Victorian Pop Culture: The Shabby Genteel

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 This is Part 2 in a series of crazes, trends, and popular expressions in our Victorian ancestors’ days. The first was “The Dolly Varden Craze.” 




Shabby genteel 

     There was a music hall song of the 1860s that was a “top hit” in England and America. 


We have heard it asserted, a dozen times o’er

That a man may be happy in rags,

That a prince is no more, in his carriage and four

Than a pauper who tramps on the flags;

As I chance to be neither, I cannot describe,

How a prince or a pauper may feel,

I belong to that highly respectable tribe,

Which is known as the Shabby Genteel. 


The chorus was the repeated in many places like a modern-day ad jingle:


To proud to beg, too honest to steal,

I know what it is to be wanting a meal;

My tatters and rags I try to conceal,

I’m one of the Shabby Genteel. 


This is an old expression, predating the Victorian era and long outlasting it. But somehow if I’d encountered it before I wasn't aware. Shabby chic, yes – shabby genteel, no. Shabby chic was all the rage in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. It was popularized in the U.S. by Rachel Ashwell, even spreading to Target’s “Simply Shabby Chic” line of clothing and home furnishings. But I’m talking about shabby genteel, not shabby chic. 

     I kept encountering the term ‘shabby genteel’ in 1870s and ‘80s newspapers in a way that was clearly not at all desirable. It wasn’t a design style, either, it was a person - the Shabby Genteel. 

     William Makepeace Thackery published an unfinished novel called A Shabby Genteel Story in 1857, one he’d written in 1840. It involved a young man, George Brandon, who was born into a family that sacrificed to give him advantages such as an Eton education. He wanted to live the life of an aristocrat. Instead, he was hiding from his creditors in a seaside town, staying with a family he came to despise in part for being socially pretentious. Snobbery and self-delusion are themes in the story. He was a Shabby Genteel - and so were his landlords. 

     Thackeray didn’t invent the term. On the surface, and in its current usage, it means someone who was once a person of means, now living in visibly reduced circumstances. Or, like Thackery’s Brandon, someone who was never wealthy but wants to be, and wants people to think he is. The expensive clothes are now unfashionably dated, or they are visibly frayed at the edges, or the person wears cheap knock-offs. They are struggling to keep up appearances, and not pulling it off. A women’s chorus in Buffalo in 1891 hosted a fundraising “Shabby Genteel Party” in which attendees were told to dress, “in clothing that will give the appearance of having “seen better days,” or give evidence of their struggle in the attempt to “keep up appearances.””

     In 1995 author Allan Gurganis called his hometown, Rocky Mount, North Carolina, shabby genteel. In 2002 at its tri-centennial, the mayor of Mobile, Alabama described his city as shabby genteel. The term was also occasionally used to describe a place in the Victorian age, as in an 1850 story in which a doctor visits “a shabby genteel house on one of those ambiguous streets of which it is impossible to say whether they’re within or without the pale of polite toleration; the difficulty arising from their standing just on the line where gentility ends and vulgarity begins, and being in fact the best of the worst or the worst of the best…”

     This seems to be the crux of things: the Shabby Genteel of the Victorian era had crossed the line between genteel respectability and vulgarity. Or, if they hadn’t quite crossed it yet, they were close. With a rising middle class, there was class anxiety and a great deal of emphasis on one’s clothing and other signs of ‘respectability.’ 

     A Shabby Genteel was an unsavory character, usually portrayed as trying to pull something over on another, avoid work, and/or to get above one’s station in life. They were not portrayed with any sympathy, but often with amusement. Sometimes they were the trickster; other times the joke was on them.

     A good trickster example is found in an 1850 story that ran in many newspapers. A “shabby genteel dandy” stepped into a hotel restaurant and ordered stewed oysters. When the proprietor said he didn’t have any but could prepare them, the customer said he’d settle for a plate of oysters on the half shell. After he’d eaten about a pound of crackers and the oysters, a large rat suddenly ran across the counter. The proprietor and a group of restaurant regulars raced out of the restaurant after it, but did not catch it. Things had just settled down when a second rat appeared. This time, when they returned from their chase, again unsuccessful, the shabby genteel had skipped out on his bill, and helped himself to fifteen dollars in the till. It turned out he had a friend outside who slipped the rats in from a window. 

      An 1879 story features the Shabby Genteel as the foolish one. He asked the man at the fruit stand for a group of grapes. “A which sir?” 

     “A group of grapes. Perhaps you have hitherto habitually spoken of ‘clusters,’ but I prefer ‘groups;’ it’s a shorter word and has a slightly alliterative sound and —”

     “Oh well, if you want a bunch of grapes, just say so,” replied the fruit seller. “Ten cents please.”

     As the narrator of the story slipped away, the Shabby Genteel was searching his pockets in vain for the money.  

     The boarding house landlady was often depicted as shabby genteel. After all, she wouldn’t be operating a boarding house if she were in better circumstances. She was not regarded kindly. 

The Boston Globe said in 1872 that the shabby genteel is not imaginary. “The shabby genteel woman is the dreaded, and if possible, the avoided, quicksand of all boarding-house keepers. [Potential boarders] know, generally by sad experience, her endless pretensions and innumerable dodges. It is a fact that there are women in this city who have nothing remaining from “better days” than a collection of faded furniture.” She dressed in antique finery or cheap knockoffs of current fashion or “descended” to black alpaca, “a sure sign of the indigent.”

     “The shabby genteel man is, if anything, a more pitiable sight. He never has everything new at once at the same time. He may be seen in the park feeding sparrows or reading at the library. He may have gloves and gaiters but his paper collar, bosom and cuffs are soiled. The paper beneath the fur on his beaver hat can be seen, although it’s brushed and polished.” 

     There was nothing shabby chic about being shabby genteel.


 Notes: 


  1. The song was published in 1866 by music hall performers Harry Clifton in the 1860s and Victor Liston in the 1870s. Harry was English and also known for the song “Paddle Your Own Canoe.” Many of his songs taught moral lessons with titles like, “Work, Boys, Work and Be Contented” and “Nothing Succeeds Like Success” Liston’s biggest success was “Shabby Genteel.” He toured the U.S. singing it.

  2. Class Anxiety - In 2008 the Pew Research Institute surveyed middle-class Americans, dividing them in four groups - the top of the class, the anxious middle, the struggling middle and the satisfied middle. One has to be very cautious about applying anything from our times to the late nineteenth century, but it is interesting to read about the “anxious middle” and their concerns about slipping out of their “place” in a class hierarchy. 


Sources:


Newspapers:


“The Doctor’s Story. The Two Patients in Two Parts,” The Cadiz Sentinel (Cadiz, Ohio), 1 May 1850, p. 1. 

     Shabby Genteel Con Artist: The News-Chronicle (Shippensburg, Pennsylvania), 22 Aug 1850, p. 1. 

     “Reduced Grandeur. How Some People Live in Great Cities – Social Enigmas,” Leavenworth Daily Commercial (Leavenworth, Kansas), 28 Dec 1872, p. 2.

     “Reduced Grandeur,” The Boston Globe, 30 Dec 1872, p. 2. 

     “Shabby Genteel,” Kansas State Record (Topeka, Kansas), 6 Aug 1873, p. 4. 

     Shabby Genteel Railroad Song: Buffalo Sunday Morning News, 4 April 1875, p. 4. 

     Shabby Genteel and Grapes: The Hazelton Sentinel (Hazelton, Pennsylvania), 13 Sept 1879, p. 4. 

     Shabby Genteel Party: Buffalo Times, 3 Nov 1891, p. 6. 


Other:


     Morin, Richard. “America’s Four Middle Classes,” Pew Research Center, 29 July 2008, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2008/07/29/americas-four-middle-classes/

         

Copyright by Andrea Auclair  © 2024 

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