Publisher's Synopsis
WE are glad to come across a book like Ups and Downs which reminds us, by its quiet story of domestic life in America, how on the other side of the Atlantic there are thousands and tens of thousands of homes of which the telegraph tells us nothing and of which newspapers never write. We are too apt to think of the United States as of a country of Erie Rings and Tammany Halls, of " six-shooters " and bowie-knives; where steamboat-boilers are always bursting, and railway bridges always breaking down; where rogues, instead of standing at the bar, sit on the Bench; where swindlers, if only on a big scale, are financiers, and where blustering bullies, if only end in an international arbitration, are jurists and patriots. We are too apt to think of New York and the New York Herald , of Congress and General Butler, of Bennett, Fisk, Jay Gould, Hamilton Fish, and Caleb Cushing.
We call to our mind too often the vulgarity which disgusts the traveler, and we forget the home life of which often enough the traveler sees nothing. Such a book as this reminds us that beneath all this froth - and very foul froth too-that is tossing about on the surface there is ever running a deep stream as pure as it is quiet. We find in it a set of steady middle-class folks who, for all that we are told, are as indifferent towards England as the ordinary Englishman is towards America, who are too much engaged in making love, in making their way in life, and in the two ends meet, to have time to think of the British Lion and the American Eagle.
We find, instead of the rash fierce blaze of riot in which the New York shoddy world so much delights, a life as homely and as picturesque as any that Mrs. Gaskell or George Eliot has described. Indeed we do not know whether the American provincial life is not more picturesque and more quaint than an we can find even with all the advantages of an old country. Mingled with the sober Puritanism of New England, which Hawthorne has so well described, there is to be found, from the constant and varied streams of emigration that set to its shores, the light-heartedness of the Celt, the homely simplicity of the German, and the still homelier simplicity of the Norwegian and the Swede. With all this there is the absence of grinding, depressing poverty, and the presence of nature still wild and untamed . To simple descriptions of such a simple life as this we gladly turn away from the extravagant novels of the present day.
As we read such a book as Ups and Downs, we get a kindlier feeling towards the honest folk of the North-Eastern and North-Western States, and feel ready to pity them rather than to condemn them for having at the head of their country so unprincipled a crew....
-The Saturday Review, Vol. 36
