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Ancestor's Pockets
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| Pair of women’s tie-in pockets, c . 1800. The design is an example of cotton quilting in jacquard Marseilles work. Our ancestor’s real pockets may have survived, either as stand-alone pockets (such as these) or as pouches sewn into garments. The material and capaciousness of a pocket might tell us something about the wealth of its owner, and his or her occupation. Embroidered pockets could be a sign of the wearer’s sense of their own attractiveness, or even their sexual self-awareness (in the same way as lingerie today!). Pockets that were worn by the wealthy may have been marked with names or initials or personalised with different embroidery designs.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. These pockets are currently held in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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When the
corpse of my 77- year-old great-great-great-grandfather Lawrence Cooke was
dragged out of the Leeds-Liverpool canal and taken to a local pub for
identification and inspection, it was discovered that his pockets contained
just two simple objects - ‘a knife and
an apple.’ These scant and mundane details appear in the record of the inquest
into Lawrence’s death in the Wigan Observer
and District Advertiser (1881). I know little of the life of this cotton
spinner and journeyman, but I now have just a tiny, but fascinating, insight
into what he contemplated might be his next meal. But was the knife simply the
means to slice the apple, or a weapon of self-defence?
The contents of the pockets of many
of our ancestors who met their ends in accidents or as a result of murder or
suicide can be gleaned online by searching the records of inquests reported in
British newspapers between 1710 and 1959 (The British Newspapers index: www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk, also accessible via www.findmypast.co.uk). And what a
motley collection of oddments those pockets held! Loose change, keys, watches
and combs were typically accompanied in men’s pockets by snuffboxes, pipes and
seals for fastening letters. Women’s pocketed items tended to be of a greater
variety - from rings and other jewellery, to
caps, handkerchiefs, thimbles, pincushions, needle-cases, scent bottles,
mirrors, scissors
and even nutmeg graters! In a Britain where
there were few on-the-road eating places, few people dared leave home without snacks
(oranges, apples, nuts and sweets) which were also invariably carried in the
pockets.
Men and women in the Victorian and Edwardian
periods often shared bedrooms and household furniture, and in such
circumstances, pockets were perhaps the only private space in which they could
place their most intimate and treasured possessions. For women – who, unlike
their menfolk, may not have had locked chests-of-drawers or writing desks in
which to hide away their private belongings - pockets were particularly
important aspects of personal space. Barbara Burman, a pocket expert, has commented that,
‘pockets
are a tiny, slight thing in terms of world importance but they are a very
sensitive barometer about how we feel about the world and our possessions.’ And
indeed, it may be possible to glimpse something of an
ancestor’s life and character from the content of his or her pockets on the
final day or his/her life. Look out particularly for evidence of his or her class
status (work tools, jewellery), financial circumstances (money, pawn tickets)
or even emotional life (locks of hair, lockets, painted
miniatures, and letters from loved ones).
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Reports of pickpocketing – with exact details of what was taken - occur frequently in nineteenth-century newspapers. Thieves might remove wallets from men’s pockets or cut the strings of women’s tie-on pockets. Particularly valuable in Victorian London were silk handkerchiefs, stolen from people at fairs, marketplaces and public executions. In Field Lane in London (the setting of Fagin’s den in Oliver Twist) it is believed that up to 5,000 stolen handkerchiefs were handled each week in the mid-Victorian period.
Credit: Photograph of an engraving in the Writings of Charles Dickens Volume 4 Oliver Twist, (Houghton, Mifflin and Co, 1894). Drawing entitled, ‘Oliver amazed at the Dodger’s Mode of Going to Work,’ by George Cruikshank. From Wikimedia commons
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Before systematic dental records or DNA analysis,
listing the contents of a deceased person’s pockets was a key method by which he
or she might be identified. Posters or fliers hastily pasted up or distributed
in the local area in the aftermath of an accident together with newspaper
reports advertised such information in the hope that someone would come forward
who could put a name to a body. Passersby and newspaper readers - perhaps
inspired by the new Victorian literary genre of detective fiction - might well have fancied themselves
amateur forensic scientists as they pored
over the details of someone else’s pockets. By way of example, here are three
cases in which the contents of pockets played an illuminating part.
On December 12th 1867, the Western Daily Press recorded that a
man’s body had been recovered from a train line and (graphically) that ‘not a particle
of the face remained…; the different members of the body were so cut up as
almost to preclude the possibility of telling what they were.’ After an
examination of the contents of the pockets of this sorry fellow, identification
was enabled by the finding of a handkerchief with the embroidered name ‘
Charles Bridges’ in its corner. It turned out that the dead man was a local
Birmingham solicitor who had committed suicide.
Beyond identity, the contents of pockets could point
obliquely to a deceased person’s final movements and even to the reason for his
or her death. The Derbyshire Times of
Saturday February 3rd 1877, for example, described the case of a
woman who had stepped (either accidentally or purposefully) onto a railway line
at Dronfield, Derbyshire and been killed by a train. At the Midland Hotel where
her remains were examined, the ‘loose pocket which had been tied around her’ was
found to contain: a purse containing ‘6 shillings, 1 and a half pence, a small
penknife, a key, and six pawn tickets. The whole of the tickets bore the name
of Ann Moran. One of them had been issued by Mr Wilcockson, Chesterfield; two
by Miss Ellen Laughton, Sheffield; one by Messrs Wright Brothers, one by Messrs.
Tyrer brothers and another by Messrs. Samuel Hull and John Vickers, of the same
place.’ Quite apart from establishing Ann Moran’s name, the pawn tickets –
their sheer number and the fact that they had been issued by so many different
pawn shops - give an indication of the likely
state of Ann Moran’s finances and emotional state at the time she died. Was
this a suicide brought about by acute poverty?
Even more reminiscent of a fictional crime story
were the contents of the pockets of seventeen-year-old weaver Mary Alice
Goldsborough who was found drowned in a
canal at Bingley, Yorkshire, (in 1895) having been dismissed three days earlier
from her job as a weaver in a local factory for poor work. According to the Leeds Times of 15th December
that year, her pockets contained ‘a black purse without any money, a pair of
scissors, a burling iron (a tool she would have needed her employment), a red
cotton pocket handkerchief, and a ‘Duchess’ novelette. The girl was described
any those who had known her as a sulky child who spoke little. The last
conversation she had with a colleague, as reported in the paper, included the
exclamation that she was going to “‘Jack it!’” From these details it is
possible to guess at what probably happened to Mary, a girl fed up of the humdrum
factory life (evidenced by the burling iron - a necessary tool for her
employment in the factory), who spent her time imagining a much more luxurious
and romantic life (evidenced by the novel and the red handkerchief), who lost
her job and had no money (evidenced by the empty purse) and who thus decided to
take her own life.
Men’s Pockets
Pockets
seem to have emerged properly sometime in the seventeenth century when they
replaced girdles worn outside the clothing and hung with tools and accessories.
A man’s pocket was not separate from his garments but sewn onto them
and, depending on his class status, a male ancestor may have had many pockets - in his breeches or trousers, waistcoat, and frockcoat or overcoat, for
example. Early male pockets were positioned in the outside of clothing which
made them highly susceptible to thieves. Later pockets, however, were sewn into
male garments and accessed through a slit in the seams.
Women’s Pockets
Women’s pockets were originally not sewn into their garments but rather
tied around their waists on long strings, often in pairs. Alternatively, some
had loops or buttons so that they could be attached to other garments. From the
eighteenth century onwards, there was a greater need for women to have pockets
– there were simply more affordable small objects around and women increasingly
had more reasons to be outside the house visiting others, shopping and
accessing entertainment. Slits in the side of dresses (and petticoats) allowed
women to reach these so-called ‘tie-on’ pockets.
From
about the 1840s, dress patterns for the first time show women’s pockets being
sewn inside their clothes, invisible but accessible, although large and robust
tie-on pockets (rather than the earlier delicate and embroidered versions)
continued to be popular. In the early twentieth-century,
women’s pockets finally took second place to the more robust handbag.
Useful
websites and books
Barbara Burman, ‘Pocketing the Difference:
Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in (eds) Barbara Burman and
Carole Turbin Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical
Perspective, Oxford, Blackwell 2003
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/history-of-pockets/
A History of Pockets – The Victoria and Albert Museum Information from the Victoria and Albert Museum on
pockets and their history including a gallery of paintings in which you are
encouraged to ‘spot the pocket’.
http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/juvenile-crime-in-the-19th-century Juvenile crimes of the nineteenth century including
pickpocketing
This article first appeared in Family Tree Magazine in early 2016.
For women's history and social history books - competitive prices and a great service - visit:
#pockets #fashionhistory #ancestors #ancestry #familyhistory #genealogy #familytree
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