{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.06528662420382166, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009952229299363057, 'mean_word_length': 4.087044534412955, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Dual Literacy: Writing in Fabric, Working in Print

ALTHOUGH the 1870 Education Act initiated many alterations and improvements in schooling in the nineteenth century, one thing remained constant: for girls, no matter what class they belonged to, instruction in needlework was considered to be fundamental to their education. Victorian women were expected to become highly accomplished not only in the production of textiles and dress, but also in understanding their social and cultural significance. Indeed, Bayles Kortsch argues, dress operates within Victorian culture as a distinct lexicon; a framework of signs that can be interpreted to reveal insights into the creator or wearer and into the social, cultural and political conditions in which the textiles and clothes have been fashioned. Particular forms of dress, adornment or embroidery are associated with, for example, the wearer’s social standing, political views or sexual morality. Moreover, as with the written word, each sign may have a number of interpretations, each subject to the context in which it is read and as dependent upon the observer or reader as it is on the wearer. This complex web of signs and interpretations constitutes what Bayles Kortsch terms ‘dress culture’. To be fully versed in it meant that Victorian women had to acquire what Bayles Kortsch further identifies as a ‘dual literacy’, whereby they were able to understand and produce writing in both print and fabric. Bayles Kortsch’s primary concern in Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction, however, is the relationship between this material culture of dress and sewing and Victorian literary culture, which she views as inextricable and key to the understanding of late Victorian and New Woman writing, but which has nevertheless yet to be given adequate critical attention. In this text, Bayles Kortsch seeks to redress this absence by augmenting her own twenty-first-century readers’ dual literacy. She explores a number of key late Victorian texts through the interpretive framework of dress and sewing in order to broaden or, to use her term, ‘thicken’ the interpretation of Victorian women’s writing and, moreover, their engagement with social and political debates around the Christine Bayles Kortsch, Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and Activism, Ashgate, 2009, £55.00 hardback 978 0 7546 6510 6. R E V I E W .