It has a Victorian-era title page, which is not surprising because it lists a publication date of 1899. In differing fonts and sizes, it reads:

Darkness and Daylight in New York

Or

Lights and Shadows of New York Life

A Woman’s Pictorial Record of Gospel, Temperance, Mission, and Rescue Work “In His Name”

With Thrilling Personal Experiences by Day and Night in the Underworld of the Great Metropolis and Hundreds of Thrilling Anecdotes, Incidents, Humorous Stories, Touching Home Scenes, and Tales of Tender Pathos, Drawn from the Bright and Shady Sides of Life Among the Lowly

By Helen Campbell, City Missionary and Philanthropist

Contributions by Thomas W. Knox, Author and Journalist

Thomas Byrnes, Late Chief of New York Detective Bureau

Including an Account of Byrnes’s Thirty Years’ Experiences Written by Himself from his Private Diary

With an Introduction by Lyman Abbott, D.D.

Superbly Illustrated with Two Hundred Fifty Engravings from Special Photographs Taken from Life Expressly for this Work, Mostly by Flash-Light.

Chapter headings follow a similar pattern. For example:

“Up Slaughter Alley, or Life in a Tenement House—A Tour Through Homes of Misery, Want, and Woe—Drink’s Doings.”

“Night Mission Work—New York Streets After Dark—Rescue Work Among the Fallen and Depraved—Searching for the Lost—An All-Night’s Missionary’s Experience.”

“Lurking Place of Sin—Face to Face with Crime—Cellar Haunts and Underground Resorts of Criminals—The Touching Story of Jim, an Ex-Convict.”

I plucked the book, knowing nothing about it, from the shelves of an obscure library. Riffling through it, I immediately saw that it was superbly illustrated. I don’t know why photographs were not directly used, but the engravings made from them showing the lives and habitats of the “lowly” were outstanding. (The introduction made clear that the photographs often made by “Flashlight” were made through the use of magnesium flashes.)

I started reading the book and found that the 450 Helen Campbell pages clearly and fluidly written and presented a view of New York City life on the eve of the twentieth century seldom presented elsewhere.

I knew nothing about the author, and only after finishing the book did I look her up. She was born in 1839 and was raised in comfort. Her father practiced law in New York City for fifty years and was involved in banking.  She married when she was twenty but got divorced. (She sometimes used the name Helen Campbell and sometimes Helen Campbell Stuart.) As a young woman, she wrote successful children’s book but soon expanded her writing horizons to the new field of home economics and conducted important studies on the conditions of women wage earners. She was a prolific and influential author but had never entered my sight before.

She drew conclusions and insights startling to the modern eye. For example:

She asserted that the Irish form the larger portion of the poor class. “They retain all the most brutal characteristics of the Irish peasant at home, but without the redeeming light-heartedness … with no capacity for enjoyment save in drink. . . . With a little added intelligence they become Socialists, doing their heartiest to ruin the institutions by which they live.”  The ethnic references dotting the book made me think about today. Should I be shocked that we still have similar comments about Venezuelans, Mexicans, and Somalis now or should I take the half-full approach and think just as the ethnic stereotypes of the past have faded, so too will the ones today?

Campbell was not alone in her ethnic concerns. The contributor Thomas W. Knox, Author and Journalist, also had his ethnic observations. He wrote that a police captain told him that the Chinese live in conditions “that would be repugnant to an American . . . and they are not over particular on the subject of ventilation. But they wash themselves oftener than do the Italians, and they shave their heads and braid their queues with a care that everybody must commend.”

He switched ethnic groups and perhaps surprisingly gave some praise: “Pawnbrokers are not all Hebrews, though the pawnbroking business is generally thought to be entirely in Hebrew hands. But whatever they may be, they are good judges of values of articles offered to them; and the man that cheats a pawnbroker must get up very early in the morning.” (I learned that even then pawnbrokers were regulated as to interest, the length goods had to be held, and the necessity for public auctions for the sale of goods.)

Campbell also had comments about gender, including, “Why girls should be less susceptible of reformation it is hard to say, save that the special sins to which they are liable are weakening to both brain and body, and thus moral fibre is lacking in greater degree than with the boy.”

Knox also had comments on reform. For example, he said that detectives report that only four in one hundred criminals ever reform. “They attribute half the criminality in the land to laziness, and the other half to immoral reading and the temptations and instructions of successful criminals.” I know that reform is still hard, but I doubt that many would attribute today’s criminality to “immoral reading,” just as I doubt that such reading caused half the criminality back then.

One of Campbell’s comments, however, certainly resonates today: “Not the least surprising experience of one who has learned to know the slums in every aspect is the flat denial of most New Yorkers that they exist save in the slightest degree.” Whether we acknowledge slums or not, few of us seek to know about the life of the lowly.