Fanny Fern and the Culture of Poverty

Fanny Fem and the Culture of Poverty by Anne Scott MacLeod "Fanny Fern" was the pen name used by Sara Payson WMs Parton, a determined, outspoken woman whose writing was extremely popular in the middle of the last century. She was bom Sara Wilis in 1811, daughter of Nathaniel WUHs, founder of the Youth's Companion, a long-Rved juvenile periodical established in 1827. In 1838, Sara married Charles Eldredge, who died of typhoid in 1847, leaving her penniless, with two children to support. After a period of severe financial struggle, she made a marriage of convenience which soon proved disastrous. The marriage ended within a few years, and Sara was on her own again. Daughter to one editor and sister to another (and abandoned by both after her divorce), she turned to writing to support herself, using the pseudonym "Fanny Fern." She wrote hi a variety of forms, including novels, children's stories and magazine articles, ail of which quickly found an enthusiastic audience. By 1856, when she married James Parton, "Fanny Fern" was sufficiently established as a writer to be offered $100.00 a week to write a regular column for the New York Ledger. The Ledger column, published weekly from 1856 until her death in 1872, was her most characteristic work, consisting as it did of short sketches and essays full of social comment, most for a general public, some addressed to children. Parton's writing for children is usually damned as her worst, and there's no doubt that it is painfully sentimental-lachrymose, as one critic put it. Yet in her sketches and stones about children is a wealth of information, not only on the wretched condition of poor children in the New York of her time, but about the emotional impact on American society of urban poverty. The anger, the fear, even the sentimentality of Parton's writing about the children of poverty was representative of the response of many Americans to the discovery that a culture of poverty had established itself in the land of promise, a culture that destroyed children and, through children, threatened the future of the country. In mid-nineteenth century America, as in the present, the problems of the age were more concentrated in New York. Heavy waves of immigration between 1840 and 1860 deposited thousands in the city who had neither skills, nor resources, nor even health and hope. There were few government agencies to help; workhouses, almshouses, and penitentiaries siphoned off only the most desperate and the most vicious of the city's destitute. The rest remained, housed in slums, exploited as cheap labor (H they had luck enough to find work at all), a bight on the city, a menace and a reproach to the respectable. The problems were not entirely new, of course; industrialization had been proceeding apace since the 1830s, as had immigration of unskilled laborers. In the major industrial centers of the United States, an unban proletariat was already a reality by 1850. Yet consciousness of unban poverty, and especially consciousness of its grim intractability, seem to have reached a new high in the 1850s. Above all, an awareness of the children of poverty and of their potential effect on the social order began to surface with increasing frequency, In both popular writing and children's literature, In the 1850s. And in fact, the children of the urban poor were hard to ignore. They Hved on "the streets and the docks and the woodpiles . . .very naturally," as Charles Loring Brace observed, since their homes were too wretched to bear (330). They were the highly visible, "little blue-lpped and barefooted children on the pavements" the Youth's Companion described (28.52(1855): 207); they were children who had "no one to care for them, and [who spent] their lives In the street, or in comfortless sheds and outbuildings, where you would think no human being could live (29.33(1855): 140). Sara Parton wrote often of these waifs, addressing the children as well as the adults of more affluent classes. If her style was overstated, the destitution she chronicled could hardly be. The poor, Fanny Fern told her "dear little readers," "live huddled...