CASEY

by Ramona Stewart ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 1968

In this extensively documented novel Ramona Stewart presents a vivid and arresting picture of what it was like for the Irish poor in New York a hundred years ago. Her elements are all melodramatic ones; the appalling conditions of the passage to the ""Golden Door"" which landed some of the immigrants, who were still alive, in the madhouse on Blackwell's Island; the incredibly Filthy tenements owned, sub-rosa, by the magnates of the day to whom the Irish gave their votes and/or their loyalties; the prostitution of children; the crippled and the maimed who worked on Vanderbilt's railroads ""at their own risk""; the Draft Riots in which the Irish turned, out of frustration, not on their oppressors but on the freed Negroes; and the politicos for whom the ""art of the possible"" was meat and drink. It is one of these political hacks whose story Miss Stewart tells. Tom Casey, a firefighter and young tough, rises within the Tweed machinery and beyond it through a plethora of city jobs until he becomes fire commissioner under Boss Kelly. Casey simply wants to make it; he has no scruples and no loyalty except self-serving ones. He has no sympathy for the likes of the Molly Maguires, or later for Henry George; he has nothing against the system so long as there is a place for him. And there will always be a place for the Caseys, Miss Stewart implies; venality will assure it. He is far more typically a product of poverty than the seeker after justice, or, in Casey's own time, the abolitionist whose moral stance may have cost him little. The interest of the novel is primarily sociological but the subject is absorbing and the author's treatment provocative.

Pub Date: March 18, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION