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

[page 16:]

As Lowell testified, Briggs possessed greater insight and wit than he was ever able to transcribe in fiction. However, his first novel amply demonstrated that his mode of perception was ironic. Harry Franco begins his narrative by expressing contempt for social pedigree. “It is a generally received opinion in some parts of the world,” he writes, “that a man must of necessity have had ancestors; but in our truly independent country, we contrive to get along very well without them.” Aristocrats, he remarks sarcastically, would scorn an “alliance with a parvenu like Adam.”

However, Franco rejoices that, in America, a man's own merits are his only claim to success. The source of the book's satire is the degree to which Franco's adventures, as he goes on to relate them, contradict this democratic assumption. [page 17:]

In two volumes, Briggs's first hero describes his life from the time he leaves his country home for New York City to seek the wealth, social position and marriage that constitute his conventional idea of “success,” until the time of his triumphant return a few years later. Franco's father, an importer, has been bankrupted by Jefferson's Embargo, and what is worse, disinherited, Harry, nurtured on the hope of receiving his grandfather's fortune, feels defrauded of his proper station in life. Unsystematically educated, lie has been reading novels and indulging in “dreamy ill-defined apprehensions of the way of the world.” Franco is as sanguine of success as he is unprepared to gain it in the ruthless city.

In a series of encounters with the worldly confidence men of New York, Harry is easily cheated out of his small fund of money. Although he determines at once on Georgiana Delancey as the girl of his dreams, his own destitution and the clumsiness of his attempts at genteel manners prevent him from even making his existence known to her. Driven to desperation by his inability to gain a foothold in the city, Franco enlists as a sailor aboard a merchant vessel bound for South America. He strikes up his first genuine friendship with a handsome and popular crew member, Jerry Bowhorn, with whom he jumps ship in Buenos Aires. They travel across the pampas, encountering dangerous gauchos and the famous “pampara” windstorm. [page 18:]

Determined to return to New York to win fortune and Georgiana, Franco volunteers to sail on a home-bound American sloop-of-war. Resisting the tyranny of a lieutenant who orders him flogged, he climbs to the topmost spar, and falls into the sea. When he is rescued, he finds that his offense has been forgiven; the crew regards him as a hero and has raised a generous subscription for him.

But when once again among the shysters of New York, Franco is duped into investing his money in fraudulent land speculation. He learns the harsh realities of hunger and homelessness; he sees the squalor of the Five Points slum. A chance meeting with his sailor friend, Bowhorn, lifts him from the suicidal depression these experiences cause. Harry determines to put aside his dreams of quick elevation to fortune, and depend solely upon his own exertions. He finally has an opportunity to woo Georgiana, when he is employed in the brokerage firm of a Mr. Marisett, who coincidentally turns out to be the girl's guardian. One of the major obstacles to his successful courtship is Franco's inability to experience religion. Georgiana requires her suitor to be susceptible to the “divine influence.” The engagement is postponed, while Marisett sends Franco to New Orleans to obtain control of the cotton market, as signs of economic depression begin to appear.

While he is following orders, Franco receives news that Marisett's firm has failed. Finding the reckless atmosphere of business depression infectious, he searches [page 19:] for a gambling house; by mistake, he wanders instead into a Negro congregation, where the words of the sermon miraculously “fall upon his heart.” Then he returns to New York, only to discover that Marisett and Georgiana have left the city to eke out an existence on a small piece of property in North Carolina. Moreover, Franco's own father has become very prosperous as a result of successful land speculation. The country village of Harry's childhood has been renamed Francoville, and a pretentious mansion erected in place of his old home.

In response to this reversal in his social standing, Harry immediately sets out dm a steamboat journey to find Marisett and Georgiana; he is strangely aided by a storm and shipwreck, for he survives the disaster and floats ashore on the North Carolina beach that adjoins marisett's property. Nursed by Georgiana, Franco recovers from the fever and delirium induced by his ordeal; he marries marisett's now penniless ward, and they become the foremost citizens of Francoville.

The plot, composed of contrivances common to popular sentimental romance, demonstrates how the inflated expectations of a country-born innocent arc reduced to a realistic perception of “the way of the world,” in time for a romantic denouement. From the first page of the book, where Franco declares that in America a man's achievement depends on his merits, Briggs has raised the reader's expectation that the hero will have to disavow dreams of romantic success and rely upon his own exertions. Until the accident of his father's lucky speculation, however, Franco is as far from his goals as ever. To rescue his hero's fortunes, [page 20:] Briggs ironically adapts the conventions of his favorite novelists, Fielding and Smollett, to the requirements of the American social scene. Just as the English heroes of these writers traditionally rediscover their aristocratic parentage, Franco comes to wealth and position, not as a result of his own lengthy and strenuous exertions, but through his father's return to wealth by means of fortunate speculation. The elder Franco's virtu clearly resides in his wealth, not in himself. In Harry Franco, Briggs burlesques an American compromise with the principle of an established elite. Like Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and other observers of nineteenth-century American society, Briggs saw that Americans, despite their vaunted ideals of democracy, set up social patterns that approximate those of the English aristocracy that they profess to despise.

Poe noted parallels in plot between The Adventures of Harry Franco, and Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random; he accuser Briggs, in the “Literati of New York’,’ ” (2) of being a hopeless imitator. However, Poe's personal resentment of the writer, which will be discussed later, led him to a hasty reading; he missed the fact that Briggs ironically placed one of the structural conventions of the English novel, the return to rightful wealth and position, against the background of the wild speculations of the Panic of 1837. His purpose was to emphasize the failure of [page 21:] mere honesty and effort to succeed in “democratic” America. Therefore Briggs may not be accused fairly of meaningless imitation, for he performed the supremely critical act of manipulating a well-worn plot device to his own purpose.

He did not openly read his countrymen a lecture on hypocrisy and moral decay, as Whitman later did in Democratic Vistas, but he used Harry Franco's ingenuous relation of his adventures to “look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease.”(3)

In his development of a form to embody this theme, Briggs got little help from the two foremost practitioners of American prose fiction in his day, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Brigs identified Irving with the English tradition of Lamb and Hazlitt, considering him out of touch with American social realities. For Cooper, he had nothing but disdain; laughing bitterly at the sea stories, he- was sure that Cooper never saw blue water. His “tars are so exceedingly flowery,” Briggs asserted in a verse satire, that Cooper must have seen them in some “naval spectacle at the ‘Bowery.’ ”

But Briggs did have an American literary hero. In a later essay, he paid tribute to Benjamin Franklin:

Briggs appreciated. Franklin's earthiness and his honesty in presenting a hero who was less than perfect. lie acknowledged the clues he picked up in the Autobiography by his choice of a name for his first hero.

In order to achieve Franklin's directness, Briggs explored the possibilities of fictional autobiography. Eventually he would choose it as the form for three of his four novels. Like Franklin, who also edited the events of his own life for artistic purposes, Briggs shaped selected aspects of his pre-literary career into the narrative of a persona. While he revealed the truth of his experience, as any novelist does, he protected personal details that were the fiber of his daily life. Harry Franco never so much as enters a wholesale grocers’ establishment. Moreover, Georgiana DeLancey bears no more resemblance to Deborah Briggs than Franco's patriotic mouthings do to Briggs's sophisticated social and political awareness. Genuine autobiography, in any case a delicate task, was impossible for Briggs, who could even be less than candid in intimate correspondence. He was a man in whom self-esteem warred with a bitter recognition of the limitations of his ability. The secretiveness and brusque manner always noted by Briggs's contemporaries were tactics employed to conceal an unsparing self-knowledge. He would scarcely choose direct autobiography, when throughout his career he buried himself in work, even in drudgery, in [page 23:] order to escape too overwhelming a confrontation with his self-dissatisfaction.(5)

While in this respect fictional autobiography was a wry joke on Briggs's part, in another, it was a useful technique, The pretense of autobiography enabled him to maintain the easy, conversational tone that, in Harry Franco, gives ironic emphasis to his theme. Because the reader listens directly to Franco's voice, the gap between his perception and the realities of his situation, on which the book's humor depends, is dramatically established. Briggs liked the mood created by autobiographical narrative for another reason, too; he placed great value on the artist's devotion to verisimilitude, a quality effectively supported by this form.

Briggs often discussed fiction, history and autobiography in introductions and authorial asides. “The only true character,” he wrote, “is one drawn by an autobiographist,” because no man can know another so well as he knows himself.” Yet Briggs said he found fiction superior to history, for the novelist is able to supply his character with a full psychological background, so that his actions, their sources revealed, are more understandable. He claimed that a man writing his own story would be apt to conceal his meaner moments. This scattered and contradictory theorizing is full of Briggs's oblique satire [page 24:] on those novelists who strove to increase the credibility of their feeble fictions by protesting that they represented truth. However, in the course of examining the labels “fiction,” “history,” and “autobiography,” Briggs aptly described the nature of his brand of fictional autobiography; he characterized his aim as the achievement of a “moral daguerreotype of character.”(6)

Briggs did not aim at creating highly individualized characters, as Hawthorne did, for example, in The Scarlet Letter. Rather, he described the actions of typed characters in order to unveil a generalized moral failure. He would have expressed his meaning more clearly had he written that his aim was to daguerreotype (that is, to portray in a realistic style) events that reveal the principles on which his fellow countrymen base their conduct. Briggs was interested in describing many types of moral depravity, just as Fielding had done in Joseph Andrews. He chose to give his daguerreotypes added effect by placing them in the framework of the autobiography of an ordinary young man, who candidly related his adventures without grasping their full implication.

The echo of Franklin in Franco's name is ironic; [page 25:] throughout the book, his attempts to follow the former's example and accommodate himself to the “way of the World” are repeatedly frustrated. Even his disavowal of romantic hopes and his acquisition of the Franklinesque virtues of hard work, honesty, piety and chastity, do not keep him from falling into more and more desperate straits, Briggs's admiration of Franklin, secure in its literary facet, was ambiguous when he regarded Franklin as a practical moralist! in Harry Franco he mocked a young man with all of Franklin's thoroughly materialistic ambitions.

Harry Franco, like his namesake, is not a man to whom virtue comes easily. He, too, has to struggle against the runaway impulses of his senses. Never quite achieving Franklin's methodical outline of daily life, Harry does not develop practical maxims for his own use, but following his father's advice, patterns himself after the models of genteel fiction and drama. For example, after he visits the theater, in which the proper fashions and address of a lover are exhibited, Franco attempts to win Georgiana in the stage-approved manner; he is, of course, thoroughly rebuffed. Again, he tries to quiet his enormous appetite on small bits of dry toast served at his genteel boarding house, since large breakfasts are unfashionable. He suffers hunger, but does not consider parting with his elegant velvet vest. The elder Franco has schooled Harry carefully in the art of eating an egg with dignity, but he neglected [page 26:] to mention the effects of liquor. His parting admonition is that whatever Harry does, he should do it “genteely.” Because the father has, in effect, set his son up as a dupe for the predatory characters he will meet, it is doubly ironic that he is eventually responsible for Harry's triumph. For Harry Franco is not only the innocent “boy from the provinces”; like his father, he is the bewildered victim of a decadent society that conceals its ruthlessness behind genteel manners and democratic pieties.

Briggs saw that, in the mid-nineteenth century, the nation's great effort to master the material resources of the continent had a counterpart in its private citizens’ lives; in acquiring wealth, they largely ignored moral scruples, just as the United States, gripped by manifest destiny, ignored tie integrity of Mexico. Moreover, city-dwelling Americans, particularly, turned in admiration to the polish and elegance of the English aristocrats, as portrayals of them flooded local newspapers and book stores in cheap, uncopyrighted reproductions of current novels. While Americans mouthed principles of democratic theory, their manners and desires were formed on models of English fiction, soon imitated by native sentimental writers. Franco, in his small country village, had absorbed the material hungers of hie countrymen, but lacked the sophistication to perceive the distorting of genuine value to which Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman so eloquently testify. [page 27:] Taking stylish surfaces and jargon about democratic opportunities at face value, he was like a boy who dashes headlong onto a partly-frozen lake in winter, taking the appearance of solidity for the fact. While he might have emerged safely by careful skating, Franco, in his inexperience, kept crashing throngh the thin crust of social forms and official pieties, into the icy water of brutal reality.

The period of his gulling is more extended than Roderick Random's in order to emphasize this theme) Harry Franco not only falls into the snares of con-men, an experience universally encountered, but is subject to the peculiar treacheries of American life. This becomes most explicit in the episode of flogging on the American sloop-of-war. Franco boards the vessel in relief, for he is happy to escape the brutality of the Brazilian Navy in order to serve his own democratic nation. However, just as success in the business world is created by wealth and social position, so preferment in the American Navy is not the result of meritorious service, but depends on political and social influence. As a result, Franco's ship is ruled by a man who revels in opportunities for petty tyranny, and sailors are mistreated and flogged as brutally as those in the pay of the most unscrupulous dictator. Throughout his life Briggs linked slavery, the flogging of sailors, and the lack of international copyright legislation as three points at which American democracy dramatically broke down. [page 28:]

Despite the detail in which Harry relates his adventures, he does not succeed in becoming a memorable character. He is honest, straightforward, affectionate, loyal, but he is unconvincingly motivated; he falls in love with Georgiana too readily, and accepts advice too uncritically. He seems a parody of heroes of conventional romance, except when he acts with a Tom-Jones-like vigor, during the episode of the threatened flogging. The punishment is ordered because Harry will not betray fellow crew members who smuggled liquor onto the vessel. In springing into the rigging to escape the brutal command, Franco refuses to bend his spirit to an official tyranny. Fierce personal pride forbids him from being a candidate for even heroic martyrdom. In de-scribing his ascent and fall from the main-topmast, Briggs wrote some of his most vivid prose:

In Melville's White-Jacket, published ten years later, the hero's fall from that same topmost yard results in his freeing himself from the strangling garment that had set him apart from his fellows. In Briggs's book, though less eloquently expressed, the experience also represents the mysterious confrontation with death that brings about a deeper identification with other human beings. Harry experiences a sense of solidarity with the sailors, symbolized by their generous subscription, that was lacking in the world of the city. The interlude at sea is written in a slightly different tone from the rest of Franco's adventures. Burlesque is almost absent, and Franco is given a chance, finally, to show that he is made of better stuff that the common run of sentimental heroes. However, Briggs drew a lively, resourceful, individualized hero more successfully in his last novel, The Trippings of Tom Pepper; in his first book, it is an essential part of the satire that the hero's growth in understanding does not significantly affect his fate. Though Harry returns to the city a more confident, and somewhat more developed character, he cannot avoid the rampant corruption. Moreover, viewing his career retrospectively, he ingenuously repeats the American piety that his success depends on his own merits. Never moved to examine his desires, Franco finds large profits as desirable as do his betrayers.

Harry Franco, then, is sacrificed as a character capable of emotional or intellectual development to the [page 30:] exigencies of the satire; on the other hand, Briggs's theme releases a gallery of vivid caricatures, some of whom are more notable fictional creations than their common acquaintance and dependable victim. Among the striking figures whose lives intersect with Franco's are the dry goods salesmen, J. Lummucks, the Southern orator, Sylvanus Spliteer, the old merchant, Stripes, the Mirror's columnist, D. Wellington Worhoss, the petty tyrant, Lieutenant Wallop, and the confidence-man, Doitt. Briggs draws these figures, through Franco's impressions, with clarity and economy. As their names imply, the men are characterized by one facet of their personalities. However, in keeping with Briggs's irony, their names are only slantingly appropriate. J. Lummucks, the salesman who models his elegant manners on Bulwer's heroes, is not clumsy or stupid in his external appearance, but he reveals himself to be a cruel oaf who extends friendship to Franco only because he is under the mistaken impression that the latter is a prospective client. Despite his fashionable exterior, Lummucks is as hollow-hearted as Stripes, the old merchant who offers no salary to his clerks the first year, and the empty boxes, the second year. In the Stripes case, the character's name represents his spiritual link with slave-owners and flogging naval officers, other American exploiters of men. In the incidents involving Lummucks and Stripes, Briggs first hinted at a theme he directly explored in later books, that the life of a merchant is dehumanizing. Moreover, Lummucks’ imitation of Bulwer's heroes is an early example of another [page 31:] of Briggs's major concerns: the corrupting influence of imported, fiction on young Americans who have no literary tradition of their own.

Not so simple a type as the dandified salesman and the avaricious merchant, D. Wellington Worhoss is an accomplished confidence-man worthy of a place in Melville's account of those ingratiating figures whose duplicity is bewildering in its variety; a one-time West Point cadet ambitious to be a writer, Worhoss wages his campaigns in the “stony purlieus” of the city, rather than on the Mexican border. A skillful manipulator of Franco's funds, he introduces the boy to high points of city life, always tactfully leaving him with the bill. Worhoss soon discovers that more money is to be made by selling nonexistent real estate than by borrowing on the promise of his literary efforts. He plausibly sells Franco some property two hundred yards into the river, and completes his beneficence by introducing the boy to Mr. Doitt.

Doitt is briefly described, but he is a character of more complexity than those already mentioned; he is engagingly frank about his sudden elevation to wealth from the lowly state of commission agent. His home smells of wet paint, and he likes to have his friends guess at the cost of furnishings. Winning Harry's confidence by his openness, Doitt describes real estate deals productive of quick profits, lamenting the unseasonable tie-up of his cash in possessions. Franco cheerfully lends Doitt the thousand dollars received from his shipmates, but refuses [page 32:] collateral security from such an obviously wealthy friend. Franco is, of course, unable to collect the debt; he has recourse to a lawyer, Mr. Slobber, who takes his last ten dollars for the advice that he has no case. The crowning moment comes when Franco overhears his story related at the boarding-house table; all the young men praise Doitt's cleverness.

We do not see Doitt or Franco's other traducers in repose, but only in brief clashes with their victim; Briggs is not so interested in the men themselves as he is in what their behavior signifies. Thus, in the Doitt fiasco, the emphasis does not fall on Doitt's chicanery, but on its general acceptance. The same is true of the best of the book's satiric episodes, in which Franco confronts a slaveholder. Franco is not only cheated out of money in his adventures; he is unable to hold onto his good name or even his respect for duly constituted authority. Colonel Sylvanus Spliteer, one of Briggs's finest caricatures, is a “lank cadaverous” Southern orator, who happens to sit next to Harry at his first dinner at a hotel. Since Franco is unable to command the attention of the waiter, he drinks from what he mistakenly supposes to be a common bottle of wine. Cursed by Spliteer, as the “son of a northern abolitionist,” Franco is assaulted by the Southerner's henchmen, who presume, from the terms of the curse, that Franco has been enticing away Spliteer's black servant. Lucky to escape a lynching, the boy is hauled before a judge; by this time, the napkins he used [page 33:] to mop up spilled wine are alleged to be abolitionist handbills. When the confusion finally subsides, the only charge against Franco is his gross breach of manners. Forgiven by the Southerner, he is invited to join in a drinking bout with the gentlemen; before he is floored by mint juleps, the titles of judge and colonel lose their sanctity for him, “for such songs, and such speeches, as came from the mouths of these gentlemen, I never listened to before nor since.”(8) The incident is still not closed, for a newspaperman, irked at his exclusion from the courtroom, picks up the outlines of the story and represents Franco as a bold insurgent; he derides Harry's appearance and demands that he be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town. Horrified at this impending fate, Harry appeals to Spliteer for protection, and is reassured by that benevolent gentleman: “nobody cares anything about a newspaper, for although there is nothing which men read more eagerly, there is nothing which they heed so little, not even their Bibles.”(9) The passage shows how Briggs developed the ramifications of a minor incident, introduced casually, and how he scored his most devastating points by understatement. Sectional hostilities, drunkenness and debauchery, and the threat of violence are so close to the surface of American life that one innocent of the game of manners may unwittingly lay them bare. [page 34:]

Briggs's material is obliquely anti-slavery; by representing Spliteer and his supporters as morbidly sensitive and bellicose, he discredits their moral position. Moreover, the indictment covers more than slaveholders; Spliteer, whose name denotes his paranoia, is clearly associated with the Northern judge, demonstrating that corruption in America is more than a one-issue, sectional phenomenon. This theme is indirectly supported at the book's end, when Harry is converted by a black minister in New Orleans; Briggs implies that Christianity cannot survive among men Who exploit their fellows for profit, whether they be Northerners or Southerners. It flourishes among the lowly, rather than among the fashionable attendants of Georgiana's fashionable New York church.

Walter Allen, in a brief discussion of Joseph Andrews, remarks that “Fielding has the gift which is the prerogative of great comic writers of being able to cap absurdity of situation on absurdity of situation, in a single scene, and go on doing it beyond what we expect to be the climax.”(10) This is the effect that Briggs achieves in the Spliteer incident, and moves toward in the Doitt episode. At his most successful, his satiric strength resides in his full exploitation of situations; instead of aiming at each of his targets in a separate incident, he simply [page 35:] sets up the first confrontation, knocks down the initial domino, and stands back to see the others fall inevitably.

Franco describes his encounters with men of the city with great candor and feeling; one expects his portraits to be somewhat simplified, as they are revealed only through the unsophisticated vision of a boy. But part of the vivid impression the minor characters make depends on the ballast of realistic description with which Briggs weights their milieu. In describing New York City, Franco never idealizes; he is always exact in presenting the color and variety of the metropolis. One of his favorite scenes, a place at which he successfully confronts his crises, is the Battery. The Battery had special meaning and attraction for Briggs himself, indicated by the frequency with which he sketches it in his work:

If the Battery gives evidence of New York's prosperity and natural beauty, the sight of which provides healthful refreshment for Franco, the Five Points slum area is [page 36:] proof of the squalor that also exists in the city. Franco, wandering into crowded, littered slum streets, is driven to thoughts of suicide when he sees how human beings starve in “this great and wealthy city.” He himself experiences hunger in the midst of plentiful displays of food. Briggs's own childhood poverty established unfailing sensitivity to the cruelty of deprivation, a theme to which he recurs in all of his novels. Franco's realistic descriptions of the town always emphasize the great disparity between rich and poor; but Briggs does not Allow him to omit portraits of those, neither wealthy nor destitute, who lead a marginal existences the apple-woman, the Negro-girl hawking hot corn, the cartmen reading their penny paper, the old second-hand-book dealer.

There is a Whitmanesque touch to these details, recorded for their own sake. The closely observed city scenes in Harry Franco are forerunners of similar sketches of New York and Liverpool in later novels; they indicate Briggs's continuing fascination with the spectacle of life in the metropolis. Although he often felt the need to refresh himself on Nantucket or Staten Island, “to dip his pen,” [page 37:] as he put it, “in the inkhorn of Nature,” the city, with its readily available contrasts, always drew him back, This aspect of his work links Briggs with Howells, Garland and, most of all, Dreiser.

Briggs's sheer pleasure in straightforward, realistic, journalistic prose is demonstrated in the description, almost for its own sake, of the Argentine pampa. The only thematic connection this episode has with the rest of the book is its demonstration of the way polite manners conceal brutality among gauchos and outlaws, too. It is ironic that the corruption of Buenos Aires is so evident to Franco, who fails to detect it at home. Briggs allowed his colleagues and thumb-nail biographers to assume that the Argentine interlude authentically represented his own experience; the description he wrote, seven years later, of a windstorm on the pampa,(13) confirms the Impression that this section of Harry Franco was based on the voyage Briggs made to South America. The Inclusion of these adventures in the novel give the added luster of exoticism to a volume that would otherwise seem to dwell too sharply on home scenes.

The critical sense that kept Briggs's satire from slipping into didacticism, the wit that reminded him to “mix a little honey with [his] mustard,” made him especially aware of deficiencies in the sentimental fiction of his day. The Adventures of Harry Franco is full of [page 38:] literary criticism. In the structure of the plot, Briggs burlesqued, the careers of sentimental heroes.(14) He also engaged in explicit criticism of such writers as Edward Bulwer, whose gothic fictions were based on tired formulae, and Hannah More, whose gushy moralistic stories play a part in the Worhoss episode. Moreover, Harry's refusal to discuss his ancestry at the beginning of the novel is not only a democratic stand, but a literary one. It registered Briggs's protest against those American writers who opened their novels fashionably, if sterilely, by imitating foreign models. Franco, unlike these, refuses to “dilate to the edge of endurance” upon leaving home; instead, he undercuts the sentimental aspect of parting by turning immediately to his first bumbling attempt to be a man of the world.

In his first novel, then, Briggs opened many doors into himself. He displayed his anti-romanticism, his wit, his anti-slavery feeling, his satiric view of the corruption in his own society, his realistic style, his interest in urban scenes, his sensitivity to poverty, and his narrative ability. But he so effectively concealed sharp satire beneath conventional plot line and vivid description that he attracted favorable attention from many magazine and newspaper critics who were only interested in his book's witty surface. Among these, the most important for Briggs's own career was Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the [page 39:] Knickerbocker magazine.

The Knickerbocker, founded in 1833, and purchased by Clark in 1834, had the distinction of publishing such notable American writers as Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Halleck, Longfellow and Whittier, by the year in which it reviewed Harry Franco. Its editor, who kept going despite financial difficulty until 1861, made it into a reflector of prosperous, conservative New York opinion. The Knickerbocker advocated an original American literature, but openly admired and imitated Scott, Byron and Dickens; it had nothing but distaste for the gothic romances of Bulwer, Clark was a thoroughgoing professionals but he encouraged the amateur literary labors of wealthy businessmen. He and hie supporters, though they ostensibly maintained an apolitical tone, identified themselves with the Whig party. They were advocates of Northern business interests, in favor of high protective tariffs, and strongly opposed to Jackson and his Democratic successors. They were as conservative in their orthodox Christianity as they were in their politics. Clark and his friends shared with less privileged New Yorkers a pride in their metropolis, and a sense of its emergence as a cultural center of greater vigor than Boston. They admired robust humor, despised Transcendentalism, and considered abolitionists New England fanatics. Clark himself was a lover of the fashionable and elegant, a gossiper, a gourmet; an egocentric man, he cultivated a clique of admirers and nourished undying antagonisms (he always referred to Poe [page 40:] as Poh).(15) Since Clark had the power to boost a writer's popularity, not only through the circulation of his own magazine, but through all the small-town papers that eagerly printed his “Editor's Table,” his praise of Briggs was highly flattering, Clark welcomed Briggs's first novel, not so much for its real merit, as for its harmony with some of his own attitudes. Because Briggs cleverly mirrored familiar scenes, interested himself in worldly affairs, and mocked Bulwer, he was to be preferred to those gothic romancers, who, Clark disgustedly claimed, “sanctify adultery, shock us with atrocity, stiffen us with terror,” Clark appreciatively labelled Briggs's humor Rabelaisian; in his review of Harry Franco, he called the book “exceedingly amusing, racy, and original,” singling out the vivid “Metropolitan pictures” for praise. However, Clark completely glossed over the satire, calling the novel an “unpremeditated natural sketch of the different phases which the career of an American boy sometimes assumes.”(16) He chose to take the book as straight autobiography, demonstrating, unsurprisingly, his own insensitivity to the corruption Briggs satirized.

Briggs, while he had reservations about Clark's personality, could only be grateful for his praise. Although he soon perceived that Clark subordinated his real [page 41:] responsibility as a literary Moses” to petty vindictiveness and self-aggrandizement,(17) 1839 he must have felt that becoming one of the Knickerbocker's regular contributors established him as a participant in the New York literary world. When Harry Franco was published, Briggs was still so involved in the grocery business that he did not have time to correct the proofs. Now he would try to leave the confines of Water Street for Ann and Nassau, the newspaper row of his day.

Briggs's usefulness as a member of the Knickerbocker clique lay in his “conciseness and felicity of expression,” and in his “unpremeditated natural” sketching. But how much did Briggs participate in Clark's view of him? In 1839, Briggs was certainly attracted to the Whig Party. However, his opposition to Jackson and Van Buren did not arise exclusively from his disapproval of their major policies. As the son of an importer who had suffered from restrictions on trade, Briggs did not favor the high tariffs recommended by the Whigs. Indeed, Harry Franco is evidence that, unlike the Knickerbocker Whigs, he did not regard American business as a progressive, moral force. He was, moreover, a sympathizer with the humane Jacksonian objective of government administered for the benefit. of working, rather than propertied classes. Briggs's deeply felt opposition to imprisonment for debt, a Whig policy also opposed by Jackson, [page 42:] turned him away from Clark. On the other hand, Briggs claimed he had suffered during the Depression of 1837, a calamity brought about by the ruinous financial policies of Jackson and Van Buren, in their power struggle with the Bank of the United States. More important, though, than any positive programs in determining Briggs's political stand in the 1840's was his distaste for the Democratic candidate. Briggs considered Martin Van Buren a smooth-talking politician whose truckling for votes led him into corrupt compacts with Southern slaveholders and Western expansionists. In contrast, he trusted the instincts of the Whig spokesman, Henry Clay, who, though he was born a Kentucky slaveholder, regarded the Southern institution as morally wrong and doomed to abandonment through progress. Briggs believed that American democracy demanded a two-party system, and so, despite his dissatisfaction with the entirety of both parties’ platforms, he refused to back any of the third-party candidates to whom other dissenters turned.(18) Confined to the choice of Clay or Van Buren and Polk, Briggs clearly preferred Clay.

At the beginning of his literary career, then, Briggs allied himself with a conservative, Whig magazine, not out of unalloyed conviction, but making the best of imperfect alternatives. Even though he made his first appearance under Clark's auspices, Briggs remained a skeptical outsider, reserving the full measure of his loyalty for the [page 43:] individual viewpoint he was developing. In the summer of 1839, he wryly acquiesced in Clark's distortion of his book's meaning by adopting “Harry Franco” as his pseudonym, thus eliminating the distance between his own critical, ironic perception and his hero's ingenuous acceptance of society's terms. By allowing himself to be identified with Franco, Briggs played down the aggressiveness of his satire, and promoted his more saleable skills as storyteller and humorist. However, his fellow literary men would only have to read “Harry Franco's” Knickerbocker contributions to see that Briggs moved toward challenging the magazine's viewpoint in its own pages.

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