Bacon's Dictionary of Boston

To know a city as one knows a book or a person is a liberal education ; but how many modern cities can one know ? The nation of London, in De Quincey’s phrase, is far too enormous for any one who has not a Mezzofantian faculty of acquisitiveness. Those who feel at home in the City or at Covent Garden might be lost in St. John’s Wood or Bays-water. Rome, too, oppresses one, not by its area or its diversity of interests, but by the palimpsest character of its history; one never knows when one has dug down to the oldest city in it. To know Paris means to hunt restlessly and disappointedly for what lies behind the present, and to abandon knowledge for immediate sensation. New York, to most men, is a sort of Sunday edition of a metropolitan newspaper, — just as miscellaneous, and just as lacking in perspective. But there are cities less discouraging to the human mind, with which one may have a cheerful familiarity, and know as he knows a picture, a book, or a person. Such a city is Florence. Venice also may so be known, and one may take Verona as he would take an old missal. Edinburgh belongs in this category, and so does Boston.

Boston has fared well at the hands of historians. Drake and Shurtleff had, the one a dryasdust, the other a mellow antiquarian, habit, and each loved the town. The younger Drake gathered into a convenient hand-book the historic anecdotage of the city; and then the company of special students under Mr. Winsor s lead produced that monument to a living person, the Memorial History of Boston, a book which spread Mr. Emerson’s great hymn over four quarto volumes. This work, however, is rather a cyclopædia, to which one may refer. There is still room for a compact History which shall give a clear-cut profile view of a city so individual as Boston.

After all, a history of a city is like the biography of a living man ; every one perceives that it is incomplete, not merely as a narrative, but as a study of forces. If one could get a cross-section, that might serve better, and such a view is obtained by the useful hand-book¹ which Mr. Bacon has made anew out of his earlier book, improving, enlarging, and systematizing. The dictionary method, with its frequent cross-references, suits well the necessity of one who would make acquaintance with a city in any of the varied aspects which it presents ; for it is in concrete expressions that one learns the physiognomy, and any other arrangement than the alphabetical would either be practically inconvenient, or would reflect too much the personal caprice of the maker of the book. Mr. Bacon’s training as a journalist has helped him to that impartial, unbiased treatment of his subject which was requisite. He has reported cheerfully and without prejudice whatever he could discover worthy of note in the multiform life of the city. Cribb Clubs and churches, Dime Museums and Museums of Fine Arts, the North End and the Back Bay, the Long Path and Scollay Square, — nothing comes amiss. Civis est: civilis nihil ab se alienum putat.

This absence of partisanship is a capital quality in the maker of a dictionary of a city. We wonder how many citizens there are who would not betray in such a task their pet aversions or hobbies, or who, if of an antiquarian cast, would not throw themselves upon one side or the other of disputed questions. But Mr. Bacon treats Christ Church with judicial fairness, and might have stopped at all the hotels in the city, to judge from the uniform character which he gives them. Even the statue of Aristides, that looks piteously over the railings of Louisburg Square, does not get a hard word from him ; and when he wishes to relieve his mind in general upon the subject of Boston statues, he calls in Mr. Wendell Phillips and Mr. T. H. Bartlett. Possibly his professional enthusiasm leads him to go into unnecessary particulars respecting the newspapers of Boston, but we fancy the newspapers would be the last to discover that too much had been said about them. One good point in the book is the mention in connection with important buildings of the architects who designed them, and our chief criticism of the Dictionary is upon its treatment of the whole subject of the city’s architecture. The buildings which go to make up the structural city are like the persons who constitute its spiritual order. The great majority are commonplace to the eye, scarcely distinguishable from one another ; it is only now and then that one has a marked individuality. But these special instances, these persons among buildings, give character and distinction to the whole ; and while Mr. Bacon has noted the few churches and public institutions which everybody knows, he has failed to point out certain commercial buildings which in their way are equally noteworthy, and certain private houses which a stranger and even many an old citizen may never have seen, because his attention has not been called to them. A valuable service might also have been rendered if Mr. Bacon had indicated the birthplaces or residences of Bostonians eminent in public life, or in literature, science, or art. To be sure, many of the houses have disappeared before the stony step of business; but all have not gone, and a walk through the North End and West End could have been made more interesting if such facts had been more plentifully given.

The Dictionary is rather for the denizen than for the stranger ; at least, it is more completely a book for one living in Boston than a guide-book, like its companion. Boston Illustrated, which suits better the needs of a casual visitor. It tells one of many things in his city of which he has only vague information : of the various charitable institutions and clubs, — its information in this last respect being surprisingly full; of the neighborhoods of foreigners, like the Italian and Chinese quarters; of the nomenclature of streets ; of educational institutions. We suspect that most who read the article Catholic Theological Seminary will open their eyes in wonder, and mentally resolve to take an early horse-car to Brighton. We wish, when referring to the Public Latin School, Mr. Bacon had allowed himself to give one or two passages from Dr. Phillips Brooks’s oration,² one of the most admirable occasional addresses ever given in the city ; rare for its historic insight, its happy characterization, its personal reminiscences, and its generous reading of boy life. Either from that oration or from Dr. Dimmock’s memorial address, he ought to have given a picture of Dr. Francis Gardner, a figure in the last half-century of Boston history more vivid in many minds than the statue of Aristides in their eyes.

We should not have objected, either, if Mr. Bacon had made a separate article on Vandalism, grouping under it the cutting down of the Paddock elms, the leveling of the trees in Pemberton Square, the encroachments on the Common, the destruction of the Hancock House, and other stupidities and brutalities which the dumb city has suffered at the hands of the ignoble. In truth, the effect of a diligent study of this skillful little book is to make one believe that. Boston is a good town for a rational and not too restless a being to live in ; but that eternal vigilance is needful to preserve that which is sound in its life, to hold fast the old traditions, and to be on guard against the people born without ancestry, who are for rushing into a future that will, if they have their way, be a worthless past.