Dressing for England

Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture. Dressing for England argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing—in dress that appealed to a sophisticated, cultured, and continental society—was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera, Dressing for England shows how evolving fashions—shawls, crinolines, turbans, corsets, hats—reflected shifting notions of class, gender, and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.