Not so long ago, in a Barnard Castle antique shop, I found a brooch of silver and whalebone. A beautiful thing, heavy in the hand, I was all set to buy it until I turned it over, at which point I discovered why it was such a bargain. On its other side, beneath an oval of glass, was a twisting rope of brown hair, dulled by time but curled there nevertheless for all eternity. “Yes, it’s a mourning brooch,” said the owner of the shop, trying to keep his voice light. My face said it all. Here was yet another squeamish 21st-century customer, unwilling to wear someone else’s hair on her coat, yet reluctant, too, simply to open the locket and throw it all away.
It’s hard to believe now, when people go to funerals in jeans and anoraks, that mourning dress was once so elaborate, its conventions both strict and ghoulish. But in the 19th and early 20th century, death was all around. Surely someone was entitled to benefit. In her new book, The Button Box, Lynn Knight cites some of the more macabre jewellery favoured by bereaved Victorians: the brooches like those worn by the women in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, in which the hair of the loved one was used to execute mausoleums and weeping willows; the buttons that resembled weeping eyes. But as she also notes, jewellery wasn’t the half of it. Drapers’ assistants knew “the correct scale of lamentation by trimming”. John Lewis sold 50 kinds of crepe. A 19th-century skit had a woman being shown a widow’s silk: “Watered, you perceive, to match the sentiment. It is called ‘Inconsolable’, and is very much in vogue in Paris for matrimonial bereavements.”
Knight’s account of mourning dress is provoked by the various bits of jet and black glass that reside in her button box, an inlaid Victorian writing case that replaced the Quality Street tin her grandmother Annie once used for the same purpose. It’s this wooden chest that provides the structure for her book, a history of women’s domestic and work lives told through their clothes. For Knight, its contents, being mostly inherited from the women in her family, have an evocative glamour. They tell so many stories. If a lowly linen button makes her think of the working-class matrons who once patronised her great grandparents’ corner shop in Chesterfield (linen buttons were made to survive the mangle), then the sight of a chunky turquoise number recalls the 1960s, when her mother bought the boxy suit it once adorned – and so on. In all, she pulls from its depths some 28 buttons, buckles and clasps, spinning a brief chapter from each one.
She proceeds through the decades in chronological order, from the Flappers to Biba via the utility fashions of the second world war and Dior’s New Look. A ladybird-shaped button is her excuse to ponder the Start-Rite shoes and cardigans she wore as a child; a wooden toggle from a duffle coat is the spur for some thoughts on the invention of the teenager, and of Sindy, a doll Knight liked to dress either as a mod, or as an air hostess. When she runs out of buttons – and when she starts giving her chapters titles such as The Small, Drab Button, you do feel her conceit is becoming rather forced – she turns to some of the other things in her box: a flower that once decorated a hat, a silver thimble, the doorknob from her childhood doll’s house.
Along the way, she digs up some good stories. It is fascinating to read, in a section about makeup, of the sainted Vera Brittain sacking a maid for wearing face powder; of Enid Bagnold (the author of National Velvet) flashing the Cash’s name tape inside her school vest at the proprietor of a Bond Street shop, the better that she might prove the identity of her father, and thus procure a new hat on tick. Some of the technical information she includes is also interesting. I was struck by her account of the way that velvet used to be manufactured, the mill girls lifting the tiny threads on the cloth using a knife-like implement to raise the nap. The women who performed this task, walking the length of the factory on their “velvet runs”, reckoned they covered the equivalent of the distance from Stoke-on-Trent to Manchester in a working week.
But it must be said, too, that there is very little that is revelatory or even vaguely new in this book: Knight has written of her Chesterfield relations at some length before (in Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue: The Story of an Accidental Family), and you can find better, more detailed accounts of, say, the coming of the New Look elsewhere. This wouldn’t matter much if her prose had swing, if it was as lively as a well cut coat or a full skirt. But mostly, it doesn’t. Save for her vague conviction that her button box is a repository of dreams, her narrative has no thrust. Her modus operandi hardly varies, each chapter beginning with a sometimes rather laboured description of a particular button or buckle, and ending with dribs and drabs of history, personal and garnered. It is, alas, a one-thing-after-another kind of a book: delightful in places and lovely to dip into, but on the wearying side if read from start to finish.
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