Clothing, Society and Culture in Nineteenth-Century England
Recently, the history of clothing has been the subject of intense scholarly interest, but there has been a shortage of source material available. This three-volume collection redresses the balance, bringing together rare documents and unpublished manuscript material in both reset and facsimile form. The volumes cover the economics of buying and selling clothes, the art of dressmaking and its democratization and issues specific to working class dress during the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

Volume 1 examines clothing from a commercial perspective and contains material from retailers’ catalogues, advertizements, pricelists, posters and dressmakers’ manuals. Illustrations are reproduced in facsimile while print material is presented in reset format. Volume 2 concentrates on changing social attitudes and dress reform, including a series of articles by or about Oscar Wilde. Other sources come from a variety of newspaper and magazine articles, extracts from books and the lyrics of comic songs. Volume 3 looks at the problems and solutions which were faced by the working class in their consumption of clothing. Various perspectives are examined through Parish newsletters and reports, as well as other local and national sources, to produce a picture of hardship and deprivation tempered with charity and ingenuity.