Counting print and digital formats, more than one billion books are sold in the United States each year. With so many titles and so little time, it's easy to ignore or overlook books that are decades or even centuries old. This could be a mistake. To prove it, here's a quick summary and some short excerpts from it Experience a hairdresser in high life by Eliza Potter (1859) – A sometimes disturbing book that challenges what could be a dangerous indifference to the past.
Experience a hairdresser in high life
If you want a peek behind the curtain of antebellum society in America, Eliza Potter has brought us a rare and lively commentary on everything from silk dresses and social orders to the toxic impact of slavery on life in the nineteenth century. As a skilled hairdresser for the elite in the 1840s and 1850s, Potter, a free, mixed-race woman who learned her trade in Paris and London, spills the beans on America's rich and famous with an elegant writing style that reminds us to know how much grace modern prose has lost.
Potter spends hundreds of words describing the finer details of her clients' restrooms and rude conversations. Readers are also treated to endearing descriptions of ball gowns at lavish parties where the wealthy classes of the North and South mingled as genteel rivals. Some examples: She wore “…a skirt of white silk, with alternate ruffles of white and crimson, and a jeweled headdress…The Maid of the Mist had a rainbow across the bodice of her white, floating gown and a sapphire veil adorned with precious stones.” Pearls like dew drops, enveloping her entire body… The first skirt was crimson, the second was blue, then pink, and the last was white – all of these were the same length, which gave her the appearance of a rainbow.
Potter was a great lover of beauty and devoted many paragraphs praising her clients' complexions and personalities: “She looked more like a fairy than a human creature.” She raised client identities as Mrs. W____, Miss L____, Mrs. S__, etc.
She also writes with indignation about her clients' hypocrisy and sometimes bad manners: “Envy, hatred, malice all appear in watering-places.”
