In Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South, Margaret, the heroine, modelled a Kashmir shawl, with Gaskell describing the shawl as having a “spicy Eastern smell”, “soft feel”, and “brilliant color”. When Margaret met her future husband, Gaskell described her attire as completed by “a large Indian shawl which hung about her in heavy folds and which she wore as an empress wears her drapery”.
In 1852, Charles Dickens wrote in the magazine Household Words that “if an article of dress could be immutable, it would be the (Kashmir) shawl; designed for eternity in the unchanging East; copied from patterns which are the heirlooms of caste; and woven by fatalists, to be worn by adorers of the ancient garment, who resent the idea of the smallest change”
