'Considerably a Gainer in Your Appearance'

Something I was reading dredged up from memory a defense attorney I knew in the nineteen-eighties when I was covering courts for my newspaper in Albany, N.Y. I’m sure he had an office but I always associate him with the shadowy marble halls of the old county courthouse, where he could be seen huddled in a corner with clients. He had no trouble drumming up business but among reporters and fellow attorneys he was something of a joke, in large part because of his appearance: he sported a cheap toupee. It looked synthetic, perhaps even flammable, and didn’t even come close to matching the color of his remaining hair. I was present when one of the county judges referred to the hair piece during a hearing, and to his credit the attorney smiled and said nothing. He appeared comfortable with his vanity. What made me think of the attorney after more than thirty years was a letter William Cowper wrote on this date, July 6, in 1781, to his friend William Unwin:

“I give you joy of your own hair; no doubt you are considerably a gainer in your appearance, by being disperiwigged. The best wig is that, which most resembles the natural hair. Why then should he, who has hair enough of his own, have recourse to imitation? I have little doubt, but that if an arm or leg could have been taken off with as little pain as the amputation of a curl or a lock of hair, the natural limb would have been thought less becoming, or less convenient, by some men, than a wooden one, and have been disposed of accordingly.”

For those unfamiliar with periwig (or Cowper’s disperiwigged), here’s the OED’s definition: “any highly stylized wig of a kind formerly worn by men and women, and (esp. in Britain and parts of the British Commonwealth) retained by judges and barristers as part of their professional dress. More generally: a wig of any kind.” To modern American eyes they look ridiculous, but the Dictionary’s citations lend it an honorable pedigree – Pepys, Swift (“It has cost me three guineas to-day for a periwig”), Burke and even Joyce in the Circe chapter of Ulysses: “Professor Goodwin, in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress.”