Literary Pockets and Nelly Dean’s Handkerchiefs
Pockets are a feminist issue. So where does Nelly Dean keep her handkerchiefs?
As a narrator and a witness, Nelly Dean is critical to Wuthering Heights, and her personal qualities are demonstrated by the nature of her interventions in dramatic events. After Catherine’s death, Nelly goes outside to tell Heathcliff that she has gone. Heathcliff, ‘leant against an old ash tree’, snarls at Nelly, ‘Put your handkerchief away - don’t snivel before me.” This handkerchief seems to emerge from nowhere, as does the one that Nelly uses to bandage Isabella’s bleeding face when she arrives at Thrushcross Grange having escaped Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights. These handkerchiefs represent Nelly’s responsive nature but it is never clear where she keeps them and this matters because women’s clothes did not have pockets until relatively recently. As a result, my assumption is that Nelly launders, irons and folds her handkerchiefs before placing them in a pocket stitched onto her apron rather than in her dress, which probably lacked pockets.
A recent article by Susanna Clapp in the London Review of Books propelled me back to the novel to look again for pockets as a feminist reading of its sartorial details. The article reviews Hannah Carlson’s Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close, first published in 2023. Carlson argues that pockets - defined as permanent pouches sewn into clothes - are a source of power because they enable the wearer to be equipped with essentials as they move through the world. Historically, however, women’s clothes were constructed without pockets. Instead, women could carry small bags or larger baskets; they could also wear add-on pockets sewn as pouches and tied around the waist, over or under skirts and dresses. In her LRB article, Clapp describes the poet Emily Dickinson’s request that her dressmaker add a patch pocket to her white dresses so that she could carry pencil and paper, while the suffragettes developed a pocket parody in 1915: ‘We must not fly in the face of nature. The great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.’
2023 was an excellent year for pockets because Carlson’s book was preceded by Barbara Berman and Ariane Fennetaux’s The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1600-1900, which investigates how the tie-on pocket provided women with a means of carrying daily essentials as a practical strategy for greater independence. Berman and Fennetaux use evidence gathered from court records describing the contents of pockets belonging to women of all classes, including servants, sex workers, laundresses, aristocrats and thieves, to understand an object that came to be a material extension of a woman’s body. The V&A Museum has a fantastic collection of these tie-on pockets along with details of the objects kept in them, including thimbles, a nutmeg grater and a snuff box.
Left to right: Pair of embroidered cotton pockets, 1800 – 29, France. Museum no. T.43A-1909. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Embroidered velvet pocket with heraldic motif, embroidered 1775 – 1800, printed and made 1840 – 50, Germany. Museum no. 1438-1871. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
As someone who relies on pockets, this research is absolutely fascinating for me. In fact, I have just emptied my pockets to discover a summary of my day: one tissue, a biro lid, a car key, a dog poo bag, a pink child’s hair clip, a lip salve and a crumpled parking sticker. And this motley collection puts me in mind of Tim O’Brien’s seminal The Things They Carried which articulates the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam through their baggage, literal and metaphorical. We are all, in so many ways, defined by what we carry with us.
The word ‘pocket’ entered Middle English from Old French via the Normans so the words ‘poke’ and ‘pouque’ became ‘poche’ and so ‘pouch’ and then pocket. Medieval men and women attached pouches to belts worn around the waist to hold essential items such as money, keys, scissors, needle and thread. Slits could be made in tunics or cloaks to allow access to these pouches. The long sixteenth century (1480-1630) was an important moment in the evolution of pockets, as Dr Rebecca Unsworth explains in her article ‘Hands Deep in History’, and a fine suit of doublet and breeches in the V&A’s collection illustrates the style of this period. By the mid-seventeenth century, the construction of men’s jackets and trousers had evolved so that pockets were sewn into jackets, coats, waistcoats and then breeches as permanent fixtures. Meanwhile, women still wore tie-on pockets as additional appendages for almost another three hundred years.
By the early twentieth century, the slim-line suffragette suit necessitated sewn-in pockets and the practical clothing required by women workers during the World Wars also featured pockets, as we can see in the famous images of Princess Elizabeth in her wartime uniforms. Nowadays, women’s suits usually feature the impression of pockets although these are often no more than decorative inserts sewn closed to avoid an unsightly contents bulge. Mercifully, twenty-first dresses and skirts are often constructed with capacious pockets and pockets have appeared in wedding dresses and red carpet gowns like Cate Blanchett’s 2023 Louis Vuitton. Much more importantly, women’s every day clothes - jeans, leggings, trousers, dungarees - have pockets that liberate us to carry objects while functioning hands-free.
And so back to literature …
I am going on a hunt for pockets. There are definitely pockets in The Tempest (Act 2, Scene 1, 68-70) both as an object and a verb (to pocket), and Autolycus refers to ‘pocketing up’ his false beard in Act 4, Scene 1 of The Winter’s Tale. Lenny keeps his pet mouse in his pocket during Of Mice and Men and I am certain that Sherlock Holmes has pockets, not least for his trusty pipe and tobacco. There must be plenty of male pockets in Dickens (but I need to check) and I am keen to know if Jekyll / Hyde has secretive pockets. I also need look again at Jane Austen to see if Mr Darcy’s visit to Elizabeth after his failed proposal (Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 35) involves a pocket. Does his crucial letter emerge from his clothing or does he carry it by hand? And do Mr Rochester’s strategies of concealment in Jane Eyre include pockets?
I am confident that I will find male literary pockets. I am much less sure about women’s pockets and I would be thrilled to hear from anyone who locates a pocket anywhere at all in literature because there is more research to be done here.