The American Essay in the American Century

2. The “Death” of the Essay

41 or most of the nineteenth century the genteel essay featuring a learned gentleman digressing amiably at a fireside was read by a relatively small, well-educated group of people, usually after dinner by lamplight at a parlor fireside. Reading was often a communal activity. Depending on the length, difficulty, and appropriateness of the essay, it might well be read aloud by the father to the rest of his family. These essays appeared mainly in the print-heavy, advertising-free pages of literary journals. After the 1870s, genteel essayists began to give way to a new kind of professional writer who published regular columns and articles about practical features of modern life. These pieces appeared in profusely illustrated magazines full of advertisements. Busy middle-class people read these new magazines at the breakfast table or while holding onto a strap in a train or trolley during their daily commute. Electric lights and central heating meant that these magazines could be read in one’s own bedroom. Editors started to aim essays, articles, and whole magazines at specific family members. The new essayists began to think of themselves as middle class as well. They saw themselves less and less as gentleman amateurs writing for elite northeastern readers and rather as trained professionals writing for a nationwide reading public. Essayists and their readers were part of that new class the Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich called the professional-managerial class, or PMC. During the closing decades of the Gilded Age, salaried writers, managers , engineers, marketing specialists, salesmen, clerks, teachers, librarians, nurses, and other professionals joined the PMC and quickly began to outstrip the old “middling sorts”—the farmers, urban artisans, and small-town entrepreneurs who had come before. As Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich succinctly put it, “The PMC emerged with dramatic suddenness in the years between 1890 and 1920.”1 F 2 the “death” of the Essay 42 The American Essay in the American Century t H E “ d E At H ” o F t H E E S S Ay, 1849 – 1897 As early as 1849 W. Alfred Jones had fretted about the “decline” and “gradual extinction” of the essay, but concern began in earnest in 1881 when Leslie Stephen announced that essay writing “is as much one of the lost arts as good letter-writing or good talk.” In 1893 Tudor Jenks wrote that he preferred essays to all other genres, but admitted, “Essays are unsalable. The public does not want them. Anybody can write essays.” Competition seemed to come from all sides. Richard Burton, in an 1894 article in the Dial, claimed, “At present the novel is the all-engulfing form. . . . Fiction . . . draws the natural essayist away from his métier . . . [and] this modern maelstrom, with its secret undertow, has drawn the essayists into its potent circle, to the impoverishment of the essay.” Societal changes, most often associated with a new, faster pace of life, were seen as the biggest threat. As Stephen put it, “We are too distracted, too hurried.”2 Many essayists tried to put a good face on the situation, but they were not always convincing. In an 1894 review essay titled “The Passing of the Essay,” Agnes Repplier (already the grand dame of the form in America) argued that even though the essay had been “warned that it is not in accord with the spirit of the age, and that its day is on the wane,” it would survive. “The essay may die,” she admitted, “but just now it possesses a lively and encouraging vitality.” To prove her point, she cited the popularity of seven essayists. Unfortunately, they were all British, three were dead, and two more would die within the year. On the eve of the Fordist revolution and its mass production of automobiles , which would make longer travel more widely available, Repplier declared with characteristic certainty, “There was never a day when by-roads to culture were more diligently sought for than now by people disinclined for long travel or much toil.” The modern essayist “feels as a carpenter might feel were he told that chairs and doors and tables are going out of fashion, and that he had better turn his attention to mining engineering, or a new food for infants.” But essays will survive, she asserted, because “there are still readers keenly alive to the pleasure which literary art can give,” and part of that pleasure is reading an essay in which “one saunters lazily along with a charming unconsciousness of effort.”3 Repplier...