The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography

Reflects a new understanding of modernism by following the fortunes of a single item of fashion.

“When Fred Miller Robinson tugs the bowler from the closet in The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography, a wealth of cultural and social baggage comes tumbling out after it.” — Esquire

“Entertaining and enlightening. . . . A scholarly, thoughtful, and well-documented cultural critique.” — Journal of Popular Culture

“A hundred years of Western culture pulled out of a bowler hat — it’s quite a trick, and Robinson accomplishes it with considerable flourish.” — Roger Shattuck, Boston University

“An attempt to penetrate the bowler’s significance in art, literature, and life. . . . [Robinson] has ferreted out plenty of curious and varied information, he has some nice observations of detail, and he offers a good deal to enlighten and amuse.” — New Yorker

“A witty, well-written, scrupulously researched book that is a wonderful fusion of genres: social history, cultural history, and something that falls between belles lettres and fiction.” — Dore Ashton, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Originally published in 1993.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Robinson (English/University of San Diego; Comic Moments, 1992, etc.--not reviewed) traces the cultural significance of the bowler hat from 1850 to the present--in a study as lighthearted and charming as its subject. Having asked, ``Why did Samuel Beckett specify that the four major characters of Waiting for Godot wear bowler hats?,'' in a 1986 TriQuarterly article, Robinson was moved to expand his inquiry to book length, studying modern life through the evolving meanings of this item of fashion that combines--symbolically and literally- -both lightness and weight. Following the history of the bowler ``as though a wind were blowing it just beyond [my] reach,'' Robinson tells of the hat's debut, in 1850 London, where its combination of style and function satisfied Victorian England's obsession with the practical and the correct. The bowler soon passed from informal use among the aristocracy into a badge of respectability by the upwardly mobile middle class, eventually inspiring Chaplin to use it in his parody of the earnest ``little man.'' As 20th-century life brought new strains of malaise, the bowler became a symbol of mass-produced anonymity in Magritte's paintings; of grim soullessness in the works of Anton Raderscheidt and Georg Grosz; and, finally, in Germany, of Jewish greed and evil. By 1948, when Beckett began writing Godot, the bowler had come to stand for an immutable social identity. It has since settled into the relative obscurity of costume wear, resurfacing only occasionally--e.g., as Oddjob's weapon in Goldfinger and an erotic toy in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yet the bowler continues to ``[express] its history precisely as it floats past it,'' Robinson concludes, until it becomes a pure design object that can adapt to anything--and ``the dream of the modern will be realized, in at least one small object, at the end of the modern age.'' A tip of the hat to this playful yet thought-provoking work. (Fifty-two illustrations) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.