Boarding Out

On March 18, 1842, Walt Whitman declaredin the pages of the New York Aurora: “it will perhaps surprise many persons to hear, but it is no less true, that half the inhabitants of the city hire accommodations at [boarding] houses.” Whitman went on to discuss the expansiveness and diversity of boarding: Married men and single men; old women and pretty girls; milliners and masons; cobblers, colonels, and counter jumpers; tailors and teachers; lieutenants, loafers, ladies, lackbrains, and lawyers; printers and parsons ... all ‘go out to board.’ Whitman was known to enthusiastically exaggerate on occasion, but even if he was only partially accurate it is clear that boarding was a significant and common experience in the rapidly expanding antebellum city. As such, the act of boarding deserves this book-length account by David Faflik. Boarding is also of particular scholarly interest, as Faflik observes, because its lack of significant existence in the United States today has left it a largely forgotten subject. Not precisely like apartment dwellers or hotel guests, boarders typically ate their meals together, used the boardinghouse as their primary residence, stayed for several weeks to several months, and were brought to boarding by the employment opportunities available in the burgeoning cities. There is something unfamiliar about boarding because it mixes so thoroughly the public and private. Thus, it does not fit neatly, as Faflik demonstrates, into the main conceptual categories for understanding antebellum social arrangements: the domestic sphere and the street scene. It is somewhere in between

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