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teaching girls ‘accomplishments’ such as dancing or playing the harp that would display their prettiness and grace to the greatest advantage.

    Black Monday , or The Departure for School (by John Jones after W. R. Bigg, 1790). The little boy in his skeleton suit is less than pleased at the prospect of a new term, although his older brother in his Eton Suit appears more stoical.

    Morning employments. Needlework was an important forum for self-expression for young ladies frequently denied an adequate education.

    Fashion plate from a ladies’ pocket book for 1795 showing the similarity between the women’s slim muslin gowns and the child’s frock. Both ladies wear the towering plumes so popular in the 1790s; the lady on the right wears a Mameluke cap like that which Jane borrowed in 1799.

    Muslin gowns, c . 1800–10 with cream embroidery of roses and foliage, and c . 1820 with all-over leaf pattern and gathered empire line bust. With gowns so sheer underwear really was a necessity!
    With its low neck-line, small puffed sleeves and high waist with sash, the infant frock persisted with girls into later childhood and quite literally became the model for women’s gowns during the first decade of the nineteenth century with the bodice à l’enfant with its rounded neckline with a running drawstring en coulisse . Sashes were an important accessory to young girls and in Mansfield Park Fanny Price fears that her cousins ‘could not but hold her cheap when they found she had but two sashes and had never learned French.’ The sweet prettiness and simplicity of these fresh, mainly white muslin gowns embodied the spirit of youthful freedom, but only if that freedom asked nothing more than to walk awhile gathering posies.
    The one freedom women did gain was release from their corsets. Because of the natural ideal of allowing the body to display its given shape, caricatures usually portray women of the turn of the century as without underwear. The tight lacing of the eighteenth century giving a small natural waistline was gone, but stays did not disappear entirely for long when it was realised that some natural shapes are more desirable than others. Instead, stays were looser or concentrated higher at the artificial waistline below the bosom.
    At this point stays still had shoulder straps, and in September 1813 Jane was ‘really glad to hear that they are not to be worn so much off the shoulders as they were’, and was pleased to note that ‘the stays now are not made to force the bosom up at all; – that was a very unbecoming, unnatural fashion.’ She may well have been referring to a ‘divorce’ – a punning name for a new corset that kept the breasts separate and according to The Mirror of the Graces in 1811 ‘made a sort of fleshy shelf, disgusting to the beholder’.
    Whilst gowns had the extra weight of a train at the back they retained more modesty, but when the train became less fashionable there could be problems with the buttocks being visible or – horror of horrors – with the delicate fabric becoming caught between them! The answer was the ‘invisible petticoat’, which was a tube of flesh-coloured knitted stockinette worn tight around the legs. It restricted walking to tiny steps but allowed the gown to fall smoothly without any unsightly shadows of what lay beneath.

    The Stays (‘The Progress of the Toilet’, Gillray, c . 1810). ‘Her bosom, which Nature planted at the bottom of her chest, is pushed up by means of wadding and whalebone to a station so near her chin that in a very full subject that feature is sometimes lost between the invading mounds.’ (The Morning Herald , c . 1790s . )
    There was a move to introduce drawers but despite the obvious practicality, this was vehemently resisted because they were associated with women of low virtue, prostitutes or dancers who had been obliged to wear flesh-coloured silk knit tights since the days of Louis XV. Riding habits offered more freedom, and