Category: Heroes Notes

Being integrated, in the dictionary sense, means being unified. I think of it as being a little more dynamic— educationally, for instance, being organically interacting. In either sense, integration implies involvement of the whole person, not just the selected parts of him; integration, for instance, of kinds of knowledge (history comes to life in the art of any period); integration of knowledge with thinking— that means holding opinions; and then integration within the whole personality— and that implies holding some unified philosophical view, an attitude toward life. And then there must be the uniting of this personality, this view, with the creative capacities of the person so that his acts and his works and his thinking and his knowledge will be a unity. Such a state of being, curiously enough, invokes the word integrity in its basic sense; being unified, being integrated.

Ben Shahn, from The Shape of Content.

I wish I’d known more about Thomas Bewick when I talked to Joe Viscomi. I did mention his name, and Joe gently corrected me on the pronunciation— it’s pronounced “buick.” There’s a weird confluence going on. I had read The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer a year or two ago, and seemed to recall a reference or two. Then, his woodcut technique showed up in the survey of American book illustration. Now, revisiting Brewer’s book I find some really relevant stuff.

In most ways, Bewick is like the anti-Blake. But like Blake, he was a city dweller. Bewick was from Newcastle, perhaps the fourth largest city in England at that time. He was apprenticed to Ralph Beilby, a prosperous engraver— later becoming a full partner in the thriving commercial engraving firm. Bewick became incredibly famous as an engraver, and people flocked to collect his work after his first major work A General History of Quadrupeds. His engravings were primarily of animal forms, infused with the sort of personification of moral conscience popular in the eighteenth century.

A question central to most of his life’s work is identical to Blake’s concerns: the relationship of art to commerce— or as Blake would put it, “the prolific and the devourer.” In this, Bewick was closer to the eighteenth century sensibility, while Blake foreshadowed the nineteenth. As Brewer puts it, “the frequency with which they addressed ‘the consistency of LITERARY and PHILISOPHICAL with COMMERCIAL PURSUITS’ betrays both the novelty of their claim and their uncertainty of its success” (511). Bewick used animals as an allegory of “the benefits of association, the value of social intercourse in cultivating the self” and became a central figure arguing for “provincial enlightenment”:

Have we forgotten in our hurried and imperfect enumeration of wise worthies— have we forgotten the ‘genius who dwells on the Tyne’ the matchless Bewick? No. His books lie on our parlour, bed-room, dining room, drawing room, study table and are never out of place or time Happy old man! The delight of childhood, manhood, decaying age!— A moral in every tailpiece— a sermon in every vignette.

Growing from children’s books mostly, it seems as if book illustration came of age through Bewick. However, common to the concerns of the 1930s photograph/text combinations, no one really read his moralizing, they just looked at the pretty pictures. They raved about his woodcut images, and either ignored or denigrated the moralizing text. Bewick was the inspiration for Audubon, and his texts did fuel the sort of naturalistic moralizing perhaps most felt in Wordsworth, who adored him. He was a rationalist, and a fan of natural religion that bordered on deism who felt that art must moralize. Blake, had he mentioned him (he didn’t— I checked), would have despised him. Bewick was a shrewd, entrepreneurial rustic who lived in a highly developed city.

The more I look at the history of illustration, the more I admire Blake. He managed to stop the overpowering nature of images, by creating overpowering texts and images. No other early illustrator really even comes close.

Notes on the History of Book Illustration

This information comes from . A History of Book Publishing in the United States: Volume I The Creation of an Industry by John Tebbel. The earliest known copperplate illustration was a frontispiece to Increase Mather’s Blessed Hope from 1701, done by Thomas Emmes of Boston. It also appeared in Cotton Mather’s Ichabod, published in 1702. The first professional engraver in the colonies was Francis Dewing, who started in 1716. After 1722, copperplate printing was common and Benjamin Franklin was credited with producing the first copperplate press. The first notable engraver is argued to be Peter Pelham, an English mezzotint engraver who worked from 1727-1751.

Woodcuts were also featured in many books of the eighteenth century, notably including a 1740 printing of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Franklin produced “the first attempt printed in America to symbolize a political situation” using an illustration in a pamphlet called Plain Truth in 1747. Children’s books began to be illustrated in the mid-eighteenth century, and magazines featured political cartoons. The most prominent producer of cartoons was Paul Revere— a copperplate line engraver. The illustrated children’s books included Robinson Crusoe, released in its first American edition in 1774. In 1776, Astly released the first American sporting book— The Modern Riding Master but the engravings were crude when compared to the children’s books. The first American Mother Goose was printed in 1785.

Woodcuts became the dominant form, after improvements by Thomas Bewick. The most ambitious illustrated work of the eighteenth century was Complete Works of Flavius Josephus, at 792 pages with 60 illustrations, published between 1792-4. A two volume folio edition of the bible with 50 illustrations was published by Thomas in 1791, and the first American editions of the illustrated Encyclopaedia Britannica were produced from 1790-97, with 542 copperplates. However, Rees’s Encyclopedia, in 18 volumes from 1790-97 illustrated by 543 copperplates produced by American artists is said to be when “American book illustration came of age”(174). Lithography was developed in 1796, but did not appear in America until 1818. It didn’t begin to catch on until 1825, and woodcuts were still popular in the mid-nineteenth century.

* I was also looking at some copies of Survey Graphic from 1930-36 today. Woodcuts feature prominantly in many of them. Photographs appear in innovative layouts in 1935 and 1936 issues.

neither

My first edition of An American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor arrived today. I didn’t really need to splurge on this book, but I did. All the copies available in the continental US were $500 plus, but I got a copy from Ireland for $100. The modern version is virtually identical, but there is something about the smell, the yellowness that makes me feel closer to it. The end papers are filled with words from the people photographed, and the scale is jarring compared to the miniaturized version used in the modern copy.

I was reading the fine print, and noticed that Horace Bristol contributed a photograph to it. But more than that, I was struck by the concern over just what this sort of book was supposed to be. I posted my bibliographic essay on the Rosskams here just now, and Rosskam’s thoughts on the subject are still fresh in my mind. Both Lange and Rosskam wanted to sketch out a new category, a sort of none of the above, regarding their integrations of photo and text. This is how Lange and Taylor put it:

This is neither a book of photographs nor an illustrated book, in the traditional sense. Its particular form is the result of our use of techniques in proportions and relations designed to convey understanding easily, clearly, and vividly. We use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field. We adhere to the standards of documentary photography as we have conceived them. Quotations which accompany the photographs report what the person said, not what we think might be their unspoken thoughts. Where there are no people, and no other source is indicated, the quotation comes from people we met in the field.

We show you what is happening in selected regions of limited area. Something is lost by this method, for it fails to show fully the wide extent and the many variations of rural changes which we describe. But we believe that the gain in sharpness of focus reveals better the nature of the changes themselves.

The ripples of You Have Seen Their Faces by Bourke-White and Caldwell are all over this book. There are multiple definitions of intent at work, from 1937 forward, and all these definitions of documentary photography are inherently rhetorical. Though Walker Evans’s photographs are usually taken to be the most “objective” they clearly are not. They are a highly subjective aesthetic reaction, combined with a ravingly subjective text questioning the very existence of objectivity. This compares directly to the “scientific” approach of Lange and Taylor, who realize however carefully they pursue their observations, they cannot contain the entirety of the changes in progress. Rosskam alone used multiple strategies, for multiple opinions, “to convey understanding easily, clearly, and vividly.” Rosskam’s incredible flexibility obsesses me.

Rosskam and Woody Guthrie

I spent most of the afternoon writing a bibliographic essay as a sample for my comp classes. I did it on the Rosskams, and as soon as I get the works cited page together I’ll post it. I’ve told the students that their survey need only be 3-4 pages, but of course I couldn’t survey these folks in less than six. At least it beats the 12 page bibliographic essay I used on views of the religious experience from someone else last semester!

Along the way, I discovered some other stuff that I wanted to preserve here, though they didn’t really factor into my essay. Searching the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress for “Rosskam” turned up a letter from Alan Lomax to Woody Guthrie recommending Edwin Rosskam as a good person to handle his autobiography. Which in turn, lead me to a short letter from Guthrie to Lomax which is permeated with the pragmatic point of view. Here’s a transcription of the part that got to me, as best as I can read the image:

I actually believe that most of us under all hard times did all sorts of wars and hungry spells have got just about the same idea about it all before we read a book or a newspaper and the thing for you to deliver and portray is what your head registers and what your ears hear and your nose smells and what your lips eat and when you disagree with books and papers or talk sermons you ought to find yourself a successful way of putting what you honestly believe into your shows. If you don’t like murder then don’t work for it and if you hate war then don’t show for it.

Of course, after I transcribed it, I found a transcription on the same LOC site. However, I think my reading of “lips eat” makes more sense than their transcription of “likes sat.”

But dammit Worldcat is down and I can’t figure out if Rosskam handled Guthrie’s autobiography. Checking the regular library catalogue, Bound for Glory was published by EP Dutton in 1943, so that means that chances are he didn’t&#8212 wrong publisher. Our library has a first edition though, I’ll have to check it out.

Never Plan Ahead

I’ve always made it a practice to read ahead but planning ahead has never worked. Classes went really well this morning. I started yesterday trying to sketch out what readings I was going to give and when, but I gave up. I’m glad I did. Unlike the massive crop of nursing students and jocks I had last time, this time I actually have some bona-fide English, Art, and Rhetoric candidates! I can use literature without feeling like I’m signing to the deaf. While it’s a fairly small percentage, it’s enough to shift the syllabus a little more that way. I’ve also got a dyslexic student, and one with some sort of motor function problem. New challenges. I love it.

I made the rounds to discuss my project with some friends/experts. Dr. Levernier, the 18c Americanist, and Dr. Murphy, the Modernist, were thrilled that I’m coming over to their team. Dr. Murphy sits on some NEH committees, and he told me that my project has good funding potential in the current research climate. Dr. Levernier, who also specializes in African American lit hinted at some great leads regarding the Centennial Exposition of 1876, and the way that black people were represented to the public in the later 19th century. I set up a meeting with him for Thursday.

I went by to talk to Dr. Parins, the Victorianist and 19th century Native American specialist, and he liked the project as well. He suggested that I talk to Dr. Littlefield, the 20th century Native specialist and I am glad I did. Another thread comes together. The Omaha Exposition of 1898 sounds like a real side-show, deeply documented by another photographer/ethnographer F. A. Rinehart. The parade of “Expositions” in the US from 1876-1916 is an interesting bridge from the spectacle of the minstrel shows, to the public relations ministry of the 20th century. Of course, there are a million splinters to this to get lost in but it seems to me that the “entertainment value” of the other, be they an ethnic other or an economic other walks hand in hand with these developments. I get the feeling that I’ll be doing primarily 19th century stuff for a while, but since there is a great Native American archive here, I want to take advantage of it.

One thing I want to figure out is the Native response to Roosevelt’s New Deal. According to Dr. Littlefield, almost all Native American presses were bankrupted and shut down in the 30s. There are a few things available though, I’ll just have to dig deep for them. One book on the sharecropper’s plight was published by the University of Oklahoma press in 1938; I ran across that a while ago. But it will take some deep digging to figure out what the real effect of the depression was on Native American peoples.

After all that, I went to my Queer Theory class. It felt so weird, after all the other introductions to come out and say: “Hi, I’m Jeff and I’m straight.” Everyone else had a declaration of one sort or another, so I felt like I should declare my sexuality. It bolstered the confidence of the only other straight person in the room to go ahead and admit it too. The role reversal involved was just hilarious. This class is perhaps only tangential to my other research, but I wanted to read more of the theory since it does deal with marginalized people. Gender issues are definitely in play in the modern re-issues of some classic documentary books. Dr. Barb and I were talking about the problem of writing histories after the class. She made the observation that though you have to use narrative threads to weave histories, it is impossible to stitch in another thread after a history is written to maintain a sense of completeness.

I can tell this is going to be a really fun semester, already! Having a good crop of students to experiment on will help keep my spirits up. But at this stage, I really can’t plan ahead. There are too many possible discoveries out there to have much of a clue.

Dealing with complexity

I’ve been playing with Inspiration 7 software. They use it at our writing center for clustering activities. The demo is free and fully functional, and I think I’m going to buy it. It is much easier than using a conventional drawing program for visually mapping ideas. The intersecting network of photographers and writers in America in the nineteenth century is difficult to sort out, and looking at it like a map helps me.

More Roots

Received Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War today, as well as Jame’s Guimond’s American Photography and the American Dream. But the real gem was Land of the Free by Archibald Macleish— what a score! This book is incredible, and markedly different from all the others. It is a long poem, with groups of lines attached to photographs from different sources. It has a somber tone, and lacks the political fervor of Richard Wright’s book or the blatant optimism of Sherwood Anderson’s. But I’m still too involved in the nineteenth century aspects to go too far into it as yet.

I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept thinking of Byron. Though I got sick of studying the permutations, Byron did create the popular notion of the “hero.” His works were printed in at least 100 separate editions in America when he was alive. Of course, he died in 1824 and doesn’t seem to be a profound influence on most of the American progressive thinkers of the 1830s, that is, unless you count a reaction against Byronmania. Andrew Jackson could have been a Byronic hero, perhaps, but he wasn’t really smart enough— but he certainly was flawed enough. Emerson skipped over the late romantics, diving directly into Wordsworth and Coleridge as models. But Emerson’s involvement with Swedenborg brings out yet another interesting road to chase down— apocalyptic rhetoric.

A popular cult of the 1830s was founded around William Miller, who predicted the world was going to come to an end in 1843. It lies at the roots of the modern day Seventh Day Adventists, but in the 1830s it attracted a lot of members from the Abolitionist movement. Looking at a study of Millerite rhetoric, there is a strong current of vox populi rhetoric. Swedenborg was an apocalyptic mystic type too, but his view of history is different, more positive— and was much more of a foundational figure in Emerson’s cheerleading positivist rhetoric.

What is really fascinating is the connection of Swedenborg with Mesmerism. Holgrave, the daguerreotypist in The House of the Seven Gables was a mesmerist before he became a photographer… so there are currents of Swedenborgism to go along with the Carlyle style philosophical view in Hawthorne’s depiction of the attitude of an early photographer.

Just more breadcrumbs to scatter along the path, along with the facts that Andrew Jackson was the first US president born in a log cabin, and that Martin Van Buren, his stooge who was president when photography entered the United States, was the first president to actually be born in the USA.

More Connective Notes

Henry Crabbe Robinson’s diary has observations on Thomas Carlyle in 1832. Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry and journeyed to Europe in 1833. He met Carlyle, Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge, and many others. According to Crabbe Robinson, Landor thought that William Blake was the greatest English poet of all time. This makes it remotely possible that Emerson was exposed to Blake’s work, though to my knowledge he never mentioned it. Emerson wrote several reminisces on Carlyle based on his own diaries in English Traits, published in 1856.

Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus was first published serially from November 1833 to August 1834, in Fraser’s Magazine, published privately for an edition of 58. An introduction to an 1899 edition of Emerson’s works noted the “Sartor” characteristics to the writing style of Emerson’s 1833 journal; obviously, Carlyle shared Sartor Resartus with Emerson before it was published. The first public edition of the book was an American one, which included an unaccredited preface by Emerson in 1836. A second American edition followed in 1837, before the first English edition in 1838.

Carlyle’s lectures on Heroes and Hero Worship occurred in 1840. They were issued in book form in 1841, 1842, and 1846. Margaret Fuller praised Carlyle in an 1841 edition of The Dial. Crabbe Robinson has reminisces of Emerson from 1848, from his second visit to Europe. In 1850, Emerson published Representative Men in 1850, coincident with Matthew Brady’s Illustrious Americans. Emerson’s work is based on a series of lectures from 1845-46; Brady began collecting portraits of celebrities in 1844.

Don’t mind me. . . . I just had to write this down before I got confused. . . . I’m reading too many things at once!

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!