Regency Pastels

I've just had Pax do a portrait with charcoal, ink and pastels.
Him being an artist of sorts.

So I have all this spare information about pastels floating around in my head, 
and I wrote a posting over at the Wenches for anyone who wants a very brief look at art materials of the Regency.

I found it all interesting myself.

 

He's using a brass pastel holder.

Regency visual artists were about half way along the technological journey between the Neolithic Cave painters and one of those high-tech computer painting programs.  The fine work, the beautiful work, the Regency artists created was accomplished with the most simple tools and a limited array of colors.
 
Let me talk about pastels, because Pax uses pastels.  I think of pastel as a portable and democratic art form in Georgian and Regency times.   If you are a spy pretending to be an artist, or vice versa, you would carry a sketchbook and maybe pastels because they're fast to use and cheap.
And, like, portable.

Portraits in these readymade crayons offered tangible advantages over oil for the artist and the sitter: they required fewer sittings as there was no drying time; less paraphernalia; the materials were easily portable and the costs were lower.
      The Rise of Pastel in the Eighteenth Century, Margery Shelley

Just a whole bunch of pastels.  From the Met

These pastels were made by grinding natural white chalk -- something you can pick up off the ground in places like Southeast England -- into a fine powder. You mixed this with pigment and a binder like gum arabic.  You rolled the mixture into thin cylindrical sticks or long square sticks and dried them.  These were 'soft pastels'.  They were just super concentrated colors that transferred readily to the paper.

They called pastels 'crayons' in the Regency -- so confusing -- because the waxy colored sticks we think of as 'crayons' wouldn't be invented for another century.

 The most exciting recent innovation for our Regency pastel artist would have been the Conté crayon,  invented in France in 1794.  These were made from kaolin clay and graphite and fired in a kiln.  They were much harder than the chalk-based soft pastel sticks, and came in a smaller range of colors.  They could be sharpened.  They were good for tight, crisp lines and fine detail, and often used to lay down the first sketch on paper.  
 

Detail of picture above

You had a potential for vivid color, but in a medium likely to crumble and come apart in your hand and smear.  So the pastel sticks were fitted into a sort of metal holder that protected them and provided control and precision for the artist.

A holder for Conté pastels, about 6 inches long, brass

Because pastels were intended to be inserted into a holder, they were thinner than the ones we use today.  A square shape gave them stability in the holder. That's why the Conté pastels are square.

 

 Find the rest of this posting at Word Wenches, here.

Technical Topic -- Note about stays

Abigail Adams, in 1800, saw visiting Frenchwomen wearing Empire-style dresses in Philadelphia and wrote in a letter:

"The stile of dress ... is really an outrage upon all decency. I will describe it as it has appeared even at the drawing Room ... A Muslin sometimes, sometimes a crape made so strait before as perfectly to show the whole form. The arm naked almost to the shoulder and without stays or Bodice."

To me this says many respectable Frenchwomen were not wearing corsets or stays in my time period when they dressed à l'antique.
 

Walking Through Regency London

I've been trying to imagine what the streets of Paris and London looked like and felt like underfoot in the Georgian and Regency eras.

The fashionable streets of Mayfair are fairly easy to picture.  We have lovely paintings of these, for one thing.
The wide, clean, quiet streets with expensive houses. The squares, with maybe a garden in the middle.  Yes.  I can see these.

I have some feeling of what the rookeries might have looked like too.  The grainy, mid-Victorian photos of the London slums give us an idea.  Hogarth illustrates the underbelly of London on one side of the era. Gustaf Dore on the other.

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself.  H.P Lovecraft
But, what about the middling streets?  Not the privileged haunts of the nobility.  Not the stews.  The everyday streets and passageways of London and Paris.  My characters spend most of their time in this ordinary sort of place.  What did it look like?

We have pictures. 





























And we can guess a lot about what the city looked and felt like from elements common to cities now.

For more, travel to Word Wenches here.

Keeping It Clean -- Georgian and Regency Bathing Customs

Talking about Georgian and Regency bathtubs, here, and the joys of getting clean. 

 
There is a general view that historical people were rather dirty, there being a dearth of historical folks getting up at six and grabbing a bar of soap and popping in to warble un bel dì vedremo in the shower.  I'm afraid we all feel rather smug about our acres of colored tile with the running hot and cold.

How clean were they?  The townsfolks as they merrily hung aristos from the lamposts, Ninon de l'Enclos, Voltaire, (Did you know Ninon left money in her will for the 9-year-old Voltaire to buy books?) Napoleon, Jane Austen, the kitchenmaid grinding coffee in the morning? How clean were they?

For more, follow the post over to Word Wenches, here.

The Oldest Memorials

Talking about the battle memorials our Regency Folks would have known.

The oldest ones . . .

We don't know what sort of memorials were raised to fallen soldiers in Britain in the very earliest days.  I like to think Silbury Hill might be one of them.  Silbury Hill is a huge mound of earth -- chalk and clay -- built on the Salisbury plain near Stonehenge four thousand years ago.  I've always wondered if it was homage and memory of some prehistoric leader.


Monuments we can date with some certainty go back to the 800s.
Here to the right is the back of a Pictish Stone at Aberlemno Churchyard in Angus, Scotland.  We see men wearing helmets, carrying spears, shields and swords battle on foot and on horseback.  

Another stone, on the left here, is the Suenos Stone, in Forres, Scotland.  It was one of a pair of obelisks described on maps as late as 1789 as "two curiously carved pillars". This to the left is a drawing made in 1861 of the surviving stone.  Below is a close view of the side.  We see the sinuous vine patterns similar to those found in the Book of Kells.

Panels on the back, so much worn the detail is all but gone,  show battle scenes of horsemen and foot soldiers and, possibly, men playing long straight musical pipes.
What battles do the stone tell of?  Who fought?  Viking, Pict, Gael, or  Northumbrians?  We can't be sure. But the Suenos Stone and the Aberlemno stones were carved with all the art of their time and raised in the honor of those long ago warriors.


Read the rest at Word Wenches  here

What a pity it isn't illegal . . . Regency Ice Cream

Ice cream is exquisite. 
What a pity it isn't illegal. 
~Voltaire

 
There's a certain perversity to Mother Nature.
Take  strawberry ice cream. 
Here we have an obvious Good Thing.  Combine fresh strawberries, something sweet, and milk.  Cradle the mixture in ice and harden it. 
Voilà -- you're going to end up with something tasty.



But it's not so straightforward.

Here, at Word Wenches

All that glistens is not . . . goldfish

You've probably asked yourself, from time to time, if there are any Shakespeare  quotes about goldfish.

Did Shakespeare say, "That which we call a goldfish, by any other name would be as bright"? 
Or insult some catiff with a, "Thou wimpled, reeling-ripe goldfish-licker!"

He did not. 
Goldfish didn't make it to England till nearly a century after Shakespeare's death.  We got Shakespearean dogs and cats, camels, carp, marmosets, mackerel, and whales . . . but no goldfish.

Basically, the goldfish is the carp who made good.

Read the rest of 'Everything you wanted to know about Regency Goldfish but didn't realize it'
over at Word Wenches . . . here.

Why the English?

Jennie at Dear Author, reviewing Caroline Linden's book, You Only Live Once, says,

". . . reflections on the French Revolution made me question (not for the first time) the anti-French, anti-revolution bias in historical romance.  (my bolding)

It’s a bias that has interested me for a while, mostly because I’m not sure what is at the root of it.
Is it a general disdain of the French common to…most everyone but the French?
Is it based on the weirdly pro-British slant in historical romance (I say weird because it’s usually American authors writing these books)?

Is it based on actual disdain for the bloodthirstiness of the revolution?"

I've thought about this subject some.



Bit of Backgound here for anyone who lives on Mars and is tuning in through subether radio:

Historical Romance has a dozen few favorite settings.  The most tenacious of these may well be 'The Regency'.  Regency Romances are set, roughly, from 1800 to 1817. 



Engaging in fussy historical quibbledry here: 

The French Revolutionary Period ran from 1789 to 1799.  From the Bastille to Napoleon's coup d'etat. 

The Napoleonic Era was 1799 to 1815.  From the coup d'etat to Waterloo.

Anyone still able to unglaze their eyes at this point will see that Regency Romances are set during the Napoleonic Era. 


Or,
to put it another way . . .

To me, this kinda sums up the Old Regine.

To a character in a Regency Romance, the French Revolution, (Aristos fleeing the mob, heads rolling like ten pins,)
is ten or twenty years ago.  It happened when they were at school.  Some of the protagonists weren't even born when the Bastille fell.

The French Revolution was, (as my kids would put it,) "so last week."

Regency characters are fighting the Napoleonic Wars.
Different animal.


The Napoleonic Wars, unlike the French Revolution,
can be presented, simplistically, as a straightforward conflict of right and wrong.   (Which may be why Regencies are set there.)

France is an invader and conqueror.  England is defending itself and other nations in Europe.
"Them bad French invaded Spain.  We go rescue Spain."

The Regency spy surveils, and the Regency soldier comes home from, 'a just war'. 

My character Annique, in The Spymaster's Lady, has been loyal to France through the Revolution.

I propose that she may plausibly change her loyalty when Napoleon begins a series of wars of conquest.

Her moral dilemma is exactly about the difference between the philosophical basis of the French Revolution and philosophical basis of the Napoleonic Era in France.

My character Maggie, in The Forbidden Rose, makes a choice typical of the French Revolution.

She's not choosing between nations or philosophical systems, but rather is forced to one side of an internecine class war.



Annique responds to a moral conflict that didn't exist in the Revolution.  Maggie, to a conflict that was resolved by the Napoleonic Era. 

Eight years apart, it's an entirely different war.

As to why books get set in England, instead of,  say, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Croatia, or France . . .

I figger it's the same reason kids go out to play soccer or football instead of making up a new game each time.  You arrive on the field and you got yer lines already painted, the goal posts are up, and everybody knows the rules.

We write books set in Regency England because the readers are familiar with the Regency and folks are familiar with Regency England because so many books are set there.
It's one of those feedback loops.  A viscous cycle.  Sticky.

Readers come to a Regency Romance armed with all sorts of background.  They know Almacks, Bond Street, Vauxhall Gardens, and Gunter's.

Just about nobody knows the Chinese Baths, the Palais Royale, the Tivoli Gardens of Paris, or the Cafe Foy.

The Chinese Baths of Paris in the 1790s

A writer who sets a novel someplace . . . novel,
faces a massive origination fee.  She has to describe the Chinese Baths.  Explain what the Cafe Foy is.
While that author is describing, explaining, and making real the setting, she's not telling the story.

And the writer doesn't necessarily know all this stuff.  It's long, irritating, and difficult work to do research outside the English-speaking world, because, (you guessed it,) the references are not in English.

Finally, when we're writing Romance, we do not generally look at the French Revolution because you'd have to be barking mad to set escapist literature in the middle of folks getting their heads chopped off.  I mean . . .  really.

Regency Bling

Regency Bling

The Regency gentleman's code might be summed up as, "no perfumes, exquisitely fine linen and plenty of it, country washing . . ."
and bling. 

I went in search of Regency bling, hoping for a gold ring in the ear of at least some Regency fops. 
Alas, not so much. 

The robust and adventurous Tudors wore earrings.  The courtier Buckingham sported major rubies.  That man of action, Sir Walter Raleigh, a gold hoop.  (This picture here shows him with a remarkably fine pearl earring.)


A half century later, Charles I wore a great pearl in his ear when he mounted the block to face the axe. 
By the Eighteenth Century, however, earrings had become the province of buccaneers, exotic foreigners, and the most foppish of macaronis.

See the rest at Word Wenches  here.

Let Them Eat Brioche

One of the minor disappointments of life is that there are no croissants in the Regency. My characters can enjoy flaky rolls, buns, sliced bread, tarts and all sorts of pastries for breakfast, but croissants didn't arrive in Paris till the late 1830s.  They're as anachronistic on the Regency table as cornflakes.

Regency folks can chow down on brioche though.  We got brioche.

Brioche is a light yeast bread, eggy and somewhat sweet -- though the recipes tell us it was less sweet in 1800 than it is nowadays -- frequently carrying a nice surprise of nuts or raisins.  It was a veritable breakfast cliché in Paris in the Eighteenth Century.  Brioche would have been comfortable and familiar on any wealthy English breakfast table, those being the ones influenced by the French way of cooking.  By 1820, brioche was so common in England it was standard in cookbooks.

Which brings us to the question . . .  

 . . .  and click here for the rest of the posting, over on Word Wenches.

photocredit dessert first

Walking Sticks and Canes

I'm talking about Sticks and Canes over at Word Wenches.

I am now a Word Wench.
*jo hugs herself madly*

This is so wonderful.

I am so delighted.

Word Wenches is THE cool blogplace to be.

And I am there.  From now on.

Yes!!






*cough*

Settling down now to talk about canes and walking sticks in a historical Regency sorta way . . .

I'm here to talk of walking sticks and canes carried by the haut ton of England and France.

English gentlemen, long before Teddy Roosevelt showed up to advise this, walked softly and carried a big stick.  Every other portrait shows some nattily dressed fellow  with a walking stick pegged jauntily into the ground or a slim baton negligently tucked under the elbow.  The dress cane was the quintessential mark of the dandy for three centuries, part fashion accessory, part aid to communication, part weapon.


And I suppose you could always just to lean on it.


More here

Knitting the Revolution

It's a great pity to do lots of research and find stuff out and then realize you will never be able to use most of it. 

Over the last year, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about  who knit what, when and how in France in 1790. 

None of this will fit into a story. 

"Ah," says I to myself.  "I'll put it on the blog."

So if you don't care about knitting in 1794 in France,
(and who could blame you,)
you can wander off again and I will doubtless write something more interesting someday.

I don't know a great deal about knitting as a craft, I'm afraid.
When I decided Maggie needed to do some knitting in The Forbidden Rose I went out and bought some yarn and five, two-ended needles to see how it felt to knit.

I kept losing yarn off the end of the needles.
Apparently the French of 1790 didn't need the endy bits that keep the yarn from escaping.  Or perhaps using endy bits was considered unsporting.

If I'd been knitting wool, I expect it would have itched.
And if I did this all day long, I'd have really strong fingers.

Technical Topics -- Bibliographies . . . French Revolution History

I was thinking I'd add a
'Useful Bibliography of the History of France, with particular attention to the period of the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon'
on the off chance that this would prove interesting to somebody, someday.

So the bibliography is here , at LibraryThing.


A different kinda bibliography exists here.

This latter bibliography is about one third useful resources on France of the period.
And one third Regency England books.
And the last third is many, many refs on slang and dialect of the time.

I am not absolutely sure that just anybody can get into these spots. If you try, and you can't, let me know.

Women's costume France 1795 - caps and hats

Here we are talking about the headwear of middleclass and working class women in 1794. Women's hats and caps.

(With any of these images, click on the images for a closer look. )

In the C20, adult women started going bareheaded. Before that, in Western Europe, women wore some type of head covering virtually all the time, inside the house and out -- shawls, caps and hats.

In 1794, inside, most grown women would have worn a cap. Outside, they would have worn a hat or a hat over a cap. It's hard to add this costume reality to a Historical Romance without the reader finding it strange.

Caps

Caps for our middleclass and working class woman could mean either a simple mob cap or a fancier lace cap. Even a relatively poor woman might wear a fancy lacy cap as an indulgence.

A mob-cap was a circle of cotton or linen, gathered up and held on the head with a band or ribbon. A deep ruffle ran around it, framing the face and neck.

Our famous tricoteuses are wearing mobcaps. In the period it was sometimes called the 'Charlotte Corday'.

In 1794, in Paris, a cap like this would have been ornamented with the tricolored cockade or rosette. It wasn't quite a law that women had to wear the cockade. (It was the law for men.) Women just found it a good idea.

To the left here, see a tricoteuse in a simple linen cap.

Here, we got a 1790 cap. It's English, but it's a good workingclass cap, and all these designs are very similar. See how fancy it is.

A mob cap was the simplest of caps. It was essentially unchanged for a century before 1794 and close to a century afterwards.

In France the mobcap's design would have conformed to Revolutionary ideas of simplicity and modesty. It'd be 'politically correct' in 1794.

Another simple cap -- if you zip down to the next post, the one on aprons, you'll see a Greuze portrait of a little girl asleep, wearing a simple cap of this type.

Where did women wear caps?

Inside and out.

Here's an early C18 example of women inside the house, wearing simple caps. The wealthy women at the card game wear a couple similar caps. The maid who's serving them coffee has the same cap on, basically. Hers may be a little simpler.

This Boilly painting is 1803. We got our upscale people in Paris. Mom -- see her there -- is wearing a sort of turban type cap.

Where I'm going with this picture ....

In the English upper middle class and gentry, there seems to have been something of an age distinction in the wearing of caps.

Young ladies might wear their hair uncovered, gathered in a simple fillette or band. Mature women and married women wore caps. One of the Regency Romance staples is a spinster deciding it's time to start wearing 'caps' indoors.

Did this ' young marriagable' versus 'spinster' age distinction hold true in France? The Boilly portrait would seem to indicate it might.

Women, as I said above, wore caps on the street, or hats. Sometimes wore caps under their hats.

So, how did you wear a cap and a hat all simultaneous?

On the left, Madame Seriziat in this David's 1795 portrait is doing it. here.

Her cap is a large, lacy and fancy one, but the pricniple's good for our simper women in simpler mobcaps.

Our 1790s newseller in Paris is wearing a bouffant lacy cap on the streets, not unlike the one in the David picture. Her cap is covered by a kind of scarf drawn up over her head and her cap

 

You remember where I said the mobcap was sometimes called the Charlotte Corday? Here's the lady herself in jail awaiting execution. Her bonnet is more fancy than the usual mobcap.

Midway between a hat and a cap are several sorts of fashionable turbans.

These seem to have been worn -- shaped a little differently -- by both sexes. They were popular with the 'arty' crowd. Maybe this was influenced by the same love of the exotic Orient that gave us Banyans.

I'm going to assume these turbans were made up carefully and permanently and set on the head, rather than being created de novo each time from a long swath of fabric.

Ok. Having said that women wore caps and hats about all the time, I'm going to backtrack and say . . . 'They didn't always.'

Sometimes grown women ventured out on the streets of Paris with their heads just bare. Look back up to our

newspaper seller above. That woman in the background is capless and hatless.

See the women here also. (Find it at home, here, at the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.)

This to the right is a roughly 1790 print -- see the tricolour ribbon on one of those fancy, frilly hats -- that's a feature of the period.

Anyhow, we got a half dozen women sitting on the very fashionable Boulevard des Italiens. A couple of them have uncovered hair. Might be a fillet or band on the head by not a hat.

The child is wearing a simple straw hat. The other hats are pretty elaborate. Upscale.

My guess is that 'bare-headed' meant fashionable and young,

or not quite respectable.

I think modest working women had a tendency to cover up.

The next post, the one about aprons, shows us some prostitutes at the Palais Royal in a time close to our target year. You can wander down and have a look at it. Several of our filles de joie have their hair uncovered.

. . . the thin line between fashionable and indecent was always skimpy in Paris, and never thinner than in Paris of the Revolution and the Directory.

Hats

A huge favorite, the chip straw hat in the 1795 David portrait of Madame Serizat, above, is typical of the era. Natural color straw, flat crowned, with a large flat brim, wide ribbon that coordinates with the outfit, tied under the chin.

In this LeBrun self-portrait to the right, we see a variation of the straw hat. It's similar in shape to the David portrait, and of similar shape, but with a feather and no ribbon tying it under the chin. The brim is turned up a bit.A lot of these straw hats were straw-dyed-black.

Below, we got a mixed bag of fashionable hats for young ladies.

These would last about ten minutes on a modern kid methinks.


Are we richer or poorer that the average person doesn't spiffy up this much?

Women's costume 1794, France, Aprons and Pockets

We're back for another installment of the clothing of the working and middle classes in France in 1794. This one is on Aprons and 'Pockets'.


Aprons

Did somebody say apron?

We don't wear aprons these days, so it's a little hard to work out what they felt like to wear. How you handled them. In 1794, everybody in the middle and working classes seems to have gone running around in an apron, more or less continuously.

Now the rich in the C18 don't routinely wear aprons over their clothes. They sometimes show up in little lacey apron-ettes, but that's not applicable to my working folks.

It seems to me well-to-do women in the 1790-1794 period start showing up more and more with an apron on 'em as part of their day dress. Maybe they were making a political point.

So. Looking at aprons.

This one is from 'Street Cries of Paris' by Bouchardon, and dates to about 1740.
But I think aprons stayed very much the same.

We got ourselves a salad seller. Romaine lettuce, looks like.

The apron is as long as the skirt, which seems to be typical for working women. It's pulled up and the hem tucked into the waist of her skirt on the side. It's the left side, (her left,) so it's likely that's what right-handed people do.

Here's a closeup of two aprons. (Greuze, The Village Bride, 1761.)

Both mother and child have the pinned-up bib on the top. See more detail of a pinned-up bib below.


Mom has her apron tied, not in back, but on the side. Her right side. That would be easier for a left-handed person, ISTM.
I have also seen period apron strings so long they come clear around the wearer and are tied in front.

The girl holds her apron up, making a pouch, keeping her little bits in it. She takes a handful of fabric. This is going to be just an automatic gesture for anyone who wears aprons.

As long as I got the picture here , look at the caraco on the woman above. I think there's a slit in the side seam to allow access to a pocket beneath.
More on pockets below.


See how the child has her fichu tucked into the top of her apron bib. There must have been an art to tucking the fichu.

Here we got another too-early picture ... before 1771. This is market women.

The clothes are much too early to be relevant. But see how our gal on the left has her aprong converted fully into a secure pouch for carrying . . . I dunnoh. Maybe the entire Oxford English Dictionary or watermelons.

She's tucked the hem of the apron neatly into her waist at the middle, letting it gape a bit at both sides.

Note also that this is a dark blue apron. I have other examples of dark-coloured aprons in France, at least one of them in period. See the 1794 apron on the tricoteuse further below.

Here are some 1850s aprons.
I'm just wandering all over the place, timewise, ain't I?

This Millet is here only for the custom of typing the apron back behind the butt like this and making a big carryall. I'm assuming this was done in my era too.

But since you're tired of me wandering all over French history ... we got some truly period aprons coming up.

Lookit.

The next ones are early 1790s, as are the tricoteuses further on.

In the picture where our sansculotte young lady is carrying a sword, see the way the skirt is drawn up on one side and tucked in. It's on her left side. Right-handed sansculotte?
Visit that bottom print at home here,

In other news, in these three prints, note the mid-length hair, worn undressed and loose under the cap. Note the sabots. Note the striped material of the skirts.

Our lady above, on the upper left has a little basket on her arm and what looks like a bag slung at waist level. I think the basket is to hold yarn. We see the same thing in the Greuze painting below. The little pouch on the side of her seems to be an exterior pocket. I've seen these from time to time.



And here we got Les Tricoteuses Jacobines by LeSueur, which is, of course, smack dab in period.

Our knitters have specialized aprons. Little pockets on the right, (their right,) side of the skirt.

And here is the dark apron I mentioned. So they weren't all white, even among our working class gals.
One way we know they are working class is the length of their skirts. See our gal on the right? Short skirt = laboring class.

Find our tricoteuses here.

Below is a rather interesting take on that 'tricoteuse apron'.

This is the Palai Royale, a noted haunt of prostitutes.

See the madame in the back offering the pretty young knitter to that unpleasant fellow? Her pocket says she's a working girl and gives the impression of an innocence she's about to sell.

Find it here.

Now ... here is Greuze, La Tricoteuse Endormie.
Let us all pause to go aaaaaawwww.

Ahem. Back to business.

This apron shows how the bib attaches. See how one side has come unpinned?

Purely by the by, see those four needles in the knitting? I have tried to knit with four needles. I will blog about that.

And we got that basket the 1794 knitters carry to hold their ball of yarn when they don't have a pocket in their skirt..


Moving on to the fascinating subject of 'pockets'.



'Pockets'

These were not the sewed-in feature we are used to. They were a little bag tied at the waist, under the skirt. Often this was two pockets, tied separately, and worn one on each hip.

This makes comprehensible the nursery rhyme:

Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it.
Not a penny was there in it,
Only ribbon round it.

which has worried and puzzled generations of readers.

We have some early C18 pockets here, from the V & A.

These are linen, sewn with linen thread, embroidered in coloured silks, with silk ribbon and linen tape

A couple more below.

Find them in detail here.

These are from Meg Andrews, Antique Costume and Textiles. Her site is here. These pockets are white cotton, marcella quilted, joined on a wide 2 inch band. They tie with tapes. There's a different design on the two pockets. Odd, what.

Here's a pair of 1796 pockets -- exactly in era. These are embroidered linen.



They belong to the Met, which welcomes you here.

You're wondering how folks got into their pockets in 1794?


Folks got into the pockets by reaching through slits in the seam of their skirt. The caraco in 1794 wouldn't have been long enough to interfere with access, so they could just go through that skirt.


Lookit here where you see just exactly those slits.


They're doing the other thing they did with these pocket holes, which is they pulled a hank of skirt up through them to shorten the skirt. Fashionable women did this for 'the look'. Working women did it to get the skirts out from underfoot.

Or for the look, I guess. And this print is from Yale. Find it Here

Here you get a look at the slit in the side of the skirt where our young lady could reach in and get to the pockets. See this picture, here. Click at the site for a closer look.