Manhattan, Ink New York as national media center: telegraph, newspapers, books, writers, art market, photography.

prices on the Philadelphia exchange, even Jacob Little became a believer.

By 1846, also, independently owned telegraph lines were converging on New York from

Washington, Boston, and Albany. Less than a decade later, better than fifty companies had sprung up

around the country, and thousands of miles of wire coupled New York to such far-away places as

Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

The city’s commanding position in the new communications web was bolstered by establishment

of a telegraphic link with Europe—the project of Cyrus West Field. A Massachusetts migrant, Field

had worked as an errand boy at A. T. Stewart’s store, then gone into paper manufacturing. Given the

explosion of the penny press, the market for bank notes and bonds, and a surge in long-distance letter

writing, Field’s firm flourished, making him one of the city’s richest men. At thirty-four he retired,

bought a house in Gramercy Park, and turned to telegraphy.

In 1854, encouraged by the recent discovery of a shallow submarine plateau between Ireland and

Newfoundland, Field teamed up with industrialist Peter Cooper (his Gramercy Park neighbor),

ironmaster Abram Hewitt, banker Moses Taylor, and Morse. After securing a charter and a fifty-year

monopoly, the New Yorkers subscribed $1.5 million, hired battalions of laborers to hack an eightfoot-wide path through four hundred miles of rugged Canadian wilderness, and succeeded in linking

St. John’s, Newfoundland, with Nova Scotia, then the terminus of lines from the United States.

In 1855, anticipating the European connection, Field, Taylor, Cooper, and Hewitt formed the

American Telegraph Company to expand their control over the U.S. network. The New York-based

firm quickly swallowed up smaller lines, Morse’s among them. By the end of the decade its

consolidated system stretched from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, making it the largest telegraph

company in the eastern states; its only rival was Western Union, a Rochester-based firm that had

acquired lines in the Midwest.

In 1857, having raised additional capital in England, two sidewheel steamships provided by the

U.S. and British governments began spooling out 1,950 miles of cable. After several setbacks, the

mighty work was completed in 1858. On August 16 Queen Victoria sent President Buchanan a

congratulatory message in “Morse” code officially opening the line; it was shortly followed by the

first transatlantic news dispatch: “Settlement of Chinese Question; Chinese Empire open to trade;

Christian religion allowed; Mutiny being quelled, all India becoming tranquil.”



The Eighth Wonder of the World: The Atlantic Cable. When the cable was finally

hooked up again in 1866, this print hailed the event—an iconographic echo of earlier

Festivals of Connection in the city’s streets. (Library of Congress)

In a keystroke, what the Times hailed as the most “wondrous event of a wondrous age” had

solidified New York’s position as principal link between New World and Old. In a jubilant Festival

of Connection, cannons boomed, church bells pealed, and public buildings were illuminated. The

fireworks at City Hall were so tumultuous they touched off a conflagration that destroyed the cupola

before it was brought under control. On September 1 a parade with Field and the mayor in the lead

carriage marched from the Battery to the Crystal Palace, past stores, hotels, and businesses festooned

with banners, placards, and transparencies; the celebration was capped that evening by a torch-lit

procession. The ecstasy proved a mite premature, however, as the cable fell silent at the beginning of

September, spurring accusations of humbuggery, and would not be reconnected until 1866.

“EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT!”



The telegraph, nurtured to fruitful life in New York City, in turn helped reshape the metropolis. By the

1850s the city’s railroads had adopted the device to route and dispatch trains, all police stations were

telegraphically interconnected, and the New York Stock Exchange was setting securities prices for



the entire nation. Nowhere, however, did the new technology have greater repercussions than in

journalism. New York’s newspapers, driven by their mania for speed, became the telegraph’s most

crucial supporters. In doing so, they won for themselves and their metropolis an insurmountable

advantage in the collection and dissemination of information.

The rise of the penny press in the 1830s had put a premium on ever swifter access to news.

Newsboy-hawked “extras” that scooped rivals by even an hour could harvest a bonanza in street

sales. By the mid-1840s, New Yorkers were being bombarded by fastbreaking stories—garnered by

pony express, chartered locomotives, express steamships, or carrier pigeons—and the race for news

had itself become good copy.

Telegraphy accelerated the frenzy. Morse himself, after marveling at what God had wrought, had

promptly tapped out a second message: “Have you any news?” Soon James Gordon Bennett of the

Herald was paying a five-hundred-dollar bonus to news entrepreneur Daniel Craig for every hour his

dispatches preceded those received by other papers, and when the Mexican War broke out in 1846,

Bennett bankrolled an extension of telegraph lines to get up-to-the minute intelligence from the front.

No one was more adept at speeding news to press than Moses Yale Beach, proprietor of the Sun.

But it was obvious to Beach that telegraphy required rewriting the rules of the news-gathering game.

Wire companies swamped with usage demands had restricted each paper to a scant fifteen minutes of

transmission time before passing the wire to competitors, effectively eliminating electric scoops. As

the construction of private lines was beyond the capacity of even the biggest metropolitan dailies,

cooperation, not costly competition, was now in the interest of the New York papers—especially as

they faced a collective threat from Boston, where Cunard’s vessels still made first landfall in the

States, bearing the latest news from Europe.

In June 1846, accordingly, Beach brokered an arrangement among six leading papers (the Sun,

Tribune, Herald, Journal of Commerce, Courier and Enquirer, and Express). They agreed to

collaborate in procuring Mexican War updates and, as well, to share the cost of transmitting political

and congressional news from Washington. The associated papers also deftly bypassed Boston in

1849 by spurring Britain’s Maritime Provinces to link New York to Halifax, the Cunarders’ first

hemispheric port of call. The group also formally established a Harbor News Association and jointly

chartered a steamer—the Newsboy—to intercept incoming vessels off Sandy Hook. New Yorkers had

locked in their control over the collection of information from Europe.

In the 1850s, the combination—soon to be known as the Associated Press (AP)—moved to

dominate news distribution as well. AP agents, placed in major cities, gathered stories produced by

local papers, then flashed them to headquarters in New York. There they were consolidated and

wired back out to a client base that soon included the great majority of America’s newspapers.

Opponents cried monopoly, and they were right. The AP, in conjunction with New York City’s cable

and telegraph companies, had cornered the information market. Subscribing newspapers were

forbidden from any independent use of telegraphy, barred even from receiving dispatches written by

their own reporters.

Manhattan’s papers thrived. By 1853 the circulation of Bennett’s Herald had jumped to fifty-two

thousand, making it the country’s most profitable daily. Horace Greeley’s Tribune was running a

close second, and its weekly edition was probably the most widely circulated journal in America.

Within the city itself, combined daily circulation shot from one paper per every 16 residents in 1830

to one for every 4.5 in 1850 (and 1 per 2.2 on Sundays).



The rise was due in no small part to the penny papers’ explicitly addressing themselves to both

sexes as readers, unlike the older, strictly male-oriented commercial press. The newspapers proved

hospitable to women writers as well. In 1841 the Boston abolitionist Lydia Maria Child was a rarity

when she moved to New York to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and as the first woman to

edit a journal of public policy, she was kept at arm’s length by the male New York press. But after

Child dramatically increased the Standard’s circulation and published her urban reportage as Letters

from New York (1843, 1845), professionals like Bryant accepted her claim to a literary vocation.

Margaret Fuller, another pioneer, had been a highly respected editor of the Dial, the literary

magazine founded by Emerson up in Concord. In 1844, at Horace Greeley’s urging, she moved to

New York and joined the Tribune’s staff. Mostly she wrote on acceptably female subjects like

literature and music, but Fuller also did pieces on slums, prisons, and almshouses—becoming the

Tribune’s woman-about-town. In 1846 Greeley even dispatched Fuller, an avid supporter of

Garibaldi and Mazzini, to cover the fight for an Italian republic. (In 1850 the ship bringing her back to

New York sank off Fire Island in a storm; a search party including Walter Whitman combed the

beach, but her body was never found.)

Along with new readers and new writers, new technology made the expansion possible. What the

telegraph was to getting a story, the rotary press was to getting it out. Patented in 1846 by New York

City’s Richard Hoe, it could produce over twenty thousand copies per hour, permitting a paper to be

printed far more quickly, with far fresher news. In the 1850s, moreover, papermaking machines

emerged to provide Hoe’s “Lightning” presses with newsprint made from wood pulp rather than

scarce cotton and linen rags, breaking another bottleneck.

The housing of mammoth presses, the steam engines to power them, and growing numbers of

correspondents, bookkeepers, typesetters, and press operators required ever larger accommodations.

By the 1850s the Tribune employed fifty people (not counting the hundred employees it shared with

the Associated Press) and filled a five-story Park Row building. Bennett had moved the Herald to

larger quarters on Fulton and Nassau in 1842, but after 1848, when he switched to Lightning presses

and his workforce topped two hundred, he was forced to expand into three adjoining buildings.

Large premises, costly presses, sizable staffs, and telegraphic services—all drove expenses

skyward. To offset rising costs, owners boosted advertising rates, justifying hikes by pointing to

increased circulation. As Greeley noted in 1841, “We lose money on our circulation by itself

considered, but with 20,000 subscribers we can command such Advertising and such prices for it as

will render our enterprise a remunerating one.” In the late 1840s, while a firm might still pay sixty

dollars a year for ads in the oldfashioned Journal of Commerce, a similar amount of copy in the

Herald could cost over a thousand.

The increase in business precipitated the first advertising agencies. Enterprising young brokers

tramped lower Manhattan’s publishing district, buying space from newspapers, then hawking it to

patent medicine manufactures and dry-goods emporiums. No one touted the new profession’s benefits

more ardently than Volney B. Palmer, selfstyled “Morse of commercial intercourse.” By the end of

the 1840s Palmer had established offices in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Baltimore and was

proclaiming that “the day will come when a man will as readily think of walking without feet. . . as of

success without advertising.”

Even with enhanced ad revenues, it now required substantial capital to establish a newspaper. It

was still possible—at least in Brooklyn—for artisan printers to enter the business, especially when



backed by politicians. The Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat, established in 1841 to

promote the party’s fortunes, would remain more or less a one-man operation for years. But in

Manhattan, only one entrant in the mass circulation sweepstakes succeeded during the mid-century

boom: Henry Jarvis Raymond’s New-York Daily Times.

Unlike the founding generation of penny press entrepreneurs, Henry Raymond had no links to the

Trades. He came to work for Horace Greeley straight from college, then moved to James Watson

Webb’s Courier and Enquirer, where he rose to become managing editor. Here Raymond

established solid conservative credentials by attacking socialism (a “stupendous humbug”) in a sixmonth print duel with his former employer. In 1849 he was elected as a Whig to the Assembly. In

1851, as a leader of what Bennett called the “Wall Street clique,” the thirty-year-old Raymond was

chosen as speaker.

That summer a group of Whig bankers surveyed the penny press field with disaffected eyes.

Bennett’s Herald seemed too flamboyant, the Sun too plebeian, and Horace Greeley, though a

stalwart Whig, had dedicated the Tribune to promoting social justice “causes.” The dailies’

collective prosperity, however, suggested there might be room for another penny press—more

agreeably conservative in style and politics. The Whig magnates, accordingly, chose the reliably

orthodox Raymond to found the Times (the eighth to bear that name). They raised $i 10,000, making

the Times the most amply funded newcomer in American journalism.

Raymond acquired a Lightning press, hired a large staff, and joined the Associated Press. He also

set out to establish a clear identity for the Times, one professing objectivity, detachment, and

bourgeois respectability. The paper’s first issue, in September 1851, declared, with unmistakable

reference to Greeley’s tubthumping, that “we shall make ita point to get into a passion as rarely as

possible.” Raymond’s mix of prudent politics, good manners, and sober design found a readership at

once—ten thousand in ten days—drawn, he claimed, from “business men at their stores” and “the

most respectable families in town.” Advertisers flocked in, circulation doubled, and the Times

replaced the Tribune as the favored organ of New York Whiggery.

Raymond and his backers had entered an extremely influential circle. By 1860 the five leading

New York dailies, with a combined per diem circulation of 250,000, wielded immense power.

Printing House Square had become the hub of American journalism, and city editors and publishers

would become national celebrities—better known than manufacturers, department store moguls, or

clipper ship captains.

A PAGEANT OF TEXT



Newspaper publishing, the city’s fourth largest manufacturing sector by the late 1850s, proved crucial

to making the printing trade New York’s fastest growing industry. But a vast array of quite different

kinds of material also rolled from the city’s presses, helping make Manhattan an ink-drenched town.

Ads were everywhere. Aleksandr Lakier, a Russian visitor in the 1850s, was struckby the steady

flow of “notices and announcements [that] are thrust in your hands” along Broadway. Trade cards—

four-by-six-inch handbills promoting everything from patent medicines to prostitutes—blossomed

with the spread of lithography. “Bill-stickers” with paste buckets mades their rounds late at night,

plastering their posters over those of their rivals, creating a patchwork of odd and quintessentially

urban juxtapositions.

“New York is distinguished for its display in the way of signs,” noted chronicler John F. Watson



in 1846; “every device and expense is resorted to, to make them attractive.” Not only were stores

festooned with ever more and ever bigger placards and announcements, but so were warehouses,

carriages, buses, fences, lampposts, trees—and people: men walked the streets with sandwich boards

on their shoulders. One commentator noted with mock surprise that umbrellas had as yet been left

blank, “their ample and conspicuous surface bearing no announcement of any new pill, new adhesive

gum, bankrupt’s sale, or What is it?”

Civic text added to the visual pageant—banners draped over buildings for celebration, broadsides

for political campaigns, and “Direction Boards” erected at the Board of Aldermen’s insistence “for

the accommodation of the whole public, and especially strangers.” Often these street signs appeared

only on gas-light stanchions, making it difficult, complained visiting novelist Anthony Trollope, to

know when to get off the horsecar. There were, however, remarkably few injunctions in the cityscape

—little by way of traffic regulations or health warnings telling people what they should or should not

do—though omnibuses did post warnings to BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS.

Some of the cleverest trade bills on the street were designed to resemble paper money—no

surprise, given the city’s role in producing the real thing. Manhattan was headquarters for the nation’s

three largest banknote manufacturers, whose clients included many of the over ten thousand

institutions empowered to issue currency. It was also home to those who produced bogus bills. “We

have never known counterfeiting carried on to a more alarming extent than at present,” wrote the Sun

in 1840. “We were shown yesterday a one dollar bill on the Atlantic Bank of Brooklyn, altered to a

ten in so ingenious a manner as to have deceived all but the most wary.” This in turn gave rise to an

impressive array of daily, weekly, and monthly journals—like Day’s New-York Bank Note List and

Counterfeit Detector—produced by more than a dozen different publishers to help store clerks and

bank tellers identify failed banks and fraudulent currency. By the late 1850s, as well, ninety-four

engraving establishments and twenty-three lithographic works were churning out such other printtools of the commercial and financial trades as checks, bills of lading, and bills of exchange.



“The Bill-Poster’s Dream,” an 1862 cartoon spoofing the proliferation of signs in the

city. When read down, beginning in the upper left, the juxtaposition of messages makes

an amusing commentary on local persons and events: “People’s Candidate for Mayor . .

. The Hippopotamus,” “Miss Cushman will. . . take Brandreth’s Pills,” “The American

Bible Society will meet at the. . . Gaieties Conceit Saloon,” “$ioo Bounty Wanted . . . A

Jewess for One Night Only,” etc. (Eno Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division

of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden

Foundations)

BOOK MART



The widespread assumption, by all these print publicists, of near-universal literacy was largely

accurate. During the 1840s and 1850s—thanks to the country’s growing number of schools and

colleges, a general conviction that literacy was essential to republican citizenship, the tremendous

evangelical commitment to teaching sacred texts, and the emergence of a cheap popular press—the

literacy rate among white adults climbed past 90 percent in the city and throughout the nation.

With the national market for reading matter growing briskly, and with the economy rising, postal

rates dropping, and railroads affording inexpensive access to the interior, New York publishers

flourished as never before. By 1860 seventeen book-printing firms were manufacturing over three

million dollars’ worth of volumes for the national marketplace. New York City, with 2 percent of the



country’s population, produced over 37 percent of its total publishing revenue.

Harper and Brothers retained its preeminence. By 1853, when its workforce of five hundred

issued more than four and a half million volumes, it had become the largest employer in New York

Qty. After its Cliff Street plant burned down that year, the firm immediately set James Bogardus to

building two splendid five-story cast-iron structures, which between them covered half an acre on

Franklin Square. One combined all of Harpers’ editorial, management, inventory, and wholesaling

operations. The other, the factory, devoted a separate floor to each stage of the production process.

This powerhouse secured Harpers’ position as the largest publisher in the world.

The company distributed its tremendous output with smooth efficiency. Advertising extensively—it

placed notices in 844 local papers during 1856 alone—Harpers circulated its wares through a

network of over a thousand booksellers and a phalanx of colporteurs (peddlers of religious material).

Harpers, indeed, had great success with religious works, especially Harper’s Illuminated and New

Pictorial Bible (1846) a giltedged, gold-embossed, morocco-bound edition that set new (and rococo)

standards for taste and elegance. The firm did well, too, with inexpensive book sets: the 150 volumes

of the Harper’s Family Library could be had for sixty-five dollars. And state legislative

appropriations underwrote widespread and profitable purchase of the two-hundredplus titles in its

Harper’s School District Library series.

The firm continued to pirate European authors: Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, and above

all Thomas Babbington Macaulay, whose confident assertions in the History of England from the

Accession of James II (1848) about the benefits of industrial progress helped it to sales of four

hundred thousand copies. It also extended growing attention to a wide array of American texts

embracing Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico (1843), a miscellaneity of geographies and travel

accounts, including Harper’s New York and Erie Rail-road Guide Book (1851), and the domestic

advice books of Catharine Beecher.

Harpers’ success spurred competitors. The House of Appleton retained its number two status by

producing Spanish-language books for the Latin American trade, commencing the New American

Cyclopedia (the greatest literary enterprise yet attempted in the United States), and securing rights to

Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book (which became the number two seller in the world, right behind

the Bible). Behind the Appletons lay a pack of up-and-coming rivals including A. S. Barnes, Charles

Scribner, David Van Nostrand, E. P. Dutton, and, scrappiest of all, the youthful George Palmer

Putnam.

Putnam teamed with John Wiley in 1840 and quickly established an agency in England to forage

for European books with which to rival Harpers. He also propelled Wiley and Putnam into building a

strong domestic list, a focus he continued after setting up on his own in 1848.

Again, women writers and readers proved crucial to the expansion of the publishing world,

particularly after 1850, when Putnam published Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World. Warner had

grown up in the fashionable town house of an affluent and genteel New York family, received an

excellent education, and thrived on the city’s cultural offerings. In the Panic of 1837, however, her

father lost his fortune and took the family into impoverished upstate exile. Warner took to writing in

hopes of making money and submitted a pious and sentimental novel to Harpers, which rebuffed it

with the single word “Fudge.” Brought out by Putnam, however, Wide, Wide World became a

publishing phenomenon. It went through fourteen editions in two years, becoming the most successful

novel yet written in the United States, and touched off a flood of domestic parlor books by and for



women. Despite the strictures against women speaking in public, which if anything had sharpened

since Fanny Wright had been howled from her platform, writing for the public became an acceptable

extension of woman’s sphere. Male publishers were simply not prepared to turn down the kind of

revenue ladies generated, and “scribbling women,” with the help of their consuming sisters, carved

out a niche in the flourishing industry.

By 1857 there were at least 112 publishers in New York City. While most were “respectable”

houses, emphasizing genteel, religious, and domestic literature, others catered to a rougher

readership. These outfits churned out blood-and-thunder adventures, sadomasochistic romances laced

with sex and horror, and lurid accounts of patrician villainy or plebeian roguery. Nearly 60 percent of

all fiction published in the United States between 1830 and 1860 was of this ilk.

In 1846, four years after the federal government banned importation of erotic material, an

indigenous pornographic publishing industry arose when William Haynes, an Irish surgeon who

immigrated to New York, reinvested the money he’d made publishing Fanny Hill in the United States

in the production of cheap erotic novels like Confessions of a Lady’s Waiting Maid (1848). Most

such paperbacks—usually octavosized pamphlets with yellow or pink wrappers, priced at twentyfive cents—were aimed at a youthful male audience and written by men, some of whom achieved

heroic levels of productivity. In the 1850s New York sensationalist George Thompson whipped off

nearly one hundred steamy potboilers—with titles like City Crimes (1849), New-York Life (1849),

and The Gay Girls of New-York (1853)—portraying group sex, nymphomania, miscegenation, and

incest in the Five Points. This plethora of pornographic confections, often replete with lustful

woodcuts, led one New York reformer to wonder: “Will not the steam-presses create licentiousness

faster than police regulations can drain it off?”

In the 1850s New York’s competing book publishers discovered, as had their counterparts in

journalism, that cooperation could be in the interest of all. The market’s growth in size and scale had

made it ever more difficult for companies to inform backcountry stores about new titles. Nor was it

easy for distant booksellers to get to New York for the fall and spring trade sales. Some of these

problems were alleviated by the establishment of a trade paper in 1851, Norton’s Literary

Advertiser, which included book news, ads, and reviews, and in 1855 the city’s bookmen decided to

establish the New York Publishers Association. It was inaugurated with a banquet for six hundred at

the Crystal Palace, the biggest-ever gathering of literary personalities in American history. This selfcongratulatory conclave of authors and editors marked publishing’s arrival as a full-fledged

metropolitan industry.

Book selling flourished too. Stores along Broadway between Pine and Houston concentrated on

new titles. Secondhand volumes were found at shops on Nassau Street and Pearl or farther uptown

along Canal, Mulberry, and the Bowery. When the Astor Library opened, Fourth Avenue between

Astor Place and 14th Street became the city’s used-book center; and it remained so for a century. In

addition streetcorner bookstalls served as outlets, especially for the fledgling pornography trade: in

1843 one paper claimed that nearly every stand sold “libidinous books with the most revolting and

disgusting contents.”

“THE CENTRE OF LITERARY POWER”



The efflorescence of book publishing boosted magazine production as well. Political, literary,

domestic, and religious journals had long flourished in New York. Now commercial periodicals



began to circulate at a hitherto unmatched pace. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted as early as

1839, in “the Great Metropolis. . . new literary projects in the shape of Magazines and Weekly papers

are constantly started, showing great activity, and zeal, and enterprise.”

Two of the grandest were offshoots of great publishing houses. In June 1850 Fletcher Harper set

up Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, in handsome format, with sumptuous engravings. The raw

material was filched from the best English authors, supplemented occasionally by local talent. The

magazine also featured columns of light commentary—including “The Editor’s Easy Chair,” a seat

filled in the late 1850s by George William Curtis—and offered travel sketches by genteel tourists just

back from perambulating Italian art galleries and classical ruins. The formula worked to perfection in

a culture that still set its course by European stars. Harpers printed seventy-five hundred of the first

number; in six months circulation hit fifty thousand; by 1860 it reached two hundred thousand.

With figures like these it wasn’t hard for Charles F. Briggs, the New York editor (and author of

Harry Franco), to convince Harpers’ rival George Palmer Putnam to found another monthly.

Putnam’s Magazine, with Briggs at the helm, sought out Amer​ican authors, compensated them well,

and attracted sophisticated contributions on art, literature, and society.

Robert Bonner’s unaffiliated New York Ledger outpaced both Harper’s and Put-nam ‘s. An Irish

immigrant printer turned entrepreneur, Bonner purchased the Ledger in 1851 when it hung on the

brink of collapse. Over the next several years he aggressively improved its circulation by lowering

the price to three cents a copy and offering a class and gender-straddling mix of adventure stories,

domestic romances, and first-rank writing.

Bonner, an advertising genius, spent twenty-five thousand dollars a week on promotions. A

pioneer in the use of “white space,” he took out full pages in the Herald, Tri-bune, and Times, only to

leave the entire space blank but for a single line in the center or a corner: “Read Mrs. South worth’s

new story in The Ledger.” In this manner, Bonner promoted a star system that featured the writer as

much as the written word. He paid unprecedented sums—thirty thousand dollars for a novel by Henry

Ward Beecher, three thousand for a poem by Longfellow—then advertised his expenses. In 1855

Bonner signed Fanny Fern to write for the Ledger. Born Sara Payson Willis, Fern had won national

acclaim in Boston for a volume of essays, Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (1853), that sold

over a hundred thousand copies. Now she moved to New York, where Bonner paid her one hundred

dollars a column, making her the most highly paid newspaper writer in the country. By 1860, with

circulation topping three hundred thousand, the Ledger was the most widely read magazine in the

nation.

Below these Everests lay ranges of more specialized weeklies and monthlies. New York

published fifty-two religious periodicals at mid-century. There were magazines devoted to ethnic

affairs, banking, sports, ladies’ fashions, politics, culture, science, humor, trade and industrial

technology. Even the American Agriculturalist made its home in Manhattan, noting that “more

Farmers and Planters resort here than to any other city in the Union.”

The magazine spectrum too had its spicier bandwidth, represented most notoriously by the

National Police Gazette. In 1845 journalist George Wilkes, the New York-born son of an artisan

cabinetmaker, was convicted of criminal libel while coediting the Sub-terranean with the pugnacious

Mike Walsh. After serving four weeks in jail, Wilkes penned a pamphlet (Mysteries of the Tombs)

exposing corruption in the city’s criminal justice system, then founded the Gazette to continue and

extend his investigations. Imitating London’s Police Gazette, Wilkes gave his readers lurid capsule



reports of crimes in the city and around the nation (in columns titled “Seductions,” “Rapes,” and

“Murders”), interspersed with criminal biographies (“The Lives of the Felons”), trial coverage of

crimes involving sex and violence, and a glossary of criminal slang (the “Rogue’s Lexicon”). Lively,

at times quasi-pornographic graphics helped boost Police Gazette sales to over forty thousand by

1850.

The Gazette and its hundreds of periodical rivals made New York’s literary marketplace intensely

competitive. With journals being founded and folded almost daily, Manhattan was perilous for

entrepreneurs but a magnet for would-be professional authors, whose arrival further altered the

process of literary production. Writing had long been an amateur affair. Gentlemen authors wrote for

their friends and peers; they lived for literature, not offit. Now, as one disgruntled Boston literatus

put it in 1843, “literature begins to assume the aspect and undergo the mutations of trade,” with

authors hoping to sell their literary goods to impersonal and far-flung audiences, addressed by

advertisement.

Writers found themselves advertised as well; they were packaged as commodities, their portraits

and biographies promoted. Horace Greeley, acting as Henry David Thoreau’s informal literary agent

(an emerging profession), told him: “You may write with an angel’s pen, yet your writings have no

mercantile, money value till you are known and talked of as an author.” Marketing, in turn, increased

the importance of reviewing—another budding profession. When Margaret Fuller moved to the city to

work on Greeley’s Tribune, she became the first full time book reviewer on an American paper.

Laudatory excerpts were cited in ads or the book itself, and while most were honestly come by,

others were bought and paid for.

Writers were ambivalent about publishing’s transformation into a capitalist enterprise. Formerly

authors had financed their own books, kept the profits, and paid publishers a percentage for printing

and distributing the work. Now the flow of funds had reversed itself, with publishers fronting costs

and paying only “royalties” to authors. Yet the new system, along with the creation of a national

market, clearly increased potential sales. Authors might therefore be simultaneously dismayed at

being encouraged to tailor their output to the marketplace and exhilarated at the chance to become

self-supporting.

As writers poured into the city, supply outstripped even the surging demand and further tilted the

balance of power from authors to publishers. By 1851 editor Nathaniel Parker Willis warned that

New York City was the “most overstocked market in the country,” noting, “I have tried to find

employment for dozens of starving writers, in vain.” Horace Greeley cautioned one upstate hopeful:

“You do not realize how little the mere talent of writing well has to do with success or usefulness.

There are a thousand at least in this city who can write very good prose or verse,” he added, “while

there are not fifty who can earn their bread by it.” Few heeded such advice, for it was clear, as a

writer in the Literary World noted in 1847, that “the seat of commerce” was fast becoming “the

centre of literary power.”

YOUNG AMERICA



One thing this “centre” lacked was a center. New York’s literary world was fissured into warring

factions, each with its own complement of writers, critics, and magazines. The two leading circles—

Knickerbockers and Young Americans—disagreed on almost everything. The former were Whigs,

Episcopalians, anglophiles, and hostile to all political and literary radicalisms. The latter were