Reviewed by Stephen Carl Arch | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 656 words from this article are provided below; about 560 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Stephen Carl Arch | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia. By Simon P. Newman . Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 211. $47.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.) Reviewed by Stephen Carl Arch , Michigan State University
The enamel painter and engraver William Russell Birch immigrated to the new United States in 1794 and settled in Philadelphia. Impressed with the city's order and optimistic about its future, he soon began work on a series of engraved views of the city, brought out in 1800 as The City of Philadelphia as It Appears in the Year 1800, the first series of its kind published in the United States. Birch's goal in these engravings was not to produce (what we might call) photographic realism. Nor was it to "illustrate" what a fellow Philadelphian, Charles Brockden Brown, referred to in the "Advertisement" to his novel Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) as "some important branches of the moral constitution of man." Birch was a booster, and in his views of the "Bank of the United States in Third Street," the "Pennsylvania Hospital in Pine Street," and other buildings and locales, Philadelphia is tidied up and spruced up to represent an idealized Enlightenment city of order and harmony. Birch might have been working for a modern Chamber of Commerce. In his engravings there is, for example, none of the messiness and illness and dirt of Brown's novel of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Edgar Huntly (1799). The streets are swept clean, the buildings and wharves are new, the people on the streets are orderly and businesslike. In Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia, Simon Newman reprints a number of these views of the city and points out that among the things missing from them are the poor of Philadelphia. We know they existed, but where are they?	1
Newman finds traces of the poor in the public records kept by city officials in Philadelphia in the 1790s. Five of the six chapters of this book draw evidence from discrete, substantial bodies of records kept by officials of the state or church. Chapter 1, for example, entitled "Almshouse Bodies," surveys the Daily Occurrence Dockets kept by Joseph Marsh at the Philadelphia Almshouse from 1787 to 1797. Chapter 3, "Hospitalized Bodies," looks at the annual accounts published by the managers of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Sick Poor for 1796, 1797, and 1801 as well as at admissions records to the hospital from 1804–1808. Chapter 6, "Dead Bodies," studies burial records kept by the Reverend Nicholas Collins at the Swedish Lutheran Gloria Dei church in the suburb of Southwark. In each of these chapters, Newman pries open the specific body of evidence with care and insight, building his argument from specific instances in the records.	2
What he is most interested in, as the title of his book suggests, is the body as a text: "how social class and condition molded the bodies of the lower sort in ways that reveal a great deal about the physical nature of their lives and deaths" (p. 14). What he finds, repeatedly, is a tense interplay between this shaping of the body and the way poorer citizens resisted regulation and control by their betters. The bodies of the poor were "both acted upon and active, a contested terrain" (p. 168 n.5), Newman argues. Thus, for example, the bodies of seamen, examined through physical descriptions on applications for Seaman's Protection Certificates filed in Philadelphia between 1796 and 1819, reveal marks of the physical labor at sea (scars, lost limbs, short stature) and tattooed designs that articulated and affirmed the sailors' personal convictions and private connections. In case after case involving the poor, the "very appearance of the body ... [manifested] a tension between the body as property [or commodity] and the body as a free and independent entity" (p. 96).	. . .

There are about 560 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.