Ladies' old-fashioned shoes by T. Watson Greig

Ladies' old-fashioned shoes by T. Watson Greig is an illustrated antiquarian monograph produced in the late 19th century (Victorian era). The book surveys historical women’s footwear, pairing plates with concise descriptions to document materials, construction, provenance, and changing fashion. It opens with a preface about preserving fragile examples, then presents eleven plates that span from a plain black satin shoe attributed to Mary Queen of Scots to richly worked silk, brocade, kid, and cloth-of-gold shoes linked to named wearers (including figures from the reigns of Charles II and Queen Anne) and several unknowns; features noted include diamond or steel buckles, gimp trimming, heart-shaped heels, and heavily stuffed pointed toes of extravagant length. The appendix adds brief remarks on ladies’ self-made shoes and a small Scottish museum inventory, and reprints R. Heath’s expansive essay tracing European footwear from the Valois through the First Empire—high heels, peaked and duck-billed toes, Regency pegs—set against global analogues from India, Persia, China, Albania, Lapland, and North Africa, plus sections on sabots, pattens (including towering Venetian chopines of Eastern origin), sandals ancient and ecclesiastical, moccasins, and the symbolism and utility behind shape and height. A final note mentions Westminster Abbey effigies and pictorial evidence (with Evelyn’s diary) to corroborate period styles. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Read or download for free

For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide

Reading Options Url Size
Read now! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77314.html.images 90 kB
EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77314.epub3.images 14.3 MB
EPUB (older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77314.epub.images 14.3 MB
EPUB (no images, older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77314.epub.noimages 399 kB
Kindle https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77314.kf8.images 11.5 MB
older Kindles https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77314.kindle.images 11.4 MB
Plain Text UTF-8 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77314.txt.utf-8 67 kB
Download HTML (zip) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77314/pg77314-h.zip 15.5 MB
There may be more files related to this item.

About this eBook

Author Greig, T. Watson (Thomas Watson), 1837-1912
LoC No. 14016396
Title Ladies' old-fashioned shoes
Original Publication Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1885.
Credits Mairi, Matthew Everett, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Language English
LoC Class GT: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation: Manners and customs
Subject Women's shoes -- History
Subject Women's shoes -- History -- Pictorial works
Category Text
EBook-No. 77314
Release Date
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
Downloads 240 downloads in the last 30 days.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free!