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Introduction  The Forms and Functions of Modern American Metropolitan Literature But . . . [insert city of choice] is an immense ocean. Drop in your sounding line and it will never reach the bottom. Have a look, try describing it! No matter how carefully you try to see and understand everything, to describe everything, no matter how many of you there are, trying hard, all of you exploring that great sea, there’ll always be places you never get to, caverns you never uncover, blossoms, pearls, monsters, quite incredible things that every literary diver overlooks. —Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, 1835 A curious work, Mortimer Thomson’s Doesticks; What He Says (1855) typifies a shift in America’s literature during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.1 Modern architects might say that its form follows its function. For as contemporary America underwent radical changes in size, scope, pace, and identity as a result of the nation’s momentous urban turn before the U.S. Civil War,2 writers like “Doesticks,” to borrow the popular humorist Thomson’s pseudonym, helped articulate an author’s equivalent of infrastructure with an urban literary form whose versatility and adaptability were suited to a society in transition. With the cities around them emerging and evolving as never before, Americans of “Doesticks’s” day sought literal and figurative ways to inhabit the New World metropolis. Period literature gave shape to that search in close correspondence with a signature city shelter, the boardinghouse . Surplus populations and rising real estate prices (the two trends were mutually reinforcing) had rendered the traditional stand-alone household increasingly obsolete for all but the era’s wealthiest urban dwellers. Boarding ranked foremost among the measures taken to resolve 3 that problem by assembling non-related peoples under one roof to partake of food, shelter, and paid-for domestic services that approximated the idealized comforts of “home” within the confines of the city. Held loosely beneath the roofs of these structures resided something other than a venue for human habitation, however. Also present was the human habit of storytelling, manifested through a set of boardinghouse-inflected literary conventions that were as flexibly mixed and mobile as boarders themselves. Boarding’s store of symbols, tales, tropes, and points of view, its recurring patterns of images, characters, and suggestive settings recurred so frequently in print as to become a fixture in the pages of antebellum newspapers, magazines, broadsides, and books, not a few of these last now considered classics of the American Renaissance. In boarding the era’s readers and writers alike secured an imaginative capacity to settle into metropolitan environs that, at the time, must have seemed as unfamiliar as urban initiates like Doesticks perceived them to be. Accompanying the country’s urban turn, in short, was a concomitant literary turn that similarly hinged on boarding. The former ushered Americans into the protoindustrial city; the latter brought the city into the nation’s literature. This study resides where the once widespread social practice that was boarding intersects with the discursive praxis from the past to which it was inextricably linked. If the precise causes and consequences of that overlap are not quite quantifiable, they do permit in retrospect the kind of qualitative description and analysis of antebellum literary boarding that this book offers. But to return to Doesticks: here we find one representative author’s playful meditation on American urbanization not as social problem, but literary possibility, with the modest residential landmark that was the boardinghouse standing as a central fact and foundational metaphor for his musings. In the self-reflexive commentary “To the Reader,” Thomson implies in the introductory pages of his assorted “sketches” the theme that emerges in the course of his own work as well as in the writings of many of his immediate peers (v). To wit, the author-narrator conflates his comical adjustments to city life—the picaresque episodes of which comprise Doesticks’s fragile storyline—with his closely wedded attempts to construct a literary form that would lend itself to the chronic crowdedness , hurriedness, and sensory excitement of his urban milieu. It was but recently, Doesticks relates, when the “eternal sameness of a country village” instilled in him the “roving fever” that has brought many before and since to his chosen destination of “Gotham” (34–35). Following his “metropolitan advent” he turns his attention in two directions at once (40). On the one hand, and coinciding with his entrance into Manhattan, 4 Introduction [18.216.190.167] Project...

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