Political and sartorial styles: Britain and its colonies in the long nineteenth century

Starting with the premise that clothing is political and that analysing clothing can enhance understanding of political style, this collection explores the relationships among political theory, dress, and self-presentation during a period in which imperial and colonial empires assumed their modern form. Organised under three thematic clusters, the volume’s chapters range from an analysis of the uniforms worn by West India regiments stationed in the Caribbean to the smock frock donned by rural agricultural labourers, and from the self-presentations of members of parliament, political thinkers, and imperial administrators to the dress of characters and caricatures in novels, paintings, and political cartoon. With its interdisciplinary approach, the book will appeal to nineteenth-century cultural and social historians and literary critics as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students whose research and teaching interests include gender, politics, material culture, and imperialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526153067

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Introduction: Jim Crow’s tuxedo

Kevin A. Morrison

What relevance does a volume that focuses on political and sartorial styles in Britain and its colonies during the long nineteenth century have for the contemporary era? How might a personification, emerging in the nineteenth century as a dressed caricature and widely used today as a figure of speech, link diverse political actors across borders and nationalities? Can the parallels or precedents offered by nineteenth-century antecedents enable one to become a better reader of political messaging in the twenty-first century? In his initial floor speech in the United States Senate Chamber on 17 March 2021, Raphael Warnock – who defeated his Republican Party opponent in a special run-off election in the state of Georgia to become only the second African American to be elected from the South since the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War (1865–77) – drew a parallel between the efforts undertaken by Southern Democrats in the era before the civil rights movement and the contemporary exertions of the Republican Party, greatly accelerated by Donald J. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.¹

Over the course of the twentieth century, numerous changes led to a seismic realignment of African American political support. From the 1890s to the 1970s, more than six million African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North and West (Grossman, 1989; Wilkerson, 2010). Although they faced housing and employment discrimination, everyday racism, and de facto segregation in these new environments, African Americans were able to vote. Until the Great Depression, they remained steadfastly loyal to the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, which championed emancipation. By contrast, the Democratic Party in the mid-nineteenth century styled itself as a bastion for White men who ran on a pro-slavery platform (Lynn, 2019, pp. 96–118) and later fiercely upheld segregation. But African Americans began to switch their allegiance to the Democratic Party during the first presidential term (1932–36) of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal economic policies attracted support across the political spectrum.² Roosevelt, whose electoral coalition included White Southerners and African American Northerners, did little to champion racial equality overtly. Yet many of his decisions solidified support for a party that had opposed the enfranchisement of African Americans in the South.³ Southern Democrats increasingly found themselves disillusioned by their party, which extended these efforts under Harry Truman, whose tenure as president (1945–53) followed Roosevelt’s. Sensing an opportunity, the Republican Party began to develop a Southern strategy – explicitly foregrounded by Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964 – to win over these voters. This strategy, which included the use of racially coded language (‘dog whistles’) to tap into White angst over legal changes, such as the desegregation of schools following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), began over time to harden into ideology (Haney-López, 2015; Maxwell and Shields, 2019). After losing the White House in 2020, Republicans in nearly all states introduced hundreds of bills containing restrictive voting provisions. These bills included stipulations that limit early in-person and mail-in voting; narrow the permissible criteria for absentee voting; reduce the hours of poll stations on election day; and implement strict onsite voter-identification requirements (Gardner et al., 2021).⁴ ‘We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era’, Warnock argued in defence of the For the People Act of 2021 (H.R. 1), which, among other measures, would have enabled Congress to expand voting rights and would have prohibited partisan gerrymandering (the process of drawing the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favour a single party or type of voter). Of the measures introduced by Republicans, he concluded: ‘This is Jim Crow in new clothes’ (C-Span, 2021).

Condemning efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict voting rights in the states, Warnock employed a sartorial metaphor that invokes a complicated transatlantic figure in the history of racial injustice. Legislation that enforced or permitted racial segregation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century became colloquially known as Jim Crow laws. In 1865 a majority of states in the Union ratified the thirteenth constitutional amendment, which abolished slavery. Three years later, the states ratified the fourteenth amendment, which granted citizenship and civil rights to everyone born or naturalised in the United States – thus to African Americans everywhere, including those formerly enslaved. In 1870 the fifteenth amendment, which extended the franchise to all adult males, regardless of race, was ratified. In the post-Reconstruction era, Southern states were required, as a condition of their reintegration into the Union, to modify their constitutions to be consistent with these values. Because the enfranchisement of African Americans had the potential to fundamentally remake the political map in the South, Democratic leaders sought to ‘deprive the voter of the right to vote’ by restoring the electorate ‘to its pre-Reconstruction form and composition’ (Perman, 2003, pp. 14, 17).

Thus Democratic elites in the South after Reconstruction engaged in a two-pronged strategy of ‘organizing political support’ while simultaneously ‘demobilizing opponents’ (Redding, 2010, p. 2). From the mid-1870s until the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, a system of racial apartheid operated throughout the former Confederate states. Schools, shops, hotels, restaurants, and a variety of other facilities were either segregated by race (‘whites only’, ‘exclusively for coloreds’) or mandated to provide separate entrances that militated against racial mixing (Figure 0.1). Through various forms of violence and intimidation – from lynchings to poll taxes to strict voter registration laws to specious literacy examinations – White Southerners sought to disenfranchise African American males.

Many of the voters who delivered Warnock’s electoral victory in Georgia had lived through this period of disenfranchisement. It was only in 1965 that a federal Voting Rights Act prohibited the discriminatory and intimidating practices that kept African Americans from exercising their right to vote. In fact, the run-off election is itself one of the last vestiges of the segregationist era. Introduced by South Carolina Democrats in 1896 and subsequently adopted across the Southern states, run-offs require a candidate to win a majority rather than a plurality of the vote in either a primary or a general election. Much like gerrymandering, the run-off has been a technique to dilute the political power of minorities (Kousser, 1999, pp. 177–78; Blauner, 1989, p. 165).⁵

0.1 Colored Waiting Room’ sign at the bus station in Durham, North Carolina, USA, 1940.

The appellation ‘Jim Crow’ stems from a song-and-dance routine that that was highly popular in the 1830s and 1840s. Written by the White playwright Thomas Dartmouth Rice and performed by him in blackface, Jim Crow was a caricature of the enslaved Black male (Figure 0.2). Rice appeared on stage in frayed and patched breeches, ‘an old coat forlornly dilapidated, with a pair of shoes composed equally of patches and places for patches on his feet, and wearing a coarse straw hat in a melancholy condition of rent and collapse over a dense black wig of matted moss’. To members of the audience, Rice was an ‘extraordinary apparition’ whose appearance – as much the clothes on his body as the burnt-cork paint on his face – engendered an ‘instant’ and ‘electric’ effect (Nevin, 1867, p. 609).

0.2 Print (lithography) by George Edward Madeley showing Thomas D. Rice wearing the costume of his character ‘Jim Crow’, full-length portrait, facing left, with right arm raised and a little skip in his dance step.

Almost overnight, Jim Crow became a lucrative theatrical persona for Rice. He was not the first White actor to perform in blackface or to play to stereotype (Marshall, 2012, pp. 111–12). Rice’s theatrical success, however, ushered in the era of minstrelsy, when White audiences could satiate their curiosity about Black lives without actually encountering someone of another race (Lott, 1993, pp. 111–35). Thus while the term ‘Jim Crow’ was generally used in the 1830s to 1870s as shorthand referring to African Americans, by the post-Reconstruction era Jim Crow was also a personification of Southern segregation. Hence, on multiple occasions in the twentieth century, American civil rights activists and supporters repeatedly declared Jim Crow’s demise, including staging funeral processions for him (Figure 0.3).

0.3 Civil rights demonstration in a Parade for Victory by the Detroit branch of the NAACP, 1944. Six African American men are shown in top hats and tails.

The genesis of Rice’s act, a parody and mimicry of Blackness, is lost to history. Many of his contemporaries as well as subsequent historians of minstrelsy have attempted to identify the impulse for the Jim Crow character.⁶ According to one frequently repeated anecdote, Rice modelled the movements and lyrics of his song and dance on the movements and tunes of a physically disabled African American who worked in a stable yard behind a Midwest theatre at which Rice was performing (Ludlow, 1966, pp. 392–93). In a different account, Rice came across a street performer in Cincinnati whose ‘voice ringing clear … in an unmistakable dialect’ gave him the idea for ‘a school of music destined to excel in popularity all others’ (Nevin, 1867, pp. 608–09). Some scholars have pushed beyond such narratives to argue that, as W. T. Lhamon Jr, contends, ‘[n]o single man authored Jim Crow; no single stable hand made up or taught the song’ (1998, p. 181). Born into a racially mixed community in New York City, Rice would have been exposed to Afro-diasporic music, folklore, and dance from an early age. In touring the South as a young actor, he may have also learned about a folk trickster named Jim Crow, popular among the enslaved, who frequently outwitted the ‘masters’.⁷

Whatever the origins of Rice’s caricature, audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were mesmerised.⁸ By 1836 his Jim Crow routine was so well established and so highly successful that in June he set sail for Liverpool to conduct a year-long tour of the United Kingdom, along with a brief stint in Paris (Cockrell, 1997, p. 65). Combining onstage capering and sprightly movements with a lyrical monologue in vernacular speech, Rice’s signature song, ‘Jump Jim Crow’, would bring the house down. He performed to English Morris dancing music, with its loud rhythmical hornpipe and snake drum, and punctuated the end of each refrain – ‘Weel about and turn about and do jis so, / Eb’ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow’ – with a distinctive move that blended ‘the hops of the Irish jig with a jump and shuffle’ (Hill, 2010, p. 8).⁹ ‘The jump came from the custom of the broom jump’, Constance Valis Hill explains, ‘which took place when black slave couples were about to get married on the plantation (they would jump over a broom, backwards; if they kicked the broom, they could not marry)’. She continues, ‘The shuffle was the plantation slave’s creative substitute for dancing without crossing the legs, which was forbidden’ (2010, p. 8). Rice would perform in London on several occasions over the following decade.

At the peak of Rice’s career, virtually everyone seemed to be familiar with the movements and lyrics of ‘Jump Jim Crow’. ‘From the nobility and gentry, down to the lowest chimney-sweep in Great Britain’, Rice’s contemporary James Kennard, Jr, proclaimed, ‘and from the member of Congress down to the youngest apprentice or school-boy in America, it was all[:] Turn about and wheel about, and do just so, / And every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow’ (Kennard, 1848, p. 108). After Rice’s rousing performances at the Adelphi Theatre in London, the phrase ‘Jump Jim Crow’ entered British political parlance and popular caricature (Figure 0.4). In 1837 the cartoonist and caricaturist H.B. (John Doyle) depicted some of the leading British politicians of the day dressed in worn waistcoats, breeches, low-heeled shoes, and an array of hats and caps, dancing Jim Crow (Figure 0.5). In the centre of ‘Fancy Ball: Jim Crow Dance & Chorus’, Doyle portrays Prime Minister William Lamb, the second Viscount Melbourne, shrinking from the Irish Catholic MP Daniel O’Connell. Other politicians on either side and behind the pair include former prime ministers (Arthur Wellesley, Charles Grey) and cabinet officials (John Russell, James Graham, Thomas Spring Rice).

0.4 ‘Jim Crow’ as sung by Thomas D. Rice (1832–60), also known as ‘Daddy Rice’. Adelphi Theatre advertisement.

In his Illustrative Key to the Political Sketches of H.B., Doyle’s publisher Thomas McLean offers a gloss of the ‘Fancy Ball’ sketch. Lord Melbourne, appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland by the Tory prime minister George Canning in 1827, ‘made several speeches against reform in Parliament’, McLean notes, before becoming ‘a member of Lord Grey’s cabinet, by which reform was carried’. In the role of prime minister, Lord Melbourne ‘went to much greater lengths towards democracy than … Lord Grey … would venture to go; and, finally, if he did not actually make, yet consented to enjoy the advantage of, an alliance with Mr. O’Connell, the sworn enemy of the Protestant Church in Ireland, and the advocate of a repeal of the union’ (McLean, 1840, pp. 328–29). Doyle captures Lord Melbourne in a moment of recognising that his U-turns on policies and positions have brought him close to an embrace of O’Connell. Whatever one may think of the artist’s characterisation of these politicians, the sketch’s point is to underscore ideological inconsistency when such reversals benefit the self.

0.5 John Doyle (‘H.B.’), ‘Fancy Ball – Jim Crow Dance & Chorus’, printed by Alfred Ducôte, published by Thomas McLean, 17 April 1837. Lithograph.

When Raphael Warnock used the occasion of his inaugural speech in the United States Senate to describe Republican efforts to restrict voting rights as ‘Jim Crow in new clothes’, he intended to activate a specific chain of associations in his listeners’ minds. Just as Southern Democrats had once employed a variety of means to deliberately suppress the African American vote, Republican state lawmakers had been engaged for more than a decade in an effort, especially following Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, to pass legislation that, while seemingly impartial in regard to race (such as voter identification laws), has been or was intended to be used to target minority populations (Bentele and O’Brien, 2013). But insofar as Republicans were calling for the elimination or roll-back of some of the very initiatives to expand voting that they once supported, contemporaries representing their party might be superimposed on Doyle’s political cartoon. His depiction of the prime minister, cabinet officials, and others on a stage – an ‘infinite variety of style … observable in the dancers’, McLean notes, ‘each variety strikingly appropriate to the character of the performer’ – highlights the performative nature of politics. This is particularly salient in the age of social media, when elected officials use misleading or false evidence and apocryphal stories as the basis for theatrical displays of outrage over voting irregularities. Directed towards a partisan audience, such displays, widely dispersed and endlessly looped, can be used as a justification for predetermined actions.

The sartorial metaphor often functions as a node at which different strands of socio-political discourse converge. I begin with Warnock’s invocation of Jim Crow because it illuminates the material traces as well as the global-historical entanglements of contemporary sartorial metaphors that might otherwise appear to be merely domestic or nation-specific concerns. Indeed, arguing a need for electoral integrity, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government introduced the Elections Bill 2021 to the Parliament of the United Kingdom in July of the same year. Among other measures, the bill made it mandatory for an individual to show photo identification before being issued with a ballot at a local polling station. Opponents argued that the Act would disproportionately impact Black and minority-ethnic voters. Although Winston Churchill’s cabinet pushed a bill through Parliament that allowed the United States government to segregate its troops on British soil during World War II (Smith, 1987), discriminatory practices in the United Kingdom have been less overt than American state and local statutes legalising discrimination, if often just as insidious. Yet, as the Labour politician Clive Lewis pointed out during Parliament’s debate on the Elections Bill, the Johnson government ‘produced a piece of legislation straight out of the far-right playbook from the United States to look for a problem that does not exist’. Lewis continued: ‘Their voter suppression laws have been and are being used to reinstate Jim Crow-era mass disenfranchisement via the back door’ (Parliamentary Debates, 2021).

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle may not have attended Rice’s Jim Crow performances at the Adelphi Theatre, but he was nevertheless familiar with and helped to perpetuate the minstrel figure. His pumpkin-eating Quashee, who occupies a central place in his ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849), is an invidious stereotype of formerly enslaved West Indians. Quashee sings, dances, and is generally merry in his lazy refusal to work. Although Carlyle saw the pumpkins that West Indians devour as well as ‘the finery they wear’ as signs of gluttony and excess, they were to John Stuart Mill, who wrote a rebuttal to Carlyle’s essay, indications of earned prosperity through labour (1850, p. 27). For Carlyle and Mill, therefore, the consuming body is the site of conflicting interpretations.

This volume focuses on the long nineteenth century, which witnessed a particularly serious effort to theorise the links between political and sartorial styles and also established concepts with which scholars today continue to work. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle was perhaps the first intellectual to offer sustained consideration of the social dimensions of clothing. Serialised in Fraser’s Magazine between November 1833 and August 1834, and subsequently published in several distinct book versions in the United States and Britain between 1834 and 1838, Sartor Resartus proved highly influential in shaping an understanding of the semiotic function of clothes.

In Carlyle’s philosophical-cum-satirical novel, readers are introduced to the work of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor of Things-in-General at the University of Weissnichtwo, by an unnamed English editor of Fraser’s Magazine. Tasked with writing a review of Teufelsdröckh’s Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence), the editor attempts to expound on its peculiar ‘Clothes-Philosophy’. On the one hand, every symbol can be grasped in sartorial terms. According to Teufelsdröckh,

all emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven. Must not the imagination weave garments, visible bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our reason are, like spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful; – the rather if, as we often see, the hand, too, aid her, and (by wool-clothes or otherwise) reveal such even to the outward eye?’ (Carlyle, 1837, pp. 77–78)

Even the human body is simply ‘an emblem; a clothing or visible garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a light particle, down from heaven’ (p. 78). ‘Nature’ and ‘Life’ make up what the professor calls ‘one Garment, a living garment’ or symbol of God (p. 210). On the other hand, all clothes function semiotically as material or cultural status signifiers or are otherwise communicative: ‘Clothes, from the king’s mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning victory over want.’ Thus an individual may be ‘said to be clothed with authority, clothed with beauty, with curses, and the like’ (pp. 77, 78). For Teufelsdröckh (as for Carlyle), humanity has, since its inception, endeavoured to find the right garments to give shape to and embody what, at any given point, it recognises as universal truths.¹⁰

A recognition of the semiotics of clothing is also an acknowledgement that the dressed body participates in a network of cultural signification. As Elizabeth Wilson usefully puts it, the peculiarity of clothing derives in part from its role connecting ‘the biological body to the social being, and the public to private’ (2003, p. 2). In the historical account of clothes that Teufelsdröckh provides, humanity first begins to dress itself not simply for functional reasons, such as the need to keep warm or the desire to appear modest in front of others, but for ornamental purposes. As soon as basic needs such as air, water, food, and shelter have been met, humans seek to satiate the ‘first spiritual want’, which is ‘decoration’ (Carlyle, 1837, p. 44). Therefore, the editor explains, Teufelsdröckh ‘undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand proposition, that man’s earthly interests are all hooked and buttoned together and held up by Clothes’. Or, as Teufelsdröckh himself puts it, uncharacteristically succinctly, ‘Society is founded upon cloth’ (p. 56).

Thus garments function as the external manifestation of humanity’s sociability. ‘[M]an is a spirit, and bound by invisible bonds to all men’, Teufelsdröckh writes, and ‘clothes … are the visible emblems of that fact’ (Carlyle, 1837, p. 66). Indeed, polity depends on sartorial differentiation. A judge stripped of the ‘emblems’ signifying one’s judicial position – ‘a horsehair wig, squirrel skins, and a plush gown’ – becomes interchangeable with members of the populace (p. 66). Social distinctions are maintained through dress as well. At ‘pompous ceremonials … [and] royal drawingrooms’, rank and station (‘how Duke this is presented by Archduke that, and Colonel A by General B’) are understood or recognised through visible appearance (p. 66). For the average person, clothes serve as an external indication of one’s identity. They are or can be expressive of one’s individuality (p. 45).

Nevertheless, for Teufelsdröckh, the inward and the outward are not necessarily related. External appearances may very well be superficial, lacking in substance, or even deceptive. If, as Teufelsdröckh proclaims, garments ‘are threatening to make clothes-screens of us’ (Carlyle, 1837, p. 45), the apparel most associated with a lack of meaning is that worn by the dandy. ‘A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing man; a man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes’, the editor explains. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well; so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress’ (p. 275). In fact, precisely because what most people ‘do reverence’ are clothes (‘Who ever saw any lord my-lorded in tattered blanket, fastened with wooden skewer?’), there is an ever-present danger of outer garments having no necessary relation to inward essence (p. 244).

From this perspective, the buyers of second-hand clothing in the shops of Monmouth Street in London can be seen as mere bodies that ‘appropriate what was meant for the cloth only’ (Carlyle, 1837, p. 244). Yet Teufelsdröckh concludes of his era that even garments befitting an individual’s station or occupation, such as the vestments worn by a clergyperson, may ‘become mere hollow shapes, or masks’ when spirit is evacuated from them (p. 221).

Because Teufelsdröckh affirms the importance of clothing to social life, he cannot countenance the implicit arguments advanced by some of his contemporaries that humanity, in its nakedness, is equal. As a ‘Sansculottist’, Teufelsdröckh is sympathetic to the revolutionary impulse of stripping away visible symbols of distinction. When reading historical accounts about ‘the Anointed Presence’ and the ‘dukes, grandees, bishops, [and] generals’ who would gather around him, Teufelsdröckh admits to imagining that ‘by some enchanter’s wand, the – shall I speak it? – the Clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps’, and all are left without ‘a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep’ (Carlyle, 1837, pp. 65, 66). Nevertheless, he rejects the ‘Adamite’ stance of being ‘an enemy to Clothes in the abstract’ (p. 63). Instead, Teufelsdröckh’s clothes philosophy obliquely calls for new forms of dress that meet the historical moment and, in so doing, properly and authentically align the inward spirit and the outward vesture.

If the body is a biological fact rooted in nature, dress – ‘an assemblage of modifications of the body and/or supplements to the body’ (Eicher and Roach-Higgins, 1992, p. 15) – is culturally mediated and historically variable (Entwistle, 2000, p. 6). It is foundational to human sociality. In turn, one’s political commitments are, necessarily, aimed at stabilising, modifying, or radically transforming the social world. Hence, a wide range of Victorian political thinkers, influenced by Carlyle, assumed that self-presentation and politics are linked. The political theorist Herbert Spencer recognised a direct correlation between attire and political ideology that, he believed, necessitated analysis: ‘Whoever has studied the physiognomy of political meetings, cannot fail to have remarked a connection between democratic opinions and peculiarities of costume’ (1858, p. 109). When Walter Bagehot, the mid-Victorian journalist and Liberal Party economic advisor, wanted to explain changes in the operations of parliamentary government that had produced what he claimed to be contentment with the status quo among his contemporaries, he likened the ‘dignified’ and ‘efficient’ parts of the political system to well-fitting clothing. ‘Thirty years ago’, Bagehot writes in The English Constitution, recalling the era of the Great Reform Act, when changes to the British electoral system were adopted, ‘[t]he nation had outgrown its institutions, and was cramped by them. It was a man in the clothes of a boy; every limb wanted more room, and every garment to be fresh made’ (2001, p. 113). Published serially in the Fortnightly Review between 1865 and 1867 against the backdrop of debates about a second reform bill, The English Constitution was not alone in making a link between the constraining nature of garments out of which one has grown and the written and unwritten political arrangements of the United Kingdom. Indeed, analogies of political reform to tailored clothes filtered into popular culture. The 11 May 1867 edition of Punch, or The London Charivari depicts the Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, then leader of the Liberal opposition, and Edward Smith-Stanley, Lord Derby, immediate past prime minister, as ‘political tailors’ (Figure 0.6). Disraeli and Gladstone are in the foreground: the former stitches a reform bill while the latter looks down at the pile of scraps, which symbolise the many amendments to the bill on which he had been voted down. Lord Derby wields a large pair of scissors in the background.

In referring to costumes and garments, Spencer and Bagehot evince a concern with dress. By contrast, John Morley – one of Britain’s premier politicians and John Stuart Mill’s leading disciple (Morrison, 2021) – was principally concerned with fashion. Writing more than a decade later than Bagehot, Morley, in his study of Diderot and the philosophes, analogised political change to stylistic trends: ‘Form of government is like the fashion of a man’s clothes; it may fret or may comfort him, may be imposing or mean, may react upon his spirits to elate or depress them’ (1878, p. 121). If fashion is defined as ‘rapid and arbitrary changes in clothing style over time’ (Carter, 2003, p. 8), then this was not Morley’s specific concern. His larger point, however, is that styles of garments, or fashion, like forms of government, are subject to change.¹¹

Despite the prominence of sartorial metaphors in the political thought and popular culture of the nineteenth century, especially concentrated in the mid-Victorian period when debates about the extension of the franchise reached a fever pitch, little attention has been paid by cultural historians to the links between clothes and political culture. Taking observations by Bagehot, Morley, and Carlyle as points of departure, this volume further develops the notion of fashion and clothing as a language. This concept has a significant intellectual history that generally reflects two schools of thought. Some thinkers have used a sender/receiver model to understand clothing as conveying messages transmitted from an individual to another individual or group (Rouse, 1989; Eicher, Evenson, and Lutz, 2000). Others have suggested the meanings of garments are, instead, culturally negotiated. The latter school includes foundational contributions by the economic theorist Thorstein Veblen (1994) and the sociologist Georg Simmel (1956) on fashion as a signifier for socio-economic status and subsequent work by the fashion theorists Caroline Evans (2003), Malcolm Barnard (1996, 2007), and Elizabeth Wilson (2003). What the two groups have in common, however, is the belief that clothes and dress are forms of non-verbal communication. As such, they can be harnessed to craft political messages that, in their rhetorical, material, and visual instantiations, assert or reinforce political identities at least as much as the written or spoken word does.

0.6 John Tenniel, ‘The Political Tailors’, 1867.

This volume also shares with Bagehot, Morley, and Spencer a concern with the intersection of political and sartorial styles. To the extent that style can be understood as ‘self-telling’, an exercise of agency in which an individual discloses autobiographical details through ‘the assemblage of garments, accessories, and beauty regimes’ (Tulloch, 2010, p. 276), political commitments can be affirmed by and expressed through one’s self-presentation. Communities also coalesce around styles. The rhetorician Barry Brummett has argued that style must be understood as ‘socially held sign systems composed of a wide range of signs beyond only language, systems that are used to accomplish rhetorical purposes across the cultural spectrum’ (2008, p. 3). Style, therefore, consists of ‘movement, gestures, speech, vocabulary, decoration, and the like’, with ‘cohesive clusters of style’ proving readable, as Spencer had observed of the apparel worn in political meetings (Brummett, 2008, p. xii).

While alluding to the contemporary relevance of studying nineteenth-century dress in varied political contexts, this volume also brings together two twenty-first-century turns in historical and contextually oriented literary scholarship: material culture analysis and performativity. Since the 1990s, literary critics and historians have been re-examining late modern political culture with a particular interest in Victorian liberalism as a social and cultural formation.¹² The 2010s saw ‘a surge in the historiographical use of performance as an analytical category’ in political history, with especial attention paid to the theatricality of popular politics (Yeandle and Newey, 2016, p. 2). Yet the Victorian visual satirist John Doyle recognised as much when, in ‘Fancy Ball: Jim Crow Dance & Chorus’, he depicted politicians inhabiting a theatrical space and – with their ‘infinite variety of style’ – appealing to various constituents as perceived members of an audience.

The performative nature and theatricality of clothing in nineteenth-century Britain and its colonies has not received nearly as much attention as discussions of politics and style with respect to other periods and national contexts. Much fine work, including edited collections by Djurdja Bartlett (2019), Beverly Lemire (2010), Justine de Young (2017), and Wendy Parkins (2002b), has ranged across periods and cultures to examine the ways in which fashion has intersected with and responded to a variety of social and political forces and occurrences. Studies by Kate Haulman (2011) and Regina A. Root (2010) have linked fashion to revolutionary aims. Other works, including a study by Marie Grace Brown (2017), have examined the relationship between dress and civic engagement. An edited collection by Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin, and Caroline Cox (2002) includes essays on dress in terms of late modern national identity.

An analysis of dress as a facet of late modern political cultures necessarily requires a predominant, although not exclusive, focus on men and masculinity. Of course, from the nineteenth century onwards, gender politics intensified, with women’s groups engaged in various forms of activism. Campaigns for dress reform were often connected to the organised suffragist movement (Steele, 2001; Cunningham, 2003). As Kimberly Wahl has compellingly shown in a pair of related essays, so too was ‘fashion … a crucial and yet largely unacknowledged factor’ in the rise of and debates over ‘New Women, Suffragettes, and Bohemians’ (2017, p. 207). Wahl demonstrates that the colour white ‘became a fundamental and central keystone in the symbolic language of the British Suffrage Movement’, playing an ‘integral role in the daily activities of campaigners … [and] functioning on a number of levels to define and inform the motifs and iconic signifiers of suffrage ephemera and print culture’ (2016, pp. 21, 22). Whereas historians of an earlier generation tended to characterise early twentieth-century ‘suffragette fashion as a psychologization or trivialization of politics’, Wendy Parkins has shown that ‘it should rather be seen as a component of feminist agency, which deliberately drew attention to the suffragette body in order to contest the legitimacy of the masculine political subject’ (2002a, p. 120). Yet insofar as the movement for women’s suffrage contested legal norms and regulations maintained by an all-male political system, a reconsideration of the behaviours, ideologies, and dress of men is warranted (Griffin, 2012).

To be sure, women are not absent from this volume. The final chapter examines the career of Gertrude Bell, the British government’s ‘Oriental Secretary’ in the Middle East during the early twentieth century. Fluent in Arabic and Persian, Bell travelled the region on horseback multiple times, and her knowledge of the geography, languages, and cultures of the Middle East made her indispensable to the Foreign Office and the War Office in the lead-up to World War I. In contrast to nineteenth-century institutional and party politics, which were the preserve of men, Bell represents the increasing political influence of women in the early twentieth century.

The purported legitimacy of the nineteenth-century masculine political subject was rooted, in part, in an ideology of separate spheres. As an ideal of a feminine private domain of the home and a masculine realm of work and politics took shape in the eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth century, a close association among women, fashion, and style was forged. When suffragists took to the streets, they were seen to transgress a powerfully imaginative line (Rolley, 1990, p. 50). Although scholarship in the past few decades has called attention to the many ways in which separate spheres were, in fact, unrealised in practice, nevertheless contemporary scholarship discusses fashionable dress and stylised forms of self-presentation primarily in relation to women and dandies.¹³

Because histories and theories of fashion and style in relation to men remain an under-represented area in scholarship, this volume’s emphasis on masculine dress is one of its distinguishing characteristics. Men’s appearance in the nineteenth century was once widely considered so unremarkable that scholars had relatively little to say about it. The ‘great masculine renunciation’ thesis promulgated by the psychologist J. C. Flügel – in which men disavowed their ‘claim to be considered beautiful’, delegating to women various forms of ornamentation, and ‘henceforth aimed at being only useful’ (1930, p. 111) – was once a commonly accepted means of accounting for men’s uniform appearance in the period. The notion of masculine renunciation continues to inform some approaches to men’s wear (Kutcha, 2002), but most scholars now accept this premise as entirely too simplistic (Wilson, 2003; Shannon, 2006). Indeed, as Ulrich Lehmann has remarked, men’s ‘apparel did not cease being beautiful; it was the concept of beauty … that changed’ (2000, p. 411 n. 47).

Several decades before Flügel advanced his theory, Thorstein Veblen (1994) sought to provide his own account of the increasingly funereal appearance of men’s dress. In contrast to men’s wear, which symbolised power, Veblen argued, women’s dress indicated their prescribed leisure. Thus for women of the non-working classes, their clothes were about display, not function. Yet as Christopher Breward has observed, this argument tells us very little about ‘the typical consumption patterns and aspirations of the middle- and lower-middle-class male’ (1995, p. 171). The politics of consumption is at the