Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian the crease proved that the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was “ready-made” these betraying trousers were called “hand-me-downs,” in allusion to the shelf. Every house still kept its bootjack, but high-topped boots gave way to shoes and “congress gaiters” and these were played through fashions that shaped them now with toes like box-ends and now with toes like the prows of racing shells. The long contagion of the “Derby” hat arrived: one season the crown of this hat would be a bucket the next it would be a spoon. Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture: dressmakers, shoemakers, hatmakers, and tailors, increasing in cunning and in power, found means to make new clothes old. Old men and governors wore broadcloth “full dress” was broadcloth with “doeskin” trousers and there were seen men of all ages to whom a hat meant only that rigid, tall silk thing known to impudence as a “stove-pipe.” In town and country these men would wear no other hat, and, without self-consciousness, they went rowing in such hats. A silk dress needed no remodelling when it was a year or so old it remained distinguished by merely remaining silk. For that matter, everybody knew everybody else’s family horse-and-carriage, could identify such a silhouette half a mile down the street, and thereby was sure who was going to market, or to a reception, or coming home from office or store to noon dinner or evening supper.ĭuring the earlier years of this period, elegance of personal appearance was believed to rest more upon the texture of garments than upon their shaping. Trotters were out, in the winter afternoons, racing light sleighs on National Avenue and Tennessee Street everybody recognized both the trotters and the drivers and again knew them as well on summer evenings, when slim buggies whizzed by in renewals of the snow-time rivalry. In that town, in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet, and when there was a new purchase of sealskin, sick people were got to windows to see it go by.

Their splendour lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city, but reached its topmost during the period when every prosperous family with children kept a Newfoundland dog. Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt New York in 1916 and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place.

Major Amberson had “made a fortune” in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then.

Book the magnificent ambersons