Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512808872

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Confounding Images
1. The Portrait and the Social Construction of Ekphrasis
2. "The Inconstant Daguerreotype": The Narrative of Early Photography
3. The Haunted Portrait and Models of Authorship in Periodicals and Gift Books
4. Hawthorne, Daguerreotypy, and The House of the Seven Gables
5. Melville's Pierre and the Burden of Imitation
6. The Photography of Travel: Reading The Marble Faun
Afterword: Photography and Portraiture in the Later Nineteenth Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CONFOUNDING

IMAGES

CONFOUNDING IMAGES PHOTOGRAPHY

AND

PORTRAITURE ANTEBELLUM

IN

AMERICAN

FICTION

SUSAN

S.

WILLIAMS

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 1997 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6097 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Susan S. Confounding images : photography and portraiture in antebellum American fiction / Susan S. Williams, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8122-3397-2 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and photography—United States—History—19th century. 3. Portrait photography—United States—History—19th century. 4. Art and literature—United States—History—19th century. 5. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864. House of the seven gables. 6. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864. Marble faun. 7. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Pierre. 8. Ekphrasis. I. Title. PS374.P43W55 1997 813'. 309356—dc21 96-29728 CIP

For my parents, Sue and Neil Williams, and in memory of Thelma Peterson Williams, who always believed I would write a book.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Preface

xi

Introduction: Confounding Images

1

1. The Portrait and the Social Construction of Ekphrasis

15

2. "The Inconstant Daguerreotype": The Narrative of Early Photography

35

3. The Haunted Portrait and Models of Authorship in Periodicals and Gift Books

66

4. Hawthorne, Daguerreotypy, and The House of the Seven Gables

96

5. Melville's Pierre and the Burden of Imitation

120

6. The Photography of Travel: Reading The Marble Faun

147

Afterword: Photography and Portraiture in the Later Nineteenth Century

182

Notes

195

Bibliography

225

Index

241

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Mathew Brady, daguerreotype of Henry James, Sr. and Henry James, Jr. (1854). 2 2. Daguerreotype of a young woman with books and a daguerreotype case (c. 1845). 4 3. Advertisements, Norton's Literary Gazette (1854). 9 4. "Our Lady Contributors," Graham's Magazine (1843). 23 5. Engraving of William Sidney Mount, The Painter's Triumph (1838), from The Gift (1840). 29 6. Daguerreotype of mother and child (c. 1847). 37 7. "The Daguerreotypist," Godey's Lady's Book (1849). 40 8. Engraving of Walt Whitman, based on a daguerreotype, Frontispiece to Leaves of Grass (1855). 43 9. "A Mother's Vigil," Postmortem daguerreotype showing mother and son (c. 1849). 50 10. Alexander Hesler, "Woman at a Mirror," Half-plate daguerreotype (c. 1856). 53 11. Cover illustration, A.J. H. Duganne, Rose Warrington; or, the Daguerreotype Miniature (c. 1865). 58 12. Levi L. Hill, daguerreotype of a miner (c. 1853). 61 13. "M. B. Brady and Frank Leslie's Artists . . . at Willard's Hotel, Washington," plate from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Magazine (1860). 68 14. Thomas Sully, "A Portrait," The Gift (1840). 78 15. "The Fair Artist," Godey's Lady's Book (1853). 87 16. Portrait of Sarah J. Hale, Godey's Lady's Book (1850). 88 17. Daguerreotype of J. Wesley Jones (c. 1856). 110 18. John Leverett, portrait possibly by Sir Peter Lely. 112 19. Sir William Pepperrell, portrait by John Smibert (1747). 113 20. Steel engraving of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-told Tales (1851). 115 21. John Rubens Smith, watercolor portrait of Allan Melville (1810). 125 22. Beatrice Cenci, portrait formerly attributed to Guido Reni. 141 23. Faun of Praxiteles, illustration from The Marble Faun. 152-53 24. Guido Reni, Saint Michael the Archangel (1635). 159 25. Roman policeman, illustration from The Marble Faun. 167

χ

Illustrations

26. "Hilda's Tower," illustration from The Marble Faun. 171 27. Catacombs of the Cappuccini, illustration from The Marble Faun. 172 28. Man in a Roman cemetery, illustration from The Marble Faun. 177 29. Page from The Marble Faun showing a group of four self-portraits by artists in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. 178

PREFACE

This book is about the intersection of the visual and verbal arts in America during the period from the advent of photography in 1839 until the Civil War. It focuses in particular on the portrait as a site from which antebellum writers could respond to the new art of photography. These writers were attracted to the ability of the photograph to reveal hidden truths, but they also realized that such truth-telling challenged the pictorial power of their own art. In response to this threat, they began to redefine the pictorial power of narrative by using fictional portraits to create an alternate form of representation. Yet these fictional portraits had very real effects, as they articulated the uncanny aspects of the photographic image and thereby helped shape the terms in which photography would be received. At the same time, writers used fictional portraits to reveal something about the status of their own art. For this reason, these portraits provide a lens through which to view not only the historical reception of photography but also the construction of authorship in mid nineteenth-century America. Although Confounding Images is primarily concerned with a particular period in American literary and cultural history, it also reflects its own historical moment. I began working on this project in 1989, when photography was celebrating its sesquicentennial: an occasion that precipitated a great number of exhibitions and celebrations of early photography and of the daguerreotype in particular. In the summer of 1996, I marked the completion of the book with a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I met Robert Shlaer, the only full-time daguerreotypist in practice today. It is difficult to make a living doing this work, but Shlaer pursues it because he considers daguerreotypy the most beautiful form of photography there is. By modern standards, the practice of daguerreotypy is rather cumbersome. The silver-iodized plate on which the image is exposed can take up to a month to prepare; daguerreotypes cannot easily be copied (each is a unique positive image); and they tend to be small (Shlaer's images are four by six inches, slightly bigger than the 3Î4 by 414 inch size favored in the nineteenth century). Daguerreotypes also take some effort to look at: their silvery surfaces become empty mirrors when they are held at certain angles. Despite these difficulties, Shlaer and others working with daguerreo-

xii

Preface

types continue to be drawn to these uncanny images, eager to expose the "secrets of the dark chamber," in the words of the title of a 1995 exhibition at the National Museum of American Art. In part, I suspect, it is the difficulty of viewing these images that attracts people to them. At a time when television, film, and the internet accustom us to seeing pictures in a split second, daguerreotypes require time and concentration. Their physical characteristics make us wonder how they are made and how they go about the work of representation; they encourage us to see the medium as well as the message. Rather than being "transparent" likenesses of certain perceived realities, daguerreotypes need to be pored over and read. It was my desire to be able to deepen my own reading of daguerreotypes that guided my initial work on this book. Understanding their historical reception helped me read them as objects and artifacts and have a better sense of what I was seeing. Readers of this book will, I hope, also have a greater understanding of daguerreotypes when they see them in an antique store, in a museum, or even in a box of family mementos. Even more, however, I hope that readers will have a greater understanding of what daguerreotypes—and portraits in general—meant to the nineteenthcentury writers who incorporated them into their short stories and novels. What did writers find appealing—and threatening—about these images? How did the popular success of the daguerreotype affect writers' sense of the commodification of their own art? In what ways did writers use fictional portraits to attract readers? What does their use of these images tell us about the conditions of authorship in antebellum America? As I have worked to answer these questions, I have been particularly influenced by current theoretical accounts of the relation between the "sister arts" of word and image. These accounts frequently articulate this relation in terms of a competition between temporal narrative and static pictures. This competition, in turn, leads writers to attempt to show the superiority of their narrative, particularly in the face of visual images that threaten to "speak" or live. Yet I have been interested in describing the source of this competition as well as its effects, focusing in particular on the historical changes that might have increased this sense of competition. In order to examine these changes, I have also studied the history of authorship during this period, including recent work on the literary market, magazine culture, and the connection among authors, publishers, and readers. As a result of this approach, the book ultimately has a dual focus: the relation between word and image during the daguerreotype era and the relation between literary production and reception in the antebellum market. My hope is that this dual focus will enable readers to gain an en-

Preface

xiii

hanced understanding not only of the cultural and literary history of photography, but also of the ways in which the study of literature and other arts intersects with that of the history of the book and authorship. The intellectual debts that I have to scholars working in both of these fields are many and are, I trust, registered in the notes and bibliography of this book. I have received more direct assistance from a number of people as well, and I am happy to be able to acknowledge them here. This book began as a dissertation at Yale University, where I benefited from the advice and support of my directors, Richard Brodhead and Alan Trachtenberg, as well as from helpful readings by Michael Denning, John Hollander, and Bryan Wolf. Several friends from Yale not only encouraged me to finish my dissertation but have also continued to support this project from afar; I am especially grateful to Scott Casper, Alison Hickey, Steven Meyer, Kate Nickerson, Niki Parisier, Stephen Rachman, Abby Rischin, Nancy Schnog, and Katie Snyder. Since leaving Yale, I have also received helpful comments and advice from colleagues at other universities; here I would like to offer my particular thanks to Meredith McGill, Joel Pfister, and Michael Winship. The English department at Ohio State University has provided a stimulating and collégial environment in which to finish this project. The chair of the department, Jim Phelan, has been generous in providing advice and material support. Two faculty reading groups—the English department's novel group and the Ohio Early American History and Culture Seminar—gave me invaluable forums in which to discuss my work. My fellow Americanists, especially Steve Fink, Elizabeth Renker, Grant Rice, and Tom Woodson, have helped by answering particular queries and reading individual chapters. Nick Howe, Audrey Jaffe, Kay Bea Jones, Georgina Kleege, Rick Livingston, Marlene Longenecker, Mary Pat Martin, John Norman, Ruth Lindeborg, Peter Schwartz, Cathy Shuman, and Luke Wilson have listened to my ideas and offered not only support but also muchneeded diversion. I am grateful to them all. The research on this project was generously supported by a dissertation grant from the Whiting foundation and by research grants from Virginia Hull and the College of Humanities of the Ohio State University. The College also provided a publication subvention for the book. I appreciate the support of the College and in particular of its Dean, Kermit Hall, and Associate Dean, Chris Zacher. For their help with the research on this project, I am indebted to David Owens and especially Irmgard Schopen; their enthusiasm about the project helped reaffirm my own.

xiv

Preface

As the book has gone into production, I have been aided in acquiring illustrations by the American Antiquarian Society, especially Georgia Barnhill; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Ohio State University Libraries, especially Geoff Smith and (for this and much more) Jim Bracken; Matthew Isenburg; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Peabody Essex Museum. The Ohio State College of Humanities helped underwrite the costs of acquiring these illustrations. I am also grateful to Jerome Singerman and the University of Pennsylvania Press for efficiently and enthusiastically ushering the book into print. Portions of this book have previously appeared in other forms. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared in Narrative 4 (May 1996): 161-74; an earlier version of Chapter 4 in Nineteenth-Century Literature 49 (September 1994): 221-44; and a section of Chapter 6 in Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996): 117-50. I am grateful to the publishers of all these pieces for permission to reprint. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially Sue, Neil, Fred, Cathy, and Taylor Williams. They have patiently waited for this book to appear and have inspired me through their example and their love.

INTRODUCTION: C O N F O U N D I N G IMAGES

In A Small Boy and, Others (1913), Henry James recounts going with his father in August 1854 to sit for a daguerreotype by Mathew Brady (Figure 1). The portrait was to be a surprise for his mother, and the twelve-year-old James was particularly thrilled by "the secresy of our conjoined portrait." 1 The fact that the portrait was a "conjoined" one of father and son gave it particular significance, since it documented "in so welcome and so definite a manner [his] father's cultivation of [his] company" (69). Indeed, he cherished the daguerreotype so much that he reproduced it as the frontispiece to A Small Boy. "Beautiful most decidedly the lost art of the daguerreotype; I remember the 'exposure' as on this occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age" (88). Although James calls daguerreotypy a "lost art," his description of the image helps to recover its beauty and revelatory power for his readers. In this book, I have a similar purpose: to recover the literary and cultural significance of this lost art by examining the ways in which it was represented in antebellum American fiction. The advent of the daguerreotype in 1839 marked a fundamental shift in the production and popularity of images, especially portraits. During the colonial period, portraiture was primarily an aristocratic art, available to only a select few. With the rapid expansion of daguerreotype studios in the 1840s and 1850s, however, the portrait became not a distinguishing mark of wealth but rather an everyday feature of middle-class culture. The shift was so profound that William Ivins has gone so far as to claim that "the histories of techniques, of art, of science, and of thought, can be quite properly and cogently divided into their preand post-photographic periods." 2 By the 1860s, when the wet-plate (or collodion) process had superseded that of the daguerreotype, photography had become sufficiently naturalized that the implications of this shift were not always readily appar-

Figure 1. Daguerreotype of Henry James, Sr. and Henry James, Jr. by Mathew Brady (1854). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Confounding Images

3

ent. But for antebellum writers, the shift signaled nothing less than a redefinition of the pictorial function of narrative. "Before Americans made pictures they used words," Neil Harris writes in a provocative phrase. "In the years before photography or the wide dispersal of lithographs and engravings, verbal description was the only means of conveying visual images."3 As images became more widely dispersed, this pictorial function began to change. The very ability of the photograph to create faithful representations also made it speak more loudly than words (Figure 2). Even as the daguerreotype and other reproductive technologies challenged the pictorial power of writers, however, they also encouraged those writers to use portraits to create a realm beyond mimetic representation. In particular, antebellum writers found a renewed interest in the Gothic topos of the haunted or magic portrait. Since these fictional portraits could not be illustrated in actual pictures, their full force could be articulated only through writing. Although these fictional portraits were often fanciful and romantic, they had a very real effect on the reception of the daguerreotype. Even as writers responded to the new art they also helped to articulate its cultural significance, creating a set of discursive terms that identified it simultaneously as a magical agent of revelation, an astoundingly "true" and accurate likeness, and a locus of sentimental value. Indeed, James echoes these various definitions of the daguerreotype in his description of his trip to Brady's studio. It is a secret venture that will only later be revealed to his mother; it also documents a growing closeness in the relation between father and son. At the same time, James remembers feeling self-conscious about "not being so adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseen my exposure" (87). The daguerreotype "exposes" his appearance even as it produces a pleasing image. By tracing antebellum writers' use of fictional portraits, I propose to explore this discourse and the ways in which it mediated the cultural reception of the daguerreotype, and, by extension, of portraits more generally. In exploring this intersection, I seek to avoid what Michael Warner terms "technodeterminism," or the assumption that "technology has an ontological status prior to culture." 4 Instead, my exploration assumes not so much a causal relation as a reciprocal one. I am concerned not only with how a technological innovation—the daguerreotype—affected American literary culture, but also in how that culture affected popular conceptions of the daguerreotype. To trace this reciprocal relation, however, is only part of my purpose. For if I am on one level interested in the daguerreotype as a technological innovation, I am ultimately more interested in its status as a literary figure. What does the daguerreotype represent for American writers?

Figure 2. Daguerreotype of a young woman with books and a daguerreotype case, c. 1845. Probably done at Plumbe's photographic gallery in New York City. Courtesy Floyd and Marion Rinhart Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon, Graphic, and Photographic Arts Research Library.

Confounding Images

5

How does it intersect with their portrayal of fictional portraits? What personal, narrative, and cultural anxieties do they displace onto the portrait? When James speaks of the "conjoined portrait" of himself and his father, he provides a potential emblem for the enterprise of this book as a whole. Fictional portraits are compelling, I think, precisely because of what they conjoin: the interpretation of figurative portraits and the reception of actual ones; narrative technique and technological change; epistemology and cultural practice. In Brady's daguerreotype ofJames, however, the conjoining of father and son appears strained. Henry's hand rests on his father's shoulder, but each seems to occupy his own sphere: the father, his hands stiffly clenched, stares at the camera rather than acknowledging his son, while Henry—perhaps worried about his clothes, or about the power of the camera—looks tentatively in the same direction. The union in the image comes as much through the shared attention to, and apprehension of, Brady's camera as it does through the newly "cultivated" relation of father and son. The joining with which I am concerned is more total and more profound, involving not only the yoking of two entities (portraits and fiction) but the complete merging—or confounding—of one with the other. My title is thus "confounding images," a phrase adapted from another late work by James, The Sense of the Past (1917). In that novel, the image that confounds Ralph Pendrel is a portrait of an ancestor whom he resembles and then, through the portrait, becomes. The face of this portrait "confounded him as his own"; the two faces become one.5 This confounding image, then, becomes less a portrait than a mirror, a reflection of Pendrel's past self that he must confront. Fictional portraits can also function as mirrors as they expose the process of interpretation and the extent to which language can do the work of a visual sign. As will become evident in the chapters that follow, I am interested in the ways in which portraits come to portray fiction and become miniaturized—even demonized—versions of narrative itself. But the confounding images that I discuss are not in any simple sense narrative mirrors. These narrative concerns are linked to the particular conditions of authorship, publishing, and reading in antebellum America, and it is these, too, that the fictional portrait confounds. This confounding, in turn, destabilizes the fictional portrait. It does not always function either as an agent of alterity or "insurmountable opacity," in Françoise Meitzer's terms, or of mimetic doubling. Rather, the fictional portrait becomes a site of constant negotiation between these two extremes.6 The very etymology of the word portrait points to its inherent duali-

6

Introduction

ties. It stems from the Latin word protrahere, to draw forth, reveal, extend, or prolong, and from the French pourtraire, to fashion or represent; it not only imitates but also reveals, making manifest something hidden. It is both a public document of fact and an agent of private revelation. Furthermore, it can refer either to an exact likeness of a person or to an image that typifies or idealizes something else, be it a person or a more generalized "scene" or "sight." 7 1 will be focusing here primarily on portraits that are likenesses of people, since the vast majority of daguerreotypes were portraits made in studios rather than landscapes. Like the daguerreotypists, writers also found the portrait particularly compelling as an emblem of human identity and consciousness. But the portrait registered different concerns for different kinds of writers. Some associated it with surface likeness and artistic performance, while others focused on its ability to reveal psychological depth and interiority. My aim here is to trace the ways in which the fictional portrait negotiates among these various definitions. The daguerreotype that James discusses in A Small Boy and Others testifies to the duality of the portrait: even as it records the likeness of father and son, it also evokes a series of memories for James. In describing these memories, James creates his own sense of the past, his own portraits of place. And these scenes themselves assume the quality of daguerreotypes. "To look back at all," he writes, "is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less l o s t . . . by my stopping however idly for it" (92). It is no surprise that James returns to his description of the Brady daguerreotype in the following sentence; his reading of that ghostly image enables him to recall other scenes that typify his past, scenes that the daguerreotype has held or "fixed" for future viewing. At the same time, these apparitional scenes also reveal the extent to which the image is always connected to the culture in which it was produced. James cannot look at the daguerreotype without also remembering "the queer empty dusty smelly New York of midsummer" (69). "Vision and its effects," as Jonathan Crary puts it, "are always inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification." 8 To look at an image from the past, for James, is thus to think of oneself in relation to that past: a past that appears as a panorama of cultural institutions. Specifically, James remembers not only Brady's daguerreotype studio on Broadway in New York, but also P. T. Barnum's great American Museum; the office of his dentist, Dr. Parkhurst, with its "sallow

Confounding Images

7

pile" of copies of Godey's Lady's Book; the "plate-glassy" windows of Stewart's ladies' shop; Horace Greeley's office at the New York Tribune; the bookstore in which he made "a great and various practice of burying [his] nose in the half-open book" looking for its particular "English smell" (80); and the Clarendon Hotel, where his father had his portrait painted by Eyre Crowe, William Thackeray's secretary. It is not surprising that while recollecting this panorama James thinks of the "generic excess" of Walt Whitman (78): James's New York here is reminiscent of Whitman's exuberant catalog in Leaves of Grass. James's panorama unfolds a picture of American literary culture at mid-century. What is especially striking is the relative lack of differentiation between "high" and "low" art. Even as James was enamored of the smell of English paper and ink and thrilled to meet Thackeray (who, to his chagrin, teased him about the buttons on his jacket), he also participated in the Barnumesque world of American popular culture. Sitting in the dentist's waiting room, he "succumbed to the spell of Godey," poring "over tales of fashionable life in Philadelphia while awaiting my turn in the chair" (65). He also remembers an "absorbed perusal" of Maria Cummins's best-selling novel The Lamplighter {77). Although James clearly knows the difference between the escapist writing one reads in a waiting room and the kinds of books that one wants to acquire for a permanent library, the fact that he simultaneously remembers works by Thackeray, Whitman, Cummins, Greeley, and the fashionable tales of Godey's helps us remember that these works were originally part of an interrelated, heterogenous literary culture. Even within this culture, however, critics worked to create particular aesthetic categories. According to these categories, the daguerreotype was a mechanical "technique" rather than a creative art. For this reason, as Alan Trachtenberg observes, discussions about it tended to emanate either from "the hermetic circle of professional practitioners and their spokesmen" or from "the sentimental-gothic rhetoric of popular fiction." This situation eventually changed when "high culture" writers like Oliver Wendell Holmes began to write about the art of photography in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly.9 Yet James's memories remind us that even learned and elite families like his read Godey's, and therefore the conceptions of the daguerreotype put forward in popular magazines helped shape the reception of the daguerreotype by "serious" writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville as well as by middle-class culture more generally. The panorama that James presents also suggests something of the historical circumstances that helped shape this reception. First, we see that

8

Introduction

even as James and his father were sitting for a daguerreotype at Brady's studio, Henry Sr. was also sitting for a portrait by Eyre Crowe. The two forms of portraiture continued simultaneously in the 1850s, but not without causing a heated debate about whether daguerreotypy should be considered a fine art. The daguerreotype posed a great threat to portrait painters, many of whom lost their jobs as daguerreotype studios proliferated. A few painters, such as Thomas Cole, categorically dismissed the daguerreotype. "The art of painting is as [much] a creative as an imitative art," he wrote, "and is in no danger of being superseded by any mechanical contrivance." 10 But other artists, such as Samuel Morse, abandoned painting altogether in order to establish daguerreotype studios. James's description helps show the allure of this new technology and how quickly it was integrated into American culture. Brady's studio shared more than geographic proximity with Barnum's Museum, Greeley's offices, Godey's volumes, and bookstores selling Cummins's Lamplighter, it shared with them an audience whose reception of these various cultural institutions was affected by the fact that they appeared at the same historical moment. Until 1853, Brady's Daguerrean Miniature Gallery adjoined Barnum's Museum, and they each became a place, as Trachtenberg puts it, "of both putting on and encountering appearances, a place of illusion and recognition, a place where the very making of illusion could be witnessed." 11 Brady was also intimately connected to the literary culture of New York. To remember Brady, for James, is also to remember the books and magazines that surrounded his studio; one is associated with the other. The patrons of Brady's studio were also patrons of book stores and subscribers to magazines; the increasing availability of portraits to the middle class was paralleled by the increasing availability of printed texts. This conjunction is particularly evident in a June 1854 issue of the New York publishers' circular Norton's Literary Gazette. Published shortly before James and his father visited Brady's studio, this issue has advertisements for The Lamplighter and Brady's Daguerrean Gallery on the same page (Figure 3). The publisher of The Lamplighter, J o h n P. Jewett, promoted this "great American romance" in terms of its sales, announcing in capital letters that 40,000 copies had been published in eight weeks.12 Brady's advertisement emphasizes the quality of his "magnificent gallery" with its "matchless collection of European and American celebrities," on the one hand, and its "facilities for the productions of First-Class Pictures" on the other. Seeking more elite patrons, Brady had just moved his studio farther uptown, away from Barnum's Museum, and his advertisement works to cultivate an audience that values not only celebrities but also "matchless" quality and originality. Fit-

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