Customer Reviews

The Quaker City, Or, the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime

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This is a long, sprawling, peculiar novel, but one that I always enjoy going back to. I forget, every time I reread it, how wonderful and strange an adventure it is! Lippard is a minor figure in American letters, inspired by early American masters such as Charles Brockden Brown and popular French novelists such as Eugen Sue. The Quaker City is certainly a flawed work, but it is only more human, engaging and approachable because of this fact. Lippard was no master of plot structure or narrative technique; in fact, he wasn't much of a craftsman at all, regarding the nuances and fine textures of language. However, he was a writer gifted with a dizzingly original, and sometimes grotesque, imagination. The Quaker City is the kind of book that you can't pot down, although part of you sometimes wants to. His tale of the intrigues and iniquities lurking beaneath the surface of Victorian Philadelphia will shock and amaze. I especially recommend this novel for fans of Caleb Carr, Egdar Allan Poe, and Robertson Davies.

Anybody who enjoyed Matthew Lewis' 'The Monk' will appreciate George Lippard's "You ain't seen nothin' yet" style. The plot revolves around an American version of England's famous 'Hellfire Club' located in Philadelphia's Southwark region (Historians differ on rather or not 'Monk Hall' actually existed. Some claim that such a club did exist from the late 1700's until the 1820's. Other claim that the club sprang from Lippard's very fertile imagination) and features such goodies as white slavery, trap doors, and wanton booze & oyster abuse (now you know why the Republicans picked Philly for their convention). This is one wild read. Lippard once attempted to produce it as a play, but angry protesters threatened to burn down the theater. 'The Monks of Monks Hall' was America's first, real best seller. Read, no doubt, by people who kept uttering "Immoral...shocking...filth..." as they eagerly turned each page. Pick up this piece of history now.

A best-seller in its day, Quaker City is a violent and surreal look at the life of the citizens of Philadelphia in the 1840s. Anyone who likes Edgar Allen Poe or the Marquis de Sade will find this an interesting read; written off by critics as blatantly pulp, before such a term existed, they considered its mass appeal a sign of weakness, and by 1900, it had vanished from most lists of important American novels. I'm glad that critics are reconsidering its position, and I look forward to more of Lippard's novels coming back to print. Devil-bug, the mastermind of evil, is a great villain, and he looks ahead to Jarry's Pere Ubu, Faulkner's Popeye and many of the great surreal or superreal villains of the twentieth century.