Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T02:41:47.923Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Our Present Work Will Be All Doors”: Writers and Periodical Culture in 1860s San Francisco

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2013

JANET FLOYD
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the periodical culture of 1860s San Francisco, a challenging and brittle print culture environment for editors and writers. It focusses on the Golden Era and the collective life it produced, in its pages, for the city's unstable population. The Era celebrated a masculine culture of street and saloon, while making social and literary convention the focus of aggressive attack. Writers in this setting developed their assault on literary form in a range of material that dismantled popular modes of writing and pressed questions about writing and reading on its audiences. Their work constitutes a distinctive strain of western writing during this period, by turns critical of and indifferent to contemporary forms of representation of the cultures of the region. It also develops a mode of response to industrial urban experience during this period that makes an address to readers nationally and internationally as well as locally.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 659 - 672
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Starr, Kevin, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1Google Scholar.

2 Mulford, Prentice, Prentice Mulford's Story: Life by Land and Sea (New York: F. J. Needham, 1889), 7Google Scholar.

3 Walker, Franklin, San Francisco's Literary Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1939), 143Google Scholar.

4 For key discussions in the field see, as well as Starr and Walker, Kowalewski, Michael, “Romancing the Gold Rush: The Literature of the California Frontier,” California History, 79 (Summer 2000), 205–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Morrow, Patrick, “Bret Harte, Mark Twain and the San Francisco Circle,” in Taylor, G. Golden, ed., A Literary History of the American West (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), 339–58Google Scholar.

5 Starr, 49.

6 Kowalewski, 214. Morrow; Starr; and Walker.

7 Rubin, Joan Shelley, “Making Meaning: Analysis and Affect in the Study and Practice of Reading,” in Kaestle, Carl F., Radway, Janice A. and Hall, David D., eds., The History of the Book in America, Volume IV, Print in Motion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 511–27Google Scholar, 517, 526.

8 Duty, Michael and Orsi, Richard J., Preface, in Starr, Kevin and Orsi, Richard J., eds., Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture and Community in Gold Rush California (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000), vii–x, viiGoogle Scholar.

9 Howells, William Dean, “Reviews and Literary Notices,” Atlantic Monthly 25 (May 1870), 633Google Scholar.; Cummins, Ella Sterling, The Story of the Files: A Review of Californian Writers and Literature (San Francisco: Cooperative Printing, 1893), 128Google Scholar

10 “All Out of Doors: A Mystery of San Francisco,” Golden Era, 31 Dec. 1865, 5.

11 Zboray, Ronald J., A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 187Google Scholar.

12 Walker, 116.

13 Roberts, Brian, American Alchemy: The Californian Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Goodman, David, Gold Seeking: Victorian and California in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Gary F. Kurutz, “Popular Culture on the Golden Shore,” in Starr and Orsi, 297–98. Morrow, 342.

14 See Shinn, Charles, “Early Books, Magazines and Book Making,” Overland Monthly, 12 (1888) 337–52Google Scholar, for a comprehensive discussion of the newspaper and periodical culture of the era.

15 Much the most detailed account of the Era's first years is given in Lawrence Eugene Mobley, “San Francisco's Golden Era, 1852–60,” thesis submitted for PhD, Michigan State University (1961).

16 Walker, 135–38.

17 “Regarding Whiskey,” Golden Era, 15 Oct. 1865, 1.

18 Twain to Clemens, Jane and Moffett, Pamela, 25 Sept. 1864, reprinted in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales and Sketches, Volume II, ed. Branch, Edgar M. and Hirst, Robert H. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 67Google Scholar.

19 “Relics of Barbarism,” Golden Era, 3 Dec. 1865, 4.

20 Prentice Mulford, “Barney McBriar,” The Golden Era, 3 Dec., 1865, reprinted in Prentice Mulford's California Sketches, ed. Franklin Walker (San Francisco: John Henry Nash, 1935), 2.

21 Ibid., 3.

22 Twain, “The Lick House Ball,” Golden Era, 27 Sept. 1863, 8; Professor C. Clearquill, “Bountiful Autumn,” Golden Era, 26 Nov. 1865, 5.

23 Florence Fane, “Florence Fane in San Francisco,” Golden Era, 15 Nov. 1863, 4.

24 “All Out of Doors: A Mystery of San Francisco,” 5.

25 Dan De Quille, “No Head nor Tail,” Golden Era, 6 Dec. 1863, 5.

26 Mitchell, Lee Clark, “Verbally Roughing It: The West of Words,” Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 44, 1 (June 1989), 67–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Dan De Quille, “Washoe Rambles,” Golden Era, 28 July–1 Dec. 1861, reprinted as Washoe Rambles (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1963), 25.

28 Daly, Nicholas, Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4–5Google Scholar.

29 Wynne, Deborah, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Shelley Streeby and Jesse Alemán discuss the ideological work of sensation in dime novels about the West in Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007). That discussion is broadened in Streeby, American Sensations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and updated in Streeby, , “Dime Novels and the Rise of Mass Market Genres,” in Cassuto, Leonard, ed., The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 586–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dime Fictions about the West receive a useful general discussion in Bill Brown, Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Novels (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997); as well as in Michael Denning's classic study of popular fiction, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1998).

31 De Quille, Washoe Rambles, 1, 95.

32 Victor, Frances Fuller, The New Penelope and Other Poems and Stories (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1877)Google Scholar.

33 Victor, Frances Fuller, Anizetta, the Guarjira, or The Creole of Cuba: A Romance of the West (Boston: The Star Spangled Banner Office, 1848)Google Scholar. Streeby, Shelley, American Sensations: Class, Empire and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

34 Victor, Frances Fuller, “Mr Ela's Story,” Overland Monthly, 5 (1870), 556–65, 557Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., 559.