Abstract
If we were to borrow a metaphor from Henry James and imagine American literature as a “house of fiction,” we might see a newspaper on the front step. Journalism was in the air in the nineteenth century, and authors put newspapers everywhere else. Readers of antebellum fiction and poetry would have found newspapers in a variety of places—in the lap of Poe’s narrator in “The Man of the Crowd,” in a volume in Hawthorne’s sketch “Old News,” in the living rooms of Senator Bird and Augustine St. Clair in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the welcoming hands of a “Snow-Bound” family in Whittier’s famous poem. Journalists are here, as well, appearing in works ranging from Cooper’s Home As Found to Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills.”
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Notes
David Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 94.
Sandor Farkas, Journey in North America, 1831, trans. Arpad Kadarkay (Santa Barbara: American Bibliographic Center— Clio Press, 1978), 165.
For discussions of images in antebellum newspapers, see James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 34.
William E. Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833–1865 (The History of American Journalism) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 54.
Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 203; colophon from Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot, August 30, 1820.
Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6–12; Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14.
Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Literati of New York City,”, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R Thompson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 1214. In his profile of Richard Adams Locke, where this remark appears, Poe goes on to call the advent of the penny press “one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress” (1221). One must wonder how sincere Poe was in this encomium on the penny press. As we will see, he mocked the mass media elsewhere.
Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 140, 144, 114; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press, 37; Mott, American Journalism, 303.
Bennett is quoted in Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 53.
Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 16; “The Newspaper and Periodical Press,” Southern Quarterly Review 1 (January 1842): 8–9. See also Leonard, News for All, 19.
Leonard, News for All, xi, 13, 117–20; Mackay is quoted in Zboray, A Fictive People, 128–29; Samuel Bowles, February 3, 1855 article, in Interpretations of Journalism, ed. Frank Luther Mott and Ralph D. Casey (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1937), 115.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 10, 1847–1848, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973), 353.
Nord, Communities of Journalism, 2–3; Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 48–57; Schiller, Objectivity and the News, 76.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Old News,”, Tales and Sketches (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 251.
Stowe is quoted in E. Bruce Kirkham, The Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 36.
David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255, 171.
Robert J. Scholnick, “‘the Ultraism of the Day’ Greene’s Boston Post, Hawthorne, Fuller, Melville, Stowe, and Literary Journalism in Antebellum America,” American Periodicals 18 (2008): 166; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield,”, Tales and Sketches, 290–91, 298.
Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 276, 171, 310, 231; Edgar Allan Poe, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 65, 125, 361.
Jack L. Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 128, 134, 140.
Dickinson, L 133, autumn 1853, in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1986), 264.
George Frisbie Whicher, This Was a Poet (Philadelphia: Dufour, 1952), 170.
Karen Dandurand, “Dickinson and the Public,”, Dickinson and Audience, ed. Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 256–57.
See also The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Vol. 3, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), 965–66, and Dickinson’s L908, in which she writes, “I wish I could find the Warrington Words, but during my weeks of faintness, my Treasures were misplaced, and I cannot find them …” (828). In a note accompanying Poem 1396 (“She Laid Her Docile Crescent Down”), Johnson writes, “In the upper corners of this copy ED pasted two cuttings from newspapers: at the left a star and crescent, and at the right tombstones slanting against another. The tombstone illustration is a clipping from the Hampshire and Eranklin Express of 12 December 1856. … The disparity in the date of the clipping and the poem leads one to conjecture that she kept a scrapbook or a file of items which to her were meaningful.”
Joan Kirkby, “Dickinson Reading,” Emily Dickinson Journal 5 (Fall 1996): 253; Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 130, 138.
Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 2:466, 473.
Leonard, News for All, 93–100. See, for example, the letters dated April 3, 1848, and April 17, 1848, in The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 217–19.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 11, 1848–1851, ed. A. W Plumstead and William H. Gilman (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), 268; Vol. 14, 1854–1861, ed. Susan Sutton Smith and Harrison Hayford (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 32; Vol. 8, 1841–1843, ed. William H. Gilman and J. E. Parsons (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), 483, 499, 517n; Vol. 13, 1852–1855, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 16; Vol. 10, 1847–1848, 157; Vol. 9, 1843–1847, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 371.
Kirkham, The Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 43, 45; Stowe to Henry Ward Beecher, February 1, 1851, in The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader, ed. Joan D. Hedrick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 65.
Rebecca Harding Davis, Bits of Gossip (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), 1.
Cooper to Horatio Hastings Weld, April 4–8(?), 1842, in The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), 4: 269, 274.
Stephen Railton, Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 225–31.
Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “Introduction,”, Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed., Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xx.
Parker and Hayford, note in the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (New York: W. W Norton, 2002), 57.
Dana, review of Typee, West Roxbury (Mass.) Harbinger, April 4, 1846, rpt. in Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 39–40; Dana’s observation about the newspaper’s serving as a “daily photograph” is quoted in Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 217; review of Typee, New York Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, April 17, 1846, rpt. in Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 46–47; H. C., review of Typee, New York Evangelist, April 9, 1846, rpt. in ibid., 46; review of Typee, Christian Parlor Magazine, July 1846, rpt, in ibid., 52, 57; review of Moby-Dick, New York Independent, November 20, 1851, rpt. in ibid., 380.
Ronald Weber, Hired Pens: Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997).
Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
Michael Robertson, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Edgar M. Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (New York: Russell & Russell, 1950).
Joseph J. Kwiat, “The Newspaper Experience: Crane, Norris, and Dreiser,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 8 (September 1953): 99–117.
Nancy Warner Barrineau, “Introduction” to Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xv–xl.
Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 484.
Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves, “American Women Writers and the Periodical: Creating a Constituency, Opening a Dialogue,” in “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers & The Periodical, 1837–1916, ed. Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 3.
Greeley is quoted in Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 134.
Tucker is quoted in Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 81.
James Boylan, “William Cullen Bryant,”, American Newspaper Journalists, 1690–1872 (Detroit: Gale, 1985), 83, 85.
William Cullen Bryant, “How Abolitionists Are Made,”, Power for Sanity: Selected Editorials of William Cullen Bryant, 1829–1861, ed. William Cullen Bryant II (New York: Fordham University, 1994), 23.
Bryant is quoted in Curtiss S. Johnson, Politics and a Belly-full: The Journalistic Career of William Cullen Bryant (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1962), 87.
John Lent, “Edgar Allan Poe,”, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 73 (Detroit: The Gale Group, 1988), 235–51; Poe to Frederick W Thomas, July 4, 1841, in The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 172; Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses, 80.
Robert D Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 131.
Cane and Alves, “American Women Writers and the Periodical,” 1; Fanny Fern (Sara Willis), Ruth Hall, in Ruth Hall and Other Writings, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 115; Joyce W. Warren, “Introduction,” in ibid., xi–xx.
Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 24–25.
Rebecca Harding Davis, “The Yares of Black Mountain,”, A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, ed. Jean Pfaelzer (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 295; Davis to James Fields, March 10(?), 1861, MSS 6109, University of Virginia Libraries; Davis to James Fields, October 25, 1861, MSS 6109, University of Virginia Libraries; Davis, “Women in Literature,”, Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, 402.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in Slave Narratives (New York: Literary Classics of the United States), 362; Douglass, “Our Paper and Its Prospects,” Dec. 3, 1847, The Papers of Frederick Douglass, Container 21, Reel 13, Library of Congress; Wilson J. Moses, “Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing,”, Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 80; Douglass, “Hints on Journalism,” The Papers of Frederick Douglass, Container 32, Reel 20, Library of Congress.
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© 2011 Mark Canada
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Canada, M. (2011). Encounters with the News. In: Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118591_3
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