Abstract
HROUGHOUT the eighteenth century, Oscar Handlin has shown, few outsiders took up residence in Boston. [T]here was no room for strangers; its atmosphere of cultural homogeneity, familiar and comforting to self-contained Bostonians, he observed, rigidly forbidding to aliens.' As the colonial cities of New York and Philadelphia grew large in size and cosmopolitan in character, Boston remained provincial. Although the early decades of the century seemed to presage prosperity, by the late 1730s, imperial wars, smallpox epidemics, serious fires, and economic slumps compounded the twin problems of economic and demographic stagnation. A rigid social structure and proscriptive legislation against theatrical and other public entertainments reinforced the community's provincialisms, which one inhabitant decried as so disgusting to strangers.3 In 1770, when Philadelphia's population
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