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By Root 298 0

was so un-Philadelphian. In the terra firma of Louisa's parlor on Spruce Street was a life inscribed by a constellation of virtues, certainties as fixed and brilliant as the stars. Philadelphia was the most comforting of big cities to call home. It proudly termed itself “the most Chinese of American cities,” changeless behind a great wall of contentment and ritual and shared belief. Louisa believed in love, beauty, honor, duty, piety, and honest work. If God didn't exist (and many since Darwin were sadly skeptical), the morality of the Holy Bible was nonetheless absolute. England and France were suitable addresses, after which the sole civilized point on the map stood, according to turn-of-the-century Philadelphia writer Christopher Morley, “at the confluence of the Biddle and Drexel families . . . surrounded by cricket teams, fox hunters, beagle packs, and the Pennsylvania Railroad.” Law or medicine, her husband's profession, were the solid occupations, followed by banking and insurance. The military or national politics were out, for they removed a man from Philadelphia. Louisa knew with certainty that the social Five Thousand never divorced. (And in the rare case that someone did, it was not with the indiscretion of the middle class).

Novelty was frowned upon, be it embodied by Whitman, Audubon, Eakins, or Joseph Leidy, who had introduced to the world the idea that a species of monstrously large reptiles not described in the Old Testament had existed on the far shore of the Delaware River. From a backyard in nearby Haddonfield, New Jersey, Leidy assembled the bones of a creature taller than a house, which he said had the pelvic structure of a bird, the tail of a lizard, and walked upright like a man, foraging with armlike limbs. This, Leidy said, was a Hadrosaurus foulkii, what he called a dinosaur, whose existence suggested the unimaginable idea that the world was millions of years old and had not been made exclusively for human beings.

Philadelphia in 1916 defined itself proudly as a place lost in time, an island of Victorian virtue in a sea of American change. That year a journalist from Harper's Weekly visited the city and found the forces of tradition resolute, the nibbles of modern erosion few. “The one thing unforgivable in Philadelphia is to be new, to be different from what has been.”

When Philadelphians ventured beyond the wall each summer, they moved in flocks to safe and sedate places favored by other Philadelphians—Northeast Harbor, Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Maine, and Cape May. The classic Philadelphia outing—in the words of Dr. Vansant's colleague Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, contemporary of Freud and famed founder of the “rest cure”—was a leisurely walk in the woods after which “the servant busied himself with the lunch, and put the wine to cool in the brook.”

It was an unspoken rule that a proper Philadelphian did not swim in the ocean. The upper classes rode horseback, painted portraits, went on hikes and walking parties. To swim was decidedly middlebrow, messy, and perhaps dangerous. The sea held mysteries a Quaker saw no sense in divining. Philadelphia's first Jersey shore summer refuge was Long Branch, and there, according to Charles Biddle, father of Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States, occurred “the archetypal confrontation of Quaker caution and the wild waves.”

In Louisa's day, it was frowned upon for both sexes to be in the water at the same time, even a body of water as big as the Atlantic. Ocean swimming was chaste. In her time European women entered the ocean in horse-drawn “bathing machines,” small, roofless cabins on wheels complete with windows and drapes, where a modest woman could enjoy the healing waters of the sea free from prying male eyes.

The modern beach was a hedonistic Xanadu that shocked her and Dr. Vansant. In the caress of the warm sea (which the Romantics equated with sex), the styles and mores of the past were relaxed, flesh bared, the cult of the body risen, Pan idealized, Venus reborn. To the sea, young men and women vanished in roadsters, entwined