Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [556]
Foster and Buntline believed that the metropolitan transformation of the 1840s and 1850s had destroyed the old republican town. New York was now a segmented city of poor and rich, each with their own territorial strongholds from which they issued forth to prey upon the other. Those in the middle ground—the assumed audience for this literature—were addressed but not described, and the result was a chiaroscuro portrait of pools of light and darkness, resembling the way radiance from gas-lit street lamps was swallowed up by surrounding blackness.
This noir-ish city was a far cry from the clearly legible one sketched by the flaneur, praised by the guidebooks, and portrayed in the bird’s-eye views. Those official New Yorks were civic spirited, filled with noble vistas. This New York was jumbled and anarchic, an incoherent labyrinth, a polarized city ruled by rapacity. It was not a site of civilizing encounters: it was a battleground, fractured along lines of class and sex.
The mysteries’ New York was peopled with dangerous and endangered women. Harlots lured victims to their dens, notably in the Five Points, where “squalid females,” or so William Bobo claimed in Glimpses of New York (1852), perched “about the windows, stoops and cellar doors, like buzzards on dead trees.” Conversely, beautiful innocent females routinely fell into the clutches of sinister monied men against whom their virtue was no defense. Tales of sex and murder based on real-life incidents were particularly popular. George Wilkes of the Police Gazette vividly recounted The Lives of Helen Jewett and Richard P. Robinson, and the prolific Joseph Holt Ingraham was but one of many who recycled the Mary Rogers murder in his La Bonita Cigarera, or The Beautiful Cigar Vender.
Thus was born the sunshine-and-shadow tradition, a way of seeing New York that became the era’s central cliché about the city. Countless writers were forced to grope for new and fresh ways to describe stark juxtapositions, usually without success. “It is but a step from the mansion where wealth gathers its luxuries,” declared an anonymous clergyman in Life in New York (1847), “to the cellar or garret where hunger gnaws and cold pinches.” Joel Ross spoke of “success and defeat, health and disease, wealth and poverty, comforts and misery, plenty and beggary.” George Lippard, in New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), went with “empire of palaces and hovels, garlands and chains, churches and jails.” Lydia Maria Child commented drily on the rage for “vituperative alliterations such as magnificence and mud, finery and filth, diamonds and dirt, bullion and brass-tape, &c. &c.”
Much of this language was clearly formulaic, rhetorical, overblown. The writers, journalists, clergymen, and public officials who wielded it exaggerated the declension from the old order. But the melodramatic prose was a response to new realities: the transformation of public space and the transmutation of class and gender cultures and relationships. Sunshine-and-shadow hyperbole was reductive, but not ridiculous. When a trio of great writers turned their attention to metropolitan life, they incorporated these metaphors of popular culture in their poetry and prose, even while transcending them.
MAN OF THE CROWD
In April 1844 Edgar Allan Poe arrived in New York—dead broke but still optimistic that even at age thirty-five he could reestablish his career as a “magazinist.” Poe had done well in Philadelphia editing Graham’s Magazine but, sick of “fashion-plates” and “love-tales,” he’d resigned, hoping to launch a serious literary journal. Having failed to raise the capital—due, he was sure, to the machinations of a Philadelphia clique—Poe headed for Manhattan, accompanied by his tubercular wife, Virginia, and a reputation for drunken irresponsible conduct.
Poe found New York hard to afford and hard to take. He perched briefly in a Greenwich Street boardinghouse but was soon complaining