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The history of the raincoat |
Club Foyer>Chillout Room >Rainwear History
Many books, articles and websites have treated different aspects of this topic, and they are sometimes very useful. The difficulty with most of them is not so much that they might contain errors or misjudgements but that they don't give their sources. A reader then has a really difficult task in determining what is soundly based on original source materials and what is not. S/he really has to do all the work of checking against things done or written at the time.
This is what I am trying to do here, because when it comes to 'the history of the raincoat' across the whole span of its existence I don't think there is a scholarly account available in English.
For the first decades of the rainwear story, one excellent study, not itself a primary source, but drawing on extensive first hand study of documents - principally letters and business records - relating to the origin and development of the pioneering rubber business of Stephen Moulton at Bradford-on-Avon is by William Woodruff: The Rise of the British Rubber Industry during the Nineteenth Century. I treat this as authoritative in areas where I haven't (yet!) been able to master the original material myself.
There is also a quite excellent website by John Loader, Bouncing Balls, which has the focus on rubber in the round as it were and not its particular role in the development of rainwear. It occasions rather sharply the regret that it doesn't always make clear where its brilliantly marshalled facts are coming from. I fall again and again into assuming they derive exclusively from original sources, and I may be right.
A scholarly article with a usefully tight focus is S. Levitt's ''Manchester Mackintoshes: A History of the Rubberized Garment Trade in Manchester'
There are three central original documents for the very early evolution of the raincoat, two extended accounts by the two central figures and one by the son of a third. They are:
Charles Goodyear's biographical account, Gum-Elastic and its Varieties
Thomas Hancock's Personal Narrative, and
George Macintosh's Biographical Memoire [of Charles Macintosh, his father].
Other sources are listed here, a list that I am constantly extending.
H
27:04:07
