A black coat narrates its passage from wearer to wearer through Georgian London, observing clergy, captains, tradesmen’s daughters and fortune-hunters. One owner, a captain with a thousand pounds and a good Dorsetshire family, debates whether marrying Miss Sirloin would disgrace his name, and the coat records every vanity.
A short example of the eighteenth-century object narrative, a form that let satirists peer into every class. Download the free EPUB.