Mate, I inflict Richardson on my mates down the pub. And he’s totally on it with the hoops.

But yeah, thanks a lot for your comments – as you say, there’s always so much going on with all of these words, and I can never hope to cover them all, so extra discussion is awesome.

Too late; we already did pull out Clarissa earlier! The seals are doomed.

It’s a noble cause, though.*

* note for RSPCA members: no seals were harmed in the making of BadRep &c &c

You’re going to inflict Richardson on me? Have you no conscience? Why not just pull out Clarissa and we can club some baby seals to death with it?

But seriously, fair points all. The phenomenon that can be neatly pointed to a single societal cause is a rare and precious one.

Oh LORDY the Uncle Thomas bit. I think I’d actually blocked that bit out!

Dear Lord, it’s a tunnel of cringe, isn’t it. But an excellent starting point for this post – perhaps for that very reason – I think.

Oh and there’s also ‘But Mother! The prime minister is naked!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Louis, he can’t be naked. He’s only…. half naked.’
Will stop now.

Yes, I tried to find that scene on Youtube for this post, but sadly, it was not to be had. All I really remember is when she shrieks and says the immortal line: ‘OH! Your majesty! They have practically NO UNDERGARMENTS’, to which Yul Brummer responds, outraged, ‘UNDER-GARMENTS????!!!’ (which is now what I hear in my head whenever I walk through John Lewis’ lingerie department)
There’s also that whole bit with the ‘Small House of Uncle Thomas’, which is cringe.

You know the “History Is Awesome” category? It’s not visible to our readers yet because I haven’t finished the posts that will go in it, but there will be a post on Constance at some point, because she is fascinating.

Oh, and you know Emily Davison, right? That horse was the tip of the iceberg.

“On 2 April 1911, the night of the 1911 census, Davison hid in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster overnight so that on the census form she could legitimately give her place of residence that night as the “House of Commons”.”

I am planning a series of early feminist hero-primer posts. (Not just rich white ladies, either.) Hopefully people will find them fun. :)

Oh GOD, the crinoline scene with the wives! I’d forgotten that bit. I should re-watch it with adult eyes, actually – I saw it when I was very small, and just didn’t clock a lot of the sheer imperialist argh, though I remember cringing a little bit at some of it. Ah, the Fifties.

Well, as with all fashions, lots of working-class women at least attempted to adopt them for themselves. There’s a lot of stuff in c18th and c19th literature about servant girls wearing homemade crinolines (and in *Pamela*, the eponymous servant is given her mistress’ crinolines as a sign of her usefulness to the family. This does, of course, feed into Richardson’s snobbery about having a servant as a heroine (so she must be as sartorially middle class as possible), but nonetheless tells us something about how pervasive the fashion was. Moreover, since the shape as a whole was such a sort of intrinsic one to how women were perceived (think of toilet signs… it still is) I wonder if the work issue (while stubbornly present whenever we have discussions about women in history) took something of a back seat to the sexual issue: after all, the higher up the social ladder you get, the more crucial legitimacy of issue becomes, and the wider and more public your metaphorical (and literal) personal space needs to be.

Also, in the case of The King and I (which, while a 1950s film, was still a c19th memoir), part of the point of Anna Leonowens (and one of the reasons for the King’s hostility to her) is that she is a working woman determined to make money for her son after the death of her husband – and she CAN do that. In some way, there’s this terrible merging of feminism and racism / imperialism which, as I commented in the article, feels like it’s linked to dress (I don’t know if you’ve seen the film, but there’s this whole section in it where she tries to get the king’s wives all up in crinolines for the Big Imperialist Visit from England). So while, of course, anything that restricts movement must be tied up to work in some way, it may not always be quite so clear-cut.

Apologies if this is incoherent and / or reads really badly. Am writing from my sickbed, in a wonderfully eighteenth century manner.

“So she wrote an expose in The Times. Rock on Constance. ”

Bwahaha!

“In November 1911 Constance Lytton was imprisoned in Holloway for the fourth time, after breaking windows in the Houses of Parliament”

She was *amazing*.

And gets +100 points for this:

“I had decided to write the words “Votes for Women” on my body, scratching it in my skin with a needle, beginning over the heart and ending it on my face. I proposed to show the first half of the inscription to the doctors, telling them that as I knew how much appearances were respected by officials, I thought it well to warn them that the last letter and a full stop would come upon my cheek, and be still quite fresh and visible on the day of my release”