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Our Curator of Printed Books Rachel D’Agostino found these
three sensational pamphlets at a recent book fair. Purchased with the Davida T.
Deutsch Women’s History Fund, they are the sort of lowbrow items our
19th-century predecessors did not acquire for the Library Company. We now
purchase them to be able to document the whole spectrum of 19th-century print
culture, not just the material that measured up to their elevated standards.
The first one is about Helen Jewett, a beautiful prostitute who was killed in
the New York City brothel where she worked. Her murder prompted a feeding
frenzy among journalists. The newspapers featured extensive coverage of the subsequent
trial. And many believed that the wealthy young man who was accused of the
murder bought his acquittal.
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| Satiric response to the not-guilty verdict in the 1836 trial of Richard Robinson for the murder of Helen Jewett. |
By 1880, when our newly acquired pamphlet appeared, the 1836
case had passed into the annals of crime. Publishers such as Barclay & Co.
profited from the public’s ongoing interest in getting all the details about the case.
The firm of Barclay & Co. also published Runaway Girls and Their Startling Adventures
(Philadelphia, 1878). According to the rest of the title, these are “true
narratives,” giving “real names” of “young women who imbibed romantic notions
of life through reading sensational novels,” which seems odd coming from a
publisher that specialized in the sensational! Our favorite section in this
pamphlet is “Adventures of a Pennsylvania Girl, Who Disguised Herself As a Boy,”
in which “Miss Schwartz” runs away to Philadelphia from a Bucks County farm.
After a few preliminary events, she finds work as a “male impersonator” in a
“theatre” at the corner of Ninth and Chestnut Streets. She continues to
cross-dress after the police raid the place, working variously as a clerk in a
gentlemen’s furnishing store on Eighth Street, as a messenger-boy in the office
of the American District Telegraph Company, as an itinerant street vendor, as a
bootblack, as a newsboy, and finally as an errand boy in a grocery store on
Girard Avenue. Her
escapades come to an end after someone catches a glimpse of her bathing.
The third pamphlet from the Boston Book Fair is Albert
Dorman’s The Life of Mary Whittey, the
Catholic Medium (Willimantic, 1874). While the Library Company did not
acquire a copy in the 19th century, we know from a scholarly study on what
William James (1842-1910) read that he probably did. In adulthood, the eminent
philosopher became an adherent of Theosophy, a movement that emerged in part
from Spiritualism, so it may have interested him to read about Mary Whittey, the
“model servant” who first learns of Spiritualism when bells ring, irons and
dishes are thrown to the floor, and windows are broken. Since she’s Catholic,
her powers as a medium come as a shock both to her and to her employer. After
Mary Whittey changes households, her talents as a medium are encouraged, and
the spirit she contacts brings amusement and solace to her new employer’s
family. Contemporary estimates suggest that as many as twenty million people
embraced Spiritualism in mid-19th century America. That number is probably on
the high side, but it’s hard to know with any real certainty how many people
believed in Spiritualism. Largely discredited today, it’s useful to know that
many well-educated people were not total skeptics.
Most likely, the people who read these three sensational
pamphlets in the 19th century–including the eminent William James–were
simply looking for good escapist reading for an evening’s amusement.
