SOURCE: Stoneley, Peter. “‘The Fashionable World Displayed’: Alcott and Social Power.” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (spring 1999): 21-36.

[In the following essay, Stoneley considers the use of fashion in Louisa May Alcott's work as a consequence of her upbringing. He asserts that Alcott's treatment of fashion also reflects tensions concerning the nineteenth century's consumer-driven middle class.]

Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtues. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is the hall of the Past.

—Emerson

Self-presentation was a source of both pleasure and anxiety for nineteenth-century American women. Louisa May Alcott often felt awkward about how she appeared, especially as she became an increasingly public figure. She knew that she needed to project an image that was “bright and comely,” but she also knew that, after years of ill health and over-work, such an image would be deceptive. At the same time, she was reluctant to risk a portrait that would “disappoint the children.”¹ When she and her publisher, Thomas Niles, were searching for suitable images for promotional purposes, Alcott expressed dissatisfaction with all the photographs of herself. She eventually sent Niles one (describing it as “a sample of the pensive invalid”) that had been taken at Conly's in Boston in the early 1880s. It is a grand and formal portrait of the writer, seated with an open volume in hand. She is attired in the high Victorian style, in a very draped and elaborate afternoon dress. A professionally made garment, it is mainly of silk, with contrasting velvet basque, bustle with tasselled bow, layers of flounces, and an apron-front with frills. The effect is very much one of opulence and expense, although the dress does not fit very well. And for all that it proclaims its costliness, the dress is not actually very stylish. Alcott had chosen to present herself to her public in a bustle at precisely the wrong moment. By this time the bustle had passed the height of fashion, and there is no sign of the narrower, straighter line that would define the mode of the 1880s. How appropriate that a woman who made a career extolling the virtues of home sewing should look uncomfortable, should get it slightly wrong, when she tried to conform to the image of Boston grande dame of letters.²

Alcott had to “sell” herself to her audience, in that she had to achieve an authoritative and attractive presence. One obvious way of doing this was to avail herself of the dress codes of the day. But as her diffidence would suggest, she embodied contradictions that did not make such projections comfortable or accurate. In her life and work, she managed several important cultural transformations, notably from rural to metropolitan, from making to buying. She grew up with ideals of genteel modesty, but lived with the emergence of “conspicuous consumption.” Even as she acquired the social authority of fame and wealth, she was deeply troubled by what Henry James would call “the air of unmitigated publicity.”³ In her most important writing for girls, she used the idiom of fashion to express concern over the loss of an older sense of intrinsic moral worth. This essay investigates her treatment of power in relation to female self-presentation. I begin with the cultural influence of her background, before turning more specifically to her fiction, and to her management of her own professional and social identity. The theme throughout is that of class definition, as defined and regulated through women's fashions.

In her journal for September 1, 1843, the ten-year-old Louisa May Alcott recorded that she had risen at five, taken a bath—“I love cold water”—and spent the rest of the day in lessons, chores, and exercise. She also mentions being read a story called “The Judicious Father,” which she then summarizes:

How a rich girl told a poor girl not to look over the fence at the flowers, and was cross to her because she was unhappy. The father heard her do it, and made the girls change clothes. The poor one was glad to do it, and he told her to keep them. But the rich one was very sad; for she had to wear the old ones a week, and after that she was good to shabby girls. I liked it very much, and I shall be kind to poor people.⁴

This story neatly matches Anne Scott MacLeod's characterization of the children's fiction of the period, which she describes as “clumsy literature, conceptually impoverished and preachy.”⁵ Alcott, though, was more subject than most to a moralized discourse on fashion and pride. She was at that point living in a community that had a dress code. The family was at Fruitlands, the experimental farm established by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane. The Fruitlands ethos incorporated a belief in the wearing of simple, practical clothes, which had been manufactured in ways that did not exploit others. To Bronson and Lane, this meant not wearing cotton as it was a product of slavery. More extraordinarily, they did not wear silk, as it was exploitative of the silk worm.⁶ Louisa May was also exposed to a discourse on the morality of fashion in the form of her parents' literary endeavours. Both Bronson and Abba sought to publish texts that offered a commentary on self-display. Bronson compiled an anthology of emblematic texts to be called “Pictures of Thought,” intended “principally to aid the Young in Self-Inspection & Self-Culture.” He lifted many of his “Pictures” directly from his collection of emblem books, which were also available to Louisa May in the library at Fruitlands.⁷ The emblems evince a concern for the need to see beyond an attractive surface. “Pride” is represented by the Peacock:

Behold the silly bird; how proudly vain
Of the bright colours of his gaudy train!

But the argument against prideful display does not amount to an egalitarian social vision. Sometimes hierarchy is reinforced, and in a way that relates specifically to gender. The emblem of “Retirement” is a drooping lily which, “proud of outward show,” has been transplanted from her natural place in the shade. Bronson's explanation asserts: “Thus do we often find a female, who might remain happy in peaceful retirement, running a thousand hazards for the sake of showing, and the idea of improving her accomplishments.”⁸ The implication is clear: female modesty and female virtue are one and the same.

Similarly, Alcott's mother sought to warn the modern age against the lures of vanity. Abba Alcott produced a new edition of John Owen's The Fashionable World Displayed (1806), which she hoped would “be the humble means of restraining folly, or checking extravagance.”⁹ Owen's satire draws attention to the vices, worldliness, superficiality and theatricality of the fashionable classes. He notes that in fashionable society a “woman may expose her bosom, paint her face, assume a forward air, gaze without emotion, and laugh without restraint at the loosest scenes of theatrical licentiousness, and yet be after all—a modest woman” (49). Elegant dress is deplored as a foolish competition, and the pamphlet ends with the call to make “the PEOPLE OF FASHION become the PEOPLE OF GOD” (93).

A final and more light-hearted example of the Alcott parents' interest in wealth, display and morality is to be found in a satirical poem, Nothing to Wear: An Episode of City Life, which was owned and cherished by Abba Alcott, her daughter Abby, and subsequent family members. The poem recounts the adventures of Miss Flora M'Flimsey of Madison Square, who, in spite of three exhaustive shopping expeditions to Paris, is still left with “nothing to wear.” Yet she does own an extensive collection of dresses:

All of them different in colour and pattern,
Silk, muslin and lace, crape, velvet, and satin,
Brocade, and broadcloth, and other material,
Quite as expensive and much more ethereal …(10)

The poem subsequently takes a much more serious turn, urging such as Flora to visit the poor, the starving, and the ill:

As you sicken and shudder and fly from the door;
Then home to your wardrobes, and say, if you dare—
Spoiled children of Fashion—you've nothing to wear!

(67)

Here and elsewhere, fashion is the sign of new money and secularizing culture. Taken together, they indicate a lack of moral feeling and social responsibility.

Like neighbours and contemporaries such as Emerson and Thoreau, the Alcotts were deeply concerned with the ethics of dress and troubled by the idea that fashion was a means of enforcing and celebrating social inequity. This was not a new concern. A mistrust of citified fashions and all that they implied was a significant feature of eighteenth-century English fiction, and of antebellum American writing.¹¹ The theme became increasingly marked by mid-century preoccupations with established and emergent methods of production: slavery, the weary dressmaker, the factory system. The Alcotts look back to a simpler age, when materialist and showy attitudes were thought not to be so much in evidence. But there is perhaps another, more closely biographical factor at work here, especially in the distrust of new money that fashion is taken to imply. Abba herself was from old money. As the daughter of Colonel Joseph May, the niece of Dorothy Quincy Hancock, and a descendant on her mother's side of Judge Samuel Sewall, Abba's background incorporated some of the most notable legal and business figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But marrying the improvident Bronson brought her class status into question. As class distinctions in the nineteenth-century United States became more pronounced, and wealth became an ever more important determining factor, gentility had less to do with behaviour—the gentility of manners—than with dressing well and not working.¹² Only fully aware of the risk she had taken after it was too late, Abba wrote to her father in desperation: “Would you have me take in washing?”¹³

The Alcotts' social humiliation had consequences for all members of the family. For Louisa May, it resulted in a kind of social disappearance. She wrote in her journal for December 1860 that she had been asked to a “John Brown meeting, but had no ‘good gown,’ so didn't go” (101). Even in radical reform circles, Alcott's poverty made her feel a loss of social mobility. She also records her disturbance at seeing other, more expensively dressed women in Boston: “In the street I try not to covet fine things” (61). But the most sustained and complex register of this class endangerment is to be found in her fiction. It is here that notions of feminine refinement are explored most fully, especially in relation to work, fashion, and class.

Little Women (1868) does not disguise its puritanical strain. The novel contains many explicit references to Pilgrim's Progress, and is structured around its precursor. But it is not directly religious or spiritual in its bent. Its moral values are more frequently conflated with those of class than with those of Christianity. While it is true that the girls are encouraged to be “little women” because it is Christian to be modest, gentle, and self-sacrificing, their discretion and their modesty are also their only remaining guarantees of their middle-class status. The narrative makes specific claims on the girls' behalf to a social position that is in danger of being lost. We are permitted to overhear a conversation in a fine drawing-room, during which the Marches are described as “one of our first families, but reverses of fortune, you know” (86). The novel constantly rescues the social standing of the characters, and by implication, of their real-life counterparts. In compensation for his increasingly fragile claims to middle-class respectability, Bronson's fictional alter ego is given high military rank: Mr. March is a colonel. The patronage of Mr. Lawrence is another means of making frequent allusion to the March family's grander past. Rather than judging on current appearances, Mr. Lawrence respects the status implied by their background and behaviour. And however far they may have fallen, the family is never confused with the lower classes. There is always a broad conceptual gulf between the Marches and their servant, Hannah Mullet, or the poor immigrants to whom the family extends its benevolence. Alcott explores the drama of poverty from a middle-class point of view. She uses her fiction to redelineate the social boundaries that her real family was in danger of blurring. In doing so, she insists on the same identification she made when, as a ten-year-old, she heard the story of the rich girl and the poor girl: “I shall be kind to poor people.” Counter-indications notwithstanding, she maintains a sense of social superiority.

Little Women investigates class in explicit relation to dress and display. The March girls are encouraged to sew for reasons beyond the merely practical. Sewing serves to inculcate a genteel feminine virtue, in that it is a quiet accomplishment, far removed from the brutish pleasures of “romping.” It is no accident that the most virtuous sister, Beth, is also the most accomplished needlewoman. Through her, Alcott offers a moralized vaunting of old-fashioned womanly skills. But Alcott's approval of neatness of dress does not preclude a strong mistrust of fashion. Sewing as a subservient, familial activity is set against a more worldly femininity in the chapter in which “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair.” Meg allows herself to be dressed up and ornamented for the Moffats' soirée: Belle Moffat and Hortense, the French maid, turn her into “a fine lady” (85). In Alcott's fiction, one thing always leads to another, and soon Meg is drinking champagne, flirting, chattering, and giggling like the most frivolous inhabitant of the beau monde. She becomes, as one man describes her, “a doll.” This giddiness causes Meg to reproach herself, and good sense wins out.

If Meg's narrative aligns Alcott firmly with a reformist post-Puritan culture, other parts of the novel suggest a different reading. When the relatively well-off Mrs. Gardiner invites Meg and Jo to a New Year's Eve ball, they rush around with humorous desperation, trying to gather together enough of the right clothes to make themselves presentable. With repairs and borrowing, they just about manage. The serious point that lies behind the humour here is that although Alcott disapproves of the vain and foolish shows of arrivistes, she also recognises that to lack the right clothes is to lose social presence altogether. It is not enough to have genteel manners; to be unable to dress appropriately is to be disqualified from polite society. In her idealistic moments, Alcott harks back to an unstratified social totality, in which fashionable display was a liability as much as anything. But if such an unstratified society had ever existed, Little Women testifies to an increasing pressure to live up to behavioral forms and codes.

Over the mid-century period, especially with the emergence of an entrepreneurial class, Concord and other towns were to become increasingly demarcated in class terms.¹⁴ Even as Alcott questions this type of middle-class “progress,” her novel is haunted by fears of being left behind. But she remains divided on the issue of fashion. Her Calvinist disapproval of the shows of the world is counterbalanced by a Romantic love of exotic, aggrandized personae. She manages this contradiction by finding safe, semi-private ways to celebrate display, most obviously in the way that the sisters love to dress up for their various theatricals. Within the earnest and moralized ethos, there is also a pleasure in sumptuary splendour. Alcott subsequently explores these contradictory tendencies in the different fates of the sisters. She extolls the virtue of domestic economy in the story of Meg, who must learn to tailor her desires to her budget on marrying the impecunious John. But Alcott and her readers may also travel to Europe with another sister. Through Amy, we are permitted the modern, monied pleasure of a continental excursion, and vicariously enjoy the experience of being courted by a rich and handsome suitor on the lake at Vevey. For all that true worth is to be discerned behind appearances, the novel does also grant a romance that consists of wealth, leisure, and “Paris finery.” As Richard Brodhead has so persuasively suggested, “at the same time that it is erecting an ethic of poor but honest virtue against the temptations of affluence, Little Women opens an unobtrusive commerce between old-style virtuous domesticity and a new-style lavishness.”¹⁵

Although a number of Alcott's novels and stories develop this theme of fashion and class, I want to focus on An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870). I do this because the novel has received very little critical attention, because it deals with display and class stratification insistently and explicitly, and also because it represents a neat structural reversal of its celebrated predecessor, Little Women.¹⁶ Whereas Meg is placed momentarily in Vanity Fair before a return to the comfortable and moralized locale of home, An Old-Fashioned Girl is set almost entirely in Boston, as the heroine, Polly Milton, must make her way among various social and economic dangers. This in itself shows that by this time, whatever her views on the relative virtues of town and country, the metropolis of Boston was coming to occupy an increasingly important place in Alcott's life and work.

Polly is presented as a natural, sensible and charming girl. The novel opens with her visit to Boston to stay with her cousin, Fanny Shaw. Although the girls are the same age, Polly's “countrified” Concordian background puts her at odds with Fanny. She wears a “simple blue merino frock, stout boots, and short hair,” and is still a girl. Her citified cousin has more advanced notions, both in terms of manner and of dress:

“You are fourteen, and we consider ourselves young ladies at that age,” continued Fanny, surveying with complacency the pile of hair on the top of her head, with a fringe of fuzz around her forehead and a wavy lock streaming down her back; likewise, her scarlet and black suit, with its big sash, little pannier, bright buttons, points, rosettes—and heaven knows what. There was a locket on her neck, earrings tinkling in her ears, watch and chain at her belt, and several rings on a pair of hands that would have been improved by soap and water.¹⁷

Alcott is directing her critical attention at the “Girl of the Period” here. Indeed, she refers specifically to this legendary figure. The “Girl of the Period” was an English version of Flora M'Flimsey, designed by Eliza Lynn Linton to typify the sense that young women were increasingly overdressed and frivolous. The points of comparison between Linton's “Girl” and Fanny Shaw and her upper-class friends are clear. Linton suggested that the “Girl” had adopted the extravagant dress of the prostitute, and that in doing so, she too had turned herself into a commodity. Fanny and her friends have secret trysts with fast young men, and seek to marry on mercenary terms. Like Linton's “Girl,” Fanny is defined by the immodesty of her appearance. She too is “a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such thoughts and intellect as she possesses.”¹⁸

Fanny and Polly provide a contrast between old and new. Polly belongs to the old order. The daughter of a poor country minister, her surname of Milton suggests that she is of the elite, but not an “aristocrat.” In the course of the novel, she is set beside other female characters as Alcott sets out to explore the roles and possibilities for the women of the age. Fanny's mother, Mrs. Shaw, corresponds to the popular fictional type of the fashionable and ailing mother. Vain and self-indulgent more than ill, Mrs. Shaw is an in-valid woman indeed. When her youngest daughter runs towards her, she pushes her away because the daughter's hands are dirty and will mark her “lustrous silk.” Polly is on hand to make the silent observation that “the velvet cloak didn't cover a right motherly heart, that the fretful face under the nodding purple plumes was not a tender motherly face.” Polly then remembers her own mother, “whose dress was never too fine for little wet cheeks to lie against or loving little arms to press” (114).

Mrs. Shaw and her daughter Fanny are caught up in exhibiting new wealth and aping European aristocratic notions. But Alcott suggests—along with Emerson and others—that if one pushes back a generation, one will discover true worth. To go back in time is much the same as returning from the city to the country, for Grandma Shaw represents all the stalwart American Revolutionary virtues that are still alive in Polly: “In my day, children of fourteen and fifteen didn't dress in the height of fashion, go to parties, as nearly like those of grown people as it's possible to make them, lead idle, giddy, unhealthy lives, and get blasé at twenty. We were little folks till eighteen or so, worked and studied, dressed and played like children, honored our parents, and our days were much longer in the land than now, it seems to me” (12). She remembers how “we all learned to make bread, and cook, and wore little chintz gowns, and were as gay and hearty as kittens.” She compares the benefit of this model of childhood with that of her daughter-in-law, remarking of her siblings that “all lived to be grandmothers and fathers, and I'm the last—seventy, next birthday, my dear, and not worn out yet, though daughter Shaw is an invalid at forty” (13). Grandma Shaw has lived upstairs, neglected by the new generation, until Polly arrives and tries to establish a relationship with the old woman. Grandma Shaw disregards Polly's lack of fashionable clothes, and recognizes her as a true gentlewomanly type, telling her: “you have lived in the country, and haven't learned that modesty has gone out of fashion” (16). But Polly's presence renews the other children's interest in the old accomplishments of cooking and sewing, and they learn to appreciate their grandmother's stories of the old days. Grandma Shaw tells of the old Beacon Hill families of Hancock, Joy, Quincy, and May. Of course, Alcott has given Grandma Shaw precisely her own mother's relations. In a moment with undisguised biographical resonance, the narrative privileges the modesty of the past, even as it makes an assertion of class status.

Eventually, after Grandma's death, the Shaw family loses its fortune, and must move back into Grandma's house. Alcott uses Grandma's property to surround the characters with a reassuring sense of their background: “The old-fashioned things … now seemed almost like a gift from Grandma, doubly precious in these troublous times” (285).¹⁹ Polly helps the family to manage under reduced circumstances, and all become more humane and independent as a result. Polly marries the previously unreliable Tom Shaw, while the newly chastened Fanny marries a gentleman of the old school.

Although I have used An Old-Fashioned Girl to demonstrate Alcott's affiliation with older models of class and virtue, it would be wrong to suppose that she wishes entirely to ignore the facts of modernity. She includes New Woman characters, and the themes of fashion and feminism come together in the story of Jenny, the impoverished seamstress. Jenny attempts suicide rather than starve or become a prostitute. Learning of her life, Polly resolves to talk to a party of rich girls about their duty to such struggling women. The rich young women have come together to make garments for charity, but their skills are so poor that they put sleeves on upside-down and make jackets inside-out. When the conversation turns to poor seamstresses, paranoia over fashion and status comes to the fore. As one young woman says of the servant class: “If they spent their wages properly, I shouldn't mind so much, but they think they must be as fine as anybody and dress so well that it is hard to tell the mistress from the maid.” Another adds: “Servants ought to be made to dress like servants, as they do abroad, then we should have no more trouble” (199). Alcott reveals here the great uncertainty that underlies the increasing emphasis on display as a system of class definition. For if class is what one wears rather than how one thinks and acts, then the lower classes will find it only too easy to mimick their “betters.” The problem with gilded age sophistication, then, is not simply that it is immoral, but that it is insecure.

Alcott believes in a sympathetic and moral middle class, doubtless because she was thoughtful and compassionate. But she was also an “old-fashioned girl” in her time, and she uses the novel to clarify her sense of her own class pretensions. In pressing the claims of her Beacon Hill background over those of fashionable self-display, she was retrieving what had been lost. This reactionary gesture is ultimately rather troubling. Alcott was attempting to consolidate the basis of class definition, suggesting that it should be as obvious and immoveable as Grandma Shaw's heavy furniture. We might have inferred this from the story of Jenny, the distressed seamstress. Although Alcott exhibits through Jenny a concern with working women's lives, she has created a very safely “deserving” figure. As Christine Stansell has observed of such stock characters, they were “the kind of working-class woman, housebound, deferential and meek, that genteel people liked.” The factory girl, on the other hand, was better off, anti-domestic, and generally “more venturesome and disturbing.”²⁰ Alcott's work seems an uncertain and incomplete effort to address shifts in class definition: even as she seeks a radical redress of social inequity, she longs to reunite with the well-modulated conservatism of Beacon Hill.

Fashion becomes increasingly important as a marker of social power in Alcott's fiction. Alcott argues that dress should not be important, and seeks to retrench older forms of class definition. Along with Emerson, Alcott sees fashion as a “posthumous honor,” a “virtue gone to seed.” She longs for the “hall of the Past”, in which her own family represented a happy conjunction of both honor and wealth. Her characters' redemption lies in their well-mannered adjustment to reversal of fortune, although she betrays herself somewhat with characters such as Amy and Fanny, who “marry well.” In itself alone, “posthumous honor” is not enough. She will also take present wealth.

The irony of Alcott's career is that she lived long enough and became sufficiently successful to “buy into” the newly consumerised middle class.²¹ All her young adult life, she managed with gifts and handed-down, re-made clothes, and herself worked as a seamstress. After her great success with Little Women, Alcott was to be diffident about fame, resenting intrusion, but enjoying the delights that had been denied her by youthful poverty. She made enough money out of praising homely virtues to partake in the beau monde. In her middle age she left the old-fashioned girl behind, and began to enjoy some of the pleasures of a Fanny Shaw. She continued to sew throughout her life, but she also began to spend considerable amounts on her wardrobe. She never became a compulsive clothes-buyer, and she certainly never came close to exceeding her income. She remained financially conservative, and even as a wealthy woman would keep a record of bills in cents as well as dollars. But she did acquiesce in a culture in which class was signified by expensive self-presentation, spending more on clothes in a year than her cook earned in a year.²² She also began to make big lump-sum payments for elaborate tailor-made dresses of the kind that we see in the “authoress” photograph.²³ She used her wealth to display her wealth, to “dress the part” of an extremely successful writer. But she was also caught up in a more pervasive shift. Fashion was becoming so accessible, so universally inclusive, that the baseline of sartorial respectability was rising.²⁴ Along with every one else, Alcott had to do more to stay in the same position. But fashion had another meaning for her. It may have been “vain,” but it was also proof of her professional success, an expression of her self-made security.

Alcott's various decisions in relation to her life and work exhibit a keen disapproval of gilded age forms and practices. She could never accept her own accommodation to the order of conspicuous consumption. She tried to disguise her unmistakable desire for money as a family obligation—to pay off her father's debts, to save for her nephews and niece. In the face of this increasingly delusory sense of economic need, she did make decisions as to what she would and would not do for money. However, this in turn might be related to non-pecuniary forms of status. For instance, she continued to write “moral pap for the young,” but discontinued her cheap sensation fiction. As Brodhead puts it, “what is Alcott's rejection of story-paper writing but a repudiation of a form she fears will declass her?” (104). In her negotiation of the related categories of fashion, class, and authority, Alcott disapproves of the showy vulgarity of cheap romance in the same way that she disapproves of extravagant dress. Her moderating impulse defines her as more securely rooted in the middle class than would a display of “nouveau luxe.” Her retreat from fame could be interpreted similarly. She became notorious for her reluctance to appear before her public, scorning to show herself to the day-trippers who peered at Orchard House hoping for a glimpse of the author of Little Women. By the late nineteenth century, such demonstrations of middle-class modesty were irretrievably compromised by financial considerations. One thinks again of James, and his notion that, in the age of the display, “the highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted privacy.”²⁵ Alcott's refusal to display herself to the common public might once have been seen as virtuous feminine reclusiveness. But in the context of her later life, it was construed as a prideful assertion of independent means. In her various and somewhat ambiguous negotiations of fashion and display, she enables us to trace the fate of modesty. It is differently prized as its context evolves. It begins as the discreet expression of genteel womanhood, and ends as the premium choice of the consumer.

Notes

1. Louisa May Alcott to Thomas Niles, 1886; see The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995), 299.

2. I am grateful to Penelope Ruddock of the Fashion Research Council in Bath, England, for giving me a “reading” of this dress.

3. Henry James, The American Scene (1907; repr. London: Penguin, 1994), 11. The notion of “conspicuous consumption” is of course derived from Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

4. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997), 45.

5. Anne Scott MacLeod, A Moral Tale: Children's Fiction and American Culture, 1820-1860 (New Camden: Archon Books, 1975), 17.

6. Alcott has been particularly well served by her biographers, though there have been quite strong elements of controversy. See Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott: A Biography (1950; New York: Random House, 1996), and Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987). Madelon Bedell gives a particularly full and interesting account of the Fruitlands episode in The Alcotts: The Biography of a Family (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1980). See also Claudia Nelson's essay, “Care in Feeding: Vegetarianism and Social Reform in Alcott's America,” in The Girl's Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915, ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994).

7. The Fruitlands copies of “Pictures of Thought” and other Alcott books (including a Fruitlands catalogue), are to be found in the Houghton Library. Richard Brodhead offers a fascinating investigation into Bronson's educative principles in relation to broader patterns of self-control and “disciplinary intimacy” in Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993).

8. [John Huddlestone Wynne], Choice Emblems, Natural, Historical, Fabulous, Moral and Divine (New York, 1814).

9. John Owen, The Fashionable World Displayed (New York: J. Osborn, 1806). This is the edition that Abba Alcott revised, and page references refer to it. The copy containing her revisions and introductory material is in the Houghton Library.

10. [William Allen Butler], Nothing to Wear: An Episode of City Life (repr. from Harper's Weekly; New York: Rudd & Carlton, 1857), 9-10. The copy in the Houghton is inscribed by Abba, and subsequently by Abby, and then “For Frederick Wolsey Pratt / Keep this book!”

11. Karen Halttunen notes the longevity of “the problem of fashion” in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982).

12. See Richard N. Weintraub, “Stratification and Social Mobility in Concord, 1750-1850: A Sociological History,” in Chronos 2 (1983): 199-259, and Robert A. Gross, “Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World,” Journal of American Studies 18 (1984): 361-81. In spite of her veiled threat to her father to take in washing, Abba showed enormous energy and ingenuity in trying to work and preserve caste.

13. Abigail May Alcott to Joseph May, October 6, 1834; quoted by Elbert (50). Bronson too was from successful Revolutionary stock, but his family's fortunes had declined considerably before he was born.

14. Gross writes of Emerson's identification with a commercializing elite, the emergence of which led to a new and troubled sense of class interest.

15. Brodhead, 96. A recent study that explores Alcott's various ambivalences more fully than I do here is Elizabeth Keyser's Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1993).

16. An Old-Fashioned Girl was serialized in Merry's Museum from July to December of 1869, and was published in book form in March 1870, with an initial American print run of 27,500. As Alcott noted in her journal, the novel “sold well” (174).

17. Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870; New York: Penguin, 1996), 8; hereafter cited parenthetically. Boston and Concord are never mentioned by name, but Alcott makes no attempt to obscure the circumstantial points of identification.

18. Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period,” Saturday Review 25 (March 14, 1868): 340; quoted by Christina Boufis in “‘Of Home Birth and Breeding’: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Girl of the Period,” in Nelson and Vallone, 98-123. Boufis discusses the “Girl” in relation to English sensation fiction, and it is interesting to note that Alcott too represents sensation fiction as part of the consumerist and sexualised enervation of “Girl” culture. Fanny's depravity is suggested by her reading of Lady Audley's Secret. In masculine counterpoint, her brother reads fiction in which “the young heroes have thrilling adventures, kill impossible beasts, and, when the author's invention gives out, suddenly find their way home laden with tiger skins, tame buffaloes, and other pleasing trophies of their prowess” (82). Of course Alcott is a double agent here, having herself written numerous gothicized romances.

19. Diane Price Herndl explores the ambiguities of this phrase in Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993).

20. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 128-29.

21. Whereas in 1860 she had not the clothes to appear at all, after 1868 Alcott's social presence became formidable: she was lionized in Boston and New York, and people would travel a long way simply to catch a glimpse of her.

22. In 1875, Alcott's dress-making bills came to ＄210.10; in the same year, she was paying her cook, Mary McGrath, ＄3.50 per week. These accounts are to be found in the Houghton Library.

23. In December, 1881, for instance, Alcott spent ＄150 on “Dress & making”.

24. When Alcott selected her locales, however, she could achieve a degree of exclusivity. She rented a fine house on Beacon Hill, and bought a holiday home at Buzzards Bay, the “closed gate” community where “the elegant summer residences of some of Boston's most exclusive set” were to be found. Buzzards Bay, close to Newport, was where ex-President Cleveland spent his summers, along with General Sheridan, Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, Century editor Richard Watson Gilder, and other assorted millionaires. Edwin Fiske Kimball, “On the Shores of Buzzards Bay,” The New England Magazine VII.i (new series; September 1892): [2]-25, 18.

25. James, 12. By “constituted privacy”, I take James to mean privacy that has been decided upon, rather than the privacy that is granted by public indifference. For a full fictional exploration of “nouveau luxe,” see Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913). For further discussion of consumerism and the novel at the turn of the century, see especially Jean-Christophe Agnew, “The Consuming Vision of Henry James,” in T. J. Jackson Lears and Richard W. Fox, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983) 65-100, and Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985).

I am grateful to Leslie Morris of the Houghton Library, and to John Pratt, literary executor for the Alcott family, for permission to quote from unpublished materials. My thanks also go to Leslie Perrin Wilson of the Concord Free Public Library, for her help both during and after my visit to Concord.