A Primer on Georgian Fashion

 

How did people really dress in the Wuthering Heights era? From InStyle:

Another year, another classic literature adaptation on the big screen. The latest book getting the Hollywood treatment? Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s gothic novel about the unbridled passions of free-spirited Catherine Earnshaw and her tortured soulmate, Heathcliff. Emerald Fennell directs the ultra-stylized interpretation of the story, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

When the first trailer dropped for the film, Robbie’s on-screen attire caught the Internet’s attention. A see-through bridal look even went viral. Wuthering Heights is set between 1771 and 1802, leading fans to wonder: was the real Georgian era that daring?  

 Not quite. The film’s costume designer, Jacqueline Durran, told British Vogue she and Fennell weren’t aiming for historical accuracy. “Our dates are all confused in the sense that we’re not representing a moment in time at all—we’re just picking images or styles that we like for each character,” she explained.

Wondering what the novel’s characters may have worn in real life? Here’s a breakdown of how people dressed in the late Georgian era, the historical period that backdrops Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Before putting on their gowns and coats, Georgian women had to assemble their base layer of clothing. First came a shift or chemise, typically made of linen, according to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Then, they put on stays—boned undergarments for shaping and offering structural support.

“A pair of stays was a sort of early example of a corset,” curator Anna Reynolds explained in a video promoting the Royal Collection Trust exhibition Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians. “They shaped the body and they provided support, a bit like a modern bra. They fasten at the back with a single lace.” Next came the ever-important petticoat, an underskirt which was often purposely exposed when worn with a robe à la polonaise—more on that later. 

Finally, there was the matter of shaping the skirt to achieve a fashionable silhouette. By the late 18th-century (aka the Wuthering Heights era), wide panniers—side hoops extending from the hips to dramatically spread out a skirt—had fallen out of fashion everywhere but the court, per FIT’s Fashion History Timeline. Taking their place? Rumps, or bum pads filled with cork, which created the appearance of an exaggerated posterior. (Read more.)

 

There is a trend of anachronistic costumes in historical films, although Netflix's The Leopard has dazzling and relatively authentic costumes, to show it can be done. From The Guardian:

 For some, this current mood for anachronisms is being overstated. Helen Walter, costume and visual historian at the Arts University Bournemouth, isn’t “sure it’s as big or as unprecedented a shift as people are making it out to be”. Costume design, she says, “often says much more about the people who are making it than the original setting … it always says something about the time that it’s being made.”

True historical accuracy is also not actually possible. According to Waddington: “Every period thinks that they’re doing the period, but they never really are [there are] always telltale signs.”

When Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell did Shakespeare in Love, she says “all of the silhouettes were the correct period cuts for all the clothing, but you can’t necessarily find period-accurate fabrics because they’re just not made in the same way now”. Powell remembers upsetting somebody by using an art deco lace to make an Elizabethan collar. “I thought, ‘Well, I don’t care,” she says. “It looks good. And actually, this isn’t a documentary’.”

Costume, says Walter, “like any other art form is not immune to fashion and general cultural trends”. But designers will ultimately be led by the film in question. “I do whatever feels right for the piece,” says Powell. Her upcoming work on The Bride! starring Jessie Buckley, is true to period but takes an anachronistic mood to “how clothes are worn more than the actual items of clothing”.

“It’s almost as if the punk that we know from, let’s say, the 70s or 80s, existed in the 1930s. What would it look like?” Often working with a lot of artistic license, with The Bride! she “had free rein to have fun and go mad with it but all within the period.” (Read more.)

Where was Heathcliff from? From Down to Earth:

Today, Liverpool is celebrated globally as the birthplace of the Beatles. However, the city is much more than that. Located strategically at the estuary of the Mersey river as it ends into the Irish Sea along the northwest coast of England, Liverpool once ruled the seas.

“The city was a center of commerce, and its famous docks formed a continuous line of sea wall for six miles. It surpassed all other English ports in terms of foreign trade particularly in Asia, Africa, and the East in general.  In fact, by mid-century, by any criteria, Liverpool was England’s “first port of empire,” writes Diane Robinson-Dunn from the University of Detroit in Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th-Century England.

In Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901, Alisha Renee Walters writes that, “Susan Meyer underlines that in 1769, “the year in which Mr. Earnshaw found Heathcliff in the Liverpool streets, the city was England’s largest slave-trading port.” She also suggests that Heathcliff may be “the child of one of the Indian seamen, termed lascars, recruited by the East India Company.”

The story of the Lascars begins with the establishment of trade links between Mughal India and Stuart England. The East India Company was established in 1600 AD after being given a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth I. Later, Thomas Roe, Emperor James I’s envoy, led a mission to India and had an audience with Emperor Jehangir in Agra. This led to the opening of English (later British) ‘factories’ across the subcontinent.

British trade with the subcontinent meant that Indian goods like spices, cotton, silk, jute, indigo, tea, porcelain and opium, made their way to docks in London, Liverpool, Hull, Cardiff, Glasgow and other British port cities. By the 1720s, Bengal alone contributed over half of the East India Company’s imports from the Indian subcontinent.

This trade in goods opened passages to migration between India and Britain.

The term ‘Lascar’ is derived from the Urdu/Hindustani and ultimately Persian word ‘Lashkar’ meaning ‘army’. The Portuguese, great rivals of the British, first used it and it soon found its way into the British lexicon as well.

The Lascars really entered the picture after 1757. That year, the British under Robert Clive won the rich province of Bengal after defeating Siraj ud Daulah, its Nawab.

According to the portal South Asians in Britain, “South Asian seafarers, seamen and mariners, known as ‘lascars’, were first hired to work on ships by the East India Company in the seventeenth century. As the Company increased its control of territory in India and trade and merchant shipping expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were recruited in ever increasing numbers. Employed on so-called ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Lascar’ Articles, which determined their rates and condition of employment, lascars were a source of cheap labour for shipping companies, who paid them significantly less than their European counterparts.”

The heyday of the Lascars was from the 1850s to the 1950s. That was the time when steam ships replaced sail ships. European sailors were not willing to work in the gruelling conditions aboard steamers. The labour shortage thus created was largely filled by Lascars.

Once they arrived in British ports though, the Lascars were in for a tough time. They were often abandoned to fend for themselves and often ended up destitute on the streets.

This was the situation especially before the Revolt of 1857, when the East India Company employed Lascars. Post the Revolt, the Company was abolished and the British Crown took over.

Many Lascars settled in British port cities where they worked as crossing-sweepers, ran lodging-houses or set up cafes and restaurants.

South Asians in Britain notes that “Men from diverse religious, regional and cultural backgrounds signed up as mariners mainly in the large port cities of Bombay and Calcutta. Initially recruited from the coastal regions of East Bengal, Gujarat and the Malabar coast in south-west India, as demand for their labour grew, workers from more rural areas of India, such as Assam, Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab also signed up.”

In East Bengal, the Lascars mainly came from the Sylhet region. In his book, Bengali Settlement in Britain, author Faruque Ahmed notes that it was mainly Bengali Muslims, rather than Bengali Hindus, who became Lascars as religious injunctions forbade Hindus from crossing the Kaalapani.

Sylhet today is located in the northeastern corner of Bangladesh. At the time of the Partition of the Subcontinent, it was a part of Assam. (Read more.)

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Maryland Sheriffs DEFY Governor’s New State Ban on Partnering With ICE

 From WLT Report:

In Maryland, Democrat Gov. Wes Moore has enacted a law to ban local law enforcement partnerships with ICE. But, it doesn’t seem to be going how he expected. The new law has nine sheriffs in the state absolutely furious! They say that they will defy the ban and continue cooperating with immigration authorities. Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis called the ban “the biggest betrayal to law enforcement and public safety” that he has ever seen....

Specifically, the new law banned 287(g) partnerships with ICE.

But, it doesn’t prevent local authorities from notifying ICE when an illegal alien is arrested.

Fox Baltimore has more details:

Maryland sheriffs who previously participated in the federal 287(g) program say they plan to keep working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in other ways, even after the governor signed a ban on formal 287(g) agreements. Although the new law eliminates formal memorandums of understanding (MOU) with ICE, it does not end all cooperation with the agency.

(Read more.)

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The Suicide of Neanderthals

 From EL PAÍS:

In his latest book, the paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak recounts how, as a young man, he spent his time observing people as he played the bagpipes in a kilt on the dirty streets of Marseille. Driven by an unconscious impulse, he had decided to master the instrument, and he succeeded, even leading a famous band in France. Then his first child was born, he found himself traveling from gig to gig, and eventually, he gave it up. But he was able to earn his PhD with the money he made from music.

The French scientist has been able to spend the last 30 years observing and studying one of the most decisive moments in the history of evolution: the encounter between our species and the Neanderthals, our closest human relatives. One of his latest discoveries is Thorin, a Neanderthal who lived around 42,000 years ago, very close to the moment of extinction. From then on, Homo sapiens became the only human species on the planet.

 In his new book The Last Neanderthal: Understanding How Humans Die, Slimak, 52, reflects on the reasons for the disappearance of these human cousins, and what it reveals about ourselves. “It’s a sad book,” he underscores, because despite the latest evidence that Neanderthals controlled fire, created cave art, and had sex and children with our own species — leaving a trace of their DNA in our genome — this scientist from the French National Center for Scientific Research believes they went extinct in isolation and abandonment. Slimak answers EL PAÍS’ questions via videoconference from his beautiful home, where he lives with his wife and two children, halfway between Toulouse and the Pyrenees. (Read more.)

40,000-year-old Stone Age symbols may have paved the way for writing, long before Mesopotamia. From Phys.org:

Over 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors were already carving signs into tools and sculptures. According to a new analysis by linguist Christian Bentz at Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of Prehistory and Early History) in Berlin, these sign sequences have the same level of complexity and information density as the earliest proto-cuneiform script that emerged tens of thousands of years later, around 3,000 B.C.E.

Using a computational approach, the team examined over 3,000 signs found on 260 objects to reveal insights into the origins of writing. Their findings, which have been published in the journal PNAS, were clear—and surprised even the researchers.

Paleolithic objects dating back between 34,000 and 45,000 years bear mysterious sign sequences—often repeated lines, notches, dots and crosses. Many of these artifacts were discovered in caves in the Swabian Jura, such as a small mammoth found in the Vogelherd Cave in Lone Valley in southwestern Germany.

A Stone Age human carved the mammoth figurine out of a mammoth tusk and carefully engraved it with rows of crosses and dots. Other artifacts found in the Swabian Jura are also etched with signs. (Read more.)

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The Spell of Posey Rings

Mary of Great Britain and Ireland

From Country Life:

Gold rings with poesies (‘little poems’) — poésie being the Old French for ‘poetry’ — quickly became the single most popular type of jewellery in the country. They were exchanged by lovers, would-be lovers, family members and best friends, but their most common use was as a betrothal or wedding ring. Henry VIII gave a posy ring to Anne of Cleves inscribed: ‘God send me well to kepe.’ William of Orange gave one to Princess Mary inscribed: ‘I’le win and wear you if I can.’ Jewellers used to keep a stock of blank rings, and booksellers promoted inspirational handbooks, such as Loves Garland or Poſies for Rings, which was published in 1624.

I was still in my teens when a friend of my mother’s showed me his collection of posy rings. I was transfixed by their beauty — the soft, almost pure yellow gold, the finely wrought decoration (flowers, leaves, hearts and other symbols) and the elegant script, but what really fascinated me were the inscriptions. ‘I like my choyce.’ ‘True love appears/In midst of tears.’ ‘God has brought to pass that which unlikely was.’ It was as if I were listening to the voices of the long-dead givers and receivers. 

The physical appearance of posy rings changed over time. Lombardic script was replaced by Gothic script, which, in turn, gave way to Roman capitals and then italics. Earlier rings carried much more decoration, too. Niello — a hard black paste — was used to fill in the letters and the costlier rings were enamelled in bright colours. The language of courtly love was, of course, Norman French (‘sans de partier’ or ‘without parting’) although some poesies were in Latin (‘Non Auri Sed Amor’ or ‘not gold but love’) and others in a sort of proto-franglais (‘Autre ne wile and evere you best’, which hardly needs translating). Later, they were almost all in English. (Read more.)

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FBI Internal Emails Reveal Biden White House Coordinated with DOJ on Mar-a-Lago Raid

 From The Gateway Pundit:

Fox News on Friday obtained internal FBI emails proving that the Biden White House coordinated with the Justice Department to raid Mar-a-Lago. Biden’s FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and seized boxes of records from Trump’s Florida estate. More than 3 dozen machine-gun-toting agents descended on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, and by November, Biden’s DOJ appointed a special counsel to investigate the documents stored at the Florida residence.

The raid came after the National Archives (NARA) visited Mar-a-Lago in early 2022 and demanded documents from Trump. Court documents revealed that Biden’s FBI authorized the use of deadly force during their raid on Mar-a-Lago, which was authorized by US Attorney General Merrick Garland. Corrupt FBI agents released staged photos of the ‘classified’ documents laid out on the floor of Mar-a-Lago. (Read more.)

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Roundup

 From Tierney's Real News:

In simple terms, spraying glyphosate at the end of the season works like a chemical “off switch” to kill the crop and help it dry down more quickly so it can be harvested on schedule. This practice is called pre‑harvest application. It is used on some wheat acres, especially in cooler or wetter northern climates, but it is not universal on all U.S. wheat.

Why do farmers do this?

• In cold or wet years, wheat can stay green and “wet” too long. Killing the plant helps it dry faster so the farmer can harvest before rain, frost, or snow.

• Sometimes part of a field is ripe while another part is still green. Spraying helps the entire field reach a similar dryness so the combine doesn’t plug with green stems.

• Late‑season green weeds can tangle in machinery and slow everything down. A pre‑harvest spray helps “burn down” those weeds and smooths out harvest.

Farmers wait until the wheat is mature – meaning the grain is fully formed and the moisture in the kernels has dropped to around 30% or less. A common “thumbnail test” is pressing a fingernail into a kernel; if the dent stays, the grain is mature enough for a pre‑harvest treatment.

At that point, a sprayer applies either true desiccants like diquat or systemic herbicides like glyphosate over the field. Contact desiccants kill green growth very quickly and dry the crop in a few days; glyphosate works more slowly and is technically labeled for weed control, but in practice it also helps the crop finish drying and ripening in bad conditions.

Once the plants are brown and brittle and grain moisture is down near storage levels (around 14%), the combine goes in and harvests.

Glyphosate has been around since the mid‑1970s, but its use as a late‑season tool became more common in the late 1980s and 1990s and expanded in the 2000s in places like Canada, the northern U.S., and the U.K., where early cold and wet weather can shut down the season fast. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette's Journey of Faith

I have always felt that Maxime de la Rocheterie's description of Marie-Antoinette is one of the best:

She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr. (The Life of Marie-Antoinette by M. de la Rocheterie, 1893)

Marie-Antoinette spent the first fourteen years of her life in Austria, worshiping in Rococo churches and listening to the music of Haydn and the Italian composers. Architecture and music in that time and place celebrated the glory of God in the beauty of His creation. As Queen, her desire to promote beauty around her, especially in the lives of those whom she loved, was an outgrowth of the culture in which she was raised. She loved theater, acting, opera, ballet, painting, gardens and everything that enhanced the loveliness of the natural order. Hers was a piety that was loving, gentle and courteous, but real and unflinching nevertheless. Antoinette's approach to faith was joyful and non-judgmental, free from the rigorist approach of Jansenism that so tainted a great deal of French piety in the years preceding the Revolution. Nevertheless, even as a young bride, she had the moral courage to defy the king in regard to Madame du Barry.

Antoinette was the fifteenth child in a family of sixteen. It is known that the young Archduchess Antonia was not an outstandingly pious child, but she was carefully taught her faith. Her mother, Empress Maria Teresa of Austria was a deeply observant Roman Catholic, who prayed novenas with her children and took them on pilgrimages. She instilled in her daughters the importance of being faithful wives and staying at their husbands' sides, no matter what.

The Empress also taught young Antoinette how to play cards before sending her to France, knowing that at the French court just like the Austrian court, gambling was rife and if a princess did not know the ropes she would lose all her money. Antoinette's mother's devotion to God did not blind her to the realities of life as a royal for which she tried to prepare her daughter, although many say that Antoinette's youth and naïveté made the task difficult. Unfortunately, the teenage Antoinette became addicted to gambling, a passion that she later overcame with her husband's help.

When I look back at my own youth I cannot be too hard on the imprudences of Antoinette as a girl. Whatever mistakes she made, she later paid for, bitterly. Her faith was practical and manifested itself in her extensive charities, including a home for unwed mothers. While her generosity to the poor is famous, it is not as widely known that she was a patroness of the Carmelite order, and visited the monastery where her husband's aunt was a nun, once a year. She made many personal sacrifices on behalf of the poor and encouraged her children to do so. She assisted at daily Mass, confessing and receiving Holy Communion on a regular basis,and lived, to all appearances, as a Roman Catholic in good standing.

After the death of her mother and loss of two of her children in the 1780's, Antoinette became more noticeably devout, growing closer to her pious sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth of France. While under house arrest at the Tuileries palace, the two connived at getting non-juring priests, (i.e., those who were faithful to the Pope), into the chateau for secret Masses and confessions. It is supposedly the time when a few historians claim she had a romantic rendez-vous with Count Axel von Fersen. I think not. The atmosphere at the Tuileries was more like the catacombs than Dangerous Liaisons.

Before her death, when her children had been taken from her, her little son abused and her husband slain, the queen again sought prayer, the sacraments of the Church, and affirmed in writing her loyalty to the "Catholic, Roman and Apostolic religion." The priest who received her last confession in the Conciergerie later publicly affirmed these facts.

The more I continue to discover about Antoinette, for history is a gradual voyage of discovery, I do not regret having painted her as I did in Trianon. If I could write it again, there is more that I would wish to add about her goodness, courage, nobility, love for God and the people of France. My fear is that perhaps I did not do justice to a very great but much maligned Queen. As historian John Wilson Croker expressed it:

We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with-- if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves-- something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny-- that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings. (History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844)

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The Big Stink

 From Direct Line News:

The Potomac River, the central artery of our region, is now contaminated with E. coli, MRSA, and other dangerous pathogens after the failure of the Potomac Interceptor. This is not a minor spill. It is a public health catastrophe that experts compare with the Exxon Valdez and BP Deepwater Horizon disasters when measured by raw pollutant volume and impact area. What happened to the nation’s capital is not an unavoidable act of nature. It is a failure of leadership.

And to understand how we got here, it helps to remember that this is not the first time Gadis has been connected to a water system in crisis.

Before taking charge at DC Water, Gadis held a senior executive position at Veolia North America, the consulting firm hired by Flint in 2015 to assess its drinking water system. Flint residents had already been complaining about foul odors, discoloration, and illness. Veolia’s review was supposed to identify problems and recommend solutions. Instead, the firm delivered an assessment that failed to warn the public about lead contamination in their homes. This failure later became the focus of lawsuits filed by Flint families and by the State of Michigan. The Attorney General accused Veolia of professional negligence. Veolia defended itself in court, but the record speaks clearly. The firm did not sound the alarm that Flint desperately needed.

Now the Washington region is living through its own version of that nightmare. Under Gadis, DC Water allowed the Potomac Interceptor to weaken and collapse. The result was the release of millions of gallons of untreated wastewater into the river that serves as the drinking water source for large parts of the region. Because the spill was not contained quickly, it spread downstream, threatening communities from Georgetown to Northern Virginia to the Maryland suburbs. (Read more.)

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“This Cursed Phenomenon We’re Experiencing”

 From The European Conservative:

Bothelford’s Gone, Edward McLaren’s recently published novel, proves the struggle is ongoing. While not outright banned, this novel examining Britain’s twenty-first-century national shame has thus far been suppressed in all the standard ways. Though Amazon is known for endeavoring to sell everything, the book is unavailable from Amazon UK (though the American parent company sells it in the U.S.). As of this writing, Oldspeak Bookshop in Suffolk is the novel’s only confirmed UK retailer. Thus, an American writer is reviewing a British book, on a British topic, published by a small American publisher.

This is not a fictional account of the Rotherham crimes. The plot extends to the present day. It names the 2014 Jay Report and Rotherham itself. The fictional Bothelford, then, portrays the ongoing failures of late-stage liberal Britain, the malignant society that endures after its authorities did precious little to address Rotherham. 

McLaren illustrates numerous defects of this society, perhaps to his detriment. We encounter attitudes to Tucker Carlson and Brexit, COVID lockdowns, and creeping technology. The narrator alludes to President Trump without naming him. A transgender-identifying character plays an unexpected role. McLaren accurately captures UK polite society, if this reviewer’s interactions with the British professional-managerial class are any indication. However, any readers from the ‘respectability’ camp—if they are willing to approach the grooming-gang subject in good faith—likely won’t read until the end. 

Bothelford probably would have benefited from a first-person narrator. Too often, especially in the first half, the narrator tells rather than shows. We might give McLaren the benefit of the doubt. Do Western readers have a reference point for grooming-gang Britain without being told? Official narratives have insisted it is conspiratorial or extremist to talk about the subject. (“Tell me why The Financial Times isn’t talking about it, if it’s such an issue?”) 

Can an author like Michel Houellebecq more easily employ a first-person narrator because readers can better comprehend his atomized, sexually depraved subjects? After all, McLaren argues pornography desensitizes young British minds to the crimes occurring in their midst. “He had been subjected to the mulching of manhood such that the English women, the little girls, would have no defence from the likes of him. It was deliberate. It must have been deliberate, all along.”

The novel gathers momentum in the second half. Bothelford’s corrupted criminal-justice, education, and local-government ecosystems are especially resonant, even if accounts of the crimes and resultant suffering are less so. The protagonists are born into Houellebecquian emptiness, not complicit in it. (Read more.)

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