Past is Present

Book sales may be up overall this year due to the introduction of e-readers (see the New York Times report here).  But strange fears about the demise of the book still abound (read the New York Times on old-fashioned book covers and e-readers here). Are Americans simply afraid to buy books, or afraid that we’re, at heart, bibliophobic?

The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first official use of the word “bibliophobia” to Thomas Dibdin, renowned author of Bibliomania; or Book Madness; Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms and Cure of This Fatal Disease (London, 1809). The OED indicates that the word “bibliophobia” first appeared in Dibdin’s 1832 pamphlet Bibliophobia, remarks on the present languid and depressed state of Literature, which detailed the depressed London book business and assuaged fears about its recovery.

A quick search in America’s Historical Newspapers reveals that “bibliophobia” actually appeared in an American context long before the publication of Dibdin’s pamphlet. In a November 18, 1793, issue of New York’s Daily Advertiser, an “obscure citizen” addressed Citizen Genêt, French ambassador to the U.S. Troubled over Genet’s attempt to recruit privateers in Charleston and, more specifically, Vice-consul Anthony Duplaine’s consorting with French privateers in Boston harbor, the article’s author declares:

“Let us call persons and things by their appropriate names—Citizen Duplaine was no Minister, he was a simple Vice Consul, and tho’ the sublimity of your genius has filled you with a horror for books, yet the Citizen Consul has been too long in habits of intimacy with them, to possess the Bibliophobia, (if I may be allowed the term); before he entered on the execution of his office, he ought to have informed himself of its extents and privileges, and of his relative connexion, with the Laws of this Country.”

Subject to constitutional distinctions between ambassadors and consuls, Duplaine overstepped his bounds in his refusal to familiarize himself with American legal principles—literally, the books.

Over two hundred years ago Elizabeth Inchbald wrote and published the three act farce Animal Magnetism.  Heavily criticizing Mesmer’s magnetized baths and healing wands, this typical eighteenth-century afterpiece farce features befuddled lovers, lovers’ ruses, and battle of the sexes.  Two hundred years later, befuddled lovers remain but Animal Magnetism is now carefully housed in AAS’s “Dated Pams” collection.

Plays, libretti, playbills, and drama reviews can be found throughout AAS’s collections.  For more on our theatrical resources, read the online guide created by AAS curators and catalogers. A simple chronological search can be done in AAS’s Online Catalog using the subject search option and inserting the search term “plays” followed by the desired year of publication (for instance, “Plays 1809” or “Plays 1810”).  This search should retrieve most records for the desired year.  (Although care should be taken, as even this subject search will not retrieve all records for the desired year.  In addition to the search terms noted on the AAS site, searchers should add keywords like “farce,” “opera,” and “comedy”).

Inchbald’s farce can be found listed under genre heading “Plays 1809” and it is available on Shaw-Shoemaker Digital Edition. The play was written and published immediately following the introduction of Franz Anton Mesmer’s magnetic baths and wands into England from France.  Whereas dispossessed French people of all sorts embraced mesmerism once it was rejected as legitimate practice by the Royal Society of Medicine, Britons were immediately suspicious of mesmerism’s outsider status and its necessitating close contact between male doctor and female patient.

Inchbald’s farce upends expectations.  Two female characters, Constance and her servant, discover the machinations of their guardian, the Doctor, who wishes to use animal magnetism to make Constance love him.  It is Inchbald’s distinctly British Doctor, denied a diploma by the Royal Academy, who finds magnetism appealing.  And it is the very French Marquis and his servant, Fluer, who purport to teach magnetism, who finally win over the women and conclude that: “there is no magnetism, like the powerful magnetism of love.”  Inchbald’s fumbling British Doctor, dispossessed by love and romance, can’t compete with the power of natural love and genuine closeness between male and female.  Passion could not be manipulated on the stage.

The farce was most likely first produced on an American stage in December of 1796 at the New Theater in Philadelphia. America’s Historical Newspapers, always a handy resource, reveals a widespread discontent with animal magnetism throughout the late 1780s and early 1790s and the final ban of animal magnetism by the Medical Society of the State of Connecticut on May 17, 1796.

By April 1807, the farce had become so popular that William Twaits, the eccentric London actor, was performing in the role of the Doctor in New York.  His last performance in January of 1808 was not the end of Animal Magnetism’s run on the U.S. stage.  But Americans had learned that animal magnetism could not sway men’s minds.  As one commentator in New York’s American Citizen noted when writing on the election for the Council of Appointment in February 1807:

Witchcrafts and sorcerers are no longer in vogue—and animal magnetism has been discarded by modern philosophers—Where then, we ask, since a coalition is denied to exist, has the secret of this mysterious coincidence of the views, votes, and measures of the parties in question?

Love may have been deemed a mystery in Inchbald’s farce, too powerful to be performed or manipulated on the stage, but nothing could control or explain party formation.

The stage, with its perfect amalgam of the arts, was perhaps the perfect venue for understanding why humans cannot be understood. As Deleuze and Guattari wrote:

It is through writing that you become animal, it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal and imperceptible: in love.

For further reference:

• Fulford, Tim.  “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s.” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2004): 57-78.   A study of magnetism and mesmerism in English and French literature and politics during the late eighteenth century.

• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari.  A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  New York: Continuum, 2004.

A recent reference question reminded me just how many amazing bibliographies there are, and it also sparked a memory of a wonderful cache of letters in AAS’s manuscript collection that give an insider’s view of the ’49er experience. (The entire Grant-Burr Family Papers are fully transcribed online, including the letters on the California Gold Rush.)

What prompted my reverie was an email from a woman wondering if her ancestor was listed in the reference work by Louis Rasmussen, California Wagon Train Lists. While not strictly a bibliography, this reference work transcribes the lists of passengers traveling west to California that appeared in local papers across the country. Since the book was on the shelf right outside my door, I offered to check the index rather than have her drive up from Connecticut. And while I was looking for her ancestor, I thought I may as well take a look to see if I could track down our Daniel Grant from the Grant-Burr Family Papers.

Now, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t already know about Rasmussen’s book. I fear I will be made to stand in a corner, down one of the many aisles of bibliographies in the reading room, with my face to the shelf for ‘fessing up to this fact. To comfort myself, a quick look around the packed shelves of the AAS reading room reminds me it’s not surprising I wasn’t already familiar with Rasmussen’s California Wagon Train Lists. We have almost 3,000 titles in the Bibliography (or BIB) collection alone. One person can’t be expected to know all of them, I tell myself. For instance, did anyone know there was a bibliography on tomatoes? Not only is there one, there are actually two in the AAS reading room! (The second one is really another edition of the first, so perhaps that’s cheating.)

As modern day researchers, we owe an immeasurable debt to those bibliographers and editors who slogged through thousands of volumes of newspapers to index them or read through other sources to pull out all the citations referring to one subject area. Although I called the debt immeasurable, if anyone could measure it, it would be the bibliographers. Indeed, there are bibliographies of bibliographies. It takes a certain kind of genius to do this kind of work and all of the rest of us benefit from the labor.

This research story has a happy ending. It turns out the ancestor of our inquirer was listed in Rasmussen’s book. Next week I’ll let you know if I was able to find Daniel Grant in there as well, and I’ll include selections from his letters and those of his brother-in-law, Ralph E. Burr, who followed him to California. So get your wagon train ready — we’re heading west!

Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science and recent AAS fellow, discusses the game “Who did it? The Maine Question” (described in an earlier Past is Present post) in the context of children’s games generally.

In the array of AAS materials about young people’s play and reading, I’ve found a large number that depict militaristic and patriotic themes. Some displays are charming, sentimental evocations of activities children must have witnessed as the adults around them became enmeshed in the Spanish-American war and other military themes. The bright and colorful chromolithography used by the McLoughlin Brothers company filled alphabet books and puzzles with proud, patriotic children. Other companies advertised paper doll soldiers and remembered the Civil War with games like “A Visit to Camp”. In terms of books, magazines, and short stories, Oliver Optics’ works portrayed historic moments from the Civil War in The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army (the text of which is available online) to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, when author W.T. Adams was caught abroad as fighting began. Click on the manuscript letter below to read what Adams wrote to his publishers.

Although it is popular to lament the passing of an era when children’s entertainments were far more innocent than they are today, the toys and games of this period were not free of risque and adult elements, despite what stereotypes of Victorian propriety and Progressive Era purity movements might suggest.
The McLoughlin Brothers’ puzzle, “Up the Heights of San Juan,” portrayed not only the Rough Riders’ charge but young men injured and dying in the grass. “A Visit to Camp” features both literal and metaphorical intoxication, as the characters visit the curvaceous Vivandier and experience her liquors and her charms. The didactic functions of games and literature –- intended to make learning enjoyable, through message-driven play — encapsulated multiple grown-up preoccupations of the day.

In this context, though, “The Maine Question” stood out. With its sheaf of thin papers, fuse cord, and illustration of what might have been seen as a sinister Spaniard, who appeared to be caught in the act of destroying the U.S. ship, this game struck a different character than many of the other military-theme games, toys, and stories for young people.

It is an atmosphere both festive yet filled with curiosity. It is an arrangement of tables filled with the written word of America. The words and images spill out across the tables with humor, with poignancy, in rhyme and in the marketing jargon of the day, dressed in color or black and white, yet all share in the simple, yet powerful quality of revelation. None more than the item I selected at the 3rd annual “Adopt A Book” fundraiser for the American Antiquarian Society, now becoming a welcome tradition.

The item I adopted was a 4 page “Soldier?s Newsletter” published by the 8th Vermont Volunteer Regiment, dated May 16, 1863 from the deep south in Brashear City, Louisiana. The 8th Vermont was different from many regiments for it was raised, armed, and equipped under the direct authority of the United States government through General Benjamin Butler. It wintered at Camp Holbrook in Brattleboro, VT, then with sealed orders left for New York City and preceded by sail to the Gulf of Mexico and landed in New Orleans May 12, 1862. As viewed by Captain S.E. Howard in the writing of the regimental history in 1892, the people of the City of New Orleans were “in a state of ugliness and vindictiveness hardly to be expressed. Men and women seemed to be filled with the spirit of the Evil one.” (See the 8th Vermont Infantry Regimental History, 1892 Revised Roster, by Captain S. E. Howard available online at the website Vermont in the Civil War).

The 8th was active in establishing order in the La Fourche District, across the Bay from New Orleans, and in late October of 1862 began a campaign to open up the Opelousas Railroad all the way to Brashear City. By December of 1862, the 8th along with other units under the command of General Weitzel successfully completed their mission. They must have spent some time in Brashear City, for the issue of the “Soldier?s Newsletter” AAS has is Vo. 1, No. 10 indicating that there were nine previous issues. And this is typical of regimental news papers: troops staying in a specific location for some time, camp life having a mind-numbing impact on their morale, thus some enterprising soldier, perhaps with a printer background or a former teacher, begins publishing the equivalent of a home town newspaper. The newspaper is read and re-read, and often mailed home to the family, which according to Vince Golden, the news print guru of the AAS, is often how we still find well preserved copies of such valuable items.

On the first page of this “Soldier?s Newsletter” is a thoughtful and well written poem in seven stanzas very much in the Victorian tradition. It is entitled “Lines of Memory” and commemorates a highly regarded Captain of Company K named John S. Clark who died, not on the battlefield, but from disease. His loss was deeply mourned. This type of material is what we would have expected from such a newspaper, and while we can appreciate its sincerity and sense of loss of a gentleman leader, we would be fooled if we thought it contained no surprises….for there is far more to these Vermonters than meets the eye. And their “hometown newspaper” tells a far broader and deeper story of America?s Civil War than you could possibly imagine.

On page 3, the 1st column, the writer asks the question, “What shall be done with the Contrabands?”, ?contrabands of war? being term used to describe those formerly enslaved who made their way to freedom by escaping their masters servitude through the safety of the Union lines. The writer goes on to say that such a question:

is losing its knottiness, as the nation loses its naughtiness, and as it is more clearly seen what they can do and are doing for us. They are bringing millions of dollars worth of cotton and sugar, which their own labor has produced, from the swamps, and sly corners where the treacherous rebels had hid them, within reach of our steamers, and so off to markets. An shall we act on the ?penny-wise and pound-foolish? plan of neglecting, starving and abusing these persons, rather than treat them as we should other unfortunate fellow citizens in the same circumstances? God forbid. (p.3)

Note the line, “unfortunate fellow citizens”. There is a distinct sense of equality in that phrase and it puts this Vermont Regiment into the same class as the Massachusetts regiments from the Worcester area (the 15th, 25th, 36th, 51st) with profound abolitionist feelings so well described in Dr. Janette Greenwood?s new book, First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

The language employed in this “Soldier?s Newsletter” is instructional for us here of the 21st century for it is strong and as William Lloyd Garrison would say, “unequivocal”, as any language used to describe those formerly enslaved. The writer talks about the government “making soldiers of the able-bodied Contrabands here” and goes on to discuss the process of the formation of a state of “Home Colonization Society” where the formerly enslaved are assisted in the establishment of schools, churches, press and other means of community “with such supplies as may be necessary to the full and fair trial of the Free labor system, on a plan which recognizes the Manhood of the black, and his right to the proceeds of his own labor, in his native land, and also to more than an ?equal right with a rebel? to enjoy under the protection of the American flag the rights of an American citizen.” (p.3)

For more about recently freed African American’s education, see AAS’s online exhibition curated by Prof. Lucia Knoles called Northern Visions of Race, Region, & Reform in the press and letters of freedmen and freedmen’s teachers in the Civil War era.

The language employed in the “Soldier’s Newsletter” is a powerful instrument in gauging beliefs for it was not just “for the Union” that these men left their Green Mountain Valley?s and ventured forth into the deep south to wade through the mosquito infested waters of Louisiana or to stand shoulder to shoulder with comrades, firing at close range at their enemy. No, there was something else. These printed words provide us with the insight to better understand the motivation of these young men as they stood engaged in the nation?s defining conflict. The words, “the Manhood of the Black”, “…the rights of an American citizen” speak to a recognition and an awareness of these basic rights due these formerly enslaved men and women. There is also a recognition of personal conduct of these Vermont men turned warriors. Also included in the “Soldier’s Newsletter” is a speech by General Daniel Ullman to his officers when his brigade was temporarily being reassigned. Ullman  admonished them to act as “Christian gentleman” and those people who would soon become their  responsibility should be treated as men:

They were our equals in the line of sight of God who made us all -that the black man was quick to read character and would with almost preternatural instinct read whether we were men-gentlemen-or otherwise; adding that not from us, but from the evidence of those under our charge, would we be judged by our treatment of them. (p.4)

The leadership of this 8th Vermont asked their men to answer a higher calling, that the values they stood for would not be trampled by the fates and horrors of war, that somehow, they would persevere as honorable men.

As we turn our thoughts to our veterans following this Memorial Day 2010 and we recall the great sacrifices they and their families have made and continue to make, these words speak through the centuries to us today. For once again, our nation is at war, and once again the challenge to us as a people and as a nation is not that our bravery will be questioned, but rather we will be viewed by how well we treat those we are there to protect and to restore their basic rights. It is a challenge today in Afghanistan and Iraq as it was in 1863 along the bayous of Louisiana. The writer, quite possibly A. W. Eastman, Editor & Proprietor of the “Soldier’s Newsletter”, calls us through the ages as soldiers, as citizens, as a nation. Paraphrasing General Ullman, our Vermont editor writes, “…conjuring us by every high and holy feeling to act circumspectly, he wished us the best success in our labors.” (p.4)

We would do well to follow that advice.