“Be-Nelsoned all over”: Patriotic Fashion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

York Georgian Society Lecture

Upon Horatio Nelson’s return to Naples after the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Emma Hamilton wrote the victorious Rear-Admiral a letter of sincere adulation. Hamilton declared that “My dress from head to foot is alla Nelson [...] Even my shawl is in blue with gold anchors all over. My earrings are Nelson’s anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over”. Hamilton’s top-to-toe adornment with nautical symbolism reflected a brief vogue for maritime dress accessories that gripped the British, from royalty to shopkeepers, in the wake of their naval triumph. While Britannia ruled the waves, the nautical anchor ruled fashion.

Sartorial accessories were a crucial site for the public performance of national loyalty, patriotic feeling, and the idolisation of celebrity. This paper opens with an examination of the National Maritime Museum’s collection of 1790s anchor necklaces, before exploring how these accessories were popularised and disseminated in fashion plates and fashion periodicals. The widespread adoption of these accessories, this paper argues, reflects a broader move towards the commercialisation of commemoration and celebrity. The smallness and fast production of these manufactured mementos reflected a sped-up ephemerality of material commemoration. Crucially, these sartorial anchors commodified Nelson as a conduit of the patriotic zeitgeist of the 1790s.

Biography:
Serena Dyer is Associate Professor of Fashion History at De Montfort University. She is author of Material Lives (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Labour of the Stitch (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and is currently writing her next book, Georgian Fashion: Britishness and Dress in the Eighteenth Century, which is under contract with Yale University Press. She presents the Fashion Through History digital series for English Heritage.

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Image: Portrait of a Woman, Said to Be Emma (1765-1815), Lady Hamilton, 1804 by Adam Buck (1759-1833), Miniature painting on ivory; 95.14.81, The Moses Lazarus Collection, Gift of Josephine and Sarah Lazarus in memory of their father, 1888-95, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York