Tag: Cartoons

First of May in New York

Illustrated magazines are treasuries of forgotten facts of everyday life. From Gleason’s Pictorial in 1851 we learn that May 1 was traditionally moving day in New York City, and it was a day when the most intrepid visitor might fear to set foot in the street. [Addendum: The state legislature had set May 1 as the expiration date for all housing contracts, according to the Historical Dilletante.] The cartoonish engraving shows us a suitably chaotic scene, revealing along the way the rather crude sense of visual humor Gleason’s expected from its audience. Ha ha! The colored fellow got hit in the head with a wagon wheel! That’ll make ’em fall off their chairs laughing. (Black men getting hurt was a never-ending source of mirth in American humorous drawings.) In the background, the American Anti-Gambling Society has moved, to be replaced by a gambling den. Subtle!

The details of the picture, however, also give us some real information about city life that would be useful to historical novelists or anyone else interested in recreating the American city of the middle 1800s. Notice, for example, the prevalence of livestock—and not just draft animals. When people move in New York City, they take their pigs with them. Men losing hats are also here and there throughout the picture, the cheap visual gag reminding us that losing one’s hat was a catastrophe a man had to worry about constantly.

The good people of Gotham seem to possess an irresistible desire to change their residences on the first of May annually, and the ludicrous scenes produced by everybody, and everybody’s furniture, being in the street at the same time, has been the subject of many a humorous poem and laughable prose sketch. Our artist has taken his cue from life, and the mad scene he has given us below is no exaggeration upon the actual truth. Porters, draymen, men, women and children, horses and carts, dogs and pigs, all seem licensed on this day to ran wild and unrestrained; but, to appreciate the picture, one must have been in New York on the first of May, and run the risk of his life, by being run over and trampled upon by the motley crowd of men and animals. In New England now, the first of May is a sort of rural holiday, when people go into the country for a breath of fragrant and pure air, and to join each other in the festivities often of dancing about the May pole as they used to do in olden times, and as we illustrated in our last number. The first of May in the city of New York is a very different occasion.

——Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, July 12, 1851.

What Charles Anthon Looked Like to His Students

An earlier version of this article appeared in Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.

The great classical scholar Charles Anthon had much to do with the high standards of learning in nineteenth-century American universities. His textbooks on the ancient languages were widely admired, and the proof of their utility may be found in the fact that many professors resented them for making the students’ work too easy. Dr. Anthon is also famous in Mormon lore as the Columbia professor who was shown a transcribed “Egyptian” inscription from the Golden Plates and pronounced it a hoax, which has been interpreted in Mormon history as “authenticating” it.

The most famous portrait of Anthon is the one by Mathew Brady:

But here is a previously unknown original portrait from life of the great Dr. Anthon. It has lain undiscovered for a century and a half among the never-circulated books in a university library, but there is good evidence for its authenticity:

The image was found on the dedication page of The Elements of Greek Grammar, by R. Valpy, with additions by C. Anthon. What is our evidence that this is a portrait from life? The book was donated to the University of California in 1873; before that, it had formed part of the library of Dr. Francis Lieber, Professor of History and Law in Columbia College, New York. Since the volume itself is the 1847 edition of a very-often-reprinted work, and since it is the sort of book one would purchase as a student, but not as a professor of law and history (who presumably has already been through his first year of Greek), we may reasonably assume that it belonged to young Francis Lieber when he was a student at that same college, where he would have seen Dr. Anthon every day. Note his elaborately juvenile signature on the same page. The chain of evidence is strong. This is very probably Charles Anthon as he actually appeared to his students.