James Burk, T.S. Arthur, and Fictional Authorship

Nineteenth century American authors both drew inspiration from the newspaper and contributed to the production and circulation of newspaper fiction, making it difficult to pinpoint where one medium begins and the other ends: or even to pinpoint where one author’s work separates from another’s. In an article exploring the reprinting and recirculation of Charlotte M. Yonge’s works, Leslee Thorne-Murphy addresses the role of readers and printers in rewriting a text. She argues that “editors were working under an expanded notion of authorship, one that implicitly allows unacknowledged contributions to a work of literature to support a fiction of single authorship.”17 The reprinting of a text could often be used to bolster an author’s reputation, but this positive outcome was still dependent on the knowledge of the original author’s name. In the case of anonymous reprinting, or cases of reprinting where an author’s name eventually falls away, “anonymity also permits squatters to claim authorship, or enables attribution to a person or type of person that readers and distributors would prefer to hear from.”18 This web of attribution becomes even stickier when we consider that authors were also borrowing from each other, complicating notions of originality within the culture of reprinting.

Authors regularly borrowed snippets of prose from the newspaper for use in their fiction, which means authors regularly borrowed from other authors who in turn drew on the same periodical sources. These layers of influence, quotation, paraphrase, and direct copying result in deeply entangled speculative bibliographies (see chapter 1), in which a single reprinted “text”—at least as identified by a computational process founded on shared sequences of words—includes work attributable to multiple authors. These convoluted clusters can tell us much about the literary climate at the time in ways that more hermetically-sealed, printed editions of the same texts cannot. A confusing yet fascinating example of such a messy bibliography can be seen a single reprint cluster attributed in turns to both James Burk and T.S. Arthur.

Published as a book in 1864, First Quarrels and First Discords in Married Life, by James Burk, can best be described as a nineteenth century self-help book. As Burk outlines in the preface, he collected the sketches in the book because they offer advice, either directly or through anecdote, germane to newly married couples. The book’s selections are intended to help couples avoid or work through the inevitable conflicts that come with a new marriage. One section, titled “Praise Your Wife,” advises the husbands to “praise your wife, man!” continuing, “for pity’s sake give her a little encouragement. It won’t do her any harm. She has made your home comfortable, your hearth bright, your food agreeable—for pity’s sake tell her you thank her, if nothing more.” We have identified at least 109 reprints of this text in our corpus of nineteenth-century newspapers. It is a model of excerptability: brief, didactic, and lively in tone.

The first occurrence of this excerpt we identify in the Viral Texts project, however, comes from a 1857 edition of the Sunbury American (Pennsylvania), several years before Burk published his book; this version circulated between 1857 and 1864. While it is possible that Burk authored “Praise Your Wife,” it seems far more likely that it was written by someone else for the newspaper, then collected and edited by Burk for his book. Burk writes in his introduction to First Quarrels that some of its sketches were “obtained”—that his role, in other words, was in selection rather than authorship. Much like the newspaper editor we describe in this book’s first paragraphs, then, Burk’s scissors were called into requisition alongside his pen.

Burk’s relationship to “Praise Your Wife” is further complicated by an 1857 appearance of the full article in the Shepherdstown Register (Virginia), which ends the article with the attribution “—Olive Branch”, the name of a Boston newspaper. This attribution may indicate that the article was actually originally published in Boston, in a newspaper not digitized in our databases, rather than beginning in Pennsylvania, or simply that the Register obtained it in a chain of reprinting that at some point crossed through Boston. We have not identified any reprints of “Praise Your Wife” in Cincinnati, where Burk’s book was published until 1865, though the article does circulate in other areas of Ohio and nearby states as early as 1857. There are inevitable gaps in the reprinting locations we can identify using our database of newspapers, but it is abundantly clear that “Praise Your Wife” was widely read across the country.

We are less concerned with whether Burk actually wrote the original article, though it seems more likely he did not. There are a few very slight variations in wording between the older version of the article that circulates in the newspaper and the version that ends up in Burk’s book. For example, the line that reads “I tell you what, young men and old” in the Burk reads “I tell you what, men, young and old” in the original article. Additionally, a section in Burk that reads “Men don’t come out with a hearty, ‘Why, Mary, (or Jennie, or Lizzie, as the case may be) how pleasant you make things look!’ or, ‘I am obliged to you, dear, for taking so much pains!’ As some one has fitly expressed it, ‘They don’t seem to know how to blossom out, but always keep in the bud!’.” More interesting to us than origins, however, are Burk’s strategies for revision, which include minor edits to an otherwise perfect word-for-word copy and point to larger trends in newspaper editing that this example encapsulates.

This example raises a more fundamental question, which is whether for nineteenth-century newspaper readers “the original” mattered much at all when it came to excerpted literature. Certainly Burk seemed uninterested in preserving a chain of provenance, instead seeking to select and propagate the ideas he found most compelling. We might then ask: does this make Burk the “author” of the text, and at what point does “editor” become “author”? Significantly, for readers at varying moments in this article’s wide circulation, Burk’s version, or a preceding version, might well be the only version they came into contact with and thus was, so far as they were concerned, “the text.” Just as contemporary ideas of originality, canonicity, or textual authority are constrained by contemporary ecosystems of media consumption—whether we encounter a text in a digitized historical archive, say, or a literary anthology—a nineteenth-century reader who encountered “Praise Your Wife” through First Quarrels and First Discords in Married Life by James Burk would understand Burk’s version as the most authoritative, while a reader who read it in the Sunbury American would understand it as a product of the networked newspaper exchange system.

Burk was not the only author to adapt this selection for book publication, or even the only author to do so in the same year. T.S. Arthur’s Light on Shadowed Paths was published in 1864, the same year as Burk’s book. T.S. Arthur was a popular temperance writer, most famous for his 1854 novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There.19 Light on Shadowed Paths is, like Harte’s Condensed Novels, a collection of sketches. In one chapter in the collection, “A Rift in the Cloud,” a man, Andrew Lee, has a tense dinner with his wife, Mary, during which she communicates silently that something is bothering her, though the couple barely speak. After dinner, Lee produces “a [news]paper from his pocket, sat down by the table, opened the sheet, and commenced reading.” In the paper, “the words upon which his eyes rested were, ‘Praise your wife.’” He encounters, in other words, the popularly reprinted excerpt making the rounds through the 1850s and 60s.

As Lee reads, “Praise your wife, man; for pity’s sake, give her a little encouragement; it won’t hurt her,” he at first argues back mentally, “I should like to find some occasion for praising mine.” This mental exchange goes on for quite some time, as Arthur interleaves sentences from the popular excerpt and his character’s arguments against them. Finally the excerpt convicts him, in a scene that echoes contemporary depictions of evangelical conversion or, as in Arthur’s own prior work, a drunkard’s sudden redemption toward sobriety:

She has made your home comfortable, your hearth bright and shining, your food agreeable; for pity’s sake, tell her you thank her, if nothing more. She don’t expect it; it will make her eyes open wider than they have for ten years; but it will do her good for all that, and you too.”

It seemed to Andrew as if this sentence was written just for him, and just for the occasion. It was the complete answer to his question, “Praise her for what?” and he felt it also as a rebuke. He read no further, for thought came too busy, and in a new direction. Memory was convicting him of injustice toward his wife.20

Following this revelation, Lee finds Mary, puts into action the excerpt’s recommendations, praising her domestic work, and the two are reconciled. Both the newspaper excerpt and Arthur’s fictional reworking of it hew closely to conventional mid-nineteenth-century gender roles, casting the husband in a paternal role toward his wife, who is depicted as easily charmed by simple praise.

Bibliographically, Arthur’s use of “Praise Your Wife” is more complex than Burk’s, as an excerpt circulating in real papers—and which Arthur might expect his own readers to recognize—appears before his fictional character. For us, this scene is particularly exciting because it stages a readerly encounter with a popular newspaper excerpt, a scene we typically infer from editorial introductions to snippets going the rounds and other indirect evidence. In its fictional context, Lee enacts precisely the readerly response that newspaper editors likely envisioned for this piece: for Lee it is timely (“just for the occasion”), tailored (“written just for him”), and effective (“Memory was convicting him of injustice”). Like Harte, Arthur illustrates the potential power and value of ephemeral newspaper writing, as this paragraph of prose effects a profound change in the characters’ marriage.

Because Arthur’s life is well documented, we know that he moved to Philadelphia in 1841 and lived there until his death in 1885. The original article, “Praise Your Wife,” began circulating in Philadelphia by 1857, as the first appearance we have identified there can be found in the November 7, 1857 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Arthur may have read the column around this time, and adapted it for his short story, “A Rift in the Cloud,” that itself first appears as newspaper fiction in late 1858. “A Rift in the Cloud” was collected in Arthur’s Light on Shadowed Paths in 1864, by which time the prose from “Praise Your Wife” was circulating in at least three distinct forms (what bibliographers would call stemma): as a newspaper excerpt, drawn from the original printing; as a newspaper excerpt, drawn from Arthur’s reworking; and as a slightly reworked version of the original, as collected in Burk’s book.

Returning to Burk briefly, we note yet another complication to this complex bibliography. In First Quarrels and Discords in Married Life, Burk reprints “Praise Your Wife” and follows it immediately with a reprint of Arthur’s “A Rift in the Clouds,” (Burk incorrectly includes an ‘s’ at the end of ‘Cloud’) including the latter’s interstitial excerpts from the former. Burk does not credit Arthur for the second piece, perhaps deliberately, or perhaps because some reprints of Arthur’s adaptation also left off the attribution. In other words, two versions of “the same” text appear together, one quite literally after the other, in Burk’s book, which both gathers many of the changes made to the text(s) during its circulation and prompts other changes made in subsequent reprints. “Praise Your Wife” is a highly volatile text that moves between media and through adaptation, exemplifying the fluid situation of popular fiction during the time period. Most likely neither Burk nor Arthur could claim original authorship of the text, but instead both reauthored it for their own purposes.

However, while the text is volatile in numerous ways, the general content and main idea of the text remains the same: that to appease one’s wife who is prone to emotional outbursts, it is the responsibility of the husband to praise her. What matters more than questions of origins, is that this text was so excerptible—its central theme so salient and its form so condensed—that it was taken up and distributed in the newspaper in three distinct forms, all at the same time. In defining what made a fictional fragment excerptible, then, paratext or editorial fidelity were less important to nineteenth-century readers than the circulation of ideas. The idea that there are certain expectations for husbands and wives is certainly not surprising for the nineteenth-century but its popularity throughout various textual mediums suggests that rather than these gender roles being upheld as a form of unspoken, self-evident truth, they were constantly being reaffirmed by popular media, and that affirmation helped drive viral attention to textual fragments. By turning to another example of bibliographical transmutation, this time of an excerpt from Stowe, we can see how bibliographical information and paratext shift freely—while ideas surrounding the roles of women remain static.

Attributing Gender

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel The Minister’s Wooing was first serialized in The Atlantic Monthly between December 1858-December 1859 before being published as a book in 1859. The novel is set in 18th-century New England and follows the courtship drama of a woman named Mary Scudder who is pursued romantically by a variety of suitors, including a sailor named James Marvyn and a fictionalized version of Aaron Burr. One of her suitors is the Congregationalist theologian Doctor Samuel Hopkins, a well-respected minister both historically and in the world of the novel. When Mary’s own choice, James, is thought to be lost at sea, Mary’s mother sees an opportunity rather than a loss. She had been concerned about James’ irreligiosity, and eagerly encourages Mary to wed Doctor Hopkins, a traditionally pious man. Eventually, James returns and Mary’s marriage to Hopkins is called off.

In The Minister’s Wooing Stowe wrestles with the theological tenets of Calvinism and the conservative religious practice of her upbringing. The character of Hopkins, in particular, represents the Presbyterian and Congregationalist traditions championed by Stowe’s father, the famous minister Lyman Beecher, and carried forward by her brothers and sisters. Mary’s primary conflict in the story hinges on whether she will marry a man who represents traditional views or marry a man who represents more modern ideas. As she debates this decision, Mary also befriends a French Catholic, Virginie de Frontenac, who is portrayed as generous and loyal, if easily misguided. Despite Frontenac’s flaws, this friendship evidences Stowe’s intellectual expansion beyond her family’s legacy, as this sympathetic portrayal runs deeply counter to the anti-Catholicism expressed most famously in Lyman Beecher’s nativist sermon and tract, “A Plea for the West,” which inspired anti-Catholic violence in Boston in 1834.

In The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe uses different characters to embody religious and social world views. Though the novel is set in the eighteenth century, it probes the morays of the mid-nineteenth through the characters’ interactions and, most importantly, Mary’s decisions. However, when The Minister’s Wooing was excerpted and reprinted in the newspaper, its context and nuance often fell away. Consider a key example, a widely-reprinted excerpt drawn from chapter twelve of the novel. This chapter is structured as a dialogue between the narrator and her readers, who are portrayed as writing with horror about the idea that Mary might wed Hopkins and insisting upon “the claims of that unregenerate James.” Stowe stages a series of questions and answers:

‘Is it possible,’ says Dr. Theophrastus, who is himself a stanch Hopkinsian divine, and who is at present recovering from his last grand effort on Natural and Moral Ability,—‘is it possible that you are going to let Mary forget that poor young man and marry Dr. H.? That will never do in the world!’

Dear Doctor, consider what would have become of you, if some lady at a certain time had not had the sense and discernment to fall in love with the man who came to her disguised as a theologian.

‘But he’s so old!’ says Aunt Maria.

Not at all. Old? What do you mean? Forty is the very season of ripeness,—the very meridian of manly lustre and splendour.

‘But he wears a wig.’ My dear Madam, so did Sir Charles Grandison, and Lovelace, and all the other fine fellows of those days: the wig was the distinguishing mark of a gentleman.21

Stowe’s dialogue with readers here reminds us that The Minister’s Wooing was first published serially. Chapter twelve opens the section of the novel published in the May 1859 issue of The Atlantic, which was the sixth installment in the novel’s serialization and falls almost precisely at the mid-point of the novel’s publication run. Much scholarship on The Minister’s Wooing has focused on Stowe’s use of The Atlantic’s readership and particular form in shaping the novel’s narrative. For example, Dorothy Baker notes that the opening of the novel is written in the style of a dry, journalistic report before cutting away from that dry style to give Stowe a chance to “puzzle about the difficulty of narrative construction, and to assert that her method of writing is akin to ‘patchwork’” (Baker 27). As Baker argues, Stowe specifically thinks about her work as a patchwork because she is envisioning a sort of cyclical process to her writing in which she will write, her readers will respond, and she will write as a way of addressing that response. By the end of the first chapter, “Stowe concludes that the small ‘piece’ that she has offered the reader is sufficient to begin the pattern of her larger quilt because it will provoke questions, and thus initiate a conversation of sorts with the reader.”22

Six months into the novel’s unfolding, we would expect that both Stowe and the Atlantic have in fact received feedback from readers about the story’s arc. It is hard not to read Stowe’s depiction of her readers, and her narrator’s responses to them, as playful, even teasing. The narrator’s defenses of Hopkins have a satirical edge and bite, the tone of which is essential, we would argue, to understanding where the chapter turns next, toward a long digression on the supposed weakness of women:

if women have one weakness more marked than another, it is towards veneration. They are born worshippers,—makers of silver shrines for some divinity or other, which, of course, they always think fell straight down from heaven.

The first step towards their falling in love with an ordinary mortal is generally to dress him out with all manner of real or fancied superiority; and having made him up, they worship him.

Now a truly great man, a man really grand and noble in heart and intellect, has this advantage with women, that he is an idol ready-made to hand; and so that very painstaking and ingenious sex have less labor in getting him up, and can be ready to worship him on shorter notice.”23

Particularly in light of what does happen in the novel, as Mary chooses “that unregenerate James” over Hopkins, it is difficult to read this passage as anything but satire, but many contemporary newspapers read and reprinted it as serious, removing it from its context and attributing its overstated rhetoric to Stowe herself. The very same excerpted quality that we find in much of our reprinting data opens Stowe up to the misappropriation of her text and misrepresentation of herself. While Stowe attempts to counter this risk of misappropriation by writing The Minister’s Wooing with The Atlantic Monthly’s newspaper audience in mind, when excerpts from the novel move to other publications, though countermeasures are rendered less effective.

Early in its circulation, newspapers identify this excerpt on women’s veneration as a quote from The Minister’s Wooing, as in the January 4, 1860 edition of the Chicago The Press and Tribune where the article includes correct bibliographical information. In these cases, the excerpt is attributed to the novel by title, with no authorial information provided, perhaps under the assumption that Stowe was famous enough that her work would be known. However, there are a number of reprints that do provide authorial information, albeit in a problematic way. The May 16, 1867 edition of the The Jackson Standard does include Stowe’s name in the excerpt, but rather than attribute the excerpt to her narrator, the quote is attributed to Stowe directly, without the novel’s title, implying that the ideas in the excerpt are Stowe’s own opinions. Likewise the March 28, 1868 edition of the Ashtabula Weekly Telegraph titles the article simply, “Women’s Veneration by Mrs. Stowe.” The fragmentation and circulation of this excerpt has political ramifications for Stowe since this excerpt includes lines referring to women as “born worshippers,—makers of silver shrines for some divinity or other, which, of course, they always think fell straight down from heaven.”24, although in the context of the novel this was likely meant to be read ironically. These small differences in attribution dramatically shift the excerpt’s connotation, from an idea expressed by a novelistic narrator—likely for ironic effect—to an idea expressed by Stowe herself, and perhaps without irony. This shift is particularly salient when the passage quoted outlines the supposed weakness of women and is attributed to a woman who is a writer and public intellectual.

While it is true that Stowe wrote the words in this excerpt, because it circulated primarily as an atomized quotation, its popularity in the newspaper likely misled readers about Stowe’s opinions. The circulation of novelistic excerpts raises urgent questions about the reception, use, and authority of fragmentary fictional texts in the period, and indeed into our present age, when similar excerpts circulate through social media. In the nineteenth century, the newspaper exchange system gave fictional excerpts a life and an impact removed from the novels or short stories from which they were drawn and magnified in scale and reach. Some widely-reprinted excerpts were likely read by far more readers than the original novels, and authors had little influence over how these excerpts would be taken up and presented to these readers.

As Amy Easton-Flake notes, Stowe did not align herself particularly with the cause of suffragists, but she was known to “elevate the status of wives and mothers, encourage the teaching of domestic economy, establish the dignity of household labor, and promote women’s progress through education and employment.”25 With this in mind, the extracted text from The Ministers Wooing that circulates the idea of woman’s weakness seems somewhat out of character. As Easton-Flake argues, however, “despite pressure from her siblings and other movement leaders and an obvious interest in the issue,” Stowe “remained aloof from all organized groups. In the absence of any definitive statement from her,” then, “each faction claimed her as an advocate” such that multiple suffragist organizations published journals that “either listed Stowe as a contributor or quoted from her writings.”26 We can see similar appropriation at work in newspaper reprints titled “Women’s Veneration by Mrs. Stowe,” which emphasize women’s desire to idolize men and claim Stowe for a very different cause: if not anti-suffrage, precisely, then certainly in line with dominant gender stereotypes that undercut women’s activism.

While scholars such as Christopher Looby have argued for the consciousness of some nineteenth-century authors of the formal and ideological implications of seriality (and their subsequent exploitation of the context of periodical publication in their writing), these scholars have mostly focused on the life of a work of fiction in either full chapter or full story form. As Looby argues, nineteenth-century writers such as E.D.E.N. Southworth took advantage of serial publication in order to build up a sense of surprise and suspense in their readers. He writes that “a writer can use suspense much more effectively—because she can be sure of suspense going unrelieved for at least the span of a week—when writing for serial publication. The serial writer, then, has her reader under the control of her suspenseful effects in a way that the writer of a novel in book form does not.”27 We see this use of seriality in the way that Stowe directly addresses her readers at the beginning of the chapter as well as the ways in which Stowe makes use of the essays and articles that surround her text in the Atlantic Monthly. As Dorothy Baker points out, The Ministers Wooing “consistently replied to political essays that appeared in earlier issues of the Atlantic Monthly.”28 Since an Atlantic reader might be assumed to read the preceding articles in a particular issue before arriving to an embedded chapter of The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe could experiment with that context in her novel. However, when the chapter is subsequently extracted from the Atlantic Monthly, that expected scene of reading becomes unstable. The context Stowe assumes her readers will bring to the novel depends on the particular form, content, and readership of the Atlantic Monthly. Separated from that context as a newspaper excerpt, such passages and Stowe’s authority could be claimed and directed in the ways editors saw fit, and which might diverge from Stowe’s perspective and intentions. While Looby accounts for the embeddedness of novels within a weekly paper, and the effects that this intertextuality had on readers, such effects can only be controlled when both authors and readers understand the context for a particular scene of reading. Amid the excerptible chaos of the newspaper exchange system, such control was impossible.

Meredith McGill writes similarly about Hawthorne’s reputation within the culture of reprinting. She writes that “the enthusiastic reprinting of much of Hawthorne’s early work indicates that he was in possession of a significant, if uneven and unpredictable reputation—a reputation from which he could not be assured to profit and which neither he nor his critics could confidently measure or describe.”29 That reputation lead newspaper editors to take up Hawthorne’s name in similar ways to Stowe’s. In a smaller excerpt uncovered in Viral Texts, we find Hawthorne’s words used to defend the railroad with the title “Hawthorne Truly Says”, though the quote comes from Clifford in The House of the Seven Gables. Similarly, in a quote from The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne writes about heroism. The quote then circulates with no title or indication that it is extracted from a novel. Instead, the quote travels, once again, as something that Hawthorne, himself, says.

The greatest obstacle; to being heroic is the doubt whether and. may not be going to prove one’s self a fool. The. truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.—Hawthorne

Both of these quotations have relatively low levels of potential harm if they are taken out of the context of the larger novel. While there is a significant difference between what a character remarks in dialogue in a fictional novel and what a writer, as author, says, both of these quotations from Hawthorne could easily be attributed directly to Hawthorne and it would have little impact on his reputation of public perception. However, more politically charged texts written by Hawthorne were also reprinted out of context in the newspaper.

As one of us noted in prior work, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satirical piece “The Celestial Railroad” was taken up by many religious editors as a way of bolstering their own denominational perspectives and critiquing other believers. This appropriation included expanding, amending, and embedding the text in such a way that it would better fit the purposes of denominations and particular religious publications.30 However, the politics of authorship for women in the nineteenth century—even for someone like Harriet Beecher Stowe who had the privilege and power to publish at all—were such that there was much more at stake when a text had the potential to be re-authored, to borrow Leslee Thorne-Murphy’s term, by male editors and compositors.

We see these dangers clearly in this viral excerpt from The Minister’s Wooing, through which Stowe is ventriloquized by editors to confirm and reify the same white, middle-class gender ideology that Burk and Arthur defend. Since traditional means of teaching theology would have been inaccessible to Stowe, despite how deeply embedded her male family members were in that world, The Minister’s Wooing might have very well been the closest Stowe could come to that male-dominated sphere. However, while the novel wrestles with complex theological questions surrounding traditional Calvinism, the reuse and recontextualization of Stowe’s words locks her out of the world, again. Editors wielded Stowe to say to women readers, “one of your own thinks this way and you should, too.” There is much more potential for harm when someone of a socially marginalized group is wielded as a tool to uphold the dominant social ideology. If an author as prominent as Stowe could be so thoroughly reauthored by the exchange system, similar or even more extreme instances must have been happening to other writers with even less ability to speak back. Largely, this is due to the ease with which the newspaper page enacts textual interpretation through editing, as texts are situated, amended, and recontextualized on the page.

Nineteenth-century texts illustrate with urgency the potential of texts to facilitate violence. Written and imagined in a world in which it was legal to own other human beings—but also in a time in which the legality of slavery would be questioned and rupture completely into Civil War—these texts demand that their violence and harm be attended to. There were many nineteenth-century writers who attempted to combat violence based on prejudices of race, gender, sexuality, and class, but writers’ access publication could often be limited, particularly if they resisted white, middle-class dominance. Because of these limitations, there are absences and gaps in the archival record—places where a writer may have never even dared to record their ideas, where a newspaper refused to print their work, or even where an archivist removed them from the record. To investigate these writers, we turn in the next section to reform literature, though as we demonstrate, that categorization and its uptake in periodicals is complicated by historical gaps which are difficult to stitch together into a coherent whole.