Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860

Citation preview

Page 1 →

Introduction In his 1856 memoir, Recollections of a Lifetime, the American publisher and author Samuel Griswold Goodrich recalled his frustrating and yet ultimately rewarding and dazzling encounters with gloomy, tortured poets. Goodrich's descriptions dwell on the titillating quirkiness and irresponsibility of these souls and on their utter lack of fitness for the regimens of everyday existence. We hear, for example, how the poet James Gates Percival—“his eye large and spectral, his whole air startled, his attitude shy and shrinking, his voice abashed and whispering”—is possessed of “imbecility in the common affairs of life”; “By the time he was twenty, he began to stand aloof from his fellow man.” “His whole life,” says Goodrich, “was a complete shipwreck. He lived to excite admiration and wonder; yet in poverty, in isolation, in a complete solitude of the heart.” Goodrich believes that Percival was “deeply injured—nay ruined—by the reading of Byron's works.”1 Equally inept is the poet John Brainard. In the chapters dealing with Goodrich's childhood, Goodrich remembers how, growing up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, he and all the other hale New England boys had loved to whittle. Goodrich believes that because it encourages happy industry and ingenuity, whittling rehearses boys in the terms of healthful and productive manhood. By contrast, Brainard, another tortured Byronic type, is a kind of antiYankee of whom his landlord says, “[He] whittles and whittles, and never makes anything!” Like Percival, Brainard is “negligent, dilatory, sometimes almost imbecile from a sort of constitutional inertness.” Indeed, so agonizingly contrary is Brainard's disposition to life's ordinary demands, that Brainard, according to Goodrich, Page 2 →cries out at one point that he wishes he were a slave, just so he would not have to exercise self-discipline or take responsibility for his actions. And yet this incompetence on the part of poets is not, in Goodrich's view, an undesirable attribute. On the contrary, it is directly related to the poet's productivity and audience appeal. Full of wonder, Goodrich describes how Brainard, one minute a pathetic excuse for a human being, would in the next suddenly light up with ire and swiftly scrawl out a poem of such sublimity, such “wild and impressive imagery,” such “deep and touching emotions,” that it takes Goodrich's breath away: “It was one of those inspirations which come to the poet—and often come like the lightning—in the very midst of clouds and darkness.”2 In the story Goodrich tells, nothing much becomes of these poets. Percival gives up poetry and spends his life as a surveyor in the wilds of Wisconsin, Brainard dies young. But Goodrich implies that the merest contact with these hopeless, dilatory yet fervently inspired souls leads to the fruition of his own Yankee aspirations as a children's book author and publishing entrepreneur. Industry and the Creative Mind is a study of the figures that so fascinate Goodrich: eccentric, alienated writers. In the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States, these figures flourished in virtually every nook and cranny of the culture field, manifesting themselves in accounts of crazed poets and starving scribblers, of hapless “loungers,” “dilettantes,” “idlers,” “Bohemians,” Byronic rebels, and “mad poets.” Often purporting to be descriptions of actual living writers, as Goodrich's are, these accounts were enlarged and enlivened not just by the ubiquitous poetry and person of Byron, who stood as a kind of patron saint of early nineteenth-century American poetry, but also by a vast tribe of vernacular fictional personages: Charles Brockden Brown's maniacal students, Washington Irving's hapless scribblers in their London garrets, Nathaniel Hawthorne's obsessed, neurasthenic scientist/litterateurs, even Augusta Jane Evans's diseased, self-destructive lady authors, so large-eyed and sensitive they seemed to hover between this world and the next. In some cases, writers propounded these stereotypes as part of their public personalities; they put themselves forward as paralytic recluses and “triflers,” as Joseph Dennie and Nathaniel Parker Willis did; or they advertised their solitude and victimization, as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Fanny Fern did. In other cases, where the line between literary play and actual life could be frighteningly blurry, these typifications were projected onto writers, even those like James Fenimore Cooper, who seemed to conform completely to bourgeois Page 3 →standards of respectability and financial success. “With the term ‘author,’” said one pundit, putting his finger on the inclusiveness of this thinking, “we have been accustomed to couple ideas of carelessness and poverty; of sudden and ill-spent wealth; of reckless indulgence; of fitful and suicidal labour; of dazzling and destructive glory; of harsh and killing neglect.”3 Moreover, it was not uncharacteristic for writers to deplore this stereotype, yet somehow to imbibe and embrace it, frequently publicizing their own lunacy and alienation and even indirectly organizing what antebellum lecturer E. P. Whipple

called their own “wildness,” “unrest, unhappiness, frailty, beggary and despair.”4 Almost without exception scholars treat these eccentric author figures, as I am calling them, as political constructs. Animated by the differential mechanisms of cultural and economic modernization, eccentric author representations and performances, in this conventional formulation, elaborated the vaunted charisma and specialness of art in the post-Enlightenment era. In the opinion of mid-twentieth-century modernist scholars, for example, the artist's social and psychic exile were a given, intrinsic to the adversarial position of the arts as a whole in modern capitalist societies. Indeed, it was generally believed by these scholars that American artists' exile was especially pronounced, given America's extremist commitments to capitalism, to positivistic science and philosophy, to a discipline-loving Protestantism and its work ethic, and to a set of glittery and empty materialistic goals.5 American literary artists, according to Richard Poirier, promulgated “an ideal of heroic character asserting its independence of oppressive environments and of prefabricated social styles.”6 New historicists of the 1980s argued that eccentricity was an emergent “high culture” attribute, propagated by the members of a dying patriciate who sought to insulate their aesthetic efforts from the taint of a mass commercial market by enclosing them in what Pierre Bourdieu famously calls the “inverse” worlds of the modern autonomous culture field.7 And finally, it is most recently proposed that the eccentric writer evinced the massive “privatization” of culture hypothesized by Jürgen Habermas, that in seeming to inhabit a realm disembodied from the ordinary trials of the workaday world, the eccentric writer instantiated culture's autonomy within a modern “leisure market.”8 However, none of these theories makes clear how the stereotype of the eccentric writer, with its disavowal of American values of industriousness and profit, sat at the center of America's thriving arts and entertainment industry, how high culture values were promoted by grouping all writers into the same category of worthlessness, or how the sovereign liberal subjects of the Page 4 →modern Habermasian private sphere were reproduced through pictures of “recklessness,” “suicidal labour” and “despair.” Rather than seeing eccentric writer figures as effects of cultural modernity, as things created or encouraged by the development of a modern marketplace for aesthetic commodities, Industry and the Creative Mind argues that the particularities of the U.S. culture field engendered, or at least allow us to see, a curious reversal of these causalities. Cultural theorists, like Americanist literary scholars, unanimously describe eccentric authorial attributes as reactive and differential phenomena. Associated with the regimes of modern Romantic authorship, these attributes figure the autonomous author's radical division from and rebellion against the orders of bourgeois commerce, politics, diversion, and sociability. The Romantic artist, in Bourdieu's words, “invents himself in suffering, in revolt, against the bourgeois, against money, by inventing a separate world where the laws of economic necessity are suspended, at least for a while, and where value is not measured by commercial success.”9 Thus conceived as radically extrinsic, “[T]he Romantic author,” according to Andrew Bennett, “is ultimately seen as different from humanity itself. He is seen as both an exemplary human and somehow both above and beyond the human, as literally and figuratively outstanding.”10 At the same time, cultural theorists argue, Romantic authorial and aesthetic constructions were contingent upon and intimately woven into the fabric of the marketplace landscapes they repudiated. In Bourdieu's words, “The emergence of the work of art as a commodity, and the appearance of a distinct category of producers of symbolic goods specifically destined for the market, to some extent prepared the ground for a pure theory of art, that is, of art as art. It did so by dissociating art-as-commodity from art-as-pure-signification, produced according to a purely symbolic intent for purely symbolic appropriation, that is, for disinterested delectation, irreducible to simple material possession.”11 Indeed, for Jürgen Habermas, the emergence of the autonomous aesthetic work was entirely contingent on the appearance of the culture commodity, for it was only through the differentiating operations internal to the commodity form that these objects became “accessible…as objects of judgment and of taste, of free choice and preference.”12 By extension, the eccentric Romantic artist, the purveyor of “art-as-puresignification,” comes into being as a repudiation of the commodity producer, an embodiment of aesthetic modernity's imperatives of radical individualism and antisociality. What I argue in this study, however, is that the case of the United Page 5 →States presents these causal structures evolving themselves in reverse. The idea of the author as a wild, eccentric outsider circulated in U.S. provincial society as a powerful and tantalizing mythology well in advance of the development of any kind of commodity

marketplace that might have conditioned cultural participants to understand this authorial type as, in fact, autonomous from a commodity marketplace. On the contrary, predating the development of a recognizably modern culture economy and imprecisely tied not just to what today we call transatlantic romanticism but also to vernacular fantasies of the storyteller's powers of magical transcendence, of wild mischief, and improbable escape, eccentric author figures acted as generative structures, entangling themselves with and helping to shape the rudimentary systems of what by the late 1830s would be America's peculiarly aggressive, laissez-faire, and massoriented print industry in cheap, sensational news and entertainment. In other words, instead of coming into being as reactive or adversarial entities, eccentric author constructions, I argue, were themselves foundational, established from the start as crucial components of an early American arts and entertainment industry that not only included eccentric author figures at its heart but that also depended on their particular elaboration of the creative personality for its profitability and vigor. It is important to stress that in thus arguing for the structural rather than political value of eccentric author constructions, this book not only addresses some of the principles of twentieth-century cultural theory, but also addresses a current gap in studies of early American literary and book history. Traditionally, as I indicate above, these studies highlighted eccentric author figures as intrinsic to the cultural politics of U.S. modernization—that is, eccentric author figures were understood as exemplars of modern elite or avant-garde countercultures whose purpose was to challenge various commercial and bourgeois verities. Indeed, as numerous scholars underline, this sense of the eccentric author as an inherently political entity was central not just to the new historicism but to scholarship on the American Renaissance from the 1940s to the early 1990s, when any given nineteenth-century writer's legitimacy as a scholarly object tended to depend on his or her seeming rebellion against normative middle-class American society. Associated with edgy political critique, with cultural elitism, and with a sort of happy social maladjustment, the figure of the eccentric author was a central part of a powerful American scholarly tradition that tended to equate aesthetic excellence with performances and representations of authorial nonconformity. A number of recent revisionist histories have questioned the validity Page 6 →of these models of alienated authorship, partly by pointing out their highly restricted pools of evidence and tendency to extrapolate from canonical writers, and partly by challenging their adherence to transnational models of cultural transition. Meredith McGill's landmark American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2002), for example, draws attention to the failure of American literary scholarship to take account of a unique feature of the antebellum U.S. culture industry: its near total reliance, in the absence of international copyright law, on the reprinting of British and European texts and on the profligate copying of domestic magazine content. These practices, McGill argues, not only fostered a domestic publishing industry based almost entirely on “piracy” but also produced their own unique “culture of reprinting,” a kind of alliance of creativity and plagiaristic indebtedness that forestalled the development of modern individualist author structures while keeping alive older “public sphere” ideals of communally owned and shared knowledge. In McGill's analysis, writers like Edgar Allan Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne, who seem to fit the role of the modern exilic “genius,” do so only in hindsight; these writers were, in fact, inspired and enabled by a lively culture of textual anonymity, flagrant copying, and genial reciprocity that tended not to foster or accommodate romantic ideals of the artist's originality and alienation.13 Other recent studies have been equally adamant in their abandonment of older models of marketplace hegemony and authorial alienation. Ronald and Mary Saracino Zboray, in Literary Dollars and Social Sense (2005), argue that the antebellum literary scene, far from being the site of “market revolution,” presents a unique instance of a prevailing voluntary, widely participatory literary culture that counters the models of division and hierarchy, of mainstream commercialism and countercultural exile, scholars typically bring to it. Like McGill, the Zborays stress the extent to which literary transactions in this era before corporate publishing were animated by profound beliefs in the social usefulness or “social sense” of literature, rather than its dollar value. They emphasize the informal, inchoate nature of antebellum literary production, the fuzzy line between amateur and professional authorship, and the powerful role played by beliefs not in art's separateness but in its sociality.14 In a similar spirit, Leon Jackson's The Business of Letters (2008) insists upon the lack of a definable split between premodern and modern marketplace economies, between temporally adjacent “amateur” and “professional” paradigms of

authorship, and even between conventional literary genres and such “literary” venues as autograph albums, diaries, Page 7 →and tombstones. Jackson argues for a radically decentered early nineteenth-century literary scene in which literature circulated within a range of what he calls gift, debtor, and symbolic economies, rather than in modern “disembedded” or “marketplace” economies.15 Notable for their collective revelation of richly nuanced regional economies and practices, these studies by McGill, the Zborays, and Jackson collectively argue for the relinquishment of eccentric writer figures, whether fictional or embodied in the performances of actual persons, as plausible identity models for early American writers. On the principle that America's premodern circumstances, which fostered networks of sociability rather than exchange, could not have generated the rebellious, iconoclastic ideals of creativity associated with British and European Romantic authorship, these histories postulate the irrelevance of eccentric author representations and structures to our understanding of the early American literary field. However, while these recent works are immensely valuable for their effort to extricate research in early nineteenth-century U.S. authorship from the political terms that have for so long dominated histories of this era—and while, indeed, my own work is greatly indebted to their findings—they also participate in the assumptions of earlier scholarship. Overlooking vast areas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American fiction, fable, and commentary that insisted on writers' strangeness and maladjustment, much of it coming from writers themselves, these newer histories implicitly continue to see the eccentric author as a fundamentally political construct, one that situates the author outside of ordinary cultural commerce: eccentric writer figures are still considered icons and embodiments of a politicized alienation and rebellion, in other words, but precisely for this reason they are not figures that should enter into our assessments of a primarily sociable, coterie-centered early American literary scene.16 One of the principal suppositions of Industry and the Creative Mind, by contrast, is that eccentric author figures, as these developed in the United States from about 1780 to 1845, had no readily identifiable political content. They are notable not for their ability to articulate individualist desire and adversarial political positions (rebellion, disaffection, lonely segregation) but for their fundamental lack of positive political value. Instead of embodying such properties as “high culture” or “art” or “individualism” or “radicalism,” American eccentric writer figures, I argue, tended to be eccentric for the sake of being eccentric. Their only necessary attribute, as these attributes developed between 1790 and Page 8 →1860, was that they seem not to belong to whatever definition of “normality” or positive productivity happened to prevail. One of the most important purposes of these fantastical, nonproductive figures was to satisfy a fundamental and not necessarily “modern” desire among cultural participants to experience literary and entertainment materials as extraordinary, as things that were diverting precisely in proportion to their failure to conform to the ordinary, palpable world. By the same token, the writer's eccentricity, which projected this experience onto an external figure of mayhem whose only purpose was to concoct textual gateways to giddy transport, had a “value” unconnected to its positive features. Transmitted into modern industrial and exchange regimes by the energies of fandom and fantasy, eccentric writer figures were not only entertaining in their own right (what would those zany writers get up to next?), but they also established a set of infrastructural patterns—for example, low rates of pay for what were necessarily deemed nonproductive personnel—that ensured their centrality to the business of entertainment as this evolved in the 1830s and 1840s. To the extent that the “success” of writers—their popularity, reputation, sales, and so on—was contingent upon their embodiment of this entertaining, nonproductive standard, the figure of the eccentric writer was produced not just within the material possibilities of the publishing industry, but within the psychic structures of writers themselves. And to the extent that the health of the entertainment industry came to depend on its exclusion of a certain quality of positive productivity, this industry included at its center a counterproductive element that compelled the creation of ever more eccentric personnel. In the first part of this study, accordingly, I argue that many of those features of early national U.S. culture that are typically taken by historians as inimical to the development of Romantic images of authorial eccentricity—early national America's peculiar intellectual property regimes, its decentralized publishing industry, its close-knit, homegrown literary production circuits—facilitated the proliferation of these images from the 1790s to the 1820s not as expressive phenomena but as outsized fables and fantasies. Indeed, it was arguably their lack of connection

to any logical external source in the American culture field that fed their inflation as diverting fictions and repositories of desire and that turned them into powerful representational constructs in a literary culture preoccupied less with sales than with pleasure and sociable diversion. Eccentric author figures flourished, in other words, not because they articulated the positions of American writers necessarily but because they were themselves objects of entertainment. Enjoyed by audiences Page 9 →(which were made up of many authors, publishers, and printers), they were exploited by authorial constituencies in the building of narrative and public personalities—and in the building of careers. I then look at how these eccentric author constructions, enormously popular among literary participants and increasingly manifested not just as textual personalities but as performances, cohered as fundamental governing principles in the development of a print-based mass entertainment industry in the 1830s. Embodied in the performances and public presences of actual authors, and thus emerging as strangely solid, materialized players in what quickly became a highly competitive domestic publishing industry, eccentric author figures not only featured prominently in authors' self-promotional and entrepreneurial projects, but also, I am proposing, congealed as internal, systemic features of U.S. mass entertainment production in the years before the Civil War. Entangled from the first in myths of the author's unfitness for the rigors of ordinary life, the U.S. mass arts and entertainment industry in the age of Barnum evolved not just by pioneering the brash publishing and advertising stunts for which the era is famous but also by incorporating and standardizing eccentric writer mythology, by basing everything from its productivity standards to its profit margins on the titillating idea that writers foiled productivity and profit. I go on to look at how writerly eccentricity, written from the first into the optimizing energies of the entertainment market's “logic,” reproduced and amplified itself within the growing print entertainment business over the course of the 1840s and 1850s, ultimately creating the “reckless” psychic tendencies and behavior patterns necessary for its upkeep and for the health of the business as a whole.

Eccentricity and Entertainment What does this study mean when it calls writers “eccentric”? In one sense, the term “eccentric” references a long tradition of writing about authors that figured the ideal author as a daring outsider. Indeed, the term “eccentric” itself was commonly in circulation in the United States from the late 1780s onward to describe what was thought to be the erratic nature of “genius,” particularly in reference to creative writers. In Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, “eccentricity” is defined as a “departure or deviation from that which is stated, regular or usual; as the eccentricity of a man's genius or conduct”; the now obsolete “eccentrical” is defined as “deviating or departing from the center.”17 It Page 10 →was precisely this emphasis on deviation that prevailed in popular descriptions of literary types. A 1775 article in the Pennsylvania Magazine, for example, told readers, “Genius” “is fiery and irregular in all his motions”; he “delights in devious and untried paths” and “eccentric flights.”18 “Genius,” said The Port Folio in 1802, “is of an eccentric character; of a restive temper; disdainful of guidance or controul, he resists all influence from without; he deserts every path not traced by himself.”19 The “eccentric genius,” says another article in 1807, this one specifically titled “Eccentricity,” “sets up his own plans in opposition to general opinion”; the “conduct of eccentricity” is “erratic and uncertain.”20 In another sense, use of the term “eccentricity” in this study more directly invokes the word's spatial connotations in order to suggest the generic place of off-centeredness that developed as the paradoxically central position for authors in the mass entertainment business of the antebellum decades. In this context, “eccentric” means, quite literally, “ex-centric,” outside the center. Which authors are included in this category? In modern criticism, the idea of an “eccentric author” typically conjures up what are now the stereotypes of the British and European Romantic tradition—the brooding, glamorous Byronic poet, the misunderstood and persecuted artist living on a pittance in his garret, the dandies and flaneurs of Paris's famed Bohemia. Versions of these figures, both represented and performed, flourished in the United States, from Washington Irving's pictures of scribblers in their attic rooms to the collocation in New York in the 1850s of a literary subculture that called itself “Bohemia.” However, of interest to me is not only this channeling of trendy cosmopolitan forms but also the institution by the 1830s of systemic positions for these forms in U.S. cultural machinery—and indeed not just for these particular forms but also for a sort of default, exilic authorial character, alienated, persecuted, socially dysfunctional, and often physically and financially debilitated. In other words, the term “eccentric author” is not intended just to refer

to those authors who seem to personify Romantic-era stereotypes but also to those who adopted or were forced into entirely generic positions of exile. It thus encompasses writers like James Fenimore Cooper, who, as I show in chapter 3, tumbled unwittingly into the ranks of the losers, lunatics, and spendthrifts that increasingly metaphorized a generic “author,” or like Fanny Fern, who, as I show in chapter 5, elaborated her celebrated public self in the same language of victimization and persecution that structured the careers of so many of her male contemporaries. In addition to understanding eccentric author figures as generic and Page 11 →structural entities, this study also understands them as part of a scene of “entertainment.” At the simplest level, my use of the term “entertainment” instead of “literary” is intended to address a perennial problem in early nineteenth-century American literary studies, which is the difficulty of classifying early national and antebellum authors as practitioners of literature. It is fairly easy to say that Percy Bysshe Shelley was a poet or Charles Dickens a novelist. In the United States, however, few writers either wanted or could afford to write in a single genre or even for a single audience. Park Benjamin, whom I discuss in chapter 3 of this study, was the author of lofty sonnets and lyceum lectures, but also of some of the trashiest papers and columns in New York City in the 1830s. Lydia Maria Child penned romantic novels, but also household instruction manuals, antislavery tracts, and travelogues. Indeed, we get a powerful sense, from the 1869 autobiography of John Neal, whose career began in the late 1810s and continued until his death in 1876, of the bewildering stew of stuff that most working American writers produced. Neal says he's written year after year, now on the subject of Temperance, or Banking, or Imprisonment for Debt, which I had been warring with, at home and abroad, ever since 1818; now upon the Militia-System, Slavery, and Colonization, now upon Woman's Rights, and now in favor of the “Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad”: on some of which leading subjects I threw off, literally, volume after volume. And still later, I have written and published, “One Word More,” a religious work, and “True Womanhood,” a novel, stories without number, poems by the score, criticism upon Literature and the Fine Arts by the acre, and last of all two or three dime-novels, and other stories for “Beadle.”21 Scholars of American literature have dealt with the difficulty of pegging authors to specific literary genres and even to “literature” as such by referring to the body of writing produced by literate early national and antebellum Americans not as “literature” but as “letters”—as in Michael Warner's Republic of Letters, Richard Brodhead's Cultures of Letters, and Leon Jackson's The Business of Letters. “Letters” is the late eighteenth-century term for “learned discourse”; to be “lettered,” according to Webster's 1828 American Dictionary, is be “literate; educated; versed in literature or science.”22 “Letters,” accordingly, is thought to be a more appropriate signifier of the diverse kinds of writing in which literate American men and women routinely engaged. However, the problem with the term “letters” in the context of this study is precisely its association with cultural literacy and thus its implicit exclusion of a whole swath Page 12 →of sublettered materials, including all the sensational genres, from frontier almanacs to city mysteries, that figured so prominently in the antebellum print explosion. “Entertainment, ” then, is meant to capture generic diversity while also including those genres difficult to classify as “letters.” But equally important, the term “entertainment” is meant to draw attention to the crucial mediating role played not by all writing but by fiction and diversion in the creation of nineteenth-century U.S. authors' public personalities. The terminology of “letters,” which has been allied to a more general effacement of generic boundaries in cultural studies and historicist scholarship in the service of analysis of political and ideological structures, breaks down what otherwise seem to be crucial distinctions between literary and nonliterary writings: lyric poems, novels, belle lettres, and other imaginative writings figure in this scholarship as the discursive equivalents of temperance lectures, antislavery pamphlets, medical treatises, conduct books, household manuals, and so on. By contrast, I take as a given that these factually based, largely pedagogical genres were treated by both authors and readers as an order of communication different from those genres understood to have the primary purpose of diversion and thus as likely to be fanciful or fictional as not.23 By extension, my term “entertainment” is the one that late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century people themselves used to reference a burgeoning body of texts dedicated not to the production of instruction or

knowledge but to the production of excitement and self-loss—to the running of what fiction theorist Gregory Currie calls “off-line simulations,”24 in this case, text-generated imaginary experiences and simulations distinguished by their being “bracketed,” in Wolfgang Iser's phrase, from ordinary life.25 I do not necessarily exclude expository texts from this category, but I do group them with explicitly fictional texts according to their similar effects. Thus while I exclude instructional or pedagogical texts, I include those titillating genres associated with what today we call “reality”—sensational autobiography, crime reporting, exotic travel tales, celebrity exposé—genres that summoned fact but also subordinated it to what Noël Carroll, discussing the alluring “power” of modern filmed entertainments, calls “erotetic narrative,” distinguished by its suspense-based storytelling and its strident modes of affective address.26 These distinctions between entertainment and nonentertainment genres are important not just because they capture generic differences relevant to the period but because they illuminate the importance of the Page 13 →role of fiction and fantasy in the production of authorial personalities. It is no coincidence that eccentric author figures did not flourish around horticultural or medical treatises; they proliferated around imaginative and sensational writing. Indeed, in the case of nineteenth-century American celebrities—Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Fanny Fern—they often represented a slippery transformation of narrative personae or fictional characters into what was thought to be the author's real character. By the same token, eccentric authorial voices and public personalities were not necessarily transparent expressions of actual authors' feelings or character. They were attention-grabbers, the audacious dramatis personae in authors' repertoires of self-promotion; they were projections and amplifications of readerly fantasy, objects of endless debate and meditation in magazines and newspapers. By the late 1830s, moreover, eccentric author personalities were bankable commodities in the emerging machinery of marketplace celebrity. In other words, eccentric author personalities, while often taken with deadly seriousness, tended to circulate in the same world of simulations, ersatz sensations, and fantasies that still typify the realms of entertainment and celebrity today. In tracking the history of eccentric writer figures in American entertainment culture, Industry and the Creative Mind focuses on the years between 1790, when the United States passed domestic copyright legislation that determined the texture of the literary and cultural fields in the decades to come, and 1860, when the Civil War swept aside what was left of an artisanal and micro-capitalistic publishing infrastructure and ushered in the era of modern large-scale corporate publishing. Recent print culture histories, as I mention above, have gone a long way toward revising traditional pictures of the antebellum print world as one in which premodern structures were suddenly effaced by “the marketplace” for mass cultural materials, leaving writers in situations of crisis, confusion, and rebellion. Scholars generally agree that in the late 1830s there fell into place the technological and economic pieces that made it both possible and profitable for U.S. publishers to produce printed texts on a mass scale and to sell them at cheap prices. In the opinion of most historians, accordingly, these years, which also saw the emergence of such famous American popular culture institutions as the minstrel show (in the 1830s) and P. T. Barnum's American Museum (in 1841), along with all the colorful campaigns, celebrity personalities, and publicity stunts that would quickly come to typify the new business of advertising, mark the birth of a modern vernacular entertainment industry.27 What many recent historians stress, however, is the partial, often local nature of these Page 14 →changes and the difficulty of mapping them onto any kind of seismic shift into full-blown “marketplace” cultural production and dissemination. Jackson, for example, illustrates the extent to which the “embedded” economic practices of a premodern culture of literary sociability, in which literary artifacts are circulated as gifts as opposed to commodities, and in which writers write for pleasure instead of for money and mass audiences, persisted and significantly overlapped with the development of modern marketplace regimes.28 What this study is intended to reflect upon, by extension, is the possibility that the entertainment phenomena that seem to be endemic to the emergence of a mass market—the development of fan and celebrity culture, for example, or the alienation of the author from communal practices—were also part of a premodern world of sociable and embedded economies, a world that projected itself forward into and became part of the world of cultural industrialization. Accordingly, I use the term “entertainment industry” to refer to the modern manufacturing and market infrastructure that came to dominate popular print after about 1835, but I also assume the existence, both prior to and inside of this formalized manufacturing and marketplace structure, of fractal-like

entertainment systems—of dynamic, often face-to-face networks similarly based on the production, circulation, and delectation of amusement. These small-scale systems could be communally oriented, on the model of the face-to-face networks of literary sociability described not only by Jackson but also by David Shields,29 in which groups of friends or professionally allied men and women set up literary salons or book clubs; such coteries might not only meet once a week or month to discuss the latest poems but might also have their own communally owned books or indeed their own magazines. However, these micro entertainment systems, I suggest, could also be based on more estranged, symbolic, or mediated relationships, even while retaining their communal origins. In chapter 2, for example, I look at the case of 1790s writer Joseph Dennie, who offered himself to his public as what he called an “eccentric idler” and “lounger,” an exaggeratedly aristocratic, anti-Franklinesque figure. While Dennie very much operated within the realms of early national literary sociability—he exploited his old-boy contacts, presided over various clubs, including the famed Tuesday Club in Philadelphia, and called upon an extended network of friends and acquaintances to contribute to his various periodical ventures—he also features in the accounts of his contemporaries, even his friends, as a figure of quasi-magical abilities who elusively personifies his protean fictional characters. Dennie functioned, Page 15 →I show, as a kind of embryonic celebrity; he had, in Joseph Roach's phrase, “It.”30 And not surprisingly, it was this aura of magic and antisocial mischief that was at the heart of Dennie's ability to translate his communally anchored literary career into one that prefigured later commercial relationships. These small-scale entertainment systems, moreover, not only evidence themselves in the premodern culture of literary sociability but also informed professional and economic relationships in the developing manufacturing and marketplace realm. Of course, vernacular celebrity cults, which had flourished around transnational outsider figures like Byron, as well as around certain local eccentric characters like Dennie, emerged as a standard feature of the world of antebellum mass entertainment, when a writer's ability to star in scandals could be proportionally related to success and book sales. But it was also the case that the highly mediated eccentric author figures produced in the fray of mass entertainment were indebted to the peculiarly intimate relationships that had characterized premodern literary sociability and that persisted as governing structures until well into the 1850s. In chapter 3, for example, I look at the extent to which eccentric author figures, with all of their celebrity and high sales potential, were amplified and multiplied not just in the abstract realm of the media but in the web of acquaintanceship and face-to-face encounter that still organized a relatively small northeastern publishing network in which writers were the ones who constantly wrote about writers in the news and entertainment press. In general, then, this study of eccentric authorship assumes a dynamic arrangement of relationships, desires, and fantasies that both structured and could exist apart from the modern manufacturing and marketplace scenes of mass production with which eccentric author figures are conventionally associated. I look at the extent to which these figures, which predated literature's industrialization, came to inform the conditions, both psychic and material, under which writers worked in the era of early mass production, focusing particularly on the way in which the Romantic-style author's fabled rejection of industrial modernity facilitated the creation of a kind of workforce of creative writers. Although portions of my study engage in comparisons between British and American representations of authors, my investigation in general does not encompass British cultural developments in any detail, nor does it aim to engage in the sort of sustained comparison that this topic invites. I will say briefly, however, that in revising traditional conceptions of Romantic authorship as an epiphenomenon of Western industrial Page 16 →modernity, my study aligns itself in spirit with recent attempts on the part of scholars of British and European literature to pry authorship studies loose from their long-standing debt to cultural materialist and progressivist historiography. In contrast to traditional narratives of autonomous authorship's emergence, which hypothesize the eighteenth century as the scene of an ever-expanding reading franchise and ever-expanding marketplace for books, of the growing “professionalization” and commercial degradation of authorship, and finally of the romantic author's rebellion against these processes and retreat into the idealized realm of the “aesthetic,” these newer studies investigate the sources and plausibility of these narratives of emergence. William St. Clair's The Reading Nation (2004), for example, revisits the notion of a democratization of books in the eighteenth century.31 Andrew Bennett's The

Author (2005) repudiates the idea of an objective historical existence for the Romantic author and sees this figure not as an embodied subject but as a tissue of often contradictory narratives about a hypothetical creature.32 Geoffrey Turnovsky's The Literary Market (2010) looks at how the idea of a “professional” or commercial author in France was dreamed up by late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French writers despite the absence of an actual commercial network for printed goods or the possibility of actual professional work for authors.33 These studies, to name three prominent examples, suggest the extent to which conventional models of authorial modernity, rather than necessarily being based on a set of verifiable historical events or economic and social transitions, were part of a mythology of cultural modernization, a mythology often created not in calculable material circumstances but in the imaginations and fictions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, publishers, and readers. By extension, it is my hope that Industry and the Creative Mind, which argues that beliefs and fictions about authors can function not only as a mythology separate from material conditions but also as predicative forces in the formation of literary and entertainment economies, suggests new ways of understanding the history of authorship not just in the United States but also in other regions of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic and European world.

The Eccentric Noncanon In the American literary and critical tradition, the whole topic of the eccentric author is a peculiarly loaded one, for it was famously on the basis of their perceived nonconformity that a small, select group of nineteenth-century Page 17 →writers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson—was admitted by twentieth-century scholars into the canons of American literature. These writers were singled out both for their seeming embodiment of Romantic and avantgarde ideals of artistic integrity, in which the author who rebels against a status quo is understood as a privileged repository of morality and authenticity, and for their repudiation of various positivitic and materialistic beliefs. This rule of thumb applied equally to the canonization of writers outside of the antebellum period: Charles Brockden Brown, for example, whose novels clearly displayed transatlantic Romantic affiliations, joined Hawthorne and Melville in the fold of canonical specialness. It might seem logical for a study of the “eccentric writer” in the nineteenth-century United States to revisit these classic “eccentric” figures. However, it is precisely this association of the stereotype of the eccentric author with a set of charismatic and talented writers who openly espoused Romantic doctrine that Industry and the Creative Mind sets itself against. In other words, while Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and even Emily Dickinson seem like obvious choices for a study of eccentric authorship, they also tempt us, partly through the beguiling richness of their histories in American literary scholarship and partly through the exemplary quality of their aesthetic and intellectual accomplishments, to reinstate as a social or ideological category the whole notion of the eccentric self, of the rarified, nonconformist artist who pursues art within a culturally constituted adversarial or countercultural space (however constructed or politically compromised that space might have been). My point, on the other hand, is that in the early nineteenth-century United States there was no such space, or at least not one capable of being articulated through Romantic languages of genius, transcendence, and writerly marginalization. In 1854, for example, one American writer expressed bitterness at the lot of artists in the modern world: “How little is [the author] understood—how imperfectly is he appreciated, by a cold, unsympathizing world! his eccentricities are ridiculed—his excesses are condemned by unthinking persons.” To illustrate, this writer went on to describe the “melancholy end” of author John Richardson, “the victim of rapacious publishers” and unfeeling audiences, who finally ends up writing in an “obscure” “garret” where he starves. The author of this complaint, however, was not a votary of romantic philosophies or sensibilities, as we Page 18 →might expect, but a selfprofessed hack, George Thompson, author of dozens of cheap and lurid city mysteries and pornographic “advice” pamphlets. Nor was Thompson being detectably ironic in these comments on authors. This passage is taken from his 1854 Autobiography, a tale of wild adventures (murders, illicit sex, sojourns in the haunts of New York's criminal underworld) that bears a striking resemblance to Thompson's fictional tales.34 Not only does this bitter lament about the fate of authors, which melts seamlessly into an adventure narrative, suggest the extent to which eccentric author idioms functioned as parts of a larger panoply of entertaining vignettes aimed at consumption by

mass audiences, but it also suggests the extent to which these idioms had a rote, generic quality that starkly contradicts their current association with the richly individuated authors of the modernist canon. In other words, to hear Melville rail against philistine audiences or the awfulness of modern commercial publishing is naturally to think of him as engaged in acts of differentiation from a vast tribe of writers who happily contributed to the commercial literary trade. To hear these same words from Thompson reveals their potentially empty, mechanical nature and their probable lack of powers of differentiation or distinction. With the exception of chapter 3, which centers on Edgar Allan Poe, Industry and the Creative Mind focuses on a set of writers notable not for their modern prominence or their aesthetic sophistication but for their success and power in the American literary and entertainment fields from 1790 to 1860: Joseph Dennie, whose journals ruled over the domain of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Federalist letters; Park Benjamin and Rufus Griswold, who were prime movers in the cheap literature revolution of the 1830s; Nathaniel Parker Willis, often called America's first full-blown celebrity author; and Fanny Fern, who in the early 1850s was the highest paid magazine columnist in the United States. But more important, these writers, most of whom were also powerful editors, were instrumental in determining the contexts in which the writers of the canon worked. Brown, for example, was part of the coterie of Philadelphia writers over which the famous Dennie, the editor of The Port Folio, presided. Walt Whitman, a bit player in the New York cheap literature scene of the 1840s, contributed pieces to Park Benjamin's enormously successful cheap paper, The New World. The powerful Benjamin was also the editor of the New England Magazine, which published some of Hawthorne's early stories. Even more central to the antebellum American literary scene was Nathaniel Parker Willis, editor first of The Token, the annual through which Hawthorne got his start, and Page 19 →then of the various New York Mirrors, which employed Poe as subeditor. Indeed, Willis was a friend, mentor, and employer to dozens of antebellum authors, from Caroline Kirkland and James Russell Lowell to Bayard Taylor and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Griswold, meanwhile, famous for setting himself up as the first great anthologist of American-authored poetry and prose, had the power in the 1840s to make or decimate any American author's reputation, a power that made him into an obsession of Poe's. Largely unexamined by scholars today, these writers were formative forces in the environment in which the traditional canonical writers (Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman)—and indeed virtually all professional American writers of poetry, fiction, and sensation—wrote and published. However, while Industry and the Creative Mind spends significant amounts of time on writers like Dennie, Poe, Griswold, Benjamin, and Willis (Fern is the exception whose presence I explain in a moment), it also uses these writers as touchstones through which to elaborate a larger history of eccentric authorship in the United States in both its representational and performative dimensions. The book begins by tackling the current consensus among historians of U.S. authorship, including David Shields, Grantland Rice, Meredith McGill, Ronald and Mary Saracino Zboray, and Leon Jackson, which is that putatively “modern,” Romantic, and individualist authorial selves—the tortured, persecuted souls wandering the landscapes of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British and European literature—were fundamentally alien to the sociable and “utilitarian” cultural environments of the early national United States, environments still very much structured on the model of the eighteenth-century “public sphere.” In chapter 1, “Anywhere but Here: Provincial Literature and the ‘Miseries of Literary Men,’” I argue that this consensus is essentially correct in its interpretation of the mismatch between British Romantic and American vernacular cultural predilections, but that it errs in assuming that this mismatch itself was somehow external or unproductively related to local cultural developments. Drawing attention to the United States' idiosyncratic intellectual property regimes, which are conventionally understood by scholars as having discouraged the emergence of modern models of autonomous authorship, this chapter stresses the extent to which these regimes also ensured that the early American literary field, in its very reliance on British and European reprints, was saturated from the 1780s on with what American literary participants themselves recognized as “foreign” representations of authors Page 20 →as wild, irreverent victims. Instead of rejecting these representations or handling them as merely trendy, decorative phenomena, as scholars traditionally do, the American literati, I argue, exaggerated the Romantic author's alienness, creating vernacular authorial personages characterized by what might be called extra-eccentricity and extra-alienation, often personages of entirely fantastical, unreal proportions. These eccentric author figures were relished and endlessly

replicated in early national periodical essays and poetry not as expressive instruments linked to the authorial subject's affective states but as outsized, legendary, sensational entities—as objects of entertainment whose attractiveness lay precisely in their seeming not to belong to palpable, ordinary life. In other words, it was as alien entities, as figures foreign to American cultural scenes, that eccentric author constructions became formative elements within local cultural economies and practices. In chapter 2, “Personifying Vernacular Eccentricity: Joseph Dennie and the American Lounger,” I look at how the fantastical, exaggeratedly eccentric author personages brewed in an early American literary milieu that rejected the referential implications of Romantic authorial expression, nevertheless came to incarnate themselves in early national authors in ways that predicated their later power over developments in commercial entertainment. Nowhere is this incarnation more spectacularly set out than in the career and person of Joseph Dennie, founder of the prestigious Philadelphia journal, the Port Folio. Traditionally, historians have a hard time pinning Dennie down: a Harvard-educated lawyer and violent Federalist, Dennie figures for many as a kind of anti-Franklin, an extravagant Anglophile and snob whose most famous literary persona, the decadently aristocratic “Lounger,” seems a wholesale renunciation of 1790s' republican and free market doctrines. Nevertheless, it was precisely Dennie's “Lounger” personalities, I suggest, that formed a springboard for what recent historians recognize as Dennie's creation of protocommercial “positions” for authors in the local literary field. Prevented by financial setbacks from a typical transatlantic publishing career, Dennie exploited local eccentric author lore in the creation of a fantastical, campy narrative persona calculated to appeal expressly to local patrons by parodying British literary traditions. One of the central features of this persona was its extratextual, sociable existence, for it was a condition of Dennie's success in what he called the “business” of literature that Dennie himself seem to incarnate the time-wasting loungers he parodied. By extension, Dennie capitalized on the highly entertaining value of his persona (and its tantalizing interchangeability with himself) to manipulate Page 21 →entrepreneurial opportunities developing inside America's early reprint industry so as to carve out, between 1795 and 1811, an unusually successful and lucrative career for himself as a writer and editor. Dennie's career, with its manifestation of a kind of mini celebrity that then becomes a condition of economic innovation, encapsulates the processes that would take place in the years leading up to print industrialization. It illustrates the extent to which eccentric author personalities, conceived as magical and unreal, would come to inhabit and even determine the structures of modern entertainment production. Whereas chapters 1 and 2 focus on the early national period, chapter 3, “‘Too Much above the Popular Level to Be Well-Paid’: Edgar Allan Poe, His Peers, and the Rewards of Genius,” looks at how figures of eccentric authorship, already internal to the early national literary field, acted as predicative forces in the exploding cheap press economy of the 1830s and 1840s. In particular I look at the curious synergy of eccentric genius and capitalistic business in the career of quintessential mad, tortured poet, Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of seeing Poe as an anomaly or as perfectly normal, as scholars tend to do, I look at his behavior and career in the context of what I argue was a whole culture of dysfunction, faux Byronism, and business savvy that flourished around “cheap and nasty” publishing and that equally informed the careers and mental habits of Poe's business-minded friends and contemporaries, Rufus Griswold, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Park Benjamin. Dennie's generation had been preoccupied with various comical, eccentric losers, but the writers who stood at the center of the mass literature industry in the early 1830s were indebted to the more grandiose figure of the Byronic genius, the type invoked repeatedly by Goodrich. Internalized as a principle of desire and behavior by the industry's creative personnel and assumed as fact by publishers, audiences, and laypeople, Byronism fed the entertainment world with dramas of authorial sacrifice and persecution; it opened opportunities for splashy self-exploitation in a burgeoning culture of celebrity; it licensed the traffic in “personalities” or caricatures that typified predatory journalism and that fueled high sales; and, perhaps most important of all, it fed a growing myth that authors themselves, living mostly in the materially nonproductive world of imagination, transcended remuneration, a myth central to the working conditions and rates of pay for what was called “mental labor”—and thus ultimately a myth that emerged as an internal, replicable feature of a “cheap” publishing industry that relied for its vitality on cheaply purchased creative work. Far from offering to transcend the seamy conditions Page 22 →of the laissez-faire amusement industry or its dismal “American Grub Street,” Byronic personages flourished at the heart of these conditions, their peculiar features, I argue, interacting reciprocally with the energies of an industry devoted to mass

entertainment and titillation. Put simply, tortured, mad poets were good for business. Chapter 4, “An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure,” extends this discussion of the midcentury literature and entertainment industry by looking at the role played by eccentric author figures in the marketplace for genteel literature. In the middle of the 1840s, U.S. arts and entertainment publishing substantially upped production in what might be called cheap genteel literature: locally produced, market-driven content for an expanding industry in magazines and story-papers aimed at upwardly mobile urban readers, the same groups that purchased conduct literature and self-help manuals in what Irvin Wyllie calls “the Age of the Self-Made Man.” One of the chief architects of this new cheap literary gentility was Nathaniel Parker Willis, widely recognized by historians as the most commercially successful author of the antebellum era. Willis is notable for advertising a new kind of entrepreneurialism: literary self-making. Overtly appropriating the commercially proven idle-man persona of Irving and mixing it with a trendier transatlantic flaneurie, Willis advertised his own career as an exemplary case of “climbing into society” via “literary celebrity.” His hundreds of popular essays featured his travels to exotic locales, where, via the conceit of his merely lounging and holidaying, he would introduce readers to the lives of the rich and give instructions on how readers might achieve this dream themselves. Willis was shameless in his embrace of entrepreneurial values, often reminding readers that his only reason for penning poems or stories was that “they sell.” Yet Willis did not feature in the contemporary imagination as a successful professional or entrepreneur. It has overwhelmingly been the feeling among scholars that genteel personae, with their dreamy rambling, functioned as agents of protection; they put a sort of veil over the grim realities of industrial-era life, or, in a more recent formulation, they asserted the ongoing vitality of alternative, more humane economies, of gift and symbolic economies over exchange ones. But in a perverse twist on this logic, the idle personae that offered, in popular fantasy, to transcend the crass circumstances of exchange, really did, in Willis's case, operate as agencies of transcendence. Instead of figuring as an entrepreneurial entity, Willis was a fixture in fantasies of hobbyism, his very success somehow conveying the genteel writer's repudiation of self-making. Page 23 →Played out in Willis's celebrity and behavior, accordingly, was not his oneness with the business of literature but his inability to achieve any kind of coherent relationship to the commercial entertainment marketplace, a realm that Willis “transcended” despite himself. However, it was precisely this “transcendence,” I argue, that operated as a condition of Willis's highly functional relationship to the mass culture industry. Energized by constant feelings of inadequacy and by fears of underachievement, Willis engaged in staggering feats of moneymaking and productivity. Known simultaneously for his huge sales and his failure to succeed, Willis illustrates with peculiar clarity the dynamic reciprocity of eccentric authorship and an increasingly sophisticated culture industry that thrived on the fantasized ability of its personnel to soar above the merely industrial world. Finally, chapter 5, “‘As Crazy as a Fly in a Drum’: The Eccentric Woman Writer,” considers how the literary and entertainment industry, which by the late 1840s had effectively rationalized eccentric authorship as a foundation of good business, generated eccentric personalities from within itself, creating new classes of alienated outsiders that were not necessarily recognizable within transatlantic Romantic rubrics—in this case the women writers who were called “literary domestics.” It has been a long-standing conviction among scholars that antebellum women writers, by virtue of being women, were barred from association with the lofty aesthetic realms of the Romantic, exilic artist. In Naomi Sofer's words, midcentury culture “defined woman and artist as mutually exclusive”;35 women writers, in this formulation, occupied a “natural” domestic domain, a space peripheral to the public world of commerce and politics but central to the reproduction of white middle-class values and institutions. Overlooked by this traditional emphasis on the politics of female authorship and domesticity, however, is an important disjunction, beginning in the mid-1840s, between political or ideological domesticity and what we might call “entertainment” domesticity—the peculiar realms of Home imagined in locally produced, low-cost diversionary literature. Inspired less by political doctrine than by self-interest, this literature imagined the Home not as a space of duty and socialization but as an aesthetic precinct, interchangeable with realms of fancy and imaginative exaltation: the home, said Harriet Beecher Stowe, is a “work of art.”36 By extension, the role of women writers in this newly glamorous domestic regime was not one of happy affiliation but of exile. Precisely because women writers still had, in the popular estimate of the day, a deficiency in the area of genius, they could not properly

belong to a domestic Page 24 →sphere that had been redefined as a crystallization of “Art.” Instead of holding women writers back, this condition of exile generated the same careerist mentality among women writers as such conditions did among male writers. This chapter, accordingly, examines a variety of popular genteel tales and essays that insist upon the home as a rarified aesthetic sphere, while also looking at the extent to which these same texts insist upon the woman writer's inability to inhabit this sphere. The extent to which these feelings of exile produced practices of fierce “go-aheadativeness” is examined in the career of Fanny Fern. In addition, this chapter looks at the extent to which these conditions of exile, far from exempting women writers from the category of the artist, made them curiously interchangeable with the ersatz Byronic souls who stood at the center of mass entertainment, something I examine through a reading of the Poe obsession in Augusta Jane Evans's 1859 novel Beulah. In sum, then, Industry and the Creative Mind attempts to understand how a peculiarly regional iteration of Romantic authorship, instead of operating as a political structure endemic to capitalist modernization, might have acted as a predicative idea, a fantasy that found a kind of eerie materialization in the “eccentric” denizens and relationships that came to characterize early nineteenth-century America's industrializing print entertainment field.

Page 25 →

{1} Anywhere but Here Provincial Literature and the “Miseries of Literary Men” Writing in the album of a friend in 1829, Edgar Allan Poe famously depicted himself as a profoundly alienated, isolated creature, at odds with the happy rhythms of ordinary life: From childhood's hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov'd—I lov'd alone—

In his comments on these lines in The Business of Letters, Leon Jackson warns against reading them as the indication of any kind of actual social isolation that authors of this period endured or even cultivated. Jackson's rationale here lies in the poem's appearance in an album. Even as Poe insists on his “intense social dislocation,” “the very purpose of album keeping was to create and sustain social bonds, and in belaboring his isolation in the process of writing in an album, [Poe] was in fact building, not burning, a bridge.”1 Jackson is not alone in drawing attention to the disjunction between Page 26 →a Romantic-era language of authorial isolation and alienation and the largely sociable, public nature of the early national U.S. literary field. From the mid-1780s to the 1820s, American books, periodicals, and other literary materials were filled with depictions of authors as “dislocated” souls—extraordinary, wild, lost, and often persecuted by an unfeeling society; but modern scholars are almost unanimous in arguing that these depictions bore little relationship either to the experiences of the vast majority of American writers or to the ideological and material conditions under which literature in the early national United States was produced. Scholars ranging from Michael Warner and David Shields to Meredith McGill, Trish Loughran, Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan, and Jackson himself, draw attention to the puny scale of provincial print culture, in which relationships between authors, readers, publishers, and printers, instead of being governed by impersonal economic forces, tended to take place at what Jackson calls “embedded” levels—often the level of face-to-face relations. They point to the fact that early national U.S. literary culture was populated not by impoverished “Grub Street” hacks, who might legitimately complain about exile, but by the educated elites of any given region, who often organized themselves into private literary associations and book clubs that provided authors with the equivalent of familial rather than commercial relations. And finally, they point to the incompatibility of authorial models of alienation with local conditions of publishing and the ideologies these conditions fostered. These scholars look at the extent to which the United States's unique intellectual property laws, which essentially obviated conventional notions of authors' proprietary rights, stressed the author's exemplary role not as the producer of arts commodities but as a voluntary and anonymous public servant writing for the enrichment of society at large. In this collective formulation, pronouncements of authorial isolation and

exile were largely formal phenomena, devoid of referential or expressive content and reproduced primarily for their fashionableness.2 However, while these narratives of incompatibility are not incorrect, they also overlook the potentially productive and structurally transformative energies that incompatibility itself might have generated. Between 1780 and 1830, American literary coteries were peculiarly exposed to British and European texts that made powerful arguments in favor of understanding the “author”—as this personage was being mapped and typified within contemporary Romantic discourse—as a creature who transcends ordinary mortal comprehension, the repository of wild feelings and instincts whose logical trajectory in the present Page 27 →world was exile and persecution. The prevalence of these texts was not something that happened in spite of local conditions of cultural production, but because of them: the intellectual property laws that militated in favor of understanding local authors as invisible and anonymous public figures also ensured the lavish local production of reprints of precisely those British and European works that argued so vociferously in favor of authorial extraordinariness and particularity. The result, I would suggest, was not that eccentric author theories and representations floated at the surface of a culture they could never wholly penetrate, as scholars have long held, but that they entered and shaped the local cultural imaginary as alien and impossible phenomena. That is, the metropolitan Romantic author's foreignness to provincial ideals and practices became the constitutive condition of his peculiar local manifestation as a figure who could never appear in the United States. Often working to make the Romantic author seem even more alien to American habits and sensibilities than he would otherwise have been, the early national literati internalized the eccentric author as a negative entity—as something not there. In this sense, the vaunted mismatch between local culture and eccentric author constructions was not just something that grew spontaneously from an asymmetry between the material conditions of metropolitan and provincial print culture; it was also something nurtured among the provincial literati who relished and took pleasure in the notion of the extraordinary, exilic author precisely for his fabled inability to actualize himself in the present time and space of the provincial world. In the following chapter, then, I begin with a general overview of the early American intellectual property and publishing regimes responsible for the saturation of the provincial literary world with Romantic-era texts and their prevailing authorial figures. Indeed, to a degree not typically recognized by scholars, early national American literary coteries tended to have greater access to these texts than the vast majority of their English counterparts. I then look at how these texts were repackaged by the peculiar tastes of the local literati, tastes very much formed in the interaction of parochial communal practices and imported paradigms. Instead of being understood as referential descriptors of social and affective dispositions or as models of comportment, eccentric author constructions, I emphasize, tended to be understood as impossibilities—indeed as themselves aesthetic phenomena, imprecisely divided from outlandish fictional personages on the one hand and the realms of imagination on the other. Valued precisely in proportion to their strangeness Page 28 →and inability to actualize themselves in the knowable world, eccentric author figures, as these appeared in contemporary periodical reprints, in locally produced poems and desiderata, and in reviews of transatlantic celebrities, were depicted in a kind of transcendent condition of foreignness and improbability, their very distance from provincial culture serving as the source of their aesthetic value and charisma. I conclude the present chapter by looking at how eccentric author figures, whose aesthetic value was inseparable from their seeming to exist outside of anything familiar to the provincial mind, emerged as paradoxically internal to evolving provincial culture systems in the 1820s and 1830s. It was precisely in seeming to lie beyond the familiar and knowable world of the typical American writer, as this entity was imagined by contemporary literary coteries, that eccentric author figures, in all their sensational strangeness, emerged as central (but also paradoxically extraneous) to local notions and ultimately local conditions of authorship.

Intellectual Property and the Romantic Climate We can better understand how eccentric author tropes and performances might have emerged as simultaneously foreign and central to early national literary culture if we consider their saturation of this culture in the years before about 1825, a saturation enabled by the United States' idiosyncratic intellectual property regimes.3 In

Britain from 1600 until well into the Victorian era, the manufacture and dissemination of printed texts was controlled by powerful publishing cartels, London-based firms that had acquired copyright over the existing English-language texts of any value in the late sixteenth century and continued thereafter to police not only the reprinting of medieval and Renaissance texts, including plays, chapbooks, ballads, and almanacs, but also of outof-copyright works and, most important of all, of new texts in copyright. The modus operandi of this monopoly from about 1600 to 1830 was the maintenance of high book prices via the creation of scarcity. Extremely limited print runs, the use of massive page formats and costly engravings, papers, and bindings, the destruction rather than resale of remainders, and the payment of large sums to authors for their copyrights and cooperation against piracy, were all mobilized by English publishers throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries to keep retail prices of in-copyright books in the stratosphere. Priced well above what even middle-class English people could afford, books were luxury Page 29 →items, like extravagant hats. The London cartels were challenged periodically by offshore printers in Scotland, Ireland, and France; cheap—or at least cheaper—editions of English-language texts did make their way to London retailers. Scottish publishers and lawmakers were particularly influential in a 1774 House of Lords decision to enforce the end of perpetual copyright. Nevertheless, at the end of the eighteenth century, when Scotland and Ireland had both come within the scope of English intellectual property law and their pirates had migrated to other climes, English publishing monopolies remained as powerful as ever. Throughout the colonial era, British North America figured in English intellectual property law as an extension of England. While “permissions” were granted by the Stationer's Company to provincial printers for materials with local content, including almanacs, newspapers, religious pamphlets, psalms, and primers,4 the vast majority of books circulating in British North America were published and printed in London, whether they were authored by such residents of the colonies as Jonathan Edwards or Benjamin Franklin, or imported to be sold as luxury goods, as was the case with the £2,000 to £3,000 worth of books shipped yearly from London publisher William Strahan to merchants in Philadelphia in the 1760s.5 These circumstances, of course, changed dramatically with the Revolution. American merchants continued to import large numbers of books published in Britain. However, the passing of America's federal Copyright Act of 1790, which extended copyright protection to books authored by American residents (for a term of fourteen years) but not to books authored by residents of other nations and not to periodical materials, reorganized U.S. publishing and literary production in several crucial ways. Most concretely, the new Copyright Act, which American publishers regarded as a license to reprint British and Continental texts, resulted in the restructuring and expansion of the American publishing industry into what was largely a reprint industry.6 Indeed, it was not coincidental that many offshore printers chased out of Ireland and Scotland in the last third of the eighteenth century settled in the United States and set up “pirate” operations similar to those they had left behind. Between 1790 and roughly 1830, when a host of technological and economic developments dramatically changed the reprint landscape, American publishers in the major urban centers of the northeast, namely, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, thrived on the reprinting and retailing of books by nonresident authors. The same was true in the case of periodical Page 30 →publishing. Local magazines were filled with content copied from both British and American magazines, both of which fell outside the boundaries of copyright protection. One of the most prominent effects of reprinting was that it offered vast numbers of American readers and authors access to Romantic-era texts—and to the ideas about authors therein.7 Indeed, as William St. Clair points out, the continuing hold of British publishing monopolies over the copyrights of contemporary British literary texts in the years between 1774 and 1830 meant that the books of the major authors of the Romantic period tended to be more readily available for reading and purchase in the United States than they were in Britain.8 Moreover, the absence of intellectual property protection in the United States for foreign-authored texts not only encouraged American publishers to develop an industry in reprinting, but also encouraged a particular set of economic practices—including competitive pricing and comparatively long print runs—that issued in the combination of low retail prices and high volumes of merchandise. A Walter Scott novel, Woodstock, for example, which was published in Britain in 1826, was priced at 31.5 shillings. Published in the United States the same year by Matthew Carey's Philadelphia firm, then called Carey and Lea, the book was priced at $1.75, the equivalent of

only 8 shillings. The print run in Britain of 10,000 copies, for sale in the British Isles and colonies, is contrasted by Carey & Lea's print run of 9,000 copies for the less densely populated United States. The following year, 1827, Scott's Life of Napoleon Buonoparte was issued in Britain in two print runs totaling 8,000 copies. The first U.S. edition, published simultaneously, totaled 12,500 copies.9 In addition, the relatively wide dissemination of these books was ensured not just by volume and low pricing but by subsequent reprinting. Although American publishers early on banded together to establish “courtesy copyright,” according to which the copyrights of a foreign text belonged to whichever American publisher could get it into print first, it was also the case that publishers pirated each other. An 1823 letter, once again from Carey's firm, in an earlier incarnation as M. Carey and Sons, details the publisher's plans for reprinting Walter Scott's Quentin Durward: “In 28 hours after receiving it, we had 1500 copies sent off and ready to go, and the whole Edition is now nearly distributed. In two days we shall publish it here and in New York and the Pirates may print it as soon as they please. The opposition Edition will be out in 48 hours after they have one of our copies but we shall have complete and entire possession of every market in the Country for a short time.”10 Page 31 → Nowhere is the copious dissemination of Romantic-era texts to American audiences more amply illustrated than in the American publication history of the writer whom most scholars regard as the exemplary Romantic outcast, Lord Byron. Historians estimate that there were about 100 editions of Byron's works produced in the United States between 1811 and 1830, but because the print runs for these have not been established it is impossible to calculate the number of actual copies in circulation.11 Contemporary observers were convinced it was vast. Touring the United States in the late 1830s, Captain Frederick Marryat determined to find out how many Americans were reading Byron: “I applied to the largest publishers in New York and Philadelphia, to ascertain, if I could, how many copies of Byron had been published. The reply was, it was impossible to say exactly, as there had been so many editions issued, by so many different publishers, but that they considered that from one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand copies, must have been sold!”12 Marryat's information, according to Peter X. Accardo, was not far off the mark. In 1814 no less than thirteen separate editions of Byron's texts were published in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore; one edition was published in the small town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, as rural publishers sought to profit from the reprint trade.13 Reviewing Beppo in 1818, the New England Galaxy said, “[E]verything from the poetical mint of his Lordship passes current, and is bought up with little less avidity than our merchants in the China trade by [sic] Spanish milled dollars.”14 Most American publishers reprinted wholesale from British editions or, in some cases, from high-quality French pirated editions. Competition, however, encouraged sometimes frantic and piecemeal practices, whose upshot was the further multiplication of print copies—and thus the greater availability—of Byron's verse. In many cases, for example, American publishers employed agents in London whose job it was to preempt their American rivals by getting access to advance proof sheets. Living in London in the 1810s, Washington Irving, who moved in the circles of Byron's publisher, John Murray, and who frequently met Byron in society, served in this capacity for the Philadelphia publisher Moses Thomas, one of Byron's most prolific American pirates. In October 1813, Irving sent Thomas The Giaour, Byron's first “orientalist” poem. Based on the London first edition, Thomas's first Philadelphia edition also incorporated an additional two hundred lines that Irving had transcribed at the last minute from an extract he had seen in The Edinburgh Review.15 Over the next year, as Byron continued to revise and more and more pieces of The Giaour appeared in subsequent London editions and Page 32 →London journals, American publishers kept reissuing new editions. These not only competed with each other but with copies of the poem reprinted in local magazines. In its December 1813 and January 1814 issues, the prestigious Philadelphia journal The Port Folio, which enjoyed the largest circulation of any magazine in the United States, transcribed the whole of The Giaour for its subscribers.16 American readers also had ready access to those works of Byron that were either out of print or difficult to find in England, notably Hours of Idleness, Byron's second book of poems, published in 1807, and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), the satire he had penned in retaliation for the bad reviews of Hours of Idleness. The publication of the latter Byron had tried to suppress in England on the grounds that he had since come to see it as

“youthful, rash, and unfair,”17 and shortly after its publication it was out of print. But English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was so successful an item in the reprint trade in the United States that Byron himself wondered at its popularity. In 1815 George Ticknor, another American who knew Byron and had discoursed with him on these matters, recorded in his journal: He wrote it when he was very young and very angry…. On every account, therefore, he was glad that it was out of print; and yet did not express the least regret when I told him it was circulated in America almost as extensively as his other poems. As to the poems published during his minority, he said he suppressed them because they are not worth reading, and wondered that our booksellers could find a profit in reprinting them.18 Indeed, according to Ticknor, Byron remarked frequently on the extensive dissemination of his books in the United States, noting especially their seemingly democratic distribution. When Byron visited Ticknor at his residence in London in 1815, he discovered there, Ticknor reports, “An American copy of his works, in two small and very shabby volumes, printed, I think, at Philadelphia.” It gave him “evident pleasure. He was glad, he said, to see it in so cheap a form that everybody could buy it.”19 Not only the works of Walter Scott and Byron, but also of D'Israeli, Kant, Burke, Goethe, Godwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, among many others, were readily available to American audiences, typically within a few weeks of being published in Britain.20 Now in one sense, this unusual access to Romantic-era texts fostered the proliferation in the United States of the same descriptions of authors we find in the edgiest British works of the period from roughly 1785 to Page 33 →1820. Indeed, well before Byron achieved transatlantic celebrity American audiences and writers were surrounded by and happily preoccupied with delineations of the autonomous artist as this figure was being sketched out in late eighteenth-century treatises, reviews, poems, and biographies. By the early 1780s, for example, British and German artists, critics, and philosophers had collectively delineated a quintessential romantic artistic personality called the “genius.” First coming into vogue in the 1750s as a distinct social and biological category whose chief role was to describe a new type of human empowerment separate from traditional social hierarchies, the genius was a creature whose superiority, instead of being decided by his rank or blood or wealth, was decided by something extraordinary inside him (sometimes learned, sometimes a gift of nature) that transgressed and transcended traditionally recalcitrant social boundaries. In the words of Zeynep Tenger and Paul Trolander, theories of genius argued that “the productive forces of society were, or ought to be, organized according to the distribution of natural or acquired intellectual powers.”21 Conceived as an alternative to existing social and political structures and increasingly associated, in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, with extraordinary feats of imagination, with irrepressible impulses, and revolutionary inclinations, the “genius” was by definition an antisocial outsider, a figure of titanic extremities, of rebellion and fiery passion. Genius, according to William Duff in his 1767 An Essay on Original Genius, is a “radical power.” The genius is distinguished by “IRREGULAR GREATNESS, WILDNESS, and ENTHUSIASM of Imagination.” Driven by a “fiery impetuosity of Imagination,” genius breaks “through the legal restraints of criticism,” overleaps “the mounds [sic] of authority and custom” “in pursuit of the New and Wonderful.” “Ordinary minds,” says Duff, “seldom rise above the dull uniform tenor of common sentiments, like those animals that are condemned to creep on the ground all the days of their life; but the most lawless excursions of an original Genius, like the flight of an eagle, are towering…its path, as the course of a comet, is blazing.”22 Alexander Gerard's 1774 Essay on Genius, which played a formative role in the theories of Johann Nicolaus Tetens and Immanuel Kant, exalted genius as a force “irregular, wild, undisciplined.”23 Accordingly, in The Powers of Genius (1804), a three-part, two-hundredpage poem dedicated to describing this Romantic personality, Philadelphia poet John Blair Linn celebrated the “genius” in exactly the same terms as his British and European counterparts as a figure of extraordinary powers and desires. “Genius, disdaining any imitation, Page 34 →strikes out a path for itself, wild and hazardous, where foot has never trodden.” Say what is Genius? words can ne'er define That power which springs from origin divine;

………………………………. It sweeps with comets its eccentric flight, And soars in air beyond the world's dim sight; Disdains the paths that common footsteps tread, But breathes the spirit of the mountain head.24

Such locally penned celebrations of Romantic authorship circulated in the United States together with descriptions of Romantic authorial personalities that took the form of reprints. In the 1780s and 1790s, British writers and critics, increasingly inclined to associate the purest forms of genius with the literary arts, became preoccupied not just with the genius's “originality” and “inventiveness” but with the genius's reputed failure to find happiness or acceptance in his society. Tributes to the genius's “soaring, eccentric” nature, his “passions,” his “sensibility,” his “warm and inflammable constitution,”25 were thus complemented in American books and periodicals of the 1780s and 1790s by reprinted accounts of the gloomy fate of those gifted with genius. “Fortune,” said a reprint of a piece from Isaac D'Israeli in The New York Magazine in 1792, “has rarely condescended to be the companion of merit. Even in these enlightened times, men of letters have lived in obscurity, while their reputation was widely spread; and have perished in poverty, while their works were enriching the booksellers.”26 “On tracing the biography of literature,” said another reprinted piece, this time in The Lady & Gentleman's Pocket Magazine in 1796, “we shall discover many examples of men of the first repute continually struggling with distress, and frequently dying in extreme indigence.”27 In both poems like Linn's and in these chronicles of “the miseries of literary men,”28 as D'Israeli called them, American readers absorbed and recapitulated the central paradoxes of literary romanticism: the genius, the authentic literary artist could only fulfill his destiny and bring the gift of his “divine” sight to the world by “soaring beyond the world's dim sight,” for which the world, already despicable and deserving of his rejection in the first place, ignored, exploited, and punished him. Yet these descriptions of outsider authorial types were not necessarily incorporated into early American literary environs in uncritical or unmediated form. Historians are correct to emphasize that the flourishing Page 35 →reprint trade, which delivered visions of authorial extremity and suffering to American audiences, also discouraged the development of an industry in vernacular literature through which authors might have found an experiential or political commonality with the metropolitan authorial constructions they read about and copied. As McGill underlines, the reprint trade, far from encouraging pictures of authors as radically isolated and beleaguered, depended upon and helped to reproduce a “republican” environment that effaced the private authorial self in favor of “the publicity of print and the political need for its wide dissemination.”29 Grantland Rice emphasizes that the early American literary field was grounded not in modern individualist notions of creativity but in what he calls a pre-Lockean “utilitarian” ideology and juridical practice that “posited the value of free and wide circulation of texts over individual property rights in literature.”30 The reprint trade, in combination with republican ideology, encouraged a view of literature as an overwhelmingly social enterprise, something created in a spirit of self-effacing, anonymous generosity for the public good and ideally available (courtesy of reprinting and comparatively cheap books) to as large a reading constituency as possible. Accordingly, in contrast to celebrations of the Romantic genius, which emphasized the literary artist's wild “inventiveness” and lonely misery, early national descriptions of local authors and locally produced literature tended to emphasize their utilitarian and public dimensions. In an 1800 article in the Boston Eagle, for example, the author notes that American literature, “though not attracting admiration by its splendor, is entitled to praise for its usefulness.” Rather than praising American literature, this piece praises the United States' peculiarly efficient dissemination of information: “The American, who knows how to appreciate the privileges which he enjoys, and to which his posterity are the fortunate heirs will survey with pride and pleasure the easy means of acquiring information, and the numerous institutions for spreading useful knowledge among us.”31 By the same token, American authors, the majority of whom pursued writing avocationally, tended to understand themselves as

utilitarian and communal entities, men and women engaged in some form of service. The editors of Boston's Monthly Anthology, for example, made a show of refusing remuneration and avowed that “their highest ideal is the pleasing consciousness of having done the state some service.”32 Indeed, the reprint industry, which thrived on books by nonresident authors who could not demand fees or royalties, contributed to the virtual absence in the United States of authorship as an embodied professional Page 36 →practice, a circumstance that effectively actualized the perception of local authors as voluntary servants of the public. As we have seen, scholars take for granted the negative correlation between these circumstances and the experiences and subject positions implied by Romantic authorship; based upon and overwhelmingly invested in communal and republican ideals, early American literary cultures, in this formulation, had a purely abstract, deracinated relationship to authorial models whose logic was powerfully based on individualist practices and beliefs. And yet commentary by early national authors and editors on the subject of authors suggests that instead of existing inertly as alien experiences and devices in a population that consumed without actually internalizing metropolitan paradigms, Romantic authorial paradigms were submitted to considerable, if sometimes subtle, revision. It was widely understood by the American literati that autonomous author personages—tortured “geniuses,” outcasts, recluses with their experiences of alienation and persecution—were, indeed, foreign to local habits and practices. Instead of simply dismissing these as immaterial to local concerns, the American literati dwelled upon and exaggerated their exoticism. Indeed, drawing not only on the extraordinary features of the Romantic author as these appeared in British and European articulations but also on local religious and folkloric traditions, the American literati imagined Romantic author figures as alien not only to local cultural scenes but to familiar life generally; they were not just non-American but otherworldly, ineffably abstract. It was accordingly an exaggerated alienness over and above their already famously marginal place in Romantic social geographies that was the central feature of their local articulation. Conceived as lying outside provincial experience, eccentric author figures were represented by the early national literati not just as social outcasts or transcendent seers but also as figures defined by their absence and impossibility.33 In the next part of this chapter, then, I look first at a number of early national literary proclamations that exemplify the literati's construction of the Romantic author as a foreign and even implausible phenomenon, proclamations that not only mimicked transatlantic fashion but also drew for inspiration on local lore. I then look at the extent to which efforts to exoticize the “genius,” as this figure was typically called, not only informed expository writing but also found curious echoes in cases of strict reprinting: that is, the Romantic author tended to get presented in local periodicals in ways that made this figure seem even more exotic and extraordinary in his local manifestation than he appeared in his Page 37 →original source and context. Finally, I look at how these ideas of the genius as utterly exotic and even impossible, far from being external to American literary culture, were internalized as part of a local fantasy of exotic and apparitional authorship, something I examine by looking at the role played by exoticism both in Byron's American fame and in the biographies of local authors.

“Where Foot Has Never Trodden” The idea that Romantic author personalities were actively understood and constructed as alien to the early national literary field is nowhere more amply suggested than in turn-of-the-century nationalist critical discourse that exhaustively emphasized America's lack of literary “geniuses.” In the words of one magazine in 1799, “[N]ot one original work of genuine genius is now publishing [sic] in the United States.”34 On the one hand, these declarations exist as straightforward objective commentary on the social and political parameters of early national literary culture. Essays that set out to plumb the reasons for America's lack of geniuses generally agree—much as so many modern scholars do—that these are simply foreign to America's current political, social, and cultural conditions. And yet almost invariably these essays see the foreignness of the “genius” as more than merely political or cultural. Ostensibly diagnosing the causes of the absence of “genius” in the United States, turn-of-thecentury nationalist essays define the genius not just as historically or politically absent but as ontologically absent, as something whose absence from the United States readily modulates into a fantastical absence from the palpable world generally. Cobbled together not just from Romantic myth but from local legend, the figure of the genius features in both of these nationalist iterations as, for whatever reason, not there, as exotic, inaccessible, the product of some extreme and even surreal processes that lie outside provincial experience.35

On the one hand, for example, nationalist essays, even while they lamented the absence of genius in the United States, also understood this absence as entirely explicable and even desirable and reassuring. Taking literally the formulation of the romantic authorial personality as both a titanic rebel and object of persecution, the American literati held that circumstances in the United States were too wholesome to allow for the flourishing of an entity born in strife and inequality. Genius, it was felt, was indigenous only to certain societies and eras: it flourished in times of war and calamity, in the midst of oppression, wealth, decadence, Page 38 →and luxury. In a well-known 1810 address, for example, Fisher Ames, the Boston orator and statesman, begins by asking, Few speculative subjects have exercised the passions more or the judgment less, than the inquiry, what rank our country is to maintain in the world for genius and literary attainments. Whether in point of intellect we are equal to Europeans, or only a race of degenerate creoles; whether our artists and authors have already performed much and promise every thing; whether the muses, like the nightingales, are too delicate to cross the salt water, or sicken and mope without song if they do, are themes upon which we Americans are privileged to be eloquent and loud.36 Ames concludes that “genius” is unsuited to a republic. “What are those causes that have forever consecrated the name of Greece? We are sometimes answered, she owes her fame to the republican liberty of her states.” But Ames goes on to remind readers that Homer, Hesiod, Linus, Orpheus, and Musaeus, among many others, “wrote while kings governed those states.” Roman genius did not flourish “till the republic fell.” “France and England are monarchies, and they have excelled all modern nations by their works of genius.” “Literary curiosity” may finally infect Americans, says Ames, but only “as luxury advances” and equality deteriorates. The development of men of genius is inseparable from the rise of “many poor and a few rich, many grossly ignorant, and a considerable number learned.”37 The idea that genius was alien to the political conditions of a republic was not peculiar to Ames. In a Harvard Lyceum article contemporaneous with Ames's, the author warns Americans not to be overeager for genius. Pointing out that “a literary life is not the most comfortable to an individual” and that great authors and philosophers only flourish among populations “old, corrupt, rich, and enslaved,” the article enjoins American literati to relish the peacefulness of a society that has no great geniuses but also no institutions of oppression. “Let us not be over anxious for the day, when, as we now seem to envy, our posterity will emulate, the glory of nations, whose subjects were Galileo, Otway, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Chatterton.” The United States might not be producing exemplary poets, but it was resplendent with “the charms of happiness.”38 In an oration published in The Port Folio in 1808, Edward Ingersoll described to audiences how in England poets, living in “miserable haunts,” had been subjected to “contempt or obloquy,” “poverty or ruin”; “but behold in America the oratour [sic] encircled with wealth Page 39 →and renown—the historian cherished and admired—the scholar supported, encouraged and protected.” Yet for this very reason, Ingersoll observes, the United States has no great authors, for “It is not on the smooth surface of a gentle wave that skill can be displayed or dexterity called into action. In the fury of the winter's storm alone the superiour mind shines conspicuously.”39 These affirmations of the foreignness of genius, which were made on seemingly straightforward sociopolitical grounds, were complemented by an equally vociferous set of affirmations of foreignness made on ontological grounds: the idea that the genius was unlikely to appear in the friendly scenes of the republic was often subtly indistinguishable from the characterization of this figure as unlikely to appear anywhere. In many cases, this unlikelihood was articulated as a kind of temporal snag. Even while they painted genius as an entirely genetic and historical phenomenon, the American literati also frequently portrayed it as something that had manifested itself primarily in the distant past, in ancient Greece or Rome. In an 1816 series titled “The Present State of Polite Learning” published in the Baltimore journal The Portico, for example, the author contends that contemporary civilization as a whole is undergoing “an alarming diminution of wisdom” and lies in the long shadow of ancient times: “To enhance the renown of antiquity, we cannot dissemble,…that we have never improved upon their incomparable models in the Belles Lettres and the fine arts: and indeed have rarely equaled their blaze of excellence.”40 In other cases, such theories of historical declension, in which genius is seen as part of a distant past, were matched by the depiction of this past itself as distinctly fantastical and unreal. For Ames, Greece shines hazily in

the American imagination as populated by “a race of giants, Titans, the rivals, yet the favorites of their gods.” “Their fabulous deities are supposed to have left their heaven to breathe the fragrance of their groves, and to enjoy the beauty of their landscapes. The monuments of heroes must have excited to heroism: and the fountains, which the muses had chosen for their purity, imparted inspiration.”41 Ames maintains that if the United States could duplicate the exact conditions of Homer's Greece, and if “Nature,” at the same time, would see fit to endow a person in its midst with “native genius,” then the United States would suddenly have its Iliad: “The same causes that made Greece famous, would, if they existed here, quicken the clods of our valleys, and make our Boeotia sprout and blossom like their Attica.”42 But of course the “causes” of Greece's fame—its “titanic” men, its “gods,” its epic history Page 40 →like a “firmament” “bespangled with stars”—undermine the whole idea of genius as an objective or empirical phenomenon that might surface in apprehensible space and time. Even in the wake of the rise of fierce cultural nationalism after the War of 1812, when it became fashionable to denounce dependence on Europe and the “ancient classicks” and to picture genius in the midst of “domestick” “institutions,” genius was imagined existing in a kind of fantastical, congenital pastness. In an essay appearing in The North American Review in 1816, Edward Tyrell Channing characterizes the genius, a figure who now hypothetically might exist in the United States, as a figure “unnatural, out-of-life,” “marvellous, wild, and unreal”; he speaks an “old poetical language” and lives in a land incomprehensible to the denizens of the ordinary world. Addressing the genius, Channing informs him that these ordinary citizens, living, Channing specifies, in familiar, plodding New England, are “alarmed or disgusted by the hoarse and wild musick of your forests, or seashore, by the frantick superstition of your fathers, or the lovely fairy scenes, that lie far back in the mists of your fable.” These “strangers” “cannot feel your pride in the splendid barbarism of your country”43—the implication being, of course, that the genius does not inhabit the same world, or indeed the same reality, as Channing's presumed audience of lettered Americans. It is important to stress that, in one sense, this depiction of the genius as a fantastical rather than solid and familiar figure was typical of Romantic articulations of the author. As Andrew Bennett has recently shown, the Romantic author, as this figure appears in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century British poetry and criticism, was in the first place a flickering, paradoxical entity. On the one hand, Bennett says, “[A] defining element in the Romantic invention of the modern sense of authorship is the self-creative and self-centring genius,” a figure of autonomy and originality. According to Edward Young's 1759 Conjectures on Original Composition, which sets up a stark opposition between traditional learning and genius, “Learning we thank, genius we revere; That gives up pleasure, This gives up rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired; for genius is from heaven, learning from man: This sets up above the low, and illiterate; That above the learned, and polite. Learning is borrowed knowledge; genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own.”44 On the other hand, an equally important “defining element in the notion of genius is a certain evacuation of selfhood”45—of volition, effectuality, agency, and even existence. “The poet,” Keats famously declared in a letter of 1818, “has no identity.” “The poetical Character…Page 41 →is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character.”46 The Romantic notion of genius takes for granted a “complex interaction of authorial absence and presence” in which “the centrality of the author,” his or her imperious centeredness, “is bound up with, is caused by and a cause of, his or her marginality,” his or her subjective emptiness and surrender to unearthly forces. Romantic authorship, says Bennett, is thus “in thrall to the apparitional.”47 However, in the northern United States religious and political as well as cultural traditions were at work in the articulation of genius as a largely absent commodity, for the authorial figures of European romanticism were routed not just through provincial cultural institutions but also, as Nancy Ruttenburg has shown, through New England Puritan epistemology and lore. Indeed, according to Ruttenburg, the genius figures elaborated by such New England litterateurs as Ames, Ingersoll, and Channing were a manifestation of what she calls “democratic personality,” an ideological structure in which the wild, informal chaos of folk passion and dissent were equated with the supernatural, apparitional world and its unembodied voices. Tracing this equation from the Salem trials of 1692, in which the community of saints was transfixed by “spectral evidence” and voices from the “invisible world,” to the Great Awakening, when tens of thousands were held rapt by Methodist preacher George Whitefield's “holy speech,” Ruttenburg looks at the extent to which discussions of genius by those like Ames and

Ingersoll reveal an early American Romantic project to “domesticate” and harness the inchoate, seemingly otherworldly energies of popular rapture—of the people possessed by forces beyond themselves—for the purposes of a national literature.48 In this sense, the failure of genius personalities to make themselves visible is inherent to their purpose. Premised in the first place on their unavailability, their “speechlessness” and “unconscious selfexemption from the conditions of discourse,”49 genius personalities were by definition remote and ineffable, for it was only from their position of extraordinary and even impassible distance that they could speak with the voice of authenticity and innocence. Ruttenburg's analysis is ultimately political, seeing the absence of the genius from the national imaginary of liberal critical discourse as inseparable from this figure's incarnation of the “common man.” What is important to stress for our purposes here is the extent to which provincial lore worked in tandem with provincial cultural structures to redouble focus on the genius's otherworldliness and insubstantiality. By extension, what we might call the excessively overdetermined nature of the American Page 42 →genius's otherworldliness—this figure's debt not just to European romanticism but to idiosyncratic local traditions and cultural formations—manifested itself not just in this figure's quality of absentness but in a kind of exaggerated absentness. One of the most fertile sources of excerpts on the topic of authors, for example, was Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature (I have already quoted an American excerpt from this book, the one that lists authors' “miseries” through the ages). Published in England in 1791 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1793, Curiosities of Literature was a hefty compendium of anecdotes and little-known facts about a variety of historical and literary characters that invited excerpting and parceling, and pieces of it were published in various British and American periodicals from the 1790s until late in the nineteenth century. The sections of Curiosities that focused specifically on authors were diverse and numerous and included such topics as “Amusements of the Learned,” “Portraits of Authors,” and “Early Printing.” In the context of Curiosities as a whole, these pieces were part of a sweeping effort on the part of D'Israeli to reveal the “hidden” dimensions of Western intellectual history, largely by substituting the psychological and private for the biographer's traditional emphasis on the grandly political and public. D'Israeli's goal here, according to April London, was a sort of tearing open of traditional history to admit the presence of those, like authors and intellectuals, whose labors, carried on in the “closet,” had no conventional presence in the public realm. D'Israeli wanted, in his own words, to “reduce the aggravated magnitude of the illustrious dead, that we may perform an act of justice to the obscure living,”50 a project that was recognized in the early nineteenth century by such magazines as Blackwood's as being related not just to D'Israeli's championship of antiquarians and men of letters but to his own marginality as a Jew. In this sense, D'Israeli was interested not just in the pain, poverty, or obscurity of literary men, but also in the whole range of their intimate lives and feelings, thus far kept “secret.” The sections on authors to find their way into American periodicals from the 1790s to the 1820s, however, were almost exclusively those that dealt with what D'Iraeli, as we have seen, called “the miseries of literary men.” One section in particular, titled “Poverty of the Learned”—the section already quoted—was excerpted and reprinted, typically without attribution and often in severely truncated form, between 1793 and 1810 in virtually every early national American periodical of note, including Massachusetts Magazine, New York Magazine, New York Weekly Magazine, Time Piece, and Port Folio.51 If we consider the regional nature of most Page 43 →early American magazines and what was doubtless their communal readership among the literati, we can estimate that the proportion of American readers and writers who saw some form of “Poverty of the Learned” was extraordinarily high, something borne out not just by its constant reprinting but by the numerous casual, often verbatim references to “learnedness” and “poverty” in vernacular reviews and essays. For example, in 1800, a reviewer for The Monthly Magazine, and American Review noted, “[T]he envy and neglect which men of genius experience from their countrymen is so common, that the remark has grown into a proverb.”52 What American readers consumed when they read “Poverty of the Learned” was not a newly nuanced understanding of authors but a condensed litany of disasters. Read in the context of D'Israeli's Curiosities as a whole, “Poverty of the Learned” stands as the revelation of a little-known facet of authorial existence, one that served in later versions of Curiosities as a platform from which D'Israeli could ask the public's charity and sympathy for authors and intellectuals. Decontextualized, it reads as a largely sensationalist account of distant,

horrific events. Launched by two gloomy sentences—“Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of merit. Even in these enlightened times, men of letters have lived in obscurity, while their reputation was widely spread; and have perished in poverty, while their works were enriching the booksellers”—“Poverty of the Learned” consists of a long, unbroken catalog of hardship: Homer was “poor and blind”; “Agrippa died in a workhouse; Cervantes is supposed to have died with hunger; Camoens was deprived of the necessities of life and is believed to have perished in the street…. Even our great Milton, as every one knows, sold his immortal work for ten pounds to a bookseller, being too poor to undertake the printing of it on his own account: and Otway, a dramatic poet in the first class, is known to have perished with hunger [seventeen authors in total are listed].” Lifted out of the political, social, and narrative contexts that might anchor the figure of the author within familiar and plausible histories, the reprints of “Poverty of the Learned” offer pictures of authors as exaggeratedly marginal, antisocial souls who suffer in an exceptionally unfair, inequitable world—a world, moreover, whose unremitting awfulness makes it difficult to pinpoint in historical or geographical space. Similar forms of decontextualization—and thus of the exaggeration of authorial exile and otherworldliness—were at work in the reprinting of articles and poems dedicated to Thomas Chatterton. A prolific English poet, essayist, and forger of medieval ballads, Chatterton achieved Page 44 →posthumous fame for being only seventeen years old when he committed suicide in 1770 by drinking arsenic, reputedly after his finest poems were rejected by London magazines and after publishers short-changed him for his lyrics and operas. Rediscovered in the 1780s, Chatterton came to epitomize the “miseries” of genius for the early British Romantics, functioning as a source not just of poetic inspiration but also of politicization. Clearly a prodigy (at the age of fifteen, Chatterton, the uneducated son of a Bristol sexton, invented a medieval scholar, Rowley, and composed a trove of poems that he passed off as the products of Rowley's pen; these were so sophisticated and their Middle English so accurate that they fooled even this period's leading antiquarians), Chatterton became a flashpoint in the 1780s and 1790s for heated debates around the bestowal of genius. Celebrants of the leveling, indiscriminate powers of genius argued that the Rowley poems were proof that genius could manifest itself in anyone, including the young and low-born, while conservatives, who included many antiquarians, held that the Rowley poems could not have been composed by a boy and so must be authentically medieval. The politicization of the Chatterton myth was ramped up by the fact that while living in London Chatterton had applied for patronage to Sir Horace Walpole, himself the perpetrator of a literary forgery, and been rudely turned away. A seeming quintessence of genius scorned, of a young, impoverished author left to starve by a crass, unfeeling aristocracy, Chatterton acted as a powerful political and aesthetic inspiration for Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, among many others.53 It is a testament to the American dedication to Romantic author mythology that Chatterton materials—biographies, poems, commemorations, many reprinted but some composed by locals—flourished in American periodicals from the 1780s until well into the 1820s. Here again, as with “Poverty of the Learned,” at the height of Chatterton's popularity in the 1790s and early 1800s, pieces on him, often extended biographies that spanned many issues, appeared repeatedly in almost every significant American periodical of the era, including New York Magazine, Port Folio, Christian Observer, Literary Magazine and American Register, and the Lady's Monitor, among many others.54 And here again, as with “Poverty of the Learned,” it was the contextual and political features of Chatterton's life and memorialization that tended to get curtailed in the translations of reprinting. One of the earliest reprints of a Chatterton-themed poem in an American periodical, for example, was a piece titled “Elegy on the Unfortunate Page 45 →Chatterton,” excerpted from William Hayley's 1782 An Essay on Epic Poetry. Printed in The New-Haven Gazette, and the Connecticut Magazine in 1786, this short excerpt (twentyeight lines) asks readers to picture the agonizing moments of Chatterton's demise: In a chill Room, within whose wretched Wall, No chearing Voice replies to Mis'ry's Call, Near a vile Bed, too crazy to sustain

Misfortune's wasting Limbs, convulsed with Pain, On the bare Floor, with Heav'n directed Eyes, The hapless Youth in speechless Horror lies! The poisonous Vial, by Distraction drain'd, Rolls from his Hand, in wild Contortion strain'd. Pale with Life's wasting Pangs, its dire Effect, And stung to Madness by the World's Neglect, He, in Abhorrence of the dangerous Art, Once the dear Idol of his glowing Heart, Tears from his Harp the vain, detested Wires, And, in the Phrenzy of Despair, expires.

These lines clearly invite readers to consider “what Pangs await / Young Genius struggling with malignant Fate! ”55 What is excluded here, however, is the argument of the larger poem, for An Essay On Epic Poetry is not a warning to would-be poets, as this excerpt suggests, but a passionate advocacy of poetry as a pursuit and vocation for young men. These lines on Chatterton are not, in fact, the narrator's. They belong to one of the poem's characters, the conservative, fearful father of a young man who uses the example of Chatterton to try to talk his son out of being a poet. Whereas the excerpt argues against trusting the “rich Promise of Poetic Fame,” the larger poem argues the opposite: it urges would-be poets to risk everything for epic poetry.56 Isolated from this larger context, the excerpt functions not only as an implicit warning to poets but as an extravagant set-piece, fixing Chatterton not within a history of debate about poetry's efficacy but in a transcendent moment of expiration—of “speechless Horror,” “wild Contortion,” of “Phrenzy” and “Despair”—that effectively redoubles Chatterton's existing reputation as a creature of misery and isolation. It is difficult to know whether these excisions were part of a deliberate choice on the part of American editors or whether they merely copied already-excised pieces circulating in British reviews and digests. Certainly, these lines on Chatterton appeared in British journals independently Page 46 →of the larger poem. And yet British editors also frequently chose to gloss them as, in fact, a monologue spoken by a paternal character in a larger poem arguing in favor of poetic pursuits. For example, these lines were excerpted in references to Hayley's poem in both The Gentleman's Magazine and The Monthly Review in 1782, both of which journals were frequent sources for American editors. In both cases, the British editors emphasized the place of these lines within the larger poem: in The Gentleman's Magazine they were prefaced by the information that they were spoken “In the character of a parent describing the fate of those who devote themselves to the Muses”; in The Monthly Review they were introduced as being from “A parent, who is introduced as summing up the dissuasives [sic] from poetry, [who] naturally falls upon a topic, which has of late so much engaged the public attention.”57 Whether deliberate or not, this absence of contextual reference accorded with and fed a local disinclination to see Romantic author figures as potentially grounded in the scenes of the present, palpable world—in particular the provincial world familiar to American audiences. Indeed, we can see at work a preference for exoticism and otherworldliness in those instances in which American editors manifestly did gloss reprints. In 1806, The Port Folio, which had a particularly intense fascination with Chatterton, reprinted Coleridge's “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” together with an introduction, probably penned by the Port Folio's editor, Joseph Dennie. Dennie reprinted the 1796 version of the poem, which fancifully enlists Chatterton for Coleridge's political projects, in

particular a plan he had with Robert Southey to found a utopian society, a Pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. O CHATTERTON!

That thou wert yet alive!

Sure thou wouldst spread the canvas to the gale, And love, with us, the tinkling team to drive O'er peaceful Freedom's UNDIVIDED dale; ………………………………. Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream Where Susquehannah pours his untam'd stream; …………………………………. And there, sooth'd sadly by the dirgeful wind, Muse on the sore ills I had left behind.58

Dennie's editorial comments, while they avow that Coleridge subscribes to “an erroneous political creed,” celebrate Coleridge “as a man of genius and a poet”; they call the poem “excellent” and compare passages in Page 47 →it to “the style of the gloomy Dante.” Where Dennie loudly steps in, however, is over the issue of Coleridge's location of Chatterton and the Pantisocracy project in the United States. In his prefatory remarks to the poem, Dennie warns readers to discount Coleridge's vision of genius setting up on the banks of the Susquehanna. He condemns this last part of the poem as a “rant,” “equally romantic and ridiculous,” and delivered in “profound ignorance” of American conditions; he makes fun of Coleridge, Southey, and “one or two more hare-brained young men” for dreaming up a “wild scheme” to migrate “to the woods of Pennsylvania, where they proposed to fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden age.”59 Presumably because it not only gives political and historical heft to Chatterton's legacy, intimating the possibility of a real-world society of poets and radicals, but also envisions the Romantic author as a potentially vernacular figure, Coleridge's scheme has to be rejected by Dennie. At the same time, what is both affirmed and reconstituted via Dennie's editorial framing and, in particular, his sarcastic condemnation of the poem's conclusion, is the disorientation of the Romantic genius from any sort of geographical or political relevance to American readers. Once again, it is impossible to tell whether all of these cases of decontextualized and shaven reprints reflect editorial deliberation. What their frequent appearance in early American periodicals does reflect, however, is a local audience taste for tales of extreme authorial woe and alienation. American literary participants not only theorized the Romantic author as a figure of unlikely dimensions who was utterly alien to provincial scenes but also tended to encounter and reproduce this figure as a structural and formal echo of local fantasy: when American readers read American periodicals they found there reflections and affirmations of precisely those attributes of exoticism that thrived at sites of perceived disjunction between metropolitan and American culture. Indeed, that this disjunction, while partly based on actual differences in how texts were circulated and received, was also the product of an engaging fantasy of discontinuity that demanded the Romantic author's outrageousness and extremity in the face of provincial standards is suggested by the fact that the logical end of the “genius's” disorientation from familiar and knowable provincial scenes was that the genius was finally so abstract, and belonged to worlds so impossible, that he was imagined by the provincial literati as indistinguishable from the realms of fiction he theoretically authored. Indeed, in an important sense, the foreignness and exoticism of the early national genius, while referencing cultural differences between province and metropolis, also finally

elaborated the genius Page 48 →as the occupant of an alien, eccentric world that was not geopolitical but aesthetic.

“Lovely Fairy Scenes” and “Dreadful Tales” The late eighteenth-century discourse of imagination, says Edward Cahill, “assume[d] and produce[d] a spacial and social context.” “Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory often figures itself in terms of the spaces it conjures. The ‘realm of the imagination’ or pays de l'imagination is both a place itself—a neoplatonic sphere of dreams and the ideal—and the site and source of imagined places.”60 In eighteenth-century civil society, according to David Shields, aesthetic experience entailed “the willing surrender of a subject's cares by transport into the irreality of some other condition. Whether imagining fairyland, utopia, ancient Rome, a pastoral field, heaven, hell, the tavern with perfect ale, or Bachelor's Hall, this other place insulated one from the immediate compulsion of necessity.”61 It was precisely this “country of the imagination,” or “irreality,” that the early American genius finally occupied. Exotic and extravagant, cut off from ordinary existence, genius figures were synonymous not with authors, in any living, breathing form, but with the fantastical scenes, personages, and effects of literary works. In some cases, this synonymy was elaborated as a generic resemblance. In Channing's piece, for example, the genius is “‘unnatural, out-of-life,’” “marvellous, wild, and unreal”; he is associated with an “old poetical language,” “hoarse and wild musick,” “frantick superstition,” “lovely fairy scenes,” and “fable.” Contemporary descriptions of Chatterton depict him in terms difficult to distinguish from what were believed to be the spatial and affective aspects of fiction. In John Blair Linn's The Powers of Genius, “Fiction” is a “pathless” space, the province of “dreadful tale[s] / Which Mystery darkens with her magic veil” and “Thro' which some dead man's voice with shuddering accents calls.”62 In an 1801 “Epitaph” for Chatterton composed for The Port Folio, Chatterton is an “injur'd shade” who was “From life's plain path by genius led astray, / He wander'd pensive till he lost his way.”63 The editorial introduction to a Chatterton biography printed in The Port Folio in 1802 sees Chatterton as a figure on a stage, a character in a “singular” drama: “this boy bard rushed naked into the amphitheatre of life, and sustained a brilliant part, though his spectators were contemptuous and cold.”64 In the introduction to another Chatterton biography, which appeared in the Lady's Monitor the same year, the editor again summons up the context of fiction, instructing Page 49 →readers to respond to Chatterton's life story as if to a novel of sentiment: “Reader! if thou hast an heart to feel, or an eye to weep, let them perform the functions of their office…. they will be honourable testimonies of your worth.”65 In other cases, this resemblance between the genius and various fictional genres modulated into a refiguration of the genius as himself a fictional personage or event. In the poems of Coleridge or Byron, exilic characters, voices, and personalities elaborate an authorial subject, an “I” presumed to stand behind and to arrange or channel the components of the aesthetic object and experience. Indeed, this “I” is made explicit in the lyric speaker of Coleridge's “Monody,” who both summons and stands in a state of convertibility with the exemplary authorial subject, Chatterton (“I weep that heav'n-born genius so should fall;…O CHATTERTON! That thou wert yet alive! / Sure thou wouldst…/ love, with us, the tinkling team to drive”). But early American poetry and commentary followed instead the kind of pattern set out in the excerpt from Hayley's poem in which Chatterton, the author, is presented not as the subject but as the object of the poem—indeed, a kind of exhibitionary object. Readers are invited to see and feel the “chill Room,” the “wretched Wall,” the “vile Bed”; they are enjoined to picture Chatterton with his “wasting Limbs, convuls'd with Pain / On the bare Floor, with Heav'n directed Eyes” and lips moving in “speechless Horror.” Chatterton is arranged here as a kind of stimulant; readers can thrill to the drama of his suffering. The figure of the genius here functions not as part of a pedagogical construct, as was the case in Hayley's source poem, nor as an extension of the lyric subject, as was the case in Coleridge's, but as the object of the reader's excitement, diversion, and aesthetic contemplation. It is important to stress that this same arrangement of the “genius” as an object out there, as it were, fixed in a realm of thrilling implausibility, like Gulliver or the heroine of a Radcliffe novel, dominates the dozens of locally penned contemplations of “genius” that populated early national books and magazines. The “genius” is not identified with the poetic self doing the speaking but is rather something this self holds at a distance and contemplates. An 1813 poem titled “Genius,” originally an oration given before Harvard's Phi Beta Kapa Society,

makes the genius's largely exhibitionary purpose explicit: How dark, yet dear, the page to memory's eye; Where genius drooped, or triumphed but to die! How sad the task, to trace the heirs of fame Page 50 → Through toil and want, through anguish and through shame And view those victim-conquerors of fate, Lovely in suffering and in ruins great! Pause we to gaze upon these spirits high, Admire their worth, and mourn their destiny.66

The genius here is figured in metaphors of ocular availability: he is a “page” dear to the “eye.” His fate is something the poet/reader “traces” and “views”; he is a “spirit” upon which we “gaze.” Moreover, this passage references the large element of titillation involved in this viewing: the genius is caught in a state not just of “toil and want” but of “lovely suffering.” The exaggerated unrealness of these author figures, rather than consigning them to merely fashionable status, played an important role in their attractiveness to provincial readers—and thus in their ability to inform and even shape local cultural structures. In other words, conceived as exotic and estranged, tethered to ancient, oppressive societies, faraway lands, thrilling dramas, and seeming to hale from the realms of “mystery” and “fable,” early national genius figures exerted a fascination and allure over provincial literary participants that was proportional to their being conceived as alien and insignificant to local concerns. To the extent that foreignness itself acted as a stimulant to reader fascination, it transcended the level of surface decoration or fashionableness to become something inherent—something to be exaggerated and produced not in response to the brute materialities of provincial publication and cultural interaction but in response to local immaterialities: to fantasies and irrational demands. Nowhere is this ultimately inherent, happily self-amplifying creation of the exotic more readily demonstrated than in the nature of the American passion for Lord Byron in the 1810s. Byron's fame was, of course, an international phenomenon.67 But in the United States the popularity of Byron was described by contemporaries not as a case of readers' attunement to metropolitan sophistication but as a case of readers' helpless attraction to what was alien and even repulsive to the American mind. By extension, Byron's fame allows us to understand how eccentric author figures, in their very abstraction from local material conditions and practices, might have become internal to the workings of local culture. Describing the advent of Byron mania in the 1810s, Samuel Griswold Goodrich remembered how American readers, accustomed to the healthful, “elevating moral tone” of Walter Scott and Hannah More, were at first shocked by Byron's poems—by their “metaphysical trances,” Page 51 →their “moody and morbid emotions,” their “daring if not blasphemous skepticisms.” What wins over local audiences, however, is not some grain of wholesomeness or morality they discover in Byron's works but Byron's antisociality and narcissism: “The power of his productions…could not be resisted: he had, in fact—in delineating his own moody and morbid emotions—seemed to open a new mine of poetry in the soul.” After this, Byron cannot be stopped. “In vain…was it that the moralist resisted the diffusion of Byron's poems over the country. The pulpit opened its thunders against them—teachers warned their pupils, parents their children.” Within a few short years, “the whole poetic world had turned Byronic.” Even as Byron “advanced his career of profligacy,” “the public—seduced, bewildered,

enchanted—still followed him.” Byron, Goodrich says, in a final salute to the perversity and even sickness of Byron's attractiveness, “could no more be kept at bay than the cholera.”68 Reviews of Byron that appeared in American magazines emphasized this “diseased” aspect of him. Dissecting Byron's power to entrance audiences, a piece in the literary paper The Stranger noted in 1814 that Byron, with his disdain of “common sources of pleasure,” his feelings nourished on “‘blasted hope and withered joy,’” and his “open and avowed infidelity,” “combined all the elements of repulsion.” While “it might naturally be conjectured that one whose sympathies were so little in agreement with the mass of mankind, could hardly meet with a favourable reception when he commenced a crusade, as it were, against those feelings and emotions which render life tolerable and even happy,” “[t]he experiment has…succeeded, and its issue may put at rest those reasoners who allow in poetry nothing but delineations of pleasurable emotions.”69 Byron's poetry often appeared in early national publications surrounded by language that drew attention to its inappropriateness for American audiences. In 1817, The American Monthly Magazine and Review reprinted the whole of The Lament of Tasso, together with a preface descrying Byron as “revolting”: he fills “our apprehensions with the spectres of unperpetrated crimes”; “When we hear him arraigning Heaven, and uttering imprecations on mankind, we cannot but call to remembrance his heinous ingratitude to the one, and his manifold injuries to the other.”70 In Byron's case, the proportional relationship between perceptions of his unwholesomeness and his popularity had a basis not just in readerly fantasy and delectation but in the way these were reproduced in conditions of dissemination, for by the 1820s many young readers in the United States were coming to Byron after first hearing of him not from literary sources but from the flood of sermons and conduct books that Page 52 →warned against reading his poetry.71 In his well-known 1835 Student's Manual, for example, the Reverend John Todd inveighed against Byron, calling him “disgusting” and “awful”: “Is he a benefactor to his species, who, here and there, throws out a beautiful thought, or a poetic image, but, as you stoop to pick it up, chains upon you a putrid carcass which you can never throw off?”72 How does Todd know this? He himself, he hints, was helpless before the power of Byron and has read his poems. By about 1835, the mania for Byron had dimmed a little among genteel readers, but it raged on in the new mass-oriented entertainment culture of the antebellum era. More than ever Byron was associated in this literature with things bizarre and illicit; and here again, evidence suggests that this intimation of authorial strangeness was proportionally related to Byron's hold over audiences. Reporting in 1836 on the murder of New York prostitute, Helen Jewett—a murder whose overblown newspaper coverage is regarded by historians as a landmark in the history of American sensational journalism—the New York Herald's editor James Gordon Bennett offered readers a tantalizing glimpse into Jewett's rooms, which were the scene of the crime. “Wild and extravagant,” filled with “mirrors, splendid paintings, sofas, ottomans, and every variety of costly furniture,” Jewett's rooms contain an object of peculiar horror and eroticism: “a beautiful female corpse” with “dreadful bloody gashes” whose form, nevertheless, “look[s] as white—as full—as polished as the pure Parian marble. The perfect figure—the exquisite limbs—the fine face—the full arms—the beautiful bust—all—all surpassing in every respect the Venus de Medicis.” Presiding over this scene of perverse seductiveness, is Bryon, whose books fill the shelves and whose picture hangs on one wall.73 The Byronic poet's iconic presence in the antebellum entertainment field will be considered at length in later chapters. For now it is sufficient to note that his presence is no coincidence. Well before the era of literary industrialization in the 1830s, wild, extravagant author figures, in their very foreignness and incompatibility with local practices and ideals, had become internal features of American culture systems. The material conditions and practices of literary production in the United States remained largely unchanged throughout the period between 1800 and 1825; indeed, except for working-class urban readers and writers, most American literary participants continued, until well into the 1840s, to experience their relationship to local literature on the models of civility and sociability established in the eighteenth century; they formed book clubs, engaged in scribal publication, sponsored coterie journals, and often Page 53 →treated literature not as an alienated or transcendent item but as part of a network of sociable and utilitarian interactions. Nevertheless, presumably because they constituted an object of audience fascination and demand, autonomous authors emerged in the years between 1800 and 1825 as desirable—if often unpredictable and contradictory—personality structures for local authors. In chapter 2, I look at an extreme case of an early national author's performance and embodiment of an alien and

apparitional eccentric author personality, but we can get a rudimentary sense of how these personalities might have interfaced themselves with local writers, production systems, and cultural practices by noting their appearance, beginning in the early years of the nineteenth century, in the biographies of early national authors. In the main, as we have seen, early national authors were invested in themselves as extroverted, “public sphere” characters, “men of letters” and utilitarian servants of the nation. Nevertheless, early national biographies, especially those by or about writers who considered themselves at the leading edge of metropolitan fashion, are peppered with Romantic author flourishes. These often vie with what were clearly vernacular conventions. However, here again, it was precisely through contradiction and incompatibility that eccentric author constructions could be incorporated into local literary culture as identities that were radically extrinsic to local norms.

Charles Brockden Brown and Eccentric Biography The contradictions between local authorial standards and the rhetoric of Romantic authorship are nowhere more amply demonstrated than in the two contemporary biographies of Charles Brockden Brown, the only early national American writer who would come in later years to incarnate familiar Romantic ideals of artistic iconoclasm and autonomy. The story of these two biographies is well known to Brown scholars. Upon Brown's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1810, Brown's family commissioned his friend and fellow author, Paul Allen, to write a commemorative biography. Allen appears to have worked on this biography in fits and starts between 1811 and 1814, but as the work continued unfinished, Brown's family took the project away from him and turned instead to another friend of Brown's, the artist and writer William Dunlap. Dunlap was instructed to work as much as he could from Allen's existing text, which had already been set in type. Nevertheless the changes Dunlap made are sufficient to constitute these as separate works: Allen's Page 54 →incomplete text, based on a single surviving proof copy, which its modern editors, Robert E. Hemenway and Joseph Katz, have titled The Late Charles Brockden Brown, and William Dunlap's Life of Charles Brockden Brown, which was published in two volumes in 1815. Strikingly different in their representations of Brown, these texts epitomize a familiar, jarring relationship between local and romantic authorial ideals while also demonstrating their oddly palimpsestic coexistence—in this case, indeed, in virtually the same material and textual space. Paul Allen's portrait of Brown is clearly indebted to the models of authorship promoted by eighteenth-century civil society. Brown is represented as an industrious gentleman of eclectic tastes who pursues knowledge in its most socially useful dimensions. Thus Allen's emphasis is consistently on the extent to which Brown subordinates his personal predilections to utilitarian and extroverted ends. We hear how Brown as a youth would come home from school and lose himself in contemplation of a map hanging on the family wall; but far from signifying an unwholesome inwardness, this occupation has educational merit: “By these means that early activity of youth so often exhausted in unprofitable recreation, became with him subservient to better purposes, and intellectual labour itself became a species of recreation.” Similarly, the young Brown's apparent preoccupation with books to the potential exclusion of other activities is offered as itself an important activity, “better than inaction.”74 “It was so much time rescued from indolence, and applied to the enlargement and invigoration of the mind; and the same species of exercise became alternately labour and relaxation.” Indeed, all the events of Brown's life serve a larger public and social purpose. His mind, “so ardent and inflexible in the pursuit of information,” does not expend itself in solipsistic speculation but finds a grandiose object in the “wide and inexhaustible field of the law.” Joining a society “for debating questions of law,” Brown, “zealous and active,” excels in his “decisions,” which are “distinguished by the solidity and extent of investigation and differences between cases seemingly analogous.”75 Needless to say, Allen's biography differed sharply from the pictures of “genius” promoted by Brown and his friends, a difference nicely illustrated by the rendering of Genius's youth by another of Brown's friends, Linn, in The Powers of Genius: The poet often gains a madman's name. When first he kindles with the Muse's flame,

When wild and starting he appears in pain, Page 55 → And shews a moon-struck phrenzy of the brain; The world cries out, “What ails our neighbour's lad? 'Tis pity of the boy, for he is mad;” He “often laughs aloud, and none know why,” And looks so strange and wildly from his eye; Heedless he roves all pale with moody care, What pleases others, he will never share At morn and evening, on yon giddy steep, 'Tis said he stands, and overhangs the deep. 'Tis said he wanders at the dead of night, And like a ghost, avoids the glare of light; 'Tis said, he babbles to the Moon's full beam, And sits, in silence, by the falling stream.76

This is precisely the sort of characterization that is absent from Allen's biography. Brown's literary ambitions, instead of being brewed in the “deep” or “dead of night” or in “moods” others will “never share,” finds his earliest inspiration in his literary club. Joining the “Belle Lettre Society,” Brown “discovered a more ample range for ambition than could have been afforded by a private correspondence.” Allen makes explicit that it is this communal context that forms the basis of poetic inspiration: “The individuals who constituted the members excited the ardour of youthful competition, and the society comprehended names over whom a triumph would be an honour, and by whom to be defeated would be attended with no disgrace.” The club thus “opened a field where [Charles] could display his talents to advantage, and it appears to have been one of the principal causes which moved his youthful ambition.”77 William Dunlap's biography, by contrast, while consigned to work with Allen's text, does its best to paint Brown in an entirely different light. Here Brown is delivered up precisely in the shape of the “genius” revered by his fellow literati, who included not only Paul Allen and William Dunlap but also Linn and Dennie. Describing Brown's choice of the law, Allen, as we have seen, represents it as entirely congenial to Brown's expansive and extroverted intellect. Here is the passage from Allen: But amidst the diversities of study, and change of avocation, it now became indispensibly necessary for him to make his professional choice. Law, to a mind so ardent and inflexible in the pursuit of information, opened a wide and inexhaustible field of indulgence.78 Page 56 → But here is Dunlap's revision of this passage:

But amidst the diversities of study and changes of avocation in which his active mind ran riot, it now became indispensably necessary for him to make his choice of a profession. That freedom, almost amounting to licentiousness with which Charles roved unguided in pursuit of knowledge, had not fitted him for the severe study of one science; however, he made his choice of the profession of law.79 The same holds true for many other passages that Dunlap revised. Here is Allen's description of Brown's first forays into print publication: While he was thus alternately enveloped in business, and in study, his ambition took a wider range, and he first presented himself to the world in the Columbian Magazine in the character of a Rhapsodist.80 Here is Dunlap's: While thus ostensibly studying law, but in reality indulging himself in every freak suggested by his love of literature and of fame, he presented himself to the world in the Columbian Magazine, in the character of “A Rhapsodist.”81 In the words of Hemanway and Katz, Dunlap's revision of Allen's text casts Brown as “an American Chatterton.”82 Because Allen's biography was never published, it was William Dunlap's version of Brown that went on to define Brown as a writer. Not surprisingly, scholars have rejected Dunlap's biography on the grounds that it misrepresents the sociable and premodern contexts in which Brown worked and lived.83 But one of the things that Dunlap's revisions make clear is the extent to which eccentric author constructions, in their very foreignness to local conditions, could be summoned and wrestled for local use, acting as agents of a kind of discursive or imaginary transformation of American authors that was separate from their lived circumstances—and that, indeed, involved their imaginative dissociation from those circumstances. In this sense, Dunlap's Brown, with his “riotous, ” “licentious” mind and his “indulging himself in every freak suggested by his love of literature and of fame,” comes into being not as a result of his cultural context but as a result of being wrenched from this context, alienated by an act of fancy from the stolid civil social world that is the foundation of the world painted by Allen. In other words, the disjunction between Dunlap's “eccentric” Brown and the real Brown's social Page 57 →and cultural reality, which is so irksome to modern critics, could act as a source of fantasy and cultural productiveness for contemporaries, not least because early national writers and audiences were invested precisely in a discontinuity between aesthetic and social phenomena, between authors as wild, fantastical beings imprecisely separated from their textual effusions, and authors as the dull, serviceable entities of vernacular requirement. In this chapter, then, I have looked at the extent to which the small, inchoate, informal literary networks of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century northeast, far from discouraging the production of eccentric, alienated authorial figures and idioms, facilitated their proliferation as outsized fable, stereotype, and fantasy. The exoticism of these figures was not only straightforwardly indicative of cultural asymmetries between province and metropolis but also was something deliberately exaggerated and nourished by local cultural constituencies. By extension, in this discussion of Brown I have looked more particularly at how these eccentric author constructions, even as they referred to a fantastical set of personages, were rudimentarily incorporated into local culture as elements of authors' biographies. But in the next chapter I want to examine what I would suggest was a more extreme case of authorial eccentricity's permeation of local culture: the performance and embodiment of eccentricity in the career and literary personality of Brown's close contemporary, Joseph Dennie. Unlike Brown, whose Romantic authorial self was almost entirely posthumous, Dennie's exhibition of eccentric personality was a fixture of his substantial, successful, and widely influential career as a writer and editor. I have been arguing here that despite—and indeed because of—its poky, premodern environment, early American literary culture was entirely hospitable to the Romantic ideals fashionable in Britain and Europe and, in fact, exaggerated these ideals and reformulated their starring figures as objects of fantasy, delectation, and amusement. Dennie's case reveals this reformulation in particularly stark terms, for Dennie's eccentric author figures, in their

very extremity and contradictoriness, might be said to elaborate a peculiarly vernacular eccentric author construct, a figure distinguished by its debt to conflicting cultural values and its utter defiance of familiar worlds and systems. What I will suggest in the next chapter is that these exaggerated constructions, while without palpable foundation in the particularities of local cultural production, acquired a curious kind of agency and power over local materialities via Page 58 →their performance and embodiment by local authors. And here again, it was the very incompatibility of Romantic forms with local environments that was at the heart of their power, for as the case of Dennie suggests, it wasn't the stereotypical Romantic authorial self that local writers embodied in any straightforward way but rather a composite personality brewed in the disjunction of the impossibly distant and the ploddingly ordinary, and comprising, in a curious way, contradiction itself.

Page 59 →

{2} Personifying Vernacular Eccentricity Joseph Dennie and the American Lounger In a series of letters he wrote to his mother in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Joseph Dennie, the American author and editor of the prestigious Philadelphia journal The Port Folio, referred to himself repeatedly as a kind of geographical error, an Englishman at heart who was accidentally born in the Americas and was now consigned to eking his life out in what he called “this execrable Country.” “[A]t bottom,” he said in one letter, “I am a malcontent, and consider it a serious evil to have been born among the Indians & Yankees of New England. Had it not been for the selfish patriotism of that hoary traitor, Adams, and the bellowing of Molineux…I might now, perhaps, in a Literary Diplomatic, or lucrative Situation been in the service of my rightful King and instead of shivering in the bleakness of the United States, felt the genial sunshine of a Court.”1 “Had not the Revolution happened,” he said in another, “had I continued a subject to the King, had I been fortunately born in England or resided in the City of London for the last 7 years, my fame would have been enhanced; and as to fortune I feel a moral certainty that I should have acquired by my writings 3 or 4 thousand pounds.”2 Dennie's Anglophilia, which found public expression in his zealous Federalism, his abhorrence of “democracy,” and his yearly printing of birthday wishes to George III in the Port Folio, has been taken by scholars as the indication of his vexed relationship to various nationalist formations. Traditionally, Dennie was understood as a still-colonial figure, incapable of coming to terms with the democratic modernity that was the Page 60 →condition of the new American nation-state.3 More recently, Dennie's Anglophilia is understood as the logical result of the fractured and imperfect processes of nationalization occurring in the decades following the Revolutionary War. Instead of being understood as the product of a colonial past, Dennie is seen here as the product of a present in which American literary activity is continuous with the intellectual and cultural life of the larger Atlantic world. In the words of William Dowling, Dennie addressed “scattered souls on both sides of the Atlantic” who fancied that they had “more in common with one another than with members of their own societies whose minds ha[d] been seduced by jacobinism and democracy.”4 Similarly, for Laura Rigal, Dennie, with his restlessness, his fatigue and disaffection, is symptomatic of the placeless souls wandering “the extended stage of a global industrial market.”5 And yet Dennie's expressions of exile, I would suggest, were never entirely separable from his elaboration of what was very much a vernacular literary personality whose chief feature was its alienation from American life.6 In chapter 1, I looked at the extent to which Romantic author constructions flourished within early American literary cultures and were ultimately internalized as tropological elements in early national biographies of authors. In this chapter, I want to suggest two things: first, that in the case of certain writers this process of internalization went well beyond a merely discursive incorporation of Romantic author constructions into local biographical materials. Instead, Dennie's case suggests the extent to which these figures of autonomy were internalized by writers as performative and self-postulative principles, though not in a way that encouraged the development of autonomous cultural ideals. In Britain and Europe in the late eighteenth century, discourses of writerly persecution and social withdrawal played a crucial role in the imagining of a rarified culture sphere, contributing to the idea of the modern literary field as, in Pierre Bourdieu's phrase, “a world apart.”7 But in the United States the eccentric, nonconformist writer, far from playing an adversarial political or cultural role, emerged as himself a figure of entertainment, and thus, I will argue, as a figure peculiarly amenable to the infiltration of America's unusual publishing economies. In this sense, eccentric author figures, for all their seeming not to belong to American literary landscapes, acquired a kind of double materiality within their horizons, not only achieving actualization in authors but also in the mechanics and economies of book and periodical publication. Second, the peculiar formation of Dennie's literary personality suggests Page 61 →the extent to which Romantic author constructions, instead of simply being transported wholesale into local literary culture, were subject to

specific revisions under pressure of local beliefs and practices. One of these revisions, as we saw in chapter 1, entailed an exaggeration of the Romantic author's strangeness and foreignness: acknowledging a gap between metropolitan and provincial conditions of literary production and ideals of authorship, early American literary constituencies tended to dwell on the Romantic author as a figure not just of strangeness and foreignness but of extraordinary strangeness and foreignness. But another revision, evident not only in Dennie's persona but in a wealth of fables and opinions that appeared in American periodicals from the 1810s to the 1830s, addressed the Romantic author's grandeur. British and European Romantic fantasies featured authorial figures of titanic and tragic dimensions, of which the Byronic hero was of course the exemplary case. By contrast, the fables generated by those early American writers who exploited Romantic personalities as aspects of their authorial selves had a deflationary, even parodic dimension. Linked primarily to local entertainment rather than to romantic expressiveness, they could be played up as both fantastical and inconsequential to real authors and their lives. In effect, these American eccentric author figures were so off-kilter as to be irrelevant—and thus, while embodied in local persons and economies, were also, I will suggest, more difficult to peg to positive social and cultural space. In the following pages, then, I look first at Dennie's creation, from the early 1790s until his death in 1811, of what I would argue was a peculiarly local eccentric author type, called the “idle man” or “lounger,” which Dennie elaborated in three major essay series: The Farrago, The Lay Preacher, and The American Lounger. I spend a considerable amount of time on these essays, for while Dennie is increasingly recognized by scholars as a crucial figure in early national culture and appears frequently in recent literary histories his actual literary works tend to be set down as “neoclassical” and then put to the side. What is neglected here is not only their considerable complexity as literary objects, but also their refusal of precisely the kind of blanket Atlantic categorization captured in terms like “neoclassical.” Named after the personae of eighteenth-century British essayists and indebted to metropolitan romanticism's veneration of eccentricity, Dennie's idle man persona is nonetheless distinctive for addressing a local preoccupation with the incompatibility of what Dennie and his compatriots understood to be vernacular and metropolitan Page 62 →aesthetic ideals. Indeed, to an important degree, Dennie's idle authorial personality was elaborated not just as a local phenomenon but as a local phenomenon that took its identity from internal contradiction. I then look at how Dennie's positioning of the author in spaces of cultural incompatibility and paradox, instead of simply functioning as a rhetorical or philosophical flourish, echoed and refracted his own unusually successful and lucrative career as a writer and editor. It was by maneuvering himself into highly contradictory social, political, and economic positions and by exploiting his own seeming exemplification of his quirky characters, that Dennie was able to build a successful career for himself in a context that otherwise discouraged such endeavors. Thus one of the things illustrated in Dennie's career is the extent to which the local author's embodiment of an extreme authorial personality—a personality that seemed not to belong to familiar landscapes—emerged as something entangled with the economies of American cultural modernization, not only informing authors' reputations and celebrity but also their incipient professionalization and economic viability. Indeed, Dennie's quirky “idle man” character, with its peculiar vernacular inception and application, turned out to have rather remarkable powers of longevity and refreshment, first directly inspiring Washington Irving's famous idlers and then also, through Irving, going on to spawn a vast host of authorial triflers who starred in the work of everyone from Richard Henry Dana Sr. and Nathaniel Parker Willis in the 1820s to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Donald Grant Mitchell in the 1850s. But Dennie's career also illustrates another point: that the alienness of these figures was reproduced as one of the conditions of their materialization. In other words, even as they became internal to American cultural economies, they worked by continuing to position the author in strange improbable realms divorced from present cultural and geopolitical circumstances.

Idleness and Metropolitan Fashion Although unfamiliar to many readers of American literature today, Joseph Dennie was a figure of considerable proportions to American writers and readers of his own generation, the “American Arbiter Elegantiarum' and “Mammoth of literature,” in the words of British traveler and author John Davis.8 A Harvard-educated lawyer, a violent Federalist, and a tireless celebrant of belles lettres, Dennie made a name for himself in the 1790s by commandeering a small Walpole paper, The Farmer's Weekly Page 63 →Museum, owned by Isaiah Thomas and

David Carlisle, and turning it into one of the most respected literary organs in the United States. Partly as a result of this success and partly as a result of support from Federalist interests, Dennie was able to launch his own journal, The Port Folio, in Philadelphia in 1801. Edited by Dennie until his death in 1811, The Port Folio was the most successful, prestigious, and longest running journal of letters in the early national United States, at one time counting over 2,000 subscribers. Dennie himself, famous for his wit, conviviality, and promotion of local writers, functioned as an important hub for a geographically dispersed set of early national literary participants. Among the dozens of authors who collaborated with Dennie and contributed to his periodicals were John Quincy Adams, Thomas Boylston Adams, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Thomas Green Fessenden, Timothy Dwight, John Blair Linn, Elihu Hubbard Smith, Sarah Wentworth Morton, William Dunlap, and Paul Allen.9 Like his contemporaries, Dennie was keenly attuned to the histories and contemplations of authorship proliferating in British venues at the turn of the nineteenth century. At the height of Chatterton's popularity in the early years of the 1800s, for example, there was no more devoted broadcaster of Chatterton's strange and tragic life than Dennie. Between 1801 and 1810, The Port Folio not only published two biographies of Chatterton, the latter of which was so substantial it ran across seven issues of the journal in 1804, but also published an endless series of essays on Chatterton, tributes to Chatterton, odes to Chatterton, anecdotes and jokes related to Chatterton, and the writings and songs of Chatterton himself.10 Dennie's promotion of Chatterton was part of his larger commitment to a late eighteenth-century transatlantic ideal of “eccentricity” as a crucial attribute of aesthetic sensibility. It was true, Dennie believed, that those who are “eccentric” and “impatient of the boundaries,” who “presume to wander, at the beckon of passion, or fancy” are inclined to court “poverty, distress, and contempt from the world.” However, it was only these dauntless disobedient souls, Dennie avowed, who were capable of standing up to a social order now ruled by “your fat-headed, leathern-ear'd, cold-hearted American speculator.” Indeed, Dennie saw Chatterton not just as a victim but as a rebel: “Did not Chatterton indignantly swallow arsenic, because he would not obsequiously bow to a patron, and because he would turn the volumes of the ancient time, rather than ‘the tape-tied trash’ of an attorney?”11 Not unexpectedly, Dennie's own essay personae—the “Idle Man,” the “Lay Preacher,” “Oliver Oldschool,” and the “American Lounger”—were Page 64 →very much inspired by emerging metropolitan ideals of literary autonomy. On the one hand, Dennie drew on an older generation of British essayists who included Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, and Henry Mackenzie. His “Idle Man,” the dominant persona of his earliest essay series, The Farrago, for example, was cobbled together from what Dennie called all the “nonchalant” and “desultory tribe”12—the Spectators, Ramblers, Idlers—who had presided over the famous eighteenth-century periodicals of these same names. His Lay Preacher, the little parson/litterateur who purports to wander the New England countryside preaching to villagers, was inspired by Sterne's sermons, while his American Lounger was indebted directly to Henry MacKenzie's paper, The Lounger. As well as conjuring these older traditions, Dennie's lounging narrators referenced the eccentric author figures that were increasingly populating Romantic discourse of the 1790s and early 1800s. Indeed, his references to “lounging” and “idleness” both register and exploit a crucial shift in the meaning of these terms, for as Willard Spiegelman observes, by the late eighteenth century the quaint attitudes of relaxation that had characterized the Addisonian tradition had evolved among such writers as William Cowper and William Wordsworth into a full-blown glorification of “idleness” and “indolence” as the proper conditions of aesthetic sensitivity.13 More radically than “rambling” or “leisure,” “idleness” and “indolence” separated the creation of art from what were understood to be increasingly rationalized fields of productivity—from bourgeois commerce, finance, and industrial divided labor. Thus while Dennie's idle men harked back to Addison, they also flowed forward into contemporary articulations of the ideal isolation and separateness of authors. In his 1795 Essay On the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, for example, Isaac D'Israeli includes a whole chapter on “literary solitude” as a “necessity” for the man of genius. “Where can he indulge, but in solitude, the delicious romances of his soul?”14 In Hours of Idleness, which had its American debut in The Port Folio shortly before Dennie's death, Bryon describes his poems as the products of his asociality and introversion, his frequent “indisposition” and his “vacant hours.”15 Dennie similarly understands the reading and writing of literature as something that happens in periods of isolation, self-loss, and transport, and in defiance of workaday conditions. In a late Lay Preacher essay, for example, Dennie explains this

oppositional relationship between literature (and the authors of literature), and the everyday world: Page 65 → In many of the old romances we are gravely informed, that the unfortunate knight in the dungeon of some giant, or fascinated by some witch or enchanter, while he sees nothing but hideousness and horror before him, if haply a fairy, or some other benignant being, impart a talisman of wondrous virtue, on a sudden our disconsolate prisoner finds himself in a magnificent palace, or a beautiful garden, in the bower of Beauty, or in the arms of Love. This wild fable, which abounds in the legends of knight-errantry, has always appeared to me very finely to shadow out the enchantment of study. A book produces a delightful abstraction from the cares and sorrows of this world. They may press upon us, but when we are engrossed by study we do not very acutely feel them. Nay, by the magic illusion of a fascinating author we are transported from the couch of Anguish, or the grip of Indigence to Milton's Paradise or the Elysium of Virgil.16 Dennie's idle men and loungers were accordingly figures in keeping with this idea of the author as truant and enchanter. The Farrago idle man announces, “Let us no longer wear the straight laced stays of systems…. Let us no longer eat the bread of carefulness; but drink our wine with a merry heart.”17 A “mercurial…creature,”18 the idle man's goal is “to cultivate careless indifference, to whistle and sing, when in the cage, and, with pithy PANZA, to laud that man, who first invented sleep.”19 And yet Dennie's version of authorial idleness, for all its references to traditional and countercultural positions in the metropolitan literary imaginary, did not really subscribe to metropolitan models. In one of the few examinations of Dennie that highlights his vernacular leanings as a writer, David Jaffee underlines the extent to which Dennie and his circle of young lawyer friends, living in the 1790s in the rural upper Connecticut River region, exploited their cosmopolitan polish to develop distinctively vernacular voices and genres. “Armed with their classical training…the legal literati had tied their craft to the village world around them. They became the first American exponents of local color and vernacular language.”20 Jaffee is here referring specifically to the invention by Dennie and Royall Tyler of caricatures of the “Yankee,” but Dennie's creation of vernacular idioms, I would suggest, can readily be extended to his belletristic essays. Indeed, the provincial axis of these essays is rudimentarily suggested by the extent to which “idleness,” while it coincided with ideals of authorial abstraction and countercultural specialness being developed in contemporary Britain and Europe, also had a peculiar and flagrant application to provincial mandates. For, of course, the whole Page 66 →idea of literature's indelible alliance with idleness acquired special meaning in the context of local obsessions with utility and industry as the foundational attributes of the American “genius” and his works. Dennie's relationship to these obsessions was in no way straightforward. On one level, as we have seen, Dennie was impatient with local institutions, something evidenced not only in his frequent harangues against a society that worships only “money” and “prudence,” but also in his attacks on Benjamin Franklin, the figure who personified “genius” within a northern American ideology that venerated aspiration, hard work, and mechanization. In an early Port Folio piece, Dennie and his collaborator, Tyler, lambast Franklin as “a pseudo philosopher” who has been “a mischief to his country”; he is not only “the founder of that Grub-street sect, who have professedly attempted to degrade literature to the level of vulgar capacities” but also “one of our first Jacobins” and the purveyor of the idea that “mind may be managed by mechanical principles.” The high priest of “a low and scoundrel appetite for small sums, acquired by base and pitiful means,” Franklin can have “no better title than the foul disgrace of the country.”21 But while Dennie pilloried Franklin as a figurehead of “democracy,” he did not reject the values of utility and industry that Franklin so famously endorsed. In the metropolitan cultural vocabulary, “idleness” and its cognates, “leisure,” “spectatorship,” “retirement,” “lounging,” “wandering,” “loitering,” and “rambling,” signified what by the late eighteenth century was an increasingly pronounced belief in the separation of aesthetic experience from the everyday world of work and productivity. British writers understood the trope of idleness not just as an expressive device for the conveyance of authorial moods but also as a metaphor for literary creation itself. For an

author to be “idle,” in this formulation, was for him to have entered the mental state required for creative and compositional activity. Dennie and his friends, by contrast, believed that their belletristic efforts, instead of being proper to an abstracted realm of “leisure” or “seclusion,” existed in a state of dynamic interaction with the nationstate and republican polity. As one of Dennie's collaborators, John Quincy Adams, put it, “Behold the lettered sage devote / The labors of his mind, / His country's welfare to promote / And benefit mankind.”22 Literature—and the leisure required for its composition—in this consensus was not a type of withdrawal from the bustling world but a central part of it. In the words of one contemporary, the literary arts, far from temporarily transporting the reading subject to a world of ease and enchantment, were the means “by which we may acquire that Page 67 →fund of knowledge which will make us instructive companions, and useful to our country…. By employing our leisure hours in these pursuits, we shall be able to view the human species as in one group; and in our solitary moments, contemplate the terrestrial globe as one grand theatre beautifully diversified, and each scene productive of rational amusement and useful instruction.”23 Accordingly, instead of being indebted to metropolitan models in any straightforward way, Dennie's essays are distinguished by their revision and often their outright refusal of metropolitan standards. Powerfully attached to local ideals of literature as a useful and socially implicated occupation, Dennie developed an “idle” narrative persona based on a critique and even mockery of literary idleness in its British manifestation. In Dennie's early essay series, The Farrago and The Lay Preacher, Dennie publicizes the idle literary personality as a de rigeur commodity while also representing the values of solitude and retirement that this figure had come to encapsulate as fundamentally inappropriate to American cultural structures and beliefs. In his later American Lounger series in the Port Folio, Dennie is more hostile. Instead of engaging in the mimicry of fashionable idle genres, Dennie's Lounger essays openly lampoon the various idle characters that form their inspiration, in the process undermining even American practitioners of the idle genre. But while Dennie essentially rejects the metropolitan eccentric author as incommensurate with local mandates and conditions, his essays do not quite reject eccentricity as an authorial attribute: rather, they are productive of their own outlandish authorial personalities. Dennie's composite, often entirely parodic idle personae—the Idle Man, the Lay Preacher, the Lounger, as well as all their indolent friends—collectively form the basis of what I would suggest was a peculiarly vernacular eccentric author figure, a figure distinctive for its personification of the incompatibility of metropolitan and local cultural systems. In Dennie's idle man essays, particularly in the later Lounger department, contradiction itself—the collapsing together of two opposed cultural systems in a paradoxical or self-defeating unity—emerges not just as a testament to cultural incompatibility but as a principle of orientation for a vernacular authorial figure defined not by its adversarial political or cultural position nor by its metropolitan allegiances, but by its pure contradictoriness and refusal to belong anywhere. Often wildly incoherent and thus entirely distinct both from the isolated, countercultural author figures imagined by Dennie's British counterparts and from familiar local authorial ideals, Dennie's idle author, I would suggest, encapsulated the Page 68 →provincial fantasy, discussed in chapter 1, of extreme authorial eccentricity—of an author so exaggeratedly strange and foreign that he cannot be captured within any positive cultural or geopolitical categories, including the category of “American.”

The American Lounger We can better understand the contradictory character of Dennie's idle author figures by considering, first, their overt transgression of their sources, something that is nowhere more amply evidenced than in their constant references not to actual idleness, as we might expect, but to a provincial cultural ethics that insisted that both literature and authors be connected to hard work and social usefulness. “Literature,” says the Lay Preacher, “cannot flourish in the bowers of indolence”;24 “Parnassus,” says one of the Farrago Idle Man's friends, is not a 'grazing country!””25 Equating “idleness” (creative writing) with social usefulness and with a mental exertion indistinguishable from any other intellectual labor, Dennie develops the idea that, unlike their British progenitors, his idle men are, in fact, hardworking. Even as Dennie's idle narrative personae whistle and sing and slumber and loiter much, they are an unexpectedly active, vital lot, seemingly animated by Benjamin Franklin's advice that leisure, instead of representing a cessation

of productivity, “is time for doing something useful.”26 Lest his readers confuse him with “his renowned predecessor, the Spectator,” who was, after all, only an “observer in society,”27 Dennie's Farrago narrator draws attention to the oxymoronic form of his own contemplative posture: Although my companions denominate me an idler, and one, who floats carelessly down the stream of life, yet long since, I have marked the distinction between stagnation and strenuous indolence…. Men, studious of laborious ease, not slothful, happy to deceive the time, not waste it, form a class numerous and respectable. To rank these loiterers with those, who doze life away, is like comparing the noiseless current of a running brook, to the “green mantle of the stagnant pool.” We may be stupidly busy, and splendidly and vivaciously idle.28 Whereas for early British Romantics picturesque nature concretized the space of escape from the world of work and business, the restful contemplation of nature in Dennie's essays exhorts the artist to busyness. Page 69 → As I am entirely of opinion with that Ancient, and with the Poet, who saw his duty inscribed on every leaf, and found a tongue in trees, and books in the running brooks, I think it would not be unprofitable for every man, who looks abroad, to remark that every department both in the animal, and vegetable kingdom is in action.…It seems to me impossible that an Idler should rove on our mountains, and not be lessoned into industry.29 These paradoxical constructions extended to Dennie's attempts to distance himself as an author from the desultory essay's mandates of retirement. Romantic aesthetic theory identified the aesthetic work as, in M. H. Abrams's famous phrase, “the overflow, utterance or projection of the thoughts and feelings of the poet.”30 But for Dennie the desultory essay is imagined not as the overflow of the author's thoughts but as the instrument of a largely pedagogical purpose. Dennie insists that the author, instead of experiencing the exilic and withdrawn states he represents, exists in an entirely pragmatic social realm from which he manipulates a series of entertaining and instructive illusions. The Farrago series, for example, which features the Idle Man narrator “whistling with pithy panza” and denouncing all “laws” and “systems,” opens with Dennie explaining that he is adopting the “light” tones of “Addison” in order to “rouse indolence.” Dennie hopes that by means of his restful and entertaining essays “the busy, the indolent, and lower orders in the community” may be enticed unawares into regimens of “mental improvement.” From this “lowly station at the bottom of Parnassus” his readers may obtain “many a glimpse of the higher region.”31 The same is true of Dennie's immensely popular Lay Preacher series, originally published in the Farmer's Weekly Museum between 1795 and 1799 and then collected in an edition in 1796. At first glance these essays especially seem cosmopolitan in nature. Addressed to “idle readers” and featuring a quaint and indolent narrative persona, they are overtly offered by Dennie as a “breath of fresh air,” a “hymn to the goddess of leisure”; they promise a relief from “the drudgery of methodized life.” “I confess with candor,” says the little Lay Preacher, “that I loiter and slumber much.”32 Nevertheless, according to Dennie, these essays have a secretly instrumental function, explicitly stated in Dennie's introduction to the book edition: “Most of the following pages originally appeared in…a rural paper of Newhampshire. Surrounded by plain husbandmen, rather than by polished scholars, the Author…has been more studious of the useful, than the brilliant. To instruct the villager was his primary Page 70 →object…. To rise to the gorgeous phrase of BOLINGBROKE would have been absurd…. The familiarity of FRANKLIN'S manner, and the simplicity of STERNE'S proved most auxiliary to his design.”33 These disputes with metropolitan idleness reach a crescendo in Dennie's American Lounger department, published in the Port Folio from 1802 to 1806.34 Not only do the American Lounger essays continue with a vengeance the conceits that typify Dennie's earlier work—the department is full of references to “strenuous indolence” or “laborious idleness”35—but they also go much further in their critique of metropolitan standards. Indeed, if the Lounger essays yoke together incompatible theorizations of aesthetic activity (the hardworking idle poet), they do so less in order to effect any kind of rapprochement between them than to send up the whole partnership as

illogical. Thus the Lounger essays are frequently little more than mockeries of Romantic aesthetic theory as it had come to manifest itself in late eighteenth-century British periodical essays. But it is precisely in this satiric illustration of the literary lounger's lack of logic that the Lounger essays, while they dismiss one eccentric author figure, generate another. In fact, not only Dennie's satirical aims but also the formal premises of the American Lounger department lent themselves to the generation of peculiarly chaotic and incoherent authorial personalities. The Farrago and Lay Preacher were written by Dennie. But the American Lounger department, though it was obviously devised by Dennie to exploit his already substantial fame as an idle author, is set up as a venue for what it calls “correspondents.” Its central lounging personality, Samuel Saunter, Esq., not only speaks to the audience as an editor but also purports to print letters received from “readers.” In fact, installments for the Lounger department were penned not just by Dennie but by a large variety of Dennie's friends, collaborators, professional acquaintances, and readers.36 Accordingly, the department often functions as a kind of boisterous feedback chamber, a space not just of critique but of self-reflection, debate, argument, grandstanding, parody, burlesque—all materialized in the words of Samuel Saunter and the “lounging” fictional personages who write him letters. While all of this chaos meshes with the overt theme of the department, which is that lounging, in its sense of a withdrawal from the busy world, cannot issue in productive and meaningful aesthetic activity, the Lounger department also generates, in its dizzying love of paradox, in its vociferous satire, and in the amorphous collectivity of its correspondents, an incoherence that surpasses this argument. Beginning with a Page 71 →vernacular authorial personality (the industrious idler) based on the mismatch between metropolitan and local aesthetic values, Dennie and the Lounger writers pursue the contradictoriness of this figure to its farthest extreme. The result is that the very vociferousness of the Lounger department's satire ends in a kind of zany nullity, an annihilation of the positions that originally orient its logic. The authorial personality generated in this process is ultimately identifiable neither as an “outsider”—a figure of withdrawal, solitude, or social exile—nor as an endorsement of the extroverted “insider,” on the model of the “man of letters” but as a bizarre entity that belongs nowhere, that can't be located in positive cultural or geopolitical space, including the space defined as “American.” The satirical aims of the American Lounger department are perhaps best illustrated by the extent to which, even more than Dennie's earlier work, it is blatantly indebted to a set of metropolitan progenitors. As I've already mentioned, the department took direct inspiration from Henry Mackenzie's paper, The Lounger, issued in Edinburgh from 1785 to 1787, but it also clearly quoted other more contemporary “idle” materials. In 1802, for example, the Port Folio excerpted materials from Literary Leisure; or, the Recreations of Samuel Saunter, Esq., an anonymous collection of musings published in Britain the same year.37 Not coincidentally, Dennie's department is presided over by a fictional editorial personage whose name is “Samuel Saunter, Esq.” However, these pointed references to British predecessors highlight the department's assault on the aesthetic principles these predecessors encapsulate, something brought into focus if we look for a moment at the contrast between the American Lounger and Mackenzie's The Lounger, with which Dennie was well acquainted. Mackenzie's weekly papers present themselves as a lightly humorous public forum in which anonymous correspondents can write in and discuss the joys and trials of being members of a genteel middle class whose financial prosperity has left them unburdened of the necessity of work. The papers are organized by an editorial persona, the Lounger, whose idleness is framed as the condition of his aesthetic productivity, both as an essayist and editor. Himself a member of the “idle” class to which all the correspondents refer, the Lounger spends his days cultivating “intimacy with himself,” engaging in pleasant and distant “observation,” and “jotting” down “little records of what I have heard or read.”38 This withdrawal from busy society is given more vital aesthetic importance in the eleventh number of the Lounger when it is revealed that all of the editor's correspondents are in fact “personalities” or fictions invented by him—when it is revealed that his isolation, in other words, bears fruit in a kind Page 72 →of whole alternative society peopled by lively fabrications. Idleness thus serves in Mackenzie's papers as both a condition of and trope for the composition of a complexly organized and engagingly self-reflexive fictional structure, the Lounger's world itself.

By contrast, while the American Lounger essays are organized on a similar principle—a central lounging editorial persona, Samuel Saunter, entertains opinions from correspondents of dubious reality—their reigning theme is not that idle reflection and withdrawal issue in a richly dimensional aesthetic world but that they issue in very little. One of the chief characteristics of the American Lounger is that his relaxed and meditative posture comically inhibits aesthetic productivity—including the production of himself and his column. In a frequently cited excerpt from “The Lounger's Diary,” for example, the Lounger's idleness, instead of constituting conditions of self-intimacy and self-enlargement, is so destructive of these conditions that the Lounger himself appears as little more than a collection of unfinished phrases and half-formed utterances: Sunday morning, half past nine. Yawned;—execrably sleepy. Ten. Read half your bill.—Head ach [sic]. Half past ten. Too cold for church.—Head ach increased by bell.—N.B. To change my apartment that I may avoid that noise…. Half past one. Dinner.—No appetite. Two. Froth called.—Argument with Froth on long quarter'd shoes.—N.B. Froth dismally in the wrong. Three to four. Slept.—Dreamt of butterflies…. Six to half past. Yawned and rou'd. Half past to seven. Rou'd and yawned. Seven to eight. Got vapours by looking out Microcosm. Eight to nine. Wrote my journal.—Buckled my shoe. Nine to ten. Intolerable vapours.—N.B. Vapours greatest bore in universe…. Half past ten to eleven. Put on slippers and night gown.—Picked teeth. Eleven to twelve. Went to bed.39

The Lounger's inability to bring himself into textual/aesthetic being in the private space of his diary is matched, in the more conventional Lounger essays, by his inability to bring much else into being either. We hear how Samuel Saunter has pondered upon a title for his department, only to discover that “almost every name expressive of the character or Page 73 →the writings of a desultory essayist has been anticipated…. Under these circumstances, the attempt to invent a name for my paper, which should be perfectly original, was utterly repugnant with my love of ease; my only difficulty was, to discover a title among the fugitive writers of Great-Britain, which would best suit my habits and dispositions, and I could then easily appropriate it, by the addition of the epithet American.”40 Rather than enabling or forming a condition of literary creativity, the American Lounger's idleness is repeatedly presented as comically disabling, often to the point of threatening the existence of the Lounger department itself. [Y]et, I must candidly own, that, without assistance from correspondents, the American Lounger will boast but a short existence. From professed indolence, much cannot be expected; but if each of my worthy brethren, and I may add sisters also, in this city, will only contribute one letter each, upon some fugitive topic, I am confident, that my existence will be more protracted than even that of the Spectator of Great Britain; and I should not be at all surprised to read, ten years hence, the American Lounger, No. 500.41

Indeed, this lack of productivity belongs not only to Samuel Saunter but extends to his contributors as well. In another lounger's diary, this time purportedly written by one of Samuel Saunter's correspondents, the author, “Cymon Torpid,” records his activities: Twelve o'clock. Walk into the office…. Take up a pen to write a “Lounger.” N.B…. very desirous of appearing in that paper…. Begin…. “Mr. Saunter.”…Too lazy to go any farther…. Feel hungry…. too soon for dinner…. N.B. Lounge about till it is ready…. Eat a jelly at Richardet's and languidly smile.42 It is no coincidence that the Lounger constantly draws attention to “the fugitive writers of Great Britain” and “the Spectator of Great Britain,” for it is precisely this tradition of “ramblers,” “idlers,” and other desultory folk that forms the target of Dennie's attack. At the same time, Dennie's attack is ultimately not limited to these ostensibly alien cultural models. Indeed, in an important sense, the instability of the Lounger department as a critical project is indicated by the modern scholarly consensus that its object of attack is, in fact, American rather than British literary values. In her extended analysis of the Lounger department, for example, Rigal argues that its fatigued, scattered personages model an attitude of bemused protest against early American celebrations of productive Page 74 →labor as the grounds of culture.43 Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan identifies the Port Folio generally, and the Lounger along with it, as a repository of “dissent” whose purpose was to build a wall of leisure and taste “against America's crass demands.”44 But if, as I am arguing, Dennie is determined to attack modern metropolitan aesthetic theory, this confusion of targets, I would suggest, has its logic in the nature of the attack. Determined to pillory not just “Loungers” but “American Loungers,” the Lounger authors pursue the logic of the Lounger's selfdefeat into a vociferous attack on the provincial mimicry of lounging. What gets lost in this process, which involves the ingenious, giddy multiplication of the paradoxes that pepper Dennie's idle essays, is any sort of positive cultural or geopolitical position from which a critique might issue. Thus one of the first things we notice about the department is its habitual foiling of the distinctions it seems to assert. Nowhere is this foiling more evident than in Dennie's treatment of “the Spectator of Great Britain.” Inspired, according to its authors, by the “Spectator” and other “fugitive writers of Great-Britain,” the Lounger department in one sense pretends to a shameless mimicry of Addison and his progeny. But Dennie's feelings about Addison were no secret. While the Farrago and the Lay Preacher pay tribute to the Addisonian essay as a tasty coating for the delivery of medicinal “instruction” to the busy and unlettered, The Port Folio, which purported to cater to more learned audiences, is filled with denunciations of Addison. Indeed, precisely because he is so easy to digest, Addison is blamed by the Port Folio writers for the kind of laziness conjured in the picture of local authors creating “American” literature by taking any old British thing and pasting the “epithet American” at the top. In one set of editorial remarks, presented outside of the Lounger column, Dennie rejects a prospective contributor's Spectator-like efforts by telling readers that Addison is “trite and common” and he refuses to “huckster out those essays, which are to be found in every parlour window”; he goes on to denounce the system of “borrowing” and “literary loan” by which Addison's host of American acolytes might just well title their works “The Plagiarist.”45 Thus one of the obvious things The American Lounger department is intended to convey through its pasting of the word “American” at the top of a garbled plagiarization of Mackenzie's Lounger is the incompatibility of “lounging,” in its sense of abstraction and withdrawal, and “American” literary excellence and originality, which are presumably antithetical to “lounging.” But it is also meant to convey the insufficiency of current “American” letters, in the sense that the geopolitical nomination here, Page 75 →instead of referencing anything genuinely vernacular, is revealed as a device of mechanical reproduction used by what are, in fact, lazy writers—a sort of rubber stamp by which British works are quickly got up to look local. The American Lounger department is thus not only theorized as the sum of two terms—“American” and “Lounger”—that in their antithesis cancel each other out, but it is also paradoxically offered as the sum of two terms that are the same. This implosion of conventionally differentiated categories through endless play with paradox and oxymoron plays a central role in the composition of the whole department, for part of the purpose of the American Lounger essays is to eviscerate the department itself as a respectable venue. Worth remarking here is not just the Lounger department's frequent satires of lounging (that is, of its own activities), but also the parodic uses to which Dennie puts the whole formal and conceptual apparatus of a “department” conducted by a personage alien to mental

application. Even as the American Lounger department serves as a forum to lampoon literary idleness, it also serves, in another sense, as a kind of waste bin into which Dennie and his collaborators can merrily dump any old thing on the principle that Samuel Saunter is so idle and unconnected to the social world that he is incapable of discrimination. One Lounger installment, for example, features a laudatory item on “German Literature,” or works of the German Romantic school as represented by Goethe, Wieland, Schiller, and Kotzebue. Dennie openly despised this branch of writing as “Jacobinical” and did not normally publish endorsements of it in The Port Folio. Appearing in the Lounger department, however, where it gets outfitted by the conceit that it was “found” by some correspondent during his “evening rambles,” the celebration of German literature is clearly set in a scene of parody. Indeed, Dennie's editorial disclaimer emphasizes that, as with all the other constructions in the Lounger universe, he wants it to undo itself: “The following letter is in open hostility to my sentiments, but I publish it not to shew an impartiality, which I do not even affect, but merely to demonstrate that ingenuity may cause paradoxes to appear plausible, and that well marshaled troops may contend on the side of Error and Evil.”46 Precisely because the Lounger department itself is devised as a sort of meaningless nonplace, prevented by its very philosophy of ease from cohering itself into positive aesthetic form, it can serve as a deflationary showcase, a space where any number of disquisitions can be made to display their own “paradoxes,” “Errors” and “Evils.” The Lounger department thus plays host to a bewildering variety of articles, poems, and fugitive pieces: Page 76 →earnest treatises on floral imagery, ruminations on “The Castle of Indolence,” condemnations of bachelorhood, satires of ladies' fashions, and even sometimes intimate (and today nonsensical) remembrances of recent parties in Philadelphia. Now, in one sense, the lack of coherence in Dennie's selection merges with the larger point that literary idleness, if unconnected to programs of improvement and civic service, is only productive of a formless heap. In this sense the real Port Folio writers and their reading public seem to be constructed as a kind of bedrock of cultural beliefs beyond the limits of the nullifying paradoxes of the Lounger universe. Indeed, we get a powerful sense of this extratextual community of rational writers and readers if we consider for a moment that while being a send-up of the compatibility of the terms “American” and “lounging,” the American Lounger is also expressly constructed as a learned, elitist exercise: comprehending its paradoxes, mockeries, and lampoons requires familiarity with significant branches of modern British, Continental, and American letters, as well as with the vernacular ideal of utilitarian leisure. To participate in the triviality of American literary lounging demands, in other words, one's implication in the bracing realms of higher learning and industrious application. Yet the existence of this seemingly positive cultural space outside of the dizzying vortex of the Lounger essays is not a certainty, for even while constructing a putatively extratextual community of the learned, Dennie and the Lounger writers boisterously blend it with the Lounger universe. One of the early numbers of the Lounger, for example, consists of a long letter from the wife of a “very respectable” and “industrious” man who is worried sick about her son's recent membership of “a certain club.” “It [is] composed of literary characters, and…they [meet] on Tuesday, to talk upon all new publications on historical subjects, and now and then to scribble a little for the magazines.” Since joining this club the son has undergone terrible changes: “his shop duty is hourly more and more neglected”; “he passes whole hours in humming a tune, or reciting silly poetry”; he speaks Latin all the time, even to shop customers, and engages in “disgusting pedantry.” The wife pleads with Mr. Saunter to denounce “this intolerable club, which I plainly foresee will be the ruin of our industrious young men, by giving them a relish, not only for Bacchannalian joys, but by making them imagine none can be gentlemen, who have not been to Rome, and are unskilled in the dead languages.”47 But of course the famous Philadelphia club that met on Tuesdays was Dennie's own Tuesday Club, which produced the Port Folio. Not only Page 77 →does this letter constitute a send-up of the club in a way that confuses boundaries between the fictional Lounger text and the writers behind it, but it also muddies up the derogation of lounging as something distinct from the activities of the Port Folio writers, for here the Tuesday Club is comically depicted as, in fact, the instrument through which “industrious” young men are transformed into the lackadaisical fops and bad poets who contribute to the Lounger department. Moreover, in this instance, the Port Folio writers, instead of aligning themselves with a cultural ethic of hard work and usefulness, seem to be

making fun of a society that makes fun of lounging—insofar as “lounging” functions, here again, as a code for aesthetic and intellectual activity. Accordingly, in some installments of the Lounger department there seems to be an effort to reclaim “idleness” on the same principle as Dennie sought to reclaim these activities in his earlier Farrago pieces: leisure features as a laudable activity when tied to programs of industriousness and instruction. For example, one correspondent remarks to Saunter: “In your introductory speculation, you observe, that the very idleness of an idler is instructive; admitting this, you must also allow, that the description of the habits of a lounger, will edify, as well as amuse a portion of the readers of your paper.”48 The American Lounger himself engages in what the department constantly calls “strenuous indolence” or “laborious idleness.”49 A composite of contradictions, the American Lounger, in his very triviality and meaninglessness, is, according to some of the Lounger essays, ultimately at one with a vernacular standard of civic and political achievement: A Lounger may be supposed to trifle with books, to prattle with ladies, to hover over toilets and teatables, to understand fashions, to study minute history, to be conversant with public places, to love music, painting and poetry, and to enjoy gay conversation, and merry adventures. Nay, he may be, sometimes, a sober mentor, and exhort, manfully, others, to display that strenuous diligence of which he is incapable himself. He may be a critic, and from the chair of Aristarchus, descant upon any performance within the extensive range of polite literature. He may sometimes play with politics, edge tools as they are, and make himself and his readers merry at the expense of faction.50 Nevertheless, this reclamation of “American lounging” takes place through the same paradoxical constructions responsible in the first place for “American lounging's” annihilation as a positive property. The end result, once again, is a set of paired terms that cancel each other out. Page 78 → What the lounger department ultimately offers, then, is not precisely an attack on its British progenitors nor an attack on the domestic literary institutions in which its authors work, but rather a kind of zaniness for its own sake. Even as they begin as sites of cultural contestation at which perceived provincial realities are pitted against seemingly distant and romantic authorial existences, Dennie's Lounger essays finally annihilate this architecture, reveling instead in the production of a set of authorial figures notable for their sheer nonsensicality, their magical occupation of two antithetical positions at once, and their failure to conform to any familiar cultural landscapes, whether metropolitan or American. But it is precisely this nonsensicality, I would suggest, that marks Dennie's idle figures as part of what I identified in chapter 1 as a provincial fantasy of extreme authorial eccentricity, of an author so wild and antic that he fails to register as a plausible entity in the tangible world. Like the vernacular eccentric author figures elaborated by Fisher Ames and Edward Ingersoll, who were distinctive for their extra eccentricity, for their occupation of extraordinary and impossible realms, Dennie's Lounger personalities are notable not for their ability to unfold truths but for their pure out-landishness and, indeed, for their evaporation of the cultural positions that would have made the detection of “truths” a possibility. It is worth stressing the extent to which the Lounger personalities registered among Dennie's contemporaries as, in fact, peculiarly inane entities. Writing The Philadelphia Pursuits of Literature, a satire and critique of “The Philadelphia lounging scribbling crew”51 published in 1805, John Davis identifies “The Lounger” as the Port Folio's “best prose production,” but then goes on: “I look upon the Port Folio Lounger as the very worst periodical work ever published. Its personages have no likeness to any thing in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. Its characters bear no resemblance whatever to real life.”52 The eccentric author figures populating metropolitan literary scenes of the 1790s and early 1800s—whether D'Israeli's persecuted victims or Coleridge's Chatterton—were elaborated as verisimilar phenomena, intended to put readers in mind of the suffering and exclusion of real individuals. The whole construct of the provincial idle man, by contrast, with his lolling about and his yawning and his obsession with his cane or his diary, is elaborated not as an authorial subject nor even as a marginally realist narrative persona but as an outlandish, clownish character, something at which the contemporary literati are enjoined to laugh. Here again, instead of resembling either their metropolitan progenitors or a local stereotype—the Franklinian self-maker, the distinguished Page 79 →“man of letters”—Dennie's idle personalities resemble the extravagantly alienated, objectified author figures that, as we saw in chapter 1, were

fostered by the practices of reprinting, figures whose function is not the transmission of lifelike, dimensional authorial selves but of vaguely mythical “characters”—overtly fictional, bold, and implausible entities intended to titillate and entertain. I have suggested, then, that both in his Farrago and Lay Preacher essays and in his American Lounger department Dennie elaborated a set of narrative personae premised on his conception of the incompatibility of metropolitan and local cultural and aesthetic values. Rejecting Romantic theorizations of the eccentric, off-kilter nature of authorial activity, Dennie nevertheless developed his own “eccentric” author figures distinguished by their radically parodic, internally contradictory character and their exaggerated disconnection from all familiar and palpable realities—including of course the realities in which actual American men of letters worked. However, it was arguably precisely in their exaggerated unrealness and seeming lack of relationship to the realities of early national authorship that Dennie's idle personalities proved peculiarly amenable to Dennie's aggressive negotiation of the early nation's formative publishing and dissemination networks. Traditionally, the British North American literati had worked within the ideological and material apparatuses of civil society with its largely anonymous print sphere. Men and women gathered in private associations, at salons or tea tables or taverns, to compose, discuss, exchange, and banter about “letters.” By the 1780s, these associations (or at least those patronized by the wealthy and educated) often had a kind of companion purely virtual existence in the printed space of periodicals, with the difference that personal identities were effaced from these venues of textual presentation: famously, American periodicals were filled with anonymous and pseudonymous contributions. But it was precisely this configuration that Dennie, even as he exploited its potential, aimed to circumvent in the pursuit of commercial opportunities opening up in the 1790s as a booming economy and changes in the way books were owned and published made it possible for Dennie and his generation to imagine innovative new roles for authors.53 It is important to stress that these new positions had nothing to do with what literary historians have traditionally called the “professionalization” of authorship or with the commercialization of literary traffic. As I discussed in chapter 1, there was no centralized print or literary industry that could “employ” writers; nor was there a formal marketplace in which vernacular literary objects were being exchanged. Instead, the development Page 80 →of new positions for authors involved the building of financial and audience opportunities from inside existing partisan and sociable networks, as well as the massaging of new capital investment systems beginning to spring up around the domestic production of books and periodicals as luxury objects. And it was precisely here, I would suggest, where writers' business and financial prospects were potentially enhanced by personal charisma and a reputation for specialness, that confusion between the writer and his purely fictional identities could come into play as a kind of promotional effect and tool of advancement. Recent historians have, in fact, recognized Dennie as an important agent in a turn-of-the-century multiplication of possibilities for authors. In modern scholarship, Dennie is typically regarded as America's first “professional author,” by which scholars mean that he was alone among gentleman writers of his generation to find ways to make a comfortable living exclusively as an author and editor. Indeed, Dennie not only got by as a writer and editor but lived in relative affluence, renowned in turn-of-the-century cultural circles throughout the United States. Visiting Baltimore in 1802, Gertrude Meredith, one of Dennie's friends in Philadelphia and a contributor to the Lounger department, happily wrote back to her family, “Tell Joe…that this vast city rings with his glory.”54 Timothy Dwight called Dennie “the father of American belles lettres.” Modern scholars, including William Dowling and Edward Cahill, have characterized Dennie as a kind of ur-figure in the development of New England high culture.55 Dennie's success and influence, I will suggest, were inseparable from his seeming to vivify in his own person his extravagantly eccentric fictional characters. This vivification was something that Dennie vaguely cultivated, but it was also, more importantly, something that was assumed and projected onto him by his friends and readers. Thus even as Dennie often drew stark separations between the author and his fictions, the fictions were in fact central to his career as an author. Indeed, this centrality, I will suggest, was twofold. On the one hand, Dennie's fictitious self narrativized his highly innovative modus operandi as an author: Dennie's success was based not only on his exploitation of the popularity of his writings and authorial personalities but also on his shrewd negotiation and creation of liminal positions for authors within the traditional early national literary economy. In effect, Dennie's

career involved a kind of canny performance of his idle man's fictitious placelessness in the production of strikingly innovative, unexplored “places” for American authors in the material workings of early national cultural production. Page 81 →At the same time, evidence suggests that Dennie's ability to actualize this placelessness was never far removed from a rudimentary celebrity in which Dennie featured for audiences—and indeed even for friends—as the type of his placeless and paradoxical fictional narrators. In the remainder of this chapter, then, I look first at Dennie's exploitation of liminal and unorthodox opportunities for authors within the highly constrained and primitive environment of early national cultural production. In contrast to his fictional characters and what became his reputation, Dennie's exploitation of these opportunities, I underline, was intensely pragmatic and even mercenary. Dennie dreamed of authorship not as an alternative to more orthodox pursuits but as a site of admixture where his personal passions—not only belles lettres but money, professional sheen, and political and social status—could happily commingle in the production of what he liked to call “fortune and fame.” I then look at the extent to which Dennie's celebrity, even as it narrativized and helped in the fulfillment of these hybridic and unorthodox forms of success, obsessively figured Dennie as the incarnation of his eccentric fictional characters—characters distinguished by their magical escape of positive materialities and their foiling of success and achievement. Dennie was instrumental in forming new roles for early national authors, in other words, precisely by seeming to exist in some strange zone beyond palpable early national social and cultural spaces.

“Vending the Fruits of the Mind” The precise nature of Dennie's manipulation of early American publishing economies is perhaps best understood through his conceptualization of authorship not just as an ancillary pursuit of America's professional and elite classes but as an instrument of wealth acquisition that could replace conventional professional upward mobility. Indeed, in an important sense, Dennie's concoction of the “industrious idler” metaphorized his ongoing and highly unconventional attempts to bring his “idle” pursuits (creative writing) into line with the values of industriousness and the rewards of economic achievement associated with the men of his class and generation. Born into Boston's merchant aristocracy, Dennie was educated at Harvard and, like many young men of his class and generation, set up in the law. There were several factors in Dennie's life that made the legal profession unpalatable to him. His chronic bad health and his short attention span were probably first among these, but also responsible were Page 82 →his family's significant financial setbacks, the result of his father's bouts of madness. As Dennie wrote to his mother in 1795, “Though my Father gave me a Law education, still neither his situation nor my reasonable wishes allowed more—But a Law Library[,] a house and a capital of 1 or 200 pounds are essential to that degree of wealth & eminence at the bar which it is my first ambition to maintain.”56 Dennie struggled for a while as a lawyer, setting up practice in the town of Walpole, New Hampshire, but at some point in 1796 or 1797 he took the unorthodox step of abandoning the law to pursue writing and editing exclusively. In Dennie's mind, vocational authorship and editing were conceived as instruments in the revival of the fortunes of Dennie's family. In letters to his mother written while he was still a lawyer, he begged his family not to “acrimoniously censure those Dispositions which Nature has given me. They must reflect that many of my foibles low from physical sources…. That to be uniformly plodding prudent & sedate requires nerves less irritable, a heart less palpitating and a Fancy, less excursive, than mine.”57 But while Dennie announced that his talents were all of the “superficial” variety, he also devised the idea that superficiality was a “useful” attribute if properly exploited.58 In some of his earliest ruminations on vocational authorship, Dennie depicts authorship not as a rejection of the law but as a canny and potentially more profitable alternative to it—at the very least “a useful Stepping Stone to…professional success.”59 Writing his mother during his brief return to Boston in 1795, Dennie informed her, “My grand object in visiting this metropolis was money. The ways & means were authorship.” Dennie believed that authorship would “enable me to pursue my profession [the law] with every advantage that property can give…. Believe me, my dear Mamma, it leads to property, it leads to political[,] to my legal & and to my literary eminence.”60 Dennie later assured his mother that literature would be the making of “my fortune and my fame.”61

One of Dennie's more innovative strategies in his pursuit of “fortune” lay in taking advantage of an emerging provincial economy in book manufacture to further his career as a belletrist and editor. In the 1790s, the unique absence of intellectual property ownership in the United States for texts by nonresident authors was making book publishing into a potentially highly lucrative entrepreneurial venture. In Rosalind Remer's words, “Publishing a book was in some ways analogous to the land speculation of the 1790s, and the new publishers eagerly sought out appropriate titles on which to risk capital.”62 William J. Gilmore estimates that at the turn of the century, real and personal property totaling $1,651 indicated Page 83 →middle-class prosperity.63 It was not unusual for a capitalist publisher to aim for profits of $1,000 per edition of a given book.64 Indeed, to a large extent, publishing in the 1790s resembled independent film-making today, in which an artistic or pedagogical commodity that is wildly expensive to produce attracts financiers who invest in its manufacture, gambling on its hitting big with distributors and worldwide audiences. American writers, not surprisingly, were readily drawn into this game. Some, like Joel Barlow, spent immense amounts of money on the production of volumes that were clearly meant to be sold as high-end luxury items on the Anglo-American market. For a 450-page quarto edition of his poem The Columbiad, which came out in 1807, Joel Barlow, who had made a fortune as a land agent in Girondist France, invested £1,200 (over $3,000) in the book's twelve engraved plates alone.65 Barlow financed the production of his volume on his own, but the other option was for authors to finance via partnerships with printers or by collecting subscribers. The expectations of profits in this climate could be extremely high. Charles Brockden Brown calculated what he might make on his Monthly Magazine: Four hundred subscribers will repay the annual expense of sixteen hundred dollars. As soon as this number is obtained, the printers will begin and trust to the punctual payment of these for reimbursement. All above four hundred will be clear profit to me; one thousand subscribers will produce four thousand five hundred dollars and deducting the annual expense will leave two thousand seven hundred.66 In most cases, these extravagant expectations were not met. However, there were a few exceptions. The biographer of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., the poet and son of the Boston patriot, reports that for his “Invention of Letters” (1795) Paine “received fifteen hundred dollars, exclusive of expense; and twelve hundred dollars profit, by the sale of his ‘Ruling Passion’” (1797). Paine's song, “Adams and Liberty” (1798), “yielded him a profit of about seven hundred and fifty dollars.”67 In any case, we can speculate that the impact of capitalist activity in publishing during this era lay not just in its actual returns but in its possibilities: it contributed to an atmosphere in which books and other literary materials being produced in the United States, including materials by U.S. authors, could suddenly be related in the public mind to large amounts of money. It was precisely this climate that both energized Dennie and made it possible for him, despite his personal lack of capital, to find partners and investors on the basis of the name he had made for himself as an essayist. Page 84 →While staying in Boston in 1795, for example, Dennie arranged with a printer to furnish Farrago and Colon and Spondee essays, the latter coauthored with his friend Royall Tyler, for a new periodical, The Tablet, which he helped to devise. Dennie's literary renown and the capitalistic climate in Boston were such that Dennie's share of the profits for these essays alone (that is, he was not obliged to invest capital or do any editorial work) was £150. 68 While not as grandiose as some of the figures quoted above, this £150 is put into perspective if we consider Dennie's earning potential in the professions. When he started in the law in 1793, clerking and practicing in country villages in New Hampshire, for example, Dennie was earning about one dollar for each day he pled a case.69 Shortly afterward he was offered £80 per annum and the profit of glebe lands to be minister of a church in Claremont, an offer countered by the Church of St. John's at Portsmouth, which promised £200 per annum. 70 It is uncertain whether Dennie collected anything on the Tablet venture, for his letters to his mother report that The Tablet shortly went under. Nevertheless, Dennie's future entrepreneurial partnerships would pay off in more substantial results. In 1796, after Dennie had set up his legal practice in Walpole, he contracted with printer David Carlisle of that village to take on the editorship of what at that time was a small country sheet, New Hampshire Journal; or, The Farmer's Weekly Museum. It was Dennie's essays, figured as “useful” and linked to acquisitiveness, that lured

Carlisle into a partnership. In another letter to his mother, Dennie recounted his calculations: “On the road I formed that plan, which I have since realized, and which has attached some success. I determined by the agency of my pen to convince [Carlisle] that I could be useful, and then, my humble knowledge of human nature taught me, I was sure he would encourage me, when his own Interest was the Prompter. Without saying a syllable, respecting a stipend, I wrote, and gave him an Essay on ‘Wine & New Wine,’ and called it the ‘Lay Preacher.’…Persevering in this and various other tracks of newspaper composition, at the expiration of 6 months, my Printer made me pecuniary proposals, which I accepted.”71 Even allowing for the notorious difficulty of collecting on subscriptions, in 1796 Dennie was supplementing his lawyer's income of £90 per annum with £110 per annum earned from his partnership with Carlisle. 72 Dennie went on to transform the Farmer's Weekly Museum from an obscure country paper into one of the most highly regarded periodicals of its day, famous for its combination of aggressive Federalist politics and exemplary literary content. Celebrated as “the firebrand of Walpole,” Page 85 →Dennie capitalized on his reputation as a “literary and political herald” and on the money he was making to finance the publication of the most widely praised of his Farmer's Museum's essay series, the Lay Preacher, in a volume, issued in 1796 and titled The Lay Preacher, or Short Sermons for Idle Readers?73 Davis, writing in 1803, called it “the most popular work on the American continent.”74 By the late 1790s, when Dennie had dropped all pretense to carrying on a legal practice, his mounting fame and increasingly lustrous social and political connections, the result of his work in the Museum, were such that in 1799 alone he was offered a salary of $800 per annum plus a percentage of all new subscriptions to edit the Gazette of the United States and a salary of $1,200 per annum to edit the Boston Independent Chronicle, both of which offers he turned down to accept the more prestigious appointment as private secretary to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, at a salary of $1,000.75 With this appointment terminated upon Pickering's dismissal, Dennie launched into yet another entrepreneurial venture: a new journal, sold by subscription and envisioned as a luxury item and the most intellectually sophisticated weekly ever published in the United States, The Port Folio. Figures are not available for Dennie's earnings as editor of the Port Folio, which he launched in Philadelphia in 1801, but Dennie's biographer Harold Milton Ellis suggests that toward the end of his career Dennie was probably making something comparable to the $2,500 a year apportioned to Nicholas Biddle when he took over editorship of The Port Folio upon Dennie's death in 1812. But in addition to exploiting new possibilities for books and periodicals as objects of entrepreneurial investment, Dennie also engaged in the highly innovative manipulation of traditional networks of sociability and patronage. Indeed, we can speculate that one of the reasons for the relative stability of Dennie's career as an author and editor, as against the careers of his contemporaries who likewise abandoned the law to attempt a living in literature, most prominently Charles Brockden Brown and Robert Treat Paine, Jr., is that Dennie did not rely strictly on the risky economies of book publishing for his advancement but rather forged alliances between the new commerce in printed texts and the old conventions of sociability and patronage. As Catherine Kaplan argues in her wonderfully detailed and perceptive account of Dennie's work on The Farmer's Museum in Walpole the mid-1790s, one of the reasons that Dennie was able to flourish is that he called upon the informal literary circuits created by the Northeast's flourishing private and professional societies to put together what was traditionally lacking in provincial cultural Page 86 →environs: a broad audience for local literary and entertainment printed texts. Unable to afford a legal practice in Boston, Dennie had traveled in 1796 to the New England hinterlands, where “the commercialization of the countryside,” to use David Jaffe's words, was creating a demand for lawyers.76 Setting up shop in Walpole, New Hampshire, Dennie, who was part of a wave of young men moving to the upper Connecticut River to advance legal careers, found himself the member of a diverse, geographically dispersed but like-minded group of lawyers interacting regularly on a professional and social basis. One of Dennie's friends and colleagues, Jeremiah Mason, recalled: “A set of young men, mostly of the legal profession, extending from Greenfield, in Massachusetts, to Windsor, in Vermont, a distance of fifty or sixty miles, were much in the habit of familiar intercourse for the sake of amusement and recreation…. They occasionally met at a village tavern, but more commonly at the sessions of the courts.”77 It was precisely this community of literate young lawyers that

became the basis of Dennie's success with the Museum. As Kaplan underlines, Dennie understood the untapped potential of these social and professional circuits when it came to the production of both authors and readerships for American periodicals. In Kaplan's words: The Museum succeeded not only because Dennie appealed to readers with his lively writing but also because he understood the powers of the nation's many amateur literati. Very early in his time in Walpole, Dennie began to piece together a creative and circulative network. That network included all those who read, wrote for, found subscriptions or extracted, or even quoted the Museum. Their efforts brought Dennie readers, and some of those readers joined the ranks of those who wrote for and informally marketed the Museum. Both product and process, the Museum fed cultural hunger as it sated it and built the network that helped to make it.78 In other words, Dennie was unique among his contemporaries to understand and take advantage of the viral logic that was internal to networks based on sociability and personal knowledge. The more writers contributed to the Museum, the more these writers became readers themselves or promoted the magazine among their family and friends. And the more new readers the Museum gathered, the more likely were other magazines in the Northeast to copy from its pages and the more the Page 87 →fame of Dennie and his magazine were spread and so the more subscribers Dennie was able to gather. In addition to manipulating conventional sociable networks, Dennie also took advantage of the Federalist party's network of wealthy families. Indeed, several of Dennie's letters suggest that for him the appeal of Federalism lay not just in its doctrines and its upper-class sheen but in its ready-made pool of potential subscribers, investors, and patrons. Moreover, Dennie's Federalism, like his exploitation of sociable networks, seems to have acted as ballast to what otherwise threatened to become a downwardly mobile career as a low-rent “scribbler” or journalist. In the same letter to his mother that extravagantly equates “authorship” and “money,” Dennie describes the giddy conflation of elite fashion and Federalist political principles that was animating Boston's literary scene in 1795 and that suddenly struck Dennie as a source of “wealth.” I found that my reputation as a sprightly writer and enlisted on the side of government had reached this place. I was canvassed by most of those who possessed the greatest genius, wealth & power. The Gay were pleased by the vivacity & originality of the Farrago. The aristocracy were pleased that the satire of Colon & Spondee was levelled against the foes of Federalism. Such is the state of parties here that this apparently trivial circumstance has procured me a host of friends, not lip service friends but such as will render me pecuniary service.79 In another letter to his mother, written in 1799 when he was being courted by Federalist newspapers and journals all over the Northeast, Dennie remarked, “My attention to political topics and my known zeal for administration have conspired to advance my hopes for fame and fortune.”80 It was famously the patronage of powerful young men in the Federalist party, including John Quincy and Thomas Boylston Adams, that helped Dennie launch the Port Folio in 1801 and that helped to keep him ensconced among the elite. On the one hand, Dennie's cultivation of this liminal position between coterie and proto-commercial structures was tied to his conscious cultivation of correspondences between himself and the idle characters that were beloved by his readers. Indeed, as one of relatively few early national writers involved in the selling of his own books and periodicals as investments and high-priced commodities, Dennie had a powerful incentive to draw attention to himself as the entity familiar to readers from his fictions. In order to generate renown, attract audiences, and lure investors Page 88 →to his projects, Dennie perforce relied upon a kind of brand name, identifying himself, according to the conventions of pseudonymous publication, as the Farrago or the Lay Preacher. In his “Prospectus” for the Port Folio, for example, Dennie begins by identifying himself as the “conductor of a Lay Preacher's gazette” who was wont to indulge in “the tranquil pleasures of a studious life.”81 Nevertheless, Dennie consistently balanced this fanciful “idle” identity with a pragmatic and even mercenary

editorial persona. That is, even as Dennie exploited the allure of his fictional characters and writing, he not only drew constant attention to the divide between his fictitious and real selves but also drew constant attention to his frequently cynical alliance with an entirely tangible world of economic and social interest. Writing to Royall Tyler in 1795 to complain of the failure of The Tablet, Dennie lamented with a certain self-humor the lack of place in the United States for people like himself: “I think it hard, Royall, when I am actually industrious & disposed to exercise regularly peculiar talents, that I can not obtain bread and wine.”82 It was accordingly this picture of the belletrist as an industrious, dedicated worker in his own “peculiar” field that Dennie openly promoted in his editorial remarks to the public, not just through his constant references to the work he put into all of his designs but also to the money he hoped to make by them. In his introductory remarks to The Farmer's Museum, for example, Dennie, speaking in the third person, announces to his public: the editor “is convinced that the industry of Franklin is a better auxiliary to an editor, than even that philosopher's abilities. Unremitting industry he pledges himself to manifest.”83 Depicting himself as a man of industry and enterprise, Dennie justified his insertion of himself into systems of exchange, advertised in his constant references to money and remuneration. To enjoy the hard-earned fruits of his “peculiar talents,” Dennie implies, readers must be willing to pay. Because Dennie received part of the profits on subscriptions, Dennie's editorial comments in both The Farmer's Museum and The Port Folio are always harping at readers to pay up. Readers must recognize, he says in The Port Folio, that literature is not a hobby for him but a “business.” In The Farmer's Museum, he tells his audience, “Like every industrious workman, he [the editor] has a right to bread, and sometimes, to write ‘all cheerily,’ he ought to have wine. The incumbrance of excessive wealth is scarcely to be dreaded by an author, but for the decent recompense of literary labor he has an importunate claim.”84 In his “Prospectus” for the Port Folio, a journal that, as I've mentioned, Page 89 →was offered as a luxury commodity, Dennie reminds readers that authors should be recompensed in proportion to the loftiness of their endeavors. “Literary industry, usefully employed” he announces, “has a sort of draught upon the bank of Opulence, and has the right of entry into the mansion of every Maecenas.” “[L]et no writers be rashly censured,” he adds, “for vending the fruits of the mind.” He then references the fantastical sums being bandied about in entrepreneurial lore, “what an ancient author, who well knew the value of literary service, calls the ‘quiddam honorarium,’ the generous stipend for mental efforts, not the paltry wages of a vulgar hireling.” It is Dennie's opinion that belles lettres produced by “industrious and high minded [men]” deserve lofty remuneration, and by way of precedent he cites authors who, although wealthy themselves, “have thought it debasement to make Literature common and cheap. The affluent lord LYTTLETON,” Dennie points out, “made his history of Henry II a book-sellers [ sic] property at the price of three thousand pounds; and Gibbon and Robertson, and Blair, and Sir William Jones sold their manuscripts for sums, which the generosity of Britain did not scruple to pay, nor the pride of authorship blush to receive.”85 Moreover, Dennie's constant references to work and money did not constitute a subtext of his reputation, something that contemporaries overlooked in their general picture of him. On the contrary, contemporaries were keenly aware of Dennie's mercenary ambitions. As Davis put it in The Philadelphia Pursuits of Literature: “Such is our Dennie! high exalted name, / Eager alike for dollars and for fame.”86 Nevertheless, almost without exception, Dennie's contemporaries conceptualized him as a figure who lay outside of the seemingly rational and transparent economic and social systems he clearly exploited, for Dennie's contemporaries imagined him not as a stereotypical “man of letters” nor as a self-maker on the model of Franklin, but as a fantastical incarnation of his imaginary figures. In the present discussion I've chosen to look at Dennie's career before looking at the peculiar character of his fame, but in an important sense this obscures what seems to have been the dynamic and interactive relationship between his career and his reputation. To be sure, Dennie did not function in an environment that would make it easy to discover direct correspondences between his success and his reputation as the embodiment of his outlandish idle characters: anonymous publication, the absence of a marketplace in which reputation could be translated into sales, and the lack of a system of reviewing that focused on American literary productions all militate Page 90 →against our ability to detect these causal relationships. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that Dennie functioned in his little world as a rudimentary celebrity, a figure

whose success was inseparable from a fantasized confusion between his veridical self and the fictional personalities through which his readers encountered him. Here again, it is important to specify that Dennie did not occupy the kind of environment associated with modern celebrity. The world of early national literature was largely bereft of the mediating phenomena that in the opinion of most scholars make celebrity possible—pictorial likenesses, material artifacts, biographical information, and all the complex print and oral structures facilitating what Chris Rojek has called parasocial interaction—that is, “relations of intimacy constructed through the mass media.”87 However, celebrity, as Rojek underlines, is not necessarily a mass media phenomenon, but an instance of displaced religious feeling, in which the magic traditionally belonging to gods and other supernatural beings comes to inhabit a charismatic mortal—in this case, I would suggest, mortals not necessarily inherently charismatic but made so through their susceptibility to confusion with what Dennie himself understood were the “enchantments” of the fictional scene and its characters.88 Accordingly, if the causal relationships between Dennie's reputation and his achievements are not precisely available in transparently documented form, they are available as an underlying theme of his fame, which stages the perverse logic of Dennie's success. The relationship between Dennie's career, in all its pragmatic dimensions, and his ability to act as an object of fantasy for his audiences, is revealed in negative form in the “legends” that accumulated around his person, for Dennie invariably features in these not just as an idle man, but as a disruptive, mischievous, and often textual figure engaged in the ruin of positive productivity. In this sense, Dennie is imagined as continuous with the fictional scenes he authors. Like the Lounger characters whose acts of wild selfdecimation help sell the Port Folio, the legendary Dennie is fantasized as succeeding (as an author, entertainer, purveyor of enchantments) in proportion to his charming and rather magical foiling of himself as an enterprising and productive entity. Inseparable from Dennie, by extension, Dennie's eccentric and counterproductive fictional figures, for all their zaniness and abstraction from the quotidian circumstances of early national literary and publishing environments, came to have an eerie substance in the pragmatic and material structures of Dennie's career. Page 91 →

“No Resemblance Whatever to Real Life” The idea that Dennie was a contrary, unaccountable figure is nowhere more amply relayed than in the stories about Dennie that circulated in early national learning and entertainment milieus both during his lifetime and after his death. It is important to keep in mind when considering these materials that editing a large weekly miscellany singlehandedly, which Dennie did in the case of both the Farmer's Museum and the Port Folio, was a significant undertaking that could hardly have afforded a lot of time for relaxation; and in fact not only Dennie's editorial comments but his private correspondence constantly mention his labors.89 Writing to his parents in 1802 while he was editor of the Port Folio, Dennie describes himself as “obliged to drudge in literature.” Explaining why he doesn't write more often, he goes on, “When I have read and written enough for the subsistence of the passing day, and have ended honest labour by the consciousness of eating independent bread, I am then, like other tired mortals, happy to escape from care and loiter, or sleep as humour or fatigue may dictate.”90 In another letter the following year, he reports “My Literary labours are so assiduous, the necessity of my affairs, and the dictates of my high and impetuous Spirit urge me to such continued exertion, I have no leisure to correspond often.”91 Yet in Dennie lore, Dennie features as a protean, trickster-like figure engaged in forms of play and negligence that constantly defeat programs of work and personal application. It is important to note that the narratives involving Dennie tend not to be part of a formal historical record. Many of them take the form of remembrances, typically included in loose, informal biographical and autobiographical reminiscences about living in the good old days of the 1790s and early 1800s. In many cases, these narratives clearly originate in old-boy legend: elderly men, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, recall their sunny, boisterous days at Harvard or in rural New England or Federal-era Philadelphia, offering thumbnail sketches of their friends. In other cases, the stories about Dennie appear to have their source in little more than late eighteenth-century rumor or local myth and were only formally recorded decades later as nineteenth-century American writers and publishers started putting together histories of American literature. However, it is precisely in their informal, urban-myth quality that these narratives capture a

kind of fantasy Dennie, registering popular fantasy and audience desire in a way that both incorporates and transcends Dennie's Page 92 →manipulation of his public persona. Whereas Dennie insists upon the American author as representative of values of industry and productivity, the fables about him suggest the other side of this imperative: to realize his industrious and productive self, the American author must fulfill his readers' fantasies of the eccentric, disobedient “scribbler” who subverts programs of industry and utility. In numerous anecdotes, for example, Dennie features as the foil of duty and service as embodied in the legal profession. In an extensive anecdote penned by Dennie's good friend and collaborator Royall Tyler and published in The New England Galaxy in 1818, we hear about the young Dennie's first day in court. Hired to defend an impoverished family of tenants from the prospect of eviction, Dennie argues passionately in their favor, using all of his considerable literary weapons to conjure the vivid picture of the family's suffering. Tyler recalls: We saw the hapless husband “plodding his weary way” through the chill blasts of a winter storm, and seeking through the drifting snow his log cottage, beneath the craggy side of an abrupt precipice; “the taper's solitary ray” appears—vanishes—and again lights up hope in his heart—the door opens—children run to lisp their sire's return and climb his knees the envied kiss to share—the busy housewife prepares the frugal repast…. the family bible is opened—the psalm is sung…. But scarcely does the incense of prayer ascend from that golden censer, a good man's heart, when an appalling knock is heard; the wooden latch is broken, the door is widely thrown open—Enter the bailiff, “down whose hard, unmeaning face ne'er stole the pitying tear.” As Dennie concludes, the courtroom sits spellbound, but then the judge, an unlettered farmer, calls out in complete mystification, “I can't say that I know for sartin what the young gentleman would be at” and exhorts Dennie to state the case plainly “without all this larry cum lurry.” Filled with outrage at this defeat of linguistic beauty by the prosaic forces of law and democracy, Dennie scoops up his hat and gloves and, casting “a look of ineffable contempt upon the Baeotian magistrate,” stalks out of the courtroom, declaring his determination never to practice law again.92 In other accounts, many of them involving the law or professions, Dennie features even more emphatically as a figure wholly given over to literature and thus inimical to rational, practical life and its mandates of enterprise and productivity. In the account of Josiah Quincy, one of Dennie's classmates at Harvard, we hear of Dennie's days as a lawyer: “The Page 93 →story goes that he opened an office in Charlestown, N.H., ready for the entertainment of clients. One day one strayed in, but the interruption he caused to the leisure and favorite occupations of his counsel learned in the law was so great, that a repetition of the annoyance was carefully guarded against. Mr. Dennie thenceforward kept his office-door locked on the inside, and bade defiance to the busy world without.”93 Along much the same lines, Jeremiah Mason recalled how Dennie's “legal knowledge consisted wholly in a choice selection of quaint, obsolete and queer phrases from ‘Plowden's Commentaries,’ the only law book he had ever read with any attention, and this was read for the sole purpose of treasuring up in his memory these quaint phrases. These he often repeated in ridicule of the law, to the great amusement of his auditors.” Mason goes on to tell the story of Dennie's appointment as private secretary to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, relating how Dennie, possessed by his “evil genius,” “procrastination,” kept putting off his acceptance of the post and so ultimately lost the job.94 It should be noted that in the real world Dennie did not lose this post; he was Pickering's private secretary in 1799. It is significant, however, that in Mason's memory he did. In his insistence upon Dennie as a quaint and useless figure of “procrastination,” Mason contributes to the larger and presumably more entertaining and engaging fantasy of Dennie's disobedience and escape from ordinary order and system. Foiling duty and productivity in the realms of the law, Dennie is elsewhere pictured foiling the cause of literary production as well. Indeed, the investment of Dennie's contemporaries in a fantasy of authorial truancy, in which the author categorically repels or escapes all forms of industry and system, is nowhere more amply manifested than in the idea that, like the American Lounger, Dennie's laziness foils the very thing that makes him famous and successful, sabotaging his productive creation of literature. In this scenario, Dennie achieves an ultimate eccentricity by becoming interchangeable with the idle, eccentric characters that earn him a living. In an extended remembrance of Dennie penned by Joseph T. Buckingham, for example, Dennie features as a rather dazzling

figure imprecisely separated (if separated at all) from his Lay Preacher and Farrago personae. In part, Buckingham's vision of Dennie is the product of the vast gulf between them. Indentured to a hard-pressed farming family at the age of six, Buckingham, an ambitious lad of sixteen, had worked his way up to printer's devil in the shop of David Carlisle in Walpole in the mid-1790s and was regularly sent to fetch copy from Dennie for the Farmer's Museum. But while Buckingham occupied a Page 94 →social sphere utterly remote from Dennie's, in Buckingham's admiring, even adoring, account, Dennie not only personifies a distant aristocratic glamour, but also lives the life depicted in his fictional Lay Preacher essays, a life that by definition is eccentric—indeed, impossible and magical—lying entirely beyond the real person's grasp and experience. With both humor and affection, Buckingham recalls how he would find Dennie, just like the Lay Preacher, still sleepily lounging in bed at late hours of the morning or else, like the idle man, happily ensconced of an afternoon among his friends at the local tavern. On one occasion, Buckingham hunts Dennie down at the tavern, but Dennie, invariably tardy when it comes to the production of copy, hasn't finished his essay yet. Unconcerned, Dennie laughingly hands pen and paper over to Royall Tyler, who quickly completes the piece for him.95 Fantasized here is not only Dennie's distance from the realms of mechanical labor, a distance that Buckingham implicitly enjoys vicariously, but also his distance from the realms of literary work and creation to which as a writer and editor he should properly belong. That Dennie occupies a world distinct from Buckingham's not just by virtue of rank and privilege but by virtue of a kind of unreality is perhaps best suggested by Buckingham's detailed account of the striking visual effect created by Dennie's person. Like other biographies and remembrances of the early and middle nineteenth century, Buckingham's account generally pays no attention to features of dress among the persons it recalls because dress was of course considered immaterial and ornamental when it came to describing the character of persons. The exception is the description of Dennie: I remember one delightful morning in May, he came into the office, dressed in a pea-green coat, white vest, nankin small-clothes, white silk stockings, and shoes, or pumps, fastened with silver buckles, which covered at least half the foot from the instep to the toe. His smallclothes were tied at the knees, with riband of the same color, in double bows, the ends reaching down to the ancles. He had just emerged from the barber's shop. His hair, in front, was well loaded with pomatum, frizzled, or craped, and powered; the ear-locks had undergone the same process; behind, his natural hair was augmented by the addition of a large queue, (called, vulgarly, the false tail,) which, enrolled in some yards of black ribband, reached half way down his back. Thus accommodated, the Lay Preacher stands before my mind's eye, as life-like and sprightly as if it were yesterday I saw the reality.96 Page 95 → All ornament and aesthetic contrivance, Dennie can figure for Buckingham as effectively all fiction, a magical, amorphous personification of the lay preachers, loungers, and idle men that so engage Buckingham as a reader. It is important to stress that in almost all of these accounts, Dennie's failure at various practical and professional pursuits, whether the law and government or editing and writing, is not a negative or melancholic occurrence but is directly proportional to his vast and wonderful power to entertain and beguile his friends and readers. Dennie's failure and disobedience, in other words, are themselves entertaining and thus inseparable from his popularity. Remarking upon Dennie's utter neglect of his legal duties, Josiah Quincy describes Dennie as one of the “most talented” and “uncommon” figures of his era: “Mr. Dennie was a most charming companion, brilliant in conversation, fertile in allusion and quotation, abounding in wit, quick at repartee, and of only too jovial a disposition.” A master of revelry, Dennie would lead “the lower of the youth of Boston” in festivities that would “reach far into the night.”97 Buckingham, as he chides Dennie for his dissipation, says that Dennie was not just the Museum's “responsible editor” but its “enlivening spirit, around which the others congregated, and to which they made their obeisance as the sheaves of Jacob's sons, of old, did to the sheaf of Joseph.” Dennie is “exotic” and “racy” and “genuine” and inhabits “the garden of genius.”98

In her account of the cultural contexts of the Museum, Kaplan underlines the extent to which the “critique of the world and the ostensible powers-that-be offered by Dennie and the Museum did not, it is important to recognize, require true alienation. On the contrary, as they participated in cultural circles, networks and projects, young Americans such as those who participated in the Farmer's Museum were in fact happy to use the developing commercial and partisan resources of the era to further their own ends (even if those ends included spreading their critique of the market's and partisanship's potentially paralyzing effects).”99 Accordingly, just as Dennie's own pictures of wandering students and useless loungers frequently contain structures of qualification that link these figures, even in satire, to programs of industry, the anecdotes about Dennie himself tend to contain devices that place Dennie in a position at once eccentric to the social order and yet somehow central and friendly to it as well. Nowhere is this companionability between eccentric author and the Page 96 →rational, ruling order he defies more succinctly set out than in a Dennie legend recorded in Rufus Griswold's 1844 Curiosities of American Literature. In this fable, which plays on the picture of Dennie as trickster, Dennie is traveling on the road and stops at an inn for the night. A shortage of rooms means that he has to share a room with staunch Puritan divine and president of Yale College, Dr. Timothy Dwight. Dwight doesn't know his roommate's name and in the course of genial conversation he asks if Dennie has ever heard of Joseph Dennie. Dwight praises this Joseph Dennie as the “Addison of the United States, the father of American Belles-Lettres,” but says that, alas, he has heard that this brilliant Dennie, a man of “such genius, fancy and feeling,” has “abandoned himself to the inebriating bowl, and to Bacchanalian revels.” Listening to this, Dennie lets the remark pass, but after a while he asks whether his companion has ever heard of Timothy Dwight. Dennie says that while there is much to admire about this great personage, he has heard that Dwight is “the greatest bigot and dogmatist of the age.” Greatly insulted, Timothy Dwight announces “I am Doctor Dwight, of whom you speak.” Dennie bursts into good-natured laughter and says “And I am Mr. Dennie of whom you spoke.”100 Far from instigating a rift between these two social categories—the trivial, eccentric scribbler with his inebriating bowl and the lofty New England dogmatist—Dennie's tricks prove the means of their happy conciliation. The two laugh uproariously and become such great friends that Dwight decides he must submit a piece to The Port Folio—a poem titled “The House of Sloth,” published in 1804, which plays on, as it discounts, the discrepancy between Dennie's airy lounging and what Vernon Louis Partington once called Dwight's “solid, old-fashioned Bible thumping.”101 Some version of these events of course probably occurred, but what is crucial to note here again is the fantasy of Dennie as a fantastical, liminal figure—traveling between places, indulging in his punch bowl and “revels,” playing pranks on the guardians of New England virtue—yet a figure that is nevertheless central to the larger, lofty cause of American literature as symbolized by the uniting of these two “fathers” of American letters and by the Port Folio itself. As this anecdote suggests, one of the most important things to emphasize about the idle selves that Dennie seems to embody is, as I have suggested, their odd positioning with respect to social and economic orthodoxy and their fundamentally apolitical status. In the British and European Romantic tradition, the autonomous genius was positioned, as we have seen, in an adversarial realm of exile and retirement, which was understood as antithetical to and often defiant of ordinary social, political, Page 97 →and economic relations. But the exaggeratedly eccentric author figures forged in the early American literary imaginary are so remote and fantastical that they do not occupy definable space at all, much less positive political positions. Brewed inside an elite American world of amusement and forged in concert with the values of the American work ethic, they are “outsider” figures who are also curiously “inside” parochial American literary production systems, never far from the world of gentlemanly sociability, of upstanding achievement, wealth acquisition, and political and national service they offer to defy. The degree to which Dennie's reputation as an idler infiltrated these pragmatic, material events, effectively intruding themselves as a ghostly energy in Dennie's progress, is suggested by the extent to which both Dennie's illustriousness and his failures were bound up with his seeming embodiment of his characters. On the one hand, evidence suggests that Dennie's fame and success were entirely permeated by his legendary “idleness.” In 1802, a year after Dennie launched the Port Folio, the young Washington Irving and his friends in New York began issuing the Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., a sheet that essentially copied Dennie's productions; indeed, Irving's “Jonathan Oldstyle” was named after Dennie's “Oliver Oldschool,” the fictional editor of the Port Folio. This debt to the Dennie persona intensified after Irving met Dennie in Philadelphia in 1807. Irving's persona,

Launcelot Langstaff, who presided over the pages of Salmagundi, was already a tribute to the Port Folio's American Lounger and to Dennie himself. But like so many of Dennie's fans and admirers, Irving was delighted to fancy a direct connection between Dennie and his idle personae. And presumably because the real-life Dennie in some sense existed for Irving in the same realm of enchantment and fictionality as his idle characters, Irving recycled Dennie back into fiction. When he returned to New York he adjusted Langstaff, who was in the first place inspired by Dennie's idle characters, in the real Dennie's image. (Dennie reputedly recognized himself in the portrait.)102 In this case, the entrepreneurial, veridical Dennie, the person who was receiving a portion of the profits from the publication of an expensive periodical, exists in an entirely convertible relationship with the characters responsible for his fame and thus, as all the legends about Dennie's mythic laziness suggest, in an entirely exterior relationship to the economic machinery he manipulates for his success. But the same was true for the less successful veridical Dennie: just as Dennie's idle characters are inseparable from his accomplishments, they were also seen as agents in his failures. Indeed, the degree to which Dennie's Page 98 →idle characters acted as an invisible energy in the material progress of his career is nowhere more amply illustrated than in their habit of seeming to lie at the heart of—and possibly literally bringing about—his missteps. In the early 1800s, when Dennie seems to have been involved in a number of schemes with publishers to bring out editions of books, their failure to appear was attributed to Dennie's “procrastination.” In Davis's satire, the Philadelphia Pursuits, Dennie, “a prodigy of genius, ” is figured, here again, as destructive of entrepreneurial productivity: “Procrastination's son! he trumps up lies / Of works to come that in the project dies.”103 In writing to a colleague about whether to renew Dennie's term of service as secretary to the secretary of state after Pickering had been dismissed from office, Pickering recommended that Dennie be given a miss: Dennie's “literary turn” and “ornamental” knowledge, Pickering said, in a way that clearly contrasted these to industriousness and application, “render his service as a clerk less productive than the labours of many dull men.”104 Here again, it may be that Dennie really was unproductive in his job as secretary, but as with the whole Dennie phenomenon these qualities are impossible to separate from the larger fantasy of Dennie's inveterate trickiness and delinquency. In Dennie's career, then, we can detect a rudimentary tendency, one that would be amplified in years to come. As these episodes attest, Dennie's idle characters, while being entirely exaggerated and unreal (indeed, even in the episodes that feature Dennie's failure, he is always fixed in the realm of the fantastical and the literary rather than in the realm, say, of the economic or political), were not simply abstract and figurative phenomena. Intimately entangled with Dennie himself, they exercised what was arguably a curious kind of power, not just over Dennie's dealings with his friends, audiences, financial partners, and patrons, but also, via these, over the general material machinery, the web of economic, infrastructural, and interpersonal relations comprising early nineteenth-century literary and entertainment production. Just as Dennie's idle characters are both radically extrinsic and yet internal to the landscapes of provincial society, Dennie himself, as their incarnation, turns out to occupy a curiously comparable position, at once alienated from a world of early national publishing innovation, fixed in a timeless, improbable realm of truancy, and working at its center as well. It is difficult to calculate how much Dennie's career, which spanned only a fifteen-year period between 1795 and 1810, mattered to the larger direction of American entertainment culture and production in the decades to come. Nevertheless, its conflation of material achievement Page 99 →and celebrated abstraction from material realities, its positioning of the author both at the center of the processes of literary and entertainment production and, phantasmatically, at the most extreme reaches of the familiar world, exemplifies a pattern that would be a signal feature of literary entertainment production systems in the decades to come.

The Eccentric Author and the Future of American Entertainment It is worth concluding this discussion of the early national idle man by noting the extent to which this figure flourished in American literature in the years following Dennie's death. Indeed, the proliferation of Byronic personalities and authorial self-postulates after 1815 was accompanied by and often strangely intermixed with the equal proliferation of the idle authorial characters that Dennie popularized and that were transmitted to the next generation of American readers primarily through Irving. Like Dennie's ludicrous loungers, Irving's Langstaff, a

figure in which he often collaborated with James Kirke Paulding, is an object of boisterous mockery, at once agitated and delayed, lolling in his “elbow chair” and “wrapped up in his flannel robe de chambre.”105 Not surprisingly, given Irving's success with these quaint personages in his initial papers, he retained his idle-man persona for the Sketch Book, whose early numbers were published in the United States in 1819. In the Sketch Book's introduction, “The Author's Account of Himself,” we hear that Irving has a “rambling propensity” and a “sauntering gaze”; his “idle humour has led [him] aside from the great objects studied by every regular traveller who would make a book.” Instead he follows “the bent of his vagrant inclinations.”106 Irving was, of course, a figure of enormous influence. The Sketch Book was a phenomenon, a critical and financial hit on both sides of the Atlantic.107 Internationally recognized, Irving instantly eclipsed Dennie as the new “father of American literature” and spawned a vast tribe of imitators and hopefuls. Accordingly, American literature from 1820 on is more full than ever of idle personalities, from Richard Henry Dana's periodical titled The Idle Man, which was published in Boston in 1820 and which featured a familiarly languid editor, to Nathaniel Parker Willis's idle men and “triflers,” who stood at the center of his immensely popular essays and poems from the late 1820s to the late 1840s (and which I examine at length in chapter 4), to Donald Grant Mitchell's “idle bachelors,” the stars of best-selling books of sketches in the 1850s, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Page 100 →“idle bachelor” in The Blithedale Romance (1852). That these figures stood on the same ground as more familiar eccentric and alienated author types is suggested not only by the extent to which authorial “idleness” after about 1814 came to be associated quite literally with Byron and his Hours of Idleness, but also by American authors' tendency to blend and confuse the two. Apart from refurbishing Dennie's peculiar brand of idleness, Irving, for example, participated in the ongoing reproduction of a set of Chattertonian characters, figures taken out of the D'Israeli catalog. In the early 1820s, Irving consolidated his success with numerous tales of wandering authors who take the reader on a tour of transatlantic “starving artist” literary coteries—from the tale “The Poor-Devil Author,” about a New England bumpkin who travels to London convinced he will have English publishers fighting over his poems, to the tale “Buckthorne,” which features an “incorrigible laggard” who gives up his patrimony to live in a garret and pen verse.108 For all their dissimilarities, the idle man and the tortured genius clearly stood in an interchangeable relationship in the minds of contemporaries, contributing mutually to a larger fantasy of authorial estrangement and extraordinariness. It is important to stress, in addition, that like Dennie's idle men and like the “geniuses” imagined by the early national literati, these later eccentric author figures, even while they continued to interact with similar figures being produced on the opposite side of the Atlantic, retained their vernacular stamp. Like Dennie, Irving developed his idle man not as a figure indebted to metropolitan romanticism but as a figure caught up, rather like Dennie himself, in American folk mythologies. It is as an American lounger and as the repository and student of New York's history and legends, that the Sketch Book persona famously travels through and comments upon European and English scenes. In both this chapter and chapter 1, I have discussed the extent to which these vernacular eccentric author figures were figures of excess and extremity, meant to be taken as sites of drama, comedy, and entertainment. As we saw in the case of Dennie's idle man, this excess produces itself in the vernacular eccentric personality via the picture of his incompetence, not just in worldly and business affairs, as we might expect, but in all of his creative writing affairs as well: incapable of actually performing the thing (creative writing) that brings him into being, the eccentric author can feature as a figure of fantastical, improbable dimensions. Between 1810 and 1830, as vernacular eccentric author figures multiplied in American literary texts, they were, as subsequent chapters of this study will show, increasingly identified as figures of incompetence. Page 101 → In the decades before the industrialization of literature and entertainment in the 1830s, then, eccentric author figures, far from existing as foreign or incidental entities, crowded the American arts and entertainment landscape as indigenous and dynamically evolving phenomena. Particularly in the case of better-known authors like Irving, moreover, they continued to be confused with their authors, thus effectively continuing to act in the early national literary and entertainment landscape as vaguely embodied phenomena. What I will suggest in the following chapters, accordingly, is that these constructions, far from isolating authors in their own countercultural universe, acted as foundational structures in the evolution of America's modern literary and print entertainment systems.

Dennie's case suggests the potentially friendly relationship between idle personalities, which seem entirely abstracted from sites of business, industry, and monetary speculation, and the modern, proto-commercial careers of their authors: as themselves entertainment phenomena, they potentially sit at the heart of the author's success. But in addition to simply suggesting that idle and eccentric author personalities contributed to modernization by contributing to authors' sales and celebrity, I want to suggest in the next chapter that in the United States the whole idea of the author as an incompetent otherworldly creature came to inform and even determine intersubjective and economic relationships in the evolving literary and entertainment business in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. The logic behind this permeation lay in the eccentric author construct's highly unstable relationship to value. Traditional evaluations of the role played by eccentric author types in literary modernization emphasize this figure's association with cultural elitism and with the author's charismatic glamour and specialness. In this formulation, eccentric authors feature as dense repositories of what we might call visible value, whether in the form of celebrity and economic value (as in Byron's case) or of symbolic capital. But one of the things suggested by Dennie's case and made clear by the role of eccentric author figures in antebellum modernization, as I will show, is that eccentric authors could also be the repositories of an invisible and even negative value, in which their merely spectral constitution and resistance to accountability as agents in a real-world economy are their defining features. In this case, I will suggest, eccentric author personalities had value to the entertainment industry not just as objects of entertainment in their own right but as the avatars of authors who escaped and defeated economic logic and could thus be excluded from the economic apparatus (and increasingly Page 102 →the economic benefits) of the entertainment business. In England in the early and late Regency periods, eccentric author personalities were associated with political radicalism on the one hand and luxury commodity production and the world of “Fashion” on the other. In the United States, by contrast, eccentric author personalities, precisely because they were free of political meaning while conferring valueless status upon authors, proliferated around the new and burgeoning sites of American cheap mass entertainment manufacture and of an exploding vernacular magazine industry that relied on reprinted and amateur content. In this case, eccentric author personalities did not confer glamour, precisely, but a magical resistance to exchange value that became inseparable from the development of an invisible class of low-paid creative personnel, figures whose value to modern American entertainment systems would lie in their stubborn defiance of economic logic.

Page 103 →

{3} “Too Much above the Popular Level to Be Well Paid” Edgar Allan Poe, His Peers, and the Rewards of Genius The obituary notices that followed Edgar Allan Poe's sudden death in 1849 were unanimous in understanding Poe as a kind of Chatterton, an erratic, isolated “genius” victimized both by society and by the philistine audiences and publishers to which the genius, in this now-familiar narrative, was painfully subservient. Poe's onetime friend, Rufus Griswold, famously portrayed Poe as incapable of functioning within the “numberless complexities of the social world”: “He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers…; and all night, with drenched garments and arms wildly beating the wind and rain, he would speak as if to spirits that at such time only could be evoked by him from that Aidenn close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjected him.”1 Many, like Poe's friend and onetime employer, Nathaniel Parker Willis, felt that Poe's particular habits and talents as a writer were bound to be at odds with the demands of modern publishing: “Mr Poe wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid.”2 George Rex Graham, another employer, agreed: “[T]he very organization of such a mind as that of Poe—the very tension and tone of his exquisitely strung nerves—the passionate yearnings of his soul for the beautiful and true, utterly unfitted Page 104 →him for the rude jostlings and fierce competitorship of trade.”3 In a related vein, Henry Beck Hirst believed that it was Poe's constitutional inability to compromise himself as a critic that made him anathema to the literary status quo: “Poe wielded too formidable a pen; he was no time server, and as a critic he could not, and would not lie. [A]s a consequence, he made enemies,—like carping muck-worms in the barnyards, [sic] of literature, whose very odor offended the nostrils of his genius. But their number was legion—and he was only one.”4 Recent Poe scholarship has tried hard to underline the contructedness of these imputations, to present Poe as an entirely normal, productive agent in the hectic, but ultimately transparent and rational world of early capitalist literary production. Terence Whalen argues that “the particular style and substance of [Poe's] fiction cannot be attributed to the mysterious operations of an ‘overwrought nervous system.’ Far from being the wild offspring of an autonomous or diseased mind, Poe's tales were in many ways the rational products of social labor, imagined and executed in the workshop of American capitalism.”5 Nevertheless, the well-known details of Poe's life—the bouts of depression, alcoholism, the poverty, and even the claims of madness—suggest that the mythology of eccentric authorship acted in Poe's career as potentially something more than a merely formal device for selfpresentation. Rather, Poe's career, I would venture, which began with assertions of alienation and eccentricity in the late 1820s and ended with what seem to have been increasingly helpless performances of alienation and eccentricity in the 1840s as Poe became more involved in mass entertainment production, offers a peculiar window into the larger role that eccentric author mythology might have played in the modernization of American literary and entertainment production in the years between about 1830 and 1845. Almost without exception, literary historians see this role as negligible. Romantic authorship is understood as a reaction to rather than a formative element in American literature's modernization and industrialization. However, as chapters 1 and 2 have illustrated, eccentric author constructions not only predated the era of industrial literature and entertainment, saturating the American literary field well before they might have constituted a reaction to literature's industrialization and commercialization, but they also early on showed themselves to be amenable to the business models peculiar to an American publishing economy based largely on reprinting and periodical production. The seeming combination in Poe's career of an often frighteningly real romantic suffering and the “workshop of American capitalism” indicates Page 105 →what I would suggest was a mutually reinforcing relationship between narratives of authorial eccentricity and alienation, which enjoyed tremendous popularity among authors and audiences throughout the early years of the nineteenth century, particularly in the wake of Byron's celebrity in the early 1810s and 1820s, and the development of an intensely capitalistic and industrializing

American literature and entertainment business in the years between about 1835 and 1845. The key to understanding this reciprocal relationship lies in identifying not just the phantasmatic but also the literal powers of the eccentric author construction, its ability to correspond with and affect the material realities in which writers, editors, and publishers conducted their business. In chapter 2 I looked at the extent to which in the early 1800s and 1810s the vernacular image of the magical, idle author who escapes social and economic definition interacted positively with the entrepreneurial ambitions and achievements of writers. In this chapter, I want to focus on the extent to which the companion image of the tortured, persecuted, and self-destructive author, à la Chatterton or Byron, came to have a similarly productive, dynamic relationship to urban news and entertainment industries in the 1830s and 1840s. At one level, I will suggest, this relationship was indexical. In 1816, Edward Tyrell Channing had celebrated the American “genius” as a figure “unnatural, out of life,” a denizen of the “marvellous, wild, and unreal.”6 In the American news and entertainment business of the late 1820s and early 1830s, this Romantic ideal acquired a strikingly literal aspect: languages of alienation, poverty, and psychological instability described with growing accuracy the writers, printers, and editors who formed a pool of low-cost labor and human capital for a thriving domestic magazine and newspaper industry increasingly thirsty for cheap content. In another sense, languages of social and psychological dysfunction, precisely because they had indexical powers, were capable of mediating and even originating economic structures within an increasingly sophisticated production apparatus that relied for its self-perpetuation on what might be called the “eccentric” behavior of its creative personnel. By the late 1830s, the American news and entertainment industry not only contained but also profligately produced writers who fit the eccentric author mold and who represented within capitalistic publishing systems what I will suggest was a source of profit. In some cases, as in Poe's case, these eccentric author incarnations resembled the stereotypes produced in British and Continental culture of this period: Byron, for example, flourished as the patron saint of the cheap press. But in many cases, the “eccentricity” Page 106 →of any given writer in the American context was constituted not by an existing celebrity personality or by what Pierre Bourdieu calls an “inverse” lifestyle and identity7 but merely by the accumulation of a media-generated reputation for antic stunts, by the public demonstration of distinctive, erratic behaviors, or by the increasingly ready association of writers' personal characteristics with those of America's social others: with “lunatics,” “freaks,” paupers, and more generally with all of those who, for whatever reason, could not or would not participate in the pursuit of American dreams of worldly success and bourgeois happiness. In other words, eccentricity in this context came to denominate a writer who was in some way “ex-centric,” not central, who occupied, whether in reality or media-generated fantasy, a lunatic position with respect both to ordinary workaday American society and to the commercial literary and entertainment industry. But it was precisely this outsider position that constituted a position of positive productivity within a news and entertainment system that thrived on various kinds of outcasts and their counterproductive behaviors. In this chapter, then, I use Poe, the writer who came to signify the quintessential mad, alienated poet, as a touchstone to examine the dynamic interface between eccentric author personalities, which ballooned in popularity as authorial self-postulates in the early nineteenth century, and the beginnings of an industry in mass literature and entertainment. However, my aim is to look not just at Poe but at the careers and reputations of several writers who, like him, were involved in some way in the antebellum news and entertainment explosion. Looking at Poe as part of a group of writers allows us to see the extent to which his famous personal and professional peculiarities were not his alone. Similar patterns of anguish, addiction, obsession, and self-destruction mark the lives and careers of the editors and authors with whom he was involved. Far from being incidental or antithetical to the careers of antebellum writers, these personal attributes, I suggest, which so closely mimicked popular dramas of authorial distress, were both produced by and played dynamically with an expanding arts and entertainment production system that embraced and cultivated social and psychic dysfunction as a condition of authorial productivity and repute. Illustrated in Poe's vocational circumstances, by extension, is not the defiance of commerce by the energies of the eccentric “genius,” as Poe's contemporaries fantasized, nor still less the architecture of perfectly legible capitalist exchange, but rather the systemization of a mixture of properties both real and unreal—genius, eccentricity, poverty, rebelliousness, Page 107 →neurosis, even obsessive compulsive

disorder—as engines of commercial entertainment. In the first part of this chapter, accordingly, I look at the extent to which those features of the early American literary milieu that in the first place encouraged the proliferation of eccentric author depictions—the prominence of the reprint industry, a highly speculative, entrepreneurial publishing business, the dominance of amateur and private publication—constituted a kind of foundation for antebellum America's unusual, highly competitive, and intensely capitalistic news and entertainment business in the years between 1835 and 1845. I suggest that in the early years of the antebellum print explosion, reprinting, entrepreneurialism, and a thriving amateur culture ensured the growing accuracy of pictures of writers as worldly failures and maladjusted rebels—pictures that were readily reproduced as inseparable from writers' actual circumstances and achievements. I then look at how these eccentric author structures and their often frighteningly embodied form interacted with print's industrialization. Not only increasingly woven into the material realities in which early antebellum writers worked but also inseparable from audience fantasy, from entrepreneurial self-promotion, and from cheap, voluntary creative labor, eccentric author fables, as the careers of Poe and his contemporaries illustrate, interfaced themselves in dynamic and reciprocal ways with developing mass entertainment economies in the print boom years after 1835, determining that authors perform and even internalize as principles of behavior the eccentric authorial characteristics generated in a milieu in which crazed poets and tortured geniuses were ultimately good for business.

The Industrial Garret In the 1820s and 1830s, the international fame and fabulous wealth not just of Byron but of Walter Scott and Bulwer-Lytton and even such American authors as Washington Irving made authorship a potentially dazzling career, the equivalent of becoming a music superstar or making it big in Hollywood today. In the United States these giddy possibilities seemed especially ripe for realization. Throughout the 1830s and early 1840s, American publishing went through an unprecedented boom. New paper and print technologies that allowed production on a mass scale, expanding transportation networks across the Northeast, ballooning constituencies of middle- and lower-class readers, falling prices for books and periodicals, and a bigger-than-ever demand for reprints contributed Page 108 →to a massive expansion of the U.S. print industry.8 Between the 1820s and 1840s, editorial and publishing enterprises in urban centers like New York and Boston proliferated by the hundreds.9 More especially for our purposes here, the 1830s and 1840s saw explosive growth in the market for print-based diversion that was penned by local writers and that appealed specifically to local audiences: miscellanies, reviews, novels, gift books, almanacs, penny papers, story papers, pamphlets. In the 1810s, few educated Americans considered authorship as a plausible profession or career. By the early 1830s, American writers, who were of course the only ones capable of creating all this “content,” were in great demand, and hundreds of individuals, lured by promises of glamour and riches, abandoned the standard learned professions and printing trades to work in the burgeoning fields of literature, news, and entertainment production. However, while huge fortunes were made in the entertainment and sensational news business in the 1830s and 1840s, several factors, including the ongoing vigor of the reprint industry, the continued dominance of structures of sociability and amateurism, and a striking inflation of the entrepreneurial activity that had characterized American book and periodical publishing since the 1790s, ensured that as a general rule local writers, instead of profiting from this growing demand for writerly wares, fell into positions of economic and social marginality. In conventional histories of the antebellum publishing scene, the industrialization of literature is characterized as a massive, tectonic shift—part of the market “revolution,” to use Charles Sellers's famous phrase—that suddenly displaced traditional cultural practices and belief structures.10 But in fact a closer look at the publishing environment from the 1820s to the early 1840s suggests that these changes often represented an intensification or enlargement of existing tendencies in ways that uncannily facilitated, as they interacted with, images of the writer as a maladjusted and alienated character. Most familiarly, as writers of this era never tired of pointing out, America's unchanged intellectual property regimes meant that throughout the era of the print explosion U.S. publishers continued to favor the reprinting of works by nonresident authors. Like its earlier counterparts, the literary and entertainment industry of the 1830s

and early 1840s was dominated by a highly competitive reprint trade that continued to determine relations between local authors and publishers. Unlike their British counterparts, who served and benefited from Britain's powerful publishing monopolies, American authors of literary books continued Page 109 →overwhelmingly to act as publishers and investors of capital in their own right.11 The rewards for authors who could afford to invest in book publication could be extraordinary. William Charvat calculates that in 1819 and 1820, Irving saw a profit of about $10,000 on American sales of The Sketch Book.12 By the mid-1840s, the bottom had fallen out of the market that afforded Irving such stellar returns, but it generally remained the case that before about 1850 those authors who made money from their books and periodical ventures were those who retained significant ownership of their productions.13 Not surprisingly, as early as the 1820s these conditions, which encouraged self-publication by the well-off and excluded from profitable publication those who lacked capital, were creating a kind of ghetto of cut-rate creative writers, men drawn to the profession by its promises of glamour and outlandish pecuniary rewards but without the means to function as capital investors and thus open to exploitation by publishers.14 Bitterly protesting (and also illustrating) this situation in a series of articles he penned for Blackwoods in 1824, American novelist John Neal reported that he got “200 dollars—(45 £)— cash, for the copyright of KEEP COOL a small novel; 2 vols;…—Cooper published the SPY on his own account. It has produced about six hundred pounds—in every way to him.”15 This economic marginalization of those working professionally as creative writers was helped along by the continued dominance of the practices and institutions of the eighteenth-century public sphere. Numerous recent histories of antebellum cultural production, including those by Meredith McGill, Leon Jackson, and Ronald and Mary Saracino Zboray, emphasize the extent to which the sociable formations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the fraternal societies, book clubs, gift exchange networks, scribal publication, anonymous and voluntary authorship—persisted as the prevailing structures of local literary interaction until well into the 1840s.16 These networks were vitalized by a belief that authorship, instead of being absorbed in modern commercial or exchange systems, ideally constituted a voluntary contribution of one's time and efforts to the larger framework of social well-being, what the Zborays call an ideal of “social sense” as opposed to an ideal of “dollars.”17 However, these beliefs in the transcendence of dollars persisted in the midst of an unprecedented, dollar-driven demand for the wares and talents of local writers. On the one hand, highly competitive, capitalistic magazine and book ventures took advantage of “social sense” in the creation of profit. In the early 1800s, as Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan notes, Joseph Dennie was Page 110 →well aware that one of the only ways of making The Port Folio pay its proprietors was to ensure that its contributors were not remunerated.18 These practices remained as vital as ever in the 1830s and 1840s. Although this period witnessed the ballooning of urban newspaper and magazine production, and although these venues relied on copy that addressed local issues and showcased local talent, the thriving culture of amateur letters meant that there was no shortage of literary hobbyists and hopefuls ready to pen diversionary matter for free, something upon which the proprietors of newspapers and magazines relied as a matter of course and which kept rates of remuneration for writers extremely low. In the early 1840s, periodicals like Graham's were paying their most famous contributors up to $50 for a poem, but the standard rate of pay until late in the decade remained $1 per page and even this was often difficult to collect.19 Indeed, many periodicals and newspapers only existed as profitable ventures because they refused to pay for content.20 On the other hand, the proliferation of print news and entertainment venues, even as they relied on free and cheap content, created a demand for writers highly skilled in both expository and imaginative composition who could act as overseers and editors. In the 1830s and 1840s, rapidly increasing demand for news and entertainment fostered the growth of a large class of news and entertainment workers—for-hire editors and subeditors, journalists, copyists, proofreaders, compilers, freelancers, court and crime reporters, and literary agents. Not surprisingly, the relationship between these professionals and a regime of “dollars” in a cultural world dominated by “social sense” was ambiguous. In the late 1850s, these “mental laborers,” as they were often called by contemporaries, would start to gel into various strata of white-collar professionals. In the 1830s, however, they formed a loose, inchoate agglomeration of personnel, often itinerant, who occupied a sort of twilight world of employment, neither precisely genteel nor mechanical, neither freelance, amateur, nor salaried. Readily confused with their amateur

counterparts and often playing vaguely entrepreneurial roles in capitalistic publishing schemes, professional creative writers drifted in a kind of literal misfit position, occupying an odd, off-kilter realm of social and economic liminality in which predictions of glamour and potential were often inseparable from the pressures of poverty. One of Poe's friends and close contemporaries, Lambert A. Wilmer, for example, recalled his life as a writer and editor from about 1825 to 1855 as “a very sad and weary pilgrimage.”21 Educated in the law but lured away at the age of nineteen by dreams of “literary renown” (18), Page 111 →Wilmer began his career working on a rural paper in Maryland before moving to Philadelphia in 1825. This was one of dozens of moves that Wilmer would be forced to make in the next five years in what became a constant hunt for editorial work. Often impoverished, homeless, and traveling on foot, Wilmer spent his time roving among Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and various parts of Maryland, each time getting hired at an establishment destined, for a variety of reasons, either to go bankrupt or to be unable to afford to keep him. The sheen wore off his career choice fairly quickly, but with no other vocational options available Wilmer was forced to continue in this work, the only kind in which he was now experienced, “solely by the necessity of providing for the wants of my family” (47). One of the things made clear from Wilmer's experiences is not just the often uncertain stability of Jacksonian economies of publishing, but the highly unstable, ambiguous position occupied by editorial and creative personnel within those economies. In some cases, for example, Wilmer was simply taken on as the paid employee of a publisher, but even here Wilmer was clearly functioning in an economy in which editors, who were neither precisely mechanical personnel nor wholly creative writers, had a tricky relationship to remuneration. Hired in Philadelphia in about 1825 by Samuel C. Atkinson, publisher of The Saturday Evening Post and Casket, Wilmer was surprised to be getting wages at all (albeit at a bare subsistence). “A publisher who paid his contributors any thing was regarded as a munificent patron of literature, and received as many compliments on that score as did that Roman gentleman to whom Horace dedicated his first ode” (19). However, as the nature of Wilmer's subsequent editorial positions makes clear, it wasn't only their amorphousness on the scale between mechanics and hobbyists that affected editors' remuneration standards; it was also their simultaneous occupation and escape of the entrepreneurial structures and ideologies that had organized American publishing since the 1790s. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, American intellectual property regimes ensured that publishing in the United States, instead of being dominated by monopolies that controlled the leases and copyrights of texts, as was the case in Britain, was a much more disorganized, ad hoc affair that involved not just well-established reprinting firms like Carey & Lea but numerous micro-players, small-time entrepreneurs who invested capital in publishing projects hoping to strike it rich.22 It was this model of capitalist self-making, in which authors and editors were understood not as employees but as investors, that animated much of the work in which Wilmer and other editors of his generation were involved. More Page 112 →often than not, Wilmer was not hired, precisely, but drawn into various ventures as a partner. In the late 1820s, for example, Wilmer was invited by a Baltimore acquaintance, C. F. Cloud, to become a partner in a new literary journal, The Baltimore Saturday Visiter [sic]. Cloud would invest $6,000 in the venture (with which he purchased a printing shop, type, etc.) while Wilmer would work as an editor without pay until the journal began to show a profit, his labor being considered the equivalent of a pecuniary investment. But as Wilmer's fate with The Visitor went on to demonstrate, the idea that creative and editorial work was the equivalent of capital tended to intersect with the idea that creative writing actually had no equivalent at all in the positive pecuniary realm. In the first six months of its existence, The Visiter flourished; “it not only paid all its expenses but began to yield some profit to its conductors” (24). At this point, however, Cloud decided to take in a third partner who introduced another writer into the mix, “a teacher of vocal and instrumental music, and the author of a popular song,” who “volunteered to write editorial articles for The Visiter, without any compensation except the glory of being named one of the editors” (25). Wilmer says scathingly, “This gentleman was not one of ‘Apollo's venal sons;’ he had other means of maintenance besides authorship or editorial labor, and he therefore possessed the manifold advantages of American writers as can afford to ‘work for nothing and find themselves’” (25). The entry of Hewitt into the Visiter scene instantly changed the status of Wilmer. Wilmer's interpretation of these events is worth quoting in full:

Mr. Hewitt's proposition to write editorials for nothing,—(or for glory, which is pretty much the same thing,) seems to have made my partners suspect that their arrangement with me had involved them in an unnecessary expense. They blamed themselves, no doubt, for agreeing to give me one-third of their profits for the performance of work which another man was willing to do without any charge at all. It appears that Messrs. Cloud and Pouder, believed that I had no just claims on the emoluments of the Visiter, and no property in the publication,—because I had contributed no money to the establishment of the business. They did not seem to understand that my time and labor were of some value—though a common opinion was that the success of the paper was owing, in a great measure, to my exertions. The business was now placed on a firm basis, the subscription list was increasing with unexampled rapidity, and the income afforded a considerable surplus over expenditures. In these circumstances my partners Page 113 →may have considered it useless to keep up those expensive “features,” which had been necessary at the outset, while the paper was struggling for notoriety and public favour. (25–26) Not surprisingly, Wilmer was evicted from the partnership and received nothing for his six months of labor, though he later sued successfully for the recovery of part of his “investment.” It is important to stress, moreover, that despite these routine frauds and mishaps and the constant movement from one city to another, Wilmer is not someone who would have been noted at the time for his lack of success. In Philadelphia in the late 1830s he was writing for such venerable periodicals and newspapers as Godey's Lady's Book, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Saturday Chronicle. What his case demonstrates, however, are the often pinched terms in which this success was actualized. Indeed, the 1830s not only saw the growing frequency of shoddy partnerships and publishers' continued reliance on amateur publication but also a distinct decrease in what editors were judged to be “worth,” both in terms of remuneration in cases of employment and in terms of shares in cases of investment. Although they typically performed what was by all accounts a grueling, feverish labor (editors were often solely responsible for compiling and writing copy for entire periodicals on a monthly or weekly basis), they were also increasingly paid amounts well below the standard set in the earlier part of the century. In 1799 Joseph Dennie was being offered between $800 and $1,200 per year to edit various newspapers and journals. John Neal reports that in the late 1810s, one of his acquaintances was offered $1,500 per year.23 While it is true that being offered this kind of money and actually collecting on it were two different things, these figures might nevertheless be said to represent a kind of ideal value: in a perfect world this is how much good editors commanded. But a number of factors ensured that these figures had dropped by the mid-1830s. Partly, of course, the multiplication of cheap print venues targeting middle- and lower-class audiences, which began in the early 1830s, meant a sharp decrease in the need for editors with Dennie's exemplary learning and social cachet. But it is also doubtless the case that as more individuals, lured by dreams of fame and glamour, sought to make a name for themselves through authorship and editing, they could be had more cheaply. In 1834, Benjamin H. Day, publisher of the New York Sun, New York's first penny daily, was paying his chief editor and writer $12 per week, or $438 per year, considered high because it was Page 114 →what he paid his printers.24 Editors of more genteel periodicals made more, but not much. In 1836, Nathaniel Hawthorne was contracted to edit the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge for $500 per year (Hawthorne was able to quit after six months and go back to living on family income).25 John Ward Ostrom calculates that Poe received $624 annually as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, in addition to which his employer paid him $1.60 per page for the poems, reviews, and short stories he contributed. According to Ostrom, this income did not place Poe above the equivalent of the 1981 national poverty level (when Ostrom did his research).26 In an 1833 discussion of American poet James Gates Percival, the North American Magazine opened with lines that had been repeated by American cultural gurus since the 1790s: “The poet's lot, in every age, among every people, and under every possible combination of circumstances, has been proverbially inauspicious and unhappy…. The sensibility—without which no man ever was a true votary of the muse—which becomes, with the bard, the very principle of existence, is perpetually assailed and lacerated by a world ill-understood and ill-fitted to understand in return…. Unhappiness has ever been the destiny of the poet—for poverty, unappreciated excellence,

solitude, midnight study and the midday persecution of envy are his portion forever.”27 What had changed by the 1830s was the degree to which the gradual emergence of a kind of ghetto of professional creative writers in the United States substantiated and interacted with these fantasies. What in the late 1790s had been an avowedly foreign phenomenon of authorial “poverty, unappreciated excellence, solitude, and midnight study” had by the 1830s acquired a curiously literal substance in the circumstances in which many American writers who followed writing as a trade or profession found themselves working. Indeed, the ready confusion of the writer's real circumstances of impoverishment with the myths of eccentric authorship made it possible to associate authorship with the attributes traditionally belonging to America's marginal populations. Over the course of the 1810s and 1820s, authorship in the United States was increasingly associated not just with exquisite sensitivity and asociality but with failure, mental instability, violence, improvidence, alcoholism, physical disability, and, more generally, with a helpless disposition toward downward mobility. In traditional histories of the rise of a literary marketplace in the United States, Romantic authorial ideals are understood to have functioned as a buffer through whose agency writers constituted their separateness Page 115 →from an industrializing news and entertainment landscape. Romantic authorship is understood here in familiar terms as a countercultural structure, brought into being by a rapidly modernizing commercial economy that expelled as it created the autonomous author, an entity saturated with inalienable and richly symbolic rather than grittily economic value. Michael Newbury, for example, argues that Romantic idioms of authorial specialness and transcendence were paired in the antebellum era with the antithetical languages of industrialization and rote production to mark off hierarchies of authors and texts: faced with the whole phenomenon of literary mass production, writers (often those who were commercially unsuccessful) imagined themselves in a consolatory realm of eccentricity and greatness where a lack of success signaled a distance from the degradations of industrial labor.28 But as I will illustrate, what is made clear by an examination of the functioning of the American literary and entertainment industry in the late 1830s and early 1840s is the extent to which Romantic authorship, far from opposing or coming into being as a counterspace of industrialized production, functioned as a kind of inspirational paradigm for the perpetuation of the economic structures that made entertainment industrialization possible in the first place. In this sense, eccentric author constructions came to describe not a few select writers of exceptional standing or rebelliousness, but the whole of the industrial entertainment workforce against which Romantic ideals would normally have been ranged. As the experiences of Wilmer and other authors suggest, these constructions thrived partly because they were overtly linked to the profitability of literary and entertainment production: fantasies in which the author's impoverishment was inseparable from transcendence and from the fairy-tale potential of self-made riches justified low and nonexistent rates of pay for literary work. But this structure also thrived on the basis of its value as entertainment. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as we have seen, tales of authorial excess and persecution were valued in the United States not as expressive constructions that transmitted an actual state of affairs among writers but as vaguely surreal, implausible phenomena, imprecisely separated from fictions and consumed in a similar spirit of excitement and delectation. These existing inclinations were fed by Byron mania in the 1810s and 1820s, in which tantalizing confusions between Byron's fictional and veridical selves formed a chief source of audience obsession. A similar logic of entertainment infused the ghetto of what we might call cheap authorship, for by the early 1830s it was increasingly the case Page 116 →that authors could transcend their pinched material circumstances through their performance of precisely the forms of eccentricity and liminality that were tied to notions of writerly success and prestige. In the 1790s, Joseph Dennie's success as a literary entrepreneur had depended partly on his ability to embody and perform his comical and outlandish fictional characters. This remained the case in later decades, with an important difference: the principle of the literal that had come to inform the relationship between fantastical fables about authors and authors' material realities paid itself out in a kind of reign of the real: as authors' mythical reputations (for eccentricity, “sensibility,” maladjustment) became inseparable from their real circumstances as economically and socially marginal creative personnel, real selves began increasingly to be interchangeable with and substituted for fantasy ones; or, perhaps more accurately, fantasy selves substituted for as they imparted magic to real conditions of poverty and isolation. Nowhere is this slippage between the fabled and the real more readily

apparent than in the extent to which performances of alienation and eccentricity among Poe and his contemporaries tended to intersect in often startling ways with authors' real histories and personalities. These writers trafficked not in outlandish, impossible characters, as Dennie had, but in their real histories, their real feelings, their real fears, even their real physical and mental idiosyncrasies. Like the selves of modern “reality” genres, these real selves had, of course, a densely mediated instantiation, impossible to separate from a growing interest in the years after Byron in authors as outsized personalities whose irreducible private selves were the stuff of mass intimacy and pleasure.29 Nevertheless, to the extent that the performance of a glamorous myth of authorial distress intersected in often uncanny ways with actual conditions of poverty, neglect, and invisible labor, the circulation of the real self—which was increasingly interchangeable with the estranged dysfunctional selves of the American rendition of Romantic myth—had dynamic and strikingly real ramifications in the larger networks of the capitalistic entertainment industry, an industry that grew increasingly to rely for its health and vigor on the wild, disaffected authors it seemed to reject. It is a truism of Poe scholarship that virtually since his death in 1849, Poe has been understood as a peculiarity, an exception to various rules. Poe's contemporaries, as we saw, were convinced that Poe, with his terrifying “genius” and his “disturbed soul,” helplessly transcended the world of commercial entertainment he tried so hard to negotiate. Twentieth-century literary criticism, which tended overwhelmingly to follow Vernon Page 117 →Parrington's decision that “The problem of Poe, fascinating as it is, lies quite outside the main current of American thought,”30 perpetuated the idea of a peculiar and exceptional Poe. At the same time, Poe's vaunted “disturbed soul” accounts for his rather spectacular presence in twentieth-century elaborations of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory. It was Marie Bonaparte's analysis of Poe's tales as records of his disturbed psychic life that inspired Jacques Lacan's famous seminar on the “The Purloined Letter” and finally typified Poe in his very peculiarity and alienation as a subject of what Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman call “‘timeless’ psychoanalytic themes.”31 As we have seen, most recent scholars reject this view of Poe as a “disturbed,” peculiar character, but in fact if we look over the general field of industrialized entertainment in which Poe worked it becomes clear that rhetorics of authorial peculiarity and dysfunction, far from being attached exclusively to Poe, circulated as global descriptors of virtually all working authors. In the cases of more successful authors, including Poe, these descriptors interacted with real psychological and biographical idiosyncrasies in ways that not only generated endless echoes between veridical and celebrity selves and between fables of a “timeless” authorial maladjustment and the entertainment industry's population of mental workers, but that also transformed eccentric authorial selves into causal agents in the evolution of cheap entertainment content, technologies, and practices.

Poe, His Peers, and the “Magazine Prison-House” I introduced this study by drawing attention to the descriptions of authors that peppered the 1856 autobiography of Samuel Griswold Goodrich. In Goodrich's account, the poet James Gates Percival, whom Goodrich knew in the 1820s, is not only possessed of “large and spectral” eyes, a “startled” air, and an “abashed and whispering” voice, but he is also possessed of complete “imbecility in the common affairs of life.” “His whole life,” Goodrich says, “was a complete shipwreck.”32 The same is true of the poet John Brainard. Like Percival, Brainard is “negligent, dilatory, sometimes almost imbecile from a sort of constitutional inertness.” Goodrich's idea of the poet not just as a repository of genius but also as a figure of incompetence, imbecility, and failure was not his alone. In the outsider author myths that animated late Romantic British literary culture, the autonomous author was more than ever a figure of outsized allure: he was a seer, a brooding lord, a heroic defender of the oppressed. Indeed, among the late Romantics, Chatterton continued to Page 118 →act as a model of poetic identity, his anguish, his mean origins, his pride, and his precocious, unearthly talent arguing for art's ability both to transcend and intervene in the class and political conflicts that so engaged British intellectuals in the first part of the nineteenth century. But in the United States in these same years, eccentric author myth, which had never really been associated with positive social or political categories, tended increasingly to blend itself with the fables of downward mobility and social obscurity that by the 1820s were a staple of American folk belief and popular diversion. American eccentric author mythology still understood the author as an improbable and outlandish personage invested with glamour. Goodrich, for example, identifies both Percival and Brainard with Byron and all his mystique. But by the 1820s, this mystique—and by extension the American eccentric author's value as an object of excitement and thrilling

pathos—was increasingly likely to be bound up with languages of incompetence, truancy, social impairment, and psychological abnormality. One of the chief features of Goodrich's descriptions, for example, is their emphasis not just on the poet's brilliance but on the extent to which this brilliance disqualifies the poet from participation in normal life's most rudimentary demands. So inept is Brainard in seeing to his daily needs that at one point he cries out to Goodrich, “Would to heaven…I were a slave. I think a slave, with a good master, has a good time of it. The responsibility of taking care of himself—the most terrible burden of life—is put on his master's shoulders…. ‘Oh, liberty, liberty, thou art a humbug!’ After all, liberty is the greatest possible slavery, for it puts upon a man the responsibility of taking care of himself. If he goes wrong—why he's damned! If a slave sins, he's only flogged, and gets over it, and there's an end of it. Now, if I could only be flogged, and settle the matter that way, I should be perfectly happy.” At the start of their acquaintance, Brainard warns Goodrich, “Don't expect too much of me; I never succeeded in any thing yet.” Goodrich comes to see the accuracy of this statement: “I afterward found that much truth was thus spoken in jest: this was, in point of fact, precisely Brainard's appreciation of himself. All his life, feeling that he could do something, he still entertained a mournful and disheartening conviction that, on the whole, he was doomed to failure and disappointment. There was sad prophecy in this presentiment—a prophecy which he at once made and fulfilled.” In an important sense, these qualities of “imbecility” are what make the Brainard of Goodich's account so charming. When Goodrich finally describes Brainard's compositional practices—when the mood is upon Page 119 →him Brainard sits down and in the course of a few minutes suddenly scrawls out a poem of surpassing genius—Brainard's powers as a poet seem all the more miraculous for his incompetence in all other aspects of his life. In this sense, the fantasy of the poet's dilatory existence, which Goodrich's memoirs spend so much time elaborating, is inseparable from the perception of the poet's ability to transport his audience into realms that lie outside the everyday. Nevertheless, by the 1820s, such vignettes had melded themselves with realist observation in a way that made the fictional and the documentary difficult to tell apart. Writing in the late 1820s, for example, James Fenimore Cooper expressed scepticism about the quality of persons who were making up authorship's ranks. “Talent is sure of too many avenues to wealth and honors in America,” Cooper remarked in Notions of the Americans, “to seek, unnecessarily, an unknown and hazardous path [of authorship].”33 In 1825, the United States Literary Gazette inveighed against authorship, contrasting “large and exalted principles of action” with the “purely literary exertions” of those “buried under the dust of libraries.” In an 1834 essay, still being reprinted in the 1840s, Thomas Jefferson's lawyer, William Wirt, warned readers, “A mere bookworm is a miserable driveller…and a mere genius a thing of gossamer fit only for the winds to sport with.” The American Quarterly Review of 1832 urged all literary aspirants to follow the example of “Sir William Blackstone [who] never did a wiser thing when he abandoned the writing of poetry.”34 The fact that most of these warnings appeared in literary journals dedicated to the promotion of literature suggests that they had their source not in objective observation necessarily but in a general production of authorial waywardness. In their loud condemnations of authorship—and these pieces were all, of course, either penned or edited by authors—they affirmed romantic fantasies of the poet's marginality and persecution. But it is also the case that by the 1830s, this decades-long production of the author as an outsider, at once brilliant and maladjusted, had become, to use Goodrich's words, a self-fulfilling prophecy: authorship developed into the refuge of those who could readily be understood, whether at the time or retrospectively, and by both themselves and others, as “outsiders”—as members of the classes of the dispossessed, the rebellious, the alienated, and the psychologically unstable. In the opinion of both his contemporaries and his modern biographers, Poe belonged to the category of the alienated and dispossessed. The orphaned son of actors, Poe was raised in Richmond, Virginia, in the prosperous household of his merchant foster father, John Allan.35 Page 120 →Never quite admitted into the fold of Allan family legitimacy (although Poe was the only child of John and Fanny Allan, they made no move to adopt him legally, for example), Poe never quite lost a sense of his own orphaned status. Like other sons of wealthy southern merchants, Poe was taught, as he put it, to “aspire to eminence in public life,”36 to which he added a rather desperate desire to please and impress his foster father. But whether because of temperament or circumstances, Poe's tendency throughout early adulthood was to mix his aspirations and his desire to please with choices that

reaffirmed his alienation. By the time he decided upon authorship as his sole career at the age of twenty-six, he had behind him a record of failures, debts, family quarrels, and unconventional romantic attachments. Poe assured Allan, “I feel that within me which will make me fullfil your highest wishes & only beg you to suspend your judgement until you hear of me again.”37 But a thwarted career at the University of Virginia, a brief stint in the U.S. Army, and then a briefer career at West Point, unenthusiastically financed by Allan, issued in neither public eminence nor the more quotidian goal of Allan's approval. Allan died without bequeathing his foster son a penny of his considerable fortune. Poe, suffering from bouts of severe depression and even suicidal, crowned this final bitter token of his dispossession by falling in love with his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, whom he secretly married in the same year. Poe had been investing considerable amounts of money in the publication of his poetry throughout this period. Although these volumes went largely unnoticed and remained largely unsold, Poe's reason for producing them was of a piece with his quest for eminence and approval. As he told Allan when he asked his support of $100 for the publication of yet another volume: “At my time of life there is much in being before the eye of the world—if once noticed I can easily cut out a path to reputation.”38 Even so, it was only when all hope of a legacy from John Allan vanished that Poe thought seriously about making a living as a writer and editor. Successively orphaned, rejected, disowned, and disinherited, Poe, in the words of Kenneth Silverman, came to professional writing with “a sense of deficiency in himself and of envy toward others he thought more adequate.”39 Many of Poe's contemporaries arrived at authorship with similar ambitions and similar records of failure, exile, psychological instability, and unconventional sexual/romantic choices. Although one could look at any number of Poe's contemporaries, I want to focus for a moment on two of Poe's employers and memorialists, Nathaniel Parker Willis and Page 121 →Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Like Poe, these two came to authorship without significant sources of capital or income; they all engaged in similar work, editing journals and writing short fiction, poetry, and criticism, much of it initially inspired by Byron; they all invested heavily in various entrepreneurial and publishing schemes; they all appealed to the same audiences, educated, middle-brow readers in search of taste and the occasional scandal; and they all achieved the zenith of their fame at about the same time, in the mid-1840s. All three, in addition, knew each other fairly well and moved in the same social circles. Poe worked for Willis as a subeditor on the Weekly Mirror, and it was Willis who first published “The Raven” in the same paper and who publicly defended Poe in the weeks following his death. Griswold not only moved in the same circles as Poe but curiously shadowed him, anthologizing Poe in his Poets and Poetry of America, replacing Poe as editor of Graham's magazine, supplanting Poe in the poet Frances Osgoode's affections, and then emerging as Poe's literary executor and purveyor of his defamation after Poe's death. Willis and Griswold were more successful than Poe. Willis in particular, about whom I will have more to say in chapter 4, would eventually emerge as one of the most famous authors of his day and, according to historians, the first American author to achieve celebrity status in the fully modern sense of that term. However, all three writers began their careers in situations that both they and others understood as situations of exile, rebellion, and alienation. Nathaniel Parker Willis was the son of a staunchly Congregationalist Boston printer.40 A student at Yale in the early 1820s, Willis abandoned his father's hopes that he would follow in the paternal footsteps and pursued life in the fashionable, upper-class society of Boston instead. Willis's theatergoing and champagne drinking, his flamboyant, dandyish clothes and salacious Byronic poetry infuriated the members of his church, and in 1829, in the first of a series of exiles, Willis was excommunicated. Having abandoned the codes of the church, Willis proved equally incapable of abiding by those of the society he had chosen instead. Perennially in debt and not shy about advertising his many sexual escapades, Willis was finally driven from Boston in disgrace, reviled all over the city for his “dissipations” and having, in his own words, not “a sou in the world beyond what my pen brings me and…a world of envy and slander at my back.”41 Willis shared with Poe a sense of his own inadequacy and a yearning to transcend his circumstances, though in Willis's case he wanted only to star in what he called “high life.” Rufus Griswold had far less auspicious origins than either Poe or Page 122 →Willis. One of fourteen children born to a shoemaker and farmer in the backwoods of Vermont, Griswold, an “unruly,” “restless” child,42 left home at the age of fifteen when both school and his brother's shop proved too confining. Griswold was introduced

to literature as well as to “emotional abandon and freedom,”43 according to his biographer, through an intense, probably romantic relationship with another writer, George C. Foster—later to be the author of such popular city exposés as New York by Gas-Light and New York Naked—with whom Griswold lived until he was about seventeen. A devotee of the “romantic and passionate school,” Foster affected “a Byronic pose and aspired to great literary heights.”44 Griswold would later recall with admiration his imitations of Don Juan. Like Wilmer, Griswold spent his early life in a state of transience, probably apprenticing as a printer at some point and eventually finding work on a Syracuse newspaper. A self-described “solitary soul wandering through the world, a homeless, joyless outcast,”45 Griswold shared with Poe a tendency to depression and morbidity. Upon the death of his wife, Griswold, who would dub Poe a madman, was so overcome with grief that in what he called “a fit of madness” he went to the vault where his wife had already been interred for forty days, “turned aside the drapery that hid her face, and saw the terrible changes made by Death and Time. I kissed for the last time her cold, black forehead—I cut off locks of her beautiful hair, damp with the death dews, and sunk down in senseless agony beside the ruin of all that was dearest in the world. In the evening, a friend from the city…found me there, my face still resting on her own, and my body as lifeless and cold as that before me.”46 But if Griswold had Poe's “exquisitely strung nerves,” he had Willis's ambition and drive. He pursued letters for the stated purpose of “elevating those excluded from an aristocracy of learning”47 and conceived of himself as America's great disseminator of belles lettres to the masses.48 To the extent that authorship by the 1830s had the power to attract individuals who were easily deemed by their society, and generally by themselves, to be in some way marginal or eccentric, personal “peculiarity” and maladjustment were not aberrant or incidental to industrialized literary and entertainment production, as the tradition of Poe criticism has it, but a systemic part of it, an outcome of paltry salaries, unpleasant work conditions, and extravagant promises of prestige. Nor, it is important to add, did this system render a writer's peculiarities any more incidental in the subsequent pursuit of success. Although Poe, Willis, and Griswold all turned to authorship in the hopes of attaining fame, eminence, and, perhaps most elusive of all, money, the circumstances in Page 123 →which they worked did not lend themselves to the easy attainment of these goals, for the same system that in the first place attracted individuals liable to liminal and alienated situations, whether personal or social, offered few ways of transcending these categories. To be awarded high rates of remuneration or to get financial backers for one's own book or periodical ventures, required, as Poe understood, getting “before the eye of the world,” becoming known, that is, for an identifiable body of work. But in the competition for reputation and renown those writers who relied on writing for a living, especially editors, were at a distinct disadvantage. Often working as many as fifteen hours a day and typically expending all their intellect and creativity on the routine production of copy and the tiresome labor of “cuttingand-pasting” from other journals, editors, as Poe put it, had “no time on [their] hands” and could themselves “write nothing worth reading.”49 The still-prevalent convention of publishing magazine pieces anonymously only added to the difficulty of producing a recognizable literary corpus and coherent public identity. And here again, in the search for recognition, amateur writers had the advantage over their vocational counterparts. In “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” Poe wrote of the anguish of working in a system whose tempos were attuned to those with leisure and independent incomes. A young author, struggling with Despair itself in the shape of a ghastly poverty, which has no alleviation—no sympathy from an every-day world, that cannot understand his necessities…—this young author is politely requested to compose an article, for which he will “be handsomely paid.” Enraptured, he neglects perhaps for a month the sole employment which affords him the chance of a livelihood, and having starved through the month (he and his family) completes at length the month of starvation and the article, and despatches the latter (with a broad hint about the former) to the pursy “editor” and bottle-nosed “proprietor” who has condescended to honor him (the poor devil) with his patronage. A month (starving still), and no reply. Another month—still none. Two months more—still none.50 This leisurely pace of time—it is six months before Poe's “poor devil author” gets paid, by which time he has died of starvation—not only affected remuneration but also writers' compositional practices and genre choices.

Amateur writers, who had no need of immediate remuneration, could produce commodious works—novels, translations, histories. Professional writers, bereft of time, were forced to opt for literature specific Page 124 →to the magazines: social commentary, reviews, short fiction, and essays, literature that in the popular estimate of the day was meant to be consumed immediately and forgotten promptly. The writers and editors who succeeded in this inhospitable system generally did so not by drawing attention to their scattered and unidentifiable aesthetic talents but by drawing attention to themselves, by cultivating sensationalism, scandal, and notoriety—by trafficking, that is, in what these writers and their audiences identified as the peculiar and outrageous features of their own personalities, features that tended, given the situations of many writers, to be interchangeable with the components of Romantic author fable. In this context, idioms of authorial alienation and eccentricity not only referenced the population of the industrializing literary and entertainment system with relative accuracy, but they also, in their very accuracy, got recycled back into this system as central instruments in this population's self-fashioning, public image, and, ultimately, fame and success. Poe's antisocial peculiarities, both as an individual and as an author, in particular his mean-spirited criticism and regular assaults on blameless writers like Longfellow, need to be understood in this context. Like Willis, from whom Poe seems to have taken his model of personality exploitation, Poe coined his own flaws and deficiencies—his envy, animosity, and alienation—in the production of a public self whose enormous currency lay precisely in its antisocial character. The acquisition in the United States of literary fame via the sensational display and cultivation of personal oddity was a trail very much blazed by Willis in the late 1820s and early 1830s.51 While still in Boston, Willis had briefly helmed his own periodical, The American Monthly Magazine (produced out of his father's shop), which was notable for establishing its editor as a moody, foppish voluptuary, a figure loosely cobbled together from Byron and Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham, but considered dangerous by Boston's staid literary establishment, the more so because it seemed so obviously a public extension of Willis's private inclinations. Such at least was the opinion of the conservative Boston press, which dubbed Willis “lewd Natty” and warned readers to sequester their daughters from the “indelicacies” of his poetry.52 Partly because of Willis's knack for parlaying his indecent private life into his public self, The American Monthly Magazine was a hit, boasting at one point a readership of six or seven hundred and fixing an equation between personal outlandishness, scandal, and success that would mark the next and most important phase of Willis's career. Page 125 → Having worn out his welcome in Boston, Willis traveled to Europe in 1831 as the foreign correspondent for George P. Morris's New York Mirror. With his eye, as ever, on a life among the “fashionable,” Willis, posing as an attaché, managed to insinuate himself into the circle of Lady Blessington, one of London's leading hostesses, and hobnobbed at her home with what at that time were literally the world's most famous people: Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Moore, Benjamin D'Israeli, the Count D'Orsay. Partly out of ignorance, partly, it would seem, out of the same habitual rebelliousness that made him such an irritant to Proper Boston, Willis wrote back to the Mirror some extremely unflattering descriptions of his new friends. When these were leaked to the British public by the Tory press, the Blessington circle was mortified, and Willis, once again disgraced, found himself flayed in journals on both sides of the Atlantic. Far from damaging Willis's career, however, his disgrace in London, which highlighted not only his raciness and daring but his clumsiness among his social betters, gave him more than ever a kind of salacious cachet. His letters to the Mirror were reprinted in over 500 American newspapers and periodicals, a number that is astonishing given the relatively small size of the early 1830s publishing industry. Over the next decade Willis parleyed his infamy and social blunders into the most commercially successful literary career of the era. There is much to suggest that Poe took his cue directly from Willis. Both Willis's recent biographer, Thomas Baker, and Poe's biographer, Kenneth Silverman, believe that Poe submitted one of his earliest poems (“FairyLand”) to Willis's American Monthly Magazine and was rudely rejected.53 In any case Poe was preoccupied enough with Willis to pen two satires of him in the years that followed, “The Duc D'Omlette” (1832) and “Some Passages in the Life of a Lion” (1835).54 If in the latter especially Poe mocks the new culture of celebrity that had

recently (and in Poe's opinion groundlessly) made Willis so stellar a commodity, he seems to have taken to heart the lesson Willis taught and began to shape himself in a similar mold. Writing to T. H. White, the Messenger's proprietor who was then considering Poe for the position of editor, Poe assured him that while his tale “Berenice” approached “the very verge of bad taste,” this was exactly what magazine readers wanted. Poe went on to stress what he saw as the emerging links between sensationalism and reputation: You may say all this is bad taste. I have my doubts about it. Nobody is more aware than I am that simplicity is the cant of the day—but take Page 126 →my word for it no one cares any thing about simplicity in their hearts…. [W]hether the articles of which I speak are, or are not in bad taste is little to the purpose. To be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity. They are, if you will, the articles that find their way into other periodicals, and into the papers, and in this manner, taking hold upon the public mind, they augment the reputation of the source where they originated.55 Like Willis, accordingly, who capitalized on what conventional antebellum society considered his failings and abnormalities—sexual indecency, foppery, a lack of respect for his betters—Poe achieved his early reputation not only by trafficking in “bad taste” but, more generally, by proffering his dispossession and alienation as features of his public self. Positioning himself overtly as an outsider, a sort of arrogant and autonomous literary orphan severed from the implicitly familial organization of what he called “cliques,” Poe launched an assault on the existing literary establishment in a series of reviews virtually unprecedented at the time for their cruel and vituperative candor. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Poe's first major attack was aimed at the New York Mirror, with which Willis was affiliated. In a review of Norman Leslie, a novel by Theodore S. Fay, one of the Mirror's editors, Poe began by denouncing a system of promotion that enabled Fay to celebrate his own anonymous publication in the pages of his own journal: “Well!—here we have it! This is the book—the book par excellence—the book bepuffed, beplastered, and be-Mirrored: the book ‘attributed to’ Mr. Blank, and ‘said to be from the pen’ of Mr. Asterisk…. Norman Leslie, gentle reader…is, after all, written by nobody in the world but Theodore S. Fay, and Theodore S. Fay is nobody in the world but ‘one of the Editors of the New York Mirror.’” Having exposed Fay as the author of his own congratulatory announcements, Poe went on to pour scorn on the novel itself: “As regards Mr Fay's style, it is unworthy of a school-boy. The ‘Editor of the New York Mirror’ has either never seen an edition of Murray's Grammar, or he has been a-Willising so long as to have forgotten his vernacular language.”56 Poe's mention of Willis, however derisive, suggests the extent to which the review had its context in the exploitation of personality that Willis typified. And Poe reaped a similar reward. Barely noticed for the poems he had published previously to this, Poe now found himself and the Messenger lauded in periodicals north and south. “Eschewing all species of puffery,” said the Pennsylvanian, “the Messenger goes to work upon several of the most popular novels of the day, and hacks and hews Page 127 →with a remorselessness and an evident enjoyment of the business, which is as rare as it is amusing, in an indigenous periodical.” Poe himself was called an author of “distinguished merit,” “the best of all our young writers,” “a gentleman of brilliant genius and endowments.”57 Although the traditional view of Poe is that he sabotaged his professional career through a personal animosity toward the era's powerful literary and publishing coteries, Poe's professional success was in the first place contingent upon that animosity—and upon the connotations of dysfunction and antisociality that went with it. If the Norman Leslie review had the extremely salutary effect of bringing Poe “before the eye of the world,” it did so on the terms that the review itself dictated, in the sense that Poe was almost unanimously figured thereafter, whether in approval or approbation, as an eccentric and antisocial outsider. Not unexpectedly, the counterattacks launched by the Mirror and its friends cast Poe's vaunted idiosyncrasy in a decidedly negative light, characterizing Poe not just as an outsider but as a misfit. Willis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Philadelphia Gazette and brother of Lewis, editor of the periodical hub of the New York “clique,” the Knickerbocker, noted, “The critical department of [The Messenger],—much as it would seem to boast itself of impartiality and discernment,—is in our opinion, decidedly quacky…. This affectation of eccentric sternness in criticism, without the power to back one's suit withal, so far from deserving praise, as some suppose, merits the strongest reprehension.”58 Colonel William L. Stone of the New York Commercial Advertiser similarly stressed

Poe's willfully alien, adversarial position: “The duty of the critic is to act as judge, not as enemy, of the writer whom he reviews; a distinction of which the Zoilus of the Messenger seems not to be aware…. The critic of the Messenger has been eulogized for his scorching and scarifying abilities and he thinks it incumbent upon him to keep up his reputation in that line, by sneers, sarcasm, and downright abuse.”59 The eccentricity stressed by the Mirror's allies was equally underlined in the notices that complimented and lauded Poe, though in this case, of course, Poe's “eccentric sternness” was held out as a positive characteristic. The Pennsylvanian felt that Poe's criticisms were “a relief to the dull monotony of praise which rolls smooth in the wake of every new book” and that “a roughness which savors of honesty and independence is welcome.”60 Echoing Poe's own opinions on what attracts the “eye of the world,” the Charlottesville Jeffersonian told its readers that although “some passages” in Poe's review of Norman Leslie “are in bad taste,” the piece “is amusing and will be read.”61 The Richmond Compiler complimented Poe on his “great dexterity and power” as a critic, Page 128 →adding, “He exposes the imbecility and rottenness of our ad captandum popular literature, with the hand of a master. The public I believe was much delighted with the admirable scalping of Norman Leslie.”62 Not content with stressing Poe's eccentricity, the New Yorker more emphatically endowed with him the racialized alterity suggested in the Compiler's metaphor of “scalping”: “The Southern Editor has quite too savage a way of pouncing upon unlucky wights who happen to have severally perpetrated any thing below par in the literary line, like the Indian, who cannot realize that an enemy is conquered till he is scalped…. We think the Messenger often quite too severe…but still able and ingenious.”63 Like Willis and Poe, Griswold achieved his early success by coining his personal and social alienation. But Griswold, who would figure so sensationally in Poe's posthumous history, is an interesting figure in the sense that, born ten years later than Willis, his self-fashioning had its source not only in his own personal foibles but in the discourse of scandalous celebrity that writers like Poe and Willis had already established. Whereas Willis and Poe, for all their feelings of inadequacy, could both boast of a gentleman's education, Griswold's alienation was, in his eyes, very much a product of his low birth and lack of formal schooling. And perhaps because he was, in a manner of speaking, invisible within the genteel norms of traditional hobbyist literary culture, Griswold's fashioning of himself as a public personality had less to do with highlighting any definitive personal characteristics of his own than with developing a protean lack of identity in the service of promoting his famous contemporaries. He was a figure distinguished for his traffic in other people's distinctions. This traffic, as with Poe and Willis, had an intimate as well as public dimension: Griswold's self-diminution and self-erasure in the presence of his literary betters was manifested personally in his relative lack of interest in the progress of his own career compared to his avid interest in the careers of his contemporaries, whose volumes and mementos he collected with geekish fervor. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who met Griswold in Boston in 1841, noted, “What a curious creature Griswold is! He seems to be a kind of naturalist whose subjects are authors, whose memory is a perfect fauna of all flying and creeping things that feed on ink.”64 Appropriately, Griswold's achieved fame as a purveyor of fame. He first made his dent in the literary scene by becoming one of the era's most notorious pirates, shamelessly stealing and reprinting British and French authors for cheap distribution. This commerce in British and French reputations rehearsed the terms of Griswold's more lasting and loftier fame as the era's Page 129 →supreme anthologist of American writers, inaugurated with his influential and widely read The Poets and Poetry of America and extended through a long series of anthologies, annuals, and edited collections. And, like Poe and Willis, Griswold had a public reputation that was founded upon and was ultimately inseparable from his personal idiosyncrasies. He is often noted in contemporary accounts for what his friend Elizabeth Oakes Smith thought was “the absence of any marked positivity in his character.”65 In New York in Slices, George C. Foster said of Griswold, “His memory is a miscellaneous storehouse of celebrities of whom nobody ever heard…. He is the most unselfish of mortals, and has dwelt so much amid the excellencies and perfections of others that he scarcely retains cognizance of his own identity.”66 Capitalizing on his own powers of self-effacement, known as a “mountebank” and “curiosity,” a “diminutive thing,” in the words of The Town,67 Griswold was ultimately associated not with any positive characteristics of his own but with the pure conveyance of publicity, as The Town implied when it parodied Griswold's plans for yet another anthology: “The Reverend Dr. Ridiculous W. Grizwold is in town superintending the publication of his great work, “The Advertisers and the Advertisements of

America.”…The volume is to be illustrated by a bouquet of heads, done in brass, of those who have acquired fame in this high branch of scholastic composition. This last work, it is said, will be the author's greatest.”68 To what extent the exploitation of seemingly intimate foibles on the part of any of these writers was initially conscious or intentional is difficult to know. Writing his sketch of Willis for his Literati series in Godey's in 1846, Poe himself expressed an uncertainty about the role of intentionality in the production of celebrity: “It is quite probable that…[Willis] only acted in accordance with his physical temperament; but be this as it may, his personnel greatly advanced, if it did not altogether establish his literary fame.”69 Nevertheless, intention ended up playing a significant part in the generation of sensational literary fame for these writers, in the sense that once ventured into the public arena and rewarded with attention, “physical temperament” became a commodity to be cultivated and ventured again. Poe, for example, in his biography of himself for the Philadelphia Saturday Museum, not only gave himself respectable birth and stable upbringing, but peppered the piece with exaggerations and lies intended to stress his decadent alienation: he had lived a wild and dissipated life at the University of Virginia; he had got into mysterious “difficulties” in Russia (he had never been to Russia) from which he had to be extricated by the American consul. Page 130 → Although flayed by Poe in the 1830s, Willis seems to have taken the abuse less as a personal affront than as a species of rhetoric that promoted both their careers. When Poe, who by this time had become Willis's friend, wrote him in 1845 asking if Willis would reply to an insult published by Charles Briggs, Willis answered, certainly not, “A reply from me to Mr. Briggs would make the man,” and summarized, “Notoriety is glory in this transition state of our half-baked country.”70 Willis, in addition, did little to discourage Poe's virulent criticism of other writers, including Longfellow, upon whom Poe launched his first extended attack while in Willis's employ on the Mirror. Although many Poe scholars cite what became known as the Longfellow War as a mark of Poe's “bizarre” and self-destructive aberrance,71 Willis took the attack as business as usual in the business of notoriety. Writing to Longfellow's friend Charles Sumner to dismiss the incident, Willis concluded, “Tomorrow's paper will contain [George] Hillard's reply, & then I shall leave him & Poe to do a joust together in my pages, which of course will serve Longfellow in the end.”72 “[M]y policy,” he told Sumner in a follow-up letter, “is always to fan up any smothered discontent, & give it the chance of contradiction. I always beg men who come with literary whispers against me to get them into print forth with, where I can meet them.” Although Willis was finally pressured by Longfellow's friends into distancing himself from Poe, he suggested to Sumner that he not only approved of Poe's attacks but encouraged them: “Another thing—I mean to let Poe make a feature of his own in the Mirror, & be recognized as the author of criticisms there, and I am obliged, (to have anything good from him) to give him somewhat free play. Tell Longfellow he shall never suffer ‘in the long run’ from me or mine.”73 However, if these writers consciously cultivated and capitalized on what they and others thought to be their own personal peculiarities, the business of notoriety also had an energy that exceeded their intentions, that amplified itself in invisible, unpredictable ways and that circled back to determine behavior and choices in ways that were not within writers' conscious control. In the mid-1840s, according to Poe's biographers, Poe began his irrational, self-destructive slide downhill to professional ruin. Not only his obsessive attacks on Longfellow for plagiarism, but also his verbal brawls with fellow writers, his bizarre sabotaging of his own performance at the prestigious Boston Lyceum, and his public announcements that he suffered from madness, ensured that by the late 1840s he was unemployable as an editor. Even though scholars pin the origins of this behavior to Poe's intimate psychological condition at this Page 131 →time—to his battles with clinical depression and alcohol addiction, to his despair over his wife's failing health, and to his desperation over money—it is also the case that these episodes of self-destructive behavior replicate and re-perform Poe's valuable outsider status. Tempting as it may be to assume that Poe was venturing too much of a good thing, Poe's behavior is consonant with the inflation of the conditions that in the first place encouraged the commodification of the writer's marginality. As the literary and entertainment industry of the late 1830s grew increasingly dependent on cheap labor and traffic in personalities for sales, competition, and profit, it not only continued to attract an off-kilter population and to encourage this population's self-exploitation, but it also generated what might be called a whole culture of

alienation and dysfunction that in turn helped to fuel not only this era's ruthless, laissez-faire business practices but also the conditions for a revolution in cheap mass entertainment. Reckless and often desperate, working for next to nothing, and launched on wild projects of defamation and self-exploitation that were proving to be a huge draw for audiences, Poe and his contemporaries, in all their eccentric, Romantic dimensions, were collectively central to the rapid development from about 1835 to 1843 of a low-cost news and entertainment industry typified by its ruthlessness and dependence on crazed and maladjusted behaviors and personalities. Before moving on to a consideration of this dynamic interplay, it is important to stress that the relationship between the cheap entertainment press and the writers who fueled its development was complex. The dynamic, reciprocal relationships among writerly alienation, jobs, and a fiercely competitive capitalist publishing economy made it extremely difficult for writers to counter or circumvent the dysfunctional identities responsible for their success as competitive and commercial properties. The result was that writers ended up internalizing—or rather reinternalizing—as principles of behavior the “worthlessness,” as James Fenimore Cooper put it, that constituted their commercial and competitive worth; they behaved in ways that redisplayed their maladjustment and lack of healthful socialization. The disastrous latter part of Poe's career illustrates the workings of this process in particularly acute ways, but so do the careers of other writers of his generation. The tendency among writers caught up in the system of eccentric celebrity and cheap entertainment was the compulsive reperformance of their inadequacies—to the point, indeed, where they ruined their employment chances and thus cemented their failed and “talentless” status once and for all. In doing so, however, they did not compromise their value to the literary and Page 132 →entertainment industry as a whole. Although, here again, the tendency in Poe scholarship is to attribute his professional failure to psychic peculiarities that rendered him “unfit” for the demands of the popular market, Poe's value to this market was, as ever, contingent upon his record of failure and defeat.

“Notoriety Is Glory” While self-exploitation enabled certain writers to bubble to the surface of a system that otherwise encouraged submergence and obscurity, it also involved them in a circuit of competition that was itself rapidly shaped by the pressure put on writers to trade in personalities. Standards of remuneration and the chances for fame via anonymity remained as low as ever, and precisely for these reasons the business of notoriety, fed as much by desperate and ambitious writers as by a growing public thirst for intimate revelation, boomed. Contemporary observers, both foreign and domestic, were routinely struck by the savagery of the early antebellum American press. Blackwood's, hardly a model of polite journalism, noted, “The personalities in which most of the American newspapers indulge are something astounding”74—“personalities” here meaning bloated caricatures of living individuals. Accordingly, between 1835 and 1843 (when new postal laws were passed to control reprinting), the debasement of writers ballooned into a culture in itself whose internal dynamics of competition had a reciprocal relationship to the larger publishing economy. As more and more writers discovered the promotional virtues of effrontery, hostility, and self-display, they collectively authorized newly personalized modes of aggression among themselves, which in turn encouraged ever more ruthless competitive practices, which in turn rippled through the unstable, ever-shifting architecture of the entertainment marketplace, creating more competitive conditions that in turn demanded even more eccentric personalities and behaviors, and so on. We can get a better sense of these reciprocal, mutually generative continuities between sensational personality commodification and an escalating climate of competition if we look at the history of one of Griswold's early editorial partners and a crucial player in the cheap press revolution, Park Benjamin.75 At first glance, Park Benjamin does not seem to belong to the world of Griswold. A Boston-born, Harvardeducated lawyer and poet with a large independent income and friends among the cream of the Boston elite, Benjamin initially drifted into editing as a hobbyist and patron, Page 133 →only gradually consolidating an actual career in the mid to late 1830s as a poet, editor, publisher, and literary agent. Benjamin's early career was full of high-culture luster. In 1835, Benjamin was editor of the prestigious New England Magazine which had been established four years before by Joseph Buckingham, the now-successful publisher who had been printer's devil and Joseph Dennie's dazzled fan in Walpole in the 1790s. But Benjamin had a keen taste for the entrepreneurial side of literature and as early as 1833 he had written friends that he was planning to “engage[e] largely…in the publishing business” and would “have need of all my capital.”76 By the late 1830s, Benjamin was in New York,

engaged in all manner of editorial and publishing schemes. For all his upper-crust background, Benjamin fixed himself with a kind of gleeful vengeance in the 1830s' world of eccentric celebrity and predatory journalism, parleying himself as a haughty patrician with a club foot, a figure distinguished by his lofty education, his daring, his deep grudges, and his stupendous personal arrogance. Indeed, Benjamin was infamous in the late 1830s for outdoing Poe. Partnering first with Horace Greeley on The NewYorker, then later editing a string of his own journals, Benjamin hacked and slashed at his fellow literary and newspaper folk with a no-holds-barred extravagance that left his rivals breathless and his friends nervous. Among the reputations he ruined with his caustic, unforgiving reviews was James Fenimore Cooper's, whom Benjamin attacked for a treasonous aristocrat and dubbed “Funnymore.”77 In modern scholarship, Benjamin tends to appear as a functionary in the larger Whig assault on Cooper carried on between 1835 and 1842.78 Yet Benjamin's political assaults were ultimately inseparable from his self-promotion, his cutthroat business tactics, and his watershed innovations in the production and distribution of mass literature. What his career illustrates with particular sharpness are the causal dynamics between eccentric celebrity, with its marginal agents and frightening slippages between reality and outlandish publicity stunts, and the evolution in the late 1830s of an increasingly brutal and competitive publishing economy dedicated to the production of cheap news and entertainment. On the one hand, for example, Benjamin was part of a ring of New York and Boston editors and writers distinguished for carrying the business of notoriety so far that they generated blind hatred among themselves. In the late 1830s, James Gordon Bennett, the colorful editor of the highly successful penny paper New York Herald and a past master in personality display, was routinely aiming below-the-belt shots at his New York rivals in the pages of his journal. So maddened by some of Bennett's Page 134 →remarks was James Watson Webb, editor of the Courier and Enquirer, that when Webb ran into Bennett in the street he shoved him to the ground and beat him with his cane. In his private correspondence, Benjamin reveals an attitude about all this similar to Willis's. Indeed, in a letter to Willis's partner at the Mirror, George P. Morris, who had clearly written to Benjamin in outrage over something printed in the New-Yorker, Benjamin chides him for having a thin skin: “[A]ssure yourself of the fact of utter disinclination on my part to create for you any personal uneasiness. I am myself so totally insensible to such attacks that I never supposed they could occasion serious perplexity to another.”79 Nevertheless, “perplexity” was “occasioned.” The hostilities boiling among editors in 1839 erupted into all-out “war” in 1840, reportedly launched by an enraged Park Benjamin after Bennett's publication of some untoward remarks about Benjamin's deformed foot. Rallying to his side nearly all of the newspapers in New York City, and eventually dozens of papers in the rest of the country, Benjamin commenced to wage a “Moral War,” as contemporaries called it, against Bennett and his sensationalist methods—using, of course, sensationalist methods.80 In the course of a vituperative anti-Herald campaign that lasted for nearly three months, Benjamin fiercely condemned Bennett and “his daily habits of blasphemy, obscenity and falsehood” and called Bennett, in one of many streams of invective, “a notorious scoffer, liar and poltroon, scourged, kicked, cuffed, tweaked by the nose, trodden on and spit upon in the open street times without number.”81 Bennett responded by calling Benjamin “Noah's Black Dwarf” and “Hervio Nono” (a circus performer, billed as “Monkey Man”), “a half Jew, half infidel, with a touch of the monster.”82 Fueled by deep personal enmities and outraged feelings, these conditions also licensed cutthroat competitive tactics that kick-started rapid revolutions in the news and entertainment marketplace, something nowhere more amply illustrated than in Benjamin's vengeful escalation of quarrels and competition with rivals over his own penny press projects. Penny papers had taken American publishing by storm in 1833 with the launching of Benjamin Day's New York penny daily, the Sun. Within two years of the Sun's existence, demand for it was so high that Day installed New York's first steam-driven Napier press. Unlike traditional newspapers that were sold by subscription and stocked largely with political, foreign, and shipping news designed to appeal to the moneyed and genteel classes, penny papers were small sheets aimed at middle- and Page 135 →working-class audiences. Hawked in the streets like broadsides, they were filled less with factual news than with sensational crime stories, human-interest features, and, most important for our purposes, with the ranting of charismatic, outraged, and gaudy editors.

In 1839, Benjamin conspired with Griswold, whom he had recently met through Horace Greeley, to launch an audacious cheap weekly devoted not to news but to literature. Smattered with caricatures and lampoons of local literary celebrities, the Brother Jonathan, as it was called, combined cheap shots with what at that time were unprecedented Barnum-style gimmicks and marketing, among the most famous of which was its “mammoth” size. The Brother Jonathan announced itself as the “largest folio sheet in the world,” and was crammed not just with summaries of weekly news and “original” American literature, but, more strikingly, with pirated literature from England, including serial portions of the newest works of authors like Charles Dickens, made available at workingmen's prices at a time when recent, high-quality British literature was available only in relatively costly leather- and cloth-bound reprints. The paper was a huge success. Benjamin wrote his friend, “It goes like wildfire. They tell me that eleven thousand, five hundred copies were disposed of at the office before three o'clock last Saturday.”83 Not surprisingly, the Brother Jonathan quickly attracted the interests of penny-press magnate, Benjamin Day, and within a few months, Benjamin and Griswold, quarreling with the new publishers, had been ousted and had rapidly set up an identical rival “mammoth” sheet, the New World. By the end of the year, Griswold too was gone, probably elbowed out as yet another potential rival. And left on his own, Benjamin waged a history-making war on the still living Brother Jonathan, in which dysfunctional celebrity and intimate hatred combined seamlessly with the invention of cutting-edge marketing and production tactics that issued in record high circulation and skyrocketing profits. Trumpeting himself as a man of the people, attacking all the rival penny papers, as well as respected American authors and the big American publishing firms, Benjamin proceeded to churn out cheap pirated British books at a furious rate, exploiting the large format of his sheet to squash numerous serializations of novels into a single issue, which were then sold for pennies, employing agents in London to pilfer books barely out of authors' brains, organizing new regiments of boy hawkers, their loyalty assured with gifts of hot coffee and gloves in winter, experimenting with mammoth typefaces to catch the attention of buyers on the street, and even organizing parades Page 136 →of newsboys, sent marching up and down the streets with fife and drum and giant placards declaring some New World triumph over the Brother Jonathan: “We Have Met the Enemy and They Are Ours.”84 These new strategies segued with the invention of new forms of fiction dissemination. At the height of the mammoth war in 1842, the Brother Jonathan was advertising, with much fanfare, its plan to serialize BulwerLytton's new novel Zanoni. Somehow obtaining a prized advance copy of the opening chapters, Benjamin commenced serializing Zanoni himself, and, in a final parry, as the Brother Jonathan was trying frantically to catch up, published Zanoni in its entirety as an “extra” or “supplement,” which his newsboys hawked in the streets for the shameless price of six cents. Launched by Benjamin the year before, these cheaply printed “extras” containing the entire text of a book and often sewn together between brightly colored papers are milestones in the history of mass fiction, for they are generally considered forerunners of the modern paperback and early versions of the dime novel. Journalism historian Frederic Hudson calls Benjamin “the father of cheap literature in the United States.”85 The launching of the Brother Jonathan and the New World helped inaugurate a crucial shift in the American literary and entertainment industries, permanently driving down the price of imported and domestic diversionary books and periodicals, legitimating the wholesale piracy of recent British and Continental novels by local newspapers and magazines, disseminating “quality” literature to middling and working-class people, launching new formats for future low-cost sensation fiction, and helping to float the era of what contemporaries notoriously called “cheap and nasty” publishing, distinguished by its combination of character assassination, flamboyant piracy, rock-bottom prices, and vicious competitive practices. What is important to note for the purposes of this discussion is the extent to which these publishing and advertising innovations, refracting and amplifying themselves in the entertainment marketplace in a way that was all along inseparable from the traffic in eccentric personalities, intensified the conditions that encouraged the traffic in eccentric personalities. One of the signal features of the discursive and social milieu surrounding Poe, Benjamin, Willis, and Griswold, accordingly, is its fractal-like production of the figure of the literary misfit or crazed outsider. Established in the first place on both a discursive and material foundation of authorial marginality and alienation and dependent for its audiences, innovation, and profits on the production of various misfit celebrity personalities, the cheap entertainment industry

Page 137 →tended to expand itself through the reproduction of increased numbers of eccentric writers in both real and figural form.

Byron, the Mad Poet, and the Cheap Press The most familiar misfit figure that proliferated in the milieu of predatory journalism and competitive publishing was Byron. Indeed, far from existing as a countercultural alternative to capitalistic mass entertainment production in the United States, Byron hovered about the cheap press revolution as a kind of patron saint. On the one hand Byron's name was summoned up both to elevate and make deliciously illicit the eroticized crimes and behaviors that crowded the pages of sensation papers and novels. It was Byron, as we saw in chapter 1, who presided over James Gordon Bennett's coverage of the lurid murder of the New York prostitute Helen Jewett in 1836, widely considered by historians to be an inaugural moment in the history of the American sensational press. It was Byron's books that crowded the bookshelves of Jewett's boudoir and Byron's portrait that hung upon her wall.86 According to the “Flash” papers, a group of cheap men's magazines that flourished from 1841 to 1843 whose chief aim was to report on (while relishing) the sexual corruption of New Yorkers, Byron was in the boudoir not just of Jewett but of all of New York's high-class prostitutes. In 1841, Dixon's Polyanthos, taking its readers on a tour of a brothel called “Princess Julia's Palace of Love,” homed in on the magnificent bedroom of “Lady Ellen,” with its “splendid bed upon which she reposes…more like the nuptial couch of our first parents in Eden than like the beds of ordinary plodders of this world,” with its portrait of Lord Byron overlooking the bed, and its “book case composed of beautifully carved rosewood” containing “the works of Lord Byron, elegantly bound.”87 Not only constantly referenced in the seamy troughs of the sensational news, Byron also hovered over the cheap press as the putative inspiration of its creative and editorial personnel. Poe's reputation as an aggrieved outsider, for example, was famously inseparable from his early and self-conscious cultivation of similarities between himself and Byron. His 1827 “Tamerlane” has as its narrator a brooding, discontented, guilt-ridden Byronic character who has a daughter named, like Byron's daughter, Ada. The biographies of Poe that appeared in contemporary reviews and anthologies, which most scholars agree were authored by Poe himself for publicity purposes, feature the young Poe “hastily quitting the country on a Quixotic expedition to join the Greeks,” just as Byron Page 138 →had joined the Greeks.88 Poe also publicized his swimming of the James River in Richmond, meant to put audiences in mind of Byron's swimming of the Hellespont. At the time of his death in 1849, Poe was fixed in the public imagination as an incarnation of Byron. An 1857 article that celebrated the similarities between Poe and Byron asserted, “We cannot read the memoirs and letters of these men without perceiving the similarity in their genius, temper, and circumstances. The same early indulgence, the same dissatisfaction, the same painful fate, was theirs.”89 Poe was not alone in his debt to Byron. Willis and Griswold were likewise profoundly influenced by Byron and his poetry. James Gordon Bennett, according to his biographer, had spent his youth as a “student” and the “author” of poems “after Byron.”90 Horace Greeley begins a chapter of his autobiography with the phrase, “We are all born poets,” and goes on to detail his deep appreciation of Byron, who wrote “some of the noblest poetry we have.” Indeed, for Greeley, a passionate reformer and investigator of social ills, Byron is a sort of complement to Greeley himself: Byron was “wild and dissolute,” says Greeley, but like the American newspaperman he had an “honest, profound, implacable hatred of tyranny in every shape.”91 When the founder of the Flash papers, Joseph Snelling, who was originally a Boston poet and the editor before Benjamin of the New England Magazine, was hauled into court on libel charges (part of a state censorship campaign), he exclaimed scornfully, “Let them suppress Byron.”92 Indeed, Byron's symbolic dominance over the whole cutthroat cheap publishing industry, which book historian John Tebbell calls a giant “gaming-room,”93 is nicely encapsulated by Nathaniel Parker Willis's choice of a title for his own 1839 paper devoted strictly to piracy, The Corsair—referencing, of course, not only Byron's famous poem but also Willis's unscrupulous piratical enterprise. In an 1831 Dunciad-like satire on the ranks of American poets, J. L. Martin described the field of American letters as already swamped with would-be Byrons: “From the four corners of the wind they crowd, / A host unnumbered, busy, boisterous, loud.”

And first, ye Yankee Byrons, take your part, Ye mimic Harolds, feel the well earn'd smart, Ye, whose wild strains, and dark defying air, Would ape the thrilling songster of despair.94

Ten years later, in 1841, when Byron had been largely eclipsed from the freshest literary minds in Britain, America's literary field, both in its Page 139 →decadent and genteel formations, was more crowded with “Yankee Byrons” than ever. Indeed, given what was often the crossover between the editors and writers of the respectable and sensational presses, and given the number of writers and editors who overtly modeled themselves and their poetry on Byron—Poe, Willis, John Neal, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Willis Gaylord Clark, George Lippard95 (all figures involved in the various paper wars of the late 1830s and 1840s)—Byron arguably floated as an authorizing fantasy over the whole of the industrializing literary and entertainment field, feeding the industry with the glamour it needed for its reproduction of low-paid writers and aspiring entrepreneurs. However, more than simply proliferating Byronic stereotypes, the early 1840s cheap literary and entertainment system produced its own set of lunatic personages, ones based not necessarily on familiar generic authorial figures but rather more specifically on the rhetorics of social alienation and mental maladjustment that flourished in the highly personalized domains of what I am calling eccentric celebrity. At the simplest level, these personages were a textual, purely virtual host—all the “poltroons,” “dwarves,” “blockheads,” “imbeciles,” “quacks,” libertines, degraded jobbers—created in a volatile, churning culture of insult and self-abasement, figures whose antics lit up the pages of the literary and entertainment press. But these phantasmal authorial personages, with their indexical references to real vulnerability and real economic competition, also readily multiplied and vivified themselves in living authors. Indeed, one of the things made clear by looking at Poe's larger milieu is the extent to which this world zanily generated eccentric outsiders even among those authors who had nothing to do either with an “outsider” self-presentation or with the cheap literature industry itself. Nowhere is this more amply illustrated than in the fate of James Fenimore Cooper. In the 1820s, Cooper was something like a deity in American literature, at once an epitome of gentlemanly respectability and an exemplar of writerly financial success. But upon his return to the United States in 1837 after a long sojourn in Europe, Cooper suddenly and without seeming reason found himself a target of Park Benjamin's wrath. In a short time, not only Benjamin but all of his editor friends in the Northeast, including the powerful Whig editor Thurlow Weed, were happily hacking and slashing at Cooper's reputation. Cooper scholars believe these attacks to have been political, launched by Whig editors against a well-known Democrat, but according to contemporary report, the sensationalist celebrity system didn't need excuses. Benjamin himself mentions in a letter to a friend that he is happy to “blow up anybody.”96 In Page 140 →Wilmer's eyes, Cooper was “anathematized and excommunicated” simply for “refus[ing] to do homage to that brazen idol” the “Press Gang.”97 Indeed, the idea that politics frequently covered for sensationalism for its own sake is mentioned by Laughton Osborn in his 1838 satire, The Vision of Rubeta. Targeting Colonel William L. Stone of the Commercial Advertiser, who features here as the epic hero, Rubeta, the satire has Rubeta speaking in the first person: For, while they pay, I love my fellow-men. My gods are glory, money, and the pen. Those drove me here, to feed my purse and pride; And so I write, I care not on which side. As the same river floats both ships and logs;

As the same physic purges men and dogs; As the same fly his lithe proboscis dips In ordure or in dew of ladies' lips.98

In keeping with the sensational press's frenetic replication of “outsiders,” James Fenimore Cooper was rejigged by Benjamin and his cronies from a national icon to an “alien” and “outcast.” In James Watson Webb's words, Cooper is a “viper so long nourished in our bosom; he must “leave our shores never again to disgrace with his presence a land to which he has proved an ingrate and…been anything but a reputable, useful, or even harmless citizen.”99 A geopolitical outcast, Cooper, according to Park Benjamin, is also a benighted “blackguard,” a “superlative dolt,” and a madman. “[H]e is the craziest loon that was ever was suffered to roam at large without whip and keeper. We respectfully hint to his friends the necessity of early application to the benevolent Director of the Insane Hospital.”100 In an important sense, moreover, Cooper actually became the lunatic and outcast projected in these reports. Beside himself with disbelief and outrage, Cooper published an increasingly hysterical set of responses in local papers and launched a series of libel suits against New York editors, including Benjamin. However, the effect of this infuriated response was largely to confirm Cooper's “looniness”—that is, what could now be read as his maladjustment, his failure to blend himself with American ways, his wild, unpredictable behavior—in the minds of contemporaries. And scholars agree that, in fact, Cooper's late-1830s' arguments with the press were the death-knell of his career, permanently ruining his sales and reputation and effectively propelling Cooper into a literal position of failure. It is important to stress, moreover, that this reproduction of exiles Page 141 →and misfits extended itself not just via sensationalist editors and writers but also through those, like Cooper, who were effectively re-created in the image of the enraged, dispossessed, and half-mad writer and who went on to publish their own streams of invective in which offending editors starred, once again, as dangerous loons and quacks. Cooper's antipress tirades—culminating in The American Democrat (1838), which rails at American newspapers and the cheap press especially—joined a host of bitter Dunciad-like satires and attacks on the news and entertainment world that flourished in the late 1830s and early 1840s.101 The themes of these works were madness, “quackery,” and social criminality, from Laughton Osborn's The Vision of Rubeta (1838), which depicts William L. Stone as a mass of seething, farting flesh, to Lambert A. Wilmer's Quacks of Helicon (1841), which eviscerates the “monstrous shapes” and “Dark, hideous forms,” “Forms…unnatural, frightful and obscene,” of the American literati,102 to Cornelius Matthew's The Career of Puffer Hopkins (1842), which purports to reveal the chaotic unkempt regions of the “mammoth” press, to George Lippard's depiction of the literati as amoral debauchees in “The Spermaceti Papers” (1843).103 It is worth noting that, flaring in the late 1830s and early 1840s, languages of insanity continued to be a popular currency in reviews, one of the more well-known examples arising in the case of Melville's Moby Dick (1850) and Pierre (1852). William Gilmore Simms's review of Moby Dick in the Southern Quarterly Review claims that Ahab's ravings “and the ravings of Mr. Melville himself…are such as would justify a writ de lunicato against all the parties.” Upon the publication of Pierre, the New York Day Book titled its review, “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY.” The reviewer claims to have heard that Melville “is deranged” and his friends “were taking measure to place him under treatment.”104 Indeed, like Cooper, Melville participated in the making of his own “lunacy”; it was when he saw the harsh reviews of Moby Dick that Melville began rewriting Pierre to include a scathing indictment of the American literary scene, an indictment that arguably ruined his novel and ironically earned him even more accusations of “craziness.” This multiplication of figures of eccentricity and dysfunction, which tended to begin in a textual source and then to inhabit living agents, could also happen in reverse: it could have a curiously material source and refraction, originating in real physical characteristics (as with Benjamin's foot), erupting suddenly into real physical attacks (as with Webb's attack on Bennett),105 and even seeming to emanate from the impoverished, desperate population haunting the fringes of New York's Page 142 →news and entertainment world. One of the fixtures of Manhattan literary life in the 1830s was street drifter and poet McDonald Clarke, dubbed the Mad Poet of Broadway. A “caricature of the literary outsider,” in David Reynolds's words, a sort of incarnation of the materialization of

eccentricity as an organizing principle of the culture economy, Clarke wandered up and down Broadway in Byronic cloak and open-throated shirt scribbling tortured verse, “a wild, worn, wretched” man, as he called himself.106 “Who cares for me?” he cried in the preface to an 1836 collection of his poems, the frontispiece of which featured a portrait of Clarke with collar open and hair tossed exactly like Byron. “Why is it?—why am I now, as in my early years, shunned by Spirits, in many respects a-kin to mine? Oh! God will be merciful to Genius—for man is not. What have I ever done, that I'm always to be an outcast?”107 Clarke's arrest for indigence and his accidental drowning in a city prison in 1842 brought forth eulogies and poems from the young Walt Whitman, who was himself a fledgling editor, an avid combatant in the anti-Bennett “Moral War,” a self-styled outsider, and a contributor to Benjamin's New World. Instead of fanning out from text to reality, these physical, material manifestations of exile and even madness were cycled back into the discursive realm, helping to license the “madness” of capitalistic competitive tactics even as they often circulated as lofty requisites of poetic greatness, as when Whitman celebrated the Byronic Clarke as a poet in whom that “all important vital spirit of poetry burnt with a fierce brightness.”108

“A Certainty of Success” As these cases suggest, the causal relationships between eccentric personalities and literary fame and glamour on the one hand and between eccentric personalities and ruthless capitalistic competition, climbing magazine sales, and financial bonanzas on the other generated a recalcitrant, cyclical system that fed on and tended to reproduce the desperate persons and crazed public personalities that were central to its vitality. Many writers were aware of the dubious gains to be had from working in the sensational press's feedback chamber of insult and selfabasement. Indeed, Poe's case illustrates the extent to which writers' careers could be ruined by their attacks on what might in future turn out to be potential employers. But entering this system was a lot easier than leaving it. In his famous “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Jacques Lacan set out to provide an explanation for the psychological phenomenon, identified by Freud and his contemporaries, of repetition automatism, the compulsion Page 143 →to repeat or relive past events. Using Poe's short story to illustrate, Lacan evolved his idea of subjects locked into fixed positions in a signifying circuit, unconsciously repeating the behaviors structurally inherent to whatever position they happened to occupy.109 It was a kind of compulsive repetition that structured writers' professional relationships and behavior in the entertainment economy, for once a writer occupied a certain position within competitive entertainment circuits he was doomed by the mandate of his own market worth to keep reperforming his familiar self. Put another way, a system whose health and vigor depended on the proliferation of eccentricity and dysfunction—and the glamour, high sales, entrepreneurial go-getting, and low standards of pay they produced—tended to reproduce, regardless of a writer's intentions or well-being, the reputation that sustained his “market” value, whether as a commercial property whose scandalous displays drummed up sales or as a competitor whose undercutting of rivals delivered optimal value for minimum money. When Willis, for example, upon his marriage in 1835, sought to leave behind his reputation for amorous dalliance, he found that the press refused to drop the matter—and kept refusing for the next twenty years. Blameless though his private behavior became, Willis was flayed for his alleged sexual escapades throughout the late 1830s, 1840s, and early 1850s, until he was finally too sick and feeble to make the accusations plausible.110 Whereas Willis was not allowed to escape his reputation for sexual license, Griswold was not allowed to escape his for the mechanical delivery of other authors' distinctions. Stung by a review (possibly penned by Poe) that accused him of being deficient as a linguist, Griswold suddenly offered himself to the public in that learned guise as a translator of the French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger. The response of his longtime friend and fellow veteran of the editorial trenches, Horace Greeley, was not to encourage Griswold in his cultivation of the French language (a gentleman's pursuit), but to remind him of his lowly, mechanical origins: “I want to thrash you for the way you have done Beranger…. Gris, you must not get up works so jobbingly. You will never get above journeyman's wages unless you amend.”111 And Poe, similarly, was not allowed to escape his reputation for ruthless animosity toward the era's powerful literary coteries. When Poe's New York Literati series for Godey's appeared shortly after his extended assaults on Longfellow and his Boston “clique”—assaults that had earned Poe the distinction of being virtually unemployable—Hiram Fuller scornfully accused him of not being nearly venomous enough. “People were looking for a furious unbottling Page 144 →…of prussic acid. But instead of these biting, withering and

scorching elements, what was our astonishment to find only a few slender streams of sugar house molasses…. As to the independence for which we have heard Mr. Poe commended, we certainly have never seen so small amount of that commodity in a literary review as is contained in his ‘honest opinions.’”112 At the simplest level, this inability to escape oneself was a function of professional and public expectation: once put into circulation, the scandalous personality was a writer's signature, something demanded of him for its pleasure value. At another level, the kind of systemic multiplication of crazed personalities that we see in the wake of Benjamin's penny press wars could also clearly include the more bewildering multiplication of one's own self in a scene beyond one's control. Whereas Poe, in the passages on Willis's celebrity cited earlier, imagines the author as a figure projecting himself or his persona out to his passive audience and then waiting for a positive or negative response, Poe's career suggests that it was more frequently the case that when the eccentric author looked out upon his audience—which also comprised his competitors—they projected his image, in all its placelessness and deficiency, back to him in endlessly enlarged and more numerous form. Publicity and professional relationships were two instruments of writers' subordination to their own market value, but a third was writers themselves, who overwhelmingly tended to reinternalize the exile and worthlessness reflected back to them in the public scene. Indeed, among the many things that link Poe and his contemporaries is their seemingly perverse and compulsive reperformance of their flaws and defects. Such patterns of behavior inhered in the logic of a success premised on self-abasement. While these writers had all turned to authorship in the hopes of stanching their feelings of inferiority and envy, and while all presumably envisioned, as Poe said, that “hour…when I may come forth with a certainty of success,”113 the “certainty of success” in this system was an ever-receding horizon. Not only involved in consciously peddling what their society judged to be their personal flaws and inadequacies—their wildness, their social exile, their nonconformity—for public consumption but also reconfronting these aspects of themselves in their professional relationships and in the publicity that elaborated their fame, these writers were barred from experiencing the transcendence of inferiority that success should have promised. And because success for them was only available on the terms of their currency as eccentric, maladjusted entities, they tended to pursue success through Page 145 →the repeated performance of their flaws, a performance distinguished by its seemingly irrational lack of regard for immediate professional and personal well-being and by its redelivery of the writer to the terms of his competitive value in the literary and entertainment system as a whole. Thus Willis, who was privately pained and bewildered by the accusations of sexual misconduct that hounded him, nonetheless repeatedly handed the press fodder for these attacks. On one occasion he took the odd step of publishing the love letters (fan mail) sent him by a besotted female reader. On another, in the midst of Bishop Onderdonk's ecclesiastical trial for sexually harassing his parishioners, Willis, precisely at a moment when he should have kept quiet, came out on the side of the bishop.114 The same was true for Griswold. Although aggrieved by his reputation as a “jobber,” Griswold could not stop himself from doing “jobs.” In the mood of depression following his wife's death, he planned or put together so many compilations that his friend, the publisher James T. Fields, fearing for Griswold's literary respectability, made a special trip from Boston to Philadelphia “to suggest…. the propriety of checking” his “publishing ambition rather than urging the horses onward.”115 Even Griswold's acceptance of the role of literary executor for Poe, which has puzzled biographers of both writers given not only the hostility and mistrust between them but also Griswold's subsequent declarations of distaste for the task, is of a piece with his frequently unthinking and compulsive assumption of the role of editor. Similar acts of compulsion typified the latter half of Poe's career. Indeed, Poe's career illustrates with particular acuity the logic of the hollow triumph, its instigation not of satisfaction but of further demonstrations of inadequacy in the pursuit of an ever-receding goal. Poe's assaults on Longfellow for plagiarism, for example, which apparently began as a gesture of self-promotion, initially had precisely that effect. Celebrated all over the nation for his recently published “The Raven,” Poe was more talked about than ever for his daring attack on America's premier poet.116 But as if this very success, which was predicated on Poe's animosity toward Boston's haute literary cliques, only refreshed Poe's feeling of being excluded from what he called “the adventitious influence…of social position” that Longfellow enjoyed,117 it impelled him to more extended and intense displays of the hostility and marginality that, in founding his fame, promised his eventual triumph. Like Griswold, consequently, who could not stop doing “jobs,” Poe could not stop writing about Longfellow. Between January

and April 1845, Poe published no fewer than eight articles and reviews that gnawed over the question of Page 146 →Longfellow and plagiarism, with the result not that he expanded his fame but that he made enemies of Longfellow and his powerful friends in the literary business. Accordingly, as Poe's fame grew without ever producing the “certainty of success” that his celebrity at once promised and foreclosed, Poe was driven to increasingly violent acts of aggression and self-isolation, like his humiliating performance of his own insufficiency at the Boston Lyceum, or his obsessive, hostile denunciations of Boston in the wake of the opprobrium that followed. The growing violence of Poe's assertions of his alienation reached a crescendo when Poe, accused (probably wrongfully) by some of the women poets in his circle of a gross lack of gentlemanly tact, declared to the New York literati that he suffered from episodes of insanity.118 Possibly at this point Poe's description of himself had a certain accuracy, for there is no question of the damage that this compulsive rehearsal of their deficiencies inflicted on writers. In Poe's case, the repeated performance of his animosity and alienation fueled Poe's sense of his own worthlessness, fed his tendencies toward depression and alcoholism, and intensified hostility in his professional relationships, all of which combined to make him anathema to potential employers. Indeed, the very terms of Poe's success, premised as they were on his alienation from prevailing literary authorities (i.e., the people who might hire him), clinched his professional demise. Nor was Poe alone in stifling his own potential as a writer. Modern scholars have combed again and again over the details of Poe's life, trying to understand the reasons for his professional suicide—the assumption being, of course, that there must be some intimate, deeply subjective cause for what Poe did to himself. But the kind of selfsabotage illustrated in his career, by which an author ruins his professional potential through the very instruments that had been responsible for his success, was, in fact, a typical scenario. Unhampered by the performance of hostility that Poe's fame mandated, Griswold and Willis fared far better than Poe in their negotiation of professional opportunity. Yet, for whatever professional success they achieved, Griswold and Willis ended up engineering a self-sabotage similar in spirit, if not in scale, to Poe's. Illustrated in the careers of all of these writers, as in the equally perverse careers of many of their contemporaries, including Benjamin, is the extent to which conditions like unemployment, mediocrity, poverty, and even such mental disorders as depression and obsessive compulsive disorder were not an incidental occurrence in the otherwise sunny vistas of writerly success but were rather the logical end-point of success itself, the ultimate incarnation of achievement in a Page 147 →system that derived competitive value and profit from displays of marginality and exile. Although Griswold existed in a constant state of anxiety about his own editorial shabbiness and lived “sick with fear” that his books would be read by “those who know how such [books] should be made,”119 he never got over his “cheap and nasty” productivity. He cherished the dream of transcending his mechanical editorial role and authoring a hefty, respectable history, but despite his relative affluence in the 1840s and 1850s he was so obsessed with editing that he waited until he was almost dead from tuberculosis to produce his magnum opus and then ended up writing “in haste” and “carelessness” with little “thought of the graces of composition.”120 Dead at the age of forty-two, Griswold not surprisingly left his contemporaries with the impression that he was “deficient” in “absolute talent and ripe scholarship.”121 Although Willis achieved a fame and financial success that far surpassed that of Griswold or Poe, reportedly earning in the late 1840s somewhere in the area of $10,000 a year, he could not leave well enough alone. Long after Willis might have rested on his laurels, he kept himself in the public eye, compulsively reperforming his blunders until he finally immolated himself permanently by his ill-conceived coverage of the Civil War as a high-society event. “Pitilessly overworked,” as he put it, to the end, Willis, like Poe, died in poverty.122 But if these acts of self-abasement were psychologically and professionally damaging to writers, if they demolished self-esteem and sabotaged professional achievement and pecuniary rewards, they also energized the literary and entertainment industry as a whole. Nowhere is this self-sacrifice of eccentric writers for the health of the larger system more amply demonstrated than in the professional fate of Benjamin. Writing for Graham's in 1841, Poe said of Benjamin, “For the last six or seven years, few men have occupied a more desirable position among us than Mr. BENJAMIN. As the editor of the American Monthly Magazine, of the New-Yorker, and more lately of the Signal, and New World, he has exerted an influence scarcely second to that of any editor in the country.”123 Within three years, however, Benjamin's career as an editor was over. An architect of dog-eat-dog

entertainment production who thrived on the public mixing of the personal and the professional, Benjamin reperformed his “causticity,” as Poe called it, so often and offended so many people that he ended up in the eccentric position of poverty, bad health, and unemployment. Indeed, in Benjamin's case, because his element was all along the deeply personal, the assault by his competitors Page 148 →had nowhere to go but deeper into his personal affairs. Hiring the enraged, discredited Cooper to write for its pages, constantly attacking Benjamin in articles with such titles as “Newspaper Quackery” and “Literary Gladiatorials,” even recycling his satires and turning them back upon him, the desperate Brother Jonathan and its allies finally resorted to publishing actual personal letters written by Benjamin, private correspondence never intended for public consumption, that revealed some of Benjamin's unsavory business practices, including the bribery of fellow editors using his friend Longfellow's poems. By 1843, when the U.S. Post Office Department hiked up postage rates to put both “extras” and sheets like the New World out of business, Benjamin's career as the era's most powerful editor was already dead, incinerated by the very fires that had made it burn so brightly. Benjamin kicked around the New York literary scene for another twenty years, fighting depression, financial difficulties, and poor health as he tried one publishing or lecturing venture after another. And as with Poe, Willis, and Griswold, he was remembered by contemporaries, even while he was alive, as someone minor and forgotten. As A. J. H. Duganne put it in his satirical verses on Benjamin in Parnassus in Pillory in 1851: Where is PARK BENJAMIN? In sooth, 'tis wond'rous, He sings not—yet the stones are silent under us! Where is that bard whose madrigals in Gotham, Took root so deep that still the newsboys know them? ............................................. Once, as a sort of editorial Warwick, He built up paper thrones—“alas! Poor Yorick!” Where is he now? I'll give—my word upon it— This book (when finished) for his “last, best sonnet.”124

And yet as dour as these writers' ends may seem in their individual manifestation, their collective positioning of the writer in some extreme or eccentric place outside of the standards of human health and welfare had the effect, as it had had all along, of feeding the vigor of the entertainment business as a whole. It is important to stress, in this regard, that this industry was not some anonymous “system” out there that excluded writers. For example, one could legitimately argue that the ferociously monopolistic publishing system in England before the 1830s did in fact exclude writers insofar as it created stark divisions between publishers, as manufacturers and holders of copyright, and authors as recipients of payments and royalties. Page 149 →Indeed, many late eighteenth-century reports of authors' marginality and persecution, including most stories about Chatterton, linked these conditions to authors' exploitation by booksellers. But the system developing out of the cheap publishing industry in the United States was not powered by the traditional American publishing houses, such as Carey & Lea or Harper & Brothers, but by upstart publishing entrepreneurs and writers like Day, Bennett, Greeley, and Benjamin. Benjamin, for example, took advantage of the sudden synergy among America's intellectual property regimes, the demand for cheap news, and new technologies of mass print production to create a market for high-quality pirated literature in cheap formats. Theoretically, the cheap print revolution belonged as

much to writers and editors, acting as capitalists and creators of value in the form of sensation and celebrity, as it did to publishers in the traditional sense as the owners or leasers of textual properties. And indeed, it was pressure from traditional American publishers that was responsible for the 1843 hike in postage rates. In other words, the late 1830s and early 1840s literary and entertainment production system is not something that can be regarded as lying outside of the desires of writers, editors, and readers but is rather a product, a kind of organism, comprised of the aggregate of their fantasies and material horizons. Accordingly, its reliance for its profitability and vigor on both scenes and actual instances of writers' suffering and maladjustment was not an “oppression” forced on writers by something outside of themselves but rather something that emanated from writers, or at least from ideas about writers that writers helped to promote—for of course all the rumors about writers, the tales about writers, the name-calling, bullying, invective concerning writers, were all written by writers. Indeed, it is useful to stress that even in the midst of the print explosion of the late 1830s, the world of American literature and print entertainment remained relatively small. Willis, Benjamin, and Snelling, the founder of the disreputable “Flash” periodicals, had all known each other in Boston in the late 1820s; and Willis, in fact, had been a suitor of Benjamin's sister, much to Benjamin's outrage; Benjamin and Snelling had both worked for Joseph Buckingham on the New England Magazine, in which they had published the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. When Margaret Fuller went to New York, she was hired by Horace Greeley, who had been partners with both Benjamin and Griswold. Griswold's early friends not only included George Foster but also the young Colonel Stone, editor of the Commercial Advertiser…And on it goes, rather like a sprawling dysfunctional high school. At the same time, however, as I have Page 150 →already emphasized, this system as a whole had powers greater than its individual parts. It was capable of generating wealth and value for enough of the overall industry—and indeed did so out of the psychic turmoil and even the impoverishment of its agents—that it flourished as an entity of vitality and profit that stood beyond the power of its individual agents to change. At the simplest level, of course, pictures and manifestations of authorial maladjustment had enormous value as publicity. Each time Willis proffered a reference to some sexual issue the resulting explosion of public outrage (courtesy of his sworn enemies in the editorial ranks), however painful to him personally, charged his celebrity, punched up sales, galvanized more enemies, and set in motion a cycle of “jousting,” of retaliation, anger, selfdefense, and one-upmanship that Willis himself understood was immeasurably healthy for the “trade.” It is important to stress, however, that at another level the presence of failed and abject individuals within the entertainment system had more than simple celebrity value. Demoralized, downtrodden, and impoverished writers, in other words, were not simply the accidental dross of this system; they were crucial to its maintenance and viability. Most directly, the myth of writers' eccentricity and worthlessness, which was so graphically represented in actual situations of authorial poverty and persecution, kept standards of remuneration for what were deemed incompetent and nonessential personnel extremely low throughout the late 1830s, 1840s, and early 1850s. The print entertainment revolution, which after all could not have happened without the millions and millions of words that writers wrote, ended up evolving publishing and business entities that discounted writers as a negligible resource—as Wilmer was discounted as a nonentity in his dealings with The Visiter—barely worth structuring into economic models. As in other entrepreneurial enclaves, the outlandish amounts of money earned by one or two individuals (like Willis) tended to suffice as a lure to keep all the others working on the cheap. Equally important, eccentric writers' compulsive pursuit of an unattainable success turned them into compulsively productive workers, like Griswold, who turned out anthology after anthology with the regularity of a machine. Damaging to writers' reputations and professional opportunities, involvement in the wild fray of eccentric celebrity issued in writers' proportional productivity. Between 1821 and 1835, James Fenimore Cooper wrote and published nine large books. During the five years of his war with Benjamin and the Whigs between 1838 and 1843, when he was driven by outrage, bent on revenge, Page 151 →and lailing to keep his reputation faloat, he wrote and published the same number, but in a third of the time—nine books in five years instead of nine books in fourteen. Fury, compulsiveness, and low self-worth not only produced prolific writers, but they also produced writers who were willing to expend their own capital on entertainment ventures or else, more commonly, to perform extensive labors on speculation and even to labor for free. Poe, for example, borrowed heavily to capitalize his

proprietorship of The Broadway Journal, and while one way of reading this is as a failed business venture, another way of reading it is as a successful proliferation of original content beneficial to readers, to the reprint market, to the publishers of Poe's books, all at Poe's personal expense. Ratified on the one hand by a culture of amateurism that celebrated the free contribution of a writer's time to the common social good, this kind of personal investment—and the free creative labor that went with it—was ratified on the other by the culture of eccentric personalities, which intimated that the writer's time, in fact, had no worth, that it belonged to strange, antic temporalities, to regions of abasement, failure, and improvidence that were inappropriate to economic exchange. Indeed, not just compulsiveness but also an air of worthlessness was a positive, productive attribute in the machinery of laissez-faire publishing. If Poe was unable to profit personally from his reputation, his reputation itself, at the very moment of his own deepest misery and impoverishment, had never been so flagrantly profitable a commodity. Capitalizing on the appealing combination of Poe's sensational reputation and his ostensible worthlessness both to himself and to potential employers, Louis Godey, the proprietor of Godey 's Lady's Book, one of the era's most popular magazines, hired Poe for the comparatively cheap price of $172 to pen a series of “opinions” of the New York literati. The series, because of Poe's reputation for vitriol—because, that is, of the very conditions that rendered Poe unemployable—was so wildly popular that, in Godey's words, “the May edition was exhausted before the first of May, and we have had requests for hundreds from Boston and New York, which we could not supply.”125 And even dead, Poe continued to feed this system. In yet another self-destructive gesture, Griswold, in his edition of Poe's works, advertised himself as Poe's detractor, a move that resulted in yet more heated jousting and violent denunciation and that ensured, even as it demoralized Griswold, that the dead Poe retained his competitive edge. It is no wonder, then, that Poe's contemporaries struggled so earnestly upon his death in 1849 to understand the contradictions of his career, its Page 152 →seemingly senseless conflation of genius and public debasement, of success and poverty, of arduous self-promotion and inexplicable self-sabotage. Nor is it any wonder, given that Poe's memorialists, were, like Poe, produced by, even as they themselves produced, the system and conditions of modern American entertainment marketplace competition, that they subsumed the paradoxes of his career by conjuring yet again the language of dysfunction and eccentricity—of alienation, hostility, and even madness—that had formed the axis of Poe's own professional self-postulation and that had dogged his career from beginning to end and well beyond.

Conclusion In the years after 1843, the sensationalist news and entertainment industry in the United States raged on as powerfully as ever, fed by an evergrowing reading franchise. But in the aftermath of the destruction of the “mammoth” sheets the literary and entertainment marketplace restructured itself in line with its more traditional publishing practices, as well as with emergent segmented ones. The jumbled terrain of the late 1830s and early 1840s entertainment revolution, where high-quality literary texts had been crowded cheek-by-jowl with cheap news and sensationalist invective, was carved up in the mid-1840s among American book and journal publishers. Large publishing institutions like Harper & Brothers, Carey & Lea, and J. B. Lippincott reasserted their hegemony over the reprint trade and now, taking a page from Brother Jonathan and the New World, offered popular reprints not just in premium but also in low-cost formats designed to appeal to cost-conscious readers. Meanwhile, the edgier and more humble side of the literary and entertainment market—the sensational fiction, crime stories, urban exposés, along with a growing portion of cheap literature targeting women and children—went to a host of new publishers, like T. B. Peterson & Brothers in Philadelphia and Gleason's Publishing Hall in Boston, which throughout the late 1840s and 1850s put out books and magazines for middle- and lower-middle-class audiences.126 Nevertheless, the legacy of the cheap publishing revolution lived on in the segmenting market of the later 1840s, which was similarly permeated with eccentric author figures, if ones of more respectability. In this chapter I have focused on the extent to which the entrepreneurially energized press of the late 1830s and early 1840s fed itself on both real and fantasized eccentric authors. The system of American print Page 153 →entertainment lured dreamers and go-getters with the sparkle of promised fame, generating sensation, celebrity, and thus wealth from putatively crazed, misfit authors who could not be counted as positive entities in emergent systems of employment and wage-earning, and even generating game-changing format and distribution

innovations by mandating fierce, disturbingly personal competitiveness among the vulnerable and often desperate individuals attracted to professional writing and editing in the first place. In the chapter that follows, I look at another feature of this early entertainment milieu: its production of a companion eccentric author figure, the genteel “idle man,” a figure handed down from Dennie via Irving and beloved by American audiences and authors not for its entanglement in the sordid scenes of industrial entertainment and celebrity but for its happy carelessness, its dreamy isolation, and its promise to soar above the merely industrial world.

Page 154 →

{4} An Idle Industry Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure In the 1790s, Joseph Dennie had described himself as a lover of “the desultory style,” a perennial “lounger,” and the author of works read by those wishing “to waste time.”1 Dennie's leisure was an ironic, comical affair, but it was also never far from Dennie's aristocratic hauteur and his conviction, shared by Federalist men of letters, that their literary efforts constituted “service to the state.” The “lounger,” Dennie announced, belongs to “‘the privileged orders’ in society.” If he adopts a “capricious,” “airy” style, if he seems to be renouncing the “toils” of wisdom, it is not to abdicate the lofty duties bestowed upon gentlemen of rank, but rather the better to instruct the “lower orders” in a language they will understand.2 By the early 1830s, when the northern United States was fully in the throes of what Charles Sellers calls “market revolution,” the aristocratic ideal that Dennie venerated had been cast into the waste bin, rejected on principle by a newly nationalistic culture infatuated with ideals of democratized opportunity and social mobility. Dominating the popular fancy were self-makers and overreachers—Napoleon, Andrew Jackson, the Common Man who worked his way from rags to riches—men who, like Emerson's scholar, conversed in the rough-and-ready language “which the field and work-yard made.”3 And yet the “idler” did not disappear. At this same period there rose to prominence a significant number Page 155 →of American authors who apparently refused to relinquish the standards of Dennie's day. Almost all professional essayists, novelists, and editors, these writers were centrally involved in the Northeast's increasingly competitive and rationalized literature and entertainment industry, but from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who liked to think of his mind as a sluggish river on whose unrippled surface the world was perfectly reflected, to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who claimed that God did all her work for her, they insisted on their exemption from the bracing rhythms of labor and accumulation. With considerable justice, scholars understand these idle authorial constructs as protective, consolatory structures, envisioning them as powerful imaginary antidotes to industrial-era literary ghettos. In the opinion of many twentieth-century critics, for example, including William Charvat, Michael T. Gilmore, Lawrence Buell, and Michael Newbury, protestations of authorial idleness were defensive, self-defining gestures; faced with a rapidly industrializing society and an increasingly commercial, mass-audience-driven literary field, antebellum writers sought refuge in fantasy worlds reminiscent of old Federalist Boston and Knickerbocker New York.4 In the opinion of Gillian Brown and Cindy Weinstein, the cult of idleness was not just an instrument of authorial protection; it was part of a society-wide, defensive abstraction of the genteel self from the political and economic circumstances of its constitution within the emerging orders of industrial capitalism.5 In more recent studies by Ronald and Mary Saracino Zboray and Leon Jackson, which highlight conditions of literary production rather than prevailing ideology, the air of luxurious hobbyism that clings to genteel idle authorial figures implicitly speaks of the extent to which writers continued to conceive of themselves as agents in sociable or symbolic literary economies in the face of an increasingly corporate, market-oriented arts and entertainment landscape.6 However, if fantasies of idleness and leisure did indeed protect writers from the brutal orders of industry and market capitalism, it is not clear that writers were always in need of the amount of protection they got. In almost all studies of the nineteenth-century cult of genteel leisure it is taken for granted that writers in this tradition were invested in what Pierre Bourdieu famously calls art as “symbolic capital”—that is, in the transcendent purity and charisma of the aesthetic object as against its merely mechanical or commercially functional production and circulation. Even in recent studies that emphasize the genteel literary object's continued implication in older “public sphere” models of culture, these Page 156 →objects are understood to be endowed with a kind of artifactual or use value that similarly transcends the commodity form. Yet neglected in these arguments is the degree to which writers working in the United States between 1820 and 1850 were invested in figures of idleness

and leisure for professional and commercial purposes. The conundrum these writers faced did not lie, as we might expect, in the difficulty of transforming their merely commercial goods and public personalities into the purified stuff of symbolic exchange, but rather in the difficulty of transforming what were often revealed as stubbornly symbolic objects and personae into things of rational commercial worth. Nowhere is this conundrum more amply illustrated than in the writing and career of the writer who reinvented “trifling” for the Jacksonian generation, Nathaniel Parker Willis. In the 1830s, Willis was at the center of the storm of entrepreneurial go-getting and character assassination that typified the dawning years of the cheap literature revolution. Unlike Poe, Benjamin, and even Cooper, however, whose careers and reputations had been destroyed by the mid-1840s, Willis prospered throughout this era, in part because of his canny ability to embody prosperity itself. In the 1830s and 1840s, Willis blazed a fresh trail in the history of idleness by overtly commodifying the Federalist idle man and refitting his latent aristocratic implications for a growing constituency of socially aspiring readers, the same groups who devoured self-help and advice books in what John Cawelti calls “the Age of the Self-Made Man.” Advertising himself as a kind of self-made aristocrat, Willis made a lucrative career out of displaying and imagining fabulous aristocratic lifestyles for the “common man's” delectation and desire, effectively turning his idleness and flaneurie into an occasion for displays of entrepreneurial selfbetterment. Accordingly, Willis's reputation as a voluptuary, at which I looked briefly in chapter 3, was never far from what was ultimately his greater fame as a man of fashion with luxurious amounts of time on his hands, time not just to dally with beautiful women but to wander in exotic, romantic lands, to drink champagne, or simply to sit back in his comfy chair in the little study in his rural “cottage” and write the reader a note or two about his adventures. But if Willis at once extended and reconfigured Dennie's project to turn the trope of leisure into the stuff of economic opportunity, his career also illustrates in proportionally exaggerated form the logical impasses and fantasy scenarios that had plagued Dennie. In the hard-pressed world of the cheap press, writers like Poe, Wilmer, and Griswold longed to fly above the grim demands of the entertainment marketplace; Page 157 →Willis's case suggests another side of midcentury eccentric writer mythology. Instead of figuring as a commercial or entrepreneurial entity, a status for which Willis sometimes desperately agitated, Willis was a fixture in fantasies of chronic amateurism and marketplace inconsequence, his very success somehow signifying the idle writer's transcendence of American imperatives of success and self-making. Repeatedly staged in Willis's celebrity and played out in his career choices, accordingly, is his inability to achieve any kind of discernable or rational relationship to the commercial entertainment marketplace, a sphere that he flies above and “transcends” despite himself. In this chapter, accordingly, I look at the proliferation in Willis's writing and celebrity of what might be called an excess amount of symbolic value and an extravagant amount of protection, something I consider not only through Willis's vociferous claims to entrepreneurial achievement but also through the fantasies of worldly incompetence surrounding his success. Looking at Willis's odd relationship to “transcendence,” as this was conceived in the contemporary arts and entertainment milieu, allows us, I will suggest at the end of this chapter, an important insight into how the reconstituted figure of the idle author came to interact with the “protected” space of the genteel hobbyist culture upon which so much American periodical and book publishing since the early nineteenth century had been dependent. Far from impeding genteel writers' careers as professional and commercial entities, these “protective” structures, I argue, functioned much like the eviscerating structures that formed around the Byronic genius: they acted as crucial generative conditions not just for the ongoing vitality of amateur culture but also for energies of competition, productivity, and profit among literary professionals working in what by the early 1840s was a growing industry in genteel mass entertainment. The ultimate irony of the genteel idler's abstracted, overprotected status is that it not only shielded the writer from a transparent relationship to entrepreneurial gogetting or market exchange, but also, in this very act of protection, reconciled the celebrants of idleness to capitalism's rhythms of hard work, loss, and gain.

“No Lords and Ladies, Mr. President, If You Love Us” It is useful to begin this discussion of Willis as a stereotypical idle man and amateur by emphasizing his

prominence not just in cults of sensational celebrity but in the genteel antebellum literary scene overall. A widely admired poet, dramatist, essayist, short story writer, and travel Page 158 →writer, Willis counted among his accomplishments the founding editorship of no less than six popular periodicals, including the Evening and New Mirrors (which employed Poe as subeditor) and the Home Journal, which still survives today as Town and Country.7 In the opinion of Fred Lewis Pattee, Willis was “the most important figure in the American midcentury school of fiction.”8 Fond of discovering and cultivating new writers, Willis was the friend and mentor of such diverse figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Grace Greenwood, Fanny Forester, James Russell Lowell, Caroline Kirkland, Bayard Taylor, James Parton, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Richard Henry Stoddard. His influential travelogues, second only to Irving's in popularity, inspired Donald Grant Mitchell, George William Curtis, and Henry James, whose idea for the “international novel” owed itself to Willis's one novel, Paul Fane.9 Willis's celebrity was bound up with his exemplification of an elite art of living, something broadcasted not only in his racy, cosmopolitan flirtations, in his famously elegant and unusual clothes, and in all the exotic, romantic scenes that formed the backdrop to his depictions of himself, but also in his charming and yet discretely revelatory address. His magazines were all distinguished for their de rigeur tips on the fine points of genteel taste, for their opening up of shadowy elite worlds to the ordinary middle-class eye, and for their catering to a central Jacksonian fantasy: the rise of “the Common Man” from rags to riches, a fantasy relayed in this era's revived celebrations of Franklinian myths of meritocratic achievement and daring self-making. In the early twentieth century, Willis, along with a host of other nineteenth-century writers, would come to typify the dreary nicety of what George Santayana dubbed the “Genteel Tradition.” But in his own day Willis was known for his place on the cutting edge. Coalescing, absorbing, and disseminating emergent discourses of upward mobility, Willis's career and celebrity participated in a broad ideological redescription of wealth and leisure in the early days of laissez-faire capitalism. For all their implication in early national commercial structures, the idle men of Joseph Dennie and Washington Irving had insisted upon traditional continuities between leisure and social station, or what Irving called “caste.” This is something that Willis's writings, even as they borrow reverently from Federalist literature, repudiate. Instead, Willis's writings and his public self-presentation, in their very contradictions, serve in the disruption of older and heretofore immutable links between leisure and caste, effectively commodifying wealth and gentility for a segment of society newly open to their acquisition. In one sense there was little to distinguish Willis from the gentlemen Page 159 →authors of the generation before. Like Dennie before him, Willis was famous as a clotheshorse and an emissary of “culture.” Described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as “something between a remembrance of Count d'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde,”10 Willis first made a reputation for himself by writing about his experiences touring the capitals of Europe in the early 1830s and mingling in “the world of fashion and genius.”11 At home Willis's reputation, although originally founded on his poetry, came increasingly to rest on his descriptions of European and American “high life.” A selfappointed chronicler of America's “Upper Ten Thousand,” a phrase he himself coined, Willis reported on the machinery of the fashionable circles in which he moved. Describing Willis's Evening Mirror, the Philadelphia Ledger said, “The journal is particularly devoted to light, elegant literature and fashionable what-nots, such as the opera, paintings, Carpenter's coats, dinner parties, Broadway, and the habits of a do-nothing eat all, self illustrating kind of life which certain people with means, visible or invisible, contrive to pass.”12 In its 1946 centennial issue Town and Country called him “an international leader of elegance in literature and living,” the man who “led a generation of Americans through a gate where weeds gave way to horticulture.”13 For his characterization of the affluent and dilettantish scribbler, Willis borrowed much from his predecessors in American indolence, Dennie, Paulding, and Irving. With some of the humorous high-camp affectation of the Paulding of Salmagundi, for example, Willis cultivated the fiction in his editorials for his earliest journal, The American Monthly Magazine, that he wrote in a crimson-curtained parlor strewn with ottomans and “lap-medelightfullys.”14 Invoking the fashionable “Noctes” of Blackwood's, he purported to sit at a rosewood desk with a bottle of Rudesheimer and a plate of olives at his elbow, his companions a servant named Alphonse, two dogs, L.E.L. and Ugolino, who made their bed in a pile of rejected manuscripts, and a South American “trulian” that flew around the room. In her 1829 Book of the Boudoir, Sydney Owenson had a chapter on “Love in Idleness” in which she contended that love requires idleness and that “The idle nations are ever the most gallant.”15 A fan of

this work, which he admired for its “graceful trifling,” Willis followed Washington Irving in extending the conceit of idleness from the realms of Federalist humor and hauteur to the more contemporary realms of transatlantic sentiment and flaneurie. However parodically represented, the stock end of an insouciant existence was for Willis an enlarged capacity for feeling and contemplation. Fond of quoting Godwin—“A judicious and limited voluptuousness is necessary to the cultivation of the Page 160 →mind, to the polishing of the manners, to the refining of the sentiment, and to the development of the understanding”16—Willis formulated his leisure as the lens of his finely focused sensibilities. His 1838 poem “Idleness” explains: I love to go Out in the pleasant sun, and let my eye Rest on the human faces that pass by, Each with its gay or busy interest: And then I muse upon their lot, and read Many a lesson in their changeful cast, And so grow kind of heart, as if the sight Of human beings were humanity. And I am better after it, and go More gratefully to my rest, and feel a love Stirring my heart to every living thing, And my low prayer has more humility, And I sink lightlier to my dreams—and this, 'Tis very true, is only idleness!17

But if Willis's idler owed much to an earlier generation of genteel idle men and loungers, who were themselves indebted to Addison, Mackenzie, and Sterne, he was distinctive for his association with America's fabled class of social “bounders,” “climbers,” and arrivistes. Historians differ on the issue of whether the kind of social mobility upon which such myths were founded actually existed. Many maintain that, contrary to popular Jacksonian belief, class hierarchies and the composition of U.S. elites stayed fairly constant throughout the ostensible “Age of the Common Man,” the elites, if anything, solidifying and shrinking, not dispersing and expanding; they hold that the fable of the Common Man's rise from rags to riches was just that—a fable.18 On the other hand, Fredric Cople Jaher's encyclopedic study of U.S. urban elites suggests that in New York especially, where Willis made his mark in the 1830s and 1840s, the upper order over this same period essentially fragmented. More given to “speculative impulses” in trade and finance than their counterparts in Philadelphia or Boston, New York's elites were also more permeable and early on split into “Old Guard” and “emerging ‘smart set’”—patrician Knickerbockers and the nouveau riches.19 It was to the aspirants in this new order, the hopefuls, that Willis addressed himself. Traditional upper-class leisure assumed a wholly naturalized situation of ease and privilege, as amorphous and immutable as the aristocrat's lofty Page 161 →birthright. Of central importance to Willis, by contrast, was the fragmentation and deconstruction of this situation. In Willis's formulation of the idle life, wealth and leisure are not, as they were in Dennie's day, the givens of an implicitly established social rank. They are plausible goals, deracinated commodities; they are objects that anyone can desire and gain.

One of the cardinal features of the commentaries Willis published throughout the 1830s and 1840s, for example, is their overt cataloging of Willis's own luxurious possessions, from his Chinese cupid ink-holder and japonica, to the amber-handled spoon that in summer keeps his palm cool. The function of these signs of affluence and leisure is not to elaborate Willis, their owner, but to state their own exciting availability. Addressing himself to the “middle and lower classes of American life,”20 Willis, in his descriptions of his own home and person, showcases symbols of ease and rank to which even the average reader can aspire. The “glorious” chair in which he invites his reader to sit is a “capacious gilt relic of the palace of Versailles,” the symbol of an almost mythic opulence that, Willis announces, he got on sale for three dollars at a museum bazaar.21 For those who can't afford to visit exotic climes to buy exotic clothes Willis recommends a Turkish shop on Broadway with exquisite shirts: “They are the poetry of negligé costume—the idealized romance of the drapery of the dishabille.”22 And for readers who will never have a chance at portentous heirlooms, Willis champions the alienable grace of antiques, directing his audience to attend “the auction sales at private houses.”23 For Willis secondhand furniture, precisely because it represents the liquidation of property, has a special doctrinal importance. Equal opportunity, he believes, is realized in the free circulation of these once fixed manorial objects: It is right and wholesome that a new country should be the paradise of the working-classes, and that ours is so may be seen very readily. A wealthy merchant, whose family is about leaving the city, sold out his household furniture last week, and among other very expensive articles, a magnificent piano. It was bid off at a very fair price, and the purchaser turned out to be the carman usually employed at the merchant's warehouse!24 In Willis's view, indeed, no property, however personal, however rich in sentimental value, should be exempt from circulation. At the start of a tender and meditative description of his own country home, Glenmary, Willis announces, “We present you this picture, dear reader, as if it were Page 162 →the portrait of a friend—and it is like announcing to you that our friend is for sale, to tell you (purely in the way of advertisement) that Glenmary may be bought.”25 Willis's vision of a mode of life—even his own personal life—as something now alienable and made available to all was complemented by his habits of address, which could not have been further from the pedagogical form of Dennie's leisure. Eschewing pedagogy, with its implications of authority and subordination, Willis opted for the more egalitarian, unpretentious properties of gossip and personal exchange. “We would have you…indulge us in our innocent egotism as if it were all whispered in your private ear and over our iced Margaux,” he enjoined his readers. “We will let you into a thousand little secrets that can only be told in an under tone.”26 Willis once said that the purpose of his magazine the Home Journal, the magazine that would eventually become Town and Country, was “The keeping open of a bridge of human sympathy and kindly feeling between the upper classes…and the country at large.”27 And in accord with the mobility, the movement across boundaries and divides, implied in Willis's metaphor of a bridge, his commentary is distinguished by its preoccupation with tropes of entry and trespassing, among the most common of which are his invitations to his reader to enter into and partake of some heretofore private environment. Thus to Fanny Forester, who Willis imagines is reading the special words he writes to her, he says, “If adorable ‘Cousin Bel’ chance to be leaning over your chair,…beg her to lift the curtain of her auburn tress-aract from your shoulder, and allow the American Public to look over while you read.”28 Like Willis's liquidation of property, his commodification of private space was implicitly intertwined with the elaboration of a new personality, the self who would desire the objects and trespass on the forbidden spaces that Willis described—in this case, Willis himself, who fortified his rhetoric by the rather spectacular example of his own success. Indeed, the power of Willis's writing, its immense popularity, resides to a great extent in the fact that Willis seemed to have lived the life he promised to his readers. Born into an old-fashioned yeoman family in Boston, his father a deacon of the staunchly Puritan Park Street Church, Willis was famous in his own day not so much for being another leisured gentleman of fashion but for having risen to that exalted position from out of nowhere.29 After some success as a poet while still an undergraduate at Yale, and some smaller success as editor of his own Boston magazine afterward, Willis sailed to Europe in 1831, the foreign correspondent for Page 163 →George Morris's New York Mirror. There he was an unexpected hit. Tall, good-looking, with excellent manners

and a flair with clothes, Willis was soon on “exceedingly good terms with…the élite of the best society.”30 He attended the balls of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the parties of the former King of Westfalia. Introduced by Walter Savage Landor to the Countess of Blessington, one of London's leading hostesses, Willis became her protegé and a regular guest at her famous and intimate parties where he dined with the lions of Britain: BulwerLytton, Benjamin D'Israeli, Thomas Moore, Lord Durham, James Smith, Albany Fonblanque, John Galt, Lady and Sir Leicester, and the Count D'Orsay himself, who was Lady Blessington's son-in-law.31 He spent time not only with society in London, but at the country homes of men like the Earl of Dalhousie and the Duke of Gordon.32 His success was unparalleled for an American, barely rivaled by the success of Irving the generation before. No one was more conscious of how far Willis had climbed than Willis himself. “What a star is mine,” he wrote to his sister Julia, shortly after his arrival in England. “All the best society of London exclusiveness is now open to me—me! without a sou in my pocket beyond what my pen brings me.”33 Accordingly, almost from the moment his correspondence from abroad appeared in print, Willis was famous as a social climber, his buoyancy perhaps nowhere more aptly expressed than in James Russell Lowell's phrase for him in A Fable For Critics: “The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.”34 Poe, writing for Godey's, thought Willis “‘pushed himself,’ went much into the world…sought the intimacy of noted women, and got into quarrels with notorious men. All these things,” the article went on, “served his purpose.”35 Satirizing Willis in Parnassus in Pillory, A. J. H. Duganne cried, “Faith, I wish him joy—/ He's forty-three years old—in good condition—And, positively, he has gained ‘position.’”36 In his comments in the Quarterly Review on Willis's collected correspondence, Pencillings By the Way (1835), John Lockhart decided that Willis was “a just representative—not of the American mind and manners generally, but only of the young men of fair education among the busy, middling orders of the mercantile cities.”37 Willis himself never shied away from the facts of his success. His magazine columns are full of comments and advice about moving up the social ladder. Having “arrived” in New York society purely by the efforts of his pen, Willis at one point suggests, without shame, “Let us see if we can give a sketchy idea of the rise and progress of literary celebrity in London; or, in other words, the climbing into society, and obtaining of notice by men who have a calling for literature.” Willis then reveals that Page 164 →there is no “climbing” up into society in England; the aristocracy is so devoted to precedent and each individual so devoted to those above him in rank, that anyone on the lower rungs doesn't have a hope. Far from being discouraged, however, Willis concludes with a celebration of American fluidity and a tribute to the spirit of competition: Understand us, we grudge no respect to dignitaries or authorities. Even to wealth, as power, we are willing to yield the wall. But we say again, that a republican spirit must rebel against homage to anything human with which it never can compete, and in this lies the only distinction (we fervently hope) which will ever hedge in an American aristocracy. Let who will get to windward of us by superiour sailing—the richer, the handsomer, the cleverer, the stronger, the more beloved and gifted—there was fair play at the start, and we will pay deference and duty with the promptest. But no lords and ladies, Mr. President, if you love us.38 In his admonitions, as in his celebrity, then, Willis could not have more loudly echoed the new possibility—exemplified in Henry Clay's self-made man and in Jackson's promise of equal opportunity—of going places. “Happiness,” he once said, “is motion.”39 Yet, not unexpectedly, Willis's relationship, as a celebrated author and “trifler,” to the Jacksonian culture of arduous self-making and aspiration was not at all straightforward. Clay himself was specific about what actually made self-made men and it was not what, by his own account, had made Willis; the “wealth they possess,” Clay said, is earned “by patient and diligent labor.”40 Clay's belief was repeated in the hundreds of advice books, novels, lectures, and sermons that proliferated in what John Cawelti calls the “Age of the Self-Made Man,” all of them championing, in the words of one New York editor, “honest and laborious industry” as the key to “great wealth and consideration.”41 Indeed, as Cindy Weinstein underlines, the powerful doctrines of the work ethic in northeastern society in the second quarter of the nineteenth century not only called upon citizens to devote themselves to “labourious industry,” but also to devote their leisure time to diligent regimens of cultural self-improvement, the belief being that a cultured and genteel mind was as crucial to social advancement as money. In this formulation, it was essential for individuals to find leisure time so that they

could work to improve themselves.42 In one short story of the period, for example, “The Mechanic's Wife,” which is typical of its kind, a poor mechanic despairs when his wife suggests they rearrange their life to include “time for enjoyment and improvement, too”: “I don't know how that can be,” says the mechanic. Page 165 →“Every moment taken from my labour, is so much taken from our scanty income. We can not afford to attend places of public amusement—in our present low style of living, we cannot mingle in the first society, and I will never consent to enter any other than good society, if we live alone—and as for improvement, my education was so neglected in my childhood, that I have little taste for reading—and besides, we have nothing to read.” Undeterred, the wife insists they adopt her idea for a new leisure regimen, which includes “rising early,” taking all possible advantage of newspapers, the public library and Lyceum lectures, and filling every moment of the day with reading and “self-education.” Twenty years later, the mechanic, formerly “depressed, vexed, crushed in spirit,” is a wealthy “gentleman.” We discover him “dressed in a rich velvet gown and embroidered slippers” and sitting relaxed before the fire-side in his large house “reading the journals of the day.”43 But if Willis clearly contributed to the alienation and availability of “wealth and consideration”—down to presenting rich velvet gowns and embroidered slippers as prizes for those who work hard—he also disavowed the “industry” and direction that wealth acquisition and social advancement seemed to require, insisting instead that his aesthetic objects were created spontaneously, even magically, without conscious design. Departing from his idle, Federalist predecessors in so many ways, Willis followed them in consciously abstracting the figure of the genteel author from the arenas of mechanical labor and physical exertion, ultimately presenting himself as a figure whose fantastical success was the product of mysterious forces. In one sense, as so many scholars have pointed out, these assertions of authorial withdrawal and relaxation were inseparable from structures of psychological protection and self-esteem, offering to enclose genteel writers in a bubble cut off from the exigencies not just of industrializing America generally but more specifically, we might suspect, from its counterpart in the low-wage ghettos of routinized “mental labor” that increasingly formed a part of this era's urban landscapes. Indeed, there is much to suggest that idleness gained in importance as a trope of cultural and class differentiation among writers in the 1830s and 1840s in proportion to the conscription of other Romantic tropes of authorial separateness and specialness—most centrally the Byronic “genius”—as the badge of mass entertainment's growing host of invisible, working-class, and for the most part downwardly mobile mental workers. Already by the early 1830s, as we have seen, the Byronic genius was a figure associated with easy replication. In 1832, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poked fun Page 166 →at Byron mania, recalling that period when “at length every city, town, and village had its little Byron, its self-tormenting scoffer at morality, its gloomy misanthropist in song.”44 Later the Byronic genius is associated with unfounded literary pretensions. Traveling on lecture tours in the late 1840s, Park Benjamin delivered a set piece on the topic of mediocre young poets, their reputations pointlessly inflated by puffs: The bard, elated, elevates his nose At common people who converse in prose, Looks wild, abstracted, wanders up and down, And à la Byron wears his collar down, Lets his beard grow and never smooths his hair, Talks to himself and gestures to the air, Till sober lovers of the public peace Esteem him mad and summon the police.45

And finally the “genius” invoked powerful links with the kind of cheap mechanical productivity associated with mass-produced sensation and story-paper fiction, as stated in A. J. H Duganne's Parnassus in Pillory, where he sarcastically advises aspiring writers, Ah, luckless wretch! Wouldst thou escape a hovel? Edit “Paul Pry” or write a “blood-red” novel; Eschew all modesty—let sense go hang: Write shilling legends for the “Killer” gang; Argue like mad some question undisputed; Swear you're a heaven-born genius persecuted; Mix in due quantities your brass and lead, And “swap” the “bogus” for you daily bread! Then shall each peddling bookman call you “Nepos,” Your name be bless'd in “Literary Depots.”46

Idleness, on the other hand, presumably because it overtly states its distance from any kind of labor—most specifically, perhaps, from the anguish and agitation (the “madness,” the “persecution,” the lack of “sense”) associated with divided and routinized mental labor—becomes increasingly important after 1830 as an instrument of cultural differentiation. It is often invoked, for example, to consolidate authors' feelings of accomplishment and self-worth and to elevate and purify their aesthetic objects. When Hawthorne, at the time a struggling writer who was nervous of adverse judgements, sent a copy of his Twice-told Tales (1837) to his old school friend, the renowned poet Longfellow, it was not with Page 167 →out a disclaimer of the labor that might have gone into his volume: he suggested that Longfellow glance over his “idle attempts in the way of Magazine and Annual scribblings.”47 Years later, when Hawthorne became a member of the elite coterie of artists and intellectuals then living in Concord, he conveyed his good fortune to the public by emphasizing in his sketch “The Old Manse” that no one—and nothing—in his exclusive world did any work: the “domestic labor” of a ghostly servant-maid leaves “no traces of anything accomplished”; the Concord River “idles its sluggish life away, in lazy liberty, without turning a solitary spindle, or affording even water-power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks.” Accordingly, Hawthorne figures the tales that follow his prefatory essay as objects whose production has been spontaneous and uncultivated; they are “flowers” that have “blossomed out” of “calm.” They are “idle weeds and withering blossoms.”48 The extent to which such rhetoric served to authorize aesthetic output, essentially testifying to the high quality of the author and of his or her work, is suggested by its frequent inclusion in prefaces and introductions. “The Old Manse” is one example, but along much the same lines popular essayist Grace Greenwood introduced her first collection, Greenwood Leaves (1850), as a “light wreath, not of flowers, but of simple leaves, of many-coloured leaves, such as children collect in the autumn woods.”49 Although drawing on different imagery, Donald Grant Mitchell prefaced his Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) with a similar emphasis on inconsequence: his book is “a collection of those floating Reveries which have, from time to time, drifted across my brain” and which have been “tossed…from me in the shape of a Book.”50 Indeed, this rhetoric appears in the prefaces of even those writers who had no claims at all to gentility but who clearly wished to draw on these energies of esteem and legitimation. Introducing his lurid autobiography, My Life, George Thompson, an 1840s' pornographer and cheap fiction writer who produced story papers “by the cartload,” as he said, informed readers that while his friends urged him to aim for the bright light of international fame, he wished otherwise: “I have been unobtrusive, unambitious, retiring”

and have “enjoy[ed] the friendship of men of letters.”51 However, if the author's rhetoric of leisure and withdrawal fortified his or her experience of self-esteem while elevating the literary objects thus produced, the case of Willis suggests that it did so through a prism of qualifying paradoxes. Evidence indicates that readers turned to light genteel entertainment—the kind produced professionally by Irving, Willis, Hawthorne, and Mitchell, and found in great anonymous troves in gift Page 168 →books and literary miscellanies—principally in order to find relief and change from overly disciplined and work-filled lives. In his examination of antebellum reading pleasure, David Stewart highlights not only “the role played by reading in compensating for the demands of work” but the peculiar forms of readerly pleasure and self-loss to be had in the sheer uselessness, what Stewart calls the “negativity of content” evinced in the excesses of certain antebellum popular genres (he focuses mainly on city crime fiction and reportage).52 A piece in Voice of Industry, a worker-edited, Lowell paper of the late 1840s, puts this case succinctly: It is true there are Churches and ministers “in any quantity,” with many good influences…. There are lectures of various kinds…. Then there are also libraries of well selected books, to which all can have access…. [T]hey continually invite to the soul-feast, those who, tho' they hunger and thirst, cannot partake. Do you ask why they cannot partake? Simply from physical and mental exhaustion. The unremitted toil of thirteen long hours, drains off the vital energy and units for study and reflection. They need amusement, relaxation, rest, and not mental exertion of any kind. A really sound and instructive lecture cannot, under such circumstances, be appreciated, and the lecture fails, to a great extent, in making an impression.—“Jim Crow” performances are much better patronized than scientific lectures, and the trashy, milk-and-water sentimentalities of the Lady's Book and Olive Branch, are more read than the works of Gibbon, or Goldsmith, or Bancroft.53 Made evident in a large portion of the literature of idleness, not surprisingly, are efforts to commune with these desires, to abstract the reading experience from, in Stewart's words, “the growing disciplinary pressures of nineteenth-century urban industrial life” via a conceit in which a coy and lazy authorial personality, absolving the reader of responsibility for productive leisure, forecloses positive content, effectively forcing the reader to sit and think of nothing productive. While clearly entwined with mechanisms of high-culture consecration and self-esteem, then, protestations of idleness and amateurism were also, in their appeal to readers, entwined with sales and professional achievement. Pictures of authorial leisure and aristocratic adventure of the sort offered by Willis were a draw for readers, partly because readers turned to this literature to escape lives otherwise filled with routinized labor and even routinized leisure. What was clearly offered in pictures of writers lazing around in green meadows, in writers engaged in Page 169 →idle dreaming in the hushed coziness of their private study, or in writers ambling around to spas or holiday spots or urban cafes, were fantastical vistas not just of the rewards of a promised mobility and social climbing but of a more temporary escape into a world of refreshing stagnancy and laxness—indeed, a world cleansed of mobility and its imperatives. Accordingly, while protestations of authorial idleness constituted a renunciation of the mandates of industrial and commercial labor, it is also the case that writers who protested their idleness and exclusion from commerce tended to stand in a more intimate relationship to the potential for—and often the actuality—of commercial success. In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Grace Greenwood, and Donald Grant Mitchell shared with Charles Dickens and Susan Warner the honor of being the most widely read, commercially viable writers in the United States.54 Idle authors, in other words, were constrained from depicting themselves as industrious workers not just by imperatives of cultural esteem but by a combination of audience fantasy and commercial systems in which sales and profits for genteel entertainment depended on the author's depictions of his idleness—and thus, of course, on his odd, magical, and even nonsensical relationship to contemporary imperatives of business success and selfmaking. Starting with Henry Nash Smith and Ann Douglas in the 1970s, scholars have been quick to point out that protestations of writerly idleness and triviality, while they theorized the author's abstraction from commerce, hard work, and business, also seemed to go hand in hand with the writer's utter subscription to and even canny negotiation of the commercial market system. Tempting as it has been for scholars to think of protestations of idleness as a form of insulation from the indignities of a marketplace that these same writers successfully

negotiated, I want to suggest here that in the larger fantasy structuring the idle author's career there is a causal, not an obfuscatory, logic at work in the congruence of idleness and success. It is true that the idle author embodies a series of impossibilities: he has worked his way to the rewards of leisure by leading a leisured life; he is a selfmade man who never needs to resort to the labors that would enable his making. And one way of reading these impossibilities is to single out their consolatory dimensions, as most modern critics do. But the other way of reading them is to stress that they withhold the thing they also offer. The idle author might seem to be the recipient of a success that is magically produced. But with success cast as a goal that leisure both evinces and logically precludes, the idle author is also in the position of always being kept from the accomplishments he seems already to have achieved. Page 170 → It is this interdiction of success rather than its magical attainment, I would suggest, that determined the idle author's peculiarly amenable relationship to the commercial market and its entrepreneurial standards. Barred from experiencing the gratification that his idleness was supposed to secure, the idle author formed a site for the mobilization of energies of self-making; that is, insofar as he incorporated an impossibility, an emptiness, the idle author was an author constantly in need of being made. Perhaps because he did so much to formulate the brand of ennui that would dominate the genteel rhetoric of the midcentury, Willis displays the mechanics of this process in particularly acute ways. For of critical importance in the discourses that articulated his celebrity was not, as one might expect, the theme of his success as a writer or a socialite, but the more complex fantasy of his repeated failure and frustration in the face of triumph. As a precondition of his aspiration Willis experiences, and for his audience provides the evidence of, his own dissatisfaction, a dissatisfaction engineered by the leisure that should represent his fulfillment.

“All Along Through the Up-hill of the Morning” To understand how Willis's leisure might both symbolize and defeat his gratification we need only look for a moment at his frequent descriptions of himself “working” (that is, writing), and purportedly working toward the idle life that is the reward of hard-earned wealth: “The coffee stands untasted, (for we write and breakfast as an idle man breakfasts and dawdles, all along through the up-hill of the morning)”;55 “We have been sitting here two hours making Caryatides to hold up some spilt ink on our blotting paper—(rather nicely drawn, one of them, and looks like a Greek girl we saw at Egina)”;56 or, remarking on the poet's meditative existence: “Labor is not in harmony with it. The thought that disturbs a nerve is intrusion…. Indolence is the mother of philosophy and we ‘let the world slide.’”57 The idle aimlessness by which Willis abstracts himself from, in Thorstein Veblen's phrase, “vulgarly productive occupations”58 is likewise the quality he promotes in poetics. “There is an easy, slip-shodical freedom about that which I love,” he says of one work; of another, “We love this rambling, familiar gossip.”59 Willis reiterates these standards when it comes to discussing his own writing. He declares himself prone to be “profligate of verbal intemperance,”60 to let similes “trickle off [his] lips.”61 At one point, in a passage that encapsulates his repudiation of purpose, direction, and even self-control, Willis enjoins his reader: “Sit back in your chair, and let me babble! I like just to pull the Page 171 →spigot out of my discretion, and let myself run. No criticism if you please, and don't stare! Eyelids down, and stand ready for slipslop.”62 Here again, Willis's elaborate denials of purpose and work seem to corroborate what scholars have maintained all along: that his protestations of idleness and amateurism are part of a fantasy in which success and mobility are magically produced without the necessities of effort. This is what Fred Lewis Pattee implies when he casts Willis's phenomenal success as a fairy tale, an “Old World romance,”63 and what Ann Douglas suggests when she condemns Willis for his production of escapist consumerist fantasies.64 The reviewers of Willis's own day seem to confirm such assessments by their insistence that his writing is the product of mysterious forces. As a writer for Graham's put it, “There is so little of effort or strain, so little of preparation and slow approach [in Willis], that when the miracle of art has been performed under our eyes, we doubt for a moment the reality of an effect of which we saw not the intention, and cannot comprehend the means.”65 Yet the central feature of Willis's celebrity is not that it featured the romantic fulfillment of his aspirations but that

it enacted his perpetual frustration. Within the terms of the causal logic governing labor and leisure, Willis could not, contrary to his claim, work his way up the social ladder to a leisured life while he lounged. But instead of eliding the absurdity of such claims, Willis's celebrity embraced them. The dominant theme of his career was not that he went places in spite of his idleness but that he never got anywhere because of it: he never managed to attain the life of ease he seemed already to be leading. Thus a piece in The Atlantic Monthly by Edward Hayward in 1884 casts him as a casualty of the leisure that is logically the reward for his success. According to Hayward, Willis suffered from “an inability, which at last became constitutional, to undertake and carry on any systematic and sustained labor, together with a frankly confessed indifference to the peculiar consideration and rewards of such a course.” And so, far from living a life of fairy-tale transcendence, as Pattee would have it, Willis was a “case of arrested development,” a man who never “advanced” beyond the standard “fixed by [the] immature fruitage of his youth.”66 In fact, Willis's fairy-tale social triumphs held relatively little interest for his contemporaries. Of concern to antebellum audiences, rather, was the more tantalizing spectacle of his defeat in the face of near victory. So engaged were Willis's contemporaries with the permutations of his frustration, indeed, that in the absence of facts they generated a monumental fiction, the fiction of his inadequacy. Page 172 → The size of this fiction, the sheer volume of commentary it entailed, is worth emphasizing. Although Willis is all but absent from modern histories of the nineteenth century, he was in his own day more written about than any other American writer. And even by the standards of the midcentury arts and entertainment industry, which thrived on the public abuse and ridicule of writers and editors, Willis stands out for the storms of criticism and ill will he attracted, not just at specific points in his history but on an ongoing basis for the length of his thirty-fiveyear career. Moreover, unlike Poe, Willis did not court negative attention. Indeed, his own published commentaries are remarkably free of the rancor and hostility toward fellow authors that typified so much of what Thomas Baker calls midcentury “predatory journalistic practices.”67 Writing in 1885, Willis's biographer, Henry Beers, expresses puzzlement at the vituperation he attracted. But just as Willis's leisure, the sign of his accomplishment, was also the sign of his defeat, his success as a literary man and his simultaneous failure to please his audience were mutually generative; for no matter how superior Willis became in the estimation of reviewers, friends, and even members of his family, he was never good enough. American audiences watched avidly as, over and over again, Willis failed to achieve his goals, his progress forestalled, if not in actuality, then in an elaborate fantasy of deficiency that saw in every triumph a sign of falling short. The strange interdependence of Willis's success and failure is evident, for example, in the unanimously qualified praise he earned from his contemporaries. He was considered by all to be an outstanding poet and essayist, and yet reviewers were never without an admonishment. Typical is this defense of Willis, penned by his good friend Samuel Griswold Goodrich: “One thing is certain—everybody thought Willis worth criticising…. Some of the attacks upon him proceeded, no doubt, from a conviction that he was a man of extraordinary gifts, and yet of extraordinary affectations…. That Willis made mistakes in literature and life,” Goodrich concludes, “may be admitted by his best friends.”68 Some of Willis's friends had worse than this to say about him, but the extent to which affirmations of Willis's success were at some level inseparable from declarations of his failure is suggested by the drastic vacillations of an 1836 piece in the North American Review. The review opens by regretting Willis's curious place in American letters: “Certain it is, that no author, belonging to our yet forming literature, has been pursued with more indiscriminate abuse.” Willis has had to “withstand the united influence of partial friends and eager foes; to bear the intoxicating draught of flattery…Page 173 →and the bitter cup of unbounded hostility.” An unabashed admirer, the reviewer goes on to extol “the depth, variety and power” of Willis's poetry, even defending him against some of his detractors. But at the end of the essay, for reasons that are mysterious, he is driven to condemnation. Willis's sketches “are coloured falsely and glaringly”; they “are out of keeping with American thought, American morals, and American life.”69 What the production of Willis's partial success failed to achieve in the way of titillation was engineered by the far more spectacular chronicle of his out-and-out failures. A favorite subject of literary journals, newspapers, and gossips, Willis was the target of an extended campaign of slander that began with his first success in Boston in the late 1820s, continued throughout his tenure in Europe and New York in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and refused

finally to end even when he died. Some of this abuse originated with Willis's unthinking publication of his honest—or rather, too honest—impressions of the men and women he met in English society. His candid descriptions of the British “lions” and “dandies” with whom he hobnobbed at Lady Blessington's events, published in the Mirror in the early 1830s, earned him more time in the British press than he would ever have wished, together with the enmity of Captain Marryat, William Makepeace Thackeray, and, of course, John Lockhart, who felt for him “unmitigated disgust.”70 And yet it is not insignificant that the reproval of Willis began in earnest at the first sign of his social success, when he had “climbed” on the wings of his poetry into the circles of New Haven and Boston elites in the late 1820s. By 1831, for example, when Willis had been on the national literary scene for barely three years, he had so frequently featured as the object of critics' ridicule and abuse that some of his critics were driven to criticize him as someone who was not worth criticizing. An 1831 Boston pamphlet, penned by Joseph Snelling, wondered: Muse, shall we not a few brief lines afford To give poor Natty P. his meet reward? What has he done to be despised by all Within whose hands his harmless scribblings fall? Why, as in bandbox-trim he walks the streets, Turns up the nose of every man he meets, As if at scented carrion? Why, of late, Do all the critics claw his shallow pate? True, he's a fool;—if that's a hanging thing, Let Pr-nt-ce, Wh-tt-r, M-ll-n also swing.71

Page 174 → Revealed at the start of Willis's career, these attacks, whose practice is to hold up Willis's very fame and social success as the occasion for remarking his social and literary failures, remained a constant throughout the remainder of his professional life, marking each high point of his fame. Upon the publication of Pencillings, at the moment Willis seemed about to reach the pinnacle of his literary and social aspirations, Tory magazines followed the lead of the Quarterly Review and pronounced Willis “a jackass.” “This is a goose of a book,” says one reviewer, “or if anybody wishes the idiom changed, the book of a goose. There is not an idea in it beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.”72 As Willis's popularity ballooned in the 1830s and 1840s, as the sales of his books and the subscriptions to his journals climbed—as he became more and more successful, his friends and critics were more and more inclined to dwell on his shortcomings and point up his defeats. There are Poe's satires, “The Duc De L'Omelette” (1832) and “Some Passages in the Life of a Lion” (1835), with their cruel parodies of Willis's fashionable aims and his sham status.73 There are reviews like the one by John Moncure Daniel, calling Willis the “man milliner of our literature” and his Home Journal “the weekly newspaper of mantua-maker's girls, and of tailor's boys.”74 Not surprisingly, in the late 1840s and early 1850s, as Willis, with his newly formed Home Journal, reached what his biographers call the peak of his celebrity and productivity, assessments of him reached the peak of cruelty. In a particularly ugly and unprovoked attack in 1845 over the trial of Bishop Onderdonk (Willis defended the bishop) the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer was moved—in a front-page story devoted especially to Willis—to

proclaim him a “slimy profligate,” a man who has “skulked, like a whipped cur, from pillar to post—constant[] to nothing but to his doctrine of open and shameless libertinism.” He has made his journal “the pet of pimps, and himself the crowned leader of all the profligacy that seeks a higher resting place than the gutter.”75 The scandal caused by this article was barely topped a few years later by the public indictment of Willis by his sister Sara, or “Fanny Fern.” Immortalized in the character of “the mincing, aristocratic” Hyacinth Ellet, the “prosperous editor of the Irving magazine” in Ruth Hall, Willis was flayed for declining to publish his sister's sketches when she was in desperate need of money. The form of Sara Willis's attack was familiar: “Mr. Hyacinth Ellet has always had only one hobby,” one of the characters in Ruth Hall remarks, “social position. For that he would sacrifice the dearest friend or nearest relative he had on earth.”76 The upshot of this constant reiteration of Willis's inadequacies was Page 175 →that Willis himself, for all his manifest success, seems to have experienced little but his own confusion and incompleteness. On countless occasions his essays and stories draw attention to the miscarriage of his lofty aims. A thinly veiled autobiographical tale about a handsome young American in England, for instance, is titled, “The Phantom-Head Upon the Table. A Singular Story From Real Life. Showing the humiliations of the barriers of high-life.”77 His poems and works of fiction, from the early “Lord Ivon and His Daughter” to his one novel, Paul Fane, dwell not on the delights but on the frustrations of social climbing. And climbing itself is for him problematic, involving not the giddy straightforward trajectory of popular myth but a process of fits and starts perhaps best expressed in his obsession with the imagery of confused motion. Calling himself a “Here-and-There-ian,” Willis titled his books and columns in ways that intimated a lack of direction and progress: Pencillings By the Way, Dashes At Life, Inklings of Adventure, Loiterings of Travel, “Here- and-There-ities,” “Slip-Slopperies of Correspondence,” “Digressive Letter to the Reader.” Such designations finally complemented Willis's sense of his own flaws as an author and an intellect. Over and over again he talks about the incomplete, abortive qualities of his writing—“This is to be a disembowelled narrative, dear reader”; he highlights his own insufficiencies—“The reader will see that we are trying to apologise for our dissipation in reading.”78 Without apparent self-consciousness, he incorporated into the pages of his own journal the mixed accounts of his own success. Following the attack of the Courier and Enquirer, mentioned above, Willis, apart from writing an outraged defense of himself in his own paper, reprinted several vindicating letters from friends that appeared in other papers, one of which was this one from the Boston Morning Post: As clean a vindication as we ever read, is Mr. N.P. Willis's answer to the malicious and grossly personal attacks upon him in the N.Y. Courier newspaper…. It is Mr. Willis's versatility of talents—his copiousness of genius—that has led many to judge of him incorrectly. He can write as vigorously, can call to his aid as high reaching and powerfully grasping thought, as any man within our knowledge—and he can write as effeminately, as mawkishly and as absurdly as any author.79 Embroiled in debates about his own merit, apologizing for his lack of substance, often presenting himself as still beneath the fashionable circles he was supposed to have penetrated, Willis very much incorporated the fractured, uncertain, confused subject projected in the paradox of leisure he also articulated. And yet it would be a mistake to think of this Page 176 →fragmented self as in any way inappropriate or marginal with respect to the arts and entertainment marketplace. Certainly, the mechanics of what might be called failed success operated not to insulate or shore up the self but rather to fracture it by foreclosing the self's experience of fulfillment or epiphany. But with success constituted as a goal that the evidence of itself (in this case, a leisured life) always tantalizingly manifests and necessarily defers, the paradox of failed success could determine the conditions for ambition as an end in itself. Consequently, Willis's arrogant ennui, far from disqualifying him from participation in the rhythms of labor and accumulation, made him peculiarly fit for the work and productivity standards of the commercial literary market. Precisely because Willis's labor, hamstrung as it is by his leisure, cannot by definition progress to a finitude or proper reward, he can never do enough of it. For all his protestations to the contrary, therefore, Willis was an author who was always working. In chapter 3, I emphasized the extent to which eccentric and marginal authorial personalities, effectively “normalized” in the 1830s and 1840s arts and entertainment production system, formed a foundation for “normal” writerly habits of frenetic and mechanical productivity. Thus on the one hand, Willis's

life is filled with labor. Not only did Willis himself exhibit all the symptoms of work mania—as Pattee notes, he wrote no less than forty tales and sketches between the years 1842 and 184480—he was, ironically, known in the book industry for the sheer work he put into his work. Writing for Godey's, Poe said of him, “He composes (as did Addison, and as do many of the most brilliant and seemingly dashing writers of the present day,) with great labour and frequent erasure and interlineation.”81 James Parton, who worked with Willis on the Home Journal, said much the same thing: “Of all the literary men whom I have ever known, N.P. Willis was the one who took the most pains with his work. It was no very uncommon thing for him to toil over a sentence for an hour; and I knew him one evening to write and rewrite a sentence for two hours before he had got it to his mind.”82 However, what is made clear with Willis's case is the extent to which these labors refused to signify within antebellum social and economic conceptual registers as, in fact, labor. Positioned in its own antic universe outside the causal relationships structuring the ideology of the workplace, Willis's work, no matter how adamantly it gets highlighted, cannot be understood as work. Thus Willis and others can mention his work incessantly without in the least harming his reputation for not doing any. The very pages that chronicle his relaxation are filled with descriptions of his exhaustion, his bleariness, the cramps in his fingers, Page 177 →and the blank in his brain as he struggles to finish a series of articles that will not end. While it is true that the idle author's self-esteem required his public rejection of the commercial market and its taint of moneymaking, it is equally true that the market refused to recognize the idle author. As with his relationship to work, Willis readily proclaimed his affiliation to a degraded marketplace without ever damaging his reputation for genteel fastidiousness. “We are…careful more to be paid than praised,” was his shameless maxim.83 Responding to accusations that the Weekly Mirror had been established only to cater to the rich and that Willis himself was a member of this class, Willis baldly informed his readers, “[I]t was a matter of business. A man may publish a paper for the deaf and dumb, and still have a tongue to use out of office his. We are not of the class whose guiltily refined amusements we thus write about, but we can write about them, as about most other things that will pay.”84 Similarly, in the preface to Famous Persons and Places, a collection of his newspaper essays, Willis justifies his publication: “That sketches of the whim of the hour…are popular and amusing, I have the most weighty reasons certainly to know. They sell.”85 But the problem with the market in Willis's case is not that it taints the fashionable idler, but that it never rewards him for the work it fails to see him do. Willis was unique among his contemporaries for being able to earn a good living with his magazine publications alone. In the early 1840s, when magazines were still paying less well-known writers a dollar per page, Willis, writing four articles monthly for four magazines, in addition to conducting and writing for the Mirror, was making about $4,800 a year.86 Yet the amount of unrecognized labor this involved was something he could not forgive. Throughout his career, Willis campaigned to be recognized as an ordinary worker—a kind of “hatter,” he suggests, who caters to the “inside” of the head instead of the “outside.”87 He demanded to be properly valued as a commodity. “Ours is a most romantic nation,” he observed with bitterness, “for it would seem that there are few who do not think their private sorrows worthy of poetry, and the distinction between meum and tuum, (as to the authors,) having long ago been broken down by our copyright robberies, the time and brains of poets are considered common property.”88 The upshot of this failure to be properly valued is not just that Willis can never be properly recompensed but that his labor can never be properly delimited. It seeps everywhere, colors everything. In the end Willis gives up on relaxation. “[T]o ask a literary man to write a letter after his day's work,” he once observed, is “like asking a penny-postman to take a walk in the Page 178 →evening for the pleasure of it.”89 Willis quits writing personal letters or trying to read for his own pleasure because both make him feel as if he's working. Willis's ambition and frenetic work habits may have been anomalous to the romantic Federalist and aristocratic cultures his idleness seemed to invoke, but they were, of course, entirely in keeping with the standards of competition and productivity charging up the capitalist arts and entertainment industry in the 1830s and 1840s. In chapter 3 I looked at the extent to which the expansion and economic rationalization of this industry were inseparable from powerful, long-held beliefs in the idea that writers could not in fact be captured within structures of productivity and market rationalization. Willis's career encapsulates these assumptions. It is Willis's idleness and publicized failure to live up to standards of professionalism and entrepreneurial self-employment—as much a source of wonder and amusement to his audiences as his “climbing”—that constitute the basis of his professional

success, effectively turning his paralysis and ineptitude into positive, productive commodities in the business of genteel entertainment. Precisely to the extent that he sits in a place of fragmentation, disorganization, and paradox, his very professional success as an “idler” exempting him from inclusion in structures of economic logic and accountability, Willis contributes to the ongoing vitality of an arts and entertainment industry whose economic rationale relies on the production of irrationally positioned creative personnel. Thus on the one hand, and rather surprisingly, Willis's tortured relationship to his success and productivity incarnates completely the central principles animating the stereotypical figure of the American entrepreneur. Indeed, it is useful to note that antebellum entrepreneurial discourse itself insisted on the importance of frustration and failure as key elements of success. Willis's nightmarish enactment of a kind of Zeno's paradox, in which every gain turns out to be a loss, was, in fact, a common set-piece in contemporary dramas of aspiration. In the Willis drama, his idleness decimates the teleology of success it also insists upon. Another, more famous, nineteenthcentury avatar of self-making, P. T. Barnum, attributed the same capacity for annihilation to consumer objects, to the furnishings of the leisured life that foils Willis. In his enormously popular lecture “The Art of Money-Getting, ” Barnum sees consumer objects not as rewards for work already accomplished but as the signs of a triumph yet to be achieved. The wealthier one gets and the more objects one acquires, consequently, the more emphatically they point to a success that is still to come. Thus in Barnum's anecdote of the Page 179 →sofa the purchase of the consumer object inaugurates not a state of fulfillment or relaxation (as one might expect from a sofa) but a process of exhaustion and dereliction: I know a gentleman of fortune who says, that when he first began to prosper, his wife would have a new and elegant sofa. “That sofa,” he says, “cost me thirty thousand dollars!” When the sofa reached the house, it was found necessary to get chairs to match; then side-boards, carpets, and tables, “to correspond” with them, and so on through the entire stock of furniture; when at last it was found that the house itself was quite too small and old-fashioned for the furniture and a new one was built to correspond with the new purchases; “thus,” added my friend, “summing up an outlay of thirty thousand dollars caused by that single sofa, and saddling on me, in the shape of servants, equipage, and the necessary expenses attendant upon keeping up a fine ‘establishment,’ a yearly outlay of eleven thousand dollars, and a tight pinch at that; whereas, ten years ago, we lived with much more real comfort, because with much less care, on as many hundreds.”90 If within the circles of this double logic financial gain only represents loss, loss itself is a productive, positive occurrence that leads to gain. Just as the idle author's defeats only propelled him toward greater and greater exertions, the midcentury doctrines of self-making held that nothing succeeds like failure. Financial destitution was the first step toward wealth. “In the religion of success,” Irvin Wyllie writes, “poverty became the equivalent of sin in Calvinist theology, an evil to be struggled against and overcome. The greater the poverty out of which a man climbed the greater the testimony to the force of his character.”91 Believing that only constant adversity cultivates a proper manly ambition, Henry Ward Beecher explained to the wealthy merchants of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church that their financial losses would only benefit their children: “How blessed, then, is the stroke of disaster which sets the children free, and gives them over to the hard but kind bosom of Poverty, who says to them, ‘Work!’ and, working makes them men.”92 The result of this process in which success bred failure and failure success was a type of the skewed trajectory that haunted Willis, a trajectory recorded in antebellum popular mythology as a journey of deferred advancement. According to Tocqueville, the typical American businessman is a man who never gets anywhere. Americans are “continually engaged in pursuing or striving to retain…precious, incomplete and fugitive delights.” “They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after Page 180 →some new delight”; at last “Death steps in…and stops [the American],” but he still has not “grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him.”93 Barnum followed Tocqueville in dwelling not on the rewards but on the pitfalls of aspiration. “How many,” Barnum wonders, “have almost reached the goal of their ambition, but losing faith in themselves have relaxed their energies, and the golden prize has been lost forever.”94 But in accord with the logic that makes loss and gain synonymous, Barnum would have agreed with those of his contemporaries who held that even the most devastating setbacks only place a person closer to victory. “Prosperity,” he said, “is more severe an ordeal than adversity.”95

On the one hand, then, the genteel author's ennui, precisely because it signified a failure to live up to the requirements of enterprise, was a potential site of entrepreneurial energy. Like poverty, which was the prerequisite of “money-getting,” idleness could be the springboard for mobility, insofar as the process of “going places” was contingent upon a motion that kept the subject pinned at a founding moment of loss and ambition. On the other hand, it is no accident that Willis, while he dramatized the repeated failure endemic to the American success story, also—and at the same time—incarnated its most wonderful, fairy-tale aspects and so transgressed its necessary connection to the orders of hard work and enterprise. In other words, not only was Willis a feverish, obsessed worker but he was also—and effectively in the same fantasy space—an entirely idle being, an international celebrity successful beyond imagining, who did not actually occupy the realms of failure and impoverishment that would have launched him on the healthful and manly course of industriousness and productive aspiration. Put another way, while idleness encouraged a psychology of workaholism, it did not at the same time allow for the subject of that psychology to register as a positive, productive entity within normative schemas of capitalist labor and exchange. In The Field of Cultural Production, Pierre Bourdieu remarks on the extent to which purely commercial cultural producers in the post-Enlightenment era—what Bourdieu calls “producers for nonproducers”—have tended to substitute their exemption from the universe of pure, charismatic aesthetic creation (“producers for producers”) with their facility as workmen and technicians. “The more a certain class of writers and artists is defined as beyond the bounds of the universe of legitimate art, the more its members are inclined to defend the professional qualities of the worthy, entertaining technician, complete master Page 181 →of his technique and métier, against the uncontrolled, disconcerting experiments of ‘intellectual’ art.”96 In Willis's case, however, the would-be “entertaining technician” finds himself invested with a troublesome transcendence and purity, an “uncontrolled, disconcerting” charisma that maddeningly foils his transparent relationship to a technical or purely functional economy. Nowhere is this excess of charisma, which inhered in the whole construct of the idle author, more amply manifested than in heated arguments over the extension of international copyright. Scholars generally agree that in mid-nineteenth-century debates over the prospect of U.S. international copyright legislation, the anticopyright position signifies a lingering attachment to older, republican values that understood printed works not as the individualized creation of a sovereign authorial subject but as common property meant to circulate in the public sphere for the welfare and benefit of all.97 However, as we saw in chapter 3, this seeming attachment to a time when authors volunteered themselves for the public good was never far removed from a more immediate time characterized by confusions about what exactly counted as labor or productivity—and thus proportional recompense—where creative writers were concerned. Arguing in favor of international copyright legislation in 1837, for example, Henry Clay—the architect of the phrase “self-made man”—contended that authors must have the state's protection because “they are frequently, from the nature of their pursuits, or the constitutions of their minds, incapable of applying that provident care to worldly affairs which other classes of society are in the habit of bestowing.”98 Clearly drawing on titillating social myths of the author's eccentric, asocial, and even abnormal constitution, Clay's procopyright arguments match almost exactly the anticopyright lobby's idea that authors could not be included in the print industry's complement of manufacturing and business personnel: publishers, booksellers, typographers. In Meredith McGill's words, “Associating authors' rights with luxury and hereditary privilege,” the opponents of copyright argued “that any extension of these rights would be an irresponsible sacrifice of public good to private interest. In equating international copyright with a threat to American industry, and locating national identity in the process of production, they make the powerful claim that manufacturing, and not literature, is America's true cultural product.”99 In one of his many procopyright diatribes, Willis draws attention to the nonsensical nature of these formulations, for of course anticopyright Page 182 →agitators were not arguing for the nonprofit circulation of print materials in the name of the public good but for conditions in which profits from sales devolved upon publishers and distributors. How much ought the jeweller to have for buying [the watch] from the maker, warranting it “to go” after examining it, for advertising it, and for selling it across a counter? Suppose the watch to sell for a hundred dollars, and seventy dollars to be the net profit above cost of material. What would you say, if the maker got but ten or twenty dollars, and the retailer fifty or sixty? Yet that is the proportion at

which author and bookseller are paid for literary production—the seller of the book being paid from twice to five times as much as the author of it!100

Of concern to Willis here, of course, is not just the wrongful exclusion of the writer from the categories of manufactory and artisanal production but also his exclusion from normative systems for measuring labor and determining exchange and accountability. “[T]o the multitude,” Willis caustically observed, “Genius” “is a phantom without mouth, pockets or hands—incapable of work, unaccustomed to food, ignorant of the uses of coin, an unfit candidate, consequently, for any manner of loaves and fishes.”101 However, when Willis himself tries to understand how go-getting writers achieve success and fame, he is driven to conclude that at the heart of this achievement is a profoundly unaccountable, even counterproductive force. In one of dozens of essays preoccupied with the ways and means of literary fame, for example, Willis pretends to write a letter to a recent college graduate with literary aspirations, ostensibly the son of an honest farmer's widow he met during a stagecoach journey. Setting out to disabuse this young man of his wild dreams of instant international fame as a poet, Willis offers a dismal picture of the realities of “mental employment” in the United States as well as a surprisingly meticulous, step-by-step set of instructions on how a practical young man might go about getting a living as a writer, complete with how much money he can expect to make and how much work he will have to do. At the start of his essay, Willis is at pains to construct utterly transparent correspondences between literary work and money; and between authors and the logic of the meritocracy. Like other successmanual authors of this period, for example, Willis connects a literary livelihood—and even eventual literary fame—to a rigorous causal logic that links together hard work, self-denial, and the gradual, painstaking and yet ultimately triumphant accrual of wealth and renown. The young man is told that if he's serious he Page 183 →should move to New York. Once there, he must give up “all idea of ‘living like a gentleman.’” “To be willing to satisfy hunger in any clean and honest way, to sleep in any clean and honest place, and to wear anything clean and honestly paid for, are phases of the crescent moon of fame, not very prominently laid down in our imaginary chart; but they are, nevertheless, the first indication of that moon's waxing.” Willis then describes the early, arduous phases of the professional literary career: Giving up the expectation of finding employment suited to your taste, you will, of course, be “open to offers;” and I should counsel you to take any that would pay, which did not positively shut the door upon literature. At the same wages, you had better direct covers in a newspaper office, than contribute original matter which costs you thought, yet is not appreciated; and in fact, as I said before with reference to farming, a subsistence not directly obtained by brain-work, is a material advantage to an author. Eight hours of mere mechanical copying, and two hours of leisurely composition, will tire you less, and produce more for your reputation than twelve hours of intellectual drudgery. The publishers and booksellers have a good deal of work for educated men—proof-reading, compiling, corresponding, &c., and this is a good step to higher occupation. I should say that, with tolerable fortune, you might make, by your pen, two hundred dollars the first year, and increase your income a hundred dollars annually, for five years. This, as a literary “operative.” After that period, you would either remain stationary, a mere “workey,” or your genius would discover, “by the dip of the diviningrod,” where, in the well-searched bowels of literature, lay an unworked vein of ore.102 But it is precisely at this last stage, where the author must make the jump from “workey” to dazzling literary lion, that Willis's rigorous causality breaks down. He tells the young man that in fact the only true formula for literary success—instead of involving productive work or self-discipline or the accrual of fortune—lies mysteriously and potently in the author's “faults,” in counterproductive areas (such as abuse) that do not submit themselves to rational value or accounting. As a “stock” or “starring” player upon the literary stage, of course you desire a crowded audience; and it is worth your while, perhaps, to inquire (more curiously than is laid down in most advice to authors) what is the number and influence of the judicious, and what nuts it is politic to throw to the groundlings. Abuse is, in criticism, what shade is in a picture, discord in harmony, acid in punch, salt

in seasoning. Page 184 →Unqualified praise is the death of Tarpeia, and to be neither praised nor abused is more than death—it is inanition. Query—how to procure yourself to be abused? In your chemical course next year, you will probably give a morning's attention to the analysis of the pearl, among other precious substances; and you will be told by the professor, that it is the consequence of an excess of carbonate of lime in the flesh of the oyster—in other words, the disease of the subaqueous animal who produces it. Now, to copy this politic invalid—to learn wisdom of an oyster—find out what is the most pungent disease of your style, and hug it till it becomes a pearl. A fault carefully studied is the germ of a peculiarity; and a peculiarity is a pearl of great price to an author. The critics begin very justly by hammering it as a fault, and the noise they make attracts attention to the pearl; and up you come from the deep sea of obscurity, not the less intoxicated with the sunshine, because, but for your disease, you would never have seen it.103

Notably, whereas a mere literary “livelihood” submits itself to rational causality, true literary greatness, Willis says in a significant change of metaphor, is a “pearl of great price” not a “watch”—a “disease” produced by an “invalid,” a “peculiarity” haplessly covered over by a sedentary “oyster.” Banished by Willis's determination to present the author as an ordinary producer of goods, in other words, the language of idleness and ineptitude, of “fault” and failure and abuse, which had all along formed the condition of Willis's frenetic productivity within the arts and entertainment production system, returns here to articulate the “starring” author's fantastical transcendence of mere materialistic and self-evident economies.

The Very Sweat of the Brain In their recent history of antebellum literary culture, Ronald and Mary Zboray dispute the traditional idea, promoted by historians since the 1960s, that this period witnessed the sudden onslaught of a full-blown capitalist literary market in the 1830s and 1840s. Studying what was in fact a large and flourishing culture of amateur literary production in the three decades before the Civil War, the Zborays join a number of other recent scholars in arguing for the laggardness of arts and entertainment modernization in the United States. In these formulations, the presence of early national ideals (such as an ideal of authorial hobbyism) in the antebellum period is viewed not as a structure of nostalgia, as was traditionally the case, but as the active and undimmed persistence of powerful Page 185 →local belief systems that in fact resisted various features of cultural modernization. For the Zborays, for example, discourses of writerly amateurism, far from merely summoning the past, renounced the advent of capitalist commercial and entrepreneurial formations in favor of still-abiding republican beliefs in literature's exalted social and spiritual purpose—and thus its ideal circulation in a milieu free of individual interests or “dollars.” Marked by its authors' renunciation of “price” and of rationalized forms of labor, amateur culture, according to the Zborays, represents a powerful “pulling against unabashed literary entrepreneurialism” and indicates “the triumph of social responsibilities over impersonal market forces.”104 Illustrated by Willis's case, however, is the difficulty of separating these two realms of production, not because the amateur could sometimes write for money or work himself into professional circumstances, as the Zboroys suggest, but because the commercial arts and entertainment industry by the 1830s and 1840s was clearly organized in a way that forced definitional and psychological confusions between these categories—partly as a consequence, it seems clear, of the ongoing size and vitality of amateur culture. Both traditional and more recent literary histories, that is, equate languages and positions of amateurism with pre-commercial or anticommercial values and production systems. But of course the amateur is not an economic nullity. The social conviction that literary creation takes place in the space of leisure or spare time (and thus constitutes an amateur pursuit and a generous, voluntary contribution of one's knowledge to the public sphere) was itself a present economic factor in the development of modern domestic arts and entertainment systems in the 1810s and 1820s. The ideal of the gentlemanly literary hobbyist, which issued in voluntary contributions to literary periodicals, voluntary editing, and self-capitalized publishing that rendered some “service to the state,” was itself productive of a fledgling and incipiently market-based culture economy. Inclusive not just of writers and their friends and audiences, but of printers, type-casters, booksellers, engravers, book buyers, shop owners, sales agents, paper and binding manufacturers, and so on, this economy was not transgressed by but rather brought into being by the gentlemanly

ideal of voluntary aesthetic creation that transcends the market. As we saw in chapter 3, moreover, materials produced by amateurs remained a crucial source of content for genteel periodicals until the early 1850s and were often the only thing that allowed them to function as profitable entities. Willis's own Home Journal, for example, did not pay its Page 186 →contributors. In an important sense, the figure of the idle entrepreneur materializes as it helps in the perpetuation of this dynamic interface between amateur and commercial production, organizing authorial subjects who feel ambition and who engage in competitive and workaholic behaviors without being able ultimately to “see” themselves—or conceive of genteel authors—as a causally interior part of the visible commercial apparatus to which they so materially contribute. Accordingly, the energies of transcendence and counterproductivity that inevitably sabotage and yet form the condition of Willis's success and self-making are not unique to his career. Integral to a genteel arts and entertainment economy whose maintenance depends on the ideal of a literature that transcends price (and is thus cheaply or freely produced), these energies of counterproductivity manifest themselves equally in other efforts of this period to understand the genteel author as an economically and rationally accountable entity. Here again, these principles are nowhere more amply evinced than in arguments over copyright—that is, in precisely that arena where the exchange or property value of creative writing is put glaringly in the spotlight. Throughout the decades between 1830 and 1860 (and well beyond), U.S. writers argued vociferously for international copyright laws that would put a stop to the extensive reprinting of foreign arts and entertainment texts and thus put pressure on American publishers and audiences to print and consume materials by American writers. The point here was partly to get the public to recognize that writers had property in the fruits of their “intellectual labours,” but also partly, as Willis makes clear, to get them to see that not all writers are hobbyists, that what the public reads in periodicals or books is the result of considerable labor and design, that the writers who perform these tasks cannot live on air, and that writers need to be remade in the public imagination as intellectual “operatives” and “professionals.” Not surprisingly, one of the signal aims of procopyright argument by the late 1840s was to clean up the popular stereotype of the writer, to transform him from a crazed, asocial eccentric destined for poverty into a respectable bourgeois citizen worthy not just of a middle-class salary, but of proprietary rights and congressional support. Yet almost invariably these efforts to render writers rationally transparent and accountable circle back to defend the image of the writer as, in fact, an unaccountable and mysterious entity impossible to peg within logical models of value. Genteel arts and entertainment journals throughout the 1840s and 1850s are filled with a combination of procopyright agitation and de Page 187 →scriptions of writers as staid, ordinary people engaged in the pursuit of professional careers. An extensive 1853 review in Putnam's, heralding the publication of Homes of American Authors, a sort of coffee table volume dedicated to celebrating the dwellings of famous American writers, begins by noting, in rather sarcastic tones, how odd this volume on “Homes” might seem given the common view of authors: It implies, firstly, that the ambiguous class of men called authors, may be in possession of Homes, —consequently of wealth, social position, and respectability…. The records of literary adventure have produced the impression the world over, that authors are a peculiar and exceptional class,—a race of shiftless, seedy and improvident individuals, who, unable to live by any of the recognized methods of society, have betaken themselves to the expedient of living by their wits. It is understood that they reside, when they reside any where, in some vacant corner of a garret, like grubs in a hole; that they pass their days in a pot-house or in lurking out of the way of bumbailiffs and landladies.105 On the one hand, this review goes on to counter these assumptions, arguing that the profession of authorship has unjustly earned a low reputation. The reviewer points out that because of promises of instant fame, literature attracts legions of unqualified aspirants whose failure is entirely predictable. But should these failures taint the reputation of the whole profession? “Hardly a Corydon fails in walks of art that demand the loftiest endowments of the mind—and what crowds of such are there every year—that he or his friends do not parade him as another example of melancholy shipwreck, as if he deserved or could fairly have anticipated any other end” (24). The reviewer remarks that if “the same note were taken of the miscarriages in law, medicine and divinity—every

briefless barrister, every physician without a patient, and every clergyman without a cure, could make his griefs the talk of the town, as authors manage to do theirs, the disadvantages of their vocation would swell into the magnitude and enormity of those of letters, and literature would no longer stand solitary in its aggravations” (24). The reviewer says that by extension if we exclude all the young fool authors who were bound for disaster anyway, we find that “Literature is as lucrative and promising as any other profession to men who are really qualified to discharge its exacting and lofty functions” (24). “We believe that if competent men engage in it with industry, patience, and consistent purpose, conducting their affairs with average foresight, they will reap at the least the average Page 188 →pecuniary rewards” (25). Having thus dismissed the idea that literature is by nature a doomed profession, the reviewer shifts into a fierce attack of present copyright conditions as, in fact, foreclosing whatever chances of “average pecuniary rewards” the “industrious” and “patient” American author might hope to achieve. Yet, for all these protestations of the practicality and accountability of authors, the Putnam's review is also filled with a contrary impulse to depict authors as helplessly bizarre and prodigal. The problem with authors and money, the reviewer says just before he launches into his defense of copyright, “is not so much the insufficiency of their incomes, as the liberality of their outgoes.” On the one hand, the author is practical; on the other (and at the same time), “A thousand peculiar temptations, springing partly from those mental susceptibilities which difference them from others…beset them to spend more than they make.” Not only is this a constitutional flaw in what is here given as a generic author, but it is actually the very thing that makes an author a great author. “The very qualities which form their greatest glory,” the reviewer intones, “are those often which lead them into the deepest pain and humiliations.” “That delicacy of organization, which makes them alive to those finer perceptions out of which literature comes,” we learn, also leads them to overspend: “genius with its irritable fancies and impetuous impulses, is least of all likely to resist the allurements of luxurious living, or to temper the seductions of taste with the cold discipline of judgement” (24, 25). With their success and greatness as authors contingent upon their “delicacy” and insensitivity to such base stuff as money, writers are effectively disqualified ahead of time from inclusion in the logic of proprietary rights that this reviewer goes on so passionately to defend. Moreover, this very exclusion is later elaborated as a prerequisite of national literary inclusion; to be included in the ranks of properly American authors requires writerly “faults” and marginal behaviors, which are also inseparable from writerly greatness. Instead of cozening “industrious” and “patient” souls, American literature itself, we learn, is “Like a noble youth rounding into manhood”; “we are wild, extravagant and impulsive, betraying the faults of want of discipline and culture” (28). Not surprisingly, the “homes” of American authors, as they are finally described in the very last paragraph of the Putnam's review, turn out to be fantastical, as if they hover in a strange, impalpable world that foils such worldly concepts as copyright: “We wander with Bryant though his island woods, where his heart has learned its lessons of severe simplicity, and his imagination caught the glow of its bright autumnal foilage [sic]: we loll in the Page 189 →sumptuous study of Longfellow, where the old panels suggest the memory of Washington, while the poet sings us golden legends of the Old and the New World; we hold high discourse with Emerson, in the shadows of his Concordian Mecca, while the weird Hawthorne, himself a shade, flits through the umbrage of the Old Manse” (30). Virtually the same shifts and circular arguments are evident in the extensive lectures and essays of influential critic E. P. Whipple. Once called by Thomas Higginson “the almost solitary instance, at that period, of the selfmade man in American literature,”106 Whipple earned considerable fame in the 1840s as an elite critic and scholar of classical, American, and European literatures. Much celebrated on the lyceum circuit and sought after by such lofty organs as The North American Review, Whipple would be one of the founders of The Atlantic Monthly. In a popular lecture titled “Authors in Their Relations to Life,” delivered in 1846 and much reprinted, Whipple heartily joins other defenders of author's rights in depicting authors as ordinary, industrious individuals that lend themselves to rational scrutiny. He argues that “Authors are…entitled to a prominent rank among the producing classes, and their lives deserve a more intelligent scrutiny from the practical men who stigmatize them as dreamers.” Banishing the image of the crazed, starving artist, Whipple goes on to assert that “Men of letters have ever displayed the same strange indisposition to starve common to other descendants of Adam.”107 While admitting that authors have their share of foibles, he argues that like other men they take on the characteristics forced upon them by economic and historical circumstances. “The law of supply and demand operates in literature

as in trade. For instance, if a poor poet, rich only in the riches of thought, be placed in an age which demands intellectual monstrosities, he is tempted to pervert his powers to please the general taste. This he must do or die;…if he hopes to live by his products, he must produce what people will buy” (16). Accordingly, Whipple uses the logic of supply and demand to reveal the folly of “that long-eared wisdom which obtains in our country, of starving authors down into despair” (19). By dragging its heals on copyright, Whipple argues, the United States is shooting itself in the foot, for authors can't help but write at the level for which they are paid. Paid starvation wages, the author comes to see literature as “the manufacture of ephemeral inanities and monstrous depravities, to serve as food for fools and vagabonds. He is ready to write on any subject which will afford him bread,—moral or immoral, religious or atheistic, solid or flash [‘flash’ meaning pornographic and sensational]” (20). Whipple offers a striking warning: “The Page 190 →merchant, who sneers at literary pursuits…and clamors for the protection of all manufactures but those of the mind,” might soon find his own wife poisoned because some starving author had no choice but to write brilliant “quack advertisements” for what was in fact a deadly “quack medicine” (19). But while the solution here would seem to be to give authors more money, Whipple also veers into arguments that hold that the greatest authors are above money. Though he spends the whole of his essay insisting that authors are ordinary men who merely take on the characteristics of the lives forced upon them by their society in any given age—“The relation of an author to his age is the most important of his life” (26)—Whipple is preoccupied with the “martyr” who transcends his age. “[T]here is a class of authors different from those who cringe to prevalent tastes, and pander to degrading passions; men whom neither power can intimidate, nor flattery deceive, nor wealth corrupt; the heroes of intellectual history, who combine the martyr's courage with the poet's genius.” Instead of being members of a “producing class,” these extraordinary souls transcend such material categories via the medium of suffering and persecution: Dante, “to whose raised spirit, even in this life, the world had passed away”; Schiller, “toiling for twenty years up the topless pinnacle of thought, unconquered by physical pain, his upward eye ever fixed on his receding ideal”; Shelley, “who made his stricken life with all its stern agonies and cruel disappointments, ‘A doom / As glorious as a fiery martyrdom’” (24). Summoning these “martyrs” who produce great literature in spite of—and indeed because of—starvation and persecution prompts Whipple to dismiss “the external life of authors” in order to concentrate on the only thing that matters, “[t]heir inward life” (36). Transcendent of the world's materialities, the great author paradoxically enters them more fully: like Willis, for whom leisure and labor are indistinguishable, Whipple sees the self-sacrificing author—as opposed to the pandering author who is pressured by his age—as the ultimate worker. In another essay, titled “Genius,” which describes writers who, in transcending mere money, work themselves to the point of physical ruin, Whipple says that “genius is labor, the hardest work that men can do, and its discoveries and combinations are earned by the very sweat of the brain.”108 However, the very fact that this exalted “sweat of the brain” seems to manifest itself in Whipple's formulation in proportion to a writer's difficulties—Whipple dwells most on those writers who suffer (Milton, for example, or Walter Scott when he's in debt six thousand Page 191 →pounds)—means that it can never be properly calculated or understood within the economic frameworks upon which Whipple tries to insist. But of course what is kept intact in these attempts to clarify the value of literary work through reference to the purity of the author's sacrifice is precisely a larger system whose vitality depends on the voluntary and generous labor—the “sacrifice,” as it were—of a substantial constituency of amateur writers. These perverse and often tortured attempts to clarify the value of literary work in a system in which both literary greatness and commercial profitability are indistinguishable from the author's failure to register within clear, accountable grids of productivity pervade discussions and representations of genteel writers in the decades before the Civil War, accompanying equally tortured contemplations of the author's professional labors. While not all antebellum writers displayed in such pointed ways as Willis the wages of the idleness ethic, fraught thematizations of what it means to “work” as an American author are amply represented, from the stutterings of Hawthorne's Miles Coverdale, the “idle” poet who can never quite tell his story, and the agonies of Melville's Pierre, who sets out to write a great “work” he can never finish, to the paralysis of Donald Grant Mitchell's “bachelor” in Reveries, who never manages to leave his fireside chair—authorial types who, like Willis, capture a dynamic of motion without progress and work without accomplishment. It is a fitting conclusion to his story that among modern-day scholars Willis has served largely in the elucidation

of various states of authenticity and transcendence from which he himself, in the final analysis, is barred. Counted a failure in his own generation, he went on, both immediately after his death and into the twentieth century, to figure as a kind of embarrassment against which the success of an emerging canon of American authors could be measured. From Malcolm Cowley to Marius Bewley, from Leslie Fiedler to James D. Hart, twentieth-century Americanist critics buttressed the ostensible iconoclasm of the Melvilles and Poes against the “sentimental prattle” of the Willises, often, as in the phrase I just quoted from Hart, citing Willis himself.109 Nor did Willis fare better among the feminist scholars of the 1970s and 1980s. Concerned to rescue “women sentimentalists” from the ghetto they had historically shared with their genteel male counterparts, feminist scholars like Ann Douglas and Mary Kelley were eager to let the males serve as a foil. Thus Willis reappears in American literary history only to highlight by his own shallowness the profundity of his sister, Fanny Fern.110 However, Page 192 →as I have been arguing throughout this study, it was precisely with respect to categories of transcendence and excellence, of mechanical productivity and cheap commercialism, that the professional writers of Willis's generation, who included, of course, Melville and Poe, stood in a state of suspension and confusion, neither above the merely materialistic world nor in it.

Page 193 →

{5} “As Crazy as a Fly in a Drum” The Eccentric Woman Writer It has been a long-standing conviction among scholars that antebellum women writers, by virtue of being women, were barred from association with the putatively lofty aesthetic realms of the Romantic, exilic artist. In Naomi Sofer's words, midcentury culture “defined woman and artist as mutually exclusive.”1 But in fact women writers frequently trafficked in the images of artistic alienation and persecution that typified so much of the work of their male contemporaries. In 1853, Grace Greenwood celebrated the “genius” of her female contemporaries by putting them in a group with the stereotypical tortured souls who had haunted the transatlantic culture field since the 1780s: It is sad, terrible, to mark how wretchedness is almost ever the hard, peculiar lot of genius. Oh Heaven! It might seem that this thy great immortal gift were but a robe of royal splendour, falling in crimson and gold round the form of some mighty and godlike grief; or a royal crown of martyrdom, whose gems, that light the world with their strange brightness, shoot madness into the brain beneath them. Milton, Tasso, Burns, Byron, Shelley; Hemens, Landon, Norton, Butler, and many, many more have been “With such a woful weight of misery laden, / As well might challenge the great ministry / Of the whole universe to comfort it.” Greenwood goes on to pay special tribute to George Sand as “first among the women of our time, for the depth of her sorrow and the grandeur of Page 194 →her genius”: “Her genius has a free, bold sweep through the broad world of thought, through the measureless universe of mind; it can scale the loftiest heights of human aspiration, and sound the deepest depths of human crime and passion.”2 And yet modern scholars are not incorrect to note something odd and compromised about women writers' affinities with these sweeping, Romantic visions of the genius's lofty intellect and tragic fate, for instead of elaborating extended portraits of these grandiose visions of genius's female form, antebellum women writers notoriously fixed their attention on the production of alternative and entirely antithetical pictures of female genius. Even as Greenwood in her 1853 essay paid tribute to “the sorrow and grandeur” and “the free, bold sweep” of the mind of George Sand, whose genius aimed at “the loftiest heights” and “deepest depths,” she also celebrated in an 1850 essay a different kind of “intellectual woman”: “True feminine genius,” said Greenwood in this earlier essay, “is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.” The female genius's “ways and words,” Greenwood goes on, “have nothing of the lofty and severe; over her face, sun-gleams and shadows succeed each other momently; her eyes are alternatively dreamy and tender, and their intensest fire quivers through tears.” Unlike Greenwood's other female geniuses, who are “mighty and godlike,” this female genius is entirely earthbound: “her most celestial visions have always a ladder leading earthward.” The woman writer in this version of female genius, in other words, occupies the seemingly “natural” domestic world so often detected and analyzed by modern scholars: her poetry, far from aiming at “wild” and imperious strains has a “delicious thrill of homemusic.”3 In this study so far, I have looked at eccentric author figures that are generally recognizable within transatlantic rubrics: the tortured genius, the Byronic rebel, the lounging flaneur. In this chapter, however, I will suggest that in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the U.S. entertainment industry, more and more dependent on “outsiders” for its regimes of profit and productivity, generated its own set of eccentric author figures, figures that had no counterparts in Romantic authorial discourse but nevertheless evinced, both in their representation and performance by authors, a commensurate exile and alienation. Instead of being related to familiar Romantic images of the artist, these new eccentric figures, I suggest, were related in often curious and circuitous ways to the “true feminine” spirits so often conjured by women writers in the late 1840s and 1850s, in particular by the

women writers who were affiliated with Page 195 →the exponential expansion of an industry in locally produced, low-cost diversionary literature aimed at women and children. Scholars have long understood that the late 1840s and early 1850s witnessed important changes in the way in which women writers functioned within American literary and entertainment regimes. From the early 1800s onward, women had steadily made up about a third of publishing writers. But the women writers who came to prominence in the early 1850s—E. D. E. N. Southworth, Susan Warner, Grace Greenwood, Caroline Kirkland, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Cummins, and Fanny Fern, to name the most famous—are distinct from their counterparts of even ten years before for their openly stated ambitiousness, their productivity, their visibility in the machinery of commercial publicity, their militancy around copyrights, their inclination to demand high wages and royalties, and their ability to negotiate lucrative positions in the extremely competitive arenas of freelance fiction and journalism.4 The flourishing of pictures of women writers as “true women” and domestic “angels,” along with women writers' general obsession with a domestic “sphere” over these same years, was no coincidence. Scholars of this topic have overwhelmingly subordinated women's professional authorial culture to the politics of middle-class domestic culture and gender ideology: the professional women writers who penned portraits of infantile women are typically read as either the transgressors or purveyors of bourgeois domestic and gender standards that sought to fix women within the private, circumscribed domain of the family.5 However, this traditional subordination of women's professional lives to domestic ideology overlooks what I will suggest was an important disjunction, beginning in the mid-1840s, between political or ideological domesticity and what we might call “entertainment” domesticity—the peculiar realms of “home” imagined in local diversionary literature. Inspired less by political doctrine than by the entertainment industry's self-interest (including the self-interest of the often-female writers who wrote woman-centered diversionary materials), this literature imagined the “home” not as a space of duty and socialization but as an aesthetic precinct, interchangeable with realms of fancy and imaginative exaltation and thus ripe for the consumption of the books and magazines the entertainment industry offered. It was precisely the creation of this new entertainment domestic sphere, I will argue, that encouraged the production of structurally and phantasmatically “eccentric” or exilic positions for women writers in the entertainment field as a Page 196 →whole. Effectively denaturing, rendering strange and fantastical, the traditional household realm in which women writers had always been ensconced, the entertainment domestic sphere, in all its outlandish perfection, extravagance, and sappy spirituality, encouraged the creation of alienated social and economic identities for women writers—precisely those identities that were so closely associated in the industry with patterns of aggression, competition, celebrity, and achievement. In the first part of this chapter, accordingly, I examine the process through which women writers redefined themselves in relation to a newly perfected and utterly unrealistic domestic sphere by looking at the career and writing of Fanny Fern. A tireless votary of “true womanhood,” Fern, I suggest, aggressively defined herself as a persecuted victim and literary entrepreneur by exploiting the impossibilities she was able to attribute to a home sphere newly remade as the implausible scene of women's gratification. Reenvisioning home as a fantastical, unnatural, and mobile space, Fern was able to reconceptualize the woman writer as a lost, alienated soul cruelly excluded from the home's wonderful precincts, and thus to create the justificatory logic for her own notorious competitiveness and expert marshaling of midcentury publicity networks. In the second part of this chapter, I look more closely at how genteel diversionary texts of the late 1840s and 1850s reimagined the domestic sphere as a fantastical space of fiction and art, focusing specifically on those texts that construct synonymies between the “true woman” and the artist. However, my interest here is not simply in these unexpected correspondences but in the extent to which they were often ventured in order to be traduced. That is, the imagining of a surreal, aestheticized domestic sphere, I suggest, created conditions for the imagining of women writers, who, in the popular estimate of the day, were incapable of true artistic “genius,” as exiles from its domain. Women writers could be set forth as tortured souls who longed for a condition of domesticity and womanhood they could never attain—and thus, according to a formula in which exile and commercial agency were synonymous, as figures comparable to and capable of competing with all the other exiles wandering the midcentury arts and entertainment landscape. In the final section of the chapter, accordingly, I look at how entertainment domesticity and its doctrines of “true womanhood,” far from merely mirroring conventional domestic ideology, predicated the ability

of writers and audiences to imagine women writers as persecuted victims and exiles and thus as contenders in an increasingly sophisticated arts and entertainment industry that thrived on and rewarded “outsiders.”

Fanny Fern and the Perversity of Home Page 197 → In 1851, Nathaniel Parker Willis received a letter from his younger sister, Sara Payson Willis, asking for his help in getting her launched on a literary career. Willis wrote back advising her not to attempt it. New York is the most over-stocked market in the country, for writers, as we get a dozen applications a day from authors who merely wish to have the privilege of seeing themselves in print—writing for vanity only. Besides all the country flock & send here for fame etc. I have tried to find employment for dozens of starving writers, in vain. The Home Journal pays for no contributions, being made up of extract, & so with all the papers & many magazines. He went on to add, in the gloomy tones with which he typically warned writers to stay away from the profession: “The most ‘broken reed,’ I know of, to lean upon for a livelihood, is amateur literature.”6 Famously, Sara Willis persevered. She sent her short pieces to various small Boston papers, from whose pages they were picked up by other journals all over the urban Northeast. She used the popularity she thus gained to attack her brother in scathing exposés that ratcheted up the sales of her books. Within three years “Fanny Fern,” as Sara now called herself, was one of the most famous writers in the United States, a best-selling celebrity sensation on a par with what her brother had been ten years before. Fern's initial popularity as a writer rested on what Lauren Berlant has famously called her relish of “complaint.”7 Fern made a name for herself by purporting to expose the duplicity and unfairness of the demands made on middle-class women in traditional household and matrimonial arrangements. Yet Fern did not precisely reject middle-class domesticity. Rather, Fern's argument with domesticity depended on a separation between the middleclass household as it might be experienced in the real lives of Fern's audiences—or the real lives of anyone, for that matter—and a fantastical, often surreal domestic domain, a sort of domestic heaven, which Fern elaborates as the orientation of her own career and identity as a woman author. Almost without exception, scholars have accepted Fern's attacks on marriage and bourgeois domesticity as, in fact, attacks—although many agree with Berlant that through their very emphasis on a racialized and gendered perfectability, Fern's “complaints” ultimately shored up the structures of the white bourgeois subject and family whose renovation they seemingly sought. By contrast, I will suggest that Fern's portraits of both failed and perfected domesticity, far Page 198 →from channeling middle-class standards, are almost entirely oriented around her construction of a highly nonstandard professional female self, a self energized by the representation and performance of exile. Fern uses the components of a surreally perfect sphere of “true womanhood” in order to imagine domesticity not as something that inheres in the household, in any material sense of that term, but as something that floats free of traditional gendered domains, that floats free even of women, and that thus can act in the unprecedented constitution of the alienation—and thus the careerism, aggression, and competitiveness among women—that domestic ideology would normally foreclose. Fanny Fern started her literary career as an occasional contributor to various Boston magazines in the early 1850s.8 Her signature articles, racy and angry for their time, purported to reveal what Fern saw as the truth about middle-class women's lives in the home. In the prevailing model of family life drawn in the late 1840s and early 1850s in vernacular fiction and periodical literature, bourgeois women led idyllic lives of comfort, love, and spiritual reflection. In the second half of this chapter I will look more closely at the connection between these idealized portraits and the consolidation of new entertainment spaces and identities for women writers, but for now I want to focus on the extent to which Fern exploits the existence of these portraits, which by the early 1850s were a standard feature of periodical commentary, in her protests against women's lot. In a typical elaboration of this perfected existence, titled “The True Woman” and published in The Ladies'

Repository in 1853, for example, the author tells readers that whereas God had created men for “the rougher and more exacting labor of the field, of mechanism, and of commerce” he created women for “the kinder, gentler labors of house and home, and works of special refinement and taste.” Whereas men were forced to fight for survival in a rude public world of “exhausting labor,” “antagonism,” ugly “business schemes,” their hearts “chilled” by “coldness, jealousy, slander,” their pure, exalted aims “thwarted by stubborn matter,” women were destined to live in “calm and sunshine”: Woman's “eyes were given her in which to mirror the soft and ravishing beauties of nature. Her delicate hands and slight figure were adjusted to the lesser burdens of domestic life, and to the works of taste and elegance in the drawing room; and no less were her instinctive timidity, her exquisite sensibility, and her delicate sense of propriety intended to guard her from the rude exposures of a public life, and adapt her to a sphere of labor too light, too delicate, and too refined for the rougher, harder sex.” “[T]imid, shrinking, and retiring,” women were made for cloistered Page 199 →realms where “delicate sentiment, deep-felt sympathy, devoted affection, and subduing tenderness, can soften the asperities of life.”9 The problem with this ideal domesticity, according to Fanny Fern, was not that it ultimately confined women to passive inefficacy, but rather that conditions in the middle-class household were seemingly incapable of securing the passive inefficacy for women that domestic literature promised. Thus Fern made a career not out of attacking domestic ideals for women, but out of attacking the propaganda that told them they could achieve these ideals within the current realities of middle-class household life. In this formulation, middle-class matrimony and family life, rather than forming a site for the attainment of ideal domestic womanhood, consistently ruin chances for the “calm and sunshine” described as the lot of the “true women.” In an 1852 article, for example, Fern angrily announces that she would like to “make a bonfire of the all the ‘Hints to Young Wives,’ ‘Married Woman's Friend,’ etc., and throw in the authors after them.” “I have a little neighbour, ” she goes on, “who believes all they tell her is gospel truth, and lives up to it,” waiting at the door for her husband in even the coldest weather, warming his slippers by the fire, and putting them on his feet for him. But these are young wives, Fern contends, soon to make the “interesting discovery that [they] were married for a sort of upper servant or housekeeper.”10 Not only in this article but in the countless articles and three novels that followed, Fern offered to reveal what Harriet Beecher Stowe privately called the “dark side of domestic life,”11 elaborating her conviction that “Love is a farce” and “matrimony is a humbug.” Far from protecting women from the harsh exigencies of “exhausting labor” or saving their delicate bodies for “taste” and “refinement,” conditions in the real middle-class home, in Fern's mind, submitted women to endless cycles of unrecognized physical and mental exertion. “It's the hardest way on earth of getting a living—you never know when your work is done. Think of carrying eight or nine children through the measles, chicken pox, rash, mumps, and scarlet fever; some of 'em twice over; it makes my head ache to think of it.”12 Not only was marriage, in Fern's opinion, a kind of glorified sweatshop, but it also traduced the values of integrity and privacy that ideally constituted the terms of true womanhood by exposing women to “insults” of “wifely honour” and to the “legalized or unlegalized brutality of husbands” (a code for marital rape). “What toil,” Fern asks, “could be more hopeless, more endless, more degrading,” than the labors of women locked into a loveless marriage?13 Page 200 → But even a marriage of love and a life of monetary privilege, in Fern's estimation, do not protect women from violation and unhappiness. In her first best-selling novel, Ruth Hall (1855), Fern represents the heroine's marriage as a constant, excruciating trial of invasion, perpetrated by the heroine's in-laws and abetted by a husband who remains wilfully innocent of their interference. In a short story titled “The Ballroom and the Nursery,” domestic contentment in the bourgeois nuclear household is so fragile that the loving mother has only to suspend her vigilance for an hour by going to a dance with her husband to find all her bliss pierced like a bubble: she returns to find the babysitter gone, the house dark and deserted, and her child, perfectly healthy while she kept her personal eye on him, dead of fever.14 Fern's households are accordingly notable for being peopled, not with the vaunted “guardian angels”15 of domestic myth but with drudges forced to physical and mental ruin, plagued by headaches and backaches, “their every nerve quivering with suppressed agony,” their bodies “rendered feeble…by the pains of maternity,” their steps “tottering” and hands “trembling.”16 Far from softening “the asperities of life” or offering the source of women's actualization as special, protected creatures, the home spaces in Fern's tireless

antiromantic tirades are petri dishes for the proliferation of exhaustion, abuse, sickness, death, and despair, utterly destructive of the true womanly euphoria they supposedly promise. It is the contradiction between ideal domesticity, in its most syrupy formations, and the putatively dreadful conditions of the real thing that ultimately authorizes Fern's rejection of the latter. However, it is important to identify exactly what this rejection entails. Scholars have long stressed the extent to which pictures of exemplary domesticity often had the effect of instigating women's dissatisfaction with household confines. As Gillian Brown points out, for example, the Victorian veneration of an abstract, perfected domestic sphere issued in countless projects (domestic self-help manuals, architectural revolutions, temperance and moral reform movements) to renovate conditions in the less than perfect real one.17 In some cases, moreover, these renovations extended well beyond the space of the household. As Lora Romero underlines, the doctrines of domesticity, in their ideological or political manifestation, were not simply agents of confinement. They endowed middle-class women with new public mobility on the principle that the domestic woman's embodiment of private moral authority justified her intervention in larger social and political arenas. Romero writes, “The increasing conventionality of claims for women's domestic identity would seem to circumscribe their Page 201 →lives completely within that home, but, ironically, making domesticity into an identity gave middle-class women a surprising amount of mobility. As an identity rather than simply as a fixed location for women's lives, domesticity could—and did—travel. Women could argue that they continued to embody domesticity even when they left the home.”18 However, revealed in Fern's writing is a different postulate. Because the middle-class household in her imagination does not in the first place provide the conditions for nurturing true womanhood, in all its saccharine, infantile dimensions, the woman who leaves the household to participate in what Fern sees as a male-dominated public world (the world of freelance journalism) does not take an ideal domestic “identity” with her. On the contrary, as Fern pictures the hollow middle-class home and the hollow women it produces, she imagines the “mobility” not of women but of ideal domesticity itself: the wonderful conditions for fulfilling true womanhood, absent in woman's “sphere,” have, in Fern's imagination, moved over into men's “sphere.” Thus Fern figures her own competitive careerism not as a transgression of domestic norms, nor as a mere extension of an already-fixed domestic identity, but as a maneuver to obtain the state of happy feminine dependency, the spirituality, and the vapid childish privileges that the middle-class household is incapable of providing. Fern figures her choice of a literary career not just as her abandonment of women's conventional domain (the familial household) but also as her abandonment of decorous womanly behavior and values, presumably on the principle that, having never been a true woman in the first place—having never lived in an exalted, cozy world of beauty, delicacy, and love—she has nothing to transgress. Accordingly, Fern's sensational and explicitly autobiographical first novel, Ruth Hall, depicts the woman writer's venture into authorship not as a move commensurate with women's private or familial functions but as a determined journey out of the debilitating domain where women conventionally work—in this case performing the outwork of sewing, which the widowed Ruth does to support her children—and into what she and others typified as the competitive, emphatically male world of the midcentury entrepreneur. On the one hand, as so many critics have noted, Fern invokes the midcentury geography of separate spheres so as to emphasize her heroine Ruth's (and by implication her own) sudden and aggressive transgression of its boundaries. Representing the moment of Ruth's decision to be a writer, for example, Fern casts it as a bold renunciation of womanly meekness and timidity. Until this point, Ruth has been like the young wives who read too much domestic propaganda: Page 202 →soft, palliative, self-sacrificing. But now her face, formerly sweet and tear-stained, is altered as a “bitter smile disfigures her gentle lip.”19 Figured as a transgression of womanly susceptibility, Ruth's journey is offered in the stock terms of this period's literature of self-making: Ruth embarks on a determined, desperate fight up the economic ladder to wealth and success. Ruth vows, “I can do it, I feel it, I will do it…. but there will be a desperate struggle first…there will be scant meals, and sleepless nights, and weary days, and a throbbing brow, and an aching heart; there will be the chilling tone, the rude repulse; there will be ten backward steps to one forward. Pride must sleep! But…it shall be done!”20 Fern frequently presented herself to the public in these same terms. An outspoken champion of what this era called “go-aheadativeness,”21 Fern assumed the rhetoric of ruthless self-making to describe herself as “an antagonistic, pugilistic female.” Speaking in the voice of one of her

male detractors, Fern said about herself, “One must needs get out of her way or [be] pushed [to] one side, or trampled down.”22 It is important to stress, however, that while Fern clearly depicts the “marketplace” as a site of aggressiveness and competition, and while she also depicts her own and her protagonist's foray into this realm as a transgression of womanly meekness and timidity, none of this, in Fern's formulation, transgresses upon the euphoric ideal of true womanhood, for rather than presenting her foray into the journalism marketplace as a compromise of her true womanly self, Fern offers it as a potential fulfillment of her womanly self, a journey toward the blissful ease and spiritualization that she is denied as a housewife. The source of this conviction, according to Fern, does not lie in the idea that women ought to have the same opportunities for self-actualization in the public world as bourgeois men, but rather in her more unusual idea that men in the public and professional world are unfairly leading the cloistered, feminine life promised to women. Theirs is the kinder, gentler life of leisure, tasteful refinement, and rich interiority that is being denied to women working in the home. Thus while Romero suggests that ideal domesticity was, in fact, a mobile construct, capable of traveling or extending itself outward from the site of the middle-class household by virtue of its embodiment in the True Woman herself, Fern purports to confront a rather different aspect of this mobility: unfixed from the site of the middle-class household, domesticity (the thing that would endow women with leisure, love, refinement, self-fulfillment, spirituality) has been put in a location where women can't get to it. True womanhood thus features in Fern's writing not as something she gets from the home, nor as something she Page 203 →innately embodies and transports with her into the public world of the “marketplace,” but as a goal that has been cagily moved to the professional world of journalism and that she is determined to attain. Fern's conviction that men in the competitive public world are secretly leading the cozy, private life promised to women is rudimentarily dramatized in a number of essays and works of fiction that feature a reversal between husbands and wives of their usual spheres. In a short story called “Family Jars,” for example, Mr. Jeremiah Stubbs is “rash enough to remark, one morning, to his wife Keziah, ‘That, after all, women had little or nothing to do; that he only wished she knew the responsibilities of a man of business.’” “‘Well let me know ’em, then,’” says his wife. “‘Seeing is believing. We will change works for one day. You get breakfast, tend the baby, and wash and dress the other three children, and I'll go down and open shop.’” It turns out that the shop has all the attributes of the promised women's domestic sphere. By lunch Mr. Stubbs is beside himself with exhaustion and frustration, while his wife, who goes out to tend to the business, spends the morning arranging its “tempting wares” with “feminine ingenuity” and sitting pleasantly behind the counter as if in her parlor while customers come and go. When his wife refuses to return to their conventional roles at lunch, insisting that they made the bargain for the entire day, Mr. Stubbs breaks down. He deserts his family and leaves his wife to “the glorious independence of a ‘California widow.’”23 The relatively spartan fulfillment that Mr. Stubbs enjoys in his little shop is imagined by Fern as a more completely feminized and retired luxury as one moves up the social ladder. Thus more affluent businessmen, while their wives slave just as hard, are more thoroughly ensconced—presumably by virtue of their more intimate link to the tempos of the “marketplace”—in a world of softness, ease, and self-fulfillment. Fern soliloquizes on these privileged loafers: “Then he gets up from the table, lights his cigar with the last evening's paper, that you have not had a chance to read; gives two or three whiffs of smoke…and, just as his coat-tail is disappearing through the door, apologizes for not doing ‘that errand’ for you yesterday,—thinks it doubtful if he can to-day, —‘so pressed with business.’” Instead of going “out” into a harrowing, public world of competition and frenetic labor, as businessmen were typically thought to do, the businessman, in Fern's imagination, goes “out” to a kind of genteel Sunday tea while his wife stays “in” to work: “Hear of him at eleven o'clock, taking an ice-cream with some ladies at a confectioner's, while you are at home new-lining his old coat-sleeves. Children by the ears all day, can't get out to take the air, feel as crazy as a fly in a Page 204 →drum, husband comes home at night…sits down in the easiest chair in the warmest corner, puts his feet up over the grate…reads the newspaper all to himself…[and] solaces his inner man with a hot cup of tea.” That the husband's occupation of the world of commerce (as opposed to the world of the home) is what accounts for his ability to spend his days eating ice cream and cultivating his “inner man” by reading and drinking tea, is more emphatically underlined later in the

essay when, growing even more relaxed, the husband puts on his “dressing gown and slippers” expressly “to reckon up the family expenses.”24 While Fern returned to this motif again and again, its most vigorous manifestation was reserved for her depictions of the culture business. As we have seen, the news and entertainment business of the 1840s and 1850s was routinely articulated through the language of exhaustive labor and competitive self-making that characterized depictions of the marketplace generally. The commercial fiction and periodical fields were especially typified by their “cheap and nasty” business practices and by what George Rex Graham described as “rude jostling and fierce competitorship.” However, Fern rewrites the entrepreneurial literary market, as she rewrites the whole of the male entrepreneurial world, as an arena that only pretends to fierce competition and exhaustion while secretly hoarding the conditions of feminine felicity promised to women. Thus at the start of one of her articles on this subject, Fern quotes a popular newspaper editor describing the debilitating rigors of newspaper work: We know of no state of slavery on earth like that attendant upon the newspaper life, whether it be as director or subordinate. Your task never ended, your responsibility never secured, the last day's work is forgotten at the close of the day on which it appeared, and the dragon of to-morrow waits openmouthed to devour your thoughts, and snap up one morsel more of your vexed existence. Be as successful as is the nature of things to be;—write with the least possible degree of exertion;—be indifferent to praise, and lion-hearted against blame;—still will the human heart wear out before its time, and your body, if not your mind, exhibit every symptom of dry rot. Fern, however, declares, “There is not a word of truth in what he says. I have been behind the curtain and I will speak this time!” She then goes on to inventory the typical editor's actual daily life: “They go down to the office in the morning—after a careful toilette and a comforting breakfast…put on a pair of old slippers, light a cigar, draw up a huge easy-chair, stick their feet up twice as high as their heads, and—proceed to business.” Page 205 →“Editors,” she writes, “live in one perpetual clover-field, and when they die, all the newspapers write nice little obituary notices, and give them a free pass to Paradise.” This euphoric existence in Fern's formulation is not just equated with a connotatively feminized ease and spiritual fruition; she actually represents the editors in her piece as exclusive owners of the feminine accouterments that should mark women as women. If the typical housewife lives in unrelieved conditions of dirt and deprivation, male editors bask in free gifts of “wedding-cake, and flowers, and fruits, and annuals, embroidered purses and tasseled smoking-caps, pretty little notes, braided watch chains” and perfumed handkerchiefs.25 For Fern no writer exhibited this proprietorship of an ideal feminine existence more dramatically than her own brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis. When Fern started writing for the magazines in 1851, Willis was one of the most famous and successful journalists in the United States. And not surprisingly, as we have seen, Fern, after getting some pieces published in the Olive Branch, wrote to her older brother to try to secure his patronage. Why exactly Willis was so discouraging and finally refused her request is not clear. But critics agree that this incident, which Fern returns to again and again in thinly veiled fictional form in her novels and essays, formed a springboard for her later self-conceptions as an author; and indeed, it seems to have been Willis's well-known patronage of the writers Grace Greenwood and Fanny Forester that determined Sara's choice of the similar pseudonym, Fanny Fern. Significantly, Willis was famous not only as an editor and essayist, but as a commercial literary entrepreneur, a key figure in the transformation of the U.S. genteel entertainment business into the professionalized, economically sophisticated purveyor of mass media that it became in the years before the Civil War. Accordingly, in Fern's opinion, her brother epitomizes the leisured femininity to which he himself had, in a manner of speaking, denied her access by denying her access to the print marketplace. Fern not only depicts her brother “tip-toeing, be-curled, be-perfumed,” decked out in “fancy neck-ties” and changing his “coat and vest a dozen times a day,” she even more extremely suggests through her fictional name for her brother—“Hyacinth”—that he attracts the male adoration that implicitly should belong to women.26 In relocating the plausible site of true womanly bliss from its expected location in the household to the realm of business and competition, Fern effectively authorizes her own renunciation of women's conventional maternal and matrimonial occupations in the name of true womanhood. And with womanly bliss paradoxically available only to

Page 206 →those firmly fixed in the male world of commercial achievement, Fern licenses, and indeed, mobilizes her own radical self-construction and aggressive maneuvering within that world so as to achieve the domestic womanliness it seems to offer. Now one conclusion it might be tempting to draw here would be that Fern was simply laying bare domesticity's economic logic. As Lori Merish has argued, ideal domesticity (pictures of beautiful homes, leisured ladies, impeccably dressed children), for all its assertions to the contrary, was entangled in conditions of economic achievement: it presented a life that by definition could not be lived without a lot of money.27 In this sense, the discourse that argued for women's confinement and leisure could apparently authorize their pursuit of these properties in the only arena capable of realizing the material purchase of domestic bliss. In fact, Fern herself frequently celebrates precisely this teleology. In a piece on the “Modern Old Maid,” Fern describes the independence of this personage: “She teaches, or she lectures, or she writes books, or poems, or she is a book-keeper, or she sets type, or she does anything but hang on to the skirts of somebody else's husband…. She lives in a nice house, earned by herself,…and has a bank-book and dividends.”28 And yet while we might expect Fern's own eventual success as a writer, which involved a great deal of money, a new adoring husband she met on the job, and servants to do her chores, to have issued in a commensurate representation of ideal domesticity as something that women who work hard can achieve, this was not the case. Fern penned many depictions of women existing in blissful states of leisure, objectification, and eroticized infantilism, but these figures are never causally connected by her to the teleology of self-making. This is true not only in a series of tales chiefly concerned with childlike, angelic girls who are victimized by cruel husbands and seducers and then end up in an early grave, but also of several stories concerned with the careers of literary women. Central to these tales of literary success is the replacement of the horrific households in so many of Fern's stories and essays by the etherealized Home of mid-century domestic fable; but it is not the “bank-book and dividends” that feature in these stories but rather the idea that “a woman may be literary, and yet feminine and lovable; content to find her greatest happiness in the charmed circle of Home.”29 Indeed, rather than representing the “charmed circle of Home” as the logical target or end of the literary woman's aspirations, Fern's tales of literary achievement are intent upon the creation of causal incongruities between work and the ideal home: working hard as a writer does not, in fact, turn out to be the way to true Page 207 →womanly and domestic happiness, which remains as fantastical and remote from real women's lives as ever. In “A Practical Bluestocking,” one of Fern's many stories about women writers, we are at first led to believe that writing and true womanhood are entirely compatible. A bachelor is invited to his friend's home for dinner. He hesitates to go because he knows his friend's wife is a writer and he expects to meet a woman “with inky fingers, frowzled hair, rumpled dress and slip-shod heels” and to discover the horrors of a “disorderly house, smoky puddings, and dirty faced children.” To his amazement, though, the parlor is a model of cleanliness, wondrously free of “dust,” the windows “transparently clean,” “the hearth-rug longitudinally and mathematically laid down.” As if he's wandered into a land of magic, the bachelor notes the “marvel” of a “child's dress half finished in a dainty little work-basket, and a thimble of fairy dimensions in the immediate neighbourhood thereof.” When the bluestocking herself enters the parlor, she surprises the bachelor still more by being not just “well-shaped” but “charming.” And remarkably, “the snowy fingers of her little hand had not the slightest ‘soupcon’ of ink upon them.” The bachelor finds himself watching her through “bewitching spectacles” and finally agrees with her husband that she is the apotheosis of the womanly spirit, an “angel.”30 But while it might be tempting to surmise that Fern here is fantasizing this scene of domestic bliss as the happy end-point in the bluestocking's hard-won success, it is, in fact, precisely a linear connection between hard work and domestic perfection that this story refuses: the domestic domain and the lovable literary woman are not present to show us how women may reach perfection via a literary career but rather to reveal to us a kind of superhuman being who is capable of performing any task, including writing and making a career for herself, while also being the perfect homemaker, something emphasized by the metaphors of magic (fairy realms, bewitching atmospheres) whose only seeming purpose is to highlight this domestic world's isolation from ordinary cause and effect. Indeed, true womanly fulfillment and domestic happiness are presented here as a kind of tautological precondition for women's literary success: the bluestocking can only be a writer because she is already a domestic “angel.”

These same tautologies and causal incongruities are evident in Fern's portrayals of literary women who have yet to achieve careers. In another short story, titled “Our Hatty,” we meet a teenaged girl who is a middle child, awkward and dowdy and hidden under a big mass of messy hair. Page 208 →Her brothers and sisters say she is “stupid, and ugly and disagreeable” and she believes them, but her life is transformed one day when the little old neighbor next door, Miss Tabetha, has a good look at her and pulls her to the mirror, “Do you see those large, dark, bright eyes of yours? Do you see that wealth of raven hair, which a skilful hand might render a beauty, instead of that tangled deformity?…Hatty,” Miss Tabetha announces, “you are a gem in the rough!” Even as Miss Tabetha makes this announcement, “a large portfolio [falls] at her feet”—from where we are not told, and the implication is that this appearance of Hatty's writings comes about mysteriously. “Oh Miss Tabetha, please don't!” Hatty begs. “It's only a little scribbling.” Miss Tabetha sits down and reads the whole thing; afterward she laughingly informs Hatty, as if on a level with her words about the potential of Hatty's hair, “Did you know you were a genius?…. A genius, you delicious little bit of simplicity,—a genius!” The next thing we know, “Five years had rolled away” and Hatty is a famous author, as well as being a “tall, graceful woman.”31 The sudden discovery of female “genius” where no such thing was suspected, the insistent, yet seemingly meaningless links between the disclosure of female beauty and the disclosure of authorial activity, and the magical, spontaneous quality of Hatty's writing and success all highlight once again the absence of any connection between female writerly success and the hard work and aggressive self-making that in Merish's account (and also in Fern's) are a logical precondition of domestic happiness and comfort. Indeed, far from displaying female authorship as a means to a more gratifying and comfortable domestic life, Fern's stories tend perversely to open up spaces for the denial of connections between women's worldly success and true womanly comfort and fulfillment, even while Fern's writing in general—not to mention Fern's success—insists that such connections are real. The stories in which the household is represented as a magical realm, for example, do not, as we might expect, present ideal domesticity as magically more available to women; they rather offer up opportunities for Fern to ponder and fret over this realm's maddening inaccessibility; imagining true womanhood's magic, that is, also allows Fern to imagine the impossibility of women's attaining it. In a story titled “A Chapter On Literary Women,” yet another doubting bachelor character, this time on the verge of being introduced to a literary woman as a possible marriage partner, announces, “[L]iterary women are a sort of nondescript monsters; nothing feminine about them. They are as ambitious as Lucifer; else why do they write?” The resounding answer, delivered by a lady, is not, as so many of Fern's other Page 209 →texts might lead us to believe, “because they are ambitious and want to improve their lives” but “Because they can't help it…. Why does a bird carol? There is that in such a soul that will not be pent up,—that must find voice and expression; a heaven-kindled spark, that is unquenchable; an earnest, soaring spirit whose wings cannot be earth-clipped.” Yes, the literary woman wants “reverence and respect,” but she wants more. Just as the realm of literary success in so many of Fern's texts is policed and protected by male writers who are enjoying true womanhood behind women's backs, the much-longed-for peace and happiness that women writers seek turn out also to be in the hands of men—things that men, indeed, hoard and deliberately keep from women who choose to be literary. The woman writer's soul “craves the very treasure you [the bachelor] would wrest from it, Love!”32 Thus career success, which is on the one hand hailed as the upcoming repository of true womanly happiness, also turns out to be without meaning for women. “Our Hatty,” though its titular heroine is a famous authoress, closes with Fern's lament, “O, what is Fame to a woman? Like the ‘apples of the Dead Sea,’ fair to the sight, ashes to the touch! From the depths of her unsatisfied heart, cometh ever a voice that will not be hushed,—Take it all back, only give me love!”33 Fern's “go-ahead” novel, Ruth Hall, itself ends with a notorious scene in which the selfmaking Ruth, wealthy beyond her dreams, does not leave her frustrating domestic past behind; she travels to the cemetery where she gazes with seeming longing at the vacant spot reserved for her next to her husband's grave, apparently now fixated on the hope of domestic bliss beyond the grave. In fact Fern herself, for all the wealth and success she achieved, never parted from her conviction that the ideal of passive fulfillment she sought in the journalism profession was invariably being experienced by others—by male writers—never by women writers, who even in success were “liable to perpetual interruption” by the obtrusive demands of family that “no housekeeper may dodge, even with her coffin…in sight.”34 But if Fern was unable to experience or even represent domestic happiness as the end of the woman writer's

professional exertions, this inability itself—rather than any positive capacity for earning money—replicated disjunctions between aim and consummation that structured midcentury cultures of entrepreneurial competition and careerist achievement. In this sense, Fern's career replicates the structural principles at work in her brother's career, examined in chapter 4. Midcentury gurus of self-making agreed that the goal of exertion in the marketplace was a pure and spiritualized palace of peace and relaxation Page 210 →purchased by wealth and success. But this goal, as historians of this topic emphasize, was experienced by the entrepreneurial subject as a moving target, always in some place just beyond the subject's current accomplishments.35 The relationship thus expostulated between ideal domesticity and enterprise is not a simple causal one, in which enterprise eventually purchases the domestic comforts promised by wealth. On the contrary, true domesticity, insofar as it entailed a transcendent spiritualized state of contentment and relaxation, was thought to be ruined if it was tainted by money or new consumer items at all. But precisely to the extent that ideal domesticity refuses to signify in the entrepreneurial economy as an effect of work, only as its provocation, it fosters an ongoing cognizance of deficiency, of something not yet attained, that propels the subject to greater and greater exertions in pursuit of the domestic fulfillment that money by definition cannot buy. We can see this principle at work in Fern's arrangement of the terms of her own success. Not only does Fern replicate entrepreneurial fantasy's always vanishing object of fulfillment by relocating womanly felicity from the home to a distant horizon she herself has yet to reach, the horizon of the market, she places an interdiction on her own success at achieving it even when she's in the market. She reerects the sex and gender boundaries that she blames for women's privation, organizing a world in which true womanhood is always put out of women's reach because it is something only available to men. Fern's idea of true womanhood, by extension, provides the fantasy justification for her own continued participation in the publishing business long after any material justification has vanished. In Ruth Hall Fern tells readers, “No happy woman ever writes.”36 But in exploiting, exaggerating, and dwelling upon pictures of fantastical womanly perfection that are always out of women's reach, Fern organizes an ongoing unhappiness, an extended condition of frustration and longing, what she calls the “unsatisfied heart,” that justifies and stimulates her ongoing commitment not just to her writing but to its marketplace powers. In the 1820s and 1830s, women authors, while hardly invisible in the world of American literature and entertainment, and while in fact actively engaged in professional writing and editing, had not featured in the blaze of eccentric celebrity, the paper wars, the scandals and publicity high jinks that had inflated so many male reputations in these years. Typically barred by household and maternal obligations from the aggressive pursuit of professional careers, barred by custom and prejudice from the exploitation of private life and personality in their published work, and barred by delicacy from inclusion in the flamboyant Page 211 →literary wars that were a mainstay of sales and popularity, women writers tended to earn less, to sell less, and to feature only transiently, if at all, in the fray of publicity and competition in the 1830s and 1840s. Fern's career, on the other hand, resembles the careers of her male contemporaries. Fern cannily exploited the economy of reprinting in the early 1850s to generate fame for her pseudonym, then exploited her fame to ratchet up the price of her articles. She made money by writing exposés and scathing satires of her famous brother, N. P. Willis, and then made more money when her real name was leaked to the press and public. Selling books in the tens of thousands, Fern leveraged her celebrity to become the highest paid newspaper columnist (man or woman) of the era, negotiating for the unprecedented amount of $100 per column when she agreed to write for Robert Bonner's New York Ledger in 1855, her salary, of course, generating more celebrity. Not only do Fern's representations of fantastical domesticity implicitly animate this ambition by providing the terms through which Fern conceives of herself as a disenfranchised victim and thus as someone entitled to engage in her own “go-aheaditiveness,” but they also necessarily play a central role in her celebrity and popularity. Fern achieves scandal value, and thus high sales, that is, precisely by trading on the gap she dramatizes between the wonderful promises of true womanhood and the grim realities that drive her to a sort of manly recklessness, a trade that requires, of course, her own celebration of true womanhood's promised wonders. I began this chapter by underlining what to modern scholars has seemed the baffling relationship between midcentury celebrations of true womanhood, with their emphasis on women's childlike helplessness and retirement, and women writers' rather sudden prominence and success in the increasingly competitive arts and entertainment marketplace of the early 1850s. What is made clear in Fern's case, I have tried to show, is the extent

to which domestic and professional authorial constructs, instead of opposing each other as scholars have traditionally argued, were part of a single psychological and economic structure. Fern's aggression and ambition, rather than transgressing contemporary pictures of female childishness and dependency, mobilized their fantasy elements in the consolidation of an entrepreneurial psychology and aggressive public personality that in Fern's case licensed a visibility and mobility traditionally known only to male writers. In the rest of this chapter, I want to look at the extent to which this public power and mobility were related not just to personal experiences of deficiency among individual writers but also, more broadly, to the evolution of a structurally antic, eccentric Page 212 →position for women writers in the arts and entertainment field in the late 1840s and early 1850s, a position that, as I stressed earlier, involved the remaking of domesticity itself. The key to understanding how this new position of exile worked lies in looking more closely at the precise nature and composition of the “domestic” realm that obsesses Fern and forms the scene of her alienation. In almost all accounts of the relationship between midcentury women writers and contemporary domestic mandates, the domestic sphere is understood as the realm of home and family where women performed their duties as wives and mothers. By extension, this realm is construed by literary critics as the opposite of the professional realm of writers. Cathy Davidson, for example, even as she renounces scholarship that takes seriously the separate spheres model, invokes this model in her spatial terminology when she remarks, “Confined by laws and mores to the home, many women managed to write their way out, some of them with spectacular commercial success and political impact.”37 However, as Fern's case indicates, such dyadic constructions—women are first “in” the home and then “out” of it—overlook a complex and even tautological geography of “spheres” in which female social or political space and the “domestic sphere” are not necessarily synonymous commodities. Indeed, it is useful to question whether Fern's rendition of the ideal domestic sphere, which she depicts not just as a transient, shifting realm liable to vanish or relocate at any moment but also as a realm policed by men and hostile to women, counts as “domestic” in any conventional sense of that term. But if Fern's domestic sphere is not really “domestic,” what is it? Precisely because it tends to subordinate the woman writer's professional milieu to the larger apparatus of middle-class domestic ideology, scholarship on this topic has overlooked what I would suggest are important distinctions that started to arise in the late 1840s between domesticity as a large-scale, inclusive ideological apparatus (the constitutive medium of gender, family, class) and the extremist “cults” of “true domesticity” and “true womanhood” evolved in literary and entertainment venues. Within the large-scale economic, juridical, and affective apparatus that conditioned women's place in the middleclass social order, women were understood as creatures of a domestic sphere whose primary purpose was socialization. In this branch of domestic discourse the middle-class household is pictured as the domain of women's labor and duty, where they minister to the physical and emotional needs of the family. But beginning Page 213 →in the mid-1840s a very different picture of the domestic realm and of women's role in it began to evolve in that area of commercial print production devoted specifically to genteel pleasure and entertainment. In arts and entertainment literature, the middle-class household, far from being represented as a domain devoted to discipline and socialization, was evolved as a rarified, amorphous realm keyed specifically to the enjoyment and creation of entertainment materials. While named the “Home,” this domestic domain had little to do with ordinary work and life; it was rather the domain of “Art.” By extension, the housewife in this home was figured not as an agent of duty but as a highly spiritualized agent of aesthetic verities—an artist. It is in this literature that we find many of the most extreme idealizations of “true womanhood” and the “true home,” idealizations that are inseparable, I will show, from celebrations of the home as a new site of aesthetic exaltation and purity. It has been the standard practice of scholars to conflate domestic pedagogical materials and domestic literary materials, the belief being that these evince in their totality a complex discursive apparatus whose phantasmatic and instructional aspects worked together in the constitution of bourgeois gendered subjects. In the next part of this chapter, however, I want to stress the extent to which the redefinition of the home in literary and entertainment culture as an artistic or aesthetic space created a special set of conditions for women writers. At the simplest level, the transformation of the home into a realm of art offered to elevate the woman writer, as denizen of the home, to the exalted position of the artist. Mid-nineteenth-century “home literature,” as I will call it, was accordingly filled with avowals of the woman writer's unique affinity with a newly aestheticized domestic sphere.

But at another level, the newly aestheticized domestic sphere, precisely because it now represented a domain of aesthetic sublimity and achievement from which women were traditionally excluded, functioned as a scene of female writerly banishment and alienation. Instead of being automatic inhabitants of a marginal domestic world, as had traditionally been the case, women writers now existed in a state of exile from a domestic space interchangeable with the lofty realm of art. As in the other exilic scenarios examined in this study, it was the woman writer's simultaneous longing for and exile from the home space, experienced as a state of anguish and deficiency, that summoned up and licensed energies of competition, ambition, aggression, and productivity in the commercial genteel entertainment marketplace—not least, of course, among women writers. Page 214 → In what follows, then, I first make a case for regarding the domestic scenes of genteel entertainment literature as relatively autonomous constructs, brought into being less in response to large-scale social transitions, as scholars typically argue, than in response to changes in the markets and demographics of the arts and entertainment industry. I then look at numerous midcentury tales by women writers in which the ideal of “true womanhood,” instead of referencing the ordinary domestic world of middle-class life, references the aestheticized domestic worlds of entertainment culture, a reference made explicit in a number of tales and poems that depict the “true woman” as, in fact, an “artist.” However, I also argue that these extremist, fantastical visions of domesticity functioned in midcentury professional author culture not by affirming inviolable links between women authors and idealized domesticity but by invoking their fundamental estrangement and discontinuity. It was the woman writer's exile and alienation from the realms of aesthetic domesticity, as these states were imagined in contemporary “domestic” entertainment culture, that functioned as phantasmatic precursors for women's new embroilment (whether voluntary or not) in sophisticated systems of celebrity and commercial competition. Finally, I want to stress that the developments under consideration here did not relate to women writers alone. On the contrary, the appearance in the literary and entertainment field of a new class of exiles contributed to the intensification of the larger mechanisms of exile that constituted terms of productivity, profitability, and competition in the arts and entertainment fields as a whole. To the extent that narratives of the woman writer's longing for true femininity and alienation from the home lent themselves to paranoid fantasies of woman writers' exodus into public life and takeover of the commercial literary scene, these narratives consolidated and multiplied exilic positions for male writers as well, here conceived as alienated not just from normality and stability, as had traditionally been the case, but also from best-selling commercial success in what was now frequently understood as a woman's field. Even as the genteel arts and entertainment industry was obsessed with separate spheres and with differences between male and female authors, these gender narratives, unanimously devoted as they were not to the segregation of the sexes but to the multiplication of exiles, produced curiously interchangeable male and female figures and spaces that echoed with Fern's conviction that true womanhood and men's sphere were the same. Page 215 →

“A Mere Vagary of the Imagination” Modern scholarship tends to highlight the midcentury cult of domesticity and the women writers who promoted it as part of a broad ideological, social, and cultural phenomenon—what Richard Bushman has called “the refinement of America”—whose development encompassed crucial changes in the familial and conceptual organization of the northeastern middle class.38 However, as Richard Brodhead reminds us, midcentury obsessions with an idealized, privatized domestic sphere were also an entertainment phenomenon, inseparable from a growing mass market trade in genteel reading.39 The years between 1845 and 1860 saw an explosion in the local production of genteel and family-oriented reading materials, something nowhere more aptly evidenced than in the proliferation of items dedicated to what were called “home” themes and audiences. There were periodicals: N. P. Willis's The Home Journal (1846), T. S. Arthur's Arthur's Home Gazette (1850) and Arthur's Home Magazine (1852), C. Stone's The Happy Home, and Parlour Magazine (1857), Dick and Fitzgerald's The Home Circle (1858), Beadle's omni-feminine The Home, A Fireside Monthly Companion and Guide for the Wife, the

Mother, the Sister, and the Daughter (1856), and Gleason's immensely popular illustrated weekly, Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion (1850). Often targeting women buyers, these titular “home” materials joined still-strong female-targeted magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book (1830) and The Ladies' Repository (1841), as well as a large new crop of journals that catered expressly to a genteel family demographic, including Sartain's Union Magazine (1847), Peterson's (1848), Harper's (1850), Putnam's Monthly (1853), and The New York Ledger (1855). Novels devoted to the experience of women and female children flourished, as did parlor and firesidethemed poems and reviews, many of the last declaring the ascendancy of the “novel” as “a household book, and in some sort a member of the family.”40 Addressed to all members of the middle-class family with a new emphasis on the tastes of women and youth, this literature followed the principle voiced by publisher George Palmer Putnam: “[P]eople expect to be entertained and amused rather more than they care to be instructed by what they read in a magazine.”41 Virtually all of the periodicals listed above, accordingly, are miscellanies and digests, keyed to the purposes of entertainment and general interest; they are filled with poetry, romantic short stories, serialized adventure fiction, book reviews, travelogues, biographies, Page 216 →fashion plates, descriptions of life in other countries, and, by the middle of the 1850s, elaborate engravings. Historians have tended to see these entertainment commodities as both symptomatic of and instrumental in vast transitions in the ideological layout of private and public life, of intimate personhood, and of the structure of the modern middle-class family and household. And yet arts and entertainment commodities, while by no means hermetic, also produced scenarios and philosophies that were specific to the world of entertainment—to amusement, recreation, imagination—and thus were divided from a traditional literature of “home” that was largely instructional in its focus. We can get a sense of the contrast between conventional gender and domestic doctrine and these new entertainment commodities if we look for a moment at midcentury manifestations of the former. In midcentury domestic manuals, for example—in Lydia Maria Child's The Frugal Housewife (1829), or Catharine Beecher's Domestic Economy (1843), or Solon Robinson's How to Live (1860)—the middle-class household is a stubborn work in progress, a concrete and recalcitrant combination of physical space, living, breathing human bodies, and (often thin) economic means that presents a constant challenge to efforts at comfort, gentrification, and spiritual improvement. Beecher admonishes her readers, “There is no one thing, more necessary to a housekeeper, in performing her varied duties, than a habit of system and order.”42 Addressing an audience of women they assume to be beleaguered and overworked, these books offer tips for the more efficient washing of dishes, for making better soap and keeping bees, for killing cockroaches, managing servants and preparing cheap cuts of meat. Equally important, these books, in particular the manuals by Beecher and Robinson, picture the home as the site of social reproduction: values of discipline, regimentation, Christian virtue, self-control, and responsible citizenship are understood as properties originated in the sphere of the family under the mother's guidance. Invested in the home's ongoing upkeep and renovation as both physical and ideological space, these books are equally invested in the wife or mother's tireless labor, vigilance, and self-sacrifice. Indeed, in Solon Robinson's How to Live, which is essentially a domestic manual cursorily compiled as a novel to make it more appetizing for young female readers, the housewife protagonist is never not working: even when she sits with her family in the parlor (in which each piece of furniture is a space-saving device) she is instructing her children on the importance of devoting all waking hours to usefulness.43 By contrast, home entertainment literature sought to redefine the Page 217 →home as a spot suited to relaxation and self-gratification rather than constant work and upkeep. Implicitly counterpointing traditional domestic discourse with its emphasis on the home as a site of duty and regimentation, home entertainment literature argued for the virtues of laxness, positing a certain amount of disorganization as itself an expression of the home's perfection. In an 1850 piece titled “The Household,” which she published in Sartain's Union Magazine while she was editor of that journal, Caroline Kirkland meditated on the wonders of homes allowed to flourish in a healthful state of disarray. Imagining the home as a castle, “the home citadel,” Kirkland pictures a big, sunny parlor, not a site of fashion but a “cheerful rendevous” for the whole family, “a radiating center of light and love”—“large, square, light, cheerful, and intensely human in its aspect—[which] admits no furniture too rich or too fragile for daily use.” Here, grandmamma rocks happily in her old chair in the corner, and papa “sits down to his paper,” and

the children always know where to find mamma. Because the family has fun and eats in this room, “Any brownhollanding of chairs and sofas, or gauzing of lamps and candelabra would be out of character. A drugget is admissible, for a great deal of eating is done in this room, and little feet might tread bread-and-butter and potato into the carpet unhandsomely.” Far from requiring dire regimens of housekeeping or “professional management,” this happy disarray—which is itself perfection and captures the “spirit of the household”—makes the home ripe for reading and entertainment: “The tables have newspapers, pamphlets, and books on them, for conversation is a chief amusement of the true household parlour, and all the topics of the day are in place, from the congressional debates, to the new novel, or the theatrical prodigy.” At one side of this “true household parlour” are a flute and a piano, with sheets of music scattered all over, for playing is “almost a domestic duty.”44 This reimagining of domestic space as a space for play and entertainment is promoted not just in the textual matter of midcentury periodicals but also in illustrations that depict the genteel family or social circle reading. One illustration in a Godey's Lady's Book issue of 1850, for example, shows a “home” scene: a mother and infant relax in an easy chair in the near background while in the foreground two older children absorb themselves in a book. Bracketed by rich drapes to signify privacy and abstraction from busyness, filled with sumptuous furnishings, toys, and a dog, the scene offers the home as a scene of play and self-indulgence, a scene that graphically funnels itself into the book at whose pages the figures all peer. Indeed, the idea of the home as a place for quixotic play Page 218 →and flights of fancy is literalized by the toys depicted: a little knight tilting at a windmill, and an elaborate kite (see fig. 1). In a related vein, the home also appears in this literature as an osmotic bubble in a wide, clamorous world of news and entertainment events. The title page of the first volumes of Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (1855–59), America's first illustrated periodical, demonstrates this principle through a vast and marvelously detailed engraving that depicts the reading of the periodical. At the center of the folio page is an oval-framed parlor scene: genteel men and women arrayed in evening clothes gather round and gaze at the pages of a magazine held by one of the ladies. Surrounding the frame, and almost dwarfing it, are the fantastical scenes that are presumably being channeled into the home via the magazine: elaborate classical allegories of the four continents of the globe, majestic ladies in feathers or skins who recline beside wildcats and who speak of news of far-off lands; pastoral cottages and coaches that speak of the scenes of sentimental romance. Implicitly because the magazine and the reading experience make the physical space of the parlor irrelevant, the parlor is at once in the center of the illustration and relatively tiny, like an island in a sea of timeless, grandiose events (see fig. 2). In one sense, the logic behind genteel entertainment literature's reimagining of the home is easy to pinpoint. As the above examples suggest, genteel entertainment literature sought to fantasize home spaces that were conducive to the consumption of genteel entertainment literature. Instead of being invested in the greater regimentation and productivity of the home, these materials projected domestic environments ideal for reading and flights of fancy. In this respect, one could argue, they mimicked more pedagogical domestic discourses. They aimed to “show” audiences how to arrange their domestic environments for optimum entertainment pleasure. Yet unlike household advice books or conduct manuals, entertainment literature had a reflexive relationship to the home it seemed to address. Whereas household advice books hoped the strategies they talked about would be realized in the actual space of its readers' households, home entertainment literature had the goal of evaporating the real home. To cite a metaphor commonly used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to approximate aesthetic experience—a metaphor clearly referenced in the Ballou's illustration—this literature sought to “transport” its audiences to exciting, exotic, or pastoral realms whose power derived from their contrast to present conditions. The ideal reading scenes this literature pictured were not intended as instructions to be followed in the real home, but as imaginary Page 219 →Page 220 →Page 221 →experiences and scenes of such realness and vivacity that they momentarily replaced the physical presence of one's real world. Instead of imagining the home as a material, irrefutable presence in the real world, consequently, midcentury entertainment literature tended to figure the home as a flickering, insubstantial space, a space that implicitly theorizes its own disappearance in the face of intense mental or spiritual experience. Instrumental as representations in the transformation and evaporation of the physical world, moreover, these homes ultimately argued for their interchangeability with the purely spiritual, imaginary, and textual constructs that in the first place posited their existence.

For modern readers, the most familiar manifestation of this magical, insubstantial domesticity comes in the form of those midcentury celebrations of the home as a space literally hovering on pure spirituality, on the border of Paradise and Eternal Life. The “home,” said an article titled “Home” in The Ladies Repository in 1853, is “the central point of social bliss”; its timeless sphere of rest and peacefulness prefigures in the here and now “an everlasting home in heaven.”45 Little Eva's famous bedroom in Uncle Tom's Cabin is not only the site of intensely gratifying consumer luxury—its precincts furnished with alabaster angels, rose-colored carpets imported from Paris, and a rich mahogany writing case—but it also turns out to contain an opening to the Pearly Gates themselves. Bordering on otherworldly realms to which they provide portals, these heavenly homes, as they appeared in popular novels and periodicals, were complemented by homes that more directly announced their interchangeability with the wholly imaginary constructs that convey them to the reader. In Kirkland's piece “The Household,” for example, we discover that the wonderful, cozy “home citadel” she describes at such length, far from referencing the reader's real life, does not exist in the present world. It turns out to be a memory, a thing of the American past, “a mere vagary of the imagination, like impossible Swiss scenery.” Thus insubstantial, the “true” home, as Kirkland calls it, is something created and maintained not by labor or physical exertion or money but by the powers of imagination. Indeed, the most essential ingredient of the true home, which is given here as an entirely impalpable affair, is imaginary play. Kirkland describes how children “will sit down under a great basket, and look round with a feeling of delicious snugness, saying ‘This is our house;’ or with even less to aid the fancy, set a circle of chairs to personate a home, supplying the enclosing walls out of ‘the stuff that dreams are made of,’ and pretending to go through the daily routine of significant nothings which to their minds constitute home.”46 Page 222 → At the logical extreme of this conceit, the homes of arts and entertainment literature are offered not just as spiritual or imaginary phenomena but also as sublimely inspired and richly designed aesthetic structures: the home is a domain of “Art,” as this term was understood in midcentury genteel arts and entertainment culture. No American writer was more preoccupied with this theme than Nathaniel Hawthorne. The idea that the “true” home might be interchangeable with imagined or aesthetic realms, which are themselves a contrivance of the artist's genius, is given extended expression in Hawthorne's short story “The Birthmark.” In this tale, the genteel couple, the artistscientist Aylmer and his wife Georgiana, occupy what at first seem to be familiar separate spheres. Aylmer's laboratory is described as a hellish, industrial precinct, with belching furnaces and grime and fierce regimes of intellectual and manual labor; Georgiana's “beautiful apartments” are like the typical ideal home, an oasis of peace and refinement. These “beautiful apartments,” however, turn out to be Aylmer's creation, one of his projects as intellectual worker and artist. Their role is not to protect the family circle from the cruel world but to hypothesize a lofty aesthetic domain characterized by its collapse of reception space and aesthetic object. On the one hand, Georgiana's boudoir is the space in which Georgiana consumes artistic concoctions. Relaxing in this “magic circle,” “the secluded abode of a lovely woman,” Georgiana enjoys the aesthetic displays arranged by her artist-husband: Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look forth from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts were answered, the procession of external existence flitted across a screen. The scenery and the figures of actual life were perfectly represented, but with that bewitching, indescribable difference which always makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much more attractive than the original. This replacement of originals relieves Georgiana of what Hawthorne calls “the burden of actual things.” On the other hand, the boudoir as a whole—expressly the product of Aylmer's design—is itself an aesthetic creation, collapsing the popular metaphor of the home as castle with the Page 223 →other popular metaphor of the castle in the air: “The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace that no other species of adornment can achieve; and, as they fell from the ceiling to the floor, their rich and ponderous

folds, concealing all angles and straight lines, appeared to shut the scene from infinite space. For aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds.” In this tale, of course, the artist's creation of an excessively aesthetic home space has tragic results. Obsessed with creating and etherealizing not just the home, but his wife, Georgiana, whom he tries to purify of a tiny birthmark, Alymer takes her so close to the borders of domestic perfection—which is also aesthetic perfection—that she dies and slides over the edge into heaven.47 Incorporating both the scene of aesthetic reception and the aesthetic object, the home is elsewhere idealized by Hawthorne as the scene of aesthetic creation. In the “Custom-House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne famously figures the domestic space as the ideal milieu of the Romantic artist. As in other works of this era, the home here is a magical, insubstantial space that hovers on the border of materiality. Hawthorne describes how moonlight falls into the parlor as he sits meditating on his upcoming tale, its silvery light transfiguring the “little domestic scenery,”—“the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a workbasket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to loose their actual substance, and become things of intellect.” And here again, this magical space, containing books and pictures, is elaborated through the imagery of play: “A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her wicker carriage; the hobby-horse; whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness.” Thus the “familiar room” seems to lie “somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet.”48 Needless to say, the midcentury entertainment industry's reconfiguration of the domestic realm from a space of discipline and duty to a space of consumer gratification and aesthetic self-loss and creativity had important implications for the figure of the woman writer. At the simplest level, as scholars have so often emphasized, the increased importance of the home in literary culture ensured that woman writers, as the traditional denizens of domestic precincts, achieved a striking new prominence in the industry's idea of itself. Reviews and periodicals published Page 224 →between about 1845 and 1860 are filled with descriptions and celebrations of “literary women.” These laud female literary productions as wonderfully suited to a ballooning constituency of women buyers and draw attention to women's special talent for chronicling “private history and domestic life.” Listing topics ideal for the female pen, for example, an article by W. A. Jones titled “Female Novelists” and published in the Democratic Review in 1844 informs readers, “There are the manifold windings of the female heart to be threaded (an Arachne's web); there is the beautiful nature of childhood to unfold, the growing beauty of the womanly maiden; and the proper audience (of readers) is composed of characters of the same stamp, sweet children, innocent girlhood, fair virginity, womanly beauty, inspiring love.”49 And yet the woman writer's new prominence in the literary industry had a curiously conditional aspect. On the one hand, the refiguration of the domestic sphere into a spiritualized, aesthetic space had its counterpart in the refiguration of the woman writer as herself an aesthetic or artistic creature. One of the chief features of the literature of literary true womanhood—the partner of the literature of the “true” home—was its insistence not upon the woman writer's femininity but upon her intrinsically aesthetic nature.50 True womanhood and true domesticity function in this literature not to designate the woman writer's affinity for ordinary household duties, as scholars have traditionally assumed, but as codes for what is now figured as the woman writer's triumphant emergence as a genuine, exalted artist. However, it is this same promise of aesthetic exaltation and oneness with art that functions as the structural ground from which to imagine the woman writer's exile from a longed-for condition of true domesticity that is now also a condition of true artisthood. In the unchanged estimate of the day, women writers could not in fact attain the giddy heights of “art” and “genius” because they were women. In the 1848 preface to his anthology The Female Poets of America, Rufus Griswold warned readers not to confuse male and female genius, for to do so would be to “confound the vivid dreamings of an unsatisfied heart, with the aspirations of a mind impatient of the fetters of time, and matter, and mortality.”51 Instead of masking the oddity of this argument, midcentury arts and entertainment culture promoted it. Being women, such propositions illogically suggested, women writers could not hope to attain the lofty aesthetic realms of the True Home and True Womanhood. Thus even as midcentury entertainment culture proliferated celebrations of the woman writer's continuity with the new aesthetic home, these celebrations provided the terms within which to imagine that such continuities were not a given, Page 225

→that the ideal domestic sphere, instead of forming the woman's writer's optimum condition, was a state she could never hope to attain. As we have seen in the case of Fern, it was precisely the estrangement of women writers from what had always been their assumed continuity with the household world that licensed new positions for them in a publishing marketplace that thrived on spectacles of tortured, victimized writers. The extent to which women writers were, on the one hand, construed as continuous with the new aesthetic domestic sphere is amply illustrated in the many tales of the late 1840s and early 1850s that set out to “prove” that women can be both writers and ideal housewives. We have already encountered samples of these tales among Fern's stories. A doubting bachelor who scorns to think of a literary woman as a wife is astonished to learn that literary women make the best wives of all. In modern scholarship, these tales are assumed to be illustrative of the principle that writing does not conflict with women's domestic duties. However, the chief preoccupation of these stories is not the woman writer's affinity for ordinary household duty but her continuity with a domestic sphere that has been transformed into a locus of spiritual exaltation and aesthetic perfection. We can see this in rudimentary form in Fern's “A Practical Bluestocking,” which pictures the woman writer not as an efficient housekeeper working within the grids of the rational world but as a magical, even supernatural entity—an “angel”—whose home is an apotheosis of otherworldly perfection. At once echoing and contributing to entertainment culture's transformation of the home sphere, these stories imagine the woman writer in the image of aesthetic domesticity as herself an intrinsically aesthetic creature. Nowhere are these propositions more pointedly set out than in a short story titled “The Reconcilement of the Real and the Ideal,” written by Margaret Junkin and published in Sartain's Union Magazine in 1852. As in all of these stories, a doubting bachelor launches the drama by announcing to his male companion that he would never marry a literary woman. Among women, says this bachelor, whose name is Cleveland, “[L]iterary avocations necessarily create a distaste for domestic duties.” His companion, an artist named Woodward, counters, “Not if she be a true woman.”52 Predictably, the story goes on to introduce the bachelor and the reader to a true womanly author, a friend of Woodward's wife. Rather than emphasizing this woman author's facility with ordinary housework and cooking, as one might expect of a project to illustrate the woman writer's affinity for “domestic duty,” Junkin depicts a domestic sphere that is itself a space of aesthetic creation; the “true woman” author, Page 226 →a creature of surreal perfection, is then presented as logically integral to and continuous with a domestic realm whose sole purpose is the generation of aesthetic energies and effects. Junkin's piece opens with a pointed confusion of domestic and aesthetic space. Coming upon his own home after a walk, Woodward, who wants to convince his bachelor friend Cleveland to marry and settle down, pauses at the window of his parlor and invites his friend to look upon the “pretty scene.” Encapsulating the character of the domestic worlds in this tale, the domestic interior of Woodward's home, framed by the window like a painting, is filled with art and objets arranged so that the room itself emerges as a rich and gorgeous work of art: “A shaded lamp threw out a soft, dreamy light, that fell with singular beauty upon a fine painting of Raphael in his boyhood, suspended over the mantel, and mellowed to a still richer tint an Italian painting opposite…. Some models of celebrated groups of statuary,—portfolios of engravings,—various articles of vertu, and curiously carved, ancientlooking chairs and divans,—filled up the apartment, making it in reality what it was,—an artist's home” (56). At center stage in this artistic scene is one of Woodward's own paintings, “the Marys at the tomb of our Saviour,” complete with “angels” who endow the room with holiness and magic. And at the foot of this painting, seated and gazing at it in a moment of stillness as if replicating the paintings and statuary in a tableau vivant, are Woodward's beautiful wife and child, the wife a pattern of the Mary in the painting, the child pointing at the angels and saying, Look at “papa's pretty angel.” In a turn that further highlights the utter continuity of the domestic and aesthetic—or “real and ideal,” as the title puts it—Woodward is overcome with love, bounds through the window, and catches his child in his arms, laughing at his wife and declaring, “[Y]ou are papa's pretty angels!” (56). It is in the midst of this dense aesthetic scenery, in which the real and ideal, the domestic and the artistic, are reflexively continuous and interchangeable, that we discover the “literary woman” whom Woodward has vowed to introduce to his friend. Fittingly, instead of meeting her in the flesh, he meets her in aesthetic form first. It turns out that this woman writer, whose name is Dora, has modeled for one of Woodward's paintings of classical maidens. Wandering in his friend's apartment the following day, Cleveland discovers the painting and without

knowing who the girl is falls in love just gazing at her face; in yet another twist on the theme of the interchangeability of ideal and real, the “true” and the ordinary, he begs his friend, “I wish you had the Promethean power of putting a live soul into your beauty, and bidding her step down from the Page 227 →canvass” (57). The remainder of the tale makes plain that Cleveland will have his wish, for the “true” literary woman, as she comes to life in the next few pages, is at once the type and animation of her portrait, inseparable from an aestheticized realm to whose making she herself, as a writer, contributes. Much like Woodward and his family, the real Dora, whom they visit the next day, lives as if in a “picture,” her cottage set in a breathtaking sylvan scene, “framed” with mountains and “tapestried” with flowers. Dora herself, who is discovered in this pastoral landscape picking flowers, has “the shy gracefulness of a frightened fawn”; she is a “young, artless, sylphlike creature.” Dora's cottage, while being homey and “unpretending,” is also a work of art of her design, its interior full of beautiful objects arranged for effect: there is “an exquisite statuette of Canova's dancing girl” and “a few soft landscapes…disposed with artistic reference to proper position on the walls” (59). When Dora serves tea on her porch by moonlight it is not a domestic moment but an artistic event: “The moon was at the full, and the rich sunset glow still lingered on the western sky…. Such an impromptu supper, with the soft astral light of the moon for their lamp—the sweet briar, white jessamine, and clematis, that overran the porch, as fragrant hangings about them—the low music of the Hudson as their unseen orchestra…” (60). In a magical vivification of the scene of resurrection depicted in Woodward's painting, Dora herself becomes an angel or savior: she saves Woodward's child from drowning and thus permanently endears her “real” self (which is the same as her ideal self) to Cleveland, already in love with her image. Climaxing these interchanges between domesticity and art and between the true woman, the woman artist, and the “angels,” Dora's saving of the child—and thus her incarnation of otherworldly figures linked to imagination and spirituality—cements the literary woman's integral relationship not just to domesticity but to the spirituality and art that domestic space, in this formulation, conjures and incarnates. These same efforts to forge continuities between the “true” womanly writer and a fantastical domestic sphere linked to aesthetic production and consumption are evident in other “literary woman” tales of this period. In “The Literary Wife,” published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1856, we are once again introduced to the doubting bachelor who scorns to think of literary women as potential wives: “I have a perfect horror of literary women. They are…always dowdy, ink-stained, and pedantic.”53 And here, once more, is the knowing male friend who laughs and offers to introduce the bachelor to his wife, a literary woman. Page 228 →Like the domestic spaces in the previous story, the literary woman's home is not an ordinary household but a vaguely surreal, expressly aesthetic concoction, the product, we are told, of the woman writer's “genius.” The parlor is filled with art and objets: a “Persian carpet of gorgeous hues,” “delicate lace draperies of spotless purity,” “Chinese tables of ebony and sandal wood,” and “books, music and choice prints” (405). A “splendidly mounted harp” standing by the fireplace as if recently played suggests a heavenly proximity, making the home, like other similar otherworldly homes in the fiction of this period, a portal to transcendent realms. The literary woman herself, meanwhile, is a picture of magic and true feminine perfection, utterly harmonious with the aesthetic environment she designs: “The features…were formed in Nature's finest mould, the brow smooth and polished, and somewhat to [the bachelor's] surprise perfectly feminine, the complexion a beauteous blending of the lily and the rose, the eyes of the deepest blue, the mouth small and the teeth pearly white, the hands small, fair, and unstained by the smallest particle of ink, and the foot almost fairy in form and proportions” (405–6). As in Junkin's story, the point here is to elaborate not just the literary woman's “true and beautiful position” as a wife and mother but also her integral relationship to a “true” household pervaded by, in the narrator's words, “magic” and “divinity” and “household gods” (408). “Perfectly feminine,” the literary woman is also, it is implied, utterly at one with a world in which femininity and aesthetic perfection are the same. In her House and Home Papers, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1864, Harriet Beecher Stowe declared, “Homes are the work of art peculiar to the genius of woman.”54 Because homes are exalted works of art, this logic promised, women are artists. And yet Fern was not alone in her conviction that this exalted, true womanly world of “innocence” and “sweetness” and “inspiring love” existed in some space that was peculiarly unavailable to women writers. On one level, women writers were celebrated as special avatars of the consumerist aesthetic sphere. Precisely because the

woman writer is a woman and thus has a special intimacy with the domestic realm, this literature proposed, she also has sudden access to the realms of Art that are now synonymous with the domestic field. At the same time, this logic was exploited to hypothesize a number of propositions that argued the reverse: that women writers cannot, in fact, achieve oneness with the true home and true womanhood. One of these propositions involved the woman writer's claims to “genius.” Indeed, implied in the very defensiveness of the literary woman fable—its aim to “prove” that literary women can Page 229 →make a beautiful home—is the prior assumption that they may be unequal to the demands not, as we might first suppose, of the ordinary middle-class household, which is barely mentioned in these tales, but of the lofty work of art. The implication here is that because women are traditionally of a lesser order of “genius,” they might not be up to organizing the home as an aesthetic environment. Their very biological status as women makes them unsuited to the highest forms of domesticity.55 In a different, more perverse line of logic, the midcentury literature of the literary woman also envisioned another exilic scenario: now that Art has been collapsed into the domestic realm, making itself tantalizingly available to women, there is no escaping women's domestic realm. The conflation of the aesthetic and domestic realms, while it theoretically puts the aesthetic realm within women's reach, also makes it impossible for women writers to escape from the ordinary household into the transcendent regions of Art. By extension, stranded in the ordinary household, women cannot attain the realms of Art because they can never be domestic enough, insofar as true domesticity requires a transcendence of the ordinary. Thus while the late 1840s and early 1850s saw the rise of a literature that celebrated women writers' oneness with the glory of the true home, it also saw the rise of an inseparable companion literature that depicted women writers as incapable of achieving oneness with this exalted spot; it depicted them plodding along instead in a kind of lesser, retrograde women's sphere—precisely that realm of drudgery and mindless productivity that obsesses Fern. Not surprisingly, these circular and paradoxical propositions, which hypothesize the woman writer's exile from true domesticity as a function of her continued habitation of a now inescapable domestic condition, appear in contemporary commentary in inextricable conjunction with the fantasies of true domesticity upon which they depend. The very organs most committed to the celebration of the literary woman and her exalted angelic functions are also those that cast doubt on the possibility of her transcendence of a dreary, quotidian world that defies efforts at aesthetic organization. In his preface to his 1848 anthology Female Poets and Poetry of America, for example, Rufus Griswold begins by predicting a glowing future for American women poets. He is proud to say that the poets featured in his volume “illustrate as high and sustained a range of poetic art, as the female genius of any country or age can display.” Indeed, he sees in American female poets a redemptive energy. The saving grace of a country “too much devoted to business and politics” will be “Youthful female voices that soften and enrich the tumult of enterprise, and action, by the Page 230 →interblended music of a calmer and loftier sphere.” And yet the poets described by Griswold do not live in this “calmer and loftier sphere.” Instead he emphasizes that these poems were “produced among humble and laborious occupations.” “Several persons are mentioned in this volume,” he goes on, “whose lives have been no holyday [sic] of leisure: those, indeed, who have not in some way been active in practical duties, are exceptions to the common rule. One was a slave—one a domestic servant—one a factory girl: and there are many in the list who had no other time to give to the pursuits of literature but such as was stolen from a frugal and industrious housewifery, from the exhausting cares of teaching, or the fitful repose of sickness.” Not surprisingly, instead of producing what is “exquisite in art,” these women poets, stranded in the same unconverted women's world of “laborious occupations” as Ruth Hall in Fern's novel, must be congratulated for “exhibiting so pervading an aspiration after the beautiful,” the point being of course that they fall short in the consummation.56 These same themes appear in numerous midcentury descriptions of literary women. Vehicles intended to celebrate women writers as specialized domestic creatures were also those that most volubly emphasized their implication in this world of “frugal and industrious housewifery.” From the mid-1850s to the mid-1860s, for example, The Ladies' Repository, a popular Methodist journal published out of Cincinnati, published a series on “Literary Women of America.” Devoutly committed to the promotion of idealized visions of the true home and true womanhood, the Ladies' Repository featured the saccharine articles titled “True Womanhood” and “The Home” cited above. Each installment of the “Literary Women of America” series consisted of a biography of one women writer. These are not tributes to the women writer's magical transcendence of drudgery and duty in the flickering

sunshine of the True Home, however, but accounts of hard economic circumstance, enforced mental productivity, and wearying duty to loved ones. An 1855 installment on Sarah Josepha Hale, the famed editor of Godey's Lady's Book and known in her day as a champion of true womanhood, for example, begins by recalling the sudden death of her husband after only eight years of marriage, which left Hale with five children to support. “The pursuits of literature had heretofore been prosecuted as a means of improvement, and for the love of it; she now engaged in it as a means of supporting and educating her children. It was a chilling prospect, but a mother's love and a woman's faith nerved her for the work.” In midcentury tales of true womanly authorship, the woman Page 231 →writer is a fey, almost insubstantial creature who writes without getting a “soupcon of ink on her fingers”; and in fact the emphasis in these tales is never on her employments but on her relaxed dreaminess and on the life of artistic creativity she leads. About Hale, by contrast, we are told, “‘Her untiring industry in the use of the pen is fully evidence in the amount of literary material she has given to the public. During the past twenty-six years she has been the principal editor of a monthly magazine, requiring a vast amount of labor to secure, cull, and prune suitable material for its columns. Those columns have been constantly enriched with the productions of her own pen.” Preoccupied not just with Hale's productivity but with the extent to which this productivity occupies brute physical space (as opposed to ethereal aesthetic space), the writer goes on to offer an exhaustive inventory of Hale's published volumes, mentioning the sheer bulk of some of these productions. Her Complete Dictionary of Poetical Quotations is “a volume of nearly six hundred double-column, large octavo pages.” “Besides these works there are a large number of tales, essays, and poems—the productions of her pen—which lie scattered among the periodicals of the day. These are sufficient to fill several volumes, and she intends, after completing her editorial career, to collect and publish them in book form.” Hale, he says, has worked at all this with “patient toil.” “It is evident that Mrs. Hale is a hard student, and that her productions are the result of laborious, persevering effort.”57 This same emphasis on the woman writer's habitation of a plodding world of “toil” features in other instalments in the “Literary Women of America” series. Julia Dumont is called “One of earth's sweetest spirits” but one of its “most toil-enduring and earnest workers.”58 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is engaged in the “toils of authorship.” Moreover, these pieces make explicit that this “toil” is coextensive with the woman author's existence within a domestic world that directly counters aesthetic domesticity. In the sketch of Phelps we hear how “Her literary pursuits were religiously subordinated to her duties ‘at home.’…With her feeble health, to perform with her books and her pen and her pencil, all that was necessary to satisfy her own mind, and yet to preside over the household of a pastor, was not—a pleasant song.”59 The biography of Alice Carey makes clear that the woman writer's implication in this world of toil and unpleasant song, instead of being continuous with aesthetic excellence and gratification, actively prevents the realization of these properties. Like Hale, Carey has spent her whole career in routinized productivity, and productivity has in this instance expressly foiled her chances for true success: “We do not, then, underrate the genius of Alice Page 232 →Cary, because the labor performed in and for its development is so apparent at every stage of her intellectual history. She has read, thought—for Alice Cary thinks—and written almost incessantly for the past fifteen years; and but for this labor Alice Cary would have been unknown in the world of literature. Had she labored more intensely in working out—in elaborating her ideas, rather than in multiplying her poems, we have no doubt that she would have produced much more than she has done that would possess ‘the ring of the true metal.’”60 On the one hand, this idea of the woman writer as a creature stranded in a world of drudgery, mechanical productivity, and grim domestic duty hinted at some insufficiency. If only the woman writer could be more feminine or more domestic, these descriptions seem to imply, she might transcend her plodding condition. And yet, as a related branch of this literature makes clear, the possibility of aesthetic transcendence, which is made tantalizingly available to women by the tenets of true domesticity, is also frustratingly foiled by the fact that the aesthetic and domestic must now be one. We can better understand the implications of this collapse if we look for a moment at earlier distinctions between poetic and domestic experience. Nowhere are these distinctions more explicitly underlined than in Lydia Maria Child's preface to her romance Philothea. Published in 1836, Philothea predates the celebrations of the woman writer's oneness with an ideal domestic world. Instead it highlights the radical separateness of household life and artistic endeavor, presenting the writing of pastoral romantic fiction as a

wild flight from domestic duty. Child begins by describing the composition of her novel as, quite literally, a form of escape: The hope of extended usefulness has hitherto induced a strong effort to throw myself into the spirit of the times; which is prone to neglect beautiful and fragrant flowers, unless their roots answer for vegetables, and their leaves for herbs. But there have been seasons when my soul felt restless in this bondage,—like the Pegasus of Greek fable, chained to a plodding ox, and offered in the market; and as that rash steed, when he caught a glimpse of the far blue-sky, snapped the chain that bound him, spread his wings, and left the earth beneath him—so I, for awhile, bid adieu to the substantial fields of utility, to float on clouds of romance.61 Child was well known in 1836 as an antislavery author and advocate. She was also well known as the writer of a famous housekeeping manual, The Frugal Housewife. While Child's reference to her place in “the spirit of the Page 233 →times” suggests her determination to escape her political obligations, the rest of the preface insists that her real desire is escape from her household duties and her identity as a writer of housekeeping manuals, both of which are depicted as clumsily incompatible with her truer, deeper identity as a writer of romances. Child describes how the idea for Philothea came to her in a dream. “I dreamed that I arose early in the morning, and went into my garden…. To my astonishment, that little spot, which the day before had worn the dreary aspect of winter, was now filled with flowers of every form and hue!” Dazed and delighted, Child calls to her husband and at first they witness a scene of magic: they pass to the side of the house to the radiant blue sea and upon it there are “a multitude of boats, with sails like the wings of butterflies…and ever as they moved, the gorgeous colors glittered in the sunshine.” Child tells us how in the dream she exclaims, “These must have come from fairy land!” She sees beautiful, majestic forms, a multitude of pale marble statues, “that seemed to be endowed with life,” playing and undulating in the water. This transcendent moment ends all too soon, however. We could find no words to express our rapture, while gazing on a scene thus clothed with the beauty of other worlds. As we stood absorbed in the intensity of delight, I heard a noise behind me, and turning round, saw an old woman with a checked apron, who made an awkward courtesy, and said, “Ma'am, I can't afford to let you have that brisket for eight pence a pound.” Child goes on, “When I related this dream to my husband, he smiled and said, ‘The first part of it was dreamed by Philothea; the last, by the Frugal Housewife.’62 Highlighted in these passages is not the continuity of authorship and domestic life but their jarring disjunction, a disjunction of course staged in the striking and bizarre intrusion of the shopkeeper, the “old woman with a checked apron,” into the writer's flights of poetic fancy. Even the husband's idea that the woman writer contains both “Philothea” and the “Frugal Housewife” inside her, instead of striking a conciliatory note in which these two aspects of the woman writer's self are reconciled, only brings into relief what has already been staged as the household's rude and bewildering interruption of “the intensity of delight.” It is worth noting, moreover, that in contrast to the romantic world of the dream (and thus implicitly of Philothea's composition) the domestic world is not only fleshly and grossly material (it manifests itself in the housewife's need of Page 234 →a “brisket”) but also coextensive with a pinched world of financial transaction and deprivation (the brisket costs more than eight pence a pound). However, it is precisely this presumed disjunction between domestic and aesthetic conditions, between housework and poetry and home and art, that disappears in the midcentury culture of the true womanly writer. While one result of this was the ability to imagine the domestically circumscribed woman writer in an unalterable and spontaneous oneness with what Child calls “the beauty of other worlds,” the other result was that “the beauty of other worlds” must be relentlessly subordinated to the quotidian domestic world in which aesthetic experience was now enclosed. Thus the tales of women's fulfillment as artists within shimmering home realms of play and fancy were never far from tales of women's drowning in household “toil” with all hopes of relief or escape foreclosed. And here again, these two views of domesticity are mutually generative: as in Fern's writing, the promises of

euphoric fulfillment in the home bring into relief the grind of an everyday household life from which there is no escape. Accordingly, in this branch of literary woman literature, the home, which should be the site of the woman writer's ultimate gratification as an artist, is the thing that stops her from writing. An 1855 issue of Arthur's Home Magazine, for example, a magazine notable for its conventional romantic and domestic content and its celebration of true women writers, contains a poem called “Labor” by Mrs. P. Farmer. In “Labor” the woman writer's very oneness with the domestic sphere, which should form the condition of her gratification and aesthetic creativity, forms a condition of nightmarish entrapment that foils “poetry.” Rising in the morning, From a restless sleep; With dull langour yawning, Out at the window peep; Frowning if 'tis cloudy, Sighing if the sun Is far on his journey, And breakfast not begun. O, labor! hard labor! I have learned from you, That sleeping late of mornings Will never, never do. ………………… Page 235 → Sweating o'er the cook-stove, That red-hot is made, Though the thermometer Tells ninety in the shade; Many irons in the fire, Attention claim at once And if either of them burn We're thought a stupid dunce. Oh, labor! hard labor! I look with sympathy

Upon the poor, weary one, That's bound for life to thee. Bolting down the dinner Laying pains in store, For the yeast is coming And threatens to run o'er; Bending o'er the table, Making bread and pies; From the fruit and sugar Driving off the lies. O, labor! hard labor! I have learned to know How you irritate the nerves And cloud the aching brow. When the supper's over, And setting the sun, Cross and fretful children Washing one by one; When the weary wee ones Their sleepy lids do close, Stitching by candle light Till dim the eyesight grows. O, labor! Hard labor! I have learned from you Take the poetry from life— From matrimony too.63

In this poem, all of the components of true domesticity, the very phenomena that exalt the home as a site of Page 236 →fancy and spirituality—the sunshine, the candlelight, the sleepy-lidded children, the stitches, the fruit and sugar—appear in alternate form as instruments of the suffocation of fancy and spirituality. A well-known 1852 short story by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps makes this same point via the figures of the “angels” who typically people

the magical homes of the true woman writer and conventionally signify her commerce with the far-flung worlds of art and spirituality and imagination. Titled “The Angel Over the Right Shoulder,” this tale involves a young wife and mother depressed and overwhelmed by the endless labor of the household. She feels “Unsatisfied longings for something she had not attained,” and yearns for some lofty “unity of purpose.” This suddenly seems to be within her grasp when her husband announces she should take two hours of each day wholly for herself to pursue her “reading and study.” Overjoyed, the wife locks herself away in the little study, only to find each day that the household refuses to leave her alone. “Scarcely had she dipped her pen in ink,” than the children need her or her husband calls or a neighbor visits. A whole year passes and she has still not had a minute to herself. In a state of despair one night, wondering if she will ever find fulfillment, the wife slides into sleep and has a dream. She dreams of a marvelous land with golden clouds, limitless except for a single road down which a woman journeys along with children at her side, helping them and guiding them on their way. Behind either shoulder, observing all that this woman does, is a golden angel on a golden cloud, each with a “golden book” and “a pen of gold.” The angel over the right shoulder marks down all her good deeds. The angel over the left shoulder marks down all her little frustrations, her lapses in diligence, her wistful hopes for personal fulfillment. Suddenly waking up, the wife sees how misguided she has been. Everything she does, she realizes, no matter how trivial, is noted and tallied up for the ultimate day of reckoning. Here is the purpose and meaning she's been looking for. Taking her cue from the angel over the right shoulder, she sees that the true purpose of her life is caring for her family. She gives up her selfish quest for intellectual fulfillment and devotes herself entirely to her husband and children.64 Like Child's dream in the preface to Philothea, the dream in this tale seems to offer the protagonist a blissful escape from a grueling domestic life. And as in a “Practical Blue-Stocking” and “The Reconcilement of the Real and the Ideal,” the instrument of the woman's transcendence is an angel, the symbol of an otherworldly perfection that the true woman writer would typically channel and embody. However, as in “Labor,” the very symbols and agents that should aid in the true woman writer's aesthetic self-actualization—in this case, dreams and angels—serve to enclose within rather than release the wife from her domestic world. Thus Page 237 →the angels are agents of discipline and self-abnegation. Far from auguring a new domestic regime in which wives and angels are magically one and in which wives transcend the world of quotidian labor via their “genius,” the angels merely return the wife to her place in the traditional regimented household, their very connection with transcendence permanently strangling the wife's chances at escape. Armed with the “books” and “pens” that the wife herself never has time to pick up, the angels dramatize the impossibility of women writers' attaining a state of transcendence under a condition in which domestic duty and women's spiritual self-gratification have been made the same. And here again, as in “Labor” it is the domestic world, theoretically the exclusive source of the true woman writer's inspiration, that puts a stop to women's writing. And yet if this branch of literature offered a grim view of the household domain, it also helped in the production of the mechanisms of alienation and exile—and thus of celebrity, productivity, and ambition—we see in Fern's writing and career. Even as nineteenth-century ideals of the woman writer, in Susan Williams words, “constructed the female author as a ‘natural’ phenomenon” and worked to “capture the ‘natural’ relation between housekeeping and writing,”65 the midcentury arts and entertainment industry transformed these “natural” relationships into potentially estranged polarities. Indeed, as we have seen, one of the most prominent features of the consumerist domestic sphere was in fact its newly unnatural—that is, magical, artful, fantastical—quality, and thus its potential disharmony with the woman writer who had traditionally featured as its natural inhabitant. On the one hand, this revised domestic sphere transformed Art itself into a viable and even pregiven female goal. Far from descrying literature as dangerous to women's properly feminine pursuits, as had traditionally been the case, the literary cult of true domesticity depicts literary pursuits as the gateway to a loftier, more “perfectly feminine” womanhood, a condition in which the quotidian, earthly cares of women's lives dissolve before the vertiginous magic of life as art. On the other hand, these fantasies, in their very depiction of a fundamentally denatured femininity and domesticity, place these properties beyond the grasp of women writers; they float in some distant domestic heaven that women writers, living in the grind of the “natural” household world, will never reach. But it was precisely by transforming womanhood and domesticity into exalted conditions from which the woman writer, stranded in a retrograde “natural” domestic life, is logically precluded, that the literary cult of domesticity helped to reorganize and reposition the woman writer as both a committed professional and a more aggressive Page 238

→competitor. It is the woman writer's pursuit of true womanhood—in effect, her pursuit of “art”—that licenses her pursuit of these commodities in the world beyond the middle-class household, literally in the professionalized, commercial arts and entertainment sector where literary art in the 1840s and 1850s was being made and distributed.

“The Spasmodic Vent of a Highly Nervous System” In previous chapters of this study I have emphasized the extent to which shifts in the demographic and economic landscape of the arts and entertainment system in the early nineteenth century tended to be reciprocally related to the multiplication of Romantic personalities and exilic positions among the industry's creative personnel. Inseparable from the cheap press revolution of the late 1830s and early 1840s, I argued in chapter 3, was a mythology of Romantic authorship that predicated and mapped itself onto a workforce of “mental laborers” whose outsized public personalities, compulsive work habits, and unethical practices, inseparable from their Byronic glamour and alienation, fed a system that expanded itself precisely by relying on and replicating these commodities. Similarly, the sector of this industry devoted to the production of genteel literature, much of it produced by amateurs, rationalized and amplified itself through its multiplication of figures of idleness and flaneurie, figures whose protected distance from base commerce assured their centrality to an industry that could not afford to conceptualize authors as entities within systems of exchange. What is made evident in the proliferation of new female authorial identities in the late 1840s, I am suggesting, are these same dynamics. A fresh market—in this case for home and family entertainment—suddenly demonstrates its profitability. Writers, publishers, and editors, including the numerous women working as writers and editors, hurry to redefine their literary vehicles and to remake home space itself into a consumerist haven so as to sell more books and magazines, resulting in yet more exaggerated renditions of home that sell more books, and so on. One result of this, as we have seen, was the opening up of positions and opportunities for women writers. Not only did the proliferation of home-themed materials endow women writers with new prominence and authority as arbiters of women's traditional social domains, but it also introduced the opportunity for women writers to refashion their relationship to domesticity itself in a way that conformed to entertainment industry norms—that reformulated women writers as artists and out Page 239 →casts, and that ultimately fed the structures of professional aspiration, frustration, and interdiction that organized psychologies of competitive self-making and circuits of celebrity and aggression in the larger arts and entertainment industry. Certainly, it was a minority of women writers who entered or were pulled into new circuits of publicity or who had sufficient sales and popularity to establish competitive relationships with other authors and publishers. Hundreds of women in the early 1850s were editing journals, writing novels, and producing periodical literature; only a handful were bestselling authors or front-page news. Nevertheless, entertainment domesticity, inseparable from the exaltation of true womanhood and the woman writer's imagined exile from its conditions, opened up radical new professional and economic options that certain women writers could, if they were so inclined or enabled, exploit. Accordingly, it is useful to stress here again the extent to which the late 1840s and early 1850s find professional women writers with celebrity and productivity profiles that strikingly resemble those of their male counterparts. While Fern was one of the few women writers of the 1850s who actively courted scandal, scandal flourished around women writers regardless. Precisely in setting so lofty a standard for women writers, the doctrines of true womanhood provided a kind of incitement to discourse, offering endless opportunities to talk about women writers. It was accordingly those women writers who most passionately celebrated true womanhood while also flamboyantly transgressing its precepts—thus giving reviewers something to talk about—who achieved the greatest fame in the 1850s, notably Fern with her antidomestic tirades and her scurrilous public indictments of famous members of her family, and Harriet Beecher Stowe with her scandalous depictions of sadism and routine concubinage and prostitution in the slave states. In addition to these inflated celebrity profiles, women writers in the late 1840s and 1850s evidence the kinds of productivity that typified the careers of so many of their male contemporaries and that were, as we have seen in other chapters, linked to structures of professional competitiveness and experiences of deficiency. There was Caroline Lee Hentz, who wrote nine novels between 1850 and her death in 1857, and Ann Stephens, who churned

out serial novels while the full-time editor of Peterson's, and E. D. E. N. Southworth, who sometimes wrote three fat novels a year. Indeed, Southworth engaged in a productivity so prodigious that it led to arguments with her editors and publishers. Writing serial novels for Henry Peterson at The Saturday Evening Post in the early 1850s, Page 240 →Southworth wrote such long and numerous installments that Peterson was often forced to bump other authors or to publish issues minus the promised story. Peterson irritably chided Southworth about needlessly “spinning” out her tales and warned, “The value of your stories is greatly lessened to us by their extreme length.”66 As might be expected, however, Southworth's tireless productivity, while irritating for Peterson, was a boon in a larger industry that fed itself on compulsive and reliable output. Southworth left Peterson in 1857 to work for Robert Bonner and The Ledger, joining Fern in Bonner's galaxy of conspicuous, high-paid stars. It is important to stress here that in a system that had all along relied for its vigor and profitability on authors' flamboyant public self-display and on open hostility among writers and editors, the addition of a new set of victimized, exilic figures on the entertainment scene (even if these figures were sometimes little more than an intimation in a novel or periodical), multiplied the possibilities of expansion and profitability in the industry as a whole. Thus while one result of the cult of literary true womanhood was the creation of new positions for women writers, another result was the restructuring of positions for all creative personnel in the industry in ways that did not necessarily reference or extend from women writers' existing practices, professional contributions, or material presence. In some ways, in other words, true womanhood and true domesticity acted as autonomous structures, as fantasy systems, that did not arise from or connect in any referential way to actual women writers. This autonomy is partly demonstrated in the popularity of the idea, which took hold of American writers and editors in the late 1840s, that the midcentury literary marketplace was being taken over by women. It is important to stress that this idea did not, as far as historians can tell, chronicle an actual increase in the proportion of female to male writers. The proportion of women contributing to the making of vernacular literary materials remained largely unchanged, fluctuating between about 20 percent and 30 percent, from the 1790s to the 1860s.67 On the one hand, fables of women's numerousness in the marketplace clearly contributed to the apparatus of women's exile. Like the constant references to women writers' numbing labors, mindless productivity, and desperation for money, references to women's teeming marketplace presence implied their banishment from the ideal home, while also collapsing the terrain of the market with the terrain of drudgery internal to the ordinary household. Thus the commentary that remarks on women's marketplace presence tends, here again, to be inseparable from the rhetoric of true womanhood. Introducing her 1853 Page 241 →anthology, The American Female Poets, for example, Caroline May noted that the woman poet's milieu was “the sacred retirement of home.” Nevertheless, “One of the most striking characteristics of the present age is the number of female writers.” Women's poems “have been poured forth through our newspapers and other periodicals, with the utmost profusion.”68 In an 1854 review of cookbooks, which by their nature imply women's domesticity, Putnam's Monthly remarked, off topic, that “A most alarming avalanche of female authors has been pouring upon us the past three months.”69 Yet more than simply exaggerating the magnitude of women's contributions to the production of genteel arts and entertainment materials, and thus encouraging women's structures of exile and deficiency, these narratives of female numerousness and takeover multiplied exilic positions among male creative personnel, now imagined as souls who were being squeezed out of the marketplace by women. For modern readers, the most famous manifestation of this new exilic scenario is Nathaniel Hawthorne's fear over the prospect of sales for his own books while the marketplace is dominated by “a d—d mob of scribbling women.” An 1864 essay by J. H. Elliot in The Knickerbocker, which echoed almost two decades of comment on this topic, warned, “It would almost seem that the domain of letters, once sacred to man, were about to be usurped by woman. Our sisters have driven off the stronger sex almost completely from the arena of light literature”70 In an important sense, the picture of Fern's unscrupulous and meteoric rise to fame on the back of her brother's fading celebrity, which fascinated writers and editors of this period, captured this new exilic scenario in peculiarly dramatic and exemplary form, for it seemed quite literally to illustrate the woman writer's aggressive conquest of positions of celebrity and success formerly reserved for men. In short, in the context of an industry that thrived on outsiders, the cult of true womanhood performed the double function of generating two sets of exiles, feeding at once the fantasy that true womanhood

could be pursued in the marketplace as well as the paranoia that woman writers' search for womanliness was responsible for their numbers in the commercial arts and entertainment sector. Accordingly, one of the chief features of the midcentury genteel cultural landscape, which essentially collapsed the gendered persons and spaces upon which it also insisted, is that male and female authorial personalities and environments emerge in contemporary fiction and commentary as curiously interchangeable. Here again, it is important to stress that the interchangeability of these positions was not necessarily Page 242 →something experienced by many women writers, most of whom, of course, remained subject to the significant gender barriers that circumvented middle-class women's lives. What was at issue here rather was a fantasy of male and female interchangeability that could, as in all the fantasy scenarios discussed in this study, interact with the psychic propensities, economic situations, and behavior patterns of the professional writers in the genteel entertainment field. All uniformly occupying positions of exile, male and female writers, in this fantasy, readily switched places and attributes, moving around a shifting landscape that, far from being segregated according to the doctrine of separate spheres, evaporated gender hierarchies and distinctions. Thus Fern's idea that true domesticity has shifted out of women's domain or that true womanhood is secretly being enjoyed by male authors and editors was coextensive with a wide range of commentary that pictured men and women authors in mixed up positions, positions that registered the transience of the separate spheres geographies midcentury literary culture so strenuously upheld. Echoing the denaturing of conventional domestic space upon which Hawthorne himself so frequently insisted, James Russell Lowell, in his 1848 A Fable For Critics, depicted Hawthorne as a figure foreign to clear-cut sexual and gender categories: When Nature was shaping him clay was not granted For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, So, to fill out her model, a little she spared From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared.71

A similar opinion was expressed by Putnam's in 1853 about Donald Grant Mitchell. Putnam's highlights “the almost feminine delicacy of Mr. Mitchell's nature. He takes us captive with those gentle spells for which the sex are famous, and we like to dally for awhile with the sweet thoughts that he whispers to us, and to daintily taste of the rich, ripe fruits that he has spread upon the board.”72 When Rebecca Harding Davis, writing for The Atlantic Monthly in 1860, imagined the quintessential male artist in “Life in the Iron Mills” she figured him with “a meek, woman's face”; Hugh is “known as one of the girl-men.”73 Occupying what is ultimately a curiously undifferentiated landscape in which all the seemingly sacred divisions of separate spheres orthodoxy—household and marketplace, female and male, home and art—mingle and interchange themselves, women writers ultimately occupied, in these overlapping phantasmatic and economic structures, the same exilic positions and indeed even embodied the same exilic personalities Page 243 →as their male counterparts. Banished from the aesthetic domestic sphere, longing for its promises of liberation and fulfillment, women writers became convertible with the various wild, dysfunctional personages that peopled the midcentury realms of professional arts and entertainment production. We saw this in rudimentary form in Grace Greenwood's description of “genius,” in which male and female writers occupy the same positions of romantic agony and exile (“Milton, Tasso, Burns, Byron, Shelley; Hemens, Landon, Norton, Butler, and many, many more have been ‘With such a woful weight of misery laden, / As well might challenge the great ministry / Of the whole universe to comfort it’”). But perhaps nowhere is this mutuality of positions more strikingly illustrated than in Augusta Jane Evans's 1860 best seller, Beulah, in which the titular heroine is effectively inhabited by the spirit of the male romantic outcast. In modern scholarship, as we have seen, the true literary woman and male romantic outcast are seen as far-flung, mutually exclusive figures. Indeed, in the opinion of numerous scholars, including Naomi Sofer, Victoria Olwell, and Susan Williams, it was precisely against the glamour, genius, and authenticity

of the Byronic outcast that women writers—homebound, intellectually limited, and engaged in the production of “light” literature—were prejudicially differentiated.74 Indicated in Beulah, however, is the extent to which the literary woman and tortured romantic genius occupy what are ultimately homologous positions of alienation in an arts and entertainment industry that vitalizes itself via the proliferation of eccentrics and outcasts. Beulah tells the story of an orphan girl named Beulah who at age twelve is put under the guardianship of the handsome, wealthy, and brooding Dr. Hartwell. In an erotic scenario popular in midcentury American fiction, Dr. Hartwell wants to mold the young Beulah to be his future wife. Beulah resists this destiny. Possessed, in her words, of “a vast volcanic agency, constantly impelling me to action,”75 she is determined to be independent and to make a career for herself as a schoolteacher and writer. She says, “I feel humbled when I hear a woman bemoaning the weakness of her sex, instead of showing that she has a soul and mind of her own, inferior to none” (141). It is important to stress that Beulah is no Ruth Hall. Its point is not to celebrate women's aspiration (however partial that celebration turns out to be in Fern's novel) but to illustrate the hollowness of women's fame and independence. Beulah slaves for years as a schoolteacher and attains renown as an author, but all of her success is like ashes in the end and she realizes that her true happiness lies with Dr. Hartwell. What is striking about this tale is that instead of incarnating Page 244 →the stereotypical intellectual or professional woman of the 1850s, or even the misguided true woman, as we might expect, Beulah incarnates Edgar Allan Poe. If this novel literalizes the exilic scenarios of midcentury true woman literature by insisting that to be an author Beulah must be an outcast, existing in this case in a state of self-imposed exile from the luxury of Dr. Hartwell's home, it also incorporates the exilic structure's complimentary logic: banished from the true home, the woman author is rendered interchangeable with all the other mad poets and outcasts roaming around in the industrialized arts and entertainment landscape. Not only does Beulah read Poe to excess, falling under the “spell of this incomparable sorcerer” (146), but she also looks like one of Poe's heroines, or indeed even Poe himself: “A pair of large grey eyes set beneath an overhanging forehead, a boldly-projecting-forehead, broad and smooth; a rather large but finely cut mouth, an irreproachable nose, of the order furthest removed from aquiline, and heavy black eyebrows, which, instead of arching, stretched straight across and nearly met. There was not a vestige of color in her cheeks; face, neck, and hands wore a sickly pallor, and a mass of rippling, jetty hair drawn smoothly over the temples, rendered this marble-like whiteness more apparent” (8–9). In accord with the conflation of true domesticity and art in the 1850s, Evans depicts the ideal woman artist as a paragon of true womanhood. In a valedictory address on the topic of “Female Heroism,” Beulah charges aspiring women not just to aim for “the most exalted attainments” but to remember their “true position”—their place as “ornaments of the social circle, angel guardians of the sacred hearthstone, ministering spirits where suffering and want demand succor” (171). When Beulah sketches a portrait of Sappho, she imagines the poetess in true womanly terms, depicting a “face of rare loveliness, of oval outline, of delicate, yet noble features.” “The uplifted eyes beamed with the radiance of inspiration; the full, ripe lips, were just parted; the curling hair clustered, with child-like simplicity, round the classic head” (217). However, it is precisely in these articulations of the true womanly artist that the woman writer appears as effectively identical with the tortured outcast incarnated for 1850s audiences by Poe. Thus Beulah's portrait of Sappho is notable not just for its “child-like simplicity” but for its disturbingly “wild eyes.” In response to her friend Clara, who is shocked by the eyes Beulah gives to Sappho, Beulah says that she deliberately made them the eyes of “madness.” “I believe poetry to be the highest and purest phase of insanity,” she declares. “[I]t is the Page 245 →spasmodic vent of a highly nervous system, overstrained, diseased. Yes, diseased! If it does not result in the frantic madness of Lamb, or the final imbecility of Southey, it is manifested in the various other forms, such as the morbid melancholy of Cowper, the bitter misanthropy of Pope, the abnormal moodiness and misery of Byron, the unsound and dangerous theories of Shelley, and the strange, fragmentary nature of Coleridge” (217). Thus interchangeable, the mad outcast and true woman occupy a landscape whose lack of differentiation, Evans implies, finds its philosophical counterpart in Emerson's “Circles,” which is one of Beulah's objects of study: “‘the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere’” (282). What is inaugurated in this collapse of spheres into a circle, moreover, is not a condition of romantic transcendence, as we might expect, but rather the regimes of technicality and mechanical productivity that bedevil the woman writer as she

drudges in the home and that had all along been a dark underside of Romantic authorship as it developed in tandem with industrialized entertainment in the late 1820s and 1830s. Thus far from including transcendence or even any kind of “insanity,” Beulah's career as an author is characterized by prosaic economic transactions, rote composition, and frenetic, debilitating productivity. Visiting the editor of a magazine in which she hopes to publish, for example, Beulah, far from staring with “wild eyes,” engages in a long conversation about the business prospects of southern periodicals as she haggles over the price of her own pieces, then returns home to exhaust herself with “the usual routine of mental labour” (396). Beulah's compositional moments are hedged in by deadlines and typified by writing's most technical aspects. Beulah is “rigidly punctual in handing in her contributions,” even when she “[shrinks] from the task of copying and punctuating.” Moreover, far from countering or opposing her Romantic identity as an outcast poet, these routinized, mechanical conditions turn out to be inseparable from the outcast poet's longing for glamour and fame. In other chapters, I emphasized the extent to which such longings were connected not to the creation of art but to the kick-starting of psychic structures of ambition and compulsive productivity. It is precisely this psychological and material economy that Beulah enters, her true womanly artistic self identical not only with the “diseased” male poet's but also with a system that converts these Romantic aesthetic components into functional elements of arts and entertainment mass production: “Her successful career, thus far, inflamed the ambition which formed so powerful an element in her mental organization, and a longing Page 246 →desire for Fame took possession of her soul. Early and late she toiled; one article was scarcely in the hands of the compositor, ere she was engaged upon another. She lived, as it were, in a perpetual brain-fever, and her physical frame suffered proportionately” (397). In achieving a state of interchangeability with the Romantic male outcast, the woman author, in this scenario, does not incarnate his glamour nor even his “disease” but rather his utility as an obsessive-compulsive worker. It is hardly a wonder that Beulah ends up hearing words identical to those that so routinely floated around the midcentury professional literature and entertainment milieu. Dr. Hartwell tells her, “Beulah, I have seen sun-lit bubbles gliding swiftly on the bosom of a clear brook, and casting golden shadows down upon the pebbly bed. Such a shadow you are now chasing; ah, child, the shadow of a gilded bubble! Panting and eager, you clutch at it; the bubble dances on, the shadow with it; and Beulah, you will never, never grasp it. Ambition such as yours, which aims at literary fame, is the deadliest foe to happiness” (401). These same phrases, uttered by everyone from Edgar Allan Poe, Park Benjamin, and Nathaniel Parker Willis, to Fern herself, who laments, “What is Fame to a woman?” fix the professional writer's state of chronic deficiency, of living in exile and chasing after “shadows,” as the condition of his or her profitable and productive relationship to the arts and entertainment system. It is useful to note, by way of conclusion, that Evans was not alone among midcentury women writers to assault the figure of the outcast artist. Writing in the Second Series of Greenwood Leaves in 1852, Grace Greenwood, even as she celebrated the perils of “genius,” thought it time to celebrate the poet's “health.” She announces, “On my Parnassus there should be no half-demented, long-haired, ill-dressed bards, lean and pale, subject to sudden attacks of poetic frenzy—sitting on damp clouds, and harping to the winds.”76 Most famous of all was Harriet Beecher Stowe's attack on Lord Byron in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869 when she published “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life,” an essay that revealed to American and British audiences that the ruin of Byron's marriage had been caused by his incestuous affair with his half sister, Augusta Leigh.77 It has been the overwhelming consensus among scholars that these attacks pitted the true womanly author—the militant mother, the simple child—against the transcendent mysteries and powers of a male artistic genius that women artists were denied. However, as I have contended in the course of this chapter, women's professionalization within midcentury commercial arts and entertainment networks rendered such distinctions Page 247 →moot. Exiled from true womanhood, the figure of the literary woman joined the tortured genius and the idle amateur not in a realm of transcendence or glamorous defiance but in the largely undifferentiated scene of industrial productivity, celebrity, and competitive aggression that typified the midcentury print entertainment industry, her alienation and aggravation, her celebrity and productivity coincident with theirs.

Page 248 →

Epilogue In memoirs he published in the 1890s, William Dean Howells recalled his trip in 1860 to the center of American “Bohemia,” Pfaff's Cellar in Manhattan. The young Howells, then a fledgling writer, was excited to go, for Pfaff's was known “so far West as Ohio” as the spot where radical artists, actors, and journalists (among them Walt Whitman) gathered in a fog of alcohol, tobacco, and sex to form the nearest thing the United States had to the glamorous countercultures of Paris. But having sat in Pfaff's and seen nothing but frail men with hangovers eating German pancakes (though Howells “staid hoping vainly for worse things”), Howells recalled this “Bohemia” as a “sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking roots in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.” Even the actual denizens of the 1850s New York Bohemia, according to what Howells apparently later discovered, “thought the pose a vain and unprofitable one.”1 What was this “Bohemia” that Howells visited? On the one hand, as both Joanna Levin and Mark A. Lause have recently argued, New York's Bohemia in the late 1850s was, in the context of the United States, an unprecedented, genuinely modern countercultural space, a forerunner, according to Levin, of the more profound segregation of aesthetic and artistic culture from the world of America's wealthy and white-collar business classes that would occur by the end of the nineteenth century.2 Born rather suddenly in 1855, New York's Bohemia was the brainchild of Henry Clapp Jr., a middle-aged temperance lecturer and abolitionist who had recently returned from a long sojourn in Paris dazzled by la vie Page 249 →de Bohème of Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, and Charles Baudelaire and determined to launch a similar experiment in New York. Commandeering Pfaff's beer cellar on Broadway just north of Bleeker Street, Clapp gathered around him a lively group of artists and writers, which swelled in its heyday to almost two hundred members and included, apart from Whitman, such New York luminaries as the travel writer Bayard Taylor, the poet Richard Henry Stoddard, the actress and author Ada Clare, the “hashish eater” Fitz Hugh Ludlow, the comedian Artemus Ward, and the Poe-esque horror writers Fitz-James O'Brien and Charles D. Gardette, among others. Clapp himself, as editor of the group's organ, the Saturday Press, was crowned the “King of Bohemia” and “King Devilmaycare.” Conceived as New York's alternative to stuffy Boston and to a “mainstream” America ruled by “Mrs. Grundy,” the Saturday Press was filled with jaunty accounts of Bohemian brilliance, drunkenness, and revelry. Pfaff's was “the anvil from which fly the brightest scintillations of the hour; this is the womb of the best things that society has heard from man-a-day; this is the trysting-place for the most careless, witty, and jovial spirits of New York,—journalists, artists, and poets.”3 The chief difference between the eccentric Bohemian, as described in the pages of the Saturday Press, and his eccentric forebears in early nineteenth-century Byronism was his gusto and self-satisfaction, his delight in the company of his friends, in conversation, in meals, in his pipe, and in his endless, beguiling exploration of the metropolis. The Bohemian was not tortured but happy and glad to be living on the fringes of the stultifying conventionality of the middle class. In many ways, one could argue, the New York Bohemia of Whitman and Clapp was a kind of expression of a real rift between the culture of art and the culture of mass entertainment production. Indeed, we can speculate that the difference between these later views of outsider artists and the earlier ones lay in the socioeconomic landscape that writers by the late 1850s had come to occupy. In the 1830s, romantic myths of authorial eccentricity were foundational to evolving systems of mass print production that had grown out of and continued to thrive on a combination of highly speculative, often guerrilla-style publishing practices and a literary culture long oriented around authorial volunteerism and self-capitalization. By the late 1850s, however, this world of micro-players was gone. American books and periodicals were not just selling in the tens of thousands but in the hundreds of thousands; and the audiences for these were no longer regional but continental and transnational. The publishing business by the late 1850s was an increasingly centralized, Page 250 →corporate affair, with large national publishing houses, typically situated in New York or Boston and centered around factory production, replacing the earlier era's regional and small-time entrepreneurs. Writers featured in this centralized, corporate machinery not as potential publishers and capitalists in their own right but as freelancers, contractual workers, and employees. Clapp's Bohemia could thus be understood as the symptom of an expulsion of the autonomous artist from the

“center” of literary and entertainment production—and thus as a genuinely “alternative” or countercultural entity, a thing that lay quite literally outside of big-business publishing and the bourgeois constituencies to which it increasingly catered. And yet it is not clear that Bohemia, instead of being an alternative to the world of corporate publishing, didn't function as a sort of gestational space for its members. Indeed, the publicizing of a romantic life on the eccentric outskirts of “Mrs. Grundy's” United States—and here again the world of the eccentric author is configured as “foreign” to the United States (transplanted from Paris)—ended up having a familiar set of unromantic connections to the world of news and entertainment production, the same world that Romantic stereotypes of the artist, I have argued in the course of this study, had their part in creating. Living in “the shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, already on his way to becoming an iconic martyr to his own creativity” (52), in the words of Lause, the Bohemians were attached to virtually the same publishing enterprises that had been so central to Poe's fame and professional decline. It is important to stress here that these attachments were not “ideological,” as this term is usually meant by scholars. Although, as Levin argues, Bohemia, with all its celebration of revelry and play, may have espoused “the cultivation of free subjectivity” essential to the nineteenth-century bourgeois order,4 the connection between the self-proclaimed Bohemian writers and the same news and entertainment apparatus in which Poe had worked was not so subtle, for the Pfaff's writers were generally employed by the same newspaper and periodical magnates who had helped to create the entertainment press of the 1830s. A large number were reporters and freelance writers on Newspaper Row (near which Pfaff's was handily located); they worked at Greeley's Tribune, Bennett's Herald, and Henry Raymond's more recent New York Times. Others, including O'Brien, wrote for Harper's and Putnam's; still others were veterans of the “flash press” of the early 1840s and, like Whitman, of Benjamin's New World. Indeed, so indistinct were the lines between the Bohemian “artist” (in all of this figure's newly exuberant dimensions) and journalists working for big-business Page 251 →newspapers that in the early 1860s the very terminology with which these entities were referenced was often the same. Writing his memoir of the Civil War, Junius Henri Browne used the term “War Correspondent” and “Bohemian” interchangeably; the definition of a Bohemian, Browne explains, is “war correspondent”: “The War Correspondent is the outgrowth of a very modern civilization; though Xenophon and Julius Caesar were early examples of the profession. They, however told the story of their own deeds, and the nineteenth-century Bohemians narrate the acts of others…. They are the outgrowth of the great and constantly augmenting power of the Press.”5 Not coincidentally, it was the outbreak of the Civil War that emptied Clapp's Bohemia. In 1861, the magic circle at Pfaff's vanished as if it had never been, partly because so many of its members went off as war correspondents. New York's Bohemia may have been jaunty and full of joie de vivre on the page, but in the real world the same economic and psychological problems that had plagued the writers of Poe's generation continued to plague the Bohemians. There was the suicide, first, of the young journalist William North, whose financial woes were terminated by his drinking prussic acid, and then of Henry W. Herbert, who invited his friends over for dinner and shot himself in front of their eyes. Indeed, the financial woes of the Bohemians were perennial, for economic circumstances for writers as a professional class remained largely unchanged as the Civil War approached. The Saturday Press itself, as Howells noted, did not pay its contributors. O'Brien at one point picketed Harper's for refusing to give him a twenty-five-dollar advance, carrying a sign that said “One of Harper's authors. I am starving.” Howells reports that in 1860 the only magazines that paid anything at all were Harper's and the Atlantic; others, the Knickerbocker, Vanity Fair, the Independent, paid nothing.6 In other words, like the eccentric writer selves that had proliferated in the 1830s print explosion, the Bohemia of the 1850s was indistinctly separated from a news and entertainment business that had all along thrived on “alternative” creative personnel, men and women whose seeming rebellion against the world of business could translate into diffuse, indefinite hours of labor, low wages, and “content” that took the writer himself—this time, a carefree, drunken, lackadaisical writer—as a central object of entertainment, fantasy, and delectation. The possibility of generating profits from the labors and performances of writers who mythically transcended the grubby taint of money and rejected the trappings of bourgeois comfort, which developed in the United States in the early nineteenth century and continued to flourish Page 252 →in the years immediately before the Civil War,

was not destined to end in the remainder of the nineteenth century. As Levin has so eloquently demonstrated, the Bohemia first imagined by Clapp and his friends proved to be the harbinger of the vogue for Bohemian fantasies and subcultures that would sweep through the United States from the 1870s to the end of the century and culminate in such famous Bohemian enclaves as Greenwich Village. Genius itself, as Gustavus Stadler has shown, continued after the Civil War to be a prized and increasingly inclusive property, embracing not just writers but painters, sculptors, musicians, singers, actors, and other performers.7 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, eccentric author structures were nourished by writers as promotional and commercial tools. As Frank Norris would note at the end of the century, America's proliferating scenes of countercultural specialness, which more and more included whole communities of artists and, increasingly, the wealthy Americans who formed Bohemia's substantial tourist population, continued—largely because of their glamorous rhetoric of rebellion and withdrawal, of play and pastoral escape—to be foundational to an ever-expanding industry in entertainment that came to include not just printed materials or theaters and music halls but also vast fairs, exhibitions, and museums. Thus for Norris, San Francisco's Bohemian world is not a haven from big-business entertainment, but an extension of it: Bohemia, declares one of the characters in Norris's The Octopus, is “like the Midway Plaisance.”8 Here again, one of the chief characteristics of the Bohemias of the 1870s and 1880s, as of the Romantic eccentric author, was their dense, vivid existence in the pages of books, newspapers, and magazines—often to the exclusion of their existence in actuality. Howells, for example, meets the glamour and liveliness of the Pfaff's Bohemians in the pages of the Saturday Press first, after which the actuality seems a pale, disappointing imitation. As Levin underlines, “Most travels to Bohemia first occurred through the medium of print.” Never entirely separable from literary iterations of Bohemia as fantasy space, the Bohemias of the 1870s and 1880s (groups of artists, clubs, clusters of cafes or taverns) inspired “endless convolutions of art imitating life and life imitating art.”9 And once again these spaces and their denizens, which in the first place were inseparable from the fictions authored by their members, existed not just for the satisfaction of artists but for the purposes of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure; they tended to be places created by artists for their audiences (that is, so that artists could showcase themselves) rather than for artists alone. In the typical Bohemian tale or article of the 1870s, accordingly, Page 253 →the reader is cast as the onlooker and tourist who is invited into enchanted precincts. In “A Few Hours in Bohemia,” an 1876 short story in Lippincott's, the American narrator is taken by his Bohemian friend Afra to see one of the fabled Bohemias of France: “The house we arrived at looked as if it might be a castle in the air materialized.” The purpose of this house is not the sheltering of artists or the creation of artistic objects, precisely, but the creation of realms of relaxation and amusement designed for audiences: “The shady spaces were occupied by guests who had arrived before us, and we saw with pleasure that ceremony had not been invited to attend. The host's kindly manner was sufficient to put the company at once at ease. We wandered at will from group to group, listening or conversing: introductions were sometimes given, but more often not.”10 Like the poet's garret, or Willis's “cottage,” or the cozy “true” home of the True Woman author, which likewise had a spurious, airy materiality, these later Bohemias were overtly imaginary lands, spaces from which a fictional authorial personage beckoned readers to enter and enjoy. And here again, the relationship between real authors or artists and these fantasy spaces was complex and often perversely literal. Like earlier authors, who were excluded from publishing economies and who could not be made to signify as productive entities within the causal logic governing normative standards of work and reward or labor and play, the artists in these later American Bohemias were understood as being on a permanent holiday. Describing the quintessential Bohemian artist, one Bohemian publication observed, “The vacations of other people being his working time, he steps hither and thither with a busy eye, making the world his workroom.”11 And like Dennie and Poe and Willis, these newer Bohemians were intriguing in proportion to their diverting failures and their performances of downward mobility. Thus virtually the same descriptions of artistic people prevailed in this period as had prevailed in the earlier. What does the word “Bohemian” mean? asked an article in Appleton's in 1877: the word “takes in all restless, unsettled, unthrifty people, who live from hand to mouth, with no definite source of income or place in society…. [I]t betokens the large class of minor scribblers, musicians, artists, actors, and other young professional men of somewhat irregular kind, who get their daily bread by their wits, with a large though desultory outlay of the latter to a meager return of the former.” True, Bohemians live an enviable life of “adventure,” “midnight jollity,” and “box-office intrigues.” Yet theirs is “a precarious existence”

marked by “clever but fitful exertion with pen or pencil,” by “anxious living,” and by “shoddiness.” Page 254 →Bohemians “lack the two great elements of a well-organized community—practical tact and thrift.”12 Although decked out in slightly altered form, the new Bohemian-style artists that teemed in the world of the late nineteenthcentury aesthetic movement were virtually identical to the charming losers who had purportedly lounged around Philadelphia in the 1790s or the hapless spendthrifts of New York in the 1840s, all of them fantastically incapable of existing within the normative requirements of the entertainment businesses for whose prosperity, I have suggested here, they were responsible. Finally, in the second half of the nineteenth century stories of the artistic genius's impoverishment and maltreatment—which were never far from real conditions of marginal economic circumstances among artists—persisted and, indeed, became more than ever part of an authorizing or authenticating fantasy: an artist was “legitimate,” a purveyor of deep impeccable truths, to the extent that he suffered. Naming the things that had made him a great writer, Jack London named “Poverty” as one of the most important. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the plight of the artist was viewed as a tragedy.13 In her 1860 short story “Life in the Iron Mills,” Rebecca Harding Davis paints a familiar picture of genius tortured and scorned by an unfeeling society. Like Chatterton before him, Davis's protagonist, Hugh Wolfe, is a preternaturally gifted artist, but he is born to poverty and obscurity. A Welsh immigrant, he slaves in West Virginia's hellish iron mills for a pittance while the moneyed classes, represented in the story by Kirby, the son of the mill owner, Dr. May, one of the town physicians, and Mitchell, a wealthy amateur philosopher, look on at Hugh with a combination of morbid curiosity and indifference. Driven by hunger and desperation to steal a wallet, Hugh is caught and put in prison and looks down upon the market from his barred window high above. At the end of the tale, in his attic room with its four bare walls, with his future dark before him, Hugh commits suicide, slicing open his wrists with a piece of tin. He dies, in an almost exact echo of the Chatterton fable, stretched out on his pallet with the moonlight shining on his prone body and pale face. His death, we are meant to conclude, is society's loss. By the end of the century, the plight of the artist was less a tragedy than a boon, a kind of gift to Art—which was also, I have suggested throughout this study, a gift to modern literary and entertainment systems that had all along relied on the selfsacrifice of artists for their vitality and profitability. It lies beyond the scope of this study to examine late nineteenth-century Page 255 →aesthetic or Bohemian culture in any depth or detail; nevertheless, as the foregoing discussion tries to show, the patterns established in the early nineteenth century multiplied and expanded themselves as the century wore on, assuring a continuation of the synergistic links between art and big business and between outsider creative personnel and industry profits that had been established in the earlier period. In the 1790s and early 1800s, American writers and publishers had exploited a transatlantic audience taste for Romantic tales of authorial distress and eccentricity to create a vernacular literary culture that took the entertaining author as its central vivifying point. Linked to audience amusement and therefore writers' success, authorial eccentricity emerged as a foundational feature of modern American print entertainment systems in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, not just because it offered writers as objects of diversion and contemplation but also because it discounted writers as positive economic entities. The American print entertainment industry evolved through its insensible effacement of the creative labors on which it so materially depended, interacting with myths of authorial wildness and irresponsibility in a way that ensured writers' occupation of a position in the industry that was at once central, absolutely crucial, and yet impossible to pin within the normative causalities of industrial modernity. And precisely because the eccentric author represented a source of economic vitality for everyone in the industry, including writers, he (and increasingly she) was not only foundational to but also replicated within American entertainment systems as these expanded and diversified in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is no surprise, consequently, that writers, always central to American economies of entertainment yet discounted from their positive workings, continued to have a bewildering, incoherent relationship to value. Writing in 1902, Jack London, an author obsessed with trying to decipher the relationship between the writer and the commercial publishing world, noted that “the literary artist-aspirant with active belly and empty purse” lives “face to face with a howling paradox”: those literary works that are most exalted by the world—those that would seem, at first, to be the most valuable—are those for which the artist is least likely to get paid. “[T]he man dreaming greatly and

pressed by sordid necessity, he is the one who must confront the absolute contradiction. He is the man who cannot pour his artist-soul into his work and exchange that work for bread and meat. The world is strangely and coldly adverse to his exchanging the joy of his heart for the solace of his stomach. And to him is Page 256 →it given to discover that what the world prized most it demands least.”14 But it was precisely upon this confusion of the priceless and the worthless, of the artist who stands above mere money and a commercial entertainment system that thrives on free contributions of labor and intellect, that the modern American literary and entertainment industries were founded and upon which they continued to thrive.

Page 257 →

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. S. G. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, or Men and Things I Have Seen, 2 vols. (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1856), 2:134, 140. 2. Ibid., 2:148, 159, 156, 149. 3. Champion Bissell, “American Authorship,” Sartain's Union Magazine 8, no. 6 (June 1851): 366. 4. Edwin P. Whipple, Literature and Life (1899; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1972), 12–13. 5. See, for example, F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957); Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958); Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1960); Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); and Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and James (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969). 6. See Poirier, A World Elsewhere, 27. 7. See, for example, Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture from Revolution through Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Cindy Weinstein, Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (New Page 258 →York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Michael Newbury, Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams, Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). This literature presents authors (typically the canonical authors) in the context of, and often in some sort of conflict with, the “marketplace” and authorial “professionalization.” In its emphasis on “professionalization” this criticism owes a debt to the work of book historian William Charvat; see especially, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), which elaborates the whole notion of a change in authorship's “institutions” from the early national to the antebellum era, a change articulated as a shift from amateur to professional models of authorial conduct and practice. In this formulation, the eccentric author is the author who exists in states of anxiety about and exclusion from commercial and professional standards. 8. See, for example, Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). There is considerable overlap between these books and some of those cited above, the significant difference being that these tend not to allow for spaces of aesthetic and political opposition, such spaces being understood as ideologically tethered to modern bourgeois subjectivity. In other words, the eccentric artist in the Habermasian and Foucauldian model anchors rather than undercuts the coherence and interiority of the bourgeois subject. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 169. 10. Andrew Bennett, The Author (New York: Routledge, 2005), 60. 11. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 114.

12. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 165. 13. See Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 14. See Ronald Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005). 15. See Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Equally important to our understanding of early national and antebellum publishing is Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), though it doesn't deal directly with authorship. Loughran questions the validity of Michael Warner's identification of a Page 259 →pre-1800 national “public sphere,” arguing that because of infrastructural limitations such an entity only came into being in the 1830s when it revealed the rifts that would lead to the Civil War. I should stress that my own study does not dispute the findings of any of these scholars. Rather, it sees the eccentric author as flourishing precisely in the parochial and idiosyncratic cultural environments these scholars describe. 16. A similar set of problems arises, albeit for different reasons, in the wealth of recent scholarship that treats early American literature as part of an Atlantic cultural world. Here again, such studies as Paul Giles's Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Leonard Tennenhouse's The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Stephen Shapiro's The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); and Meredith McGill's anthology, The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), are invaluable for placing late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American literature in the context of broadly Atlantic cultural trends, thus bringing into focus aspects of American culture, from the 1790s' taste for British and European gothic to the complex relationship between, for example, Hawthorne and Trollope, that are too easily overlooked in the traditional scholarly preoccupation with nationalist themes and self-consciously nationalist projects. However, as Trish Loughran argues, these broadly Atlantic or “world” projects also risk effacing crucial regional particularities. Most important for my purposes here, transatlantic studies of American literature tend to map themselves onto the time lines developed by the Frankfurt school and Foucault, time lines whose dubious application to the United States scholars like Loughran have already underlined. Romanticism, for example, is typically understood in these studies as a movement that only penetrates U.S. literary culture at the time of what scholars have always identified as the American Romantic movement—in the 1830s, not the 1790s or early 1800s. Investigations of Atlantic romanticism thus tend to concentrate on the post-1830s period, the essays in McGill's volume being examples. In terms of authorship studies, this supposition once again fixes the birth of cults of eccentric and Romantic authorship in the later part of the antebellum period where they can, as usual, be sewn into political (and largely transnational) models of industrial and marketplace upheaval. Here again, eccentric author figures can be typified as adversarial entities and the purveyors of a broadly Western privatization of culture and aesthetics, with the result that a vast amount of writing about authors from the early national era remains unaccounted for. 17. “Eccentricity,” Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language: Exhibiting the Origin, Orthography, Pronunciation, and Definitions of Words…Abridged From the Quarto Edition of the Author (New York: S. Converse, 1829). 18. Pennsylvania Magazine; or American Monthly Museum 1 (July 1775): 327. 19. “Review,” Port Folio 2, no. 27 (July 10, 1802): 214.Page 260 → 20. “The Wanderer—Eccentricity,” Emerald, or, Miscellany of Literature 2, no. 43 (February 21, 1807): 85. 21. John Neal, Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869), 352. 22. “Letters,” in Webster, American Dictionary. 23. Brodhead uses “entertainment” to signify the public exhibitions and spectacles that became part of America's urban landscapes in the 1840s. See Cultures of Letters, chap. 2. By contrast, I am using “entertainment” as a category of experience offered by any variety of texts, exhibitions, performances, and

spectacles—though my focus here is texts. 24. Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 152–63; see also Currie, Arts and Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 25. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 12–13. In fiction, Iser specifies, “[R]ecognizable ‘realities’…are marked…as being fictionalized. Thus the incorporated ‘real’ world is, so to speak, placed in brackets to indicate that it is not something given but is merely to be understood as if it were given” (12–13). 26. See Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 5, in which Carroll discusses the narrative and generic principles that he believes underpin popular film. “Reality” genres, as they relate to eccentric author constructions, are discussed in chapter 3 of this study. 27. For discussions of antebellum popular entertainment see, for example, Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Verso, 1990); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 28. See Jackson, Business of Letters. 29. See David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 30. See Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007) for a study of celebrity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 31. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 32. See Bennett, The Author. 33. Geoffrey Turnovsky, The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); see esp. pp. 1–23.Page 261 → 34. George Thompson, My Life: or, the Adventures of Geo. Thompson, 1854, rpt. in “Venus in Boston” and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life, ed. David S. Reynolds and Kimberly R. Gladman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 314, 340. 35. Naomi Z. Sofer, “‘Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl to Glory’: Redefining Female Authorship in the Postbellum United States,” American Literature 75 (2003): 32. 36. Christopher Crowfield [Harriet Beecher Stowe], House and Home Papers (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 77.

CHAPTER 1 1. Jackson, Business of Letters, 97. The lines are from Edgar Allan Poe, “Alone,” Complete Poems, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 146. 2. See Warner, Letters of the Republic; Shields, Civil Tongues; McGill, American Literature; Loughran, Republic in Print; and Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forms of Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). These studies, among many others, collectively understand early national cultural production in terms of its organization through what Jürgen Habermas famously describes as the “public sphere” or civil society, rather than through the later “private” structures that accompany commercial and industrial modernity. See Habermas, Structural Transformation. McGill is notable for underlining the persistence of “public sphere” cultural values well into the early nineteenth century, largely owing to what she identifies as a continuing reprint economy that effaces individuated authorial presences, about which I will have more to say in a moment. Loughran challenges Warner's picture of the early nation as linked together and brought into being by print, arguing

that geographical isolation and extremely primitive communications systems perforce determined the primacy of regional over national identity and militated against a nationalist “imagined community” at least until print industrialization in the 1830s. Both Shields and Kaplan look closely at the composition of British North American and early American civil society and its conventions of coterie authorship. See also Jackson, Business of Letters, in which Jackson challenges the notion of a “professionalizing” author class in the decades before 1830. As I will shortly illustrate, I do not disagree with these pictures of a small, primitive culture field. My aim, rather, is to contend the adversarial relationship generally constructed between this field and the images of eccentric, alienated authors circulating in British and Continental literature. 3. The following account draws on numerous sources, but in general I follow the narrative of transatlantic reading and publishing history set out by St Clair in The Reading Nation. St Clair's study, which argues that we cannot understand histories of reading and authorship without taking into account the stranglehold that London publishers had on the production of English-language printed books in the period from 1600 to 1830, is extremely useful for clarifying the practices of American publishers, both before and after the Copyright Act of Page 262 →1790. See especially chap. 19. In addition, I rely on accounts in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930–68), vol. 1; Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Lawrence C. Wroth, and Rollo G. Silver, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States (New York: Bowker, 1951); Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959); John Tebbel, The Creation of an Industry, 1630–1865, vol. 1 of A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1972–81); Cathy Davidson, Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 4. See Hugh Amory, “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” in Amory and Hall, Colonial Book, 27–28, in which Amory discusses those colonial printed materials produced independently of the Stationer's Company. 5. See St Clair, Reading Nation, 378. For an account of colonial luxury book imports to Charleston, see James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2002). 6. In 1778 the number of titles printed in the United States totaled less than 500; by 1798 this had risen to over 1,800. The majority of these were reprints of texts written and published in Britain. Elizabeth Carter Wills, Federal Copyright Records, 1790–1800 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1987), ix, qtd. in St Clair, Reading Nation, 383. 7. For accounts of the growth of reading among Americans from 1790 to 1820 see Victor Neuberg, “Chapbooks in America: Reconstructing the Popular Reading of Early America,” and David Paul Nord, “A Republican Literature: Magazine Reading and Readers in Late Eighteenth-Century New York,” in Davidson, Reading in America; and William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). 8. See St Clair, Reading Nation, 389. 9. See ibid., appendix 5, p. 522, and the discussion of Scott, p. 386. 10. Qtd. in Tebble, History of Book Publishing, 208–9. 11. St Clair, Reading Nation, 387. General information on the Byron phenomenon in the United States is from William Ellery Leonard, Byron and Byronism in America (Boston: Nichols Press, 1905). 12. Capt. Marryat, Diary in America, With Remarks on its Institutions, Second Series (Philadelphia: T.K. & P.G. Collins, 1840), 298. 13. See Peter X. Accardo, “Byron in America to 1830,” Harvard Library Bulletin, New Series 9, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 37–40. 14. “Literary Intelligence,” New-England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine 1, no. 37 (June 26, 1818): 2.Page 263 → 15. Accardo, “Byron in America,” 9. Irving's relationship to Thomas and Byron is detailed on pp. 8–10. 16. “Selected Poetry. The Giaour; A Fragment of a Turkish Tale,” Port Folio, Fourth Series 3, no. 1

(January 1814): 91–103. 17. Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 1:324, qtd. in Accardo, “Byron in America,” 6. 18. Life and Letters of George Ticknor, 2 vols. (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1876), 1:59. 19. S. Austin Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1858), 1:324. Byron's idea that “anyone” in the United States could buy his books needs qualification. Before 1830, the cost of books and magazines relative to average daily wages, though much lower than it was in Britain, was high nonetheless. Between 1805 and 1815, for example, the average wage for a skilled artisan fluctuated from between about $.70 and $1.50 per day. See Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 190 n. 39. The cost of literary books, including novels, gift books, and volumes of poetry, tended to be between $.75 and $2.00, potentially more than a blacksmith or even a country lawyer or minister could afford. Samuel Griswold Goodrich remembers his father, a minister in the town of Ridgefield, Connecticut (population 2,000) earning about $400 per year at the turn of the nineteenth century; see Recollections of a Lifetime, 1:17. What is important to stress from the point of view of the present argument, however, is the profuse availability of Romantic-era reading materials to those who wielded power over the direction of American culture, typically the elite and learned in any given city or borough. 20. As Gilmore's study of reading patterns highlights, until the early 1830s the various regions of the United States remained part of a North Atlantic intellectual and cultural world dominated by British perspectives and products. This was true not only for America's populous and relatively cosmopolitan urban centers—Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Charleston—but also for its distant, isolated areas, such as rural Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. By the late 1820s, copies of popular British works, especially novels, which appeared in urban American editions within a few months of their appearance in Britain, were customarily transported to shops and subscribers in the far reaches of rural New England later the same year or early the next. See Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity, 212. 21. Zeynep Tenger and Paul Trolander, “Genius versus Capital: Eighteenth-Century Theories of Genius and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations,” Modern Language Quarterly 55, no. 2 (June 1994): 170. For histories of the notion of Romantic genius in Britain and Europe see James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (New York: Routledge, 2005). These scholars all discuss the extent to which the discourse of genius had radical political implications; Elfenbein, in addition, examines genius as an identity category, Page 264 →one that provided a kind of armature for the elaboration of congruencies between homosexuality and artistic endeavor. 22. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1767), 86, 162, 165, 166, 167. 23. Alexander Gerard, An Essay On Genius (London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell; Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1874), 9, 14. 24. John Blair Linn, The Powers of Genius: A Poem in Three Parts (London: Albion Press, 1804), viii, 2. 25. Ibid., viii. 26. [Isaac D'Israeli], “Poverty of the Learned,” New York Magazine 3, no. 6 (June 1792): 355. As I discuss shortly, this was one of many reprints of this piece from Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature (1791). D'Israeli's researches, by extension, were part of a growing interest in the early nineteenth century in what was called “eccentric biography,” life narratives of outlandish characters, often those struggling with physical disability. See James Gregory, “Eccentric Biography and the Victorians,” Biography 30, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 342–61. 27. C. I. Pitt, “Thoughts on the Discouragement of Genius,” The Lady & Gentleman's Pocket Magazine of Literary and Polite Amusement 1, no. 4 (November 1, 1796): 204. This piece was reprinted from C. I. Pitt, The Peddler. A Miscelleny (London: Harrison, 1796). 28. D'Israeli, “Poverty of the Learned,” New York Magazine, 356. 29. McGill, American Literature, 43. 30. Rice, Transformation of Authorship, 73. Mark Rose argues that it was, by contrast, a Lockean regime that prevailed in eighteenth-century British copyright legislation. See Authors and Owners: The Invention of

Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5, 6. In Britain by the late eighteenth century, according to Elfenbein, the discourse of genius served the multiply individuating (if not always unified) purposes of guaranteeing the proprietary rights of authors over their works; of prodding writers to unprecedented formal experimentation; and of encouraging writers from traditionally marginal populations to adopt genius not just as a rhetoric but as an identity, a way of understanding the self as unique and worthy. See Elfenbein, Romantic Genius, 28–38. 31. “The Eagle, No. V: The Peculiar Genius of American Literature,” Columbian Phenix [sic] and Boston Review 1 (March 1800): 176. 32. “Address by the Editors,” Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review 5, no. 1 (January 1808): 2. 33. It is useful to stress that many studies of the influence of British and European romanticism on American writers begin analysis at what is conventionally understood as the era of the American “Romantic movement” from 1830 to 1850. See, for example, Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and McGill, The Traffic in Poems, both of which focus on the post-1830 period. Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), deals briefly with the Revolutionary era, but largely as a seedbed for the inspiration of the British Romantics. Page 265 →It then looks at the extent to which “The disenchantments of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley” (22) are revived in the American writers of the period 1830–50. Paul Giles's Transatlantic Insurrections looks at early national literature but not as something influenced by romanticism. More central to my concerns here are studies that address the United States' position in a broad Atlantic cultural economy, including Tennenhouse, Importance of Feeling English, and Shapiro, Culture and Commerce. The former, for example, argues that “American authors reinvented the homeland [England] by producing a generic notion of Englishness particularly adapted to the North American situation” (7). One could say the same of the American production of the Romantic author: American authors reinvented the “genius” by producing a generic entity particularly adapted to the American situation. 34. “American Literature. From the Farmer's Weekly Museum,” Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence 4, no. 42 (April 27, 1799): 91. 35. Many of the following essays came out of coterie groups in Boston and Philadelphia, groups that, particularly at the turn of the nineteenth century, frequently interacted with each other. The former groups, which included such figures as Fisher Ames and Edward Tyrell Channing, were mostly upper-class Harvard graduates with careers in the law and ministry; their general character is described in Buell, New England Literary Culture, esp. chap. 2. See also Ronald Story, Harvard and the Boston Upper Class: The Forging of an Aristocracy, 1800–1870 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980). The Philadelphia groups are described in Kaplan, Men of Letters, chap. 5. Kaplan emphasizes the extent to which the literati of the disparate regions of the Northeast corresponded and interacted with each other. The point to emphasize here is that the men and women involved in these small, regional, and yet mutually interactive literary worlds could partake of a single fantasy. For a discussion of the collegial and professional webs created across early national geographical space see Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), chaps. 4 and 5. 36. Fisher Ames, “American Literature,” Works of Fisher Ames, ed. Seth Ames (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), 428–29. 37. Ibid., 431, 442. 38. “American Literature,” Harvard Lyceum 1, no. 8 (October 20, 1810): 177. The author of this piece mentions that he wrote it “before he had seen Mr. Ames' upon the same subject.” 39. Edward Ingersoll, “An Oration On the Encouragement of Genius in America,” Port Folio 6, no. 10 (September 3, 1808): 152. 40. “Miscellany. View of the Present State of Polite Learning,” The Portico 1, no. 2 (February 1, 1816): 108. 41. Ames, “American Literature,” 432. 42. Ibid., 433. 43. [Edward Tyrell Channing], “On Models in Literature,” North American Review 3, no. 7 (July 1816): 202, 207.Page 266 → 44. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1918), 17, qtd. in Bennett, The Author, 58–59. 45. Bennett, The Author, 64. 46. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:387, qtd. in ibid., 65. 47. Ibid., 66. 48. See Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trials of American Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 34, 105, 290. 49. Ibid., 293. 50. Isaac D'Israeli, Miscellanies; or Literary Recreations (London: Cadell and Davies, 1796), 71, qtd. in April London, “Isaac D'Israeli and Literary History: Opinion, Anecdote, and Secret History in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Poetics Today 26, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 359. London discusses D'Israeli's project to discover an alternative historiography in the hidden and unacknowledged. See also Ina Ferris, “Antiquarian Authorship: D'Israeli's Miscellany of Literary Curiosity,” Studies in Romanticism 45, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 523–42, which likewise looks at D'Israeli as a celebrant of the marginal but more in the context of literary history as someone who carved out “a properly literary space for the ever-thickening band of intermediary genres appearing in his time” (525). 51. See, for example, “Poverty of the Learned [From Curiosities of Literature Lately Published],” Massachusetts Magazine; or, Monthly Museum 4, no. 6 (June 1792): 354–55; “Poverty of the Learned; From the same,” New York Magazine, or Literary Repository 3, no. 6 (June 1792): 355–56; “The Poverty of the Learned,” New York Weekly Magazine 1, no. 50 (June 15, 1796): 394; “Extract. The Poverty of the Learned,” Time Piece; and Literary Companion 2, no. 38 (December 11, 1797): 1; “Poetry of the Learned” [sic], Literary Tablet 1, no. 15 (March 8, 1804): 59. In addition, periodicals published unattributed extracts from this extract in their “anecdotes” departments or plagiarized D'Israeli's words; see, for example, “The Fate of Genius,” Literary Mirror 1, no. 28 (August 27, 1808): 109–10, which is “Poverty of the Learned” slightly reworded. By the early 1800s, journal editors and authors often referred to “Poverty of the Learned” as if its lessons were proverbial. See, for example, “Political Synopsis. For the Port Folio. Foreign Occurrences,” Port Folio 1, no. 23 (June 6, 1801): 182, in which we hear, “[T]he price of books is so enhanced, that, if the ordinary stories of the poverty of the learned be true, the charges for a few volumes, would exceed the income of the student.” 52. “Art. LV,” review of Poems, Chiefly Occasional, by the Late Mr. Cliffton, Monthly Magazine, and American Review 3, no. 6 (December 1800): 428. 53. General information on Chatterton is from Linda Kelly, The Marvellous Boy: The Life and Myth of Thomas Chatterton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971). 54. Commentary on Chatterton flourished in early American periodicals, especially in the 1790s and first decade of the 1800s. See, for example, Mrs. M. Page 267 →Robinson, “Selected Poetry. Monody to the Memory of Chatterton,” New York Magazine 3, no. 8 (August 1792): 505–7; “Epitaph. To the Memory of Chatterton,” Port Folio 1, no. 15 (April 11, 1801): 119; and “Biography. Life of Thomas Chatterton,” which ran across seven issues of The Port Folio from April 28, 1804 to July 7, 1804 (vol. 4, nos. 17, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27); “Chatterton,” New England Quarterly Magazine 2, no. 2 (July–September 1802): 58–61; Mary, “To the Editor of the Christian Observer,” Christian Observer 3, no. 3 (March 1804): 193–94; and “Biography. Thomas Chatterton,” Lady's Monitor 1, no. 29 (February 6, 1802): 227–28 and 1, no. 30 (March 13, 1802): 234–35. 55. “Elegy. On the Unfortunate Chatterton. From Mr. Hayley's Essay on Epic Poetry,” New-Haven Gazette, and the Connecticut Magazine 1, no. 11 (April 27, 1786): 82. 56. See William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry (London: J. Dodsley, 1782). The lines on Chatterton are on pp. 81–83. 57. “Select Poetry, Ancient and Modern, for Jun. 1782,” Gentleman's Magazine 52 (1782): 302; and review of An Essay on Epic Poetry by William Hayley, Monthly Review 67 (1782): 349. 58. “For the Port Folio” [Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”], Port Folio 2, no. 23 (August 23, 1806): 107. 59. Ibid., 105, 106. 60. Edward Cahill, “An Adventurous and Lawless Fancy: Charles Brockden Brown's Aesthetic State,” Early American Literature 36 (2001): 59.

61. Shields, Civil Tongues, 35. 62. Linn, Powers of Genius, 7–8. 63. “Epitaph; To the Memory of Thomas Chatterton,” Port Folio 1, no. 15 (April 11, 1801): 119. 64. “Biography. The Life of Chatterton,” Port Folio 2, no. 18 (May 8, 1802): 139. 65. “Biography,” Lady's Monitor, 227. 66. “Poetry…. Genius,” General Repository and Review 4, no. 2 (October 1, 1813): 382. 67. For studies of Byron's reception in Britain, see Samuel Claggett Chew, Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965); and Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 68. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, 2:103, 104, 106, 105. It is useful to underline that Goodrich's account, in presenting the American love for Byron as an originary passion, something that came from out of nowhere, effaces the fact that Byron mania culminated what was already an established fascination with bizarre and moody authorial personalities, as the preceding parts of this discussion have shown. 69. “Lord Byron,” Stranger, a Literary Paper 1, no. 26 (June 11, 1814): 387. 70. Review of The Lament of Tasso by Lord Bryon, American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 1, no. 6 (October 1817): 423; the poem follows the review. 71. See Leonard, Byron and Byronism, 113.Page 268 → 72. John Todd, The Student's Manual, rev. ed. (1835; Philadelphia: Bridgman and Childs, 1871), 150. 73. New York Herald, April 12, 1836, qtd. in Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage, 1999), 16, 17. 74. Paul Allen, The Late Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Robert E. Hemenway and Joseph Katz (Columbia, SC: J. Faust, 1976), 10, 11. 75. Ibid., 12, 15, 12. 76. Linn, Powers of Genius, 5–6. 77. Allen, Late Charles Brockden Brown, 20–21. 78. Ibid., 12. 79. William Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815), 10–11. 80. Allen, Late Charles Brockden Brown, 16. 81. Dunlap, Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 14. 82. Hemenway and Katz, introduction to Allen, Late Charles Brockden Brown, xli. 83. In the introduction to a special issue of Early American Literature on Brown, for example, Bryan Waterman identifies Brown scholarship since the 1980s as a deliberate “departure from older generations of critics…who wanted to see Brown as a prototypical Romantic author and framed him as writing against his culture rather than typifying it.” See “Introduction: Reading Early America with Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature 44 (2009): 236. For nuanced discussions of Brown that take into account the communal nature of his literary and intellectual practice, see Stephen Watts, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Bryan Waterman, Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

CHAPTER 2 1. “Joseph Dennie to Mrs. Mary Dennie,” Walpole, April 26, 1797, in The Letters of Joseph Dennie, 1768–1812, ed. Laura Green Pedder (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1936), 159. 2. “Joseph Dennie to Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Dennie, Sr.,” Philadelphia, May 20, 1800, ibid., 182. 3. See, for example, Lewis Leary, “The Literary Opinions of Joseph Dennie,” Soundings: Some Early American Writers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 253–71. 4. William C. Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and “The Port Folio”, 1801–1812 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 74. 5. Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 121; see Page 269 →also chap. 4. For more general assessments of the Atlantic contexts in which Dennie worked, see Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals

and the Early American Republic (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), especially chap. 6, which deals with the role of British immigrants and expatriates in the Republican-Federalist paper wars, in which Dennie was centrally involved; and Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections. 6. See Tennenhouse, Importance of Feeling English, which discusses how “Englishness” circulated among late eighteenth-century Americans, members of a British diaspora, as the signification of the longing for a “homeland” of entirely phantasmatic dimensions. But Dennie's assertions of foreignness, as I will later suggest, were related less to the production of a distant anchor than to a cultivation of placelessness for its own sake. 7. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 48. Bourdieu's terminology is relevant here insofar as it identifies a mythology of autonomous literary culture and authorship gaining ascendency in the early nineteenth century in Britain and Europe. 8. John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America (London: Ostell, et al., 1803), 71, 311. 9. General biographical information on Dennie is from the major biography by Harold Milton Ellis, Joseph Dennie and His Circle: A Study in American Literature, 1792–1812 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1915). See also the much briefer but still useful [William Warland Clapp, Jr.], Joseph Dennie, Editor of “The Port Folio,” and Author of “The Lay Preacher” (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson, 1880). 10. See, for example, “Epitaph: To the Memory of Thomas Chatterton,” Port Folio 1, no. 15 (April 11, 1801): 119; “Biography. The Life of Chatterton,” Port Folio 2, no. 18 (May 8, 1802): 139–41; and Lodinus, “For the Port Folio. Lines, Suggested by a Perusal of the Life of Chatterton,” 4, no. 35 (September 1, 1804): 280. The long biography of Chatterton, “Biography. Life of Thomas Chatterton,” which ran across seven issues, is in The Port Folio from April 28, 1804 to July 7, 1804 (vol. 4, nos. 17, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27). 11. [Joseph Dennie], “The Farrago. For the Port Folio,” Port Folio 2, no. 32 (August 14, 1802): 252. 12. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. I,” Port Folio 2, no. 1 (January 16, 1802): 1. 13. See Willard Spiegelman, Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 1. Martha Woodmansee argues that the whole notion of the “fine arts” as a distinct category of experiences and objects developed in England in the early eighteenth century “as a solution to the ‘problem’ of leisure.” Hoping to instruct “a rising class of bankers, merchants, and manufacturers who had so recently achieved a modicum of the leisure enjoyed by the aristocracy” in pastimes that would not involve them in vice or criminality, Joseph Addison recommended the “kind of amateur occupation with objects of ‘fine’ art that would eventually come to be known as connoisseurship.” Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History Page 270 →of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 87. In The Pleasures of the Imagination, Addison recommends reading and contemplation as a way “to fill up [Life's] empty Spaces.” Cut off from “serious Employments, ” appreciation of the arts acts like “a gentle Exercise to the faculties, awaken[ing] them from Sloth and Idleness, without putting them upon any Labor or Difficulty,” forming a “sphere” into which a man may “retire with safety,” in The Spectator (no. 93), ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:397; and The Spectator (no. 411), 3:538–39. The term “idleness,” meanwhile, as Sarah Jordan notes, was linked in the early eighteenth century to working-class “laziness” (unearned relaxation) and to the pathologies of melancholy and ennui. See The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), chap. 2. Jordan, it should be noted, looks at idleness less as a literary structure than as a social stigma that haunted eighteenth-century British authors. In any case, thus separated from working-class work, from bourgeois practice, and from a properly socialized mental health and vigor, “idleness” and its near relative “indolence” could be renovated in the late eighteenth century as the tropes of a new and more radical mode of aesthetic “retirement.” 14. [Isaac] D'Israeli, An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (London: T. Cadell, Junr. and W. Davies, 1795), 64–65. 15. George Gordon, Lord Byron, preface to Hours of Idleness, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron: Complete in One Volume (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1850), 386. Selections from Hours of Idleness appeared in “Criticism,” Port Folio, New Series 1, no. 3 (March 1809): 258–61. 16. [Joseph Dennie], “For the Port Folio. The Lay Preacher,” Port Folio, New Series 5, no. 4 (January 23, 1808), 51. For a discussion of the idea, elaborated in the eighteenth century by a number of philosophers of

the aesthetic, that “texts transport readers by representing images and tableaux,” see David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), especially chap. 2, which discusses Kames and Burke, with both of whose writings Dennie was familiar. 17. Joseph Dennie, “The Farrago No. 11,” Eagle, September 16, 1793, rpt. in Joseph Dennie, The Farrago, ed. Bruce Granger (Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1985), 31. The twenty-six Farrago essays (there were others but only these survived) were published between 1792 and 1795 in one of The Morning Ray, The Eagle or Dartmouth Centinel, and The Tablet; one original appeared in the Port Folio in 1802, which also reprinted several of the early Farrago pieces. See Granger's introduction to Dennie, The Farrago, 4. 18. Dennie, “The Farrago No. 2,” Morning Ray, February 21, 1792, rpt. in The Farrago, 14. 19. Dennie, “The Farrago No. 11,” Eagle, September 16, 1793, rpt. in The Farrago, 29. 20. David Jaffee, People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in the History and Memory, 1630–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 233. The discussion of Dennie runs from p. 227 to p. 237.Page 271 → 21. “An Author's Evenings. From the Shop of Messrs. Colon and Spondee,” Port Folio 1, no. 7 (February 14, 1801): 54. 22. John Quincy Adams, Poems of Religion and Society (Buffalo: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), 98. 23. Wilkes Wood, An Oration, Pronounced Before the Philological Society, In Middleborough (New Bedford, MA, 1795), 8, qtd. in Warner, Letters of the Republic, 127. 24. [Joseph Dennie], The Lay Preacher; or Short Sermons, for Idle Readers (Walpole, Newhampshire [sic]: David Carlisle, 1796), 12. 25. Dennie, “The Farrago No. 13,” Eagle, October 28, 1793, rpt. in The Farrago, 36. 26. Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, The Way to Wealth, no. 2 (New York: Leavitt, Trow, 1848), 3. The full passage reads: “Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never; for ‘a life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things.’” 27. Dennie, “The Farrago No. 23,” Tablet, May 19, 1795, rpt. in Dennie, The Farrago, 72. 28. Dennie, “The Farrago No. 9,” Eagle, August 26, 1793, rpt. in ibid., 23. 29. Dennie, Lay Preacher, 97. 30. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 21–22. 31. Dennie, “The Farrago No. 1,” Morning Ray, February 14, 1792, rpt. in Dennie, The Farrago, 10, 11. 32. Dennie, Lay Preacher, 91. 33. “Advertisement,” ibid., iii–iv. 34. The American Lounger appears as a formal department in 1802, but the 1801 volume of the Port Folio contains numerous articles on “lounging,” including “Miscellany. Lessons for Loungers,” Port Folio 1, no. 3 (January 17, 1801): 22; “The Lounger's Diary,” in the same issue; and a reprinted Farrago essay on the “idler,” “The Farrago. No. IX,” Port Folio 1, no. 11 (March 14, 1801): 83–84. Clearly, The American Lounger department represented a formalization of these elements into a single unit the following year. 35. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. V,” 2, no. 6 Port Folio (February 13, 1802): 42. 36. See Randolph C. Randall, “Authors of the Port Folio Revealed by the Hall Files,” American Literature 2 (January 1940): 379–416, which identifies many of the Port Folio authors; eighteen Lounger authors are identified: Nicholas Biddle, Horace Binney, Charles Brockden Brown, Joseph Dennie, John Dunn, Samuel Ewing, John Elihu Hall, Sarah Hall, Emily Hopkinson, Gertrude Meredith, Richard Peters Jr., Condy Raguet, Robert H. Rose, Richard Rush, Thomas Sergeant, A. Skelton (unidentified), Dr. John Edmonds Stock, and Robert Walsh. 37. See, for example, “Miscellany. From Literary Leisure,” Port Folio 2, no. 27 (July 10, 1802): 211. 38. The Lounger. A Periodical Paper, by the Authors of The Mirror, 2 vols., 6th ed. (New York: Printed for Samuel Campbell, 1789), 1:4.Page 272 → 39. “The Lounger's Diary,” Port Folio, 1, no. 3 (January 17, 1801): 22. 40. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. I,” Port Folio 2, no. 1 (January 16, 1802): 1. 41. Ibid. 42. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. IX,” Port Folio 2, no. 10 (March 13, 1802): 73.

43. Rigal, American Manufactory, 120. 44. Kaplan, Men of Letters, 157. 45. “To Readers and Correspondents,” Port Folio 1, no. 9 (February 28, 1801): 69. 46. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. 113,” Port Folio 5, no. 11 (March 23, 1805): 81. 47. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. XIV,” Port Folio 2, no. 15 (April 17, 1802): 107. 48. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. IX,” Port Folio 2, no. 10 (March 13, 1802): 73. 49. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. V,” Port Folio 2, no. 6 (February 13, 1802): 42. 50. “The American Lounger, by Samuel Saunter, Esq. No. XLIV,” Port Folio 3, no. 5 (January 29, 1803): 34. 51. [John Davis], Juvenal Junius, The Philadelphia Pursuits of Literature. A Satirical Poem. Book First (Philadelphia: Printed for the Author and sold by John Davis, Juvenile Book Store, n.d. [1805]), 3. 52. John Davis, The Philadelphia Pursuits of Literature. Book the Second (Philadelphia: John Davis, The Original Publication Store, 1805), 9. 53. For the impact of the economic boom of the 1790s on publishing and literary production see Shapiro, Culture and Commerce, chap. 3; and Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). 54. “Gertrude Meredith to William Meredith,” August 26, 1802, qtd. in Kaplan, Men of Letters, 146. 55. See Dowling, Literary Federalism, and Edward Cahill, “Federalist Criticism and the Fate of Genius,” American Literature 76 (2004): 687–717, both of which peg the Port Folio as the origin of a strain of Federalist culture that would be central to the coteries around the North American Review. 56. “Joseph Dennie to Mary Dennie,” April 24, 1795, in Dennie, Letters, 145. 57. “Joseph Dennie to Mr and Mrs. Joseph Dennie Sr,” January 1794, in ibid., 132. 58. Ibid., 141, 140. 59. “Joseph Dennie to Mary Dennie and Harriot Green,” June 2, 1795, in ibid., 149. 60. “Joseph Dennie to Mary Dennie,” April 24, 1795, in ibid., 146. 61. “Joseph Dennie to Mary Dennie,” August 29, 1796, in ibid., 153. 62. Remer, Printers, 53.Page 273 → 63. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity, 246. 64. See Remer, Printers, 112–13. The $1,000 is based on a rough estimate taken from Remer's calculations working from the Carey and Lea cost books: the edition size of a guidebook for millwrights, for example, was 750; Carey and Lea's costs for the manufacturing were estimated at $781.19; their projected profits, given sales of all 750 copies at roughly $2.25 per copy, were $1,687.50. It should be emphasized that book publishing was a risky business; projected profits could fall far short of real ones. 65. See Charles Burr Todd, Life and Letters of Joel Barlow, LL.D. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1886), 213. 66. Qtd. in “Charles Brockden Brown,” Cyclopaedia of American Literature, ed. Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856), 1:588. 67. [Anon.] The Works, in Verse and Prose, of the Late Robert Treat Paine Jun. Esq. (Boston: J. Belcher, 1812), xlv, xlvi. William Charvat remarks, “The figures are incredible, for the first two were pamphlets which could not have sold for more than a shilling or two, and the last was a single lyric.” Charvat, Profession of Authorship, 13. 68. “Joseph Dennie to Mrs. Mary Green Dennie,” April 24, 1795, Dennie, Letters, 146. 69. See Clapp, Joseph Dennie, Editor, 16. 70. “Joseph Dennie to Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Dennie Sr.,” January 1794, in Dennie, Letters, 137, 138. 71. “Joseph Dennie to Mrs. Mary Dennie,” Walpole, April 26, 1797, Dennie, Letters, 158. 72. “Joseph Dennie to Mrs. Mary Dennie and Harriot Green,” August 29, 1796, in ibid., 153. 73. The phrases are from Ellis, Dennie and His Circle, 104. 74. Davis, Travels, 204. Dennie lost a considerable amount of money ($500) on his Lay Preacher volume when Carlisle failed; he specifies that all of this was money he had saved from his salary as editor in the previous two years. See “Joseph Dennie to Mary Dennie and Harriot Green,” September 6, 1799, Dennie, Letters, 171. 75. See Ellis, Dennie and His Circle, 107–9. 76. Jaffee, People of the Wachusett, 233.

77. Jeremiah Mason, Memoir and Correspondence of Jeremiah Mason, compiled by G. S. Hillard (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1873), 28, 32. 78. Kaplan, Men of Letters, 122. 79. “Joseph Dennie to Mrs. Mary Green Dennie,” April 24, 1795, Dennie, Letters, 145–46. 80. “Joseph Dennie to Mary Dennie and Harriot Green,” September 6, 1799, Dennie, Letters, 172. 81. [Joseph Dennie], “Prospectus of a New Weekly Paper, Submitted to Men of Affluence, Men of Liberality, and Men of Letters,” bound into the front of Port Page 274 →Folio 1 (1801): [1], col. 1. In the volumes I consulted in the Huntington Library and the Houghton Library, Harvard, the “Prospectus” takes up the first five pages of each volume, but is not paginated. 82. “Joseph Dennie to Royall Tyler,” October 2, 1795, Dennie, Letters, 151. 83. “To the Publick,” Newhampshire and Vermont Journal: Or, The Farmer's Weekly Museum 4, no. 157 (April 5, 1796): 1. 84. Qtd in Joseph T. Buckingham, Specimens of Newspaper Literature: With Personal Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850), 2:180. 85. Dennie, “Prospectus of a New Weekly Paper,” n. 5, cols. 2, 3. 86. [Davis], Philadelphia Pursuits, Book First, 5. 87. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 52. 88. See ibid., chap. 2. For discussions of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century celebrity, see Roach, It; Tom Mole, Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Tom Mole, Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Almost all studies of celebrity assume the dense presence of mediating phenomena—and typically of visual media—as a condition of celebrity's existence. They also assume some sort of mass circulation of either the celebrity's image or works. Many traditional considerations of celebrity, for example, peg its origins at the beginning of either the photographic or cinematographic eras, when it became possible to circulate images of a person to mass audiences. Thomas Mole's study of Byron's celebrity links its possibility to the popularity of the stage and the circulation of engraved images of writers (Mole, Byron's Romantic Celebrity, chap. 1). Even Joseph Roach's recent effort to move celebrity studies backward to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concentrates almost exclusively on the celebrity of actors and royals, the supposition being that it is only around the histrionic personality made visible in the flesh or in the sensible metonymy of paintings, regalia, costumes, wigs, and so forth, that celebrity can cohere. However, given the number of cases in which celebrity has attached to fictional characters (Pamela, Little Eva), it seems reasonable to assume that in cases where fictional phenomena are at work, mental picturing works in much the same way as visual or tactile experience: the veridical author can be interfaced with a fantasy scene built around his or her fictional productions. Like other scholars, Rojek argues that “celebrity must be understood as a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon of mass-circulation newspapers, TV, radio, and film” (16). However, Rojek's analysis, which looks at celebrity as a type of religious experience, offers a way of detaching celebrity from media-saturated environments and of understanding it as something that can flourish with minimal conventional mediation in very small groups—the one mediating instrument being, in my formulation, fictions. This is important for the purposes of the larger argument I am pursuing here, for it means, once again, that celebrity is one of the authorial structures that predates and comes to impress itself upon the forms of literary industrialization, something I discuss in chapters 3 and 4.Page 275 → 89. At the end of 1802, Thomas Boylston Adams joined Dennie in the editing and business administration of the Port Folio, which the Adams family had heavily patronized from its inception. Linda K. Kerber and Walter John Morris suggest that Thomas Boylston Adams's decision was motivated by the sloppiness with which Dennie ran the journal, but they also admit that the stories of Dennie's incompetence are hard to corroborate. As I argue below, the myth of Dennie as a lazy fellow interested only in entertainment is inseparable from his attractiveness to his contemporaries and is thus difficult to pin to objective fact. In any case, Thomas Boylston Adams found the work on The Port Folio irksome and barely lasted a year as Dennie's assistant. See “Politics and Literature: The Adams Family and the Port Folio,” William and Mary Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1966): 461–65 n. 7. 90. “Joseph Dennie to Mrs. Mary Dennie,” January 10, 1802, in Dennie, Letters, 189. 91. “Joseph Dennie to Mrs. Mary Dennie,” June 15, 1803, in Dennie, Letters, 191.

92. The Galaxy piece is excerpted in its entirety in Buckingham, Specimens of Newspaper Literature, 2:200, 201, 202. 93. Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 30, 31. 94. Mason, Memoir and Correspondence, 30, 31. 95. See Buckingham, Specimens of Newspaper Literature, 2:196–97. 96. Ibid., 2:196. 97. Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy, 30, 31. 98. Buckingham, Specimens of Newspaper Literature, 2:179. 99. Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan, “'He Summons Genius…to His Aid': Letters, Partisanship, and the Making of the Farmer's Weekly Museum, 1795–1800,” Journal of the Early Republic 23 (Winter 2003): 563. 100. Rufus Griswold, “Dr. Dwight and Mr. Dennie,” Curiosities of American Literature, 51, 52; published in I. C. D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature and The Literary Character Illustrated and Rufus Griswold, Curiosities of American Literature, complete in one volume (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1857). 101. Qtd. in William J. McTaggart and William K. Bottorff, introduction to The Major Poems of Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 (Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1969), xiii. Dwight's poem appears in Dr. Dwight, “The House of Sloth,” Port Folio 4, no. 41 (October 13, 1804): 327. 102. See Ellis, Dennie and His Circle, 197. General information on Irving is from Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935). 103. Davis, Philadelphia Pursuits, Book First, 11, 5. 104. Pickering to John Marshall, June 27, 1800, Timothy Pickering Papers, XIII. No. 557, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, qtd. in Kaplan, Men of Letters, 138. 105. Salmagundi No. VIII, by Anthony Evergreen, Gent., April 18, 1807, in Washington Irving, Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. Salmagundi; or the Whimwhams Page 276 →and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others, ed. Bruce I. Granger and Martha Hartzog, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Washington Irving, 30 vols. (Boston: Twayne, 1969–82), 153. 106. Washington Irving, “The Author's Account of Himself,” The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. Haskell Springer, vol. 8 of Complete Works of Irving, 8, 9, 10. 107. For an account of the publishing circumstances of the Sketch Book see Haskell Springer, introduction to Irving, Sketch Book, xvii–xxi. Irving ended up selling the copyrights to the Sketch Book to London publisher John Murray for the relatively small amount of 250 guineas. However, the Sketch Book was a financial hit in other ways: first, Irving had already made a tidy profit from the Sketch Book papers in the United States before he made his deal with Murray; second, the great popularity of the Sketch Book transformed Irving into an eminently bankable commodity; Murray would pay four times as much for Bracebridge Hall in 1822. 108. See [Washington Irving], “The Poor Devil Author” and “Buckthorne: Or, The Young Man of Great Expectations” in Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Author's Revised Edition (1824; New York: G.P. Putnam, 1857), 133–56 and 163–225. Buckthorne calls himself an “incorrigible laggard” on p. 164.

CHAPTER 3 1. [Rufus Wilmot Griswold], “Death of Edgar Allan Poe,” New York Daily Tribune (October 9, 1849), rpt. in I. M. Walker, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 300, 299. 2. Nathaniel Parker Willis, “Death of Edgar A. Poe,” Home Journal (October 20, 1849), rpt. in ibid., 311. 3. George Rex Graham, “The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham's Magazine 36 (March 1850): 224–26, rpt. in ibid., 382–83. 4. Henry Beck Hirst, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Model American Courier 19 (October 20, 1849): 2, rpt. in ibid., 316. 5. Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton, NJ: Princton University Press, 1999), 9. Whalen's work represents a broader effort among scholars to normalize and historicize Poe and to wrest him from implication in twentieth-century

psychoanalytic criticism. See, for example, the essays in Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, eds., The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and McGill, American Literature, all of which insist upon Poe as a subject not of psychic but of definable historical forces. Although the present chapter likewise argues that Poe is a subject of specific economic fields, it does not jettison the idea of Poe's “disturbed soul” as somehow exterior to these fields. On the contrary, I argue that in his very peculiarity—his maladjustment, his moody anguish—Poe illustrates how such psychic properties Page 277 →were produced in and, in turn, affected the early antebellum arts and entertainment milieu in which Poe worked. 6. Channing, “On Models in Literature,” 202. 7. Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 58. Bourdieu is describing the “invention of an art of living” among young writers in Paris in the 1840s. “The Bohemian lifestyle, which has no doubt made an important contribution…to the invention of the artistic lifestyle was elaborated…against the routines of bourgeois life” (55–56). It is worth noting that there was no coherent “alternative” lifestyle imagined for American writers of the 1830s and 1840s, except for those associated with various reform movements or political projects that subordinated the role of the writer to the role of the activist. 8. For general information on antebellum publishing, professional authorship or editing, and book and magazine production, see Charvat, Literary Publishing in America and Profession of Authorship; Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, A History: 1690–1960, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Mott, History of American Magazines, vols. 1 and 2; Tebbel, Creation of an Industry; John Tebbel, The Compact History of the American Newspaper, rev. ed. (New York: Hawthorn 1969); John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Scott E. Casper et al., The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, vol. 3 of A History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Other histories from which I draw are cited below as they arise. 9. See Zboray and Zboray, Literary Dollars, xix. The Zborays report, for example, that in Boston “editorial offices grew from 113 during the 1820s to 665 during the 1840s.” 10. The phrase “market revolution” is from Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The idea that cultural modernization constituted a vast indelible shift which swept aside familiar institutions—“aristocratic” traditions of authorship, for example—was a foundation of new historicist scholarship and is discussed in the introduction to this study. Representative works in this school include Charvat, Profession of Authorship and Gilmore, American Romanticism, both of which were widely influential. Recent scholarship has challenged these assumptions by arguing that older institutions persisted well into the antebellum era. See, for example, McGill, American Literature, Zboray and Zboray, Literary Dollars, and Jackson, Business of Letters. My point throughout the discussion that follows is that many of those structures and relationships we associate with later marketplace developments, including equations between letters and entrepreneurialism, and between authorship and escapes from positive productivity, were already amply present in the premodern era and projected themselves into modern developments. 11. The shift to centralized, corporate publishing and distribution systems began to make itself felt in the late 1840s, when giant publishing houses like Page 278 →Harper & Brothers began to eclipse artisanal and small-scale entrepreneurial publishing, a shift that was complete by the end of the Civil War. See Susan S. Williams, “Authors and Literary Authorship,” Industrial Book, vol. 3 of History of the Book, 91–92; and Zboray and Zboray, Literary Dollars, 169–205. 12. See Charvat, Profession of Authorship, 33. 13. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who owned his own stereotype plates, is the exemplary case here. See Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 135. 14. Although many women were involved in the early antebellum literary and entertainment industry as both writers and editors, they did not, by and large, actively contribute to its entrepreneurial and celebrity systems—hence my use of the masculine pronoun throughout this chapter. The degree of women's participation in these systems would change in the early 1850s, something I address in chapter 5.

15. John Neal, “American Writers. No. II,” Blackwood's Magazine 16 (October 1824): 415–28, rpt. in John Neal, American Writers: A Series of Papers Contributed to Blackwood's Magazine (1824–1825), ed. Fred Lewis Pattee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1937), 59n. 16. See McGill, American Literature; Zboray and Zboray, Literary Dollars; and Jackson, Business of Letters. 17. See Zboray and Zboray, Literary Dollars. The Zborarys' work is notable for its revision of the dominant scholarly picture of the midcentury literary marketplace as a highly sophisticated, proto-corporate purveyor of commercial mass culture. Their study highlights the informal, decentralized character of literary exchange in the years between 1820 and 1865 and its debt to voluntary expenditure and makeshift distribution practices. However, whereas the Zborays tend to stress the benevolence and populist vigor of this system, I am interested in the peculiar professional environments and psychologies generated by these precarious and informal structures. What did it mean for actual professional writers to work in a culture that tended to think of all writers as amateurs? While the Zborays are concerned to replace traditional distinctions between amateur and professional writers with a more fluid model of literary production and dissemination, I emphasize the ramshackle world of northeastern professional creative writers, magazinists, journalists, editors, and publishing entrepreneurs, whose employments formed a kind of dispersed Grub Street across the publishing circuits of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and the major urban centers of the South. 18. See Kaplan, Men of Letters, 125. 19. See Tebbel, Compact History, 70–71. 20. As late as 1851, Nathaniel Parker Willis informed his sister, Sara Payson Willis, later known as Fanny Fern, that his own magazine, The Home Journal, received “a dozen applications a day from authors who merely wish to have the privilege of seeing themselves in print—writing for vanity only.” “The Home Journal,” he went on, “pays for no contributions, being made up of extract.” He Page 279 →claimed that the same was true “with all the papers & many magazines.” Qtd. in Joyce W. Warren, Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 93. 21. Lambert A. Wilmer, Our Press Gang; or, A Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspapers (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd; London: Sampson Low, 1859), 17. Citations are hereafter included in the body of the text. 22. Samuel Griswold Goodrich, for example, engaged in numerous speculative publishing projects in the late 1810s, bringing out an edition of Scott and another of the works of John Trumbull. Recollections of a Lifetime, 2:109–13. 23. See Neal, “American Writers. No. II,” 59n. 24. See Mott, American Journalism, 225. 25. See James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 71. 26. See John Ward Ostrom, “Edgar A. Poe: His Income as Literary Entrepreneur,” Poe Studies 15 (June 1982): 2, 1. 27. “Percival's Poems,” North American Magazine 1 (April 1833): 325. 28. See Newbury, Figuring Authorship, 7 and passim. Newbury argues that antebellum authors, filled with “anxieties about professional writing” (15), engaged not only in a Romantic mythologizing of themselves but also in a figural displacement of their practices that involved imagining authorship as if it were other kinds of labor. My own argument, by contrast, reverses these propositions by arguing that Romantic authorship predicated rather than provided a salve for the institutions of industrial-era entertainment. 29. Discussing the component of the real in reality TV, Susan Murray argues that the distinction between “reality” and traditional documentary genres lies chiefly in their rhetorical markers: the latter endows itself with “social weight,” mobilizing discourses of sobriety, social purpose, artistic integrity, and pedagogical mission; the former is self-conscious in its mobilization of the titillating and sensational; it pairs itself deliberately with mass commercial entertainment. See Susan Murray, “‘I Think We Need a New Name For It’: The Meeting of Documentary and Reality TV,” Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 42–43. It was a rhetoric of scandal and entertainment, I am suggesting, that Poe and his contemporaries mobilized in their marketing of themselves as “real” entities. However, I am also arguing that the commodity of the real had, as I have said, indexical as well as rhetorical value: it pointed to real circumstances and events that lay outside of the

mediated realm of the public authorial self. 30. This oft-quoted phrase appears in Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginning to 1920, 3 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World), 2:58. 31. Rosenheim and Rachman, introduction to American Face, xi. 32. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, 2:134, 140. 33. James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans, Picked Up By a Travelling Bachelor, 2 vols. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963), 2:108.Page 280 → 34. “Review,” United States Literary Gazette 3 (October 1825–April 1826): 260; David Hoffman, A Course of Legal Study; Respectfully Addressed to the Students of Law in the United States (Baltimore: Coal and Maxwell, 1817), 27; William Wirt, “Public Letter Written December 30, 1832,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 (October 1834): 34; “Eminent British Lawyers: A Review,” American Quarterly Review 12 (1832): 289. The preceding are all quoted in Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 92, 91, 92. 35. Biographical information on Poe is taken from Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: D. Appleton Century, 1942); and Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). 36. “E.A. Poe to John Allan,” March 19, 1827, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1:7. 37. “E.A. Poe to John Allan,” December 1, 1828, ibid., 1:10. 38. “E.A. Poe to John Allan,” May 29, 1829, ibid., 1:20. 39. Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 72. 40. General biographical information on Willis is from Henry A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890); and Thomas N. Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Willis is dealt with at greater length in chapter 4 of this study. 41. Qtd. in Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 140. 42. Joy Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe's Literary Executor (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1943), 7. This is the only modern biography of Griswold and forms my main source of information about his life. 43. Ibid., 9. 44. Ibid., 8, 9. 45. Ibid., 11. 46. “Rufus Wilmot Griswold to Richard Henry Dana Sr.,” March 6, 1843, qtd. in ibid., 66. 47. Olean Advocate, August 20, 1836, qtd. in ibid., 17. 48. It is important to stress that biographical information about these writers was in some ways concocted after the fact both by the writers themselves and by subsequent biographers to meet the expectations of a culture that increasingly demanded that writers originate in conditions of exile and marginality. What I will underline in a moment, however, is the extent to which these three writers all achieved their success partly through a disturbing confusion of their veridical and “public” selves—of the real person and public personality—that makes biographical information about them at once crucial for the literary historian to understand and yet difficult to grasp. In any case, the chicken-and-egg nature of these questions—Did the real Poe emerge from or preexist the fabricated Poe? Did Poe invent himself as an alienated poet or was he invented by others? And most of all, How did these fabrications and realities interact with the peculiar economy in which Poe worked?—is part of the problematic I am investigating here.Page 281 → 49. Qtd in Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 109. Also from Silverman are the hours Poe worked, in this case on The Broadway Journal, 245. These hours were by no means unusual. The endless hours of work involved in editing are a standard subject of complaint among antebellum editors. Griswold reported at one point, “I now work fourteen hours a day (which is more than they do in the mines),” “Rufus Wilmot Griswold to Bayard Taylor,” November 21, 1846, qtd. Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 114. 50. Edgar Allan Poe, “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849, vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969).

51. Michael Allen demonstrates Poe's indebtedness to the cult of personality promoted in British magazines of this period, a cult to which, I would add, Willis was also indebted. See Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 52. American Traveller, February 23, 1830, 3, qtd. in Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity, 48; and New England Weekly Review, June 30, 1828, 2, qtd. in ibid., 47. 53. See Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity, 46, and Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 53–54. 54. See Kenneth L. Daughrity, “Poe's ‘Quiz on Willis,’” American Literature 5 (1933–34): 55–62. 55. “E.A. Poe to T.H. White,” April 30, 1835, in Poe, Letters, 57–58. 56. Edgar Allan Poe, rev. of Norman Leslie, in Literary Criticism, vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 51, 60. 57. “Supplement” to the Southern Literary Messenger 2 (January 1836): 133–40; and “Supplement” to the Southern Literary Messenger 2 (April 1836): 341–48, both rpt. in Walker, Poe: Critical Heritage, 83, 85, 86, 87. These are compilations of reviews of the Messenger that Poe himself put together and published as promotional material. 58. Philadelphia Gazette and Commercial Intelligencer (April 8, 1836): 2, qtd. in Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963), 45. 59. New York Commercial Advertiser (April 12, 1836): 1; this passage is quoted by Poe in a review of Drake-Halleck, Southern Literary Messenger 2 (April 1836): 327. 60. “Supplement” to the Southern Literary Messenger 2 (January 1836): 133–40, rpt. in Walker, Poe: Critical Heritage, 83. 61. Ibid., 85. 62. “Supplement” to the Southern Literary Messenger 2 (April 1836): 341–48, rpt. in ibid., 87. 63. “Supplement” to the Southern Literary Messenger 2 (July 1836): 517–24, rpt. in ibid., 90. 64. “Oliver Wendell Holmes to James T. Fields,” n.d., qtd. in Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 41. 65. Beadle's Monthly 3 (May 1867): 441, qtd. in ibid., 137–38.Page 282 → 66. [George Foster], New York in Slices: By An Experienced Carver, Revised By the Author (New York: William H. Graham, 1849), 56. 67. The Town (March 8, 1845), qtd. in Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 98. 68. The Town (June 7, 1845), qtd. in ibid., 100. 69. Edgar Allan Poe, “N.P. Willis,” Literati—Autography, vol. 15 of Complete Works, 10. 70. “Nathaniel Parker Willis to Edgar Allan Poe” [1845?], Griswold Mss. (1240), Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library; published courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library. 71. See, for example, J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Violence of Melancholy: Poe Against Himself,” American Literary History 8 (1996): 536. 72. “Nathaniel Parker Willis to Charles Sumner,” shelf mark bMS Am 1.9 [January 16? 1845], published by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 73. “Nathaniel Parker Willis to Charles Sumner,” shelf mark bMS Am 1.9, 27 [January 1845], published by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 74. Qtd. in Wilmer, Our Press Gang, 261. 75. General information about Park Benjamin is from Merle M. Hoover, Park Benjamin: Poet and Editor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). It is worth noting here that studies of Poe and his relationship to late 1830s and early 1840s newspaper and magazine invective tend to focus on the paper wars between Whig and Democratic organs, the classic example being Perry Miller's The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), which looks at the feud between Knickerbocker and Democratic Review factions. By contrast, my interest lies in analyzing this political rhetoric as one part of a larger discourse of eccentricity that flourished around authors and editors in the arts and entertainment industry regardless of politics. 76. “Park Benjamin to Lafayette S. Foster, Esquire,” October 8, 1833, Boston, Park Benjamin Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 77. “The Author of Rubeta,” New World 3, no. 8 (August 21, 1841): 124. 78. Cooper's relationship to what scholars have traditionally defined as the Whig press is nicely set out in

James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (n.c.: William Sloane, 1949), chaps. 5 and 6. For a more detailed account see Dorothy Waples, The Whig Myth of Fenimore Cooper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938). Here again, while Cooper's arguments with Benjamin are understood in terms of late 1830s northeastern politics, my aim is to see them as part of a broader discourse of dysfunction and eccentricity that pervaded writing about writers from the early nineteenth century until at least the Civil War. 79. “Park Benjamin to George P. Morris,” March 15, 1839, n.p., Park Benjamin Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library; original in Simon Gratz Collection, Library of Pennsylvania Historical Society.Page 283 → 80. For accounts of the Moral War see Mott, American Journalism, 235–38; and Hoover, Park Benjamin, 103–8. 81. Qtd. in Hoover, Park Benjamin, 106. Writing in the early 1870s, journalism historian Frederic Hudson was so struck by the invective generated in the Moral War that he made a list of the dozens of epithets used against Bennett. Park Benjamin's contribution to these epithets includes “Obscene Vagabond,” “Infamous blasphemer,” “Loathsome and leprous slanderer and libeller,” “Instrument of mischief,” “Polluted wretch,” “Prince of darkness,” “Veteran blackguard,” along with about forty others. Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper, 1873), 459. 82. Qtd. in Hoover, Park Benjamin, 106. 83. “Park Benjamin to LaFayette S. Foster,” September 10, 1839, New York, Park Benjamin Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 84. The New World–Brother Jonathan wars are detailed in Hoover, Park Benjamin, chap. 6. 85. Hudson, Journalism in the United States, 589. 86. See Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett, 16, 17. 87. “Destruction of the National Theatre,” Dixon's Polyanthos, June 6, 1841. This piece, together with other extracts from the pages of the Flash Press, is reprinted in Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 138. 88. “Edgar Allan Poe,” Poets and Poetry of America, ed. Rufus W. Griswold (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846), 387. 89. “Byron and Poe,” Virginia University Magazine 1, no. 6 (June 1857): 241. 90. Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times. By a Journalist (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855), 42. 91. Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J.R. Ford, 1868), 479, 478, 479. 92. “Our Indictments,” Flash 1, no. 16 (December 11, 1841), qtd. in Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, Flash Press, 106. 93. Tebbel, Creation of an Industry, 209. 94. J. L. Martin, Native Bards (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1831), 17. 95. See Leonard, Byron and Byronism, chaps. 3 and 4. 96. “Park Benjamin to LaFayette S. Foster,” September 10, 1839, New York, Park Benjamin Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 97. Wilmer, Our Press Gang, 282. 98. [Laughton Osborn], The Vision of Rubeta, An Epic Story of the Island of Manhattan (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1838), 46. 99. Qtd. in Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper, 153.Page 284 → 100. “Mr. Cooper's Last Novel,” New-Yorker 6, no. 11 (1 December 1, 1838): 173. 101. See James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, ed. George Dekker and Larry Johnston (New York: Penguin, 1989). 102. L. A. Wilmer, Quacks of Helicon: A Satire (Philadelphia: J. W. Macclefield, 1841), 8, 7. 103. See Osborn, Vision of Rubeta; Cornelius Mathews, The Career of Puffer Hopkins (New York: D. Appleton, 1842); and George Lippard, “The Spermaceti Papers,” which ran weekly in the Citizen Soldier from May 31 through August 16, 1843, and pilloried Philadelphia's genteel literary scene; selections rpt. in George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822–1854, ed. David S. Reynolds (New York: Peter Lang, 1986). See also Augustine J. H. Duganne, Parnassus in Pillory: A Satire (1851; rpt. New York: Kennikat Press, 1971), which sends up various individual members of the northeastern literature

trade. Grotesque scatological and sexual imagery, blasted landscapes, hideous bodies, and a general bedlamlike atmosphere characterize all of these in varying degrees. 104. Qtd. in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2:73, 132. Parker summarizes the reception history of these novels in chaps. 4 and 6. 105. The eruption of paper wars into physical fights is given a chapter in Wilmer's Our Press Gang; see chap. 18, which is titled “Fights and Floggings of Editors,” 312. 106. David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 89. 107. [McDonald Clarke], Poems of M'Donald Clarke (New York: J. W. Bell, 1836), 10. 108. [Walt Whitman], The Aurora 1, no. 89 (March 8, 1842): 2, The Walt Whitman Archive, accessed May 15, 2011, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/periodical/aurora.html. Whitman's embroilment in the system of Romantic celebrity, if only as a marginal player, is treated in David Haven, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 109. See Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, “French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis,” special issue of Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38–72. 110. The unusual number of attacks Willis attracted is addressed at more length in chapter 4. 111. “Horace Greeley to Rufus Griswold,” November 13, 1843, in Passages From the Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold, ed. William M. Griswold (Cambridge, MA: W. M. Griswold, 1898), 146–47. 112. “Mr. Poe and the New York Literati,” Evening Mirror, May 26, 1846, qtd. in Moss, Poe's Literary Battles, 224–25. Poe, Willis, and Griswold were not the only writers unable to escape the terms of their initial success. Perry Miller, speaking of Charles Briggs and Herman Melville, notes that each was “cursed…with an initial success from the shadow of which he could never escape. The Adventures of Harry Franco made in 1839 as great a splurge as did Typee in 1846. Henceforth Briggs was known, even to his intimates, as ‘Franco’; Melville in turn would grow Page 285 →sick of being called ‘Typee.’” In Miller, Raven, 47. Both novels, it is worth noting, capitalized on veiled links between their vaguely scandalous content and the personal experiences of their authors. 113. Qtd. in Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 232. 114. For accounts of both incidents see Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity, 128, 123. 115. “James T. Fields to Rufus Griswold,” September 13, 1844, in Griswold, Passages, 159. 116. See Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 250. Many Poe scholars hold that the counterattack launched in response to Poe's initial attack on Longfellow's The Waif, which was printed in the Evening Mirror and purportedly written by a Longfellow advocate who styled himself “Outis” (Nobody), was in fact written by Poe with Willis's help as an elaborate publicity stunt. 117. Qtd. in Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 254. 118. See Moss, Poe's Literary Battles, 221. 119. “Rufus Wilmot Griswold to James T. Fields,” December 29, 1846, qtd. in Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 117. 120. Rufus W. Griswold, “Prefatory Letter to John W. Francis,” The Republican Court (New York: D. Appleton, 1855), iii. 121. From an untitled memoir (evidently late nineteenth century), reprinted in Griswold, Passages, 37. 122. Qtd. in Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 349. 123. [Edgar Allan Poe], “A Chapter On Autography,” Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine 19 (November 1841): 226. 124. Duganne, Parnassus in Pillory, 50. 125. Qtd. in Ostrom, “Edgar A. Poe,” 5. Also from Ostrom is Poe's payment for the “Literati” series (5). 126. See Madeleine B. Stern, ed., Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980). For a discussion of the segmentation of the marketplace see Sarah Wadsworth, In the Company of Books: Literature and Its Classes in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

CHAPTER 4

1. Dennie, The Farrago, 11, 73. 2. Ibid., 72, 11, 9. 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” “Nature”, Addresses, and Lectures, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 61. 4. See Charvat, Profession of Authorship, especially chaps. 1–4, and Literary Publishing in America; Gilmore, American Romanticism; Buell, New England Literary Culture, chap. 3; and Newbury, Figuring Authorship. 5. See Brown, Domestic Individualism, and Weinstein, Literature of Labor. Page 286 →Weinstein argues that as a constitutive power, antebellum leisure was as rationalized and regimented as labor, a point to which I will return. For a study of the complex ways in which antebellum writers represented and thematized bodily labor, see Nicholas K. Bromell, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Bromell does not materially address the representation of mental labor, except as it relates to women writers, a topic I address in chapter 5 of this study. 6. See Zboray and Zboray, Literary Dollars; and Jackson, Business of Letters. 7. General information on Willis is from Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis; Cortland P. Auser, Nathaniel P. Willis (New York: Twayne, 1969); and Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity. Beers's biography is especially valuable in that it quotes at length private correspondence that has since been lost. Willis's contribution to American journalism encompasses his editorship of the annuals The Legendary and The Token (in 1828 and 1829, respectively) for Samuel G. Goodrich; his founding of his own American Monthly Magazine (1829–31), his founding with W. O. Porter of The Corsair (1839–40), and with George P. Morris of the various Mirrors (New York (1831–39), New (1843–44), Evening (1844–46), Weekly (1844–46), and, finally of the Home Journal (1846–64). The Home Journal was renamed Town and Country in 1901. 8. Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey (New York: Harper, 1923), 78. 9. See Van Wyck Brooks, The World of Washington Irving (New York: Dutton, 1950). 10. Oliver Wendell Holmes, introduction to A Mortal Antipathy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891), 4. 11. N. P. Willis, Pencillings By the Way, 3 vols. (London: John Macrone, 1835), 3:83. 12. Qtd. in “Mercy For the Rich,” Weekly Mirror, December 14, 1844, 181. 13. Basil Rauch, “The First Hundred Years,” special centennial issue of Town and Country 100 (December 1946): 62. 14. See chiefly the writings of “Lancelot Langstaff” throughout Salmagundi, in Irving, Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle. Descriptions of Willis's surroundings are available in the “Editor's Table” of the American Monthly Magazine. See, for example, October 1830, 477. 15. Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], The Book of the Boudoir, 2 vols. (New York: J&J Harper, 1829), 1:23. 16. Qtd. in Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 108. 17. N. P. Willis, Melanie and Other Poems (New York: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 156–57. 18. See, for example, Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Edward Pessen, Riches, Class and Power Before the Civil War (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1973); and Story, Harvard. These three are representative of a large body of work that disputes older assumptions about Jacksonian America's democratization of wealth and opportunity.Page 287 → 19. Fredric Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 183, 231. 20. Qtd. in Pattee, American Short Story, 81. Willis liked to specify his audience. In a column in the New Mirror, December 9, 1843, for example, he opens with a more exacting description: “Dear pastoral-minded, centrifugally-bent, and moderately well-off reader” (159). For a description of the white-collar class that made up Willis's audience, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 21. “Editor's Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (1829): 357. 22. “Cosmopolite Attraction in Broadway,” Weekly Mirror, October 19, 1844, 29.

23. “Diary of Town Trifles,” New Mirror, May 11, 1844, 90. 24. “Diary of Town Trifles,” New Mirror, May 18, 1844, 105. 25. “Neighbourhood of Glenmary,” New Mirror, July 29, 1843, 257. 26. “Editor's Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (1829): 357. 27. Home Journal 11 (July 7, 1855): 2. 28. Who Are the Upper Ten Thousand,” New York Mirror, February 22, 1845, 314. 29. Willis's rise to success from obscure origins was part of a Willis mythology, but in fact Willis had solidly middle-class origins. Willis's father, also Nathaniel and also a journalist, has a chapter devoted to him in Rex Burns, Success in America: The Yeoman Dream and the Industrial Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), chap. 2. It was Willis's hobnobbing among the aristocrats and celebrities of the “Old World” that seemed so dazzling to his contemporaries. 30. Qtd. from unnamed source in M. A. DeWolfe Howe, American Bookmen: Sketches, Chiefly Biographical, of Certain Writers of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898), 108. 31. The Blessington circle is detailed in Michael Sadleir, The Strange Life of Lady Blessington (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933). Willis is discussed on pp. 197–208. For a reading of Willis's travels as landmarks in a history of publicized intimacy, see Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in NineteenthCentury American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chap. 5. For an analysis of Willis's travelogues and his antics in Britain, see Sandra Tomc, “Restyling an Old World: Nathaniel Parker Willis and Metropolitan Fashion in the Antebellum United States,” Representations 85 (Winter 2004): 98–124. 32. See Willis, Pencillings By the Way, especially vol. 3, which chronicles Willis's adventures among the London literati. Willis also agreed at one point to hire William Makepeace Thackeray for his Corsair, but the arrangement fell through. Thackeray went on to pillory Willis in a variety of venues. For information on Willis and Thackeray, see Harold H. Scudder, “Thackeray and N.P. Willis,” PMLA 57 (1942): 589–92. According to Scudder, Willis is Mr. Paul John Jefferson Jones in chapter 49 of Vanity Fair (591–92).Page 288 → 33. Qtd. in Emily Morse Symonds, Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century (1902; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 175. 34. James Russell Lowell, “A Fable For Critics,” The Poetical Works, vol. 9 of Lowell's Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), 47. 35. “The Literati of New York City,” Godey's Lady's Book, October 1846, 1124. 36. Duganne, Parnassus in Pillory, 56. 37. Rev. of Pencillings By the Way; First Impressions of Foreign Scenes, Customs and Manners, by N. P. Willis, Quarterly Review 54 (1835): 457. 38. “Author-Life Abroad,” New Mirror, September 2, 1843, 344–45. 39. Qtd. in Van Wyck Brooks, The World of Washington Irving (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1944), 431. 40. Qtd. in Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 10. 41. Ibid., 18. John G. Cawelti's useful discussion of this topic is Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). 42. See Weinstein, Literature of Labor, especially chap. 1. 43. Anon., “The Mechanic's Wife,” Household Scenes for the Home Circle (Buffalo: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), 179, 182, 184. 44. [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow], “The Defence of Poetry,” rev. of The Defense of Poesy by Sir Philip Sidney, North American Review 34 (January 1832): 76. 45. Park Benjamin, “The Age of Gold: A Lecture in Verse,” Poems, ed. Merle M. Hoover (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 173–74. 46. Duganne, Parnassus in Pillory, 25. 47. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “To Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” March 7, 1837, letter 74 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Letters, 1813–1843, vol. 15 of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al., 20 vols. to date (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962–), 249. 48. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Old Manse,” Mosses from an Old Manse, vol. 10 of Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 7, 18, 34.

49. Grace Greenwood, preface, Greenwood Leaves: A Collection of Sketches and Letters (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850), iii. 50. Marvel, Reveries of a Bachelor: or A Book of the Heart, 17th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856), vii. 51. Thompson, My Life, 313, 314. 52. David M. Stewart, “Cultural Work, City Crime, Reading, Pleasure,” American Literary History 9 (1997): 685. 53. “Factory Life—Romance and Reality,” Voice of Industry, December 3, 1847, 2. 54. See James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 306. 55. “Egotism and Libel,” New Mirror, January 6, 1844, 224. 56. “To the Ladies,” New Mirror, October 14, 1843, 32. 57. “Editor's Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (September 1829): 428–29.Page 289 → 58. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Dover, 1994), 24. 59. “Editor's Table,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (October 1829): 466 and (November 1829): 580. 60. “Confab in the Cloister,” New Mirror, April 13, 1844, 32. 61. “Behind the Curtain,” New York Mirror, January 25, 1845, 241. 62. Qtd. in Pattee, American Short Story, 85. 63. Pattee, American Short Story, 83. 64. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), 237–38. 65. “Our Contributors. Nathaniel Parker Willis,” Graham's Monthly Magazine 25 (1844): 147. 66. Edward F. Hayward, “Nathaniel Parker Willis,” Atlantic Monthly 54 (1884): 213. 67. Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity, 8. 68. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, 2:265–67. 69. Rev. of Melanie and Other Poems, Pencillings By the Way and Inklings of Adventure, by N. P. Willis, North American Review 43 (1836): 385, 406, 412. 70. Rev. of Pencillings, Quarterly Review, 463. 71. William J. Snelling, Truth, A Gift for Scribblers, 2nd ed. (Boston: B. B. Mussey, 1832), 33. 72. Qtd. from various unspecified British reviews in Symonds, Little Memoirs, 201. 73. According to Daughrity, “Poe's ‘Quiz on Willis,’” “Some Passages in the Life of a Lion,” or “Lionizing, ” was probably written with Willis loosely in mind. But “The Duc De L'Omelette” was a direct satire of Willis's “Editor's Table” in the American Monthly Magazine, complete with references to the olives and ottomans. 74. [John Moncure Daniel], rev. of Edgar Allan Poe, Southern Literary Messenger 16 (1850): 172–87, rpt. in Walker, Poe: Critical Heritage, 360. Daniel's review is a response to Willis's defense of Poe, which appeared in the Home Journal following Griswold's famous and slanderous obituary notice. 75. [Untitled notice], Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, February 7, 1845, 2. Willis's reputation for profligacy is discussed in chapter 3. It is worth noting here that before his marriage in 1835 Willis had had a reputation for his many affairs with women, but of interest in this instance is less the veracity of the allegations than the publicity itself, which is all the more notable for summoning up “dissipations” that, according to Willis's unpublished letters and the accounts of his friends, Willis had left behind him upon his marriage ten years before. Willis's description of his happy relationship to his first wife, Mary Stace, is available in his letters to Brantz Mayer, the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. See also James Parton, Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity and Public Spirit (New York: Virtue and Yorston, 1874), 18, in which Parton defends Willis against the rumors of immoral conduct that dogged him to the end of his life. 76. Fanny Fern, “Ruth Hall” and Other Writings, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Page 290 →Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 160, 178. See also in this same volume the sketch “Apollo Hyacinth” (259–60), a satire of Nathaniel published in the Musical World and Times in 1853. I deal at length with Fanny Fern and her investments in celebrity in chapter 5. Accounts of Willis's relationship to his sister are available in Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 333–37, and Warren, Fanny Fern, 93–94. 77. “Dashes At Life With a Free Pencil. The Phantom-Head Upon the Table,” New Mirror, April 6, 1844, 1. 78. “Mourning Over: My Second Essay With Mrs. Passable Trott,” New Mirror, June 17, 1843, 161, and

“Things As They Come,” New Mirror, June 22, 1844, 192. 79. “Postscript to Mr. Willis's Defence…” New York Mirror, February 22, 1845, 314. 80. Pattee, American Short Story, 80. 81. “Literati,” Godey's, 1125. 82. Parton, Triumphs of Enterprise, 17. 83. “A Confidential Letter,” New Mirror, November 11, 1843, 96. 84. “Mercy For the Rich,” Weekly Mirror, December 14, 1844, 181. 85. N. P. Willis, Famous Persons and Places (Auburn: Alden and Beardsley, 1854), vi.; emphasis in original. 86. See Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 260–61. This was before the days of the best seller in the early 1850s when writers of Willis's stature were able to make considerably larger sums through royalties on books financed by the publisher. 87. N. P. Willis, The Rag-Bag, a Collection of Ephemera (New York: Charles Scribner, 1855), 84–85. 88. “Digressive Letter,” New Mirror, December 9, 1843, 160. 89. Qtd. in Symonds, Little Memoirs, 212. 90. P. T. Barnum, “The Art of Money-Getting,” The American Gospel of Success: Individualism and Beyond, ed. Moses Rischin (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965), 51. 91. Wyllie, Self-Made Man, 22. 92. Qtd. in ibid., 23. 93. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Perennial Library; Harper & Row, 1988), 531, 536. 94. Barnum, “Art of Money-Getting,” 57. 95. Ibid., 51. 96. Pierre Boudieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randall Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 130. 97. See, for example, Rice, Transformation of Authorship; McGill, American Literature; and Martin T. Buinicki, Negotiating Copyright: Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Routledge, 2006). 98. Qtd. in McGill, American Literature, 90–91. 99. Ibid., 95. 100. “Authors' Pay in America,” Weekly Mirror, October 12, 1844, 15.Page 291 → 101. N. Parker Willis, Rural Letters and Other Records of Thought At Leisure, Written in the Intervals of More Hurried Literary Labor (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1849), 55. 102. Ibid., 194. 103. Ibid., 195. 104. Zboray and Zboray, Literary Dollars, xiv, xiii. 105. Rev. of The Homes of American Authors, Putnam's Monthly Magazine, January–June 1853, 23. All citations are from this edition; page numbers are included in the body of the text. 106. Qtd. in Denham Sutcliffe, “‘Our American Macauley’: Edwin Percy Whipple, 1819–1886,” New England Quarterly 19 (March 1946): 4. 107. Edwin P. Whipple, “Authors in Their Relations to Life,” Lectures on Subjects Connected with Literature and Life (1850), rpt. in Literature and Life, 12, 15. All citations are from this edition; page numbers are included in the body of the text. 108. Edwin P. Whipple, “Genius,” Lectures on Subjects Connected, 181. 109. Hart, Popular Book, 95. 110. See Ann D[ouglas] Wood, “The ‘Scribbling Women’ and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote,” American Quarterly 23 (1971): 16–17; and Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 153–54.

CHAPTER 5 1. Sofer, “‘Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl,” 32.

2. Grace Greenwood, Greenwood Leaves: A Collection of Sketches and Letters, 4th ed. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1853), 366–67. 3. Grace Greenwood, Greenwood Leaves: A Collection of Sketches and Letters, 2nd ed. (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850), 311. 4. Traditionally, scholarship on women writers tends to subordinate professional to political concerns, often downplaying women's professional culture in favor of the writer's relationship to bourgeois domestic ideology. Nevertheless, numerous recent studies emphasize the self-assertiveness, agency, and acumen of the generation of women writers working professionally from about 1845 to 1860. See, for example, Sandra A. Zagarell's biography of Caroline Kirkland in her introduction to Caroline Kirkland, A New Home, Who'll Follow? Or Glimpses of Western Life, ed. Sandra A. Zagarell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Melissa J. Homestead, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially chaps. 3 and 4 on Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Fern; and Susan S. Williams, Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), chap. 3. Williams discusses the emergence in the 1850s of women's professional authorial behaviors. As Homestead emphasizes, Page 292 →women writers, because they were women, worked under different conditions than their male contemporaries; but given those conditions, Homestead finds significant changes in the way women negotiated their careers and the rights to their materials from the 1830s to the mid-1850s. For a study that argues for women's ongoing entrenchment in standards of delicacy and gentility, see Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 5. For Mary Kelley and Susan K. Harris, for example, midcentury women writers existed in an ambiguous relationship to domestic doctrines, whose edicts they might have advertised but whose principles they also subversively undermined and transgressed. See Kelley, Private Woman; and Susan K. Harris, NineteenthCentury American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For Ann Douglas, Gillian Brown, Lauren Berlant, and Amy Kaplan, on the other hand, bourgeois women writers were engaged not in the transgression or questioning of domestic structures, but in their consolidation and dissemination. Celebrating the intimacy of family and home, the women writers of the early 1850s aided in the constitution of the white, bourgeois subject and its family unit, contributing not just to the development of modern consumer regimes but also to the ideology of white nation and empire, what Kaplan calls “manifest domesticity.” See Douglas, Feminization of American Culture; Brown, Domestic Individualism; Lauren Berlant, “The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment,” American Literary History 3 (1991): 429–54; and Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), chap. 1, which is titled “Manifest Domesticity.” Recent studies of nineteenth-century women's authorship, including important studies by Anne E. Boyd and Susan S. Williams, similarly stress the subordination of women's professional culture to domestic mandates, underlining the extent to which women's public presence in the years before the Civil War was organized and circumscribed through, in Williams's words, their “continuity with domestic pursuits.” See Williams, Reclaiming Authorship, 55; and Anne E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 55. Boyd's study principally concerns a postbellum generation of writers who cultivated self-consciously “high art” and connotatively European female authorial personalities, but her assumption is that such personalities were cultivated as part of a rebellion against the enforced domesticity of the prewar years. See chap. 2, especially pp. 80–84. 6. “Nathaniel Parker Willis to Sarah Eldredge Farrington,” n.d., qtd. in Warren, Fanny Fern, 93. 7. See Berlant, “Female Woman,” 433–34 and passim. Berlant describes the female complaint as “an aesthetic witnessing of injury. Shuttling between a sexual politics that threatens dominant structures of authority and an affirmation of the female speaker's practical powerlessness, the female complaint registers the speaker's frustration, rage, abjection, and heroic self-sacrifice in an oppositional Page 293 →utterance that reveals the constraints and contradictions of feminine desire in its very saying” (433). 8. General information on Fern's life and career is from Warren, Fanny Fern. 9. Jesse T. Peck, “The True Woman,” Ladies' Repository 13 (August 1853): 339, 337, 339.

10. Fanny Fern, “Hints To Young Wives,” Olive Branch, February 14, 1852, rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 224. 11. “Harriet Beecher Stowe to Calvin Stowe,” June 16, 1845, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters On Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere, ed. Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 70. 12. Fanny Fern, “Aunt Hetty on Matrimony,” Olive Branch, December 6, 1851), rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 220–21. 13. Fanny Fern, “A Word on the Other Side,” New York Ledger (October 24, 1857), rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 293. 14. Fanny Fern, “The Ballroom and the Nursery,” Fern Leaves From Fanny's Port Folio (Auburn: Derby and Miller; Buffalo: Derby, Orton and Mulligan; Cincinnati: Henry W. Derby, 1853), 141–45. 15. Peck, “The True Woman,” 339. 16. Fern, “Word on the Other Side,” 293, 292. 17. See Brown, Domestic Individualism, 69–77. 18. Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 25. 19. Fern, Ruth Hall, 116. This moment is underlined by Wood, “Scribbling Women,” 21–22. 20. Fern, Ruth Hall, 116. 21. Fanny Fern, “Insignificant Love,” Olive Branch, April 10, 1852, rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 226. 22. Fanny Fern, “Fresh Leaves,” New York Ledger, October 10, 1857, rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 291. 23. Fanny Fern, “Family Jars,” True Flag, January 10, 1852, rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 221, 222, 223. 24. Fern, “Aunt Hetty on Matrimony,” rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 220. 25. Fern, “Editors,” Fern Leaves, 326, 327–28. 26. Fern, Ruth Hall, 70. In Ruth Hall, Willis is “Hyacinth Ellet” but that Fern was conscious of the implications of the name “Hyacinth” is suggested by her pairing of it with “Apollo” in other sketches of her brother where his name is “Apollo Hyacinth.” See Fanny Fern, “Apollo Hyacinth,” Musical World and Time, June 18, 1853, rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 259–60. 27. See Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), chap. 2 and passim. 28. Fanny Fern, “The Modern Old Maid,” New York Ledger, June 5, 1869, qtd. in Warren, Fanny Fern, 131.Page 294 → 29. Fanny Fern, “A Chapter on Literary Women,” Fern Leaves, 179. 30. Fanny Fern, “A Practical Blue Stocking,” Olive Branch, August 2, 1852, rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 233–34. 31. Fanny Fern, “Our Hatty,” Fern Leaves, 36, 37, 38. 32. Fern, “Chapter on Literary Women,” Fern Leaves, 177. 33. Fern, “Our Hatty,” Fern Leaves, 39. 34. Fanny Fern, “A Voice From Bedlam,” New York Ledger, October 26, 1861, rpt. in Fern, Ruth Hall, 319. 35. The relationship between genteel authorship and the American cult of self-making is discussed at length in chapter 4 of this study. For general discussions of entrepreneurial culture see Wyllie, Self-Made Man, and Cawelti, Apostles. 36. Fern, Ruth Hall, 175. 37. Cathy Davidson, preface to “No More Separate Spheres!” American Literature 70 (September 1998): 444. Davidson sums up and concurs with a long tradition of thinking in these terms. 38. See Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992; New York: Random House–Vintage, 1993), which chronicles the gentrification of middle-class household space from about 1830 to 1860. See also Blumin, Emergence of Middle Class. 39. See Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, especially chap. 2, in which Brodhead argues that midcentury entertainment culture produced as it exploited new domestic environments. It is worth noting that Brodhead sees the woman writer as an exemplary figure in these newly publicized private scenes: her conspicuous presence within new celebrity regimes gestures at a deeply private, hidden self beneath her public facade. My own argument, by contrast, emphasizes the powerful presence in new entertainment culture of dramas of the woman writer's failure to achieve exemplary status. 40. “Rev. of Isabella Orsini, by F.D. Guerrazzi,” Knickerbocker 52 (1858): 630.

41. “George Palmer Putnam to James Gillespie Birney,” November 30, 1854, qtd. in Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, Representative American Publisher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press), 293. For a detailed account of the practices of the reading communities addressed in this literature, see Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), chap. 7. 42. Catherine. E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy; For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and At School, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1856), 272. 43. See [Lydia Maria] Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 27th ed. (New York: Samuel S. and William Wood, 1841); and Solon Robinson, How to Live: Saving and Wasting, or, Domestic Economy Illustrated (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1860). 44. C. M. Kirkland, “The Household,” Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art 7 (July–December 1850): 42, 43. 45. Bishop Morris, “Home,” Ladies' Repository 13 (August 1853): 343. 46. Kirkland, “The Household,” 43, 44. 10.Page 295 → 47. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark,” Hawthorne's Tales and Sketches, ed. James McIntosh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 123, 124, 123. 48. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, vol. 1 of Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 35, 36. 49. W. A. Jones, “Female Novelists,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 14 (May 1844): 484. 50. As Gustavus Stadler notes in Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the United States, 1840–1890 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), equations of women's artistic virtuosity with “genius” were a feature of 1850s literary and entertainment culture. Descriptions of Jenny Lind, for example, emphasized her affinity with this prized commodity: writing in the Tribune, John Sullivan Dwight described Lind as “the divine songstress with that perfect bearing, that aid of all dignity and sweetness, blending a childlike simplicity and half-trembling womanly modesty with the beautiful confidence of Genius and serene wisdom of Art” (Tribune, September 12, 1850, 1, qtd. in Stadler, 34). Stadler argues that genius functioned as a politically radical identity category in the late nineteenth-century American culture field. By contrast, my interest is in how the vocabularies of “genius” and “art” were invoked to reposition women writers as alienated, and thus productive, members of the genteel entertainment industry. 51. Rufus Griswold, ed., The Female Poets of America (1848; rpt. Philadelphia: Moss, Brother, 1860), 7. 52. Margaret Junkin, “The Reconcilement of the Real and the Ideal,” Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art 10 (January 1852): 55. Page numbers for subsequent references to this story are inserted in the body of the text. 53. F. G. R. D., “The Literary Wife,” Southern Literary Messenger 23 (December 1856): 403. Page numbers for subsequent references to this story are inserted in the body of the text. 54. Crowfield, House and Home Papers, 77. 55. Nowhere is this principle more strikingly demonstrated than in one of Stowe's House and Home Papers, “The Economy of the Beautiful.” In this parable of home beautification, which teaches that the most beautiful homes are a matter of aesthetic design rather than money, Stowe introduces a wife with “a veritable ‘gift of good faërie’”: “All that she touches falls at once into harmony and proportion.” Nevertheless, the entire focus of Stowe's fable is on the husband, John, “a worshipper and adorer of beauty and beautiful things” who ends up decorating the home while the wife, apparently alienated by the lofty aesthetic demands of the perfect home, stands by and watches. See ibid., 88, 90. 56. Griswold, Female Poets, 8, 9. 57. [D. W. Clark], “Literary Women of America. Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale,” Ladies Repository 15 (April 1855): 194, 195, 196. 58. T. M. Eddy, “Literary Women of America. Mrs. Julia L. Dumont,” Ladies' Repository 17 (June 1857), 321. 59. [D. W. Clark], “Literary Women of America—The Author of ‘Sunny-Side,’” Ladies' Repository 15 (June 1855): 367.Page 296 → 60. [D. W. Clark], “Literary Women of America. Number VI. Some Notice of the Writings and Genius of Alice Cary,” Ladies' Repository 15 (September 1855): 559. 61. Lydia Maria Child, Philothea: A Romance (Boston: Otis, Broaders; New York: George Dearborn, 1836), vi–vii.

62. Ibid., vii–viii. 63. Mrs. P. Farmer, “Labor,” Arthur's Home Magazine 6 (December 1855): 324. 64. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The Angel Over the Right Shoulder,” Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), 22, 18, 23. 65. Williams, Reclaiming Authorship, 46. 66. Qtd. in Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business, 66. Accounts of Southworth's relationship with Peterson are available, in chap. 3, and in Kelley, Private Woman, 159–66. 67. My source here is Lyle H. Wright, American Fiction, 1774–1850: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography, rev. ed. (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1969). Women count for approximately onethird of authors of books of fiction published throughout this period. It could be argued that a bibliography of published books may not accurately indicate the number of women pursuing writing during the period under investigation here (roughly 1845–60), since books, of course, were the most expensive form of publication and were out of the reach of many writers; many women wrote for periodicals and gift books and other less formal venues. However, under this rule, a bibliography of books cannot give us a very accurate picture of any authorial demographic, given that individuals of both sexes pursued writing in an amateur way that did not necessarily manifest itself in books. For my purposes, the bibliography of fiction is a reasonable indicator of the number of women who took themselves—or were taken by publishers—seriously enough to expend labor and capital on a book. For scholars who underline the dubiousness of the mob of women scenario see Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 338; and Romero, Home Fronts, 13. 68. Caroline May, ed., The American Female Poets: With Biographical and Critical Notices (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1853), vi, v. 69. “Editorial Notes—Literature,” Putnam's Monthly 4 (July 1854): 110. 70. J. H. Eliot, “Woman in the Domain of Letters,” Knickerbocker Monthly, July 1864, 83. 71. James Russell Lowell, A Fable For Critics, Under the Willows and Other Poems, vol. 9 of Lowell's Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890–92), 9:59–60. 72. “Our Young Authors—Mitchell,” Putnam's Monthly Magazine 1 (January 1853): 75. 73. Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron Mills,” Atlantic Monthly 7 (April 1861): 435. 74. See Sofer, “‘Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl,” 32. In Victoria Olwell's account, women's eccentricity and genius occupied social and aesthetic registers that were entirely discreet from men's eccentricity and genius: men were possessed and individuated Page 297 →by genius, which was thought to be inseparable from the male artist's subjectivity; women were “trustees of genius,” their genius fixed in the realms of impersonal convention. See “‘It Spoke Itself’: Women's Genius and Eccentric Politics,” American Literature 77 (2005): 40, 41. The antebellum “[woman] author,” says Susan Williams, “was not a social outcast but rather someone who fit into acceptable categories of womanhood.” See Reclaiming Authorship, 46. 75. Augusta J. Evans, Beulah (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1860), 141. All future references are to this edition; page numbers are hereafter inserted in the body of the text. 76. Grace Greenwood, Greenwood Leaves: A Collection of Sketches and Letters, Second Series (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1852), 272. 77. [Harriet Beecher Stowe], “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life,” Atlantic Monthly 24 (September 1869): 295–313. Stowe expanded this notorious piece into a book, Lady Byron Vindicated, the following year. For interesting accounts of the controversy over these publications see Susan Wolstenholme, “Voice of the Voiceless: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Byron Controversy,” American Literary Realism 19, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 48–65; and Michelle Hawley, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lord Byron: A Case of Celebrity Justice in the Victorian Public Sphere, Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 229–56. Like other critics, Wolstenholme and Hawley emphasize the sexual and national politics of the Stowe-Byron controversy. What is interesting from my point of view is Stowe's performance, in the course of this attack, of the American male Romantic artist's self-destruction. Like Poe and Park Benjamin, Stowe pursues true womanhood until she immolates her career. She effectively cements the buried synonymy of true womanhood and tortured genius by engineering a Byronic fate for herself.

EPILOGUE

1. W. D. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship, ed. David F. Hiatt and Edwin H. Cady, vol. 32 of A Selected Edition of W.D. Howells (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 66, 62, 66. 2. See Mark A. Lause, The Antebellum Crisis and America's First Bohemians (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2009), and Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). These books were published too recently to be taken into account in my general argument, but both offer important pictures of the largely unexamined late nineteenth-century Bohemian phenomenon, particularly Levin's, which covers more of the later nineteenth century. Both take for granted Bohemia's conventional articulation as an autonomous entity; I have argued in this study, by contrast, that the mythical autonomy of American Romantic or autonomous author figures was in the first place an important predicative factor in the paradoxically central “outsider” role these would continue to play within mass-scale entertainment systems. 3. “Pfaff's [from the New York correspondence of the Boston Saturday Express],” Saturday Press, December 3, 1859: 2. General accounts of Pfaff's are from Page 298 →Lause, Antebellum Crisis; Levin, Bohemia in America, chap. 1; Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 61–79; and Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 368–84. 4. Levin, Bohemia in America, 29. 5. Junius Henri Browne, Four Years in Secessia: Adventures Within and Beyond the Union Lines (Detroit: W. H. Davis, 1866), 14. 6. Howells, Literary Friends, 71. 7. See Stadler, Troubling Minds. Stadler argues that the category of the genius in the late nineteenth-century United States both delimited and could challenge “conventional collective categories, such as nation, race, gender, as frames of self-understanding” (xxv). My own study, by contrast, has focused on what I believe to be the lack of political content in the category of the American genius. 8. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), in Frank Norris: Novels and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1986), 817. 9. Levin, Bohemia in America, 128, 2. 10. Ita Aniol Prokop, “A Few Hours in Bohemia,” Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 17 (February 1876): 189. 11. Earl Shinn and Francis Hopkinson Smith, The Book of the Tile Club (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887), 13, qtd. in Levin, Bohemia in America, 131. 12. “Good Bohemians,” Appleton's Journal 3 (October 1877): 336. 13. Jack London, “Eight Factors of Literary Success,” The Portable Jack London, ed. Earle Labor (New York: Penguin, 1994), 512. 14. Jack London, “Again the Literary Aspirant,” Critic, September 1902, rpt. in Dale L. Walker and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, No Mentor But Myself: Jack London on Writers and Writing, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 48–49.

Page 299 →

Index Abrams, M. H., 69 Accardo, Peter X., 31 Adams, John Quincy, 63, 66, 87 Adams, Thomas Boylston, 63, 87, 275n89 Addison, Joseph, 69, 74, 96, 269n13 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 19, 158 alienation of authors, 26, 47, 60, 95; cultures of, 131–42; and Poe, 104–5, 120–21, 129, 146, 152. See also genius Allen, Michael, 281n51 Allen, Paul, 53–57, 63 Allibone, S. Austin, 263n19 Altick, Richard D., 261–62n3 amateur literary culture, 107, 157, 184–86 American canon, 16–18 The American Lounger. See Dennie, Joseph, works by American Monthly Magazine, 51, 124, 125, 154 American Renaissance, 5 Ames, Fisher, 38, 78, 265n35 Amory, Hugh, 261–62n3, 262n4 Appleton's Magazine, 253 Arthur, T. S., 215 Arthur's Home Magazine, 215, 234 Atkinson, Samuel C., 111 Atlantic Monthly, 171, 189, 228, 242, 246 Auser, Cortland P., 286n7 authorship: amateur, 184–86; as business, 79–80; and downward mobility, 119; and economic value, 184–91; and entrepreneurialism, 111–13; wages of, 113–14. See also romantic authorship; women writers

Baker, Thomas, 125, 172, 280n40, 289n67

Ballou's Pictorial-Drawing Room, 129 Baltimore Saturday Visiter, 112 Barlow, Joel, 83 Barnum, P. T., 13, 178–79, 180–81 Baudelaire, Charles, 249 Bayless, Joy, 280n42 Beecher, Catharine, 216 Beecher, Henry Ward, 179 Beers, Henry A., 172, 280n40, 286n7, 289–90n76 Benjamin, Park, 11, 18, 21, 138, 139, 140, 142, 149, 156, 246; and Brother Jonathan, 135–37, 148; on celebrity, 134; and James Fenimore Cooper, 133, 140; early life and career, 132–37; and New World, 135–36 Bennett, Andrew, 4, 16, 40 Page 300 →Bennett, James Gordon, 52, 133, 137, 138, 149, 250 Berlant, Lauren, 197, 292n5, 292n7 Beulah. See Evans, Augusta Jane Biddle, Nicholas, 271n36 Binney, Horace, 271n36 Bissell, Champion, 257n3 Blackwood's Magazine, 42, 159 Blake, William, 44 Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of, 125, 163, 173 The Blithedale Romance. See Hawthorne, Nathaniel, works by Blumin, Stuart M., 287n20, 294n38 Bohemia, New York, 248–51, 297n2 Bohemian, 2, 277n7 Bonaparte, Marie, 117 Bonner, Robert, 240 book prices, 30 Bottorff, William K., 275n101 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 4, 60, 106, 155, 180, 269n7, 277n7

Boyd, Anne E., 292n5 Brainard, John, 1–2, 117, 118–19 Briggs, Charles, 130, 284n112 The Broadway Journal, 151 Brodhead, Richard, 11, 215, 258n8, 260n23, 294n39 Brooks, Van Wyck, 286n9, 288n39 Brother Jonathan, 135–36, 148, 152 Brown, Charles Brockden, 2, 17, 53–57, 63, 83, 85, 271n36 Brown, Gillian, 155, 200, 258n8, 292n5 Brown, Richard D., 265n35 Browne, Junius Henri, 251 Buckingham, Joseph T., 93–95, 133, 274n84 Buell, Lawrence, 155, 257n7, 265n35 Buinicki, Martin T., 290n97 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 107, 124, 125, 136, 163 Burke, Edmund, 32, 270n16 Burns, Rex, 287n29 Bushman, Richard L., 294n38 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 1, 2, 15, 49, 61, 99, 100, 105, 107, 115, 116, 118, 122, 124, 157, 238, 243, 245, 246, 263n15, 267n67, 267n68, 270n15; and cheap press, 137–39, 165–66; dissemination in U.S., 31–32; in Edgar Allan Poe, 138, 139; on reprints, 32; and women writers, 193, 246–47 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, works by: Beppo, 31; English Bards, 32; The Giaour, 31–32; Hours of Idleness, 32, 64, 100; The Lament of Tasso, 51

Cahill, Edward, 48, 80, 272n55 capitalist publishing. See publishing, capitalist The Career of Puffer Hopkins, 141 Carey, Alice, 231–32 Carey, Matthew, 30 Carey & Lea, 30, 149, 152 Carlisle, David, 84

Carroll, Nöel, 12, 260n26 Casper, Scott E., 277n8 Cawelti, John G., 156, 164, 288n41, 294n35 celebrity, 13–14, 15, 20–23; in antebellum marketplace, 115–16; and Joseph Dennie, 89–98; and Fanny Fern, 210–11; as inescapable, 142–47, 284n112, and intimacy, 124–29; and Edgar Allan Poe, 125, 130, 144; as religious experience, 90, 274n8; and Nathaniel Parker Willis, 124–25, 128, 130, 150, 171–76, 246 Channing, Edward Tyrell, 40, 48, 105, 265n35 Charvat, William, 109, 155, 258n7, 261–62n3, 273n67 Chase, Richard, 257n5 Chatterton, Thomas, 38, 78, 149, 266n54; among British Romantics, 117–18; and Charles Brockden Brown, 56; in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 46; as genius, 48–49; life of, 43–44; in Port Folio, 63, 269n10; in U.S. literature, 44–47 cheap press, 5, 13–14, 18, 21–23, Page 301 →105; and employment for authors, 108–10; mammoth sheets, 134–37; penny press, 113–14, 134. See also publishing industry, antebellum; publishing industry, early national Chew, Samuel Claggett, 267n67 Child, Lydia Maria, 11, 232–34, 236; Frugal Housewife, 216, 232; Philothea, 232, 236 Christensen, Jerome, 267n67 civil society, 54. See also public sphere Clapp, Henry Jr., 248 Clapp, William Warland Jr., 269n9 Clare, Ada, 249 Clark, D. W., 295n57, 296n60 Clark, Willis Gaylord, 127, 139 Clarke, McDonald, 142 Clay, Henry, 164, 181 Cloud, C. F., 112 Cohen, Patricia Cline, 268n73, 283n87 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 32, 44, 78, 245; “Monody on the Death of Chatteron,” 46–47, 49 Cooper, James Fenimore, 2, 156; The American Democrat, 141; on authorship, 119; and Park Benjamin, 133, 148; as eccentric, 139–40, 141; productivity of, 150–51; and Whigs, 282n78 copyright, U.S.: absence of, 28–29; Act of 1790, 29, 261n3; arguments over, 186–92; and authorship, 181–82. See also reprint industry The Corsair, 138

Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, 291–92n4, 296n66 Cowper, William, 64 Curiosities of American Literature, 96 Curiosities of Literature. See D'Israeli, Isaac Cummins, Maria, 195 Currie, Gregory, 12, 260n24 Curtis, George William, 158

Dana, Richard Henry, Sr., 62, 99 Daniel, John Moncure, 174 Daughrity, Kenneth L., 281n54, 289n73 Davidson, Cathy, 212, 261–62n3 Davis, John, 62, 78, 85, 89, 98 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 242, 254 Day, Benjamin, 113, 134, 135, 149 Dekker, George, 284n101 The Democratic Review, 224 Dennie, Joseph, 2, 18, 20–21, 46, 55, 109, 116, 154, 156, 158, 162, 271n36; and alienation, 95; as Anglophile, 59–60; as Atlantic citizen, 60; as celebrity, 15, 90, 97–98; as colonial, 59–60; earnings of, 84–85; as eccentric, 90–99; on eccentricity, 65; and Federalism, 87; on fiction, 65; and idle man, 61, 68–79, 89–99; and Washington Irving, 97, 99; life of, 62–63; and lounger, 61, 90; and money, 59, 88–89, 113, 273n74; as professional author, 62, 80–81; as trickster, 96; Tuesday Club, 76–77; in Walpole, 86; and wealth acquisition, 81–83 Dennie, Joseph, works by: American Lounger, 61, 64, 67, 70–79, 80, 271n34; Colon and Spondee, 84; Farmer's Weekly Museum, 69, 84, 86–87, 91, 93; Farrago, 61, 64, 68–69, 70, 74, 79, 84, 88, 93; Lay Preacher, 61, 64, 66, 68–70, 74, 79, 85, 88, 93, 94; Port Folio (see The Port Folio); The Tablet, 84, 88 Dickens, Charles, 11, 135, 169 Dickinson, Emily, 17 D'Israeli, Benjamin, 125, 163 D'Israeli, Isaac, 32, 34, 42–43, 64, 78, 264n26; Curiosities of Literature, 42; “Poverty of the Learned,” 42–43, 44, 266n51 domestic sphere: and advice literature, 199, 216; as aesthetic space, 23–24, 213–14, 221–23; and entertainment literature, 196, 217–18; in Fanny Fern, 199–206; and women writers, 194, 223–24 D'Orsay, Count, 125, 163

Page 302 →Douglas, Ann, 169, 171, 292n5 Dowling, William, 60, 80, 272n55 Duff, William, 33 Duganne, A. J. H., 148, 163, 166, 284n103 Dumont, Julia, 231 Dunlap, William, 53, 55–57, 63 Dunn, John, 271n36 Durey, Michael, 268–69n5 Dwight, John Sullivan, 295n50 Dwight, Timothy, 63, 80, 96

eccentric author: as Bohemian, 248–51; and cheap press, 137–42; in early national periodicals, 26; economy of, 150–52; as entertainment, 8; as extreme, 36, 47–50, 62, 68; as high culture figure, 3; and labor, 150–51, 176–77, 253; mockery of, 165–66; as mythology, 5, 8–9, 16; as personality, 13; as political construct, 3, 5, 7; and politics, 7–8; and poverty, 42–43, 108–14, 254; and provincial culture, 20, 27–28; in U.S., 118; and value, 101–2, 186–92; and women writers, 23. See also romantic authorship editorial labor, 281n49 Eddy, T. M., 295n58 Edwards, Jonathan, 29 Elfenbein, Andrew, 263n21, 264n30 Eliot, J. H., 296n70 Ellis, Harold Milton, 269n9, 273n73 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17, 154, 189, 245 Engell, James, 263n21 entertainment: definition of, 10–14; and domesticity, 212–23: and eccentric author, 48–50, 53, 252–54; and women writers, 238–40 entrepreneur, 178–81 entrepreneurial culture, 22, 156–57, 160, 164–65, 210 Evans, Augusta Jane, 2, 24, 243–46 The Evening Mirror, 158, 159, 286n7 Ewing, Samuel, 271n36

A Fable for Critics. See Lowell, James Russell Farmer, P., “Labor,” 234–36 The Farmer's Weekly Museum. See Dennie, Joseph, works by The Farrago. See Dennie, Joseph, works by Fay, Theodore S., 126 Feidelson, Charles, 257n5 Ferguson, Alfred R., 285n3 Ferguson, Robert A., 280n34 Fern, Fanny (Sara Payson Willis Parton), 2, 13, 18, 174, 195; and celebrity, 211, 239; and culture industry, 204–5; and domesticity, 198–203, 202–3, 234, 242; earnings of, 211; and entrepreneurialism, 202, 206; and female genius, 207–9; and gender role reversal, 203–5; and labor, 210; on separate spheres, 201; and true womanhood, 206–9, 242; and N. P. Willis, 174, 197, 205, 241, 278n20, 289–90n76, 293n26 Fern, Fanny (Sara Payson Willis Parton), works by: “The Modern Old Maid,” 206; “Our Hatty,” 207–8, 209; “A Practical Bluestocking,” 207, 225, 236; Ruth Hall, 174, 200, 201–2, 209, 210, 230, 243 Ferris, Ina, 266n50 Fessenden, Thomas Green, 63 Fiedler, Leslie, 257n5 Fink, Steven, 258n7 flaneur, 10, 159, 194 flash press, 137–38, 250 Forester, Fanny (Emily Chubbuck Judson), 158, 162, 205 Foster, George C., 122, 129, 149 Foucault, Michel, 258n8 Franklin, Benjamin, 14, 20, 29; and Joseph Dennie, 66, 68, 70, 78, 88, 89; and myth of self-making, 158 Fuller, Hiram, 143 Fuller, Margaret, 149

Page 303 →Galt, John, 163 Gardette, Charles D., 249 Gautier, Théophile, 249 gender role reversal, 242–43

genius: in the ancient world, 38, 39; and domesticity, 194–96; in early national poetry, 34; and eccentricity, 10; as fiction, 48–50; as foreign, 39, 50; in France and England, 38; history of, in Britain, 33, 263n21, 264n30; history of, in U.S., 33–34, 66, 264n33; and imagination, 33; and invisible labor, 165–66; lack of, in U.S., 37–40; misery of, 34, 38–39, 44–45, 114, 142, 243; neglect of, 43; persecution of, 34; post–Civil War, 252; and transcendence, 157; and women writers, 193–94, 208–9, 224–25 “Genius” (poem), 49 genteel entertainment, 213–18, 215–16 genteel tradition, 158 Gerard, Alexander, 33 German Romanticism, 75 Giles, Paul, 259n16, 264n33, 268–69n5 Gilfoyle, Timothy J., 283n87 Gilmore, Michael T., 155, 257n7, 277n10 Gilmore, William J., 82, 262n7, 263n20 Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, 215 Gleason's Publishing Hall, 152 Godey, Louis, 151 Godey's Lady's Book, 113, 143, 163, 215, 217, 239 Godwin, William, 159 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang van, 32, 75 Goldsmith, Oliver, 38, 64 Goodrich, Samuel Griswold, 1, 50–51, 117–19, 172, 263n19, 279n22, 286n7 Graham, George Rex, 103 Graham's Magazine, 110, 121, 147, 171 Granger, Bruce, 270n17 Gravil, Richard, 264n33 The Great Awakening, 41 Greeley, Horace, 133, 135, 138, 143, 149, 250 Greenspan, Ezra, 294n41 Greenwood, Grace (Sara Jane Lippincott), 158, 169, 195, 205, 243; on genius, 193–94; Greenwood Leaves, 167, 246 Greenwood Leaves. See Greenwood, Grace

Gregory, James, 264n26 Griswold, Rufus, 21, 132, 156; and Park Benjamin, 135; career, 121; celebrity of, 129–30; compulsiveness, 143, 150; early life, 121–22; end of career, 147; as jobber, 143; and labor, 281n49; and Edgar Allan Poe, 103, 149, 151; power of, 18, 19; and publishing scene, 149 Griswold, Rufus, works by: Curiosities of American Literature, 96; Female Poets and Poetry of America, 224, 229–30; Poets and Poetry of America, 121, 129 Grossman, James, 282n78

Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 4, 258n8, 261n2 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 230–31 Hall, David D., 261–62n3 Hall, John Elihu, 271n36 Hall, Sarah, 271n36 Harper & Brothers, 149, 152, 277–78n11 Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 215, 250, 251 Harris, Neil, 260n27 Harris, Susan K., 292n5 Hart, James D., 288n54 Haven, David, 284n108 Hawley, Michelle, 297n77 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 2, 259n16; and domestic sphere, 222–23; as eccentric writer, 6, 17, 189; and entertainment, 222–23; as feminine, 242; and idle man, 62, 99–100, Page 304 →155, 166–67, 191; in publishing scene, 18, 19, 149, 169; salary as editor, 114; and scribbling women, 241 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, works by: “The Birthmark,” 222; The Blithedale Romance, 99–100; “The Old Manse,” 167, 189; The Scarlet Letter, 223; Twice-Told Tales, 166–67 Hayes, Kevin J., 276n5 Hayley, William, 45, 49 Hayward, Edward, 171 Helmut, Lehmann-Haupt, 261–62n3 Hemenway, Robert E., 54 Hendler, Glenn, 287n31 Hentz, Caroline Lee, 239

Herbert, Henry W., 251 Higgins, David, 263n21 Higginson, Thomas, 189 Hillard, George, 130 Hirst, Henry Beck, 104 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 139 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 128, 159 home, 23; and art, 222–23; and imagination, 221–23; literature of, 212–18 The Home Journal, 158, 162, 174, 176, 185–86, 215, 286n7, 289n74 Homes of American Authors, review of, 187–89 Homestead, Melissa J., 291n4 Hoover, Merle M., 282n75 Hopkinson, Emily, 271n36 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, 283n87 House and Home Papers. See Stowe, Harriet Beecher Howe, M. A. DeWolfe, 287n30 Howells, William Dean, 248, 251, 297–98n3 Hudson, Frederic, 136, 283n81

idle man, 62, 64, 68–70; in antebellum era, 99–100, 154–57; in Richard Henry Dana Sr., 99; in Joseph Dennie, 61, 62, 69–79; in Grace Greenwood, 167; in Nathaniel Hawthorne, 99–100, 166–67, 191; in Washington Irving, 99–100; in Donald Grant Mitchell, 167; in Nathaniel Parker Willis, 170–71; and work ethic, 155. See also idleness; lounger idleness: as consolation, 166–69; history of, 63–67, 269n13; as marketplace structure, 168–70; as metaphor, 66; as symbolic capital, 155–56 “Idleness” (poem). See Willis, Nathaniel Parker, works by imagination, 48, 218–23 Ingersoll, Edward, 38, 78 intellectual property. See copyright, U.S. Irving, Washington, 2, 22, 62, 97, 101, 107, 153, 158, 167, 236n15; as agent, 31; and Joseph Dennie, 197–99; earnings, 117; and eccentric author, 100; as idle man, 99–100 Irving, Washington, works by: Salmagundi, 97, 159; The Sketch Book, 99–100, 109, 276n107

Iser, Wolfgang, 12, 260n25

Jackson, Leon, 6–7, 19, 25, 109, 155, 261n2, 277n10 Jaffee, David, 65, 86 Jaher, Frederic Cople, 160 James, Henry, 158 J. B. Lippincott, 152 Jewett, Helen, 52, 137 Johnson, Samuel, 38 Johnston, Larry, 284n101 Jones, W. A., 224, 295n49 Jordan, Sarah, 269–70n13 Junkin, Margaret, 225–27, 228

Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 270n16 Kant, Immanuel, 32, 33 Kaplan, Amy, 292n5 Kaplan, Catherine O'Donnell, 26, 74, 85, 86, 95, 109, 261n2, 265n35 Katz, Joseph, 54 Page 305 →Keats, John, 40–41, 44 Kelley, Mary, 292n5, 296n66 Kelly, Linda, 266n53 Kennedy, J. Gerald, 282n71 Kerber, Linda K., 263n19, 275n89 Kirkland, Caroline, 19, 158, 195, 217, 221 The Knickerbocker, 127, 241, 251

Lacan, Jacques, 117, 142, 284n109 The Ladies' Repository, 198, 221; on women writers, 230–32

The Lament of Tasso. See Byron, George Gordon, Lord, works by Landor, Walter Savage, 163 Langstaff, Launcelot, 97, 99 Lause, Mark A., 248, 297–98n3 Lawrence, George, 290n93 The Lay Preacher. See Dennie, Joseph, works by Leary, Lewis, 269n3 Lehuu, Isabelle, 260n27 leisure. See idleness Leonard, William Ellery, 262n11 letters, 11–12 Leverenz, David, 257n7 Levin, Harry, 257n5 Levin, Joanna, 248, 252, 297n3 Lewis, R. W. B., 257n5 Linn, John Blair, 33, 54–55, 63 Lippard, George, 139, 141 Literary Leisure or, the Recreations of Samuel Saunters, Esq., 71 The Literary Wife, 227–28 Literati. See Poe, Edgar Allan, works by Lockhart, John, 163, 173 London, April, 42, 266n50 London, Jack, 254, 255–56 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 124, 130, 165–66, 166–67, 189, 278n13, 285n116 Lott, Eric, 260n27 Loughran, Trish, 26, 258n15, 261n2 lounger, 14, 20; in Joseph Dennie, 61, 68–78; early national, 154; in Washington Irving, 49, 97; in Henry Mackenzie, 71–72 The Lounger, 64, 71–72 Lowell, James Russell, 19, 158, 163, 242

Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, 249

Mackenzie, Henry, 64, 71–72 Marchand, Leslie A., 263n17 Marryat, Frederick, 31, 173 Marshall, David, 270n16 Martin, J. L., 138 Mason, Jeremiah, 86, 93 Mathews, Cornelius, 141 Matthiessen, F. O., 257n5 May, Caroline, 241 Mayer, Brantz, 289n75 Mayer, J. P., 290n93 McGill, Meredith, 6, 7, 19, 26, 35, 109, 181, 259n16, 262n2, 264n33, 276n5, 277n10, 290n97 McTaggart, William J., 275n101 “The Mechanic's Wife,” 164–65 Mellow, James R., 279n25 Melville, Herman, 17, 62, 284n112; Moby Dick, 141; Pierre, 141, 191 Meredith, Gertrude, 80, 271n36 Merish, Lori, 206, 208, 293n27 Miller, Douglas T., 286n18 Miller, Perry, 282n75, 284n112 Milton, John, 43, 190 Mitchell, Donald Grant, 62, 99, 158, 169, 242; Reveries of a Bachelor, 167 Moby Dick. See Melville, Herman Mole, Tom, 274n88 “Monody on the Death of Chatterton.” See Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Monthly Anthology, 35 Moore, Thomas, 125, 163

Moral War, 134 More, Hannah, 50 Morris, George P., 125, 134, 286n7 Morton, Sarah Wentworth, 63 Moss, Sidney P., 281n58 Mott, Frank Luther, 262n3, 277n8 Murray, John, 31, 276n107 Murray, Susan, 279n29 My Life. See Thompson, George

Page 306 →Neal, John, 11, 109, 113, 139 Neuberg, Victor, 262n7 Newbury, Michael, 155, 258n7, 279n28 The New England Galaxy, 31, 92, 262n14 The New England Magazine, 18, 133, 138, 149 The New World, 18, 135–37, 142, 148, 152, 250. See also Benjamin, Park New York by Gas-Light, 122 The New York Commercial Advertiser, 127 The New Yorker, 128, 133 The New York Herald, 52, 133, 134, 250 New York in Slices, 129 The New York Ledger, 211, 215 The New York Magazine, 34, 42, 44 The New-York Mirror (also called The Evening Mirror), 19, 121, 125, 126, 127, 158, 163, 173, 177, 286n7 New York Naked, 122 The New York Sun, 113 The New York Times, 250 The New York Tribune, 250 Nord, David Paul, 262n7

Norman Leslie, review of. See Poe, Edgar Allan, works by Norris, Frank, 252, 298n8 North, William, 251 The North American Review, 40, 172, 189

Okker, Patricia, 291n4 “The Old Manse.” See Hawthorne, Nathaniel, works by Olwell, Victoria, 243, 296n74 Osborn, Laughton, 140, 141 Osgoode, Frances, 121 Ostrom, John Ward, 114, 279n26, 285n125 Otway, Thomas, 38, 43 Ouellette, Laurie, 279n29 Owenson, Sydney, Lady Morgan, 159, 286n15

Paine, Robert Treat, Jr., 83, 85 Parker, Hershel, 284n104 Parnassus in Pillory. See Duganne, A. J. H. Parrington, Vernon Louis, 96, 117 Parton, James, 158, 176, 289n75 Parton, Sara Payson Willis. See Fern, Fanny, works by Pattee, Lewis, 158, 171, 176, 287n20 Paulding, James Kirke, 99, 159 Peck, Jesse T., 293n9 Pelham, 124 Pencillings By the Way. See Willis, Nathaniel Parker, works by Percival, James Gates, 1–2, 114 Pessen, Edward, 286n18 Peters, Richard, Jr., 271n36

Peterson, Henry, 239–40 Peterson's Magazine, 215 Pfaff's Cellar, 248–49, 251 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 231, 236–37 The Philadelphia Pursuist of Literature, 89, 98. See also Davis, John Philothea. See Child, Lydia Maria Pickering, Timothy, 85, 93, 98 Pierre. See Melville, Herman Pitt, C. I., 264n27 Poe, Edgar Allan, 2, 13, 21–22, 156, 158, 172, 174, 176, 250; in American canon, 17; antisocial persona, 124, 126–28; in Beulah, 244–46; and Byron, 138, 139; and celebrity, 125, 130, 144; in critical tradition, 116–17; decline, 130–31; early life, 119; and genius, 116; Longfellow War, 130, 133; obituary notices of, 103–4; as professional author, 120; in psychoanalysis, 117; Saturday Museum biography, 129; trials of authorship, 123–24; on Nathaniel Parker Willis, 129 Poe, Edgar Allan, works by: “Alone,” 25; “Berenice,” 125–26; Drake-Halleck review, 281n59; “Duc D'Om-lette,” 125; Literati, 129, 143; Norman Leslie review of, 126–27, 128; “The Raven,” 121, 145; “Some Passages in the Life of a Lion,” 125; “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” 123 Page 307 →The Poets and Poetry of America. See Griswold, Rufus, works by Poirier, Richard, 3, 257n5 Pope, Alexander, 245 Porte, Joel, 257n5 Porter, W. O., 286n7 The Port Folio: and Adams family, 87; and Byron, 64; and Thomas Chatterton, 46–47, 48, 63; and elite culture, 74, 96; founding of, 63, 85; and Washington Irving, 97; “Prospectus” for, 88–89; and Tuesday Club, 76–77; See also Dennie, Joseph “Poverty of the Learned,” See D'Israeli, Isaac The Present State of Polite Learning, 39 print explosion, antebellum, 107–10, 134–35, 156 Prokop, Ita Aniol, 298n10 public sphere, 19, 53, 109, 258–59n15, 261n2 publishing, capitalist, 21; in antebellum era, 104, 105–9; in early national era, 82–84. See also publishing industry, antebellum; publishing industry, early national; reprint industry publishing industry, antebellum: and eccentricity, 131–42; genteel market, 238; in late 1850s, 249–50; segmentation, 152; sensational journalism, 52, 124–30, 131–42

publishing industry, early national: and coterie authorship, 87–88; profits, 109; reprint industry, 29–30; speculation in, 82–84; and viral networks, 82–84 Putnam, George Palmer, 215 Putnam's Monthly Magazine, 187, 215, 242, 250

Quacks of Helicon. See Wilmer, Lambert A. Quincy, Josiah, 92–93, 95 Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 280n35

Rachman, Stephen, 117, 276n5 Raguet, Condy, 271n36 Randall, Randolph C., 271n36 Rauch, Basil, 286n13 Raven, James, 261–62n3, 262n5 Raymond, Henry, 250 reality (as genre), 12, 116, 279n29 Remer, Rosalind, 82, 272n53, 273n64 reprint industry, 29–30, 109–10 Reveries of a Bachelor. See Mitchell, Donald Grant Reynolds, David S., 260n27, 296n67 Rice, Grantland, 19, 35, 258n8, 290n97 Richardson, John, 17 Rigal, Laura, 60, 73 Rischin, Moses, 290n90 Roach, Joseph, 15, 260n30, 274n88 Robinson, Solon, 216 Rojek, Chris, 90, 274n88 romantic aesthetic theory, 69–70 romantic authorship: as apparitional, 40–41, in Britain and Europe, 60, 68, 96, 117–18; and Charles Brockden Brown, 153–57; changes in, 249–50; and Joseph Dennie, 63, 64, 90–99; as foreign to the U.S., 47; and modernization, 104–5; and Edgar Allan Poe, 137–38, 139; post–Civil War, 252–54; theories of, 4; as transatlantic,

259n16, 264n33; and Nathaniel Parker Willis, 124, 138, 159–60; and women, 193–94, 243–47; in U.S., 5, 26–27, 47, 61, 114–16. See also genius Romero, Lora, 200, 296n67 Rose, Mark, 264n30 Rose, Robert H., 271n36 Rosenheim, Shawn, 117, 276n5 Rush, Richard, 271n36 Ruth Hall. See Fern, Fanny, works by Ruttenburg, Nancy, 41

Sadleir, Michael, 287n31 Salem witch trials, 41 Salmagundi. See Irving, Washington, works by Page 308 →Samuel Saunter. See Dennie, Joseph, works by: American Lounger Sand, George, 193 Santayana, George, 158 Sartain's Union Magazine, 215, 217, 225 Saturday Evening Post, 111, 113, 239 The Saturday Press, 249, 251, 252 Saxton, Alexander, 260n27 The Scarlett Letter. See Hawthorne, Nathaniel, works by Schiller, Friedrich, 75, 190 Scott, Walter, 30, 50, 107, 190 Scudder, Harold H., 287n32 self-made man, 22, 156, 164–65 Sellers, Charles, 108, 154, 277n10 separate spheres, 198–99. See also domestic sphere Sergeant, Thomas, 271n36 Shapiro, Stephen, 259n16, 272n53

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11, 32, 44, 190, 245 Shields, David S., 14, 19, 26, 48, 261n2 Shinn, Earl, 298n11 Silver, Rollo G., 261–62n3 Silverman, Kenneth, 120, 125, 281n49, 281n53 Simms, William Gilmore, 141 The Sketch Book. See Irving, Washington, works by Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 63 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 129 Smith, Francis Hopkinson, 298n11 Smith, Henry Nash, 169 Smith, James, 163 Snelling, William Joseph, 138, 149, 173, 289n71 Sofer, Naomi, 23, 193, 243, 261n35, 296n74 “Some Passages in the Life of a Lion.” See Poe, Edgar Allan, works by The Southern Literary Messenger, 114 Southey, Robert, 46, 47, 245 Southworth, E. D. E. N., 195, 239 The Spectator, 64, 68, 73, 74 Spiller, Robert E., 285n3 Springer, Haskell, 276n107 St. Clair, William, 16, 30, 261n3, 262n5, 262n6, 262n8, 262n11 Stadler, Gustavus, 252, 295n50, 298n7 Stephens, Ann, 239 Stern, Madeline B., 285n126 Sterne, Laurence, 64, 70 Stewart, David M., 168, 288n52 Stock, John Edmonds, 271n36 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 158, 249

Stone, Colonel William L., 127, 140, 141, 149 Story, Ronald, 265n35, 286n18 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 23, 155, 195, 199, 295n55; House and Home Papers, 228, 261n36; “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life,” 246; Uncle Tom's Cabin, 221 Streeby, Shelly, 260n27 Sumner, Charles, 130 The Sun, 134 Sutcliffe, Denham, 291n106 symbolic capital, 155–56

The Tablet. See Dennie, Joseph, works by Taylor, Bayard, 19, 158, 249 T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 152 Tebbel, John, 138, 261n3, 277n8, 278n19, 283n93 Tenger, Zeynep, 33, 263n21 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 259n16, 264–65n33, 269n6 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 173, 287n32 Thomas, Moses, 31, 263n15 Thompson, George, 18, 167 Thoreau, Henry David, 17 Ticknor, George, 32 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 179–80 Todd, Charles Burr, 273n65 Todd, John, 52 The Token, 18 Tomc, Sandra, 287n31 Town and Country, 158, 159, 162 Trolander, Paul, 33, 263n21 Page 309 →Trollope, Anthony, 259n16 “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life.” See Stowe, Harriet Beecher

true womanhood: and art, 224–29; and Fanny Fern, 202–3; paradox of, 229–32; representation of, 198–99; as structure of authorship, 196, 213–14, 237–38, 240, 241, 242; and woman artist, 224–29 Tuesday Club, 14 Turnovsky, Geoffrey, 16 Twice-Told Tales. See Hawthorne, Nathaniel, works by Tyler, Royall, 63, 65, 66, 84, 92, 94

Uncle Tom's Cabin. See Stowe, Harriet Beecher The United States Literary Gazette, 119

Vanity Fair, 251 Veblen, Thorstein, 170 The Vision of Rubeta, 140, 141 The Voice of Industry, 168

Wadsworth, Sarah, 285n126 Walpole, Horace, 44 Walsh, Robert, 271n36 Waples, Dorothy, 282n78 Ward, Artemus, 249 Warner, Michael, 11, 26, 258n8, 258n15, 261n2 Warner, Susan, 169, 195 Warren, Joyce W., 278–79n20, 289n76, 293n8 Waterman, Bryan, 268n83 Watts, Stephen, 268n83 Webb, James Watson, 134, 140 Webster, Noah, 259n17 Weed, Thurlow, 139 Weinstein, Cindy, 155, 257n7, 285n5 Weisbuch, Robert, 264n33

Whalen, Terence, 104 Whipple, E. P., 3, 189–91 White, T. H., 125 Whitefield, George, 41 Whitman, Walt, 17, 142, 248, 249, 250, 284n108 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 75 Wilkes, Wood, 271n23 William, Stanley T., 275n102 William, Susan S., 237, 243, 277–78n11, 291n4, 292n5, 296–97n74 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 2, 13, 21, 22, 99, 103, 156; on authors' pay, 278n20; and business, 177; and Byron, 138, 139; celebrity of, 124–25, 128, 130, 150, 171–76, 246; and consumer culture, 161–62; and copyright, 181–82; early life, 162–63; end of career, 147; as entrepreneur, 156; in Europe, 125, 162–63; failure of, 171–76; and Fanny Fern, 197, 205, 211; as genteel author, 157–58; as idle man, 62, 159–60, 170–71; and leisure, 170–71; on literary success, 164, 182–84; as middle class, 287n20;, and modern critics, 191–92; and money, 177; paradox of success of, 170–71; and Edgar Allan Poe, 120–21, 126, 130; and profligacy, 143, 174, 289n75; and upward mobility, 158, 160–64, 287n29; and work, 176–78 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, works by: Dashes at Life, 175; Famous Persons and Places, 177, 290n85; Home Journal, 158, 162, 174, 176, 185–86, 215, 286n7, 289n74; “Idleness,” 160; Loiterings of Travel, 175; Mirror Journals, 286n7; Paul Fane, 158, 175; Pencillings By the Way, 163, 174, 175; “Phantom-Head Upon the Table,” 175; Rag-bag, 290n87; Rural Letters, 291n101 Wills, Elizabeth Carter, 262n6 Wilmer, Lambert A., 150, 156, 284n105; as professional author, 110–13; Quacks of Helicon, 141 Winship, Michael, 278n13 Wirt, William, 119 Wolstenholme, Susan, 297n77 Page 310 →women writers: as “angels,” 225, 227, 229, 236–37; as artists, 214, 224–28; and celebrity, 239; and “complaint,” 197–98, 292n7; and drudgery, 230–32, 240–41; as exiles, 214, 223–24; and genius, 193–94; numerousness of, 240–41, 296n67; professionalization of, 195, 198, 210–11, 238–40 Woodmansee, Martha, 269n13 Wordsworth, William, 32, 44, 64 Wright, Lyle H., 296n67 Wroth, Lawrence C., 261–62n3 Wyllie, Irvin, 22, 179, 288n40, 294n35

Young, Edward, 40

Zboray, Ronald, and Mary Saracino Zboray, 6, 19, 155, 184–85, 277n8, 277n9, 277n10, 278n17; Everyday Ideas, 294n41