This fall, students in Dr. Rita Bode’s fourth year English seminar at Trent University Durham, visited, not the Bata Library, but the Bata Shoe Museum in downtown Toronto to consider, “the pleasures and perils of dress in the 19th century.”

The course, “Crossing the Pond: Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literary Relations,” studies 19th century fiction and travel accounts, by both American and British writers in the context of a transatlantic culture. The exhibit, Fashion Victims, at the Bata Shoe Museum and curated by Alison Matthews David, associate professor in the School of Fashion, Ryerson University, and Elizabeth Semmelhack, senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum, provides insight into the challenges of bodily mobility in an age of tight corsets, hoop skirts and extremely narrow pinching footwear.

Men and women alike, moreover, were subject to the toxic elements, such as arsenic and mercury, that went into the making of fashionable appearances. With examples from the United States, Europe and England (including a pair of Queen Victoria’s black shoes worn in her long mourning for Albert), the exhibit shows significant cross-Atlantic trends in clothing and self-representation.

After the exhibit, class members took a walking tour of the University of the Toronto to look at examples of Gothic Revival buildings, a style of architecture popular in the 19th century. They were accompanied by local Oshawa architectural historian Joseph Marion who explained some of the similarities between the buildings on the tour and Oshawa architectural examples.

Posted on Tuesday, December 2, 2014.