If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (8 page)

The secrets of the perfect figure revealed,
c
.1810

Shaping the body is not just a feminine phenomenon. In the mid-eighteenth century, Richard Campbell mockingly
described Londoners’ dependence on what he called their ‘Shape Merchants’. Men of fashion had no ‘Existence than what the Taylor, Milliner, and Perriwig-Maker bestow upon them’. Stripped of their clothes, they appeared to be ‘quite a different Species’, rather like ‘Punch, deprived of his moving Wires, and hung up upon a Peg’. George IV – brandy-swilling, bewigged, heavily made-up and slightly mad – was likewise a constant wearer of corsets. His baby corset, designed to encourage a straight figure, remains in the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace. His adult corset, which doesn’t survive, was designed to hold in his fat and to help him to walk. (The idea that medieval knights wore corsets, sadly, is based on the mistranslation of a Latin word. They didn’t.) In the generation after George IV’s, chest padding created the silhouette favoured for a gentleman seen in profile. This discreet addition to the manly chest was even adopted by Prince Albert, and can be seen inside a military outfit of his at the Museum of London.

But ladies’ shapes gave away so much more about their status. A country girl, arriving fresh off the stagecoach in Georgian London, quickly found new friends suspiciously keen to ‘help’ her lose her bumpkin ways:

An awkward Thing, when first She came to Town;

Her Shape unfashion’d, and her Face unknown:

She was my Friend, I taught her first to spread

Upon her Sallow Cheeks th’Enliv’ning Red.

Of course, the naive country girl ended up working as a prostitute, like her friend who narrates the poem. A Georgian prostitute in prints and cartoons – and presumably in real life too – indicates her availability by lifting up one side of her skirt and showing her ankle.

The tight-laced stays necessary for eighteenth-century female costume were difficult to put on alone; in fact, one wonders how working women without maids managed. But there were short cuts. For a start, you might simply sleep in your stays rather
than going to the trouble of taking them off. Also, it is actually possible to lace yourself up by running one string down from the top, and the other up from the bottom. You can tighten yourself at the mid-point by reaching over your right shoulder and under your left, grabbing the two strings and pulling them in a diagonal movement.

It was Victorian ladies who suffered the tightest lacing. A book of
Advice to a Wife
(1853) suggests that one should not lace to fewer than twenty-seven inches; to go down to the widely desirable twenty-one was to sacrifice ‘comfort, health and happiness’. It was hard to persuade women to take off their stays, even under the most extreme conditions. The same writer makes the point that ‘
the stays should not be worn
’ during labour. (Women in childbirth nevertheless expected to wear a chemise, petticoat and nightgown, with a ‘broad bandage’ round the abdomen.)

Stays for women can be excruciatingly painful, and Victorian ladies’ manuals make recommendations for treating flesh rubbed raw and other superficial wounds. Archaeologists at the Museum of London have studied the malformation of the skeleton caused by Victorian tight lacing. They have also noticed that shoes had a crippling effect on the bones of the feet before shoes specifically designed for the left and right feet were introduced in the early nineteenth century, when shaped cobblers’ lasts came into use.

The invention of the liberty bodice in the late nineteenth century saw the beginning of the end of body-shaping as an essential part of women’s daily life; it had passed out of men’s lives long before. In the twentieth century, the bra and girdle replaced the stays; then the girdle too eventually disappeared. But still teenagers longed for the underwear that would mark maturity: ‘Are you there God?’ prayed Judy Blume’s fictional adolescent in 1978. ‘It’s me, Margaret. I just told my mother I want a bra. Please help me grow God.
You know where
.’

Before we finish with underwear, we need to make a detour
into the curious history of the pocket. The variety and quality of the items in her handbag provide a particularly intimate snapshot of a modern woman’s daily life. The handbag’s predecessor was an even more intimate item: the tie-on pocket or pouch worn around the waist (of the type that Lucy Locket lost, and that Kitty Fisher found).

A Berlei corseted girdle from the 1940s

Some thieves specialised in stealing these particular items: ‘My chief dexterity was in robbing the ladies. There is a peculiar delicacy required in whipping one’s hand up a lady’s petticoats and carrying off her pockets,’ boasted one (fictional) pickpocket. Putting an intrusive hand into a lady’s pocket was often used as a metaphor for seduction. In the 1760s, though, in line with a general explosion in the number of consumer
goods of all sorts made suddenly available, handbags began to appear for carrying purses, fans, combs and shopping money. The days of the pocket as a separate item from the skirt were numbered.
The Times
of 1799 mentioned ‘the total abjuration of the female pocket’, and handbags quickly became known as ‘Indispensables’.

The pocket became sewn into a skirt, and the handbag went from strength to strength. But both remain private places where their owners’ needs, desires and aspirations are all laid bare. They have that in common with the room called the closet.

5 – Praying, Reading and Keeping Secrets

All is but vanitie.

Painted motto in a seventeenth-century
closet at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire

Ever ‘closeted’ yourself away to do something private? If so, you were referring to a room whose purpose has faded away, rather like the appendix in the human body: the closet.

The bedchamber was originally a place of prayer and study as well as sleep. Then architecturally ambitious Tudors began to construct an extra little room adjoining it called the closet. Richly decorated and often incorporating cupboards for the storage of treasures, these funny little rooms became a dead end in architectural history. For a couple of centuries, though, they provided the most intimate and private space in a house. The closet was used for solitary activities – for praying, reading, meditating – or for storing precious art, musical instruments and books.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, as literacy spread, we come across a novelty: people willingly spending time by themselves. This new trend for solitude, linked to the rise of reading, called for new, small and private rooms. The allure of seclusion is expressed in a poem written by Charles, Duc d’Orléans, while prisoner in the Tower of London. In 1440, this
duc
(the nephew
of the king of France) was imprisoned after the British victory at Agincourt. He is perhaps the first recorded person to suffer from the agonising but creative melancholy which would become so common in the Romantic age, but which seems quite out of place in the medieval. His homesick, miserable condition made him want to mope about alone:

Tristesse

M’ si longuement tenu en son pouvoir

Que j’ai totalement relégué ma Joie
.

Il vaut mieux que je m’écarte de mes semblables:

Celui qui est pris d’affliction ne peut qu’embarrasser
.

[Sadness has held me in its power so long

that I have cast off Joy completely.

It is better that I separate myself from my fellow man.

He who is afflicted can only embarrass.]

The seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, sitting at her desk in her private closet, her ideas swirling round her head

Closets, these new rooms for solitude, also developed out of a tradition of prayer. As the Bible’s Book of Matthew put it,
‘when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly’. Indeed, the forerunner to the closet was the private oratory, like the one just off Edward III’s bedchamber at the Tower of London (
plate 4
).

If your house wasn’t big enough or grand enough to contain a special, dedicated closet, you could make do with other rooms. The seventeenth-century London wood-turner, diary fiend and depressive Nehemiah Wallington had a strong Puritan faith which forced him to frequent prayer. His writings give an unusual insight into the mind of an introspective and religious man of the middling sort. One winter night, he had something of an epiphany in his ‘garret’, which he’d been using as a kind of closet: