This paper is the first to consider the role of late-nineteenth century British beauty culturists in establishing the respectability of anti-aging goods and services. It surveys self-published beauty texts, periodical press coverage, and advertisements to ask how female beauty providers positioned their businesses so as to enhance the reputation of their wares. These texts reveal that, by foregrounding the respectability, modernity, and novelty of regenerative techniques, British beauty culturists challenged existing narratives of commercial beautification, shifting feminine regeneration from the realm of vanity to necessity, from a question of moral character to commercial endeavor. However, these discursive strategies, not to mention the use of technology for the purpose of female bodily enhancement, were not welcomed by all. The paper subsequently turns to police court coverage and medical journals that criticized beauty "quacks" for reportedly duping unsuspecting female customers. The pursuit of duplicitous "beauty doctors" by unsatisfied customers and medical publications comes to the fore in a concluding profile of Anna Ruppert, a popular London-based beauty culturist who found herself charged under Ireland's Pharmaceutical Act in 1893 for selling arsenical compounds. And yet, despite public scrutiny, the British press, consumers, and commercial providers increasingly embraced a more overt beauty culture that would prevail through the interwar period. This paper argues that this was due, in part, to discursive shifts advanced by fin de siècle beauty culturists, who paid the price for these interventions, existing as a liminal group straddling respectability and quackery.
In recent years, historians of American, French, and global beauty consumption have charted the rich relationship linking beautifying goods to self‐fashioning and the body, historical subjectivities, and the construction of gender and racial identities. Yet, despite productive attention to male beauty in Britain and its relationship to masculinity and the history of sexuality, little attention has been devoted to women's beauty consumption in modern British history. This article surveys literature on U.S., French, and global female beauty consumption to argue for further study of beauty commodities and their production by historians of modern Britain and its empire. The history of British women's beauty consumption intersects with important historical developments that make it worthy of exploration, most notably the use of beautifying and grooming goods as tools for self‐fashioning in the British imperial context. Ultimately, a focus on female beauty consumers and producers positions women as key figures in the formation of or resistance to the British imperial project.
In February 1868 the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine printed a letter enquiring about experiences with hair treatments. Correspondent C. M. R. requested advice from readers of the "Englishwoman's Conversazione" on a widely available commercial hair restorer. On news that Mrs. Allen's Dressing caused itchy red scalps in two acquaintances, "I bethought," she wrote, "of your invaluable Conversazione, which so often helps us out of difficulties"; she felt "most thankful if any of your subscribers who may have used this preparation will kindly inform me whether the result was similar in their case." 1 C. M. R.'s letter set off a chain of responses over the coming months, including a warning from respondent Constance that Mrs. Allen's Dressing contained hazardous amounts of mercury. Constance's disclosure in turn prompted a defensive response from the manufacturer, who asserted the "natural" makeup of his company's product and impugned Constance's motives. 2 Other responses followed both refuting and supporting Constance's charge, accompanied by correspondents' own tried-and-true personal recipes for hair restorers. Exchanges like that of C. M. R. and her contemporaries illuminate the role of the correspondence column as a textual community of participants, as defined by Margaret Beetham and Lynn Warren. The conversazione functioned as a textual forum where female interlocutors engaged in the production of personal and collective meanings. According to Beetham and 2 Warren, columns could operate as relatively independent entities despite editorial attempts to manage their content, forging a sense of belonging to a discursive milieu populated by textual identities. 3 As part of this exchange, participants in the "Englishwoman's Conversazione" periodically debated daily practices of bodily management despite popular opprobrium of female beautification through the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, in addition to questions about fashion and needlework, the column encouraged a widening circle of consumer knowledge encompassing a commercially conscious public sphere of citizens who debated the efficacy and, more importantly, the safety of widely available beauty products. Although C. M. R. reportedly discussed hair treatments with two friends, she relied on the larger community of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine's correspondents to substantiate their negative claims. She placed her trust in a textual community of women facilitated by the popular press in an effort to buttress traditional forms of advice shared among female intimates. Her effort bore fruit; it elicited Constance's response that exposed the dangerous chemical makeup of the hair product, a factor unbeknownst to C. M. R.'s unfortunate acquaintances. C. M. R.'s letter, with its focus on health and beauty, appeared at a moment when the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine was embroiled in a contentious and highly documented debate over corset training, first ignited in March 1867. In that same year another sensational correspondence emerged. This time the topic of...
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