Judith Flanders

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain


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the needle vertically, was made of iron not wood, and had toothed gears that didn’t jam, a spring that permitted variations in the thickness of the fabric without manual adjustment, and a presser foot to hold the fabric in place, which meant the operator could use both hands to control the cloth. The new machine could also, most importantly, sew in curves as well as the straight lines, which had been all the earlier machines had managed. Now an operative could produce 900 stitches a minute, instead of the 40 stitches a quick hand-sewer could make.30*

      Further improvements followed, but in England any improved machines were blocked by the patent for the earlier—and much inferior—machine. Finally in 1856 Singer opened an agency in Glasgow, to avoid paying English patent fees. Barran swiftly saw how this machine would solve his problem of the imbalance between the speed with which his mechanized bandsaws cut and the appreciably longer time it took his tailors to sew. He had the machines installed in his works, linked to steam-driven shafts instead of the machines’ original foot-powered treadle.32 Soon every Leeds clothing factory was using bandsaws, steamdriven sewing machines, and steam presses and button-holing machines. By the 1880s fifteen sewing-machine-manufacturing firms had set up in the city, and even more engineering works specialized in developing new machinery for this now enormously successful trade.33

      Technology and technological innovation were changing the entire face of fashion. Waterproof coats and shoes are two examples of this revolution. Before the nineteenth century, when it rained people either stayed inside or they got wet. There was no other possibility. Oiled-silk umbrellas were carried by some, but they were at best water-resistant, not waterproof. In 1823 Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist, patented a fabric which had a layer of rubber sealed between two layers of cloth, creating a waterproof material. He was not the first to use rubber to make fabrics waterproof, but his method, which used cheap coal oil, was better suited to large-scale, economical manufacturing than earlier versions had been. Macintosh joined together with a cotton manufacturer, and Charles Macintosh and Co. was set up the following year in Manchester, an ideal location. The city had shipping links with South America for rubber imports; it had a gasworks, for the supply of naphtha, used in softening the rubber; it was the cotton centre of the country, producing an endless supply of material suitable for waterproofing; and, like Leeds, it was also filled with engineering firms eager to work on adapting machinery for this new industry.34

      At first, waterproofed material found limited numbers of customers, although Captain Parry’s expeditionary team heading to the North Pole in 1827 carried waterproof bags. The problem was that the fabric turned brittle in cold weather, sticky in hot; it didn’t breathe, and therefore caused the wearer to sweat heavily; and, even worse, the rubberizing process saturated the fabric with a smell that was said to be easily detectable across the road from the coat’s wearer. In 1843 the process of vulcanizing rubber was developed: this led to the fabric being treated with sulphur, which kept it stable whatever the weather. Further developments throughout the decade continued to produce improvements, and by the Great Exhibition Bax and Co. showed its ‘Aquascutum’ cloth, which soon afterwards the army ordered in bulk for its Crimea-bound soldiers. Others benefited too: the India Rubber Waterproof Works in east London was ideally suited to gear up production quickly. By 1844 it already had a site covering 24,000 square metres, and when war was declared it managed to produce 50,000 waterproof suits for the departing soldiers in only forty days.35

      Rubber affected shoe- and boot-making as much as it had overcoats, as did standardization. Shoes went from being personally measured and made to order to being produced in standard sizes fairly early on. From 1848 C. and J. Clark advertised that its lines were available in three widths it called ‘fittings’, and in seven sizes. In 1875 the company advertising boasted:

      We used to have only three fittings, the N narrow, M medium and S scotch. The narrow were seldom called for and we found that our range of fittings was not large enough to suit our customers and that…there was a demand for a fitting wider than N but not so extreme as S. We spent a great deal of pains and labour during two whole years in fixing on the best shape of soles, to cover all parts of the three kingdoms…and we flattered ourselves at having arrived as nearly at perfection as we could reasonably expect in all three points.40