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Social America in 1850.

There is a good old gentleman in Boston who was a strapping young society man as far back as 1850, and he gives the Herald, of that city, some interesting recollections of life there at that period:

The furniture, in city houses especially, often costly enough, was almost without exception dreadful.
The carpets of enormous patterns and discordant colors, and the furniture of excessively varnished rosewood of some material, and always in "sets," were things to shudder at.
The costumes of the women were in keeping with the houses.

Not only did the ladies wear long trousers of some white material that came so low that it was impossible for the wearers to walk without getting them in the dust or mire, but the small girl was rigged out in the same preposterous garments, it being thought highly immoral for a tot of six to expose her ankles.

The ladies' boots, made usually of cloth, were heelless, laced at the side, and came not quitr to the ankle bone, while the one-button gloves left the wrist entirely bare.
The nearer the female forehead reached to the back of the head the lovelier, many even shaving the central portion to enhance their "beauty."

Any hair that was golden or yellow was thought almost a deformity, and a girl with sunny tresses was looked upon as hideous, was taunted as a "red head," and generally used a lead comb or some wash to make her golden tresses conform as nearly as possible to the prevailing standard.
All women plastered their hair in a hard, flat mass tight to the skull with bandoline or some other mucilaginous substance as low down as the ears, and then had it twisted in stiff, wire-like spirals or puffed out like blinders.