Set in Back Bay Boston in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book examines how residents—from wealthy homeowners and reformers to working-class immigrants and the poor—struggled to claim, display, and defend respectability through domestic arrangements, consumption, public rituals, and institutional practices. It traces how ideas of dignity and honor were shaped by class, gender, race, and economic change, and how efforts to police or extend respect produced both inclusion and exclusion within the city. Drawing on newspapers, household records, diaries, and reform literature, the work argues that dignity was an actively negotiated social achievement central to everyday urban life.