In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

53 he world of the late Victorians produced the mix of whimsy, quiet reflection, and good manners associated with the genteel essay, but that world was never as ordered and sedate as it sometimes seemed to be. Certainly, by the turn of the century, industrialization, incorporation, a flood of new immigrants, increasing labor unrest, the first wave of feminism, and the revelations of the muckrakers had challenged its complacency. These changes, coupled with the magazine revolution and the rise of consumer culture , forced essayists out of their libraries and gardens and into the streets and newsrooms. Meanwhile, the lives of their readers—the rapidly expanding cohort of young professionals—were changing in two important ways. Their parents had lived in small towns or the walking neighborhoods of big cities, and their fathers had owned a shop or read for the law on their own, but this new generation was going to college and moving to the suburbs. These two changes meant that the essay would now be read by a new cadre of readers for new reasons in a new setting. Middle-class readers began to read essays in living rooms instead of parlors, and they read them in order to better understand the demands of modern urban and exurban life. H o M E ow N E r S H I P A N d A M E r I C A’ S N E w M I d d l E C l A S S In 1890 Howells had written a novel about a middle-class editor like himself who leaves Boston for New York and a job in modern publishing. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, Basil March takes on the editorship of Every Other Week, a magazine Phillip Lopate describes as a kind of “precursor to The New 3 the Essay in the Progressive Era T 54 The American Essay in the American Century Yorker” that tried “to be light and informative, and to catch the Gotham spirit, mainly for readers outside the city limits.”1 From the start March’s life in New York is rife with contradictions, and the demands of the market force him into a number of editorial compromises. He claims to be “not ashamed” of his literary choices for the first issue, which include a “sketch of travel,” “a literary essay and a social essay,” and “dashing criticism of the new pictures, the new plays, the new books, [and] the new fashions,” but he quickly realizes that “the number would be sold and praised chiefly for its pictures.” His backer is “extremely proud” of the issue, but decides “it was too good” and they had given the public “too much” for “their money.” March and his wife, Isabel, spend six chapters at the beginning of the novel house hunting. Their long journey from property to property is a downward spiral of useless real estate agents, misleading advertisements, and lowered expectations that leads finally to a small, grim, furnished apartment and the realization, in Isabel’s words, that “life isn’t what it seems when you look forward to it,” for Americans are driven by the “superstition that having and shining is the chief good” and so end up “moiling and toiling on to the palace or the poorhouse.”2 AHazard of New Fortunes was Howells’s first full experiment in the unflinching realism he had been advocating for some time in the pages of the Atlantic. The novel was colored by the disenchantment Howells felt after the hangings of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887, whom he felt had been executed for their beliefs. His pessimism about America’s persistent inequalities may have led him to the stark carrot-and-stick of the palace or poorhouse, but at the time the new middle class saw the rising rate of home ownership as proof of their country’s unique role in the world. Home ownership was increasing (though until 1950 it stayed below 50 percent), class composition changed, and a new, simpler house became the rage. Historians, economists, and sociologists use various criteria to identify the new middle class, including occupation , income, standard of living, and aspiration, but one could argue that at the turn of the century, no criterion was more telling than home ownership. Buying a house became an expected life stage, a gateway to the middle class. As Clifford Clark has noted, “Owning one’s own home was evidence both of a certain level of income and of a...

Share