A Great Drawback. First British Workman to Second D[itt]o: — “I say, old boy, I wonder whether we’ll ever be rich enough to let our missuses drag their clothes about the street like that?” Source: Fun (10 December 1864): 130. Courtesy of the Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. Click on image to enlarge it.
Allison Matthews David points out that “long Victorian women's skirts, filthy from dragging in excrement-filled streets have introduced infections into the nineteenth-century household” (see bibliography).
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Related material
- Dangerous to their health — a review of Alison Matthews David’s Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present
- What British men and women wore in the 1860s
Last modified 17 February 2016