In eighteenth-century England, the wearing of wigs had become so entrenched in public custom that to go without one was unheard of for all who aspired to gentility and a great many who could not. Then as now, hairstyles and the time spent on hair was a reliable indicator of social class and gentility. Precision and adherence to not only fashion but to the precis of elite fashion governed ball rooms and salons, while the lower classes wore the discarded finery their betters had thrown away. There was a particularly notorious ‘dip’ in London where those in search of wigs could part with a coin for the chance to fish a wig out a pit with a stick. If the first one did not meet their expectations, they could throw it back and try once more.
It would have been immediately obvious to onlookers who possessed money and who did not, but the absence of a wig, or worse, a hat, no matter the condition, would have been tantamount to being naked in the streets. This continued to be true well into the Edwardian era. The temporal nature of style and the association of wigs in particular to a moment in time were demonstrated in letters, remarked upon in person, and could be a useful foil in satirical prints. On February 6, 1842, Edward FitzGerald wrote to Frederick Tennyson, the elder brother of the poet. He wrote colorfully of an evening at the theatre in Drury Lane, where he saw ‘Acis and Galatea’ and took in the sounds of ‘box doors open and shut’ ‘ladies taking off their shawls’ and gentleman twisting their side curls. His assessment of the composer George Frederick Handel, dead for nearly a century at the time of his writing, was that this musical piece “…is of Handel’s best: and as classical as any man who wore a full-bottomed wig could write.”
The historian Penelope Corfield has written an article on the concept of ‘Hat Honor’ and we derive the term ‘big wig’ from the very wig Edward FitzGerald mentions in his letter. Though hats had of course existed before the wig became a marker of the upper middle class in the 1660s, the towering, curled, bag wigs needed correspondingly tall hats to accommodate their voluminous size.