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When Clothes Don’t Make the Man: Sartorial Style, Conspicuous Consumption, and Class Passing in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Scenes in the Life of a Masher
- Children's Literature Association Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2012
- pp. 43-65
- 10.1353/chq.2012.0009
- Article
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This essay examines Lothar Meggendorfer’s once well-known pull-the-tab book Scenes in the Life of a Masher as a revealing example of the tremendous social anxiety surrounding the interplay of conspicuous consumption, sartorial style, and the social construction of masculinity as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The 1894 text provides a rare glimpse in a book for young readers of the impact that consumer capitalism had not simply on the expected issues of social standing and class mobility but on the less expected one of male gender roles. In so doing, the moveable toy book records an important paradigm shift in the history of white Western masculinity, its relationship to retail commercialism, and its production of men’s sartorial style