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Style and substance: Why the handkerchief remains a small symbol of civilised behaviour

Matthew Dennison

Once considered a luxury item and given as a love token — or even used as a makeshift toothbrush — the handkerchief still offers an elegance sorely lacking in a packet of paper tissues, says Matthew Dennison.

In the spring of 1712, a provincial newspaper offered a substantial reward for lost property. The property in question belonged to Robert Paterfew, a pedlar in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and consisted — according to the Newcastle Courant — of ‘a Bundle of Handkerchiefs’, part of Paterfew’s stock-in-trade. ‘Whoever can give Notice of them to Robert Paterfew aforesaid so they may be had again shall have a Guinea Reward,’ promised the paper.

By the early 18th century, such was the handkerchief’s ubiquity that, as in the case of Paterfew and his ilk, it could be obtained for a few pennies from itinerant tradesmen for whom it constituted a reliable commodity, but the accessory’s heritage was altogether loftier. ‘The handkerchief,’ noted The Manchester Guardian in 1923, ‘has not always been at the beck and call of everyone. It has had an aristocratic career.’

One medieval French noblewoman attached such value to her handkerchiefs that, in 1301 and again in 1328, she listed them in inventories of her linen. The handkerchiefs included a century later in inventories made for Louis XI’s wife, Charlotte of Savoy, were described as gold- or silk-embroidered and, as such, items of luxury. In 1489, the Mantuan heiress Elisabetta Gonzaga married the future Duke of Urbino; her dowry included lengths of cloth specifically designated for handkerchief-making.

Evidently, the handkerchief — recorded in early imperial Rome, including in poems by Catullus, as a means of freshening the face — had achieved elite status. As did so many fashions, it arrived in these islands from France, following the marriage of Joan of Navarre, granddaughter of the King of France and the Duchess of Brittany, to Henry IV. In 1403, Queen Joan received a present of 36 handkerchiefs. Where the Queen led, courtiers and, in time, subjects followed.

It is clear in records made by 16th-century antiquarian John Stow, author of The Chronicles of England and A Survey of London, that, in England, the handkerchief remained a luxury item into the reign of Elizabeth I. Stow described handkerchiefs ‘with a button or tassel at each corner, and a little one in the middle, with silk and thread; the best edged with a small gold lace, or twist’. In a period before women’s clothes included pockets, handkerchiefs were more visible than their 21st-century counterparts and were decorated accordingly.

‘His gift of the handkerchief to Desdemona symbolised his affection for her’

Elaboration added to their costliness and this affected how Elizabethan women thought about their handkerchiefs. Take Othello’s mother, who entrusted a handkerchief of Egyptian cotton to her son on her deathbed, ‘and bid me,’ Othello remembered, ‘when my fate would have me wive,/To give it her’. Othello, of course, obeyed his mother’s wishes. His gift of the handkerchief to Desdemona symbolised his affection for her and the fidelity he expected from her, alongside his love for his mother. Its theft at Iago’s instigation accelerated the couple’s tragic unravelling. Stow’s account of Elizabethan mores suggests that Othello acted in line with Shakespeare’s contemporaries, as ‘it was the custom for maids and gentlewomen to give their favourites, as tokens of their love, little Handkerchiefs of about three or four inches square’.

In Rome, Catullus suggested, a handkerchief might be used to wipe the lips or dab at perspiration. In cooler British climes, it acquired its current purpose early on. Sources noted that, in the late 14th century, Richard II used handkerchiefs to wipe his nose (unlike Henry II of France, who used his own scrap of fabric to clean his teeth). As handkerchiefs became more widespread, advice on their correct deployment proliferated.

For Dutch theologian Erasmus, the use of a handkerchief was a mark of gentle behaviour. ‘To wipe your nose on your cap or your sleeve is boorish,’ he noted. ‘It might be alright for pastrycooks to wipe their noses on their arm or their elbow; to blow your nose in your hand and then, as if by chance, wipe it on your clothes, shows not much better manners.’ In his treatise on children’s manners, On Civility in Children, published in 1530, Erasmus offered clear guidelines on what and what not to do with a handkerchief: ‘You should not offer your handkerchief to anyone unless it has been freshly washed. Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearl and rubies might have fallen out of your head.’

The handkerchief has remained a small indicator of civilised behaviour, as Tolkien suggested in The Hobbit, when the absence of a handkerchief is seen to mark a shift in Bilbo’s behaviour: ‘He was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag End long ago. He had not had a pocket-handkerchief for ages. He loosened his dagger in its sheath, tightened his belt, and went on. “Now you are in for it at last, Bilbo Baggins,” he said to himself.’

For Erasmus, the use of a handkerchief was clearly preferable to other means of wiping one’s nose. His view that the used handkerchief should remain as much out of sight as possible is still widely accepted, but neither then nor since has this prevented makers from creating pretty, witty or handsome hankies. A quartet of early-Victorian English cotton handkerchiefs in New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in America demonstrates that handkerchiefs made for boys, girls, men and women frequently differed. These red-bordered, black-and-white boys’ handkerchiefs feature appropriately ‘boyish’ engraved designs of wild animals, including giraffes, an antelope and a lion, or ships and galleons.

‘In the 18th-century, patterned and darker-coloured handkerchiefs were produced in response to the habit of snuff-taking to conceal snuff stains’

From the 17th century, handkerchiefs were also produced as souvenirs. Their designs included portraits of the Royal Family, patriotic symbols, images of battles or prominent statesmen and soldiers. In 1819, supporters of parliamentary reform carried handkerchiefs commemorating the Peterloo Massacre; later in the century, handkerchiefs were among items produced for Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees. Handkerchiefs have commemorated successive coronations — even that of Edward VIII, which did not take place — the Olympic Games, Imperial skirmishes such as a handkerchief celebrating ‘The Heroes of the Soudan[sic]’ and, in 1830, the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. In 1839, the popularity of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers inspired a handkerchief, on which a portrait of the youthful novelist is surrounded by characters from the novel, labelled ‘The Pickwickians’.

Other changes in handkerchief fashions have arisen for more practical reasons: in the 18th-century, patterned and darker-coloured handkerchiefs were produced in response to the habit of snuff-taking to conceal snuff stains.

Thanks to the invention of paper tissues, handkerchiefs are less universal than they were once, but, in Britain in particular, they remain in wide usage, still visible in white or brightly coloured piles in chests of drawers or on wardrobe shelves. Red-and-white handkerchiefs, often with a pattern of spots, were once associated with farm workers, but have formed a staple of British wardrobes for more than a century, immortalised in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and Enid Blyton’s short-story collection The Red Spotted Handkerchief. Many modern handkerchiefs may lack the glamour now reserved for pocket squares, but, to those suffering from colds, they offer a kind of comfort wholly absent from a diminutive paper tissue flat-packed in a cellophane wrapper.

Matthew Dennison is an author, biographer and a regular contributor to Country Life