SPARKS, SUMMAR C., Ph.D. Bound by Paper: Nineteenth-Century Southern Editors and Their Northern Connections. (2015) Directed by Dr. Karen A. Weyler. 173 pp. Nineteenth-century editors frequently discussed their work in public forums (including their own periodicals) and in private correspondence. These sources provide insight into how editors imagined their work and their professional roles. For many nineteenth-century editors, one of the most important (and underappreciated) elements of their work was building expansive social networks that promoted productive relationships between writers, readers, and other editors. After establishing the function of the nineteenth-century editor in Chapter II, I proceed in the remaining chapters to examine how specific Southern editors attempted to gain access to a national audience by cultivating relationships with their Northern counterparts. Chapter III uses Caroline Gilman’s career to demonstrate the many ways that, despite her religious and family connections to the Boston literati, her gender prevented her from establishing the types of professional ties that could have advanced her career. Chapter IV analyzes the impact of the New York-based Young America movement on the career of William Gilmore Simms, and Chapter V contends that Edgar Allan Poe lacked the social capital necessary to successfully negotiate a professional relationship with New York editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. These chapters demonstrate the importance of social networks, particularly connections with Northerners, in the professional lives of Southern editors. BOUND BY PAPER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOUTHERN EDITORS AND THEIR NORTHERN CONNECTIONS by Summar C. Sparks A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2015 Approved by ________________________________ Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Summar C. Sparks has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ________________________________ Committee Members ________________________________ ________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My committee—Karen A. Weyler, Scott Romine, and Hephzibah Roskelly—have been both encouraging and exacting, and I am very grateful for their guidance throughout this project. I also appreciate the generosity of the many libraries who supported my research endeavors. The Boston Athenaeum awarded me a Caleb Loring Jr. Short-Term Research Fellowship. During my time there, Mary Warnement and Carolle R. Morini worked diligently to facilitate my access to necessary materials, and I am very thankful for the time and energy they devoted to my project. I received a Lillian Gary Taylor Visiting Fellowship in American Literature from the University of Virginia, which allowed me to spend an extremely productive summer in Charlottesville at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collection Library. While I was in Virginia, Robert H. Perkins thoughtfully ensured that I had all of the materials and space I needed to both read and write, and I greatly appreciate his consideration. The New York Public Library supported my work through a Short-Term Research Fellowship, which allowed me to spend time pouring over the Duyckinck Family Papers. Thomas Lannon’s knowledge of New York history and families was incredibly useful, and I am very grateful for the time he devoted to helping me research the New York publishing world. Lastly, part of Chapter IV, “Toward a National Southern Literature: The Young America Movement and Southern Editors,” was originally published in the first issue of volume 22 of The Simms Review. I would like to thank Todd Hagstette for giving me permission to republish that material in this dissertation. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................1 II. THE ROLE OF THE EDITOR: CREATING COMMUNITY AND TEACHING TASTE ..............................................................................14 III. AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH: CAROLINE GILMAN’S SELF-RELIANCE ...........................................................................................55 IV. TOWARD A NATIONAL SOUTHERN LITERATURE: THE YOUNG AMERICA MOVMENT AND SOUTHERN EDITORS ................................77 V. AN EXPANDING NETWORK: EDGAR ALLAN POE AND NATHANIEL P. WILLIS ..............................................................................124 VI. CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................167 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................169 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Newspaper editors seem to have constitutions closely similar to those of the Deities in “Walhalla,” who cut each other to pieces every day, and yet get up perfectly sound and fresh every morning. —Poe, “Fifty Suggestions” Joseph Buckingham, an unfamiliar name in the twenty-first century, was a prominent nineteenth-century editor dedicated to encouraging the growth of his profession.1 With the intention of preserving elements of ephemeral media, in 1822 he published and edited Miscellanies Selected from the Public Journals, a collection of material from American periodicals that included obituaries, poems, and essays. Since he maintained a geographically expansive definition of America, he included items in Miscellanies Selected from the Public Journals from the Mississippi Republican. Buckingham stated, “If…its [the book’s] ill fortune should forbid all future attempts of the kind, some indemnification for pecuniary loss will have been realized in the pleasure derived from the collection and preservation of these proofs of the genius and talent of my countrymen” (Preface). As this statement suggests, Buckingham viewed himself as a 1 As the editor of the Courier, an influential Whig newspaper in Boston, Buckingham was active in cultural and political debates. He was involved in a particularly passionate exchange of ideas with Nathaniel Parker Willis, the infamous editor of the American Monthly. Henry Beers, a Willis biographer, describes Buckingham and Willis as engaging in a “good-natured war” about morality and literature (87). A twentieth-century Willis biographer, Cortland Auser, offers a different interpretation of these public exchanges; he argues that Buckingham was one of a long list of people (including William Snelling and Lydia Maria Child) whom Willis offended. Regardless of the relationship between Willis and Buckingham, the fact that Buckingham was involved in such a visible newspaper war points to his professional status and notoriety. 1 curator protecting the work of all of his fellow American editors—including those from the South. As editors forged distinct professional identities in the mid-nineteenth century, Buckingham turned his attention to creating a history of their occupation, focusing on New England. In 1852, Buckingham diligently preserved the work of a previous generation of printers and publishers in the book Specimens of Newspaper Literature with Personal Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Reminiscences.2 He describes this book and himself in very humble terms: These volumes make no pretension to a high literary character. They are the production of one, who had no advantages of education, but such as were supplied by the district schools in Connecticut, more than sixty years ago, and before he was ten years old. For all else of literary qualification, he is indebted only to his own unaided efforts. The printing-office was his academy, and he has no diploma from any other University than that, of which Gutenberg, Laruentius, and Faust, were the founders. (viii) In this passage, Buckingham repeats the well-known tale of the self-made man and assumes a posture that would be familiar to nineteenth-century readers of Horatio Alger’s work. Arguing that the printing office is an appropriate and sufficient academy, he implies that other editors are similarly autonomous. According to Buckingham, an editor’s only debts and social connections are to those great men who previously compiled and conducted texts. Yet, editors were involved in intricate social networks connecting them to contemporary colleagues. As Buckingham implies by focusing on 2 Unsurprisingly, Evert A. Duyckinck, one of the most important nineteenth-century editors, owned this book. It is listed in an undated catalogue of Duyckinck’s books to be sold at auction. 2 New England, the nodes of these social networks were most heavily concentrated in the North. In the antebellum United States, publishers and editors in Northern metropolitan areas—including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—controlled national print culture; in order to gain a national audience Southern writers and editors had to cultivate relationships with Northern publishers and editors. Ronald Zborary explicitly states, “Authors and publishers, aware that the Northeast constituted the primary market for literature and that the distribution of imprints by rail left most of the South untouched, could afford to ignore the South altogether” (12). Given the communication and technological infrastructure in the nineteenth-century