'The Garies and their Friends' Summary

Webb was the second African American, after William Wells Brown, to publish a novel. Although The Garies and Their Friends received favorable reviews in England, it went relatively unnoticed in the United States during the 19th century, receiving little attention until editions were published in 1969 and 1997.

Although he did not publish another novel after The Garies and Their Friends, Webb wrote poems, articles, and two novellas, which were published in 1870 in The New Era, a weekly publication based in Washington, D.C., which had recently been taken over by Frederick Douglass as publisher. Webb is not known to have published any other works.

In the later 20th century, following the Civil Rights Movement and renewed appreciation for the works of minority authors, Webb's novel was reprinted in 1969 and critically appraised. (It was published in a new edition in 1997.) It was the first novel by an African American to focus on the lives of free blacks in the North, rather than those in slavery. It was the first "to treat passing in great depth and the first to show white mob violence against blacks in the North."

Its critique of northern white racism, including its satirical portraits of several "benevolent-minded" but patronizing white Philadelphians, may have made it unpalatable in the nineteenth century to the readers who had made sentimental abolitionist works like Uncle Tom's Cabin best sellers. Its frank and sympathetic portrayal of the Garies' mixed-race "marriage" would likely have offended progressive readers on both sides of the color line.

Critical perspectives on the novel since its 1969 republication have been mixed. While Webb is often faulted for his sentimentalism and his apparent embrace of white middle-class values, he has also been credited for his realistic portrayal of the tense relations between whites and blacks in Philadelphia, one of the most racially integrated cities in the United States at mid-century and one with an active abolitionist movement. It had been a major destination of Irish immigrants since the mid-century and, faced with their own struggles against discrimination, they competed with blacks for jobs, housing, and respect. Webb specifically features enmity of the Irish toward the blacks in Philadelphia in his novel; they form a mob attack against blacks and abolitionists.