University of Virginia Library

LETTER XXIII.
The sun—and fashion.

YOUR first charge, at parting, was that
I should, by every ship, give you an account
of my health—your last, “to send
“you a particular detail of the fashions.”
As to the first, I can obey it I trust to
mutual satisfaction: my cough abates, and
I gather strength daily. Could I but enjoy
twelve hours such clear sunshine as you
have in Brooklyne, I should feel “my
“youthful joy and bound of health.”
But, alas! in this desponding clime the
sun is generally obscured by dense clouds,

or if a day should intervene which they
here call fine, the best we can expect is to
catch a transient glimpse of this invigorating
luminary, through turrets, steeples,
and chimneys, where it looks as cheerless
and forlorn as a poor debtor peeping
through the grates of his prison; even in
its meridian altitude it is obscured by
clouds of sea-coal smoke, continually
arising from household or manufacturing
fires in this vast city, and appears, like
Milton's fallen angels, “with looks down“cast
and dampt.” As I pass the streets
I cast my eyes upwards, and can scarcely
forbear exclaiming, with the wayward
Hamlet, “this most excellent canopy, the
“air—look you—this brave o'erhanging
“firmament, this majestical roof fretted
“with golden fire—why, it appears no
“other thing to me than a foul and pesti
“lent congregation of vapours.” I assure
you I often recollect poor O'Callaghan's
exclamation, which we in our childhood
used to laugh at and ridicule as a
bull—“Och! I wish you could see now
what a brave sun we have in Drogheda.”
When I hear a London cit. praise a day
as fine which would be condemned with
us as gloomy, I feel there is no blunder in
the conception of a local sun, and am
ready to exclaim to this beclouded race,
Ah, I wish you could see what a brave
sun we have in Boston;”—I yearn to
be again basking in its beams: methinks
if I could once again inhale the mild
breeze of our early autumn, under the
vivifying expanse of a clear blue sky, I
should lapse from my faith, and “pay
“ my worship to the gairish sun.”

Nothing is more difficult, and no one
less qualified than myself to give you an
account of the fashions; but no task is
too hard, which I would not attempt to
please my sister: Were I qualified, the
ever varying whims and caprice of this
inconstant goddess would prevent a correct

detail. I often think of Pope's direction
to portray the volatile fair:
Should I accurately describe a bonnet, ere
this could reach you, and Mrs. Crufts
make it, its place here would probably be
usurped by a hat, and your fashionable
bonnet consigned to the servant-maid.

The English should not, however, be
rashly charged with volatility in their frequent
changes of the mode. The change
of fashion, which with us is a whim, here
is a principle: thousands get their bread
by making ornamental dresses, and thousands
would starve if they waited (as in
the days of our grandmama) until the
substantial brocade, the durable damask,
or firm watered tabbies, whose fashion
was as durable as their textures, were
decayed. Even the august and venerable
parliament, to revive decaying manufactories
and give bread to their artificers,

have condescended to intermeddle with
the fashions, and protruded their legislative
power into the regions of taste.
Buttons of a certain construction have
been prohibited, under a penalty, and
shoe-tyes interdicted by statute. You remember
Pope's dying beauty:
The lady alludes to the law for burying
the dead in flannel. The rich, however,
since that day, seem influenced by the
same dreadful apprehensions of lethal deformity,
and contrive to evade this homely
shroud by sometimes lining the coffin, or
stuffing a silken pillow for the corpse,
with the statute quantity of flannel.

The English are not so much indebted
to the French as formerly, for their

fashions. Some years since, the milliners
and mantua-makers received, regularly,
dressed dolls from Paris—if they do now,
it is not openly avowed. Indeed, the epithet
dressed would not at present apply to
the fashionable dames du Paris; they
would, perhaps, be better represented by
undressed dolls. You recollect the account
which Addison gives, in his playful manner,
in the Spectator, of a romping club,
how they demolished a prude over-night,
and sent a coach the next morning to
carry off the spoils. Whether such a character
as a prude exists now, in the world
of London fashion, I cannot say—I ought
to observe, to the honour of the English
fair, that I have met with no lady who appeared,
in the least degree, to possess the
austere qualities of that forbidding character:
but if a fashionable prude should
be now found and demolished, not only her
spoils but the attire of the whole club
might be carried in an old-fashioned tent-stitched
pocket-book.

So far as I can dive into this mysterious
science, the actresses, the kept mistresses,
and certain dashing belles in high life,
support the present fashions—except on certain
occasions. When it becomes necessary
to revive a decayed mode, for the
benefit of the manufacturers, the buckle-maker,
or other machinist to some one
of the royal family, presents his or her
royal highness with the old fashion, new
vamped, and its display at a birth-night
ball, seldom fails to give it currency.

When a fashion takes, it is adopted
by the families of the nobility and gentry,
and from them passes, in regular gradation,
to the lower classes, and from them
to the colonies and the United States,
while those who are first in the fashion
carry it to an extreme, to maintain a proud
distinction. The object of the English
elegantes, indeed, seems not to be to
adorn themselves becomingly, but to avoid
as much as possible, looking like beauties
of meaner rank, or inferior wealth. The

present female fashions seem ill-adapted
to this climate, for although a profusion of
furs are worn in the winter, they are
thrown by in the house, and then their
drapery would scarce serve for a mosquito
net; and even this slender texture is
made to fold, or rather fall around them,
in imitation of what the statuaries call
wet-drapery, which, as you have no statues
to admire or ladies dressed like statues
to copy, I will endeavour to elucidate:
Next washing-day, if you will quit your
piano-forte and follow Betty into the
clothes'-yard, and direct her to cover one
of the old red posts with muslin dripping
from the wash-tub, you will have a distinct
idea of wet drapery, and, if you have
the eye of a connoisseur, will certainly
notice that, although the post is completely
enveloped, yet, none of the beauties
of its fine form are lost.

The English, after having long ridiculed
the French for their winter and
summer dresses, which were regularly

changed by the calendar, without regard
to the advancement or retrogade of the
seasons, now, in lieu of investing their
wives and daughters in the comfortable,
modest, and therefore graceful and attractive
attire of their ancestors, admirably
adapted to their moist climate, search all
climes for modes of dress, and adopt them
indiscriminately as the ships arrive or the
whim takes, without regard to their climate
or the seasons.

They have not only imported fashions
from the polished cities of the continent,
but, with the fastidiousness of a sickly
taste, they have sought the abodes of labour
and poverty for novelty, and condescended
to imitate the coarse habiliments
of the vitious and the vagrant. Cottage-bonnets
and gipsey-hats are no longer
solely appropriated to thatched houses,
hedges, and by-lanes, but are transferred
to the toilets of the elegant and the opulent.—If
you was to view an old landscape,
which the painter had enlivened by rustic

occupation, and was told it was painted in
the present times, you would imagine the
artist had grossly erred in the costume of
his labourers—that he had portrayed city
belles raking hay, and a lady of the court
turning her spinning-wheel. Turning over
some old magazines, I assure you I at first
mistook the print of Moll Squires, the old
gipsey, for an English dutchess, dressed
for a promenade.

Fashion, this mighty conqueror of decorum,
modesty, beauty, and health, like
the mighty conquerors of ancient days,
having laid the poor and miserable of her
own country under contribution, and enriched
herself with the spoils of civilized
nations, now stoops to plunder the barbarian.
Modes of dress are plundered from
Tartary, from Kamschatka,

and I have strong expectations of seeing
the nose-jewels, the wampum, and other
ornaments of our Wabash and Creek Indian
belles, adopted by the English beauties.
They once imitated the Cherokee
cut of the hair; and their vermilion, under
a more fashionable name, is now the accompaniment
of their toilets.

Indeed, I do not know where fashion
will stop, unless at the fairy-shoe of the
Chinese beauties—which the haughty fair
of England must be content to envy, as
they cannot imitate. Apropos—suppose
you should take your English suitor,
poor S****, into favour, and come with
him to London, as Mrs. S****—although
you must not expect he will be here the
man of consequence he is considered by
the credulity of Boston folks, (for Fetterlane,
where his honest father retails farthing
candles, is not so courtly a place as
he used to represent it,) yet, if you will
come adorned in all the paraphernalia of a
sachem's lady, with your moccasons, wampum,
medals, broaches, and nose-jewels—
with your hair refulgent with bear's
grease, the rim of your left ear slit and the

cartilage encased in silver—with your pipe
modelled like a tomahawk, and your tobacco-pouch
resplendent with the quills of
the porcupine, and, above all, your superb
bed-blanket tasselled with scarlet worsted,
and embossed with various coloured
beads—I have little doubt, although wife
of a cit, you may set the fashion at court:
I assure you, three-fourths of the people
in London would suppose you dressed in
the best fashion of an American lady;
perhaps they might be surprised that you
were not copper-coloured—for the mere
cits of London verily believe there are few
white people in the world but themselves.
Even the learned are not exempt from
the weakness of crediting that the English
complexion is unrivalled, and have actually
made some grotesque attempts to
prove that their national cognomen is a
derivative from Angel. As they hate the
French most, they compare complexions
with them first—and in their novels, and
on the stage, represent them as meagre
and sallow; although they have frequent
intercourse with the inhabitants of the
south of France, whose complexions are
not surpassed by any people, and equalled
only by the Yankey youth. The English
are so proud of their national complexion
that when they would praise Milton (as if
personal charms could add glory to this
sublime poet) they seldom fail to mention
that he was eminently beautiful—in his
youth his complexion was pure red and
white. To flatter this vanity, Manso,
Marquis of Villa, who had been the patron
of Tasso, addressed the following Latin
distich to Milton, then a youth, and in
Italy:
which you can request the Rev. Dr.
E****, or the Rev. Mr. F*****, to
translate for you. The wily Italian, it
seems, had discovered this national weakness,
and complimented the young poet's
beauty: Milton was an Englishman, and
therefore delighted with the compliment.
The English, however, although not the
fairest people in the world, can boast many
clear and florid countenances, and some of
their young ladies I have verily thought
(without recurrence to the herald's office)
the legitimate descendants of angels;—
don't mention this to Amelia!

At the commencement of this long
letter I sat down to describe the fashions,
and I assure you, with the aid of my
opera-glass, I had critically examined
three ladies of the ton, to enable me to do
it correctly, but I found fashion, as Burke
found taste, too volatile to bear the chains
of a definition; I have therefore concluded
to send you what is better than the
best description—I have been to the first
milliner and mantua-maker in London,
(who, it is said, work for the ladies at the
court end of the town,) and directed a
walking and full dress suit for you, in the
tip of the mode. A very pretty girl, the

milliner's apprentice, brought home her
part this morning; she insisted I should
examine them, but my reverence for the
sex is such I could not gratify her: however,
I caught a glimpse of a turban or
cap which, as it is very gaudy, very odd,
and extremely homely, I conclude must
be very fashionable.

Do not, in displaying your finery, my
dear sister, expose yourself to the evening
air, especially after dancing; reflect on
what I have suffered from similar incaution—and
let me see you, on my return,
as healthy as beautiful, for I know you
will be as good and affectionate as ever.