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Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233

Barbara Burman, ‘Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth-Century Britain’
Gender & History, Vol.14 No.3 November 2002, pp. 447–469.

Pocketing the Difference:

Gender and Pockets in
Nineteenth-Century Britain
Barbara Burman

The artist Gwen Raverat (1885–1957) compared clothes of her adult life
to those she had worn in her comfortable late nineteenth-century childhood
in Cambridge, England. She found she regretted none of the changes
except one.
After writing so bitterly about the clothes of my youth, I must now be just, and admit
that they had one great advantage over the clothes we wear nowadays. We had
Pockets. What lovely hoards I kept in them: always pencils and india-rubbers and a
small sketch-book and a very large pocket-knife; beside string, nails, horse-chestnuts,
lumps of sugar, bits of bread-and-butter, a pair of scissors, and many other useful
objects. Sometimes even a handkerchief. For a year or two I also carried about a
small book of Rembrandt’s etchings, for purposes of worship.
Why mayn’t we have Pockets? Who forbids it? We have got Woman’s Suffrage,
but why must we still always be inferior to Men?1

A humdrum, often invisible object, the pocket has received scant attention
in the literature of dress history. However, as Raverat suggests, pockets
have not only personal histories to tell but they also echo the wider gender
issues of the day. In spite of Raverat’s wish for the greater male repertoire
of pockets, her contemporary, J. C. Flugel, noted that, whilst he had
twenty pockets in total when wearing his overcoat, men’s pockets were ‘by
no means an unmixed blessing’.2 Pockets still embody gender difference
today, vividly evoked in a children’s story in which a young boy wakes up
as a girl and endures a day at school in a pink dress. Amazed by its lack of
pockets, he asks himself, ‘How was a person in a frock like this supposed
to survive? … How can you live without pockets?’3
This essay offers a preliminary study of how the pocket can be situated
as a significant gendered object in nineteenth-century Britain. After an
introductory section, the essay takes an overview of the different forms of
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448 Gender and History

pockets in the dress of men and women at this time. Turning then to the
functions of pockets, the next section explores male and female pockets
in relation to gendered possessions and the ordering of things. The essay
then moves on to argue that pockets were gendered through their reci-
procity with gesture and their relation to the productive and reproductive
body. The essay ends by proposing further lines of enquiry. In its assessment
of the significance of pockets in both of these roles, relating to personal
possessions and to gestures, the essay covers a period starting with the
eighteenth-century tie pocket for women, well established by the time
major changes in women’s dress occurred in the 1790s and ending with
new clothing conventions for women established by 1914. Using evidence
from a long nineteenth century defined by women’s clothing reveals that
changes in pocket form and function were sometimes linked to main-
stream fashion and, in the case of the continuing use of the old form of tie
pocket for women, uncovers practices firmly resistant to fashion. It also
reveals the outwardly more stable nature of men’s pockets within the period,
though many shifts occurred in the cut of men’s clothing, especially in
suits of all kinds.4 However, the period registers tensions about masculinity
reflected in contemporary discussion of pockets, and these are outlined
later. Pockets in all their variety are artefacts in daily use, but they are also
obscure and liminal and so even a preliminary picture of their use and
significance during this period must draw on diverse primary sources.
These include extant pockets in museums; paintings, prints, drawings and
photographs; popular fiction; newspapers; etiquette and dress books, auto-
biographies and memoirs, sewing instruction books and fashion periodicals.
The principal elements of men and women’s experience of pockets over
the nineteenth century can be encapsulated as a series of changes in form
accompanied by various expressions of discontent, even exasperation.
As today, pockets took many forms and positions. Some are still familiar
to us, such as the welt pockets on a man’s waistcoat but others have dis-
appeared from use and seem strange to the modern eye, such as the
capacious tie pockets often worn in pairs under a woman’s skirt. These
years saw the erosion of women’s use of this eighteenth-century device. Its
gradual replacement by the now familiar smaller integral pockets sewn
into the seams of skirts and dresses and supplemented by handbags was
complete by 1914. Men of fashion had already replaced their pouches
with pockets sewn into the structure of their garments by the seventeenth
century.5 For men a change of emphasis was marked by their giving up
the old-style great-coat in the first half of the century. These important
shifts of practice are examined in detail later in the essay. Despite some
important differences remaining, notably in the number and disposition
of pockets, there was eventually more parity between men and women in
the acceptance of certain hands-in-pockets postures and gestures by the
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Pocketing the Difference 449

end of the century. The widespread crime of pickpocketing was suffered

and perpetrated by men and women alike. These years were also marked
by dissatisfactions about pockets expressed as attacks on women’s fashion
and its perceived tendency to ignore or abandon items of proven utilitarian
value such as pockets, and also as complaints about the unfair advantages
and freedoms of men’s clothing in contrast to women’s. There were also
difficulties for men in achieving desired levels of tailored sleekness when
they filled their pockets. Dissatisfactions with the adult female and male
pocket may also have derived precisely from its adult status and its part in
a sartorial system for the disciplining of gender, giving a certain order to
small personal possessions, deportment and gestures. Disciplinary pockets
were at odds with memories of the child’s haphazard pocketfuls, so often
recalled with pleasure as tokens of the more carefree, imaginative possi-
bilities in the child’s experience of the world. A child’s disorderly hoard
eventually gives way to the discipline and obligations, routines and roles
denoted by the adult’s specialist pockets for watch, money, visiting cards
and handkerchief. As Raverat implied, in the passage from girlhood to
womanhood, a state partly constructed through powerlessness, a girl might
feel a special loss of identity as she relinquished her personal reservoir of
‘lovely hoards’ and ‘useful objects’.
Central to an overview of the different forms of pockets in the dress of
men and women at this time is the female tradition of making and using
tie pockets, already well established in the eighteenth century in various
forms for women of all classes. They have been described recently as ‘gen-
erous bags’.6 They were usually made in pairs connected by a linen tape,
tied round the waist, worn with one on each side and independent of the
garments under which they were worn. Such pockets were individually
very capacious, typically between twelve and twenty inches long and
between eight and fifteen inches at the wide base, with a vertical slit for
access worn to the outside and edged to withstand wear and tear. Some
had small inner compartments stitched to the back part. There were
corresponding openings in hoops and the skirts of petticoats and gowns
to allow access through these over-garments or, when worn just under
an apron, the apron could be pulled to one side to reach them.7 It is not
uncommon to find museum examples of single pockets and ‘double
deckers’ with two horizontal semi-circular slits giving access to upper and
lower compartments.8 Sometimes tie pockets consisted of older materials
from furnishings, cut up and recycled. Many of the surviving eighteenth-
century pockets were embroidered, often signed and dated, a common
habit in the nineteenth century too when they were often made of plain
or printed sturdy cottons in the whole piece or as patchwork. There is also
firm evidence of an eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century market in
ready-made tie pockets, though little is yet known of this potentially
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450 Gender and History

important trade and its effect on changing consumption habits.9 The

home-sewn tie pockets that survive are often striking in their own right as
a result of their combination of needle skills, thriftiness and a happy eye
for design. With only small variations, tie pockets showed a remarkable
stability of form for two centuries (Figure 1). Given this substantial
tradition, it is hardly surprising to find so many complaints about the
smaller sewn-in pockets which came to dominate by the end of the nine-
teenth century. But why would women give up such efficient, convenient
and often lovingly worked tie pockets without an adequate alternative?
The disavowal of tie pockets has been accounted for in the literature
of dress history in two ways, both located in the material determinants
of clothing’s construction and style. Firstly, since pockets contain, secure
and transport small personal possessions and therefore interrelate with
other artefacts capable of fulfilling a similar function, it has been argued
that there was a three-way interdependency between changing pocket
construction, bags (held on the wrist, in the hand or hung on the belt)
and the form of the skirt. Buck suggests the fashion for the reticule in

Figure 1: A pair of eighteenth-century women’s tie pockets in a form

which endured, with variations, for 200 years. English, 36 cm long,
coloured silk embroidery on linen. T.281+A-1910. Victoria and Albert
Museum. © V&A Picture Library.
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Pocketing the Difference 451

the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century was due to the
fact that the slimmer neo-classical silhouettes of that time would have
been ‘disfigured’10 if tie pockets had been worn underneath. But the novel
reticules, so glamorously illustrated in fashion plates of the day, were
valued for delicacy and ornamental charm with a fraction of the capacity
of a pair of tie pockets. Buck also notes that sewn-in pockets are found
‘more often’ in dresses of 1845 to 1855, a period which ‘probably’ produced
less bags. Although skirts then grew larger until the end of the 1860s, they
were smoothed over the crinoline and more bags were used to com-
pensate for the loss of sufficient folds needed to conceal a useful pocket,
especially in lightweight fabrics.11 Thus the apparent demise of tie pockets
is explained by changes in the shape of fashionable garments.
Secondly, Foster suggests a change of status, so that by the time the
fuller skirts with lower waistlines of the mid 1820s onwards encouraged
their ‘revival’, the tie pockets had become ‘like underwear, as something
to be kept neat, white and laundered’.12 However, whilst many surviving
undecorated white tie pockets undoubtedly support this significant trend,
and the old habit of embroidering tie pockets seems to have disappeared
entirely, other surviving tie pockets demonstrate the use of printed cottons,
heavy black and brown cottons and patchwork until late in the century.
There was no doubt in The Workwoman’s Guide of 1838 that women’s
pockets still came in three forms. ‘Pockets are either worn tied round
the waist, fastened into the petticoat, or buttoned upon the stays. When
fastened into the petticoat, they are made of the same material, otherwise
of dimity, calico, jean, twilled muslin, and sometimes of nankeen or brown
jean.’13 The book provided diagrams for the cutting out of these simple
unadorned pockets. Whilst this comprehensive cutting out and sewing
manual claimed to be largely for those who were responsible for clothing
the poor or teaching them to make garments for their own use, it also
offered guidance on tasks for domestic servants who would practise these
for their mistresses. This leaves open the question of whether mistress
or servant, or both, wore the finished pockets. The survival of mid and
late nineteenth-century tie pockets in museum collections, together with
pictorial evidence14 and printed sources (including a remarkable fictional
source which will be discussed later), support the argument that tie
pockets, though becoming less ornate, persisted through the century in
both imagination and everyday practice.
So the question of why women gave up these ‘generous bags’ is
answered in part by evidence that many simply did not do so, signalling a
resistance to fashion through both home-sewn and ready-made objects
which helps inform our understanding of clothing consumption at this
time. In the case of home-sewn pockets, particularly through the choice
of recycled or remnant cloth, the act of making the pocket and the
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452 Gender and History

additional time and handicraft invested in the needlework surface

decoration, a woman created an object embodying a cluster of values,
including thrift. The tie pocket made in this way, to borrow from Weiner’s
example of an old Fijian bark cloth, could ‘carry the histories of past
relationships, making the cloth itself into a material archive that brings
the authority of the past into the present’.15 A tie pocket’s embodiment of
‘the authority of the past’ was itself counter to fashion’s focus on present
and future. More contentiously, it can be argued that the woman’s tie
pocket carried a uterine symbolism in both its shape and its function. The
discovery of a mid-eighteenth-century tie pocket concealed in a wall-
cavity revealed within its cotton and silk ‘womb-like enclosure’ a cache of
objects which may have had a ‘protective function’, including a baby’s cap,
coins and dried hops.16 A lingering association with this old kind of
symbolic promotion of fertility17 or a supernatural function, combined with
their embodiment of memory in handiwork, gave tie pockets a special, if
shadowy, place in the repertoire of feminine material culture in the new age
of industrialisation, impersonal mass production and urban anonymity.
However, the many who did abandon tie pockets, or who remained in
ignorance of their benefits, may help account for expressions of pocket
discontent as the nineteenth century wore on.
An overview of the period shows the tie pocket lived on whilst along-
side it the new trend for inset pockets in women’s clothing brought a
range of alternatives, such as a pocket inset into one side seam of a dress,
or into a seam of the bustle area, accessed through a slit opening. Watch
pockets were sometimes dropped inside the side front waist band, rather
like a man’s fob pocket in a trouser’s waist band. Small ticket pockets
could be inserted into a bodice front. As tailor-mades for women grew in
popularity, the seam between the left side and centre skirt gores became
a favoured site for an inset pocket. These more robust skirted suits of the
1880s and 1890s, so symbolic of the ‘new woman’, were never so well
equipped with pockets as their male counterparts, but sometimes had
outer patch pockets on the jacket, as did the coats which accompanied
them. Over-garments commonly offered more pocket space as the century
went on. Travelling cloaks often had a pouch pocket gathered at the top
edge and set into the left front lining, a style also seen in the looser jackets
of later walking suits. The long knitted sports cardigans which came into
fashion at the turn of the century were amongst the first garments for
women to routinely carry side patch pockets and the significance of this
for women’s gesture and posture is enlarged on later in the essay. Fancy
aprons often had a decorative external pocket or two. Some fancy hanging
pockets were worn singly outside the skirt, looped over a sash or belt.
Nevertheless, none of these alternatives had a capacity equal to the
older form of tie pocket. There is evidence from the extant clothing itself,
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Pocketing the Difference 453

and elsewhere, that women were not able to rely on practical pockets
being readily available in their clothing, whereas a man could assume his
ready-made or bespoke suit or coat would be liberally provided with
pockets. However, ingenious alternatives were available to women in the
form of concealed pockets sewn inside hand muffs, travelling rugs and
foot muffs for use in trains or later in motor cars, and travelling bags and
hand-held cases designed with pockets and straps to secure small personal
possessions. Travel and the accompanying fear of theft generated numer-
ous new versions, such as coin pockets in garters or to hang round the
neck beneath clothing and the old-style tie pocket worn inside a petticoat
was valued in this context.18 A variety of suspended containers were also
worn externally at the waist presumably to supplement inadequate pockets.
The popular aumonières and chatelaine bags of the 1870s onwards are
an example of this trend.19
Between the 1870s and 1890s there was a kind of crisis over the position
and number of women’s pockets, which attracted the attention of fashion
journalists:

Her greatest difficulty is her pocket. Dressmakers take a weird delight in concealing
it, and you have to search for it as long and fruitlessly as for hidden treasure. The
indiscreet person who, without first extracting her purse, hires a hansom, writhes
about it inside in search of her pocket, whilst the ‘astral body’ of the dressmaker
hovers near, and almost betrays itself by its malevolent chuckle of delight.20

The problem was compounded if awkwardly positioned pockets contained

anything more than a handkerchief. Lady Greville complained:

The average woman is still insensible to the value of useful pockets, still carries her
purse in her hand, and dives into the recesses of an impossible receptacle, situated
somewhere in the back breadths of her gown, for her pocket-handkerchief, her
letters, her note-book, her card-case, or her money, – the whole forming a disagree-
ably hard aggregation on which she patiently elects to sit.21

The essay now turns to the function of pockets and their role in the
carrying and ordering of small possessions. This section starts with
men, who had entered the nineteenth century with the same principle of
multiple sewn-in pockets distributed for balance across their garments
as they were to have when they entered the twentieth century. They had
lost the skirted amplitude of eighteenth-century coats and during the
century tailors made sleeker shapes. Men, though envied by women for
having more pockets, also experienced difficulties with them. They were
often inefficient, given the range of personal possessions which men of
all social groupings wished to carry in them. Some or all of the following
items might be owned and carried at times during the period: pocket
watches, pocket knives, pocket compasses, handkerchiefs, pens and pencils,
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454 Gender and History

Vesta or match cases, pipes and tobacco, cigars or cigarettes and keys.
The more affluent man might also carry calling card holders, toothpick
cases, napkin holders, spectacles or monocles and their respective cases,
gloves and, on occasion, opera or theatre glasses and programmes, to
say nothing of purses, wallets, or loose coins, cheque books and papers
or notebooks. Working men may have pocketed food and drink, small
tools and sundries and away from home they supplemented their pocket
capacity with satchels or bags. A knee-length Sussex round smock made
for a large man has two big patch pockets with button-down flaps situated
on either side of the chest. Being made to be worn either way round, there
are pockets to ‘back’ and ‘front’, capable of carrying substantial items, per-
haps food for a day’s work on the land or the necessities for attendance
at market or a hiring fair. The pockets thus gave a measure of security
and self-sufficiency to the agricultural worker who wore this, carrying his
possessions as he laboured.22
The contents of men’s pockets could be problematic. Nineteenth-
century newspapers report the unexpected dangers which could lurk in
them, causing serious accidents or death: setting clothes on fire by leaving
smouldering pipes in pockets, small firearms or fireworks in pockets being
set off, and injuries from open knives and even gunpowder carried in
pockets. Pockets also involved women’s domestic labour: the socialist
reformer Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) criticised the frequent renewing
of male pockets as part of the work which ‘binds women down’.23 This is
confirmed by a pair of early nineteenth-century labourer’s breeches made
of leather-lined corduroy found in Surrey, England, in which patches
inside the pockets have themselves been patched.24
The pocket advantage over women which was enjoyed by men had
perhaps its most serious setback of the century when great-coats made
way for slimmer over-garments, probably encouraged by the change from
horse power to trains. Mid century, George Sala (1828–96) wrote of
‘Things Departed’, mourning the great-coat as yet another loss alongside
numerous other services, trades and everyday objects fallen from use
in the expanding, restless metropolis. Sala thought the ‘host of other
garments’ were insufficient replacement and he situated the great-coat as
a male institution sacrificed to the fashionable foibles of modern life.
But where is the great-coat – the long, voluminous, wide-skirted garment of brown
or drab broadcloth, reaching to the ankle, possessing unnumbered pockets; pockets
for bottles, pockets for sandwiches, secret pouches for cash, and side-pockets for
bank-notes? This venerable garment had a cape, which, in wet or snowy weather, when
travelling outside the ‘High-flyer’ coach, you turned over your head. Your father
wore it before you, and you hoped to leave it to your eldest son. Solemn repairs –
careful renovation of buttons and braiding were done to it, from time to time. A new
great-coat was an event – a thing to be remembered as happening once or so in a
lifetime.25

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Pocketing the Difference 455

In Sala’s gendered coat the functional pockets were central to it being a

kind of portable ‘habitus’, to use Bourdieu’s term, ‘a structuring
structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices’.26
However, while the ‘habitus’ may be a valid analogy for all clothing
during the century, new tailoring techniques, both bespoke and ready-
made, could lead to physical structures at odds with other practices of
male consumption.
The quality of the middle- and upper-class male consumer might be
judged by the kind of possessions he carried in his pockets; the quality
of his tailor might be judged by the degree to which the suit of clothes
smoothly concealed them. This became more marked as the century went
on and, by the 1870s, descriptions of men’s wear had an ‘overwhelming
concern with visual tidiness’.27 The ‘right’ cut and fit of men’s tailored
clothing were both subtle and skilled. Whilst varying in detail over the
period, they continued to embody notions of gentlemanly posture and
behaviour. ‘… everything should be sacrificed to perfect ease, as any
garment which pinches or incommodes the wearer will strongly militate
against the easy deportment of even the most graceful, and tend to give a
contracted and constrained appearance.’28 The size, position and number
of pockets were central to the effect. Men were admonished about
bulging or stretched pockets. ‘If you want to ruin your coat irretriev-
ably stuff the pockets full of things. Go for the pockets; if they are small,
stretch them; fill them up, weigh them down … and in a remarkably short
space of time you ought to succeed in stretching your coat out of all shape
and in wearing it out.’29 The ‘sombre, dark and shapeless suits’ so beloved
of the middle- and upper-class male have been generally read as
‘emblematic’ of, or embodying, the mid-nineteenth-century gendered
compartmentalisation of sexuality and power and the association of the
male body with self-control.30 We can add that the generous allowance of
pockets in suits underscores the association of masculine authority with
ownership of property. But the material details complexify this reading.
The suits were not in fact shapeless; on the contrary, by skilled internal
padding, layering, stitching and stiffening, the tailors exacted the
maximum structure and shape possible from heavy suiting cloths.
Mapping trends in the function of men’s pockets show a tension between
this moulded, external ‘visual tidiness’ of the suit and the tendency of used
pockets to disrupt it by bulging or sagging with an abundance of portable
personal possessions. Like the proverbial cat out of the bag, the disruptive
male pocket then reveals just the same degree of consumerism and
apparent lack of control over the world of things by which women were
judged inferior. Thus a pocket, like larger elements of men’s wear
identified by Breward, carried ‘conflicting constructions’ of masculinity,
‘which while remaining true to an essential differentiation from the
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456 Gender and History

appearances associated with femininity … could also carry traces of

worldliness, domesticity or display derived from the very same sources’.31
Turning to the function of pockets for women’s possessions, we find
that this was still embedded in the earlier practice of tie pockets:

Much better than a spinning wheel, this homely object symbolizes the obscurity,
the versatility, and the personal nature of the housekeeping role. A woman sat at a
wheel, but she carried her pocket with her from room to room, from house to yard,
from yard to street … Whether it contained cellar keys or a paper of pins, a packet
of seeds or a baby’s bib, a hank of yarn or a Testament, it characterized the social
complexity as well as the demanding diversity of women’s work.32

In her work on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sources, Amanda

Vickery has shown that the care and ordering of material household
goods, though valued for their own benefits, also represented ‘more
complex responses’.33 ‘In a well-regulated household, the mistress-
housekeeper could literally itemize the physical contents of a house and
knew exactly where to lay her hands on a particular object.’34 A woman
was not normally in a position to pass on to her family much beyond
movable goods, and her skills were ‘embodied’ in the household. ‘Small
wonder if, in consequence, she turned to personal and household artefacts
to create a world of meanings and, ultimately, to transmit her history.’
Those meanings were likely to be gendered, and reveal on the part of
women ‘a more self-conscious, emotional investment in household goods,
apparel and personal effects’.35
By the later nineteenth century the hands-on, working knowledge of
a household’s material culture was still valued, though cast in different
terms. ‘The family sense of well-being does not consist in the romantic
surroundings, or architectural beauty, or artistic furnishings of a house, so
much as in the cleanliness, the neatness, the punctuality – in a word, the
order of its interior economy.’36 The surviving usage of tie pockets by
some women to the end of the nineteenth century may be explained
not only by their sheer capacity but also by their more robust embodiment
of women’s work, and as investment in the material domestic world
which differed from the more mannered exhibition of leisured fashion-
able taste by means of reticules, bags and purses. The mix of things inside
these ‘generous bags’ was analogous with women’s household life as a
bricolage of practices, skills and artefacts.
Despite their common use, few contemporary descriptions of how tie
pockets functioned in everyday life have yet come to light. However, in a
children’s moralising story of 1849 by the prolific British author Anna
Maria Hall (1800–1881) we have a rare account which merits extended
quotation. In Grandmamma’s Pockets, the form and content of the older
woman’s cornucopian tie pockets are laden with meaning about the
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Pocketing the Difference 457

proper roles and responsibilities of women. ‘Annie always looked at

these pockets with veneration: they really were venerable specimens of
bygone times.’37 Through the young granddaughter Annie’s responses,
rather than marginalising them as merely démodé, Hall emphasises the
pockets’ narrative potency. On her way to bed, Grandmamma slings
them over the back of a chair and Annie contemplates them as ‘majestic
pockets! – so broad, and deep, and long, and strong, nothing flimsy about
them …’. Their majesty, analogous to that of the loving grandmother
herself, is compared to lesser pockets. ‘Let no modern lady housekeeper,
who has a bag-like slip of silk inserted in the skirt of her dress – let no
demoiselle with a three-inch pocket stitched into her pretty little apron –
or a bustling country dame with a white jane pocket behind, imagine
that they understand a tithe … of the utility or comprehensiveness of
38
GRANDMAMMA’S POCKETS!’
Their ‘utility’ and ‘comprehensiveness’ are demonstrated partly
through their contents. Hall takes us right inside the pockets, into their
‘interior economy’, into a world which was by this time ‘venerable’ but still
common. At the midway point of the industrialising century, she charges
these gendered pockets with the sense of tension between a new and an
old world. The right-hand pocket contained keys ‘with their parchment
numbers’, ‘a large silver nutmeg grater, with a cunningly-devised case at
one end to hold the nutmeg’,39 a snuff box,40 ‘a large pin cushion …; then
a very large “housewife” – containing every description of needle, from
the Brobdignag “packing” to the graceful “darner”. Then such real, actual,
useful threads! … positive flax thread of all kinds, and silks of all colours,
and buttons of all sizes.’ There were knives, scissors ‘of every possible
dimension’, tweezers, bodkins, corkscrews, files, ‘a most perfect, tiny,
hard-headed brass hammer’, tin tacks ‘in a little bag’; ‘a three-foot ivory
rule, done up into three inches’, a recipe-book, a bon-bon box, ‘a little
silver nut-cracker’. Hall notes that ‘in fact, everything seemed to find space
and place in these wonderful pockets; and, considering, they were not
so very heavy’.41 They also contained two small pockets-within-pockets.
Utility and comprehensiveness are demonstrated again by function.
The left pocket was regarded as a store place, for ‘put-away-things’42 such
as the store of snuff, spare spectacles and sticking plasters in one of the
little interior pockets. Grandmamma teaches Annie to appreciate the
distinction between the left pocket which ‘preserves’ and the right pocket
which ‘distributes’:43 ‘no matter what we realise; unless we preserve, we
shall be neither useful nor rich’. Hall reiterates the lesson. ‘One typified
the spirit of activity, the other of carefulness.’44 The self-sufficiency sug-
gested by both the contents themselves and their ‘spirit’ of preservation
and distribution speaks directly of the role of women as household
managers. Importantly, Hall’s fictional pockets are not used to carry or
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458 Gender and History

store cash, although there are other examples of old tie pockets used to
hoard money.45 Self-sufficiency in a different sense is also indicated by
the older woman, when confined to bed, calling for her pockets – ‘and I
will find amusement from their contents’.46 Hall depicts a woman of this
servant-keeping social class having several pairs of pockets of varying
quality and status, including ‘state pockets’ of ‘white satin, run with
coloured silks to imitate natural flowers. These were put on on birth and
festival days.’47 The range of tie pockets surviving in museums supports
this notion of a hierarchy of form and use.
In Hall’s story, Grandmamma’s tie pockets created a miniature adult
world into which the child could enter, her fingers straying ever deeper
inside until the desired object is grasped and consumed. The adult tie
pocket was also open to the child as a site of shared work, creativity and
pleasure because its informal decoration and small simple structure lent
themselves easily to lessons in cutting, plain sewing and embroidery. ‘I
learnt to backstitch on her pockets!’ says Annie of her mother’s dimity
pockets.48 The home-produced tie pocket, secluded beneath layers of
clothing, was one of the few opportunities for a woman or child to wear a
child’s work. The new style sewn-in pocket lacked this potential for the
embodiment of love and labour.
If the household was at the heart of the woman’s tie pocket, a man’s
set of integral pockets carried the prerequisites for a day spent in the
public world of work. Money was at the heart of the gender difference
dramatised through pockets in an American story which makes a widely
applicable point about female responses to the connection between male
pockets, work and power. The ‘pretty little Mollie Mathewson’, a ‘true
woman’ who nevertheless wished ‘heart and soul she was a man’, suddenly
turned into her own husband and spent the day as him. She enjoyed
‘a new and delightful feeling of being the right size’. Pockets were amongst
the numerous revelations and ‘new views, strange feelings’ she encountered
that day. On the way to (his) work in an office, she explored them.
Of course she had known they were there, had counted them, made fun of them,
mended them, even envied them; but she never had dreamed of how it felt to have
pockets.
Behind her newspaper she let … that odd mingled consciousness rove from
pocket to pocket, realizing the armored assurance of having all those things at hand,
instantly get-at-able, ready to meet emergencies. … the keys, pencils, letters,
documents, notebook, checkbook, bill folder – all at once, with a deep rushing sense
of power and pride, she felt what she had never felt before in all her life – the
possession of money, of her own earned money – hers to give or to withhold; not to
beg for, tease for, wheedle for – hers.49

In the world of later nineteenth-century fashion, with its small sewn-in

pockets, the frustrations and limitations of women’s access to money
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Pocketing the Difference 459

and ownership of property were neatly mirrored in the restricted scope

of their pockets. Until the reforms culminating in the 1882 Married
Women’s Property Act, women were unable to own property in their own
right and were legally subordinate to their husbands. For middle-class
women, much shopping for goods of all kinds was achieved through the
acceptance of their husband’s credit-worthiness by the retailer. Abuses
and failures of this system gained considerable notoriety.50 Cash was
fraught with tension right across the social spectrum. The turn from credit
to cash has been described as arguably ‘one of the greatest changes
in nineteenth-century retailing’,51 but it remained ‘culturally suspect’ for
wealthier women used to pledging their husband’s credit.52 For these
women, pin money too was a vexed question, ‘idiosyncratic’ and slippery
in legal terms and often disruptive in practice.53 Whilst the developing
nineteenth-century discourses of consumption sought to situate women
as passive, if disruptive, spenders, outside the sphere of business and the
generation of profit and income, in practice many women did continue
to function in business.54 Many women of all classes also exercised con-
siderable decision-making powers over consumption on behalf of their
households. This was well established by the nineteenth century at a local
level, when dealing with small traders, ‘with the shillings and pence for the
immediate needs of family subsistence in their control, women seem to
have been granted significant, if limited, economic responsibility’.55 By the
later nineteenth century it was a widespread working-class habit to give
over part or all of the male breadwinner’s wages to the wife and ‘what
distinguished all mothers of the poor, whether they worked or not, was
their total command of the family finances in every respect, except for
that money retained by a husband for his own pleasure’.56
What Zelizer has argued for American history in the period 1870–1930
is equally applicable to Britain: that a utilitarian theory of money is
inadequate to explain how domestic money worked, because money
entering the home was ‘transformed’ in the process, ‘as it became part of
the structure of social relations and the meaning system of the family’.57
This transformation was inflected by social class in Britain. Despite
variations, it is possible to argue that the resulting ambivalence and
tension about money in the hands, or pockets, of women was reflected in
the physical problems they described about their pockets. The ambivalence
during the period concerning ownership and independence is also visible
in the strange difficulties fashion illustrators seemed to have when
depicting women holding handbags; repeatedly the drawings fail to make
firm visual connections, showing instead limp, weak hands and small,
apparently weightless bags.
If money bestowed the means for action and power, women’s limited
pockets, like the rest of their clothing, were ill-equipped for its enjoyment.
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460 Gender and History

However, in nineteenth-century fiction, middle- and upper-class female

characters enjoyed the use of their pockets for a different kind of cur-
rency, when they feature as the place in which they keep letters, often for
some time, whilst they contemplate their significance. ‘She hovered for an
hour or two in and out of the room, conscious of the letter which she had
in her pocket, and very desirous in heart of reading it’.58 Thus the pocket
offered a woman a space in which to conceal or treasure communication
of a personal nature, and supplemented the few private spaces available
to wives and daughters in their work boxes or baskets, portable writing
cases and other small domestic nooks and crannies, prior to the emergence
of handbags.
Moving on now from possessions to the gendered body itself, the
interiority of pockets suggests a particular intimacy with it. Pockets offer
one of the few permissible breaches of the clothed space between the
private body and the public world, though subject to social regulation.
The pocket is literally at the edge, it is a space attached to or enclosed
by the main garment. The hand quickly learns to locate the pocket in
any given garment. Once found, it is seldom forgotten and thereafter
we reach into the pocket almost automatically. ‘All touch traverses the
boundary between interiority and externality and reciprocally returns
to the agent of touching. Touch, like dizziness, is a threshold activity – a
place where subject and object are quite close to each other.’59 Through
its special place close to the body, enclosing interior space and offering
the hand of the wearer, and the eye of the onlooker, a conduit towards
the body, the pocket signals the extent to which the clothing of men and
women is open or closed to the outside world. It indicates gender by the
degree to which the body beneath can explicitly draw attention to itself,
and thus how much that body can inhabit, confront or command the social
world. Hollander claims the ‘naked male body, coherent and articulated’
remains present as a ‘ghostly visual image’ beneath the suit.60 The respect-
able female body in the nineteenth century is shown as shielded and
closed off by its clothing, its power in the social world thus formally
inaccessible and unknowable. In a self-fulfilling embodiment of gender
difference, women’s delineation and management of their own bodies in
social space was limited by their lack of opportunity to touch their own
bodies, by proxy, through their pockets. Instead, their hands made other
gestures through the medium of dress by smoothing or arranging their
clothes or through elegant turns or tasks such as pouring tea, holding fans,
sewing or knitting. By the 1830s there is evidence that the tie pocket,
though still worn in some quarters, was seen by others as incompatible
with fashionable behaviour, and this may be due to its associated gestures.
Rummaging into those deep pockets perhaps suggested housewifery or,
worse still, the accumulations and fumblings of old age. In the 1831 novel
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Pocketing the Difference 461

Pin Money, Mrs Lucretia is gently mocked for three simultaneous signs of
age, ‘conveying her snuff-box as she spoke through a labyrinth of quilted
petticoats into a bottomless pit of a pocket’.61 Significantly, the more modern
Lady Barbara wins at the gambling table and in exhilaration ‘swept her
allotted handful of sovereigns’ not into a pocket but a reticule.62
It has been noted that ‘the embodiment of power does not always have
to occur purely through the development of a powerful body … It has
other variants which incorporate such elements as posture, height, weight,
walk, dress etc.’63 This is evident in the way the articulation and form of
the male body is emphasised by disposition of hands in pockets. It is seen,
for example, in the iconic photographs of Isambard Kingdom Brunel from
185764 and Keir Hardie from c.1892,65 and the vastly popular Victorian
practice of studio photography provides innumerable instances of it. By
contrast, in the photographer’s studio the female hand is seldom if ever
pocketed. It is usually empty or lightly holding a book or a fan, and, shown
chiefly as a hand at rest, nevertheless is a hand with a message (Figure 2).
Most obviously it is poised to demonstrate ease and leisure, at least
momentarily. Its emptiness confers the special status of the unworldly,
unencumbered and unproductive body. Such a hand also offers itself
for aesthetic appreciation and for the same reading of social class and
personal character as the face. The same social protocol which kept the
female hand in view and prevented it being pocketed like a male hand
was reinforced by frequent advice in etiquette manuals and women’s
magazines on how to keep hands beautiful and delicate, underlining the
habitual and expectant nature of the connoisseurial gaze on the female
hand. As Kowaleski-Wallace noted, certain kinds of delimited action
registered femininity in the context of the development of modern con-
sumer practices over the long eighteenth century:

the discursive construction of business as masculine effectively relegates woman to

the body. It thereby removes her from the scene of economic opportunity and positions
her as the object of consumer society. For if consumption is seen metaphorically
as a bodily phenomenon, then woman as body was historically viewed as ready to
consume … The management of female behaviors, gestures, and, above all, speech,
were the prerequisites for women’s cultural participation.66

To be pocketed would negate the charm of the female hand on display

and disrupt its potential for certain sorts of ‘cultural participation’. In
the context of her exploration of the ‘pervasiveness’ of class and gender
categories in a case study of Alfred Munby (1828–1910), the barrister,
poet and diarist who maintained a secret marriage with domestic servant
Hannah Cullwick (1833–1909), Davidoff notes that ‘hands take on a spe-
cial significance and play a central role in both class and gender imagery
… They also carry an explicitly sexual connotation for Munby and, one
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462 Gender and History

Figure 2: Seated outside a modest house, this pair adhere to popular

gendered conventions of pose and gesture established forty years before
in the earliest days of photographic studio portraiture. She lightly holds a
book with both hands on view, any pockets well hidden. He stands with
his left hand in his trouser side pocket and displays the use of two further
front pockets for his handkerchief and watch. Cabinet portrait
photograph, English, c. 1890. Author’s collection.

would guess, for many other Victorians as well.’67 Exhibiting the female
leisured hand reinforced the distinction in middle- and upper-class homes
between employers and servants. In 1874 Hannah Cullwick remarked that
her own hands, ‘broad and spread with work’, were unfitted for wearing
gloves and therefore made it hard for her to pass as a lady, had she wished
to do so.68
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Pocketing the Difference 463

If male pockets created particular gestures for studio photography, it is

also widely evident in fiction that male characters could signal emotions
and social nuance by the positioning of their hands in their pockets. In
Trollope, an angry young man confronts his rival in the latter’s lodgings
and, refusing a chair, stands with his hat held behind his back with his
left hand, ‘with his right leg forward, and the thumb of his right hand in
his waist-coat pocket’.69 The same young man signals his aggression by
refusing to sit at the reading of a will, and stands ‘with his hands in the
pockets of his trousers, and his coat-tails over his arms’.70 He demon-
strates callous disregard for his former mistress by standing looking at her
‘with his hands thrust deep into his pockets’, whilst, by contrast, her
gloved hands are visible and, by implication, usefully employed. ‘And
for this she had dressed herself with so much care, mending her gloves,
and darning her little fragments of finery!’71 Another young man, having
lost all his money at the gaming table, attempts to appear indifferent by
walking away from the table ‘and, putting his hands in his trousers
pockets, whistled as he walked away’. Nobody is deceived. ‘The motion of
his head, the position of his hands, the tone of his whistling, all told the
tale.’72 An anxious father ‘at his wit’s end’ about his daughter’s financial
problems, ‘went on walking about the room, jingling the money in his
trousers-pockets, and pushing the chairs about as he chanced to meet
them’.73 Whilst Trollope’s men make these emotional hand gestures by
means of their pockets, in the same novel, women gesture outside their
pockets: ‘Lady Midlothian held up one hand in a manner that was truly
imposing.’74
The hand in the trouser pocket, though expressive of bodily confidence
and presence, was also an ambivalent stance because of its association
with poor deportment, lack of restraint and degeneracy. In 1868 an
English public school reportedly ruled that its scholars would no longer
have ‘side trousers pockets’ because they ‘continually had their hands in
these pockets, and thereby contracted a lounging and stooping habit’.75 By
the end of the century the growing literature on adolescence, problem-
atising it within debates about national degeneracy, included promotion
of hygienic, simple clothing as a remedy for many ills. Boys’ pockets
did not escape attention. ‘Undergarments for both sexes should be loose
and well cut away, and posture, automatisms and acts that cause friction
should be discouraged … Pockets should be placed well to the side and
not too deep, and should not be kept too full, while habitually keeping the
hands in the pockets should be discouraged.’76
It can be argued that the suggestive qualities of concealed and visible
pockets echoed the perceived binary division between the controlled, clean
and concealed body of the respectable woman and the uncontrolled,
dangerous and more visible body of the working or fallen woman. When
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464 Gender and History

open, the visible pocket transgresses or breaches the boundary between

the body and the social world.77 Visible patch pockets for women featured
more frequently on work wear such as aprons, overalls and pinafores. For
example, women gleaning grain in the harvest fields in Norfolk, England,
wore aprons with ‘large pockets in the front to put the short ears in’.78
When women wore quasi-military uniforms for the first time in World
War I, they acquired almost the same ration of pockets as their male
counterparts, at least on their jackets. Pockets used in working clothes of
all types give rise to questions about the actual and taxonomical bound-
aries between clothes and tools, and therefore underline the association
of certain clothes with manual labour.79 This was suppressed by the
concealed arrangement of pockets on highly fashionable clothes. When
dress pocket visibility became briefly fashionable in the 1870s and 1880s,
it generated a spate of fussy, ornate and awkwardly situated pockets
which were emphatically without much practical function beyond the
carrying of handkerchiefs, themselves the subject of discussion in fashion
journalism of the day.
However, by the end of the century, there are important parallel develop-
ments which merit more research. As women took up clean work in
service industries, and as waged female work extended into the middle
class, more substantial handbags become ubiquitous and the articulation
and mobility of women’s bodies were routinely represented by the placing
of hands in front or side patch pockets. The new loose-fitting knitted
jackets that became popular at the turn of the century suited this rapid
development in the repertoire of women’s gestures (Figure 3). These
agile women confirm the early emergence of Hollander’s notion of a
more ‘unified bodily experience’, in which women’s clothes and bodies
approximated more closely to those of the male, ‘as a visibly working, self-
aware and unified instrument’,80 or at least in the prescient eyes of fashion
illustrators.
In conclusion, it is hoped that this preliminary study of pockets can
contribute to the larger challenges in dress history. It opens several lines
of enquiry including the wider interaction of gesture, posture and clothing
which has not been much addressed theoretically or empirically to date.81
Pockets throw up questions about clothing in the transition from childhood
to adulthood. They also reveal how little we know about the gendered
everyday life of money and how it shaped self-presentation. The study
argues that the form and content of pockets can be read as part of the
gendering of work and consumption and that the study of details or small
components of dress can offer insights not always visible with a larger
lens. As Bachelard noted, ‘miniature is an exercise that has metaphysical
freshness’.82 There is also a danger that fashion has been conceptualised
into such a blunt and homogenising tool for historians that it is not precise
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Pocketing the Difference 465

Figure 3: An anonymous illustrator stresses the advantages of knitted

sports wear for women by using boldly articulated figures. Soft, loosely
structured ‘jackets’, ‘coats’ and ‘wraps’ come in a wide range of colours
and offer ‘freedom of movement’. The hands shown in easily accessed
patch pockets are part of an enlarged lexicon of female movement and
gesture. 1914 spring and summer fashion catalogue, Harrods Ltd.,
London. Author’s collection.

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466 Gender and History

enough for understanding the full complexity of change and function in

either production or consumption of clothing. Individuals have made
their choices of clothing whilst living in circumstances more intricate and
more fluid than fashion history has yet grasped. The common regret over
the loss of pockets in the mid century which united Sala, the male journal-
ist, and Hall, the female novelist, centred on the notion that fashion was,
in Sala’s words, ‘a whirligig of vanity and inutility – of waste and glitter’,83
which cast aside things familiar, practical or self-sufficient. Our inventories
of clothing consumption are incomplete unless they recognise that an
individual, or groups of individuals, may have worn garments which lived
in a present or future tense, defined by novelty and commercially generated
fashion, alongside others which were imbued with more elusive functions
and associations. Pockets join other marginal components such as cuffs,
neckwear, hats, aprons, gloves and handkerchiefs to reveal some of
the instabilities and intricacies which play over the surface of the clothed
body and register the ambivalences and transformations inherent in the
construction of gender.

Notes
I would like to thank Alison Carter; Anthea Jarvis; Miles Lambert; the staff of Carrow House,
Norwich Museum Service; Oriel Cullen; members of the Gender & History Collective; at the
University of Southampton, my colleagues Dinah Eastop, Maria Hayward, Lesley Miller, Alison
Matthews-David and Annie Richardson; Joyce Dawson; Ruth Gilbert and students on the MA
History of Textiles and Dress.

1. Gwen Raverat, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 267.
2. J. C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes (1930; repr. International Universities Press, 1969),
p. 206. Also pp. 186–7 for an extended discussion on carrying small articles about the
person, including an early call for more use of the knapsack, currently achieved in a variety
of forms.
3. Anne Fine, Bill’s New Frock (Methuen, 1989), pp. 49–50.
4. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (Alfred Knopf, 1994);
Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–
1914 (Manchester University Press, 1999).
5. Vanda Foster, Bags and Purses (B. T. Batsford, 1982), p. 8.
6. Linda Baumgarten and John Watson, Costume Close-Up: Clothing Construction and Pattern
1750–1790 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1999), p. 65. Tie pockets were also in
common use in America. See Yolanda Van de Krol, ‘“Ty’ed About My Middle, Next To
My Smock”: The Cultural Context Of Women’s Pockets’, unpublished Master’s thesis
(University of Delaware, 1994).
7. For example, see William Beechey, Sir Francis Ford’s Children Giving a Coin to a Beggar, oil
on canvas, 1793, Tate Gallery, London.
8. Collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tie pockets consulted: Carrow House,
Norfolk Museum Services; Hampshire County Museums Service; Museum of London;
Gallery of Costume, Manchester City Galleries. See also Jane Tozer and Sarah Levitt,
Fabric of Society, A Century of People and their Clothes 1770–1870: Essays Inspired by the
Collections at Platt Hall, The Gallery of English Costume, Manchester (Laura Ashley, 1983).

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Pocketing the Difference 467

For examples in the USA, see Linda Baumgarten, Eighteenth-Century Clothing at

Williamsburg (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1986) and Van de Krol, ‘“Ty’ed About
My Middle”’. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes the gender difference in the form and contents
of pockets in early America in The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of
an American Myth (Alfred Knopf, 2001), p. 263.
9. Foster, Bags and Purses, p. 10; Van de Krol, ‘“Ty’ed About My Middle”’, p. 39; Beverley
Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660–1800
(Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 183. A pedlar doll of c. 1820 carries a ready-made
pocket in its tray of wares (1922.566, Gallery of Costume, Manchester City Galleries,
Manchester City Council).
10. Anne Buck, Victorian Costume and Costume Accessories (Ruth Bean, 1984), p. 149.
11. Buck, Victorian Costume, p. 150.
12. Foster, Bags and Purses, p. 45.
13. A Lady (Maria Wilson?), The Workwoman’s Guide, Containing Instructions etc. (Simpkin,
Marshall and Co., 1838), p. 73.
14. For example, see large linen drill tie pocket, twenty inches long, marked ‘FJ 1824’
(1947.1254), and tie pocket with front of silk patchwork and back of block and resist print
cotton with signs of earlier gathering indicating recycled use, 1840–60 (1947.1262) (Gallery
of Costume, Manchester City Galleries, Manchester City Council); tie pocket, machine-
made of drab twill, marked ‘E.J.Miller’, c. 1870 (226.972.2), Carrow House, Norfolk
Museum Services; tie pocket, printed cotton in green trellis pattern, two compartments
one above the other, horizontal openings, c. 1890 (BWM 1963.163), Hampshire County
Museum Service. Some paintings of the Victorian period situate plain tie pockets in
bucolic scenes.
15. Annette B. Weiner, ‘Why Cloth? Wealth, Gender, and Power in Oceania’, in Cloth and
Human Experience, ed. Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1989), p. 52.
16. Dinah Eastop, ‘Garments Deliberately Concealed in Buildings’, in A Permeability of
Boundaries? New Approaches to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore, ed. R. J. Wallis
and K. Lymer (British Archaeology Reports Series 936, 2001), p. 80, and Kathryn Gill and
Anna Harrison, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Detachable Pocket and Cap, Found Concealed in
a Wall Cavity: Conservation and Research’, in Textile History (forthcoming).
17. In pre-Victorian prints and caricatures, tie pockets can be visually associated with disreputable
or sexualised female behaviour, for example in the work of James Gillray (1757–1815)
and Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827). In this symbolic representation, they are plain and
undecorated. See Van de Krol, ‘“Ty’ed About My Middle”’, pp. 81–4.
18. Queen, 7 August 1880, p. 128.
19. Genevieve Cummins and Nerylla Taunton, Chatelaines: Utility to Glorious Extravagance
(Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994).
20. Mrs. F. Douglas, The Gentlewoman’s Book of Dress (Henry, 1895), p. 77.
21. Lady Violet Greville, The Gentlewoman in Society (Henry, 1892), p. 251.
22. In Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, England, this is a rare example of a nineteenth-
century waterproofed smock (Louise Squire, Textile Conservation Centre, University of
Southampton Conservation report, 1712.2, 1996).
23. Edward Carpenter, ‘Simplification of Life’, in England’s Ideal (1886; repr. 1919), p. 114.
24. Kjerstin Emilia Mackie, Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton (1089 –
B3, unpublished Diploma report, 1988).
25. George Sala, Gaslight and Daylight (Chapman and Hall, 1859), p. 59.
26. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979; repr.
Routledge, 1986), p. 170.
27. Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 31.
28. Anon., How to Dress or Etiquette of the Toilette (Ward and Lock, 1876) p. 13.
29. The ‘Major’ of To-day, Clothes and the Man: Hints on the Wearing and Caring of Clothes
(Grant Richards, 1900), p. 36.

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468 Gender and History

30. Leonore Davidoff, ‘Regarding Some “Old Husbands’ Tales”: Public and Private in Feminist
History’, in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Polity Press, 1995),
p. 236.
31. Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 260.
32. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern
New England 1650–1750 (Vintage Books, 1991), p. 34.
33. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale
University Press, 1998), p. 194.
34. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 148.
35. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 194.
36. Anon, The Five Talents of Woman (Fisher Unwin, 1890), p. 56.
37. Anna Maria Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets (Chambers, 1849), p. 39.
38. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 36.
39. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 38.
40. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 43.
41. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 120.
42. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 119.
43. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 44.
44. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 39.
45. For example, a servant hoards £20 in notes, gold and silver in an old pocket under her pillow
(Camilla Toulmin, The Neglected Child (Chambers, 1858), p. 29).
46. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 119.
47. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, pp. 39–40.
48. Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets, p. 156.
49. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘If I Were a Man’, in The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories
(1914; repr. Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 263.
50. Erica Rappaport, ‘“A Husband and His Wife’s Dresses”: Consumer Credit and the Debtor
Family in England, 1864–1914’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical
Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia (University of California Press, 1996).
51. Erica Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, Women in the Making of London’s West End
(Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 70.
52. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 72.
53. Susan Staves, ‘Pin Money’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 14 (1985), p. 72. The sexual politics of money in marriage
were dramatised in Anon. (Catherine Gore), Pin Money, A Novel (Colburn and Bentley,
1831).
54. For example, Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, ‘The Economic Role of Middle-Class
Women in Victorian Glasgow’, Women’s History Review, 9 (2000), pp. 791–814.
55. Edward Copeland, Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England 1790–1820
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 4. Also Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna Mui, Shops and
Shopping in Eighteenth Century England (Routledge, 1989).
56. C. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939
(Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 51.
57. Viviana A. Zelizer, ‘The Social Meaning of Money: “Special Monies”’, in American Journal
of Sociology, 95 (1989), p. 370.
58. Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864; repr. Oxford University Press, 1982), vol. 2,
p. 139.
59. Susan Stewart, ‘Prologue: From the Museum of Touch’, in Material Memories: Design and
Evocation, ed. Marius Kwint et al. (Berg, 1999), p. 35.
60. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits, p. 113.
61. Anon. (Catherine Gore), Pin Money, A Novel (Colburn and Bentley, 1831), vol. 2, p. 161;
italics added.
62. Pin Money, A Novel, vol. 2, p. 207.
63. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (Sage, 1993), p. 113.

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64. Robert Howlett, National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG P662).

65. Arthur Weston, National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 13173).
66. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the
Eighteenth Century (Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 13.
67. Leonore Davidoff, ‘Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Case of Hannah Cullwick
and A. J. Munby’, in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Class and Gender (1979; repr.
Polity, 1995), p. 123.
68. Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (Abacus, 1974), p. 371.
69. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, p. 119.
70. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, p. 155.
71. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, p. 324.
72. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, p. 367.
73. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, p. 211. Original text has extra hyphen.
74. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, pp. 407–8.
75. The Times, 6 August 1868.
76. G. Stanley Hall, The Psychology of Adolescence (Appleton, 1904), p. 468.
77. Karen Sayer, ‘“A Sufficiency of Clothing”: Dress and Domesticity in Victorian Britain’,
Textile History, 33 (2002), pp. 112–22.
78. Bridget Yates, ‘Rural Dress in Norfolk’, Strata of Society, Costume Society Conference,
Department of Textiles, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1974, p. 9.
79. Yates, ‘Rural Dress in Norfolk’, p. 9.
80. Hollander, Sex and Suits, p. 136.
81. There is precedent in art history, if not much in dress history, for examining gesture;
for example, Arline Meyer, ‘Re-Dressing Classical Statuary: the Eighteenth-Century
“Hand-in-Waistcoat” Portrait’, Art Bulletin, 77 (1995), pp. 45–63; Jan Bremmer and
Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Gesture from Antiquity to the Present Day
(Polity Press, 1991).
82. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958; repr. Beacon Press, 1994), p. 161.
83. Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, p. 360.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.