Consuming George Thompson - Duke University Press

David M. Stewart

Consuming George Thompson

G

eorge Thompson was a fat man. In his 1854 memoir, My Life: Or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson, he accounts for his large size (“two hundred pounds and over”) by declaring himself “somewhat of a gourmand,” a man of appetites that extended to all forms of what he calls “fast living.”1 Known today as the author of innumerable cheap, lurid city-mystery novels in the 1840s and 1850s, Thompson was something of a celebrity among the first generation of writers to eke out a living in the United States’ new print-culture industry. In addition to maintaining a remarkable rate of literary production, Thompson led an active public life, apparently quite at ease with the figure he cut and a lifestyle that, by his own account, left much to be desired. In an engraving of Thompson on the front page of Broadway Belle, a pornographic weekly he often edited, he wears his corpulence like his clothing, with little to suggest embarrassment (see fig. 1). If the picture is any indication, he seems quite pleased with both his appearance and his mission that day. Climbing the steps of New York’s city jail, Thompson was on his way to answer charges of obscenity brought against one of his books, charges that had to be dropped when he revealed that everything in the offending volume was reprinted from other sources. His animated look and carriage express satisfaction in flouting the law; yet insofar as the law in question sought to curb public lewdness—in publications such as Broadway Belle, where he regularly enacted himself as a public man— he also flaunts his body, specifically its appetites and the appetites of readers he serves. Thompson—his life, literature, and girth—can help us understand American Literature, Volume 80, Number 2, June 2008 DOI 10.1215/00029831-2008-002 © 2008 by Duke University Press

Figure 1 Sketch of George Thompson. Broadway Belle, 12 February 1855. Printed courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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how reading of the kind he produced served antebellum readers. This service occurred bodily, from the direct appeal of sex and violence to the less immediate effects of such reading once books were closed and newspapers put away. Thompson, who refers to himself in another memoir as the “Fat Philosopher,” reflected often on issues related to antebellum print culture and his role in it.2 My Life recounts his “adventures” as a writer and a “gourmand,” categories that, as we shall see, were not always distinct for Thompson or for those who read him. To make the most of the link Thompson suggests between reading and eating at a time when both greatly affected bodily life, I will revisit the metaphor that once commonly joined the two. Given the importance bodies have assumed in literary and cultural studies, misgivings about the implied determinism of consumption reflect an uneasiness that has made our turn to the body an oddly self-alienating project. Bodies reduced to abstractions of theory and language reveal little about writing such as Thompson’s, and even less about those who read it. The main audience for cheap, sensationalistic reading was the large numbers of workingmen who filled antebellum cities. We currently treat such men as fodder for our newly acquired taste for cultural politics. As a biological metaphor, however, consumption realizes the physicality of men’s working lives, including the physicality of their reading. Employing this metaphor will not redraw the look and carriage of an embodied publicity that invited caricature; but it will give it content, which I hope will counter public comportments of our own that make it hard to move beyond caricature to a more substantial view of workingmen. Reading Bodies

It has been some time since consumption fell from grace as a term for the use of market-generated culture, from purchasing cultural products to practices whereby those products become more intimately ours. In “Reading Is Not Eating” (1985), Janice Radway rejected the metaphor consumption for implying that audiences passively buy, “in a dual sense, the ideas of others.” The “biological processes of ingestion, incorporation, and absorption” suggest a crude determinism that Radway associated with the Frankfurt School and postwar communication theory. Her correction is Gramscian. The culture industry

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aside, “meanings are still transformed and even made by people who are forced to use and remake the expressive modes and codes forged initially by others.”3 Radway’s critique emerged from her now canonical study of women readers who exert control over the effects of popular romance novels: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (1984). By denying biological processes, Radway replicates a relationship to print culture that Michael Warner identifies with Benjamin Franklin.4 Readers who “remake” the romance to serve their interests achieve self-determinacy of a kind advanced in The Autobiography. However, such determinacy erases those pleasures enjoyed in reading that relieve bodies of the burden of everyday selfhood and carry them away with titillation, arousal, and the various sentimental affects of popular romance. That women speak sensibly and articulately about their reading shows that they are not mindless dupes of the culture industry but good liberal citizens. This defense is like the one Franklin mounts in The Autobiography when he breaks his vow of vegetarianism. Caught for “some time between Principle and Inclination,” Franklin finally submits to the latter and dines “upon Cod very heartily.” To excuse himself, he concocts “a Reason” for acting as he does. Recalling that fish eat other fish, he declares: “[I]f you eat one another, I don’t see why I mayn’t eat you.”5 Appetite gets its due. Irony is as obvious in Franklin’s account as it is absent from Radway’s. Reading the Romance locates agency in romance by abstracting reasons for reading it that are not very romantic. This does more than validate women readers in the way Franklin validates himself as “a reasonable Creature” ( A, 28). It reduces their reading to a form of instrumental calculation typical of the industry that produced it. Irony is absent in Warner’s analysis too, at least in regard to the body and its appetites. The irony Warner does address involves the citizen figured as a published text. This figure turns up notably in Franklin’s “errata” of youth, which he observes from the perspective of age and experience, mediating the divide with self-deprecating humor of the kind in the fish episode. The publishing metaphor turns a series of cautionary anecdotes on the follies of youth into a reflection on the necessity of self-objectification in a free society. Franklin advocates “an internally privative relation to himself” that is “negative and critical,” a “splitting” that allows a thinking private self to regulate an acting public one (L, 80). Print performs a similar splitting by


abstracting words from speech, giving them authority based on their apparent objectivity (not attached to a speaking body). It also allows for editorial calculation. Franklin calculates that his success (in business and politics) increases with his seeming disinterestedness. Of “great Advantage” is language that avoids self-assertion (“Certainly, undoubtedly”) through performative modesty (“I imagine it to be so, or it is so if I am not mistaken”) (A, 13–14). According to Warner, Franklin’s “gesture of self-negation” “repudiates personal authority in favor of a general authority based on a negative relation to one’s own person” (L, 81). This “self-negation” abstracts codes of reasonable citizenship from the personal and particular. The personal and particular thus become a threat to reason and citizenship, with no single particular more threatening than the personal body. Warner never treats the “corruptive body” as more than an abstract, often textual, category, following Franklin’s own metaphor (L, 86). Yet Franklin treats errata in emphatically bodily terms. While Addison and Steele supply his model for writing and the basis for Errata as his self-publishing trope, he learns about a “Vegetable Diet” from “a Book written by one Tryon” (A, 12). Franklin seeks ideal publicity (writing and eating) by basing his actions on codes abstracted in printed texts (the Spectator and William Tryon’s Way to Health, Wealth, and Happiness). But if a taste for fish wins in the end, more is at stake than reason. A hungry body compels him to “eat with other People,” which he continues to do after the cod-eating episode, returning only “occasionally to a vegetable Diet” (A, 12). Eating with others who share unprincipled appetites resolves a problem of republican sociability. Working in his brother’s print shop when he reads Tryon, Franklin profits from denying himself animal food; but he eats alone, a split with fellow workers that leads to conflict in London when he rejects local customs regarding food and drink. Franklin’s body resists its own negation to advance him as a social and “reasonable Creature.” Eating “heartily” does not mean eating freely. If reason threatens sociability, Franklin warns against outright surrender to inclination— also for social reasons. Having himself grown tired of “the Doctrine of using no animal Food,” Keimer, the master of the printing shop, orders a roast pig and invites guests to dinner. But the party is ruined when the pig arrives early and Keimer “could not resist the Temptation, and ate it all before we came” ( A, 29). Keimer’s appetite exemplifies a larger problem of having no space for calculation between


impulse and action. Franklin generalizes this problem too in publishing terms. Keimer defies a key piece of advice from Franklin’s father on writing, namely, that “Manner” is as important as truth, and that manner is produced between “Argument” and “expression” (A, 11). While Franklin edits, Keimer, the “Knave in his Composition,” makes “Verses . . . but very indifferently. He could not be said to write them, for his Manner was to compose them in the Types directly out of his Head” ( A, 22). Self-splitting would seem to be advised, in publishing and diet. I pursue this split self for two reasons. First, at key moments both Radway and Warner convert bodies to abstractions. Both replicate logic they critique by denying their material object. To empower readers of popular romance, Radway embraces sites of struggle alien to the visceral life of the form. Whatever lip service we pay to meanings, ideas, and Radway’s “modes and codes” as embodied categories, all are estranged from the material life of reading, including affects enjoyed because they disempower. Talk of flesh always converts it to an abstraction, if not a categorical generalization (the gendered body), then to language (the flesh made word). But this conversion is not the only problem. Thirty years after Jane Tompkins criticized our scientistic desire, we continue to avoid what cannot be neatly objectified in favor of that which can: genre, ideas, politics, the text.6 Even when we venture into agency and pleasure, our drift is away from the body as a locus of explanation. Reading bodies vanish even in studies that purport to be about them. This has been facilitated by constructivism, which allows us to speak about texts as if they are bodies, and vice versa. Theory hasn’t helped either. Following Warner’s pioneering work on print culture and the public sphere, Bruce Burgett’s Sentimental Bodies (1998) treats “corporeal metaphors” whereby the “body politic” embraced a national liberal consensus based on feelings. In examining feelings, however, Burgett operates in a profoundly bodiless zone between texts and political theory, abstracting bodies as affective propositions, which he never acknowledges, much less verifies, as lived experience. Words like affect and sentiment sustain an empirical vacuum where specific emotions go unnamed and feelings float about vaguely as embodied language.7 Reading bodies do more than threaten our politics; they embarrass our “gesture of self-negation,” the objective posture of academic publicity. This is a result not of reducing bodies to language or categorical


abstraction but of calculating authority in the same way Franklin does, by effacing the personal as corruptive. Aroused bodies threaten to arouse us and thereby close the split we enact as ideally self-negated citizens. I do not wish to debate the “great Advantage” of academic objectivity. Yet while Warner calculates its subjective costs with no reference to his own, Franklin negotiates a better deal with his erratastrewn youth by figuring into his instruction not an abstract body but a hungry one—which embarrasses him. By linking reading (the basis for vegetarian calculation) with eating, Franklin locates it in the sphere of appetites, producing effects that are also corruptive. If Tryon’s calculation sets Franklin on a course to health and wealth, it also makes him a hungry young man who cannot eat and a pedantic ass among coworkers and friends. Again, I mustn’t overstate; Keimer illustrates Franklin’s position on the relative merits of appetite and reason. But his qualification is vital. A poetics of sociability and enjoyment provides room to maneuver in an instructional grammar dominated by calculations of health and wealth. My second reason for beginning with Radway and Warner is to examine one set of cultural consumers whose maneuverings continue to trouble U.S. critics even while, in rising to new heights of selfnegated citizenship, we have rejected the biased formalism of the past and embraced a more inclusive critical practice. Antebellum workingmen have been saved from the trash can of cultural history only to become a receptacle of “bad attitudes,” another kind of trash, which we recycle to produce a differently useable past. In the 1980s, David Reynolds reported heroically on the vast archive of popular literature ignored in our preoccupation with canonical writers of the American Renaissance.8 Scattered efforts to probe this material led to increased interest in the rise of whiteness studies. Driven by David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), whiteness was a perfect storm that broke across various critical disciplines in the 1990s. As Eric Arnesen argues, the innumerable studies that followed Roediger’s lead have been based on assumptions about class and racial identity largely unsupported by the historical record.9 Others explain the whiteness rage as a result of factors ranging from narcissism to an academic workplace where rising pressure to publish has left less room to revise between our impulse to moralize and the setting of type.10 I am less interested in the merits of whiteness than in one of its


effects: a focus on workingmen as the quintessential embodiment of bad attitudes in the antebellum United States. In Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1995), Eric Lott applies the term whiteness to “racial bad attitudes,” extending to blackface minstrelsy Roediger’s claim that racial superiority compensated white workers for their decline in the evolving antebellum market economy.11 But there are other attitudes—nativism, anti-Catholicism, misogyny—that can just as easily be located in men’s entertainment, especially the cheap, sensational reading of the United States’ first mass-culture industry. Turning racial caricature into bad attitudes was aided by the narrative of decline that Roediger used to argue that white workers needed compensation. He obtained this narrative in the particular form he needed from Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984), which claims that by the 1830s, U.S. workers had acquired class consciousness only to submerge it beneath a renewed identification with masters after the economic crash of 1837. Key to Wilentz’s success in carrying the long-rejected notion of an antebellum working class was his claim that workers displaced class antagonism onto African Americans and immigrants. Now regarded with as much skepticism as whiteness, “artisan republicanism” identified class conflict just beneath the surface of working people’s cultural lives.12 This proved a great boon to those trained in interpretation, although it has been pointed out that reading culture like a literary text can involve as much projection as discovery. Interpreting workingmen’s texts has not so much revealed their lives as reified a causal account that serves our new preoccupation as critics not of form but of justice. Interesting work has been done. In treating minstrel culture, Lott performs speculative recoveries of “genuine negro fun” brilliant in their energy and situatedness.13 Despite its fixation on race (and on a single recreational practice), Lott’s Love and Theft provides the most intimate account to date of working life in the period. But Lott’s lead has not been followed, either by historians notoriously resistant to culture or literary critics equally squeamish about pursuing claims into realms beyond texts.14 Historians feel vindicated by questions about whiteness, including the key binary supplied by class; and decades of citation by literary critics have naturalized these assumptions so that they no longer need to be demonstrated.15 In American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (2002), Shelley


Streeby doesn’t even cite Wilentz, much less engage his account of artisanal decline. Without him, class identity and bad attitudes become text features. Streeby locates “responsibility for the long U.S. history of nativism, empire-building, and white egalitarianism” in popular literature about the 1848 war with Mexico, which she classifies socially, based on a “three-tier” division of print culture.16 While implicitly reception categories, these tiers (corresponding roughly to high-, middle-, and low-brow) are based on formal and ideological features with no reference to those who read the literature in question, what made them working class, how reading was responsible for their bad attitudes, or even if they had any. The drift toward a new formalism based on moral certainties and dubious historical schemas tells us little we don’t already know about workingmen. Andrew Ross showed some time ago that popular culture is prone to attitudes we find bad. And that men have such attitudes, Mark Kann tells us, has been a principle of political philosophy since the seventeenth century.17 But reducing workingmen to the offenses of their texts equates bad attitudes with bad culture in a way that Franklin would have called composing “directly out of [one’s] Head” ( A, 22). As a perfect storm, the whiteness rage merged two critical pressure systems that Franklin resisted, neither of which gives workingmen a break: his pedantic idealism, or “political rationality” (Ross’s term), so quick to binarize in moral terms; and Keimer’s hunger, the vertiginous drift of such binarizing that soon restricts what we can say about it. If we take this compulsive appetite to censure as a product of more than unprincipled wrong that includes anxieties of employment, professionalism, narcissism, even masochism, then the burden born by our “white” working subjects is enormous.18 Apart from a view of workingmen as walking pathologies of antebellum social life, the worst effect of whiteness has been to distract us from things we were starting to know when it came along. One was how to operate with some degree of wit between texts, readers, and reading to illuminate not just the meaning of texts but the lives of those who read them. Radway and Warner were key figures in this project, both benefiting from work on reception begun in the 1960s.19 Love and Theft is not about reading, but it is courageous and innovative in treating bodies as the material location where culture has effects. The tendency to think of reading as an act of imagination makes it easy to neglect this materiality or abstract it as disembodied theory. This is


a mistake in treating a period when reading assumed unprecedented influence over the bodily lives of Americans. U.S. workingmen began to read in large numbers at about the same time they became the most materially productive in the industrializing world. They also began to adopt a bodily style that would become a key marker of class identity. When such men closed their tracts and pamphlet novels, they stepped into the street where they swaggered and lounged, enacting forms of bodily display that aspired as much to grace and beauty as vulgarity and intimidation. Into our instructional grammar I want to intrude working bodies that encountered the material demands placed upon them first, and in many respects most profoundly, in reading. This requires that we readmit into conceptual view the extent to which reading is eating. Richard Stott shows that productivity in antebellum shops depended on bodies that consumed large amounts of cheap, good food.20 It also required that they “ingest, incorporate, and absorb” large amounts of cheap, good reading—reading that targeted bodies and succeeded in having its affects linger in the somatic structures that determined how workingmen behaved. To understand such reading, and those who did it, we must examine the specific feelings (fear, honor, shame) that were used to influence male behavior, the effects of which represent appetites catered to in the popular press. It is not in our interest to push the analogy too far. This would return to the unidirectional communication model that Radway rightly opposes. But we must concede in material terms that reading affects the material lives of readers, and we must do so in ways that don’t evaporate amid abstractions of theory, language, and morality. This means not denying consumption but embracing it more fully. Whatever absorption it involves, eating is not a unidirectional act. Much that we read is bland and uninspiring; much we void with no lasting effect. But much of it stays, often in forms dictated by the nature of reading as a bodily act. Eating we imagine as empirically verifiable and palpably somatic. It then locates reading rhetorically in a world of bodily acts: men read and felt ashamed; they wept, grieved, and were angry, often equivocally. These responses were not confined to reading but affected bodily life afterward. By treating the obvious in affective reading, we materialize body arguments in ways essential to understanding reading that both produced antebellum conditions and reconciled readers to them. If this reading split the republican self, reconciliation closed that split—


in reading itself and in the working body it produced. Materializing this body may also close another split in our relations with it as the place where bad attitudes occur. To save a “Principle” of sociability from an “Inclination” toward pedantry (A, 28), we must treat working bodies in a disciplinary context where immediate needs were subjugated and denied by reading that was brutal in its persuasive force. This approach can’t take the usual forms employed to build solidarity across time, place, and lines of social and cultural difference. Neither sympathy nor populist romance (artisan republicanism) reconciles us to texts with attitudes that are clearly bad—or clearly opposed to the attitudes of texts we have metabolized in recent decades. We must take the link between reading and eating seriously, perhaps as more than metaphor. Cultural Diet

I turn now to two texts. One is Benjamin Baker’s wildly popular play A Glance at New York (1848), which includes more than a “glance” at how workingmen felt about eating and their bodies. The other is Thompson’s My Life. As a “Knave in his [own] Composition,” Thompson takes Keimer’s part in an autobiography much like his fiction: a series of vulgar, disconnected escapades punctuated by scenes of gross violence. This says less about the reliability of Thompson’s account than the needs it served. Thompson opposed the self-objectification taught by approved reading for men—and here my comparison with Keimer is less gratuitous than it may seem. My Life begins by parodying the leading example of such reading, chronicling Thompson’s early life as a young runaway, printer’s boy, reader, writer, and wouldbe moral exemplar. “I’ll be a printer!” he proclaims on his first day as a free man in New York: “Franklin was one, and he, like myself, was fond of rolls” (ML, 19). Thompson has just breakfasted on rolls— three, in fact—although unlike Franklin, who shares his, Thompson eats them all. His appetites, in other words, liken him as much to Franklin’s glutinous master as to Franklin himself. He acquires these appetites early and in a variety of forms. Where his model lands in Philadelphia and meets a young Quaker who leads him to respectable lodgings, Thompson falls in with a young delinquent, Jack Slack, and after an evening sampling brandy cocktails, both retire for the night to a brothel.


Thompson’s target is the ethic of self-improvement that took Franklin’s diligence and self-denial as its model.21 My Life depicts Franklin-inspired standards as cruel and a threat to democratic ideals. These standards Thompson identifies with his uncle who raised him and who, alarmed by his growing sensuality (and size), locks the food closet and beats him, praising the “luxury of abstinence” (ML, 6). Thompson flees, but his master, Mr. Romaine, is just as violent. Romaine murders his wife for infidelity, a crime of which he too is guilty. “How prone are many people to lose sight of their own imperfections,” Thompson remarks, “while they censure and severely punish the failings of those who are not a whit more guilty than themselves! The swinish glutton condemns the drunkard—the villainous seducer reproves the frequenter of brothels—the arch hypocrite takes to task the open, undisguised sinner” (ML, 29). Thompson blames the split between desire and action for cruelty ranging from capital punishment and vendetta justice to blacklisting and the stigma attached to traditional pleasures by a culture that increasingly internalized discipline. Reading was a means to success in the new economy. Franklin’s contribution to this understanding is apparent in a banner carried by representatives of the Apprentices’ Library of New York in the 1825 parade celebrating the completion of the Erie Canal. Two images appeared on the banner: the Bible and Life of Franklin.22 Reading supplied what Charles Loring Brace called “influence,” which sought, as one school committee put it, to “shut out . . . baser passions” and promote conduct that was orderly and productive.23 An 1863 tract, Tramps in New York, describes Sunday school in the “mechanics’ wards” taught by a policeman who when called to intervene in “the brawls of parents . . . goes armed with attractive little books wherewith to influence the more youthful members of the family.” Containing the “baser passions” takes a more direct form when teachers put unruly students “through a series of maneuvers with their hands and arms, which, as in this instance, produced the desired result of keeping them comparatively quiet for some time after.”24 Reading was still key to this quieting project, however. In Stephen Simpson’s words, education saves “them from all temptations of degrading vice and ruinous crimes. A reading and intellectual people were never known to be sottish.”25 What Harvey Graff calls “the literacy myth” didn’t rule out mixed feelings toward quieting itself or how it was achieved.26 Thompson


understood these feelings, along with their recreational opportunities. He knew that disciplinary reading caused men to work harder and denied them pleasure, especially in their bodies. It was not the “way to happiness,” as William Tryon promised. Nor were its methods less repressive than violence. Tract writers inserted fear, shame, and other emotions between appetite and action. For Franklin, this space was filled with the reasons of Tryon, who reduced appetite to reasonable calculation. Franklin locates the failure of reason in scenes of eating, mediating the gap between principle and behavior with humor and sociality. Thompson does the same, except he treats reading itself as an embodying practice, not as a metaphor—an act that feeds corruptive appetites, thus closing the split self of republican publicity. He does this by joining reading and eating in the history of his disciplining. His uncle beat him for reading books and stealing food, a pairing of crimes that reflects values applied jointly to eating and reading in the lives of workingmen. If Thompson’s fat marked his success in resisting a pervasive rhetoric of Franklinian self-denial, it also suggests what happened to such men when they read Thompson’s books. Food itself is a good place to begin. Among countless details that Richard Stott turns up about everyday working life in antebellum New York is one highly apropos to the materiality of male working bodies: they were very well fed. Workingmen ate lots of meat: beef and pork, mainly, two or three times a day; it was not “stretched” but fried in large pieces and choice cuts. The numbers are worth contemplating: Estimated annual consumption per person in the 1850s and 1860s ranges from 152 to 187 pounds of beef and from 221 to 257 pounds of all meat. On a weekly basis, the figures are 2.9 to 3.6 pounds of beef and 4.2 to 4.9 pounds of meat. (The 1984 American totals are 106 pounds of beef and 176 pounds of meat yearly—2.0 pounds of beef and 3.4 pounds of meat per person per week.) (WM, 177) Meat rivaled grain as a staple. But even grain was excellent; it was mostly wheat, mainly in white bread. Vegetables, fruits, and dairy products were cheap and of prime quality. Immigrants were amazed by what they were fed. English watchmaker John Harold wrote that boardinghouse fare included “[b]eef Steaks, fish, hash, ginger cakes, buckwheat cakes, etc such a profusion as I never saw before at the breakfast tables.” An unnamed proofreader was likewise impressed:


“hot beef-steaks (cut from the ribs), mutton chops, fish, fried potatoes, boiled potatoes, huckleberries and sugar . . . fresh butter, [and] new bread.”27 The New York Shamrock Society warned arriving Irish to be wary of “animal food” in particular. Faced with such abundance, they often ate until they were sick (WM, 180). This was partly due to the economics of U.S. food production: large tracts of agricultural land in the Midwest coupled with moneyed, centralized urban markets. But this serviced another economy in the producing bodies of men. Immigrants were also amazed by the intensity of U.S. work and the stamina of U.S. workers. They linked both to food. Far from considering his daily fare a luxury, one Irish worker commented: “[W]e need it all, I can tell you, to do the work.”28 Some could not do the work, but food was again the deciding factor. Cabinetmaker Henry Price attributes his demotion to varnisher to weakness caused by “Innsuficient [sic] food dole’d out” in the English workhouse where he was raised. Others took time and “comfortable feeding” before they could match the speed and endurance of native workers.29 Stott avoids suggesting that diet caused the productivity of U.S. workers, but he leaves little doubt that their bodies were fueled by cheap, abundant food of good quality. Nor did food cause workingmen to require vulgar, rowdy entertainment any more than vitality did—or strength. Working bodies were not just well nourished; they were in peak physical condition from years of hard, fast-paced labor. And they were bored, a state Roger Lane claims caused stress among the growing numbers who worked in new manufacturing concerns, where long hours were not the only problem.30 “Work, work, work” was repetitive, highly regulated, and dull; when the day ended, workers looked for excitement. Yet boredom, like food and strength, is an inadequate explanation for the productivity of U.S. workingmen or the kinds of recreation they enjoyed. These factors, nonetheless, should not be ignored even in turning to places we often look for answers. As hard as men worked, Stott finds no evidence of a work ethic that made labor anything but a source of money they would rather have obtained more easily. Worse, most were men whose trades were being capitalized, a process that devalued skills and denied promotion. Apprentices, journeymen, and even masters were denied the occupational means through which they had traditionally enacted themselves as citizens and men. Whatever hopes


were raised by tracts such as Franklin’s, upward mobility was unlikely because wages were too low and unstable to advance more than a few. The result was resentment that conflicted with codes meant only to produce more labor. And men labored more. But the reason was not competition for jobs. In work, men found recognition in a world that stripped them of every other form of positive identity. Here bodies assumed emphatic materiality. Strength and stamina became foundational virtues in a form of masculinity that was hostile and ironic, giving employers the labor they required but in bodily terms that threatened the wider social order over which they presided. The exemplary figure for this masculinity was Mose, Bowery B’hoy and hero of A Glance at New York. B’hoys were men from New York’s Bowery known for their toughness and distinctive attire, which included a red shirt, high beaver hat, and soap locks—hair left long, curled and greased on the sides. Benjamin Baker’s play consists of a series of episodes in which Mose rescues newcomer George Parsells from various scrapes he gets into because of inexperience. Violence is often involved, usually against those who prey on young greenhorns. Like Thompson, Baker draws on the belief that sharp-dealing of one kind or another robbed ordinary Americans of economic prosperity. George Parsells invites identification: like most urban workers, he comes from the countryside and learns his lessons the hard way. Within months of the play’s debut on the New York stage, Mose was playing to packed houses across the nation. Versions of his character also appeared in fiction, always ready to knock heads on behalf of the weak and unfortunate. As a volunteer fireman in Ned Buntline’s Three Years After, Mose charges into a burning building to rescue a young woman named Eliza, who later becomes his “g’hal.”31 Tall, swaggering, powerfully built, Mose embodied male energy overflowing the channeling structures of productive labor. This energy is evident in Frank Chanfrau’s striking pose as the character in James Brown’s 1848 lithograph (see fig. 2). Mose was a butcher. Baker too joins the consumption of food and culture, at least insofar as his hero purveyed not just meat but highprotein entertainment to disaffected urban men. Mose did more than represent male energy; he animated it and gave it form. His effect on audiences was electric. As one observer put it, “Mose, instead of appearing on stage, was in the pit, the boxes, and the gallery.”32 He was also on the street in front of the Astor Place Theater in 1849 when

Figure 2 Poster of the actor Frank S. Chanfrau as the character Mose, as performed in A Glance at New York and other plays in the Mose cycle. Lithograph by James Brown (New York: E. & J. Brown, 1848). Printed courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.


Bowery B’hoys staged a riot in which the State militia killed twentytwo men by way of recontaining overflowing male energy.33 Violence wasn’t the only response. In recognition of Mose’s role in constituting rowdy male bodies, writers, actors, and theater owners softened his character. In Linda the Cigar Girl (1856), Mose speaks for Linda, who is denied aid from a wealthy home: I thought when a poor girl was perishing in the streets, the proudest mansion in the land was a hospital to succour her. You call her a pauper; look well upon her, and then tell me if her form is not as fair as the proudest of you here; clasp on her arms the gems that glitter there on yours, and tell me if they lose their lustre. No! They fade in brightness only when worn by one whose heart-streams are so corrupted she cannot feel a throb of pity for one of her own sex who lies dying at her feet.34 This intervention in the culture that men consumed continued until Mose was, in Peter Buckley’s words, “little more than a walking conscience for the bourgeoisie,” his brawling defense of the weak now reduced to supplicating appeals for pity and charity (“TOH,” 398). Eating and theater were both charged cultural acts. In being essential to production, food figured labor value in terms beyond exploitation: whatever else could be taken away, food could not. Eating assumed a belligerent edge, found in the aforementioned Irish worker’s defense of “comfortable feeding” (“we need it all, I can tell you, to do the work”). The differential between wages and food occurs when the same man is reminded that he got “three times the Irish wages” and replies “that he did six times the Irish work.”35 Pride in work joins inequity between pay and productivity. Food erases this inequity because “it all” is required to sustain output. Bitterness remains, however, metabolized in an act over which men continued to exercise some degree of economic say. Eating was not only theater, of course. Reformers such as William Alcott and Sylvester Graham condemned the dietary license of young men in cities: late suppers, foreign foods, “free use of fresh-meat . . . richly prepared dishes . . . tea and coffee and wine and . . . other stimulants with which civic life is unwisely cursed.”36 A “civic” diet filled streets with bodies threatening in the very power that made them necessary. Baker opens a scene with Mose delivering meat to the home of a wealthy customer. “Say,” he calls to street cleaners working nearby,


“if you kick up such a dust as that when I’m passin’, to spile my beef, I’ll lam you!” They stop, but they identify him as the problem: “We ain’t kickin’ up as much dust as you are.”37 His labor value (providing meat) gives Mose command of city streets, which to accommodate him remain unswept. The play concludes with a similar scene set in a restaurant, with Mose now the customer. “Bring me a plate of pork and beans,” he says to the waiter. “Say, a large piece of pork, and don’t stop to count de beans.” The waiter complies, asking if there is anything else: “Yes—a brandy skin!” (G, 33). Mose implies here that workers were a mixed blessing; in their bodily productivity, depicted as a defiant appetite, they became a bodily threat to production. Mose’s words also imply that men metabolized this threat by performing an everyday act of embodiment in which they maintained economic power. For men reduced to the value of bodily output, eating fused calories and spite in a reiterated act of negative self-assertion.38 A Glance at New York provoked a similar fusion. Mose engaged feelings associated with meat production as the publication of male bodily power. Of fifty-two men arrested at Astor House, butchers outnumbered other trades by two to one. Buckley attributes this disparity to the status of New York’s butchers, who were spared the ill effects of capitalization on their trade by licensing laws that restricted competition, leaving traditional work styles intact and giving them an air of invincibility. He also suggests that butchers’ visibility in the streets and markets enhanced their public profile and made them natural leaders (“TOH,” 306). Butchers were known beyond New York for causing trouble, however, suggesting that they played an active role in securing and maintaining their autonomy as well as the perception that they were invulnerable: male bodies that capital both needed and feared. Butchers staged this message in the violence of a craft that produced energy in its most productive yet menacing form: as meat, abundant and enabling; as flesh, volatile and disruptive. Butchers performed routine acts of violence with no apparent thought to the vulnerabilities that make bodies subject to restraint.39 Mose staged this message, not in the spectacle of public slaughter but in a performance that purveyed bodily self-assurance. Thompson purveyed similar self-assurance in reading. He also tapped the assertive pleasures of eating. Thompson’s Life is chiefly about the life of his appetites, which defied every effort to contain them. But the book does more than celebrate bodily license. It exploits the ambiguity reading shared with eating, which is that both were vital


to production. Workingmen wanted reading and got it. It was cheap, abundant, and of good quality. Much of it remained true to reformers’ aims to save Americans from what Simpson had called “degrading vice and ruinous crimes,” but much of it also received Henry Ward Beecher’s cautionary label “black lettered” for reading that was good only insofar as it entertained.40 As all reading became subject to market forces, most of it fell somewhere in between. Beginning in 1833 with the publication of the New York Sun, the country’s first penny daily, workingmen enjoyed a widening array of reading meant to amuse and excite: serial novels, urban exposés, police reports, and more—including reform literature often so lurid it brought charges of salaciousness. Many saw such reading as the greatest danger of modern life. Its authority as reading blurred disciplinary boundaries. It fired the mind and aroused evil desires. As productive as legitimate reading was, it all too easily turned bad. There are two points to make here. The first is to emphasize again the bodiliness of reading, which Thompson signifies in his preoccupation with appetites and his parody of Franklin, whose Autobiography epitomized reading judged to be legitimate insofar as it objectified working bodies, allowing them to be instrumentalized for productive gain. In its effects on behavior, reading was seen as no less bodily a practice than eating. Good reading produced reliable workers and orderly citizens; bad reading did not, being, it was thought, a direct cause of what Thompson called “fast living.” All reading was calculated to move readers. Good reading moved them productively; bad reading excited and enflamed them, causing illness and insanity, according to some, or leading to other evils such as masturbation and drink. Bad reading, in every sense, fed a bad appetite. My second point extends from the fact that whatever assurance workingmen displayed, their power did have limits, as the New York militia made clear. These limits were inherent in eating and reading themselves: whatever defiance they allowed, they also transformed U.S. men into productive, reliable workers. Also pertinent are Lane’s findings that urban crime decreased in the period, suggesting that, public perception aside, men’s conduct in fact improved. This is the inverse irony of bodily power, and it turns up as the most significant recreational content of the culture men consumed. This consumption involved food and the ambivalence of men whose recognition as men depended on their posing a self-immolating threat to public order. Observing Mose’s exchange with the waiter in the


closing scene is his girlfriend, Lize, who arrives with another girl she meets along the way: Jenny. Say, Lizey, can’t you wring me in? Lize. I suppose I can with hard squeezin’—but that Mose of mine is such a dear fellow—he don’t care for expense—not he— he thinks there’s no gal like me in this village. You ought see him in the market once, I tell you—how killin’ he looks! De way he takes hold of de cleaver and fetches it down is sinful! Dere’s no mistake but he’s one of de b’hoys! (G, 32) Butchering is definitively masculine here, and its violence eroticized. Mose’s aggression extends to his ordering a meal for the couple, where intimidation is largely for public consumption. That Lize is the main consumer (watching and eating) implies the material limits of working male bodies. He is “squeezed,” not by restaurant portions but by her expectation. “A cup of coffee,” she says when asked for her order, “and nine donuts!” (G, 33). Minutes later, Mose, struck by her appetite, exclaims: “Lize! Why don’t you come along? Don’t be eaten up all de man has in de house!” (G, 34). They are not married. But the domestic reference invokes the tenuousness of Mose’s power. Workingmen were not just out-muscled by the state. As Stott suggests, they often remained well fed only while they were single. Add a family, and the classic conditions of producer poverty loomed, including hunger—and disgrace for expected providers. Mose performs his role effortlessly, joining food (providing) and violence (his working body) in the final moments of the scene when Lize leaves her pile of donuts and urges him to join a brawl: “Bravo! Mose, go to it!” Lize uses her feminine prerogative to require Mose’s sacrifice (“he don’t care for expense”) as a protector and provider (G, 32). In assuming liability for the gap between self-assurance and the harsh reality of working life, Lize becomes the recreational object. The script provides no indication of how her voracious appetite should be staged. But we can assume that when it was, it was not flattering. Thompson is no more flattering when he uses gluttony to characterize his delinquent desires. That he targets himself signals his interest in the irony of male bodily power. Caught stealing food, Thompson relates how “rather a stout youth” can run away “to do [and eat] as I please,” reducing rebellion from republican virtue to boyhood fantasy. “I’m going in,” he shouts. (This is also Mose’s battle cry.) Despite


being only twelve years of age and outnumbered, he wins his liberty, breaking his uncle’s leg in the bargain (ML, 8). If Thompson’s size registers success in resisting the “luxury of abstinence” (ML, 29), it also insinuates softening of the kind we see in Mose, and in men generally as they adjusted to disciplinary conditions. Figuring this adjustment as body fat implies ambivalence: toward disciplining, clearly, but also toward eating as a mixed performative signifier. If food supplied the source of male power, it also furnished the means of men’s exploitation by their employers. Once fed, men worked; once they had families, they worked harder. Also in Thompson’s fat lurks pacification: pleasure gained, freedom won, but in a sphere where performance distracts from battles already lost. He succeeds in trouncing his uncle, but the agency he claims only makes him look silly—like Mose challenging a waiter over a plate of beans. Thompson’s appeal stemmed from negotiating the oppositions connoted by his size—from bridging the gap between tough, self-assured workingmen and the exploitation to which they submitted and of which they increasingly approved. This approval he concedes when he ridicules rather than debates Franklin. First, he uses his appetites, which represent a domain in which men challenged the power of capital and the state. But appetites were objects of ambivalence. While Thompson celebrates victory over a repressive upbringing, much of My Life narrates his struggle between “fast living” and a deeply felt wish to reform. If he escapes his uncle’s beatings, he remains subject to the wider culture determined to tame him. He allegorizes this struggle in his relationship with Jack Slack. Thompson flees the brothel he visits with Jack, rejecting him as his “evil genius,” the personification of all wayward impulses (ML, 37). He finally kills Jack in a barroom brawl, signaling his alienation from appetites and male society. Moving from city to city, Thompson looks not for adventure but for escape from evil ways and bad company. He fails. But he treats defeat with “philosophy,” an attitude of thoughtful resignation toward standards either unattainable or not worth the necessary sacrifices. In Boston, after a meditative visit to the Bunker Hill monument, Thompson joins the “Uncles and Nephews,” a club whose name reflects reconciliation between discipline and bodily desires that he failed to achieve with his own uncle. Brawling and debauchery lead to atonement and regret among club members. Tolerance stems from mutuality and humor; shared vices provide socia-


bility of the kind Franklin finds in finally submitting to “animal food” (A, 29). The point assumes republican proportions when, dressed as Falstaff, Thompson marches in an Independence Day parade and pens an “ode to liberty” that praises “the sublime moral spectacle afforded by a people arising in their might to throw off the yoke of bondage and assert their independence” (ML, 85). His outfit implies the lessthan-utopian reality of the democratic sublime. Flawed or not, however, freedom is better than standards that produce only bondage and alienation. Thompson also wrote philosophically. Like Keimer, he composed “fast,” directly from impulse to action. He wrote two novels during a brief stay in jail. The July Fourth ode “of considerable length” he “dashed off” in minutes (ML, 85). Speed produces novels fragmented and erratic. Errata abound, along with detours, such as one discussing Helen Jewett’s murder and his own advice on drinking. Printers were equally careless. My Life is riddled with errors, from typographical mistakes to missing text. Stray letters appear, in a cluster at one point. “Fast” also describes Thompson’s content. He had talent for violence: blood spurting from Mrs. Romaine’s breast, a bullet piercing her lover’s brain, Jewett’s half-burned body lying across her “couch of sin” (ML, 7). He had a knack for sex too, especially when he could give it a new angle. Traveling in the country, he is struck when the daughter of a farmer becomes infatuated with a female companion who is disguised as a man. “The idea of a woman falling in love with one of her own sex,” he declares, “is rather rich” (ML, 57). Thompson’s books were trash, cheap in their production and in the pleasures they gave. Whatever else My Life might be—a critique of popular reform, republican social theory, local color—it has a prurient surface as obvious as Thompson’s less-than-philosophical motives in writing it. This represents a defining feature of men’s recreational reading in the period. In part, I mean to say that novels such as Thompson’s Venus in Boston: A Romance of City Life (1849) and City Crimes; or Life in New York and Boston (1849) inverted the values of good reading, providing in their debased form an anti-aesthetic in a culture bent on the productive rationalizing of working life. Their appeal was subcultural, the basis for what I call negative self-assertion. But lost in such an account is once again the embodiedness of this self-assertion, which Thompson suggests in his shift in selfcharacterization from Franklin to Falstaff as a purveyor of men’s read-


ing. Bad books did more than “remake expressive modes and codes forged initially by others.” They engaged men bodily in an activity that re-formed them bodily. At stake were not compensations obtained from books but adaptations metabolized in reading. Thompson’s vulgarity incited this adaptation the way Falstaff did by parading his fat obscenely down the street. Thompson closed the self-objectifying split that Warner identifies as key to the Franklin project and that was radicalized in the productivity of workingmen. Thompson drew these men into bodily disclosures of what they were, and were not. These disclosures opened them bodily to shifts negotiated in antebellum disciplinary life. Men in Public

I want to end by considering briefly how such shifts might be accounted for beyond the dietary, while retaining the bodiliness we materialize by joining the eating and reading lives of workingmen. Retaining this materiality requires that we treat with a greater degree of particularity the feelings inserted between impulse and action to affect the conduct of such men. Shame played a key role in antebellum disciplinary reading, from reform and self-improvement literature to the subtler urgings of sentimental fiction. The latter has drawn great interest, much of this in its socializing functions. Two aspects of sentimentalism are important here. One is that its power was based on emotion, though this, once again, has been treated linguistically as generic affect more than as specific emotions that were produced and manipulated by reading. Second is the role of injury in sentimental rhetoric, especially the injury of women, children, and other victims figured feminine, though, like Uncle Tom, not always female. It is difficult to exaggerate the quantity of reading consumed by antebellum men that relied on this device, which, as we see in Lize, produced as much ambivalence as obligation. Thompson locates both in My Life when, after killing Jack, he meets a widow who has been seduced and robbed by a lawyer. Mrs. Raymond wears white and plays the harp; Thompson, “like a knight errant of old, [becomes] the champion of beauty” (ML, 43). Taking her to Pittsburgh to confront the man, he arranges a meeting only to discover that his angel (they sell her harp to pay for the trip) intends a more permanent reckoning. Much to Thompson’s horror, when they enter the office of her seducer, she murders him with a


knife. It is beauty’s cruelty (codes enforced by her merciless rage), and Mrs. Raymond’s eventual death, that set Thompson to philosophical thinking and a career in pornographic publication. Richard Brodhead argues that a Lize or a Mrs. Raymond derives rhetorical force from antebellum childrearing practices that enhanced emotional bonds between parents and children, providing grounds for internalized self-regulation at a time when older forms of social control were in decline. Brodhead takes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Eva to typify figures that utilized emotional debts acquired in the home to affect behavior outside. The closest Brodhead comes to treating this influence as indeed emotional is to say that figures such as Eva tapped mother love, attaching misgivings to a variety of activities (personified by drunkards, seducers, slave holders) that caused them pain. Readers were held emotionally liable for this pain, either because they themselves committed such wrongs or because they permitted others to commit them. In addition to personal correction, persuasion of this kind drove more direct forms of control: men who were properly socialized disciplined other men who were not.41 Eve Sedgwick elaborates the kind of socializing Brodhead describes in terms of shame. Sedgwick tells us that shame’s bodily signs (eyes down, head averted) appear early in life, when a child is scolded and feels the loss of the identity-constituting recognition of the caregiver. Fear disciplines the child, who struggles to recover that recognition by acting correctly. Yet correct action is steeped in doubt and irony. It may only mask bad desire, the “evil genius” that haunts Thompson’s would-be respectability, allegorized in his relationship with Jack. Shame also demarcates space in the feeling body where a sense of self develops independent of the caregiver. One acquires a self, in effect, by acting badly. This does not end with childhood. Shame depends on the look of another, if only the self-scrutinizing other that Warner finds in Franklin. Being told of our faults causes distress recalled from times when blame threatened our very existence, bringing the desire to survive—and so to misbehave—to the desperate and irresistible fore. Memory is not the only way we recall such distress. In an era when mothers assumed child rearing as their principal social function, reading was a way to extend their disciplinary reach. Narratives of feminine violation returned men repeatedly to the self-deconstituting/ reconstituting shame of lost love.42 In adapting shame theory to queer theory, Sedgwick suggests how workingmen responded to the persuasions of mother love. “Shame


consciousness and shame creativity” are key not just to identity formation but also to “performative identity vernaculars” such as “flaming”: And activism. Shame interests me politically, then, because it generates and legitimates the place of identity—the question of identity—at the origin of the impulse to the performative, but does so without giving that identity space the standing of an essence. It constitutes it as tobe-constituted, which is also to say, as already there for the (necessary, productive) misconstrual and misrecognition. Shame—living, as it does, on and in the muscles and capillaries of the face—seems to be uniquely contagious from one person to another. And the contagiousness of shame is only facilitated by its anamorphic, protean, susceptibility to new expressive grammars. (TF, 64) Pertinent to Thompson’s “expressive grammar” in My Life is Sedgwick’s additional claim that “shame/performativity may get us a lot further with the cluster of phenomenon generally called ‘camp’ than the notion of parody will” (TF, 64). While parody scorns its object, “shame/performativity” retains a negative Falstaffian self enacted without denying the Franklin-inspired terms of social good. Thompson remains as ambivalent toward the “fast” life as Franklin is toward appetite. Thompson does not regret killing Jack, calling it an act of “self-defense” (ML, 41). He is faithful to Mrs. Raymond, even after she proves so deadly a disciplinarian. And when on the Fourth of July he and other members of the “Uncles and Nephews” are jailed for public brawling, he openly acknowledges their guilt, citing neither democratic right nor autocratic injustice. All are released in time to take part in the day’s celebration, though not (in Thompson’s telling) by an act of law. This involves a female figure to whom the men, bruised and beaten, submit, but with a performative irony not unlike camp. Pressing “the portrait of his Katy to his lips,” one man declares: “‘[S]o long as this blessed consolation is left me, this world may do its worst! Frown on, ye fiends of misfortune! I defy ye all, so long as my Katy Darling remains but true!’” Then someone calls for a song, and . . . from the depths of that gloomy dungeon rolled forth the words, in tones of thunder— “Did they tell thee I was false, Katy Darling?” Suddenly, to our


great joy, the ponderous iron door of the dungeon was unlocked and thrown open. . . . (ML, 84) Freedom is the reward for a question of identity that the singers pose, though never answer, to a motherly (injured but ever-forgiving) Katy. Later, Thompson’s ode to liberty raises another question: Is he true to “Manner in writing”? Does he compose “directly out of his Head”? Thompson is a man insofar as he is bad—insofar as he writes fast, lives fast, Katy weeps, and he poses questions never answered. The key word is pose, its double meaning suggesting the falsity by which workingmen were, in Sedgwick’s words, “to-be-constituted” in public view. Reading provided a location for this pose, as did other practices modified for effect: top hats worn cocked to one side, or the lavish B’hoy soap locks that mimicked the sideburns of gentlemen. Workers also enjoyed the “shame consciousness and shame creativity” of books. My Life advises young men how to drink heavily but avoid the DTs. And Thompson’s fiction was not what educators had in mind when they advocated mass literacy. Most of them regarded reading that departed from its instructive role as a source of corruption. They were right—sort of. If reform literature condemned drinking, recreational forms made it more appealing. This is not to say men did it. Shame worked. As the century progressed, men behaved better, drank less, stayed home more. But insofar as it produced these changes, shame demarcated bodily space in which they recreated themselves as men. Something of this creativity appears in the engraving of Thompson on his way to answer charges of lewdness. Again, he succeeds in having the charges dropped by showing that the offending material was already in print. Thompson walked a fine line as purveyor of recreational reading, his lewdness most apparent perhaps in the pleasure he displays in finessing the “ponderous iron door” between right and wrong. In approaching that door, he also begs the question of his manliness. Dress, posture, and fat all suggest softness not expected in a neighborhood where Mose lounged menacingly on every corner. Yet Mose is as much like Thompson as not, especially in the lithograph of Chanfrau posing as the character that made him famous. Thompson has the strong jaw common in images of Mose (see fig. 1). They wear similar hats tilted forward. Both sport fashionable hairstyles and are attentive to dress, trousers, and accessories. Their footwear is narrow, almost pretty. Both appear to float. To the extent


that they appear feminine, the effect stems from their self-conscious occupation of space: to be seen. Yet as decorative as they are, the key markers of self-display (Mose’s hard stare, Thompson’s fat) are confrontational in their public demand for recognition, which they are denied, publicly—and would spurn on any account. Such is the pose, at any rate, that Thompson strikes publicly in responding to the question about decency (“Did they tell thee I was lewd?”), the answer to which he skirts on a technicality. Mose is more wary; only Lize betrays his look. When Ned Buntline (who was jailed for inciting the B’hoys at Astor House) wrote Mose into his novel Three Years After, Mose meets Lize at the window of a burning house, which she refuses to leave without her sick mother. “‘I’d like to know that ’ere g’hal!” he says. “‘I’ll bet my life on her goin’ to heaven!”43 Mose’s (bad) attitude denies the recognition he yearns for, embodied in the rhetorical figure that compelled it: a sweet, motherly girl who will surely go to heaven. Mose’s weakness resides, like Thompson’s, in the fine line he walks between prohibitions enforced by such girls and transgressions they compel him to perform, a line not well finessed on the night of the Astor riot. If Mose looks intimidating, “fat” lurks in the meticulousness of his dress, the self-consciousness of his pose, the dainty way he holds his smoke—all gestures, Northall tells us, that men imitated. Testimonials aside, it is tricky to join Mose’s pictorial styling to the texts men read, much less to their comportment on antebellum streets. Not all such streets were in New York, nor were all men B’hoys. Public celebrity can hardly be taken at face value to show how a journeyman mechanic strolled about a Massachusetts factory town in his free time. Such men were instructed how to conduct themselves in public in much the way New Englander Brown Thurston’s father told him: “‘[D]o not swing your arms too far.’ ‘Do not sway your body from side to side.’ ‘Do not raise your body and drop it at every step.’ ‘Walk with a steady and even motion, as if you had a pail of water on your head and did not wish to spill it.’”44 It’s a wonder Mose can keep his hat on his head. He and Thompson occupy the space they occupy, an appealing trait in the eyes of men tolerated only grudgingly as engines of an economy that had little use for them otherwise. By teaching his son how to be so tolerated, Mr. Thurston supplied the formal basis for parody in the two images. But more than parody occurred when instruction affected working-


men. This we find in Thurston’s mother, or rather the countless victims (in print and social life) who drew on his bonds with her to make him behave. Such rhetoric supplied not the form of his style but its content, as workingmen negotiated a world where shame internalized both specific behavioral codes and a wider sense of lived legitimacy, which in their bodies they were denied. For such men, shame marked space (cultural, physiological, urban) where an embodied self assumed shape, a working male habitus that emerged from anxiety and remorse as the public exhilaration of being what one was—not despite but in spite of the agreed terms of social good. If shame shows in flushed cheeks or a fallen head, in the same “muscles and capillaries,” men smirked. They strode, swaggered, and boxed the air. They burst into their homes. They struck their wives. Beyond the covers that circumscribed practice, reading ingested limits across which men enjoyed the way their attitudes made them feel and move, in potency and pretense, defiance and bravado. National Central University, Taiwan Notes Research for this essay was supported by grants from the American Antiquarian Society and National Science Council of Taiwan. For comments on drafts at various stages, I am grateful to Paul Erickson, Barbara Hochman, Helen Horowitz, and Christopher Looby. 1 George Thompson, My Life: Or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson (Boston: Federhen, 1854), 6, 14. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as ML. My Life is reprinted in “Venus in Boston” and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life, ed. David S. Reynolds and Kimberly R. Gladman (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 2 See John McGinn [George Thompson], Ten Days in the Tombs, or a Key to the Modern Bastille (New York: P. F. Harris, 1855). Ten Days chronicles Thompson’s experience when jailed in New York for drunkenness. He refers to himself throughout by the names “Falstaff” and the “Fat Philosopher.” 3 Janice Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor,” Book Research Quarterly (fall 1986): 10–12. 4 Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), 73–96; further references will be cited parenthetically as L.

Consuming George Thompson 261 5

6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14

15

16

17

18 19

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography, ed. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: Norton, 1986), 28. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as A. See Jane P. Tompkins, “Criticism and Feeling,” College English 39 (October 1977): 169–78. Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), 3–23. See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988). See Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” in International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (October 2001): 3–32. On narcissism in whiteness studies, see Robyn Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” boundary 2 (fall 1999): 115–50. On academic publishing, see Adolph Reed, “Response to Eric Arnesen,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (October 2001): 69–80. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 11. On artisan republicanism, Sean Wilentz’s term for proto-class identity in the antebellum United States, see his Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 61–103. Lott, Love and Theft, 136. Saidiya Hartman mixes methods and sources to speculate compellingly on the effects of racial subjugation in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997). For a similarly broad approach to antebellum men working in nonmanual labor, see Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tail: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003). On artisan republicanism, see Richard Stott, “Artisan and Capitalist Development,” in Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic, ed. Paul Gilji (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1997), 101–16. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2002), 28. See Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Mark Kann, On the Man Question: Gender and Civic Virtue in America (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1991). On moralism and masochism, see Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 18–61. Two figures who profoundly affected reception studies in the United States were Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics of Reception, trans.


20

21

22

23

24 25 26 27

28 29

30

31

Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978). See Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), 138– 39, 176–81. Further references will be cited parenthetically as WM. Thompson’s combination of sensational narrative, personal observation, parody, allegory, and spectacle—often involving gross violence—makes him tricky to interpret, especially when we try to extract from his writing something like a position. Little is known of Thompson, but he seems to have been thoughtful and well-read, with a reputation along these lines. See Paul Erickson, “New Books, New Men: City Mystery Fiction, Authorship, and the Literary Market,” Early American Studies 1 (spring 2003): 273–312. See Cadwallader D. Colden, Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of the City of New York. . . . (1825; reprint, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1967), 237. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work among Them (New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1880), 46. The 1851 Lowell School Committee’s Annual Report is cited in Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 122. On reading as social control, see Toward an Urban Vision, 95–128. N. A., Tramps in New York (New York: American Tract Society, 1863), 8, 29. Stephen Simpson, The Working Man’s Manual (Philadelphia: T. L. Bonsal, 1831), 205. See Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (New York: Academic Press, 1979). John Harold, diary, 25 October 1832, New York Historical Society, quoted in WM, 179; “The Anonymous Proofreader,” The Real Experiences of an Emigrant (London: 187[?]), 70, quoted in WM, 179–80. Unnamed Irish worker, quoted in John White, Sketches from America (London, 1870), 370; cited in WM, 140. “Diary of Henry Price,” in British Records Relating to America in Microform (East Ardsley, Eng.: 1963), 64, quoted in WM, 138. Henry Coleman refers to “comfortable feeding” in European Agriculture and Rural Economy (Boston, 1846), 1:50; quoted in WM, 139. See Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1999), 115–30. See Edward Z. C. Judson [Ned Buntline], Three Years After; A Sequel to the Mysteries and Miseries of New York (New York: Judson, 1849), 14–16. In a later play of the Mose cycle, Mose marries Bowery G’hal Lize.

Consuming George Thompson 263 32 William Northall, Before and behind the Curtain; Or, Fifteen Years’ Observations among the Theatres of New York (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1851), 92. 33 Peter Buckley gives an extensive account of Mose, the Bowery B’hoys, and the Astor House Riot in “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860” (PhD diss., State University of New YorkStony Brook, 1984), 294–409. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as “TOH.” 34 Of the many plays featuring Mose, only Baker’s A Glance at New York survives. But there are fragments, such as this one from Linda the Cigar Girl, author unknown, staged at the Louisville Theatre, 5 November 1856; see “TOH,” 396. 35 Unnamed Irish worker, quoted in White, Sketches from America, 370; cited in WM, 139, 140. 36 Sylvester Graham, Lecture to Young Men on Chastity (Boston: Light and Stearns, 1837), 59. 37 Benjamin Baker, A Glance at New York (New York: Feedback Theatrebooks, 1996). Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as G. 38 This is a hard point to make when we treat eating as political only when it is combined with a cultural category such as cuisine, or an economic one such as hunger. I am referring to actions that involve consuming food: biting, chewing, swallowing. The best case I can make is that these jointly metabolized calories and spite come from working for food. Farm laborers are often poorly paid but fed on the job—often very well. Food acquires status when placed before men who do physical labor for little other reward. Only a shortsighted farmer underfeeds men who need an equal supply of calories and good will to work under these conditions. 39 On butchers, see Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 243–44. 40 Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects (Salem, Mass.: John P. Jewett, 1846), 211. 41 See Richard Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” Representations 21 (winter 1988): 67–96. 42 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 35–65. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as TF. 43 Judson [Buntline], Three Years After, 16. 44 “Brown Thurston Journal,” cited with permission from the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. This statement appears among numerous anecdotes following the entry for 16 June 1843.