A Hazard of New Fortunes

"William Dean Howells is not read much now, but he should be. He was one of the best-known writers of the time. A Hazard of New Fortunes may not be the greatest novel of the period, but it is quite important and very revealing. The plot is simple. Basil March and his wife Isabel are moving from Boston to New York where he becomes the editor of a magazine and is caught up in the social conflict of the period. Howells has a wonderful eye. He makes the Marchs’ house hunt an exploration of late 19th century New York. He takes you on a walk from working class to rich areas of the city. He introduces you to a cast of characters that range from radicals to the new rich. Howells is scrupulously fair and sympathetic to almost everyone he writes about, even those who are unfair to others. Howells gives his readers a sense of what it was like to live in New York City in the 1880s, amid vast disparities of wealth, as great political conflicts opened up. That is the power of the book. New York City, for Howells, was ‘the Great American City.’ During the Gilded Age, New York overshadowed all other American cities. New York became central because it is where capital flows. As capital centralized, New York gained great influence over other parts of the country. People make their money all over the country, but as inequality grows during the Gilded Age, the upper crust of society centers itself in New York. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The second reason New York became central was its diversity. New York was where immigrants from all over the world came. During the Gilded Age, New York was an industrial city. It was filled with mid-sized factories and workshops. New York became a place where the working poor congregated. The rise of a wealthy elite and the rise of wage labor came together in New York. In the 1870s and 1880s, before Brooklyn and Queens were incorporated into New York, these two groups were concentrated in Manhattan. New York City became one of the most densely populated places in the world; great wealth and great poverty rubbed right up against each other. The finance industry grew out of the Civil War. The Union fought on borrowed money. After the Civil War, the government no longer needed small savers to buy bonds to finance the federal government. So, banks turn to selling bonds to finance railroads and other enterprises expanded along with them. In the late 19th century, the United States built great railroads, which became the first large joint stock corporations. Nobody had the individual wealth to build these enterprises; they depended on borrowed money. During the Gilded Age, London rather than New York was the world financial center. But New York was the financial center of the United States. There is capital in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago; but the real money was in New York. It’s not so much the stock market as the bond market that developed in 1870s and 1880s New York. Then, in the 1890s, when the corporate model expanded to all sorts of enterprises, New York becomes even more important."