Mapping Taste: Urban Modernities from the Tatler and Spectator to Frederick Douglass’ Paper

This essay, which is part of a larger book project, reflects my interest in rethinking concepts of Black modernity and speculating on its possible manifestations in different forms at different historical moments. Specifically, I posit the emergence of an urban Black modernity in US northern cities during the antebellum era. I begin by mapping a literary history of urban modernity in periodical culture over a span of 150 years. I examine its origins in Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709–11) and Joseph Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711–12), which detail the rise of modern London and its new middle-class subjects, whose conspicuous consumption demanded the regulation of taste, deemed a crucial marker of modernity. This urban modernity is then reconfigured across the Atlantic in New York, specifically in Washington Irving’s Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent (1802) and Salmagundi (1807–08), which anatomize the behaviors of New York’s social elite. I then elucidate how a group of Black New York correspondents to Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1852–55)—notably James McCune Smith, William J. Wilson, and Philip Bell—take up and repurpose such representations of urban modernity to define the taste of the city’s Black urbanites and meet their intellectual, social, and political needs at mid-century.