Defining the Vignette

If the nineteenth-century newspapers prose genres are, as a rule, imbricated in ways that make definitive classification impossible, perhaps no sub-genre better exemplifies the genre slippages of the medium than the vignette. The vignette is a subspecies of the sketch, a genre that has received considerable attention from scholars of periodical culture. Norman Sims describes the sketch as “such a common, ordinary form for journalism” in the nineteenth century “that it almost escapes our notice.” Common to newspapers and magazines during the nineteenth-century, sketches were brief prose accounts of colorful characters or situations, often (though not always) drawn from the writer’s personal observations and thus, ostensibly at least, from real life. As Sims (2007) notes, sketches were “not studies for later, more fully developed treatments; they were complete as published.” Sims notes, “the term sketch covered a lot of ground, including especially the humorous sketch.” In Sims’ account the sketch could be humorous or serious, a paragraph or a page long:

The sketch provided writers with something we often miss today: the opportunity to write about ordinary life. The sketch did not require great events or disasters. Small, private events would do. It could be improved upon, in case real life didn’t provide enough material. It could be funny … It was short, done in a day, personal, free from restrictions, and grew from immersion in everyday life. (46–47)

In our conclusion to this chapter we will argue that the internet, and social media in particular, have renewed “the opportunity to write about ordinary life” Sims locates in the nineteenth-century sketch, and that vignettes in particular thrive in the economies of circulation or virality, whether nineteenth-century newspapers or twenty-first-century online platforms.

Given Sims’ expansive definition of the sketch, the genre would likely include the widely-reprinted selection “Regularly Sold,” which features the genre’s key elements of brevity, attention to ordinary life, and observational humor. This text purports to recount a conversation between “two gentlemen from New York” in a Sacramento (or sometimes San Francisco) hotel. The scene provides details that imply it is drawn from real life, reporting a conversation between “two gentlemen from New York” that was “accidentally overheard” at “the Sutter House, Sacramento” at a (relatively) specific time, “During the month of January, 1850.” The piece reports on a private and—in the grand scheme of things—unimportant or ephemeral conversation between these two men as they discuss the family they left behind, one of the men struggling to understand how his interlocutor could have “a wife and six children in New York” while he also “never saw one of them.” Its denouement turns on a miscommunication rooted in dialect, as the first man understands “I never saw one of them” to mean the second had never seen any of his children (and perhaps not his wife) while the second man only means he missed the birth of his youngest child due to his trip west, so that “one of them was born after I left.” The whole piece is certainly a joke, as it builds toward a punchline. It is also a sketch, in the broad sense of that term, but we want to categorize it more precisely as a vignette.

Most academic studies of the sketch have focused on authored (and often relatively long) sketches by writers such as Charles Dickens, who published his sketches together in the book Sketches by Boz, or Samuel Clemens, who first published under the pen name Mark Twain when writing sketches for the Virginia Daily Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Nevada. The reason for scholars’ focus on these examples is easily understood: because of their later careers and well-developed bibliographies, scholars can find the sketches of writers such as Dickens and Twain and consider the relationship of that early writing to their later fiction. Authorship grants certain sketches importance through their kinship with recognizable literature. In the networked-authored newspaper, however, sketches (like the fugitive poems we discuss in chapter 2) proliferated beyond and outside of authorship and, within that wider context, in a range of forms beyond the longer sketches that have received most scholarly attention to date. By approaching the newspaper archive computationally, however, we can identify popular anonymous sketches—by far more common than authored examples—and consider commonalities among the form and content of those which were most widely reprinted.

Reading across many thousands of widely-reprinted newspaper selections, however, it is clear that vignettes were a dominant form of sketch in the nineteenth century. To expand slightly on our earlier definitions, vignettes are typically very short prose pieces: no more than a few paragraphs and frequently only one, as in “True Philosophy—The Farmers.” This short text recounts a conversation between two neighboring farmers who both lost their early pea crop to frost. Vignettes typically make soft claims to facticity but offer few verifiable facts. We can mark this trend in the opening description of the two new Californians in “Regularly Sold,” or in the phrase “Two farmers who were neighbors” in “True Philosophy,” which implies the text’s characters are drawn from life without giving readers any traceable details. Vignettes unfold in a single scene, without a change of setting, and include a single set of characters, typically only two. Finally, they offer a tidy resolution in the form of either punchline, a lesson, or a moral: e.g. “one of them was born after I left” (punchline) or “it is astonishing how many might be repaired by a little alacrity and energy” (moral).

We do not claim that the kind of brief, occasional writing we name the vignette is a direct or unique product of the nineteenth century newspaper. One can find similar examples in magazines, commonplace books, and other media in earlier periods: perhaps especially in the anecdotes that often punctuate evangelical sermons (where they serve similar purposes, driving home a moral lesson or loosening up the audience with humor). Nevertheless, the vignette is a genre perfectly suited to—even exemplary of—the medium of the nineteenth-century newspaper. We name such pieces vignettes because they recall both the literary and artistic uses of the term. They are brief episodes, certainly, but they are also small illustrations, drawn from life, that blend, around their generic edges, into their medium. Vignettes borrow from both the journalistic and literary influences of the nineteenth-century newspaper, acting to smooth the boundaries between the medium’s distinct rhetorical purposes and audiences. They sit, quite literally, among many other genres on the printed newspaper page while also, formally, borrowing linguistically from the medium’s distinct modes.

Consider a vignette with more overtly social and political implications than those we have thus far discussed. “A Philosophical Darkey” (~196 reprints) purports to transcribe a conversation during the Civil War between the unnamed author and “An elderly darkey, with a very philosophical and retrospective cast of countenance” and whose “dress and appearance indicated familiarity with camp life.” Probing a bit, the narrator learns that his interlocutor served in the Union army but fled during the fight for Fort Donelson:

Were you in the fight?

I had a little taste of it, sa.

Stood your ground, did you?

No, sa, I runs.

Run at the first fire, did you?

Yes, sa, an’ would hab run soonar had I know’d it was comin’.

Why, that wasn’t very creditable to your courage.

Dat isn’t in my line, sa—cookin’s my profession.

Well, but have you no regard for your reputation?

Reputation! nuffin to me de side ob life.”

Do you consider your self worth more than other people’s?

It’s worth more to me, sa.

It is possible to read the man’s replies in this vignette as deliberate and subversive. He repeatedly refuses to concede that his life is worth less than a series of abstract ideals. Perhaps most poignantly, when the narrator asks, “why should you act upon a different rule from other men?” his subject replies, “Cause, sa, different men sets different value on derselves; my life is not in de market.” By insisting that he set the value of his own life, the black man—newly freed, it is implied—denies the white narrator authority over his body. He explicitly proclaims himself to be not on the market, a phrase that recalls the slave markets of the immediate near past. Many of the newspapers reprinting this selection characterized the man’s replies as “so much in the Falstaffian vein,” recalling Falstaff’s dissenting speech on honor in Henry IV Part I:

What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor?” What is that “honor?” Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead.

Some witnesses even titled this piece, “A Colored Falstaff,” highlighting this Shakespearean corollary.

In offering this reading, we do not want to overstate the subversive political message of this vignette. We suspect many contemporary readers took its minstrel humor at face value—and the Falstaff reference as bathetic—and that one reason for its viral success stemmed from its confirmation of readers’ racist views. As scholars such as Benjamin Fagan have shown, the newspapers digitized through projects such as Chronicling America predominantly served middle-class, white readers (Fagan 2016). Given that context, we might instead read this vignette’s overt purpose as playing upon minstrel stereotypes of black Americans, making the central character an object of derision for his cowardice and seeming obliviousness to the ideals implicit in the narrator’s questions. This selection is often titled “A Truthful Negro,” a title that confirms by exception many white readers’ prejudicial belief that black people are untrustworthy or cowardly.

The earliest witness we identify of this vignette comes from the Nebraska Advertiser on 8 May 1862, just a few months after the battle for Fort Donelson. This witness claims to reprint the story from an exchange paper and cites the author as a "correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette, writing from the Cumberland River. This paper was firmly Republican—though clearly willing to mock black Americans—but many of the papers that reprinted this selection in the coming decade were Democratic, such as Upper Sandusky, Ohio’s Wyandot Pioneer (26 November 1868) or Woodsfield, Ohio’s Spirit of Democracy (11 July 1874), where it appeared on the same page as articles lambasting elected Republicans and their policies. The trends of reprinting do not indicate, however, that this text was primarily valued along partisan lines. Instead, pointing back to Fagan’s arguments about the constitution of digitized historical newspaper archives in the US, we might identify a common thread among white newspapers at the time, in which a comic black character can become a cipher for readers to interpret across many ostensibly distinct political media.

We point to “A Philosophical Darkey” to demonstrate how the generic form of the vignette could be turned toward more explicit forms of political and social commentary. This vignette also demonstrates the generic blurring such pieces enact on the newspaper page. This selection appeared alongside journalistic pieces reporting the events of reconstruction and then, over the life of the selection’s circulation, the institution of Jim Crow after reconstruction’s end. In at least three later witnesses of this vignette, the correspondent/narrator is replaced by President Lincoln himself, so that the selection begins: “President Lincoln once met with a negro on the deck of a steamboat…The President, finding that the negro had served in a regiment that suffered severely at the battle of Fort Donelson, asked if he was in the fight.” In these reprintings, Lincoln disappears from the text after the first lines, so that he serves only to authorize the story and its implied messages, much as his supposed favor authorized the reprinting of the fugitive poem “Mortality,” as we describe in Chapter 2 of this book.

In the medial space of the nineteenth-century newspaper, vignettes such as “A Philosophical Darkey” served complex rhetorical purposes: a work of not-fiction and not-journalism that likely propped up readers’ biases as they navigated among the newspapers’ many genres and registers. Building on Matthew Philpott’s (2015) conception of the periodical as a “a fractal form across all levels of scaling” (413), we posit the vignette as a fractal expression of the nineteenth-century newspaper at the scale of an individual selection, embodying the hybrid genres, styles, and epistemologies of the medium in a few sentences or paragraphs. In particular, the vignette is both fact and fiction, operating in the gray space produced by a medium through which news, poetry, fiction, and countless other genres jostled for readers’ attention on the same pages.

These ambiguities become even more apparent when vignettes feature real and named subjects. When “The Judge Needed the Money” (~53 reprints) went the rounds in the late 1880s, for instance, readers around the country read about Georgia’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Logan Bleckley’s ostensible encounter with “a little street gamin, with an exceedingly dirty face.” The piece begins by reminding readers—many of whom were quite far from Georgia—that Bleckley is well known “his long waving hair and beard.” When Bleckley offers to pay the shoe-shine boy a dime if he will wash his face, the child one-ups him, telling the Judge, “you take it and have your hair cut.” As with so many vignettes, it seems possible this story could have happened as reported, and a contemporary could have asked the Judge if it was accurate.

In all respects, however, this text is a perfect vignette: a single scene, defined by dialogue between two characters, concluding in a pithy denouement. While the judge is named, the boy is not, and the selection begins, “I have heard the following good story on Chief Justice Bleckley. The editorial ”I" invites readers to imagine their newspaper’s account is but one person removed from the source, but upon closer inspection the “I” could refer to a particular local editor; the editor of Augusta Chronicle, cited as a source for many reprints of this vignette; or an unnamed correspondent. As we have argued throughout this book, we might better read the “I” as a collective, the “I” of the exchange network which brought this scene from Georgia to readers from Augusta to Boston, from Michigan to Idaho, from Opelousas to Honolulu.

In writing about a real person using the vignette form, this selection blurs distinctions between information and entertainment in the period’s newspapers. More accurately, this selection is a vignette, at least in part, because it exploits and perpetuates the blurry generic and epistemological boundaries at play across the nineteenth-century newspaper’s texts. Surveying the genre, we might trace a continuum of journalistic veracity, from those drawn directly from life, perhaps mildly embellished—the tale of Chief Justice Bleckley may be one at this end of the spectrum—to those making only small gestures toward actuality—as, perhaps, the account of the farmers we write about above.

While we focus on a few particular vignettes to illustrate our ideas about the genre, our argument about their role and effects in the medium are cumulative. Reading across the frequently-reprinted texts identified in the Viral Texts project, we mark the vignette form as particularly prevalent in the period’s “viral” literature. Readers encountered them regularly, situated amidst material of every kind, and it is this sustained, engagement with the form through serial reading that we argue made this form significant to readers’ experience of the larger medium.