# Famous Single Poems/Nothing to Wear

NOTHING TO WEAR AN EPISODE OF CITY LIFE
Miss Flora McFlimsey, of Madison Square, Has made three separate journeys to Paris, And her father assures me, each time she was there, That she and her friend Mrs. Harris (Not the lady whose name is so famous in history, But plain Mrs. H., without romance or mystery) Spent six consecutive weeks without stopping In one continuous round of shopping,— Shopping alone, and shopping together, At all hours of the day, and in all sorts of weather,— For all manner of things that a woman can put On the crown of her head or the sole of her foot, Or wrap round her shoulders, or fit round her waist, Or that can be sewed on, or pinned on, or laced, Or tied on with a string, or stitched on with a bow, In front or behind, above or below;
For bonnets, mantillas, capes, collars, and shawls; Dresses for breakfasts and dinners and balls; Dresses to sit in and stand in and walk in; Dresses to dance in and flirt in and talk in; Dresses in which to do nothing at all; Dresses for winter, spring, summer, and fall; All of them different in color and pattern, Silk, muslin, and lace, crape, velvet, and satin, Brocade, and broadcloth, and other material, Quite as expensive and much more ethereal; In short, for all things that could ever be thought of, Or milliner, modiste, or tradesman be bought of, From ten-thousand-francs robes to twenty-sous frills; In all quarters of Paris, and to every store, While McFlimsey in vain stormed, scolded, and swore, They footed the streets, and he footed the bills.
The last trip, their goods shipped by the steamer Arago, Formed, McFlimsey declares, the bulk of her cargo, Not to mention a quantity kept from the rest, Sufficient to fill the largest-sized chest, Which did not appear on the ship’s manifest,
But for which the ladies themselves manifested Such particular interest, that they invested Their own proper persons in layers and rows Of muslins, embroideries, worked underclothes, Gloves, handkerchiefs, scarfs, and such trifles as those; Then, wrapped in great shawls, like Circassian beauties, Gave good-by to the ship, and go-by to the duties. Her relations at home all marveled, no doubt Miss Flora had grown so enormously stout For an actual belle and a possible bride; But the miracle ceased when she turned inside out, And the truth came to light, and the dry-goods beside, Which, in spite of collector and custom-house sentry, Had entered the port without any entry.
And yet, though scarce three months have passed since the day This merchandise went, on twelve carts, up Broadway, This same Miss McFlimsey, of Madison Square, The last time we met was in utter despair, Because she had nothing whatever to wear!
Nothing to Wear! Now, as this is a true ditty, I do not assert—this, you know, is between us— That she’s in a state of absolute nudity, Like Powers’ Greek Slave, or the Medici Venus; But I do mean to say, I have heard her declare, When, at the same moment, she had on a dress Which cost five hundred dollars, and not a cent less And jewelry worth ten times more, I should guess, That she had not a thing in the wide world to wear!
I should mention just here, that out of Miss Flora’s Two hundred and fifty or sixty adorers, I had just been selected as he who should throw all The rest in the shade, by the gracious bestowal On myself, after twenty or thirty rejections, Of those fossil remains which she called her “affections,” And that rather decayed, but well-known work of art, Which Miss Flora persisted in styling “her heart.”
So we were engaged. Our troth had been plighted, Not by moonbeam or starbeam, by fountain or grove, But in a front parlor, most brilliantly lighted, Beneath the gas-fixtures we whispered our love. Without any romance or raptures or sighs, Without any tears in Miss Flora’s blue eyes, Or blushes, or transports, or such silly actions, It was one of the quietest business transactions, With a very small sprinkling of sentiment, if any, And a very large diamond imported by Tiffany. On her virginal lips while I printed a kiss, She exclaimed, as a sort of parenthesis, And by way of putting me quite at my ease, “You know, I’m to polka as much as I please. And flirt when I like,—now, stop, don’t you speak,— And you must not come here more than twice in the week, Or talk to me either at party or ball, But always be ready to come when I call; So don’t prose to me about duty and stuff, If we don’t break this off, there will be time enough For that sort of thing; but the bargain must be That, as long as I choose, I am perfectly free,
For this is a sort of engagement, you see, Which is binding on you but not binding on me.”
Well, having thus wooed Miss McFlimsey and gained her, With the silks, crinolines, and hoops that contained her; I had, as I thought, a contingent remainder At least in the property, and the best right To appear as its escort by day and by night; And it being the week of the Stuckups’ grand ball,— Their cards had been out for a fortnight or so, And set all the Avenue on the tiptoe,— I considered it only my duty to call, And see if Miss Flora intended to go. I found her,—as ladies are apt to be found, When the time intervening between the first sound Of the bell and the visitor’s entry is shorter Than usual,—I found—I won’t say, I caught her,— Intent on the pier-glass, undoubtedly meaning To see if perhaps it didn’t need cleaning. She turned as I entered,—“Why, Harry, you sinner, I thought that you went to the Flashers’ to dinner!”
“So I did,” I replied; “but the dinner is swallowed And digested, I trust, for ’tis now nine and more, So being relieved from that duty, I followed Inclination, which led me, you see, to your door; And now will your ladyship so condescend As just to inform me if you intend Your beauty and graces and presence to lend (All of which, when I own, I hope no one will borrow) To the Stuckups’, whose party, you know, is to-morrow?”
The fair Flora looked up with a pitiful air, And answered quite promptly, “Why, Harry, mon cher, I should like above all things to go with you there; But really and truly—I’ve nothing to wear.”
“Nothing to wear! go just as you are; Wear the dress you have on, and you’ll be by far, I engage, the most bright and particular star On the Stuckup horizon”—I stopped—for her eye, Notwithstanding this delicate onset of flattery, Opened on me at once a most terrible battery
Of scorn and amazement. She made no reply, But gave a slight turn to the end of her nose (That pure Grecian feature), as much as to say, “How absurd that any sane man should suppose That a lady would go to a ball in the clothes, No matter how fine, that she wears every day!”
So I ventured again: “Wear your crimson brocade,” (Second turn-up of nose)—“That’s too dark by a shade.” “Your blue silk”—“That’s too heavy.” “Your pink”—“That’s too light.” “Wear tulle over satin”—“I can’t endure white.” “Your rose-colored, then, the best of the batch”— “I haven’t a thread of point lace to match.” “Your brown moire antique”—“Yes, and look like a Quaker.” “The pearl-colored”—“I would, but that plaguey dressmaker Has had it a week.” “Then that exquisite lilac In which you would melt the heart of a Shylock.”
(Here the nose took again the same elevation)— “I wouldn’t wear that for the whole of creation.” “Why not? It’s my fancy, there’s nothing could strike it As more comme il faut”—“Yes, but, dear me! that lean Sophronia Stuckup has got one just like it, And I won’t appear dressed like a chit of sixteen.” “Then that splendid purple, that sweet Mazarine, That superb point d’aiguille, that imperial green, That zephyr-like tarlatan, that rich grenadine”— “Not one of all which is fit to be seen,” Said the lady, becoming excited and flushed. “Then wear,” I exclaimed, in a tone which quite crushed Opposition, “that gorgeous toilette which you sported In Paris last spring, at the grand presentation, When you quite turned the head of the head of the nation; And by all the grand court were so very much courted.” The end of the nose was portentously tipped up, And both the bright eyes shot forth indignation,
As she burst upon me with the fierce exclamation, “I have worn it three times at the least calculation, And that and the most of my dresses are ripped up!” Here I ripped out something, perhaps rather rash, Quite innocent, though; but, to use an expression More striking than classic, it “settled my hash,” And proved very soon the last act of our session. “Fiddlesticks, it is, sir? I wonder the ceiling Doesn’t fall down and crush you—oh! you men have no feeling; You selfish, unnatural, illiberal creatures, Who set yourselves up as patterns and preachers, Your silly pretense,—why, what a mere guess it is! Pray, what do you know of a woman’s necessities! I have told you and shown you I’ve nothing to wear, And it’s perfectly plain you not only don’t care, But you do not believe me” (here the nose went still higher). “I suppose, if you dared, you would call me a liar. Our engagement is ended, sir—yes, on the spot;
You’re a brute and a monster, and—I don’t know what.” I mildly suggested the words—Hottentot, Pickpocket, and cannibal, Tartar, and thief, As gentle expletives which might give relief; But this only proved as spark to the powder, And the storm I had raised came faster and louder; It blew and it rained, thundered, lightened, and hailed Interjections, verbs, pronouns, till language quite failed To express the abusive, and then its arrears Were brought up all at once by a torrent of tears, And my last faint, despairing attempt at an obs- Ervation was lost in a tempest of sobs.
Well, I felt for the lady, and felt for my hat, too, Improvised on the crown of the latter a tattoo, In lieu of expressing the feelings which lay Quite too deep for words, as Wordsworth would say; Then, without going through the form of a bow, Found myself in the entry—I hardly knew how,— On doorstep and sidewalk, past lamp-post and square,
At home and up stairs, in my own easy-chair; Poked my feet into slippers, my fire into blaze, And said to myself, as I lit my cigar, Supposing a man had the wealth of the Czar Of the Russias to boot, for the rest of his days, On the whole, do you think he would have much to spare, If he married a woman with nothing to wear?
Since that night, taking pains that it should not be bruited Abroad in society, I’ve instituted A course of inquiry, extensive and thorough On this vital subject, and find, to my horror, That the fair Flora’s case is by no means surprising, But that there exists the greatest distress In our female community, solely arising From this unsupplied destitution of dress, Whose unfortunate victims are filling the air With the pitiful wail of “Nothing to Wear.” Researches in some of the “Upper Ten” districts Reveal the most painful and startling statistics, Of which let me mention only a few: In one single house, on Fifth Avenue, Three young ladies were found, all below twenty-two,
Who have been three whole weeks without anything new In the way of flounced silks, and, thus left in the lurch, Are unable to go to ball, concert, or church. In another large mansion, near the same place, Was found a deplorable, heartrending case Of entire destitution of Brussels point lace. In a neighboring block there was found, in three calls, Total want, long continued, of camel’s-hair shawls; And a suffering family, whose case exhibits The most pressing need of real ermine tippets; One deserving young lady almost unable To survive for the want of a new Russian sable; Another confined to the house, when it’s windier Than usual, because her shawl isn’t India. Still another, whose tortures have been most terrific Ever since the sad loss of the steamer Pacific, In which were engulfed, not friend or relation (For whose fate she perhaps might have found consolation Or borne it, at least, with serene resignation), But the choicest assortment of French sleeves and collars Ever sent out from Paris, worth thousands of dollars,
And all as to style most recherché and rare, The want of which leaves her with nothing to wear, And renders her life so drear and dyspeptic That she’s quite a recluse, and almost a skeptic; For she touchingly says that this sort of grief Cannot find in Religion the slightest relief, And Philosophy has not a maxim to spare For the victims of such overwhelming despair. But the saddest by far of all these sad features Is the cruelty practised upon the poor creatures By husbands and fathers, real Bluebeards and Timons, Who resist the most touching appeals made for diamonds By their wives and their daughters, and leave them for days Unsupplied with new jewelry, fans, or bouquets, Even laugh at their miseries whenever they have a chance, And deride their demands as useless extravagance; One case of a bride was brought to my view, Too sad for belief, but, alas! ’twas too true, Whose husband refused, as savage as Charon, To permit her to take more than ten trunks to Sharon. The consequence was, that when she got there, At the end of three weeks she had nothing to wear,
And when she proposed to finish the season At Newport, the monster refused out and out, For his infamous conduct alleging no reason, Except that the waters were good for his gout. Such treatment as this was too shocking, of course, And proceedings are now going on for divorce.
But why harrow the feelings by lifting the curtain From these scenes of woe? Enough, it is certain, Has here been disclosed to stir up the pity Of every benevolent heart in the city, And spur up Humanity into a canter To rush and relieve these sad cases instanter. Won’t somebody, moved by this touching description, Come forward to-morrow and head a subscription? Won’t some kind philanthropist, seeing that aid is So needed at once by these indigent ladies, Take charge of the matter? Or won’t Peter Cooper The corner-stone lay of some splendid super- Structure, like that which to-day links his name In the Union unending of honor and fame; And found a new charity just for the care
Of these unhappy women with nothing to wear, Which, in view of the cash which would daily be claimed, The Laying-out Hospital well might be named? Won’t Stewart, or some of our dry-goods importers, Take a contract for clothing our wives and our daughters? Or, to furnish the cash to supply these distresses, And life’s pathway strew with shawls, collars, and dresses, Ere the want of them makes it much rougher and thornier, Won’t some one discover a new California?
Oh, ladies, dear ladies, the next sunny day Please trundle your hoops just out of Broadway, From its whirl and its bustle, its fashion and pride, And the temples of Trade which tower on each side, To the alleys and lanes, where Misfortune and Guilt Their children have gathered, their city have built; Where Hunger and Vice, like twin beasts of prey, Have hunted their victims to gloom and despair;
Raise the rich, dainty dress, and the fine broidered skirt, Pick your delicate way through the dampness and dirt, Grope through the dark dens, climb the rickety stair To the garret, where wretches, the young and the old, Half-starved and half-naked, lie crouched from the cold. See those skeleton limbs, those frost-bitten feet, All bleeding and bruised by the stones of the street; Hear the sharp cry of childhood, the deep groans that swell From the poor dying creature who writhes on the floor, Hear the curses that sound like the echoes of Hell, As you sicken and shudder and fly from the door; Then home to your wardrobes, and say, if you dare,— Spoiled children of Fashion,—you’ve nothing to wear!
And oh, if perchance there should be a sphere Where all is made right which so puzzles us here,
Where the glare and the glitter and tinsel of Time Fade and die in the light of that region sublime, Where the soul, disenchanted of flesh and of sense, Unscreened by its trappings and shows and pretense, Must be clothed for the life and the service above, With purity, truth, faith, meekness, and love; O daughters of Earth! foolish virgins, beware! Lest in that upper realm you have nothing to wear!
William Allen Butler.
NOTHING TO WEAR
“I confess,” writes William Allen Butler, in his Retrospect of Forty Years, “that I have sometimes felt a pang, or at least a thrill, of mortification that, after many years of toil to attain a desired place in my profession, my chief, if not only, claim to public recognition has been the writing of a few pages of society verse.”
When Mr. Butler died, twenty years ago, many learned societies passed resolutions of respect and regret, and panegyrics upon his legal attainments were pronounced in many courts; but he was quite right in thinking that all these would quickly fade. They are almost as though they had never been, and the great public still remembers him—in so far as it remembers him at all—only as the author of a single poem.
That poem, of course, is “Nothing to Wear,” published in 1857—the first bit of genuinely American rhymed satire in our literature. There had been satire before it from American pens, but the inspiration was that of Pope and Dryden. Here was a new note, something indigenous and original, a definite breaking away ​from the classic formulas of the eighteenth century—the Nymphs, the Muses, the Pierian Springs. How fresh and delightful it must have seemed!
William Dean Howells has told how he was entranced by it. At the time of its appearance in Harper’s Weekly in February, 1857, he was editing the Ohio State Journal at Columbus, and in an introduction to a collection of Mr. Butler’s poems published in 1899, he tells the story thus:
“In the year 1857,” he says, “prairie fires were still punctual with the falling year on the plains which farms and cities now hold against them; and when one said that this thing or that was sweeping the country like a prairie fire, every one else knew what one meant, and visualized the fact with quick intelligence. But if I say now that in 1857 a new poem, flashing from a novel impulse in our literature, and gay with lights and tints unknown before, swept the country like a prairie fire, how many, I wonder, will conceive of the astonishing success of ‘Nothing to Wear?’…
“But, after all, one must have lived in the year 1857, and been, say, in one’s twenty-first year, to have felt the full significance of its message and shared the joyful surprise of its amazing success. If to the enviable conditions suggested one joined the advantage of being a ​newspaperman in a growing city of the Middle West, one had almost unequaled privileges as a spectator and participator of the notable event. Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that prairie fire suggests a feeble image of the swift spread of Mr. Butler’s poem under the eye of such a witness; and I begin to prefer a train of gunpowder.
“I do not know where the piece first appeared, but I remember that with the simple predacity of those days we instantly lifted the whole of it out of a New York paper, hot from the mail, and transferred it to our own columns about midnight, as if it were some precious piece of telegraphic intelligence. I am not sure but that it was for us something in the nature of a scoop or beat. At any rate, no other paper in town had it so early; and I think it appeared on our editorial page, and certainly with subheads supplied by our own eager invention, and with the prefatory and concurrent comment which it so little needed.”
What happened in that newspaper office, happened in scores of others. “Nothing to Wear” swept the country; Miss Flora McFlimsey became a type, and “nothing to wear” a phrase with satiric implications which it has never lost. Its permanence, indeed, is due in no small part to its universality, for its message is as intelligible and apropos to-day as the day it was written. ​The moral at the close may be found old-fashioned and banal, and the puns sometimes a little forced, but, as a whole, the poem has lost none of its sparkle.
Mr. Howells hazarded the opinion that “but for the professional devotion of the able lawyer, we might have counted in him the cleverest of our society poets.” But this may be doubted. He was a one-poem man, visited once and once only by genuine inspiration. His other poems show a certain whimsicality and facility in rhyme, but none of them approaches “Nothing to Wear.” They are written out of the air, not out of experience, and time has worn them as thin as ghosts.
William Allen Butler was not a born poet—he was a born lawyer; his career proves that. Indeed one has only to look at the photograph which he had taken in 1857 and includes in his book. Nothing could be more typically legalistic than the face and figure there portrayed. But both in his father’s family and in his wife’s family the feminine sex was in a large majority. He had five sisters and his wife had four sisters. Consequently whenever the families got together, the usual subject of discussion was clothes, and the phrase “nothing to wear,” in connection with proposed entertainments or social festivities, was continually in his ears. This was the inspiration. It was of this ​mental reaction that the poem was the precipitant.
Curiously enough, Mr. Butler himself believed that he was inspired to write, not this portion of the poem, but the very portion which has least inspiration in it. Here is what he says:
The idea of giving a moral turn to the subject did not occur to me until I had made considerable progress in my work on the poem, which occupied odd moments of leisure in a very busy winter, and I remember that it was while I was walking one evening that the thought expressed in the closing lines of “Nothing to Wear” came to me, a sudden, and, I must believe, a genuine inspiration.
But it was not the mind of the poet, it was the mind of the lawyer which devised the closing lines, and the lawyer is also betrayed in other places by a stilted phrase or a legal reference. Mr. Butler continues:
However, he immediately possessed himself of it for publication in Harper’s Weekly, then recently started, and I at once acquiesced, making the single condition that they should publish it in columns wide enough to prevent breaking of the lines. No thought of securing the copyright or of retaining any control in reference to the publication of it occurred to me, and the check for fifty dollars which in due course I received from Harper’s, represented the entire pecuniary benefit that ever came to me from “Nothing to Wear.”
Mr. Butler never stated where these twenty-four lines were added, but it is fairly safe to guess that they comprise the section beginning
But why harrow the feelings by lifting the curtain,
“Nothing to Wear” became almost instantly popular in England as well as in this country. It was published in book form in London; Harriet Martineau quoted it entire in an article on “Female Dress” in the Westminster Review; it invaded the continent, and was translated into French, with a foot-note explaining that the Mrs. Harris referred to in the opening lines as “famous in history,” was a lady who had lost her life at Niagara Falls; a German translation with illustrations appeared in the Almanach de Gotha. Evidently it appealed to all peoples, for of course there were Flora McFlimseys in Belgravia and on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, as well as on Madison Square—and equally, of course, there still are.
“It does not indeed find her posterity in Madison Square,” says Mr. Howells; “the fashion that once abode there has fled to upper Fifth Avenue, to the discordant variety of handsome residences which overlook the Park. But there it finds her descendants quite one with her in spirit, and as little clothed to their lasting satisfaction. Still they shop in Paris, still they arrive in all the steamers with their spoil, still it shrinks and withers to nothing in their ​keeping. Probably there are no longer lovers so simple-hearted as to fancy any of them going to a function in a street costume, or in a dress which has already been worn three times, but, if there were, their fate would be as swift and dire. In such things the world does not change, and the plutocrats of imperial New York spell their qualities with the same characters as the plutocrats of Imperial Rome.”
On the basis of all this popularity, Mr. Butler tried to persuade the Harpers to publish the poem in book form, but they refused on the ground that they had sold 80,000 copies of the Weekly which contained it, and there could be no possible demand for the book. They were so sincere in this belief, that when the firm of Rudd & Carleton, just starting in the publishing business, asked permission to publish “Nothing to Wear,” the Harpers granted it, without asking any payment and also without any consultation with Mr. Butler. The book, with illustrations by Augustus Hoppin, was a great success and assisted materially in placing the new firm on its feet. Mr. Butler, of course, received nothing, not even credit, for nowhere in the book does his name appear.
He soon found, indeed, that not only was he ​to get no material benefit from the poem, but that he was in danger of having the laurels of authorship snatched from his brow. He had not signed his name to the poem when he sent it to Harper’s Weekly, and it had appeared there anonymously. That was the general custom in those days, and Mr. Butler had an added reason for withholding his name—or thought he had! As he himself puts it, “I feared that if I were known to be the writer of verses, it might injure my standing as a lawyer. Members of my profession were permitted to make politics an adjunct of their practice at the bar, but dalliance with the Muse and dabbling in verses were apt to come under the ban of a commercial clientage.”
The consequence was that a number of claimants to the authorship soon came forward. The most annoying of these—annoying because her youth and her sex gave her an advantage and won a certain sympathy—was a girl of fifteen named Peck. Her story, confirmed by her father, was to the effect that about a year previously she had been wandering through the woods near her home in the outskirts of New York, and accidentally tore the skirt of her dress. “There, now, I have nothing to wear!” she had exclaimed vexedly, but this exclamation was followed by the reflection, “How many are in the habit of declaring that they have nothing ​to wear, who really have no just reason for the complaint, while, on the other hand, multitudes might make the same complaint with truth as well as sorrow!”
When she reached home, she sat down and wrote a poem around this thought—a poem of thirty-nine lines, written on a single sheet of paper. She took it with her on a visit to New York, intending to show it to some friends, “had the manuscript in her hand on leaving the cars near Twenty-sixth Street, and passing through the crowd it was lost.”
What was her astonishment to discover in Harper’s Weekly some months later her poem incorporated in a much longer one. The first nine lines of her poem had been used as the introduction, and the other thirty lines included at the close. The inference was, of course, that the author of the poem in Harper’s Weekly had picked up Miss Peck’s verses, and found in them the inspiration for his more ambitious effort.
It would seem that a story so absurd, and put forward as this one was without the slightest effort at substantiation beyond the worthless confirmation given it by the girl’s father, would drop dead of its own weight; but, as has already been remarked in the course of these pages, there are always a lot of people seemingly ready to believe anything, and a number ​of them rallied enthusiastically around Miss Peck, who became a sort of nine days’ wonder, her partizans pointing out, quite justly, what a remarkable achievement it was for so young a girl to have written even thirty-nine lines of such a poem.
But her triumph was short-lived, for Mr. Butler soon decided that the only thing for him to do was to disclose his authorship, which he did in a card stating “in the most explicit and unmistakable terms that every line and word in ‘Nothing to Wear’ was original with him and branding the claim as utterly false.” Horace Greeley, who lived next door to Mr. Butler (and kept a goat in the back yard, much to the annoyance of his neighbors), came to his defense in an editorial in the Tribune, and Harper’s Weekly confirmed Mr. Butler’s statement and denounced Miss Peck as a fraud. Thereafter, no sensible person ever questioned his authorship of the poem, though a few very silly ones still affected to regard him as a thief and impostor.
Mr. Butler, as has been said, was always proud of the moral twist he had given the poem at the end, but a more discerning judgment was well expressed by a French reviewer, M. Étienne, who admired the poem as a true expression of American humor until he came to ​its last lines. “Then,” says he, “I am brought back against my will to the memory of those old Puritans who founded the American nation. The idea of damnation dissipates all my gaiety, and I look to see if I have really before me a humorist or a son of Calvin.”