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by Henry Hitchings

  English fashions have had their political and economic aspects, with royal favour often a factor. In 1765 the London peruke-makers, appalled by how many people were ‘wearing their own hair’, petitioned George III to discourage this practice. That year Queen Charlotte asked the ladies at court to wear only Spitalfields silk, to encourage the London weavers and curtail imports. There was also at this time a brief mania for shoe-buckles, which George was expected to sport when he returned to public life after his first illness. But he wore shoe-laces on his first public appearance, and the town of Walsall, a buckle-making centre, allegedly came close to ruin. Gold-laced hats had a brief vogue, in 1778, among men trying to give themselves an air of military distinction or avoid the attentions of press gangs. The use of hair powder by women dropped off after it was abandoned by Queen Charlotte in 1793; along with dogs and armorial bearings, it was an item on which William Pitt imposed a special tax during the revolutionary war with France. Queen Charlotte’s influence was not always positive. The huge, impractical hoop petticoat, very probably an English invention and most popular around 1750, had largely disappeared by 1780, but she encouraged the continued use of the hoop in public life – with the intention of supporting the many people who made a living out of its elaborate construction.4

  The hoop petticoat was expensive, uncomfortable and inconvenient – which some might say is a definition of fashion. The anxieties bound up with voguishness are today discernible in the strange double meaning of the phrase ‘too fashionable’: once a criticism, this is now sometimes a plaudit, and it can be hard to tell which is the desired sense. Here we return to the question of sartorial good manners, which involves careful judgement about colours, shapes and materials. Making the most of oneself can be a matter of spreading one’s plumage in imitation of a peacock. Mostly, though, it is a case of wearing the right uniform (in many cases the uniform not of an organization, but of a social group). While this may be inventively accessorized, even gently subverted, we strike a balance between expression and repression. Clothes do not just add to our appearance; often they are our appearance. In fashion, features that at first serve some useful purpose are later retained as ornaments: this is true of manners and, much more broadly, of life.

  Dress codes exist to regulate appearances. They tend to be designed to curb the excesses of fashion, but sometimes they enforce them, as in the case of the club Torture Garden, where the code is ‘Fantasy, Fetish, Latex, SM, Body Art, Drag, Burlesque, Moulin Rouge, Medical, Uniform, Militaria, Vegas Showgirl, Kit Kat Cabaret, Venice Carnival, Circus Freak Show, Boudoir, Top Hat & Tails, Electro Freak, Porno Punk etc.’.5 In the workplace a dress code will probably signify the status of employees; it may also present a company’s brand and serve a practical purpose in relation to safety or hygiene. Generally, a dress code works like a screening device, a means of preserving standards. ‘Standards’, it should be said, doesn’t always mean ‘high standards’. I have been refused entry to a bar because I wasn’t wearing a jacket, but have also been refused entry to a bar because I was wearing one.

  Failing to observe a dress code, whether prescribed or implicit, is considered at best gauche and at worst a sort of vandalism. Observing the code is a passport into a realm in which the code can (sometimes) be dropped: once we have shown an understanding of context, we are granted more latitude. The most tightly specified dress codes are ephemeral ones: what you’re expected to wear to a party, for instance. Then there are broad codes that may not even be explicitly set out, such as what’s appropriate in a particular office; these are likely to be absorbed, as if by osmosis. The broadest codes might be called ‘general principles of dress’: men’s attire and women’s are different, clothes protect the skin and keep certain delicate parts of the body out of sight, and our garments exist perhaps not so much to protect our modesty as to create it. But these principles are not rock-solid, and plenty has altered that once seemed immutable. Women no longer expect to have to put on gloves before leaving the house. Jeans are not associated with protest or even that often with the utilitarian needs of cowboys. Nor do we associate striped garments with ignominy, whereas in the medieval world they marked a person as an outsider: juggler, fool, prostitute, executioner.6

  For a common-sense view of what to wear, I like Laurie Graham’s five rules for the wardrobe door: ‘Studied perfection should be ruffled before use’, ‘All attention-seeking items should be donated to Oxfam’, ‘When in doubt, opt for navy’, ‘When in navy, use a clothes brush’, ‘Always check your rearview mirror.’7 The pragmatism here is something we may well regard as redoubtably English. The grandest statements of English fashion are the result of a dialogue with French style, in which the English influence is a moderating one. Even the most consistently outrageous of English fashion designers, Vivienne Westwood, blends her swagger and punk sensibility with nostalgia. A surprising number of her inspirations are seventeenth-century: the enthusiasm for slashed hose, the baroque theatricality of Anthony van Dyck’s portraits, the coquettish wit and style of the courtesan Ninon de l’Enclos. Having digressed into table manners and matters sartorial, it is time to return to that period.

  9

  Mr Sex

  On New Year’s Day in 1660 a twenty-something Londoner, the son of a tailor, starts keeping a diary in a fat notebook. He maintains it with enthusiasm. In the first month he records that he eats a delicious slice of brawn but has a poor night’s sleep afterwards, suffers a swollen nose and is told by his doctor that it is due to nothing more serious than a cold, shares his financial anxieties with his wife in bed, goes to what he describes as a coffee club where he enjoys a debate about Roman government, expresses his shame at not dining more often with his father, observes his wife’s difficulties with an uncomfortable new pair of shoes, and stays up one evening to create pegs from which to hang his hats and cloaks.

  The twenty-something Londoner is of course Samuel Pepys. His diaries, which eventually cover a period up to the middle of 1669, illuminate the life of seventeenth-century England. He also turns a great deal of attention on himself. He is a useful guide to the manners of his age, three and a half centuries remote from our own, but he is more than that: his experience has a timelessness, and there is a tremendous amount that we can recognize and savour in his depiction of a world full of indulgences, smart manoeuvres, come-ons and brush-offs.

  The year Pepys began the diaries was a watershed: in May the twenty-nine-year-old Charles II arrived in England; he had been the lawful monarch since the death of his father Charles I in 1649, but had spent the 1650s in exile on the Continent, where he had learned French tastes and manners. In Thomas Shadwell’s play The Humorists (1671), a character complains that there is no corner of town ‘without French tailors, weavers, milliners, strong water-men, perfumers and surgeons’.1 With Charles’s return came a fashion for wigs (Pepys acquired his first in 1664), expensive combs and silk handkerchiefs. Courtiers adorned themselves with ribbons and velvet, and sported ostrich feathers in their beaver hats. Heels were high; trousers were wide.

  The poet John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, embodied the new spirit of dandyism. Intent on breaking taboos, he delighted in pranks and ‘the free use of wine and women’. Unless it was dangerous to others or to his own health, pleasure ‘was to be indulged as the gratification of our natural appetites’.2 Rochester took hedonism to an extreme matched by few others, and repented only when he was on his deathbed, aged thirty-three, ravaged by syphilis. He was a divisive figure, and a symbolic one: his extravagance and individualism will strike us as modern.

  Rather than being self-indulgent like Rochester, Charles II was strategic. He was ambitious to match the dazzle of Louis XIV and his court. Louis had transformed Versailles from a hunting lodge into a palace containing a 240-foot-long Hall of Mirrors. The noblemen he chose to elevate were made to understand that they were tame, obedient and under surveillance. Rochester portrayed Louis as ‘the French fool who wanders up and down / Starving his people’
.3 Lest we imagine him a creature more soigné than any star of MTV Cribs, it is worth noting that at his court a bath was taken only in exceptional circumstances. But Louis instituted rituals that inspired awe in his subjects: all his actions, from getting up and dressing to receiving courtiers, were tightly regulated and accompanied by ceremony. These routines were means of dramatizing his power and his subjects’ subordination.

  There were similarly precise rules about the conduct of Charles’s royal household. For instance, it was decreed that when Charles was out walking, ‘a gentleman usher daily waiter and a gentleman usher assistant shall go before us, and a gentleman usher daily waiter, or gentleman usher assistant and a gentleman usher quarter waiter shall go behind us, unless there be no gentleman usher daily waiter or gentleman usher assistant’.4 The language here, repetitious and pedantic, sounds like that of a legal contract. Charles had twelve Grooms of the Bedchamber, supporting the First Gentleman and Groom of the Stool, and six pages as well. His everyday life was crammed with ceremony. But this was hardly the same thing as civility, and Charles’s palace at Whitehall was a scene of open exuberance. Pepys’s fellow diarist John Evelyn, though intent on finding favour at court, characterized it as a profane place, aswarm with lackeys and packed with gamblers. Profligacy, artificiality and the pursuit of sensual pleasure were rife. A mid-nineteenth-century historian wrote: ‘It is … to the wanton and lascivious court of Charles the Second that we must look for the origin of that general demoralization which tainted the manners of the fashionable world during great part of the last century.’5

  Ceremony is an edifice we construct: it consumes our time and shields from us the fact that we have a lot of time on our hands. Charles made himself more accessible to his subjects than his predecessors had done, but ceremony ensured that the nature of his relationship with them was unambiguous. Processions were a means of advertising both his openness and his regal bearing. The practice of touching his subjects to alleviate their ailments – specifically the tubercular disease known as scrofula – was a means of capitalizing on their awe, investing him, like Louis, with a mystique that bordered on the magical.

  The culture of Charles’s court differed from that of Versailles in being less driven by a theory of domination. The circulation of the Sun King’s image (on medals, in prints) was a carefully managed form of propaganda. Portraits of Louis identified him with Alexander the Great, the Good Shepherd and Hercules, and it was an offence not only to turn one’s back on the king, but even to turn one’s back on a picture of him. Critics of Louis’s policy noted its use of divertissement, entertainment that served to distract attention from hardship, drugging the people with spectacle.6 Charles’s publicity campaigns were more haphazard and impromptu. An aversion to political theory would in the following century become an emblem of anti-French sentiment and English self-confidence. Something of that remains, as in the joke about a French politician who listens to an English official’s sage proposal and says, ‘I can see that it will work in practice. But will it work in theory?’

  For an immediate sense of the atmosphere of Charles’s rule, we can turn to Pepys. He observes with pleasure the pageantry attending Charles’s coronation and later his enthusiasm for church music and good sermons. He notices how busy the king keeps himself, finding time for real tennis only at five o’clock in the morning. Yet he is appalled by Charles’s unconcealed adultery (‘a poor thing for a prince to do’) and by his inability to address parliament without a written text in front of him. Charles’s speeches can be silly, suggesting restlessness. In time we see Pepys come to be valued by Charles, who shares his interest in naval matters. When the Great Fire of London rips through the city in September 1666, it is Pepys who receives Charles’s orders about the need for houses to be torn down to create firebreaks.

  Pepys’s narrative is studded with lovely detail. There are revelations about his own conduct (as the fire rages, he packs his valuables off to Bethnal Green and buries his Parmesan cheese in the garden), but also insights into the more general currents of behaviour. He remarks on curious ideas that circulate among people he knows, be they the prophecies of Nostradamus or the claim by a sea captain that ‘negroes drowned look white and lose their blackness’. His frequent trips to the theatre bring him into contact with a wide range of people. In 1663 he notes that it has recently become fashionable for ladies to keep their faces masked in public places such as the theatre. A couple of years earlier, a woman at the theatre spits and the saliva hits him; rather than being appalled, Pepys regards this merely as a mistake and ‘after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all’. With hindsight, he can be seen as representative of a new age in which ideas about manners were no longer based on what happened at court. The court was still important, but politeness was less specifically rooted in its rituals.

  One feature of Pepys’s diary is his system of moral accountancy, in which acts of self-indulgence are balanced by gifts and charity. Thus, the day after dallying with an unexpectedly obliging young woman, he buys his wife Elizabeth an expensive pearl necklace. Pepys appears affectionate but also practical, pleasure-seeking but also orderly, and benevolent but also stingy; he often has the look of a magistrate surveying his own lapses.

  Where might Pepys have picked up his ideas about how to conduct himself? Although in his youth he had been a Puritan and a republican, in adulthood his convictions relaxed. He turned to religion only in moments of crisis. In the diary, when he thanks God for some pleasing development, the gratitude seems a reflex. In the England of Charles II, there were more immediately practical guides to behaviour. One of these was Francis Osborne’s Advice to a Son (1656–8), remarkable for preaching a form of good manners that had little to do with other kinds of goodness. Osborne’s ‘good manners’ were useful, and they enabled whoever had them to carve a passage through the corruption and confusions of society. Osborne advised his son to learn about medicine, for instance, on the grounds that it would make him a welcome guest in many places – and especially among women, who treated physicians with reverence. Presenting marriage as a trap, at best a necessary evil, he described it as ‘a clog fastened to the neck of Liberty’ and a means of providing life’s ‘general necessities’ rather than its ‘particular conveniences’. One of his fundamental principles was that self-preservation mattered more than great displays of honour: after all, he said with a nod to the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion’.7

  Pepys knew Osborne’s book and reported that it was among the works his contemporaries were most likely to praise as a fund of wit. Its cynical, conceited worldliness impressed readers who thought of society as a treacherous place full of bribable officials and grasping relatives. Osborne’s shrewdness did not prevent his ending up poor, as a result of a property dispute; his atheism and sour attitude to women led to proposals that his books be banned and even publicly burned. He represented a new turn in discussions of English manners: towards insiderish and disillusioned counsel, smacking of opportunism. He is the precursor of the advice columns in modern men’s magazines, preaching ruthlessness and avoidance of commitment.

  At the opposite end of the moral scale was the clergyman Richard Allestree, whose sober writings urged a blemishless earthly existence as the only means to guarantee happiness in the hereafter. Allestree wearily observed that his contemporaries did not give as much attention to religious duties as they did to observing codes of politeness. In 1668 Pepys had Allestree’s recently published The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety urged on him at a dinner in Lincoln’s Inn. Allestree described the ruinous consequences of lust, wealth and an interest in fashion. He might have been writing with Pepys in mind. Yet although Pepys in his diaries is candid about his own shortcomings, in a way that proves endearing, we recognize him not as a disciple of the sober Allestree, but as a hedonistic inhabitant of the worldly sphere Osborne depicted. When Pepys refers to him as ‘my father Osborne’, his chosen fo
rm of words is only mildly surprising.

  Like many cultivated men of his time, Pepys thought that hard work and business had a civilizing effect. But he was easily diverted. It was fashionable among his contemporaries to show contempt for the cautious middle orders by posing as a libertine – Rochester being an extreme example. The morality of a patrician man could be called into question without dark consequences for his social standing. In 1696 the bookseller John Dunton published a work with the splendid title The Night-walker: or, Evening Rambles in Search of Lewd Women. Dunton recorded his conversations with prostitutes, noting that it was young women’s desire for ‘honour’ that led them to behave in unchaste ways; to consort with a man of breeding, no matter how immoral the connection, was a sure means of boosting their chances in life. Something of this remains, in the co-ordinated uproariousness of a certain very small, privileged section of England, drunk on a sense of its entitlement. These people’s rivalry (over sex, drinking, drugs, possessions and their rampages), matched by that of the frolicking admirers who cling to them, is a flaunting of resources and also of power.8

  Pepys’s sexual behaviour often involves some kind of barter: a small gift or loan, or helping a mistress’s husband advance professionally. He is opportunistic, too. On one occasion he is caught by Elizabeth in a compromising embrace with one of her companions, seventeen-year-old Deborah Willet, known as Deb. It is a Sunday, and the episode ‘occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world’, for ‘indeed I was with my main [i.e. hand] in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also.’ It is worth picturing this exactly. What could Pepys have said to account for the obvious physical intimacy? You can be sure that it was not very convincing. Readers of the diary have by this stage seen him brought to orgasm in a moving coach by a married, pregnant acquaintance, so they know what to expect. But this was the first time that Elizabeth had got wind of his infidelity. She pulled her husband’s hair and threatened to slit Deb’s nose.