Throughout the story, clothing is a motif that highlights the rise of the middle class in the 19th century following the Industrial Revolution. Detailed descriptions of clothing occur throughout the story, but here is one example:
The tribe of clerks were an obvious one and here I discerned two remarkable divisions. There were the junior clerks of flash houses—young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips [...] the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class.
Here, the narrator uses clues from the clothes of the people around him to make deductions about their social class. He comes across as somewhat scornful in this passage, describing the clerks as wearing “the cast-off graces of gentry,” which suggests a snobbery on the part of the narrator. Throughout the story, the narrator delights in his careful discernment between expensive clothing and what is merely a “fac-simile” of the fashions of the wealthy. Another example of this is when the narrator describes “the upper clerks of staunch firms,” whom he says wore “the affectation of respectability;—if indeed there be an affectation so honorable.” This implies that to imitate the clothing of the wealthy is a sort of moral failure.
The narrator’s obsession with detecting what he sees as “authentic” respectability (or, in other words, inherited wealth, as opposed to wealth earned through labor) reveals an anxiety about the new social mobility that many people were able to benefit from in the 19th century. During the Industrial Revolution, inventions like the sewing machine made clothing much faster and cheaper to produce, leading to mass production and a new ability for the middle class to imitate the fashion of the wealthy. It is possible that the narrator himself comes from an aristocratic lineage and feels threatened by the blurring of social lines—a blurring represented by the crowd, in which people from all walks of life rub shoulders with one another.
It is notable that the narrator regards all of the “imitators” he spots in the crowd with disdain, quickly categorizing them into a type before moving his attention to the next person. However, once he sees the old man (whose clothing he believes is expensive), his attention is so arrested that he follows him around London through the night. He describes the old man’s clothing in the following way:
His clothes, generally, were filthy and ragged; but as he came, now and then, within the strong glare of the lamp, I perceived that his linen, although dirty, was of beautiful texture; and my vision deceived me, or, through a rent in a closely-buttoned and evidently second-handed roquelaire which enveloped him, I caught of glimpse both of a diamond and a dagger. These observations heightened my curiosity, and I resolved to follow the stranger whithersoever he should go.
Here, the narrator reveals that he prioritizes the quality of clothing over its condition. Although the old man’s clothing is dirty and torn, it was clearly expensive and, unlike the clothing of many people he sees in the crowd, not mass-produced. His roquelaire—a sort of knee-length cloak that men wore in the 18th and 19th centuries—is “second-handed,” possibly inherited from a family member rather than bought at a shop. This suggests that the narrator believes a noble background is more important than material wealth and that he looks down on people whose wealth has been recently acquired.
