The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York

by Matthew Goodman

Overview

On August 26, 1835, a fledgling newspaper called the Sun brought to New York the first accounts of remarkable lunar discoveries. A series of six articles reported the existence of life on the moon — including unicorns, beavers that walked on their hind legs, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. In a matter of weeks it was the most broadly circulated newspaper story of the era, and the Sun, a working-class upstart, became the most widely read paper in the world.

An exhilarating narrative history of a divided city on the cusp of greatness, and tale of a crew of writers, editors, and charlatans who stumbled on a new kind of journalism, The Sun and the Moon tells the surprisingly true story of the penny papers that made America a nation of newspaper readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465019007
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	06/01/2010
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	902,268
Product dimensions:	5.76(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.96(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Matthew Goodman's nonfiction writing has appeared in the Forward, the American Scholar, Harvard Review, Brill's Content, and the Utne Reader. He is the author of Jewish Food: The World at Table. He lives in New York City with his wife and children.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Man on the Moon 1

Part 1 The Sun

1 Benjamin Day's Whistling Boy 17

2 The News of the City 33

3 Bearer of the Falcon Crest 49

4 The Atrocious Impositions of Matthias 65

5 "The Evil Spirit of the Times" 83

6 The Prince of Ivy Island 97

7 Strange Attractions 115

Part 2 The Moon

8 Celestial Discoveries 131

9 A Passage to the Moon 147

10 "If This Account Is True, It Is Most Enormously Wonderful" 165

11 The Picturesque Beauty of the Moon 185

12 "The Astronomical Hoax Explained" 199

13 Moonshine 217

14 Monck Mason's Flying Machine 233

15 "Joice Heth Is Not Dead" 251

16 The Best Self-Hoaxed Man in New York 265

Epilogue That Tyranny Shall Be No Longer 283

Acknowledgments 299

Notes 301

Selected Bibliography 327

Index 335

Editorial Reviews

Goodman offers a highly atmospheric account of a hoax that he says reflects the birth of tabloid journalism and New York City's emergence as a city with worldwide influence. In August 1835, New York Sun editor Richard Adams Locke wrote and published a hoax about a newfangled telescope that revealed fantastic images of the moon, including poppy fields, waterfalls and blue skies. Animals from unicorns to horned bears inhabited the moon, but most astonishing were the four-foot-tall "man-bats" who talked, built temples and fornicated in public. The sensational moon hoax was reprinted across America and Europe. Edgar Allan Poe grumbled that the tale had been cribbed from one of his short stories; Sun owner Benjamin Day saw his paper become the most widely read in the world; and a pre-eminent British astronomer complained that his good name had been linked to those "incoherent ravings." Goodman (Jewish Food) offers a richly detailed and engrossing glimpse of the birth of tabloid journalism in an antebellum New York divided by class, ethnicity and such polarizing issues as slavery, religion and intellectual freedom. B&w illus. (Nov.)

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Publishers Weekly

The focus of this work concerns a series of 1835 New York Sun articles that convinced many of that newspaper's readers that the moon was inhabited. Goodman (Jewish Food: The World at Table) gives the context of the time while also providing a look at the life of Richard Adams Locke, who wrote and published these stories, and such figures as P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe. Malcolm Hillgartner (The Reagan I Knew) reads with great energy and enthusiasm. Public libraries may wish to consider this one. [Audio clip available through www.blackstoneaudio.com; the Basic Books hc was described as more likely to appeal "to the general reader than to the academic," LJ9/15/08.-Ed.]
—Michael T. Fein

Library Journal

A delightful recounting of "the most successful hoax in the history of American journalism."The moon, it turns out, is covered with poppy fields, grassy plains, forests and lakes, and populated by assorted shellfish, single-horned goats, bi-ped beavers, miniature zebras and four-foot-tall, simian, winged creatures-so-called "man-bats"-capable of conversation and religious worship. Or so wrote Richard Adams Locke in his sensational 1835 series for New York's Sun. Intended as a satire of those who would make science the handmaiden of religion, Locke's Great Astronomical Discoveries mixed just enough real-life names, genuine science and plausible technological advances to be believable. Reprinted and debated in competing papers, the series helped turn the Sun, the first of the penny papers, into the world's largest-selling newspaper. Although Goodman (Jewish Food, 2005, etc.) focuses on the anatomy of Locke's brilliant deception, he also surveys New York's newspaper scene at a time when the dailies were becoming something more than a compilation of commercial information, currency-conversion tables and reprints of outdated foreign news. The trend toward local, preferably sensational, news was led by the Sun's publisher Benjamin Day who, in addition to setting the penny price, practically invented the idea of newsboys to hawk his paper and lithographs to illustrate the stories. The true appeal of Goodman's story, though, lies in his skillful interweaving of "an elaborate series of deceptions and exposures" in the air near the time of Locke's creation: P.T. Barnum's exhibition of Joice Heth, the 161-year-old nursemaid of George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe's faked account of Monck Mason'sballoon flight across the Atlantic and the shady story of religious con man Mathias the Prophet, whose gullible disciples included Sojourner Truth. Goodman consistently entertains with his tale of press manipulation, hucksterism and the seemingly bottomless capacity for people to believe the most outrageous things. Absolutely charming. Agent: Henry Dunow/Dunow, Carlson & Lerner

Kirkus Reviews

New Yorkers like to think of themselves as sophisticates, but in the summer of 1835 they were anything but. An elaborate hoax, perpetrated by NEW YORK SUN editor Richard Adams Locke, tricked them into believing that the moon is inhabited by animals such as unicorns and four-foot-tall talking "man-bats." Narrator Malcolm Hillgartner's rich baritone works well with a story that could almost be fiction but isn't. His slightly melodramatic reading lends a certain tone of irony to the book, keeping the listener aware that while this is factual history, it’s based on a big joke. This entertaining book gives an interesting glimpse of the early days of newspapers in New York City and how trusting and gullible readers were, once upon a time. K.M. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2009 - AudioFile