| Abstract |
"Back in Boston, the Daltons moved to no. 18 Mechanic Street near what is today the city's main tourist district featuring the Faneuil Hall shopping concourse, historic Old North Church, the Paul Revere House, and the occasional colonial reenactor in ruffled shirt and periwig. Billy Dalton, now in his mid-teens, tooled around, looking for a toehold. The city bristled with opportunities. He was smart and ambitious, looking for a way in. With little formal schooling and a father who was not in fact a mining magnate, Billy knew he'd have to make his way up from the bottom. But that was okay. Like much about his early life, Julian Eltinge would later provide mixed, confusing, or vague information. Opaqueness would come to suit him. Upon his return to Boston, it's possible he worked in a hardware store and then a dry-goods emporium before becoming a counter clerk at a department store. Department stores were good places to learn about what a newfangled generation of consumers wanted, especially if it was your job to smile and answer their questions. While such establishments may have become dinosaurs in an age of Internet-selling and big-box showrooms, at the time, department stores represented the cutting edge of the consumer economy, summoning desire and acquisitiveness. Dry goods shops of past eras, department stores' predecessors, had been little more than vaguely-curated warehouses with piles and bolts of fabrics for customers who largely made their own apparel. The new department stores and retailers, however, used carefully-designed lighting, huge display windows, and lifelike mannequins. Part museum, part theatre, part bazaar, the new stores relied on stagecraft as much as accounting and inventory management. Shoppers began to cultivate an "autonomous identity" as such, apart from their roles as, say, mother, laborer, or citizen. Like crowds in a theatre, they expected to be dazzled. In addition to working in retail, young Billy Dalton may have spent some time clerking in an architect's office. Architecture was a classy field, smart, sexy, and appealing to those with an eye for design. Being an architect, or pretending to be one, was a theme that would crop up through Julian Eltinge's career"-- Provided by publisher. |
