The final stages of getting ready for my work commute resemble the preparations made by most professors: car keys must be located, along with student papers, lecture notes, and the mug of tea which accompanies me into my first class of the day. But some mornings include a few more steps culminating in a dilemma not faced by anyone born in the eighteenth century, namely relearning the art of driving a car while wearing shift, stays, petticoats, and gown. The petticoats get in the way of the gas pedal, the stays require sitting perfectly straight, and the sewing tools attached to the chatelaine at my waist hit against the clutch. But all these complications are worth the response when I walk into my classroom an hour later. “Wow,” said a student the first time I taught a class in period clothing. “You really get into this” (fig. 1). 

History classes often focus on political and military transitions over broad chronological periods, and discerning the social changes occurring between the decades and centuries can prove challenging for students and professors alike. My classes cover American history in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and flipping through a textbook or a historical film for this period easily leaves students with little more than a blur of women in long dresses and men in wool coats. And so teaching in historical clothing helps me highlight the reasons for the subtle differences between the dresses and coats, and these differences, in turn, become the story of how wider societal transitions affected the lives of ordinary people. Focusing on historical clothing conveys other benefits in the classroom. Clothing is instantly relatable. The core need for shelter from hot or cold weather and the wider desire to make a statement about how you present yourself to the world have existed for centuries, however much these statements change over time, which makes it the perfect blend of familiarity and challenge for students of all ages.

The decision to add teaching in historical clothing to my classes was a natural one for a living history interpreter turned early American history professor. I spent years working at museums across the United States, and wearing period clothing was second nature to me long before I finished my own undergraduate degree (looking back, I don’t remember telling this to any of my history professors). But teaching in a full set of period clothing requires an enormous investment, both personal and financial. At various points in my museum career, I’ve gone to the hospital in full period clothing with a head injury, purchased crickets for my sister’s lizard on my way home from work, and delighted my cat when my milk-stained apron landed on the floor in the evening. Even with all those experiences, I once hesitated to change into my eighteenth-century clothing for a night class when the one female student in the class was absent. And well-made reproduction historical clothing is expensive. Some of mine is the result of my own labor with a needle and thread; the rest was purchased by my university when items such as a gown and stays were beyond my own sewing skills. Given these challenges, while this essay is focused on teaching in historical clothing, it also suggests other methods for using historical clothing in the classroom.

 

I use historical clothing in both my introductory “United States History to 1877” survey class and my 300 level “Colonial America: History and Culture” class. The first class fulfills a general education requirement and is taken by many non-history majors; the second is usually taken by history majors and covers North American history from the pre-European contact period to the 1750s and is a precursor to another class on the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars. Both classes introduce the eighteenth-century clothing during a class identified in the syllabus as a discussion on household order in colonial North America. The “U.S. to 1877” students prepare for class by reading primary source documents addressing ordinary life in the North American colonies provided by Bedford St. Martin’s America Firsthand, volume one. The “Colonial America” students read Carole Shammas’ “Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective.” While both sets of readings are used in the discussion, they also exist to suggest that the class will be no different than any other day in which students are asked to prepare for class by reading primary source documents, secondary articles, or monographs for discussion. As a side note, I find that providing students no indication in the syllabus that this class will differ from any of the others serves as a reminder that all classes can cover unexpected material.

I arrive in class on the assigned day wearing my eighteenth-century clothing, usually about five minutes before I plan to begin teaching. By that time, the first students are seated in the classroom. Sometimes there’s a sudden lull in the voices, other times the first response is immediately verbal. Students in the front rows often have questions about where my clothing came from, and I answer them informally. I begin class with a series of PowerPoint slides which introduce students to the early modern household with its complex blend of family and labor from the head of household at one end of the spectrum and servants or slaves (or both) at the other. These slides use images of historical interpreters from Colonial Williamsburg to illustrate the differences between the various social orders present in the early modern household. This exercise is easily replicated in class without historical clothing and can be further developed with Colonial Williamsburg’s “Dress the Part” activity, which is part of their larger “A Day in the Life” teaching series.

 

Once the class has finished discussing early modern household structures, we focus on the historical context for my own clothing. I start by explaining that men begin dressing by putting on shirts, while women wear shifts (fig. 2). Both are loosely fitted garments made from linen or cotton which can be easily washed and were intended to absorb sweat and odors from the wearer’s body. Women then put on their stays, a garment similar to the nineteenth-century corset. Most eighteenth-century stays had their lacings in the back and a smooth, conical front like this one from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Back-lacing stays must be laced by a second person, and so some stays had additional lacings in the front so they could be laced up by their wearer. I deliberately had my stays made as front-lacing stays so I could always put them on myself for class. Next, I explain to the class that while my gown may appear to be a single garment, it is composed of multiple items of clothing (fig. 3). After putting on my shift and stays, I put on my petticoats, one made from the same fabric as my gown and one made from a contrasting color. My gown is a long, open-fronted garment with sleeves, which goes on top of my shift, stays, and petticoats. Fabric was expensive before the Industrial Revolution, and open-fronted gowns helped women expand their wardrobes with relatively little fabric. Because the front part of the petticoat can be seen, wearing the petticoat made from the contrasting fabric on top of the petticoat made from the gown fabric suggests a different gown altogether. This illusion can be further enhanced with the final part of the gown, which is called the stomacher. Stomachers were triangular pieces of fabric that filled in the open part of the gown over the wearer’s waist. Most women owned several stomachers made from different fabrics, and, like the petticoats, they were used to extend their wearers’ wardrobes. While my stomacher is a simple one made from the same fabric as my gown, many were heavily embroidered and richly decorated, like this one from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Finally, I finish with my outer layers of stockings, shoes, apron, kerchief, and cap (fig. 4). 

 

Then the two classes peel away from each other as the “United States History to 1877” class begins to focus on the ways in which clothing helps us understand historical perceptions of childhood, while the “Colonial America” class focuses on how clothing helps us understand class structures in historical societies. The initial similarities between the two classes was a deliberate decision on my part as the opening segment provides students in the “Colonial America” course who have not taken the “U.S. to 1877” course with information on early modern households necessary for taking part in the discussion, while returning students can build on previous knowledge from the earlier class and often will help lead the household order discussion. Students taking both an introductory and an upper-level course over a similar time period from the same professor will, inevitably, run into some overlap, so I use these moments to remind them of the many ways we can approach historical societies and that different lenses bring different elements to life.

Examining historical perceptions of childhood is a recurring theme throughout my “United States History to 1877” course. Like clothing, the subject of children and childhood provides students with a similar blend of familiarity and challenge to help pull them into the discussion. I introduce this theme on the first day of class by passing a reproduction of an eighteenth-century pewter porringer around the room. My porringer was given to me by my grandparents when I was born (and some students notice that the birth date is 1974 rather than 1774) but a teacher could also use an image of a pewter porringer and a modern plastic child’s bowl for a similar demonstration. While the dish travels down the first row of students, I tell them that this style of dish was often used for feeding young children and infants in the colonial period. Once the porringer has reached the second row of students, I ask why such dishes might have been used for this purpose. Some students comment that the pewter material would make it hard to break, while others notice that the handle makes it easy to hold. With the porringer entering the third row of students, I ask what it can tell us about how children were perceived in the eighteenth century. One student points out how different it is from the brightly colored plastic bowls we use for young children now; others observe that they would have no way of knowing it was a child’s dish if I had not told them, and we talk further about this.

 

This last point from that first day of the semester can now be more fully explored as the discussion on household order moves into its next stage. I used PowerPoint slides with photographs of historical interpreters earlier in the class to introduce them to the hierarchy present in early modern households. Now I bring up more slides to show students paintings of women and men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries so they can see how clothing styles changed over the course of the colonial period. I deliberately use photographs of historical interpreters earlier in the class and paintings in this part of the class to help students focus on the portraits as pictures of once living people with different ideas from our own about how they might exist and function in the world.

I next show paintings of children from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and ask students what they notice about the clothing. Almost immediately, someone calls out that there is almost no difference between the children’s clothing and the clothing worn by adults. I ask what this tells us about being a child in the colonial period, and conversation centers on the concept of children as miniature adults and how this affected society for both children and adults. Some classes remember the porringer from the first day of the semester, others do not, and I leave this as a connection for students to make on their own. I also show them a painting of a young boy in a dress and ask whether it is a boy or a girl, which leads to a discussion of the complications posed by changing diapers in earlier centuries and, often, a discussion on differences in how gender was perceived in the colonial period and now. Finally, we move on to the third stage of the class in which students discuss the assigned primary source documents for the day and I ask them to consider how children are portrayed in the documents. With this we round out the discussion with both visual and verbal sources on the subject.

 

A few weeks later, a class on the rise of the middle class in the nineteenth century returns the “United States History to 1877” class to their ongoing examination of changing perceptions of childhood. This time, I bring an American Girl doll to class that is dressed in eighteenth-century shift, stays, stockings, gown, apron, kerchief, and cap as a reminder of children’s clothing in the colonial period (fig. 5). Once the class members have again familiarized themselves with clothing for children in the eighteenth century, I exchange her clothing for a dress from the nineteenth century, with pantaloons, chemise, socks and shoes. I ask the class what they notice, and they point out the difference immediately (fig. 6).  Her body is no longer carefully molded by her stays (or corset, as they were known in the nineteenth century), and her dress reaches to her knees rather than the floor. Since I do not own nineteenth-century women’s clothing, I show them drawings, which make it abundantly clear that nineteenth-century women were still wearing full-length dresses. This lesson would be equally possible with drawings of children’s clothing or a scene from a historical film.

Later in the same class, we consider differences between factory-made toys and homemade toys like these ones from the collections of Old Sturbridge Village, which raises further questions for the class. What does it mean to have a society in which children wear clothing which allows them the movement needed to play? Or a society with enough parents willing to purchase toys for their children that factory owners feel that it is financially viable to mass-produce toys? I also make the point that while working-class children now largely wore children’s styles of clothing, their daily lives included as much, or more, labor as their colonial counterparts. On the surface, this is a lighthearted conversation. After all, we are talking about clothing and toys—I did just bring a doll to my university-level classroom. But at the same time, the discussion encompasses the mass production made possible by the Industrial Revolution, Enlightenment thinkers who believed children were innocent beings who needed to be nurtured and protected, and the other massive societal shifts traditionally explored by historical survey courses.

I use the final exam for the “United States History to 1877” course to help me assess whether my students can now compare perceptions of childhood in the colonial period and the nineteenth century and also explain how these differing perceptions came to exist. One exam section asks students to pick one compare-and-contrast question from a list of four possible options; this particular question asks them to contrast “Children in the colonial period” and “Children in the Nineteenth Century” in a two- to three-paragraph essay. The last time I taught this course, there were forty-two students who took the final exam, and twelve of them chose to answer this question. All drew on a wide range of source material to support their answers, and eleven of the twelve cited changes in clothing as a core piece of evidence for their arguments (the twelfth student rarely attended class and may not have been present on the days when I used historical clothing in class). One student wrote that “in class we saw a dress that littler girls wore during the nineteenth century and it was very different from the miniature adult versions they previously wore . . . I hadn’t ever thought about it being different to be a child in the past.” Another remembered “all the layers I can still see in my head.” Overall, these responses demonstrate that historical clothing can be an effective classroom tool for exploring larger, often abstract, societal shifts and for provoking both immediate discussion and longer-term analysis and recall among students.

Unlike my “United States History to 1877” course, where historical clothing is used throughout the semester to explore shifting perceptions of childhood, my “Colonial America” class only uses historical clothing once to demonstrate class structures, though class is examined alongside racial and gender structures throughout the semester using other source material. Again, I open with the discussion on early modern households, though this time I use historical portraits rather than photographs to contrast from the “U.S. History to 1877” discussion and to move the class toward considering the lives of the people behind the pictures as quickly as possible. Once I have covered the full hierarchy of the household, I tell students that clothing was commonly used to identify class demarcations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and we focus on this point for the second part of the discussion.

 

My clothing represents a woman from the middling classes, and it is easily contrasted to clothing worn by women in the upper and working classes. After identifying my shift, stays, petticoats, and gown, I move on to the elements of my clothing that I did not discuss in the first class. First, I show students my linen stockings and plain black shoes, which are held together with a simple pewter buckle. Then I pass a linen stocking and a silk stocking around the room and have students feel the differences between wearing linen and silk. One of my shoes goes around the room accompanied by a shoe that I have painted to represent the embroidered silk shoes popular in the period and that has a rhinestone buckle. While the shoes travel between students, I show photographs of the original silk shoes. We talk about shoes worn simply to protect one’s feet and shoes intended to show wealth and style. Then I bring up drawings of barefoot servants and slaves on the screen and ask about field work with nothing to protect your feet from insects or rain or the stubble left behind in a harvested field. Here the conversation turns to societies in which class (and, for that matter, gender and racial) structures are immediately apparent based on appearance, and the role such a discussion plays in our own twenty-first century society. This exercise in which different stockings and shoes are passed around the room could be used in lieu of a full set of period clothing. Even passing around pieces of coarse wool and silk has much the same effect because they all demonstrate the role social class played in how clothing in the colonial period felt on the body.

I open our next discussion by asking how many students remember the nursery rhyme “Lucy Locket lost her pocket/Kitty Fisher found it/Not a penny was there in it/Only ribbon round it.” Then I ask whether any of them can lose their pockets (fig. 7).  Today, this is nearly impossible with pockets sewn into clothing. But people living before the twentieth century relied on portable pockets, which could be tied around the waist. The Victoria and Albert Museum provides multiple examples of these pockets over time. I now pull out my own pocket, which measures approximately eighteen inches long, twelve inches at the base and tapering to seven inches at the top, with a slit for reaching inside. It is heavily embroidered in blue and white wool, a summer project when I was in college. It holds my housewife, a roll of fabric filled with scissors, linen tape measure, buttons, thread winders, and pins. While I pass my pocket and its contents around the room, we consider the balance between utility and decoration. If pockets do not need to be covered with embroidery to fulfill their basic purpose of holding and transporting small objects, why did middle- and upper-class women in the colonial period embroider them? And, in turn, what purpose might this labor have served?

 

Next, I untie my chatelaine, a brass circular disk with a thistle in the middle of the circle, which is tied to the top of my apron so it hangs at my waist (fig. 8).  Three chains hang from the base of the chatelaine, one holding a stiletto, one holding a brass needle case, and one a thimble. The term chatelaine comes from medieval France, when a châtelaine was the wife of the châtelain, the lord of the manor. Initially, the châtelaine or châtelain would wear keys attached to a belt at the waist so they were both readily available and easily monitored. Over time, the term came to mean a piece of metal which held either keys or sewing tools, like this one from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Most chatelaines were decorative and could often be very personalized. My first job as a historical interpreter was as a uniformed park ranger in the Boston Harbor Islands when I was in college. A Revolutionary War reenactment was held one weekend on the island where I worked, and I was deeply envious of the women’s clothing. One woman had a brass chatelaine with a thistle and I resolved to find one the following year when I was studying at the University of Edinburgh. Mine turned up in an antique store in North Berwick, Scotland, and I spent the next few years collecting sewing tools to hang from it. The stiletto and needle case were ordered from an American company that sells reproductions of items from the eighteenth century, but the thimble came from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey, and appears to have been intended for a chatelaine because there is a tiny metal loop at its base for attaching it to a chain.

Like pockets, chatelaines can be used for continuing discussions on the differences between utility and decoration. The sewing tools suspended from chatelaines all served useful purposes, and nearly all colonists would have had access to some form of these tools. But even a simple brass chatelaine like mine provides a symbol of wealth and authority. When I walk, the tools make a gentle clinking sound that can be heard across rooms and down hallways. Working-class women may have sewed, but they could not afford chatelaines, and their tools were probably not worth displaying in any event. Chatelaines can also be used to introduce new research on the lives of ordinary colonists. Marla Miller’s The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (2006) demonstrates that colonial society recognized clear distinctions between the simple, straight seams sewn by unskilled housewives and their daughters and the highly skilled labor done by the paid professionals who created the carefully shaped gowns and jackets worn by the middling and upper classes. The mistress of a milliner’s shop like the one recreated at Colonial Williamsburg would almost certainly have worn an elaborate chatelaine to demonstrate her professional expertise and her authority over the workers who labored beneath her. These discussions around authority and professionalism are easily linked to classes surrounding the household order discussion in my “Colonial America” course as we also consider the societal shifts demonstrated by the First Great Awakening and the transition into the Enlightenment period, which would later give birth to the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century.

 

Overall, my experience with using a wide range of material objects, visual images, and written documents in the classroom suggests that all three feed the kinds of discussions that lead students into the wider pastures that help shape a class into a cohesive whole, no matter how teachers choose to use them. Nevertheless, there is another, more important, lesson to be considered here. I observed at the beginning of this essay that I did not tell any of my history professors that I spent my weekends and summers working at living history museums. I wonder now if I believed my fledgling museum career had no role in what I was learning in their classrooms. But one of my recent students concluded the final exam by writing, “I also liked when you came in with the older style clothing, not only did we learn but I admired how passionate you are towards teaching history through material culture.” I think the greatest gift we can give our students is to demonstrate the ways in which our love for history (or literature or anything else) shapes our lives inside and outside the classroom. We come to the classroom to teach our subject material, but we also provide models for how, and why, we are historians, so that our students can seek out what they, in turn, may wish to become.

Further Reading

There are many books on historical clothing and some also include instructions for making your own. I particularly recommend Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines (New York, 1954), Linda Baumgarten, Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, 1986), Beth Gilgun, Tidings from the 18^th Century (Texas, 1993), Avril Hart and Susan North, Fashion in Detail from the 17^th and 18^th Centuries (New York, 1998), Linda Baumgarten and John Watson, Costume Close-Up (New York, 1999), Lucy Johnston, Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail (London, 2009) and Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven, 2012). For more information on the role played by fashion and the needle trades in the eighteenth century, I recommend Marla Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (Amherst, 2006), Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York, 2006), Maureen Daly Groggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950 (Farnham, England, 2009) and Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2011). And for more information on using historical objects in the classroom, I recommend my other article on the subject, “Teaching with a Tea Set: Using Objects in the US History Survey,” Perspectives on History 52:4 (2014).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

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Abby Chandler worked at living history museums in Tennessee, Iowa, and Maryland before attending graduate school at the University of Maine. She now teaches early American history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and her first book, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England, was published by Ashgate in 2015.

 

 

 

 

Hats off to Linda Baumgarten and Colonial Williamsburg. They have put together a book that is an exhibit catalogue, synthesis, and a piece of decorative art itself. Like the museum, What Clothes Reveal is worth its high price of admission.

The book’s jacket reveals the ambition and the splendor: not one but five men’s suit coats from the eighteenth century grace the cover, layered as if being displayed for a genteel purchaser. Each one is carefully wrought, down to the dozen or so fabric-covered buttons. The back flap features four pairs of women’s shoes, in bluish green, tan, and a beige-ish yellow, arranged in a circle, toes tastefully pointed inward . . . exquisite, really. There are more than 350 illustrations of men’s and women’s fashions in the volume–artifacts from the collection and period illustrations that fill in the gaps. As in contemporary exhibits, sidebars, projected on what appears to be a blue linen background, address particular issues and problems like bed gowns, the confusing names of imported fabrics, how suits were made to fit, and the “Scarlett O’Hara myth” of tight corsets and tiny waists. If you are interested in how and why stomachers were worn, or how our founding mothers managed lactation fashionably, or who wore breeches and when–and you like to see what you are reading about–then this is the book for you.

In thematic chapters What Clothes Reveal seeks out the general public and scholars alike. Baumgarten begins with perhaps the most interesting question of all: how did these clothes survive? How do they make it into a museum? The introduction and first chapter serve as a primer on connoisseurship and some of the basics of eighteenth-century clothing: styles, court dress, undergarments, fabrics. Some of the most beautiful costume pieces adorn these first chapters.

We then move on, as the fashion history scholarship has, to questions of meaning. And here the work gets more general, introducing contemporary material culture scholars’ perspectives on how everyday life’s meaning is mediated by, understood through, and thus best recaptured by objects. As the subtitle reveals, Baumgarten employs the structuralist notion of dress as a system of meaning, being akin to a language. A fashion is like a trope, an article of clothing like a word well or ill chosen from a widely shared but culturally bounded repertoire. This explanation–itself a metaphor–has its limitations. It snags especially on the eighteenth century’s own penchant for metaphors of clothing.

For example, Thomas Jefferson’s famous rapprochement with his old friend and political enemy John Adams occurred after Adams, cheekily complimenting him as a “Friend to American Manufactures . . . of the domestic kind,” sent him “two Pieces of Homespun”: his son John Quincy Adams’s leather-clad Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (1810). The package of books got separated from the letter, so Jefferson did not get the joke at first, thinking that there were actual textiles from Braintree on their way south. The thought inspired him to wax poetic in his response to Adams about the “economy and thriftiness” that placed one sheep for every person on Virginia farms, increased production of cotton, hemp, and flax, and ultimately made “every family in the country a manufactory within itself.” After Adams then explained about the books, Jefferson apologized for his flight of rhetoric. Adams replied that such words had been exactly what he had wanted–suggesting that each man sought to continue a conversation that had always mixed national politics and the stuff of everyday life.

Such rhetorical and archival (not to mention presidential) stuff may seem far removed from the material and artifactual realities clarified by Baumgarten’s study and the visit to the museum it permits–but is it really? Adams knew very well Jefferson’s penchant for dressing up and dressing down to make political points, as when he had greeted the British ambassador and spouse in his “down at the heels” slippers. (Adams’s own great-grandson Henry, with his usual combination of brio and solid research, would later observe that “Jefferson, at moments of some interest in his career as President, seemed to regard his peculiar style of dress as a matter of political importance, while the Federalist newspapers never ceased ridiculing the corduroy small-clothes, red-plush waistcoat, and sharp-toed boots with which he expressed his contempt for fashion.”) The point is that some analytical distinction between language and clothing needs to be kept in order to appreciate how historical actors interwove them.

The structuralist approach tends to conflate language and other aspects of culture. As a result, common meanings are stressed and specific, often political actions are underrated. What we gain in Baumgarten’s approach, for example, to James Fenimore Cooper’s close attention to clothing in his (not coincidentally named) Leatherstocking tales, we lose in her assumption that Cooper mainly reveals widely shared myths about the recent frontier past. The problem is not that Americans did not imagine leather goods like hunting shirts and moccasins as part of a self-sufficient, passing frontier past. Baumgarten rightly calls such beliefs myths, reminding us several times that neither Americans not Indians were self-sufficient with respect to clothing during the eighteenth century, except for brief and highly politicized intervals. The problem is that seeing Cooper as someone who captured existing myths makes it hard to see how, as Alan Taylor pointed out in William Cooper’s Town, he was also creating them, for purposes at once personal and political.

Not everyone agreed about the meanings clothing revealed, even if they would have agreed that clothing had meaning. Perhaps the uses of clothing became more creative during this period precisely because of such disagreements. Certainly slaves and other working people found meanings and uses for clothing they made, acquired, and altered that the original owners of those gowns and jackets would not have acknowledged. Jefferson repeatedly relied on the common symbol of homespun, much as he wore the best clothes he could find while in France, but when he dressed even further down as president he knew that his slippers would be understood differently by different people. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has suggested, it may be time for the very material as well as symbolic complexities of clothing to guide our understanding of culture and history. Clothing may make a better metaphor for culture than language makes for clothing.

Fortunately What Clothes Reveal does not get caught in the tight-spun webs of myth. Baumgarten does a tremendous service in comparing ordinary and fancy clothing. She does even better by stressing the common threads. Dress historians have successfully pieced together the scraps of evidence that show how high and plain styles both overlapped and differed in a period when clothing, because of its great value, was regularly recycled. Instead of apologizing for the non-American origins of most of the textiles in the collection, Baumgarten details the adaptation of metropolitan styles to colonial and American contexts, a running theme of the study. A final chapter explores subsequent alterations and returns to the artifacts themselves, many of which are not in their original shape. Refreshingly, there is not a whiff of condescension in this work toward any maker or wearer of clothing. Because they shared and shaped the goods, and because of the beauty and usefulness of what they created and adapted, for Baumgarten early Americans join a democracy of meaning-making, one which opens up the subject rather than restricting it to textile experts and collectors.

I’d still rather have just one of those suits in my closet. Imagine the effect on my students were I to give my “consumer revolution” lecture in period attire! But I will settle, happily, for the book on my shelf.

Further Reading: The exciting possibilities of clothing as the “stuff” of early American history have been demonstrated by, among others, Jonathan Prude, “‘To Look Upon the Lower Sort’: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Labor in America, 1750-1800,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 124-60; Karin Calvert, “The Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America” in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 252-84; James Axtell, “The First Consumer Revolution,” Beyond 1492 (New York, 1992); Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), esp. chap. 3; Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001); Michael Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Homespun to Ready-Made,” American Historical Review 106 (December 2001): 1553-1586; Catherine Anne Haulman, “The Empire’s New Clothes: The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth Century British North America” (Ph.D diss., Cornell University, 2002). My own sampler projects appear as “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56 (1999), esp. 250-54, and “Why Thomas Jefferson and African Americans Wore Their Politics on their Sleeves: Dress and Politics Between American Revolutions” in Jeffrey Pasley, Andrew Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, forthcoming). The Adams and Jefferson letters referred to are John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1 January; 3, 10 February 1812; Jefferson to Adams, 21, 23 January 1812, in Lester J. Cappon ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill, 1959), 2:290-97. The passage from Henry Adams is in his History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1889-91. repr. New York, 1986), 126-27.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 4.1 (October, 2003).

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David Waldstreicher teaches history at the University of Notre Dame and is the author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997) and editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Related Documents (New York, 2002) and The Struggle Against Slavery: A History in Documents (New York, 2002). He is currently finishing Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution.

Think of it as colonial text messaging: quick, cheap print stuck to walls for announcements, advertisements, and popular debate. Broadside poetry was as ubiquitous and unremarkable in early America as smart phones are today. The elegy on Mrs. Lydia Minot (fig. 1) showcases its peculiar appeal: graphic and verbal art work together, much like our modern MMS (multimedia messaging service, now on all major carriers), to transmit both images of her death and puns on her name. The result is a piece of paper that looks like a gravestone—morbid and witty at the same time. Such creations, funeral elegies, were how most Puritans encountered poetry, aside from the Psalms. It was simultaneously the most popular genre of verse in New England, as well as a mechanism of distribution and display. For these reasons, it is worth looking a bit closer at Minot’s elegy and at what it tells us about grief and colonial culture.

On the left-hand side of the pictures preceding the poem, we see a bunch of fellows dressed in black following a hearse. On the right stands another hearse, with a shovel and pick handy for digging the grave. Skulls, bones, and winged hourglasses frame a skeleton who urges the reader to “remember DEATH,” once in English, once in Latin. The contrast between the elaborately engraved header and the crude woodcuts of an hourglass, coffin, and shovel halfway down the page made me suspect these elements were not created at the same time. Indeed, the top decorations appear in a much more unified design on a 1708 broadside (fig. 2). The banner is, in fact, ready for recycling: it became the most popular decoration for mourning verses in eighteenth-century America, during which Minot’s funeral elegy was likely reprinted—some 40 years after her 1667 death.

But why would an elegy on an unknown mother (instead of, say, a famous preacher) be reused after so many years, in such a cobbled-together format? The poem itself lends some clues, taking three different anagrams of “Lydia Minot”—I di to Al myn’; I di, not my Al; Dai is my Lot—for thematic inspiration. The last stanza even doubles as an acrostic: spelling out the deceased’s name from top to bottom. Such intricate wit was common in New England funerary poetry; you’ll see that Marsh’s elegy also ends on an acrostic. Yet it lends the appearance of an exercise or a game (like Scrabble, if you will) to the elegy, as if the poet is trying to find new meaning in old elements. It is fitting that Minot’s broadside should follow this principle both in verse and illustration.

The reprinting and cobbling together of funeral elegies matter because these features show elegies to be more than occasional products or props for grief. Rather, they are reassembled, reread, and remembered as collective aesthetic artifacts. The larger societal significance and persistent use value of these objects become even more pronounced in light of a 1722 article from a Boston newspaper, which claims that there is “not one Country house in fiftie” in New England “which has not its Walls garnished with half a Score of these Sort of Poems … which praise the Dead to the Life.” Broadsides and manuscript elegies were, apparently, omnipresent as elements of interior decoration. In the absence of visual portraiture, which was eschewed by the Puritans on ideological grounds, the reasons for keeping funeral broadsides may have been genealogical: the lyrical remembrance of ancestors perhaps struck a balance between the heraldic crests found in living rooms across America and the magnetic poetry on the fridge.

Yet, returning to Marsh’s and Minot’s broadsides, we see that the genealogical analogy fractures as broadsides repeatedly use the exact same textual and visual elements. Ninety-nine anagrams on a wall become an endless, maybe senseless, exercise in repetition and recombination. Skulls and skeletons seem less special and scary if they are always around. The comfort or memory these elegies may have offered is not of a personal but of a collective nature. So what does this kind of macabre, repetitive, communal comfort have to do with early America? How can we integrate this important part of the colonial literary tradition into an understanding that connects it to other expressions, rather than shrugging it off as weirdness? In what ways might conventionality show not a lack of imagination, but a consistent response to the challenges of the New World?

First, it helps to contextualize Minot’s broadside within the (somewhat overwrought) culture of mourning in colonial America. Within a few decades of settlement, the colonists had developed a tradition of funeral sermons, lay mourning poems, and an iconography of gravestone carving unique to New England. Yet, in comparison to contemporary Europe, colonial America was hardly an unhealthy place to live. Death rates were much lower for adults living in the American colonies than in Europe, though child and infant mortality remained high, hovering between 10 and 13 percent. Perhaps because death was so common among young people, James Janeway’s Token for Children (1676), featuring scenes of childhood death and salvation, became one of the colonies’ biggest bestsellers. Manuals on grieving and funeral sermons were particularly popular, with more than 600 copies printed and sold in Massachusetts before 1800. Colonists displayed a daily occupation with death, formulating exact instructions for funerals and even carrying self-elegies around in case they dropped dead in the street, like Anne Bradstreet’s father. The Puritans felt death, deeply and often, even when there was none.

Considering the omnipresence of imagined death, it is not surprising that elegiac verse—both occasional (written for the funeral) and composed years after the fact—became the most popular literary exercise in New England. The majority of poems dealt with secular and spiritual leaders—their death being the primary occasion for such social expressions of mourning. But elegies were kept, collected, published, and reprinted: Nathaniel Morton’s New-Englands memoriall (1669), for example, presents colonial history as a series of losses, ending each later chapter with an elegy. In this way, an ostensible administrative account of the flourishing of the colony turns into a litany of loss. Morton’s book repeatedly enacts small dramas of succession, which are not satisfactorily resolved. New England thus appears unmoored, without guidance or worship, perpetually mourning its first generation of leaders. Readex’s Early American Imprints lists nearly 450 separate elegiac publications before 1800, not counting those that purport to be about something else, like Morton’s compendium. In sum, it seems colonists mourned more intensely, expensively, and frequently than their Old World counterparts.

 

The habit and practice of mourning poetry was debatable from the start. There is no doubt that elegiac verse was fashionable, but in early New England, it became ubiquitous and democratic, even taking women and children as its subject matter, in contrast to the genre’s more formal English roots. People practiced writing elegies in grade school and Anne Bradstreet, for example, composed elegies on Sir Philip Sidney and Du Bartas, even though both were dead more than two decades before her birth. She also, more famously, wrote three small poems on the loss of (three different) granddaughters, verses in which we read a quiet kind of difficulty squaring such daily events with divine will. Her own father was found, upon his sudden death, to have prepared by carrying around a poem on his own demise, similar to Thomas Smith’s elegy, which protrudes from the jaws of a skull on his own “Self Portrait” (fig. 3).

If the tropes of time, tears, and bones strike you as staid, you would not be the first: recall Benjamin Franklin’s satirical shopping list for writing KITELIC Poetry, named after the Elegy on Mrs. Mehitebell Kitel, which memorably rhymes “and a sister” with “we have mist her.” As Silence Dogood, Franklin recommends “seasoning” some unfortunate’s demise with

a Handful or two of Melancholly Expressions, such as Dreadful, Deadly, cruel cold Death, unhappy Fate, weeping Eyes & c- . put them into the empty Scull of some young Harvard [presumably a medical student]- there let them Ferment for the Space of a Fortnight and [add] double Rhymes, such as Power, Flower; Quiver, Shiver; Grieve us, Leave us … & c. you must spread all upon Paper … then … you will have an Excellent Elegy.

Good New England poetry is thus concocted as a verbal witches’ stew, rehashing the same tired old ingredients with a distinctly morbid flavor. Underlying this ironic contemplation of creative energy (as Franklin immediately belies his longing for a muse who “Impatient of the Reins / Pursues an unattempted Course”) is a charge of emotional dishonesty. Puritan mourning verse is funny because it is too formulaic to be heartfelt. The lowly nature of its subject matter—the family ties of ordinary New Englanders—leaves few other options than the recitation of clichés.

 

But the tradition persisted. Phillis Wheatley initially gained fame with her funeral verse on George Whitefield (fig. 4), followed by lesser-known broadside elegies on Mr. Leonard (1771), Mrs. Pitkin (1772), and the Rev. Mr. John Moorhead (1773). Wheatley manages to combine the requirements of the genre with skillful requests for patronage and self-advertising. More than a hundred years later, Huck Finn stands amazed at the deathly imaginations of the young Miss Emmeline Grangerford,

who kept a scrapbook … and used to paste obituaries and examples of patient suffering … and write poetry after them … Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was cold … Everyone was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do … but I reckoned, with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard.

The Anglo-American penchant for the sentimental dwelling on death, including the pilgrimages to the real New York grave of the fictional Charlotte Temple, is (at least in part) the target of Twain’s parody here. Still, Emmeline’s speed of composition is suspect, and the simplicity of mourning verse becomes, literally, child’s play. It is worth noting that elegy was not a tradition for women to do and men to mock, as these examples seem to suggest. Most poems appeared on the deaths of preachers, teachers, and soldiers, with those who served the greater good apparently deemed most worthy of communal remembrance.

 

Even though most of the poems memorialize the first generation of leaders in New England, these men were themselves unfamiliar with elaborate mourning rituals. No elegies or funeral sermons survive from the first decades of settlement. Instead, colonial funerals were initially performed in the resolutely anti-liturgical tradition befitting principled Puritanism. English Separatists excluded all reading, music, and even ministers themselves from the funeral, so that there might be no praying or preaching over the dead. These politicized burial practices prompted impassioned responses, including one from a Catholic convert, who wrote: “The Burialls now among the Reformed in England [in the 1640s], are in a manner profane, in many places the dead being throwne into the ground like dogs, and not a word said.” In America, things began in similar silence, according to Thomas Lechford’s Plain Dealing (1642): “At Burials, nothing is read, nor any Funeral Sermon made, but all the neighborhood, or a good company of them, come together by the tolling of the bell, and carry the dead solemnly to his grave, and there stand by him while he is buried.”

This funerary culture changed rapidly, allowing for sermons, poetry, and public sadness. John Cotton gave the first colonial funeral sermon in 1646, and in that same decade John Wilson and John Fiske started writing anagrammatical elegies, scrambling the names of the deceased into verse. Gravestone art began, tentatively, in 1653. There was also a marked shift toward displays of personal grief—initially eschewed because the transition of the deceased to heaven was supposedly a happy one. But people wept openly now. Take John Eliot at his wife’s funeral in 1687, in the words of Cotton Mather: “and when at last she died, I heard and saw her aged husband, who else very rarely wept, yet now with tears over the coffin, before the good people, a vast confluence of which were come to her funeral, say: ‘Here lies my dear, faithful, pious, prudent, prayerful wife; I shall go to her, and she not return to me.'” Eliot’s anguished note of finality—”she not return to me”—belies any happy acceptance of separation from his wife and seems, instead, to echo Orpheus’ age-old cry over Eurydice: he wants her back.

 

New Englanders incorporated poetry into multiple mourning behaviors: verses were pinned to the hearse, read aloud at the graveside, distributed in manuscript or print, engraved on the headstone, and taken home as a memorial. In their heyday, elegies were produced in vast quantities—so much so, that Cotton Mather likened the large number of poems pinned to Nathanael Collins’s hearse to “a Paper winding sheet to lay him out.” Poetry was a measure of tribute to the dead, and the keeping and copying of it encouraged appropriate remembrance. In some ways, it was just one category of objects among an emerging cottage industry in memorabilia, which also included gloves and rings. Gloves and rings were sent as invitations to and reminders of important funerals; as such, they became significant status symbols. Samuel Sewell, for example, recorded receiving fifty-seven mourning rings between 1687 and 1725, while Doctor Samuel Buxton of Salem left his heirs a quart tankard full in 1758. Rings were usually engraved with skulls or skeletons, as well as the date of death (fig. 5).

The contents and appearance of poetry were much more personal than the stock skeleton rings of course, especially in anagrammatical lyrics, which circulated in both print and manuscript. Some poems may have even been written down after oral performances at the graveside. In the personal notebook he kept from 1712 to 1723, John Thompson admitted he found “a soule satisfying delight” in reading the anagrams and acrostics he collected and composed, “pondering & writeing and remembering afresh my Dear father and his Contemporaries with him.” His delight is evident in the 5 consecutive anagrams and epitaphs on his father, William Thompson, written down 56 years after the actual death: “transcribed March 2, 1723, upon the Death of my Dear honoured father, Mr. William Tompson, pastor of the Church of Christ in Braintry, Decemb. 10, 1666.”

 

A peculiar kind of comfort seems to inhere in the continual shuffling and combining of letters. The activity was at once creative and preservative. Its very emphasis on the building blocks of language seems to run counter to death’s destruction and decay. The visual similarity of elegies and gravestones strengthens the tension between the perishable corpse of the deceased and its permanent keeping in letter or words. Literary historian Max Cavitch has observed that elegies with word games “bring mortuary inscription inside” people’s homes while also preserving a sense of the verses’ “material nature, its connection with history’s remains: the relics, corpses, monuments, and effigies that history leaves behind.” The elegies that look like gravemarkers are thus both temporary props and permanent tokens: simultaneously fragile like paper and solid as stone. Despite their contemporary popularity, these language games are rarely included in modern anthologies. The funereal verse now seems unfashionable or even funny—going by Franklin and Twain. The poems are also, admittedly, difficult to interpret within a larger Reformation or specifically colonial tradition.

Anagrams and acrostics were popular devotional exercises in the Middle Ages, allowing believers to discover new meaning in saints’ names and their permutations. The genre was disparaged, however, during the Renaissance. George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) casts it as a kind of occupational therapy: “a thing if it be done for pastime and exercise of wit without superstition is commendable inough … neither bringing [the author] any great gayne not any great losse, unless it be of idle time.” The only major Protestant poet in England who scrambles letters to make meaning is George Herbert, writing pattern poetry in carmen figurations (such as his famous “Easter Wings), echo-verse (in “Heaven”), and a single anagram (“MARY/ARMY”). Herbert’s poetry was frequently read in colonial New England. Still, it seems unlikely that he single-handedly set the tone for what was to become such a pervasive poetic habit.

 

Ideologically, playing on or with letters was a way for Puritan poets to deny artistic agency or individual wit. What Puttenham dismisses as “superstition” was precisely the attraction of the form in New England. At the heart of this conflict lies a differing view of language and signification: personal names, to Puritans, are not randomly selected, but part of a divine code. Whereas Puttenham believes spelling and scrambling create arbitrary combinations that are neither true nor false, the colonists think anagrams and acrostics reveal hidden aspects of a higher reality. These kinds of expressions, whereby poetic invention is not primarily figurative or formal, but rather typographical, were suited to the settlers’ fallen natures and available to human sense. Such representative strategy may have become so popular at the specific site of mourning because it, like the phenomenon of death, bridges earth and heaven: putting forth a kind of knowledge that is universally true.

Perhaps this transcendent quality makes up for the notable lack of emotional progress in New England elegies. The three main psychological functions of the funeral elegy in early modern England were to praise the deceased, lament his or her death, and console the bereaved. Poetic lamentation was supposed to be comforting, restorative, and, according to Puttenham “a medicine [and a] cure,” which allowed the poet “to play also the Phisitian.” Yet it is this movement—a verbal mirroring or mimicking of the emotional processes of mourning—that colonial elegies do not possess. At times, they assign blame to congregants or backsliding children in a move that mimics the Puritan jeremiad. Or they seem to get stuck in staid tropes (weeping eyes and doleful cries) that do not overtly offer consolation aside from a communal sharing of sorrow.

It helps to return to John Thompson’s “soule satisfying delight” in anagrams, which suggests that linguistic play has taken on the psychological movement that is thematically absent from these elegies. The composition and interpretation of word games offers some basic kind of solace in that it is useful and generates new knowledge or information about the deceased. Scrabble conserves and protects because it acknowledges change while accounting for each letter and sound; it provides a model of transfiguration that ensures completion and ongoing meaning. In this way, colonial funeral elegies provide a compelling combination of individual transcendence and comforting materiality.

One last, lovely example illustrates this appeal: the manuscript notebooks of Benjamin Franklin’s eponymous uncle (1650-1727). Commonly known as Benjamin Franklin the Elder, he left behind two impeccably neat octavo volumes, of which the first one features 230 numbered and indexed (!) pages of rhymed language play. The highest degree of word play is reserved for elegies on his predeceased daughter, himself, and especially his wife (figs. 6 and 7). Franklin carefully organized his compositions by date, creating the illusion of a journal, while the perfect paper-saving spacing of the poems, as well as the consistency of the handwriting and Scriptural annotations (visible as minute scribbles at the start of the fourth stanza in fig. 7) make it more likely that he prepared this notebook from other drafts at one particular time. In addition to the two volumes currently at the American Antiquarian Society, there is a further commonplace book and a “Short Account” of his life, held by Yale’s Beinecke Library.

Franklin in his natural, chronological organization makes some tell-tale mistakes: for example, the highly wrought shape poem “No Cross, No Crown” claims to be based on his wife’s name, Hannah Franklin, more than 5 years before the couple married in late 1683. So on September 14, 1678, Hannah’s name was not yet Franklin, but Welles. She was, as Franklin himself notes: “Daughter of Mr Samuel Welles minister of Banbury in Oxfordshire”—a famous dissenter and thus a notable name—”this Mr W. was one of those 2000 that were turned out soon after King Charles 2d restoration, on 24 Aug 1662, commonly called Black Bartholomew day.” This detail matters because it shows that Franklin not only copied, but also wrote many of these poems much later than their given dates: towards the end of his life, after he had emigrated to America. These poems are therefore not the occasional artifacts they purport to be, but ongoing aesthetic exercises in consolation.

Franklin’s constant restatements of his wife’s name (even when he gets it wrong, historically) allow him to invoke and address her. It is as if by repeating Hannah’s name, her husband conjures her presence after he has, in his own words, “Lost the delight of mine Eyes, the desire of my heart, and the comfort of my life.” Spelling out HANNAH makes concrete, tangible, and alive that which is forever inaccessible. In this way, colonial elegies are not just props or sanctioned poems; they are material prayers, found their way into the spiritual world, while still clothed in flesh.

So far, I have explored the ideological and aesthetic reasons for the Puritan penchant for language games. We now know how the Puritans mourned, but explaining why they grieved so often and (it seems) disproportionately is harder. Elegies dramatize rituals of succession, which were often fraught in New England due to the perpetually disappointing nature of its young people. David Stannard has put forth the idea of “a profound sense of tribal vulnerability” contingent upon immigration. Perhaps the unfamiliar American surroundings and scary new neighbors conditioned these hyper-literate responses, which might be best read as attempts at differentiation from Native rituals of grief.

The European settlers of New England immediately noticed the ravages of epidemic disease that had spread down the coast from (probably) Nova Scotia, where Englishmen came to fish. William Bradford describes the Native people as “being dead and abundantly wasted … the skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground.” Thomas Morton, in a rare instance of agreement with the Puritans, dubbed early seventeenth-century New England “a new found Golgotha,” meaning “a place of a skull.” It is unknown whether Native death still so visibly marked the landscape at the founding of Massachusetts Bay a decade later. But even then, ethnographers remained focused on Indian habits of grief, which were uniformly found to be primitive and extravagant.

In New England’s Prospect (1634)—meant to attract the interest of travelers and new colonists alike—William Wood writes:

the date of their life expired … all hope of recovery being past, then to behold and hear their throbbing sobs and deep-fetched sighs, their grief-wrung hands and tear-bedewed cheeks, their doleful cries … The glut of their grief being past, they commit the corpses of their deceased friends to the ground, over whose grave is for a long time spent many a briny tear, deep groan, and Irish-like howlings, continuing annual mournings with a black, stiff paint on their faces. These are mourners without hope.

This passage features a deep sense of cultural alienation from Native sorrow, which is seen as a set of hyper-corporealized performances rather than as an emotional or interior state of being. The focus on Indian physiques—”deep-fetched sighs, grief-wrung hands and tear-bedewed cheeks”—shows the author’s attention to such outward markers of inward change as being perhaps more reliable than verbal utterances. Although Wood acknowledges the careful temporal spacing (“annual mournings”) of Native ceremonies of remembrance, he also distinguishes their grief from the Christian expectation of an afterlife: “these are mourners without hope.”

Roger Williams’s Key into the Languages of America (1643) includes more detailed and sensitive observations on Native mourning practices: “Bewailing is very solemn amongst them morning and evening and sometimes in the night they bewail their lost husbands, wives, children, brethren or sisters &c. Sometimes a quarter, halfe, yea, a whole yeere, and longer, if it be for a great Prince.” Although the action here is even more temporally structured than in Wood’s description, Indian mourning remains exclusively non-verbal. This is important because the close-range observations of Wood and Williams are, of course, rare. Most settlers would have heard nightly Native howls, shrieks, and cries coming from the woods without any idea of their calendrical significance or cultural context.

Consequently, colonists were absolutely terrified of such expressions. Because the sounds were (thought to be) below or beyond language, they came—especially during and after King Philip’s War—to be coded as animalistic, brutal, and savage. In his epic poem on the war, Benjamin Tompson notes the “hideous Indian cry,” while May Rowlandson describes her captors as “a company of hell hounds, roaring, singing, ranting … as if they would have torn our very hearts out” with faces “as black as the devil.” Although Indians may have sung or wailed on various occasions—at powwows, while going to war, or in grief—my point here is that these instances were, in white minds, collapsed into a single, typical behavior: that of the Indian who cannot properly feel or speak, and therefore simply howls.

The final element that defined Native grief for the colonists was the tradition of giving grave goods, including wampum, furs, and weapons. The first account of settlement in New England (an anonymous Relation from 1622) mentions “sumptuous” Indian graves and items that can there be “found” or stolen. Roger Williams also relates an instance of large-scale property destruction due to Indian grief:

after the dead is laid in Grave, and sometimes (in some parts) some goods cast in with them. They have then a second great Lamentation … the chiefe and most aged peacable Father of the Countrey, Caunoúnicus, having buried his sonne, he burn’d his own Palace, and all his goods in it, (amongst them to a great value) in solemne remembrance of his sonne.

These “excessive Sorrowes” second Wood’s suggestion of “the glut of [Indian] grief”: that there is something unseemly and profligate about Native mourning. Historian Erik R. Seeman points out that Canonicus likely burned goods of “great value” that he had first bought at Williams’s trading post. You might wonder whether the Christian understanding of sacrifice—whereby one good is relinquished to gain another—inflects these descriptions of ritual burning, but no such fellowship was extended to the Indians.

The ritual burning or burying of precious commodities seemed, to the Puritans, not just silly, but intrinsically savage, which led Puritan missionaries to spend a great deal of effort trying to root out this tradition among their converts, to no apparent effect. In the Praying Towns of Massachusetts, the ministers happily observe “here were no black faces for it as the manner of the Indians is, nor goods buried with it, nor hellish howlings over the dead.” Yet despite these assertions, archaeological evidence shows that the number of burial goods in Native graves increased strongly in the seventeenth century. Even in the Praying Town of Natick, graves of converted owners, which were moved in the eighteenth century, included wampum and glass beads (both valuable currency), metal spoons and a glass bottle. These findings convincingly show Native resistance in the face of missionary surveillance, and, more importantly, they prove that mourning itself became an intercultural battleground in colonial America.

Read as a cultural response to the perceived nonverbal and destructive qualities of Indian grief, the Puritan elegy starts to make more sense, both in its characteristic hyper-literacy, revealed in language games like anagrams and acrostics, and in its emphasis on materiality, evinced in a representative focus on bones and graves. The coming together of both those concerns, in which words become concrete material to be molded or woven together, creates monuments that simultaneously assert timelessness and specific sorrow. Preaching or praying at the graveside saves the Puritans from charges of inhumanity (silently burying bones “like dogs”), while no music (aside from the church bells) prevents an association with savage (“Irish-like”) howling. Like rings and gloves, poems inspire a collectors’ impulse: verbal and visual collages postpone the final farewell, as well as becoming an accepted sign of civilization and sophistication in early New England.

 

Indian influence on immigrant cultures in colonial America is rarely acknowledged. Although the Puritans may have settled on a hill, they hardly functioned in a vacuum. The effects of displacement and intercultural encounter come to permeate performances, habits of mind, and strategies of representation in early America. It is worth remembering that these gestures are not necessarily or even deliberately antagonistic towards Native Americans, but rather that they result from a collective search for comfort and solace in difficult times. Consequently, though the characterization of verbal ingenuity as a game (of grief) may seem flippant, it does conjure the communal endeavor to newly interpret everyday elements. The true nature of a New England elegy is perhaps a cross between Silence Dogood’s cookery and an overdetermined ouija board: the pungency of its clichés should not deter us from finding new meaning.

Further reading:

The vast quantity of Puritan elegies has fortunately led to many considerations of the specific genre, among which recent explorations by Matthew P. Brown—The Pilgrim and the Bee (Philadelphia, 2007)—and Max Cavitch, American Elegy (Minneapolis, 2007) prove valuable additions to older readings by Jeffrey A. Hammond, The American Puritan Elegy (Cambridge, 2000) and Ivy Schweitzer, The Work of Self-Representation (UNC for Omohundro, 1991). Aside from his book, Cavitch adds an important voice to Puritan “death studies” in his 2002 article on Thomas Smith’s Self-Portrait in Early American Literature 37:1.

The field of “death studies” has been defined by Eric R. Seeman (see his Death in the New World [Philadelphia, 2010]) and was practiced avant la lettre by Gordon E. Geddes in Welcome Joy (Ann Arbor, 1981) and David E. Stannard in The Puritan Way of Death (Oxford, 1977).

For multi-disciplinary approaches, one might productively turn to David H. Watters in ‘With Bodilie Eyes‘ (Ann Arbor, 1981), Maris A. Vinovskis, “Angels’ Heads and Weeping Willows: Death in Early America,”Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 86:2 (1977), and the standard work by Allen Ludwig, Graven Images: New England Stone Carving and its Symbols (Lebanon, N.H., 1999).

There are multiple online databases devoted to New England mourning culture; the best ones include thePlymouth Colony Archive Project; the “death” section of the Reed Digital Collections Native Converts Collection); and an earlier Common-place contribution on how to teach high school students about death in New England, “Tiptoeing through the Tombstones” by Dean Eastman 2:2 (2002).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 11.4 (July, 2011).

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Last spring, the campus I have called home for the last twenty years suffered an unprecedented act of violence. A young man, caught in the grips of psychosis and beset by hateful delusional beliefs, decided to take vengeance on an entire college-town community. On May 23, he first stabbed to death his three roommates; then he got in his car and drove around the center of Isla Vista, California, attempting to gain entry to the Alpha Phi sorority house; shooting at passersby; and intentionally ramming at least four people with his car. Within about a quarter of an hour, three more lay dead, shot in cold blood, and fourteen were injured. As sheriff’s deputies rushed his car, he shot himself in the head. In the end, six young people died, all students at my university, along with the shooter, a student at the local community college. This story became national news—yet one more in the string of campus shootings that have descended like a plague on a nation whose patchwork mental health systems and variable gun control policies have failed to contain the present epidemic of violence.

But I also mused on the ways that we historians seem to specialize in speaking with the dead. We imagine the lives of those who have come before us, and we try, through discipline and deep immersion in the documents of a past world, to understand and reanimate the lives of those long dead.

Some 22,000 people—faculty, staff, and students—attended the memorial service for the victims. On the night before the service, one of the victim’s parents met his murdered child in a dream, an experience reported in a statement at the memorial:

I saw my son in a dream last night. And he asked me to give you this message. ‘My time at UCSB was the happiest two years of my life. I love all my friends who stayed with me through good and bad. I wanted to stay here forever with everyone. I know that there is still great injustice in the world and policies that can be improved. I cannot help with this any more, but you can. Please love and appreciate everyone around you.’

 

Watching from the stands, I felt for the pain of these families then, and I feel for them, and everyone affected by these horrific events, now as well. Even just a few short months later, our lives go on, strangely, much as before. The sidewalk memorials that emerged in the aftermath have been taken down and most students are back at school, though a few of the most heavily affected may never be able to return. Our community has pulled together in the wake of this disastrous loss, trying to ensure that some positive transformations come from this disaster.

The events of May 23, 2014, occurred just at the end of our spring quarter, and for me, that meant I was just at the end of a ten-week course in history and comparative literature called “Dreaming in Historical and Cross Cultural Perspective.” As my students filed back into the classroom on Thursday, two days after the memorial service and not even a full week since the horrific murders, we sat down together, not quite sure how to proceed, some 28 of us, all caught in different aspects of grief, all traumatized, to a greater or lesser degree, by the violence at our very doorstep.

Tentatively, I began the class. I had already scrapped my entire lesson plan for the day. Professors and teaching assistants had been carefully briefed by our campus mental health team, and we had been urged to focus on acknowledging students’ feelings, needs and reactions, and then to emphasize the need to keep going, to finish the quarter as we were able, and to give ourselves and each other permission to approach these events in a variety of different ways, without judgment.

The class focuses on several carefully controlled case studies in the uses of dreams and dreaming—from the Freudian revolution to modern clinical psychology, from sleep researchers and neuroscientists to religious practitioners and lucid dreaming advocates, as well as historians and anthropologists. We read a variety of historical and cross-cultural texts, emphasizing the unique meanings of dreams in different societies, and emphasizing the importance of understanding historical context and following established ethnographic methodologies through which to situate dream reports and dream practices. We had already looked at dreaming in the ancient Mediterranean, cruised through medieval and early modern Europe, and ended up with the Romantics. We had also read several articles and books that explored non-Western dream belief and dream practice in depth, which I assigned to open students’ minds to some of the insights of ethnographers about dreams and dreaming cross-culturally. We had just finished a book by a sociologist on the human potential movement of the 1960s and its appropriation of tribal dream beliefs and practices from the Senoi of Malaysia. I was about to give a lecture on lucid dreaming and, for want of a better word, New Age dream practitioners. But then the shootings happened. And after spending a weekend bombarded by pictures of the mentally ill perpetrator taken from his YouTube videos, I had no intention of subjecting my class to any of the Internet videos that were a fundamental part of my lecture.

 

Instead, I began the class by welcoming them back and reassuring them that, although it was hard, we would move forward together as best as we could. I paused, and asked how they were doing. We noticed that the memorial service had been a very special event, a time when the entire campus came together—something that I had never previously experienced in my twenty years on the faculty. And then I noted aloud how curious it was that a dream visitation—something that we had studied in our class—had been invoked at the memorial service. I invited them to share their thoughts about it with a short piece of free writing. Neither the significance nor the emotional power of this dream-event-become-dream-narrative was lost on my students. Clearly the dream visitation had offered a message of connection, a sense of purpose, and also some comfort—not only for the bereaved parents, but for all of us as well. Modern clinical theory would tell us that such dream cognition offers an important way of integrating challenging emotions, processing change, or signaling emotional growth, and that such dream visitations are frequently part of mourning.

Slowly, we worked our way through the mechanics of changed deadlines and altered assignments, figuring out how we would manage to finish up the quarter, so suddenly made trivial by the shocking intrusion of violent death into our everyday lives.

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For my part, these sad events caused me to look more deeply at sources I had worked with in a book just completed, about the experiences and practices of dreaming in colonial New England. Did such dream visitations serve similar purposes for men and women of this far-away world as well?

Historic dream reports offer some of the most gripping sources I have ever encountered in my work as a historian. Men and women in early modern English and English colonial society commonly experienced dream visitations from deceased family members or friends. But while these dream reports seem so fresh, so recognizable, so universal, the methodological challenge of working with dreams cross-culturally (as I had taught my class) lies in always uncovering the particular contexts and the uniquely historical aspects of recorded dream phenomena. This essay, then, offers us a chance to explore the freshness and vitality—as well as the peculiarity—of dreams and dreaming in early modern English society.

The ubiquitous Boston magistrate, Samuel Sewall, frequently recorded stirring encounters in his dreams—though he did not always see fit to note who was dead and who was alive, leaving it up to the historian to discover that his nighttime visits were as often with the dead as with the living. Thus, for example, in December of 1688, while on board ship headed for England, and just after hearing from a passing ship of the Glorious Revolution staged by William of Orange, Sewall had this dream: “Last night I dreamed of military matters, Arms and Captains, and, of a sudden, Major Gookin, very well clad from head to foot, and of a very fresh lively countenance—his Coat and Breeches of blood-red silk, beckoned me out of the room where I was[,] to speak to me[;] I think ’twas the Town-house.” Following the dream, Sewall sat down to read “the Eleventh of the Hebrews,” a text on faith, and then sang the 46th Psalm, which is on God as a refuge and source of strength—acts, perhaps, to contain and to channel the dream’s power, and reclaim the dream for divine, rather than deluding, purposes. The dream itself was something of an invitation to Sewall, who was heading to England as an agent of the colony and hoping “to uphold the interests of the colony, now without a charter or a settled government, and to secure, if possible, a restoration of its privileges.” Daniel Gookin himself had, at his death in 1687, been known as a vigorous defender of Massachusetts’ liberties.

Sewall also made a remark in this dream report that reveals how particularly special dreams might sometimes circulate as stories, especially when they involved visitations from the dead. When he awakened from his conversation with Gookin, Sewall wrote, “I thought of Mr. Oakes’s Dream about Mr. Shepard and Mitchell beckoning him up the Garret Stairs in Harvard College.” Urian Oakes had succeeded Jonathan Mitchell as pastor of the church at Cambridge in 1671 (Mitchell had earlier succeeded Shepard). It appears that Oakes had received in his dream an invitation from these deceased predecessors, something remarkable enough that it was told, and retold, and here remembered by Sewall many years later. From this vantage point, Gookin’s lively appearance could also appear to be divine authorization of Sewall to take on the tasks assigned to him as colonial agent.

Such dreams of masculine hierarchy and paternal succession were not unfamiliar to Sewall, who frequently dreamed about his father-in-law, John Hull, or about other notable father figures, such as Charles Chauncy, the president of Harvard during Sewall’s years as a student. In 1695, Sewall had a disturbing dream that “Mr. Edward Oakes, the Father [of Urian Oakes], was chosen Pastor of Cambridge Church. Mr. Adams [an age-mate who had died in 1685] and I had discourse about the Oddness of the matter, that the father should succeed his Son so long after the Son’s death [Urian Oakes had died in 1681].” On awakening, Sewall noted, “Thus I was conversing among the dead.”

What did early modern men and women think of these occasions in which they spoke with the dead? If we follow the work of anthropologist Barbara Tedlock, whose prominent anthology on dreaming in the ethnographic literature stresses the critical importance of collecting not only dream texts, but also dream beliefs, practices of dream sharing, and indigenous interpretive techniques, we must try to locate such dream encounters in the local contexts in which the dreamers are embedded. And dreams and dreaming were at the crux of religious controversy in the seventeenth century. By well-established reputation, puritans were not supposed to place much store in dreams—certainly not more than in the revealed word of God in Scripture. But as is well known, by mid-century “hot Protestants” (radical reformers) of all sorts had begun to experiment with direct revelation. Quakers were using their dreams as a guide to their missionary preaching, leading them into trouble with puritans in Massachusetts Bay and elsewhere. Moderate puritan Philip Goodwin, in his 1658 Mystery of Dreams, attempted to recuperate dreams and dreaming as deserving of attention from even the most cautious believers. Work like Goodwin’s, though, reveals the place of dreams within a fairly well-established World of Wonders of which Europeans—Protestants as well as Catholics, and “hot Protestant” reformers as well as the mainstream orthodox—all took note.

Some early moderns believed that their dreams could be predictive of death. By far the most moving example of this sort is found in the work of Gervase Holles, a supporter of the crown during the English Civil War. In 1635, Holles had a vivid predictive dream that he recalled years later with as much clarity as if it had just occurred: “I dreamt my wife was brought to bed of a daughter and that shee and the childe were both dead.” Holles, still dreaming, and “(in a great deale of affliction)” suddenly found himself walking alongside a stone wall near his childhood home. He was “under the north wall of the close in the Friers Minorites at Grimesby (the place where I was borne) [and] my owne mother [Elizabeth Kingston, long deceased] walked on the other side hir hand continually touching mine on the top of the wall; and so (my heart beating violently within me) I awakened.”

 

 

Holles concealed this dream from his pregnant wife, Dorothy Kirketon, and yet “the day after made it too true in every sillable. For the Sunday morning following shee was delivered of a daughter, and both were dead within a hower after.” In addition to the dream’s obvious prediction of Dorothy’s death, Holles was also struck by many strange “parallel[s]” between the death of his wife and the death of his mother: “my mother brought my father 3 children as [Dorothy] did unto me; my mother died in childebed of a daughter as [Dorothy] did; the daughter [i.e .his daughter] died likewise as [had his sister]; and my sonne was within about six weekes as olde as I was at the departure of my mother.” Clearly he saw an ominous repetition of events in adulthood that had already happened to him in childhood. Indeed, the dream itself (as dreams so often do) had doubled the past loss before the future one had occurred, thus preparing Holles for the inevitable possibility of his wife’s death in childbirth. And while the dream brought him a taste of that powerful, painful separation, it also partially transformed it by the startling visit with his dead mother, their hands touching “continually” despite the gulf of years that separated them. From this he awakened in an intense emotional state: “(my heart beating violently within me)”.

Holles thought that such predictive dreams could sometimes occur as the result of a strong sympathetic resonance between two people. Elsewhere in his autobiography, he told the story of another dream—this one about the death of his son. In this night-vision, “one came to me and tolde me my son was dead; after which I wakened with a great passion and palpitation of my heart.” Finding that he could not rest again, he immediately arose and wrote to his (second) wife, Elizabeth, to ascertain whether his son was all right.

While Holles would be relieved at the answer—the boy was hale and unhurt—he thought the dream brought news nevertheless, because it had occurred on the very night after the battle of Newark (1644), when his cousin, William Holles, just a boy of 23, had, in fact, been slain. The elder Holles wrote of this event, “which though it proved not my dreame exactly true, yet relatively it did, I having ever placed him both in my affections and intentions in gradu filii.” Holles went on to allow as how, sometimes “amongst the variety of dreames,” there may be mere coincidences—”sometimes they may casually sort with the present accidents.” But, he noted, “(notwithstanding Hobs his new and atheisticall philosophy),” that “when there is between two an harmony in their affections, there is likewise betweene their soules an acquaintance and sometimes an intelligence.” It was this intelligence, in Holles’s view, that had allowed him to predict his wife’s death; the same special insight had caused him to dream of the death of his son, and when that was proven incorrect, nevertheless, the dream’s insight was proven on learning of the death of his nephew, who was like a son to him. Holles thought puritans were, well, too puritanical, at least when it came to dreams. He reported that his first wife’s parents had begged him to tell them about the dream that troubled him just before her death, but when he did, “they being rigid puritanes, made sleight of it.”

Despite this bad press, the puritans of New England actually seem to have treated dreams with much the same wonder and caution as Holles. A dreaming John Winthrop came into his chamber and saw there his wife and children, “in bed & 3: or 4: of hir Children lyinge by her with moste sweet & smylinge co[u]ntenances, with Crownes upon their heads & blue ribandes about their necks.” On awakening, Margaret and John talked over the dream, trying to determine if this celestial vision in fact meant that Mistress Winthrop and her children were among God’s elect. Other dreams, of course, were considerably grimmer. As the criminal court in Rhode Island learned in 1671, the murdered shade of Rebecca Cornell visited her sleeping brother, John Briggs, in fulfillment of a time-honored tradition through which victims of untimely deaths might reveal the presence of foul play by their apparition to relatives or other close friends. In this case, suspicion fell on Cornell’s son, Thomas, as the guilty party. Puritan or no, the English colonists of New England, like other early modern English men and women, developed a robust interchange with the afterlife, visiting and being visited by those who had already crossed over into the invisible world, a world accessed at night and while asleep.

Belief in the potential power of dreams colored colonists’ understanding of the dream beliefs and practices of their Algonquian neighbors. While we know that much was forever lost in the translation from indigenous to colonial understandings, colonial observers nevertheless were interested in natives’ dreams, even though they usually dismissed the Indians as “credulous” dreamers. Samuel de Champlain complained that the Montagnais he met in 1608 went in “such constant dread of their enemies, that they often took fright at night in their dreams, and would send their wives and children to our fort.” Champlain’s admonition, “that they should not take dreams as truth upon which to rely, since most of them are only fables,” may have mirrored orthodox European teachings of the day, but were clearly contradicted by the hopeful reliance on dreamed knowledge displayed by many later colonists. John Eliot’s first sermons among the Indians of Massachusetts were followed by questions such as: “In wicked dreames doth the soul sin?” and “doth God make bad men dream good Dreames?” And the Indian lives (and deaths) recounted by Experience Mayhew in the second decade of the eighteenth century seem no less marked by dream experience than those described by earlier authors. Indian dreams even sometimes rose to the level of prophecy: Jedidah Hannit, the daughter of the Martha’s Vineyard Indian minister Japheth Hannit, dreamt in her last illness that “there was a very dark and dismal time shortly coming on the Indian Nation; with which Dream being much distressed, she waked out of her Sleep, and had such an Impression on her Mind that what she had so dreamed would come to pass, and of the Dreadfulness of the thing so apprehended, that she immediately prayed earnestly to God, that she might not live to see the thing feared, but that she might be removed out of the World before it came to pass,” and thus, in just a few days, she died.

Her death made a convenient story for missionaries and colonists alike, convinced as they were that the Indians would soon be gone from Massachusetts’ shores. But both her prophecy and the seriousness with which Indian Christians took such dreamed knowledge suggest the continuing importance of dreams to these communities. The seriousness with which missionaries listened and recorded these dreams suggests that they, too, understood that powerful messages could sometimes appear in a dream, and, in addition, that sometimes a conversation about dreaming could contain both conquest and resistance. And in some cases, seventeenth-century New England had even seen native resistance movements centered around particular visionaries and their powerful dreams.

We had only three class sessions in which to absorb the impact of the shootings and to wrestle with the many narratives, including the powerful dream narrative, that emerged from that tragedy. We sought together for a path through the pain and the shock. For some students, that path seemed to come fairly quickly, allowing them to settle, at least for the time being, into a new normal that let them finish their work for the term. For others—those who had known the victims or who had lived in the apartment building where the murders began—the end of the quarter brought little resolution.

As for me, I spent the next weeks and months as others did, mourning the lost and engaged with the living in advocating for policy changes that might have saved lives. But I also mused on the ways that we historians seem to specialize in speaking with the dead. We imagine the lives of those who have come before us, and we try, through discipline and deep immersion in the documents of a past world, to understand and reanimate the lives of those long dead. Over the course of the summer I found myself reflecting on the ways that dreams help to potentiate new experience; calm emotional turmoil; and prepare us for loss. And I also reflected on the ways in which mine was a peculiarly modern means of interpreting such dream visitations. Early modern men and women knew death intimately, and in their world, the door was never closed between the world of the dead and that of the living. Dreams remained a conduit for them between these realms, albeit a door that was only meant to open when God gave it a push.

For us, the doorways dividing the dead from the living take more work to open. I am collaborating these days with a small group of students and library staff on an ongoing project to create an archival collection related to the Isla Vista murders. We hope that in retaining for future study some of the many objects, cards, letters, prayers, and other items left at the places where victims fell, these events will not be forgotten. Of course, my students and I hope, along with those bereaved parents, that those who lost their lives will still have the power to inspire action in others—to change the policies that need changing, and to build a community that honors their spirit.

Sometimes, just every once in a while, I myself have a particular dream of the dead. Usually I am in a diner, talking with a group of friends. I look over my shoulder, and I see my godmother, gone more than twenty years now, sitting in a booth just a bit away. This is the person, more than anyone else, who supported my love of history when I was a child, spending countless hours taking me to historical sites and museums. I try to extricate myself from the party, offering excuses, but I am trapped in an inside seat and no one hears me. Finally, in exasperation, I blurt out, “I’m sorry that I have to go, but I want to go sit with my godmother. She’s been dead for a long time, and I don’t get to talk with her that often.” By the time I finally get free, she slips away, just out of reach, until the next time. And so I, like the rest of us moderns, have to find other ways to speak with the dead.

Further reading:

The dream reported by James Cheng Yuan Hong’s family was contained in the remarks of Richard Martinez, another parent, who was designated as spokesman for the victims’ families at the memorial service on May 27, 2014, at Harder Stadium, University of California, Santa Barbara.

The dreams mentioned are found in a variety of sources, all cited in full in Ann Marie Plane, Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, Colonists and the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2014).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

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Ann Marie Plane is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, California.

December 5, 1876, was the second night of the Brooklyn Theatre’s production of The Two Orphans, a popular French melodrama that had taken New York by storm. The Brooklyn version of the show had received rave reviews too, with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle calling it “a near approach to the common idea of perfection,” while Kate Claxton, a rising actress seemingly on the verge of stardom, played Louise, one of the titular characters. Perhaps because of these attractions, nearly 1,000 people, about two-thirds the theater’s capacity, braved the bitter winter cold to see the show. The spectators and actors alike found themselves at the center of one of the deadliest fires in New York history (fig. 1).

The infamous Brooklyn Theatre Fire became a legend in theatrical circles, spawning popular songs and melodramas and making Claxton one of the most popular celebrities of the day. Yet the Brooklyn Theatre Fire also left a longer-lasting legacy. After an investigation into the causes of the fire revealed negligence and lax conditions in most theaters in Brooklyn and New York, the local press, led by the New York Mirror, campaigned for regulations that helped transform the physical space of the American theater. Moreover, the voluntary relief efforts to aid the “destitute widows and orphaned children” encouraged municipal reformers in Brooklyn to challenge the city’s existing charity structures and eventually end public outdoor relief in Brooklyn, a move that transformed the nature of welfare in the nineteenth-century American city.

On this December night, when a cross-section of Brooklyn society turned out to see The Two Orphans, the primary concern was whether Claxton and her fellow actors would be able to capture the audience’s imagination. The play proceeded without incident until the beginning of the last act, shortly after eleven o’clock. A piece of painted scenery, improperly secured by the stagehands, had strayed too close to one of the gaslights used to light the theater and caught fire. The blaze spread rapidly, and it seems the actors were the first to become aware of the danger. Sensing that a panic would be dangerous, the actors attempted to continue with the play amid a growing sense of unease. Claxton herself was forced to break character and assure the audience that “There is no fire. The flames are part of the play” (fig. 2).

 

 

Yet almost immediately as she reassured theatergoers, pieces of flaming debris began to fall onto the stage, leading the actors to scatter and causing a full-fledged panic. Though the largely middle-class patrons seated on the main floor were able to easily escape, the working-class men and women in the cheapest seats, the top-level family circle, and parquet seats nearest to the stage were less fortunate. Hundreds of people crammed the narrow stairways down to the main exit, and dozens were trampled as the panicked throng attempted to reach the exits even as the fire spread to the theater’s upper levels. One witness reported to the New York World that he saw “women screaming, pushed aside by rough-looking men and boys… I saw a large rough man who appeared to be blind from excitement jump over the heads nearest to him and come down on the face of a fallen woman. The sight sickened me” (fig. 3).

 

 

Only twenty minutes elapsed between the first signs of fire and the immolation of the entire building, hardly enough time to evacuate the theater. Lingering flames prevented the fire department from entering the building until the early hours of the next morning. Though it would take weeks to sort through the wreckage, it was immediately clear that the fire had caused casualties on a scale previously unimaginable. A coroner’s report listed 283 confirmed fatalities, though some reports place the death toll as high as 350. Among these were several actors in The Two Orphans, though Kate Claxton survived; police found her wandering about in a state of shock the morning after the fire, still clad in the flimsy dress from the performance.

Regardless of the number of dead, the Brooklyn Theatre Fire was the deadliest fire in a public building in the nation to that point, and is still the third deadliest in American history (behind the 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago and the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston). The scale of the disaster staggered Brooklyn, the nation’s third-largest city (the consolidation of New York City would not take place until 1898), a place that styled itself as “the city of churches and homes.” While the police began to gather survivors at the First Precinct station house on Washington Street near the back of the theater, the coroner’s office and the fire department began the arduous task of removing the charred remains of the deceased from the theater’s ruins. Over the next few days city officials were besieged by families of potential fire victims seeking news of loved ones, or just as often, temporary financial support. City Mayor Frederick W. Schroeder, a well-to-do cigar manufacturer elected on a pledge to curb city spending, admitted ruefully that he had “drawn from the city treasury” to meet the demands of aid-seekers. Similarly, church officials, charity aid workers, and even agents of Brooklyn Democratic “boss” Hugh McLaughlin provided money indiscriminately to those affected by the fire. The entire system was, in the words of Brooklyn Theatre Fire Relief Association member Simeon Chittenden “entirely disorganized … [causing] an undue strain on public finances.”

 

Furthermore, there was the problem of identifying the bodies and determining what to do with them. The coroner set up viewing galleries so that families of potential victims (and curious spectators) could see many of the remains and items that could possibly be identified (fig. 4). 180 bodies were eventually claimed in this way. The remaining 103 victims, most of whom were unidentifiable or unclaimed, were buried in Brooklyn’s famous Green-Wood Cemetery in a mass grave during a public funeral (fig. 5). Later, the city would erect a thirty-foot-high obelisk at the site to commemorate the victims. The obelisk still stands today, and is the only visual reminder of the tragedy in Brooklyn (fig. 6).

 

 

As bodies were still being pulled from the rubble, the local paper the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran an article chronicling widespread dishonesty among supposedly “bereaved” families affected by the fire. Mayor Schroeder cut off public relief for fire victims immediately. Conscious that legitimate relief was required, Schroeder instead utilized the occasion of a memorial service for the deceased on December 12 to call for the creation of a private organization that would “systemize the work [of relief] through one central organization.” The privatization of disaster relief in Brooklyn was part of a larger effort by municipal reformers in the 1870s to refine urban welfare, giving the administration of aid to upper-class “experts” with experience managing charitable organizations. Schroeder and his fellow reformers feared that if the machine-controlled Brooklyn Common Council were given charge of fire relief efforts, “Boss” Hugh McLaughlin would use the funds to buy political influence while the “virtuous poor” would be ignored. Given the scale of the disaster and the severity of the 1876-77 winter, Schroeder and his colleagues demanded that aid efforts be controlled by experienced administrators. Though the privatization of Brooklyn fire relief seems at odds with the narrative of urban reform in the Gilded Age, the privilege granted to expertise and the fear of the power of the urban machine puts these efforts in line with similar reform efforts of the time. At a public meeting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music a few days before Christmas, that organization, the Brooklyn Theatre Fire Relief Association (BTFRA) came into being. The brainchild of Ripley Ropes, a wealthy merchant and the president of the Brooklyn branch of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP), the BTFRA followed procedures developed by the AICP to streamline relief efforts. All prospective aid-seekers were forced to visit BTFRA offices and undergo a home visitation before receiving relief, and recipients faced strict accounting procedures and a number of other anti-fraud measures afterwards. Appealing to the hearts and pocketbooks of prominent Brooklynites, headlining speaker Henry Ward Beecher explicitly cast relief efforts as a struggle against creating more public dependents. “How will you provide for those whom God has made your guest?” Beecher asked, demanding to know if the elite of Brooklyn would let the fire victims and their families “fall into the degrading and brutalizing position of public dependence.” Donations streamed in from Simeon Chittenden, Seth Low, Henry Evelyn Pierrepont, and other rich Brooklynites, as well as hundreds of smaller donations from all over Brooklyn and beyond. Indeed, theater companies nationally took up the cause of the disaster. Companies from as far away as Charleston, South Carolina, held impromptu fundraising performances in urban theaters across the country, with the proceeds donated to fire relief. By the end of 1876, the BTFRA had over $28,000 in their account to distribute for the relief of fire victims and their families—particularly widows and orphans, the stated focus of the BTFRA’s relief efforts.

Ripley Ropes recruited many other wealthy Brooklynites to join him on the board of the BTFRA. Daniel Chauncey, president of the Mechanics’ Bank, served as treasurer. More importantly, Ropes’s close friend Reverend Alfred Putnam, the pastor at Brooklyn’s First Unitarian Church (where Ropes was a member), became the association’s secretary and managing director. Putnam was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the BTFRA and became the organization’s “face” to the public. The volunteer “visitors” who affirmed a family’s suitability for relief were drawn from the ranks of the AICP’s staff, which had experience in sorting out the “worthy poor” from the unworthy residuum.

 

Indeed, the very structure of the BTFRA seemed to be skewed against aid-seekers from the very beginning. This is perhaps best observed in the rigorous screening process that potential relief recipients were forced to undergo. First of all, most men were excluded from making a claim unless they could prove that they, through reason of age or disability, relied upon the income of their wife or child. Most men who applied for aid were summarily dismissed, revealing the BTFRA’s lack of understanding of the economic structures of families in the city’s working class. BTFRA clients needed first to provide the BTFRA with a reference attesting to their character and to the fact they lost a relative who provided for them and their family. Then, “their family circumstances were investigated by case workers who spared no pains to acquaint themselves with the character and needs of the numerous applicants and with the merits of their claims.” If found worthy by the visitors, the Executive Committee would set a biweekly stipend appropriate for the family’s lost income. Visitors kept copious notes about each home, and particular attention was paid to family arrangements and suspicions of alcohol consumption. The visitor for each ward would also be able to adjust the biweekly stipend at their discretion (and often did). These adjustments most frequently drew letters of complaint from aid recipients.

During any step along the way, applicants could be judged ineligible, and many of the other charities took it upon themselves to police the distribution of relief. For example, when Reverend S.B. Halliday, Beecher’s assistant at Plymouth Congregational Church, heard that the mother of 22-year-old Irish laborer William Kennedy had applied for aid, he wrote to the Executive Committee to warn them that “Mrs. Kennedy is addicted to drinking … no money should be given to the mother.” In another case, the visitor assigned to the widow of vegetable seller Jacob Allen felt “she is not telling the truth [about her lost income] and [he] could not recommend any help.” Indeed, there was a near-obsessive fear among members of the BTFRA that their assistance was not going to the most “worthy” families. Robert Foster, the president of the Union of Christian Work, wrote to Rev. Putnam on January 4, 1877, nearly a month after the fire, to warn him, “It is possible some of [the aid-seekers] have not been so far purified by fire that they will not falsify.”

Yet in spite of such a fear of fraud, the BTFRA was motivated by a genuinely humanitarian impulse, and the organization proved remarkably effective in aiding victims of the theater fire. Of the 278 confirmed victims, the BTFRA ultimately provided an average of $250 per family to 188 families over the course of its two-and-a-half years of existence. Though the audience the night of the fire was a mixture of middle and working-class patrons, the dead had been disproportionately working-class immigrants, and they received the bulk of the BTFRA’s financial support. Only a handful of families were rejected as being unworthy; for the most part, families not receiving aid either did not ask for it, or were rejected on the grounds of having other means of support. Moreover, there seemed to be little ethnic or racial prejudice in determining who received aid. Families of Irish descent made up nearly a third of those receiving aid, while immigrant families from Germany, Italy, and Poland were also represented on the BTFRA’s relief rolls. The children of the only two African American victims of the Brooklyn Theatre Fire, William and Hannah Brown, were among the last people to be taken off the relief list; even after they moved to Oswego, New York, to live with an aunt they continued to receive a biweekly stipend. The Executive Committee was often willing to hear arguments of aid recipients who felt their stipend was wrongly reduced or discontinued, and in at least a handful of cases restored payments if family circumstances changed.

 

 

There were certainly missteps as the BTFRA groped with the scale of the disaster. For example, the BTFRA began by providing every family a $20 stipend every two weeks, a sum that the BTFRA Executive Committee later acknowledged “would have completely depleted our treasury within one year.” Generally, however, the BTFRA proved to be an effective relief measure. Recipients of relief were genuinely grateful for the aid they received. Mary Jackson, whose husband, Robert, perished in the theater fire, was one such recipient. The mother of eight children (one of whom was born after the fire), Jackson became a media sensation in the wake of the disaster. Journalists hungry for stories of heartbreaking tragedy reported on Jackson endlessly in the weeks after the fire, and in many ways she became the face of the Brooklyn Theatre Fire for Brooklynites and people around the nation. She remained on the books of the BTFRA for two years, and credited the BTFRA with her salvation. The aid she received, she wrote to the Executive Committee, “allowed me to provide for my children without sacrificing my womanhood … I will remain forever in the debt of the fine citizens of Brooklyn.”

As time passed, and donations to the Brooklyn Theatre Fire Relief Association began to dwindle and the number of recipients decreased, the organization moved to dissolve itself. On March 17, 1879, the BTFRA issued a check for $317, the remaining money in its treasury, to the widow Jackson. A week later, on March 25, the Executive Committee presented its final report to the public, declaring “it is believed that time has been given for nearly all of the families to find some other resources which may enable them to meet the necessary expenses of life.” Reverend Putnam and the BTFRA had distributed nearly $50,000 to Brooklyn families affected by the fire in a little over two years. With the dissolution of the BTFRA, the Executive Committee felt that “the most tragic and impressive event in the annals of Brooklyn” had been finally overcome, thanks to the charity of citizens from around the nation and overseas, as well as the efforts of the “best men” making up the BTFRA.

After seeing the success of the BTFRA in solving the problems of disaster relief, however, Putnam and Ropes began to wonder whether private charity would be a more appropriate means of dealing with all of the city’s destitute. After being appointed to the state Board of Charities, Ropes recruited Putnam to assist him in an investigation of the structure of relief in Brooklyn, and their findings horrified middle- and upper-class citizens. Ropes and Putnam revealed that Brooklyn’s spending on public welfare had climbed steadily. Between 1872 and 1877, relief spending increased from $95,771.43 to $141,207.35; moreover, relief rolls had increased dramatically in that time, with an estimated 50,000 people receiving relief in 1877, double the amount from five years earlier. Part of this increase was surely due to Brooklyn’s growth during the 1870s. The city’s population grew from just under 400,000 in 1870 to 566,000 at the end of the decade. Moreover, the Panic of 1873 introduced a further element of economic uncertainty that surely added to Brooklyn’s relief rolls. Yet, Ropes and his colleagues ignored these structural causes and instead saw the increasing number of aid recipients as a challenge to Brooklyn’s image as “a city of homes and churches.” At a meeting of Kings County Supervisors, Ropes described Brooklyn’s public relief system as “exceeding expensive” and “encouraging to pauperism.” Ropes proposed that outdoor relief should be limited to coal, with private charities taking responsibility for issuing any direct financial aid. Ropes also suggested that nearly 46 percent of outdoor relief in the current system went to “expenses” paid to the Supervisors and the Charity Commissioners—charges which the Kings County Charity Commissioners Thomas Norris and Bernard Bogan and members of the Board of Supervisors (led by Supervisor John Byrne) angrily denied, instead accusing Ropes and Putnam of trying to “punish the worthy poor.”

 

 

The same split between the genuine desire to aid the poor and the suspicion of charity that lay at the center of the BTFRA similarly animated those in favor of abolishing outdoor relief. The Brooklyn Eagle spoke for many when it outlined the objections to outdoor relief. In an editorial dated December 18, 1877, the Eagle argued that the outdoor relief system encouraged pauperism, hurt private charity efforts, was too expensive, served the unworthy poor rather than those most deserving and, most seriously, “had a political side which [was] unconditionally vicious.” Democrats like Bogan and Byrne who had relied on “Boss” McLaughlin’s machine for election were portrayed as abusing public funds to serve the interests of McLaughlin while at the same time encouraging the virtuous poor to fall into permanent pauperism.

In contrast, men like Ropes and others who supported his proposals, including key members of the BTFRA Executive and Financial Committees, including Putnam, Mayor Schroeder and future mayor of both Brooklyn and New York City Seth Low (fig. 7), portrayed themselves as seeking to remove politics from the distribution of outdoor relief—and in the process “save” the worthy poor from pauperism. Their accusations were supported by an investigation by the Eagle into the Commissioners of Charity that led them to brand outdoor relief efforts “a sham” and a “damnable fraud.” Later that month, Winchester Britton, former district attorney of Kings County (no relation to the author of this article), advised the Board of Supervisors that the program of outdoor relief was illegal in the form that had been established by the supervisors. Despite vociferous opposition by members of the Board of Supervisors and the Charity Commissioners, the board formally voted 17-12 to eliminate appropriations for outdoor relief from the county budget in July 1878. Frequent attempts to revive the system were made in the next few years, but never got very far in the face of adverse public opinion.

What happened to the nearly 50,000 Brooklynites who had been receiving outdoor relief? It is difficult to say. Despite reports by Seth Low and others that private charity had more than met the needs of the city’s poor, it is clear that their suffering had not been eased. Historian Michael B. Katz notes an increase in the number of children handed over to asylums and agencies as well as a general increase in the number of petty larcenies in the years 1878-1880. He suggests that the money saved by the elimination of outdoor relief was lost in the increased expenditures to operate city, county, and state orphanages, poorhouses, and asylums.

So what connections can be drawn between the BTFRA and the move to privatize all benevolence in Brooklyn? Certainly, the personnel and organizations involved in the two movements were nearly identical. Ripley Ropes, the leader of the movement to abolish outdoor relief, was president of the Brooklyn AICP, the group that provided the professional framework for the Brooklyn Theatre Fire Relief Association and took over the responsibilities of outdoor relief. Ropes also helped establish the BTFRA and served on its executive committee. Reverend Alfred Putnam, the key figure behind the BTFRA, aided Ropes in his investigation of the Charity Commissioners. Mayor Frederick Schroeder, the former president of the BTFRA, strongly supported Ropes’s efforts and later, as a state senator, led the efforts to indict the Charity Commissioners on charges of malfeasance. These men and the host of supporters they brought together all were staunch Republicans and members of the elite establishment in Brooklyn.

However, the BTFRA cannot be described as the sole inspiration behind the private charity movement, as that crusade predated the theater fire. Instead, the Brooklyn Theatre Fire Relief Association provided these elites with a model for and experience in private charity that they could transpose upon the entire city. Proving that the private model as represented by the BTFRA had succeeded in providing for the families of fire victims, these same elites sought to expand the system to cover all 50,000 people on relief in Brooklyn.

Henry Ward Beecher, the favored religious leader of many of these elites, made the connection explicit. Beecher had been a tireless fundraiser for the BTFRA, but in November of 1878 he transferred his efforts to making appeals for Ropes’s AICP. “Within the past two years, a change has been made in the system of relieving the worthy poor, and the change seems to be a good one,” Beecher said, calling the AICP “a very wholesome and desirable substitute for the old system.” To those who questioned private charity, Beecher pointed to “the money subscribed by a grieving city for the relief of sufferers by the Brooklyn Theatre fire disbursed by philanthropy … in a most satisfactory way.” For Beecher, speaking for his well-to-do parishioners, the evidence of the BTFRA’s success demonstrated the efficiency of private charity.

Behind the congratulatory plaudits and political power these elites gained from their work privatizing charity in Brooklyn in these years, there was a recognition, at least by some, that the power of private charity was limited. Dr. Thomas Norris, one of the Commissioners of Charities who opposed the abolition of outdoor relief, observed the shortcomings of private philanthropy in his year-end report for the Board of Supervisors. Private charity was appropriate on a small scale such as the theater fire, Norris wrote, but in cities the size of Brooklyn, “very many more cases require help than private benevolence can reach.”

Yet Norris, discredited and dispirited, was a voice in the wilderness. He was indicted as a result of Ropes’s and theEagle‘s investigations, and though he was acquitted, his career was over. The “success” of the Brooklyn experiment encouraged other cities to follow their model. By 1900, outdoor relief was abolished in nearly every major urban area in the United States. The success of men like Seth Low, Alfred Putnam, Ripley Ropes, Frederick Schroeder, and their counterparts across the country did not rest in insulating the poor from pauperism, removing politics from charity, or even saving the taxpayers money, as they claimed. Rather, their triumph came from seizing control over the mechanism of urban charity, giving urban elites a valuable method of social control that reflected earlier private models of urban charity. Ropes, Low, and other upper-class political figures self-consciously returned to this form as a way to undercut the power of political bosses like Hugh McLaughlin. McLaughlin derived much of his power from his ability to provide aid to the city’s working class. By arranging charity along private, “business-like” lines, Low and Ropes hoped to shake the machine’s hold over aid recipients and further their own political ambitions.

The abolition of outdoor relief in Brooklyn was not the only lasting legacy of the Brooklyn Theatre Fire, however. Indeed, the fire helped transform the very structure of the American theater itself. While the BTFRA was investigating aid-seekers for their economic and moral conditions, another sort of investigation was ongoing. City authorities sought to identify the causes of the fire and establish blame, if necessary. On December 7, Coroner Henry Simms impaneled a jury to hear testimony and determine the cause of the fire. Ripley Ropes was named foreman of the jury, and he was joined by many of Brooklyn’s most prominent men, including streetcar magnate William “Deacon” Richardson and warehouse owner Samuel McLean. Simultaneously, Patrick Keady, the city’s fire marshal and member of the Democratic machine, began his own investigation (fig. 8).

Keady finished his investigation first, releasing his findings on December 14, just two weeks after the blaze. His scathing conclusions laid blame on the theater’s owners, Sheridan Shook and A.M. Palmer. He noted that the theater had little means to extinguish fires—Palmer and Shook had disconnected the hose attached to the theater’s fire hydrant—nor were the stagehands prepared to deal with emergencies. Finally, though Keady acknowledged the ease with which most patrons fled the theater, he concluded that the single biggest reason for the death toll was the narrowness of the stairs down from the gallery to the exits. While in normal circumstances the stairs were adequate, Keady noted, “they could not afford safety with a panic and fire, such as occurred in the Brooklyn Theatre, raging together.”

The coroner’s jury, which released its report at the end of January, came to similar conclusions. Shook and Palmer were “guilty of a culpable neglect” of safety measures in the theater, and the jury recommended that they face criminal charges (which they ultimately avoided). Beyond that, however, the coroner’s jury also set forth a series of remarkable recommendations for all theaters in Brooklyn that sought to prevent a similar disaster from happening again. The New York Mirror led the way, declaring the coroner’s jury’s proposals—which included enclosing the gaslights in iron fenders, building a brick wall to separate the stage from the rest of the auditorium, and developing safer materials for use in scenery—as “sound and sensible” principles for remaking America’s theaters. And indeed, some theaters took these precautions to heart. Under the recommendation of architects called to consult on safety measures, the owners of the Coates Opera House in Kansas City (originally erected in 1870) added a brick wall to separate the stage from the rest of the auditorium as a means of fire containment, while several theaters in New York City closed in order to expand the exits to accommodate more patrons.

Both the Brooklyn and New York fire departments briefly experimented with stationing groups of firefighters in theaters for every theatrical production in their respective cities, but this proved to be too expensive and too difficult to manage, particularly in New York, and was discontinued after a few months. One enterprising theater owner in New York coated his sets with an anti-incendiary powder that had the unfortunate side-effect of leaving his actors unable to perform due to lung irritation after they inhaled the powder. The recommendations of the Brooklyn coroner’s jury were too expensive or impractical for most established theaters to adopt, and without a set of guidelines, things quickly returned to normal. Reviewing the measures taken by New York theaters in 1881, theInsurance Times declared “there is not a safe [theater] in New York,” and recommended adjusting insurance premiums upwards.

Theater owners and patrons alike were jolted out of their complacency soon, however, after a devastating fire tore through Vienna’s Ringtheater during a performance of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman on December 8, 1881—almost five years to the day after the Brooklyn Theatre disaster. The circumstances of the Ringtheater fire were remarkably similar, although the death tolls were markedly different. While the Brooklyn Theatre Fire claimed “only” 283 victims, the Ringtheater disaster took the lives of anywhere between 620 and 850 people. It remains the deadliest theater fire in world history.

Brooklynites, and members of the original coroner’s jury in particular, were quick to point out the connection between the two disasters. Ripley Ropes told the Brooklyn Times that, “the similarities between the two tragedies are such that they might as well be duplicates.” Ropes, at the time preparing to become the city’s commissioner of public works under mayor-elect Seth Low, joined with Brooklyn Fire Chief Thomas Nevins to revive the coroner’s jury’s proposals for making Brooklyn theaters safer, updating them slightly. The proposals still contained demands to widen and increase the number of exits and separate the stage from the rest of the theater, but they also included provisions for having a telegraphic connection between every theater in the city and the fire department. Nevins presented these proposals to the Brooklyn Common Council, noting that only the Brooklyn Opera House and the new Brooklyn Theatre (built on the same site as the old theater) had any sort of fire precautions at all. The city’s Progressive reformers, epitomized by the energetic Low, embraced these ideas; after taking office, Low insisted that Brooklyn Fire Department investigate every theater in the city to ensure they met Nevins’s standards.The Eagle summed up the spirit of the movement by insisting that “if the proprietors of theaters cannot be induced to voluntarily adopt these or kindred experiments, it will be in order to consider the propriety of making them compulsory.”

The call for reform soon spread across the East River. The Mirror was New York’s premier literary and artistic newspaper, and was one of the loudest voices for reform in the wake of the Brooklyn Theatre Fire. The Ringtheater disaster reawakened them to the need for regulation and reform of the physical space of the New York theater. “The carelessness that caused the Brooklyn fire is still apparent in even the finest theaters of New York,” the Mirror charged, asking “will it take yet another conflagration to compel managers to adopt measures to protect the public?” The Mirror‘s advocacy pushed the New York Fire Department to conduct a thorough investigation into the conditions of the city’s theaters. Their findings—that many theaters did not have an appropriate number of exits, nor did they have proper facilities for those in balcony seats to escape—proved The Mirror‘s point.

The Mirror, the Eagle, and other reformers faced entrenched opposition from theater managers and proprietors, who argued that the reforms that Ropes, Nevins, and others suggested were far too expensive. Colonel William Sinn of the Brooklyn Park Theater complained that if he undertook all the reforms that Nevins suggested, he “would be obliged to raise ticket prices to a level well above the reach of a working man.” This appeal to the working classes, coupled with many theater owners’ connections to both New York and Brooklyn’s Democratic machines, made the theaters a formidable opponent. Yet the public, shocked by the prospect of a New York catastrophe on the scale of Vienna’s Ringtheater, largely sided with the reformers. Nor was the theater owners’ cause helped by a series of theater fires across the country (the Mirror estimated that 13 theaters burned down each year between 1871 and 1881). Indeed, as historian Benjamin McArthur notes, “anxiety about theater fires [in New York] even influenced drama, as nervous audiences lost their taste for realistic fire scenes.” The public, the press, and municipal reformers all demanded action.

In 1882 and 1883, the state legislature and the Common Councils of Brooklyn and New York took action. Though theater owners were able to dilute the legislation, new regulations by the state forced all theaters in New York to provide at least four separate exit ways and to widen all existing exits. New York City went further, prohibiting theaters from building sets on theater premises, and limiting the amount of sets and props a theater could keep in storage. Brooklyn’s Common Council, then under the control of a reform element, went further, requiring the placement of a Theatrical Detail Officer at every theater to inspect the theater’s fire-prevention facilities and the exits. Coming as it did just as theaters in New York were “creating” Broadway as we know it today, the improved regulations played a very important role in drawing families back to New York City theaters, and perhaps saved the theater’s reputation at a critical time.

Of course, there would be other fires. The most notable, the Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago in 1903, was the single most catastrophic loss of life in U.S. theater history, as 605 people lost their lives in the fire. That fire finally spurred New York City to adopt many of the regulations that Ropes and Nevins had first suggested in the 1880s. By 1910, all city theaters had to be equipped with a brick wall separating the stage from the auditorium, sprinkler systems, and extra, clearly marked emergency fire exits. These changes have largely created the physical space of the theater as we know it today, and made it a much safer space than it was at the time of the Brooklyn Theatre Fire.

The fire remains a crucial moment in Brooklyn’s history. For years afterward, Brooklyn’s newspapers would compare every great fire to that of the old Brooklyn Theatre. Folk songs were composed and sung about the fire, and there were even stage plays offering fictional recreations of the story in the years to come. Even Kate Claxton, who survived the fire and indeed perhaps achieved national fame for her part in it, remained tied to the fire in the public’s imagination. For years after the fire, Claxton was seen as a theatrical “Jonah,” as theater fires—or at the very least panic over false cries of “fire”—seemed to follow her as she toured the nation in the role she made famous in The Two Orphans. In 1892, the Louisville Courier published a profile of Claxton, noting that “for over fifteen years, she has been pursued by a particular form of ill luck … several fires and a dozen or so panics.” Claxton herself believed (or so she said) that she had a reputation “as a fire fiend,” “pursued by an evil genius.” Claxton retired from performing in 1911, living comfortably on earnings from performances and filmed versions of The Two Orphans (to which she owned the performance rights). Yet, her reputation as “Kate Claxton of the Big Brooklyn Fire” followed her until her death in 1924. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Claxton is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, very near to the monument erected in honor of many of the fire’s victims.

Further Reading

Those interested in the state of American theater in the decades after the Civil War should see Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Iowa City, 2000) and The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson and Nineteenth-Century American Theater (New Haven, 2007); Gillian Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 2010); and, most recently, Amy Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theaters and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor, 2012).

The literature on urban poor relief and welfare is voluminous, but a good start can be made with Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A History of Social Welfare in America, tenth anniversary ed. (New York, 1996); Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, sixth ed. (New York, 1998); and June Axinn and Mark Stern, Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need, seventh ed. (Columbus, 2007)

No good full-length literature on the Brooklyn Theatre Fire itself exists, though readers may enjoy Brooklyn’s Horror: A Thrilling Personal Experience (Philadelphia, 1877), a cheap dime novel supposedly written by one of the theater fire’s survivors. Though the book is of dubious veracity, it is extremely entertaining. The book is available to view online at Google Books.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 13.4 (Summer, 2013).

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Joshua Britton recently received his PhD in American history from Lehigh University. He is currently revising his dissertation entitled “Building a ‘City of Churches and Homes’: Elites, Space and Power in Nineteenth-Century Brooklyn” for publication