g READING AND DISORDER IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA g g READING AND DISORDER IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA g David M. Stewart THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS · COLUMBUS Copyright © 2011 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stewart, David M. (David Malcolm), 1953– Reading and disorder in antebellum America / David M. Stewart. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1158-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1158-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9257-0 (cd) 1. Men—Books and reading—United States—History. I. Title. PR448.M37S75 2011 028’.9081097309034—dc22 2010046572 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1158-8) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9257-0) Cover design by Melissa Ryan Text design by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe. Type set in Adobe Caslon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS g List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Reading and Recreation in Antebellum America 1 PART 1. CITY CRIME Introduction. City Reading 37 Chapter 1. Theorizing Disorder 47 Chapter 2. The Erotics of Space 55 Chapter 3. Narrating Excess 71 PART 2. BODILY STYLE Introduction. Reading Bodies 93 Chapter 4. Cultural Diet 103 Chapter 5. Accusing Victims 118 Chapter 6. Men in Public 131 PART 3. THE POETICS OF INTIMACY Introduction. Intimacies of Disorder 145 Chapter 7. Social Poetics 153 Chapter 8. Sex and the Police 161 Chapter 9. The Joys of Seduction 175 Chapter 10. The Mysteries of Chumship 196 Afterword. The Trouble with Men 220 Selected Bibliography 225 Index 237 ILLUSTRATIONS g Figure 1. The Carpenter Family, c. 1853 18 Figure 2. Illustration from New-York Scenes: Designed for the Entertainment and Instruction of Children of City and Country, 1830 42 Figure 3. “A Walk around the City,” from The New-York Guide, in Miniature: Contains Hints and Cautions to All Little Strangers at New-York, 1830 43 Figure 4. Bay State Mills and Boarding Houses, Lawrence, Massachusetts 57 Figure 5. Washington Mills, Lawrence, Massachusetts 57 Figure 6. Merrimack boarding houses, Dutton Street, Lowell, Massachusetts, c. 1930 58 Figure 7. The Manhattan gridiron, 1811 60 Figure 8. Working Men’s Home, 1856 61 Figure 9. Bird’s-Eye View of an East Side Tenement Block 62 Figure 10. Merrimack Mills and Boarding House, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1848 65 Figure 11. “Scene of the Horrible and Mysterious Murder in Broadway: Drawn on the Spot,” from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1856 75 Figure 12. The Scene of Riot at Sixth and St. Mary Streets, from George Lippard, Life and Adventures of Charles Anderson Chester, the Notorious Leader of the Philadelphia “Killers,” 1850 96 Figure 13. Poster of actor Frank Chanfrau as the character Mose, from A Glance at New York, 1848 97 Figure 14. Sketch of George Thompson, from Broadway Belle, 1855 107 vii viii • Illustrations Figure 15. Headpiece from Chapter XLII, “An Authentic Ghost Story,” from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1853 123 Figure 16. “The Drunkard at Home,” from Charles Jewett, Youth’s Temperance Lecture, 1841 124 Figure 17. “A Night Scene,” from Thrilling Scenes of Cottage Life, 1853 125 Figure 18. “Dancing for Eels,” lithograph by James Brown, 1848 142 Figure 19. Frontispiece from Ralph Glover, Every Mother’s Book; or, The Duty of Husband and Wife Physiologically Discussed, 1847 167 Figure 20. Frontispiece from Robert Dale Owen, Moral Physiology: A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question, 1831 167 Figure 21. “Specie Claws,” lithograph by Henry Dacre, 1838 169 Figure 22. Frontispiece from George Lippard, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, 1845 183 Figure 23. Illustration from Amanda Bannorris, The Female Land Pirate, 1847 190 Figure 24. “The Drunkard’s Progress,” lithograph by Nathaniel Currier, 1846 208 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS g Much of the manuscript was drafted while a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil Center of Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Final revisions were completed at the Institute for European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Research funding came from the National Science Council (Taiwan), American Antiquarian Society, Huntington Library, and Library Company of Philadelphia. I also enjoyed research privileges at the American Textile History Museum (Lowell, MA), Massachusetts Historical Society, Columbia Univer- sity Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt Library, and Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I want to thank National Central University for its support and generos- ity during the decade-plus I have lived and worked in Taiwan. Without the friendship and inspiration of my colleagues in the English Department at NCU, I would not have survived. My thanks to Senior Editor Sandy Crooms and the staff at The Ohio State University Press for helping bring Reading and Disorder to press after many years of work. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their effort on my behalf. Readers and advisors have been many. A short list would include Christo- pher Looby, Robert Gross, Barbara Hochman, Paul Erickson, Joshua Green- berg, Josephine Ho, Andrew Hoberek, Thomas Knoles, Daniel Richter, James Green, Ping-chen Hsiung, Shirley Teresa Wajda, and Helen Horowitz. Thank you all. And finally, I want to thank my family, especially my parents, Malcolm and Bianca Stewart, my sisters, Barbara Stewart and Betty Goodfellow, and my wife, Shuling Ko. A ix x • Acknowledgments Parts of chapters 4 and 6 were published under the title “Consuming George Thompson,” in American Literature, Vol. 80:2, 233–63. Copyright 2008, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. INTRODUCTION g Reading and Recreation in Antebellum America I have not been out of the shop today only to go to my meals. I am either at work or else reading Modern Romance. —Edward Jenner Carpenter1 REQUIRED READING It was raining. It was also Thursday, and the town, Greenfield Massachusetts, while no country backwater, was not one of the nation’s hot spots either. So when Edward Carpenter, nineteen-year-old apprentice to the cabinetmaking firm of Miles and Lyons, wrote in his diary that he stayed in all day, working and reading and leaving only to eat, he may have had nothing better to do. But Carpenter often stayed in to read, even when the weather was fine, work was finished, and there were other things to do. His reading on these occasions was not limited to “Modern Romance,” a volume of condensed popular novels (Marrying for Money, The Fatal Whisper, The Game of Life, and three others) he bought for 25 cents three days before. A constant stream of newspapers and magazines crossed Carpenter’s workbench. Some he subscribed to; others he borrowed or obtained through networks of young men like himself who exchanged reading by mail. He also read tract and advice literature, to which he had access in a variety of forms. Novels had special appeal, though, and even when he took up history or popular reform, it was usually narrative, often fictional. More than any other, this kind of reading kept him in the shop. We 1. Journal of Edward Jenner Carpenter, August 22, 1844. Further references are cited by date parenthetically in the text as ECJ. 1 2 • Introduction detect something of his enthusiasm in the gusto of pairing romance and labor in a day stripped of all but the barest essentials. More direct is the relish of his response to books like Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, Attila: A Romance by G. P. R. James, and Alexander Stimson’s temperance novel Easy Nat. Carpenter was not alone. Many stayed in to read, for news and education, but also for recreation and pleasure. Carpenter saw opportunity in the trend. In 1849, with his craft in decline and soon to be married, he relocated to Brattleboro, Ver- mont, where he started a small bookshop and wholesale newspaper business. Later, he became town librarian. The living was modest, but sufficient to raise four children, one of whom followed his father’s professional lead. Edward, Jr., became a printer and editor in Amherst, MA. He even took a turn at author- ship, writing the town’s first history, which he published in 1896, four years before his father’s death.2 Reading is the small topic of Reading and Disorder. Edward Carpenter exemplifies William Gilmore’s claim that by the mid-nineteenth century read- ing had become “a necessity of life” in the Upper Connecticut River Valley.3 Necessity was not limited to that corner of New England that Carpenter called home. Innumerable studies have traced the importance of reading throughout the United States before the Civil War, especially in the industrializing north- east.4 What some call the “reading revolution” involved changes in the style, quantity, and business of reading that occurred in relation to other develop- ments, notably the rise of a market economy. These developments required significant changes in how Americans lived and where. Reading facilitated large-scale migration to cities, together with new forms of manufacturing, domestic relations, business practices, and the growth of knowledge-based professions.5 As this list suggests, more than bald utility placed reading at the 2. Biographical information for Carpenter and his family is obtained from Christopher Clark and Donald M. Scott, eds., “‘The Diary of an Apprentice Cabinetmaker: Edward Jenner Carpenter’s ‘Journal,’ 1844–45”; Lucy Kellogg, History of the Town of Bernardston, 329–34; and Amos Carpenter’s A Genealogical History of the Rehoboth Branch of the Carpenter Family in America, 447–50, 636–37.