A History of Shopping by Dorothy Davis

Author:Dorothy Davis [Davis, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Reference
ISBN: 9781134563104
Google: YcV_AAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-08-27T01:18:27+00:00

Barbers had ceased to be general surgeons in the sixteenth century although for many years afterwards they were prepared to undertake any number of small personal services of a similar nature along with shaving and hair-cutting and, as the verse above indicates, blood-letting and dentistry. Philip Stubbes in 1583 allows barbers to be expensive but necessary tradesmen, ‘or we should be ugglesome to behold’. But in Restoration times, the fashion of wearing wigs came over from France, and the barber’s trade took a sudden upward flight into dizzy prosperity. At first they charged £2, or £3 for a good wig, but the elaboration and the price increased over the years, so that £10 or £15 was a common price in the early eighteenth century. A dandy might go to £40 or £50 for an exquisite creation—the sort that ‘the touch of a hat never profaned’—but even this did not save him from buying a hat, for he still needed one to tuck under his arm.

One thing that drove up the price of ordinary wigs was the increasing scarcity of hair. ‘Money for live hair’ was a common notice in a barber’s window. And although it was the thing to do when first embarking on a wig, to trade in one’s own hair for part of the price, this was obviously a once-and-for-all economy. The Protestant Mercury of 1700 mentions £3 an ounce as the price offered by wigmakers that year for fine hair, and ‘when human hair was scarce, a little horse-hair supplied the place in the parts least in sight’. When wigs were still in their infancy the Great Plague occurred and there was some fear that the hair of plague victims might be used or even that the fear of such a thing might drive wigs out of fashion. Vanity triumphed, however, over the darkest suspicions. And was there an element of laziness? The night before he had audience of the Queen, and before he owned a wig, Pepys sent for his barber after supper to come and trim and curl him. The barber’s task took so long that he was locked in the Admiralty building where Pepys lived and a porter had to be fetched out of bed to let him out.

Pepys explains, with characteristic frankness, his feelings about wigs:

3 May 1663

I did try two or three borders and periwigs, meaning to wear one, and yet I have no stomach for it but that the pains of keeping my hair clean is so great. He trimmed me and at last I parted, but my mind was almost altered from my first purpose, from the trouble that I forsee in wearing them also.

26 October, 1663 [The day he deserted poor Mr Jervas at the Swan] Being resolved to go a little handsomer than I have hitherto . . . to one or two periwig shops about the Temple, having been much displeased with one that we saw, a head of greasy old woman’s hair, at Jervas’s this morning. And I think I shall fit myself with one very handsomely made.

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