Families of John and Jake, The.
[Dietrick, Ellen Battelle]. The Families of John and Jake. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1886. 8vo, original printed yellow wrappers, 21 pages. First edition. A reforming work on improving the slums, from the woman’s suffrage activist and author Ellen Dietrick, who here contrasts the families of “John” (the family arises from humble beginnings through hard work and thrift, but once wealthy neglects their Christian duty to aid the urban poor) with the families of “Jake” (a similarly humble lad who rises to become an idle drunken loafer with numerous children and a worn-out wife, and who “earned considerable money at election times, selling himself to the highest bidder”). After a number of dramatized comparisons between the two families (to the advantage of neither), Dietrick outlines a plan of rational early education, punitive civic labor for vagrants, model tenements, and cooking schools. A little soiling and wear; a very good copy.
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