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Eaten Alive: Slavery and Celebrity in Antebellum America

1994; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.1994.0007

1080-6547

Michael Newbury,

American and British Literature Analysis

Eaten Alive: Slavery and Celebrity in Antebellum America Michael Newbury How slow and sure they set their types! How small editions ran! Then fifty thousand never sold — Before the sale began. For how could they, poor plodding souls, Be either swift or wise, Who never learned the mighty art Of how to advertise. James T. Fields, the Boston-based publisher, recited this celebration of modern marketing and printing techniques to about six hundred authors and other celebrities — politicians, editors, publishers, ministers, and more — on September 27, 1855 at “The Complimentary Fruit and Flower Festival, Given to Authors, by the New York Publishers’ Association.” The publishers sponsored and hosted the extravaganza at the Crystal Palace in an attempt to ease, or at least disguise, tensions between publishers, booksellers, and writers. Suspended above the primary banquet table, enclosed in gaslights, read the publishers’ tribute to authorship: “HONOR TO GENIUS.” In the speeches following dinner, notes of shared economic interest were sounded, and the following day, reporting on the Fruit Festival in a story that made the front page, the New York Times declared that if the antagonism between publishers and writers “ever had any existence, [it] has now completely passed away.” 1 The Fruit Festival did not, of course, end the economic tensions between authors and publishers. In fact, the staging of it may have helped to reinforce and construct a new kind of conspicuously public space for the celebrity, one which caused some discomfort for many antebellum authors. The event, in other words, was not only, perhaps not even primarily, an attempt to establish unity within the industry. The Festival, in all its gaudy self-consciousness, was a publicity stunt, the presentation by the publishers of authors and other notables before their public. The publishers distributed color-coded tickets weeks before the sold-out event (then advertised the unavailability of and demand for [End Page 159] these tickets) with instructions as to which entrances were to be used by the press, spectators, and guests. Three-hundred celebrity-seeking fans, nine-tenths of them women, occupied the gallery overlooking the pavilion where dinner was served to the celebrities below. The art of advertisement was not entirely new in 1855, but, as Fields’s poem suggests, it had achieved a sophistication and vastly expanded presence only recently, and the particular advertising strategy acted out in the Fruit Festival, the public appearance by the author as a celebrity in order further to promote that celebrity, may have been systematically used for the first time in America as a mass-marketing tool less than twenty years before, by Charles Dickens. 2 The Fruit Festival was only one among many events and orchestrations of public appearance that began to construct a newly prominent and celebrated place for those working in the (broadly defined) cultural sphere. It was in the 1840s and 50s that P. T. Barnum, perhaps the first to understand fully the potentialities of an emergent middle-class cultural market, emerged to promote himself and such divergent personages as the tiny Tom Thumb and the sweet-singing Jenny Lind. Religious figures such as Henry Ward Beecher (who attended the Fruit Festival) more and more abandoned the harshness of Calvinist doctrine in their attempts to promote themselves as prominent spokesmen to and for a middle-class public. Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign marked a quantum leap in campaign spending and was the first to rely on a nationwide network of party newspapers and publications to present its candidate as a representative man of the masses. Widely-circulated campaign biographies (such as the one Hawthorne wrote for Franklin Pierce) became standard political practice during the antebellum period. 3 The literary market and the authorial celebrity emerged within this broader cultural field of the publicized personality. Following the lead of William Charvat, a great deal of recent scholarship has detailed the social and technological developments that made the expansion of the literary market possible. 4 The emergence of a literate middle class, the passage of copyright laws, and improved technologies of reproduction and distribution all combined to bring authors into an unprecedented relation with their audience. Where genteel modes of avocational authorship for a familiar social group had...