The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (49 page)

“Are you in earnest?” asked Barnum.

“Certainly, quite so.”

Barnum smiled. “Really,” he said, “I am sorry I can’t accommodate Mr.

Bennett. I have not got the little sum about me; in fact, I have spent the money.”

“It will be better for you to take back the lease,” the attorney warned.

“Nonsense, I shall do nothing of the sort,” replied Barnum. “I don’t make child’s bargains.”

Exactly thirty years after his “exposé” of the faked death of Joice Heth, James Gordon Bennett had been gulled once more by P. T. Barnum, and for all his sputtering there was nothing he could do about it. So Bennett

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was forced to keep the property at Broadway and Ann, and on it he built a white-marble palace with massive black walnut doors flanked by six richly ornamented Corinthian columns. Bennett had always been a great admirer of beauty, and this was the lovely face that the
Herald
showed the city. But on the inside, where the work was actually performed, the rooms were small and the stairs made of metal, modest surroundings more in keeping with the owner’s ascetic Scottish origins. There the
Herald
remained for a quarter-century, until his son moved it to a new office building far uptown, where Broadway meets Sixth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street; and though that building is long gone, the intersection is still known as Herald Square.

As the years passed and the moon series faded from memory, its history became ever more encrusted with myth and misinformation, much of which challenged the authorship of Richard Adams Locke. In 1872, for instance, the British mathematician Augustus De Morgan produced a two-volume work entitled
A Budget of Paradoxes,
a history of ideas running contrary to conventional scientific opinion. In the first volume De Morgan devoted a brief section to “The Herschel Hoax,” which he called “a curious hoax, evidently written by a person versed in astronomy and clever at introducing probable circumstances and undesigned coincidences.” De Morgan was not sure about its original place of publication, but he had “no doubt that it was produced in the United States, by M. Nicollet, an astronomer, once of Paris, and a fugitive of some kind.”

Born in Savoy, France, Jean-Nicolas Nicollet was a respected mathematician and astronomer, at one time an assistant to the great Pierre Simon Laplace at the Paris Observatory. Financially ruined after the revolution of 1830 (he had speculated too heavily in stocks), Nicollet sailed for the United States, eventually settling in St. Louis, where he was living when the moon series appeared in the
Sun
. According to Augustus De Morgan, Nicollet composed the moon story in order to deceive—and thus exact his revenge on—his old rival François Arago, director of the Paris Observatory; in this effort he succeeded magnificently, for upon reading of Herschel’s discoveries Arago “circulated the wonders through Paris,” at least until Nicollet wrote a letter to his fellow astronomer Alexis Bouvard informing him of the hoax. “R. A. Locke,” De Morgan added for good measure, was the pseudonym Nicollet had adopted in writing the story.

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Epilogue: That Tyranny Shall Be No Longer

Even De Morgan’s editor conceded in a footnote about Nicollet that

“there does not seem to be any very tangible evidence to connect him with the story.” Nevertheless, in the second volume of
A Budget of Paradoxes
De Morgan again insisted that “I have no doubt that M. Nicollet was the author of the Moon hoax,” and further noted that the hoax had appeared shortly after Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hans Phaall—A Tale” was published in a Southern literary magazine. “I suspect,” wrote De Morgan, “that he took Poe’s story, and made it a basis for his own.”

The Nicollet theory was taken up in an 1878 book by the British astronomer Richard A. Proctor, entitled, ironically enough,
Myths and Marvels of Astronomy
. Proctor pointed out that the great astronomer Arago would not have been deceived by the moon story (as indeed he was not), but he did give credence to De Morgan’s notion that the original work had been in French and may have been written by Nicollet. However, Proctor recognized that the French-speaking Nicollet would not have been capable of the kind of prose exhibited in the
Sun
series, and a translator would thus have been required to convert the story into English. In the United States the credit for the moon series was popularly attributed to that translator— a man, Proctor explained, named “Richard Alton Locke.”

A somewhat more plausible origin story concerns Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the
Knickerbocker
, the most popular and influential literary magazine of its time. Clark himself was not a major literary talent, but he was a lively and witty writer, and his gossipy column “The Editor’s Table” was one of the most eagerly read features in the magazine. According to his entry in the 1924 edition of the
National Cyclopædia of
American Biography
, he was also the creator and coauthor of the moon series. (The entry cites the series, oddly, as “one of Clark’s most successful achievements in humorous literature.”) Lewis Gaylord Clark, the
Cyclopædia
claimed, had furnished “the incidents and imaginative part” of the series, while Richard Adams Locke was responsible for “the purely ‘scientific’ parts.” No source is provided for this statement, but it is clearly traceable to an earlier book,
History of New York City
,
Embracing an
Outline of Events from 1609 to 1830, and a Full Account of Its Development from 1830 to 1884
, in which the historian Benson J. Lossing put forward what he called “the secret history of the ‘Moon Hoax’”: Mr. Moses Y. Beach had recently become sole proprietor of the
Sun
, and Richard Adams Locke was the editor. It was desirable to have some new
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and startling features to increase its popularity, and Locke, for a consideration, proposed to prepare for it a work of fiction. To this proposal Mr. Beach agreed. Locke consulted Lewis Gaylord Clark, the editor of the
Knickerbocker Magazine
, as to the subject. The Edinburgh
Scientific Journal
was then busied with Herschel’s astronomical explorations at the Cape of Good Hope, and Clark proposed to make these the basis of the story. It was done. Clark was the real inventor of the incidents, the imaginative part, while to Locke was intrusted the ingenious task of unfolding the discoveries. Messrs. Beach, Clark, and Locke were in daily consultation while the hoax was in preparation. It was thus a joint product.

Unfortunately for Lossing’s “secret history,” it was Benjamin Day, not Moses Yale Beach, who owned the
Sun
in 1835; Beach did not buy the paper until two years later. Moreover, Lewis Gaylord Clark could not have been reading about John Herschel in the Edinburgh
Scientific Journal
, because such a journal did not exist;
Edinburgh Journal of Science
was Locke’s incorrect rendering of the title of the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
. Nor was that journal, or any other, “busied with Herschel’s astronomical explanations,” for Sir John had not yet revealed any of the findings made at his observatory in Cape Town—a silence that had allowed the
Sun
to reveal the fictitious “discoveries” in the first place.

Thus there were three notable errors in Benson Lossing’s paragraph-long history of the Moon Hoax—a history that had somehow remained

“secret” for fifty years until he revealed it. Lossing presented no evidence for his claims other than his own assertion of them, nor did any hint of his thesis about Clark’s involvement in the hoax ever surface anywhere else.

For what it is worth, Lewis Gaylord Clark himself never claimed authorship of the moon series, nor did Richard Adams Locke ever mention him in his own discussion of its creation. Any connection between Clark and the series is purely speculative; but what link there is can be traced, fittingly enough, to Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark detested one another (each man saw the other as everything that was wrong with American literature), and for years they carried on an astonishingly vicious feud in the pages of the country’s literary magazines. (To Clark, Poe was “a mortified but impotent littérateur . . . an ambitious ‘authorling’ perhaps of a small volume of effete and lamentable trash,” while Poe pronounced Clark “noticeable for
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nothing in the world except for the markedness by which he is noticeable for nothing.”) Nearly a century later, in his introduction to
The Letters of
Willis Gaylord Clark and Lewis Gaylord Clark
, Leslie W. Dunlap noted that Lewis Gaylord Clark “took an active part in the perpetration of the famous New York
Sun
‘Moon Hoax’ in 1835,” and further observed that this might have been a contributing factor in the enmity between the two: for Poe, presumably, because he suspected plagiarism in the
Sun
series, and for Clark, because Poe suggested as much. It is an intriguing proposition, but as evidence of Clark’s role in the hoax Dunlap provided only a single source—Benson J. Lossing.

If Poe actually believed that Lewis Gaylord Clark had anything to do with the moon series, he kept that idea to himself. In all of his writings about the series he referred solely to Richard Adams Locke as its author.

His last word on the subject appeared in the October 1846 issue of
Godey’s Lady’s Book,
in his
Literati of New York City
essay “Richard Adams Locke.” In that essay, Poe again presented the striking similarities that he saw between the two hoaxes, “the one of which,” he did not fail to point out, “followed immediately upon the heels of the other.” It was a subject that had long bedeviled him. This time, though, there was a crucial difference, stemming from what seems to have been a discussion between Poe and Richard Adams Locke—perhaps one that took place at the literary salon in Anne Charlotte Lynch’s home on Waverly Place two years earlier.

Having stated the case, however, in this form, I am bound to do Mr.

Locke the justice to say that he denies having seen my article prior to the publication of his own; I am bound to add, also, that I believe him.

By this time Poe had reason to feel magnanimous, because he had at last achieved literary fame. In January 1845, the
New-York Mirror
had published his poem “The Raven” to enormous critical and popular acclaim. Almost overnight Poe vaulted from obscurity to celebrity—as was demonstrated one evening when he attended the theater and one of the actors slyly inserted the word
nevermore
into the script, to the amusement of the audience and the great pleasure of the poem’s creator. Poe himself was immensely proud of the poem. (A friend once told him that he had read “The Raven” and found it to be “uncommonly fine.” “Fine!” cried Poe. “Is that all you can say of it? It is the greatest poem ever written,
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sir—the greatest poem in the world!”) He was deluged with invitations to read his famous poem, which he did in grand style. Slim and elegant, he stood in the flickering candlelight and intoned the carefully wrought ca-dences in a low, rhythmic voice like the tolling of a bell—it was, remarked a guest at one of the readings, “an event in one’s life.”

Still, success proved to be an unexpectedly weak tonic: it could not forestall the death and despair that continued to stalk him. Virginia succumbed to tuberculosis in January 1847 at the age of twenty-four, the very age his mother had been when she died of the disease. Poe’s great friend William Gowans—the New York bookseller who in 1859 would publish a new edition of the moon series as
The Moon Hoax; or, A Discovery that the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings
—described Virginia as “a wife of matchless beauty and loveliness,” who had been “as much devoted to him as a young mother is to her first-born.” In the wake of her death Poe entered a new period of dissipation and ill health. He was then living in a small cottage in the village of Fordham at the top of a hill surrounded by cherry trees, overlooking the Bronx River. (The sweeping view of fruit trees and water might have reminded him of the vista seen from John Allan’s house in Richmond.) Poe took long walks through the countryside, carried on flirtations with female admirers, and raged against his critics. Amid his grief he managed to finish some writing— including his hoax story “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” about the discovery of an alchemical method for producing gold—but none of it approached the quality of his earlier work or was received with the kind of enthusiasm that had greeted “The Raven.”

By 1849, just four years after his great success, Poe had thoroughly alienated himself from the New York literary world. His enduring feud with Lewis Gaylord Clark had turned many of the city’s most important writers against him, and his
Literati of New York City
sketches, a good number of them withering in their criticism, had not helped matters any.

In June of that year he decided it was time to move back to the South.

He embarked on a trip to his native Richmond, where he spent the summer reacquainting himself with old friends and endlessly revising his poems. In the fall he headed north again, intending to close the cottage at Fordham, but he did not get far. He arrived by steamship in Baltimore at the end of September, and sometime during the following week he began to drink. A local physician, alerted to Poe’s condition, found him, “bloated and unwashed,” sitting in a tavern on a cold, rain-swept night

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as if in a scene from one of his poems. He was shivering, drenched in perspiration, and seemingly insensible. A carriage was sent for, and he was taken to a nearby hospital, where he held on, trembling and deliri-ous, for four more days. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, the city where he had enjoyed his first literary success. He was forty years old.