LITMIR.BIZ

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a basis for solidarity, especially among Irish coal heavers and handloom weavers. The former torched a Reading Railroad bridge in 1842; the latter chased off the sheriff and his posse during a dispute in Kensington a few months later. But strikers, like most Jacksonian Americans with a grievance, tended to use violence discriminately, targeting bosses and journeymen who ignored union scales. Another coal heavers’ strike, this one on the Richmond wharves of the Reading just a few weeks before the first 1844 riot, provides a telling illustration. Demanding an increase in pay, the men forced “all the different laborers in the vicinity to join them,” and by the time Sheriff Morton McMichael turned up with his posse, the employer had evidently caved in.⁹

      For bourgeois Philadelphians, the “labor question” in the early 1840s could seem like just another manifestation of suburban disorder in a city that had become a “war-field for every faction and party.” Thomas Pym Cope read the May 1844 riot in this vein as one more episode in a district characterized by “the frequent demolition of private property.”¹⁰ Strikers, who tended to coalesce around a trade, neighborhood, or culture, lacked the metropolitan-wide reach of the GTU, and their militancy proved easy to subsume into a broader pattern of suburban violence. Few assumed their disturbances had roots in the relationship between labor and capital.

      Wealthy residents of Philadelphia, however, could not afford to ignore militancy even where it was geographically contained. The city proper’s economic elite may have had few reasons to follow the battle between handloom operatives and master weavers in Kensington—a struggle in a dying craft that pitted impoverished workers against petty entrepreneurs—but plenty paid taxes to support the sheriff’s posse or owned stock in the strikeplagued Reading Railroad. Moreover, frequent strikes risked further damage to the city’s reputation. By 1845, then, even Cope’s merchant-dominated Board of Trade had identified fraught industrial relations as a threat to the “prosperity of Philadelphia,” as it attacked the “mad attempts” to “resist by combination and by open violence, the law of demand and supply.”¹¹

      Lippard and his allies saw virtues where the board saw vices. For them, combination offered the best form of resistance to the commodification of labor, which for all the elegance of liberal theory reduced free men to what they termed wage slaves. In the years after the riots, they launched an attack on the “law of demand and supply” that led them to explore how the city worked. If citizens wanted to understand the earthquakes that shook Philadelphia, radicals insisted, they needed to look beneath the surface and map its social fault lines.

      The Social Cartography of Radical Philadelphia

      The man who caused such a stir at the Chestnut Street Theater, George Lippard, shared McMichael’s sense of the city as an interdependent but illegible whole, yet saw the metropolis very differently than the North American publisher. Born in 1822, he grew up in Germantown, a rural borough annexed to the city in 1854, and after turning his back on careers in the church and law, began writing in the shadow of the Panic of 1837. Lippard spent the hard times as a jobbing journalist and romance author, and having slept rough in the city’s streets and cellars, started work on his first political novel, The Quaker City, which appeared in serial form in the months that followed the 1844 riots. He was working on the book when the mayor halted the stage adaptation—Lippard alluded to the censorship in subsequent chapters—but the controversy heightened public interest and secured him a salary. When it appeared in 1845, it sold 60,000 copies, making it the most popular American novel prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Before his death at 31—just a decade after his literary breakthrough—he wrote over twenty books and countless newspaper articles. He became best known for his “city mysteries” fiction: novels that lifted the veil on metropolitan life.¹² Through his writing and politics, he played a leading role in a radical subculture that challenged bourgeois citizens’ reading of the city.

      Lippard was both a product and a critic of Philadelphia’s capitalist transformation. New printing technology and rising literacy created a mass market for cheap fiction, and mysteries novelists’ audience crossed social boundaries.¹³ But if genteel Philadelphians sometimes enjoyed a snigger at Lippard’s tales, the author saw himself, in the words of a radical cleric, as “the age’s leading spokesman for the common man.” He found his calling in the task of consolidating the toiling but ignorant masses around a project of social reconstruction. Lippard wielded his pen as a weapon in a class war, which a recent critic sees as the “literary equivalent” of the riots.¹⁴

      Lippard’s task, as he stated in an 1849 preface to his best-known book, lay in explaining “all the phases of a corrupt social system, as manifested in the city of Philadelphia.” His mysteries fiction did so in ways that would have resonated with veterans of the GTU and generations of American populists. Like them, he divided the world into producers and idlers, lauding the former for creating value through their labor, and lambasting the latter for living off the work of others. Lippard hurled invective here not just at bankers, merchants, and lawyers, but also at politicians, publishers, priests, and the manufacturers he called “white slaveholders.”¹⁵ Ignoring divisions among Philadelphia’s economic elite, he portrayed such figures as a conspiring cabal. In trying to unite producers, Lippard consolidated a bourgeoisie.

      His writing guided readers through a metropolis that class had corrupted. Mysteries novels crossed the Atlantic from France, where Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris—published just a few months before Lippard began The Quaker City—captured the attention of writers ranging from Edgar Allen Poe to Karl Marx. The magnitude of fast-growing American metropolises gave works that purported to reveal their secrets wide appeal and inspired authors in Philadelphia and elsewhere to mimic Lippard’s method. Only some of these imitators shared his radical politics, and few embraced the gothic elements that owed more to Poe than Sue, but nearly all of them blurred the boundary between fact and fiction in their depiction of the city.¹⁶ Indeed, novelists frequently insisted on the veracity of their findings and emphasized the labor that had gone into their research. “He who would learn the mysteries and miseries” of New York and Philadelphia, wrote one, “must, as we have done, make it” his “sole occupation.” To “penetrate all the haunts of dissipation and crime,” he claimed to have divided the city into eight districts, which he systematically explored over the course of six months. Lippard made no pretense of social scientific rigor but still promised to bring to the surface “the strange and thrilling scenes that lie buried beneath” the “exterior of society.”¹⁷

      In doing so, he demystified the shadowy spaces of urban capitalism. Like Marx, Lippard asks his audience to see beyond labor’s objectification in the commodity, and gaze instead on the hidden process of production. As he walks his readers through the riot district of Kensington in The Nazarene (1846), for instance, he points to the windows of an immense factory, behind which “miserable forms, swarming to their labour,” work from before dawn to after dusk.¹⁸

      But Lippard’s cartography also mapped the inequality woven into the urban form and plotted how a morally bankrupt capitalism reproduced it. Like lithographers, Lippard sometimes saw Philadelphia synoptically, rising above its rooftops to look down on the metropolis below. Where the bird’s eye view gave boosters a sanitized snapshot of urban greatness, Lippard used the panorama to show the city’s social depravity, bringing into view chains of interdependence and exploitation. From a pulpit on the dome of the new Girard College, for instance, “a writer of immoral books” surveys the “great city.” The vantage point allows the preacher—a thinly disguised version of the author himself—to see the metropolis as a whole. “Sweep the roofs from this large City at midnight,” he tells his congregation, and the “anatomy of civilization lies open to your gaze.” Lippard’s perspective soon shifts from sky to street, as he peers into the homes of wealthy judges and starving widows, juxtaposing “dens of want, in the narrow alleys” and “the great mansion, where the revel, bought with the poor man’s labor, roars on from midnight until break of day.” As he stresses the gulf between what he called the “upper tenth” and “lower million,” he also suggests how the two classes are bound together, with one’s wealth the fruits of the other’s toil.¹⁹

      When he wanted to show the power wielded by a consolidated class, though,

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