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, Lippard distilled Philadelphia to a single setting. Monk Hall, a mansion that connects his novel’s subplots, compresses the “social and sexual relations” of the city. That is not to say it is easy to navigate. The structure, “lonely even amid tenements and houses,” lies hidden amid a “tangled labyrinth of avenues,” defying the legible grid. Within its walls, a young man warns his companion, “it is easy enough for a stranger … to find his way in, but it would puzzle him like the devil to find his way out.”20 Riddled with secret passages and subterranean lairs, the building sets Philadelphia’s mystique in stone.
Yet when Lippard resumes his role as guide, it becomes evident that the disorienting space disguises clear social divisions. The powerful people who plot urban fortunes in its rooms are easy enough to identify. Monk Hall’s “monks” are not the despised papists targeted by the church burners of 1844, but a canting, conniving bourgeoisie. “Here were lawyers from the court, doctors from the school, and judges from the bench,” Lippard writes, as parsons, publishers, and politicians scheme frauds and seductions. If the conspiracies are hard to decode, the class that hatches them is perfectly readable.21
By vesting metropolitan power in a powerful and corrupted class, Lippard and his allies challenged bourgeois readings of the riots. Monk Hall’s Southwark setting might be telling here. After the July clash between the militia and the mob, wealthy Philadelphians blamed the district’s turbulent population for civil war on the streets; The Quaker City, in contrast, identifies “respectable citizens” as the real dangerous classes. “The poor man toils in want,” its author insists, “and the rich man riots in his sweat and blood.” As another radical put it, the “authorized fraud and force of orderly society” lay behind the “spontaneous outbursts” of mobs.22 To them, the 1844 violence sprang more from a dissolute rich than a disorderly poor.
Lippard and other radicals thus linked a corrupt environment and civic ruin.23 But their environmental determinism differed from that of their bourgeois contemporaries. Where elements of the economic elite worried about the moral miasmas emanating from suburban courts and alleys, Lippard labeled luxury as corrosive. In his account of an 1849 race riot, for instance, a fictionalized leader of the real street gang that provoked the outrage was ruined by a childhood that tended “to pamper the appetite and deprave the passions.” Elsewhere Lippard chastised newspapers for failing to pay more attention to “Respectable Killers”: not the boys who “get up riots, hunt negroes and burn houses,” but rapacious manufacturers, landlords, and bank presidents.24
When he did portray a dissolute poor, they were brutalized by avarice. Devil-Bug, more monster than man, was described by a contemporary of his creator as “the product of a rotten civilisation,” while The Quaker City has him raised “in full and continual sight of scenes of vice, wretchedness and squalor.” Philadelphia’s “outcasts”—“vagabond tribes” who speak “a language of their own”—are kept “in the underground recesses of Monk Hall by day before being set loose “to beg, to rob, or … to murder” at night.25 In Lippard’s city, producers confronted the conspiracies of capital and the savagery of its slavish victims.
No republic, Lippard believed, could long endure in such a state. Alluding, perhaps, to a year of apocalyptic fervor—a few weeks before the Kensington riot, a millenarian sect, the Millerites, had loudly proclaimed the End Times were at hand—he foretold the “Last Day of the Quaker City” in a reverie, which carried the keeper of Monk Hall, Devil-Bug, forward to 1950. Lippard’s futuristic Philadelphia had degenerated almost beyond recognition from its egalitarian roots. The ruins of Independence Hall provide stone for a royal palace; Washington Square had given way to a penitentiary and gallows. Carriages of a “proud and insolent nobility,” who had “wrung the sweat from the brow of the mechanic,” ride past beggars on wide boulevards. As “slaves of the cotton Lord and the factory Prince” prepare to crown their king, the dead rise from the grave, chanting “Wo Unto Sodom.” Judgment day arrives as lightning rains down from the sky and houses fall into the ground. For Lippard, the fate of the “guilty and blood-stained City” is retribution for its moral rot.26
His radical cartography mapped the city in a very different way than the bourgeoisie. The sermon from Girard College used the form of evangelical piety in pursuit of radical
