“I. Popular Authorship in the Wright Collection” in “Reprinting Wright”
I. Popular Authorship in the Wright Collection
In this chapter, we employ the Wright American Fiction collection as a comparative corpus to the newspapers used throughout this book, in large part because it is perhaps the best structured, most comprehensive open-access dataset of nineteenth-century American fiction which includes a mix of canonical and non-canonical works. It derives, as described on the project’s current website, from a bibliography compiled in the 1950s by Lyle Wright, the collection’s namesake:
Lyle H. Wright, a librarian at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, created a bibliography of American fiction from the years 1851–1875, published as American Fiction 1851–1875: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1957; revised 1965). He listed a total of 2,923 titles in adult fiction, including “novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales, tract-like tales, allegories, and fictitious biographies and travels, in prose” (from the introduction), and inventoried 18 American libraries for holdings. This compilation is part of his three-volume set listing American fiction from 1774 through 1900, and is considered the most comprehensive bibliography of American adult fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries.
However, that it is the most comprehensive digitized collection does not mean it is comprehensive. While extensive, the Wright Collection does reflect a mid-twentieth century understanding of American literature such that its authors are, for instance, predominantly white. In the introduction to Going the Rounds, we outline the parallel limitations of the Chronicling America newspaper collection. Thus our analyses in this chapter should be understood as addressing predominantly the literature of middle-class, white readers, as filtered through the periodicals of similar readers. However, we make explicit effort to also highlight the few texts within Wright written by writers of color of which we are aware and also acknowledge that access to publishing was often unavailable to many whose identities could be considered marginalized. In the final section of this chapter, we will compare our findings using Wright to findings using a corpus of Black, American fiction writers in order to pressure the findings of this section and illustrate the shaping influence of corpus choice on the outcomes of computational literary research. The studies outlined in this chapter emphasize essential questions about how the collecting practices underlying our digital archives shape the computational analyses we can perform, and what they might teach us about literary history as well has its gaps. Our newspaper data only allows us to evidence the uptake and resonance of marginalized writers in predominantly middle-class, white papers, but we attempt to use this uptake as a way of attending to archival silences and questioning how these silences came to be. We hope subsequent analyses will employ similar methods to compare our findings against trends in still other corpora, such as the black press.
The definitions of both “American” and “fiction,” as operationalized in this chapter, are shaped by whether works are or are not included in the Wright Collection, but this reliance on metadata might be misleading as many of the works within Wright have multiple sub-genres such as documentary, historical fiction, memoir, advice writing, and so forth. Despite these limitations, the Wright collection can help us pressure the canon. While Wright includes many authors that dominate the American literature canon today, such as Twain, Stowe, or Hawthorne, the vast majority of its authors are less well studied, often despite enormous popularity during the nineteenth century. Indeed, when we plot the authors whose works were most widely reprinted in nineteenth-century newspapers, we find that a majority of them are, if not unfamiliar, at least unlikely to appear in modern anthologies of American literature and scarcely represented in the scholarship indexed by the Modern Language Association. We might spot the bestselling E.D.E.N Southworth, for instance, whose works have been recently recovered by scholars, but also the more obscure—at least to twenty-first century readers—“Danbury news man,” James Montgomery Bailey or, most challengingly for literary history, the most-reprinted author in the corpus: “Anonymous.” Our list of most-reprinted authors already includes many women writers whose work has been largely ignored by scholars. If we then follow Virginia Woolf and “venture to guess that Anon . . . was often a woman,” then this study promises to shift the center on nineteenth-century American fiction to focus even more squarely on women’s writing, as well as writing by other marginalized authors for whom publishing under Anonymous might have been the safest, or the only, option.
Taking newspaper reprinting as our signal of prominence, the most popular authors of the mid-nineteenth century, as represented in Wright, comprise canonical, recently recovered, and non-canonical names. Additionally, at the very top of the list, after the large “Anonymous” category, is Thomas Powell, whom many would recognize as an English author, but who moved to New York and published from the US beginning around 1849.4 By looking at this list, we begin to see how the traditional outlines of the nineteenth century American canon do not, in fact, capture the readerly interests of the people who lived in America in this period, at least so far as those interests were refracted through newspapers. Additionally, this list illustrates how the very category “American fiction” can be fuzzy. Does writing and publishing in America make someone an American author, or must that author be native-born in order to belong to an American canon? What of writers such as William Wells Brown, who fled the United States in order to avoid recapture into slavery and who published his novel Clotel in London, though the novel focuses on American slavery? These are not new questions for literary critics, of course, but they are sharpened by a computational reading of the Wright collection as a seed corpus. By using computational reprint detection methods, we can surface the voracity of writers who have been forgotten, such as Samuel Putnam Avery who we identify as being the third most popular writer as well as more recently recovered names such as Fanny Fern who we identify as the thirteenth most popular writer. The lack of biographies and archival indexing for these forgotten writers would make surfacing their impact on the American literary landscape difficult, if not impossible, using traditional methods.
Questions of identity and definition become even more complex when we turn our attention to the titles that were most frequently reprinted. The top three most reprinted works from the Wright collection are all comedic works—Chit-Chat of Humor, Wit and Anecdote by Thomas Powell, Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-bag of Fun by Samuel Putnam Avery, and Everybody’s Friend by Josh Billings—while many of the others are collections of sketches or short stories. Like other newspaper genres, these findings suggest that the most successful newspaper fiction—by volume, at least—is the curt and exceptable, rather than longer serial texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Turning to the preface of a text titled Condensed Novels within the Wright collection, we see that nineteenth-century authors were often quite aware of this trend in newspaper reprinting. In that preface, Bret Harte writes, “the style and finish of the following sketches may make it sufficiently obvious to the reader, without further statement, that they are written with no higher ambition than that of filling the ephemeral pages of a weekly paper. But their publication in that form, has been the means of giving them a popularity which their author trusts justifies him in reproducing them in a collected and more permanent shape.”5 Harte explicitly acknowledges the origins of the texts in this collection: they were short fictions prepared for the pages of American newspapers, what we might call sketches or short stories, which Harte names “condensed novels” as part of his argument that they are valuable enough to be gathered and published in a less ephemeral form.
In order to demonstrate how a machine reading of Wright might realign our sense of the nineteenth-century canon, we turn to a case study of “Mrs. Partington,” a popular character authored by a number of nineteenth century writers, few of whom are much studied in literary criticism today. We might think of Mrs. Partington as an ancestor of an internet meme—a broad characterization that could be used for humor or commentary, and who could be adapted by a range of authors. Looking at the circulation of Mrs. Partington sketches immediately complicates the story of which American authors might be worthy of critical attention based on readership and circulation.
Persona Fiction
The character of “Mrs. Partington” was, as scholar Melissa Homestead notes, a sort of “Yankee Mrs. Malaprop, whose unintentionally humorous sayings became fodder for ‘squibs’ reprinted in papers throughout the country.” Mrs. Partington and her family were originally created by Benjamin Shillaber, a humorist and editor of The Carpet-Bag, a weekly humor magazine, and they soon became staples of periodical literature in the period. The popularity of Mrs. Partington warrants critical attention, and brings Shillaber himself into focus, though not Shillaber only. While the short, humorous Mrs. Partington sketches in newspapers and magazines are sometimes Shillaber’s work, they are just as often not. Both of the most reprinted works from the Wright collection we identify in this study are Mrs. Partington sketches, but neither one was written by Shillaber—the most popular Mrs. Partington sketches we have identified were written by Samuel Putnam Avery and Thomas Powell.
The subjects of Mrs. Partington’s sketches varied, though they centered on domestic scenes. One popular excerpt that circulated in 1847 came from the collection Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington and Others of the Family, by Benjamin Shillaber, and was reprinted at least fifty-six times:
TASTE. "I CAN’T bear children," said Miss Prim disdainfully. Mrs. Partington looked at her over her spectacles mildly before she replied. “Perhaps if you could you would like them better,” she at last said.
This exchange well illustrates the direct and sometimes cutting humor associated with the Mrs. Partington character, as well as the ways she serves to prop up middle-class values of domesticity, a quality of reprinted Wright excerpts we will examine in more detail later in this chapter. Another popular excerpt, reprinted at least sixty-two times, comes from Samuel Putnam Avery’s Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-bag of Fun and began circulating in 1850. It reads:
MRS. PARTINGTON AND SALVATION.
—Mrs. Partington says that nothing despises her so much as to see people, who profess to expect salvation, go to church without their purses, when a recollect is to be taken.
Yet another excerpt, with at least seventy-seven reprints, appears first in Thomas Powell’s Chit-chat of Humor, Wit and Anecdote and began circulating in 1852:
Mrs. Partington says she did not marry her second husband because she loved the male sex, but just because he was the size of her first protector, and would come so good to wear his old clothes out.
Mrs. Partington shows up numerous other times in the Wright Collection, but seems be most prominent in Avery’s work, at least when viewed through the lens of reprinting. Although Shillaber created Mrs. Partington, her sketches exemplify punchy newspaper writing and capitalize on short, witty punchlines. Thus, the style was easy to copy, and the character easily adopted by other writers. Our Mrs. Partington clusters gather around the character herself rather than a particular author or work. Much as previously-discussed excerpts circulated without titles or authorial attribution, Mrs. Partington seems designed primarily for rhetorical velocity or virality, though as Homestead notes, the lack of credit given to Shillaber would make him resentful (215).
While Shillaber perhaps resented that he was rarely credited for creating Mrs. Partington, her uptake by other writers ensured her circulation and enduring cultural life. In an advertisement placed inside Ellen Grant: Or Fashionable Life in New York, the physical copy of Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-Bag of Fun is described as having “150 comic wood-cuts,” being printed on “fine white paper, and contains 300 pages,” and having a “tinted frontispiece by Darley.” The advertisement boasts that 20,000 copies of the book had been sold thus far.6 While we find 51 instances of newspapers reprinting excerpts from Shillaber, we find 377 instances of them reprinting Avery. At least as far as our reprinting algorithm can detect, then, Avery was the more popular writer of Mrs. Partington sketches, rather than her creator, Shillaber.
Our goal is not to identify the “real” owner of this literary character, but instead to point to Mrs. Partington as a lynchpin for understanding intellectual property, circulation, and reauthorship in the nineteenth-century newspaper press. Mrs. Partington becomes a meme, in the modern sense: a template with certain recognizable conventions of temperament, vocabulary, and tone, but also flexible topically, so that she can be written by anyone and written to address anything. Some of these revisions are more skillful or successful than others, but they all contribute to the character’s cultural life. Avery even acknowledges Mrs. Partington as a template in his preface to Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-Bag of Fun when he writes that the works in the book are “original and selected, that is, ‘begged, borrowed, and stolen.’”7 By calling particular attention to the fact that some of the sketches that Avery includes in the book are outright stolen from other Mrs. Partington writers (including Shillaber, himself) with no credit given, Avery directly addresses the free floating conceptions of intellectual property. Just as memes circulate on the internet today in various forms and sometimes with competing ideas of their origins, Mrs. Partington circulated both in periodicals and in bound books outside of the sphere of Shillaber’s control or authority. The fact that our reprinting data indicates that Avery was the more widely reprinted Mrs. Partington writer points to Shillaber’s inability to mark Mrs. Partington as a type of text that only he is able to produce.
Shillaber tries to regain control over the circulation and attribution of Mrs. Partington in his preface to the collection Life and sayings of Mrs. Partington and Others of the Family when he writes that “we will tell to you, reader, a little story about the origin of the, Partington sayings.” In the origin story that Shillaber presents, he explains that while he originally published Mrs. Partington anonymously to make some money on the side, and although there are some who claim that writers like Sydney Smith invented the character, “the reputation of Mrs. Partington belongs to the Boston Post, as much as if Sydney Smith had never uttered the name in his great speech in Parliament.”
So, then what is it about the formula of Mrs. Partington that made it so easy for writers to produce and circulate their own versions of her? Often, the sketches are short, depicting Mrs. Partington as an older woman who often misreads social cues, leading to an often humorous faux pas. Men impersonating women and using women as a mouthpiece in comedy has a long history. However, suffragists also used Mrs. Partington occasionally as a mouthpiece in suffragist propaganda plays. For instance, in a 1913 production entitled “The Auction Interrupted,” Mrs. Partington is represented as an anti-suffragist, and although she claims to merely be a weak woman who is incapable of fighting, knocks down another person with her broom.8 As Helen Davies and Sarah Ilott argue, in comedy power relations are “confirmed, negotiated, or undermined,” so when a character is structured as one who fails to follow social regulations, as is often the case with Mrs. Partington, “it is down to their representation to illustrate whether the satirical attack is directed at a flawed character or a flawed system.”9 What is notable about the Mrs. Partington template, and perhaps why her persona is so easily taken up by such a wide variety of people, is that she can represent either type of flaw. When a reader laughs at Mrs. Partington’s flawed view of feminism, their attention is drawn to the flawed system of gendered oppression. When a reader laughs at Mrs. Partington placing a sausage in a collection plate at church rather than money, they are laughing at her.
In either configuration, however, Mrs. Partington stands in for a woman who is mocked for her lack of knowledge and this woman is a figure used by writers to further an agenda, whether that be women’s suffrage or just to make money. The fact that Mrs. Partington had enough traction that a well known illustration of her appears in an early edition of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer as Aunt Polly illustrates just how fluid this persona was (Tom Sawyer Illustrations). Mrs. Partington was a template that traversed political ideologies, newspaper publications, canonical texts, and even crosses back and forth between newspaper and codex. Mrs. Partington is reliably humorous to a reader because the newspaper editor—and the writer—is ensured that any potential reader is sharing an inside joke with them which capitalizes on the vulnerability of many women in the nineteenth-century while simultaneously confirming the superior status of writer, editor, and reader.
We point to the popularity of Mrs. Partington across authors—Shillaber, Avery, and Powell—to demonstrate how the Wright corpus, as refracted through newspaper reprinting, complicates our picture of which nineteenth-century authors merit literary critical attention. These three authors are entangled through a character, or meme, that structures our interest in them as authors. We are not so much arguing that Shillaber, Avery, and Powell deserve more recognition as we are arguing that a multi-authored, intertextual character, Mrs. Partington, be considered alongside more recognizable literary artifacts. More than anything, the example of Mrs. Partington highlights modes of fragmentary, iterative authorship that a computational approach to reprinting exposes, but which many modes of literary reading risk missing entirely. From this case study we turn to an author who has been recovered in recent years, Fanny Fern, showing how her construction of authorship borrowed from, and learned from, the kinds of appropriation we have thus far outlined.
Fanny Fern’s Persona
The work of Fanny Fern evidences a similar use of literary persona to Mrs. Partington, though Fern used the reprinting system more cannily than the three authors we discussed above. In fact, Fern even took on the persona of Mrs. Partington, just once, and was eventually chastised for doing so by Shillaber himself. However, Fern was aware of how authorial credit shifted in the newspaper, as this often happened to her own work. As Homestead argues, Fern “exposed how writers in the newspapers she ‘wrote for’ as well as those reprinting her sketches poached on what she considered to be her ‘property,’ including her persona and writing style.”10. Fern’s literary persona was so popular that “readers often adopted their own pseudonyms and personae to engage Fern’s satiric ‘Fanny’ persona in discussion, competition, and particularly flirtation.”11
Booksellers understood that they could market books not actually written by Fanny Fern using her name, such as in the unauthorized The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern.12 Since Fern was a pseudonym, it was easily usurped, as in, an advertisement, reprinted at least fifty-four times, for The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern, which asks:
Who is Ruth Hall? Is Ruth Hall Fanny Fern or somebody else? And if Fanny Fern is not Ruth Hall, Who is Fanny Fern?
These questions sow doubt about Fern’s identity and, perhaps paradoxically, sow some hope that Life and Beauties just may be authentic. Similarly, in our reprinting clusters, we find many instances of Fanny Fern’s writing circulating, sometimes with and sometimes without her name attached. For example, the sketch “Awful Thoughts,” was collected in her 1857 collection Fresh Leaves and which we identify began circulating in 1856, circulates for the most part with the text intact and her name attributed at the bottom of the text. Sometimes, however, periodicals manipulate the text’s formatting to convey a different meaning. For example, Ohio’s The Perrysburg Journal (5 February 1857) publishes “Awful Thoughts” as a correspondence:
Fanny Fern on Husbands.—A lady having remarked that “awe is the most delicious feeling a wife can have towards a husband,” Fanny Fern thus comments : ‘Awe of a man whose whiskers you have trimmed, whose hair you have cut, whose cravats you have tied, whose shirts you have ’put into the wash,’ whose boots and shoes you have kicked into the closet, whose dressing gown you have worn while combing your hair; who has been down into the kitchen with you at eleven o’clock at night to hunt for a chicken bone who has hooked your dresses; unlaced your boots, fastened your bracelets, and lied on your bonnet; who stood before your locking glass, with thumb and finger on his probocis, scratching his chin! whom you have buttered, and sugared, and teaed; whom you have seen asleep with his mouth wide open! Ridiculous!”
While slight, this formatting change—“‘This had, from the very beginning of their acquaintance, induced in her that awe, which is the most delicious feeling a wife can have toward her husband’ ‘Awe!’’—awe of a man whose whiskers you have trimmed” (Fresh Leaves) shifts the meaning of the text subtly. Rather than making it clear that the selection is an excerpt, as the original formatting would imply, the newspaper resituates the text as a correspondence between Fanny Fern and a reader, making it appear as if Fanny Fern directly contributed to The Pettysburg Journal. Homestead comments that unauthorized reprinting of Fanny Fern’s work was a huge issue in her lifetime. Because Fanny Fern was so popular, editors were eager to feature her work in their papers in an attempt to boost their own reputations. Thankfully, “as each editor fights for the right to build his own popularity on a claim of enabling hers, her popularity remains unquestioned.”13 So while editors were fighting over the right to claim that they were in contact with Fanny Fern and were the first to publish her works, because the power being fought over in this situation depends on the reader knowing that Fanny Fern is the one who wrote the article, her name is almost always attached to the text in some way no matter who is publishing her. Really, what the editors are fighting over is not the content of the text, but the name Fanny Fern and the reaction that that name will have over their readers. In this situation, paratext and the text, itself, are moved around and circulating somewhat independently from one another.
Although Fern’s name usually circulated alongside the text, there are also some cases where it didn’t. For example, her sketch “Two in Heaven,” which is collected as part of her 1853 collection Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, sometimes circulates with her name attached. Equally as often, however, the excerpt is simply printed with—Olive Branch at the end, which attributes authorship to the periodical and not its individual writer. Some newspapers, such as the March 25, 1853 edition of the Daily Evening Star (Washington D.C.), offered no attribution at all. In other words, newspapers used Fern’s persona in many ways, sometimes attempting to co-opt her popularity and other times circulating her popular excerpts anonymously. Sometimes the power invoked is in her name, and sometimes it’s in the text, but only occasionally is power invoked in both of these pieces together.
In order to prevent her name being dropped from her work, Fanny Fern occasionally left her mark on the text in other ways. As Homestead argues, “Fern’s use of the word”model” is a pun on a series of sketches she published in the Olive Branch, each using the word ‘Model’ in the title as an adjective describing either the best or the worst of a class of people.“14 However, rather than simply stand as a comedic, tongue-in-cheek title, the repeated use of”Model” in the titles of some of her sketches also marks the sketch as hers even when her name is not attached. For example, Fern’s sketch “The Model Lady” doesn’t circulate with her name attached at all, at least within our data. It is only the title that might indicate to a reader that Fanny Fern had written the sketch. When the title is manipulated, however, that signal and distinct style are likewise lost. One example occurs in the Daily American Telegraph (22 June 1852), where the title is simply printed as “What is a Lady.”
In many ways, tracking the circulation and reprinting of popular writers such as Fanny Fern reveals the tensions that existed between writers and editors in the nineteenth century. While Fanny Fern worked to carve out a place for herself as a serious author, particularly after the publication of her novel Ruth Hall editors were more concerned with using her name to boost the sales of their papers, or using her work to hold readers. Fern’s work was so easily manipulated in part because her sketches were written for the newspaper and meant to be reprinted. They were written, in other words, explicitly for excerptability and for the newspaper first. In this way Fern’s sketches are very like many of the most-reprinted excerpts we identify from Wright, which were composed first for newspapers and later collected in books. Many popular nineteenth-century fiction writers published in the newspaper with the explicit aim of capitalizing on viral modes of distribution. The book, for some of these authors, was a potential, secondary outcome for their work rather than its primary mode. Harte, recall, describes the type of fiction that resonates with the newspaper reader as “ephemeral” in a way that matches the nature of the newspaper itself, noting a formal distinction between “condensed novels’’ and those written from the start with a form in mind, whether serial publication or a bound book. We might argue that the writers of such works wrote virality intentionally into the texts, as an explicit aim. Harte’s insistence that texts’”popularity . . . in that form” of newspaper snippets “justifies . . . reproducing them in a collected and more permanent shape’’ echoes the overarching argument of this chapter and indeed this book, insisting that newspaper circulation is one valuable marker of readerly and literary value. By collecting such newspaper fictions, Harte testifies to the lasting value of newspaper texts, however rough-hewn they may be, to both readers and authors. In our next section, we theorize excerptability in light of the Wright Collection and ask how our view of nineteenth-century literature might shift when we foreground fragments in our account of reading and writing.
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