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  • The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876-1926
  • Roger Lane
The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876-1926. By John Henry Hepp IV (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) 278 pp. $36.50

This is an interesting book, well written, carefully researched, and often lively despite a number of loose ends and much repetition. Its main theme is persuasive: Philadelphia from 1876 to 1926 provides an ideal case study of the way in which three institutions—public transport, the department store, and the daily newspaper—exemplify how bourgeois citizens used space and time to order their world. In addition, pace Robert H. Weibe's The Search for Order (New York, 1967), as believers in progress through science, the middle class faced the continual transformation of their everyday lives with optimism rather than fear, although, ironically, the insulated world that they constructed proved "fragile." Eventually, the same economic forces that had created a middle-class monopoly of consumer culture opened it to the working class, so that, as an example, the cautiously bourgeois Public Ledger lost out to the "multi-classed" Evening Bulletin as Philadelphia's dominant newspaper.

Hepp's novelistic use of contemporary diaries, guidebooks, and journals give a sense of the times. He shows how all three institutions progressively ordered (or segmented) space, most obviously the department store, and helped to order time, most obviously the railroads, on the basis not only of class but of gender as well. Most valuable, however, are the insights that go beyond the obvious; readers will learn much, as did this reviewer, a longtime devotee of old newspapers in particular.

The book is laden with some overblown and unnecessary claims, about changing conceptions of science. For instance, the word paradigm, with big footnote, is thrown into the last paragraph with little apparent analytical relevance. What is billed as a pathbreaking union of social with political history, too, never materializes; the closest thing to politics inthis book are a few pallid sentences about zoning as a means of protecting bourgeois turf. Nor is it clear why the middle-class world proved "fragile," as prosperity brought others onto the trolleys and into the department stores; there is no evidence of class resentment (as distinct fromanti-black or Jewish sentiment) among the sixty-three men and women whose papers Hepp has mined. But with these caveats, this is a real contribution to the history of the city in general and Philadelphia in particular.

Roger Lane
Haverford College

Footnotes

1. See Georg Simmel (ed. David Frisby; trans. Tom Bottomore and Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg), The Philosophy of Money (New York, 1990; orig. pub. 1978).

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