Finale

In “The Future City and The Female Marine,” I set Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography against The Female Marine, a pamphlet narrative written in three overlapping installments and published in nineteen different editions between 1815 and 1818 by Boston publisher Nathaniel Coverly. I contrast the Autobiography’s version of US urban space as a replicable franchise city to the transgressive city constructed in The Female Marine. The Female Marine’s protagonist, Lucy Brewer, seduced, abandoned, and working as a prostitute in Boston, disguises herself as a young male sailor to serve on the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. Easily read as political allegory for Boston’s shifting wartime loyalties, The Female Marine also marks a critical transition in US urban literature. Coverly rewrites the seduction tale to allow for female urban success, foreshadowing the racy female libertines of the 1840s sporting press. Virtually untouched by literary critics, The Female Marine is a remarkably rich text. Coverly quotes from and revises Charlotte, offers us a newly graphic version of the city’s geography that evokes the phantasmic cities of Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard, previews the rise of urban serials in the penny press, and delivers a more triumphant outcome than the equivocal endings of Kelroy or Ormond. As it picks up on earlier urban forms, The Female Marine operates as a fantastic, subversive, and funny precursor to the urban genre fiction that would become immensely popular in the second half of the century.

Kindred Contemporaries

This essay traces lines of influence between Edgar Allan Poe and five of his American contemporaries: George Lippard, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving. Various categories of influence are identified, including suggestive parallels (allegedly present in many works by Poe and Hawthorne), negative influence (Poe avoided in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym a technique he had previously criticized in reviewing Bird’s Sheppard Lee), avowed inspiration (Poe worked from a published hint by Irving in developing the story “William Wilson”), and plagiarism (Poe plagiarized from Irving’s Astoria in his own fictionalized adventure narrative covering similar geographical/temporal terrain, “The Journal of Julius Rodman”). The current impasse in influence studies is addressed. The essay concludes by noting that Poe’s body of work betrays numerous affinities with Thomas Gray’s pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner, published in Baltimore in 1831, though direct influence cannot be definitively established.

Lone Stars and Golden Circles

This chapter focuses on the Knights of the Golden Circle. George Washington Lafayette Bickley became one of the most famous members of the Brotherhood of the Union after he founded his own Knights of the Golden Circle. In a nation of “self-made men,” the founder of the Knights of the Golden Circle so persistently and frequently remade himself that many contemporaries remained at a loss as to who he actually was. Nevertheless, by any measure, the Knights of the Golden Circle became much more well known and accorded vastly greater importance than the organizations of George Lippard or Hugh Forbes. While Giuseppe Mazzini's idea of a mystic national destiny rested, in part, on the cooperation of nations, Bickley worked where nationhood grew pure without feudal or monarchist constraints. In his mind, an American “Manifest Destiny” unfolded in an unbounded fashion that would be not only unique but exceptional.

The Brotherhood of the Union

This chapter focuses on the Brotherhood of the Union. The Brotherhood represented a particularly American version of the radical nationalist idealism characteristic of the European revolts of 1848–49. Unlike such associations abroad, it functioned within a civilization, paradoxically free in terms of a republican ideology but politically shackled to human slavery. In founding the order, Gothic writer George Lippard sought to create a mutual aid fraternal order that would play the same sort of role widely attributed to the secret political societies in Europe. Known members—a rather limited proportion of the entire order—included some of the leading socialist and radical land reformers, people with ties to the antislavery Free Democratic Party. No less than kindred associations abroad, the Brotherhood of the Union blended abstract romantic humanity and social love with political goals that required blood and iron.

George Lippard, Ignatius Donnelly, and the Esoteric Theology of American Labor

This chapter examines the works of two labor novelists, George Lippard (1822–54) and Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901), focusing specifically on their use of esoteric Christianity as a source of worker empowerment. Esotericism here is defined as that strand of belief and practice that finds hidden significance beneath the surface of religious traditions. Esotericists view all nature as alive and posit elaborate correspondences between heaven and earth, or the self and God. Most esotericists see themselves as bearers of an ancient tradition that has been transmitted through initiations by secret brotherhoods. For some Western esotericists, this secret tradition is outside of and antithetical to Christianity. For others—including Lippard and Donnelly—it is the vital heart of Christianity itself, albeit a heart that has often been suppressed by ecclesiastical institutions.