Papa’s Curious Wedding Present: 1891

 

A Curious Wedding Present.

“There was a fine old gentlemen in this city, who from the humblest beginnings made his way steadily up to commercial fame and immense wealth, all by the manufacture of soap,” said a New-Yorker the other day, “and with all his wealth and prosperity, he never forgot how a poor man feels or lost any of his consideration for the rights of others. Pride never puffed him up, nor made him ashamed of his business or his early history.

”He was proud of the purity and excellence of his soap, and the secrets of his success over his rivals lay in the fact that he invented several processes for cheapening the manufacture of that article, and his great factory in this city was full of machinery of his own invention and manufacture. He made one ample fortune solely out of patenting the ideas of his fertile brain, and several others by selling the manufactures he was thus able to turn out.

“His wife was as intensely purse-proud as he was simple, though her origin was as simple as his own, and her daughter took after her. This child married well, as they say, that is, a young swell about town, proposed to her on account of the great wealth he knew she would inherit. When the engagement was settled the daughter and mother asked the old man what he was going to do in the way of setting the young people up in life.

“Here they ran up against an unexpected snag. The old boy would give nothing in the way of a dowry. He thought the bridegroom should support his wife unaided, till her father’s will gave her a share of his estate. The utmost he could be prevailed upon to do was to give his daughter a wedding present. What this would be he steadfastly refused to say just then. On the wedding day, however, his gift to the bride was the deed for a handsome house in a fashionable street, completely furnished in costly style from top to bottom.

“The bridal tour had all been arranged, so no stop was made by the happy pair to examine the new house. All through the honeymoon they talked of the pleasure they would have in going over the house, examining the pictures and plate and entertaining their friends in it. Great was the delight with which they entered their new home on their return. The carpets were velvet, the hangings of velvet and lace, the furniture hand-carved, the pictures old masters, the linen of the finest, and silverplate was everywhere, even in the kitchen.

“The bridegroom was delighted, but the bride’s cheeks were crimson, and her eyes flashed a fire that tears could not quench. Everywhere she looked she saw familiar objects that filled her with rage, snatching a silver salver from the table, she showed to her husband, engraved on it minutely but with elaborate detail, the representation of a bar of soap with her father’s well-known trademark on it.

“This queer crest was everywhere about the house, worked into carved furniture, woven into the linen and hangings, and even painted on the carriage and stamped on the harness which were presented with the house. It was the old man’s greatest pride, that trade-mark and what it stood for, but whether he had it put on his daughter’s things out of sheer simplicity of heart, or whether he intended it as a rebuke to her foolish pride I never found out.” N. Y. Tribune.

Idaho Statesman [Boise ID] 19 June 1891: p. 6

Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire: Mrs Daffodil does not believe in sheer simplicity of heart, particularly in wealthy soap magnates. The young lady was full of foolish pride and one expects that she sent the offending silver to the jeweller’s shop to rub out the crest (difficult to do with plate), called in carpenters to putty over the furniture motifs, and tipped the coachman to carelessly scratch the carriage panels with a hoof-cleaner.

No doubt her letter of thanks for the lavish and generous wedding-gift was a model of repressed emotions.

 

Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdotes

You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.

 

An Imposter at the Concord Ball: 1875

Colonial Revival costumes in a portrayal of George and Martha Washington’s wedding, 1912

A Western Deceiver.

Nora Perry writes of the centennial celebration at Lexington and Concord in a letter to the Chicago Tribune. Of the Concord ball she writes: And oh! What a pretty sight, as everybody unanimously voted. Such brocades, smelling of cedar and camphor-wood, as would now and then appear, plaited and puckered in the very stitches of the old-time—not a fold altered nor a ruffle changed. But there were not many of them. Those fair ones who rejoiced in these veritable old heirlooms walked about with their pretty chins aloft, lifted up above common modern clay by the sublime consciousness of a fine Mayflower ancestry, which these credentials would place beyond dispute.

But a woman’s wit will sometimes get the better of the stoutest credentials; and so a saucy, mischievous little damsel managed to array herself in a brand new gown, which she so plaited and puckered and betrimmed with coffee-dipped lace and scented with camphor-gum, in the very pink and pattern of the Continental dames, that all the little Mayflowers lowered their chins on her approach and whispered audibly, in her delighted hearing, “That is the real thing! Wonder who she is?”

And the little deceiver, with “a smile that was child-like and bland,” went on her way rejoicing, happy as all human nature must be at such a signal triumph. Boston is much too well-bred to ask outright questions of identity, so my fair one kept her secret with these fine Mayflowers; but after the ball she is perfectly willing to reveal her cunning guilt, and to let a faithful correspondent say that it was one of Chicago’s nearest neighbors who thus proved herself more than a match for Boston.

Daily Graphic [New York, NY] 7 May 1875: p. 6

Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire: On this, the anniversary of the fateful day that the American Revolution began: the commemoration of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, it seems appropriate to record the sartorial conflict between the camphor-scented blue-bloods of the East and the parvenu of the West in her coffee-dipped lace.

1876 saw a revival of “Colonial” American costume, from antique lace ruffles at ladies’ elbows to daintily embroidered shoes to sack-back gowns of flowered brocades. Mrs Daffodil regrets to say that some enthusiasts actually remade historic 18th-century garments into fancy-dress costumes or pageant attire for “Lady Washington teas.”

Eighteenth-century costumes were proudly displayed as an emblem of pedigree by Americans who otherwise scorned England’s class system as un-democratic.  An aged American lady of impeccable lineage was distressed to part with her historic quilted petticoat. And this improbably aged relic was described at a celebration of The Geauga County Historical Society, 30 September, 1875:

In the exhibit, first, I bring to your attention, the singular and costly specimens of work presented by Mrs. Polly Norton, of Troy, Ohio, in 1873, a widow lady, seventy-seven years of age, and an early settler in that township. Her husband was a farmer, and died some years ago. First, the waist of a dress; second, a portion of the skirt to another dress; third, a window curtain—all made of linen, the waist being striped with blue, the other two pieces white, all worked in flowers, made of woolen floss. In this floss may be found, at this date, twenty-three different shades of color, and upon the waist are forty-seven different kinds of buds and flowers. Upon the skirt, which is supposed to be about one width, there are one hundred and sixty kinds, and it is estimated that upon the whole skirt there must have been no less than eight hundred buds and flowers worked. Upon the curtain there are one hundred and thirteen kinds, no two of which are considered to be alike. The flax was carded, spun and wove for the fabric of these relics, and the wool was carded and spun for the floss, and it was colored into all the various shades, and then worked into the almost countless flowers upon the fabric. Then the dresses were made, and the curtains stitched and worked, all this having been done by one and the same person, the great-great-grandmother of Mrs. Polly Norton, thus running back, on the line of descent, four generations, or more than six generations of the average life of men. These garments, so skillfully made, must have cost more than twelve months of work to perfect them, including the full set of curtains. The dresses look like the completion of a “sensation” toilet upon the charming person of this great-great-grandmother, as she moved in society more that two hundred years ago, in the colony of Massachusetts. Indeed, they take us back to the threshold of the days of the Pilgrims, and it would almost seem that this dress had brushed against the sword at the side of Miles Standish, or touched the gallant arm of a Governor Carver or Bradford. It was made in the old Bay State, far back beyond the days of cotton mills and whizzing spindles. Pioneer and General History of Geauga County [Ohio] 1880: pp. 42-3

Mrs Daffodil fears that this little story perpetuates the myth of pioneer ladies who made clothing entirely from “scratch,” although, both before and during the Revolution, there was an active trade smuggling the English textiles, laces, and luxury goods the Colonies desired.

Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdotes

You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.