Leslie Fiedler
THE MALE NOVEL
George Lippard, the author of
The Quaker City,
or
The
Monks of Monk Hall
is a little known figure in the history of Amer–
ican literature. For many years, as a matter of fact, his very existence
was kept a secret in the official histories of the novel
in
the United
States, as
if
he represented a shameful episode in a past we were all
doing our
best
to forget. In recent years, however, scholarly candor
has triumphed over patriotic shame; and beginning with Alexander
Cowie in
The Rise of the American Novel
(1948), historians of our
fiction have been making an effort to come to tenns with Lippard
and his "dirty" book.
It is, after all, inlpossible to ignore forever a writer who produced
one of the all-time best sellers, a book which he himself boasted
"has
been more attacked, and more read, than any work of American fie–
·tion ever published"; and whic,h, in fact, sold 60,000 copies
in
1844,
the year of publication, and was
still
being bought at the rate of
30,000 a year in 1854, the year of Lippard's death. Not only
in
America, but in England and on the Continent, Lippard was read by
those who pretended to be scandalized as well as by those who
didn't even realize that they ought to be shocked. In Gennany the
"most immoral work of the age" seems to have been a special fav–
orite; and, ironically, during the period when
The Quaker City
had
disappeared from our own literary histories, it continued to
be
listed
in German ones as the work of Friederich Gersilicker under the title
Die Quackerstadt uoo ihre Geheimnisse.
Lippard is an immensely attractive figure, a revolutionary dandy
w,ho,
in
the short thirty-two years of his life, managed to dazzle and
provoke the Philadelphia society in which he moved, romantically
wrapped
in
a Byronic cape and always anned against paid
assassins
