Tassels on Her Boots

WARD MCALLISTER and his ‘Blue Room List’; the world and his wife, drawn by high-stepping horses, bowling along beneath Fifth Avenue’s arching shade trees; Boss Tweed and his Tammany boys grabbing off the money; Fisk and Gould and Vanderbilt and Morgan; Long Branch and Saratoga; James Gordon Bennett, and General Grant (and what will the boys in the back room have?); the Cooper Union and the Vigilance Committee. That we have-accepted the cosy cliché of ‘little old New York’ as an apt descriptive phrase for these goings-on is a serious sign of vocabulary starvation. New York in the ‘70s was a bold, bad, exciting town, whose glowing gas lamps cast a deceptive halo around a lot of unsanctified heads, whose social aspirants barred no clinches in manoeuvres for position, and whose streets, though pretty, were not very clean. There are three historical characters to one fictional in Arthur Train’s novel, and the genuine interest in the book centres on an able dramatization of those years after the Civil War when no one had heard of conservation, or anti-trust laws, and would just have laughed at them anyway. A nice enough little love story holds the book together, and the drawings are a delight.