On the Margins: Lodgers and Boarders in Boston, 1860-1900

Abstract

Few concerns were as important to urban reformers at end of nineteenth century as fate of community and family in city. Boston's reformers shared that generic concern but focused more than most groups on increasing popularity of lodging house. Lodging attracted attention because it seemed to promote a kind of antisocial behavior inimical to family and community ties, alienating native and newcomer alike from bulwarks of order. Robert A. Woods, head of Boston's first settlement house, saw lodging as a key element in the advance of irresistible forces . . . pushing all earlier types of American life entirely outside confines of old Boston. To counter such threats to urban community, Woods and other reformers urged revitalization of such traditional instruments of stewardship and socialization as neighborhood, parish, and boardinghouse. Their explicit distinction between family life of boardinghouse and lonely self-absorption of lodgers replaced vaguer image of life outside primary family common at midcentury. By 1900 a nostalgia for boarding provided many reformers with a dramatic contrast to dangers, even moral shipwreck, fostered in lodging house. It is a contrast that merits historical attention. 1 Boarding ideally functioned as a surrogate for family, shielding transient individuals from uprooting forces of migration. It was family's agent in