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Social Networks, 19th-century novels, Gossip Girl

September 14, 2010 in Books, Television by Bryan | 5 comments

Wednesday night, when the new NYU Bookstore (726 Broadway) kicks off its inaugural programming season by featuring our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, Brooklyn-based writer Caleb Crain will be reading from his piece on the literature of nineteenth-century New York’s affluent classes. In the chapter Caleb spends some time with Nathaniel Parker Willis, “the writer who invented the concept of [New York's] upper ten thousand.” As Caleb notes, Willis remained somewhat ambivalent toward the upper classes and their social rituals, but he was particularly insightful about the role “fashion” played in shoring up the elite’s boundaries:

What did American fashion reward? “Conspicuousness in expense,” Willis wrote with dismay. (A few years later, he would identify New York as “the point where money is spent most freely for pleasure.”) He hoped that this preference was temporary and that Americans could change it by force of will. But he feared that no one would bother to take the problem seriously. Like Willis himself, fashion seemed trifling to most people. He insisted it wasn’t, because it determined which virtues the ruling class would welcome into their beds and thereby into the elite.

I couldn’t help but think about Caleb’s piece while watching last night’s season premiere of Gossip Girl, a guilty pleasure I justify in part because it so clearly positions itself in a Whartonian tradition — or perhaps one that stretches back to Willis — of simultaneous discomfort with and celebration of New York’s moneyed classes. (Whether or not Gosssip Girl‘s tween/teen viewers here or in the hinterlands comprehend the levels of satire at play in the show is another subject for another day.)

This afternoon, New York Magazine‘s Vulture blog posted an amazing interactive chart by which the show’s viewers or other curious onlookers can account for the dense network of sexual activity and romantic relations among the show’s characters. That chart itself reminded me of something else I’d wanted to blog, though it focuses more on Victorian British rather than New York fiction: new work by a team of Columbia University computer science and English Ph.D. students mapping the social networks represented in nineteenth-century novels. (A Berkeley computer science Ph.D. student blogged about it in a post widely re-tweeted by digital humanities types.) Maybe Vulture blog and the Columbia folks can team up to create a similar map of literary New York — something that goes beyond the incestuous network of this one TV show? Caleb’s piece would be a good starting place for discovering inroads into such networks.

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Cambridge Contributor: Caleb Crain

April 5, 2010 in Books, People by Bryan | 3 comments

The Brooklyn-based writer Caleb Crain is the author of “The Early Literature of New York’s Moneyed Class,” a chapter in our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York that looks at narratives of New York high life from the mid to late nineteenth century. He is also the author of the 2001 book American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (Yale UP) and a frequent contributor to such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. He maintains the weblog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, from which he has selected a number of pieces in the print volume The Wreck of the Henry Clay (2009).

Caleb’s piece for the companion could alternatively been called “High Life, with a Glance at the Low,” since he includes a significant treatment of the sunshine/shadow dynamic that structured many accounts of nineteenth-century New York City. But as fascinating as the lower depths were to armchair slummers in the nineteenth century, readers then as now also loved to peek into the world of New York’s elite. Of the insider expert and literary celebrity Nathaniel Parker Willis, Crain writes:

Fashion was Nathaniel’s god. But he wrote about it with more insight, nimbleness, and edge than any of his contemporaries. On a city without an opera: “Like a saloon without a mirror.” On the depreciation of courtesy in New York: “Politeness has gradually grown to be a sign of a man in want of money.” On a sudden vogue for a fabric still posh today: “‘She had on a real Cashmere’ would be sweeter, to a number of ladies, as a mention when absent, than ‘she had a beautiful expression about her mouth,’ or ‘she had such loveable manners,’ or ‘she is always trying to make somebody happier.’”

For all his talent, Willis never wrote a solid book. The need to earn a living fettered him to magazine ephemera, a fate he accepted with a pose of tragic resignation: “The hot needle through the eye of the goldfinch betters his singing, they say.” After he abandoned sacred poetry in early youth, Willis’s ambition took a conventionally serious form only once, in a public lecture on fashion at the Broadway Tabernacle in 1844. In the lecture, Willis made explicit his peculiar, and peculiarly democratic, understanding of fashion, which he called an “inner republic.”

He began by defining fashion as “a position in society” that different cultures awarded to different traits. In France, it went to intellectual and artistic achievement; in England, to beauty and cocksureness. In both countries, according to Willis, the “first principle” of fashion was “rebellion against unnatural authority,” because fashion forced the ruling class to acknowledge people of merit born outside it. The particular acknowledgment that he had in mind was sexual, although he didn’t say so explicitly. Through fashion – that is, through a selection of spouses prompted by fashion – the English upper class ensured that their children would be attractive and bold, and the French, that theirs would be intelligent. Although the principle of fashion might be revolutionary, its effect was conservative, by a kind of sexual engrossment.

What did American fashion reward? “Conspicuousness in expense,” Willis wrote with dismay. (A few years later, he would identify New York as “the point where money is spent most freely for pleasure.”) He hoped that this preference was temporary and that Americans could change it by force of will. But he feared that no one would bother to take the problem seriously. Like Willis himself, fashion seemed trifling to most people. He insisted it wasn’t, because it determined which virtues the ruling class would welcome into their beds and thereby into the elite.

We’re thrilled to have Caleb serve as a tour guide through the fascinating world of nineteenth-century New York’s fast set.

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Bedbugs and Ballyhoo

March 31, 2009 in Books by Bryan

boarding house.jpegCaleb Crain — a contributor to our forthcoming Cambridge Companion, whose bookish blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, we’ve long and consistently enjoyed — had a piece in the NY Times Book Review last Sunday on nineteenth-century New York boardinghouses. Taking as its departure point a nineteenth-century book on boarding life, Caleb wonders whether past housing habits may return in the current economic crisis:

[O]nce upon a time, the boardinghouse thrived in America, especially in New York. In 1856, Walt Whitman
claimed that almost three-quarters of Manhattanites lived in one. He
may have been exaggerating slightly, but the historian Wendy Gamber has
estimated that “up to 30 percent of all 19th-century households took in
boarders,” and the 1860 census counted 2,651 boardinghouse keepers in
New York State alone. In 1857, foreseeing that the phenomenon might not
last forever, Thomas Butler Gunn undertook to record it for posterity
in The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses, which is available in an opportunely reprinted edition from Rutgers University Press ($23.95) as well as a facsimile edition from Cornell University Library ($23.99).
“I wonder what they were!” Gunn imagines a future researcher asking,
and for an answer, he provides chapters on the Hand-to-Mouth
Boardinghouse, the Fashionable Boardinghouse Where You Don’t Get Enough
to Eat and the Boardinghouse Where the Landlady Drinks, among other
representative types. New Yorkers of the 21st century will probably
recognize the 8-by-6-foot rooms and the walls soiled where mosquitoes
“have encountered Destiny in the shape of the slippers or boot-soles of
former occupants.” But the unceasing drama of boardinghouse life — the
flirtations, drunkenness, mutual irritation, backbiting, whining,
eccentricity, conspiracy, chiseling and deceit — may come as a
surprise. The closest modern parallel may be the comments section of a
blog.

[Read the rest of the piece here.]

Tempted to rent out your sofa? If the past’s prologue, you may want to get your hands on Gunn’s book — which is also available on Cornell’s Making of America website — to see what you may be in for.

One thing appears not to have changed from then until now: the persistent plague of bedbugs, which were thoroughly blogged about on New York sites last week and even mentioned in New York magazine’s week-in-review. Don’t miss the argument in the comments section of NYC The Blog, where readers debate the likelihood that the 2 Train Bedbug Man actually had bedbugs crawling on him when he was removed from the train by police. Oh, and over here you’ll find bedbug photography, too.

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