American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855 By John Jude Garcia A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael J. Mascuch, Chair Professor Anthony J. Cascardi Professor Elisa Tamarkin Professor Samuel Otter Spring 2014 American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855 © 2014 by John Jude Garcia Abstract American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855 by John Jude Garcia Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Mascuch, Chair This dissertation combines literary study, cultural history, and critical bibliography to examine the development of a specific literary genre in the early United States, from the Federalist era to just prior to the onset of the Civil War. I argue that the social and cultural impact of biography occurs not solely through literary narrative but also through the materiality of the printed book. Ideology, in other words, is transmitted through literary artifacts via what we traditionally define as the “text,” but textual meanings are mediated through paratexts, book bindings, paper, typography, presswork, page design, and illustration. Using archives, documents, financial records, and correspondence related to the early U.S. book trade, I recover the social thought of printers and booksellers as they understood the role of the printed book in fostering cultural nationalism. Combining the methods of book history and bibliography with conceptual frameworks developed by Benedict Anderson and Pierre Bourdieu—on the imagined political community and the field of cultural production, respectively—the dissertation focuses throughout on the specificities of primary source materials to make a methodological contribution to literary and cultural history. From 1800 onwards the printed book was a media technology that could unify Americans through the collective reading of national biography, even as the specificities of book formats and the range of printed materials subtly reinforced class divisions within American society. With the rise of urban environments and the penny press in the 1840s, I further demonstrate that biographical pamphlets tied to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum helped foster a critical discourse within U.S. print culture about the rise of a culture industry. Furthermore, by 1848 many biographical texts combined narrative with illustration to shape public perception regarding the U.S.-Mexican War. Using publisher’s records along with evidence of the subscription book trade, I argue that texts about the Mexican War linked the sites of combat and military life in Mexico with American cities, small towns, and the private domain of the bourgeois home. I conclude with two investigations of how biography helped structure modalities of literary authorship in the mid-nineteenth-century. In Israel Potter (1855), Herman Melville wrote a literary biography that was both a meditation on the challenges and failures faced by authors in a depersonalized publishing environment as well as a coded reflection on how his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne used the genre of biography to secure political and financial success through writing the Life of Franklin Pierce. My second investigation of authorship involves the publication history of Evert A. and George Duyckinck’s Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855), a literary anthology that offered authoritative capsule biographies of writers in the American tradition. 1 For Zoe, John and Cyn, and my parents i Contents Chapter 1. Introduction—The Grand Treasury of Lives 1 American Biography 2 / The History of Books 10 / The Market for Nationalism 15 Chapter 2. Printed Lives in the Early United States 20 Liberal Interiors and Elegant Exteriors 20 / Consuming the Civic Text 23 / Biography in Early U.S. Magazine Culture 26 / Selling George Washington 30 / Typographic Exertions: The Weems Biographies 38 / The Image Before the Text: Illustrated Biographies of the American Founders 44 Chapter 3. P.T. Barnum’s Biographical Illusions and Antebellum Print Culture 52 From National Heroes to Ordinary (and Extraordinary) Lives 52 / Images of P.T. Barnum 53 / Planet Barnum 56 / Stages of the Barnum Persona 61 / The Biographical Illusion 63 / Entextualizing P.T. Barnum 67 / Antebellum Popular Culture and Printed Lives 71 / The Life of Joice Heth 72 / Barnum and Blackness: Blackface Minstrelsy in the Life of Charles S. Stratton 74 / The Many Lives of Jenny Lind 83 / The Later Biographies: Ordinary Freaks 81 Chapter 4. Annexation, Dismemberment, Disavowal: (Biography and Visual Culture of the U.S.-Mexican War) 83 The Leg I Left Behind Me 83 / National Vanity: Print Capitalism, U.S. Empire, and Writing from the Camp 89 / John Frost: Subscription Publishing, Wood Engravings, Biographical Propaganda 96 / Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Post-War Politics of Editing 103 Chapter 5. “Biography, in its purer form”: Herman Melville’s Israel Potter 107 A Biographical Ghost 107 / A Curiously Unequal Book 110 / Melville’s Dedication 112 / The Many Editions of Israel Potter 116 / A Difference in Brick 123 / Israel Potter and the World We Live In 128 Coda. Biography, the Book Trade, and the Making of an American Literary Canon 130 Bibliography 135 ii List of Figures Figure 1. Fly-leaf marginalia to Das Leben des Georg Washington, (Baltimore, 1817). Collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia 17 Figure 2. “View of the Barnum Property” Yankee Doodle (1847) 58 Figure 3. Printed cover of Autobiography of Petite Bunkum, the Yankee Showman (1855) 70 Figure 4. A caricature of Barnum as one of the curiosities. From “Original Comicalities,” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion (June 1854) 75 Figure 5. Santa Anna Declining a Hasty Plate of Soup at Cerro Gordo. Lithograph, published by H.R. Robinson (1847). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-13650) 84 Figure 6. A New Rule in Algebra. Five from Three and One remains!! Or “The Three Mexican Prisoners, having but one leg between them all.” Lithograph, published by E. Jones and G.W. Newman (1846). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-9915) 86 Figure 7. “Latest From The Army,” Yankee Doodle (Dec. 12 1846) 91 Figure 8. “Storming of Chapultepec—Pillow’s attack,” from The War Between the United States and Mexico Illustrated (1850). Lithographed by the Parisian artists Lemarcier and Adolph Jean Baptiste Bayot. Courtesy of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. 95 Figure 9. Two representations of soldiers on horseback. John Frost, Pictorial History of Mexico and the Mexican War, 386-387. Courtesy of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia 99 Figure 10. Engraved frontispiece to the first edition of The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824, printed and authored by Henry Trumbull). Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 117 Figure 11. Engraved frontispiece to the second 1824 edition of Potter’s Life and Remarkable Adventures, printed for Potter by John Howard. Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 119 Figure 12. Title page to The Refugee, from the personal library of Herman Melville. Houghton Library, Harvard University 121 iii Acknowledgments Book history’s greatest insight is that all knowledge is collaborative—and that every stage in the making of an intellectual document like a dissertation depends upon countless hidden agents, amanuenses, and gift economies. Michael Mascuch patiently helped at every stage of the Rhetoric graduate program, always being willing to listen and give constructive criticism. Marianne Constable also helped me be a better thinker, and she accidentally led me into the field of book history through her graduate course on the role of documents in law and history. I benefited from many courses with Pheng Cheah, Judith Butler, Kaja Silverman, and Anthony Cascardi. My readers in English, Samuel Otter and Elisa Tamarkin, patiently listened to ideas often more intuitive and gestural than fully formed, and they challenged me at every stage. Mitch Brietwieser is not on my official committee, but I couldn’t have started on this path without him. David Henkin gave me a crash course in American cultural history before 1900 through his history graduate courses and as a reader for his undergraduate lectures on Antebellum America. There are other faculty from Berkeley who had a hand in my intellectual development besides those listed here. I thank them too. The Program in Critical Theory, along with Rhetoric, gave me the funding that got me started on this project. I thank Judith Butler for several fellowships and her generous support. Rhetoric gave me several Block Grant awards and Wollenberg Grants which, along with several years of teaching assistantships, kept me fed and sheltered while I did the work you are reading here. More recently, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation sponsored two external fellowships made the final year of writing just terrific. I thank Jim Green and Dan Richter for awarding me a fellowship in Early American Literature and Material Texts. And I thank Michael Suarez, Donna Sy, and Barbara Heritage for welcoming me into the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School. Through RBS at the University of Virginia I have met and learned from some amazing book historians and bibliographers, and I must thank David Whitesell and the assistants in his course on descriptive bibliography. Through the Library Company of Philadelphia and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn I have benefited from conversations, intellectual exchanges, and friendships with the following people: Michael Winship, Max Cavitch, Marcy Dinius, Chris Looby, Meredith McGill, Chris Hunter, Alea Henle, Steve Smith, Mark Mattes, Seth Perry, Sarah Scheutze, Peter Jaros, Adam Lewis, Lindsay van Tine, and many others, especially through life at the McNeil Center.