'Nursing Secrets: The Story of a Victorian Nursing Dress'

‘Nursing Secrets: The Story of a Victorian Nursing Dress’

Kate Lampitt Adey, University of Edinburgh

In the archives belonging to Glasgow Museums there lies a silk dress cradled in tissue paper. The dress, dating from about 1850, has an unusual secret which can be discovered on further inspection. Hidden in the bodice are openings in the fabric to facilitate breastfeeding. This dress intrigued me as the sweat stains and the provision for nursing tell of intimate bodily functions and personal details.

This paper explores what stories this dress can help us tell about the experience of being a woman and mother during the Victorian period. I will discuss my personal interactions with this dress, suggesting that the luxurious fabric, corseted waist and provision for nursing can fuel rich and evocative discussion. The paper will take the audience through the process of investigating this dress, and explore how we might use and negotiate issues of objects as evidence and the potential for shared experience across time to generate insights into lived experience.

After setting out some methodological thoughts on these issues the paper discusses, in turn, the style and fabric, the corseted waist and then Victorian breastfeeding. Each of these features are positioned as representations of aspects of the owner’s identity. I will suggest that looking at clothing in this way we can imagine how this Victorian woman might have negotiated her individual identity and her identity as a wife and mother and how dress might be both an imposer of identity and as a vehicle to challenge impositions.

1b: Textiles and Labour (Chair: Louisa Yates) – CWE 125

Irish Rags and Irish Lace: Famine, Fabric and Nationality in the Nineteenth Century - Melissa Fegan, University of Chester

‘Irish Rags and Irish Lace: Fabric, Famine and Nationality in the Nineteenth Century’

Melissa Fegan, University of Chester

For many writers on Ireland in the nineteenth century, raggedness was the national condition. Travellers in Ireland were amused, astonished, and often made apprehensive by, the state of Irish clothing: Samuel Foote is said to have exclaimed ‘Now I know where the cast-off clothes of English beggars go to!’, while Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal: ‘You are constantly fearful that some knot or loop will give, and place the individual before you in all the primitive simplicity of Paradise’. Yet Ireland was also associated with fine fabrics: Limerick gloves, Connemara stockings and Ulster linen were highly prized, and Irish lace and crochet were showcased at the 1851 Great Exhibition. This paper will examine the relationship between Irish rags and Irish lace, as the symptom of and potential solution to Irish poverty, in particular the encouragement of lacemaking and knitting by poor girls and women during the Great Famine, and their literary representation in texts such as Mary Anne Hoare’s ‘The Knitted Collar’, Louisa Anne Meridith’s The Lacemakers: Sketches of Irish Character, and ‘Brother James’’s Eva O’Beirne, or The Little Lacemaker.

1b: Textiles and Labour (Chair: Louisa Yates) – CWE 125

Perusing The Paradise: Dressing in the Department Store - Kara Tennant

‘Perusing The Paradise: Dressing in the Department Store’

Kara Tennant, University of South Wales

In this paper, I consider representations of Victorian clothing and bodies in the BBC’s 2012-13 costume drama The Paradise, set in the nineteenth-century British department store. Its appearance reflects a growing interest in the history of consumer culture within mainstream television. The Paradise, for example, aired alongside its ‘rival’ ITV production Mr Selfridge (2013-present), and was followed by the three-part BBC documentary Shopgirls (2014), presented by Professor Pamela Cox, which examined the ‘strange new phenomenon’ of the female shop-worker.[1]

The Paradise took inspiration from Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames, and follows the experiences of Denise, an assistant in the ladieswear section of a burgeoning new store. In this case, however, the action is resituated from 1860s Paris to the  north-east of England in the mid-1870s, a decision that impacts significantly upon the costume design, as well as upon the social meanings conveyed through clothing.

Indeed, I argue that the process of dressing the Victorian body – particularly the female body – becomes centrally significant within the series. As Denise shapes and re-shapes both her own body, by wearing her new work uniform, and those of her customers, in the form of the garments that they purchase, we see new understandings of Victorian fashion and femininity formed. And these, I suggest, respond to our own, modern, culture in interesting and revealing ways.

1a: Fabricating Femininity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124

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[1] ‘Shopgirls: the True Story of Life Behind the Counter’ (2014), <http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2014/25/shopgirls> [accessed 10 December 2014].

Idealised and Fabricated Femininity in 'The Lady's Dressing Room' - Sue Elsley

‘Idealised and Fabricated Femininity in The Lady’s Dressing Room

Sue Elsley, University of Chester

The Lady’s Dressing-Room was published in Britain in 1893, adding another volume to the existing plethora of manuals offering advice, on matters as diverse as household management and personal conduct, to Victorians eager to improve themselves and their lot.  This specific work is in fact a translation from an 1893 French book by Baroness Staffe. Its Continental origins, its focus on the creation of domestic sanctuaries where ‘ordinary women’ might become ‘goddesses’, and its translation into English by the glamorous and notorious Lady Colin Campbell, all suggest that its appeal may have been more exotic than other publications which also advised wives on such things as furnishing bathrooms and care of the clothes and body. The Baroness constantly reminds her married, female readership that finding their inner goddess, and making the most of her potential, is an essential element of their wifely duties. This sentiment, along with some bizarre, alarming, and some still viable suggestions for self-help, provides insight to the dreams and realities experienced by those who yet aspired to be perfect wives rather than New Women, but nonetheless yearned for glamour and greater autonomy. Staffe presents the dressing-room itself as a bespoke alchemical chamber in which a woman might blend potions and fabrics to transform herself into the ideal of feminism, as natural as ‘the lilies of the field’; but she shows those with limited financial resources and imperfect bodies how they too might create a ‘holy of holies’ and transform themselves into its securely resident deity.  

1a: Fabricating Femininity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124  

Dressing/Undressing the Victorians - George Eliot's Dresses by Jen Davis

‘George Eliot’s Dresses’

Jen Davis, University of Chester

 ‘I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles – to win your tears for real sorrow: sorrow such as may live next door to you – such as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.’ (George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life)

It is appropriate that Eliot chooses clothing to illustrate her manifesto for the ordinary and commonplace in Scenes of Clerical Life; she often uses clothes to represent her characters’ personalities in some way. Analysing dress in Eliot’s novels can reveal fascinating insights into characters’ morality, sexuality and social status, as well as shedding light on Eliot’s attitudes and preconceptions. Eliot’s comments on the practicalities of her characters’ dresses can provide a fresh perspective on the reality of dressing the Victorians. Anyone familiar with Eliot’s novels, or her biography, may expect her to dress rather sombrely – a Dorothea in dove-grey silk, perhaps, or a mourning gown to match her Sybilline status. It may come as a surprise, then, to discover that her choice of clothing for herself tended towards the colourful and vivacious. A discussion of one of Eliot’s own dresses presents her in a new light. 

1a: Fabricating Femininity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124

Promotional Post: TALKING BODIES 2015

TALKING BODIES 2015

31st March - 2nd April 2015

An international, inter-disciplinary, conference at the University of Chester

This is the second international, interdisciplinary TALKING BODIES conference. Scholars, practitioners, researchers and postgraduate students from a wide range of disciplines (art, performance, art history, social history, and history of science, literary criticism, theology, (eco)feminism, political theory, medicine, jurisprudence, and more) will be attending. Questions they will consider include (but are absolutely not limited to):

• How does the idea of the ‘taboo’ impact on self-perception? How do writers and artists articulate that taboo?
• How do visual artists represent the complexities of the embodied self? Or, how can writers, performers, or musicians do so?
• How is sexual identity articulated by and in the body?
• What happens when the ‘talking body’ conflicts with the ‘talking mind’?
• How do (consensual or non-consensual) body modifications silence the body, or ‘allow’ it to ‘talk’?
• What relationships do erotica, porn and the ‘obscene’ have with the embodied self?
• How does representation of the body facilitate political activism?
• Where do gender and ideology intersect on the site of ‘the body’?
• Is language ever sufficient in talking about bodies?

In addition to the conference presentations, there will be an exciting keynote speaker; a conference ‘Marketplace’ with book and craft stalls; a feminist pub quiz; and much more!

You can read about the 2013 TALKING BODIES conference here:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/vagina-dialogue-and-bodies-in-evidence/2002780.article

email: talkingbodies@chester.ac.uk (Queries about the conference should also be directed to this email address. Please note that there are NO funds available to subsidise delegates’ costs.)

Twitter: @talking_bodies

Dressing/Undressing the Victorians - Programme Released!

We're very pleased to announce the programme for Dressing/Undressing the Victorians!

Programme can be downloaded by clicking here