AMERICA LOOKS AT SETTLING IMMIGRANTS AND POOR: WITH TWO AUTOGRAPH LETTERS
ADDAMS, Jane.
Twenty Years at Hull House with autobiographical Notes.
New York, Macmillan, 1910.
8vo, pp. 465, [1]; frontispiece photograph of Jane Addams, 11 plates and numerous illustrations; a very good, bright copy in original red cloth, illustration of Hull House blocked to upper board; two typed letters, signed by Addams in ink to William Scarlett, typed on blue Hull-House letterhead paper, corrections by hand, dated 30 December 1910 and 9 January 1911, tipped onto title-page; Scarlett’s ownership inscription and bookplate to pastedown and title.
First edition, second printing (issued in the same month and year as the first) of Jane Addams’s bestselling autobiography and account of Hull House, Chicago’s first settlement house for immigrants and the poor (the second in the United States), our copy with two autograph letters from Addams to her disciple, William Scarlett.
Social reformer Jane Addams (1860–1935) co-founded the Hull House Settlement in Chicago, and it quickly expanded to encompass an entire square block. ‘Of the four hundred settlement houses opened around the country before World War I, it was by far the most famous, most influential, and most innovative … [Addams] insisted that the settlement should have a “sterner and more enduring aspect” than mere philanthropy. She saw the provision of legal services, visiting nurses, a meeting place for ethnic clubs and labor unions, a boarding house for working girls, and a group of middle-class residents ready to mediate between neighbors and the city bureaucracy as evidence that Hull-House was a “commission merchant,” the middle agent uniting a cross section of Chicago residents around common civic goals’ (ANB).
Provenance:
William Scarlett was Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri, and one of the founders of the Grace Hill Settlement House in St Louis, based on Addams’s model for Hull House. The letters, addressed to Scarlett in New York, concern his attempts to invite Addams to speak at a dinner he is hosting; in both instances she declines. She writes: ‘I may be in New York … but if that is true I have promised to attend the Lincoln Day Celebration which is held at the Union Seminary. I think this day has been made use of by social workers for a long time’.
