Sheltered young ladies who had no one to take them to the theater remained at home and embroidered chaste mottoes on sofa pillows or played sentimental ballads on the piano. In provincial Terre Haute it was unheard of. It would have been a daring thing to do even in her home city of Chicago. Without male escort, without even a female companion, she was going to an evening performance of Macbeth. Her chin was tilted at a belligerent angle and for good reason. On a certain evening in November, Miss Judith Amory stood before her mirror in an Indiana boardinghouse and dressed to go to the theater. It was the decade following the Civil War.
And Edwin Booth was making his first midland tour since the tragedy of Ford's Theatre in Washington. Quack medicine, paper money, and Grant campaign buttons flooded the country. Eggs were selling at ten cents a dozen butter at eight and a third cents a pound. There was the usual post war wave of spiritualism the usual postwar depression. Edison's inventions and the fact that the Republican party was in power, times were not so very different then from now. Dumpty's egg and now expected them to put together again. The younger generation retorted that they had inherited a world which their elders had treated like H. The older generation complained that the younger generation was going to the devil. Returned veterans complained that civilians had all the jobs. The war referred to in conversation was not World War II,Ĭonversation, however, held a not unfamiliar ring. Gentlemen wore greatcoats instead of overcoats, and male quartets sang "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh." Hoops were going out, bustles were not yet in, but ladies achieved quite as telling effect with tight lacing and lasers of petticoats. Stagecoaches made six miles an hour, and one traveled by rail at the risk of one's neck. Those disturbances are recorded in this novel as the subjective experience of one of the characters, and to that extent the work is founded on fact but the story is fictitious and the people in no sense represent real persons living or dead.Ĭandles were still used to light one to bed kerosene lamps still exploded. The house was renowned for its hospitality and witnesses were not lacking to testify to the strange disturbances which in timehave tobecame a legend.
DARKROOM BOOTH 2 UPGRADE SERIES
In my great-grandmother's house in Indiana, shortly after the close of the Civil War, a series of extraordinary events transpired which were never satisfactorily explained.
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