In 1779, a satire called The History of a French Louse; or, the Spy of a New Species, in France and England was published in London. On its title page, the book claims to be a fourth edition translated from the French. A French edition was also published in 1779, but there is no evidence that previous editions exist.

The Louse was published anonymously but is often attributed to “Delauney.” The text is an “it narrative,” part of a genre of tales told by nonhuman narrators that was wildly popular in Britain and the Anglo-Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. The satire’s narrator is a louse who has lived on a series of heads in and around Paris and been witness to the political maneuverings happening behind the scenes of the American Revolution.

This anti-revolutionary satire, the centerpiece of which is a caricature of Benjamin Franklin, quickly made its way to British colonial North America. In 1781, advertisements for the Louse appeared in the Loyalist newspaper the Royal American Gazette, which was published in New York City. In Philadelphia, the Louse circulated at least until the 1830s. The Library Company of Philadelphia holds two copies of the text, one of which was damaged in a fire in 1831. Readers cared enough about the Louse to rebind it afterward with a group of pamphlets that had been similarly damaged.

Upon its publication, the Louse joined a wave of anti-Franklin propaganda unfolding  on both sides of the Atlantic. Satirical renderings of Franklin as a self-serving lush and lecher were popular in France, England, and British America. From its position on the scalp of a dinner guest, the Louse’s narrator introduces Franklin as “a man of great note who came from another part of the world,” as a minister representing a people who’d recently rebelled (19). Franklin is then quickly derided as a “grotesque figure,” sunburnt, wrinkled, and warty with absurd spectacles. The louse also encounters Marie Antoinette; Mademoiselle d’Éon, who had been a diplomat and spy under the male identity Chevalier d’Éon but later identified as female; and Pierre Beaumarchais, a French supporter of the American rebellion.

In addition to skewering some of the most famous people of the period, the Louse raises questions about the status of the individual agent and the scale of political action. Spying, after all, is so easy, and human bodies are not as individual and discrete as they might at first appear. Influential political philosophers of the period, including John Locke, acknowledged and sought to manage the material discontinuity of the human body—what Locke calls the “constantly fleeting particles of matter” that make up a man. The louse inhabits bodies that ooze both matter and information, which he carries with him as he scurries from head to head.

By the late eighteenth century, the idea of a social parasite and the idea of a biological parasite would both have been familiar to readers. The Louse makes the predictable anti-revolutionary argument that British colonial Americans like Franklin are lousy parasites. It also explores the uneasy possibility that some minute part might scramble off a human body and go on to tell a story of its own, with significant political consequences.

The History of a French Louse is available on GoogleBooks. Google unfortunately omits four prefatory pages, in which the louse introduces himself as the first author of his species, dedicates his narrative to King Louis XVI, laments his misfortunes, and declares himself as stoic as a Roman republican statesman. This introductory material is digitized in the Sabin Americana Digital Archive. You can also find copies of the Louse at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Huntington Library, or the Newberry. An excerpt from the text appears in British It-Narratives 1750-1830, Volume 2: Animals.

Further Reading

For more on Loyalist writing in British colonial America, see Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (New York, 2013). On Franklin in France, see for example Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York, 2005). For more on it narratives, see Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, 2006); Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cranbury, N.J., 2007); and Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton and Oxford, 2011). For an argument about social relations as fundamentally parasitic, see Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis, 2007). The excerpt of the Louse is in British It-Narratives, ed. Heather Keenleyside (London and Brookfield, Vt., 2012).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

Julia Dauer is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and the history of science.

Teaching American History in the Clemente Course

Since 2001, I have taught American history in the Boston Clemente Course, a college humanities program accredited by Bard College and offered free of charge to lower income adults through the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, Massachusetts. I also teach at Harvard. The driving distance between Harvard Square and Codman Square is less than eight miles, but these neighborhoods can sometimes feel like they’re a world apart. My Clemente students are mostly women and people of color, often from immigrant backgrounds. Many of them have young children and older relatives for whom they are the primary or sole caregivers, which makes it more difficult for them to afford or attend college, especially full time. They shoulder the heavy burdens and myriad manifestations of poverty and prejudice that disproportionately affect people who live in places like Dorchester. Despite all of this, my Clemente and Harvard students have important things in common: they are smart and engaged, they are eager to learn and improve their lives, and they struggle to balance lingering self-doubt with the loftiest of dreams. The Clemente Course is driven by two core ideals: first, that the humanities—the study of history, literature, art, and philosophy—should be accessible to everyone; and second, that the humanities have something to teach all of us, can help us become more critical and compassionate citizens.

Aspirations to equal opportunity, to more enlightened citizenship, and to the common good are part of the core of what it means to be American. Thomas Jefferson’s ambitious and elusive phrase “the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” set in motion Americans’ tenacious belief that tomorrow can and should be better than today, our mythic faith in the possibility of progress. It has inspired our “new births of freedom,” our “new deals” and “new frontiers,” our “great societies” and “mornings in America,” our “bridges to the 21st century,” and our “audacity of hope.” Yet these aspirations—to equality and freedom, to the full rights of citizenship, to a better life—have also functioned as cruel reminders that throughout American history, many people have been denied these things by virtue of their race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and country of origin. The Declaration’s enduring power—as an act of political dissent and as a piece of protest literature—rests in the fact that more than any of the founding documents, it has inspired future generations of Americans, particularly those who have been marginalized or disenfranchised in some way, to critique the ongoing shortcomings of their society and struggle to create a more just world.

It is for these reasons that I begin my Clemente American History class with the Declaration of Independence. Actually, I begin with two Declarations: Jefferson’s draft and the final version. Jefferson preferred the former, but for various reasons, the Second Continental Congress went with the latter. The vast majority of my students, both at Clemente and Harvard, have never read Jefferson’s draft, another reason why I always insist on teaching it. The most striking change between the two versions comes at the end of a long list of colonial grievances against the “repeated injuries and usurpations” and “absolute tyranny” of the King of England:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christianking of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

This entire paragraph from Jefferson’s draft—by far the most sharply worded of the original grievances—was edited out completely. I always read this section aloud, as Jefferson originally intended, so that my students can hear the power and urgency of the language. Their responses are always as diverse as they are: “He sounds angry.” “The language is so violent.” “It seems like Jefferson is working out some issues here.” “How can Jefferson blame the King for slavery when he owned slaves himself?” “No one person was solely responsible for slavery.” “He’s right, slavery was a war crime.” “Who made the decision to remove this paragraph?” What follows is a discussion that never disappoints, one that explores the complex political dynamics of the Revolution, the percolating regional tensions within the colonies, the relationship between Jefferson’s psychology and his rhetorical project, the unsustainable co-existence of slavery and freedom. My students come to understand that the omission of this last grievance in the final version of the Declaration, combined with the absence of any race-specific language or explicit mention of “slavery” in the Constitution, serves as powerful evidence of the Founding Fathers’ personal and political limitations, their inability—and unwillingness—to confront slavery head-on at that historic moment. They erased slavery in word, if not in deed, rendering it all but invisible to readers of the founding documents who did not have access to their behind-the-scenes political wrangling as they were writing the nation into existence. At first, my students seem startled by this revelation, but it begins to make sense to them as they reflect more deeply on the fact that subsequent generations of Americans, including our own, have had similar difficulties squaring the nation’s loftiest professions of freedom and equality with the pernicious legacy of the “peculiar institution.” As one of my Clemente students once said in class: “Slavery was America’s original sin, but we’re all still paying for it.”

No one understood these things more deeply—or experienced them more directly—than enslaved people themselves. When the Declaration of Independence was signed in the summer of 1776, slavery existed in some form in all thirteen colonies, where people of African descent, most of them enslaved, constituted roughly one-fifth of the total population. In the northern states, where the Revolution set in motion a decades-long process of gradual abolition, African Americans began to organize and speak out against both slavery and racial discrimination. Among the most compelling documents from this period are the surviving petitions that enslaved people submitted to colonial (and then state) legislatures to gain their freedom. In the Clemente Course, I teach two such petitions from Boston—the first submitted on January 6, 1773, by an individual (“Felix”), and the second submitted on April 20, 1773, by a group (“Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie”). Enslaved individuals began petitioning local governments for their freedom, sometimes successfully, long before the Revolution, but prior to the 1770s, petitions for black freedom were usually written by one’s master or master’s minister, and framed as moral rather than political appeals, highlighting good behavior or religious piety as justifications for freedom. As the Revolution unfolded, and as enslaved people began to acquire the literacy necessary to write their own petitions, their appeals increasingly displayed the kind of political rhetoric that was common in other, white-authored documents from the period, as well as a growing awareness of the spirit of rebellion that was sweeping the colonies. The petitions from 1773 represent this shift. Inspired by the Revolution’s promise, African Americans began using the printed petition to express their own grievances, giving enslaved people, both individuals and groups, their first public forum to assert their rights to freedom and equal citizenship on their own terms. Taken together, they represent the first and largest expressions of black political agency in the face of white political supremacy in the early history of America.

My students are fascinated by these documents, and more than a few are surprised that they exist at all. As a group, they are drawn, among other things, to questions about authorship (were they written by an individual or group?), literacy (were they written by or on behalf of enslaved people?), regional variation (was it possible for enslaved people to petition southern governments, or just northern ones?), and tone (why are some more deferential and others more defiant?). Building on their reading of the Declaration and its draft, they begin to see more clearly the political implications of rhetorical choices, and the power of language itself: the strategic use of pronouns (I, you, we, us, them); the careful ways petitioners navigated between sacred and secular appeals; and the explicit invocation of “natural rights,” as well as “liberty,” “tyranny,” “equality,” and “independence.” And then they read back from these documents to the Declaration, understanding that all of them are petitions of grievance and acts of protest against existing—and unacceptable—government practices.

One of the most thrilling moments of my Clemente teaching experience occurred early on in my tenure, during the first year of Mitt Romney’s term as governor of Massachusetts. The students came to class the week after we had been reading these and other documents from the American Revolution, including excerpts from Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense. The students were all fired up about some of the governor’s proposed budget cuts to public education and social services, cuts that were certain to negatively affect their lives and livelihoods. There was a town hall meeting that night, at the Great Hall, across the street from our classroom in the Codman Square Health Center. They were clamoring to attend. One student—clearly designated by her classmates to be their spokeswoman—said to me: “Professor Tim, you’ve been teaching us all about revolution, about the right to petition your government when you have grievances. We, the people, have grievances. Can we go?” I pointed out the irony inherent in their asking my permission to protest: What would Jefferson, or Felix, do? They all laughed and then left for the town hall meeting together. Afterwards, we returned to class to discuss how our actions that night, right here in Boston, were related to the Revolutionary history we’d been studying. At that point the students began brainstorming other ways to make their voices heard. They had learned a lesson about citizenship that went far beyond my initial plans or intentions.

For some students, the most powerful historical documents are those that are more individual or private in nature. In addition to very public texts like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, slave petitions for freedom and pamphlets like Common Sense, we also study the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and letters from Abigail Adams to her husband, John. In 1773, Wheatley made history as the first person of African descent to write and publish a book in English, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, making her, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has argued, the “Founding Mother of African-American literature.” Born in West Africa, Wheatley was brought to the North American colonies at the age of about eight in 1761. That she would complete her first book of poetry at the age of nineteen, while still enslaved, was nothing short of remarkable. But before she could secure its publication, she had to prove to eighteen of “the most respectable Characters in Boston” (all wealthy, white, older men) that she had actually written the poems herself. Wheatley convinced her interrogators, the book was published, and she became something of a celebrity, both in England and America.

In the Clemente Course, we begin our study of Wheatley with her most famous (and also infamous) poem, “On Being Brought from AFRICA to AMERICA”:

‘TWAS mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

My students always have a wide range of reactions to this poem. The more religious students are drawn to Wheatley’s religious language. Some of the more secular students find it troubling; they reject the implication that one must “find Jesus” to be civilized or worthy of citizenship. We discuss the poem’s voice, as opposed to the poet’s (these are not always the same thing, I tell them, in Wheatley’s poetry or anyone else’s). We debate the extent to which Wheatley was an “apologist” or an “abolitionist” insofar as slavery was concerned, and whether she was making strategic, not just aesthetic, choices in presenting herself, and her art, in this way. Time permitting, I add several other poems to the mix—”On Imagination,” “To the University of Cambridge, in New-England,” “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770,” and “To His Excellency General Washington”—to get them talking about religious imagery and Classical allusion, Wheatley’s personal and political audacity, and her preferred use of elegy. The class is often divided on a number of issues—whether Wheatley was successfully using the “master’s tools” to dismantle the “master’s house,” whether her poetry was (or wasn’t) “political,” why she seemed to be “obsessed with death,” and “what the deal was with her relationship to powerful white men,” including Whitefield, the British evangelical Methodist minister who was a religious inspiration to her, and Washington, the American Founding Father with whom she shared a mutual admiration.

When I re-introduce Thomas Jefferson—this time as a sharp critic of Wheatley’s poetry—the class dynamic always changes. “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately,” Jefferson wrote in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, “but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are beneath the dignity of criticism.” It is here that my students—nearly all of them, regardless of their previous stance on Wheatley—shift from being critics to defenders. They are struck by Jefferson’s “cheap shot” in publishing his derisive comments about Wheatley one year after her death in 1784, and they insist upon recognizing—and respecting—Wheatley’s achievements, given the extraordinary hurdles she had to overcome to be a trailblazing writer, a “first.” “Regardless of whether you love or hate her poetry,” a student once remarked, “Jefferson had no right to disrespect her like that.” As the eighteenth-century debate over Wheatley continues to rage in my twenty-first-century classroom, my students view Jefferson’s critique of Wheatley as something of a racist assault on all black (and female) intellectual and artistic expression, and they rush to the Boston poet’s defense, even as they continue to offer a wide range of critical interpretations of her poetry.

Themes of race, gender, and class are always central touchstones in the Clemente Course. My students bring a mix of sensibilities to the classroom, and their academic work is often refracted through the lens of their own experiences, identities, and backgrounds. To my mind, this is a good thing. Connecting the past to the present, the historical to the personal—and vice versa—is part of living history, not just studying it. How this plays out in any given class is never predictable. Take, for instance, Abigail Adams. When I first began teaching selections from the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, I did not necessarily expect that my students would relate to them. After all, by any measure, the Adamses were elites—wealthy, educated, powerful—who were far removed from the world of ordinary people, then and now. But there is something about Abigail Adams’ spirit—the way she expressed her affection for, challenge to, and disagreement with her husband—that strikes a chord with many of my students. When we read aloud lines like “I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you” or “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could,” the room always erupts in laughter, head-nods, knowing glances, vocal affirmations—and not a little squirming and grumbling from some of my male students! In addition to her willingness, as one student expressed it, “to put her husband on notice,” the group is also struck by the dynamic between Abigail and John: “They clearly love each other.” “He sees her as an equal.” “She feels comfortable challenging him.” “All things considered, this seems like a pretty good marriage.” This opens the door for a discussion about the history of marriage, about gender and class and race dynamics in the late eighteenth century, about letter-writing as a more private space where women might have had more freedom, or power, to express themselves. In the end, my students are most surprised by Abigail Adams’ political audacity: her bold exhortations to “Remember the Ladies” and “not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” as well as her sharp warning that “if particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” To them, Abigail Adams is a revolutionary in her own right—like Phillis Wheatley, a Founding Mother, both determined to work within and against the various constraints of their society to express themselves forcefully and more freely.

If one thing has become abundantly clear to me teaching in the Clemente Course all these years, it’s that students will fall in love with American history if they can see themselves, something they recognize, in the historical record. This was the animating impulse behind multicultural social history—that women and workers, racial and sexual minorities, outliers and ordinary people have made history, and continue to do so. This does not mean that we always, or only, find kindred spirits in the lives of people who are just like us—as my students’ reactions to Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams demonstrate—but it does mean that if we teach and write history to include the broadest possible spectrum of humanity, we have a better chance of discovering commonalities in the human experience that can inspire new modes of empathy, understanding, and connection across the ages. We will never be able to have everything in common with those who lived in other times, but in knowing more fully what they were up against, how they responded to their worlds, we may gain a deeper understanding of how to live and act in our own.

This indispensable lesson was confirmed for me again last fall, when I attended the annual gala dinner for Mass Humanities, a non-profit organization that supports public humanities work, including the Clemente Course, across the Commonwealth. David Tebaldi, its executive director, asked one of our recent graduates to speak at the dinner. Ieshia had excelled in the Clemente Course and had recently been accepted to Boston University’s Metropolitan College to continue her undergraduate studies. In the middle of her speech, Ieshia turned to address me directly from the podium, as if only the two of us were in the room. “Professor Tim,” she said, “I don’t think you know how much it meant to me, and to so many of my classmates, that you began your course with Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley.” She went on to tell me about how inspired she had been to learn about women who wrote poetry, challenged their husbands and masters, and engaged with the major political issues of the day, despite the fact that they were living at a time in American history when they enjoyed neither rights nor liberty, to say nothing of equality. “They did more than foment a rebellion,” Ieshia concluded, quoting Adams’s words. “They helped us find our voice.” At the end of her remarks, my husband, an educator himself, turned to me and said, “That’s why you teach.”

Indeed it is.

Further Reading

On the Declaration of Independence, see Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York, 2014); Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, 1993); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: How America Declared Its Independence from Britain (New York, 1997), and Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978).

For examples of slaves’ petitions for freedom, see Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Volume 1: From Colonial Times to the Civil War (New York, 1990) and Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian, eds., The Radical Reader: A Documentary Anthology of the American Radical Tradition (New York, 2003). See also James and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks (New York, 1997).

Phillis Wheatley’s writings are collected in Vincent Carretta, ed., Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings (New York, 2001). See also Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, Ga., 2011) and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York, 2003). Abigail Adams’s letters are collected in Frank Shuffelton, ed., The Letters of John and Abigail Adams (New York, 2003). See also Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York, 2010) and Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Timothy Patrick McCarthy, PhD, is the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History and former academic director of the Boston Clemente Course. He also teaches in the History and Literature program and at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is the author or editor of five books on history, politics, and social movements in the United States, all published by the New Press.

“I can’t wait to read this religious nineteenth-century pulp magazine!” said no one ever. Yet as a historian, I have found myself reading such texts repeatedly. I stumbled upon the pulp fiction of yesteryear as an undergraduate. Since then, I’ve learned that dime novels, story papers, chapbooks, and other literary ephemera of the nineteenth century offer unconventional perspectives on American culture—and especially on American religion.

I happened upon dime novels while desperately searching for a paper topic for an undergraduate research seminar. At the urging of my professor, I contacted the librarians at the University of Rochester’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, & Preservation to consult their collection of dime novels. I vaguely knew that dime novels, with their ludicrous and fanciful stories, anticipated twentieth-century comic books. I also knew that British dime novels, known as penny dreadfuls, introduced iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Sweeney Todd. However, I had never seen an actual nineteenth-century dime novel.

Within fifteen minutes at Rare Books, I had more dime novels than I knew what to do with. Manuscript Librarian Phyllis Andrews brought out a stack of texts measuring roughly six inches high. A closer look revealed that dozens of dime novels, each wafer-thin, made up this stack. Most of the novels were not catalogued, so Phyllis encouraged me to just dive in. She also gave me a copy of J. Randolph Cox’s reference work, The Dime Novel Companion (2000), which explains that, although story papers and other pulp publications originated in the early 1800s, dime novels in the literal, sold-for-a-dime sense were published after 1860.

Leafing through my sample pile, I saw small dime novels formatted like a modern magazine and others the size of newspapers. After a few minutes of sifting and feeling a bit overwhelmed, I found a mid-sized title that sounded familiar—The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main (1847), written by the prolific dime novelist Edward Zane Carroll Judson, a.k.a. Ned Buntline. Thinking back to high school English class, I remembered that, in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, young Tom imagines himself as the Black Avenger. A look at the academic literature revealed that the connection between Judson and Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens had not been explored in depth. Intrigued, I re-read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and connected them to Judson’s Black Avenger.

Judson’s tale describes a runaway slave, Francisco Solonois, whose family is kidnapped by the governor of Cuba. Francisco expresses his desire to live a good Christian life, yet he argues that circumstances force him to commit piracy. The implication is that (male) vigilantism is permissible so long as the vigilante cites Christian morality as his justification. Judson portrays the protagonist’s seventeen-year vendetta against the Cuban government through overblown prose, racist caricatures, and hapless female characters. Francisco unleashes mayhem with the assistance of a self-loathing black hangman, Lobo, who speaks with mangled grammar. A handful of female characters attempt to aid Francisco and his allies, but the women are generally depicted as incompetent, and always accompanied by male chaperones. These themes resurface in at least one other pirate dime novel, Prentiss Ingraham’s The Black Pirate (1882). Ingraham borrows Judson’s ends-justify-the-means approach to vigilantism; he gives readers female characters devoid of agency (one gives up and kills herself moments before our heroes are rescued); and he reuses the pernicious stereotype of the murderous black man, which sadly appeared often in post-Civil War fiction. Judson and Ingraham glorified Protestant family life, but in a manner that is discomfiting when read today, due to their dime novels’ ingrained misogyny and racism.

As for the Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain connection, Clemens in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) patterns young Tom on Francisco Solonois. Both characters are master manipulators who shirk normal expectations of behavior, although Tom just wants to have fun, rather than inflicting harm like Francisco. Like Judson, Clemens includes a violent non-white character (Injun Joe, instead of Lobo) and portrays women as passive (Becky Thatcher languishing in the caves while Tom seeks a way out, to name but one example). Still, Clemens shows some interest in mocking the conventions of dime novels. When Tom, Huck Finn, and Joe Harper run away to play pirates on Jackson’s Island, they quickly run out of supplies and become homesick. Clemens thereby reminds his readers how difficult it would be to launch, let alone sustain, a multi-year crusade like that of Solonois.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), however, Clemens actively attacks the clichés of American pulp fiction instead of recycling and gently mocking them. The African American slave Jim is an active, noble character. Mary Jane Wilks and Aunt Polly play strong supporting roles: they are the opposite of the weak women in pirate stories (or Becky in Tom Sawyer, for that matter). Most of all, Clemens skewers the implausibility of dime novel plotting. When Tom and Huck plan to liberate a captured Jim, Tom foolishly makes the plot convoluted, so that it is more exciting—like a real-life dime novel. Tom’s dramatic scheme proves a disaster. In this way, Clemens shows that the events described in dime novels, with all their unbelievable coincidences, cannot play out in reality.

My work with Ned Buntline and the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main revealed that the lines between high and low culture were blurry in nineteenth-century America. Dime novels lacked critical acclaim, yet famous authors like Samuel Clemens readily drew from dime novel conventions. No wall separated pulp from art. Historians should continue to explore this intersection of prestigious and pulp literature, replacing rigid genre boundaries with a more fluid understanding of writing and reading in America.

Although I enjoyed the Black Avenger project, I didn’t work much with dime novels during the rest of college. As I started graduate school at Villanova, however, dime novels returned to my life. When the librarians showed me around Special Collections, they revealed stacks of dime novels, some of which were being digitized for the first time. I recalled the despairing words of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III—“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”—but I spun those words in a positive way. Since I had access to extensive primary materials and many of the texts had never been studied, I decided to embrace this sign from the pulp heavens and get to work.

Maybe it was Villanova’s Catholic ethos, or maybe it was because I’d written my senior thesis on Mormon portrayals in nineteenth-century newspapers, but I became curious about the treatment of religion in dime novels. Although it was clear that ideas of Protestant morality undergirded Black Avenger, I had relegated the topic of religion to the background of my project, focusing instead on the connections to the Tom Sawyer novels. What might I discover, I wondered, if I brought religion to the fore? With this approach in mind, I turned to a small, decaying pamphlet, Mormonism Exposed, which the J. Regan firm of Chicago published in 1896.

My investigation of this booklet focused on its literary contents and its material aspects, especially as they related to the dime novel industry. Supposedly authored by a “Mormon slave wife,” Mormonism Exposed purports to be nonfiction, but it is almost certainly a false document—a thinly veiled Protestant critique of Mormonism sold as the account of a survivor. The book is not billed as a dime novel, but it sure reads like one. The Exposed author recounts the history of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) movement, but portrays the new religion as corrupt and immoral. Although most pulp fiction could be read by youths, Exposed does not seem like children’s fare. The violent narrative deems Mormonism despotic, interrogates LDS theology at length, claims that Mormon secret societies kidnapped women to serve as sex slaves, and concludes by recounting the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and Native Americans wiped out a wagon train.

Ironically, the author ignored the changes in LDS society that were underway in 1896. The LDS Church had officially disavowed polygamy, and Utah was about to become a state. By printing this book, the Regan staff perpetuated longstanding criticisms and stereotypes of Mormonism, even as those criticisms ceased to describe contemporary Mormons. It is true that many dime novels after 1896 used Mormons as villains, but these stories were set in the days of the American West long past. By contrast, Mormonism Exposed asserted that Mormons remained enemies of Americans in the present, thereby failing to reflect the changing attitudes of Protestants toward Mormons in the early twentieth century.

The edition of Mormonism Exposed that I studied had a strip of paper pasted on the back, in the spot that other Regan books listed their publication information. The paper strip suggests that another publisher wanted to hide that Exposed was a Regan publication. This practice reflects the widespread plagiarism and the purchasing of companies’ excess stock, both of which occurred with some frequency in the dime novel industry. Dropping down the rabbit hole of alternate editions, I identified several versions of Exposed, one of which—A.B. Courtney’s—was apparently from 1894, but was not available online in full-text form. Not long ago, Prof. Marlena E. Bremseth, the current editor of Dime Novel Round-up, showed me her copy of the Courtney edition. Sure enough, it was published in 1894, two years before the Regan version. While Courtney at this point seems like the original publisher of Mormonism Exposed, it’s difficult to know for certain. Earlier variants may exist, in a chain of plagiarism or buyouts all the way down. In this way, Exposed speaks to the volatility of the nineteenth-century pulp industry: Buy or steal an existing book; slap a new cover on it; artfully conceal older publication information; and put the “new” text on sale.

I initially assumed that the five-cent price of Exposed meant the booklet was written for and marketed to working-class laborers. However, Exposed contains advertisements for bulk orders of two luxury items: mechanical pencils and a dice game. These items may seem like trifles in 2016, but in 1896 the daily wage for a non-farm laborer was approximately $1.20. It’s unlikely that a person making a dollar a day, who already spent five cents on a book, would then spend ninety cents on pencils, or seventy-five cents on games. As such, it seems that Exposed was meant for middle-class readers with extra spending money. At the very least, Regan did not publish its pulps exclusively for the working class.

I could not confidently determine a target age group from Exposed’s ads (or from the book’s cover price, although some historians speculate that nickel or dime prices denoted books for different age groups). Based on the content of Exposed, however, I doubt the book was meant for children. By appealing to an adult audience, Regan was out of step with current publishing practices. In 1896, most dime publishers were targeting an exclusively youthful audience, while Regan still aimed for adult readers. Similarly, Regan published Exposed with an understated black-and-white cover—showing a polygamist Mormon family reading—at a time when dime publishers were turning to sensational covers illustrated in color. Just as Exposed’s ideas lacked staying power, so too did its format fail to meet the changing conventions of the pulp industry.

After I published my paper on Exposed, I learned from Marlena that Mormonism Exposed is not a dime novel in the official sense (i.e., a cheap novel sold after 1860). Technically, this kind of small, (dubious) nonfiction pamphlet is called a chapbook. Marlena’s suggestion reminded me to look beyond dime novels to analyze other formats in the pulp industry. In particular, Marlena prompted me to study documents that I had scanned as a volunteer for Villanova’s Digital Library. Many of these documents constitute religious pulp literature, although they are not dime novels per se.

Consider the Catholic Weekly Instructor, a Philadelphia-area periodical for children from the 1840s. Some issues begin with fictional stories like those found in story papers and other proto-dime novels, while other issues begin with essays and poems. Various other sections—Bible excerpts, Catholic Church news, travelogues, devotionals, jokes, advertisements, and even math questions—fill the remainder of each issue. A Catholic child reading the Instructor would encounter literature, even escapist stories, but in a manner approved by Catholic elders. In other words, the stories and essays reinforced a religious and social worldview that Catholic adults wanted their children to adopt.

Texts like the Catholic Weekly Instructor, with their explicit references to Catholic customs and doctrines, provide historians with alternatives to the non-denominational Protestant perspective expressed in works like Mormonism Exposed, Black Avenger, and Black Pirate. Historians should further investigate the youth magazines of American Jews and other non-Protestant religions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The LDS Children’s Friend, which existed from 1902 to 1972, comes to mind. By identifying pulp stories and literary ephemera written by non-Protestants, historians can construct counter-narratives of American religion within nineteenth-century popular culture.

I also digitized an 1898 volume from the New Sabbath Library, a short-lived series of moralistic Protestant dime novels. The volume in question contained a reprint of Rev. J.H. Ingraham’s The Prince of the House of David (1855), a histrionic epistolary novel about a young Jewish woman caught up among Jesus’ followers. In the context of the New Sabbath Library, House of David works as a devotional text and an evangelization tool, imparting the glory of Christianity to young readers. Very few secondary sources discuss the New Sabbath Library, although dime novel historian Nathan Vernon Madison wrote a blog surveying the series in 2011. However, historians know that religious pulp novels like those of the New Sabbath Library left their mark on at least one famous reader: Cecil B. DeMille based his 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, on Rev. Ingraham’s 1859 Moses novel, Pillar of Fire.

Essentially, the New Sabbath Library’s editors were not satisfied with contemporary literature that simply reflected their worldview (as is the case in Mormonism Exposed, Black Pirate, and Black Avenger). Rather, the editors of the New Sabbath Library sought to write children’s literature that foregrounded and actively promoted Christianity. The New Sabbath editors worked within the Protestant idiom that the Catholic Weekly Instructor’s editors challenged, but these Protestants and Catholics had the same strategy. They would use the conventions of pulp fiction to attack what they considered the sinful nature of pulp fiction. As Nathan Madison points out in his blog, advertisements for the New Sabbath Library made the editors’ message of evangelization plain. According to the ad inside House of David’s front cover: “To meet the growing demand for pure literature at popular prices, we began in April, 1898, the issue of a monthly publication entitl[e]d the New Sabbath Library…” As such, the New Sabbath editors would likely be happy that DeMille recycled Pillar as a movie, and that the film still airs at Easter time.

Despite the religiosity of these denominational pulps, we should not assume that religious dime novelists were exclusively wedded to pure literature. It is true that Rev. Ingraham wrote House of David and Pillar of Fire, but he also wrote pirate stories and other adventure pulps—the sinful kind of dime novel. His son Prentiss, author of Black Pirate, continued in this sensationalist vein. It seems that the Ingrahams were comfortable balancing their religious impulses with thrilling stories.

Historians have only scratched the surface of American dime novels. Unfortunately, two major obstacles impede the academic study of these stories: the overwhelming number of dime novels in American archives, and the fact that many archives have not catalogued individual volumes. Research projects like the ones I have embarked upon are regrettably piecemeal, looking at small samples of dime novels, while the full range of, say, pirate stories or religious dime novels remains unknown. If historians are truly to understand pulp literature, then they must collaborate with librarians, archivists, and antiquarians to track down and catalog surviving dime novels. This process will require historians to learn digital techniques like scanning, optical character recognition (OCR), and text mining, all of which are common in library science but are not yet standard parts of a history graduate degree. Nonetheless, the study of dime novels can be a rewarding one for historians who learn to wear multiple hats—much the way Rev. Ingraham learned to pivot between evangelist and fabulist.

The ultimate goal in dime novel cataloging should be the creation of a national database of extant dime novels. Such a database would allow scholars to track trends in publishing over time and identify titles dealing with religion, gender, race, and other relevant topics. Villanova’s ongoing Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography is a step in this direction. Yet the LeBlanc Bibliography needs the help of more people—professional historians and interested citizens alike—to be completed.

A comprehensive database would open up dime novels to research in fields as diverse as the history of publishing, race and gender studies, and material culture. The study of religious pulp fiction, to take but one example, has spatial implications. It would be illuminating to map the places where dime novels, magazines like the Catholic Weekly Instructor, and chapbooks like Mormonism Exposed were published, and then to classify the publishers based on the attitudes they expressed toward different religions. To identify a publisher’s view of a religion is a subjective process, reliant on what the historian deems normative or not. Nonetheless, such a spatial project would show how religious opinions varied across the United States and among publishing houses. If the resulting dataset were run through a customizable application like CartoDB or Google Maps, historians could produce striking visualizations of these religious views, region by region.

Finally, historians should strive to make dime novels accessible not only to other researchers, but also to K-12 educators. The vast majority of dime novels are not great, or even good, literature. Yet the best of the stories still have entertainment value, while the worst—the most sexist, racist, xenophobic, and religiously bigoted—reveal the prejudices of past Americans. Dime novels are as educational as they are shocking, so they have great potential as teaching tools for high school teachers of history and English. Since most dime novels are now in the public domain, accessible dime novels would also provide educators with free primary source materials. HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, and Google Books contain some nineteenth-century dime novels, but these websites provide only a small percentage of what was actually published. The holy grail of dime novel digitization would be to place the Library of Congress’s enormous collection online. Until the Library obliges, academic historians should work with their universities to digitize local dime novel collections. Once the digital repositories are available online, historians should write lesson plans and discussion guides to accompany the texts. In this way, the study of dime novels could become a form of public history.

A broad swath of the American populace once consumed dime novels as disposable but diverting entertainment. In the process, readers likely absorbed some of the stories’ ideas and biases. It is important to keep pursuing this line of historical inquiry, for dime novels provide rich insights into the popular culture of a past age. Besides, reading and interpreting tales of mummies, secret societies, pirates, and rogue religions never gets old.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Prof. Marlena E. Bremseth, the editor of Dime Novel Round-up; Demian Katz, Michael Foight, and Laura Bang of Villanova Library Special Collections; Phyllis Andrews of the University of Rochester Libraries, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, & Preservation; Dr. Joan Shelley Rubin of the University of Rochester, who advised my Ned Buntline project; Dr. Whitney Martinko of Villanova University, who advised my Mormonism Exposed project; and Dr. Wendy Woloson of Rutgers University-Camden, my editor for this essay. The friendly spirit of collaboration that I’ve experienced is one of the joys of working with dime novel scholars: Even when you’re wrong, your colleagues are likely to be encouraging when offering criticism. Still, I have learned that the historian of dime novels chases after loose ends, contradictory facts, and unclear terminology. Sometimes, it feels like falling down a rabbit hole of cultural history!

Further Reading

Michael Austin, “‘As Much as Any Novelist Could Ask’: Mormons in American Popular Fiction,” Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon, Volume Two: Literature, Art, Media, Tourism, and Sports, edited by J. Michael Hunter (Santa Barbara, 2013).

The Beadle and Adams Dime Novel Digitization Project, Northern Illinois University Libraries.

Biography of “Col. Prentiss Ingraham,” The Beadle and Adams Dime Novel Digitization Project, Northern Illinois University Libraries.

Biography of “Rev. Joseph Holt Ingraham,” The Beadle and Adams Dime Novel Digitization Project, Northern Illinois University Libraries.

Ned Buntline (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main: Or, The Fiend of Blood. A Thrilling Story of the Buccaneer Times (Boston, 1847).

Ned Buntline (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), The Hero of a Hundred Fights: Collected Stories from the Dime Novel King, From Buffalo Bill to Wild Bill Hickok, edited by Clay Reynolds (New York, 2011).

Michael L. Cook, Dime Novel Roundup: Annotated Index 1931-1981 (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1983).

J. Randolph Cox, ed., Dashing Diamond Dick and Other Classic Dime Novels (New York, 2007).

J. Randolph Cox, The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book (Westport, Conn., 2000).

Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, from the Haymarket Series (New York, 1987).

Dime Novels from the Rare Book collections of the Library of Congress, LC online catalog, loc.gov.

The Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography

Paul J. Erickson, “Judging Books By Their Covers: Format, the Implied Reader, and the ‘Degeneration’ of the Dime Novel,” American Transcendental Quarterly 12:3 (September 1998): 248-263.

Chad J. Flake, ed., A Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930: Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Broadsides Relating to the First Century of Mormonism, introduction by Dale L. Morgan (Salt Lake City, 1978).

Terryl Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York, 1997).

Daniel Gorman Jr., “The Untold Stories of Mormonism Exposed: Material Culture, Dime Novels, and Mormonism in American Society,” Concept: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Graduate Studies 38 (2015): 18-45.

Daniel Gorman Jr., “The Joy of Piracy: Ned Buntline, Mark Twain, and the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main,” eds. Mila Lemaster and William Patton, Proceedings of the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (2013): 574–582.

Index for Dime Novel Round-Up, Readseries.com.

Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle & Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature (Norman, Okla., 1950).

Demian Katz, Paper for the People: Dime Novels and Early Mass Market Publishing, Villanova University Falvey Library Exhibits.

Nathan Vernon Madison, “An Interesting Find—The New Sabbath Library,” Argonotes (April 23, 2011).

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).

John Springhall Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830-1996 (New York, 1998).

Larry E. Sullivan and Lydia Cushman Schurman, eds., Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes: Dime Novels, Series Books, and Paperbacks (New York, 1996).

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

Daniel Gorman Jr. is a second-year history M.A. student at Villanova University. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Rochester and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In Fall 2016, Dan is returning to Rochester for his PhD in American history. Dime novels are not the only religious topic Dan enjoys researching, but he is increasingly happy being the dime novel guy. Read more of Dan’s work here and follow him on Twitter at @DanGorman2 and @TangentsUSA. He can also be reached at dgormanjr14@gmail.com.

More people than you might think

Who reads an early American book? The varied list of readers implied by our table of contents suggests several answers to the question posed by the title of this special issue. But consider also the readers, past and present, represented by the history of one curious early American text: the epitaph on the headstone of a Revolutionary-era poet named Elizabeth Whitman, the prototype for the heroine of one of the new nation’s bestselling novels, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797). The thirty-seven-year-old daughter of a Hartford, Connecticut, minister and an associate of the best-known poets of the new nation, Whitman became famous in the summer of 1788, not for her poetry, but for her death, which helped to bring her poetry to a wider audience than she had enjoyed during her lifetime. Whitman died, self-exiled in South Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts, having delivered a stillborn child out of wedlock. Her identity became known as a combination of newspaper notices and gossip circulated throughout New England, the mid-Atlantic, and as far down the coast as Charleston, South Carolina. A flurry of newspaper commentary ensued, and Whitman’s story was recounted in the “first American novel,” William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, early the next year. In the fall of 1789, a little more than a year after her death, Whitman’s Connecticut friends paid for an unusually wordy headstone to be erected in Danvers.

This humble stone, in memory of
ELIZABETH WHITMAN,
Is inscribed by her weeping friends,
To whom she endeared herself
By uncommon tenderness and affection.
Endowed with superior genius and accomplishments,
She was still more distinguished by humility and benevolence.
Let Candour throw a veil over her frailties,
For great was her charity to others.
She lived an example of calm resignation,
And sustained the last painful scene,
Far from every friend.
Her departure was on the 25th of July, A.D. 1788.
In the 37th year of her age;
The tears of strangers watered her grave.

Whitman’s epitaph, which was reproduced with some minor but significant revisions at the close of The Coquette, was one of the most widely reprinted in the nineteenth century. Her grave (like that of the fictional heroine Charlotte Temple in New York City) became a major tourist destination and was also a favorite spot for local youths to become engaged. All this was due in some measure to Foster’s novel, which went through ten editions between 1797 and 1866. Generations of American readers consumed it; grandparents passed it down and told their grandchildren stories about the beautiful, mysterious stranger who died in Danvers; and relic seekers chipped off pieces of her headstone until nothing remained but a soft stump of red freestone with only the last line of the epitaph visible. Some readers in the later part of the nineteenth century even assumed Elizabeth Whitman had provided a model for Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne.

Many of the strangers whose tears watered Whitman’s grave read an early American book, the one penned by Hannah Foster. Though it eventually fell into obscurity, relegated to a readership of specialists and antiquarians, its extraordinary shelf life should suggest to us something of its value as a roadmap not only to the early decades of the new republic but to much of the nineteenth century.

Can early American books regain such a readership in the twenty-first century? Again the case of The Coquette is instructive. In the spring of 2004 the Peabody Historical Society (PHS), led by Martha Holden and Bill Power, aimed to revive interest in Whitman and in Foster’s novel among local residents. Along with calling for a town read, the society sponsored dramatic renderings of parts of the novel as well as some of Whitman’s extant poems; Peabody Veterans Memorial High School (PVMHS) added the book to the American literature curriculum; and the Peabody Historical Commission and Peabody Institute Library placed a new headstone at the gravesite—one modeled on the version that appeared in Foster’s novel. The new headstone even reproduces the conventions by which early printers sought to create the image of a headstone on the printed page. On its face, that is, the new headstone bears the outline of a headstone as it would have appeared in print, along with repeated winged-skull icons common to early American grave markers. The appearance of these print conventions on an actual “restored” headstone suggests, perhaps, the ways in which the “real” Elizabeth Whitman was eventually overshadowed by her fictional counterpart from Wharton’s novel. Outside the cemetery gates a sign now announces Whitman’s grave as a stop on the Massachusetts Literacy Trail. A few years after the new headstone arrived, and unrelated to the PHS celebration of Whitman, another local resident created a virtual gravesite for Whitman on the popular Website findagrave.com, where readers of Foster’s novel or those who simply stumble upon the story fresh can leave their thoughts along with virtual flowers (and tears) of their own.

The renewed attention given to Whitman and Foster beyond the university classroom suggests that early American books still have much to teach ordinary Americans, even about a world whose political luminaries, thanks to an unending parade of biographies and even HBO miniseries, now feel like familiar friends. During the Peabody discussions of The Coquette, as the PVMHS English department chair, Michalene Hague, wrote to me, “it became clear that people were learning about the era as it presented women’s roles and the lifestyles of ‘acceptable’ society; social mores then and now were discussed and regional connections explored. Our students, living as they do surrounded by history which they take for granted or often forget, benefitted in a community pride way—knowing that the early townspeople looked past the ‘sin’ and nurtured Elizabeth Whitman’s needs at the time.” Another local teacher and community historian, S. M. Smoller, who had brought Whitman’s story to local attention a few years earlier during a Women’s History Month celebration, was drawn to Whitman as a writer, not simply a literary heroine. “As I scrutinized her poetry,” Smoller recalls, “I was taken with her voice, especially when she adopts an attitude of anger and admonishes her deserting lover to go on and live although she knows her life is over.” Smoller was intrigued, too, by the story’s long popularity, the stuff of local legend. Salem resident Robert Buckley, who created the virtual gravesite for Whitman, has one theory: “I believe The Coquette fell into a category of novel that was long on titillation, and offered just enough moral instruction or consequence to justify the titillation. I think it was entertaining to readers because the story of a chaste, well-bred lady’s ruination packed an erotic wallop.”

Who reads an early American book? With a recommendation like that one, even you might.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Bryan Waterman is associate professor of English and American literature at New York University and author of Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature. His essay “Elizabeth Whitman’s Disappearance and Her ‘Disappointment'” appears in the April 2009 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly.

Upon hearing the news yearned for by every college professor—the announcement of an upcoming sabbatical leave—a senior scholar of religious studies I know celebrated his freedom by buying a fresh copy of a long-admired sacred text: Moby-Dick. Before he contemplated the research and writing he might accomplish, or outlined the diligent yet humane schedule that might structure his blissful days, he set what appeared to be a manageable goal: to have a thorough encounter with the novel whose compelling intricacies had so far managed to elude him. An hour a day spent in serene contemplation of Melville’s prose, feet propped on the ottoman, cup of tea at hand, seemed the humanist’s reward for years of labor. The novel, it seems, had other plans.

Burnt out, frustrated, and bored after thirty chapters, this professional reader could not finish the book.

What had gone wrong? Surely it was his fault. Perhaps it was some innate deficiency: a previously asymptomatic and probably imaginary tin ear for great works of literature. It might well have been the book’s “Cetology” chapter: that bugbear of a whale catalogue whose painstaking detail has repelled generations of undergraduate readers, sending them back to their CliffsNotes. At the very least, this scholar suddenly appreciated the challenge of pursuing such a major literary project on his own without the motivating presence of colleagues or students, whose anticipated questions often push us through our most difficult texts.

But was this failed encounter with Moby-Dick the reader’s fault, or the book’s? Why did this literary experience promise so much, and then refuse to deliver? Even more curiously, was there anything that this reader might have learned in the midst of this endeavor that might eventually be of greater value than a successful reading of the book itself?

Many of us labor under the impression that Moby-Dick is a book we should read and, more importantly, understand. An avatar of the “Great American Novel,” as elusive a concept for writers and critics as the White Whale is for Ahab, the book both tantalizes us and makes us feel uninformed if we have not yet turned its pages. Those who were not exposed to the book in their high school or college years may be slightly embarrassed; Moby-Dick may be on others’ bucket lists as they dream of continuing their education in retirement. Yet Moby-Dick is familiar territory to most of us. We may have read excerpts from the novel in American literature anthologies, all the while absorbing the message that The Scarlet Letter is certainly legible in full, whereas Moby-Dick is not. The central drama of Melville’s book seeps into popular culture, and often supplies the animating metaphor in political debates about American imperialism, exceptionalism, and assertions of global morality. Ahab has reappeared alternately as Al Gore fighting for disappearing votes in Florida, one of the two Presidents Bush in pursuit of embodied “evil,” or a monomaniacal hedge-fund manager in search of the ultimate rate of return. The ghostly cultural presence of Moby-Dick might persuade us that Ahab is the narrative’s central figure, and that his quest for revenge is the only story that the novel has to tell.

To the reader who actually commits to opening the book, Moby-Dick offers an entirely different story: the journey of Ishmael. Melville’s narrator is the one who encourages us to address him as a friend before ushering us into the “wonder-world” of whaling, and who makes those promises on which the narrative fails to deliver. It is he who essentially creates Ahab, and he to whom we as readers must pay more attention. Ishmael gets our hopes up from the start. Have you not felt the thrill of that “mystical vibration,” he asks, or experienced the revelatory confluence of “meditation and water” that a sea voyage holds? His questions are maddeningly suggestive. What will happen on this adventure? “Surely all this is not without meaning,” he assures the reader, as he evokes “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life” that will be “the key to it all.” After such an opening, who could not hope to find an explanation of the meaning of life itself in this novel’s pages?

There are some early warning signs that we as readers may not receive what has been promised to us. Even as Ishmael sparks the reader’s curiosity with a vision of “a portentous and mysterious monster” floating in “wild and distant seas,” not to mention other “attending marvels” of his voyage (the kind of exotic itinerary to which the readers of Melville’s highly successful early adventure novels, Typee, Mardi, and Omoo, had become accustomed), he confesses his limited understanding of his own story. Ishmael explains, “I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and judgment.” Weighed down with qualifiers (“I think I can,” “a little”) and uncertain in its intent (obscured by “disguise” and “delusion”), the statement provides readers with a clue that this narrator may not fully comprehend the events of his own life, or know how to retell that story so that it makes sense to others. We are already in trouble.

Ishmael, as it turns out, is cripplingly naïve. When he enters this new “wonder-world,” he misinterprets nearly every sign and character he encounters. When Peter Coffin, the landlord of New Bedford’s Spouter-Inn, tries to explain to him why his mysterious suitemate, the Pacific Islander Queequeg, has not yet returned to the inn, Ishmael works himself into “a towering rage,” exclaiming, “Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozling story is this you are telling me?” Without the cosmopolitan reference points that other sailors possess, Ishmael fails to realize that Coffin is not mocking his ignorance, but rather speaking of Queequeg’s shrunken head, nor can he tell that another hotel proprietor really means to give him a choice between two kinds of chowder when she offers him one measly “clam for supper.” As Ishmael misses these verbal cues, readers are plunged into the same confusion that he feels; we are at sea even before the Pequod‘s voyage begins.

The novel actually intends for us to share Ishmael’s disorientation; his interpretive challenges therefore become our own. His arrival at the Spouter-Inn plays out in the second person, as not only he, but now “you found yourself” in the entry hall of the inn, looking at a particularly baffling painting. As “you” (the reader) and Ishmael contemplate this picture together, you begin to understand why reading the novel itself might be such a challenging proposition. Ishmael observes:

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last came to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

The painting, like the book, is obscure and difficult. It requires “diligent study” and intellectual exertion, and it cannot be understood on the first try. Along with Ishmael, we must ponder this painting in “a series of systematic visits” or multiple readings, and we cannot do it alone: we also must ask for help from our “neighbors,” friends, and fellow readers who are likely to share our baffled frustration.

As I tell my students, Moby-Dick is the ideal text to read together in a discussion seminar, a group that can share the burden of interpretation and illuminate the book’s mysteries from different angles. But woe to the solitary reader who finds herself stymied in an effort to discern the narrative’s ultimate “purpose.” The novel celebrates this kind of sociability as it chronicles events like the “Gam”: a floating gathering of whaling ships that relieves the isolation of months or years at sea. In fact, one of the key experiences that persuaded me to give the previously impenetrable Moby-Dick another try was a “Gam” of sorts held by a group of professors and students in my graduate program: a meeting of landlocked readers who found certain elements of the novel fascinating, but realized that they would come to a much better understanding of the book as a whole in conversation with others. No wonder Ishmael insists on our fellowship in this work of interpretation.

What puzzles him the most is the actual subject of the painting. Later on, Ishmael will realize that instead of “chaos bewitched,” his first but nonetheless startlingly accurate impression, the painting depicts a ship about to be destroyed by a giant “exasperated whale.” Our minds do not have to leap very far to recognize this as a version of the Pequod‘s fate: this is one of many portholes through which the novel foreshadows its narrative conclusion. In the end, however, locating the whale underneath all the layers of accumulated grime that “besmoke” this picture isn’t the point. The process of guesswork is far more interesting. Ishmael tells us that this is “[a] boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet there was a sort of half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant.” Despite, or more likely because of its “squitchy” nature, the book inspires in us a feeling of wonder, a desire for knowledge. You as a reader are compelled to “find out” more, simply because the meaning that this book promises is so sublime. Although that meaning may be only “half-attained,” or even “unimaginable,” it hovers right on what Philip Fisher calls “the horizon line of what is potentially knowable, but not yet known”: that territory we want desperately to inhabit but know we cannot quite reach.

Frustrating, teasing, and egging us on as we swear to ourselves that we will master, or at the very least, finish this book are all part of Melville’s larger plan. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” the 1850 review of his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction that served as a platform to discuss his own theory of writing, Melville shares his secret. What is most admirable about an author like Shakespeare, he explains, is the way in which his lines evoke “that undeveloped, (and sometimes undevelopable) yet dimly-discernable greatness” of a working imagination. This imagination captures “occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth” that, however fleeting, keep spectators and readers alike hooked as they balance on the edge between the known and the unknown. For Melville, a writer’s power to suggest an elusive “Truth,” whatever that may be, is far more important than his capacity to explain what that meaning really is. As readers of Moby-Dick, a book of distinctly Shakespearean ambition, we are perplexed by the holes that riddle the narrative even as we endeavor to see through them to the ultimate truth we have been promised.

As the story works toward its final scene of deadly encounter between Moby-Dick and the Pequod, Ishmael, and consequently the novel’s readers, get distracted by a number of fascinating but oddly unrelated pursuits. In the midst of the voyage that Ahab commands with frightening resolve (“Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”), Ishmael cannot stop playing around. In what other nineteenth-century novel would you find such a clash of high-mindedness and lowbrow humor? The narrative swings wildly from monologues that would be more at home in a tragic drama to a song and dance scene straight out of musical theater, from Biblical reflections on the story of Jonah and the whale to a sacrilegious costume party in which a fellow sailor dresses up in the foreskin of a whale and becomes a candidate, as Ishmael winkingly informs us, for an “archbishoprick.” The novel is fundamentally strange and endearingly nerdy, as students often delight in observing, with its pages of epigraphs, its jokes about “Sub-Sub librarians,” and its leaden footnotes. It explores different types of language and various registers of meaning, from those vague questions of fate and free will that haunt the narrative from the beginning, to the symbolic potential of the color white, to the detailed cultural history of the “curious substance” called ambergris that is extracted from whales. Unlike such contemporary novels as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose lines of narrative intent were consistent to a fault, Moby-Dick never would have survived serialization, as each chapter seems like an independent essay or perhaps a novel in miniature. Even when those disparate parts are bound together along the spine of a book, readers must constantly readjust their expectations of the text lest they lose their footing in the midst of its literary storm.

So what are we to make of Moby-Dick, that book which New York editor Evert Duyckinck pronounced in his review “an intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine writing, good feeling, [and] bad sayings”? Ishmael, who has endeavored throughout the narrative to piece together the different components of a whale, has left us holding its parts without comprehending the whole. He studies each body part of the whale carefully, devoting entire chapters to the skin, the blubber, the head, the sperm, the brain, the spout, and finally, the tail. When he reaches the end of this catalogue, Ishmael stops, apparently defeated. He tells us:

The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable… Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.

The whale’s “tail” in this passage illuminates something crucial about the “tale” of the whale that Ishmael himself tells. Not only does he sense his “inability to express” its essence in writing, a narrative deficiency that has been clear from the beginning of the story, that very essence is itself “inexplicable.” Both the tail and the tale have “no face”: they perpetually elude the reader bent on their pursuit, and cannot be met head on. Ishmael’s invocation of the Biblical language of the Old Testament in this moment—in particular, the prophet Jeremiah’s portrayal of divinity as that ineffable presence with no discernable face—speaks to the limits of human understanding that Melville seeks to explore.

When Ishmael realizes that he cannot comprehend the whale’s tail, his wonder returns, and the cycle of questioning and knowing the world begins again. In this moment of failure, even intellectual disaster, Ishmael grasps the humility that eludes Ahab even more definitively than Moby Dick himself. Unlike Ishmael, Ahab is confident that he knows the whale and follows a stubbornly straight line to locate him, all the while proclaiming “[t]hat inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”

As a narrator, Ishmael fails us. He admits as much, noting as he constructs his ambitiously comprehensive system of cetology that “any human thing supposed to be complete, must infallibly be faulty.” Yet, he is the only one who survives the wreck of the Pequod, and the only one who has a chance to tell this tale. In the novel’s paradoxical terms, his failure is actually the key to his success.

To a certain extent, Moby-Dick rewards those readers who make it to the bitter end with the Pequod and her crew. The novel’s final chapters chronicle three days of a climactic chase: the Hollywood-style action sequence that we have been waiting for all along. For those who have made their way through the preceding 130-odd chapters, though, it might seem that the real energy of the book lies elsewhere: in that middle ground where Ishmael’s meditations meet our own exasperated efforts to comprehend the novel’s intentions. When we as readers fail in our encounters with this book, whether that means we never complete it or never feel like we fully understand it even if we read every chapter, we have seized, perhaps by accident, upon its uniquely counterintuitive truth. If you have never managed to finish Moby-Dick, you may actually be wiser than you think.

Further Reading:

An excellent edition of Moby-Dick with sections on Melville’s sources and reviews is published by Norton (New York, 2002). On the sea narrative tradition, see Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill, 2008), reviewed in Common-place 9:3 (April 2009). For more on the historical context in which Melville wrote Moby-Dick, as well as the resurgence of its themes and characters in contemporary American culture, see Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York, 2006). For a consideration of Moby-Dick as a “Great American Novel,” see Lawrence Buell, “The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case,” American Literary History 20:1-2 (2008). Passionate readers may be especially intrigued by the discussion of wonder in Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, 2002).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Leslie Eckel is assistant professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. She is completing a book on Transatlantic Professionalism: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World and contemplating a reader’s guide to Moby-Dick.

We seem to have entered an era in which global financial capitalism has become more opaque than ever. Mountains of paper bonds, securities, mortgages, and credit change electronic hands in cyberspace, while hedge-fund managers, portfolio insurers, and international bankers manipulate our investments in shrouds of mystery until their schemes crash. And even then the mystery remains. Regulatory officials and lawmakers fail to keep up with the brokers and managers who hatch ingenious plans for investing billions of dollars. Rising expectations and dashed investments operate without obvious economic causes and global markets thrive on guesswork and the kind of rationality that most Americans do not practice. And yet Americans from all walks of life have lined up in unprecedented numbers to ride a roller coaster of boom and bust over the previous three decades, willing to invest with leveraged loans and easy money wherever there is a promise of success, despite the fact that time after time, stocks, bonds, and hedge fund failures spiral into losses of myriad jobs and homes. As one middle-class Chicagoan who had lost his overpriced home recently told a journalist, “I just asked the bank to fund me to the max” because “I had this gut feeling I would be safe from foreclosure.” His gut was wrong. According to many of the authors rushing to publish books from their perches close to the epicenter of hedge funds, most of the catastrophes of the last three decades were utterly predictable, yet “the experts” did not dream of averting them.

Perhaps because our habits of building personal investments such as savings accounts, life insurance, and retirement pensions have provided us with real security against crises and infirmity, many Americans are willing to extend such investment-for-security to encompass the riskier forms of investment-as-a-gamble. Most of the time, personal gains are fairly modest and investments grow at a reasonable pace, with reasonable account managers keeping an eye on stock markets for us behind the scenes. But at times we are reminded about the fragility of economies in which the gambling has run amok. The stock market crash of 1987, a subsequent Internet bubble, the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s, overlapping with a Russian bond default that triggered the failure of hedge fund giant John Merriweather, a portfolio insurance implosion, Bernard Madoff and his massive Ponzi scheme, cascades of bank failures, and the sub prime-mortgage bond tsunami, are only some of the recent debacles that have defied regulatory powers and enticed millions of people into schemes that promised riches before the bubbles burst.

The stories of hard times brought on by speculators and hedge fund gurus who drive up the prices of stocks and bonds through great global webs of investment have become too familiar; bailouts and regulations have been woefully inadequate. The general contours of the great public rush of investors eager to get a piece of the artificially inflated riches, followed by stunning losses of private savings, are equally familiar. But how new are the stories? Americans’ fascination with making their dollars grow through paper speculating, and their fortunes and failures resulting from it, has been a subject of scholarly interest for a long time. Historians have chronicled credit and investment schemes beginning in the late-colonial years and continuing in every era of American history. In the two hundred years between the Revolution and the 1980s, over a dozen episodes of overextended credit or speculative frenzies grew into full-fledged financial panics, some followed by years of depression. In many respects, the crashes and panics of the recent past do not differ in kind from previous historical examples, but only in intensity: the cycles of boom and bust bombard Americans more frequently, the fortunes reported are outlandishly greater, the effects spread far more widely, and the losses to millions of people are much more consequential.

Shocked repeatedly, as we have been in recent decades, by swindles and crashes of mind-boggling dimensions, the Panic of 1792 seems to be a minor episode in comparison. After all, Americans had barely begun to build institutions, make their mark in global commerce outside the former empire, and conquer the western wilderness. How much cash and credit could have been available to speculators in so fragile a republic? How deeply could a panic have affected average Americans’ lives, especially when most Americans still thought about wealth in tangible, material ways, and still doubted that piles of paper securities and IOUs could play a viable role in the “true prosperity” of their country?

As they entered the American Revolution, patriots professed that in order to be successful, their Revolutionary War required a higher degree of self-control and moral virtue than anyone had demanded of them previously. Their conception of virtue, which was refined as they assumed responsibility for independence and mobilized all their resources, entailed self-sacrifice, unflinching commitment, and an impeccable regard for the public cause over private agendas for profits. Three major nonimportation movements during the Imperial Crisis joined elite and middling colonists in public pledges to restrain individual desire for more goods of a wider variety by ceasing to consume an array of British imports. Benjamin Rush’s famous words that a citizen was “public property. His time and talents—his youth—his manhood—his old age—nay more, life, all belong to his country,” became a truism at the onset of the Revolution. Corruption, venality, and luxury, republicans insisted, had no place in the American polity.

Yet it was abundantly clear, to those who studied events closely, that civic and moral virtue was insufficient to sustain either the Revolutionary War or the rebuilding that followed. For generations, colonists had looked with ambivalence at merchants who marshaled a whole bundle of privileges, including greater access to credit and investment opportunities than most colonists had. But this perspective faded in the late colonial years; older, customary, notions of an organic harmony of interests, which had been especially manifest during the nonimportation movements, gave way slowly to images of a congeries of individuals in the marketplace of goods and services, where every American’s own private interests were said to have social benefits, in turn validating widespread risk-taking and inviting visions of abundance. The idea of restraining individual desire for more and better goods on behalf of the commonwealth’s welfare would arise now and again in the early republic, but it seemed a curiously outmoded way of thinking to an increasing number of Americans after the Revolution. The prospects of hiking up the prices of agricultural goods to what the market would bear appealed to farmers more and more. The prospects of winning supply contracts that promised to yield exaggerated commissions, or getting privateering contracts that legalized snatching the riches on enemy vessels, swept merchants into the role of business agents to state governments and the Continental Congress on a previously unimagined scale.

Not all revolutionary Americans gained from such thinking and behavior. When dire times set in by 1779, wide sections of the revolutionary movement began to question the consequences of mixing private benefits with the ideal of public virtue. Price inflation, severe currency depreciation, chronic food shortages, selling necessities to the enemy, and the failure of price-fixing were placed at the feet of the most visible scapegoats, the merchants and suppliers entrusted with the well-being of everyone. Although a broad swath of Americans welcomed the greater degree of individual autonomy that the Revolution both promised and made possible for the ambitious, they were not complacent about the new interests that seemed to be so handsomely profiting. Critics took note that only a few Americans, most already well-positioned, could live the promise of free individuals pursuing self-interested opportunities; critics also argued that this self-interest had serious social drawbacks if left unbridled. Their public warnings, spread through a growing print culture in America, turned into petitioning and rioting against those perceived to be responsible for economic injustices in their communities.

The critics were correct in claiming that relatively few Americans prospered, or prospered for long, on the scale that the new rhetoric promoted and promised. But those who were already so positioned in the late colonial era, those few with privileged access to resources in land and commerce, together with the ambitious fast-risers who emerged in the wake of the Revolution, were poised to make the most of—indeed, to create—a speculative fever in the war’s aftermath. New Yorker William Duer, a Revolutionary army supplier and international importer, was among the best at grasping opportunities to move much-needed goods for personal gain. Using false clearances, forging commercial bonds, and collaborating with customs officials at foreign ports, he “greased the way” for goods that supplied both patriots and loyalists. After the Revolution he continued to win Army contracts, but more importantly, he was poised to amass state and federal securities in the wake of the war, buying them at drastically reduced prices and gambling that this debt would be assumed as part of Alexander Hamilton’s federal program and thus grow in value. Duer professed the dawning financial wisdom, that money not only embodied the value of actual goods and labor but also the value of future development and profits. Like other ambitious entrepreneurs, he insisted that the enterprise of myriad Americans would be driven not by the necessity to avoid starvation, as so many early modern theorists had thought, but rather by the incentives of high wages and interest rates, and the availability of extensive credit on easy terms. Likewise, the development of commerce and land need not be bound by the limits of one’s available capital, but “could be furthered with barrels, nay store rooms, full of Revolutionary paper.” Duer, and a consortium of ambitious speculators and risk-takers around him, believed that the 1780s presented a golden opportunity to overtrade in public assets, especially the paper securities of state governments and the Continental Congress.

At first, speculators scrambled to accumulate state and Continental Congress currencies at drastically depreciated prices; farmers, veterans, and widows sold the money and certificates issued during the Revolutionary war at a few cents on the dollar in order to raise more usable cash for themselves in the hard times of the 1780s. By the end of the decade, speculators were eagerly purchasing stock in the country’s few state banks and they were looking forward to amassing scrip from the proposed federal Bank of the United States.

There was no shortage of ways for Duer to invest these stocks and securities. Plans to turn the newly independent country toward manufacturing popped up everywhere, though most of them failed for want of capital and plentiful cheap labor. But Duer leaped at the opportunity to develop one such plan, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM), in early 1791. Acting as an agent for Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, he mobilized the corps of mid-Atlantic speculators who held bundles of state and federal securities issued during the Revolution; having purchased these “barrels” of paper from veterans, suppliers, and army agents at a fraction of their face value, Duer’s circle was poised by the end of the 1780s to invest or resell these securities to another layer of speculators—middling Americans with their own deep ambitions—at enormous profits. So long as a federal financial plan was not yet in place, including the much-talked-about Bank of the United States, the speculators could not be certain that their fistfuls of paper would be redeemed at the level of profit they wished to gain. But Duer acted as if the rumors and wishes would soon come to pass. He assumed authority over the sums amassed for the SEUM—especially wartime securities of state and Congressional governments—and used their prestige to attract further investors who sank their private savings in the project. Then, before building a single manufactory or mill on the SEUM site, Duer and his associates used the SEUM’s precarious paper funds to speculate in different schemes in New York and New Jersey. To top it off, they ran state-chartered lotteries that granted SEUM investors the privilege of raising still more funds to indemnify themselves from losses in the value of their investment, should the SEUM not work out. Investors promised to bring skilled labor and machinery for manufacturing, attract miners and equipment to take iron and copper from nearby hills, and build stores and homes for future migrants. But the site, the future Paterson, New Jersey, became, instead, an opportunity for a few men to “make a bubble of this business” from stock shares, wartime securities, and unpaid loans from friends.

Then, too, there were Duer’s dreams of colonizing land beyond the original states. Like numerous speculators of his day, Duer obtained a vast tract of land from Congress, based on his promise to raise a small fraction of the land’s cost quickly, make further payments much later in the future, and settle migrants on surveyed tracts. He formed a syndicate to settle the Scioto tract, stretching over 4 million acres along the Ohio River, with French immigrants. However, within months after a few families arrived and crossed into the Ohio Valley, Duer’s debts to Congress went unpaid, his promissory notes were rejected in France, and suppliers who sent goods to the new Ohio towns begged for payments. The small nucleus of French settlers languished from hunger and vulnerability to Indian attacks, and then dispersed. Duer fared just as poorly in developing land in Maine and along the Mississippi River near St. Louis.

Duer and the circle of speculators around him believed their securities would continue rising in value so long as the Hamiltonian plan for public credit and a central bank was put into place, and so long as the Bank of New York continued to make loans to Duer for his speculations. Rumors surfaced in spring 1791 that Duer’s circle was cornering the newly issued scrip of the Bank of the United States, borrowing heavily in order to buy the scrip, on the expectation that its value would rise. However, after an initial surge in scrip and securities prices, values fell precipitously in mid-1791. On guard against the potential for a complete collapse of credit and prices across the nation, Hamilton initiated a kind of bailout, in which the Treasury purchased large amounts of circulating securities in order to restore their higher values. When the Bank of New York refused Duer further loans to buy securities and cover his debts, Hamilton lamented that however irresponsible Duer had been with other people’s money, his downfall would harm thousands of Americans and the economy overall. Reluctantly, Hamilton instructed the Bank to buy Duer’s stock at market prices, thereby averting his ruin and a tremendous shock to the economy that autumn.

Yet, despite the need for government support and a publicity campaign warning Americans about the dire effect that any speculative craze would have on the economy’s stability, the Duer circle was buoyed into a new frenzy of securities and stock-buying by the end of 1791, and planned to corner the market on federal securities in order to sell them at inflated prices to not only those whose appetites for speculation were already whetted, but also to “my fellow inhabitants of this city [New York] and far beyond.” Rumors held that Duer not only speculated on the first shares of the Bank of the United States, using information gleaned from the first stock holders’ meeting to time his purchases, but he also demanded advances from the SEUM and his land companies, as well as extensive loans from his erstwhile friends, to buy “as much paper as my chests will hold.” By late 1791, his obligations far outran his ability to pay, so he widened his circle of speculation further and scrambled to borrow “small sums” at usurious rates from “shopkeepers, widows, orphans, butchers, cartmen, Gardeners, market women & even the noted Bawd Mrs. McCarty.”

Duer’s paper castle began to crumble in the early months of 1792 when overdue debts plagued him and the Bank of New York closed its doors to him. The First Bank slowed the expansion of its loans and contracted its supply of circulating banknotes, which forced a general credit contraction throughout the economy. Soon the Federal government initiated a suit for repayment on Duer’s army contracts and land holdings. When small lenders came forward in distress, he blamed his problems (which were just as much their problems) on brokers and agents who “acted outside my authority;” he stopped payments on his obligations just as the general fall of stocks and reputations caught up with him in early 1792. Like many of the credit crises in our times, there was no great precipitating international event, no war or revolution, that initiated the generalized collapse.

The Panic of 1792 did not generate a bailout plan. At first, mobs of small note holders who despaired of getting their money back held Duer virtually a prisoner in his house. Within weeks, his larger creditors took the additional step of committing him to the city prison, where he lived out most of the rest of his days. Duer’s debt to scores of Americans was so enormous that his own undoing was only a beginning to the panic. In the ensuing confusion “Speculators fought like Dogs, Cursing & abusing each other like pick pockets & trying every fraud to prey on each other’s distress” over the rapid decline in securities values. Some sold off their own securities and defaulted on loans, adding to the contagion; some fled the city to evade lenders; others in Duer’s circle landed in jail, and many people who trusted him with their small savings went to the poor house. By March, food prices rose, “and as for confidence there [was] no such thing.” Hamilton, who continued to believe that public offices were best tended by men who anticipated private rewards, kept a safe distance from New York. From Philadelphia, where the new Bank of the United States offices were headquartered, he engineered huge open-market purchases of bank stocks, which helped manage the national financial market by prompting a rise in stock prices and restoring some of the Bank’s lost credibility. Four years later the state of New York refused to lighten the laws concerning debt and bankruptcy, for fear Duer would be released and “get in the game again.” He never did; Duer died in his prison cell in 1799.

Was the excess of self-interest that provoked the Panic of 1792 any more or less consequential than the periodic crises engineered by our own era’s Mad Hatters? Measured in dollars, the post-Revolutionary generation’s speculative fever was miniscule compared to trading done now on Wall Street. Post-Revolutionary Americans also practiced more face-to-face negotiations over loans and credit, and lived within a more interpersonal matrix of trust and reputation, than our own generation’s traders who buy stocks online and build portfolios with Wall Streeters they will never (and perhaps never care to) meet. The international reach of men like Duer was hardly comparable to the complicated and interdependent reach of postmodern capital markets today. Perhaps those Americans endowed with inside information and social access are prone to a form of blindness that admits the light of potential profits to be garnered from fistfuls of securities while shutting out any light that might illuminate dire outcomes, no matter what era they live in. But what is it that entices so many people of all walks of life to gamble with life savings? What makes them too arrogant to guard against overextending themselves? Like our recent hard times, the Panic of 1792 drew scornful attention to the agents of speculation and the evils of overdrawn credit; people pointed fingers and agreed that men such as Duer deserved to languish somewhere out of sight. And yet, before the panic, that same bandwagon was crowded with an eager public investing its small sums in an unpredictable future built on scraps of paper. In that respect, little seems to have changed. For every Duer historians meet in the sources for 1792 there is a John Merriweather or a Bernard Madoff two hundred years later.

Further reading

On the Panic of 1792, I offered one interpretation in Cathy Matson, “Public Vices, Private Benefit: William Duer and His Circle, 1776-1792,” in Conrad Edick Wright, ed., New York and the Rise of American Capitalism: Economic Development and the Social and Political History of an American State, 1780-1870 (New York, 1989), 72-123. For parallel stories of paper and land speculation, financial insecurity, and the speculating mania of Americans during the 1780s and 1790s, see Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, 2002); Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York, 2008); Allan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2007); and Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore, 2003). Thanks to Christian Koot and Ken Cohen for their insights.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3 (April, 2010).

Cathy Matson is Professor of History at the University of Delaware and Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in Early American Economy and Society. She has written books and articles on the political economy and economic culture of colonial and early national years and is currently at work on her fourth book, “A Gamblers’ Ocean: The Economic Culture of Commerce in Philadelphia, 1750 to 1811.”

In the last few years, scholarly interest in American music before the twentieth century has increased as the focus of interdisciplinary articles and dissertations, and this is a most welcome development for all of us who have specialized in topics relating to music in early America. Part of this resurgence comes from a revival of early American studies from within musicology as well as an expansion of enthusiasm for historical music performance. Perhaps the defining characteristic of this trend, however, is the extension of boundaries that previously circumscribed academic fields of study. This issue of Common-place offers a sampling of some of the most recent research being conducted by specialists from musicology, religion, history, English literature, geography, American studies, dance/theater, and music performance. The range of fields is significant not only because this work has generally broadened the purview of these other disciplines but also because new perspectives of inquiry have moved from an approach based somewhat narrowly on the music itself to aspects of what music historically represented to its practitioners and consumers.

In the 1950s and 1960s, an earlier generation of musicologists published groundbreaking analyses of early hymnody and music production that set a high bar for widely read research in the relatively overlooked field of indigenous American music. The work of Richard Crawford, Alan Buechner, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Irving Lowens, Nicholas Temperley, Nicholas Wolfe, and their graduate students helped to expand a vibrant sub-field within musicology that has endured through the efforts of organizations like the Oscar Sonneck Society for American Music. From a historiographic perspective, the best of this work strove for a synthesis of musical styles, influences, and context in addition to more specific deconstructions of musical notation and musicians’ biographies. Besides a small library of monographs and articles, several compendiums of early American sacred and secular music were compiled. For instance, Crawford’s core repertory is a “top 100” of sacred tunes published in America based on printing frequency, assembled in the same era that Billboard Top 100 listings for popular music began to be broken down by genre within the American music industry. Temperley’s hymn tune index is a comprehensive database of English language hymn tunes that helps identify composers, texts, and publication history through a variety of references including tracking the first five notes of any given melody. Significantly, this latter search engine makes accessible a great deal of specialized scholarship to those with minimal music reading ability and is a great boon to even casual owners of pre-1820 hymnals, often missing title pages or indexes, in identifying publications and songs. The fruits of these scholars’ labors have been indispensable for continuing research.

However, as recently as 2005, an opinion essay in the Bulletin of the Society for American Music, the principle musicological organization for Americanists, asked “What Happened to the Nineteenth Century?” and noted a paucity of young musicologists choosing subjects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a trend that apparently started in the 1970s. The essay suggests that the cause of this lapse was not from a constriction of opportunity or limited vision, but rather an unintended consequence of the success of the society in fostering interest in popular music. Initially understood as a twentieth-century secular phenomenon, scholarly attention to commercially successful music that often marginalized music literacy, rather than eurocentric art music, was an aesthetic sea-change within the study of music with enormous appeal for young students. In addition, the benefits of studying and teaching to non-specialists musical topics with available sound recordings and moving pictures, as opposed to those without, can well be imagined.

Ultimately, however, the omnipresence of sacred music in early euro-American culture, in and outside of churches, has come to be seen as the popular music of its time by every definition but secularity itself. Its printing and dissemination offered financial opportunity; tradesmen sang hymns while they worked, and many people had favorite, nostalgic hymns they treasured for a lifetime; some populist denominations used contrafacta, or melodies taken from well-known secular songs, in crafting texts for new hymns; stylistic changes came through experimentation with other new forms of music (from theaters, recent immigrants, new mechanical technologies, etc.); music literacy was simplified through a plethora of shape-note systems (a.k.a “dunce notes”) and numeric or letter substitutions for conventional music notation; singing schools for young people met in the middle of the week outside of the church, where new ways of singing that would offend older parishioners could be tried; in some denominations, instruments were gradually introduced, making performance in public more sophisticated; and particularly in the northeast, just about any man with an interest and aptitude in music could establish a reputation as a publishing composer of hymns. Along with the secular folk tradition, early popular music was fair game for any scholar interested in popular culture.

As these new trends were underway in the 1980s and 1990s, other liberal arts such as history, American civilization, and literary studies were being influenced by cultural anthropology in ways that made revealing the process of cultural formation a defining component of research. Positioning courses of study that extended into other fields was a natural consequence of the redefinition of former categories within these disciplines. Researchers who lacked intensive musical training, and previously may have been intimidated, or put off, by the perceived requirement of a grounding in music theory and composition, now felt fully qualified to assess historical music as a cultural artifact. And of course providing the gamut of contexts for specific musical expressions in America’s past makes them all the more comprehensible, and conveys an appreciation for the ubiquitous importance music had for people long before the age of electronics.

Research has also been encouraged by the realization that music is not just a reflection of culture, it is an essential part of cultural production in one of its most protean, humanistic forms. Closely related to language, music is a universal human activity that antedates civilization and perhaps even speech itself. Recent neurological and paleo-humanities studies, such as Daniel J. Leviton’s This Is Your Brain On Music, Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals, and Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, have collectively posited that the human capacity for music is a much more complex and widespread component of the brain than previously understood; or rather, they have sought to substantiate what has long been surmised by many thoughtful music theorists through the ages. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American religious tracts pointed to sacred music’s ability to create an atmosphere of sublime transcendence, to cool passions such as melancholy, anger, fear, or grief to a Christian equanimity of acceptance. By the early nineteenth century, however, secular claims for music’s benefits were being rediscovered. For example, an 1804 dissertation on “The Influence of Music In The Cure of Diseases” by a graduating medical doctor at the University of Pennsylvania notes that his opinions “will excite the risibility of many … [but] that its originality entitles it to some degree of notice, and that future investigation of the subject will, no doubt, give it that place in the Materia Medica which it merits.” His theory was based on observations of the calming effect music had on mentally disturbed patients but he hoped to extend the hypothesis to physical disorders.

Several of the essays in this issue touch on this nearly magical capacity of music, and the intimately related ritual of dance, as ways of better imagining historical events, and an alternate means of cross-cultural communication. The reciprocity between melody and dance rhythms, as well as the Irish and African immigrants who exchanged them in mid-nineteenth century America, is highlighted in April Masten’s complex exploration of competitive popular dancing. The efficacy of this non-verbal cultural traffic, which exists alongside, and outside, archival historiography, is further highlighted by her impressions of current reproductions of Negro jigs performed at a recent music conference. Masten also includes extensive discussion of instrumental performance practice and interchange as well as glimpses of audiences and venues for this widespread vernacular entertainment that has received little explication.

In Jeanne Eller McDougall’s series of early musical encounters between English colonists and Kikotan natives in 1609 Virginia, she expands on brief mention of the presence of instruments and musicians in documents recording some of the earliest interaction between Europeans and Powhatan natives to flesh out the importance that each culture placed on various uses of music. The wonderment and strangeness that the music of each culture wrought in the other becomes our own as she parses the social assumptions evident, particularly in the extant English reports. Clearly, each culture’s music is being deployed in the name of diplomacy, deceit, and even conviviality in ways that augmented or replaced the shortcomings of language.

Christine DeLucia’s piece presents a similar contrast between Native and English musicality but firmly locates this confrontation in southern New England. Here, Puritan psalmody conveyed a religious solidarity more akin in purpose to the spiritual chanting of their native neighbors than the martial music of their Jamestown countrymen. However, she traces the continuation of musical interplay between cultures from the eighteenth century to the present, highlighting musical memorials of King Philip’s War. Like a metaphor for their cultural survival, Narragansetts and Wampanoags early on consciously incorporated European musical forms with their own traditions to succeed in conveying their history to the American public.

In a similar use of music as a mnemonic device, Nikos Pappas makes the case for seeing and hearing an 1868 southern hymnal as a solemn reverie for the lost cause of the Confederacy. Papas presents a close reading of the names that Rigdon McIntosh, the compiler and composer of some of the hymns, used to memorialize camps, battles, and officers he knew personally that commemorate his experience as a soldier during the war. He provides a revealing explication of the biblical symbols used by McIntosh on the cover illustration, demonstrating once again that contextualizing cultural artifacts is crucial in recovering meaning that can quickly be lost on later generations unversed in scripture. Pappas makes us aware of the southern audience to which this hymnal is addressed, distinguishing it from other American audiences characterized by region, class, or musical sophistication. By showing how singular this particular collection was we also discover something about how vibrant the mainstream American market for hymnody was.

Nara Newcomer’s article delves into unscrambling a century-old controversy over the authenticity of a manuscript hymnal purportedly signed by John Wesley from the early 1700s. It is also this issue’s nod to the importance of historical manuscript music which reflects an individual’s favorite pieces: an eighteenth-century playlist, if you will. Handwritten music and/or texts were a ubiquitous and inexpensive mode of communal music transmission that could anticipate, copy from, or circumvent printed dissemination. Five line staff markers, for making one’s own blank music paper, were available in most music stores in Britain, even though the first known business dedicated to music didn’t exist in the American colonies until 1768. In the case of the pseudo-Wesley manuscript, personal preferences, like the absence of fuging tunes, help to establish where original owner and psalm singer Ralph Potts situated himself in the controversies that raged in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century hymn aesthetics; and the presence of a single tune that Wesley publicly condemned adds to the evidence that he had nothing to do with the manuscript.

Handwritten music figures prominently in Carol Medlicott’s piece where the idiosyncratic style, music notation, and purpose of Shaker song and dance demonstrate how one of the best known utopian societies in the early nineteenth century customized music to its daily regimen. Shaker music is clearly an ethnomusicologist’s dream: an isolated, tight-knit community with worship and dance traditions that are so different that outsiders flock to witness them; a music notation system that is so radically different that it remains indecipherable for over a century; and a literate society with extensive repositories of both music and letters that discuss their worship and beliefs. At the same time, Medlicott traces the musical ways in which such a proselytizing sect nonetheless could be influenced by trends in mainstream American sacred music. Perhaps the most fascinating feature of the Shaker use of music, and its relationship to fundamentally human needs, is the uniformity of worship and sense of community it could engender over such a wide geographic area.

Two of our essays in this issue center on the rapidly expanding American market for indigenously printed secular music starting in the 1790s, and its penchant for political argument and satire. Myron Gray concentrates on three songs of French derivation printed by Benjamin Carr, one of the best known and most prolific musician/publishers of the early republic. His choice of controversial songs of the French revolution in America details their positioning between the emerging two-party system of Federalists and Democratic Republicans. Musicologically speaking, it directly addresses the nexus of comparisons between a song’s original intent and construction, and its repurposing in a different social context while still retaining some of its original meanings. Glenda Goodman gives us a thick description of how an English popular song, “Derry Down,” with a rich pedigree in street culture adaptability stretching back to the seventeenth century, was widely employed in American political prints of the late 1790s to decry the attempts of revolutionary French diplomats to bribe emissaries of the new American republic. In both essays the influence of the human voice is an important undercurrent to the alterations made to the music itself. In the case of “Derry Down,” the melody acquired syncopation and high-note emphases at phrase ends as it passed through its use in English ballad operas of the mid-eighteenth century. This effect accented key words on the London stage but complicated its suitability for easy singing off the pages of American newspapers. In both cases, later American adaptations moved away from their originally comfortable use within most people’s vocal range. “La Marseillaise,” “La Carmagnole” and “Ça Ira” were each envisioned by Carr as theater entertainment or in a parlor piano setting where singing was peripheral to the project. This points to important shifts in the American music scene that immigrant European professional musicians were implementing in the 1790s. The wide popularity of the tune “Derry Down,” when used as a vehicle for political satire, appears to have been more important than its ability to be sung; but it is also quite possible those responsible for adapting the words to the tune were not musical.

While musical exegesis can be fine-pointed and narrowly targeted, the revelation of historically derived meanings have implications far beyond music’s technical arrangements. Every one of these essays has, at least, that theme in common. Musical change over time, both in the construction of early American song as well as the values with which audiences and performers imbued it, are worth discovering as ways of intelligibly complicating the way we come to know our cultural heritage. We hope you enjoy these essays as much as we have.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Peter S. Leavenworth is an independent scholar, writer, professional musician, and master carpenter from Madbury, New Hampshire. He is currently working on publishing his research in American popular music of the early national period, Accounting For Taste: The Early American Music Business and Popular Aesthetics in the Early Republic.

Violence is the business of war—sword, gun, and canon wreaked havoc among soldiers, sailors, militiamen, and civilians as they faced off in deadly confrontation during the Revolution. Violence against individuals expressed outrage, retaliation, and political conviction. Violence, in those years of Revolution, in this conflict born of an Enlightenment political science experiment, also was visited on art objects, proxies for hated men and even more hated policies.

Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion, for instance, on August 26, 1765, was assaulted by an angry Boston mob, its Georgian elegance ransacked during the Stamp Act Crisis. Historians may not weep for the mahogany furniture, but they have mourned the archive of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents scattered to the winds that dark night (fig. 1). Similarly, in the heated riots of 1769, a mob entered Harvard Hall and cut the “heart” from the Copley portrait of Governor Francis Bernard hanging there. Another vandalized Copley portrait was of Joshua Henshaw, “an able man, a firm ‘Son of Liberty,’ who, [when British soldiers sent to Boston to restore order in 1768 were billeted on the populace] left nothing undone which would make the condition of the soldiers uncomfortable.” His likeness was reportedly slashed by a British bayonet when war erupted and Henshaw removed his household in haste, leaving his furnishings in Boston (fig. 2). More dramatically, a larger-than-life-size 4,000-pound equestrian statue of King George III—cast of lead and gilt with sheets of gold—that had been erected in 1770 in New York City was pulled down on July 9, 1776, by a mob and fashioned into bullets, projectiles flung at the king’s troops in succeeding months.

Patrick Spero prompts Margaretta Lovell to talk about historical memory and material culture.

The problem of war, of course, is that even when passions are not inflamed by specific policies, symbolic executions, betrayals, and cruelties, it shatters the very thing it seeks to establish or reestablish—everyday life lived in peace and prosperity. Everyday life—especially among the craftsmen who have been the focus of my interest during this period—was the universal collateral damage of the war. During the Revolution, coastal, Caribbean, and transatlantic trade was disrupted or halted altogether; materials for the fabrication and production of all kinds of goods were unobtainable; many markets were shut down, and whole sectors of the production economy faltered. Furniture craftsmen whose skills in design and fabrication were such that their works now sell for more than McMansions eked out a living repairing chicken coops. They lost their markets, their suppliers, their patrons, and their customers, even when they did not lose their shops, their kin, or their lives.

What did artists do under these circumstances? How did the trade in face-painting do? The Pennsylvanian (and lapsed Quaker) Benjamin West, having emigrated years earlier but maintaining his American identity, spent the Revolution in London. Indeed, in 1772 he was appointed historical painter to the court with an annuity from the king and a studio in the palace. Gilbert Stuart spent the Revolution in London in West’s studio, maturing into a successful portraitist of the British elite. Essentially, then, these artists stayed out of the fray, while quietly “voting with their feet.”

John Singleton Copley, located at the eye of the storm in Boston, equally asserted the apolitical nature of the artist, voicing neither Loyalist nor Patriot affiliations. As tempers flared in the years leading up to the Revolution, he proved himself an equal opportunity painter: the commander in chief of British forces, General Gage, sat to him, as did arch-Patriots Sam Adams and Paul Revere (figs. 3, 4). Copley’s stance of high-minded neutrality, however, was taxed when his father-in-law’s tea was thrown into Boston Harbor; he found this a convenient time to go to Italy to study European art.

John Trumbull, youngest of these Revolutionary-era artists, enlisted and became aide-de-camp to George Washington, but resigned in 1777, traveling to England in 1780 to study in the studio of Benjamin West. The British did not view his apolitical art project in exactly the same light as he did, and threw him in jail as an enemy combatant. But my point is that in 1780 Trumbull went to London to study art!

Charles Willson Peale is the unambivalent exception to the apolitical (or somewhat Loyalist) stance of most colonial painters. Having spent two years in West’s studio in the 1760s, he returned to America, and, in 1776, settled himself in Philadelphia. He enlisted in the Continental Army, saw action, and served in the Pennsylvania State Assembly, returning to painting and the study of natural history in 1780. Peale eventually assembled a gallery of all the principal faces of the Revolutionary movement (many of these portraits remain together and today are housed in the Second Bank of Pennsylvania, near the location of Peale’s original museum) (figs. 5, 6).

Excepting Peale, all the major American artists of the Revolutionary period appear to have placed art and personal ambition above politics and national feeling. Nevertheless, when we imagine the events and personages of the Revolution, we do so in images they have given us. Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum Washington is the iconic face of the Father of his Country, and we all keep the engraving in our wallets on the one-dollar bill (fig. 7). Stuart is said to have painted 130 reproductions of this unfinished original and called them, perhaps a little cynically, his “hundred-dollar bills.”

Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, begun in 1785 in Paris, is the iconic rendering of that event and of the faces of those participating. The original is at Yale (Trumbull’s later large-scale copy is in the U.S. Capitol in Washington), and we are familiar with the image from the back of our two-dollar bill (fig. 8). His Battle of Bunker Hill (1786) is equally the best-known battle scene of the war. Abigail Adams, upon observing the work, commented that Trumbull “is the first painter who has undertaken to immortalize by his pencil those great actions that gave birth to our nation. He teaches mankind that it is … character alone, which interests posterity.” Character here is represented by both Patriot and English soldiers deflecting the bayonet of an unfeeling redcoat from the dying body of Gen. Joseph Warren (fig. 9).

My point is that artists seemed to float above (or outside) the fray, but they certainly made hay in the shadow of the Revolution fixing the public memory of the event and its cast of characters. I do not think artists were more ideologically confused or more economically disadvantaged than other craftsmen, although they certainly were in a more socially ambiguous position, rising from modest birth to intimacy with elites, aristocrats, and the king himself. Their chameleon loyalties were to art, and may well have had an element of Stockholm syndrome.

To return to the broader picture: What is the role of material culture in the study of serious history? I would say that the test of its utility for a historian (as distinct from its utility for a collector or curator) is that it provides material evidence that can teach us something significant on which the written record is silent, ambiguous, or obscure. What Peale and Stuart capture in their portraits of the Founding Fathers is not the intensity of their convictions, the violence of the conflict, the inflamed visual rhetoric of nation-building, nor the presumed passionate fire of leadership, but rather the precise physiognomy of the major players, their faces expressing extreme calm and insightful reason. Whether they correctly interpret the faces and behaviors of their subjects is immaterial; what is key is the social and political ideal these portraits embody of purely cerebral activity. What Trumbull intended in Bunker Hill, similarly, was to pantomime violence not as brute force, but as the site of character-formation and character-revelation: specifically, the heroic virtue of dying for one’s nation and the redemptive virtue of clemency. British and Patriot officers collaborate in deflecting the bayonet of a bull-headed grenadier so that all the parties (including the viewer) can savor the exemplary Dr. Warren’s moment of illumination: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. These are the stories the generation of the Revolution wanted to tell and to hear. That these tales do not move us—indeed, that they appear to operate as cover stories for vastly different motivations—does not subtract from the fact of their testimony concerning the power of those narratives in that distant period.

Further Reading:

For more on the visual culture that grew out of the era of the American Revolution, see Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia, 2005).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Margaretta M. Lovell is the Jay D. McEvoy Jr. Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (2005), winner of the Smithsonian’s Charles C. Eldredge prize.

The French view of themselves and the world

By the time gold was discovered in California in the middle of the nineteenth century, gold had been a human obsession for five thousand years. From the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia through the Roman Empire, gold had been a symbol of wealth and the standard of currencies. The Columbian voyages at the opening of the sixteenth century ushered in a new chapter in the search for gold. The Spanish conquest and subsequent destruction of the Aztec and Incan empires produced an outpouring of gold from the New World that astonished the Old. This gold production led to endless expeditions of discovery and conquest, all in search of the legendary city of gold known as El Dorado. For five hundred years, the name would survive as a symbol of the unrelenting European quest for gold.

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the gold flowing out of the South American mines continued to dominate world production. But as the nineteenth century unfolded, the locus of world gold production shifted. Russia now became the leading producer, and by 1847 it was the source of about three-fifths of the annual output of the world’s gold mines.

All this changed again with the California gold discoveries. From January 1848 to 1860, the streams flowing out of the Sierra Nevada produced a flood of gold. And, in hopes of sharing in these bonanzas, peoples from all over the world poured into California—almost one hundred thousand in 1849, some two hundred and fifty thousand by 1855. But the impact of California gold around the world involved much more than the mass migration it spurred. From San Francisco to China, from Australia to Western Europe, the social, economic, and political effects of California gold were profound. Among European nations, the impact in France and on the French was perhaps the most profound.

France began 1848 with a violent revolution that gave rise to the country’s second experiment in republican government. The course of that revolution was closely tied to the discovery of gold in California. As opportunists from the Pacific coastal regions—Sonora, Oregon, Hawaii—converged on the gold-bearing streams of the Sierra Nevada, the newly created French Republic struggled with divisive factionalism, street demonstrations, and ultimately a violent urban insurgency. In four days in June 1848, the city of Paris was convulsed by clashes large and small, pitting various liberal anti-government factions against units of the regular army, many brought into the city from the more conservative countryside. When the physical confrontations ended—or rather died away—the cost was staggering. Some twelve thousand had died; another twelve thousand were wounded (no one knew exactly how many). From this catastrophe, the Second Republic stumbled forward in search of a stable government, internal calm, and a revived economy.

Amidst this upheaval came the news of the California gold discoveries. In response to the rumors of gold nuggets available to anyone who could bend over and pick them up, the French focused for the first time since the War for Independence on the United States—now a distant sister republic. Heretofore, America had been an ungrateful petitioner, unmindful of and indifferent to the crucial French alliance of 1778. As America expanded in area and population, the French came to admire its energy and entrepreneurial spirit, while disdaining its crude manners, bad food, and indifferent dress; it was a place altogether too democratic for comfort. As the century advanced, the United States drew English and French travelers, fascinated by its novel institutions and peculiar democratic culture. Alexis de Tocqueville was the most prominent but far from the only Frenchman who had visited the United States and written about this strange and different place. Now it took on an even stranger, more alluring quality.

Within two weeks of news of the gold discoveries half a world distant, one commentator noted the special nature of the commercial opportunities opening up to France. Consider the character of the mines and mining enterprise, he wrote. They sustain “an immense population that consumes but that produces nothing.” Thus, “the greatest chance for success is for France.” Instead of carrying to California “the gold hunters, she should carry on her lines a mass of manufactured products. It is not men who ought to be conveyed to California, it is things; it is not explorers, but traders and the products of our industries.”

Benjamin Delessert wrote in the same vein for the Revue des Deux Mondes. “If the reports which we have of this country are confirmed, the colonization of this rich country by a race as intelligent and entrepreneurial as the Anglo-Saxon race has a great influence on the future destiny of the world and of our commerce. Without a doubt, the Americans can exploit by their ordinary activity the hidden riches in this country which conceals so much treasure.” In short order, “the treasures of California, that the Spanish left so long unexploited, the American race will exploit, and this is a good thing for our old Europe. She will exchange her products of the soil of California against the products of our manufacturers and of our fabriques. This will be a big advance over the aristocratic Russians.” For “the adventurous citizens of the US will rapidly disperse the gold which they have gathered so easily in California, and one can say that it is a veritable gift of Providence that the riches of California have fallen into the hands of the Americans.” These riches could then be acquired through aggressive trade by the French.

One observer offered specific advice on how to respond to this trading opportunity: “I am persuaded that without going to Eldorado, one can do a great business in this country, and that a ship of 400 to 500 tons, loaded one half with wines from Bordeaux, Champagne, Madeira, Tenereiffe; then the other half, clothes, ready-made wear, but principally for the working class, such as chimises, pants, shirts, boots, as well as foodstuffs, tools to work the earth, kitchen ware, ordinary furniture for all the houses that are under construction, strong boxes for the gold that is amassed, and which would go directly from France to California.” Here and elsewhere, the French viewed California in a colonial framework, a source of raw materials but without the capability of providing finished goods for its rapidly growing population.

In addition to commerce, there was the question of empire. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the French were already mindful of the significance of imperial expansion. After various trials, they had at last subdued their first imperial possession in Algeria, and they were now moving to fill this place with colonists and investment. Many of the first colonists turned out to be the insurgents of 1848, convicted and sentenced to deportation. Yet the model of the British Empire suggested that colonies were the future for European nations who hoped to compete on a worldwide scale.

Even before the confirmation of the gold discoveries—or simultaneously with the confirmation—the French began to think about the significance of California as an American possession. Acquired at the close of the war with Mexico under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in February 1848, California (gold aside) was an imperial possession of the greatest importance. Facing the Pacific Ocean to the west, it represented a final piece in America’s new continental empire. Consider the observations of Benjamin Delessert on the occasion of the California gold discoveries: “What an imposing and extraordinary spectacle offers us the constant and rapid progress of this powerful America which, each year, extends her arms farther?” he wrote. “Within the last three years, the territory of the United States has been doubled by the annexation of the Republic of Texas, the conquests from the war against Mexico, and the acquisition of a large part of the northern coast of the Pacific Ocean by treaty with Great Britain. Today Congress discusses buying Cuba from the Spanish.” Delessert continued, “What are thus the limits of this always growing ambition? Where will cease this continual need to grow? Mistress of five hundred leagues of coast on the Pacific Ocean, this strength that nothing can make fall back, goes without doubt to found a new empire.” He went on to suggest that the “immense future is reserved for the nation” with a powerful presence on the Pacific Ocean. “There is there a new world to exploit, to civilize, and to enrich, and, while old Europe debates and wears itself out in the sterile struggles against barbarism which one would wish to revive, the genius American marches with great strides to the peaceful conquest of this new world.”

For the French, the American presence resonated with their own imperial experiences. In the words of the Journal des Debats, a newspaper with official connections, the seizure of California by “the anglo-saxon race” with the intention of colonizing, administering, and making flourish “a vast country which the last year was almost deserted” was a “most interesting spectacle.” And now this heretofore largely deserted landmass with the outlet to the Pacific “had attracted an immense crowd of adventurers gathered from all points of the globe.” The editor continued, “It is a subject filled with insights for France, which tries also a grand work of colonization and which has for eighteen years been mistress of one of the most beautiful countries in the world.” The reference to Algeria, France’s colonial possession conquered in 1830, suggested that the French were still trying to develop an imperial policy. But the common denominator was clear. Like the French in Algeria, the Americans were a superior race replacing an inferior race in the settlement and exploitation of a natural setting of great richness and beauty.

A commentator wrote of the parallels: “In California we see the Anglo-Saxon race as colonizer, administrator, to render flourishing a vast country that last year was a desert.” France had to learn how to govern its new colony, to institute “a rule of law, to maintain order and liberty in the midst of a population which elements are, in the majority, also dissolute and vicious as the population which pours today into the golden sands of the San Joaquin and of the Sacramento.” As for the Mexicans, they were embarrassed to see a portion of that population now living “under American law, ashamed to have been seen to cede almost without a struggle a country where the activity of a superior race has found the treasure for so long time resting unexploited.”

In addition to American growth and physical expansion, another dimension of the California gold discoveries that immediately engaged the French was the role of her citizens in the exploitation of natural resources. Behind wars and treaties came America’s citizens. One of the extraordinary qualities of the nation on exhibit in California was the American capacity as colonizers. The Americans moved aggressively and with great speed. When the news of the gold discoveries became known, many Americans left for the gold fields, including soldiers and their officers, government officials, farmers and merchants, ship captains and ordinary sailors. This rapid response was an essential part of the national character, what one French newspaper called “the spirit of the nation.” And in the vacuum left by their departure, women and children carried on the work and guarded the houses.

The Americans could do more than simply move rapidly. After two hundred and fifty years of experience, they knew how to open up the resources of the land. Indeed, it was “the traits of the Americans that make them so successful in exploiting lands.” Thus, the Americans were the ideal national group to exploit the gold discoveries: “By one of those admirable secrets which suddenly come to modify and to rule the destinies of nations, Providence, has wished that this country, a treasure unexploited and lost between the hands of the indolent Mexicans, passes suddenly into those of the hard working and indefatigable Yankees.” In this old Spanish possession, “the river of gold, un Pactole [a rich gold mine] on which one does not know either the depth nor the limits, is the first fruit of the conquest.” Will this land remain the same? No, it will change as rapidly as the prairies and forests of Indiana and Illinois. “A population ardent, active, and adventurous flocks together from all parts.” Already the new possession feels the force of American presence. The Americans are a force to be reckoned with. “And what a force!” 

This energy and confidence in acquiring new lands and opening up the old led to rapid national growth in the economy and transportation systems. A balance sheet of American progress in these areas from the inauguration of its first president to midcentury (1851) showed this physical achievement. The growth in the physical size of the nation was astonishing, paralleled by its increase in population. At a time when French population was stable or even falling, America’s growth was remarkable. In 1850 alone, the American population increased by one million. By the middle of the century, the Americans had built more than ten thousand miles of railroads and fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines. Their steamboat fleet was far larger than the French. Their public library system was unique in the Western world. The conclusion: “It has not been given to any other people to march in a step as rapid and to make also in such little time conquests also important for civilization and for the perfection intellectual and material of men.”

Finally, there were issues of monetary policy. France was a leading nation of Europe. It had a valued and widely accepted circulating currency. It had large gold reserves in the Bank of France. The immediate concern was the price of gold. What would be the result of the outpouring of the precious metal from California? The Revolution of 1848 had produced uncertain financial conditions across France: businesses closed, government bonds plunged in value, and the Paris Stock Exchange temporarily closed. In response, the price of gold had risen steadily. With the confirmation of news of the California gold discoveries, the price of gold began to fall. As one newspaper noted, “the news from California and gold which begins to arrive in Europe from this distant Eldorado has contributed much to [falling gold prices].” By the beginning of March, “California gold has already led to the fall of the price of gold in Paris. One has rarely seen gold at a price so low.”

With the decline in the price of gold, the issue was now its impact. In the words of the Journal des Debats, “[T]his change in the relative value of gold, this depreciation of all precious metals, will this be good or bad?” Awaiting the long-term impact on financial markets, observers noted immediate tangible results. “Seriously, however, one effect must inevitably follow from any great influx of this metal, namely, a rise in the price of all commodities, as compared with the gold standard, and where that rise would stop, he must be a bold man who would venture to predict. We have already seen this result take place in California itself.” But the influence in two areas was clear: “Annuities will fall in value; investments in real property will increase two or three times.”

Michel Chevalier, an observer of monetary policy, wrote a series of articles, the first dated September 1849, under the title “The California Gold Mines.” Published over nine months, these essays analyzed the potential influence of California gold on the French economy and French monetary policy. After a lengthy review of the history of gold, Chevalier asked whether the discoveries in California would mark a dramatic change or simply a continuation of the periodic discovery of new sources, which had been the case over the millennia. He concluded that much would depend on the extent of the California gold fields and the richness of the ore bodies. Would the production in California continue to rise dramatically, as it had over the first two years, or would the harvest of gold level off and then begin to decline?

One important difference was already significant: miners from all over the world, including major contingents from England and France, had joined the Anglo-Americans in harvesting the gold from California’s mountain streams. This made the California gold rush unique in the history of gold mining. Heretofore, the gold had belonged to the imperial authority that controlled the landscape, whether Roman, Spanish, or Russian. Now the gold was being parceled out among representatives of a score of nations. And what a remarkable change that was, making the California gold experience something new, driven by several different national groups, and accordingly, making any predictions about economic impact that much more difficult. One thing was obvious, though. The California gold discoveries would profoundly threaten Russia’s dominance of world gold production. Chevalier thought this was a good thing because it was done by prospectors free to claim the fruits of their labors. For in the end, Chevalier wrote, the richest nation was not the nation with the most gold; it was the nation in which the workers harvested by their labor food, clothing, and shelter—the ongoing needs of a civilized people. From this perspective, the California gold harvest was an important advance in the condition of humanity.

In late December 1850, the French monetary world confronted a crisis brought on by rumors. The crisis began when an English paper reported that France would go off the gold standard. London was an important financial center; rumors coming from London, however fragile, thus demanded serious consideration. For a month, French newspapers gave extended coverage to the question. Repeated denials by government officials eventually took hold. France would maintain a bimetallic system, balancing gold and silver. The last central question about the impact of gold on France’s monetary system had been asked and answered.

In the final analysis, the French bimetallic system was strong enough to absorb the impact of the California gold discoveries. The French economy, especially the port towns, benefited from the commercial opportunities connected with the emigration of French forty-niners to California and the export of commodities, clothing, and manufactured goods to this thriving market half way around the world. The influence on ordinary citizens remained uncertain. The sheets on the walls of Paris and other large cities advertising expeditions to California attracted much attention and some participation, among those who could afford the trip. Yet, the issue resonated with working people in ways that were both ideological and practical. These twin themes emerged in an advertisement for a French company that would go to California in search of gold. It read, in part: “People of France, you suffer because gold, that principal stimulant of nations, does not circulate in your veins, because it rests and stops in the hands of some privileged people who refuse to offer it for your work and your sweat.” The object of this exercise, and by implication for all interested in the well-being of the citizens of the Republic, was “to make gold circulate from the heart to all the extremities of the social body.”

Although many of good heart and good will struggled “to circulate” economic advantage to all citizens of the Second French Republic, they did not succeed. The political divisions and the growing strength of those who favored “order” at the expense of “liberty” doomed them to failure. But the California gold discoveries brought a new element into French life, an exhilarating breath from a sister republic across the sea, a new kind of nation, expansive and enriched by gold. The opportunities associated with the gold rush touched many aspects of French life, official and unofficial. They provided a forum within which to debate many of the important economic and social questions of the day. But the transformations gold brought to California ultimately eluded France. Four years after the first discoveries in John Sutter’s mill race, California was a state with two hundred and fifty thousand citizens, producing $60 million in gold annually. Four years after the first tremors of revolution, the Second Republic had become another historical relic. Frenchmen and Frenchwomen had become the subjects of a new emperor, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, now Napoleon III.

Further Reading:

On the history of gold through the ages, see Brian Kettell, Gold (Cambridge, 1982) and Timothy Green, The World of Gold Today (New York, 1973). The standard accounts of the California gold rush from the American perspective are Rodman W. Paul, California Gold (Lincoln, Neb., 1947), James S. Holliday, The World Rushed In (New York, 1981), and Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold (Berkeley,1997). The best descriptions from the French perspective are Annick Foucrier, Le reve californien (Paris, 1999), Liliane Créte, La vie quotidienne en Californie au temps de la ruee vers l’or (1848-1856) (Paris, 1982), and Michel LeBris, La fièvre d’or (Paris, 1988). An important contemporaneous account is Benjamin Delessert, “Les Mines d’Or de la Californie,” Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris, 1849): 468-84. Among the most important French newspapers are Pilote de la Somme (Abbeville), Memorial Bordelais (Bordeaux), National Boulonnais (Boulogne), Ocean (Brest), Journal du Havre, and Courrier de Nantes. Four Paris newspapers are also crucial in tracing official French reactions: Constitutionnel, Gazette de France, Journal des Debats, and Siecle.

Acknowledgement: The author wishes to express his appreciation for a residential fellowship from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Malcolm Rohrbough, professor of history at the University of Iowa, is the author of Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (1997).

A recent New York Times piece on “superagers” offers strategies to keep your brain youthful, suggesting that it is no longer enough to maintain the face and body of someone decades younger; now, we must strive to keep our memory and attention “on par with healthy, active 25-year-olds.” Women, in particular, are expected to remain preternaturally young. Glossy magazine covers frequently purport to offer the secrets of perpetual youth; readers are urged to “defy” age or to become “ageless” altogether. By the time they reach a certain age, women are expected to be less visible and less vocal, and those who refuse to conform to age expectations are disciplined and vilified. We can easily recall how the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign drew on long-held prejudices about old women as shrewish and ineffective.

Such age-phobic rhetoric is commonplace in American culture, especially as it relates to women, its history stretching back at least to the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that historian W. Andrew Achenbaum calls a “watershed in which the overall estimation of old people’s worth clearly changed.” In this essay, I trace the construction of old age, as we now know it, to the turn of the last century, which saw the rise of convalescent homes, geriatric medicine, and mandatory retirement. As we enter into an era in which most of our citizens will be elderly (what one writer refers to as a “demographic denouement”), it is useful to reflect on the first time mainstream American culture responded to the “graying” of the population and to consider one imaginative response to the dominant expectations for old age as it became a scripted stage of life.

Then, as now, we are taught how to inhabit our ages. Although we tend to think of aging as an inevitable biological reality, there are powerful norms and values that shape our experience of each life stage. Consider, for example, an essay entitled “Growing Old Gracefully,” which appeared in an 1875 issue of The Ladies Repository. “The thought of becoming old myself brings always a saddened feeling, an inward shrinking—almost a shudder,” writes Katie Clark Mullikin. She continues, “The American people . . . are entirely lacking in due and proper reverence for age and its accompaniments,” and old people are “often considered burdens, spoken of as having outlived their usefulness and their day; spoken of often with thoughtless, if not heartless, lack of reverence.” Mullikin’s sentiments convey the extent to which old age was a stigmatized status, and she registers pre-emptive shame, what she calls an “inward shrinking,” at the idea of becoming old, which she attributes not to concerns about frailty or loneliness but rather to the social stigma against elderly people in mainstream American culture (how old people are “considered” and “spoken of”).

Discussions of old age as pathological and feeble pervaded late nineteenth-century popular culture as scientists and social workers classified “the elderly” as a population and made older people subjects of social organization and medical scrutiny. The rise of convalescent homes that specifically catered to older individuals reinforced the view of old age as infantile and socially useless. While the majority of elderly people did not spend their final years in nursing facilities or almshouses, one historian notes that “even the uninstitutionalized elderly began to be affected by the growing social differentiation of senescence.”

Popular magazines and advertisements emphasized the separateness of old age by teaching readers how to appropriately inhabit this specific stage of life. A regular column in Ladies Home Journal by Virginia Ralston, editor of the dressmaking department, instructed women on how to dress for their age. Her columns included titles such as: “For Elderly Women and Semi-invalids,” “The Elderly Lady at Christmas,” “For the Stout and Elderly Woman,” and “Dressing the Elderly Ladies.” Ralston’s columns served to entrench gendered age norms and to homogenize women along age lines, reinforcing generational barriers and disciplining women through the language of “age appropriateness.” Indeed, this advice literature presumes that age is a stable, biological category, even as it does the very work of producing age as a cultural construct. That is, just like contemporary women’s magazines, these columns exemplify anxieties about the proper performance of age and expose the unnaturalness of age expectations.

Moreover, these columns reveal how age, and its supposed pathology, came to be scripted in concert with class and gender. That is, they lay bare the co-construction of gender and age, revealing the double marginalization of being old and being female. Ralston articulates what she calls “certain unwritten laws—laws which are known and intuitively obeyed by all women—which prohibit certain colors and styles to her who can no longer be said to be in the first flush of youth.” Through these laws, Ralston’s column teaches elderly women what Kathleen Woodward calls the “pedagogy of mortification,” or the practice of becoming invisible. By urging her older readers to consider “jet in its many varieties” and explaining that, “most elderly women require a rather plain skirt, whether the material be cloth or silk,” Ralston aligns old age with plainness and discretion. To be an old woman, she implies, one must become as diminutive and unobtrusive as possible, and such dictates mandate that only one model of old womanhood is appropriate.

Literary women chafed against such dictates. In 1894, when Ladies Home Journal ran a forum called “When is a Woman at Her Best?” a variety of well-known writers, including Julia Ward Howe, Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman), and Rebecca Harding Davis, almost unilaterally refused to answer the question as posed. For example, Howe acknowledged aging as individual and idiosyncratic, noting that “the development of character does not correspond with the period of physical growth and maturity.” Their collective refusal to treat women’s lives as quantifiable and uniform in their unavoidable decline serves as a feminist rejoinder to a culture increasingly preoccupied with aging as pathological and unattractive, especially for women.

In their fiction, nineteenth-century women writers resisted limited notions of old age. The old maids and widowers that populate the work of writers such as Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett stage a subversive dialogue with the scientific and cultural denigration of elderly people, particularly elderly women. While mainstream periodicals articulated a disciplinary regime of dress and social conduct for older people, women writers railed against generational segregation and refused to sentimentalize the difficulties of old age. For the remainder of this essay, I turn to a story by Mary Wilkins Freeman to demonstrate possibilities for reading old age as a contested site, a politicized identity to be rigorously explored in its own right, rather than simply a metaphor for obsolescence or a marker of nostalgia. Although it was written more than a hundred years ago, Freeman’s work anticipates our contemporary culture’s obsession with “successful aging” and self-sufficiency and offers a vision of old age in which dependence and debility can be recognized as oppositional.

Freeman wrote primarily about old people. In a letter to the editor of Harpers, she wrote, “I am on another story with an old woman in it; I only hope people wont tire of my old women.” Here Freeman acknowledges that fiction about old people, especially women, risks alienating readers and disappointing critics. Nonetheless, she was widely respected by the gatekeepers of the literary establishment, published in the premiere venues of the day, and was compared by her earliest critics to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Her story, “A Mistaken Charity,” published in the collection A Humble Romance and Other Stories in 1887, centers on two elderly sisters who are coerced into moving to an “Old Ladies’ Home.” At the beginning of the story, Charlotte and Harriet Shattuck live together, rent-free, in a dilapidated home; they are described as having “old rheumatic muscles,” “feeble cracked old voices,” and “little shriveled hands.” Moreover, Charlotte is blind and Harriet is deaf. However, even as they inhabit a deteriorating house and aging bodies, Harriet and Charlotte are content, and “it could not be said that they actually suffered.” Instead, they take much pleasure from the natural world, and Charlotte, the blind sister, delights in the “chinks” in her consciousness, her word for the “light streamin’ in all of a sudden through a little hole that you hadn’t known of before.” These chinks suggest her alternative orientation, and the story’s own interest in opening up a previously overlooked, unseen reality to its readers.

The plot is set in motion when an intrusive neighbor, Mrs. Simonds, visits them one day and decides they must be moved to an institution. Representing a middle-class ideology that expects old women to be stationary and “comfortable,” Mrs. Simonds’s intervention exposes how benevolence directed toward elderly people often masks an anxiety about unfulfilled gender and age norms. The sisters, in other words, must be relocated not because they are unhappy or in danger but rather because they are too openly old and frail. The narrator notes that “the struggle to persuade them to abandon their tottering old home for a better was a terrible one.” Mrs. Simonds’s eloquence, her plea, her “struggle to persuade” and “convince” them, and her appropriation of the term “comfortable” highlights the force of her intervention. Through her coercive use of language, Mrs. Simonds interpellates these women into the physical and ideological space of old age; she must teach them to see themselves as needy and elderly. The very use of the term “Home” indicates the extent to which the emergence of age ideology in the late nineteenth-century involved the co-optation of discourse and the sentimentalization of old age in order to render it powerless and acquiescent.

For Freeman, though, old age is not about docility or pathos; instead, she underscores the ethos of resistance that can characterize elderliness. Indeed, she envisions old women as liberated from gender norms and the expectations of middle class culture. Of the sisters, she writes, “They had been, in the main, except when pressed by some temporary anxiety about their work or the payment thereof, happy and contented, with that negative kind of happiness and contentment which comes not from gratified ambition, but a lack of ambition itself.” This “negative kind of happiness” suggests the unconventionality of their lives, which are not structured around striving or accumulating but rather from simply having enough—a repudiation of the rapidly evolving consumer culture that linked women with fashion and materialism.

The community’s impulse to move the Shattuck sisters to a Home is a way of standardizing their non-normative bodies and controlling their inappropriate modes of consumption and self-presentation. From the moment they arrive at the Home, “they were at total variance with their surroundings, and they felt it keenly.” The most explicit evidence of their misfit with the institution and its expectations is in their dress. The Home requires them to dress more tidily, “but nothing could transform these two unpolished old women into two nice old ladies.” To be “nice old ladies” would entail adopting the types of etiquette and gender performance outlined in Ladies Home Journal, but the Shattuck sisters “did not take kindly to white lace caps and delicate neckerchiefs.” And beyond that, Harriet has “a suspicion of a stubble of beard on the square chin,” suggesting an utter disregard for the expectations to keep their bodies under feminine control and essentially invisible, a refusal to participate in the proper performance of elderly womanhood.      

Paradoxically, even as U.S. culture fixated on old age as a time of sadness and decrepitude, old women were expected to diffuse good feeling, to perform a kind of affective work to counteract the bad feelings their bodies ostensibly elicited. This logic is made explicit in an 1892 column in Ladies Home Journal: “If you want to keep from growing old, if you want to look young and charming, see that there come no wrinkles in your heart. Be as merry and as happy as you possibly can, finding good in everything and loveliness everywhere.” Such affective requirements applied even in convalescent homes. The Home in Freeman’s story may have been based on the Brattleboro Home for the Aged and Disabled, an institution located near Freeman’s home and to whose residents she sent gifts at Christmas. The bylaws for this Home state that residents “will endeavor to diffuse cheerfulness and good feeling throughout the Home.” In other words, residents living in the Home must comply with an emotional code of conduct along with the behavioral norms. To be an appropriate old woman necessitates a kind of emotional labor, a perpetual “cheerfulness and good feeling.”

In Freeman’s story, not only are Charlotte and Harriet guilty of inappropriate affect, they also eschew the very cultural work expected of older women: they are neither mothers nor widowers invested in the preservation and/or reproduction of family values. On the contrary, “neither of them had ever had a lover; they had always seemed to repel rather than attract the opposite sex,” and Harriet has a “blunt, defiant manner that almost amounted to surliness.” Thus, they fundamentally diverge from ostensibly natural ideas about womanhood and its attendant responsibilities. Indeed, Freeman emphasizes their rebelliousness rather than their respectability, reminding us that old age might contain a range of affects and styles, some of which might be deviant. When they are forced to stay at the Home, they “looked like forlorn prisoners,” and just two months after their arrival, they run away. “Hobbling along, holding each other’s hands,” the escaping sisters are “as jubilant as children,” a description that destabilizes the Home’s singular definition of old people as docile and tame. In another affront to the expected behavior of “nice old ladies,” they hitch a ride from a stranger after underestimating the distance of the journey back to their home.

The story does not end in death, as one might expect, but rather with the women back at their actual home, gleefully observing the butterflies and pumpkins they have missed. The final words belong to Charlotte, who declares, “Thar is so many chinks that they air all runnin’ together!” (“Chinks,” as we learned earlier, are those moments of light and beauty that penetrate Charlotte’s blindness.) This articulation of unbounded pleasure underscores the notion that old age may encompass ineffable joys as well as perspectives unknowable to those at other points on the age continuum—it is a final vision of old age a kind of sensory exultation; the little secret pleasures of the chinks are now dilating and encompassing their world.

Freeman’s story flies in the face of the ageism that emerged at the close of the nineteenth century, and it also suggests a novel response to the directives and imperatives that shape old age in our contemporary moment. Freeman presages a world in which it is unacceptable to inhabit an old body, to reject the pursuit of advancement and achievement, and to jettison prevailing gender and age norms. Her characters, in their blend of frailty and zest, demand that we see old age as multifarious, neither a time of utter debility nor a period indistinct from midlife or youth. Moreover, Freeman reminds us that vigor can coexist with dependence. Her work repeatedly suggests that pure autonomy—at any stage of life—may be elusive, impossible, and even undesirable.

In “A Mistaken Charity,” the sisters do not own their home nor are they self-sufficient. On the contrary, “meaningful survival” in the world of this story entails both dependence and disability; these women rely on one another as well as on a community of strangers, including the man who lets them live in his house rent-free and another who gives them a ride back home. And, of course, their dependence on one another forms the emotional backbone of the story. In this sense, her work warns us against assessing old age according to the dictates of capitalism, which teaches us that to age well is to not age at all, not to need others, not to lose control, or even to slow down. Thus, while the story criticizes a culture of benevolence that smugly assumes it knows what is best for everyone, Freeman also dismantles the notion that autonomy is the sine qua non of a good life or of good aging. Instead, she asks her readers to see how age ideology—its desire to naturalize and universalize seemingly innocuous values like comfort, respectability, and self-sufficiency—can do a kind of violence to the experience of aging, rendering the chinks unseeable, and thus disabling individuals at the end of their lives.

As we attend to age and its intersections with disability and other hierarchies, we should, as literary critic Heather Love reminds us, “check the impulse to turn [dark] representations to good use in order to see them at all.” That is, we need not celebrate old age only when it aligns with the paradigms of success and beauty privileged by capitalism or refuse to acknowledge it at all. Rather, we must see old age as part of a whole embodied life that is unexplored, untheorized, and is inherently oppositional to the demands of power, capitalism, and gender.

Further Reading

The classic histories of old age in the United States include W. Andrew Achenbaum’s Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790 (Baltimore, 1980), David Hackett Fisher’s Growing Old in America (Oxford, 1978), and Carole Haber’s Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past (New York, 1983). See also Carole Haber and Brian Gratton’s Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History (Bloomington, Ind., 1994). Cultural histories of age, broadly defined, in American culture include Howard Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1989) and Thomas Cole’s The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (New York, 1992), and more recently, the excellent Age in America: The Colonial to the Present, edited by Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett (New York, 2015). For a contemporary examination of old age, see G. Stanley Hall’s Senescence (1922), a follow-up to his definitive tome on an earlier stage of life, Adolescence (1904). As he put it, “Ever since I published Adolescence in 1904, I have hoped to live to complement it by a study of senescence.” The most current biography of Mary Wilkins Freeman is Leah Blatt Glasser, In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Amherst, Mass., 1996).

Sari Edelstein is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she teaches courses in U.S. literature and culture. She is the author of Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing (2014) and is currently at work on a book about age and maturity in nineteenth-century American literature.