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Christopher Breward
The translation of Sloper’s misadventures onto the streets of London was not
straightforward, but many of the features discussed by the critics, especially the
love of display and the promotion of consumption for its own sake, did find their
parallels in leisure activities associated with inner suburban and working-class
districts. It is in descriptions of institutions such as the weekly monkey parade that
the features of ’Arry’s “living” style can be discerned. In the Hackney monkey
parade, a Saturday and Sunday night promenade down Mare Street in which gang
rivalries, friendships, and courtships were subsumed into an excuse to parade in
one’s best clothing, young women attained an unusual prominence, and George
Sims’s description of the scene in The Strand Magazine during 1904 provides a
useful context for considering the relationship of a masculine sartorial image to
broader gender relationships. According to Sims, young women in Hackney set
the tone for the evening and clearly led innovation in terms of adopting distinctive
“coster” clothing styles. The emulative habits of the minority of young men,
though equally theatrical in their own way, remained a foil to the brilliance of the
street sellers and factory girls who made up the majority of the crowd:
We have heard so much of the famous Monkey’s Parade that we expect to see a bustling
crowd directly we enter the thoroughfare. There are plenty of people on the pavement
and in the roadway. Here and there are groups of typical London lads, cane, cap and
cigarette, and we exclaim simultaneously “The Monkeys!” . . . And yet the scene was
remarkable, and in one sense I should think unique. There were considerably more young
women than young men . . . They were dressed in pairs like sisters, yet in many instances
there was not the slightest family resemblance . . . The costumes were as gay and
gorgeous as the costumes that grace the Heath of Hampstead on a Whit Monday. The
favourite colors were petunia, violet, green and sky blue. Two young ladies, one dark
and one fair, had adorned themselves in light green blouses, red hats and blue skirts, and
waistbands of bright yellow . . . When the scene was at its busiest Mare Street was
absolutely prismatic . . . Occasionally a weird effect was added . . . by a looping up of
the skirt with the old fashioned dress suspender which fastens round the waist . . . As
soon as the novelty of seeing a crowd of young women in pairs similarly attired had worn
off, the feature of the crowd that leapt to the eyes was the complete absence of gloves
and umbrellas. 35
There is much here suggestive of the desire to both acknowledge and reject
mainstream fashionable dictates and foster a “louder” appearance based on local
networks of friendship, exchange, supply, and competition. A willingness and
ability to consume underlies the extravagant clothing of the promenaders and the
author indicated that young women in the district had greater access to disposable
income than men of the same age, stating that
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