19. Life Imitates Art
Supplement to Endnotes
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Endnote 2) Throughout Tom Jones, for example, Fielding shows sympathy -- even mild admiration -- for the sexual failings of the lusty but good-hearted Tom. The novel even takes various shots at Methodism for its misdirected, enthusiastic teachings that supposedly encouraged men to live a conniving life. Blifil, Tom’s sinister foe in the novel, even embraces Methodism in order to snare himself a wealthy wife.
Endnote 3) Throughout Amelia, the protagonist’s marriage is battered about by deception and the licentiousness of urban life. Exposure to the crime and dissipation bred in the streets of London served as Fielding's inspiration for Amelia. It was Fielding’s darkest tale, and most dire in tone. Its characters inhabit a menacing world where the folly of youth hardens into destructive vice, where wives trade their chastity to officers to secure their husband’s promotion, where intimate friends are wolves in disguise. Even semi-angels like Amelia can find themselves caught in the webs of others. Good character, in short, does not guarantee happiness.
Endnote 4) The curious document was written in the hand of prisoner Cole. It does not introduce itself. It has no date or signature. Much larger than the quarto and octavo-sized paper that George used for his private letters, the lined sheets have a blue-and-red line running down the left margin, like a precursor to today’s legal pad. Clearly not a letter, it was intended to serve as a kind of script or defense that George hoped would be used in his approaching trial.
Endnote 6) George kept the word “possess” in another part from Harrison’s speech. But this was in a part where Harrison suggests that Colonel James is committed to seducing a woman, why not direct his attentions to another lady “as handsome as your friend’s wife whom you may possess with much less guilt.”
Endnote 9) George spent much of his time reading newspaper narratives about himself and plots from books that helped him understand his own predicament. Of all the books that circulated in and out of his cell, though, Amelia is the only work mentioned in any of George’s surviving letters or those of his family. Cornelius wrote about “Fealding” in his second letter to Olive that day from his hotel room, apparently with some haste. Perhaps his inability to spell the author’s name was just the product of fatigue. But the misspelling -- more than just confusing the order of i and e -- suggests that Cornelius had not actually read the book himself or perused its cover or title page. (In other words, he only knew its story from the lips of his brother.) Cornelius referred to it as a “story,” not a “book” or “novel,” implying that he thought of it as a tale more than a sprawling novel over five-hundred pages in length. (An 1857 edition printed in New York ran 524 pages.) Cornelius did not claim he had read it, of course, but only that his brother was reading it.
Given the Methodist upbringing of the Cole brothers it is not surprising that Cornelius was less than familiar with Fielding and his novels. Compared to the works of Dickens, which Olive, Mary, and Cornelius alluded to in their letters, Fielding’s most famous works lacked sobriety. The sins of their characters were too unvarnished, their folly too bawdy.
Endnote 10) The original clipping is missing from Olive’s letter. But I am certain that was a story from The Sacramento Daily Union. The story about Mr. Spangle was printed, with slight variations, for several weeks in various newspapers throughout America and beyond. The original used “unexceptionable” but the Daily Union accidentally reprinted it as “unexceptional”--which makes little sense. See: Dubuque Daily Herald, September 15, 1867.
Endnote 12) Since its founding in the 1840s the National Police Gazette had increasingly retreated from its sexualized attacks on class privilege and political corruption, narrowing its scope to revel in the lurid details of murder, sexual scandal, and blood sports. Feigning shock and concern for immoral behaviors was a standard in the “flash press" and erotic publications. This feigned moral indignation is captured well in the contemporary erotic book called The Secret Habits of the Female Sex. In Secret Habits, readers indulged in tales about “seductive temptations to young girls” as a way to save young women from insatiable spells.
Revealing the sordid details promised to awaken members of society so that a women who might have fallen, or who could fall, would “become an ornament of society, a virtuous wife, and a refulgent mother!” See: Elliott J. Gorn, “The Wicked World: The National Gazette and Gilded-Age America” in The Culture of Crime, edited by Craig L. LaMary and Everette E. Dennis (New Brunswick: University of Rutgers, 1995), pp.9-22; Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in the Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 87-92. “Secret Habits” found in Licentious Gotham, pp. 106-107.
Endnote 13) Before the Comstock laws, which began in the 1870s, the legal justification for prosecuting men for obscenity was drawn from British common law (especially from commentators like William Blackstone, famed for his ideas on coverture), and claims by jurists that men were free to write and say what they pleased, but could not avoid the just consequences when such words or publications harmed the common interests of society.
Anti-obscenity campaigns, though, could not keep pace with the commodities and technologies of pleasure. On the eve of the Civil War, new and cheaper forms of photography, along with expanding rail lines and mail services, ballooned the market for erotic publishing. Moral reformers, especially clergy and YMCA activists, worked to thwart the booming business of erotic novels, mail-order trading cards of nude or nearly nude women (like those claimed to have been found in Hiscock’s pockets), and erotic cartes de visites and stereoscopic images spilling in from Paris. (Many Civil War soldiers, far from their parents and wives, helped this market expand). See, especially, Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in the Nineteenth-Century New York, chapter 6.
Endnote 15) Few took Mary’s erotic desires as ends in themselves, as natural hungers that needed satisfying. By some accounts, sex was just a weapon she used to lure Luther. She was a lonely schemer, a Jezebel, a false mother with worldly designs. One report in a Troy paper came close to recognizing her erotic needs, but painted the sex as part of an emotional neediness. In this telling, Mary feigned sickness and, half dressed on her bed, sent for Hiscock, a “man of the world, accomplished, suave, intelligent, and more than ordinarily attractive.” But her physical attraction to him was part of her wartime suffering, of her “loneliness and isolation, of depression and yearning for companionship.” Even more, the papers claimed that Mary had not been ravished, but instead had created the “opportunity” for her own downfall. In other words, she had been drawn to Hiscock’s worldly accomplishments, and even his looks. But she had been impelled by depression and loneliness, and a lust for worldly power. See: The Troy Whig, June 6, 1867.
The powerful myth of coverture secreted itself into almost every explanation of the Stanwix tragedy. The General was painted again and again as the soldier who rushed to war to protect his family and upon learning of the affair could not shake the image of what was his, in the arms of another. Hiscock’s defenders strongly hinted at Mary’s part in the affair but never questioned the assumption that marriages were held together by the purity of wives.