Brown grew up in a Quaker family in revolutionary Philadelphia. His father, Elijah Brown (b. 1740), was among the members of the Society of Friends to be deported from Pennsylvania to Virginia because they would not affirm allegiance to Pennsylvania during the war for independence from Great Britain. At six years old, Brown could hear the firing of cannons and musket shots and feared the persecution of his family. These events helped to spur his imagination and form his literary aesthetic. Especially inspiring to the writing of Arthur Mervyn was Brown’s contracting of yellow fever in New York in September 1798.

Arthur Mervyn began as a serial in Philadelphia’s Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence, but it had to be discontinued due to a lack of enthusiasm among the magazine’s correspondents and the editor’s death from yellow fever. The end of the serialization pushed Brown to issue the book on its own. Arthur Mervyn combines two stories, although it is often read as a single narrative. The first component of Arthur Mervyn was published as a full-length work between March and May 1799. The “sequel,” as Brown understood it, was published in September or early October 1800, as Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. Second Part. The 1800 follow-up became very rare, and few collectors in later years found it possible to obtain both volumes separately.

Challenges of the City

The novel follows the actions of protagonist Arthur Mervyn, a farm boy who leaves a rural area to move to Philadelphia, and the challenges he faces. After being exiled from his father’s farm, Mervyn arrives penniless to a city riddled with yellow fever. He was cheated out of all his money on the trip there. When readers first meet Mervyn it is through the eyes of Dr. Stevens, who finds him ill with yellow fever and takes him in. Mervyn recounts everything that brought him to that desperate position. The novel’s villain, Mr. Welbeck, is a constant adversary for Mervyn, as he is a thief and forger whom Mervyn met when he was begging for money. Mervyn gets wrapped up in Welbeck’s wrongdoings and ultimately escapes back to the country. The first part of the novel is narrated by Dr. Stevens,  the second part is narrated by Mervyn.

The novel’s subplots reflect the author’s experiences growing up in a Philadelphia Quaker merchant family during the era of the American Revolution and Quaker activism against slavery. Arthur Mervyn includes reflections on slavery and dramatizes financial institutions, practices, and legal concerns surrounding the slave trade. Many nameless slaves, bound servants, free Blacks, and laboring-class whites featured in Arthur Mervyn embody the shifting class and racial social organization of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scholar James H. Lustus has linked the physical impact of the yellow fever to the symbolic manifestation of moral “pollution,” a word Mervyn frequently uses in the novel. The term embodies the licentiousness, greed, and deception permeating Philadelphia at the time. Arthur Mervyn ends with the protagonist marrying Achsa Fielding, a rich widowed Jewish woman, an act that illustrates the character’s new approach to social relations.

With novels like Arthur Mervyn, based on historical precedents, Brown attempted to persuade readers that novels could extend beyond imagination to provide communal truth. The critical reception of Arthur Mervyn has been contradictory, with scholars debating whether the Mervyn character is a hero or a scoundrel, or, as one critic argued, lacking “the force of will to be either” hero or villain. Mervyn often has been cited as an unreliable narrator.  Critics also have found the novel’s narrative structure to be confusing, with stories frequently told from several points of view.

Arthur Mervyn inspired other American Gothic authors, including Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who also spent time in Philadelphia and whose “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)  is about a fictitious disease that plagues a fictitious country. For Brown, the novel served as an opportunity to reflect on his childhood and the challenges he and his family faced during the American Revolution. He used the work to free himself from the past and in turn helped to influence a new literary genre, the American Gothic.

Kristi Collemacine is an English M.A. candidate at Rutgers University-Camden, where she is a part-time lecturer. She also teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Autobiography is arranged in four parts, each with a distinct purpose and tone, though Franklin intended for the work to be read fluidly as a whole. He began writing The Autobiography in 1771, during a stay in London of more than ten years as a mediator between England and the American colonies. Although Philadelphia was Franklin’s home, this trip marked his third sojourn to England. As a young man, Franklin traveled to England in 1724-26 to expand his knowledge of the printing trade and then returned to Philadelphia where he would seize production of The Pennsylvania Gazette from Samuel Keimer (c. 1688-1742) and begin Poor Richard’s Almanack. After thirty years of building his reputation as a printer and civic leader, Franklin also spent five years in England as a diplomat for the Pennsylvania Assembly beginning in 1757.

Written during the era of tension between the British and the colonies caused by seemingly arbitrary taxation, Part One of The Autobiography takes the form of a letter addressed to Franklin’s son William (1731-1814), then serving as royal governor of New Jersey. Franklin documents his childhood and adolescence, including his arrival in Philadelphia and his achievements in the printing business. He recounts his lineage, depicts his early life in Boston, and documents his apprenticeship with his brother James (1697-1735), a printer. After a dispute with his brother, at the young age of seventeen Franklin leaves his apprenticeship and resolves to move secretly to New York. There, he has trouble finding work and thus moves to Philadelphia.

Part One chronicles Franklin’s eventful journey to Philadelphia, including his arrival by boat on October 6, 1723, after first docking in Burlington, New Jersey. Franklin calls attention to the contrast between his humble beginnings and entrance into Philadelphia and his eventual status as a businessman, civic leader, and public servant, addressing the reader directly: “You may in your Mind compare such unlikely Beginning with the Figure I have since made there.” Recalling the experience of arriving in his new city, he writes, “I knew no Soul, nor where to look for Lodging,” and then describes his first day in Philadelphia: “I walk’d up [Market] Street, gazing about, till near the Market House I met a Boy with Bread. I had many a Meal on Bread and inquiring where he got it, I went immediately to the Baker’s he directed me to in Second Street; and ask’d for Biscuit, intending such as we had in Boston, but they it seems were not made in Philadelphia.” Franklin’s first walk through the city took him west on Market Street to Fourth Street, then to Chestnut Street and Walnut Street, and “coming round found [himself] again at Market Street Wharf,” near where his boat was docked. At the end of his walk, Franklin entered “the Great meeting house of the Quakers near the market.” Although Franklin himself was not a Quaker, in The Autobiography he recounts the courtesy shown him by the Society of Friends: “I sat down among them, and, after looking round awhile and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy thro’ labour and want of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and continu’d so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to rouse me. This was, therefore, the first house I was in, or slept in, in Philadelphia.”

Early Years in Philadelphia

In Philadelphia, Franklin creates a life for himself. He attempts to find work as a printer and struggles with financial burdens. Eventually he finds lodging with John Read (1677-1724), a carpenter and building contractor, and begins to court Read’s daughter, Deborah (1707-74). Throughout his young adulthood, Franklin spends time in London studying the printing trade (1724-26). In Philadelphia Franklin establishes “The Junto,” an intellectual and philosophical conversation group, where he first introduces the concept of the lending library. Franklin finds work as a printer with Samuel Keimer and in 1729 buys his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and eventually becomes the official printer for the Pennsylvania Assembly.

Franklin’s writings became associated with American mythologies of success early on. A contemporary of Franklin, his friend and fellow diplomat Benjamin Vaughan (1751-1835), read Part One of the memoir-in-progress in 1783 and noted that it exemplified the American ideal of upward social mobility: “All that has happened to you, is connected with the detail of the manners and situation of a rising people.” Vaughan’s statement, written in the aftermath of the American Revolution, speaks not only to Franklin’s achievement as an individual but also to the milieu in which he was writing and his audience of Americans in search of national and individual identities.

Franklin began writing Part Two of his autobiography in 1784 while serving as the United States minister plenipotentiary to France. This section is perhaps the best known of The Autobiography because it includes Franklin’s list of thirteen virtues for self-improvement: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility. Franklin puts forth a plan to develop one virtue per week, intending to eventually perfect all thirteen virtues. Franklin’s virtues are meant to appeal to people of all religions, making his tenets for moral perfection a viable option for all people. Franklin’s emphasis on these thirteen virtues in The Autobiography has been cited as the impetus for self-help literature. Although inspirational for many, the message of self-improvement also drew negative criticism from such notable and varied figures as John Adams (1735-1826) and Abigail Adams (1744-1818), Mark Twain (1835-1910), and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), who found Franklin’s Puritan-like self-criticism to be inaccessible and improbable. Nevertheless, Franklin developed Puritan and Quaker influences into a message that mass audiences found instructive.

Franklin returned to writing his autobiography from 1788 to 1789, following his return from France in 1785 and his participation in the Constitutional Convention (May 25-September 17, 1787). Now in his eighties, Franklin in Part Three reflects on his life from 1730 through the late 1750s and highlights his involvement in politics, science, and publishing. At this time, Franklin also began to revise the already completed parts of The Autobiography manuscript.

Franklin as Publisher

In Part Three, Franklin describes his continuing involvement in the publishing industry with Poor Richard’s Almanack, first published in 1732 and subsequently for the next twenty-five years. Franklin uses the almanac and his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, to achieve his goal of educating common people. Franklin becomes clerk of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania and then deputy postmaster of Philadelphia, which allows him to distribute his Gazette by mail. In 1753, Franklin is appointed postmaster general of America. Franklin also publishes influential pamphlets, such as Plain Truth (1747), which outlines the need for colonial unity, and Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Philadelphia (1749), which leads to the creation of the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751 (in 1791, renamed the University of Pennsylvania). Franklin’s political agenda also includes advocating for the education of women. In Part Three, Franklin speculates on creating a political “Party of Virtue,” whose members would subscribe to his thirteen virtues as well as a compilation of virtues distilled from various religions. He also recounts his activities in science and invention, including the invention of the stove in 1742 and the notable 1752 kite experiment, which concluded that lightning and electricity are, in fact, one and the same. Culminating two decades of publishing, political, and scientific, advancements, the Pennsylvania Assembly appoints Franklin to the role of commissioner to England in 1756.

Part Four, written between November 1789 and his death on April 17, 1790, briefly documents Franklin’s journey to London from 1757 to 1762, where he petitions the Penn family for financial assistance on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly. In 1762, after the Penn family agreed to provide financial assistance to Pennsylvania for events transpiring in the colony, such as the French and Indian War (1754-63), Franklin returns to Philadelphia. The brevity of Part Four reflects Franklin’s declining health.

Franklin’s autobiography has a complex publication history. After Franklin’s death in 1790, his grandson William Temple Franklin (1762-1823) served as his literary executor. However, without his approval, unauthorized excerpts of The Autobiography appeared in Philadelphia magazines, Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine (May 1790-June 1791), and American Museum (July and November 1790). The text made its debut as a book in Paris in 1791 as a French translation of Franklin’s manuscript of Part One, subsequently translated into German and Swedish. An English translation of the French edition, titled The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, was published in London in 1793. By the next year, American editions based on the retranslated edition circulated in New York and Philadelphia. More than two decades passed before William Temple Franklin released his own edition, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, in 1818. Although this edition became viewed as the standard version, it remained flawed; based on an unrevised manuscript, it did not include Franklin’s revisions of the text or Franklin’s Part Four. In 1828 Part Four made its debut in Mémoires Sur La Vie De Benjamin Franklin, a Paris edition written in French.

A Resurgence in Popularity

Finally, in 1868, seventy-eight years after Franklin’s death, all four parts of Franklin’s Autobiography appeared in an edition produced by John Bigelow (1817-1911), an American author, journalist, and diplomat. This edition, titled Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin used Franklin’s final manuscript. The autobiography’s resurgence in the late nineteenth century mirrored the publication of “rags-to-riches” young adult novels by Horatio Alger Jr. (1832-99), in which impoverished boys rise through hard work and determination to lives of middle-class security and comfort. The life of Benjamin Franklin fits into this schema that became known as the “Horatio Alger Myth.”

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has served as source material for Franklin’s many biographers and continues to be republished in various forms, including digital e-books and audiobooks. The manuscript of Franklin’s autobiography was made available digitally through the Huntington Digital Library. An accessible text, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin continues to be read widely by students and scholars in the twenty-first century.

Rachel Lewis is enrolled in the Rutgers University-Camden Graduate School, where she is pursuing her master’s degree in English and New Jersey Teacher Certification in secondary education of English. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the late seventeenth century, William Bradford (1663-1752) established the first printing press in Philadelphia. For many years, he was the only printer in the city. In colonial America, printers often acted as booksellers and sometimes as publishers of broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, and almanacs. Book publishing was far less common during this period because it was so risky. Printing and binding books was expensive, and would-be publishers had no guarantee that they would be able to recoup their investment through sales. Instead, printers preferred to import books from Great Britain.

Nonetheless, a few enterprising printers in the Philadelphia region published books during the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most famous of these was Benjamin Franklin (1706-90). Over the course of his career, Franklin printed and financed sixteen books including Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1742-44) and Philadelphia politician and scholar James Logan’s translation of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Cato Major (1744). One of Franklin’s contemporaries was Christopher Saur (1695-1758). Saur set up shop northwest of Philadelphia in Germantown, where he focused on printing and publishing German-language materials to serve a growing population of German immigrants.

Another early printer and publisher who operated outside of Philadelphia was Delaware-born Isaac Collins (1746-1817). Collins got his start in Philadelphia as an apprentice before moving to Burlington and, later, Trenton, New Jersey. Collins mostly published religious texts as well as a few schoolbooks. Scottish-born printer Thomas Dobson (1751-1823) took on perhaps the most ambitious printing and publishing project during this period: the first American edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1789-98). In order to finance this expensive multivolume work, Dobson gathered subscribers from across the country, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Still, Dobson had trouble finding enough support for the project, and the Britannica was not a financial success.

A Surge in Printers

In the second half of the eighteenth century the number of printers began to grow substantially. Printers gravitated to Philadelphia because of its large, cosmopolitan population, as well as its high concentration of learned organizations, from the American Philosophical Society to the University of Pennsylvania. Geographic location played an important role as well. Philadelphia’s proximity to important rivers and roads meant that printed materials could more easily reach markets in the South and West. By the late 1830s, however, Philadelphia’s growth slowed. With the opening of the Erie Canal, New York possessed superior waterways as well as several large general publishing firms that proved to be tough competition.

By the nineteenth century, the market for print had expanded considerably. More Americans could read than ever before, and there was a growing sense that an educated society was crucial to a thriving democracy. These changes, along with a booming economy, made printers more willing to take risks and publish books. It was also during this period that the line between printer and publisher became more defined. Mathew Carey (1759-1839) is generally considered Philadelphia’s first modern publisher. Born in Ireland, Carey got his start as a printer but soon focused his attention solely on publishing and bookselling. He found success publishing British novels, such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (first published by Carey in 1794). Carey also pioneered new methods in marketing and distribution that few American publishers had tried before. In the 1820s, Carey asked his oldest son, Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), and his son-in-law, Isaac Lea (1792-1886), to take over the firm, under the new name Carey & Lea. The firm went on to publish a wide variety of books, including popular novels by Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Eventually, fierce competition from the growing Harper Brothers in New York helped convince the firm to shift its focus to medical publishing. Carey & Lea was located in the right city for such a specialization, as Philadelphia was home to a growing medical community which included two medical schools. Over the years, the firm changed names several times. By the twentieth century it was known as Lea & Febiger.

Another important nineteenth-century Philadelphia publishing firm was J.B. Lippincott & Co. Founded in 1836 by New Jersey-born Joshua B. Lippincott (1813-86), the firm got its start publishing religious books. By the 1850s Lippincott began to focus on medical publications and gift books. While Lippincott was known as a publisher, the firm did considerable work as a jobber, helping to distribute books published by other firms to retail stores in the South. Lippincott also operated a large factory for printing and bookbinding at 715 Market Street. The company was incredibly successful, by the end of the nineteenth century printing around 2,000 books per year.

Religious publishers thrived in Philadelphia during the nineteenth century. These organizations, financed largely by donations, sold some of their publications but mostly gave books away for free. The Philadelphia Bible Society, founded in 1809, published Bibles and New Testaments. The American Sunday School Union got its start in Philadelphia in 1824 and soon became one of the largest national religious publishing societies in the United States. The group aimed to establish Sunday Schools across the country and to supply each school with religious books appropriate for children. In addition to noncommercial publishers, by the mid-nineteenth century many general publishers partnered with specific denominations to supply religious works. J.B. Lippincott & Co., for example, allied with the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Subscription Publishing

Another distinctive aspect of the book trade in Philadelphia was its focus on subscription publishing. Subscription books were sold door to door by agents, instead of through a bookstore. Many types of books were sold by subscription, including novels, histories, and reference works. While Hartford and Chicago are often identified as centers of the subscription book trade, Philadelphia also played an important role. In fact, Mathew Carey was one of the earliest American publishers to rely on a book peddler to sell his books. His book agent, a clergyman and author named Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825), traveled across the South trying to convince people to buy. After the Civil War, a number of publishing firms specializing in subscription books formed in Philadelphia, including T. Ellwood Zell, Gebbie and Barrie, and later, the National Publishing Company. Even general publishers like J.B. Lippincott & Co. maintained a subscription book department. Most subscription publishers eventually went bankrupt during the early twentieth century, when the practice of selling books door to door largely ended.

Despite the many book publishers in Philadelphia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few were women. Two of city’s earliest female publishers were Jane Aitken (1764-1832) and Lydia Bailey (1779-1869). Although they were printers first and foremost (Lydia Bailey did printing work for Mathew Carey, among others), Aitken and Bailey occasionally acted as publishers. Aitken, for example, published the first American translation of the Bible in 1808. By the late nineteenth century, although more women were entering other areas of the book trade, the number of women book publishers did not increase. In 1880, Florence I. Duncan (1849-1906) and Mary R. Heygate Hall (?-?) formed Duncan & Hall. The firm published at least one book, Ye Last Sweet Thing in Corners (1880), which was written by Duncan. Another woman publisher was Louise C. Boname (?-?), a French teacher in the city who wrote and published French language books for students beginning in 1896.

By the early twentieth century, book publishing in Philadelphia was dominated by a few well-established firms including Lea & Febiger and J.B. Lippincott & Co. In 1901, Lippincott moved to new offices at 227 S. Sixth Street, overlooking Washington Square. W.B. Saunders, Lea & Febiger, David McKay, and others eventually moved to the area as well, making it a center for publishing in the city. Perhaps the best-known book Lippincott published during this period was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Lippincott was sold to Harper & Row in 1978, and then to the Dutch company Wolters Kluwer in 1990. The imprint is now called Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Lea & Febiger was sold to Baltimore-based Waverly Inc. in 1990. Waverly was bought by Wolters Kluwer in 1998 and became part of Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Only a handful of new publishing firms formed in Philadelphia during the twentieth century. One of the most important was Running Press, founded by brothers Stuart and Larry Teacher in 1972 to publish nonfiction, children’s literature, and miniature books. Although acquired by New York’s Perseus Book Group in 2002, Running Press remained headquartered in Philadelphia.

While commercial publishing declined, universities became the major publishers of books in the Philadelphia region. University presses got their start publishing faculty scholarship, but soon expanded to publishing the work of other scholars. The University of Pennsylvania Press, established in 1890, began to regularly publish books in 1927, when Phelps Soule (1883-1968) was brought in from Yale University Press to act as a full-time editor. Under Soule, the press grew substantially, publishing books on a wide variety of topics from finance to medicine to bibliography to history. Other presses soon followed. The University of Delaware Press was founded in 1922, Rutgers University Press was founded in 1936, and Temple University Press began publishing in 1969. Saint Joseph’s University Press, primarily a publisher of books on Catholic history and culture, was founded in 1997. Although most books published by university presses are aimed at scholarly readers, some have found a wider audience. The Lincoln Reader, edited by Paul M. Angle and published by Rutgers University Press, was named a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1947.

Book publishing is one of Philadelphia’s oldest industries. Early on, Philadelphia printers like Benjamin Franklin and Mathew Carey understood the importance of books to a new nation. Especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia publishers played a crucial role in producing books for readers in remote areas across the United States. As the book trade grew, Philadelphia publishers successfully adapted to a changing market. Ultimately, Philadelphia’s book publishers became part of a national and international industry.

Ann K. Johnson is the Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Bookstores have long been an important part of the economic and cultural fabric of Philadelphia. As early as the eighteenth century, booksellers set up shop in the city, eager to serve a highly-educated population hungry for information. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the number of bookstores continued to rise. These stores sold a wide variety of titles, from the latest best sellers to rare first editions. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, bookselling began to change in significant ways. The growth of chain bookstores, and, later, the Internet, resulted in the closing of independent bookstores across the region.

In colonial America, many printers were also booksellers. Bookselling helped provide the capital that men like William Bradford (1663-1752), Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), Thomas Dobson (1751-1823), and Mathew Carey (1760-1839) needed to finance their printing and, later, publishing operations. During this period, booksellers imported most of their stock from Europe. Religious texts, almanacs, and schoolbooks sold particularly well. Booksellers also sold stationery and other items. One of Philadelphia’s earliest bookstores was run by the Martinique-born author Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), who first came to Philadelphia to escape the violence of the French Revolution. He opened his shop at Front and Walnut Streets in 1794, selling a variety of foreign-language books. His bookstore quickly became a center for the French expatriate community in the city.

Bookstores thrived in Philadelphia during the nineteenth century, as literacy rates continued to climb and reading became an important part of American self-improvement efforts. Although several local publishers, such as J.B. Lippincott & Co., ran retail stores, as the century progressed bookselling became largely independent from printing and publishing. Leary’s Book Store, founded in 1836 by Maryland-born William A. Leary (1816-65), became one of the city’s most popular places to buy books. The store, which had several locations including 138 N. Front Street (1836), Fifth and Walnut Streets (1868), and 9 S. Ninth Street (1877), did not gain prominence until it was taken over by former employee Edwin S. Stuart (1853-1937) in 1876. Leary’s became known for its large stock of used books as well as for its distinctive sign, which featured an older man on top of a ladder with his hands full of books. In 1891, Stuart became mayor of Philadelphia, and, in 1907, he became governor of Pennsylvania. Stuart’s brother, William H. Stuart, took over the operation of the store. Under William, Leary’s continued to thrive. Writer Christopher Morley (1890-1957), who frequented the shop, used it as the inspiration for his mystery novel The Haunted Book Shop (1919). By 1950, Leary’s was selling almost 40,000 books a week. The store closed in 1968.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, books could be found not only in bookstores but also in department stores as well. John Wanamaker (1838-1922) started selling a few children’s books in his Philadelphia store in 1877. By 1884, he was selling $10,000 worth of books a day. He even published the monthly magazine Book News to advertise his offerings. Before long, other Philadelphia department stores began selling books, including Gimbels, Strawbridge and Clothier, and Snellenburg’s.

During the twentieth century, women became more prominent in the bookselling business. One advocate for women in bookselling in the region was Georgiana Hall, who worked for Wanamaker’s. In 1914, Hall gave a speech on the subject in front of the Philadelphia Booksellers’ Association. Hall argued that in addition to careers in teaching and librarianship, college-educated women should also consider bookselling. Another important woman in the bookselling business was Elisabeth Woodburn (1912-90). Woodburn sold books out of her farmhouse in Hopewell, New Jersey, where she specialized in agricultural and horticultural books. Woodburn was a founding member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and later became the group’s president.

Woodburn was one of many antiquarian booksellers who clustered in and around Philadelphia in the early twentieth century. Perhaps the most famous was A.S.W. Rosenbach (1876-1952), who started the Rosenbach Company at 1320 Walnut Street in 1903. Known for offering extremely rare books, including Gutenberg Bibles and Shakespeare Folios, Rosenbach sold to some of the richest men in the United States, including Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927) and Henry C. Folger (1857-1930). Rosenbach and his brother Philip Rosenbach (1863-1953) established the Rosenbach Museum and Library in 1954 to showcase their personal collection of books. In 2013, it became part of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

One of Rosenbach’s neighbors and competitors, the Vienna-born bookseller Charles Sessler (1854-1935), opened his shop on 1314 Walnut Street in 1906. Sessler sold all sorts of rare books, but he specialized in the work of Charles Dickens. Sessler’s assistant, Mabel Zahn (1890-1975), began working at the store when she was only fifteen years old and took over the store when Sessler died. Zahn became president of Sessler’s in 1955.

The 1960s and 1970s brought new energy to Philadelphia, with the growth of the counterculture and new social movements. The city’s bookstores reflected these changes. Robin’s Book Store was founded by David Robin (1901-74) in 1936 at 21 N. Eleventh Street. Eventually moving to 6 N. Thirteenth Street, Robin’s gained notoriety in the 1960s as one of the few bookstores in the city willing to sell Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1891-1980). Many people considered the book controversial because of its sexually explicit content, and the city’s district attorney tried to ban bookstores from carrying it. Robin’s refused and ended up selling 7,000 copies in one week. In 1980, Robin’s moved to 108 S. Thirteenth Street. The store closed in 2012.

Other bookstores served specialized audiences. New World Book Fair was located at 113 S. Fortieth Street in West Philadelphia. Opened by William H. Crawford (1911-2002) in 1961, the store sold Marxist and African American books and became known as a gathering place for local activists. It closed in 1974. Giovanni’s Room, one of the first gay book shops in the United States, opened in Center City in 1973. Founded by Tom Wilson Weinberg (b. 1945), Dan Sherbo (b. 1950), and Bern Boylethe (1951-92), the shop took on an especially important role during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, when it sold books about HIV that could be found nowhere else. In 1975, activist Sheila Lee Goldmacher (b. 1934) helped found Alexandria Books, Philadelphia’s first lesbian and feminist bookstore. The shop closed two years later. Two other important activist bookstores that were founded during this time were House of Our Own, which opened in 1970 at 3920 Spruce Street, and Wooden Shoe Books, which opened in 1976 at 112 S. Twentieth Street.

Beginning in the 1980s, independent bookstores in the Philadelphia region faced stiff competition from large chain bookstores like B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, which could afford to heavily discount their books. During this period the Booksellers’ Association of Philadelphia, which had 250 members in the 1950s, disbanded. By the 1990s, the online retailer Amazon.com began offering books for even lower prices. Many independent bookstores closed, but others managed to find their niche. Joseph Fox Books was founded in 1951 by Madeline and Joseph Fox in Rittenhouse Square. In the mid-1990s, the store, which by then had moved to 1724 Sansom Street, started hosting authors’ events to draw readers to the store. As of 2016, it was the oldest independent bookstore in the city. Despite the dominance of Amazon.com and the rise of ebooks, the opening of several new independent bookstores, including Big Blue Marble Bookstore and Port Richmond Books, continued to make print books available to Philadelphia readers.

Ann K. Johnson is the Library Publishing and Scholarly Communications Specialist at Temple University. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The novel The City Merchant; or, The Mysterious Failure, written by John Beauchamp Jones (1810-66), captures the height of Philadelphia’s anti-abolitionist movement and its emotional force and toll on the city, while at the same time transcending its locale to comment on the dynamics of market capitalism in early nineteenth-century America.

The City Merchant chronicles the rising fortunes of a third-generation Philadelphia merchant, Edgar Saxon, whose father and grandfather failed in business. Although Saxon’s father recognized commercial trends too late to help himself, he left a diary for his son that described how the capitalist economic system rose and fell in cycles, thus enabling Edgar to find great opportunities during times of bust. In addition to the novel’s economic concerns, the plot also reveals Beauchamp Jones’ anti-abolitionist position, using social conditions and rising violence in Philadelphia as a backdrop to the growing mercantile apprehensions on Market and Front Streets. Although he plays with chronology, real events are depicted in the novel, including the destruction of Philadelphia’s abolitionist meeting hall, Pennsylvania Hall; the financial panic of 1837; Andrew Jackson’s veto of the congressional rechartering of the Bank of the United States; and the Philadelphia riots of 1838 and 1842. Historical figures also appear, including Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) and Frederick Douglass (1818-95).

The novel begins on Market Street in 1836 in Philadelphia’s thriving commercial marketplace. The first half is primarily concerned with Saxon and his decision to sell his stocks of various holdings. He tells Nicholas Biddle of the Bank of the United States (who was indeed president of the Bank of the United States headquartered in Philadelphia) that he is doing this in order to “secure his wealth against the possibility of serious diminution” that will be the result of the excesses of his fellow businessmen’s financial speculations assuming, as Saxon does, that Martin Van Buren will be elected president of the United States. Rumors then circulate that Saxon’s business is failing. Beauchamp Jones dramatizes the link between the excess of speculation and the politics of race during the second half of the novel, which builds up to and depicts the burning of Pennsylvania Hall on the evening of May 17, 1838.

Beauchamp Jones believed that Northern politicians, or “white instigators,” undercut the power of the Southern states by advocating, through agitation and riot, the end of slavery. He alleged that abolitionists deliberately provoked violence through public displays of interracial contact. The second half of the novel follows several lines of development. The author employs the sensational plot contrivance of depicting the kidnapping of Saxon’s nieces by mulatto men. The two men are cousins of Olivia, who was once a slave and is now “passing,” yet is unhappy with her lot in the North. Saxon’s porter, Paddy Cork, is exploited by Democrats in his facilitation of the burning of the hall and leaves the party, coming to the realization that “party business [is where] a man must demean himself to do all sorts of nasty tricks for a little bit of office.”

A day in the country, minor love subplots, and a hypocritical pastor are additional components in the story of Edgar Saxon, who ultimately enjoys even greater financial success, while his fellow merchants, who erroneously relied on the market, lose their fortunes. A disturbing coda depicts a wealthy Philadelphia abolitionist hosting a party for African Americans on Chestnut Street. Her guests seemingly do not know how to behave, her Black staff refuses to serve them, and her white servant girls quit. The hostess, Miss Lofts, ends up personally attending to her guests and comes to the conclusion that “it would be best to be a philanthropist only in theory.”

Author, journalist, diarist, and southern Civil War clerk Beauchamp Jones was born in Baltimore. Raised in Kentucky and Missouri, he lived in or near Philadelphia during several years of his adult life (particularly 1839-40, 1845, 1847-48 and, 1857-61). He shared a brief correspondence with Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) in the summer of 1839. The City Merchant; or The Mysterious Failure, published in 1851 by Philadelphia publisher Lippincott, Grambo & Co., was Beauchamp Jones’s third novel, but the first published under his name. His first, Wild Western Scenes (1841), sold over 100,000 copies and was followed by The Western Merchant: A Narrative Containing Useful Instruction for the Western Man of Business (1849). Both were published under the pseudonym Luke Shortfield. In 1857, Beauchamp Jones founded a Philadelphia weekly, The Southern Monitor, which he edited during its three years in press. According to the Dictionary of Missouri Biography, the newspaper “helped to fuel the growing sectional crisis.” His final work, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, for which he is mostly remembered, records his time as a clerk in Richmond’s Confederate War Office. Beauchamp Jones believed in the Union, but was sympathetic to the South. The diary, published in 1866, reveals his growing disillusionment with Jefferson Davis and is considered one of the finest civilian accounts on the conditions of the Confederacy. After the war, John Beauchamp Jones returned to the North, where he died in Burlington, New Jersey.

Susan Barile is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hunter College, New York, in the Department of English, and a graduate of The Graduate Center, New York, where she edited the letters of Edith Wharton to Bernard Berenson in fulfillment of her Ph.D. She is also the author of The Bookworm’s Big Apple: A Guide to the Booksellers of Manhattan (Columbia University Press, 1994). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Born in England, Paine (1737-1809) adopted Philadelphia as a temporary home in November 1774, when he arrived with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), whom he had met in London. Franklin recognized Paine’s skills as a writer and polemicist, and his letter helped Paine secure a position as the first editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine. In eight months as editor, Paine increased subscriptions and popularized colonial essays and poetry (as opposed to reprints of British material). Upon leaving The Pennsylvania Magazine, Paine was encouraged by Franklin and Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) to write Common Sense.

Philadelphia, the leading colonial political and mercantile city, was central to American resistance to exertions of British power in the 1770s. Delegates from most of the North American British colonies met in Philadelphia as the first Continental Congress in September and October 1774. A second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in May 1775, then declared independence in July 1776. Throughout 1776, Philadelphians feared invasion by water as well as by land. British ships blockaded Delaware Bay, while British soldiers moved south from New York through New Jersey toward Philadelphia. Appearing in the midst of this heightened political state, Common Sense found an audience in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Attacking Traditional Authority

Paine’s renown in his own time and in later eras rested on his attack on traditional political authority and his defense of a radical form of democratic political participation. Paine had little inkling that politics dominated by white men would be, beginning in the nineteenth century, challenged by women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. But he did define political participation and representation in ways that were in theory open to all. Much of American political thought after the War of Independence has entailed accepting or rejecting the notion of full political participation that Paine enunciated in Common Sense.

Paine’s arguments against traditional political authority dissected notions like the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of custom, the social value of aristocrats, and the ability of monarchs to ensure peace and prosperity for their subjects. Often Paine used familial metaphors such as King George III as a father who had turned against his children. The implication was that ordinary people, who had experienced familial relations, could make informed judgments about weighty political matters. He cast the situation in the Anglo-American colonies in 1776 as historic and universal. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he wrote. “Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected.”

Accordingly, in Common Sense, Paine cast himself as “under no sort of Influence public or private, but the influence of reason and principle.” His arguments for democratic politics rested on a broad suffrage, annual elections, and a large unicameral body of legislators. He aimed for representative government close to voters and responsive to their interests. Since the government recommended in Common Sense was a revolutionary alternative to the English Parliament, the British Crown, and the colonial royal governors and councils, then Paine’s conclusion was obvious. Reconciliation between Americans and the British government was impossible, and separation, independence, and unification of the colonies into a new nation should proceed.

First Edition Published Anonymously

The form of government Common Sense recommended—a unicameral legislature with annual elections—was indeed crafted in 1776 by a Pennsylvania convention charged with writing a constitution for the new state. Most of the former colonies wrote new constitutions at this time as replacements for their colonial charters.  The first edition of Common Sense was published anonymously by Scottish-born Philadelphia printer Robert Bell (c. 1732-84), who risked a charge of treason for disseminating the work. After arguing with Bell about profits and copyright, Paine appealed to Bell’s competitors, the Bradford Brothers, who published several enlarged editions, including the one most known to posterity, a third edition with new front and end matter and, for the first time, with Paine’s name on the title page. The wrangling over the work simply added to its notoriety. Moreover, Paine castigated Pennsylvania Quakers for mixing religion and politics in their appeals for peace. The book was quickly republished in a number of American and European cities.

In the mid-1770s many Americans as well as many Philadelphians were torn between loyalty to the British empire and anger over the incursions of imperial power into the colonies in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Paine’s contemporaries (like modern scholars) perceived Common Sense as the decisive text that propelled colonial sentiment into independence. George Washington (1732-99), for instance, praised its “sound Doctrine, and unanswerable reasoning.” Edmund Randolph (1753-1813) wrote that after the dissemination of Common Sense, “public sentiment which a few weeks before had shuddered at the tremendous obstacles, with which independence was environed, overleaped every barrier.” Still, Common Sense also had critics, for example James Chalmers (1734-1806) in Plain Truth (1776, printed by Bell).

Paine continued to exhort for the patriot cause in a series of essays, American Crisis. Some of the language that Americans associate with the revolution—for example, “These are the times that try men’s souls”—flowed from Paine’s pen in these years. But in 1790 Pennsylvanians dismantled and modified their radically democratic government. A new constitution enacted mixed government, balancing a lower house with an upper house and a governor. By then Paine had moved to England (where he wrote Rights of Man) and then France (where he wrote The Age of Reason).

In sum, Common Sense was one of the most significant catalysts of the War of Independence as well as a bellwether of democratic thought. Although the radical structure of government that Paine recommended proved short lived in Pennsylvania, Americans at large have since the revolution grappled with some of the central concerns of Common Sense. Americans still contest the balance between popularly elected governments (both state and federal) and individual rights. Moreover, Paine, often called “a citizen of the world,” wrote in the American Crisis, “My attachment is to all the world, and not to any particular part.” His sense of world citizenship remains pertinent in the twenty-first century, an era of energetic human migration, instantaneous electronic communication, and global ecological interdependence.

John Saillant is Professor of English and History at Western Michigan University. He is the author of the monograph Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The novel opens on a beaten man, Turley, stumbling through 1950s Port Richmond in Philadelphia. Running from two assailants, he hides in a dive bar, where he finds his piano-playing brother, Eddie. The two men follow him inside and Eddie facilitates Turley’s escape, thus setting up Eddie’s reluctant involvement in what becomes a few long nights of cat and mouse through the streets of Port Richmond, as Eddie and a waitress, Lena, who befriends him, try to stay one step ahead of this criminal element. Eventually, the pair escapes to Eddie’s family’s home in South Jersey, where his two criminal brothers are waiting for the fellow criminals they duped to find them.

This narrative is memorable for several reasons, one of which is its vivid portrayal of Port Richmond, a working-class neighborhood heavy in industry that boasted small houses that were a bit “shabby,” in Northeast Philadelphia. Although the book’s thin plot focuses on Eddie’s handling (or avoidance) of the deep grief over his wife’s suicide while he’s on the run, the story is really about how to pull (or accede to being pulled) from grief. The setting allows Eddie to both avoid his profound grief until Turley arrives as well as force him to confront it, finally, as he must get safe from the trouble that’s found him. The setting is also responsible for his salvation, such as it is, in the end.

As rendered by Goodis, Philadelphia’s Port Richmond offers a safe haven for any person looking to disappear amidst its working-class residents—there, no one pesters Eddie to pursue his dreams; he’s left alone in the bar as he plays to a mostly seemingly-indifferent crowd. But this environment is not judged harshly by the author; rather, the novel is in many ways a nod of respect to the type of establishment easily mistaken for a trashy dive bar. In Harriet’s Hut, the working-class clientele, mostly local mill workers, slump over drinks in the beat-up interior. Tough women work the bar while patrons keep an eye on intruders into their world, such as Turley in the opening chapter. Furthermore, when Eddie is trying to dodge the two goons, he feels “protected” on these streets, as if the neighborhood is looking out for him. Eddie’s saving at the end also hinges on this working-class neighborhood. The residents lie to protect his “accidental” killing of Hugger, even allowing him to return to their world to play piano. He’s clearly unhappy, but at least he belongs.

While some critics have suggested that Goodis mocks his working-class characters, others have noted the likely source of the eventual strength Eddie finds: the community. The story does not paint a pretty picture of Philadelphia, but it suggests that it was stronger during the 1950s than non-residents realized or would have given it credit for. Goodis demonstrated his mastery of conveying urban angst over the course of his 18-novel career.

Brad Windhauser is a Philadelphia-based writer whose short stories have appeared in several literary journals. He has published two Philadelphia-set novels: Regret (2007) and The Intersection (Fall 2016). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Sanchez, an African American poet, playwright, children’s author, activist, and professor, was born on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. After moving to Harlem, New York, during the 1950s Sanchez became involved with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights organization. Through this group, Sanchez met Malcolm X (1925-65), who influenced her curt but passionate poetic style. Sanchez also met other prominent civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68) while he was on a book tour in 1957. Sanchez’s involvement with influential civil rights leaders and activists led her to become a foundational member of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. A majority of Sanchez’s work, especially 1969’s Homecoming and 1970’s We a BaddDDD People, displays a deep connection with Black heritage and community. She moved to Philadelphia in 1976, just nine years before the events of May 13, 1985.

Sanchez’s activism continued to influence her work into the 1980s. Although Sanchez wrote “Elegy (for MOVE and Philadelphia)” (sometimes titled “Elegy: For MOVE and Philadelphia”) in response to the 1985 tragedy, the poem was not published until 1987 as a part of Sanchez’s seventh poetry collection, Under a Soprano Sky (1987). Sanchez waited to release the poem in an effort to not appear accusatory.

“Elegy (for MOVE and Philadelphia)” is a free-verse poem written in eight numbered sections, with eleven stanzas of varying lengths. Sanchez adopts the form of an elegy in order to mourn the eleven deaths and extensive destruction that resulted from the bombing of Osage Avenue. The poem begins with a description of Philadelphia as a city with “southern” racial attitudes hiding behind its northeastern locale, then quickly moves to the fire, death, and destruction that resulted from the bombing. “Elegy” focuses particularly on the tragic impact that the bombing had on Black Philadelphia because of perceptions of MOVE as part of the Black Power movement. Additionally, Osage Avenue (referred to as “osage st” in the poem) is located in West Philadelphia, a section of the city that became heavily populated by African Americans during the 1950s.

As the poem continues, it assigns the reader two roles: bystander and reporter. As a bystander, the reader is urged to bear witness to the horrors of the fire firsthand; then, sardonically, the poem asks the reader in the role of the reporter to cover the story in a passive, underhanded way. “Elegy” ends in a sermonlike call to acknowledge the “beyond”—a reminder that a city is more than its tourist destinations and traditions; a city is also its people. The poem acts as both a lament and a memorial, encouraging the reader to remember the tragic aspects of the bombing, despite the more appealing aspects of Philadelphia’s cultural heritage.

Critics praised Under a Soprano Sky and “Elegy (for MOVE and Philadelphia)” for Sanchez’s commitment to a variety of poetic styles, such as haiku, sonku, and tanka, as well as her incorporation of blues and jazz culture into her writing. Recognizing that the content of “Elegy” made people uncomfortable at first, Sanchez did not read the poem publicly until three years after the bombing. She then chose to read the poem at a gathering in Philadelphia. Sanchez performed the poem again in a 1990 episode of the PBS series A Moveable Feast: Profiles of Contemporary Authors (1990-91). In the recorded reading, Sanchez emphasized the sermonlike quality of “Elegy” and the historical significance of poetry that emerges from tragedies like the MOVE bombing. Events like the MOVE bombing are “part of our [Philadelphia’s] history and it must be recorded in some fashion,” she said. “Not just the report, but also the poetry that records something that is terrible. … So therefore, we as people who live in Philadelphia must never let this happen again, you see. So, it [the poem] becomes part of history. It becomes a historical document also too.”

Later, in 2011, Mayor Michael Nutter (b. 1957) appointed Sanchez as Philadelphia’s first poet laureate in recognition of her ability to define the City of Brotherly Love in both its beauty and disgrace. In “Elegy (for MOVE and Philadelphia),” Sanchez memorialized the cultural and historical significance of the MOVE bombing so that it would not be forgotten.

Laurene Munyan is a high school English teacher in southern New Jersey. She is currently an M.A. candidate studying English at Rutgers University-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Anderson, a New York Times best-selling author of the award-winning young adult novels Speak (1999) and Chains (2008), conceived the idea for Fever 1793 after reading a newspaper article about the yellow fever epidemic while her family was stuck in traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway, driving into Philadelphia. Anderson then lived in the city and worked as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Always interested in historical fiction, she began research in 1993 for Fever 1793 by examining primary sources at the Historical Society of Philadelphia and consulting historians at Independence National Historical Park and the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians.

Before completing and publishing Fever 1793 with Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers in 2000, Anderson published two children’s books, Ndito Run and Turkey Pox, both in 1996, and Speak, which became a National Book Award finalist adapted into a 2004 film starring Kristen Stewart (b. 1990). In 2001 Anderson published another children’s book, The Cheese on 3rd Street, also set in Philadelphia. In many of her novels, she writes from the perspective of teenagers and children, often the marginalized. With Fever 1793 and her other works of historical fiction, like the trilogy Seeds of America, Anderson developed a reputation for writing novels that address challenging topics and engage young readers.

Rumors of the Fever

In Fever 1793, Mattie Cook lives with her mother, grandfather, and a family cook named Eliza. She helps with her family’s coffeehouse, originally built by her now-deceased father. Toward the beginning of the novel, Mattie argues with her mother because she wants to be treated as an adult rather than a child. While facing this issue, Mattie and her family begin to hear rumors of the fever spreading throughout Philadelphia. At first the townspeople, including Mattie’s grandfather, are not alarmed and believe it will be like other fevers during previous summers. However, as the death toll begins to rise, Mattie and her family discover the overwhelming danger of the plague.

To avoid the sickness, Mattie leaves the city with her grandfather. They travel to the Pennsylvania countryside, only to be denied entrance because of their fever symptoms. Fighting off dangers and the fever itself, Mattie must persevere and make it back to Philadelphia to find her family. In the fight for her survival, she discovers how to care for others while also achieving the maturity she eagerly sought. Mattie’s character demonstrates the power of perseverance and determination in the face of sickness and sometimes death, and readers experience some of the dangers of illness in eighteenth-century America from a child’s perspective.

Throughout the novel, Anderson describes Philadelphia of the 1790s, when the city served as capital of the United States. She portrays the effects of the rampant fever in Philadelphia as well as important historical landmarks such as Christ Church and influential people like Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), who advocated bloodletting patients in an effort to cure them. She quotes archival accounts of the fever and writes about places like Bush Hill, an estate used as a hospital for those affected by the fever. In the novel, Mattie finds herself at the mansion, where she learns about the French doctors’ methods, which were more effective than some approaches of American doctors. Anderson also uses the character Eliza to recount the important acts of the Free African Society, founded by Richard Allen (1760-1831) and Absalom Jones (1746-1818). Readers see how this society assisted people affected by the fever by bringing resources, burying the dead, and caring for orphaned children.

Recommended by the publisher for grade levels 5-9 (ages 10-14), Fever 1793 has often been assigned in schools following widespread, favorable reviews that called attention to its potential uses in the classroom. Publisher’s Weekly emphasized the quality of its research, useful for students studying eighteenth-century America. A review for junior and senior high school librarians in the journal Book Report suggested teachers could pair the novel with a historical-fiction unit and identified it as essential for every school library. In The New York Times Book Review, Constance Decker Thompson wrote that Anderson tells a “gripping” story that “rages like the epidemic itself.”

Fever 1793 encourages readers to envision a significant time in Philadelphia’s history. The novel introduces students to research using primary sources and nonfiction texts, correlates with subjects such as history and science, and promotes discussion of contemporary issues related to health and medicine. Mattie’s character development and the historical context of the novel give readers a glimpse into eighteenth-century Philadelphia during a deadly time that most could otherwise never have imagined.

Megan Walter is completing her M.A. in English at Rutgers University-Camden. While in elementary school, she wrote her first-ever book report on Fever 1793 and the historic significance of the epidemic. After receiving her B.A. in English Education, she assigned the novel to her own students while teaching high school English at a public school near Richmond, Virginia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Published in London in 1857, Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends is among the earliest novels written by an African American. Although it is not strictly a historical novel, The Garies reflects the deteriorating conditions of the free Black community in Philadelphia during Webb’s childhood and early adulthood, in particular, the 1838 disenfranchisement of Black men by the Pennsylvania legislature and the anti-abolitionist and anti-Black violence of the 1830s and 1840s.

Born to free Black residents of Philadelphia, Webb (1828-94) was the youngest of his parents’ five children, one of whom died in infancy. His father, Francis Webb (1788-1829), was educated and active in various church and civic organizations, and his mother, Louisa Burr Webb (1784-1878), was the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of former U.S. vice president Aaron Burr (1756-1836). Francis and Louisa participated in an unsuccessful colonization project in Haiti, returning to Philadelphia in 1826, sixteen months before Frank’s birth.

The Garies narrates the fortunes of two families over several decades. Clarence Garie is a slaveholder living in Georgia with Emily, his slave and common-law wife, and their two children, also named Clarence and Emily. Because their marriage is not legally recognized in Georgia, and their children therefore considered illegitimate, they decide to move north to Philadelphia, where they are met and welcomed by Mr. and Mrs. Ellis and their three children, Esther, Caddie, and Charlie. We follow the Garies and the Ellises as they raise their children in an atmosphere of often vicious racial discrimination. The light-skinned Garie children are forced to leave their school after it is discovered that they have a mixed-race mother and the white parents object. Later, Charlie Ellis finds that his skin color prevents him from being hired for positions that he is otherwise qualified for. When an “Abolitionist” businessman offers to take him on as an apprentice, the other employees in the office refuse to work as long as Charlie is permitted to remain, and so Charlie is let go.

The central event in the novel is a graphically-rendered race riot, evoking the historical riots of 1834, 1838, 1842, and 1849. In Webb’s fictionalized account, two plots spur the violence: a plot by greedy and jealous whites to destroy and take possession of Black-owned property, and a plot to defraud the Garie children of their inheritance. Mr. Walters, a wealthy Black investor in real estate, probably based in part on the prominent Philadelphia businessman and activist James Forten Sr. (1766-1842), converts his home into a temporary fortress and, with the Ellises, successfully defends his property from the violent mob. The Garies are less fortunate.  Mr. Garie is shot as part of the scheme to claim his estate, Mrs. Garie dies giving birth to a stillborn child, and little Clarence and Em are left orphans, swindled of their inheritance. The novel’s final six chapters take place “many years” later. In New York, Clarence Garie is exposed attempting to pass as white. He returns to Emily—who has stayed in Philadelphia and chosen to identify as Black—and dies. For the other characters, though, the plot has a conventionally happy resolution. Mr. Walters marries Esther Ellis and Charlie Ellis marries Emily Garie, whose inheritance is restored.

The Garies was initially published by the British publisher George Routledge in both a “cheap series” edition and a “library” edition. Webb’s novel was not read widely in the United States , and the only known book review in the United States was reprinted from a London source in Frederick Douglass’ Paper.  Both Routledge editions featured prefaces by Lord Brougham (1788-1868), who was influential in abolishing slavery in Britain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96). (Stowe was acquainted with Webb, as his wife Mary gave dramatic readings of scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.)  Stowe’s preface casts Webb’s novel as addressing whether “the race at present held as slaves [are] capable of freedom, self-government, and progress.” It is precisely this perceived emphasis on representations of Black bourgeois respectability, to the exclusion of a more direct attack on the institution of slavery, that led the first wave of twentieth-century critics to denounce Webb’s novel as insufficiently principled. More recently, critics have emphasized the novel’s depiction of racism and discrimination in the North, what Werner Sollors called “an encyclopedia of manifestations of racial hatred and segregation from cradle to grave.” Sollors also observed how closely Webb’s representation of antebellum racism anticipated the major concerns of the civil rights movement, including housing and employment discrimination and segregated schools.

Katherine Henry is Associate Professor of English at Temple University, specializing in American literature before 1865.  Her current book project is titled Ghosts of Liberty: Civic Unrest and the Philadelphia Gothic, 1830-1855. (Author information current at time of publication.)