Text: Bette Statsky Weidman, “Abstract,” Charles Frederick Briggs, dissertation, 1968 (This material is protected by copyright)

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This study traces the literary career of Charles Frederick Briggs from his emergence as a humorous novelist as the result of the New York publication of The Adventures of Harry Franco, in 1839, to his death in 1877, after a varied career as novelist, editor and journalist. Briggs's contribution to the development of American literature has hitherto been incompletely revealed by biographers of his best-known associates, Edgar Allan Poe and James Russell Lowell. I summarize the scanty details recorded of Briggs's early life, but concentrate on the moments in his literary career at which he fully articulated his sense of the discrepancy between ideals and practice in American life. His role in the editorship of the Broadway Journal and Putnam's Magazine, two periodicals that helped to define a national literature, is also fully considered. Attention is given to the personality of Briggs, who was an intelligent, sensitive, witty man, attempting to take a rational and humane, if unpopular, stand in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Briggs was born on Nantucket on December 4, 1804. After a brief career as sailor and urban merchant, he wrote the fictional autobiography of Harry Franco, a country boy whose innocence prevents him from perceiving the confidence games rampant in New York City. The novel [page a02:] received favorable reviews and Briggs assumed the name of his first hero as a pseudonym, under which he contributed sketches to several New York magazines, notably the monthly Knickerbocker. In 1843, he became intimate with James Russell Lowell; their surviving correspondence provides many biographical facts. In the same year, Briggs published his second novel, The Haunted Merchant, in which he developed, in Dickens’ manner, moral complications in the life of an urban businessman. The following year he wrote Working a Passage, a novelized account of conditions aboard American merchant and naval vessels. This short volume, based on Briggs's own stint as a sailor, illustrated his straightforward, realistic style as its best.

In 1845, Briggs founded the Broadway Journal, and enlisted the editorial assistance of Poe; after three months, the magazine was censured by the abolitionists, were displeased by what they regarded as Briggs's equivocating stand on slavery. The editor, dismayed by Lowell's disapprobation, and in conflict with Poe, allowed his control of the magazine to lapse in July, 1845.

In July, 1846, Briggs published, in the New York Mirror, a series of fictional foreign letters. Purporting to be from Ferdinand Mendes Pinto, a pompous American journalist travelling in Europe, the letters satirize the actual correspondence of Nathaniel Parker Willis and Margaret Fuller. Pinto reports on literary and social affairs, revealing himself to be a hopeless bigot, [page a03:] addicted to the manners of aristocracy while hypocritically mouthing democratic ideals. In Pinto, Briggs portrayed a self-deceived, self-satisfied imperialistic American of the late 1840's. In 1847, he began to serialize a fourth novel in the Mirror. In The Trippings of Tom Pepper, which contains devastating caricatures of New York literati, Briggs restated his view of the brutal, money-making world of urban America.

Dissatisfied with his novelistic skill, Briggs turned again to editing. He founded Putnam's Magazine in 1853, dedicating it to his belief that American writers deserved support in their attempt to create a national literature. Putnam's, which printed the work of Herman Melville and Henry Thoreau, was a distinguished success. After his displacement as editor in 1855, Briggs became a newspaper journalist, serving on the New York Times, the Brooklyn Union, and the Independent. In the last year of his life, he contributed a series of fictional “Letters from Brewsterville,” to the Independent; they demonstrated that, after his long silence during the terrible war years, Briggs's skill as a satirist was undiminished.