And like any good character, the city changes over time. Like any other character in the book, Philadelphia feels the effects of the fever. The streets are deserted and trade is completely cut off from the city.
Once the fever strikes, however, the city turns into a nightmare vision of pain and suffering with corpses on every corner. Free blacks can walk the streets in safety thanks to the anti-slavery influence of the Quakers. There are West Indian women selling hot soup in the marketplace and lively conversations between merchants and lawyers, politicians and plebes underway in the coffeehouses. At first, the city is represented as a diverse melting pot of people, sounds, and colors, alive with commerce and merchant activity. Philadelphia is the place that Matilda loves so very much, and it comes to be a character of sorts in the book. The conversation includes Grandfather, a doctor, a government clerk, and a lawyer, all exchanging ideas and opinions on the epidemic though the doctor is clearly the medical authority on the matter, all the men have something to say. Take, for example, the discussion of the fever early on in Chapter 4 (4.17-4.27). Beating Starbucks to the punch by about two hundred years, eighteenth-century coffeehouses were a large part of the public sphere and were very important in the formation of things like public opinion. (And here we were thinking they just served coffee!) Grandfather and his friends frequent the place, as do lawyers, doctors, politicians, and merchants. The Cook family's coffeehouse is located in the city of Philadelphia, and is a site where people discuss news, politics, current events, and titillating gossip.
A Coffeehouse in Philadelphia, 1793 Cook Coffeehouse
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