Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 November 1875 — Extravagance In Boston. [ARTICLE]

Extravagance In Boston.

A correspondent of the Chicago Journal writes: I don’t know how it is in Chicago, but here in Boston personal expenses, especially among certain classes, are equal to anything witnessed during the most profitable times of the late war. The dressmakers and milliners are coining money; coin is the word, and the leading dry-goods stores were never selling more expensive goods than now. It is enough to make a man of moderate means go crazy to see how recklessly the women buy silks and things, and I know that rkeh men see visions of bankruptcy as they are called upon to settle the bills of their wives and daughters. The fashionable modistes are absolutely overrun with work; cheap clolkesare almost unknown; a black silk dress now costs fully the retail price of fifteen barrels of flour, with all the necessary trimmings, and women whose husbands earn no more than $1,24)0 a year are wearing such dresses, but have to starve their table at home to do it. And then the bonnets or hat's. Every fashionable milliner calculates to double her money on the material she puts into a hat, besides charging a round sum for the work. So that when a customer wants to purchase a decent sort of a hat she has to pay at least $25 for it. Shop-girls, seliool-girls and seamstresses there are who wear such expensive hats, and where they get the money to pay for them is a mystery to many people. Jordan, Marsh & Co., Chandler & Co., Hfty, Spalding & Wales, Hovey & Co. and other leading dry-goods dealers say they have sold more fine goods this season than ever before, and that their sales this year will be a third larger than last year. It is an anomaly in the economy of hade that the duller the times the more extravagance in personal habits, particularly in dress. This extravagance seems to pervade the middling class more than any other class. No doubt the enterprising dealers have much to d® with this species of extravagance, on account of the character of their advertisements, which also shows that they who by trade would thrive must advertise.