My Library Runneth Over: Books on Victorian Clothing

I have a lot of books.  You're all surprised. The other day I discovered two new books that'd been hitherto unknown to me, and it inspired me to write a bit of a review, since my current pet peeve is the lack of critical and comparative reviewing on self-published works.

(No, I haven't had a chance to clean up and start the next corset yet)

Right, so.  Almost everyone I know has the trio of Dover collections of Victorian photography, so I'll start there.

Alison Gernsheim's collection in Victorian and Edwardian Fashion is a very good overview, as you'd expect from the title. It starts out around 1845, and contains about twice as much academic commentary on the history of Western (and particularly British) dress as it does pictures of it. The book has an amazing variety of styles represented, all neatly labeled with year and studio when available. Additional notes are available at the front of the book.  My quibble with this one is that it contains less about the high-crinoline era than I'd like, and it tends to capture the exceptional - the exceptionally rich or richly dressed, the royals, and people in rather interesting poses - rather than the mundane. It's difficult to critique as a representative sample because of that, and so I think it's a great introduction to the wide variety and novelty in Victorian photography, but not necessarily a good generalized costume reference.

(Also, I totally cracked up when I saw the doll furniture carving guy on The Wire looking at a copy.)

Kristina Harris's Victorian Fashion In America is a good deal more specific, but suffers from the same issues as above. The quest seems to mainly be for novelty, and little attention is paid to the prevailing fashions. I'm also really disappointed that in a book of 88 pages, only 9 pages cover the period of most interest to most American Victorian reenactors, which is to say the Civil War. There's a lot of randomness in there, and again, novelty, but it's also mostly pictures of young and middle aged rich white women and their children.  Hardly a diverse representative sample.

American Victorian Costume in Early Photographs by Priscilla Harris Dalrymple does much, much better. The book is helpfuly divided by decade, and contains a much wider variety of subjects and different economic classes, though again, no really poor people or servants. (I wouldn't expect that of a book of portraits, but hey, I could dream.) There's a bare page or so of description for each decade, which I actually greatly appreciate - it's much better, IMO, to let your eyes tell you what you're seeing first and not let the text lead you down other paths. For example, that picture of the kid in the diagonally buttoning tunic? It's a la Russe, which is to say in the style of a Russian peasant tunic, but if you'd read the caption first you might assume that the applied description was the ultimate one.

As a great companion to these books, I recommend Asa Briggs' Victorian Portrait.  While the photographs reproduced in the book aren't clearly labeled with a year, the book provides a good introduction to the practices of Victorian photography. It's an invaluable introduction to spotting the more posed specimens - theatrical promo photos, staged curio or souvenir photos, fancy dress balls, satirical or comedic photos - and correctly identifying genuine occupational photos, as opposed to those produced as a sort of propaganda campaign glorifying the Industrial Revolution.  It's very meta. There are also some interesting pictures of working poor and laboring servants, which is a nice change.

Next, the acclaimed Who Wore What? by Juanita Leisch.  This is a really good book for anyone just starting in Civil War reenacting, because it covers a rather narrow span of years (1861 to 1865) and breaks down a woman's ensemble into parts. However, it's not always clear where a certain aspect being discussed belongs on the socio-economic scale, and it's also not clear when certain aspects do or do not go together. (Described in a vacuum, you could just assume they were mix-and-match, but they really weren't.)  Still, the line drawings are very clear and helpful, and the book also contains a quick and helpful introduction to historical interpretation (a la The Ruritainian Purple Feathers, if you're familiar with that article). My only problem is that the author takes some very strong proscriptive stands, which I think you could find exceptions to quite easily. It seems that this book was written as a bespoke manual in reaction to some sub-par costuming somewhere.  That said, as a book for dressing an ensemble, this is a great start.

And since I failed to acquire a copy of Dressed for the Photographer at a reasonable price, we'll skip to the newest acquisitions.

The Way They Were: Dressed in 1860-1865's somewhat awkwardly placed semicolon makes me wonder if Donna J. Abraham (of the somewhat eponymous Abraham's Lady sutlery) plans to tackle other subjects in the future. I hope so. The books are a quarto sized, about 150 pages each, with 4 cartes de visite reproduced on most pages. None of the pictures are explicitly dated, but given that the subject matter is very narrowly dated, I can't find fault there. The photos are helpfully grouped by main feature: outerwear, fancy bonnets, fabric types, dress details, accessories, hairstyles. There are sections on children and men, and a very sweet section of group portraits. Very little background information is presented, and I actually prefer this.  By looking at such a large volume of pictures, you get a sense of the trends and styles, taste and sensibilities at work behind the actual garments. You truly begin to understand the generalities of the fashion, and less the specifics as picked out in exceptional portraiture.  This would also be a great reference for ensembles, and as a self-published work it is quite inexpensive.

If I ever decide to shell out $60 for Dressed for the Photographer, I'll update this entry. ;)