In honour of London Fashion Week – yes it is: I’m a journalist so I know these things (unfortunately) — I thought I’d repeat the fashion advice of Ladies Magazine for June 1775:

The head-dress was ushered in at the beginning of the spring with a Small tuft of feathers which was Soon changed to two or three distinct ones of the largest size placed remarkably flat with a rose of ribbons on the fore part, and a knot Suspending at the back of the head.
The hair low before, yet rising on the forehead nearly perpendicular, in a round small toupee. The sides down to the ears combed smooth, very far back and broad behind. The corners raised but a little above the front, with two, three or four large curls down the sides, the bottom curl in many nearly upright. The bag not so low as the chin, small and smooth at bottom, in general. The robings straight, in many puckered. Stays quite low before, and the bosom much exposed. Breast-knot small ; bouquet large. The round cuff, variously trimmed, in some up the arms, was indiscriminately worn on sacques, or the loose gown, which was thrown carelessly behind, and gathered up the sides, or close to the back of the waist ; in either tied up with ribbons of a different colour.
Hats little worn ; white roses were generally worn in the shoes or slippers.”

(A sacque, the dictionary tells me, is a short, loose-fitting outer garment, something like a shawl I gather.)

This from my newest Ebay antiquarian, English Women in Life and Letters, by M. Phillips and W.S. Tomkinson, OUP, 1927, p. 122. (It is not like the books the press put out now, being profusely illustrated and distinctly frivolous.)

… that’s what I’ve been musing on after seeing this evening the production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe with an all-female cast.

It’s amazing how well it works, how soon you even stop thinking about it working. The “actor” playing Benedick – a star playing in this role somewhat against part as the fool – reasserts his “lead star” quality at one point by flirting with female members of the audience, and it IS a male actor flirting, not a dressed-up woman.

Benedick (Josie Lawrence) is the undoubted star of the show; Beatrice (Yolanda Vasquez) has a great stage presence too, but without the problem of playing across gender.

It makes it much easier to understand through all those centuries when clothing was very strictly gender-specific how so many women (and they are just the ones we know about) were able to “pass” as men for long periods of time. Lower the pitch of your voice, walk in a swaggering way, wear the right clothes, and voila!

I thought of that thesis, and Francis Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption, one of the most ridiculously ill-informed books I have ever read, when C-18L this morning delivered this wonderfully useful website, Selected readings.

I dug out the book, which has a bookmark about half-way through that marks the point where I finally threw it against the wall in frustration. It was when it said for about the 50th time about how good it was that Asian cultures tried to keep women unemployed and pregnant …

Flicking through now I came across this wonderful paragraph, which really could not be satirised:

“At the core of Victorian morality was the inculcation of impulse control in young people, the shaping of what economists would today call their preferences so that they would not indulge in casual sex, alcohol or gambling that would be bad for them in the long run. Victorians sought to create respectable personal habits in societies where the vast majority of inhabitants can be described only as crude. Today the desire for respectability if usually derided as an expression of insufferable middle-class conformism, but it had an important meaning in the first half of the nineteenth century when civility could not be taken for granted. Teaching people habits of cleanliness, punctuality, and politeness was critical in an era when all three of these bourgeois virtues were lacking.” (p. 270, Profile, London, 2000)

History by an economist.

I can’t say that there’s much that I miss about Australia — cheap BYO restaurants and good Asian food perhaps — but I was rather taken with this blog.

The picture of the tunnel in Central Station in Sydney certainly took me back to when I was first venturing out of the suburbs; I thought the dingy, tatty (and I bet it still is) area around the station was the height of intellectual sophistication – there were Chinese shops, and secondhand bookshops and everything.

I guess it goes some way to explaining why one of my favourite quotes is Marlowe: “But that was in another country, And besides, the wench is dead.”

A convergence of two items about Shakespeare has left me musing this morning on the nature of literary fame. The first was in Today in Literature (that link will only work for a couple of days) and the second was further English Garner browsing: “Sketch of English Literature, Painting, and Music up to September 1598,”, by Francis Meres.(Vol II pp. 94-106).

It starts with the ancients, and tries to match them up with the moderns, so:
“As Greece had three poets of great antiquity, Orpheus, Linus and Musaeus, and Italy, other three ancient poets Livius Andronicus, Ennius and Plautus: so hath England three ancient poets: CHAUCER, GOWER and LYDGATE.” (Fair enough – but then Meres already had a couple of centuries perspective.)

Then he gets to his contemporaries, and Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindarus, Phyocylides and Aristophanes; and Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Silius Italicus, Lucanus, Lucretius, Ausonius and Claudianus, “so the English tongue is mightily enriched, and gorgeously invested in rare ornaments and resplendent habilments by SIR PHILIP SYDNEY, SPENSER, DANIEL, DRAYTON, WARNER, SHAKESPEARE, MARLOW, and CHAPMAN.”

Several “who?”s in that one.

Just finished Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with America?, an interesting exploration of the right-wing working-class voter. It’s not quite so original a phenomena as he claims, I would suggest, nor does he really manage to explain why so many voters are suffering from what he effectively describes as “false consciousness”, but interesting nonetheless.

His account is almost entirely focused on his home state of Kansas, which was, he says, a hotbed of radicalism 100 years ago, “when those in the hardest-hit areas [economically] were the most radical. In Kansas, the political geography of class has been turned upside down”.

He argues the right has largely achieved this by hijacking the left position of perpetual victimhood, through fighting issues of abortion, gay rights, TV and movie content that it almost certainly cannot win. He concludes, without really exploring, the reason why the right has got away with this is that liberalism has surrendered the economic arguments, leaving that ground to laissez-faire capitalism as a fait accompli.

I still don’t think that he gets to the “why”, but an interesting discussion.

The Observer’s reviewer was more complimentary.