Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [545]
YOUNG AMERICA
One thing this “centre” lacked was a center. New York’s literary world was fissured into warring factions, each with its own complement of writers, critics, and magazines. The two leading circles—Knickerbockers and Young Americans—disagreed on almost everything. The former were Whigs, Episcopalians, anglophiles, and hostile to all political and literary radicalisms. The latter were Jacksonians seeking a democratic literature and politics and an end to America’s cultural subservience to Europe.
Knickerbockers and Young Americans also related differently to the marketplace. Knickerbockers were prosperous gentleman amateurs—businessmen and professionals who dined well, told good stories at table, and wrote lightly ironical essays in the style of Charles Lamb. At the center of their circle was man-about-town Lewis Gaylord Clark, who since 1834 had piloted the Knickerbocker magazine, a literary monthly. Clark’s chatty “Editor’s Table” kept the nation apprised of the Rabelaisian wit of his glamorous circle, which included Henry Brevoort and Charles Astor Bristed (J. J. Astor’s grandson).
Clark didn’t pay his well-heeled writers; he considered publication its own reward. But the Knickerbocker wasn’t utterly divorced from the marketplace. Clark often “puffed” books for favored authors or publishers, tossing off glowing reviews of volumes he hadn’t necessarily bothered to read. Whig newspapers then circulated his opinions to the nation, which meant a Knickerbocker puff could sell out a book in several weeks or, conversely, kill it. By 1840, much to the annoyance of Young Americans, the conservative Knickerbocker was the most influential literary organ in America.
Clark’s nemesis, Evert Augustus Duyckinck, represented the young professionals. He himself had been bred to the business—his father was a Water Street bookseller and publisher—and unlike Clark, an upstate New Yorker, Duyckinck was an authentic Knickerbocker (his name in Dutch meant “diving duck”). An ample inheritance allowed him to attend Columbia, study law, and do the Grand Tour of Europe, after which, in 1840, he settled down in a Clinton Place town house, surrounded by a ducal library of seventeen thousand books.
Around Duyckinck gathered the first generation of New York intellectuals for whom literature was a vocation. These youthful writers shared a generational distaste for the clique of conservative critics, publishers, and magazine editors whose mutual backscratching made it difficult for newcomers to penetrate the market. But Duyckinck’s circle focused on more than moneymaking. At rollicking Saturday night suppers they debated the future of U.S. culture. They adopted the name Young America, emulating and expressing solidarity with Mazzini’s Young Italy and Daniel O’Connell’s Young Ireland. Most mere young, in their late twenties or early thirties. Like Duyckinck’s fellow Columbia alumnus Cornelius Mathews, an ardent (verging on shrill) literary nationalist, they considered New York “the seat and stronghold of this young power.” From their metropolitan base they set out to foster an American literature.
In 1840 Duyckinck and Mathews established Arcturus, a monthly literary magazine that quickly rivaled Clark’s Knickerbocker. Two years later they organized an American Copyright Club, hoping that if Harpers and other pirates were forced to pay their European sources, they might turn more often to American authors. In 1845 Duyckinck urged city writers to develop the kind of labor solidarity common in other New York trades, for only a “union among authors, bringing together the force of their aggregate works, would create a sentiment, a feeling in their behalf, a voice to which booksellers would be