171

65. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 41. 66. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain, plate 27. 67. Myers also suggests that Pyne inspired imitators like William Alexander (Myers, William Henry Pyne, 59). 68. Pyne, The Costume of Great Britain , plate 45; William Alexander, Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the English (London, 1814), plate 6. 69. George Walker, Costume of Yorkshire (London, 1814), plate 17. 70. Pyne, Etchings of Rustic Figures, 38. 71. Pyne, Etchings of Rustic Figures, 4. 72. Colley, Britons, 321.