Inverting the Urban Order—George Lippard's Philadelphia

Abstract:George Lippard's novels reshape the space of Philadelphia in two different ways. For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, the city's image had been dominated by the geometric regularity of William Penn's plan for Center City. But Lippard shifts his focus outward, to the city's margins, to the working-class and ethnic districts of Southwark, Moyamensing, and Kensington. He also flips the spaces of the city's two-dimensional grid--onto a vertical axis--moving his narratives up and down inside a series of gothic interiors. Such remapping is an assertion of power: Penn's grid is an abstract "representation" of space that aims to control development and distribute the city's population; Lippard's novels, on the other hand, work to reclaim the city as "lived" space for its inhabitants. His interiorized Gothic conveys simultaneously 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 socio-economic conflicts and the ever-widening gulf between classes.