ABSTRACT
As Dudley Costello declares in an article published two years later, there ‘may be other integuments, equally indicative of manhood, but there are none of which a male wearer is so proud as of his boots’: ‘Hats and gloves are temporary adornments; other articles of clothing depend, more or less, on the skill of the tailor, but boots depend upon themselves: self-reliant, they stand alone.’2 The idea that a man like Mr Hoggins may be made anew by the splendour of his boots points to the more general function of clothing as a symbolic expression of identity in Victorian culture, as well as to its particular use in the nineteenth-century novel to define fictional character. Dress is a sign replete with social meaning and value. As the most famous Victorian clothes-philosopher argues in Sartor Resartus, ‘“Society is founded upon Cloth,”’ and Carlyle uses clothing and its fetishism to expose the fabrications of authority in modern social and political institutions.3
