Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [549]
Photographs of street life and urban residents were also touted as enabling a new, more veracious knowledge of reality. Soon, inspired by the new way of seeing, journalists and novelists were busy turning out what they claimed were “daguerreotypes” of city life.
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Seeing New York
In the 1820s city watching became a highly developed art form in Europe. Gentleman spectators sauntered the streets observing and recording impressions, then published amiable commentaries for coffeehouse and parlor readers that made bewildering, stressful cityscapes seem knowable and negotiable. One of the most popular of the genre was Life in London, or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (1821). Written by Pierce Egan, an Irish-born London printer and journalist, and illustrated by the brothers Cruikshank, Life in London recounted the fictional peregrinations of two men-about-town. Tom and Jerry, though well-born, were equally at home in the West End or at gin parlors and cockfights—places respectable people didn’t go in person.
Over the next fifteen years, London’s slums attracted ever-increasing interest, penny papers commenced their Bow Street Police Court reporting, and Charles Dickens started evoking London’s lowlife. Sketches by Boz began appearing in December 1833, and soon, in Pickwick Papers (1836-37) and Oliver Twist (1839), Dickens had provided thousands of armchair Londoners with a guide to their city’s hidden terrains.
New Yorkers loved these European flaneurs. They bought American reprints of Egan’s Life in London, perused city sketches in the London Quarterly and Edinburgh Review, and devoured Dickens. Their own city, alas, was not deemed flaneurable. Lacking the spectacular variety of European metropoles, it didn’t seem worth perambulating for publication. Would-be urban spectators went abroad instead. They sent back dispatches on London’s immensity, on Paris’s complexity, on the power of great cities to induce disorientation—even insanity!—in unwary tourists. Washington Irving was an early American master of the form, and Nathaniel Parker Willis carried on the tradition. In 1835, after he joined George Pope Morris as coeditor of the New-York Mirror, the dandyish Willis went abroad and sent back somewhat precious urban sketches done in a pun-filled style. But flaneurism made Willis New York’s first successful professional “magazinist.” (“My rubbish, such as it is, brings me a very high price.”)
In the 1830s the Sun and its penny press competitors began defining everyday life in New York as something worthy of coverage. Benjamin Day published a vivid account of a visit to the Five Points in 1834 (“they endure literally, a hell of horrors”), launched police court reporting, and paid episodic attention to everyday life. But it was in the 1840s that New York became fully flaneurable. As Manhattanites turned their attention homeward—newly enchanted (or appalled) by their city’s growing size and diversity, the kinetic flow of its crowds, and its flowering as a cultural center—street narratives by middle-class walkers became omnipresent.
Willis turned his practiced eye on Manhattan in “Daguerrotypes of the Present,” a series of urban essays for the New York Mirror, and bundled up another batch of sketches as Hurry-Graphs. Lewis Gaylord Clark and the Knickerbocker crowd filled their magazine with sketches like ” ‘Loaferina’ in New York,” which celebrated the immensity and diversity of the “London of America,” and their Young American rivals at Arc-turus provided equally urbane commentary on New York’s passing show. For Duyckinck’s circle, moreover, the shift of sensibility suggested a new frontier