Prior to the appearance of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on December 14, 1855 and Harper’s Weekly on January 3, 1857, several illustrated publications had come and gone, and a variety of other publications were competing for New York readers. Most visibly, of course, were the penny newspapers—notably Benjamin Day’s New York Sun (1833), James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald (1835), Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune (1841), and Henry J. Raymond’s New York Daily Times (1851)—which used boys and unemployed men to hawk the most sensational stories their editors and publishers could provide. Some of the same vendors sold less respectable “sporting men’s publications” or “flash papers,” challenging the limits of propriety. All of these, in turn, competed in an increasingly stimulating entertainment environment being defined, in large part, by P. T. Barnum with his “humbugs” and his phenomenal tour of the “Swedish nightingale” singer Jenny Lind.
Barnum was one of the defining characters of American popular culture, the mass media, and public relations. The showman and promoter created public relations and took advertising to a whole new level. “Today’s patterns of promotion and press agentry in the world of show business were drawn, cut, and stitched by the greatest showman and press agent of all time—that ‘Prince of Humbug,’ that mightiest of mountebanks, Phineas Taylor Barnum,” wrote public relations historian Scott M. Cutlip.1 After failing at a number of enterprises, Barnum discovered the power of show business and publicity, using newspapers, posters, and pamphlets. When he found no fonts that rose to the status he sought to convey, he created a new typeface. His Barnum type remains in many software programs today.
Barnum launched into the field in 1835 when he bought Joice Heth, an allegedly 161-year-old slave who had been a nurse to George Washington. Without investigating her authenticity too carefully, Barnum exploited her combination of bizarre biology and patriotic appeal by selling tickets for a discussion with her. Unlike her previous owner, Barnum knew how to successfully exploit the old, blind, toothless woman by using newspapers for publicity. Barnum persuaded writers to comment on her strange appearance, her skill at answering questions, her ability to discuss supposed details of Washington’s life, and her ability to quote scripture and sing hymns. On a New England tour with Heth, Barnum demonstrated a formula he used for decades, starting with a quick discovery, a barrage of unusual information, and planted lies and details in the local press.2
Raising doubts could be as profitable as guaranteeing authenticity. Barnum may, indeed, have believed that a customer was born every minute, and he entertained them through humbugs in which his customers—not suckers—could feel they were part of an inside joke. Barnum’s humbugs counted on the possibility that his customers would willingly participate in the fakery and enjoy the show. As owner of the American Museum in New York in the 1840s, Barnum found he could charge admission for people to view a hoax, raise a doubt about it, and charge admission a second time to allow people to draw their own conclusions. Some people seemed to enjoy being fooled, admired the foiler’s enterprise, and felt like insiders when let in on the joke.3
Barnum took the hoax mainstream, but he was not alone, of course. Author Edgar Allan Poe wrote six hoaxes, some of which appeared in newspapers. The first and most dramatic appeared in Southern Literary Messenger—also in 1835—before the New York Sun’s more famous moon hoax. Like the moon hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall” involved the moon and astronomy. A man, who had been transported to the moon by his balloon experiments, requested a pardon for killing three creditors who forced him to choose between leaving the Earth or committing suicide. If pardoned for the murders, Pfaall could return to Earth after his five years on the moon. After Richard Adams Locke’s moon series appeared in the Sun, Poe found little reason to finish the Hans Pfaall serial with its promised descriptions of the moon. “I did not think it advisable even to bring my voyager back to his parent Earth,” Poe said later. “He remains where I left him, and is still, I believe, ‘the man in the moon.’” And Poe did not see any need to change Locke’s descriptions of the moon. Despite this competition from the Sun, Poe later wrote a brief balloon hoax published as a Sun extra in 1844 about a man whose balloon had drifted across the Atlantic Ocean.4
The same writers sometimes created and exposed hoaxes. Richard Adams Locke, who wrote the Sun’s moon hoax, exposed Barnum’s Joice Heth as a fraud. And Poe, who exposed Locke’s hoax, created hoaxes of his own. “Barnum, the master of publicity, could find an angle on both sides. When Heth’s credibility was questioned, Barnum planted newspaper letters suggesting that she was a mechanical device. His attendance, like the Sun’s circulation after the moon hoax, went up when people went to see for themselves whether Heth was real. Barnum repeated the Heth precedent when he exhibited the grotesque corpse of a so-called mermaid.”5
The most sensational news story and hoax of the era was, of course, the New York Sun’s week-long discussion of life on the moon, which was supposedly discovered by astronomer Sir John Herschel. With its usual mix of exotic, miscellaneous items and scientific news, the Sun gave the story credibility by citing sources, including a scientist and a scientific journal, and describing scientific instruments, like the telescope. A supposed Herschel associate described the creature found on the moon in forests not unlike those of the English countryside. “We were thrilled with astonishment,” the associate is quoted as saying, “to perceive four successive flocks of large winged creatures, wholly unlike any kind of birds, descend with a slow even motion from the cliffs on the western side, and alight upon the plain.”6 The story provided descriptive details of creatures resembling cranes, pelicans, and a dozen other species, but the Sun did not explain how scientists could tell the gender of animals from this distance. The Sun enhanced the story’s credibility with attribution of information, use of direct quotations, wealth of descriptive detail, and an apparent lack of opinion.
Poe and Day’s major competitor, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, immediately attacked the story as a hoax. Bennett, who had worked with Locke at the New York Courier and Enquirer, attacked the writer on a personal level. Like Bennett, Locke had studied for the priesthood; yet, Bennett said, he abandoned religion for astronomy because of “some youthful love affair, getting a chambermaid in some awkward plight.”7 Locke quickly responded to the attack on his personal life.
Circulation numbers for both the Sun and Herald climbed as the newspapers debated the likelihood of bat-like men and other creatures on the moon. They sold supplemental pamphlets and reprints of the stories, complete with illustrations. Where readers stood on the man-in-the-moon debate is impossible to determine from this distance, but it is plausible to speculate that they enjoyed a good fight and, as Barnum and Poe demonstrated, they were not averse to a good humbug in 1835. Most readers seemed to care little about credibility, even though the newspapers promoted themselves for their independence and educational value. Circulation continued to climb, even after the Sun admitted its moon story was a hoax the following month. Some of the moon publications came complete with pictures of the inhabitants of the moon. Pictures added to the sensation.
Bennett demonstrated the value of pictures in the Herald’s coverage of a fire that destroyed a large area of New York City in 1835. Damage from the fire became illustrated news when Bennett ran an illustration of the burned-out shell of the Merchant’s Exchange Building and a map showing the burned area of the city. “Above we give a delineation of the ruins of the Merchant’s Exchange, as they now appear to the spectator,” the caption proclaimed. “We were struck with the magnificence of the view on beholding it after the desolating flame had swept over it, and left it as it now stands…. This edifice, which was consumed by the flames on Wednesday night, was one of the largest in the city, situated on the south side of Wall street, and embracing 115 feet of the front between William and Hoover street.” The building had been marble with porticos and columns. The caption under the map stated that the fire destroyed one-third of the city’s First Ward.8
Bennett’s reporting, like that of the other penny newspapers, made news accessible to the mass audience—with or without pictures. Broadening the news market, the penny newspapers were cheap—although they seldom sold for a penny—and they covered ordinary people, provided useful knowledge, conveyed popular mythology, and based advertising rates on sales and readership. They were marketed on the street by newsboys who needed exciting stories to sell.
No story was more dramatic than the ax murder of a prostitute and the burning of the luxury brothel in which she worked. The victim was Helen (sometimes called Ellen) Jewett and the alleged perpetrator was a regular customer, Richard P. Robinson. Less than a year after founding the Herald, Bennett threw his body and soul into this story, demonstrating “his talent for overstatement to promote his story, his newspaper, and himself.”9 While emphasizing the basic facts, Bennett also turned Jewett’s story into a morality play about life in the big city. Like today’s journalists, he also covered public reaction. The first story began under a heading THE RECENT TRAGEDY with a reaction: “The excitement yesterday morning throughout the city, was extraordinary. Every body exclaimed ‘what a horrible affair!’—‘what a terrible catastrophe!’ News was received from Texas, highly disastrous to the colonists, but the private tragedy of Ellen Jewett almost absorbed all public attention.”10
Bearing no resemblance to an inverted pyramid story, Bennett’s report dives into the young woman’s background in proper Boston and small-town Maine where she was known as intelligent, attractive, considerate, quick-witted, and imaginative. “Yet even at this young age, she occasionally gave indications of a wild, imaginative mind—without fixed principles—or a knowledge of the true point of honor in morals. Her passions began to control her life. Her education only gave additional power to her fascinations.”11
Bennett provided titillating descriptions of the brothel and interviews with other prostitutes. Bennett changed his views about Robinson’s guilt several times before the trial was over. By the time a jury acquitted Robinson, he also had concluded he was innocent.12
While filling his front pages with details of the Jewett murder and the Robinson prosecution, Bennett ran one of his largest illustrations to date, an advertisement showing the Wall Street fire. But the fire illustrated Harington’s moving diorama that could be viewed nightly at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum.13
While exploiting sensation, Bennett argued that his work was in the public interest. Exposure, Bennett contended, discouraged criminals more than apprehension and trial.
In advertising, Bennett pushed the limits among the mainstream penny editors. For example, he carried advertisements for Madam Restell that were not seen in many other newspapers. On October 6, 1840, for example, her advertisement in the Herald said:
IMPORTANT TO MARRIED FEMALES. – MADAME RESTELL’S PREVENTION POWDERS. – Three valuable Powders have been universally adopted in Europe, but France in particular, for upwards of thirty years, as well as by hundreds in this country, as being the only mild, safe, and efficacious remedy for married ladies whose health forbids a too rapid increase of family.14
Madam Restell ran up against the law when she was accused of performing abortions.15
The New York Herald’s advertisements attacked other problems of the human body as well. Ads, based on testimonials, promised to relieve pain in the breast, back, or limbs and to relieve cough and asthma. THE UNFORTUNATE’S FRIEND appeared at the top of an advertisement for the product to cure “the Gonorrhea, Gleets, Strictures, Gravel, Seminal Weaknesses, Mercurial Complaints, &c. and any or all of the varied diseases of the urinary organs.” Doctors or alleged doctors frequently endorsed products, including Sherman’s truss from Dr. Chilton’s on Broadway, “where Mr. S. will supply Surgeons and Patients with his most improved instruments correctly adapted to every description of Hernia, and other abdominal weaknesses, Prolapsus of the Anus, Suspending Bandages, &c. &c.”16
These ads helped provide the pretext that Bennett’s enemies used against him to wage a moral war against the Herald in 1840. Opposing editors, including Park Benjamin, James Watson Webb, and Mordecai Noah, joined the legions of Bennett’s enemies, including clergy, bankers, and teachers, who attacked him as an “obscene vagabond,” a “turkey-buzzard,” a “moral pestilence,” a “profligate adventurer,” and the “prince of darkness.” Their boycott against the newspaper forced a drop from 17,000 to 14,500 in its daily circulation and from 19,000 to 12,240 in weekly sales. The boycott reached both readers and advertisers and, despite his denials, it influenced Bennett to get religion, literally, but it may not have ended his blatant anti-Semitism toward Noah and Benjamin. One of Bennett’s offenses was to introduce a newspaper on Sunday; he began the Sunday Herald in 1835 but quickly dropped the idea because of intense opposition. He tried again in 1838 but did not succeed until 1841.17
By then, the moralizers faced bigger threats—the men’s sporting newspapers or flash press—that contained both words and pictures. If the penny newspapers became more sensational and carried occasional pictures through the 1830s, the flash press pushed the boundaries in the 1840s. Although thirty-five penny newspapers started in New York in the 1830s, Day’s Sun and Bennett’s Herald were the only survivors of the first decade. During the 1840s, the flash publications were often sold by the same vendors as books and newspapers, but authorities kept a watchful eye on them.18
Taking a seemingly moral high ground, some flash publications feigned shock and disgust, even as they provided directories of the New York brothels, complete with prices and directions. Flash publications often provided playful stories, news, and commentaries. They also followed the police docket and investigated the personal lives of political and business leaders—more often for blackmail than for publication. Of course, if the culprit didn’t pay, then the story was published.
Few flash newspapers have been saved, but because the American Antiquarian Society recently received a collection, some recent scholarship has been done on them. Three scholars who have written about the sex trade and sensational newspapers have collected some excerpts into a small book called The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York.19 Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz provide ample evidence of illustrated publications—and racy ones at that—on the streets before Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
Flash papers, Professor Donna Dennis explains in Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York:
defiantly flouted middle-class standards of respectability, temperance, and discipline, by promoting instead a libertine ethic of sensual pleasure for the male reader. Beginning with the Sunday Flash in 1841, they championed a variety of popular, rough-and-tumble male leisure activities: drinking in saloons, mingling in the pits of Bowery theaters, heckling at bare-knuckle boxing matches and cock fights, hanging out in gambling “hells,” and frolicking at fireman’s balls. Papers of this kind also promoted prostitution by featuring biographies of notorious New York courtesans and offering detailed descriptions of the city’s many brothels. In this way, flash newspapers served as erotic tour guides for young men on the prowl for sexual pleasure, both in real life and as imagined through reading. In addition, such publications routinely trafficked in sexual gossip, often as a prelude to blackmail.20
They reflected deep cultural conflict over the meaning of manhood in a rapidly evolving capitalist society.21
Political leaders looking to protect their wives and children from exposure to corrupting influences became concerned with what was being sold on city streets. Most authorities used British common law or state and local laws and defendants apparently did not consider invoking the yet untested First Amendment freedoms. In Pennsylvania, John Ruggles challenged his conviction for blasphemy by using the New York constitution, which protected religious liberty. His crime was stating: “Jesus Christ was a bastard, and his mother must have been a whore.” Worried that liberty could descend into licentiousness, Judge James Kent convicted Ruggles of obscene rather than blasphemous libel. “Without sanction against offensive speech such as blasphemy and obscenity, Kent reasoned, civil government would be destroyed, leaving ‘semi-barbarous’ licentiousness to rein in its place.”22
In a Pennsylvania court in 1815, Jesse Sharpless and five other men became the first known American targets of prosecution for obscene libel for the crime of viewing “a certain lewd, wicked, scandalous, infamous, and obscene painting, representing a man in an obscene, impudent, and indecent posture with a woman” in a private home. The defendants argued that the Pennsylvania constitution protected free expression. Their lawyer challenged the court’s refusal to show or describe the allegedly obscene picture; the court did not describe the scene because such material would not be appropriate to a court document. The defendant’s lawyer also argued: “In every public exhibition there are pictures which are viewed with pleasure and approbation, by many respectable and pure minded persons, as noble productions of art, while others more fastidious consider them improper to be presented to the public eye.”23
John Cleland’s novel, Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, was published in two volumes in 1748 and 1749. In the United States, authorities began prosecuting vendors for selling it in 1819 when a trial court in Worcester, Massachusetts convicted a vendor for selling an obscene book. The first obscenity case in New York City before the Court of General Sessions was also against a printer for selling Fanny Hill in 1824.24
Neither the crackdowns on publications nor their defenses came easily in a society without any idea of obscenity beyond British common law or any defense against government imposition on rules of publication. Strangely, the First Amendment was not invoked as a defense by those accused of distributing obscene materials. Carving out a novel niche, Venus’ Miscellany offered a thrill of transgression by focusing on precisely the representations of that year’s New York obscenity prosecutions that had been singled as the most illicit: expressions by women of sexual passion and pleasure. Another publisher ran a regular column of letters supposedly from married, average, middle-class women sharing their sexual experiences.25
Publishers did not necessarily look out for one another. Publisher James Harper, a foreman of one grand jury, disapproved of publishers who hurt the reputations of respectable people in the field. James Gordon Bennett’s nemesis, Mordecai Noah, also served on an urban court prosecuting publishers of the offending newspapers. As we can see, many were offended by the pictures sold on urban streets. One mainstream newspaper even complained about the revealing nature of posters in downtown store windows.26
In many newspapers, advertisers ran more pictures than the news sections. They also arranged type into designs and shapes, and they used standard graphics like pointing fingers, houses, taverns, ships, stagecoaches, steamships, hats, and runaway slaves, children, and wives. Pictures appeared in advertising before news, but the cost of reproduction forced Bennett to change his rules when advertisers had pictures. Breaking his requirement that advertisers frequently change their copy, the Herald ran for weeks the advertisement depicting the line drawing promoting the diorama of the New York City fire. Maps, cartoons, and line drawings typically constituted the most dramatic illustrations in any newspaper. Special maps and illustrations often carried sponsors, like the city map the Herald ran in March 1836. Bennett’s New York Herald was among the few dailies to run occasional news pictures, but the process proved too slow and too expensive to become a standard part of routine daily news. The most dramatic reproduction of news pictures came when Bennett devoted the entire first page and part of the second to illustrations of the funeral of former President Andrew Jackson in 1845.27
As Bennett demonstrated with the Jackson funeral, news and more respectable content could attract readers. During the 1850s, many sought more respectability and fewer hassles with officials seeking to monitor the public morality. As a means of promoting wholesome entertainment, P. T. Barnum turned his considerable talents to first persuading singer Jenny Lind to tour the United States and then promoting her tour. Barnum and others began creating pictorial weekly newspapers to appeal to a broad audience, following the model of the Illustrated London News begun May 14, 1842. Frank Leslie, a devotee of that model, learned the business at Illustrated London News before immigrating to the United States. He arrived in New York penniless and persuaded Barnum to hire him to produce illustrated programs for Jenny Lind’s tour. From Barnum, Leslie apparently learned much about self-promotion. The London publication, where he had worked, mixed picture-oriented news and entertainment. Because halftone technology had not been invented, these publications relied on engravers to draw the pictures on hardwood blocks and then to carve the relief areas to which ink would adhere during the printing process.28
Leslie devised a process that allowed an engraver to draw the picture and then cut the block apart, giving each section of an illustration to a different engraver. Once all the sections of the picture were completed, then they could be bolted together as a completed engraving for the printing press. This process allowed Leslie and Harper to create multi-page illustrations overnight during the Civil War. The pioneers in the process worked for book publishers and the illustrated newspapers, the largest of which were Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and the New York Illustrated News.29
Boston publisher Frederick Gleason founded Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion in 1851. Leslie was one of the few experienced wood engravers in the United States, so he joined this first American publication to copy the Illustrated London News. Gleason’s, a sixteen-page illustrated folio, used wood engravings to print on one side—eight pages—of each large sheet used to create an edition. Because of the time required to do engravings, the pictures were confined to such subjects as travel, natural history, sculpture, ships, military scenes, and moral or religious themes. Gleason’s showed little interest in illustrated news, and Leslie, who was interested in news, left the staff after less than a year.30
Engraver T. W. Strong soon followed with the Illustrated American News using a similar formula but adding cheap fiction, popular poetry, and many more illustrations. From Leslie’s perspective, Strong’s publication had a major difference: it added pictures to news. But the time lag between events and the publication of pictures doomed the project. Labor-intensive hand-carved engravings needed for the printing presses took time. The experiment failed after six months, but Barnum with partners H. D. and A. E. Beach revived it with an investment of $20,000 each. Leslie worked as an illustrator and engraver for Barnum and Beach’s Illustrated News in 1853, but he turned down Barnum’s offer of a $20,000 salary to manage the publication. Barnum sold his publication to Gleason, and Leslie left to start his own publishing enterprise.31
Leslie created his own publishing firm in 1854 to generate the capital to underwrite his news magazine. Leslie began with the Gazette of Fashion, and the following year he published his first book, Frank Leslie’s Portfolio of Fancy Needlework, written by dime novelist Ann Stephens. Although the book carried the imprint of Stringer & Townsend, its success encouraged Leslie to get into the book-publishing business. The Gazette of Fashion’s formula of women’s topics and miscellany exceeded expectations and, at the end of the first year, Leslie wrote that the magazine’s success paid for a new steam press. Leslie’s in-house engraving department and presses designed for pictorial work gave him an advantage with both price and the quality of illustrations.32
The first of these weekly picture magazines to be successful, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “took the public by surprise,” wrote a former staff artist. “Many purchased—many were incredulous. Were the sketches real, or imaginative? It could scarcely be credited that these were bona fide representations of occurrences in so many different parts of the country.”33 The differences came in the number and size of the illustrations, the emphasis on current events, and the timely distribution of illustrated news. Despite the emphasis on news, most illustrations depicted timeless features relating to the home, natural history, fiction, or exotic scenes. Leslie also reprinted many stories and illustrations from the foreign press.
Because time and money would not allow every page to be filled with breaking news, the publisher relied on illustrated miscellaneous material, including exotica, such as pictures of exotic people and places. Although the illustrated newspapers imported the idea of miscellany from earlier magazines, they seldom used the word or the word exotica. Harper’s Weekly used the word exotic 190 times between the first issue of January 3, 1857, and September 9, 1911.34
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly sought to make illustrations of exotic people and places a routine part of mainstream consumer media. The quality of the pictures, as well as the attractiveness of the content, could contribute to whether an item appeared in the pictorial newspapers of the antebellum era. The idea of exotica or the publication of exotic—or different—people, places, and pictures grew along with the pictorial press.35
Photographs today include exoticism (and eroticism), and freelance writers know their odds of publishing a story improve if it is accompanied by a photograph. Tom Ang, prolific author of books on photography and photojournalism, lists the value of a photograph as its ability to tell a story, convey a mood, display a strong composition, and provide bright, saturated color or tonally rich black-and-white images. Two general categories that have historical value are:
Eroticism: Sexually charged images: preferably subtle, nearly subliminal.
Exoticism: Exotic, unusual location, mood, or lighting; or strange gesture, surprising juxtaposition.”36
Like many graphic artists, Ang uses the term to define itself. Exoticism is exotic:
Seemingly obvious on the face of it, this observation is as subject to demands of the working context as are other aspects of picture editing. Having a big jungle cat in a celebrity portrait may win the picture a place in a magazine featuring the lives of celebrities: the big cat is exotic, contrasting the celebrity’s poise against its latent savagery. A wildlife magazine may hesitate over the same picture. Is this a stunt and has the big cat been drugged to be safely managed? Or is the animal simply old and exhausted? In either case, running the picture may provoke protests from its readers, many of whom will be knowledgeable about big cats.37
Long before publishers, editors, and advertisers advocated pictures over words, photography had been preceded by illustration in print media. Even before photography could be published, the pictorial press, led by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly, sought to make strange and exotic places, people, and pictures a basic content element of the mainstream media.
1.Scott M. Cutlip, Public Relations History from the 17th to the 20th Century. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995): 171–175.
2.Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 22–23, 61–67.
3.Ibid., 16–18, 71–89.
4.William E. Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833–1865. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999): 25–27.
5.Ibid., 26.
6.New York Sun, August 28, 1835.
7.New York Herald, August 31, 1835.
8.New York Herald, December 21, 1835.
9.Huntzicker, 20.
10.“The Recent Tragedy,” New York Herald, April 12, 1836.
11.Ibid.
12.New York Herald, April 25, 1836.
13.For example, see New York Herald, April 9 and April 12, 1836.
14.New York Herald, October 6, 1840.
15.For a discussion of Madam Restell’s legal problems in the context of women’s legal issues, see A. Cheree Carlson, The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005): 111–135.
16.“The Unfortunate’s Friend,” New York Herald, October 6, 1840.
17.Huntzicker, 31.
18.Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America. (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002): 70–85.
19.Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
20.Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 44–45.
21.Ibid.
22.Ibid., 31–34.
23.Ibid., 33.
24.Dennis, Licentious Gotham, 20; Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 70–85.
25.Dennis, Licentious Gotham, 6.
26.Ibid., 3–4, 20, 80.
27.New York Herald, June 25, 1845.
28.W. Porter Ward and Thaddeus C. Lockard Jr., P. T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind: The American Tour of the Swedish Nightingale. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).
29.William E. Huntzicker, “Picturing the News: Frank Leslie and the Origins of American Pictorial Journalism,” in The Civil War and the Press, edited by David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Debra Redding van Tuyll. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000).
30.Ibid.
31.Ibid.
32.Ibid.
33.Ibid.
34.This number is from a search of the HarpWeek database containing the entire content of the publication.
35.“A picture is worth a thousand words” has been described as a famous Confucius saying, an ancient Chinese slogan, and an ancient Japanese saying. The expression has often been credited to an advertising executive promoting signs on the sides of buses and trolleys, saying that a quick glance at a message can promote a product. In Printer’s Ink in December 1921, Frederick R. Barnard, national advertising manager for the Street Railways Advertising Company with offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, argued for the effectiveness of dramatic pictures and graphics by citing “a famous Japanese philosopher” as saying “One look is worth a thousand words.” One picture he claimed, tells a story more effectively than a large amount of descriptive text. More than five years later, the phrase and its origins had both changed. In the March 1927 issues of Printer’s Ink, Barnard claimed: “Chinese proverb. One picture is worth ten thousand words.” Daryl Hepting, “The History of a Picture’s Worth,” Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, at http://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting/research/web/words/index.html, accessed August 29, 2009; John Paul Lester, “A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words?” Department of Communications, California State University at Fullerton, http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/letters.html, accessed June 15, 2009.
36.Tom Ang, Picture Editing, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Focal Press, 2000): 111.
37.Ibid., 117.