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

[page 44:]

Briggs hinted at his duplicitous attitude when he sent the Knickerbocker four stanzas of verse celebrating his “entrance into a compact with the prince of ... periodicals.” Returning the Biblical metaphor, Clark responded, in his “Editor's Table,” that he did not “know [Briggs] from Adam.” As if to prove this, he quoted as flattery Briggs's doggerel lines:

Clark, prepared to obscure Briggs's seriousness by vigorously promoting him as a humorist, evidently relished the mockery as a sample of fashionable New York wit. On the other hand, Briggs, while his joking verses indicate that he was aware of his differences with the Knickerbocker set, chose to win over his new audience before he fully revealed his animus to some of their manners and morals. As he later pragmatically noted, “You can never gain the ear of anybody by abusing him, by calling him names.”(2) [page 45:]

In August, 1859, Briggs began a series of articles called “Gimcrackery,” that continued to appear in the Knickerbocker until March, 1840. The sketches were designed, in one of the grocer's favorite metaphors, as the appetizer to a fine dinner, the “potage a la julienne” which one enjoys while pondering the offerings of a menu. Briggs enlisted the sympathy of his audience by disavowing a number of attitudes opposed by the Knickerbocker Whigs. First he told his readers not to expect any “translations from nor imitations of any of the high Germanorum mystery-mongers.”(3) He appealed to New York's anti-intellectuals by accusing the “smoke-dried professors of Heidelburgh and Harvard” of smothering feeble thoughts “under a heap of dictionary words.” Then he mocked those who depend on false erudition conferred by the Dictionary of Quotations. He disclaimed the intention of writing learned dissertations on trivial subjects, and refused to handle fashionable gossip. Lastly, he told his audience, who delighted in this deflation of Transcendentalists and professors, that he would present his less serious thoughts first, in imitation of Nature, which provides “buds and blossoms before fruits and flowers. And in elegant society,” he continued, “we all know that ‘Potage a la julienne’ invariably precedes ‘Bas grillee au maitre d'Hotel,’ or a ‘Fricandeau fe Veau.’ ” Having cleverly disarmed his readers, who discovered their own views defended, Briggs could afford to insert a warning [page 46:] that he meant his plate of thin potage to stimulate its consumer's appetite for more substantial fare.

The first of the “Gimcracks” could not have given Clark's subscribers too much discomfort. Briggs began by making witty attacks on prosperous lawyers and judges, on those who have no regard for the genuine values of the past, on the falsely pious, and on the subject-matter and quality of the daily press. In one piece, the narrator dreams that virtue-proclaiming tombstones have been re-inscribed in conformity with truth. Of a judge, Hezediah Helphimself, the revised inscription reads, “He has now gone to a place where he will receive what he never dispensed himself, Justice.”(4) In another “Gimcrack,” an old man is done out of his ancestral home and his civil rights through the cupidity of fellow citizens. The narrator describes unfortunate changes wrought by the passage of time, but concludes that “Time ... is a conservative compared with the destructive gentlemen who compose the common council of this famous city.”(5) In a “Gimcrack” devoted to the utopian future, a society is described in which women are equal to men, servants are unknown, and government is at an end. In spite of the fact that ill of the radical social goals of Briggs's day have been achieved, there are still abolitionists about. This time the mistreated group are “inmates of the nursery,” who are calling for abolition — of “leading-strings.” although some of their themes touched [page 47:] on issues of social justice, most of the “Gimcracks” are the trifles that their name implies.(6)

The best one appeared in December, 1859. Called “A Ride in an Omnibus,” it climaxes the series. Briggs demonstrated here the knowledge of and affection for scenes of the city that first drew Clark's attention. Entering an omnibus on upper Broadway, the narrator calmly begins to describe the trip to Bowling Green, at the other end of the line. However, an omnibus driver from the competing company challenges his driver to a race, and suddenly the purpose of their vehicles, public transportation, is forgotten in a helter-skelter dash through the city. The omnibus race becomes symbolic of the highly competitive nature of society, in which everything is sacrificed to win wealth and power. Disregarding traffic and pedestrians, the driver of the omnibus in which the narrator is a passenger demonstrates his humanity by avoiding running over a “near-sighted old market woman” carrying a basket of apples, who has been sent sprawling by a frightened porker; he merely grazes her petticoat, but loses the lead as a result. The buildings rush by “as though they were reeled off,” and they are aptly characterized — “Saint Thomas’ church, with his two gray towers, and his shingle roof, walked by like a ‘sober second thought*} and Niblo's Garden, with its gingerbread grottoes, and dirty finery, rushed away like a feverish dream.” The omnibusses smash, splatter and crash on their way, overturning market stands and mud-dying [page 48:] pedestrians. They have the energy of a natural force, but they are controlled and cheered on by human beings. There is a Swiftian touch to the moment at which the omnibusses become entangled with a charcoal wagon and a butcher cart, causing “considerable scampering among the foot passengers”:

At the end of this reckless flight, the narrator, characteristically in the losing omnibus, draws the “moral”; sounding very unlike the innocent Harry Franco, he writes, “After all, what is the use of striving to out-race our fellows in this world? If we win, our spirits have all evaporated in the contest, and if we lose, we have nothing but mortification for our exertions.”(7) The piece summarizes the themes of earlier “Gimcracks”: the desire to outrun others gives rise to the ruthlessness, hypocrisy, corruption and false piety that Briggs satirized. Moreover, the omnibus race contains a glancing comment on Briggs's view of his own career. Delayed, like the driver of his omnibus, in the race for literary success, by an [page 49:] involvement in commercial traffic, Briggs reminded himself of the mixed quality of worldly triumph.

His own spirits were evidently evaporating in the effort to balance his serious message with the fun that would make it palatable. Briggs let the monthly “Gimcracks” go until March, 1840, when he turned for refreshment to a description of his native island. Sensing that sustained social criticism had to be balanced by presentation of positive views, Briggs devoted his final “Grimcrack” to his notion of true value. In “Siaconset: How it Arose and What it is,” he employed a straightforward, serious manner to describe the naturalness, simplicity and honesty of Nantucketers. The Islanders, he wrote, model themselves on Thomas Macy, an uncorrupted, compassionate man who was forced to flee Massachusetts for harboring Quakers during a storm. On Siaconset, “Fashion loses sway, “ ”gride and luxury cannot take root,” and “useless restraints and formalities are thrown off.”(8) In the kind of American society that survived on Nantucket, with its blend of practicality and generosity, Briggs saw hope for preserving the democratic ideals and humane qualities that cities seemed to destroy. However, the Knickerbocker readers were accustomed to having their magazine apotheosize the American merchant; they did not regard Siaconset as anything but charmingly quaint.

Four months later, Briggs found himself chafing at this point of view, expressed by a wealthy literary amateur, Henry Cary, who well represented the Knickerbocker mentality. [page 50:] Briggs's dispute with Cary ostensibly involved only a difference about the proper manner of preparing chowder. Briggs contested Cary's elaborate recipe for chaudiere by creating another persona; he sent the Knickerbocker the letter of a fictional Nantucketer, Hezediah Starbuck, who rebelled at the use of a “finical French name” for an honest native dish. Moreover, Starbuck wrote that a man who could so distort the recipe for Nantucket chowder could not be “altogether correct in his views of religion,” not to mention politics. Briggs had taken Cary's recipe as a challenge to the simplicity praised by his Siaeonset article, which had ended with a description of “soused chowder.” Starbuck's letter met with a harsh rebuke from the gourmet merchant, who abandoned humor to write: “Think more and write less; and instead of coining names and living on the wits of other men, endeavor to extract some one useful or amusing idea from thine own.”(9) Cary's tone seems disproportionate to the occasion, until one realizes that Harry Franco's contributions to the magazine must have been irking him for some time. As moderator to the dispute, Clark mildly supported Cary, whom he regarded as a star contributor; he suggested that Harry Franco should handle Cary's delicate style with care, for it, like affiliation with the magazine that printed it, is an “edged tool.”(10) A gentle rebuke, Clark's reply clearly indicated who the outsider was. [page 51:]

Thus Briggs's first full year as a Whig magazinist ended on a note of disharmony that could have been foreseen from the beginning. Although Clark remained hospitable to his work, and continued to print it through 1846, Briggs was already unwilling to identify himself wholly with the Knickerbocker, when it was possible to give his work to other editors. In his contributions to other magazines, he continued to sign his work “Harry Franco,” which by now stood for caustic wit rather than simpleminded adventuring. Often he used only the initials, which were sometimes replaced with variations on his own. Briggs's articles, during the next few years^ were scattered among many periodicals, some as distant as the Hartford Journal, for which lie wrote a letter a week, others as local as Park Benjamin's New World, in which he first appeared in August, 1840.(11)

With wider editorial acceptance of his work, Briggs was able to return to Clark's pages on an independent, irregular basis. Among the miscellany of articles appearing in the Knickerbocker after the conclusion of “Gimcrackery,” are several which show that Harry Franco had set aside the light potage. and moved on to a main course. Briggs showed how the rich assuage their guilt by subscribing funds for missionary ventures, instead of relieving the suffering around them. Aiming a blow at the pretenses to aristocracy flourishing in America, he wrote, “Since every man can and [page 52:] will be his own master,” American gentlefolk should learn to care for their own sculleries.(12) When a “Lady-Sufferer” replied that men would be reduced to savagery if distinctions of class were lost, Briggs's rejoinder was the Jacksonian one that employers must cease to outrage the “natural feelings of their employees.”(13)

While this social criticism was appearing in the Knickerbocker, Briggs was defending another major interest in the New World; he served as the newspaper's art critic during the early 1840's. An early and ardent supporter of American painting, Briggs became a share-holding member when the Apollo Association was formed for the support of native artists in 1859. The Association, composed of dues-paying members who were not themselves artists, selected a number of paintings for purchase each year; after a public exhibition, the shareholders conducted a lottery to determine the private ownership of the paintings. The Association thus benefitted artists, who finally had a market and place of exhibition, and art lovers, who, for a small membership fee, became patrons of the arts, with the chance of owning paintings they could not afford to purchase directly. Four years after joining, Briggs was on the Committee of Management of the group, which had become the American Art-Union; he was influential in selecting the paintings to be purchased and exhibited, and prepared [page 53:] the Annual Reports in 1845 and 1844.(14) In one of these reports, he proclaimed the theme of his criticism: “It is not only nature that we want in our works of art, but it is our own nature, something that will awaken our sympathies and strengthen the bond that binds us to our own homes.”(15)

In frequent New World reviews, Briggs attacked artistic cliches, imitations, prudishness, and the tradition of sending American artists abroad to study; he promoted portraiture, painting from nature, and exhibition and support of American artists. At every opportunity, he praised the work of William Bags, whose painting looked “as though it had been cut out of nature.” He railed against “ideality” in painting as in fiction: “effigies of men should resemble men and not gods,” dust as Emerson riveted attention to everyday detail — the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan — Briggs considered the realistic delineation of American scenes and portraiture of men's faces of greatest worth. He often Reminded his readers: “The thought seems never to occur to the national mind, either as regards literature or art, that our wants may be, and of right, should be, supplied by the growth of our own soil.”(16) He was infuriated when the National Academy's Council rejected a painting by Page because it displayed nude figures; [page 54:] accusing it of “Pecksniffian morality,” he angrily demanded:

Briggs always appreciated the similarity of the plights of American painters and writers of fiction. Painters suffered less from pirated and falsified reproductions of foreign works, but had an analogous difficulty in overcoming the effects of European training, which turned them to classical and Renaissance models and away from the realities before them. Briggs often linked the struggle for international copyright law with establishment of native institutions for training of artists; yet his cultural nationalism never became strident. It was supported by the firm insistence that a painting or a work of fiction genuinely reflect the perception of the artist.

Briggs finally brought his advocacy of American art to the pages of the Knickerbocker. Clark's “Editor's Table” of March, 1842, contained an “Artistical Letter” from Briggs [page 55:] to Page, in praise of the portrait the artist had done of him. The theme of the letter, like that of the New World reviews, is that a painting's greatest merit is its “truthfulness.” Clark himself reported that Briggs's portrait looked as if “the living, thinking original had himself stepped into the frame.” The “Artistical Letter” is of particular interest, however, for more than its praise of Page; it contains Briggs's first published expression of enthusiasm for Dickens, on whose work he was then modelling a novel. Moreover, the same number of the Knickerbocker includes Clark's tacit apology for siding with Cary in the chowder dispute. Evidently Briggs's stature had been increasing during the preceding three years, for in introducing the “Artistical Letter,” Clark characterized him as an “old and favorite correspondent” who always served up an “authentic and savory chowder.”(18)

Briggs also concocted for the Knickerbocker a satire devoted to the cause of international copyright. The article, appearing in the October, 1843, issue, demonstrated; that he did not belong among the magazine's coterie of Anglophiles. Clark published the piece because it made fun of nationalistic bombast; he ignored the fact that it was an audacious attack on the conservative position. Briggs carried the anti-copyright position of many of the Knickerbocker's readers to an absurd extreme, at the same time mimicking the screech-eagle rhetoric of their opponents. Clark could read the article as a satire on the style of [page 56:] the “Young Americans,” Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, whom he abhorred; Mathews and Duyckinck could appreciate the mockery of conservative opinion.(19) Briggs's narrator advocates that we save out countrymen from the poverty, drudgery and disease that always result from authorship, by importing all our literature:

Doubtless, Clark felt that he could risk this much; some of his anti-copyright readers might not even perceive that this paragraph, based on their major premise, had slipped into satire. However, what really made Briggs's piece inappropriate for the Knickerbocker was its conclusion. He reminded Clark's readers that if they pass a copyright law entitling authors to a right of property in their work, they will be establishing a dangerous precedent by relying on truth and justice, rather than on their usual guide, expediency:

Briggs's recognition of the damning links between many manifestations of American greed often caused readers to find his chowder too sharp.(21)

One Knickerbocker article that promised to make Whig readers dyspeptic began as an early “Gimcrack” in October, 1859. Dedicated to “those brave spirits who still refuse to bend the knee to the stern idols of these latter days,” the story of The Haunted Merchant was discontinued after two months. Briggs saw that serial publication in the Knickerbocker would hamper the development of his theme, and it was not until 1843 that the aborted serial reappeared as his second novel, under the title, Bankrupt Stories.

Briggs's ambitious intention was to prepare a kind of Decameron; ten bankrupt merchants, meeting in the anteroom of a lawyer, decide to retrieve their lost wealth by publishing their stories under the disinterested editorship of Harry Franco. Of the ten projected Bankrupt Stories, only [page 58:] one, The Haunted Merchant, was ever written; Briggs explained to Lowell that pressures of serialization exhausted his interest in the plan. A more potent dissuasion was that he had thoroughly expressed his theme in the first tale, which grew to book length. As a disillusioned Harry Franco, Briggs wrote in his introduction that mankind, even “American democrats,” sturdily opposes the fact that “every man has a right to his own soul.”(22) Stripped by a bankrupt law that has no counterpart to restrain speculators or right injustices, men lose their dignity and self-respect along with their fortunes. The Haunted Merchant was a book that Briggs had long promised himself to write; it sprang from his childhood experience, when he was “just old enough to remember anything terrible, but not old enough to recollect any ordinary occurrences.”(23) He later wrote to Lowell that he “should never cease to remember” the effect that his father's bankruptcy and subsequent imprisonment for debt had on his unhappy family. In the novel, Briggs expressed it this way:

The Haunted Merchant is autobiographical insofar as it demonstrates its author's thorough revulsion from the realities of mercantile life, as he had experienced them.

Considering its subject, it is surprising that Clark reviewed Briggs's second novel enthusiastically. The American Review, A Whig Quarterly, did not hesitate to express its reservations about the author's handling of his subject, while the Democratic Review praised Briggs for confronting conditions it deplored. Why, then, did Clark like the novel? The answer is of a piece with his earlier view of The Adventures of Harry Franco; he simply discounted Briggs's seriousness and focused on his skill in creating comic scenes. Here Briggs gave him very congenial material, for he had modelled The Haunted Merchant on the work of one of Clark's favorite writers, Charles Dickens. Dickens’ underlying concerns — the bureaucracy of the law, the exploitation of children — could be viewed with sympathetic republican detachment by his American Whig readers, who felt themselves in no way responsible for the grim life of London streets. Conscience-free, they were able to enjoy Dickens’ pictures of everyday life and his amusing caricatures, revelling in the “moral framework” of his stories.(25) Briggs's theme disturbed Clark's social conscience [page 60:] as little as Dickens’. In adopting Dickens’ plot devices and style of characterization, Briggs deprived his American readers of the Bense of confronting an American book about American social problems. Instead, he encouraged them to fall into the same pattern of appreciation as they assumed toward Dickens — a willingness to be amused without having to admit their own participation in cruelty and exploitation.

The influence of Dickens, not only on plot structure but characterization and comic scenes, in The Haunted Merchant, is easy to detect. The English novelist had just concluded the serialization of Oliver Twist, in which the misadventures of an orphan lead him from poverty to crime, and finally to fortunate adaption. Briggs turned a variation on Dickens’ extremely popular work; in The Haunted Merchant, the nameless orphan, escaped from an asylum, attempts to pick the pocket of the senior partner in the firm of firm of Tremlett and Tuck. Old Tremlett, like Scrooge, regrets(26) his single-minded devotion to the accumulation of wealth at the expense of love and family; he is moved by loneliness and the boy's beauty to adopt the child. But Briggs marks an important departure from Dickens’ plot line when he reduces the reader's expectation at the beginning of the book, saying of the youngster: “He is not the son of anybody of whom the reader will ever hear again.” Briggs's disavowal of the convention of Fielding, Smollett and Dickens, [page 61:] one he would use to advantage in The Trippings of Tom Pepper, gives the reader a foretaste of tragedy. Unlike Oliver Twist, Briggs's story requires the adoption to come first, and the descent into a type of hell, later. The Haunted Merchant is an uncharacteristically serious book, regarded in terms of its hero's fate, Briggs achieves the uplift of comedy at the end, but only by marrying the hero's intended, conveniently if unconvincingly, to his only loyal friend.

The adopted child, John, is so obviously intelligent and disposed to be good that he captivates all but those motivated by jealousy or genteel horror of his unknown parentage. His tragic downfall is caused by the malevolent influence of the family of Griswold Bacon Tuck,(27) Tremlett's business partner. Tuck himself is confident of immortality; he loves only his moneybags, and affects an auburn wig in his old age. The family of his dead brother, for which he accepts limited responsibility, is made up of Tom, Fred, Julia, and their widowed mother; the Tucks play a central role in the novel, coming to represent all the corruption of Gotham. Mrs. Tuck is one of Briggs's impoverished, but malicious and gossip-mongering “genteel” ladies. The effects of her training are seen in Julia, a dark, ugly girl who suffers from convulsive fits. Tom, a forward rogue” from youth, becomes a sly, self-seeking financier, who resorts to murder in his manipulations to gain wealth and power. Fred Tuck, incarnating the corruption in art and taste that follows from [page 62:] imitation of false models, is an effete youth; helplessly addicted to the models of G. P. R. James, he admires everything that Briggs despised. In building his Gothic villa on Long Island with tainted money from Tom's corrupt dealings, Fred personifies the novel's major theme: devoting one's life to the accumulation of wealth is a perversion of human activity that results in distorted lives and falsified art. Tremlett, who makes this discovery belatedly, expresses the theme this way to John; in doing so he explains Briggs's own decision to quit his business affairs:

This statement, so opposed to the Knickerbocker creed, could never have appeared in Clark's magazine without an outraged response from his readers.

In the course of indicting the life of a merchant, Briggs also satirizes the other pole of the occupational compass, that of the transcendental schoolteacher. His account of Tremlett's interview with Professor Dobbins is still funny reading, although the issues are not as sharply represented today as they were in the Boston and New York of Briggs's time. [page 63:]

Dobbins, Briggs's caricature of Bronson Alcott, (29) advises Tremlett to “Follow Nature.” However, since Nature is everywhere and everything to Dobbins, his advice borders on unintelligibility. “Study the works of men's hands,” the Professor continues; when Tremlett objects that Americans have no cathedrals, Dobbins expansively orders them built. Read Hesiod, Homer, Smollett, — everything, he counsels. “Play on the organ and the German flute, and cultivate the soil; deliver lectures and mingle with your fellow beings.”(30)

Tremlett refuses Dobbins’ aid in providing for John's education; the indiscriminate appreciation fostered by his Transcendental view is useless to a man who must survive in this world. The final symbolic rejection of the Professor's teaching is given by a young pupil. Asked a metaphysical question about the nature of man, the boy forgets his lesson and blurts out, “A man is a brute. That's what my mother says.” The crowning moment comes when the boy's mother, who happens to be Dobbins’ sister, comes to her son's aid: “ ‘To be sure I say so,’ added the lady, ‘and why do you not learn him, brother, to say that men are wicked, hypocritical creatures?’ ‘Because, sister,’ ” replied the professor with forced calmness (he was evidently not transcendental enough to shrug off losing a client), “ ‘that is my definition of woman.’ ”(31) Briggs found the life of a merchant too narrow [page 64:] and self-seeking, but the life of a Transcendentalist without adequate moorings in reality. Because it fails to recognize the brute in man, transcendentalist teaching is irresponsible, and especially inadequate preparation for urban life.

The debacle created by Dobbins’ pupil is parallelled in the novel by another incident in which intractable children embarrass their parents. Some of Tremlett's neighbors converge on his home with their young sons at tea-time. The ladies intend to demonstrate the superiority of their legitimate offspring to John, whom they believe to be the product of Tremlett's sexual indiscretion. However, their hopes of winning favor and riches from the old man are dashed when one of the boys helplessly reveals his mother's crass interpretation of the merchant's benevolence. In both instances, children are the spokesmen for their parents’ jungle morality. The use of parallel plot devices, asserting the common meaning of events, is Briggs's outstanding technique in The Haunted Merchant. Thus the bloody moment of John's suicide at the novel's end id. expertly foreshadowed by the comic mock murder of the bookkeeper, Bates; on the day John first joins the young Tucks in petty theft, Bates falls asleep at his ledger, spilling a bottle of red ink that looked enough like, blood to provoke a scene of high comedy.

Briggs was extremely successful in the comic first half of the book, in which he described John's childhood; [page 65:] the second half, his account of John's spiritual deterioration, is less convincing. He resorts to raising the mute ghost of the dead Tremlett, again imitating The Christmas Carol, to symbolize John's guilt and despair. Tragedy was clearly not Briggs's mode; John falls victim to the malevolent Tucks without arousing much sorrow in the reader. It is doubtful if Briggs's audience ever demanded him restored, as Dickens’ did Paul Dombey.

Briggs threads other familiar themes through the book. John, on a business visit to Charleston, observes the perfect form of a favorite black house-servant, and comments on its superiority to the distorted shapes of white women who are ruled by the “mantua-maker.” Yet when he becomes attached to the slave Juno, who has nursed him through a bout with smallpox, and wants to secure her freedom, he is caught in the complexities of Southern etiquette, designed to control the highly volatile emotions surrounding slavery.

On another trip John meets Farmer Hogshart, enabling Briggs to display those attitudes of Quakers that he found at times inviting, and at times ridiculous. Hogshart, as his name implies, is a practical, earthy, sensuous man, a shrewd dealer unashamed of his appetites and his prosperity. He shows his surface sanctity when he refuses to shelter John on a stormy night, because the evening has been set aside for worship; the sight of Tremlett's money and respectability succeed in changing his mind. However, Hogshart is finally revealed as a man of basic good nature in the terms Briggs used in Harry Franco to distinguish [page 66:] the finicky genteel from the honest and wholesome, — a substantial dinner. In this case, it is, significantly, a feast out of his Nantucket memory, from the rye and Indian bread through the roast veal, preserved peaches and brown ale!

In a third noteworthy incident in The Haunted Merchant. Tremlett goes to a political ward meeting, hoping to find some significant place in the workings of democracy. Like Marisett, he is driven away by the selfish motives of his fellow citizens. As Briggs expressed it, “He met with nothing there to remind him in the least degree that he was a man, but everything to make him think that he was affiliated to a race of animals, if any such exist, whose instincts lead them to devour each other.”(32)

For Briggs, the preservation of honesty and simplicity was impossible in urban America. The jury that tries Tom Tuck for his uncle's murder convicts him, but only because too many murderers had recently been acquitted. Briggs ironically puts his indictment of the law into the mouth of shrewd Tom Tuck; at last, Tom's corruption becomes more than an isolated flaw of character, but a symptom of a society in which accused men must come before “a set of Judges who are required to know nothing, not even their alphabets.” Justice cannot he appealed to in a society so consumed by greed and self-interest; the jurors, described [page 67:] as human vultures, rest after the verdict with the “consciousness of having done their duty.” To them the Tucks are a “carcass that affords a meal.”(33) In replacing the eagle with the vulture as the symbol of American democracy, Briggs turned the New Eden of Freneau and Crevecoaur into a swamp of corruption. Although the novel implicitly raises the question of whether democracy is compatible with a capitalist economy, Briggs did not attempt full exploration of it. Instead, he ended the book with the punctuating words of an aged parrot: “Let us pray.” The parrot's panacea has an ironic sound, as if the punster in Briggs intended the reader to hear an echo of urban vultures, scenting their prey.

The novel's only redeemable character is Jeremiah, the poor, ugly, unfortunate man, all his life the butt of smart young clerks, and the victim of confidence-men; unambitious for worldly success, Jeremiah is set apart by his honesty and loyalty to John. He wins the trust and affection of John's fiancée, the pure Fidelia Clearman, who, like Briggs's wife, was the daughter of a sea-captain. The novelist found it necessary to remove the couple from the bustling commercial world of New York, where Fidelia's old home is quickly replaced by a “flaunting brick store.” With the remnants of Tremlett's estate, Jeremiah and Fidelia live in a secluded Staten Island cottage, built on a “gentle eminence overlooking the sea and the highlands [page 68:] of the Neversink, screened from the northwest by lofty hills, whose tops were fringed by cedars and hardy evergreens.”

Modelled on Briggs's own Willowbrook, the Staten Island cottage to which he moved in the early 1840's, Jeremiah's cottage is the opposite of Fred Tuck's Gothic monstrosity:

Like Siaconset, in “Gimcrackery,” Willowbrook represented the creative withdrawal to basic human values, to the country surroundings that restore one's spirit and body to health. His own rural retreat, although it could not be Jeremiah's unbroken one, provided Briggs with a relaxed atmosphere for study and self-scrutiny. He now turned to evaluating his work and reconsidering his literary and political alliances. During the next two years, he would strike out in new directions, accompanied by new friends.

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