"These occasions allowed rich and middle-class people to dress down and enjoy it. Linscott's suggested invitation included rules for party garb: 'Every womin what kums must ware a Poverty dress and apern, er something ekelly erpropriate, an leave her poodle dorg to hum.' (I know, this stuff is hard to read. But these invitations are such interesting ephemeral examples of the Gilded Age's passion for the use of 'humorous,' 'colorful' dialect in literature; I must include it.)"
Rebecca Onion at Slate discusses nineteenth-century "poverty parties."
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