Reading Backwards: Reckoning with Context during the 1850s

In George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher, Ezra Greenspan was faced with the kind of problem that has long bedeviled students of nineteenth-century periodicals. Who was “the Putnam Public”? More specifically, who read Putnam’s, the ambitious literary monthly that arrived in green covers beginning in 1853? At a scholarly moment when context usually started with consumption, researchers were finding that subscription lists were often unavailable and always incomplete. After all, nineteenth-century subscribers generally shared issues, which were sent as well to libraries, reading rooms, and railway depots. Greenspan turned resourcefully to archived letters, magazine ads, comments in other periodicals, earlier biographies, papers deposited by the periodical’s several editors, and finally to “implied readership,” which took its cue from what Putnam’s dubbed “the model subscriber.”¹

What he could not manage was turning to readers themselves, as Janice Radway had in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, an engaging 1984 study that traded “model subscribers” for actual subjects, and informed speculation for interviews, questionnaires, and case studies. Intrigued by what Radway later called “ethnographies of reading,”² scholars like Greenspan have found themselves awash in survey envy when first readers so long ago are too dead to poll.

Considering implied readership as narratologists have offers one form of reading backwards, from textual invitation to likely reception. It’s a way of gauging pitch to insinuate catch and, from it, the sway of a particular reading public with expectations. But there are other ways to read backwards and other contexts to reckon with besides consumption.

Theodore Hamm, for instance, has edited a collection of specific addresses by Frederick Douglass starting in 1859 to highlight his immediate reception in Brooklyn, New York, a priority that emphasizes performance and makes local newspaper accounts indispensable. By contrast, Graham Thompson has situated Herman Melville’s magazine writing during the 1850s in the context of what was “magazinish”—that is, what kind of short fiction was readily sought, rewarded, and enlisted in settling the early contours of the American short story. Neither preoccupation is altogether new: the significance of site was already a mainstay for Frank Luther Mott’s groundbreaking History of American Magazines when his first volume was published in 1930, while negotiations with periodical editors have been a cornerstone of author studies for even longer. Still, both of these volumes bend reading backwards in creative directions that bode well for innovative periodical research.

Hamm comes by his newspaper priorities honestly as the chair of journalism and new media studies at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn. It’s no accident that his book has been published by a Brooklyn press and carries an endorsement from the Brooklyn borough president. Hamm includes only those speeches that Douglass delivered in Brooklyn, which remained independent of Manhattan until 1898. Following an extended introduction that portrays the city as both receptive to Douglass and inhospitable to his abolitionist aims, in part because of vigorous trade with the slave South, Hamm devotes each of his eight chapters to one of Douglass’s speeches, from “Self-Made Men” (1859) and “The Black Man and the War” (1863) to “John Brown’s Heroic Character” (1886) and “Lincoln’s Godlike Nature” (1893). These appear as reprinted texts with a difference; instead of favoring Douglass’s pristine paragraphs, this volume relies on partial newspaper transcriptions, combined excerpts, italicized summaries, and detailed reports that are quick to note the lines that drew cheers or laughter or applause, even laughter and applause at once. What emerges is less poised than participatory; it’s easy to see what Hamm means when he writes that “Douglass struck up lively conversations with his audiences” (31). That keenly interactive sense is compounded when Hamm gathers his reports and summaries from sharply differing sources: the hostile Brooklyn Daily Eagle...