Poise under pressure: Eliteness, fashion, and the spatial perception of women in nineteenth-century Britain

Every summer thousands of Britain’s elite upper class travelled to London’s West End to socialize and participate in the Season. During this time, elite women donned luxurious court gowns and went to St. James Palace to present themselves before Queen Victoria in Drawing Room ceremonies. One of these gowns, from 1863, survives today and offers an evocative glimpse of how elite women styled themselves for one of the most important ceremonies in their life. But, the West End was not just an elite neighbourhood. It also housed and employed middle and working-class Victorians with whom the elite did not always happily coexist. In 1861, peer and M.P. Sir Shelley allegedly flashed the public and his middle-class neighbours while a carriage procession for one of the Queen’s Drawing Room ceremonies passed below. The Times reported his trial, which featured contemptuous cross-examinations of several working-class women, and Sir Shelley’s triumphant victory. Two years later, several elite men submitted letters to the editor of The Times, complaining about the cramped and sometimes combative atmosphere of royal ceremonies, suggesting that they were not safe for women to attend. There is a gendered conflict in these sources. Those from elite feminine perspectives show the value in attending royal ceremonies, during which women could use their fashion and occupation of space to reinforce or manipulate their social status. The documents written from men’s points of view, however, show an attempted renegotiation of elite status by excluding the middle class and further limiting women’s access to elite spaces. My research questions where this conflict originated and how historians can utilize less traditional sources to bring feminine perspectives into areas of history in which male points of view have often dominated.