Retro Blast: Bathing Place Assembly Ball Dress

I'm away from home (and my research books and prints) for another few days yet, in what might quaintly be called a "Bathing Place", a.k.a. Cape Cod, so this blast-from-the-past post seems appropriate for the occasion. I hope your summer plans will bring you to the Bathing Place of your choice...and that you'll have an equally delightful costume to wear while there!

Now, I ask you, dear NineteenTeen readers: is this print not perfectly wonderful?

I’m not absolutely certain of the date of this marvelous “Bathing Place Assembly Ball Dress” print from La Belle Assemblée. One source lists it as being from January 1813...but would anyone really be interested in “bathing place” attire in winter? On the other hand, the placement of description of the dress at the top of the plate is in keeping with other La Belle Assemblée prints from 1809-1810, so I’m going to go with August or September of one of those years.

It shows a young woman strategically posed before a full-length mirror so that the viewer very conveniently gets a look at the back of this delightful dress. I can’t begin to guess the materials used, but the style gives more than a passing nod to drapery techniques—the ribbon drawing up the overskirt and the peplum-like decorations  in back make me think of custom window treatments. Note the tops of the sleeves—strips of the green fabric, woven in a lattice—and the frill of lace extending all around the neckline, and the little lion’s head belt buckle.

And her hat! It’s a delightful cross between a Nelson bicorne and a Carmen Miranda head-dress (do I spy a pineapple in there?) and utterly made of win. Notice too how her hair is arranged, with a braid across the forehead ending in a fetching little curl!

We’ve seen another “bathing place” costume recently—the evening dress that was actually a walking dress, also from La Belle Assemblée. I’ve yet to discern what it is that separates an everyday ball dress (if there is such a thing!) from a Bathing Place ball dress. Perhaps a touch more informality than one might expect in a London ball dress? Whatever the difference, I think it can be agreed that this is quite the outfit!

Recent Acquisitions: Full Dress for Assemblies in the Persian Style

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about my prints from Ackermann’s Repository: they were exquisitely engraved and colored, were of uniformly excellent quality during the twenty years of the journal’s existence, and are a total delight. But that doesn’t mean one of the other great publications of the Regency era, La Belle Assemblée, doesn’t have its moments as well.

One of those moments occurred in the December 1807 issue of the magazine, with the appearance of a plate titled Full Dress for Assemblies in the Persian Style.  I’ll let you admire it for a moment before we proceed.

The description accompanying the gown is curious, for it doesn’t seem to describe the dress very well in many particulars. One wonders if the colorist wasn’t given the description, and made her own decision about which colors to use. In addition, while the plate reads “Persian” style, the description heading reads “Parisian.” Oops:

A Ball Dress in the Parisian Style

A Neapolitan robe and petticoat, of white, or coloured satin, made quite plain. Armorial vest of white satin, beaded in gold stripes. A cestus [a girdle or belt] á-la-Cleopatra, composed of wrought gold and amethysts. Hanging sleeve, gathered in front of the arm, with brooches of the same. The hair confined from the roots, the ends flowing in irregular curls, leaving the forehead and temples exposed. An Indian casque of tissue, with amethyst ornaments. A long veil of gossamer gause, rounded at the end, and embroidered in a delicate border of silver, or silk, flowing from the centre of the crown, over the right shoulder, and forming a drapery in front of the figure by the attitude of the left hand. Pear earrings of amethyst or pearl. Necklace of pearl, with amethyst star in the centre. White satin slippers, edge with silver beading, and white kid gloves above the elbow.

I can’t help wondering what held on the fez-like hat (close-up above)—presumably some description of hairpin. And it would have been remarkably tedious to have to hold onto the veil for the entire evening to "form a drapery in front of the figure." This may have been a dress to wear to balls and assemblies, but probably not one to dance in. 

Nevertheless, whether Persian or Parisian, it’s a delight. Would you like to have worn this one?

Green and Pleasant Land, Part 3: Bath

I think the city of Bath is a place that really must be experienced; photographs and descriptions simply won’t do justice to the elegance of the 18th century architecture, the cool, classical perfection of which is enlivened by the soft golden warmth of the Bath limestone out of which it is made. It’s a beautiful little place, a gem of a city, and wonderfully walkable despite its hilliness.

And walk we did—from our B&B at the foot of the hill upon which the famous Royal Crescent stands—an arc of very elegant row housing built in the 1760s-1770s—up to the Crescent itself. Lovely!

At the end of the Crescent (at right in the picture above) is a delightful historic house museum, No. 1 Royal Crescent, which has been restored to its 18th century origins as the home of Mr. Henry Sandford, who lived there from 1776 to 1796. In addition to the house itself, a small special exhibit of 18th and early 19th century doll houses was on display—an interesting follow-up to our visit to Windsor. Among the exhibits was a replica of a patent medical electrical machine, one of which Sandford is known to have owned and which became something of a fad in the early 19th century, but for entertainment purposes, not healing:

Our next stop was the Bath Assembly Rooms...

I had a little sigh viewing the lovely ballroom, wishing Almack's Assembly Rooms were still around...but this gave me a good feel for the space:

In the same building as the Assembly Rooms is the Fashion Museum of Bath, which boasts an enormous collection of clothing items dating all the way back to the 1580s. The emphasis of the current exhibit (which changes frequently as clothes can't be left on display for long--gravity does a job on them!) was 18th century, which was lovely (and a little stupefying--OMG those crazy court hoopskirts!) but alas not as interesting to me as a larger selection of, say, clothes from 1810 might have been. However, one of Queen Victoria's dresses ca. 1897 (black, of course) was on display, and...um, no disrespect intended, but yes, she was more or less as wide as she was tall!

After lunch, it was on to the Roman baths museum, which I visited on my last trip to England 25 years ago...and they're still pretty awesome in their extent and complexity:

Just for fun, here's an awesome picture my husband took of an unlit hypocaust alcove (the under-floor heating system the Romans used)--his flash revealed pencil-thin stalactites formed by the incredibly mineral rich water dripping down from somewhere: 

And yes, Daughter #1 and I were brave enough to sample the water at the Pump Room, where the infirm gathered for supposedly healing draughts of Bath's water....on the principle, I suppose, that anything that tastes so nasty must be good for you!

However, a very pleasant tea soon chased away the flavor:

A brief tour of Bath Abbey finished our visit to Bath...along with very sore feet.  But oh, what a day!

Next stop, Dartmoor: stones, sheep, and prehistory galore!

 

Harvesting at Assemblies

Have you brought in your harvest yet? It is officially autumn, and September 22 marked the traditional time of Harvest Home in nineteenth century England. Harvest Home celebrated the end of hay-making, when all the hay and other crops had been gathered for the winter. If your dear Papa owned lands, he probably offered his tenants and farm laborers a gift of money in thanks for a good season. If your dear Papa was one of those laborers, you’d have probably spent Harvest Home celebrating with him at a big dinner with all the workers, followed by jokes, stories, and songs. Here’s how a gentleman from Dorset remembered it in 1832:

“The conversation commonly turned on the incidents of the summer: how the hay-makers overtook the mowers, or how the rain kept the labor back; how they all crept in a heap under the wagon in a thunderstorm; how nearly some of them were crushed under the load that was upset; who was the best mower or reaper in the village; which field yielded the best crop; and which stack was most likely to heat.”

Either way, the harvest time was a jolly good time for a ball.

We’ve talked about public and private balls before. Public balls were generally held in assembly rooms and so might be called assemblies. Jane Austen talks about going to assemblies in her letters to her sister Cassandra. Take this one from Lyme Regis in September 1804:

“The ball last night was pleasant, but not full for Thursday. . . Nobody asked me to dance the two first dances – the next two I danced with Mr. Crawford – and had I chosen to stay longer might have danced with Mr. Granville, Mrs. Granville’s son – whom my dear friend Miss Armstrong introduced me to – or a new, odd-looking man, who had been eyeing me for some time, and at last without introduction asked me if I meant to dance again.”

You see, the primary “harvest” of an assembly was acquaintance. You went to meet old friends and make new ones. At the assembly, you danced, you promenaded about the room on a gentleman’s or a girl friend’s arm and whispered confidences, you partook of light refreshment and strong gossip. If you were on the lookout for a husband, you flirted and visited and preened to catch the right fellow’s eye.

In the mood for dancing yourself? A group recently introduced themselves to us, and so we pass along the introduction. Mostly Waltz RI is just beginning its season this Sunday with beautiful live music. In addition to the waltzes, the program includes a basic waltz lesson and waltz mixers along with occasional other couple dances. If, like me, you don't live anywhere near Rhode Island, look for other contra dance or English Country Dance groups in your area.

Who knows what you might harvest?

And speaking of harvesting, return next week to reap of bounty. I hear someone will be giving away books.

Heaven, Regency Style

It was "the seventh heaven of the fashionable world", the "exclusive temple of the beau monde", the "marriage mart" of exclusive London society. Regency wit Henry Luttell said of it:

"If once to Almack’s you belong,
Like Monarchs you can do no wrong;
But banished thence on Wednesday night,
By Jove, you can do nothing right."

On the other hand, it served "wretched refreshments", had a "bad floor", and was viewed as shockingly dull by most young men.

So just what was Almack’s, that place that has appeared in almost every Regency-set novel since Georgette Heyer?

Originally, it was an assembly room (remember that we discussed those last week?) built on King Street (behind St. James’s Square) in 1764 by a Yorkshireman of Scottish ancestry named William Almack who began life as a gentleman's valet but soon moved up in the world. Mr. Almack opened his assembly rooms in 1765, charging 10 guineas for a series of twelve weekly balls and suppers over the course of the season. Anxious to make his assemblies appear exclusive and select, Almack enlisted the aid of a group of blue-blooded society ladies to help decide who merited admission and who did not, and thus was the famous voucher system born. If the lady patronesses did not approve of you, no matter how large your estate or noble your birth, you didn’t get in to Almack’s.

Almack’s system worked. By the Regency era, Almack’s was THE place to be if one had any pretensions to being a member of the haute ton. And as a result, the lady patronesses wielded an almost ridiculous amount of power over society; the cartoon above comments on just how sought-after those vouchers to purchase tickets were. According to one story, a man challenged the husband of one of these august ladies to a duel because his wife had been refused a voucher. Others worked out elaborate schemes to sneak in. No one who had any connection to trade was admitted, and even otherwise socially acceptable army officers and members of the aristocracy might find themselves refused admission.

Within the hallowed halls, the rules were just as rigid. There was a strict dress code for men, and even those who had proper tickets might be turned away if not properly attired (even, it was rumored, the Duke of Wellington on one occasion!) Until around 1814, dances like the quadrille and the waltz were not permitted. Even after they were, young ladies had to demonstrate that they were of modest demeanor and attitude before they could get the permission of one of the lady patronesses to engage in waltzing (which was still considered a rather improper dance). And no one was permitted to enter the rooms after 11 pm, even those with tickets. Liquid refreshment was limited to lemonade, tea, orgeat (a non-alcoholic drink flavored with almonds and orange-flower water) and ratafia (a light liqueur, also fruit and nut based); bread and butter and cake were the only munchies served.

So with all these rules and the less-than-exciting atmosphere, why was it so sought-after?

Because admission to Almack’s meant that you counted. It meant that you were the crème de la crème of English society…one of the 19th century version of the beautiful people. If you were on the prowl for a "good" marriage, it was the prime hunting ground. It meant that, as Henry Luttrell said, "you can do no wrong."

The Ball: A Primer

A ball is a ball is a ball. Right?

Well, not quite. There were actually a few different types of balls that we ought to go over...so here we go!

Public Balls: Also known as "assemblies." Most towns of any size from the 1770s onward had "assembly rooms", often located at an inn in smaller towns or in their own building in larger, where local society met for lectures, concerts, and other cultural events (some even included lending libraries)... and of course, dancing! (That's the Bath Assembly room at left). The wealthier local families would often pay a subscription fee to defray maintenance costs and pay for the services of a master of ceremonies, who ran all events (hiring an orchestra, arranging refreshments, etc.) Tickets were required for admission, with cost varying. Jane Austen was an avid assembly-goer, as can be seen from her letters...as were her beloved creations, the Bennett sisters. Attendance at these assemblies was generally self-limited to the gentry--that class of smaller landed families and professionals who could be considered "gentlemen" (the clergy, military officers, physicians, barristers), though assemblies for other classes might also be held. This may sound strange to modern American ears, but don't forget that in the 19th century, class distinctions were very real and accepted, and members of different social classes did not, on the whole, like to mingle socially.

In London, public balls were also held at places like Vauxhall (the orchestra stand is seen here at right) and Ranelagh, a cross between a public garden and a circus/carnival fairway. Most notorious were the masked balls held here, where all wore dominoes (voluminous hooded cloaks with masks) that concealed identity and promoted flirtation and secret assignations in the shrubbery for clandestine lovers. Again, anyone who could pay the admission fee could come.

That certainly wasn't the case with private balls, which were, of course, by invitation only (though gate-crashing was certainly a common phenomenon!) The season was prime ball-giving time, and a ball given by her family was often part of a debutante's presentation to society. Of course those were the most elaborate: the flowers and other decorations, the food and drink, the musicians must be the best. But elaborate balls were also part of entertaining in the country, either for the neighboring "families" or during the house parties that were common during the times when Parliament was not in session and the ton vacated London for their country estates.

Next week I'll be chatting about that early 19th century institution, Almack's-- a peculiar cross between a public and private ball...but in the meanwhile, stay tuned for Friday's dance lesson from Regina. White gloves prefered but not required.