Tea at Trianon: Victorian Hats

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"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."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, December 1, 2018

Victorian Hats

From Francine Mathews:

For much of the 1880s and 1890s, a woman's headgear was in transition: from the bonnet style, tied under the chin with ribbons, that dominated fashion around the Civil War, to the hat--a decorative structure that might or might not cover the ears. Bonnets were still worn when Jennie Churchill moved through the decade of her thirties in London, but they were no longer the helmet-like poke bonnets of her childhood. Although they tied under the chin, most managed to perch on the top of a lady's hair, almost like bird nests. Hats, which did not tie under the chin but rather had to be pinned to a lady's hair, hid almost nothing of the elaborate coiffeurs common to the late Victorian period. (Read more.)