The sentiment would remain close to Bennett’s heart throughout his career. At the same time, as he soon came to appreciate, there was nothing quite like a “gripping and horrific” murder to sell newspapers. From the moment he caught wind of the Helen Jewett story, Bennett sensed its explosive potential. Eager to capitalize, he took the unprecedented step of visiting the scene personally to report on the crime. His firsthand account, written in a breathless, immediate tone, gave him an excuse to linger over the salacious details, such as the moment when a police officer lifted a linen covering to allow him a glimpse of the corpse: “What a sight burst upon me! I could scarcely look at it for a second or two. Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse as one would the beauties of a statue of marble. It was the most remarkable sight I ever beheld. I never have and never expect to see such another. ‘My god,’ I exclaimed. ‘How like a statue! I can scarcely conceive that form to be a corpse.’ Not a vein was to be seen. The body looked as white, as full, as polished as the purest Parisian marble. The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.”
The dead woman, Bennett soon discovered, had been no ordinary “daughter of the pave.” Born in Maine to a destitute family, Helen Jewett had been taken in and given an education in the home of a local judge, only to lose her “honor and ornament” and fall into the ways of sin. Arriving in New York at the age of nineteen, she found her way into the service of Rosina Townsend, whose house on Thomas Street was thought to be one of the most orderly and genteel brothels in the city. Jewett soon cultivated a devoted circle of patrons, offering them companionship that extended beyond the usual services of such an establishment. She accompanied her gentlemen callers to the theater, darned their socks, and wrote them letters—as Bennett would report—filled with “apt quotations from the Italian, French and English poets.” Bennett expressed a hope that the murderer of this “remarkable but wayward” young woman would soon be brought to justice.
By the morning following the discovery of the body, the police had recovered a bloody hatchet wrapped in a long blue cloak at the rear of the Townsend house. Within hours, a nineteen-year-old clerk named Richard Robinson had been seized at a boardinghouse on Dey Street. The son of a prominent Connecticut family, Robinson had come to New York to gain experience in business, and soon gained a reputation as a young rake. Initially, the case against him appeared inarguable. Rosina Townsend and several others testified that he had been with Helen Jewett in her room on the night of the crime. The hatchet used in the murder matched one that had gone missing from the shop where Robinson worked. The blue cloak found at the scene appeared identical in style to one that Robinson had worn on the night in question, though he denied owning such a garment until confronted with the testimony of witnesses.
Reporting on the case in the Herald, Bennett assumed at first that Robinson was guilty, and the discovery of a diary, under the name of “Frank Rivers,” that purported to describe the young man’s sexual exploits seemed to guarantee Robinson’s conviction. But as the evidence mounted, the contrarian Bennett decided to swim against the tide. Robinson, he proclaimed, was in reality a “young, amiable and innocent youth” who had been wrongly accused by a corrupt police force “which is rotten to the heart.” Bennett attempted to explain away the bloody hatchet and cloak, and laid out a dubious theory that a scorned woman had committed the crime. “How could a young man perpetrate so brutal an act?” he asked. “Is it not more likely the work of a woman? Are not the whole chain of circumstances within the ingenuity of a female, abandoned and desperate?” Bennett fixed his suspicions on Rosina Townsend, whom he described as an “old miserable hag who has spent her whole life seducing and inveigling the young and old to their destruction.”
It is impossible to say whether Bennett actually believed his own rhetoric or simply recognized that taking a contrary position would boost the sales of the Herald. In either case, his competitors were quick to condemn him not only for championing Robinson but also for dwelling on the lurid details of the murder. William Cullen Bryant declined to discuss this “disagreeable subject” in the Post, while James Watson Webb wrung his hands over the Herald’s “moral leprosy.” To protect the delicate sensibilities of female readers, a new paper called the Ladies Morning Star came into being, promising to offer a more palatable version of the events.
As the Herald’s circulation took a dramatic climb, however, the other newspapers were soon forced to follow Bennett’s lead. With no fresh details emerging, the press began to fill pages with conflicting theories, false accusations, and dubious conclusions. One clergyman, who described the victim as beyond redemption, actually expressed approval of the murder. Other commentators traced Helen Jewett’s moral degradation to the effects of popular literature. Bennett himself noted with concern that a portrait of Lord Byron hung in her bedroom, while a copy of the poet’s Don Juan was found among her effects. He declared that the book “has no doubt produced more wretchedness in the world than all the other moral writers of the age can check.” Other newspapers took up the cry. “Avoid the perusal of novels,” advised the Journal of Public Morals, for “it is impossible to read them without injury.”
Meanwhile, the attacks against Bennett gained force. A rumor circulated that he had extorted thirteen thousand dollars in hush money from a man who had literally been caught with his pants down at the scene of the crime. “The whole story is too ridiculous to be entertained for a single moment,” Bennett complained. If his rivals imagined that impugning the editor’s integrity would undercut the Herald’s sales, they were sadly mistaken. Over the course of the Helen Jewett affair, Bennett’s circulation topped fifteen thousand—passing most of his competition—and he predicted, correctly, that it would soon double.
By the time the case came to trial in June of 1836, New York was bitterly divided. Those who believed Robinson was guilty reviled him as a symbol of society’s decay, while those who thought him innocent complained that he had been made a scapegoat because of his “sporting” lifestyle. Robinson’s supporters packed the courtroom wearing a type of hat favored by the defendant, which came to be known as a “Frank Rivers cap.” They cheered lustily for Robinson’s defense witnesses, and sent up catcalls at every statement by the prosecution. Robinson’s attorney portrayed the young man as an innocent led astray, and dismissed the considerable evidence against him—much of it based on the testimony of Rosina Townsend—as fatally flawed. “I am not going to say that a prostitute’s oath is not legal in a court of justice,” he said, “but I am going to say that eminent judges have held it very doubtful as to the credit that should belong to it.” Following a three-hour summation, Robinson was acquitted after only fifteen minutes of jury deliberation.
An exultant Bennett provided his own summation of the case: “The evidence in this trial and the remarkable disclosures of the manners and morals of New York is one of those events that must make philosophy pause, religion stand aghast, morals weep in the dust, and female virtue droop her head in the dust.…the publication and perusal of the evidence in this trial will kindle up fires that nothing can quench.” Bennett was no less grandiose in reviewing his own role in the proceedings: “Instead of relating the recent awful tragedy…as a dull police report, we made it a starting point to open up a full view upon the morals of society—the hinge of a course of mental action calculated to benefit the age—the opening scene of a great domestic drama that will, if properly conducted, bring about a reformation—a revolution—a total revolution in the present diseased state of society and morals.”
Bennett’s concern for social welfare rings a bit hollow when measured against the fact that, in all likelihood, he helped to free a guilty man. Robinson, whom a later writer branded “the Great Unhung,” would spend the rest of his days coyly hinting that he had gotten away with murder. Nevertheless, although Bennett later reversed his opinion of the case, his reporting had ushere
d in a journalistic revolution. Crime had been plucked from the dull, matter-of-fact columns of the police reports and spun into public drama. The old guard newspapers would grouse about impropriety for years to come, but Bennett’s sales figures showed that his readers had a taste for blood. It is too much to say that he created the sensational press—Benjamin Day’s Sun and others had already opened the door—but Bennett had turned the penny press into a force that could no longer be ignored. For good or ill, the floodgates had opened.
Bennett would spend the next five years attempting to duplicate the sensation that had surrounded the murder of Helen Jewett, filling the pages of the Herald with murders, suicides, grisly accidents, and catastrophic fires. At times, when New York did not provide a broad enough canvas, he drew on bloodshed from overseas—a guillotine execution in France, a knifing in Russia, scenes of torture from South Africa. Bennett could scarcely have imagined that the next great newspaper phenomenon was quite literally waiting around the corner.
VII
The Sable Divinity of Night
ARRIVING IN NEW YORK at the outset of the banking panic of 1837, Edgar Allan Poe sank to new extremes of desperation. With New York and much of the rest of the country entering a six-year economic depression, Poe found that opportunities for work, literary and otherwise, were in short supply. Visitors to his lodgings would recall an atmosphere of threadbare gentility. “The rooms looked neat and orderly,” remarked one friend, “but everything…wore an air of pecuniary want.” Much the same could have been said about Poe himself. He wandered the streets in a worn black suit that Virginia and Aunt Maria kept carefully brushed—“his linen was especially notable for its cleanliness”—but few doors were open to him. A friend observed that Poe “carried himself erect and well, as one who had been trained to it.…Coat, hat, boots, and gloves had very evidently seen their best days, but so far as brushing and mending go, everything had been done, apparently, to make them presentable. On most men his clothes would have looked shabby and seedy, but there was something about this man that prevented one from criticizing his garments.”
William Gowans, the friendly bookseller who lodged with the family, would attest that Poe spent much of his time in New York toiling away at his writing table. For some months Poe had labored to find a publisher for a collection of stories to be called Tales of the Folio Club. The publishing firm of Harper & Brothers gave serious consideration to the volume but eventually sent a rejection, along with a word of advice: “I think it would be worth your while, if other engagements permit, to undertake a Tale in a couple of volumes, for that is the magical number.”
Poe seems to have taken the message to heart, and immediately set aside his stories to work on a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which he hoped would be published in the popular two-volume format of the day. Drawing on Defoe, Swift, and his own “MS. Found in a Bottle,” Poe envisioned the work as a first-person account of a perilous sea voyage to the South Pole. Early portions of the work had already appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, but Poe set it aside as his relations with White began to fray. Now, in New York, he resolved to finish the manuscript and Harper & Brothers agreed to publish it on terms they described as “liberal and satisfactory.”
Poe envisioned the story in epic terms, as evidenced by the novel’s sprawling subtitle: “Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivers; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.”
As Richard Adams Locke and other artful hoaxsters had done, Poe took a special delight in obscuring the line between fact and fiction, even withholding his own name from the title page. Instead the book was presented as the work of “A. G. Pym,” whose preface identified “Mr. Poe” as one of a group of gentlemen from Virginia who had expressed interest in the tale. Pym went on to explain that Poe’s earlier account of the adventure, as published in the Messenger, had been adapted “under the garb of fiction” from an early portion of the narrative. Poe bolstered his conceit with mock diary extracts, logbook entries, and even hieroglyphic inscriptions. At a time when little was known about the Antarctic, some editors and readers accepted the fanciful narrative as fact. In a few places, extracts from the novel were reprinted as breaking news, as if Pym were a genuine pioneer sending back dispatches from a distant realm.
Reviews were mixed when the novel appeared in July of 1837, in part because the literary elite of New York and Boston had not forgotten Poe’s critical thunderbolts from Richmond. Though Poe’s career had barely begun, he had managed to blacken his name with a powerful cabal of literary figures, including Theodore Fay, whose novel Norman Leslie had been lambasted by Poe a few months earlier. Lewis Gaylord Clark, a supporter of Fay’s, attacked Pym for its “loose and slip-shod style, seldom chequered by any of the more common graces of composition.” Poe may well have heard echoes of his own attack on Fay: “There is not a single page of Norman Leslie in which even a school-boy would fail to detect at least two or three gross errors in Grammar, and some two or three most egregious sins against common-sense.”
In spite of the ambivalence of the critics, Poe had reason to hope that Harpers would now consider publishing a collection of his stories. The following year, however, he managed to squander whatever goodwill he had accrued with an ill-considered piece of hack work. Harpers had recently published an expensive and lavishly illustrated book on sea creatures called The Manual of Conchology, prohibitively priced at eight dollars. The author, Thomas Wyatt, hatched plans to bring out an abridged version of the work at a lower price, in hopes that it might be sold in schools. When Harpers objected, not wanting to undermine the sale of their more expensive edition, Wyatt decided that he would publish the abridgment under the name of “some irresponsible person whom it would be idle to sue for damages.”
Enter Edgar Allan Poe, who assisted in editing the book and contributed a preface and introduction. Although he had withheld his name from the title page of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, he now accepted billing as the author of The Conchologist’s First Book: Or a System of Testaceous Malacology. The book sold well, but Poe did not share in the royalties. Instead he received a flat fee of fifty dollars and earned the lasting enmity of Harpers. It marked a low point of his career, and charges of plagiarism and copyright infringement would dog him for years to come.
Poe now sank even deeper into what he invariably called “a state of pecuniary embarrassment.” Soon enough he would declare himself ready to accept any type of work, no matter how menial—“any thing, by sea or land”—to lift himself out of the “literary drudgery” in which he felt trapped. He was keenly aware that he had “no other capital” apart from “whatever reputation I may have acquired as a literary man,” but even this modest resource had now been squandered. After only a few months in New York, Poe found himself unable to get work of any kind. For the moment, he concluded, he would do better to try his luck elsewhere. In the early months of 1839, he abandoned New York for Philadelphia, eventually settling with his wife and mother-in-law in a small house on Sixteenth Street.
It had been more than two years since Poe left the Southern Literary Messenger. Although his fortunes had foundered badly in the interval, he felt reluctant to submit himself to the tastes and whimsies of another magazine publisher. Even so, in May of 1839, with no other options emerging, Poe made a tentative overture to William Burton, the publisher of Philadelphia’s Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, about the possibility of being taken on in an editorial position.
Poe’s approach to Bu
rton provides a fair index of his desperation. By this time Poe had become an assiduous reader of reviews of his own work (“No man living loved the praises of others more than he did,” one colleague remarked), and he never forgot a critical slight. Perhaps the most scathing of all the notices for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym had come from the pen of Burton. “A more impudent attempt at humbugging the public has never been exercised,” the editor declared. “We regret to find Mr. Poe’s name in connexion with such a mass of ignorance and effrontery.”
After two years of scrabbling, however, Poe felt he had no choice but to swallow his pride and come to Burton asking for a job. To his relief, he found the editor in a receptive frame of mind. Burton, an Englishman who had made a name for himself in Philadelphia as a comic actor, bore a passing resemblance to two of his more popular roles, Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch. A man of extraordinary energy and wide interests, he entered into the magazine business with the intention of creating a publication “worthy of a place upon every parlour table of every gentleman in the United States.” When Poe arrived on the scene, only a few hundred gentlemen had seen fit to clear a space on their parlor tables for Burton’s magazine, and the publisher, who divided his time between the editor’s desk and the stage, needed help in the daily maintenance of the enterprise.
In June Poe’s name appeared alongside Burton’s as the magazine’s assistant editor. Although the title was impressive, the salary was not. Claiming that his expenses were “woefully heavy,” Burton started Poe off at ten dollars a week, promising a raise if the arrangement bore fruit. Burton expressed confidence that the duties would be light, requiring no more than two hours a day, leaving Poe free to pursue other “light avocation” in his spare time. Poe was in no position to bargain; Burton’s wages, however meager, marked a substantial improvement. Poe’s earnings over the previous two and a half years averaged less than five dollars per week.
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