Sanitary and Social Lectures, etc by Charles Kingsley
page 60 of 220 (27%)
page 60 of 220 (27%)
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patent. They are most common in--I had almost said they are
confined to--those classes of well-to-do persons who are the least educated; who have no standard of taste of their own; and who do not acquire any from cultivated friends and relations: who, in consequence, dress themselves blindly according to what they conceive to be the Paris fashions, conveyed at third-hand through an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the fact--for fact I believe it to be--that Paris fashions are invented now not in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the sake of producing, through variety, increased expenditure, and thereby increased employment; according to the strange system which now prevails in France of compelling, if not prosperity, at least the signs of it; and like schoolboys before a holiday, nailing up the head of the weather-glass to insure fine weather. Let British ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty which are as eternal as any other of nature's laws; which may be seen fulfilled, as Mr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every flower and every leaf, in every sweeping down and rippling wave; and they will be able to invent graceful and economical dresses for themselves, without importing tawdry and expensive ugliness from France. Let me now go a step farther, and ask you to consider this: There are in England now a vast number, and an increasing number, of young women who, from various circumstances which we all know, must in after life be either the mistresses of their own fortunes, or the earners of their own bread. And, to do that wisely and well, they must be more or less women of business, and to be women of business they must know something of the meaning of the words |
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