Is She Not an Unusual Woman? Say More

Germaine de Staël and Lydia Maria Child were both among the most well-known female intellectuals of their times and places: Staël in eighteenth-century Europe, Child in the nineteenth-century United States. Both women were influential in spreading the ideas of eighteenth-century German philosophy, and both used philosophical ideas to articulate their insights on the progress of history and the moral potential of art. Both also used their philosophical skills to address the moral crisis of slavery and to articulate the burden of being an unusual woman. As Staël’s first American biographer, Child helped extend Staël’s ideas beyond Europe and into the United States. Comparing their philosophical views provides us with an echo of women’s involvement in eighteenth-century German philosophy in the tumultuous American nineteenth century.

The City Sketch

Although the picturesque sketch genre is primarily associated with rural subjects, it was also applied to city life during the mid-nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Chapter 2 argues that the newly popular picturesque city sketch helped the emergent middle class to establish its identity as it attained a distinctive position between the wealthy and the working classes. Walking the streets, the middle-class picturesque city sketcher turned the class-divided city into picturesque tableaux that were far less antagonistic to city life than the sensationalist characterizations that were central to the dominant mode of city writing in midcentury. The chapter examines city sketches and fiction derived from the genre, written by Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, George “Gaslight” Foster, Margaret Fuller, Cornelius Mathews, and others. Although city sketchers helped articulate a middle-class identity, the picturesque at times tended to give way to a sublime mode in which the city crowd threatened to absorb the middle class into its undifferentiated mass.

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

This book examines the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth-century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural world that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, midcentury bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promulgated in a variety of popular literary genres, all of which focused on landscape description and inculcated readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed “minor” or have even been forgotten in our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include those from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe) to major authors of the period who are now less familiar to us (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller) to those who are now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.

Cry of Murder on Broadway

This book shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the Astor House Hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him. Ballard survived the attack, and the trial that followed created a sensation. Newspapers in New York and beyond followed the case eagerly, and crowds filled the courtroom every day. The prominent author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child championed Norman and later included her story in her fiction and her writing on women's rights. Norman also attracted the support of politicians, journalists, and legal and moral reformers who saw her story as a vehicle to change the law as it related to “seduction” and to advocate for the rights of workers. This book describes how New Yorkers followed the trial for entertainment. Throughout all this, Norman gained sympathys, in particular the jury, which acquitted her in less than ten minutes. The book weaves together Norman's story to show how, in one violent moment, she expressed all the anger that the women of the emerging movement for women's rights would soon express in words.

The Law of Seduction

This chapter recounts how Lydia Maria Child had taken Amelia Norman to her home to live with her as an intimate of her family after she won the trial. It notes how Lydia kept track of Amelia during the months that she lived with her in the spring of 1844, getting to know her better than she had been able to when Amelia was a prisoner at the Tombs. It also mentions Lydia's belief that Amelia's strong deep feelings were what drove her to the verge of madness. The chapter refers to Maria Lowell, wife of poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell, to whom Lydia recommended Norman for a job as a personal maid. It highlights Lydia's publication of “Letter from New York No. V” while Amelia was living with her, which was a jeremiad against the failure of the law to protect women and the men who made the law.

Harlot’s Fate

This chapter reviews the later years and final fates of many of the players in Amelia Norman's story, such as Mike Walsh, the Democratic politician and journalist who had championed Amelia. It mentions Amelia's celebrated jail mate, George Wilkes, who capitalized on his experience in the Tombs and produced his prison memoir, Mysteries of the Tombs. It also traces Frederick Tallmadge's reputation after he became the principal judge of the Court of Sessions and struggled in vain to persuade the jurors to ignore the context of Amelia's crime. The chapter points out how Amelia's story is still remembered in studies of abortion, prostitution, seduction in law and literature, the “unwritten law,” female murderers, and in studies and biographies of Lydia Maria Child. It includes Lydia's letter to a friend, indicating Amelia had come to a bad end.

A Great Heart

This chapter discusses how Amelia Norman attracted new and influential friends during her time in the Tombs, which became more important to her than any of her fellow inmates proved to be. It recounts how Amelia's new friends read moral and political meanings into her ordeal that went well beyond the sensational interests of the press and even the boundaries of her own experience. It also refers to popular author and reformer Lydia Maria Child, who became Amelia's chief protector throughout her trial and afterward. The chapter describes Lydia as a committed reformer who by the early 1830s was deeply embroiled in abolition. It talks about how Lydia came to New York in May 1841 to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society.