ABOUT THIS BOOK
The English middle class in the late nineteenth century enjoyed an increase in the availability and variety of material goods. With that, the visual markers of class membership and manly behaviorunderwent a radical change. In The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860 –1914, Brent Shannon examines familiarnovels by authors such as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hughes, and H. G. Wells, as well as previously unexamined etiquette manuals, periodadvertisements, and fashion monthlies, to trace how new ideologies emerged as mass-produced clothes, sartorial markers, and consumer culture began tochange.While Victorian literature traditionally portrayed women as having sole control of class representations through dress and manners, Shannon argues that middle-class men participated vigorously in fashion. Public displays of their newly acquired mannerisms, hairstyles, clothing, and consumer goods redefined masculinity and class status for the Victorian era and beyond.The Cut of His Coat probes the Victorian disavowal of men’s interest in fashion and shopping to recover men’s significant role in the representation of class through self-presentation and consumer practices.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Brent Shannon is a visiting professor of Englishat Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.He has published articles on nineteenth-centuryliterature and culture in Victorian Studies and Studiesin Browning and His Circle.

REVIEWS

“Shannon’s book is like one of those nifty wardrobes advertised for sale by the new department stores of the era, a polished piece of furniture with carefully labeled chapters and neatly hanging concepts that help us organize all that information and tuck it away without getting it wrinkled.”—Ellis Hanson, author of Decadence and Catholicism

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Figures	000
Acknowledgments	000
Introduction	001
Chapter One. "It cannot be supposed that men make no study of dress": The "Disappearance" of 
Men's Fashion and Consumption in Victorian Britain	000
Chapter Two. Outfitting the Gent: The Emergence of the Male Consumer and the Commodification 
of the Male Body	000
Chapter Three. "Really there is much more to be said about men's fashions than I had imagined": 
Fashion and the Birth of the Men's Lifestyle Periodical	000
Chapter Four. From Dandy to Masher to Consumer: Competing Masculinities and Class 
Aspirations	000
Chapter Five. Ready to Wear: Class Performance and the Triumph of Middle-Class Sartorial Taste
	000
Epilogue	000
Notes	000
Bibliography	000
Index	000