THE CORSET GIRLS

As a historian who got semi-famous in part because of my lectures on the History of Corseting, I could give you thirty pages on just about any aspect. Relax, I won’t do it here. What I’ll do, instead, is introduce you some of corsetry’s technological marvels, the ones that arose in the 1800s. These appear—along with the women who put them to work every day—in my Victorian romantic suspense series, The Corset Girls.

Metal eyelets. These were developed during the Napoleonic Wars by a surgeon. Made of brass, they were subject to breakage, discoloration, bleeding, and tarnish. Still, the metal eyelets were superior to hand-worked holes to push lacing through.

Cotton fabrics. Another spin-off from the Napoleonic Era. Cheap cotton from Egypt flooded the West and went immediately into corsets. Cotton allowed for frequent laundering and lowered the price and weight of corsets, giving industry sales a boost.  

Front busk closure. A front-closing corset was invented in 1821, but it didn’t catch on until the 1850s. The design was a true equality warrior. Unless you had female kin in the house or were a contortionist, and especially after more rigid, steel-boned corsets arrived, a back-lacing corset required a maid. Only the wealthy had those.

Steel boning. Steel was the miracle stuff of the 1800s. In addition to being durable, steel boning saved thousands of whales, since whale bones for corsets were the second largest contributor to the depletion of whales. (The first? Whale oil for lamps.)

  Mass production. There were plenty of corset patterns available, but until the last quarter of the century most of those were made up by small ateliers. The workers were called corsetières, corset makers: in London, “corset girls.” While France remained the leader in corset fashions, the captain of mass-production was America, where highly evolved machine technology meant that virtually the entire manufacturing process was mechanised.

But (luckily for me, the novelist) women of means continued to prefer bespoke clothing. Small, upmarket corset salons gave women the opportunity—for a price—to have custom corsetry. Nothing off the rack for Milady! No trying to fit into standard sizes! No settling for mainstream colors and decoration!

Salon Sirena, the posh Mayfair atelier in my series The Corset Girls, is that sort of bespoke corset studio. Wealthy and titled ladies are the clientele. The owner is careful with her vowels and goes by “Madame,” despite never having set foot in France.

In the workroom behind the curtain, four young women exemplify working class London in the 1890s. Jillian, Ada, Evie, and Min are better off than their peers in the factories, but they still work six-day weeks, for wages that will probably never let them escape their station. Into their hard lives come four hard men. Three are former gang members. One is a deserter from the Royal Navy. One by one, they—

You don't suppose I'll give away the plot, do you?  

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