Without a Home

A prosperous family loses everything, and the daughter goes out to work in a New York shop — where the hours, the standing and the manager between them do what the fire could not. Roe was a Presbyterian minister and a chaplain at Gettysburg who turned novelist after the Chicago fire and outsold every American of his decade; this 1881 novel is his attack on shop conditions and on the opium the doctors handed out for exhaustion.