Without a Home

A prosperous family loses everything, and the daughter goes out to work in a New York shop — where the hours, the standing and the manager between them test her harder than poverty did. Roe was a Presbyterian minister and a Union army chaplain who turned novelist after the Chicago fire and outsold every American of his decade; this 1881 novel is his attack on shop conditions and on the opium the doctors handed out for exhaustion. Fifty-three plates, among them Eastman Johnson and George Inness, follow the novel's course from home and warmth to the cold Atlantic and Greenland coasts.