Art for the Middle Classes: America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s

NOTES

169 Notes CHAPTER 1 1. While these magazines certainly were not the only venue for the circulation of art engravings in the decade of the 1840s, the period under study in this project, these magazines reached larger audiences, at lower prices, than any other venue for the distribution of American art. While illustrated annuals and gift books served as the primary sites for the distribution of art engravings in the 1830s, and single-print distributors like Currier & Ives and the French firm of Goupil & Co. monopolized the market for inexpensive art prints in the 1850s and beyond, I argue that the illustrated magazines served as the primary site for the distribution of original American art in the decade of the 1840s. 2. On comparative circulation of monthly magazines in the 1840s, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1741–1850, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). All subsequent references to Mott’s five-volume history published by Harvard University Press will be made parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 3. There is a burgeoning body of scholarship on the emergence of the middle class and middle-class culture forms in the mid-nineteenth century, that both builds on and challenges the groundbreaking work made in the 1980s by Stuart Blumin and Mary Ryan. For earlier definitions of the economic and social boundaries of the middle class, see Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For more recent scholarship on middle-class culture forms, see John Henry Hepp IV, The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Melanie Dawson, Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Heidi Lynne Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America: Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art and Antebellum Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in NineteenthCentury America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); and Katherine C. Grier, Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988). The recent release of the ProQuest American Periodical Series Online (APS Online) enables scholars to search for references to the “middlin’ classes” and the “middle class” in the periodical press. A recent search of APS Online between the dates of 1835 and 1855 returned more than one hundred results of articles specifically referencing and defining an American middle class and middle-class culture in these decades. Publications represented every geographic sector of the country and periodicals ranging from weekly newspapers to farmer’s almanacs to scientific journals. These results 170 NOTES challenge earlier scholarly arguments suggesting that the middle class was ill-defined in American social and cultural life before 1855. Clearly, there was in the preceding decades a widespread understanding of the parameters of the middle class and middle-class culture. 4. On Godey’s exercise of control over the magazine’s contents, see Camille A. Langston, “Sarah Josepha Hale’s Rhetoric Of ‘Mental Improvement’ and ‘Women’s Sphere’ In Godey’s Lady’s Book,” in Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace, ed. Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 118–36. On Hale’s presentation of her bodily persona in the magazine, see chapter 5 of Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 172–208. 5. For more on the life of George Graham, see Alf Pratte, “George Rex Graham,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 73: American Magazine Journalists, 1741–1850, ed. Sam G. Riley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1988), 153–58. 6. For more on the life of Charles Peterson, see Karen Nipps, “Charles Jacobs Peterson,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 79: American Magazine Journalists, 1850–1900, ed. Sam G. Riley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), 236–41. 7. On the importance of Peterson’s serial novels, see Patricia Okker, Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 8. In the “Editor’s Table” for Godey’s, September 1841, Louis Godey introduced his readers to McMichael, his sometimes editor and business partner, upon McMichael’s...