Slavery, labor reform, and intertextuality in antebellum print culture: the slave narrative and the city-mysteries novel.

Some of the most provocative recent scholarship in the fields of 19th-century American studies and American literature has been devoted to recovering exchanges between black and white cultural forms. (1) Writing specifically about the antebellum period, for example, Jennifer Rae Greeson has recently unearthed the fascinating relationship between the city-mysteries novel and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. (2) The premise of the current article is that the genres of the slave narrative and the city-mysteries novel shared numerous points of contact in the 1840s and 1850s as a result of their position within the overlapping print cultures of abolition and labor reform. Starting with these two genres but reading outward from them to the wider print culture in which they were embedded, I will document a rich field of intertextuality in which literary devices and rhetorical postures passed readily back and forth across racial and generic boundaries, in a process that was mediated by the structures and agencies of the antebellum publishing trade.

Underlying and justifying this analysis is the fact that slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Henry Box Brown, and others, and fictional exposes of urban life, by authors such as George Lippard and George Thompson, enjoyed simultaneous and unprecedented popularity in the urban northeastern United States in the 1840s and 1850s. (3) The city-mysteries novels introduced readers to the seamy underground life of places like New York and Boston, employing gothic settings, colorful villains, and outrageous plots. A hallmark of this literature was its ostensible reform agenda, as authors purported to expose the crimes that wealthy capitalists committed at the expense of virtuous laborers; Michael Denning labels this ideology as "artisan republicanism" (Denning 103). (4) These novels, published by such commercial firms as T. B. Peterson & Brothers of Philadelphia and Stringer & Townsend and Frederic A. Brady of New York, sold in cheap formats to an urban, working-class audience that delighted in the genre's graphic violence and sexual titillation. The (white) authors' claims to a radical political agenda were sometimes merely a ploy by which they gave a high-minded pretense to erotically charged fiction, though in Lippard's case, at least, there was an active commitment to the labor movement.

The slave narratives, by contrast, were published with the support of abolitionist organizations and were aimed largely at the white middle-class audience perceived to have the political power to bring pressure to bear on the institution of slavery. When these authors depicted brutal violence and sexual exploitation, it was with the intention of shocking the sensibilities of their audience, and their political aims were obviously genuine. It is difficult to judge the extent to which readers of the two genres overlapped. (5) But the city-mysteries novel and slave narrative occupied a common print culture that facilitated the traversal of certain forms of expression from one to the other, sometimes as part of a network of intertextual relationships within the publishing field of reform literature, but also as a result of the direct plundering of one genre by authors from the other. The latter appears to be true of the influence of the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown on Thompson's City Crimes and Lippard's The Empire City, a case in which the way that white authors borrowed from and effaced a black writer's work emerges with unusual, even startling, clarity.

Henry Box Brown acquired his middle name by having himself mailed on March 29, 1849, as a parcel from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia (a 27-hour, 350-mile journey). Brown bored holes in a three-foot high packing crate, provided himself with a bladder of water, and suffered the hardships of the journey, among which were being turned upside-down, a detail worth noting for reasons that will soon become apparent:

   I was first carried to the express office,
   the box being placed on its end, so that
   I started with my head downwards,
   although the box was directed, "this
   side up with care." From the express
   office, I was carried to the depot, and
   from thence tumbled roughly into the
   baggage car, where I happened to fall
   "right side up," but no thanks to my
   transporters. But after a while the cars
   stopped, and I was put aboard a
   steamboat, and placed on my head. In
   this dreadful position, I remained the
   space of an hour and a half, it seemed
   to me, when I began to feel of my eyes
   and head, and found to my dismay,
   that my eyes were almost swollen out
   of their sockets, and the veins on my
   temple seemed ready to burst. (Brown
   60)

Brown's novel means of escape was clearly the main selling point of his narrative, which in its first edition was entitled Narrative of Henry Box Brown who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself. This edition was published in Boston by Brown and his amanuensis Charles Stearns in 1849; it launched Brown's career as a lecturer on the abolitionist circuit. In his recent edition of the 1851 self-authored version of Brown's narrative, Richard Newman documents the wide circulation of Brown's story with an illustration from an 1849 children's book and The Liberty Almanac engraving of Brown emerging from his box (Newman n.p.). The story was also retold under the title "Thrilling Narrative" in the June 30, 1849, edition of the Friends' Weekly Intelligencer, including the memorable detail of being turned upside-down (109). On the strength of its multiple editions in America and England, Brown's narrative attracted the attention of a pair of professional writers, who decided that neither the commercial nor the political potential of the story of Brown's unique method of liberation from captivity had yet been fully exploited.

Within a year of its publication, Thompson and Lippard both published city-mysteries novels in which they shamelessly pirated the most notable elements of Brown's narrative, transforming it in the process to suit their own ideological agendas. Thompson's City Crimes, published in Boston by W. Berry in 1849, purports to be (in the words of its subtitle) "a mirror of fashion, a picture of poverty, and a startling revelation of the secret crimes of great cities" (105). The novel's most prominent villain, the kingpin of underground New York, is the Dead Man, who escapes from Sing Sing prison by having himself nailed into a crate and shipped out. Thompson's debt to Brown is obvious in the following passage on the Dead Man's escape:

   But oh, horrible! unconscious that
   there was a man in the box, they stood
   it upon one end, and the Dead Man
   was left standing upon his head.... The
   drive from the wharf to Pearl street
   occupied scarce five minutes, yet during
   that brief period of time, the Dead
   Man endured all the torments of the
   damned. The blood settled in his head,
   and gushed from his mouth and nostrils;
   unable to hold out longer, he was
   about to yell in his agony for aid, when
   the cart stopped, and in a few
   moments he was relieved by his box
   being taken down and carried into the
   warehouse. (182)

Thompson sensationalizes Brown's story by suggestively altering the dimensions of the box, which is now "about six feet in length; and two in breadth and depth" (182) and by adding the blood that runs so liberally through the pages of this style of fiction. But his most interesting changes to Brown's story are subtler and more significant.

The Dead Man is a hideous villain, who has had his face burned with acid to forestall identification for his many vicious crimes. In the chapter that describes his escape from prison, however, the Dead Man nobly strikes a blow for the exploited working class. He has been mailed to a furniture warehouse, where, concealed within the crate and awaiting the chance to come out, he overhears the proprietor boast of his reliance on prison labor. The proprietor pays the convicts 30 cents a day in contrast to the $2.00-$2.50 that he had formerly been paying journeymen. As the proprietor's friend observes, "'So it seems ... that you are enriching yourself at the expense of the State, while honest mechanics are thrown out of employment'" (182). Indignant, the Dead Man upon emergence from his box bums down the entire warehouse (whose insurance, he has overheard, has just expired). The narrator's commentary on the action is overwrought and sentimental: "Oh, laborer! Thou art uncouth to look upon: thy face is unshaven, thy shirt dirty, and lo! thy overalls smell of paint and grease ... but give us the grasp of thy honest hand, and warm feelings of thy generous heart, fifty, yes a million times sooner than the mean heart and niggard hand of the selfish cur that calls itself thy master" (183)!

It is not surprising that Thompson abstracts Brown's story from its original context. As Thompson realized, his white, working-class readers would not have been sympathetic with the plight of escaped slaves mailing themselves North where they were seen as competition in the labor market. Thompson therefore profits from the novelty of Brown's escape while replacing one version of confinement and labor exploitation with another more likely to kindle the outrage of his readers. Thompson boldly retains the rhetoric of slavery by invoking the figure of a "master" even as he disguises his debt to the writing and suffering of Henry Box Brown, whose features, like the Dead Man's, have been conveniently effaced. The cynicism of Thompson's literary theft seems magnified by our recognition that the political ideology embraced by the narrator is manipulatively couched in the language of sentiment, through which a hint of Thompson's distaste for the common worker appears to voice itself. (6)

In his own more complex and ambiguous appropriation of Brown's story, Lippard betrays a wider awareness of the literature of slave narratives. (7) His novel The Empire City; or, New York by Night and Day, was first published in 1850 but completed under a new title in 1853. (8) Whereas City Crimes dwells in the criminal underground, The Empire City is mainly concerned with the misdeeds of New York's social and political elite. The Henry Box Brown counterpart in the novel is an exslave named Old Royal. Old Royal's former owner is Harry Royalton, who, when we meet him, is in the act of selling his enslaved half-sister Esther to a political figure modeled on Daniel Webster, as Lippard deftly indicts the slaveocracy and its New England patrons in one stroke. Lippard dispenses so quickly with the device of mailing oneself from freedom to slavery that his reason for borrowing it at all is hard to discern. Meeting Rudolph Royalton (half-brother of Harry) in New York Old Royal explains that he escaped from the plantation called Hill Royal "by the box line": "Arter you and Essy left de plantation, de old boy felt a-kind o' lonesome, and so he gits hisself put up in a box, and sent North by de railroad. He had some bread an' crackers in de box, an' a jug o' water" (105). Mentioning that the box was marked "Dis side up--wid care!" (105), Lippard's sly allusion to the difficulties faced by Brown and (perhaps) the Dead Man, Old Royal further explains that he, like Brown, was removed from his box by a Quaker in Philadelphia.

In the figure of Old Royal, Lippard curiously blends the con tented slave from the plantation novel or the minstrel show with the more threatening figure of the enslaved insurrectionist. Besides speaking in a dialect common to black characters of the period, Old Royal possesses the physical characteristics by which white authors usually marked the "Negro" face and physique: "His low, square forehead, black as anthracite, was surmounted by white wool. His eyes, expanding with astonishment, displayed their white balls, in the centre of his ebony face" (105). In plantation-novel style, Old Royal expresses nothing but gratitude and loyalty to Esther and Randolph Royalton, whom he seems to view as kind masters. In fact, he addresses the mixed-race Randolph as "Massa" in spite of the fact that both men were enslaved by Harry. But the characterization takes an unexpected turn when Old Royal learns that the siblings are being pursued by Harry. Old Royal reveals a biblically inspired plan of revenge that he plans to enact on his former owner, flashing a knife and ominously quoting the Book of Judges in which Ehud stabs and kills the King of Moab, then delivers Israel from 18 years of slavery.

At this point in the novel Lippard invokes another well-known slave narrative, that of Nat Turner, who, through his amanuensis, similarly claimed religious sanction for violent insurrection. Originally published in Baltimore in 1831, The Confessions of Nat Turner would sell 50,000 copies by the outbreak of the Civil War (Slave Narratives 1007). Like Turner, Old Royal has a reputation for special piety, being a slave "renowned among all the neighboring plantations, for the strength of his muscles, and the fervor of his prayers" (106). And in commenting on the plan, Lippard's narrator assumes the role of amanuensis Thomas Gray to Old Royal's Nat Turner, challenging the would-be insurrectionist's interpretation of the Bible: "the Old Slave, warped by much suffering, had derived a terrible philosophy from the pages of the Bible" (106). The comment recalls Gray's gloss on Nat Turner's claim of divine inspiration as the "offspring of gloomy fanaticism, acting upon materials but too well prepared for such impressions" (Gray 247). Lippard steps back from the violent implications of the characterization by preventing Old Royal from acting out his plan. Instead, Old Royal is drafted to execute the punishment leveled on Harry Royalton by a mysterious "Court of Ten Millions," whose judgment is a punishment of 39 lashes.

While the invocation of Nat Turner at first stokes readers' fears that escaped slaves might exact violent and indiscriminate retribution, the threat is allayed by Old Royal's obedience to the dictates of the Court. Perhaps the message is that the violent impulses of escaped slaves, however righteous, require direction from the institutions of benevolent Northerners. Interestingly, Lippard explicitly identifies the Court as the defender of labor's interests, as the judge intones before Harry's trial that the purpose of the Court is "to redress and punish those crimes, which, in the outer world, have been committed for the love of money; in other words, by the thirst for Labor's fruits, without Labor's work" (124). Implicit in this passage, given that Harry Royalton is not a capitalist manufacturer but a plantation owner, is the idea that the interests of slaves and white Northern laborers equally warrant redress. But this political stance is not one on which Lippard rests comfortably.

Lippard's purportedly abolitionist sympathies are compromised by the narrative's clear implication that the travails of oppressed white people, whether enslaved in the South or exploited in the North, are more deserving of readers' sympathy and identification than those of black slaves. This idea is communicated through the presence of the characters Esther and Randolph Royalton. They were both the offspring of Harry's father John by one of his slaves, a white-appearing woman who nonetheless was a slave by virtue of her own mixed ancestry. These victims of Harry Royalton's cruelty may technically have been slaves, but they are white in characterization. Esther has a "cheek white as marble" (78) and hands that "were very white, like hands of marble" (79), while Randolph is said to be "a shade whiter than his Master" (124). They both speak in the standard sentimentalized diction of antebellum white characters, in contrast to Old Royal. When Harry is punished by the Court of Ten Millions, it is not for the crime of slavery, but more specifically for lashing his half-brother and selling his half-sister. Both Esther and Randolph were more likely than Old Royal to enlist the white, working-class reader's identification and sympathy; the narrative endorses this identification by emphasizing Harry's crimes against his white half-siblings. Thus, like Thompson, Lippard relies on slave-narrative sources in the construction of his working-class fiction but revises their political implications by transferring the reader's identification from slaves to their white counterparts. Lippard acknowledges as much in a passage where he denounces slavery, but then asks of his readers: "Pardon me, then, if, while I lift the golden shroud from the misery and crime of the great city, I dare picture--not slavery as it exists at the South--but some of the features of that slavery as contrasted with the white slavery of the North" (76). Lippard borrows the rhetoric and the moral authority of abolitionism, replacing the victimized slaves with the oppressed laborers (sometimes called "wage slaves" or "white slaves") of the urban North. (9) This effacement is in keeping with his readers' intermittent identification with the plight of slaves, wariness regarding the organized abolitionist movement, and generally racist beliefs.

The interpretation that immediately suggests itself is that Thompson's and Lippard's borrowings fit into the long history in US popular culture of white artists stealing material from their black counterparts and using it to reach a mass audience, a history that may be said to have its beginning in the popularity of minstrel shows that was nearly concurrent with the literary developments sketched here. Black culture held a special fascination for white working-class Americans in the nineteenth century, according to Eric Lott, who calls the minstrel show "a manifestation of the particular desire to try on the accents of 'blackness'" that demonstrates "the permeability of the color line" (6). Either indulging (in the case of Lippard) or conspicuously repressing (Thompson) this fascination with racial otherness, the two city-mysteries novelists smuggled Brown's novel means of escape and his sense of victimization across racial and generic boundaries, thereby (to use Denning's terminology) inflecting the sensational novel with the "accents" of the slave narrative.

But the history of white appropriations of black culture is too simplistic a framework for the negotiation between the slave narrative and the city-mysteries novel. The more historically specific context in which these acts of literary appropriation need to be understood is the complex and heterogeneous print culture of the antebellum United States. In an era when the notion of intellectual property was far more lax than it is today, the movement of plots, characters, images, and rhetorical stances from one medium to another was commonplace. This phenomenon has probably been most thoroughly documented in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Describing "the complex relationship between Stowe's novel and the many Afro-American antislavery texts published in the late 1840s and early 1850s," Robert B. Stepto has clarified the extent of Stowe's debt to slave narratives by Josiah Henson and Henry Bibb (135). Meanwhile, Stowe's novel inspired plays, minstrel shows, ballads, and translations, from none of which Stowe ever saw any profit. This state of affairs in the publishing world permitted Henry Box Brown himself to raid the print culture of the day for material from a white artist, putting it in the service of his own agenda. Moving in the opposite direction of Lippard and Thompson, Brown took advantage of the popularity of composer Stephen Foster's sentimental minstrel ballad "Old Ned," a song about a faithful, dying slave. This song's wide dissemination in sheet music form can be inferred from its publication in New York Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Louisville in 1848 alone. Brown invented new lyrics for the song celebrating his escape from captivity and then sold broadsides of the ballad at his lectures, with the legend "AIR--Uncle Ned" instructing readers in the proper melody (Newman n.p.). Divesting the song of its racism and facile sentimentality, Brown impressed upon "Uncle Ned" his own abolitionist accent.

Nor could Brown have quarreled with his imitators Lippard and Thompson for exploiting a neat convergence of ostensible political activism with commercial success, as it was a formula he was himself criticized for employing. Frederick Douglass censured Brown for commercializing his story and thereby preventing other slaves from using the same method of escape, arguing that "the practice of publishing every new invention by which a slave is known to have escaped from slavery, has neither wisdom nor necessity to sustain it. Had not Henry Box Brown and his friends attracted slaveholding attention to the manner of his escape, we might have had a thousand Box Browns per annum" (Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom 184). It appears, however, that Brown was untroubled by the convergence of political activism and personal financial gain. The print culture that emerges from this incident is a racially and generically fluid one in which Brown, Lippard, and Thompson (and their respective publishers) nimbly and opportunistically responded to popular trends, readily transplanting material from "white" to "black" genres and back again, with regard only to what suited their commercial, political, and artistic purposes.

A closer examination of the publishing trade in this period reveals numerous intersections between sensational novels and the discourses of slavery, antislavery, and minstrelsy. For example, in the June 1849 edition of Godey's Lady's Book, a review of Lippard's novel of the American Revolution, Blanche of Brandywine ("one of the best books ever written by this author"), crossed paths with a notice for a new edition of sheet music published by E. Ferrett & Co. of Philadelphia: "Uncle Ned and Oh! Susanna--two of the prettiest of the Ethiopian Melodies, arranged for the piano" ("Editors' Book Table" 437). That Lippard's novel and the very minstrel song appropriated by Brown are reviewed in adjacent columns of the same page is more than coincidental; it also gestures toward the ways that white and black forms of expression inhabited a common print universe that permitted exchanges between them, especially among works aimed at working-class readers.

This mediation becomes particularly evident in publishers' catalogs of the period. That Lippard's publisher, T. B. Peterson of Philadelphia, emphasized working-class readers is clear from an advertisement that promises inexpensive formats: "Works of Bulwer, James, and Others Equally as Good, at 25 cents each" ("Advertisement" 112). Alongside cheap fiction, T. B. Peterson published numerous works related to minstrelsy. Included in the firm's 1850 catalog, for example, was Christy's and White" s Ethiopian Melodies: Containing Two Hundred and Ninety-One of the Best and Most Popular Ethiopian Melodies Ever Written. George Christy was a popular minstrel performer and the star of Christy's Minstrels, while White was a well-known arranger. According to Lott, "'mass' entertainment publishers (Dick and Fitzgerald in New York, T. B. Peterson and Turner and Fisher in Philadelphia) yearly cranked out dozens of dime songbooks in the names of famous minstrel stars or companies" (171). Sensational literature and the literature and songs of minstrelsy frequently converged in publishers' catalogs. Frederic A. Brady of New York published a number of novels by George Thompson (The Outlaw, The Road to Ruin, The Brigands) in the 1850s, while also specializing in the literary genre of the "negro farce." Old Dad's Cabin: A Negro Farce and The Black Shoemaker: A Negro Farce, both 1856 publications attributed to Charley White, are representative examples. Brady's publishing activity in the 1850s indicates that the influence of minstrel shows extended beyond the site of performance into the print culture, where they supported a sub-industry of music, joke books, and farces, much of which was published alongside sensational fiction marketed to white working-class readers. (10)

An infamous 1853 review in Graham" s American Monthly further suggests the mediations between sensational fiction and the literature of abolitionism facilitated by antebellum print culture. In the wake of the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the author of "Black Letters; or Uncle Tom-Foolery in Literature," chafes at the popularity of antislavery literature: "We have a regular incursion of the blacks. The shelves of booksellers groan under the weight of Sambo's woes ... let us have done with this woolly-headed literature" ("Black Letters" 209). In response to this publishing trend, the reviewer asks for a return to sensational literature: "Let us have the breathless 'Romance of the Lowell Factory Girl,' the thrilling "Pirate of the Chesapeake,' the 'Mystery of the Modern Gomorrah,' the 'Dark Monk of Wissawampanoag" (209). Of those latter two titles, one is a clear reference to city-mysteries fiction, while the second sounds like a conflation of two popular Lippard novels, The Quaker City: or, The Monks of Monk Hall and The Rose of Wissahikon. The author goes on to contrast the lot of southern slaves with the working conditions of northern urban laborers, slipping into the rhetoric of labor reform: "Ah! Brother of the North, what becomes of scores of laborers with you, whose sweat and sinews have enriched some gigantic capitalist at the cost of health and hope?" (214) Judging by this review, it was a short step from the literature of abolitionism to the literature of sensationalism (with its overtones of labor activism), two genres that are here defined in opposition to one another, an opposition that only serves to highlight the links between them in the minds of readers and reviewers as well as in the catalogs of publishers.

Indeed, by the early 1850s, publishers like T. B. Peterson stood to profit from broad interest in the slavery question, without making fine distinctions between one position and another. For instance, Peterson was the Philadelphia publisher of cheap reprints of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Meanwhile, the firm also published The Cabin and the Parlor; or, Slaves and Masters (1852), one of the many novels that arose in response and opposition to Stowe's book. Citing it as an antidote to Uncle Tom-foolery, the Graham's reviewer singles out for praise this novel in which abolitionists are derided and the conditions of slaves are favorably contrasted with those of northern factory workers ("Black Letters" 212-13). (11) Published under the pseudonym J. Thornton Randolph, The Cabin and the Parlor was actually written by Theophilus B. Peterson's brother Charles Jacobs Peterson, who also served as the editor of Peterson's Magazine, a competitor to Godey's and advertising outlet for the family publishing business (Mott 512-13). In the book review section of Peterson's Magazine in the early 1850s, one finds reviews of sensational fiction (The Mysteries of Three Cities, by A. J. H. Duganne), labor reform literature (London Labor and the London Poor, by Horace Mayhew), and the plantation novel (Swallow Barn, by J. P. Kennedy), all of which were promoted with more or less equal enthusiasm to the magazine's readership. (12) The network of production and circulation in which the firm of T. B. Peterson was positioned in the 1850s, therefore, supported a rich field for intertextual exchange among the discourses of abolition, anti-abolition, minstrelsy, and artisan republicanism. (13)

The intertextuality made possible by these conditions emerges clearly in Douglass's writings from the late 1840s through 1855. A number of the tropes of labor-reform literature seeped into Douglass's abolitionist newspaper and his second slave narrative, in spite of black authors' legitimate reasons for animosity toward the white working class. Douglass had personally experienced violence at the hands of white laborers, having been attacked by carpenter apprentices in a Baltimore shipyard and denied employment by the white caulkers of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Yet in the pages of Douglass's abolitionist newspaper The North Star, one finds causes and language associated primarily with the concerns of the white working class. Styling him "The Universal Reformer," Philip Foner documents Douglass's interest in Chartism, temperance, land reform, a universal peace movement, the abolition of capital punishment, and women's rights (101-03). The pages of The North Star confirm Foner's assertion while demonstrating Douglass's immersion in a discourse of reform that rings at times with a distinctly white working-class tone.

For example, on February 25, 1848, Douglass clipped a piece from The Chicago Democrat in support of land reform, an article that made provocative use of the rhetoric of labor versus capital: "The time has come when the voice of Labor must be heard.... Man must in the end triumph, and Capital must be his slave" ("Land Reform"). Another article in the same issue of The North Star portrayed laborers vainly seeking redress from capitalists for inequalities of wealth in the United States: "It is then they learn that Commerce is robbing them of their share. Then they turn to the rich and mighty, and ask their protection against the robberies of Commerce; but selfishness and gain having blinded their moral vision, their reply is, 'Commerce does nothing contrary to the laws of man'" ("The Five Eras"). An article in the May 5, 1848, issue defended the dignity and humanity of Irish workers ("Irishmen"), an article from June 30 cataloged the wages of labor in the United States in order to prove that slavery depressed the wages of white mechanics ("Wages"), and the issue of August 25 included a paean to labor clipped from a sermon ("Labor"). Nor was Douglass alone among abolitionist publishers in embracing this language. Sensational novelist A. J. H. Duganne sometimes contributed poetry celebrating the common laborer to the abolitionist newspaper The National Era, whose editors included numerous articles and poems on labor reform during the late 1840s. (14) Reform literature served as a broad category within antebellum print culture with a common vocabulary drawn on by white and black authors alike.

Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, strongly evidences influence from the language of white, working-class literature, including the city-mysteries novel. Published 10 years after Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass's 1855 slave narrative partially explains his disillusionment with the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement. Not incidentally, this decade also witnessed the publication of a host of city-mysteries novels. Reynolds writes that "some fifty American novels of city life ... appeared between 1844 and 1860" (Introduction to The Quaker City xiv). One staple of such literature is the contrast between the lifestyles of the rich and poor. In their guise as champions of labor reform, the city-mysteries novelists frequently attempted to arouse the outrage of their working-class readers by contrasting the privileged life of the city's wealthy residents with the squalid conditions of the urban poor. A representative example of this rhetorical technique is found in the "Prologue" to Lippard's The Empire City: "He saw many temples, dedicated to the Living God, rise in all the glory of lofty pillars and swelling domes; yet beside these temples rose the dark haunts, where the honor of women was sold, and afar through the night, came the light of unholy places, where poison is given to the poor, the price thereof being their sweat, their blood, their life. He saw lofty mansions and miserable huts stand near each other" (5-6). In numerous passages like this one, the city-mysteries novelists deplored the rich for flaunting their luxuries in the faces of the very workers on whom their prosperity was based.

In a different economic context, but using markedly similar language, Douglass aims to elicit the same sense of outrage from readers in chapters six and seven of My Bondage and My Freedom. Chapter six describes the coarse clothing and insufficient food doled out to slaves once a year, with no significant revisions from the 1845 text, while chapter seven includes a detailed and newly embellished account of the luxuries enjoyed by Colonel Lloyd in the plantation house, including a litany of delicacies such as "the fruits and flowers of all climes and of all descriptions ... figs, raisins, almonds and juicy grapes from Spain ... [w]ines and brandies from France; teas of various flavor, from China; and rich, aromatic coffee from Java" (63). Inserted between the two accounts at the end of chapter six appears this passage, which has no counterpart in the 1845 Narrative:

   But, let us now leave the rough usage
   of the field, where vulgar coarseness
   and brutal cruelty spread themselves
   and flourish, rank as weed in the tropics
   ... and let the reader view with me
   the equally wicked, but less repulsive
   aspects of slave life; where pride and
   pomp roll luxuriously at ease; where
   the toil of a thousand men supports a
   single family in easy idleness. This is
   the great house; it is the home of the
   Lloyds! Some idea of its splendor has
   already been given--and, it is here that
   we shall find that height of luxury
   which is the opposite of that depth of
   poverty and physical wretchedness
   that we have just now been contemplating.
   (61-62)

The language and imagery of the labor reformers, particularly the emphasis on the indolent and luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by the wealthy even as they are surrounded by the poverty that they maintain among their laborers, has found its way into the slave narrative. In a reversal of the process by which the city-mysteries novelists appropriated the suffering of Henry Box Brown, the literature of labor reform provided Douglass with an idiom through which the "white slaves" of the urban North could be transformed back into the exploited slaves of the southern plantation.

Another notable parallel between Douglass's second autobiography and the sensational literature of the period is his use of the language of expose. Both the city-mysteries novel and the slave narrative are based on the premise of peeling back a veneer of respectability to reveal the hypocrisy and corruption that underlie fashionable society. The full title of Thompson's City Crimes exemplifies the pose: City Crimes; or, Life in New York and Boston. A Volume for Everybody: Being a Mirror of Fashion, A Picture of Poverty, and a Startling Revelation of the Secret Crimes of Great Cities (105). Often this theme is emphasized by the device of an ingenue who is initiated into a scene of licentiousness or cruelty in which the social elite play a prominent role. Working-class readers immersed in this print culture simultaneously indulged envy over the luxurious lifestyles of the rich and experienced righteous indignation in recognizing that such wealth represented the betrayal of republican virtue.

The slave narrative was bound to partake of a similar language of criminality exposed, by virtue of the authors' avowed purpose, to show northern readers the true character of slavery in contrast to the benign characterization drawn by its apologists. However, in the case of My Bondage and My Freedom, the similarity to the language of city-mysteries fiction is striking. In both his 1845 and 1855 texts, Douglass represents himself in the early chapters as an ingenue; his initiation into the horrors of slavery comes when he witnesses the brutal whipping of his aunt Hester (called Esther in 1855), whose master is jealous of her affection for another slave. In the 1845 version, after describing the scene in graphic detail, Douglass calls this event "the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass" (284). The scene is equally shocking and bloody in My Bondage and My Freedom, but in this later version Douglass is careful to frame the scene in such a way as to have a reader looking over his shoulder: "My sleeping place was on the floor of a little, rough closet, which opened into the kitchen; and through the cracks of its unplaned boards, I could distinctly see and hear what was going on, without being seen by old master" (87). By specifying the vantage point from which his unseen gaze penetrates into the scene of his master's wickedness, a detail missing from the earlier version, Douglass amplifies the reader's feeling that he or she is peeking through the facade normally upheld by the southern slaveholding aristocracy to witness its secret, sexually-oriented crimes.

Moreover, by isolating "Life in the Great House" in its own chapter, Douglass provides a locale that serves as the focal point of his exposure of the plantation owners, so that the Lloyd plantation house, site of unimagined luxury and horrifying violence, bears a close resemblance to Lippard's Monk Hall in The Quaker City. Chapter titles are another addition to the 1855 text, and here, too, Douglass relies on the language of exposure that permeates city-mysteries fiction. Chapter five is titled "Gradual Initiation into the Mysteries of Slavery," and chapter eight is called "A Chapter of Horrors" (46, 69), titles that might be compared with "A Glimpse of the Crimes and Miseries of a Great City" from Thompson's City Crimes (192) or "A deed of blood and horror" from his fictionalized autobiography, My Life. As with the antebellum city, Douglass implies through the newly sensationalized language of his 1855 text, the refinement and luxury of the plantation are rooted in a normally invisible layer of criminal violence, to which the naive reader can only be introduced through the efforts of an experienced guide.

In many ways it would have been natural for the slave narrative and the city-mysteries novel to rely on similar linguistic and rhetorical features, since both groups of writers saw themselves as defenders of the powerless and champions of reform against the interests of the wealthy and powerful. The writers also had a mutual interest in challenging the limits of propriety in their shared print culture. William L. Andrews contends that slave narratives became more graphically violent in the 1850s, citing Slave Life in Georgia, published in 1855, as just one example of "more and more horrendous testimonials of man's inhumanity to man" (183). In this account, former slave John Brown describes such torturous practices as "bucking" and "the picket" and tells of being loaned out by one owner to a physician for the purpose of medical experimentation (35-37). (15)

Slave narrators of the late 1840s and 1850s began to regard shocking violence as an aid rather than an impediment to establishing their credibility. In this effort they may have been the beneficiaries of a print culture that was becoming ever more permissive in the depiction of graphic violence, as the sensational novelists pushed the envelope in the interest of titillating and shocking their readers. Indeed, the fiction of Lippard, Thompson, and their peers sometimes reads like a competition to see who could conceive the most elaborate methods by which to torture, mutilate, and brand human bodies. (16) If Thompson could raid Henry Box Brown's slave narrative for a story of extraordinary physical discomfort and then exaggerate its gruesome and bloody features for his own gothic purposes, then the slave narrators could turn around and use this new standard of permissiveness to add greater force to their condemnations of the peculiar institution.

The relationship between sensational fiction and the slave narrative in antebellum print culture fits seamlessly into the account of the slave narrative's development that modern scholars have described. According to Andrews, as slave narrators broke free of the conventions initially imposed on the form by abolitionist handlers, they increasingly made use of literary devices to expand their expressive possibilities. Thus, paradoxically, slave narrators began to find their own voice--just like any other writers--by mimicking and appropriating elements of the print culture in which they were readers as well as writers. Douglass's debt to both antebellum travel literature and the southern historical romance has been documented in two recent articles (Brawley, Jones). Similarly, Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster describe Harriet Jacobs's strategy in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, as relying on "a manipulation of the conventions of the popular sentimental fiction of her day" (xi). What has not been sufficiently recognized in this valuable scholarship is the extent to which the work of publishers, periodical editors, and reviewers helped to broker such accommodations.

The print culture in which the slave narrative and sensational fiction were mutually positioned promoted a complex dialectic of exchange between the two genres and between black and white cultural forms more broadly defined. This dialectic fostered surprising political and cultural ironies--Henry Box Brown's reclaiming a minstrel song (with its distant roots in black folk culture) from the racist assumptions of white working-class culture and putting it in the service of abolitionism; George Thompson's cynically raiding the slave narrative for a plot device he uses to champion the cause of white workers who probably had little sympathy for escaped slaves; T. B. Peterson's cheap reprints' abetting both sides of the debate on slavery--that might in some cases have escaped the notice of contemporary producers and consumers. In addition to permitting a more acute perception of the richness of both genres, close scrutiny of the procedures and agencies of the antebellum publishing trade helps bring these ironies to light. Recovery of this racially and generically fluid print culture also contributes to scholars' ongoing reconstruction of the fertile relationship between "black" and "white" artistic forms during a unique and formative moment in American literary and cultural history.

Works Cited

"Advertisement: A Catalogue Worth Preserving." Godey's Lady's Book (July 1852): 109-12. APS Online. 5 Mar. 2005.

Andrews, William L. To Tell A Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988.

Ashwill, Gary. "The Mysteries of Capitalism in George Lippard's City Novels." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40.4 (1994): 293-317.

Berthold, Michael C. "Moby-Dick and the American Slave Narrative." The Massachusetts Review 35.1 (1994): 135-48.

"Black Letters; or, Uncle Tom-Foolery in Literature." Graham's American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion 42 (1853): 209-15. APS Online. 5 Mar. 2005.

Brawley, Lisa. "Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom and the Fugitive Tourist Industry." Novel 30.1 (1996): 98-129.

Brown, Henry Box. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Boston: Brown & Stearns, 1849.

Brown, John. Slave Life in Georgia; A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape Of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave. 1855. Ed. F. N. Boney. Savannah, GA: Beehive P, 1991.

Cunliffe, Marcus. Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1880. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1979.

Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1998.

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Ser. 2, vol. 2. Ed. John W. Blassingame, et. al. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003.

--. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself. 1845. Slave Narratives. 267-368.

"Editors' Book Table." Godey's Lady's Book (June 1849): 435-40. APS Online. 5 Mar. 2005.

Ehrlich, Heyward. "The 'Mysteries' of Philadelphia: Lippard's Quaker City and 'Urban' Gothic." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18.1 (1972): 50-65.

Erickson, Paul. "New Books, New Men: City-Mysteries Fiction, Authorship, and the Literary Market." Early American Studies 1.1 (2003): 273-312.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. "Interrogating 'Whiteness,' Complicating 'Blackness': Remapping American Culture." American Quarterly 47.3 (1995): 428-66.

"The Five Eras." The North Star 25 Feb. 1848: 3.

Foner, Philip S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Citadel P, 1964.

Gilmore, Paul. The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Gray, Thomas. The Confessions of Nat Turner. 1831. Slave Narratives 243-66.

Greeson, Jennifer Rae "The 'Mysteries and Miseries' of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." American Literature 73.2 (2001): 277-309.

"Irishmen." The North Star 5 May 1848: 4.

Jones, Paul Christian. "Copying What the Master Had Written: Frederick Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave' and the Southern Historical Romance." The Southern Quarterly 38.4 (2000): 78-92.

"Labor." The North Star 25 Aug. 1848: 4.

"Land Reform." The North Star 25 Feb. 1848: 1.

Lippard, George. The Empire City; or, New York by Night and Day. 1864. American Fiction Reprint Series. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries P, 1969.

--. The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. 1845. Ed. David S. Reynolds. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995.

Looby, Christopher. "George Thompson's 'Romance of the Real': Transgression and Taboo in American Sensation Fiction." American Literature 65.4 (1993): 651-72.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Mandel, Bernard. Labor: Free and Slave: Workingmen and the Antislavery Movement in the United States. New York: Associated Authors, 1955.

McKay, Nellie Y., and Frances Smith Foster. Introduction. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. By Harriet A. Jacobs. New York: Norton, 2001. ix-xxiii.

Mott, Frank Luther. "Charles Jacobs Peterson." Dictionary of American Biography. Vol. 15. New York: Scribner, 1934. 512-13.

Newman, Richard. Introduction. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. By Henry Box Brown. 1851. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. xi-xxxiii.

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

--. Introduction. The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. By George Lippard. vii-xliv.

--. George Lippard. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. 1991, Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1999.

Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Library of America, 2000.

Stepto, Robert B. "Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass." New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1986. 135-53.

Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Thompson, George. Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life. 1849. Eds. David S. Reynolds and Kimberly R. Gladman. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2002.

"Thrilling Narrative." Friends' Weekly Intelligencer 30 June 1649. APS Online. 12 Mar. 2005.

Trendel, Robert. "The Expurgation of Antislavery Materials by American Presses." The Journal of Negro History 58.3 (1973): 271-90.

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Notes

(1.) Four studies that I have in mind are by Gilmore, Lott, Sundquist, and Zafar. Fishkin offers an important article surveying critical literature on exchanges between white and black cultural forms. More germane to the mid-19th-century literary context are articles by Berthold and Stepto.

(2.) I agree entirely with Greeson's claim that "these two apparently distinct antebellum genres--urban gothic fiction and abolitionist narratives--were in fact intimately connected" (278). Whereas Greeson focuses her analysis for the most part on Incidents and the ideology of fallen womanhood that the work shares with city-mysteries precursors, here I extend the history of the dialogue between the two genres beyond that which her (excellent) article asserts. Also, Greeson mainly sees Jacobs borrowing from and manipulating the conventions of city-mysteries fiction. But the sensational novelists had an eye on the slave narrative, too, as my analysis makes clear.

(3.) Reynolds uses the term "radical-democrat" to describe this class of antebellum novelists (Beneath the American Renaissance 170). On the popularity of slave narratives and radical-democrat or city-mysteries novels, Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, sold 4,500 copies within four months of initial publication in May 1845; William Wells Brown's Narrative of William W. Brown went though four prints and sold 10,000 copies between 1847 and 1849 (Slave Narratives 1015). Meanwhile, George Lippard's The Quaker City, published in book form the same month as Douglass's Narrative, was reputed to have sold 60,000 copies within a year, according to Reynolds' introduction to The Quaker City (xii).

(4.) Ashwill explores the extent to which Lippard's fiction supports a progressive political agenda in spite of its implication in a capitalist economy, while Ehrlich offers an earlier analysis of Lippard's use of gothic tropes in the service of (purportedly) progressive fiction.

(5.) A number of historians, including Cunliffe, Mandel, and Roediger, have investigated the links between labor and abolitionism in the antebellum period. The consensus appears to be that the abolitionist movement included a significant minority of working-class Northern whites, but no lasting alliance between the groups was forged. Roediger writes that "in a nation in which whiteness was so important and emancipation so hard to achieve, abolition was bound to be a minority movement within the working class as in the larger society" (86-87).

(6.) That Thompson would simultaneously purport to represent laborers' interest and recoil from them because they are dirty and smelly is consistent with Looby's claim that sensation fiction such as Thompson's "Is not the radical critique it pretends to be" (666).

(7.) In a biography of Lippard, Reynolds describes his attitude toward slavery as "complex" (George Lippard 58). Lippard sometimes used racist imagery to describe black characters, but he also protested against slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law in some of his works.

(8.) Quoted passages are from a 1969 reprint of the 1864 edition of The Empire City; or, New York by Night and Day. Unfortunately, the 1850 original edition that appears on the Wright Fiction Archives microfilm (the text is not in the online database) is incomplete. However, my comparison of the pages available in the microfilm copy of the 1850 first edition with the reprint of the 1864 edition shows them to be identical, evidently set from the same plates.

(9.) Lippard and Thompson enact through their literary works the same replacement of the chattel slave with the white urban laborer that took place in the rhetoric of the labor movement. As Roediger explains, for a time "wage slavery" was the preferred term by which labor leaders referred to workers exploited by capitalists. However, the term implied an equality between white workers and black slaves that was painful for (white) workers to embrace. Eventually the term "white slavery" came into vogue. This antebellum phrase linked the white worker with the slave but also implied that the treatment of labor was unjust precisely because it was aimed at white workers. And even if they were metaphorically slaves, white workers were not chattel slaves; the phrase did not call into question black chattel slavery. Roediger writes in The Wages of Whiteness that "comparisons between wage labor and chattel slavery between 1830 and 1860 were likewise both insistent and embarrassed" (66). Along these lines, Lippard at one time compared the work of authors with that of slaves, complaining in his weekly magazine that publishers would "sit themselves down to buy an author, body and soul, as a Southern Planter buys a Negro for his cotton-field" (qtd. in Erickson 302).

(10.) A WorldCat search of Brady's imprints from the 1850s reveals the following titles (among others): Old Dad's Cabin: A Negro Farce; The Black Shoemaker: A Negro Farce; Vilikens and Dinah: A Negro Farce in One Act and One Scene; Oh! Hush! Or, The Virginny Cupids: An Operatic Olio; Charley Fox's Ethiopian Songster; Uncle Jeff: A Negro Farce; The Rival Lovers, a Negro Farce in One Act and One Scene (Date of Access: 12 Mar. 2005).

(11.) In 1854 T. B. Peterson would bring out perhaps the most famous and successful of the responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride.

(12.) These brief reviews appeared in the "Editors' Table" column of Peterson's Magazine 17 (1850): 272; 19 (1851): 247; and 20 (1851): 209, respectively.

(13.) Not all publishers participated with equal enthusiasm in this mingling of pro- and anti-slavery discourses. According to Trendel, publishers with substantial readerships in the South (including the American Tract Society, American Sunday School Union, and Harper & Brothers) expurgated offending references to the evils of slavery from some of their works.

(14.) Duganne's poem "The Laborers of France" appears in the 3 Aug. 1848 issue of The National Era. Poems titled "The Laboring Man" and "Labor" and an article titled "Labor and Capital" appear in the 29 July 1847, 23 Dec. 1847, and 9 Nov. 1848 issues, respectively. The National Era had, of course, been the paper in which Stowe originally serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1850.

(15.) As Brown describes the practice of bucking, a slave is stripped and then tied in a sitting position with a stake under his legs and his knees under his chin: "In this position he was turned first on one side then on the other, and flogged with willow switches and cowhide, until the blood ran down in streams and settled under him in puddles" (35). The picket involved suspending a slave over a sharp stake and flogging him; when he tried to relieve the pressure on his hands and arms, the only point of support was the picket, which then pierced his foot (37).

(16.) Any reader familiar with the sensational novels knows of their often horrifying (and sometimes blackly humorous) violence, but a few examples here will suffice for the uninitiated. In City Crimes, a 15 year-old boy named Clinton Romaine has his tongue cut out of his mouth by the Dead Man, to prevent the boy from testifying against him (166). Later in the novel, the protagonist Frank Sydney is confined in "a box made of iron and shaped like a coffin; the sides and bottom were covered with sharp nails, firmly fixed with their points outwards; beneath the box was a sort of furnace, filled with shavings and charcoal.... The nails penetrated his flesh, causing him the most excruciating torture; blood started profusely from all parts of his body, and he could scarce repress groans of the most heart-felt anguish" (256). This device is named the Bed of Ease. In Lippard's The Quaker City, the villain Devil-Bug kills an old woman by dashing out her brains on a brass andiron: "The brains of the old woman lay scattered over the hearth, and the body which Devil-Bug raised in the air, was a headless trunk, with the bleeding fragments of a face and skull, clinging to the quivering neck" (241).

Carl Ostrowski's book on the Library of Congress, Books, Maps and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783-1861, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2004. An Associate Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, Ostrowski has also published several articles on 19th-century American literature.