In 1842 New York City, Walt Whitman was the twenty-two-year-old editor of the Aurora. He was just about to publish a temperance novel, Franklin Evans, and he would begin work on the follow-up, The Madman, only a fragment of which he ever published, in January 1843. His short fiction, poetry, and editorials were being published in newspapers all over New York City. He already had a sense of himself as a famous author and was a ruthless self-promoter, but his writing was overwrought, sentimental, and derivative. Whitman himself called Franklin Evans “damned rot—rot of the worst sort” (Traubel 93). Indeed, the most striking thing about the 1842 Whitman is just how average he was.
Only thirteen years later, Whitman would become the American poet, the one who abandons the strictures of classical form and meter for long lines of free verse, the creator of a literature distinctly American in Leaves of Grass. These poems comprise an important historical map of a century that saw mass immigration, industrialization, enormous technological advances, and a Civil War that tore the country in two. Whitman documented slavery before, and after, the amendment that abolished it; and he memorialized Abraham Lincoln after his assassination. Whitman wrote that Leaves of Grass “arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York . . . absorbing a million people . . . with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equaled” (Walt Whitman’s America 83).
How did the average Whitman of 1842 become the genius Whitman of 1855? Of course this is a question without a real answer, and Whitman’s trajectory as a writer, and his genius, owe us no explanation. Thirteen years of writing is a lot of time for a writer to develop, and yet I can’t help but wonder at the gap. The quality of his writing is not only different in technique but in scope and understanding. The broad impetus for Speakers of the Dead was to imagine what might have happened to change Walter Whitman the journalist and temperance novelist into Walt Whitman, the American poet.
Young Walt
Walt Whitman left home in 1831 when he was only twelve years old to work for the Long Island Patriot. The editor of the paper, Samuel E. Clement, was “a tall, hawk-nosed Quaker of Southern antecedents who walked the village lanes in long-tailed blue coat with gilt buttons and a leghorn hat” (Kaplan 75). Whitman admired Clement, and “went along for the ride and for the company when the editor drove out to Bushwick and New Lots delivering papers to country subscribers.” It is easy to imagine how Whitman might have viewed Clement as a father figure—his own relationship with his father was strained, and he was living away from home for the first time.
So when Clement was arrested for digging up the body of Walt’s spiritual mentor, the Quaker prophet Elias Hicks, Whitman was shocked. Samuel Clement and the noted sculptor John Henri Browere made a plaster cast of the corpse’s head and face. The plan was to sell busts made from the cast to Hicks’s admirers, a venture that would have made them hundreds of dollars had they not been caught. So affected was Whitman by the grave robbery that he wrote “a newspaper article about the incident in the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1857, included both prose and pictorial portraits of Hicks in November Boughs, and perhaps reworked his adolescent, gruesome experience in the surreal poem ‘The Sleepers’” (A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman 155):
A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the coffin,
It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is blank here, for reasons.
(It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.)
Whitman’s experience with grave robbing turned out to be a pivotal moment in the evolution of Speakers of the Dead. This is when I first began to think about Whitman as a person instead of “the poet.” The fact that he came face-to-face with grave robbing at so early an age would undoubtedly shape his identity, and might be one way of explaining the theme of death that is present in Leaves of Grass. And, on a more practical note for my own writing, it meant that a young Whitman would have certainly been aware of the resurrection men.
Resurrection Men
With no legal means of acquiring cadavers, medical students and their instructors had to rely on the illegal body trade run by resurrection men. These businessmen would troll the obituaries, then dig up the recently deceased and sell them to medical schools for anatomical dissection. Stealing a body was illegal, but “at $5 to $25 per body, grave robbery was too lucrative to resist: a skilled journeyman in the mid-1820s might only earn $20 to $25 for an entire week’s work. And when body snatchers were caught, the statutory [five-year prison sentence] was rarely enforced” (Sappol 113–14). At a time when jobs were scarce and the demand for cadavers high, body snatching became a legitimate career choice.
The year 1843 was an exciting and frustrating time in the medical field: Anatomical dissection had opened the door for new discoveries and possible cures, but those in the medical profession had a serious PR problem. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pranks involving body parts were common. Students courted disaster by throwing pieces of their dissections at visitors, displaying severed limbs in windows, or taking bodies or body parts home” (Sappol 84, 104). Indeed, an entire collection of photographs exists in which medical students prank the bodies. This, along with the religious belief that dissection prevented resurrection, made it almost impossible for doctors and medical students to win public support for a legal cadaver supply. Riots and medical-school mobs became commonplace, and human dissection a dangerous enterprise. Legislation called the Bone Bill would give the medical community a way to procure these bodies, but the bill would not pass until 1854.
Elizabeth Blackwell
My research into the illegal body trade and the importance of anatomical dissection led me to Elizabeth Blackwell. In 1847, when women did not study medicine, Blackwell became a student at Geneva Medical College in upstate New York after the other 150 medical students, who believed the application was a joke, voted to accept her. Her interest in becoming a doctor came from watching a close friend die from a painful disease. Blackwell came to believe that women patients would benefit from a woman doctor. After graduating from Geneva in 1849, Blackwell moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a surgeon. There, while treating an infant with ophthalmia neonatorum, she lost her sight in one eye when some of the contaminated solution squirted in her eye. Blackwell returned to New York City, where she opened her own clinic. Her sister, Emily, along with Marie Zakrzewska, both MDs, joined her in 1857 to help run her newly established New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.
Blackwell’s appearance in Speakers of the Dead imagines a time before she attended Geneva Medical College. The Women’s Medical College of Manhattan is my creation, as are its founders, Abraham and Lena Stowe. It seemed a good way to bring Elizabeth to New York City in 1843 (when she was actually in Cincinnati) and have her rub shoulders with Walt. The Stowes’ work on behalf of women in the novel also seems a good way to represent the real work both men and women did at the time on behalf of women’s rights. Blackwell’s story, as far as I can tell, has not yet been adequately told, and I make no claim to have done so here. I only hope that readers will be persuaded to learn more about her life and work after reading this novel.
Mary Rogers
Walt Whitman spent much of the 1840s jumping from newspaper job to newspaper job, with a few failed teaching jobs in between. He had a reputation for being difficult, and he was often walking the streets of the Bowery when he should have been typesetting at the printing press. Not only would Whitman have reported on body snatching and anatomical dissection, but he also would have known about the Cigar Girl Murder.
In his book The Beautiful Cigar Girl, Daniel Stashower writes that the Mary Rogers murder “became a catalyst for sweeping change” in 1840s New York City (4). Law enforcement was exposed as inadequate. The sensational details gave rise to sensationalism. And murder became “a bankable commodity” (5). Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the murder in a desperate attempt to restart his career. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was his fictional attempt to solve the real murder of Mary Rogers. The problem for Poe was that, by the time he published the trilogy of stories, new theories about the death of Rogers had emerged, rendering Poe’s own theories useless.
A novel about 1843 New York City cannot ignore the impact of the Mary Rogers murder. Rogers’s death exposed a city mired in corruption, power plays, and incompetence. Isaiah Rynders was a Tammany Hall boss who manipulated the truth to his benefit, who really could start and stop a mob, and who was a middleman between the upper and lower classes. James Gordon Bennett used the Mary Rogers case to further his own career and to promote the New York Herald, and he was involved in a committee of safety organized to find Mary Rogers’s murderer. The medical establishment was condemned when the rumor emerged that Rogers died from a botched abortion. And the public was dragged through it all: From the moment the body washed up on the banks of the Hudson River, through the various theories of her death and the sensationalist reporting, to the case’s ambiguous conclusion, New Yorkers watched the drama unfold.
Speakers of the Dead is first and foremost a mystery novel, and I have played fast and loose with the details in service of the genre. One big change I made for the sake of the novel’s chronology is to set the novel in 1843. Whitman enthusiasts will recognize, for example, that Whitman worked at the Aurora in spring 1842 and not winter 1843. That said, I have tried to be as accurate as possible within this fictional framework, and while I have leaned on a lot of secondary sources to create this story, the mistakes are mine.
J. Aaron Sanders
Columbus, GA