Letters of Peregrine Pickle

Weekly letters written for the Chicago Tribune in the late 1860s under the name of Peregrine Pickle, on the gossip and amusements of a city growing faster than its manners: the social season, sleeping in church, the organ grinder, the circus, the wedding and everything before it, the Boston girl and the muscular Christianity of the Chicago pulpits. Upton was the critic who taught the middle west what to listen for, and here he turns the same ear on his own town. Fifty-nine plates, among them Hudson River views by Albert Bierstadt and Samuel Colman, give this Chicago of the pen its wider American frame.