The Story of Black

by John Harvey

In Winter, furrs and Wild beasts haire

  For a smoother skinn at night

  Embraceth her with more delight.

  Though the lines are dissociative, their effect is to sexualize the mask, while the shadow of cruelty falls both on it and on its wearer. Putting this print together with Hollar’s other fur studies, where his eye caresses every hair, one may suspect a fetishism in his attaction to black softnesses – the more so given the routine way in which he draws women, their little mouths inert and mute. The mask can seem as active in looking as the cold-kitten eyes behind it.

  Masks were not entirely new, for in Tudor England ladies sometimes wore light vizard-masks to protect them from wind or sun. But it was in the mid-seventeenth century, and especially after Charles II returned to the throne bringing fashions from France, that masks became notably à la mode. Tudor masks had often been white, but the new fashion-masks were almost always black: the word ‘mask’ may derive from the old French mascurer, to blacken. They were worn at the theatre, partly for reasons of discretion. In 1663 Samuel Pepys noticed Lady Falconbridge put on her mask as the playhouse filled, and keep it on throughout the performance. She was Mary, the daughter of Oliver Cromwell, whose body had recently been exhumed in disgrace; she may have preferred to be incognito. Pepys’s general comment is that the wearing of masks ‘is become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face’. Leaving the playhouse – it is late afternoon – Pepys and his wife go shopping, partly so she too can buy a mask.10

  Probably there was nothing sinister in the mask bought for Elizabeth Pepys, simply a pleasure in teasing, such as Pepys observed on another visit to the theatre, with his wife and Sir Charles Sedley.

  And one of the ladies . . . did sit with her mask on, all the play, and, being exceeding witty as ever I heard woman, did talk most pleasantly with [Sedley]; but was, I believe, a virtuous woman, and of quality. He would fain know who she was, but she would not tell; yet . . . did give him leave to use all means to find out who she was, but pulling off her mask. He was mighty witty, and she also making sport with him very inoffensively, that a more pleasant ‘rencontre’ I never heard.

  Clearly the mask gave both parties an exhilarating freedom, justified by their play of wit, while perhaps what they managed, through the longueurs of the play, was a satisfying – and safe – sublimation of sex. Sedley and the lady, flirting through the eyeholes of a mask, are more innocent than Pepys himself, who earlier that day was at his office, ‘where je had Mrs Burrows all sola a my closet, and did there baiser and toucher ses mamelles’ before going to the theatre with his wife.11

  Both the intrigue of the mask, and its utility as disguise, were appreciated by the prostitutes who haunted London’s theatreland, and it was said that by the century’s end, prostitutes were the principal users of masks. Thus, if the mask had not been too sinister in the mid-century, it could be so in the 1690s, leering beside a street-door – ‘Good sir, come hither.’ Then it no longer hid the character of its wearer, and was perhaps worn simply to entice, though it might conceal a syphilitic sore, or a nose with the cartilage eaten away, such as Fielding described and Hogarth drew. A genre of popular print evolved, where we see – though the lover does not – that the maiden’s mask conceals a rotting skull.

  By the early 1700s, if not before, masks had been both sexualized and dramatized. One might then expect society to drop them, but the opposite happened. In the 1710s Johann Jacob Heideggar – a Swiss count and unsuccessful diplomat who had become manager of the Haymarket Theatre – began to organize masked balls on nights when the theatre had no opera. The ‘masquerades’ were vastly popular, and were patronized by the merchant class, the aristocracy and sometimes the monarchy, while the ticket price, of five shillings or less, allowed in footmen, housemaids and apprentices – and prostitutes also. The arrangements reflected the Carnivals of Catholic countries, where social ranks were reversed, and sometimes genders: a duchess might come as a milkmaid, a hairdresser as a Sultan, a young gentlewoman as a hussar, all of them wearing masks. Unlike the Carnival, the London masquerades were not confined to the period before Lent, and did not overflow into the streets or go on for days. They were run for profit and were contained by the Haymarket Theatre or the Vauxhall or Ranelagh Gardens; or, after 1760, by Carlisle House in Soho, and the assembly rooms known as the Pantheon, where the opera-singing courtesan Mrs Theresa Cornelys took over as principal impresario.12

  Behind the masks, the great dressed regularly as the humble, and the humble as the great, though it is hard to say now to what extent their dressing up provided a ‘safety valve’ that preserved the status quo, and to what extent a subversive impulse worked with real effect. It is a fact that as political tensions increased in Europe, moving towards real revolution in France (in 1789) and to serious fear of revolution in England, the fashion for the masquerade faded, and could be said to have died by the 1790s. Attendance in the 1780s was ‘thin’, Carlisle House was demolished in 1788, the Pantheon burned down in 1792, and Mrs Cornelys (after a brief period trading in asses’ milk) died bankrupt in the Fleet Prison in 1797.

  In their heyday, however (from 1710 to 1760), the masquerades were a show of noise, laughter, colour. Wine (canary and champagne) was free, several orchestras played at once, and the Haymarket was lit by 500 candles. Revellers might come as Persian monarchs, orange-girls, Harlequins, Roman soldiers or Circassian maids. There was a touch of Halloween: a corpse came to one ball, a dancing coffin to another, and one or more devils, black from head to cloven foot, brandished their pitchforks at most masquerades. For black was the most common single colour. Many masqueraders came in a domino – a loose, enveloping gown – which could be white or blue, but most often was black. Others came in the black habits of monks, friars and nuns, the black gowns of rabbis and Orthodox priests, or the black clothes of Methodist preachers; or as chimney sweeps with black brooms. Africans were not forgotten, though a ‘blackamoor’ would be tribal, not a slave; the sexual prestige of Africans was alluded to when, in 1768, a Miss Pelham came in the guise of a blackamore, with legs that were entirely bare but also entirely black.

  The single most common black item of costume was the mask itself. It was either a black disc with holes for eyes and mouth or a black rectangle for the top half of the face; it was tied on with strings or sometimes held on a stick like a lorgnette. The century clearly loved to play at showing and hiding both face and eyes. In Francis Hayman’s painting of David Garrick and Mrs Pritchard there is a witty reciprocity in the game the man and woman play with each other and with us (illus. 70). He lifts his black tricorn hat to hide his face, while she holds her black (slightly sinister) mask down from her face. Neither sees the other’s face, though we see both; they play with masking and performance within the play The Suspicious Husband, even as they perform it.

  70 Francis Hayman, David Garrick as Ranger and Mrs Pritchard as Clarinda in a scene from Benjamin Hoadly, The Suspicious Husband (c. 1747), 1752, oil on canvas.

  Instead of black, one might wear the mask of a blood-red devil, or a dead-white half-mask with a grotesque big nose, but this again had a black veil hanging under it, to cover mouth and chin. Dancers played with false voices (masqueraders were said to squeak and hoot), but above all they played – or worked – with their eyes. They had the freedom of disguise, and the resource of libido on the loose. For the mask, one might say, is the supreme mascara and needs small prompting from the eye that it accentuates to launch its innuendo of mystery and excitement.

  One might here consider at large the relationship between the human eye and blackness. Eyelashes are often dark, and at its centre the eye has a black pupil, which dilates in dim light or during sexual arousal, when it may darken the whole iris. Perhaps for this reason eye cosmetics (such as kohl) have been predominantly dark and very often black. Literature may associate deeply dark eyes with a chaste, longing love, but the dominant association of ‘black eyes’, Black-Eyed Susans and black-eyed maidens in fictio
n is with powerful desire and desirability, even to the point of fearfulness. These associations were already established when Shakespeare’s Biron both complained and exalted in the fact that his girl ‘had two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes’. And when Andrew Marvell paints his beloved, in ‘The Gallery’, as ‘an inhuman murderess’, he places ‘black eyes’ among ‘the most tormenting . . . engines’ within her ‘cruel arts’.13

  ‘The Ballad of Black-Eyed Susan’ was itself written early in the eighteenth century by a poet much involved with the London theatre and the London streets, John Gay. Susan’s eyes are black and shine from weeping – though actually she is both white and black, containing together the lights and darks of India and of Africa. Her departing lover, a naval seaman, sings:

  If to fair India’s coast we sail,

  Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright:

  Thy breath is Afric’s spicy gale,

  Thy skin as ivory so white:

  His ship itself is a fertile woman (‘Her sails their swelling bosom spread’). Hereafter black-eyed maids recur in poetry – in the early verse of William Blake, for instance (‘to my black-eyed maid I haste away’), and in Byron’s Don Juan they are numerous. Most notably, Juan’s ‘Romagnole’ has eyes that are ‘black and burning as a coal’. Byron’s attitude is relaxed – he later says ‘an eye’s an eye, and whether black or blue, / Is no great matter, so ’tis in request’.14 In later verse and popular song ‘black eyes’ may at times be a cliché, and then again reassert their original power. For the arresting potency, the enticing menace of actual ‘black eyes’ would seem a permanency in human life.

  As to the general role of black in masquerades, one could say that black plays with its own solemnities when revellers come as monks, nuns or priests, and that it plays with its dark side when they come as devils, witches or as hooded Deaths. But that sort of play was a dance on a knife-edge, since the masked enticer might lead you away to forced sex, an unwanted pregnancy or the discovery (later) that your genitals burned with the pox. The contemporary novel played on these uncertainties. When the heroine of Fanny Burney’s novel Cecilia (1782) goes to a masquerade, ‘the very first mask who approached her . . . was the devil! He was black from head to foot . . . his face was so completely covered that the sight only of his eyes was visible.’ He bows obsequiously, looms close above her and, using his fiery wand as a weapon, menaces or strikes other maskers, who retire, including a Don Quixote who briefly defies him and ‘the black bile which floateth within [his] sable exterior’. The devil then begins ‘a growling, so dismal and disagreeable’ that other onlookers desert Cecilia, while she learns that if everyone is disguised, then you are truly alone. She is increasingly molested and menaced until a chimney sweep of equal blackness, dropping real soot, accosts the devil roughly and allows her to escape. It is no surprise to learn later that the devil, this ‘black Lucifer’, is the novel’s unscrupulous villain Monkton, who is the real scheming devil in Cecilia’s story, being equally infatuated with her body and her fortune.15 Names with ‘monk’ in them serve well for villains in Protestant novels, like the villain ‘Monks’ in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, who gives ‘dark and evil looks’ and wears a dark cloak, as monks, villains and devils were all known to do. In the direct representation of monks as villains in other Protestant novels – in the Gothic genre – one may see the black of the church becoming little different from the black of goblins and devils.

  In later art the masquerade can be morbidly gruesome – in the etchings of Goya, for instance, where masks may seem alive with evil. In Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, of the next century, the unknown mask, dressed in a winding sheet spotted with blood, is Death. But the eighteenth century too saw the shadow behind its play: in contemporary engravings, those attending the masquerade may huddle and squabble, a half-animal rabble, and Death may be among them. In Rowlandson’s drawing The Masquerade Death is a supple skeleton; he brandishes his dart and a devil’s-face mask (illus. 71). His black domino dances with him, curling through the air, while in the foreground Harlequin (in a black mask) and other dancers, dressed like the Devil or like pashas, tumble over each other as they flee. In the further background the dance goes on, with the hectic abandon of Death’s own dance. Earlier, in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–5), Death had been ‘the dreadful masquerader’ who ‘leads the dance . . . gaily carousing’ until he ‘drops his mask . . . his black mask of nitre . . . and devours’.16

  71 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘The Masquerade’, illustration from William Combe, The English Dance of Death (1815–16), hand-coloured etching with aquatint.

  In Young we see the dark side of the masquerade joined with the ongoing fashion for melancholy. For eighteenth-century poetry had its own ‘black accent’, in the gloomy visions of the ‘graveyard poets’. Their focus is on transience and death, contemplated in the darkness of night and the tomb, standing alone beneath sad cypress trees. In Young’s Night Thoughts, ‘the black raven’ hovers while Night, the ‘sable goddess, from her ebon throne’ lets her ‘black mantle fall’. In Robert Blair’s The Grave, of 1743, the poet wanders ‘the gloomy aisles / Black plaister’d’ of some ‘hallow’d fane’ while ‘night’s foul bird, / Rook’d in the spire, screams loud’ and ‘grisly spectres rise’. A ‘new-made widow . . . crawls along in doleful black’.17 The poem’s tone is not however morosely depressed, and could even be called exalted, while Young had said ‘How populous, how vital is the grave!’ At times these pensive, pessimistic poets seem positively to revel in death’s accessories, in crypts and vaults, in skulls and winding sheets and coffins, which recur again in the growing fashion for the ‘Gothic’ novel. For though the eighteenth century knew real depressive illness – such as affected William Cowper and possibly Samuel Johnson – the culture of melancholy has an element of theatre about it. Thomas Young and Robert Blair are latter-day Hamlets, and at times echo, with a sombre delectation, his truly depressive eloquence.

  In the last decades of the century it became positively fashionable for young people to be mournful, to dress in black, and to read sad verses in country cemeteries. In doing so they were pioneers in the new black fashion which was to envelop so many departments of life as the eighteenth century moved into the nineteenth. Then it might seem, to someone watching from a distance, as if the black shadows of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had, after all, been simply sleeping, and woke again with an appetite to swallow the world.

  72 Detail of cast-iron balconette at 7 Adam St, Westminster, London, c. 1770s.

  NINE

  Britain’s Black Century

  AT THE END of chapter Four of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the heroine watches over London as midnight strikes. She notices

  a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St Paul’s. As the strokes sounded . . . she saw it darken and spread with extraordinary speed . . . As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge blackness sprawled over the whole of London . . . The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.

  Much was black in the nineteenth century – frock coats, velvet dresses, hansom cabs, chimney sweeps. Wine came in a black bottle. If ill, injured or concussed, one took a ‘black draught’ (made from senna, Epsom salts, cardamom and ginger). The air itself could be bitter with soot. Running the different blacks loosely together, one may see the century as the Age of Black in an almost mystical way. Is there a unitary meaning to the century’s blackness? But first one must distinguish the different blacks in play. I concentrate on Britain because the new black turn began here, but draw some images from elsewhere because of their clarity and quality.

  Black menswear, which had a smart but low profile through the eighteenth century, became more prominent at the turn of the century. The move to black in evening dress (for men) became decisive when it was adopted by Beau Brummell in the 1810s, and mimicked by his then friend the Prince Regent, setting the fashion for all of society. Knee-breeches by now looked dated and wer
e succeeded by black trousers, first in the skin-tight form known as pantaloons, though by 1820 the loose leg (much like modern trousers) had arrived. Men’s daytime wear blackened through the 1820s, the frock coat becoming mainly black in the early 1830s and daytime trousers in the later ’30s (in the cool months especially). Also in the 1830s the cravat changed from mainly white to mainly black, while the evening waistcoat gave up colour for black or white in the 1840s. George Routledge added, in his Manual of Etiquette (1860), ‘And let your hat be always black.’ A gentleman’s handkerchief might be of black silk. More colours could be worn in the daytime, but many men still chose black. Anthony Trollope remarks in The Eustace Diamonds (1871), ‘With Mr Dove every visible article of his raiment was black, except his shirt, and he had that peculiar blackness which a man achieves when he wears a dress-coat over a high black waistcoat in the morning.’1

  In the learned professions, barristers and clergy of ‘the old school’ still wore black breeches with black hose, but physicians and teachers, and new professionals like engineers, wore the new smart evening style during the day; so did bankers and merchants. The style, with its rules, percolated downwards, so that clerks in the lawyer’s chambers or in the merchant’s counting house wore black, as servants did in the home. For to flaunt extreme wealth it was now necessary to have two sorts of servant, some in livery and wigs from the eighteenth century and others in the new black. Describing the household of a great financier, Trollope says, ‘Of the certainty of the money . . . there could be no doubt . . . There were the servants with the livery coats and powdered heads, and the servants with the black coats and unpowdered heads.’2 The best coats were of black kerseymere (cashmere) or of superfine black broadcloth, but cheaper black woollens were available, and the use of black as a work-colour spread, until in the 1870s Thomas Hardy noted that farm-workers went to the fields in black suits. At all levels black had brilliance because it was worn with white – a white shirt especially. There were also the white gloves that a gentleman kept in his pocket in the evening, and slipped on were he likely to touch his partner in dancing a waltz or a polka. The top hat was occasionally white, and made of beaver-fur.