Sketching the 1830s Cotton Boom: Charles Dickens and Southwestern Humor
In a June 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe reviewed a new book by a then unknown British author. Sketches by Boz—or Watkins
Tottle and Other Sketches, as Poe identifies it in his review—was Charles Dickens’s first
major publication and features a collection of stories, impressions, and character
descriptions of London life that Dickens wrote while working as a journalist in the city. In his evaluation of the book, Poe identifies a critical trend to read sketches in a
collection as “detached passages, without reference to the work as a whole—or without reference to any general design” (205). Sketches, in contrast, collects various impressions to create what Poe dubs a “unity of effect,” in which the reader is left with a single impression of 1830s London (205). Using the metaphor of visual art to make his point,57 Poe writes, “To the illustration of this one end all the groupings and fillings in of the painting are rendered subservient—and when our eyes are taken from the canvass, we remember the personages of the sketch not at all as independent existences, but as essentials of the one subject we have witnessed” (206). Therefore, according to Poe, the sketches “are all exceedingly well managed, and never fail to tell as the author intended” (205).
In this case, the sketches in Dickens’s collection tell of a rapidly changing London during the 1830s, in which morally and ethically ambiguous characters increasingly
dominated British cultural life. In Poe’s review, the unlikely and unlikeable centerpiece of Sketches is Watkins Tottle. Rather than a stalwart, hard-working, or respectable man, Tottle lives off the credit of others and is constantly in debt. In short, Tottle is a
confidence man—or swindler—who can manipulate others to earn a profit for himself. Within the context of Dickens’s Sketches, Tottle and other confidence men are the emblems of London life in the mid-nineteenth century, one that had evolved from a society structured around an agricultural economy to one that was urbanized, industrialized, and dependent on emerging capitalist economic structures.
Poe’s evaluation of Sketches reveals the ways in which the sketch form during the 1830s and 40s could serve the ends of conveying a particular impression or image of spaces undergoing change. During this time, the sketch became more commonplace and popular in conjunction with the boom in print journalism and growing urbanization on both sides of the Atlantic. In contrast to the novel, Poe argues, the sketch has the ability to create a “unity of effect” that nonetheless pulls from a varied set of subjects, themes, and characters. While the novel’s unity is assumed, the sketch collection creates that unity through its diverse and brief representations, and further, through its character tropes that represent the varied populations inhabiting a changing space. The confidence man in particular is a recurring character in sketches published between the 1830s and 50s, with morally questionable—yet ultimately entertaining—figures such as Watkins Tottle populating British and American sketch collections.
At the same time that Poe wrote his review of Sketches, the center of growth for the southern American region was shifting from the east coast—where Poe, Simms, Kennedy, and the Southern Literary Messenger were all based—to the West. As a result
of the growing demand for cotton in the North and Britain spurred by the Industrial Revolution—and motivated by the promise of plentiful land in the growing southwest territories of Georgia, Alabama Mississippi, and Arkansas—thousands of settlers poured into the South. Plantations sprang up throughout the Southwest and provided the cotton needed for the numerous mills and factories in the North and Britain. In this sense, the growing and diversifying 1830s London featured in Dickens’s Sketches was one node in the larger network of a transatlantic economy that connected the growing southern American region to the rest of the globe.
In turn, fiction written about the South shifted from the setting of the historical romances to sketches of the Southwest and featured confidence man figures similar to Dickens’s Watkins Tottle. The same economic downturn that led to longer novels becoming passé in the 1840s gave rise to the popularity of the sketch. Beginning in the 1820s and lasting up through the Civil War, American newspapers published humorous stories and sketches set in the expanding territories of the Southwest. Two collections of such stories, Johnson Jones Hooper’s Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845) and Joseph Glover Baldwin’s The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), are both set during the boom of the 1830s, when immigrants flooded into the southwestern region and individuals became wealthy through land speculation that would culminate in the 1837 bank panic. Both Hooper and Baldwin capitalized on this atmosphere to create two of the more famous “confidence men” figures of the nineteenth-century: Simon Suggs and Simon Suggs, Jr., respectively.
Just as London and the Southwest were connected by trading patterns, sketches representing these areas evince the attempt to represent spaces that were rapidly changing
due to the Industrial Revolution and transatlantic trade. The three collections of sketches I discuss in this chapter—Sketches by Boz, Some Adventures of Simon Suggs, and The
Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi—all emerge from the economic moment that
united the metropolis with the frontier through global trade and industrial development. The sketch form, then, with its ability to create “unity” from heterogeneity (to paraphrase Poe) presents the ideal literary form to harness spaces in economic and social flux. In this sense, I posit that the mid-nineteenth-century sketch form focused more on representing a temporal change and cultural shift than a particular location.
But rapid change also entailed a shift that upended previously stable mores and social structures, a problem that the sketch must also address. As a result, all three collections employ the confidence man trope as a way of negotiating the pull between older economic and social systems and the emerging transatlantic economy. In settings that were shaped by an increasingly dominant free market economy, the financially savvy, but untrustworthy, man was king. These figures become the central characters in all three collections. Their role in the sketches is to embody the potential for socio- economic mobility in a free market, but to also represent the potential dangers.
I argue that the sketch collections by Dickens, Hooper, and Baldwin trace the emergence of a new economic standard in the nineteenth century through the confidence man figure. I begin by outlining the general economic and social shifts that took place during the 1830s through the 1850s and discuss the concurrent rise of the sketch form in representing those changes. The confidence man, I posit, becomes a trope through which sketch authors could mediate that change. I then argue that as texts that appeared at the beginning of this era, Dickens and Hooper’s collections remain ambivalent in evaluating
the figure’s potential role in the mid-nineteenth-century economy. I conclude with a discussion of Baldwin’s collection, which I argue presents the confidence man as an exemplar of nineteenth-century life as shaped by the tenets of the free market. By using the sketch form as a framework for understanding the economic patterns represented in these three collections, we can see the growth of a new social order at the beginning of the nineteenth century through a literary paradigm, in which older, pre-capitalist economic structures would give way to the dominance of free market capitalism.
“A Time of Visible and Violent Transition”: The 1830s
America is much farther off from England than England from America. You in New York read the periodicals of this country, and know every thing that is done or written here, as if you lived within the sound of Bow-bell. The English,
however, just know of our existence, and if they get a general idea twice a year of our progress in politics, they are comparatively well informed. Our periodical literature is never even heard of.
-Nathaniel P. Willis, “Willis’s Impressions of London,” Southern Literary Messenger, March 1835
When he wrote the above passage, Nathaniel Willis had been traveling in Britain for several months and sending back his impressions of the English countryside, culture and people. Willis, who would become famous in the United States and Europe for his travel sketches, eventually lived in London briefly.58 Despite his assertions of the English ignorance of American culture, his passage inadvertently highlights a triangle of
connection that was the foundation of the British-American transatlantic relations from
58 During the mid-nineteenth century, Willis was known for being the highest paid periodical writer in America. On a more inglorious note, he was also brother to author Fanny Fern, who depicted him as an egotistical dilettante in her autobiographical novel, Ruth Hall. For more information on Willis, see Thomas N. Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity (2001).
the colonial period up through the Civil War. Beginning during the early portion of the nineteenth century, and intensifying after the Industrial Revolution in and 1820s and 30s, Britain, the northern United States, and the South participated in a mutually dependent economic relationship founded primarily on the cotton trade. For as Eric Hobsbawm remarks, “Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton” (40). Through the movement of raw cotton and cotton manufactures interregionally in the United States and then across the Atlantic, Britain and America formed a global network that not only affected the economic structures of each region and nation, but eventually shaped the cultural production of those spaces.
To describe this era in British history in his 1833 England and the English, Edward Bulwer-Lytton dubs the moment “a time of visible and violent transition” (2:68). The period from 1800 to 1840 witnessed massive industrial and economic changes, particularly in the area of cotton manufacturing. Due to technological innovations in weaving and cotton processing, the development of improved rail systems for transport, and the shift from home weaving to a more efficient factory-based manufacturing system, both Britain and the United States developed from agriculturally-based economic and social systems to more urban, industrialized structures.59 The first “industrial cities” developed around a concentration of cotton mills and factories in the North and Britain (Farnie 7-10, 21). More factories meant more jobs, and increasingly those who had formerly farmed or worked as laborers in rural areas migrated to cities for better job opportunities. As a result, early nineteenth-century Britain and the northern United States were marked by an increased urban population (Chapman 46).
The transatlantic cotton trade also became the major force behind the United States’ expansion into western territories, specifically the old Southwest. A higher demand for cotton required a larger portion of land on which to grow it, and the southern United States as they were (namely Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas) could not logistically meet that demand, both in terms of space and also the conditions needed to grow a large amount of cotton. The old Southwest stretching from the
Carolinas to Arkansas, however, could fill that need with its varying soil composition and space on which to organize larger-scale plantations (Wright, Political Economy 19-22). Britain was entirely reliant on imports for the supply of raw cotton for its mills, and by the 1830s the plantations of the southern United States were its almost exclusive supplier (Chapman 36; Sellers 93).
In addition to highlighting the transatlantic triangle of the 1830s and its accompanying changes to the global economy, Willis’s sketch indicates the growing importance of the sketch form in representing these changes. He opens the article with his entrance into the city: “From the top of Shooter’s Hill we got our first view of London— an indistinct, architectural mass, extending all round in the horizon, and half enveloped in the dim and lurid smoke” (366). Here, London is not a beautiful, cultured city, but an industrial center, a hodge-podge of buildings adapted to accommodate the industrial growth indicated by the curtain of “lurid smoke.” Willis then goes on to describe views of the Tower and St. Paul’s, glorying in their magnificence (or perhaps trying to erase the ugly aspect). Still, like the smoke surrounding the increasingly industrial city, that first impression lingers. While most of the article revolves around stories of the vibrant London social life, the aristocracy, and brief physical descriptions of the city (all
carefully focused on its charms or beauties), the backdrop of that haze and “indistinct, architectural mass” that first greeted Willis’s, and the reader’s, eye is always present. Therefore, in a brief glimpse of the London landscape, Willis conveys the vying social and economic systems that constituted the changing space of Britain—and vicariously, the United States—in the form of the older aristocratic structures in which he glories and the industrialization he attempts to ignore.
“Willis’s Impressions of London” exemplifies the function of the sketch form in representing the “visible and violent transition” in the nineteenth-century the global economy. Although the sketch had achieved popularity during the eighteenth century,60 sketches gained prominence during the early portion of the nineteenth century in such a way that coincided with the increased urbanization of the transatlantic world, as well as the simultaneous growth of the transatlantic industrial economy (Garcha 3-4). Further, the changing dynamic of print culture and the rise/diversification of print journalism led to a greater emphasis on shorter, impressionistic pieces that would appear in newspapers and then later collected in full-length book form.61
More important, however, is the nineteenth-century sketch’s role in translating those dynamic shifts. The genre of the sketch, its basic structure, lends itself to
representing spaces that were constantly changing and developing. By limiting its representation to a single moment, snapshot, or impression, the sketch captures the fleeting temporal quality of a space that will not remain the same for much longer. And
60 See, for one example, The Spectator papers published by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele between 1711 and 1712.
61 For more on the shift in print culture and its effects on cultural and social development in the transatlantic world, see Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities or Jürgen Habermas’s The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989).
when those sketches are collected into a single body, their whole or—to return again to Poe’s phrase—their “unity” assembles a representation that is at once diverse and
mutable, but also cohesive. Willis’s sketch, for example, in a brief snippet of London life, melds the new urbanized setting with the last vestiges of pre-industrial London. As Amanpal Garcha observes, “literary sketches present time at once as fragmented, ever- changing, and thus best represented by static images and plotless analysis. These opposed temporalities captured the authors’ and readers’ sense of discontinuity and their desire for stable repose—a repose that the sketches often link to the very traditions modernity was in the process of destroying” (5).
But Garcha’s final point in that passage gestures to a trend in literary scholarship on the nineteenth-century sketch that I wish to contradict. Because the nineteenth-century sketch emerges from a moment of radical shifts, the typical critical approach is to read the sketches as counterpoints to those cultural changes, in which the sketches serve a reassuring function for their middle-class readers and the narrator is removed from the often dirty and bawdy scenes being described.62 Indeed, many of the sketches in Dickens’s collection and in those by Hooper and Baldwin employ a framing device in which an unnamed narrator, often of a higher class than the figures being described, enters into a situation anonymously and details the experience for the presumably middle- class reader. In reference to the Southwest humor stories in particular, Kenneth Lynn
62 For example, regarding sketches featuring urban England, critics frequently cite Walter Benjamin’s definition of a flâneur in order to identify the narrative voice. See Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973). I find Benjamin’s reading of the flâneur to be unhelpful, especially in reference to sketches from the early portion of the nineteenth century. As I will demonstrate later in reference to Dickens and the Southwest humorists, the concept of the flâneur does not take into account the authors’ translation of their own experiences in London and the Southwest. See Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century (2007) for more on critical misapplications of Benjamin’s study.
describes the framing as a cordon sanitaire: “By containing their stories within a frame, the humorists also assured their conservative readers of something they had to believe in before they could find such humor amusing, namely, that the Gentleman was as
completely in control of the situation he described as he was of himself” (Mark Twain
and Southwestern Humor 64).63
However, the authors of the sketch collections were active participants in the changing economic dynamic of the 1830s in a way that contradicts the label of gentleman observer and also complicates their representations of London and the Southwest. The changes to the transatlantic economy resulting from rapid industrialization also entailed a more general ideological and material shift in British urban areas and the Southwest that implied a greater sense of socio-economic mobility in the emerging free market
economy. In Britain, political and economic power was less tied to the aristocracy and the ownership of land, and fell increasingly to those who actively participated in business dealings (Walvin 66). What once was an agriculturally-based, tenant labor population in which an individual would work on the same estate his or her entire life was now an urban, physically mobile industrial and business-centered workforce (Farnie 36; Lemire 93-4; Walvin 14-15).
Likewise, those who poured into the Southwest territories to capitalize on the new demand for cotton were not always the established planters who populate the plantation romances of William Gimore Simms or John Pendleton Kennedy. As with the urban areas of Britain, the Southwest territories demonstrated a sense of physical and social
63 For criticism that argues for the reassuring function of nineteenth-century British urban sketches, see Allison Byerly, “Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature,” Criticism 41 (1999): 349-64; or Garcha, From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (2009).
mobility brought about by rapid economic change (Justus 34). This expansion fostered a culture in which any individual could, in theory, seize upon new opportunities for financial prosperity through land cultivation or speculation (Beidler 89). And that image of self-propelled economic gain was promoted by the opportunities emergent in the newly-settled lands. Not only were they more fertile and better suited for growing cotton, but the cost of planting and maintaining a cotton trade was much lower than in the east due to greater opportunities for transportation on the rivers and the cheapness of the land (North 125).
In turn, all three authors personally benefited from this economic and ideological