The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

In The Unvarnished Truth, Ann Fabian seeks to investigate what motivated people in marginalized groups to publish their personal stories, and the impact those stories had on society. As such, the book is in many respects a history of the tabloid press in the United States. Looking primarily at the publishing experiences of nineteenth-century beggars, convicts, slaves, and prisoners of war, Fabian asks: "How [did] poor people [go] about getting their stories into print[?] What did it mean to base a tale on experience? What rules governed the representation of experience? What happened when a storyteller was caught inventing the details of experiences described as 'true'?" (xii). Discussing three main types of narratives--captivity, confessional, and slave narratives--Fabian states that she has written what "might be called the social history of a cultural form" (4). Most importantly, Fabian maintains that all of "these narratives provide us with an opportunity to explore conflicts over truth and authority, art and honesty, assertion and deference" (7).

Turning first to the writings of beggars, Fabian states, "it is clear that they wrote from the margins of the economy, but they also extracted from their experiences of economic marginality a kind of provisional cultural authority." Beggars testified to "the effects of an expanding maritime economy that tied men and women of the east coast into an Atlantic world where some prospered but others were sent wandering in search of money or work" (11). Fabian explores an intriguing question: "What can we learn of the workings of culture in nineteenth-century America by exploring the connections between behavior so socially marginal as begging and behavior so culturally central as writing?" (12). Clearly, beggars' narratives show that very marginalized people could gain a modicum of respect through the printed word. But if beggars' stories were too lurid, they were deemed implausible and did not sell. Many beggars understood this and embellished their stories accordingly. A beggar who had been maimed on the job in a brickyard quickly discovered that by disguising himself as a sailor, and allowing listeners to assume he had been injured in some adventure on the high seas, his tale of deprivation was much more lucrative. Interestingly, some beggars may have been motivated to write because of a change in the way social institutions categorized truth claims. As municipal aid agencies came to view poverty as the fault of the poor, they demanded plausible explanations for a proposed aid-recipient's circumstances. Good stories got good results, and could even serve as "the means to edge into the legitimate commercial economy" (43).

Beggars' attempts to fashion stories worthy of aid set up an interesting literary dilemma, as noted by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier: how was one to distinguish between impostors who wove a good tale and professional writers--like Whittier--"who made a living arranging words" (44)? According to Fabian, one result of the effort to distinguish between impostors and professional writers was "the transformation of philanthropy into a profession whose principal activity was distributing money (rather than kindness and love)" (44). The Mayhew Mendacity Society sought "to protect a credulous public from imaginative schemes hatched by the clever poor" (45) by ferreting out impostors. Agents of the society alleged to have discovered men in London who falsely claimed to be escaped American slaves, some having gone to the extreme of dyeing themselves black, because such stories sold well in England. Eventually, George Fitzhugh published a catalogue of "lurkers"--beggars claiming to be escaped slaves--which he employed in pro-slavery arguments. Fitzhugh charged that if philanthropists were tricked into supporting liars, they had no one to blame but themselves, and "reminded middle-class abolitionists that their purses, as well as their hearts, were vulnerable." As Fabian poignantly points out, "we began with beggars who cast themselves as the victims of circumstance they...