What Hath God Wrought (93 page)

After the critical reevaluation of American literature that began in the 1920s, Longfellow fell out of favor. Most literary critics now deem his didacticism and sentimentalism quaint and trite, but one suspects his poetry could still serve its original purpose of inspiring the young, if once again it were taught in schools.
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Not all authors aimed at the market for uplift, however. Writers such as George Lippard achieved commercial success by targeting an audience of young working-class males with sensationalism, violence (mild by our standards), social criticism, and escapism. Like the domestic fiction aimed at women, working-class “dime novels” told about characters with whom their readers could identify. Starting in 1839, these novels would appear first serialized in weekly “story papers” and then in cheap paperbound pamphlet editions. With their exciting adventures often set on the western frontier, such publications helped popularize imperialism, though not necessarily the expansion of slavery, among the northern working class. Dime novels confirmed the fears of Calvinists and gave cause for the concern of anxious reviewers who wanted literature to promote personal improvement.
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Middle-class readers throughout the Union also liked novels about frontier bloodshed, Indian wars, and the Revolution. South Carolina’s William Gilmore Simms hoped to duplicate the success of New York’s Fenimore Cooper in dealing with such themes. The ambitious son of a humble storekeeper, the prolific Simms worked hard at the literary profession, writing not only fiction but also poetry, history, geography, and literary criticism, lecturing on tour, and editing a series of magazines culminating in the
Southern Quarterly Review
. Nevertheless, Simms found his literary career a constant scramble and, in the end, died impoverished. Through his writing and addresses he helped create the romantic legend of the Old South (to which a number of northern writers also contributed), featuring paternal plantation owners and contented slaves. This proslavery perspective has contributed to his fall from popularity, leaving Simms in the status of a formerly famous writer.
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The antebellum southern author best remembered today is Edgar A. Poe (the form of his name that he preferred). Whereas both Transcendentalists and didactic Christian writers intended their art as moral and spiritual inspiration, Poe espoused the position—unusual in America at the time—that art did not need to serve some further function but was worthwhile for its own sake. He and Margaret Fuller were probably the finest American literary critics of their day. Orphaned at an early age, Poe quarreled with his guardian, developed a drinking problem, and never enjoyed a stable home life. Although he got several good jobs (notably as editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
), he could not manage to keep them. His romantic relationships were tempestuous, and his young wife, Virginia, died tragically from tuberculosis. Poe’s poetry and fiction reflect both his sophisticated literary theory and the agonies of his personal life. His poem “The Raven” (1844), a meticulously crafted meditation upon inconsolable grief, became an instant success and has remained among the best-known poetry of all time. Although he wrote one novel, Poe more significantly pioneered the short story and within that genre essentially invented detective fiction, which the Scotsman Arthur Conan Doyle would take up in the next generation.
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The difficulties Simms and Poe found in earning a living as writers were not peculiar to southerners. Emerson’s Concord neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne encountered similar problems. Starting in 1830 Hawthorne sold stories to magazines, and in 1836 collected some for publication in book form. Although well received, Hawthorne’s writings generated only a modest income for him, his wife, the artist Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and their children. He hoped that the commune started by some of his literary friends at Brook Farm would provide a way of life compatible with writing but learned otherwise and lost his financial investment in the enterprise. He got revenge by writing
The Blithedale Romance
, a thinly disguised satire on Brook Farm, Emerson, Fuller, and the Transcendentalist movement. From time to time, financial rescue came in the form of federal patronage: appointments in the Boston Custom House, the Salem Custom House, and finally as U.S. consul in Liverpool, England—all of which, however, cut into his writing time and energy. His two great novels,
The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851), were written between government jobs. Despite eventually achieving recognition, if not wealth, through his work, Hawthorne always resented the competition of those he called the “damned mob of scribbling women,” whose efforts sold better than his.
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Hawthorne tried many kinds of writing, including children’s books, but the works for which we chiefly remember him deal with New England’s Puritan past, combining the qualities of historical romance with psychological depth. Like Poe, Hawthorne appreciated the literary power of guilt and grief and, like him, moved away from realistic fiction into surrealism and symbolism. For this reason, he preferred to call his long works of fiction “romances” rather than “novels,” a distinction generally drawn at the time. While a Unitarian in his own religion, Hawthorne retained much of his Puritan ancestors’ Calvinist sense of sin—a combination also found in John Quincy Adams, with whose politics Hawthorne disagreed.
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A friend and admirer of Hawthorne was the New Yorker Herman Melville. Although his parents came from distinguished families, Herman grew up in shabby gentility. A youthful rebel, he ran off to sea as a common sailor, first on a merchant ship to Liverpool in 1839, then on a whaler around Cape Horn in 1841. He jumped ship in the Pacific Islands and spent several adventurous years there before signing on with a U.S. naval vessel as a means of returning home in 1844. Back in New York, Melville turned his experiences into books,
Typee
(1846) and
Omoo
(1847), presenting a romanticized view of his Polynesian escapades that made him a controversial celebrity. Though he had achieved enough financial success now to marry the daughter of Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, Melville’s next three books,
Mardi
,
Redburn
, and
White Jacket
, brought him little income. Moving to the Berkshire Mountains in order to live near Hawthorne, Melville composed his giant tragic masterpiece,
Moby-Dick
, the greatest of sea stories, published in 1850 and dedicated to Hawthorne, its rhetoric redolent of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Although it started out selling well, sales of
Moby-Dick
dried up after negative reviews appeared. Some of these, not surprisingly, objected to the book’s questioning attitude toward religion. Others resulted from a defective edition published in London that omitted the epilogue and so left readers wondering how Ishmael could narrate the story when he had perished (it seemed) in the wreck of the
Pequod
. Melville’s next publication, his tormented semiautobiographical
Pierre
(1851), did nothing to reassure his readership. Attempts to salvage his finances by lecture tours failed. His writing career stumbled and went into decline, while his family’s security depended on his wife’s inheritance and his job as a customs officer in the Port of New York, awarded after prolonged lobbying on his behalf. Only in the 1920s did literary scholars begin to recover appreciation for Melville’s saga of the doomed Captain Ahab, who dares defy the incomprehensible power of the universe by his hunt for the white whale named Moby-Dick. Still more recently, readers have begun to notice the political dimension of Melville’s masterpiece: Ahab the demagogue leading his followers to destruction.
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The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed publishing flourish as an industry while creative writers struggled to establish an economically viable profession in the United States. Unfortunately the interests of publishers and writers collided in the area of copyright law. The Constitution authorized copyright laws, and Congress enacted one in 1790, protecting American but not foreign authors. This law effected a massive transfer of intellectual property from British to American publishers, but it proved a very mixed benefit to American authors. In the absence of international copyright, American publishers preferred to reprint free the works of established British writers like Thackeray, Scott, Dickens, and the Brontë sisters, rather than take a chance on American writers to whom they would have to pay royalties. By our standards such reprinting constituted literary piracy, but it was not then illegal. American writers lobbied for an international copyright law to save them from this unfair competition, and found a champion in Henry Clay. The publishers declared it contrary to American national interest to pay royalties to foreign authors. They also cleverly aligned their interest with that of the reading public, arguing that free reprints kept down the price of books, and the Jacksonian Democratic Party sided with them rather than with the authors. By such means, American publishers succeeded in fending off international copyright until 1891. Ironically, the United States today strongly protects intellectual property and insists that other countries observe international copyright rules.
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The absence of international copyright made it harder for Americans to earn a living by writing. This helps explain why male writers often supplemented their income in other ways—lecturing, editing magazines, or seeking political patronage jobs such as Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and James Russell Lowell obtained. Women writers found these alternatives impossible or much more difficult; this helps explain why women who wrote for a living had to concentrate so hard on making sure their publications would be commercially successful.

The connections between politics and journalism gave rise to connections between politics and literature. New York’s
Democratic Review
mostly patronized Democratic authors. Whig writers more commonly appeared in the
American Whig Review
, Greeley’s
Tribune Weekly
, both also originating in New York, and Boston’s
North American Review
. Only occasionally did such journals run a piece by someone identified with the opposing major party, though the
Tribune Weekly
often ran pieces by radical reformers and socialists. Writers themselves sometimes befriended colleagues across party lines, as the Whig Longfellow did the Democrat Hawthorne. Margaret Fuller, active in the Whig Party despite her gender, made friends among Democratic writers of the “Young America” group in New York City. Washington Irving enjoyed good relations with both Democratic and Whig politicians; Walt Whitman started out as a Democrat but became bitterly disenchanted with the party’s proslavery stance.
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As postcolonial peoples often do, Americans in the young republic asked themselves whether they yet possessed a distinctive national literature. The question chiefly concerned American
writers
, since American
readers
clearly inhabited a transatlantic literary world, consuming large quantities of British literature made even larger by the absence of international copyright. Conversely, a few American writers sold well in Britain (without copyright protection); the favorite poet of the English people in the nineteenth century was not Wordsworth or Tennyson but Longfellow. By midcentury the United States was just on the verge of an unparalleled explosion of literary creativity. The decade of the 1850s would witness, in addition to the great novels of Hawthorne and Melville, Emerson’s
Representative Men
(1850), Thoreau’s
Walden
(1854), Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
(1855), and the record-breaking best seller of the entire nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852). When the Association of New York Publishers met in New York’s Crystal Palace ( just erected in imitation of the one in London) on September 27, 1855, they could with perfect justification greet 153 of their most popular authors with the proud toast: “To American Literature!”
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IV

Even more than novels, the theater remained under a moral cloud in the newly independent United States. Calvinist Protestantism had disapproved of dramatic productions ever since the English Puritans had closed the theaters during the seventeenth-century interregnum. The First Continental Congress, reflecting the kind of religious fervor that imbued many in the Patriot cause, had done likewise in 1774. The influential Calvinist John Witherspoon, president of Princeton and signer of the Declaration of Independence, famously denounced the theater as an aspect of that worldly gentility and emotional indulgence which a well-disciplined Christian should avoid.
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In the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, many theater owners undertook to free dramatic productions from their traditional stigma and to broaden their audiences. They presented plays with patriotic and moral themes as well as entertaining ones. Sometimes they went so far as to ban the prostitutes who had customarily plied their trade in theater galleries. And they produced lots of Shakespeare, whose plays were by no means confined to an elitist enclave. Tocqueville surely exaggerated when he wrote, “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” but he had noticed something real: Americans usually read Shakespeare before seeing his plays performed. Already revered as cultural icons, the Bard’s plays could be defended by theatrical producers not only as rattling good stories but also as part of a spectator’s program of self-improvement. This in turn prompted many parodies of Shakespeare—not so much poking fun at the plays themselves, however, as at the use to which overly earnest playgoers put them. The parodies relied for their humor on the audience’s familiarity with the original.
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