Poor Little Rich Girl

JULIA NEWBERRY'S DIARY--Introduction by Margaret Ayer Barnes & Janet Ayer Fairbank--Norton ($2.50).

"I have been twice to Florida, & three times to Europe. I have been to two boarding-schools, & gained a great many friends in diffirent ways. ... I have learned how to faint, & have inheirited a fortune. Have been through a long illness & had a terrible sorrow! And I might have been married if I had choosen . . . I have never sworn eternal friendship to anyone, nor written poetry since I was eleven years old." On her 17th birthday (Dec. 28, 1870), Julia Newberry thus cast up her accounts. This two-year diary of a last-century Chicago socialite is less kittenish and platitudinous than most of its kind, may seem surprisingly lively to modern readers who put family albums on a level with comic strips. It will be of special interest to Chicagoans whose grandparents figure--not always to their advantage--in its sprightly pages.

Julia Newberry was born with a good-sized silver spoon in her good-sized mouth. When her father died he left his wife and two daughters so well off that they could easily afford $60,000 to make over their town house into what everyone said was "the handsomest house in Chicago." The hall was 70 ft. long, and Julia had her own "studio." with a private staircase. They could also afford to leave it for summers in Richfield Springs, N. Y., visits to Utica, Manhattan, St. Augustine, Fla., extended grand tours abroad. Their U. S. travels were of course by "palace car" (early Pullman). Julia's plaints of their continual traveling, her vehement assertions that Chicago is her home, "worth all London Paris & New York put together," ring a little false, her boredom is a little showy; but she had another cause for ennui: ill health. Undergoing the rigors of a Manhattan dress-fitting one day she suddenly keeled over. Afterwards she admitted to her diary: "I always wanted to faint once, just to know how it felt; & it is very nasty; however heroines always faint, but authors never say it is because they are billious." This mysterious "billiousness" took her out of a fashionable Manhattan finishing school, sent her to European watering-places and seaside resorts (always fashionable places, however, where shoals of eligible young U. S. bachelors danced constant attendance), finally turned into a throat inflammation that carried her off, at 22, to a Roman cemetery.

Like other fashionable young ladies, Julia fancied her own tastes in literature, music and the arts; but. perhaps because of her scattered schooling, her spelling was not up to snuff. "Asparagrass . . . tasted diliciously"; to forward swains she could be "very fridged indeed''; of one Hooker Hammersly she states: "He is not the man for My Sister by a long short." She must have read even her favorite authors with half an eye: "I have just read Mrs Gasgells life of Charlotte Bronte, & enjoyed it immensely, almost as much as Jane Ayer." But she was often a shrewd observer. Of General Phil Sheridan she notes: "When anyone makes a commonplace remark or says something that does not interest him, he says, 'um, um, yes. yes,' in the most aggravating manner." She quotes, though without approval, the remark of an English fellow-traveler: "I think one always feels so cross & nasty if one gets up before noon, & then besides the world is not well aired before that time."

Julia lived in an exciting world, and knew it. She heard Adelina Patti sing, was carried away by Johann Strauss's conducting, thrilled to Col. Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte's eyewitness account of Balaclava, wrote exclamation-filled pages on the Franco-Prussian War, and mourned, as even a poor little rich girl could, the Chicago Fire which swept away their grand house, her studio with its private staircase.

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