Gill Hoffs discovers how nineteenth-century women’s fashions could prove lethal at sea t’s generally accepted now that corsetry and the pursuit of a wasp-waisted hourglass silhouette had serious impacts on the internal organs and general health of many Victorian women, and the vast bell-shaped crinolines were acknowledged as a hazard near open fires, cigars, and machinery even then. What I hadn’t realized was how lethal this fashion proved at sea. When researching the history of a forgotten shipwreck for my book, The Sinking of RMS Tayleur: the Lost Story of the Victorian Titanic, I learned about British fashion in the mid-1850s and how the trend for tiny waists proved fatal for more than a hundred women in one shipwreck alone. Mid-Victorian women wore up to 16 layers of clothing, including bloomers, stockings, garters, chemise
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(undershirt), corset, corset cover (like a fitted shirt), the hooped frame for a crinoline skirt, petticoats (several would be worn to keep warm in cooler weather) and a near floor-length skirt, a blouse, highnecked under a long-sleeved bodice with a long row of tiny buttons to do up (buttonhooks were commonly used) or hooks and eyes, jacket, and a shawl or mantle (a cape-like garment worn over the shoulders). Women and girls from the lower classes usually wore petticoats stiffened with quilting, or sewed a tube stiffened with horsehair near the hem of their skirt in place of an expensive hooped frame. The natural shape of a woman’s body was distorted by the whale-boned rigours of their undergarments and the voluminous bell-shaped crinoline skirts popular at the time.
D I S C O V E R Y O U R H I S T O R Y • J A N U A RY 2 0 1 4
This would have been a heavy outfit when dry, let alone soaking wet.
On the move Nowadays, comfort is the key for travel, and the safety of garments is taken for granted. This was not always the case, and the rise in the number of women who travelled by sea during the mid-1800s, and the subsequent fatalities, makes this clear. The potato famine in the Hungry Forties, combined with the push to colonize far-flung lands with British subjects and the Gold Rushes in California and Australia, led to an increase in sea travel by men and women of all ages. Whole families sailed from crowded living conditions, poverty and disease to fresh starts and fresh air, wide open spaces and the possibility of a decent wage. Although many travelled w w w. d i s c o v e r y o u r h i s t o r y. n e t