United States -- Social life and customs -- To 1775
One of the cut-paper landscapes of Madam Deming, a Boston lady who was a
famous "papyrotamist," is here shown. It is now owned by James F. Trott,
Esq., of Niagara Falls. It is a view of Boston streets just previous to
the Revolution. In that handsome volume, the _Ten Broeck Genealogical
Record_, are reproductions of some of the landscape views by Albertina
Ten Broeck at the same date. They show the house and farm surroundings
of the old Ten Broeck "Bouwerie," the ancestral home in New York, and
give a wonderfully good idea of it. These are not in dead silhouette,
for an appearance of shading is afforded by finely cut lines and
intervening spaces. The highest form of cut-paper reproduction and
decoration ever reached was by the English woman, Mrs. Delaney, who died
in 1788, the friend of the Duchess of Portland, and intimate of George
III. and his queen. She reproduced in colored paper, in what she called
"paper mosaics," the entire flora of the United Kingdom, and it is said
it was impossible at first sight to distinguish these flowers from the
real ones.
CHAPTER XII
DRESS OF THE COLONISTS
At the time America was settled, rich dress was almost universal in
Europe among persons of any wealth or station. The dress of plain people
also, such as yeomen and small farmers and work-people, was plentiful
and substantial, and even peasants had good and ample clothing.
Materials were strongly and honestly made, clothing was sewed by hand,
and lasted long. The fashions did not change from year to year, and the
rich or stout clothes of one generation were bequeathed by will and worn
by a second and even a third and fourth generation.
In England extravagance in dress in court circles, and grotesqueness in
dress among all educated folk, had become abhorrent to that class of
persons who were called Puritans; and as an expression of their dislike
they wore plainer garments, and cut off their flowing locks, and soon
were called Roundheads. The Massachusetts settlers who were Puritans
determined to discourage extravagance in dress in the New World, and
attempted to control the fashions.
The Massachusetts magistrates were reminded of their duties in this
direction by sanctimonious spurring from gentlemen and ministers in
England. One such meddler wrote to Governor Winthrop in 1636: "Many in
your plantacions discover too much pride." Another stern moralist
reproved the colonists for writing to England "for cut work coifes, for
deep stammel dyes," to be sent to them in America. Others, prohibited
from wearing broad laces, were criticised for ordering narrow ones, for
"going as farr as they may."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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