1.Hugh Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 2003), 27.
2.Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 31–32, 35; E. Maxtone Graham, The Beautiful Mrs. Graham and the Cathcart Circle (London: Nisbet & Co. Ltd, 1927), 248–249.
3.Lynedoch MS. 3591, National Library of Scotland.
4.Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 32, 35.
5.Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 43.
6.Graham, The Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 128; Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 281–282.
7.Graham, The Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 284.
8.Wednesday June 20, 1792, Lynedoch MS 16046, National Library of Scotland.
9.Tuesday June 26, 1792, Lynedoch MS 16046, National Library of Scotland.
10.Tuesday July 17, 1792, Lynedoch MS 16046, National Library of Scotland.
11.Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 46.
12.The dress remains in private hands and cannot be viewed, however Hugh Belsey states “This simple gown was preserved by Thomas Graham as a treasured relic of Mary Graham until his own death in 1843 and has remained in the family ever since. The cut and length of the dress suggest that Mary was … very slender, her figure having become skeletal as she wasted away from pulmonary tuberculosis.” Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 42.
13.Donald L. Spieglburg, ed., New Topics in Tuberculosis Research (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2007), 3.
14.C. Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Illness and Self in Society (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), xi.
15.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, xi.
16.Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 28–32; Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3.
17.Arthur Caplan, “The Concept of Health, Illness and Disease,” Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2001), 240–241. For Foucault, the artificiality of civilization diminished health and multiplied the incidence of disease while simultaneously altering its identity. Foucault contended “as one improves one’s conditions of life, and as the social network tightens its grip around individuals, health seems to diminish by degrees” Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 16–17.
18.Rene Dubos and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 3.
19.Selman A. Waksman, The Conquest of Tuberculosis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 8.
20.Henry C. Deshon, Cold and Consumption (London: Henry Renshaw, 1847), 31.
21.Waksman, The Conquest of Tuberculosis, 8.
22.Henry Ancell, A Treatise on Tuberculosis (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1852), xxiv.
23.Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (London: Hambledon and London Ltd., 1998), 9.
24.Most notably, Rene and Jean Dubos’s The White Plague (1952) argued that public health measures and sanitary reform in England were responsible for the decline in mortality observed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The White Plague remains one of the most influential works on the subject, in part because it located tuberculosis in its social context rather than simply enumerating exclusively scientific advances and the work focused primarily on the link between poverty and the disease. Thomas McKeown’s The Modern Rise of Population (London: Edward Arnold, 1976) asserted that the decline in mortality from tuberculosis was the product of better nutritional standards in England. McKeown’s thesis remains hotly contested and there is continued reappraisal of its validity and the empirical evidence upon which it rests. For instance, Simon Szreter echoes the Duboses’ assertion that sanitary intervention was critical in creating the decline in Britain’s mortality rates. Upon a careful assessment of McKeown’s evidence, Szreter claims, “the epidemiological evidence collected by the registrar general and analyzed by McKeown did not in fact show a definite downturn in the national incidence of respiratory tuberculosis until after 1867.” Simon Szreter, Health and Wealth: Studies in History and Policy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 113. For more information on the debates over mortality also see Anne Hardy, “Diagnosis, Death, and Diet: The Case of London, 1750–1909,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1988); Andrea Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France; Graham Mooney and Simon Szretzer “Urbanization, mortality and the Standard of Living Debate: new estimates of the expectation of life at birth in nineteenth-century British Cities,” Economic History Review, XL (1998), 84–112. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofiled, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Anne Hardy, The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventative Medicine, 1856–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
25.These books include Sheila M. Rothman’s Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (1994), Katherine Ott’s Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (1996), Barbara Bates’s Bargaining for Life: a Social History of Tuberculosis 1876–1938 (1994), and Georgina D. Feldberg’s Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (1995).
26.“Tuberculosis into the 2010s: Is the Glass Half Full?” Contagious and Infectious Diseases (2009: 49, 574–583), 574.
27.XDR-TB is defined as a “disease caused by bacteria that are resistant to at least isoniazid and rifampin—both first-line TB drugs, resistance to which defines multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB)—plus resistance to any fluoroquinolones and resistance to at least 1 second-line injectable drug (amikacin, capreomycin, or kanamycin).” Although this is the base definition many of the XDR-TB strains are resistant to most other second-line drug and as such are untreatable. “Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: Are We Learning from History or Repeating it?” Contagious and Infectious Diseases (2007: 45, 338–342), 338.
28.“The Challenge of New Drug Discovery for Tuberculosis,” Nature, Vol. 469 (January 2011, pp. 483–490), 483–484.
29.“Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: Are We Learning from History or Repeating it?” Contagious and Infectious Diseases (2007: 45, 338–342), 338.
30.“The Challenge of New Drug Discovery for Tuberculosis,” Nature, Vol. 469 (January 2011, pps 483–490), 484.
31.For instance, see Lee B. Reichman and Janice Hopkins Tanne, Timebomb: the global epidemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2002); Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zuml, The Return of the White Plague: Global poverty and the ‘new’ tuberculosis (London: Verso, 2003); and Flurrin Condrau and Michael Worboys, Tuberculosis Then and Now: Perspectives on the History of an Infectious Disease (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
1.Gideon Harvey, Morbus Anglicus: Or the Anatomy of Consumptions, 2nd edn. (London: Printed by Thomas Johnson for Nathanael Brook, 1674), 2.
2.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 19.
3.Mark Caldwell, The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption, 1862–1954 (New York: Athenaeum, 1988), 9.
4.F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 4.
5.William Black, A Comparative View of the Mortality of the Human Species (London: C. Dilly, 1788), 170, 183.
6.John G. Mansford, An Inquiry into the Influence of Situation on Pulmonary Consumption (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818), 67.
7.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 9.
8.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 24.
9.John M. Eyler, “Farr, William (1807–1883).” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/
10.Henry Gilbert, Pulmonary Consumption: Its Prevention & Cure Established on the New Views of the Pathology of the Disease (London: Henry Renshaw, 1842), 6.
11.Henry Gilbert, Pulmonary Consumption, 4–5.
12.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 24.
13.Quoted in Waksman, The Conquest of Tuberculosis, 20.
14.Stanley Joel Reiser, “The Science of Diagnosis: Diagnostic Technology,” In Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2001), 826–827.
15.Lindsay Granshaw, “The Hospital,” In Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2001), 1187.
16.Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 307.
17.The discovery of percussion by Leopold Auenbrugger (1722–1809) with its tapping of the chest and careful notation of the sounds produced opened an entirely new avenue of inquiry, by providing a window into the interior of the living body. However, his book and technique faded into obscurity until it was translated and popularized by Jean Nicholas Corvisart (1755–1820). Lyle S. Cummins, Tuberculosis in History From the 17th Century to our own Times (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1949), 94–96, 100–102.
18.Laennec and other devotees of the stethoscope were able to detect a variety of illnesses by differentiating between abnormal and normal respiration sounds. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 307–309.
19.Cummins, Tuberculosis in History From the 17th Century to our own Times, 121.
20.Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 311.
21.John Hastings, Pulmonary Consumption, Successfully Treated with Naphtha (London: John Churchill, 1843), 4.
22.Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 311.
23.Barrow, Researches on Pulmonary Phthisis, From the French of G.H. Bayle, 3–4.
24.Gabriel Andral (1797–1876) was a French physician, who emphasized the purulent, inflammatory, and “secretory” manner of the changes in consumption. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 337, and Anton Sebastian, A Dictionary of the History of Medicine (New York: The Parthenon Publishing Group, Inc., 1999), 47.
25.Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872), was a Parisian physician and expert in tuberculosis and typhoid. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 337; Anton Sebastian, A Dictionary of the History of Medicine, 47; John Galbraith Simmons, Doctors & Discoveries: Lives that Created Today’s Medicine from Hippocrates to the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 75.
26.Carswell (1793–1857) was hired by Professor John Thomson, while studying medicine at the University of Glasgow, to gather information in France and illustrate the findings for a course on morbid anatomy Thomson was developing. Upon returning to Britain, Carswell received the first chair of pathological anatomy, created in 1828 by the University of London in a jump ahead of the French; however, the position soon became a victim of the more established disciplines of practical and normal anatomy. Carswell’s disillusionment with the lack of support, combined with his resulting difficulty in making a living, led him to leave the position. Andrew Hull, “Carswell, Sir Robert (1793–1857),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/
27.Localized concepts of disease sought to specify the seat of illness at the level of individual tissues or organs while taking into account more generalized pathological alterations, systemic changes, and symptomology.
28.Robert Hull, A Few Suggestions on Consumption (London: Churchill, 1849), 2.
29.Scrofula, often termed the king’s evil, was a form of non-pulmonary tuberculosis characterized by an inflammation of the lymph nodes, and was accompanied by unsightly swellings caused by tubercles at the neck and under the skin in other areas of the body. Scrofula often resulted in ulceration of the skin due to the persistent and massive swelling.
30.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 74.
31.James Sanders, Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), v.
32.Henry M’Cormac, On the Nature, Treatment and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, and J. Churchill, 1855), 1.
1.The idea that consumption was a contagious disease was a notion of long standing, Galen considered it both contagious and incurable. In 1546 Florentine physician Hyeronymus Fracastorius systematically argued for its contagious nature, making a distinction between contagious phthisis (which resulted from exposure to those already afflicted) and spontaneous phthisis (which was the result of some type of traumatic event). Waksman, The Conquest of Tuberculosis, 50. In the seventeenth century contagion was a widely-accepted part of consumption theory in southern Europe, and by the eighteenth century it was firmly entrenched, leading Italian physicians and anatomists, including Morgagni, to avoid dissecting the bodies of those who had expired from phthisis out of a fear of contracting the illness. Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 29.
2.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 28.
3.Harvey, Morbus Anglicus, 2–3.
4.Harvey, Morbus Anglicus, 3.
5.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 33.
6.England tended to follow the example of northern Europe, in part due to the similarity of climate.
7.Ancell, A Treatise on Tuberculosis, 481.
8.Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 440.
9.John Reid, A Treatise on the Origin, Progress, Prevention, and Treatment of Consumption (London: R. Taylor & Co., 1806), 160–161.
10.Robert C. Olby, “Constitutional and Hereditary Disorders,” In Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2001), 413.
11.Catherine Walpole (1703–1722) perished from the illness at age nineteen and Mary Viscountess Malpas (c.1706–1732) the wife of George James Lord Malpas (afterwards Earl of Cholmondeley) died at twenty-six of consumption.
12.Peter Cunningham, ed., The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, Vol.1 (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1906), xcix.
13.James Clark, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1835), 2.
14.Waller, “The Illusion of an Explanation,” 436.
15.Waller, “The Illusion of an Explanation,” 443–444.
16.Thomas Reid, An Essay on the Nature and Cure of Phthisis Pulmonalis (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 2–3.
17.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 36–38.
18.Charlotte Brontë to W. S. Williams, January 18, 1849, in Clement Shorter, The Brontës: Life and Letters, Vol. II (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), 21.
19.August 18, [1836], In Emily Shore, Journal of Emily Shore, ed. Barbara Timm Gates (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 146.
20.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 42.
21.J. J. Furnivall, On the Successful Treatment of Consumptive Disorders (London: Whittaker & Co., 1835), 11.
22.M’Cormac, On the Nature, Treatment and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, 14.
23.Thomas Bartlett, Consumption: Its Causes, Prevention and Cure (London: Hippolyte Bailliere, 1855), 12.
24.Waller, “The Illusion of an Explanation,” 421–422.
25.Erwin Ackerknecht argued that the hereditary constitutional approach gained popularity to address the difficulties that the anatomico-pathological approach faced in explaining systemic, expansive illnesses like tuberculosis, gout, and rheumatism. Olby, “Constitutional and Hereditary Disorders,” 414. John C. Waller takes exception to Ackerknecht’s thesis as insufficient, and echoes Charles Rosenberg, arguing that the concept of hereditary illness was “a by-product of a prior linkage forged between, on the one hand, the notion of incurable disease and, on the other, the ancient concept of the relatively unchanging individual constitution.” For Waller, this conceptual linkage was the result of the medical profession’s attempt to explain its powerlessness in the face of a variety of relentless chronic illnesses. Waller, “The Illusion of an Explanation,” 414.
26.John Murray, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption its Prevention and Remedy (London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Arnot, 1830), 7.
27.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, xix.
28.Quoted in Waller, “The Illusion of an Explanation,” 442.
29.Olby, “Constitutional and Hereditary Disorders,” 413–414.
30.Clark, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, 220–221.
31.The Lancet, Vol. XI, No. 183 (London, Saturday, March 3, 1826–7), 696.
32.James Sanders, Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 65.
33.“Domestic Occurrences,” The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, Volume C, Part II (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1830), 461.
34.S. Hooll to Arthur Young on the death of his daughter Martha Ann (Bobbin) from consumption. In S. Hooll to Arthur Young, August 1797, Add 35127, folio 424, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
35.Black, A Comparative View of the Mortality of the Human Species, 176.
36.George Bodington, An Essay on the Treatment and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption (London: Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1840), 1–2.
37.The Magazine of Domestic Economy, Vol. 6 (London: W. S. Orr & Co., 1841), 111.
38.Waksman, The Conquest of Tuberculosis, 56.
39.James Carmichael Smyth, An Account of the Effects of Swinging Employed as a Remedy in the Pulmonary Consumption and Hectic Fever (London: J. Johnson, 1787), 17 & 19.
40.Smyth, An Account of the Effects of Swinging, 20.
41.Sunday December 9, [1838], In Emily Shore, Journal of Emily Shore, 290.
42.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 43. The prescription of sunshine and warm climes, which dated from Pliny and Galen, remained the most helpful and common advice well into the nineteenth century.
43.King George III to Lord Eldon, February 8, 1803, Eldon Family Papers, Add MS 82581, British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
44.John Armstrong, Practical Illustrations of the Scarlet Fever, Measles, Pulmonary Consumption and Chronic Diseases (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1818), 289–290.
45.Travel Diary of Emma Wilson (1828), UPC 158, 641x9, Norfolk Record Office, UK.
46.Clark was a friend as well as physician to Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert and was responsible for bringing Florence Nightingale to the attention of the Queen. R. A. L. Agnew, “Clark, Sir James, first baronet (1788–1870),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/
47.William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Vol. III (London: Published by the College Pall Mall East, 1878), 224–225.
48.Bodington, An Essay on the Treatment and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption, iv.
49.Bodington, An Essay on the Treatment and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption, iv.
50.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 143–144; Bynum, Spitting Blood, 82–83.
51.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 134 & 139.
52.The London Medical Gazette, Vol. III (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829), 696.
53.“Tubercular Consumption,” The Lancet, Vol. II (London: 1832), 423–424.
54.Dormandy, The White Death, 46.
55.Cupping was designed to draw infection and other deeply rooted toxins to the skin surface first by making a small slice in the skin then placing a glass cup possessing a slightly rounded lip that has first been heated to the incision site. As the glass cools the air contracts creating a vacuum that was to suck the pus, any necrotic tissue, and other toxins free of the patient’s body.
56.Cod-liver oil became the chief therapeutic employed to restore the physically debilitated and as such was popular in the case of consumption, despite its revolting taste. Clinical trials to determine the beneficial effects of cod-liver oil were undertaken the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases at Brompton by Dr. C. J. Blasius Williams and Sir Peter Rose. Christopher F. Lindsey, “Williams, Charles James Blasius (1805–1889),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/
57.Anne Brontë routinely employed cod-liver oil in treating her consumption. Charlotte Brontë wrote of her sister’s therapeutic regimen, “Mr. Wheelhouse ordered the blister to be put on again … She looks somewhat pale and sickly. She has had one dose of cod-liver oil; it smells and tastes like train oil.” Five days later she stated, “She takes the cold-liver oil and carbonate of iron regularly; she finds them both nauseous, but especially the oil.” Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, January 10, 1849 and January 15, 1849, in Shorter, The Brontës, 18.
58.Sir Alexander Crichton, Practical Observations On the Treatment and Cure of Several Varieties of Pulmonary Consumption (London: Lloyd and Son, 1823), 5.
59.Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950, 45.
60.John Baron, An Enquiry Illustrating the Nature of Tuberculated Accretions of Serous Membranes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819), 18.
61.Elizabeth Lomax, “Heredity or Acquired Disease? Early Nineteenth Century Debates on the Cause of Infantile Scrofula and Tuberculosis,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32:4 (October 1977), 374.
1.Thomas Bartlett, Consumption: Its Causes, Prevention and Cure, 2–3.
2.Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, “The Disease of the Self: Representing Consumption, 1700–1830,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Vol. 74, No. 3, Fall 2000), 476.
3.In 1818 John Mansford addressed some concerns attendant to city life: “Amongst the causes of pulmonary consumption … is the breathing a dusty atmosphere: and I consider this a circumstance of so much importance in the choice of residence, that I cannot refrain from offering a few admonitory hints respecting it. Those who live in large cities, and in the vicinity of public roads, can never be said to breathe a pure air in dry and warm weather. The clouds of dust which are incessantly raised by the passing throng … become the sources of something more than mere inconvenience. I am persuaded that air … becomes when thus loaded, a powerful cause of irritation and subsequent disease in the lungs.” Mansford, An Inquiry into the Influence of Situation on Pulmonary Consumption, 54–55.
4.Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1892), 98–99.
5.The public’s pulmonary organs were the parks of London. The article addressed the necessity of providing clean open spaces to temper disease. “The Lungs of London,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. XLVI, (London: T. Cadell, 1839), 213.
6.Hull, A Few Suggestions on Consumption, 52.
7.Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, 6.
8.In 1842, Henry Gilbert actually denied there was an increase in tuberculosis among the laboring classes: “As far as my own experience goes, I am disposed to think that the partial increase of consumption has chiefly occurred in the upper classes of society, and more especially among females; while among the lower classes the malady seems to have become less frequent. This may, perhaps, be accounted for by taking into consideration the greater comfort now enjoyed by laborers and the poor, which classes constitute so great a proportion of the population; while the rich, to gratify the morbid fancies of the age, indulge more and more in pernicious and unnatural luxuries, which gradually produce a tendency to disease. We see that this malady is not even heard among some nations, where the arts of refinement and the luxurious practices of civilized life have not as yet obtained a footing.” Gilbert, Pulmonary Consumption, 22.
9.Hull, A Few Suggestions on Consumption, 53.
10.Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, 125.
11.Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, 64.
12.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 197–198.
13.Charles Turner Thackrah, The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1832), 6.
14.This was one to the subscription balls orchestrated by the Tory White’s club to celebrate the recovery of King George III from his illness.
15.Miss Lyddel the daughter of Henry George Liddell (1749–1791), 5th baronet of Ravensworth Castle, while Matthew Baillie (1761–1823) was a physician who specialized in thoracic and abdominal medicine who published Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body (1795). By 1799 his private practice was so large he stopped teaching and resigned from St. George’s Hospital to focus on it. He was one of the physicians that attended George III’s daughter Princess Amelia in the final stages of her consumption, and after her death became physician extraordinary to the king.
16.Hester Lynch Piozzi to Anna Maria Pemberton, June 1814, In Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, ed., The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1748–1821 (formerly Mrs. Thrale), Vol. 5 1811–1816 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999), 278.
17.By a Physician, The Manual for Invalids, 2nd edn. (London: Edward Bull, 1829), 194.
18.“Cure of Phthisis Pulmonalis by Sugar of Lead combined with Opium and Cold Water,” The Medical Times, Vol. XII (London: J. Angerstein Carfrae, 1845), 142.
19.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 19.
20.Roy Porter, “Diseases of Civilization,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, eds W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2001), 591.
21.Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 311; Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 127.
22.Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease, 29.
23.Robert Hull addressed the role of the passions in 1849: “The deposition of tubercle is wonderfully influenced by these [the passions of the mind]. Hilarity, joy, hope prevent, perhaps remove tubercular deposits. Gloom, fears, despondency lead to rapid and fatal mischief. The histories of young women, ‘crossed in hopeless love,’ furnish numberless cases of tubercular decline … Depression induces phthisis.” Hull, A Few Suggestions on Consumption, 51.
24.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 52.
25.Some notable seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists of the nervous system include Thomas Willis, Albrecht von Haller, Robert Whytt, William Cullen, Alexander Monroe II, and John Brown. For more on discussions of the nerves and the influence of these theories see George S. Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” Studies in the Eighteenth Century, R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, eds (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976); Clark Lawlor, “It is a Path I Have Prayed to Follow,” in Romanticism and Pleasure, Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert, eds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
26.Peter Elmer, The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1500–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 187.
27.William Cullen was an extremely powerful member of the Edinburgh medical school who published First Lines of the Practice of Physic. W. F. Bynum, “Nosology,” in the Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Volume 1, pages 346–347 (London: Routledge, 2001), 346. Elmer, The Healing Arts, 167, 189; Roy Porter, ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 165.
28.Elmer, The Healing Arts, 189.
29.Bynum, “Nosology,” 346–347.
30.Bynum, “Nosology,” 347.
31.Porter, ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine, 166.
32.From Dr. John Brown’s Table of Excitement and Excitability, reproduced in John Rutherford Russell, The History and Heroes of the Art of Medicine (London: John Murray, 1861), 342–343.
33.Bynum, “Nosology,” 347.
34.The literature on sensibility is vast, but some excellent guideposts are: G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, Ltd., 1987); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993); and Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
35.For instance, Paul Goring has investigated the ways in which fiction “promoted the performance of a language of a feeling, including a performance of weakness.” Goring, Rhetoric of Sensibility, 14.
36.See Dana Rabin, Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
37.Iain McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 102.
38.Porter, “Diseases of Civilization,” 590.
39.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 49.
40.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 49–50
41.William White, Observations on the Nature and Method of Cure of the Phthisis Pulmonalis, edited by A. Hunter (York: Wilson, Spence, and Mawman, 1792), 22.
42.Porter, “Diseases of Civilization,” 589.
43.This notion held well into the nineteenth century as Bodington argued, “those persons who are for the most part the freest from the attacks of consumption … are commonly but little troubled with nervous disorder; they are rather remarkable for an apparent obtuseness of nervous susceptibility.” Bodington, An Essay on the Treatment and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption, 11.
44.Roy Porter, “Health Care in Enlightenment England: Knowledge, Power and the Market,” in Curing and Ensuring: Essays on Illness in Past Times, Hans Binneveld and Rudolf Dekker eds (Rotterdam: Erasmus University, 1992), 96, 98–99; and Porter, “Diseases of Civilization,” 589.
45.George Cheyne, George Cheyne: The English Malady (1733), Edited by Roy Porter, Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry (London: Routledge, 1991), xi.
46.Cheyne, George Cheyne, xxxii.
47.Cheyne, George Cheyne, xxix.
48.Cheyne, George Cheyne, xxx.
49.Gout was particularly notorious as a disease of affluence and civilization, one associated with those of a certain status. See Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
50.The illness she referred to was most likely consumption, as her daughter had taken up riding “on a double horse,” a popular treatment for tuberculosis. She did so “every other day, with Miss Wollonzoff, the Russian Ambassador’s Daughter, a very charming girl, of about twelve years old—I have great hopes from it—but she looks like a Ghost still.” Charlotte Burney to Fanny Burney, Aug. 17, 1790, Hill Street, Richmond, Eg 3693 Folio 63, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
51.Thackrah, The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, 164.
52.Bodington, An Essay on the Treatment and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption, 10.
53.Bodington, An Essay on the Treatment and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption, 10–11.
54.J. S. Campbell, Observations on Tuberculous Consumption (London: H. Bailliere, 1841), 231.
55.Campbell, Observations on Tuberculous Consumption, 231.
56.These notions were extended to the nation as a whole, as it was believed that commercial success, along with intellectual and artistic accomplishment, and religious and political liberty set up conditions that made the population ripe for nervous disorders. This curse, or perhaps blessing, was a symbol of a nation’s prosperity and wealth. In this idea consumption was a common illness because Britain was a prosperous nation and as its upper and middle classes were the most affluent it followed they were most likely to develop an illness of indulgence.
57.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 31.
58.Porter, “Diseases of Civilization,” 592.
1.Evangelicalism was a complex multifaceted phenomenon, typified by a string of unstructured and independent revivals in a number of geographical locations. By the mid-nineteenth century, evangelicalism made religion the language and the heart of the culture of the middle class. The role of the individual was central to this culture, as was the notion that salvation could only be achieved through intense struggle, and disease was one venue for that struggle to occur and the Christian to shine. Religion provided a reference structure for the classification of illness and evangelicalism played an important role in the conceptions surrounding consumption. Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 25, 83; and Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 7, 10.
2.The achievement of a good death had been orchestrated through the ars moriendi, a highly influential set of rituals that surrounded Christian death during the early modern period. It addressed the necessity of preparation and provided instruction on how to die well. In general, these texts provided guidance for the final moment, addressing the preparedness of the soul, and the practical actions necessary for the management of the deathbed. Consumption figured prominently in the literature, as a death from this illness was treated as a blessing. The idea that consumption was a relatively painless way to die, combined to make it seem an ideal exit. Pain could mar the deathbed performance: it could make its victim ill tempered, impair the mental faculties, or push an individual into blasphemy or angry raving. The time it allowed for preparation, the perception of a relative absence of pain, and the lack of overt physical deformity all combined to elevate consumption in the ars moriendi tradition. Richard Wunderli and Gerald Broce, “The Final Moment Before Death.” (Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol.20. 1989), 263; Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., Death, Ritual, and Bereavement (London: Routledge, 1989), 46, 48; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 315; David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 386; and Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 35.
3.Tucker, ed., A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 114.
4.Pat Jalland has argued the Annales School and Ariès were too liberal in applying to all of Britain a narrow and unconventional approach, particularly as Ariès’ work rested primarily upon the works, letters, and accounts left by the Brontës. Instead Jalland, based her work on extensive study of the private papers, correspondence, diaries, memorials, etc. of fifty different families over a century to characterize death in nineteenth-century Britain as a good evangelical death. Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 8–9.
5.Hilton, The Age of Atonement, 3.
6.Hilton, The Age of Atonement, 11.
7.Doddridge was a well-known and respected religious educator who promoted evangelical Christianity both in England and abroad. Isabel Rivers, “Doddridge, Philip (1702–1751),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online edn, ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/
8.January 4, 1736, In The Correspondence and Diary of Philip Doddridge, D.D. edited by John Doddridge Humphreys, Vol. V (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 361–362.
9.January 4, 1736, In The Correspondence and Diary of Philip Doddridge, D.D. edited by John Doddridge Humphreys, Vol. V (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 361–362.
10.S. Hooll to Arthur Young on the death of his daughter Martha Ann (Bobbin) Young from consumption. S. Hooll to Arthur Young, August 1797, Add MS 35127, Folio 424, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
11.June 29 [1836], Journal of Emily Shore, ed. Barbara Timm Gates (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 140–141.
12.July 5 [1836], Journal of Emily Shore, 142.
13.December 15, [1836], Journal of Emily Shore, 170–171.
14.December 25, 1837, Journal of Emily Shore, 232.
15.December 25, 1837, Journal of Emily Shore, 232.
16.Emily Shore succumbed to consumption at Funchal, Madeira on July 7, 1839 and was laid to rest in the Strangers’ cemetery where she first acknowledged the possibility of her mortality from the disease.
17.December 24 [1838], Journal of Emily Shore, 300–301.
18.November 6, 1836, Diary of Thomas Foster Barham (1818–1866), MS 5779, Wellcome Library, London, UK, 19.
19.November 6, 1836, Diary of Thomas Foster Barham (1818–1866), MS 5779, Wellcome Library, London, UK, 19.
20.November 6, 1836, Diary of Thomas Foster Barham (1818–1866), MS 5779, Wellcome Library, London, UK, 19–20.
21.The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. (London: James Moyes, 1831), 88.
22.The Literary Gazette, 88.
23.Hilton, The Age of Atonement, 11.
24.Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings, eds, Death in England: An Illustrated History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 235.
25.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 97, 100.
26.Jupp and Gittings, Death in England, 210.
27.What is termed “Romanticism” is a more or less arbitrary grouping of chronically overlapping groups of writers and artists with a partially shared sensibility. In England, the movement is generally viewed as beginning around the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 or with the publication of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) and continuing through the 1830s. The first generation of Romantics in England was typified by Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge and the second generation is commonly associated with Shelley, Keats, and Byron. The term Romanticism is a literary construct and the Romantic writers were designated by their contemporaries in England as belonging to various schools. For instance, Wordsworth and Coleridge were designated as belonging to the “Lake School” (because they all lived in the Lake District of England); while Keats was lumped in the “Cockney School” (a disparaging term applied to Keats for what was seen as his plebian lower-class rhyming); while Byron was denoted as belonging to the “Demonic or Satanic School” (for what was seen as a Satanic pride and impiety in his work). Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3, 240; Michael Ferber, A Companion to European Romanticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2005), 7, 11, 86–87; Aidan Day, Romanticism (London: Routledge, 1996), 2; Duncan Wu, A Companion to Romanticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1988), 4; and Stephen Bygrave, Romantic Writings (London: Routledge, 1996), 47.
28.Michael Neve, “Medicine and Literature” in the Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Volume 2 (London: Routledge, 2001), pages 1520–1535.
29.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 123–124.
30.Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 61.
31.Porter, Bodies Politic, 61.
32.Laura Jean Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury, eds, Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2002), 117.
33.Porter, Bodies Politic, 61.
34.“The Infirmities of Genius Illustrated,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. IV (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1834), 49.
35.David Wendell Moller, Confronting Death: Values, Institutions, and Human Mortality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, death from suicide was treated as another manifestation of illness (melancholy) and was correspondingly immersed in the elevation of feeling and sensitivity as the principal aesthetic value of Romanticism. This focus on the melancholy passions and grief led to a Romantic fascination with the tragic youthful death, be it the consequence of suicide or the inevitable result of certain illnesses. The death of the young poet Thomas Chatterton at the age of seventeen in 1770 from suicide was deeply influential in linking genius with an early death and in visualizing suicide and other early exits from the mortal plane as a display of increased feeling and sensitivity. Jupp and Gittings, Death in England, 212–213. Lawlor has argued of Chatterton that “suicide and madness were other, less godly, fates for over-sensitive poets, their minds overwhelmed by the harshness of an unwelcoming world, especially if they were emanating from the lower ranks of society. At least consumption was involuntary and, in theory, more dignified than unchristian options.” Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 124. Madness, suicide, and lingering terminal illnesses, such as tuberculosis, were all poetic options in the Romantic conception, as they were all distinguished by acute and excessive sensibility, which provided the apparatus through which the unavoidable and expected disappointments of life culminated in an early grave. Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 133. See Michael MacDonald and Terrence R. Murphy, eds, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For more on Melancholy see, Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac: The History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
36.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 54.
37.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 54–55, 131–132.
38.Lawlor and Suzuki, “The Disease of the Self,” 488.
39.Hibernian Magazine, Vol. III (Dublin: Printed by James Potts, 1774), 680.
40.White, Observations on the Nature and method of cure of the Phthisis Pulmonalis, 22.
41.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 121.
42.Thomas Young, A Practical and Historical Treatise on Consumptive Diseases (London: B. R. Howeltt, 1815), 43–44.
43.A Physician’s Advice For the Prevention and Cure of Consumption with the Necessary Prescriptions (London: James Smith, 1824), 123.
44.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 25.
45.“On the Early Fate of Genius,” The European Magazine and London Review, Vol. 87 (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1825), 535–536.
46.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 53.
47.The Englishwoman’s Magazine and Christian Mother’s Miscellany, Vol. VI (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1851), 606.
48.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 46.
49.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 7.
50.Ron M. Brown, The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2001), 134.
51.James Najarian, Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 27.
52.Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed., Nathan Haskell Dole, Vol. 8 (London: Virtue & Company, 1906), 150.
53.“On the Early Fate of Genius,” 536.
54.Timothy Ziegenhagen, “Keats, Professional Medicine, and the Two Hyperions,” Literature and Medicine 21, No.2 (Fall 2002), 287, 290; Bynum, Spitting Blood, 79.
55.Raymond D. Havens, “Of Beauty and Reality in Keats,” ELH, Vol. 17, No 3 (Sept. 1950), 209.
56.Bynum, Spitting Blood, 79.
57.Bynum, Spitting Blood, 79–81; Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 12–13.
58.John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, ed., Horace E. Scudder, Cambridge Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1899), 338.
59.John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats edited by Harry Buxton Forman (London: H. Frowde, 1907), 231.
60.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 10.
61.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 136–137.
62.Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, 440.
63.John Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats: Based on the Texts of Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., Grant F. Scott (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2005), 484.
64.Joseph Severn, Joseph Severn Letters and Memoirs, Grant F. Scott, ed. (England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2005), 113–114.
65.Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats, 497.
66.Najarian, Victorian Keats, 27.
67.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 11.
68.George Noël Gordon Byron, Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1844), 520.
69.One of the earliest examples of the consumptive Romantic poet was Henry Kirke White (1785–1806), whose claim to fame derived more from his illness than his poetry. White wrote an ode To Consumption, and the disease also figured heavily in some of his fragments. For White, consumption was more than just a subject, it was also a goal, and the young author appeared infatuated with the condition before he ever experienced it. White was heavily steeped in evangelical Christianity and was also conscious of animating the Romantic myth of the consumptive poet. White thus combined his notions of evangelicalism with Romantic ideology to visualize consumption as his ideal “good death.” He constructed an illness narrative that not only glamorized the experience of tuberculosis but also explicitly linked the illness and poetic genius. Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 127–128.
70.John Keats, The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats in Four Volumes, edited by Harry Buxton Foreman, Vol. III (London: Reeves & Turner, 1883), 374.
71.Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (Pisa, 1821), 4.
72.Shelley, Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, 20.
73.Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, edited by William Michael Rossetti, a new edition revised with the assistance of Arthur Octavius Prickard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 68.
74.Shelley, Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, 3–4.
75.Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What it is, and What it is Not (London: Harrison, 1860), 204.
1.Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 60. While Halttunen’s book is about the United States, a lot that is in it applies equally well to middle-class culture in Britain.
2.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 153.
3.Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, xiv.
4.Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, xiv.
5.Lawlor and Suzuki, “The Disease of the Self,” 492.
6.Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 58.
7.Religious conviction was a fundamental part of the middle-class imagining of the model family. There was a feminization of religion and an elevation of the status of benevolence and moral purity, qualities explicitly identified as feminine traits. Although the prescriptive ideology of “separate spheres” was not necessarily a reflection of the reality of life for most, the rhetoric was nonetheless pervasive in the life of the nineteenth-century middle-class woman. Upper- and middle-class women were never entirely free of these popular idealizations, which managed to exert influence over the entire social spectrum and helped define individual as well as social respectability. Middle-class women struggled to accommodate their personal circumstances with the idealized model, which apportioned duties for both men and women according to religious guidelines designed to maintain order.
8.The female role developed as part of a larger discourse on sexuality, and sexual ideologies were a vital component of the cultural battles waged in Britain beginning in the 1790s, when two opposing movements arose. The Regency, identified as it was with the character of the Prince Regent and the militarization of society produced by the extended war with France, created an era of debauchery, typified by the obvious libertinism common among the military and noblemen. A reaction to these excesses grew among the respectable, propertied classes, many of whom sought to craft a new imperative for bourgeois morality and so started to foster a new sexual and moral sincerity under the aegis of evangelicalism. This evangelicalism necessitated an alteration in the sexual debate, forcing attention, as Roy Porter has argued, “away from the Georgian ‘pleasures of procreation’” and instead in a direction that emphasized public character, civic probity, and “a re-idealization of love over sensuality, or moral law.” Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, eds, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 125–126.
9.These changes have been rationalized alternatively as the product of industrialization, with its associated growth in the separation between the work and home spaces; the growth of evangelicalism, which not only re-imagined female spirituality but also elevated female morality; and the emergence of the middle class in England as a group that sought to differentiate itself. All of these circumstances played a role in shaping the new principles of gender that rested upon a dependent female located within the home and a male breadwinner functioning in the wider world. The “cult of domesticity” was an idealized notion of both home and family that embraced its members and provided a buffer to the outside world. It located Christian values within the home while capitalism and competition were kept in the public sphere achieving a relatively comfortable moral balance. Marjorie Levine-Clark, Beyond the Reproductive Body: the Politics of Women’s Health and Work in Early Victorian England (Ohio State University Press, 2004), 7; Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Indiana University Press, 1982)
10.Levine-Clark, Beyond the Reproductive Body, 2.
11.George Gordon, Lord Byron, was reported to have said to Lord Sligo, upon looking in a mirror after recovering from an illness in 1828 that had left him weak and thin: “How pale I look! I should like, I think, to die of a consumption.” When asked for a reason, Byron replied, “Because then the women would all say, ‘See that poor Byron—how interesting he looks in dying!” The article went on to assert that despite the minor nature of the related anecdote “the relater remembered as a proof of the poet’s consciousness of his own beauty.” The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. (London: James Moyes, 1830), 54.
12.Lady Morgan to her niece, February 6, 1843, In Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography Diaries and Correspondence, Vol. II, 2nd edn. (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co, 1863), 474.
13.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 107, 154–155.
14.“Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats,” The British Quarterly Review, Vol. VIII (London: Jackson & Walford, 1848), 328.
15.Lawlor and Suzuki, “The Disease of the Self,” 493.
16.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 72.
17.Thomas Hayes, A Serious Address on the Dangerous Consequences of Neglecting Common Coughs and Colds (London: John Murray and Messrs. Shepperson and Reynolds, 1785), 61.
18.The World of Fashion, Vol. XXVII (London, April 1, 1850), 43.
19.Waller, “The Illusion of an Explanation,” 411.
20.The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. V, (London: Henry Colburn and Co., 1822), 255–256.
21.November 6, 1836, Diary of Thomas Foster Barham (1818–1866), Wellcome Library, London, UK, 17–18.
22.G. M. C. “A Sketch of Two Homes,” The Dublin University Magazine: A Literary and Political Journal, Vol. XLIX, January to June 1857 (Dublin: Hodges, Smith & Co., 1857), 542.
23.G. M. C. “A Sketch of Two Homes,” 545.
24.Physiology for Young Ladies, In Short and Easy Conversations (London: S. Highley, 1843), 78–79.
25.Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg, “The Female Animal,” 112.
26.Davidoff and Hall, argue middle-class ideology developed as a counterpoint to perceived aristocratic degeneration and corruption, rather than as a form of middle-class emulation of aristocratic lifestyles. The nineteenth-century middle class embodied certain expectations, most importantly the desire for improvement, both personal and social. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 1780–1850, 149.
27.Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease, 49.
28.Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 20.
29.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 65–66.
30.Both scientific and medical theories helped shape an ideological structure that was traditional in its direction but also remained accommodating to a variety of particulars utilized to both justify and validate the place assigned to women. Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg, “The Female Animal,” 112.
31.Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 105.
32.Robert Bentley Todd, The Descriptive and Physiological Anatomy of the Brain, Spinal Cord, and Ganglions, and of their Coverings (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1845), 121.
33.Hastings, Pulmonary Consumption, 11.
34.Deshon, Cold and Consumption, 71–72.
35.Alexander Walker, Intermarriage; of the Mode in Which and the Causes Why, Beauty, Health and Intellect, Result from Certain Unions, and Deformity, Disease and Insanity, From Others (London: John Churchill, 1838), 24.
36.Walker, Intermarriage, 47, 49.
37.Reid, A Treatise on the Origin, Progress, Prevention, and Treatment of Consumption, 172.
38.Walker, Intermarriage, 44.
39.Walker, Intermarriage, 21.
40.Walker, Intermarriage, 21.
41.“Dr. Pring’s Principles of Pathology,” The Medico-Chirurgical Review, and Journal of Medical Science, ed., James Johnson, Vol. IV (London: G. Hayden, 1824), 271.
42.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 17–18. Although not a new assertion, these ideas were re-popularized in the eighteenth century as part of the debate over the uniqueness of humans in relation to the natural world and the characteristics that defined sex. Phobias over the menstrual blood were of long standing, and contact with it, or even close proximity to it, were thought to have a multitude of negative effects ranging from the souring of wine and other foodstuffs, to the destruction of crops and bees. Closeness to a menstruating female was also believed at one point to impel madness in dogs, and cause flowers to lose their scent. Menstrual blood itself had also been assigned the ability to function as a poison; for instance, in the thirteenth century the medical scholar Albertus Mangnus was asked by a priest to write about the subject in a work entitled the “Secrets of Woman.” The request was most likely made because it was believed that menstruating females produced a poison thought to be able to kill a child still in the cradle. Edward Shorter, Women’s Bodies: A Social History of Women’s Encounter with Health, Ill-Health, and Medicine (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 287–288; Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science (London: Pandora, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 89–91.
43.Robert Thomas, The Modern Practice of Physic. Ninth Edition. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1828), 540.
44.“Phthisis,” The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Vol. XVIII (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1840), 123.
45.C. J. B. Aldis, An Introduction to Hospital Practice (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1835), 116.
46.Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996), 6.
47.Francis Hopkins Ramadge, Consumption Curables (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne, Green, and Longman, 1834), 81.
48.Samuel Dickson, Fallacies of The Faculty, Being the Spirit of the Chrono-Thermal System. (London: H. Bailliere, 1839), 180.
49.Dickson, Fallacies of The Faculty, 181.
50.Thomas, The Modern Practice of Physic, 545.
51.John T. Ingleby, A Practical Treatise on Uterine Hemorrhage in Connexion with Pregnancy and Parturition (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1832), 89.
52.Marshall Hall, Commentaries Principally on Those Diseases of Females Which are Constitutional, 2nd edn. (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1830), 140.
53.Walker, Intermarriage, 7.
54.Jalland and Hooper, Women From Birth to Death, 281.
55.Walker, Intermarriage, 41.
56.John C. Ferguson, Consumption: What it is, and What it is not (Belfast: Henry Greer, 1856), 5.
57.Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 57.
58.Todd, The Descriptive and Physiological Anatomy of the Brain, Spinal Cord, and Ganglions, 121.
59.Caldwell, The Last Crusade, 17.
60.Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 57.
61.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 24. Although there were certainly instances in which individuals sought to exhibit an increased quantity of sensibility, the affectation of emotional sensibility was looked upon with contempt, or at least derision. This condemnation of affectation had been occurring since the latter part of the eighteenth century when sensibility had begun to grow in importance, and is evident in the description of one such individual, a Miss Williams who “is, I think, without any exception, the most affected of any young lady I ever met with! a sentimental affectation—she sits like a lily drooping in Company, & proposes to dislike any thing that is comic” Charlotte Burney to Susan Burney, 1784, Barrett Collection, Vol. XII, Egerton MS 3700A, folio 127, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
62.Emotions had a long tradition of being significant in the course of tuberculosis as such, keeping the patient calm and in good spirits was believed to be of a vital importance in cases of the disease.
63.Clark, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, 236–237.
64.H. D. Chalke, “The Impact of Tuberculosis on History, Literature and Art,” Medical History VI (1962), 307. For instance, Charlotte Brontë makes consumption a defining feature of Helen Burns’ character in Jane Eyre.
65.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 76.
66.For more on this transition see Carolyn A. Day and Amelia Rauser, “Thomas Lawrence’s Consumptive Chic: Reinterpreting Lady Manners’ Hectic Flush in 1794,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.4 (Summer 2016).
67.Cotton, The Nature, Symptoms, and Treatment of Consumption, 80.
68.Rosenthal and Choudhury, Monstrous Dreams of Reason, 117.
1.Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 29.
2.For more on Siddons celebrity see Laura Engel, Fashioning Celebrity: 18th-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011).
3.Philip H. Highfill, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, managers & Other Stage Personnel in London,1660–1800, Vol. 14 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 23. Although her salary from 1788–1799 was £20 per night, increasing to £31.10s per night in the period from 1799–1800, the Siddons family was faced with financial shortfalls because Sheridan was consistently behind in paying her salary and as late as November 1799 still owed Mrs. Siddons over £2,100.
4.Robert Shaughnessy, “Siddons, Sarah (1755–1831),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/
5.The punctuation of the letters in this chapter appears as in the original manuscripts. Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Barrington, London, June 3, 1792, Barrington Collection Add MS 73736, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
6.Highfill, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, 26.
7.Entry dated January 26, 1834, in Charles C. F. Greville, The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1875), 213.
8.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Barrington, London, April 7, 1792, Barrington Collection Add 73736, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
9.Thomas Campbell was, unfortunately, for posterity’s sake, Mrs. Siddons choice as her biographer, and to whom she turned over the bulk of her writings, journals, and personal correspondence. He used disappointingly few of these items in his Life of Mrs. Siddons, a circumstance bemoaned by his contemporaries and historians alike. To make matters worse, he failed to return her papers to the family and they were mysteriously lost.
10.Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 224.
11.Mrs. Piozzi to Mrs. Pennington, from Guy’s Cliffe, Sunday, October 14, 1792, in The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington 1788–1821, ed. Oswald G. Knapp (London: John Lane, 1914), 69.
12.The therapy was successful as Sally, according to Mrs. Piozzi, was growing “fat and merry.” Mrs. Piozzi, September 9, 1792, in An Artist’s Love Story: Told in the Letters of Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mrs. Siddons, and Her Daughters, Oswald G. Knapp (London: George Allen, 1904), 9–10.
13.Mrs. Piozzi to Mrs. Pennington, from Guy’s Cliffe, Sunday, October 14, 1792, in Knapp, ed., The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 69.
14.William Cullen asserted of asthma, that “in some young persons it has ended soon, by occasioning a phthisis pulmonalis.” William Cullen, First Lines of the Practice of Physic, Vol. II (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1808), 215–216. John Roberton seconded these assertions: “Asthma, also, may occasion this disease [consumption], by producing tubercles.” John Roberton, A Treatise on Medical Police, and on Diet, Regimen, &c., Vol. I (Edinburgh: John Moir, 1809), 234.
15.John Fyvie, Tragedy Queens of the Georgian Era (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1909), 253.
16.Lawrence was reintroduced to the Siddons’ daughters sometime after their return from a finishing school in Calais. The girls had been taken there in 1789 or 1790 and had returned approximately two or three years later. They were still there in 1792, when Mr. Siddons took his son Harry to Amiens and wrote to his wife of his daughters’ appearance. In Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 188.
17.During this period, Sally’s health remained precarious as evidenced in December of 1797 when Mr. Siddons related that Sally “has had the worst fit I ever knew, and is still very ill.” Her condition was confirmed by Maria in a letter to Miss Bird. “Sally is getting better, I hope; she has been very ill, and is still very weak.” Mr. Siddons to Dr. Whalley, December 15 and 17, 1797, in Journals and Correspondence, Vol. II (London: Richard Bentley, 1863), 109, and Maria Siddons to Miss Bird, 1797, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 14.
18.Sir Walter Armstrong, Lawrence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 42.
19.Mrs. Siddons to Dr. Whalley, January 15, 1798, in Whalley, Journals and Correspondence (London: Richard Bentley, 1863), Vol. II, 109–110. Dr. George Pearson was well acquainted with Mrs. Siddons’ brother Kemble. The two had met when the doctor was first starting out in Doncaster and continued their acquaintance once Pearson had settled in London. William Munk stated “As a practitioner he was judicious and safe rather than strikingly acute or original.” This may help explain his cautious approach to Maria’s illness. William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 2nd edn, Vol. II (London: Published by the College, 1878), 343.
20.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Barrington, May 17, 1798, Barrington Collection Add MS 73736, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
21.Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, January 5, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 16–17.
22.Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 15.
23.Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, January 5, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 17.
24.Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, January 28, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 19.
25.Parsons provides an even shorter window, stating that this change in affections occurred within six weeks of the official engagement. Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons, 193. For more on Sally and Lawrence’s relationship see Laura Engel (2014) “The Secret Life of Archives: Sally Siddons, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and The Material of Memory,” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830: Vol. 4: Issue 1, Article 2. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/
26.Sally to Mr. Lawrence, 1798, in Eliza Priestly, “An Artist’s Love Story,” Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review, 57:338 (April 1905), 645–646.
27.Eliza Priestly, “An Artist’s Love Story,” 646.
28.Eliza Priestly, “An Artist’s Love Story,” 646.
29.Fyvie, Tragedy Queens of the Georgian Era, 254.
30.Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, March 5, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 26–27.
31.Maria Siddons to Miss Bird, March 14, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 29.
32.This pain was an acknowledged symptom of consumption. Henry Herbert Southey stated, in tuberculosis, there was a “sharp transient pain in the chest which is called a stitch” or “some fixed pain either in the side or below the sternum, or a sense of general soreness in the chest.” Southey, Observations on Pulmonary Consumption, 7–8.
33.Maria Siddons to Miss Bird, March 14, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 29.
34.Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 29–30.
35.Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 30–31.
36.Mrs. Piozzi to Mrs. Pennington, March 27, 1798, In Knapp, ed., The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 152.
37.Knapp, ed., The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 152.
38.Maria Siddons to Miss Bird, April 8, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 32.
39.Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 33–34.
40.Maria Siddons to Miss Bird, May 6, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 42.
41.Mrs. Siddons to Tate Wilkinson, May 29, 1798, in Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 199.
42.Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 199.
43.Phyllis Hembry, The English Spa: 1560–1815 (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), 245–246.
44.The New Bath Guide; or Useful Pocket Companion (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1799), 55.
45.William Nisbet, A General Dictionary of Chemistry (London: S. Highley, 1805), 76.
46.William Saunders, A Treatise on the Chemical History and Medical Powers of Some of the Most Celebrated Mineral Waters, 2nd edn. (London: Phillips and Fardon, 1805), 125–126.
47.Dr. Andrew Carrick (1789), quoted in L. M. Griffiths, “The Reputation of the Hotwells (Bristol) as a Health Resort,” The Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Journal (March 1902), 22.
48.Julius Caesar Ibbetson, A Picturesque Guide to Bath, Bristol Hot-wells, the River Avon, and the Adjacent Country (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1793), 174.
49.Ibbetson, A Picturesque Guide to Bath, 170.
50.Saunders, A Treatise on the Chemical History and Medical Powers of Some of the Most Celebrated Mineral Waters, 112.
51.Saunders, A Treatise on the Chemical History and Medical Powers of Some of the Most Celebrated Mineral Waters, 125.
52.Robert Thomas, The Modern Practice of Physic, 4th edn. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1813), 425.
53.Thomas, The Modern Practice of Physic, 425–426.
54.Jeremiah Whitaker Newman, The Lounger’s Common-Place Book, Vol. IV (London: 1799), 181.
55.Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, Clifton, June 13, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 45.
56.Dowry Square was situated at the bottom of Clifton Hill on the road to the Hot-well house, and as such, provided an unparalleled location for Maria as an invalid visiting the village. Ibbetson, A Picturesque Guide to Bath, 166–166, 167; Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons, 197.
57.Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, Clifton, June 13, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 46.
58.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, Worcester, July 26 [1798], Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 1, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
59.Edward Owen, in Observations on the Earths, Rocks, Stones and Minerals, for some miles about Bristol, and on the nature of the Hot-Well, and … its water (1754), addressed the practice of “riding-double” upon Durdham Down writing: “the best lady attending the Hot well will not refuse riding behind a man, for such is the custom of the country. Numbers of what they call double horses are kept for that purpose.” Quoted in John Latimer, The Annals of Bristol In the Eighteenth Century (Printed for the Author, 1893), 245.
60.Maria’s access to the activities of Clifton would have been total, as her mother’s boon companion, Mrs. Pennington’s husband William, had attained the position of Master of Ceremonies at the Hot-wells in 1785. Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 36, 38.
61.Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, July 27, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 53.
62.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, c.July 31, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 2, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
63.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, c.July 31, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 2, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
64.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, Cheltenham, August 9, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 3, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
65.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, Cheltenham, August 9, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 3, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
66.Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, 1798, in Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 72.
67.“I pray God his phrenzy may not impel him to some desperate action! What he can propose by going thither I know not, but it is fit they should both be on their guard. Mr. S. knows nothing of all this, the situation of dear Sally, when one recurs to her original partiality for this wretched madman, placing her in so delicate a situation, we thought it best to keep the matter entirely conceal’d, as it was impossible that anything cou’d come of it, if ever, NEVER, she was RESOLV’D, till her sister shou’d be perfectly restor’d. I hope it will always be a secret to Mr. S., as it could answer no end but to enrage him and make us all still more unhappy.” Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 7, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
68.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 7, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
69.Thomas Lawrence to Mrs. Pennington, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 8, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
70.Thomas Lawrence to Mrs. Pennington, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 8, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK. Lawrence’s attempt to shift blame was not a disavowal of the role of feelings in Maria’s illness, but rather of Maria’s feelings for him.
71.“The affairs of this unhappy man are very much derang’d. He told me some time ago, when he was as mad about Maria as he is now about Sally, that, if she rejected him, he would fly, to compose his Spirit, to the mountains of Switzerland. Maria reign’d sole arbitress of his fate for two years, or more. The other day he told me, if he lost Sally, SWITZERLAND was still his resource. Oh! that caprice and passion shou’d thus obscure the many excellencies and lofty genius of this man! Tell my sweet girl how infinitely more she deserves than I cou’d ever endure, in tenderness to her repose.” Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, Fryday 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 12, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
72.Lawrence was not only motivated by forestalling Maria’s interference in he and Sally’s relationship but, according to Oswald Knapp, Sally was not fully convinced of his constancy and in protecting her feelings increased Lawrence’s insecurity to the point where his jealousy overwhelmed any good sense he might have possessed and he was concerned he might have a rival for her affection in Clifton. In Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 94–95.
73.Mrs. Pennington to Lawrence, September 4, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 19, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
74.Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 108.
75.Mr. Lawrence to Mrs. Pennington, Postmark, Sept. 7, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 21, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
76.Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Hotwells, Sept. 11, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 23, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
77.Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons, 199.
78.Mr. Lawrence to Mrs. Pennington, Postmark, Oct. 2, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 26, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
79.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK. The newspapers had to print a correction after prematurely reporting Maria’s death: “Miss Maria Siddons, whose death was prematurely stated in the public prints, on Saturday se’nnight expired at Bristol Hot Wells.” Bell’s Weekly Messenger (London, England), October 14, 1798; Issue 129.
80.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
81.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
82.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
83.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
84.Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 127.
85.Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, September 4, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 19, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
86.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
87.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
88.Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 2, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 27, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
89.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
90.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
91.Lawrence even participates in assigning Maria a refined, intellectual, delicate, beauty, in a poem entitled simply “For Maria,” likely written the eve of her death. “If all of thy Beauty that gives me delight were gone to the Joys that are fled/ And all that enchants in that Intellect bright no more sweetest Influence shed/ Were Genius rare gifts with right Judgment combin’d with Talents, their powers to impart/ By saddest Infirmity, torn from thy mind, And tenderness self From thy Heart/In that delicate Form, while a pulse should remain/ Of that mind, but one ray be preserv’d/ That throb, would thy power undiminish’d retain/ That glance be with reverence observ’d/ Unotice’d- unknown-my devotion, I’d prove/ Till the last emanations expire/ As faithful, when cold e’en the embers of love/ As when cherish’d and blest by its Fire/ Then hope from that Power that permitted thy worth/ Thy last dying prescription forgiven / If the soul, by thy virtues, refin’d on this earth, Such its Angel again in their Heaven.” Thomas Lawrence, For Maria, LAW/5/537, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK.
92.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
93.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
94.Letter Mrs. Pennington to Mr. Lawrence, Oct. 8, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 31, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
95.Clark Lawlor argues that in this cultural prototype, women were subordinate to and dependent upon men, and love provided the avenue through which women could connect themselves to and bond with men. As a result, Lawlor argued that when this love went awry the woman had no other option except disease and in due course death and, if at all possible, that death should be the beautiful exit provided by tuberculosis. Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 16, 152, 154.
96.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 16, 152, 154.
97.Richardson’s novel had been translated into French in 1751, and Rousseau was certainly familiar with the work as he complimented it in his Letter to d’Alembert. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse: Julie, or the New Eloise, Translated and Abridged by Judith H. McDowell, 5th Edition (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 8. Apparently, Rousseau initially planned to have Julie die by drowning, but changed his plans and had her exit life via the tableaux of consumption, as Richardson had done with Clarissa. David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 94.
98.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 59.
99.“Clarissa’s illness [was] probably a galloping consumption.” Margaret Ann Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 171.
100.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 9.
101.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 58–59.
102.Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. Contained in The Novelist’s Magazine. Vol. XV. Containing the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Volumes of Clarissa (London: Harrison and Co., 1784), 1140.
103.Richardson, Clarissa, Vol. XV, 1145.
104.Marshall, The Frame of Art, 95.
105.Mrs. Sarah Siddons to Mrs. Elizabeth Barrington, October 19, 1798, Barrington Collection Add MS 73736, The British Library, London, UK.
106.Oswald Knapp dated this letter as having been written on October 4, 1798, a full three days before Maria’s death. Mrs. Piozzi to Mrs. Pennington, October 4, 1798, in Knapp, ed., The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 164–165.
107.Mrs. Piozzi to Dr. Gray, October 14, 1798, in Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale), A. Hayward, ed., Vol. II, second edition (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 249–250.
108.Letter Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Pennington, October 27, 1798, Lawrence Siddons Letters Add 6445, Folio 45, Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, UK.
109.Verse 600, from Night Thoughts. Knapp, An Artist’s Love Story, 128.
110.Mrs. Sarah Siddons to Mrs. Elizabeth Barrington, Cheltenham, May 16, 1803, Barrington Collection Add MS 73736, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
111.Mrs. Siddons to Mrs. Fitzhugh, Cheltenham, June 1803, in Mrs. Siddons, Nina A. Kennard (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887), 276.
1.Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, 178.
2.Rosenthal and Choudhury, Monstrous Dreams of Reason, 117.
3.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 43. Susan Sontag has argued that it was during this period that consumption came to be inextricably tied to appearance. The disease, she wrote, “was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth century manners. The TB influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks. The tubercular look had to be considered attractive once it came to be a mark of distinction, of breeding.” Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors, 28–29. While, Jean and Rene Dubos applied these assertions specifically to women arguing that “the distorted picture of consumption drawn by poets and novelists was in keeping with the peculiar ideal of feminine beauty that was then prevailing.” Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 54. See also, Roy Porter “Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?” in John Brewer and Roy Porter ed., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); and Lawlor and Suzuki, “The Disease of the Self.”
4.Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003), 241.
5.The London Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. III (London: Renshaw and Rush, 1833),
6.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 25.
7.Steven J. Peitzman, “From Dropsy to Bright’s Disease to End-Stage Renal Disease,” The Milbank Quarterly, Vol. 67, Supplement 1, Framing Disease: The Creation and Negotiation of Explanatory Schemes (1989), (Published by: Milbank Memorial Fund), 18–19.
8.Peitzman, “From Dropsy to Bright’s Disease to End-Stage Renal Disease,” 17.
9.Peter McNeil, “Ideology, Fashion and the Darlys’ ‘Macaroni” Prints,’ in Dress and Ideology: Fashioning Identity from Antiquity to the Present, Shoshana-Rose Marzel and Guy D. Stiebel, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 112. See also Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
10.Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 62. Amelia Rauser, building upon Wahrman, has argued that “caricature signified insiderness and sophistication as well as exaggeration and superficiality,” as a result caricature marked individualism, but also served “as a warning of its dangerous extremism.” Amelia Rauser, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 76.
11.The Times, Monday, March 25, 1793 (London, 1793), 2.
12.For more on corpulence and obesity see Sander L. Gilman, Obesity: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Sander L. Gilman, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
13.Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 240, 243. Clark Lawlor has argued this phenomenon was entrenched by 1799. Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 44.
14.Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 240.
15.William Wadd, Cursory Remarks on Corpulence or Obesity Considered as a Disease, 3rd edition (London: J. Callow, 1816), 54–55.
16.“On Corpulence,” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. X (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 184.
17.The Art of Beauty; or the Best Methods of Improving and Preserving the Shape, Carriage, and Complexion. Together with, the Theory of Beauty (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), 77–78.
18.Walker, Intermarriage, 339.
19.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 58.
20.For a further discussion of the role of sensibility and nerves in consumption see Carolyn A. Day and Amelia Rauser, ‘Thomas Lawrence’s Consumptive Chic: Reinterpreting Lady Manners’ Hectic Flush in 1794’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.4 (Summer 2016).
21.James Makittrick Adair, Essays on Fashionable Diseases (London: T.P. Bateman, 1790), 4.
22.A Manual of Essays, Vol. II (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1809), 106.
23.Adair, Essays on Fashionable Diseases, 3. For more on the commercialization of fashion see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) and John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
24.The Lady’s Magazine, Vol. XXI (London: 1790), 117.
25.For discussions of eighteenth and nineteenth century beauty see Greig, The Beau Monde; Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Patricia Phillippy, Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases & Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Caroline Palmer, “Brazen Cheek: Face-Painters in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” Oxford Art Journal 31 (2008), 195–213; and Richard Corson, Fashions in Makeup: From Ancient to Modern Times (New York: Universe Books, 1972).
26.George Cheyne, George Cheyne: The English Malady, xxviii.
27.Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 55–58.
28.The Lady’s Magazine, (London: 1774), 523. Clark Lawlor rightly calls attention to Dr. John Gregory’s contribution to this debate, who wrote “But though good health be one of the greatest blessings of life, never boast of it … We so naturally associate the idea of female softness and delicacy, with a correspondent delicacy of constitution, that when a woman speaks of her great strength … we recoil at the description.” Dr. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (Philadelphia: 1795), 32. Also in Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, 57.
29.George Keate, Sketches from Nature, Vol. II (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), 38–39.
30.Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 11.
31.Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 11.
32.John Leake, Medical Instructions Towards the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases Peculiar to Women, Vol. 1, 6th Edition (London: Baldwin, 1787), 302–303.
33.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. III, (London: J. Bell, 1811), 202.
34.Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 28.
35.The Age We Live In: A Fragment Dedicated to Every Young Lady of Fashion (London: Lackington, Allen, and Co., 1813), 79–80.
36.For instance, Beddoes compared women “to flowers brought forward by the cherishing heat of the conservatory … They cannot with impunity bear to be roughly visited by the winds of heaven. The slightest cause disorders them, and … they exist in a perpetual state of dangerous weakness. For in this country, by whatever cause women under thirty are weakened, there is always considerable hazard of consumption.” Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, 124.
37.Akiko Fukai, et al., Fashion: the Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute: a History from the 18th to the 20th Century (Taschen, 2002), 151–152.
38.“Scenes of the Ton, No. 1. Bringing out Daughters,” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. 25 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829), 566.
39.Betty had just recently died due to a “fatal cold by exposure to the night air, in consequence of a blunder of her coachman at Almack’s. It was the first time she had been exposed to the air of Heaven five minutes for twenty years before her decease.” “Scenes of the Ton,” 566.
40.“Scenes of the Ton,” 566.
41.Mrs. William Parkes, Domestic Duties; or Instructions to Young Married Ladies (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 253.
42.The World of Fashion, Vol. IX (London: 1832), 263.
43.Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1834), 54.
44.The use of the imagery of consumption to characterize female beauty became more frequent and can be found throughout imaginative and medical literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For instance, Samuel Richardson describes his heroine Clarissa in the following manner: “One faded cheek rested upon the good woman’s bosom, the kindly warmth of which had overspread it with a faint, but charming flush; the other paler, and hollow, as if already iced over by death. Her hands white as the lily, with her meandering veins more transparently blue than ever I had seen even hers; (veins so soon, alas! To be choaked [sic] up by the congealment of that purple stream, which already so languidly creeps rather than flows through them!) her hands hanging lifelessly.” Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. Contained in The Novelist’s Magazine. Vol. XV (London: Harrison and Co., 1784), 1133. The classic look of consumptive beauty was also that of Lucy Asheton, “the lamp fell upon her beautiful but delicate face, from which the rose had long since departed; the blue veins were singularly distinct on the clear temples, and in the eye was that uncertain brightness which owes not its luster to health. Her pale golden hair was drawn up in a knot at the top of her small and graceful head, and the rich mass shone as we fancy shine the bright tresses of an angel.” “An Evening of Lucy Asheton’s,” Heath’s Book of Beauty (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1833), 248. Lucy’s appearance—the gradual emaciation, sparkling eyes, the pronounced blue veins, and flush brought on by a low-grade fever—all mirror consumption.
45.Neville Williams, Powder and Paint: A History of the Englishwoman’s Toilet, Elizabeth I-Elizabeth II (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957), 81.
46.The Art of Beauty, 338, 381–382.
47.The Medical and Physical Journal, Vol. II (London: William Thorne, 1799), 115.
48.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 123–124.
49.The Monthly Magazine, Vol. XII (London: Richard Phillips, 1801), 444. These “accounts of diseases” were part of the attempts by the physicians of the Finsbury dispensary to account for morbidity in the metropolis. For more on this practice see Irvine Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
50.Phillippy, Painting Women, 6. Aileen Ribero has argued that the fashion for white skin and red cheeks and lips dates back to antiquity, stating that “By the fourth century BCE, the application of cosmetics was a well-established part of the life of the fashionable woman … the face was painted (with white lead powder or wheat flour), the cheeks and lips reddened (either with wine lees, red ochre or vermillion-red mercuric sulphide).” Ribeiro, Facing Beauty, 38. While Phillippy has stated that by the sixteenth century, European instructional manuals had established “a consensus on ideals of feminine beauty—blonde hair, black eyes, white skin, red cheeks and lips.” Phillippy, Painting Women, 6.
51.These references to the symptoms of consumption were those that were most commonly mentioned in more than 90 separate medical treatises dating from 1674 to 1860.
52.Charlotte Brontë made specific mention of Emily’s hair when discussing the day before she lost her battle with tuberculosis. “Emily sat on the hearth to comb her hair. She was thinner than ever now—the tall, loose-jointed, ‘slinky’ girl—her hair in its plenteous dark abundance was all of her that was not marked by the branding finger of death.” Shorter, The Brontës, 13.
53.“Eye miniatures were popular at the end of the 18th century as “an attempt to capture ‘the window of the soul’, the supposed reflection of a person’s most intimate thoughts and feelings.” Eye Miniature, England, early 19th century (painted), Museum number: P.57-1977. ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London. For more on eye miniatures see Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.)
54.“Criticism on Female Beauty,” (From the New Monthly Magazine) The Times, Thursday, Aug 18, 1825.
55.A. F. Crell and W. M. Wallace, The Family Oracle of Health; Economy, Medicine, and Good Living, Vol. I (London: J. Walker, 1824), 176–177.
56.Aileen Ribeiro argues this was a practice with a long history, stating “The appearance of emotion could be created by dilating pupils of the eyes with atropine (from belladonna, extracted from the berries of deadly nightshade), which made the eyes seem darker and more glistening; although dangerous, it was especially popular in the sixteenth century with Italian women—thus the plants name.” Ribeiro, Facing Beauty, 76.
57.Crell and Wallace, The Family Oracle of Health, 176–177.
58.The Art of Beauty, 294.
59.Crell and Wallace, The Family Oracle of Health, 437.
60.Lampblack was made when a small plate was held above a candle or lamp flame, allowing the smoke to leave a residue that was collected and applied to the eyelashes using a brush to darken their appearance. Williams, Powder and Paint, 102.
61.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. III (London: J. Bell, 1807), 205.
62.Even more disturbingly, some beauty prescriptions were also behaviors believed to actively bring about tuberculosis. “It is said that nothing tends to whiten the skin so much as walking abroad in the cool of the evening, especially near water. This may be possible; but is not the humidity of the evening productive of ill consequences, which would make those pay very dear who would purchase a fine skin at that rate, especially since it is an advantage that may be procured in so many other ways?” La Belle Assemblée, Vol. III, 207.
63.Edward Goodman Clarke, The Modern Practice of Physic (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805), 219–220.
64.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. III, 206.
65.Armstrong, Practical Illustrations of the Scarlet Fever, Measles, Pulmonary Consumption and Chronic Diseases, 255–256.
66.The Atheneum; or Spirit of the English Magazines, Vol. V (Boston: John Cotton, 1831), 84.
67.The Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. XV (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Company, 1824), 169.
68.“Bell on the Anatomy of Painting,” The Edinburgh Review, No. XVI (Edinburgh: 1806), 376.
69.The Mirror of the Graces; or the English Lady’s Costume (London: B. Crosby and Co., 1811), 43.
70.Colin Jones, “The King’s Two Teeth,” History Workshop Journal, (2008) 65 (1): 79–95, 90–91. For more on the commodification of dentistry see Roger King, The Making of the Dentiste c.1650–1760 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); A. S. Hargreaves, White as Whalebone: Dental Services in Early Modern England (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 1998); Christine Hillam, Brass Plate and Brazen Impudence: Dental Practice in the Provinces, 1755–1855 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991); Mark Blackwell, “Extraneous Bodies”: The Contagion of Live-Tooth Transplantation in late-Eighteenth-Century England, Eighteenth-Century Life, Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2004) 21–68; and Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in 18th Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
71.Jones, The Smile Revolution, 73.
72.Andrew Duncan, Medical Commentaries, Part I (London: Charles Dilly, 1780), 64.
73.A Physician’s Advice For the Prevention and Cure of Consumption, 122–123.
74.Rowland’s Odonto Pearl Dentifrice claimed not only to exterminate diseases of the teeth and gums but also to render teeth “perfectly sound, arraying in pure whiteness and fixing firmly in their sockets—producing a BEAUTIFUL SET OF PEARLY TEETH.” Hudson’s Tooth powder declared that it cured “gum boils, swelled face, and the tooth-ache” and was capable of removing “the scurvy from the gums.” The Court Journal, (London: Henry Colburn, 1833), 63.
75.Jones, The Smile Revolution, 119.
76.The Art of Beauty, 149–150.
77.Max Wykes-Joyce, Cosmetics and Adornment: Ancient and Contemporary Usage (London: Peter Owen, 1961), 81.
78.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. II (London: J. Bell, 1807), 109.
79.The Art of Beauty, 104.
80.Williams, Powder and Paint, 79.
81.The Servant’s Guide and Family Manual, 2nd edn. (London: John Limbird, 1831), 99.
82.The Art of Beauty, 187.
83.The Art of Beauty, 194.
84.Murray, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption its Prevention and Remedy, 40.
85.A New System of Practical Domestic Economy (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), 82.
86.Corson, Fashions in Makeup, 295.
87.This was an intensification of an already “entrenched notion that appearance revealed nature.” Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 247. Early Victorian culture on the whole was swayed by sentimentalism, which provided one avenue for escaping difficult social realities. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, xvi. The sentimentalists increasingly sought to conceal reality through a refusal to acknowledge the harsher aspects of a situation; a repudiation of the real world which permitted the further elevation of consumption as an ideal of beauty. Lawlor and Suzuki, “The Disease of the Self,” 492.
88.Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 57, 71.
89.Herzlich and Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, 147.
90.Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London: Printed by Luke Hansard for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1806), 28. Gisborne, however, refused to grant that the female fortitude to endure suffering was higher than that of their male counterparts, asserting instead that, due to their slighter stature, women did not experience the same degree of suffering as a larger framed man.
91.G. to J. T., June 1814, in Rev. R. Polwhele, Traditions and Recollections; Domestic, Clerical, and Literary, Vol. II (London: John Nichols and Son, 1826), 662.
92.Mrs. Ellis, The Women of England, their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1839), 384. Mrs. Sarah Stickney Ellis, a well-known writer of evangelical conduct books, was the wife of Mr. William Ellis, the chief foreign secretary of the London Missionary Society. Mrs. Ellis was extremely interested in the promotion of temperance and what she deemed the proper education of the young ladies of England, principles she elucidated in her numerous works. She was instrumental in defining the middle-class Victorian woman within the context of marriage and promoted women as the guardians of respectability. George Smith, The Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 714–715.
93.Mrs. Ellis, The Women of England, 384–385.
94.Mrs. Ellis, The Daughters of England, Their Position in Society, Character & Responsibilities (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1842), 181.
95.Mrs. Ellis, The Daughters of England, 233–234.
96.Charlotte Brontë to W. S. Williams, January 18, 1849, in Shorter, The Brontës, 21.
97.“On the Beauty of the Female Figure,” Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine, Vol. 24 (London: A. H. Blackwood and Page, 1848), 23.
98.Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, Vol. 1 (London: Charles Knight, 1834), 137–138. “Criticism on Female Beauty” acknowledged that beauty was “a very poor thing unless beautified by sentiment;” most particularly, “affectation and pretension spoil everything.” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Part II (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), 72, 74.
99.Walker, Beauty, 4.
100.George Combe, Lectures on Phrenology (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1839), 325.
101.The verse came from Wordsworth’s Excursion Book I, line 503. Theophilus Thompson, Clinical Lectures on Pulmonary Consumption (London: John Churchill, 1854), 176–177.
102.Although the assigning of virtue and beauty to those suffering from tuberculosis was already present at the turn of the nineteenth century, these connections continued to intensify, so by the 1840s Charlotte Brontë repeatedly assigned elevated character to both Anne and Emily while they labored under tuberculosis. She stated of Emily, “I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.” Shorter, The Brontës, 13. Such associations between character and consumption were also evident in the account of Eliza Herbert (1830): “A more delicate and lovely little creature than was Eliza Herbert, at this period, cannot be conceived. She was the only bud from a parent stem of remarkable beauty:—but, alas, that stem was suddenly withered by consumption! … Little Eliza Herbert inherited, with her mother’s beauty, her constitutional delicacy. Her figure was so slight, that it almost suggested to the beholder the idea of transparency; and there was a softness and languor in her azure eyes, beaming through their long silken lashes, which told of something too refined for humanity … In short, a more sweet, lovely, and amiable being than Eliza Herbert never adorned the ranks of humanity … and kept Sir.___in a feverish flutter of apprehension every day of his life, was, that his niece was, in his own words, ‘too good- too beautiful, for this world’.” “Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician. Chapter IV. Consumption,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. XXVIII (Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: T. Cadell, 1830), 771. Despite being touted as “Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician” it is not possible to determine whether Eliza’s trails derived from an actual case or were simply the product of the author’s imagination. Despite this ambiguity, the tale provides insight into accepted contemporary depictions about the illness and Eliza’s tale is just one among a multitude of writings (fictional, ostensibly true, or even factual) centered on consumption during the first half of the nineteenth century.
103.The Englishwoman’s Magazine and Christian Mother’s Miscellany, Vol. I (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1846), 342.
104.The Ladies Hand-book of the Toilet, a Manual of Elegance and Fashion (London: H. G. Clarke and Co., 1843), vii.
105.An English Lady of Rank, The Ladies Science of Etiquette (New York: Wilson & Company, 1844), 43.
106.An English Lady of Rank, The Ladies Science of Etiquette, 43.
107.Gilbert, Pulmonary Consumption, 51.
108.Charlotte Brontë to W. S. Williams, February 1, 1849, in Shorter, The Brontës, 23.
109.The Art of Beauty, 90.
110.The Art of Beauty, 116.
111.The Art of Beauty, 124.
112.Crell and Wallace, The Family Oracle of Health, Vol. I, 293.
113.Alexander Walker, Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Women (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846), 232. For more on the impact of Walker’s Beauty see Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty, 232–233.
114.Mrs. A. Walker, Female Beauty, 200. Mrs. Walker is thought to be a pseudonym used by physiologist Alexander Walker. Although reflecting Alexander Walker’s attitude, by presenting it in the form of a toilet manual these notions were carried to a wider audience. “Walker, Alexander (1779–1852),” Lucy Hartley in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, ed. David Cannadine, Oxford: OUP, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/
115.Clark, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, 13–14.
116.An English Lady of Rank, The Ladies Science of Etiquette, 47–48.
117.An English Lady of Rank, The Ladies Science of Etiquette, 47–48.
118.Esther Copley, The Young Woman’s Own Book and Female Instructor (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1840), 378.
119.Corson, Fashions in Makeup, 319. An 1837 article in The Magazine of the Beau Monde complained: “Instances are not wanting, of young persons attempting to bleach their skins, and beautify themselves … Mercury and lead manufactured in various forms, are, unhappily, ingredients too common in many of our modern cosmetics … [and] occasions … tubercles in the lungs … until at length consumption, either pulmonary or hectic, closes the dreadful scene.” “General Observations on Cosmetics,” The Magazine of the Beau Monde, Vol. 7 (London: I. T. Payne, 1837), 165.
120.The Art of Dress; or, Guide to the Toilette: With Directions for Adapting the Various Parts of the Female Costume to the Complexion and Figure; Hints on Cosmetics, &c. (London: Charles Tilt, 1839), 59. For more on these sorts of manuals, see Alieen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty, 219–221.
121.Ladies’ Gazette of Fashion (London: George Berger, 1848), 45.
122.Williams, Powder and Paint, 56.
123.Sally Pointer, The Artifice of Beauty: A History and Practical Guide to Perfumes and Cosmetics (United Kingdom, 2005), 138.
124.The London Medical Gazette, Vol. XII (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1833), 225.
125.The New Monthly Belle Assemblée, Vol. XXVI (London: 1847), 3.
1.Clothes have been, and continue to be, significantly more than simply a way of covering and protecting the body; instead they are heavily invested with social, political, and moral undertones. The fashioning of the body occurs through make-up, manners, and clothing, and these can also be used to establish social identity, status, and sexuality, all of which become the tools through which the individual is self- and socially-managed. Kaja Silverman has argued that dress “makes the human body culturally visible,” while Jennifer Craik has suggested, “we can regard the ways in which we clothe the body as an active process of technical means for constructing and presenting a bodily self.” Amy de la Haye and Elizabeth Wilson, eds, Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 2; Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge, 1994), 46.
2.Craik, The Face of Fashion, 44.
3.La Belle Assembleé, Vol. I (London: J. Bell, 1806), 79.
4.Mrs. William Parkes, Domestic Duties; or Instructions to Young Married Ladies (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), 172–173.
5.There was a move toward a fluid silhouette, marked by flowing lines and a high waistline, a development often attributed to the effects of the French Revolution; however, the push for simpler lines had already begun before 1789. Ribeiro has argued, “In some respects, it [the Revolution] acted as a catalyst for styles already in the pipeline, but which were pushed to the forefront by the impact of politics.” Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (London: Batsford, 1988), 140. This simplification received impetus from a number of sources, including the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Already by the 1760s, Rousseau had called for a move toward the “natural,” including greater informality, simplicity, and a return to “a state of nature.” The fascination with the Classical also meant that women’s clothing moved to outright emulation, as dresses were often copied directly from the Greek pottery and statuary. Jane Ashelford, The Art of Dress: Clothes and Society 1500-1914. (London: National Trust Enterprises Ltd., 1996), 173; Fukai, et al., Fashion, 120. For more on Rousseau and the natural body in fashion see Michael Kwass “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 3 (June 2006), 631–659.
6.The chemise gown, ostensibly named for its resemblance to the undergarment of the same name, was simple in construction, voluminous, with a dropped shoulder and gathered neckline that could be pulled over the head. In 1783, a portrait of Marie-Antoinette wearing this style by Elizabeth-Louise Vigée Lebrun was exhibited. This portrait, and the fashion, created a great scandal; however, the queen’s patronage helped popularize the garment, and it spread rapidly across the English Channel. As Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, has argued “For British tourists—like the Duchess of Devonshire and Mr. Crewe—who flocked to France after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1783, the chemise gown was the quintessential Paris Souvenir.” In August 1784, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire went to a concert attired “in one of the muslin chemises with fine lace that the Queen of France gave me,” and the fashionable elite quickly followed her lead. [Quoted in Ashelford, The Art of Dress, 175.] A few months later, The New Spectator paid homage to the Duchess’s innovation in taste: “I have sometimes been amazed, that those patronesses of taste and fashion in female dress, the Duchesses of Devonshire and Rutland, never procured his Majesty’s Royal Letters Patent, for the exclusive privilege of wearing, appearing in, and exposing to admiration certain dresses, by them the said Duchesses first invented, formed, fashioned, and worn; for in such words, or in words similar to those, doubtless said Patent would run.” The New Spectator, No. III (London: 1784), 4. By the latter part of the decade, the chemise dress was an integral part of feminine fashion, and in 1787 The Lady’s Magazine acknowledged its dominance: “All the Sex now, from 15 to 50 and upwards … appear in their white muslin frocks with broad sashes.” Quoted in Judith S. Lewis, Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class and Politics in Late Georgian Britain (New York: Routledge, 2003), 176. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell has argued that “The chemise gown of the 1780s is erroneously equated with the high-waisted, short-sleeved white gowns that became popular in the 1790s and early 1800s. It may have been a precursor of this neoclassical or ‘Grecian’ gown … but it was a much different garment, both in construction and in appearance.” Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 172–175. Ashelford, The Art of Dress, 175; Fukai, et al., Fashion, 150.
7.Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, 155.
8.It turns out, however, that these contours were not as natural as advertised, relying as they did, upon the undergarment as their “unnatural” predecessors also had done. For more information on cotton textiles see: Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Beverly Lemire, Cotton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); George Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014); Jon Stobart and Bruno Blondé, eds, Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century: Comparative Perspectives from Western Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Robert S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
9.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. IV (London: J. Bell, 1811), 90.
10.Elaine Canter Cremers-van der Does, The Agony of Fashion, English Translation Leo Van Witsen (Dorset: Blandford Press, 1980), 73.
11.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. I (London: J. Bell, 1806), 614. Susan Sibbald mentions them in her memoirs, describing them as being woven on a stocking-loom and dubbed them “the most uncomfortable style of dress was when they were made so scanty that it was difficult to walk in them.” She ran afoul of these undergarments while trying to spring over a small stream when she received “a sudden check” from her tight garments and fell with “her face in the water.” Francis P. Hett, The Memoirs of Susan Sibbald (Paget Press, 1980), 138.
12.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. III (London: J. Bell, 1807), 17.
13.The Monthly Magazine, Vol. XXIV (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 548.
14.Charlotte Burney to Madame d’Arblay, Saturday 23 Vendiemiaire l’an II, Eg MS 3693, Folio 84, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
15.This is not to suggest that there were not options for women seeking to keep warm or that all women ignored the advice of medical authors.
16.The European Magazine and London Review (London: J. Sewell, 1785), 23.
17.Early on, the possibility of scanty clothing leading to disease combined with a growing alarm over what was seen as the trespass of decency, in a “Letter to the Editor” of the Monthly Magazine, by a gentleman claiming to have just returned to England after a long absence. He expressed dismay that the clothing of the day made the fashionable fair look like members of the Cyprian class, complaining, while at the opera, of the “ladies, whose bosoms were exposed in a manner that I never saw before, except under the piazzas of Covent-Garden of an evening, or in some of the most nocturnal street-walkers. ‘Surely (said I,) they are of no other description, unless they are of a higher order of demireps, and kept by men of fashion.’” The Monthly Magazine, Vol. XXIV (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 548.
18.The Times, Wednesday, December 11, 1799 (London, 1799), 2. The Times is referencing Edmund Burke’s indictment of the Jacobins and the French constitutional theorist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyés in his 1795 letter to the Duke of Bedford. For more information on the letter, see Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Edmund Burke (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 213.
19.Sarah Harriet Burney to Mary Young, December 4, 1792, Barrett Collection, Vol. XII Eg MS 3700 A, folio 226, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
20.Dror Wahrman has examined “Ladies dress, as it soon will be” by James Gillray, arguing it was one of many that satirized the transparency of these fashions and their proclivity for “accentuating the natural female body form.” Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, 65.
21.Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, 131.
22.The Fashionable World Displayed, 2nd edn. (London: J. Hatchard, 1804), 73–74.
23.“A Naked Truth of Nipping Frost,” (1803), by Charles Williams, Published by S.W. Fores. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
24.George Colman, The Younger, The Gentleman, (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806), 47.
25.John Roberton, A Treatise on Medical Police, and on Diet, Regimen, &c., Vol. I (Edinburgh: John Moir, 1809), 180–181.
26.Roberton, A Treatise on Medical Police, and on Diet, Regimen, &c., 183.
27.Armstrong, Practical Illustrations of the Scarlet Fever, Measles, Pulmonary Consumption and Chronic Diseases, 211.
28.As one journalist acknowledged, “you cannot form your under dress too scanty to exhibit the drapery which may flow over it to advantage.” In some instances, women only wore stockings and one tight petticoat. In La Belle Assemblée, Vol. I (London: J. Bell, 1806), 614.
29.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. I (London: J. Bell, 1810), 246.
30.Ashelford, The Art of Dress, 178–179. Fukai, et al., Fashion, 150. For more on cashmere shawls see David Brett, “The Management of Colour: The Kashmir Shawl in a Nineteenth-Century Debate,” Textile History, Vol. 29 (1998); Michelle Maskiell, “Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000,” Journal of World History, Vol.13 (Spring 2002); Isabella Fabretti, “Ugly and Very Expensive: The Cashmere Shawls of Empress Josephine,” Piecework, Vol. 14, (2006); Chitralekha Zutshi, “‘Designed for eternity’: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Journal of British Studies, Vol. 48 (April 2009).
31.“Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician. Chapter IV. Consumption,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, No. CLXXIII, Vol. XXVIII (Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: T. Cadell, 1830), 780.
32.Armstrong, Practical Illustrations of the Scarlet Fever, Measles, Pulmonary Consumption and Chronic Diseases, 211.
33.Armstrong, Practical Illustrations of the Scarlet Fever, Measles, Pulmonary Consumption and Chronic Diseases, 213.
34.Saunders, Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, 7.
35.Reid, A Treatise on the Origin, Progress, Prevention, and Treatment of Consumption, 203.
36.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. III (London: J. Bell, November 1807), 282.
37.The Monthly Magazine, Vol. XXIV (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 549.
38.William Burdon and George Ensor, Materials for Thinking, Vol. I (London: E. Wilson, 1820), 75.
39.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. I, Part I (London: J. Bell, June 1806), 227.
40.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. I, Part I (London: J. Bell, June 1806), 227.
41.Dubos and Dubos, The White Plague, 54.
42.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. VI (London: J. Bell, 1809), 163–164.
43.Edward Ball, The Black Robber, Vol. I (London: A. K. Newman and Co., 1819), 81–82.
44.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. I (London: J. Bell, 1806), 502.
45.Reid, A Treatise on the Origin, Progress, Prevention, and Treatment of Consumption, 163.
46.The Ladies Magazine (Dec. 1818) as quoted in Robinson’s Magazine, A weekly Repository of Original Papers; and Selections from the English Magazines, Vol. II (Baltimore: Joseph Robinson, 1819), 204–205.
47.Dorothea Sophia Mackie, A Picture of the Changes of Fashion (D.S. Mackie, 1818), 54.
48.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. XXI, (London: J. Bell, 1820), 87.
49.Felix M’ Donogh, The Hermit in London, or Sketches of English Manners (New York: Evert Duyckinck, 1820), 214.
50.A Physician’s Advice For the Prevention and Cure of Consumption, 123.
51.M’ Donogh, The Hermit in London, 215–216.
52.The Ladies Pocket Magazine of Literature & Fashion, No. VIII (London: Joseph Robins, 1829), 23.
53.Sir Arthur Clarke, A Practical Manual for the Preservation of Health and of the Prevention of Diseases Incidental to the Middle and Advanced Stages of Life (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 62.
54.Sir Arthur Clarke, A Practical Manual for the Preservation of Health, 62
55.La Belle Assembleé, Vol. VI (London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1827), 167.
56.Thomas, The Modern Practice of Physic, 9th ed., 540.
57.By a Physician, The Pocket Medical Guide (Glasgow: W.R. M’Phun, 1834), 56–57.
58.The Ladies Monthly Museum, Vol. XVIII (London: Dean and Munday, 1823), 142.
59.The Ladies Monthly Museum, Vol. XVIII, 142–143.
60.As Crell and Wallace stated: “Out of the four or five thousand who annually die of consumption … in the metropolis, we may safely say that two-thirds can date their complaints, from their attending some crowded assembly. The danger then is when you are heated to perspiration in the theatre, ball-room, &c., that your feet be exposed to some cold stream of air, or become cold from damp … This rashness has often caused instant death, and oftener laid the foundation of a lingering and fatal illness … bringing on cough and decline.” Crell and Wallace, The Family Oracle of Health, Vol. I, 258–259.
61.The London Medical Gazette, Vol. XII (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1833), 234.
62.The London Medical Gazette, Vol. XII, 234.
63.Reid, A Treatise on the Origin, Progress, Prevention, and Treatment of Consumption, 197.
64.G. Calvert Holland, Practical Suggestions for the Prevention of Consumption (London: W. M. S. Orr, 1750), 114. The eighteenth-century “corset” was a rigid long-waisted concoction of closely stitched together casings (intended for whalebone or cane inserts) to give stiffness and form to the garment. These stays generally laced up the rear, had high backs, shoulder straps, and a busk inserted down the front for extra support.
65.George Cheyne to Hans Sloane, Bath, July 11, 1720, Sloane MS 4034, Folio 323, The British Library Department of Manuscripts, London, UK.
66.Benjamin W. Richardson, The Hygienic Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption (London: John Churchill, 1757), 38.
67.Dr. John Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), 31–32.
68.For instance, William White asserted: “The binding of the body tight with ligatures, by obstructing the free circulation of the blood through the cutaneous vessels, occasions … haemoptoe, inflammation, &c. I would therefore forewarn the fair sex of the dangerous tendency of drawing their stays too tight. My sensibility has been much affected on observing several melancholy consequences of such a practice, where the vessels of the lungs, too tender to bear such an increased impetus of the circulation, were ruptured, and a haemoptoe produced.” White, Observations on the Nature and Method of Cure of the Phthisis Pulmonalis, 26–27.
69.The exposed bosom and projecting shoulders could not be achieved without aid. What nature had failed to gift, artifice could provide. Presumably, a young woman with a naturally slender figure may have been liberated from her stays for a short time at the beginning of the century, while an older, stouter individual would have continued to rely on a corset as part of her effort to accommodate to neoclassical fashions. Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines (New York: Routledge/Theatre Arts Books, 2004), 75; Elizabeth Ewing, Dress and Undress: A History of Women’s Underwear (London: Batsford Ltd., 1978), 57.
70.Ewing, Dress and Undress, 57. For an example of trade cards, see: John Arpthorp. Stay & Corsett Maker (c. 1802) and H. Rudduforth, Long Stay Corset & Vest Manufacturer, JJ Trade Cards 26 (68), From the John Johnson Collection, ©Bodleian Library 2001. For Caricatures, see James Gillray, “Progress of the Toilet—The Stays” (1810).
71.Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines, 75.
72.The corset was cut to fit the body and could be “properly shifted or padded in those parts required for persons to whom nature has not been favorable.” Martha Gibbon, Stays for Women and Children, patent number 2457, December 17, 1800. The National Archives, London, UK.
73.Reid, A Treatise on the Origin, Progress, Prevention, and Treatment of Consumption, 198–199.
74.Roberton, A Treatise on Medical Police, and on Diet, Regimen, &c., 182–183.
75.Despite the vehemence of the protests, the return of the corset was not as dramatic an occurrence in England as in France, in part because it had never completely disappeared in Britain. David Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism: Corsets, Tight-lacing, & Other Forms of Body Sculpture (United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing, 2004), 80, 82; Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines, 75.
76.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. II (London: J. Bell, 1811), 213.
77.A Lady of Distinction, The Mirror of the Graces, 36.
78.La Belle Assemblée, Vol. II (London: J. Bell, 1811), 90–91.
79.Natural waistlines returned in the mid-1820s and Fukai states that “corsets once again became necessary for women’s fashions since smaller waists were recognized as an important feature of the new style.” Fukai, et al., Fashion, 151–152.
80.Phyllis G. Tortora and Keith Eubank, Survey of Historic Costume: A History of Western Dress, 3rd edn. (New York: Fairchild Publications, 2004), 278.
81.Ashelford, The Art of Dress, 189.
82.Douglas A. Russell, Costume History and Style (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1983), 340.
83.Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty, 230.
84.T. Bell, Kalogynomia, or the Laws of Female Beauty (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1821), 315–316.
85.Fukai, et al., Fashion, 151.
86.The neckline grew during the 1820s and became a broad oval shape. Over the next ten years the shoulder seam dropped, further amplifying the bosom by exposing more of the décolletage and highlighting the long, swanlike neck, a feature increasingly admired in a woman. Even more attention was drawn to the neckline by the tight-fitting bodice below. Francois Boucher, A History of Costume in the West (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1987), 366.
87.By 1827, the gigot sleeve had achieved such grand proportions it often required the addition of some form of support provided by whalebone, buckram, horsehair, or even down stuffing to maintain shape. The dimensions of these sleeves reached their pinnacle around 1835.
88.Fukai, et al., Fashion, 151.
89.“Bishop Sleeves,” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Part II (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829), 214.
90.This busk became a major source of concern as one author remarked, “It is not enough that the stays are laced so tight as scarcely to leave room for the women to breathe, but the mischief which such pressure would occasion is greatly increased, by a stiff piece of whalebone, or steel, introduced in front.” The Ladies Pocket Magazine of Literature & Fashion, No. VIII (London: Joseph Robins, 1829), 27.
91.Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines, 75, 79. As the waist lengthened, the number of inserts also increased, and beginning around 1835, the hips were further enhanced by a “basque”-shaped construction.
92.Sarah Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned: Registered Designs for Clothing, Their Makers and Wearers, 1839-1900 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986), 26.
93.There was a practical innovation in corsetry that concurred in 1823 when Rogers of London took out a patent on corset lacings; however, the style of eyelet that would eventually come into common use in 1828 was invented by Daude of Paris. The Romantic style of corset typically laced in the rear, and shoulder straps continued as a prominent feature until the 1840s. The eyelet and other technical inventions, including the split busk patented in 1829, aided in the achievement of the feminine silhouette. This improvement allowed for the development of a front-fastening corset, although the item did not come into common usage until the middle part of the century. Ewing, Dress and Undress, 58.
94.The Ball; Or, A Glance at Almack’s in 1829 (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), 31.
95.Articles on the subject were published in every conceivable venue, from medical journals to fashion periodicals, and they were even distributed in the standalone form of pamphlets. The subject was also discussed in the various books devoted to beauty, dress, health, and hygiene and was even mentioned in household encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the growing genre of general periodicals devoted to “useful and entertaining knowledge” whose audience was taken to be “the educatable woman.” Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism, 90.
96.The number of women reported to have died in the annual reports of 1838. Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, Vol. XXV (London: G. W. Nickisson, 1842), 191.
97.Ewing, Dress and Undress, 60–61.
98.A great number of these anatomical illustrations, like the one published in The Penny Magazine of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1833), were either direct copies or based upon the work of the German anatomist and physician Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring whose 1788 work on the Effects of Stays remained incredibly influential, despite the alterations in the shape of the corset since that date.
99.The Art of Beauty, 26.
100.La Belle Assembleé, Vol. VI (London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1827), 308.
101.A Physician’s Advice For the Prevention and Cure of Consumption, 127.
102.The Art of Beauty, 27.
103.The Art of Beauty, 28.
104.There were a number of works dedicated to correcting deformities of the spine and those of the trunk of the body, many of which put forth the corset as the originator of these defects.
105.Charles Pears, Cases of Phthisis Pulmonalis, Successfully Treated Upon the Tonic Plan (London: Crowder, 1801), 11–12.
106.John Mills, “Elastic Stays for Women and Children,” Patented March 14, 1815, The National Archives, London, UK.
107.The Art of Beauty, 29–30.
108.The World of Fashion, Vol. VIII (London: Mr. Bell, 1831), 59.
109.The Kaleidoscope; or Literary and Scientific Mirror, Vol. 9 (Liverpool: E. Smith & Co., 1829), 425.
110.Ramadge, Consumption Curables, 21.
111.Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 65.
112.The 1830s, then, were transitional, as fashion moved from the ebullient Romantic style to a drooping sentimentalism that denoted the emerging silhouette.
113.James Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (London: Thames & Hudson World of Art, 2002), 168.
114.Fukai, et al., Fashion, 209.
115.As Female Beauty observed, “the beauty of the waist, whether high, intermediate, or low, depends in great measure on the form of the corsets or stays.” Mrs. A. Walker, Female Beauty, 310.
116.The Magazine of the Beau Monde, No 68, Vol. 6 (London: I. T. Payne, 1836), 109.
117.Ewing, Fashion in Underwear, 54.
118.The rear-lacing corset remained the common style, and shoulder straps continued as a central feature until the 1840s. Gussets were another important feature of the corset, introduced in the 1830s to help fit the garment to the bust and hips. In France in the 1840s there was another new development in corset making—the creation of a new style. This new corset design excluded gussets and was assembled from between 7 to 13 different pieces, each of which was cut to shape to the waist. This style was lightweight, and remarkably short and though it was exceedingly popular on the Continent it was less so in England. The busk also continued as a corset feature in the center front until the split busk gradually became fashionable, and provided an easier method of getting into and out of the corset. The first split busk, one fastened by catches, was patented in 1829, however the device would not catch on until the middle part of the nineteenth century. The use of this split style of busk and the development of front-fastening corsets occurred as the garment as a whole became stiffer; all of these innovations aided in the laces being drawn tighter and tighter. Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism, 25.
119.Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism, 90.
120.Esther Copley, The Young Woman’s Own Book and Female Instructor (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1840), 371.
121.Francis Cook, A Practical Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption (London: John Churchill, 1842), 45.
122.Cook, A Practical Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, 55.
123.The Art of Dress, 39.
124.Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine, Vol. 24 (London: A. H. Blackwood and Page, 1848), 23.
125.The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons, Vol. XXV, No. 292 (London, 1848), 79.
126.By a Lady, The Young Lady’s Friend; A Manual of Practical Advice and Instruction to Young Females On their Entering upon the Duties of Life, After Quitting School (London: John W. Parker, 1837), 77.
127.During the height of the Romantic period, ribbons, lace or ruffles often adorned the sleeves and necklines of women’s dresses, in an effort to amplify the shoulder line; skirts suffered similar decoration, with the addition of appliqué, ruffles, pleats, tucks and even loops made either from silk or fur. According to many sentimentalists, the Romantic period was one of excessive detail and ornamentation, and that ornament and artifice were associated with a deficiency of character. Thus, one author remarked, “That the gay votaries of a vain world should love to deck themselves with superfluous ornament is but in keeping with their character—though even here I often wonder at the evidence afforded of weak mindedness in those who delight to revel in the variegations of fashion, and the useless encumberment of decoration.” The Christian Lady’s Magazine, Vol. VI (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1836), 314. The heavy detailing that characterized Romantic clothing hid, rather than revealed, the “true” temperament and disposition of the woman, while sentimentalists believed the new style, in contrast, emphasized a sincere simplicity in dress which translated into the revelation of a woman’s essence.
128.Janet Dunbar, The Early Victorian Woman: Some Aspects of Her Life, 1837–57 (London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1953), 20.
129.Alfred Beaumont Maddock, Practical Observations on the Efficacy of Medicated Inhalations in the Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption, Asthma, Bronchitis, Chronic Cough and Other Diseases of the Respiratory Organs and in Affections of the Heart, 2nd edn. (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1845), 33.
130.“Narrow shoulders and broad hips are esteemed beauties in the female figure, while in the male figure the broad shoulders and narrow hips are most admired.” In Mrs. Merrifield, Dress as a Fine Art (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, & Co., 1854), 30.
131.Aileen Ribeiro has argued that the “quietened down” dress of the 1840s restricted movement and as such complimented the feminine social role “that a woman should not appear to be capable of any physical effort.” Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (Oxford: Berg, 1986), 126.
132.Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine, Vol. 24, 25.
133.Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 149.
134.Russell, Costume History and Style, 343; Laver, Costume and Fashion, 173.
135.The tight bodices, over even more-tightly laced stays, provided further indicators that physical activity in women was discouraged, though Fukai, et al. argue this “was viewed less as a restrictive element than an indicator of influence.” Fukai, et al., Fashion, 152.
136.Russell, Costume History and Style, 343; Laver, Costume and Fashion, 173.
137.Mrs. John Sandford, Woman, In her Social and Domestic Character (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831), 5.
138.Russell, Costume History and Style, 334.
139.The 1830s, then, were transitional, as fashion moved from the ebullient Romantic style to a drooping sentimentalism that denoted the emerging silhouette.
140.Norah Waugh, The Cut of Women’s Clothes, 1600–1930 (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1968), 140.
141.Hall, Commentaries Principally on Those Diseases of Females Which are Constitutional, 142.
142.Hall, Commentaries Principally on Those Diseases of Females Which are Constitutional, 146.
143.Hall, Commentaries Principally on Those Diseases of Females Which are Constitutional, 147.
144.A Physician’s Advice For the Prevention and Cure of Consumption, 127.
145.Deshon, Cold and Consumption, 72.
146.Deshon, Cold and Consumption, 72.
147.John Tricker Conquest, Letters to a Mother on the Management of Herself & Her Children in Health & Disease (London: Longman and Co., 1848), 231–232.
1.Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 57.
2.This move away from both sentimental clothing and mentality was illustrated, in part, by yet another shift in the shape and appearance of head and face, there was a drift from the elongated oval to an appearance of a rounded sphere. The pensive expression characteristic of the sentimental face and demeanor gradually fell out of favor and the face acquired an increasingly animated appearance.
3.Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 91–92.
4.By the early part of the nineteenth century, different disciplines concerned with societal improvement—ranging from the religious, medical, and philosophical to political economy as well as Utilitarianism—all proffered solutions to the problems of population growth, poverty, and observed threats to health. During the nineteenth century, there was a steady extension of governmental authority into new areas. The unending complications brought about by overcrowding gave rise to a number of reform efforts and increased involvement by the government in the domestic lives of a growing number of people. Social policy mimicked larger political and economic trends, as there was an inexorable drift away from laissez-faire attitudes toward increased governmental intervention. The population of the cities had rapidly expanded beyond the coping abilities of existing institutions and structures in all sorts of ways including poor relief, sewer and drainage systems, and housing for the urban working classes. The corresponding social and economic problems created by industrialization prompted a number of responses, and the public intercession into the lives of individuals on the basis of improving, preserving, or managing health was often contentious, leading to debates over individual rights versus public protection. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 408–409, 420–421.
5.Alexandre Dumas, The Younger, The Lady with the Camelias (London: George Vickers, 1856) and Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady, edited by David Skelton (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 386.
6.For example, in 1852 La Dame aux Camélias was reviewed in both The Westminster Review and Bentley’s Miscellany. Later in the 1850s the work was invading and influencing other aspects of English literary life, for instance in 1858 it was mentioned in other novels, like the A Lover’s Quarrel: or, The Country Ball and was used as part of Punch’s social commentary on The English Churchman.
7.Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. LXXII (London: 1852), 728.
8.Quoted in H. D. Chalke, “The Impact of Tuberculosis on History, Literature and Art,” Medical History VI (1962), 308.
9.For more on the life of Duplessis, see: Virginia Rounding, Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans (London: Bloomsbury, 2003.) and Julie Kavanagh, The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (New York: Vintage Books, 2013).
10.John Forester, The Life of Charles Dickens, in Two Volumes. Vol. I, 1812–1847 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1899), 522.
11.P. Toussaint, Maries Dupléssis: la vrai Dame aux Camélias (Paris, 1958), Quoted in Dormandy, The White Death, 62.
12.Porter, ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine, 107.
13.Porter, ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine, 107.
14.There was still a palpable rejection of the contagion theory for tuberculosis in England, although the notion was gaining purchase on the continent. This adherence to heredity and miasmata had much to do with the dominance of the sanitary approach to the illness among social reformers and the strength of the life insurance industry in England. Acceptance of contagion would have led to large payouts of life annuities, additionally, in England many of the top physicians at hospitals for consumption were also on the payroll of the insurance companies. This institutional integration contributed to the longevity of the notion that consumption ran in families. Even after Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus there was a continued place for hereditary predisposition in English life tables.
15.Porter, ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine, 171.
16.Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920 (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2003), 5.
17.Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 10–11.
18.Susan Sontag argues that during the second half of the nineteenth century there was a reaction against “the Romantic cult of disease.” Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 34.
19.A China-aster is a flower with a daisy-like appearance. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Nature and Human Nature (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1859), 196.
20.Ewing, Dress and Undress, 74–75.
21.Cremers-van der Does, The Agony of Fashion, 90.
22.The Family Herald; Domestic Magazine of Useful Information and Amusement, Vol. IX (London: George Biggs, 1851), 317.
23.Steam-molding involved taking the garment, once stitched and boned, and starching it heavily then shaping it with steam over a mold constructed in the preferred silhouette. In Ewing, Dress and Undress, 76.
24.Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 6.
25.Ewing, Dress and Undress, 64–65.
26.Madame Roxy A. Caplin, Health and Beauty; or Corsets and Clothing, Constructed in Accordance with the Physiological Laws of the Human Body (London: Darton and Co., 1856), xi.
27.Caplin, Health and Beauty, ix–x.
28.Georgina D. Feldberg, Disease and Class, 7.