On Tuesday evening, March 29, 2011, at 6pm, the American Antiquarian Society will hold its fourth annual Adopt-A-Book event in Worcester. At this event you will see recently acquired books, pamphlets, newspapers, prints and ephemera that have been added to the collection by the Society’s curators over the past year. You can also enjoy drinks and hors d’oeuvres, all included in the $20 entrance fee, while listening to the curators talk about their finds. We hope you will want to “adopt” an object by making a contribution to help the library take in other waifs and strays in the future. In return AAS will permanently record the adopter’s name(s) on a special bookplate attached to each item, and in the AAS online library catalog.
As with previous years, we have prepared an illustrated online catalog of the 176 items up for adoption this year. Have a look! If you see an orphan that appeals to you, you can even adopt now, in case you can’t make it to the event at the end of the month. Just follow the “How to Adopt” directions on the side bar of the catalog and contact our Curator of Books (and Chief of Adoptions) David Whitesell with your adoption requests. Be assured, you don’t have to be a Daddy Warbucks or Angelina Jolie, either – we have objects available for adoption for as little as $10! That said, if Ms. Jolie reads our blog and would like to adopt, of course we would be more than happy to help her make a selection.
The 2010 Adopt-a-Book event
At the event on March 29th, AAS curators will give a brief overview of objects they have purchased with resources raised at last year’s Adopt-a-Book fundraiser. All of this year’s adoptees will be displayed in the reading room and the AAS staff will be available for questions and conversation. In addition, AAS-National Endowment for the Humanities fellow Lisa Wilson, Professor of American History at Connecticut College, will discuss her ongoing research on American step-children and step-families. As an added incentive to come out to the event, we will have some “too-new-to-make-the-catalog” adoptees, fresh from the acquisition table and only available for adoption that night.
For the next couple of weeks we are going to use the blog as a way to highlight different objects in the Adopt-a-Book catalog. You will see examples from each department including manuscripts, books, children’s literature, newspapers & periodicals and graphic arts. Hopefully, all these postings will help raise funds for the Society’s future acquisitions by matching up material with potential adopters. So mark your calendars for March 29th and we look forward to seeing you under the dome!
Leaf through the pages of Glamour or Vogue in mid-March and the inventory will reveal that American fashion designers’ thoughts have turned to the spring line. Here at the American Antiquarian Society, when our thoughts turn to fashion, they turn to hoopskirts and side curls and to the famed fashion plates of Godey’s Lady’s Book. As March is women’s history month, we thought it the perfect time to examine this “Lady’s Book.”
As you might know, Godey’s Lady’s Book was the number one selling periodical in Victorian America. Mr. Godey himself calculated the number of readers at a million by the eve of the Civil War. You might also know that the colored fashion plates at the beginning of the magazine were its most famed component. But did you know that the colored plates were hand painted? That the ‘lady editor’ of the magazine was vehemently opposed to including fashion plates in a woman’s periodical? That the magazine played an integral role in establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday? That hoopskirts were gigantic during the Civil War? All of this information and more can be found in original issues of Godey’s Lady’s Book in the collections at the American Antiquarian Society along with secondary source material on the creation of the magazine. Godey’s Lady’s Book contains not only a wealth of information about Victorian fashion but also about the culture of bygone America.
The ‘lady editor’ of Godey’s Lady’s Book was Sarah Josepha Hale, a literary-minded social reformer whose civic-minded zeal rivaled that of Lucretia Mott and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She edited the magazine along with its owner, Louis A. Godey, from 1837 to 1877. Many are familiar with Hale solely for her authorship of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” but Sarah Hale’s accomplishments reached far beyond a poem for children. Formal education for women at the time was scant. Hale derived much of her education from a brother who attended Dartmouth College and tutored Sarah at home. After losing her husband at a young age, Hale went on to support her family through literary means, successfully submitting novels and shorter pieces to publishers. She edited the Boston-based Ladies’ Magazine, the first women’s magazine in America. In the magazine, she included original literary pieces by American authors, an unusual practice at a time when American magazines borrowed heavily from those of Europe. As editor, she promoted women’s education and worthy social causes. She spearheaded the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument and founded the Seaman’s Aid Society of Boston to give monetary relief to the families of poorly paid sailors.
In 1837, she partnered with Louis Godey as co-editor for Godey’s Lady’s Book, which was a second-rate magazine until Hale came aboard. As editor of Godey’s, Hale promoted women as heads of female boarding schools, advocated for the retention of married women’s property rights, and opposed the current fashion trend of tight bodices for women’s dresses on grounds that they were unhealthy. She championed Elizabeth Blackwell, was integral in establishing the observance of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, which she believed would help unite a country divided by slavery, and promoted the creation of Vassar College, the first women’s college in America. She staunchly opposed including fashion plates in a woman’s magazine on grounds that they were frivolous.
Louis A. Godey, a Philadelphia publisher and the owner of Godey’s Lady’s Book, was the other vivid character involved in the creation of the magazine. Hailing from two of the world’s fashion centers, as a New Yorker of French descent, Louis fervently believed in including fashion plates in his magazine, overriding Hale’s opposition to them. Sharing Hale’s journalistic vision and interest in the new womanhood being promoted in America at the time, he complemented Hale as a charming extrovert with a flair for business. He knew that a female co-editor would be well received by the American reading public of the time and reputedly flattered Sarah into accepting the position. He insisted that the magazine not take a political stance during the Civil War in order to avoid alienating Southern readers. He suavely referred to his readers as “dear readers” and “the fair ladies.” He promised a free copy of his magazine to subscribers who failed to receive a copy, a common phenomenon at a time when the mail service in America was unreliable. Most notably, he insisted on including the colored fashion plate with which every issue of Godey’s commenced, and which would become its most beloved feature. Godey was also the first person to copyright a periodical in America with his copyrighting of Lady’s Book.
The impressive joint effort of these two editors was Godey’s Lady’s Book. The magazine was in print from 1830 to 1878. Its circulation doubled that of rival magazines. It was published at 113 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia on a monthly basis and was read by both men and women. Each page of the magazine was printed on a hand held flat-bed press. The printed sheets were folded and sewn by hand. The colored plates were hand painted in Philadelphia both at the Godey plant and in the home of young women hired to assist with the painting. Artists sometimes misunderstood coloring instructions. When the supply of color ran out, they often switched to other colors. This resulted in different subscribers receiving differently colored fashion plates, and made women unsure about the latest style when comparing their copy of the magazine to their neighbors’! Godey boldly smoothed the situation over with characteristic charm, “We now colour our plates to different patterns, so that two persons in a place may compare their fashions, and adapt those colours that they suppose may be most suitable to their figures and complexions” (Finley 54).
Early American fashion can be charted by following the changing clothing design in the colored plates of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Crinolines gave way to hoops, skirt width expanded with increasingly elaborate trim, sleeves tightened and loosened, hoops evolved into bustles. Dresses required at least twenty-five yards of material, and often weighed so much they were difficult to wear! As a result, not all women wore hoops and no one wore them all the time. Ringlets, flared sleeves, knitted hoods, bows on children’s dresses, checkered pants, gowns of “peach-blossom hue,” cashmere morning robes of Persian design, beaded opera hats, gentlemen’s mitts, and flower adorned bonnets are among the many fashions to be found in the magazine’s pages. Along with fashion plates, the magazine included recipes, embroidery patterns, sheet music for the piano, suggestions of hairstyles, lessons in drawing, suggestions for interior decorating, and original American literature, including pieces by Hawthorne, Holmes, and Irving.
Godey’s Lady’s Book is both eye candy for fashion buffs and a treasure trove of early American culture for the professional and casual historian. Consider making it part of your research endeavors the next time you stop by the American Antiquarian Society. It will whet your interest in the human drama of our country’s past and make you regret that dresses so elegant and elaborate can no longer be found in your latest issue of Vogue.
For Further Reading:
Finley, Ruth E. The Lady of Godey’s: Sarah Josepha Hale. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1931.
Okker, Patricia. Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.
Rogers, Sherbrooke. Sarah Josepha Hale: A New England Pioneer, 1788-1879. Grantham, New Hampshire: Tompson & Rutter, Inc., 1985.
Did you know that a patriot printer named Isaiah Thomas founded the American Antiquarian Society in 1812? Did you know that the terms uppercase, lowercase, and stereotype originated from terms used in relation to early printing presses? Did you know that early printers needed to read backwards and upside down? Do you know why the pages of many late nineteenth-century books crumble when turned? The answers to all of your unasked questions about Isaiah Thomas, early printing, the American Antiquarian Society’s history, and more can be learned on the library’s free public tours offered every Wednesday afternoon at 3:00pm.
As a new intern here in the readers services department, I joined Elizabeth Pope, Head of Reader Services, last Thursday for a fascinating tour of the library. I thought I would blog about what I learned for the benefit of the readers of Past is Present who are as curious as I was about the library’s history. The tour was specially arranged for a local college history professor and his class of what we hoped were budding young historians. Beginning the tour in the lobby, Elizabeth showed us the portrait of Isaiah Thomas, which hangs above the stairs, informing us that he was a patriot printer who lived during the Revolutionary War. She then led us upstairs to see Isaiah Thomas’s original wooden printing press and the shoulder-height cases where he stored his type.
Standing amid Isaiah’s printing equipment on a landing overlooking the reading room, Elizabeth regaled us with engaging historical facts. Isaiah Thomas’s press was a wooden one, made in England, and it had a name. Isaiah referred to it as “Old No. 1.” Born into a poor family, Isaiah was apprenticed to a printer at a young age. Elizabeth explained to us that it was a common phenomenon in early America to apprentice young boys to a tradesman. Can you imagine what it would be like to leave your family at the age of eight and be required to learn a trade? Isaiah later became such a successful printer that he was able to buy his master’s business, including the very printing press that Isaiah had first learned on as a young apprentice, something that Elizabeth surmised must have brought him satisfaction. Isaiah called this press “Old No. 1” as it was the first of many in what became his printing empire.
Isaiah Thomas was famous for publishing, The Massachusetts Spy, a Whig newspaper, which supported the cause of American Independence. One day in April 1775, just days before the Battle of Lexington, Thomas heard rumors that the British were intending to seize his press. He smuggled it out of Boston and set it up in Worcester where he published accounts of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Years later, in the hopes of improving posterity, he later founded the American Antiquarian Society also in Worcester, donating his personal collection of over 8,000 books to the library.
Elizabeth passed around a facsimile of the first paper printed in Worcester on Isaiah’s press and showed us the metal type letters similar to the type Isaiah Thomas used in printing. In the eighteenth-century, type was stored in separate cases; the lowercase was nearest to the printer’s apprentice who would be setting the type and it contained the more frequently used smaller letters, which would come to be called lowercase. The farther case had the larger capital letters, which would be come to be called uppercase. Elizabeth showed us a composing stick, a small tray that could fit a couple lines of type, that was used to move the type over to the composing stone, where each page worth of type was set into a metal tray. Basically, you needed to be able to read backwards and upside down in order to lay the type since it needed to have a reverse impression when pressed onto paper! Later in the early nineteenth century when printers devised paged-sized metal molds of type, used to print a whole sheet at the same time, it was called a stereotype – the root of our term, stereotype, or a pre-prepared, conventional notion. Elizabeth also showed us how to work the press and informed us that printers in early America could be identified when walking down the street in Boston since they had overly developed muscles on the arm they used to pull the bar on the press. Apparently printing was the early American counterpart to scooping ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s, only more extreme!
The tour resumed in the closed stacks where the Society stores all its collection materials. On the floor we were on, shelves of large, flat boxes filled with newspapers lined the walls in a room where lights are dim for preservation purposes. Elizabeth passed around a duplicate copy of The Boston Chronicle, an early eighteenth-century newspaper printed on paper with a high rag content. She informed us that the earliest newspapers were made from rags. In fact, newspapers often put out ads asking for people’s old white rags to make their papers. This paper is easier for librarians to preserve than later paper since its fibers are relatively strong. Later paper was made from wood pulp. Brittle, yellow, and easily crumbled when handled, the pages of many late nineteenth-century books were made from wood pulp. The next time you read an early copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you’ll know why it’s crumbling in your hands! Elizabeth proceeded to show us the newest, state-of-the-art part of the stacks where rare books and pamphlets are stored.
This special tour ended in the council room, a large room with a long table where curators laid out rare books and manuscripts for the students to see relating to the Civil War. (On the normal public tour you get to see the council room, but these original materials would not be out.) Plastic book cradles supported the bindings of many of the old books. We were excited to learn that visitors are allowed to gently touch original documents at the American Antiquarian Society, as long as their hands are clean and dry. A curator led us around the room and showed us each book or manuscript. The first was a large sheet of paper describing slaves for sale. Others were Civil War sheet music and a document outlining the conditions of surrender for the seceded states. Among the treasures on display were children’s books printed in the North and South during the war and a printed story about a woman who lived in a cave during the Battle of Vicksburg. Seeing these original documents, and being allowed to lightly handle them, brought history alive.
Elizabeth informed us that the American Antiquarian Society estimates they have two out of every three books printed before 1820 in what became the United States, which makes it the best collection of such material in the world. AAS continues to collect original sources and recent works on early America through 1876, actively acquiring additional material every day. She invited the tour to come back to the American Antiquarian Society to conduct research. If you have a research project related to early America before 1876 (or even 1900), it only takes about half an hour and two forms of ID (one with a photograph) to register to use the resources at AAS. The research library is not appropriate for children, but high school students may do advanced research here if accompanied by a parent. More information about the requirements and the process of registering as a reader (the term for library patrons in rare book libraries) is on the “Using the Library” page on the AAS website.
So the next time have a historical research project or are investigating your family tree or the history of your hometown, make researching in the reading room here at the American Antiquarian Society a part of your afternoon. Or if you’re simply curious about early American history and old books, join us at 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, MA for a tour any Wednesday at 3:00pm.
AAS is pleased to announce our spring series of public lectures. These programs are designed to highlight the work of our members and fellows, showcase the kinds of research done in the collections, and explore the history and culture of the United States during the time period of the Society’s collections. These programs will explore various ways that American culture was created and defined from the American Revolution through the antebellum period.
All of these programs take place at 7:30 p.m. in Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts. They are all open to the public free of charge.
Tuesday, April 5
“Teapot in a Tempest: Massachusetts and the Boston Tea Party”
By Benjamin L. Carp
On the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of disguised Bostonians boarded three merchant ships and dumped more than forty-six tons of tea into Boston Harbor. Why did the Tea Party happen? Whom did it involve? What did it mean throughout Massachusetts and beyond? Based on his new book, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Benjamin L. Carp will explore these questions.
Tuesday, April 19
“Noah Webster and the Creation of an American Culture”
By Joshua C. Kendall
Noah Webster was not only America’s greatest lexicographer; he was also a Founding Father who helped define American culture. His obsession with words, which helped a high-strung genius live an amazingly vibrant life, ended up giving America a language of its own. This talk is based on Kendall’s new book, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture.
Thursday, May 12
“Liberty and Justice for All: The Civil War as Blacks’ Second American Revolution”
By James O. and Lois E. Horton
During the increasingly militant 1850s, African Americans formed unofficial militias to prepare themselves for an anticipated conflict over their liberty. In this lecture, James O. and Lois E. Horton will explore how African Americans’ militia and military service shaped the Civil War as a war for freedom, turned the tide of the war, and helped to fulfill the promise of the American Revolution.
Tuesday, May 24
“Igniting the War: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Antislavery Politics, and the Rise of Lincoln”
By David S. Reynolds
Twenty-eighth Annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture
No book in American history molded public opinion more powerfully than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. David S. Reynolds will describe how Stowe’s novel shaped the political scene by making the North, formerly largely hostile to the antislavery reform, far more open to it than it had been. The novel and its dissemination in plays, essays, reviews, and the tie-in merchandise directly paved the way for the public’s openness to an antislavery candidate like Lincoln. Simultaneously, it stiffened the South’s resolve to defend slavery and demonize the North. Uncle Tom’s Cabin thus ratcheted up the political tensions that led to the war that ended slavery.
Thursday, June 2
“American Love Story: Abigail and John”
By Joseph J. Ellis
The friendship and love of John and Abigail Adams is contained in the letters they left behind, nearly twelve thousand of which still exist today. Based on his latest book, First Family: Abigail and John Adams, Ellis will draw upon these sources to explore the combination of commitment, honesty, and loyalty that made John and Abigail’s marriage a success and played a significant role in the triumph of the Revolution and the early government.
Ministry of the Interior building in Havana with giant steel image of Che Guevara, 2011
Here is a link to a short piece I recently wrote about a trip to Cuba in January sponsored by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. The piece appeared in Mass Humanities’ blog The Public Humanist. My excuse for mentioning it on this blog is the fact that 9 of the 21 people on the trip were members of AAS. That is a remarkable number given that only 287 of AAS’s 953 members are Massachusetts residents and that the state’s population is about 6.5 million.
"Holiday in Havana, Cuba," late nineteenth-century view from the AAS Stereograph Collection
The trip to Cuba also provides an opportunity to mention a part of AAS collections that is not well-known. While AAS may not be the first place you think of when doing research on Cuba, we actually have an impressive amount of material about the island. An earlier post on Past is Present mentioned our recent acquisition of a wonderful collection of early Cuban newspapers, but there’s more Cuban material to be found at AAS by searching our two main online resources:
AAS online catalog: Searching for Cuba results in almost 400 records. Limit your search by type of item (i.e. manuscripts, serials, or graphic arts) or by date to winnow down your results.
AAS website: Searching here will help you locate material listed in graphic arts inventories, lists of newspapers recently acquired, and manuscript collection finding aids. These additional online resources list items not necessarily in the AAS online catalog yet (although we’re working on it!). A search of the AAS website yields a few dozen hits from other collections with Cuba material.
While not all of us can travel to present-day Cuba, AAS always provides the opportunity to travel to Cuba’s past.
A late nineteenth-century stereograph of Obispo, Havana's main shopping street from the AAS Stereograph Collection
Luckily, the American Antiquarian Society does not collect in all areas of human condition and experience.
An example of such an area?
Internal organs.
What we do have, however, is a rich collection around this object of study. And whereas February was American Heart Month, an opportunity in the calendar year to focus on the well-being of what we refer to colloquially as the ticker, we thought it fitting to extract some pieces from the collection to showcase how nineteenth-century Americans valued and studied this vital organ.
Each image in the virtual exhibit below can be clicked on to enlarge for closer examination.
Health-related publications are an area well represented in the library. Soon after its first appearance on the American fashion scene, the now notorious corset was suspected as having less-than-beneficial side effects on the female body. This illustration inside Dr. William Alcott’s health tract Tight Lacing published in 1841, shows the deformation of the chest cavity resulting from wearing the garment. The author also devotes a section to injuries of the heart which resulted by practicing the style.
Publications such as home companions and health manuals proliferated during the era, since much health monitoring and hygiene fell under the purview of the domestic space. Catharine Beecher (1800-1878), the writer and innovative educator, penned Letters to the People on Health and Happiness in 1855. It is a more-or-less epistolary style piece which discusses laws of health, the functions of organs of the body as well as remedies and how they are created. Women, as keepers of the health of the home, would find these books central as reference material.
As well as magazines and home manuals, AAS also has examples of medical companions and the published form of delivered anatomical lectures. This example from A Popular Treatise on Diseases of the Heart published in 1859 by Samuel Sheldon Fitch (1801-1876) features illustrations of the structures of the heart and discusses ailments of the organ. Fitch also edited a periodical for general use called The Medical Exponent and Gazette of Health – the aim of both publications being the spread of popular medicine.
Anyone who has experience with the Society’s holdings knows of its vast graphic arts and ephemera collections. In the tickets collection, we have examples for anatomical lectures engraved with images of the heart. The item featured here is to see Doctor Alexander Ramsay (ca. 1754-1824); AAS also has several of Dr. Ramsay’s prospectuses for the lecture series. The ticket here is by engraver Francis Kearny (1785-1837) dated 1809 which granted its holder, Samuel A. Bradley Esquire, admission to “Anatomy and Physiology or the 1st Course No. 13” which likely included a live dissection of a cadaver.
Other ephemera items include trade cards for bitters and other medical aids. Diet, exercise, and stress were quickly discovered to be culprits for ill heart-health, which gave advertisers a profitable stage to promote their goods. Machines such as “Hale’s Vibratory Exercise” featured on this trade card from circa 1870, promised to give “Passive Exercise” for the treatment of disease. (Many of AAS’s trade cards are available digitally through the Readex product, American Broadsides and Ephemera, which is available in the AAS reading room.)
In addition to manuals and ephemera, AAS also has texts where the intended audience was the medical establishment and community. Frequently, these were illustrated. One such example is this engraving by prominent American artist Alexander Anderson (1775-1870) which shows the “Rupture of the Heart” a piece which appeared inside The Physico-Medical Society of New York Transactions published in New York in 1817. Anderson’s engraving appeared at the end of the piece “A Case of Sudden Death from a Rupture of the Left Ventricle of the Heart, with remarks” by Valentine Mott, M.D. read before his colleagues; it is constructed similarly to our contemporary medical journals.
The objects featured here demonstrate that although it was not instituted until 1963 as American Heart Month, the heart nonetheless has remained vital in national mind, print – and, yes, heart. Each of the items discussed here are currently on display in the exhibit case in the AAS reading room. Since we got a late start celebrating American Heart Month, the exhibit will remain up in the reading room through March. If you are in the area and are interested in viewing these pieces, feel free to stop in for our public tour offered every Wednesday at 3pm to see them in person.
Fraud Week on Past is Present concludes today on an appropriately ambiguous note with examples from AAS’s graphic arts collections, most of which are not true forgeries but rather what might be called wishful attributions. These works of art hover perpetually in “the limbo of doubtful pictures,” to quote an earlier AAS librarian. In honor of the collaborative nature of scholarship at AAS, this post is presented in three part harmony.
I. From Jackie Penny, Imaging Rights Coordinator:
Objects fated for the AAS Council Room are typically invested with much prestige. Currently on exhibit is the large collection of Staffordshire Pottery, given to the Society by Emma Deforest Morse in 1913. Also on display is the John Hancock desk and clock, the Isaiah Thomas tea service, a bottle of tea leaves collected after the Boston Tea party, the Mather Family highchair…
In other words – historically powerful objects. So when a crayon and pencil portrait of George Washington in General’s uniform by famous portrait painter Thomas Sully (1783-1872) was given to the Society in 1932 it was slated for Council Room display as well.
Figure 1 (front): Portrait of George WashingtonFigure 1 (back): The supposed Sully signature and authentication on reverse
This framed bust portrait of the former President [Figure 1] has a manuscript annotation on the reverse that reads: “My dear Sir I have much pleasure in presenting you with this drawing” and is signed “Sincerely your friend Tho[mas] Sully. Oct 23 1860.”
Mounted on the frame itself is an additional manuscript annotation: “This will certifies that I have this day cleaned the drawing of the American General Washington I believe this drawing to be the work of the painter Thomas Sully London April 9th 1878 William Sharpless.”
It was an exciting addition to rather small fine arts collection of the library…
…that is, until it was deemed a forgery, stripped of its designation and banished from the Council Room.
Sully’s signature featured here on the reverse of the framed Washington portrait, was deemed a forgery by John Hill Morgan (1870-1945) two years after it was presented to AAS in 1932. Hill determined the forger was “Doc” Shepard (also known as George J. Shepard OR Ferdinand Danton OR John J. Hughes – a man with many alias names). Morgan uncovered material regarding Shepard as well as other Washington Portraits sold as forgeries in the 1920s and 30s; the resulting collection “John Hill Morgan research files, 1922-1944” is currently at the Frick Art Reference Library.
II. From Lauren Hewes, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts:
Figure 2: Portrait of unknown woman
Continuing in the Washington theme, this portrait [Figure 2] was once thought to depict Martha Washington (1731-1802). The portrait has been the subject of much scrutiny since its arrival at the American Antiquarian Society in 1943 since a twentieth-century inscription on the reverse reads ‘Martha Washington, 1787,’ but there is little other evidence to support this identification of the older woman. We do know the previous owners often traveled abroad, which suggests that the pastel may be of European origin. AAS Director Clarence Brigham wrote in 1943:
“[I]t may be of a European lady by an English artist. It is well possible that Mrs. Lowell picked it up in an antique shop and someone penciled Martha Washington’s name on the back because it seemed a likely choice…. All we can do for now is to let the portrait stay in the limbo of doubtful pictures and hope for an eventual solution.”
Figure 3: Sculpture of an unknown woman
Similarly, the identity of the subject of this bust [Figure 3] has been in doubt from the time it was acquired on behalf of the American Antiquarian Society in 1881. In that year’s Proceedings, Librarian Edmund T. Barton requested assistance from the members to help identify the subject:
“Attention is called to a marble bust lately received by Mr. Salisbury Jr., from New York, and your judgment requested both as to the sculptor and subject. It was found in a Spanish drugstore, which had previously been used by a marble worker, and represents a lady, probably of the early part of the nineteenth century. Nothing more is known of its history.”
In 1884 the possibility that the bust depicted the writer Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865) was put forward but was disputed by friends who had known the author in Connecticut. The following year a photograph of the bust was sent to Sigourney’s daughter, Mrs. Francis T. Russell, whose husband responded: “The bust is not of Mrs. Sigourney, we are sure of that.” The elegant sitter, with her carefully coiffed hair and fashionable gown, remains unidentified.
There is, of course, a difference between the outright deceit of a forgery and these examples of wishful thinking. The gaps in history, when information is lacking, often cause people to “fill in” information to create a new reality — one that often reflects modern taste more that the reality of the information that the object presents. When looking at the first woman’s portrait in 1943 they probably thought: it must be Martha — who else could it possibly be? And looking at the bust in 1880, it should be Sigourney — after all, it’s in a prestigious research library now. Sometimes it is better to just honestly say, “we don’t know.” Leave the gaps alone and maybe eventually someone will come along and fill them up!
(You can try your hand at helping us fill in those gaps by examining images of these and other unidentified portraits at the end of the list of sitters in the Society’s illustrated inventory of portraits.)
III. From Elizabeth Watts Pope, Head of Readers’ Service:
To carry on from Lauren’s line of reasoning above, why is it that no matter how lovely a work of art is in its own right, it seems to be human nature to want to dress it up with a famous name? Certainly, one answer is monetary valuation, and the associated values of historical significance and artist merit. Yet the work of art doesn’t change even if you find out it wasn’t done by a famous artist. So why this persistent push to try to connect art to famous people?
Another reason may be because a famous artist or subject gives us a point of contact, a way to connect to a historical artifact. It can help to make history seem somehow less distant and more comprehensible. After all, how can I hold in my head the infinite variation of images from the daily lives of all the eighteenth and nineteenth century women who were washing dishes and reading to their children and dressing up in their finest clothes? But if I think of an eighteenth-century woman and picture Martha Washington, or a nineteenth-century woman and see Lydia Sigourney, that gives me a discrete and understandable package to put my historical ideas into.
Here at AAS, though, we aim to bust open those narrow frames. We don’t want to just talk about famous people or valuable art. The American Antiquarian Society has always collected as indiscriminately as possible (within the scope of our collection). Here you will find the fakes, the unknowns, and the copies identified as such and sitting on the shelf alongside the famous and the first editions.
IV? There’s room for your voice too!
We hope you have enjoyed this week of posts exploring this underside of the archival world, and we would love to hear your thoughts on the implications of fraud in history. Hopefully we have armed you with some tools so you can be on the look out for forgeries, funny money, pirated copies, and falsely-identified works of art. Let us know what you find!
If we’re to believe iconic popular culture films like Christian Slater’s 1990 Pump Up the Volume, media and information pirates act as heroic rebels fighting an overbearing FCC and even more overbearing parents. If we’re to believe historians like Adrian Johns, author of the recently published Piracy and Death of a Pirate, piracy has fostered multiple creative communities far more vital than large corporate entities. If we’re to believe novelists like William Gaddis, author of the 1994 novel A Frolic of His Own, neither piracy nor copyright law have any relevance when it comes to authorial originality and adjudicating copyright infringement claims. And if we’re to believe early Americans like Noah Webster, copyright was essential for protecting American identity and nationality against pirate re-printers. As we enter the fourth day of our archival Shark Week (or Fraud Week, as we have dubbed ours) the topic is—you guessed it—piracy, a serious menace of the literary seas.
From Isaiah Thomas\’s 1785 edition of Mother Goose
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in North America, literary piracy most often took the form of reprinting copyrighted British works. Before 1790 the U.S. had no copyright law of its own, and the 1709/1710 British copyright law had never applied to British colonies. Such a lack of restrictions allowed printers like AAS founder Isaiah Thomas to reprint exactly such popular works as John Newbery’s original children’s books, including the rare Mother Goose’s Melody (1785).
By the time copyright was made federal law in 1790, thanks to the likes of Noah Webster, pirate reprinting of British works had become common practice. Printers like Mathew Carey, whose account books are in the AAS manuscript collection of Mathew Carey Papers, were famous for reprinting popular British works of literature. Since the 1790 copyright law applied only to U.S. citizens and residents, British authors were generally not protected by American copyright. Printers like Carey took full advantage of lax laws.
At the same time Thomas was reprinting Newbery, Noah Webster, schoolteacher and author of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language, fought to protect his own publications by copyright. Throughout the 1780s, Webster and others gained success in one state after another, but state copyright laws, like the states themselves, remained fragmented. Earlier copyright laws (like John Usher’s limited 1673 copyright) did not apply to American authors, and Webster wished for a copyright law that would cross state borders. When federal copyright went into effect and covered American citizens and residents, national copyright effectively coincided with Webster’s vision of a national language.
Click to enlarge and read John Willard’s justification for using Ames’s name on his almanacClick to enlarge and read Ames’s response
Throughout the eighteenth century, pirating of British American works on North American soil occurred frequently. One of the more well-known “pirated” items at AAS, and an example of this very kind of unauthorized copying, is a 1766 Ames almanac. In 1765, John Willard, writing as Philodemos, published an almanac in Nathaniel Ames’s name. Declaring that Ames was not planning to publish an almanac for 1766, Willard most likely published under Ames’s name to profit quickly before the Stamp Act went into effect. Ames retaliated by writing in his preface to his 1766 almanac that Willard “made use of [his] name, to impose upon the public, by prefixing it to their counterfeit almanacks.” Even James Franklin, years before his brother Ben created his own authentic and original almanac, pirated a 1725 Bowen’s almanac.
At the height of battles over U.S. copyright in 1786, Philip Freneau, poet and newspaper editor, wrote a poem “Literary Importation.” Seemingly ashamed at Americans’ lack of creativity and inspiration, he satirically lamented American dependence on British learning:
If a college be planned,
‘Tis all at a stand
‘Till in Europe we send at a shameful expense,
To send us a book-worm to teach us some sense.
Copyright was the early American solution to the creativity gap. But with the new copyleft movement advocated by groups like Creative Commons, the future of American creativity and originality may very well be in the hands of those who embrace digital piracy and support limited or little copyright at all!
Deborah M. Child (www.deborahmchild.com) has been at AAS for the past month researching her upcoming book on Lyman Parks (1788-1872). Parks’ forged bank notes were so accomplished that even the experts could not tell his notes from legitimate currency. Part of Fraud Week on Past is Present, Deborah’s post below gives tips on how to identify counterfeit currency, starting with a bill that features our man-of-the-week, George Washington.
Gilbert Stuart’s bust portrait of George Washington continues to be a favorite subject for vignettes on American currency. Shown here [Fig. 1] is an example from the AAS currency collection. Figure 1 (click to enlarge): Two dollar bill purportedly from the Washington Bank in Westerly, RI This counterfeit bank note is an excellent illustration of what to look for when examining currency made before 1862 when the Federal Government began regulating the currency. Prior to that, each bank adopted its own distinctive design. Paper was not standardized and bank note plates were outsourced to private engravers. Internal control of currency was just as loosely maintained. Each note was individually numbered and then signed by the cashier and the bank president. Denominations for currency were not standardized either and could range from five and half cents to 10,000 dollars. All these variations provided a myriad of opportunities for the counterfeiters aka koniackers to ply their trade.
The first thing to consider when assessing whether a bank note is genuine is its textual content. Is the date inscribed on the note consistent with the dates of operation of the bank? Secondly, is it the correct plate design for that particular bank? Third, do the signatures look right? In this case [Fig. 1], the same hand clearly signed as the cashier and the president of the bank. The paper is equally suspect: it is thinner and darker than currency paper which has a whiter appearance and softness to it owing to the presence of silk rag.
The ink here [Fig. 1] is of a similar inferior quality having none of the glossy jet black qualities found in inks an engraver would painstakingly prepare. Note the amateur quality and uneven spacing of the numbers. Instead of the precise lines that are accomplished with the use of a geometrical lathe that a professionals engraver would use, the lattice work surrounding the currency numbers is crudely drawn by hand and off-center. The vignette featuring Washington’s face is similarly lacking and disappears into the paper.
Figure 2 (click to enlarge): One dollar bill purportedly from the Hamilton Bank in Boston
The second example [Fig. 2] is another bank note from the AAS currency collection. Examined over a light box, it becomes immediately apparent this bill has been chemically altered. The ink is uneven and the lettering is not consistent with the rest of the text. The paper is thinner and lighter, the texture altered, making it obvious that the bank name “Hamilton” in the center has been substituted.
Figure 2 (close-up)
The bank for which it was originally printed was undoubtedly defunct so the counterfeiter removed the name of the original bank and substituted this name to place it back in circulation.
Not surprisingly, all this devious behavior corrupting the currency prompted a public outcry and a proliferation of anti-counterfeit guidebooks and newspapers. Trouble was the counterfeiters would study these guides as closely as the bankers and adjusted their practices accordingly.
Figure 3 (click to enlarge)The last example [Fig. 3] is a book illustration from E.J. Wilber & E. P. Eastman, A Treatise on Counterfeit, Altered and Spurious Bank Notes … (1865), a guideshowing step by step how to discriminate between genuine and dubious currency. No comparison image is provided for Washington at the centerpiece of the sheet. Why? The engravers here employed an especially ingenious method to prevent replicating his countenance on the currency. They placed his visage in a gilt oval using a method called dry-printing process that counterfeit artists would not have access to. Instead, the deceivers would have to rely on the ordinary wet process which results in a much darker appearance that is instantly recognized as being counterfeit. In this case, duplication (at least in theory) should not be possible.
What better way to say Happy Birthday George!
Further Reading:
Clark’s New England Bank Note List and Counterfeit Bill Detector. (Boston, MA: 1838-1845)
Mihm, Stephen. A Nation of Counterfeiters. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)
Wilber, E.J. & E. P. Eastman. A Treatise on Counterfeit, Altered and Spurious Bank Notes with Unerring Rules for Detection of Frauds in the Same. Illustrated with original steel, copper, and wood plate engravings. (Poughkeepsie, NY: Published by the authors, 1865)
We are kicking off Fraud Week on Past is Present with a big one: forgeries of George Washington’s handwriting. The choice of subject is particularly apropos since today is Washington’s birthday and, not surprisingly, the American Antiquarian Society has many Washington-related items, including:
AAS has only a small manuscript collection of George Washington Papers, though, and two of the most interesting items in that manuscript collection were actually not written by George Washington. They are forgeries, created by the most famous forger of Washington’s handwriting, Robert Spring.
Who was Robert Spring?
While nowhere near as well-known as the president whose signature he copied, Washington’s most famous forger was something of a notorious celebrity in his own right. Robert Spring even merited an entry in Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, making him the “only rogue — at least so labeled — in that six-volume work,” according Thomas Madigan’s book on autographs, Word Shadows of the Great. Robert Spring’s rise (or rather, slide) to infamy is outlined in a newspaper article that originated in the Philadelphia Press and was picked up by The Trenton Evening Times on October 30, 1885.
According to the newspaper account published years after his death (apparently Spring was considered sensational news even posthumously!), Robert Spring was born in England in 1813 but moved to America in his youth:
He was industrious and pushing, and when about 23 years old, started on a tour as a book-peddler, selling “Binns Justice” a work just published and in great demand. Spring was in those days comparatively honest, and he traveled on horseback through Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee meeting with great success in selling his books to justices and lawyers. It was while on this long tour that he became acquainted with a new business, the purchase and sale of rare books and autographs.
Spring’s early work as a book peddler not only gave him insider knowledge of the book and autograph market, but also may have helped him develop his own “confidence man” sales techniques that he later would use to pass off faked Washington letters.
What pushed Spring, a “comparatively honest” if “pushing” young man, into a life of crime?
The surprising answer is a cartload of foolscap (i.e. letter-sized) waste paper and an old-fashioned washstand. As the newspaper account of Spring’s descent into a life of crime recounts it, the turning point in Spring’s life came in 1855:
At a sale in Baltimore of the accumulated paper of an old banking house, Spring bought a cartload of waste paper. In it he found a fortune in the shape of a quantity of checks of General Washington on the Alexandria bank… and also a large amount of blank foolscap, of English manufacture, such as was used in this country until after the revolution. … Had it not been for the suggestive presence of the old foolscap, possibly Spring would have been contented with their [i.e. the genuine Washington articles] legitimate sale.
At first Spring was content to sell the original checks and other business papers with Washington’s signature, but when these ran out, he began to forge Washington’s handwriting.
How did Spring actually create his forgeries?
Here is where the newspaper account of Spring’s life becomes so detailed it reads almost like a how-to guide to forgery:
Every one has seen the old-fashioned washstand, with a round hole in the top, in which the washbowl was placed. Spring took such a stand, placed a pane of glass over the hole, over this a genuine Washington signature, and over this a sheet of blank paper. Then beneath the glass he placed a lamp and darkened the room. Thus the signature was illuminated from beneath and could easily be traced on the blank paper. … He easily stained the paper to the color of age, and would crease it and give it a worn edge by wearing it between this stocking and the sole of his shoe.
Upon first read this account, I wondered: why Spring would have to stain the paper to age it? After all, one of the reasons he even began this life of crime was the tempting possibilities of reams of old foolscap contemporaneous with the genuine Washington artifacts. Yet unused paper that has been stored away from light and air will age quite differently than paper that has been out-and-about in circulation, so it makes sense Spring would have to “rough up” his paper supply, even if it was the right age.
Spring's forged documents from the AAS collection of George Washington Papers, Folder 29 (click on image to enlarge)
The stained paper was one of the first things that stood out as odd when I first examined the two Spring forgeries at AAS in person. It’s hard to describe exactly what seemed wrong with it: the staining is almost too perfectly irregular, perhaps? The best way I can put it is that it reminded me of an elementary school history project for which I had to write a letter pretending to be from the eighteenth-century. I soaked my letter in tea in an attempt to make it look more authentic, although mine turned out a little spotty. Did Spring resort to this same tea-staining method to artificially age his forgeries? Were the examples that survive at AAS done on the original Revolutionary-War era foolscap that Spring purchased, or had his supply run out forcing him to substitute later 19th-century paper and more tea to achieve the effect? Perhaps these are questions for the History Detectives!
How do we know the Washington documents at AAS are forgeries?
Even without being able to closely examine or test the paper and ink, there are a number of ways to tell that these two purported Washington documents are fake once you know where to look. So here’s a crash-course in detecting Washington forgeries. (Just for fun, you may want to try to figure out which is the forgery and which is really Washington’s signature below before continuing to read; the images have been grayed out so you can try to focus on the pen strokes rather than variations in the paper and color.)
Signature A (click on image to enlarge)Signature B (click on image to enlarge)
Looking at the signatures, focus on the “G” in particular. The most obvious difference is that the real George Washington always signed his name “Go:” with the “o” as a superscript and two dots under it; for some reason, Spring would only put one dot.
Close-up of Washington's real handwriting from facsimile, George Washington Papers, Folder 17Close-up of Spring's forgery
In the close-ups of the text of the documents, notice how the real Washington’s handwriting is round and loopy, whereas in the forgery it is tighter and more perfectly angled. For instance, if you carefully examine the letter “h” in the word “the” in each close-up you will notice the real Washington’s handwriting has a very round loop at the top while in the forgery it is much narrower and looks more like a penmanship book.
Now that we have assured ourselves that these two documents are indeed forgeries, how do we determine that they were done by Spring?
In this case, Spring made it easy for himself and for us: he recycled only a few scripts over and over. The documents at AAS follow two of Spring’s most common scripts line-by-line, as described by the editors of the George Washington Papers in an excellent article written by Dorothy Twohig, “George Washington: Forgeries and Facsimile.” The most common script reads as follows:
To Jabez Huntington Esqr.
Sheriff of the County of Windham, Connt.
At the urgent solicitation of several of the Selectmen and respectable inhabitants of the town of Poughkeepsie, I hereby authorize you to discharge from custody Daniel Elliott now a prisoner and confined by Military Warrant to the Gaol of sd. County.
Go: Washington
Head Quarters
New Windsor
Jany 14th 1781
The name of the prisoner and the date vary with each document, but the script is otherwise exactly the same. Similarly, in the other most common Spring forgery, the names may change, but the story stays the same:
Head Quarters
Valley Forge
Feby 5th 1778
Permission is granted to Mr. John Edwards with his Negro boy Jack to pass and repass this picket at Ramapo.
Go: Washington
In her article on Washington forgeries, Dorothy Twohig explains why Spring used so many different names:
The Papers of George Washington staff has acquired innumerable copies of this pass issued to Mr. Johnson and Sam, to Mr. Smith and Tim, to Mr. Carson and Henry, and so on… Since none of the passes unearthed so far bears the same name, it is evident that Spring changed the names on the document each time he encountered an affluent victim, simply making out a pass to order.
Spring’s penchant for repetition led the witty Thomas Madigan, whose book on autographs titled Word Shadows of the Great was mentioned earlier, to speculate:
Heaven knows how many times the indefatigable Spring caused “Mr. Ryerson and his negro man, Dick,” to pass the picket at Ramapo — so often, I am sure, that the two might have constituted the first important traffic jam in American history.
Spring’s lack of imagination finally caught up with him, though. He was arrested in Philadelphia 1869, spent years in prison, and died in poverty 1878 — an appropriately moral ending to his story of fraud and forgery, all sparked by the “suggestive presence of the old foolscap.”
What about the afterlife of Spring’s handiwork? How did his forgeries end up at AAS?
The good news is, we weren’t duped into purchasing the Spring forgeries. The bad news is, someone else was.
By the turn of the twentieth century, our two “Washington” documents had found their way to a London bookshop of Walter T. Spencer. In a fascinating twist, this bookseller wrote a memoir titled Forty Years in My Bookshop and he claims at the very end of that book that at about the turn of the century he had been offered forged documents, including Washington’s signature! In his book, the bookseller claims he was smart enough to refuse them:
Fifteen or twenty years ago I had offered to me from time to time several letters and short manuscripts alleged to be in the autograph of great men, Thackeray and George Washington among them. .. I am glad to be able to recall I had sufficient knowledge of my business to pronounce them forgeries. (279-280)
Original bill from Walter T. Spencer's London bookshop for what he listed as "two autographed notes of George Washington"
Apparently, at least these two forgeries by Spring got past the bookseller’s expert detecting skills, because he sold them as the genuine to a Mr. Edward R. Warren on January 16, 1901 for €9. (According to the site Measuring Worth this would be approximately $1,000 in today’s money.) Just imagine how Mr. Warren felt when he found out the documents he bought were forgeries!
Unfortunately, no letter from Mr. Warren explaining why he gave us these documents survives in the AAS archives. There is a note on the envelope they came in that states the forged documents were the gift of Mr. Edward R. Warren, Dec. 18, 1934, along with the “original bill from the English dealer who sold the two documents as genuine.” Perhaps Mr. Warren could no longer bear having to look at them once he realized he had been duped. We certainly are glad he gave the documents to AAS rather than throwing them into a therapeutic bonfire. In my opinion at least, the story of the fakes is much more interesting than if we really had a letter from Washington allowing passage through that fictionally well-traveled picket at Ramapo.
Further Reading:
Madigan, Thomas. Word Shadows of the Great. (New York, 1930)
Spencer, Walter T. Forty Years in My Bookshop. (Boston, 1923)
And finally, if you’ve had enough of the forgeries and want to read some of Washington’s real writing, check out The Papers of George Washington, or visit a new website debuting today which includes transcriptions of many of Washington’s writings, First in Peace.
Discovery Channel may have cornered the market on Shark Week, but here at Past is Present we are instituting our own Fraud Week to explore the seamier underside of the archive. Or perhaps we will discover that there is another side to fakes, forgeries, and frauds, in a similar manner to how Shark Week has helped those raised with the fear of Jaws in them to appreciate sharks in new ways — even if they’re not ready to swim with them.
For another example of nineteenth-century fraud, click on the image above to read recent AAS fellow Lara Cohen's piece on the counterfeit gift book economy in the AAS publication, The Book (November 2008), p.3
Fakes can be fascinating historical documents in their own right. (Of course, it helps to have the perspective of at least hundred years between you and the fake. And it really helps if you didn’t shell out a ton of money to purchase what turns out not to be the genuine article!) But honestly assessing forgeries, counterfeits, and pirated copies reminds us of the value of the real thing.
We will spend this week bent over a light box examining bank notes with magnifying glass in hand on the trail of a counterfeiter. We will pull pirated copies of books off our shelves and take to high seas of early copyright law (or lack thereof). We will trace the path of a forged George Washington signature from its origination with a cartload of foolscap wastepaper bought at auction and an old-fashioned washstand that together tempted a young book peddler to become an expert forger; follow it through the hands of flattered collectors, a respected London bookseller, and a disappointed buyer; and see it ultimately deposited in its final resting place — the AAS vault. We will learn what people in the nineteenth-century considered the most pernicious frauds of their time and get advice on how to protect ourselves from “confidence men” in all forms.
As we uncover these frauds in the archives, we hope you will join us in pondering the questions they raise:
Why are some people willing to spend thousands of dollars for just the signature of a famous man (or, less often, a famous woman)? Is there something inherent valuable in paper we know George Washington’s hand touched and his pen bore down on?
What exactly is the difference between an authorized edition and a pirated copy of a book? Between genuine and counterfeit money? How is it determined that the authority behind these documents is legitimate?
What makes something worth faking?
How are people convinced to believe counterfeit items are genuine, and to pay good money for them?
And perhaps most importantly of all, will you be able to spot the fakes amidst the genuine, or will you too be fooled?
As the week goes on, please comment on our posts and let us know if you enjoy a themed week like this Fraud Week. We already have ideas for a follow-up Crime & Deception Week, and we’re always open to other suggestions. So let us know what you’d like!
Jackson, Isaac R., d. 1843. A sketch of the life and public services of William Henry Harrison. Philadelphia, Jan. 1836.
The Making of the President, 1840 style. By the 1824 presidential election, the printed campaign biography had become a key component of any serious presidential run. Hence when William Henry Harrison consented to run against Martin Van Buren in 1836, several biographies were cobbled together from existing sources and published. The leading account was penned by Isaac R. Jackson and printed in at least half a dozen editions. Jackson’s work proved so helpful in painting Harrison as a military hero and man of the people, in stark contrast to Van Buren, that for the 1840 campaign it was revised, considerably expanded, and printed in nearly two dozen full or abridged versions, usually with significant text alterations to suit the pamphlet’s intended audience.
This copy offers a unique window into the process of shaping a candidate’s public persona. A copy of one of the 1836 editions has been revised for the 1840 campaign through erasures, manuscript deletions and additions, and even printed sections cut from other 1840 revised editions (or different biographies!) and pasted where the new text should be inserted. The title and imprint have been altered (with added directions for the typesetter) to: “The Life of General Harrison of Ohio, the people’s candidate for the presidency … Philadelphia: 1840.” The revisions were not made by Jackson, but by an unknown Harrison supporter. No 1840 edition with this exact title is known, but various of the editions now at AAS contain some of the textual alterations and not others, and a few proposed alterations may not have seen print at all. In other words, the text of this particular campaign biography may exist in a dozen or more versions, depending on which edition(s) a Whig Party hack used as printer’s copy for the local edition he was charged with preparing. Purchased from David Lesser. Hugh Amory Memorial Fund.
Historians of American life and culture have studied and argued about Mark Twain’s use of dialect in his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn since the novel’s U.S. publication on this date in February 1885. Censors and bowdlerizers have made efforts to prevent students and others from reading the novel with its dialect intact. From early attempts to ban the book in public libraries to the latest efforts by one professor to scrub the book clean of offensive language, the novel has had a long and controversial history. Indeed, a recent New York Timesarticle reported on new efforts to censor Twain.
When Twain published his American edition of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on February 18, 1885, he commissioned Edward Windsor Kemble, son of California newsman Edward C. Kemble, to illustrate the work. Twain had worked on the Alta California, a newspaper once owned by the elder Kemble (click here for an AAS catalog list of newspapers edited by E.C. Kemble).
Edward W. Kemble later reflected on his illustration process in “Illustrating Huckleberry Finn” which appeared in the February 1930 issue of The Colophon: A Book Collectors’ Quarterly. In the article, Kemble describes the beginning of his career as a time when he “was a budding cartoonist … and Thomas Nast reigned supreme as the master cartoonist of the country.” Illustrating Twain’s book, though, changed everything for Kemble. His images became so closely associated with Huckleberry Finn that when William D. Taylor directed the 1920 film version of the Adventures, he modeled his actors and set after Kemble’s illustrations.
E.W. Kemble’s illustrations have never received the same type of controversy or attention as Twain’s language, yet Kemble’s depictions of African-Americans were prominently featured in late-nineteenth-century periodicals, newspapers, and illustrated novels. Below is a sampling of records for other works featuring illustrations by Kemble and owned by AAS.
For a list of all the cataloged works illustrated by Kemble at AAS, click here. And, of course, both the American first edition and the earlier London edition from 1884 of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with their now-famous Kemble illustrations, are at AAS, too!
When a new technology comes along, like the iPad or the Kindle, human consumers are naturally fascinated. We admire our colleague’s new-found technological abilities; we test the gadgets in the stores; we read about them in the press. Some among us predict the end of older technologies. Others scoff and stick with the tried and true. Lest you think this is purely a twenty-first century phenomenon, we blog here today about a technology that took America by storm in the 1840s – the daguerreotype.
Above: Mrs. Samuel (L.E.R. Treadwell) Woodward (d. 1857), sixth plate daguerreotype, 1856;
Right:
Luther Holman Hale (1823-1885), sixth plate daguerreotype, late 1840's
Click either image to enlarge.
We have blogged about photographs elsewhere, and, if you want more images, you can certainly link to any of the Society’s wonderful online photographic resources to see more. But today we are thinking about the first photograph, when the whole idea was new and the technology was completely mystical to most Americans. We don’t necessarily want to look at images – but we have included a couple here for your viewing pleasure. Mainly what we are interested in is how daguerreotypes were perceived by those early consumers of this new technology. Often we rely on critical reviews in periodicals or newspapers for this sort of information, but every once in a while, we get a rare first-person account.
Item from the Emory Washburn Papers, which AAS acquired in 2009
Recently one of our valued volunteers, Jane Dewey, was helping us to process the Society’s Emory Washburn (1800-1877) Papers (you can read more about this recent acquisiton in our Fall 2009 Almanac). While working with the collection, Jane discovered an interesting quote about a daguerreotype. In 1841, just a few years after the technology was invented and made available in the U.S., the future Massachusetts governor sat for his portrait in Worcester or Boston. He sent the image by mail to his wife, who, with their three children, was visiting her parents in Walpole, New Hampshire. Alas, the American Antiquarian Society does not have the 1841 daguerreotype, just a very important letter from Mrs. Washburn back to her husband, written upon receipt of the portrait. This is what she wrote on July 29, 1841:
I thank you most sincerely for sending the daguerreotype – to me it is invaluable. The truth of sunlight cannot be questioned or criticized. The dimness and indistinctness at first sight are pleasant to me in a miniature; you look at it, it seems like a shadow or a spirit; you turn it into a stronger light & the spirit becomes embodied. The longer you look & the brighter the light; the more & more you find comes out & he seems to be yours only. He seems to be yours, bright, clear & distinct, but dim, unreal & shadowy to others – & this feeling of monopoly, love, in its selfishness, likes. Father and Mother were affected almost to tears. Minnie declared it looked like Mr. Van Buren. Charlie said at first it was a little looking glass and then smiling said he “could see his Father, Mr. Washburn in it.” Emory said, “That is my Father.”
Later photograph of Emory Washburn
In 1841 Minnie Washburn was age 10, Charlie was 8, and little Emory was just 5. One can almost picture the family gathered together in the parlor in New Hampshire passing around the small silvery daguerreotype and exclaiming over the surface, the image of Emory Washburn looking back at them. It must have been a somewhat disconcerting feeling to see an image of a loved one, reduced in size, set in a small book-like case, knowing in reality that their father was miles away in Massachusetts. This might be akin to our modern apps like FaceTime or Skype – where we can see people half way around the world and talk to them, too! The delight we take in these new developments is exactly like the feeling captured in Mrs. Washburn’s letter.
If you think you might know where the original image of Emory Washburn lives, do let us know! We have no idea who the photographer might be and would be delighted to learn more. The Society has several images of Emory Washburn in his later years, and would love to see him at age 41, looking out of the mirrored surface of the daguerreotype, a confident lawyer and young father.
Did you know that the American valentine industry started right here in Worcester in 1848? That America’s first widely mass-produced valentines were designed by a woman named Esther Howland in her workshop on Summer Street? That Victorians ate conversation hearts? That Valentine’s Day greetings were part of a larger cultural debate in early America about love’s relationship to marriage? The American Antiquarian Society has much to teach us by way of Valentine’s Day lore. Among its collections are valentines designed by Esther Howland and secondary source material on the history of valentines in America.
Esther Howland (1828-1904), a Mount Holyoke grad and Summer Street native, produced America’s first elaborate valentines here in Worcester in 1848, the same year that Worcester became a city. The daughter of an affluent stationer, Howland first copied a Valentine’s Day greeting sent from England by her father’s colleague. An astute businesswoman, Howland eventually opened a successful female-run valentine business combining the female world of the hearth and home with the world of commerce, at a time when valentines were becoming increasingly popular. She became known as the “Mother of the Valentine.” Though never marrying herself, Howland united innumerable lovers through her valentines.
Exchanging valentines had become very popular in America by the early 1840s. In 1846 over 30,000 valentines passed through the New York City post-office on the 14th. In a February 14, 1849 letter to her cousin, Emily Dickinson commented on the widespread nature of the Victorian valentine craze:
The last week has been a merry one in Amherst, & notes have flown around like, snowflakes. Ancient gentlemen, & spinsters, forgetting time, & multitude of years, have doffed their wrinkles – in exchange for smiles – even this aged world of our’s, has thrown away it’s staff – and spectacles, & now declares it will be young again. (quoted in Petrino 89)
Valentines were scrutinized to determine lovers’ feelings and sometimes resulted in offers of marriage. In fact, Susan Sweeney notes that even “the position of the stamp could reveal a sender’s feelings: upside down meant “I’m lovesick”; sideways, pointing right, meant “love and kisses”; sideways, pointing left, meant “I’ll never leave you”; diagonal, pointing right, meant “Will you marry me?”; and diagonal, pointing left, meant “Yes, I will.” (Sweeney 78) Lovers lacking verbal facility could copy verses from valentine writers, small books suggesting various poems tailored to suit the many moods writers might wish to convey (Sweeney 82). The American Antiquarian Society has some of these small treasures in its collections (click here to see a list of valentine writers from our online catalog).
Valentines had cultural significance in Victorian courtship rituals. Sweeney notes that valentines “enabled lovers to convey, interpret, and respond to romantic intentions… A man usually initiated the exchange by sending his beloved a token to which she replied in kind, producing a complex verbal transaction that began during the week of St. Valentine’s Day but could last well into March” (Sweeney 82). Debates about love’s relationship to marriage raged in nineteenth-century America. The valentine craze thus reflected “a shift toward widespread acceptance of romantic love, especially as a basis for marriage” (Cook 103).
In the midst of this new interest in valentines and the uncertain social status of romance, Esther Howland opened her valentine business. She started by setting up a workroom in the family home on Summer Street, staffing it with a few local girls to help fill the orders by copying her designs. According to Howland, her girls were paid “liberally” and the work was “light and pleasant” (Cook 100). Lisa Cook notes that Howland’s workshop likely resembled an English valentine workshop described by Dickens in All the Year Round:
[They are] in a long room occupied by nymphs, each one having at her elbow a pot, not of color this time, but of glue. Strewn before each girl in apparent confusion, but really in regularly-assorted heaps, lie hearts and darts and doves and bows and arrows, and rose-buds and true lovers’ knots, and torches of Hymen, and every variety of emblem appertaining to love and matrimony… Some are paper, some are silk and velvet, some tinsel and gold-leaf. (quoted in Cook 101)
Esther Howland created many innovations in valentine design. She introduced layers of lace, wafers of colored paper placed beneath lace, three dimensional accordion effects, and a mechanical bouquet in which pulling a string moves flowers aside to reveal printed verses underneath. She insisted that verses and mottos not appear on the outer surface of a card. A shrewd businesswoman, she instructed her girls to write a red “H” on the back of her valentines to distinguish them when she encountered rivals. Her sales quickly reached $75,000 a year and she stayed in business for 30 years.
Original valentines produced by Esther Howland are part of the American Antiquarian Society’s collections. Many of them sport vivid primary colors in contrast to our modern reds and pinks. Delicately cut, gilt lace affairs featuring pictures of lovers in Victorian costume and verses reflecting Victorian ideals, they are a must see for anyone interested in the history of Valentine’s Day. And as for that other Valentine’s Day staple, conversation hearts, the small heart-shaped candies were also invented right here in Massachusetts by Daniel Chase of Boston in 1866.
This Valentine’s Day we hope you will keep a special place in your heart for Worcester, and Massachusetts generally, now that you know how integral their residents were in shaping Valentine’s Day traditions in America. As part of your Valentine’s Day celebrations, please enjoy more of the beautiful valentines from AAS collections in one of our classic online exhibits: “Making Valentines: A Tradition in America.” Consider it our valentine to you, dear Past is Present readers.
For Further Reading:
Cook, Lisa Connelly. “Esther Howland and the Business of Romance.” The Worcester Review. 23,2 (2002): 99-110.
Emerson, Marion Winslow. “The Rose Is Red” or Esther Howland’s Valentines. Newburyport, Mass.: Newburyport Press, 1953.
Petrino, Elizabeth A. “Allow me, Sir, at parting’: Sentimentality and Emotional Spectatorship in Dickinson and Poe’s Verse Valentines.” The Worcester Review. 23,2 (2002): 89-97.
Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “Words from the Heart in Early American Valentines.” The Worcester Review. 23,2 (2002): 81-87.
