Introduction

In deliberately taking his stand at the center of his age and entering into the “essences of the real things,” Whitman had knowingly embraced the whole of America’s growing industrial civilization; and images of a thriving urban economy, of mechanics and laborers, flicker throughout the early editions of Leaves of Grass. At times—especially in the journalism of the 1850s and 1860s—Whitman could sound like the cheeriest of boosters, waxing prosaic over the “immense variety of manufactures, works, foundries, and other branches of useful art and trade carried on in the limits of our expansive and thriving city.” Doorknobs, cups and saucers, dishes, pitchers, doorplates, piano keys, clock faces—nothing was too humble for Whitman to celebrate.¹ This was the Whitman who read “Song of the Exposition” at the fortieth annual Exhibition of the American Institute in 1871, celebrating the arrival of the new muse on American shores with a humor his readers often overlook: “Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay, / She’s here, installed amid the kitchen ware!”²

For Whitman, as for many in the late nineteenth century, the new force of mechanization was identified optimistically with the spirit of national progress. Senator Orville H. Piatt, for example, speaking at the 1892 Patent Centennial Celebration in Washington challenged his audience to a thought experiment: “Try to imagine what our social, financial, educational, and commercial condition would be with an absolute ignorance of how steam and electricity can be used in the daily production of things for our sustenance and comfort; with an absolute ignorance of the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, the modern printing press, and the machinery in common daily use.”³ Thus was the machine incorporated into an already existing religious tradition that gave people dominion over nature: the exploitation of “crude matter” to achieve greater comfort was part of a providential plan that furthered the individual’s power.⁴

This celebration of America’s growing wealth and of a newly arising technological civilization was part of a middle-class culture that thrived on a traffic in representations and replications of every possible sort. The popular culture in America was rapidly becoming, after the Civil War, at once a culture of consumption and a culture of spectatorship. Richard Altick in The Shows of London (1978) details the extraordinary variety of spectacles that caught the fascinated eye of the British public, and many of these had a second life across the Atlantic, or were imitated and adapted for American consumption. During the 1870s and 1880s spectator entertainment grew from its rudimentary pre-Civil War forms into more and more elaborate spectacles: circuses, minstrel shows, vaudeville, light musicals, sports, road shows. Barnum was of course the great innovator in such eclectic entertainments, and he featured during the mid-century the usual jugglers and gypsies, giants and dwarfs, but also ventriloquists and automatons, and other forms that evinced the growing taste for representations—“dioramas, panoramas, models of Niagara, Dublin, Paris and Jerusalem,” as the promotional literature put it.⁵

The popular theater, too, in the last decades of the century catered increasingly to a taste for lifelike imitations that floated easily over the border between life and art. It was an excess of such theatrical representations—which might include everything from real food eaten on stage to real horses used to enact battle scenes—that prompted the critic William Thayer to argue in 1894 that the sensationalism of the theater had dulled the viewer’s imagination, a symptom of the same disease—“epidermism”—Thayer saw manifest in the taste for realism in literature.⁶

But the disease was already far advanced in American culture, and growing ever stronger, as the practice of imitation supplied the matrix for cultural forms in virtually every sphere. The climax of this aesthetic of replication—though by no means the end of it—was, one might say, the whole of the Chicago Exposition of 1893. The fair was divided into two apparently different geographical areas: on the one hand, a Midway Plaisance, with shows and rides, pleasures and excitements; and on the other, the hugely impressive great Court of Honor, an environmental stage worthy of a deMille extravaganza on the Roman Empire. (Of the latter, Louis Sullivan wrote, “Thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and false.”)⁷ John Cawelti has justly seen in the Court a monument to elite taste and in the Midway the messy vitality of popular culture, with the distance between the two an anticipation of the split that would characterize modern society.⁸ Yet both the popular Mid way and the elite Court shared at bottom a similar aesthetic of replication: in the official exposition there were not only the imitation palaces made out of ephemeral staff, but also replicas of home-grown structures: a reproduction of St. Augustine’s Fort Marion offered by the state of Florida, for example, and a replica of the clock tower on Independence Hall—together with the actual Liberty Bell—displayed by Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, moored at the Lake Front were replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Marίa, built in Spanish naval yards. As for the Midway, it featured replicas of German and Turkish villages, a street in Cairo (with dancers), a Moorish palace, a Viennese cafe, villages from Algeria, Tunisia, Austria, and Dahomey, a Japanese bazaar, etc., with people from these places as “actors.”⁹

And where the Columbia Exposition’s Midway left off, amusement parks and the cinema were soon ready to take over. Coney Island, for example, which endured long into the twentieth century, originated in the same late nineteenth-century industrial aesthetic of replication, offering not only mechanized rides and thrills, but also a series of simulated disasters—the Fall of Pompeii, the eruption of Mount Pelée, the Johnstown and Galveston Floods, not to mention a burning four-story building that was repeatedly set ablaze and extinguished.¹⁰ The cinema, itself a product of the late Victorian imagination, would soon make those actual repetitions unnecessary. But one of the initial “improvements” on the cinema—Hale’s Tours—suggests that movies were not enough, or at least that the appetite for replication knew no limits. Hale combined moving pictures with a moving audience in a bizarre hybrid that simulated movement through a landscape via a pseudo-railway: rocking platforms, circulating air, clicking track sounds, and front and rear scenic projections convinced Hale (as he tried to convince his audience) that “it is impossible not to imagine that you are actually on the train.”¹¹ But we surely miss the point of Hale’s Tours if we see them as simply substitutes for an audience that could not afford train travel; even for the experienced traveler there was the primary marvel of the recreated experience.

One dominant mode in the popular culture in the late nineteenth century was thus the tendency to enclose reality in manageable forms, to contain it within a theatrical space, an enclosed exposition or recreational space, or within the space of the picture frame. If the world outside the frame was beyond control, the world inside of it could at least offer the illusion of mastery and comprehension. And on a more elementary aesthetic level, the replica, with its pleasure of matching real thing and facsimile, simply fascinated the age. Nothing better illustrates this characteristic pleasure in replication than the Victorian parlor, with its artifical flowers and marble fruit; and—to anticipate a later chapter—nothing was more at home in the Victorian parlor than the stereograph collection, inevitably including an abundance of still-life images.¹²

The pervasive growth of the spectatorial habit in America is adroitly suggested by William Dean Howells in A Hazard of New Fortunes, when he shows us the voyeuristic excitement of riding on the New York elevated, in which the rider gains a “fleeting intimacy” with the urban dweller in the apartments seen from the traveling car. “March said it was better than the theater, of which it reminded him. . . . W hat suggestion! what drama! what infinite interest!”¹³ Where Whitman, nearly half a century earlier, had sought connection with his fellow New Yorker—whether on omnibus or ferry or pavement—Howells’s March delights in the more distanced quality of representation; it is like the theater, only better.

The theatricalizing of experience that Howells epitomizes in his character harmonized fully with a consumer culture that in other respects was offering imitations of every kind in place of the real thing. For this was the triumph of the machine—that in its capacity to produce imitations it could supply everything from entertainment to necessities in virtually unlimited quantities. But to the more thoughtful observers of change, it was precisely the machine’s capacity to imitate that raised the knottiest issues. And the question first posed by industrial technology in the nineteenth century would become the question we are still trying to answer: how has the machine, with its power to produce replicas and reproductions, altered our culture? Has it, for example, degraded the quality of civilization by flooding our world with sham things? Or has it enlarged and democratized the base of culture? That question was debated during the years following the Civil War in terms, especially, of the ubiquitous chromolithograph, which became a symbol of the new culture. The whole problem of the cheap art reproduction sums up a good deal of the class conflict surrounding the advent of a culture of imitation and is worth a closer look.

Improving aesthetically with a rapidly advancing technology, the chromos, as they were called, entered the home as premiums offered by salesmen, or through direct purchase, or through the agencies of galleries, museums, religious, and fraternal organizations. They offered images drawn from a huge range of subject matter—allegories of childhood, manhood, and old age, of marriage and bachelorhood, historic battles and heroes, steamboats and railroads, urban buildings and street scenes, sublime landscapes, fruit, vegetables, meat, flowers and babies, horses and deer and fish, Beethoven, Washington, and Yankee Doodle.¹⁴

The problem with the chromos was not just that they were cheap and therefore widely available; it was that the reproductions could be of quite good quality, and the better they were, the more they challenged the elite classes. The socially aspiring middle-class reader had an ally in the Beecher sisters, who in The American Woman’s Home advised him or her of the charms of reproductions “of the best class”—not only chromos, but plaster statuettes as well, “providing always that they are selected with discrimination and taste.”¹⁵ And publishers often guaranteed the accuracy of a reproduction, happily oblivious to the paradoxes they were courting, as when a chromo, available in two sizes ($5 and $20) was promised to be “certified ... a facsimile of the original.”¹⁶ So good was the quality that one observer at the mechanics’ exhibition stood amazed before a display of chromo wonders “which challenged the observer to tell how they differed from the original paintings at their side.”¹⁷ But to others, that was just the problem: to the degree that the chromos (and other kinds of reproductions) erased the difference between the original and the reproduction, they called into question some of the fundamental values of cultural entitlement.

To champions of an egalitarian culture, the chromos epitomized the goal of a heritage accessible to all. As James Parton argued in The Atlantic, they harmonized well with “the special work of America at the present time, which is not to create, but to diffuse; not to produce literature, but to distribute the spelling book.”¹⁸ But just because of their democratizing tendency, the chromos also represented, to more conservative critics, the chiefest evil, the erosion of barriers between the classes. The most consistent voice here was that of E. L. Godkin, editor of The Nation, who argued that the copy of a painting destroyed the unique qualities of the original and led to a distorted appreciation of art.¹⁹ The society that the British-born Godkin saw shaping up around him was a “pseudo-culture,” lacking in moral and mental discipline, a society brought about by the rapid acquisition of wealth. To Godkin the chromo was part of a series of debasements of culture—along with lyceum lectures, magazines, and newspapers—all of which “diffused through the community a kind of smattering of all sorts of knowledge, a taste for ‘art’—that is a desire to see and own pictures—which, taken together, pass with a large body of slenderly-equipped persons as ‘culture.’” Godkin campaigned against the chromo for years, but what confirmed his view of the age and brought about this definitive attack was the scandalous Beecher affair (the charismatic minister was tried for adultery but later acquitted) which, Beecher being a champion of egalitarian culture, Godkin took as an epitome of what he christened the “chromo-civilization.”²⁰

The division within the culture over the value of the chromo was, typically, evident in the singular person of Mark Twain, who in this, as in so much else, mirrored the popular taste. In Connecticut Yankee, for example, Hank Morgan surveys his sparsely furnished sixth-century apartment and feels acutely the lack of decoration: “It made me homesick to look around over this proud and gaudy but heartless barrenness and remember that in our house in East Hartford, all unpretending as it was, you couldn’t go into a room but you would find an insurance chromo, or at least a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home over the door; and in the parlor we had nine.”²¹ Twain’s irony, confusingly, seems to cut both ways: against the backward barrenness of the British, but also against the excesses and banality of Hank’s own nineteenth-century Hartford. A letter to Andrew Lang from the same year (1889) indicates that he was puzzling much over the larger implications of the whole chromo question: for he defends himself there against Matthew Arnold’s recent attack on the vulgarity of American culture by identifying his own art with the egalitarian ethos of the chromo; but he then argues that the ultimate purpose of the reproduction is to advance the masses, finally, toward the real thing.²² Are the old masters to be scorned? or approached at last?

Perhaps the middle ground in the debate had already been struck by Edward Bruce who, surveying the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia, saw no inherent contradiction between the democratizing tendencies of the age and true cultural achievement—at least if one looked far enough ahead. For Bruce saw in the magnificence of America’s industrial progress and in the “vastly increased” number of “cultivated minds,” in the swelling museums and galleries and libraries, in the universal distribution of literature and the universal copying of artworks, a promise of achievement yet to come. As for just now, “The age, recognizing perforce the inherent capabilities of the race as a constant quantity, contents itself so far with endeavoring to adapt and reproduce, or at most imitate, such manifestations of the artistic sense as it finds excellent in the past. The day for originality may come ere long.”²³ Yet even the sanguine Bruce cannot withhold his disgust, at the Centennial, from the “depressing atmosphere of fraud” that is all about him in the mechanisms that replace human labor by machines and real things by shams. Standing before an “immense iron wheel devoted to the drying of paper collars,” which he grandly styles a “monument to sham,” Bruce prophecies a bionic future that would await its fulfillment in the twentieth century: “Soon we shall have sham paper collars, then enameled skins, and then the costume of Vortigern’s Pict, and the fever called buttoning and unbuttoning shall be, as Poe craved, ended at last.” (Poe, who had imagined the “Man Who Was Used Up,” is surely an appropriate allusion here.) In all this, in the fashions of consumption beginning to sweep the country, Bruce saw the machine and its products bringing “the American people within its yoke and manacle.”²⁴ There were others with fears similar to Bruce’s, of course, but their cautious response to the machine forms part of a reaction to technology that I want to explore in a later part of this study.

The pervasiveness of the culture of imitation in the late nineteenth century can best be grasped through a more detailed examination of three interrelated areas of cultural expression, which will occupy the following three chapters. The first deals with the middle- and upper-class world of material goods that was more and more creating identity in America and supplying the vocabulary of self-expression. What things meant to the middle class in this new world of reproductions and replicas will be the subject of “A Hieroglyphic World.” A major part of that world was the photographic image; photography was arguably the most widely experienced and therefore most influential of replicated forms, and it will be examined in the second chapter of this section. The third major area of consideration will be literary realism; although the mimetic goals of realism were, broadly speaking, in harmony with the nineteenth century’s culture of replication, during the 1890s a breakdown in conventional realism occurred in the writing of a younger generation that paved the way for the modernist revolution that followed in the twentieth century.