Riffling the Queen's knicker drawer

... well not our current monarch, but yesterday I did get to look at Queen Victoria's underwear during a special research visit. The lovely curators of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Historic Royal Palaces kindly agreed to let me look at some items in their collections, picking out some pieces with monograms and laundry marks.

Hampton Court Palace

Queen Victoria's split drawers, dated circa 1900, were made of fine linen and marked on the waistband with an exquisite, self-coloured, embroidered monogram and crown. The style of embroidery was much more elaborate than the marking on the Prince's Shirt and was also slightly larger. In short a completely different style of marking although it would have served the same purpose because it also had an number for laundry. You can see images here.

Queen Alexandra's nightdress had an almost identical style of monogram to Victoria's, this time below the front opening. Being from a similar date, it would seem this was a universal style for marking items in the royal household of this period.

Going back to 1810 (around the period of the Prince's Shirt) George III's white linen shirt was fascinating to see. The shirt was of a similar style to the Prince's Shirt, with a high standing collar and ruffled front opening, however it was less exuberant; the collar was shorter, the ruffle narrower, containing less fabric and the cuffs very short. The fabric of George's shirt was a fine linen but certainly nowhere near as fine as the Prince's Shirt, and there was no decorative embroidery around buttonholes. This completely took me by surprise as I had expected it would be comparable in quality. It would seem our Prince 'AF' had exceptionally fine taste indeed!

What was really wonderful to see was that the style of laundry marking was rather like to ours. On the right above the side vent was a tiny red cross stitch crown, the initials GR and the date 1810. The George IV shirt exhibited at Dress for Excess at Brighton Pavilion had a similar laundry mark.

Although there is no, one individual proof everything seems to point to The Prince's Shirt being exactly what it looks like. Fantastic news!

Research is... not tidy

It has occurred to me recently that while trying to tackle the Princes Shirt as a 'proper' academic project I may loose something of my personal angle. In discussion with a colleague yesterday it seems that many people feel that Prown's methodology for material culture analysis has it's downfall in this area. There is a danger of loosing huge amounts of contextual information by being blinkered to the surrounding story of an object.

I also feel that things are not neat and often cannot be compartmentalised, research cannot always be arranged to happen in the 'correct' order and it is not possible to remove emotion from the process. That said I do appreciate the importance of having a methodology, of avoiding bias as much as possible and of keeping an open mind.

So I have made the decision to look at things in a more holistic manner. Why not make measurements of the shirt and compare them with other examples? Why not look at the garment shape while reading about the evolution of the shirt? I think from now on I will try to use Prown as a framework or a check list for my project, rather than a rule book. I do not think it holds all the answers. I want to look wider, I want to ask experts and get advice. I also want to track my journey in a more honest way; the twists and turns, the dead ends and the don't knows.

Now that sounds like a plan!