Lucinda Gosling - Debutantes and the London Season

DEBUTANTES AND THE LONDON SEASON

Lucinda Gosling

Court dress designs by Norman Hartnell, published in Harpers Bazaar in 1930. The mothers gown is of jewelled lace with a train of panne velvet, the debutantes is a souffle of soft tulle frills, lightly jewelled with a train of transparent ruffled tulle fabric which Hartnell approved of for young girls.

SHIRE PUBLICATIONS

Stylish society at Ascot, incorporated into a vibrant masthead design by the artist Peter for The Bystander in 1927.

AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB

THE LONDON SEASON

HOW TO BE A DEBUTANTE

THE COURTS

DANCING AND ROMANCING

THE LAST PARADE

FURTHER READING

Front cover of The Spheres Season Number from June 1927. The quality weekly magazines took an unflagging interest in The Season and each years new crop of debutantes.

EACH SPRING, from the mid-nineteenth century through to the beginning of the Second World War, as the blossom on the trees in Londons exclusive squares unfurled, the well bred and well-heeled left their country estates and headed for the capital. Ahead of them travelled servants to prepare houses in readiness for their familys arrival. Across Mayfair, dustsheets were removed from heirloom furniture and windows were flung open to air fusty rooms. This flurry of activity prompted hotels, florists, hairdressers and caterers to place advertisements in society magazines, and to wait for their order books to fill up as invitations and RSVPs to endless balls, parties, evening receptions and events criss-crossed the city. This seasonal migration, these fevered preparations, heralded the start of what was known as the London Season; an intensive three-month social whirl participated in by those whose breeding, wealth and status marked them out as the so-called cream of British society.

Society once described the countrys uppermost social ranks, a handful of ducal families sometimes described as the ton. But an expanding population in the early nineteenth century led to an expansion of Society itself. Marital links were forged further down the chain, between the aristocracy and the landed gentry, and, in turn, the middle class, as younger sons of larger families cast their net wider in order to find a wife. In addition, increasing industrialisation created a growing contingent whose fortunes were made rather than inherited. These were new money families; those who had the wealth but not, necessarily, the connections to gain admittance to Society.

H. V. Horton, writing a history of Mayfair in 1927, claimed that the origins of the Season lay in Mayfairs gentrification in the early eighteenth century, with the Season then lasting from December to the end of May. It did not follow the same rigid pattern as later centuries; Society followed the court and gravitated towards the great houses of political leaders but found entertainment at public spaces such as Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens or in Covent Garden theatres. A commentator in 1871 wrote of a previous generation that they [the very great] should partake of these pleasures in company that was always mixed and sometimes more than dubious as to its quality, supping, dancing, and playing at cards and hazard and yet to the best of our knowledge no special harm or annoyance appears to have resulted from this singular comingling of the classes. Advertising ones rank and station through segregation did not seem to occur to the eighteenth-century nobleman.

Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in the eighteenth century. Before the more intensive social segregation of the nineteenth century, the nobility would mix with lower classes at public entertainment venues.

In the following century, socialising began increasingly to take on a more private form centred on parties in grand houses, meaning only those wealthy enough to own such residences, and only those who knew them, or knew someone who could introduce them, could take part. The grandest house of all, Buckingham Palace, operated the same system and only those who were introduced by someone who already had the entre could gain admittance. In many ways, the Season represented networking at the highest level, sub-consciously developed to filter out any undesirables and, in time, to bring together, under supervision, Societys unmarried daughters with potential husbands from the same elite stock.

Piccadilly, one of the smartest thoroughfares in London, pictured during the Season in 1895. The route was once lined with a number of aristocratic mansions.

The Seasons timing shifted around before finally settling in spring and early summer. Roughly coinciding with the Parliamentary year, at first, when Parliament sat in February, gentlemen would bring their families with them to London, and in time, it occupied the more concentrated period during the Parliamentary recess, which ran from spring to August. The timing provided a convenient period for this annual pilgrimage when a temporary easing of political obligation happily converged with social expediency. For the 120 years that followed Queen Victorias accession, it became the way that Britains upper classes spent May, June and July each year. In May 1886 an anonymous writer in Harpers New Monthly Magazine ran a feature on The London Season, introducing its readers to the giddy world of a high society summer. It began with the conundrum of finding a satisfactory definition for what was a vague and changeable phenomenon:

A house in prestigious Carlton House Terrace overlooking St Jamess Park at the height of the Season, showing guests arriving and others enjoying the night air on the portico above the entrance.

To give a definition of the London season that would satisfy a West End lady and inform an inquiring Oriental is not an easy task. The difficulty arises from the fact that the season is not, like other seasons, limited by fixed dates, nor is it the season of any one thing in particular It is not especially the dancing season, the riding-in-the-Row season, the Parliamentary season, the drum season, the bazaar season, or the garden-party season, but the season of all combined.

The Season was basically a series of events forming the backbone of a society summer allowing members of the aristocracy to mix, mingle, reinforce connections, keep out the riff raff and show off, sometimes a little, often a lot. For the wealthy newcomers to Victorian Society the industrialists, financiers and manufacturers the Seasons activities helped them to adhere to a set of rules of behaviour which in time would assimilate them with aristocracy of old. Laborious rituals such as card-calling, and other forms of etiquette, ensured that those not necessarily born into Society at least were accepted into it on prescribed terms.