Today, during a fine lecture on the portrayals of tenement life in Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, our teaching assistant Kristen Highland discussed several books that draw on the “sunshine and shadow” made famous by Matthew Hale’s Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1869).
These included one that isn’t discussed much: Darkness and Daylight; Lights and Shadows of New York Life by three authors, reformist Helen Campbell, journalist Thomas Knox, and Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes. Kristen tells us that learned about Darkness and Daylight through a post over at Ephemeral New York.
Bryan and I came across Campbell in the the first chapter of Robert M. Dowling’s recent Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem, which is one of the books included in an essay-review that he and I have just finished for the journal American Literary History. Campbell’s account, which gives the volume its title, is subtitled “A Woman
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