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: The Wigmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg An Account of His Barbering Hair-dressing & Peruke-Making Services & Some Remarks on Wigs of Various Styles. by Bullock Thomas K Tonkin Maurice B Townsend Raymond R Contributor Ford Thomas K Editor - Wigmake
Contributor: Raymond R. Townsend
Editor: Thomas K. Ford
An Account of his Barbering, Hair-Dressing, & Peruke-Making Services, & some Remarks on Wigs of Various Styles.
Richard Gamble, barber and perukemaker of Williamsburg in the middle years of the eighteenth century, appears to have remained a bachelor all his life. Other than this he seems to have been no more improvident than the average craftsman of his time. That is to say, he came--or was brought--into court with startling frequency in an endless round of suits to collect unpaid debts.
He was in good company. Going to the law was part of the colonial way of life in Virginia, and everyone from a town's least citizen to the colony's greatest planter engaged in it. In fact, suing and being sued had some of the aspects of a game: the plaintiff in one case might shortly be defendant in another and witness in a third--and keep right on doing business with the other parties in all three cases!
Alexander Finnie, co-defendant with Gamble in at least one large suit for debt--perhaps the one that led to Gamble's "Arrest"--was himself a wigmaker who had abandoned the craft for the arduous pleasures of innkeeping. He was proprietor at the time of the Raleigh Tavern, Williamsburg's largest and most famous hostelry.
When Gamble died, Edward Charlton, late from London, succeeded to the business and became in time Williamsburg's leading barber and wigmaker. His livelihood--as perhaps he foresaw--was already doomed when he retired from business shortly before the Revolution: the wig fashion was on the way out in England and would soon be dropped in America. And in any case his former clientele would vanish from the streets of Williamsburg when the capital of Virginia was moved to Richmond in 1780.
Charlton, Gamble, and Finnie were only three of some thirty men concerned with barbering and wigmaking in eighteenth-century Williamsburg. Once or twice between 1700 and 1780 the town apparently had to struggle along for short periods with but a single active practitioner of the craft. Usually there were at least two or three, and for a time in 1769 as many as eight plied their trade in the little capital city.
All of these Williamsburg barbers and perukemakers performed at least one, but not always all three, of the craft's basic services: making, selling, and dressing wigs and false hair pieces for men and women; cutting and dressing men's, women's, and children's natural hair; and shaving men. Before we go into more detail on these aspects of the craft in colonial days, however, it may be well to peer briefly still further back into history.
The trouble with hair is that it persists in growing, and every once in a while something must be done about it. Over the millenia since time began--or at least since people began--that "something" has been manifold in variety: dyeing, bleaching, oiling, powdering, pomading, trimming, curling, straightening, shaving off completely, or augmenting with hair from horses, cows, goats, and from other human heads.
Roman barbers followed the example of their Greek colleagues when the beard passed out of favor during the Republic. The classic reply of the Roman general Archelaus rings true even today: asked by a talkative barber how he would like to be trimmed, Archelaus answered, according to Plutarch, "In silence."
From the onslaught of the barbarians until about the thirteenth century, the craft of barbering probably reverted in most of Europe to its elementary procedures of trimming and dressing the hair and beard. In the latter century the first guilds of barbers were formed in both France and England, and by the seventeenth century the golden age of the barber had begun.
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