Reading Reading

David M. Henkin. City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xviii + 242 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $16.50 (paper).

On April 25, 1836, on a rail car in New York City, twenty-seven-year-old Michael Floy "saw a poor looking man and forlorn wife; a baby was in her arms; he would gape at it with the most endearing looks, then read a book which upon examination I found to be one of Harper's Family Library, the Life of Sir Isaac Newton!" ¹ As fodder for cultural history, such an encounter offers multiple levels of reading. The episode might reveal how a series published by an emerging capitalist firm like Harper & Brothers circulated in the 1830s. Floy himself was "reading" his fellow passenger, taking the measure of another traveler in this city of strangers. Either of these interpretations would be another sort of reading: a historian analyzes a chance meeting on a train. To a historian of print culture, the little volume's material appearance and content might become central. Within an urban cultural history, public spaces like the railway car encourage people to read not just the artifacts of print, but each other as well. Taken more broadly, this scene might resonate with our own lives: peering at another subway rider's newspaper, or noticing the airline passenger in the next seat reading the latest Tom Clancy novel.

David Henkin wants us to reconsider antebellum New York through all these lenses. In Henkin's Gotham, signs on commercial buildings, ephemeral handbills and broadsides, cheap newspapers, and paper money all connected the multitudes who sought to read urban space--in the process helping to create "a new kind of public" (p. 7). In this New York, the first American site of modernity, "promiscuous circulation" of people and print occurred among strangers negotiating their surroundings in "spectatorial detachment" (p. ix). Between the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the end of the Civil War, nowhere more than in New York did Americans confront a world of unfamiliar stimuli. The city's population ballooned from more than 160,000 in 1825 to five times that number by 1860. By midcentury, New York swelled with foreign immigrants. As America's chief commercial metropolis, the city attracted thousands of visitors every year. Earlier, face-to-face forms of community and authority became impossible to maintain, especially because New York witnessed spatial as well as social change. In 1811 the metropolitan government adopted the grid pattern for the city's northward expansion. The Erie Canal sped that expansion by solidifying New York's preeminence in national commerce. Every year, old buildings were torn down to make way for new ones, even as previously open space was sold to developers. The grid subordinated individual structures to the larger mapping and helped promote the "notion of land as commodity," an essential development in the rise of a capitalist culture (p. 37).

Earlier cultural historians have explored how antebellum urban Americans responded to these transformations. To make sense of a society full of strangers, parvenus, and cheats, middle-class urban dwellers employed codes of genteel manners and dress, joined associations with people of similar inclinations, and created a domestic sphere distinct from the streets. In parades, citizens saw their social order performed: their trades and voluntary militias at first, capitalist stratification over time. Its spaces increasingly segmented by purpose, class, or ethnicity, marked by architectural and human difference, the city itself became the ultimate "urban text." ² Yet in adopting the insights of cultural anthropology, have historians found "texts" everywhere-in social custom, public performance, the built environment-at the expense of texts in a more literal sense, the artifacts of print culture? Henkin thinks so, despite the fact that print lined and littered the streets of antebellum New York. Meanwhile, historians of the book have looked elsewhere for urban reading. Even if the penny press, sensationalistic...