Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg
Women's Wig Fad
"The Flower Garden"
Caricature by Mary Darly, 1777
On page 272 of Fashions in Hair: The First Five
Thousand Years", Richard Corson writes:
Unfortunately, some of these satires on contemporary
customs are so subtle in their exaggeration and the fact and
fiction so skillfully interspersed that occasionally they
later writers have accepted them verbatim and have listed
as historical fact that which was invented purely for purposes
of satire. In fact, little more than a century later the method
of hair dyeing described [in a satire on the preceding pages]
was reported quite seriously as one of the curiosities of
eighteenth-century life.
In "Wigs", published posthumously in All the Year 'Round,
(Volume 9, p. 450), Charles Dickens writes:
If ladies head-dresses, rather than real wigs and
perukes, were the subject of the present paper, we should
have to notice the monstrous height (literally, not merely
figuratively) which such head-gear attained in the latter
quarter of the century. Queen Marie Antoinette is aid to
have invented a coiffure which represented all the refinements
of landscape gardening—hills and valleys of hair, dewy
prairies, silver streamlets, foaming torrents, symmetrical
gardens, and so forth.
Thus, Dickens, while not certain about attribution
("is said to have invented"), thinks that such a monstrous
coiffure was literally used by Marie Antoinette. We cannot be
sure that Dickens did not mean this literally; we are limited
to what he actually wrote.
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