All the Rage

In 1787 Thomas Lee Shippen, an American student at Inner Temple, London, shipped a hat to his sister Anne Home Livingston in Philadelphia. Nancy, as she was called by kith and kin, was living at Shippen House with her parents after her marriage to a scoundrel with a taste for scandal and no taste for divorce fell through.  Tommy Shippen was a bon vivant and a bit of a clothes horse, writing home from London: "I am so transformed already by dress that you would hardly know me, curls to my hair, round hat, raven's gray coat, black satin vest," etc. Tommy was keen on the latest fashion, and keen to lift the spirits of his melancholy sister with a magnificent bit of millinery fresh from the frontlines where Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, set the standard. If not for the droll prose penned in exposition of the hat by their uncle Arthur Lee, the transit of this hat from London to New York to Philadelphia might have escaped notice. Tune in this month to track the itinerary of the grandest, most anticipated hat in human history! 

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Transcript

Stratford Mail

VII. 

Welcome to Stratford Mail, a Production of Stratford Hall Historic Preserve, where the voices of American history still speak. This episode is made possible by the generous support of Chapter 23 of the Colonial Dames of America. Here now is our Director of Research, Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey.

This month we surrender to the lure of fashion as a fabulous hat wends its lazy way from London to New York and on to the Shippen House in Philadelphia. 

The Shippen house at 238 South Fourth Street in Philadelphia was home to William Shippen Jr., a co-founder of America’s first medical school at the College of Philadelphia and Director General of Hospitals for the Continental Army from ‘77 to ‘81. Shippen married Alice Lee of Stratford Hall, and their Philadelphia home became the northern headquarters of the Lees of Stratford, especially during the revolution. It was from Shippen House that Richard Henry Lee made his way to the Continental Congress on June 7th, 1776, and there shook the earth with his motion, [Richard Henry] “that these united Colonies are, and of right out to be free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” Richard Henry and his brothers Francis Lightfoot and Arthur Lee were regulars at Shippen House.  

Their niece Anne Home Shippen called ‘Nancy’ was born to the Shippens of Philadelphia on February 24, 1763; she was the bright star of her doting family and a belle of society. Some will have heard of Nancy’s pretty cousin, Peggy Shippen, a loyalist recruited by British spymaster John Andre and wife of turncoat Benedict Arnold. Unlike the slightly older Peggy who conducted espionage against Americans, teenage Nancy was immersed in the established system of ‘female education,’ and she spent her days in the practice of harpsichord and dance, French and etiquette, needlework and embroidery, all at Mistress Rogers’ School for Young Ladies in Trenton, NJ. 

The school was an oasis of ‘business as usual’ for elite girls even while squalls of war raged around it. Despite the recent American defeat at the Battle of Brandywine, her mother Alice writes Nancy 11 days later with guidance expressive of a kind of quarantine from current events: [Alice Lee Shippen] “do remember my dear how much of the beauty and usefulness in life depends on a proper conduct in the several relations of life … Needlework is a most important branch of female education, and tell me how you have improved in holding your head and shoulders, in making a curtsy, in going out or coming into a room, in giving and receiving, holding your knife and fork, walking and setting. These things contribute so much to a good appearance that they are of great consequence.” Nancy’s 12-year-old brother Tommy was a student at the Needwood Academy of Rev. Bartholomew Booth in Frederick County, Maryland, where the war and news of it made slightly deeper inroads than at Mistress Roger’s. Tommy’s ‘modern’ curriculum included classical literature and the ‘polite arts,’ but also technical and vocational training in subjects like Merchants Accounts, Navigation, and Surveying.   

By 1786 the war was done and dusted, and Tommy was studying law at Inner Temple, London, though he was more socialite than scholar. In London Tommy’s immersion in society and fashion will turn to the material advantage of sister Nancy, who had returned to Shippen House in 1783 after a catastrophic marriage to Colonel Henry Beekman Livingston, whose numerous affairs and several natural children were a scandal too far. Nancy lived at Shippen House in alienation from her brutish husband and tortuous isolation from her infant daughter Margaret Beekman Livingston (b. Dec. 12, 1781), who had been placed in the care of Nancy’s sympathetic mother-in-law, the Old Lady Livingston. To break the tedium of Shippen House and to alleviate symbolically Nancy’s circumstantial alienation from society, Tommy (speaking of himself in the third person) promises to secure her a vogue new hat:     

[Thomas Lee Shippen] "He would send you a hat also … but as it is not yet determined what will be the fashionable one this winter, and as he wishes to let you know the fashions by what he sends, he waits with patience until their high Mightenesses the Dutchesses, the Marchionesses, and the wives of Earls … come to town, hold their Council and decide the knotty point."

Decide the knotty point they must have, for Tommy came good and in 1787 shipped a hat to Nancy in Philadelphia via their learned uncle Arthur Lee, who then sat on the newly formed Board of Treasury in New York. To judge by the space Arthur devotes to the hat’s safe passage in his June letter to Nancy, it was obviously a point of anxiety for her.

[Arthur] "At length the dear delightful, long expected hat is arrived. It came in a square box, somewhat smaller than a common imperial."

The reference to a common imperial is to a roomy rooftop luggage carrier custom-fitted to carriages in the 18th century. It was a big box.  

[Arthur] "I was obliged to open it in order to pay the duty on the value of the contents and those contents were–a hat. This vast machine contained–a hat. The mountain labored and brought forth—a mouse."

Arthur’s use of this old proverb suggests the packaging was so grand as to dwarf its contents, which is astonishing given his subsequent description of the contents in question:

[Arthur] "The rim of this hat is somewhat less than a yard diameter and the crown not above two feet and a half high. The Crown is of blue tiffany, or some such stuff with a large bunch of white ribband appended and hanging down about two feet. The rim is white silk edged with a kind of white velvet, or silk plush … I apprehend, upon the whole, that it is a winter hat and will be useless to you now; except to shew how much your brother wished to gratify you." 

Arthur pledges to send this monstrosity by sea lest it be jostled to pieces by coach, but cannot forbear offering his opinion of the headwear.  

[Arthur] "It is in my opinion–an absolute fright–but what is my opinion to the fashion–a dear, fascinating word, that renders everything charming." 

Uncle Arthur did not ship the hat with sufficient alacrity for impatient Nancy, who peppered him for updates as to its status:

[Arthur] "O the hat! It is gone by the Philadelphia packet … I delivered it with my own hands to the Captain praying and beseeching his tender care of it as beeing more precious than all the things his vessel had ever carried before." 

Nancy was unimpressed, and Arthur was once more compelled to reassure her when the hat hadn’t arrived according to her timetable:

[Arthur] "When it arrives and arrive it will unless Thetis should bribe the skipper to betray his trust and deliver it to her; I hope it will be announced by a general ringing of bells and discharge of artillery and be carried in procession through the streets … and Dr. Rush deliver a lecture on this wondrous work of the milliner."

It so happens the ancient sea goddess Thetis had no need for Nancy’s hat, but the three month lag between the promise of its shipment from New York and its arrival in Philadelphia sorely tested Nancy’s patience, and Nancy in turn tested her uncle Arthur’s. In the end, he took it in good humor and applied his wit to an essay on the missing item:

[Arthur] "That hat–that charming hat–my dear Nancy, where shall we find it? I have searched Ancient and Modern history for it, in vain … Homer, among all the charming things he mentions … has not one so charming as this hat. Whether Helen wore such hat, when she enamored Paris, and involved not only all Greece and Asia, but all the Gods and Goddesses in war, is what I cannot discover in any book Ancient or Modern … Nor could I trace one glimpse of it among those enchanting things that enabled Cleopatra to seduce Anthony from the empire of the world … After having read twelve volumes of Ancient history, with twenty-four of German commentaries and illustrations in folio, I have not been able to determine whether such a hat was among the imperial ornaments of Semiramis or of Queen Zenobia, or whether that renowned Princess Thalestria wore it, when she marched six thousand miles to try whether Aexander was as invincible in the fields of Venus as in Mars. The books of Chronicles and of Kings … would not inform me whether the amorous Queen of Sheba wore this hat when she came enveloped in spices to hold dalliance with the sapient King."

Arthur was having fun, and why not–he knew it would arrive, if not precisely when. His playfulness was an expression of love for his niece. 

[Arthur] "You see, my dear Nancy, with what arduous assiduity I have labored to trace this hat, because you are anxious about it. After all, perhaps Mr Herschell’s forty foot telescope will discover it to have become one of the brightest satellites of the Georgium Sidus. Oh that we had another Pope [the poet Alexander Pope] to consecrate its transmutation to everlasting fame. Then might Nancy’s hat outshine Belinda’s hair; and reign among the most brilliant and beautiful constellations that adorn our Poetic sky."   

Whence came the inspiration for this fashionable monstrosity seemingly lost in transit? What had Tommy Shippen seen? The reigning fashionista of Georgian London was the beautiful, charming, intensely passionate and intelligent Georgiana Cavendish (nee Spencer), the Duchess of Devonshire, who like Nancy Livingston was a devoted mother locked into an unhappy marriage (not unlike Georgiana’s descendant, the late Diana Spencer). 

Georgiana’s influence on fashion was mammoth. In ‘74 she set society ablaze with her three-foot ostrich feather headress, imported from Paris; in ‘75 she pioneered extravagantly designed and themed hair towers, for example, a nautical themed hair tower might have tiny wooden ships and a sea creature tossed artfully among Georgiana’s roiling auburn curls. In ‘83 Georgiana appeared in a free-flowing muslin dress tied about the waist with a ribbon. All of these innovations were immediately copied and multiplied across high society and trickled down in more modest forms to the underclasses. Was Tommy Lee Shippen inspired by the Picture Hat–so called because the broad brim frames the face–which was popularized by Georgiana and on prominent show in the 1786 portrait of her by Sir Thomas Gainsborough? Or perhaps he was captivated by the beribboned behemoth of the sort sported by Mary Smith (nee Cunliffe) in the 1786 portrait of her by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Whatever his inspiration, big hats were the rage, and Tommy’s gift (to judge by uncle Arthur’s prose) was spot on.

Nancy’s hat was neither to be found among the moons of the planet Uranus (the Georgium Sidus) nor among the verse of Mr. Alexander Pope, but whether it finally topped Nancy’s head we cannot say with certainty due to the lapse in her journals and the failure of correspondence to confirm it. This may be another instance in which the journey proves to be more important than the arrival. Nancy’s journey was far from finished, though it seemed so to her. In 1791 she dismissed her life as “uninteresting” and so marred by misfortune that she despaired of earthly success and took shelter in the promises and practice of religion. 78-year old Nancy died in August 1841; her life was turbulent and deeply shadowed, fractured and disfigured by the ten thousand wrongs of her wretch of a husband, and complicated by the reciprocal but chaste desire for the true love of her life, Louis Guillaume Otto, a ranking member of the French delegation to the colonies from 1779 to 1791, but that is a story for a different day.         

Thank you for listening and subscribing to Stratford Mail, from Stratford Hall Historic Preserve in Westmoreland County, Virginia, I’m Director of Research Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey

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Sound effects courtesy of Pixabay
Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of Play.ht and Murf.ai (except Dr. Steffey)

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2023