Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1889 — Marks of Gentility. [ARTICLE]

Marks of Gentility.

There are many curious personal habits and usages that originally marked gentility, if not aristocracy. The practice observed among Spanish hidalgos of allowing the finger-nails to grow into claw-like forms was to show that they had never done any work. The same thing is done by the Chinese for the same purpose. Among the ancient Romans the wearing of long sleeves, which came down over the hand, was the fashion in the upper circles. This advertised to the world that the wearer did not engage in any labor, and freedom from employment was, according to their crude notions of worth, the condition of respectability. The height of absurdity is reached in the fancy of the Chinese leaders of fashion who have gone to the extent of inducing shapeless deformity in women’s feet, and rendering the victims cripples for life, to prove that these could afford to get along without doing anything for themselves. Yet we can not afford to laugh at the Chinese in this matter. English boots and shoes have been designed more or less for the same absurd purpose. As early as the time of William Rufus “peaked-toed boots and shoes excited the wrath and contempt of the monkish historians. The shoes called pigacia had their points made like a scorpion’s tail, and a courtier named Robert stuffed his out with tow, and caused them to curl round in form <?f a ram’s horn, a fashion which took mightily amongst the nobles.” It is plain that the purpose of this fashion was to show that the privileged wearer was not dependent on any kind of labor or tieetness of foot for his daily bread. The practice of wearing tight-fitting boots and shoes is an old one, for Chaucer, writing of them in his day, says that it is “Merveyle sith that they sitte bo pleyn, How they come on, or off again.” Later, in 1765, Horace Walpole said, “I am now twenty years on the right side of red heels.”