Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [936]
Most of Howells’s early work mirrored his Boston Brahmin colleagues’ in its sunny and genial optimism. As late as 1886, in a review of Dostoevsky, Howells invited his fellow novelists “to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American.” As prudish as any of the genteel elite, he was uncomfortable with Zola and “bad French morality” and argued that novels should “make the race better and kinder.” He had, however, become discomfited with the moralizing prettiness of much contemporary fiction and was attracted, like his good friend Henry James, to Turgenev. Making tentative gestures toward “realism,” he began dwelling to an unusual degree on matters of everyday life.
He also began spending more and more time in New York City, where, he wrote his father, there was “more for me to see and learn.” He published much of his new work (like The Rise of Silas Lapham) in the Century and, in 1885, agreed to author a regular “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s. But it was the events of 1886-87 that converted Howells into a self-conscious renegade from the ranks of the proper. In the latter year he broke ranks with his genteel colleagues to speak out on behalf of the condemned Haymarket anarchists, the only leading American man of letters to do so, and he was subjected to scathing attack and shunned by friends. His interest in social issues ripened, he read Tolstoy, William Morris, and the Fabian socialists and grew increasingly estranged from laissez-faire orthodoxy and “our competitive civilization.” In 1888, at the age of fifty, he left Boston and moved to Manhattan.
After settling in at 330 East 17th Street (just across Stuyvesant Square from St. George’s Episcopal Church and a short walk from the Lower East Side), he began exploring the city by foot and train. Howells was exhilarated by its noisy ebullience. “At the bottom of our wicked hearts,” he wrote James in London, “we all like New York,” and he confided his intention “to use some of its vast, gay, shapeless life in my fiction.” He got his chance almost immediately when his new publisher, J. W. Harper, asked him for “a powerful presentation of the life of our great metropolis, social, educational, economical, political,” one that would treat “the rich & the poor, the idler & the worker,” and “command the interest of all classes.” Howells’s response was A Hazard of New Fortunes, serialized in Harper’s beginning March 2, 1889. Hazard, the first novel to present a fully rendered portrait of the metropolis, was, Howells wrote, the “first fruit of my New York life.”
Hazard broadened the boundaries of the permissible in fiction as Pulitzer’s World had in news. Its panorama of city life included German Marxists, striking workingmen, natural gas millionaires, Christian socialists, advertising experts, and restaurateurs. But the central figures were a genteel middle-class couple—the Howells-like Basil March and his wife Isabel—who throughout the novel, in confrontation with the giant metropolis, come to realize the limits of their genteel worldview.
The Marches, like Howells, move from Boston to New York, where Basil is to work on a new literary magazine. Once ensconced in a Manhattan apartment, the Marches venture out, on foot and elevated, into nongenteel parts of the city—voyages they find “unfailingly entertaining.” In Washington Square and the Lower East Side, they encounter a vast and “picturesque” hive of “nationalities, conditions, and characters.”
Their fascination with metropolitan bustle, however, is a superficial and condescending one, Howells suggests, as if the ragged poverty of Italian immigrants “existed for their appreciation.” Glints of other ways of seeing flit through March’s mind—“he had read that they are worked and fed and housed like beasts”—but like most of respectable society, March didn’t much trouble himself about “what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who and what they individually were.”
The remainder of the novel recounts March’s awakening