History in fiction

What Edward Rutherfurd did in one fat novel — tell the history of New York City through fiction (New York, 2009) — Beverly Swerling did in four fat novels. Her death in 2018 prevented her from continuing that history into the 20th century, assuming that was ever her intent.

Following City of Dreams, City of Glory and City of God, her 2011 novel City of Promise covers the period from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s, or the time when the Brooklyn Bridge was under construction. This was the Gilded Age, when those who made fortunes in business thanks to the war enhanced those fortunes, when immigrants flooded into the city and when, to accommodate the growing population and growing business, developers started building up as well as out.

The story centers on one of these businessmen, Joshua Turner, who came out of the war with a wooden leg that in no way slowed his ambition. His bright idea is to build multi-story apartment buildings for the middle class. His even brighter idea is to marry Mollie Brannigan, a sharp-as-a-tack Irish woman who, because she is over 20 (and still a virgin despite growing up in her aunt's brothel), has resigned herself to spinsterhood. She meets Joshua while working at Macy's.

Yet this is also the period when the Boss Tweed political machine is in power and when criminal gangs are exercising power of their own. Then there is a rival businessman who made life miserable for Joshua when he was a Confederate prisoner of war and is now willing to do anything, including kidnapping or killing Mollie, to claim Joshua's success as his own.

Those in Joshua's corner include a resourceful dwarf who knows how to make steel, Mollie's aunt  whose business has provided her with many valuable contacts in the business world, and a pawnbroker who seems to know everything going on in New York but whose true loyalty remains in doubt until the end.

Swerling makes New York history an important part of her story while at the same time keeping it in the background, so readers may not even realize they are learning anything.