Twisted Path

The twisted path of research . . .

I thought it might be fun to explain how I get from A to B, because I’m sure it’s quite confusing. Researching the early genres of photography in nineteenth century photography, I noted a passing mention in Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 by Peter B. Hales that Holgrave, the daguerreotypist in Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables might have been based on Albert Sands Southworth. This of course splits me on two separate paths. I wasn’t that familiar with Southworth, so I poked around and found:

• America’s First Masters of Photography: Southworth and Hawes

• Southworth and Hawes at the Getty Museum

• All Things Under the Sun a portfolio with a large selection of their photographs

• A 3.3 Million Dollar Discovery of Southworth and Hawes photographs from 1999.

That was the first branch. Since of course I’m a literature guy too, and I like Hawthorne, I had to start reading The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Some preliminary observations: the novel is certainly indebted to both the Gothic genre and Thomas Carlyle. Holgrave the daguerreotypist’s rhetoric is straight out of Sartor Resartus, and the prominence of the house as a character of the story is the fruition of a trend that is traceable directly to Ann Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (I knew all that gothic reading would come in handy sometime). But two interesting things happen in the first part of the novel: the allegorical presence of the spectre of slavery, and the tension between the old aristocracy and commerce.

I’ll probably write about that at greater length later, but for now I wanted to note my research on the beginnings of Jim Crow in the 1830s. Jimcrowhistory.org is a great source. In the early chapters that take place inside a shop in the Pyncheon house, a vicious little boy just loves to bite the heads off Jim Crow gingerbread men. Since the novel is from 1851, it seems that Jim Crow was pretty damn popular before Jim Crow laws. I stumbled on a nice article on Minstrel shows as a result, and also want to note that Princeton seems to have a nice collection of material. I’m just trying to trace my footsteps here, in case I need to come back. Leave some breadcrumbs on the blog, so to speak.

All this makes me certain that the sort of deep context I’ve been lost in is important to the story of American photographic rhetoric. Funny, but I really didn’t want to spend more than a chapter on it. It’s a fascinating story though, and I can’t ever seem to get past the nineteenth century!