(c) Tate, London 2001

Omnibus Life in London (1859) by William Maw Egley. This, Egley's best-known work, considered one of the key pictures of Victorian contemporary life. It shows the crowded interior of an omnibus--a type of horse-drawn carriage that was common at the time. A mother holds on to her fashionably dressed son as he squirms on her lap. Egley's accounts list over 1,000 paintings but reviews were disappointing for the greater part of his life.

Omnibus Life in London by William Maw Egley is a painting which shows a mixture of people from different social levels, with their clothing carefully portrayed. The two foreground figures, the girl and the elderly woman, set up a contrast between young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, fashionable and traditional. Egley wrote a catalogue of his pictures (now in the Victoria & Albert Museum), in which he notes down the clothing of this girl in great detail:

a fashionable dressed little girl of twelve, wearing a straw hat with feathers and ribbons, the hair in long, dark ringlets: a grey jacket, and light, striped silk dress, with a short skirt displaying her long, white trousers trimmed with needlework, and black kid boots with brilliant patent leather toes and high heels.

	Thinking Points
	Technological progress resulted in the development of new styles of clothing in the Victorian era. Crinoline swung from side to side and revealed womens' feet and ankles. Think about how dress conventions have changed since then. Are new techniques the product of a shift in social attitudes, or have they actually contributed to those changes? Compare the young women who play central roles in the three paintings. What can we learn about Victorian attitudes to gender by looking at the way women are depicted in art?

His description stresses the girl's needlework trousers and boots, which are 'displayed'--but only to the viewer of the painting, since the other occupants of the omnibus (including the man in the top hat, who appears to be gazing at her) would not be able to see them. As the art historian Susan Casteras has noted, Egley had a curious obsession with his wife's clothes, and particularly with her footwear, stockings and lace-trimmed trousers, worn under her petticoats. This is evident from both repeated entries in his diary (which is also in the Victoria & Albert Museum), and his catalogue of pictures, compiled in 1903 from earlier records. When painting The Talking Oak in 1856, Egley obviously took particular interest in the veiled trousers just visible at the bottom of the figure's skirt, a detail which, as Casteras has pointed out, is hardly noticeable to the modern viewer.

Egley was particularly obsessed by shiny patent leather shoes, high heels, tight shoes, and long trousers which fell across the instep. In his catalogue, his mention of such details starts with descriptions of portraits of young girls in the 1840s and is gradually transferred to paintings and drawings of his wife. He also records, in his diary, many outings to buy her footwear which sounds painfully uncomfortable--for example, Sunday, November 12, 1854:

My dear little girl went out this morning in a pair of quite new black cashmere boots with brilliant glittering enamel toes. They are very small and fit so tight that she can scarcely bend her pretty feet, but it only serves to show off the elegance of their form in a most fascinating manner and add to the grace of her walk. They looked sweetly pretty with her long brilliant white trousers (quite plain) reaching to her instep.

gue record aspects of Victorian sexuality which are well-known from other sources--an interest in young girls or childlike women, and a fetishistic focus on details of clothing in an age when the body was generally well covered up. It has been argued that the invention of the crinoline, which swung from side to side, revealing ankles, petticoats, and footwear, stimulated the development of foot and shoe fetishism in this period, and Egley's diary certainly seems to provide lots of supporting evidence for this hypothesis. There is also a consumerist desire to see his wife in items that he has bought for her, and an emphasis on characteristics which emphasised their newness, such as the sparkling brilliance of shoes or white trousers. What is interesting is that there is very little difference between the way he describes his wife's clothing, in his diary, and the way he describes that of the figures in his paintings, in his catalogue of works. In both cases, the descriptions are obsessively detailed and repetitive. Obviously, Egley was exceptional, but his case does raise interesting questions about the depiction of female costume in mid-nineteenth century painting, and in particular, the emphasis on the feet and legs and on sensuous materials such as silk.

In both Omnibus Life in London and Work, a young girl occupies an important role in the composition--the girl in Brown's painting is more obviously erotic to us, perhaps, with her bare neck and shoulders, but Egley's well-dressed girl is seen to have a similar function when looked at in the light of his writings. This figure is prominently placed in the foreground, where such details could be voyeuristically examined. Further crowd scenes by Frith, Ramsgate Sands and The Railway Station, also have young girls in prominent foreground positions. One lifts her skirt to expose bare legs, while the other lifts her skirt to display lace trousers and petticoat. In each case, the gesture is justified by the context--bathing in the sea and travelling in full skirts both necessitated exposure--and to our eyes these figures are innocent enough; but they may also have had a particular type of charm for male viewers of the 1850s and 1860s. There is no evidence that Frith shared Egley's peculiar predilections, but the two men were on friendly terms with one another. Once you start to look for them, these young girls can be found in a number of paintings of the Victorian crowd in this period.