John Burroughs and the Place of Nature

Three: Pastoral Illustration: Burroughs, Muir, and the Century Magazine

3Pastoral Illustration Burroughs, Muir, and the Century Magazine Codes of Illustration JohnBurroughsneversparedhisfriends.WritingonFebruary1, 1891, to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Burroughs criticized the magazine, especially the latest issue, which featured illustrations of poor white southerners, for printing “ugly pictures of ugly objects.” The right purpose of an illustration, said Burroughs , is to suggest “something pleasing,” for “why should the eye be greeted with something ugly in an illustrated magazine, any more than the nose should be greeted by a bad odor in a house, or the ear by a discordant sound? These Georgia crackers are hideous. Think what their effect might be upon a sensitive, imaginative pregnant woman who might be fascinated by their very ugliness! If I were a woman I think they would make me miscarry.” Burroughs lambasted illustrator E. W. Kemble as “the worst realist who has yet turned up” and asked his friend Gilder rhetorically, “When one sees a defect in a great public institution like the Century, why should he not point it out?”1 The diatribe is unintentionally humorous in its hyperbole. The only “hideous” aspect of Clare de Graffenreid’s article is the writing, which portrays the Georgia “cracker” as an illiterate and shiftless cog in the industrial machine. The men come in for special condemnation, since they exhibit remarkable skill in avoiding all manner of work, whereas the women and children perform the majority of household duties and factory labor. Kemble’s illustrations are realistic, and they consist mainly of portraits, of “heads” and “types,” not grotesque distortions or exaggerations. The details of illustrations such as “Cooking in the Yard,” “Around the Grocery,” “In the Mill,” and “A Race Problem” are spare and 73 74 Chapter Three characteristic. So, for example, the grandmotherly figure who stirs a pot over an open fire in the first-named illustration is smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, and the dominance of tobacco among the subjects is a major point in de Graffenried’s article. Only in the last-named engraving does the illustrator imply a criticism, since the poor whites’ “race problem” is the whiskey jug. To a modern reader, the article and illustrations seem well intentioned and condescending, but they are hardly the stuff to make an imaginative, fascinated young woman miscarry. The letter to Gilder reveals Burroughs’s sense of propriety, his hyperbolic imagination, and his acute image of the typical reader as a sensitive, imaginative woman. In all of these aspects, he is characteristic of American literary culture at the end of the nineteenth century. From 1881 to 1910, the Century was indeed a “great public institution.” The leading illustrated monthly magazine in America, the Century exerted a powerful influence on the formation of American culture during the period. As an insider and frequent contributor to the magazine, Burroughs participated actively in the cultural formation. Along with John Muir, who would become his friend and associate during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Burroughs established the place of nature in mainstream American periodicals . In addition, both Muir and Burroughs made a place for the nature essay, developing the genre within the pages of the illustrated monthly magazine. A set of remarkable convergences in the cultural history of postbellum America is especially pertinent to the rise of the nature essay as a genre in American periodicals. In the 1870s, Scribner’s Monthly, edited by Josiah Gilbert Holland, became a culturally influential illustrated magazine, appealing to the burgeoning urban, middle-class readership that was also attracted to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.2 A commonplace of American cultural history accords elite status to the Atlantic Monthly, which never succumbed to the temptation to use illustrations for its articles and reviews; the older Harper’s Monthly, on the other hand, was expressly begun to attract readers for its book publications and aimed at “the great mass of the American people.”3 The growth of periodical literature in the second half of the nineteenth century suggests that there were in fact many Pastoral Illustration 75 kinds of readers for an amazing variety of newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies. Moreover, specialized journals grew at least as rapidly as general literary magazines. The first convergence, then, is that just as John Muir and John Burroughs were becoming writers in the late 1860s and early 1870s, new magazines were springing up, eager to print and illustrate their articles. This...