Art for the Middle Classes: America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s

Art for the Middle Classes CYNTHIA LEE PAT TERSON Art for the Middle Classes AMERICA’S ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINES OF THE ...

Author: Cynthia Lee Patterson

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Art for the Middle Classes

CYNTHIA LEE PAT TERSON

Art for the Middle Classes AMERICA’S ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINES OF THE 1840S

UNIVERSIT Y PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI / JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us Funding for the color illustrations provided by the University of South Florida Polytechnic. The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2010 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2010 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patterson, Cynthia Lee. Art for the middle classes : America’s illustrated magazines of the 1840s / Cynthia Lee Patterson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-60473-736-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 9781-60473-737-0 (ebook) 1. Magazine illustration—United States—19th century. 2. Art and the middle class— United States—History—19th century. 3. Periodicals— Publishing—United States—History—19th century. 4. Middle class—Books and reading—United States— History—19th century. I. Title. II. Title: America’s illustrated magazines of the 1840s. NC975.P38 2010 741.6’52097309034—dc22 2010008412 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents vii

LIST OF FIGURES

ix

LIST OF COLOR PLATES

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

3

1. Introduction THE PHILADELPHIA PIC TORIALS AND AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE IN THE 1840S

18

2. “From the Burin of an American Artist” ARTISTIC PRODUC TION IN THE 1830S AND 1840S

37

3. “Superior Embellishments” INNOVATIONS TO THE GRAPHIC ARTS IN THE PHILADELPHIA PIC TORIALS

55

4. “The Fluttering Host of Many-Colored Competitors” REGIONAL IMITATORS IN THE NORTHEAST, WEST, AND SOUTH

87

5. “Illustration of a Picture” AMERICAN AUTHORS AND THE MAGAZINE EMBELLISHMENTS

119

6. “Engravings from Original Pictures” COMPE TING FOR AUDIENCES AND ORIGINAL ART

142

7. “A Mezzotint in Every Number” BAT TLING FOR EMBELLISHERS, BAT TLING OVER ART

160

8. Conclusion THE ASCENDANCY OF NEW YORK, AND MARKE T STRATIFICATION

169

NOTES

203

INDEX

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Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 6.3

Editor of the Lady’s Book, frontispiece, Godey’s, February 1850 5 Sarah J. Hale, frontispiece, Godey’s, December 1850 6 Editor of Graham’s Magazine, frontispiece, Graham’s, July 1850 7 Graham’s Magazine 1846, title cover 8 Edith, frontispiece, Peterson’s Ladies’ National Magazine, July 1849 10 Thomas Sully 33 Morton McMichael 39 Miss Eliza Leslie, frontispiece, Godey’s, January 1846 40 T. S. Arthur, frontispiece, Godey’s, January 1844 42 The Rustic Maid, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, May 1843 47 The City Belle, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, May 1843 48 Title cover, Boston Miscellany, April 1842 60 Title cover, The Eclectic Magazine, August 1845 67 The Culture and Preparation of Tea, frontispiece, Ladies’ Companion, August 1843 72 Doctor Sian Seng; Or, a Chinaman in Paris, Graham’s, March 1849, page 174 73 Storming of Palace Hill at the Battle of Monterey, frontispiece, Columbian, January 1847 78 The Penobscot Belle, frontispiece, Ladies’ Repository, January 1849 83 The Young Vermont Mathematician, frontispiece, Ladies’ Repository, April 1849 85 The Mother, frontispiece, Graham’s, July 1843 97 The Snake in the Grass, frontispiece, Sartain’s, October 1849 101 The Bud and the Blossom, frontispiece, Graham’s, August 1842 106 Steps to Ruin, I, frontispiece, The Union, November 1847 111 The Novel Reader, frontispiece, The Union, November 1847 113 Taking the Advantage, frontispiece, The Union, August 1847 115 The Rose and the Lily, frontispiece, Godey’s, September 1845 132 The Child and Lute, frontispiece, Graham’s, January 1845 133 Heroic Women of America/The Rescue, frontispiece, Godey’s, January 1847 135

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F IG U R ES

6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8.1 8.2

Fort MacKenzie, frontispiece, Graham’s, November 1847 138 Domestic Life among the Indians, frontispiece, Godey’s, June 1845 139 The Sportsman, frontispiece, Graham’s, October 1847 143 Mountain Airs and City Graces, fashion plate, Godey’s, October 1850 145 Godey’s 1848 Lady’s Book, title cover, Godey’s, January 1848 147 It Is I, frontispiece, Peterson’s, June 1849 149 The Lost Glove, frontispiece, The Union, April 1848 153 Taking the Queue, frontispiece, Godey’s, August 1849 161 The Burial of De Soto on the Mississippi, frontispiece, Sartain’s, October 1851 165

Color Plates Plate 1 Plate 2 Plate 3 Plate 4 Plate 5 Plate 6 Plate 7

Croome’s Vase, frontispiece, Godey’s, January 1844 Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature & Art, title cover, July 1850 Fashion plate, Graham’s, November 1841 The Pets, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, March 1843 Grandpapa’s Pet, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, April 1843 Belisarius, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, August 1843 Thirty-one Coloured Embossed Medallion Seals, frontispiece, Godey’s, December 1843 Plate 8 Lace and Birds, frontispiece, Graham’s, January 1842

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Acknowledgments Financial support for this project was provided by a number of sources. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) funded the project in its early stages. My thanks to Linda Shopes at PHMC, and to Jonathan Stayer, Linda Reis, and G. Jerry Ellis at the Pennsylvania State Archives for valuable guidance selecting collections and for providing digital images. A summerlong fellowship through the Smithsonian Institutions allowed me to access collections at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), the National Museum of American History (NMAH), and the Archives of American Art. I want to thank Wendy Wick Reaves at NPG, for her continued support as I revised the book manuscript. Priscilla Wood (now retired as head librarian of the Costume Collection Library at NMAH), carved out precious space in her already cramped oﬃce for me to catalog the contents of many of the periodicals in this study. Also thanks to Joan Boudreau in Graphic Arts at NMAH. William Truettner read the case study of Thomas Sully and pronounced my argument “convincing,” for which I was grateful. A special thanks belongs to Helena Wright, Head Curator of Graphic Arts at NMAH, who provided invaluable guidance during my research, and read and commented on the book manuscript. A crucial monthlong fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) allowed me to catalogue periodicals from Boston, New York, Cincinnati, and the South, and bolstered my argument about the market supremacy of the Philadelphia pictorials in the 1840s. A special thanks to Georgia B. Barnhill, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, and director of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC), for encouraging my work at AAS, and most especially for reading and providing feedback on the manuscript. Georgia also introduced me to Katharine Martinez, John Sartain scholar and the Herman and Joan Suit Librarian of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University, who also provided much-appreciated feedback. Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library provided two separate monthlong residential research fellowships—the ﬁrst while this project was in early stages, the latter as the book manuscript neared completion. I was grateful to make the acquaintance of Eleanor McD. Thompson before she retired. Her systematic card cataloguing of the work of artists and engravers held in the

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AC KNOWL E DGME NTS

Winterthur collections spurred me to create my own digital databases of the artwork in these magazines. Jeanne Solensky in manuscripts and Dorothy Higgins in rare books, cheerfully assisted, while Gary Kulik introduced me to other scholars and archivists, chief among them James Green at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where I later spent several weeks over two summers adding to my databases. Thanks also to Helena Richardson and Emily Guthrie for their prompt assistance retrieving materials during my second stay at Winterthur, and to Rosemary Krill for organizing the lively Thursday roundtable lunches. The University of South Florida Polytechnic provided two summer research fellowships that permitted my return to northern archives. A special thanks belongs to Judith Ponticell, Associate Vice Provost of Academic Aﬀairs at USF Polytechnic, for her understanding that an interdisciplinary project of this nature takes time to bring to completion. Thanks also to Mark Greenberg, director of the Florida Studies Center at the University of South Florida Tampa campus library, who provided permissions to reproduce engravings from bound periodicals housed in the USF Library Special Collections. My early writing-group partner and dear friend, Wendy Burns-Ardolino, continued to be my primary cheerleader, long after her ﬁrst book was published. Other writing partners who provided much-needed feedback at various stages include Chris Sutch, Katy Razzano, Elena Cardenas, Katja Hering, and Stephanie Mayer Heydt. Likewise, my mentor, Barbara Melosh, continued her encouragement, even after leaving the profession to become a Lutheran minister. My daughters Hailey and Caitlin managed to grow from exasperating teenagers into successful college students and productive citizens, in spite of my distracted parenting during the process of researching and writing this book. My mother, Alda E. Nan, believed absolutely that this book project would come to fruition, even when I remained less hopeful. Although she did not live to see the book published, her pride in my work sustained me when I wanted to give up. I wrote this book imagining her as my audience, and I dedicate this book to her memory.

Art for the Middle Classes

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1 Introduction THE PHILADELPHIA PIC TORIALS AND AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE IN THE 1840S

In January 1844, publisher Louis A. Godey oﬀered to his “fair patrons” of The Lady’s Book a frontispiece engraving of a ﬂower garland–draped vase surrounded by books and a decorative fan prepared by the artist, William Croome (see plate 1). Godey used his editorial column that month to remind his “kind and constant readers” of the tremendous expense of providing them with the “numerous beautiful engravings” and the work of the “ﬁrst writers in America.” Importantly, Godey greets Croome as an artist familiar to both the publisher and his readers: “Our talented friend, Mr. Croome, has furnished an embellishment for the present number of the Lady’s Book, which aﬀords an additional evidence of his exquisite taste and skill in design.” Godey continues his praise of Croome by noting that the artist’s depictions of historical subjects are as adept as his “beautiful creations of Flora.” Godey concludes, “We are gratiﬁed that our magazine should aﬀord a ﬁeld for the display of his brilliant and versatile talent” (The Lady’s Book, January 1844, 56). The following holiday season, for his January 1845 issue, Louis A. Godey oﬀered another Croome design, an exquisite hand-colored frontispiece engraving entitled Bowl of Fruit. In his “Editor’s Book Table” column at the end of this issue, he explains: “By the aid of our accomplished friend Croome, we are enabled to treat our friends to a dessert of fruit, served up in a cutglass fruit-basket in a style suitable to the season. . . . It gives us great pleasure to present so rich a dessert, and in doing it, we hail our friends, far and near, with the old-fashioned but heartfelt wish of a MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR” (“Editor’s Table,” January 1845, 48).

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P HI LADE L P HIA PIC TORIAL S A N D AM E R IC A N V ISUA L CULT UR E, 1840S

Godey’s 1844 and 1845 New Year’s greetings to his subscribers oﬀer a window into an important venue for the circulation of original American art in the middle decades of the nineteenth century: the illustrated monthly magazines.1 A parsing of Godey’s greetings introduces the major themes underlying this study. First, Godey’s description of Croome’s engravings indicates that Godey has commissioned them exclusively for publication in his magazine. Unlike earlier illustrated magazines that frequently featured secondhand plates reproducing the work of Continental artists, Godey’s featured engravings of original American artwork, created exclusively for the magazine. In referring to artist William Croome as his “talented” and “accomplished” friend, Godey therefore hints at his own assumption of the role of patron and promoter of American art. Second, Godey refers to his readers as his “over thirty thousand friends,” establishing both the size of his subscription list in the mid-1840s, and Godey’s established editorial persona—one that assumes cozy familiarity with his readers. This strategy of constructing a familiar editorial persona would prove critical to Godey’s success in staving oﬀ the increased competition his magazine encountered from other illustrated American monthlies in the 1840s, a decade in which Philadelphia surpassed all other cities in monthly magazine circulation.2 Third, in describing the “richness” of the dessert, Godey references not only the artistic beauty and lifelike verisimilitude of the fruit, but the implicit value of this engraved and colored plate as a desirable home decoration. In oﬀering the plate as a Christmas “treat” for his “friends,” Godey’s comments here underscore another major theme in this study—the importance of these magazines in establishing American periodical art engravings as desirable and aﬀordable middle-class commodities in the 1840s.3 By 1845, Godey’s Lady’s Book had become one of the leading illustrated monthly magazines of the era. Louis Godey (see ﬁg. 1.1) established his Philadelphia magazine in 1830, and had acquired his most important asset, editor Sarah Josepha Hale (see ﬁg 1.2), in 1837 with the purchase of her Ladies’ Magazine, a Boston contemporary.4 During the 1830s, Godey steadily introduced improvements to both the quality of paper, type, and printing ink, and to the literary content of the magazine. For the decade of the 1830s, Godey’s Lady’ Book remained relatively unchallenged as America’s leading illustrated monthly magazine, featuring the latest innovations to the graphic arts, as his presentation of the Christmas present engraving, Croome’s Vase, indicates. By decade’s end, however, Godey faced challengers.

FIGURE 1.1 Editor of the Lady’s Book, frontispiece, Godey’s, February 1850.

FIGURE 1.2 Sarah J. Hale, frontispiece, Godey’s, December 1850. Painted by W. B. Chambers and Engraved expressly for Godey’s Lady’s Book by W. G. Armstrong.

FIGURE 1.3 Editor of Graham’s Magazine, frontispiece, Graham’s, July 1850. Painted by T. B. Read, engraved by W. G. Armstrong. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

FIGURE 1.4 Graham’s Magazine 1846, title cover. Engraved Expressly for Graham’s Magazine by J[ames] W. Steel, from a Model by J[ohn] McPherson.

PHILA D E LPHIA PIC TOR IA LS A N D AM E R I C AN V I S UAL C U LT U R E, 1840S

In 1839, twenty-six-year-old George R. Graham (see ﬁg. 1.3), newly admitted to the bar, abandoned the law profession to buy a struggling Philadelphia monthly magazine, the Casket. Within a year, he also purchased Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, combining the two into one publication he titled Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine (the Casket and Gentleman’s United). While Graham changed the title several times over the years as he sought to appeal to varying audiences, he nonetheless developed the magazine into the leading literary monthly of the 1840s. According to Frank Luther Mott, the great historian of this literature, Graham’s became “one of the three or four most important magazines in the United States.” In fact, in Mott’s words, “in the ﬁve years 1841–1845 [Graham’s] displayed a brilliance which has seldom been matched in American magazine history” (I, 344).5 Like Louis Godey, George Graham also sought to feature innovative and uniquely “American” embellishments, as in this cover from 1846, done up in a style to resemble bank note engraving (see ﬁg. 1.4). Three years later, in 1842, Charles J. Peterson, a partner of Graham’s in another publishing venture, the Saturday Evening Post, plotted with Graham to publish a competitor to Godey’s popular three-dollar women’s magazine. Peterson and Graham also engaged the writing and editorial services of a well-known woman writer, Ann S. Stephens, who had aided the latter in editing Graham’s. Like Graham, Peterson would pitch his magazine to varying audiences over the decade of the 1840s, though initial publication presented the magazine as written by women, for women. Although the new magazine featured fewer pages than Godey’s (thirtysix to Godey’s usual forty-eight to seventy-two), Peterson prided himself in featuring a minimum of three engravings in each issue to Godey’s two, and in oﬀering reduced price incentives: a dollar twenty-ﬁve a year for a club of eight subscribing simultaneously (Mott, II, 307).6 As Peterson boasted in the April 1843 issue, “In four numbers we have published eighteen pictorial embellishments. Not even the three dollar Magazines have equalled this” (“Editor’s Table,” 128). Peterson favored the costlier mezzotint engravings over line engravings, particularly later in the decade to illustrate the serial novels his magazine especially promoted.7 However, like Godey, he endeavored to oﬀer novel fashion plates as well, like the colored lithograph of Edith—which performed triple duty as frontispiece and fashion plate for July 1849, and as an illustration for a continuing series “Hints for Equestrians” (see ﬁg. 1.5). In January 1843 a small but attractive monthly entitled Miss Leslie’s Magazine: Home Book of Fashion, Literature and Domestic Economy entered the Philadelphia magazine fray, ﬁnanced by the “ample means” of publisher Morton

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FIGURE 1.5 Edith, frontispiece, Peterson’s Ladies’ National Magazine, July 1849, Wagner & McGuigan, Lithographers.

PHILA D E LPHIA PIC TOR IA LS A N D AM E R I C AN V I S UAL C U LT U R E, 1840S

McMichael, and edited by popular recipe book and gift book editor, Eliza Leslie.8 Miss Leslie was sister to the painter Charles Leslie, and related by marriage to the Carey publishing ﬁrm of Philadelphia (publishers of The Gift, the oftpraised annual edited by Leslie). With a commitment to push magazine embellishment to new artistic heights, McMichael and Leslie directly challenged the artistic pretensions of competitors Godey’s, Graham’s, and Peterson’s. Late in the decade, John Sartain, already the leading mezzotinter of his era, also threw his hat into the magazine publishing ring, assuming ownership of The Union Magazine in 1848. Sartain had engraved for Godey’s, Graham’s, Peterson’s, and Miss Leslie’s (as well as other venues) before buying the Union, relocating it from New York to Philadelphia, and renaming it Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art. Like Graham’s, the Union targeted an audience of both men and women from its inception. Like Godey’s, Peterson’s, and particularly Miss Leslie’s, John Sartain sought to make the “embellishments” in his magazine represent the ﬁnest in original American artwork, as this chromolithographed title page indicates (see Plate 2). Additionally, following both Godey and Graham, Sartain frequently commissioned short stories and sketches to illustrate the engravings, rather than the other way around. These ﬁve monthly magazines—Godey’s, Graham’s, Peterson’s, Miss Leslie’s and the Union—referred to in this study collectively as “the Philadelphia Pictorials,” helped place Philadelphia at the artistic and publishing center of the nation in the 1840s.9 Boston and Cincinnati launched New England and western regional magazines to challenge Philadelphia’s supremacy, though most were short-lived. The southern cities of Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans also hosted literary magazines, but apparently lacked both the printing technologies and the ﬁnancial backing necessary to include the expensive illustrations, at least in this decade. By decade’s end Charles Peterson would write nervously, about the Harper Brothers Publishing House of New York, “What will they be at next?” (“Editor’s Table,” The Ladies’ National Magazine, January 1848, 52). For the decade of the 1840s, however, Philadelphia reigned supreme in the publishing industry, and the city’s monthly magazines brought particular “distinction” to Philadelphia’s periodical press (Mott, I, 378). These magazines served up to middle-class audiences a steady diet of ﬁction, poetry, travel literature, essays, and embellishments. The full-page embellishments in particular, printed separately on specially designed paper and tipped in to the magazines, often at the front or back, were clearly designed for pulling out and framing (Mott, I, 580). The 1840s saw advances in the technologies of reproduction that led to a proliferation of images in monthly magazines that had previously relied primarily

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on printed text. Although some of the illustrated periodicals—Godey’s for instance—came to be known for the hand-colored fashion plates,10 Peterson’s, Graham’s, and the Union, in keeping with their wide range of topics and multiple intended audiences, also displayed engraved portraits, historical and religious scenes, landscapes and wildlife, rural and urban scenes, images of Native Americans, and other innovative embellishments. During its one year with Eliza Leslie at the helm, Miss Leslie’s speciﬁcally featured a series of novelty embellishments, touting them as “American ﬁrsts.” These magazines were extremely popular and widely circulated in their era. The Union achieved a circulation of 25,000 in its heyday, and Graham’s boasted a circulation of 40,000 in 1842—at a time when the U.S. population hovered around 17,000,000.11 By 1850, Godey advertised a print run in excess of 70,000, at a time when the American Art-Union membership was only 16,500.12 Several scholars have pointed to the importance of the embellishments in contributing to the success of these magazines.13 Yet surprisingly little scholarly work has been done speciﬁcally on these magazines, and even less work explicitly targeting the embellishments.14 The wide circulation of these magazines argues for their importance to the circulation and democratization of American art. Yet nineteenth-century American art history survey texts and monographs have largely overlooked the importance of these materials to the history of American art.15 This project redresses this scholarly neglect by focusing speciﬁcally on the engraved matter in these magazines, and the ways in which these embellishments functioned as cultural artifacts in the literary and artistic marketplace of the 1840s. The Philadelphia pictorials reached a widespread market of readers and viewers who lacked access to the print shops, art galleries, and public exhibitions available to citizens in the larger seaboard cities. My primary claim in this study is that the large readership and widespread distribution of these magazines argues for their centrality to a comprehensive narrative of nineteenth-century American art. These magazines made a signiﬁcant contribution to the production, distribution, and consumption of American art by placing engraved copies of original American artwork in the hands of an eager middle-class reading/viewing public. Further, both the textual and artistic contributions to these magazines remunerated the authors, editors, artists, and engravers associated with these magazines adequately enough that they too could entertain middle-class aspirations. With the digital availability of Harper’s Weekly, Godey’s (through Accessible Archives), and the Library of Congress American Memory collection, and the Making of America collections at Cornell and the University of Michigan,

PHILA D E LPHIA PIC TOR IA LS A N D AM E R I C AN V I S UAL C U LT U R E, 1840S

American periodicals from the 1850s and 1860s (and the full-page embellishments contained therein) are now much more widely available to scholars. Moreover, with ProQuest’s 2000 release of the American Periodical Series Online (APS Online), scholars can now search through these digital databases for textual materials from the magazines covered in this study (save a few magazines discussed in this book that were never scanned or digitized). Two challenges remain for scholars interested in these magazines—the ﬁrst an issue of access, and the second an issue of reproductive technologies. Access to the commercial databases is limited to those institutions (and the scholars fortunate enough to be employed at these institutions) that can aﬀord the steep subscription and/or purchase prices for these products. This restriction severely limits access to commercially produced digital archives. The reproduction issue presents equal challenges: unfortunately, for visual culture scholars and art historians, ProQuest, the largest of the commercial databases, digitized materials not from original print copies of the magazines and newspapers (which would likely have proved a logistical nightmare) but from formats utilized for the original microﬁlm APS series. The full-page engravings appear just as murky in the ProQuest online database as they were in the earlier microﬁlm format. That leaves scholars interested in the visual material in these magazines where they started—forced to consult print copies of these magazines in limited archives across the country. I suspect that poor microﬁlm quality, coupled with limited access to print archival holdings of full runs of these magazines, has deterred many scholars from a sustained treatment of the visual images in these magazines. The limited access to highquality visual reproductions of the embellishments in these magazines argues further for the importance of this project in recuperating their place in the history of American art and culture. Most magazines prior to this era tended to target an audience primarily either of men or of women. In fact, most magazines published prior to the 1840s featured work written by men, for men. Louis Godey departed from this trend in assuming the helm of the Lady’s Book in 1830, and for over forty years directed his energies and his magazine to meeting the needs of his “fair readers” (Mott I, 580-94). In Graham’s, Peterson’s, Miss Leslie’s, and the Union we have examples of periodicals that not only published work by both male and female authors, but targeted an audience of both men and women as well.16 This study adds to our understanding of nineteenth-century reading practices by focusing on magazines that addressed both male and female readers.17 Because most historians and literary critics tend to homogenize the artwork in discussions of these magazines, I attempt in this study to tease out

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subtle diﬀerences between them. To do so, I focus on the strategies employed by editors and publishers to target their imagined audience(s) through their selection and promotion of the magazines’ embellishments and embellishers. This project thus also serves as a case study for periodical publishers’ promotional practices in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to targeting mostly male readers, most magazines published prior to the 1840s featured reprints lifted from other, often European sources, and rarely attributed authorship.18 The Philadelphia pictorials not only boasted “entirely original” contents, but also prominently published the names of contributing authors, artists, and engravers. While Godey’s prided itself on being “for the ladies,” and mostly “by the ladies,” Graham’s, Peterson’s, and the Union featured a fairly equal division of male and female authors. Godey’s, Peterson’s, Miss Leslie’s, and the Union all featured women editors, although both the artistic and publishing functions of these magazines were controlled exclusively by men.19 The generous pay to contributors instituted by George Graham and Louis Godey prompted other magazines to follow suit, and in the 1840s magazine writing and embellishing became, for the ﬁrst time, a way to earn a modest but respectable living. Union editor Caroline Kirkland, for example, relied on her writing and editing for the magazine to support herself and four children after the sudden death of her husband.20 In addition to Kirkland, Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Frances S. Osgood, among others, also wrote out of ﬁnancial necessity as well as literary ambition. While some recent scholarly work has been done on some of these writers and editors, and the canonical writers certainly have received their due, no previous study has attempted to focus primarily on the artistic matter and to treat these magazines in relationship to one another in the literary and artistic marketplace of the 1840s.21 In particular, this study looks more carefully at the economics of production and distribution—examining how publishers managed to stay in business in an era before widespread reliance on paid advertising, and at how contributors (authors, editors, artists, and engravers) negotiated with publishers to earn a living.22 The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion in textual and visual materials, as improved technologies of reproduction, coupled with increased literacy and improved methods of distribution (canals, railroads, turnpikes), permitted more widespread dissemination of print and visual media. The American reading public in the major cities faced a cornucopia of available reading material, including occasional pamphlets, daily and weekly newspapers, monthly magazines, gift books, annuals, serialized

PHILA D E LPHIA PIC TOR IA LS A N D AM E R I C AN V I S UAL C U LT U R E, 1840S

novels, and books.23 Additionally, with the rise of the American Art-Union and other art organizations, mass-reproduced engravings of both the work of European masters and original American artists became widely available to the urban citizenry.24 In major metropolitan areas like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, American audiences faced a dizzying display of visual culture, in newly opened museums, on billboards, in storefront displays, banners, daguerreotype studios, street signs, and even on banknotes.25 Yet these magazines were the ﬁrst to target a national reading audience of moderate means, and to penetrate widely to markets outside the eastern seaboard cities, bringing “original” American art into the hands of ordinary citizens.26 In towns too small to support art galleries and print shops, middle-class readers who could not aﬀord the more expensive annuals and gift books could nonetheless sample the latest in American art via the pullout embellishments in the monthly magazines.27 While evidence of the reading and viewing habits of ordinary citizens is notoriously diﬃcult to uncover, we can analyze the intended audiences of these magazines by examining the editorial matter. We can also examine the manuscript evidence of the artists, engravers, authors, and editors of these magazines to determine how the producers of these cultural products also positioned themselves as consumers of these cultural goods. This study is organized both chronologically and thematically. To sketch a more detailed picture of the economics of production of the embellishments for these magazines, I consulted the previously underutilized correspondences of some of the artists, engravers, authors, editors, and publishers working primarily in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston in this era (chapter 2). This material proves particularly useful in establishing a sense of the economics of artistic production in the mid- to late 1830s and running through the mid-1840s. Focusing on 1843, a pivotal year in Philadelphia publishing, I demonstrate the link between innovations in engraving and printing technologies, showcased by the Franklin Institute, and publishers’ eﬀorts to promote both the beauty and utility of their art engravings as aﬀordable middle-class commodities (chapter 3). Chapter 4 examines a handful of regional imitators published in Boston, New York, and Cincinnati. While most of the artists, engravers, and publishers were men, well-known American authors, both men and women, also contributed to the periodicals. Chapter 5 examines the relationship between the textual material submitted by American writers to “illustrate” the engravings, and the engravings themselves. The large national readership attained by the Philadelphia pictorials, particularly Godey’s and Graham’s, set these magazines apart from some of

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their regional imitators. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the heated competition between Godey’s, Graham’s, Sartain’s, and, to a lesser extent, Peterson’s, in the mid- to late 1840s. Key issues driving this competition for artists, engravers, and audiences included: “What is art, and, speciﬁcally, what is American art?” and “Who should control what circulates in the magazines under the banner of ‘American art’?” Chapter 6 frames this competition around audience address and the competition for original artwork from Philadelphia’s best-known painters. Chapter 7 extends this analysis to competition for the services of the leading engravers, and to a discussion of the magazines’ art columns as important sites for examining the battle between publishers over deﬁning and evaluating American art at the end of the 1840s. Any study that attempts treating over a decade’s worth of content for several monthly magazines risks ﬂattening out the often shifting and competing voices both within an individual periodical and between these periodicals. Reading back and forth through monthly issues of these magazines is like looking through a constantly shifting kaleidoscope. Calculating an average of 60 pages of text and 3 full-page engravings per month (using Peterson’s 36 pages at the low end, and the Union’s 100+ pages at the upper), this study covers well over 200,000 pages of text and over 2,000 full-page engravings. I catalogued the contents in a fully searchable database, and read or skimmed approximately one-quarter of the reading matter (concentrating on the editorial matter and engraving illustrations), and examined nearly all of the visual material (in some cases full-page engravings had been removed from the bound volumes I examined). Thus, although this study is fairly comprehensive it is also necessarily selective, and focuses primarily on these periodicals as cultural and artistic artifacts. Any number of historically accurate narratives could be generated from a study of these magazines and their producers. Most of the previous work done on these magazines only sampled the engraved material, while I have tried to analyze the entire scope of this artwork over the sweep of a decade. A strictly literary study of these magazines might also overlook the materiality of these cultural products. The volumes in my own collection range from unbound single issues to bound half-year volumes (consisting of six consecutive monthly issues, either January to June or July to December), to one-year double-volume editions ﬁnely bound and embossed with the owner’s name on the cover. In the ﬁrst issue of a six-month volume, publishers provided an “Index” to the preceding volume. This “Index” and a “Preface” generally precedes the printed material in bound volumes and serves as a table of contents.

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The Philadelphia pictorials oﬀered a wide array of reading and visual matter. Expensive bindings and personalized bookplates indicate that some owners treasured this reading material as cherished possessions that served not only as continuing entertainment and enlightenment but also as markers of social status. In a young country increasingly concerned with deﬁning itself in opposition to its English and Continental predecessors, the Philadelphia pictorials oﬀer one site for studying the emergence of a distinctly American literature and art. To understand the importance of the artwork to the ﬁnancial success of these magazines, it is necessary ﬁrst to understand the economics of artistic production of these images, and that will be the focus of the next chapter.

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2 “ From the Burin of an American Artist” ARTISTIC PRODUC TION IN THE 1830S AND 1840S

In his “Editor’s Table” for the March 1839 issue of his magazine, Louis A. Godey promises to oﬀer his fair readers, besides the monthly color fashion plate, “a beautiful engraving on steel,” either a portrait, landscape, or historical subject. Then, in a special column entitled “OUR PLATES” published two months later in the May issue, he promises that these steel engravings will be “always from the burin of an American artist.” Additionally, he notes his plans to provide two extra steel plates each year, of either an American landscape, or “some celebrated literary character,” observing that this will bring the total to “TWENTY SIX Engravings on Steel in a year, besides Wood Cuts of the ﬁnest kind, Embroidery and Music.” Godey also uses this column as an opportunity to remind his readers of the costs incurred to bring them these plates, and urges them to pay their subscriptions. In return, he promises them “several original pictures from our own collection” to be engraved on steel in the year ahead. In August 1839, Godey boldly informs his readers that he employs twenty “lady colourists” year-round at a cost of three thousand dollars, just to color his fashion plates. In the same column devoted to “PLATES OF FASHION,” he also sniﬀs disparagingly at the uncolored wood fashion plates oﬀered by a “contemporary,” and announces he will demonstrate the diﬀerence by oﬀering two fashion plates in the September issue, one colored and one uncolored, so that his readers can compare. By the opening of the decade of the 1840s, Louis Godey’s magazine was the leading illustrated monthly of the era.1 As noted in the previous chapter, Godey had launched his magazine a decade earlier, eventually buying

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out a smaller Boston rival, the Ladies’ Magazine, and absorbing editor Sarah Josepha Hale into the purchase. Hale, widowed in 1822 with ﬁve children to support, had launched her Ladies’ Magazine in 1828, two years before Godey. No fan of the fashion plates that Godey knew his readers prized, Hale maintained a steadfast commitment to the literary matter in the magazine, using her editorial pen tirelessly to promote women’s education. With her eyes ﬁrmly on the literary matter, Godey could indulge his interest in American art. Godey’s interest in obtaining the best in American art for his magazine’s embellishments helped to promote the work of a growing number of ﬂedgling American artists and engravers. As Wendy Wick Reaves points out, art historians have tended to neglect or denigrate “pictorial material of this type” because it was traditionally held to be “commercial art, a popular art, and frequently a derivative art” (Reaves speaks speciﬁcally here of portrait prints). However, Reaves continues, “these pictures must not be overlooked as legitimate works of art” because they were “considered as such in their own time.”2 The artists, engravers, designers, and publishers of the Philadelphia pictorials understood the embellishments prepared for the magazines as uniquely “American art” forms, and this chapter and subsequent ones treat them as such. The consumers of these images also treated them as art. As Lawrence Levine and Alan Wallach have argued, before the Civil War American consumers failed to make the distinctions between “high” and “low” art that would be institutionalized in the twentieth century.3 In the 1840s, for the ﬁrst time in our nation’s history, American artists produced and distributed, via the embellishments oﬀered in the Philadelphia pictorials, art intended for a widespread middlebrow audience. These magazines thus serve as a fruitful site for studying the production, promotion, and consumption of cultural artifacts that served as markers of class aﬃliation as well. In this and subsequent chapters, I make several interrelated claims. First, I argue that the periodicals served as an important vehicle for the widespread distribution of American art—in conjunction with, yet surpassing in importance, the Art-Unions, the gift books, the annuals, illustrated books, exhibitions, and art and print galleries, just to name the most obvious corollary distribution sites. I also assert that the periodicals encouraged the production of a uniquely American art—by commissioning original art works directly for the magazines. Because the artists and engravers contributing to these periodicals aspired to middle-class comfort, they frequently adapted their artistic skills to a variety of genres and media—concerned less with critical reception of their work than with simply making a moderate living. With this in mind,

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I oﬀer at the end of this chapter a brief rereading of the work of Thomas Sully that accounts for his contributions to the periodicals. Finally, I argue that the periodicals, as a site of cultural production and consumption, operated on a cultural register between “ﬁne art” and “commercial art” as these terms become deﬁned by the subsequent art historical literature. Publishers cast the magazine embellishments as costly but aﬀordable commodities, thereby encouraging consumption of art by and for an emerging middle class. Middleclass magazine readers could own artwork, albeit mass-produced engraved prints, created expressly for their consumption. In making American art widely available through the pullout art engravings, the producers and consumers of these magazines helped democratize and commodify American art in the process. Louis Godey clearly understood the appeal for his audiences of owning original artwork—he himself was an avid collector of American paintings. As noted earlier, he marshaled the editorial spaces in his magazine speciﬁcally to herald the original American art featured in Godey’s. However, Godey was not the only publisher to make such claims. George Graham also promised as much in February 1844, during the mid-decade “golden years” of Graham’s Magazine: The leading embellishment in the January Number was from an original picture, painted expressly for us by Thomas Sully, Esq., and in the present number we give an original from Rothermel, a young Philadelphia artist who is rapidly rising in his profession. We have now in the hands of engravers several original pictures, by Chapman, Sully, Leutze, Conaroe [sic], Croome, and other well-known artists; and, if these elegant prints are properly appreciated, we shall adopt at once the plan of having all our pictures painted expressly for this Magazine. In the meanwhile, gentlemen critics, please remember that ours is a magazine of art as well as literature—that we are furthering the interests of a large number of artists as well as writers—and judge us accordingly. (Graham’s, February 1844, 96) By “properly appreciated,” George Graham alludes to the problem inherent in making a promise of this nature: in the absence of signiﬁcant advertising revenues, publishers relied on maintaining and increasing a large subscription base to pay for the costly embellishments. Earlier in the column quoted from above, entitled “Our Portrait Gallery,” Graham promises that “every writer of note” would be pictured in the magazine, and defends “light

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magazines” of this kind against their critics. He writes, “It has become fashionable among a certain set—a very small one—to sneer at the ‘light magazines,’ as if the literature of a young and growing nation must be heavy to be good, or would be popular if it were.” He admits that like many, he would like to see “a high-toned magazine with ﬁfty thousand readers . . . and without the aid of pictures,” but opines, “the man who expects it now is a quarter of a century ahead of his time.” In so stating, Graham not only betrays his own ambivalence about the pictorial matter in the magazines, but also obviously addresses critics who panned the pictorials both for their light literary content and for their reliance on “embellishments” to sell subscriptions. “Embellishment,” after all, implies something frivolous, extraneous to, and in counterpoint to the serious literary matter of a magazine. Here Graham echoes a mistrust of “pictures” reminiscent of an earlier Republican dismissal of art as superﬂuous and associated with aristocratic pretensions.4 However, Graham’s acknowledgment of the importance of the artwork also signals a shift in cultural attitudes; by pointing out the service his magazine performs in promoting the work of ﬂedgling American artists, he assumes his readers (and critics) agree that art is “useful” as a method of promulgating American values. In refusing the older Republican model of embellishments as frivolous, he also stakes out the turf he hopes his magazine will occupy: oﬀering “exquisite original engravings from drawings by our own painters” and reading matter from a “host of young writers” targeting “a young people panting for a literature of their own.”

THE ECONOMICS OF ARTISTIC PRODUC TION IN THE 1830S AND 1840S As several scholars of periodical literature have noted, echoing the publishers and editors themselves, illustrations were expensive. However, as Mott notes, “all the really prosperous magazines printed many plates” (I, 519–21).5 Payments to engravers generally did not include separate fees to the artists who prepared the original designs upon which the engravings were based.6 Some publishers, like Godey, bought original paintings for their private collections, then loaned them out to engravers to prepare plates for their publications. In some cases, engravers also prepared original designs at the request of the publishers. In other cases, copyists worked from original paintings to produce watercolor reductions of originals. More frequently, publishers engaged

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an artist for the design, an engraver to prepare the plates, and frequently, the additional services of a printer to prepare the full-page embellishment, which would then be inserted into the book or periodical. Accordingly, the illustrations were so costly that sometimes publishers paid more for the plates than for the written content. Sartain reported spending $34,592.75 on the magazine in 1849, of which $7,174 went to the literary department, including editorial salaries, indicating an additional $27,000 likely went to the artwork.7 By 1851, Louis Godey could boast that he spent an astonishing $100,000 annually on the combined literary and pictorial matter for his magazine. In spite of all the money spent by publishers on embellishments, it was nonetheless challenging to earn a reliable living as an individual artist or engraver in the 1830s and early 1840s. Ironically, artists who helped establish magazine embellishments as aﬀordable middle-class cultural commodities often struggled to aﬀord the fruits accruing to their own labor. Manuscript evidence for these transactions, although slight, reveals a range of strategies artists employed to secure a living. Many artists working alone experimented with a variety of artistic genres to earn a modest income—coach and sign painting; theatrical backdrops; panoramas and dioramas; silhouette, miniature, and portrait painting; engraving; and daguerreotype portraiture— thereby blurring the lines between their “serious” and “commercial” art.8 Archival evidence speciﬁc to these ﬁve magazines is modest. Graham, Peterson, Godey, and Sartain left behind no complete collection of the ﬁnancial records and correspondence for their magazine ventures. Most of the correspondence between artists and publishers can be found either in the Archives of American Art (collected in Washington, D.C.), or in the publishing records for Carey & Hart in Philadelphia. Thus, this chapter will ﬁrst sketch an outline of a typical artistic career at mid-century, using two Pennsylvania artists as brief examples. Then the chapter will shift focus to artists and engravers who worked for the Philadelphia pictorials as well as for the annuals, gift books, single print venues, and illustrated books at mid-century. Finally, the chapter will zero in on speciﬁc negotiations between artists and engravers and the Philadelphia pictorial publishers, and oﬀer a rereading of the career of Thomas Sully. John Houston Miﬄin provides one example of a painter working in the late 1830s and early 1840s who tried his hand in a range of artistic genres. He worked at portrait painting in the late 1820s, making regular tours of southern cities (Augusta, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina, Tallahassee, Florida) in the early to mid-1830s.9 Supported emotionally and ﬁnancially by his

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uncle, Lloyd Miﬄin, he ventured into daguerreotype portraits in the summer of 1840. A letter to his uncle dated December 18, 1841, encloses $200, a portion of which he directs his uncle to use to pay a bill for “plates sent me,” suggesting that most of his proﬁts derived from daguerreotype portraits. In the letter, he complains of the stinginess of Milledgeville, Georgia, residents for preferring daguerreotypes to painted portraits. Nonetheless, he appears to be making a living from the daguerreotype business. He adds, “I don’t mean, I am sorry to confess, in being a great artist, but at last am independent, that is, an unindebted man.” Miﬄin’s conﬁdent independence did not last for long: with his marriage in April 1844, he worries to his uncle about “want of business,” and by mid-1845 he has turned to a new endeavor, manufacturing and selling printer’s ink. Along the way, he also invested in a scheme to erect a “cocoonery” to raise silk, but that eﬀort proved fraught with obstacles. Although he served on the “Board of Control” for the Artists Fund Society in the mid-1840s, by the end of the decade he appears to have abandoned art as a profession, though his son, named Lloyd for his uncle, would go on to be a well-respected Pennsylvania poet and painter.10 James Reid Lambdin was a fellow Pennsylvanian with a similar tale. His journals tell the story of a rather peripatetic career that began with Lambdin teaching himself how to engrave on wood blocks in 1821, at the age of 14. While working in a bookstore owned by his brother and a partner, Lambdin spent his leisure time studying the interior paintings of the theatre next door, while his mother urged him to become a coach painter. At the advice of Thomas Sully, he next studied drawing with James Miles in Philadelphia for six months and shortly afterward Sully agreed to paint Lambdin for half of his regular fee so that Lambdin could see how a portrait sitting progressed. Carrying letters of introduction to Isaac Lea and Edward L. Carey, Lambdin was soon befriended and began borrowing from Carey “books on Art not to be found elsewhere.” By the mid-1820s he too, like Miﬄin, found himself an itinerant portrait painter, traveling to “the west” of Pittsburgh and Wheeling, West Virginia. At this time he reported receiving $25 for a color portrait and $5 for a miniature portrait done in India ink, the latter supplying him the bulk of his commissions. By the late 1820s he was drawing on stone as well, and reported that his 1828 lithograph of one of Raphael’s Madonna’s “was the ﬁrst attempt at Lithography in this city” (Pittsburgh). As a result of his marriage on September 8, 1828, Lambdin desired to pursue a steadier means of income and purchased from Rembrandt Peale “a collection of objects of Natural History” to start a museum in Pittsburgh much like Peale’s father’s museum in Philadelphia. When the museum proved costlier to run than anticipated,

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Lambdin relocated to Philadelphia in 1837 and continued to struggle as a portrait painter, though he became a well-respected member of the Philadelphia art community.11 Miﬄin and Lambdin were not alone as painters who experimented with other artistic genres. Portrait painter John Neagle, son-in-law to Thomas Sully, prepared a “Prospectus” in 1831 for a series of engravings of “medical professors,” proposing to charge $4.50 for India ink copies; $2.50 for “early prints” and $2.00 for regular prints.12 Apparently, the eﬀort did not prove successful enough to lure Neagle away from the portrait painting business; as Sully’s son-in-law, he could usually rely on a steady stream of customers when Sully found himself overbooked for work. These painters tried engraving, lithography, and daguerreotype; but some artists who earned the bulk of their income from engraving also painted, and others who painted also worked as copyists. Thomas B. Welch apprenticed himself to James Barton Longacre to learn both stipple and mezzotint engraving, turning to portrait painting in 1841.13 Welch returned to engraving in the second half of the decade, however, forming a partnership with fellow engraver Adam B. Walter. The two executed plates primarily for Godey’s (more on this in chapter 7). According to graphic art historians, Cephas Childs, Peter Maverick, John Cheney, Steven Gimber, and James Smillie, among others, earned the bulk of their income from engraving, yet tried their hands at painting as well.14 To this list we could also add John Sartain.15 Henry Inman collaborated with Cephas Child in his lithography ﬁrm, and Asher B. Durand, better known as a painter, began his career as an apprentice to an engraver.16 Artist James McMurtrie also doubled as a copyist, although apparently not always a good one. Defending the diﬃculty encountered by the engraver Ritchie in working from McMurtrie’s copy of Huntington’s Mercy’s Dream, Daniel Huntington surmises “the genius of McMurtrie is of too original—ﬁery and impulsive a nature to succeed well in the shackles of a copyist.”17 Not all artists experienced the same diﬃculties encountered by McMurtrie moving from one artistic role to the other. Many moved ﬂuidly from one medium to another, earning professional fees for work accomplished along the way. In a letter to Ferdinand Dreer, James Lambdin discussed how he worked in painting his portrait of Daniel Webster: “it was commissioned from a Daguerreotype taken in Boston, and ﬁnished during Mr. Webster’s visit to the city in October . . . and has been copied twice by myself. . . .”18 So in the early life cycle of this image, the artist worked ﬁrst from daguerreotype, then from live sittings; once the original painting was completed, the

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artist copied two more paintings from the original. Thomas Sully also created paintings from daguerreotypes and from engravings; John Sartain engraved mezzotints from daguerreotypes and painted as well, exhibiting a number of canvas paintings (in addition to engravings) at the 1837 Artists’ Fund Society annual exhibition.19 Moving from one medium to the other sometimes presented challenges, and both artists and engravers explained to would-be patrons the pains they would need to take to provide an acceptable artistic rendering of the work in progress. In preparing a mezzotint of Dr. Hale, done from daguerreotypes, Sartain wrote to N. Cleaveland, evidently Hale’s friend in charge of commissioning the portrait print: “Dear Sir/Enclosed are impressions of Dr. Hale’s portrait, taken since the last alterations. Will you have the kindness to forward them to the family and communicate to me their further remarks when you receive them. The ﬁrst daguerreotype (the one engraved from) is not only quite white all over the face, but has an earnestness of expression amounting to anxiety, and a very sharp piercing expression in the eye. This is not liked in the engraving, and the only way I know is to lean in the corrections to the last daguerreotype sent, because that is the reverse of the other in the particulars I have named.”20 Experienced engravers clearly considered themselves more than mere draftsmen, and did not hesitate to increase their fee for particularly challenging work. In a reply to a query from Rawdon, Clark & Co. (New York engravers), Asher Durand stipulated that he would charge $200 for engraving a portrait, $250 if the portrait included a hand. Evidently, they wished him to paint the picture as well, but Durand declined, stating, “I should not be able soon to paint the picture myself. I should therefore wish it furnished— the engraving, however, I would undertake immediately on rec’t of order.”21 Occasionally even Sartain turned down work he found too disagreeable. Asher Durand approached Sartain about preparing a mezzotint, and found his request rejected, on much the same grounds as Durand had rejected the request of Rawdon, Clark: “In this morning received your letter of the 31st of May respecting a steel plate and mezzotinto ground. I should be happy in accommodating you were it not that I cannot without considerable inconvenience. The process of laying a ground is so tedious & disagreeable that I am unwilling to do it myself, and the only person in my house capable of doing it has also to print my plates when ﬁnished, and consequently has his hands so full that my work is frequently at a standstill for want of grounds.”22 Thus, although artists struggled to secure adequate income and frequently worked in several diﬀerent media to earn a living, they also understood the relative

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value of their labor, and negotiated artistic undertakings in an eﬀort to be adequately compensated for their eﬀorts.

NEGOTIATIONS BE T WEEN ARTISTS, ENGRAVERS, AND PUBLISHERS The art of engraving had gradually received increased attention and respect in the Philadelphia arts community at least from the time of John Sartain’s arrival to the United States in 1832. Five years later, The Artists’ Fund Society published a catalogue of their third annual exhibition in 1837, allotting a separate notice for engravings. By the time of his 1840 address to the Artists’ Fund Society exhibition, art patron George W. Bethune could speak conﬁdently of the importance of engraving in “reaching the mass of our people who control the national sentiment.” In his address he declared engraving “the true child of Painting,” and even went one step further to opine, “A good engraving of a good picture, in its eﬀect on the mind, is incomparably superior to a painting of ordinary merit.”23 The establishment of the Art Union of Philadelphia in 1840 speciﬁcally promoted the “Arts of Design,” so that, by mid-decade, engraved works received regular public approbation. Artists who worked almost solely as painters expressed a range of attitudes toward the engravers and engravings of their work. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, manuscript evidence suggests that some painters understood little about engraving as an art, although, like Washington Allston, they did acknowledge it as such. In a letter responding to a proposal from James McMurtrie to have Cousins engrave Allston’s Mother and Child, Allston replies: “I have seen some of Cousins’ engravings (or, I suppose I should say, mezzotints, for I believe some artists make this distinction) and feel satisﬁed that he will make a ﬁne print from the picture.” He requests only that his full name be attached to the print, and makes no mention of receiving remuneration from the deal.24 Like other artists, Allston apparently viewed the engraving as a method for attracting potential customers for canvas sales—while he requested his full name be attached to the engraving, he entrusted its artistic merits to Cousins.25 Painters sometimes found themselves forced to learn more about the art of design when approached by publishers and engravers seeking to distribute prints of their work. Daniel Huntington became a quick study when the popularity of his painting Mercy’s Dreams resulted in a request from the ArtUnion of Philadelphia to make an engraving from the picture. Responding

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to a letter from Edward Carey, who had purchased Mercy’s Dream, he writes: “I hasten to say that I have full conﬁdence that all will be done as well as though I had the entire control of the matter myself.—In fact I have so little knowledge of these methods of engraving adopted in this case and of relative merits of engravers that I should be quite at a loss what advice to give.—I am very glad to leave the whole conduct of the matter entirely in the hands of those who have it in charge and feel assured they will do all in their power to render the work as perfect as possible.”26 Less than two months later, however, Huntington found himself forced to oﬀer an opinion on how negotiations should proceed in the engraving of Mercy’s Dream. First, he alludes to the previous state of business negotiations between painters and engravers: “Indeed it is quite unusual in this country for the painters to be advised with when their pictures are engraved—several of my paintings have been engraved—published editions sold without my ever hearing of it—till months afterwards.”27 For Huntington, this was just the beginning of his education into the complex negotiations between artists, engravers, and publishers. He would continue for another two decades to shepherd Mercy’s Dream through art reproductions based on his own versions of the paintings as well as copies produced by others for reproduction.28 Artists and engravers shepherding their work through reproduction and publication did not always fare as well as Huntington. James B. Longacre’s long struggle to publish the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans illustrates how business between painters and engravers initiated on a handshake could go terribly awry. Longacre had already successfully completed the engravings for the 1820 Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence when he proposed to complete a series of engravings of distinguished Americans. Longacre formed temporary partnerships along the way with the painters whose work he relied on for the engravings. Surviving letters from Longacre to the artist Chester Harding reveal that Longacre’s memory of his deal with Harding diﬀered from Harding’s recollection, and this led to bad feelings on both sides.29 Longacre apparently learned from his mistakes: three years later, in negotiating with Asher Durand to provide an engraving for his series, Longacre apparently paid Durand $200 upon receipt of his engraving, assuming rights to any proﬁts from the venture.30 By the time fellow engraver John C. Buttre arranged for the engraving and publication of Prayer in Camp in 1865, a detailed “Memorandum of agreement,” such as the one Buttre drew up with J. B. Polk, was undoubtedly the norm.31 In this struggle for power and money between painters and engravers, the painter might express his opinion (as Harding and Huntington clearly did),

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and yet ultimately be at the mercy of the engraver or publisher. If, like Huntington, the painter wished to protect his reputation by insuring that the best copy possible were executed from his originals, he frequently needed to curry the favor of the engraver or publisher, even if this meant additional work on his part. William Sidney Mount, responding to a request from Edward Carey to produce a copy of his picture “Undutiful Boys” replies: “It will not be possible for me to copy the picture “undutiful Boys” at present, hence I hardly know what to say upon the subject. It is a favorite picture of mine and I should like to see an engraving of it, from the original, but I can not say I like the plan of following a pencil sketch or any oﬀ hand sketch in oil colours however well done.” On the one hand, Mount does not want to comply with Carey’s request to produce a copy of the picture because it would mean putting aside whatever work Mount had in front of him. On the other hand, he also does not want to see the picture engraved from some second-rate copy made by someone else. He oﬀers his view, an echo of Huntington’s: “In my opinion the engraver in all cases should draw from the original, for his own reputation, and not two or three removes from the picture.”32 Mount suggests a couple of more palatable alternatives, both involving a substitute to the picture Carey seeks. First, Mount suggests Carey send the engraver John Cheney (living near New York) to copy another Mount picture entitled Courtship, owned by John Glover of Fairﬁeld, Connecticut. Or, better yet, Mount suggests, “Why not own my Fortune Teller, make me an oﬀer in Money—it would open rich for The Gift—a good story can be written for it.” Mount directs Carey to the location where that picture is being stored and suggests that Carey “call and see it.”33 Mount undoubtedly hoped that once Carey viewed the painting, he would want to add it to his extensive collection, or else compensate Mount to have it copied and engraved for The Gift.

ENGRAVERS FOR THE PHILADELPHIA PIC TORIALS The three examples detailed above—Huntington, Longacre, and Mount— treat business relationships between painters, engravers, and publishers working in three diﬀerent print venues: Art-Union print distribution; multivolume print series; and gift annuals, respectively. What about painters and engravers working on the monthly magazines? What do we know about their negotiations with editors and publishers? Again, manuscript evidence

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is scarce, but we can piece together some idea of these negotiations from a few examples. Mott identiﬁes engravers working for the Philadelphia pictorials and mentions brieﬂy the monthly sums several magazines claim to have paid for their embellishments. According to Mott, Graham’s often spent $2,000 per issue on illustrations: the cost of executing a single engraving, $200; and the cost for paper and printing, $500 (I, 521). When John Sartain ﬁnally realized that his business partner, William Sloanaker, had ruined his magazine, he detailed several claims against Sloanaker for outstanding fees he had not been paid. In one example, he claimed to be owed $100 for an engraving of the Washington Monument.34 In another document detailing his contributions to the magazine, Sartain claimed: “Besides this I may be said to have put in from $150 to $180 per month for forty two out of the forty four months the work was published, being the diﬀerence between my uniform rate of charges for engraving & repair of plates, and those I made against the Union Magazine.”35 Therefore, presumably, Sartain generally charged $250 to $280 per engraved plate for the monthlies. John G. Chapman, an artist who contributed designs to the annuals and periodicals, oﬀers an example of an artist working as a magazine embellishment designer, and earning far less than an engraver for his annual and periodical work. Receipts for Chapman at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania indicate that the Harper Brothers paid Chapman thirty-ﬁve dollars for Illustrations of Rienzi and forty dollars for A Year in Spain in 1836.36 In 1839 he negotiated with Edward Carey for a “vignette design” for a Carey publication, likely The Gift. He explains that a work Carey expressed interest in, which Chapman refers to as the “nibble,” was actually a snippet from a larger picture that had been engraved previously in mezzotint, then adapted to vignette form for a bank note die. He explains, “The vignette designs I have usually made have been oil on panel with the ﬁgures about twice the size desired for the engraving,” adding “In looking over my memoranda I ﬁnd I have several sketches that will, I dare say, suit your purpose.”37 Having opened a door with Carey, he is emboldened the following year to spell out in advance his fees for designs Carey is interested in: “the prices of the sketches, thirty dollars for the ‘Boy’ and $45 for the Shipwreck.” Chapman explains that he has sent both along for Carey’s inspection because he is uncertain which Carey would prefer—and, undoubtedly, he hopes that Carey will take both rather than pay to send one or the other back to him. Naming his fee in advance, he perhaps hoped to collect as soon as Carey had accepted

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one or both of the designs. He may have feared having to wait until Carey released the volume to be paid for his work; other Carey contributors seem to have been inconvenienced by this practice.38 By 1843 Chapman could be said to be a seasoned veteran in negotiating with publishers for the sale of his designs. In a series of letters to Rufus Griswold, then editing Graham’s Magazine, we see Chapman wielding his newly earned business acumen in negotiations for periodical work. In a letter dated April 14, 1843, Chapman urges Griswold to send “as much of the matter you desire to be illustrated soon, as my engagements are such, that unless I can ﬁnish these plates immediately I shall be placed to very great inconveniences as I shall be compelled to place other work on my desk.” Chapman also states, “Four designs are now on the steel,” suggesting that he is serving as both designer and engraving supervisor for the work Griswold has commissioned.39 His next lengthy exchange with Griswold reveals his indignation to learn of George Graham’s “qualiﬁed acceptation” of the pictures he has submitted— Graham apparently authorized the New York engravers Rawdon, Wright & Co. to alter his pictures for the magazine. Chapman fumes: I am somewhat at a loss to understand, precisely, your meaning . . . If I mistake not, you ordered that designs be furnished by me for Graham’s Magazine. They have been done, and I can recognize no right or capacity in Messrs Rawdon, Wright & Co. to alter or correct them: nor was I aware such were the terms upon which I undertook to do them or I should have, most certainly, declined the favour./ . . . If the name of a designer or painter is to go on a plate the Engraver has no right to alter or vary from his model; and if some of them would look a little more to their own sins they would be all the better for it, and so would it be for those whose pictures they libel as well as their publishers and the public.—It is rather reversing the order of things to place the designer under the engraver’s order and I, for one, feel rather disposed to have objections to any such innovations./I presume from your letter we have not already understood one another in this matter . . . I am very unwilling that Mr. Graham should pay me for what he does not want, and I will receive back any of the three he chooses. Such or suit he can pay for and the sooner the matter is settled, the greater I shall be obliged, and hereafter all diﬃculty can be avoided by mutually understanding that I am unwilling to undertake any thing, in the completion of which I cannot be trusted and of the acceptation of which, after its corruption, there is to be a question.40

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This extended passage establishes the tensions that could develop between designers, engravers, magazine editors, and publishers over the question of the artistic merits of the plates. It is one thing to observe George Graham bragging editorially to his readers about his eﬀorts to support American art and artists, and quite another to glimpse the behind-the-scenes drama of how these negotiations actually played themselves out from the artist’s perspective. Artists and designers like Chapman might ﬁnd their interests at odds with those of the publishers with whom they needed to negotiate for payment (and, by extension, for survival). Relationships between artists and periodical publishers supporting the arts could sour quickly, and this was, no doubt, all the more problematic in an era before routine copyright protection for original artwork.

THE INFLUENCE OF PERIODICALS ON ARTISTS: THOMAS SULLY, A CASE STUDY As the bulk of this chapter has tried to demonstrate, many Philadelphia artists pursued fairly ﬂuid career paths. Artists experimented as engravers and vice versa, and a number of Philadelphia artists relied on at least a portion of their income from other artistic endeavors, including work for gift books, annuals, illustrated books, and periodicals. But what about the impact of the periodicals on the careers of so-called “serious” artists—painters whom art historians have considered canonical and whose work has long been the purview of art historical study? While I will examine the periodical work of a number of Philadelphia painters in greater depth in chapter 6, here I would like to treat some of Thomas Sully’s magazine work as a case study, and suggest a new way to read Sully’s career that accounts for his interaction, as an artist, with periodicals. The general view of Sully’s earlier biographers, all trained as art historians, is that Sully was a serious artist and the leading portrait painter of his day in his mature years, generally cited as from the mid-1820s to the mid1840s (see ﬁg. 2.1). These scholars distinguish between the “talent” displayed by Sully at making common portraits, as opposed to the “genius” displayed by painters working in the more prestigious medium of historic portraits. Although his biographers do not go as far as art historian Jules Prown, who dismissed Sully’s female portraits as “prettiﬁed images of boneless ﬁgures,” they do, nonetheless, disparage Sully’s forays into imaginative work, what

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art historians refer to as “fancy pictures.” And, unfortunately, their work, although dated, was, until recently, the only serious book-length treatments given to Sully.41 Steven E. Bronson labels Sully a “portrait painter, history painter, Victorian genre painter” but argues that Sully “thought of himself as a portrait painter.”42 In an earlier study, biographer David M. Robb Jr. had argued: “There can be no doubt that Sully’s execution of fancy pictures was not central to his image of himself as an artist; he almost never mentioned fancy pictures in his Hints to Young Painters, where he concentrates almost exclusively on portraits.”43 The tendency of art historians to disparage “fancy pictures” runs deep and relates, no doubt, to the hierarchy of painting styles articulated by Sir Joshua Reynolds and reinforced in the early nineteenth century by the review of the 1827 National Academy of Design exhibit long credited to Daniel Fanshaw.44 In this ranking system, “the Epic, the Dramatic, and the Historic” rank ﬁrst in order of artistic merit, with “the historical or poetic portrait” ranking second; “the Historical Landscape,” third, and so on, common portraits ranking sixth among the “lower ranks.” Bronson discusses the inﬂuence of Henry Fuselli on Sully (Sully studied with Fuselli on his ﬁrst trip to Europe), and notes that Fuselli embraced the “Romantic tradition” that elevated “dramatic” paintings over “historic paintings.” Bronson speculates that this might explain Sully’s forays into a more dramatic style, although Bronson seems to credit the popularity of the daguerreotype for the decrease in Sully’s commissions for portraits after 1840. Another Sully biographer, Monroe H. Fabian, attributes the increased number of “fancy pictures” in Sully’s later years to “Sully’s decline in physical and artistic soundness.”45 Robb, Fabian, and Bronson all agree in disparaging the fancy pictures. Fabian derides the “overly sweet children” and the two dozen pictures of “pleasant peasants.”46 Bronson describes Sully’s fancy pictures as “saccharin scenes of idealized, youthful peasants,” and dismisses them along with “similarly unambitious pieces.”47 None of these studies attempts to trace the inﬂuence of Sully’s periodical work on his painting. Moreover, they similarly overlook references to his fancy pictures in his Journal and Register of Paintings. If we consider evidence from these sources, we get a much richer picture of Sully’s artistic life, one less tainted with the whiﬀ of elitism still clinging to the interpretations of his biographers. Additionally, in probing the inﬂuence of the periodical press on the artwork of Thomas Sully, we see clearly that the monthly magazine served not merely as artifacts reﬂective of larger cultural change, but themselves inﬂuenced the artists contributing to their pages.

FIGURE 2.1 Thomas Sully, self-portrait, engraved by John Sartain in 1856 for Mr. Ferdinand J. Dreer, printed in The Life and Works of Thomas Sully (1783–1872), by Edward Biddle and Mantle Fielding (Wickersham Press, 1921). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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First, let us examine Bronson’s assertion that Sully “thought of himself” as a portrait painter. While Sully did leave behind an unusually rich bank of manuscript materials for scholars to consider, they should be read without preconceived notions that either valorize one art form over another or attempt a causal link between Sully’s notes and Sully’s self-image. An equal amount of evidence exists to suggest that Sully thought about “imaginative work” throughout his career. In an early entry in his “Hints for Pictures,” dated February 9, 1812, Sully writes a “Memorandum of subjects to paint.” Of the seventeen possible subjects listed, only one refers succinctly to a portrait of a speciﬁc human being, and that is a “Statue of the President of the United States, leaning on a Roman Facaes, an emblem of strength of union.” While three others mention scenic details that could be added to a portrait, not one mentions a speciﬁc subject by name, and the remaining thirteen mention romantic subjects ﬁtting for imaginative works or “fancy pictures.”48 It includes not a single reference by name to a speciﬁc human subject Sully hoped to paint.49 Countering this, we have ample evidence of Sully’s interaction with artists and publishers working with periodical literature, and with his transformation of what were originally begun as portraits into fancy pictures. Therefore, I think we need to be very careful of accepting Robb’s assertion that Sully’s fancy pictures “were almost entirely executed by assistants” (for which he provides not a shred of evidence),50 or of Bronson’s attempts to argue (using Elizabeth Cook as a Country Girl as evidence) that Sully’s fancy pictures were “never intended as [a] portrait[s].”51 Sully’s relationship to periodical publications complicates our understanding of his fancy pictures. Robb argues that “Sully’s idealized portraits of women are based on a facial type very similar to that used by painter Washington Allston during the 1820s and 1830s.”52 While there is clear evidence of Sully’s relationship with Allston, Sully’s longstanding interest in the fancy pictures preferred for magazine distribution does more to explain his depiction of the female face than any speciﬁc inﬂuence of Allston. Indeed, Sully contributed work intended for mass circulation as early as the 1820s. Cephas Childs included an engraving of Sully’s The Swedish Lutheran Church in his 1827 work Views of Philadelphia. Engravings of Sully’s work appeared as magazine illustrations as early as 1830.53 He had also done work for the Carey annual, the Atlantic Souvenir. In his Journals he records, on December 9, 1827: “H. Carey politely presented me with a copy of the last New-Year’s Gift and a portfolio of prints of the same.”54 Sully was gregarious, and the Philadelphia art and literary communities small enough, that he

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quickly befriended engravers, editors, and publishers.55 Sully’s work appeared in a variety of venues over the years, including gift books, annuals, and the illustrated magazines. John Cheney was the leading engraver of female heads for The Gift in its heyday, and his engravings of Sully’s paintings nearly always appear as either the frontispiece to the annual, or the title page, and sometimes both.56 We know from the catalogue of Cheney’s engraved work that many of what would become his “female heads” originated in portrait paintings.57 In addition, we know from Sully’s Journals that he sometimes turned rejected portraits into fancy pictures.58 Based on this evidence, it seems very likely that a more ﬂuid relationship existed between Sully’s portrait work and his fancy pictures for the periodicals. We also know that periodical publishers contacted Sully directly for paintings to be engraved for the illustrated monthlies. George Graham took an aggressive stance in support of American artists when he assumed ownership of two dying magazines in 1839, merging them into Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. In his September 1842 Editor’s Table he reviewed an advance copy of The Gift for 1843, praising the work of Sully and others. He promoted Sully especially in February 1844, boasting to his readers “The leading embellishment in the January Number was from an original pictures, painted expressly for us by Thomas Sully, Esq.” Further, he promised his readers, “We have now in the hands of engravers several original pictures, by Chapman, Sully, Leutze, Conaroe, Croome and other well-known artists . . . painted expressly for this Magazine.”59 Louis Godey also pursued original work by Sully; in fact, securing the original work of Sully and other American artists became a point of competition for publishers, especially toward the mid- to late 1840s. We also know from the manuscript evidence that fancy pictures could be lucrative. Sully valued “Carey’s fancy piece, pendant to F. Kemble” at $100, and the copy of it Lady reading in bed at $125. He valued Musidora, a fancy piece begun in 1813, at $200. He sold another fancy piece of “a Mermaid on a wave” to Carey for $300, and valued “A family of Mother & 2 children fancy” at $500. Fancy pictures of Sleeping Girl, Strawberry Girl, Peasant Girl, and Girl & Bird were all valued at $300 each, as were “Spanish gitar [sic] & mantilla.” Sully generally valued his fancy pictures between $150 and $300, and they seem to have sold readily.60 Evidence from the exhibition catalogues from the 1840s indicates that Sully aggressively marketed his fancy pictures in these venues. Consequently, fancy pictures increasingly found an audience with art patrons. The painter Thomas B. Read wrote to his brother-in-law, Cyrus

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Garrett, “I ﬁnd I that I can make vastly more money painting fancy pictures than at portraits.”61 Amateur artist and art patron Joseph Sill remarks favorably in his journal about fancy pictures by Sully (The Farewell) and Emanuel Leutze (The Return) that he viewed at the 1841 Artists’ Fund Society exhibition.62 It seems rather likely that Sully increasingly switched from portrait painting to fancy pictures in the 1830s and 1840s not solely because portrait orders fell oﬀ, but because he found it more lucrative (and perhaps more satisfying). Clearly fancy pictures found an appreciative audience with some art patrons like Sill, thanks, in part, to the promulgation of American artwork in the periodical publications of the day.63 As we have seen here brieﬂy, although long treated as a “serious” American artist, Thomas Sully also painted pictures intended for distribution to a wide middle-class audience via embellishments commissioned for the periodical press. His work, and the work of the other artists and engravers discussed in this chapter, elides the distinction between “serious” and “commercial” art instituted by later art historians. In producing art for magazines that catered to an emerging middle-class audience, these artists and engravers helped democratize American art—both by producing new art uniquely focused on American themes, and by circulating American art beyond the purview of the cultural elite. Additionally, in seeking a ready market for their wares in the monthly magazines, these artists and engravers aspired to attain the same comforts and status as their eager middle-class magazine-reading audiences.

3 “Superior Embellishments” INNOVATIONS TO THE GRAPHIC ARTS IN THE PHILADELPHIA PIC TORIALS

In January 1843, an upstart little monthly entitled Miss Leslie’s Magazine: Home Book of Fashion, Literature and Domestic Economy entered the Philadelphia magazine fray with a bold new claim to its readership: “. . . we have caused our fashion plates for the present month to be arranged in a novel and ingenious manner, such as has not before been attempted in this country; nor, as far as we know, in any other, except in costly books of which the edition is very limited” (Miss Leslie’s, January 1843, 1, emphasis added). The editor, Eliza Leslie, a sister to the painter Charles Leslie, had already established her literary reputation as editor of the popular Carey & Hart annual The Gift, and as a writer of recipe books and advice manuals for ladies and children.1 She and her magazine publisher, Morton McMichael,2 used their inaugural editorial column to establish their magazine’s claims to artistic innovation: “We conﬁdently assert that no magazine published either at home or abroad, has ever presented to its patrons fashion plates in which so much regard has been paid to grace, beauty and elegance, as in these of ours. Indeed, apart from their value as guides in costume, they are superior embellishments. Which would do credit to the pages of any periodical” (Miss Leslie’s, January 1843, 1). In making a claim for their magazine’s “superior embellishments,” Leslie and McMichael announced their intention to compete head-to-head with the other established Philadelphia pictorial monthly magazines, including, most notably, Godey’s Lady’s Book and Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine.3 However, Leslie and McMichael were not alone in issuing a challenge to Godey’s and Graham’s: also arriving on the Philadelphia magazine scene was Peterson’s Magazine, launched by Charles Peterson as a cheaper alternative

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to Godey’s. Peterson hoped his $2.00/year subscription fee would undercut Godey’s and Graham’s $3.00/year fee and thereby attract readers of more modest means. This chapter will focus on the technological innovations featured by Miss Leslie’s in 1843 that ignited ﬁerce competition between the Philadelphia illustrated magazines. As noted in the introduction, prior to the 1840s few magazines featured pictorial embellishments, and those that did typically bought and recycled used European plates. During the 1830s, Louis Godey had made steady improvements to his fashion plates. By the end of the decade both he and his nearest competitor, William Burton (editor and publisher of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, which George Graham bought out to form Graham’s) began featuring in each six-month volume a few steel plates, including mezzotints engraved by John Sartain. However, until Miss Leslie’s emerged on the scene, no illustrated magazine attempted to secure a large subscription base largely on the strength of its pictorial matter, or to oﬀer a serious challenge to Godey’s in this department. In this chapter, I argue that the 1843 arrival of Miss Leslie’s on the Philadelphia magazine scene fueled ﬁerce competition between the established illustrated monthlies that contributed to the production, distribution, and commodiﬁcation of uniquely American artwork. At a time before widespread reliance on advertising, publishers relied almost solely on subscription and single-copy sales to keep magazines solvent. Not surprisingly, many monthlies failed within their inaugural year. Godey’s, entering its twelfth year of publication, was clearly the best established of Philadelphia’s illustrated monthlies. Graham’s, Peterson’s, and Miss Leslie’s, all rising to prominence between 1841 and 1843, hoped to take advantage of the rapidly increasing demand for illustrated American newspapers and magazines. As the decade of the 1840s opened, the entire cycle of production, distribution, and consumption of American magazines relied on an array of technological improvements: in the printing press; in the quality of paper, ink, and binding; in transportation (improved roadways, canals, railroads); and, in the case of the artwork in the pictorials, in innovative reproductive imaging technologies.4 Godey’s and Graham’s already featured a variety of engraving processes that had been used for several centuries: mezzotint engraving, line engravings, woodcuts, and the more recently developed lithography. However, beginning in 1843, with the challenges oﬀered by Miss Leslie’s and Peterson’s, the periodicals began to display innovative engraving and printing technologies as well.

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FIGURE 3.1 Morton McMichael. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Eliza Leslie and her publisher, Morton McMichael, engaged the best artists, engravers, and printers in Philadelphia to produce embellishments for her ﬂedgling magazine. Both Leslie and McMichael had worked for Louis Godey, and Godey developed a business partnership with McMichael shortly after relocating to new oﬃces in “Publisher’s Hall” at 101 Chestnut St. McMichael’s father had been a gardener, but McMichael was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and admitted to the bar in 1827 (see ﬁg. 3.1). He was elected

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FIGURE 3.2 Miss E. Leslie. frontispiece, Godey’s, January 1846.

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alderman and later sheriﬀ. However, he formed early friendships with literary men, and he and Godey started a family newspaper, the Saturday News, as early as 1837. He would become better known in later years as the publisher of the North American and United States Gazette (a paper with long-established roots in Philadelphia) and as mayor of Philadelphia from 1866 to 1869.5 Eliza Leslie was the eldest of ﬁve children, and her father claimed friendship with Washington, Franklin, and Jeﬀerson. Upon his death, Eliza and her mother opened a boarding house to support the family. Both her sister Ann and her brother Charles became painters, Charles studying with Thomas Sully before relocating for most of his life to England. It was Sully who painted this portrait of her, engraved subsequently by various hands (see ﬁg. 3.2). Her sister Patty was the wife of Henry C. Carey, of the Philadelphia publishing dynasty. Through her connection with the Careys, “Miss Leslie,” as she was called, in 1827 began publishing cookbooks, domestic advice manuals, and collected tales for children. Her sketch Mrs. Washington Potts, published in Godey’s in 1832, made her a household name, and she had served as an assistant editor at Godey’s, as had McMichael. Perhaps seeking more editorial independence, and certainly with a desire to promote uniquely American art and innovation, she was ﬁfty-ﬁve years old when she partnered with McMichael and journalist T. S. Arthur to launch the magazine which would be short-lived under her moniker.6 At ﬁrst glance, Arthur, Leslie, and McMichael seem an unlikely trio to launch a new magazine to challenge the established Godey’s and Graham’s. Even the title of the new periodical—Miss Leslie’s Magazine; Home Book of Fashion, Literature and Domestic Economy—fails to highlight the artistic innovations for which it would become known. On top of that, the primary editors, Arthur and Leslie, appear to have brought vastly diﬀerent personal backgrounds to the magazine. Eliza Leslie never married or had children, and her primary experience with domestic economy apparently derived from the earlier boarding house experiences with her mother that began in 1803, when she was sixteen.7 In an early autobiographical sketch, written in epistolary style as a letter to her friend, Alice B. Neal (and frequently used as a source for subsequent biographical sketches), Leslie reports having collected the recipes for her ﬁrst cookbook (published in 1827) from classes she took at Mrs. Goodfellow’s cooking school in Philadelphia.8 After her mother’s death in 1824, Leslie lived from time to time with her brother Thomas and his wife at West Point, where he was an army engineer, but correspondence from 1824 on indicates that she primarily boarded at the United States Hotel in Philadelphia, where her meals were provided.9 Quite ironically, Leslie made a name

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FIGURE 3.3 T. S. Arthur, frontispiece, Godey’s, January 1844. J. Tooley, Del., W. G. Armstrong, SC. Courtesy of the University of South Florida Libraries Special and Digital Collections Department.

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for herself from the publication of cookbooks, juvenile advice manuals, and sketches of domestic customs and manners, while never managing her own household as wife and mother. Timothy Shay Arthur hailed from much humbler origins. Born to a miller and farm laborer, and lacking regular education due to illness, Arthur tried and failed at a number of professions before directing his energies to writing. By 1843 he had accumulated experience editing two diﬀerent publications: the Baltimore Athenaeum and Young Men’s Paper, a weekly; and The Baltimore Literary Monument, a monthly. Arthur prospered enough to marry, and relocated his family from Baltimore to Philadelphia in 1841, recognizing that the city proclaimed the “Athens of America” would be the best place to earn a living to support his growing family. His didactic domestic ﬁction apparently balanced Leslie’s practical tips on domestic economy (see ﬁg. 3.3).10 As publisher, McMichael appears to have served primarily as public promoter and ﬁnancier for the magazine. McMichael and Godey had been friends since boyhood,11 and in 1841 Godey had puﬀed McMichael’s earlier foray into periodical publication, The People’s Library, a Magazine of Choice and Entertaining Literature, by oﬀering his readers bundled subscriptions to both Godey’s and The People’s Library. Godey assured his readers that McMichael had “ample means at his command” to deliver a quality product.12 Evidently, McMichael’s “ample means” emboldened him to woo Eliza Leslie away from her role as one of Godey’s assistant editors, because both turned their primary literary eﬀorts to launching Miss Leslie’s Magazine less than eighteen months later. As lawyer, sheriﬀ, and alderman, McMichael displayed oratorical skills that would later serve him well in his magazine’s “publisher’s table.” In an address on public education delivered before the Philadelphia Lyceum in 1839, McMichael ﬁrst publicly argued for America’s supremacy in the mechanical arts. He analyzed the succeeding epochs in the evolution of art and education, from the Egyptians to that time. McMichael argued that until the present age in America, no country had mastered the ingredients he found necessary to achieve the pinnacle of civilization: widespread public education; improvements in the “mechanical arts”; and art that contributes to the “moral education” of its people. America alone, he proclaimed, achieved all three.13 McMichael used his magazine to promote America’s primacy in the mechanical arts. In his “Publisher’s Table” for the magazine in February 1843, McMichael put his oratorical skills to use promoting his magazine as both “useful” and “decorative.” He argues that while Arthur and Leslie make “distinct and separate”

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contributions to the magazine, under their “joint direction” the magazine will be both “pleasant and practical,” and will shun the “mawkish sentimentality” and “hacknied” prose of its competitors. He particularly touts the magazine’s innovative embellishments, remarking, “Imitation may be practiced by any body, but how few are there who possess the skill to originate.” He promises his readers only “that which is novel and attractive,” pointing out that the ﬁrst “decoration” for the present issue was “raised from a die which took the premium at the recent exhibitions of the Franklin Institute.” He also discusses how diﬃcult to master is this new technology of raising an impression from a die (a method of printing similar to the raised impression on coins), and opines, “few publishers would have ventured to give [the embellishment], even if they had the sagacity to perceive its practicability . . .” (“Publisher’s Table,” February 1843, 76). The magazine lasted just twelve months with McMichael as publisher and Leslie as editor (Arthur took it over in January 1844), but it featured a series of ﬁrsts to magazine embellishment that capitalized on the latest innovations in the graphic arts. In addition to the raised impression from a die highlighted in the previous paragraph, the magazine also featured a host of other ﬁrsts: colored mezzotint; lithotint; steel engraving using colored inks; embossed engravings, die-cut fashion plates layered one on top of the other; and the art of medal ruling. The staple of the illustrated magazines had long been woodcuts and line engravings. Newspapers and book illustrations tended to utilize woodcuts, due to the cheapness and greater ease of production of this method. The oldest form of embellishment, woodcuts relied on a relief process whereby a wooden block is carved to leave a ﬂat, raised surface that is then inked and pressed onto paper. However, woodcuts could not deliver the same artistic sophistication as newer methods and, although used by the Philadelphia pictorials, they were not favored. Line and stipple engraving on steel, according to art historian Wendy Wick Reaves, had become the “respected medium for reproduction” by the 1840s,14 and the annuals and illustrated monthly magazines (including the Philadelphia pictorials) touted “steel engravings” as the principal method used to furnish readers the popular “fashion plates.”15 Most twenty-ﬁrst-century readers, if they know anything about these magazines, know vaguely about the fashion plates. Louis Godey boasted that he kept 150 young ladies in work hand coloring his famous fashion plates (Mott, I, 591). As was true of the other engraving techniques featured in the Philadelphia pictorials, 1843 proved to be a watershed year for the ubiquitous fashion plates. The principal improvements involved three distinct strategies,

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the ﬁrst of which Godey’s and Graham’s had engaged in prior to 1843 as well. First, the magazines shed their reliance on recycled French and English fashion plates, hiring engravers to prepare original plates—though, of course, based on the fashion trends in Europe.16 Both Godey’s and Graham’s used this technique before 1843. Godey added a second innovation to his magazine in 1843: engaging illustrators to show feminine ﬁgures free of the “tight-lacing” associated with the European styles, thereby creating “Americanized” fashions.17 Finally, Miss Leslie’s used the fashion plates to create new novelty embellishments for its readers, again relying on both printing innovations and an emerging cult of the celebrity.18 Godey started boasting of “entirely original contents” and improved paper quality as early as January 1840, although at that time, his fashion plates appear to be printed from woodcuts and on the same paper as the textual material.19 By April 1840, touting a circulation of 17,500 subscribers, Godey’s oﬀered hand-colored fashion plates printed on higher quality paper. In the “Editors’ Table” for April he noted “We have advanced with a steady step, and now compare with the best French or English periodicals that are devoted exclusively to this subject—which, as every body knows, the Lady’s Book is not.”20 Thus, Godey reminds his readers both that his magazine is more than just a guide to fashions, and that his American fashion plates now compete with their European counterparts. By December 1840 he grouses that “exchange papers” fail to distinguish between borrowed and original plates: “Exchange papers in noticing the embellishments in the various magazines should make a distinction between those engraved expressly for a work and second hand plates. We give two engravings in each number from steel plates engraved expressly for the Book” (“Editors’ Table,” 285). Godey used these American-engraved fashion plates as an early form of product placement, advertising his magazine and instructing readers how and where to read it. His hand-colored fashion plates for both January and February 1841 feature conspicuously placed bound volumes of the magazine. The January number reveals a parlor scene with a mother surrounded by her children, one daughter playing a piano with a bound volume clearly titled “Ladies Book” resting on the piano top. Wanting to assure his readers that his magazine should serve more than ornamental purposes, his February plate shows four female ﬁgures, one of who appears to be reading to her companions out of a bound volume of the Ladies Book. An April 1841 fashion plate targets readers who may have subscribed too recently to collect a year’s worth of the magazine for binding—this plate shows a reader leaﬁng through a singlecopy number of Godey’s. Not to be outdone, George Graham oﬀered similar

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fashion plates in September and November 1841, adding a male fashion ﬁgure. In the November issue the magazine is shown propped up against the tall hat of the gentleman caller in the parlor scene (see plate 3). Thus both publishers schooled their captive readers to connect reading of their magazines with other genteel parlor activities—in the case of Graham’s, parlor reading done in mixed-gender audiences. The entrance of Peterson’s Magazine and Miss Leslie’s Magazine challenged Godey’s and Graham’s. Peterson entered the fray copycat style, as a less expensive knockoﬀ of Godey’s, making sure his fashion plates noted that they were “engraved expressly” for his magazine. Meanwhile, as noted above, Miss Leslie’s stressed “novelty” and “innovation,” putting the established Godey’s and fellow newcomer Peterson’s to shame. In January the magazine introduced die-cut techniques into the monthlies by featuring two fashion plates layered on top of each other, with an oval hole cut out of the face of the top plate so that the face of the bottom ﬁgure serves both, an innovation repeated in the May issue. As noted earlier, this strategy, she claimed, had never been attempted in a magazine. It was generally reserved for expensive gift books and children’s paper dolls and books. She explains to her readers: “we have caused our fashion plates for the present month to be arranged in a novel and ingenious manner . . . The two ﬁgures . . . are so placed that one face is made to serve for both of them.” She further boasts of these innovations: “Our plates of the fashions, it will be observed, are not mere mechanical copies from indiﬀerent French engravings, but they are original pictures drawn and executed by artists of the ﬁrst eminence.” In stressing the originality and uniqueness of her embellishments, she encourages her readers to consider them as precious commodities that her magazine oﬀers for their consumption. She used the same strategy with The Rustic Maid and The City Belle in the May number, as seen in ﬁgures 3.4 and 3.5. Meanwhile, at Godey’s, the fashion plates were being revamped to reﬂect the interests of American clothing reformers, moving away from the “tightlacing” deemed detrimental to the health of the magazine’s young readers. A special note to the readers, “OUR FASHION PLATES,” explains: “The publisher has, at great expense, engaged an artist of taste and celebrity, to reform the foreign fashions, so far as health and delicacy require; and we shall try the experiment of exhibiting the mode in accordance with that system of improvements in the moral character of woman which our own ‘Book’ is pledged to sustain. We are happy to say, that ladies of the highest inﬂuence in the religious as well as literary world are engaged with us in this plan.”21

FIGURE 3.4 The Rustic Maid, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, May 1843. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

FIGURE 3.5 The City Belle, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, May 1843. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

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However, Miss Leslie’s novelty peek-a-boo fashion plates really fueled competition. She followed with two “celebrity” embellishments: an embossed portrait (a technique resembling bas relief sculpture in print) of the Indian chief Red Jacket in the February 1843 issue; and an embossed “portrait of Princess Esterhazy in the latest and most recherché style of evening dress” in the March number. Peterson’s tried to ﬁght back in August, oﬀering a fashion plate printed in blue ink. Peterson’s blue-inked plate appeared along with a second specially prepared gift plate, a hand-colored ﬂoral entitled Peony and Butterﬂy that Godey editorially groused had been a concept prepared ﬁrst for his magazine.22 In oﬀering both the blue-inked fashion plate and the colored ﬂoral, Peterson crowed: “We call particular attention to the peony and butterﬂy in this number. This embellishment was got up under the supervision of Mrs. Hill, a celebrated teacher of painting in water colors.” Peterson continued, “The execution of the ﬂower will bear the closest examination, and is equal to anything in the most expensive drawing-books; and yet this embellishment is furnished to our subscribers in addition to the two other costly illustrations which adorn the number.”23 Again, note the markers of status implied by consumption of these embellishments, described as “costly,” “novel,” and “equal to anything in the most expensive drawing-books.” Like Miss Leslie’s, Peterson adopted the strategy of linking consumption of his innovative embellishments to aspirations of upward mobility and genteel status. Middle-class magazine readers could imitate the consumption patterns of the cultural and economic elite via the purchase and display of plates from these illustrated monthlies. However, Peterson was a month behind Miss Leslie’s in the blue ink innovation for the fashion plate. In the June 1843 number, McMichael announced conspiratorially, “Our embellishments have been costly, novel, and appropriate,” and promised readers for July “a series of pictorial illustrations of an entirely novel character.” In July, the magazine delivered, with a four-page poem illustrated with engravings, all printed with blue ink—a month ahead of Peterson’s.24 Godey’s retaliated in November, oﬀering an engraving of the plate A Runaway Match with three frames surrounding it—the ﬁrst printed with black ink, the second with blue ink, and the outside, red ink.25 However, Miss Leslie’s had featured a similar strategy in January 1843, a nearly a year before its competitors. Moreover, these were just the innovations to fashion plates and steel engravings! Miss Leslie’s choicest work for 1843 focused on what were already the most costly and time-consuming reproduction methods: mezzotint and lithography. The leading mezzotint engraver in Philadelphia in the 1840s, and indeed

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in the entire country, was the English emigrant, John Sartain. As Sartain scholar Katharine Martinez notes, few American engravers before 1830 had attempted the technique of mezzotint, though artists and collectors admired and purchased English mezzotints. Mezzotint uses a printing technique called intaglio, the Italian word for “incised,” indicating the technique relied on the use of a burin to incise lines on metal plates.26 Sartain spent the decade of the 1830s perfecting this technique, which involved roughening up the metal surface (a process Sartain called “preparing the grounds”) and dampening the paper in the printing process, all of which was costly and time consuming. To increase the number of imprints from one plate, Sartain switched from a copper to steel plate, trained his own printer in the technique, and arranged for the construction of a suitable press to produce the prints.27 Because mezzotinting had long been connected with the successful reproduction of portraits for mass distribution, Sartain quickly befriended prominent Philadelphia portrait painters. By 1840, he was already producing mezzotints for a variety of sources, including individual print sales, art associations, and magazines.28 In their March 1843 issue, Leslie and McMichael pushed magazine mezzotint embellishment to a new height by oﬀering their readers The Pets, a “coloured mezzotint” engraved by Sartain from a picture by English artist Edwin Landseer (see plate 4). Sartain had earlier engraved an identical mezzotint, though uncolored, for the May 1839 issue of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. In the March 1843 “Publisher’s Table,” McMichael described his version of the embellishment to his readers: “The principal plate is a mezzotint by Sartain, from one of Landseer’s ﬁnest pictures; and to give to it the highest possible eﬀect and ﬁnish, we have had it coloured in the richest style by the most skilful artist, in his line, to be found in this country. No other publisher has ventured to give a coloured mezzotint; and no coloured print of any description at all approaching this of ours, has ever before been furnished to the subscribers of a monthly magazine.”29 The publisher’s rhetoric here clearly displays the status meant to be conveyed to the owner of this embellishment. By insisting that it is taken from one of Landseer’s “ﬁnest” paintings, engraved by the best-known engraver of the era, and ﬁnished in the “richest style” and with the “highest possible eﬀect and ﬁnish” by the “most skillful artist,” the publisher elevates the value of the embellishment. Instead of mere picture, a light and superﬂuous addition to the serious literary matter, it becomes the magazine’s raison d’être. Cast as a prized commodity, the embellishment distinguishes its possessor from subscribers to other illustrated magazines.30 Indeed, the embellishments

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featured in Miss Leslie’s in 1843, and soon challenged by Godey’s and Peterson’s, surpassed those found previously only in the expensive annuals that generally sold for three to four times the price of an entire year’s subscription to one of the Philadelphia pictorials.31 The following month, April 1843, Leslie oﬀered to her readers another ﬁrst: Grandpapa’s Pet, a lithotint prepared by John H. Richards of the P.S. Duval ﬁrm (see plate 5).32 Lithography, a technique of printing from stone, appeared in the Philadelphia pictorials before 1843. Cephas Childs, a Philadelphia printer and publisher, specialized in lithography in the 1820s and 1830s, believing it to be the print medium closest to painting, and ideal for portrait prints.33 Childs employed the deaf-mute Alfred Newsam, and recruited from France the young lithographer, Peter S. Duval.34 Lithography, a planographic method of printing, works through the natural repulsion of grease and water. Lithographers employed a greasy pen, drawing on the surface of a dry stone.35 Color could be added by hand after printing. By 1843 Duval had started his own lithography business, specializing in colored lithographed prints. His strategy involved painting in colors directly on the stone.36 Print historians generally distinguish between lithotinting (tonal lithography using colors on one stone only) and chromolithography (the successive use of multiple stones to build up color).37 Regardless of the method used, adding colors was aimed at achieving the eﬀect of watercolor painting in a print medium.38 Duval prepared chromolithographed covers for Godey, while the New York ﬁrm of James Ackerman prepared the Sartain’s Union cover featured in the Introduction. Miss Leslie’s devoted the front page of the April 1843 issue to a detailed description of this “new art.” Reminding readers that the publisher promised “whatever novelties in the way of embellishments we could procure,” the publisher assured his audience that he has “not hesitated either to incur expense” in so doing. He identiﬁes lithotint as “an art hitherto unknown in the United States,” and traces its invention to a London lithographer “of rare skill,” Mr. Hullmandel. He notes that his own engraver saw several productions by Hullmandel prepared in this manner and, working in conjunction with Duval, experimented with achieving like results. The publisher predicts that lithotint will “eﬀect a revolution” in print publishing.”39 Although print historians point out that lithotint never really caught on in the United States, they also recognize Grandpapa’s Pet as the ﬁrst lithotint produced in America.40 In the same issue, the publisher presented a fashion plate prepared in “chalk-tints on stone,” also claiming it to be the ﬁrst time that this technique had been applied to a magazine embellishment.

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In August 1843 Miss Leslie’s featured yet another ﬁrst in magazine embellishments, introducing the plate with another front-page article beginning: “Our readers will have noticed that it is a part of the plan of our Magazine, to present whatever is new and attractive in the graphic art.” She continued with a description of that month’s plate, entitled Belisarius, engraved by A. Spencer (see plate 6), identifying it as “the art of medal ruling, executed by the original inventor of the medal ruling machine.” While print historians contest the assertion that Asa Spencer was the ﬁrst to perfect the art of medal engraving, they do acknowledge his contribution to the process.41 Medal engraving relies on what is known as a pantographic device, which utilizes two needles to trace the surface of a coin, medal, or small relief and transfer the image to metal plates, preserving areas of light and shadow to reproduce the quality of relief. An earlier version of this device, known as the physiognotrace or silhouette machine, was used to trace a person’s proﬁle. In introducing the embellishment to readers, the publishers reminded those who might have forgotten their history lessons, that Belisarius was the “great general” who protected the emperor Justinian (Miss Leslie’s, August 1843, 33). As the year continued, one surmises that McMichael must have overextended himself on these costly engravings, for after this beautiful plate, Miss Leslie’s embellishments noticeably fall oﬀ in quality. Graham’s, meanwhile, never really engaged in the oneupmanship between Godey’s, Peterson’s, and Miss Leslie’s, relying instead on tried-and-true mezzotints and a few colored ﬂoral bouquet plates for the bulk of the magazine’s pictorial matter. Godey indicated his ability to outlast the competition by announcing his plans for the December issue: “The December Number will contain the greatest novelty ever yet oﬀered in a Magazine, THIRTY-ONE COLOURED EMBOSSED MEDALLION SEALS, with every variety of design, and with beautiful and appropriate Mottoes, ready for immediate use. These cannot be had separately for less than seventy-ﬁve cents. They are oﬀered by the publisher as a holiday present to his fair patrons. This has never before been attempted by a Magazine, and is only another instance of what may be eﬀected by good taste and an expensive outlay of capital” (see plate 7). This graphic art, known as die-sink cameo stamps, had never before appeared in a mass-market magazine. The earliest example previously uncovered by a researcher of this style of engraving is from the mid-1850s.42 The Godey’s plate predates this by more than a decade and was produced in quantity to be distributed to Godey’s readers. This innovation drew the label cameo stamp because it utilizes a method of textured embossing (a raised surface), usually in white relief because untouched by the colored ink

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surrounding it. Thomas Beckman, an expert on this engraving style, reports that blue ink worked best and was used most frequently in the early years of the method.43 It is worth noting that Godey conﬂates the medallions’ value with both their expense and their usefulness.44 In case readers needed direction on the utility of these seals, the February 1844 “Editors’ Book Table” contained a small notice to subscribers instructing them how to use them: “A little gum Arabic dissolved in water, and applied to the back of any of the seals in [the] December number, will cause them to adhere ﬁrmly to a letter” (104). Godey also implies that it takes more than an “expensive outlay of capital” alone to stay the course in the magazine business; by reminding readers of both his good taste and the usefulness of his medallions, Godey implicitly calls into question the taste of his competitors. Seemingly assured of vanquishing the threat of Miss Leslie’s, Godey also claims superiority over French publishers. He notes that although they “embrace almost every novelty in their various works of fancy,” the French have not yet matched Godey in “oﬀering to the fair sex in remote places the luxuries and elegances of the larger cities,” such as these novel embossed friendship medallions (Godey’s, THE EMBELLISHMENTS, November 1843, 240). At the close of 1843, Godey had managed successfully to fend oﬀ the challenge to his magazine’s supremacy occasioned by the entrance of Miss Leslie’s onto the publishing scene. While Godey’s and Miss Leslie’s promoted innovations to American graphic arts, and attached clear signiﬁers of taste and upward class mobility to consumption of these new commodities, the publishers of these illustrated monthly periodicals still needed to contend with market forces that circumscribed the limits of their innovations. Embellishments that were expensive to produce required a large enough audience to support their continued production. In the case of Miss Leslie’s, lack of a substantial enough subscription base likely contributed to the discontinuation of the expensive and innovative embellishments. The magazine continued, but under a new publisher (E. Ferrett) and under the sole editorship of T. S. Arthur, who renamed it Arthur’s Ladies Magazine of Elegant Literature and the Fine Arts. Louis Godey eventually had the last laugh, as he bought out the failing Arthur’s Magazine in July 1846 and merged its subscription list with his own. McMichael’s “ample means” had not been enough to unseat Godey’s. In addition to spurring technical and artistic innovations, however, Miss Leslie’s helped create an economic climate in which artists, engravers, and other graphic designers could promote the artistic value of their wares. Competition between the Philadelphia illustrated periodicals would shift to new

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ground in the middle to later years of the decade, and we will return to this competition in Chapters 6 and 7. However, what about the regional imitators that arose and nearly as quickly folded? How can a brief examination of their histories shed light on how the Philadelphia magazines established and maintained supremacy in the decade of the 1840s?

4 “ The Fluttering Host of Many-Colored Competitors” REGIONAL IMITATORS IN THE NORTHEAST, WEST, AND SOUTH

An August 1842 puﬀ printed on the inside back cover of the newly launched Boston Miscellany queried, “Why cannot Boston produce a ﬁrst-rate literary magazine as well as Philadelphia?” Clearly, by the early 1840s Philadelphia’s illustrated monthly magazines of art and literature set the standards against which newcomers sought to compete. This bold writer then answers his own query: “It can, and in this instance it has.” The Boston Miscellany launched in January 1842 with Nathan Hale Jr., son of one of Boston’s famous patriots, as literary editor. Seeking to capitalize on the Hale reputation, and on the desire of Boston readers to patronize a hometown publication, it looked to have every advantage in its favor: elegant embellishments, original literary contributions, an able editor, and supportive publishers. As the proud puﬀer elaborated, the articles were “good, entertaining and useful.” Furthermore, he continued, “The plates of fashions and pieces of music are as good as those of any other work, and the engravings, especially in the last number, are excellent.” An additional notice published just below this one advised, “Any in New England, who may wish for a literary magazine, had better subscribe for the Miscellany, than import one not half so good from Philadelphia.”1 Similarly, in the inaugural issue of The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in January 1844, the editor, John Inman, brother to the painter Henry Inman, explained in a lengthy introduction his rationale for launching yet one more competitor to the ﬁeld. Inman ventured that the demand for literary production in this country, especially in the periodical channel, exceeds the supply in a very large proportion, and 55

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that new supplies have only to be presented of the right quality, and in the right way, to ensure a hearty welcome and proﬁtable reception. . . . From these premises it is undoubtingly inferred that there is abundant room for another Magazine, notwithstanding the merit and success of those already in being. . . . Another and strong motive has been the feeling that New York, the ﬁrst city of the Union, should be the home of a periodical owning no superior in either merit or success.2 Cincinnati, the “Athens of the West,” proved to be the prominent western publishing center in this decade. By 1846 some half-dozen monthlies of note had launched, faltered, and failed. The longest-running illustrated monthly to emerge in this decade, the Ladies’ Repository, ﬂourished from 1841 to 1876 (Mott, I, 386–88). Published by the Methodist Book Concern, initially from Cincinnati, then later from both Cincinnati and New York (“Editor’s Table,” January 1846, 32), the magazine relied primarily on literary contributions from Methodist ministers, educators, and religious sympathizers. Although a “ladies” magazine, the editor eschewed tales of “love-sick swains and lasses, and intoxicated dames,” oﬀering instead articles on religion, morals, history, education, geography, science, and book reviews.3 While launched as a magazine explicitly interested in furthering “western” and Methodist interests, by decade’s end the editor could claim to be shepherding a periodical “which circulates in every part of the United States.”4 Thus, readers, editors, and publishers in Boston, New York, and Cincinnati positioned their ﬂedgling monthlies against the older, better-known, and more widely circulated Philadelphia magazines. (Several southern cities also launched literary magazines in this decade; more on these shortly). While the publishers of these regional magazines strived to achieve the success of the Philadelphia pictorials, they necessarily relied on what proved to be sometimes competing strategies: an appeal to sectional interests and regional pride to boost local circulation, balanced against an insistence on promoting an emerging national literature and art to generate subscriptions beyond their cities of origin. None proved successful in displacing the Philadelphia pictorials as industry leaders in the 1840s; however, some produced embellishments notable either for featuring regional vistas, or for introducing engraving subjects “entirely new” to American audiences. This chapter will highlight several regional challengers with notable embellishments: the Boston-based Ladies’ Repository (same name as Cincinnati magazine, but diﬀerent publisher) and Boston Miscellany; the Eclectic, the Ladies’ Companion and the Columbian (New York); and the Ladies’ Repository (Cincinnati).

R E G ION A L IM ITATOR S IN T HE NO RT H E AS T, WE S T, AND S O U T H

As noted above, several southern cities—such as Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans—published monthly magazines during this era. However, while acknowledging editorially their eﬀorts to imitate the established northern magazines in support of an emerging American literature, none of these southern magazines attempted to compete with the northern monthlies in featuring original American art. Richmond hosted the Southern Literary Messenger, launched in 1834 and brieﬂy edited by Edgar Allan Poe in 1835–36 (Mott, I, 382). Charleston served as home to some halfdozen monthlies that perished shortly after their births: the Southern Literary Gazette, the Southern Review, the Southern Literary Journal, the Magnolia, the Southern and Western Monthly Magazine, and the Southern Quarterly Review (Mott, I, 382–83).5 Several of these periodicals bounced from one southern city to another, changing names and ownership along the way: the Magnolia began in Savannah as the Southern Ladies’ Book; the Southern Quarterly Review launched in New Orleans before relocating to Charleston. J. D. B. DeBow’s Commercial Review of the South and West emanated from the southernmost city of New Orleans for nearly 35 years (1846–80); although it featured a wider array of articles that the title might suggest, it was sparsely illustrated in this era.6 Although none of the southern magazines oﬀered art engravings to compete with the northern monthlies, a brief examination of perhaps the best-known literary magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, evidences the claim that southern periodicals sought to best their already-established northern counterparts. Thomas Willys White had launched the Southern Literary Messenger from Richmond in 1833, employing rhetoric similar to that of the Boston, New York, and Cincinnati magazines. As owner, publisher, editor, and evidently printer, as well, White gambled greatly in issuing a magazine at a time when the population of Richmond had not yet reached twenty thousand.7 In a column presenting the fourth issue, White announced his intentions to make his magazine the publication “where southern minds especially, may meet in honorable collision.” However, White hastily noted that by this he meant no “slighting or undervaluing” of the contributions he hoped to receive from his “northern and eastern brethren.” In fact, he noted, “We desire to emulate their own noble eﬀorts in behalf of American literature.”8 However, with a $5.00/year subscription fee (while Philadelphia magazine subscriptions ran $2.00 to $3.00/year) White struggled to attract a large readership, either in the South or beyond. White appears to have wanted to have it both ways: on the one hand, he bowed to Northern magazine superiority in an eﬀort to woo a northern

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audience; on the other hand, he wished the Southern Literary Messenger to prosper as the peculiar mouthpiece for a southern literary tradition. To secure northern notice, if not readership, he needed to play down the regional speciﬁcity of the magazine. However, to secure a substantial southern audience, he needed to appeal to readers’ sense of southern pride. Some seven years after founding the magazine, White’s December 1841 “Prospectus” for the 1842 volume betrays his continued frustration: “In all the Union, south of Washington, there are but two Literary periodicals. Northward of that city, there are probably at least twenty-ﬁve or thirty!” White then fumes, “Is this contrast justiﬁed by the wealth, the leisure, the native talent, or the actual literary taste, of the southern people, compared with those of the Northern?” In answering his own query, White alludes to at least one factor contributing to the failure of southern magazines to attract a large readership. White avows, “No: for in wealth, talents, and taste, we may justly claim at least an equality with our brethren; and a domestic institution [emphasis mine] exclusively our own, beyond all doubt aﬀords us, if we choose, twice the leisure for reading and writing, which they employ.” Here White implies that the south’s citizens possess wealth, talents, and taste equal to their northern counterparts—and moreover, that the South’s “domestic institution” (slavery) should enable the leisure necessary for educated citizens to produce and consume literature in proportions exceeding that of the North. What White does not acknowledge is that sustained promotion of its “domestic institution” in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger reinforced sectional diﬀerences and likely discouraged widespread northern readership. A second factor contributing to the struggle faced by the Southern Literary Messenger in particular is the magazine’s steep $5.00/year subscription fee, which doubtless discouraged widespread readership in the South—where there were fewer men of means—as well as in the North, where there was a ready selection of cheaper literary monthlies.9 Moreover, styled primarily as a gentleman’s magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger lacked, in this decade, the fashion plates and other fancy embellishments that appealed to a feminine readership—and this at a time when women were fast becoming the leading consumers of the nation’s illustrated magazines.10 Price, regionalism, and lack of illustrations hampered the Southern Literary Messenger, and other similarly styled southern literary magazines, from signiﬁcantly challenging the artistic supremacy of the Philadelphia pictorials in this decade.

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THE BOSTON MONTHLIES: BOSTON MISCELLANY AND LADIES’ REPOSITORY As the Boston reader whose observations led oﬀ this chapter noted, Boston publishers attempted numerous times to launch monthly magazines to rival their Philadelphia competitors in the 1830s and 1840s, but none achieved the circulation necessary to remain solvent. However, two magazines did publish some noteworthy plates in the 1840s, from Boston artists and engravers, featuring local landmarks and personages that directly appealed to a local audience. The Boston Miscellany appeared in January 1842, undoubtedly relying on a renewed interest in the arts exempliﬁed by the founding, the year before, of the Boston Artists’ Association.11 Published by Bradbury, Soden & Co., of Boston and New York, the magazine oﬀered much to recommend it. A title page presented to readers, beginning with the May 1842 issue, featured a pair of engravings of Revolutionary War scenes depicting tales that would have been familiar to Boston readers (see ﬁg. 4.1). The top engraving, Gen Marion inviting a British oﬃce to dinner, is based on a John B. White painting that had been engraved for the Apollo Association in 1840 by Philadelphia mezzotinter John Sartain. The scene depicts South Carolina revolutionary war hero General Francis Marion, known as the “Swamp Fox,” inviting a British oﬃcer to dinner. According to lore, the British oﬃcer was so moved by the simple fare and the fact that American soldiers drew no wages, that he switched allegiances.12 The bottom engraving, Capture of Andre, 1780, references the wellknown tale of British Major John Andre’s conspiracy with American General Benedict Arnold, and his capture at the hands of three New York militiamen. Philadelphia artist Thomas Sully had painted the scene in 1812, and it had inspired a host of other reproductions, including a stage play.13 In its brief fourteen months in publication, the Boston Miscellany oﬀered fashion plates (some colored, some not), engravings based on fancy pictures, and three plates of local Boston landmarks. Unlike Godey’s fashion plates, which, during the Boston Miscellany’s short publishing run, were now being “Americanized,” this magazine’s plates bear the title “Paris Fashions” and oﬀer no explanatory text. The engravings of fancy pictures, although for the most part of high quality, display little to distinguish themselves from similar plates in other illustrated monthlies. With titles such as The Bride, The Inquiry, The Dreamer, The Importunate, The Young Gleaners, and The Young Tutors, most appear to have their origins in Continental, rather than American, paintings.

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FIGURE 4.1 Boston Miscellany of Literature & Fashion, title cover, January 1842. Engraved by Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Smillie. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Moreover, unlike the Philadelphia pictorials, the engravings are presented as adjuncts to the literary matter: the index lists short tales and poems by title, then in brackets following includes the statement “with an engraving.” The plates of Boston landmarks likely appealed to local audiences, but largely lack the iconic and nationalistic appeal of similar plates in the Philadelphia pictorials. Chamber of Representatives/From the Park, depicting the Massachusetts state house, published in the February 1842 issue, was engraved by Joseph Andrews, a Boston engraver who had worked under Abel Bowen, Boston’s leading engraver and lithographer.14 Bunker Hill Monument, published in the August 1842 issue, was “engraved expressly” for the Boston Miscellany by John A. Rolph, a New York engraver whose work frequently appeared in the Boston periodicals. Perhaps the best executed of the three is Boston Common, designed by Hammatt Billings, a respected Boston architect and monument designer, and engraved again by Rolph for the December 1842 issue.15 All three plates depicted scenes likely appealing to Massachusetts residents; however, only the Bunker Hill plate alluded to events of greater signiﬁcance to a narrative of national history. Publishers Bradley, Soden & Co. must have realized at the end of their ﬁrst year in business that the balance sheet needed reckoning. In their “Prospectus” for the new volume, the publishers mention the “pressure of the times,” the “great competition in this line . . . from periodicals long established,” and note that the “numerous attempts . . . to locate a magazine of a purely literary character in this quarter of the United States” had “as often failed.” Perhaps the publishers intended this as a spur to prod subscribers not only to pay up, but also to enlist additional subscribers. Certainly, the promise of engravings of “New and original American subjects/Historical, Landscape and Picturesque” suggests that the publishers realized that the fancy plates had done little to distinguish the pictorial matter of the magazine. Likewise, this notice suggests that plates of local landmarks might have limited appeal to readers outside Boston—largely because the Philadelphia magazines already oﬀered readers plates of geographically dispersed American sites and scenery, including Boston scenes.16 Tellingly, editor Nathan Hale Jr. bade farewell to readers in the December 1842 issue, claiming to be leaving the magazine in other hands “for better conduct and enlarged ability.” A publishers’ notice in that same issue indicated that the editorship would be passing into the hands of Henry T. Tuckerman, a New York writer and art critic responsible for combining the Boston Miscellany with the New York magazine Arcturus (Mott, I, 720). With no further announcement from the publishers about their intentions for the combined

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magazine, it simply ceased publication two months later, after the February 1843 issue. A much longer-running Boston monthly (1843–73), the Ladies’ Repository, could not have been more diﬀerent from the Boston Miscellany in editorial intent, content, contributors, and readership. Whereas the Boston Miscellany aspired to become the literary magazine of New England, the Ladies’ Repository represented Universalist religious interests. Whereas the Boston Miscellany featured ﬁction and poetry, the Ladies’ Repository gravitated toward articles on religion, morals, philosophy, education, history, geography, and science—though it did not completely eschew ﬁction. Whereas the Boston Miscellany sought to engage contributions from the nation’s leading poets and novelists (and in reality, Hale composed much of the content), the Ladies’ Repository relied on the unpaid contributions of ministers, educators (many were college professors), and religious sympathizers. While the Boston Miscellany aspired to compete with the Philadelphia pictorials, then boasting readerships in the tens of thousands, the Ladies’ Repository contented itself with a modest subscription list hovering around two thousand souls in 1843.17 However, the plates did receive great care in selection and presentation, and for that, readers had to thank the Rev. Henry A. Bacon, who served as editor of the magazine throughout the 1840s. Moreover, the contents were not the narrow and stodgy didacticisms one might expect from an explicitly religious publication. In the November 1843 issue, Bacon explained, “That the Repository has been a Universalist periodical, none can dispute . . .” (200). However, as the Rev. E. G. Brooks explained, “We are opposed to creeds. We regard them as wholly unauthorized and unscriptural—opposed altogether to the free spirit of Christ and Christianity. Christ delivered no creed; Christianity enforces none.”18 In addition to embracing universal salvation, Universalists (and their near-brethren, Unitarians) also supported many of the leading liberal social causes of the day: prison reform, abolition of slavery, suﬀrage rights, the peace movement, educational reform, and the like.19 Moreover, Rev. Bacon speciﬁcally voiced his belief in the transformative potential of works of art, and his support of Boston’s art community. From the magazine’s inception in 1843, plates appeared quarterly, in January, April, July, and October. Generally, these were steel engravings, although the magazine oﬀered the occasional mezzotint, usually a portrait. However, while the Philadelphia and New York illustrated magazines featured portraits of “distinguished” Americans, usually authors and statesmen, the Ladies’ Repository featured portraits of Universalist ministers and leaders. As might be expected, religious scenes formed a staple of the pictorial material.

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American landscapes also proved a favorite with the Repository, as with many of the illustrated monthlies: following the 1840 London publication of Nathaniel P. Willis’s American Scenery, with nearly seventy plates designed by William H. Bartlett, most monthlies scrambled to prepare their own engravings based on Bartlett’s designs.20 In the early issues of the Repository, Bacon provided most of the text accompanying the engravings, and additional editorial matter promoting the Boston art scene. An engraving for the July 1843 issue, Hudson Highlands, based on a Bartlett design, displayed the engraving talents of a local engraver, Oliver Pelton, known also for his banknote work.21 In his accompanying description of the plate, Bacon notes, “The engraving is from a painting by W. H. Bartlett, who is called by N. P. Willis, ‘the draftsman of the American scenery—the best of artists in this way.’”22 In a paragraph from the “Books, Notices & c.” column on the following page (39), Bacon oﬀers his observations on the Boston art scene: “It is becoming quite fashionable in Boston to call into the rooms of the various Artists of that city . . . Boston can boast of quite a number of artists to whom the title of distinguished can with propriety be applied.” Bacon mentions speciﬁcally the work of sculptor Edward Augustus Brackett, and painter Thomas Buchanan Read, both living in Boston at the time.23 Though admitting to be no “professed connoisseur” of the arts, Bacon nonetheless sought to support the Boston arts community, and to frame the magazine’s art embellishments with suitable commentary. In addition to Hudson Highlands, the magazine featured other American landscapes in this decade, many based on Bartlett’s designs, and most of a local or regional interest: Boston Highlands/(From Bull Hill); Connecticut River/ Near Vernon (another Pelton plate); Boston (October 1845); and Trenton Falls (November 1845, also by Pelton). For the October 1845 plate Boston, Bacon provides this note (155): “The plate given in this No. is an original sketch of Boston as seen from the Harbor, from a drawing made by the artist himself for the express purpose.” Bacon continues, “Every one familiar with the point of view, to whom we have shown the plate, has admired it and pronounced it an accurate picture, and well executed.” As noted, religious scenes and portraits of Universalist clergymen also proved a staple of the pictorial matter. Ruth and Boaz, published in the January 1845 issue, is of special note since it featured the work of two Bostonian artists: it was engraved by Oliver Pelton, from the painting by Thomas Buchanan Read. Bacon himself was the subject of two full-page engravings: the ﬁrst, a steel engraving published in the July 1846 issue; the second a mezzotint engraved from a daguerreotype portrait for the February 1850 issue. In

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the wry, self-deprecating tone characteristic of Bacon’s editorials, he writes of the 1850 portrait: “to none, we believe, is it too handsome” (316). In supplying brief biographical details, he particularly foregrounds his sixteen years of active ministry, fourteen of which include his editorship of the magazine. A portrait of the Rev. John Murray, published in the July 1845 issue, likely also held special appeal for Universalists: Murray was the leading exponent of the theology of “Complete Redemption” that distinguished Universalists from their more conservative and Calvinistic Christian counterparts.24 Murray had immigrated to America in 1770, and preached his ﬁrst sermon at Thomas Potter’s chapel in Good Luck, New Jersey.25 In his “Books, Notices, & c.” column for October 1845, Bacon writes a review of a single-print engraving Potter’s Meeting House, available for 12 cents from the printing house of Repository publisher A. Tompkins. Bacon notes (160): “We received this engraving with peculiar pleasure. It is more to us than any sketch of natural scenery, for it makes us think, reverently, gratefully and hopefully, as but few pictures can.” Moreover, Bacon’s ﬁnal words indicate the use to which he encouraged readers to put this picture: “This engraving is added to the pictorial sermons which speak to us from the walls of our study, and which make the silence of our solitude to be eloquent with wisdom.” Bacon’s belief that engravings could serve as “pictorial sermons” was certainly not unique in this decade. In his 1840 address to the Artists’ Fund Society, George W. Bethune had claimed: “A good engraving of a good picture, in its eﬀect on the mind, is incomparably superior to a painting of ordinary merit.” Bethune noted in his address that those “whose means are too narrow to purchase original designs, can ﬁnd a cheap, but delightful gratiﬁcation from the engraver’s art.” He added that engravings “have enlivened with glimpses of Art the walls of many a humble dwelling, once poor and mean.”26 Bacon clearly believed that the magazine’s artwork served as one vehicle for fulﬁlling Universalism’s mission of educational reform and moral uplift. Considering the magazine’s religious origins, a series of belles lettres plates oﬀered in the early 1850s perhaps was unique in the Repository’s choice of engravings. Featuring scenes from novels, these plates speciﬁcally challenged the prevailing notion (advocated by Union editor Caroline Kirkland, among others) that “novel reading” constituted a corrupting (Kirkland called it “vicious”) inﬂuence, particularly on female readers. The Repository featured Catherine Seyton as the plate for August 1850, and Bacon speciﬁcally encouraged readers (76) to consult Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Abbot, for a fuller delineation of his female character (pictured, as in the novel, in her disguise as a page). In March 1851, the magazine featured The Sentry Box, painted by

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expatriate artist Charles Leslie, living in London. Bacon’s textual accompaniment (356) refers readers to the scene from Tristram Shandy in which Uncle Toby suﬀers the lures of the widow Wademan. That Universalism embraced “the most liberal tolerance,” in Bacon’s words, likely accounts for the publisher’s and editor’s selection and promotion of both pictorial and reading matter. While secular illustrated monthly magazines like Godey’s and the Union featured articles and engravings that railed against the evils of novel reading, the Repository embraced a more liberal position toward both art and literature than some of its secular counterparts. This liberal attitude toward the arts seems to have stemmed from the Universalist belief in the “sanctity of conscience” in making ethical and moral choices. For example, in a column on “Children of Universalists” Bacon noted, “no true Universalist would wish to violate the conscience of a child, and force attendance in the family pew.”27 Universalism embraced the light of reason and intellect in spiritual matters, and viewed art and literature alike as possible vehicles for spiritual inspiration for all its adherents. The ability of women readers to make their own moral choices appears to have been the bedrock of the magazine’s philosophy. In his “Editor’s Table” for the July 1849 issue, Bacon notes that Universalism, as a religion, gives “dignity and substantiality to female character,” and that Universalist women ought therefore better support the eﬀorts of the Repository to honor women’s moral independence. Likewise, in an article on Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the July 1850 issue, Bacon takes issue with the prevailing notion that strength of thought must be connected with masculine coarseness (40). Moreover, at a time when her contemporaries, including Godey’s editor Sarah Josepha Hale, deserted popular author Elizabeth Oakes Smith for taking the lyceum stage on behalf of women’s rights, Bacon published a review of Woman and Her Needs defending Oakes Smith against her detractors. Of the book, Bacon writes in his editor’s table for December 1851: “Mrs. Smith gives her thoughts on this subject, and her book abounds with strong and indignant protests against the shams which are sanctiﬁed by custom and the discords which are called unions” (237). Bacon also praises Oakes Smith’s moral courage in taking her cause to the lyceum stage while other women reformers eschewed professing their beliefs in such public spaces. While many Boston monthlies came and went, the Ladies’ Repository maintained its steady commitment to liberal Universalist ideologies years past the Civil War. In the decade of the 1840s, the magazine oﬀered Bostonians (and beyond) who harbored liberal religious leanings an alternative to the illustrated monthlies emanating from Philadelphia. Though never achieving an

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audience anywhere near that of the Philadelphia pictorials, the Repository nonetheless managed a steady enough subscription base to sustain publication while secular Boston monthlies like the Miscellany surfaced, ﬂourished, and failed. The magazine supported the work of local artists and engravers via its plates of regional landscapes and portraits of homegrown religious leaders. Advocating sanctity of conscience for women and for children, the Repository occupied a liberal high ground in American literary culture that its secular Philadelphia counterparts in this decade did not attempt to challenge. Publishing articles on the peace, temperance, suﬀrage, Universalist, and antislavery movements, the Repository occupied an interesting, and largely unexplored, position in antebellum American culture. As such, it deserves more sustained scholarly attention.28

NEW YORK MONTHLIES: THE ECLECTIC, LADIES’ COMPANION, AND COLUMBIAN Although Philadelphia proved to be the primary publishing center for illustrated monthly magazines in the 1840s, New York ran a close second and, in terms of weeklies and mammoth dailies, surpassed the City of Brotherly Love. Her longstanding literary monthly, the Knickerbocker (1833–65), largely eschewed pictorial embellishments; until 1858, when monthly steel engravings began to appear, the magazine oﬀered only the occasional, largely unremarkable, woodcut (Mott, I, 612). However, other periodicals showcased the talents of New York’s artists and engravers. This section will focus on three monthlies oﬀering higher-quality art embellishments: the Eclectic, the Ladies’ Companion, and the Columbian. In addition, brief mention will be made of the engravings in New York’s popular illustrated weekly, the New Mirror. Though featuring work from the same artists and engravers, these three illustrated monthlies diﬀered in audience and intent, and therefore, in the subject matter of the monthly plates. The Eclectic (1844–1907) reprinted excerpts from Europe’s leading literary newspapers and magazines, and thus featured the work of English and Continental authors; each month featured a mezzotint portrait engraved by John Sartain. The Ladies’ Companion (1834–44) launched as New York’s alternative to Philadelphia’s leading $3.00/ year illustrated monthlies (Godey’s and Graham’s). Godey’s Lady’s Book and The Ladies’ Companion targeted a feminine audience, while New York’s Columbian, like Philadelphia’s Graham’s, included the elaboration Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in its extended title. The Eclectic appears to have commenced

FIGURE 4.2 The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, title cover, August 1845. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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speciﬁcally to capitalize on the faltering of The Ladies’ Companion, which folded that same year. Although perhaps the longest-running of the New York illustrated monthlies that commenced publication prior to 1850, the Eclectic largely featured reprints from European periodicals and, in terms of literary content, merits closer comparison with other popular miscellanies of the era rather than with the Philadelphia pictorials. Tracing its roots back to a Philadelphia weekly commencing publication in 1819, the Eclectic, under various titles and incarnations, continued publication until 1907. Eliakim and Squier Littell shepherded the magazine through transitions during 1843, before selling it oﬀ in January 1844 to start the periodical that became its closest competitor in that era, Littell’s Living Age. As the new title of the magazine proudly proclaimed, it was a magazine of “foreign literature” culled from Europe’s leading periodicals (see ﬁg. 4.2). In terms of artwork, it is chieﬂy remembered for 200-plus mezzotint portraits of dignitaries (American, as well as Continental) contributed by John Sartain during the magazine’s heyday between 1844 and 1862 (Mott, I, 306–9). The Eclectic’s subscription fee of $5.00 payable in advance, $6.00 upon billing, and $6.50 for bound older volumes, along with the magazine’s promise of pictorial embellishments “embrac[ing] the whole of MODERN EUROPEAN ART,” suggests a target audience primarily of East Coast elites with economic, political, and social ties to the Continent. The incentive for securing new subscribers was unorthodox. The Philadelphia magazines relied on promotional schemes involving reduced subscription rates for clubs subscribing simultaneously, or premiums such as single engravings or bundled subscriptions to other print material from the same bookseller. The Eclectic, on the other hand, oﬀered cash commissions to subscribers: $1.00 for securing one new subscriber at the $5.00 fee; $2.00 for securing between $5.00 and $100.00 in new subscription fees; and so on, up to $3.00 for sending in $300.00 in subscription fees.29 In addition to displaying the work of European artists and mezzotint portraits of European nobility and literati, the Eclectic featured in this era a few other engravings worth mentioning. The work of expatriate American painter Charles Leslie is featured in several plates: The Gypseying [sic] Party (February 1844); The Widow (September 1844); and The Mother (August 1845), all engraved by Sartain. Mezzotint portraits of Milton Dictating to His Daughters (April 1844), Tennyson (March 1848), and Wordsworth (August 1849) stand out, as well as an engraving based on Thomas Sully’s fancy picture The Mantilla (July 1847). Two other notable Sartain mezzotints are Dr. Johnson

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Rescuing Goldsmith from his Landlady (January 1848) and A Literary Party at Sir Joshua Reynolds (January 1849), picturing Boswell, Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, Burke, Paoli, Burney, Warton, and Goldsmith. Also of interest is a series of plates depicting stages of a romantic relationship, based on the work of two diﬀerent painters: The Last Appeal (September 1848), The Pardon Refused (April 1849), The Reconciliation (May 1849), and The Gentle Warning (October 1849). Like Louis Godey, the Eclectic’s publisher bragged, “the engravings are considered, by many, worth the price of the work” (front matter, September 1844). However, with an initial subscription list of between 800 and 1,200 subscribers, the steep subscription fees, and a relentlessly European focus, the Eclectic was never in direct competition with the Philadelphia illustrated monthlies, touting their original contributions of American literature and art. Nonetheless, the Eclectic did contribute to the distribution of art engravings during its long history, and the magazine’s artwork deserves further study. Editor and publisher William W. Snowden launched his Ladies’ Companion in May 1834 as a New York challenger to the Philadelphia monthlies, and by 1840 claimed a subscription list surpassing that of Godey’s.30 Snowden staked his claim to supremacy on his magazine’s success at being the ﬁrst in America to publish an original steel engraving in every issue. The publisher ﬁrst makes this claim in his prospectus for the volume to begin May 1838 (unlike most publishers, Snowden’s new volumes commenced in May and November, rather than July and January). In a note entitled “TO CORRESPONDENTS AND READERS,” he announces his intention, beginning with the next volume, to engage the engraver Archibald L. Dick (although Snowden mistakenly calls him “James”) to prepare “an entirely new steel plate” for each issue. By contrast, Godey ﬁrst began claiming “entirely original contents” (as opposed to “plates”) a bit later, in January 1840; in December of that same year the publisher complained that reviewers failed to notice between magazines that oﬀered borrowed plates, and those, like Godey’s, that oﬀered two original steel engravings in each issue. Frank Luther Mott famously referred to Snowden as a “literary adventurer who knew more about circulation building than he did about literature,” but as is true of many of Mott’s observations, he did not explain exactly how Snowden built up the magazine’s circulation (Mott, I, 626). However, a close reading of the editorial spaces of the magazine reveals that Snowden’s success is owed to several aggressive collection strategies. Beginning in June 1838, the publisher announced that he would begin reprinting on the cover of the magazine the names of all subscribers who discontinue or move without

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paying up. In his “Editors’ Table,” Snowden reprinted excerpts from an article published in the Hesperian noting that the “negligence of good subscribers” is the primary force operating against the success of the establishment of American magazines. Later on the same page (100), Snowden reminded subscribers that the $3.00/year fee rises to $4.00/year if not paid by the ﬁrst of August (three months after the commencement of a new volume). In the October 1838 “Editors’ Table,” the publisher announced that his agent, Mr. Alexander Means, was on a “collecting tour” throughout the state of New York and that subscribers should pay up by mail, or “when called upon,” otherwise they would be billed for $4.00 rather than $3.00. By October 1840, Snowden included this paragraph at the end of nearly every “Editors’ Table” explaining to readers the magazine’s collection policy, citing legal decisions in the policy’s defense: NOTICE.—It is requisite that it should be distinctly understood that the year of the Ladies Companion commences in May or November. All subscriptions expire, either with the April or October number. Persons receiving the ﬁrst number of a new volume, are considered as subscribers for the whole year, and payment will be insisted upon. It is the duty of every subscriber to give notice at the oﬃce, personally, or by letter postpaid, if he desire the work stopped, and not to permit it to be forwarded to his address for several months after the year has expired. When a person once causes his name to be registered, it is not for any deﬁnite period—but so long as he suﬀers the work to come in his name, he is answerable for the subscription, (see Judge Thompson and Judge Williams’ decisions), whether it is taken from the post oﬃce, or allowed to remain there by the person whose name it bears. No subscription can be transferred without the consent of the oﬃce, otherwise the person ﬁrst subscribing, is held responsible. These three strategies—dunning delinquents on the magazine’s cover, sending collection agents door to door, and spelling out clearly a subscriber’s legal liabilities in commencing a subscription—likely contributed to his success in maintaining adequate enough revenues to keep the magazine running for over ten years. At the conclusion of the magazine’s ﬁrst year of publication in April 1835, Snowden reminded his readers that he had provided them engravings “from many a scene of romantic interest.” While Snowden did oﬀer the typical romantic fare—idealized images of shepherdesses, Indian maidens, and

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ladies in peril—within a few years, the scope of the magazine’s embellishments widened signiﬁcantly beyond this description. In advance of the 1840 release of Willis’s American Scenery, Snowden featured Saratoga Lake, a Bartlett design engraved by Dick (May 1839), and before the magazine folded, he had published a dozen and a half American landscape plates based on Bartlett designs.31 He also featured plates of American scenery from other well-known New York painters—The Falls of Catskill by Thomas Cole (May 1837); I Went to Gather Flowers by George Loring (Claude) Brown (July 1837); The Whirlwind, also by Cole (August 1837); and Title Cover for 1837, based on a Brown painting. He also published The Wrecked Mariner, by landscape artist Thomas Birch (June 1837), and The Indian Toilette, painted by New York artist and designer John G. Chapman (September 1837). In two genres of images, Snowden deﬁnitely appears to have bested his Philadelphia competitors in the decade of the 1840s: engravings of belles lettres and plates depicting contemporary Chinese culture.32 As the next chapter will discuss, the relationship between image and text in these illustrated magazines ﬂuctuated throughout the 1840s, in part in response to larger changes in the literary marketplace. However, Snowden appears to have led the competition in the 1840s in oﬀering to his readers art engravings depicting well-known literary characters. Not to be confused with simple woodcut illustrations that began to be used with greater frequency in book illustration beginning early in the 1840s, these expensive-to-produce, high-quality art engravings were meant to serve as the focal point of an image/text duo: the text usually “illustrated” the image, not the other way around. They were also meant for pull-out and parlor display. Likewise, his China scenes neither exoticized nor caricatured the Chinese as a race and nation (as did much visual depiction of the Chinese in this decade), but rather attempted ethnographic verisimilitude. Snowden apparently favored Scottish themes in choosing literary characters to illustrate, and seems to have assumed his readers’ familiarity with the works in which they appeared. He featured four plates of characters based on poems by Robert Burns, and another four plates of characters from novels by Sir Walter Scott.33 Dick engraved all of the Burns plates from paintings by J. M. Wright. These engravings feature very similar-looking male and female characters, accompanied by a dog, and one suspects that Wright used the same models for all four designs. The Scott plates, from diﬀerent artists and engravers, feature female characters: two from Scott’s novel Heart of Mid Lothian, a third from Peveril of the Peaks, and a fourth from The Betrothed.34 That Snowden assumed that his subscribers were novel readers is apparent in

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FIGURE 4.3 The Culture and Preparation of Tea, frontispiece, Ladies’ Companion, August 1843. Drawn by T. Allom, engraved by A. L. Dick. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

his editorial presentation of the plate of Eﬃe Deans for the July 1841 issue: “Our engraving for this month is the portrait of one of Scott’s heroines, from one of his most popular novels, the Heart of Mid Lothian. Few readers but will recollect the circumstances arising from an error in her life, on which Scott has constructed his novel, as well as her sister, the virtuous Jeanie Deans, one of the most beautiful sketches of high principle and steady aﬀection which was ever delineated by any author” (103). Like Louis Godey, Snowden listed his magazine’s embellishments separately from the ﬁction and poetry in each issue. Moreover, like Godey, Snowden insisted that his magazine’s engravings be received as works of art. In an October 1842 “Editors’ Table,” looking back over eight years of publication, Snowden includes a special paragraph, “Our Engravings.” He notes, “We would call the attention of our subscribers to the engravings of the present number, as works of art, unsurpassed by any other periodical of similar pretensions” (334).35 Again like Godey, in the pivotal year 1843 (discussed in ch. 3) Snowden found himself caught up in the heated

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FIGURE 4.4 Doctor Sian Seng: Or, A Chinaman in Paris, page 174, Graham’s, March 1849.

competition to obtain unique and “novel” engravings for his magazine. The plates he secured were of so diﬀerent a character from those he usually published that he must have realized he would need to position them for his readers in advance. In a July 1843 column, “Periodical Literature,” Snowden opines, “the public taste has become completely nauseated with the sickly sentimentalism.” He promises his readers “more wholesome nutriment” that will engage the “intellectual appetite” of American readers who admire “real science and letters” (154).

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The next month (August 1843), he presented to his readers the ﬁrst of four plates illustrating contemporary Chinese culture. This plate engraved by Dick, The Culture and Preparation of Tea (see ﬁg. 4.3), was introduced as “the ﬁrst of its kind, that has ever appeared in any of the periodicals of our country.”36 Indeed, most images and texts depicting the Chinese in magazines of art and literature—magazines that touted their aim to “elevate the intellectual and moral character of the people”37—presented Chinese men visually as caricatures, and textually, as weak, indolent, and materialistic. This depiction of the Chinese predominated through the end of the decade in the polite literature. Typical of this depiction is a two-part illustrated tale published in Graham’s for February and March 1849, “Doctor Sian Seng, or The Chinaman in Paris” (see ﬁg. 4.4). By contrast, Snowden’s Chinese plates, and the accompanying textual explications, oﬀered the magazine’s readers a snippet of the “real science and letters” that Snowden claimed the American reading public now craved. As scholars have pointed out, Americans in the eastern cities proved eager to learn about Chinese culture, from newly opened “museums” and exhibitions, as well as from regular coverage of Chinese travel and commerce covered in newspapers and magazines.38 The full-page article accompanying The Culture and Preparation of Tea reads part history, part geography, part botany lesson, and part cultural analysis. The article begins by noting the increased interest in American-Chinese relationships.39 A description of the climate and soil necessary to cultivate the plants follows. The article next gives a botanical description of the two principal plants from which Chinese green and black teas, respectively, are harvested. Finally, the article describes the medical eﬀects of tea on the human body, and the various uses to which the Chinese and other tea drinkers put the beverage. Snowden oﬀered a second plate in this vein for the December 1843 issue: Silk Culture in China. The accompanying one-page explication, like that accompanying the tea cultivation plate, serves as both scientiﬁc treatise and sociocultural analysis. Silk production was receiving quite a bit of attention in the American print media, in part due to Treasury reports claiming that in 1835, over twelve million dollars’ worth of silk had been imported into the United States from France alone, making silk the single most expensive import.40 The article accompanying the plate cites the American Institute’s eﬀorts to promote silk production in the United States. (Similar to Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, the American Institute, chartered in May 1829, sponsored exhibitions of the leading developments in science, agriculture and the mechanical arts.41 The 1843 convention featured a separate Silk Convention, where

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ﬂedgling American growers shared strategies for increasing production and displayed their wares.42) In addition to praising the eﬀorts of the American Institute to promote domestic industry in agriculture, commerce, manufactures, and the mechanical arts, Snowden’s article accompanying the silk culture plate also seeks to overturn long-held misconceptions about the Chinese people. The author (it is unclear whether this was Snowden or one of his assistant editors) praises the “temperance, industry, constancy and the domestic aﬀections” of the Chinese people, in addition to admiring their skill in the design and production of ﬁne porcelain, ivory carvings, and silk fabrics (57). He chastises previous geographers and historians for categorizing the Chinese as a “semi-enlightened people,” and ventures a guess that when Chinese literature has been translated, it will be found to eclipse “the most highly prized of all our Greek and English classics” (57). Although Snowden said his goodbyes to his subscribers in the April 1844 “Editors’ Table,” reporting that he had sold the magazine “to a company of gentlemen, who will continue its publication,” he evidently had already arranged for the publication of two additional plates of Chinese culture that were published after his departure: Facade of the Great Temple, Macao (June 1844) and Lake See-Hoo (September 1844). The article accompanying the Great Temple plate opens by observing “the universal interest which has been created in America . . . relative to the aﬀairs of China,” and credits the knowledge gained about China to the dogged eﬀorts of the British to open the country to trade. Likewise, the article accompanying the engraving Lake See-Hoo reminds readers of the magazine’s eﬀorts to “lay before our people a faithful character of the country of China,” a country which for centuries had been shrouded in mystery, according to the writer. The Chinese plates proved to be the magazine’s pictorial swan song; with no fanfare, the Ladies’ Companion slipped into oblivion a month later, following the October 1844 issue. In its ten-year history, the magazine, under Snowden’s able direction, showcased the work of New York artists and engravers; published numerous plates of American scenery; established successful collection methods that built and maintained a subscription list impressive for its era; and bested the Philadelphia pictorials in oﬀering art engravings of belles lettres and plates capitalizing on the rising popularity of Chinese commerce and culture. In many ways John Inman simply picked up where William Snowden left oﬀ. The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine made its appearance in January 1844, and carried on the Ladies’ Companion tradition of presenting

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readers with ﬁne art embellishments based on the work of New York artists and engravers.43 The magazine seems to have quite literally inherited a couple of additional plates of Chinese culture likely originally intended for the Ladies’ Companion: Pavilion and Gardens of a Mandarin Near Pekin.—China (February 1845) and Raree Show, at Lin-Sin-Choo (December 1845). A. L. Dick executed both engravings from drawings by the same artist, Thomas Allom, whose drawings inspired the Chinese views for the Ladies’ Companion. The editor and publisher could justly brag, however, that the Columbian, in presenting these plates, “shall be in advance of its competitors,” since the Philadelphia pictorials oﬀered no art engravings in this vein during this decade.” As noted earlier, the Columbian launched as a New York competitor to the Philadelphia pictorials, particularly Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. Under the editorial leadership of Inman and the publishing eﬀorts of Israel Post, the monthly appears to have prospered for its ﬁrst three years. After Post sold the magazine in early 1847 to Waterman Lilly Ormsby (a New York bank note engraver and inventor of engraving machines who had engraved plates for the magazine from its inaugural issue), the magazine began a downhill slide (Mott, I, 744).44 During the prime years of 1844–46, however, the magazine featured plates based on paintings and sketches from New York artists Charles Ingham, John G. Chapman, Samuel Osgood, and Henry Inman (the editor’s brother), in addition to the ever-present fashion plates. In the inaugural issue, the editor promised subscribers “at least twentyfour elegant productions of the graphic art, which could not be otherwise procured at three or four times the annual cost of the magazine.” Thus, both editor and publisher staked the magazine’s claim to superiority, in part, on its art engravings. When the publisher occasionally could not deliver the plates intended, due to the failure of an engraver to meet a deadline, an editorial apology accompanied the inferior plates oﬀered to readers instead.45 In addition to featuring New York artists and engravers, the Columbian also featured several genres of plates on uniquely American themes: historical plates featuring famed encounters between settlers and Indians; plates honoring the nation’s founder, George Washington; plates based on popular American novels; and plates highlighting recent American exploits in the war with Mexico. The September and November 1844 issues featured two engravings of wellknown Indian-encounter scenes by New York portrait, historical, and landscape painter John L. Morton. A member of the National Academy from 1831 until his death in 1871, Morton exhibited frequently at annual Academy exhibitions and for the American Art-Union.46 Gen. Scott & John Brant, engraved by Ormsby for the September issue, references an incident in the War of 1812

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involving John Brant, also called Ahyouwaighs, youngest son and successor of the famous Mohawk chief Joseph Brant. Captain Smith & Pochahontas, engraved by H. S. Sadd for the November issue, is a particularly well-executed mezzotint depicting the oft-engraved scene of Smith’s supposed rescue at the pleading of Pocahontas.47 The life of George Washington served as the inspiration for some halfdozen plates appearing in the Columbian between 1844 and 1848, the last recycled from an earlier issue (a clear indication that the magazine took a downward turn after Ormsby assumed proprietorship in early 1847). The November 1844 issue featured Washington Crossing the Allegany, based on the Daniel Huntington painting. Washington’s reception on the Bridge at Trenton in 1789 appeared as the frontispiece for the January 1845 issue, and then again for the January 1848 issue. The Birthplace of Washington, based on a design by John G. Chapman and engraved by the New York ﬁrm of Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Smillie, appeared the next month. In October 1845 the magazine published The British surrendering their arms to Gen. Washington after their defeat at Yorktown, Virginia, with a subtitle identifying the names of the soldiers depicted in the engraving. The May 1846 issue featured Washington’s Death Bed, designed by Tompkins H. Matteson and “engraved expressly” for the magazine by H. S. Sadd.48 In featuring scenes from popular American novels, Inman implicitly claims for American belles lettres the same status accorded by Snowden and his ilk to the work of Continental writers. Again, these plates featuring scenes from popular American novels should not be confused with the simple woodcuts that publishers increasingly began using to illustrate novels in the early to mid-1840s. These art engravings, although illustrating and thereby promoting American belles lettres, stood on their own as elegant art embellishments.49 Where Snowden had preferred Scottish themes, Inman and Post proved staunch promoters of American literature and art; and in the case of the scenes from popular American novels, the magazine bested its Philadelphia competitors in this decade.50 James Fenimore Cooper’s novels appear to have been the favorites. The magazine published three plates based on Cooper’s work: A Scene from the Pioneers (January 1846), in addition to Harvey Birch’s Warning to Young Wharton (February 1846) and Harvey Birch and the Skinners (January 1847), both taken from The Spy. Washington Irving warranted one plate, A Scene from Irving’s Sketch Book/Rip Van Winkle, published in March 1846. Of this plate, newly enlisted assistant editor Robert A. West wrote, “as a work of art it has never been surpassed, if equaled, in the periods of greatest rivalry in magazine

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FIGURE 4.5 Storming of Palace Hill at the Battle of Monterrey, frontispiece, Columbian, January 1847. Designed by T. H. Matteson, engraved by H. S. Sadd.

embellishments” (138). The ﬁnal plate in this series, A Scene from Hope Leslie (June 1846), elicited this response from the editor: “We are pleased that we can present to our readers another of those superb engravings, from original designs, which have elicited such universal and spontaneous commendations from the conductors of the press in every section of the United States” (280). In his editorial comments on the ﬁnal plates under consideration here, Robert A. West proclaimed them as “entirely unique in the history of magazine illustration.” Indeed, the three plates featuring scenes from the war with Mexico, released between August 1846 and January 1847, were unlike any others that had appeared in the pages of an illustrated monthly magazine.51 Even West expresses astonishment at what the magazine accomplished in releasing the plates, noting that when the magazine promised readers a series of “original designs,” the editors and publisher “dreamed not then of events of such a character or of such magnitude and importance in our national history” (September 1846, 142). The ﬁrst plate, The Fall of Major Ringgold (August

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1846), depicts events that transpired on May 16, 1846, a mere two and a half months prior to the release date of the magazine (the magazine was published on the ﬁrst day of the month, according to the inaugural editorial column). A second plate, The Charge of Captain May, appeared a month later, in September 1846. The ﬁnal plate Storming of Palace Hill, appeared in the January 1847 issue (see ﬁg. 4.5). Although both Inman and West had admitted that arranging the pictorial matter of the magazine fell largely to the publisher, Post, and although they had both appeared indiﬀerent from time to time with the editorial task of describing the plates, with these scenes West waxes enthusiastic. He clearly understood their nationalistic and patriotic appeal to readers.52 In his textual accompaniment for the ﬁrst plate, The Fall of Major Ringgold, West speculates that the engraving “seems to us to possess more than a temporary interest, and to be really valuable as a historical record, and as such it will by many be preserved” (August 1846, 92). In introducing the second plate, The Charge of Captain May, West observes that the narration of the battle scenes “has awakened the patriotism of so many noble American hearts” (142). West explains to readers the publishers’ determination to spare “no pains or expense” to secure “the ﬁnest artistic embodiments of the more stirring scenes in the events” (142). The plates certainly appear to have burnished the reputations of the designers and engraver responsible for their execution. The Charge of Captain May was designed by John L. Morton, the same painter who had contributed the Pocahontas and John Brant scenes. Tompkins H. Matteson, an up-and-coming history and genre painter, designed the other two scenes, and all three plates were engraved by Henry S. Sadd. Likely both Morton and Matteson worked from published accounts of the battles circulating in the major newspapers, rather than from their own on-the-scene observations. In addition to West’s editorial introductions, the textual material accompanying each plate relies on quotes from various sources purporting to have witnessed the events. This conﬂation of news reporting with high-quality art engravings of very recent events appears to be a transitional moment in American print media, a bridge between the illustrated monthly magazines of art highly popular in the 1840s, and “illustrated journalism,” which would rise to prominence in the 1850s.53 Although scholars have noted the importance of the Mexican War to the emergence of pictorial journalism, most elide the distinctions between print venues—the illustrated monthly magazines of art versus daily and weekly newspapers.54 As discussed previously, illustrated monthly magazines

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routinely featured “historical” subjects and portraits of well-known statesmen and soldiers. However, these engravings typically portrayed idealized scenes of past American exploits, rather than events unfolding in ongoing military conﬂicts. Moreover, for these illustrated monthly magazines, the engraving typically took center stage, with textual illustrations performing an adjunct role. Newspapers, on the other hand, relied on a synergy between eyewitness reportage and sensational, sometimes sensationalized, pictorial illustration. Editor Robert West appears to understand the importance of these engravings when he observes that they possess more than “temporary interest” (typically accorded to the daily press?), but rather will contribute to the “historical record.” Additionally, in noting the ability of these “stirring scenes” to awaken patriotism, West inadvertently marks their signiﬁcance as political propaganda. Blending characteristics typically associated with high art (history painting) and low (the penny press), these engravings and their textual explications circulated to a middling audience for whom they would have possessed tremendous patriotic appeal as markers of America’s ﬁrst “foreign” war.55 These plates also proved to be the Columbian’s artistic high-water mark. When Israel Post sold the magazine in order to launch his new venture, The Union Magazine of Art and Literature, he took Matteson and Sadd with him, and the pair went on to design additional Mexican war plates for the Union in the latter half of 1847 and 1848. Meanwhile, the Columbian languished under the new ownership of engraver Waterman Lilly Ormsby, before passing into yet other hands, and ﬁnally failing in 1849. One other illustrated New York periodical, the New Mirror, bears mentioning, not only because, as a weekly, the magazine still managed to publish one steel plate per issue, but primarily because a large percentage of its plates were recycled to other periodicals (a practice noted by scholars but notoriously diﬃcult to trace).56 A resurrection of the earlier New York Mirror, initially launched by George Pope Morris and poet Samuel Woodworth in 1823, the New Mirror recommenced publication in April 1843 (after being abandoned at the close of 1842), this time published by Morris and edited by Nathaniel P. Willis (Mott, I, 320–27). Although the New Mirror survived in this incarnation for a scant eighteen months, it published over seventy plates—one engraving per week—in addition to regular columns on the arts.57 More than a dozen of those plates resurfaced in later ladies’ monthlies published primarily in New York and Boston.58 Moreover, the magazine was not above publishing plates already published elsewhere, particularly toward the end of the weekly’s short run when, it appears, ﬁnancial concerns

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ﬁnally prompted Morris and Willis to redirect their primary eﬀorts toward the publication of a daily newspaper instead.59

THE LADIES’ REPOSITORY, CINCINNATI One of the longest running of the “western” illustrated monthlies was the Ladies’ Repository, issued from Cincinnati (and later New York as well) from 1841 to 1876 (Mott, I, 388). Published by the Methodist Book Concern, the magazine’s circulation grew steadily during the 1840s, so that by January 1846, the editor, the Rev. E. Thomson, could announce that the magazine would henceforth be published simultaneously in Cincinnati and New York in an eﬀort to enhance increased circulation.60 All of the magazine’s proﬁts, after expenses, supported Methodist relief eﬀorts on behalf of widows and orphans, so the publisher’s decision appears to have been a benevolent one. In announcing the new publishing arrangements, Rev. Thomson ventured a hope that his “eastern brethren” would be disposed to “cheer the west, to be merciful to her defects, to encourage her success, and to aid her in creating a literature of her own.”61 In his July 1846 “valedictory,” Rev. Thomson reﬂected on the magazine’s ﬁve-year history thus far, and on the improvements instituted during the two years it was under his control. He noted that while some of the contributors (largely Methodist clergymen and laity) had been “paid a paltry sum,” most had written “without compensation or hope of reward.” He observed that the magazine was likely “too religious for the secular, and too secular for the religious, too volatile for the serious, and too serious for the volatile.” He defended the path taken to eschew “peculiarities of the creed, or of the ecclesiastical organization of any Church,” while simultaneously avoiding tales of “love-sick swains and lasses, and intoxicated dames.” Thomson further noted that under his editorship, all the literary material is now entirely “original,” and ventures a hope that the magazine’s subscription list will reach 20,000 (an impressive projection since the same-titled magazine published by Universalist religious concerns out of Boston, reported a circulation of around 1,800 at that time).62 While Thomson increased both the magazine’s circulation and its monthly oﬀering (from thirty-two to forty pages), it was the Rev. B. F. Teﬀt, Thomson’s replacement, whose interest in American art encouraged an improvement in the quality of the steel plates the magazine featured. In its ﬁrst year of publication (1841), plates appeared only quarterly (in January, April, July, and

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October); however, beginning with the second volume (1842), plates appeared monthly. Like many of the illustrated monthlies, early in the decade the Ladies’ Repository featured plates of American scenery taken from the work of William H. Bartlett. However, in keeping with its “western” focus, many of the early landscape plates favored western scenes, such as View on the Ohio/ Near Cincinnati (January 1841); Frankfort, KY (October 1841); Columbia Bridge (On the Susquehanna) (May 1842); Miami Canal (December 1842); and View of St. Louis (January 1845). Rev. Teﬀt instituted improvements to both the magazine’s literary contents and its embellishments. In assuming editorial duties beginning with the December 1846 issue, Rev. Teﬀt announces his plans for improving the magazine’s engravings: “Our readers may also expect a decided improvement in the embellishments of the Repository. Although those of the present and preceding volumes were as good as could be conveniently obtained, and equal to those found in the majority of our most popular monthlies, we have made great exertions to obtain better ones, and have been successful in our eﬀorts” (380). Beginning in January 1847, he instituted a practice of concluding each issue with “the best piece of poetry, of the suitable length, which our contributors may have furnished for the month.” While his predecessors had gravitated toward articles of a strictly religious or moral nature, Teﬀt announces his plans to improve the literary quality of the magazine as well: “Both science, and art, and literature, profane and sacred, and morality, and religion, have their share of attention,” he promised readers in February 1847. Indeed, Teﬀt, himself holding a doctorate of divinity, was able to secure contributions from other clergymen also serving as college professors and deans, and specialists in their areas (literature, history, science, religion, mathematics).63 In the December 1847 issue, Teﬀt again announces an ambitious plan for the embellishments for the upcoming volume. He explains to readers that for 1847, the magazine had been importing designs from London, and having them engraved in New York (many by the burin of the ubiquitous A. L. Dick). He promises for 1848 four scenes from the life of Wesley, sure to please his Methodist readers, plus “a series of almost unrivaled embellishments illustrative of the scenery of the west,” which he promises are “entirely new and rare.” These engravings were based on paintings and sketches executed by members of the Frankenstein family, artists living and working out of Springﬁeld, Ohio.64 Bellevue Springs (Near Niagara Falls), based on a sketch by John P. Frankenstein, appeared in April 1848, followed by Indiana Knobs (near New Albany) in July 1848, painted by Godfrey N. Frankenstein. A third, Bank Lick (KY), also based on a G. N. Frankenstein sketch, did not appear until

FIGURE 4.6 The Penobscot Belle, frontispiece, Ladies’ Repository, January 1849. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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March 1849. Prescott (from Ogdensburg Harbor, Canada) (September 1848) and Coburg, Canada (December 1848) may also have been from members of the Frankenstein family, although the attribution is diﬃcult to discern.65 The magazine’s most unique engravings in this decade, however, had nothing to do with the life of Wesley, nor of western scenery. In 1849, the magazine published two splendid mezzotint portraits of subjects not generally pictorialized in illustrated magazines of art and literature in this decade. The January issue contained The Penobscot Belle, engraved by Frederick F. Halpin from a daguerreotype portrait, exclusively for the magazine (see ﬁg. 4.6). The accompanying editorial, presumably written by Teﬀt (although unsigned), oﬀers the plate as the magazine’s sole “fashion plate.” The editor explains that he has often received inquiries about why his magazine does not oﬀer the fashion plates typically found in other illustrated monthlies. In a two-page satiric narrative describing this plate, Teﬀt denounces the attention paid by supposedly pious Christian women to their outward dress and appearance. He embeds within this narrative a description of a purported trip into the wilds with a colleague acquainted with the Penobscot tribe to meet the original of the portrait. The writer claims (whether seriously or satirically is difﬁcult to determine) that he returned from this “singularly interesting visit” with the daguerreotype of “the celebrated beauty” in hand, presumably a gift from the young lady herself. The second plate, The Young Vermont Mathematician, is a portrait of Truman Henry Saﬀord taken at ten years of age (see ﬁg. 4.7). Saﬀord, proclaimed in the American media a child prodigy, went on to become the country’s leading mathematician and astronomer in his era.66 The accompanying seven-page article, submitted by the Rev. A. Stevens, provides a biographical sketch of the young genius, as well as detailed descriptions of the mathematical problems posed to (and as easily solved by) Saﬀord by several skeptical professors of mathematics who had visited the boy. At the time of the article’s publication, Stevens reports that Saﬀord had recently been admitted to Cambridge, and though in delicate health, was making great progress in his studies. The mezzotint portrait of Saﬀord, and the accompanying narrative of the child prodigy, likely proved popular with the magazine’s subscribers. His biography contains all the narrative elements of an unfolding American success story: an apparently quite ordinary native-born son of Vermont turns out to be quite extraordinary. His humble birth to a farmer father and schoolteacher mother; his frail constitution; the watchful care of a doting mother nursing him to health; his unusual intellect and precocity with mathematics; his confounding of older interrogators; his acceptance to college at the age of

FIGURE 4.7 The Young Vermont Mathematician, frontispiece, Ladies’ Repository, April 1849. Drawn by P. F. Mason, engraved by F. E. Jones. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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ten—these details likely resonated with the magazine’s primary audience of rural western readers. This plate, like that of The Penobscot Belle, was unlike anything published by other illustrated magazines of art and literature in this decade.67 While none of the illustrated periodicals from New York, Boston, Cincinnati, or the South achieved the success of the Philadelphia pictorials in the 1840s, several of the magazines published in these cities, as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, did make contributions important to a narrative of the production, distribution, and consumption of American art engravings in this era. Some, like the Boston Miscellany and both the Boston and Cincinnati Ladies’ Repository, oﬀered audiences landscape scenes with speciﬁc regional appeal, as well as portraits of dignitaries important to each magazine’s readership. Others, like the Columbian and Ladies’ Companion, featured genres of engravings not found in the Philadelphia pictorials, as well as engravings forwarding uniquely American historical themes, and supportive of American artistic and literary achievement. Moreover, miscellanies like the Eclectic warrant further scholarly attention for both their visual material and the vast amount of reading material they provided American readers interested in Continental aﬀairs.

5 “Illustration of a Picture” AMERICAN AUTHORS AND THE MAGAZINE EMBELLISHMENTS

In a letter dated April 6, 1839, Joseph H. Ingraham writes this to Philadelphia publisher Edward Carey: “I have forwarded to you . . . the MS of the tale written by me, at your request, to illustrate the painting by Mount, which I saw at your residence when in Philadelphia.” Carey published, among other literary matter, the popular annual The Gift, for which Ingraham sent along his manuscript. Ingraham’s letter highlights the practice of mid-century publishers of ﬁrst commissioning engravings for the illustrated periodicals, then soliciting popular writers to contribute literary matter to illustrate the engravings. Ingraham continues: “I trust it will serve in some measure to illustrate your own idea of the painting. It is, you are doubtless aware, one of the most difﬁcult parts of authorship to write to a painting . . . and the chances are ten to one for a failure on his part who attempts it.”1 Ingraham may have found the task of illustrating an engraving diﬃcult, but the diﬃculty did not deter a great many writers at mid-century from attempting it. Manuscript evidence and evidence from the magazines themselves clearly demonstrates that the practice of soliciting both an engraving an accompanying textual “illustration” was widespread during the 1840s.2 In fact, most of the well-known authors contributing original poetry and short ﬁction to the illustrated periodicals composed at least a few of their pieces speciﬁcally on commission to illustrate an engraving. In this chapter, I argue that illustrating an engraving served as one nexus in a complex web of literary sociability and exchange. As such, it should be considered alongside corollary sites of exchange: literary salons and societies; anthologizing; and editorial “puﬃng,” among others.3 For an author, agreeing to illustrate an

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engraving frequently served to launch a new career, cement a literary friendship, or forge a possible publishing alliance for future work. For an editor or publisher, commissioning an illustration could serve to placate a reader-contributor longing to see his/her name in print, assist a needy literary widow, reward a reliable second- or third-tier writer with additional work, mollify an old school chum low on funds, or promote a new literary sensation.4 While the bulk of this project focuses primarily on the artistic matter in these magazines, in this chapter I want to focus primarily on the writers who contributed textual illustrations for the engravings, ﬂeshing out our understanding of how this practice functioned in a larger network of literary sociability and exchange.5 This chapter begins by establishing the historical context for this practice. I then examine correspondences from several writers whose contributions of textual illustrations are particularly well documented. Finally, I will isolate the work of several authors in a series of case studies, to examine the relationship between these authors’ texts and the engravings they illustrate.

“DO NOT CALL THEM ILLUSTRATIONS” Frank Luther Mott pointed to the centrality of the engraved embellishments to these periodicals in his extended sketch of Godey’s Lady’s Book: “—the embellishments. Do not call them illustrations. They did not illustrate the text; the text illustrated them” (Mott, I, 591). As this project argues throughout, the artists and engravers contributing work for the periodicals, as well as the publishers soliciting the artwork and the accompanying textual illustrations, valued these engravings as original American art, on a par with the paintings and sculptures displayed in the galleries and annual exhibitions found in the major cities. Publishers frequently paid more for one engraving than for all the literary matter combined (Mott, I, 519). Graham, Godey, and Peterson understood that the artistic quality of their engravings could mean the success or failure of their magazines, and they attempted to provide their readers the highest-quality original artwork produced by American artists and engravers. For example, so proud was Godey of the mezzotint “Beauty and Innocence” engraved by H. S. Sadd for the April 1842 issue, that beginning in December 1841 when the ﬁrst proofs were cast from the plate, he used his “Publisher’s Table” speciﬁcally to encourage artists (not specifying engravers) to scrutinize the merits of the engraving. Godey invited “any artist who may favour us with a call, even before the day

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of publication,” to view the mezzotint in his oﬃce. He predicted, “[f]ifty thousand copies will not supply our demand, when that plate is published,” and he oﬀered “proof impressions for framing” at a cost of twenty-ﬁve cents each— the cost of an entire monthly issue of the magazine (“Mezzotint Plates,” Godey’s, December 1841, 297). As this example also indicates, publishers often arranged for the engraved matter months in advance. Godey likely saw a proof impression of Beauty and Innocence in November 1841 (as he would have had to put the December 1841 issue to press by mid-November), which he promised to deliver his readers in February or March of the next year—and did not actually publish until April 1842. His announcement is, of course, a promotional ploy, designed to boost subscription sales for the volume commencing in January 1842. However, the time and labor required to engrave plates for magazine publication likely contributed to this practice of securing engraved matter ﬁrst, literary matter next. By 1850, Godey could explain to his readers that the promised portrait of editor Sarah Josepha Hale would be delayed, as it required ﬁve months to print oﬀ enough copies to meet the demand.6 Engravers frequently needed to prepare multiple versions of the same plate in order to complete a printing run—even plates engraved on steel could only withstand so many imprints before the plates degraded. The general practice appears to have been to secure in advance an engraver’s services, for a minimum six-month commitment (volumes ran January to June and July to December). For example, in his diary, James Smillie reports that Graham contracted with him to supervise all engraving services for the year 1844, and that his partnership with Graham continued for two years total.7 The speciﬁc connection between an engraving and its accompanying textual illustration varied from magazine to magazine, and shifted over the period under study. From 1839 to 1842, when original engravings (rather than recycled European plates) were still a relative novelty, the three major editor/publishers—Godey, Graham, and Peterson—seem to have assumed that readers would make the connection between an engraving whose title always appeared immediately beneath, and the identically or similarly titled text published in the same issue. It is worth noting that during these early years most full-page engravings were “tipped in” to the front of a monthly issue and not embedded within the issue, so that readers might not encounter the text designed to accompany an engraving until midway through the magazine. As Mott points out, Louis Godey often identiﬁed the accompanying literary material as the “illustration of the plate” (Mott, I, 591). George Graham most consistently identiﬁed a textual entry as the “illustration of a picture,” particularly

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in 1842–43, when nearly a dozen poems and short sketches appeared with that subtitle. Frequently the author of one of these early Graham’s illustrations is not identiﬁed, or identiﬁed only by initials. The wording of the attribution varied as well: “illustration of a picture” appears most frequently in Graham’s from 1842 to 1846, indicating clearly that the engraving both preceded the textual illustration and took precedence over it. “See plate” or “see engraving” were other identiﬁers used by editors and publishers as textual subtitles designed to point readers to the full-page engraving the text illustrated. Charles Peterson prided himself on providing three embellishments per issue (to the other publishers’ two), mostly mezzotints, but until later in the decade, rarely noted the direct relationship between the embellishment and the textual material. However, careful inspection reveals that a mezzotint nearly always matches up with a poem, tale, or sketch found in the same issue. Peterson’s strategy shifted in February 1847, when he explicitly notes, “this month’s mezzotint . . . was engraved expressly to illustrate Agnes Courtenay.” Peterson continues, “We have found this new enterprise of illustrating a continued story exceedingly popular” (90). When the direct relationship between an engraving and a similarly titled poem, tale, or sketch is not indicated, we can deduce the primacy of the engraving either by the name and reputation of the engraver, or by the length of the accompanying textual material, or both. For example, both Graham and Peterson used editorial space early in the decade to tout their ability to secure the services of the highly sought-after mezzotinter John Sartain. Textual material accompanying Sartain’s engravings nearly always appears to have been secured secondarily to the engraving, and usually takes the form of short poems of two to four stanzas length. Manuscript evidence indicates that publishers often waited until the last minute to secure these short poetic illustrations, and frequently expected a quick turnaround from the writers who agreed to provide them.8 However, the practice of commissioning a text to illustrate an engraving was by no means universal and static. Rather, publishers and editors seem to have adapted strategies for presenting the combined engravings and accompanying text in ways that also referenced larger shifts in the literary and artistic marketplace. For example, popular American novels and serialized magazine tales were rarely lavishly illustrated prior to the 1840s, in large part because the printing technologies required were too primitive and too expensive for mass production. As previously noted, improvements in printing technologies and papers in the early 1840s opened the door to new arrangements of text and images.

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In 1843, a young illustrator burst on to the publishing scene and helped change the way publishers approached illustrating serial novels and books. Felix Octavius Carr (F. O. C.) Darley had served as a staﬀ illustrator for Graham’s in 1841. In 1843 Darley published Scenes in Indian Life: A Series of Original Designs Etched on Stone, and an enthusiastic Graham’s book review praised the “youthful artist” for capturing “a most singular people rapidly passing from about us, and soon to become extinct.” The reviewer added, “We have never seen any thing more historically truthful than these sketches” (Graham’s, “Review of New Books,” September 1843, 164). That same year Darley provided illustrations for Joseph C. Neal’s Selected Books Illustrated. Within a year, Carey & Hart engaged Darley to illustrate a series of novels that eventually ran to eighteen volumes and stayed in print until 1880. Darley also illustrated popular volumes of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.9 It is likely that Darley’s success is at least partially responsible for Charles Peterson’s 1847 decision to begin providing a mezzotint illustration for his serialized novels. It may also be that Peterson sought to copy the successful eﬀorts of New York’s Columbian and Ladies’ Companion magazines in providing plates to illustrate belles lettres. It is also likely that Darley’s success explains, in part, George Graham’s gradual shift in the middle of the decade away from rhetoric that subordinates the textual illustration to the engraving to rhetoric that suggests coordination of the two. Illustrating an ongoing tale proved proﬁtable in the literary marketplace, and while both publishers continued to seek high-quality engravings for their magazines, both Peterson and Graham adapted their strategies for presenting those engravings to capitalize on the new popularity of illustrated tales. When publishers did follow the popular practice of commissioning the embellishments ﬁrst, the task of illustrating an engraving frequently fell either to editors, to novice authors, or to women authors, regardless of their previous publishing experience. However, it should be noted that most of the popular periodical writers, male and female, contributed at least a piece or two as an illustration of an engraving over the course of the decade. In fact, the range of authors contributing textual illustrations for engravings is so broad that it would be diﬃcult to generalize about authors’ rationales for adapting their writing practices to this particular task. While Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pronouncement about her periodical work—“I do it for the pay”10— could stand in here as a rationale for most of these writers, the complete picture, in each case, is likely more complicated than that. For some writers, like Elizabeth Oakes Smith, ﬁnancial need clearly won out over any particular literary ambitions. For others, like Caroline Kirkland, illustrating a picture

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appears to have been part of a publisher’s expectations of an editor. For yet others, like Henry William Herbert, who did entertain literary ambition, the task served to provide ready cash between larger, “serious” literary projects. Editors and publishers were not above crafting an illustration for an engraving, when necessary. Evidence from the magazines demonstrates that editor/publisher Charles Peterson occasionally composed textual illustrations. For example, Peterson wrote the illustration for Seth Cheney’s engraving The Pilot’s Boy for his October 1844 issue. Writing under his pseudonym Jeremy Short, Peterson also wrote an amusing (and somewhat titillating) sketch on “The Science of Kissing” to illustrate a Graham’s June 1842 engraving, The Proferred Kiss.11 Publisher Louis Godey appears to have relied on editor, Sarah Joseph Hale to secure—and fairly frequently, to provide herself— textual illustrations for his magazine’s embellishments in the early 1840s.12 In fact, Godey “puﬀed” Hale’s illustrations in promoting forthcoming issues of the magazine.13 Caroline Kirkland, editor of the Union Magazine (later Sartain’s Union Magazine) also provided illustrations for the engravings in the magazine under her charge. Most of the popular women writers composed at least a few pieces on commission to illustrate an engraving, including Caroline H. Butler, Elizabeth F. Ellet, Emma C. Embury, Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances S. Osgood, and Caroline Kirkland. In addition, a host of lesser-known women writers, with names lost now to literary history, appear to have also regularly contributed illustrations, including Enna Duval, Agnes Pierol, Miss Anne C. Pratt, Mary L. Lawson, Mrs. Lydia J. Pierson (alternatively spelled Peirson), and E. M. Sidney. Sidney seems to have specialized in composing eight-line stanzas to illustrate engravings for Graham’s: between 1844 and 1847, over a dozen two- to six-stanza poems under this nomenclature appear as engraving illustrations.14 If Sidney wrote out of ﬁnancial necessity, as did even some of the betterknown writers, it is poignant to note that her contributions cease suddenly in mid-1847, and no further references to this writer appear in the Philadelphia pictorials through 1852. With all the recuperative and celebratory scholarship on nineteenth-century women writers that has appeared in the last several decades, it is worth remembering that for every woman who was able to write her way out of poverty in the nineteenth century, likely a half-dozen others slipped quietly away. Male authors contributed textual illustrations as well, often, it appears, as part of a gentlemanly exchange between a literary protégé and his promoter. Park Benjamin, longtime friend of Graham’s editor Rufus Griswold,

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likely penned his illustrations at Griswold’s request. Henry T. Tuckerman agreed to write a biographical illustration to accompany Archibald L. Dick’s engraving of Charles Fenno Hoﬀman, prepared for the “Our Contributors” column in Graham’s, October 1843.15 Epes Sargent Jr. contributed a ﬁve-page ﬁctional narrative to accompany J. Gimbrede’s engraving The Reprimand, for the November 1842 issue of Graham’s, charging Griswold $25 for the text but agreeing to take $5 less for the piece if Griswold would arrange for immediate payment.16 As Sargent’s letter indicates, he was both doing Griswold a favor and desperate for ready cash. Manuscript evidence, though not overwhelming, indicates that most male authors found the task of illustrating an engraving somewhat onerous—this is likely why editors, male and female alike, turned to women writers to supply the bulk of the textual illustrations. Women writers likely would have inherited this writing task more frequently anyway, simply by virtue of their numbers; at various points in this decade, the editors and publishers—particularly of Godey’s and Peterson’s, magazines that targeted women readers— sought also to limit their contributors to women writers. Although Graham’s and Sartain’s Union sought a virtual balance of male and female contributors, when the illustrator of an embellishment is identiﬁed, the writer is more frequently a woman. If this writing genre was gendered “feminine”—and there is some indication that it was—there may be several factors involved.17 Likely, some male authors felt that the speed with which a textual illustration was expected disrupted their notions of their own “creative genius.” Henry William Herbert, whose textual illustrations will be discussed later in this chapter, clearly viewed his book-length work as more important in deﬁning literary success. In addition, contemporaneous reviews of these magazines, often anonymous, posited the entire genre of “illustrated magazines” as “feminine.” For example, a writer in the January 1844 New Englander refers to a group of these magazines as “our lady-literature” (96), even though the list includes Graham’s, a magazine combined, in part, from the earlier Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Another writer, in the “Critical Notices” of the November 1850 Southern Quarterly Review, refers to Godey’s, Graham’s, and Sartain’s as especially in the “the service of the ladies” (535), again, despite the fact that the last two explicitly targeted mixed-gendered audiences. In an article entitled “Parlor Periodicals” published in the January 1852 Democrat’s Review, yet another anonymous writer, again citing these three magazines, complains of the “fecundity” of this literature, that “dilute[s]” and “emasculate[s]” American letters.

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It would appear that this last-cited anonymous writer disdained periodical literature explicitly because he/she felt it to be a “feminine” literature— one that in its fecundity, threatened the “masculine” spirit of American belles lettres. Similarly, periodical writer Nathaniel P. Willis, never one to be bashful about expressing his views, christened Godey’s, in particular, a “powerful gynocracy.” In his May 26, 1843, editorial for his weekly newspaper the New Mirror, Willis complained of the “bloodless revolution” that, in the wake of the popularity of Godey’s, spawned a host of imitators, leaving magazine literature the domain of women (128). Although clearly tongue in cheek, Willis’s lambasting of the illustrated magazines (also ironic, since he made no small portion of his fortune via his magazine writings), likely echoes the sentiment of other writers, many male, who found themselves dependent for income on these more ephemeral genres of writing. Poet and playwright George Henry Boker, in letters to Sartain’s Union Magazine co-editor John Hart, refers to a fellow writer’s contribution to the magazine as this “weak, tender, female stuﬀ.”18 As Henry William Herbert’s biographer argues, Herbert considered his writing for the magazines “hackwork,” yet found himself forced to churn it out when his longer, “serious” work did not sell.19 What this all would seem to add up to is a literary climate in which contributions to the illustrated monthlies provided a steady income for many writers, including “serious” authors, yet in which the work was considered suspect, perhaps even “feminine.” Genres like short poetry and engraving illustrations appear to have been particularly gendered feminine. Writers complied with requests to provide these illustrations, but within a framework that devalued this kind of writing. One example of an author who provided textual illustrations even while she devalued this work is popular poet Hannah Gould. In one documented exchange with Sarah Josepha Hale, Gould expressed her displeasure with the prospect of providing an illustration, but complied in order to maintain her literary friendship with the editor. Hale approached Gould to provide a poetic illustration for an engraving to appear in an annual Hale was editing (from the date of the letter, likely The Opal for 1848). In response, Gould writes to Hale seeking a detailed description of the engraving of Deborah, a biblical scene—and it is clear from her letter that Hale had sent only the title of the engraving, not a proof sheet of the engraving itself. Gould writes: “I will furnish you a poem such as I think may suit the engraver. But I am not sure that the scene of ‘Deborah’ will present itself so impressively to my imagination as

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to enable me to give a transcript which will be clear and eﬀective for the artist to transfer the image to plate.” Gould inquires of Hale whether she has “an engraving of the imagery you desire already sketched,” indicating that Gould is hoping to see at least the drawing or design provided by the artist to the engraver in order to have something to work from for her textual illustration. Gould continues: “As I do not know how long the engraver requires for his part, it is indispensable that he and the poet have a fair, mutual understanding of the imagery, to make a good adaptation. I’ve seen many beautiful pieces spoiled for want of this.” While it is not completely clear from the syntax of her sentence whether “beautiful pieces” refers to the engraving or to her illustration, it seems likely that it is the former. Gould appears to want to avoid the public embarrassment of providing an illustration that seems “ill-suited” for the engraving by negotiating directly with the engraver about his intent for the engraving. In this respect, her comments echo Ingraham’s about the ten-to-one likelihood of getting it wrong. Gould continues, in a lengthy passage indicating her own assessment of her poetic works in the literary marketplace: “I will do the best I can for you though I have been a great while trying to withdraw from writing poetry for annuals, magazines, &c., ﬁnding it much more available to write for myself, and have the fresh use of my poetry for my own works. And certainly if poetry can be measured by the page, [it] is rather valued thus, and obtained for ‘a dollar’ it is but right that such as can aﬀord to furnish such as is desirable, to take the lead, and let the other writers retire within themselves.” Gould’s comments suggest that her literary career has progressed to the point where she no longer needs to do textual illustrations for engravings either for the money or for the exposure. Yet, in nearing an end to the letter, Gould includes personal remarks— that she is glad to hear that Hale’s loved ones are well—and praises the publisher of the gift-book for choosing Hale to be its new editor. Then Gould closes with this compliment: “I shall be happy to receive the new volume conducted by [my] able & talented friend, Mrs. Hale, and to render her the aid of her friend./Sincerely,/H.F. Gould.”20 Gould clearly places her compliance with Hale’s request for an illustration within a literary relationship of sociability and exchange: she will provide Hale with the illustration she requests and, in exchange, Hale will send her a copy of the gift book in which it will appear. While this apparently suited Gould, for some women writers, more than literary friendship was at stake in agreeing to provide textual illustrations.

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A CASE STUDY OF FOUR AUTHORS Henry William Herbert, a pal of Godey’s and Graham’s, contributed frequently to both magazines under both his own name and his nom de plume, Frank Forester, and occasionally his contribution is clearly on commission to illustrate an engraving. An Englishman by birth, Herbert’s grandfather was the ﬁrst Earl of Carnarvon, and his father served in the House of Lords when Herbert was a boy. Herbert emigrated to American under murky circumstances. After meeting Godey and Graham in 1840, he wrote regularly for their magazines and others.21 His genteel English pedigree appears to have been a draw for the American periodical publishers who sought out his services. However, as English nobility, Herbert seems also accustomed to a genteel lifestyle he found diﬃcult to support as an American magazine writer.22 Herbert seems to have been perennially short on cash. He often wrote to Graham’s editor, Rufus Griswold, looking for work. In a letter dated August 3, 1843, Herbert is clearly responding to a proof sheet of an engraving Griswold had sent him to request a textual illustration. Herbert writes, “The illustration I like; you shall have it in a fortnight from next Monday.”23 However, in the same letter Herbert grouses about the title of a second engraving Griswold appears to have sent in proof sheet in the same packet. Herbert complains, “‘The Bride of Ceylon’ is tough work for I know nothing about Ceylon nor have any means of ﬁnding out.” Herbert suggests changing the title of the engraving and again pleads for additional work: “Will not Peterson [likely Charles Peterson] have some brevities now for a ten or some Newspaper letters for a V ($5)?”24 The engraving shown here, The Mother (see ﬁg. 5.1), and Herbert’s accompanying poem illustrate the complexities of analyzing and interpreting image/ text duos in these illustrated periodicals. The engraving purports to show an idealized image of a presumably middle-class mother and child—such images were a staple of these illustrated magazines in the 1840s.25 However, this mezzotint by Henry S. Sadd is based on a portrait originally executed by Sir Thomas Lawrence. In keeping with the artistic practice of the day, paintings originally commissioned as portraits of English nobility could well turn up as idealized fancy pictures engraved for American illustrated magazines. Well-known newspaper columnist Nathaniel P. Willis divulged examples of this practice to readers of his illustrated weekly, the New Mirror: “It is very likely that we can tell our readers a secret about this and many similar pictures. The shepherdesses common on paper and the common shepherdesses on grass, diﬀer, not only by the artist’s embellishment, but in the birth and

FIGURE 5.1 The Mother, frontispiece, Graham’s, July 1843. Painted by Sir T. Lawrence, engraved by

H. S. Sadd.

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quality of those who sit for pictures” (July 1, 1843, 193). Willis further avows that this practice of “disguised portraits” was “very fashionable” in England. Lawrence frequently painted portraits of the English nobility, and Herbert’s noble connections likely aided in his identiﬁcation of this idealized image as, in fact, a portrait of the Duchess of Sutherland and her child. In submitting a sonnet to illustrate Sadd’s engraving, Herbert demonstrated his willingness to bend his literary talents to the task of creating what he refers to as “the old maternal sonnet.” His rhetoric indicates that the genre would have been a familiar one to periodical authors and readers. In his letter to Griswold accompanying his sonnet, Herbert writes: Within you have the sonnet—such as it is. The note you can leave out or not just as you please I am not sure at all it is the portrait of the Duchess of Sutherland; but I think it is—at all events it might just as well be, if it is not. I have tried to do something diﬀerent from the old maternal sonnet—Consisting of “Fears” & “Tears”—“Kiss” & “Bliss” & “Breast” & “Rest” “Lips” And “Sips” — & c. But I do not know whether very successfully. At all events, I can do no better.26 Clearly, Herbert attempted to craft a sonnet that would deviate from the accepted norm, “the old maternal sonnet,” perhaps because he did not wish to have his name associated with the “weak, tender, female stuﬀ” that other male writers, like the aforementioned George Henry Boker, found so emasculating. At any rate, in writing a poem that maintained the aristocratic British ancestry of the presumed sitter’s lineage, Herbert deviated from the universalizing, idealized poetry that generally accompanied these maternal images. Frances S. Osgood, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Caroline Kirkland also left letters illuminating the practice of writing to an engraving. These women writers found themselves at varying stages of their literary careers when they contributed the bulk of their textual illustrations: Osgood near the end, Oakes Smith near the beginning, and Kirkland mid-career. For Osgood and Oakes Smith, extreme ﬁnancial necessity appears to have been the deciding factor in taking on textual illustrations. Caroline Kirkland, already well known by the mid-1840s for her novels of the western frontier (primarily A New Home: Who’ll Follow? and Forest Life) nonetheless found herself in need of steady income after the untimely drowning of her husband.27 Illustrating the engravings for the magazine under her editorship, The Union Magazine, fell to Kirkland at the publishers’ request. The remainder of this chapter will

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examine a sampling of the textual illustrations these three women authors contributed to the Philadelphia pictorials. Like Henry William Herbert, Frances S. Osgood appears to have easily composed verses to illustrate the pictorial matter in the periodicals, and to have found it a quick source for ready cash. In fact, she apparently met her husband, Samuel Stillman Osgood, in 1834 while writing poems at the Boston Athenaeum in response to paintings hanging in exhibition.28 Of the dozens of poems, short tales, and play fragments Frances S. Osgood published in the Philadelphia pictorials between 1839 and 1850, some half-dozen appear to have been written or adapted speciﬁcally as illustrations commissioned to accompany embellishments, and most of these appeared in 1849 and 1850, after her husband had deserted her for California.29 Her illustrations early in the decade treat conventionally sentimental themes: “The Coquette,” a tale composed to accompany an engraving in Graham’s January 1843, warns young ladies against practicing artiﬁce in courtship, while “First Aﬀection,” a poem from Graham’s April 1843, celebrates the ﬂush of ﬁrst love. Meanwhile, Osgood’s illustration of John Sartain’s mezzotint Little Red Riding hood, for the May 1843 issue of Graham’s Magazine, blithely rewrites the original gruesome ending to the Grimm Brother’s fairy tale, recasting the ending in the rhetorical garb of sentimentalism. Her eighteen-stanza poetic illustration grants that Little Red Riding Hood met the wolf in the woods. However, Osgood insists, “on the faith of a poet,” that the rest of the tale [i]s but a libel, and should be repressed.” No gobbling up of the girl and her granny! In Osgood’s retelling of the tale, Little Red-Ridinghood [sic] personiﬁes “Innocence,” and her “sweetness and purity” dissuade the wolf from his “evil design.” Instead of making her his next meal, the wolf pays Red-Ridinghood “homage/For grace so divine,” and sends her on her way, unharmed. Little Red Riding Hood proved a popular subject for paintings in the 1840s, no doubt due in part to the increased interest in childhood and parenting promoted in the illustrated periodicals, and celebrated in the sentimental novels of the day.30 Osgood’s poetic illustration for the engraving appears to uphold, unapologetically, conventional sentimental themes, albeit at the expense of the original gruesome ending imagined by the brothers Grimm.31 The handful of Osgood illustrations from 1849–50 appear in magazines published just months before her death, and both the subject matter of the engravings, and Osgood’s illustrations of them, depart from the conventionally sentimental themes of earlier in the decade. Osgood’s diﬃculty with her marriage, the scandal surrounding her relationship with Poe, and her grief

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over the loss of her infant daughter, Fanny, in 1847—these biographical details have been well documented.32 Less well documented is the relationship between her state of mind and her poetic output in the months just before her death. Her eulogizers, Rufus Griswold and John Hart, insist in their tributes to her that her death took both Osgood and her adoring public by surprise.33 However, her poetic illustrations for The Union suggest that she was well aware of her impending death, and faced it with a mélange of thoughts that emerge in her verse. Osgood corresponded with editor John Hart on November 11, 1849, from her lodgings at the Union Place Hotel in New York. She writes: “I enclose the poem which I wrote today immediately on receiving the picture—I only wish my lines were half as ﬁne or half as much to the purpose as those of the splendid engraving.” She then adds a note at the end of her letter, inquiring: “Please say when I may send a draft for the money? & let me have another picture soon.”34 Her tone is diﬃcult to deduce here. On the one hand, her apology— wishing the lines were “half as ﬁne or half as much to the purpose”—could simply represent Osgood’s admission of the haste under which she composed the poem. On the other hand, she may simply be adopting the deferential posture she assumed Hart would expect in this literary exchange.35 It is also possible that Osgood may have sent Hart a poem containing lines previously composed for another occasion, which she hastily adapted “to the purpose” of the engraving, a practice that appears to have been common.36 It is diﬃcult to state positively exactly which engraving Osgood references in this letter to Hart. The editor published four of her illustrations in Sartain’s Union during this time: “Snake in the Grass,” (October 1849, too early for the letter to reference), “The Conversion of St. Paul” (January 1850), “The Melancholy Jacques” (February 1850), and “The Death of Las Casas” (June 1850). However, given the quick turnaround often expected of authors illustrating engravings, it is likely that Osgood composed the lines in question to illustrate The Conversion of St. Paul. Before brieﬂy discussing the ﬁnal three poetic illustrations, however, I want to focus on “Snake in the Grass,” one of two poems Osgood provided to illustrate engravings of female nudes for Sartain’s Union Magazine in 1849-50. The engraving shows a semi-reclining young woman nude from the waist up, her right hand languorously lifted to brush against her face (see ﬁg. 5.2). Osgood’s eleven-stanza poem conﬂates the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden with the tale of a “deluded maiden” seduced by “Passion” masking as “true Love.” Like some of Osgood’s other love poems, this one does attempts to cloak its eroticism within the conventions of sentimentalism, despite the engraving’s

FIGURE 5.2 The Snake in the Grass, frontispiece, Sartain’s, October 1849. Engraved by John Sartain— the original by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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obvious voyeuristic appeal.37 However, unlike the tone of world-weariness of similar poems treating a woman’s vulnerability in love, this poem ends on a triumphant note. At this point at the end of the 1840s, images of female nudes had ﬁnally made inroads into polite, middle-class culture, albeit under the guise of providing moral and religious instruction.38 However, their use in the pictorials caused quite a stir, as chapter 7 will detail. In the case of “Snake in the Grass,” Osgood rewrites the original fall from Edenic grace: in her version the serpent, “Spirit of Evil,” shrinks, spellbound by the maiden’s “glorious soul,” out of the garden, leaving the maiden unharmed (much as the wolf left Red Ridinghood unharmed). In recasting Eve as a sympathetic castoﬀ lover, and in rewriting her mythically ignominious end, Osgood challenged both the masculine proprietary gaze the engraving constructs and the assumptions of true womanhood the gendered gaze supports. Although the engraving might lend itself to a poem closer in spirit to Osgood’s saucy salon poems, “Snake in the Grass” instead combines an awareness of woman’s vulnerability with an almost naïve rewriting of humankind’s familial beginnings—as if Osgood sought to imagine what the story of woman might have been without the fall of “mother” Eve.39 Another popular female subject, the Indian maiden, takes center stage in the embellishment Aﬀection of the Indians for Las-Casas, from the June 1850 issue of Sartain’s Union. The engraving shows two Indians, one male, one female, bending over the deathbed of the Spanish explorer. The Indian queen, Anacaona, is unclothed from the waist up. Images of semi-clad Indian maidens were a staple of the illustrated monthlies, titillating middle-class readers/ viewers with accompanying tales suggestive of Indian polygamy and sexual promiscuity.40 Osgood’s seven-stanza poem largely ignores the scene depicted in the engraving, focusing instead on the perﬁdy of the Spanish settlers, who, taking advantage of the revels of the native tribe, destroy the natives’ village, kill the queen’s only son (pictured beside her in the engraving) and crucify the queen herself. It is interesting to speculate about the degree of Osgood’s identiﬁcation with the persecuted queen Anacaona. Osgood had lost her young daughter in October 1847, and her health was rapidly declining in the early months of 1850. Her relationship with Poe had fueled gossip and speculation from the time they met in 1845 until his death in 1849, and scholars have followed Osgood’s private and public responses in some detail. This poem, written shortly before her death, suggests the continued weight of Osgood’s emotional losses.41 In particular, the emotional energy of the poem, largely

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expressing anger, is directed at the ﬁgures of the Spanish settlers, who, in the name of the Christian religion, seek to destroy what they perceive as the savage and pagan culture of Queen Anacaona and her people. To what degree did Osgood feel herself persecuted as well for pursuing a literary lifestyle (extramarital relationships, the high life of New York salon culture) frowned upon by many of her contemporaries? Osgood’s decisions to illustrate not one but two nudes for Sartain’s Union, and to provide illustrations that betray both anger and triumph, suggest that she was making her peace with her own life choices as her health declined. The line engraving for The Conversion of St. Paul, bookended by Sartain’s earlier mezzotint Snake in the Grass (October 1849) and his later mezzotint, Death of Las Casas (June 1850), lacks the beauty and sophistication of the female nudes. However, the Conversion is engraved from what was originally a monumental historical painting by Rubens, so, again, it is likely that this is the engraving Osgood refers to in her apologetic note to Hart. The engraving is dominated by three large, warlike ﬁgures seated on writhing horses, and Paul’s conversion rather resembles the prototypical death scene of historical paintings, with a muscular Paul prostrate on the ground, cradled in the arms of an equally burly companion. Osgood’s uninspired illustration, commenting on the “arrogant bigotry” of Saul, suggests that, in spite of her praise of the engraving to Hart, she may have felt it worth little more than the eﬀort she gave it (Sartain’s Union, January 1850, 41). Osgood concludes of Paul that he best serves God “who most serves man,” and it is diﬃcult not to hear in this line an implicit condemnation of the overly zealous believer ﬁxated only on his own righteousness at the expense of his fellow creatures. The Melancholy Jacques (February 1850) is a very indiﬀerent wood engraving, but Osgood’s forty-two-line poem, printed directly on the reverse side of the woodcut, is haunting, suggesting a strange premonition of her own impending fate. Published just a few months before her death, the poem reads, in part: A dream within a dream. I fell asleep Holding a picture of the dreamer, Jacques, And musing upon Life’s vicissitudes: — I dreamed that life itself was but a dream; This stern, dark, terrible life, with all its fears, Its wrong and sin and suﬀering and despair – That it was all, only a long night’s sleep. (Sartain’s Union, February 1850, 160)

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While it can be reckless to read into the voice of a narrator the life of the poet, it is interesting to speculate that these poetic illustrations, composed so near the end of Osgood’s life, suggest her awareness of her impending death. That two of her eulogizers wrote her death as “unexpected” is perhaps not surprising—both Hart and Griswold knew the value of maintaining Osgood’s authorial persona as one who was naïve, childlike, and death’s untimely victim. The reality of her life, as these illustrations suggest, was likely more complicated than that. In ill health, separated from her husband, and driven by ﬁnancial necessity, Osgood dashed oﬀ indiﬀerent lines for quick cash. However, she could equally craft haunting poems pondering man’s perﬁdy in love, his inhumanity to his fellow man, and his anger and despair in the face of life’s vicissitudes. Ill health and ﬁnancial necessity remain a constant refrain in the literary correspondences of another popular female author, Elizabeth Oakes Smith (Mrs. Seba Smith). Although she would become known later in life for her outspoken support of women’s rights, in the 1840s Oakes Smith struggled to feed her family and keep a roof over their heads. Yoked in marriage to a man nearly twice her age, Smith bore six sons to her husband, Seba, during the 1830s, while their ﬁnancial situation deteriorated. Relocating to New York in 1839, Smith and her husband supported their family with their literary contributions.42 In addition to their other literary work, husband and wife wrote embellishment illustrations, for both the monthly magazines and the literary annuals. For Carey & Hart’s 1843 annual, The Gift, Seba submitted a thirty-four-page tale to accompany an engraving of Henry Inman’s famous painting News Boy. Writing to Carey & Hart on March 25, 1842, Seba blames “occasional ill health in myself and family” for submitting the tale a month after it was promised. In the same letter he mentions that his wife will submit an illustration for the engraving of Daniel Huntington’s painting The Florentine Girl, also intended for The Gift: “Mrs. Smith will undoubtedly get sight of the picture of the ‘Florentine Girl’ in a day or two, and will forward an illustration to you in a few days—at any rate within the time speciﬁed by your letter.”43 Smith’s casual reference to his wife’s work on the illustration, particularly the rapidity with which he asserts she can execute the work, suggests that he likely valued her literary eﬀorts lightly in comparison to his own. At the very least, they indicate his understanding that Carey & Hart implicitly participated in literary conventions at work at mid-century. Speciﬁcally, he assumes that the publishers would accept from his wife, a female poet, an illustration composed in haste, while at the same time sympathizing that Seba, as a male writer, would need to carefully craft his lengthier (and tardier) contribution.

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Smith includes a bit of self-puﬀery in his letter, defending the excessive length of his tale. He writes: “I should have made this shorter than it is, but I could not give a proper ﬁnish to it in less compass. I shall express no opinion of its merits farther than to say that sundry little urchins to whom I have read it have teased me to read it over and over again, and are even more loud and decided in their praise of the story than they were of the ‘tough yarn’” [a tale submitted to Carey for the previous Gift]. Smith continues, “I have often thought that children and illiterate people were better tests of the popularity of a story than learned entities.”44 Mr. Smith’s conﬁdent pronouncements contrast sharply with his wife’s seemingly self-deprecating manner in her letters at this stage in her career. In a missive to her new literary impresario and newly appointed Graham’s editor, Rufus Griswold, dated June 13, 1842, Oakes Smith defends her choice of a prose illustration for an embellishment she identiﬁes as The Sisters. The illustration actually accompanied The Bud and the Blossom, an engraving of two sisters that appeared in Graham’s in August 1842. She writes, “The illustration for The Sisters I have made in prose, believing it would be more acceptable to the common reader especially where the subject is trite.”45 Oakes Smith’s dismissal of this subject (likely the “marriage tale”) implies her weariness with the task of having to generate one more fairly predictable rendering of that subject for the “common reader.”46 Perhaps, however, she is referencing the “subject” of the engraving: an idealized image of two sisters, one of clearly marriageable age, the other still in her youth (see ﬁg. 5.3). The prevailing codes of genteel female portraiture clearly mark this engraving: a lacy ruﬄed dress, an elongated neck, delicate curls, and an oval face with classical features—all served as markers of domestic femininity in female portraiture.47 Engravings like this thus served as a kind of visual shorthand for the gender ideologies so prevalent at midcentury: true womanhood, separate spheres, and the like.48 Readers would expect to ﬁnd such an image coupled with sentimental poem or tale depicting the girls’ beauty, piety, purity, and submissiveness—and most engravings like this were, in fact, illustrated in this manner. For Oakes Smith to have submitted a three-page prose tale instead of the brief verse that would have suﬃced, suggests one of two motives, and possibly both: she needed the additional money Graham generally paid for prose over poetry; and she had something to say in her illustration of the engraving that was a bit more than “trite.” As it turns out, this is no simple “marriage tale,” and Griswold evidently liked it well enough to run the tale as the opening-page featured story for the August 1842 issue of the magazine. (This was not yet an established practice

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FIGURE 5.3 The Bud and the Blossom, frontispiece, Graham’s, August 1842. Engraved by Welch & Walter from a drawing by W. C. Ross, A.R.A.

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in the pictorials; textual illustrations for engravings were still often buried somewhere within an issue.) Although the tale’s title, “The Bud and the Blossom,” is trite enough, the subtitle hints that the tale will not be: “a reason for bachelorism.” Since a bachelor was generally as frowned upon as an “old maid” in most of this literature, that the tale purports to provide a rationale for it hints that the tale will be out of the ordinary. The tale opens with the narrator begging of one Charles Hunter the reason for his bachelorhood. Hunter relates the sad history of his love for the elder sister in the embellishment, her death at sea, then his love for her younger sister, Anne, once she reaches young womanhood. Anne, alas, thinks of Charles only as an older brother (and rightly so, as he has been the sisters’ guardian and is nearly twice their age), so he must give her up to another. In relating his tale, Hunter rails against marriage, citing the woes endured by Shakespeare’s Cassius, Othello, and Macbeth—victims of tragedies brought on largely by their wives, Hunter insists. As Oakes Smith explains of her central character in her letter to Griswold: “You see I have made bachelors very good thinkers as to our sex. I have found them so; a little like Iago, indeed, ‘nothing unless critical’, but yet just in their estimates.”49 Yet, a careful reading of Oakes Smith’s tale renders her letter to Griswold a bit disingenuous, since her characterization of Hunter is not entirely ﬂattering, and the tale clearly depicts the female narrator having a bit of fun at Hunter’s expense. Oakes Smith’s narrator notes that she indulged his “ebullition of bachelor spleen” when he initially rails against womankind, in order to prod him to continue his tale. The narrator describes the bachelor as “stout,” “smooth-faced,” and habitually self-content, and her goading of him for the tale—and the tale itself—feature him in no ﬂattering light. In his description of the elder sister, he observes that women “admire nobleness and generosity of spirit” because they lack these characteristics; and that they admire “courage” because they are “cowards.” Oakes Smith’s narrator protests this characterization of her sex, and one suspects narrator elides with author here. Oakes Smith’s rhetoric in her accompanying letter to Griswold suggests she clearly understands both what Griswold expects of her, and what she may be able to get away with if she simply accedes to her role in this professional exchange. She makes two additional requests of Griswold, presumably because she has fulﬁlled her part of their literary bargain by submitting her illustration in a timely manner, as commissioned. First, she asks for a proof of the tale before it goes to press—a request editors and publishers generally hesitated to comply with except for the best-known writers in their stables— and Oakes Smith lacks that status at this early stage of her career. By way

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of justiﬁcation, she tells Griswold that she “fears the Mss is so bad it will be ‘full of blunders’” and she explains, “I cannot aﬀord to have more nonsense imported than belongs to me.” Her second request is for a free subscription to the magazine. She justiﬁes her request by noting, “Mr. Godey sends me the Lady’s Book through the Port of the Bowery.” Thus she not only plays on Griswold’s competitive spirit by pointing out that fellow editor Louis Godey already extends to her this courtesy, but she deftly directs Griswold how to ensure the subscription will reach her. Apparently, Oakes Smith’s only diﬃculty in composing an illustration for the engraving was to provide one that upheld, unironically, the platitudes of womanly beauty and ideal domesticity suggested by the drawing. Her calculated letter to Griswold appears to be one piece in an elaborate system of literary exchange based on her compliance with his request for an illustration, coupled with her awareness that the tale she has submitted may not be exactly what Griswold had anticipated. Although her illustration presents a conventional sentimental ending—the younger sister dies soon after disappointing Hunter’s hopes for happiness with her by marrying a suitor of her own choosing—her female narrator’s unﬂattering portrait of the bachelor undercuts the force of his conventionally sentimental description of womanly virtues and foibles. Like Osgood, Oakes Smith seems to use her illustrations to challenge subtly her culture’s gender ideologies. Unlike Kirkland, however, she seems less quick to impute fault to her sex for women’s unwillingness to conform to patriarchal expectations. A second tale submitted by Oakes Smith (under her pseudonym Ernest Helfenstein) for the July 1843 issue of Graham’s displays a similar tendency to challenge the gender and cultural stereotypes implicit in the engraving. The embellishment, Coming to Get Married, shows a bashful, but smiling couple entering a room where a stern-faced cleric is rising from his chair to attend to them. Two women, one younger, one older, stand behind the minister, apparently having just delivered his afternoon tea to his worktable. Oakes Smith’s tale, rather than following the formula of the standard courtship tale (which generally narrates the young couple’s various trials and mishaps, concluding in their happy marriage) instead focuses on the early life of the minister and his blighted ﬁrst love. We learn that the woman pouring his tea is his maiden sister (not his wife, as a viewer might assume), and the younger woman not his daughter but another female relative entrusted to their care. The tale follows the minister through his collegiate days and his attachment to a woman of high intellect and deep melancholy, who he marries only to learn that she loves another who has died. Her confession of her belated

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realization of deep attachment to her dead former lover sends the minister into a rage and he banishes his young wife to a cloistered life, while he chooses a life ministering to (and marrying) others. Hence, an engraving that should have prompted an illustration in conformance with courtship tales that inevitably end in the matrimonial bliss of the married pair, instead depicts the misery of marital disappointment. While the courtship tale would run its course by decade’s end and tales of “marital complication” would become far more common, a tale like Oakes Smith’s was still fairly rare this early in the decade. That she felt emboldened to create it in the face of readers’ likely expectations for something far more platitudinous indicates, I believe, that the proto-feminism for which she would become later known was already simmering and seeking literary outlet this early in her career. Her biographers note that Oakes Smith’s mother arranged her marriage to Seba Smith against her will, and that she herself believed marriage to be a hypocritical institution.50 In her 1851 publication, Woman and Her Needs (written as a pamphlet to be distributed during a lecture tour on which she had embarked), she speciﬁcally upbraids older men who obsessively pursue marriages with younger women. She opines, “the man who has passed his life to thirty and upward in accumulating wealth, has become hard, selﬁsh, hackneyed in the world, and utterly blind to the soul-needs of a sensitive girl of half his years.” She adds, “It is not unusual for girls to be married and become mothers at sixteen, at the expense of health, happiness, and all the appropriateness and dignity of life; and men seem quite proud of these babywives, when in truth they should blush at their selﬁshness.”51 Seen in the light of these later proto-feminist statements, the embellishment illustrations from the 1840s indicate that Oakes Smith had likely long thought about how best to address injustices against women, particularly women being married oﬀ to much older men. In the 1840s, she worked largely within the conventional cultural channels of the middle-class illustrated periodicals. By 1851, she felt emboldened enough to risk public censure—and censure she did receive. Sarah Josepha Hale publicly broke with Oakes Smith over her decision to take the lyceum stage and speak out for women’s rights.52 Although she would continue to publish her work in other quarters, by the end of the 1840s her work for the Philadelphia pictorials had all but ended. While Oakes Smith’s work for the illustrated magazines was winding up, Caroline Kirkland’s was in full steam. Kirkland found herself forced to take on additional work when left to support four children after the sudden death of her husband. When she commenced her editorship of the Union Magazine (July 1847), under publisher Israel Post, the magazine was being published in

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New York, Kirkland’s home. However, in mid-1848, John Sartain purchased the magazine, relocating publishing headquarters to Philadelphia. Kirkland left a particularly rich trove of manuscript evidence on the practice of illustrating an engraving, by virtue of conducting the second portion of her stint as editor of the Union long-distance from New York. However, even during 1847–48, evidence from her letters and from the magazine itself indicates that Kirkland’s troubles with the pictorial matter of the magazine began early. From its inception, the Union advertised “entirely original contents” and “exclusively original pictures,” under the direction of T. H. Matteson, Esq. Tompkins Harrison Matteson was an up-and-coming American artist, popular for his history and genre paintings with patriotic themes.53 Matteson had exhibited paintings through the New York–based American Art-Union, a subscription association that spawned similar art-unions in other Eastern Seaboard cities. The Union launched with a title speciﬁcally referencing the Art-Union. While the art-unions generally disbursed annual prizes on a lottery giveaway to subscribers, the new editors promised each reader “not one picture, but many, in return for his contribution to the cause.”54 Moreover, these pictures were commissioned and composed exclusively for the magazine, under Matteson’s direction. Kirkland was extremely well educated for a woman of her era. However, while her letters record an appreciation for the arts, her early published writings on the subject appear hesitant and unsure.55 A year after taking on editorial responsibilities at the Union, Kirkland traveled to Europe with her friends, the Rev. Henry Bellows and his wife, Eliza. In a letter home to acting editor Bayard Taylor, she asks Taylor to inform Matteson that she is “racing through galleries every day hoping to learn a little something about pictures.”56 In a letter to publishing friend Evert A. Duyckinck dated a few months earlier, she had groused about the Union publishers: “Those concerned consider the ‘illustrations’ as of so much more importance than the literary matter, that every thing gives place to them” (Roberts 158). Kirkland’s frustration over the preference shown the illustrations and in working with Matteson to coordinate literary and artistic material is evident from the ﬁrst issue of the new magazine. Kirkland initially objected to Matteson’s martial tendencies—the inaugural issue featured an original engraving of a scene designed by Matteson of a battle fought in the ongoing war with Mexico. When the second Mexican War engraving designed by Matteson appeared in the January 1848 issue, the illustration of the engraving included an addendum by Kirkland speciﬁcally objecting to Matteson’s choice of “warlike pictures.”57 Kirkland’s “Note” adds that she has been able to secure from

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FIGURE 5.4 Steps to Ruin, I, frontispiece, The Union, November 1847. Designed by T. H. Matteson, engraved by H. S. Sadd.

Matteson a promise to feature no more of these kinds of embellishments, “in deference to her feelings.”58 When the subject matter of the engraving suited her own didactic predilections, Kirkland rose to the occasion. Matteson began in November 1847 a fourpart series of engravings entitled Steps to Ruin, modeled after the well-known eight-plate temperance series by English artist George Cruikshank entitled The Bottle.59 Kirkland reviewed the Cruikshank series in the November 1847 editorial column, in addition to writing the illustration for the ﬁrst of Matteson’s plates (see ﬁg. 5.4).60 In her illustration of the plate, Kirkland claims she intends to “make the picture the occasion of a little homily,” and proceeds to tell the story of one John Hinchley—based, she claims, on incidents she

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observed during her residence in the western frontiers of Michigan. The ﬁrst plate depicts a young man at the blacksmith’s, drinking and indulging in a game of cards.61 Kirkland’s narrative blames the young husband’s behavior on his overly harsh but avaricious father, who put the youth in apprenticeship to a blacksmith the father knew to be less than morally upright. Kirkland opines at the conclusion of her tale: “How much of the misconduct and unhappiness of young people is the direct fruit of a deﬁciency of virtue, or sincere eﬀort of virtue in their parents, is an awful thought for many of us” (Kirkland “Steps to Ruin,” Union, November 1847, 231). She equally relished the opportunity to illustrate a second plate designed by Matteson in the November 1847 issue, entitled The Novel Reader (see ﬁg. 5.5).62 Genre pictures like this, depicting American domestic scenes, would likely have been popular with the magazine’s national, and increasingly rural, audience, and the detail in the engraving suggests Matteson’s careful attention to providing high-quality art. The scene depicts what appears to be a serving girl reading a novel while being scolded by both her better-dressed mistress and the hard-working head of the household, who appears to be a shopkeeper. Meanwhile, the baby cries, a dog attempts to snatch a cooling pie from the windowsill, and dirty dishes sit, unwashed, on the table. Drawing out the moral for her readers, Kirkland asserts, “Though we consider a thoughtless and absorbing habit of novel-reading next to a love of the bottle in its ruinous eﬀects upon character and happiness, yet it would be contrary to all experience to think violence would mend the matter.” Admonitions against novel reading were a staple of the advice literature and popular magazines at mid-century.63 Here Kirkland equates novel reading in women as calamitous a vice as intemperance in men—perhaps she draws this conclusion for the reader because the two illustrations (Steps to Ruin No. 1 and The Novel Reader) appeared in the same issue. Although Kirkland could be a harsh critic of women’s foibles, here she advises male readers to “speak gently” to their wives if indeed they discover them in this “vicious act.” Her illustration for Matteson’s picture My Child in the December 1847 Union reveals that Kirkland held high expectations of her sex. In the engraving, a desperate and disheveled mother pleads, kneeling, before her irate husband, even as this father ﬁgure directs a servant girl to carry their infant daughter out of the room. Formatting her prose illustration as a one-page, ﬁve-act tragedy, Kirkland opens her tale with the protagonist, Clara, defying her parent’s prohibition against marriage by eloping. Again, the narrator blames Clara’s mother for “want of ﬁrmness” in failing to follow-through on threatened punishment. Instead, Clara’s mother badgers her husband to

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FIGURE 5.5 The Novel Reader, frontispiece, The Union, November 1847. Designed by T. H. Matteson, engraved by H. S. Sadd.

set up the newlyweds in housekeeping, and, her every wishes indulged, Clara plays the coquette while her husband takes to the gaming tables. Discovering Clara in a compromising position, the enraged husband kicks her out of the house, unyielding to her pleas to take with her their young child. Kirkland closes her tale hoping that it serves “the blessed work of warning” to her readers. The illustration—both visually and textually—suggests the inﬂuence of the moral reform melodramas that were popular with urban audiences at mid-century.64 The didactic message would have been a warning to young middlebrow readers both against marrying contrary to a parent’s wishes, and against falling victim to the lures of urban high-life. Kirkland’s didactic tone is perfectly consistent with how she viewed her own task, and that of the other artists and authors contributing to the

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monthly magazines. In her inaugural editorial, she likens the launching of a new magazine to an act of patriotism, stating, “To elevate the intellectual and moral character of the people, is a work no less necessary and commendable” than that of the solider in defending the country from attack (“Introductory,” Union, July 1847, 1). In a letter to Eliza Bellows, wife of her minister and good friend, the Rev. Henry Bellows, Kirkland defends her work on the magazine: “I think it would not be diﬃcult to show you that this kind of publication occupies a very important ﬁeld in our rising country, and deserves attention on that account if no other” (Roberts, 125). Additionally, in a letter to her friend and fellow magazine editor Evert Duyckinck, she attests to her own plans to make the magazine “more purely literary” and to “elevate it as fast as I can with their concurrence” (Roberts, 124). Kirkland apparently saw upholding both the literary quality of the magazine and its high moral tone as consistent, and central to her role as editor.65 No wonder, then, that her eﬀorts to illustrate Matteson’s gorgeous plate for Taking the Advantage led to a reconstruction of the scene depicted that pretends to misunderstand the artist’s intentions (see ﬁg. 5.6). The plate shows a country swain stealing a kiss from a lass who looks to be spilling her milk in confused response. Meanwhile, an aging guardian adjusts her glasses in the doorway behind, unsure of what she has just witnessed. Courtship scenes like this one were a favorite subject for Matteson and other genre painters at mid-century.66 Kirkland uses her illustration to contain the erotic zing of the picture: “Not having had any consultation with the artist, we conclude the adventurous swain in this picture to be the brother or cousin of the vexed damsel—or, perhaps, some friend of the family just returned from Oregon— though such a supposition may seem hardly to account for the puzzled look of the old lady in the background” (Union, August 1847, 71). Protesting that the American farmer is far too grave to oﬀer “such a piece of impertinence,” even in his youth, Kirkland’s illustration appears to dismiss any possibility of a romantic connection between the busser and the target of his attentions. Yet from the tone of her illustration, it is diﬃcult to determine whether Kirkland is oﬀering a serious critique of the appropriateness of Matteson’s choice of subject matter for the engraving, or whether she is adopting a gently mocking attitude toward the overly familiar courting rituals of country folk. Certainly the former reading would be consistent both with her general disapproval of the importance accorded the embellishments, and with her speciﬁc disagreements with Matteson over pictorial subject matter and the magazine’s mission of moral uplift. However, the latter reading is consistent with her mocking treatment of her rural neighbors in her novels and ﬁctionalized western sketches.

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FIGURE 5.6 Taking the Advantage, frontispiece, The Union, August 1847. Designed by T. H. Matteson, engraved by H. S. Sadd.

Whatever Kirkland’s intent, at least one male reader sided with Matteson. In a subsequent letter to the editor from a new reader in Ballston Spa, New York, the writer crows “‘Taking the Advantage’ is an exquisite piece of art. Then, so true to life! What lover has not taken the advantage?” The writer continues, “The editor calls it a ‘piece of impertinence.’ Indeed! Who could

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have refrained from ‘taking the advantage’ at such a time, and when such a beautiful rosy cheek was the object of attraction?” (Union, “Letters,” September 1847). Evidently, at least some Union readers understood Kirkland’s illustration as intentionally moralizing, and resisted it as such. Matteson’s engraving, Kirkland’s illustration, and the male reader’s response indicate some of the challenges inherent in trying to analyze the reception of magazines marketed to mixed-gendered audiences. In this case, in the absence of a published response from a female reader, the verdict of the male reader seems to stand as the last word on this engraving. It is certainly a reading that appears in keeping with the erotic iconology of the engraving: the phallic spray of the spilling milk; the bottle erect on the middle shelf between two round bowls—this visually suggestive imagery would certainly have been understood by the artist, if not by some of his less sophisticated and less artsavvy readers.67 Once the Union passed into the hands of John Sartain and moved from New York to Philadelphia, Kirkland expressed increasing reluctance to meet the demands of the new publisher to illustrate engravings for the magazine. In a letter dated December 26, 1849, addressed to “Messrs. Sartain and Co.,” Kirkland writes: “As to your request for a story I will look at the pictures with the best intention in the world—I trust you are convinced I should be glad to oblige you, or to advance your intention in any way—But you need not be told that it is not easy or even possible to write stores when we will if it were, I might be rich. If after due study of the designs I feel that I can write any thing I shall be willing to publish, you may be assured nothing could give me more pleasure—If not I will let you know as early as possible” (Roberts 255). She goes on to explain that the previous tales written for illustrations were “suggested by facts, incidents or occurrences” and that she “never yet wrote one as long as you propose” nor of the “ﬁxed length” stipulated in his request. She concludes, “If I write one, the length will have to take care of itself.” In the case of this particular set of designs, the task of illustrating them passed to Grace Greenwood (Roberts 256). Apparently, the issue of the length of her articles was far from over. Six months later, June 7, 1850, she writes to “Sartain & Co” an irritated response to a letter received from the publisher that apparently objected both to her proposed trip to England for the summer and to the length of her articles for the magazine. To the former charge she replies, “I certainly never asked or desired ‘a furlough for six months on full pay.’ I travel to freshen my thoughts and improve my capability for labor . . . and if you can suggest any thing for the advantage of the Magazine that will be within my capabilities, I shall be

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most happy to under take it.” In answer to apparent complaints about the length of her articles for the magazine, she reminds Sartain that “subject, length and all else were left entirely to me.” She contrasts Sartain’s evident complaint that her articles are too short, with the observation, “At the same time Prof. H[art] protests against long articles, as do most readers. To make objections on this score is therefore very unreasonable” (Roberts 267–68). Sartain evidently also complained about her fee for a two-part article on “dress,” and suggested she write an article “Gossip from New York,” which Kirkland begged “respectfully to decline” as, in her words “not in my line.” Kirkland oﬀers to withdraw her services as co-editor (at that time she was co-editing with Professor John Hart, a Philadelphia educator), noting, “If my services to the Magazine are not proﬁtable to it I have no desire to force them upon it. I have done my best, and can do no more. I can neither write to order as to length nor subject, though I am always willing to oblige as far as my ability will serve.”68 Although she continued to solicit submissions from English writers for the magazine while in London, and to submit her own essays for publication, by July 1851 she was no longer advertised on the magazine’s cover as a contributing editor.69 Central to her decision to leave her editorial duties seems to be the issue of being asked to “write to order,” a request she had attempted to honor from the magazine’s inaugural issue in supplying the pictorial illustrations, but one that she, like other writers, seems to have found challenging. As these brief case studies suggest, a writer could choose to accept a commission to illustrate an engraving and yet ignore, or challenge, the iconology or ideology the engraving appeared to uphold. A writer’s decision to accept a commission to illustrate an engraving operated within a much larger framework of literary sociability and exchange. While the task oﬀered ﬂedgling and economically needy writers an opportunity to secure quick cash and literary exposure, most writers found the task somewhat onerous. Many writers were willing to do so to maintain ongoing relationships with literary patrons and protégés—an illustration dashed oﬀ today might lead to more lucrative work tomorrow. That the task seems to have fallen most frequently to women writers suggests both the female author’s relative economic vulnerability in the magazine marketplace and the gendered expectations for periodical authorship at mid-century. In a publishing culture that subordinated the textual illustration to the picture, we should perhaps not be surprised to ﬁnd that the lesser task of illustrating an engraving often fell to women writers. The important roles of artist, engraver, editor, and publisher fell almost exclusively within the

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purview of men. At decade’s end, even male artists, editors, and publishers found themselves at odds, as editorial battles broke out over the status of art engravings in the larger literary and artistic marketplace. Publishers scrambled to secure for their magazines the best American art, buying up and commissioning paintings for exclusive use in their magazines. They also maneuvered to ensure the continued services of overworked and highly sought-after engravers. Finally, publishers squabbled over the question of who was best qualiﬁed to judge the artistic merits of an engraving—the artist/engraver or the art patron/connoisseur.

6 “ Engravings from Original Pictures” COMPE TING FOR AUDIENCES AND ORIGINAL ART

In the “Editors’ Table” for the May 1844 of his magazine, Louis Godey features a letter from a reader who complains: “The great objection to the Monthlies of Chestnut Street is their plates. Each has generally thirty-six plates a year— women and children. Now these may be scarce on Chestnut Street, but they are not so here.” This astute reader alludes to the fact that all the major Philadelphia illustrated periodicals emanated from publishing houses located on Chestnut Street, within a stone’s throw of each other, and all run by male editors and publishers (hence the quip about the absence of women and children on Chestnut Street).1 In fact, Edgar Allan Poe is said to have famously complained that if one were to remove the covers from these magazines, one could not distinguish between them because all relied on the same authors and the same embellishers (Mott, I, 352). While Poe and the reader were right that Godey, Graham, and Peterson relied on many of the same authors and embellishers, and featured a preponderance of images of women and children in their magazines, they both missed the subtle diﬀerences between the artistic matter in these magazines, and what those diﬀerences reveal about imagined audiences. The reader continues: “Now, can’t you throw in a little variety—say a loafer, a bank director, a starved poet, an omnibus boy, or a cab driver, or any thing that is not common in the West?” This reader’s request for images of urban male ﬁgures highlights several important facts. Firstly, although Godey prided himself on creating a magazine targeting his “fair readers,” men clearly read (and generally paid the subscription fees for) these magazines.

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This male reader felt entitled to request images in keeping with his own interests. Secondly, this letter points to the fact that, by mid-decade, the illustrated monthlies reached readers far distant from the Eastern Seaboard cities of the magazines’ origins, and that these readers were hungry for images of American life in the distant cities. This male reader, and likely many others receiving these magazines in the rural areas where the bulk of the nation’s population still lived, relied on these magazines both to learn about life in the cities, and to learn about American art. In responding, Godey “pleads guilty” to the preponderance of images of women and children, but argues that his selection of embellishments has improved. He queries: “Have we not given scriptural, historical and Shakespearean subjects? Have we not published match plates illustrative of virtue and vice; views of celebrated places; engravings from original pictures & c.?” It is evident from Godey’s response to this reader—a response Godey published prominently in the editorial space of his magazine—that Godey is concerned about the breadth of subject matter given in his embellishments. Beyond this, Godey’s response provides evidence of his continuing concern with the reputation of his magazine in the promotion of American art—he stresses that his magazine has given “engravings from original pictures.” Most scholars who have consulted the images in these magazines have made much the same mistake that Godey’s reader made—focusing solely on the sentimental images of women and children in the illustrated periodicals, at the expense of the rest of the artwork in the magazines.2 While the illustrated monthlies did serve up fashion plates and idealized mother/child images, they also featured original American art, commissioned speciﬁcally for the periodicals, and circulated this artwork more widely than was possible via any other medium. As noted in chapter 3, competition between publishers early in the decade focused on artwork that utilized novel or innovative printing techniques. But with the vanquishing of Miss Leslie’s at the end of 1843, the “big three”—Godey’s, Graham’s, and Peterson’s—shifted their focus to securing original artwork executed by American painters, on American themes, and prepared primarily by prominent Philadelphia engravers. In particular, these publishers commissioned for exclusive publication in these magazines original American landscapes, historical paintings, illustrations of Native Americans, fancy pictures, and idealized female portraiture. Although they competed for the services of the same artists and embellishers, a careful examination of these speciﬁc genres of art engravings in each magazine proves Poe wrong. Each publisher seems to have imagined a slightly

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diﬀerent audience, and to have secured artwork intended to appeal to that imagined audience. Godey’s reader was right that his magazine contained a preponderance of images of women and children. Both Peterson’s and Graham’s featured a great many images of idealized female portraits as well.3 Graham’s female ﬁgures are far less likely to be maternal, however; belles, brides, and coquettes form the bulk of Graham’s feminine ﬁgures—largely, I argue, because George Graham imagined his primary audience to be other worldly-wise gentlemen like himself.4 Most of his female images assume a male gaze and appeal to the male imaginary, while Peterson and Godey select images intended primarily for women readers/viewers and more likely to appeal to their desire to emulate the idealized role models. Likewise, Graham featured more images of Native Americans, and selected those designed to appeal primarily to a male reader/viewer. Godey’s and Graham’s featured plates commissioned to illustrate important events in American history, although Godey sought images of heroic American women, while Graham’s featured a preponderance of engravings highlighting war exploits and nation-building narratives. With John Sartain’s purchase and renaming of the Union Magazine in 1848, a new kind of competition emerged between these four illustrated magazines that also reﬂected tensions in the larger Philadelphia art community. Central to this competition were two key questions: 1) What counted as “art”?—particularly in reference to the embellishments included in the illustrated monthlies; and, 2) Who was the best judge of a work’s artistic merits— other artists, or the patrons and connoisseurs upon whose generosity the artist traditionally depended? In the Philadelphia pictorials, this argument played itself out at decade’s end in a series of pointed exchanges in the editorial spaces of these magazines—primarily between Louis A. Godey and John Sartain.5 This chapter will begin by examining some of the promotional ploys and editorial matter in these magazines that help determine diﬀerences in audience address. Key to competition between these magazines is the claim of each to original American artwork, and the second half of the chapter will focus on the speciﬁc artists promoted by these publishers, and the uniquely American paintings commissioned for publication in the monthlies. I target, in particular, two genres of images—of women, and of Native Americans—as case studies for analyzing diﬀerences between artwork in these magazines. Woodcuts, fashion plates, and the female nude formed a nexus for controversies that developed at decade’s end over the questions of what constituted art and who was qualiﬁed to judge its merits.

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CONSTRUC TING AN AUDIENCE: TITLES, PROMOTIONAL PUFFS, AND EDITORIAL SPACES As we glimpsed in chapter 3 using Miss Leslie’s as our primary focus, these illustrated magazines targeted generally middle-class audiences with aspirations of upward mobility. All three employed nationalistic rhetoric to diﬀerentiate themselves from the highbrow New York magazines and European imports. However, in the absence of publishers’ subscription lists, we must rely on other interpretive strategies to construct a more complete picture of the audiences imagined by each, in order to understand how publishers competed for readers.6 We can learn about the audiences imagined by these periodicals by examining brieﬂy several diﬀerent kinds of editorial content: magazine titles; promotional puﬀs and subscription schemes; and editorial columns. As noted in the introductory chapter, George Graham bought two existing magazine’s—Atkinson’s Casket and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine—naming the newly consolidated monthly Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. Graham clearly hoped to diﬀerentiate himself from Godey by addressing an audience of both men and women. However, his imagined readership was decidedly more masculine than his competitors. Between January and June 1844, Graham brieﬂy changed the title to Graham’s Magazine of Literature and Art, presumably to showcase his support for original American literature and art, and to contrast his magazine with Godey’s (who had early relied on European writers and French fashion plates). Then in 1848, after The Union Magazine of Art and Literature entered the fray, Graham added the moniker “American” to the title, changing the name to Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art. Doubtless, he sought to compete with the Union’s stated alliance with the newly formed American Art-Union, and to highlight Sartain’s English lineage. In each case, the name change indicated an attempt to maintain and increase the magazine’s subscription base by manipulating the audience address. As also noted earlier, Charles Peterson launched his Ladies’ National Magazine in 1842–43 as a less expensive competitor to Godey’s, targeting, at least initially, female readers. After buying another small magazine, the Artist, and combining the two, Peterson experimented with no less than ﬁve magazine titles in 1843 alone (Mott, II, 306). Like Godey, Peterson employed a woman editor (Ann Stephens) and frequently featured her book-length ﬁction in monthly magazine installments designed to encourage continued magazine subscription renewal from one volume to the next.7 In calling his magazine the Ladies’ National Magazine, Peterson also seems to have

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contrasted his predominantly American target audience with Godey’s international appeal (Godey’s was popular abroad as well as in the States). In producing a smaller, less expensive magazine that occasionally lacked fashion plates, Peterson also seems to target an audience of less aﬄuent female readers. However, as we have seen, to compete with Godey’s and, initially, Miss Leslie’s, Peterson stressed his willingness to furnish the “costly and beautiful” mezzotints that he believed would make his magazine “the most popular work” available. For his part, Godey maintained a steadfast commitment to a “ladies” book, adding his name to the title in 1840, but changing little else about his magazine’s address to its imagined female readers. His support of editor Sarah Josepha Hale remained consistent throughout the magazine’s long publishing history. In his “Publisher’s Table” address to his readers, he stressed his magazine’s tireless support of women’s issues and his persistent oﬀering of the most up-to-date fashion plates, published consistently each month (the other monthlies were sometimes erratic in oﬀering fashion plates). With the challenge of Miss Leslie’s early in the decade, Godey brieﬂy emphasized his ability to secure novel embellishments as well. By decade’s end, he demonstrated a commitment to American artwork that outshone (and outspent) Peterson’s, Graham’s, and Sartain’s Union. All four publishers not only targeted an audience seeking the markers of gentility; all four magazines also linked the attainment of gentility with the consumption of art and literature, speciﬁcally with American art and literature.8 Yet in featuring “entirely original contents” (as each of these magazines advertised in one way or another during this decade), the Philadelphia pictorials also shrewdly distanced themselves (and, presumably, their audience members) from the attitudes and practices of the highbrow New York magazines—particularly the Knickerbocker. “Old Knick,” as it was known, targeted an aristocratic audience, and relied primarily on material borrowed from foreign, usually British, sources (Mott, I, 610). The Philadelphia pictorials were thus decidedly more middlebrow in their address, and showed decided preference for the work of American authors and artists. Promotional schemes also reveal something about imagined audience members. As already noted, Peterson commenced publication of his $2.00/ year monthly to compete directly with Godey’s $3.00/year magazine. Both Graham’s and the Union also sold for $3.00/year and, like Godey’s, contained more reading matter than Peterson’s. Entering the market simultaneously with Miss Leslie’s, Peterson distinguished his magazine both by its cheapness and by the quality of its embellishments. As he proudly announced in his

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“Editors’ Table” for June 1843: “Never before in this country has a work of such cost been oﬀered at so low a price.” Such puﬀs for one’s own publication, or that of a fellow publisher, were common as a subscription period drew to a close. Most magazines started new volumes in January and again in July, so that December and June issues prominently featured promotional schemes designed to sell more subscriptions. In the June 1843 promotion, Peterson makes the generous oﬀer of throwing in a copy of the annual The Gems of Art and Beauty to any subscriber who brought in two new subscribers at the $2.00/year rate.9 By November 1844, in a “Word to the Ladies” Peterson is reminding them to “get up clubs” to secure a reduced price on eight subscriptions of only $1.25/year, a signiﬁcant savings over the $2.00/year subscription fee. Indeed, although Peterson sought an ever-widening circulation base, he wavered little from his basic philosophy in starting the magazine: “the publisher believ[es] that small proﬁts on a large circulation are preferable to high gains on a small edition” (“Editor’s Table,” June 1843, 191). In addition to promotional pricing and gender address, publishers relied on winning new subscribers by increasingly promoting their magazines as national rather than merely regional, and as “American” in focus. By decade’s end, particularly in the wake of the Mexican War, all four publishers employed unifying and nationalistic rhetoric. In his “Chit-Chat with Readers” column in December 1850, Peterson writes: “Our object is to describe real life as it exists in America.” He points to Ann Stephens’s serialized American novel Palaces and Prisons and another serial, Julia Warren, to substantiate this claim. He also promises tales from New England, a novel of Middle States, a story of the South, and romance of the Southwest. He concludes: “We intend, in a word, to make our Magazine a home-guest in every part of the United States; and thus, even more than heretofore, thoroughly national.”10 That audiences were national by the end of the decade is suggested also from reader columns, like the “Letters from Readers” column published in the front editorial section of the Union in its early issues. These kinds of columns are notoriously slippery evidence: as other scholars have pointed out, it is likely that some letters to the editor may have been written by the editor him/herself. Certainly, that practice seems to have occurred with magazines published later in the century.11 However, in the case of the Philadelphia pictorials, only Godey’s and The Union used letters with any regularity, and they appear to be original. As scholars have noted, Godey used editorial columns to cozy up to his readers;12 frequently he cites readers’ letters, as noted in the

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introduction to this chapter, to advertise new features especially designed in response to readers’ requests. On the other hand, at the very least these letters construct an imagined audience, and provide evidence of the target audiences for the magazines. In the September 1847 issue, we see that the Union was being read in “the west”: Cleaveland [sic], Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky—and in New England: Hartford, Connecticut, and Delhi, New York. The October 1847 issue contains additional letters from New London, Connecticut; Newburgh, New York; Reading, Pennsylvania. Subsequent issues feature letters demonstrating distribution to a southern audience as well—letters from Charleston, South Carolina; Madison, Georgia; Asheboro, North Carolina. A cursory survey of letters received during the ﬁrst year of publication of the Union (July 1847 to July 1848) reveals an imagined audience expanding from the major cities of the eastern seaboard (New York, Philadelphia, Boston) to include the smaller towns and villages in the Midwest and South. The Philadelphia pictorials strove to reach an ever-widening geographic audience and each sought to outdo the others’ subscription lists. George Graham boasted a circulation of 25,000 in December 1841, and by March 1842 that ﬁgure had jumped to 40,000. By April 1850, Godey’s boasted an initial run of 62,500, noting, “We think this is nearly double that of any other magazine published in the world” (“OUR WORK” column, 295). Peterson’s rhetoric in December 1851 clearly indicates the elusive ﬁgure magazine publishers pursued: “In a great and intelligent country like this, with more than twenty millions of inhabitants, a periodical so cheap, beautiful, entertaining, and indispensable [sic], should not have a circulation of less than one hundred thousand.” During and after the Civil War, Peterson would achieve that ﬁgure and better, subscriptions soaring to 165,000 (Mott, II, 309). In the 1840s, though, Godey’s remained the one to best. We should place these subscription rates in the context of income. At a time when female garment workers earned between $0.75 and $1.50 per week in New York City, female bookbinders $1.50 to $3.00 per week, and female domestics $3.00 per month,13 it seems unlikely that urban working-class female readers would have chosen to pay these subscription rates (in most cases payable in advance). A skilled male laborer earned about $300 per year, so that a subscription to the Union or Graham’s would have represented 1 percent of total wages for the year. Far more likely, as other scholars have argued, that working-class readers relied on newspapers, story papers, and dime novels for the bulk of their leisure reading materials.14 Clearly, these

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magazines imagined an audience with discretionary income to spend on cultural reﬁnements. Nonetheless, it is also likely that a great deal of cross-reading occurred during this era. Magazines did not always reach only their intended audiences. The numerous tales about seamstresses and factory girls in these magazines typically depict them as poor but hard working. Although depicted as the object of readerly sympathy, it is also conceivable that they themselves were at least occasional readers. Additionally, Louis Godey reported that Civil War soldiers subscribed to his ladies’ magazine (Mott, I, 590). In January 1849 George Graham quipped: “And when we wish a happy New Year to the thirty or forty thousand who take, and the four hundred thousand who read Graham, we wish a general happiness,” indicating that subscribers typically circulated their copies to non-subscribing fans as well. In January 1852, in fact, Graham dunned readers who circulated their copies of Graham’s widely, but failed to encourage borrowers to subscribe. Godey published a letter in July 1840 from one exasperated female reader who cancelled her subscription, citing an inability to read the magazine due to her neighbors’ excessive borrowing of her copy (“Editor’s Table,” 40). Examining each publisher’s direct address to his imagined readership also reveals something about audiences. Like Godey, both Graham and Peterson served as editor-publishers, so their ownership of their magazines induced a more intimate and motivated address to their readers. When Graham speaks to his readers, he frequently employs the device of an intermediary, one “Jeremy Short” (a stand-in for fellow-editor and pal, Peterson).15 In a February 1849 “Graham to Jeremy Short,” Graham reminisces about incidents from their boarding school days. In the March and April 1849 addresses to Jeremy, Graham muses about the gold rush, and how investors were cheated out of their contributions. In the January 1850 address, he warns Jeremy against being tempted into other kinds of “speculations” likely to lose him money. In the February 1852 address to Jeremy he includes a small woodcut engraving and accompanying poem on “Winter” that urges Jeremy to “labor and care for the poor!” In each instance, Graham talks to his imagined reader as though he were talking to his best friend—indeed, as though he were talking to himself! He seems to have imagined his readers to be other “self-made men” (to use Peterson’s description of him) just like himself, who desire to be both “good Christians” and yet to enjoy the “reﬁnement” accruing to the fruits of their labor. Moreover, he imagines these men both within the context of their business aﬀairs and as lords of the home circle as well. That is not to say that Graham

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did not also address the ladies, but in inheriting Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, he seems particularly keen to maintain his magazine’s masculine audience. While Graham addressed an imagined male reader, Peterson played the part of the beau in sweet-talking his lady readers, adopting a playfully romantic tone Godey eschewed. For example, here he announces the merger of his two magazines in the June 1843 issue: “So, in July, our fair friends must be on the look-out. We shall come with the ﬂowers and the summer skies, the songs of our sweetest birds, and the sound of waters in sultry days, and, coming thus, how else can we be but welcome? And every lady of taste is asked to stand bridesmaid at the union of THE ARTIST AND LADY’S WORLD” (“Editor’s Table,” The Artist and Lady’s World, 191). Both Godey and Graham also used their editorial space to boast about their magazine’s preeminence in the ﬁeld. Graham’s claimed greatest longevity since one of the magazines he purchased, The Casket, dated to 1826 (“Editor’s Table,” Graham’s, June 1849, 392). Godey dismissed Graham’s claim, noting in January 1850 that his was “the oldest magazine in America,” with Godey as sole proprietor for twenty years (“Prospectus for Godey’s for 1850”). Peterson stressed that his was the “most popular” of the Philadelphia monthlies, although circulation numbers would not conﬁrm that until the Civil War years.

MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS AND THE PHILADELPHIA ART SCENE: SECURING ORIGINAL ART WORK The Philadelphia pictorials were part of an increasingly complex and sometimes contentious Philadelphia art scene. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), established in 1805, remained primarily under the control of art patrons and amateurs through the 1840s, and fueled the frustrations of struggling Philadelphia artists.16 PAFA supporters tended to favor the work of old master European artists, often at the expense of underappreciated American artists. Philadelphia artists responded with their own organization, the Artists’ Fund Society, which held separate exhibitions from 1835 to 1845. Toward the end of the decade, the two brieﬂy joined forces in mounting exhibitions. Coming fast upon the heels of Miss Leslie’s successful year showcasing innovations to American graphic arts, the Artists’ Fund Society in 1844 partnered with the ﬂedging Art-Union of Philadelphia to promote the “Arts of Design” in the United States.17 By 1848, this Art-Union was not only participating in exhibitions, but also soliciting ﬁve-dollar memberships

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and awarding prizes. Graham, Godey, and Sartain were members of the New York–based American Art-Union, and took leading roles in establishing the Philadelphia Art-Union as well.18 In 1848 Sartain purchased the Union magazine, named for the New York organization, and relocated it from New York to Philadelphia. In terms of sheer numbers, the Philadelphia pictorials far exceeded the reach of exhibitions and art-unions in presenting original American artwork to an eager public. In 1842, with Graham’s alone claiming a readership of 40,000, the American Art-Union (New York) reported a membership of only 1,120. Although by 1850 membership in the American Art-Union had stabilized at 16,500, by December 1850, Godey’s reported the largest print run in the world, printing nearly 70,000 copies per issue.19 Art-Union members typically received only one engraving a year, while the Philadelphia pictorials each published at least one mezzotint or line engraving monthly, in addition to the fashion plate and illustrative woodcuts. For their $2.00–$3.00 annual subscription, magazine readers could expect at least twenty-six to thirty-six original full-page engravings per year, per periodical. Readers who subscribed to more than one of the illustrated monthlies doubled and tripled the number of original engravings they received in a year’s time. Again, these magazines circulated to the small cities and towns of the heartland, where far fewer likely could aﬀord the $5.00/year Art-Union membership fee or travel to art exhibitions in major cities. The ﬁerce competition between the magazines to purchase and publish original artwork meant that serious artists began to have a steady venue for the work they might not sell otherwise. By the mid-1840s, Godey’s alone solicited regular work from a half-dozen artists and an equal number of engravers. At this point in the decade, most artists and engravers worked for more than one of the illustrated monthlies. By decade’s end, Godey would lead an eﬀort to corral certain artists and engravers into working exclusively for his magazine, much as, at mid-decade, Godey’s and Graham’s had attempted to do with the most popular writers of the day. Godey began boasting of “original” American art, purchased speciﬁcally for his magazine, as early as May 1839, announcing to readers, “We have in the hands of our engraver, several original pictures, from our own collection.” Again, in December 1839, he promised readers more original steel engravings, noting that two of them would be “from pictures of our own” (“Editor’s Book Table,” December 1839, 287). In the August 1840 issue, Godey slyly noted improvements to his plates: “We said nothing in the July number of No. 1 of our Original large sized Steel Engravings—but our friends of the Press

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have done it for us. Are not twelve such Engravings in a year worth more than $3?” (96). In the December 1840 issue, he implicitly doubled the value of the engravings by noting that in the previous six-month volume alone, the engravings, if purchased separately, would cost more than a year’s subscription (282). Until 1844, Graham’s did not attempt to compete with Godey’s on this account. Instead, George Graham pursued the literary giants of the era, billing his magazine as “far in advance of all the other literary periodicals of the country.” In fact, up until February 1844, when he admitted he would like to see “a high-toned magazine with ﬁfty thousand readers . . . and without the aid of pictures,” Graham had shown only a passing interest in the artwork for his magazine. Nevertheless, the advent of Miss Leslie’s on the scene in 1843 had shaken things up a bit, and Graham evidently understood that if he wished to remain in serious competition with Godey, he would have to start competing on Godey’s turf—in the area of the embellishments. As the frontispiece for the January 1844 issue, Graham’s featured a gorgeous mezzotint by Sartain, taken from a painting by Sully titled Harry, but with no accompanying explanation about the embellishment.20 In the February issue, Graham then includes an explanation for January’s engraving. In a column entitled “OUR PORTRAIT GALLERY,” Graham writes, “The leading embellishment in the January Number was from an original picture, painted expressly for us by Thomas Sully, Esq., and in the present number we give an original from Rothermel, a young Philadelphia artist who is rapidly rising in his profession” (321). He next announces plans for additional embellishments currently in the hands of the engravers, based on original paintings by Sully, Leutze, Conarroe, Croome, and others. By early 1844 Graham had decided to go head to head with Godey in securing original work from American artists. These artists—Thomas Sully, Peter Rothermel, Emanuel Leutze, George Conarroe, William Croome—became well-known in their era, thanks in part to the wide circulation of the illustrated monthlies, but art historians have typically under-acknowledged the work of all but Sully and Leutze in surveys of nineteenth-century American art, and have especially ignored their magazine art work.21 Yet the ﬁrst four exhibited their work extensively during the 1840s, primarily in Philadelphia but elsewhere as well. Sully exhibited over a hundred paintings in the city during this decade.22 Conarroe exhibited nearly forty pictures during the 1840s, as did Leutze, even though Leutze spent the latter part of the decade in Rome and Dusseldorf. Rothermel exhibited over ﬁfty paintings in the 1840s.23 William Croome, the least known today, was quite familiar to magazine subscribers of the 1840s. In 1843, Godey employed

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Croome to “Americanize” the fashion plates by portraying American women without the tight lacing typical of the French fashions.24 As I noted in the introduction, Croome also worked with fruit and ﬂoral designs early in the decade. He also executed pencil drawings and woodcuts in the latter part of the decade; Sartain employed him to produce woodcut illustrations for some of his magazine’s literary matter. The record of exhibition catalogues for PAFA and the Artists’ Fund Society indicate that all three publishers owned paintings exhibited during these years, and commissioned directly by the publishers from these very artists, for inclusion in their magazines. Graham owned four paintings, Peterson nine, and Godey at least seventeen paintings shown in Philadelphia, including works by local artists James Hamilton, Peter Rothermel, and Thomas Sully.25 James Hamilton was a favored landscape painter. Scene on the Schuylkill, painted by Hamilton, appeared as the lead engraving for the August 1845 issue of Godey’s, with this notice: “Engraved by A.W. Graham from an Original Picture by J. Hamilton for Godey’s American Views.” Godey also featured another landscape that may have been by Hamilton as the frontispiece to his September 1846 issue. The engraving, entitled View on the Delaware Opposite Philadelphia, bears the subtitle Engraved by J. Sartain for Godey from an original picture. Charles Peterson also owned landscapes by Hamilton, and appears to have engaged artist-poet Thomas Buchanan Read to paint portraits of himself and his wife.26 Sully’s portraits and fancy pictures garnered praise from both Graham and Godey. Graham praises Sully as “deservedly, the father of American artists,” and rhapsodizes particularly on his ability to capture the loveliness of the female countenance: “His females are women, and yet spiritual creatures, beings from a better world, and yet partakers of our feelings and sharers in our sorrows. What his mistress is in a lover’s eye, that Mr. Sully makes her.” The publisher’s eﬀusions in February 1844 become more comprehensible in view of two details. First, Sully had just completed a portrait of Graham’s wife in 1842, and Sully’s successful execution of this portrait likely accounts, in part, for Graham’s newly discovered interest in promoting the work of American artists.27 Sully’s Register of Paintings records the completion not only of portraits of Mrs. Graham and Mrs. Godey, but also one of Mrs. Sartain, “for her relatives in England” during this time.28 Sully clearly mixed socially in both artistic and publishing circles—his Journal also records social visits from Godey, Eliza Leslie, Graham, Sartain, and Graham’s editor Rufus Griswold.29 Secondly, Sully was recognized (and largely dismissed by art historians, as we saw in chapter 2) precisely for his ability

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to paint ﬂattering female portraits and fancy pictures. Sully’s abilities would thus have suited Graham’s preference for images of idealized womanhood to present his imagined gentlemen viewers. Sully’s work clearly suited Godey as well. He published more engravings of Sully’s paintings than he did of any other of these ﬁve artists, at least four between 1845 and 1850: The Rose & The Lily, (September 1845); Miss Leslie (January 1846); A Spring Flower (May 1848); and Bishop White (July 1850). The Rose & The Lily is an example of a painting originally begun as a portrait that is then presented to Godey’s readers as an idealized “fancy picture.” It is likely a portrait of Sully’s daughters Blanche and Rosalie, and Sartain’s engraving even replicates Sully’s initials and the date 1841 in the lower lefthand corner (see ﬁg. 6.1). In his register of paintings for 1842, Sully records “Blanche and Rosalie in group,” with a price, but no buyer listed.30 The facial features of the two girls pictured in The Rose & The Lily bear a strong resemblance to Sully’s other daughter, Mary Chester Sully, who married the painter John Neagle.31 In addition, the 1845 exhibition catalogue of the Artists’ Fund Society lists as item 139, “Rose and Lily—Specimen of Printing in Colours after Sully, owned by L.A. Godey.” So while it is not clear that Godey owned the original portrait of Blanche and Rosalie mentioned in Sully’s register from 1842, it does appear that he had an engraving done from the painting, and printed in colors, though the embellishment oﬀered as the frontispiece for the September 1845 issue of Godey’s is an uncolored mezzotint engraved by Sartain. Thus, images of idealized womanhood suited both Godey and Graham—Godey presenting them to his imagined female readers as models to be admired and emulated, Graham to his imagined male readers as objects for the male imaginary. Emanuel Leutze is another Philadelphia painter favored by the periodical publishers. Leutze was born in Germany but brought to America as a child. During the early 1840s, he lived in Philadelphia on Sansom Street, known at the time as Art Row because also living in the neighborhood were John Neagle, John Sartain, Thomas Buchanan Read, Jacob Eichholtz, and Peter Rothermel.32 In the “Our Artists” column on Leutze published in the October 1846 issue of the magazine, the reviewer Henry T. Tuckerman praises Leutze for the “moral signiﬁcance” of his paintings and for his “prophetic genius.”33 Noting that Leutze works largely on historical pictures, Tuckerman faults his work for being overly melodramatic at times. Tuckerman also urges Leutze to turn to American historical themes (which Leutze later did). Although featuring him in Tuckerman’s work commissioned for the “Our Artists” column, Godey does not appear to have commissioned engravings from any of Leutze’s work.

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FIGURE 6.1 The Rose & The Lily, frontispiece, Godey’s, September 1845. Engraved by Thomas B. Welch, from a painting by Thomas Sully. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

However, both Charles Peterson and George Graham featured engravings from Leutze paintings. In July 1843 Peterson published Perilous Feat, engraved by Sartain; Graham featured a gorgeous engraving by Sartain from a Leutze painting entitled Child & Lute as the frontispiece for his January 1845 issue (see ﬁg. 6.2). According to PAFA’s cumulative exhibition catalogue, the original title of the Leutze painting was The ﬁrst Music Lesson, and it was owned by G. W. Snyder.34 The theme of the painting—the important role of the mother in educating the male child—recurred frequently in Graham’s; a number of embellishments and accompanying textual illustrations highlight the importance of early education to the self-made man.35 George W. Conarroe was another leading member of the Philadelphia artistic community. In addition to exhibiting dozens of paintings in the 1840s alone, he served on the board of directors of the Artists’ Fund Society.36 Although none of the publishers apparently owned any of Conarroe’s work, Godey featured an engraving of his painting Rosalie as the frontispiece to his November 1843 issue. Graham featured an engraving of Little Nell in the Storm as the frontispiece for his March 1844 issue, and Mirror of Life (said by Graham to be based on a real-life portrait) as a line and stipple frontispiece to his February 1849 issue.37 These fancy pictures and idealized female portraits undoubtedly proved popular with Godey’s and Graham’s readers.

FIGURE 6.2 The Child and Lute, frontispiece, Graham’s, January 1845. Engraved expressly for Graham’s Magazine by J. Sartain from the original picture by E. G. Leutze. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Peter Rothermel was also a favorite of the magazine publishers; his work appeared in Graham’s, Godey’s, and Sartain’s Union.38 George Graham featured Rothermel’s Viola as his February 1844 frontispiece, as the second of his promised paintings by Philadelphia artists. A fancy picture, Viola had been shown at the Ninth Annual Exhibition of the Artists’ Fund Society that year. Beneath the embellishment is the inscription, “Engraved Expressly for Graham’s Magazine by Welch & Walter from the Original Painting by P.F. Rothermel/From Bulwer’s Zanoni.” Viola was a popular character from British author Edward Bulwer Lytton’s 1842 novel, Zanoni, and a suitable subject for the fancy picture Rothermel painted. While Graham did not own Viola, he had evidently secured it on loan from the owner in arranging for the Welch & Walter mezzotint.39 In presenting the engraving to his readers, Graham not only capitalized on the popularity of Bulwer’s widely read novel, he also supported a ﬂedgling American artist whose painting of Viola perfectly suited Graham’s sense of his audience. Louis Godey seems to have owned at least four paintings by Peter Rothermel. The PAFA catalogue lists two of them—The Filagree Worker and Mrs. Shubrick protecting an American Soldier, while Godey featured a third, A Gift from Heaven, as the frontispiece for his May 1850 issue, and another, The Last Visit, as the cover for his August 1851 issue. A Gift from Heaven, a fancy picture, belongs in the genre of “pleasant peasant” images, and shows a couple of modest means in an unadorned interior, with mother and child seated in a Madonna-like pose, the bare-armed father standing behind. The Last Visit represents the genre of the “vanishing Indian,” and shows an Indian maiden visiting with her aging father on the plains, seated on a gnarled tree, a prairie town with church and steeple visible in the background. Magazine engraving subtitles indicate that Godey owned both original paintings. Graham, Sartain and Godey also wrote about Rothermel in their coverage of the arts. Graham contrasts Rothermel and Sully in his frothy paean to Sully in his February 1844 issue; but Rothermel is more frequently compared with Leutze. Sartain, in his “Notice of Arts and Artists” for June 1849, compares Rothermel’s “steady onward progress” to Leutze’s sudden rise to eminence around 1837. In a follow-up notice in his art column for August 1849, Sartain situates Rothermel as a focal point for the editor’s condemnation of wouldbe “connoisseurs.” Sartain claims that Rothermel prospered in spite of such “self-styled lovers of art,” and he pronounces these connoisseurs “snakes in the grass.” Although he does not speciﬁcally mention Godey (who owned works by Rothermel), Sartain did feud openly with Godey at decade’s end. Godey clearly admired Rothermel’s work, and he also used Rothermel’s painting Heroic Women of America/The Rescue (see ﬁg. 6.3) to launch a new

FIGURE 6.3 Heroic Women of America/The Rescue, frontispiece, Godey’s, January 1847. Engraved by A. H. Ritchie expressly for Godey’s Lady’s Book from an Original Picture by Rothermel. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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series in his magazine based on a work-in-progress by Mrs. E. F. Ellet titled Heroic Women of the Revolution. The series continued throughout 1848, with a few episodes appearing in 1850. At a time when Peterson’s and Graham’s were featuring endless engravings of idealized women in dreamy and passive poses (as did Godey), Godey also commissioned embellishments featuring out-of-the-ordinary American women busy at the work of nation-building.40 This strategy was in keeping with his commitment to promoting all that was instructional and inspirational for the “fair sex.” Another example illustrating the contrast between Godey’s use of embellishments on a given subject, and that of the other magazines can be seen in his engravings depicting the lives of Native Americans. Tales of the “vanishing Indian” were ubiquitous in the Philadelphia periodicals, and over a dozen full-page engravings on Indian themes appeared in these magazines during the 1840s. These images fall into three broad categories: historical, proto-ethnographic, and idealized. Most of the idealized images divide along gender lines: those of Indian males replicate the “noble savage” motif, while those of females typically feature erotically charged, semi-nude Indian maidens.41 Most of the proto-ethnographic images originated from two highly publicized western expeditions: the 1832–34 expedition headed by the Prussian explorer Prince Maximilian of Weid, which resulted in Travels in the Interior of North America in the Years 1832–34; and the travels of Thomas L. McKenney, chief of the Bureau of Indian Aﬀairs, whose volume The History of the Indian Tribes of North America provided several artists and engravers with work.42 Swiss painter Karl Bodmer (alternately written Carl or Charles) traveled with Prince Maximilian, preparing most of the sketches for his publications, while Philadelphia artist and illustrator F.O.C. Darley prepared many of the sketches for McKenney’s work. Graham’s, Peterson’s, and Sartain’s Union all featured full-page embellishments of semi-nude Indian maidens that no doubt titillated middle-class audiences. Peterson’s oﬀered The Indian Fruit Seller for April 1843 and The Forest Queen for November 1850, both full-page embellishments showing Indian maidens nude from the waist up. Graham’s featured similar embellishments with The Captives in February 1843 and The Chief ’s Daughter in February 1845. Sartain featured a number of female nudes in 1849 (one source of his feud with Godey), including one of the Indian queen Anacoana in The Death of Las Casas (discussed in chapter 5) in June 1850. Godey’s presentation of the romanticized Indian maid is far more subdued, in keeping with his motto of oﬀering to his “fair ladies” only that which is “free from grossness and puerility” (“PUBLISHER’S NOTICES,” June 1840,

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384).43 He oﬀered The Indian Maid in November 1840 and The Last Visit in August 1851 (by Rothermel, discussed previously). In the former, the ﬁgure of the Indian is small and set against a landscape; the latter, as noted previously, shows a fully clothed female comforting her aging father, with signs of the encroachment of civilization in the background. Another embellishment, The Indian Captive, serves as the frontispiece to the November 1845 issue of Godey’s. This engraving shows a white female settler seated on a horse in front of an Indian warrior. The subtitle to the engraving reads, “Painted for Godey by Darley and Engraved by [John G.] Chapman.” This painting is not listed in the PAFA catalogue, suggesting that it had not been exhibited in Philadelphia, but rather was commissioned by Godey exclusively for his magazine.44 Graham’s featured by far the largest number of proto-ethnographic images of Indians in this decade. Beginning in July 1844, George Graham promised his readers a series of “Indian sketches,” and nearly a dozen appeared in 1844 and 1845. Most of these were engraved by the New York ﬁrm of Rawdon, Wright, and Hatch (occasionally in business with James Smillie, who also collaborated with Robert Hinshelwood during these years) from sketches by Bodmer, although the ﬁrm engraved from Darley sketches as well.45 Most of these engravings focus on male ﬁgures, and highlight distinctive dress and tribal customs, like Hunting Buﬀalo (September 1844), Horse-Racing of Sioux Indians (January 1845), Blackfoot Indians on Horseback (February 1845), Maennitarri Warriors in the Costume of the Dog Dance (October 1845), and Dance of the Mandan Indians (September 1850). Others highlight sites of Indian encampments and unusual geological formations, such as Elkhorn Pyramid (November 1844) and Cave-in-Rock (July 1844). Two engravings, Fort MacKenzie (November 1847; see ﬁg. 6.4) and Dance of the Mandan Indians (September 1850), portray the male warriors in grotesque poses—the former depicts an attack by Assinboins and Crows against the Black-Feet Indians camped outside the fort; the latter depicts a Mandan post–battle victory dance. Far fewer Graham’s images depict proto-ethnographic ﬁgures of female Indians, but these diﬀer substantially both from the images of male Indians and from the eroticized images of idealized Indian maidens. “Real” female Indians appear not to have oﬀered erotic appeal for Graham’s presumed male readers. A Skin Lodge of an Assinboin Chief (December 1847) depicts family members, mostly male but one female and one child, in daily chores, while Mandan Women (May 1847) focuses on the depiction of the women’s dress and seems concerned primarily with ethnographic verisimilitude. The female Indian depicted in Skin Lodge is too small to make out clearly, but the one depicted in Mandan Women clearly lacks the markers of feminine beauty

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FIGURE 6.4 Fort MacKenzie, frontispiece, Graham’s, November 1847. Drawn by Charles Bodmer, engraved by Rawdon, Wright, Hatch, and Smillie.

typical of Graham’s other images of either idealized (white) womanhood or eroticized (Indian) womanhood. Mandan Women seems to have served as a pendant to Mandan Chief, published in January 1845. The textual illustration of that earlier engraving dwells on the “vanity” of the Mandan men, observing, “A warrior, in adorning, takes more time for his toilet than the most elegant Parisian belle.” Noting that warriors choose adornments that display their exploits both on the battleﬁeld and with the tribal ladies, the sketch pronounces Mato-Topo, the particularly warrior featured in this engraving, an “Indian dandy.” It is hard not to hear in this engraving’s textual illustration a gentle admonition to Graham’s readers, both male and female, against the excesses of “dandyism.” In contrast to Godey’s, however, Graham’s depictions of eroticized Indian females clearly pander to the male imaginary, with their suggestions of sexual availability and Indian promiscuity.46 Louis Godey never oﬀered to his readers eroticized Indian maidens; nor will you ﬁnd in his magazine images of Indian savagery and grotesqueness such as Fort Mackenzie. Graham’s imagined dual

FIGURE 6.5 Domestic Life among the Indians, frontispiece, Godey’s, June 1845. Drawn by F. O. C. Darley, engraved by Rolph & Jewitt, printed by Illman & Sons. Painted and Engraved expressly for Godey’s Lady’s Magazine. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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audiences of both male and female readers likely explain the greater variety of images of Native Americans featured in his magazine, compared to Godey’s. The diﬀerence in audience address between Graham’s and Godey’s is perhaps best exempliﬁed by the ﬁnal Indian embellishment and illustration described here In Domestic Life Among the Indians, published by Godey in his June 1845 issue (see ﬁg. 6.5), an Indian warrior sits with his chin resting on his hands, a look of resignation on his face. He watches his mate tend the ﬁre, a papoose on her back, with the family dog resting nearby. The warrior’s posture of resignation likely would have been understood by the magazine’s readers as a sign of the Indian’s acceptance of the ascendancy of the white man, and the inevitable vanishing of his tribe’s culture. In the accompanying text, the narrator (likely Hale, as she illustrated a good many engravings) decries the stereotypical depiction of the “innocence and happiness of savage life” predominating in the literature of the previous century. The narrator continues, “The real forest life of the poor Indian is now known to be one of hardship and suﬀering.”47 Adding that the lives of both male and female Indians are “hard and sad,” the narrator discourages readers from feeling any particular sympathy for the females of the tribe: “We think in savage as in civilized life, that woman always remains where the Creator ﬁrst placed her—by the side of man.” The narrator concludes, “we don’t expect readers to want to leave civilization to join Indians on the basis of the plates given” (“Domestic Life Among the Indians,” Godey’s, June 1845, 252). In addition to dunning the romantic depiction of the “noble savage” typical of the “previous century,” Hale’s pointed quip seems to address the equally idealized and romanticized engravings of Indians ubiquitous in Graham’s and Peterson’s. Although both Graham and Godey featured proto-ethnographic Indian-themed embellishments, and both showcased these plates in competing for readership, their choice of plates indicates subtle diﬀerences in their imagined audiences. Graham featured the work of Bodmer, prepared initially for McKenney’s work but tailored here to Graham’s readership. Meanwhile, Godey commissioned Darley to prepare both Domestic Life Among the Indians (June 1845) and The Indian Captive (November 1845) exclusively for use in his magazine, and likely owned both paintings as well. George Graham featured more images of Indians in his magazine than that of any other type, except, perhaps, of idealized white womanhood. Godey featured only a very few, and clearly tailored those chosen to highlight themes of domesticity and women’s social inﬂuence—messages appropriate to his imagined female readers. All four publishers sought uniquely American artwork in promoting their magazines, collecting and presenting original American landscapes, historical

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scenes, fancy pictures, idealized female portraits, and images of Native Americans. However, although all touted the importance of their magazines in promoting American art and artists, at decade’s end, Godey and Sartain, in particular, disagreed in the editorial spaces of their magazines about several signiﬁcant issues facing the young American art community. While they battled over these important issues, they also battled over embellishers.

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When Godey promised his readers in May 1844 “a mezzotint in every number,” he had at his command all the best artists and engravers working in Philadelphia. Just as the list of American painters featured in his magazine argues for their inclusion in a comprehensive narrative of nineteenth-century American art, Godey’s roll call of mezzotint and line engravers stands out as a who’s who in the graphic arts at mid-century. Godey’s invocation of their names in his editorial spaces indicates that if they were not already, these engravers would soon be household names: John Sartain, Henry S. Sadd, William Warner, William Tucker, and Jacob D. Gross (mezzotinters); Joseph Ives Pease, Thomas B. Welch, Adam B. Walter, Francis Humphreys, Archibald L. Dick, and Joseph Gimbrede (line engravers). Yet again, with the exception of Sartain, the importance of the work of these engravers to the popularization and democratization of American art is all but missing from narratives of nineteenth-century American art.1 Although by decade’s end the ﬁercest competition was between Sartain and Godey, George Graham and Charles Peterson struggled to compete, each developing a kind of niche market with specialty engravings. As noted in the previous chapter, Graham featured over two dozen engravings taken from sketches of the western expeditions of Thomas McKenney and Prince Maximilian, executed by Karl Bodmer and F. O. C. Darley. The New York ﬁrm of Rawdon, Wright, Hatch and (sometimes) Smillie engraved most of the Bodmer and Darley sketches for Graham’s. This ﬁrm, comprised of the brothers Ralph and Freeman Rawdon, Neziah Wright, George W. Hatch, and James Smillie, executed dozens of engravings for Graham’s in the 1840s, and appears to have engraved exclusively for his magazine in the Philadelphia market.2 They also

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FIGURE 7.1 The Sportsman, frontispiece, Graham’s, October 1847. Painted by J. F. Lewis, engraved by

A. L. Dick.

specialized in American landscape scenes, and engraved a great many scenes originally drawn by William H. Bartlett and published in Nathaniel P. Willis’s 1840 publication, American Scenery.3 Graham also preferred the work of another proliﬁc New York line engraver, Archibald L. Dick. Dick engraved nearly a hundred plates for the Philadelphia pictorials in the 1840s, and for several months during 1843 and 1844 Graham’s, Godey’s, and Peterson’s all featured plates executed by him. George Graham relied on Dick for landscape scenes (some, again, originally executed by Bartlett), and for the “sportsman”-themed plates likely to appeal to Graham’s gentlemen readers. Typical in this vein are Highland Sport (October 1843), A Day in the Woods (December 1843), and The Sportsman (October 1847; see ﬁg. 7.1). Peterson also employed Dick for landscape scenes, but relied on him as well for engravings of idealized women, such as The Swiss Girl (December 1843), Florence (July 1844), and Julia (November 1852). Dick received the largest number of commissions from Godey, however, executing over half of his Philadelphia magazine plates for Godey’s. He was a

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versatile engraver. His work for Godey includes landscapes (Schuylkill Water Works, September 1840; Niagara Falls, February 1841) and contrast plates (Sickness and Health, January 1847; Gravity and Gaiety, April 1847). However, he specialized in genre scenes. As the frontispiece to his May 1844 issue, Godey featured May Day Morning, pronouncing it a “sweet rural picture, from the burin of Dick, who is always successful in similar scenes” (“Editors’ Table,” 248). Other Dick engravings in this vein include The Stray Kitten (April 1841); Family Devotion (May 1842); The First Ear Ring (June 1843); The Family Jewels (August 1843); The Pastor’s Visit (April 1844); The Pic-Nic (June 1844); The Fair Client (February 1846); and The Love Letter (August 1846), among others. Another New York engraver, although little known today, Frederick Quarre was discovered and promoted by Godey and went on to work for the other Philadelphia pictorials as well.4 Quarre and his wife prepared lace pattern work for Godey as early as 1839. In August 1839, Godey introduced a plate by Quarre as “a specimen of Lace Drapery,” boasting that “a more beautiful and appropriate ornament has never been published in the Book. The work is of the ﬁnest kind, and the imitation is perfect” (“Editors’ Table,” 95). Quarre published his own magazine, the Artist, in 1842; this is the magazine Charles Peterson bought out in 1843 and combined with Lady’s World beginning with the July 1843 issue. In the “Editors’ Table” that announces the merger, Peterson also announces that Quarre and Sartain will be “chieﬂy employed in illustrating the book” (191). Like Peterson, George Graham also featured work by Quarre in the early part of the decade. Peterson notes, in a puﬀ for his November 1844 issue entitled “A Brilliant Array,” that Quarre is known for his “brilliant illustrations in color, such as bouquets, shell-work, lace, arabesque colored birds, & c.” (180). Plate 8 is an example of a Quarre embellishment from Graham’s combining colored lace work and hand-painted birds. Once Peterson and Graham snapped up the services of Madame and Monsieur Quarre, Godey turned to a Philadelphia engraver who specialized in similar novelty embellishments, William Croome (discussed brieﬂy in the introduction). Although little known today, Croome was perhaps better known to Godey’s lady readers than any other of his featured engravers, for it was Croome who “Americanized” Godey’s fashion plates by redrawing the ﬁgures free of the “tight-lacing” typical of French fashions.5 As Godey noted in introducing these new fashion plates in April 1843, “Formerly the proportions of the ﬁgure were somewhat disregarded in exhibiting the dress; but since we have obtained the valuable aid of Mr. Croome, the claims of good taste and artistical [sic] ﬁdelity in drawing the ﬁgure are fully recognized” (“Editors’

FIGURE 7.2 Mountain Airs and City Graces, frontispiece fashion plate, Godey’s October 1850.

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Table,” 204). The popularity of these Americanized fashions and novelty gift plates in Godey’s likely contributed to Croome’s status as a household name at mid-decade. By decade’s end, however, Godey’s “Paris Fashions Americanized” were being prepared by two other engravers on Godey’s roll call: Joseph Ives Pease, and Francis Humphreys. Pease worked ﬁrst in Albany with his brother, Richard, before moving to Philadelphia.6 In addition to working as a line engraver, he also exhibited watercolors and crayon portraits at PAFA in the late 1840s.7 However, he became better known to the reading public when he engraved all the portraits for Thomas Buchanan Read’s 1849 anthology, The Female Poets of America. Pease excelled at engraving the female countenance, as both his portraits for Read’s anthology, and his thematized fashion plates for Godey’s demonstrate. In 1850, he prepared two thematized fashion plates: Wedding Costumes (March) and Mountain Airs and City Graces (October), in addition to three additional hand-colored plates, The Flower Girl (July; presented in Godey’s August “Chit-Chat” column as a fashion plate, 126), The Rose (September), and Evening Star (November).8 Godey seems to have had Pease in mind in his debate with John Sartain over whether or not the fashion plates should be treated as art (more on this dispute later in the chapter). Pease’s thematized fashion plates, like the October 1850 Mountain Airs and City Graces (see ﬁg. 7.2), appear to have been extremely popular with Godey’s readers.9 Pease seams to have alternated monthly fashion plates with Humphreys (not to be confused with William Humphreys, also a line engraver) and with A. W. Graham, who, like Pease, also produced thematized fashion plates. Graham engraved I Am Sorry You Can’t Go (April 1850), and The Train is Coming (May 1850). Humphreys, like Croome, also executed line engravings for Godey’s competitors as well at decade’s end. Graham and Godey also competed for the services of line engraver William E. Tucker. Tucker had engraved for the annuals in the 1830s, and he both drew the designs and executed the engravings for title pages for both publishers’ magazines.10 In October 1848 Graham announced that Tucker was in Europe at the publisher’s behest and “engaged to engrave exclusively for Graham’s” (“Editor’s Table,” 240). However, by March 1850, Godey was boasting the same thing, stating that he had sent Tucker to London “for the purpose of enlisting the services of the best artists that could there be found . . . whatever expense [may] attend the measure.” In August Godey noted that Tucker’s additional charge is to secure a set of religious plates (March, 223; August, 188). Graham long relied on Tucker to engrave his elaborate title pages, as did Godey (see

FIGURE 7.3 Godey’s 1848 Lady’s Book, title cover, January 1848. Designed and engraved by William E. Tucker.

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the particularly elaborate cover for Godey’s 1848 volume, ﬁg. 7.3). The two apparently competed ﬁercely for Tucker’s services between 1848 and 1850. After boasting that he has secured Tucker’s services exclusively, two months later Graham appears to have lost Tucker to Godey’s deeper pockets. Graham grouses in his “Editor’s Table” about the “degrading of magazines into picture-books for children,” and announces he will no longer attempt to compete, but will oﬀer his readers only the “most ﬁnished and elegant” plates he can secure (December 1848, 366). Meanwhile, Godey boasts in his November 1848 number, under a special heading entitled “WM. E. TUCKER, Esq.”: “We have several plates in the hands of this gentleman, one of which will appear in the January number, and another soon after. We will say that no engraver in the United States can equal the eﬀort of this talented artist for the initial number of next year” (323). Tucker’s title page is beautiful, and his frontispiece engraving for Graham’s January 1849 issue is particularly well executed. Entitled The Belle of the Opera, it is one of a dozen images of idealized womanhood Graham’s featured in 1848 and 1849 alone. As noted previously, both Godey and Graham featured these idealized portraits, but Graham relied on belles, brides, and coquettes, while Godey preferred maternal ﬁgures.11 The next month Godey boasts that he has “the two best line engravers” in the country in the persons of “Messrs. Pease and Tucker.” Godey’s boast could easily have been intended for Graham—clearly the two publishers each thought they had snagged Tucker exclusively in 1848; but by that time, Godey was also locked in a death struggle with Sartain. While Godey and Graham fought over Tucker, Peterson maintained his steady commitment to securing exquisite mezzotints for his magazine, relying primarily on Jacob D. Gross, a pupil of Sartain’s. Beginning in March 1847, with the tale “Agnes Courtenay” and an accompanying mezzotint of the same title, Peterson announced, “We have found this new enterprise of illustrating a continued story exceedingly popular” (“OUR MEZZOTINT,” 126). Peterson followed the same formula of commissioning a mezzotint to illustrate more than half a dozen other tales (though many were not “continuing”).12 Gross engraved most of Peterson’s prized mezzotints, but he engraved for Godey as well. In fact, Peterson sought out his services almost exclusively after the appearance of a November 1846 Godey’s column in which Godey declared his work superior to his master’s. Indeed, Gross’s mezzotints for Peterson’s at least match Sartain’s: It is I, from the June 1849 issue of Peterson’s, is in the “pleasant peasant” vein, and is particularly well executed (see ﬁg. 7.4).13

FIGURE 7.4 It is I, frontispiece, Peterson’s, June 1849. Engraved by J. D. Gross.

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BAT TLING OVER EMBELLISHERS, BAT TLING OVER “ART ” The real feud at decade’s end was between Godey and Sartain. It appears that the conﬂict began simmering in 1844, but broke out in earnest in 1846 over Godey’s approbation of the work of Jacob Gross, Sartain’s pupil. Once Sartain purchased the Union in 1848 and relocated the magazine from New York to Philadelphia, Godey found that Sartain was no longer a hireling, but a competitor, particularly for the services of engravers. Sartain could lay claim to their loyalties as a fellow engraver, while Godey wielded the power of his larger purse strings. The battle spread to include competition over issues of art. Using the art columns and editorial spaces of their corresponding magazines, Godey and Sartain disputed several key issues also aﬀecting the larger Philadelphia art community at mid-century: the use of woodcuts for illustration; the artistic merits of fashion plates; the female nude; and the role of patrons and connoisseurs in evaluating art. By the early 1850s, only one magazine would remain in business.14 While Godey had certainly mentioned the arts and artists in his editorial spaces earlier in the decade, by way of “puﬃng” upcoming embellishments purchased and executed exclusively for the magazine, he did not publish a regular column on the arts until later in the decade. His editorial persona in the early to mid-1840s establishes him as a patron of the arts, but not speciﬁcally as a connoisseur or critic. For example, a four-line notice in Godey’s publisher’s column for November 1840 notes that his “friend,” the artist Russell Smith, has given him a landscape. Godey praises Russell’s work and thanks him for the gift (240). In the same column, Godey inserts a two-line notice of Catherwood’s Diorama and urges readers not to neglect the “splendid” view of Jerusalem depicted therein (240). In the same column for November 1841, Godey notes that the engraving The Wreck is taken from an “original” picture painted by John G. Chapman exclusively for “the Publisher” (240). Beginning in 1844, however, Godey begins to feature extended notices on the arts, although initially it is not clear who is contributing these articles. A clue to Godey’s shift from patron of the arts to publisher of art criticism appears in a January 1844 notice in the “Editor’s Book Table.” Godey typically used this space to review newly released books, or to notice other newspapers, magazines, or gift-books. In the January 1844 column, he notes, “We hear that our friend Sartain, the artist, has the chief direction of the literary as well as the artistical [sic] department of Campbell’s semi-monthly Magazine.” While praising Sartain’s “taste,” Godey mentions that Campbell’s features only literary reprints from recent British magazines; hence Sartain is

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praised merely for his “judicious selection” of the material copied into Campbell’s.15 Sartain’s foray into magazine publishing apparently prompted Godey to reconsider his commitment to art criticism: if an artist could publish a magazine, perhaps a publisher who patronized the arts ought also to provide criticism of the arts? A half-year later, in the August 1844 issue, Godey features his ﬁrst extended column of art criticism. The “Editors’ Table” opens with a defense of the magazine’s entry into this ﬁeld: “The encouragement of the ﬁne arts, more particularly those of drawing, engraving and painting, must, in our country, depend very much on female inﬂuence.” The column continues by noting that the Lady’s Book led support of American arts and artists by featuring “engravings of the ﬁrst merit.” Godey takes credit also for “improving the taste for this delightful art,” noting that under the inﬂuence of Godey’s, other magazines followed suit in seeking to publish the ﬁnest engravings and notices of the arts (95). To “corroborate” his own opinion of the importance of cultivating a “taste” for the arts of drawing, engraving, and painting by oﬀering a critique of these arts, Godey then oﬀers his ﬁrst column of art criticism, a review of the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design. Although Godey does not identify the author of the review, he notes that it was solicited from “a gentleman of New York, who has enjoyed great advantages of foreign travel and personal acquaintance with our best artists, both at home and abroad” (95). It seems very likely that this exhibition review, and many other art columns published in Godey’s in the second half of the decade, were written by Henry T. Tuckerman. As art historian David B. Dearinger has noted, American art criticism was still in its infancy in the 1840s.16 Tuckerman, a versatile contributor to the periodicals, published one of the ﬁrst “histories” of American art in 1847, Artist Life, or Sketches of the American Painters.17 What has not been previously recognized is that many of these biographical sketches originally appeared, unsigned, in Godey’s, beginning with a selection on Daniel Huntington in August 1846. In a sly note in the January 1848 editorial space, Godey observes: “We perceive that the press in general are praising Mr. Tuckerman’s book upon the artists of America. It does not seem to be generally known that most of the articles in it, if not all, were originally published in the Lady’s Book” (72). While the biographical sketches of the artists in Godey’s are easy to identify as the work of Tuckerman, other Godey’s art columns prove more elusive to authenticate. “Visits to the Painters,” published in December 1844, carries the byline “by an amateur.” Since the column focuses primarily on

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Philadelphia artists (Tuckerman lived in New York from 1845 on) and mentions “frequent” visits, both to the artists and to Godey’s own residence, it seems unlikely that Tuckerman authored this column. One possible source is Joseph Sill, a member of the Amateurs and Artists Association in Philadelphia, who records in his diary numerous visits to the Philadelphia painters during these years, and records that artist James Reid Lambdin asked him to write notices for the papers on upcoming Artists’ Fund exhibitions.18 By mid-1846, Godey was alternating the “Our Artists” column (contributed anonymously by Tuckerman) with a new column formally titled, “Notices of the Fine Arts.” The column featured a decorative woodcut heading representing popular artistic symbols—a painter’s palette and easel, books, canvases, busts, and framed paintings. Some columns announced upcoming exhibitions and works-in-progress; others covered Philadelphia area art happenings, like the opening of the “life school” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Some were devoted to speciﬁc genres, like engraving (January 1848) and bank note engraving (February 1848). Only one of these columns carries Tuckerman’s byline (November 1847); one, devoted to wood engraving, bears the mysterious initials “C. T. H.” (August 1847). Although Sartain appears to be still engraving for Godey at this time—a September 1846 plate “View on the Delaware Opposite Philadelphia notes that it was engraved by Sartain from an original by J. Hamilton—by November it is clear that a rift has occurred between the two. Whereas Sartain once virtually monopolized the mezzotint work in Philadelphia, a generation of his pupils were now coming into their own, and placing their work in venues previously serviced by Sartain. New mezzotinters emerged as well. The November 1846 issue of Godey’s features a frontispiece Beneﬁcence of Washington, engraved by Gross, and in the “Editors’ Table,” Godey has this to say about his mezzotints: Our plates this month are both grave and gay. The mezzotint by Gross is equal to anything ever done by Sartain—indeed, Mr. G. was his pupil, and bids fair to outstrip his tutor. Upon the subject of mezzotints, we may remark that everything depends upon the printing. Our subscribers may remember the plate “A View on the Delaware,” published in our September number. The plate, although engraved by Mr. Sartain, was printed by Mr. John Butler, of this city; hence its great beauty. (240) Godey’s comments slur Sartain on two counts: ﬁrst, the publisher pronounces Sartain’s pupil’s work as equal to Sartain’s and predicts that Gross will surpass

FIGURE 7.5 The Lost Glove, frontispiece, The Union, April 1848. Designed by T. H. Matteson, engraved by H. S. Sadd.

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the master; second he credits the beauty of the plate A View on the Delaware not to Sartain’s engraving, but to Butler’s printing. Since Sartain generally engaged his own printer to print his mezzotints, it appears that this is not part of the business arrangement with Godey.19 Godey’s apparent demoting of Sartain’s talent may have contributed to the mezzotinter’s decision to take on ownership of his own magazine. When he moved the illustrated monthly to Philadelphia in 1848, he rechristened it Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art. Godey found himself competing not only with Graham and Peterson for mezzotinters, but with Sartain— and he had lost the services of the accomplished engraver as well. Godey may well have feared that other engravers sympathetic to Sartain’s eﬀorts to publish his own illustrated magazine might defect to Sartain and leave Godey scrambling for embellishers. Sartain immediately brought one former Godey’s engraver with him in his new venture: Henry S. Sadd. Like Sartain, Sadd had learned the art of mezzotint engraving in England, and had immigrated to America in 1840. He had engraved for the former art director of the Union magazine, Tompkins H. Matteson, in New York. A proliﬁc engraver, Sadd executed nearly three dozen plates for these pictorials alone in the 1840s, including Taking the Advantage and Steps to Ruin, discussed previously. His engraving of Matteson’s The Lost Glove is one of the few images of African Americans in these magazines in this decade, and is in the vein of the happy minstrel ﬁgure (see ﬁg. 7.5).20 Although the engraving depicts the diminutive African American servant with slightly caricatured features, the accompanying textual illustration explicitly pokes fun not at the servant, but at the aging dandy who accuses the servant of misplacing a glove, when in fact the dandy has left it atop his head after removing his hat. Taking notice of Sartain’s snagging of Sadd in his “Notices of the Fine Arts” column for January 1848, Godey (or one of his stand-ins) sniﬀs at the “murky mantle of mezzotinted mediocrity” emerging from the pages of his new competitor’s magazine. An elaborate verbal pun begins with a denunciation of “SARTAIN SADD ‘scrapers’ of steel and copper. . . .” The author continues with other pronouncements about the work of engravers John and Seth Cheney and James Smillie. The editorial concludes: “For the rest of the graver brotherhood, the Ellises, Kellys, Neagles, Peltons, Balches and other fashionable names of the day, we are at a loss to know upon what ground they found admirers, or in what line they could justly be said to stand high?” (Godey’s, January 1848, 61). The pronouncement against “SARTAIN SADD ‘scrapers,’” possibly written by Tuckerman but certainly with Godey’s tacit approval, undoubtedly

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heightened tensions between Godey and Sartain. Evidently, Sadd was not the only mezzotint engraver Sartain sought to steal away from Godey. In his April 1848 “Editor’s Book Table,” in a special column titled “OUR MEZZOTINT ARTIST,” Godey writes: “Oﬀers have been made to the gentleman who is engaged exclusively by us for this department, to engage his services for another establishment, but he was not to be bought. Fear of his great success has lead [sic] to this step. He is pronounced the best engraver in mezzotint now in this country” (251). Godey likely refers here to William Warner. However, he could just as easily be referring either to Thomas B. Welch or Adam B. Walter. Walter was Welch’s pupil and they formed a business partnership early in the decade, executing many plates for Godey’s.21 In fact, The Bud and the Blossom (discussed in chapter 5) and Viola (discussed in chapter 6) are Welch and Walter creations. Although Welch took on work under his own name in 1847, in his “Editors’ Book Table” for November 1848, Godey announces upcoming work by the duo. In another column devoted to “OUR MEZZOTINT ARTISTS,” Godey announces: “Mr. Walter and Mr. Welch are both busily engaged in the pictorial department of this work . . . Messrs. W. & W. are artists, and produce plates that will bear examination. They are considered here in Philadelphia as pre-eminent among mezzotint engravers.” A month later he boasts of this duo, “We have the two best mezzotint engravers in America, Messrs. Welch and Walter.” This boast clearly challenges Sartain’s long-held supremacy as the country’s premier mezzotinter. Godey ends his editor’s column for November 1848 on an ominous note, announcing that his next issue will include an article on mezzotint engraving to answer the claims of another article recently published. The promised column appeared a month late—in January 1849—and indicated that there was more at stake than Godey’s loss of a mezzotinter. Whether authored by Tuckerman or someone else, the column speciﬁcally addresses claims made in an April 1848 article published in The Nineteenth Century, edited by Rev. C. C. Burr. The article pronounced Sartain “the father of mezzotinto engraving in this country,” claiming he remained “the master.” Godey’s column takes exception to this pronouncement, and draws on evidence from a variety of sources to argue that mezzotint had been successfully executed long before Sartain arrived. Of his work, the column notes: “Mr. Sartain has made some elegant pictures, but he has made many more that even inferior artists would not suﬀer to go into the world with their names attached. His art seems to us to be to him merely the means of pecuniary advancement. . . .” Clearly at stake is the role of the graphic arts and graphic

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artists—is the engraver “inspired” as is the canvas painter, or does he ply the burin as a trade? Godey’s column suggests the graphic arts could be “art” or they could be “trade,” but not both; or, at the very least, that an engraver degrades himself by engraving merely for money. The column continues by pronouncing the late William Warner as “far exceeding Sartain in the quality of his mezzotints,” claiming, “The last two or three engravings executed by Mr. Warner before his decease were the most exquisite gems that ever came from a burin” (“Editor’s Table,” 69). Warner, dying young, seems to have met Godey’s ideal of the “inspired genius” (by virtue of dying young?). Godey appears to have published three mezzotints by Warner in 1848: Happy Hours, as the frontispiece for the January 1848 issue; Lobster Sauce for March 1848; and Widow’s Hope for the April 1848 issue. Lobster Sauce is a humorous (and somewhat ghastly) piece showing a ferocious cat looming over a dead ﬁsh with fang and claw bared. Happy Hours is in the “pleasant peasant” genre and shows a young girl frolicking with a pet lamb at her side. Widow’s Hope captures the kind of intimate domestic scene of mother and child for which Godey’s was best known. Warner also painted, and exhibited a dozen paintings, mostly portraits and fancy pictures, before his death in 1848.22 In fact, Warner was one of the rare artists who not only painted but engraved directly from his own work. Although Godey attempted to set up Warner as a foil to Sartain, they were actually more alike than not. Both painted. Both engraved. Moreover, it is likely that in securing Warner’s work, Godey worked to his own pecuniary advantage as well, since Warner served as both artist and engraver for his work published in Godey’s. It seems unlikely that Godey acknowledged, or even recognized, the irony in his pronouncements about Warner and Sartain. Sartain’s response to Godey’s critique, when it came, was decidedly muted. In the June 1849 issue of Sartain’s Union, an editorial signed by Professor Hart (then co-editor with Caroline Kirkland) announced the increase in circulation from 7,000 to 20,000 in six months under Sartain ownership.23 The editorial continues: “Our object, however, has been, not to put other Magazines down, but to establish our own. It is not the belief of any one connected with Sartain’s Magazine, either as editor or proprietor, that its success depends upon the rise or fall of others, but upon its own independent course.” Though Sartain declined, at this point, to ﬁre back editorially to defend his own artistry, he indicated his intent to continue competing with Godey to produce innovative and high-quality art for his magazine. His August 1849 issue featured an embellishment titled The Serenade, an example of “Block

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Printing in Colours,” which the “Arts and Artists” column pronounced as “a specimen of art yet new in this country.” The column explains that the embellishment was produced by a series of successive impressions on paper taken from six engraved blocks of wood, and notes that this method is less cumbersome than working from stone. This apparently incited Godey’s ire on yet another issue—whether or not printing in colors from wood blocks could compete with printing in colors from stone. Godey preferred using stones (lithography); Sartain clearly championed using wood for colored plates. Godey and Sartain also sparred over the use of woodcuts, usually smaller illustrations done on wood, used to accompany sketches and tales. Godey denigrated all printing from wood as “cheap.” Sartain considered woodcuts “economical” and eﬃcient, arguing that they were the method best suited for producing a series of illustrations to accompany a longer tale (“TO THE PUBLIC,” September 1849).24 In addition, Godey only declared them “cheap” after bragging he had been the “ﬁrst” to introduce the practice in 1848 by engaging William Croome to illustrate a series of sketches penned by T. S. Arthur (Godey’s, December 1848, 393). Godey clearly wanted to have it both ways in this debate. On the question of the fashion plates: Godey considered them works of art, while Sartain dismissed them as merely utilitarian. For April 1850, Godey featured a fashion plate colored using aqua tint. His “Editors’ Book Table” for the same issue includes a special notice “OUR FASHION PLATES.” He argues, “The fashions published in our February and March numbers have never been surpassed by any ever published in France.” He goes beyond this boasting to proclaim, “For beauty of engraving and elegant coloring, they may be called embellishments.” Sartain’s answer, coming ﬁve months later in September, was decisive. In a full-page address titled “TO THE PUBLIC” attached to the back of his magazine, Sartain addresses, among other topics, the question of fashion plates. He asks his readers if they would imagine encountering a fashion plate on the wall of an art gallery. If the answer is “yes,” then the plates should be considered works of art. If “No,” as Sartain insists, then art they are not. Godey also objected to the publication of images of the female nude. In his “Prospectus” for 1850, published at the end of his January issue, Godey strenuously objects to what he calls the “vulgar ‘model artist’ engravings” a “competitor” ran in 1849.25 Sartain featured a series of these images in 1849, clearly based on the European tradition of the female nude. He published Undine in the March issue; La Esmerelda in April; Snake in the Grass in October (discussed in chapter 5); and The Fountain of Vaucluse in November. While the

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nude had made inroads in gallery exhibitions, its inclusion in an illustrated middle-class magazine set oﬀ this furor between Sartain and Godey. If Sartain refrained from defending himself as an artist and engraver publicly, he withholds little in a critique of the “art connoisseur” that does everything but name Godey as the subject of ridicule. Another column in the same August 1849 issue, titled “CONNOISSEURDOM” and signed with the initials “J.S.,” Sartain takes a swipe at the “lovers of the ﬁne arts.” He describes how they while away their leisure hours in the public galleries critiquing the work of artists (presumably while the artists are hard at work in their studios). He criticizes these folks for asserting that only the “amateur and the connoisseur” can judge what is “good in art,” and claims they are like sheep— afraid of making a purchase until their choice has been judged admirable by those who know little more than they do. While he names no one directly, it is likely he had Godey in mind, particularly in view of their ongoing editorial disputations. While Sartain defended his magazine publicly, privately he expressed his extreme anxiety at the competition he felt from both Godey’s and Graham’s. In a letter to his son Samuel, then in London, dated June 4, 1850, he urges Samuel to buy some “quality plates,” noting that “Graham has come out strong in his July number,” and that Godey and Graham have purchased some inexpensive but “choice” plates left over from the publications of Charles Heath, a London dealer. He warns Samuel, “Thus you perceive that there is considerable danger that the éclat we had may pass over to Graham and our exertions must be well directed for the balance of this year from September.”26 Even while Sartain fretted about Godey’s and Graham’s purchases of English plates, Godey was busy playing the “exclusively American” trump card. In July 1850, he promised his readers, “In the course of a little while, we shall be enabled to publish in the Lady’s Book plates designed and engraved by American artists only, relying no longer upon English engravings to illustrate an American book” (“Editors’ Book Table,” 61). Godey no doubt realized that his “new” American plates would be ready just as Sartain would be rolling out Samuel’s newly acquired, but used, English plates. Indeed, it would appear that Godey, Peterson, and Graham decided to close ranks against Sartain at decade’s end, for just as Sartain secured European plates and British writers, all three published notices in their editorial spaces decrying the practice of relying on foreign contributions to American magazines. In his January 1850 “Editors’ Table: Chit-Chat with Readers,” Peterson brags that his magazine is “not only a lady’s magazine, but a national one also . . . thoroughly and consistently American” (70). Later in the same column, he

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claims that a letter from an American author indicates that, while he looks forward to an occasional piece from a foreign author (the letter writer speciﬁcally names Fredrika Bremer and William and Mary Howitt, all of whom Sartain had solicited to contribute to his magazine in 1849–50), the author considered it “out of place, in toto.” Peterson indicates his decision henceforth to publish only American authors, and this pronouncement seems a pointed critique of Sartain. Godey boasts in December 1850, “We cannot forget that we are American born,” another dig at Sartain, who had emigrated from England (“Editors’ Book Table,” 386). Likewise, Graham pointed out in his February 1850 editorial column that he and Godey had led the way in paying liberally for the work of American writers, and gradually shunning the work of British writers (88)—an announcement that comes precisely at the time that Sartain is featuring contributions by Bremer and the Howitts. Regardless of whom we might judge to have “won” these artistic debates, Godey simply was able to outspend Sartain on his embellishments, and Godey knew that well enough to publish to his readers his anticipated outlay for 1851. In a full-page “Prospectus” for the new volume appended to the rear of the October 1850 issue, Godey lists over eighty plates, including work by all the well-known artists and engravers, for which he claims to be spending a staggering $50,000. Sartain’s Union limped along through 1851 but the ﬁnancial misdeeds of Sartain’s partner sank the engraver’s ﬁnancial ship. By that time, Godey’s, Graham’s, and Peterson’s had tougher competition to contend with in the market for engraved art reproductions, and it was not to be found in the City of Brotherly Love.

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As early as January 1844, George Graham looked nervously to the New York publishing houses. In a January 1844 “Review of New Books” column, he swooned over the “swarm of new works” coming out of the “proliﬁc press of the Harpers” (46). In 1848 Charles Peterson also wondered what the brothers would be up to next. As a new decade dawned, new forms of competition arrived on the art reproduction scene, threatening the supremacy of the Philadelphia pictorials, and one from the very source Graham and Peterson most feared: in June 1850 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine made its debut (Mott, II, 383). The remaining Philadelphia pictorials circled the wagons by repeating the assertion that they were truly “American.” Graham, apparently the most nervous about his New York publishing brethren, attempted to dismiss Harper’s, sneering in his “Editor’s Table” for March 1851 that it was a good “foreign magazine” because it featured European writers, not American ones (280). Graham had good reason to fret, since his was a decidedly more literary magazine like Harper’s. Godey remained noticeably silent on the matter; evidently, as the publisher of the leading “ladies” magazine, he feared little direct competition from Harper’s, at least in terms of his primary audience. Godey faced competition from another corner, and notice of this new threat surfaced in the pages of his magazine in 1849. Godey spent the decade of the 1840s tirelessly promoting the work of American artists and engravers, most of them Philadelphia artists and engravers. By decade’s end, their names were like familiar friends to the 100,000 readers regularly buying his magazine and clipping out his full-page embellishments. However, a singular engraving featured in his August 1849 presaged change. The mezzotint was

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FIGURE 8.1 Taking the Queue, frontispiece, Godey’s, August 1849. Engraved by H. S. Wagner for Godey’s. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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engraved by Henry S. Wagner, a portrait engraver active in Philadelphia in the 1840s and 1850s.1 Titled Taking the Queue, the engraving is a curious blend of the anachronistic and the new (see ﬁg. 8.1). The bewigged male slumberer harks back to paintings of an earlier era. The verbally punning title (queue/ hair braid; queue/cue), the playful kittens, the kitchen interior, everything right down to the clothing and hair style on the superintending domestic matron, all scream “Lilly Martin Spencer.” Although Godey does not identify this engraving as originating from a Spencer painting, or as a portrait of Spencer, and although no Spencer painting by this title is known to exist, the visual evidence is certainly suggestive of Spencer’s work from this era. Lilly Martin Spencer relocated from Cincinnati to New York by late 1848, and Sartain had taken notice of her work in his arts column for January 1849. She exhibited a painting, Domestic Happiness, or Hush! Don’t Wake Them in Philadelphia in 1849.2 Sartain later featured a biographical sketch of Spencer in his August 1851 issue (152–54), accompanied by a crude woodcut portrait of the artist. The biographical sketch notes that she had recently exhibited two paintings at the Philadelphia Art Union, The Flower Girl and Domestic Felicity, that had “attracted considerable attention” from viewers. Regardless of whether or not Taking the Queue is an echo of a lost Spencer work, from historical hindsight, the presence of this image in Godey’s late in the decade of the 1840s inadvertently advertised the shift in cultural and artistic inﬂuence that would be clearly under way by the early 1850s. Taking the Queue puns verbally on another Lilly Martin Spencer connection to the shifting cultural tides that Godey noted in his pages in 1849—by the mid1850s Spencer would be “taking the cue” from other struggling New York artists, and selling her canvases to the French ﬁrm of Goupil, Vibert & Co. for print distribution. As Spencer scholar April Masten has noted, Spencer sold dozens of paintings to the ﬁrm in the 1850s, and this ﬁrm distributed nearly one million prints of her paintings in the 1850s.3 Godey had fumed about Goupil and company’s invasion of the New York art market in a column entitled “AMERICAN ART-UNION, NEW YORK” in December 1849 (468). Godey charged that the French ﬁrm, “by studied eﬀrontery and erroneous statements,” had been trying to establish themselves in competition to the American Art-Union as an “International Art Union.” Godey charged that the French ﬁrm, clearly a commercial business and not a promoter of American art, had taken advantage of the “general taste for Fine Art, which [the American Art-Union] had created and fostered for the last ten years,” merely “for the purpose of increasing their business and disposing

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in this country of a large collection of pictures, which cannot be sold to good advantage in their own.” Godey further pointed out that all the engravings were made in France, all the pictures [at that time, at least] of French origin, and all the workmen employed by their ﬁrm also French. “The whole aﬀair is under the supervision and control of Frenchmen in Paris,” Godey raged. As both loyal supporter of the art-union movement and proud publisher of original American artwork, Godey loudly protested the eﬀorts of outsiders to corner the market for the inexpensive distribution of art engravings. However, his indignant indictment of the French ﬁrm would do little to stem the tide of popularity for cheap prints of American art. Nor would Godey’s eﬀorts restore the Philadelphia pictorials to their former position of eminence as the leading distributors of American art reproductions. By the mid-1850s not only Goupil and company, but also a new group of American printmakers, like Currier & Ives, would garner the lion’s share of the market for inexpensive American art prints, and realize single-print circulations Godey could never have imagined.4 The end of the 1840s did not herald the demise of all of the Philadelphia pictorials, although it did mark the shift in the center for artistic production from Philadelphia to New York, and secondarily, to Boston. Although Sartain’s Union folded in 1852 and Graham’s in 1858, Godey’s and Peterson’s steamed ahead, both continuing publication until 1898.5 Thus it would be an oversimpliﬁcation to argue that Goupil, Vibert & Company, Currier & Ives, and other distributors of art prints replaced or displaced the illustrated magazines. Rather, it would appear that what was at work was increased market stratiﬁcation, driven by market demand. By the mid-1850s readers of modest means could choose to purchase engraved matter from a range of sources: $1.00/year Boston monthlies that relied heavily on recycled steel-engraved plates and woodcut engravings; $3.00/year Philadelphia pictorials, with their range of mezzotints, woodcut and steel engravings, and lithographs; and hand-colored lithographic prints circulated by both Goupil, Vibert & Company and Currier & Ives.6 Each of these distribution sites appear to have serviced slightly diﬀerent markets, in terms of class and gender (although, clearly, largely white, and predominantly middle-class). The dollar monthlies likely appealed to a middle-class audience of more modest means, and possibly to an audience of pious working-class readers (many of the dollar monthlies espoused a commitment to a mission of religious and moral uplift). The Philadelphia pictorials and their imitators, at $2.00 to $3.00 annual subscription, likely targeted a predominantly middle-class audience. By virtue of their wider geographic

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penetration into smaller towns that may not have supported a vendor specializing in single-print sales (like a bookseller), these magazines reached a larger audience than that of the art-unions, whose inﬂuence was clearly on the decline after the collapse of the American Art-Union in 1852.7 Additionally, the $5.00 annual subscription fee assessed by most of the art-unions likely indicates an audience of relatively well-to-do middle- to upper-class readers. Yet, even at its peak, the American Art-Union topped out at just under 19,000 members—at a time when Godey boasted print runs nearly three times that number. Moreover, the larger size and higher expense of the art-union engravings, compared to those circulated in the magazines, indicates that artunion members could be expected to aﬀord the additional expense of a frame before mounting an engraving on a parlor wall for display. If we assume that the New York ﬁrms of Goupil, Vibert & Co. and Currier & Ives, ﬁlled the gap vacated by the art-unions in circulating higher-quality art engravings generally of a larger size than that provided by the illustrated monthlies, we still see evidence in these three distribution sites of market diﬀerentiation based on gender and subject matter. Most of the 2,000+ paintings purchased by the American Art-Union illustrated American scenes, predominantly of male subjects engaged in public-sphere activities, though the art-union eschewed the genre of the individual portrait of the great man.8 Art-union managers chose only one to two paintings per year for engraving and distribution to subscribers (rather than the dozens of engravings available in the periodicals); the remainder could be seen at art-union exhibitions staged in New York during the year. Goupil, Vibert & Co. initially seem to have engraved and distributed the work of Continental artists, although when they did turn to American art, they preferred to purchase canvases of well-known American artists, like Lilly Martin Spencer.9 Meanwhile, Currier & Ives relied on producing lithographs designed by their own in-house artists, and rarely purchased paintings from the leading artists of the day. Moreover, while the art-unions favored masculine, public-sphere scenes and sported a largely male subscription base, Currier & Ives favored idealized, often romanticized subjects that targeted largely white, middle-class women living in cities and larger towns.10 Godey’s and Peterson’s continued to thrive, in spite of increased competition from these print purveyors, largely because these magazines delivered more than merely art reproductions to their devoted readers. Both publishers continued to feature popular literary content, and both also diversiﬁed their embellishment oﬀerings. By the late 1850s a typical issue of Godey’s contained twelve pages of front matter, including ﬁne art engravings, prized

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FIGURE 8.2 Burial of De Soto in the Mississippi, frontispiece Sartain’s, October 1851. Engraved by J. Sartain from an original Drawing by Jas. Hamilton. Discovered in the scrapbook of the Pennsylvania Old Guard State Fencibles. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives.

steel-engraved fashion plates, woodcut engravings of additional fashions for women and children, and pattern work, as well as numerous woodcut engravings illustrating the contents throughout. With the demise of Sartain’s Union Magazine in 1852 and Graham’s Magazine in 1858, it would appear that Godey’s formula of oﬀering his “fair readers” a predictable diet of ﬁne engravings, fashions, pattern work, light ﬁction, poetry, sketches, and essays won out over the eﬀorts of Sartain and Graham to target mixed-gendered audiences with a more volatile mix of articles and engravings. Certainly, Godey proved to be the more astute businessman, and Peterson, riding on the popularity of Godey’s coattails with his cheaper $2.00 ladies’ magazine, appears also to have beneﬁted from the Godey formula and his own good business sense. Additionally, it would appear that the novelty embellishments featured by publisher Morton McMichael in Miss Leslie’s

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Magazine in the pivotal year of 1843 proved too expensive to produce to sustain an audience of moderate means—and this despite McMichael’s spirited eﬀorts to link consumption of his magazine both to support for America’s ingenuity in the mechanical arts, and to aspirations of upward social mobility. Other indicators, like the huge success of Harper’s Monthly, a magazine targeting a largely masculine, cosmopolitan audience, suggest increased market diﬀerentiation divided along gender lines, certainly by the mid-1850s.11 Yet, evidence indicating how individual subscribers actually used these magazines, and particularly the embellishments, while certainly more elusive, suggests a more complex picture. We know that Civil War soldiers requested copies of Godey’s at the front lines, so clearly Godey’s formula, while targeting primarily women, appealed to male readers as well (Mott, I, 590). Americans prized their art prints, and wills and estate listings indicated that they passed along these prized markers of middle-class status to their heirs.12 Moreover, what to make of this Sartain’s engraving (see ﬁg. 8.2), sporting barely perceptible pinholes in each corner, found pasted on the page of one of a halfdozen scrapbooks compiled by The Old Guard State Fencibles, a military militia group dating to 1813 and headquartered in Philadelphia? Page after page of the scrapbooks chart the military and social life of the organization from 1831 through 1880, with similar engravings, newspaper clippings, admission tickets to balls, dinners, and other social events, and the like. This engraving, like many in the scrapbook, demonstrates evidence that it once graced a wall somewhere. The question is, Where? the State Fencibles meeting chambers? the stable of one of the oﬃcers or militiamen? the modest parlor of a militiaman’s wife? Absent corroborating evidence, it is diﬃcult to determine. Yet, the scrapbook compiler clearly thought highly enough of this engraving entitled Burial of De Soto in the Mississippi to remove it from Sartain’s Magazine, pin it up, and then to include in his/her compilation of ephemera documenting the activities of the militia group.13 Sartain’s Magazine may have folded, but engravings like this survived, in scrapbooks, on parlor walls, in estate holdings passed down to survivors. Evidence like this, and like that of personalized bound volumes of these magazines found in libraries and archives (and now bought and sold on the Internet), points to the lingering signiﬁcance of these Philadelphia magazines to the history of American art and print culture. By the early 1850s, Philadelphia’s era of dominance, in both the art and publishing arenas, had passed. What the illustrated gift books had done to distribute and democratize American art in the 1830s, the Philadelphia pictorials continued in the decade of the 1840s. By the mid-1850s, however, New

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York rose to prominence as the undisputed artistic and publishing center of the nation. Meanwhile, in terms of sheer numbers, it appears that the bulk of the distribution of high-quality art engravings shifted largely to single-print distributors like Goupil, Vibert & Company and Currier & Ives. However, for the decade of the 1840s, the Philadelphia pictorials brought the best of original American artwork to hundreds of thousands of households in every corner of the union, and did more than any other institution to promote the production, distribution, democratization, and commodiﬁcation of American art.

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Notes CHA PT ER 1 1. While these magazines certainly were not the only venue for the circulation of art engravings in the decade of the 1840s, the period under study in this project, these magazines reached larger audiences, at lower prices, than any other venue for the distribution of American art. While illustrated annuals and gift books served as the primary sites for the distribution of art engravings in the 1830s, and single-print distributors like Currier & Ives and the French ﬁrm of Goupil & Co. monopolized the market for inexpensive art prints in the 1850s and beyond, I argue that the illustrated magazines served as the primary site for the distribution of original American art in the decade of the 1840s. 2. On comparative circulation of monthly magazines in the 1840s, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1741–1850, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). All subsequent references to Mott’s ﬁve-volume history published by Harvard University Press will be made parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 3. There is a burgeoning body of scholarship on the emergence of the middle class and middle-class culture forms in the mid-nineteenth century, that both builds on and challenges the groundbreaking work made in the 1980s by Stuart Blumin and Mary Ryan. For earlier deﬁnitions of the economic and social boundaries of the middle class, see Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For more recent scholarship on middle-class culture forms, see John Henry Hepp IV, The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Melanie Dawson, Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Heidi Lynne Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America: Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art and Antebellum Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in NineteenthCentury America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); and Katherine C. Grier, Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988). The recent release of the ProQuest American Periodical Series Online (APS Online) enables scholars to search for references to the “middlin’ classes” and the “middle class” in the periodical press. A recent search of APS Online between the dates of 1835 and 1855 returned more than one hundred results of articles speciﬁcally referencing and deﬁning an American middle class and middle-class culture in these decades. Publications represented every geographic sector of the country and periodicals ranging from weekly newspapers to farmer’s almanacs to scientiﬁc journals. These results

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challenge earlier scholarly arguments suggesting that the middle class was ill-deﬁned in American social and cultural life before 1855. Clearly, there was in the preceding decades a widespread understanding of the parameters of the middle class and middle-class culture. 4. On Godey’s exercise of control over the magazine’s contents, see Camille A. Langston, “Sarah Josepha Hale’s Rhetoric Of ‘Mental Improvement’ and ‘Women’s Sphere’ In Godey’s Lady’s Book,” in Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace, ed. Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 118–36. On Hale’s presentation of her bodily persona in the magazine, see chapter 5 of Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Conﬁgurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 172–208. 5. For more on the life of George Graham, see Alf Pratte, “George Rex Graham,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 73: American Magazine Journalists, 1741–1850, ed. Sam G. Riley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1988), 153–58. 6. For more on the life of Charles Peterson, see Karen Nipps, “Charles Jacobs Peterson,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 79: American Magazine Journalists, 1850–1900, ed. Sam G. Riley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), 236–41. 7. On the importance of Peterson’s serial novels, see Patricia Okker, Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 8. In the “Editor’s Table” for Godey’s, September 1841, Louis Godey introduced his readers to McMichael, his sometimes editor and business partner, upon McMichael’s launch of an earlier publication, The People’s Library, a Magazine of Choice and Entertaining Literature. McMichael and Leslie, both associated with Godey’s, launched Miss Leslie’s eighteen months later, in direct competition with their former employer. 9. Frank Luther Mott uses the term “Philadelphia picture periodicals” to describe these magazines (I, 520). A nineteenth- century reviewer referred to them as the “picture magazines” of Philadelphia (I, 348). A Godey’s reader refers to them as the “monthlies of Chestnut Street” and complained that they all featured a preponderance of images of women and children (see chapter 6 for a discussion of this letter to the editor). In this study, I use the term “Philadelphia pictorials” to refer to these magazines. Although not the ﬁrst illustrated magazines published in Philadelphia, these ﬁve magazines certainly positioned Philadelphia as the leading center for illustrated periodicals in the decade of the 1840s. For a brief history of two earlier and important illustrated monthlies published in Philadelphia, see articles on The Columbian Magazine (Bruce Granger, 112–16) and The Port Folio (Edward Chielens, 319–23) in American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Edward E. Chielens, ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986). 10. Literary critic W. A. Jones makes this observation in a column for the Democratic Review in 1844. See Mott, I, 348. 11. James Playsted Wood, Magazines in the United States (New York: Ronald Press, 1971), 47. Louis Godey claimed one hundred thousand readers early in the decade (from readers sharing with family and friends) and claimed to have printed 40,000 copies of its July 1849 number (Godey’s, July 1849, 82). Mott asserts that just before the Civil War, Godey’s subscription list topped out at 150,000 (see Mott, I, 181). 12. See Godey’s December 1850, 386. On Art-Union ﬁgures see Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts and the American Art-Union 1816–1852 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1963), 243.

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13. See, for example, Mott, I, 592. Also see Wood, Magazines in the United States, 45; David B. Dearinger, “Annual Exhibitions and the Birth of American Art Criticism to 1865,” in Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925, ed. David B. Dearinger (New York: National Academy of Design, 2000); and Katharine Martinez and Page Talbott, eds., Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape: The Sartain Family Legacy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 15–17. 14. A recent dissertation-turned-book discusses the Union, but focuses mainly on the textual materials and features few illustrations; see Nichols, The Fashioning of MiddleClass America. Patricia Okker’s recent book focuses on some of the novel-length ﬁction serialized in these magazines; see Okker, Social Stories. Isabelle Lehuu discusses some of the illustrations from Godey’s but focuses exclusively on the idealized images of women and children; see Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), ch. 5. 15. Most of the standard survey texts of nineteenth-century American art focus almost exclusively on paintings (as opposed to sculpture, architecture, or the graphic arts), within a framework of accepted art historical genres (landscape, portraiture, historical, genre, etc.). Examples of this tendency include Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969); Patricia Hills, The Painter’s America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810–1910 (New York: Praeger, 1974); Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Barbara Groseclose, Nineteenth-Century American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For examples of work published over the past few decades that situates art within larger social and cultural contexts, see Wayne Craven, American Art: History and Culture (Madison: Brown & Benchmark, 1994); Joshua C. Taylor, America as Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002); Patricia A. Johnston, ed., Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conﬂict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). A few noted art historians (as opposed to graphic arts historians) have published book-length studies focused primarily on graphic arts, but these studies have tended to focus either on the graphic art of canonical artists (as a kind of apprenticeship for their more highly respected canonical artwork), or on nineteenth-century publications explicitly showcasing engravings and other print media. For an example of the former, see Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (New York: G. Braziller, 1966). For an example of the latter, see Sue Rainey, Creating Picturesque America: Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994). 16. As noted earlier, Charles Peterson seems to have initially targeted primarily a female audience, but as the decade wore on and he strove to increase circulation, he seems to have shifted his focus to attract male readers also. 17. For additional background on nineteenth-century reading practices see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, Expanded Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Also see the work of Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray on the circulation and consumption of mass-marketed books in Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino

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Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005). 18. On the topic of reprints see Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–53 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 19. Other scholars have focused on female editorship in the nineteenth century. On Hale’s editorship of Godey’s, see Patricia Maida, “Breaking Ground: The Legacy of an American Female Editor,” CEAMAGazine: A Journal of the College English Association, Middle Atlantic Group 11 (1998): 47–56. Also see Patricia Okker’s groundbreaking work, Our Sister Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); and the essay collection Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, Sharon M. Harris, ed. (Boston: Northeastern, 2004), 20. See Audrey Roberts, “The Letters of Caroline Kirkland” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1976), 68. 21. Mott provides some information on the economics of the magazine business, particularly in Vol. I, ch. X, “Editors, Contributors and Management.” Scholars working in the history of the book tradition also explore the ﬁnancial relationships between authors, editors, and publishers; see for example William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America 1790–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959); Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, eds., Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Ann Caroline Gebhard, “The Invention of Female Authorship in Nineteenth-Century America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1991); Linda Morris, Women Vernacular Humorists in Nineteenth-Century America: Ann Stephens, Frances Whitcher, and Marietta Holley (New York: Garland, 1988); and Melissa J. Homestead, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Recent work in literary history has focused on the contributions of canonical writers to the periodicals. See, for example, James M. Hutchisson, Poe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), especially chapters 5 through 7; Jeﬀrey Charis-Carlson, “‘You, Who So Well Know the Nature of My Soul’: Poe and the Question of Literary Audience,” American Periodicals 12 (2002): 198–207; Jeﬀrey A. Savoye, “Reconstructing Poe’s ‘The Gold-Bug’: An Examination of the Composition and First Printing(s),” Edgar Allan Poe Review 8, no. 2 (2007): 34–48; and Burton R. Pollin, “Dickens’s Chimes and Its Pathway into Poe’s ‘Bells,’” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 51, no. 2 (1998): 217–31. Historians of many diﬀerent ilks have sampled from these periodicals to forward arguments speciﬁc to their ﬁelds of inquiry. See, for example, Anne Blue Wills, “Pilgrims and Progress: How Magazines Made Thanksgiving,” Church History 72, no. 1 (2003): 138–58; and Richard J. Powell, “Cinque: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art 11, no. 3 (1997): 49–73. For recent work on the professionalization of American women artists see Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); and April F. Masten, Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 22. Although late in the decade of the 1840s these magazines began to feature fullpage advertisements, generally inserted at the back of a monthly volume, throughout

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this decade publishers relied almost solely on subscription revenue to stay in business. Advertising changed both the look of American magazines and their economics. For a study done on the relationship between advertising and content of turn-of-the century magazines, see Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 23. For a discussion of this “explosion” in print culture in America, see Lehuu, Carnival on the Page. For a similar discussion focused on Britain, see Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 24. For information on the American Art-Union, see Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts and the American Art-Union 1816–1852. Heidi Nichols discusses the relationship between the American Art-Union and Sartain’s Union Magazine in chapters one and three of her book. 25. On early American museums, see David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); and James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). On the importance of window displays to American consumer culture, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). For a discussion of mid-nineteenth-century methods of self-imaging, see Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For a discussion of billboards, banners, signs, and currency, see David M. Henkins, City Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 26. Basil Hunnisett points out that Philadelphia’s illustrated magazines began circulating art reproductions from the beginning of the nineteenth century. He cites the Port Folio (launched in 1801) as the earliest example. He credits the gift books, however, as the ﬁrst medium dedicated principally to circulating art: “The annuals were the ﬁrst means of popularizing artistic illustrations, which dictated the accompanying text in most cases, averaging 8–12 illustrations per volume . . .” (330). The heyday of the gift books was the 1830s and early 1840s, and their costs likely made them prohibitive for lower-middleclass reading audiences. It is fair to say that the illustrated magazines in the 1840s took over where the gift books left oﬀ in extending the distribution of art reproductions to ever widening audiences. See Basil Hunnisett, Engraved on Steel: The History of Picture Production Using Steel Plates (Cambridge: Ashgate, 1998), especially chapter 10. 27. On the art engravings circulated in gift books, see Stephanie Gray Mayer Heydt, “The Art of The Gift: Edward L. Carey, William Sidney Mount, Daniel Huntington and the Antebellum Gift Book” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2008). In Dissertations & Theses: Full Text [database on-line]; available from www.proquest.com (publication number AAT 3314029; accessed June 29, 2009).

CHA PT ER 2 1. That Godey’s and Graham’s were considered industry leaders during this period (1838–52) can be traced in references to the illustrated magazines found throughout the periodical literature of the day. See for example “Notices,” Oasis: a Monthly Magazine Devoted to Literature, Science and the Arts, July 28, 1838, 189; “The White Room,” Sargent’s

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New Monthly Magazine of Literature, Fashion and the Arts, February 18, 1843, 90; “Literary Notices,” Brother Jonathan, December 23, 1843, 473–74; “The Fashionable Monthlies,” New Englander (January 1844), 96–105; “Our Cotemporaries,” Southern Literary Messenger (February 1845), 128; “Illustrated Magazines,” Broadway Journal, January 25, 1845, 60–61; “Topics of the Month,” Holden’s Dollar Magazine, January 1848, 57–58; “Literary World,” Prisoner’s Friend, January 1, 1849, 225; “Literary World,” The Rural Repository (January 1850), 236; “The Illustrated Magazines,” Southern Quarterly Review (November 1850), 535; and “Parlor Periodicals,” Democrat’s Review (January 1852), 76–82. 2. Wendy Wick Reaves, ed., American Portrait Prints: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual American Print Conference (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, for the Smithsonian Institution, 1984), ix. Peter C. Marzio notes the same disparagement by art historians of chromolithographic prints in his important 1979 study The Democratic Art: Pictures for a 19th-Century America (Boston: David R. Godine); see especially chapter 1. 3. See Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), especially 11–15. See also Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 4. See Neil Harris’s classic discussion of this view of the artist in Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860, especially 34–48. Also, see Lee L. Schreiber, “The Philadelphia Elite in the Development of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1805–1842” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1977), 46–51. 5. See also Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 6. For a parallel discussion of the collaborations between artists, engravers, and authors of British illustrated books, see chapter 4, “The Art of Steel Engraving,” in Basil Hunnisett, Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980). For an earlier study that looks at the relationships between New York writers and artists, see James T. Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807–1855 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). 7. In fact, Sartain poured so much money into the magazine that he claimed it took him seven and a half years to pay oﬀ the debts once Sartain’s Union folded in mid-1852. See Mott, I, 771–72, and John Sartain, The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 1808–1897 (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), 219. 8. Recent studies on the careers of John Neagle, James Reid Lambdin, and the Peale family exemplify work that redresses earlier scholarly neglect by focusing on the breadth of artistic endeavors these artists pursued. The brief case studies included here are intended as examples of a typical career path at mid-century. For more detailed treatment of these artists, see Robert W. Torchia, John Neagle: Philadelphia Portrait Painter (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1989); Lillian B. Miller, ed., The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy 1770–1870 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996); Ruth Irwin Weidner, The Lambdins of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Schwartz Gallery, 2002). 9. For more on itinerant portrait painters of the 1820s and 1830s, see Leah Lipton, “William Dunlap, Samuel F. B. Morse, John Wesley Jarvis, and Chester Harding: Their Careers as Itinerant Portrait Painters,” American Art Journal 13: 3 (1981): 35–50. The “painting tour” was ﬁrmly established by the mid-nineteenth century and most of the well-known East Coast portrait painters went on western and southern tours when

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commissions began to slack oﬀ. For a discussion of the painting tour in the eighteenth century, see Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 14. 10. See the John Houston Miﬄin collection (PHMC, Collection MC 135, on microﬁlm 1432). Also see the 1844 Exhibition Catalogue for the Artists’ Fund Society. 11. Lambdin served as an oﬃcer for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts annual exhibition (see Exhibition Catalogue for 1849) and as an oﬃcer and on the Board of Council for the Artists’ Fund Society (see Exhibition Catalogues for 1844 and 1845). Also see James Lambdin Diary (PHMC Manuscript Group 6: Diaries and Journals Collection 1763–1938). 12. John Neagle Papers 1817–1865 (AAA Reel 3909, Frame 19). Robert Torchia also discusses this incident in his wonderful biography of Neagle. See Torchia, John Neagle: Philadelphia Portrait Painter, 17, 53–55. 13. 1874 description of Thomas B. Welch’s portrait of Stonewall Jackson in the Albert Duveen Collection (AAA Microﬁlm NDu3). 14. Frank Weitenkampf, American Graphic Art, with a New Introduction by E. Maurice Bloch (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970). John Cheney seems to have moved eﬀortlessly from painting to engraving, sometimes painting a copy of a picture from an engraving made of the picture, and at other times engraving either from original paintings or copies of paintings (AAA Dreer Collection of Painters & Engravers, Reel P20, Frame 441 and AAA Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Reel PA23, Frame 523). 15. See “Preface and Acknowledgements,” Martinez and Talbott, eds., Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape: The Sartain Family Legacy, xiii. 16. On Durand’s negotiations with engraving ﬁrms see, for example, a letter to the ﬁrm of Rawdon, Clark & Co. dated December 16, 1833. Durand negotiates prices for an engraving: $200; $250 if a hand is included; $25 less if the engraving done on copper instead of steel (AAA Simon Gratz Collection, Reel P22, Frame 147). For a detailed discussion of Durand’s work as an engraver, see Wayne Craven, “Asher B. Durand’s Career as an Engraver,” American Art Journal 3, no. 1 (1971): 39–57. On Henry Inman’s work as a painter, see William H. Gerdts, The Art of Henry Inman (Washington: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1987), William H. Gerdts, “Henry Inman: Genre Painter,” American Art Journal 9, no. 1 (1977): 26–48. 17. Daniel Huntington, letter to Henry C. Carey dated November 24, 1849 (AAA Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Reel P23, Frame 549). 18. James Reid Lambdin, letter to Ferdinand J. Dreer dated December 27, 1852 (AAA Reel P20, Frame 508). 19. See Sully’s “Register of Paintings” for 1842 on painting from an engraving; and for 1848 on painting from daguerreotype (AAA Reel D18). For a discussion of Sartain’s work from photography and daguerreotype, see Martinez, in Reaves, ed., American Portrait Prints, 135–93. Notes written in the margins of the copy of the exhibition catalogue that I examined at the Library Company of Philadelphia pronounce Sartain’s Lady and Parrot as “tiny, stiﬀ,” but praise his Twilight on the Atlantic with “good conception & well-executed.” 20. John Sartain, letter to N. Cleaveland Esq. Dated October 31, 1854 (AAA Alfred W. Anthony Collection, Reel N4, Frame 1033). 21. Letter dated December 16, 1833, from Asher Durand to Rawdon, Clark & Co., Simon Gratz Collection at the Archives of American Art, reel P22.

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22. John Sartain, letter to Asher Durand dated June 9, 1834 (AAA Asher Durand Collection, Reel N19, Frame 829). 23. George W. Bethune, Address to the Artists’ Fund Society, 1840, in the James R. Lambdin collection, Archives of American Art, reel P38. For more on mid-century lectures and publications on American art, see William H. Gerdts, “‘The American “Discourses’: A Survey of Lectures and Writings on American Art, 1770–1858,” American Art Journal 15, no. 3 (1983): 61–79. 24. Washington Allston to James McMurtries, in a letter dated March 2, 1837 (AAA Dreer Collection of Painters and Engravers, Reel P20, Frame 423). 25. Lilly Spencer Martin treated print sales of her work in this manner. See April F. Masten, “Shake Hands? Lilly Martin Spencer and the Politics of Art,” American Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2004): 377. 26. Daniel Huntington to Henry Carey, in a letter dated October 17, 1849 (AAA Dreer Collection of Artists and Engravers, Reel P20, Frame 491). 27. Daniel Huntington, letter to Henry C. Carey dated December 11, 1849 (AAA Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, Reel P24, Frame 150). 28. For a fuller discussion of the history of the painting and its reproductions, see William H. Gerdts, “Daniel Huntington’s ‘Mercy’s Dream’: A Pilgrimage through Bunyanesque Imagery,” Winterthur Portfolio 14:2 (1979): 171–94. 29. For more on this exchange, see Leah Lipton, A Truthful Likeness: Chester Harding and His Portraits (Washington: National Portrait Gallery, 1985), 79–80. 30. Asher Durand, letter to James B. Longacre dated October 30, 1836 (AAA Longacre Family Papers, Reel P1, Frame 1001). 31. John C. Buttre, Memorandum of agreement with J. B. Polk dated November 27, 1865 (AAA Albert Duveen Collection, Reel DDU-1, Frame 80). 32. William Sidney Mount, letter to Edward L. Carey dated January 9, 1842 (AAA Simon Gratz Collection, Reel P22, Frame 336). Basil Hunnisett, in his work on relationships between English book engravers and artists, observes that engravers preferred to collaborate with living artists to produce the best results. See Hunnisett, Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England, 35. 33. Hunnisett, Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England, 35. 34. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, hereafter referred to as HSP, letter from John Sartain dated June 6, 1852. Sartain Family Papers, Reel 4563, Frame 952. 35. HSP, “John Sartain’s answers to queries put in Andrew R. Chambers’ Bill” (Sartain Family Papers, Reel 4563, Frame 953). 36. Receipt for John G. Chapman, dated March 10, 1836 (AAA Simon Gratz Collection, Reel P22, Frame 94). 37. John G. Chapman, letter to Edward L. Carey dated December 29, 1839 (AAA Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collections, Reel P23, Frame 522). 38. For example, in a letter to Carey & Hart from 1846, Frances S. Osgood, who had edited The Floral Oﬀering for the ﬁrm, requests a $50 advance on her fee since the ﬁrm has experienced “an unexpected delay in publication” of the annual and, in Osgood’s words, put her to “some inconvenience” (HSP, Gratz American Poets Collection, Case 7 Box 7, Frances S. Osgood folder). In a similar move, Epes J. Sargent, in a letter dated January 24, 1843, oﬀers a $5 discount on an article solicited by Carey & Hart for The Gift for 1844, explaining that he is willing to take $20 instead of his usual $25

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in exchange for not deferring his bill until the volume is published. He reasons: “a little now, is more acceptable that a good deal will be likely to be a year hence” (HSP, Gratz American Literary Duplicates, Case 6, Box 35). Catharine Maria Sedgwick states her stipulations even more forcefully in a letter dated March 6, 1836: “With this I forward to you a tale which Miss Leslie requested me to write for the Gift for 1837—. Heretofore I have made no stipulations, as to the price of those little productions written by me for your annuals but as the compensation received from you is much less than that which I get from any other quarter, I take the liberty to name eighty dollars as the price of this story. & lest you should deem me encroaching allow me to add that this is considerably less than I receive from The Token for an equal quantity of writing —. The copy-right, for a reprint, as I have uniformly done, I reserve to myself.” In a July 1840 letter to Carey & Hart she requests prompt remittance for the $100 owed to her (HSP, Gratz American Literary Duplicates, Case 6, Box 35). Engraver Joseph Ives Pease also appealed to Carey & Hart on August 18, 1842, for a draw of $60–$70 against money owed him for two engravings accepted for The Gift—one published 1842, the other 1843—explaining that he might “need some of the ‘needful’” and “could not obtain it” from other sources. 39. John G. Chapman, letter to Rufus W. Griswold dated April 14, 1843 (AAA Simon Gratz Collection, Reel P22, Frame 98). 40. John G. Chapman, letter to Rufus W. Griswold dated July 27, 1843 (AAA Simon Gratz Collection, Reel P22, Frame 97). 41. Two recent studies do advance a more balanced assessment of Sully’s career, but each focuses on one speciﬁc portrait in the Sully oeuvre. See Carrie Rebora Barratt, Queen Victoria and Thomas Sully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); John Clubbe, Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture (Hants, England: Ashgate , 2005). While both Barratt and Clubbe discuss other Sully paintings, Barratt’s book is clearly more concerned with positioning Sully’s portrait of Queen Victoria in relationship to other portraits of the monarch. Likewise, Clubbe’s primary impetus seems to be his passion for Byron. However, unlike Sully’s earlier biographers, Clubbe non-disparagingly acknowledges the wide range of artistic work Sully performed in order to earn a living. 42. Steven E. Bronson, “Thomas Sully: Style and Development in Masterworks of Portraiture 1783—1839” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1986), 1. 43. David M. Robb Jr., “Thomas Sully: The Business of Painting” (Master’s thesis, Yale University, 1967), 39–43. 44. David Dearinger argues that Samuel F. B. Morse actually authored the review. See Dearinger, “Annual Exhibitions and the Birth of American Art Criticism to 1865,” in Dearinger, ed., Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925, 53–91. 45. Monroe H. Fabian, Mr. Sully, Portrait Painter (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 17. 46. Fabian, Mr. Sully, Portrait Painter, 13. 47. Bronson, “Thomas Sully: Style and Development in Masterworks of Portraiture 1783–1839,” 2. 48. For example, he lists “landscape with female child,” “lady and child entirely in white drapery,” and “a mother bathing her infant.” 49. I examined both the typescript copy of the “Hints” on microﬁlm N18 at the Archives of American Art, and the 1965 reprint of the 1873 published version (New

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York: Reinhold Publishing). For a discussion of the diﬀerences between published and unpublished versions of the “Hints,” see Clubbe’s “Select Bibliography” note, 299. 50. Robb, “Thomas Sully: The Business of Painting,” 40. 51. Bronson, “Thomas Sully: Style and Development in Masterworks of Portraiture 1783–1839,” 247. 52. Robb, “Thomas Sully: The Business of Painting,” 23—24, 38–39. 53. His portrait of Nathaniel Chapman, M.D., engraved by Neagle, appeared in Atkinson’s Casket in 1830. 54. The Journal of Thomas Sully (AAA Reel N18, Frame 308). 55. Sully’s journal records social visits with many of the major artists of his day, as well as with Graham’s editor, Rufus Griswold; George Graham himself; the publisher Louis Godey; and author and editor Miss Eliza Leslie (whose brother, Charles, had studied with Sully), among others. 56. I have examined copies of The Gift from 1837, 1842, and 1843 containing Cheney’s engravings of Sully’s work. 57. Sylvester Rosa Koehler, Catalogue of the Engraved and Lithographed Work of John Cheney and Seth Wells Cheney (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 43, 57, 60. 58. See, for example, his notation on the portrait of “Miss Gratz” from June 5, 1807 (AAA Reel N18, Frame 261). See also his notation on the “Fancy group of the misses Beard and Lea” (AAA Reel N18, Frame 412). Also, see his notation of November 26, 1840, on the fancy piece entitled the “Family Group” (AAA Reel N18, Frame 526). 59. “Editor’s Table,” Graham’s Magazine, February 1844, 97. 60. See Sully’s Register of paintings 1801–71 (AAA Reel D18, for years 1834–1840, especially). 61. Thomas B. Read to Chris Garrett, February 13, 1851 (AAA Read Family Papers, Reel 1478, Frame 411). 62. See Joseph Sill selected diaries (AAA Reel P29, frame 250). 63. Sill also remarks in his diaries from the early 1840s that he considered writing some notices of the exhibitions for the papers because he believed “the Arts need such encouragement here!” See AAA reel P29, frame 246.

CH AP TER 3 1. See Record Books, Carey & Hart (HSP: Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, Collection 227A, Box 98, Volume 1 of the Record Books). See also Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar, “Eliza Leslie,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 202: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Writers, ed. Kent P. Ljungquist (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989), 166–72. For a brief sketch of Miss Leslie’s see Mott, A History of American Magazines 1741–1850, I, 733–34. 2. McMichael’s last name also appears in the literature of the day (newspapers and magazines) as “Mcmichael” and “M’Michael.” For the sake of consistency, I will use “McMichael” unless the name appears as part of a publication title. 3. Combined in 1841 by George R. Graham from two earlier, ailing magazines, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and The Casket. See Mott I: 544–55). 4. For a detailed description of parallel developments in Britain, see Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860. For an alternative take

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on the relative importance of these improvements to changes in book distribution and consumption (as opposed to periodicals), see Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public, especially chapter 1. 5. See undated obituary on McMichael in the HSP Society Collection under Morton McMichael. See also Mott, I, 582. 6. For biographical details on Leslie, see Godey’s January 1846 article, “Our Contributors, Miss Eliza Leslie,” 1. Also see Alice B. Haven, “Personal Reminiscences of Miss Eliza Leslie,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, April 1858, 344–50; Beshero-Bondar, “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” 166–72; John S. Hart, Female Prose Writers of America (Philadelphia: E.H. Butler, 1852), 26–32; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Catalogue of the Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings (Philadelphia: T.K. and P.G. Collins, Printers, 1843); Ophia Smith, “Charles and Eliza Leslie,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1950, 512–27. 7. See Beshero-Bondar, “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” 169. 8. See sketch as reprinted in Hart, Female Prose Writers of America, 30–31. 9. See manuscript evidence cited in Smith, “Charles and Eliza Leslie,” 517–18. 10. See J. B. Dobkin, “Timothy Shay Arthur,” in American Writers for Children before 1900, ed. Glenn E. Estes (Detroit: Gale Group, 1985), 77–82; Kathleen L. Endres, “Timothy Shay Arthur,” American Magazine Journalists 1850–1900, ed. Kathleen L. Endres (Detroit: Gale Group, 1989), 33–43; and Donald A. Koch, “Timothy Shay Arthur,” Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Group, 1979), 3–7. For a discussion of Arthur’s tales in Godey’s Lady’s Book in the 1840s, see Francis Timothy Ruppel, “Marketplace Romances: Elusive Ambitions in the Fiction of T. S. Arthur, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland College Park, 1997). In Dissertations & Theses: Full Text [database on-line]; available from www. proquest.com (publication number AAT 9808663; accessed June 15, 2009). 11. See John W. Forney, Memorial Address Upon the Character and Public Services of Morton Mcmichael, as Editor, Public Oﬃcer and Citizen (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1879). 12. See “Editors’ Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, September 1841, 144. 13. The question of tax-supported public high school education was a source of public debate in this era. The Franklin Institute had sponsored a series of successive high schools beginning in 1826, and by 1836 the Pennsylvania state legislature had passed legislation to fund public high schools. Philadelphia’s Central High School opened in 1839, the same year as McMichael’s address. See Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute 1824–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), particularly chapter 5. 14. Wick Reaves is particularly concerned with portrait prints and the challenges faced by Cephas Childs in trying to introduce consumers to lithographed prints of their painted portraits, for distribution to a wider circle of friends, when line and stipple engravings on steel had been the preferred method for portrait prints previously. See Reaves, ed., American Portrait Prints, 97. 15. Bamber Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Inkjet, 2nd ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), sec. 13a. 16. On the place of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine in the history of American fashion magazines, see Mary Jane Lewis, “‘Godey’s Lady’s Book’: Contributions to the Promotion

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and Development of the American Fashion Magazine in Nineteenth Century America” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1996). In Dissertations & Theses: Full Text [database on-line]; available from www.proquest.com (publication number AAT 9710927; accessed June 29, 2009). 17. It is diﬃcult to determine which of Godey’s several “editors” was behind this drive. As Sarah Josepha Hale biographer Patricia Okker notes, Godey reminded readers in 1859 that Hale was not the fashion editor (see Okker, note 25, 231). The title page for January 1843 lists Hale, McMichael, and Godey as editors, with Sedgwick, Leslie, and Willis as regular contributors. Since Leslie and McMichael had, in fact, defected to start their own monthly and it is unlikely Godey suggested the changes in the fashion style, that leaves Hale and Sedgwick. While it is possible that Sedgwick drove the reform, it seems rather in keeping with Hale’s forceful presence at the magazine to have pushed through the changes to the fashions and then to have turned her attention to the literary matter she so clearly preferred to direct. 18. On the rise of a celebrity culture in America, see Thomas N. Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and David Haven Blake, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 19. See “Publisher’s Notice,” 48, and fashion plate, 49, Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1840. 20. See “Editors’ Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, April 1840, 191. 21. See Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1843, 58. Godey’s “apology” for the change included a letter of support from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who praised the magazine for revamping the fashions to show “a healthful, well-proportioned female ﬁgure.” Evidently there had been some discussion of discontinuing the fashion plates altogether, because the February 1843 issue includes a snippet from a letter sent by Mrs. Ann F. Annan, a regular contributor to the magazine, stating “I am glad to ﬁnd that you intend to continue the Fashion Plates. They are a strong attraction to female subscribers out of the large cities. The new series promises to be a very great improvement” (“Editors’ Table,” 105). 22. The September 1843 number of Godey’s contained a Coloured Rose and Butterﬂy Godey claimed to have commissioned before the Peterson’s August Peony and Butterﬂy. He huﬀed that his magazine featured an uncolored version of the rose embellishment in July. 23. See “Publisher’s Table,” Peterson’s Magazine, August 1843, 72. 24. “Publisher’s Table,” Miss Leslie’s Magazine, June 1843, 220. 25. See Frontispiece to Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1843. 26. Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints, sec. 1b. 27. Basil Hunnisett notes that, even with steel plates, Sartain needed to engrave four plates of each subject to meet the circulation demands of 40,000 for Graham’s Magazine in the early 1840s. See Hunnisett, Engraved on Steel: The History of Picture Production Using Steel Plates, 336. For these reason, publishers frequently used the editorial spaces of their magazines to encourage subscribers to be the ﬁrst to re-subscribe. Charles Peterson, in particular, claimed that the earliest imprints (and therefore the crispest) went to the earliest re-subscribers. See “Publisher’s Card,” The Ladies National Magazine, December 1848, 216. 28. On Sartain’s career, see the excellent collection edited by Martinez and Talbott, eds., Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape: The Sartain Family Legacy. See also Katharine

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Martinez, “John Sartain (1808–1897): His Contribution to American Printmaking,” Imprint 8, no. 1 (1983): 1–12. Finally, see Martinez’s essay “Portrait Prints by John Sartain,” in Reaves, ed., American Portrait Prints, 135–93. 29. See “Publisher’s Table,” Miss Leslie’s Magazine, March 1843, 112. In that same issue Leslie and McMichael also oﬀered their readers a plate of “Berlin worsted patterns for Slippers,” proclaiming that this embellishment is “an entirely new one . . . as this is the ﬁrst time any thing of the kind has been attempted in this country.” 30. For a discussion of “commodity fetishism” see Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Marion Boyars, 1978). 31. Indeed, as a reviewer for the Southern Chronicle noted of Godey’s early issues for 1845, the magazine had become “as ornamental as an annual” (“The Editors’ Book Table,” Godey’s, March 1845, 144). 32. Nicholas B. Wainwright notes this about Duval: “Duval came into his own as a lithographer in 1835, when the partnership of Lehman & Duval moved into attractive quarters in a new four-story building on the southeast corner of Dock Street and Bank Alley. This was an excellent business location, for it faced the Merchant’s Exchange in the heart of the commercial district.” See Nicholas B. Wainwright, Philadelphia in the Romantic Age of Lithography (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1958), 30. 33. For a discussion of lithography as a ﬁne art, see Janet Flint, “The American Painter-Lithographer,” in Art and Commerce: American Prints of the Nineteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 127–28. See also Antony Griﬃths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980), 101–2. 34. For more on Cephas Childs and Alfred Newsam, see Wendy Wick Reaves, Reaves, ed., American Portrait Prints, 83–134. 35. Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints, sec 19a. 36. How to Identify Prints, sec 19d. 37. See Peter C. Marzio, “The Democratic Art of Chromolithography in America: An Overview,” in Art & Commerce, 92. 38. See Michael Twyman, Lithography 1800–1850 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 147–50. 39. See “The New Art of Lithotint,” Miss Leslie’s Magazine, April 1843, 113–14. 40. Karen Nipps, Naturally Fond of Pictures: American Illustration of the 1840s and 1850s (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1989), 2; and Marzio, “The Democratic Art of Chromolithography in America: An Overview,” 92. 41. See George C. Groce and David H. Wallace, The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America 1564–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 595; Mantle Fielding, Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, with an Addendum by James F. Carr (New York: James F. Carr, 1965), 344–45; Elizabeth M. Harris, The Art of Medal Engraving: A Curious Chapter in the Development of 19th Century Printing Processes (Newtown, PA: Bird & Bull, 1991), 7–12; and Arthur H. Frazier, “Joseph Saxton and His Contributions to the Medal Ruling and Photographic Arts,” in Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology, ed. Smithsonian Institution (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975), 2–8.

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42. Thomas Beckman, “American Diesinkers and Their Cameo Stamps, 1850–1880: A Researcher’s Discoveries and Survey,” Maine Antique Digest (May 1999): 44b–46b. 43. Beckman, 45b. Collectors and print enthusiasts publish trade magazines that routinely attempt to establish printing “ﬁrsts” of all kinds. Scholars working in the ﬁelds of the history of science and technology also occasionally examine the artwork in these magazines. See for example, Ann Buermann Wass and Clarita Anderson, “Rivalling Nature in the Beauty and Brilliancy of Their Coloring: Synthetic Dyes and Fashionable Colors in Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 1856–1891,” Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association 53:4 (December 2000): 156–62. 44. Again, the correspondences from the Franklin Institute echo this same conﬂation of the mechanical arts and utility. See Chapter V of Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute 1824–1865.

CH AP TER 4 1. Back matter, The Boston Miscellany, August 1842. For additional information on the magazine, see Debra Brown, “The Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion,” in American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Edward E. Chielens (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 70–73. 2. John Inman, “Prospectus,” The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1844. 3. As Jan Pilditch has noted, Godey’s Lady’s Book also featured popular articles on science, but in ways that upheld editor Sarah Josepha Hale’s belief in the ideology of “separate spheres.” See Jan Pilditch, “‘Fashionable Female Studies’: The Popular Dissemination of Science in Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1830–1860,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 24: 1 (2005): 20–37. 4. Rev. B. F. Teﬀt, “Editor’s Table,” Ladies’ Repository, January 1849, 31. 5. For additional brief sketches that better detail the sometimes tangled relationships between these southern magazines, see articles on each of them in Chielens, ed., American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. 6. I examined copies from 1847–49 at the American Antiquarian Society, and found only two engravings of any note, and both depicted speciﬁc southern landscapes connected to business enterprises. 7. Mott, Vol. I, 629. By way of comparison, ﬁve years later Godey’s circulation surpassed the entire population of Richmond, Virginia, at the time the Southern Literary Messenger had been launched. Mott, Vol. I, 581. 8. Thomas Willys White, “Editorial Remarks,” the Southern Literary Messenger, December 1834, 190. 9. White’s successor as editor/proprietor, Benjamin Blake Minor, who ran the magazine from 1843 to 1847, recorded in 1905 his remembrances of the magazine’s publishing history in a volume entitled The Southern Literary Messenger 1834–1864. In his introduction to the 2007 reprinting of Minor’s work, Jonathan Daniel Wells aﬃrms the claim that southerners subscribed primarily to northern magazines like Godey’s and Graham’s. See Jonathan Daniel Wells, “Introduction,” in The Southern Literary Messenger 1834–1864 (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2007), xv.

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10. Patricia Okker discusses this phenomenon in her chapter “Women Reading,” in Our Sister Editors, especially page 111, where she cites comments by magazinist Nathaniel P. Willis and Godey’s. Whether factually true that women were the primary readers of monthly magazines, certainly popular perception held it to be true. For example, numerous other publications also identiﬁed the illustrated magazines as in particular “service of the ladies.” See “The Illustrated Magazines,” The Southern Quarterly Review 2:4 (November 1850): 535. This article lumps The Lady’s Book in with Graham’s and Sartain’s, even though the latter two magazines explicitly targeted a mixed-gender audience. An article in the New Englander, “The Fashionable Monthlies,” likewise identiﬁes Graham’s, Godey’s, and Miss Leslie’s (Philadelphia), the Boston Miscellany (Boston), along with Sargent’s, The Lady’s Companion, the World of Fashion, and The Pioneer (New York), as “our lady-literature.” See “The Fashionable Monthlies,” New Englander 2:5 (January 1844): 96. Another writer for the Democrat’s Review bemoaned the eﬀect of the “renowned Triad” (Godey’s, Graham’s, Sartain) on the quality of American magazine writing, in clearly gendered terms: “But between pirated magazines on the one hand, and the Philadelphia magazines on the other, our periodicals of a more sensible and masculine stamp are in danger of going down altogether.” See “Parlor Periodicals,” Democrat’s Review 30:1 (January 1852): 76. 11. For the history of this organization, see Leah Lipton, “The Boston Artists’ Association, 1841–1851,” American Art Journal 15, no. 4 (1983): 45–57. 12. The painting, donated to the United States Senate by White’s son, Octavius, was oft copied in its time. For information on the painting and its historical context, see the United States Senate website www.senate.gov/artandhistory/art/artifact/ Painting_33_00002.htm. 13. For a description of the painting and the events surrounding it, see the Worcester Art Museum online collection description at www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_ American/. For a book-length study of the events surrounding Andre, see John Evangelist Walsh, The Execution of Major Andre (New York: Palgrave, 2001). For a discussion of the numerous nineteenth-century representations of the capture of Major Andre, see Larry J. Reynolds, “Patriot and Criminals, Criminal and Patriots: Representations of the Case of Major Andre,” South Central Review 9, no. 1 (1992): 57–84. 14. Groce and Wallace, 10, 70. For more on Andrews, see Nancy Carlson Schrock, “Joseph Andrews, Engraver: A Swedenborgian Justiﬁcation,” Winterthur Portfolio 12 (1977): 165–82. 15. For more on Billings, see Groce and Wallace 49; and James F. O’Gorman, Accomplished in All Departments of Art: Hammatt Billings of Boston, 1818–1874 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 16. After the 1840 London publication of Nathaniel P. Willis’s volume American Scenery, featuring plates designed by William H. Bartlett, nearly all the illustrated magazines engaged designers and engravers to copy Bartlett’s designs for their own magazines. That volume had featured Boston and Bunker Hill, Mount Auburn, East Port and Passamaquoddy Bay, and Northampton, all Massachusetts locales. Bunker Hill and Mount Auburn, popular Boston landmarks, became the subject of engravings in the other illustrated monthlies. 17. In the January 1843 issue, under the heading “It is a Truth to be Believed,” the editor announces that contrary to reports that the magazine has 3,000 subscribers,

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the largest print run peaked at 2,509, and that the current list held slightly fewer than 1,800 subscribers (40). For more on the history of the Ladies’ Repository, especially in comparison to other New England monthlies, see Bertha Monica Stearns, “New England Magazines for Ladies 1830–1860,” The New England Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1930): especially 632–35. 18. Rev. E. G. Brooks, “Creeds,” Ladies Repository, April 1844, 373. 19. For more on the history of Universalism in the United States, and its particular intersection with reform movements, see Ann Lee Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America 1770–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 80–96. 20. For more on Bartlett’s sketches for American Scenery, see Alexander M. Ross, William Henry Bartlett: Artist, Author, and Traveller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 38–42. Also see Rainey, Creating Picturesque America: Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape, 30–31. 21. Groce and Wallace, 497. 22. Rev. Henry Bacon, “Hudson Highlands/See Plate,” Boston Repository, July 1843, 38. 23. For more on Brackett, see Groce and Wallace 74; on Read, same source, 527. 24. Rev. Henry Bacon, “The Rev. John Murray,” Ladies’ Repository, July 1845, 37. 25. For more on Universalist history and theology, see John A Buehrens and Forrest Church, A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 26. George Bethune, “Address to the Artists’ Fund Society, 1840, in James Reid Lambdin Collection AAA, Reel P38. 27. Rev. Henry Bacon, “Children of Universalists,” Ladies’ Repository, April 1846, 398. 28. The Ladies’ Repository is the focus of my second book-length project, in process. This magazine was not included in the original American Periodicals Series on microﬁlm and, likewise, has not been digitized for the APS online series released by ProQuest. Scholars must consult bound volumes in research libraries and archives, such as the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. 29. “Commission for Procuring New Subscribers,” the Eclectic, January 1844, front matter. 30. In an April 1840 “Editor’s Table,” Godey claimed 17,500 subscribers; at that time, Snowden claimed on the cover of his magazine 22,500 subscribers. See Mott, I, 628. 31. Viaduct on Baltimore and Washington Railroad (July 1839); The Narrows/From Fort Hamilton (November 1839); East Port and Passamaquoddy Bay (March 1840); Washington’s House, Mount Vernon and Harper’s Ferry/From the Potomac Side (May 1840); Boston and Bunker Hill (July 1840); View from Mount Ida/Near Troy (September 1840); Light House Near Caldwell’s Landing/Hudson River and Cemetery of Mount Auburn (November 1840); View of Northumberland/On the Susquehanna (March 1841); The Indian Falls Near Cold Springs/Opposite West Point (June 1841); Crow-Nest from Bull Hill/Hudson River (August 1841); Caldwell/Lake George (October 1841); View from Hyde Park/Hudson River (November 1841); View of the Capitol at Washington (December 1841); View of Baltimore (January 1842); Utica (February 1842); Village of Sing-Sing/Hudson River (April 1842); Washington/ From the President’s House (June 1842); Valley of the Connecticut (January 1844). 32. Philadelphia’s Port Folio was perhaps the earliest American monthly to feature engravings from paintings targeting belles lettres works. For more on the genre of the “literary painting,” see Gerdts, “Henry Inman: Genre Painter.”

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33. The four Burns plates include Now Westlin’ Win’s (June 1839); Burns and His Highland Mary (February 1840); Bess and Her Spinning Wheel (August 1840); and The Rigs O’ Barley (February 1841). 34. Eﬃe Deans (July 1841) and Madge Wildﬁre (January 1842) are characters from Heart of Mid Lothian; Alice Bridgenorth (November 1841) is a character from Peveril of the Peak; and Eveline Berenger (October 1839) from The Betrothed. 35. For more on Snowden’s fondness for his embellishments, see Robert W. Weathersby II, “The Ladies’ Companion,” in Chielens, ed., American Literary Magazines, 195–99. 36. The Chinese engravings were modeled on those executed in London by Thomas Allom for the two-volume series China in a Series of Views, Displaying the Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of That Ancient Empire (London, Fisher, Son, 1843), originally released in four installments. Allom’s great-great-granddaughter, Diana Brooks, reports that Allom never traveled to China, instead producing his over 120 sketches of Chinese culture by studying paintings and drawings in the British Museum contributed by earlier travelers to China and by Chinese artists. See Diana Brooks, Thomas Allom (1804–1872) (London: British Architectural Library, RIBA, 1998), 40. 37. Caroline Kirkland, “Introductory,” The Union Magazine of Art and Literature, July 1847, 1. 38. For a well-researched study of America’s intersection with Chinese culture in the nineteenth century, see John Rogers Haddad, The Romance of China: Excursions to China in U.S. Culture, 1776–1876 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), especially chapters 4 and 7. Also, see Steven Conn, “Where Is the East? Asian Objects in American Museums, from Nathan Dunn to Charles Freer,” Winterthur Portfolio 35, no. 2–3 (2000): 157–73. 39. Although Roman Catholic priests had set up missions in China dating to the late sixteenth century, Protestant missionary eﬀorts really took oﬀ in the early 1800s. By the mid-1830s, American booksellers were actively promoting works by British and American missionaries to China, and newspapers and magazines regularly featured articles covering missionary activity in China, reports on American trade with China, and reviews of books on Chinese missionary and trade activity. See for example, “First American Trade with China,” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review (May 1841), 468; and a review of the Rev. Charles Gutzlaﬀ’s A Sketch of Chinese History, Ancient and Modern, Comprising a Retrospect of the Foreign Intercourse, and Trade with China, published in the Boston Recorder, June 16, 1835, 9. 40. See for example, General James Tallmadge’s “Address Before the American Institute at New York October 26, 1841,” reprinted in Niles’ National Register, January 8, 1842, which uses data on American imports and exports to argue for tariﬀ protection for American goods, and urges American entry into the production of goods like silk, then heavily imported. 41. See, for example, T. B. Wakeman’s address before the eighth annual exhibition, which includes a history of the Institute’s founding, reprinted in Mechanics’ Magazine and Journal of the Mechanics’ Institute 5:2 (February 1835): 68ﬀ. 42. “American Institute Fair,” American Agriculturist 2:5 (August 1843): 139. 43. For more on Inman’s literary career, see Sam G. Riley, “John Inman,” in American Magazine Journalists, 1741–1850, ed. Sam G. Riley (Detroit: Gale Group, 1988), 192–96. 44. For information on Ormsby, see Groce and Wallace, 478.

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45. See for example “An Apology,” The Columbian, January 1844, 46; and John Inman, “A Legend of Chelsea Hospital,” The Columbian, August 1846, 94. 46. Groce and Wallace, 457. 47. For a study of representations of Pocahontas in American history, literature, and visual culture, see Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 48. Images of Washington were ubiquitous in the mid-nineteenth century. For a discussion of some of the major paintings of Washington, see William H. Gerdts and Mark Thistlethwaite, Grand Illusions: History Painting in America (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1988). 49. In his brief sketch of the magazine, Arthur Wrobel largely overlooks these belles lettres plates, dismissing the embellishments as “pleasantly diverting” although “either sentimental or edifying.” See Arthur Wrobel, “The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine,” in Chielens, ed., American Literary Magazines, 107–12. 50. A Philadelphia precursor to Graham’s, Atkinson’s Casket had published two plates featuring similar scenes from the same Cooper novels that publisher Israel Post would choose for the Columbian: Harvey Birch from The Spy (November 1837); and The Panther Scene from The Pioneers (January 1837). These earlier copper plate engravings likely served as Post’s inspiration for launching his magazine’s series of steel engravings based on novel scenes. However, the Philadelphia pictorials oﬀered nothing to compare with the Columbian plates in the 1840s. As chapter 4 points out, Charles Peterson did begin to commission art engravings to illustrate his continuing ﬁctional tales after 1846; however, none of the other Philadelphia illustrated monthlies copied Post’s decision to issue art engravings depicting scenes from previously published American novels. 51. Elaborately detailed scenes such as these could be found in the mammoth daily papers of the day. See William H. Truettner, “Storming the Teocalli—Again: Or, Further Thoughts on Reading History Paintings,” American Art 9, no. 3 (1995): 57–95. 52. For a compelling take on the intersection of American empire and the ideology of separate spheres, see Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581–606. 53. For a discussion of the rise of illustrated journalism, see Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 54. For a discussion of Mexican War imagery, and particularly of Matteson’s contributions to the Columbian and Sartain’s Union Magazine, see Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially chapters 5 and 8. See also Martha A. Sandweiss, Rick Stewart, and Ben W. Huseman, Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). 55. See Johannsen, chapter 1. 56. Although Mott cryptically noted that “there was no little exchanging of plates among publications, and few of the magazines kept themselves free of the second-hand vice” (I, 520), he oﬀered no speciﬁc examples of this practice. Since few magazines listed in the Index (which served as a table of contents) the artist or engraver for a particular plate, and since OCD scanning techniques used to digitize these magazines rarely pick up the artist and engraver attributions generally found in very small print beneath a

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published engraving, it has been challenging for art historians to actually trace this practice. However, I examined bound copies of all the magazines cited in this study, and entered this information into a fully searchable database. In crosschecking engraving titles, the results for the New Mirror stood out in this regard. While I could ascertain a few traded plates between some of the other monthly magazines, nearly a ﬁfth of the New Mirror’s plates surfaced again in later illustrated monthly magazines. 57. David Dearinger has noted the importance of the New World to early American art criticism. See his essay “Annual Exhibitions and the Birth of American Art Criticism to 1865,” in Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925, especially 61–64. 58. Most of the recycled plates seem to have been sold to one of four monthly ladies’ magazines: The Ladies’ Repository (Boston); the other Ladies’ Repository (Cincinnati); The Ladies’ Companion (New York); and the Mother’s Assistant (Boston). 59. William Snowden (or his successor at the Ladies’ Companion) appears to have sold oﬀ two of his China plates to the New Mirror after publishing them in his own magazine: The Culture and Preparation of Tea appeared ﬁrst in August 1843 in Snowden’s magazine, then again in the July 27, 1844, issue of the New Mirror. The Duke and Duchess Reading Don Quixote appeared ﬁrst in Snowden’s monthly May 1843, then again in Morris’s weekly September 7, 1844. Mott reports that changes in post oﬃce regulations that treated the weekly as a magazine, thereby charging much higher postage, led to the publisher’s decision to switch formats once again, and publish a daily newspaper instead, with a weekly supplement renamed the Weekly Mirror, to be sent to former New Mirror subscribers. See Mott I, 329. 60. For a brief history of the Methodist Book Concern, see David Dzwonkoski, “The Methodist Book Concern,” in American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1889, ed. David Dzwonkoski (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1986), 304–10. 61. “Editor’s Table,” the Ladies’ Repository, January 1846, 32. 62. Rev. E. Thomson, “Valedictory,” the Ladies’ Repository, July 1846, 221. 63. The February 1847 issue, for example, featured “The Poetry of the Hebrews” by Professor Waterman, and “Literature and Mental Cultivation” by Professor E. W. Merrill. The March issue follows with an article on the development of the printing press by Bishop Morris, and another on “The Family Library,” by Rev. A. Stevens. 64. The Frankensteins were the Peales of Cincinnati: six siblings became painters— Eliza, George, Godfrey, Gustavus, John, and Marie. See Groce and Wallace, 238–39. 65 Godfrey made his ﬁrst trip to sketch the falls of Niagara in 1844, and dedicated most of his life’s work to scenery thereabouts. See Groce and Wallace, 238–39. 66. Saﬀord’s early precocity and subsequent life and academic career were covered widely in the American news media. See, for example, “Mr. T. H. Saﬀord, Mathematician and Astronomer,” The Round Table 3:47 (July 28, 1866): 467–68, published at the time Saﬀord left Cambridge Observatory in Boston to run the new Chicago Observatory. He died in 1901 after a long and illustrious career. See “Obituary,” New York Observer and Chronicle 79:25 (June 20, 1901): 800. 67. The magazine published a second mezzotint portrait in January 1852, Young Mathematician in a Fix, which appears to be a second portrait of a slightly older Staﬀord, but nothing in the editorial description of the plate nor in the magazine contents identiﬁes it as such. The mathematic problem illustrated in the engraving appears to be a simple equation the youth is attempting to work out on a small chalkboard held in his lap,

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so it may be unlikely that this could be Staﬀord—whose genius allowed him to complete highly complex calculations in his head.

CH AP TER 5 1. Gratz American Literary Duplicates Collection, Case 7, Box 31, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For a brief history of the additional publishing ventures of the ﬁrm Carey & Lea, see David Kaser, “Carey & Lea,” in Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Madeline B. Stern (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 73–80. 2. Frank Luther Mott speciﬁcally points to this practice in Godey’s in his sketch of the magazine. See Mott, I, 591. Also see Allison Bulsterbaum, “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” in Chielens, ed., American Literary Magazines, 144–50. However, archival evidence, as well as evidence within the magazines themselves, demonstrates that the other Philadelphia periodicals followed this practice to varying degrees throughout the decade. Art historian William Gerdts has chronicled a corollary practice, ekphrasis, which he deﬁnes as “the literary representation of the visual arts” in his essay for the 2000 National Academy of Design collection Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925 (New York: National Academy of Design, 2000), 145–157. Although Gerdts focuses speciﬁcally on poetry composed upon the occasion of viewing a work of art, and positions this poetry as a kind of art criticism, Gerdts seems unaware of the fact that many magazine engravings were illustrated by poems (although he does mention an 1832 Godey’s poem entitled “The Portrait: A Sketch,” which relies in its narrative setup on the narrator’s viewing of a ﬁctitious portrait hanging in a gallery exhibition [Gerdts 152]). 3. Recent scholarly work has focused on the importance of the literary salon to midnineteenth-century American writers. For example, on the importance of literary salons to the career of Edgar Allan Poe, see Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially her introduction. See also Charlene Avallone, “Catharine Sedgwick and the Circles of New York,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 23, no. 2 (2006): 115–31. Joanne Dobson’s article on Frances S. Osgood’s erotic poetry is another good example of the importance of literary sociability to understanding an author’s work. See Joanne Dobson, “Sex, Wit and Sentiment: Frances Osgood and the Poetry of Love,” American Literature 65, no. 4 (1993): 631–50. 4. For example, after popular writer and editor Joseph C. Neal died in July 1847, Godey, Graham, and Peterson appear to have steered work to his widow. Between July 1847 and the end of the decade, nearly two dozen poems and short tales by his widow, Mrs. Joseph C. Neal, appeared in the three magazines. By contrast, none of her work is recorded prior to June 1847. It seems likely that the three publishers proceeded from dual motives: both out of sympathy for Mrs. Neal and a desire to come to her aid and—by virtue of prominently featuring her name on her submissions—to capitalize on the literary reputation of her deceased husband to beneﬁt sales of their own periodicals. 5. For a collection of essays devoted to the contributions of various women authors to periodical literature, see Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves, eds., “The Only Eﬃcient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837–1916 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001).

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6. See “Editor’s Book Table,” Godey’s, May 1850, 359. 7. See Smillie’s “Memoirs: A Pilgrimage,” Archives of American Art reel 1710, frame 24. Smillie does provide a predominance of Graham’s engravings for 1844 and 1845. 8. For example, John Sartain, with the shoe on the other foot after taking on the responsibilities of publishing his own magazine, writes to Charles G. Leland, just after completing the February 1852 issue of the magazine, that he will need the illustration for “Raﬀaelle” intended for the March issue “as soon as possible.” Item number 76x414 of the Winterthur Library Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. 9. See Georgia B. Barnhill, “Felix Octavius Carr Darley,” American Book and Magazine Illustrators to 1920, ed. Steven E. Smith (Detroit: Gale Group, 1998), 60–67. 10. As quoted in Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of the Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 96. 11. I have found no manuscript or magazine evidence to suggest that George Graham ever wrote textual illustrations to accompany engravings in his magazine, although after his ﬁnancial troubles between 1848–50, he did write an editor’s column that attempted to cozy up to readers disappointed by the impact of his ﬁnancial troubles on the magazine’s pictorial and literary content. 12. Nearly two dozen short poems and sketches by Hale, with titles matching the engravings, appeared in Godey’s in the early 1840s. Similar illustrations, likely also by Hale, continued to appear in the magazine during the second half of the decade, most without authorial attribution. It appears that Hale gradually found other writers to replace her to provide the bulk of the illustrations for the engravings; among the littleknown writers who shouldered the responsibility for this task were a Professor W. J. Walter, a Professor Frost, and Miss Virginia Deforest. Godey particularly singled out the ﬁrst of these in a July 1841 “Editor’s Book Table” column “COMMENCEMENT OF A NEW AND BEAUTIFUL VOLUME” (48), by mentioning two steel engravings prepared by Archibald L. Dick and noting, “How well has Professor Walter illustrated them!” 13. In his “Editors’ Book Table” column for November 1842 (251), Godey announces in a special section “TO OUR READERS” that “Mrs. Sarah J. Hale will illustrate one of the plates in the December number.” In addition, he notes, “Miss Virginia Deforest, our new contributor, has won golden opinions by her illustrations of our plates.” Also in this column, Godey announces, “Mrs. E. F. Ellet. We have two articles on hand written by this lady, one of them illustrative of a splendid steel plate.” 14. “The Bride of Ceylon,” March 1844, 125; “The Reaper’s Friend,” December 1844, 269; “The Love-Letter,” March 1845, 135; “The Flowers,” July 1845, 32; “The Love Token,” December 1845, 282; “The Young Cavalier,” January 1846, 44; “Catherine Seyton,” February 1846, 73; “The Parting,” April 1846, 174; “The Greeks at the Well,” September 1846, 119; “The Two Friends,” November 1846, 251; “Hawking,” January 1847, 81; “Pittsburgh,” April 1847, 249; “Miriam,” July 1847, 36. 15. Tuckerman also appears to have been perennially short on cash. His May 9, 1843, letter to Griswold reads, “[A.L.?] Dick showed me his engraving of Hoﬀman, yesterday. It is a very pretty thing, but, between ourselves, no likeness. Advise me when you want the sketch to accompany it.” In several other letters to Griswold, Tuckerman requests $10 in advance for poems he has submitted for Graham’s. See the Gratz American Poets collection, Case 6, Box 36, HSP.

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16. In a letter to Griswold dated September 10, 1842, Sargent writes, “I will send you a story for the picture—probably in one week—certainly in two. I shall charge you for it $25, and if the terms are acceptable, your silence shall be considered an answer.” See Gratz American Literary Duplicates, Case 6, Box 35, HSP. 17. The complicated ways in which authorship was gendered in the mid-nineteenth century has interested feminist literary historians for the past several decades, dating back to the work of Elaine Showalter, Judith Fetterly, Nina Baym, Mary Kelley, Mary Ryan, and others. More recent work, like Eliza Richards’s study of Poe and his circle, seeks to complicate our understanding of the connections between gender and genre. It does seem clear, from literary correspondences and from contemporary pronouncements in the press, that these illustrated monthly magazines were gendered “feminine” as a literary genre, regardless of the speciﬁc gender of contributing authors, or of the intended audience(s). 18. Heidi M. Schultz, “The Editor’s Desk at Sartain’s Magazine: 1849–1851,” American Periodicals 6 (1996): 95. 19. See Stephen Meats, “The Letters of Henry William Herbert, ‘Frank Forester,’ 1815—1858” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1972), xi. 20. Unpublished letter from Hannah F. Gould to Sarah Joseph Hale dated 22 Feb. 1847, in the Louis A. Godey collection at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia. 21. Meats, “Letters,” 136. Also see Stephen Meats, “Henry William Herbert,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 3: Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Group, 1979), 150–59. 22. Herbert’s life provides a cautionary tale about the excesses of male “sporting culture” in the major Eastern Seaboard cities. A published biography of his longtime friend, publisher George R. Graham, indicates that both Herbert and Graham had drinking problems; see J. Albert Robbins, “George R. Graham, Philadelphia Publisher,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 75 (1951): 279–94. For more on the lures of sporting culture, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Vintage, 2003); Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); and Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992). 23. As Meats states in his notes to this letter, Herbert here is likely referring to the short sketch he submitted to accompany Highland Sport, an engraving published September 1843 in Graham’s. Meats, “Letters,” 142–43. 24. Meats, “Letters,” 142–43. 25. In an early content analysis of the images in these magazines, I catalogued approximately 150 of these idealized images of women out of a total of 1,000 engravings published between 1847 and 1852. 26. Meats, “Letters,” 136. Meats, obviously unaware of the practice of editors to send proof sheets of the engravings to authors, writes that “Herbert evidently sent a picture along with the sonnet, with a note of explanation.” Clearly, Herbert was returning the proof sheet of the engraving to Griswold along with his sonnet. Meats classiﬁes Herbert’s magazine writing as “hackwork,” and there is substantial evidence from Herbert’s letters, such as the one quoted here, that he essentially considered it in the same light.

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27. On the popularity of Kirkland’s western sketches for these magazines, see Scott Peeples, “‘The Servant Is as His Master’: Western Exceptionalism in Caroline Kirkland’s Short Fiction,” American Transcendentalist Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1999): 304–16. 28. See Mary De Jong, “Frances Sargent Osgood,” in Antebellum Writers in New York, Second Series, ed. Kent P. Ljungquist (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), 275–284. 29. Rufus Griswold insisted, in his literary tribute to Osgood after her death, that Samuel had gone to California to recover his own health and to increase his fortune for the sake of his family. 30. Thomas Sully also painted this subject (1846), as did George W. Conarroe. It seems likely that both Sully and Conarroe worked either from Sartain’s engraving, or from a copy of the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence on which Sartain’s engraving is based. For a discussion of Sully’s painting, see Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Catalogue of the Memorial Exhibition of Portraits by Thomas Sully, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1922), 108. For a view of the Conarroe painting, see Philadelphia Museum of Art, Paintings from Europe and the Americas in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994), 267. 31. Evidently, some versions of the tale are even darker, with hints of human cannibalism—Little Red Riding Hood gobbling up her granny before being gobbled up by the wolf. 32. See especially the work of Mary De Jong: “Lines from a Partly Published Drama: The Romance of Frances Sargent Osgood and Edgar Allan Poe,” in Shirley Marchalonis, ed., Patrons and Protogees: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 31–58; “‘Read Here Thy Name Concealed’: Frances Osgood’s Poems on Parting with Edgar Allan Poe,” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation 32:1–2 (1999): 27–40; and De Jong, “Frances Sargent Osgood,” in Antebellum Writers in New York, Second Series, 275–284. 33. In the tribute volume to Osgood edited by Mary E. Hewitt, Griswold claims that he had to convince Osgood, on her deathbed, that she was, in fact, dying; see The Memorial: Written by Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood and Edited by Mary E. Hewitt (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), 16. In his tribute to her in Sartain’s Union, July 1850, 52, John Hart claims that her death had been unexpected by her close friends. 34. Frances S. Osgood to John S. Hart, November 11, 1849, Gratz American Literary Duplicates, Case 6, Box 33, HSP. 35. For a collection of essays that examines the myriad ways that women writers negotiated with male editors and publishers, and used their periodical writings to advance speciﬁc social causes and to critically examine gender ideologies, see Cane and Alves, eds., “The Only Eﬃcient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837–1916. 36. Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who also wrote illustrations for the periodical embellishments, had oﬀered to do the same thing for Hart, suggesting that she could “re-model” her lines on the “Sleeping Child,” which she had previously submitted to Sartain’s, but which the magazine had not yet used. See Schultz, “The Editor’s Desk at Sartain’s Magazine: 1849–1851,” 102. Schultz uncovered a cache of letters from contributing authors to editor Hart. In this same essay, Schultz publishes Grace Greenwood’s letter acknowledging her contribution to the magazine that ended up substituting for the illustration Kirkland declined to provide (noted above), a ballad “Arnold de Winkelreid.” See Schultz, 100.

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37. On Osgood’s erotic poetry see Dobson, “Sex, Wit and Sentiment.” 38. Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 46–72. 39. See Dobson, “Sex, Wit and Sentiment,” 663. Also see Paula Bernat Bennett, “Laughing All the Way to the Bank: Female Sentimentalists in the Marketplace, 1825– 1850,” Studies in American Humor 3, no. 9 (2002): 11–25. 40. Similar images in these magazines include: The Indian Maid, Godey’s, November 1840; The Captives, Graham’s, February 1843; The Chief ’s Daughter, Graham’s, February 1845; The Indian Maiden’s Reply, the Columbian, June 1847; and The Forest Queen, Peterson’s, November 1850. For scholarly discussions of the Indian maiden ﬁgure in American art, see Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives. 41. See Mary G. De Jong, “Lines from a Partly Published Drama: The Romance of Frances Sargent Osgood and Edgar Allan Poe,” in Patrons and Protegees: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Marchalonies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 31–58; De Jong, “‘Read Here Thy Name Concealed’”; and Mary G. De Jong, “Frances Sargent Locke Osgood (1811–1850),” in Writers of the American Renaissance, ed. Denise D. Knight (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003), 275–84. 42. On the life of Oakes Smith, see Veronica Margrave, “Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806– 1893),” in Knight, ed., Writers of the American Renaissance, 277–81; Timothy H. Scherman, “Elizabeth Oakes Smith,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography 239: American Women Prose Writers, 1820–1870 (Detroit: Gale Research, 2000), 222–30. Also see literary biography of Oakes Smith in “Our Female Poets, No. 1” by Charles J. Peterson, Ladies National Magazine, September 1843, 88–89. 43. Seba Smith to Carey & Hart, March 25, 1842, in the Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, Box 82, folder 15, HSP. 44. Ibid. 45. Elizabeth Oakes Smith to Rufus S. Griswold, June 13, 1842, Gratz American Poets Collection, Case 7, Box 9, HSP. 46. For a comparative analysis of the various types of female heroines in Godey’s ﬁctional tales 1837–38 and 1857–58, see Janice Hume, “Deﬁning the Historic American Heroine: Changing Characteristics of Heroic Women in Nineteenth-Century Media,” Journal of Popular Culture 31, no. 1 (1997): 1–21. 47. See Laura Prieto’s analysis of a self-portrait by Sarah Miriam Peale in At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 14. 48. The academic debate over the ideology of “separate spheres” is nicely summarized in Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher’s introduction to their 2002 collection No More Separate Spheres!, Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 49. Elizabeth Oakes Smith to Rufus S. Griswold, June 13, 1842, Gratz American Poets Collection, Case 7, Box 9, HSP. 50. See Margrave, “Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806–1893),” 277.

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51. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Woman and Her Needs (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1851), 55, 66. 52. See Susan Belasco, “Elizabeth Oakes Smith,” in The American Renaissance in New England, Fourth Series, ed. Wesley T. Mott (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), 273–280. 53. See Audrey Roberts, “The Letters of Caroline Kirkland” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972), 1231. For additional biographical details on Matteson and a review of some of his better-known paintings, see Frank Weitenkampf, American Graphic Art, with a New Introduction by E. Maurice Bloch (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970). See also Hills, The Painter’s America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810–1910; Hermann Warner Williams, Mirror to the American Past: A Survey of American Genre Painting: 1750–1900 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973); William H. Truettner, ed., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1991). 54. On the establishment of the magazine and its connection to the Art-Union, see Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America, 9–32, 86. 55. Kirkland mentions viewing Hiram Powers’s “The Greek Slave” in her “Editorial Miscellany” for October 1847. Her letters indicate her enthusiasm for the statue, but in the editorial space, she writes, “We are delighted to oﬀer our readers something from a competent pen . . . ,” alluding to the inclusion in the October issue of a review of Powers’s work by Orville Dewey. She continues: “The passionate admiration which it excites is so new among us, that we wait for the better-informed to account to us for our own feelings, and to sanction our emotions by the assurance that what we admire in our newness is no less approved by those who have, at great cost of time and study, learned to judge.” In a letter addressed to Minor Kellog dated January 7, 1848, she writes of taking “a last look at your beauty” (Kellog was directing a traveling exhibition of the statue). See AAA Reel D-30, frame 71. 56. See letter to Taylor from London dated May 17, 1848 (Roberts 173). While in England and separated brieﬂy from her friends the Bellows, she wrote to them that she was attempting to meet with some of the English artists who prepared designs for the illustrated periodicals because her brother Joseph pronounced their work “very superior” while conﬁding that he believed they worked for “cheaper” than the American artists (Roberts 188). During this European voyage, she also attempted actively to solicit contributions from English writers for the Union. Her actions here seem a bit peculiar because, in her editorial voice for the magazine, she espouses the importance of promoting American art and literature. She later explains to her newly appointed co-editor, John Hart, that English writers expect to be paid more than their American counterparts (Roberts 209). Her attempt to promote better pay for both American and European writers contributing to the periodicals appears to have been balanced by an eﬀort to reduce the capital outlay for the magazine’s illustrations. 57. The Mexican War proved to be a popular subject for mid-century genre paintings. Matteson’s design News from the War reworks similarly titled paintings by his contemporaries by focusing not on excited male readers reveling in the news of American victories, but on the prostrate and grieving widow of a soldier whose death is announced in the paper. For a view of James Goodwyn Clonney’s Mexican News, also from 1847, see Taylor, America as Art, 43. See Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life, Plate 1 and 180, for a treatment of Richard Caton Woodville’s War News from Mexico, dated 1848.

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58. Matteson’s paintings on the Mexican War have not received the attention granted to similar work by his contemporaries, Richard Caton Woodville (War News from Mexico) and James Goodwyn Clonney (Mexican News). Perhaps this is because Woodville’s and Clonney’s are clearly genre paintings, focusing on views of Americans receiving the news of the war, while Matteson’s work is clearly historical and, as Kirkland complains, focused on bloody battle scenes. In addition to the two paintings published in the Union and mentioned here, Matteson executed several others for the Columbian, as noted in chapter 4, and at least one other, Storming of the Castle of Chapultapec: by the American Army under General Scott, September 13, 1847, which appeared as an engraving in Pictorial Brother Jonathan. On this third design see William H. Truettner, “Storming the Teocalli—Again: Or, Further Thoughts on Reading History Paintings,” American Art 9, no. 3: 75. 59. The setting is also reminiscent of similar genre paintings by better-known Matteson contemporaries William Sidney Mount and Francis W. Edmonds. 60. Kirkland later met Cruickshank during her European travels in 1848. She pronounced him a “funny looking fellow,” with “the true artist temperament—nervous, tender, full of irritability and egotism,” but concedes that he is a man “of great worth and honesty.” See Roberts 190. 61. Matteson’s design echoes Richard Caton Woodville’s 1846 The Card Players, as well as William Sidney Mount’s earlier Raﬄing for the Goose (1837). For a discussion of these paintings see Johns, American Genre Painting, 180, 38–41. 62. This same engraving appears in the 1853 annual The Winter Wreath, edited by Nathaniel Parker Willis. The annual credits the original artist, Matteson, and the original engraver, Milo Osborne, but the accompanying textual illustration is written by Willis. 63. On the issue of women and novel reading, see Amy Beth Aronson, Taking Liberties: Early American Women’s Magazines and Their Readers (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 51; and Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 40. On the ways that Godey’s contributed to both the visual and literary discourse on women’s reading habits, see Okker, especially chapter 5, on “Women’s Reading.” 64. For more on the moral reform melodramas, see Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), particularly chapter 6, “We Will Restore You to Society.” For the connection between temperance reform and moral reform melodramas, see John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), particularly chapter 4, “Reform comes to Broadway: temperance on America’s mainstream stages.” Frick points out that Cruikshank’s The Bottle series became popular as a kind of tableaux vivants performed on the Broadway stage. 65. For more on Kirkland’s understanding of her editorial role, see Okker, Our Sister Editors, 17–18; and Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America, 9–11. 66. For more on these courtship scenes, see Sarah Burns, “Yankee Romance: The Comic Courtship Scene in Nineteenth-Century American Art,” American Art Journal 18, no. 4: 51–75. Also, see Hills, The Painter’s America, especially discussion of Matteson’s Now or Never, 1849; William Sidney Mount’s The Sportsman’s Last Visit, 1835; and Francis William Edmonds, The City and the Country Beaux, 1840. Also see Francis William

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Edmonds’s The Bashful Cousin, 1841—42, in Franklin Kelly, American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 67. I am indebted to Janice Simon for pointing out to me these details, and suggesting their link to a long tradition of western iconology around issues of male virility and female virginity (and the loss thereof). For more on this iconology, see Kathleen Russo, “A Comparison of Rousseau’s ‘Julie’ with the Heroines of Greutze and Fuselli,” Woman’s Art Journal 8, no. 1 (1987): 3–7. 68. See Roberts, “Letters,” 268. For an additional discussion of Kirkland’s problems with Sartain, see Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America, 24–26. 69. See Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America, 24.

CHA PT ER 6 1. Godey’s oﬃce was located ﬁrst at 212, then 101 Chestnut, also referred to as Publisher’s Hall. Graham’s and Peterson’s were located at 98 Chestnut, in a building owned by Peterson’s brother, the book publisher and seller. The Art-Union of Philadelphia opened an oﬃce at 160 Chestnut Street. 2. Just to take several recent examples, see Isabel Lehuu’s Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Okker, Our Sister Editors. Okker’s sole use of images of women in the Lady’s Book is perhaps understandable, as her focus is on “women’s reading” and how it was pictured in the book. However, Lehuu’s book purports to cover “popular print media in antebellum America,” yet she, too, focuses almost solely on images of women in the illustrated annuals and monthly magazines. Most historians of all ilk (literary, cultural, art) have allowed these sentimental images of women and children to stand in for the whole of the “art” in these magazines, and that oversight colors most previous treatment of these magazines. 3. For a discussion of the popularity of similar images of idealized womanhood in British illustrated periodicals of the same era, see Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860. 4. Graham seems particularly concerned with maintaining the male readerships he inherited with the purchase of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. For more on the articles targeting Burton’s male readers, see Robert S. Hughes Jr., “Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine,” in Chielens, ed., American Literary Magazines, 90–94. 5. Both Godey and Sartain featured columns devoted to coverage of the arts and art criticism, but that is not the primary focus of this analysis. For an excellent overview of the contribution of Sartain’s Union Magazine to the promotion of the arts, see Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America, chapter 3. 6. Scholars generally refer to this line of inquiry as analysis of audience address or audience interpolation. See Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, and Jhally, The Codes of Advertising. 7. On Stephens’s serialized ﬁction, see Okker, Social Stories. 8. Obviously, all the magazines in this study targeted a white, upwardly mobile reading audience. For ladies’ magazines targeting African American women readers,

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see Noliwe M. Rooks, Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 9. Peterson astutely points out that this annual provides twelve engraved steel plates, like similar English annuals, and yet is priced well below the $8.00 English competitors. In bundling the annual with his magazine, he oﬀered his readers more engraved matter, at a lower cost, than they could possibly secure elsewhere. 10. For a discussion of the serialized novel Palaces and Prisons, and the connection between serialized ﬁction and American national identity, see Okker, Social Stories, especially chapter 3. 11. For a discussion of this issue, see Ellen Gruber Garvey’s foreword to Sharon M. Harris, ed., Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), xi. Also see Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post 1880–1910 (Albany: State University of New York, 1994), note 15, 213. 12. See Mott, I, 580–82. On Hale’s editorial voice, see Okker, Our Sister Editors, particularly 31–33. 13. See Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 111, 228. 14. See, for example, Denning, especially page 27; and Felicia L. Carr, “All for Love: Gender, Class, and the Woman’s Dime Novel in Nineteenth-Century America” (Ph.D. diss., George Mason University, 2003). 15. In announcing his return to ownership of his magazine in July 1850, Graham reveals that “Jeremy Short” is, in fact, his old publishing pal, Charles Peterson (44). 16. See Anna Wells Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 1807–1870; the Society of Artists, 1800–1814; the Artists’ Fund Society, 1835–1845 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1955), Foreword, 1. 17. The Art-Union appears to have formed as early as 1843. Peterson’s May 1843 issue contains a column, “The Fine Arts,” that reviews the Eighth Annual Exhibition of the Artists’ Fund Society, which had opened April 5. Peterson plugs the Art-Union, hoping for the association “to receive a crowd of members” (Peterson’s, May 1843, 160) 18. The January 1848 issue of Graham’s Magazine includes a full-page ad at the rear of the issue announcing the “American Art-Union of Philadelphia” and oﬀering memberships at $5.00. Sartain and Graham are prominently listed as “managers” of the new organization. Godey, Graham, and Sartain are listed as members of the New Yorkbased American Art-Union. See Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts and the American Art-Union 1816-1852. 19. See “Editors’ Book Table,” Godey’s, December 1850, 385. In his June 1850 “Editor’s Book Table,” Godey reports having printed 68,500 copies of the January 1850 number to date (421). By December 1850, his “Editors’ Book Table” notes that he printed 70,000 copies of both the November and December 1850 issues, and surmises editions of 100,000 for 1851 (386). 20. Sully exhibited this painting at the 1844 Artists’ Fund Society Exhibition, where it was listed in the catalogue as belonging to “G. R. Graham. See Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, 223.

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21. Although most of the major surveys of nineteenth-century American art feature at least one painting from both Sully and Leutze, these surveys largely overlook Rothermel, Conarroe, and Croome. In addition, previous scholarly treatment of these artists has been problematic. Art historians like James Thomas Flexner are haughtily dismissive of the work of Sully and Leutze. Following the lead of Sully biographers (as discussed in chapter 2), Flexner blames Sully’s weakening vision for his “nauseous sentimentality.” Flexner ﬁnds most of Leutze’s paintings “repulsive” (except Washington Crossing the Delaware) and complains that he used a “too facile brush and too bombastic temperament.” See James Thomas Flexner, Nineteenth Century American Painting (New York: Putnam, 1970), 34 (Sully), 143 (Leutze). Other art historians less dismissive of Leutze nonetheless mention only his historical paintings. See Hills, The Painter’s America, 25. Joshua Taylor features only Leutze’s 1861 Westward the Course of Empire Its Way, the other Leutze painting generally mentioned, if Leutze is mentioned at all. See Taylor, America as Art, 134. Barbara Novak features another historical painting, Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth, pronouncing it “highly theatrical.” See Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting (New York: Vendome Press, 1986), 198. Elizabeth Johns talks only about Sully’s paintings of mothers, children, and “rural pleasures,” and claims these were themes “popular in England,” but makes no attempt to assess their popularity in America. See Johns, American Genre Painting, 4, 44. None of these surveys of nineteenth-century art discusses Rothermel, Conarroe, or Croome, and all seem equally dismissive of “popular” taste, when they discuss the subject at all. Several more recent articles and monographs begin to redress this imbalance. For example, in addition to the work of William Truettner on Leutze, noted elsewhere, see Jochen Wienrich’s dissertation, which includes a chapter on Leutze: “The Domestication of History in American Art: 1848–1876.” Ph.D. diss., The College of William and Mary, 1998. In Dissertations & Theses: A&I [database on-line]; available from www.proquest. com (publication number AAT 9936911; accessed June 29, 2009). Rothermel’s relationship with the engraver John Sartain is the subject of a chapter by Mark Thistlethwaite in Katharine Martinez and Page Talbott’s wonderful compilation; see Martinez and Talbott, eds., Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape: The Sartain Family Legacy, 39–50. More recent surveys provide richer social and cultural contexts for American art. See, for example, Pohl, Framing America, and Craven, American Art. However, even these survey texts fail to adequately address art engravings in the nineteenth century. Given the importance of these magazines to the circulation of American art, this would seem to be an oversight. 22. Because the primary focus of this chapter is the relationship between these illustrated magazines and the larger Philadelphia art community, I do not here include statistical data on the work of these artists exhibited in other cities, such as New York, Baltimore, Boston, and the like. 23. See Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, entries on Sully, Rothermel, Leutze, Conarroe, and Croome. 24. See Godey’s column on “THE FASHION PLATES” in the April 1843 issue, 204. Godey boasts, “Formerly the proportions of the ﬁgures were somewhat disregarded in exhibiting the dress; but since we have obtained the valuable aid of Mr. Croome, the claims of good taste and artistical [sic] ﬁdelity in drawing the ﬁgure are fully recognized.” 25. Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, entry on Thomas Sully. Sully’s Register of Paintings for 1842 includes a listing for a “bust of Mrs. Graham.” See AAA, Reel D18, listings for 1842.

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26. See Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, 349. Read would go on to prepare the 1849 Female Poets of America anthology, containing engravings of original portraits of the poets painted by Read and engraved by Joseph Ives Pease. Pease also engraved for Godey and Graham in this decade. 27. For the information on Graham’s ownership of paintings, including one listed as “Portrait of a Lady by Thomas Sully,” see Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, 321. J. Albert Robbins dates the painting of this portrait to 1842. See J. Albert Robbins, “George R. Graham, Philadelphia Publisher,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 75 (1951): 286. 28. See Thomas Sully, “Register of Paintings 1801–71,” in Thomas Sully Papers, AAA, Reel D18. 29. See Thomas Sully, “Journal of Thomas Sully,” in Thomas Sully Collection, AAA, Reel A18 frames 1792ﬀ. 30. See Sully, “Register of Paintings 1801–71,” AAA, Reel D18. 31. Mary Chester Sully was the daughter of Sully’s wife, Sarah Annis Sully, and Sully’s brother, Lawrence. Thomas Sully married his brother’s widow, took in their children, and then he and Sarah had children of their own. The Sully features are distinctive in both the portrait of Mary Chester Sully and The Rose & The Lily. 32. For a brief biography of Leutze, see Groce and Wallace, The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America 1564–1860, 395–96. For more about relationships between the artists living on “Art Row” see Mark Thistlethwaite’s chapter “John Sartain and Peter F. Rothermel,” in Martinez and Talbott, eds., Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape: The Sartain Family Legacy, 40. For Leuzte’s addresses during the 1840s see Rutledge, 128. 33. These “Our Artist” columns went unsigned, and until this project, scholars had not discovered that they were written by Henry T. Tuckerman. However, a careful comparison of these columns against Tuckerman’s 1847 Artist-Life: or Sketches of American Painters, reveals them to be the work of Tuckerman. This fact places Tuckerman’s art writings at an earlier date than previously noted by art historian David Dearinger. See Dearinger’s chapter “Annual Exhibitions and the Birth of American Art Criticism to 1865” in Dearinger, ed., Rave Reviews, 76. 34. See Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, 358. 35. For similar embellishments and accompanying illustrations in Graham’s, see The Penitent Son, August 1841; The Young Shepherd, July 1845; The Young Deserter, October 1845; The Young Cavalier, July 1845; and The Young Astronomer, February 1846. 36. See 1844 Artists’’ Fund Society Exhibition Catalogue and Rutledge, 51–52. 37. The engraving is by William A. Wilmer, a line and stipple engraver who was a pupil of James Barton Longacre and had done work for Longacre on the National Portrait Gallery. “Portrait of Mother and Child” was listed in 1848 as one of the “Stationary Paintings” on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. See Groce and Wallace, 692; Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, 52. 38. Rothermel and Sartain also collaborated on illustrations for the gift books. See Mark Thistlethwaite, “John Sartain and Peter F. Rothermel,” in Martinez and Talbott, eds., Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape: The Sartain Family Legacy, 39–50. 39. The 1844 Artists’ Fund Society Catalogue indicates that the painting was owned by “E. Clarke.” 40. For more on these idealized portraits of women in the gift books, see Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, particularly chapter 4.

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41. A very small number might be termed “historical,” such as engravings depicting Pocahontas or Powhatan, but I have discovered fewer than a handful of these. For a discussion of images of Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, see Truettner, ed., The West as America; Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Pohl, Framing America, particularly 152–63; and Taylor, America as Art, particularly chapter 4. 42. For additional background on the McKenney expedition, see Carolyn Kinder Carr and Ellen G. Miles, A Brush with History: Paintings from the National Portrait Gallery (Washington: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 30; Reaves, ed., American Portrait Prints, 110; Conn, History’s Shadow, particularly chapter 2; and Wainwright, Philadelphia in the Romantic Age of Lithography, 30. For more on Bodmer’s sketches for the Prince Maximilian expedition, see William Truettner’s introduction to George Catlin, George Catlin’s Souvenir of the North American Indians, a Facsimile of the Original Album, with an Introductory Essay and Chronology by William H. Truettner (Tulsa: Gilcrease Museum, 2003). Also see Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, 190–94; and Pohl, Framing America, 155–63. 43. For a reading of Godey’s “textual” Indians (as opposed to his engraved Indians), see Linda M. Clemmons, “‘Nature Was Her Lady’s Book’: Ladies’ Magazines, American Indians, and Gender, 1820–1859,” American Periodicals 5 (1995): 40–58. 44. Darley is best remembered today for his book illustrations, particularly for Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. However, he was an active member of the Philadelphia art community, serving on Artists’ Fund Society Board of Control, and worked in a variety of media. See the 1845 Artists’ Fund Society Exhibition Catalogue; Taylor, America as Art, particularly 72–82; James F. O’Gorman, “The Poet and the Illustrator: Longfellow, Billings and The ‘Disproportion between Their Designs and Their Deeds’ in the 1840s,” in Aspects of American Printmaking, 1800–1950, ed. James F. O’Gorman (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 31. 45. Graham expressly praised the work of Darley in a notice of his book Scenes in Indian Life, Drawn and Etched on Stone in Graham’s “Review of New Books” column for September 1843. He praised the “youthful artist” for capturing “a most singular people rapidly passing from about us, and soon to become extinct,” vouching “we have never seen any thing more historically truthful than these sketches” (164). 46. The ﬁctional sketches accompanying the images of Indian maidens are nearly always suggestive of Indian polygamy and sexual promiscuity. Additionally, “captive tales” nearly always raise issues of interracial mating and miscegenation. 47. Although the Indian couple depicted in the engraving is clearly from one of the Plains tribes, Hale (or whichever writer composed this textual illustration) either had greater knowledge of the lives of the “forest” Indians indigenous to Pennsylvania and the eastern states, or simply glossed over any diﬀerences between forest and plains Indians’ lifestyles.

CHA PT ER 7 1. The leading contemporary authorities on these engravers vary in the information they provide. Although Mantle Fielding is often cited as an authority, Groce and

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Wallace provide fuller entries, including ﬁrst and sometimes middle names, but give no information on speciﬁc works executed by individual engravers. William Spohn Baker provides more biographical detail and often discusses the single-print works of some of the engravers. However, Baker makes little to no mention of the periodical work of these engravers, and completely fails to mention Henry S. Sadd, Jacob D. Gross, Francis Humphreys, Ralph and Freeman Rawdon, Neziah Wright, William Croome, and Frederick Quarre, all of whom contributed substantially to the Philadelphia pictorials. I have chosen to cite most of my information from Groce and Wallace. See William Spohn Baker, American Engravers and Their Works (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1875); Groce and Wallace, The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America 1564–1860; Mantle Fielding, Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers (New York: James F. Carr, 1965). 2. Groce and Wallace, The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists, 525. 3. Ibid., 33. 4. Ibid., 520. 5. Godey’s editorial columns at the end of 1842 and throughout 1843 reﬂect the ongoing debate over “dress reform.” Godey selected and published letters from readers in support of his “Americanized” fashions, and these letters highlight the healthful improvements for women of avoiding fashions requiring tight lacing. See, for example, an excerpt from a letter purported to have been from Harriet Beecher Stowe published in a column “OUR FASHION PLATES” in the January 1843 issue, 58. 6. Groce and Wallace, The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists, 495. 7. Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, 170. 8. For an interesting reading of these thematized fashion plates in terms of “female types” oﬀered to women readers in the mid-nineteenth century, see Monika M. Elbert, “Striking a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants, “Godey’s” Illustrations, and Margaret Fuller’s Heroines,” The New England Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 235–75. 9. Interestingly, some of Pease’s thematized fashion plates can be found on Internet sites selling both original and reproductions of Godey’s fashions. 10. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, later purchased by George Graham, noted favorably Tucker’s engraving The Farmer’s Boy, done for the 1839 volume of The Gift. See the “Review of New Books” column, September 1838, 210. 11. In an initial study done on these images, I catalogued approximately 150 full-page engravings depicting idealized womanhood in these magazines during the latter part of the 1840s, out of approximately 1,000 featured engravings. 12. See similar arrangements for: “Alice Linly” (August 1848); “The Belle of the Fancy Ball” (December 1848); “It is I” (June 1849); “Impending Mate” and “Mated” (November and December 1849); “Edith” (June 1850); “Kate Manley” (September 1850); “Pray God Bless Dear Mama and Papa” (January 1851); and “The Love Letter” (January 1852). 13. Like many of the engravings touted as mezzotints at decade’s end, this one appears to combine mezzotint with line and stipple work. For a contemporary discussion of how engravers combined these methods, see T. H. Fielding, The Art of Engraving (London: M.A. Nattali, 1844), 58–61. 14. This would not be the last of Sartain’s battles with the larger art community. On Sartain’s contentious role organizing the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, see Kimberly Orcutt, “‘Revising History’: Creating a Canon of American Art at the Centennial

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Exhibition” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2005). Retrieved June 22, 2009, from Dissertations & Theses: Full Text database (Publication No. AAT 3187359). 15. Mott reports that Sartain’s venture with Campbell’s Semi-Monthly had been “unfortunate” and that it was with some reluctance that Sartain purchased the Union (his share was $5,000) at the end of 1848 and relocated it to Philadelphia. Mott, I, 770. 16. See Dearinger’s essay “An Introduction to the History of American Art Criticism to 1925,” in Dearinger, ed., Rave Reviews, 17–29. 17. For more on Tuckerman, see Janice L. Edens, “Henry Theodore Tuckerman,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 64: American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1850– 1880, ed. John W. Rathburn (Detroit: Gale Research, 1988), 236–41. 18. Sill’s diaries oﬀer a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek into the many controversies facing the Philadelphia art community in the 1840s. See the Joseph Sill collection, AAA, reel P29. 19. On the question of Sartain’s use of his own printer, see Martinez, “John Sartain (1808–1897): His Contribution to American Printmaking,” 4. 20. Better-known paintings in this vein include William Sidney Mount’s Dance of the Haymakers, The Power of Music, and Rustic Dance, as well as John Lewis Krimmel’s Dance in a Country Tavern. See Hills, The Painter’s America, 28; and Johns, American Genre Painting, particularly chapter 4. 21. In addition to the cited notices in Godey’s, see Fielding, Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, 390. 22. According to Fielding, Warner was self-taught as a mezzotint engraver. See Fielding, Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, 391; and Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues, 242. 23. Godey clearly read Sartain’s editorial matter carefully; in his “Editor’s Book Table” for August of 1850, he tops Hart’s editorial puﬀ by noting that his subscription list increased by 20,000 in ﬁve months, gaining readers in numbers equal to the entire subscription list of “another magazine” (125). 24. This debate over engraving from wood blocks can become confusing, because it actually involves two diﬀerent methods of engraving from wood: woodcuts and wood engraving. Woodcuts is the term generally used for older methods of engraving on the “softer” plank surface of wood. Wood engraving refers to a newer method perfected in the late eighteenth century by English engraver Thomas Bewick. He discovered that if he engraved across the end of a plank, against the grain, particularly of very hard woods, he could achieve ﬁner detail. See Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints, 6a. In his “Index” to each volume, Sartain consistently separates his illustrations into speciﬁc categories, although his designations for each category become more complex in subsequent volumes. In the “Index” to volume 7 (July to December 1850), he divides illustrations into “Plates” and “Wood-Cuts.” The plates he further identiﬁes as either “line,” “mezzotint” or “coloured print.” The latter suggests the possibility of a lithograph. In the “Index” to volume 8 (January to June 1851), Sartain adds the clariﬁcation of “lithograph” beside some plates (indicating that his embellishment was printed from a stone), clariﬁes some plates as “stipple,” and further describes some plates as “tinted” or “illuminated.” In the “Index” to volume 9 (July to December 1851), under “Embellishments” he redesignates “Plates” as “Engravings on Steel” and now calls the other category “Engravings on Wood.” Gone is any mention of engravings on stone

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(lithographs). Perhaps Sartain’s categorization of his plates was one way he attempted to claim artistic expertise over Godey. 25. For a diﬀerent take on Godey’s illustrations and the tableaux vivants, see Elbert, “Striking a Historical Pose,” 235–75. Elbert looks at later issues of Godey’s and misses his 1849–50 denouncements of “artist model” engravings that fueled this dispute. 26. Sartain Family Papers, AAA, Reel 4563.

CH AP TER 8 1. Groce and Wallace, The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists, 653. 2. See Masten, “Shake Hands? Lilly Martin Spencer and the Politics of Art,” 358. 3.Ibid., 378 and note 105, 393. 4. Le Beau reports that some Currier & Ives prints achieved print runs in the hundreds of thousands. See Le Beau, Currier & Ives: America Imagined, 22. 5. See Mott on the cessation of publication of Sartain’s Union (I, 769) and Graham’s (I, 543), and on the eventual demise of both Godey’s (I, 593ﬀ.) and Peterson’s (II, 306ﬀ.). 6. There is a study waiting to be done on the numerous dollar monthlies that sprang up largely in the 1840s and early 1850s. Boston alone boasted some half-dozen that, as noted in chapter 4, made use of recycled plates: The Father’s and Mother’s Manual, The Ladies’ Album, The Ladies’ Magazine and Casket of Literature, The Lady’s Wreath, The Mother’s Assistant. 7. On the collapse of the American Art-Union, see Rachel N. Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: The Rise and Fall of the American Art-Union,” Journal of American History 81:4 (March 1995): 1534–61. jstor.org/stable/2081648?origin=JSTOR-pdf, accessed 6/7/2009. 8. See Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City,” 1541–42. 9. Founded in 1827, Goupil, Vibert & Company set up a New York oﬃce in 1846. See William H. Gerdts, “‘Good Tidings’ to the Lovers of the Beautiful”: New York’s Dusseldorf Gallery, 1849—1862,” American Art Journal 30:1/2 (1999): 50–81. jstor.org/ stable/1594632?origin=JSTOR-pdf, accessed 6/7/09. For more on Lilly Martin Spencer’s prints from the company, see Masten, “Shake Hands?” especially 377–78. 10. See LeBeau, Currier & Ives: America Imagined, especially the introduction. 11. Mott suggests as much when he notes that the arrival of Harper’s “banished Godey’s to the boudoir, where it had probably always belonged” (Mott II, 30). 12. I examined numerous family manuscript groups at the Pennsylvania State Archives, and several included estate documents and ledger books listing the family’s goods and purchases, including prints of various sorts. 13. Scrapbooks, as a print media, are just beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. See the excellent collection of essays, The Scrapbook in American Life, ed. Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

Index Abbot, The, 64 Ackerman, James, 51 Aﬀection of the Indians for Las-Casas, 100, 102–3, 136 Allston, Washington, 26, 34 American art, 4, 11–13, 15–16, 19–21, 31, 36, 38, 41, 57, 81, 86, 88, 118, 120–21, 123, 127–29, 140–41, 142, 151, 162–64, 166–67, 169n1, 171n15, 193n56, 197n21 American Art-Union, 12, 15, 76, 110, 122, 128, 162, 164, 196n182, 202n7 American artists, 15, 19, 21, 35, 88, 127, 129–30, 158, 160, 164, 193n56 American artwork, original, 4, 11–12, 121, 128, 163, 167 American authors, 15, 87, 91–118, 123, 159 American Institute, 74–75, 185n40 American magazines, 38, 70, 158, 173n22 American Scenery, 63, 71, 143, 183n16, 184n20 Andre, Capture of, 59 Andrews, Joseph, 61, 183n14 Apollo Association, 59 aqua tint, 157 Arnold, Benedict, 59 Armstrong, W. G., 6–7, 42 art: illustrated magazines of, 84, 86; mechanical, 43, 74–75, 166 art criticism, 150–51, 187n57, 188n2, 195n5 art engravings, 4, 15, 20, 57, 69, 71, 75–77, 79, 86, 118, 120, 163–64, 167, 169n1, 173n27, 186n50, 197n21; high-quality, 59, 71, 79, 91, 112, 156, 167 art historians, 13, 19, 24, 31–32, 36, 129–30, 171n15, 174n2, 187n56, 197n21 Arthur, Timothy Shay, 41–44, 53, 157, 179n10 Arthur’s Magazine, 53 Artist Life, or Sketches of the American Painters, 151, 198n33

artistic marketplace, 12, 14, 90, 118 artistic production, 15, 17–31, 163 artists, serious, 31, 128 Artists’ Fund Society, 25–26, 36, 64, 127, 130–32, 134, 152, 196n17 Artists’ Fund Society Exhibition, 25–26, 36 Art-Union of Philadelphia, 26, 127, 195n1, 196n18 art-unions, 19, 110, 128, 164 artwork, 4, 11–13, 16–17, 20–22, 31–32, 36, 38, 64, 68–69, 88, 120–21, 123, 127–29, 140, 163, 167, 171n15, 182n43 Atlantic Souvenir, 34 audiences, 9, 11–12, 15–16, 20, 36, 46, 56, 61, 86, 93, 113, 116, 119–27, 136–40, 165, 169n1, 173n26 bachelors, 107–8 Bacon, Rev. Henry, 62–65 Bank Lick, KY, 82 Bartlett, William, 63, 71, 82, 143, 183n16 Beckman, Thomas, 53, 182n43 Belisarius, 52 Belle of the Opera, The, 148 Bellevue Springs, 82 Bellows, Rev. Henry and Eliza, 110, 114, 193n56 Beneﬁcence of Washington, 152 Benjamin, Park, 92 Bethune, George, 26–27, 64 Birch, Harvey, 77, 186n50 Birch, Thomas, 71 Bishop White, 131 Blackfoot Indians on Horseback, 137 Bodmer, Karl, 136–38, 140, 142, 199n42 Boston, Massachusetts, 4, 11, 15, 19, 24, 55–57, 59–66, 80–81, 86, 99, 125, 163, 202n6 Boston Artists’ Association, 59 Boston Highlands/From Bull Hill, 63

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Boston Miscellany, 55–56, 59–62, 86 bound volumes, 16, 45, 166 Bowen, Abel, 61 Brackett, Edward Augustus, 63 Bradbury, Soden & Co., 59, 61 Bremer, Fredrika, 159 Bride of Ceylon, The, 96 Bronson, Steven E., 32, 34 Brooks, Rev. E. G., 62 Brown, George Loring (Claude), 71 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 65 Bud and the Blossom, The, 105–7, 155 Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 134 Bunker Hill Monument, 61 Burial of De Soto in the Mississippi, 165–66 burin, 18, 50, 82, 144, 156 Burns, Robert, 71, 185n33 Burr, Rev. C. C., 155 Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, 9, 38, 50, 93, 122, 127, 195n4 Buttre, John, 27 Campbell’s Magazine, 150–51, 201n15 careers, 31, 98 Carey, Edward L., 23, 27–29, 87, 173n27 Carey, Henry, 41 Carey & Hart, 22, 37, 91, 104, 176–77n38 Casket, The (Atkinson’s), 9, 122, 127, 186n50 Catherine Seyton, 64 Catherwood’s Diorama, 150 Cave-in-Rock, 137 Chamber of Representatives/From the Park, 61 Chapman, John G., 20, 29–31, 35, 71, 76–77, 137, 150 Charge of Captain May, The, 79 Charleston, South Carolina, 11, 22, 57, 125 Cheney, John, 24, 28, 35, 154, 175n14 Cheney, Seth, 92, 154 Chestnut Street, 39, 119, 170n9, 195n1 Chief ’s Daughter, The, 136 Child and Lute, The, 133–34 children, books for, 37, 41, 46, 148 Childs, Cephas, 24, 34, 51, 179n14 Chinese culture, plates of, 71–72, 74–76, 185n36, 185n38, 185n39

chromolithography, 51 Cincinnati, Ohio, 11, 15, 56–57, 81–82, 86, 162, 187n64 circulation numbers, 4, 12, 34, 45, 56, 59, 69, 81, 124–25, 127, 129, 156, 163, 170n11, 180n27 cities, southern, 11, 22, 56–58, 93, 125 City Belle, The, 46, 48 Civil War, 19, 65, 125–27, 166 Cole, Thomas, 71 colors, printing with or adding, 49, 51, 131, 157 Columbia Bridge/On the Susquehanna, 82 Columbian, The, 55–56, 66, 75–78, 80, 86, 91 Coming to Get Married, 108 competition between magazines, 28, 47, 50, 64–66, 73, 83, 85, 132–33, 140, 162, 170–72, 174 Conarroe, George W., 129, 132, 191n30, 197n21 Connecticut River/Near Vermont, 63 connoisseurs, 121, 134, 150 consumption of art, 12, 19–20, 38, 46, 49, 53, 86, 123, 166 Continental artists, 4, 164 Conversion of St. Paul, The, 100, 103 Cooper, James Fenimore, 77, 186n50 copyists, 21, 24 cost of artwork, 18, 20, 22–23, 29, 37, 49–50, 52, 76, 89, 123–24, 129 Croome, William, 3–4, 20, 35, 129–30, 144–46, 157, 197n21, 197n24 Cruikshank, George, 111–12, 194n64 Culture and Preparation of Tea, 72, 74 Currier & Ives, 163–64, 167, 169n1 daguerreotypes, 15, 22–25, 32, 63, 84 Dance of the Mandan Indians, 137 Darley, Felix Octavius Carr (F. O. C.), 91, 136–37, 139–40, 142, 199n44–45 Day in the Woods, A, 143 Dearinger, David, 151, 177n44, 187n57, 198n33 Deborah, 94 designers, magazine embellishments, 19, 31, 53, 79

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Dick, Archibald L., 69, 71–72, 74, 76, 82, 93, 142–44, 189n15 distribution of art engravings, 12, 14, 19, 28, 34, 36, 38, 50, 69, 86, 125, 162–64, 167, 173n26, 179n4 Doctor Sian Seng, 73–74 domestic economy, 41, 43 Domestic Felicity, 162 Domestic Happiness, or Hush! Don’t Wake Them, 162 Domestic Life Among the Indians, 139–40 Dr. Johnson Rescuing Goldsmith from His Landlady, 69 Durand, Asher B., 24–25, 27, 175n16 Dreer, Ferdinand, 24, 33 Duval, Enna, 92 Duval, Peter S., 51, 181n32 Duyckinck, Evert, 110, 114 Eclectic, The, 56, 66–69, 86 Edith, 9–10 editorial matter, 15–16, 63, 121, 201n23 editors, magazine, 12, 14–15, 21, 28, 31, 35, 41, 43, 53, 56, 61, 64, 75, 78, 81, 90–93, 98, 107, 109–10, 118–19, 172n18, 180n17, 190n26 Eﬃe Deans, 72 Eichholtz, Jacob, 131 Ellet, Elizabeth F., 92, 136, 189n13 embellishers, 14, 119–20, 141, 142–49, 154 embellishments, as term, 9, 11–15, 19–22, 29, 36–39, 44–46, 49–53, 55–56, 58, 63, 66, 68, 71–72, 76–78, 82, 88, 90–92, 99, 111, 114, 120–21, 123, 129, 132, 136, 140, 144, 150, 157, 159–60, 163, 166, 186n49, 191n36, 201n24 embossed medallion seals, 52–53 Embury, Emma C., 92 Emperor Justinian, 52 English nobility, 96, 98 engravings: mezzotint, 9, 11, 24, 25–26, 29, 38, 44, 49–52, 63, 66, 68, 77, 84, 88–91, 96, 99, 103, 123, 128–29, 131, 134, 142, 148, 152, 154–56, 160, 163, 187n67, 200n13, 201n24; model artist, 157; original, 21, 89, 110, 128; single, 64, 163–64, 167, 169n1, 200n1; stipple,

24, 44, 132, 179n14, 198n37, 200n13, 201n24; woodcut, 44–45, 66, 71, 77, 103, 121, 126, 128, 130, 138, 150, 152, 157, 162–63, 165, 201n24 European artists, 68, 127 Evening Star, 146 Exhibition Catalogues, 35, 130 Fabian, Monroe, 32 Façade of the Great Temple, 75 Fall of Major Ringwold, The, 78–79 Falls of Catskill, The, 71 Family Devotion, 144 Family Jewels, 144 fancy pictures, 32, 34–36, 59, 68, 96, 120, 130–32, 134, 141, 156 Fanshaw, Daniel, 32 fashion plates, 37–38, 44, 51, 58–59, 76, 84, 120–23, 128, 165; “Americanized,” 45–46, 130, 144, 146, 197n24, 200n5; and Sarah Hale, 19, 180n21; as advertisement, 45–46; as art, 146, 150, 157; die-cut, 44, 46, 49; foreign, 45, 65; hand-colored, 18, 44–45; steelengraved, 165; thematized, 145–46, 200n9 female authors and editors, 14, 104–5, 117, 172n19 female Indians, 137, 140 female nudes, 100, 102–3, 136 Filagree Worker, The, 134 First Ear Ring, The, 144 First Music Lesson, The, 132 Florence, 143 Florentine Girl, The, 104 Flower Girl, The (Pease), 146 Flower Girl, The (Spencer), 162 Forest Queen, 136 Forester, Frank, 96 Fort MacKenzie, 137–38 Fountain of Valcluse, The, 157 Frankenstein family, 82–84, 187n64 Frankfort, KY, 82 Franklin Institute, 15, 44, 47, 179n13, 182n44 frontispiece, 3, 9, 35, 77, 129–34, 137, 144, 148, 152, 156

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frontispiece engraving, hand-colored, 3 Fuselli, Henry, 32 Gems of Art & Beauty, 124 Gen. Marion Inviting a British Oﬃcer to Dinner, 59 Gen. Scott & John Brant, 76–77 genres, artistic, 19, 22, 24, 71, 76, 86, 120–21, 152, 171n14 genres, literary, 94 Gentle Warning, The, 69 Gift, The, 11, 28–29, 34–35, 37, 87, 104–5, 176n38 gift books, 11–12, 14–15, 19, 22, 28, 31, 35, 46, 95, 150, 166, 169n1, 173n26–27, 198n38 Gift from Heaven, A, 134 Gimber, Steven, 24 Girl & Birds, 35 Godey, Louis A.: as art patron, 4, 19–21, 35, 128–30, 137, 142–48, 150–70, 196n18; editorial columns, 3, 18–19, 45, 49, 53, 120, 124–27, 141, 155–56, 189n13, 197n24, 200n5, 201n23; editorial persona, 4; and Morton McMichael, 39–41, 42, 170n8; as publisher, 4–5, 13–14, 22 Godey’s assistant editors, 43 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 4, 37, 66, 88, 182n3 Gould, Hannah, 94–95 Goupil, Vibert & Co., 162–64, 167, 169n1, 202n9 Graham, A. W., 130, 146 Graham, George Rex, 7–9, 20–22, 38, 189n11, 190n2, 195n4; as art patron, 35, 45–46, 88, 122, 128–43, 146, 148, 154; editorial columns, 90–91, 126–27, 148, 159–60; negotiations with artists, 29–31, 89; pay to contributors, 14, 105 Graham’s American Monthly Magazine, 122 Graham’s Magazine, 20, 122, 165 Grandpapa’s Pet, 51 graphic arts, 4, 44, 53, 127, 142, 155, 156, 171n15 Gravity and Gaiety, 144 Griswold, Rufus S., 30, 92–93, 96, 98, 100,

104–5, 107–8, 130, 178n55, 189n15, 190n16, 190n26, 191n29, 191n33 Gross, Jacob D., 142, 148–50, 152 Gypseying Party, The, 68 Hale, Nathan, Jr., 55, 61–62 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 4, 6, 19, 65, 89, 92, 94–95, 109, 123, 140, 170n4, 172n19, 180n17, 182n3, 189n12–13, 199n47 Halpin, Frederick F., 84 Hamilton, James, 130, 152, 165 Happy Hours, 156 Harding, Chester, 27 Harper Brothers Publishers, 11, 29 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 160, 166, 202n11 Hart, Professor John, 94, 100, 103–4, 117, 156, 191n33, 191n36, 193n56, 201n23 Heart of Mid Lothian, 71–73 Herbert, William Henry, 92–94, 96, 98–99, 190n22, 190n26 Heroic Women of America/The Rescue, 134–36 highbrow New York magazines, 122–23 Highland Sport, 143 History of the Indians of North America, The, 136 Hoﬀman, Charles Fenno, 93, 189n15 Hope Leslie, A Scene from, 78 Horse-Racing of Sioux Indians, 137 Howitt, William and Mary, 159 Hudson Highlands, 62 Hullmandel, engraver, 51 Hunting Buﬀalo, 137 Huntington, Daniel, 24, 26–28, 77, 104, 151, 173n27 I Am Sorry You Can’t Go, 146 idealized womanhood, images of, 34, 70, 96, 98, 105, 120–21, 131–32, 136–38, 140–41, 143, 148, 171n14, 190n25, 195n3 Illman & Sons, 139 illustrated magazines, 4, 35, 38, 44, 50, 58, 62, 71, 84, 86, 93–94, 96, 109, 121–22, 163, 169n1, 170n9, 173ch1n26, 173ch2n1, 183n10, 183n16, 197n22

I ND E X

imitators, regional, 15–16, 54–86, 94, 163 income: artists’, 22–25, 31; authors’, 94, 98; subscribers’, 125–26 Indian Captive, The, 137 Indian Fruit Seller, The, 136 Indian Maid, The, 137 Indian Toilette, The, 71 Indians, 49, 76, 134, 136–40, 199n43; female, 78, 102, 136–40, 199n46–47 Ingham, Charles, 76 Ingraham, Joseph H., 87, 95 ink, blue, 49, 53 Inman, Henry, 24, 76, 104 Inman, John, 55, 75–77, 79 innovations, artistic, 4, 15, 30, 37–54 institutions, domestic, 58 It Is I, 148–49 Julia, 143 Julia Warren, 124 Kemble, Fanny, 35 Kirkland, Caroline, 14, 64, 91–92, 98, 108–17, 156, 191n36, 194n60 Knickerbocker, The, 66, 123 La Esmerelda, 157 Ladies’ Companion, 56, 66, 68–69, 72, 75–76, 86, 91, 186n59 Ladies’ Magazine, 4, 19 Ladies’ National Magazine (Peterson’s), 122 Ladies’ Repository, Boston, 56, 62–65, 184n28 Ladies’ Repository, Cincinnati, 56, 81–86 Lady Reading in Bed, 35 Lady’s Book, 3–4, 13, 45, 88, 108, 151, 158, 183n10, 195n2 Lady’s World, 127, 144 Lambdin, James, 23, 152, 174n8, 175n11 Landseer, Edwin, 50 Last Visit, The, 134, 137 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 96–98, 191n30 Leslie, Charles, 11, 37, 65, 68 Leslie, Eliza, 11–14, 37, 39–44, 50, 130, 170n8, 180n17 Leslie, Patty, 41

Leslie, Thomas, 41 Leutze, Emanuel, 20, 35–36, 129, 131–34, 197n21 literary magazines, 11, 55–58, 62, 160 literary matter, 19, 21, 50, 61, 87–89, 110, 130, 180n17 Literary Party at Sir Joshua Reynolds, A, 69 literature, magazine, 94 lithographs, 9, 23–24, 163–64, 179n14, 201n24 lithography, 23–24, 38, 49, 51, 157 lithotint, 44, 51 Littell’s Living Age, 68 Little Nell in the Storm, 132 Little Red Riding Hood, 99, 191n31 Lobster Sauce, 156 Longacre, James B., 24, 27–28, 198n37 Lost Glove, The, 153–54 Love Letter, The, 144 Maennitarri Warriors in the Costume of the Dog Dance, 137 magazine publishers, 125, 134 magazine publishing, 11, 151 magazines: high-toned, 21; middleclass, 4, 11–12, 15, 22, 36, 49, 109, 158; southern, 57–58; three dollar, 9, 70, 128 male reader(s), 14, 112, 115–16, 120–21, 127, 131, 137, 166, 171n16, 193n57, 195n4 Mandan Chief, 138 Mandan Women, 137–38 market stratiﬁcation, 163 marriage tales, 105 Masten, April, 162 mathematics, 82, 84 Matteson, Tompkins H., 77–80, 110–16, 153–54, 186n54, 193n53, 193n57, 194n58 Maverick, Peter, 24 May Day Morning, 144 McKenney, Thomas L., 136, 140, 142 McMichael, Morton, 11, 37, 39, 41, 43–44, 49–50, 52–53, 165–66, 170n8, 178n2, 180n17 McMurtrie, James, 24, 26 medal engraving, 52 Melancholy Jacques, 100

207

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Mermaid on a Wave, 35 Methodist Book Concern, 56, 81 Mexican War, 76, 78–80, 110, 124, 193n57, 194n58 mezzotint engravers, 155 mezzotint portraits, 66, 68, 84 mezzotints, 25–26, 38, 50, 52, 68, 90, 123, 148, 152, 154, 156, 163, 200n13 middle-class audiences, 11, 36, 122, 136, 163 Miﬄin, John Houston, 22–24 Milton Dictating to His Daughters, 68 minister, image of, 108–10 Minor, Benjamin Blake, 182n9 Mirror of Life, 132 Miss Leslie’s Magazine, 9, 11, 37, 41, 43, 46 Morris, George Pope, 80–81 Morton, John L., 76–77, 79 mother, images of, 26, 35, 45, 68, 96–97, 112, 120, 134, 156 Mott, Frank Luther, 9, 29, 69, 88–89, 186n56, 188n2 Mount, William Sidney, 28, 87 Mountain Airs and City Graces, 145–46 Mrs. Shubrick Protecting an American Soldier, 134–35 Mrs. Washington Potts, 41 Murray, Rev. John, 64 Musidora, 35 National Academy of Design, 32, 76, 151 Neagle, John, 24, 131, 154, 174n8 Neal, Alice B., 41 Neal, Joseph, 91, 188n4 negotiations, 22, 26–31 New Mirror, 66, 80, 94, 96, 187n56, 187n59 New Orleans, Louisiana, 11, 57 Newsam, Alfred, 51 News Boy, The, 104 Niagara Falls, 144 Nineteenth Century, The, 155 Novel Reader, The, 112–13 novels, and artwork, 9, 64, 71–72, 76–77, 90–91, 186n50 Oakes Smith, Elizabeth, 14, 65, 91–92, 98, 104–9

Old Guard State Fencibles, 166 Opal, The, 94 original art, 16, 19–20, 31, 88, 119–21, 127–38 Ormsby, Waterman Lilly, 76–77, 80 Osgood, Frances S., 14, 92, 98–104, 108, 176n38 Osgood, Samuel, 76, 99 Our Artists column, 131, 152 PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), 127, 130, 132, 134, 137, 146, 152 painters, 16, 21, 24, 26–28, 31, 41, 50; genre, 114; itinerant portrait, 23, 174n9; Philadelphia, 31, 152 paintings: genre, 110, 191n57, 194n58; historical, 103, 120, 197n21 Palaces and Prisons, 124 Pardon Refused, The, 69 Pastor’s Visit, The, 144 patrons, art, 25, 35–36, 121, 127, 150 Pavilion and Gardens of a Mandarin, 76 Peasant Girl, 35 Pease, Joseph Ives, 142, 146, 148, 177n38 Pelton, Oliver, 63, 154 Penobscot Belle, 83–84, 86 Peterson, Charles, 11, 22, 37–38, 47–49, 96, 119, 121–27, 130, 132, 142, 144, 158–59, 196n9; as art patron, 88–89, 130, 132, 144; as Godey imitator, 9, 37–38, 46, 122–23; as “Jeremy Short,” 92, 126; preference for mezzotints, 9, 90–91, 123, 148; promotional ploys, 124 Peterson’s Ladies’ National Magazine, 10 Peterson’s Magazine, 37, 46 Pets, The, 50 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: art community, 24, 26, 34, 121, 127–28, 152; artists, 43, 139, 146, 148, 164, 172; as publishing center, 4, 11, 22, 55, 66 Philadelphia Art Union, 38, 174 Philadelphia Lyceum, 43 Pic-Nic, The, 144 picture, illustration of a, 89–90 Pierson, Mrs. Lydia J., 92 Pilot’s Boy, The, 92 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 23

I ND E X

plates: belles lettres, 64, 71, 75, 77, 91; colored, 146, 157; copper, 50, 154; match, 120; metal, 50, 52; original, 45; recycled, 38, 45, 77, 80, 89, 163, 187n58; steel-engraved, 163, 165 Pocahontas, 77, 79, 199n41 Poe, Edgar Allan, 57, 99, 102, 119–20 poetry in magazines, 11, 62, 72, 82, 87, 94–95, 105, 165, 188n2 portrait painter, 23–24, 31–34, 50 portrait painting, 22, 24, 35–36 portraits: daguerreotype, 22–25, 32, 63, 84; engraved, 12 Post, Israel, 76–77, 79–80, 109, 186n50 Potter’s Meeting House, 64 Pratt, Miss Anne C., 192 Prince Maximillian of Weid, 136, 142 printing innovations, 4, 11, 15, 38, 45, 120 production of art, 12, 14–15, 17, 19–26, 38, 44, 51, 53, 86, 90, 163, 167 Proferred Kiss, The, 92 proof sheet, 94, 96, 190n26 Publisher’s Hall, 39 Publisher’s Table, 43, 50, 88, 123 Quarre, Frederick, 144 Raree Show at Lin-Sin-Choo, The, 76 Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Smillie, 25, 30, 60, 77, 137–38, 142 Read, Thomas Buchanan, 7, 35, 63, 130–31, 146 Reconciliation, The, 69 Register of Paintings, Sully’s, 32, 130–31 review, art, 32, 64, 131, 151 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 32, 69, 101 Richards, John H., 51 Richmond, Virginia, 11, 57 Robb, David M., 32, 34 Rolph, John A., 61, 139 Rosalie, 132 Rose, The, 146 Rose and Lily, The, 131–32 Rothermel, Peter, 20, 129–31, 134–35, 137 Runaway Match, 49 Rustic Maid, The, 46–47 Ruth and Boaz, 63

Sadd, Henry S., 77–80, 88, 96–98, 111, 113, 115, 142, 153–55 Saﬀord, Truman Henry, 84 Sargent, Epes, Jr., 93 Sartain, John, 11, 22, 24–26, 29, 33, 38, 50, 59, 66, 68, 90, 99, 101, 103, 110, 116–17, 121–23, 128–34, 136, 141–42, 144, 146, 148, 150–52, 154–59, 162–63, 165 Sartain, Samuel, 158 Sartain’s Union Magazine, 11, 92, 94, 100, 154, 165 Savannah, Georgia, 11, 57 Scene on the Schuylkill, 130 scenery, American, 63, 71, 75, 82 Schuylkill Water Works, 144 science, 56, 62, 65, 73–74, 82, 182n3 Scott, Sir Walter, 64, 71–72 scrapbooks, 165–66 Sentry Box, The, 64–65 Serenade, The, 156 Short, Jeremy, 92, 126, 196n5 Sickness and Health, 144 Sidney, E. M., 92 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 92, 191n36 Silk Culture in China, 74–75 Sill, Joseph, 36, 152, 201n18 sisters, images of, 105–8 Skin Lodge of an Assinboin Chief, A, 137 Sleeping Girl, 35 Sloanaker, William, 29 Smillie, James, 24, 60, 77, 89, 137–38, 142, 154 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 14, 65, 91–92, 98, 104–5, 107–9 Smith, Russell, 150 Smith, Seba, 104, 109 Snake in the Grass, 100–3, 157 Snowden, William, 69–75, 77 South, magazines of, 11, 56–58 Southern and Western Monthly Magazine, 57 Southern Literary Messenger, 57–58 Southern Quarterly Review, 57, 93 Spanish Gitar & Mantilla, 35 Spencer, Lilly Martin, 162, 164 Spencer, Asa, 52 Sportsman, The, 143

209

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Spring Flower, A, 131 St. Louis, View of, 82 Stephens, Ann, 9, 122, 124 Steps to Ruin, 111–12, 154 stone, prints from, 23, 51, 157 Storming of Palace Hill, The, 78–79 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 91, 180n21, 200n5 Strawberry Girl, 35 Stray Kitten, The, 144 subscribers: oﬀers to, 4, 49–50, 53, 61, 68–73, 76, 110, 124, 152, 164, 180n27, 187n59; statistics on, 56, 69, 126, 183n17, 184n30 Sully, Mary Chester, 131 Sully, Thomas, 20, 22–25, 31–36, 41, 59, 68, 129–32, 134, 177n41, 191n31, 197n21, 198n31 Sully’s fancy pictures, 32, 34 Sully’s paintings, 35, 131 Sully’s Register, 130–33 Swiss Girl, The, 143 Taking the Advantage, 114–16, 154 Taking the Queue, 161–62 taste, artistic, 3, 46, 52–53, 58, 73, 127, 144, 150–51, 162 Taylor, Bayard, 110 Teﬀt, Rev. B. F., 81–82, 84 Tennyson, 68 textual illustrations, 80, 88–96, 98–99, 107, 117, 132, 138, 154 themes, sentimental, 99 Thomson, Rev. E., 81 Tompkins, Abel, 64 Tooley, J., 42 Train Is Coming, The, 146 Tristram Shandy, 65 Tucker, William E., 142, 146–48 Tuckerman, Henry T., 81, 93, 131, 151–52, 154–55, 189n15, 198n33 Undine, 157 Union Magazine of Literature and Art, The, 11, 80, 122, 154 Universalism, 64–65 Universalist, 63–66, 81

View on the Delaware, 130, 152, 154 View on the Ohio/Near Cincinnati, 82 Views of Philadelphia, 34 Viola, 134, 155 visual material, 13–14, 16, 86 Wagner, Henry S., 161–62 Walter, Adam B., 167 Warner, William, 168 Washington, George, images of, 53, 89, 164 Webster, Daniel, 24 Welch, Thomas B., 36, 144, 154, 167, 187 West, magazines of, 11, 55–56, 81–84 West, Robert A., 77–80 White, John B., 59 White, Thomas Willys, 57–58 widow, images of, 65, 68, 156 Widow’s Hope, 156 Willis, Nathaniel P., 63, 71, 80–81, 94, 96, 98, 143 Woman and Her Needs, 65, 109 women, images of, 34, 108, 112, 119–21, 130, 136, 140, 143, 190n25 women writers, 15, 91–93, 95, 99, 117 wood engraving, 103, 152, 201n24 woodcuts, 38, 44–45, 66, 71, 77, 103, 121, 126, 128, 130, 150, 152, 157, 162–63, 165 Woodworth, Samuel, 80 Wordsworth, 68 Wreck, The, 150 Wrecked Mariner, The, 71 Wright, J. M., 71 Wright, Neziah, 142 writers, 3, 14–15, 20–21, 87–88, 90–95, 98, 107, 117, 122, 128, 158–60 Young Vermont Mathematician, The, 84–85

PLATE 1 Croome’s Vase, frontispiece, Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1844. Designed by William Croome, drawn on stone by Alfred Newsam, printed by Peter S. Duval. Courtesy of the University of South Florida Libraries Special and Digital Collections Department.

PLATE 2 Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art, title cover, July 1850. Lithographed by James Ackermann.

PLATE 3 Fashions for November 1841, frontispiece, Graham’s. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

PLATE 4 The Pets, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, March 1843. Painted by Edwin Landseer, engraved by John Sartain. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

PLATE 5 Grandpapa’s Pets, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, April 1843. Drawn and lithotinted by John H. Richards, expressly for Miss Leslie’s Magazine: the 3rst specimen of this art ever produced in the United States. Lith. of P. S. Duval, Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

PLATE 6 Belisarius, frontispiece, Miss Leslie’s, August 1843. A. Spenser. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

PLATE 7 Thirty-one Coloured Embossed Medallion Seals, frontispiece, Godey’s, December 1843. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

PLATE 8 Lace and Birds, frontispiece, Graham’s, January 1842.