39. The Quaker City: The Forbidden Play of 1844, Part Two

COPYRIGHT PETER SCHMITZ - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING THEME]

 Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History. Today, we present the second of a three part series that we began in our last episode, as we commence our Season Two, Drama is Conflict! So here it is: The Quaker City - the Forbidden Play of 1844, PART TWO.” [00:32]

[“Drama is Conflict” Musical Theme]

 At the beginning of George Lippard’s novel The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall, a group of four men are depicted, tottering down Chestnut Street on a winter’s evening, already three sheets to the wind, as it were, but still ready for more fun. One of the group, a young swell named Byrnewood Arlington, sits for a moment on a curbside municipal fireplug. He gazes up at the moon shining over the city of Philadelphia. His bleary eyes seeing double, and he calls out to his companions:

“Miller the prophet’s right! Right I say! The world . . . damnation, the plug, how it shakes . . . the world is coming to an end for a certain - for d’ye see boys, there’s two moons shining up yonder this blessed night, sure as fate.”

Across the sidewalk from Byrnewood, as Lippard paints the scene, is the leader of thIs little group, the tall dark and handsome Augustus Lorrimer, leaning on the steps of a Chestnut Street house, his hat rakishly to one side, and his black mustache gleaming in the moonlight. Augustus looks at Byrnewood Arlington sitting on the fireplug, and at the other two members of the party, named Colonel Mutchins and Sylvester J. Petriken.

“Come on boys,” commands Lorrimer, “Let’s go in to Smokey Chifflin’s oyster cellar, and have a cozy supper.” So, the four tipsy men noisily clatter down the street and into the basement establishment proposed, where they order woodcock, venison, and stewed oysters. And four bottles of champagne. The evening’s repast laid before them, three of them call out to their leader, Gus Lorrimer, demanding that he finish a story he started earlier in the evening, the one about his latest romantic conquest.

“I see, boys, that you expect something nice,” replies Lorrimer “. . Well, here goes. About two weeks ago I was strolling along Chesnut Street towards evening, with Boney (that’s my big wolf dog, you know?) at my heels. I was just wondering where I should spend the evening; whether I should go see Forrest at the Walnut, or take a turn around the town; when who should I see walking ahead of me, but one of the prettiest figures in the world, in a black silk mantilla, with one those saucy kiss-me-if-you-dare bonnets on her head.” . . and Lorrimer then reveals that he spoke to an immediately charmed this young lady, whom he reckoned was a virginal maid of a good family. He boasts to his companions that in three hours time he has an assignation with her, and has already planned a mock wedding ceremony with her at the infamous Monk Hall, after which he will, of course, have his way with her. 

His companions are all suitably impressed by his rakish devilry, but Byrnewood, for one, is skeptical about the young lady’s supposed high-born virtue. There are so many whores in Philadelphia, after all, he says. He bets Lorrimer one hundred dollars that this girl is not who she says she is, and that once Lorrimer has had his fun, her real identity will come out. Lorrimer, for his part, is confident that his prey is no mere prostitute, accepts the wager.

Soon after, Byrnewood and Lorrimer leave the other two men behind, and exit the oyster bar arm in arm. On a lark, they decide to visit the shop of an astrologer to have their mutual fortunes told. But the two young swells are startled when the astrologer gives them his prediction: 

As the first installments of the novel Quaker City began to be released, in serial form, in the Fall of 1844, it caused quite a sensation in Philadelphia. Its author, George Lippard, was only 22 years old, but he had already made a name for himself. Everyone was talking about this new book, and thought they recognized the true identity of almost every character in it. In fact, because it was “Based On A True Story,” they knew exactly how this story was going to end - eventually Brynewood Arlington would realize that he had set Augustus Lorrimer loose on his own sister, and in his horror, anger and remorse he would kill Lorrimer on the ferry to Camden -  but of course that was exactly why everyone needed to read it! In fact, this book was making a lot of people both very excited - and very nervous.

Lippard had been born in 1822, on a small farm out in Chester County, Pennsylvania, but when his father suffered a serious injury two years later, his parents brought him and his siblings back to Germantown, where the old Lippard family homestead had been for generations. His grandfather, in fact, still spoke Pennsylvania Dutch, and as his mother was not well, his two maiden aunts mostly looked after little Georgie. But then his mother died in 1831, and his father soon remarried. I won't get into all the details of his early life, but suffice it to say that to read about the Lippard family is to see a constant litany of illness, economic decline, misfortune, and death. Nobody that George ever loved lived for very long, and perhaps naturally he turned into a very morose and moody child. He was also intensely religious, very bookish, and very sensitive to slights and social insults. He thought about becoming a Methodist minister at one point, and even went to school in Rhinebeck NY to study for it, but then gave it up when the headmaster of his school seemed unable to show any Christian charity, even (one occasion) to share a bag of fresh peaches with him. 

Returning to Philadelphia, Lippard arrived back home only in time to watch his father die, and then afterwards learn he had been mostly disinherited in the will. George studied law for a while, but he didn’t become much enamored of what he saw of the legal profession, either. For a while, frankly, he was homeless, squatting in abandoned Philadelphia houses, or wandering the countryside outside the city, mostly around the Wissahickon Creek northwest of the city. He was a bit of a hipster bohemian, really, and grew his hair long and swept back - in the style of the Pennsylvania Dutch of the 18th Century. He was still quite intellectually curious, and he read every novel and history book and newspaper he could get his hands on, and went to the theater when he could afford it. It helped when, in 1842, now 20 years old, he began working for John S. DuSolle, editor of the penny newspaper Spirit of the Times. 

Here it was that Lippard began to write the torrent of material that he was to turn out over the next dozen years. It was like a tap had been turned on. As a new employee he first just rewrote pieces clipped from other papers, but soon he was contributing three original columns under different pen names, as well as doing local reporting and supplying short fiction as well. Lippard was especially attracted to stories that revealed the secrets of supposedly respectable folk: preachers, theater managers, lawyers, politicians, and bankers. Of the last category, he especially detested Nicholas Biddle, who had been given control over the estate of the late millionaire Stephen Girard, but had yet to act on the stipulation of Girard's will that his fortune be used to build a home for orphans - and this Lippard regarded as an outrage. Lippard also reported on the visit of the author Charles Dickens to Philadelphia, and correctly predicted that the Englishman secretly despised America. He put all this, and more, in his columns, and Lippard began to attract a loyal readership. His most popular pieces in the Spirit of the Times, and also in his next job at another newspaper called The Citizen Soldier, caricatured members of Philadelphia’s elite classes, employing easily decipherable joke names. George Graham, publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, was called by Lippard “The Grey Ham”, and his co-publisher Samuel Paterson became “Spermaceti Sam”. The writer and preacher Rufus Wilmot Griswold was rechristened “The Reverend Rumpus Grizzle,” and so on.

Lippard was also increasingly finding an audience for his fiction, too. Some of it was set during the American Revolution, and some of it was placed in Medieval Europe. Copies of his gothic novel The Ladye Annabel were being eagerly snapped up as they came out in regular installments. By now, by the way, he had befriended another struggling Philadelphia writer and sometime journalist, Edgar Allen Poe. Poe, in fact, wrote a public letter to Lippard, praising Ladye Annabel, and bestowing upon the younger man the title of “genius”, which helped to drive sales and also encouraged Lippars to supply the market with further torrents of his rather fulsome writing.

But Lippard’s works of fiction during this period, even if they were set in a distant historical past, were full of commentary on current events and ideas: abolition, women’s rights, Millerism, spiritualism, socialism. Lippard wanted to start his own monthly magazine to contain all the things he wanted to say, in fact. But when that didn’t work out, in the early fall of 1844, he began on another project. The facts of the Heberton-Mercer murder case, as Lippard had detailed it for his readers in the pages of the Citizen Soldier, gave him an idea for a much larger work. He envisioned it on the model of the works of Eugene Sue, such as The Mysteries of Paris, which as we noted before had been frequently produced in Philadelphia theaters. Lippard ironically picked up the longtime virtuous nickname of his hometown, “The Quaker City,” and put it right in the lengthy title, but gave it an ominous spin: The Quaker City, or, the Monks of Monk Hall; a Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime. 

The events that drove young Singleton Mercer to murder formed the bones of the plot, but he mixed those bones in a steaming cauldron of subplots and picaresque nightlife, all of which tended to reveal social and moral corruption. The action centered in a mysterious mansion called “Monk Hall” in South Philadelphia that was home to a cabal of upper-class gentlemen who seduced and murdered unsuspecting victims, and plotted financial crimes, and held secret rituals there. All of this nefarious wickedness was conducted under the watchful eye of a ghoulish club doorman, a mulatto hunchback who was called “The Devil Bug.”

So, quite an undertaking. But importantly the timing of his book was significant. The first two paper-covered installments of this provocative work appeared in October of 1844, as the quadrennial election season reached a fever pitch in Philadelphia. But the book was not calculated to calm things down, it was meant to keep things riled up! . . . “The Tremendous excitement of the election should not deter any one from procuring  a copy of QUAKER CITY,” shouted an ad for the book printed in the Public Ledger. “Eugene Sue eclipsed!” said another. “Thrills! Novel of real life! Published this morning, and for sale at 3 Ledger Building, Third Street near Chestnut. The Quaker City or the Monks of Monk Hall . . founded on fact, gleaned from the manuscript of an aged member of the bar, to be published in four numbers, at 12 ½ cents each.” Not a bad price for all that. 

 Well, as we said, pretty soon almost everybody in Philadelphia was reading about Lorrimer and Brynewood - obvious stand-ins for Heberton and Mercer, as well as  other nefarious shady character as an editor of a newspaper called the Philadelphia Daily Black Mail, who boasted to his fellow monks how he has seduced actresses in Philadelphia theaters: “I make advances. She foolishly repels me; very likely she calls me a puppy. Next day an on dit appears in ‘Black Mail’ headed ‘licentiousness of the stage,’ and embracing some compassionate allusions to the lady aforesaid. You understand? I damage her reputation by a paragraphical slur . . And she capitulates?  . . Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t . . if her reputation is ruined, it isn’t my fault, I’m sure.” It’s likely that Lippard loosely based this particular character on Rufus Griswold, a critic at the Philadelphia Daily Standard, known for his vindictive nature. Other characters in the book included great ladies and prostitutes and innocent young girls, corrupt lawyers and crooked doctors, and a gang of Black criminals. It was a real potboiler. Nobody came off well in it. Even the supposedly sympathetic character of Brynewood Arlington was revealed to have once seduced and abandoned a servant girl in the past.

From the very first, copies of the book flew off the shelf, as everyone in the city, knowing Lippard’s reputation, wanted to take a look - had he written about them? They nervously inquired. But you know one person didn’t care if he was in the book, in fact he rather hoped he was, because he immediately sensed an opportunity for free publicity: Our old friend Francis Wemyss, actor and theatrical manager extraordinaire.

Francis Wemyss was now in a bit of a financial bind. He had only recently emerged from bankruptcy, and he had lost of lot of money when, as the manager of the National Theater on Chestnut Street, he had been forced to shut down for two weeks during the anti-Catholic riots earlier in the year. He looked elsewhere for opportunities but New York theater was at a low ebb, just then. Lesser markets like Baltimore and Pittsburgh also looked bad. The only performing artist that was making real money, he figured, was the touring Norwegian violinist Ole Bull. But Francis Wemyss also noticed how the growing theatrical rivalry between the actors Edwin Forrest and William Charles Macready drove ticket sales for the dueling tragedians. Their respective partisans filled their houses, whether to applaud or to boo them. Either way, the theater got the audience’s money. Controversy is always good for box office, he figured.

So in that fall of 1844, Wemyss decided to take over the lease of the Chestnut Street Theatre and look for controversy. Of all Philadelphia' current theaters, as we’ve mentioned, the Chestnut was the favorite theater of the city’s cultured elite. So its regulars were very nervous about what Francis Wemyss, the well-known stager of disaster melodramas in all his previous theaters, was going to do with their beloved “Old Drury”. At first, admittedly, he tried to cater to the good old crowd, assembling once again the theater’s regular stock company, and attempted to present what the regulars might have expected. A visiting ‘star’, for example, named “Miss Nelson” opened with the respectable drama La Sylphide but it had proved to be box office poison. Desperate, Wemyss had next booked the Jim Crow burlesque version of Othello, which had led to the uproar we’ve already described, all to the horror of polite society. But Wemyss was very happy with the amount of money it had brought in. Let’s keep doing that sort of thing, he thought. It worked. 

Then Wemyss had another brainstorm. What if he put on his stage a version of the novel Quaker City! It would be a local sensation, like the Mysteries of Paris - but better. So Wemyss called on Mr. Lippard. We don’t have Lippard’s version of this conversation, but here is Wemyss’ account:

“Mr. Lippard was publishing a book . . . in which he exposed, right and left, the profligacy of both the rich and powerful, and the poor and worthless of the city of Philadelphia. By the advice of my worthy friend, Mr. Ashbell Green, at that time one of the Deputy Attorney Generals, I procured an interview, and he drew up a contract for which, under certain considerations, Mr. Lippard agreed to dramatise his own work and to furnish me with a copy of the play in fourteen days from the date of our agreement. The scenery was painted, the properties arranged, and the piece announced for representation.”

Now I do have one admission to make: For the life of me, I can’t see how the timeline works out here - despite what we find written in that last passage, Lippard and Wemyss MUST have had this worked out somewhat earlier – I can’t think there’s a way Lippard, who had never written a play before, could come up with a script in 14 days, and then for Wemyss to have all the actors ready and the sets prepared in just one short week. They must have been working on this project even earlier than the accounts we have, said that they did. But, you know, who knows? 19th Century theater was a very different animal than the one we know today. Maybe everyone - Lippard, Wemyss, the actors, and Durang, who for his part was in charge of running rehearsals with the company, were just used to working on an extremely tight deadline. Still, to me, on a basic level, this just makes no sense. It takes me all day, sometimes to come up with a single paragraph. A four act play in two weeks? According to Wemyss’ account, that’s what Lippard did. Okay, maybe this guy was a writing machine. But what about the actors who needed to memorize huge amounts of dialogue in a brand-new play they’ve never seen? I can attest from experience that memorizing a role can take up to a month, at the very least. And guess what - Wemyss had cast himself in the principal villain’s role of Gus Lorrimer! And he was busy running the theater company as well! Surely he would have needed more time than just a week. Frankly, I don’t buy it. But okay, that’s what the record says. Just mark me down as a skeptic, or as being in awe.

Not to mention that in the same period, Charles Durang also had to quickly put the scene painters and carpenters of the Chestnut Street Theatre to work making the sets for Quaker City. According to his firsthand account, this scenery was intended to startle Philadelphia theatergoers with the accuracy of familiar local places, but transformed and cast over with a gothic and sinister gloom, of course. Again, how he did all this so quickly I don’t know, maybe they used the printed early versions of the novel as their guide, together with Lippard’s descriptions of what locations the book’s final scenes would require, and pasted that over the stock collection they took from the back of the house.

But this is what Durang recalled, years later: “There were many local views painted of buildings, churches, court-rooms, etc. Parker’s restaurant was accurately sketched, with even Sully’s great portrait of G.F. Cooke, the eminent tragedian, and young Thomas Sully’s inimitable conception of William Shakespeare.” And, too, evidently the Chestnut’s actors and scene painters and propmen must have talked to their friends in the city about what they were up to, because, said Durang, the word got out, and “ . . the scenes, the persons, and the incidents of the play became the universal topic of conversation.”

And we can imagine the implications of these conversations. Remember that all of this potential dramatic exposure of the wealthy and powerful was happening in the midst of a heated political season. In those days an all-male, all-white electorate - a much smaller proportion of the populace than today - for them reputation might mean everything for one’s political career and social capital. And, as you will recall, one of Philadelphia’s most prominent citizens, George M. Dallas, was on the Democratic Party’s ticket for Vice-President! Election Day was Tuesday, November 5th. The play was scheduled to premiere on Monday, November 11th.

So, let’s leave the theater world behind and return to the political narrative that we discussed in Part One, because I’ve never seen any other examination of the events surrounding this controversial play that takes it into account. By Friday, November 8th, 1844, the late results coming in from distant states had made it clear: James K. Polk had been elected the next President of the United States! George Dallas would be joining him in Washington as the Vice President. A popular print shows the returns being announced in Philadelphia, as a dead raccoon, representing  the losing candidate Henry Clay, is buried at the former Second Bank of the United States. The ghost of Andrew Jackson is depicted exulting up in Heaven. And because this was Philadelphia, the artist of this particular drawing knew to show a great hubbub in all the streets. As a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the scene in front of the Democratic headquarters which was at 8th and Chestnut, wrote:

“The streets were thronged by a dense mass of human beings, who made the welkin ring with their shouts, cheers, songs, and crowing. . . . Lanterns were lit, bearing various inscriptions and mottoes, and the crowd formed into procession and marched to the residence of the Hon. George M. Dallas. Here they halted and Mr. Dallas answered their loud calls by coming to the doorway and delivering them a speech, which was received with most enthusiastic cheers. [27:25 -a FINAL CHEER, UNDER, and SFX OUT]

Mr. Dallas dwelt upon the subject of the late victory,  . . and the men in each section of the Union who had labored in their work.. . “ etc, etc, you know, the usual election ritual.

Dallas, mindful of how badly things had recently been going lately in Philadelphia, and knowing that there were many disappointed supporters of the defeated Whig candidate Henry Clay still in town, made one other special plea that night as he stood on his doorstep in Philadelphia. According to the reporter:

“He insisted strongly upon the necessity of treating their adversaries with the utmost kindness, and of making no harsh or uncourteous manifestations . . it was the cause, he said, and not the men who had triumphed.  . . These remarks made a decided impression upon his hearers, and after he had concluded he was saluted with tremendous cheering,  and the crowd filed off in procession . .  Up to a late hour the city was alive with excitement, and the street resounded with shouts, songs, and all the various demonstrations of triumph and rejoicing,” said the reporter. 

Still, Dallas’ calming words had done their work, and on the whole there were no angry disturbances anywhere in Philadelphia that evening. 

But, you know, the spark for violence can come from many different sources, and there was still a lot of dry tinder lying around, as it were. The very next evening, less than two blocks away from Democratic Party headquarters, a young Philadelphian, accompanied by a group of his friends, strode up to the front of the Chestnut Street Theatre. An acquaintance of his had told him to take a gander at the new big playbills then being placed next to the big front doors of the Chestnut, that advertised the coming of next week’s play.

 Pushing aside the person plastering the bills on the large sloping boards leaning against the wall, the man read the words printed in bold capital letters at the top of the playbill:

THE QUAKER CITY, OR THE MONKS OF MONK HALL! A ROMANCE OF LIFE, MYSTERY AND CRIME! 

Quickly, frantically, the young man’s eyes flew down the text of the rest of the poster  . . it was all there, each scene described, promising to theatergoers exactly what they could expect from the drama opening in just two nights time, staged in four acts . . .

“Act One Scene first: An Oyster Cellar, . . scene fourth an Astrologer's House. “On Christmas Eve at the hour of sunset, one of you will die by the other’s hand!” Act Two “The Deluder and the Deluded: A day of reckoning - Spare My Sister . . “

And the man grabbed the poster and ripped it off the board. Running over to the sheet on the other side of the theater’s front doors, over the protests of the bill sticker he tore it to shreds too, while his companions cheered him on. Singleton Mercer (for it was he) saw no necessity of treating his adversaries with utmost kindness, as Mr. Dallas had pleaded. After all, he’d killed a man over this very matter, and he didn’t find further public exposure of his sister’s experience very amusing. The recently acquitted murderer was very very angry indeed, and he had one idea burning in his head. He marched to the Chestnut Street Theater’s box office, and demanded of the treasurer that he be allowed to buy 200 tickets, for all his friends. Because, as he said ominously. He was going to stop this play, even if he had to start a riot to do it.

[ “DRAMA IS CONFLICT Closing theme here]

Okay! Well, once again, we will leave you in suspense about what happens next . .  Be sure to tune in next time, when we bring you the thrilling conclusion of this whole narrative, Part Three of  “The Quaker City” - The Forbidden Play of 1844!

[AITH END THEME]

COPYRIGHT PETER SCHMITZ - ALL RIGHT RESERVED