For a while now, a long while, I have found benevolent fairs to be fascinating. I am sure this can be partially blamed on the ladies fair we depicted years and years ago for Yuletide. The combination of fundraising, women in public, thematic decorating, making little items to sell and pagentry… well, fascinating.
The thesis I recommended pre-flu, on miser purses added a whole nifty twist to the fair fascination. “Women’s ‘immoral’ behaviour at fairs.” Yep.
Check this out. Laura L. Camerlengo, in her discussion of miser purses in social context through the symbolism in literature and paintings says this:
Thackeray’s sarcastic remark about fancy fairs relates to larger society’s criticisms of this method of fundraising and the women who frequented these fairs. These criticisms, as we will see, were reflected in contemporary artworks, and directly relate to the role of the miser’s purse as a foreshadower of marriage in literature and paintings. Although contemporary women’s publications, particularly of the mid-century, favored this method of fundraising, many writings by and for men criticized fancy fairs and the women who hosted them. Gary R. Dyer reflects in “The ‘Vanity Fair’ of Nineteenth-Century England: Commerce, Women, and the East in the Ladies’ Bazaar,” that “bazaars…became integrated with misogynistic notions of feminine corruption and duplicity, the discursive tradition surrounding them implies that lust, greed, anddeceit are women’s essence.”
The bazaar is held in a large marquee, which is furnished by stalls gaily decked out with ribbons, wreaths, and flags, and covered withmerchandise; and numberless young ladies preside at the stalls, dressed in the height of fashion, and never cease to attract publicattention to the goods with the most winning, coaxing, insinuating and if one may be allowed the expression, wheedling ways. (Doyle)
Aspiring young ladies, who read flaming accounts of some ‘fancy fair in high life,’suddenly grow desperately charitable; visions of admiration and matrimony float before their eyes; some wonderfully meritorious institution, which, by the strangest accident in the world, has never been heard of before, is discovered to be in a languishingcondition…and the aforesaid young ladies, from mere charity, exhibit themselves for three days, from twelve to four, for the small charge of one shilling per head! (Dickens)

“Early in 1816 John Trotter, having made a fortune supplying the armyduring the Napoleonic Wars, turned his warehouse on Soho Square in London into what he called a “bazaar,” where women, particularly widows and orphans of army officers, could sell items they had made, renting counter space for three pence per foot daily.”
“From the first, English bazaars were sites of conflict among cultural and moral values.”
- A Visit to the Bazaar, 1820
- Embroidered slipper ready to be cut
- Doll or doll pin cushion
- Three prints – one of Jesus carrying the cross, one portrait, one unknown
- Two undetermined bottles – One tall possibly with a wicker woven exterior, one short with possibly an elephant on the label
- Embroidered braces/suspenders with a rose motif
- Feather duster with wooden handle
- Hat, possibly straw on a hat stand – trimmed around the brim with ribbon and feather trim, possibly a gold metal button in the front.
- An empty hat stand
- Print or painting of flowers against the wall
- A brown wooden box with a white and blue label that may say “bricks”
- A ball or ball pin cushion triangle pieced of red and black.
- A framed portrait – small
- A folding fan
- A domed planted flower potted – (Fernery)
- A squared bottle with something white inside
- A small reticule that appears to have a shaped base, silk bag and decoration.
- A short, squat decorative jar
In her hands is a miser’s purse and possibly a ring that may or may not go to the purse.
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