Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870–1914 (review)

Rosy Aindow’s study of fashion and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aims to investigate the “new status of dress as a fashionable commodity” (2). Beginning with an overarching theoretical discussion of the role played by dress in the late-Victorian novel, Aindow provides a degree of historical context in a chapter on modernization in the fashion industry from the advent of the sewing machine and the rise of ready-made clothing to what we might call the newest Victorian technologies of consumption: the department store, the advertising industry, and the fashion magazine. Her remaining three chapters address the relationship between clothing, gender, and class, attending to such issues as morality, respectability, and social mobility. Overall, the book, though uneven, presents a solid analysis of fashion’s significance in late-Victorian and Edwardian literature, with a commendable methodological approach—rather than focusing on individual texts, her chapters are comparative— and an impressive archive of primary texts ranging from periodical essays to the novels of Arnold Bennett, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Mary Ward. Of most interest is Aindow’s effort to trace what she terms “sartorial codes” in the fiction produced during a period of cultural transformation (2), and the breadth of her scope is laudable in this respect. However, as she notes, this is not a sociological analysis of class in the period under examination; rather Aindow explores the ways in which literary texts negotiate class through references to dress, display, and the desire to consume.

The strongest aspect of Aindow’s discussion is her analysis of the relationship between class and fashion—what she describes as anxieties over the late-nineteenth-century democratization of dress—and the “imitative” function of clothing (16). As she observes, “fashion was seen to provide lower-class women with a social platform, a means of establishing a place in respectable society based primarily on their appearance” (89). Hence her fourth chapter, “Fashion and the Art of (Class) Deception,” which was previously published in the Berg collection Fashion in Fiction (2009) edited by Peter McNeil, Vicki Karaminas, and Catherine Cole, presents the most original and compelling readings. Aindow also usefully examines the role of gender in constructing the perceived “sartorial divide” in the nineteenth century, in which men were represented as soberly and simply dressed while women were seen as extravagant and frivolous consumers (55). Aindow rightly identifies a cultural perception that fashion forms “a deceptive surface” (113), arguing that in novels by Hardy and Gissing, men are more attuned than women to the ambiguous nature of identity as depicted through fashionable dress. In such a way the threat of social mobility is kept in check. For women working in the fashion industry, the rhetoric of deception is all the more powerful as the environment of the dressmaker’s shop or department store provides the backdrop for dramas of class ambiguity.

Aindow’s book thus contributes some valuable insights to the current scholarship on fashion and consumer culture in the Victorian period, but there are missed opportunities as well. In such a wide-ranging discussion, it is perhaps surprising that no mention is made of the role of dress and commodity culture in constructing Britain’s imperial identity; here, for example, Suzanne Daly’s work on the significance of Indian textiles in Victorian domestic novels would be a useful complement. And there are some surprising bibliographic omissions. Needlewomen and shop girls form the subject of Aindow’s fifth chapter, but her discussion of working women would have been greatly improved through recourse to relevant scholarship: Tracy Davis on the actress, Peter Bailey on the barmaid, and Amanda Anderson on the prostitute, to name only a few. The extensive criticism on Gissing, and especially on The Odd Women (1893), goes largely ignored; at the very least, the work of Maria Teresa Chialant, Elizabeth F. Evans, Sally Ledger, and Emma Liggins should be...