Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [431]
Robinson, a handsome, ruddy youth of nineteen who dressed in the height of fashion, was one of Jewett’s most ardent suitors. Scion of a fine old Connecticut family, Robinson worked for Joseph Hoxie, a Yankee cloth merchant. Hoxie was a charter member of the New-York City Temperance Society, and he supported a lecture series promoting industrious habits and moral deportment among young clerks. So far as his employer knew, Robinson was an unblemished exemplar of proper behavior.
In fact, Robinson was a habitué of whorehouses. Since meeting Jewett in June 1835, Robinson had been visiting her several times a week. He sent her romantic epistles, books, literary periodicals. He went with her to the Park and Bowery theaters. He boasted of his relations with her to his friends, many of whom also shared her favors.
Like their plebeian male counterparts, Robinson and his confraternity of “sporting men”—clerks, cashiers, and fledgling merchants—adopted promiscuous bachelorhood as a way of life, defying the culture of chastity demanded by the evangelicals, and even the conventional proprieties adhered to by Knickerbocker businessmen. Many of these macho clerks lived on their own, as did the single male laborers in working-class boardinghouses, and were equally beyond the moral surveillance of employer, family, or church. Robinsonian dandies, in satisfying their sexual needs through the marketplace, benefited as well from the differential standard of sexual propriety for men and women.
In 1831 McDowall and his Magdalen Society had forced issues of sexuality into the public forum; they had been ruthlessly suppressed and civic silence restored. In 1834 the New York Female Moral Reform Society had redeclared war against male promiscuity, but its crusade remained a marginal and minority preoccupation.
The Jewett murder injected the issue of class into the debate about sex in the city at just the moment when the penny press had arrived, with the result that the conversation was catapulted into the mainstream of popular discourse. Traditional sixpenny editors had preferred not to talk about such sordid issues. Bryant pronounced the case a “disagreeable subject.” But the Herald, Sun, and Transcript lavished oceans of lurid prose on the murder, making it the most intensely covered story of the decade. And, as they took violently opposing positions on the guilt or innocence of the parties, their pugnacious exchanges generated additional excitement, further boosting the circulation of all three.
Bennett led off with a melodramatic recounting of his visit to the scene of the crime. His alluring description of Jewett’s body—“the perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici”—was a bit odd, to be sure, given that the corpse had been hacked and roasted. His report of an exchange with Madam Townsend, replete with verbatim dialogue and generally considered the first formal interview ever recorded in an American newspaper, was rendered similarly suspect by Townsend’s denial, related in the Sun, that she had ever talked with him.
But Bennett was after more than mere facts—or what he called “dull police reports.” He had a thesis to promote: that Robinson, despite appearances, was a “young, amiable, and innocent youth.” In the role of murderer, Bennett cast a series of candidates. First he said one of the other prostitutes had killed Jewett out of jealousy. After all, he asked, given the brutality, “is it not more likely the work of a woman?” Then he blamed Townsend, an “old miserable hag, who has spent her whole life in seducing and inveigling the young and old to their destruction.” He even implied that Jewett herself bore moral responsibility for her own death: in becoming one of the “licentious inmates of a fashionable brothel,” she had violated the canons of true womanhood and put herself beyond the