Easy virtue, cold fashion

Press, 29 October 1977, Page 19

Easy virtue, cold fashion

The Grand Century of the Lady. By Arthur Calder-Marshall. Gordon and Cremonesi, London. 176 pp. Index. $39.55.

The century of the title is that from 1720 to 1820, from Queen Anne to Jane Austen, and Arthur CalderMarshall has put together a miscellany of the details of day-to-day life in the kitchen, boudoir, theatre and nursery, all spiced up with tales of leading ladies of fashion and easy virtue. But in spite of the title, this does not sound like a century in which life was especially grand or attractive for women. Dress was cold and uncomfortable; hair styles were often verminous; medicine was primitive and surgeons were judged on the speed at which they could operate without anaesthetics; contraception was almost unknown; even women in the most comfortable circumstances had to spend much time setting good examples to servants and children.

It is an arch, gossipy book, always ready to digress to a scandal about a lady jockey or gambler. Nearly SO handsome illustrations help to

demonstrate the woes and delights of women 200 years ago — but plentiful illustrations, even a cardboard slipcase for the book, can hardly justify the price. Mistresses get special attention. In England, at least, this seems to have been almost the only career open to female talent in the eighteenth century. The language to describe them changed. What in the time of George I were “women on the town” and “kept mistresses” had become, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, “tender friends” or “interesting connections.” And if their life was uncertain, it was still probably better to be sold by one protector to another, like Emma Hamilton, and to be kept for pleasure, than to be a wife who was expected only to breed and manipulate a household. Servants might take the place of domestic appliances, but this was still a world in which coal dust spoilt salads in London, lead-based cosmetics poisoned the wearer, and a reputation could be lost as easily as a handkerchief. In spite of what some women’s liberationists would have us believe, some progress has been made.