From Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings
Interview: “The Mind and Heart of Margaret Fuller: Three Editors on Assembling the Definitive Edition of a Singular American Voice” (Library of America)
“Fuller as a Conversationalist, Feminist, Journalist, Social & Literary Critic” (The Walden Woods Project)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Our City Charities,” Margaret Fuller
• “Tyrants of the Shop,” Fanny Fern
• “The Apostate,” Jack London
• “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” Stephen Crane
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Margaret Fuller: Collected WritingsSummer on the Lakes, in 1843 | Woman in the Nineteenth Century | Essays, Journalism, Journals, Letters
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| “Turtle Bay, East River, N.Y. 1853.” Drawn by Benson John Lossing (1813–1891) and printed for the 1858 edition of D. T. Valentine’s Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (Courtesy New York Public Library). When Margaret Fuller first arrived in New York at the end of 1844, she moved in with Horace Greeley, his wife, and their infant son at their home in Turtle Bay and soon wrote to a friend back in Boston: “On both sides of the house are beautiful trees, standing fair, full-grown, and clear. Passing through a wide hall, you come out upon a piazza stretching the whole length of the house, where one can walk in all weathers; and thence, by a step or two, on a lawn, with picturesque masses of rocks, shrubs, and trees, overlooking the East River. Gravel-paths lead, by several turns, down the steep bank to the water’s edge, where, round the rocky point, a small bay curves, in which boats are lying; and, owing to the currents and the set of the tide, the sails glide sidelong, seeming to greet the house as they sweep by.” |
Fuller had just completed twenty months as the literary editor for the New-York Tribune, for which she wrote some 250 reviews and articles. Two years earlier, in September 1844, the Tribune’s publisher and editor, Horace Greeley, traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to convince her to take the job, and she arrived in Manhattan in November and became the only woman on the staff.
Halfway through her first year on the job, she received a letter from James Freeman Clarke, a friend back in Cambridge, who had been reading her articles regularly. “They seem to me to be better written than anything of yours I have read. There is more ease, grace, freedom and point to them. . . . I am extremely glad that you have such an excellent organ through which to speak to the public.” Fuller responded with gratitude:
I was pleased with your sympathy about The Tribune. I do not find much among my old friends. They think I ought to produce something excellent, while I am well content for the present to aid in the great work of mutual education in this way. I never regarded literature merely as a collection of exquisite products, but as a means of mutual interpretation. Feeling that many are reached and in some degree aided the thoughts of every day seem worth noting, though in a form that does not inspire me.Among her “old friends” who seemed to have doubts about her career move was Ralph Waldo Emerson, her collaborator and mentor while she was editor of The Dial, the short-lived but influential periodical of the Transcendentalists. Emerson regarded the penny press with skepticism—as a distracting trend robbing the world of artists. In 1838, he complained that William Cullen Bryant, who had become the editor of the New-York Evening Post, was wasting his talents: “He suffers, I think, manifestly, from want of culture, has no time for books or thoughts but must welter all day in the foaming foolishness of newspapers.”
Emerson’s attitudes toward the Tribune were more complicated, however. Not only was Greeley a close friend, but the newspaper heavily promoted Emerson’s essays and lectures and often reprinted or discussed items originally published in The Dial. Greeley, for his part, regarded The Dial as “the most original and thoughtful periodical ever published in this country,” and in the years after the journal folded in April 1844, he hired or published many of its contributors. To Emerson, the Tribune at its best might aspire to his ideal of the journalistic enterprise. “That is the theory of the newspaper—to supersede official by intellectual influence,” he later wrote, but all too often “theory” in the press gave way to partisanship, sensationalism, and hack writing.
In fact, Emerson had initially helped both Fuller and her brother-in-law William Ellery Channing get their positions at the Tribune. Yet, in 1845, after hearing that Channing had had a rough start at the paper, Emerson groused,
Our landscape at present mourns its poet, for Ellery , as you know, struggles as he can with certain hateful elements in the Tribune in N.Y. and seems really to have resisted a crisis of spleen , & to have made up his mind to much endurance. . . . The Tribune office may be good treatment for some of his local distempers, but it seems a very poor use to put a wise man & a genius, to. Is it any better with Margaret? The muses have feet, to be sure, but it is an odd arrangement that selects them for the treadmill.The following year he wrote about Fuller to Thomas Carlyle, “This employment was made acceptable to her by good pay, great local and personal conveniences of all kinds, and unbounded confidence and respect from Greeley himself. . . . [Her] work as critic of all new books, critics of the drama, of music; and good arts in New York, has been honorable to her. Still this employment is not satisfactory to me.”
During her first year at the Tribune, Fuller lived with the Greeleys—Horace, his wife, and their infant son—in their Turtle Bay home, about three miles north of the downtown area. After her arrival, in March 1845, she wrote to her brother:
As to a home the place where we live is old and dilapidated but in a situation of great natural loveliness. When there, I am perfectly secluded, yet every one I wish to see comes to see me, and I can get to the centre of the city in half an hour. . . . My room is delightful; how I wish you could sit at its window with me and see the sails glide by!As Megan Marshall writes in her biography of Fuller: “The trek from Turtle Bay to the New-York Tribune offices was a long one, and Margaret sometimes preferred to write at home when reviewing books. But her material was the city itself, and points beyond. Even so slight an incident as a wealthy woman’s officious treatment of an Irish boy on an East River ferry could make a column.” That article, “Prevalent Idea That Politeness Is Too Great a Luxury to Be Given to the Poor,” is reprinted below as our Story of the Week selection.
As to the public part; that is entirely satisfactory. I do just as I please, and as much or little as I please, and the Editors express themselves perfectly satisfied, and others say that my pieces tell to a degree I could not expect. I think, too, I shall do better and better. I am truly interested in this great field which opens before me and it is pleasant to be sure of a chance at half a hundred thousand readers.
Mr Greeley I like, nay more, love. He is, in his habits, a slattern and plebeian, and in his heart, a nobleman. His abilities, in his own way, are great. He believes in mine to a surprizing extent. We are true friends.
“While her essays in The Dial are more elaborate and ambitious,” Greeley wrote two years after Fuller’s death, “her reviews in the Tribune are far better adapted to win the favor and sway the judgment of the great majority of readers. But, one characteristic of her writings I feel bound to commend,—their absolute truthfulness. She never asked how this would sound, nor whether that would do, nor what would be the effect of saying anything; but simply, ‘Is it the truth? Is it such as the public should know?’ And if her judgment answered, ‘Yes,’ she uttered it; no matter what turmoil it might excite, nor what odium it might draw down on her own head.”
Prevalent Idea That Politeness Is Too Great a Luxury to Be Given to the Poor
A few days ago, a lady, crossing in one of the ferry boats that ply from this city, saw a young boy, poorly dressed, sitting with an infant in his arms on one of the benches. She observed that the child looked sickly and coughed. This, as the day was raw, made her anxious in its behalf, and she went to the boy and asked whether he was alone there with the baby, and if he did not think the cold breeze dangerous for it. He replied that he was sent out with the child to take care of it, and that his father said the fresh air from the water would do it good.
While he made this simple answer, a number of persons had collected around to listen, and one of them, a well-dressed woman, addressed the boy in a string of such questions and remarks as these:
“What is your name? Where do you live? Are you telling us the truth? It’s a shame to have that baby out in such weather; you’ll be the death of it. (To the bystanders:) I would go and see his mother and tell her about it, if I was sure he had told us the truth about where he lived. How do you expect to get back? Here, (in the rudest voice,) somebody says you have not told the truth as to where you live.”
The child, whose only offence consisted in taking care of the little one in public, and answering when he was spoken to, began to shed tears at the accusations thus grossly preferred against him. The bystanders stared at both; but among them all there was not one with sufficiently clear notions of propriety and moral energy to say to this impudent questioner, “ Woman! do you suppose, because you wear a handsome shawl, and that boy a patched jacket, that you have any right to speak to him at all, unless he wishes it, far less to prefer against him those rude accusations. Your vulgarity is unendurable; leave the place or alter your manner.”
Many such instances have we seen of insolent rudeness or more insolent affability founded on no apparent grounds, except an apparent difference in pecuniary position, for no one can suppose in such cases the offending party has really enjoyed the benefit of refined education and society, but all present let them pass as matters of course. It was sad to see how the poor would endure—mortifying to see how the purse-proud dared offend. An excellent man who was, in his early years, a missionary to the poor, used to speak afterwards with great shame of the manner in which he had conducted himself towards them.—“When I recollect,” said he, “the freedom with which I entered their houses, inquired into all their affairs, commented on their conduct and disputed their statements I wonder I was never horse whipped and feel that I ought to have been; it would have done me good, for I needed as severe a lesson on the universal obligations of politeness in its only genuine form of respect for man as man, and delicate sympathy with each in his peculiar position.”
Charles Lamb, who was indeed worthy to be called a human being from those refined sympathies, said, “You call him a gentleman: does his washer woman find him so?” We may say, if she did so, she found him a man, neither treating her with vulgar abruptness, nor giving himself airs of condescending liveliness, but treating her with that genuine respect which a feeling of equality inspires.
To doubt the veracity of another is an insult which in most civilized communities must in the so-called higher classes be atoned for by blood, but, in those same communities, the same men will, with the utmost lightness, doubt the truth of one who wears a ragged coat, and thus do all they can to injure and degrade him by assailing his self-respect, and breaking the feeling of personal honor—a wound to which hurts a man as a wound to its bark does a tree.
Then how rudely are favors conferred, just as a bone is thrown to a dog. A gentleman indeed will not do that without accompanying signs of sympathy and regard. Just as this woman said, “If you have told the truth I will go and see your mother,” are many acts performed on which the actors pride themselves as kind and charitable.
All men might learn from the French in these matters. That people, whatever be their faults, are really well-bred, and many acts might be quoted from their romantic annals, where gifts were given from rich to poor with a graceful courtesy, equally honorable and delightful to the giver and the receiver.
In Catholic countries there is more courtesy, for charity is there a duty, and must be done for God’s sake; there is less room for a man to give himself the Pharisaical tone about it. A rich man is not so surprised to find himself in contact with a poor one; nor is the custom of kneeling on the open pavement, the silk robe close to the beggar’s rags, without profit. The separation by pews, even on the day when all meet nearest, is as bad for the manners as the soul.
Blessed be he or she who has passed through this world, not only with an open purse and willingness to render the aid of mere outward benefits, but with an open eye and open heart, ready to cheer the downcast, and enlighten the dull by words of comfort and looks of love. The wayside charities are the most valuable both as to sustaining hope and diffusing knowledge, and none can render them who has not an expansive nature, a heart alive to affection, and some true notion, however imperfectly developed, of the nature of human brotherhood.
Such an one can never sauce the given meat with taunts, freeze the bread by a cold glance of doubt, or plunge the man who asked for his hand deeper back into the mud by any kind of rudeness.
In the little instance with which we begun, no help was asked, unless by the sight of the timid little boy’s old jacket. But the license which this seemed to the well-clothed woman to give to rudeness was so characteristic of a deep fault now existing, that a volume of comments might follow and a host of anecdotes be drawn from almost any one’s experience in exposition of it. Those few words, perhaps, may awaken thought in those who have drawn tears from others’ eyes through an ignorance brutal, but not hopelessly so, if they are willing to rise above it. *
Originally published in the May 31, 1845, issue of the New-York Tribune.