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Lily Langtry and the Smock Frock

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Smock frocks do turn up in the most unusual places and on the most unusual people.  Lily Langtry for example, famous for being an actress and mistress of the future Edward VII.  It is amazing where they can lead you, here into the world of Victorian drama, although I have to declare an interest having a great uncle on stage around the same time as Lily although I don’t know whether he wore a smock frock or indeed knew Lily.

Lily was born in Jersey in 1853. She married Irish landowner Edward Langtry in 1874, shortly after coming to London where she captivated high society and sat for various artists including Millais, partly because her simple plain black dress marked her out as different.  The rest of the 1870s and early 1880s were tumultuous, including her affair with the Prince of Wales, the birth of her daughter and her husband’s bankruptcy.

On the advice of her friend Oscar Wilde, to support herself, she took up acting, making her professional debut in December 1881 at the Haymarket in London in ‘She Stoops to Conquer’.  She was popular with the public forming her own touring company in 1882 which covered the country.  American impresario, Henry Abbey, organised a tour of the United States which she completed in 1882-3 to wide public success if not critical acclaim.  In 1883, she registered for six weeks intensive training at the Paris Conservatoire to improve her acting technique.

She then returned to touring the provinces, as the Bucks Herald reports, ‘Mrs Langtry is everywhere attracting enthusiastic houses in her provincial tour’.  Her new play was widely reported, partly because it required the renowned beauty to dress in boy’s clothing. As the Spirit of the Times in New York reported on 20 June 1885:

Two new plays of Interest have been recently produced in London, but the cable has failed to give us any account of their reception. One is A Young Tramp, written by W. G. Wills, for Mrs. Langtry, in which, for the first time since her Rosalind, the British beauty appears in boy’s clothes.

It certainly aroused worldwide curiosity, even if communications could not provide all the desired information.  The play was noted in Daily Alta California, Volume 38, 7 June 1885 and in the New Zealand Herald, Volume XXII, I25 July 1885, where it was described as ‘A light vein of high comedy mingles with the romantic pathos of the drama’.  W. G. Wills was a well-known Irish play writer of the period who produced over thirty plays and worked regularly with Henry Irving.  He wrote this play in 1884, its full title ‘A little tramp: or, Landlords & tenants. A comedy drama in prologue and three acts’, although it was also called ‘A Young Tramp’ too.

The smock frock reference came with its performance at the Prince’s Theatre in Bristol on 12 September 1885 where Lily ‘looked very charming disguised as a boy’. [W.G. Wills: Dramatist and Painter, Freeman Wills, 1898).  As the Bucks Herald noted on 19 September 1885, ‘Her appearance in boy’s clothes…excited great enthusiasm; but her assumption of the loose smock-frock and easy fitting breeches of the Yorkshire yokel was hardly what was anticipated’. I am not sure if the writer disapproved of the assumption of male dress and perhaps the disguise of her famous beauty or whether it is the smock frock in particular, a working garment solely for men with a disreputable reputation especially at that time, before it reached the folk status we associate with it today.  The writer does conclude that her ‘acting…improves every month’ so at least he was grateful for that.

As the Otago Witness of 14 November 1885, reported:

Probably everyone is by this time pretty tired of hearing that Mrs Langtry is or is not to   appear in breeches in Mr Wills’ play ‘A Little Tramp,’ but independently of Mrs Langtry there is a peculiarity about one particular scene. The little tramp disappears — his supposed corpse is found in a river, and he attends his own funeral. This story, according to the New York Herald, is founded upon an actual adventure which occurred to Miss Ellen Terry, who   once disappeared for a few days without letting her friends know where she had gone. The body of a woman who resembled her was found in the Thames and was being duly buried in   her name, when to the astonishment of all she burst in upon the scene as gay and bright and full of life as ever.

The play was obviously gaining some notoriety, both for the cross dressing and the relationship to the disappearance of Ellen Terry.

The play continued to be produced, in 1889 in a tour around America although I cannot find any further references to costume nor, sadly, any photographs so I am not sure if the smock frock went too.   The Rock Island Argus, Number 7, 26 October 1889, eulogised:

The play was a grand success, the critics of the great metropolis praised it with one accord, the superior quality of its material, its faultless construction, its dramatic force, the     originality of the plot and purity of language in which the story is told. ‘A Little Tramp’ has enjoyed a highly successful career throughout England. The nature of the plot is such, and it is unfolded so delicately, so gracefully, that to publish the entire story would be to rob the   audience of many pleasant surprises. …’A Little Tramp’ has the elements to satisfy the most genuine patrons of dramatic art.

A popular dramatic realisation of the true lives of the tramps such as those that we saw in the previous blog, sanitized just enough for the Victorian theatre-going audience.

 

http://digital.chipublib.org/cdm/ref/collection/CPB01/id/2919

http://www.jaynesjersey.com/lillielang.htm

A Case of Deception

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Recently, I have been trawling through Victorian newspapers to find references as to how smock frocks were used by people in everyday situations.  Reading the papers somehow seems to bring you closer to ordinary people’s lives of the time, particularly court cases where people were cross-examined and asked to account for the minutiae of their lives such as where they were sleeping.  One such case caught my eye in particular. It shows how men on the margins of society used various strategies to get by and to live on their wits.  Reported by the Oxford Times in May 1870, the case involved two men and the theft of a pair of leggings and a smock frock.

The stealing of property, which included clothing, was a capital offence until a succession of various acts lessened the punishments during the 1820s and 1830s.  Every theft of a piece of property was a form of larceny and hence a felony and could only be tried on indictment at the Quarter Sessions even if the value of the property was only 6d or 1s.  This led to the somewhat harsh sentencing for seemingly low value crimes.    Therefore as a felony, the consequences of carrying out such a crime could be harsh, although generally reserved for repeat offenders.  Items of clothing were often the most valuable personal item that people owned and could not just be lost. Today, in the era of cheap clothing, we tend to forget the value of our clothing.  It could not be forgotten in the nineteenth century.

James Baker, a labourer of Waterstock, Oxfordshire, left his smock frock overnight, in the shed of Mr Griffiths, who he was presumably working for, between 5pm and 6am the following day, by which time it had gone missing.  John McDonnell was tramping around the countryside, basically walking from place to place in search of work.  He had recently been in prison for fourteen days, having been convicted of vagrancy.  The Vagrancy Act 1824 (5 Geo. 4. c. 83) is an Act Of Parliament that makes it an offence to sleep rough or beg, sections of which are still enforced today.     So he was obviously fighting for survival on the edge of society for whatever reason.  He told the court he went into Mr Griffith’s cow shed to sleep, presumably as it was warm and dry and he would be less obvious than sleeping outside, and there he spotted the abandoned smock frock, along with leggings.  Such clothing, even if not taken to be worn, had a small value on the second hand clothing market.

Setting off the following morning, ‘to go on the tramp’ on the road to Reading, he met up with a man in similar circumstances named William Pace.  McDonnell asked Pace to sell the leggings onto another man for him, Pace not knowing they were stolen.  Apparently this was unsuccessful and instead McDonnell urged Pace to wear them instead as he was unwell and very tired and they had to sleep in the open that night.  They slept under some straw where they were found the following day by a policeman at 10 or 11am, who seemed to have been on their trail.

Immediately Pace said that he had made the leggings and McDonnell that he had been given the smock by a farmer in Lincolnshire.  They were both sent for trial although McDonnell claimed that Pace was innocent.

This small snapshot of three ordinary people’s lives over the course of forty-eight hours shows the historian several interesting things. Firstly that the leggings, who belonged to James Silver who was working alongside James Baker, and the smock frock were considered valuable enough, either for monetary reasons or that they would be unable to function properly at their work without their protective clothing, or probably both, to call a policeman and for him to trail the possible suspects. The leggings were stated as being worth 3 shillings, the second hand value of smock frocks was similar, although they were more expensive to buy new.  They were both too expensive to simply loose or let disappear, representing a substantial part of a week’s wages.

Secondly, that there was definitely an air of comradeship for those in similar circumstances, certainly in this case, on the tramp.  McDonnell was worried about Pace’s health and prepared to defend his innocence, Pace was prepared to risk his innocence by selling the leggings for McDonnell although he may well have suspected that they might be stolen.  There is no indication that they previously knew each other.

Thirdly, the mobility of the population.  It is nearly thirty miles between Waterstock and Reading but this was not seen as unreasonable, although they could have been trying to put some distance between them and the scene of the crime.  They were found at Chalgrove, just over half way there. Once in Reading, McDonnell and Pace could have disposed of the clothes for cash to a second-hand dealer, who would not have been warned that they might be stolen.  The policeman caught them before they had gone too far and the clothes were still identifiable.  The Lincolnshire reference also shows how usual this was, to go from one part of the country to the other, McDonnell presumably choosing Lincolnshire as again it would be difficult to check the veracity of his tale but it was not unlikely.

This is a small a paragraph in one newspaper but it highlights both the struggles of the labourers with work to hold onto their property and maintain their livelihoods and the tough life of those right on the margins, before the safety net of the welfare state.  The smock frock leads us into their histories.