[Illustration: WHAT MUST BE THE NEXT FASHION IN BONNETS]
This was the age of flounces and crinolines; it was also the age of ringlets. Bands and braids and hair nets are features of early Victorian _coiffure_, but ringlets were undoubtedly the favourite mode for full dress occasions. The fashion lasted for a good many years. You will find it in the ballroom scene depicted by Leech in 1847, and Leech illustrated Surtees's novel _Plain or Ringlets?_ in 1860. Of the "plain" variety of hairdressing there are several good examples in _Punch_, notably the head given above, with which we couple the ringleted belle illustrated at the foot of the same page.
[Footnote 28: "Æsthetical" was noticed as early as 1847 in a dig at _New Curiosities of Literature_, and in 1853 we read of an "æsthetic tea," at which "the atmosphere was one of architecture, painting, stained glass, brasses, heraldry, wood carving, madrigals, chants, motets, mysticism and theology."]
MRS. TURTLEDOVE: "Dearest Alfred! Will you decide now what we shall have for dinner?"
MR. TURTLEDOVE: "Let me see, poppet. We had a wafer yesterday--suppose we have a roast butterfly to-day."]
In the mid-'fifties, it may be noted, it was the fashion for women to wear gold and silver dust in their hair. In 1854 it was often dressed _à l'impératrice_ in imitation of the Empress Eugénie, and _Punch_ satirizes as an absurdity the general adoption of a _coiffure_ unsuited to people of certain ages, features, and positions--a wide scope for his wit. Tight lacing is seldom noted, and in one respect the ladies of the time were exempt from censure: high heels had not yet come in, or, if they had, they escaped _Punch's_ vigilant eye. In the main Leech, on whose pencil the burden of social commentary fell, was a genial satirist of feminine foibles. Whether they were dancing or riding or bathing, walking or doing nothing, the young women he drew were almost invariably comely to behold. And that reminds me that the decorum of sea-bathing in the 'fifties was promoted by the apparatus known as the awning, attached to bathing machines. Children were handed over to the rigours of old bathing-women as depicted in the terrifying picture opposite.