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• CHAPTER XVII •

THE DRESSING ROOM

I

Toward the end of September 1991, two German hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon of Nuremberg, were making their way along a glacier high in the South Tyrolean Alps, at a place called the Tisenjoch Pass, on the border of Austria and Italy, when they happened upon a human body protruding from the ice at the glacier’s edge. The body was leathery and severely emaciated but intact.

The Simons made a two-mile detour to a manned hut at Similaun to report their discovery. Police were summoned, but when they arrived it quickly became apparent that this was a matter not for them but for prehistorians. With the body were personal effects—a copper ax, a flint knife, arrows, and a quiver—that connected the man to a much earlier, more primitive age.

Subsequent radiocarbon dating showed that the man had died over five thousand years ago. He was quickly nicknamed Ötzi, after the nearest major valley, the Ötztal; others called him the Iceman. Ötzi had not only a full range of tools but also all his clothing. Nothing so complete and ancient had ever been found before.

Contrary to common assumption, bodies that fall into glaciers almost never pop out at the terminal end in an impeccably preserved state. Glaciers grind and churn with slow but brutal force, and any bodies within them are generally crushed to molecules. Very occasionally they are stretched to outlandish lengths, like characters flattened by a steamroller in a cartoon. If no oxygen gets to the body, it may undergo a process called saponification, in which the flesh transmutes into a waxy, foul-smelling substance called adipocere. Such bodies look eerily as if they have been carved from soap and lose nearly all meaningful definition.

Ötzi’s body was preserved as well as it was through a combination of unusually favorable circumstances. First, he died in the open on a day that was dry but with the temperature falling swiftly: effectively, he was freeze-dried. Then he was covered by a series of dry, light snowfalls, and probably stayed in that perfectly frigid state for years before the glacier slowly claimed him. Even then he remained in an outlying eddy that saved him—and, no less important, his possessions—from being dispersed and crushed. Had Ötzi died a few steps closer to the glacier or a little lower down the slopes or in drizzle or sun, or in almost any other circumstances, he would not be with us now. However ordinary Ötzi may have been in life, in death he became the very rarest of corpses.

What made Ötzi uniquely exciting was that this was not a burial, with personal possessions thoughtfully arranged about him, but a person found straight from life, with the day-to-day items he had on him when he died. Nothing like that had ever been found before, and it was almost wholly undone by four days of overexuberant recovery efforts. Passersby and sightseers were allowed to take turns hacking away at the ice that held the body. One well-meaning helper seized a stick and tried digging with it, but it snapped in two. “The stick,” the National Geographic reported, “turned out to be part of the hazel-wood and larch-wood frame of the Iceman’s backpack.” The volunteers, in short, were trying to dig out the corpse using his own priceless artifacts.

The case was dealt with by Austrian police, and the body, once freed, was whisked away to a refrigerator in Innsbruck. But a subsequent GPS investigation showed that in fact Ötzi had been just inside Italian territory when found, and after some legal wrangling the Austrians were ordered to surrender their treasured body, and Ötzi was driven over the Brenner Pass to Italy.

Today Ötzi lies on a slab in a refrigerated room in the archaeological museum in Bolzano, a German-speaking city in the north of Italy. His skin, the color and texture of fine leather, is stretched tight across his bones. His face wears an expression that looks very like weary resignation. Since being hauled off the mountain nearly twenty years ago, Ötzi has become the most forensically studied human being in history. Scientists could determine many of the details of his life with startling precision. With electron microscopes they could see that on the day of his death he consumed ibex and deer meat, bread made from a type of wheat called spelt, and some unidentified vegetables. From pollen grains recovered from his colon and lungs they were able to deduce that he had died in the spring and had begun the day in the valley below. By studying isotopic trace elements in his teeth, they could even work out what he had eaten as a child and therefore where he had been raised, and concluded that he had grown up in the Eisack Valley, in what is now Italy, then moved to a valley called the Vinschgau farther west near the modern border with Switzerland. The biggest surprise of all was how old he was: at least forty but possibly as much as fifty-three, making him exceedingly old for the period. But there was also much they couldn’t explain, including how he had died, and what he was doing nearly two miles above sea level at the time of his death. His bow was unstrung and only half made, and the arrows mostly had no flights, and so were useless, yet for some reason he took them with him.

Normally not many people stop at small archaeological museums in out-of-the-way provincial towns, but Bolzano’s museum is thronged with visitors throughout the year and the gift shop does a brisk trade in Ötzi keepsakes. Visitors line up to peer at him through a small window. He lies naked on his back on a glass slab. His brown skin glistens from the mist that is perpetually sprayed over him as a preservative. In fact, there is nothing innately distinctive about Ötzi. He is a completely normal, if unusually old and well-preserved, human being. What is extraordinary are his many possessions. They are the material equivalent of time travel.

In addition to the ax, knife, quiver, and arrows, Ötzi had shoes, clothing, two birchbark canisters, a sheath, a bowstave, miscellaneous small tools, some berries, a piece of ibex meat, and two spherical lumps of birch fungus, each about the size of a large walnut and carefully threaded with sinew. One of the canisters had contained glowing embers wrapped in maple leaves, for starting fires. Such an assemblage of personal effects was unique. Some of the items were, as it were, really unique in that they had never been imagined, much less seen. The birch fungus was a particular mystery because it was obviously treasured, and yet birch fungus is not known to be good for anything.

His equipment employed eighteen different types of wood—a remarkable variety. The most surprising of all his tools was the ax. It was copper-bladed and of a type known as a Remedello ax, after a site in Italy where such implements were first found. But Ötzi’s ax was hundreds of years older than the oldest Remedello ax. “It was,” in the words of one observer, “as if the tomb of a medieval warrior had yielded a modern rifle.” The ax changed the time frame for the Copper Age in Europe by no less than a thousand years.

But the real revelation and excitement were the clothes. Before Ötzi we had no idea—or, to be more precise, nothing but ideas—of how Stone Age people dressed. Such materials as survived existed only as fragments. Here was a complete outfit, and it was full of surprises. His clothes were made from the skins and furs of an impressive range of animals—red deer, bear, chamois, goat, and cattle. He also had with him a woven grass rectangle that was three feet long. This might have been a kind of rain cape, but it might equally have been a sleeping mat. Again, nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined.

Ötzi wore fur leggings held up with leather strips attached to a waist strap that made them look uncannily—almost comically—like the kind of nylon hose and garter sets that Hollywood pinups wore during the Second World War. Nobody had remotely foreseen such a getup. He wore a loincloth of goatskin and a hat made from the fur of a brown bear—probably a kind of hunting trophy. It would have been very warm and covetably stylish. The rest of his outfit was mostly made from the skin and fur of red deer. Hardly any came from domesticated animals, the opposite of what was expected.

The boots were the greatest surprise of all. They looked like nothing so much as a pair of bird’s nests sitting on soles of stiffened bear skin, and seemed hopelessly ill-designed and insubstantial. Intrigued, a Czech foot and shoe expert named Vaclav Patek carefully fashioned a replica pair, using exactly the same design and materials, then tried them on a mountain walk. They were, he reported in some astonishment, “more comfortable and capable” than any modern boots he had ever worn. Their grip on slippery rock was better than modern rubber, and it was all but impossible to get blisters in them. They were, above all, exceedingly effective against cold.

Despite all the forensic probings, ten years passed before anyone noticed that embedded in Ötzi’s left shoulder was an arrowhead. Closer inspection showed also that his clothes and weapons were speckled with the blood of four other people. Ötzi, it turned out, had been killed in a violent showdown of some kind. Why his murderers chased him up to a high mountain pass is a question that is not easily answered, even speculatively. Even more mysterious is why the murderers didn’t help themselves to his possessions. Ötzi’s personal items, particularly his ax, had real value. Yet having evidently stalked him for quite a distance and engaged in a remarkably bloody fight at close quarters—clearly it takes a lot of lashing out to draw the blood of four people—they left him where he fell, with his possessions undisturbed. It is of course lucky for us that they did, for his personal effects provide answers to all kinds of otherwise unanswerable questions, except the one that seems bound to tantalize forever now—namely, what on Earth was going on up there?

We are in the dressing room—or what at least was called the dressing room on Edward Tull’s original plans. One of Tull’s many architectural curiosities was that he didn’t provide direct access between the dressing room and Mr. Marsham’s bedroom next door but had both decanting separately into the upstairs passage. So in order to dress or undress, Mr. Marsham would have had to leave his bedroom and walk a few steps along the corridor to the dressing room—rather an odd way to go about things, bearing in mind that just across the way was the “Female Servant’s Bedroom” (now the bathroom)—which is to say, that of the loyal spinster Miss Worm. Such an arrangement would almost certainly have guaranteed occasional encounters, which we may presume would tend to be awkward. But then again perhaps not. A separate oddity is how cozily proximate their bedrooms were, considering how rigorously their domains were separated by day. It is certainly a hard household to figure.

In any case, Mr. Marsham apparently had second thoughts. In the house as built, the dressing room and bedroom are in fact connected. The dressing room is now, and probably for the better part of a century has been, a bathroom. We still do some of our dressing in there, however, which is just as well, because the long and really quite mysterious history of dressing is what we have come here to talk about.

How long people have been dressing themselves is a question not easy to answer. All that can be said is that about forty thousand years ago, there stepped from the shadows the big-brained, behaviorally modern people commonly known as Cro-Magnons (after a cave in the Dordogne region of France where they were first found) and that among these new people was some ingenious soul who came up with one of the greatest, most underrated inventions in history: string. String is marvelously elemental. It is simply two pieces of fiber placed side by side and twisted together. That achieves two things: it makes a cord that is strong, and it allows long cords to be built up from short fibers. Imagine where we would be without it. There would be no cloth, clothing, fishing lines, nets, snares, rope, leashes, tethers, slings, bows for shooting arrows, or a thousand useful things more. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, a textile historian, was hardly exaggerating when she called string the “weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth.”

Historically, the two most common fibers were linen and hemp. Linen was made from flax and was popular because flax grows tall—up to a height of four feet—and quickly. Flax can be sown one month and harvested the next. The downside is that flax is tediously demanding in its preparation. Some twenty different actions are required to separate flax fibers from their woody stems and soften them enough for spinning. These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.

The result of all that effort was a sturdy and adaptable fabric: linen. Although we tend to think of linen as snowy white, its natural hue is brown. To become white, it had to be bleached in sunlight, a slow process that could take months to execute. The poorer stuff was left unbleached and made into canvas or sacking. The principal drawback of linen is that it doesn’t take a dye well, so there isn’t a great deal you can do with it to make it exciting.

Hemp was roughly similar to flax, but coarser and not so comfortable to wear, so it tended to be used for things like rope and sails. It did, however, have the evidently very considerable compensating advantage that you could smoke it and get high, which Barber believes accounts for its prevalence and rapid spread in antiquity. Not to put too fine a point on it, people throughout the ancient world were very, very fond of hemp, and grew more of it than they needed for ropes or sails.

But the primary clothing material of the Middle Ages was wool. Wool was a lot warmer and more hard-wearing than linen, but wool fibers are short and difficult to work, especially as early sheep were surprisingly unwoolly creatures. Their wool, such as it was, originally was a downy undercoating beneath dreadlocks of tangled hair. To turn sheep into the blocks of fleeciness we know and value today took centuries of devoted breeding. Moreover, wool wasn’t sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around.

Even once medieval people had a pile of wool in front of them, their work was really just beginning. To turn it into cloth required washing, combing, carding, teaseling, warping, sizing, and fulling, among many other processes. Fulling consisted of beating and shrinking the cloth; sizing involved the application of a glaze. Combing the fibers flat created a hard-wearing but comparatively stiff fabric: a worsted. For softer wool, carding paddles were used to make the fibers fluffier. The hair of weasels, stoats, and other animals was sometimes blended into the mix to make the finished cloth more lustrous.

The fourth principal fabric was silk. Silk was a rare luxury, literally worth its weight in gold. Accounts of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nearly always dwell on the way criminals were imprisoned or transported to Australia for the theft of a handkerchief or packet of lace or some other seeming trifle, but in fact these were often items of great value. A pair of silk stockings could cost £5 and a packet of lace could sell for £20—enough to live on for a couple of years and an exceedingly serious loss to any shopkeeper. A silk cloak would cost £50—well beyond the means of any but the highest nobility. Most people, if they had silk at all, had it in the form of ribbons or other trim. The Chinese ferociously guarded the secrets of silk production; the punishment for exporting a single mulberry seed was execution. The Chinese needn’t have worried too much about northern Europe, because mulberry trees were too sensitive to frost to thrive there. Britain tried hard for a hundred years to produce silk, and sometimes got good results, but ultimately couldn’t overcome the drawback of periodic harsh winters.

With these few materials, and some trimmings like feathers and ermine, people managed to make wondrous outfits—so much so that by the fourteenth century rulers felt it necessary to introduce what were known as sumptuary laws, to limit what people wore. Sumptuary laws laid down with fanatical precision what materials and colors of fabric a person could wear. In Shakespeare’s day, someone with an income of £20 a year was permitted to wear a satin doublet but not a satin gown, while someone worth £100 a year had no restrictions on satin, but could wear velvet only on doublets and then so long as the velvet wasn’t crimson or blue—colors reserved for people of still higher status. Restrictions existed, too, on the amount of fabric one could employ in a particular article of clothing, and whether it might be worn pleated or straight and so on. When Shakespeare and his fellow players were given royal patronage by King James I in 1603, one of the perks of the appointment was that they were allowed four and a half yards of scarlet cloth—a considerable honor for someone in as louche a profession as acting.

Sumptuary laws were enacted partly to keep people within their class, but partly also for the good of domestic industries, since they were often designed to depress the importation of foreign materials. That’s why for a time there was a Statute of Caps, aimed at helping national capmakers through a depression, which required people to wear caps instead of hats. For obscure reasons, Puritans resented the law and were often fined for flouting it. Although various clothing restrictions were enshrined in statutes in 1337, 1363, 1463, 1483, 1510, 1533, and 1554, records show they were never much enforced. They were repealed altogether in 1604.

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history—perhaps most—it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.

Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn’t have to do physical work. Throughout history, and across many cultures, this has generally been far more important than comfort. In the sixteenth century, to take just one example, starch came into fashion. One result was the magnificent ruffs known as piccadills. Really enormous piccadills made eating almost impossible and necessitated the fashioning of special long-handled spoons so that diners could get food to their lips. But there must have been a lot of dismaying dribbles and a general sense of hunger at mealtimes for many.

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn’t get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn’t actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have always been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.

Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him.

Wigs might be made of almost anything—human hair, horsehair, cotton thread, goat hair, silk. One maker advertised a model made of fine wire. They came in many styles—bag, bob, campaign, grizzle, Ramillies, cauliflower, brown tie, riding bob, and more, all denoting some crucial difference in length of braid or bounciness of curl. Wigs were so valuable—a full one could cost £50—that they were left as bequests in wills. The more substantial the wig, the higher up the social echelon one stood—one became literally a bigwig. Wigs were also one of the first things snatched by robbers. The ridiculousness of outsized hairpieces didn’t escape comedic notice. Sir John Vanbrugh in The Relapse had one of his characters, a wigmaker, boast of a wig “so long and full of hair that it may serve you for a hat and cloak in all weathers.”

All wigs tended to be scratchy, uncomfortable, and hot, particularly in summer. To make them more bearable, many men shaved their heads, so we should be surprised to see many famous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century figures as their wives saw them first thing in the morning. It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn’t afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.

Wigs took a lot of maintenance. Once every week or so they had to be sent out to have their buckles (from the French boucles, meaning curls), reshaped on heated rollers, and possibly baked in an oven, a process known as fluxing. From about 1700, for reasons that had nothing to do with common sense or practicality, it became fashionably necessary to place on one’s head a daily snowfall of white powder.

The main powdering agent was simple flour. When wheat harvests failed in France in the 1770s, there were riots all over as starving people realized that diminished supplies of flour were not being baked into bread, but were instead being used to powder the privileged heads of aristocrats. By the late eighteenth century, hair powders were commonly colored—blue and pink were especially popular—and scented, too.

Powdering could be done while the wig was on a wooden stand, but it was widely agreed that maximum stylishness was achieved by powdering the wig while it was on. The procedure required the owner to don his wig, cover his shoulders and upper body with a cloth, and stick his face in a paper funnel (to avoid choking) while a servant or frisseur armed with a bellows dispensed clouds of powder onto his head. A few more fastidious people took matters further. A certain Prince Raunitz employed four valets, who puffed out four clouds of powder, each dyed a different color, through which the prince smartly strode in order to achieve exactly the right effect. Learning of this, Lord Effingham employed five French frisseurs just to look after his hair; Lord Scarborough hired six.

And then, pretty abruptly, wigs went out of fashion. Wigmakers, in desperation, petitioned George III to make wig wearing by males compulsory, but the king declined. By the early 1800s, nobody wanted them and old wigs were commonly used as dust mops. Today they survive only in certain courtrooms in Britain and the Commonwealth. Judicial wigs these days are made of horsehair and cost about £600, I’m told. To avoid a look of newness—which many lawyers fear might suggest inexperience—recently purchased wigs are customarily soaked in tea.

Women, meanwhile, took wig wearing literally to another level—building their hair up on a wire scaffolding known as a pallisade or commode. By mixing greased wool and horsehair with their own hair, they could attain truly monumental heights. Female wigs sometimes rose as much as two and a half feet, making the average wearer roughly seven and a half feet tall. When traveling to engagements, they often had to sit on the floor of their carriages or ride with their heads out the windows. At least two fatalities were attributed to women’s hair catching fire after brushing against chandeliers.

Women’s hair became so complicated that it took on a whole new vocabulary; even individual curls or sections of curls had names—frivolité, des migraines, l’insurgent, monte la haut, sorti, frelange, flandon, burgoigne, choux, crouche, berger, confident, and many more. (Chignon, for a knot at the back of the head, is about the only word that survives from this once-extensive vocabulary.) Because of the amount of work involved, it was not uncommon for women to leave their hair untouched for months on end, except to add a little paste from time to time to keep everything cemented in place. Many slept with their necks on special wooden blocks to keep their hairstyles elevated and undisturbed. One consequence of failing to wash was that their hair often swarmed with insects, particularly weevils. One woman reportedly miscarried when she discovered that mice were nesting in her upper decks.

Extreme hair: Miss Prattle Consulting Doctor Double Fee About Her Pantheon Head Dress (photo credit 17.1)

The heyday of the towering hairstyles for women was the 1790s, when men were already giving up wigs. Generally women’s wigs were festooned with ribbons and feathers, but sometimes with even more elaborate devices. John Woodforde, in his History of Vanity, mentions a woman who had a model ship, complete with sails and cannon, riding the waves of her headwear, as if protecting it from invasion.

In the same period it became fashionable to wear artificial moles, known as mouches. Gradually these artificial patches took on shapes, like stars or crescent moons, which were worn on the face, neck, and shoulders. One lady is recorded as sporting a coach and six horses galloping across her cheeks. At the peak of the fashion, people wore a superabundance of mouches until they must have looked rather as if they were covered in flies. Patches were worn by men as well as women, and were said to reflect one’s political leanings by whether they were worn on the right cheek (Whigs) or left cheek (Tories). Similarly, a heart on the right cheek signaled that the wearer was married, and on the left cheek that he or she was engaged. Patches became so complicated and various that they generated a whole vocabulary, too, so that a patch on the chin was known as a silencieuse, one on the nose was called l’impudent or l’effrontée, one in the middle of the forehead was a majesteuse, and so on all around the head. In the 1780s, just to show that creative ridiculousness really knew no bounds, it became briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin.

Patches at least were not toxic, and as such were almost the only beauty aid in centuries that wasn’t. There was in England a long tradition of poisoning oneself in the name of beauty. Pupils could be attractively dilated with drops of belladonna, or deadly nightshade. Most dangerous of all was ceruse, a paste made of white lead and commonly known as paint. Ceruse was very popular. For females with smallpox scars it was applied as a kind of spackle, to fill in the divots, but even many women who were free of blemishes used it to give themselves a lovely ghostly pallor. Ceruse remained popular for a remarkably long time. The first reference to it as a cosmetic is in 1519 when it was recorded that women of fashion “whyte their face, necke and pappis [which is to say breasts] with cerusse.” In 1754, the Connoisseur, a periodical, was still marveling that “every lady you meet is besmeared with unguent ceruss and plaister.” Ceruse had three principal drawbacks: it cracked when the wearer smiled or grimaced, after a few hours it turned gray, and if used long enough it could kill. At the very least, it could make eyes swell painfully and teeth loosen and fall out. At least two well-known beauties, the courtesan Kitty Fisher and the socialite Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry, are said to have died from ceruse poisoning, both while only in their twenties, but no one can begin to guess how many others may have had their lives shortened or constitutions unsettled by their attachment to ceruse.

Toxic potions were popular, too. Well into the nineteenth century, many women drank a concoction called Fowler’s Solution, which was really just dilute arsenic, to improve their complexions. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal (who is best remembered as the model for the drowned Ophelia in the painting by John Everett Millais), was a devoted swallower of the stuff, and it almost certainly contributed to her early death in 1862.*

Men wore makeup too, and indeed for a century or so were inclined to display breathtaking effeminacy, sometimes in the most unexpected circumstances. Louis XIV’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, “in spite of being one of history’s most famous sodomites,” in the startlingly forthright words of the historian Nancy Mitford, was a brave soldier, but an unorthodox one. He would arrive at the battlefield “painted, powdered, all his eyelashes stuck together, covered with ribbons and diamonds,” Mitford wrote in The Sun King. “He would never wear a hat for fear of flattening his wig. Once in action he was as brave as a lion, only afraid of what the sun and dust might do to his complexion.” Men as well as women festooned their hair with plumes and feathers, and tied ribbons to each bouncing curl. Some men took to wearing high-heeled shoes—not clunky platform shoes, but slender, spiky heels up to six inches high—and to carrying furry muffs to keep their hands warm. Some carried parasols in the summer. Nearly all drenched themselves in perfume. They became known as macaronis, from a dish they first encountered on Italian tours.

So it is curious that the people who actually brought some restraint to matters—namely, the macaronis’ rival sartorial tribe, the dandies—have become associated in the popular consciousness with overdress. Nothing, with respect to male attire, could be further from the truth, and the quintessence of that muted splendor was George “Beau” Brummell, who lived from 1778 to 1840. Brummell was not rich or talented or blessed with brains. He just dressed better than anyone ever had before. Not more colorfully or extravagantly, but simply with more care.

He was born in reasonably privileged circumstances on Downing Street, his father a trusted adviser to the prime minister, Lord North. Brummell went to Eton and, briefly, to Oxford, before taking up a position in the military in the Prince of Wales’s regiment, the Tenth Hussars. If he had any aptitude for command in battle, it was never tested; his function essentially was to look good in uniform and to act as a kind of companion and assistant to the prince at formal gatherings. In consequence, he and the prince became close friends.

Brummell lived in Mayfair, and for some years his house was the epicenter of one of the more improbable rituals in London’s history—that of a procession of grown men of great eminence arriving each afternoon to watch him dress. Among those regularly in attendance were the Prince of Wales, three dukes, a marquess, two earls, and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. They would sit and watch in respectful silence as Brummell began the daily process of grooming with a bath. It was generally thought an amazement that he bathed every day—“and every part of his body,” as one witness added with special astonishment. Moreover he did it in hot water. Sometimes he added milk, which itself set a fashion, though not an entirely happy one. When word got out that the withered and miserly Marquis of Queensberry, who lived nearby, was also in the habit of taking milk baths, milk sales in the district plummeted because it was rumored that he returned the milk for resale after he had immersed his crusty and decrepit skin in it.

The attire of dandies was studiously muted. Brummell’s apparel was confined almost entirely to three plain colors: white, buff, and blue-black. What distinguished dandies was not the richness of their plumage but the care with which they assembled themselves. It was all about getting a perfect line. They would spend hours making sure every crease or furl was perfect, unimprovable. A visitor, arriving at Brummell’s to find the floor strewn with cravats, once asked Robinson, his long-suffering valet, what was going on. “Those,” Robinson sighed, “are our failures.” Dandies dressed and redressed endlessly. In a day they would typically get through at least three shirts and two pairs of trousers, four or five cravats, two waistcoats, several pairs of stockings, and a small stack of handkerchiefs.

Some of the fashion was dictated by the ever-increasing stoutness of the Prince of Wales (or “Prince of Whales,” as he was snickeringly known behind his back). By the time he reached his thirties, the prince had taken on such a fleshy sprawl that he had to be forcibly strapped into a corset—a “Bastille of Whalebone,” in the words of one who was allowed to see it—which his attendants tactfully referred to as his “belt.” All this pushed his upper body fat upward through the neck hole, like toothpaste coming out of a tube, so the very high collars fashionable in his day were a kind of additional mini corset, designed to hide an abundance of chins and the floppy wattle of his neck.

The one sartorial area in which dandies did stand out, as it were, was in their trousers. Pantaloons were often worn tight as paint and were not a great deal less revealing, particularly as they were worn without underwear. The night after seeing the Count d’Orsay, Jane Carlyle noted in her diary, perhaps just a touch breathlessly, that the count’s pantaloons were “skin-coloured and fitting like a glove.” The style was based on the riding trousers of Brummell’s regiment. Jackets were tailored with tails in back, but were cut away in front so that they perfectly framed the groin. It was the first time in history that men’s apparel was consciously designed to be more sexy than women’s.

It appears that Brummell could have had almost any lady he longed for, and many men, too, but whether he did have any or not is intriguingly uncertain. On the evidence, it appears that Brummell was asexual; we don’t know of any relationship, male or female, he engaged in that involved intercourse other than aural. Curiously, for a man famed for his appearance, we don’t know what he looked like. Four reputed likenesses of him exist, but they are all strikingly different from one another, and there is now no telling which, if any, is actually faithful.

Brummell’s fall from grace was abrupt and irreversible. He and the Prince of Wales had a falling out and ceased speaking. At a social occasion, the prince pointedly ignored Brummell and instead spoke to his companion. As the prince withdrew, Brummell turned to the companion and made one of the most famously ill-advised remarks in social history. “Who’s your fat friend?” he asked.

Such an insult was social suicide. Shortly afterward Brummell’s debts caught up with him and he fled to France. He spent the last two and a half decades of his life living in poverty, mostly in Calais, growing slowly demented but always looking, in his restrained and careful way, sensational.

II

At just the time that Beau Brummell was dominating the sartorial scene in London and beyond, one other fabric was beginning to transform the world, and in particular the manufacturing world. I refer to cotton. Its place in history can hardly be overstated.

Cotton is such a commonplace material now that we forget that it was once extremely precious—more valuable than silk. But in the seventeenth century, the East India Company began importing calicoes from India (from the city of Calicut, from which they take their name), and suddenly cotton became affordable. Calico was then essentially a collective term for chintzes, muslins, percales, and other colorful fabrics, which caused unimaginable delight among Western consumers because they were light and washable and the colors didn’t run. Although some cotton was grown in Egypt, India dominated the cotton trade, as we are reminded by the endless numbers of words that came into English from there: khaki, dungarees, gingham, muslin, pajamas, shawl, seersucker, and so on.

The sudden surge of Indian cotton pleased consumers, but not manufacturers. Unable to compete with this wonder fabric, European textile workers bayed for protection almost everywhere, and almost everywhere they received it. The importation of finished cotton fabrics was banned in much of Europe throughout the eighteenth century. Raw cotton could be imported, which provided a powerful incentive to the British cloth industry to exploit it. The problem was, cotton was very hard to spin and weave. The solution to that problem is called the Industrial Revolution.

Turning bales of fluffy cotton into useful products like bedsheets and blue jeans involves two fundamental operations: spinning and weaving. Spinning is the process by which short lengths of cotton fiber become long threads; the spinner adds short fibers a little at a time and gives them a twist—the very process mentioned with string. Weaving involves interlacing two sets of strings at right angles to form a mesh. The machine on which cloth was woven was a loom. All that a loom does is hold one set of strings tight so that a second set can be fed through the first to make a weave. The tight set of strings is called the warp. The second, “active” set is called the weft—which is simply an old form of the verb weave. Most everyday household cloths—sheets, handkerchiefs, and the like—are still made from this basic, straightforward type of weaving.

Spinning and weaving were cottage industries that supported large numbers of people. Traditionally, women spun and men wove. Spinning, however, took a lot longer than weaving, and the disparity grew even worse after 1733 when John Kay, a young man from Lancashire, invented the flying shuttle—the first of the breakthrough innovations that the industry required. Kay’s mobile shuttle doubled the speed at which weaving could be performed. Spinners, already unable to keep up, fell ever more hopelessly behind, so problems developed all along the supply line, with enormous economic stresses for all concerned.

According to the story as traditionally recounted, weavers and spinners alike grew so furious with Kay that they attacked his home and he had to flee to France, where he died a pauper. The story is repeated in most histories even now with “dogmatic fervour,” in the words of the industrial historian Peter Willis, but in fact, Willis insists, there is no truth in it at all. Kay did die poor, but only because he didn’t manage his life very well. He proposed to manufacture the machines himself and rent them out to mill owners, but he set the rental so high that no one would pay it. Instead his device was widely pirated, and he spent all his funds unsuccessfully fighting for compensation through the courts. Eventually, he went to France, hoping—vainly—to find more success there. He lived almost another fifty years after his invention. He was never attacked or driven away.

A generation would pass before anyone devised a solution to the spinning problem, and it came from an unexpected quarter. In 1764, an illiterate weaver from Lancashire named James Hargreaves devised an ingeniously simple device known as the spinning jenny, which did the work of ten spinners by incorporating multiple spindles. Not much is known about Hargreaves beyond that he was born and grew up in Lancashire, married young, and had twelve children. There is no known likeness. He was the poorest and unluckiest of all the major figures of the early Industrial Revolution. Unlike Kay, Hargreaves really did experience trouble. A mob of angry locals came to his house and burned twenty half-finished jennies and most of his tools—a cruel and desperate loss to a poor man—and so for a prudent period he stopped making jennies and went into bookkeeping. The jenny, incidentally, was not named after his daughter, as is often stated; jenny was a northern word for engine.

Hargreaves’s machine doesn’t look like much in illustrations—it was essentially just ten bobbins on a frame, with a wheel to make them rotate—but it transformed Britain’s industrial prospects. Less happily, it also hastened the introduction of child labor because children, nimbler and smaller than adults, were better able to make running repairs to broken threads and the like in the jenny’s more inaccessible extremities.

Before his invention, homeworkers spun five hundred thousand pounds of cotton in England every year by hand. By 1785, thanks to Hargreaves’s machine and the refined versions that followed, that figure had leaped to sixteen million pounds. Hargreaves, however, didn’t share in the prosperity that his machines created, in large part because of the machinations of Richard Arkwright, the least attractive, least inventive, but most successful of all the figures of the early Industrial Revolution.

Like Kay and Hargreaves, Arkwright was a Lancashire man—where would the Industrial Revolution have been without Lancashire men?—born in Preston in 1732, which made him eleven years younger than Hargreaves and nearly thirty years younger than Kay. (It is as well to remember that the Industrial Revolution wasn’t a sudden explosive event, but more a gradual unfolding of improvements over many lifetimes and in lots of different fields.) Before he became a man of industry, Arkwright was a publican, a wigmaker, and a barber-surgeon with a speciality in pulling teeth and bleeding those who were unwell. He seems to have gotten interested in cloth production through a friendship with another John Kay—this one a clockmaker who was no relation to the John Kay of the flying shuttle—and with his help began to pull together all the machinery and components necessary to bring the whole of mechanical cloth production under one roof. Arkwright was not a man troubled by a lot of scruples. He stole the rudiments of the spinning jenny from Hargreaves without hesitation or remorse (or of course compensation), wriggled out of business deals, and abandoned friends and partners whenever it became safe or profitable to do so.

He did have a genuine knack for making mechanical improvements, but his real genius was in turning possibilities into realities. He was an organizer—a hustler, really, but a very, very good one. Through a combination of hard work, luck, opportunism, and icy ruthlessness, he built up, for a short but extremely lucrative time, a virtual monopoly on the cotton business in England.

The people displaced by Arkwright’s machinery weren’t merely inconvenienced; they were often reduced to the basest desperation. Arkwright evidently saw this coming because he built his first factory like a fortress in a remote corner of Derbyshire—already a remote county—and fortified it with cannons and even a supply of five hundred spears. He cornered the market in the mechanical production of cloth, and in consequence grew fabulously rich, if not loved or especially happy. At his death in 1792, he employed five thousand workers and was worth £500,000—a fabulous sum for any man, but particularly for someone who had spent much of his life as a wigmaker and barber-surgeon.

In fact, the Industrial Revolution hadn’t become truly industrial yet. The man who made it so was the most unexpectedly pivotal figure of his, or almost any other, age: the Reverend Edmund Cartwright (1743–1823). Cartwright came from a well-heeled and locally important Nottinghamshire family and had aspirations to be a poet, but went into the church and was appointed to a rectorship in Leicestershire. A chance conversation with a cloth manufacturer led him to design—absolutely from out of nowhere—the power loom in 1785. Cartwright’s looms transformed the world economy and made Britain truly rich. By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, a quarter of a million power looms were in operation in England, and the number grew by an average of 100,000 per decade before peaking at 805,000 in 1913, by which time nearly 3 million were working throughout the world.

Had Cartwright been compensated to anything like the degree his inventions merited, he would have been the richest man of his age—as rich as John D. Rockefeller or Bill Gates in theirs—but in fact he earned nothing directly from his invention at all and actually became indebted through trying to protect and enforce his patents. In 1809, Parliament awarded him a lump payment of £10,000, almost nothing compared with Arkwright’s £500,000, but enough to let him live out his final days in comfort. Meanwhile, he had developed an appetite for invention, and came up with rope-making and wool-combing machines (both very successful) as well as novel types of printing presses, steam engines, roof tiles, and bricks. His last invention, patented shortly before his death in 1823, was for a hand-cranked carriage “to go without horses,” which his patent application confidently declared would allow two men, cranking steadily but without undue exertion, to cover up to twenty-seven miles of ground in a day over even the steepest terrain.

With power looms humming, the cotton industry was ready to take off, but the mills needed far more cotton than existing sources could supply. The obvious place to grow it was the American south. The climate, too hot and dry for many crops, was perfect for cotton. Unfortunately, the only variety that would grow well in most southern soils was a difficult type known as short staple cotton. This was impossible to harvest profitably because each boll was packed with sticky seeds—three pounds of them for every pound of cotton fiber—and these had to be hand-plucked one by one. Separating seeds from fiber was such a labor-intensive operation that even with slave labor it could not be done economically. The costs of feeding and clothing the slaves were far greater than the amount of usable cotton that even the most diligent hand-plucking could produce.

The man who solved the problem grew up a long way from any plantations. His name was Eli Whitney, he came from Westborough, Massachusetts, and, if all the elements of the story are true (which, as we are about to see, they may not be), it was the luckiest of chances that allowed him to make his name immortal.

The story as conventionally told is this: After graduating from Yale in 1793, Whitney accepted a job as a tutor to a family in South Carolina, but upon arriving discovered that the promised salary was to be halved. Offended, he refused the position, which satisfied honor but left him fundless and a long way from home.

While sailing south he had met a vivacious young widow named Catharine Greene, wife of the late General Nathanael Greene, a hero of the American Revolution. A grateful nation had awarded Greene a plantation in Georgia for his support of George Washington through the darkest hours of the war. Unfortunately, Greene, a New Englander, was unused to Georgian heat, and on his first summer there fatally keeled over from sunstroke. It was to Greene’s widow that Whitney turned now.

Mrs. Greene was by this time cohabiting enthusiastically and fairly openly with another Yale man named Phineas Miller, her plantation manager, and they welcomed Whitney into their household. There Whitney was introduced to the cotton seed problem. Examining a boll, he at once thought he could see a solution. He retired to the plantation workshop and devised a simple rotating drum that used nails to snag cotton fiber as it turned, leaving the seeds behind. His new device was so efficient that it could do the work of fifty slaves. Whitney patented his gin (a shortened form of engine) and prepared to become stupendously wealthy.

That is the story as conventionally told. It appears, however, that a good deal of it may not actually be quite true. The suggestion now is that Whitney already knew Miller—their Yale connection does seem improbably coincidental otherwise—that he was acquainted with the problems of growing cotton on American soil, and that he traveled south, probably at Miller’s behest, knowing that he would try to invent a gin. Moreover, it appears that the work may not have been done in a couple of hours on the plantation, but over weeks or months in a workshop back in Westborough.

Whatever the actuality of its invention, the gin truly was a marvel. Whitney and Miller formed a partnership with every expectation of getting rich, but they were disastrous businessmen. For the use of their machine, they demanded a one-third share of any harvest—a proportion that plantation owners and southern legislators alike saw as frankly rapacious. That Whitney and Miller were both Yankees didn’t help sentiment either. They stubbornly refused to modify their demands, convinced that southern growers could not hold out in the face of such a transforming piece of technology. They were right about the irresistibility, but they failed to note that the gin was also easily pirated. Any halfway decent carpenter could knock one out in a couple of hours. Soon plantation owners across the South were harvesting cotton with homemade gins. Whitney and Miller filed sixty suits in Georgia alone and many others elsewhere, but found little sympathy in southern courts. By 1800—just seven years after the gin’s invention—Miller and Catharine Greene were in such desperate straits that they had to sell the plantation.

The South, however, was growing very rich. Cotton was soon the most traded commodity in the world, and two-thirds of all that cotton came from there. American cotton exports went from almost nothing before the invention of the cotton gin to a staggering two billion pounds by the outbreak of the Civil War. At its peak, Britain took 84 percent of it all.

Before cotton, slavery had been in decline in the United States, but now there was a great need for labor because picking cotton remained extremely labor-intensive. At the time of Whitney’s invention slavery existed in just six states; by the outbreak of the Civil War it was legal in fifteen. Worse, the northern slave states like Virginia and Maryland, where cotton couldn’t be successfully grown, turned to exporting slaves to their southern neighbors, thus breaking up families and intensifying the suffering for tens of thousands. Between 1793 and the outbreak of the Civil War, over eight hundred thousand slaves were shipped south.

At the same time, the booming cotton mills of England needed huge numbers of workers—more than population increase alone could easily provide—so increasingly they turned to child labor. Children were malleable, worked cheap, and were generally quicker at darting about among machinery and dealing with snags, breakages, and the like. Even the most enlightened mill owners used children freely. They couldn’t afford not to.

So Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a simple rotating drum.

Eventually, some southern states did agree to pay Whitney a little. Altogether he made about $90,000 from the gin—just enough to cover his costs. Returning north, he settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and there hit on the idea that would finally make him rich. In 1798, he landed a contract to make ten thousand muskets for the federal government. The guns were to be manufactured by a new method, which came to be known as the Whitney system or American system. The idea was to build machines that would create an endless supply of matching parts, which could then be assembled into completed products. No worker would need any particular skills. The skills would all be in the machines. It was a brilliant concept. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin has called it the innovation that made America rich.

The guns were urgently needed because at the time America seemed on the brink of going to war with France. The contract was for $134,000—the largest government contract ever signed in America to that time—and was given to Whitney even though he had no machines and no experience of making guns. But in 1801, in a moment treasured by generations of history books, Whitney demonstrated to President John Adams and President-elect Thomas Jefferson how a tableful of random parts could be assembled into a complete gun. In fact, behind the scenes Whitney was having all kinds of problems getting the system to work. The guns were delivered more than eight years late, long after the crisis that had prompted their manufacture had abated. Moreover, a twentieth-century analysis of the surviving guns showed that they weren’t actually made by the Whitney system, but instead incorporated parts that had been hand-crafted in the factory. The famous demonstration for the presidents was done with bogus parts. Whitney, it turns out, spent most of the eight years not working on the musket order at all, but using the money from the contract to further his efforts to gain compensation for the cotton gin.

III

Compared with anything that had gone before, cotton was a wonderfully light and cool material, yet it did almost nothing to stifle the impulse to dress ridiculously, particularly where women were concerned. As the nineteenth century progressed, women became increasingly embedded in attire. By the 1840s, a woman might carry beneath her dress a knee-length chemise, a camisole, up to half a dozen petticoats, a corset, and drawers. The idea, as one historian has noted, was “to eliminate, as far as possible, any impression of shape.” All of this sartorial infrastructure could be dauntingly weighty. A woman could easily go about her daily business under forty pounds of clothing. How she managed to deal with urinary needs is a question that seems to have escaped historical inquiry. Crinolines, or hoopskirts, stiffened with whalebone or steel, were introduced as a way of giving shape without requiring so much underclothing, but while the load was fractionally lightened the scope for clumsiness was greatly increased. As Liza Picard put it in Victorian London: “One wonders how, or whether, Victorian ladies managed to traverse a properly equipped drawing room in a full crinoline without sweeping several small tables clear.” Getting into a carriage required consideration and cunning, as one fascinated correspondent indicated in a letter home: “Miss Clara turned round and round like a peacock, undecided which way to make the attempt. At last she chose a bold sideways dash, and entered with a squeeze of the petticoat, which suddenly expanded to its original size, but when her sisters had followed her there was no room for the Major” (or indeed anyone else).

Crinolines also lifted slightly when the wearer bent—when leaning to strike a croquet ball, for instance—offering an electrifying glimpse of frilly leggings to any man wise enough to say, “After you.” When strained, crinolines had a dismaying tendency to invert and fly upward, like a stressed umbrella. Stories abounded of women left trapped and staggering inside misbehaving hoops. Lady Eleanor Stanley recorded in her diary how the Duchess of Manchester tripped going over a stile—though why she decided to attempt to negotiate a stile in a hoopskirt is a separate imponderable—and ended up exposing her tartan knickerbockers “to the view of all the world in general and the Duc de Malakoff in particular.” High winds were a special source of disorder, and stairs a positive danger. The greatest risk of all, however, was fire. “Many wearers of crinolines were burnt to death by inadvertently approaching a fire,” C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington note in their unexpectedly solemn History of Underclothes. One manufacturer advertised proudly, if unnervingly, that its crinolines “do not cause accidents, do not appear at inquests.”

The golden age of crinolines was 1857–1866, by which point they were largely being abandoned, not because they were dangerous and preposterous, but because they were increasingly being worn by the lower orders, destroying their exclusivity. “Your lady’s maid must now have her crinoline,” tutted one magazine, “and it has even become essential to factory girls.” The danger of crinolines among the grinding cogs and whirring belts of factory machinery is easy enough to imagine.

The abandonment of crinolines didn’t mean that the age of pointless discomfort was at last coming to an end. Far from it, for crinolines gave way to corsets, and corsets became the most punishing form of apparel in centuries. A few authorities found this strangely heartening, on the apparent grounds that it somehow denoted sacrifice and chastity. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, the Beetons’ popular periodical, approvingly recorded in 1866 how the boarders at one girls’ school were strapped into their corsets on a Monday morning and left constrained until Saturday, when they were allowed to ease the stays for an hour “for purposes of ablution.” Such a regime, the magazine noted, allowed the average girl to reduce her waist size from twenty-three inches to thirteen in just two years.

The quest to reduce circumference at almost any cost to comfort was real enough, but the enduring belief that some women had ribs surgically removed to make their midsections even more compressible is, happily, a myth. Valerie Steele, in the engagingly precise and academic The Corset: A Cultural History, could find no evidence that even one such operation had ever been undertaken. For one thing, nineteenth-century surgical techniques were simply not up to it.

For medical experts tight corsets became something of an obsession in the second half of the nineteenth century. There wasn’t a functioning system within the body, it appeared, that wasn’t gravely susceptible to suffering and breakdown from the constricting effects of lace and whalebone. Corsets kept the heart from beating freely, which made the blood grow congested. Sluggish blood in turn led to almost a hundred recorded afflictions—incontinence, dyspepsia, liver failure, “congestive hypertrophy of the uterus,” and loss of mental faculties, to name a notable few. The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association, regularly investigated the dangers of tight corsets and concluded that in at least one case the victim’s heartbeats were so impeded that she died. Some doctors additionally believed that tightly laced undergarments gave women a greater susceptibility to tuberculosis.

Inevitably, a sexual dimension became attached to corset wearing. The tone of anticorset literature for women was strikingly similar to the tone of antimasturbation literature for men. By restricting blood flow and compressing organs in the vicinity of the reproductive zone, corsets, it was feared, could lead to a tragic increase in “amative desires” and possibly even induce involuntary “voluptuous spasms.” Gradually, clothing fears extended to every part of the body where clothes were worn snugly. Even tight-fitting shoes, it was suggested, could engender some dangerous tingling, if not a full-throttled, table-rattling spasm. In the worst cases, women could actually be unhinged by their clothing. Orson Fowler, author of an attack tantalizingly entitled Tight-Lacing, Founded on Physiology and Phrenology; or, the Evils Inflicted on the Mind and Body by Compressing the Organs of Animal Life, Thereby Retarding and Enfeebling the Vital Functions, propounded the theory that the unnatural distortion of circulation pushed extra blood to the woman’s brain and could thereby cause a permanent and disturbing change in personality.

The one place where there really was danger from tight corsets was in the development of babies. Many women wore corsets perilously deep into pregnancy, even pulling them tighter to hide for as long as possible the indelicate evidence that they had been party to an unseemly burst of voluptuous spasms.

Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going “to bed”—that planted too stimulating an image—but merely that they were “retiring.” It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became “nether integuments” or simply “inexpressibles” and underwear was “linen.” Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing else that brushed bare flesh.

Behind the scenes, however, things were a little spicier than we are sometimes led to suppose. Chemical dyes—some of them quite rich and colorful—became available in midcentury and one of the first places they appeared was on underclothes, a matter that scandalized many since it raised the obvious question of for whose delight all that color was intended. The embroidery of underwear became similarly popular and identically scandalous. In the very year that it was praising an English girls’ school for keeping the young ladies murderously strapped into corsets for a week at a time, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine was also railing that “the amount of embroidery put upon underclothing nowadays is sinful; a young lady spent a month in hemstitching and embroidering a garment which it was scarcely possible that any other human being, except her laundress, would ever see.”

One thing Victorian women didn’t have were brassieres. Corsets pushed up from below, which held breasts in place, but for true comfort (I am told) breasts are better held up by slings. The first person to see this was a lingerie manufacturer named Luman Chapman, of Camden, New Jersey, who secured a patent in 1863 for “breast puffs”—a kind of early halter top. Between 1863 and 1969, exactly 1,230 patents on bras were taken out in the United States. The word brassière, from a French word meaning “upper arm,” was first used in 1904 by the Charles R. DeBevoise Company.

One small but tenacious myth may be demolished here. It has been sometimes written that the bra was the invention of one Otto Titzling. In fact, if such a person ever existed, he played no part in the invention of foundation garments. And on that slightly disappointing note, we may move on to the nursery.

* Overcome with grief, her husband buried her with a sheaf of poems that he had failed to copy; seven years later he thought better of the gesture, had the grave dug up, and retrieved the poems, which were published the following year.