Produced by David Widger
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
By William Dean Howells
PART 1
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I beganto live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston, endingin 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercial metropolis inframing the experience which was wholly that of my supposititiousliterary adventurer. He was a character whom, with his wife, I haveemployed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much thehero and heroine of 'Their Wedding Journey' as the slight fable wouldbear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had foundmyself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask thecompany of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not to behad at once for the asking. When I began speaking of them as Basil andIsabel, in the fashion of 'Their Wedding Journey,' they would not respondwith the effect of early middle age which I desired in them. Theyremained wilfully, not to say woodenly, the young bridal pair of thatromance, without the promise of novel functioning. It was not till Itried addressing them as March and Mrs. March that they stirred under myhand with fresh impulse, and set about the work assigned them as peoplein something more than their second youth.
The scene into which I had invited them to figure filled the largestcanvas I had yet allowed myself; and, though 'A Hazard of New Fortuneswas not the first story I had written with the printer at my heels, itwas the first which took its own time to prescribe its own dimensions. Ihad the general design well in mind when I began to write it, but as itadvanced it compelled into its course incidents, interests,individualities, which I had not known lay near, and it specialized andamplified at points which I had not always meant to touch, though Ishould not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact. It became, tomy thinking, the most vital of my fictions, through my quickened interestin the life about me, at a moment of great psychological import. We hadpassed through a period of strong emotioning in the direction of thehumaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich seemed not so much todespise the poor, the poor did not so hopelessly repine. The solution ofthe riddle of the painful earth through the dreams of Henry George,through the dreams of Edward Bellamy, through the dreams of all thegenerous visionaries of the past, seemed not impossibly far off. Thatshedding of blood which is for the remission of sins had been symbolizedby the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago, and the hearts of those who feltthe wrongs bound up with our rights, the slavery implicated in ourliberty, were thrilling with griefs and hopes hitherto strange to theaverage American breast. Opportunely for me there was a great street-carstrike in New York, and the story began to find its way to issues noblerand larger than those of the love-affairs common to fiction. I was in myfifty-second year when I took it up, and in the prime, such as it was, ofmy powers. The scene which I had chosen appealed prodigiously to me, andthe action passed as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allowmyself to think such things happen.
The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartmenthouse which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room ofwhich I could look from my work across the trees of the little park inStuyvesant Square to the towers of St. George's Church. Then later in thespring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house on theBelmont border of Cambridge. There I must