History of the Carpet Bag
The carpet bag, invented in Paris in 1826, was initially considered somewhat revolutionary. It is a small, lightweight, handheld piece of luggage, made from a piece of carpet wrapped around a sturdy cast iron frame. The product exemplified modernity at the time. The fabric was often clippings of larger pieces being used in the recently industrialized and booming carpet industry. The use of cast iron for the frames was made possible by recent technological advancements. Beyond the thing itself, however, was a thoroughly modern purpose. Railroads had been built across the country and world, roads were becoming more discrete and more heavily used, and mobility, on the whole, was surging the world over as the result of new technologies. Before this transportation revolution, ‘luggage’ typically meant a large, heavy trunk, which usually required the assistance of carts and porters to move about. The carpet bag allowed travellers to bring with them the essentials: an extra outfit or two, assorted trinkets, and/or a book for the passage. Essentially, the carpet bag was the first foray into carry-on luggage, whereas previously only the ‘checked’ variety had existed. In the early days, a carpet bag implied a modest, unencumbered, and even bourgeois traveler, since it was designed for smaller, recreational trips. Charles Dickens once wrote that when travelling “a carpet-bag… is enough for any man”.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the carpet bag’s image had begun to deteriorate. The carpet bag would later become a “women’s accessory”, then evolve into the purse we are familiar with today. Much sooner, however, the carpet bag would raise suspicions of “disproportion”; that its carrier may not have enough possessions to fill a trunk, or was too physically weak to manage such luggage. Though the item was initially a technological advancement celebrated by the upper class, the cheapness with which it could be manufactured and bought resulted in usage regardless of class lines. This gave the item the dual role of both the luggage of choice of the bourgeois for short, pleasant voyages, and also the only viable option for a poor traveller who must move about looking for work. ‘Tramp’ entered the American lexicon nearly contemporaneously with carpet-bagger, and the 1860s and 70s would see the ‘tramp panic’, widespread fears of transient, unscrupulous individuals that posed a danger to society, and constantly moved about to avoid being jailed for vagrancy. In 1835, an English playwright put out a farcical play called The Man with the Carpet Bag that revolves around a scam artist’s employment of the carpet bag in his trickery. Thenceforth, the phrase ‘man with the carpet bag’ came to be used, both in England and America, to refer to a swindler or rogue. This archetype would later be re-named a ‘confidence man’ before being shortened to the modern ‘con man’.