the merest touch of lippy
My search for smiles is taking me to some wonderful places. From just before 1770, a heady mix of continental fashions and English folly created the ‘macaronis’, described in Oxford Magazine as
“There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst us. It is called Macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.”
Wigs became huge, topped by a small hat which could only be removed with the tip of the sword. In a cruel age, these gallants were ripe for satire, and the printmakers set to with a will.
There’s a whole collection of them here.
According to this source, the Macaronis were closely associated with homosexuality. After the conviction for sodomy and subsequent pardon of Captain Robert Jones in 1772, a magazine called The Public Ledger
“.. castigated Captain Jones’s supporters as maccaronies: “the country is over-run with Catamites, with monsters of Captain Jones’s taste, or, to speak in a language which all may understand, with MACCARONIES. This word especially connotes upper-class effeminate practitioners of sodomy – a crime imported from Italy by our spindle-shanked Gentry, who make the grand Tour but to bring home the vices of our Neighbours, and return, if possible, greater Coxcombs than they were before Embarkation.”
The word is also the origin of the verse in Yankee Doodle Dandy, originally a British regimental song mocking colonial pretensions:
Yankee Doodle came to town
Riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his hat
And called it Macaroni
The fashion of the male periwig, which started with Louis the Thirteen in France in the 1620’s, migrated to Britain on the shiny, shaved pate of Charles the Second. It lasted in civilian life for at least 150 years, although William Pitt the Younger started its decline by taxing wig powder in 1791. A group of Whig grandees cut off their queues in public protest.
I love this wiggy image, by the incomparable Thomas Rowlandson, who still makes contemporary cartoonists look squeamish.
March 15th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
fantastic post, David. thanks for clearing that bit up about Yankie Doodle, I’ve been puzzling over that one for decades.
So what happened to wigs I wonder. The French Revolution started with them on and finished with Napoleon’s Caesarian comb-over. They must have suddenly seemed as dated as the Ancien Regime, I guess.
March 15th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
Aargh! Why does that smile remind me of Phillip Rudock’s rare attempts to approximate a normal ’smile’??