An Age of Excess

Abstract

For a brief moment in the mid-1890s, says M. H. Dunlop, urban Americans became obsessed with the foot. It was Trilby's beautiful foot that set off the craze, but the passion also reawakened fascination with the Cinderella story, staged in countless amateur and professional productions in these years. Less innocently, the fetish also partook of the age's favorite perversion, flagellation, about which a lively underground literature was produced. The age loved diamonds even more. South Africa's prodigious output of gems, beginning in the 1870s, flooded the market and brought them within reach of many. Diamond Jim Brady's twenty thousand rocks became a token of tasteless consumption, while clergyman Russell Conwell's Acres of Diamonds lecture-perhaps the most oft-delivered talk of the centuryexhorted countrymen that is your duty to get rich ... it is your Christian and godly duty to do so (p. 15). If diamonds threatened to become commonplace, royalty remained uncommon on this side of the Atlantic. Thus, sightings of genuine European nobility excited both crowds and prolific newspaper coverage. The separate American visits of the Duc de Veragua (a direct descendent of Columbus) and the Spanish Infanta Eulalie (a many-generations removed issue of Ferdinand and Isabella) during the Chicago Columbian Exposition thrilled democratic hearts. That is, until Veragua admitted bankruptcy, at which point newspaper coverage suddenly stopped. Even worse was the Infanta's lack of democratic instinct, exemplified by her rebuff of Mrs. Potter Palmer's hospitality: Eulalie was appalled to learn that she was visiting people who kept an inn (p. 119). The demands of royalty wore thin on American ears, and the Infanta's visit trailed off into public apathy. Such well-told anecdotes fill M. H. Dunlop's Gilded City. But Dunlop's study rises above the usual stack of easy summer reading by the shrewd intelligence and suggestiveness she brings to her effort. The stories add up to something, making Dunlop's effort a notable contribution to American