NEW YORK

In the period from 1820 to 1870 New York City consolidated its status not only as the United States' largest city but also as the nation's economic and cultural capital. The literature of New York during this period reflected the city's diversity of voices, its complex balance of commerce and culture, and its increasing prominence as the cosmopolitan center of American literary life. Many of the most important American writers of the nineteenth century, including Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, spent a significant part of their careers in New York City. They joined a host of other writers associated with New York City, ranging from serious-minded reformers such as Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) and Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) to the alternately urbane and sentimental sketcher and poet Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1850) to sensational writers of city-life exposés such as George G. Foster and "Ned Buntline" (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), all of whose work reflected the dynamic political, social, and cultural transformations taking place within the city during this period.

THE 1820S AND 1830S: PROGRESS AND NOSTALGIA

In 1820 New York City was a regional center ready to explode into national dominance. The Erie Canal, funded in 1817 and completed in 1825, made the city the most important domestic and international trade hub, for the first time linking the expanding interior of the United States to the Atlantic trade. Growing at an unprecedented rate, New York City's population tripled from 1825 to 1850, reaching over half a million people. During this period, real estate development spread north up Manhattan Island, moving from the irregular village-like streets of downtown up to the rationalized grid set out in the Commissioner's Plan of 1811, which was designed to maximize property values and trade. From the 1820s onward much of the population influx came from foreign immigration, most notably from Ireland and Germany. By 1850 foreign-born whites constituted almost half of New York City's population. Amidst these many changes, observers often identified the first day in May as the archetypal moment of New York City life. "May Day" or "Moving Day," as it was called, was traditionally when residential lease contracts ended and the city streets turned to chaos, filling with carts transporting all the worldly goods of both rich and poor New Yorkers; "May Day" was a symbolic moment resonant of the bustling, transitory nature of city life in the period.

Given the disruptive effect of these transformations in New York, it is perhaps not surprising that the literature of the city in the 1820s and 1830s was nostalgic, drawing upon older English literary models and often taking the city and the region's past as its subject. Washington Irving (1783–1859) had the first American transatlantic literary success with The Sketch Book (1819–1820). Written in England, this work joined descriptions of English travel with sentimental sketches and, most famously, included the stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," folklore tales that drew upon New York State's colonial Dutch heritage. Before the international success of The Sketch Book, Irving was well known as a regional author for his satirical sketches of New York types in Salmagundi (1807; written with his brother William Irving [1766–1821] and James Kirke Paulding [1778–1860]) and for a comic history of the city from the perspective of an "antiquarian" of Dutch descent, Diedrich Knickerbocker, in A History of New York (1809). Irving returned to New York after his time in England and continued a long career as an author, adding travelogues, histories and biographies to the sketches that made him famous. "Knickerbocker" became a name applied to other New York writers of this generation, including Paulding and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867), who had success with his Byronic poem of Federalist New York, Fanny (1819), but would leave writing to work as the assistant to John Jacob Astor (1763–1848), the wealthiest man in the city. William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) is often associated with this group despite being a New England émigré. Like Halleck, Bryant also abandoned early poetic success for a career in law and journalism, holding the position of editor of the New York Evening Post. Even the most successful Knickerbocker authors often characterized authorship as a leisure pursuit rather than a vocation. In some ways, this reflected the economic realities of the American literary marketplace, but it was also a pose that recalled the eighteenth-century English ideals of the gentleman-author.

Despite being a New York author of the same generation, James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was not associated with the Knickerbockers. The son of the founder of Cooperstown, in upstate New York, Cooper became the first successful U.S. novelist through his application of Sir Walter Scott's model of the historical novel to the setting of his father's frontier in his Leatherstocking novels: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). Cooper wrote other types of novels throughout his career but experienced little critical or commercial success with them. Notable amongst his other works was the comedy of manners, Home as Found (1838), which savagely attacked the pretensions and provincialism of New York society from the perspective of an American family returning from Europe; this unmistakably autobiographical frame did little to endear Cooper to his fellow New Yorkers and American readers more generally. Although very different from Irving and the Knickerbockers in style and literary format, Cooper's most popular work was also shaped by a cultural nostalgia that seemed at odds with the dynamic city in which he wrote.

THE 1840S: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND CLASS CONFLICT

During the 1840s canal transportation gave way to the railroad, leading to yet further penetration of trade throughout the nation. Meanwhile, industrialized modes of production began to take hold. Responding to these shifts, New York City continued to grow and consolidate its power as the nation's financial and transportation hub in the decade. This had its effect as well on the business of literature in the city. At this time New York publishing houses such as Harper & Brothers began to conceive of a truly national audience for their authors. In the 1840s the Harpers' publishing house, a multistory and largely mechanized factory downtown, was reflective of the city's broader turn to industrialization after the construction of the Croton Waterworks (1842) which brought new supplies of water to Manhattan and helped power the steam engines that drove New York's 550 percent growth in industrial investment from 1840 to 1860. The increasing mechanization of printing helped fuel the proliferation of newspapers and magazines throughout the nation but nowhere as much as in New York City, where as many as three hundred different journals were published between 1820 and 1850. Newspapers and magazines were no longer merely local. Bundled for distant sellers and transported by rail free of postal charges, New York papers could be sold throughout the nation. During the 1840s, New York newspaper, magazine, and book publishing became an industry.

As a result of its new importance to the business of American literary publication, New York attracted a variety of authors from around the nation. The southerner Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) published his second book of poetry in New York City in 1831 after being expelled from West Point. He returned to New York in 1837–1838 (when he published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) and again in 1844–1847, earning a livelihood writing stories and poetry for newspapers and magazines and briefly becoming the sole editor and proprietor of the Broadway Journal before it failed. In 1846 Poe brought special attention to the city's authors with his series of profiles, "The Literati of New York City" in Godey's Lady's Book. The series was curtailed after Poe's blunt assessments were met with threats of legal action, but despite the often-personal insults offered, Poe stressed the prominence of New York writers in American letters as a whole. Nathaniel Parker Willis, another émigré from New England, came to New York in 1831 and became a national celebrity for his work as editor and writer for newspapers and magazines, including the Evening Mirror and the Home Journal. Later, Willis's sister, Sara Payson Willis Parton ("Fanny Fern," 1811–1872) also achieved celebrity and wealth as a columnist for New York City newspapers in the 1850s and as a novelist of an autobiographical story of her struggles, Ruth Hall (1855). Even Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), famous for his nature writings and association with Concord, Massachusetts, came to New York to pursue a literary career. Although his tenure was brief, it indicated the allure of the professional opportunities that New York offered to writers from all over the country in this period.

New York's astounding population growth, economic successes, and turn toward industrialized production reshaped the social landscape of city life, revealing dramatic differences between the wealthy and poor that challenged long-held assumptions about American democracy. The city's poor lived and worked in the older but increasingly industrialized downtown area, most famously in the Five Points neighborhood, which was notorious for its prostitutes, bars, and gambling dens. The city's wealthy (often called the "upper ten" for the wealthiest ten thousand people) lived uptown in new homes built to their spec-ifications and attended exclusive institutions like the opulent Grace Church and the Astor Place Opera House, which sought to bring foreign-language opera to those willing to pay the high subscription rate.

Exploring the inherent drama of these evident social extremes, literary depictions of city life fascinated New Yorkers and the nation as a whole. Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), a controversial figure due to her endorsement of abolitionism in the 1830s, regained a national audience as editor of New York's National Anti-Slavery Standard for her series of sketches, "Letters from New-York" (1841–1843). In these "letters" to an unnamed friend, Child responded to the city's poverty and crime (visiting the city's new prison and asylum on Blackwell's Island) and its beauty (rhapsodizing over new fountains making use of water brought into the city by the Croton Waterworks). Margaret Fuller, a feminist and transcendentalist, moved from Boston to New York in 1844 to work for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. Fuller used her position as a columnist on the arts to present an idealist, reformist perspective on a variety of city subjects, including the treatment of the poor and criminals. She also offered suggestions for how the city's newly wealthy might best contribute to the benefit of their fellow citizens. Her position was most notable in U.S. literary history, however, as the first full-time book reviewer for a daily newspaper in the United States, reflecting the new importance that literature played in people's day-to-day life. Another employee of Greeley's Tribune, George G. Foster (d. 1856), reached a wide audience with sketches of distinctive and seedy elements of city life, including the series "New York in Slices" (1848) and "New York by Gas-Light" (1849). In a city expanding beyond anyone's comprehension, Fuller's reformism and Foster's sensationalistic promise of an insider's view of adulterers, prostitutes, and con men offered the seemingly contradictory pleasures of reformist idealism and prurient voyeurism for the Tribune's readers.

Despite the dramatic economic disparity between New York's wealthy and poor, the city's cultural life was remarkably rich in the 1840s, with entertainment options readily available to individuals from all walks of life. What one read, what theater one attended, where one shopped: these all became important indices of identity in the city. Working-class New Yorkers, members of what was called "the Bowery Republic," so named by historians for their egalitarian political beliefs and association with downtown's Bowery Street, had their own fashions, cultural venues, and institutions—from cheap theaters with raucous "pit" seating to the often-brawling fire companies. Working-class New Yorkers also had their own literature, from the easily affordable "penny" newspapers, to "dime" novels that often cast workers as heroes, to plays that catered to their interests and sensibilities. Wealthy New Yorkers, by contrast, could be found promenading on Broadway, a street known for its elaborate commercial display, including Alexander Turney Stewart's "Marble Palace," a five-story precursor to the department store, built in 1844.

In 1849 the Astor Place Riots pitted the two worlds of New York City against each other in a surprisingly violent encounter based upon what started as a trivial feud between two actors. The riots revealed the deep social tensions and conflicts between the divided classes. Populist support for the American actor Edwin Forrest (1806–1872) by the Bowery Republic met up against the support on the part of the upper ten for the English actor Charles Macready (1793–1873), so that city police and state militia were posted inside and outside the Opera House. The popular protest became so heated that it ended in the state militia firing on the crowd outside the Opera House and killing more than twenty people. The Astor Place Riots have been called an important moment in the development of a distinction between "high" and "low" culture in American life. While this claim may be subject to debate, there is little question that the riots signaled the central place that cultural experience played in the conflicts of class and politics in nineteenth-century American life.

New York City writers participated on both sides of the Astor Place Riots, reflecting the complex place of authors within the class divides of the nineteenth century. Edward Zane Carroll Judson ("Ned Buntline," 1823–1886), one of the nineteenth century's most prolific and popular authors, wrote sensational novels such as The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848). Perhaps best known for his role in mythologizing "Buffalo Bill" Cody in dime novels of the West of the 1860s and 1870s, Judson was sentenced to a year in prison for his role in inciting the popular crowd to violence during the Astor Place Riots. On the other side, signers to a petition in support of Macready included Washington Irving and Herman Melville (1819–1891). Melville was born in New York City and returned to the city after the success of his early South Pacific travelogues, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), to pursue a career as an author. Although he moved to the Berkshires during the writing of his most famous work, Moby-Dick (1851), Melville often came back to New York to write, continued to work with New York publishers, and often took up New York as a location for his fiction, including his short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street" (1853), which presents the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between Christian values of brotherhood and the competitive and hierarchical "common sense" values of business in the mercantile world of the city.

THE 1850S AND 1860S: IMPENDING CRISIS AND THE SEARCH FOR UNITY

Perhaps the quintessential New York City writer was the poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who came to national attention in the 1850s and 1860s with the appearance of multiple, extensively revised editions of his poetry collection, Leaves of Grass. Born in Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, Whitman moved to New York City in 1841 and entered the city's life and literature through newspapers and magazines. A literary jack-of-all-trades in his early career, Whitman covered the news of city police and coroner's offices, political meetings, opera performances, and art exhibits for newspapers. He also published poetry and fiction, including a sensational temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). In the 1850s, Whitman experienced a professional crisis linked to the political crisis of the impending sectional division of the Civil War. Whitman had been a committed member of the Democratic Party, personally invested in its populist politics and professionally involved as a writer and editor for newspapers allied with and financially supported by the party. Over the course of the 1850s, however, Whitman became increasingly uncomfortable with the Democratic Party's support of slavery.

The first edition of his lifelong poetic project, Leaves of Grass (1855), was an attempt to create a poetic persona who could embody and reconcile the many differences—political, racial, class, and moral—that threatened national unity. In the poem "Song of Myself," Whitman turned often to images of the city life and its inhabitants, from the "jour printer" to the "machinist" to the "prostitute," to imagine a national union that would forestall the predicted political crisis. In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856), Whitman took the common urban experience of the commuter ferry and transformed it into a meditation upon the universal bonds of corporeality and consciousness. In the overtly homosexual poems of "Calamus" of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote of Manhattan as a "city of orgies," described male lovers holding hands and kissing amid crowded scenes of city life, and imagined an utopian "new city of Friends," "invincible to the attacks / of the whole of the rest of the earth" (p. 164), casting the liberated experience of urban homosexuals as an answer to the imminent crisis of national disunion.

Whitman was not the only New Yorker seeking to ease the sense of impending crisis within the nation and city. Identifying city life itself as the greatest problem, many New Yorkers called for the development of a park within the city to offset the unremitting sprawl of urban development.

After much debate and political wrangling in the 1850s, land was acquired and in 1856 the Greensward Plan of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824–1895) was approved for Central Park. Olmsted, who went on to become North America's most influential landscape designer, had earlier pursued a career as author—writing a series of investigative travelogues about the South—and editor of the influential Putnam's Magazine, which published the work of Melville, Thoreau, Bryant, and Henry James, among others. Olmsted and Vaux's plan for Central Park was characterized by the aesthetic values of the picturesque, transforming the space from a mixture of farmland, scattered small communities, and undeveloped tracts into a carefully planned "natural" landscape of rolling green fields, lakes, and wooded areas. In addition to its aesthetic appeal, Central Park was intended to offer public health benefits, functioning as the city's "lungs" and helping to forestall the spread of disease as well having the social benefits of providing cultural and recreational resources for the masses and thus functioning as a safety valve for class conflict in the increasingly divided city.

Central Park, however beneficial, unfortunately did not solve New York City's social problems. Construction of the park was suspended during the Civil War, and it was ironically during this time that social division came to a head in the city, with the 1863 Draft Riots. New York's poor and working class, largely affiliated with the Democratic Party by longstanding tradition, were not supportive of the war effort, in part due to a belief that freed slaves would become their economic competitors. Although the possession of slaves in New York State had been wholly outlawed by 1827, New York City had a relatively small African American population, largely because of its prejudicial climate.

When Abraham Lincoln instituted the Union draft, with a provision that allowed the wealthy to purchase the services of a replacement, workers' protests turned violent. In July 1863 the protests spiraled into looting and violence against African Americans over the course of four days. City police and state militia could not stop the rioting and the Union Army was called in. This amounted to a military occupation of New York City. Melville's poetry cycle narrating the course of the Civil War, Battle-Pieces (1866), included a poem entitled "The HouseTop: A Night Piece" that described the riot, and saw the army's presence as

The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied 

Which holds that Man is naturally good, 

And—more—is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.

(P. 87)

Like Melville, many writers and other New Yorkers during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath came to question the optimism they had earlier expressed about the American nation and their great city.

CONCLUSION

The end of the war saw the extension of New York City's antebellum economic, social, and cultural trends across the nation, with the United States as a whole experiencing population growth and urbanization, the march of industrialism and the spread of a commercialized industry of the arts and entertainment. New York City retained its position as the dominant center of United States trade and financial power and solidified its position as cultural capital. For example, in 1870 the wealthiest New Yorkers helped to establish the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, creating the first American home for important European art. In the midst of northern postwar growth, New York City became the undisputed center of what Mark Twain mockingly called in 1874 "the Gilded Age," an era in which the national prosperity cast a superficial layer over moral hypocrisy and a range of injustices. In the decades to follow, a new generation of writers associated with the literary movement of realism, including such figures as William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane, would explore the new, but not wholly new, social extremes of New York City life.

See also "Bartleby, the Scrivener"; "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; English Literature; Immigration; Knickerbocker Writers; Labor; Landscape Architecture; Leatherstocking Tales; Leaves of Grass; Political Parties; Sensational Fiction; Technology; Urbanization

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Child, Lydia Maria. Letters from New-York. 1843. Edited by Bruce Mills. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

Foster, George. New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches. Edited by Stuart M. Blumin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Fuller, Margaret. Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846. Edited by Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, the Scrivener." 1853. In The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, pp. 13–45. Chicago: Northwestern University Press–Newberry Library, 1987.

Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. 1866. New York: Da Capo, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. Edited by Francis Murphy. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Secondary Works

Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Miller, Perry. The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

John Evelev