Here in raw, undigested (i.e. with spelling and grammar errors intact) form are some of the notes I've used to form my thinking for this course. These notes are culled from a variety of previous projects, all with the aim of helping me understand American literature.

I include them for two reasons: to show the kind of material that goes into developing a course and to offer a view of the age. You'll note that most of these quotes are from period sources, and thus represent the voices of those who lived through the times.

I've grouped them roughly into parts which correspond to the course, but there is much overlapping. Some of these notes are included in the lesson plans -- but most are not. Consider this a grab bag of ideas, and a place to dive into -- though be sure you're wearing your life preserver.

First a few facts, and then the real magilla'.

Facts

Bode, Carl. The Anatomy of American Popular Culture. 1840-1861. Berkeley: U of California P, 1959.

Reformers of the period: Theodore Parker (slums); Dorothea Dix (Prisons, insane); John Gough (Temperance); Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison (abolition). (Bode)

on newspapers: "IN 1840 there were an estimated 138 dailies; in 1850, 254; and in 1860, 372. Similarly, in 1840 a count showed 1,266 weeklies; in 1850, 2,048; and in 1860, 2,971. (Bode)

Zboray, Ronald J. "Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation." Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson. Baltimore: John Hopikins UP, 1989.

"Technological change in printing did not . . . lower the price of books" (but he later asserts it did for foreign authors) . . . . The overconcentration on innovations in printing to explain teh growth of the antebellum reading public ignores the imporatnce of other technologies of the reading experience" including railroad for both reading time and distribution of texts, lighting and "the availbility of corrective eyeglasses" (Zboray 182)

After discussing the price of books -- hardcovers amounted to a day's wage for men ($1) and four days wages for women (.25) (and even paperbacks averaged .50) -- notes that "[t]hose few books that could be bought -- those appearing in twelve-cent [paperback] editions -- were usually novels by foreign authors" (Zboray 190-191)

Kelly, Karol L. Models for the Multitudes: Social Values in the American Popular Novel, 1850-1920. New York: Greewood Press, 1987.

Periods 1 (1850-1869); II (1870-1899); III (1900 +)

"Period I is the time when most authors write of domestic matters -- that is, of the family, the home, and household work. There is more information about the parents of the main figures. Some three-fifths of the characters are seen to acquire more wealth than their fathers. . . . Family love is most significant in the first period. Almost nine-tenths of the novels include major stories of family affections, in comparison with just over half in Period II and three fifths in Period III. These are also the proportions for the variables measuring homeownership, the characters' love of their homes, and , to a lesser extent, domestic labor such as housework and nursing.

In Period I there is more concern for proper behavior and piety. Some 92 percent of the central characters have a high score in morality; 76 percent rate height in Period II; and 86 percent, in Period III" (Kelly 118)

"the best-selling authors of the Period I do address the problems of the female sphere. What they do besides is to reassure readers that the separation of the spheres is not something to be anxious about, because the sexes are really very much alike, at least within reasonable limits. Their female central characters have access to wealth, mobility, and the positive personal attributes even as do males. Women and children face the same kinds of problems that men do and solve them just as successfully. There is a kind of feminism in this. Moreover, the popular novelists of the first period suggest that 'the answer to life' is in the everyday world. People work; they fall in love; they marry; they have children; they concern themselves with their homes, families, and friends; they accomplish their goals, but they care for the people around them. According to the novelists, this what most middle - and upper-class people do and what they should do.

Of course, these novels are not true feminist works. They also obscure the reality of women's limited place. First, they give to character-structure and feelings an importance that they did not have in real life. Next, they offer women a great many opportunities middle-class nineteenth-century women did not actually have. Finally, they mute or ignore the real economic and political practices that deny women equality. The popular literature of Period I may therefore be understood as a force upholding the status quo." (Kelly 121)

Death rates:

Green Harvey. The Light of the Home. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.

"There were major epidemics of cholera in northeastern cities in 1832, 1849, and 1866 and periodic outbreaks of typhoid, typhus, diphtheria, and such childhood diseases as scarlet fever, measles, and mumps were common. diphtheria was especially prevalent in 1863 and 1864, between 1874 and 1882, and in 1889; typhoid ravaged the Northeast in the mid-1860s and in 1872. Smallpox claimed fewer 166 lives than either, but was especially virulent in 1872 and 1873, which were also years of exceptionally lethal outbreaks of measles" (Green 165-6)

"In New York City in 1853, forty-nine percent of those who died were children under five. Nearly one-third of Massachusetts women born in the United States in 1850 died before they were twenty; eighty percent of that group (that is, twenty-four percent of the total female population) never reached the age of five" (Green 166)

Nye, Russell B. Society and Culture in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

"Urban mortality rates rose as city population increased. New York, a typical case, had a death rate of about 21 per 1,000 in 1810 and 37 per 100 in 1857. . . . Savannah . . . had a death rate during the twenties and thirties of 70 per 1,000." (Nye Society 340)

McDannell, Colleen. The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900. Indiana UP, 1986.

"Smaller families [from 7.04 children per women in 1800 to 3.56 by 1900], the closing off of the workplace from middle-class white women, and the solidification of the concept of woman's real `nature' contributed to equating the home with women" (McDannell 8)

Here starts the notes proper -- hang on

Introduction

Make a section title “Voices from the Past”

Rhees, William J. Manual of Public Libraries, Institutions, and Socieites, in the United States, and British Provinces of America. Philadelphia: Lippincott Co. 1859.

This had some interesting comments on Transcendentalism at the beginning of the book -- copy out

See Saum For Transcendentalism 36

The Lady's Book of Flowers and Poetry ed. Lucy Hooper (New York, 1842) has a "Floral Dictionary" with symbolic menaings.

"Hints on Reading." American Journal of Educators. Vol 2. 1856: 215-230

A collection of quotes on, well, reading.

"2. Objects of Reading"

Professor Alonzo Potter, D. D. from Advantages of Science. On knowledge and reading for knowledge "It constitutes a rich store-house, whence we should draw materials for glorifying God, and improving man's estate. In other words knowledge is to be employed by us in doing good. . . . This remarks leads us to notice another of the benefits to be derived from books, when judiciously selected and properly read. This is the improvement of our intellectual powers and moral sentiments. . . .What is true of intellect and taste, is not less true of our moral sentiments" (215)

on magazines: "Whoever has travelled through the country and observed the ornaments that decorate the tables of parlors and chambers in hotels and private residences, as well as milliners' windows, or has made inquiries in the quarter where accurate information might be acquired, must be aware how extensive a popularity this species of reading enjoys." (FDH 388-389)

Orians, G. Harrison. A Short History of American Literature. New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1940.

Reading

Use this as a source for reading in nineteenth century America

101 "The modern reader of American literature has to be reminded of the days when the readiest medium for publication was the literary corner of any one of a thousand newspapers. All except the most highly commercial journals included poetical sections." (Orians 101)

in fact, Dickinson's only poem was published in a newspaper.

"Scott, though dead in 1832, was still a great favorite with all classes. The veneration expressed for him when the news of his death reached America, November 10, 1832, is index of the place he held among American novel-readers. . . . Scott became one of the staple offerings in Harper's Family Library. He was brought out in many additions. . ." (107)

in the thirties, Bulwer Lytton was popular: "Bulwer maintained an audience undisturbed by his moral and literary reputation. Captain J. E. Alexander could declare as early as 1831 that `the author of "Pelham" is an especial favorite in the States, the ladies considering him a nonpareil, and certain speculators (forgers and swindlers) have been detected last year with `Paul Clifford" in their portmanteaus.' N. P. Willis remarked in 1835 `A novel of Bulwer's is republished in three days after it arrives in the swift packet from Liverpool; and in three weeks, it is read in every settlement and cabin in Louisiana, and criticized in every one of the thousand or two newspapers between the Atlantic and the Mississippi.'" (108)

"Harriet Martineau remarked in 1837: `I think no one is so much read as Mr. Bulwer. I question whether it is possible to pass half a day in general society without hearing him mentioned.'" (109_

"The annuals made their American appearance in 1826, and reached the maximum in quantity in 1845. The height in influence and quality, however, was attained by 1835. . . . contributors [included] Bryant, Hawthorne, Poe Sedgwick, Willis, Mrs. child, Leggett, Hall Simms, Longefellow. As an institution they (1) gave outlet for writing to timid and aspiring literary men, (2) provided financial return for authors who could not afford to write for fame alone, (3) helped build up a national literature. Most famous of American annuals during the decade were The Talisman, The Token, Atlantic Souvenir, The Religious Souvenir, The Pearl, The Boston Book, Youth's Keepsake and The Lily. A complete set of these constitutes a considerable chapter in American literature." (118)

"After the rise of Dickens sentimentalism went to extremes. Although it is the fifties which are most frequently described as sentimental, yet the emotional tendencies were becoming cumulative though the forties in the gift-books and feminine stories and poetry of the Embury-Sigourney school." (Orians 133)

Monetary pressures, roll printers, and wood pulp instead of rags made printing cheaper in the 30s and led to "issuing complete novels as `extras'; it led to cheap weekly periodicals of a trashy order; it brought out `mammoth weekly papers' with cheap fictional contents. These -- The Albion, The New World, Brother Jonathan -- devoted half and octavo page to the news of the week and appropriated all the rest of their space to `tale, essay, narrative, descriptive poem . . ." (Orians 134)

Also popular -- Fedrika Bremer, Charlotte Bronte 's Jayne Eyre, G.P.R James, Paul de Kock (135)

Causes of renewed sentimentalism: "two decades of lady's books. . . the work of Dickens and of the Bronte sisters, the emotionalism of religion, the influence of Mrs. Stowe. The editor of Putnam's remarked: `Charles Dickens and Mrs. Stowe are answerable for a large number of these offenders. The Little Nell and her old Grandfather of the one, and the Uncle Toms and George Harries of the other are the 56 parents of an immense progeny of similar personages.'" (155-56)

Rhees, William J. Manual of Public Libraries, Institutions, and Socieites, in the United States, and British Provinces of America. Philadelphia: Lippincott Co. 1859.

This had some interesting comments on Transcendentalism at the beginning of the book -- copy out

Rhees (was Chief Clerk of the Smithsonian Instituion)

xix "The libraian of the Providence Athenaeum."

"From his report for 1855-1857...`From an estimate by the delivery of their works, the following is the order in which the authors here mentioned are ranked by our reading comunity; or rather, we should say, by those who use the books i the Athenaeum LIbrary. First, Sir Walter Scott; next, Simms, Cooper, and Dickens, with not ten volumes difference between them; Irving stands next; then Mrs. Stowe; after her, Prescott, the historian, Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Hentz; then Bulwer, Longfellow, Willis, Kingsley, Thackeray, Abbott, Macaulay, James, Bayard Taylor, Curtis, Hawthorne, and Bancroft in the order in which we have placed them'."

From same report as above

xx "`Such writers as Scott and Cooper, Irving and Dickens, are the general favorites, and the call for them appears to be about as great at one time as another.'"

155 New Bedford Free Public Library: "of novels, Scott's, Cooper's, and Miss Edgeworth's, are most read.'"

241 Buffalo Young Men's Association -- 1n 1854.

"`The books most called for were Ida May, Lamplighter, Ruth Hall, Autobiography of an Actress, Queechy, and Lofty and Lowly.'"

249 Apprentice's and Demilt Library "Founded Nov., 1820, by the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesman of the City of New York."

from a statement by W. Van Norden, Feb. 1857

"A large proportion of our readers are boys, between the ages of 12&21 years,...we have notice, however, that the works most frequently called for, are the following, according to the order in which they are stated, viz.: Cooper's Novels, Simm's, most of Scott's, Marryat's, Dickens's, Lever's, Mayre Reid,

class 213

"The people may always be mentally divided into three classes. The first of these classes consists of the wealthy; the second, of those who are in easy circumstances; and the third is composed of those who have little or not property and who subsist by the work they perform for the two superior orders." (Tocqueville 213)

on the aristocracy

*** 215

On the wealthy -- "They are not, indeed, callous to the sufferings of the poor; but they cannot feel those miseries as acutely as if they were themselves partakers of them. Provided that the people appear to submit to their lot, the rulers are satisfied and demand nothing further from the government. An aristocracy is more intent upon the means of maintaining than of improving its condition.” (Tocqueville 215)

on the tyranny of the majority

259 "the power to do everything, which I should refuse to one of my equals, I will never grant to any numbers of them."

263"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."

Christian Examiner March 1842 "Fiction has its origins in man's dissatisfaction with the present state of things, and his yearning after something higeher and better, in effort to relaize those innate ideas of the beautiful, the grand, and the the good, which have no countepart in the acutal world" (Baym 27-38)

2 Religion and Literature

3 Contact: native American

4 Rationalism and Nationalism: Franklin/Irving

The Huntress – DC Newspaper

Feb. 24, 1838 “Rip Van Winkle” “Whoever has made the voyage . . . “

6 Transcendentalism: Emerson and Thoreau

Religion

Saum, Lewis O. Saum. The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.

"In popular thought of the pre-Civil War period, no theme was more pervasive or philosophically more fundamental than the providential view. Simply put, that view held that, directly or indirectly, God controlled all things" (Saum 3)

No popery. an Illinois woman, Mrs. Aiton, writing to her husband, commented that "were I an inhabitant of Hancock County I would much rather the Mormons would have possession than the Catholics. Doubtless they have deep designing well laid plans and when once they get a foothold there is no telling what they may do connected as they are with a foreign power." (Saum 40)

Barrett, Benjamin Fiske. Beauty for Ashes; or The Old and the New Doctrine, concerning the state of Infants After Death, Contrasted. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1855.

Inscribed "Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with the best regards of the Author Brooklyn Feb. 9, 1856.

"The Old doctrine is a sad one, and consorts only with gloom; while the New doctrine is cheerful, and gladdens the heart with its serene sunshine" (Barrett vi).

"the interest which most men feel in the beautiful, the good, and the true, is often enhanced by contrast with their opposites. Beauty never appears so attractive, as when exhibited along with deformity" (Barrett 9).

Cf. Poe.

The New doctrine is from "Swedenborg" -- a "New Dispensation of Christianity\" (Barrett 10).

"thus, the lot of infants and all of the little children in the spiritual world, is altogether preferable to the lot of those in this world. They are in fare better company, and under far better influences, there than here . . . . Here, the moral atmosphere which our little ones are compelled to breathe, is polluted more or less with the pernicious taint of sin: There, they breathe the healthful and balmy air of heaven" (Barrett 69)

Bushnell, Horace. Christian Nurture. 1861. Rprt. Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 1994.

His audatious assertion was "That the child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being otherwise" (Bushnell 10) Instead of "In Adam's fall, we sinned all," Bushnell saw the doctrine of original sin as a detrimate to a child's understanding of God.

"the house, having a domestic Spirit of grace dwelling in it, should become 20 the church of childhood, the table and hearth a holy rite, and life an element of saving power" (Bushnell 19-20)

The crux of the theological debate: "There has been much specultation, of late, as to whether a child is born in depravity, or whether the depraved character is superinduced aftewards. But, lke many other great questions, it determings much less than is commonly supposed; for, according to the most proper view of the subject, a child is really not born till he emerges from the infantile state, and never before that time can he be said to receive a separate and properly individual nature" (Bushnell 27)

****************

Great Awakening

Finney, Charles G. From Lectures on Systemic Theology. 1846. Rpt. American Ideas Vol. I. Ed. Gerald N. Grob and Robert N. Beck. London: The Free Press of Glencoe. 330-337.

Under the heading "How Moral Depravity Is to be Accounted For" "1. It consists, remember, in teh committal of the will to the gratification or indulgence of self -- in the will's following or submitting itslef to be governed by the impuslses and desires of the sensibility instead of submitting itself to the laws of intelligence" (Finney 330)

Regeneration -- change -- is necessary (cf. Scrooge) from a religious point of view: "Without regeneration a selfish soul can by no possibility be fitted either for the employments or for the enjoyments of heaven" (Finney 331)

How is the regeneration accomplished? "We have seen that the subject is active in regeneration, that regeneration consists in the sinner changin his ultimate choice, intention, preference; or in changing from selfishness to love or benevolence; or in other words in turning from supreme choice of self-gratification to the supreme love of God and the equal love of his neighbor. Of course the subject of regeneration must be an agent in the work" (Finney 332)

"It implies an entire present change of moral character, that is, a change from entire sinfulness to holiness. . . . benevolence is a state of entire and supreme consecration to God and the good of the universe. Regeneration then surely implies an entire change of moral character." (Finney 334)

Boynton, Lucien. "Selections from the Journal of Lucien C. Boynton." Ed. by Solon J. Buck American Antiquarian Society Proceedings n.s. 43 (1933): 329-380.

1st Teacher and then Lawyer Vermont, Virginia, Mass. Begins in 1836.

May 9th 1836 Andover Theologicla Seminary: "I think I have made some advancement in piety, though it has been very littel to what it ought to have been . . . I at times seemed to have some due sense of my sinfulness and a strong desire for th epormotion of the cause of Christ. At other times, however. . . I seemed to have no religious enjoyment. The heavens were brass over my head. yet I feel that the fault was mine. Have had man struggles with ambition, and selfishnes, and wrong feeling stowards other. Find it difficult to keep thiese in subjection to the great and holy principle of living to God, and of loving others as myself." (Boynton 332)

Note the guilt that suffuses his thinking

*******************

Transcendentalism

Lucy Ann -- "a poor factory girl" from Clinton, MA. After complaining to a friend about the "childish mummery" of Catholicism, said her "church" was "in the wild-woods" (Saum 30-31).

Bode, Carl. The Anatomy of American Popular Cultre 1840-1861. Berkeley: U of California P, 1959.

Sees the period as having "four principal complexes (or clusters) of qualities" 1) Patriotisim (chauvinism and the paradoxical idea that Europe has a "better culture"; 2) "Agressiveness" ("optimism and restlessness"; 3) Religion "religiosity: excessive or affected religious feeling. Neopuritanism and humanitarianism) -- "much humaniatarianism will have religiousness as its source" (Bode Anatomy xiv); 4) Love (which can shade into sentimentalism) (Bode Anatomy xiii-xv)

Williams, Williams R. "Religion a Principle of Growth." from Religious Progress (1850). Midcentury America. Ed. Carl Bode. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1972: 136-139.

"It is again, even in lands and governments where political revolution is not needed or is not desired, an age of social reform. And in such a time, when the operatives, the proletary [sic] class, to use a word of French thinkers, the men living on the day's wages, the laborious and the begrimed, the doers of hard and honest work, are crying out because of the long neglect and cruel oppression which they deem themselves to have endured on the part of their richer brethren, -- is it not especially the season, when alike all those who seek and all those who dread such changes, should study, in the scriptures emanating from the Former and Ruler of Society, man's duties to man, and his obligations to his God? The law of human brotherhood is there illustrated as no where else. . ." (139)

HWB. rev. of Discourses on the Christian Body and Form by C. A. Bartol. The Christian Examiner. Vol. 54 Jan 1853: 103-123)

on christianity in literature: "literature in our day is penetrated with Christian ethics and evangelical sentiments, and criticizes the Church, not of its credulity and assumption, but for its want of faith and activity. The most popular works of the day are works in which piety, not piracy, makes the interest of their heros, and Uncle Tom and Peggotty take the place of Conrad and Paul Clifford.) "HWB 110)

J. A. B. "The Wants of the Age" Vol 14. April 1837: 162-165.

"This, above all others, is an age of benevolence -- a benevolence which beholds and commiserates every form of suffering endured by every member of the human family: which knows no geographical limitation, but goes forth on its errand of mercy through the earth. . . (J.A.B. 165)

"A strong tendency also exists to prefer German university regulation to ours, that is, mere instruction to instruction joined with moral discipline. . . . The dark side of Germany is the scepticism and rationalism of its literary men; . . . .[97] Here the importation of German rationalism is particularly dangerous, for none of these counteracting principles ["conservative habits of the country. . .submissive religious feelings of the more ignorant classes]; and the spread of Unitarianism, Rationalism, and Pantheism, by which New-England is now overrun, appears very alarming." (Godley 97)

In a footnote, he comments: "To see a God in every star, to people every wood and stream with guardian spirits, is infinitely better than to recognize the existence of neither God nor spirit any where' for in fact it comes to that, those who call themselves Pantheists being, in nine cases out of ten, practically Atheists. Perhaps extremes meet in this case, so that the prevalence of Pantheistic doctrines among the educated classes may be connected with, and lead to, superstition and idolatry among the vulgar." (158)

Some hilarious comments on "Transcendentalism" August 8, 1840 (157) rev. of the debut of The Dial

"As the question is often put to us, what is transcendentalism, we can best convey an answer by quoting the following very luminous and clear definition from what Mr. Alcott modestly calls his `Orphic Sayings'.

`The popular genesis is historical. It is written to sense not to the soul. Two principles, diverse and alien, interchange the Godhead and sway the world by turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity. unity is actual merely. The poles of things are not integrated [etc.]

From this it is clear as mud what transcendentalism is. Or readers can not fail to be enlightened by so simple an explanation. Seriously: from the tenor of nearly every article in The Dial we infer, that the transcendentalist believe "that each individual soul is a finite portion of, and an emanation from, the infinite spirit . . . "

It is not difficult to see that this is merely a refined sort of Deism, and that it strikes at once at the vital principal of the faith of Christianity." (157)

"The commonest tyro in philosophical history will see the absurdity of the claims of these people to novelty and originality. Their philosophy is merely Platonism revived. Their doctrine, with regard to the soul, is precisely that which was taught by Zeno of Cyprus." (157)

Reese, Lizette Woodworth. A Victorian Village: Reminiscences of Other Days. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1929.

Waverly and Baltimorre City area, Maryland

"This was the age of faith. We were as sure of God as we were of the sun. Christmas had a reality that clutched us hard; we were of it, and it was us." (Reese 5)

"Everybody read Sartor Resartus, a crabbed, wise book, with evidence of Carlyle's German browsings on more than one page. Carlyle was a sort of British Thor: when he thundered, people ran out to take a look at the weather." (Reese 197)

Talcott, Hannah Elizabeth Goodwin. Dr. Howell's Family. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1869.

Stephen confides to a Captain Ashmead about worries about infecting his sister with the metaphisics he learned in college: "I've given Di a world of anxiety with my foggy philosopy and transcendentalism, my thirst for something new, and my lack of purpose. But thanks to father, and Di, and yourself, I can see a rift in the clouds." (276)

"Editors' Table" Godey's Lady's Book Vol. 42 June 1851: 391-392::

"A letter from a very earnest searcher after truth, asking a definition of that much-used-and-little-understood-word, `transcendentalism,' reminds us of the remark in on of the English periodicals, viz., that Mrs. Child had given the most intelligible and satisfactory definition the review had ever seen. We subjoin it:--

Transcendentalism -- All who know anything of the different schools of metaphysics are aware that the philosophy of John locke was based on the proposit on that tall knowledge is received into the soul through the medium of the senses; and thence passes to be judged of an analyzed by the understanding.

The German school of metaphysics, with the celebrated Kant at its head, rejects this proposition as false; it denies that all knowledge is received through he senses, and maintains that the highest, and therefore most universal truths, are revealed within the soul, to a faculty transcending the understanding. This faculty they call pure reason; it being peculiar to them to use that word in contradistinction to the understanding. To this pure reason, which some of their writers call `the God within,' they believe that all perceptions of the good, the true, and the beautiful are revealed, in its unconscious quietude; and that the province of the understanding, with its five handmaids, the senses, is confined merely to external things, such as facts, scientific laws."

17 April 1841 Daily Tribune reprints "Northern Mythology" from Carlye's Hero and Hero-Worship

14 April 1841 Daily Tribune reprints "Gems from Emerson's Essays"

The Rev. Caleb Stetson

Transcendental: Rev. Stetson "some philosphers are of opinion that genius does not invent but discover; it penetrates the veil between us and the spiritual world, and becomes acquainted with glorius forms fo beauty and life hitherto unknown. The poet is an inspired seer, who ranges over the mystic dreamland to find what exists, to reveal what is hidden" (qtd. Wilkins 74).

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. (1918) New York: Modern Library, 1931.

on the 1850s "The literary world then agreed that turth survived in Germany alone, and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Renan, Emerson...taught the German faith. The literary world had revolted against the yoke of coming capitalism..." (61)

Gohdes, Clarence. American Literature in Nineteenth Century England. Southern Illinois Press, 1944.

31-32 "In 1891 "a careful investigator" determined to find out just what books were read by the English peasants. Four works, he concluded, were to be discovered in "most English well-to-do labourers; cottages": Pilgrim's [32] Progress, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Wide Wide World."

46 "Especially important to the student of the Victorian literary background appear to be the last two decades of the century, when the consupmption of books by Americans reacheds it highest point. During thse twenty years publishing houses in the British Isles brought out at least thirty five edition s or issues of t one or more volumes by Poe, twenty by Whitman, nine by Melville, twenty by Thoreau, fifty by Loswell, sixty by Irving, fifty by Cooper, seventy by Holmes, ninety by Hawthonre, twenty-five by Emerson, fifteen by Bryant, twenty-five by Whittier, forty-five by Howells, and sixty by Mark Twain."

60 footnote: "Maudie's Library was begun with a collection of American transcendental works....Emerson's first little book Nature (1836) was at the outset more widely circulated in the United Kingdom than in the United States since much of it was reprinted in a Swedenborgian magazine."

104 Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors collected and annotated by Walter Hamilton 1884-1889. Contains examples tweaking Whitman, Harte Poe, Emerson etc. Parodies means that the author's style must be well known or the parody won't work. Proves that American authors were well known.

120 "George Eliot ranked Hiawatha and The Scarlet Letter as "one of the two most indigenous and masterly productions in American Literature.""

Mackintire, Eliab Parker. Letters of Eliab Parker Mackintire of Boston Written Between 1845 and 1863 to Reverend William Salter of Burlington, Iowa. Ed. Philip Dillon Jordan. New York: New York Public Library, 1936.

Anti-catholicism No-nothings

October 10, 1846

"I do hope strenuous efforts will be made to establish a system of public education in Iowa, before the people become so ignorant and degraded as not to appreciate or desire it, as is now the case, I understand, in many parts of Illinois. If it can be guided by good men, it seems to me, it will be one of the most effective barriers to Romanism, a means of preparing the way for the Gospel, and an essential instrument in elevating the mass of the people" (18)

The reform of antebellum period - Quakers

57 "The antebellum period has long been known as the great era of reform movements, the time when piety came to be widely equated with puritanical moralism and when scores of societies were organized to combat behavioral vices and social ills. Recent social historians such as Bruce Laurie and Sean Wilentz have distinguished between two major groups of antebellum reformers, the rationalists and the evangelicals, who often shared the similar goals (e.g., to combat intemperance or to aid the poor) but who battled bitterly over ideology and tactics....The rationalists, based mainly in the Northeast, included Unitarians, freethinkers, and Quakers who promoted education and rational self-improvement and who were appalled by the increasing zeal of their archopponents, the evangelicals..../the abolitionist William Loyld Garrison ushered in an extraordinary harsh rhetoric that threatened to overwhelm moral statement and even to subvert the very meaning of vice and virtue."

He identifies two types of Reform literature, Conventional and reform.

58 the themes of Conventional reform literature include "the power of family togetherness and active morality in the face of social inequities." A list of such works is on this page.

They are truly moral because they "avoid excessive sensationalism and always emphasize the means by which vice can be circumvented or remedied."

59 "the Subversive reformers (often called 'ultraists' by their contemporaries) de-emphasized the remedies for vice while probing the grisly, sometimes perverse results of vice, such as shattered homes, sadomasochistic violence, eroticism, nightmare visions, and the disillusioning collapse of romantic ideals."

86 "The most significant common denominator among disparate reformers was a conscious impulse to 'tear away veils' or 'lift up masks' in an effort to reveal hidden corruption. To antebellum reformers (particularly the increasingly prominent Subversive reformers), authority figures such as urban aristocrats, wealthy churchgoers, Catholic priest, landlords, bankers, and so forth were 'whited sepulchres' whose inner rottenness could be revealed only through what I term unmasking images: violent, often sensational language designed to strip hypocrites of their sanctified cloaks and bring to light the horridness within."

"In the eyes of many reformers, America itself was a nation that could be best described through contradiction or paradox: it was a republic that permitted slavery: it was a democracy that was witnessing widening class divisions; it was a land of virgin wilderness but also festering cities; it was a nation of Christians who tolerated the most unChristian practices."

Religious questioning

89 "Deep metaphysical questions, therefore, were being posed by numerous reformers who were horrified by the distance between the ideals and practice of Protestant America. And it was precisely this nagging doubt about received religion that drove reformers to new extremes to find rhetorical and imaginative replacement for bygone religious certainties.

"Emerson acknolwdeged in his journal that most of his countrymen spent their time 'reading all day murders & railroad accidents' in newspapers" (Reynolds Beneath 171)

"What causes democratic nations to incline towards pantheism"

"When the conditions of society are becoming more equal and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and insignificant, a habit grows up o ceasing to notice the citizens and considering only the people, of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once, and it constantly strives to connect a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses man and is sought by him so generally that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself to repose in that belief. Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator, he is still embarrassed by this primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole." (Tocqueville 31 Vol. II)

76 "Among a democratic people poetry will not be fed with legends or the memorials of old traditions (though the transcendental's proved him wrong). The poet will not attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings, in whom his readers and his own fancy have ceased to believe;p nor will he coldly personify virtues and vices, which are better received under their own features. All these resources fail him; but Man remains, and the poet needs no more. The destinies of mankind, man himself taken aloof from his country and his age and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare properties and inconceivable wretchedness, will become the chief, if not the sole, theme of poetry among these nations." (Tocqueville Vol. II 76)

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. Hill and Wang:NY. 1982.

The controlling power of industry

38 "many Americans before the Civil War had believed that industrial technology and the factory system would serve as historic instruments of republican values, diffusing civic virtue and enlightenment along with material wealth.

38 "If the machine seemed the prime cause of abundance of new products changing the character of daily life, it also seemed responsible for newly visible poverty, slums, and an unexpected wretchedness of industrial conditions. While it inspired confidence in some quarters, it also provoked dismay, often arousing hope and gloom in the same minds. For accompanying the mechanization of industry, of transportation, and of daily existence, were the most severe contrasts between 'progress and poverty' (in Henry George's words) which seemed to many a mockery of the republican dream, a haunting paradox."

Weisbuch, Robert. Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson. University of Chicago Press, 1986.

200 the difference b/t Carlyle and Emerson: "Carlyle's self-conflict pits an histoircal sense of delcine agianst a wavering belief in a permanent value, still historically visible if infinite at its edges. Emerson blatantly employs history unto its dissolution into invisible qualities....The world is magnificently present for Carlyle even if he can speak in fleeting abstraction of the world as a projection of each person's thought. For Emerson, thought is prior, causal, almost all in all. Five of his six representative men ar philosophers or poets..."

Bremer, Fredrika. America of the Fifties: Letters of Frederika Bremer. Ed. Adolph B. Benson. New York: OUP, 1924.

20 Oct. 1829: "Emerson has more ideality than is common among thinkers of the [15] English race, and one might say that in him the idealism of Germany is wedded to the realism of Britain" (Bremer 15-16)

20 Oct. 1849 "Waldo Emerson, a philsopher rather than a poet, yet poetic in his prose philosophical essays, strikes me as a new and peuliar character. . . . Strong and pure, calm and self-collected, but fantastical withal, he sends out from his transcendental viewpoint aphorisms on nature and history, on God (whom he does not regard as a personal God, but as a superior soul in harmony eith laws), and on men, criticising them and their works from the ideal of the highest truth and highest beauty" (Bremer 13)

On Emerson 4 Dec. 1849: "always looking out for an ideal, which he never realized on earth; iscovering wants, shortcomings, imperfetions; an dtoo strong and healthy himself ot understand other people's weaknesses and sufferings, fir he even despises suffering as a weakness unworthy of higher natures" yet goes on to acknowlege the death of his two brothers and son and wife. (Bremer 43)

22 Jan. 1850: "Pantheistic as Emerson is in his philsophy, in his moral view of the world and life, he is in a high degree pure, noble and severe, demanding as much from himself as from others." (Bremer 61)

January 22 1850:"Emerson is at this moment regarded as the head of the Transcendentalists . . . . [but he is the] only one actual Alp. . . [63] The others seem to stretch themselves out, and to powder themselves, merely to look lofty and snowcronwed; but that does not help them. They have more pretension than power. Their brows are in the clouds instead of towering above them." (Bremer 62-63)

8 August 1850: During a discussion on whether American has reached its intellectual pinnicale, Emerson responded "By no means . . . there are at thsi time a number of Germanisms and other European ideas, nay, even ideas from Asia, which are now for the first time finding their way into the lifeo fmin, and which will there produce new developments" (Bremer 313)

7 Domesticity and Hawthorne

Domesticity/Domestic Fiction

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1978.

"The many novels all tell, with variations, a single tale. In essence, it is the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world. This young girl is fittingly called a heroine because her role is precisely analogous to the unrecognized or undervalued youths of fairy tales who perform dazzling exploits and win a place for themselves i the land of happy endings. She 12 also fits the pattern of comic hero, whose displacement indicates social corruption and whose triumph ensures the reconstruction of a beneficent social order. In Jungian perspective, her story exemplifies the difficult but successful negotiation of the undifferentiated child through the trials of adolescence into the individuation of sound adulthood. The happy marriages with which most -- though not all -- of this fiction concludes are symbols of successful accomplishment of the required task and resolutions of the basic problems raised in the story, which is in most primitive terms the story of the formation and assertion of a feminine ego." (Baym Woman'sn 11-12)

"My own view is that these novels represent (what some may consider a contradiction in terms) a moderate, or limited, or pragmatic feminism, which is not in the least covert but quite obvious, needing only to be assessed in mid-nineteenth-century terms rather than those of a later century" (Baym Woman's 18)

"They were profoundly Victorian in that they had an oppressive sense of reality and its habit of disappointing expectations, and they believed that duty, discipline, self-control, and sacrifice (within limits) were not only moral but actually useful strategies for getting through a hard world. They were not cultural or historical relativists and consequently failed to see that many aspects of their situation might be functions of time and place rather than the will of God" (Baym Woman's 18)

"This story itself exists in two parallel versions. In one, the heroine begins as a poor and friendless child. Most frequently an orphan, she sometimes only thinks herself to be one, or has by necessity been separated from her parents for an indefinite time. In the second, the heroine is a pampered heiress who becomes poor and friendless in midadolescence, thought the death or financial failure of her legal protectors. At this point the two plots merge, for both show how the heroine develops the capacity to survive and surmount her troubles. At the end of the novel she is no longer an underdog. The purpose of both plots is to deprive the heroine of all external aids and to make her success in life entirely a function of her own efforts and character. The idea that a woman's identity or place in life is a function of her father's or husbands' place is firmly rejected, not merely on idealistic but also on realistic grounds. It the orphan's rags-to-riches story caught one aspect of American life and faith, the heiress's riches-to-rags caught another. As some moved up, others fell down. When men fell, their dependent women fell with them Several women authors began their careers as a direct result of financial catastrophe in their families; as we will see, the Panic of 1837 created a large new group of women authors. Their novels showed how women were forced to depend on themselves. They asserted that women had to be prepared for both economic and emotion self-support, ..."

There are two kinds of heroine in this novel, the flawless and the flawed. the flawless are those who already possess the emo 36tional strength and stability to function when adversity strikes. The flawed are those whose characters are defective, so that triumph in adversity becomes a matter of self-conquest as well as conquest of the other. Some novels present more than one heroine. A flawed and a flawless heroine may counterpoint one another. Again, two kind s of flaws will be opposed, such as excessive dependency against excessive self-will. The overly dependent woman has to acquire firmness, the self-willed woman learns to bend so as not to break. The idea of what is, and what is not, a flaw varies according to the perspective of the individual author, yet all agree that some degree of self-control is a moral and practical necessity while total self-abnegation is suicidal. The writers' conviction that character had to adjust to limiting circumstances, their belief that suffering and hardship could not be avoided in any human life, and their strenuous insistence that such trials, because they called out otherwise dormant abilities, could become occasions for 'perfecting' the character imply a deeply Victorian world view" (Baym woman's 35-36)

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Mrs. L Sigourney in Whisper to a Bride "Home! Blessed bride, thou art about to enter this sanctuary, and to become a priestess at its altar!" (qtd. in Welter 245) pp 44 in orginal

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. "Anti-Slavery Literature." The Independent. 21 Feb. 1856: 57.

Rev. of anti-slavery novels, and memoirs, she promotes a theory of American fiction. "The use of the novel in the great question of moral life is coming to be one of the features of the age. Formerly, the only object of fictious writing was to amuse. Now nothing is more common than to hear the inquiry of a work of fiction, `What is it intended to show or prove?' A novel now is understood to be a parable -- a story told in illustration of truth or fact." (Stowe "Anti-Slavery" 57)

"Now, through the influence of civilization and Christianity,-- that mightiest agent in civilization, --- home has become the centre of all that is pure and dear in affection, and all that is valuable 179 in art and refinement. . . . Let our homes be held in honor; they should be most honorable. It is there that our happiness is most promoted or harmed,-- it is there that the young receive their earliest and most enduring impressions,-- it is there that the world's selfish business an passions may be forgotten in a circle of happy hearts,-- it is there that in sickness we may meet with those soothing attentions that almost make a sickness a blessing, by throwing around it such a halo of love,-- it is there that we may expect to lie down on our death-beds, and hope that the voice of kindred may cheer our last moments, and the hand of affection close our eyes in the last sleep. Let the home, therefore, be honored equally with the Senate Hall, the Court of Justice, the house of God. it is the cradle of the young, the great school of the forming mind. it should be the abode of our joy, the asylum of our sorrow,-- the fountain of public virtue, the temple of our faith." (S.O. 178-79)

Cram, Jacob Abbott [Harvard Professor]. "The Attempts of Modern Writers of Fiction to Inculcate Doctrines of Philantropy, and Promote Schemes of Social Reform." University Quarterly July 1860: 70-83.

Fiction "now claims the ability and the right to discuss the great problems of social reform which are agitating society, and thus increase still further the sphere of its practical usefulness." (Abbott 72)

---. rev. of "Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales." Arcturus. April 1842: 394.

"His pathos and sensibility, if they lose something by being always in one vein, are often intense and powerful, never affected or exaggerated. It would seem to us, at times, in the sad and fanciful passages, (for H. unites these,) that Mr. Dickens must have seen them, so great is the resemblance, in such parts, of the two authors. The little Nell of the latter is greatly and deservedly admired, but we hazard nothing in saying, that in the finer portions of sentiment, Hawthorne is fully the equal to the author of the Old Curiosity Shop." (394)

"Now, through the influence of civilization and Christianity,-- that mightiest agent in civilization, --- home has become the centre of all that is pure and dear in affection, and all that is valuable 179 in art and refinement. . . . Let our homes be held in honor; they should be most honorable. It is there that our happiness is most promoted or harmed,-- it is there that the young receive their earliest and most enduring impressions,-- it is there that the world's selfish business an passions may be forgotten in a circle of happy hearts,-- it is there that in sickness we may meet with those soothing attentions that almost make a sickness a blessing, by throwing around it such a halo of love,-- it is there that we may expect to lie down on our death-beds, and hope that the voice of kindred may cheer our last moments, and the hand of affection close our eyes in the last sleep. Let the home, therefore, be honored equally with the Senate Hall, the Court of Justice, the house of God. it is the cradle of the young, the great school of the forming mind. it should be the abode of our joy, the asylum of our sorrow,-- the fountain of public virtue, the temple of our faith." (S.O. 178-79)

B. Y. "Thoughts on the Happiness of Woman: As Connected with the Cultivation of Her Mind." Godey's Lady's Book Nov. 1837 (204-206)

"If a woman would please, let her never study to shine. Would she command admiration, let her never demand it. By nature and the appointment of God, `man is the head of the woman.' If not her superior in intellect, he is unwilling to be thought otherwise, least of all can he endure that woman herself should assume an air of superiority. Let her cultivate her mind, let her enrich it with all the stores of learning, let her embellish it with all the delights of literature, if exemptions from more important duties permit, but let this be done, to increase her happiness, to enlarge, expand and adorn her mind; to furnish her with those resources that woman peculiarly needs, and to fit her till, honourably and usefully her station in life; but let her beware that her learning never betrays her into pedantry. Let her be satisfied with possessing it, without endeavouring to exhibit it." (B.Y. 204)

"Woman is, and ever must remain, a dependent being. Her frame, less robust than that of man, unavoidably confines her to a less active life. Upon man, she must depend for support. But Oh! how far more dependent is she, in a moral point of view! her mind more delicate, her feelings more refined, her affections deeper, more fervent, more lasting; her sensibilities greater; her heart once firmly attached, refusing to part with the object of its love, (I had almost said, of its adoration) clinging with a grasp so pertinacious, that in many instance, Death alone has the power to unloose it. O! how dependent is such a being!" (B.Y. 204)

"The pride of man requires that he should be looked up to. He will not bear that woman shall be his equal, much less his superior. But `she that humblethe herself shall be exalted.' Let the opinion be once firmly fixed in his mind that the female, whose superior understanding and cultivated intellect he admires, looks up to him with deference, and considers herself as the inferior; he is at once ready to acknowledge she is all she things herself, and if she be truly diffident, will admit her to be much more. But it must not be forgotten, that woman's proper sphere and scene of usefulness, is in domestic life. 'Tis there she shines most brightly. 'Tis there the scene of her true enjoyment lies. 'Tis there she communicates and receives happiness." (B.Y. 204)

Admits that women work harder than man "To suffer is indeed the lot of woman!" (204) and during the evening hours as her man rests "To her the social hour brings not a cessation from labour; but a change of occupation; and no refreshment to mind or body, but that which is derived from the presence and conversation of him she loves. Fortunately for her, it is all she requires." (B.Y. 205)

After details all of the travails of womanhood and married life, the writer asks "But what can induce the female . . .to encounter the certain cares and trials of married life.

It is that want of the heart which demands an object upon which to fix. One upon whom she can lavish all the tenderness of affection , all the assiduities of love. . . (B.Y. 205)

So what should a woman do? "A woman should not aspire to shine, but to please." (B.Y. 205)

"To the charms of cultivated understand, governed by good sense, let her unite then, a knowledge of those arts, which can alone enable a female to make her house that well ordered spot to which the husband loves to come." (B.Y. 205)

Tasistro, Louis Fitzgerald. "Modern Female Education." Godey's

Lady's Book, April 1842.

"As a general thing, there was much wisdom in the advice given by an old mother to a young one: `Stimulate the sensibility of your boys, and blunt that of your girls.' There is nothing harsh in this last clause but the sound . . . .Poetry and fiction devoured for amusement enervate the mind: poetry and fiction considered as subjects for study, and taken in connection with high reading of other kinds, will have a sobering effect even upon the most imaginative and romantic. It is not thinking which unrealizes the mind, but musing and dreaming." (Tasistro 191)

"The great boast of the Americans is the forwardness of their children, and it certainly appears to be fully justified; I have hardly seen a genuine, infantine child; they are all little men and women, dressed like their fathers and mothers, and hardly less sharp and ready in mind and manner; and so [42] it goes on through life; the boys are men, and the men (and women) prematurely old. They undoubtedly go a-head , and get over the ground in living, as in doing every thing else, faster than other people." (Godley 42)

Review of H's Twice-Told Tales 26 Feb. 1842

"There exists a certain class or clique of readers, who entirely overestimate the writings of Mr. Hawthorne. On the other hand, we are inclined to think that the great body of the reading public do no sufficiently regard them. These twice-told tales are of very unequal merit. Some of them are very excellent; `The Gray Champion,' `The Gentle Boy," `A rill from the Town Pump,' `Little Annie's Ramble,' and a few others, have a great and peculiar merit, displaying considerable originality in thought and expression, and being related in a style of charming simplicity. Others, again, of a more ambitions character, are, comparatively, failures. On the whole, however, these tales from two entertaining volumes, and are a valuable addition to our stock of native literature."

E.B.C. "The Mothers and Children of the Present Day." Southern Literary Messenger. May 1865: 391-393.

"Mother! the world can utter no sweeter, purer words than this." (E.B.C. 392)

"It is vain to close our eyes to the fact, it stares us boldly in the face, the most monstrous deformity of the nineteenth Century: this is the reign of the children: at home and at school. The parent is ruled, and the teacher striving in vain to assert his authority, is overcome in the battle, waving over his defenseless head the banner of `moral suasion.'" (E.B.C. 392)

"The seeds of disobedience, sown so successfully in the nursery shoot up the deadly Upas branches until they sweep against the very arch of heaven; man is resisted on earth, and God defied on his awful throne in the skies." (E.B.C. 392) lends a Babelistic touch to his argument.

Ann Douglas, The Feminazation of American Culture

b/t 1820 and 1875 "As the secular activities of Amnerican life were demonstrating their utter supremacy, relgiojn became the message of America's offical and conventional cultural life." (Douglas 6)

also marked a decline in Calvinism: 7 "By 1875, American Protestants were much more likely to define their faith in terms of family morals, civic responsibility, and above all, in terms of the social function of churchgoing." (Douglas 7)

Sentimentalism "asserst that the values a society's activity denies are precisely the ones it chereishe; it attmepts to deal with the phenonmennon of cultural bifurcation by the manipulation of nostalgia. Sentimentalism provides a way to protest a poer to which one has already in part capitualtied....It always borders on dishonesty but it is a dishonesty for which there is no known substitute in a capitalist country." (Douglas 12)

Educated women with nothing to do constitued a consumer base and thus gained power. In addition, "Northeastern clerglyman, and middle-class literary man lacked power....Instead they wished to exert 'influence,' which they eulogizeed as a religious force....chiefly thorugh literature which was just in the process of becoming a mass medium." (Douglas 8-9)

"In America, for economic and social reasons, Calvinism was largely defeated by an anti-intellectual sentimentalism purveyed by men and women whose victory did not achieve their finest goals; America lost its male-dominated theological tradition without gaining a comprehensive feminism or an adequately modernized religious sensibility. . . .The tragedy of nineteenth-century northeastern society is not the demise of Calvinist patriarchal structures, but rather the failure of a viable, sexually diversified culture to replace them." (Douglas 13)

From "What are the Rights of Women?" Mrs. E. Little Ladies' Wreath, II (1848-49)

"The right to love whom others scorn,

The right to comfort and to mourn,

The right to shed new joy on earth,

The right to feel the soul's high worth,"

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance:The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Harvard University Press: 1989.

Hawthorne's influence on R.H.D.?

4 "Hawthorne too was a voracious reader of what he called " all sorts of good and good-for-nothing books," including crime pamphlets, almanacs, and newspapers. He explained his attraction to ephemeral literature as follows: "It is the Age itself that writes newspapers and almanacs, which therefore have a distinct purpose and meaning.... Genius...effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer."

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Feeling/sentimentality/death and religion

Harland, Marion. Marion Harland's Autobiography. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910.

"Tears were fashionable, and came easily in those early times [1850s], and weeping in church was such a godly exercise that convesation or exhortation upon what was, in technical phrase, `the subject of religion,' brough tears as natrually as the wringing of a moist sponge, water." (Harland Auto 87)

on death of her mother: letter to sister: April 6, 1843: "I have no reason to mourn for our mother. I feel she is realsed from a world of sorrow and pain, -- that she is now a pure spirit in the mansions of the blest, -- that our loss has been her unspeakable gain. To know that she was ready and willing to go, was to me heavenly consolation. Oh! for her I weep not, but for those she has left behind" (Dyson 95)

Journal: april 28th 1843: On god "He has spared me my kind firends, many underserved blessings. How good is God, how kind even in his chastenings. The sorrows he has caused me to feel have been indeed the cords of his love, to bring me back to the God from whom I have wandered." (Dyson 98)

Giles, Henry. “Sentimentalism.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. July 1860: 203-211.

The “tendency” of the “sentimental scribblers” is to “weaken in youth the functions of thought and conscience; to distort their view of life; to disorder their imagination; to hasten unhealthily the season of passion; to loosen all moral as well as conventional restriants: thus, on the femineside of human existence, to prepare the way for light love, for easy marriage, for intrigues, and for divorce; on the masculine side, for idleness, rashness, ambition, discontent, violence, and crime” (Giles 210).

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Reform:

Works such as The Lamplighter and The Wide, Wide World are examples of "domestic literature, which I classify as the Conventional, valorized the home, good woks, stylistic clarity, and Christian virtues such as submission and endurance....The great Conventional best-sellers were rhetorical constructs in which the troubled social and philosophical climate of antebellum America was determinedly meliorated and an alternative world of village pastoralism and victorious moral exemplars were offered as mythic correctives for thorny realities such as crime, urbanization, tangled reform movements, and savage frontier life." (Reynolds 182)

"In his notebook for 1836 Hawthorne drew a direct connection between human sinfulness and poular crime trials. "There is evil in every human heart . . .which may remian latent, through the whole of life, but circumstances may rouse it into activity . . . . This appetite may be traced in the popularity of criminal trials" (Reynolds Beneath 178)

"Beginning in the early 1830s, sex scandals were often featured in penny papers, dark-reform literare, adn trial pamplets, and in time a frankly erotic popular literature emerged. Whitman mentions in his notebooks having read 'erotic poetry and stories, dwelling on the lusty and copulative'" (Reynolds Beneath 211)

"sexuality in antebellum literature had little to do with natrual passion or honest feeling. Increasingly, erotic themes became the special proveince of militant radical democratis who wen to perverse extremes to expose what they viewed as teh rottenness of America's ruling class They believed that the most effective way of doing this was to depict outwardly respectable figures . . . engaged in secret sexual intrigues that exposed them as scheming and bestial" (Reynolds Beneath 223)

"by the 1840s it had become virtually impossible for an American novliest ot portray a sympathetic clergyman figure because of the satirical stereotype of the reverend rake. The female moral exemplar became a cheif means of reconstructing moral value in a world of devalued, amoral males." (Reynolds Beneath 342)

Grayson, P. W. From Vice Unmasked, an Essay, Being a Consideration of the Influence of Law Upon the Moral Essence of Man. New York, 1830. Rpt. in Notions of the Americans 1820-1860. Ed. David Grimsted. New York: George Braziller, 1970. 45-60.

Serious lawyer bashing

"Wherever we find evil, no matter how venerable it may seem from the sanctity of its origin, or reputable from the customary regards of men, we should not scruple, even for an instant, to tear off the disguises which conceal its enormity, and, exposing the viciousness of its essence, strike for its extinction!" (Grayson 46)

Nye, Russell B. Society and Culture in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

"`No word in the English language,' said a writer in The Southern Quarterly Review in 1854, `is so much used as the disyllable progress. In America we use it so much , that we have made a verb of it.'" (Nye Society 27)

"`No reform is now deemed impossible,' said the Reverend Orville Dewey of Massachusetts in 1844, `no enterprise for human betterment impracticable. Everything may be made better." (Nye Society 29)

George Bancroft, from a 1854 oration titled "The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race" "The course of civilization . . .flows on like a mighty river through a boundless valley, calling to the streams from every side to swell its current, which is always growing wider, and deeper and clearer, as it rolls along. Let us trust ourselves upon its bosom without fear; nay, rather with confidence and joy. Since the progress of the race appears to be the great purpose of Providence, it becomes us all to venerate the future. . . . Everything is in movement, and for the better, except only the fixed eternal law by which the necessity of change is established." (Nye Society 30-31) from Bancroft, George. Literary and Historical Miscellanies. NY, 1855

On American Reform:

"The majority of reforms it proposed were pragmatic, practical ways of improving a practical society."

Religion and reform

"Reform in the United States received its most powerful support from the religious evangelism that swept the country int he twenties and thirties." (Nye Society 36)

"Evangelical religion made social reform a moral imperative. If social evil were the result of individual sin and selfishness, then progress came from reforming individuals by religious conversion." (Nye Society 36)

"`We are all a little mad here,' Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1840, `with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has the draft of a new community in his pocket'" (Nye Society 54)

"The revivalistic movement that characterized popular Protestantism over the first half of the nineteenth century left lasting imprints on the national character [nice phrase]. Most directly, of course, it reinforced and reinvigorated the reform movements of the times . . .The commitment to `usefulness'; and `benevolence' that conversion brought, when translated into practical terms, changed the style of American reform. . . . American Protestant Christianity gained from the revivalistic movement -- and never lost -- a social consciousness and sense of obligation that still remains one of its major characteristics." (Nye Society 291)

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Sensationalism

Upon returning from September 1850 Sunday morning service at Broadway Tabernacle, a New Yorker named William Hoffman, who was punctilious about his religious observances, had the "pleasure" to observe through a peephole in his room "the perfect female form of the two Miss Whitings, young girls or ladies about 17 & 19 years old . . . for about 20 minutes with every part of their bodies exposed." Without revealing any compunctions, he notes that he attended the Tabernacle again that evening (Saum 35).

clipping of American Museum attractions: "AMERICAN MUSEUM -- Splendid exhibitions and performances every afternoon at 3 o'clock, and aver evning at 7 1/2.

[finger pointer] The Manager has engaged the Dioramic and Panoramic Representation of the Removal of the Remains of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE from St. Helena to France for burial, adn the magnificient and gorgeous cermonies performed in honor of THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD. -- Models of 20 of the largest Diamonds. Alos a beuative and healthing LIVING ORANG OUTANG. Two monster SNAKES 20 feet long. ETHIOPIAN MINSTRELS -- GREAT WESTERN. MISSES WHEELER and JULIEN. MADAME ROCKWELL, the fortune Teller.

ANATOMICAL VENUS, to be seen at all hours at an extra charge of one shilling.

Admittance 25 cents: childern under 10, 12 1/2 cents."

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Women and Children

Stowe from the Minister's Wooing "the Christian home was the `appointed shrine for woman, more holy than cloister, more saintly and pure than church or altar . . . .Priestess, wife, and mother, there she ministers daily in holy works of household peace. . .'" (567-68)

From Queechy "One woman will learn more wisdom from the child on her breast than another will learn from ten thousand volumes. . . . A woman's true sphere is in her family -- in her home duties, which furnish the best and most appropriate training for her faculties -- pointed out by nature herself" (Queechy II 72)

Mrs. Hentz on children: "The incarnation of innocence, sweetness, and grace; fresh from the hands of its Creator, before temptation has obscured, or sin marred or passion darkened the image of the Deity; it comes before the world-weary eye, a flower sparkling with the dews of Paradise, and breathing the fragrance of heaven" (Rena, 40)

"In nineteenth-century American fiction there emerged two main types of moral exemplar: what may be called the angel . . . and the practical woman. . ." (Reynolds Beneath 342)

S.O., Rev. of American Education, or Strictures on the Nature, Necessity, and practicability of a System of National Education, suited to the United States by Benjamin O. Peers, and Home Education by Isaac Taylor. Christian Examiner. Vol.26, May 1839: 162-179.

Taylor believes that "It is, perhaps, well enough for men to be early acquainted with evil, and to learn to resist it. But the less a woman knows of the world's depravity, the greater is the charm and purity of her character" (S.O. 171).

Tuthill, Louisa C. The Young Lady's Home. Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1848.

"Woman's lot may be deemed a lowly one, by those who look not into the deeper mysteries of human life; who know not the silent, resistless influences that mould the intellectual and moral character of mankind. Woman's lot is a high and holy one; and she "who fulfills the conditions required by conscience takes the surest way of answering the purposes of Providence." Conscientiously and cheerfully, then, go on with your own education, mental, physical and moral." (Tuthill 14)

"Woman owes her present elevation of character and condition to Christianty; in all countries where its begnign, holy influence is unfelt, she is still and unintellectual, a degraded being, -- and just in proportion to its purity and its power over a people, is her domestic happiness" (Tuthill 93)

"The silent, resistless influence of home and the affections, -- this is woman's true glory" (Tuthill 99)

One 1848 guidebook advised young women that their "waking thoughts" should "be upon my Heavenly Father, who has spread over me the wings of love, and opened my eyes upon another day" This should be followed, "before breakfast" with a half hour of bible reading or prayer (Tuthill 184). And of course, upon retiring, "God's holy book" should be read, and a a final benediction "for the aid and guidance of his Holy Spirit" offered. (Tuthill 185)

The Scrap-Book: Consisting of Tales and Anecdotes, Biographical, Historical, Patriotic, Moral, Religious, and Sentimental Pieces, in Prose and Poetry. Comp. William Fields. 2nd Ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854.

"I believe that if Christianity should be compelled to flee from the mansions of the great . . . we should find her last and purest retrea with woman at the fireside; her last alter would be the female heart; her last audience would be the children gathered around the knees of a mother" (Scrap-Book 115)

"The female heart may be compared to a garden, which, when well cultivated, presents a continued succession of fruits and flowers, to regale the soul and delight the eye. . . . Then let this gorund be faithfulyy cultivated; let the mind of the yound and lovely female be stored with useful knowledge, and the indluence of women . . . [will pour] its refreshing streams thorugh every avenue of the social and moral fabric" (Scrap-Book 199)

Beecher, Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman's Home or, Principles of Domestic Science. 1869. Hartford, Connecticut: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, 1996.

What is a woman's role: "It is to provide for the training of our race to the highest possible intelligence, virtue, and happiness, by means of self-sacrificing labors of the wise and good, and this with chief reference to a future immortal existence.

The distinctive feature of the family is self-sacrificing labor of the stronger and wiser members to raise the weaker and more ignorant to equal advantages. The father undergoes toil and self-denial to provide a home, and then the mother becomes a self-sacrificing laborer to train its inmates. The useless, troublesome infant is served in the humblest offices; while both parents unite in training it to an equality with themselves in every advantage. Soon the older children become helpers to raise the younger to a level with their own. When any are sick, those who are well become self-sacrificing ministers. When the parents are old and useless, the children become their self-sacrificing servants.

Thus the discipline of the family state is one of daily self-devotion of the stronger and wiser to elevate and support the weaker members" (Beecher and Stowe 18)

"Her great mission is self-denial, in training its members to self-sacrificing labors for the ignorant and weak" (Beecher and Stowe 19)

"A woman, therefore, needs to cultivate the habitual feeling that all the events of her nursery and kitchen are brought about by the permission of our Heavenly Father, and that fretfulness or complaint in regard to these is, in fact, complaining at the appointments of God, and is really as sinful as unsubmissive murmurs amid the sorer chastisement of his hand" (Beecher and Stowe 218)

Sprague, Achsa. "Selections from Achsa Sprague's Diary and Journal." Ed. Leonard Twynham. Vermont History 9 (1941): 132-184.

born 1828. Reformer, author, woman's right. mainly unpublished author

1855 Dec. 10: This from an odd woman who is much inclined to believe a variety of quack cures "Women must either by a slave or a butterfuly or at least she is so at the present time. And if, following the prompting of ht eintellectual or philanthropic energies of her mind she dares to think, she dareds to act out of the beaten tracked marked centuries ago for her to tread, straightway she become ssomethitng out of the course of nature, a something fo rthe curious to gape at in astonishment, & the world, & particularly her own sex (I speak it with shame) to censure. As if a woman outh not to be firm as well as gentle, energetic as well as yieliding in her nature, strong minded as well as pure, & intellectual as well as amiable. Should not all these qualities be combined? And if they are so, what woman can smother these energies & those aspirations till their light shine no furhte rthan the fireside? Woman can be woman as the wife, the mother & yet as the Teacher & the Reformer. More than all shoudl the mother be strongminded & 157 energetic, firm & high souled, naturel & developed intellectually as well as socially, that her childern may wear the stamp of somehting that lives within itself. . ." (Sprauge 156-57)

Dyson, Julia A. Parker. Life and thught: or Cherished Memorials of the Late Julia A. Parker Dyson. Ed. Miss E. Latimer. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, Hafflefinger & Co., 1871.

Well-travelled Northern woman: teacher,

Letter to a friend Oct. 18 1844; "There is no one acquirement I have made form books which I would not readily give in exchange for a thorough practical acquaintance with domestic economy. I feel that home is a woman's true sphere, and that to be able to preside ther iwht ease, grace, and propriety, is, or should be, the great end of her education, so far as the present life is concerned" (Dyson 115)

On 1860 Godey's engraving entitled "The Light of the Home" the editors of the magazine note: "The perfection of womanhood . . . is the wife and mother, the center of the family, the magnet that draws man to the domestic altar, that makes him a civilized being, a social Christian. The wife is truly the light of the home." (qtd. in Green 56)

"God's Plan of Your Life." The Ladies' Repository. April 1865: 205.

"Never complain of your birth, your employment, your hardships; never fancy that you could be something if you only had a different lot and sphere assigned you. God understands his own plan, and he knows what you" need "better than you do" ("God's" 205)

8 Wealth Melville

Williams, Williams R. "Religion a Principle of Growth." from Religious Progress (1850). Midcentury America. Ed. Carl Bode. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1972: 136-139.

"It is again, even in lands and governments where political revolution is not needed or is not desired, an age of social reform. And in such a time, when the operatives, the proletary [sic] class, to use a word of French thinkers, the men living on the day's wages, the laborious and the begrimed, the doers of hard and honest work, are crying out because of the long neglect and cruel oppression which they deem themselves to have endured on the part of their richer brethren, -- is it not especially the season, when alike all those who seek and all those who dread such changes, should study, in the scriptures emanating from the Former and Ruler of Society, man's duties to man, and his obligations to his God? The law of human brotherhood is there illustrated as no where else. . ." (139)

Rev. "Pickwick Papers." Southern Literary Messenger. Septm 1837: 525-32.

Class and anti-anglophobia "Nothing therefore will suit him better than a light work, exactly adapted to the low and vulgar taste of counter-jumpers and miliner's apprentices in a city where there are enough of such characters for his purposes." (526)

"It is his misfortune to possess a talent, the abuse of which renders him acceptable to that class of readers by whom meretricious arts are preferred to modest grace." (531)

"The increase of works of this kind, marks the increasing importance of that class of readers which patronizes it. It is a symptom of that illusory and distempered prosperity, which, by multiplying the symbols of wealth, introduced among the patrons of literature multitudes of men without taste, without education, and consequently prone to low amusements and degrading indulgences. When the price of a book can be readily spared from the wages of a journeyman tailor, or a merchant's clerk, it is to be expected that books will be written expressly to please them." (531)

Compares this movement to sansculottism (531)

draws a cause and effect relationship between "Trades Union," and the prevalent corruption in the taste for light literature." (531)

Political context of Melville.

"Driven by what he termed 'republican progressiveness,' he wished to forge a literature that captured the spirit but not the political content of working-class protest." (Reynolds 278)

"I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property." (Tocqueville 51)

"There is...a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to which all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." (Tocqueville 53)

"The rich have a hearty dislike of the democratic institution of their country. The people form a power which they at once fear and despise. If the maladministration of the democracy ever brings about a revolutionary crisis and monarchical institutions ever become practicable in the U.S., the truth of what I advance will become obvious." (Tocqueville 180)

"It is certain that democracy annoys one part of the community and that aristocracy oppresses another." (Tocqueville 190)

"Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy....The lower orders are agitated by the chance of success, they are irritated by its uncertainty; and they pass from the enthusiasm of pursuit to the exhaustion of ill success, and lastly to the acrimony of disappointment. Whatever transcends their own limitations appears to be an obstacle to their desires, and there is no superiority, however legitimate it may be, which is not irksome in their sight." (Tocqueville 201)

158 "When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of apply his mind to the direction of the work. He every day becomes more adroit and less industrious; so that is may be said of him that in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded..... When a workman has spent a considerable portion of his existence in this manner, his thoughts are forever set upon the object of his daily toil...he no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling that he has chosen." (Tocqueville Vol. 2, 158)

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. Hill and Wang:NY. 1982.

38 "If the machine seemed the prime cause of abundance of new products changing the character of daily life, it also seemed responsible for newly visible poverty, slums, and an unexpected wretchedness of industrial conditions. While it inspired confidence in some quarters, it also provoked dismay, often arousing hope and gloom in the same minds. For accompanying the mechanization of industry, of transportation, and of daily existence, were the most severe contrasts between 'progress and poverty' (in Henry George's words) which seemed to many a mockery of the republican dream, a haunting paradox."

"The attitude toward poverty in the forties and fifties was ambivalent. Some people were poor, it was assumed, because they were morally incapable of living a better life; they were, said one investigator, `content to live in filth and disorder with a bare subsistence.' . . . . For the most part, poverty was considered a personal rather than a social responsibility, to be cured by reforming the person himself and rewarding him for ridding himself of those habits that made him poor.

Poor relief and charity work, therefore (at least until the sixties), consisted chiefly of providing moral instruction for the poor, with some direct assistance to alleviate present suffering." (Nye Society 45)

Professor Francis Bowen, in a apologia of industrial capitalism entitled The Principles of Political Economy (1859), confidently asserts that "Neither theoretically nor practically, in this country, is there any obstacle to any individual's becoming rich, if he will, and almost to any amount that he will . . . . How is it possible, indeed, that the poor should be arrayed in hostility against the rich , when . . . the son of an Irish coachman become the governor of a State and the grandson of a millionaire dies a pauper?" (qtd. in Curti 300)

Bartleby the Scrivner

As the reformer cum novelist??? Lydia Maria Child noted in Letters from New York, "In Wall-Street, and elsewhere, Mammon, as usual, coolly calculates his chance of extracting a penny from war, pestilence, and famine, and Commerce, with her loaded drays, and jaded skeletons of horses, is busy as ever fulfilling the 'World's contract with the Devil.' . . . I have often anathematized the spirit of Trade, which reigns triumphant, not only on 'Change, but in our halls of legislation, and even in our churches. Thought is sold under the hammer, and sentiment, in its holiest forms, stands labelled for the market. Love is offered to the highest bidder, and sixpences are given to purchase religion for starving souls. In view of these things, I sometimes ask whether the Age of Commerce is better than the age of War? Whether our 'merchant princes' are a great advance upon feudal chieftains? Whether it is better for the many to be prostrated by force, or devoured by cunning?" (qtd. in Curti 378)

From The Almighty Dollar! or The Brilliant Exploits of a Killer, a Romance of Old Quakerdelphia. Philadelphia, 1847. Rpt. in Notions of the Americans 1820-1860. Ed. David Grimsted. New York: George Braziller, 1970. 245-259.

odd book about a society of ruffians who mass against the

"aristocrats." From their "Constitution:" "Society is so framed, and the DOLLAR has become such a mighty engine, and those who have wealth have power, and those who have poser will be sure to abuse it . . . . Therefore, it is apparent that the rich want a signal estrangement from the people, and WE, the people, swear an eternal estrangement, a deadly enmity, a war of extermination against the aristocrats, the plunder and burning of their property, and all the mischief that can be concocted and executed against those overbearing and self-styled demigods" (Almighty 251) cf. Barnaby

"There is no surer sign of an unmanly and cowardly spirit than a vague desire for help; a wish to depend, to lean upon somebody, and enjoy the fruits of the industry of others. There are multitudes of young men, I suppose, who indulge in dreams of help from some quarter, coming in at a convenient moment. . . . some benevolent old gentlemen with a pocket full of money . . . who will, perhaps, give or lend them anywhere from ten to twenty thousand dollars" (Titcomb 16)

"It is the general rule of Providence, the world over, and in all time, that unearned success is a curse. It is the rule of Providence, that the process of earning success shall be the preparation 20 for its conservation and enjoyment" (Titcomb 19-20).

Lippard, George. New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million. Cincinnati: H. M. Rulison, 1854.

‘Thus far toward freedom! Here they come, -- three hundred serfs of the Atlantic cities, rescued from poverty, from wages-slavery, from the war of competition, from the grip of the landlord! Thus far toward a soil which they can call their own; thus far toward a free home. And thou, O! Christ, who didst live and die, so that all men might be brothers, bless us, and be with us, and march by our side, in this our exodus.’

The speaker was the socialist, -- Arthur Dermoyne.

And let us all, as we survey the masses of the human race, attempting their exodus from thraldom of all kinds, -- of the body, -- of the soul, -- from the tyranny which crushes man by the iron hand of brute force, or slowly kills him by the lawful operation of capital, labor-saving machinery, or monied enterprise,-- let us, too, send up our prayer, -- ‘O! THOU of Nazareth, go with the People in this their exodus, dwell with them in their tents, beacon with light, their hard way to the Promised Land!’” (Lippard New York 283-84)

9 Gothic Poe

Death

Dily Richards, writing from Mason, Tennessee in 1855, delineates a roll-call of the dead to his brother-in-law: "Your Brother Jon is ded [;] he Died the 11 of Sptenber last I am her by Alone. . . .Jon dident live but five days[.] [S]uppose he died with the fluks . . . . Ammy Richards is dead[,] Rebecah Richards is dead [,] Henison is Dead[.] [M]y yongest child About Twenty too years old an my our step son died in Mexico[.] Burrels oldest son is dead [;] he was About twenty years old[.][H]is dagter is dead[;] she was About five years old" (Saum 82)

A Georgian girl, from a school composition titled "Things that I Love," penned a rapsohdy to graveyards which mirrors Nell's passion: "I love to walk in the graveyard, and read the inscriptions on the tombstones, the weeping willows fall so gracefully over the silent dead; here and there you may see a rosebush, or a bed of violets, planted and trained by some gentle hand over a dead friend" (Saum 91)

Saum traces the nineteenth century's fascination with graveyards to three reasons: "a weepy melancholy [had] become fashionable in poetry and other cultural forms[;]. . . . the graveyard served as a vehicle of recollection[;] . . . [and] because it was invested with religious and spiritual intensity" (Saum 92)

On the deathbed: "three veiled hopes informed [the] preparations: (1) the hope of providing solicitude, emotional comfort, and some reassurance for the departing; (2) for the gathered circle, the hope of receiving inspiration by witnessing a calm and clear-eyed death; and (3) the guarded hope for the soul of the deceased that derived from a demonstration of Christian fortitude and resignation. Death could be a powerful lesson and reassurance for the living, as well as final outward sign of the departed's inward grace" (Saum 94)

Godey's Lady's Book vol. 26, 1843 boasts two poems entitled "The Dying Girl" Henry S. Hagert, and Mrs. John K. Lasky, as well as "The Memory of the Departed" "The Young Southern Widow" "The Mother's Lament" (about the death of a child), "The Trial of the Dead" "The Angel's Visits" ("And the Angel soars to his home on high,/While faith reveals, to the mother's eye,/ That he bears her sweet child to heaven!" Mrs. S. J. Hale), "The Mourner" ("She sleeps -- `the long and dreamless sleep' -- that voice is silent now,/ The seal is on her clay-cold lip, the death-dew on her brow.). And even a title as seemingly as carefree and lively as "To a Child at Play" ends, after picturing the "sweet frolic" of a "fair and lovely boy," ends with "And, when thy life is o'er,/ Translate thee to that `better land'/ Where sin and sorrow come not, and/ Where death shall be no more." (127) Lewis J. Cist.

"To say that the memoirs of women and clergymen were concerned with death is an understatement; to a degree that requires special consideration, they were exercises in necrophilia" (Douglas 200)

Mason, Rev. Erskine. "The Approach of Death -- A New Year's Sermon." The American National Preacher. (19) January 1845: 1-13.

Pastor of Bleecker St. Presbyterian Church, New York.

After admonishing the "visions of decietful hope" fostered by the birth of a new year, he gets to the heart of the matter: "My subject, then, this morning, is death -- and my object is to set it before you, in some of those aspects adn associations which beliong to it, and in the light of which it si calculated to esert a healthful moral influence over the mind" (Mason 2).

Taking for his text, Revelations iii. 11. "Behold I come quickly," he warns it flock that "Death comes suddenly" as well (Mason 8).

Under the simple entry "SADNESS" "There is a mysterious feeling that frequently passes like a cloud over the spirits. . . . a sound will come booming across teh ocean of memory, gloomy and solemn as the death-knell, overshadowing all the bright hopes and sunny feelings of the heart. Who can describe it, and yet who has not felt its bewildering influence? Still it is a delicious sort of sorrow; and like a cloud dimming the sunshine of the river, although causing a momentary shade of gloom, it enhances the beauty of returning brightness" (Scrap-Book 353)

Interesting qualificaiton -- the "Still" is the important word

Under the title "Beautiful Extract"

"I saw a mourner standing at eventide over the grave of one dearest to him on earth. The memory of joys that were past came crowding on his soul. 'And is this,' said he, 'all that remains of one so loved and so lovely? I call, but no voice answers. Oh! my loved one will not hear O death! inexorable death! what hast thou done? . . . . While he thought thus in agony, teh gentle form of Christianity came be. She bade him look upward, and to the eye of faith the heavens were disclosed. He heard the song and transport of the great multitude which no man can number around the throne. . . . there, the spirit of her he mourned! There happiness was pure, permanent, perfect. The mourner then wiped the tears from his eyes. . . and returned to the duties of life no longer sorrowing as those who have no hope" (Scrap-Book 518)

extract entitled "Christianity in the hour of death" "But oh, how soft the bed of death; what easy, pleasant dying, when the comfortable assurances of God's word are brought home to the heart of the striken one in the langauge that cannot be misundersood" (Scrap-Book 291)

1855 Hartford CT. "I have spent a part of two days walking in the Cemetaries here. I have enjoyed it much" (Sprague 148)

*****************

on Virginians: "They even seem to like talking of themselves as the `cavaliers' of the Union, and of recalling the origin of their States' soubriquet of the `old dominion.'" (Godley 197)

"The community was, in its own way, like the South in general, aristocratic. Mistaken notions have been held in regard tot he aristorcatic condition of Southern society. One of these is that the planters lived with a degree of state and luxury. This I imagine to be a mistake. This way of living existed ina few localities, but was not general. Manners as a rule were simple. . . . All that is necessary to make a society aristocratic is that certain of its members shall be recognized by their neighbors to be superior to certan others. This was true of the South." (75-76)

"Southern Literature" 88-99

"But the Southern writers, from being unable to be veracious upon one subject, seemed to lose the power of veracity regarding all subjects. They became imitative, exaggerated and sentimental. Their society they Europeanized. The Southern planter was an English squire. They made him a feeble Sir Roger de Coverley, and his farm or plantation a rather shabby English manor house. . . . Everything was exaggerated. All their geese became swans. [cf. Tom Sawyer]. . . . A soldier became a cavalier; a house was a hall. (92-93)

Rev. "Pickwick Papers." Southern Literary Messenger. Septm 1837: 525-32.

Class and anti-anglophobia "Nothing therefore will suit him better than a light work, exactly adapted to the low and vulgar taste of counter-jumpers and miliner's apprentices in a city where there are enough of such characters for his purposes." (526)

Reading

"It is his misfortune to possess a talent, the abuse of which renders him acceptable to that class of readers by whom meretricious arts are preferred to modest grace." (531)

"The increase of works of this kind, marks the increasing importance of that class of readers which patronizes it. It is a symptom of that illusory and distempered prosperity, which, by multiplying the symbols of wealth, introduced among the patrons of literature multitudes of men without taste, without education, and consequently prone to low amusements and degrading indulgences. When the price of a book can be readily spared from the wages of a journeyman tailor, or a merchant's clerk, it is to be expected that books will be written expressly to please them." (531)

Compares this movement to sansculottism (531)

draws a cause and effect relationship between "Trades Union," and the prevalent corruption in the taste for light literature." (531)

This type of literature she calls "contemporary consolation literature." (Douglas 201)

"Poe famoulsy borrowed crime stories from the penny press" (Reynolds Beneath 171) Did Dickens??

"Sensational literature . . . . had precedents in foreign collections of criminal biography such as teh Newgate Calendar. .[he notes dickens, bulwer and ainsworth] . . Since there was still no international copyright, American publishers issued many cheap reprintsing of such foreign sensational writings, which found a huge market in America." (Reynolds beneath 172)

"The crucial transitional moment in American jounalism was 1833, the year that the first penny newspapers, Horation David Sheppard's New York Morning Post and Benjamin H. Day's New York Sun, appeared." (Reynolds Beneath 174)

On James Gordon Bennet's New York Herald: Bennet said "[I found out that Americans] were more ready to seek six columns of the details of a brutal murder, or the testimony of a divorce case, or the trial of a divine for improprieties of conduct, than the saem amount of words poured forth by the genius of the noblest author of th etimes" (qtd. in Reynolds Beneath 174)

Cf. Jerry Springer: Bennet "courted insults to gain publicity." (Reynolds Beneath 174)

George Wilkes made a series in 1847 entitled The lives of the Felons, or American Criminal Calendar (Reynolds Beneath 177) compare with newgate calendar

John Harpe -- convicted murderer circa 1830s: "I have not the least regret for the murders I have committed. I have taekn pleasure in the sight of humna blood shed by my own hands . . . I curse you and all mankind, for I hate you and the whole human race. One of my own childern I have murdered. . . Think you then that I cared for the blood of strangers?" (Reynolds Beneath 177)

"What relations did the penny papers and the crime writings have with the major literature? In the most direct sense, they generated popular images and stereotypes that were absorbed into the major literature" (Reynolds Beneath 177)

"Whereas previous American crime reports, from Puritan times through the mid -- 1820s, were carful to draw religious or moral lessons from criminals' experiences, the antebellum reports wer, in the main, gloating rcords of unthinkable atrocities obviously designed to please a ssensation-hungry public" (Reynolds Beneath 178) But Dickens was able to combine the two and thus avoid censure

Parsons, John. "A Student at NYU in 1847: Exerpts from the Diary of John E. Parsons" New York Historical Soceity Quarterly 38 (1954): 325-344.

Lippard, George. "Eulogy of Poe" from Quaker City Weekly. 20 October 1849. George Lippard: Prophet of Protest, Writings of an American Radical, 1822-1854. Ed. David S. Reynolds. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. 262-263.

On Poe "As an author, his name will live, while three-fourths of the bastard critics and mongrel authors of the present day go down to nothingness and night." (Lippard "Eulogy" 262)

10 Slave Narrative

On abolitionists -- remarks on the fervor of the Abolitionists in the Northeast, but. . . "The mobs in the northern states are very much divided upon this subject, but the majority (including all the Irish) are in most places anti-abolitionist, entirely from hatred to the blacks, and fear lest abolition in the South might be followed by a large immigration of negros to the North, and a corresponding reduction of wages." (Godley 70)

Interesting discussion of Civil War issues of slavery and politics -- "(though I have no idea, as some have, that it is likely to lead to an early dissolution of the Union)" (Godley71)

Considers abolitionist rhetoric and ideology very dangerous since it calls for violent manumission.(Godley 74-75)

Reports of "great riots. . .during the summer between the whites (principally Irish) and the negros." 162.

on Virginians: "They even seem to like talking of themselves as the `cavaliers' of the Union, and of recalling the origin of their States' soubriquet of the `old dominion.'" (Godley 197)

11 Whitman

Haswell, Chas H. Reminiscences of an Octogenarian of the City of New York (1816-1860). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897.

Bowery Boys

"The Bowery, at this period, had become perhaps the most interesting street in the city, and so it remains, though with characterisitcs much altered from those of 1840. That date is about the mid-period of its peculiar notoriety as a native rpduct, before the vast incursion of foreigners had given it its present cosmoploitan distinction. The "Bowery boy" (or b'hoy) and "Bowery gal" were at the height of their development as represented on the theatrical stage, with not overmuch exaggeration, by Chanfrau in the well remembered types of Mose, Sikesy, and Lize. The "bowery boy" flourished in his own proper time, and departed, never to return. He was the outcome of conditions that will not exist again, being primarily a product of the volunteer fire department system, and appearind in an age when the comparative smallness fo the icty allowed marked soical peculiarities to become prominent, which would be lost amid the mass of people and the whirl of htings in which all forms of singulairty now appear and pass, with but a moment's notice anc comment. "Bowery boys" were not wholly admirable beings, but they had some qualities that were admirable, and were much to be preferred to an later varieties of the genus ""rough." In their combats they were content with nature's weapons, avodigin murderous implements; they wer mostly men of regular occupations and industyr, the Boweryism being only their form of amusement in leisure hours; they wer comparatively sober, and cultivated certain trait os manliness, especiallya a respect for women, which was traditional with them; and they were intensely American." this around 1840.

November 1842 "First American Edition" American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens. Extra Series. Published complete. Vol. II numbers 8,9. 12 1/2 cents

On last page, an advertisement:

Friends of Temperance, Ahoy!

Franklin Evans,

or

The Inebriate.

A Tale of the times -- By a popular American Author.

The novel, which is dedicated to the Temperance Societies and the friends of the Temperance Cause throughout the United States, will create a sensation, both for the ability with which it is written, as well as the interest of the subject, and will be universally read and admired. It was written expressly for the New World, by one of the best Novelists in this country, with a view to aid the great work of Reform, and rescue Young Men from the demon of Intemperance. The incidents of the plot are wrought out with great effect, and the excellence of its moral, and the beneficial influence it will have, should interest the friends of the Temperance Reformation in giving this Tale the widest possible circulation.

Terms: It will be issued as an Extra New World (octavo) on Wednesday, Nov. 22 at 12 1/2 cents single; ten copies for $1, or $2 per hundred. J. Winchester, 30 Ann Street, N. Y.

Whitman, Walt. "A Memorandum at a Venture." Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Library of America, 1982: 1030-1036. An apologia for "Childern of Adam" first published in NAR 188?.

on the repression of sex in culture "non-scientific, non-aesthetic and eminently non-religious condition" (Whitman 1031)

"the sexual passion in itself, while normal and unperverted, is inherently legitimate, creditable, not necessarily an improper theme for poet . . ." (Whitman 1032)

"No, it is not the picture or nude statue or text, with clear aim, that is indecent; it is the beholder's own thought, inference, distorted construction" (Whitman 1036)

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Last Revised August 2002
David Bordelon