"Oldtown Folks" (1869) is Mrs. Stowe's most effective and least adulterated novel. The people of the story are many and varied, ranging from Sam Lawson, the village Rip Van Winkle, to the choicest of Old Boston adornments of society. While the book had no social purpose it had the avowed narrative "object ... to interpret to the world the New England life and character in that particular time in its history which may be called the seminal period"--a statement followed by the complacent and thoroughly provincial assertion that "New England was the seed-bed of this great American Republic, and of _all_ that is likely to come of it." It should be remembered in Mrs. Stowe's defense that when she wrote these words the cleavage between North and South could account for many asperities from both sides and that to most Easterners "Trans-Mississippi" meant territory rather than people. In "breadth of canvas," to resort to the slang of criticism, "Oldtown Folks" is in Mrs. Stowe's whole output what "Middlemarch" is in George Eliot's. It is filled with popular tableaux--in the old Meeting House, in the Grandmother's Kitchen, at the Manor House, in the coach on its grave progress to Boston, in the school and its surroundings; and it is red-lettered with festivals in which the richest flavor of social life in the early nineteenth century is developed. As a life story of the four youthful characters it does not linger vividly in mind. One does not recall them and their subjective experiences half so clearly as one does their intellectual and social and material surroundings. Yet the shape of their life experience was determined by just these external influences; and how clearly they belonged to a bygone period appears at a glance of comparison with any similar twentieth-century story.[26] [26] This distinction is valid even though the Oldtown folks belonged to Mrs. Stowe's childhood. The Andover of her later years was Oldtown in all essential respects. Margaret Deland's "The Iron Woman," for example, is a companion picture of four young people, but with how great a difference! The new industrialism, the decline of a theology which is only a relic in the iron woman, Mrs. Maitland, the post-Victorian attitude toward sex and the family, suggest the vast change in the fashions of human thought in a half century; and this is no less convincing because the conclusions of Mrs. Deland's characters are practically identical with those of Mrs. Stowe's. With Mrs. Stowe marriage is a finality and sexual sin a damnation in the sight of God. With Mrs. Deland marriage is an expedient and a protection for the woman who may otherwise be abandoned, and sin is punished in remorse and loss of reputation. Mrs. Stowe is moved by the thought of hell; Mrs. Deland, by the possibility of Promethean tortures from within. And in the later book capital and labor loom up to afford the background supplied in the earlier story by the church and its communicants.