A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Eliza Potter

Camille Silvy, Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Sarah Davies)

(July 16) This one came to me via A Dress a Day, whose Erin mentioned it because of all the descriptions of 1840s and '50s clothes, particularly ball gowns.

But I got interested in it because of the cool time-travel effect of reading the memoirs of a woman who had a unique vantage on the aristocracy of her day, and who had travelled a lot and seen many things. She didn't have much school -- she started dressing hair and nannying at a young age -- but, despite a certain amount of disjointedness in her narrative, she was able to tell a good anecdote and make acute observations, and was fun to read. "Good on her that she wrote a book," I was thinking.

It was then a shock to find out when I was already about 50 pages into it that Eliza Potter was black! This made her abolitionist stance and her many descriptions of herself challenging slave-owners all the more heroic, and I’d been convinced of her courage already.

It was also surprising to see how different racism was at that time. Iangy (Potter's name for herself as narrator) and other black people consort freely in white company (Iangy was often at high-society parties as a guest on top of peeking in on them when she was dressing hair) and that is OK because they are free people. However, slaves were not allowed to sit at the same table as free people (although Iangy makes a point of challenging this several times and kind of shames some conservatives).

There was a surprising amount of interracial marriage -- white men marrying black women mostly -- and not infrequently it was a slave becoming the wife of a plantation owner or a well-to-do householder. Iangy reviews a good number of these instances, because she always found ex-slaves to be the cruellest slave-masters.

Also, slavery was not always wretched abuse, according to some of Iangy's stories. Sometimes the slaves are able to require conditions when they are bought and sold, and these are always honoured.

Next most cognitively dissonant: the rampant adultery. People were always cheating on their spouses and carrying on, at least in the upper classes, and quite often with little damage to their social status. In the Victorian Age! Why do we think people are more "immoral" today??

So, yes, it's a gossip-fest.