ince a mantua-maker's charge for making a gown was but eight
shillings.

Though the shops were full of rich stuffs, there was no ready-made
clothing for women for sale either in outside garments or in
under-linen. Occasionally, by the latter part of the eighteenth century,
we read the advertisement of a "vandoo" of "full-made gowns, petticoats
and sacs of a genteel lady of highest fashion"--a notice which reads
uncommonly like the "forced sales" of the present day of mock-outfits of
various kinds.

About the middle of the century there began to appear "ready-made
clothes for men." Jolley Allen advertised such, and under that name, in
1768, "Coats, Silk Jackets, Shapes and Cloth Ditto; Stocking Breeches of
all sizes & most colours. Velvet Cotton Thickset Duroy Everlasting &
Plush Breeches. Sailors Great Coats, outside & inside Jackets, Check
Shirts, Frocks, long and wide Trowzers, Scotch bonnets & Blue mill'd
Shirts." But women's clothes were made to order in the town by mantua
makers, and in the country by travelling tailoresses and sempstresses,
or by the deft-fingered wearers.

New England dames had no mode-books nor fashion-plates to tell to them
the varying modes. Some sent to the fatherland for "fire-new fashions in
sleeves and slops," for garments and head-gear made in the prevailing
court style; and the lucky possessors, lent these new-fashioned caps and
gowns and cloaks as models to their poorer or less fortunate neighbors.
A very taking way of introducing new styles and shapes to the new land
was through the importation by milliners and mantua-makers of dressed
dolls, or "babys" as they were called, that displayed in careful
miniature the fashions and follies of the English court. In the _New
England Weekly Journal_ of July 2, 1733, appears this notice:

"To be seen at Mrs. Hannah Teatts Mantua Maker at the Head of
Summer Street Boston a Baby drest after the Newest Fashion of
Mantues and Night Gowns & everything belonging to a dress. Latilly
arrived on Capt. White from London, any Ladies that desire to see
it may either come or send, she will be ready to wait on 'em, if
they come to the House it is Five Shilling & if she waits on 'em it
is Seven Shilling."

We can fancy the group of modish Boston belles and dames each paying
Hannah Teatts her five shillings, and like overgrown children eagerly
dressing and undressing the London doll and carefully examining and
noting her