Monks, Devils and Quakers

The lurid life and times of George Lippard, Philadelphia's original best-selling author.

by Edward Pettit

In the fall of 1844, a young Philadelphia journalist, George Lippard, began a weekly serial in one of the city's penny newspapers. The story, titled The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall, was such a hit that the 10 serial installments were bound together and 48,000 copies sold the following year. An expanded version was then published and went on to sell an unprecedented 60,000 copies in its first year alone.

Illustration By: Bill Westervelt (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Sixty thousand is a significant number of books to sell. It's not in the Stephen King range; it'll get you on the fringes of today's best-seller lists. But 60,000 in 1845? Immense. If we can believe the numbers, Quaker City sold more copies than the entire population of Philadelphia at the time. The work went through numerous editions over the years and was the best-selling novel America had ever seen until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Lippard was not only a popular novelist, he was also a widely read journalist who published his own weekly newspaper, aptly named The Quaker City. Lippard's novels and newspaper pieces embody a kind of muckraking clarion call for social reform that made him many enemies among the rich, but beloved by the working class. Although his work was read all over the young United States, Lippard's primary focus was to change the social conditions of the people of his own city, Philadelphia. Anti-capitalist, anti-banking, anti-anything-that-smacked-of-oppression, Lippard wrote (and organized) to expose the cracks in American society into the which the poor fell by the thousands, the ever-widening gaps that threatened to destroy the promise of universal freedom that Lippard saw as the birthright of the American Revolution.

More than 150 years later, Lippard's dream of a Philadelphia in which its residents are zealously devoted to helping one another has not come to pass. Sadly, too, Lippard's visions have also been forgotten. Rampant crime, an out-of-control murder rate, the poor deprived of a decent education, pay-to-play political corruption — these are not just hallmarks of present-day Philly. These were the very issues that Lippard fought to eradicate in the early 19th century.

Would he be surprised to see the same problems still besetting the once-named Athens of America? Probably not, but that wouldn't stop him from working ever harder to alleviate the sufferings of those less fortunate. And it's not a bad reason for modern-day residents to pay attention to what Lippard had to say.

Before turning to journalism, the young Lippard trained for the ministry, but left dissatisfied with organized religion. He tried studying law, but found the profession too corrupt. As a journalist and novelist, though, he found his niche as a social crusader. At the peak of his fame in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Lippard strolled the city as a kind of Byronic hero. His black hair hung to his shoulders. He wore a blue velvet cape and carried a sword-cane. Lippard looked the part of a novel's dashing hero. When he married his wife, the couple scorned a church ceremony, choosing instead to wed by moonlight, on a rock overlooking Wissahickon Creek.

Lippard's most famous novel, The Quaker City, is as unconventional as his life.

It's a chaotic story set in Philadelphia in 1842. Its sprawling, sensationalistic plot hinges on the evil denizens of a secret club, The Monks of Monk Hall, who gather every night in a decrepit-looking mansion in Southwark. But inside the walls of this house lurk all the horrors of the modern age: vice and crime, rape and murder, perpetrated on a nightly basis. Within Monk Hall is a tower with three levels below its ground floor, including a crypt formerly used by a real monastic community that occupied the house in the 18th century, and, deepest of all, a dark pit, into which bodies fall through trap doors, never to be seen again. Lippard takes all of the conventions of the gothic novel — a decaying castle/mansion chock full of secret, labyrinthine passages, trap doors and underground pits for prisoners, cackling torturers, sorcerers, innocent damsels about to be ravished, evil "monks"— but doesn't give them the usual medieval setting of a gothic novel. Instead, he drops them right down in the midst of an urban Philadelphia in 1842.

The monks of this hall meet to carouse in drunken splendor amid erotic statuary of satyrs and orgiastic murals of Bacchus in his cups.

These monks are not some kind of criminal gang, operating on the fringes of culture, like some outlaw biker gang of the 20th century. Nor are they evil practitioners of some ancient rite, like the monks of countless gothic novels. The Monks of Monk Hall is composed of the most prestigious members of Philadelphia society:

Here were lawyers from the court, doctors from the school, and judges from the bench. Here too, ruddy and round- faced, sat a demure parson, whose white hands and soft words, had made him the idol of his wealthy congregation. Here was a puffy-faced Editor side by side with a Magazine Proprietor; here were sleek-visaged tradesmen, with round faces and gouty hands, whose voices, new shouting the drinking song had re-echoed the prayer and the psalm in the aristocratic church, not longer than a Sunday ago; here were solemn-faced merchants ... ; here were reputable married men, with grown up children at college, and trustful wives sleeping quietly in their dreamless beds at home; here were hopeful sons, clerks in wholesale stores, who raised the wine-glass on high with hands which, not three hours since, had been busy with the cash-book of the employer, here in fine were men of all classes — poets, authors, lawyers, judges, doctors, merchants, gamblers, and — this is no libel I hope — one parson, a fine red-faced parson, whose glowing face would have warmed a poor man on a cold day.

Lippard leaves no profession unturned; no one is exempt from his ire. His was an equal-opportunity attack.

Throughout the novel, no social injustice goes unaddressed. His motto as a penny-paper crusading journalist — "Have something to say and say it with all your might"— serves him well. Lippard deplores the treatment of the poor. He sees the criminal class as a creation of a callous system of neglect. He rails against the treatment of the insane who are placed in asylums little better than prisons. He is incensed at the effrontery of religious preachers who collect money from the poor and spend it on their own material comfort. The rich, especially the bankers, take the most pointed criticism, not only for profiting off the backs of the poor, but also for their indifference to those more needy. Banks fail and bankers walk away from the wreckage. However, the working man who has toiled away the years to save a few hundred dollars for his child's future is left destitute when a bank fails.

And many of Lippard's social concerns still haunt us.

The Quaker City is also a novel of death. Not only do characters plot murders and are, in turn, murdered, but even the living walk around with deathlike visages, pallid lips, vacant stares, driven mad by the madness that spirals around them. Philadelphia is a city of night under a sky of doom. In a passage that could very well metaphorically describe the effect of the murder rate in today's Philadelphia, Lippard writes:

... from the bosom of darkness, which like a bird of omen, broods over the city, forms of mist and shadow arise; they raise their hands to the heavens, they glide along with looks of unutterable woe. Do you hear the mournful music floating on the air? Do you see the awful frown, darkening over the faces of these Death-Angels? For they are Death-Angels, sent forth to dip their raven wings in blood. It is night now, but ere the morrow breaks, these ministers of wrath, will lay down before the Throne of Fate, the souls of the slain.

In 2007, the souls of the slain continue to make Philadelphia a city of night, where residents are left to battle it out on the streets, where the innocent caught in the crossfire.

Yet another more earthly character lurks around the corners of Quaker City's Monk Hall, waiting to claim his own victims. He is the monstrous porter, Devil-Bug, a huge, misshapen, troll-like man, who guards the door and the secrets of the club. Lippard paints him as a vivid, grotesque creation of "Satanic majesty" with a Quasimodo-like face, prodigious strength and wicked cunning. No one fools Devil-Bug and few survive his wrath:

From his very birth, he had breathed an atmosphere of infamy.

To him, there was no such thing as good in the world.

The novel's central plot concerns the rape of a young society girl, Mary, by a rich ne'er-do-well of the city, Gustavus Lorrimer. Lippard based this story on a sensational murder that had electrified the city just a year before, in 1843. Mahlon Heberton, a young man from a wealthy family in Philadelphia, had seduced (the 19th-century euphemism for rape) another young girl of a reputable family, Sarah Mercer. When Sarah's brother, Singleton, found out, he hunted Mahlon down, finally catching him on a ferry escaping to Camden. Singleton Mercer fired four shots at Heberton; the first probably killed him. Mercer's trial made news across the country; it was a blockbuster media event of its time. And most surprising is that Mercer was acquitted of all charges. Such was the heinousness of Heberton's crime against Sarah, the jury found Mercer justified in taking action.

Lippard changed the names of the protagonists in his novel, but the bare bones of the story are the same, and his audience recognized the players in The Quaker City. However, Lippard hadn't created a simple story of good guys and bad guys dueling over a pretty damsel in distress. His heroine continues to love her seducer, even after she's been disgraced and scorned by him. The brother in the novel is complicit in his own sister's seduction (although he doesn't know her identity at first) and has, himself, impregnated and abandoned a young girl.

Needless to say, the Mercer family were none too pleased with their depiction in this enormously popular novel, especially when a drama was commissioned by the city's Chestnut Street Theatre. Lippard wrote the play, which was rehearsed and ready to open. Singleton Mercer, not to be aped onstage as a blackguard, purchased 200 tickets for the opening night's performance and led a mob to the theater, threatening a riot. Lippard, armed with sword-cane and pistol, gave a speech to help defuse the situation, but the show had to be canceled. The mob dispersed.

The Mercer family were not Lippard's only critics. The Quaker City was well-read, but also sorely criticized as lascivious, lurid entertainment, the pornography of its day. And truth be told, Lippard never missed an opportunity to describe a naked, heaving, snowy bosom — the plumper the better. According to one critic in 1849, Lippard was either a "constellated lamp of learning" or a "brilliant satellite of sin." Lippard, who saw himself as a firebrand who exposed corruption of all stripes, was labeled the corrupting influence. "Monks, ghosts and demons seemed to be his idols."

Lippard's style of prose also came under attack. Indeed, he developed his craft at the penny press, where there were no "rough drafts." The writer composed his sheets and delivered them to the copy boy, who took them to the typesetter. No writers' workshop, no agonizing over word choice or plot details. So Lippard's plethoric novels are often hectic and convoluted. The best description of the Lippardian style came from his contemporaries, and although they did not mean their criticisms as compliments, Lippard sometimes published their descriptions in his own newspaper as a badge of honor. One such critic wrote of the Lippard's abilities:

We know of no name for your style, and have not learned that any critic invented any other than the "Lippard style," which must mean a style that requires the writer to be born with St. Vitus' dance, to be inoculated for the delirium tremens, take the nightmare in the natural way, get badly frightened at a collection of snakes, and write under the combined influence of these manifold causes of inspiration.

Another critic, in praising Lippard, wrote, "The reader may consult a thousand authors, he will find some who write better, and some who write worse, but no one who writes like Lippard."

At the center of The Quaker City, Devil-Bug, who has been beset for years by hallucinations of his murder victims, has a "dream-vision," a waking dream of the apocalypse. He envisions the city of Philadelphia in the far-off future year of 1950, in which he stands in the ruins of Independence Hall. A monstrous royal palace is rising next to it. The greed, corruption and vice have slowly created a Sodom of Philadelphia. A fleet of coffins come floating down the Delaware River, the corpses rising in them to point their accusing fingers at the city before clashing together in a thunderous naval bone-battle. The earth trembles, blood flows in the streets, the dead rise from their graves and all is lost. Fanciful hyperbole? What would Lippard make of the figurative fleet of coffins lining the city's streets in 2007, a murder rate of more than one per day for over a year running now? How many shootings does it take before it becomes a real river of blood? A hundred and fifty years later, Lippard would still have plenty of grist for his crusading mill.

Nowadays, Quaker City is known to a few literati and some scholars, but it is rarely read and George Lippard is a name known to the smallest coterie of readers. And if Quaker City were Lippard's only claim to fame, perhaps his anonymity would be deserved. However, Lippard was an enormous figure in antebellum American letters. Most of his other books were also best-sellers. He wrote gothic novels, historical romances and collections of stories of the American Revolution. He wrote for magazines. He wrote his own weekly newspaper. He wrote essays and delivered lectures around the country. Between 1842 and 1852, Lippard averaged 1 million published words per year. He wrote so much that he employed a clerk whose sole job was to make sure Lippard's cigar stayed lit while he sat at his desk and wrote.

Lippard also founded one of the first labor unions of the United States, "The Brotherhood of the Union." In his newspaper, he campaigned vigorously for civil rights — for workers, women, African-Americans and American Indians. He championed the poor and lashed out at the corruption he saw permeating American society — the bankers and merchants hoarding their wealth, the hypocritical preachers of diverse religious sects. Lippard tore away the curtains of a society that hid the vast cogs and machinery of vice, graft and mismanagement, a machinery still in use today. His people were the workers of the city (of all races and gender) who labored with their hands and saw little remuneration for their toil. Lippard was driven by the Christian ideal of loving thy neighbor, yet saw little of it in a city named for brotherly love. A passage from a piece titled "Jesus and the Poor" still has power today:

Do you not hear those voices— speaking even now from Fairmount— from Moyamensing— from Kensington— from the heart of the city, from dark courts where disease rankles and festers and kills? Do you not hear those awful voices, asking not for wealth— not even for comfort— but— O, God of mercy! can this be true, in enlightened, Protestant Philadelphia?— asking for a rag to cover their nakedness— asking for bread?

American history and, specifically, the American Revolution provided Lippard with his vision of an ideal society. For all of his devotion to Jesus Christ, he saw greater models in the founding fathers of the United States — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin — plus daring military leaders such as "Mad Anthony" Wayne and Thaddeus Kosciusko. Like many who grew up in the generation or two after the American Revolution, Lippard looked back on the formation of the United States as a golden age when giants walked the country.

So Lippard apotheosized his heroes in stories for newspapers and book-length collections. His most famous story became one of the greatest myths of American history, the story of a bell being rung from the steeple of the State House (later, Independence Hall), as the Declaration of Independence was signed, then read to the public gathered in front of the building. The name of this bell? The Liberty Bell, of course. Now, that bell still represents the birth of freedom. But how disappointed would Lippard be to see security guards, gates and metal detectors take the place of awed reverence?

Loved by many and hated by many, Lippard was, above all else, widely read. And he accomplished his many feats — best-selling novels, historical mythmaking, labor organizing — all before the age of 32. Lippard died of consumption (we've given it the much-less-romantic-sounding name of tuberculosis) on Feb. 9, 1854. Just 10 years after he burst on to the literary, social, political scene, Lippard's prodigious output of words (over 10 million, and all of it read) came to an end.

In 1900, a large procession of mourners filed into The Odd Fellows Cemetery at Diamond and 24th streets in Philadelphia. The mourners were members of the Order of the Brotherhood, a social/labor/insurance organization over 20,000 strong. They wended their way through the grave markers until they reached the monument honoring their founder, George Lippard. At his grave site, they sang hymns and gave speeches. The cemetery visit capped their annual four-day convocation. The Order would repeat this procession to Lippard's grave when they met again in 1922, specifically to celebrate the centennial of Lippard's birth.

Now Lippard's tombstone sits in another cemetery, re-interred in Lawnview Cemetery in 1951 to make way for a housing project. The impressive grave marker is hidden in the back row, with no mourners paying to commemorate his endeavors. When I tried to find it on a cold, cloudy, windy morning in January, the caretaker couldn't find the burial lot on his computer; he had to research it in the elephant folio volumes in the back storage room, the ledger's pages crumbling to the touch.

The tombstone itself is about 5 feet high, carved to resemble a pile of stones, like some barrow of an ancient tribe. On the flat top, sculpted in stone is a small altar, an urn and an open book. The remains of a tattered American flag flutter from the bars of the altar. A veteran's organization still places a flag here from time to time, perhaps misinterpreting the "Brotherhood of the Union" engraved on its side as a reference to service in the Civil War. Although Lippard was no military veteran, his patriotism was of the highest order, and it is fitting that he is allowed such honors. Fitting, too, that the flag is tangled upon the altar, as Lippard's religious fervor and patriotism were ever intertwined. The urn is also an appropriate emblem for Lippard, as a reminder of the macabre, death-drenched novels he wrote.

Most significant is the open book. Of course, typical religious iconography for a tombstone would suggest the book represents the Bible. And it is likely the sculptor had this in mind when it was crafted. Indeed, on the side of the marker is engraved a passage from the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus reads a scroll of the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

This reads like Lippard's personal mission in life and reminds me of his Christianity (although he was vehemently against organized religion). Lippard took these instructions to heart and crafted fiction, scribbled polemics and founded labor movements to achieve these goals, "to set at liberty them that are bruised."

The pages of the stone book are blank, but I can imagine the words written thereon and they are not the words of Jesus or Isaiah or even George Washington. This book is The Quaker City, in all its lurid, apocalyptic, visionary madness. It is the book Lippard bequeathed to the city of Philadelphia. Not a gushing rhapsody of joy on how wonderful is the City of Brotherly Love, but how depraved it is for not living up to its name. Although Lippard's fiction is set in his own day and although Devil-Bug's prophecy of 1950 did not exactly come to pass, The Quaker City still resounds as a clarion call against social injustice, against the craven victimization of the poor, against the corruption that oils the machinery hidden in the bowels of power halls. Lippard would weep to see so many coffins still rushing down the rivers that bracket his city. But he would not wallow in that sadness. Lippard would pick up his pen, light a cigar and get to work. "Have something to say and say it with all your might."

Edward Pettit wishes to acknowledge the works of Professor David S. Reynolds in compiling information for this article. He invites all readers to visit his Web site, www.omnigatherum.com, to read The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall, which will be published in annotated weekly serial installments over the next year.