Thinking about the History of Pockets and Pocketbooks

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1067

I’ve known about this photo for a long time—a picture of a willed, powerful woman stepping up to an (early, interesting)  microphone to perform:  that would be Dame Nellie Melba, the prima donna from Australia, singing at the Chelmsford Marconi works on 15 June 1920 in the first-ever-advertised broadcast entertainment.   Weirdly,  what has always struck me about this is the handbag. The pocketbook.  Why didn’t she put it down to sing? 

Its not a big question, really, especially if you look at the pocketbook as just a pocket that you hold—an irony in itself, a displayed thing holding concealed things.

The pocket, or handbag, or purse or pouch goes back a long way, thousands of years.  But for this scant view of the history of the pocketbook the action begins in the 14^th century or so, when pouches with drawstrings were used to haul this and that, attached to the exterior girdle of the clothing of men and women alike.  These exterior pockets were switched to the interior in the 16^th and 17^th century (or so) given the new and voluminous articles and layers of clothing that were in fashion—there was so much material that the girdle or belt could be worn under the clothing with the pouches attached to them there.  Of course if you didn’t have a lot of clothing to wear—like these guys in Brueghel's "Two Elders" , you’d be wearing your pouches still on the outside, this in the manner of K Street bike messengers. 

And so by the end of the 18 th c fashion was flayed with the curse and rumor of revolution—people wore less layered and puffy clothing, and the pouches returned again, though aided in a short while by the invention of what we  know and recognize today as the modern pocket.  The pocket would at first be a simple slit in the clothing to get to the hanging, girdle/belted dangling pocket, and then after Something Happened the pouch would be attached to the slit. Voila.

The pocketbook that we think of today came into being in the mid/late 19^th century—just a few decades really before this photo was made—and that article of necessity hasn’t looked back since.  It seems to me that the pocketbook of the 19^th century might’ve been an advertising platform too for marketing marriagability—the bags were often finely decorated/embroidered, which would show in effect a particular domesticity skill.  And then of course the bags just held stuff, too.  It would be interesting to see a collection of the preserved contents of handbooks by the decade for 150 years or so—just the contents spilled into a bag and preserved, a version of “the Things They Carried With Them”. 

I have no idea about the evolution of the interior pockets of pockets in pocketbooks.