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

[page 1:]

“I am no Prospero,” wrote Charles Frederick Briggs to his friend James Russell Lowell. “No word that sounds like it belongs to me.”(1) The writer distilled his career in this self-mocking remark. He did not possess the transforming creative powers of Shakespeare's Prospero, nor was his personal experience that of a fortunate, thriving man. In response to these lacks, however, Briggs developed a worldly and ironic mode of perception that, combined with a talent for sharp phrasing, turned him into a satiric humorist. Just as he fashioned his personal content out of the less than perfect materials of an often-disappointed life, he learned to trap moments of comedy in the cruelties and inconsistencies of men.

The circumstances of his birth, on an island as barren as Prospero's, were inauspicious enough. Charles was born in the midst of the harsh Nantucket winter, on December 30, 1804, the fourth child of Jonathan and Sally Briggs.(2) He later wrote that if his ancestors “did not come on the Mayflower, they did in the very next ship.”(3) His mother [page 2:] had been widowed in her early twenties by Samuel Barrett, who was probably lost at sea. The daughter of Simeon Coffin, she belonged to the family whose surname Lielville later chose to represent salty, shrewd Nantucketers. Sally Earett remarried quickly and bore Jonathan Briggs's first child by the time she was twenty-six. Four children were born in the first nine years of their marriage; soon, however, Briggs, a merchant engaged in the China trade, began to suffer financially as a result of Jefferson's Embargo. Two more children were born after a lapse of five years.

Built and furnished before restraints on trade had narrowed their income, the Briggs home was comfortable, if not as grand as the sea captains’ mansions that stood along the island's cobbled main street. Like many Nantucket families, they must have displayed, among household furnishings and familiar playthings, a share of exotic souvenirs of sea voyages to the Orient.

In contrast to the ease of his first few years, Charles's youth was soon troubled by his father's bankruptcy. He was a small boy when Jonathan Briggs's ships were seized by the British in the War of 1812, and financial disaster overtook the family. His earliest memory was that of being taken to a “strange-looking building with a high fence around it,” where his uncle lifted him up to the bars: [page 3:]

behind them I saw my dear father's face . . . I cried for him to come to me but he couldn’t; the night before he had been taken from my mother's arms and carried to jail because he owed a sum of money to a Chinese merchant which he could not pay.(4)

The humiliation of sudden poverty and resentment of unjust laws, two emotions associated with this experience, remained sharp and immediate for Briggs throughout his life.

However, Jonathan Briggs did not complete the Dickensian tableau by languishing in debtors’ prison until his wife and children perished of want. He somehow found the money to repay his debt and continued to live on Nantucket until the age of eighty-five, while his sons went to sea with the hope of restoring the family's means. The oldest boy, William, succeeded in becoming captain of the ship Phoebe; he was lost at sea in October, 1831, at the age of thirty-six, leaving a wife and two young children.(5) Both of these also died early, the son, twenty-two, at sea, and the daughter, four, two months after the devastating loss of her father. The Briggs family endured their share of the tragedy common on Nantucket. The second son, Thomas, was born in 1800; the course of his career, probably at sea, is unknown, but it is recorded that he died, unmarried, at fifty-two. Lydia, the first daughter, born a year after Thomas, remained [page 4:] one of the island's spinsters. The youngest son, James H., born in 1809, was distinguished by the fact that only he, of Jonathan Briggs's six children, had as large a progeny as his father; his four boys and two girls, scattering from their place of birth, have left no record of their lives. Finally, Sally Briggs's sixth child, Mary, died in infancy.

Although they were loving parents, the Briggses were distracted by misfortune; as if the responsibility were too painful, they allowed their third son to grow up unrestrained by formal education or rigorous duties. As soon as possible, he followed the example of his older brothers. Charles made at least two voyages as a sailor, one to Liverpool and one to South America. However, he soon proved no ordinary tar; though he had grown up “without a soul caring if [he] knew [his] letters,”(6) he was deeply interested in contemporary poetry, dashing to a London bookshop in 1824 to purchase an early copy of the last canto of Don Juan.(7)

Young Briggs soon glimpsed the attractions of New York from the vantage point of the harbor and the Battery, where he looked “with wondering eyes . . . upon the crowded wharves of a thronged seaport . . . in the heyday of its [page 5:] activity.”(8) Before the sailor's life strengthened, its claim on him, he found a position among the busy merchants of the growing city. From the late 1820's until his death fifty years later, Charles Briggs lived and worked in New York. He later wrote that the mercantile pursuits that occupied him for most of thirteen undocumented years, after his 1824 Liverpool voyage, came to an unsuccessful conclusion in the Panic of 1837.(9) Briggs implied that he turned directly to a literary career after these early business ventures failed. However, his own testimony, when it is not missing entirely, often proves misleading. As late as 1841, he was a full partner in the wholesale grocers’ firm of Ransom E. Wood, Charles F. Briggs and William H. Mather, located at 47 Water Street. He had been employed at the Water Street address as early as 1858; by 1842, Briggs's name dropped out of the partnership, though Wood and Mather continued the business for several years.(10) Thus it seems unlikely that financial failure was the reason for Briggs's abandonment of American business.

More probably, he felt increasingly dissatisfied with the life of a merchant. He married the daughter of a Nantucket sea-captain on May 16, 1856, as if to assert, despite [page 6:] the seductiveness of New York, basic loyalty to the qualities his birthplace represented to him: stubborn honesty, distaste for show, self-reliance, and unsentimental compassion. This affirmation, one that he would repeat throughout his life, released a creative impulse; in 1859, Briggs, departing from family tradition, completed a comic novel that measured the gap between ideals and practice in urban America. The Adventures of Harry Franco was praised by a leading magazine editor, though not for its satiric purpose. Briggs ignored the misinterpretation, which would haunt his reputation, and eagerly grasped the chance to develop a literary career. As soon as possible, he. disassociated himself from his former occupation, never mentioning it by name. Mingling with the artists and writers of New York, he even assumed the dress of an artist, as if to sever any appearance of connection with tradesmen.

In later years, however, he slipped a grocer's metaphor into a letter describing this period of transition:

I was not regularly bred to the trade of authorship, although I have always indulged “on the sly,” but as my early occupations were mercantile I carefully hid all my literary efforts so effectually under a bushel that I could not lay my hand on the half of them if I were desirous of doing so, as I am not.(11)

By the time he made these remarks, Briggs was experienced in the ungentle manners of the New York literary world. [page 7:] His motives for concealing the products of his literary apprenticeship from would-be biographers are obscure. Moreover, the tradition of journalistic anonymity makes it impossible to identify with certainty any published writing he did prior to 1859. Paraphrasing Melville, then, Briggs dated his literary life from his thirty-fifth year. In the decade that followed, he was known in New York as Harry Franco, humorous novelist. Under this pseudonym Briggs contributed articles to most of the major periodicals. He published two more novels in 1845 and 1844, respectively The Haunted Merchant, a Dickensian tragicomedy, and Working a Passage, a novelized critique of conditions on American merchant and naval vessels.

In January, 1845, Briggs founded the Broadway Journal, a weekly review which Lie co-edited with Edgar Allan Poe. He strenuously expressed his support of international copyright legislation, and established an extensive acquaintance among other men of letters. However, the ill-luck of the Briggs family persisted; the bright prospects of the magazine were dimmed by personal clashes and finally quenched by the hostility of an organized political faction. In 1846 and 1847, Briggs published a series of letters from a fictional foreign correspondent, renewing the reputation as a Swiftian satirist that he had established in scattered earlier pieces. He then wrote a final novel, The Trippings of Tom Pepper, in which he exposed the naivete of the [page 8:] American dogma that virtuous behavior is the way to worldly success. Realizing that his creative ability did not lie in sustained plot and characterization, but in effective satiric vignettes, Briggs closed his career as a writer of fiction by composing a withering portrait of his fellow literati in Tom Pepper. His novelistic vein played out, he fell to mining the innumerable magazines and newspapers of the day for his living; with one brief exception, prospecting for literary gold as editor of Putnam's Monthly, he was soon buried under the coal dust of journalistic anonymity.

The facts that led to the rediscovery of Charles Briggs as a figure of interest among mid-nineteenth-century American writers, were not buried so deeply as his literary remains. The biographers of Poe and Lowell, sifting the correspondence of their subjects, found the relationship with Briggs an important source of information. Lowell's earliest biographer, his friend Charles Eliot Norton, relied heavily on the long and intimate correspondence between Briggs and Lowell for details of Lowell's life in the 1840's. However, Norton did not fully acknowledge Briggs's influence on his younger friend; jealous of his own intimacy with the poet, he failed to understand the quality of Lowell's affection for Briggs, who was always an outsider, by birth and education, to the circle of Boston Brahmins.(12) Horace Scudder, whose biography [page 9:] of Lowell long remained the standard, followed Norton's example. It was not until the 1967 publication of Martin Duberman's book on Lowell that Briggs's interest and worth were fully acknowledged.(13) Even if they did scant justice to Briggs, Lowell's early biographers printed ample quotations from correspondence between the friends; they exposed enough of the relationship to interest a reader in Briggs.

Poe's biographers, of course, were deeply interested in the affair of the Broadway Journal, and in the collapse of a relationship that had begun in high hopes for fruitful collaboration. However, in attempting to redress the errors perpetrated by Poe's unscrupulous literary executor, Rufus Griswold, they scarcely differentiated Briggs from others who slandered Poe out of personal pique and jealousy. But in George Woodberry's life of Poe, the full quotations from passages in the Briggs-Lowell correspondence that concern Poe convey the sense that Brigg was victimized by Poe; the whole story of the Broadway Journal was left untold.

In 1956, Perry Miller picked up some of the loose ends, and wove them into his fascinating account of the “war of words and wits in the era of Poe and Mellville.” The major achievement of his book, The Raven and the Whale, is its lively re-creation of literary New York in the mid-nineteenth century.(14) Miller, with broad grasp of political and social alignments, and ability to make relevant the works and [page 10:] personalities of those whose contemporaneous Reputations were large, was the first to place Briggs in detailed perspective. Miller found Briggs interesting mainly for the parallels in theme and incident between his novels and Melville's Redburn and White-Jacket. He made particular note of the potential importance of Briggs's realism, but conceded the debt it owed to Dickens’ example.

Miller described Briggs's novels briefly, quoting just enough of then to display the sharp satire that made Briggs a reputation. Relating the personal conflicts of literary New Yorkers, and the battles they waged through their short-lived magazines, he brought to light Briggs's stake in the Broadway Journal and Putnam's, as well as his puzzlingly ambiguous political position. Briggs figures in almost every major clash that Miller described in The Raven and the Whale; two of the book's chapters are named for his novels. Miller, who found Briggs an “interesting, thwarted man, who could be charming,” wrote in a postscript that if his volume “inspires further disclosure of [Briggs] shall not have worked in vain.”(15)

The present study was encouraged by Perry Miller's appealing treatment of Briggs. My research, like Miller's, did not turn up any new large body of Briggs's papers. As Lowell and Poe pointed out, the first with affection, the second with scorn, Briggs was a secretive man, Even Lowell, whom he considered one of his only two intimates, had no [page 11:] knowledge of his financial state at the height of their friendship, like Poe, who attempted to be the architect of his posthumous reputation, Briggs knew how to edit his remarks for the ear of each correspondent. It is not known if he wilfully destroyed manuscripts and papers,(16) if they perished in the accidents of time,(17) or if they survive, undiscovered, in the possession of an unsuspecting heir.

The justification of this book, then, lies in its more detailed scrutiny of the known aspects of Briggs's career. A study of his novels, identifiable magazine pieces, and editorial positions, fleshed out with important surviving correspondence, provides a remarkably clear image of Briggs. He must have written many articles and supported himself by one of two editorial positions that have not been recorded here.) these will be revealed as students of mid-nineteenth-century American literature, several of whom have recently expressed interest in Briggs, continue to turn over the products of an age whose “whole tendency [was] magazineward.”(18) It is likely, however, that literary ventures not described on the following pages were brief and unimportant. In any case, Briggs had so strong and consistent a personality that other events cannot but support the conclusions presented here. [page 12:]

Perry Miller painted Briggs on a large canvas, in the company of at least half a hundred of his contemporaries, in the active style of Rembrandt's “Night Watch.” This study was planned as the verbal equivalent of William Page's serious, realistic portrait of Briggs. However, in a metaphor more consistent with the novelist's own language, it became a series of daguerreotypes of Briggs as he can be captured at significant moments. I view the record of Briggs's life as an album of photographs, taken in sporadic clusters. They are not the usual stiffly posed graduation and wedding pictures, however, but group themselves around events Briggs himself would have found crucial — the closest approaches he made to expressing his vision. If the records of the intervening years, in which his abilities and plans slowly matured, are blank, surviving documents summarize his growth. We are missing details of an island childhood among many brothers and sisters, of life at sea, of early love affairs, but we know of Briggs's loyalty to Nantucket, of his periodic returns to it in person and in prose, and of his choice of a wife from among its sea-captains’ daughters. If we lack clues to those staples of biographers — formal education, financial records, sexual encounters — we can summon daguerreotypes like these to compensate: Briggs studying Byron and Scott to keep his thoughts engaged during the long night in which his wife labored to give birth to their first child; tossing his voluminous notes on Walpole [page 13:] and Macaulay into the fire; striding coldly past Poe in the small Broadway Journal office; artfully persuading George Putnam to finance a new monthly magazine; rejoicing in the birth of a daughter after having abandoned hope for the pleasure of fatherhood; suffering the eclipse of a vital friendship; amusing the clever Bohemian clique in Pfaff's German restaurant; fascinating young journalists, in his final years, with tales of the exciting literary life of New York in the forties. It is hoped that scenes like these, scattered through the following pages, will do as much to recreate Briggs as the detailed, consecutive account of his ports of call, business addresses, or bank statements — evidence of his days that he clearly determined we would never have. The succeeding chapters deal with the recovered novels, magazine pieces, and editorial ventures, in chronological order; in addition, the third chapter, which is drawn from the block of correspondence between Lowell, Briggs, and Page, seeks to describe the novelist as he existed for his two friends just after he had established a reputation.

The scanty treatment of Briggs by biographers of Poe and Lowell, and the intriguing glimpse presented by Perry Miller, were sufficient to awaken interest in the man and his work. If this book began in curiosity about a man who was loved by Lowell and despised by Poe, and whose novels bear points of resemblance to Melville's early work, it has ended in respect for a figure who deserves a qualified inclusion in the pantheon of American men of letters. In [page 14:] a difference of emphasis from Perry Miller, who wrote that Briggs's success and failure lay in his realism,(19) I conclude that Briggs's preoccupation with the discrepancy between ideals and practice in American life, the ironic vision he applied to his own society, constitutes his major literary achievement. In his development of this theme, he shared a common outlook with Thoreau, in Walden, Melville, in Redburn and White-Jacket, Whitman, in Democratic Vistas; his satirical expression leads to a work like Mark Twain's To One Sitting in Darkness. This view of Briggs's career naturally puts emphasis on moments of fully realized satire in Harry Franco and Tom Pepper, and the Pinto letters.

An additional claim of Briggs on the attention of students of American literature is his role in the editorship of the Broadway Journal and Putnam's two magazines that helped to define a national literature. His reasoned and practical support of copyright legislation and an original literature complements his novelistic concern with his country's social conscience.

Finally, I have sought to describe Briggs's limited achievement as a writer, in order to more fully present an intelligent, sensitive and witty man, attempting to take a rational and humane stand in the feverish years leading up to the Civil War. Briggs is worth knowing in his own right. Although none of his efforts brought him the [page 15:] recognition he merited, he had the balance to dismiss tedious misanthropy and regret; he was able to assert, with rightful pride if a tinge of bitterness, that his ambition was to be useful, not known. A slightly built man, his thin face tapering to a sharp chin, Briggs looked, even in his prime, as if he had weathered harsh experience. By the time he was forty, his dark hair had receded slightly at the temples, emphasizing the long, thin triangle of his face, and drawing attention to the set of his mouth, firm and austere. The 1842 portrait by Page, described by a contemporary as looking as if “the living, thinking original had stepped into the frame,” shows a serious, almost drawn, fine-featured man, with small, piercing eyes. Even Briggs's most unrelenting enemy, Poe, admitted that his eyes, though small and gray, were occasionally brilliant. Lowell, whose word portrait of Briggs was as accurate as Page's painting, remarked that Briggs's aloof, reserved expression concealed extraordinary personal warmth and loyalty. Perhaps the poet put it best when he said that Briggs was better than anything he wrote.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 1:]

1. Charles Frederick Briggs to James Russell Lowell, unpublished letter dated March 24, 1845, deposited in the Page Papers, Archives of American Art, Detroit, Michigan.

2. Vital Records of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

3. Briggs to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, unpublished letter dated August 6, 1848, deposited in Boston Public Library.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 3:]

4. Briggs to Lowell, unpublished letter dated march 19, 1845, Page Papers.

5. Vital Records of Nantucket and Pollard Papers, Nantucket Atheneum, Nantucket, Massachusetts.

[The following footnotes appeared at the bottom of page 4:]

6. Briggs to Mrs. Martha Jenks of Nantucket, unpublished letter dated March 4, 1845, deposited in Miscellaneous Collections, New York Public Library.

7. Briggs to Lowell, unpublished letter dated August 19, 1844, Page Papers.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 5:]

8. Charles Frederick Briggs, The Adventures of Harry Franco (New York, 1859), 1, 152.

9. Briggs to Griswold, August 6, 1848, Boston Public Library.

10. Brooklyn City Directories and Doggett's New York City Business Directories, 1820-1855. From the evidence of his later fiction, it seems likely that, before 1857, Briggs had worked for a dry goods jobber and a Wall Street broker.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 6:]

11. Briggs to Griswold, August 6, 1848, Boston Public Library.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 8:]

12. Norton had good reason to be hostile to Briggs; the latter had refused several of his pieces for Putnam's, despite the sponsorship of George William Curtis. When Charlotte Briggs loaned her father's letters to Norton, she had a great deal of difficulty getting the biographer to return them. In a letter of March 25, 1899 (deposited in the Houghton Library, Harvard), she was forced to remind him of her legal and moral rights.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 9:]

13. Martin Duberman, James Russell Lowell (New York, 1967).

14. Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York, 1956).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 10:]

15. Miller, p. 556.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 11:]

16. In a letter of April 11, 1844 (Page Papers), Briggs describes the manner in which he handled the manuscript of an article on Horace Walpole: “I took no copy of what I had written and threw my notes into the fire.”

17. A letter of March 29, 1854, from Lowell to Briggs (Houghton Library), reveals that Briggs's home had just been destroyed by fire.

18. Broadway Journal, I (March 1, 1845), 139. This statement is variously attributed to Poe or Briggs.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 14:]

19. Miller, p. 58.