The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  As with any colour used widely, black acquired different and even opposite values, which coexisted without confusion because everyone understood them. With differences of material, and in age, cut and costliness, black could signify wealth, a competence or shabby-gentility. Black could be proudly aristocratic, or solidly respectable; sexually exhilarating, or churchy and moralistic. It was however seldom frivolous, and on its serious side it embodied the anxious severity of a class-ridden and Bible-ridden society that was frightened by its own rapid changes and latent unrest and devoted to many forms of control, including self-control. There may be exaggeration in fiction’s depiction of sadistic father-figures in black being piously harsh to their wives, children and employees. I have nonetheless argued, in another book (Men in Black, 1997), that men’s habitual wearing of modest but assertive, serious, Christian, all-black clothes did serve to reinforce a severe male authoritarianism in the world, in marriages and in the home.

  The world was not all monochrome, and in Tancred (1847) Benjamin Disraeli describes ‘a character of the class of artists’ who wears a bright blue frock-coat, green trousers (frogged and braided), a maroon waistcoat and primrose gloves. Some high-life dandies, like the Count d’Orsay, also dressed so. They were however conspicuous because the world was different; the outward character of men’s black clothes is given in Mrs Catherine Gore’s novel The Banker’s Wife (1843), when the banker Hamlyn walks through his counting-house, ‘spruce, black, lustrous’, with a brow that is serene and a smile that is bland.3

  Black was not so widespread in women’s dress, which was light in tone and often white, the colour-coding of gender being more marked in the nineteenth century than ever before. Stronger colours were available, however – deep reds and blues – even before the arrival of aniline dyes in the 1850s added mauve, magenta and chrome yellow. But a black item was often worn – a lace shawl, a velvet mantle, a black fur jacket, a silk pelisse. The ‘best dress’ a woman had was very often black. It might be of black velvet: the novelist Dinah Craik admired a ‘black velvet gown, substantial, soft, and rich, without any show’. Often the ‘best dress’ was black silk, but while silk was good, black satin was better. In Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley a daughter forbids her mother to wear her ‘old gown any more’ – ‘You shall put on your black silk every afternoon . . . And you shall have a black satin dress for Sundays – a real satin, not satinet, or any of the shams.’ The mother responds economically, ‘My dear, I thought of the black silk serving me as a best dress for many years yet.’ For the nineteenth century knew how to make black silks last: Mrs Beeton advised on washing (‘if old and rusty, a pint of common spirits should be mixed with each gallon of water’) and drying (‘in the shade, on a linen-horse . . . they will be improved if laid again on the table, when dry, and sponged with gin or whiskey’). But the daughter will have none of this. ‘Nonsense, mamma. My uncle gives me cash to get what I want . . . and I have set my heart on seeing you in a black satin.’4

  These dresses are not mourning dresses, but nineteenth-century women spent many weeks or months of their lives mourning for relatives at various degrees of remove as well as for sadly many children. Also, as Mrs Beeton said, ‘visitors, in paying condoling visits, should be dressed in black’. Though mourning dresses should not be lustrous, and were mostly made in dulled silk crape, they could be elaborate in their crochet insertions, slashed velvet borders and trims of goffered tulle – not to mention the coiffure, perhaps of black velvet coral with black ostrich feathers. Sarah Ellis in The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1839) mocked the wasteful expense of mourning: ‘So extremely becoming and ladylike is the fashionable style of mourning, that, under the plea of paying greater respect to the memory of the dead, it has become an object of ambition to wear it in its greatest excellence.’5

  These blacks may sound sedate, but black is also worn by Trollope’s attractive, dynamic American woman, Mrs Winifred Hurtle, who has killed a man ‘somewhere in Oregon’. Her ‘silken hair’ is ‘almost black’, and ‘her dress was always black, – not a sad weeping widow’s garment, but silk or woollen or cotton as the case might be, always new, always nice, always well-fitting, and most especially always simple. She was certainly a most beautiful woman, and she knew it.’ In June she wears the light silk weave known as grenadine, ‘a light gauzy black dress . . . It was very pretty, and she was prettier’. There is no suggestion that her black style follows from her (self-defensive) skill with firearms, nor is she a widow. Her blacks do relate to her being American, since the fashion for black – both for men and for women – was stronger again in America than in Europe, influenced both by the puritan tradition and by the emerging association of black with democracy.6

  Then there was the jewellery. Men had jet buttons at their pockets and cuffs, and their shirt-studs might be of black pearl. Women wore black jewellery not only when in mourning (mourning wear was not to glitter), but because – in the 1860s, ’70s and ’80s especially – black jewellery was the fashion. The stones might be jet, onyx, vulcanite or black tourmaline, or again black pearl. Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette noted that ‘a natural rarity, such as a black pearl, is a more distingué possession than a large brilliant’, and warned against common black beads.7 A jet pendant or locket would be worn round the neck with a strip of black velvet.

  Items about the home would be black. In the lady’s dressing room, her powder jar, glove-stretcher, bonnet brush and darning egg might be of ebony. If tea were served in the drawing room, it might be brought in on a tray of papier mâché, japanned black all over. When the well-to-do family rode out, their barouche, chariot, landau or phaeton might again be black-japanned. If open, its hood would be of blackened leather, as would the harness of the horses (which might again be beautifully black). Not everything was always black: there was a fashion called the ‘French Style’ with deep and florid colours. Still, considering the number of fine blacks in use, we could imagine that the nineteenth century had something like an aesthetic of blackness.

  Not all the furniture was ebony, but oak – which was much used – was often stained black. In his Hints on Household Taste (1869) Charles Eastlake said that ‘unpolished mahogany acquires a good colour with age’, but he went on: ‘it also looks very well stained black and covered with a thin varnish’. He said of mirror frames that ‘if in the commoner kinds of wood they can be ebonized (i.e. stained black)’, and many chairs, rocking chairs, tables and sideboards were. Eastlake recommended also bedroom chairs and rush-bottomed nursery chairs ‘of which the woodwork is stained black’.8

  Also, the century’s new products often came in black. Cast iron is a blackish grey, lying fresh in the foundry mould, and it was normally ‘dressed’ with paint that had a high bitumen content to protect it from corrosion – bitumen or pitch being a natural black preservative whose use goes back to Ur and earlier. Bitumen was already the principal ingredient in japan, the black varnish applied to woodwork (named after Japanese lacquer). By adding a small amount of vegetable carbon, the paint for ironwork could be given an egg-shell finish, and this fine black paint was known as Berlin black (because it was used for their cast-iron jewellery by the Berlin Royal Ironworks). Berlin black is the recommended ‘best finish’ for many cast-iron fenders and fire-irons offered in the 1875 catalogue of the Coalbrookdale Company (a principal producer of wrought and cast iron), as also for fire dogs, door porters and umbrella or stick stands. The surround to a cast-iron fire insert might be of Welsh grey-black slate, often painted to mimic black marble. A fireplace might be one massive piece of cast iron, dressed black, with gothic finials and Solomonic (corkscrew) columns built into it, with small cast-iron angels beside the fire basket supporting an Anglo-Saxon arch, thus completing the consecration of a pious and British hearth. Fine cast iron decorated the house, both inside and outside – as in the ‘balconettes’ designed by Robert Adam which decorate the house, also designed by him, at 7 Adam Street, Westminster (illus. 72).
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br />   Not that black is an easy colour, since it shows up dust and smears. Mrs Beeton gives numerous tips for keeping blacks ‘bright’. Among her first duties each day, the housemaid should black-lead the cast-iron grate, and brush it to a polish. If rust has appeared, she should apply Brunswick black (less lustrous than Berlin black), and a recipe is given for this (asphalt, linseed oil and turpentine). Furniture should be polished with a gloss made of wax, black rosin and turpentine. For such work the maid should wear a black apron; for serving tea to guests she should wear a white one. Moving to menservants, Mrs Beeton recommends for boots and shoes good commercial blacking, and if that is not available she again gives a recipe (ivory black and treacle, plus sulphuric acid, olive oil and vinegar). For patent leather footwear, a little milk may be used ‘with very good effect’. Visiting the stables, she gives a recipe for blacking harnesses and the leatherwork of carriages (wax mixed with ivory black, thinned with turpentine and scented with ‘any essence at hand’). If the leather was not black to start with, she recommends one or two coats of black ink before the polish is applied.9

  To know more of the century’s ‘aesthetic’ of black, one might turn to the article on ironwork in the Art Union journal of 1846.

  The characteristic, and what may be called the ‘natural’ colour of those [iron] castings, is a brilliant and beautiful jet black produced upon the casting when dressed . . . This [the ‘dressing’] is a very delicate operation, and requires great skill in the manipulation, but the results are beautiful.

  The author is not uncritical, for those recommending black were aware of its difficulties. ‘There is however one defect: all shadow is lost on the black surface, and hence delicate tracery and minute details of form run a very obvious hazard of being overlooked.’ The author notes that many products are ‘bronzed over’, but is unhappy with ‘a disguise of material’. His attitude, in sum, is divided: he celebrates forcefully ‘a brilliant and beautiful jet black’, but also says at one point, almost poignantly, that ‘perfect blackness, even accompanied by a high polish, has a sombering effect, from which the wearied eye in vain seeks for the relief it finds by the introduction of colour’.10

  The author was not alone in his divided attitude to black. In his Hints on Household Taste Charles Eastlake recommends the use of black all over the house, but still is troubled by the black clothes that are worn so widely, in which ‘occasions of public and private festivity’ become indistinguishable from ‘occasions of public and private mourning’.11 Not that a young nineteenth-century couple, wearing their best blacks and surveying a new home at once dark and bright with jet-black accessories, would have been troubled with thoughts of their sombre mournfulness, any more than we have such thoughts about a jet-black BlackBerry, puffer jacket or huge, flat-screen television.

  THE PREMIUM ON black was assisted by the fading of the Neoclassical style, with its love of white marble. In architecture taste jumped to the Middle Ages and then advanced backwards, from Gothic (pointed arches) to Romanesque (round arches) to Byzantine (round and florid), all with deep-toned facades often using much brick. China might be deep-coloured, or set its flower patterns against gleaming black. Walls that had been painted a light greenish-grey were covered now with deep-toned wallpapers (assisted by the invention in the 1790s of machines that produced continuous wallpaper, and by the steam-powered printing presses of the 1810s). In the high art of the painting academies, English and French (which both followed, and fed, the general taste), black paint was laid on canvases both to catch Romantic gloom and also from an increasing fascination with Rembrandt.

  The return of Rembrandt is an index of the darkening taste, for from the late seventeenth until the late eighteenth century Rembrandt’s art was in dim eclipse. But then in portraiture (Rembrandt’s art), from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, in Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney and Watts, admiration for Rembrandt showed in many dark-to-black backgrounds and in the pleasure in rendering fine black clothes. When thinking of nineteenth-century art, one may think first of protest art, the Pre-Raphaelites in England and the Impressionists later in France, both schools bright with gorgeous colouring. But in both cases the protest was against the dark tones in so many other paintings, and (as they sometimes said) against the quantities of bitumen deployed in innumerable grand battle scenes and deaths of famous generals. John Ruskin, who supported the Pre-Raphaelites so vocally, also said ‘you must make black conspicuous . . . it ought to catch the eye’.12

  For artists, black was not ‘outside of any chromatic system’, as Michel Pastoureau put it. The popular Royal Academician Edwin Landseer was not committed to chiaroscuro but he loved to render the more-than-silky sheen in the black coats of dogs and horses, in the fine coats of men and in the fine dresses of young women and duchesses. In his painting of Queen Victoria on horseback wearing mourning clothes, the subdued lustre of her silk plays against the more strongly silken lustre in the coat of the beautiful black horse she rides, while John Brown in mourning attendance wears the lustreless black proper to men in his black bonnet, jacket, dark kilt and black socks (illus. 73).

  In prints and illustrations there was a positive renaissance of black-and-white art. At the turn of the century Thomas Bewick had revived wood-engraving, which had fallen to the level of street art. He used harder woods than those used for broadsheet ballads, especially box, and he cut into the end-grain rather than the plank. This made finer cutting possible, and printed rich blacks, since ink caught well in the texture of the wood grain. His masterpiece, A History of British Birds, came out between 1797 and 1804, with deep blacks and a lively, bold notation for plumage, foliage and water. With time, wood-engraving became the medium of choice for books, journals and news-sheets. The great master of the medium was Gustave Doré, with his genius for dark tones, the deepest blacks and silvery glimmering lights (see illus. 56).

  Wood-engravings print like linocuts – or like the letterpress of books – where paper is applied under light pressure to a well-inked surface. Most quality prints, however, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, had been made using the intaglio process, where the ink lies in grooves and needs to be picked up by damp paper under high pressure. Dürer and Rembrandt had worked with copper, but in the 1790s engravers began to work on steel, at first in producing banknotes and then for general illustration. The cutting is harder work but finer, and yields its own rich darks. And since acid of the right strength bites into iron as easily as copper, a revival of Rembrandt’s art of etching followed. The illustrations for nineteenth-century novels by Dickens, Thackeray and their competitors were etched in steel. The line-work in these plates can be as dense, dark and dramatically black as that of any earlier etcher or engraver, as can be seen in George Cruikshank’s gruesome study of a career-executioner readying his tools, ‘Mauger Sharpening His Axe’, for William Harrison Ainsworth’s serial novel The Tower of London of 1840 (illus. 74). The artist shares Mauger’s relish for well-tempered steel – such as the silver-gleaming plate of new Sheffield steel on which the design itself was etched.

  73 Edwin Landseer, Queen Victoria at Osborne (Sorrow), 1867, oil on canvas.

  The process of making an etching was as labour-intensive in the nineteenth century as it had been for Rembrandt. The spirit of mechanization did, though, produce some shortcuts for deepening chiaroscuro. The Stranger at the Grave is by Hablot Knight Browne, who called himself ‘Phiz’ when he illustrated Dickens (illus. 75). But he illustrated Dickens’s competitors also, and in this plate for Ainsworth’s novel Mervyn Clitheroe (1858) the waxy coat laid on the metal has been lightly traced with a ruling machine. The fine lines expose the metal but are then covered, in stages, with stopping-out varnish. Those lines which are last to be stopped out will be bitten so deep by the acid that they add a deep tone to the close cross-hatching, which will again be strengthened by running over the plate a ‘roulette’, a spiked wheel, which directly pits the steel so it holds more ink. Both effects can be seen in the br
ighter gravestones, while the clear spots of moonlight reflected in the lake were made by stopping out the lines before the acid touched the metal. Browne has worked like any film-maker managing a night scene – balancing deep darkness with dramatic but low lighting.

  74 George Cruikshank, ‘Mauger Sharpening His Axe’, illustration from William Harrison Ainsworth, The Tower of London (1840).

  75 Hablot Knight Browne, ‘The Stranger at the Grave’, illustration for William Harrison Ainsworth, Mervyn Clitheroe (1858), etching.

  Another intaglio technique, revived and turned to black effect, was mezzotint. Here the metal is roughened with a fine-toothed ‘rocker’ until the surface is so rough that it holds much ink and prints jet-black. If now, with a burnisher, one rubs some places smooth, they hold less ink and print in greys – or white, if one scours the metal to flatness.13 John Martin used this technique for his visionary illustrations to an edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost of 1827 (illus. 76). ‘The Bridge over Chaos’ shows the road that Sin and Death have built – or rather excavated – to connect our world with Hell, following the Fall. The tiny crouching form of Sin, and black Death with his crown, can just be made out in the top right corner, beside their incestuous parent Satan, who stands with wings triumphantly spread. Their tiny figures seem hardly equal to this vast construction work, which resembles the bridges, viaducts and tunnels which engineers had begun to make in the 1780s and ’90s. But the ‘slimie’ stuff of Chaos also has an organic look, and might call to mind the nineteenth century’s passion for looking inside the body (which led to the invention of the endoscope and laryngoscope), especially since the tunnel resembles a throat. The succulent blackness of the mezzotint makes such ambiguous suggestiveness easy, while the straight black road from earth to Hell looks here like a ray of Milton’s ‘darkness visible’.