At Home - Bill Bryson [217]
Behind the scenes, however, things were a little spicier than we are sometimes led to suppose. Chemical dyes—some of them quite rich and colorful—became available in midcentury and one of the first places they appeared was on underclothes, a matter that scandalized many since it raised the obvious question of for whose delight all that color was intended. The embroidery of underwear became similarly popular and identically scandalous. In the very year that it was praising an English girls’ school for keeping the young ladies murderously strapped into corsets for a week at a time, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine was also railing that “the amount of embroidery put upon underclothing nowadays is sinful; a young lady spent a month in hemstitching and embroidering a garment which it was scarcely possible that any other human being, except her laundress, would ever see.”
One thing Victorian women didn’t have were brassieres. Corsets pushed up from below, which held breasts in place, but for true comfort (I am told) breasts are better held up by slings. The first person to see this was a lingerie manufacturer named Luman Chapman, of Camden, New Jersey, who secured a patent in 1863 for “breast puffs”—a kind of early halter top. Between 1863 and 1969, exactly 1,230 patents on bras were taken out in the United States. The word brassière, from a French word meaning “upper arm,” was first used in 1904 by the Charles R. DeBevoise Company.
One small but tenacious myth may be demolished here. It has been sometimes written that the bra was the invention of one Otto Titzling. In fact, if such a person ever existed, he played no part in the invention of foundation garments. And on that slightly disappointing note, we may move on to the nursery.
* Overcome with grief, her husband buried her with a sheaf of poems that he had failed to copy; seven years later he thought better of the gesture, had the grave dug up, and retrieved the poems, which were published the following year.
• CHAPTER XVIII •
THE NURSERY
I
In the early 1960s, in a hugely influential book called Centuries of Childhood, a French author named Philippe Ariès made a startling claim. He declared that before the sixteenth century, at the very earliest, there was no such thing as childhood. There were small human beings, of course, but nothing in their lives made them meaningfully distinguishable from adults. “The idea of childhood did not exist,” he pronounced with a certain finality. It was essentially a Victorian invention.
Ariès was not a specialist in the field, and his ideas were based almost entirely on indirect evidence, much of it now held to be a little doubtful, but his views struck a chord and were widely taken up. Soon other historians were declaring that children before the modern period were not just ignored but actually weren’t much liked. “In traditional society, mothers viewed the development and happiness of infants younger than two with indifference,” declared Edward Shorter in The Making of the Modern Family (1976). The reason for this was high infant mortality. “You couldn’t permit yourself to become attached to an infant that you knew death might whisk away,” he explained. These views were almost exactly echoed by Barbara Tuchman in the best-selling A Distant Mirror two years later. “Of all the characteristics in which the medieval age differs from the modern,” she wrote, “none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in children.” Investing love in young children was so risky—“so unrewarding” was her curious phrase—that everywhere it was suppressed as a pointless waste of energy. Emotion didn’t come into it at all. Children were merely “a product,” in her chilling view. “A child was born and died and another took its place.” Or as Ariès himself explained, “The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children