Inverting the Urban Order—George Lippard's Philadelphia

Abstract

George Lippard's novels reshape the space of Philadelphia in two different ways. For most of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the city's image had been dominated by the geometric regularity of William Penn's plan for Center City. But Lippard shifts his focus outward, to the city's margins, to the working-class and ethnic districts of Southwark, Moyamensing, and Kensington. He also flips the spaces of the city's two-dimensional grid--onto a vertical axis--moving his narratives up and down inside a series of gothic interiors. Such remapping is an assertion of power: Penn's grid is an abstract "representation" of space that aims to control development and distribute the city's population; Lippard's novels, on the other hand, work to reclaim the city as "lived" space for its inhabitants. His interiorized Gothic conveys simultaneously the city's growing economic and residential segregation and the compression and overcrowding of its slums. The tangled plots of his fiction offer no through-lines of individual heroism or success; their excesses instead forcefully depict Philadelphia's socio-economic conflicts and the ever-widening gulf between classes.

Writing his Autobiography in the 1770s and 1780s, Benjamin Franklin describes his mastery of Philadelphia's urban space, whose geometric regularity is designed to further both commercial visibility and individual movement through the streets. In the 1790s, on the contrary, Charles Brockden Brown chronicles the breakdown of the city's economic and social order during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. But his characters (and the fever itself) still move along the east-west grid Franklin depicts: Arthur Mervyn oscillates between the Jersey Market and the Delaware River on the east and the countryside to the west, across the Schuylkill.

Fifty years later, George Foster's Philadelphia in Slices (1848–49) also focuses on the Center City, using similar reference points. He notes the emergence of working-class suburbs but takes pains to separate them and their "proletaires" from the city proper.¹ For him, Philadelphia

Figure 1.

Thomas Holme's city plan (1683), The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/citymapPhila_hsp.jpeg.

remains defined by its bourgeois shopkeepers and "streets … as regularly balanced as a merchant's ledger"; it is still Franklin's city, where "everything is done by square and compass."² But Foster's contemporary George Lippard, by contrast, reshapes Philadelphia in two important ways. His novels of the 1840s and 1850s shift their focus outward, to the city's northern and southern margins, and the working-class and ethnic districts of Southwark, Moyamensing, and Kensington. Their factories and slums, rather than Center City stores and workshops, now dominate working-class life, and Lippard responds by reorienting his plots onto a north-south axis. Lippard also flips the spaces of the city's two-dimensional grid in another way—onto a vertical axis—moving his narratives up and down inside a series of Gothic interiors. Rather than following a single central figure across the city, his stories feature multiple characters and plot lines, bringing them together only in these symbolic spaces.

Such remapping is an assertion of power: on the one hand, William Penn's grid is an abstract "representation" of space that aims to control development and distribute the city's population; Lippard's novels, on the other hand, work to reclaim the city as "lived" space for its inhabitants. For Christopher Castiglia, the books' emphasis on interior space over narrative temporality also has a political valence: it makes possible both a radical privacy and queer resistance to an exploitative economic system.³

Writing for a local and working-class audience, often in inexpensive story papers, his work distributed by "Dealers in Cheap Publications," Lippard rejects the superficial travelogue approach of writers like Foster and Horatio Alger, who aimed at a larger, national readership.⁴ Instead, he offers his readers a spatialized version of the social and economic inequality that working-class Philadelphians actually knew.

II

Philadelphia had changed immensely by the mid-nineteenth century; its population rose from ten thousand in 1746 to one hundred thousand by 1820—and then to five hundred thousand by 1860.⁵ Such growth put a severe strain on the city's infrastructure: as early as the 1790s, rising prices and rents had already produced a serious housing shortage.⁶ The resultant overcrowding also made the city vulnerable to epidemics; its "physical habitat had simply collapsed" under the pressure of "residential and industrial density."⁷ Lippard's fiction, written in the 1840s–50s, reflects these changes.

Franklin's Philadelphia was characterized by an intermingling of classes, businesses, and residences. But by the 1840s, businesses and factories had come to dominate Center City, with wealthy residences shifting west of Broad Street.⁸ Stuart Blumin suggests that residential mobility indicates social and economic mobility, but most of that mobility in antebellum Philadelphia was downward.⁹ Growing social inequality meant increasing economic and residential segregation, with the middle and working classes moving to poorer areas.¹⁰ Factories and other workplaces had developed in these outlying areas to the north and south, drawing the working-class and immigrant population—as well as Lippard's plots—along with them.

Lippard leaves Philadelphia's central grid in place, but he empties it out. Michael Denning, in Mechanic Accents, says that Lippard "offer[s] very little in the way of urban topography, very little local color."¹¹ Samuel Otter does note that The Quaker City (1844–45) uses points on the urban grid to plot the movement of its characters, and he lists a number of locations mentioned in the novel, but these sites are only mentioned, seldom actually described; they remain coordinates on an otherwise empty map.¹² Lippard often sends his characters careening down Chestnut or Walnut Streets, fashionable east-west thoroughfares, before they turn south on Third or Seventh Streets.¹³ But there are rarely other people on these streets. The four drunken revelers of the book's opening chapter do encounter each other again four hundred pages later (QC, 5–8, 426–31), but they do so in an apparently deserted Independence Square.¹⁴ Characters in the various versions of The Killers move in a similar fashion, with only a few spots mentioned in an otherwise empty Center City: merchant Jacob D. Z. Hicks's counting house at Chestnut and Front Streets, the Merchants' Exchange between Walnut, Dock, and Third Streets, and Hicks's mansion "in the heart of the city."¹⁵

There are only two major occasions in The Quaker City when Lippard describes crowds in Center City, both late in the book. One is near the story's close, as Byrnewood Arlington rushes along Chestnut Street to confront his sister's seducer:

Plumed belle, and soft-visaged exquisite, sober merchant, and prattling child walking by its mother's side on that pavement of beauty and fashion, started aside … [H]e passed a long array of glittering stores, and then his path was thronged by a crowd of ragged boys, who made the air ring with shouts and cries.

(QC, 562)

The only working-class figures in the scene are newsboys announcing the headlines about his sister's seduction.

The other description of crowds comes in the novel's darkest, strangest section, in an apocalyptic dream of the city's destruction. The monstrous and misshapen Devil-Bug sees

sidewalks lined with throngs of wayfarers, some clad in purple and fine linen, some with rags fluttering around their wasted forms. Here was the lady in all the glitter of her plumes, and silks, and diamonds, and by her side the beggar child … [Here] the lordly Bishop, … the man of law … the Judge … [and] the mechanic in his tattered garb.

(QC, 372)

But these figures are soon joined by thousands of corpses, risen from the graveyards to witness the city's destruction. Rather than the eighteenth century's intermingling of classes, artisans and merchants, shops and residences, Lippard's city is a place of economic extremes that seldom intersect.

Indeed, one of the themes of Lippard's fiction is the deskilling and immiseration of the city's artisan class.¹⁶ "With the shift of production from homes and shops to manufactories," many workers faced longer and more regimented work days and conditions.¹⁷ And with the erosion of traditional skills, the ladder from apprentice to journeyman and master was harder to climb.¹⁸ The printing office where Elijah Watson works in The Killers has become a factory, with its presses underground and "the Compositor's room in the sky": "Boys are employed to do men's work, in a bungling manner, at half wages," and the pay of girls in the bindery is slashed (93, 94). Stripped of its middle and artisan classes, Lippard's Center City becomes either an empty vacuum or the site of violence and destruction.

III

Much of the action in Lippard's books takes place instead in the densely populated and ethnically mixed areas of Southwark and Moyamensing in The Quaker City and The Killers and Kensington in The Nazarene. As Otter notes, "Characters are repeatedly pulled down [out of Center City] toward Southwark and from main streets into side streets and alleys."¹⁹ In the map published in The Life and Adventures of Charles Anderson Chester, one of several versions of The Killers,

Figure 2.

Map of the City and Districts of Moyamensing and Southwark.

the city's grid is inverted, with the southern slums of Southwark and Moyamensing at the top—in the privileged visual position.²⁰

The Quaker City's Monk Hall occupies a marginal space, but one closer to the center of this reoriented map. It stands "on the out-skirts of the southern part of the city," a decayed mansion now reachable only by "wind[ing] up a narrow alley, turn[ing] down a court, [and then] strik[ing] up [another] avenue" (QC, 46, 48). There is

a printing office on one side and a stereotype foundry on the other, while on the opposite side of the way, a mass of miserable frame houses seemed about to commit suicide and fling themselves madly into the gutter, and in the distance a long line of dwellings, offices, and factories, looming in broken perspective, looked as if they wanted to shake hands across the narrow street.

(48)

Here is all the detail missing from Lippard's picture of Center City; here is a mix of work and residential spaces, but this is a working-class slum, replete with images of breakage, compression, and overcrowding—the visual and spatial opposite of Penn's clean and regular city plan.

The counterpart of Monk Hall in The Nazarene is Columbiana Hall, which stands in "the centre of [a] dark alley of poverty and crime. On either side extended a long prospect of miserable tenements, whose toppling doors and window frames, battered fronts, sashes stuffed with rags or straw, and roofs bending toward the sidewalk … presented … a picture of utter misery and degradation." Once again, it is a landscape of fragmentation and decay, which Lippard offers as a bitter contrast to the reader's "fancy" of "an elegant structure, with marble pillars in front, and lofty windows, blazing with festival light."²¹

Much of both The Nazarene and The Killers is also set on the city's southern border with Moyamensing, in and near the "Barbarian District," which "swarms with hovels, courts, groggeries" but contains both "hard-working and honest people … and the largest portion of the Outcast population" (K, 126). It features streets like Dog Alley and Runnel's Court, whose "six three story brick houses [are] built upon an area of ground scarcely sufficient for the foundation of one … Each of these houses comprised three rooms and a cellar … [each] room the abode of a [different] family" (101, 69).

The area is characterized by its working-class street life, which serves as a sharp contrast to the emptiness of Center City. There are groggeries "every five yards" along "a well-known street leading from the Delaware to the Schuylkill [South Street?]," with "groups of men, or half-grown boys," gang members, near the door of each (K, 108). On Election Night, Lippard depicts the area as densely crowded, "full of bonfires and devilment" (106), with "crowds of voters … collected around every poll" (K 125).

Most of this territory is, however, formally uncharted—or unofficially renamed by its residents. The alley where Columbiana Hall is located in The Nazarene "may have a pretty name in the Directory of the city, but in the dialect of the thieves, cut-throats, and paupers who swarmed within its huts, it was known by this graphic designation—the devil's long lane" (139). Lippard refers to South Street, for example, either euphemistically or only as a general reference point; his specific settings are elsewhere, as he expands and reshapes the outline of the city.

His most carefully and densely described urban landscape may be the northern district of Kensington in The Nazarene. Lippard begins with a depiction of a monstrous "factory … crowded by miserable forms, swarming to their labor in rooms rendered loathsome by foul air, and filled with floating particles of cotton" (N, 166) but then spends more than a page leading the reader to the apartment of an impoverished weaver. The narrative twists and turns, as Lippard points out a church, a school, and the market house, before coming to a triangular block between Cadwallader, Jefferson, and Master Streets (168). The precision is necessary this time not because it is an imaginary space but because it is beyond the limits of Penn's grid and thus unknown to conventional readers.

IV

Lippard's novels move off the map in another way, as they represent class conflict in interiors, rather than across the surface of public spaces—on the different floors of Southwark's Monk Hall in The Quaker City and in the contrast between slum cellars in Moyamensing and Kensington and "lofty mansions" on Front and Arch Streets in The Nazarene. Just as Center City is emptied out compared to the city's working-class suburbs, so are its exterior landscapes compared to Lippard's labyrinthine interiors.

David Reynolds describes the dreamlike "mazes" in Monk Hall as representations of the city itself.²² Monk Hall "is the Quaker City," according to Denning, "condensing the social and sexual relations between the 'upper ten and lower million' into a single house"; for Otter, it is "an interpretive map of Philadelphia elaborated in three dimensions."²³ Monk Hall's third floor, just below its tower, is taken up by rooms belonging to Gus Lorrimer, the novel's embodiment of upper-class corruption and depravity, their "lavish magnificence" providing the setting for seduction and deceit.²⁴ Just below street level lies the banqueting room, where drunken revelers ("Monks") from a range of classes—merchants, a doctor, a poet—mingle (QC, 70). One level farther down is the hall's wine cellar and "Dead-Vault" among whose coffins gather "Thieves, Cut-throats and Vagabonds," the "Outcast Monks" of the city (479, 477). And beneath all is the Pit, below the building's foundations, where rubbish, rats, and unburied corpses lie along an underground stream (307–8).

These groups never intersect on the streets, but within the hall trapdoors and secret passageways make movement between levels sudden and unpredictable. Byrnewood Arlington, for instance, falls precipitously from the heights of the hall's tower to near death in the Pit beneath. The hall's proprietor, Devil-Bug, is the only character who seems able to move at will both up and down, through hidden doors that only he knows.

The same vertical distribution of classes appears in The Nazarene and The Killers. Here the wealthy are depicted in the "luxuriously furnished" upper chambers of "lofty mansions" (N, 39). And it is on the third story of banker Jacob Hicks's house that his son finds a hidden safe in The Killers (157). In The Nazarene, by contrast, paupers, criminals, and Black people gather in the "damp … subterranean apartment" beneath Columbiana Hall to swear vengeance against the merchant Calvin Wolfe (145). Anti-Catholic conspirators also gather below ground, although they are led by the duplicitous Wolfe himself. And "the killers" of that novel enter their "den" through a cellar (K, 109, 116), while on the north side of the city, Irish weavers gather in a cellar to defend themselves from anti-Catholic attacks (N, 202).

V

Struggles for social and economic power are also conflicts over the definition and control of social space—what is central or marginal, ordered or disordered—and Lippard intervenes directly in these debates. In building his Philadelphia novels around symbolically located interiors, he further empties out the public space of Penn's grid. Also missing from Monk Hall, Columbiana Hall, and the city as a whole are the middle classes, whose commercial values Lippard rejects.²⁵ His interiorized Gothic conveys simultaneously the city's growing economic and residential segregation and the compression and overcrowding of its slums. The tangled plots of his fiction offer no through lines of individual heroism or success; their excesses instead forcefully depict Philadelphia's socioeconomic conflicts and the ever-widening gulf between classes.

The only alternatives remaining are escape—to a mythicized West in The Killers and New York and a romanticized "deep forest wild" in The Quaker City (568)—or an apocalyptic leveling of distinctions in the destruction of the entire urban order, as in Devil-Bug's dream. The one feature of Center City that remains as a reference point in The Quaker City (and in Foster's Slices as well) is the tower of the State House (today's Independence Hall)—but it becomes an increasingly ironic symbol, a point from which to look down over a decaying and divided city.²⁶