George Lippard

George Lippard (1822-1854) was a 19th-century American novelist, journalist, playwright, social activist, and labour organizer. Almost completely unremembered today, during the decade between 1844 and 1854 he was one of the most widely-read authors in the United States. He befriended Edgar Allan Poe. He advocated a socialist political philosophy and sought justice for the working class. He founded a secret benevolent society, Brotherhood of the Union, investing in it all the trappings of a religion; the society, a precursor to labour organizations, survived until 1994. He authored two principal kinds of stories: gothic tales about the immorality, horror, vice, and debauchery of large cities, such as The Monks of Monk Hall (1844), reprinted as The Quaker City (1844); and historical fiction of a type called romances, such as Blanche of Brandywine (1846), Legends of Mexico (1847), and the popular Legends of the Revolution (1847). Both kinds of stories, sensational and immensely popular when written, are mostly forgotten today. Lippard died at the age of 31 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 1854 February 9.

Life
George Lippard was born on 1822 April 10 near Yellow Springs, in West Nantmeal Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, on the farm of his father, Daniel B. Lippard. The family moved to the city of Philadelphia two years later, shortly after his father was injured in a farming accident. Young Lippard grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Germantown (presently part of the city of Philadelphia), and Rhinebeck, NY (where he attended the Classical Academy). After considering a career in the Methodist religious ministry, and rejecting it because of a “contradiction between theory and practice” of Christianity, he began the study of law, which he also abandoned, as it was incompatible with his beliefs about human justice. He then commenced employment with the Philadelphia daily newspaper Spirit of the Times. His lively sketches and police court reporting drew readers and increased the paper’s circulation. He was but twenty when the Saturday Evening Post published his first story, a “legend” called “Philippe de Agramont”.

He called his historical fiction stories “Legends” as they were not so much about what happened, as about what ought to have happened. Some of his legendary romances include: The Ladye Annabel (1842); The Belle of Prairie Eden (1844); Blanche of Brandywine (1846); The Nazarene (1846); Legends of Mexico (1847); and Legends of the Revolution (1847). One of the particular Legends of the Revolution was called “The Fourth of July, 1776,” though it has come down to us under the name “Ring, Grandfather, Ring”. It relates how the persistent ringing of the Liberty Bell proclaiming the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July caused its fabled crack, something that manifestly did not occur. Another misrepresents somewhat the beliefs of Johannes Kelpius and his community of followers along the Wissahickon Creek; John Greenleaf Whittier relied on Lippard’s legend about Kelpius for his long poem Pennsylvania Pilgrim. Another of Lippard’s legends, “The Dark Eagle,” about Benedict Arnold, was received uncritically by later readers, though few of its contemporary readers would have done the same. Many of the legends were republished in the Saturday Courier; another edition Legends of the Revolution was published 22 years after his death in 1876.

Lippard’s most notorious story about big-city immorality is set in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Monks of Monk Hall, almost immediately pirated and reprinted as The Quaker City (1844), is a lurid and thickly plotted exposé of Philadelphia vice, a weird, gothic story filled with lust, murder, ghosts, and political diatribes. The book aimed to expose the hypocrisy of the Philadelphia elite, and is partly based on the March 1843 New Jersey trial of Singleton Mercer, who was found not guilty of the murder of Mahlon Hutchinson Heberton aboard the Philadelphia-Camden ferry vessel Dido on 1843 February 10. Mercer alleged that Heberton only five days before he shot him had lured his sixteen-year old sister into a brothel and raped her at gunpoint. He also entered a plea of insanity. The trial took place only two months after Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart, a story based on other murder trials employing the insanity defense; Mercer's defense attorney openly acknowledged the "object of ridicule" which an insanity defense had become. Nonetheless, a verdict of not-guilty was rendered after less than an hour of jury deliberation, and the family and the lawyer of young Mercer were greeted by a cheering crowd while disembarking from the same Philadelphia-Camden ferry line on which the killing took place. Lippard employed the seduction aspect of the trial as a metaphor for the oppression of the helpless. The Monks of Monk Hall outraged some readers with its lingering descriptions of “heaving bosoms”, but such descriptions also drew readers, and he sold many books. Though many were offended by the story’s lurid elements, the book also prompted social and legal reform and may have led to New York's 1849 enactment of an anti-seduction law.

He became a popular lecturer, journalist, and dramatist, renowned both for his story writing and for relentlessly advocating social justice, both in his stories and in his actions, including his participation in the National Reform Congress (1848) and the Eighth National Industrial Congress (1853), and his 1850 founding of the Brotherhood of the Union. He was not, however, immune from some of the particular prejudices of his day. The Monks of Monk Hall (also published as Quaker City) portrays a malevolent hump-backed Jewish character, Gabriel Van Gelt, one who forges, swindles, blackmails, and commits murder for money. Lippard's portrayal of blacks also reflects some of the stereotypes of his day; this is certainly hinted at in the lengthy full title of one of his sensational crime novels: The killers: A narrative of real life in Philadelphia : in which the deeds of the killers, and the great riot of election night, October 10, 1849, are minutely described : Also, the adventures of three notorious individuals, who took part in that riot, to wit: Cromwell D. Z. Hicks, the leader of the Killers; Don Jorge, one of the leaders of the Cuban expedition; and "The Bulgine," the celebrated Negro Desperado of Moyamensing. A bulgine is a derisive term for a nautical steam engine or a small dockside locomotive; the term is recalled in several folk songs, including the capstan shanty "Eliza Lee", also known as "Clear the Track, Let the Bulgine Run".

In one of his later stories Lippard relates that George Washington rises from his tomb at Mount Vernon to take pilgrimage of nineteenth-century America accompanied by an immortal Roman named Adonai. The pair travel to Valley Forge where they see a strange, huge building and hear chaotic, frightening noises. Lippard writes: "There, from the gloom of the Valley, uprose a huge edifice, its hundred windows flaming with light. And the sound which they had heard, echoed deep and deafening from the bosom of this edifice. It was the roar of iron machinery, mingled with the noise of a cataract. "Let us enter," said Adonai, and, descending from the hill, they entered. . . . The sight which they saw held them dumb. Women were imprisoned within that edifice, their cheeks blasted into untimely decay, their eyes vacant with despair. . . . Children were imprisoned there—children who had nothing of the love or beauty of childhood in their leaden eyes. Men were imprisoned there—men whose cramped forms, and faces stamped with stolid endurance, told of a life without hope or object save a crust of bread and a grave. . . . "It is a prison," said the Arisen Washington. "It is a sepulchre where they bury the living," said Adonai. "No," said a pleasant voice, which echoed at their side. "It is neither prison nor sepulchre. It's only a FACTORY."

George Lippard married Rose Newman on 1847 May 14. In an unconventional ceremony they were married outdoors under evening moonlight while standing on Mom Rinker's Rock above the Wissahickon Creek.

In 1850 Lippard founded the Brotherhood of the Union (later the Brotherhood of America), a secret benevolent society aiming to eliminate poverty and crime by removing the social ills causing them. His legend-like vision was that such an organization would establish a means for men to sincerely follow a living religion. The organization grew and achieved a membership of 30,000 by 1917, but declined some time thereafter, ceasing to exist in 1994.

His friendship with Edgar Allan Poe is notable. Poe gave Lippard credit for rescuing him from the streets on several occasions. He was more reserved about Lippard's artistic merits; possibly Poe’s own artistic standards were too high to admit praise of Lippard's writing. This is ironic, because everything we generally associate with Poe was even more intense in Lippard's style. Lippard wrote an effusive obituary after Poe’s untimely death.

George Lippard’s wife died on 1851 May 21, shortly after the March death of their infant son. A daughter had died in 1849. Always frail, he died of tuberculosis on 1854 February 9, shortly before attaining the age of 32. He was buried at Odd Fellows Cemetery at 24th and Diamond Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but his remains and an impressive burial monument were years later removed along with many other graves from this cemetery to Lawnview Cemetery, an Odd Fellows Cemetery in Rockledge, Pennsylvania, just outside of Northeast Philadelphia.

Literary heritage
Lippard acknowledged the influence of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) on his writing and dedicated several books to him.

Lippard’s writing has occasional glimmers of style, but his words are more memorable for quantity than for quality, and his writing for its financial success than for its literary style. He proved that one could make a living by wordsmithing. If he is remembered at all today, it is more for his social thinking, which was progressive, than for his language and literary style.

Nonetheless, years after Lippard's death, Mark Twain mentioned him in a letter to home. During the short time Twain spent in Philadelphia working for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he wrote: "Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it . . . . I saw small steamboats, with their signs up--"For Wissahickon and Manayunk 25 cents." Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon . . . ."

Many of Lippard's fictions werte received as historical fact. Probably the most famous person to quote a historical romance by George Lippard as though it were actual history is the late President Ronald Reagan, in a commencement address at Eureka College on June 7, 1957. Reagan quoted from George Lippard's "Speech of the Unknown" in Washington and His Generals: or, Legends of the Revolution (1847), which relates how a speech by an anonymous delegate (often assumed to be John Hanson) was the final motivation that spurred delegates to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Works

 * Philippe de Agramont (1842 July in Saturday Evening Post)
 * Adrian, the Neophyte (1843)
 * The Battle-Day of Germantown (1843)
 * Herbert Tracy; or, The Legend of the Black Rangers. A Romance of the Battle-field of Germantown (1844)
 * The Ladye Annabel; or, The Doom of the Poisoner. A Romance by an Unknown Author (1844)
 * The Quaker City; or, The monks of Monk Hall (anon., 1844) (full text page images at openlibrary.org)
 * Blanche of Brandywine (1846) (on-line text at Google Book Search)
 * The Nazarene; or, The last of Washington (1846)
 * The Rose of Wissahikon; or, The Fourth of July, 1776. A Romance, Embracing the Secret History of the Declaration of Independence (1847)
 * Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution (1847) (on-line text at Google Book Search)
 * Legends of Mexico (1847)
 * Bel of Prairie Eden: A Romance of Mexico (1848)
 * Paul Ardenheim, the Monk of Wissahikon (1848)
 * Memoirs of a Preacher: A Revelation of the Church and the Home (1849)
 * The Man with the Mask: A Sequel to the Memoirs of a Preacher. A Revelation of the Church and the Home (1849)
 * Washington and His Men: A New Series of Legends of the Revolution (1850)
 * The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia By a Member of the Philadelphia Bar (1850)
 * The author hero of the American revolution (n.d.)
 * The bank director’s son (1851)
 * Adonai, the pilgrim of eternity (1851)
 * Mysteries of the pulpit; or, A revelation of the Church and the home (1851)
 * Thomas Paine, author-soldier of the American Revolution (1852)
 * The Midnight Queen; or Leaves from New York Life (1853) (online page images at Wright American Fiction)
 * The Empire City; or, New York by night (1853)
 * New York: its upper ten and lower million (1854) (online page images at Wright American Fiction & on-line text at Google Book Search)
 * Eleanor; or, Slave catching in Philadelphia (1854)
 * The life and choice writings of George Lippard (1855)
 * The legends of the American revolution “1776” (1876) (full text at Pennsylvania digital bookshelf)

Quotations

 * "The numerous chimneys with their fantastic shapes rose grimly in the moonlight, like a strange band of goblin sentinels, perched of the roof to watch the mansion. The general effect was that of an ancient structure falling to decay, deserted by all inhabitants save the rats that gnawed the wainscot along the thick old walls. The door-plate that glittered on the faded door, half covered as it was with rust and verdigris, with its saintly name afforded the only signs of the actual occupation of Monk-hall by human beings: in all other respects it looked so desolate, so time-worn, so like a mausoleum for old furniture, and crumbling tapestry, for high-backed mahogany chairs, gigantic bedsteads, and strange looking mirrors, veiled in the thick folds of the spider's web." (from 2nd paragraph of part 1, chapter 7 "The Monks of Monk-Hall" (p 43) of The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall)


 * " The maiden---pure and without stain--lay sleeping on the small couch that occupied one corner of the closet. Her fair limbs were enshrouded in the light folds of a night-robe, and she lay in an attitude of perfect repose, one glowing cheek resting upon her uncovered arm, while over the other, waved the loosened curls of her glossy hair. The parting lips disclosed her teeth, white as ivory, while her youthful bosom came heaving up from the folds of her night-robe, like a billow that trembles for a moment in the moonlight, and then is suddenly lost to view. She lay there in all the ripening beauty of maidenhood, the light falling gently over her young limbs, their outlines marked by the easy folds of her robe, resembling in their roundness and richness of proportion, the swelling fulness of the rose-bud that needs but another beam of light, to open it into its perfect bloom." (from part 1, chapter 9, "The Bride" (p 72) of The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall)


 * ". . . I would make the profession of every man, the rule by which to fashion his crest or coat of arms! . . . To the petifogger (sic), three links of a convict's chain, with the Penitentiary in the distance! To the Bank Director a Widow's Coffin, with a weeping Orphan on either side by way of heraldic supporters! Pah! There is no single word of contempt in the whole language, too bitter, to express my opinion of this magnificent Pretension - the Aristocracy of the Quaker City!" (from part 2, chapter 4 "Dora Livingstone at Home" (p 156) of The Quaker City; or The Monks of Monks Hall)


 * "On some occasion - when the lapse of time shall allow us to express ourselves freely - we shall speak more fully of the gifted dead. For the present we can only say, that his death adds another name to that scroll on which neglect and misfortune has already written the names of John Lofland and Sumner Lincoln Fairfield." (from Lippard's obituary of Edgar Allan Poe)


 * "You have prayed to these priests -- they have answered you with death. You have shed your tears at the feet of these kings -- they have fed upon your flesh. You have clutched the garments of these rich men -- they have quenched their thirst with your blood ... NOW THE DAY OF PRAYERS AND TEARS HAS PASSED. THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT HAS COME." (Adonai, 86)


 * "The Kingdom of God is plainly that state of temporal affairs which, by a proper distribution of labor, enables the entire human family to cultivate their best faculties. The Kingdom of God commences in this world, will progress in the next, and in all other worlds ...." (from The Quaker City weekly, March 30, 1850)


 * "“Enormous WEALTH is only enormous CRIME. (capitals in original) Yes, we may phrase it as we will, the immense concentration of wealth in the hands of any one man, or in the hands of any corporate power, is an evil, fraught with more danger to the happiness and liberty of the nation, than all the crowned tyrants in the world."