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First published in 1850, New York by Gas-Light explores the seamy side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum—the underground story—of life in New York!" The author of this lively and fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster, reporter for Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the characters of the urban demi-monde to produce a sensationalized but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches from two of Foster's other books, New York by Gas-Light will be welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture, literature, and journalism.
Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism of Jacob Riis.
- Sales Rank: #614538 in Books
- Color: Red
- Published on: 1990-11-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .59" w x 5.98" l, .79 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 251 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A Great Sampler of a Great Sensationalist
By Rocco Dormarunno
Stuart Blumin has done a brilliant job of capturing the essence of George Foster's contemporaneous accounts of New York as he presented it, in "New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches". By that I mean that this collection of "sketches" are not to be taken as literal accounts. This is not a history. George Foster was one of the acknowledged kings of sensationalism when it came to writing about mid-19th century New York City.
While the Five Points neighborhood was a crime-ridden, filthy neighborhood, its depiction in Foster's accounts are highly exaggerated. And while crime was an unavoidable element of a New York which, at the time, had no real police force, Foster's essays would lead one to believe that merely walking down the street--any street--was an invitation to mayhem. This was not true then, nor is it now. So why did he write these sketches? Why did he make Manhattan seem so undesirable? Because there was a profit to be made. Affluent New Yorkers bought these types of books to make themselves feel better about their own situations, and it offered them a bit of voyeurism into a dark world that was a part of their island. It also proved popular with people in other cities, as they could read about the terrors of a New York City that was cluttered with "filthy immigrants", criminals and chaos. And George Foster played it to the hilt!
If you can put aside the over-the-top stuff, however, there is much to be learned in these pages. The streets of lower Manhattan were congested, they did smell (think of the wild pigs or of the countless horses that were relied upon for transportation), and the misery of the slums was a given, if you were poor. Foster's language is also an undeniable historic artifact, as it captures the idioms of the day.
For my money, the more historic sketches are in the second half of this collection, the streaks of "sunlight". Here Foster presents a handful of vignettes of every day life in the growing city. "The Eating-Houses" is a delightful look at how ordinary men and women took their meals. And the "Quarter of an Hour under an Awning" is so lucid, so cleanly written--even with its pickpocket story--that it is the most "real feeling" essay in the book. The sudden storm that breaks out during the afternoon rush hour, the inablility to catch an omnibus (bus) or a hack (taxi) rings true to this day. At times, on my lunch hour, I walk by the street corner near City Hall where this quarter of an hour passed, and can watch it all transpire in my head. With so many of the old buildings still extant in that area, it's easy to do.
"New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches" is a marvelous book about a by-gone era in New York's history, as well as a great insight into the sensational sensationalist that George Foster was.
Rocco Dormarunno, author of The Five Points and The Five Points Concluded
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent First-Person Account of New York Life in 1850
By L. Sabin
This book was a delight to read. The fact that it was written as a first person account, using the vernacular of the time, made it even better. Also, the fact that the majority of the book is involved with nocturnal New York, and all the seedy goings-on one might associate with it in any time period, make it even more interesting. I especially liked the way Foster evoked a sense of adventure, by figuratively taking the readers hand and "leading" him down darkened streets and alleys, etc.
For a quick dose of NYC history from a perspective you can't get everywhere else, this book is highly recommended.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Sensationalism at its most sensational
By Dark Romantic
To start with, Blumin's introduction is an important piece, wrangling together the few certain facts about Foster's life and career; this alone makes Blumin's work valuable. He also contextualizes the writing and offers an extended analysis of the type of sensationalism Foster wrote, why it was popular, and how to read and understand it. Foster's book itself is outstanding - and a fun read. He writes like a poet, with beautiful imagery and fascinating description. I picked this book up partly because it fed into my interest in George Lippard and his book "The Quaker City, Or, the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime," but the two are hardly comparable. Lippard offers a more enclosed urban storyline and, more importantly, he's not a good writer and his over-the-top moral judgments as the story rolls along make it nearly unreadable except for specialists. Foster, however, knows how to entertain, but he also writes elegantly. It's a sort of bouncy, witty style that reminds me a bit of the prose of Nathaniel Parker Willis - especially because it is written in the first person and invites the read to tag along on the adventure.
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