The dress of the ladies interested Dickens just as much as it has interested visiting authors since. “Heaven save the ladies, how they dress!” he wrote. “We have seen more colors in these ten minutes than we should have seen elsewhere in as many days. What various parasols! what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings!” Here was a community apparently awaiting a Barnum. The gaudy hoods and linings, the fluttering ribbons and rainbow silks and satins indicate a certain wealth and a taste for the gay and amusing. Barnum must have been conscious here in New York as he walked the streets and pondered how to support his wife and baby, of an atmosphere more favorable to his talents and their expression than the New England which he had just left, where the “pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes” would have been punished by means of the whipping post, or at least with the jealous and shocked disdain of neighbors and the exclamatory menaces of the town clergyman. In the New York of 1835 to adorn the body and to divert the mind were not crimes, and a corresponding share of the trade and industry of the city were devoted to the satisfaction of those ends. Broadway had shops that were handsome enough to impress Mrs. Trollope, who found most of America new, brazen, and boring when it was not offensive. She also admired the uniform houses in the residential sections of the city where neat iron railings and pretty green blinds gave an impression of ease and luxury that she found nowhere else in the United States. That New Yorkers of 1835 could be unrestrained in their enjoyments when the occasion was presented we know from the many accounts of the nature of New Year celebrations. James Gordon Bennett, the elder, wrote in the _New York Herald_: “We were sorry to see so much intoxication in our streets ... and it even extended into the Mayor’s office. In consequence of the improper behavior of many of his visitors, by which the carpets were completely ruined, he was compelled to close up and go home at one o’clock, and deprived many of the pleasure of seeing him.”