Kelroy’s Shifting City

Abstract

Chapter 6, “Kelroy’s Shifting City,” centers on Rebecca Rush’s 1812 Philadelphia novel Kelroy, which charts Philadelphia’s transition from a cosmopolitan urbanity where family, blood, and inheritance are reliable indicators of class and status, to a more fluid and performative urbanity. In Kelroy, Rebecca Rush constructs—and distorts—a Philadelphia of the past that offers a useful window on fantasies and anxieties about US urban life and urban spaces on the cusp of great political and cultural change. Set in 1790s Philadelphia, which by 1812 was fading into memory, Kelroy actively frames and fictionalizes a vision of a past Philadelphia that looks toward a different future than earlier authors imagined. Kelroy teaches cosmopolitan codes of gentility but violently undermines them as well. The novel thus reveals and emphasizes the limits of self-making, especially for the women, immigrants, and working-class people who might benefit most from performative modes of status and power. Kelroy gestures toward a developing US urbanity that includes characters of diverse classes, races, and ethnicities, but paradoxically reasserts the power of white men, foreshadowing dynamics that would structure the literature and culture of the Jacksonian period.