Writing New York

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Previously: Cahan

March 9, 2010 in Books, Teaching, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

We’ve been a little overworked the last few weeks and so have been a little slower to post than usual.

Our students are taking a midterm tomorrow morning. The last lecture before the exam was Cyrus’s take on Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896).

I don’t have anything new to say about it at the moment, and indeed should be working on something else. But I thought I’d offer up some links to prior content for the sake of students who may be checking the blog tonight.

Last year Cyrus posted a general intro, including a sneak preview of Sarah Wilson’s essay on the New York novel of manners from our forthcoming Cambridge Companion. (This year our students have read her entire piece; next year we’ll actually be able to order the book!) Cyrus also gave some additional detail on one of his favorite topics — baseball — which ties nicely into the novel’s film adaptation, Joan Micklinn Silver’s Hester Street (1975).

Maybe once the exam’s out of the way — and a couple writing deadlines have been reached — we’ll be back in regular blogging form.

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American Realists: James and Cahan

March 5, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

We’re finishing up a section of the Writing New York course devoted to the novel of manners. We include in this section James’s Washington Square, Crane’s Maggie, Wharton’s Age of Innocence, and Cahan’s Yekl, though we note affinities between these novels and both the nineteenth-century plays that Bryan discusses earlier in the course and the work of Walt Whitman. We note, also, the overlap between this tradition of manners and the idea of American literary realism. Setting up Wharton’s connection to realism in lecture the other day, I quoted from Henry James in The Art of Fiction: “One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel, –  the merit in which all its other merits . . . helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing . . .”

As an example of James ’s attempt to convey “solidity of specification,” I cited the “topographical parenthesis” from the third chapter of Washington Square, a passage that Bryan always calls to the attention of our students:

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street five minutes’ walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway. By the time the Doctor changed his residence the murmur of
trade had become a mighty uproar, which was music in the ears of all good citizens interested in the commercial development, as they delighted to call it, of their fortunate isle. Dr. Sloper’s interest in this phenomenon was only indirect–though, seeing that, as the years went on, half his patients came to be overworked men of business, it might have been more immediate–and when most of his neighbours’ dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings and large fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and shipping agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce, he determined to look out for a quieter home. The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air
which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare–the look of having had something of a social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailantus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that
didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.

[Click here to read an e-text of the novel at Project Gutenberg.]

On Monday, I’ll ask our students to recall this passage and to compare it to this description of Suffolk Street from Abraham Cahan’s novel Yekl (1897):

Suffolk Street is in the very thick of the battle for breath. For it lies in the heart of that part of the East Side which has within the last two or three decades become the Ghetto of the American metropolis, and, indeed, the metropolis of the Ghettos of the world. It is one of the most densely populated spots on the face of the earth–a seething human sea fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centers of Europe. Hardly a block but shelters Jews from every nook and corner of Russia, Poland, Galicia, Hungary, Roumania; Lithuanian Jews, Volhynian Jews, south Russian Jews, Bessarabian Jews; Jews crowded out of the “pale of Jewish settlement”; Russified Jews expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kieff, or Saratoff; Jewish runaways from justice; Jewish refugees from crying political and economical in justice; people torn from a hard-gained foothold in life and from deep-rooted attachments by the caprice of intolerance or the wiles of demagoguery–innocent scapegoats of a guilty Government for its outraged populace to misspend its blind fury upon; students shut out of the Russian universities, and come to these shores in quest of learning; artisans, merchants, teachers, rabbis, artists, beggars–all come in search of fortune. Nor is there a tenement house but harbors in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern exodus by the vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of today. You find there Jews born to plenty, whom the new conditions have delivered up to the clutches of penury; Jews reared in the straits of need, who have here risen to prosperity; good people morally degraded in the struggle for success amid an unwonted environment; moral outcasts lifted from the mire, purified, and imbued with self-respect; educated men and women with their intellectual polish tarnished in the inclement weather of adversity; ignorant sons of toil grown enlightened–in fine, people with all sorts of antecedents, tastes, habits, inclinations, and speaking all sorts of subdialects of the same jargon, thrown pellmell into one social caldron–a human hodgepodge with its component parts changed but not yet fused into one homogeneous whole.

I’ll suggest that here Cahan’s project is to make the Lower East Side seem less foreign and more full of potential than his readers might expect. Cahan’s narrator seems to identify both with the people he is depicting and with the readers for whom he is depicting them — and to exist in an ambivalent relation to each. Acknowledging what is idiosyncratic in the experience of Jewish immigrants, Cahan’s narrator nevertheless shows that they are not inscrutable (a tern often applied to immigrant groups from Asia in this period. As the novel progresses, however, we see a marked contrast between the eloquent prose of the narrator and the fractured English of his characters. It’s that kind of authorial superiority that strikes me as one of the Jamesian aspects of Cahan’s writing.

[Click here to find  e-texts of the Yekl in a variety of formats.]

Wharton resources on PWHNY

March 3, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

Our students, who are wrapping up their reading of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence even as I type, may find some past PWHNY entries useful.

Last year, Cyrus offered a general intro to the novel and later  posted about the archives of what Wharton refers to as the “new opera house,” for those who’d like to trace opera in the city beyond the temporal frame of this novel into the moment in which Wharton wrote.

Reaching back to his lecture on Whitman and realism (which this year’s students missed out on, since I took the Whitman this year) he found yet another occasion to share his appreciation of European realist painting.

We’ve also tracked some of Wharton’s engagement with the idea of the Knickerbocker. In recent popular representations of the city, Knickerbocker New York has informed both Mad Men and Gossip Girl, the latter of which included a great Wharton episode last season, complete with the kind of theater-audience-watching scene I love to bring to the class’ attention.

Speaking of the theater, it would be worth students’ while to think about the relationship between the novel of manners, which Cyrus has been lecturing on this week, and the comedies of manners we read early in the semester, including Royall Tyler’s The Contrast and Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion. How do the social concerns raised in the plays find themselves taken up or transformed in Wharton’s novel? Do “manners” perform the same cultural work in these multiple contexts or genres?

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Trilling on Manners

March 1, 2010 in Architecture, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

The subject of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and its relation to the novel of manners. I explained why “manners” in this sense means more than simply “good manners” or “good taste.” Instead, it signifies the system of customs, mores, and codes that bind a social group together — a group like the Old New York society that Wharton depicts in her novel. One of the abiding subjects of Wharton’s novel is the way in which Old New York shares characteristics with the kind of tribal societies that ethnographers were beginning to study when Wharton was writing.

One of the quotes that I use to establish this idea comes from Lionel Trilling’s study The Liberal Imagination (1950):

What I understand by manners, then, is a culture’s hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning. They are the things that separate them from the people of another culture. They make the part of a culture which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture. It is modified by them; it generates them. In this part of culture assumption rules, which is often so much stronger than reason.

The quote is useful because it gets at the idea of manners as  system that works through very subtle codes that have been internalized by its subjects, who use them almost unconsciously. “Good manners” are one of the tools used by the larger system of manners: having good manners identifies a person as an insider, someone who know the proper codes of behavior withina social group.

I like the idea that manners are an “evanescent” part of culture: that they belong to a system that is not “art, or religion, or morals, or politics,” but that is linked reciprocally to all of them.

But what I noticed today was the word “departments.” In referring to art, religion, morals, and politics as “departments of culture,” Trilling suggests that the study of manners offers ways of understanding that elude — but perhaps complete — them. And I can’t help thinking that he is therefore making an argument — by implication as it were — of the importance of literature, because it seems to have a special purchase on the regime of manners: it can dramatize the ways in which manners produce and regulate social subjects. And I wonder whether Trilling is also implicitly making an argument about the importance of literary study, which may enable students to understand things that other academic departments — call them “art,” “religion,” “philosophy,” or “politics”  — can’t. The chapter from which the quote is taken, after all, is called “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.”

The Liberal Imagination has recently been reprinted by the New York Review of Books with an introduction by Louis Menand.

[For an additional perspective on today's lecture, see this post at patell.org.]

Darkness and Daylight

February 24, 2010 in Books, Teaching, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

Today, during a fine lecture on the portrayals of tenement life in Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, our teaching assistant Kristen Highland discussed several books that draw on the “sunshine and shadow” made famous by Matthew Hale’s Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1869).

These included one that isn’t discussed much: Darkness and Daylight; Lights and Shadows of New York Life by three authors, reformist Helen Campbell, journalist Thomas Knox, and Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes. Kristen tells us that learned about Darkness and Daylight through a post over at Ephemeral New York.

Bryan and I came across Campbell in the the first chapter of Robert M. Dowling’s recent Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem, which is one of the books included in an essay-review that he and I have just finished for the journal American Literary History. Campbell’s account, which gives the volume its title, is subtitled “A Woman’s Story of Gospel, Temperance, Mission, and Rescue Work”; the supplementary pieces are described as “A Journalist’s Description of Little-Known Phases of New York Life” (Knox) and “A Famous Detective’s Thirty Years’ Experiences and Observations” (Byrnes). Kristen writes that the book is “some 500+ pages of really juicy stuff with great images–about a dozen or so are by Riis.” During the lecture she pointed out that the volume brings together three interpretive frames through which the slums of the late nineteenth-century were often viewed: as a site for missionary work, as a site for sensationalist journalism, and as a site for criminality.

According to the publisher’s preface, the goal of Darkness and Daylight was “to give scrupulously exact descriptions of life and scenes in the great metropolis under three different aspects … It was essential that each of the writers selected for this undertaking should possess a thorough practical knowledge of the subject, combined with ability to describe what they have seen and experienced.” The preface describes Campbell’s contribution in this way:

The first division was assigned to Mrs. Helen Campbell, whose life has been spent in New York city, and whose wellknown sympathies for the poor and unfortunate, combined with long experience in city missionary work and charitable enterprises, peculiarly fitted her for this portion of the work. Her interest in missions and her labors among the lower classes have brought her face to face with squalor and misery among the hopelessly poor, as well as with degraded men and women in their own homes; while her ready sympathy gained for her access to their hearts, and thus gave her a practical insight into their daily life possessed by few. Who but a woman could describe to women the scenes of sin, sorrow, and suffering among this people that have presented themselves to her womanly eye and heart?

Campbell is a forerunner of Riis, and Dowling writes that she came to believe that “the only effective means of ‘training’ the poorer classes … is not from the outside in, but rather from the inside out. … By immersing herself in the waterfront culture, Campbell accumulates firsthand knowledge that would aid her and her outsider compeers in the struggle to reform the urban poor; looking ‘from within, out,’ she discovers an alien moral framework that was to be effectively torn down.”

If you know Crane’s novel Maggie, you can see why Campbell’s writings might make an effective pairing. Crane also seems to depict something like “an alien moral framework” within the slums, though it is a framework that seems to be a mutated form of the kinds of representations of morality found both in the mission and in the melodrama. In fact, the final chapter of the novel brilliantly conflates these two modes.

Kristen, whose research interests include the print culture of early national America and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. popular culture, was one of the panelists at last fall’s Lost New York conference: she curated a case at the Fales exhibition on the subject of the idea of “Gotham” and her companion essay appears in the Lost New York volume (available here as a PDF).

There are several digitized versions of the book available on the web. The Google has an 1892 printing digitized from a copy in the University of Michigan library; and 1892 printing digitized from a copy at Radcliffe; and a 1900 printing digitized from a copy in the New York Public Library. My favorite version is a full-color scan of the 1897 printing available at the Internet Archive.

Find your way around Washington Square

February 23, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

The novel, that is, not the Park itself. If you’re interested in finding out more about the Park, past and present, we recommend exploring the archives of this excellent blog.

My initial impulse in teaching James’s novel has always been to take the title and setting seriously, to take what we know about the actual history of the development of Washington Square — its origins as a Potter’s Field, the history of class conflict surrounding its development and renovation over time — and read it against the narrator’s account, early in the novel, of the Square’s development and the Slopers’ place on it. (In taking the setting seriously I’m following Marcus Klein’s excellent treatment in Arizona Quarterly many moons ago, which is worth digging up if you have access to the print run in your library.) Last year Cyrus posted an overview of the approach we’ve taken and I offered up the timeline I use in lecture to contrast the novel’s admittedly partial memory with a more verifiable set of events.

One of the more interesting disjunctions between the novel and the Square’s actual history is the fact that the Slopers arrive on the Square — ostensibly to escape the clamor of commerce farther downtown — right on the heels of the Stonecutters’ Riots, in which laborers and masons resisted the city’s and University’s decision to use convict labor to build what would be NYU’s gothic University Building (pictured). I wrote a little bit about this issue last year — as well as about the contemporaneous development of another ritzy neighborhood, Colonnade Row, on the newly cut Lafayette Place, which bisected a mixed-class leisure space, Vauxhall Gardens, and undoubtedly helped pave the way for the Astor Place Riots there only a few years later. All of this unrest the novel would push to its symbolic margins. The Washington Square of James’s novel exists blissfully unaware of class conflict pushing right up against its borders.

Yesterday morning in lecture I took this contextualization so far as to suggest a parallel between the lawyer in Melville’s Bartleby and Dr. Sloper: each is subject to a certain blindness, to borrow a phrase from Henry’s older brother, William. Certainly the lawyer’s cozy kissing up to John Jacob Astor in Bartleby anticipates Dr. Sloper’s complicity in a market economy he thinks he has risen above. (We talked earlier in the semester about ways to read Bartleby in the context of the class conflicts that culminated in the Astor Place Riots.) And just maybe, I suggested, Catherine Sloper has a little bit of Bartleby himself in her. When it comes time to get married at the novel’s end, as good heroines are supposed to do, she simply prefers not to.

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Get your flash on

February 17, 2010 in History, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

The aim of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was to situate Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass within the nineteenth-century city’s worlds of print, from the highbrow publishing industry to cheap print, penny presses, flash weeklies, and urban pornography. Depending on which Whitman critics you read, he hews closer to high or low. I suggested he wanted to have it both ways: ever a joiner, he wanted to bring together the best of both worlds.

At one point, while talking about the so-called “Flash press,” I did geek out considerably, telling the story of how a bundle of these rare “sporting” men’s periodicals, mildly pornographic and thoroughly anti-authoritarian, made their way from an early-20c sportswriter’s private collection into the American Antiquarian Society. For the last dozen years or so, cultural historians have been poring over them aiming to understand more about 19c New York subcultures of style, sexuality, and reading. Other rare examples of these magazines have turned up in the city’s municipal archives, where they were long ago submitted as evidence in a rash of obscene libel trials in the 1840s, right about the time Whitman was editing his nativist newspaper, The Aurora. I mentioned Donna Dennis’s account of this legal history last week; you can also read key samples of this material in an anthology published a few years ago by some urban historian whose work I admire quite a bit.

If you want to understand why I would geek out about the preservation of this sort of ephemera, let me just offer one example of the fascinating work these materials have allowed cultural historians to undertake. In the on-line quarterly Common-place a few years back, James Cook — a cultural biographer of P. T. Barnum and editor of a thoroughly engrossing Barnum reader — drew on some material from flash weeklies to tease out some new understanding of the mixed-race origins of American popular culture. He starts his piece by recalling Charles Dickens’ famous account of the a dance hall in the Five Points, which featured a black performer who later became famous as “Master Juba.” Later in his essay Cook points out that most people have assumed Dickens catapulted Juba to stardom, but some new evidence from flash weeklies helps us flesh out the story: “We now know a good deal more” about Juba than ever before, Cook writes. We know

that his real name was William Henry Lane, although he generally performed as Juba or Master Juba; that he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, during the late 1820s, part of the first generation of African Americans to come of age following emancipation; that soon after Dickens’s visit he became the first black man to break the color line in the minstrel industry; that he participated in a series of “match dances” against Master John Diamond, the leading Irish American minstrel dancer of the day; and that he used his growing fame to forge a more lasting and successful career in Britain, where he eventually performed for Queen Victoria.Most scholars have assumed that American Notes represented the starting point for Lane’s public career. But an anonymous letter to one of the flash papers offers a more complex history. An up-and-coming showman by the name of P.T. Barnum, it turns out, had recently managed a young black dancer known as Juba at New York’s Vauxhall Gardens. The letter also suggests that Barnum deceived the sporting fraternity in two ways. In 1840, he presented Lane as part of a conventional minstrel show, without informing his patrons that the man behind the burnt cork was black. In 1841, he took the deceit a step further, promoting the young African American virtuoso as John Diamond. Barnum even staged bogus “trials of skill” as part of the act, with wagers on Lane-as-Diamond to win!

For evidence of the hopelessly mixed racial origins of U.S. popular culture, this is about as good as it gets.

For cultural historians of 19c NYC, that’s about as good as it gets too. I recommend the rest of Cook’s fascinating essay, which includes topics that have turned up elsewhere in our course, from Five Points and Bowery B’hoys, to city mystery novels (including those by Ned Buntline, a guy I didn’t get a chance to mention, but who, in addition to writing racy novels was a ringleader in the Astor Place riots), to blackface and the Bowery Theatre. It’s a perfect slice of the Bowery world Whitman sometimes wandered into, eager to take his readers with him.

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Prostitution exposed! (1839)

February 10, 2010 in Writing New York by Bryan | 1 comment

This morning in lecture I spent some time talking about Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick as belonging, in part, to the genre of the urban tourbook, offering armchair tourists an introduction to several of the city’s important civic landmarks and public spaces. Talking a little more generally about NYC guidebooks in the 19th century, I contrasted Alger’s approach — in which Dick scrupulously avoids taking his readers to the seedier neighborhoods he no doubt knew well — with books that offered to take readers into the depth of the city’s depravity, either in poverty-stricken neighborhoods where sin ran unchecked or behind the closed doors of the licentious upper-crust, on Bond Street and elsewhere.

As I usually do in this lecture, I showed a slide with this title page and frontispiece from an 1839 “moral reform directory”:

I’ve long used this image in lecture, but only recently came across a really fine discussion of the text itself. This morning (blame it on the hour!) I mixed up a few of the details, conflating this book with a publication it’s no doubt satirizing, a reform serial by the name of McDowall’s Journal.

As Donna Dennis recounts in Licentious Gotham, which I finally finished reading, McDowall’s Journal was published by a young Princeton Theological Seminary grad named John McDowall, who with the backing of New York’s Female Benevolent Society founded the publication to expose what he saw as a burgeoning sex trade and erotic publishing industry in the city. (He claimed that New York had 10,000 active prostitutes, which would have made one in ten New York females a sex worker.) McDowall ended up running afoul of civic authorities, who claimed that in exposing the details of the city’s seamy side he was merely peddling smut himself. It may have been the case that his threat to expose the names of prominent johns also made them nervous. In any case, he unwittingly set the model for a popular 19c stereotype: the moral reformer who takes up his cause in order to satisfy his own prurient interests. Following McDowall’s indictment by a grand jury for publishing material “calculated to promote lewdness,” the doors were opened to public discussion of sexual scandal and to popular literature that played to erotic interests.

Dennis follows her account of McDowall’s Journal with a discussion of Prostitution Exposed. If you can’t make out the details in the small print, the full title reads: PROSTITUTION EXPOSED; or, a MORAL REFORM DIRECTORY, Laying Bare the Lives, Histories, Residences, Seductions, &c. of the most celebrated COURTEZANS AND LADIES OF PLEASURE of the city of New-York, Together with a Description of the Crime and Its Effects, as also of the Houses of Prostitution and the Keepers, HOUSES OF ASSIGNATION, Their Charges and Conveniences, and other particulars interesting to the public.

Ostensibly intended to direct readers away from such “houses of assignation,” such “moral reform directories” nevertheless provided lists of names, addresses, prices, physical descriptions, and typical clientele and so doubled as directories for the trade itself.

Dennis sees Prostitution Exposed as intended in part to satirize the efforts of possibly prurient do-gooders like McDowall. She also notes the political implications of the double-entendre in the author’s pseudonym: “A Butt Ender.”

The slang clearly referred to a defiantly boisterous, unruly faction of egalitarian, prolabor Democrats in the 1830s (generally knows as Locofocos) that was closely linked to emerging machine politics. The Butt Enders probably took their name from the workingmen’s style of constantly chomping on the “butt end” of a “segar,” as popularized by the character of Mose, the famous Bowery B’hoy.

Mose, the moral reformer! A new line for his c.v. And to whom is this moral reform directory dedicated? To the “Ladies Reform Association for the Suppression of Onanism.” Nothing like a prostitute to keep the kids from indulging in the solitary vice. As Dennis notes, Prostitution Exposed is the “earliest surviving book dealing with material of a plainly libidinous nature to be both written and published in the city.”

Previously.

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No dainty kid glove affair

February 3, 2010 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan | 3 comments

I wound up today’s lecture on the varieties of 19th-century NYC theater with a long quote from one critic’s recollection of the opening of A Glance at New York, the play that made Mose the Bowery B’hoy a household name, made b’hoy red-flannel fashion an instant craze, and launched Mose’s career in American folklore. The account of opening night comes from William Knight Northall’s Before and Behind the Curtain (1851), a theater history of the preceding 15 years, published only three years after Glance’s debut and two years after the notorious riots at the Astor Place Opera House. Northall recalls A Glance at New York’s impact on the venue in which it premiered, the Olympic Theater, and on New York’s theater scene in general:

For four months did this unmitigated conglomeration of vulgarity and illiteracy keep the stage … The theatre was crowded from pit to dome nightly, and the hi-hi’s of the pit testified how happy they were to see a congenial vulgarity thrust under the nostrils of a better class of people. It would be scarcely fair to judge of a person’s taste, simply because they spent an evening in witnessing the rowdyism of Mose. The piece was the town talk, and few could resist the inclination to go and see for themselves what had produced such an extraordinary excitement all around them. …

The house was filled with a constant succession of strangers, for we venture to assert that no man with any pretension to good taste, with any love for the stage, or any desire to see it fulfil its proper uses, would ever go there twice, and sit through the abomination the second time. When the public curiosity had been somewhat satisfied … the boxes no longer shone with the elite of the city; the character of the audiences was entirely changed, and Mose, instead of appearing on stage, was in the pit, the boxes, and the gallery. It was all Mose, and the respectability of the house mosed too.

Northall’s account differs slightly from the apocryphal but widely circulated story of Mose’s first appearance on the stage, in which an audience of rapt workingmen break into uproarious approbation on seeing one of their own stride on stage. Instead, he offers a story of a Bowery audience’s take-over of a respectable theater. Bowery audiences had already controlled their own theater spaces — most notably the Bowery Theater itself — for more than a decade. Though city officials hoped the Bowery Theater would help gentrify the neighborhood and provide civilizing social uplift for poorer patrons, they misjudged, and working-class audiences made that space their own, to the dismay of some officials and elite onlookers.

The growing class divisions to which Northall nods weren’t merely confined to theater spaces. Class-based riots erupted throughout the 1830s and 40s. But the theater became a special site for wearing your class politics on your sleeve: literally, in the sense of fashion and taste. B’hoys soaped their locks and dressed like Mose, promenading on the Bowery; the genteel set daintily applauded the construction of the Astor Place Opera House (pictured), a new spot for refined entertainment, built at the head of Lafayette, a street created expressly for the purposes of exclusive real estate. (The new street also bisected an old entertainment spot, Vauxhall Gardens, where Glance at New York concludes.)

In spite of the rosy cross-class friendships at the end of Glance, the class tensions in these plays—and the competing styles of masculine behavior among audiences—would culminate in one of the most famous episodes in New York theater history: the Astor Place riots of May 1849, only a year after Glance premiered at the Olympic and three after Fashion played to friendly audiences at the genteel Park.

The riots, which have been written about by dozens of historians (most recently Nigel Cliff, whose book I haven’t yet managed to read) were the culmination of an ongoing rivalry between two leading Shakespearean actors. William Charles Macready was an Englishman, Edwin Forrest an American. The two had different acting styles that appealed to different audiences. Macready was refined, aristocratic, and appealed to wealthy, genteel New Yorkers: the Park set. Forrest typified the Bowery style: rough, forceful, and patriotic. He was something of a teen idol for the Bowery B’hoys. Philip Hone—the mayor who had dedicated the Bowery in 1826—considered Forrest “a vulgar, arrogant loafer, with a pack of kindred rowdies at his heels.”

The two actors had a longstanding feud. Forrest had toured England to poor reviews, which he blamed on Macready. He struck back by hissing Macready during a performance of Hamlet. British newspapers came down hard on Forrest, who defended himself, in true Bowery fashion, by asserting his right as an audience member to express his dramatic criticism on the spot.

In May 1849, the two actors performed in New York in competing performances of Macbeth. Forrest took a dig at Macready by emphasizing Macbeth’s line, “What purgative drug will scour these English hence?” This led to several minutes of sustained applause from his audience. The same night, Macready performed at the two-year-old Astor Place Opera House, whose dress code included white kid gloves for gentlemen, a detail that particularly pissed off the b’hoys. Forrest’s friends and fans still managed to infiltrate the opera house and showered Macready with vegetables, glass bottles, and chairs during his performance. The pit and gallery from one house, in essence, had taken over another that belonged to a higher class. In other words, the whole city had become a theater like the one Irving’s Jonathan Oldstyle had portrayed earlier in the century.

At his next performance, nearly 15,000 people gathered outside the Opera House, most of them spectators. Inside, the crowd again showered Macready with eggs and tomatoes. Outside, the crowd began to throw bricks through windows and tried to break down the theater doors, which had been barricaded. The militia fired into the crowd, killing over 20 and wounding over 100 others. It was the first time American militia had fired on American citizens.

86 people were arrested. They were primarily workingmen, many of them butchers, like Mose. The papers picked up on the class politics and framed the event as stemming from working class resentment against “aristocratizing the pit.” The episode allows us to see how theater politics were one manifestation of larger public issues, and how they fed into larger public issues as well.

More on the response to the riots by writers including Irving and Melville sometime next week.

My quick account of the riots here is cobbled from a lot of sources: the longstanding classic is Richard Moody’s The Astor Place Riot (1958). Philip Hone’s account, quoted above, is reprinted in Phillip Lopate’s anthology Writing New York. The title of this post comes from Walt Whitman’s recollections of the Bowery Theater in “The Old Bowery” (1892).

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John Adams, Royall Tyler, and Woody Allen

February 1, 2010 in Writing New York by Cyrus | 3 comments

Today Bryan is lecturing on Royall Tyler’s 1787 play The Contrast, which he discusses in the context of anitheatrical prejudice in the early national period. (Click here for the online illustrated edition at the University of Virginia.)

Last week, I quoted from the introduction to Kenneth Jackson and David S. Dunbar’s anthology of New York writing, Empire City: New York Through the Centuries.

In 1624 when the Dutch first set up a trading post on Manhattan, their goal was not to convert the Indians or to practice a special religion but to make money. Visiting Manhattan in 1774 from Puritan Boston, John Adams expressed disdain: ‘I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town. They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out on you again and talk away.’

Jackson and Dunbar feel the need to rebut Adams.

Poor breeding? Perhaps. But New Yorkers established the first chamber of commerce in the Western Hemisphere in 1768, developed the first regularly scheduled shipping service in 1818, built the Erie Canal by 1825, and established the nation’s dominant stock exchange by the 1840s.

Adams rears his head as a sourpuss again in Bryan’s lecture. He refuses to give his approval to the courtship between Royall Tyler and his daughter, Abigail, nicknamed “Nabby.” In the introduction to play in the edition that we use, Early American Drama, Jeffrey H. Richards writes:

As a college student at Harvard, he participated in illicit theatricals with his classmates, complete with guards posted to warn of coming proctors, but with the intervention of the Revolution, further opportunities for such rash behavior would be few. He wrote poems and studied law and hoped by that combination to earn the good graces of one of his countrywomen, Nabby Adams, daughter of John Adams, his reputation in some circles as a frivolous youth damned Tyler in the father’s eyes.

Note that the Wikipedia entry for Nabby (to which we linked above) offers a different story. Nabby ultimately married a man ten years her senior Colonel William Stephens Smith, her father’s secretary. The wedding took place  in London on June 12, 1786. The Contrast was published the following year, and Bryan notes the similarities between Smith and the play’s Colonel Manly. Perhaps the play is more ambivalent about Manly than readers and audiences sometimes assume.

We were fortunate enough to see a production of Tyler’s play at the Metropolitan Playhouse last fall. Click here and especially here for Bryan’s thoughts on that production.

For us, The Contrast serves as a commentary on New York’s social theatricality, a point well captured by Luc Sante in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York:

Manhattan was a theater from the first. When, early on, it was a walled city, and further surrounded by a forest of masts, it enclosed in its ring a small universe. This enclosure is the model of cities as it is of theaters, as can be seen when one compares old representations of fortress cities and of Greek amphitheaters and later theaters like the Globe. In Manhattan, social stratification followed a course in which the waterfront and the area environs near it became undesirable, became like the galleries [in theaters], while the dead center, Fifth Avenue, would be the orchestra stalls. In Manhattan, social stratification followed a course in which the waterfront and the area environs near it became undesirable, became like the galleries [in theaters], while the dead center, Fifth Avenue, would be the orchestra stalls. . . . The other answer has to do with the street that runs diagonally up the island—Broadway—putting itself on display and carrying in its train its dark twin, the Bowery. (pp. 71-72)

The Contrast is also the first of the texts that belong to the tradition of manners, which in our course will include not only this week’s plays, but also (at least) the novels by James, Cahan, and Wharton. Bryan illustrates the interplay of ideas about social theatricality, manners, and the experience of theater-going in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with two film clips: the opening sequence of Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence (1993) and this scene from Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975). These scenes underscore — one more humorously than the other — the significance of a long tradition of theater audiences watching themselves as much as, or more than, the actors on stage. The relevant scene here begins at 52 seconds in.

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