The first “Great American Novel” came, not from Boston, or from Philadelphia, or from New York, but from Pittsburgh, where Hugh Henry Brackenridge published the first part of his Modern Chivalry in 1792.

Yes, we have a literary tradition 220 years old, and when it comes to the Great American Novel we have Boston, Philadelphia, and New York beat. From the ordinary reader’s point of view, it’s a rambling shaggy-dog tale that goes nowhere and has a great deal of enormously clever fun getting there. From the historian’s point of view, it’s an unrivaled view of life as it was lived in western Pennsylvania in the early years of the Republic.

Brackenridge kept adding to his book until at least 1815, and made numerous corrections throughout his life. This first posthumous edition is thus probably the closest to what he intended the thing to be, although in spite of its the printer’s “great pains to expunge” the mistakes of previous editions, this one has more than its share of errors.

Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of a Captain and Teague O’Regan, His Servant. By H. H. Brackenridge, late a Judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, 1819.

Volume I.

Volume II.

In the late nineteenth century Pittsburgh had a thriving publishing industry, nourishing some writers who would make names in the world. Mr. William J. Kountz, Jr., might well have become one of America’s most popular humorists, except that he died at the age of not quite thirty-two, having written only enough to fill a little book of less than a hundred pages.

But that little book of Billy Baxter’s Letters went everywhere. It was distributed as a promotion by the Duquesne Distributing Company of Harmarville, a maker of liver tonics, or what Pittsburghers today would call “pop.” Father Pitt himself has two copies, and Project Gutenberg has helpfully digitized the book here:

Billy Baxter’s Letters (Project Gutenberg)

A good scanned copy of the book can also be found at Google Books:

Billy Baxter’s Letters (Google Books)

The sketches are in the form of letters from “Billy Baxter” of Pittsburg (so spelled in those days) to his friend Jim. Mr. Baxter writes about the ordinary things that might happen to a Pittsburgh gentleman of 1899, such as getting drunk and spending a good deal of money:

Yesterday at 2:30 I had a hundred and ten dollars; this morning I’m there with a dollar eighty, and that’s the draw out of a two-dollar touch. If there is any truth in the old saying that money talks, I am certainly deaf and dumb to-day. Besides I have a card in my pocket which says I’ve opened up a running account of thirty-two forty at George’s place. I wonder if this George is on the level, because I’ll swear I don’t think I was in there at all. I’ll bet he stuck the forty on anyway. You know me, Jim; I am one of those bright people who tries to keep up with a lot of guys who have nothing to do but blow their coin. I stood around yesterday and looked wise, and licked up about four high-balls; then I kind of stretched. Whenever I give one of those little stretches and swell up a bit that’s a sign I am commencing to get wealthy. I switched over and took a couple of gin fizzes, and then it hit me I was richer than Jay Gould ever was; I had the Rothschilds backed clear off the board; and I made William H. Vanderbilt look like a hundred-to-one shot. You understand, Jim, this was yesterday.

Looking at the Google Books version, Father Pitt turned up a strange anomaly. Several good illustrations are included in the book, all in the same style. Here’s one:

This is from the Google Books copy. Father Pitt’s copy has this illustration:

Why a new illustration? All the others are the same in both editions. In fact the only other difference is that Father Pitt’s copy has a letter, missing in the Google Books copy , from Admiral Dewey, thanking the publishers for the book, along with this notice:

We also sent a copy to His Royal Highness, Albert, Prince of Wales, and, having heard nothing from him, it now looks as though Al were going to snub us. Under the circumstances, when he runs for King we can’t be for him.

The change in illustrations is a mystery; both are good, and there was no reason to abandon one for the other. The only explanation Father Pitt can come up with is that perhaps the original plate was damaged, and the original artist was not available to replace it.

The name “Carnegie” is everywhere in Pittsburgh: four museums, libraries everywhere, a great university, among other things. Just how much did Andrew Carnegie spend on gifts to the people of Pittsburgh? A 1915 guide to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) tallies it up:

It sounds like quite a bit of money. But how much was that worth in 1915? The same guide gives us an interesting point of comparison:

John Quincy Adams, Daguerreotyped in 1843, the year he visited Pittsburgh. Could a new two-volume edition of Modern Chivalry be among the books on the table behind him?

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An interesting pamphlet has just appeared on Project Gutenberg:

Ex-President John Quincy Adams in Pittsburgh (1843)

It consists of a speech by Wilson McCandless (who gave his name to the Town of McCandless, Allegheny County’s most perfectly square township) welcoming Mr. Adams, Adams’ speech in reply, and some correspondence between the two men.

McCandless sent Adams the new edition of Modern Chivalry by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and it’s very interesting to read Adams’ opinion of the work. He had read and loved it as a young man, and he expects it to be a permanent part of the world’s literature. Whether it has lived up to that expectation is debatable; it is not always in print like the works of Hawthorne, but on the other hand it is reprinted often enough that it could not quite be called forgotten. At any rate, Pittsburgh has at least the honor of having made one of the first substantial contributions to American fiction, and can claim a literary culture well over two centuries old.

Here we have a short film, whose source is unidentified, of some of the cleanup after the St. Patrick’s Day Flood in 1936. It seems to be amateur footage, but it’s good enough to show us what a mess everything was. (It seems to be impossible to embed correctly on wordpress.com, so you’ll actually have to leave this site to see it. But hurry on back.)

In the 1890s, a department store in Pittsburgh that made any pretense to customer service would need a multilingual staff. Here’s an 1892 advertisement for Kaufmann’s from the Volksblatt, one of three German daily newspapers in Pittsburgh at the time. From this advertisement we can gather that a gentleman could be a gentleman with or without a cigar, but no gentleman who pretended to fashion would venture forth without his stick.