Dressing Queen Victoria for Christmas 1848 — and the Tree the Film Doesn't Show

Six minutes and forty-nine seconds. That is all it takes for Crow's Eye Productions' “Getting Dressed – Queen Victoria – Christmas 1848” to do what no portrait ever could: show, layer by layer, how a queen got dressed. Faye Caddick plays Victoria; Stephanie Lee plays the lady-in-waiting who does the actual work. Chemise, corset, petticoats, silk gown, jewels — each piece arrives in order, and each one needs a second pair of hands. The film was made in 2015 for the Lady Lever Art Gallery, whose costume curator Pauline Rushton commissioned it as museum interpretation, so visitors could see how the silhouettes in the gallery's portraits were really achieved. Some 25 million viewers have watched it since.

The most historically honest thing about the film is what it leaves out: there is no cage crinoline. The steel-hooped cage would not be patented until 1856 — by R. C. Milliet in Paris that April, with a British patent following in July. In 1848, the great bell skirt of the 1840s was held out the hard way: half a dozen or more heavy petticoats, some stiffened with horsehair crinoline fabric or rows of cording, layer upon layer of laundered cotton. The film's long petticoat sequence is the authentic 1848 engineering, and it explains why getting dressed took the time — and the staff — that it did.

The premise is documentary, not fantasy. Victoria was never dressed by her own hands. Her “dressers” undressed her on her wedding night — her journal for 10 February 1840 records it — and her ladies-in-waiting helped her into her dresses each morning and out of them into her nightgowns each night. The woman standing behind the queen in the film, lacing and fastening, is the true subject of the story: clothing in 1848 was infrastructure, and it ran on other people's labor.

What the film misses is the Christmas itself. It is set at Christmas 1848 — and that very month, the Illustrated London News published its Christmas supplement containing J. L. Williams's engraving of the royal family's Christmas tree at Windsor Castle: a table-top tree hung with wax candles, sweets and gilt gingerbread, topped with an angel, with dolls and toys labeled with their recipients' names arranged at its base. Victoria, Albert, their young children and the Duchess of Kent stand around it. Within a decade the tree was the fashion in every prosperous British home. The engraving did for the Christmas tree what the film does for the dress — it showed the thing being done, and everyone copied it.

The tree then crossed the Atlantic the way so many Victorian fashions did: through print. In December 1850, Godey's Lady's Book — the most influential women's magazine in America, edited by Sarah Josepha Hale — reprinted the engraving “Americanized”: Victoria's tiara removed, Albert's mustache and sash gone, so American readers would see a family Christmas rather than a monarchy. By the 1870s the tree was common in American parlors. (The custom was not invented in 1848, only popularized: Queen Charlotte, Victoria's grandmother, had set up a yew tree at Windsor as early as December 1800.)

That is why a six-minute dressing film has 25 million views. The Victorians left no zippers, no stretch fabrics, no ready-to-wear — every silhouette was a construction project, and the film lets modern eyes watch the construction. The engraving and the film belong together: one shows the private ritual of Christmas 1848, the other its public image, made within weeks of each other, both still shaping how we dress a tree and imagine a queen.