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Christopher Breward
This ambivalence went hand in hand with those constructions of aggressive
heterosexuality that upheld notions of a female sphere concerned with conspicuous
display, while simultaneously devaluing its worth by rejecting overt interest in
sartorial matters as effeminate or antisocial, so that any major deviation from the
standard conservative working wardrobe, ’Arry’s bell bottoms excepted, signified
a rebellious or even pathological act. Robert Roberts in The Classic Slum recalled
the dangerous associations of particular modes of working-class dandyism in turnof-the-century
Salford when
the proletariat knew and marked what they considered to be the sure signs of homosexuality,
though the term was unknown. Any evidence of dandyism in the young was
frowned upon. One “motherbound” youth among us strolled out on Sunday wearing of
all things gloves, low quarters and carrying an umbrella! The virile damned him at once
– an incipient nancy beyond all doubt. 49
The subtleties of coding and detail that consequently surrounded “street dress”
functioned subconsciously or associatively to produce forms of subcultural
identification almost hidden to the gaze of the uninitiated contemporary observer,
or else suggestive of a heightened violence that simply magnified masculine
expectations. In his novel To London Town of 1899, Arthur Morrison alluded to
the encoding of a bowler hat with connotations of workshop etiquette, and the
observation of a hierarchical order that was easily fractured by inappropriate
display, stating that “it was the etiquette of the shop among apprentices that any
bowler hat brought in on the head of a new lad must be pinned to the wall with
the tangs of many files; since a bowler hat, ere a lad had four years of service, was
a pretension, a vainglory and an outrage.” 50 This fine division between the
proprieties of work and leisure clothing, and the contradictory codes pertaining to
each, had a long-standing tradition and gave rise to frequent misinterpretation.
Thomas Wright, writing under the pseudonym of “a journeyman engineer” in
1867, produced a very rich description of working-class habits that identified the
various codings of weekday, Saturday, Sunday and holiday clothing among skilled
laborers. The author acknowledged that
in all phases of life there is I fancy a sort of inner life . . . that is known only to the
initiated . . . there are traditions, customs and images interwoven with, and indeed in a
great measure constituting the inner and social life of workshops, a knowledge of which
is . . . essential to the comfort of those whose lot is cast among them. 51
According to Wright the consequences of such intricate coding were a tight
adherence to specific looks, policed by a merciless lampooning of the unfortunate
who attempted to “rise above.” He noted that
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