Textile History

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The Dress of the Poor

Steven King & Christiana Payne

To cite this article: Steven King & Christiana Payne (2002) The Dress of the Poor, Textile History,
33:1, 1-8

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Textile History, 33 (1), 1-8,2002

Introduction: the Dress of the Poor

STEVEN I<ING AND CHRISTIANA PAYNE

This special issue arises from a conference held at the Humanities Research Centre,
Oxford Brookes University in November 1999, which was itself prompted by a
conversation between a social historian and an art historian, both of whom felt that the
topic of the dress of the poor was one which had been unjustly neglected and yet held
great potential for research across disciplinary boundaries. In the course of his research
on historical welfare patterns, Steve IZinghad come across material on the clothing that
was distributed to those on poor relief; Christiana Payne's interest had been aroused by
very different sources, exhibited paintings of rural labourers, produced by artists for
consumption by the rich. The creative tensions between written and visual sources and
between actuality and representation were, therefore, issues which informed the project
from the outset.
The history of dress itself is an area which is rapidly growing in scope. Clothing, once
seen as a somewhat marginal issue in historical study has gained in academic
respectability, as historians of all kinds become increasingly aware of the role of dress in
maintaining class structures and expressing moral ideas. As Diana Crane has recently
noted,
Clothing, as one of the most visible forms of consumption, performs a major role in the social
construction of identity . . . One of the most visible markers of social status and gender and
therefore useful in maintaining or subverting symbolic boundaries, clothing is an indication of
how people in different areas have perceived their positions in social structures and negotiated
status boundaries. 1

In the last decade, a burgeoning interest in the body, the self and identity has also led to
a plethora of publications on dress.2 And economic and social historians have become
ever more aware of the growing demand for clothing at all levels of society in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The eighteenth-century consumer revolution,
traced so effectively by commentators such as Weatherill, was a revolution in the
domestic environment generally and clothing in particular. 3 Cottons were substituted
for wools and linens in many areas and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
diarists from outside the gentry and aristocracy show an interest in clothing and fashion
which one does not largely find amongst similar people in the seventeenth century.4 For
those whose means did not stretch to new clothing, there was a vibrant English second-
hand market which could open up fashion, colour and style as well as functionality to
both rural and urban consumers.5 By the mid-nineteenth century, accounts of the
clothing preferences of female mill operatives show clearly that a passion for clothing,
both for its practical and symbolic value, was to be seen.6 Little wonder, then, that more
people in Lancashire were employed in making, altering and supplying garments by the
1830S than were employed in all stages of the cotton industry. Indeed, in a national

I
Introduction: The Dress of the Poor
sense, the clothing trades probably constituted the sixth or seventh largest occupation
in 1851, depending upon how we define the limits of the trade.7
Such observations testify to a society awash with clothing and 'clothing aware' in a
way that would not have been the case in, say, 1700. Clothing was a vehicle for obtaining
respectability, it was a store of value that could be liquidated at the pawnbrokers, it was
a vital part of the courtship process, it was something that needed to be thought about
in the range of new occupations emerging in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain
(it was dangerous, for instance, to have loose clothing in mills, to the extent that mill
rules often specified a type of uniform), it was frequently the cause of criminal activity
and, as Buck has shown, it provided a living for numerous people even in the smallest
local community.8 Of course, we know more about London fashions and London
production than almost anywhere else, but there are now detailed analyses of firms,
individuals and consumers in the lace-making, hosiery, glove-making, silk and other
industries. 9
Yet in the new literature on fashion, dress and the body the emphasis has been very
much on the dress of the elite; the clothing of the poor - either labouring people or the
destitute - has tended to be neglected. Literary historians have begun to look more
closely at descriptions of the dress of the poor in the work of nineteenth-century
novelists, and art historians also show an increasing appreciation of the importance of
dress in genre and landscape painting, but there has been little systematic study of the
topic in either of these disciplines.10 Recent publications by Beverly Lemire and John
Styles have approached the dress of the labouring poor from different and illuminating
perspectives. Lemire's research on criminal records showed that there was a ready
market for stolen cloth and clothing in the late eighteenth century, and that there was
an astonishing variety of colours, patterns and materials in the dress of working-class
people from around 1760 onwards.11 Using the inventories of clothing and cloth
retailers in conjunction with criminal and other records, Styles was able to show that it
was relatively uncommon for 'non-elite' households to make the cloth for their clothes,
and even to make the cloth into the clothes which they wore.12 Instead, the labouring
poor purchased new, second-hand and stolen goods on their own behalf, or turned to
the poor law to obtain such items.13 Wider literature on the dress of the poor is,
however, rather rarer. Dress is considered as a minor and tangential issue in the
historiography of rural labouring unrest, historical demography, custom, urban culture,
medical history and work. Poor law historians have not rectified this shortfall either.
While the recent historiography has at last moved away from institutional or legal
representations of the welfare systems, embracing questions such as who got what from
the poor laws old and new, who was turned down, how people made ends meet in
addition to the poor law, what paupers thought of their poverty, and what local
ratepayers thought of the poor, there has been little concern with the dress of poor
people broadly defined. 14
Some of this neglect reflects problems of sources and methodology. Few concrete
examples of the dress of the poorest sections of society survive in museums and so it is
easy to assume that the poor had no time to worry about clothing and that they wore
drab, functional garments, or rags, or even nothing at all - perspectives that are
discussed critically in many of the articles here. Contemporary comments on the dress
2
 STEVEN IZING AND CHRISTIANA PAYNE

of the poor reinforce these -notions. For example, William Cooke-Taylor, touring
Lancashire in 1842, noted that,
The invariable account given in every place was 'no work' and as a consequence 'no food, no
furniture and no clothing'. We entered one house tenanted by a young couple whom I at first
mistook for brother and sister ... On a table of coarsest wood, but perfectly clean, stood what we
were assured was the only meal they had tasted for twenty four hours ... Their furniture had
been sold piecemeal to supply pressing necessities, their clothes had been pawned awaiting better
times. IS

Eighteen years earlier the Liverpool Courier had carried an article on the poor of the
coastal town of North Meols during the 1826 cotton depression, noting that 'The
distress which prevails there is very great and as many of the sufferers are almost naked it
would be a great kindness if old clothing or bedding ... could be obtained for them'. 16
Of course, these are representations of clothing at times of crisis, but, as many of the
contributors to this volume show, the representation of the poor dressed in rags is a
commonplace. Accordingly, occasional depictions of the poor in colourful or fashion-
able clothing by artists have been assumed to be the product of an artist's fancy rather
than a reflection of reality. Or they might reflect the contemporary and historiographical
problem of defining who 'the poor' were. In a crude sense, the answer to the question is
a simple one. There is now convincing evidence that by the nineteenth century at least
70 per cent of all people would experience part of their lives in absolute or relative
poverty, with a growing tendency for parents to pass on their poverty to children and for
a poor underclass to emerge. The social surveys of the later nineteenth century clearly
identified this underclass and showed, more widely, that an average life-cycle would
involve short periods of intensive resource accumulation and long-drawn-out periods
of dis accumulation. However, this 'crude' perspective really conflates the risk of poverty
and the actuality of poverty. In practice, only perhaps one-fifth of the 'labouring classes'
might be actually 'poverty stricken' (in the sense of being dependent upon community
or charity or on the margins of being in such a position) at any point in time in even the
most pauperized of counties of the early nineteenth century. It is this difference between
risk and actuality which so often leads to ambiguity in our sources for the dress of the
poor, a recurring theme in the contributions to this volume. Of course, we do not have
the space here for an extended discussion of the different ways of defining and
measuring poverty (and in any case there are good discussions of this issue elsewherel7)
but all of the contributors to this volume address implicitly or explicitly the question of
definition. Overall, our volume adopts a nuanced definition of 'poverty' including the
working class and the destitute poor, but also those thought of as poor by their
contemporaries and those labelled as poor by posterity.
An additional problem is that, however we define them and measure their number, it
is clear that the size of the poor element in local society could fluctuate wildly over time
in both urban and rural areas. By inference, then, the styles and standards of 'poor
dress' are heavily dependent on when one looks at 'the poor'. Trade downturns could
have catastrophic, but temporary, effect on the numbers of poor people and their basic
clothing standards, as the quote from Cooke-Taylor suggested. After depression passed,
however, clothes were retrieved from pawn or replaced, and the same commentators
who had lamented the state of those caught in trade depression then lamented the
tendency of working people to luxury, not least in terms of clothing. In turn, a variety of

3
Introduction: The Dress of the Poor
other temporary and extreme circumstances could reduce whole communItIes to
beggary and have an impact upon clothing. Agricultural depression was frequent and
severe during the nineteenth century and could drag whole counties into penury. Fires,
theft and bank failures could all set off chain reactions which temporarily swelled the
number of those in need and dragged down background clothing standards. Exactly
when painters choose to paint and writers choose to write thus keenly affects the
definition of 'poor' and the clothing standards that such sources appear to demonstrate
to the modern commentator.
Yet, we should not take concern with basic methodological or terminological
problems too far. It is clear to anyone studying British art in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries that artists took a close interest in the dress of the poor.
Genre painting, landscape, caricature and costume books all provide a wealth of
examples and suggest that there may have been a spectrum of clothing experience
amongst the poor, as well as distinctive regional and occupational differences. There is
ample material to begin exploring these more nuanced perspectives. This volume, for
instance, draws on a wide range of different types of source. Taking visual material
alone, our contributors use paintings, sketches, caricatures, prints, costume books,
illustrations to novels, and photographs, not indiscriminately mixed as they tend to be
in the older books on the history of dress, but carefully distinguished in terms of the
kind of information they provide and their degree of reliability as an indication of what
people were actually wearing. A wide range of written texts are also discussed, from
treatises on household management, the accounts of people employing servants,
through poor law accounts and Parliamentary reports, to exhibition reviews and novels.
And even this wide-ranging coverage leaves some potentially very important records
untouched. Those with an interest in the dress of the poor might turn, for instance, to
pauper inventories, pauper letters or pauper petitions to magistrates. Here the poor
described in their own terms the clothing situation that they faced, adding pauper voices
to those of elite commentators on the poor who appear so often in the historiography.
Alternatively, some parishes and townships retained the bills and samples for clothing
supplied by contractors to Boards of Guardians, vestries and overseers. Such sources
have not as yet appeared in the historiography of poverty or dress. Nor has local and
regional poetry, huge volumes of which remain buried in family collections in county
archives, or the records of clothing charities.
Clearly, then, it is possible to talk in concrete terms about the dress of poor people,
widely or narrowly defined, and a broadly based review is now well overdue. This is
what our special issue sets out to provide. In recognition of the complexity of the topic,
each contributor concentrates on a specific category of people, rather than attempting
to encompass any monolithic definition of 'the poor'. There are occupational groupings,
such as dustmen or servants, geographical groupings such as Welsh labourers, and
distinctions of gender, with several articles focusing on either men or women. In most
of the articles, the question of the distinction between absolute and relative poverty,
and between perceived and real poverty is ever-present. Thus, while in some ways
groups such as dustmen or servants were not truly 'poor' judged from a twenty-first-
century standpoint, they may have been perceived as such, and they figure naturally
alongside those on poor relief, the subject of Steven IZing's paper, who would have been

4
 STEVEN IZING AND CHRISTIANA PAYNE

universally recognized as 'poor'. Caroline Jackson-Houlston uses material from Dickens

to provide a useful index of gradations of poverty as shown in dress in her article.
The contributors to our volume come from a range of institutional and disciplinary
backgrounds, from museums and universities, from departments of History, History of
Art, and English studies. Some are primarily concerned with the question: what did the
poor actually wear in a given period? Others are more interested in the attitudes towards
dress indicated in representations of the poor, either visual or literary. In most cases,
these two concerns co-exist and take the debate forward, and a brief review of some of
the lessons of individual articles will be helpful. The arrangement of articles in the
volume is broadly chronological, moving from the mid-eighteenth through to the late
nineteenth century. Using the records of Robert Heaton, a Yorkshire worsted
manufacturer, for the period 1768 to r792, John Styles shows that female household
servants did indeed (as contemporary commentators complained) autonomously buy
fashionable costume. A particularly telling detail of this case study is that the hats
purchased by the servants were so elaborate that they also needed to buy hat boxes to
keep them in. The second article, by Sam Smiles, is a methodological piece, considering
issues of representation in the depiction of occupational costume, specifically that of
industrial workers. Smiles argues that sources such as costume books created a
taxonomic ordering which masked a more complex reality, creating a uniformity in
representation which the poor themselves occasionally resisted. One issue that he
highlights is the distinction between work and leisure wear, setting the evidence that
workers liked to change when leaving the factory against the tendency of visual artists to
show them alwayswith the distinguishing signs of their occupation. Steve I<.ing'sarticle,
based upon the administrative records of the pre-r834 poor law, provides further
evidence that the poor of this period were rather better dressed than we might imagine.
Paupers' clothing was regularly replaced, and, in comparison to the poor who were not
in receipt of relief, the quality of cloth was surprisingly high and the colours varied.
However, by the 1830s, commentators were emphasizing the role of clothing in keeping
the poor on the straight and narrow. Instead of gaudy, flimsy fabrics, they were to be
dressed in plain cloth of good quality, and a degree of uniformity began to be expected.
The articles by Christiana Payne, Christine Stevens and Brian Maidment deal with
three distinct regional and occupational groups: rural labourers, Welsh working women
and urban dustmen. Christiana Payne returns to the issues of representation first taken
up by Smiles, considering exhibited paintings in the light of two powerful artistic
stereotypes, the ragged Picturesque and the ideal of neat respectability. Her article
illustrates a range of images which can provide useful information for the dress historian,
both on what the poor actually wore and on the preconceptions and moral positions
underlying attitudes to their clothing on the part of the elite. Christine Stevens' article
shows that even the rare survivals of actual pieces of clothing can be a misleading
source; items of traditional work \tvearhave been preserved and classified as Welsh
national dress when they were never anything of the kind. The image of the 'Welsh
Lady' is revealed as a fabrication, stimulated by nationalism in the mid-nineteenth
century, yet sharing some of the features of traditional working dress. Brian Maidment
examines graphic images of one occupational category noted for its highly distinctive,
colourful and showy dress: the dustman. He interprets these images as emblematic
projections of the fears, fantasies and beliefs of their contemporary artists and audiences.

5
Introduction: The Dress of the Poor
Caricatures of dustmen, he argues, were a strategy for coping with the disquiet
unleashed by the evident interest in fashion shown by those who were meant to 'know
their place'.
Finally, the articles by Caroline Jackson-Houlston and IZaren Sayer bring the debate
up to the mid- and late nineteenth century. Caroline Jackson-Houlston considers
Charles Dickens' use of clothing as an index of morality and class, demonstrating his
awareness of a subtle range of indicators of poverty, respectability and genteelness in
the dress of his characters, a concern that was shared by his illustrators. Like the images
of dustmen, Dickens' writings betray anxieties about the dress of the poor, the fear that,
without decent clothing, man is reduced to complete degradation. A comparative
example is provided by Thomas Hardy, and the focus here is on rural dress. Anxiety
about the dress of the poor is a theme that is further developed by IZaren Sayer, who
draws on a range of discourses - educational, scientific and political - to show that
the Victorians regarded working-class dress as inextricably linked to health and
morality. Poor women were expected not only to dress appropriately, but to make and
maintain the dress of their families. Thus, dress was an integral part of social control
and the enforcement of sexual morality.
Taking all the articles together, certain themes recur. One is that it may not have been
that easy to distinguish rich from poor, even though the makers of visual images liked to
imply that it was. This was a source of enduring concern; it was essential to the
maintenance of a social hierarchy that the poor should look different from the rich, and
clothing was one of the most effective ways of achieving this. When servants aped their
mistresses, or dustmen behaved like dandies, the whole social fabric was seen to be in
danger. Clothing was a matter of intense interest to artists, writers, and social
commentators, and presumably also to the poor themselves, though we rarely have
direct access to their views. It seems possible that the poor people of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries could have found considerable opportunity for self-expression in
their clothing. The scope for such self-expression may have varied enormously
according to global and individual economic conditions and individual choices in the
expenditure of household income. Some were certainly dressed in the rags of the
stereotype, but for others clothing was a means bringing colour, style and variety into
their lives.
Of course, while our contributors do much to take us forward, they also collectively
leave many questions for others to address. Some groups of paupers - particularly the
travelling vagrants who had to make their plight seem as bad as possible in order to sway
the discretionary allowance giving of the overseer in their favour - had a vested interest
in appearing poorly clothed. Those who applied to vestries as opposed to overseers of
the poor because of the local organisation of relief might also have an incentive to look
badly clothed and to claim in their narratives that this was the case. More work is
needed on such groups and their clothing strategies.
Even when there was no incentive to appear poorly clothed, various articles in this
volume suggest clearly that we must consider the overall clothing standards of the poor
from week to week rather than simply taking a snapshot. As Sam Smiles points out,
there were differences between a crudely defined 'Sunday best', leisure clothes and
work clothes, and it is not sensible or reasonable to suppose that having changes of
clothes was out of the reach of all poor people. As Steve IZing shows in his article, the
6
 STEVEN IZING AND CHRISTIANA PAYNE

poor law replaced clothing quite frequently, with no evidence that they took in the old
clothing for recycling or burning. In other words, the operation of the poor law must
have allowed the building up of a wardrobe at family level (with the clothes of adults or
older children recycled for younger children) or at individual level (where the poor law
paid for new clothing for all of the family). How might we"weight the different outfits in
assessing overall clothing standards? Indeed, how can we find out about 'changes' of
clothes to give a dynamic impression of the dress of the poor? These questions feed into
issues of representation and the place of the poor and their dress in the imagination of
those who wrote literature and painted pictures.
One particular aspect of the latter issue that we need to highlight is work clothes. As
Rachel Worth has pointed out, there was a difference between work and leisure or 'best'
clothes and there was a sense in which painters were as much driven to represent the
poor as somehow 'spotless' by the desires of the poor themselves as by the taste of the
time or the artist. 18 And outside of paintings, if labouring people have a bad reputation
in historical clothing terms, it might be because we fail to make an important
distinction between work and other clothing. As the Somerset parson William Holland
observed,
I was surprised to see women carrying heath from the Quantock almost half naked, they generally
put all the rags they have on on the occasion as they find the heath to tear their petticoat. 19

The need for more systematic work on occupational costume, avoiding the indiscrimin-
ate mixing of different types of source and devoting sufficient attention to the particular
functions, motives and agendas of particular categories of visual image, is thus clear. 20
A further area which would benefit from more detailed research is the issue of
clothing in peripheral areas versus those well connected by improved or improving
transport. Christine Stevens suggests that there were subtle differences in the clothing
styles of the one type of region as compared to the other, and that there were very big
differences indeed in the speed and completeness with which certain types of clothing,
colours and fabrics were replaced by lighter cottons and new fashions. The more
mainstream one was, the more likely one was to be exposed to fashion trends. Such
observations demonstrate the need for much more research on the way in which
clothing norms for different social groups were created in local societies, perhaps with
reference to groups such as servants. In addition, we might query the extent to which
the clothing of the poor can be used as an indicator of community sentiment towards
poor people. We might also question to what extent clothing was seen as a bargaining
tool by poor people. Questions of colour, clothing quality and fashionability also require
further work. Colour was evidently important to Welsh peasant women and to
nineteenth-century female workhouse inmates, but to who else and how far did poor
law authorities, painters and writers take care over the issues of clothing and quality?
When it comes to the issue of fashion, we might ask whether the poor were stragglers in
an increasingly fashionable society. Did they have their own distinctive notions of
fashion, or did they have fashion imposed upon them by artists, poor law authorities
and workhouse masters and mistresses? To what extent did those who were poor or
who were seen as poor (such as dustmen) view clothing as an important issue? Did poor
people take the sort of care with their clothes that Brian Maidment suggests? And to
what extent were the poor aware of the symbolism of dress, and, if they were aware,

7
Introduction: The Dress of the Poor
how did they attempt to manipulate the way they looked? These are important
questions, raised implicitly or explicitly by the contributors to this volume. We hope
that others will take up where they have left off to drive forward this exciting research
area.

REFERENCES

1 D. Crane, Fashion and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender and Identity in Clothing (London: University

of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 23.

2 These include a series of books, Dress, Body and Culture, and a new journal, Fashion Theory (first

issue 1997), both published by Berg publishers. In 1997 a conference brought together scholars from a
variety of disciplines; Dress in History: Studies and Approaches was held at the Gallery of Costume
(Manchester City Art Galleries), Platt Hall between 3-6 July. For a review of that conference see
Costume, 32 (1998), and for further references to the more theoretical recent literature on dress and the
body see K.aren Sayer's article in this volume.
3 L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London: Routledge,

1988).
4 L. Weatherill, 'Consumer behaviour, textiles and dress in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth

century', Textile History, 22 (1991),297-310.

5 For analysis of such markets, see B. Lemire, Fashion's Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer
in Britain, 1660-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
6 C. Aspin ed., Manchester and the Textile Districts in 1849 (Helmshore: Helmshore Local History

Society, 1972).
7 C. H. Lee, British Regional Employment Statistics, 1841-1971 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979).
8 A. Buck, 'Buying clothes in Bedfordshire: customers and tradesmen 1700-1800', Textile History,
22 (1991),211-37.
9 For a recent review, see S. A. King and J. G. Timmins, Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
10 For references to discussion of the dress of the poor in literature, see Caroline Jackson-Houlston's
article in this volume. Two recent articles deal with the representation of the dress of the poor in
novels: R. Worth, 'Elizabeth Gaskell: Clothes and Class Identity', Costume, 32 (1998), 52-59, and
J. Maynard, 'Respectability in Dress in the Novels of Hesba Stretton', Costume, 32 (1998), 60-68.
Both writers stress the role played by dress in the Victorian code of respectability, and hence its
importance to the poor when they wished to gain access to employment, charity or even to Christianity.
In art history, the smartness of Stubbs' labourers has long fascinated and puzzled commentators. See
Christiana Payne's article in this volume for further references.
11 Lemire, Fashion's.

12 J. Styles, 'Clothing the north: the supply of non elite clothing in the eighteenth century north of

England', Textile History, 25 (1994), 139-66.

13 Ibid. See also B. Lemire, Dress, Commerce and Culture: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory,
1660-1800 (Routledge: London, 1996); Lemire, Fashion's; and Buck, 'Buying'.
14 See S. A. IZing, Poverty and Welfare in England 1700-1850: A Regional Perspective (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000).
15 W. Cooke-Taylor, Notes on a Tour of the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, 1842 (London:
Augustus K.elley, 1964), p. 72. Our italics.
16 Liverpool Courier, March 1826. Our italics.

17 For an overview, see King, Poverty.

18 R. Worth, 'Rural laboring dress, 1850-1900: some problems of representation', Fashion Theory, 3
(1999),323-42.
19 J. Ayres, Paupers and Pig I<:illers(Stroud: Sutton, 1989), p. 235. Our italics.

20 See, for example, P. Cunnington and C. Lucas, Occupational Costume in Englandfrom the Eleventh
Century to 1914 (London: Black, 1967) and D. de Marly, Working Dress: A History of Occupational
Clothing (London: Batsford, 1986).