One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  This technological wonder, visited by all and sundry during the next few months, was hampered not just by the need for more money, but also by the sheer audaciousness of her proportions. Launching her had proved difficult and dangerous, because she was too long to launch at right angles to the river; she would have almost hit the Deptford shore opposite the huge Millwall Iron Works Company at Masthouse Terrace Pier on the Isle of Dogs where she was built. She had to be launched parallel to the river with the bows pointing out to sea. Two huge timber cradles on a specially designed slipway held the ship until she was ready to slide into the water.49 (Part of the slipway, together with one of the ship’s huge iron chains, can still be seen at Masthouse Terrace Pier.)

  As a contemporary engineer, Thomas Wright, wrote in 1867, the Isle of Dogs was the centre of the iron shipbuilding and marine engineering trade, hosting more than a dozen establishments, including the ‘gigantic one’ which built the Great Eastern. The company, owned by John Scott Russell, who collaborated – not always amicably – with the brilliant but prickly Brunel on the great ship, employed, according to Wright, 4,000 men and boys. A number of these, including Russell himself, were Scots who had learned their trade on the great shipbuilding River Clyde in Glasgow.50 Brunel was irascible and undiplomatic, writing on one occasion in 1855, early in the process, to the placid Russell, who had failed to give him the precise details he wanted about the weight of the ship: ‘How the devil can you say you satisfied yourself of the weight of the ship when the figures your Clerk gave you are 1000 tons less than I make it or than you made it a few months ago. For shame, if you are satisfied. I am sorry to give you trouble but I think you will thank me for it. I wish you were my obedient servant, I should begin by a little flogging.’51 There were arguments and a brief parting between the two men, but the ship continued to be built. When The Times described Russell as the builder in April 1857, he wrote to the paper to demand that Brunel be given his fair share of the praise:

  I designed her lines and constructed the iron hull of the ship, and am responsible for her merits or defects as a piece of naval architecture … It is, however, to the company’s engineer, Mr I.K. Brunel, that the original conception is due of building a steam ship large enough to carry coals sufficient for full steaming on the longest voyage … The idea of using two sets of engines and two propellers is original, and was his invention … It will be seen that these are the main characteristics which distinguish this from other ships, and these are Mr Brunel’s ideas.52

  The launch was planned for autumn 1857; Brunel was hurried into it by the financial backers, who advertised the launch for 3 November and encouraged paying spectators, to Brunel’s annoyance. The attempt failed, as the cradles did not move as planned but jerked, killing one of the workers. Brunel suspended the operation until more trials could be made and advice taken.53 Everyone watched with interest to see whether the next attempt would be successful. For two weeks in December preparations were made to try again, but once more the launch failed. On 7 December Carlyle told his brother John that ‘a terrible tussle is going on, launching that Big Ship’.54 Brunel despaired; he was tired and ill and worried about money. To his relief success came finally on 31 January 1858, when the ship slid into the river as intended.

  The naming of the ship was confusing. She was registered as the Great Eastern, but apparently at the first launch attempt on 3 November 1857 a reluctant and infuriated Brunel, when asked to choose a name, snapped that they could call her Tom Thumb for all he cared. The young woman designated to name the ship was Henrietta Hope, the daughter of one of the company’s financial backers, Henry Hope, the richest commoner in England and an MP who had supported Disraeli’s Young England movement twenty years earlier. She it was who cracked a bottle of champagne over the hull and named the ship Leviathan.55 Though she was finally launched successfully in January 1858, there was no money to complete her or sail her anywhere. Brunel was ill and ordered by doctors to go abroad to rest. The Leviathan/Great Eastern sat at Deptford, on display and visitable, until a new company bought her at the end of November 1858. After more delays and anxieties about costs she was ready by September 1859 to make her first voyage, to Liverpool, with the idea that if all went well she would then embark on a proper maiden voyage to New York.56 Brunel, though very feeble, went on board, but was too ill to travel. The ship set off without him on 7 September; an explosion off the Kent coast killed six sailors on board. Brunel himself died the following week. The Great Eastern, as she was now called, sailed on, but the envisaged voyage to New York was put off for another year.57 She was ahead of her time and never reached her full potential, though she was to be rightly celebrated as the only ship large enough to carry sufficient cable to complete the Atlantic Cable project in 1866. Brunel died in despair, but his efforts made him a hero. The most famous photographs of him are those taken in 1857–8 on the slipway beside the huge chains of the Great Eastern, and later on board his masterpiece. He looks tiny and unwell. (The young photographer who caught these images, Robert Howlett, had been commissioned by W.P. Frith to take pictures of the crowds at Derby Day in May 1856. Frith used them when painting his famous Derby Day picture for exhibition in 1858.58)

  The weather stayed hot right till the end of June. Record-keepers varied slightly in their observations and calculations, but it was generally agreed that June 1858 was either the hottest or second-hottest month on record. Joseph Irving, the journalist and antiquary who published a largely accurate account of public events from 1837 to 1871, The Annals of Our Time, reported that ‘the mean high day temperature’ was 76.5 °F (just under 25 °C) – ‘or 8.6 above the average’. Wednesday, 16 June hit the heights, reaching an unprecedented 102 °F (39 °C) momentarily at Greenwich, according to Irving.59 When on the last day of the month Disraeli, Gladstone, and other members of the House of Commons Bank Acts committee were seen rushing from a committee room at two in the afternoon, with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses, the image was seized on to characterise the crisis.60 The heat and stink were widely compared to the trials faced by the British in India; the Thames was likened to the Ganges, as well as to the fearful rivers of myth, the Lethe and the Styx. The writer for the Athenaeum whose misfortune it was to review a matinée concert on Saturday, 26 June wrote of ‘crowd, crinoline, ciarleria [chatter], and a heat which made one think sympathetically of Lahore and Lucknow’.61

  Crinolineomania

  Contemplating on Saturday, 3 July the previous fortnight’s excessive heat, Punch offered its readers a survival guide in an article entitled ‘Advice in Hot Weather’:

  Refrain from reading the Debates. Keep as cool as possible … Avoid going near a tallow-chandler’s shop … Shun public dinners … Keep clear of concerts, classical quartets, matinées, soirées, réunions, thés dansantes or chantantes, private parties … Walk twice the distance rather than get inside a red-hot oven of an omnibus; in the latter case, you will infallibly be baked alive … Avoid all theological hair-splitting matters of metaphysical mysticism, … parish squabbles, and Puseyite scandals [a reference to the goings on at St Barnabas], until the cool of the evening. Wear old boots … Tight clothes are a nuisance … during this brain-boiling and all-your-joints-hot-roasting weather.62

  Though it might seem that the surprisingly long-lasting vogue for ladies to wear crinoline petticoats under their ever-expanding skirts would make life doubly unbearable in such hot weather, the reverse was true. Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky, broiling in a Berlin summer, expressed her surprise and delight that her mother was wearing ‘a cage’; ‘what a comfort they are, so cool and light’, she wrote on 24 July.63 When Darwin’s granddaughter Gwen Raverat wrote down her memories of the family, she recalled asking her Aunt Etty, Darwin’s daughter Henrietta, what it was like to wear a crinoline. Gwen, born in 1885, suffered through the fashions of the 1890s and 1900s, when women wore floor-length ‘heavy tweed “walking skirts”, which kept on catching between the knees’, and girls sweltered in summer in vests
, stays, heavy woollen stockings, and overalls with long sleeves. Aunt Etty told her that it was ‘delightful’ to wear a crinoline: ‘I’ve never been so comfortable since they went out [of fashion]. It kept your petticoats away from your legs, and made walking so light and easy.’64

  Skirts had been getting progressively fuller for most of the nineteenth century, and required more and more petticoats underneath them to keep them from collapsing. The petticoats got stiffer and heavier to accommodate the increasing width. Something was needed to support the yards of material in skirts without making the whole costume too hot and heavy. The word ‘crinoline’, originally denoting a fabric woven with horsehair (French crin) used to stiffen petticoats, came to mean the new type of petticoat patented in 1856, which allowed skirts to grow in diameter without weighing down the dress and its wearer. This was the spring-steel hoop, known as a cage because of its shape; it was worn on top of a cotton petticoat, with the dress draped over the cage. The steel solution was found after experiments with rubber, inflatable tubes, whalebone, and cane.65 The popularity of the crinoline lasted for at least ten years, after which the fullness moved to the back of the skirt in the form of a bustle, before beginning to subside altogether.66 In May 1865, Punch, which constantly lampooned the crinoline, declared that the garment was now ‘doomed’. ‘Ladies fresh from Paris startle our eyes now-a-days by appearing in what at first sight we might fancy are their night-dresses.’67 The fashion had come from Paris in the first place. The Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, had her crinolines made for her by the English couturier Charles Worth.

  Thanks to the advent of steel hoops, dresses could become bigger and more elaborate in their decoration without bringing discomfort to the wearer. In April 1856 Disraeli’s wife Mary Anne, rather too keen – given her age (she was now sixty-four) – on keeping up with the latest fashion, told her elderly friend Sarah Brydges Willyams that the dresses in London ‘this season’ were ‘vast & grand looking, [with] such an immense quantity of trimming’.68 That the fashion was new in London and might not yet have reached provincial parts of Britain in 1856 was suggested in a short story by Elizabeth Gaskell, published in Dickens’s journal All the Year Round in 1863. Called ‘The Cage at Cranford’ and set in 1856, the story never mentions the word crinoline, but tells of the ladies of Cranford expecting something fashionable from Paris. When they are told it will be a ‘cage’, they are disappointed, thinking it must be a present for the parrot. The item arrives, and they are puzzled by its lack of top or bottom and try to sew and tie it up in order to put the parrot inside. The maid Fanny shyly suggests it might be a petticoat, and is ridiculed by the ladies, until the local doctor recognises its identity from looking at his wife’s fashion magazine.69

  Punch began its ten-year running commentary on crinolines in the summer of 1856, with pictures of complicated cage structures, including one showing a woman in a very wide dress with the cage worn outside her skirt and with a circular platform on top on which her two children play, one spinning a hoop, the other hanging over the bars of the platform. The picture is entitled ‘Every Lady her own Perambulator’.70 By December 1857 ‘Dr Punch’ is shown taking the pulse of a woman wearing a crinoline; the accompanying text, ‘Crinolineomania’, declares that this is a new female complaint, but it is the husbands who have something to complain about. The contagious disease broke out first in Paris, says Punch, starting with the empress and soon spreading alarmingly to Britain. ‘Like other insane people’, goes the article, ‘the Crinolineomaniac is difficult to approach – indeed it may be said that even her nearest relatives have to stand some distance off her’, with even her husband being compelled to keep at arm’s length. Dr Punch’s advice is to keep away from illustrated books of fashion and from Regent Street, where the most up-to-date cages can be bought. Husbands should put their patients ‘on a low diet of pin-money’ and try laughing them out of their insanity. To help them Dr Punch ‘will continue to dispense this wholesome medicine [i.e. ridicule], in weekly doses, at the small charge of threepence’.71

  Punch was as good as its word. All through 1857 and 1858 the magazine commented on the disadvantages of the crinoline craze. In February 1857 it said with authority that ladies were now complaining that they received fewer invitations to parties, because rooms which used to accommodate fifty ladies now only had space for fifteen. In May it suggested that many paintings sent in for the annual Royal Academy exhibition would take up too much room, as they depict life-size ladies wearing crinolines.72 In February 1858 two ladies in huge dresses are shown trying to get through a narrow church door; in July a short article entitled ‘Crinoline in the Slums’ describes the scrum at the old clothes market held on Sundays in the appropriately named Petticoat Lane, where servants and the working-class women of Houndsditch now buy crinolines discarded by the ladies of Belgravia; and in October the magazine declares a ‘New Omnibus Regulation’, namely that ladies must now hang their hoops on the outside of the vehicle so as not to take up too much space inside.73

  Most surprisingly, but in fact truthfully, Punch pointed out on 29 May 1858 that Edward Barry’s new Covent Garden Theatre, recently opened, had taken crinolines into account by making the seats and staircases wider than in the previous building, which had burnt to the ground in 1856:

  ‘Place aux dames! To ladies more than ever now must place or space be given’ … It is a new thing to us to say anything in favour of the Crinoline monstrosities, but we must admit that the present width of fashion may, masculinely viewed, be found of some advantage. For instance, thanks to large and lovely woman, Covent Garden is so built that a man may stretch his legs in it … We gentlemen of England may loll there at our ease, and sit through a whole opera uncramped as to our knees, etc. Decidedly, for this we have to thank the ladies.74

  The Builder, in a long article on 22 May on Barry’s sumptuous new building describing the crowds gaping as it emerged from its wrapping to open on 15 May, gave detailed accounts of the increase in dimensions offered by this state-of-the-art edifice.75 Meanwhile men’s fashions had begun to accommodate themselves to the crinoline craze by becoming narrower at the bottom. The so-called ‘pegtop’ trousers came in from the mid-fifties, making dancing easier.76

  Though the dangers to women of falling over by catching their hoops on an obstacle, or having their dresses catch fire, were obvious, crinolines came in handy on some occasions. They could keep a drowning woman afloat long enough for her to be saved, for example.77 In July the People’s Paper reported a ‘Perversion of Crinoline’: ‘On Tuesday [6 July] a female attired in a most voluminous skirt, was committed by the Liverpool magistrates for pocket picking and shop-lifting. By an ingenious contrivance she had formed her crinoline into an immense receptacle for stolen property. Several shawls and other articles stolen, shortly before her apprehension, were found upon her.’78

  When the season of pantomime came round in December, crinoline played an important part in the story of Amy Robsart, the heroine of the extravaganza Kenilworth, or ye Queene, ye Earle, and ye Maydenne at the Strand Theatre. The historical Amy was the wife of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. While her husband accompanied the queen on her royal progresses through the kingdom, Amy was left alone at home. She died suddenly from falling down a staircase; almost immediately a plot to murder her on the part of her ambitious husband was suspected. This tragic story was turned to ‘pun and parody’ by the authors of the burlesque, which according to the review in the Athenaeum was ‘manufactured with some skill’. A happy ending is contrived; Amy Robsart ‘is saved from death by her crinoline, which prevents her from falling through the fatal trap’.79

  Punch and several of the 1858–9 pantomimes punned and joked about the crinoline petticoat by calling it the ‘hoop-de-dooden-do’. The originator of this trend was the Punch writer Henry Silver, who published a poem in the magazine on 5 June 1858. Called ‘Hoop de dooden doo. A fashionable ballad’, it drew on an already popular danc
e song, the Hoop de dooden do Galop, by Charles Marriott, first published in 1857 and much reprinted. This in turn seems to have been influenced by a song of the same title performed in New York concert halls by the banjoist and comedian Henry Fox. This song, imitating the voice of a freed slave as he walks along a railway track, begins ‘One hundred years ago to-day, / My old massa set me free’, and ends every stanza with ‘Hoop de dooden do’.80 Henry Silver combines the minstrel dialect with the idea of a dance; he concentrates on the awkwardness for the male partner caused by the crinoline, or ‘hoop de dooden do’. The speaker complains that his dance partner’s crinoline trips him up; he addresses young women in general: