The End of the World, The Beginners of a Nation: Edward Eggleston and the Crisis of National Meaning in the Gilded Age

Abstract

In a remarkable span of days at the turn of the year 1888, Edward Eggleston and Edward Bellamy issued critiques of Gilded Age America that employed a similar, and for the time, unusual, narrative device – the glance backward from the late twentieth century.1 Bellamy's, of course, was Looking Backward, 1887–2000, the most successful novel of the period, and one of the few works of American popular fiction to impel both social action and political reform.2 Eggleston's work, far less ambitious and visionary than Bellamy's, nonetheless warrants interest; not only does it provide a point of entry for recuperating Eggleston's considerable reputation in the nineteenth century as a regional novelist and social historian, it also allows us to recover the relation his writing bore then – and bears now – to American pluralist fantasies about race, class, and national identity.3 Entitled “A Prospective Retrospect,” Eggleston's backward glance purports to describe “The Age of Paradox,” an article from “a magazine called The Twentieth Century … dated November, 1987,” in which a future antiquarian “look[s] back but one hundred years upon American life.” To the observer from the future “the manners of the people of 1887” revealed the paradox of the age. On one hand, the “antiquary” noticed that democratic America had removed from the public arena “any mark of social distinction”; in this “paradoxical age,” he argued, fashion was no longer a reliable gauge of class: “the gentleman, and especially the statesman … held fellowship with cabby in wearing the high hat, the man of the upper walks of life was yet more intimately associated with the waiter, in the fact that the dress-coat of the gentleman was an exact copy of the working coat of the waiter.”