Since Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin put type to printing press, Philadelphia has been a haven and an inspiration for writers. Local essayist Agnes Repplier once shared a glass of whiskey with Walt Whitman, who frequently strolled Market Street. Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard plumbed the city's dark streets for material. In the twentieth century, Northern Liberties native John McIntyre found a backdrop for his gritty noir in the working-class neighborhoods, while novelist Pearl S. Buck discovered a creative sanctuary in Center City. From Quaker novelist Charles Brockden Brown to 1973 US poet laureate Daniel Hoffman, author Thom Nickels explores Philadelphia's literary landscape.
Includes photos
Since Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin put type to printing press, Philadelphia has been a haven and an inspiration for writers. Local essayist Agnes Repplier once shared a glass of whiskey with Walt Whitman, who frequently strolled Market Street. Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard plumbed the city's dark streets for material. In the twentieth century, Northern Liberties native John McIntyre found a backdrop for his gritty noir in the working-class neighborhoods, while novelist Pearl S. Buck discovered a creative sanctuary in Center City. From Quaker novelist Charles Brockden Brown to 1973 US poet laureate Daniel Hoffman, author Thom Nickels explores Philadelphia's literary landscape.
Includes photos
Literary Philadelphia: A History of Poetry & Prose in the City of Brotherly Love
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Literary Philadelphia: A History of Poetry & Prose in the City of Brotherly Love
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Overview
Since Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin put type to printing press, Philadelphia has been a haven and an inspiration for writers. Local essayist Agnes Repplier once shared a glass of whiskey with Walt Whitman, who frequently strolled Market Street. Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard plumbed the city's dark streets for material. In the twentieth century, Northern Liberties native John McIntyre found a backdrop for his gritty noir in the working-class neighborhoods, while novelist Pearl S. Buck discovered a creative sanctuary in Center City. From Quaker novelist Charles Brockden Brown to 1973 US poet laureate Daniel Hoffman, author Thom Nickels explores Philadelphia's literary landscape.
Includes photos
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781625853431 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 163 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A BAWDY AND UNRULY CITY
Eighteenth-century Philadelphia was a bawdy and unruly place, and when it came to life's pleasures, the city was anything but restrictive. After the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia experienced a scandalous sexual golden age, replete with casual sex in alleys, brothels, taverns and anywhere else that seemed convenient. Many referred to Philadelphia then as "Sin City."
"The nocturnal culture [in Philadelphia] was boisterous and bawdy," writes Richard Godbeer in Sexual Revolution in Early America.
Sailors, servants of both sexes, laborers, apprentices, and journeymen drank, sang, and brawled; single, married, widowed, deserted, and runaway denizens flirted, groped, and fornicated. The merrymaking often got out of hand: in March 1799 a young man was arrested for being "stripped naked" in the street. Highly visible among these carousing pleasure seekers were women working as prostitutes. Readily available in taverns and brothels or outside in thoroughfares and byways, these "ladies of pleasure," were "so numerous" observed one visitor to the city, that they "flooded the streets at night."
But the New Republic was living a "dream" that could not last. Freedom from England did not mean the freedom to do anything you wanted to do with your body. The end to these freedoms would come later, but in the meantime, venereal disease — the price of uncontrolled libertine pleasure — was common among city residents. To handle the venereal epidemic, a Frenchman named Moreau de St. Mery ran a bookstore in the city from 1794 to 1798 that offered prophylactics and "cures" for venereal afflictions. Most Philadelphians were oblivious to the dangers of unprotected sex. Bawdy houses were so common that neighbors generally left them alone as long as no trouble came from them. Trouble in a bawdy house often meant fights, noise and gunshots. If a house was too troublesome, neighbors often razed it; however, it was razed not from a sense of moral outrage but for practical reasons.
The mid-eighteenth century also saw the proliferation of erotic almanacs, pamphlets and books. For the first time, the lower classes had access to these materials.
The unbridled atmosphere meant that in 1779, "at least one out of 38 adults was parent of a bastard." These late eighteenth-century freedoms came to a halt in the early 1800s, when the middle classes were able to redefine culture. The new social guidelines required sexual restraint from women, resulting in the isolation of the old pleasure culture.
This emphasis on pleasure went underground. Polite society, in effect, forced prostitutes into the margins of society, and children born out of wedlock were seen more or less as contaminated human beings who were responsible for their own plight. The pretzel logic that defined this system was twisted, indeed, especially when social mores dictated that the average woman could choose between only two lifestyles: chastity and marriage. That didn't leave much wiggle room. If a woman wasn't married and didn't cultivate the "chaste label," she was automatically considered a prostitute. The spiral of rigidity continued when any sex outside of marriage was seen as a form of prostitution. Although punitive measures didn't include public stoning, unmarried pregnant women, for instance, were sent to almshouses while their grown children were put in child labor pools in an attempt to pay their mothers' debts. Unfortunately, the radical Puritanization of the culture devolved even further when diaries and letters documenting Philadelphia's libertine era were trashed or destroyed in bonfires. Godbeer writes:
As the culture was redefined, female respectability was also redefined. A woman could choose only chastity or marriage, but anything in-between was seen as prostitution. Prostitution in fact covered all non-marital sex, and it wasn't long before Philadelphia adopted a more punitive system: unmarried pregnant women were forced into the almshouse and forced the other children of these women to work to pay off their debts.
Entering colonial Philadelphia from the area around Valley Forge, most travelers took Swedesford Road, the country's oldest road, no doubt taking the time to freshen up at the White Horse Tavern, established in 1721 in Frazer, which later became the private residence of poet Myrtle L. Berger Swanenburger, who in the 1920s would write the famous poem "Cow Jumped Over the Moon." This mystic country gives rise to hills and a river called Schuylkill that winds its way into the "Greene Country Towne" of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia.
Penn, a Quaker convert from Anglicanism, wrote Some Fruits of Solitude while spending time in an English prison. Published in 1682, the book would influence Robert Louis Stevenson to such a degree that the short story writer was careful to always carry it around in his back pocket.
"Never Marry but for Love," Penn wrote, "but see that thou lov'st what is lovely. If Love be not thy chiefest Motive, thou wilt soon grow weary of a Married State, and stray from thy Promise, to search out Pleasures in forbidden Places."
Because a writer without a printer may be compared to a soldier without a regiment, in colonial Philadelphia, a printer was often a writer, the dual vocation guaranteeing a steady production of books and pamphlets. Despite Benjamin Franklin's great genius, he was not the city's first printer but in fact arrived from Boston after William Bradford had established the earliest printing press in Pennsylvania in 1690. Bradford's tomes were religious in nature and paved the way for the nation's most famous pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, who would come to have a profound influence on the American Revolution in essays like Common Sense, his most famous pamphlet, in which he explains the reasons independence from England was necessary.
"If we inquire into the business of a king," Paine wrote in Common Sense, "we shall find that in some countries they have none; and after sauntering away their lives without pleasure to themselves or advantage to the nation, withdraw from the scene, and leave their successors to tread the same idle round."
Born in 1737, the largely self-educated Paine worked as a corset maker as a boy while assisting his father in the collection of liquor and tobacco taxes. His marriage in 1760 ended when his wife and child died in childbirth. When the corset business went bust, he set his writing skills to work, arousing considerable controversy with his first political work, a twenty-one-page pamphlet encouraging higher pay for excise officers. The essay's notoriety was the catalyst for his move, in 1774, from England to Philadelphia, where he found employment editing the Pennsylvania magazine and where he once again courted editorial controversy, this time by condemning the African slave trade. Common Sense advocated a total break with Britain and was praised for its use of plain language and avoidance of Latin words. As a colonial bestseller, 500,000 copies were distributed in just a few months.
It was Paine who coined the (by now) hackneyed phrase, "These are the times that try men's souls," a line that would go on to become the opening salvo of a million typing students. Pain, however, was no armchair philosopher but saddled up regularly in order to travel with the Continental army under General Nathanael Greene. In 1777, Congress appointed him to the post of secretary to the Committee for Foreign Affairs.
Paine's writings were so powerful that they were used to inspire the troops at Valley Forge when, in 1776, General Washington ordered that his pamphlet, The American Crisis, Number 1, be read aloud to the men. Yet trouble seemed to follow Paine wherever he went. In 1779, he was expelled from the Committee for Foreign Affairs, although he would later become clerk of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania before making another change: returning to England. Not one to quell a rebellious nature, in England he supported the French Revolution and wrote a pro-revolution book, The Rights of Man, which so angered the English that the book was banned and Paine indicted for treason. Imprisoned from 1793 to 1794, he narrowly escaped losing his head at the guillotine.
President Thomas Jefferson invited Paine to return to the United States, but by 1802 his reputation had been ruined. Perceived as "a world-class rabble rouser" at his death in June 1869, the New York Citizen wrote that "he had lived long, did some good and much harm." Legacies change, however, and in 1937 the Times of London dubbed him the "English Voltaire." Other accolades followed, as many now perceived him to be the original author of the Declaration of Independence, even the "original zinester and first blogger." Philosopher Bertrand Russell, in 1957, wrote, "To our great-grandfathers, he [Paine] seemed a kind of earthly Satan, a subversive infidel rebellious alike against his God and his King."
Russell explains that one of Paine's first friends, Dr. Rush, would have nothing to do with him because of the principles avowed in The Age of Reason. Russell writes that Paine couldn't even board a stagecoach without being refused a seat and that there were prohibitions against his voting in elections in the last years of his life. Life got progressively worse for him because he had to deal with accusations of immorality and drunkenness; at his death, he was alone and poor. On his deathbed in 1809, it is said that two clergymen entered his room and tried to convert him when Paine told them, "Let me alone; good morning!" The nation's mythmakers changed this fact and invented a story about an eleventh-hour conversion.
The myth of Benjamin Franklin is probably greater than the myth of Santa Claus, and that's because the Ben Franklin that most schoolchildren know is nothing more than a jovial, benign Kris Kringle — a smiling, kite-flying, granddaddy figure filled with chuckles, winks and wise sayings that sound like they were lifted from the pages of Readers Digest.
The undisputed fact, of course, is that Ben Franklin really was a genius with a dark history. Born in Boston in 1706, the tenth son of soap maker Josiah Franklin and Abiah Folger, Franklin was many things: a printer, inventor, writer, publisher, adventurer and lover, as well as a man of secrets and mystery. His childhood was difficult, with his father marking him early on as "destined" for the clergy, although that plan failed when the cost of divinity school proved prohibitive. Instead, the precocious, troubled boy who liked to read was farmed off to his elder brother, James, then editor and publisher of the New England Courant.
James put young Ben to work as a printing hand, so the twelve-year-old was soon diligently working all the time setting type. In the end, the "technical-only" job proved unsatisfying because little Franklin wanted to write for the magazine but knew his brother would never allow a lowly print assistant, much less his younger brother, to become a contributor. Ben, undeterred, went on to invent a nom de plume, Silence Dogwood, supposedly an anonymous female writer who penned letters to the editor criticizing the treatment of women in the colonies. Unaware of his younger brother's duplicity, James published Dogwood's letters in the Courant, and they became quite famous — on the order of a colonial version of "Dear Abby." Soon, everyone in town wanted to know who Silence Dogwood was.
In one letter, Silence riducled Harvard University, an institution for which she had little respect because she believed it had been tainted by corruption:
I reflected in my Mind on the extream Folly of those Parents, who, blind to their Childrens Dulness, and insensible of the Solidity of their Skulls, because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send them to the Temple of Learning, where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquir'd at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.
When Ben owned up and confessed to his brother the truth that he was Silence Dogwood, James's reaction was not nice. In fact, it was downright volatile. James became self-righteous and claimed that Franklin had harmed the publication and then proceeded to beat him as if he were a slave. But the teenage Franklin had had enough and found passage to Philadelphia, where he hoped to find a job in printing, arriving with just enough money for a few loaves of bread. On his first day in the city, it is said that he walked the streets soaking wet (it had just rained) and that his "odd" look impressed his future wife, who, serendipitously, happened to catch a quick glimpse of him walking the streets. They would marry years later, after her first marriage failed and after Franklin had established roots working for the Pennsylvania Gazette.
The Founding Father's life then takes on a mythic cast. He fathered an illegitimate child named William before his marriage, but after his marriage, tales of his flirtations with other women, especially in France — where the spirit of sexual licentiousness has always seemed to rule with an iron fist — began to circulate. He also embarked on a number of simultaneous careers, including that of inventor. His inventions included the lightning rod for homes and the glass armonia. On one sailing trip, he was the first to discover the warming effects of the Gulf Stream. He also resurrected Silence Dogwood in the form of another pseudonym, Poor Richard or Richard Saunders, when he published the annual Poor Richard's Almanac, a chapbook of aphorisms, quotations, reflections, weather reports and other oddities that the public found endearing. In Poor Richard's Almanac, we read:
Diligence is the mother of good luck. God gives all things to industry. Plough deep while sluggards sleep and you shall have corn to sell and to keep. Work while it is called today for you know not how much you may be hindered tomorrow. One today is worth two tomorrows
Noted by some as America's first arms dealer, Ben went to London to work on behalf of the colonies and was for a while the guest of Lord Snowdon, at whose estate in East Wycombe he stayed. Here's where his life takes a mysterious turn. Lord Snowdon was the founder of the Hellfire Club, a secret esoteric society that held meetings and parties underneath the Wycombe estate, where the male members dressed as monks and the women as nuns. The behavior among Hellfire Club members was in perfect alignment with Philadelphia's own Sin City reputation in the eighteenth century, when bawdy houses were common in the city.
In some correspondence, Ben makes references to Wycombe's "underground" life, although the extent of his involvement there is unknown. Ben, after all, was the ultimate PR man. In his book Benjamin Franklin, Politician: The Mask and the Man (1996), Francis Jennings wrote: "To begin with, Franklin's Autobiography is about as valid as a campaign speech. It sounds good. Everything he wrote sounds good. Franklin's public life was devoted to public relations, of which he became a preeminent master."
Jolly ol' Ben was a man of passionate appetites. To use a Walt Whitman expression, he contained multitudes — so many "different selves," in fact, that today there are still a number of people who accuse him of being a British spy or of murdering and then burying the corpses of women and children under his old house on Carver Street in London, while others reduce him to a Satanist who worshipped Lucifer in the Hellfire caves at Wycombe. But it was Ben's PR abilities that continue to affect how some biographers see him to the present day. These biographies paint too sweet a portrait of the man, although these portraits are thoroughly in keeping with the touristy imitation of Franklin one sees walking around Independence Hall. If your knowledge of Ben didn't extend beyond this Santa image, you would never know, for instance, that novelist D.H. Lawrence found Franklin "a little pathetic ... ridiculous and detestable" and that German sociologist Max Weber summed up Franklin's thinking as a "philosophy of avarice."
Franklin, for instance, called German immigrants "the Refuse of their People," and he referred to the black slaves on American soil as having "a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful and cruel."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Literary Philadelphia"
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Copyright © 2015 Thom Nickels.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
I. A Bawdy and Unruly City,
II. Words as Common Currency,
III. The Overnight Bestseller,
IV. Poetdelphia,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
About the Author,