Death by Crinoline: What the Records Show About Burning Skirts

In the late 1850s a new kind of underskirt reached England from France. The cage crinoline was a frame of steel hoops joined by tapes, light and springy where the old stack of starched petticoats had been heavy. It let a dress stand out from the body in a wide bell, and by about 1862 it had reached its greatest size.¹ It also put several yards of thin cotton or muslin in places where women could not easily see them: near the bars of an open grate, over a candle set on the floor, beside a revolving shaft in a mill. Within a few years, as Mitchell puts it, frequent reports of deaths caused by crinoline fire were appearing, often under sensational titles.¹

The phrase was easier to print than to measure. Victorians argued fiercely about how many women the fashion killed, and the argument was never settled, because almost nobody was counting in a way that could answer it.

A skirt you could not see the edge of

The crinoline was an industrial product, and its makers and the steel industry prospered together. An 1862 article cited by the literary historian Rebecca N. Mitchell claimed that Sheffield was turning out 150 tons of crinoline wire every week. The shape kept changing, which kept customers buying.¹

The danger came from the geometry. A hooped skirt swung as its wearer walked, and the hem sat well away from her feet. Mitchell notes that it was hard for a woman to judge the sweep of her own skirt near a hearth, and that the swinging motion made that worse.¹ Dresses worn over the hoops were often of light muslin, the very fabric that chemists were then trying to fireproof.² A hearth fire, a gas bracket or a candle needed only to reach the outer edge of the hem.

Florence Nightingale, writing in Notes on Nursing (1860), thought the whole thing ridiculous. Her main complaint was practical: “The fidget of silk and of crinoline” disturbed the sick. But in a footnote, under the marginal heading “Burning of the crinolines,” she went further: “I wish the Registrar-General would tell us the exact number of deaths by burning occasioned by this absurd and hideous custom.” She also passed on a cheap precaution, putting alum into starch, which she said would stop starched clothing from blazing up.³

Counting the dead

Nightingale’s wish points to the core problem. English civil registration did record burns, and it did separate out deaths from clothes catching fire. All the Year Round, Charles Dickens’s weekly, reported in 1862 that in the five years from 1852 to 1856 the registers attributed 9,998 deaths in England and Wales to burns, of which 2,181 were said to have been caused by clothes taking fire.² Those years mostly come before the cage crinoline became common, which is a useful reminder that Victorian dresses burned before the hoop arrived. The registers did not record what the victim had been wearing underneath.

The closest thing to systematic local evidence came from coroners. Edwin Lankester, coroner for Central Middlesex, told an inquest in early 1863 that since his appointment he had held 601 inquests, of which 23 involved burns, and that 18 of those had been caused by clothes catching fire. He thought at least two-thirds could have been prevented by non-flammable clothing, and he saw no reason why any child should be put to bed in a flammable nightdress.⁴ His numbers concern clothing fires in general, and he did not say how many involved crinolines.

Lankester was also the garment’s loudest official enemy. At the inquest on 18-year-old Sarah Padley in August 1862, whose muslin dress over a cage crinoline had caught alight, the London Standard reported him calling the case “one of those numerous distressing casualties from the use of the dangerous crinoline,” and the jury, on his suggestion, returned a verdict of “Accidental death through wearing crinoline.”¹ He believed such deaths were badly underreported. Not everyone agreed. Mitchell quotes the satirical Anti-Teapot Review arguing that old-fashioned petticoats had caught fire too, but that in earlier days there were not “scores of hungry London newspapers ever ready to chronicle domestic accidents in the dull season.”¹ Mitchell concludes that reports may have been inflated, and that Lankester was adept at supplying quotable lines to the press.¹

So the honest answer is that no reliable national figure for crinoline deaths exists in the sources examined here. The large round totals that circulate today could not be traced to any official count, and this article does not repeat them.

Two famous cases, read closely

The death most often attached to the crinoline is that of Frances “Fanny” Appleton Longfellow, wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Her brother-in-law Samuel Longfellow, who edited the poet’s journals, described it in 1886. On 9 July 1861 she was sitting in the library of the family house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her two small daughters, sealing up packets of their curls. “From a match fallen upon the floor, her light summer dress caught fire.” She died the next morning. Henry Longfellow, confined to his room by severe burns of his own, could not attend her funeral.⁵ The National Park Service, which now runs the house, gives her death on 10 July 1861 from burns sustained in an accidental fire, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 1902 biography gives the same dates.⁶⁷ None of these accounts mentions a crinoline. Her death belongs in the history of dress fires, but calling it a crinoline death goes beyond what these sources say.

The case of Emily and Mary Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters, is harder to document because it was deliberately hushed up. Born outside marriage to Sir William Wilde, they were raised in County Monaghan. According to a 2006 Irish Times column summarizing Michelle McGoff-McCann’s study of the local coroner’s casebook, they attended a Halloween ball in 1871 given by a Mr Reid. Late in the evening Emily, dancing with the host, swung past the open hearth and her dress caught; Mary tried to help and her dress caught too. Mary died first, and Emily lived until 21 November. The inquest on Mary was reduced to an inquiry after a letter from Sir William, and the sisters’ surname was disguised as “Wylie” in the coroner’s book.⁸ The column calls Emily’s dress a crinoline. That detail, like the rest, reaches us through a retelling of a record that was kept discreet at the time, and later accounts differ in detail. A 2016 piece on Slate says it was most likely Mary, not Emily, who caught fire first, from candles rather than the hearth; it gives Mary’s death as 9 November and quotes a Northern Standard death notice giving it as the 8th.⁹ Alison Matthews David’s Fashion Victims (2015), a scholarly survey of dangerous dress, also includes the sisters’ deaths among its cases.¹⁰ The column quotes a later letter by John Butler Yeats, who heard the story from a guest at the ball: “There is a tragedy, all the more intense because it had to be buried in silence.”⁸

Factories, theaters and crowds

Fire was not the only hazard. Matthews David’s book, as described by the reviewer Shahidha Bari, reports that in 1860 a Lancashire industrialist banned crinolines among his workers as “quite unfitted for the work of our factories,” and that girls could be dragged in by printing presses and other machines.¹¹ One inquest of this kind, reported in Cork in June 1864 and known here only from a transcription quoted on a museum blog, concerned a woman in a mangling room whose dress, held out by her crinoline, caught on an uncovered shaft turning about fifty times a minute. She died within hours, and the jury asked for the shaft to be boxed in.¹² Mitchell found a widow who blamed her husband’s fatal fall between two moving boats on a crinoline that blocked the gangway.¹

Theaters combined gaslight with gauzy costumes, and the review notes Matthews David’s evidence that some dancers resisted flame-retardant treatments because they yellowed the fabric.¹¹ The inquest into a fatal accident at London’s Princess’s Theatre early in 1863 was the occasion of Lankester’s statistics quoted above.⁴

The worst disaster linked with crinolines happened far from England. On 8 December 1863 fire broke out during a festival service at the Jesuit church of La Compañía in Santiago, Chile, with about 2,000 worshippers inside, most of them women. Chile’s national library notes that crinoline skirts caught alight or snagged on church furniture and that long dresses tripped people in the crush, while the doors opened inward and could not be forced against the pressure of bodies.¹³ The skirts were one cause among several; the decorations were flammable and the exits inadequate. In London, Lankester was reported as saying that over three years as many women had died by fire in the capital, chiefly through crinoline, as had been lost at Santiago.¹ That was rhetoric, not a tally.

Satire and blame

Comic papers treated the fashion as an open target. Punch in August 1861 offered a one-line joke: “From the frequency with which it takes fire, we should say that Crinoline was entitled to be called, par excellence, ‘The Lady’s Light Dress.’”¹⁴ Fun ran a comic poem in 1862 on “The Skeleton Petticoat,” warning the fashionable girl that she little knew “what a funeral pyre / She thus prepares for the fatal fire.”¹⁵

Much of this commentary blamed women’s vanity, and some of it went further. In 1862 the Medical Times and Gazette reported that the Bristol coroner had landed in “terrible hot water” with his fellow citizens after telling an inquest on a young woman whose crinoline caught fire that whenever he saw a woman, other than one “of rank and importance,” in crinoline, he took it for granted that she was hiding the discredit of an unmarried pregnancy.¹⁶ Mitchell shows that worry about concealed pregnancy and infanticide ran alongside the fire stories, and that writers readily blamed feminine folly, even as press words such as “suttee” and “holocaust” hinted at wider failures of social protection.¹

A chemical answer that few used

There was a practical remedy. The chemists Versmann and Oppenheim had tested salts that might make light fabrics non-flammable. All the Year Round summarized their findings in 1862: borax rotted ironed muslin, phosphate of soda stiffened it, but sulphate of ammonia worked for finishing new cloth, and for washing, in their words, “the tungstate of soda only can be recommended.” Treated muslins had been shown to the Queen.² Tungstate of soda was sold through chemists with simple instructions: dissolve four ounces in a pint of water and dip the starched fabric. The magazine’s writer held a treated scrap of lawn in a candle flame for a minute without its being consumed, and in a test of the patented preparation, when a fold of treated muslin was let bulge into a fire, only the part touching the flame burned.²

Uptake was poor. The same article suggested, half in jest, that the makers would sell more if they called it the “Ladies Skirt Expander” and mentioned fire safety only in small print.² A year later Lankester told the Princess’s Theatre inquest that he “did not know how many women would be required to be burnt to death before any of the fair sex would give up wearing an article of fashion,” but that the means of making dresses safe existed and were little used. He noted a claim in the Times that stage and ballroom dresses were never washed; if so, he said, the remedy for them was a matter of manufacture rather than laundry.⁴

After its peak around 1862 the crinoline’s sweep narrowed, as skirts flattened at the front and fullness moved to the back, a trend that ended in the bustle.¹ What the crinoline years left behind was a vivid and partly exaggerated public story, a handful of well-documented inquests, and a set of figures that show how often Victorians burned without showing how many were killed by the hoop itself.

Footnotes

1. Mitchell 2016, BRANCH. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. “Ladies’ Lives,” All the Year Round 6 (1 February 1862), 441-444. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Nightingale, Notes on Nursing (1860), ch. 4 and footnote “Burning of the crinolines.” ↩

4. “Non-Inflammable Clothing,” Medical Times and Gazette, 7 February 1863, 142-143. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. S. Longfellow, Life, vol. 2 (1886), 368-369. ↩

6. National Park Service, “Gold Ring Room.” ↩

7. Higginson 1902, ch. on 1861. ↩

8. McNally, Irish Times, 31 May 2006. ↩ ↩²

9. Zapata, Slate (Atlas Obscura), 20 December 2016. ↩

10. Matthews David 2015 (publisher abstract). ↩

11. Bari, Times Higher Education, 24 September 2015. ↩ ↩²

12. Molly Brown House Museum blog, quoting a Cork report of June 1864 (original not seen). ↩

13. Memoria Chilena, “El incendio de la iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús (1863).” ↩

14. Punch 41 (24 August 1861). ↩

15. “The Skeleton Petticoat,” Fun (1862), via the Victorian Web. ↩

16. “A Coroner on Crinoline,” Medical Times and Gazette, 27 September 1862, 342-343. ↩