The Trouble with Tom (30 page)

The Talking Heads

The life and works of George Lippard have been slowly making their way back into the canon of nineteenth-century literature, thanks in no small part to the efforts of my old professor David Reynolds.
The
Quaker
City (also known as
The
Monks w o n k
Hal.
is now easy to find in reprints. It really is too bad that Lippard didn't get to put on his stage extravaganza of
The Quaker
City, for it would have been some fine viewing to see how he pulled off the culminating vision of the book: archvillain Devil-Bug's dream of the destruction of Philadelphia in the far-off year of 1950. Led by a mournful ghost through the ruins of Independence Hall—for the republic has fallen and monarchy reestablished—Devil-Bug gleefully finds only one telltale institution of the old America still thriving:

"It is the gallows!" said the Ghost. "And thanks to the exertions of some of the Holy Ministers of God, it is never idle! Day after day its rope is distended by the wriggling body of some murderer . . ."

"Hurrah!" shouted Devil-Bug. 'The gallows is livin' yet! Hurrah!"

"For some years it was utterly abolished," said the Ghost.— 'Murders became fay in number, convicts were restored to society, redeemed from their sins, and gaols began to echo to the solitary footsteps of the gaoler. But these good Preachers arose in the Senate and the Pulpit and plead beseechingly for blood!"

"Hurrah for the Preachers! Them's the jockies!"

"'Give us but the gibbet,' they shrieked. 'Only give us the gibbet and we'll reform the world!' "

'They said this? The jolly fellers!"

Devil-Bug merrily watches the vengeful dead rise up from their graves and slaughter each other all over again in a massive conflagration on the Schuylkill River, where fleets of thousands of floating coffins, piloted by corpses, row to doleful drumbeats sounded upon burning skulls affixed at the prow of each casket.

Ah, Philly in the old days!

Lippard's
Thomas Paine: Author-Soldier of the American Revolution, delivered in Philadelphia on January 25,1852
, is altogether more rare; a reprint can be found in the Gimbell Collection of the American Philosophical Library in Philadelphia. An editor's note by Jason Elliott notes the effect that Lippard's speech had in reviving Paine's popularity among publishers.

Charles Hammond's
Lightpom the Spirit World
was published by different publishers in various cities across the country, but most copies turn up from the New York publishing house of Partridge & Brittan, which did a roaring business in the popular spiritualist writings of A. J. Davis, along with hawking their magazine
The Spiritual Telegrapb
—a title that, for the 1850s, must have carried the edgy cachet of the latest technology. Hammond's Boston publisher was Bela Marsh, who was also a primary publisher of Paine's "sequel,"
The Philosophy of Creation
(1854) by Gordon Wood. Curiously, the Library of Congress's copy of Wood's Philosophy of Creation comes from the personal collection of Harry Houdini, who was no doubt much amused by Paine's ethereal shenanigans. Inevitably, the fad produced spoofs as well, such as Henry Horn's 1864 collection
Strange Visitors
, which features "new works" by such deceased writers as Poe, Irving, and Margaret Fuller. But Jacob Harshman's
Series of Communications
(1852), in case you hadn't guessed, was very earnestly self-published—and its enclosed printer's slip of errata is perhaps the most hopelessly outgunned copyediting effort in the history of publishing. Maybe it didn't help that, as the author claimed in his introduction, "They [the ghosts] always spelled spirit SPERIT, and stated that it was the proper way."

The fantastical press accounts of images being retained on dead men's retinas are recounted in
Notes and Queries
magazine article "Impressions on the Eye," in its October 3,1857, issue. As an urban legend, it had legs, for precisely the same press claims were reported again a decade later, under the title "Photographic Miracle," in the
Notes and Queries
issues of June 9 and 23, 1866.

But for an endlessly fascinating pseudoscience, nothing quite beats phrenology. The best glimpse into the daily workings and cultural spread of phrenology can be found simply by leafing through old issues of Fowler's monthly
American Phrenological Journal
, which had a staggering seventy-three-year run from 1838 to 1911. The latest celebrities and reformers of the day are pictured in each issue—along with analysis of their heads, naturally—and the result is a fascinating and forgotten glimpse into both phrenology and popular culture at large. Fowler's own
Practical Phrenology
is another obvious starting point; its sales were so great that there are constantly copies to be found in online auctions, and not uncommonly with Orson's or Lorenzo's signature on the personalized title page. Fowler's
Sey-Culture
(1847) is if anything even more valuable, as its goals of progressive phrenology are more explicitly stated.

In describing Fowler's store I found his
Catalogue of Portraits, Busts, and Casts
(n.d.) brochure helpful; many of those masks eventually wound up in the Fowler Mask Collection at the New-York Historical Society, where they can still be seen today. Of Fowler's innumerable other pamphlets and books, I'm especially fond of the
Hydropathic Cookbook
, perhaps because it includes an anti-meat soliloquy delivered in verse by the ghost of a cockroach. The cockroach is the meat, so to speak, that accidentally turns up in a piece of bread:

A cockroach crawled o'er a baker's shelf,
Waving his horns and looking for pelf;
The baker, upon his bread board below,
Was kneading and rolling about the dough.
The board received such terrible thumps,
As the baker's rolling-pin struck the lumps,
The shelf was shaken, the cockroach fell—
Ah, where? the baker he could not tell!

Who says Whitman was Fowler's only poet of importance?

In addition to Fowler's seminal octagon work
Home For
All
(1849), Carl Schmidt's self-published
The Octagon Fad
(1958) is an invaluable state-by-state compilation of surviving examples of octagonal architecture. Schmidt also includes many floor plans for these buildings, and these are quite revealing: ideological fervor eventually gave way to pragmatism, and many buildings sprouted naughty rectangular additions to the back in order to house modern kitchens, pantries, and the like. A later undated book by Schmidt and Philip Parr, which looks to be from the 1970s, is
More About
Octagons;
both books, though uncommon, can be found at the New York Public Library. The dire fate of the Octagon settlement can be read about in Miriam Colt's memoir
Went to Kansas
(1862), which includes appendices of the venture's charter and other information; Russell Hickman's article "The Vegetarian and Octagon Settlement Companies" in
Kansas Historical Quarter4
for November 1933 remains one of the best summaries of this fiasco.

For an inside look at the movement—and such oddities as John Brown's final communication—Nelson Sizer's 1882 memoir
Forty
Years in Phrenology
is well worth reading.

Jarvis's plaster death mask of Paine proved to be part of a long and curious history of death masks. Aside from the Fowlers, the preeminent collector in the 1800s was Laurence Hutton, whose collection is now owned by Princeton University. Hutton is better known today, when he is known at all, as Mark Twain's friend and editor at Harper & Brothers. But death masks were his great hobby, and they are altogether more haunting than any bust or heroic statue. The effect is that of a man sleeping; you realize you are seeing them as perhaps only their spouse and children ever did: unguarded, a little unkempt, and unconscious. "He does not pose; he does not 'try to look pleasant,'" Hutton explained of his unwilling subjects. "In his mask he is seen, as it were, with his mask off." Hutton had masks of Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth; he could gaze upon the faces of Lincoln, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. Grant and Sherman both stared out from Hutton's display cases, the pair vanquished by a more implacable foe than they ever could have imagined. Jonathan Swift cast a baleful eye over Hutton's stud5 so did the surprisingly brawny head and shoulders of Samuel Johnson and the eternal good-hair-day features of actor David Garrick. The result of Hutton's obsessive pursuit was surely one of the strangest volumes his publishing house ever printed: Portraits in Plaster, released by Harper & Brothers in 1894. It is a sumptuous old volume, crammed with smooth photographic plates in black-and-white, face after face of death.

As you might imagine of such a volume upon such a singular interest, not many copies were printed. The copy I found, entombed peacefully in the "Sculpture/How-To" section of a used bookstore in Portland, had the sturdy, well-maintained look of a book that nobody has bothered reading in several generations. Inside the front cover, though, a surprise waited. Spidery handwriting spiked and dipped across the creamy paper:

Horace Traubel
His book.
by
his friend
Laurence Hutton.

What a curious route this book must have taken, bumping along the currents of the streams of time before coming to rest here among the reeds. Horace Traubel had been Walt Whitman's faithful assistant in the final years of that poet's life. Today Traubel is famous—infamous, really—among Whitman scholars for writing down a nine-volume account, millions of words, of every single detail of Whitman's final years.

Hutton started his collection when a boy found a pile of what were probably George Combe's abandoned death masks in a trash can at the corner of Second Street and Second Avenue; a collector's widow was getting rid of the hideous things. I was first put onto the story of the trash can by Frank Weitenkampfs 1947 memoir
Manhattan Kaleidoscope.
The book is long out of print, but it deserves reissue. Weitenkampf, by then an ancient and retired prints curator at the New York Public Library, offers a wonderfully scattershot stroll through Victorian Manhattan, as when he recalls the time in 1892 that ax-wielding country lumberjacks were brought in by the city to fell the city's old telegraph poles—really, just imagining Irish and Polish immigrants gawking out of their tenements at the burly chaw-chewing lumberjacks makes for a pleasantly off-kilter thought. Weitenkampf is particularly fine at conveying a sense of life as an artist back then; he describes one ramshackle art school on Bond Street where "snow would sift through the roof, to the discomfort of the model posing in the altogether."

As to the eventual fate of Fowler's own building, there were numerous
New York Times
articles in the 1960s about the construction site for the Federal Building, especially during the 1964 evictions. The key pieces are "Vast U.S. Office Building Planned at Foley Square" (11/24/58), "Architects Urge Foley Sq. Delay" (6/14/ 62), "Digging Shifts Foley Sq. Land" (5/1/64), "Evictions Pushed at Foley Square" (5/6/64), and "New Federal Office Building" (8/29/ 68).

The rise of scanned indexes of newspapers from across the country has opened up a wealth of information about the Fowlers and the history of phrenology. One of my favorite minor items turned up in the February 17, 1843, issue of the Brook Daily Eagle, recounting a phrenological professor who was entertaining an audience by stimulating the various significant bumps of a slumbering subject: "Finally he touched the organ of Combativeness, when the slumberer gave the professor such a blow in his 'bread basket' as to lay him sprawling upon the floor."

It is mystifying that no comprehensive history of the Fowlers and their phrenological movement has been published for three decades. Madeleine Stern's splendid 1971 account
Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers
proved invaluable to me, as did Ms. Stern herself—she still keeps a rare book shop on the Upper West Side. Publishers, will you please do her the courtesy of reprinting this fine work?

Personal Effects

The first thing you must know is that the doorplates are back in box 46, swaddled in their old gauze and ribbon: and my apologies if they fall out on your lap. As anyone who has seen me murder the roll of gift wrap on Chistmas Eve can attest, I am terrible at wrapping things.

There really are some odd things to be found in those boxes of Conway's. In one of them, I came across a framed piece of art: a placid scene of people by a pond and a church. But look closely, and it gets rather strange. The flame is comprised of pieces of rolled-up bits of colored paper, and the illustration itself is made of rolled-up bits of hair and ribbon. A note on the back reads: "Made by one of Napoleon's soldiers when a prisoner—with hair on a piece of ribbon—(England)." God knows where Conway found
that.
But aside from the treasure trove of Conway's papers and possessions at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, much of this chapter is drawn from Moncure Daniel Conway's invaluable
Autobiography: Memories and Experiences
(2
vols., 1904), and it is worth laying your hands on a copy. The man is a veritable Forrest Gump of the Victorian world; his memoir is one of the great overlooked eyewitness accounts of transcendentalism, abolitionism, and radical politics in both the U.S. and U.K.

The book is full of odd little anecdotes. When he first arrived in Boston, the local historian the Reverend Dr. Alexander Young showed the wide-eyed Southerner around the great city's streets, taking in the sights of buildings which, just barely within living memory, had been the backdrop of revolution. He even met one ancient lady who held among her earliest memories that of the Boston Tea Party—which, historians were always quick to point out, only involved the pointedly political dumping of tea, and not the grubby thievery of it.

Funny—how living memory doesn't always match with what is written down. "The young men in her parents' household had been in the riot," Moncure marveled, "and she told me her recollection of them rushing in, and emptying their shoes of tea which they had preserved from destruction for the benefit of their grandmother." It is a mark of just how valuable tea was back then that tea crammed into someone's sweaty shoes was still deemed palatable.

Conway was a prolific writer in his later years, not least including his
Life
of Thomas Paine
(1892) and his
Collected Writings
of
Thomas
Paine
(1894); those interested in Conway himself will find an interesting cross-section of his writings from over the years in
Moncure D. Conway: Addresses and Reprints,
1850-1907
(1909)' ranging from his early proslavery writing to the liberal jeremiads against imperialism in his later years. I also found useful information in Edward Walker's eulogistic
A
Sketch and Appreciation of Moncure
Daniel Conway
(1908), and in a lengthy and genial remembrance published in 1907 by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The latter, a clipping of which I found pasted inside a copy of Conway's
Autobiography,
bore neither a date nor the name of the publication, though it seems to have run in a Boston newspaper in the days after Conway's death on November 15, 1907.

There are also two books on Conway—Mary Burtis's
Moncure
Conway,
1832-1907
(1952), and John D'Entremont's
Southern
Emancipator: Moncure Conway, the American Years,
1832-1865
(1987), and both are useful as such things go, particularly if you are trying to save yourself the trouble of reading Conway's weighty autobiography. But don't save yourself that trouble. Plowing through both volumes of Conway's own account is well worth it. Loyd Easton's
Hegel's First American Followers
(1966) provides an additional useful bit of context to Conway's intellectual growth while in Cincinnati.

Gilbert Vale's Life
of Thomas Paine
is still to be found in major libraries, including the New York Public Library, but acquiring your own copy will cost you dearly-unless, of course, you are fortunate enough to rescue a splendidly horrid copy like mine from a rubbish bin. Augustine Birrell's quote on the "villainous" printing of old editions of Paine comes from a review of Conway's Life
of Thomas
Paine,
included in Birrell's collection
In the Name of the Bodleian:
And Other Essays
(1905). Though not known today, Birrell was esteemed as a belles-lettrist, and his books still have their charms. Discussing the much-loved—though only among very owlish bib-liomaniacs—
Life and Errors
of John Dutton (1705), Birrell includes this pricelessly frank bit of advice about reading eighteenth-century memoirs: "[It] may be safely recommended to everyone, except, indeed, to the unfortunate man or woman who is not an adept in the art, craft, and mystery of skipping."

But really: do go and buy Conway's autobiography. And do not skip.

Every once in a while one comes across odd little sideways glances at the great figures of American literature; one other pleasant example of this is Herbert Gleason's
Through the Year With Thoreau
(1917), a book-length photographic essay which revisits the various sites, plants, and animals of Thoreau's writings. Gleason did some wonderful detective work over the years on foot to find the actual coves, clearings, and pastures Thoreau wrote about. And while time had already obliterated some of the vistas Thoreau had seen decades earlier, a surprising number of sights were still to be seen, including the pile of stones that marked the remains of Thoreau's cabin. Gleason also spoke with a number of locals, some of whom still remembered Thoreau and who were not in any awe of him. Meeting an old man who used to drive the butcher's cart from house to house, and thus had known virtually every resident of the area, Gleason asked him if by any chance he'd known Henry David Thoreau:

"Henry Thoreauy—with an expression of undisguised contempt"—I knew Henry Thoreau ever since he was a boy, and I never had much of an opinion of him.
And
I
hain't seen nothing
since to change my mind!'

As Gleason dryly concludes, "It is curious to note how little Thoreau was esteemed by most of his fellow villagers."