Tin-types Taken in the Streets of New York
Twelve New York characters get a chapter apiece in this 1890 collection by the newspaperman Lemuel Ely Quigg, the Tammany man getting two. Mr. Ricketty coaxes a Bowery pawnbroker’s wife into a string of pearls whose history he keeps vague. Absalom Jayres, counsellor, works out of an office lined with peerage books and sells poor families the dream of a lost British fortune. Bludoffski leans on a drunken millionaire for money to bring on the reign of anarchy. The Hon. Doyle O’Meagher prices a Supreme Court nomination at twenty thousand dollars and calls it a campaign assessment. Then comes Maggie, whose chapter ends in an alley and drops the comedy entirely. Cassell issued the book with fifty-three drawings by Harry Beard. Quigg was on the Tribune staff at the time, and it shows.
