‘[Ad]dressed for you: a Victorian view
of dress in popular greetings cards’
Stephanie
Boydell, Manchester Metropolitan University
The
exchange of illustrated greetings cards is a largely a Victorian invention.
Commercial cards came to prominence in the 1840’s and dramatically took off in
popularity, coming to a peak in the 1890’s. By their very nature they are
ephemeral; the content of their illustration reliant on the everyday, the
passing and the fashionable. The Victorians designed and published hundreds of
thousands of these cards. They are a huge, varied and largely untapped source
for contemporary visual accounts of the period, including dress.
Using the internationally renowned Seddon
Collection of Victorian and Edwardian Greetings cards (housed in the MMU
Special Collections, and which comprises over 100,000 individual cards), this
paper will be a graphic exploration of how the Victorians used, viewed and
visualised dress. Greetings cards can be surprising in their revelations about
the Victorian psyche. Its contradictory nature is evident in the range of
subjects and styles represented. There is vibrant colour, humour and sauciness,
alongside the religious, the moralising and the sentimental. The collection
demonstrates how dress is employed as a signifier of these attributes in
popular print media. The scope of the collection presents a snapshot of changes
in dress from the 1840’s to the 1900’s, covering high fashion, working dress,
sporting dress, seasonal dress and allegorical costume. Some make a feature of
dress; others capture it accidentally. The cards offer the chance to examine
the cultural significance of dress in relation to popular culture and the rapid
development and explosion of visual culture and visual language in 19th
Century Britain.
2b: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Deborah Wynne) – CWE 125
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