The Duchess of Edinburgh's Pickle:

• The other drawback-and the one that affected the guests even more than the artists was that when once the Prince and Princess were seated no one could rise on any pretext or provocation whatever. I think it was at my second appearance at the royal concerts that an amusing incident occurred, which impressed the inconvenience of this regulation upon my memory. The Duchess of Edinburgh, daughter of the Czar, entered in the Prince of Wales' party. She looked an irritable, dissatisfied, bilious person; and I was told that she was always talking about being "the daughter of the Czar of all the Russias," and that it galled her that even the Princess of Wales took precedence over her. Those were the good old days of tie-backs, made of elastic and steel, a sort of modified hoopskirt with all of the hoop in the back. The tie-back was the passing of the hoop, and its management was an education in itself. I remember mine came from Paris and I had had a bit of difficulty in learning to sit down in it gracefully. Well, the Duchess of Edinburgh had not mastered the art. She was all right until she sat down, and looked very regal in a gown of thick, heavy white silk and the most gorgeous of jewels-encrusted diamonds and Russian rubies, the latter nearly the size of a pigeon's eggs. Her tiara and stomacher were so magnificent that they appalled me. The Prince and Princess sat down and every one else followed suit, the daughter of the Czar of all the Russias among those in the front row. And she sat down wrong. Her tie-back tilted up as she went down; her skirt rose high in front, revealing a pair of large feet clad in white shoes, and large ankles, and legs nearly up to her knees. There was a footstool under the large feet, and they were very much in evidence the whole evening, posing, entirely against their Owner's will, on a temporary monument. The awful part of it was that the duchess knew all about it and was so furious that she could hardly contain herself. It was a study to watch the daughter of the Czar of all the Russias in these circumstances, Her face showed how much she wanted to get up and pull down her dress and hide her robust pedal extremities, but court etiquette forbade and the duchess suffered.

Not hoopskirt related but this is how the rest of the article ends:

• The end of everything, as a matter of course, was the singing of God Save the Queen, and as there were nearly always two prima donnas present, each of us sang one verse. All the artists and the chorus sang the third, which constituted "good night' and was the official closing of the performance. I usually sang the first verse. When the concert was over the Prince and Princess with the lesser royalties filed out. They passed by the front of the stage and always had some agreeable thing to say. I recall with much pleasure Prince Arthur, the present Duke of Connaught, stopping to compliment me on a song I had just sung- the Polonaise from Mignon-and to remind me that I had sung it at Admiral Dahlgren's reception at the navy yard in Washington during his American visit. "You sang that for me in Washington, didn't you, Miss Kellogg?" he said; and I was greatly pleased by the slight but courteous remembrance.

Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Saturday_Evening_Post/009j61DirnwC?hl=en&gbpv=1

This is part of a collection of different stories in the source article called 'A Singer's Story' by Clara Louise Kellogg-Strakosch (1842-1916). Kellogg sang opera from 1861 until she retired in 1886. In 1913 she published her memoirs under the title 'Memoirs of an American Prima Donna', which I imagine might have some of the content mentioned in this paper. The Duchess of Edinburgh mentioned in the article is Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia (1853-1920).

• She squatted as low as her voluminous crinoline would allow, then smiled as a ridiculous, irrational thought struck her. Mrs. Haynes and those silly suffragists certainly had the right idea when it came to dress reform. Whoever decreed that women should wear four-foot hoops around their legs certainly must have intended that they be confined. "Charity, help me, will you?" She stood and looked around for a private place to discard the unwieldy foundation garment. But when she glanced behind her, she saw that the dozen or so soldiers around the nearest fire had frozen in a tableau of curiosity, pausing from their work to take an unseemly interest in hers. "What am I to do, Miss Flanna?" Charity asked, wringing her hands."Let me think." Flanna squatted again, her skirt mounding around her as she peered inside the small tent. A center pole blocked her path; she couldn't even waddle in. She couldn't crawl forward, for the hoop skirt would tilt upward and expose her pantalets to an entire company of curious Yankees. "Dog take it all!" The crude expression was one of Wesley's favorites, and she felt better after saying it. In a flash of decision, she stood and pulled her apron off, then tossed it to Charity. As the maid watched in stupefaction, Flanna smoothed the fabric of her dress until she had exposed the seam that joined her bodice and skirt. "Scalpel, Charity," she said, extending her hand. "Miss Flanna?" "My scalpel, if you please. Now."..........."Charity," Flanna handed the scalpel back to her maid, "will you please work your fingers into the hole and untie the string that holds my hoop skirt? I'll never be able to maneuver in this." Nodding, Charity came forward and did as she was told. When Charity had untied the string, the cage-like contraption fell from Flanna's skirt, billowing the fabric of her plain plaid housedress. The soldiers behind her cheered in newfound appreciation for her ingenuity. "Now, to tend my patient." Flanna stepped over the collapsed steel hoops and knelt to crawl into the tent.

• "We could try the trains again. Maybe we could get through." Flanna shook her head. “No. Last week I read about two women who were hauled off the train in Washington. The soldiers there ripped off their dresses, looking for guns under their hoop skirts." She lifted a brow. "You don't want that to happen to us, do you? The paper didn't say, but I can't imagine that the women's ill treatment stopped there."

• But what else could she do? If she wanted to go home, common sense told her that she'd have to agree to Alden's plan. Franklin O'Connor would have to walk into a tent and vanish so Miss Flanna O'Connor, the nurse, could take her place. Soon she'd be wearing a corset again, and pantalets, and a hoop skirt so wide that no man could come within three feet of her without tilting the birdcage beneath her skirt and risking an immodest glimpse of the lace at her ankles.

Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Velvet_Shadow/3zcZ4CBDV28C?hl=en&gbpv=0

"I was in a street car," says Miss Knowlton, "and Mr., sitting by me, whispered the question as to whether I knew Miss Peabody. I replied that I did not, and he said: "That is she in the other corner, but don't look for a minute.' The caution came too late, for as he named her I glanced that way. It was in the days of hoops, and she sat serenely and meditatively in her seat, her hoop skirt flying up before her, disclosing a black- and-red petticoat and white stockings, but she was perfectly unconscious of any disarray in her appearance." Mrs. Hawthorne, on the contrary, was a model of neatness and exquisite taste. Miss Peabody's carelessness of personal attire was always a trial to the eyes of Emerson, who demanded neatness and order about him.

Source, pages 182-83

The other day we observed Mrs. Paragon and her two daughters walking in Regent-street. The young ladies were walking close to, and one on each side of their mother. Consequently their respective crinolines were tilted up in the air on the "off-side." An opportunity was thus afforded to all anxious spectators to study the manufacture of the young ladies' balmorals, and the fit of their open-worked silk stockings over their ankles, a word which is now by courtesy applied to some eighteen inches or thereabouts of the leg. In short, this fashion would be termed, in the ultra-refined language of the penny-a-liners, "not strictly in accordance with our ideas of feminine propriety;" in old-fashioned English, "immodest and "indelicate."

Source, page 7

Adele took a deep breath and replied sweetly, "Good sir, I do not love you, and I will never marry you.” With those words, she turned around, pulled up her hoop skirt, and ran out of the garden toward the house, her dress billowing up behind her like a great balloon.

Page 172: Charlotte shoved the maid's hand away. "I'll be sick if you keep holding that awful stuff under my nose!" She rolled onto her back, not caring that her hoop lifted her dress high over her legs. "If you were really worried about me, you'd find my husband and tell him how much I need him."

Page 220: When she heard Ella Mae slam the front door shut an eternity later, she finally found the strength to move. Walking over to the sofa on wobbly knees, she threw herself across its unyielding surface, not even caring that someone might come in and see her hoop skirt sticking straight up in the air. But what did it really matter if someone came in and saw her undergarments when her whole world had come crashing down?

Source: https://archive.org/details/xt7bg7372m1f

This incident happened in Belfast, Maine but it made the front page in the Mayesville, Kentucky Evening Bulletin for October 19, 1882 under the headline “Infernal Machine.” Must have been a slow news day.

"A rather sad affair took place on one of our streets the other day. A young lady with her arms full of bundles emerged from a dry goods store when one of them fell on the sidewalk without her noticing it. Just behind her was a young man – a Belfast young man who is not polite is not anything – and he quickly stepped forward to pick it up. Now a bundle done up in a piece of paper with a dry-goods advertisement on it is apparently as harmless as a mother’s spanking; and there it lay as guileless as an angleworm, on a sidewalk after a rain. Just as he stooped to pick it up there was a rustling of paper, the twist began to come out of the ends and in another instant a bright red thing – a sort of a cross between a balloon and a devil fish – flew into the air before his eyes, and a No. 10, thirty-six-inch, double-jointed, duplex, elliptic, steel-bowed, bustle-attachment, dollar-and-a-half, red-headed hoopskirt waltzed around and gyrated and opened and shut up and fell on the walk as flat and thin as a restuarant pie; and the young man straightened himself up, looking as if he wished the tail of comet No. 2 would sweep him from this fair land, and the young lady came back with a face that resembled a sunset on a 50 cent chromo, and she picked up the wire contrivance and then she went toward the east and he went toward the west and the sun ducked his head behind a cloud to hide a smile, and three or four looked on, laid down and laughed and doubled themselves up in a manner that would have made a mess of green apples hang their heads in shame."