Lately, over each day's various cups of coffee and tea, I have been paging through a fat book of photographs compiled and annotated by costume historian Joan Severa: Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans & Fashion, 1840-1900. Reading this book bears some resemblance to reading People at the dentist's office. The experience is strangely compelling--giving rise to bemusement, amusement, irritation, disgust, embarrassment, boredom, and occasionally awe.

Dressed for the Photographer opens with a quotation from Quentin Bell's On Human Finery. (Bell was Virginia Woolf's nephew. I knew he'd written a biography of his aunt but had no idea he'd written a treatise on fashion.)

In sociological studies fashion plays the role which has been allotted to Drosophila, the fruit fly, in the science of genetics. Here at a glance we can perceive phenomena so mobile in their response to varying stimuli, so rapid in their mutation, that the deceptive force of inertia, which overlays and obscures most other manifestations of human activity, is reduced to a minimum. In obeying custom we undergo distresses which are needless and futile. We do so for the sake of something that transcends our own immediate interests. There are some who can rejoice in fashion, others may detest it, but as any photograph will show, there will be very few ready to defy its laws.

The exact photographs in the book are not available online, but most are very like these in the daguerreotype collection at the George Eastman House--family groupings, wedding poses, pictures of children with pets, young men in fancy new hats, pretty girls in homemade dresses, etc. Severa organizes her choices by decade, and next to each photograph she comments on the specifics of the outfit: how stylish or old-fashioned it is; whether it was homemade, bought ready-made, or made by a tailor or milliner; how common or unusual it was in this particular setting. She notes details of arm width, corset style, pleats, and trimming, and she muses about how the person wearing the outfit was struggling to do the best she could with what she had to work with. The book is both predictable and intensely peculiar--an immersion into the frets and follies of another century that is also familiar and touching. I say this as a person who can barely sew, who admires a beautiful dress, who has spent much of her life feeling as if she's never quite figured out how to wear one herself. It seems that many nineteenth-century women weren't much different from me.