[This article first appeared in September 2024's issue of Discover Your Ancestors Magazine]
On Thursday 3rd December 1835,
Princess (Later Queen) Victoria remarked with satisfaction in her diary on how
well her governess had done her hair, ‘Dearest Lehzen was so kind as to comb
and brush my hair for me, besides many other things; she makes my curls (which
are done as dear Aunt Louise wore them) beautifully.’
Ways of styling the hair – and
particularly curling it - were a
pre-occupation of the Victorian age with middle- and upper-class ladies of
leisure spending enormous amounts of time and money on achieving soft, glossy
and sustainable waves. At the same time,
poor women became very resourceful in trying to emulate them. People of both
sexes who were born with curly hair were considered extra-fortunate with their
rippling locks thought to demonstrate their
superior health and vigour. As the Canterbury Journal March 14th 1896 put it, ‘Curly
hair indicates exuberant vitality, the curl being caused by the heat or
electricity which pervades the system.’
In a French scene, a maid playing with a baby on her knee points out its curly hair to the visiting doctor; he replies that the mother must have been in curling tongs when she gave birth. Process Print after J-A Favre, 1902. Via Wellcome Collection
But, more than this, curly hair was thought to bestow a distinct advantage in the all-important business of attracting a suitable marriage mate. In 1899, The West London Observer opined that ‘one rarely meets with a curly-haired old maid’ suggesting, surely facetiously, that curly-haired women were more attractive than straight-haired women. The former, he suggested were ‘generally bright, vivacious, artistic, witty and coquettish.’ He also noted that many more women of this type were generally to be found working as actresses on the stage than in any other sphere of life. This was, of course, something of a tongue-in-cheek compliment. Sober, steady women were generally considered by the Victorians as a better prize in marriage than their flighty counterparts. Whether they might be successfully identified by their straighter hair must have remained a matter for conjecture! (December 29th 1899).
Natural curls on men were admired as much as those on women. Photograph taken by James Holroyd, T & J Holroyd, Harrogate, North Yorkshire. Wikimedia Commons.
For those ordinary nineteenth-century women who didn’t
have the good fortune of being born with natural ringlets, there was advice
aplenty. Many women bought hairpieces that could be affixed into their own hair
to give the illusion of curls. But, the craze for creating bigger, better and
longer-lasting curls from one’s own hair was also well and truly on. Regardless
of which device you might choose to use to make curls – and there were many
different options - you could ensure the efficacy of the process by coating the
hair in a solution of some sort. The precursors of modern-day hair gels and
mousses were concoctions made from egg white, or even tea with a ‘lump-sized
piece of sugar’ dissolved in it. These could be combed through the hair before
it was curled to ensure that the curls were ‘crisp’. An advice columnist in The
Weekly Telegraph of Saturday September 2nd 1894 suggested that a
trip to the chemist might produce better curling solutions: ‘Mix with a quart
of boiling water one drachm of gum-arabic and two ounces of borax. When all are
dissolved add three tablespoons of strong spirits of camphor. Alternatively,
‘water in which a pinch of bicarbonate of soda has been dissolved’ might be
applied.
Embryonic versions of today’s multimillion pound
hair-care businesses can be seen in the small ads of late Victorian newspapers.
If you sent two shillings in the form of 24 penny stamps to Dr Russell in
Kentish Town, you would receive through the post a small bottle of his
‘Lixivene,’ an ‘elegantly perfumed toilet compound for nourishing, preserving
and restoring the hair.’ A ‘genuine’ bottle would have the name of the product
engraved into the glass and would be wrapped in a 16 page pamphlet (including
George Russell’s trademark and signature) on how to take care of the hair and
skin. Whilst moustaches, baldness, eyebrows and whiskers might all benefit from
a splash of this liquid, customers eulogised mainly about it’s hair curling
properties. As a Mrs Pratt mentioned in the advert said, ‘For keeping the hair
in curl, it is the best thing I ever used.’
Hinde’s Pyr Point hair-pin (used without heat) was invented towards the end of the nineteenth century by Miss Stephanie, a French woman from Brittany. It’s main selling point was that it had more comfortable pear-shaped points rather than sharp ones. The Sketch, April 24th 1895. British Newspaper Archive via FindMyPast.
Curled hair was admired at all levels of
society. At the top, audiences eulogised over the glorious crimped manes of the
models of the Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Lizzie Siddal. And, the
mid-century Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, caught the zeitgeist when he described
one of his heroines, Maud, as ‘sunning over with curls.’ But whilst curls
themselves were lauded, it was generally agreed that the artificial methods of
acquiring them - attempted by so many - were
best kept secret. As one journalist put it, ‘Lovely woman looks her worst in
curl papers.’
This iconic portrait of the Victorian age celebrates the wavy tresses of redhead Lizzie Siddal, a muse of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This picture is entitled ‘Regina Cordium’ (Queen of Hearts), and is Rossetti's 1860 marriage portrait of Siddal. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Being seen in the act of curling one’s hair was akin to being caught in one’s underwear and very much frowned upon in amongst the aspiring middle and lower classes. In 1896, the Headmistress of the Normanton Common Board School in West Yorkshire was hauled before the local School Board because she had banned forty or fifty of her charges from coming to school in curling pins – ‘those unsightly props to the coiffure’ - something she felt to be against the principles of the Education Code which required teachers to keep an eye on the cleanliness and neatness of their pupils. Much to the annoyance of the parents of the girls, the Board supported her view.
At the lower end of society, the wearing of curling
papers or pins could be a bone of contention between workers and bosses. Whilst
factories in the Northern industrial towns sometimes tolerated them because at
least they kept women’s hair away from dangerous machinery, private employers
were not so forgiving. In 1898, a household servant, Lily Langton, took her
mistress to court because she had been summarily dismissed for wearing hairpins
whilst doing her job. ‘On March 22nd, Mrs Rushbrook came down and started
to grumble at me. I had two or three curling pins in my hair, she told me to
take them out. Then she sent me to do some washing up and, seeing me soon
after, she said, you still have got those hairpins in; leave my house at once.”
As a rejoinder, Mrs Rushbrook complained that ‘this was the fourth or fifth
time [Lily] had gone about the house in curling pins.’
When the judge queried why the young woman had had the
pins in her hair at 11am, she replied, ‘I was going out that afternoon. You
understand – a young man. [At this point those present in court laughed]. I
wanted to look nice.’
Perhaps it was a sign of the changing times and a
slight relaxation of Victorian mores, that the judge ruled in Lily’s favour, ‘I
do not see that she disobeyed any reasonable order.’ He awarded her 5s (one
week’s salary in lieu of notice) and costs, though he did warn her to be more
‘conciliatory’ with future mistresses. Liverpool Echo May 6th
1898
If working in one’s curlers was frowned upon, going
out into more public situations wearing them brought even more censure. On March 16th, 1900, The
Western Chronicle reported that a woman had appeared before the relief
committee of the Camberwell Guardians ‘at 5’clock in the afternoon with her
hair fastened in curlers.’ The panel were so shocked that they ‘reduced the
relief she had been in the habit of receiving’ with one of them claiming that
the wearing of curlers was ‘indecent.’ This view was challenged and, in the
end, the woman’s case was reviewed by the General Relief Committee but not
before she had had several sleepless nights as a result of ‘the slur thrown
upon her.’
The end result of all this curling - a fine head of
lustrous and coiled tresses - remained
an aspiration for most women into the twentieth century and this desire gave
rise to a host of innovations. Hair pins (also known as ‘kirby grips’ and, in
America, as ‘bobby pins’) appeared in 1916. Whilst their prime purpose was to
keep new shorter hairstyles in place, they could also be used very effectively
to curl damp hair overnight.
A plethora of more expensive hair-curling options were
also emerging. French hair stylist Marcel Grateau invented a perm-like
technique using a curling iron and chemicals in 1875 and this later gained
great popularity as the Marcel Wave renowned in the 1920s. A more advanced wave
machine was invented by German hairdresser
Karl Nessler in 1906. This involved both chemicals and thermal processes
but took a lengthy twelve hours and a good deal of money to implement. The next
big technological advance in hair curling came in 1941 with the Cold Wave of
Evans and McDonough using thioglycolic acid. This was a cheaper and quicker
process than earlier perming methods taking only two hours.
The 1940s and 50s saw a slew of famous Hollywood
actresses such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor with curls, which set the
bar high for the ordinary woman. Now there were hot rollers, and heated bristle
brushes (invented by Julian Rizzuto in 1959). Commercially produced hairspray
replaced the tea and sugar concoctions of the previous century. It was as late
as 1980 that Theora Stephens patented the familiar modern day curling iron with
a spring clasp and heat control mechanism.
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the Queen, in 1944. The fashion for curls inspired every class right through to Royalty in the mid-twentieth century. William Timyn. Via Wikimedia Commons
The popularity of curled hair has (to coin a phrase) -
undulated - in recent years. The need
for speed in hair care, together with women’s emancipation and their greater
participation in the workforce has arguably given rise to a greater desire for
shorter, straighter hair. But curls -
shaped and created according to new trends in fashion, technology and
aesthetics - will no doubt always come bouncing back!
Books and Articles
Mimi Matthews, The Girl with the 19th Century Curl: Hot Tongs, Setting
Lotions, and False Hair | Mimi Matthews.
Sarah Heaton, ed., A Cultural
History of Hair in the Age of Empire, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
Susan J. Vincent, Hair: An Illustrated Visual History,
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018
#hair #hairinhistory #women'shistory #Britishhistory #fashionhistory #QueenVictoriahair #coiffure #hairstyles #hairdressers #tresses #ringlets
