ABSTRACT
As we consider Hickey’s memoirs as a construction of an identity, where episodes are carefully recalled, fashioned and recorded, we can perceive a socially turned self that measured its being in the eyes of certain others. William Hickey’s self-fashioned performance was a social strategy to gain admittance and membership in a select community that would ratify his claims to gentility and would earn from a readership an acceptance of the viability of those claims. He knew full well that genteel status was nebulous and negotiated among those who belonged to it, so he performed the role of the gentleman and attached its attributes to himself. He trumpeted his taste and connoisseurship, which he unabashedly proclaimed to be universally recognized among the gentle; he tediously reported his many invitations to select social gatherings; he went to some length to inform the reader of his membership in select clubs. As an attorney, Hickey well knew he was in a fragile position to claim genteel status, poised on the lowest rung of the social ladder below which yawned the chasm between the gentle and the vulgar.
