Newly
discovered fragment of an unpublished novel about Philadelphia by
Owen Wister, author of The Virginian. Owen Wister is known
to most Americans as the creator of the heroic cowboy in The Virginian
(1902). Despite his success as a Western novelist, Wister's failure
to write about his native city of Philadelphia has been lamented by
many for the loss of a literary "might-have-been." If only, sighed
Wister's contemporary Elizabeth Robins Pennell in 1914, the novelist
could understand that Philadelphia was as good a subject as the Wild
West. Hence the surprise when James Butler uncovered a substantial
fragment of a Philadelphia novel, which Wister intended to call Romney.
Here, published for the first time, is the complete fragment of Romney
together with two of his other unpublished Philadelphia works.
Even in its incomplete state-nearly fifty thousand words-Romney
is Wister's longest piece of fiction after The Virginian
and Lady Baltimore. Writing at the express command of his
friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister set Romney in Philadelphia (called
Monopolis in the novel) during the 1880s, when, as he saw it, the
city was passing from the old to a new order. The hero of the story,
Romney, is a man of "no social position" who nonetheless rises to
the top because he has superior ability. It is thus a novel about
the possibilities for meaningful social change in a democracy. Although,
alas, the story breaks off before the birth of Romney, Wister gives
us much to savor in the existing thirteen chapters. We are treated
to delightful scenes at the Bryn Mawr train station, the Bellevue
Hotel, and Independence Square, which yield brilliant insights into
life on the Main Line, the power of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and
the insidious effects of political corruption.
Wister's acute analysis in Romney of what differentiates
Philadelphia and Boston upper classes is remarkably similar to,
but anticipates by more than half a century, the classic study by
E. Digby Baltzell in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia
(1979). Like Baltzell, Wister analyzes the urban aristocracy of
Boston and Philadelphia, finding in Boston a Puritan drive for achievement
and civic service but in Philadelphia a Quaker preference for toleration
and moderation, all too often leading to acquiescence and stagnation.
Romney is undoubtedly the best fictional portrayal of "Gilded
Age" Philadelphia, brilliantly capturing Wister's vision of old-money,
aristocratic society gasping its last before the onrushing vulgarity
of the nouveaux riches. It is a novel of manners that does
for Philadelphia what Edith Wharton and John Marquand have done
for New York and Boston.
"Like Wharton's best work, the unfinished Romney, along with Wister's
essays about Philadelphia society, remains striking for its examination
of American social pathologies that, despite changes in ethnic,
cultural and technological composition, remain virulently prevalent
today.—Kirkus Reviews
