FROM THE ARCHIVE: THE LURE OF WHITE LINEN
Written by Amanda Vickery (Selvedge issue 39)
Imagine a sweet-smelling cupboard stacked with crisp linens – sheets, pillow cases, napkins, towels, shirts and shifts. All are snowy white, fragrant with lavender and crackle with starch. One glance inside such a cupboard, one sniff of the atmosphere, would tell an observer that this was a moral and healthy house with a virtuous housekeeper at the helm. The linen cupboard was a great symbol of the standing, decency and wholesomeness of the 17th and 18th century house.
In George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, the disintegration of the household in the face of impending bankruptcy is felt most bitterly by the middle-aged mother. “Mrs Tulliver was seated there with all her laid-up treasures. One of the linen chests was open; the silver teapot was unwrapped from its many folds of paper, and the best china was laid out on the top of the closed linen-chest; spoons and skewers and ladles were spread in rows on the shelves; and the poor woman was shaking her head and weeping, with a bitter tension of the mouth, over the mark, ‘Elizabeth Dodson,’ on the corner of some tablecloths she held in her lap...
“To think o' these cloths as I spun myself... she went on, lifting things out and turning them over with an excitement all the more strange and piteous because the stout blond woman was usually so passive – if she had been ruffled before, it was at the surface merely, – “and Job Haxey wove ‘em, and brought the piece home on his back, as I remember standing at the door and seeing him come, before I ever thought o’ marrying your father! And the pattern as I chose myself, and bleached so beautiful, and I marked ‘em so as nobody ever saw such marking – they must cut the cloth to get it out, for it's a particular stitch. And they're all to be sold, and go into strange people's houses, and perhaps be cut with the knives, and wore out before I'm dead. You'll never have one of 'em, my boy," she said, looking up at Tom with her eyes full of tears, "and I meant 'em for you.”
All Mrs Tulliver's heartfelt history is bound up in those linens. Her memories past and her hopes for the future. Without her treasured stocks, she imagines there will be no dignity in living. Her daughter Maggie is distraught to witness such fuss over objects, not people, when they are in the grip of tragedy, but Mrs Tulliver is the inheritor of a venerable tradition. The linen cupboard had long been the material expression of the worth of the irreproachable housewife.
Linens might sound mundane to us now, but for centuries the most expensive things in a house were the textiles. Linens dressed the beds, the tables and the body – the whiter the better. Young maidens built up a store of linens as a hope chest before marriage.
The inherent virtue of linen was that it could be homespun from the local flax harvest. Flax grows freely in northern Europe, so linen like wool, had no taint of the expensive exotica of silk. But linen could also be had in exquisite weaves and feathery weights – fit for the high table at a prince's banquet or a new born baby's bonnet. Above all, the sterling quality of linen was its strength when wet – linen could be washed. As the glorious folk song reminds us ‘Twas on a Sunday morning that I beheld my darling, she looked so neat and charming in every high degree. She looked so neat and nimble, O a washing of her linen, O dashing away with a smoothing iron...”
Since the plague and the closing of public bath houses, western Europeans were wary of bathing. Immersing the body in water could lead to the ingestion of dangerous pollutants. Nevertheless it was still important to be seen to be clean. The solution was to change your body linens as often as possible, in effect your underwear. It could be washed even if the body could not. So a show of brilliant white linen at the neck and the sleeve publicised your hygiene. And as cleanliness was next to godliness, spotless linen attested to your moral worth.
Grubby linen suggested the opposite – it was held to be physically as well as morally disgusting. A lady of quality who had sacrificed herself in marriage to a rich, greasy old man was likened to ‘a dirty tablecloth’ by the diarist James Boswell. Even today, when we criticise those who 'wash their dirty linen in public', we invoke the vintage link between clean linen and righteousness.
The snowy cuff became a universal mark of personal cleanliness, dignity and self-respect. Decency of appearance for men demanded a minimum of seven clean shirts a week. Even the working poor hoped to have one shirt on and one in the wash. The guardian of the whiteness, the insignia of family honour, was always the mistress.
Image: At Sandpit Gate: Washing Clothes, Paul Sandby, 1731-1809.
Pure white linen was not achieved without strenuous effort. Laundry was a massive undertaking before piped water, water heaters, washing machines and dryers. It required a good fire, copious boiling hot water, cauldrons and coppers, drying space, mangle and irons, as well as soap, bleach and starch, not to mention the woman-hours involved, a day's steamy toil at a minimum. Each weight of linen had its own washing requirements. While clear-starching and ironing without scorching was an exquisite art.
In larger households, the mistress did not get her hands wet, but orchestrated an all-female workforce to do the necessary. Gentlemen expected to have nothing to do with the business and often made themselves scarce on wash days. In the semi-sealed world of the army and navy, many men had no choice but to learn the mysteries, but civilian male antipathy to laundry was extreme. A man who had to wash for himself was a pitiful spectacle – hands in the tub was a feature of the widower's desperation.
Household linens were a terra incognita to the civilian adult male. Save authorising the occasional bank draft for the finest linens, a proud man had nothing to do with the selection, spinning and weaving, making up, washing, mending and monitoring of linens.
Bewilderment is a common bachelor theme. Listen to the Oxford scholar John James in a postscript to his letter to his father in 1778. “I beg to be informed by my mother to what uses I must apply the napkins, and to what the towels, how long a pair of sheets must be used before they are washed; and what price I must set on a stock if my laundress should lose one.” Basic matters were puzzling to him.
Even the brilliant Adam brothers who were to establish themselves as the most stylish architectural designers of their generation still bleated to their womenfolk after ‘linnens’ when they first struck camp in London in 1758. James Adam appealed to his sister Helen back in Edinburgh: “Linnens are what we want most & coud wish you woud send by first convoy a box of those lately made consisting of 4 pairs of fine sheets 3 pairs of course ones & half a dozen of course table cloaths for any thing passes down with batchelors”.
Women seem to have kept men supplied with household linens as a proof of their love. In 1803 at Trinity College Cambridge, the Dorset gentleman William Bankes was set up by his Grandma: “My Dear Grandmother. I feel myself extremely obliged to you for all the care & trouble you have taken in providing linen for me… my jip (for the servants appropriated to various districts in the college are so called) claimed that he had not seen to handsome a set of table linen towels & glass cloths since he has been at the college.”
Women were also responsible for making all the shirts and shifts for the family. Birmingham Unitarian Catherine Hutton remembered with pride that she became 'contriver and cutter of the family linen' from the age of 14. Making a husband's shirt was a fundamental matrimonial duty. If you did not provide the shirts you were hardly a wife.
Of course, in richer families, wives did not expect to make shirts and shifts in bulk themselves. Yet administering the production of personal linens, from buying the finest grade linens, sourcing the thread, to employing the neat seamstresses and overseeing the making up and washing, perhaps personally finishing them off and labelling them was one of the key ways that women serviced the needs of their men.
“Pray let me know what order your shirts are in?” is a recurring request in women's letters to bachelor sons. The lawyer Thomas Greene had chambers in Gray’s Inn by the 1770s, yet he continued to rely on his mother and then his sister (even after her own marriage) for the creation and overhaul of his personal linens. Greene must have found a laundress nearby, but he still sent his linen home 300 miles to Lancaster to be bleached and mended, and asked his sister to find him black silk stockings and to make his shirts: “they fit extremely well except that the neck and wrists are a little too narrow but that you may easily alter when I come down.”
Long after her sons left home and were apprenticed in textiles in London, Lancashire merchant's wife Elizabeth Shackleton saw to their personal linens. John and Robert wrote from London requesting 11 new shirts without a blush. Mrs Shackleton revelled in her ability to be useful to her sons, urging them to bring home any shirts that required mending. She used her mending to make recompense with one of them after a quarrel. “I am happy to have [John] here. Mended up slightly some shirts and night caps, all his things much out of repair. God knows he will find it a great and expensive difficulty to renew them.”
All the evidence suggests that keeping men in clean linen was a test and proof of love. A real mother would chew off her arm before she would let her menfolk go about in soiled linen. Female responsibility for, expertise in, and authority over linens was a recognised fact of domestic life. Only tyrannical or hen-pecked husbands carried the key to the linen cupboard. And while linens may sound a mundane province, it is a province that was ever-enlarging in the 18th century, as the grades and weights of linen and the uses to which they were put proliferated.
As time went on, women were less and less likely to weave linen themselves or parade in home-spun clothes but there is no evidence that the emotional investment declined with great recourse to the linen draper. Maintaining a stock of dazzling linen was both a practical exercise in caring and a demonstration of the spotlessness of family reputation. The linen cupboard stood at the very heart of the housewife's moral mission. No wonder that Mrs Tulliver wept at its demise!
Extract taken from Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, Amanda Vickery, Yale University Press.
The date of the Slow TV event can only be predicted a few days ahead of the harvest of the flax crop at Silverburn Flax Mill. Nature defines the harvest and cannot be hurried. We will follow the flax crop during the month of September 2022 to monitor when it is ready to harvest and for the Slow TV event to document the process. Filming is dependent on the flax crop and the weather.
This is a free event that will live streamed on our website on the SLOW TV PAGE.
Imagine a sweet-smelling cupboard stacked with crisp linens – sheets, pillow cases, napkins, towels, shirts and shifts. All are snowy white, fragrant with lavender and crackle with starch. One glance inside such a cupboard, one sniff of the atmosphere, would tell an observer that this was a moral and healthy house with a virtuous housekeeper at the helm. The linen cupboard was a great symbol of the standing, decency and wholesomeness of the 17th and 18th century house.
In George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, the disintegration of the household in the face of impending bankruptcy is felt most bitterly by the middle-aged mother. “Mrs Tulliver was seated there with all her laid-up treasures. One of the linen chests was open; the silver teapot was unwrapped from its many folds of paper, and the best china was laid out on the top of the closed linen-chest; spoons and skewers and ladles were spread in rows on the shelves; and the poor woman was shaking her head and weeping, with a bitter tension of the mouth, over the mark, ‘Elizabeth Dodson,’ on the corner of some tablecloths she held in her lap...
“To think o' these cloths as I spun myself... she went on, lifting things out and turning them over with an excitement all the more strange and piteous because the stout blond woman was usually so passive – if she had been ruffled before, it was at the surface merely, – “and Job Haxey wove ‘em, and brought the piece home on his back, as I remember standing at the door and seeing him come, before I ever thought o’ marrying your father! And the pattern as I chose myself, and bleached so beautiful, and I marked ‘em so as nobody ever saw such marking – they must cut the cloth to get it out, for it's a particular stitch. And they're all to be sold, and go into strange people's houses, and perhaps be cut with the knives, and wore out before I'm dead. You'll never have one of 'em, my boy," she said, looking up at Tom with her eyes full of tears, "and I meant 'em for you.”
All Mrs Tulliver's heartfelt history is bound up in those linens. Her memories past and her hopes for the future. Without her treasured stocks, she imagines there will be no dignity in living. Her daughter Maggie is distraught to witness such fuss over objects, not people, when they are in the grip of tragedy, but Mrs Tulliver is the inheritor of a venerable tradition. The linen cupboard had long been the material expression of the worth of the irreproachable housewife.
Linens might sound mundane to us now, but for centuries the most expensive things in a house were the textiles. Linens dressed the beds, the tables and the body – the whiter the better. Young maidens built up a store of linens as a hope chest before marriage.
The inherent virtue of linen was that it could be homespun from the local flax harvest. Flax grows freely in northern Europe, so linen like wool, had no taint of the expensive exotica of silk. But linen could also be had in exquisite weaves and feathery weights – fit for the high table at a prince's banquet or a new born baby's bonnet. Above all, the sterling quality of linen was its strength when wet – linen could be washed. As the glorious folk song reminds us ‘Twas on a Sunday morning that I beheld my darling, she looked so neat and charming in every high degree. She looked so neat and nimble, O a washing of her linen, O dashing away with a smoothing iron...”
Since the plague and the closing of public bath houses, western Europeans were wary of bathing. Immersing the body in water could lead to the ingestion of dangerous pollutants. Nevertheless it was still important to be seen to be clean. The solution was to change your body linens as often as possible, in effect your underwear. It could be washed even if the body could not. So a show of brilliant white linen at the neck and the sleeve publicised your hygiene. And as cleanliness was next to godliness, spotless linen attested to your moral worth.
Grubby linen suggested the opposite – it was held to be physically as well as morally disgusting. A lady of quality who had sacrificed herself in marriage to a rich, greasy old man was likened to ‘a dirty tablecloth’ by the diarist James Boswell. Even today, when we criticise those who 'wash their dirty linen in public', we invoke the vintage link between clean linen and righteousness.
The snowy cuff became a universal mark of personal cleanliness, dignity and self-respect. Decency of appearance for men demanded a minimum of seven clean shirts a week. Even the working poor hoped to have one shirt on and one in the wash. The guardian of the whiteness, the insignia of family honour, was always the mistress.
Image: At Sandpit Gate: Washing Clothes, Paul Sandby, 1731-1809.
Pure white linen was not achieved without strenuous effort. Laundry was a massive undertaking before piped water, water heaters, washing machines and dryers. It required a good fire, copious boiling hot water, cauldrons and coppers, drying space, mangle and irons, as well as soap, bleach and starch, not to mention the woman-hours involved, a day's steamy toil at a minimum. Each weight of linen had its own washing requirements. While clear-starching and ironing without scorching was an exquisite art.
In larger households, the mistress did not get her hands wet, but orchestrated an all-female workforce to do the necessary. Gentlemen expected to have nothing to do with the business and often made themselves scarce on wash days. In the semi-sealed world of the army and navy, many men had no choice but to learn the mysteries, but civilian male antipathy to laundry was extreme. A man who had to wash for himself was a pitiful spectacle – hands in the tub was a feature of the widower's desperation.
Household linens were a terra incognita to the civilian adult male. Save authorising the occasional bank draft for the finest linens, a proud man had nothing to do with the selection, spinning and weaving, making up, washing, mending and monitoring of linens.
Bewilderment is a common bachelor theme. Listen to the Oxford scholar John James in a postscript to his letter to his father in 1778. “I beg to be informed by my mother to what uses I must apply the napkins, and to what the towels, how long a pair of sheets must be used before they are washed; and what price I must set on a stock if my laundress should lose one.” Basic matters were puzzling to him.
Even the brilliant Adam brothers who were to establish themselves as the most stylish architectural designers of their generation still bleated to their womenfolk after ‘linnens’ when they first struck camp in London in 1758. James Adam appealed to his sister Helen back in Edinburgh: “Linnens are what we want most & coud wish you woud send by first convoy a box of those lately made consisting of 4 pairs of fine sheets 3 pairs of course ones & half a dozen of course table cloaths for any thing passes down with batchelors”.
Women seem to have kept men supplied with household linens as a proof of their love. In 1803 at Trinity College Cambridge, the Dorset gentleman William Bankes was set up by his Grandma: “My Dear Grandmother. I feel myself extremely obliged to you for all the care & trouble you have taken in providing linen for me… my jip (for the servants appropriated to various districts in the college are so called) claimed that he had not seen to handsome a set of table linen towels & glass cloths since he has been at the college.”
Women were also responsible for making all the shirts and shifts for the family. Birmingham Unitarian Catherine Hutton remembered with pride that she became 'contriver and cutter of the family linen' from the age of 14. Making a husband's shirt was a fundamental matrimonial duty. If you did not provide the shirts you were hardly a wife.
Of course, in richer families, wives did not expect to make shirts and shifts in bulk themselves. Yet administering the production of personal linens, from buying the finest grade linens, sourcing the thread, to employing the neat seamstresses and overseeing the making up and washing, perhaps personally finishing them off and labelling them was one of the key ways that women serviced the needs of their men.
“Pray let me know what order your shirts are in?” is a recurring request in women's letters to bachelor sons. The lawyer Thomas Greene had chambers in Gray’s Inn by the 1770s, yet he continued to rely on his mother and then his sister (even after her own marriage) for the creation and overhaul of his personal linens. Greene must have found a laundress nearby, but he still sent his linen home 300 miles to Lancaster to be bleached and mended, and asked his sister to find him black silk stockings and to make his shirts: “they fit extremely well except that the neck and wrists are a little too narrow but that you may easily alter when I come down.”
Long after her sons left home and were apprenticed in textiles in London, Lancashire merchant's wife Elizabeth Shackleton saw to their personal linens. John and Robert wrote from London requesting 11 new shirts without a blush. Mrs Shackleton revelled in her ability to be useful to her sons, urging them to bring home any shirts that required mending. She used her mending to make recompense with one of them after a quarrel. “I am happy to have [John] here. Mended up slightly some shirts and night caps, all his things much out of repair. God knows he will find it a great and expensive difficulty to renew them.”
All the evidence suggests that keeping men in clean linen was a test and proof of love. A real mother would chew off her arm before she would let her menfolk go about in soiled linen. Female responsibility for, expertise in, and authority over linens was a recognised fact of domestic life. Only tyrannical or hen-pecked husbands carried the key to the linen cupboard. And while linens may sound a mundane province, it is a province that was ever-enlarging in the 18th century, as the grades and weights of linen and the uses to which they were put proliferated.
As time went on, women were less and less likely to weave linen themselves or parade in home-spun clothes but there is no evidence that the emotional investment declined with great recourse to the linen draper. Maintaining a stock of dazzling linen was both a practical exercise in caring and a demonstration of the spotlessness of family reputation. The linen cupboard stood at the very heart of the housewife's moral mission. No wonder that Mrs Tulliver wept at its demise!
Extract taken from Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, Amanda Vickery, Yale University Press.
Slow TV, Linen Harvest
Make sure to tune into our upcoming Slow TV experience, a live streaming of the flax harvest at Silverburn Flax Mill.
Make sure to tune into our upcoming Slow TV experience, a live streaming of the flax harvest at Silverburn Flax Mill.
The date of the Slow TV event can only be predicted a few days ahead of the harvest of the flax crop at Silverburn Flax Mill. Nature defines the harvest and cannot be hurried. We will follow the flax crop during the month of September 2022 to monitor when it is ready to harvest and for the Slow TV event to document the process. Filming is dependent on the flax crop and the weather.
This is a free event that will live streamed on our website on the SLOW TV PAGE.