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NOTES ON ISSUE 5: GLOSSARY
PART 2 OF 4
…half of the half-dozen had
become members of a fantastic sect of Convulsionists, and were even
then considering within themselves whether they should foam, rage,
roar, and turn cataleptic on the spot….
The Convulsionists were a group of religious enthusiasts in France (“les
convulsionaires”), so-called for the “convulsions” they performed
under divine inspiration. During the reign of Louis XV, they occupied a
prominent place in fashionable and aristocratic circles (Sanders 85).
Dickens’ source for the “Convulsionists” is Mercier’s Tableau de
Paris (1781-8), where they are described in a chapter called “Amour du Merveilleux” (“Love of the
Marvelous”). Catalepsy – one of the symptoms attributed to Dickens’
Convulsionists – is a disease characterized by seizure and prolonged
unconsciousness, described in the Dictionary of Daily Wants
(1859) as follows:
CATALEPSY – A disease purely of a
nervous character, in which certain parts of the nervous system are in
a state of profound coma, or sleep, and others preternaturally excited.
The patient remains exactly in the position and attitude, in which he
was taken in the fit, for from two or three minutes[;] sometimes the
period extends to several hours. The chief characteristic of this
disease is the rigidity of the muscles and entire body; and though the
limbs may be moved into any position, the patient himself has no
control over them, or knowledge of what is done. The remote cause of
this disease depends upon some of those half revealed phenomena that
give rise to other maladies affecting the brain and spinal marrow;
while the more immediate cause is often any sudden paroxysm of joy or
anger, strong emotions of the mind, or inordinate grief. The attack
generally comes on without any previous warning. The treatment
is first to discover and remove all exciting causes and sources of
irritation, and then by a course of alteratives and tonics, purify and
brace the system. At the same time change of scene, exercise, and
sea-bathing act as powerful auxiliary means. Should the attack be
attended with headache, suffusion of the eyes, or ringing in the ears,
blood-letting must be resorted to, and a blister applied on the nape of
the neck, before adopting the course of systematic tonics already
mentioned. (250)
Catalepsy agrees with the general
behavior of Dickens’ Convulsionists in its unexpected onset, and its
relationship to “exciting” causes of undiscoverable origin. Mercier
describes the behavior of the Convulsionists as follows:
The convulsionaries have
accomplished tours de force which surpass, it must be admitted, the
most shocking things one could see at a fair. Few have the secret of
it; in addition, their contortions rightfully astonish us and even
scare the most intrepid glances and the spirits most on guard against
the marvelous. One can be assured that these tricks have something
truly extraordinary about them, although it is well known how much
ardour, fanaticism and the desire to make conversions can accomplish.
If it all seems a bit supernatural at times, this is highly
understandable. (qtd. in and translated by Maxwell 414)
Beside these Dervishes, were
other three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with
a jargon about ‘the Centre of Truth’…
A dervish is “[a] Muslim friar, who has taken vows of poverty and
austere life. Of these there are various orders, some of whom are known
from their fantastic practices as dancing or whirling, and as howling
dervishes” (OED). Like the
French Convulsionists of Louis XV’s time, dervishes – especially the
“whirling” or dancing dervishes – were religious enthusiasts who danced
under the influence of divine inspiration. The “jargon about ‘the
Centre of Truth’” refers to a pseudo-spiritual position described in
Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (1781-8), in a chapter on the
“Love of the Marvelous”:
A new sect [writes Mercier],
composed above all of young people, appears to have adopted the
widespread visions in a book titled Errors
and Truth, work of a hothead mystic who has had, nonetheless,
several flashes of genius.
This sect is driven by vaporous affections; a singular sickness common
to all France for half a century [previous to the 1780s, when this
account was written]; a sickness which favours every divergence of the
imagination and gives it a tendency towards the prodigious and the
supernatural. According to this sect, man is a degraded being, moral
evil is his own work; he has departed from the centre of truth; God, by
his clemency, keeps him within the circumference, when He might have
allowed him to wander out towards infinity; the circle is nothing but
the explosion of the centre: it is up to man to get back to the centre,
by way of a tangent.
In order to follow this tangent, the sectarians of these hollow ideas
live in the most rigorous continence, fasting up to the point of
wasting away altogether, thus procuring themselves ecstatic dreams, and
keeping at a distance all earthly things, in order to leave the soul
its complete liberty and to keep open a path to the centre of truth.
(qtd. in and translated by Maxwell 414-5)
Such frizzling and powdering
and sticking up of hair, such delicate complexions artificially
preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate
honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for
ever and ever.
Aristocratic fashions of the second half of the 18th century included –
in both France and England – wigs and headdresses of unprecedented
proportions and elaborateness. 19th-century English histories of
costume like Fairholt’s Costume in England (published in
1860, and thus roughly contemporary with A Tale of Two Cities)
commemorate the 18th-century penchant for elaborately-dressed false
hair.
These engravings from Fairholt, which accompany the text given below,
demonstrate the extent to which “frizzling and powdering and sticking
up of hair” increased in France and England from the 1760s through the
time of the French Revolution:
By contrasting the head-dress of the lady
in the cut already given
upon page 310 [above left] with the following group [above right,
figures
1-4], the reader will at once detect the great change effected
by fashion
in this particular portion of female costume. Fig[ure]s 1 and
2 are copied from engravings by G. Bickham to The Ladies
Toilet, or the Art of Head-dressing in its Utmost Beauty and
Extent, translated from the French of “Sieur Le Groos,
the inventor and most eminent professor of that science in Paris,”
published in 1768. The figures in this very curious book (of
which there are thirty) were so much admired in Paris, that
we are told, “not only all the hair-dressers of any note
have them, both plain and coloured, in their shops, but every
lady’s toilet is furnished with one of them, very elegantly
bound, and coloured to a very high degree of perfection.”
To describe fig[ure] 1, in the author’s own words: –
“This head is dressed in two rows of buckles (or close
curls), in the form of shellwork, barred and thrown backwards;
two shells, with one knot in the form of a spindle, composed
of a large lock or parcel of hair, flatted, or laid smooth,
taken from behind the head, in order to supply the place of
a plume or tuft of feathers.” Fig[ure] 2 is “dressed
with a row of buckles, the roots whereof are straight, two shells
(on the crown of the head), and a dragon or serpent (at the
side of the head, reaching to the shoulders), composed of two
locks of hair taken from behind the head, with a buckle inverted
(running upwards from the nape of the neck to the crown, where
it is fastened by a comb). These serpents or dragons are seldom
worn but at court-balls, or by actresses on the stage.”
Figures 3 and 4 in the illustration above
are taken from A Treatise on Hair by “David Ritchie,
hairdresser, perfumer, etc.” Ritchie’s title suggests
that the individuals responsible for fashion in hairdressing
were also professionally concerned in what Dickens calls “delicate
honour to the sense of smell.” Indeed, Fairholt notes
that hairdressers enjoyed an especially elevated status during
this period, and pretended to diverse areas of expertise:
[I]n these days, hairdressers were
great men, and wrote books upon their profession, laying no small claim
to the superior merit of “so important an art”; and not content with
merely describing the mode of dressing the hair, “favoured the world”
with much learning on the origin of hair, affirming it to be “a vapour
or excrement of the brain, arising from the digestion performed by it
at the instant of its nourishment”; with many other curious and learned
conclusions, into which we cannot think of following them. The figures
selected from this book [3&4 above] will show with what care and
dexterity ladies’ heads were then dressed, “with many a good pound of
wool” as a substratum, over which the hair was dexterously arranged, as
the reader here sees, then bound down with reticulations, and rendered
gay with flowers and bows. (312-3)
Dickens’ apparent disapprobation for
the processes described here, though obviously a matter of personal
preference, evidently has significant basis in fact. Fairholt describes
how
[h]eads thus carefully and
expensively dressed were, of course, not dressed frequently. The whole
process is given in the London Magazine of 1768: “False locks
to supply deficiency of native hair, pomatum in profusion, greasy wool
to bolster up the adopted locks, and grey powder to conceal dust.” A
hairdresser is described as asking a lady “how long it was since her
head had been opened and repaired; she answered, not above nine weeks;
to which he replied, that that was as long as a head could well go in
summer; and that therefore it was proper to deliver it now, as it began
to be a little hasardé.” The description of the
opening of the hair, and the disturbance thereby occasioned to its
numerous inhabitants, is too revolting for modern readers; but the
various advertisements of poisonous compounds for their destruction,
and the constant notice of these facts, prove that it is no
exaggeration. (313)
Despite such drawbacks, however, huge wigs
and headdresses remained in style up to the time of the French
Revolution. Dickens is describing French hair of the early 1780s,
and it was not until 1782 that headdresses topped out. As Fairholt
describes the trend,
The head-dress of the ladies still continued
as monstrous as ever, until in 1782 it reached the extraordinary
size depicted in our engraving [see below]. It consisted of
a heap of tow and pads, over which false hair was arranged,
and hung with ropes of pearls, gauze-trimming, ribbons, feathers,
and artificial flowers; until it added two or three feet to
the stature of the fair wearers. (320)
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