The First Mass Medium

Continuing excerpts from my book in progress, The Undressing of America. Having brought our Puritan hero Tony Comstock into contact with New York squalor, we take a section break and return with:

The story of mass culture in the 19th Century is largely the story of paper. In fact, it was paper that made possible a “mass culture.” Over the span of four or five decades, a tidal wave of cheap paper and printer’s ink surged across the cultural, social, and economic landscapes of Europe and North America. Industries were born, old trades were wiped out, hierarchies were toppled and the obscure were vaulted into power. Paper transformed the ways in which information was transmitted, children were taught, class identities were shaped, politics was conducted, morals and aspirations were shaped, literature and art were developed, and the whole shape of culture was formed. New York was one the cities most changed by paper, and in the years after the Civil War it became the center of the one first great cultural battles over paper’s new power.

        As the century began, little had changed in publishing, printing, or paper manufacturing since the Gutenberg revolution had settled down in the early 17th Century. Paper, hand-pressed from linen and other rags, was expensive as a raw commodity: middle-class letter writers developed the practice of “cross-writing,” completing a letter and then turning the page at a right angle in order to write perpendicularly on top of the earlier words, thus squeezing two sheets’ worth of words onto one precious slip of paper.

        Printing, conducted mainly by independent artisans with small staffs of journeymen, made published material more expensive still. Book prices were such that many writers lined up subscribers in advance to cover the costs. In 1796, the English novelist Fanny Burney filled the first thirty-six pages of her novel Camilla with a list of her subscribers; Camilla was a best-selling novel by the standards of the day, but it was aimed at a select and mostly affluent audience. Some books sold in the tens of thousands, a few may even have mounted toward a hundred thousand, but they were those that became required reading among the intelligentsia: Voltaire’s Candide, Goethe’s Faust, Rousseau’s Julie. A market for popular fiction was building, but its clientele remained well-to-do and even the more successful novels sold only to a few thousand readers. Burney’s Camilla was considered a tremendous success for having sold out its first print run of four thousand copies.

      Newspapers were circulated among the affluent and posted in public places for the less affluent. The “broadsheet,” the gigantic page that was becoming standard for news, was as much poster as reading material. Most newspapers, especially in the United States, were partisan political organs, supported by wide-ranging political networks more than by local readers and advertisers. Production and distribution were slow, often creating a lag of a few days between an event and its description in the journals, and most of them ignored the stories of crime and mishap that we think of as “news” today in favor of discourse on political developments. Circulation was primitive: copies were sold at the printing offices, delivered by hand or wagon to scattered general stores, or mailed to subscribers.

      All these publications consisted almost entirely of the typeset word. Pictures could only be reproduced by engraving, a slower and far more expensive process even than printing. The less costly and more widely circulated publications generally contained no pictures, and what pictures did reach print were mostly simple line drawings. Art and illustration remained the province of people who could see original pieces—which for most meant only what was displayed in churches and other public buildings—and those who could afford fine engravings. There was no such thing as a mass visual medium or a popular illustrative vocabulary. Fine art, precise representation, and pornography were all the provinces of the few.

       By the end of the 18th Century, however, it had become clear that the markets for all kinds of printed material were growing, and that a vast number of customers were eager to buy whatever they could afford. The populations of Western Europe and America were growing rapidly, and literacy was on the rise thanks to burgeoning industrial economies and a spreading doctrine of the value of education—even for the poor, in the United States and a few other countries. Urban populations were growing especially quickly, creating vast new markets for newspapers. In 1780, a French chemist named Aimé Argand, knowing how much this new urban, literate citizenry must crave more hours to read, developed a clever lamp that burned as much as ten times brighter than a candle. By the end of the century, the darkness of night had been driven back more violently than it had been in millennia, and the time taken from it was used mainly to consume the printed word.

      Soon other chemists, mechanics, and printers were devoting themselves to finding ways to lower the costs of producing those words. For generations, most printers had been able to press about one hundred pages in an hour, the fastest printers double that, scarcely enough to keep up with the growing market. An Englishman, Charles Stanhope, worked out a new press in 1800 that more than doubled that, but then a German outdid him: Friedrich Koenig developed a steam-powered press that put out over a thousand pages an hour. The Times of London, its circulation already the highest in the world, inaugurated the Koenig press in 1814; two years later Koenig sold them another press that could print on both sides of a sheet simultaneously, instantly doubling productivity. The Times instantly longer and come pouring out of the presses earlier in the morning, while its price dropped. The newspaper for the masses was born.

      During the same decades, paper production was being speeded through chemistry and steam-powered pressing machines, raising supplies and lowering prices. Some quality was sacrificed as the new methods of processing and bleaching rag-paper left it less supple, more likely to tear or to break with age. But the appetite for words and information far outweighed that for nice paper. Soon magazine and book printers were switching to steam printing and cheaper paper, discovering vast new markets for news, articles, and fiction. By the late 1820s, the prices of some English newspapers had dropped to a penny; where the earlier mass-produced newspapers had still aimed for a middle-class and reasonably well educated audience—those who had been interested in newspapers before but curtailed their purchases due to the price or were unable to find them easily enough—these went after an entirely new audience, one that not long before had read little but shop signs, pamphlets, and broadsheets pasted to building walls. Clerks, mechanics, and even those industrial workers who could read began to discover the pleasures of written information and diversion.

      In the span of just a few years, an entirely new reading public had been invented. As the material spread, so did literacy, for the arrival of this cornucopia of entertainment and information stoked a desire to read fluently among people who hadn’t seen much point in it before. Although news led the way, every other form of written diversion quickly followed: gossip, illuminating articles, editorials, humor, fiction, and everything else that had graced the expensive and rather exclusive magazines of the 18th Century, now targeted at broader and less sophisticated audiences. “Story papers” and “story magazines” proliferated, turning fiction from a haute-bourgeois amusement into an industry, a craze, a sweeping common denominator. Publishers quickly discovered the power of the serial to bring readers back, and soon great, sprawling novels began to wend their way like rivers through the magazines, pooling into fat books a few months later.

      This was something new: a mass medium. A new generation grew up on it, shaped by it, making from it a new kind of culture, a mass culture. It worked the way mass culture still works: new media arenas aren’t driven by artistic visions needing a venue. Machines make the arenas just as big as technology and market will allow and then the writers and artists fight to fill them, and to shape them. And as with every new medium since, the audience was in love with the medium itself. So Charles Dickens became its first hero in part because he was the cheap press, in his riverrine productivity, his relentless surge toward undetermined endings, his casts of characters as motley and restive as his still-evolving readership. A readership happy to slog through his swamps of page-filling dribble to reach those peaks of his from which they could scan this sprawling new world that paper and ink were making them part of.
       The flood of cheap publications rose first in England, but it quickly swept across the Atlantic to inundate America’s cities. The American belief in freedom of the press then extended to lax copyright laws, including a complete indifference to the copyrights of Europe. Anything published in London was likely to show up, often riddled with errors but dirt cheap, from pirate printers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore almost as quickly as a ship could cross the sea. British writers and publishers howled, but, as has been the case ever since, nothing could slow the American production of mass culture.

      The typeset word was not the only beneficiary of new technology. A clever young German actor named Alois Senefelder had devised limestone lithography in the last years of the previous century, and over the next few decades it had been refined by sundry hands to become a practical and inexpensive means of mechanically duplicating pictures in large numbers. Lithos were far more expensive than text, but they allowed illustrations in moderately priced books and pictorial covers even on cheap newspapers, making imagery an integral part of the new mass culture. Then, at the end of 1835 a twenty-two year old printmaker’s assistant in New York City named Nathaniel Currier published a lithograph of a dramatic fire that only days before had devoured most of Wall Street; he sold several thousand copies, and the litho became part of the news revolution.

      When two years later, a Frenchman patented “chromolithography”—the use of multiple plates to create an image in different colors—Currier jumped on it instantly with a lurid, two-colored litho of another fire, this one on steamboat. It sold so well that the New York Sun, one of the new generation of mass newspapers, contracted him to supply a chromolitho of some current event every Sunday. Now with a steady supply of capital, Currier turned his energies toward publishing “Cheap and Popular Prints” of whatever type the public wanted, and soon he became the leading figure in a “chromo” craze that swept the nation. He began hiring the most popular artists from the newspapers and magazines to turn out original images of American life and events, and soon was putting out as many as three new images a week and selling over ten thousand prints a year. Countless other printers followed him, plastering the nation with color posters, advertisements, novelty cards, bookplates, and home decorations.

      Meanwhile, the flood of mass print rose higher as inventors and capitalists competed to find ways to exploit a market for cheap publications that seemed to grow faster by the year. In the middle of the 1840s a German engineer named F. G. Keller developed a chemical process for making paper out of trees. Many others had tried before, but it was Keller who realized that wood contained fibers that, if extracted, could be chemically turned into pulp just as rag was. And that wood pulp, just like rag pulp, could be pressed and dried and bleached into paper. That paper was more brittle and easily torn paper than even the cheapest rag paper, and because of its high acidity it would quickly destroy itself in a “slow fire,” likely to turn yellow and fall apart within months. But it was cheaper than rag paper. And as the means of logging and transporting low-grade wood improved—especially in America, as canals were dug and railroads were built into the trackless forests of the hinterland—the price would drop still further. Keller sold his patent for almost nothing and ended his life in poverty; but he had given the world pulp—newsprint—the very stuff of mass culture, the fat, cheap, porous, ephemeral, and universally accessible foundation on which a new world of rapid information and disposable mythology would be erected.

      By the beginning of the Civil War, American publishing had become a giant industry. Fat, prosperous newspapers battled for circulation and political power. Fiction publishers began to organize the production of content along industrial lines. Story papers were increasingly replaced by “dime novels” and “five-cent novelettes” produced by in-house writers to fit a uniform format. A couple of New York printers still in their thirties, Francis Scott Smith and Francis Shubael Street, kept costs down and production smooth by developing a “fiction factory”: on the top floor, clever young men scribbling novels in pencil, every one a hodgepodge of formula and plagiarism; editors at neighboring desks, plowing rapidly through pages to catch the most incomprehensible passages and the most egregious violations of audience expectations; on the floor belong them the typists and typesetters; and on the ground floor the ceiling-high stacks of paper the ever-whirling presses, and the stitching machines that bound the books. No plot or word left the building between the time it left the writer’s brain and the time it went on sale. And so the American popular-culture factory was born.

      The largest audience for such products were young people, adolescents and yet-unmarried adults of that most broadly literate generation in history, that first generation raised on mass publications. They poured into the towns and cities, putting their rustic backgrounds behind them, filling the ranks of a fast-growing and volatile class: the skilled mechanics and semi-skilled laborers, the clerks and copyists, the  delivery boys, the seamstresses—and the newspaper and print-company employees. Literate and often ambitious, aware of greater economic and social possibilities through promotion or marriage, vastly more cosmopolitan and invested in the future and the greater world than the farmers and manual laborers who sired them, and yet still shut out from affluence, property, and social power, they were a complex and heterogeneous, an optimistic and restless bunch.

      They shared a vast appetite for news of social scandal and sensational crime, and for loud, simple fiction that could be ingested in a few gulps on ferry rides, during lunch breaks, and in the brief evenings after long, exhausting workdays. They liked stories of the criminal underworld and the wild west; they liked tales of lethal jeopardy and last-minute rescues, fistfights and wrestling matches with innocent lives at stake, death and tears offset by romantic awakenings, fires and raging rivers, depravity banished by virtue, occasionally the crack of a gun or the thunder of cannons. They liked their heroes young, brave, and forward-looking; in the wake of the Civil War they especially loved stories of young men coming to the city to seek their fortunes.

      So, as the children of American farms and the escapees of impoverished Europe flowed into the cities, as the city of New York surged like dirty floodwaters up the length of Manhattan, a great wave of printed words and images rose with them.  Booksellers sprang up everywhere. A new institution, the newsstand, peddling newspapers, magazines, and cheap books, began popping up on the street corners like mushrooms. A few voices rose in alarm, mostly the same voices that expressed fears of immigration, unbridled growth, epidemic disease, the growing armies of the poor, and moral decay, the voices of those invested in a more homogeneous and less volatile America. With sensation and titillation as selling points, they knew that much of what saw print must violate the bounds of decency.

To be continued...