| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926. By John Henry Hepp, IV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. ix plus 278 pp.).
The Middle-Class City offers a 'case study' in middle-class Philadelphians' efforts to order their city according to Victorian ideas of rationality, and to maintain their physical and cultural spaces in the face of challenges created by growth, an increasingly diverse population, and the erosion of the borders between classes. Hepp contributes to the literature on suburbanization, on the culture of consumption, and on the effect of unregulated capitalism and big business on individual industries like newspaper publishing, by examining Philadelphians' shared sense of themselves as members of a particular kind of culture: one ordered along rational principles, with appropriate divisions according to nature and function, and with a common faith in progress. In Hepp's view, the primary characteristic of the Victorian middle class was not a search for order as a defense against social change, but faith in rationalization and progress, embodied in both public and private spaces.	1
Hepp focuses on three kinds of public spaces to explore Victorian ideas of classification according to function, class, and audience: public transportation, department stores, and newspapers. Using a range of primary and secondary sources including the obvious (diaries, advertisements, maps) and the innovative (railroad timetables), Hepp attempts to show how middle-class Philadelphians constructed an increasingly compartmentalized urban environment in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Victorian enthusiasm for classification produced lively business and cultural districts in Center City, and a growing ring of bedroom communities inhabited by a middle class that was able to live with, but not among, the working classes and elites with which they shared the city.	. . .

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