| Additional Info About Winnifred Dawson |
| Age: |
27 |
| Occupation: |
Housewife |
| Class: |
Middle class |
| Origins: |
Burniston |
| Relationships: |
Husband - Hugo Dawson
Father
Mother
Twin sister
Younger brother - Norman Garrow
Younger sister
Younger sister |
| Physical Description: |
Winnie is of average height and size. She has grey eyes with a hint of green and thick lips. She wears her dark brown hair in whatever style is the latest fashion according to the many ladies’ magazines she’s subscribed to. She tries to follow the latest fashion in her clothes as well. Luckily, her husband is very eager to see her happy and allow her to spend whatever his budget minus her constant redecorating of the home allows. She is unhappy about her jaw, which she feels is too strong, and her skin which is pale but ‘not the right kind of pale’ and which still has occasional breakouts. |
| History: |
Winnifred Dawson was born as Winnifred Eloise Garrow in 1868. Along with her twin sister, she was the oldest of what would finally be a five children: one boy and four girls. Winnifred has fond memories of her childhood in the small village of Burniston, in the Scarborough area, where her father was a school teacher. Though her father’s income was not large, the family lived comfortably enough. Winnie was of a kind and helpful nature, and made many friends among the local children, with whom she explored the countryside. Occasionally she was complicit in their mischief. She was also very close to her twin sister. Being the daughters of a teacher, both girls learned to read from an early age, and they would be inspired by the stories they read to come up with adventures to play out, for which they later used their little brother, Norman, to play villain and side roles.
Winnie did well in school and hoped to become a teacher like her father, partly to avoid having to work in a shop or for a milliner, to supplement the family’s modest income and sustain herself. It never got that far. While she was still in school, her father, who was now head teacher at the local school, got promoted to headmaster at a school Scarborough, lifting both her family’s income and social status. The family left Burniston and moved to a decent area in Scarborough proper.
Although their new home was larger and more comfortable than the one they had lived in before, Winnie found it hard to adapt to her new life at first. She missed Burniston and her friends, and Scarborough seemed so big to her. But the real impactful transition was a social one: while social differences had played a marginal role in her life in Burniston (where they had belonged to what her mother called the ‘decent people’ anyway), she was now confronted with the numerous strata within the hierarchy of the middle class they now ‘properly belonged to’, and of their own very modest rank within it. There were people here who wouldn’t befriend them, and people her mother did not allow her to befriend.
Becoming either a shop girl or a teacher, was out of the window now, both in her own eyes and in her ambitious mother’s eyes. She was going to be a proper young lady, like the well-dressed young ladies at the park who lived just two streets down from them and went to the same church, but wouldn’t greet them at the park. Her parents were eager to shake their humble roots and to advance their own social position. The family hired a maid (alright, ‘a room and board only’ girl from the workhouse was all they could afford, but they had a servant!). When her father changed to a better school, the actual difference in income and status was slight, but her mother made it a big deal, while also encouraging her husband to look out for an even better position. The girls, meanwhile were to take piano lessons, no longer play games that were too exerting or got their hands or dresses dirty, and no longer play with kids from working class families. Meanwhile, they were encouraged to make friends with girls from ‘proper’ homes, and take over those friends habits and hobbies. Winnie didn’t necessarily like this pressure, but she also felt she couldn’t afford to lose at this game and risk being snubbed.
Once Winnie and her sister left school, they were more extensively trained by their mother to become elegant young ladies and desirable housewives. They helped around the house, learned to host little parties for friends, joined their mother on social calls, and paid their own once they were old enough. Her father often complained about how much money was spent on the girls – on getting their best dresses mended or adapted when they were invited to parties, and on new gloves, ribbons, shoes, and the ever changing fashion regarding hats, corsets and bustles demanded. But their mother insisted that the girls should look the part. One would hardly suspect their father’s modest position.
Over the years, Winnie embraced her mother’s efforts, enjoying the praise when her mother thought she looked prim and proper, or even beautiful, and relishing the rush every time a new social circle opened to her. Though she often thought them too busy and rather draining, she also enjoyed the parties she was increasingly invited to, and she basked in the increasing attention young gentlemen paid to her. So nothing prepared her for falling head over heels for plain old Eddie Howard at nineteen.
Eddie was a childhood friend from Burniston, who was now a railway worker in Scarborough. Their first meeting after all those years was a chance encounter at Scarborough Central, when she returned from a visit to her grandmother. After that they met several times as friends to commemorate fond childhood memories. But friendship, laughter, and sweet memories of a simpler time turned to tenderness and love, and before she knew it, Winnie was hardly interested in parties and proper society and only dreamed of being Eddie’s wife. The feelings were reciprocated and they courted in secret for a time. But when Winnie finally told her parents, they were not supportive. After all, Eddie was but a railway worker. She could do so much better. Winnie resisted her parents pressure at first, refusing to listen to warnings of the misery she’d throw herself into, threats that everyone would look down on her and speak badly of her, and promises of happiness with a more suitable man who could properly support her. For a few weeks, she considered eloping, as Eddie had suggested when she told him of her parents’ unyielding ‘no’. But finally, she gave in and broke it off.
But the ‘real gentleman’ her parents had promised her didn’t show up. That was, she rejected all the suiters who proposed over the years (much to her mother’s chagrin), because none of them gave her that feeling of ‘being in love’ that she had once felt. Word spread that she was picky and that she had left a string of men embarrassed. The proposals dried up. Once her twenty-fifth birthday passed, both Winnie and her parents began to fear that she would end up a spinster. Winnie began to see that she would have to lower her standards and forget how she had once felt. Throwing herself more actively into social events, she finally met the director of the Whitby building society, who paid her a lot of attention and seemed very respectful and gentlemanly. They began to court. He was wealthier and more successful than her father, made her feel flattered and special, her family improved of him, and he even got her brother Norman a promotion, and so she decided it was a good match. She did not love him as passionately as she had once loved Eddie, but she loved him, and told herself passions were for children. And so when he finally proposed, she agreed to marry him.
They have been married for a little over a year now. There are no children yet, but this allows Winnie to focus on her hobbies: obsessively redecorating their fine home, making social calls, and telling the two (2!) maids how to do their work and where they've missed a speck of dust.
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| OOC Preferences: |
No limits in language. For violence, please discuss any maiming, torture, death, or harm to a child with me first. For sexual content, no rape (see rules as well!). I generally suck at NSFW threads.
Unless otherwise discussed, I will consider a thread dead/finished and move on if I haven’t had a reply in a month (a oneliner is A-ok. I just hate my plots stagnating and my character trapped in time). I’ll probably nudge you a week before or so, in case it fell off your radar.
If we are in a group thread, I would like everyone to have a chance to reply in turn. However, if I bombed your thread, don't wait for me if I'm not responding fast enough. |
| Alias: |
Jack |
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Offline
Last seen 01-22-2023, 04:34 PM.
Local time is 04-20-2024 at 12:28 PM.
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Birthday: 06-11-1990 (33 years old)
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