Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [544]
Below these Everests lay ranges of more specialized weeklies and monthlies. New York published fifty-two religious periodicals at mid-century. There were magazines devoted to ethnic affairs, banking, sports, ladies’ fashions, politics, culture, science, humor, trade and industrial technology. Even the American Agriculturalist made its home in Manhattan, noting that “more Farmers and Planters resort here than to any other city in the Union.”
The magazine spectrum too had its spicier bandwidth, represented most notoriously by the National Police Gazette. In 1845 journalist George Wilkes, the New York-born son of an artisan cabinetmaker, was convicted of criminal libel while coediting the Sub-terranean with the pugnacious Mike Walsh. After serving four weeks in jail, Wilkes penned a pamphlet (Mysteries of the Tombs) exposing corruption in the city’s criminal justice system, then founded the Gazette to continue and extend his investigations. Imitating London’s Police Gazette, Wilkes gave his readers lurid capsule reports of crimes in the city and around the nation (in columns titled “Seductions,” “Rapes,” and “Murders”), interspersed with criminal biographies (“The Lives of the Felons”), trial coverage of crimes involving sex and violence, and a glossary of criminal slang (the “Rogue’s Lexicon”). Lively, at times quasi-pornographic graphics helped boost Police Gazette sales to over forty thousand by 1850.
The Gazette and its hundreds of periodical rivals made New York’s literary marketplace intensely competitive. With journals being founded and folded almost daily, Manhattan was perilous for entrepreneurs but a magnet for would-be professional authors, whose arrival further altered the process of literary production. Writing had long been an amateur affair. Gentlemen authors wrote for their friends and peers; they lived for literature, not offit. Now, as one disgruntled Boston literatus put it in 1843, “literature begins to assume the aspect and undergo the mutations of trade,” with authors hoping to sell their literary goods to impersonal and far-flung audiences, addressed by advertisement.
Writers found themselves advertised as well; they were packaged as commodities, their portraits and biographies promoted. Horace Greeley, acting as Henry David Thoreau’s informal literary agent (an emerging profession), told him: “You may write with an angel’s pen, yet your writings have no mercantile, money value till you are known and talked of as an author.” Marketing, in turn, increased the importance of reviewing—another budding profession. When Margaret Fuller moved to the city to work on Greeley’s Tribune, she became the first full time book reviewer on an American paper. Laudatory excerpts were cited in ads or the book itself, and while most were honestly come by, others were bought and paid for.
Writers were ambivalent about publishing’s transformation into a capitalist enterprise. Formerly authors had financed their own books, kept the profits, and paid publishers a percentage for printing and distributing the work. Now the flow of funds had reversed itself, with publishers fronting costs and paying only “royalties” to authors. Yet the new system, along with the creation of a national market, clearly increased potential sales. Authors might therefore be simultaneously dismayed at being encouraged to tailor their output to the marketplace and exhilarated at the chance to become self-supporting.
As writers poured into the city, supply outstripped even the surging demand and further tilted the balance of power from authors to publishers. By 1851 editor Nathaniel Parker Willis warned that New York City was the “most overstocked market in the country,” noting, “I have tried to find employment for dozens of starving writers, in vain.” Horace Greeley cautioned one upstate hopeful: “You do not realize how little the mere talent of writing well has to