Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ the mid-century, men’s clothes in particular had becoming standard, ready-made, and were being heavily advertised. For this to have happened, items we take entirely for granted needed first to be invented. At the Great Exhibition, Charles Cattanach from Aberdeen, who listed himself as ‘Inventor’, showed an ‘apparatus for measuring the human figure, and for transferring the measure to cloth so as to produce an exact fit of garment’²⁴—or, as it is known today, a tape measure. He was one of many claiming ownership of this useful invention, which seems to have first appeared around the beginning of the century, and to have been in more general use from around 1825. Once this was available, treatises like Dr Henry Wampen’s The Mathematical Art of Cutting Garments According to the Different Formation of Men’s Bodies (1834) could be written, giving guidance on how to create clothes without an actual, specific body in front of the tailor.²⁵

      For standardized sizes had not yet arrived. Men’s clothes led the way: over the century they moved away from the earlier skintight fitted breeches and jackets, towards the loose, tube-like shape of modern dress. Women’s clothes were more difficult to standardize: bodices were expected to fit so tightly to the figure that the stays underneath showed through. By the 1840s shops were advertising ‘Sewed’ dresses, but they may have been only partly finished, for the purchaser or her dressmaker to alter to fit her own measurements. Challinier of New Bond Street stocked this type of half-and-half item: ‘Muslin Bodices…can be completed for wearing in a few hours’ notice.’²⁶ Twenty years later Jay’s Warehouse was still attempting to find a way to combine the fashion for skintight bodices with a desire for ready-made clothes, coming up with a ‘self-expanding’ bodice. But the spread of women’s ready-made clothing lagged behind men’s and children’s for some time.

The move towards simplification and standardization created the possibility of major changes in the production, and in the selling, of men’s ready-made clothes. Leeds quickly became the centre of massproduced men’s clothes. It had no previous history of tailoring, and therefore no moribund guild system to limit growth; its old linen industry provided the necessary skills, networks and capital bases to new entrepreneurs, while that same industry’s collapse meant there was no bar to the shift into new production; and finally the arrival, from the 1860s, of an eastern-European Jewish population well-versed in tailoring skills and closely linked to each other by marriage and trade made possible the formation of an efficient and complex outworking system.* Perhaps most importantly, Leeds also had an established engineering industry, which meant that machinery used in other fields could be retooled for use in the production of mass tailoring.²⁸

      John Barran, a retail tailor in the local high street in the late 1840s, had sold cheap ready-made clothes for men and children in exactly the pattern we have seen above. In 1856 he set up a manufacturing works; his great innovation was to develop with the engineering firm of Greenwood and Batley the first mechanical cutter, a bandsaw that could cut through several layers of cloth at once. This mass cutting machine forced Barran into further technological and organizational changes, for the bandsaw produced many more cut-out pieces than his tailors could process. So he subcontracted these out to a tailor with a workshop, who in turn passed them on to others as piecework. For the first time in the clothing industry, production was divided into two parts: cutting, via new technology, at the factory, and then a division for the sewing—outwork for the more complicated jackets and coats, while Barran’s own sewers dealt with the trousers and waistcoats, which required lesser skills. And for these workers he had equipped the works with the new sewing machines.²⁹

These machines had been developed piecemeal, by several different inventors. After the initial crude chain-stitch machine had been invented to sew army uniforms in France in 1829, most of the innovations and improvements occurred in the United States in the 1840s and ‘50s. In England, Elias Howe Jr had produced a lock-stitch machine in 1846, but, seeing little prospect of financial return, had sold the patent on. In the USA Isaac Singer had seen a similar lock-stitch machine in 1850. It was so complicated that it required special training and then some skill to operate it, and even more technological know-how to service and maintain it. In 1851 Singer’s improvements were patented: the new machine now held the needle vertically, was made of iron not wood, and had toothed gears that didn’t jam, a spring that permitted variations in the thickness of the fabric without manual adjustment, and a presser foot to hold the fabric in place, which meant the operator could use both hands to control the cloth. The new machine could also, most importantly, sew in curves as well as the straight lines, which had been all the earlier machines had managed. Now an operative could produce 900 stitches a minute, instead of the 40 stitches a quick hand-sewer could make.³⁰*

      Further improvements followed, but in England any improved machines were blocked by the patent for the earlier—and much inferior—machine. Finally in 1856 Singer opened an agency in Glasgow, to avoid paying English patent fees. Barran swiftly saw how this machine would solve his problem of the imbalance between the speed with which his mechanized bandsaws cut and the appreciably longer time it took his tailors to sew. He had the machines installed in his works, linked to steam-driven shafts instead of the machines’ original foot-powered treadle.³² Soon every Leeds clothing factory was using bandsaws, steamdriven sewing machines, and steam presses and button-holing machines. By the 1880s fifteen sewing-machine-manufacturing firms had set up in the city, and even more engineering works specialized in developing new machinery for this now enormously successful trade.³³

      Technology and technological innovation were changing the entire face of fashion. Waterproof coats and shoes are two examples of this revolution. Before the nineteenth century, when it rained people either stayed inside or they got wet. There was no other possibility. Oiled-silk umbrellas were carried by some, but they were at best water-resistant, not waterproof. In 1823 Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist, patented a fabric which had a layer of rubber sealed between two layers of cloth, creating a waterproof material. He was not the first to use rubber to make fabrics waterproof, but his method, which used cheap coal oil, was better suited to large-scale, economical manufacturing than earlier versions had been. Macintosh joined together with a cotton manufacturer, and Charles Macintosh and Co. was set up the following year in Manchester, an ideal location. The city had shipping links with South America for rubber imports; it had a gasworks, for the supply of naphtha, used in softening the rubber; it was the cotton centre of the country, producing an endless supply of material suitable for waterproofing; and, like Leeds, it was also filled with engineering firms eager to work on adapting machinery for this new industry.³⁴

      At first, waterproofed material found limited numbers of customers, although Captain Parry’s expeditionary team heading to the North Pole in 1827 carried waterproof bags. The problem was that the fabric turned brittle in cold weather, sticky in hot; it didn’t breathe, and therefore caused the wearer to sweat heavily; and, even worse, the rubberizing process saturated the fabric with a smell that was said to be easily detectable across the road from the coat’s wearer. In 1843 the process of vulcanizing rubber was developed: this led to the fabric being treated with sulphur, which kept it stable whatever the weather. Further developments throughout the decade continued to produce improvements, and by the Great Exhibition Bax and Co. showed its ‘Aquascutum’ cloth, which soon afterwards the army ordered in bulk for its Crimea-bound soldiers. Others benefited too: the India Rubber Waterproof Works in east London was ideally suited to gear up production quickly. By 1844 it already had a site covering 24,000 square metres, and when war was declared it managed to produce 50,000 waterproof suits for the departing soldiers СКАЧАТЬ