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SUPPLEMENT XVIII
Charles Frederick Briggs to Robert Wrigley
American Writers
A Collection of Literary Biographies
JAY PARINI
Editor in Chief
SUPPLEMENT XVIII
Charles Frederick Briggs to Robert Wrigley
American Writers Supplement XVIII
Editor in Chief: Jay Parini For product information and technology assistance, contact us at
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photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, American writers: a collection of literary biographies / Leonard Unger, edi-
taping, Web distribution, information tor in chief.
networks, or information storage and retrieval p. cm.
systems, except as permitted under Section 107 The 4-vol. main set consists of 97 of the pamphlets originally published as
or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright the University of Minnesota pamphlets on American writers; some have
Act, without the prior written permission of been rev. and updated. The supplements cover writers not included in the
the publisher. original series.
Supplement 2, has editor in chief, A. Walton Litz; Retrospective suppl. 1,
This publication is a creative work fully c1998, was edited by A. Walton Litz & Molly Weigel; Suppl. 5–7 have as
protected by all applicable copyright laws, as editor-in-chief, Jay Parini.
well as by misappropriation, trade secret, Includes bibliographies and index.
unfair competition, and other applicable laws. Contents: v. 1. Henry Adams to T.S. Eliot — v. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson to
The authors and editors of this work have Carson McCullers — v. 3. Archibald MacLeish to George Santayana — v. 4.
added value to the underlying factual material Isaac Bashevis Singer to Richard Wright — Supplement[s]: 1, pt. 1. Jane Ad-
herein through one or more of the following: dams to Sidney Lanier. 1, pt. 2. Vachel Lindsay to Elinor Wylie. 2, pt. 1. W.H.
unique and original selection, coordination, Auden to O. Henry. 2, pt. 2. Robinson Jeffers to Yvor Winters. — 4, pt. 1.
expression, arrangement, and classification of Maya Angelou to Linda Hogan. 4, pt. 2. Susan Howe to Gore Vidal — Suppl.
the information. 5. Russell Banks to Charles Wright — Suppl. 6. Don DeLillo to W. D. Sn-
odgrass — Suppl. 7. Julia Alvarez to Tobias Wolff — Suppl. 8. T.C. Boyle to
August Wilson. — Suppl. 11 Toni Cade Bambara to Richard Yates.
ISBN 0-684-19785-5 (set) — ISBN 0-684-13662-7
1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. American
literature—Bio-bibliography. 3. Authors, American—Biography. I. Unger,
Leonard. II. Litz, A. Walton. III. Weigel, Molly. IV. Parini, Jay. V. University of
Minnesota pamphlets on American writers.
PS129 .A55
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Gale
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ISBN-13: ISBN-13: 978-0-684-31552-2

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Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 12 11 10 09 08
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment is gratefully made to those publishers and MARGARET EDSON Edson, Margaret. From Wit. Faber and Faber,
individuals who permitted the use of the following material in Inc., 1999. Copyright © 1993, 1999 by Margaret Edson. All
copyright. Every effort has been made to secure permission to rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber, Inc.,
reprint copyrighted material. an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC./ The Washington
Post, February 27, 2000, for “A Teacher’s Wit and Wisdom:
BOB DYLAN Dylan, Bob. From “Blowin’ in the Wind,” in Lyrics Margaret Edson, Finding Lessons in Her Sole Play,” by Nelson
1962–2001. Simon and Schuster, 2004. Copyright © 1962 by Pressley. Copyright © 2000 The Washington Post. Reprinted by
Warner Bros., Inc. Copyright © renewed 1990 Special Rider permission of the author.
Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
JON KRAKAUER Krakauer, Jon. From Eiger Dreams. The Lyons
Reprinted by permission./ Dylan, Bob. From “A Hard Rain’s Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Jon Krakauer. Reproduced by
A-Gonna Fall,” in Lyrics 1962–2001. Simon and Schuster, 2004. permission.
Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros., Inc. Copyright © renewed
1991 Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International MARILYN NELSON Waniek, Marilyn Nelson. From For the Body.
copyright secured. Reprinted by permission./ Dylan, Bob. From Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Copyright © 1978 by
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” in Lyrics 1962–2001. Simon Marilyn Nelson Waniek. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
and Schuster, 2004. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros., Inc. permission./ Rasmussen, Halfdan. From Hundreds of Hens and
Copyright © renewed 1993 Special Rider Music. All rights Other Poems for Children. Translated by Marilyn Nelson and
reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by Pamela Espeland. Black Willow Press, 1982. Text copyright ©
permission./ Dylan, Bob. From “The Times They Are Marilyn Nelson Waniek and Pamela Espeland. All rights
A-Changin’,” in Lyrics 1962–2001. Simon and Schuster, 2004. reserved. Reproduced by permission./ Espeland, Pamela and
Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros., Inc. Copyright © Nelson, Marilyn. From The Cat Walked Through the Casserole.
renewed 1991 Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. Carolrhoda, 1984. Text copyright © 1984 by Pamela Espeland
International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission./ Dylan, and Marilyn Nelson Waniek. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
Bob. From “When the Ship Comes In,” in Lyrics 1962–2001. Carolrhoda, a division of Lerner Publishing Group./ Waniek,
Simon and Schuster, 2004. Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros., Marilyn Nelson. From Mama’s Promises. Louisiana State
Inc. Copyright © renewed 1991 Special Rider Music. All rights University Press, 1985. Copyright © 1985 by Marilyn Nelson
reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by Waniek. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission./ Waniek,
permission./ Dylan, Bob. From “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Marilyn Nelson. From The Homeplace. Louisiana State
Bleeding),” in Lyrics 1962–2001. Simon and Schuster, 2004. University Press, 1990. Copyright © 1989, 1990 by Marilyn
Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros., Inc. Copyright © renewed Nelson Waniek. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission./
1993 Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International Waniek, Marilyn Nelson. From Partial Truth. Kutenai Press,
copyright secured. Reprinted by permission./ Dylan, Bob. From 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. Copyright
“Idiot Wind,” in Lyrics 1962–2001. Simon and Schuster, 2004. © 1992 by Eric Spencer. Reproduced by permission./ Waniek,
Copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music. All rights reserved. Marilyn Nelson. From Magnificat. Louisiana State University
International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission./ Dylan, Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. All
Bob. From “Ballad of a Thin Man,” in Lyrics 1962–2001. Simon rights reserved. Reproduced by permission./ Nelson, Marilyn.
and Schuster, 2004. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros., Inc. From The Fields of Praise. Louisiana State University Press,
Copyright © renewed 1993 Special Rider Music. All rights 1997. Copyright © 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 by Marilyn Nelson.
reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission./ Nelson, Marilyn.
permission./ Dylan, Bob. From “Summer Days,” in Lyrics From She-Devil Circus. Aralia, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by
1962–2001. Simon and Schuster, 2004. Copyright © 2001 Marilyn Nelson. Reproduced by permission./ Nelson, Marilyn.
Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright From A Wreath for Emmett Till. Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Text
secured. Reprinted by permission./ Dylan, Bob. From “Love copyright © 2005 by Marilyn Nelson. All rights reserved.
Minus Zero/No Limit,” in Lyrics 1962–2001. Simon and Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Schuster, 2004. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros., Inc. Publishing Company./ Nelson, Marilyn. From The Cachoeira
Copyright © renewed 1993 Special Rider Music. All rights Tales and Other Poems. Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by Copyright © 2005 by Marilyn Nelson. All rights reserved.
permission. Reproduced by permission./ Nelson, Marilyn. From Triolets for
v
vi / American Writers
Triolet. Curbstone Press, Ltd, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by (USA) Inc. and the author./ Wrigley, Robert. From Moon in a
Marilyn Nelson. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission./ Mason Jar; and, What My Father Believed: Two Volumes of
Pederson, Inge. From The Thirteenth Month. Translated by Poetry. University of Illinois Press, 1986. Copyright © 1986,
Marilyn Nelson. Oberlin College Press, 2005. Introduction and 1991, 1998 by Robert Wrigley. Used with permission of the poet
translations copyright © 2005 by Marilyn Nelson. Reproduced and the University of Illinois Press./ Wrigley, Robert. From What
by permission. My Father Believed. University of Illinois Press, 1991. Copyright
© 1991 by Robert Wrigley. Used with permission of the author./
JANISSE RAY Ray, Janisse. From Naming the Unseen. University Wrigley, Robert. From In the Bank of Beautiful Sins. Penguin
of Montana, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Janisse Ray. Group, 1995. Copyright © 1995 Robert Wrigley. Used by
Reproduced by permission. permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
and the author./ Wrigley, Robert. From Reign of Snakes. Penguin
CONRAD RICHTER Richter, Conrad. From A Country of Strangers. Group, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Robert Wrigley. Used by
Alfred Knopf, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Conrad Richter. permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Reproduced by permission of Alfred Knopf, a division of and the author./ Wrigley, Robert. From Lives of the Animals
Random House, Inc. Penguin Group, 2003. Copyright © 2003 Robert Wrigley. In the
U.S. used by permission of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. In the
ROBERT WRIGLEY Wrigley, Robert. From The Sinking of Clay City. U.K. reproduced by permission of the author./ The Hudson
Copper Canyon Press, 1979. Copyright © 1979 Robert Wrigley. Review, v. LIX, winter, 2007. Copyright © 2007 by Robert
Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group Wrigley. Reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review.
List of Subjects
Introduction ix ALICE McDERMOTT 155

Paul Johnston
List of Contributors xi
MARILYN NELSON 171
CHARLES FREDERICK BRIGGS 1 Kim Bridgford
Bette S. Weidman
JANISSE RAY 189
BOB DYLAN 19 Joan Wylie Hall
Ian Bickford
CONRAD RICHTER 207
MARGARET EDSON 35 David R. Johnson
Angela Garcia
PAUL WILLIAM RYAN 223
PERCIVAL EVERETT 53 Joseph G. Ramsey
Tracie Church Guzzio
BUDD SCHULBERG 241
WILLIAM HOFFMAN 69 Tom Cerasulo
William L. Frank
SUSAN WARNER 257
HA JIN 89 Laurie Ousley
Deborah Kay Ferrell
DOROTHY WEST 277
JON KRAKAUER 105 Whitney Womack Smith
Susan Butterworth
ROBERT WRIGLEY 293
NELLA LARSEN 119 Richard Wakefield
Whitney Womack Smith
Cumulative Index 309
JONATHAN LETHEM 135
Bert Almon Authors List 569
vii
Introduction
“Literature is as old as speech,” said John Stein- writers in a way that attracted a devoted follow-
beck, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in ing of readers. The series proved invaluable to a
1962. “It grew out of human need for it, and it generation of students and teachers, who could
has not changed except to become more depend on these reliable and interesting critiques
needed.” The fact is we need books of poetry, of major figures. The idea of reprinting these
novels, plays, and memoirs. We need the solace essays occurred to Charles Scribner, Jr. (1921–
they provide, their inspiration, their guiding 1995). The series appeared in four volumes
light. The great authors of the world are spiritual entitled American Writers: A Collection of Liter-
mentors, and they teach us ways to grow and ary Biographies (1974). Since then, eighteen
think. They offer directions for living. They supplements have appeared, treating well over
amuse us, they console us. The books they write two hundred American writers: poets, novelists,
are speech, human language, in a refined and playwrights, essayists, and autobiographers. We
heightened state of activity. We have always have discussed not only “literary” writers but
needed good writing, and—as Steinbeck sug- popular ones as well, sometimes taking the
gests—we need this writing even more now, measure of those in the field of genre fiction,
when the threat from the larger culture is for example. Yet the idea has been consistent
overwhelming, and books must contend with with the original series: to provide clear,
MTV, cable television, movies, radio, and count- informative essays aimed at the general reader
less new media. and intelligent student. These essays often rise
In this eighteenth supplement of American to a remarkably high level of craft and vision,
Writers, we offer eighteen articles on writers of but they are meant to introduce an author of
fiction, drama (including film), and poetry some importance in American literature, and to
(including song lyrics, in the case of Bob Dy- provide a sense of the scope and nature of the
lan). Each of the writers discussed is ac- career under review. A certain amount of
complished, having made a major contribution biographical and historical context is also
to one or more of the genres of literature, and provided, giving a context for the work it-
none of them has yet been featured in this self—on the assumption that no work of litera-
series. These articles are meant to provide an ture arises from nowhere. Every poem or novel,
introductory guide to these writers, although play or memoir, roots in its time and place.
many of them rise to a level of criticism that The writers of these articles are teachers and
will interest even those with considerable scholars. Most have published books and
expertise in the subject. Certainly each of the articles in their field, and several are well-
subjects discussed may be considered a primary known writers of poetry or fiction as well as
example of “human speech” in the terms that critics. As anyone glancing through this collec-
Steinbeck proposed. tion will see, they have all been held to a high
This series had its origin in a series of standard of good writing and sound scholarship,
biographical monographs that appeared between and a great deal of attention has been paid to
1959 and 1972. The Minnesota Pamphlets on revealing the career of each writer as it unfolds
American Writers were incisively written and in time, with some focus on the critical recep-
informative, treating ninety-seven American tion of individual works. Each of the essays
ix
x / American Writers
concludes with a bibliography of works by the authors discussed are Margaret Edson, Percival
author, followed by a select bibliography of Everett, William Hoffman, Ha Jin, Jon Krakauer,
critical works about the author; these latter Jonathan Lethem, Alice McDermott, Marilyn
references are intended to direct the reading of Nelson, Janisse Ray, and Robert Wrigley. Each
those who wish to pursue the subject further. of these has attracted a following, won awards,
In this eighteenth supplement, we treat a wide and gotten a good deal of critical attention in
range of authors from the past and present. newspapers and journals; but few of them have
Among them are three interesting writers from yet to receive the kind of sustained critical focus
the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth that we offer here.
centuries, including Susan Warner, Charles Fre- As Steinbeck said, literature is human speech,
derick Briggs, Conrad Richter, Nella Larsen, and the writing examined in these pages is quite
Dorothy West, Budd Schulberg, and Paul Wil- remarkable for its brilliance and enduring value.
liam Ryan. They were each popular in their time My belief is that this supplement performs a
(Schulberg is still alive, in his nineties), and useful service in this regard, providing substan-
they continue to attract a discerning readership. tial introductions to American writers from the
The main focus of this supplement, however, is past and present who have managed to change
contemporary literature. We examine the work the lives of their readers (or, in Dylan’s case,
of Bob Dylan, the great song writer and singer— his listeners). These articles will assist readers
this is something of a departure for this series, in the difficult but rewarding work of close read-
but we firmly believe that Dylan writes songs ing.
of genuine literary value, and he has also
published important books. Among the recent ——JAY PARINI
Contributors
Bert Almon. Poet, critic, and biographer, Bert where she teaches courses in literature, research,
Almon teaches English at the University of Al- and writing. She has written reference articles
berta. He is the author of William Humphrey: for such volumes as the Oxford Encyclopedia of
Destroyer of Myths (North Texas State Univer- American Literature, American Writers, British
sity Press, 1998), This Stubborn Self: Texas Writers, Magill’s Survey of World Literature,
Autobiographies (TCU Press, 2001), and eight Musicians and Composers of the Twentieth
collections of poetry. He has published articles Century, Critical Survey of Mystery and Detec-
on American, English, Canadian, and Australian tive Fiction, among many others. She also
writers. JONATHAN LETHEM writes and publishes creative nonfiction, travel
and memoir writing, and literary biography. JON
Ian Bickford. Ian Bickford is a visiting as- KRAKAUER
sistant professor of English at Bard College at
Simon’s Rock and a student in the Ph.D.
program in English at the City University of Tom Cerasulo. Tom Cerasulo holds the Shaugh-
New York Graduate Center, where he is writing ness Family Chair for the Study of the Humani-
a dissertation titled “The Thief of Paradise: John ties at Elms College. He has published on film
Milton and Seventh-day Adventism.” His poetry adaptations and on the cultural history of
and other writings have appeared in Agni, LIT, American authorship. His recent work appears
Post Road, Beloit Poetry Review, Colorado in Arizona Quarterly, MELUS, The Litchfield
Review, Sleeping Fish, Smartish Pace, Asheville Review, and Studies in American Culture. He is
Poetry Review, Oxford Encyclopedia of Ameri- currently writing a book that reconsiders Hol-
can Literature, and elsewhere. He has been the lywood’s effect on American literary authors.
recipient of a Mayers fellowship at the Hunting- BUDD SCHULBERG
ton Library. He lives in Pownal, Vermont. BOB
DYLAN Deborah Kay Ferrell. Deborah Kay Ferrell
earned a doctorate in creative writing and
Kim Bridgford. Kim Bridgford is a professor American literature from Florida State Univer-
of English at Fairfield University and editor of sity. She has been the recipient of a Florida Arts
Dogwood and Mezzo Cammin. Her books Council grant for her fiction. Currently, she is
include Undone, nominated for the Pulitzer an associate professor of English at SUNY–
Prize; Instead of Maps, nominated for the Poets’ Finger Lakes Community College, where she
Prize; and In the Extreme: Sonnets about World teaches courses in writing, cinema, and Ameri-
Records, winner of the Donald Justice Prize. In can literature. She recently completed a novel
addition, she has written on such poets as on her experiences with the Cuban-American
Sharon Olds, Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Brigit community in Miami. HA JIN
Pegeen Kelly, Mark Doty, and Micheal
O’Siadhail. She is currently working on a three-
book poetry/photography project with visual William L. Frank. William L. Frank is a
artist Jo Yarrington, focusing on journey and professor emeritus and former dean of the Col-
sacred space in Iceland, Venezuela, and Bhutan. lege of Arts and Sciences at Longwood College.
MARILYN NELSON Before teaching at Longwood, he served for
four years in the U.S. Air Force and taught at
Susan Butterworth. Susan Butterworth is a the University of Southern Mississippi, North-
professor of English at Salem State College, western University, Delta State University, and
xi
xii / American Writers
the University of Southeast Missouri. He has Paul Johnston. Paul Johnston is an associate
published books and articles on Sherwood Bon- professor of English at the State University of
ner, William Hoffman, Robert Penn Warren, and New York at Plattsburgh, where he teaches
Allen Wier. He resides in Rice, Virginia, with courses in colonial and nineteenth-century
his wife. They have three children and eight American literature, as well as nature writing
grandchildren. WILLIAM HOFFMAN courses. He has published articles on Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and
Angela Garcia. Angela Garcia earned a mas- the Fireside Poets, Susan and James Fenimore
ter’s degree in English from the University of Cooper, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Merton,
California, Davis. She has taught in El Salvador, and Barry Lopez. He is currently writing a study
as well as California schools. Having recently of Catholicism in nineteenth-century American
moved to Corvallis, Oregon, she is employed as literature. ALICE MCDERMOTT
a freelance online writer, as well as a profes-
sional scorer for Pearson and the Educational Laurie Ousley. Laurie Ousley is a faculty
Testing Service. MARGARET EDSON member at the Nichols School. She has pub-
lished a collection of essays about children’s
literature titled To See the Wizard: Politics and
Tracie Church Guzzio. Tracie Church Guzzio the Literature of Childhood, which includes her
is an associate professor of English at the State essay “‘Well-read people are less likely to be
University of New York at Plattsburgh, where evil’: Intellectual Development and Justice in
she teaches courses in African American litera- Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate
ture, literary theory, and human rights literature. Events.” She has also published in Legacy and
She has published criticism on various African has an essay forthcoming in Mother Knows
American writers and was co-editor of The Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”. She is cur-
Encyclopedia of African-American Literature. rently working on a study of political intentions
She recently completed a manuscript on the within young readers’ literature from the
work of John Edgar Wideman, and she is cur- nineteenth century to the present-day. SUSAN
rently working on a study of post-traumatic nar- WARNER
ratives and African American literature. PER-
CIVAL EVERETT
Joseph G. Ramsey. Joseph G. Ramsey is an
assistant professor of English at Fisher College
Joan Wylie Hall. Joan Wylie Hall teaches and a recent graduate of Tufts University’s
Southern literature and other American literary Ph.D. program in English. His current research
genres at the University of Mississippi. Author focuses on U.S. proletarian literature and the
of Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction intersections between left-wing movements and
and editor of the interview collection Conversa- twentieth-century U.S. mass culture. Along with
tions with Audre Lorde, she has published es- Graham Barnfield and Victor Cohen, Ramsey
says on Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Jose- co-edited a special issue of the e-journal Recon-
phine Humphreys, Anna Deavere Smith, Ruth struction focusing on the theme of “class,
McEnery Stuart, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Wil- culture, and public intellectuals.” Work from his
liams, among others. She contributed the Ann dissertation “Red Pulp: Radicalism and Repres-
Patchett essay to American Writers Supplement sion in Mid-20th Century U.S. ‘Genre’ Fiction”
XII. JANISSE RAY is forthcoming in Mediations and Reconstruc-
tion 8.4, while his film criticism has appeared
David R. Johnson. David R. Johnson is a in such journals as Cultural Logic, Socialism
professor of English at Lafayette College. He is and Democracy, and Counterpunch. PAUL WIL-
the author of Conrad Richter: A Writer’s Life LIAM RYAN
and has written on Ernest Hemingway, John
Steinbeck, Harold Frederic, and on aspects of Whitney Womack Smith. Whitney Womack
American literature and culture. CONRAD RICHTER Smith is an associate professor of English and
Contributors / xiii
an affiliate in women’s studies and black world East of Early Winters, was published by the
studies at Miami University Hamilton. Her University of Evansville Press and received the
research focuses on the transatlantic relation- Richard Wilbur Award. ROBERT WRIGLEY
ships and dialogues among nineteenth-century
British and American women writers. She has
Bette S. Weidman. Bette S. Weidman is an as-
published articles and biographical entries on
sociate professor of English at Queens College
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis,
of the City University of New York, where she
Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Siddal, and Marga-
has been teaching American literature since
ret Sackville. NELLA LARSEN, DOROTHY WEST
1968. She also serves as director of American
studies at Queens College and held a Fulbright
Richard Wakefield. Richard Wakefield has fellowship in India in 1997. She has written on
taught composition and American literature at Charles Frederick Briggs, Henry David Tho-
Tacoma Community and the University of reau, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller and
Washington for over twenty-five years. He has other antebellum authors, as well as on Native
also been a literary critic for the Seattle Times American literature and historic photographs.
for over twenty years. His collection of poetry, CHARLES FREDERICK BRIGGS
CHARLES FREDERICK BRIGGS
(1804—1877)
Bette S. Weidman
CHARLES FREDERICK BRIGGS played an influential role street familiarity with the growing city. Most of
in the development of American literature in the all, he identified his point of view, in the perilous
antebellum period through his work as a novelist, 1840s and 1850s, with “the meridian of Broad-
as a writer of sketches and short fiction for way,” which he imagined, hopefully, as a harmo-
periodicals, and as the founding editor of two nizing alternative to the approaching conflict of
important magazines. He was also the author of North and South.
hundreds of unsigned book reviews and columns
of cultural commentary circulating in the press of
the young country. His four novels, rich in social LIFE
satire, give a view of pre–Civil War urban scenes Charles Frederick Briggs was born in the town of
and the shipboard experience of crews aboard Siasconset at the eastern edge of the island of
American vessels, accompanied by acute analysis Nantucket, Massachusetts, on December 30,
of the influence of economics and social class; 1804. He was the fourth child of six born to Sally
this work made popularly available forms and Coffin and Jonathan Briggs, a merchant engaged
themes that later writers like Herman Melville in the China trade. Their families had long been
(1819–1891) and Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) settled in this seacoast town thirty miles off the
would absorb and develop. Briggs also made an coast of the New England mainland but not at all
original contribution to American literary satire peripheral to the trade routes vital to the early
in his witty fictional letters published in newspa- Republic. Nantucket, and particularly his birth-
pers in the 1840s and again in the 1870s, making place, known as ’Sconset, made a lasting impres-
him a forerunner of the humorists Artemus Ward, sion on Briggs, who always reached back to it
Josh Billings, Petroleum Nasby, and Mark Twain. for his definition of true moral values.
Charles Briggs’s forty years of largely When he was establishing his literary reputa-
anonymous literary labor, dating from his emer- tion in the pages of the Knickerbocker, or New-
gence in 1839 as the hitherto unknown author of York Monthly Magazine, in 1840, he wrote a short
a popular success, The Adventures of Harry history and appreciation of Nantucket, noting its
Franco, to his death in 1877, on the day he founding by Thomas Macy, who had been forced
composed the last of his “Brewsterville” letters to flee colonial Massachusetts for harboring
for the weekly Independent, were rooted in New Quakers. The sublime beauty of the ocean, the
York City, where he was a passionately engaged vigor and challenge of the fishing and whaling
citizen. His contemporaries acknowledged his industries, the modesty and hospitality of the
interest in the architecture and social life of the inhabitants, gave Briggs his earliest real
city by appointing him to civic organizations, education. In a later autobiographical article, he
among them the American Art-Union, the Copy- wrote:
right Club, and the committee that planned
Central Park. From 1853 through 1877, Briggs When a very small boy, I used to climb to the top
of high hills for the pleasure of reveling in the fresh
wrote the unsigned introductions to Trow’s New breeze as it flew by; and my first dream of freedom
York City Directory, showing that his fictional was the open sea, where there was nothing between
metropolitan portraits had a basis in street-by- me and the winds. Many a time have I wished
1
myself one of the dwarf cedars that fringed the ment to Nantucket values by marrying his cousin
bleak hill at the back of my father’s house,—the Deborah Rawson, on May 16, 1836. The publica-
winds seem to take such a delight in rustling
tion of Briggs’s novel The Adventures of Harry
through them. Many a winter’s night in my boy-
hood have I heard the nor’westers carousing in the Franco in 1839 made his reputation as a satiric
forest, roaring and screeching among their dry humorist and launched his literary career.
branches, and wished myself among them.
Although he worked at multiple jobs for
(“The Winds,” pp. 52–53)
much of his life, his literary ambitions and his
But economic woes abbreviated this happy child- commitment to the development of a national
hood as President Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo literature never wavered. In the absence of
Acts of 1807 and 1808 severely limited New international copyright law, periodicals that paid
England shipping. The War of 1812 put an end to authors were shaping American literary produc-
Jonathan Briggs’s prosperity; his ships were tion; Briggs’s work can be found, unsigned and
seized by the British and he was jailed for under the pseudonym of Harry Franco, in all sorts
bankruptcy. Thirty-three years later, in a letter to of periodicals, from the Knickerbocker to the
his friend James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), Union Magazine of Literature and Art; American
Charles Briggs recalled a sharp memory of being Magazine: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature
taken to a “strange-looking building with a high and Art; U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review;
fence around it,” where his uncle lifted him up to Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion;
the bars to see his father. His later work shows Liberator; National Anti-Slavery Standard;
that he never forgot the sudden experience of Graham’s Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ Magazine;
poverty and the sting of unjust laws. Hartford Courant; and many others. Briggs wrote
Jonathan Briggs’s sons went to sea to redeem two more novels in 1843 and 1844: The Haunted
the family’s fortunes, the oldest, William, becom- Merchant, a Dickensian tragicomedy, and Work-
ing captain of the ship Phoebe, and Charles, the ing a Passage; or, Life on a Liner, a novelized
third son, making at least two voyages as a critique of living and working conditions on
merchant sailor, one to Liverpool and the other American merchant vessels.
to South America. We know he was at sea by the During the early years of his life as a
age of twenty, as he records in a letter to Lowell merchant-turned-writer, Briggs developed two
that he dashed from Liverpool to a London book- important friendships. He met the portrait painter
shop in 1824 to purchase an early copy of the William Page (1811–1885) as a result of art criti-
last canto of Lord Byron’s Don Juan. The source cism he wrote for Park Benjamin’s newspaper,
of his literary interests is unknown, as he wrote New World. Briggs was an early and ardent sup-
later to a Nantucket friend that he had grown up porter of American painting and became a
“without a soul caring if [he] knew [his] letters.” shareholder in the Apollo Association, formed for
Remarkably well self-educated, he favored the support of native artists in 1839. A few years
Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and the witty later Briggs was on the Committee of Manage-
satire of Restoration comedy. His omnivorous ment of the group, which became the American
reading in early manhood prepared him well for Art-Union. He was influential in selecting paint-
his later work reviewing a great variety of new ings to be purchased and exhibited and prepared
books for magazines and newspapers. the organization’s 1843 and 1844 annual reports.
Glimpsing the attractions of the growing city He praised Page’s realism, defended his portrayal
of New York from the harbor, Briggs took up of nudity, and extended the hand of friendship to
land-based mercantile pursuits, eventually becom- Page, whose domestic life was in turmoil. In turn,
ing a full partner in the wholesale grocers’ firm Page introduced him to the young poet James
of Ransom E. Wood, Charles F. Briggs, and Wil- Russell Lowell. One cannot overstate the impor-
liam H. Mather, located at 47 Water Street. tance of Briggs’s friendships with Page and
Although Briggs lived and worked in New York Lowell. Their substantial preserved correspon-
for the rest of his life, he marked his commit- dence provides valuable detail about the lives of
2
all three men, who encouraged and supported is remembered today for its serious format,
each other for twenty years. In 1847, Lowell anticipating the New York Review of Books; its
included a literary portrait of Briggs in his negative reception of Margaret Fuller’s Woman
famous “A Fable for Critics” and also made him in the Nineteenth Century (1845); and its first
a New Year’s gift of the manuscript and all the publication of many of Poe’s stories and poems.
proceeds of its publication. In 1847, Charles and Deborah Briggs moved
In the early 1840s, Charles and Deborah to Brooklyn to await the birth of their daughter,
Briggs moved to a rural retreat on Staten Island, Charlotte. From this time to the end of his life,
which was developing as a spacious suburb for Briggs’s name can be found in Brooklyn street
the growing city. Briggs called his first cottage directories at various addresses, sometimes also
“Willowbrook,” possibly after the north-shore identified by the profession of editor or clerk.
waterway near the present-day campus of the His belated fatherhood, coming after eleven years
College of Staten Island. Soon he moved to larger of marriage and the loss, in 1844, of an infant
home he jokingly called “Bishop’s Terrace,” in son, was a great pleasure to him. He confessed to
honor of his wife’s bishop, or bustle, hanging out Lowell that the world turned more smoothly for
on a clothesline. Staten Island historians think him after Charlotte’s birth. Briggs went to work
that this house was located in the region known for the New York Mirror, a daily with a weekly
as Dutch Farms, where Ralph Waldo Emerson’s edition, publishing a series of letters from a
brother, Judge William Emerson, lived, as well fictional foreign correspondent parodying the let-
as Henry James, Sr. Lowell came to Staten Island ters of Nathaniel Parker Willis and Margaret
to visit an eye specialist, Dr. Samuel Mackenzie Fuller then appearing in New York newspapers.
Elliott, who lived in the neighborhood today He used these “Pinto letters” to promote his
called New Brighton. Briggs’s friends Sydney antislavery views by satiric indirection. He then
Howard Gay and George William Curtis also wrote a final novel, The Trippings of Tom Pep-
lived in this vicinity, home to the island’s per, a string of satiric vignettes (first serialized in
abolitionist community. the Mirror from 1847 to 1850) in which he
mocked the American dogma that virtuous
Briggs realized the dream of creating a
behavior will bring worldly success. The Trip-
magazine of his own in January 1845, when he
pings of Tom Pepper (published in two volumes,
founded the weekly Broadway Journal, promis-
in 1847 and 1850) culminates in a withering
ing to print only original material and undertak-
portrait of the New York literati.
ing an ambitious role in reviewing new books.
Politically, the Broadway Journal hoped to Among the jobs of literary work that Briggs
establish a third voice to balance those of Boston took on in 1847–1848, the most notable are the
and South Carolina. Briggs deplored the rapidly notes he wrote to the architectural drawings of
polarizing discourse of New England abolition- William H. Ranlett. Ranlett made sketches of
ists and the Southern apologists for slavery; he homes of varying pretensions and costs, and
hoped his Journal would be a means of com- Briggs developed short essays that explored the
munication and a rational alternative in American relationships of men to their homes. The draw-
politics. The Broadway Journal was antislavery ings and essays were published as The Architect
but not abolitionist; it made an effort to print in 1849, and they follow up on an interest in
Southern writers. But as Briggs’s chief support- architecture that Briggs had been elaborating
ers were his New England friends, he made a since his early days as a writer for the
tactical error in accepting Edgar Allan Poe as Knickerbocker.
coeditor; Poe emphasized the magazine’s alliance During the 1850s, Briggs continued to write
with the South and undermined its subscription for a variety of magazine and newspapers, but in
list. Briggs gave up his hopes by the second 1853, he succeeded in collaborating with George
number and, before the end of 1846, Poe ran the William Curtis to interest the publisher George
enterprise into the ground. The Broadway Journal Palmer Putnam in sponsoring a new magazine.
3
The Broadway Journal was reborn on a more (1858), based on their Times dispatches. Still
ambitious scale as Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, writing hundreds of reviews, he finally noticed
which Briggs served as editor from 1853 to 1855. the third edition of Leaves of Grass, character-
Among the distinctions of this landmark in izing its author, in the Times, as “uncultured,
American literary history, Putnam’s under Briggs rude, defiant and arrogant ѧ a rough diamond”
published Melville’s short stories “Bartleby the (May 19, 1860, Books Supplement, p. 1). In 1862
Scrivener,” “The Encantadas,” the installments of he reviewed the display of Matthew Brady’s
Israel Potter, and “The Lightning Rod Man” as daguerreotypes of Antietam.
well as Henry David Thoreau’s “An Excursion to
In the uneasy years of the war, Briggs edited
Canada.” James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wad-
sworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and the short-lived Irving Magazine and wrote the
Edmund Quincy contributed prose serials that articles on William Page and Henry Fielding for
testified to the editor’s support of local color and the New American Cyclopedia (1864). He pro-
realism. Briggs’s interest in engravings gave vided an introductory essay for the new series of
space to a valuable series called “New York Putnam’s in 1868 and undoubtedly wrote reviews
Daguerreotyped.” until December 1870, when the magazine merged
into Scribner’s Monthly. His life was shaped by
Although its political orientation was liberal
the tremendous amount of literary labor, much of
and antislavery, rather than abolitionist, Briggs
had secured enough allies to prevent Putnam’s it anonymous, that he put into the establishment
from meeting the fate of the Broadway Journal. of an American literary culture.
In 1856, Putnam himself took over the editorship Settled in Brooklyn Heights for the twenty
and the magazine gradually stopped publishing. years since Charlotte’s birth, in his last years
In the five years before and during the Civil War Briggs attended the Congregational Church of
Briggs turned to newspaper journalism, helping the Pilgrims, where the pastor was a scholar,
Henry J. Raymond edit the daily New York Times. Richard Storrs, also president of the Long Island
In his 1884 reminiscence Fifty Years Among Historical Society. He pointedly did not choose
Authors, Editors, and Publishers, J. C. Derby the nearby church of the flamboyant Henry Ward
remembered Briggs as one of the “brightest and Beecher.
most popular humorous men of the day.” Along In 1870, a neighbor on Livingston Street,
with Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, T. B. Aldrich Theodore Tilton, editor of the daily Brooklyn
and others, Briggs frequented George W. Union and the weekly Independent, engaged
Carleton’s bookstore and lunched at “Pfaff’s Briggs to assist him by reporting on financial
celebrated German restaurant, in a Broadway news. Soon, however, a sorry affair disrupted
basement, near Bleecker Street, the rendezvous at Tilton’s life. Fifteen years earlier, Tilton had
that day of the so-called Bohemians” (p. 239). reported on Henry Ward Beecher’s oratory; he
The thirty-six-year-old freelance journalist Walt became the preacher’s friend and follower and
Whitman, who was about to publish the first edi- married a Sunday school teacher from Beecher’s
tion of Leaves of Grass (1855), also frequented church, Elizabeth Richards. In 1870, Tilton
Pfaff’s; whether or not the two ever met, Briggs learned that his wife and Beecher had committed
would have despised Whitman’s politics, because adultery. After a Machiavellian intervention by
as a regular Democrat, Whitman had campaigned Henry Bowen, who owned the Union and the
for U.S. presidents Martin Van Buren and James Independent and who had also been cuckolded
Polk and supported Polk’s imperialist war with by Beecher, Tilton lost his journalistic positions.
Mexico (1846–1848). He also lost his social position as a result of the
In 1855, Briggs contributed to an anthology ignominy brought on him by his radical sup-
honoring Lewis Gaylord Clark, of the Knicker- porter, the prophetess of free love Victoria
bocker, his own first editor. He collaborated with Woodhull. Benjamin Tracy, a Brooklyn lawyer,
Augustus Maverick on The Story of the Telegraph bought the Union and made Briggs editor in chief.
4
Although he benefited by Tilton’s tragedy, comic episodic plot influenced by the works of
Briggs took no pleasure in it; he scrupulously Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding but directed
kept his family and himself out of the affair, at particularly American social contradictions.
although his home was only a few doors from The novel’s subtitle, A Tale of the Great Panic,
the one occupied by the unhappy Tiltons. While places its criticism of social life in the context of
the daily Union was a journalistic success, Briggs the volatility of economic conditions. Even at the
preferred to work at the weekly Independent. In end of the book, when Franco has experienced
1874, he provided the annual Christmas story for sincere religious conversion, he is still not free of
the Independent and inaugurated a new series of the uncertainties imposed by forces stronger than
fictional correspondence, this time masquerading his will or virtue.
as Elder Brewster of Brewsterville. Elder Brew- Franco, whose name carries the echo of
ster commented freely, sharply, and satirically on Benjamin Franklin, one of Briggs’s favorite
the presidential election of Rutherford B. Hayes autobiographers, must make his own way in New
versus Samuel Tilden and on the mores of the York City. His father, like his author’s, has been
citizens of Brewsterville. The Brewsterville let- bankrupted by Jefferson’s Embargo and, more-
ters appeared eight times, until the black-bordered over, disinherited. Unlike Briggs, however, Harry
June 20, 1877, issue of the Independent an- Franco has been nurtured on expectations of an
nounced the author’s sudden death at age seventy- inheritance; his dreams fail to prepare him for
three, of a heart attack, following a pleasant the ruthlessness of the city, where his innocence
evening entertaining friends. of the game of manners lays bare the sectional
Deborah Briggs outlived her husband by hostilities, drunkenness and debauchery, and
twenty-two years, staying on in Brooklyn until threat of violence so close to the surface of
she was ninety-five years old, accompanied by American life.
Charlotte, who remained unmarried. Both women If Briggs experimented with writing prior to
were devoted to Briggs’s memory; Charlotte the publication of The Adventures of Harry
reported, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, how Franco in 1839, his efforts are well concealed by
much pleasure reading his biography of James the practice of journalistic anonymity. He later
Russell Lowell gave to her aged mother. Living wrote that he hid his literary efforts under a
on until 1928, Charlotte Briggs cared for her bushel. We know he gave some of his own
father’s literary remains, lending his letters to experience as a merchant sailor in South America
biographers of Lowell and Poe but always plead- to Harry Franco. But unlike Briggs himself,
ing for their return. No one has yet located her Franco does not work his way up to partnership
father’s manuscripts, although she gave his cor- in a wholesale grocer’s firm; instead, his autobi-
respondence with Lowell to the Houghton ography is a fiction intended to reveal Franco’s
Library at Harvard University. The Briggs family foolish investments in pseudo-gentility and pride,
is buried in the Moravian Cemetery, New Dorp, as he pursues the beautiful Georgiana DeLancey.
Staten Island.
As Franco makes his way in the city, he is
cheated by a dandified dry-goods salesman, J.
Lummucks; sold worthless real estate by a con
HARRY FRANCO
man named Doitt; victimized by a lawyer, Mr.
During the undocumented years of his life in the Slobber; and cursed by a Southern orator, Colonel
early 1830s, when Briggs was transforming Sylvanus Spliteer. In each of these comic epi-
himself from a wandering sailor to a rooted New sodes, Briggs is interested in the social failure,
Yorker, he must have tried several employments, not the characters themselves. At the start of his
experiencing firsthand some of the troubles that literary career, he shows that his treatment of
later beset his first hero, Harry Franco. Like his slavery is not going to be directly critical but
creator, a boy from the provinces, Harry is repeat- shaped to make the slaveholder visible as corrupt
edly cheated of his money and his ideals in a and morally discredited. Colonel Spliteer curses
5
Harry as the “son of a northern abolitionist” (Vol. in the city. Franco, wandering into the crowded,
1, p. 40), because at the boardinghouse table littered slum streets, is driven to thoughts of
Harry innocently drinks from what he takes to be suicide when he sees how human beings starve
a common bottle of wine. The terms of the curse amid the wealth of the city. The reader will have
lead Spliteer’s henchmen to assault Franco, to wait ten years for Herman Melville’s Redburn
presuming he is enticing away Spliteer’s black before encountering another such immersion of
servant. Lucky to escape a lynching, the boy is innocence in the city.
hauled before a judge, the napkins he used to Briggs’s own childhood poverty established
mop up spilled wine alleged to be abolitionist unfailing sensitivity to the cruelty of deprivation,
handbills. Finally revealed as having committed a theme to which he recurs in all of his novels.
only a breach of manners, Franco is forgiven and Franco’s realistic descriptions of the great dispar-
invited to drink with the colonel and the judge, ity between rich and poor do not cause him to
who behave so grossly that their titles lose their omit portraits of those, neither wealthy nor
sanctity for the boy. The incident is still not destitute, who lead a marginal existence: the
closed, for a newspaperman, irked at his exclu- apple woman, the Negro girl hawking hot corn,
sion from the courtroom, picks up the outlines of the cartmen reading their penny papers, the old
the story and represents Franco as a bold insur- secondhand book dealer:
gent; he derides Harry’s appearance and demands
that he be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of “Close by was a negro opening hard-shelled clams,
town. Horrified at this impending fate, Harry ap- with a red flannel shirt on his back, and a bell
peals to Spliteer for protection and is reassured crowned beaver hat on his head. Not far from him
was a young girl in a black silk dress and a tattered
by that benevolent gentleman: “nobody cares leghorn hat, selling ice cream.”
anything about a newspaper, for although there is (Vol. 2, p. 2)
nothing which men read more eagerly, there is
nothing which they heed so little, not even their There is a Whitmanesque touch to these details,
Bibles” (Vol. 1, p. 64). recorded for their own sake. The closely observed
Franco describes his encounters with men of city scenes in Harry Franco are forerunners of
the city with great candor and feeling; the reader, similar sketches of New York and Liverpool in
seeing beyond the innocence of the boy, under- the later novels; they indicate Briggs’s continu-
stands the irony of the author in revealing slavery ing fascination with the spectacle of everyday
as the national paranoia and greed as the urban life in early-nineteenth-century New York, with
pastime. But in addition to his satiric purpose, its oyster cellars, firehouses, and counting houses.
Briggs also weights the city scenes with a ballast This aspect of his work links Briggs with the
of realistic description. One of his favorite sites later writers William Dean Howells, Hamlin
is the Battery: Garland, and most of all, Dreiser.
After a substantial experience of failure in
The sky was bright and blue and a thousand penons the city, his efforts bringing him no closer to the
and signals, and the flags of many nations, grace- distant Georgiana, Franco enlists as a sailor
fully floated upon the breeze. The magnificent aboard a merchant vessel bound for South
proportions of the ships, with their beautiful figure- America. He strikes up his first genuine friend-
heads, and rich gilding and bright waists, and tall
taper masts and outstretched spars, filled me with ship with a handsome, popular sailor, Jerry
amazement; and the countless multitudes of smaller Bowhorn, a literary ancestor of Melville’s Jack
vessels, their curious and varying shapes and the Chase, with whom he jumps ship in Buenos
regular confusion of ropes and spars, gave me no Aires. They travel across the pampas, noting that
less astonishment. polite manners conceal brutality among gauchos
(Vol. 1, p. 152) and outlaws. Somewhat inconsistently, perhaps
If the Battery gives evidence of New York’s as a sign of Briggs’s nationalism, Franco has no
prosperity and natural beauty, the Five Points trouble recognizing the corruption of Buenos
slum area is proof of the squalor that also exists Aires, though he is blind to it at home.
6
The Adventures of Harry Franco, highly 2, p. 220). A reversal of his fortunes comes about
praised by the Knickerbocker editor Lewis Gay- through a lucky speculation by his father; this
lord Clark, made such a stir in literary circles in finally makes him a worthy suitor for Georgiana,
1839 that one would not be surprised to learn as her guardian has lost his fortune in the same
that it had eventually caught the eye of another economic turmoil. The country village of Harry’s
young aspiring sailor-turned-writer, who a few childhood has been renamed Francoville, and a
years later also jumped ship with a congenial pretentious mansion erected in place of his old
companion in an even more exotic locale. Her- home. Seeking Georgiana, Harry is caught in a
man Melville may even have remembered the shipwreck, after a storm that adds natural disaster
most striking episode in The Adventures of Harry to the symbolic weight of economic disorder.
Franco, when the boy sails home from Argentina Eventually he conveniently floats ashore on the
on an American sloop of war. Resisting the North Carolina beach where Georgiana is waiting.
tyranny of a lieutenant who orders him flogged, Just as the English heroes of Fielding and
Franco climbs to the topmost spar and falls into Smollett traditionally rediscover their aristocratic
the sea. The punishment is ordered because Harry parentage, Franco also comes to wealth and
will not betray his fellow crewmembers, who position. However, this is not as a result of his
smuggled liquor onto the vessel. In springing lengthy strenuous exertion but, instead, of his
into the rigging to escape the brutal command,
father’s attainment of wealth by chance. In Harry
Franco refuses to bend his spirit to an official
Franco, Briggs burlesques an American compro-
tyranny. In describing his ascent and fall from
mise with the system of an established elite. Like
the main topmast, Briggs wrote some of his most
vivid prose. In Melville’s White-Jacket, published Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and other
in 1850, the hero’s fall from that same topmost English observers of nineteenth-century American
yard results in his freeing himself from the society, Briggs saw that Americans, despite their
strangling garment that had set him apart from vaunted ideals of democracy, set up social pat-
his fellows. In Briggs’s book the experience also terns that approximate those of the British
represents the mysterious confrontation with aristocracy that they profess to despise. Although
death that brings about a deeper identification Franco achieves his fortune and his beloved, he
with other human beings. Harry experiences a is only temporarily secure, for the shape of the
sense of solidarity with the sailors, symbolized novel’s plot emphasizes the fragility of any
by their generous subscription, which was miss- security in a tumultuous world.
ing in the world of the city. The interlude at sea While the plot is full of variety and witty
is written in a different tone from the rest of complication, the narrative style is also of
Franco’s adventures. Burlesque is almost absent, interest. The Adventures of Harry Franco begins
and Franco is given a chance, finally, to show as a retrospective first-person narrative, the
that he is made of better stuff than the common speaker an older and wiser Harry than the boy
run of sentimental heroes. who is being described. This distance contributes
In this book, however, it is an essential part to the ironic detachment Briggs seeks. As the
of the satire that the hero’s growth in understand- narrative proceeds, the gap between narrator and
ing does not significantly affect his fate. Though actor narrows to emphasize dramatic action;
Harry returns to the city a more confident and Harry loses his opening sophistication but regains
somewhat more developed character, he cannot it at the novel’s end, where he ties up the loose
change his condition by his own merit. He travels ends of the story and meditates on the difference
to New Orleans to deal in the cotton market, but between fiction and history.
fails; in desperation, seeking a gambling den, he The Adventures of Harry Franco introduced
wanders by mistake into a religious congregation. Briggs to the reading public as a comic satirist
Guided by an old slave, he takes a seat and the interested in urban social interactions and
words of the sermon “fall upon [his] heart” (Vol. economic inequalities. Of course his readers
7
preferred to laugh at the comic situations rather treasure of prerevolutionary currency. The story
than heed the serious social criticism. As a sign sharply criticizes the demolition of old New York
of the uncritical merging of author and character, in the name of profit and new fashions. A reverse
Briggs was known in the literary world as Harry Rip Van Winkle, instead of leaving its old man
Franco; his work can still be found more easily contentedly surviving into the new political
under this pseudonym than under his real name. dispensation, Briggs’s story ends with the old
When James Russell Lowell paid Briggs the Dutchman hanging himself from the single
compliment of a portrait in his “A Fable for Crit- remaining beam of his house, a victim of politi-
ics,” he remembered him as Harry Franco. cal and economic forces he cannot fight.
The third “Gimcrack” offers the first two
chapters of a narrative that later became Briggs’s
BRIGGS AT THE KNICKERBOCKER second novel, The Haunted Merchant (1843). The
story of an orphan boy adopted by a lonely rich
Briggs’s literary career was launched by the merchant, this work was projected as the first of
favorable review given The Adventures of Harry a series to be called Bankrupt Stories. Intended
Franco in the pages of the New York Knicker- as a kind of Decameron, in which ten bankrupt
bocker, a conservative monthly periodical ad- merchants would retrieve their wealth by telling
dressed to the tastes of prosperous merchants and their stories, the series never materialized beyond
lawyers. Edited by Lewis Gaylord Clark, who the first volume. The novel’s theme springs from
purchased it in 1834 and kept it going until 1861, Briggs’s childhood experience and its literary
the Knickerbocker had published such notable
influence is Dickens, a favorite with American
writers as Washington Irving, James Fenimore
readers in this period. But Briggs’s Dickensian
Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Hal-
hero falls victim to jealousy and corruption.
leck, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John
Briggs targets the distortions of lives devoted to
Greenleaf Whittier by 1839, the year in which
Clark enlisted Briggs as a regular contributor. the accumulation of wealth, false values resulting
Devoted to celebrating the vitality of New York in imitative art and architecture. The hero, John
City, the Knickerbocker disavowed New England Tremlett, eventually commits suicide, but not
transcendentalism and abolitionism and defended before Briggs has used his experiences to satirize
high protective tariffs, Whig candidates, and transcendental schoolteaching (through a charac-
orthodox Christianity. ter modeled on Bronson Alcott), to explore the
The Knickerbocker’s politics did not entirely complexities of Southern slaveholding, to reveal
coincide with that of its new contributor, but the the corruption of a political ward meeting, and to
connection was useful to a writer making his praise Quaker honesty and wholesome values.
reputation and evidently profitable to Clark, Not all of these episodes appeared in the Knick-
eagerly enlisting new voices to promote erbocker, where they would have been offensive
circulation. In August 1839, Briggs began a series to Clark’s readers.
of articles called “Gimcrackery,” which he Instead, Briggs suspended “The Haunted
promised would be lighthearted. Yet the second Merchant” in favor of a fourth “Gimcrack” in
installment, “The Story of Poppy Van Buster,” which he imagines a future world, in which all
while it begins as a comic portrait of an old man contemporary social evils are corrected: “Women
devoted to the preservation of his house in a sea enjoy the same privileges as men; servants are
of urban change, ends as tragedy. In spite of the unknown, and all government is at an end”
persistence of old Van Buster, he is the victim of (November 1939, p. 425). He retrieves a newspa-
modern times. His wooden mansion of 1779 is per of that day, The Minors’ Mirror, which is
razed by the mayor and the city council, while edited by a society of infants still contending for
Poppy wanders about the changed town in search their rights. Some of the comedy is heavy-
of his cousin, with whom he wants to share a handed, some of it topical, but one can still tease
8
out the humorous criticism of contemporary WORKING A PASSAGE

journalism.
Briggs’s third novel, Working a Passage; or, Life
The two best “Gimcracks” in the series are
on a Liner, first published in 1844, is narrated in
the fifth, “A Ride in an Omnibus” (December
the first person by a young man of good family
1839) and the sixth, “Siasconset: How It Arose
who leaves New York for Europe during a
and What It Is” (March 1840).
cholera epidemic, hoping both to avoid the
The omnibus ride takes the reader on a trip pestilence and to enhance his education with
down New York City’s Broadway in a “long visits to London, Paris, Florence, and Rome.
white carriage, drawn by four horses of as many Unluckily, when he reaches Paris to collect his
different colors, and with a figure of Minerva
bill of credit, he discovers that his father has died
painted upon its central panel” (p. 542), bound
insolvent. To avoid further debt, he determines to
for Bowling Green. The daring young driver
work his passage home on a shabby American
takes up a challenge from a driver from the op-
merchant vessel that is poorly run and
position line, and the two vehicles hurtle down
the great street, passing by the city’s landmarks provisioned. The narrative offers a realistic
and interfered with by old market women, pigs, description of the life and work of sailors, as the
charcoal wagons, butcher’s carts, and overloaded narrator adjusts to losing his status as a “soft
drays, arriving at a Swiftian climax before the hand” in favor of becoming a “hard hand.”
race is over. All of Briggs’s relish for city scenes Incompetence and bad weather abort the journey,
and his rich local knowledge are displayed in this and after a short stay in Liverpool, where the
vigorous essay. Quite in contrast, his sixth narrator observes the lives of the poor and
“Gimcrack” memorializes his tranquil birthplace, socially marginalized, he takes ship on a New
reviewing its history of political resistance to York liner, and the clash of democratic ideals and
tyranny and persecution and its capable brave military methods becomes the theme of the book.
whaling fleet, ending in a tribute to its matchless Like many of his countrymen, Briggs had
codfish and a recipe for New England chowder been alarmed by an event that took place in the
that roused a controversy among the U.S. Navy on November 26, 1842, when on
Knickerbocker’s readers (explored by Perry board the brig Somers, Captain Slidell MacKen-
Miller in his 1956 volume The Raven and the zie had three sailors hanged for plotting mutiny,
Whale). without giving them the benefit of civil trials. In
In addition to the “Gimcracks,” Briggs made his novel, Briggs writes, “The authority of a ship-
numerous other contributions to the Knicker- master, like that of a slave-owner, is too great not
bocker, under the pseudonym of “Harry Franco.” to be abused” (p. 57). He framed Working a Pas-
These include a humorous sketch of sea travel sage as an argument against the abuse and
with vigorous views of ocean phenomena and exploitation of sailors, thus providing a model
stirring descriptions of danger at sea, concluding for the younger writer Herman Melville to fol-
with literary criticism aimed at James Fenimore low, five years later, when he composed White-
Cooper that anticipates that of Mark Twain. “The Jacket (1849).
Day-Dream of a Grocer” (November 1841) is In Working a Passage, Briggs treats rough
another example of Briggs’s rendering of metro- sailors with compassion. At the mercy of igno-
politan scenes with a critique of unequal distribu- rant, quirky commanders, inadequately fed and
tion of wealth and the injustice served by courts sheltered, they are understandably demoralized;
of law. Modern readers have an easy opportunity their condition illustrates the “inequalities of
to read “Harry Franco” in the pages of the Knick- civilized life, where one portion of the people are
erbocker and the other magazines to which he privileged to live without work, and the other
contributed, thanks to digitizing technology that portion are doomed to work without living” (p.
makes much of his work retrievable online 57). Briggs took sharp note of those conditions
simply by typing in his famous pseudonym. that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
9
caused some sailors to see the political ramifica- they have been fattening and banquet on turtle
tions of their situations and find effective means and champagne. Briggs indicates their anticipa-
of resistance. Scholars since the late twentieth tion and excitement; he describes the odors
century have identified this racial and political emanating from the galley, the jovial attitude of
consciousness with the term “the Black Atlantic.” usually grim passengers, and the exaggerated
Briggs’s directness and the clarity of his politeness of the group as they walk into dinner.
descriptions make the short volume memorable As the cook carries the precious tureen across the
for the quality of its prose. This realistic writing, deck, the fascinated sailor at the wheel, our nar-
thick with detail, may have caught the ear of rator, forgets his job. The ship lurches, the tureen
young Melville, trying in these years to write his slips, and the soup is lost, to the unbearable
first novels. Briggs’s description of Liverpool chagrin of the self-indulged privileged class. In
reminds the reader of Melville’s later Ishmael, Working a Passage, Briggs’s democrat may go
who set out in the Pequod to escape the “damp hungry, but he wins a moral victory over the
drizzly November in [his] soul” (Moby-Dick, plutocrats of American society.
1851). It was evidently a state of mind and
weather familiar to both writers:
THE BROADWAY JOURNAL
It was the last day of November, a cold, dreary,
drizzling day; a dirty yellowish vapor hung over the After more than five years of struggling to
city, so impervious to the sun’s rays. ѧ A suffocat- publish in magazines that failed to satisfy his
ing stench of coal smoke pervaded the atmosphere, standards of independence and intelligence,
and everything dripped, dripped, dripped dismally
with rain; the gutters poured out never failing Briggs arranged to put forth a journal of his own.
streams of muddy water, too thick and slow to make Combining his resources with those of a printer
a bubble; most of the shops had gas lights burning, and a publisher, he issued a prospectus for his
and the fish women with their baskets of herrings new magazine. It would respect the ideal of
upon their heads, as they waded their miserable international copyright, even in the absence of
rounds, seemed too disheartened to cry their scaly
commodities.
such a law, by permitting only original matter
(pp. 14–15) into its pages: “Essays, Criticisms in Art and
Literature, Domestic and Foreign Correspon-
Throughout the novel, food is used to distinguish dence, and Literary and Scientific Intelligence.”
“soft hands” from “hard hands.” While the It would present original illustrations and demon-
captain and his guests eat a breakfast of mutton strate interest in the design of public buildings.
chops, fried ham, hot rolls, buckwheat cakes, The weekly journal would “espouse the cause of
omelets, and coffee, the sailors survive on scrap- no political party, but would hold itself free to
ings from mahogany-like salt beef. The continu- condemn or approve any men or measures that a
ing use of food is brought to a skillful climax at patriotic regard for the welfare of the country
the book’s end. In the next-to-last chapter, the might dictate” (p. 1).
sailors’ spokesman, Jack Plasket, is revolted by The first number of the Broadway Journal
the mishandling of the sailors’ poor supper. He appeared on January 4, 1845, with a full “Intro-
opposes the captain by tossing the filthy meat ductory” explaining its name and character:
overboard; Plasket prefers hunger to being “fed
like dogs” (p. 76). The sailors grumble briefly at Broadway is confessedly the finest street in the first
the loss of their supper, but they bear their priva- city of the New World. It is the great artery through
tion with dignity in the manner of those ac- which flows the best blood of our system. All the
customed to it. The book’s final chapter describes elegance of our continent permeates through it. If
a parallel incident, a loss sustained by the there is a handsome equipage set up, its first ap-
pearance is in Broadway. The most elegant shops in
privileged class, borne with far less aplomb.
the city line its sides; the finest buildings are found
Officers aboard the liner, a few days before there, and all the fashions exhibit their first gloss
their arrival in port, decide to kill the green turtle upon its sidewalks. Although it has a character of
10
its own, the traveler often forgets himself walking with the greatest glee, anticipating “visions of
through it, and imagines himself in London or Paris. fields of carnage ѧ of broken-hearted widows; of
Wall Street pours its wealth into its broad channel weeping orphans, of national debts ѧ and in-
and all the dealers in intellectual works are here
centered; every exhibition of art is found here, and numerable other delights which he feels sure will
the largest caravan series in the world border upon follow on the heels of annexation” (p. 200).
it. Its pavement has been trod by every distinguished
The most pointedly personal of the engrav-
man that has visited our continent; those who travel
through it are refreshed by the most magnificent ings was a satiric portrait of Briggs’s fellow
fountains in the world. It has a sunny side, too, journalist Margaret Fuller, for whom his acrimony
where we have opened our office of delivery. It was unabated through the 1840s. Her book
terminates at one end in the finest square in the Woman in the Nineteenth Century had aroused
city, doubtless in the Union, and at the other, in the Briggs’s disagreement. His reviewer, Lydia Maria
Battery, unrivalled for its entire beauty by any
marine parade in the world. So travelers say. For Child, wrote the first mild notice of the book in
ourselves, we have seen many in the old world and February 1845, but on March 8, 1845, along with
the new, but none that equal it. As Paris is France, the engraving, Briggs published a second discus-
and London, England, so is Broadway, New York; sion of the book that took issue with Fuller’s
and New York is fast becoming, if she be not feminism, contending that the woman who is
already, America, in spite of South Carolina and
sexually unfulfilled “sees things through a false
Boston.
medium ѧ her nature is distorted and unnatural”
(p. 1)
(p. 145). Opposing female suffrage, he brought
Moved to rare exuberance by the spectacle of the down upon the Journal the wrath of his liberal
city and his hope for the new magazine, Briggs readership.
put aside his critical eye and offered a tribute to Soon after, seeking allies, he added the name
American material progress. The challenge of his of Edgar Allan Poe to the masthead of the
last statement, that New York could find a middle Journal. Poe cultivated his Southern connections
ground between the North and the South, re- and completed the alienation of Briggs’s New
mained to be tested. Briggs planned to gain a England readership. Despite the excellence of its
national readership, keeping a line of Northern articles on New York architecture, its interesting
influence to the South. His Journal was to be fiction by Briggs and by Poe, its articles by Wil-
antislavery, not as an isolated political program liam Page on the use of color in painting, Briggs
but as a natural outgrowth of its hatred of all found himself losing control of the Journal, as
forms of social injustice. Poe monopolized much of its space to carry on
One of the most important features of the his vendetta against Henry Wadsworth Longfel-
new magazine was a series called “American low, whom he accused of plagiarism. When Poe
Prose Writers.” To support native writing Briggs escalated the issue into the “little Longfellow
also undertook a substantial section of book and war,” it was clear that Briggs had miscalculated
magazine reviewing. The Broadway Journal Poe’s value to the magazine. Briggs’s moderation
often included portraits of urban conditions, on abolitionism had alienated Lowell and the
revealing the little immigrant children, barefooted New Englanders, who officially withdrew their
in winter, sweeping the street corners for pen- support of the Broadway Journal in the Boston
nies, while fat, prosperous lawyers hurry by in Liberator for 28 March 1845. Then Poe, seeking
their high boots. Briggs used the magazine to an outlet for his work, negotiated with the
continue his crusade against corruption in the Journal’s publisher, John Bisco, to buy out
U.S. Navy. He introduced a series of satirical Briggs’s share in the magazine. The end of
engravings, the most striking of which appeared Briggs’s dream of an independent literary journal
on March 29, 1845, after annexation of Texas. was so abrupt that the story he was in the process
Under the title “Portrait of an Annexationist,” the of serializing, “Adventures of a Gentleman in
artist has sketched the figure of Satan, crowned Search of a Dinner,” was left forever unfinished.
with iron horns, receiving the news from Texas His long-anticipated dinner repeatedly postponed
11
by comic circumstances, the gentleman remained Willis venerated European aristocracy, a

hungry, much like the editor, who had to wait sycophancy Briggs despised; Margaret Fuller, at
eight years, until Putnam’s offered him the chance the start of her European tour, sought to meet
to satisfy his editorial ambitions. literary celebrities and to impress them with her
own erudition. Pinto shares these tastes, but
Briggs takes a step away from his models by
THE LETTERS OF PINTO: 1846–1847 also making Pinto into a patriot and a defender
of his country’s “peculiar institution.” So while
After the loss of the Broadway Journal, Briggs he eagerly accepts an invitation to a shooting
resumed publishing in a variety of magazines, of- party at the estate of the British prime minister,
fering a notable series of sketches on urban life, he takes offense at being seated at breakfast
“City Articles,” to his old editor, Clark, at the beside the African Alexander Dumas. Traveling
Knickerbocker, but his steadiest employer in 1846 on to the estate of the Duke of Argyle, he is
was the new editor of the New York Mirror, mortified to meet up with Margaret Fuller, who
Hiram Fuller. Fuller’s pro-war pro-Polk political is pontificating to the famous critic Christopher
stance was repugnant to Briggs, but Fuller al- North, but he is forced to leave Inverary when he
lowed him a good measure of freedom in return is introduced to “the notorious runaway slave,”
for as many book reviews and sketches as Briggs Frederick Douglass:
could produce.
On July 4, 1846, an outspoken American My blood was at boiling heat, in a moment, and
named Ferdinand Mendes Pinto made his first drawing myself up at my full length, I said with a
appearance on the foreign correspondence pages proud air to his Grace, before all his noble guess;
“Sir, as the representative of a free and enlightened
of the Mirror. Briggs used as a pseudonym the
country—as a republican—I resent this insult. I find
name of an adventurer that William Congreve, in that the days of exclusiveness and gentility are
his 1695 play Love for Love, had made the gone, and in their place those of reformers and
proverbial epithet for a liar. He conceived the abolitionists and amalgamations have come. The
idea of a fictional foreign correspondent partly as glory of Europe has departed. I will return to my
a witty response to the letters of Margaret Fuller, own country.” This cut them to the quick, and to
disguise their feelings, they set up a loud laugh. But
then appearing in Horace Greeley’s Tribune, and I was determined to mortify them still more, and
partly as a satire on the recently published edi- immediately walked grandly out of the castle, with
tion Pencillings by the Way (1841), the collected the intention of going directly to the inn. I took
European letters of Nathaniel Parker Willis. In nothing with me but my hat, and stalked proudly
Pinto, Briggs created a self-assured Yankee across the lawn to the road which leads into the
village. The night was dark and cold, and soon a
whose personality was modeled on the genteel,
thick fog set in and I lost my way. But I scorned to
pretentious Willis and on the self-centered, oblivi- cry for assistance and walked straight on, and pres-
ous Margaret Fuller. ently found myself nearly up to my middle in a
Briggs’s fictional letters fitted into the Mirror bog.
seamlessly, as daily newspapers in the 1840s (“Pinto Letter 8” in Studies in the
American Renaissance, p. 114)
were composed of political discussions, observa-
tions on social life, and reports of local events, The bog, of course, is an apt metaphor for the
many of them in the form of letters. In addition, dead end Briggs saw in the defense of slavery.
Briggs had many literary models to inspire him, Unlike the abolitionists, however, he prefers
from Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith to pointing out absurdity to moralizing.
Benjamin Franklin and Washington Irving. His Pinto meets Miss Fuller again at the wedding
friend Lowell was planning fictional letters on of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, an af-
abolition purporting to be written by “Hosea fair he disparages for its asceticism. When a toast
Biglow.” When he took up his pen to satirize is offered to the “American ambassador,” in-
Fuller and Willis, Briggs could expect his audi- tended for the historian George Bancroft, Fuller
ence to recognize and appreciate the genre. rises to accept it! Anticipating the “ugly Ameri-
12
can,” she attempts to buy Shakespeare’s house Briggs could expect his sophisticated readers
and move it to America. The Pinto letters not to recognize Myrtle Pipps, “the American
only mock the overreaching of this American but G. P. R. James,” as a portrait of the proslavery
also satirize the moral imperviousness and Southern novelist and historian William Gilmore
sentimentality of the British aristocracy, as in the Simms. Fitch Greenwood and his wife, transla-
description of Mayfair’s grief at the departure of tors from the Swedish, represent William and
Tom Thumb and the death of Paul Dombey. But Mary Howitt, the British writers of a volume
the Pinto letters are strongest on Pinto’s struggles called The Homes and Haunts of the Most
with his “patriotism,” when he repeatedly encoun- Eminent British Poets, reviewed negatively by
ters Frederick Douglass in the homes of British Briggs on June 24, 1847, in the National Anti-
aristocracy. Briggs’s genius is to complicate the Slavery Standard. Infuriated by Howitt’s treat-
satire by mocking Margaret Fuller directly while
ment of Jonathan Swift, Briggs had written, “The
also mocking her critic Pinto, by making him
gossiping, book-peddling writer of literary catch-
ridiculous in his objections to Dumas and
pennies could no more comprehend the qualities
Douglass. Lowell thought the antislavery satire
of such a mind as that which conceived the Tale
in the Pinto letters too good to be lost. In all,
of a Tub, than a mud-paddling duck could
Briggs wrote eighteen Pinto letters, which belong
understand the movements of an eagle” (p. 15).
to the tradition of American satire that culminated
As he worked, Briggs saw the inclusive possibili-
in the work of Mark Twain (1835–1910).
ties of his “soiree,” to which he also invites
satiric representations of Cornelius Mathews and
Evert Duyckinck, prominent members of the
THE TRIPPINGS OF TOM PEPPER “Young America” literary movement, and finally,
Always alert to absurdity and pretension, Briggs “Austin Wicks,” his stand-in for Edgar Allan Poe.
must have noted the publication of Fanny Assembling all of those who had angered or
Forrester’s Trippings in Authorland (1846). He wronged him since the Broadway Journal years,
borrowed part of the title and the concept for his Briggs dramatizes a fracas caused by Poe that
fourth and last novel, The Trippings of Tom Pep- undermines the credibility and moral decency of
per (published in two volumes, 1847 and 1850), the whole group.
a savage satire of the New York literary society More than the overflow of revengeful feel-
he knew so well. His Trippings was first serial- ings, Briggs’s satire fulfills a genuine moral
ized in the Mirror in columns adjoining Dickens’s purpose in castigating the politics and personali-
Dombey and Son, juxtaposing a homegrown work ties of the New York literati, reminding them to
to the popular British reprint. cleanse themselves of posturing, jealousy, and
Illegitimate and orphaned, Tom Pepper imitativeness. Among the figures with which
spends his childhood on his native Cape Cod. Briggs fills his two-volume novel are portraits of
Stowing away on a New York–bound packet, he Margaret Fuller, as “Sophia Ruby”; William
falls under the influence of a kind merchant who Page, as the bohemian artist “Ardent”; and Hiram
sees him as unspoiled and who offers to help him Fuller, the editor of the Mirror, as “Mr. Wilton.”
to find his father, in return for Tom’s promise to The only literary figure of significance missing
live a life of truth-telling as he makes his way in from Briggs’s narrative is introduced in the
the city. His vow to live by the truth enmeshes dedication to “Matthew Trueman,” as the reader
Tom in a series of misadventures with money- for whom the book was written. “Matthew True-
lenders, lawyers, and, ultimately, literati, observed man” was the pseudonym used by Lowell when
by Tom at a soiree hosted by “Lizzy Gil,” the he wrote a prose piece for the Broadway Journal
note-shaver’s daughter. Briggs based this charac- condemning slavery and annexation in terms too
ter on the figures of Anne Charlotte Lynch and strong for the practical editor. The “great moral
Elizabeth Frieze Ellet, two contemporaries lesson” that Briggs tells Matthew Trueman he
involved in a scandal with Poe. has illustrated in his book is not the surface les-
13
son that truth-telling is the only path to happiness women’s movement, a topic on which Briggs
but, rather, the underlying fact that ideals must remained conservative. When moved to passion,
be accommodated to social realities. he resorted to an old option: the invention of a
Briggs ends Tom Pepper’s Trippings with his fictional character. Because of the practice of
discovery of a wealthy British father who makes journalistic anonymity, it is difficult to identify
it possible for him to marry a poor, humble girl all of Briggs’s contributions to the magazine, but
like his abandoned mother and retire to a rural it is likely that he invented the Quaker character
location. Of course, no such retirement was pos- Bildad Hardhed to express his opposition to the
sible for his creator, who was finishing his war hawks of the mid-1850s. Described within
double-decker novel and beginning his editorship the February 1855 “Editorial Notes,” Hardhed
of Holden’s Dollar Magazine at the same time. appeared in the editorial offices of Putnam’s to
Intended to correspond to the penny papers, confront General Delablueblazes, whose central
Holden’s was to achieve a circulation of thirty belief was “in time of peace, prepare for war.”
thousand, bringing to the working class a serious Bildad opposes the military man’s espousal of
magazine filled with book reviews and articles war as a solution to political problems: “Shall the
on notable figures and issues. fair young wife, who now laughs to her crowing
baby, in the coming years see the child brought
home a mutilated man?” (p. 205).
PUTNAM’S MONTHLY
One can still browse through the sturdy
After a stint as clerk in the debenture room at the bound volumes of Putnam’s with pleasure and
New York Custom House, a modest plum of profit, reading frank evaluations of race relations;
political patronage that fell to him through Hiram an analysis of the culture of Wall Street; detailed
Fuller, the editor of the Mirror, Briggs interested discussions, accompanied by engravings, of New
his friend George William Curtis in the develop- York City theaters and concert rooms; letters on
ment of a new literary magazine as ambitious as international copyright; and amusing fictional
the Broadway Journal but more securely sketches and serials. In early 1853, Briggs
established. Together, the friends put their plan to published a lengthy piece on “The Polar Seas
the publisher George Palmer Putnam as a counter- and Sir John Franklin,” still a topic of great inter-
weight to the popular Harper’s Magazine, which est, a thorough discussion of “Woman and the
was filled with British reprints. Putnam’s Monthly Woman’s Movement,” and a thoughtful review
was to print only original material, as its publisher article on Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Uncle
was an earnest advocate of international copyright Tomitudes.” Antebellum intellectuals must have
law. found Putnam’s indispensable.
Putnam’s under Briggs is remembered today Briggs looked upon the editorship of
for its publication of Melville’s now-famous short Putnam’s as the zenith of his career, the best ef-
stories, Thoreau’s prose, and distinguished work fort he could summon on behalf of a national
by Cooper, Lowell, Longfellow, Quincy, and oth- literature. As an obituary notice written by
ers, all of whom were published anonymously in Charles Richardson on July 5, 1877, in the Inde-
the style of the day. Putnam’s was openly pendent would later point out, Putnam’s “was
antislavery in its political orientation and included Mr. Briggs in his prime” (p. 3). In one of the last
serious reviews, notably Briggs’s reviews of numbers of Putnam’s that appeared under his edi-
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and of torship, Briggs enumerated his duties. He calcu-
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin lated that he had to wade through thirty thousand
(1852). In addition, copyright legislation is a pages of manuscripts each year, avoid the ap-
recurring theme in the magazine, with Briggs pearance of hard-heartedness in rejecting contri-
responding to Whig criticism regarding the topic. butions, “do” the books, overcome literary
Putnam’s included commentary on art and pirates, succeed in being the exponent of national
architecture as well as on women and the thought and the supporter of what is right and
14
true, and—at the same time—please public taste! For the Independent, Briggs wrote the column
After eighteen months of editing Putnam’s, “Personalities,” filled with thumbnail obituaries
Briggs was optimistic about the future of the and witty characterizations. On the last day of
literature he was trying to shape. He concluded 1874, he contributed a retrospective called “The
his tenure as editor by remarking in the April Good Old Times: New York Fifty Years Ago,”
1855 “Editorial Notes” that his magazine had and in 1876 he contributed the Independent’s
already succeeded in publishing superb American traditional Christmas story, “The Widow’s Wish,”
writers; that Putnam’s “leaved and flowered so vintage Briggs in its satire on venality in the
soon and so luxuriantly,” he asserted, “shows church and the marketplace. But the most
unusual pith and vigor” in the young American important of his contributions are the eight
literature. He went on to write, in the prophetic fictional letters from “Brewsterville.”
style of Whitman: On January 4, 1877, the Independent prom-
ised a new feature to its growing readership;
Who knows how many, in every village in the along with a new serial by Petroleum Nasby, it
country, and in the solitary houses, too—as from
would run a series of “rich, racy, and truthful
Henry Thoreau’s seven dollar palace in the woods—
have already written to publishers; or have by them, communications from Elder Brewster, Jr. of
in secret nooks, piles of scratched paper, their Brewsterville, Mass, on men and things, religion
tickets for immortality—or at the very least are and politics, and every ‘top topic,’ as it comes
meditating, alta sub mente repostum, what the com- up.”
ing years shall make known?
(p. 442) The Elder is a descendent of the old Puritan stock,
and he has spent a lifetime in thinking, rather than
writing; so our readers will have “an old man for
counsel” all through the year. The Elder’s notions
ELDER BREWSTER OF BREWSTERVILLE may be a little old-fashioned and peculiar but they
will not err on the side of shoddyism, cowardice or
Briggs undertook his last creative work for the fashionable infidelity.
literary weekly the Independent in 1875. In 1910, (p. 4)
George Cary Eggleston wrote: Briggs’s new set of fictional letters was launched
on January 11, 1877. They established the voice
The Independent exercised an influence upon the of a prominent elder in a small New England
thought and life of the American people such as no
periodical publication of its class exercises in this
town writing to the readers of the Independent
later time. ѧ Its circulation of more than three with political and social commentary. Elder
hundred thousand exceeded that of all the other Brewster supports Rutherford B. Hayes in prefer-
publications of its class combined, and more ence to the Democrat, Samuel Tilden, and he is
important still, it was spread all over the country, full of righteous indignation at the jockeying for
from Maine to California. political patronage shown by the Democrats. Of
(Recollections of a Varied Life, p. 107)
course, he has his own candidate, his brother, for
In his affiliation with the Independent, then, the plum of the postmastership of Brewsterville.
Briggs demonstrated that, even as a septuagenar- He gets seriously exercised about the issue of
ian, he had not lost touch with important periodi- invoking prayers for Congress as they count
cals and the group of young writers through electoral votes, but his hotheaded son, Amzi,
whose work American literature would enter the prefers to raise a military company to assist at
twentieth century. Briggs was these young the inauguration of their candidate. Amzi is the
writers’ link with previous generations; as one of family realist: “Father, I tell you how it is. It is
them, Charles Richardson, later wrote in the Inde- no use praying for Congress while it has a
pendent, “To share his editorial room was an Democratic majority of seventy. Wait until the
education in the history of the nineteenth century; next Congress, when the majority will not be
and in gentle courtesy and a singular uniformity more than five or six, and then I will join in, and
of manner as well” (p. 3). we may hope to do some good” (p. 4).
15
As usual in Briggs’s satire, the central figure The last letter from Brewsterville, published
is not only the maker of satiric jabs but the object alongside its author’s obituary, on June 28, 1877,
of them also. In the second letter, published on returns to the figure of Frederick Douglass, who
February 8, 1877, “A Brewsterville Croesus,” the is reported in the press as urging emancipated
elder engages the local rich man in a dialogue slaves to acquire money and property. The elder,
about his “worthless dross,” but betrays his however, reads in the same newspaper a report of
willingness to accept a gift. Elder Brewster visits the sorry treatment of a wealthy Jewish banker of
the town Croesus again in “The Great Sleigh- New York, who was not welcome at the Grand
Ride of Brewsterville,” trying unsuccessfully to Union Hotel of Saratoga. He assures the
raise funds for a winter festival. The old Scrooge Independent’s readers that Seligman would be
refuses even to lend his sleigh bells, but the welcome in Brewsterville’s top hotel, where there
townspeople take up the challenge, construct a are so many empty rooms that even a repentant
great ark into which seventy-two people climb, rebel officer, “if it were Jeff Davis himself,”
and set out for the neighboring town, where they would be welcome. As usual, Briggs’s satire
participate in a communal celebration, complete comes home to sting: “As to Jews, I should be
with music and dancing. This letter, with its jolly glad to see some of them here, and I can promise
journey through a winter landscape, is a rural them the best seats for hearing in our church.
match for Briggs’s earlier “A Ride in an Nobody here will be offended by any display
Omnibus.” Its scene is a contribution to New they make of diamonds, rubies, or pearls.” Elder
England regionalism and Elder Brewster’s Brewster cuts the ground from beneath his best
Puritan scruples are acknowledged, even as his attempt at a truly liberal attitude by his display
son, Amzi, leads the wild youth: of submerged bigotry.
Finding new subjects in the postwar social
For my own part, I did not look on at the dancing;
and, feeling quite certain that it would be no use to scene susceptible to his style of satire, Briggs
expostulate, I sat down with Brother Scudder, from was developing a paradigm for the North in
West Hopkins, who had come with his parishioners, Brewsterville. In the late 1870s, he saw American
and had a very satisfactory talk with him upon the society in the grip of the same contradictions that
subject of evolution, which has been very much had plagued it in the expanding 1840s, and he
discussed in these parts of late.
asked, in his last letter, a troubling question: “Are
(p. 1)
we so well persuaded that anything has happened
Later letters engage the millionaire neighbor in a down south since Abraham Lincoln was elected
discussion of the uses of wealth and its redistribu- for the first time?”
tion, describe Brewster’s attempt to defuse a riot
after the election of Hayes, and become quite
complex in analyzing Brewsterville’s response to
BRIGGS FOR TODAY’S READERS
Hayes’s appointment of Frederick Douglass as
marshall of the District of Columbia. The elder Briggs is most interesting to today’s readers for
remembers a lecture by Douglass in Brewster- his mature satire in the fictional Pinto letters and
ville before the war, when the orator had to spend the letters from Brewsterville. We see him work-
the time following his lecture in the town ing in an American vernacular form to address
cemetery, since no one would invite him home. his contemporaries on social issues such as
Brewster devotes a letter to Mrs. Hayes and her economic inequality and racial injustice, which
preference for plain attire and includes his continue to resonate in American culture. In spite
distaste for the Mormons, eventually bringing his of his conservatism on women’s issues and his
commentary home to Boss Tweed, imprisoned initial resistance to embracing abolition, he
for graft. There is a grafter in Brewsterville, as grasped the significance of the figures of Margaret
well, Deacon Upton, who exposes his motives to Fuller and Frederick Douglass, the two figures of
the elder and asks, unsuccessfully, for his his day who best represented radical change. As
protection. a man of the city, with a deep appreciation of the
16
built environment, he provides modern readers Stringer / W. H. Graham / Long & Brother / J. A. Tuttle /
with a rare experience of nineteenth-century New George Dexter, 1847; volume 2, New York: Mirror Office
/ W. H. Graham / Dewitt & Davenport / Long & Brother
York City. A 2001 issue of PMLA reprinted / George Dexter, 1850). (This novel was first serialized in
Briggs’s story, “Elegant Tom Dillar,” with com- the New York Mirror, irregularly, in 1847–1850.)
mentary from Stephanie P. Browner on its
sophisticated treatment of economic volatility NONFICTION
and the minstrel show, suggesting that buried in The Architect. Drawings by William Ranlett. Commentary
by Briggs. Vol. 2. New York: William H. Graham, 1849.
the prolific anonymous literary production of this
Homes of American Authors. Edited by Briggs and G. P.
period there may be other gems of his acute
Putnam. New York: Putnam, 1853.
social analysis.
The Story of the Telegraph, and a History of the Great
In the past, scholars have turned to Briggs’s Atlantic Cable: A Complete Record of the Inception,
substantial private correspondence with his Progress, and Final Success of That Undertaking. With
friends and colleagues to gather information for Augustus Maverick. New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1858.
biographies of James Russell Lowell, William
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PUBLISHED BOOKS
Page, and Edgar Allan Poe, or, like Perry Miller, “Annual Report.” In Transactions of the Apollo Association,
they have used the letters to compose a pioneer- for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in the United States,
ing portrait of his literary world. Cultural for the Year 1843. New York: Printed for the Association
theorists in the early twenty-first century have by Charles Vinton, 1844. Pp. 3−10.
shown renewed interest in Briggs’s life and work “Annual Report.” In Transactions of the Apollo Association,
as they explore his central role in the transatlantic for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in the United States,
for the Year 1844. New York: Printed for the Association
circulation of literary texts, described by Meredith by John Douglas, 1845. Pp. 3−9.
McGill as “the culture of reprinting.” “The Winds.” In The Missionary Memorial: A Literary and
Religious Souvenir. New York: E. Walker, 1846. Pp. 52–
60.
“A Commission of Lunacy” and “Channing.” In Voices of
Selected Bibliography the True-Hearted. Philadelphia: J. Miller M’Kim, 1846.
Pp. 102–104 and 106.
“The Harper”and “A Pair of Sonnets ѧ Siaconset [and]
WORKS OF CHARLES FREDERICK BRIGGS Coatue.” In Seaweeds from the Shores of Nantucket.
Boston: Crosby, Nichols / New York: C. S. Francis, 1853.
Pp. 52-56, 63-64.
NOVELS Trow’s New York City Directory, introduction by Briggs
The Adventures of Harry Franco: A Tale of the Great Panic. (New York, 1853-1877).
2 vols. New York: Frederic Saunders, 1839. (This first
“Benjamin Franklin.” In Homes of American Statesmen.
edition, represented by a copy in the New York Public
New York: G. P. Putnam, 1854. P. 65.
Library, was reproduced as a photographic reprint by
Garrett Press, New York, in 1969, with an introduction “A Literary Martyrdom.” In Knickerbocker Gallery. New
by Bette S. Weidman.) York: S. Hueston, 1855. Pp. 481–491.
Bankrupt Stories. New York: John Allen, 1843. (The
PERIODICALS
Haunted Merchant, the only one of Briggs’s Bankrupt
Knickerbocker (1839–1846).
Stories to be written, can be read online, located under
Briggs’s name, as part of the Google company’s digitiza- New World (1840–1844).
tion project.) Broadway Journal (1845).
Working a Passage; or, Life on a Liner (Published for the United States Democratic Review (1846).
Benefit of Young Travellers). New York: John Allen, 1844. New York Mirror (1846–1850).
(A second edition was published by Homans and Ellis of Holden’s Dollar Magazine (1848–1850).
New York, in 1846, with the penultimate chapter. The
New York Times (1852–1862).
second edition was reproduced as a photographic reprint
by Garrett Press, New York, in 1970, with an introduc- Putnam’s Magazine (1853–1855).
tion by Bette S. Weidman.) Irving Magazine (1861).
The Trippings of Tom Pepper; or, The Results of Romancing. Brooklyn Union (1870–1873).
An Autobiography. 2 vols (volume 1, New York: Burgess, Independent (1875–1877).
17
Briggs’s work appeared under the pseudonym McGill, Meredith. American Literature and the Culture of
of “Harry Franco” and unsigned in the above Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of
New York periodicals. However, in the absence Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
of copyright legislation, his work was probably Miller, Perry. The Raven and the Whale. New York: Har-
widely copied, without attribution. court, Brace, 1956.
Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5
MANUSCRIPTS AND OTHER PAPERS vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
The only Briggs literary manuscript located as of 2008 is a University Press, 1938–1968.
short piece, “A Caution to Sea Travellers,” held in the Norton, Charles Eliot. The Letters of James Russell Lowell.
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Bros., 1894.
Genealogical and birth records are in the Vital Records of
Nantucket, Nantucket Atheneum. Significant collections Poe, Edgar Allan. The Literati. New York: J. S. Redfield,
of letters by and to Briggs are located in the following 1850.
libraries, listed in order of importance: Lowell Collection, Putnam, George Haven. Memories of a Publisher, 1865–
Houghton Library, Harvard University; Archives of 1915. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1915.
American Art, Detroit, Michigan; New York Public
Shamir, Milette. Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of
Library, Duyckinck, Berg, and Miscellaneous Collections;
Boston Public Library; Massachusetts Historical Society; Antebellum American Literature. Philadelphia: University
and Columbia University, Special Collections. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Taylor, Joshua. William Page, the American Titian. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1957.
CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES
Tilton, Theodore. Sanctum Sanctorum; or, Proof-sheets from
Browner, Stephanie P. “Documenting Cultural Politics: A
an Editor’s Table. New York: Sheldon, 1870.
Putnam’s Short Story.” PMLA 116, no. 2:397–415 (March
2001). Weidman, Bette S. “The Broadway Journal: A Casualty of
Derby, J. C. Fifty Years Among Authors, Editors, and Abolition Politics.” Bulletin of the New York Public Li-
Publishers. New York: C. W. Carleton, 1884. brary 73, no. 2:94–113 (February 1969).
Duberman, Martin. James Russell Lowell. Boston: Hough- ———. Charles Frederick Briggs: A Critical Biography.
ton Mifflin, 1966. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1968.
Eggleston, George Cary. Recollections of a Varied Life. New ———. “The Pinto Letters of Charles Frederick Briggs.” In
York: H. Holt, 1910. Studies in the American Renaissance. Edited by Joel
Greenspan, Ezra. George Palmer Putnam, Representative Myerson. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
American Publisher. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania Woodberry, George. The Life of Edgar Allan Poe. Boston:
State University Press, 2000. Houghton Mifflin, 1909.
18
BOB DYLAN
(1941—)
Ian Bickford
BOB DYLAN TOURED England in 1965 and again in accompanying his albums described in one
1966. Accompanying him on both occasions was instance as “Some Other Kinds Of Songs,” only
filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, documenting the adds to the complexity of the popular resolve
commotion of Dylan’s abrupt and enormous fame that this singer was not only a singer but also a
in what would become Dont Look Back (1967) poet, his songs not only songs but also poems,
and Eat the Document (1972). Pennebaker’s his influence exceeding the scope of anything to
dominant venture in the first of these documenta- be found on record albums. Poetry, from this
ries was to reveal the contrasts and narrate the perspective, was a context of sufficient cultural
tensions between an uptight, aging establishment authority for Dylan’s accomplishments to be
(largely represented by members of the press) measured—positively or negatively—within it.
and a hip, enthusiastic, liberated younger To cast his compositions as poetry was essentially
generation. In the second film, however, the same to claim for them an unambiguous status.
youthful crowds discover their own capacity for A secondary effect of the rhetoric enthroning
cantankerousness as they criticize and indeed boo Dylan as a poet, meanwhile, was to disturb the
Dylan’s new, loud, plugged-in performances. A very definition of poetry, to stage an incursion
young man stares defiantly at the camera long against the limits of what was possible within
enough to speculate that England might very well that genre. From the earliest moments of Dylan’s
have something of her own to offer, some variety career his contested literary eminence comprised
of cultural icon, entirely commensurate to the not only a line of questioning about Dylan but
brilliance of the American visitor: “Shakespeare,”
also an equivalent questioning and projected
he suggests by way of example, and then,
repositioning of poetry itself, along with a
piquantly, “perhaps.”
questioning of what it meant to be a poet,
Equally a symptom and an idiosyncrasy of especially an American poet, in the middle of the
the way in which Bob Dylan entered into, then twentieth century. This is why such a miscellany
occupied, the center of popular culture, the place- of major literary figures—including John Ciardi,
ment of Dylan within a literary rather than a
Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Frank Kermode,
musical canon had by this time become routine.
Stephen Spender, John Clellon Holmes, Anthony
Indeed, the palpable skepticism in this particular
Burgess, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Philip
British youth’s comparison of Dylan to Shakes-
peare derives its irony from a readiness on the Larkin, and Robert Lowell—all found it neces-
part of scores of his peers to acknowledge Dylan sary at one time or another to take up the ques-
as nothing less than a literary giant, someone tion of Dylan as a poet. In the 1960s and 1970s
who un-ironically might be compared to and the question became a variety of litmus tests for
potentially upstage the brightest, the greatest, the one’s position within a fracturing literary world.
reigning representatives of canonical literature, Writers hastened to define themselves in relation-
past and present. That Dylan was a writer of ship to an accelerating avant-garde—sometimes
songs, moreover that for most of the first decade oscillating between positions, as in the case of
of his professional career he published nothing Norman Mailer, who initially declared, with
but songs, with even the printed lyrical verses characteristic truculence, “If Dylan’s a poet, I’m
19
BOB DYLAN
a basketball player,” yet eventually acknowl- Q: Do you prefer writing poetry or songs?
edged, in a full reversal, “Dylan may prove to be
our greatest lyric poet of this period.” Even B.D.: Poems. I don’t have to condense or restrict
my thoughts into a song pattern.
trenchant arguments against Dylan’s songs as
(p. 59)
poetry added to the energy accumulating behind
the debate, helping therefore to rank the debate Expressing a preference for writing poetry, Dylan
among the most challenging of literary puzzles. simultaneously distinguishes between endeavors.
Whether Dylan is or is not classifiable as a poet Poetry and songwriting, he implies, even his own
matters less, perhaps, than the extraordinary and despite the opinion of most of his fans, are
impact of his music upon literary writers of different kinds of writing. Much later, remember-
subsequent but also of prior generations, such as ing early literary and musical attachments in his
Allen Ginsberg. The unusual quality of Dylan’s autobiographical Chronicles: Volume One (2005),
popularity likewise affected popular tastes in Dylan praises the “street ideologies” of such texts
literature: “If Dylan has done nothing else,” wrote as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and
Henrietta Yurchenco in 1966, “he is responsible Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) yet complains that noth-
for the present widespread interest in poetry.” ing comparable could be found among hit singles
on the radio: “45 records,” he writes, “were
The songs of Bob Dylan have long occupied
incapable of it.” On the other hand, “LPs were
a significant place in university curricula. Robert
like the force of gravity. They had covers, back
Shelton reports that as early as 1977 “more than
and front, that you could stare at for hours” (p.
one hundred courses had ѧ been taught on
35). In full-length records, if not in singles, Dy-
Dylan’s poetics alone”; that number has com-
lan saw a possibility for something equivalent to
pounded exponentially over the years. Dylan’s
literature, at least in the mystique and authority
lyrics appear alongside a more traditional stock
of covers—covers of books, covers of LPs. Ac-
of poems in such standard volumes as The Norton
cordingly, Dylan’s songs grew in scope through-
Anthology of Poetry, and articles on Dylan, or
out the 1960s and into the 1970s, from his 1962
referencing Dylan, or borrowing their obligatory
eponymous first album of almost entirely tradi-
epigraphs from Dylan, regularly appear in
tional songs, to the instantly iconic, politically
mainstream academic journals. The Oxford challenging material of The Freewheelin’ Bob
professor Christopher Ricks, celebrated for his Dylan (1963) and The Times They Are A-Changin’
work on Milton, Keats, Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot, (1964), to the roiling visions of Highway 61
lectured and wrote on Bob Dylan for three Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966),
decades before publishing Dylan’s Visions of Sin to the literary inflections of Blood on the Tracks
in 2003. The work is a milestone in Dylan (1975). Of the single “Like a Rolling Stone,”
scholarship, exploring what Ricks sees as Dylan’s twice the length of most songs receiving radio
superb poetics, especially his facility with rhyme, airplay in 1965 yet reaching number two on the
while never losing track of the experiential Billboard charts after its release that year, Dylan
peculiarities of listening to a song as opposed to has said the following: “After writing that [song]
reading a poem. I wasn’t interested in writing a novel or a play or
Dylan’s own statements on the appropriate- anything like that. I knew I just had too much. I
ness of discussing his songs in a literary con- wanted to write songs” (Scorsese, No Direction
text—of calling him a poet at all—have been as Home). More than simply a rejection of his liter-
ambivalent as they have been various. When ary ambitions, this statement finds Dylan grow-
asked in San Francisco on December 3, 1965, ing into his medium, discovering avenues within
whether he considered himself “primarily a singer it that would not restrict, as he worried at other
or a poet,” he dodged: “Oh, I think of myself moments, but instead free, his will to experiment.
more as a song-and-dance man.” Yet, during the Now it was not only LPs with impressive front
same year, at the Beverly Hills press conference, and back covers but also individual songs on the
Dylan was more direct: radio that could command full respect, could
20
BOB DYLAN
express the “street ideologies” (Chronicles: ness to rest even momentarily within a genre,
Volume One) once available only to books and within a persona, within a style.
poems, could have the impact of “a novel or a
play or anything like that” (Scorsese, No Direc-
tion Home). BIOGRAPHY
Abandoning the desire to write a book was Robert Allen Zimmerman was born on May 24,
no idle sacrifice for Dylan in 1965—nor would 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, the eldest of two
he stick to it, exactly. Dylan had signed a contract boys. His first performance was on Mother’s Day,
with the Macmillan Company to produce a 1946: the four-year-old Bobby sang “Some
volume to which he referred at different moments Sunday Morning” and “Accentuate the Positive”
as a novel, as poetry, and, echoing Hamlet to for delighted, praising relatives. When Bobby
Polonius, as “a book of words.” Later he would was six the family moved to Hibbing, Minnesota,
confess it was a mistake to promise a book before where his father, Abe, whose bout with polio had
writing one, but in a September 1965 interview, left him with a pronounced limp, joined Bobby’s
at that moment still enthusiastic, he mentioned it two uncles in their furniture and appliance
by its title, Tarantula, and announced business. Bobby’s mother, Beatty, remembered
(optimistically) a December release. Plans for her talented son spending significant time alone
publication were moved to the fall of 1966, in his room. “Bob was upstairs quietly becoming
whereon, in the tumult of a demanding concert a writer for twelve years,” she said to Robert
schedule, combined with editing of the second Shelton, the journalist who first and famously
Pennebaker film and constant pressure from reviewed Dylan in the New York Times and who
trespassing fans, Dylan would suffer a motorcycle spent much of his career compiling interviews
for a massive biography, No Direction Home
accident near his home in Woodstock, New York,
(1986). While Beatty would prove enormously
and withdraw from all obligations—including his
supportive of Bobby’s artistic aspirations and
book contract. Review copies of Tarantula had
eventually of his success, his earliest activities
already been circulated; pirated editions of these
were, for her, a point of anxiety: “I said to Bobby
were widely sought. The book’s official publica- that you can’t go on and on and on and sit and
tion would not occur until 1971, yet in its vari- dream and write poems. I was afraid he would
ous iterations Tarantula represented a major end up being a poet! ѧ In my day, a poet was
confirmation of the compass of Dylan’s virtuosity. unemployed and had no ambition.” Abe, on the
He was, the book proved, a writer whose talents other hand, recalled Bobby’s overall aptitude in
were not constrained to songwriting. school, noting only, “History was always a
Readers waited more than three decades for a problem for him. ѧ I used to argue that history
second original book from Bob Dylan. only requires you to remember what you had
Chronicles: Volume One appeared in 2004 to read. He said there was nothing to figure out in
overwhelmingly positive reviews. Between Ta- history.” The comment was perhaps weighted
rantula and Chronicles—very different texts, yet with particular meaning, for Bobby would gain
thematically linked—several volumes were his first notoriety almost immediately upon gain-
published of Dylan’s lyrics and other miscel- ing his first professional recognition when he
laneous writings. Dylan has also cowritten two began, as the transformed Bob Dylan, broadcast-
films: Renaldo and Clara (1978) with Sam Shep- ing radically revised versions of his personal his-
ard and Masked and Anonymous (2003) with tory—especially those portions of history having
Larry Charles. His importance as a writer is to do with his family.
undoubtedly secure, yet what kind of writer and Indeed, if Bobby Zimmerman had no taste
how exactly to position him within an American for history, Bob Dylan cultivated a remarkable
literary tradition remains uncertain—any resolu- flair for rewriting it. Partly for this reason, the
tion confounded in his eclecticism, his unwilling- details of his life exist in perpetual tension with
21
BOB DYLAN
alternative versions, half-truths, revisions and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis,

retractions, strategic manipulations. There is where he would stay through the end of 1960 but
perhaps no living person of whom so much has fail almost completely to attend classes, he began
been written whose biography remains so inveter- using the name Bobby Dillon, then Dylan, chang-
ately—and enchantingly—elusive. In Writing Dy- ing his name legally to Bob Dylan in 1962. He
lan: The Songs of a Lonesome Traveler, Larry was feeling his way toward the elasticity of
David Smith argues that “Bob Dylan” is the name identity for which he would soon be famous,
for a vast, deliberate, and ultimately coherent finding that the farther he traveled from home,
artistic vision authored by Robert Zimmerman the farther his identity would stretch.
over the course of nearly a half-century and that, How he arrived finally at the surname Dylan
in essence, if Dylan is a poet he is also his own is one of those disputed affairs which should, as
poem. Although somewhat overstated in its a matter of extensive accumulated evidence, be
thesis—no less than in its style—Smith’s book simple enough to resolve; Dylan, however, has
supplies some instruction for examining the consistently and persistently gone out of his way
circumstances of Dylan’s past: before a certain to agitate the issue, to muddy it as much as pos-
point, an elaborate pattern of biographical sible, to shroud it in the kind of mystery that
misinformation gives way to an equally elaborate keeps his biographers searching and his audi-
confusion; after that point, Dylan seems to have ences fascinated. The popular theory is that he
been so purposeful, so precise, and yet so borrowed his name from Dylan Thomas, yet, if
unpredictable in weaving and stitching and patch- there is truth in this, it must be only fractionally
ing the fabric of his identity that one struggles to true, given the initial discrepancy of spelling and
distinguish between the genuine individual and the likelihood that Dylan was introduced to the
his adopted roles, between, that is, the person Welsh poet’s verse only after experimenting with
and the performance. homophonic versions of his name. Robert Shel-
This habit—preferring fibs to facts, refusing ton points to the young Bobby’s idolization of
to tolerate the details of a prosaic upbringing, of the Gunsmoke character Matt Dillon, as well as a
ordinary surroundings—began early. Bobby’s first Hibbing family named Dillion to whom Bobby
band in high school, the Golden Chords, quickly held some relation. In fact, Dylan petitions Shel-
dissolved as Bobby became increasingly fasci- ton to right the record: “Straighten out in your
nated with rock and roll. Classmates remember a book that I did not take my name from Dylan
riotous performance at the Hibbing High Jacket Thomas.” Much later, interviewed in Martin
Jamboree Talent Show, amps turned up loud, Scorsese’s 2005 documentary of the same title as
Bobby pounding on the piano and screaming the Shelton’s biography (Scorsese and Shelton both
lyrics to “Rock n’ Roll Is Here to Stay.” The derived their title from a line in “Like a Rolling
school’s principal finally cut the microphones, Stone”), Dylan, referring to the sequence of
foreshadowing a probably apocryphal account of events leading to his new name, said, “It really
the folk patriarch Pete Seeger threatening to cut didn’t happen any of the ways I’ve read about
the cables with an ax at the 1965 Newport Folk it.” Presumably this includes what he read in
Festival, where Dylan yet again surprised an Shelton’s account, an account shaped upon
audience with extreme amplification. In 1959, Dylan’s own statements and at least informally
just after graduating from high school, Bobby authorized by him. Hence, No Direction Home
played piano in the backing band for the regional (the film) corrects and inverts No Direction Home
musician Bobby Vee; he held on to the gig only (the book), injecting a nearly comic tension
briefly, performing under the stage name Elston between the titles whereby seeking direction
Gunn, but when Vee had a hit later that year with leads only to new varieties of misdirection, and
the song “Suzie Baby,” Bobby Zimmerman told “home”—or origin—recedes always further
friends and relatives that he was the Bobby Vee toward indeterminacy. Dylan has frequently used
they were hearing on their radios. Enrolling at his contact with scholars, biographers, and the
22
BOB DYLAN
press, including Shelton, with whom he shared a Rimbaud: “Je est un autre,” or “I is another.” The
friendship and to whom he owed a considerable paradox contrived in the rupture of the subject
debt for effectively introducing his music to the “Je” from its first-person status in the third-
world, as an occasion for renewing control of the person verb form “est” constitutes in its very in-
details of his life, revising those details wherever coherency a strikingly consistent gesture across
necessary, introducing fresh contradictions Dylan’s oeuvre. If Bob Dylan represents nothing
wherever strategically productive. For example, but a prosthetic identity for Bobby Zimmerman
he insisted to Shelton that he had arrived in New (who is supposed to have died in one motorcycle
York City at the close of 1960, not, as previously accident or another), the prosthesis would logi-
believed, at the beginning of 1961, and that he cally bear replacement as successive iterations
did not go directly to Greenwich Village but spent wear out. This network of ideas is central to Todd
two months around Times Square, turning tricks. Haynes’s 2007 film I’m Not There, in which six
Shelton, attuned to what he calls Dylan’s “put- different actors of different ages, genders, and
ons,” does not assign any particular veracity to ethnicities play a person recognizable as but
the story, and in Scorsese’s film Dylan again never called Bob Dylan. The aforementioned line,
reverses his rendering, now radically simplifying “Je est un autre,” topped Haynes’s single-page
it: “Got out of the car at George Washington film proposal to which Dylan granted his rare ap-
Bridge. Took a subway down to the Village.” proval, and one of the film’s seven versions of
Dylan elides these details in Chronicles: Dylan is actually named Arthur Rimbaud. Haynes
Volume One, but he does return to the subject of clearly understood the importance of Rimbaud to
his name, offering yet another version which Dylan’s overarching aesthetic, and he understood
reinstates Dylan Thomas as central to the as well that recognition of this importance would
narrative. He also writes this: “One of the early be invaluable in gaining Dylan’s trust, therefore
presidents of the San Bernardino [Hell’s] Angels gaining a green light for the film.
was Bobby Zimmerman, and he was killed in It was in Minneapolis that Dylan was intro-
1964 on the Bass Lake run. ѧ That person is duced to the songs of Woody Guthrie. Guthrie’s
gone. That was the end of him.” Replacing the impact on Dylan cannot be overstated. Dylan
former Bobby Zimmerman with a stand-in, a kind began playing almost exclusively Guthrie compo-
of crash-test dummy, Dylan effectively kills sitions in his coffeehouse performances around
himself off, projecting his identity into the death the folk-oriented “Dinkytown” section of
of someone else who happens, conveniently, to Minneapolis. In the fall of 1960 he read Guthrie’s
bear the same name. He simultaneously conjures autobiographical Bound for Glory (1943), which
his own 1966 motorcycle accident, rumored in its quickly replaced On the Road as his touchstone
aftermath to have been disfiguring or even fatal. for American seeking and dreaming. When Dy-
Dylan’s identity, by his own design, begins to lan learned that Guthrie was hospital-bound in
fracture, to take up residency in new and various Morris Plains, New Jersey, he decided to pay a
bodies, some surviving, some succumbing. Foot- visit to his hero. Guthrie suffered from
age included in Scorsese’s No Direction Home Huntington’s chorea, an inherited neurological
depicts Dylan shortly before his accident, ex- disorder, deadly as well as profoundly disabling,
hausted, frustrated with the intense pressures of and Dylan found him languishing in a psychiatric
his second major English tour, joking, “I think institution, the older singer’s mind still sharp but
I’m going to get me a new Bob Dylan next his body given over to uncontrollable tremors
week. ѧ Use the new Bob Dylan, see how long and spasms. Visiting him there and, later, at
he lasts.” In concert on Halloween 1964, Dylan Brooklyn State Hospital, Dylan played guitar and
famously announced from the stage, “I have my sang for Guthrie, taking requests for Guthrie’s
Bob Dylan mask on.” His discussion of literary own songs. At this point Dylan’s repertoire
influences in Chronicles gives pride of place to a comprised entirely songs written by others. “I
single syntactically intricate line from Arthur wasn’t yet the poet musician that I would
23
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absence was probably misinterpreted by his friends as cowardly
dereliction. York was calling on him in vain. Monina perhaps
suspected his truth. Next to the sun of his life, the noble Richard,
Monina lay nearest his heart. It was a mixture of many feelings; and
even love, subdued by hopelessness, quickened them to greater
intensity. As soon as he could rise from his couch, he directed his
course to England. He arrived in London on the day of the duke of
York's worst disgrace. It was reported to him as the gossip of the
town: at the fatal word a mortal change seized upon his frame: his
limbs were as if struck by palsy; his cheeks fell in; his hair grew
white. On his arrival he had taken up his abode in a monastery in
the habit of a poor pilgrim: the sage monks, who beheld his state,
possessed no leech-craft to administer his cure: he lay with beating
pulses and open eyes, while the work of the grave appeared already
in operation against him: he wasted into a fleshless skeleton. And
then another secret change came over him; he conquered death,
and crawled forth, the ghost of what he was, into the hopeless
world.
He contrived to gain admission to the princess. She did not
recognize him, such was the pale disguise disease had put upon
him. His voice, hollow as from a tomb, was altered; his dark,
melancholy eyes, occupying too large a portion of his face, gleamed
from under his streaked and wan brow. Yet his was a visit of
comfort, for he could do her mission to Scotland, and invite the
forgetful James to succour his friend and kinsman. Edmund listened
eagerly to this proposal: a draught of soothing balm descended into
his frame, with the thought that yet all was not lost. His physical
energy almost returned: he hurried to depart—"How will you
traverse this wide kingdom?" asked the lady. "Cannot the Adalid
come as before, to aid and speed you on your way?"
"The Adalid is sailing on the far ocean sea," replied Plantagenet;
"we are all as dead, in the eyes of De Faro and our Monina."
"Faithless girl!"
With a trace of his ancient warmth and sweetness, Edmund
entered upon the gentle maiden's exculpation. He related that a
poor fellow lay on the bed next his in the convent hospital, whom he
recognized to be an Irishman, who had escaped from Waterford, and
sailed with them in the Adalid to Cornwall. From him he heard the
tale of what had befallen De Faro and his child. He heard how the
mariner had long haunted the English coast waiting for an
opportunity to carry off the prince; of the fatal night, when
snatching his daughter from the watery peril, he saw Richard, as he
believed, perish in the waves. What more had the Moorish mariner
and his daughter to do with this miserable, guilty island? He called
his men together; he told them his resolve finally to quit the eastern
world for the golden islands of the west, inviting those who were
averse to the voyage to go on shore at once, before the fair wind
that was rising should hurry them into the open sea. The poor
Irishman alone desired to land: before he went he saw the Spanish
damsel; he described her as calm and mild, though there was
something unearthly in her gleaming eyes and in the solemn tone of
her voice. "If," she said, "you meet any of our friends, any who ask
for De Faro and his daughter, if you see Lady Brampton, Lord Barry,
or Sir Edmund Plantagenet, tell them that Monina lives, that she
tarries with her father, and tasks herself to be his comfort and
support. We seek the Western Indies; well may it betide us that we
never reach the unknown strand; or we may be cast away in an
uninhabited solitude, where my care and companionship may stead
my dear father much; or I may teach the sacred truths of our
religion to the wild Indians, and speak the dear name of Christ to
the unbaptized of those wilds; or soften, as best I may, the cruel
Spaniard, and save the devoted people from their barbarity. Tell
them, whichever way I look, I perceive a thousand duties to which
our great Taskmaster calls me, and these I live to fulfil, if so my
feeble body will permit; tell them that my only hope is death; that,
and that by my obedience to the Almighty will, I may partly merit to
join in Paradise the earthly angel who now survives there."
Tears choked further speech; she imprinted her words by a gift of
gold. The boat which had been hailed, came alongside. The man on
board, the sails of the Adalid swelled proudly in the gale; the little
caravel ran lightly along on the top of the roughening waters. In less
than two hours she was out of sight, speeding swiftly over the sea
towards the wild western ocean.
Plantagenet departed; and the princess was yet more cheered
when she found that no further injury 'was meditated against her
lord. Imprisonment in the Tower was his sole punishment. Her pure,
gentle mind could not divine the full extent of King Henry's villany,
nor guess how he undermined the edifice he claimed praise for not
levelling with the ground.
Nor could her resigned, patient, feminine spirit conceive the cruel,
biting impatience of his lot that York endured. He had yielded at first
to the overwhelming sense of disgrace, and felt that last, worst
emotion of the injured, which answers the internal question, "What
have I done so to be visited?" in the poet's words,—
"I cannot charge

My memory with much save sorrow—but
I have been so beyond the common lot
Chastened and visited, I needs must think
That I was wicked."
But soon his eager, eagle spirit spurned the tame debasing
thought: he resolved again to struggle, and at last to conquer; the
fire burned brighter for its short smouldering; almost with a light
heart he laughed, as he resolved again to endeavour.
His prison life was more than irksome; it was unendurable. No
change, which is the soul of enjoyment, varied it. No sympathy, the
parent of content, came anear. In his young days he had trod on the
verge of life's wave, watching it recede, and fancying that it would
discover glittering treasures as it retreated into the ocean of
eternity: now the tide ebbed sullenly; the barren sands grew dark;
and the expanse before afforded no hope—what was to be done?
He was in the Tower, whence he had twice escaped; where the
earl of Warwick was immured, pining in fruitless vegetation, rather
than living. Should he do as he had done, and become a cipher, a
forgotten prisoner, a mere thing to wake and sleep, and be as
nothing? The very dog that guards a cottage-door from nightly harm
had more dignity and purpose in his life than this victim of ambition.
The bird that alighted on the sill of his iron-barred casement, and
carried off a crumb for her nestlings, was an emblem of utility and
freedom in comparison, which Warwick, cut off from all, must weep
to mark. How different was Richard's fate; he had dear friends ready
to risk all for him, whose life's sacrifice he could repay only by being
true to himself; he had a wife, wedded to him in youth's early flower,
whose happiness was unalterably linked to his. He had courage,
fortitude, energy; he would not cast these gifts away, a thankless
boon: he valued them at their price: if death crowned his efforts, it
were well; he was a mere toy in the hands of God, and he
submitted; but as a man, he was ready to cope with men, and
though defeated never to be vanquished. Not a month after his
removal to the Tower he had observed his facilities, marked his
instruments, and resolved to enter on his schemes: they were
quickened by other circumstances.
Warwick heard of his cousin's arrival; and he believed this to be
the signal of his own deliverance. His first chief desire was to have
communication with him. Among his attendants there was one to
whom he could apply; he was a lank, tall fellow, with little
understanding and but one idea—gratitude to the duke of Clarence.
This man, called Roger, and nicknamed Long Roger, his length being
his chief distinction, had been very poor, and burthened besides with
several infant children: accidents and a bad season brought them to
the verge of starvation, when a chance threw him in the way of the
duke of Clarence, who got him made servitor in the Tower. When
this unfortunate prince was imprisoned within its fatal walls. Long
Roger underwent a thousand perils to wait on him by stealth, and to
do what service he might. Long Roger had a prodigious appetite,
and his chief delight was to smuggle dainties, cooked by his Madge,
into the prison chamber of the duke. The manner of Clarence's
death, which Roger affirmed to accord with the popular tradition,
alone consoled the faithful sympathizing fellow. Now he had turned
the key for thirteen years on the duke's hapless son: in spite of his
watchful care and proffered cates, he had seen the poor youth
dwindle to a skeleton, when suddenly the progress of delay was
checked by Our Lady: it was a miracle to see Lord Edward grow fat
and comely to look upon, changing his woe-begone looks into
gracious smiles: by the mass, there was witchcraft in it! Warwick
often thanked Long Roger, and told him what he would do when
restored to freedom and rank: which will never be, Roger said,
except among the saints in Paradise; unless it pleased God to
remove his majesty, when my lady the queen should fully know how
fervently her cousin prayed for her; and, forsooth, with sweet prince
Arthur, his royal mother would be all-powerful. Long Roger's visions
went not beyond. He never imagined the possibility of effecting the
earl's escape; his limited understanding suggested no relief, save a
bottle of Canary, or bunches of white roses in June, which in fact
was Dame Madge's feminine idea; and often had the simple flowers
soothed Warwick's care. To this man the poor prisoner applied, to
enable him to see and converse with the newly-arrived Richard: two
are better than one to a feast; and, the next time Roger meditated a
dainty supper for his lord, he resolved to endeavour that York should
partake it with him as a guest.
In his own guileless way, the simple-hearted man began to
practise on and bribe one of his fellows, without whom it had been
difficult to accomplish his desire. Abel Blewet had lately been
appointed to his service: he was nearly a dwarf, with bushy
eyebrows and red hair: there was something of ill omen in his
physiognomy, but as the tall yeoman looked over the head of his
comrade, his courage rose: "The whipper-snapper could not rebuff
me," he thought, as he drew himself up to his full height, and began
to propound the mighty deed of conducting Perkin by mistake to the
Lord Edward's chamber, on his return from vespers. Roger paused
suddenly; for, in spite of his stature, he was appalled by the glance
Blewet shot up from under his penthouses of brows: still he gave a
willing assent, and even took upon himself the chief risk of the
undertaking.
The following evening, while Richard was yet pondering how to
commence his machinations, undecided, though resolved; and while
he made up his mind not to betray his thoughts to the sinister-
looking being before him, he was surprised to find that he was led
through an unaccustomed gallery; and still more on entering the
chamber into which he was introduced, to recognise it as that where
he had unexpectedly found refuge during his last visit to the Tower,
and to perceive that Warwick himself was there expecting him.
Was this the thin, wasted being he had seen three years before?
Had Warwick been then set free to hunt upon the hills, he had not
regained more flesh and bloom than now that hope had been his
only medicine. His cousin York had inspired him with marvellous
confidence; his last entrance into the formidable Tower, and his
speedy exit, had appeared a miracle to the poor earl, to whom these
high walls and sad chambers formed a world, from which, as from
the larger one, death only promised egress. He had pined and
wasted in his appetite to be free, to be without those gates, beyond
that fosse and giant battlements that girded him in: these
portentous, insuperable obstacles were mere cobweb chains to
Richard. He had come in, he had departed, and all as easily, so
Warwick thought, as the unregarded fly, that had perhaps flown
from Westminster, from Elizabeth's chamber, to light upon his cheek.
In all the subsequent tales of York's checks and overthrow, he smiled
at the idea that one born to victory could be thus overcome. He
laughed at the chains Henry had thrown over him; and his transfer
to the Tower elated him with a firm belief that liberty was at hand.
Dwelling on these thoughts, Warwick ceased to be the dead alive;
he was cheerful, erect, elastic in his gait, his complexion glowed with
health, while sickness lingered still on the cheek of the younger
Plantagenet, and a more subdued spirit dwelt in his heart.
Long Roger beheld the cousins embrace: he heard the earl call
him, named Perkin, his liege, and most dear kinsman: from that
moment the opprobrious name was banished from Roger's lips: he
was convinced of York's truth, and the Lord Edward's friend became
an object of reverence and of love.
CHAPTER LV
ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE
Gentle cousin,
If you be seen, you perish instantly
For breaking prison.
No, no, cousin,

I will no more be hidden, nor put off
This great adventure to a second trial.
TWO NOBLE KINSMEN.
Quick on the first greeting followed Warwick's question. "And,

noble cousin, what have you projected? when shall we escape?"
Richard's being in durance with him, seemed sufficient pledge,
that without delay they should both be free. While York, wearied by
opposition to his mighty foe, just foiled in his endeavours to preserve
his freedom, even when he had attained it, saw giant obstacles in
his path; and, although resolved to endeavour all, was fully
conscious of the fatal end that must wait upon his too probable
failure. His reply was dictated by these feelings; he was averse to
drag one so inexperienced, and so unhappy, into the pit he believed
that he was digging for himself. He besought the earl well to weigh
the value he set upon life; to place the fatal scaffold in prospect; to
teach himself to know what death was, and to be ready to meet it,
before he planned escape from the wily Tudor. Warwick listened with
impatient wonder; but when Richard concluded with affirming, that
he himself, in sober sadness, preferred hazarding all to the
remaining in prison, and that he would be free, the earl's
countenance again grew light and gladsome. "But when, coz—
when?" was still his eager question.
Thus they had changed characters. Warwick, so many years
secluded from the world, was in total ignorance of its ways. Had the
Tower-gates been opened to him, he had trembled to walk forth
alone; but restraint had made him feminine; and with his cousin he
would have rushed upon an army of spears, in sure belief that some
unseen aegis would protect him. His position rendered him timid,
indolent, and dependent; but he relied on Richard, as a woman on
her lover. York beheld all things in their clear, true light; he was
aware of every difficulty; of the means he possessed for overcoming
them, and of the hazards he ran in using these means. A sentiment,
born of the highest generosity made him hesitate before he
concerted any plan with Warwick. It was not alone that he was
averse to risking another life; but he felt that his cause would
receive advantage from this link with an undoubted Plantagenet;
nay, that, in the prison itself, the attachment and respect felt
towards the son of Clarence, by some of the very men he meant to
use, would serve him. That he should reap benefit from exposing the
ill-fated prince to untried dangers, revolted his high and independent
nature. Warwick had recourse to many an entreaty and persuasion,
ere he brought Richard to consent that their fortunes should be
joined, and that, last of the White Rose, they would rise or fall
together. Still York was obliged to check his cousin's impatience, and
to show that they must slowly work out the end they had in view.
To gratify the earl's greedy curiosity, York related his adventures;
they afforded him an inexhaustible fund of surprise and delight. He
sighed over his tale of wedded happiness; and half wondered that
angelic woman, seated high on the throne of loveliness and love,
should deign to devote herself for man. A pang, not of envy, but of
regret, on comparing their fates, shot across him; soon the usual
current of feeling returned; and when he heard that his idolized, lost
Elizabeth, was the friend and companion of the devoted wife of York,
his affection for Richard was increased. Night was far advanced
before they separated, and then only in certain expectation of
meeting again.
York's hopes grew brighter, and he indulged in visions of the
future, which lately had been so blank. He verily believed that he
might escape, though still he doubted whether he should. He
remembered the fondness of the duchess of Burgundy for her
brother Clarence, and how she had deplored the hard destiny of his
offspring; he would present that son, liberated by him, to her. His
junction with the prince must revive the old Yorkists in his favour;
this worst blast of fortune might be the gale to speed him to the
harbour of his hopes. The royal cousins met again and again; nor
was it long before their own desires, and Henry's craft, began to
weave that fatal web which entangled them even in the very mode
the hard-hearted king devised.
Summer was gone: quicker than he was wont, the sun withdrew
his embattled array of light and heat; and cold and tempest,
erewhile driven to mountain fastnesses, or to their own frozen
kingdoms in the north, took courage and force, and broke with wild
fury upon the defenceless world: the bleak winds were their
coursers; savagely they yelled and howled over the land they
desolated. First, the growth of flowers was their prey; the fruits, and
then the verdure of the earth, while the sun, each day retreating,
afforded further scope to their inroads. York resolved not to pass
another winter in prison. He had quickly perceived that his purpose
could only be effected by corrupting their guards, and then all would
depend upon the fidelity of these men. His first attempts were
followed by an almost too easy success: good-hearted, dull-headed
Long Roger heard with unreplying credulity the assertions of
Warwick, that Richard must succeed in all he undertook, and readily
promised his aid. Abel Blewet, in spite of his dogged, sinister aspects
yielded at once to the seduction of a promised bribe. Two others, by
his advice, were associated as necessary to their success.
Strangeways, a ruffling drunken fellow, who had been thrice
dismissed, but whose pretty wife each time procured his
reappointment; and Astwood, a saving miser, who lent money to his
fellow-servitors on usury. With these instruments the cousins went to
work. Warwick in full belief of success: York, perceiving treason and
discovery close to them, but ready to defy these bloodhounds to
their worst.
"And now, coz," said Warwick, "in very truth there needs no
further delay. Methinks were the drawbridge down, you would
mistrust some gin, and wait to throw an arch of your own across the
moat. Sooth, my lord, I am a weary of your sloth."
There was a caressing sweetness in Warwick's voice and manner:
an ignorant, indolent, confiding enthusiasm, so unlike quick-witted
Clifford, or any of Duke Richard's former friends, that he felt a new
emotion towards him—hitherto he had been the protected, served,
and waited on, of his associates, now he played the protector and
the guardian.
"My gentle cousin," he replied, "even as you trust, so you shall
find me—wait but a little, and all will be past. Yet I grieve to say,
where you see escape, I perceive an ambushment of death; and,
though ready to face the grim skeleton, we must arm ourselves
against him. I wish I could show you even as I see, the dangers that
environ us—perhaps you would shrink; and it is yet time. What do
you do? Not only plan escape, but ally yourself, and give the
sanction of your untarnished name, to one whom Tudor brands as
an impostor, and abhors as a rival. His vengeance will fall heavily for
this deed, if he reach you. While a few years, like the many already
gone by, may lead him to his grave, and you to liberty. I have too
often met danger to be frightened by him: and I endure worse than
death, each day I pass of youth, apart my sweet White Rose. You
have no lady-love to beckon you across the path of peril. Bethink
you well, my ever dear lord, will you not regret this prison, when the
cruel axe glitters before your eyes?"
"Do you refuse then to take me with you?" said Warwick,
mournfully.
"Be the choice yours; to go with me is fraught with danger—to
stay—"
"Hush, cousin!" cried the earl, eagerly, "speak not the ill-omened
word. Stay,—to endure days and nights of guarded doors; to eat
viands served up poisoned by the jailor's touch; to see the sky but
through those iron bars; alas! in my dreams, when heaven and its
stars are before me, they are crossed and paled by those accursed
lines. Give me but an hour to tread earth a free man—or, mark,
cousin; sometimes I win good Roger to lead me to the roof of the
White Tower; it is high, and overhangs the deep, dangerous river—
the day you quit my side, I seek that tower, I leap from its height,
and the cold waters shall drink up my being, rather than I endure
another hour my prison-life."
"My dear, dear cousin," said York, "it is written by the Fates, and I
yield—our fortunes shall be one. A few days now brings the hour; it
will move along the dial; it will become a portion of past time—what
it will leave us, is in the hands of God."
That hour came—full soon it came—the evening hour which
preceded their escape. Long Roger served supper to the kinsmen,
the last they were to partake within the fated walls. The poor fellow
heaved a bitter sigh, as he waited by his lord's chair. "Thou art
downcast, good Roger," said the earl, "pledge me, my man, in this
ruby wine of Burgundy—think of to-morrow, not of to-night—to-
morrow the deed will be done."
Roger quaffed the proffered bowl—he set it down with another
sigh, almost a groan, adding, "Better drown reason than life in the
vat!" Then recollecting to what he alluded, and before whom, he
blushed scarlet to his very ears, and like a bashful man he made it
worse by going on blunderingly, "I was never handy at these sort of
things; it is for all the world like turning out of a warm bed on a cold
snowy morning, only to think of them—and when they are about,—
by the Cross, I thought no hole far enough or dark enough, when
my lord your father—"
"Roger!" exclaimed Warwick.
The wine had not decreased the man's terror, but it had opened
his mouth, and taken away his discretion; he continued: "It was an
awful night. We all knew what was going to be done. I am sure, as
Thomas Paulet said, we heard our very hearts beat. Then there was
grim-faced Hobler, who at the judgment might be taken for the born
twin of Master Abel, only he was taller by a span—even he looked
uglier, nor spoke above his breath—'Is he at his prayers?' asked he,
and Sir Brakenbury was as white as the earth itself—it was the
beginning of Lent; and the snow lay three feet deep on it."
By no uncommon law of our nature, the dread design of the
present night awoke keen recollection in the usually drowsy mind of
this man. At first, with thrilling horror, Warwick interrupted him, but
now the very terrors of the theme he chose assumed an awful
charm—he was fascinated to listen, while his knees knocked
together. Richard felt also the magic of such perilous excitement.
"Oh, Lord Edward," continued Roger, "these walls have seen
fiendly sights—the blood of many a Plantagenet, York, or Lancaster,
is on its pavement. Was it not in this room that the pious king Saint
Henry, as Father Piers calls him—you will not sleep another night in
it, so there is no harm now, telling you that his poor ghost has been
seen on the battlements coming from this very chamber, where he
was murthered."
The night wind rushed round the massy walls, the autumnal wind,
fierce and howling—York started up. "No more of this unreason,
while we need all our strength, and God's grace to boot, to nerve us
to our task. Oh, ghost of Lancaster! if indeed thou hauntest this
spot, where those akin to me did the foul deed, be thy pious soul
propitiated now; many a mass shall be told for thy repose?"
Roger crossed himself, and said an Ave; then in his usual voice he
rejoined, Would the thing did not require blood. Master Abel vows by
the saints—'twere better when men make bad oaths to swear by the
fiends—that Sir John must die; old wrinkled Astwood squeaks out,
"By'r Lady, it were not worth while, with only promises for reward, if
we have not the rifling of the lieutenant's private chamber. They are
bloody-minded men, my lord; Mat Strangeways, when he is sober,
and I, fasting or feasting, hold out that we might bind him, and get
the keys.' 'Blockhead,' says Master Blewet, saving your presence,
'thou goest the way to hang us all.'"
Another goblet had set Roger talking. Warwick had quitted the
table. He threw open the casement: it was very dark, and the wind
howled fearfully—"Oh, iron bars of my prison-house," cried the ill-
fated prince, "can only midnight-murder wrench ye asunder? It is a
dread act to disobey God's word, and lay the soul under mortal sin—
must it be done?"
"My dear cousin," said York, "do not mistake—a month ago the
choice was yours; now there is no going back. We have no right to
draw these poor men into peril, and then to quarrel at the
precaution they take for their safeties. We said, ay, when the matter
was proposed. Again I repeat the word; they must look to it, who so
savagely have driven us to the fatal pass. When Digby undertook the
ungentle task of jailor, he knew that he must hold it at the hazard of
his life."
"Sir John has ever been kind tome," said Warwick, "forgive the
word, my lord, I am firm now—away with mercy! To win an easy
egress from these murderous walls, I could myself plant the dagger."
"We are not executioners," interrupted the duke, who felt none of
Warwick's vacillations, now sinking beneath the required tone, now
wound up far above it, and was perfectly calm, though his heart, he
scarce knew why, entertained no hope of success. Warwick believed
that he should win, and mourned the losers in the frightful game.
Richard knew that he might fail, and assuredly would, did he not
meet each necessity and hazard with a dauntless spirit.
The sound of a bell from a neighbouring convent was brought
fitfully by the wind—"They are ringing matins—there is our signal,"
cried Roger.
"And Digby's knell." The door of the chamber opened as Warwick
said these words, and Blewet, with his usual catlike pace, slid in; he
walked straight up to Roger, and casting on him a glance from under
his brows, said only, "Come."
"Are all at rest?" asked the earl.
"Two hours agone," said Master Abel, "I have kept myself awake
sharpening my steel:" he touched the handle of a huge butcher's
knife stuck in his girdle, whose glittering blade did credit to his care.
Warwick turned pale and sick. "It will be dulled anon," continued
Blewet.
"Where are thy comrades?" Richard asked.
"They wait at the end of the corridor—Master Astwood is counting
his gains. Come, Long Roger."
Poor Roger followed him to the door, then turning to the princes;
"My royal masters," said he, "if this deed goes ill, and I never see ye
more, by Christ and his Cross, I pray a blessing on ye; if I may pray,
but by the mass I fear I shall never pray, nor sup more."
They were gone—Warwick strove to look, to be firm, but he grew
ashy white—a door clapped to at a distance made him almost faint.
Richard was pale also; but his hand shook not in the least, as he
presented a cup of wine to his cousin. "Give me water rather," said
the earl, shuddering, "that cup is red—hark—it is his groans!"
"It is the wind around the turret, where my liege and brother
died," said York, endeavouring to give other thoughts to the poor
prince, who cried,—
"It is the hell-born laugh of fiends viewing the deed." With the
breeze indeed came a sound of laughter. "Are we betrayed!" cried
York: but the sound passed away in wailing. Warwick was on his
knees—"I cannot pray," he cried, "a sea of blood is before me."
"Hush!"
Steps now approached along the corridor, and Blewet, his stained,
half-wiped knife in his hand, appeared—Again the monosyllable
"Come," was pronounced—fraught with how different a meaning. A
life had been torn from an innocent breast since then by that fell
instrument. The princes, awe-struck, one trembling with dread, the
other striving to quell his horror for a murderer, followed him, as he
led through the gallery—at the end stood Astwood with a bunch of
keys—there were no stains on his hands; he looked anxious, but
brightened up when he saw the prisoners.
They trod stealthily along. Warwick's faltering steps scarce kept
pace with their conductor's. After passing through many narrow high
passages, they reached a low postern door. Astwood put the key in
the lock—the sound was magical to the fearful earl. "Farewell, old
frightful walls," he cried; "farewell, dark murderous prison-house,
the Foul Fiend possess thee! such is my benison."
Blewet looked at him—York marked the sarcasm, the scorn of his
glance—the gate meanwhile was opened; at that moment a clash of
arms was heard. "The sentinels at the eastern gate," remarked Abel.
"God grant it!" cried Warwick, "God grant—yet can it be! and am I
free?"
He rushed through the open door, intent to seize upon liberty, as
Tantalus on his forbidden feast—his first step beyond the threshold
of his prison was followed by a shriek—almost a woman's shriek, it
was so shrill and piercing. What he quailed before, gave presence of
mind to York—experienced in ills. Whatever the new evil might be,
he went out to meet it calmly. A party of archers and yeomen were
drawn up in the courtyard. "This truly is a mime," he said, "in which
one at least wins. Our good lieutenant is safe; we are lost."
Grim Sir John had much disliked even this masque of murder. He
saw their seizure with a grin of delight. He abhorred Richard, as the
prime mover of the meditated assassination; but he hated Warwick
more, who thus could lay in ambush for the life of one, who he
believed had been a most courteous and soft-hearted jailor to him—
he commanded his myrmidons to lead the royal kinsmen to the
strongest ward-rooms of the Tower, with dogged, savage joy.
In dark and separate cells, in solitude and night, these ill-fated
victims of craft and ambition were consigned to biting reflection and
sinister anticipation. Warwick, worn out by the unusual excitement of
the last weeks, by his eager hopes, and overwhelming despair, had
no one thought, but ten thousand thoughts, making a chaos and hell
of his poor heart. Richard felt more for his cousin than for himself.
"But for me," he repeated internally, "he had still been a patient
prisoner. Yet to break prison is not crime capital—he may yet be
saved. Elizabeth will intercede; Tudor, for very shame, cannot do
further wrong to one so near akin, so powerless and unfortunate.
For myself:—I am dead already: the duke of York died, when first I
became a slave. So that my memory survive in my own White Rose's
heart—let the victor dispose at his pleasure of this mere shell of
Richard."
CHAPTER LVI
THE TRIAL
Tempestuous Fortune hath spent all her spite,

And thrilling sorrow thrown his utmost dart
Thy sad tongue cannot tell more heavy plight
Than that I feel and harbour in my heart.
SPENSER.
The morning of the first of November dawned: a cheery day. Men

went to their usual works: the earth, despoiled of her summer
garniture, yet bore the change with sober content; for the sun
shone, and soft airs, despite the coming winter, lightly shook the
scant and altered foliage of the woods:—
All rose to do the task He set to each,

Who shaped us to His ends, and not our own.
And many rose
Whose woe was such, that fear became desire.
Among such fate-hunted victims was the duke of York. Hope had
died in his heart; and his few remaining days were only to be spent
in celebrating her dark funeral. Morning opened its eyes on Prince
Richard's dungeon, showing him vanquished by grievous overthrow
and change. To look back through his tumultuous life, to dwell upon
its chances, to think of the many who had suffered for him, were sad
but fitting thoughts, to which he betook himself, till death became
lovely in his eyes. But intermingled with such retrospection were
other memories: his own sweet love was before him, in her tears or
smiles; he looked into her dear eyes, he closed his own, and thrilling
kisses pressed his burning lips, and soft, white arms were round
him; at thought of such he grew impatient of his chains, and the
fearful cutting off from all that awaited him. He began to calculate
on the probability that his life would be spared, and grew cowardly
the while; to feed upon those roseate lips, to drink life from those
eyes, to clasp his beautiful, fond wife, feeling that beyond the circle
of his arms nought existed worthy his desires, became a fierce,
impatient hunger, to gratify which he would call himself impostor,
give up fame and reputation, and become Perkin Warbeck in all
men's eyes.
There was but one refuge from this battle of youth and life with
the grim skeleton. With a strong effort he endeavoured to turn his
attention from earth, its victor woes, and still more tyrant joys, to
the heaven where alone his future lay. The struggle was difficult, but
he effected it: prayer brought resignation, calm; so when his soul,
still linked to his mortal frame, and slave to its instincts, again
returned to earth, it was with milder wishes and subdued regrets.
Monina's lovely form wandered into his mind; she was an angel now,
a blessed spirit, he believed; for, what deceived her, deceived him;
and he fancied that he alone had escaped from the watery perils of
that night: she had arrived there, where he soon should be, in the
serene immutability of eternal life; he began, in the revulsion of his
thoughts, to pity those destined still to exist. Earth was a scathed
planet, a roofless, shelterless home; a wild where the human soul
wandered a little interval, tortured by sharp, cruel storms; lost in
thorny, entangled brakes; weary repining, till the hour came when it
could soar to its native birthplace, and find refuge from its ills in
promised Paradise.
His cell was indeed the haven of peace, compared to the turbid,
frightful atmosphere in which his Katherine lived. Edmund had not
returned; every attempt she made to communicate with Scotland or
Burgundy failed. She had passed a summer of wretchedness, nor
could the tender attention of Elizabeth soothe her. In spite of all, the
poor queen was almost happier than she had ever been; for many
years she had been "the cannibal of her own heart," devouring her
griefs in voiceless, friendless, solitude; her very joys, and they were
those of maternity, were locked up in her own bosom. It was the
birth of happiness to share her griefs with another; that other being
so gentle, so wise, and yet so sensitive, as the fair White Rose, who
concealed her own worst pains, to soothe those of one possessing
less fortitude and fewer internal resources than herself. Yet, while
thus she forgot herself, she never quitted in thought her Richard's
side; since the day she had seen him delivered over to ignominious
punishment, pale and ill, he was as it were stamped on every
outward object, an image placed between her and her thoughts; for,
while those were employed apparently on many things, he, in truth,
was their first, last, all-possessing idea, more engrossing than her
own identity. At one time she spent every effort to obtain an
interview with him in prison; and then she learned, through covert
means, of the plots carrying on in the Tower for his escape, while
the name of Warwick, mingling in the tale, roused the latent feelings
of Elizabeth. When the last, worst hour came, it was less replete
with pain than these miserable, unquiet days, and sleepless, tearful
nights; the never-ending, still-beginning round of hours, spent in
fear, doubt, and agonizing prayer.
After a restless night, the princess opened her eyes upon the day,
and felt even the usual weight at her heavy foreboding heart
increased. The tale was soon told of Richard's attempted escape and
failure: "What can be done?" "Nothing; God has delivered the
innocent into the hands of the cruel; the cruel, to whom mercy is as
unknown as, methinks, it is even to the awful Power who rules our
miserable lives." Such words, with a passionate burst of tears, burst
from the timid Elizabeth, whose crushed and burning heart even
arraigned the Deity for the agony she endured.
Katherine looked on her with sweet compassion, "Gentle one,"
she said, "what new spirit puts such strange speech into your
mouth, whose murmurings heretofore were those of piety?"
"It is a bad world," continued the queen; "and, if I become bad in
it, perchance I shall prosper, and have power to save: I have been
too mild, too self-communing and self-condemning; and the frightful
result is, that the sole being that ever loved me, perishes on the
scaffold. Both will perish, my White Rose, doubt it not. Your own
York, and my devoted only loved Edward. In his prison I have been
his dream; he breaks it, not to find liberty again, but Elizabeth.
Wretched boy! knows he not that he shall never again find her, who
roamed with a free spirit the woodland glades, talking to him of the
future, as of a scene painted to my will; faded, outworn, a degraded
slave—I am not Elizabeth."
"Did you know the dearest truth of religion," replied Katherine,
"you would feel that she, who has been tried, and come out pure, is
a far nobler being than—"
"I am not pure, not innocent; much you mistake me," said the
queen: "wicked, impious thoughts harbour in my heart, and pollute
my soul, even beyond the hope of mediation. Sometimes I hate my
beautiful children because they are his; sometimes in the dark hour
of night, I renounce my nuptial vow, and lend ready, willing ear to
fiendish whisperings which borrow Edward's voice. I court sleep,
because he wanders into my dreams: and—what do I say, what am I
revealing? Lady, judge me not: you married him you loved, fulfilling
thus the best destiny that can be given in this hard world to woman,
whose life is merely love. Though he perish in his youth, and you
weep for him for ever, hug yourself in the blessed knowledge that
your fate is bright as angels: for we reap celestial joys, when love
and duty, twined in sisterly embrace, take up their abode together
within us: and I—but Katherine, did you hear me?—They perish even
as I speak: his cruel heart knows no touch of mercy, and they
perish."
"They shall not, dearest," said York's White Rose; "it cannot be,
that so foul a blot darken our whole lives. No; there are words and
looks and tones that may persuade. Alas! were we more holy, surely
a miracle might be vouchsafed, nor this Pharaoh harden his heart for
ever."
All her love-laden soul beaming in her eyes, with a voice that
even thrilled him, though it moved him not, the White Rose
addressed Henry. She had yet to learn that a tyrant's smile is more
fatal than his frown: he was all courtesy, for he was resolved,
implacable; and she gathered hope from what proved to be the
parent of despair. She spoke with so much energy, yet simplicity, in
the cause of goodness, and urged so sweetly her debt of gratitude;
telling him, how from the altar of their hearts, prayers would rise to
the Eternal, fraught with blessings to him, that he encouraged her to
go on, that still he might gaze on lineaments, which nobility of soul,
the softest tenderness, and exalted belief in good, painted with
angelic hues. At length he replied that his council were examining
witnesses, that her cause depended on facts, on its own justice; that
he hoped report had blackened the crimes of these rash men; for
her sake he sincerely hoped their guilt, as it was detailed to him, had
been exaggerated.
For a moment the princess was unaware what all this jargon
might mean; his next words were more perspicuous. "Indeed, fair
dame, you must forget this coil: if I consent, for the welfare of my
kingdom, to sacrifice the queen's nearest relative, you also must
resign yourself to a necessity from which there is no appeal.
Hereafter you will perceive that you gain, instead of losing by an act
of justice which you passionately call cruelty: it is mercy, heaven's
mercy doubtless, that breaks the link between a royal princess and a
base-born impostor."
A sudden fear thrilled Katherine: "You cannot mean that he
should die," she cried; "for your own sake, for your children's sake,
on whom your sins will be visited, you cannot intend such murder:
you dare not; for the whole world would rise against the unchristian
king who sheds his kinsman's blood. All Europe, the secret hearts of
those nearest to you, your own knowledge, all proclaim your victim,
your rival—to be your brother, and will brand you a fratricide. You
are Lancaster, your ancestors were kings, you conquered this realm
in their name, and may reign over it in peace of conscience; but not
so may you destroy the duke of York. His mother avouched him, the
duchess of Burgundy acknowledges him; I was given to him by my
royal cousin, as to one of equal rank, and he upholds him. More than
all, his princely self declares the truth; nor can evil counsellors, nor
false chroniclers, stand between you and heaven and the avenging
world. You vainly seek to heap accusation on him you term
Crookback's head: time will affix the worst indelible stain upon you.
You cannot, will not slay him."
What were words to the fixed mind of Henry? A summer breeze,
whispering round a tempest-withstanding watch-towers—he might
grow chill at this echo of the fears his own heart spoke: but still he
smiled, and his purpose was unshaken. It became known that the
princes were to be arraigned for treason: first the unhappy,
misnamed Perkin was tried, by the common courts, in Westminster
Hall. When a despot gives up the execution of his revenge to the
course of law, it is only because he wishes to get rid of passing the
sentence of death upon his single authority, and to make the dread
voice of misnamed justice, and its executors, the abettors of his
crime.
When tragedy arrays itself in the formal robes of law, it becomes
more heart-rending, more odious, than in any other guise. When
sickness threatens to deprive us of one, round whom our heart-
strings have twined—we think inextricably—the skill of man is our
friend: if merciless tempest be the murderer, we feel that it obeys
One whose ways are inscrutable, while we strive to believe that they
are good. Groping in darkness, we teach our hearts the bitter lesson
of resignation. Nor do we hate nor blame the wild winds and
murderous waves, though they have drunk up a life more precious
and more beloved than words have power to speak. But that man's
authority should destroy the life of his fellow-man; that he who is
powerful, should, for his own security and benefit, drive into the
darksome void of the tomb one united to our sun-visited earth by
ties of tenderness and love—one whose mind was the abode of
honour and virtue; to know that the word of man could still bind to
its earthly tabernacle the being, voice, looks, thoughts, affections of
our all; and yet that the man of power unlocks the secret chamber,
rifles it of all its treasures, and gives us, for the living mansion of the
soul, a low, voiceless grave:—against such tyranny, the softest heart
must rebel; nor scarcely could religion in its most powerful guise, the
Catholic religion, which almost tore aside for its votaries the veil
between time and eternity, teach submission to the victims.
Days flowed on. However replete with event, the past is but a
point to us; however empty, the present pervades all things. And
when that present is freighted with our whole futurity, it is as an
adamantine chain binding us to the hour; there is no escape from its
omnipotence and omnipresence; it is as the all-covering sky. We
shut our eyes; the monster's hollow breath is on our cheek; we look
on all sides: from each his horrid eyes glare on us; we would sleep;
he whispers dreams. Are we intelligible? Will those possessed by
present tell us whether any bondage, any Bastille, can suggest ideas
of more frightful tyranny, misery, than the cruel present, which clings
to us, and cannot be removed.
"It is so; he attempted to escape, and was discovered; he is low
in his dungeon; his dear eyes are faint from disappointed hope. He
will be tried. Tyranny will go forth in a masque, and with hideous
antics fancy that she mantles with a decorous garb her blood-thirsty
acts. He will be condemned; but he will not die! not die! Oh no, my
Richard is immortal—he cannot die!"
"My royal cousin, when you gave me to my sweet love, and
pledged your word that in weal or woe I should be his; and I
promised myself still dearer things, to be the guardian angel and
tutelar genius of his life; and took pleasure, fond, foolish girl that I
was, in the anticipation of misfortunes that I should rob of all power
to hurt; no thought, among the many that strayed into futurity, told
me of this desertion, this impotence of effecting good. Alas! how
deaf and cruel man is: I could more easily tear asunder his prison-
walls with my hands, and break with my weak fingers his iron
chains, than move one, as liable to suffer and to die as even his
victim, to pity!"
Elizabeth listened pale and silent to these complaints—bitter as
they were, they were hushed to more heart-rending silence when
the hour of trial came—she should only pray to die, before the word
that spoke his condemnation met her ear. Accustomed as a princess
—a high-born and respected daughter of one most powerful, to be
obeyed and served; to find herself destitute of all influence, seemed
to place her in another planet—it was not men—not her fellow-
creatures that were around her; but fiends who wore the mask of
humanity. An uninhabited desert had not been more solitary than
this populous land, whose language she possessed not; for what is
language, if it reach not the heart and move it?
Richard, the wonder of the time, gathered courage as ill-fortune
pressed more hardly upon him; in the hour of trial he did not quail,
but stood in bold, fearless innocence before the men, whose
thoughts were armed against his life. He was not guilty, he said, for
he could not be guilty of treason. When the indictment was read
which treated him as a foreigner and an alien, the spirit of the
Plantagenet flashed from his eyes, and the very stony-hearted clerk,
who read, casting his regards on him, faltered and stammered,
overawed by a blaze of dignity, which, did we foster antique creeds,
we might believe was shed over him by some such spirit as imparted
divine majesty to the person of the king of Ithaca. Proudly and
silently Richard listened to the evidence on his trial. It touched only
on such points as would afterwards be most material for inculpation
of poor Warwick. In the end he was asked what he had to plead,
wherefore judgment should not pass upon him—but he was bid to
be brief, and to beware not to use any language derogatory to the
high and mighty prince Henry king of these realms. A smile curled
his lips at this admonition, and with even a playful air he said, "My
very good lord, I ask for nothing, save that a little mercy be
extended to the memory of my gracious uncle, my lord of
Gloucester, who was no child-murderer."
At the word he was interrupted, and sentence pronounced. As the
ignominious words were said, Richard, who from the beginning had
abstracted himself in prayer, so that his ears might be as little
wounded as possible, by an unconquerable impulse put his hand
where his sword might have been. Its absence and the clanking of
his chains recalled him to the truth, and he muttered the words, "O
basely murdered York!" in recollection of his unhappy grandfather, to
whose miserable fate he often recurred, as an example of suffering
and patience.
Thus ended the bitter scene; one he had long expected, for which
he had nerved himself. During nearly the whole, his look was as if he
were absent from it. But who could read the secrets of his heart,
while his impassive eyes and lips were no index to the agonies that
tortured it?
CHAPTER LVII
THE PRISON OF LUDGATE
So young to go
Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground!
To be nailed down into a narrow place;
To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again
Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost—
How fearful!
SHELLEY.
"Speak to me, lady, sister, speak! your frozen glances frighten me;
your fingers, as I touch them, have no resistance or life. Dearest and
best, do not desert me—speak but one word, my own White Rose."
Katherine raised her blue eyes heavenward: as if the effort were
too great, they fell again on the ground, as she said, in a voice so
low that Elizabeth could hardly catch the sound: "I must see him
once again before he dies."
"And you shall, dearest, I promise you. Cheer up, my love, not to
affright him by looks like these. Indeed you shall see him, and I will
also; he shall know that he has a sister's prayers, a sister's love.
Patience, sweet Kate, but a little patience."
"Would I could sleep till then!" replied the miserable wife: and she
covered her face with her hands, as if to shut out the light of day,
and sighed bitterly.
When our purposes are inflexible, how do insurmountable
obstacles break before our strong will; so that often it seems that we
are more inconstant than fortune, and that with perseverance we
might attain the sum of our desires. The queen, the weak, despised,
powerless queen, resolved to gratify this one last wish of her
beloved friend. Many a motive urged her to it; compassion, love, and
even self-interest. At first she almost despaired; while Richard
continued in the Tower it was impossible; but on the twenty-third of
November, two days before the destined termination of his fatal
tragedy, on the day of the trial of poor Warwick, he was removed to
the prison of Ludgate. And here, at dead of night, Henry, being
absent inspecting his new palace at Richmond, Elizabeth, timid,
trembling, shrinking now at the last—and Katherine, far too
absorbed in one thought to dream of fear, took boat at Westminster,
and were rowed along the dark, cold tide to Blackfriars. They were
silent; the queen clasped her friend's hand, which was chill and
deathlike. Elizabeth trembled, accustomed to hope for, to seek
refuge in her stronger mind, she felt deserted, now that she,
engrossed by passion, silent and still, the wife of the near prey of
death, could remember only that yet for a little while he was alive.
Their short voyage seemed endless; still the oars splashed, still the
boat glided, and yet they arrived not. Could it last for ever—with one
hope ever in view, never to know that he was dead? The thought
passed into Katherine's mind with the sluggish but absorbing
tenacity of intense grief, and at last possessed it so wholly, that it
was with a scream of fear that she found herself close to shore.
The necessity of motion restored Katherine to her presence of
mind, while it deprived the queen of the little courage she
possessed. Something was to be said and done: Elizabeth forgot
what; but Katherine spoke in a clear, though unnatural voice, and
followed their conductors with a firm step, supporting the faltering
queen. Yet she addressed her not; her energies were wound up to
achieve one thing; more than that it would have cost her life to
attempt. They reached the dark walls of the prison; a door was
unbarred, and they were admitted. The princess passed the
threshold with a quick step, as if overjoyed thus to be nearer her
wish. Elizabeth paused, trembled, and almost wished to turn back.
They crossed the high-walled court, and passed through several
dark galleries: it seemed as if they would never arrive; and yet both
started when they stopped at the door of a cell.
"Does his grace expect us?" asked Katherine.
The turnkey looked as not understanding; but their guides who
was the chaplain of the jail, answered,—
"He does not. Fearful that some impediment might intervene,
unwilling to disturb by a disappointed hope a soul so near its
heavenly home, I have told him nothing."
"Gently then," said Katherine, "let our speech be low."
The door opened, and displayed the sou of the proud, luxurious
Edward, sleeping on a wretched mattress, chained to the pavement.
The ladies entered alone. Katherine glided noiselessly to his side; her
first act was to bend down her cheek, till his breath disturbed the
ringlet that rested on it; thus to assure herself that life was within
his lips. Elizabeth fixed her earnest gaze on him, to discover if in
aught he reminded her of the blue-eyed, flaxen-haired bridegroom
of Anne Mowbray: he more resembled a picture of her father in his
early manhood; and then again her aunt the duchess of Burgundy,
whom she had seen just before king Edward's death. He lay there in
placid sleep; thought and feeling absent: yet in that form resided the
soul of Richard; a bright casket containing a priceless gem: no flaw
—no token of weakness or decay. He lived—and at a word would
come back from oblivion to her world of love. A few days and that
form would still exist in all its fair proportion. But veil it quick; he is
not there; unholy and false is the philosophy that teaches us that
lurid mockery was the thing we loved.
And now he woke, almost to joy; yet sadness succeeded quickly
to rapture. "My poor girl," he said, "weep not for me; weep for
thyself rather; a rose grafted on a thorn. The degraded and
disgraced claims no such sorrow."
Katherine replied by an embrace; by laying her beautiful head on
his bosom, and listening with forgetful, delicious ecstasy to the
throbbings of his beating heart.
"Be not unjust to thyself," said a soft, unknown voice, breaking
the silence of the lovers; "be not false to thy house. We are a
devoted race, my brother; but we are proud even to the last."
"This is a new miracle," cried the prince. "Who, except this
sainted one, will claim kindred with Tudor's enemy?"
"Tudor's wife; your sister. Do you not remember Elizabeth?"
As these words were said, Katherine, who appeared to have
accomplished her utmost wish, sat beside him, her arms around him,
her sweet head reposing, her eyes closed. Kissing her soft hair and
fair brow, York disentwined her clasped hands, and rose, addressing
the trembling queen:—
"My sister," he said, "you do a deed which calls for blessings from
heaven upon you and yours. Till now, such, was my unmanly spirit,
the stigma affixed to my name, the disgrace of my ignominious
death, made me odious to myself. The weakness of that thought is
past; the love of this sweetest sweet, and your kindness restore me.
Indeed, my sister, I am York—I am Plantagenet."
"As such," replied the queen, "I ask a boon, for which, selfish as I
am, I chiefly came; my brother will not deny me?"
"Trifler, this is vanity. I can give nothing."
"Oh, everything," exclaimed the lady; "years of peace, almost of
happiness, in exchange for a life of bitter loneliness and suffering.
You, my dearest lord, know the celestial goodness of that fair White
Rose; in adversity and peril you have known it;—I, amidst the cold
deceits of a court. She has vowed never to return to her native land,
to bear a questioned name among her peers; or perhaps to be
forced by her father to change it for one abhorred. Though she must
hate me as the wife of her injurer, yet where can she better be than
with your sister? She would leave me, for I am Tudor's queen; bid
her stay with, her lord's nearest kinswoman; tell her that we will
beguile the long years of our too young life with talk of you; tell her
that nowhere will she find one so ready to bless your name as poor
Elizabeth; implore her, ah! on my knees do I implore you to bid her
not to leave me, a dead-alive, a miserable, bereft creature, such, as
I was ere I knew her love."
"What say'st thou, sweet?" asked Richard; "am I yet monarch of
that soft heart? Will my single subject obey the crownless Richard?"
Katherine stretched out her hand to the queen, who was at York's
feet, in token of compliance: she could not speak; it was a mighty
effort to press the fingers of Elizabeth slightly; who said,—
"Before heaven and your dear lord, I claim your promise; you are
mine for ever."
"A precious gift, my Bess; was it not thus my infant lips called
you? I trust her to you; and so the sting of death is blunted. Yet let
not too fond a lingering on one passed away, tarnish the bright
hours that may yet be in store for her. Forget me, sweet ones; I am
nought; a vapour which death and darkness inhales—best
unremembered. Yet while I live I would ask one question—our
victim-cousin, Edward of Warwick?"
Elizabeth could no longer restrain her tears as she related, that
however weak Warwick might heretofore have seemed, he appeared
a Plantagenet on his trial. He disdained the insulting formalities of
law, where the bitter Lancastrian, Lord Oxford, was the interpreter of
justice; he at once declared himself guilty of plotting to put the
English crown on the head of his cousin, the duke of York. He was
quickly interrupted, and condemned to be beheaded.
"Generous, unhappy Warwick. Ah! is not life a misery, when all of
good, except ye two angelic creatures, die?"
The signal was now given that the interview must end. Elizabeth
wept. Katherine, still voiceless, clung closer to her husband; while he
nerved himself to support these gentle spirits with manly fortitude.
One long, affectionate kiss he pressed on the mouth of Katherine;
and as her roseate lips yet asked another, another and another
followed; their lives mingled with their breath.
"We meet in Paradise, mine only one," whispered York: "through
our Lord's mercy assuredly we meet there."
He unwound her arms; he placed her in those of Elizabeth,
"Cherish, preserve her. Bless thee, my sister; thee, and thy children.
They at least will, by my death, reign rightfully over this kingdom.
Farewell."
He kissed her hand, and then again the lifeless hand of his wife,
who stood a breathing statue. She had not spoken; no words could
utter her despair. Another moment, and their fair forms were gone;
the door of his cell was closed; and, but for the presence of the God
he worshipped, Richard was left alone to solitude and night.
CHAPTER LVIII
CONCLUSION
Love is too young to know what conscience is,

Yet who knows not. Conscience is born of Love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove.
SHAKSPEARE.
Time,[2] we are told by all philosophers, is the sole medicine for

grief. Yet there are immortal regrets which must endure while we
exist. Those who have met with one, with whose every feeling and
thought their thoughts and feelings were entwined, who knew of no
divided past, nor could imagine a solitary futurity, to them what balm
can time bring? Time, the giver of hours, months, and years, each
one how barren, contemptible, and heavy to bear to the bereft!
There was no consolation for Katherine, which could make her for
a moment forget that her present existence was but the lees of life,

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Introduction ix ALICE McDERMOTT 155

out the humorous criticism of contemporary WORKING A PASSAGE

by comic circumstances, the gentleman remained Willis venerated European aristocracy, a

alternative versions, half-truths, revisions and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis,

"I cannot charge

No, no, cousin,

TWO NOBLE KINSMEN.

Quick on the first greeting followed Warwick's question. "And,

Tempestuous Fortune hath spent all her spite,

The morning of the first of November dawned: a cheery day. Men

All rose to do the task He set to each,

THE PRISON OF LUDGATE

Love is too young to know what conscience is,

Time,[2] we are told by all philosophers, is the sole medicine for

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