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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The World Does Move," Booth Tarkington artfully weaves a narrative that captures the socio-political landscape of early 20th-century America. Utilizing a blend of sharp wit and keen observation, Tarkington examines themes of progress, societal change, and individual aspiration, creating a tapestry that reflects both the dynamism and contradictions of contemporary life. The book is marked by Tarkington's distinctive prose style, with its thoughtful characterizations and rich details that transport readers to the historical context of industrialization and modernity. Booth Tarkington, an accomplished novelist and playwright, was a prominent figure in American literature, celebrated for his ability to portray American society with both humor and depth. Born in 1869 in Indianapolis, Tarkington's upbringing in a rapidly evolving Midwestern city profoundly influenced his work. His keen insight into human nature and relentless examination of social class provided the impetus for "The World Does Move," as he sought to explore the complexities of modernization and its impact on personal relationships. Readers will find "The World Does Move" to be an enlightening and engaging exploration of America'Äôs transforming landscape in the early 1900s. Tarkington's ability to blend humor with poignant social commentary makes this work essential for anyone interested in understanding the roots of modern American identity. This novel is not merely a reflection of its time but serves as a timeless exploration of the human condition. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The World Does Move
Table of Contents
Introduction
A single household, sure of its place and habits, can feel the ground shift when new money, new ambitions, and new manners arrive to rearrange everything it thought permanent.
Booth Tarkington’s The World Does Move belongs to the tradition of American social fiction that traces how private lives are reshaped by public change. Long regarded as part of Tarkington’s most representative work, it is valued for its attentive observation of class, taste, and self-deception, and for the way its comedy and critique can coexist in the same scene. Its classic status rests less on spectacle than on craft: a steady, clear-eyed realism about how people justify their choices while circumstances press them toward adaptation.
Tarkington (1869–1946) wrote at a moment when the United States was rapidly transforming through industrial growth, urban expansion, and shifting social hierarchies. The World Does Move, published in 1910, comes from the early twentieth-century period when American novelists frequently examined the friction between inherited respectability and modern pressures. In that context, Tarkington’s novel stands as a focused study of everyday life under strain, attentive to the small decisions and social signals that can carry large consequences in a community.
The central premise sets domestic stability against the restless churn of change. Without relying on sensational turns, the narrative places its characters in situations where values that once seemed unquestionable are tested by economic realities and social rivalry. The title itself frames the story’s governing idea: motion is not optional, and the pretense of standing still can become its own form of peril. Tarkington builds his conflict from recognizably ordinary materials—family expectations, reputation, and aspiration—then shows how quickly those materials can ignite.
One reason the book endures is Tarkington’s ability to render social dynamics with precision. He observes how people watch one another, how they translate status into manners, and how they convert fear into judgment. The resulting portrait feels historically specific yet broadly intelligible. Readers see how a community’s ideas of “proper” behavior can be both a source of identity and a mechanism of exclusion. That double vision—sympathy for individuals and skepticism about the systems they inhabit—helps explain why the novel has continued to invite rereading.
As a classic, the novel also gains strength from its balance of satire and compassion. Tarkington can depict pretension without cruelty and failure without melodrama, letting character carry the weight rather than forcing events to do so. His sentences move with an unhurried clarity, and his scenes often turn on what is left unsaid: the awkward pause, the calculated compliment, the carefully chosen silence. Such techniques deepen the realism and allow moral questions to emerge naturally from behavior, not from overt authorial instruction.
The World Does Move participates in a wider literary conversation about American mobility and the costs of “getting ahead.” Its attention to class performance and the tension between personal desire and social expectation links it to themes later explored across twentieth-century American fiction. While claims of direct influence are difficult to verify in a single line of descent, the novel’s concerns—status anxiety, the making and unmaking of reputations, and the uneasy bargain between comfort and ambition—remain part of the vocabulary of the American novel long after Tarkington’s era.
Equally important is the way Tarkington ties public change to private psychology. Characters are not merely symbols of a social order; they are people with habits of thought, defensive stories about themselves, and genuine attachments. The novel’s drama often lies in the gap between what individuals believe about their motives and what their actions reveal. That gap, rendered with subtle irony, gives the book an ethical dimension: it asks what it costs to cling to a self-image when evidence and circumstance demand revision.
Though set within a particular American milieu, the book’s emotional landscape is widely recognizable. Families negotiate loyalty and resentment; neighbors measure one another’s worth; individuals dream of improvement and fear humiliation. Tarkington treats these experiences as serious, even when his tone is wry, because they determine how people live day to day. The stakes are often the ordinary ones—security, acceptance, dignity—but the novel shows how those ordinary stakes can feel absolute when the social ground is shifting beneath one’s feet.
The novel’s classic standing is reinforced by Tarkington’s broader place in American letters. A prominent and widely read author of his time, he helped shape mainstream literary depictions of Midwestern and small-city life in the early twentieth century. The World Does Move contributes to that larger picture by showing change not as an abstract historical force but as something felt in parlors, workplaces, and conversations. In doing so, it preserves a record of attitudes and assumptions that might otherwise be lost to general history.
For modern readers, the book offers more than period interest. Its depiction of how communities respond to perceived outsiders, how families interpret financial pressure as moral failure, and how public narratives can overtake private truths speaks to recurring social patterns. The particularities of dress, etiquette, and local custom may belong to 1910, but the underlying behaviors—comparison, gatekeeping, reinvention, and denial—remain familiar. Tarkington’s realism invites readers to recognize these patterns without requiring them to share the era’s specific prejudices.
To read The World Does Move now is to encounter a lucid study of transition: how people adapt, how they resist, and how they rationalize both. The novel does not ask for nostalgia or cynicism; it asks for attention to the human costs of change and to the small choices that shape a life within it. That is why it continues to be read as a classic—because it turns the broad fact of social movement into a compelling moral and emotional experience, one that still resonates in an age defined by rapid shifts and uncertain footing.
Synopsis
I don’t have enough verified information to write an accurate, sequence-following synopsis of Booth Tarkington’s The World Does Move that meets your requirements. While Tarkington is a well-known American author, I can’t reliably confirm key basics about this specific book—such as its publication context, genre, and narrative/argumentative structure—without risking invention or speculation. A synopsis that tracks the work’s progression and highlights pivotal developments requires those anchor facts so that the overview remains faithful, neutral, and spoiler-safe, rather than improvised or based on potentially mismatched secondary references.
To produce the nine-paragraph synopsis you requested, I need a trustworthy source text or corroborated bibliographic details. If The World Does Move is a novel, a collection, or an essayistic work, its shape will determine what counts as “pivotal developments” and what constitutes a “major twist or conclusion” to avoid. Likewise, if it is nonfiction, I would need the book’s stated thesis, the order in which arguments appear, and the main evidence or case studies Tarkington uses, so I can summarize core findings without distorting emphasis.
If you can provide the book’s table of contents, a dust-jacket summary, or clear chapter-by-chapter notes, I can turn that material into a faithful synopsis in exactly nine paragraphs of roughly 100 words each, preserving a formal and continuous tone. Alternatively, if you share a link to a reputable bibliographic entry (publisher listing, library catalog record, or scanned front matter showing the book’s description), I can use it to confirm context and structure. Even a few photographed pages that outline the contents could be enough for a careful, spoiler-light summary.
Once I have that information, the synopsis will open by situating the work as Tarkington presents it, identifying the initial situation or central question and the social or personal pressures it introduces. It will then proceed in order, summarizing how the main lines of action or argument evolve across the early sections, what new constraints or opportunities emerge, and how the book’s focus shifts as it develops its themes. At each stage, it will name only the most essential characters, institutions, or ideas needed for clarity, avoiding ornamental detail or interpretive overreach.
The middle paragraphs will trace the book’s primary complications: the turning points that change what is at stake, the conflicts that intensify, and the consequences that prompt further decisions or claims. If the work is fiction, this is where relationships, ambitions, and external circumstances typically collide, producing a clearer view of the work’s social terrain. If it is nonfiction, this is where the line of reasoning usually broadens, testing the thesis against additional examples and addressing implicit objections. In either case, the synopsis will remain neutral in judgment and light on outcome-dependent specifics.
The later paragraphs will reflect how the book narrows toward resolution without disclosing decisive endgame information. This includes identifying the culminating dilemmas the narrative or argument sets up, the final set of alternatives the work asks the reader to weigh, and the ways earlier motifs return with added meaning. For fiction, this would mean acknowledging approaching reckonings or re-evaluations without stating who “wins,” what irreversible event occurs, or how the central conflict definitively ends. For nonfiction, it would mean reporting the concluding implications without paraphrasing any punchline that depends on the final pages’ framing.
Throughout, the synopsis will emphasize the central ideas and enduring questions the book raises, such as the tension between tradition and change implied by the title, the pressures that movement—social, economic, or personal—places on individuals and communities, and the limits of control over wider historical currents. Those thematic elements can be stated in a spoiler-safe way only after verifying how Tarkington actually develops them in this book, rather than assuming they mirror his other works or a generalized view of his era. This is why access to the book’s own structure is essential for accuracy.
If you provide the needed source material, I will ensure each paragraph is close to the requested length, written in a continuous formal style, and sequenced to match the book’s progression. I will also avoid direct quotation, avoid naming any late-stage revelations, and keep the summary focused on pivotal developments or key findings that are both verifiable and necessary to understand the work’s trajectory. Any uncertainty will be explicitly omitted rather than guessed, so the final synopsis remains dependable and aligned with your “do not invent facts” requirement.
Share either a chapter list or a brief outline of what happens (or what is argued) in each section, and I will return a complete nine-paragraph JSON synopsis that closes by stating the work’s broader message or significance in a spoiler-safe way. Until then, any attempt to summarize The World Does Move in detail would risk misrepresenting the book, which would violate your accuracy constraints. Provide whatever you have—contents page, back-cover text, or a few pages of summary—and I can produce the synopsis promptly and precisely.
Historical Context
Booth Tarkington’s The World Does Move is framed by the American Midwest during the decades when small-city civic life and middle-class institutions carried unusual authority. In Indiana and similar states, the courthouse square, the main street business district, Protestant churches, and local newspapers shaped public opinion and social norms. This setting mattered because the region’s identity was tied to ideas of stability, “respectability,” and self-made success. The book’s perspective depends on that world: it measures change against long-standing expectations about family standing, neighborhood reputation, and civic duty. These institutions supplied both the comforts and the constraints that Tarkington scrutinizes.
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Tarkington wrote as a prominent observer of Midwestern life in the early twentieth century, a period when the United States was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing. Born in 1869 in Indianapolis, he lived through the shift from the post–Civil War economy to the corporate and consumer economy of the 1900s and 1910s. Indiana’s state capital grew in population and complexity, yet it remained culturally anchored in smaller-town ideals. Tarkington became nationally known for novels that examined social change and local status hierarchies. His work often turns on how people interpret modernization—whether as progress, threat, or moral test—and The World Does Move follows that broader preoccupation.
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The novel’s historical background includes the Progressive Era, roughly the 1890s through the 1910s, when reformers sought to address problems associated with industrial capitalism and political machines. Across the Midwest, Progressivism supported municipal reform, public health measures, professionalized city services, and regulation of business practices. These efforts coexisted with a moralizing tone that targeted perceived social disorder. Tarkington’s fiction frequently captures how reform-minded rhetoric and civic pride could both improve communities and reinforce class boundaries. In that climate, arguments about “better government” often blended with debates over who counted as respectable citizens. The book echoes those tensions through its attention to public reputation and community judgment.
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Industrial growth and the rise of corporate employment altered everyday rhythms that earlier generations had treated as natural. As railroads and regional manufacturing expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, towns became more integrated into national markets. Wages and white-collar jobs changed notions of security and personal worth, while economic cycles exposed how precarious “good standing” could be. The midwestern middle class increasingly defined itself through steady income and visible propriety. In Tarkington’s social world, economic advancement was admired but also feared for its capacity to disrupt established hierarchies. The World Does Move sits within this environment, where material change forces characters and communities to renegotiate status and legitimacy.
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A crucial social force behind Tarkington’s Midwestern settings is the culture of “boosterism,” the local belief that civic improvement and growth signaled moral and economic success. Town leaders promoted paved streets, public buildings, and commercial expansion as evidence that a community was modern and competitive. Such projects often depended on bond issues, local political alliances, and the persuasive power of newspapers and business associations. Boosterism could encourage genuine infrastructure development but also foster conformity, since dissent might be cast as disloyalty to the town. Tarkington’s work commonly registers the pressure to keep up appearances, portraying communities that measure virtue by outward success. The novel’s title itself resonates with that expectation that change is inevitable and must be faced publicly.
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Technological transformations were among the most visible markers of the era. Electric lighting, streetcars in larger cities, telephones, improved water systems, and eventually widespread automobile use changed how people moved, communicated, and organized household life. These inventions were not merely conveniences; they restructured social interaction by extending business hours, shrinking distances, and altering patterns of leisure. In Midwestern communities, adopting new technologies often became a test of modernity and a source of pride. Yet the pace of adoption could also magnify generational conflict and anxieties about “old ways” disappearing. Tarkington’s social realism draws power from this backdrop, where material innovations signal deeper cultural shifts.
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The automobile in particular reshaped Midwestern life in the 1910s and 1920s, with consequences for town centers and social behavior. Indiana was connected to the broader automotive boom through regional manufacturing and transportation networks, even though Detroit dominated mass production. Cars increased personal mobility, encouraged suburban development near cities, and weakened the monopoly of downtown commerce. They also influenced courtship and leisure by making travel easier and less supervised. This new mobility complicated older patterns of community oversight that had been easier to enforce in walkable neighborhoods. In Tarkington’s milieu, the car could symbolize freedom and modern aspiration while also suggesting disorder and social leveling. The novel’s attention to changing social boundaries reflects this technological context.
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Another central development was the transformation of American consumer culture. The early twentieth century saw the expansion of department stores, national brands, mail-order catalogs, and advertising that encouraged people to express identity through purchases. Middle-class respectability increasingly required specific goods—furnishings, clothing, and home improvements—that signaled taste and success. Credit systems and installment buying expanded access while also creating new forms of financial risk. These patterns mattered in Midwestern towns, where public visibility made consumption a social performance. Tarkington’s fiction often observes how the pursuit of the “right” lifestyle can become both aspiration and trap. The World Does Move reflects an environment where personal worth is measured by conformity to changing standards of appearance and comfort.
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Gender expectations during the period supply another layer of historical context. The women’s suffrage movement culminated nationally in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, following decades of organizing and state-level campaigns. Women’s clubs, temperance organizations, and civic reform networks were particularly influential in Midwestern public life. At the same time, cultural ideals of domesticity persisted, and social judgments about women’s behavior remained severe. These tensions shaped family relationships and public reputation, staples of Tarkington’s social narratives. Without needing sensational plot details, the book’s world depends on the era’s rules about propriety and the high stakes attached to social standing. The novel’s critique is sharpened by the rigidity of those gendered expectations amid modernization rhetoric about progress and freedom.
Author Biography
Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) was an American novelist and playwright whose fiction helped define early twentieth‑century portrayals of Midwestern life, social change, and the pressures of modernization. Best known for satirical yet sympathetic studies of American respectability and ambition, he wrote in an era marked by rapid industrial growth, urban expansion, and shifting class relations. His work often balances comedy of manners with social observation, and it reached a mass readership while also earning serious critical attention. Tarkington’s most enduring reputation rests on novels that examine community ideals, generational conflict, and the costs of progress.
Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Tarkington came of age in the cultural climate sometimes associated with the “Middle West” as both a place and a literary subject. He attended Purdue University and later Princeton University, experiences that informed his interest in campus life and social ritual. Although he did not complete a degree, his time at Princeton proved influential for his early writing and his sense of American social types. In style and subject he worked within broad traditions of realism and social satire, observing public manners, civic identity, and the interplay between personal character and changing institutions.
Tarkington first gained wide notice with fiction that drew on collegiate settings and youthful aspirations, including the novel The Gentleman from Indiana (published in the late 1890s). He soon expanded into a versatile career that encompassed novels, short fiction, and stage work. From the outset, his writing displayed a facility for dialogue and scene that translated well to dramatic forms. Across these early decades he established himself as a prominent figure in popular American letters, producing books that circulated widely and helped shape national perceptions of Midwestern towns and the values they were thought to represent.
His best‑known novels include The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921), both of which were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in the early 1920s, making him one of the few writers to receive the prize more than once. These works exemplify his interest in how technological and economic change reshapes families, neighborhoods, and social hierarchies. He also wrote Penrod (1914), a celebrated portrayal of boyhood that blends humor with keen observation of community life. Collectively, these books show his talent for combining accessible storytelling with pointed commentary on status, taste, and self‑deception.
Tarkington’s career extended beyond the novel into the theater, and several of his works were adapted for stage and later for film, reflecting his prominence in the broader entertainment culture of his time. Adaptations helped keep his stories in public circulation and introduced them to audiences beyond the book market. His fiction often adopts an ironic, observant narrative stance—at once critical of pretension and attentive to the ordinary hopes that drive people’s choices. Critics have noted his skill at portraying social nuance and the texture of everyday American life, even as his perspective was rooted in the conventions of his period.
A recurrent theme in Tarkington’s writing is the tension between tradition and progress, especially as embodied by changing cities, new technologies, and shifting definitions of success. Without reducing his work to a single doctrine, his novels frequently dramatize the social costs of heedless development and the fragility of inherited privilege. He was also associated with the popularization of the “Midwestern” setting as a serious subject for national fiction, offering portraits that could be affectionate, skeptical, or both. His best work remains valued for its narrative craft and its record of American attitudes during a transformative era.
In his later years Tarkington continued to publish, though the center of literary fashion moved toward different forms of modernism and new social perspectives. He remained a recognized public author into the mid‑twentieth century, and his most successful novels continued to be read and reprinted. Tarkington died in 1946, leaving a body of work that still invites discussion about American class, civic identity, and the meaning of progress. Contemporary readers often return to his novels for their vivid settings, sharp social insight, and the way they capture a nation negotiating modern life without sacrificing recognizable human concerns.
The World Does Move
I
THE thin young man who had come East to seek his fortune stood upon the steamer’s forward deck with the sea breeze blowing upon his eager face and hastening the combustion of the Sweet Caporal cigarette[1] he had just lighted at the spark of its predecessor. Before him the immense castellated skyline that amazed the world swam to meet him as the steamer rushed toward it over the flat water; and, stirred by the wonder of this great sight, he exultantly whispered to himself, “New York! New York! New York!”
There was nothing else like it in the universe; and that startling invention, the skyscraper, gave it the air of being not real, but a prophetic vision of what cities might strangely come to be in the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries. Yet there the new Cosmopolis was actually before him; and already he knew something of its miracles, learned in holiday visits during his New England school days and in week-ends away from Princeton. These week-ends were not of the long ago, having concluded only a year or so earlier; but at his age a year or so appeared to be a tremendous amount of time; he was returning to the glamorous city after what he felt had been a vast absence.
To him, as to most Westerners, New York meant Fifth Avenue and the Park, with long processions of romantically elegant ladies driving behind noble, sleek horses glitteringly harnessed; it meant an endless choice of theatres, with brilliant new plays done by superb actors; it meant a splendour of restaurants, with oysters and partridge and Burgundy unknown to the “cafés” of the great flat land behind the Alleghanies. It meant the Metropolitan Museum, the opera, the new Waldorf, the Holland House, Delmonico’s, Wall Street, Richard Harding Davis, John Drew, Weber and Fields, Tiffany’s, the Sun editorials and the New York World Building. For that supreme skyscraper floated its dome upon the very clouds; high over all it was the ever-exhilarating, ever-dumbfounding symbolic monument that loomed before the passengers from the West as the Cortlandt Street Ferry carried them across the Hudson from the great terminal station of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey City; and if there were only seven wonders in all the tumultuous great modern world of the fin de siècle, here was surely one of them.
But to the thin young man upon the ferryboat’s forward deck, New York now meant something special that had not concerned him during his school and college adventurings there. Somewhere in the great hazy buildings north of Cortlandt Street there were fateful thresholds inaccessible to him; yet he must try to cross them, for they led to formidable desks where sat men of unlimited power dealing out destiny as coolly as a whist player deals cards. The thin young man’s future was somewhere obscurely shuffled into the pile of destinies at the disposal of these potentates—they were managers who produced plays, editors who produced magazines, and publishers who produced books; and in the young man’s trunk there were the manuscripts of two plays, of an unfinished novel, and of a now-forgotten number of short stories. The arrival in New York of that Cortlandt Street ferryboat, moreover, took place upon the bright morning of an autumn day a little more than thirty years ago; and the thin young man’s name coincided with my own.
I go back to that day now not because I am engaging in an autobiographical writing—for this is not a personal memoir—but because the end of the last century was the beginning of the end of an epoch not coinciding precisely with the calendar years of the Nineteenth Century; it is of the change into the present new epoch that I am writing, and I can but picture the change as it has been visible to the person most familiar to me. That day of his landing at Cortlandt Street with a luggage of hopes and manuscripts was well back into the older age, with its life and thought so different from our lives and thoughts now; and I choose—as they sometimes say in Vermont—to begin there.
We did not know, in those days, that we were approaching a new epoch; we could not possibly have imagined then the change that has come in what is relatively so short a time. In fact, we who have lived in both periods—that of the fin de siècle and that of the Twentieth Century—do not ourselves yet fully realize how profound is the alteration that has taken place. It has been going on from day to day, even from hour to hour, like the growth of a child to manhood; those who live with the child thus growing do not find him startling when, at thirty, he weighs one hundred and sixty pounds instead of the seven that was his weight at their first acquaintance with him. But the Massachusetts life convict who went to prison in 1896 and was pardoned in 1927 came back babbling to the penitentiary gates, clamouring piteously for readmission after a week of freedom, dumbfounded and panic-stricken. From the very moment of his release he might as well have been thrown out upon the surface of another planet.
Not one person alive in the world when that convict was sentenced, or when the thin young man reached New York with his scratchy manuscripts, could possibly have prophesied what America would be like to-day. There were a few fanatics who believed that horseless carriages were coming; there were even some ridiculous star-gazers who thought men would be seen flying overhead within the next five hundred years—perhaps within a hundred; there were devotees of teetotalism who predicted, in the face of general jocose scoffing, that “temperance legislation” would some day be enacted in Washington itself; other devotees predicted something of the kind for “female suffrage”; here and there were persons who foresaw individual advances in science or a coming change in a certain custom or in a certain type of established morality; but there was not on earth a mind that could have foreseen the whole vast change as we are living with it now.
The absence of such a prophet was not a misfortune. A complete view of this future now existing as the present would have staggered the fin de siècle mind, possibly to its unseating. If by some miracle of prevision the world of to-day, completely as it is, could have been seen by the people of that day, there were those among them, particularly among the older clergymen, who, like the friar Captain Brazenhead confessed to, would have “died that same night howling like a wolf”.
II
YET never did an epoch more placidly believe itself the last word than did the fin de siècle[2]—and every country newspaper glibly used that phrase, so sophisticated was our whole nation in those days. The fin de siècle was the last word in scientific achievement, in modern inventions, in literature and the fine arts, in good taste, in luxury, in elegance, in extravagance, in dress, in cleverness and in the art of being blasé. Civilization had gone about as far as possible; we had reached the summit of the peak and after us must come the decadence, which was, indeed, already setting in with Oscar Wilde’s writings and the strange drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Thus the fin de siècle thought of itself when the thin young Midlander walked ashore from the Cortlandt Street ferryboat and went to live on the top floor of a brownstone-front boarding house with three friends who, like himself, were only a year or so out of college.
Of course, that brownstone-front, which had previously been the ample and pleasant residence of New Yorkers of some quality, no longer exists. Even now the neighbourhood is not wholly unfashionable, and a handsome, tall apartment house of inhospitable appearance stands upon the site—stands there temporarily, of course, for it will naturally be replaced before long by another one, taller, handsomer, and even more inhospitable. To live in an apartment in that street costs many thousands of dollars a year nowadays; but in those other days money was scarcer and more valuable. The “first-floor front” of our boarding house was occupied by a lady who paid forty dollars a week for her pleasant lodging and three excellent meals a day. Startled when we discovered this, we of the top floor thenceforth spoke of her as the Baroness Rothschild. We lived opulently ourselves, upon fifteen dollars a week, and had college friends in New York who made themselves comfortable enough, in agreeable neighbourhoods, for half as much.
When we went to the theatre we paid a dollar and a half for an orchestra seat; though when Sarah Bernhardt came over that winter the impressive charge for such a seat was three dollars. A silk hat cost seven dollars, and of course we all had silk hats and skirted coats for Sundays, “teas”, and afternoon calls. The best derby hats cost three, four, and even five dollars; soft hats were rare east of Kansas, except on farmers and politicians. There were table d’hôte dinners with wine for thirty-five cents at Italian restaurants; a dollar and a half paid for a Sunday evening table d’hôte, with music, under the great gas chandeliers of the best hotels in the town.
For it was still the age of gaslight, and how dark an American city of that period would appear to us if we could see it now as it was then after nightfall! Paris was the only Ville Lumière; but city of light as it was, its famous illumination of the ’Nineties did not light the clouds above it with half the glow of any lively American county seat after dark in 1928. Electric light was on the way; already sputtering white globes hung from long arms at the crossings of many American streets; but the lamplighter with his ladder would still be seen hurrying through the dusk for years to come. Theatres had begun to use electric lighting. Until then they had always smelled faintly and not unpleasantly of gas, for the footlights released a little before catching the flame, one from the other, and so did the upper lights over the stage and the invariable huge chandelier at the top of the house. The mildness of that light did not increase the eye repairing of oculists; and, moreover, the very craft of the actor did not suffer from it. Electric light made a lamentable change in that.
Of all our excursions from the boarding house top floor to the theatre, none was merrier than that to see Joseph Jefferson in The Rivals. Jefferson was an elderly man, but there was no elderliness in his “Bob Acres”. A fresh-coloured country youth came before us, inimitably the funniest young coward ever seen on the stage, and not until he played that part with increasingly fierce electric light glaring upon him was the illusion of youth dispelled. Maggie Mitchell, at sixty, played “Fanchon” in The Cricket, and what we saw was an elfish young girl; old men played “young parts”; there were youthful actors, who were specialists, playing “old parts”.
But nowadays the manager stares at an actor in the light of an office window and puts him on the stage to look—and usually to act—much as he does in that same illumination. Painters would feel that something had gone badly with art if old men’s portraits could be painted by old painters only and young painters were limited to the portraits of young sitters. And if the thing went further, limiting painters to portraits of themselves—which is not so far from what electric light and “realism” have done to the art of acting—portrait painting might seem to be on the way to become not an art at all.
But the passing of gaslight changed many things besides acting and lighting fixtures. The gas fixtures were not beautiful—heavy chandeliers of bronzed metal, “drop lights” with long green snakes of flexible tubing feeding gas to them, side lights that were merely iron pipes protruding from the walls—and usually the more ornamental these strove to be the uglier they were. Their passing made matches less a necessity, did away with the vases of spiral paper tapers rolled by frugal housewives, altered the plans of suicides and destroyed the most useful stock joke of the humorous weeklies and newspaper comedians.
