Historicizing “Sin”

The Quaker City certainly seems highly concerned with sex and sin, and without contextualizing Lippard’s life and work, it could be read as a sort of conservative tale encouraging morality.  However, with a little background information–

http://citypaper.net/articles/2007/03/22/monks-devils-and-quakers

–one finds that Lippard was a labor organizer and an ardent social critic.  “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”(Pettit, above text).  Therefore, although I agree with the other posters that the text is concerned with the clandestine ‘sin’ of the monks, it is difficult to see their acts as unusual or fantastic as would be the norm in the Gothic genre.  Rather Lippard places this sect of libertines firmly at the heart of Philadelphia’s society.  “And the monks of Monk Hall-who are they?  Grim-faced personages in long black robes and drooping cowls?…Ah no, Ah no, from the eloquent, the learned-and don’t you laugh-from the pious of the Quaker City…”(331).  He continues on to list various positions held by those within the group; they are within the legal and business sectors, as well as the church.  Here is the crux of Lippard’s sin, the social injustice of post-Revolution, urban America, and those who control the system are hidden away–out of view from the new democracy.  Cloistered inside the decrepit aristocratic structure that is Monk Hall.  The text does not explicitly state that the mansion was constructed/owned by an aristocrat, one can assume thusly because it was built in the pre-Revolutionary period by a wealthy foreigner(323).  “Soon after the Revolution, fine brick buildings began to spring up…” around the mansion(325).   Thus signalling, at least a mild redistribution of wealth because of the burgeoning democracy.  However, once Abijah K. Jones begins to inhabit Monk Hall and presumably begin his clandestine meetings of the wealthy and powerful, the surrounding buildings “…about to commit suicide and fling themselves madly into the gutter…”(325).  The regression of social welfare already visible and I think, firmly placed in the hands of these “Monks” (oligarchs, capitalists and bureaucrats).  Therefore, I think this text shifts away from a religious view of sin and toward one more akin to what we might consider social injustice.

Dedications…

It’s worth noting that Lippard dedicated The Quaker City thusly:

“INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN.”

Thoughts?

What Lippard would like to say to you, dear 21st-century reader

From the Preface to the 1849 edition:

“To the young man and young woman who may read this book when I am dead, I have a word to say:

Would to God that the evils recorded in these pages, were not based upon facts. Would to God that the experience of my life had not impressed me so vividly with the colossal vices and the terrible deformities, presented in the social system of this Large City, in the Nineteenth Century. You will read this work when the hand which pens this line is dust. If you discover one word in its pages, that has a tendency to develop one impure thought, I beseech you reject that word. If you discover a chapter, a page, or a line, that conflicts with the great idea of Human Brotherhood, promulgated by the Redeemer, I ask you with all my soul, reject that chapter, that passage, that line. At the same time remember the idea which impelled me to produce the book. Remember that my life from the age of sixteen up to twenty-five was one perpetual battle with hardship and difficulty, such as do not often fall to the lot of a young man–such as rarely is recorded in the experience of childhood or manhood. Take the book with all its faults and all its virtues. Judge it as you yourself would wish to be judged. Do not wrest a line from these pages, for the encouragement of a bad thought or a bad deed.”