Opening up the Story Paper: George Lippard and the Construction of Class

Inverting the Urban Order—George Lippard's Philadelphia

“…Also missing from Monk Hall, Columbiana Hall, and the city as a whole are the middle classes, whose commercial values Lippard rejects. 25 His interiorized Gothic conveys si mul ta neously the city's growing economic and residential segregation and the compression and overcrowding of its slums. The tangled plots of his fiction offer no through lines of individual heroism or success; their excesses instead forcefully depict Philadelphia's socioeconomic conflicts and the ever-widening gulf between classes.…”