Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [554]
MYSTERIES OF THE CITY
None of the misgivings about the isolation or the chicanery or the rootlessness or the ahistoricism of New York life did much to cloud the prevailing sunny optimism. But a much harsher take on the city was emerging in these years, promoted by a host of popular journalists and urban fiction writers. This genre dismissed the showier aspects of New York’s street life as inconsequential froth and proposed a troubling thesis. The real essence of metropolitan life was a stark, indeed shocking, contrast between two new social classes: a monied aristocracy of debauched nouveaux riches and a threatening mass of degenerate immigrants. These critics offered a darker way for New Yorkers to see, and evaluate, the new urban scene, a perspective summarized with brutal succinctness by Harper’s in 1857: “What was then [1827] a decent and orderly town of moderate size, has been converted into a huge semi-barbarous metropolis—one half as luxurious and artistic as Paris, the other half as savage as Cairo or Constantinople—not wellgoverned nor ill-governed, but simply not governed at all.”
This perceptual framework, like flaneurism an import, was first formulated by writers in Paris and London. In 1842-43, Eugene Sue serialized his Mysteries of Paris in the popular French press, a work that exposed two shadowy and corrupt worlds, one of the criminal underground, the other of a decadent elite. Sue’s Mysteries was widely pirated and reprinted in England and on the Continent—it appealed greatly to artisans and became the sensational reading of Chartists and the revolutionaries of 1848—and in New York Mike Walsh brought out excerpts in his Subterranean.
A still more influential lesson in how to read the contemporary city was delivered to Manhattan, in person, by Charles Dickens. His books had depicted a London where the center no longer held, where a well-ordered and harmonious world had split into realms of squalor and splendor, of civilization and barbarism. The depraved paupers and grasping nouveaux riches responsible for these appalling changes merited and received condemnation in his pages, but they were also fascinating in their very repulsiveness. Part of Dickens’s phenomenal popularity was the opportunity he afforded readers of feeling simultaneously superior to, and enthralled by, villains of the upper and lower registers.
New Yorkers were thrilled when Dickens arrived in the city in January 1842, partly for sightseeing, partly in a fruitless attempt to promote an international copyright law that would require Americans to pay for the pleasure of reading him. New York’s elite threw a Boz Ball in the Park Theater for twenty-five hundred people—“the greatest affair of modern times,” said Philip Hone—and in an encore, Washington Irving presided over a feast for 230 diners at the City Hotel.
Later that year New Yorkers had the additional pleasure of being able to pick up American Notes (in a pirated twelve-and-a-half-cent edition Harpers brought out in November 1842) and find out how Dickens applied his way of seeing to their very own city. On the whole, his account of “the beautiful metropolis of America”—in a book whose revenues Dickens counted on to cover his travel costs—was quite flattering. Dickens had nice words for Broadway, the city’s pride, apart from some catty remarks about its pigs—“two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage, and a select party of half a dozen gentlemen hogs have just now turned the corner”—which called embarrassing attention to Broadway denizens routinely excised from boosterish lithographs.