Unpublished portions of the Introduction to The Politics of Art Criticism
On the penny press and the Bowery Theater (from the Introduction):
William Snelling and George W. Dixon at the Polyanthos had accused Hamblin of trying to seduce a teenage actress, Louisa "Miss Missouri" Miller, who chose “honor over life,” at least in George Endicott’s print of her untimely death.[1] She was a sister of another of Hamblin's protegees at the Bowery, Josephine Clifton, whose portrait by Italian Risorgimento-refugee Spiridione Gambardella (lithographed by Endicott) was at the Academy of Design exhibition, and admired by Bennett and H of the American. Clifton’s and Missouri’s mother, a madam and an actress, believed Hamblin drove her younger daughter to death and financially supported the Polyanthos campaign against him. Bennett, or perhaps his reporter William Attree, a frequenter of brothels who had gotten a judge to place Louisa Miller in Hamblin’s household, took the side of Clifton and Miss Missouri against Hamblin and his backers.[2] The Herald identified Clifton as exemplifying the penny press style of acting, a native style not to the taste of "loafers" because of her natural feeling that defies conventional rules. This conveniently ignored that N.P. Willis, long associated with Mirror editor George Morris, and Mirror subeditor Epes Sargeant wrote a play for her, as Bennett called the latter's plays filled with the refined verbiage of album poetry, much as he dismissed Morris' poetry as suited for watering places like Saratoga and young ladies' albums.[3] An editor, friend and fishing partner of Mirror-favorite artist Henry Inman, William T. Porter, was drawn into the scandal when Noah at the Evening Star accused Porter of taking bribes from Missouri’s mother, the brothel keeper, to attack Hamblin in Porter’s paper, The Spirit of the Times, and of conspiring against Morris and the Mirror (Hamblin supporters) as well. Porter, whose brother co-edited the Corsair with Willis, denied it, explaining that he only took champagne from Miss Missouri’s mother. Hamblin only assaulted Bennett and Dixon in revenge for their attacks; Bennett had among other epithets compared Hamblin, because of his series of affairs with actresses, to a madam in breeches.
The Herald, which like George Dixon (a blackface performer, and so a specialist in satire) and his Polyanthos, was frequently accused of blackmail and immorality, tried to make a case that journalism included such exposés, because the public interest required, in this instance, defending marriage and female honor. If papers could not report on immoral acts (seductions, adultery, et al), as the Herald said, “fashionable libertines, by their political connections with the courts, lawyers and juries, can at any moment stifle the voice of truth.”[4] The men whom Dixon attacked (Thomas Hamblin; auctioneer Rowland Minturn, from an aristocratic and politically active family; Episcopalian minister and editor (Church Record) Reverend Francis L. Hawkes, a clubmember with literati Bryant, Verplanck, Halleck, et al; and so on) were the same elite who Bennett promised to unseat, and that editors Noah, Webb, Stone, King and their writers were ardent in defending.[5]
[1] Polyanthos, July 21, 1838. At 6 cents, it was more expensive than most of the weeklies, as befit its racy character, and it was sold at Henry Robinson’s print store in Wall St; Robinson also vended a lithograph portrait of Clifton in a male (trousers) role. The 18-year-old actress died of natural causes. Sun, June 16, 1838, where the editor may have been Horatio S. Bartlett and H. Hastings Weld. Weld left in 1839 for the Morning Dispatch, which merged with Brother Jonathan, the weekly of the Evening Tattler; Day, also formerly of the Sun, had a financial interest. N.P. Willis joined Weld as country editor in 1840. See also Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
[2] That a previous Hamblin liaison with an actress and daughter of a madam had led to her death in childbirth, made his liaison with Miss Missouri more suspect. See Cohen et al, Flash Press, 34-39, and Miriam Lopez Rodriguez, "Louisa Medina: Uncrowned Queen of Melodrama," in Women's Contribution to Nineteenth-Century Theatre, ed. Rodriquez and Maria Dolores Narbona Carrion, (University of Valencia, 2004) 29-41.
[3] Herald: on Clifton, September 2, 1836, p. 2; on Morris, April 11, 1838, p. 2. Sargeant’s play for Clifton was 1836’s “Bride of Genoa,” also at the Park; his “Velasco,” at the Park, Herald, December 20, 1838, p. 2, was written for Ellen Tree. On Willis’ play, Herald, September 1, 1837. Epes Sargeant and his lawyer and Whig brother John (Jack) O. Sargeant would join Park Benjamin’s New World (which published his play as "The Genoese") and Evening Signal in October 1839, the rivals to Brother Jonathan and the Evening Tattler.
[4] Herald quoted in Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Harvard University Press, 2009) p. 62, in regards to the exposure of powerful auctioneer Rowland Minturn’s adultery. On Bennett and the Herald, see James L. Crouthamel, Bennett's New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse University Press, 1989), Oliver Carlson, The Man who Made the News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942), Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts: Father and Son (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1928) and Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times by a Journalist [Isaac Clark Pray] (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1855).
[5] The Minturns subscribed to the Evening Star, as did the Niblos (where Hamblin drank), J. Palmo, and the Astor House, headquarters for the Whigs, which the twopenny Plebeian, July 7, 1842, accused of not receiving Democratic papers. It was speculated that Dixon was bribed to plead guilty in the Hawkes libel case.