How did the famous trilby hat get its name?
Here’s a question for you: what was the biggest-selling novel of the Victorian era? And who wrote it – Dickens perhaps? George Eliot? Robert Louis Stevenson? It was none of these, though they all enjoyed huge sales. Instead, the accolade arguably goes to a man who was principally known, not as a novelist at all, but as a cartoonist. (We say ‘arguably’ because reliable sales figures for nineteenth-century books are not always easy to find.)
The cartoonist’s name was George du Maurier and the novel is Trilby (1894). Du Maurier had made his name as an illustrator: in 1895 he was responsible for the famous ‘curate’s egg’ cartoon (with its complaisant curate assuring the vicar, concerning the bad egg he’d been served up, that ‘parts of it are excellent’), and he’d even been responsible for coining the phrase ‘bedside manner’ in a medical cartoon of 1884. But owing to failing eyesight, du Maurier had begun to complement his illustrating work with novel-writing as a way of continuing to make a living from his pen. 
He certainly succeeded: Trilby would become the sensation of the age, not just in Britain but in the United States. In time, even when the novel was largely forgotten, its title would be immortalised in the name of a hat.
Trilby became a craze. Not just for novel tie-ins – that in itself was nothing new. A novel like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, published in 1860, had yielded a host of spin-off products, including hats and cloaks, a perfume, and even a type of waltz. No, what really made Trilby the first in a long line of modern literary phenomena was the way in which the source material itself would quickly become eclipsed by all of its associated memorabilia and by the better-known adaptations of the novel. Trilby appeared shortly before the invention of cinema, which would take the ‘adaptation that becomes more successful than the book’ to a whole new level. Du Maurier’s novel would itself be adapted for the silver screen in 1914 – or rather, the stage adaptation of the original novel would be adapted. Adaptations of adaptations. Further film adaptations would follow in 1915, 1923, 1927, 1931, 1954, and 1983. By the 1920s, the mesmeric Svengali had displaced Trilby as the novel’s principal character – the real heart of the story. Both characters’ names would enter into common use, floating free of the novel in which they originated.
Although the word ‘trilby’ is now synonymous with hats, the Oxford English Dictionary reveals the interesting evolution of the heroine’s name and how it was applied to other things first: originally, ‘trilby’ was used as a jocular name for the foot, after the heroine’s feet in the stage version of du Maurier’s novel and the fact that they are objects of admiration. At the Broadway production of the novel in 1894, you could even buy ice cream in the shape of Trilby’s feet, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘put one’s foot in one’s mouth’. (Aptly, du Maurier was something of a foot fetishist.) Shortly after this, ‘trilby’ was applied to shoes, and then – finally – to the Homburg hat, with which it has been chiefly associated ever since.
The novel’s other lasting legacy, as well as providing the origin of ‘trilby’, was the term Svengali, denoting a person who wields considerable power and influence over others. In the novel, Svengali is a hypnotist who works his powers on the novel’s female protagonist – her of the delightful feet – transforming the tone-deaf Trilby into a musical sensation. It’s little wonder that someone like Simon Cowell has been referred to as a ‘pop svengali’. Hypnotism, it would seem, has simply given way to auto-tune.
Image: Virginia Harned in the 1895 American production of Trilby (picture credit: Napoleon Sarony); Wikimedia Commons.
Great post … I have the book, an ancient, mothy old thing … and have read it through a couple of times. Big fun. Did you know that George is actually the grandfather of the famous Daphne Du Maurier, author of Rebecca, My Cousin Rachael, Frenchman’s Creek and Jamaica Inn … all old favs.
wow, what an interesting post –
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The trilby is my favorite kind of hat. Now I can tell people the origin of the name.
This post was a fun read. Looking forward to exploring your blog some more and to following in the future. Thanks…
I seldom read every single word of a blog post. Read every single word of this one, though. You’re to be commended on your content. I’m hooked.
Thank you! Much appreciated :)
I read Trilby last year and loved it! It was probably the best book I read all year!
Great post on one of the most fascinating 19th century novels. i had no idea it was possibly the bestseller of its day. I always thought it likely that it influenced Phantom of the Opera. Du Maurier’s other two novels The Martian and Peter Ibbetson are also largely forgotten gems of the period.
An interesting read, thank you
Interesting post, thank you~~