George Lippard’s Quaker City: A Tale of Murder, Scandal & the Theatre

George Lippard’s phenomenally successful (though largely forgotten) novel The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845) is a lurid, darkly comic and grotesque fictionalization of a real-life murder that shocked the city of Philadelphia. We’ll explore the author and the book, as well as what transpired when the Chestnut Street Theatre sought to stage a dramatic adaptation of Lippard’s novel amidst the most violent era in the city’s history.