Reconfiguring "public attention": Margaret Fuller in New York City.

Steele, Jeffrey

While many urban essayists focused upon descriptions of city streets, Fuller--following in the footsteps of her friend Lydia Maria Child--was interested less in recording the sights of the city than in measuring the limits of urban vision. Dedicated to social change, she supplemented vision with multiple organs of perception--the heart, the soul, and the imagination. Resisting the obvious temptation to focus only on visible spaces of the city, Fuller reveals that the image of the "urban panorama" as a continuous spatial field is a fiction that sutures the social and political divisions. As she confronted the discontinuous spaces of the modem metropolis, Fuller moved far beyond spectatorial observation--which objectified the persons and places visible in an urban panorama--to include aspects of urban experience that were discontinuous or invisible. Focusing on the links between public awareness and social change, Fuller began adapting to urban life Transcendentalist models of individual self-reliance. In place of the self-reliant individual tapping into and utilizing the unconscious energies of the Oversoul, she dramatized herself as the journalist whose public reflections brought to the surface unseen political energies located in the communal psyche of the body politic. This process of political investment depended upon Fuller's keen understanding of what she termed "public attention"--the field of communal interest generated through texts focusing shared concern onto specific cultural issues and problems. Molding public attention, Fuller's New-York Tribune essays doubled vision, lifting readers above the sights of the city, by supplementing the immediacy of experience with parallel planes of reflection. She models for her readers processes of compassionate witnessing that bring the poor and institutionalized into the perceptual field of middle-class urban consciousness. In the process, she breaks down barriers that relegated the disabled, insane, and criminalized to preserves cut off from the city's collective gaze, creating a modified form of Transcendentalist idealism that I term "sentimental Transcendentalism." This mode of writing surpasses merely visual modes of representation by measuring the distance between visible urban realities and invisible standards of response. It creates a 'stereoscopic' overlay by pairing visible scenes with imagined analogues--whether models of sympathy, imaginary vistas, or historical echoes. The resulting double exposure places Fuller's readers in two places at the same time--in the immediate, visible city and in a 'virtual city' available to the mind's eye.

In this essay I focus on an obscure New-York Daily Tribune column written by Margaret Fuller and published roughly two weeks before her well-known review of Frederick Douglass. Fuller's review of Lucy Duff Gordon's translation shows not only her range in topic (in this case, a consideration of French colonial practice) but also how she writes through the moment when Walter Benjamin's famous "aura" was losing ground against modern modes of production. The extended quotations juxtaposed in Fuller's review have about them a visual or dramatic quality, as if Fuller reaches forward toward the inclusion of photographs in newspaper reports. Yet the odd resemblance she establishes between the passages reaches backward toward the narrative disruptions of the epic simile. A great deal is at stake in these associations, both for our understanding of Fuller and for our thinking about the critical tools of Walter Benjamin, whose reading habits blend nicely with Fuller's. Both took an interest in the utopian theories of Charles Fourier, both found efficacy in the task of the translator, and each geared their social critique to the seismic shifts shaping the cultural productions of their day. Fuller's citations from The French in Algiers target those attributes for which Benjamin will later fault the newspaper itself: the reduction of life's collective texture and experience to mere "information" for shallow consumption. Yet given Fuller's unique attentiveness to events in Europe and at home, she does so across a broader cultural horizon, making it possible for the emancipatory dreams of Abd-el-Kader and Frederick Douglass to flash up momentarily in each other's company on the front pages of the NewYork Daily Tribune.

This essay reflects on Fuller's "socialism" within and against some of the historical stipulations that constitute the socialist tradition. While her known writings lack an explicit political economy, they make important contributions to an understanding of the ends and means of democratic revolution in her time. Fuller's analytical methods are marked by inclusiveness, mutuality, and a comprehensive concern for the individual as well as the category. If one strips the term "utopian" of its Marxist opprobrium, Fuller may well be considered a "utopian socialist."

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When she moved to New York City at the end of 1844, Margaret Fuller became aware of the fault-lines structuring urban space and perception. Although many antebellum urban writers continued to rely on an aesthetics of visibility (located, for example, in the urban picturesque), they were also faced with the need to deal with the discontinuities and opacities of urban space. While many urban essayists focused upon descriptions of city streets, Fuller--following in the footsteps of her friend Lydia Maria Child--was interested less in recording the sights of the city than in measuring the limits of urban vision. Dedicated to social change, she supplemented vision with other organs of perception--the heart (associated with sentimental narratives), the soul (linked to the discourses of Christianity, Transcendentalism, and utopian socialism), and the imagination (popularized by Gothic and sensational fiction). Lifting readers above the visible, Fuller began to uncover the fault-lines fracturing urban society. This attention to nonvisual, as well as visual, aspects of urban experience opposed the seduction of what Guy Debord has termed "the society of the spectacle" --a world-view invested in the idea that visible appearances embody the whole of social reality (Debord 12).

According to most scholars, the most important model of nineteenth-century urban authorship was the flaneur, the leisurely stroller who walked the city streets and recorded his impressions. But such unimpeded urban travel was an impossibility for any respectable middleclass woman, who ran the risk of being accosted as a streetwalker. As Deborah Nord has argued in Walking the Streets: Women, Representation, and the City, it was extremely difficult for the nineteenth-century woman writer to step into the literary role of the flaneur. Objectified as she walked the streets, she was forced by her gender role into a double vision that weighed her own subjective responses against the often sexualized reactions of other city dwellers. (1) Like Child before her, Fuller was frequently forced to travel through New York with a male companion, and many of the more notorious sites --such as the infamous Five Points slum--were inaccessible to her. Less directly involved in street scenes, which she could describe first-hand, Fuller balanced her experiences in New York City against other planes of existence--emotional paradigms of shared political sympathy, scriptural models of responsible living, and imagined realms of perfected being.

To date, flaneurial models of city writing have measured the texts of nineteenth-century authors against visually-based paradigms. According to Dana Brand, the texts of American urban writers grew out of their interest in the "perpetually changing spectacle" of the urban "panorama" --literary investment in spectatorship that dated back to eighteenth-century urban essayists (Brand 4, 52). (2) Emerging in the 1830s and '40s, gigantic panoramic paintings became a popular form of "virtual travel," enmeshing spectators in the illusion that "knowing" a place was coequal with "seeing [its] major sights" (Byerly 152, 153, emphasis added). Some panoramas were located in large circular rooms; others were "painted on enormous stretches of canvas that could be slowly unrolled before the audience." Providing what seemed like "a comprehensive overview of a place," panoramas--Alison Byerly argues--reinforced the assumption that the experience of places such as cities was "a seamless continuum" (Byerly 154, 161). In similar fashion, the panoramic model of urban spectatorship privileges visual continuity and mimetic accuracy at the expense of other aspects of urban experience. Resisting the obvious temptation to focus only on visible spaces of the city, Fuller reveals that the image of the "urban panorama" as a continuous spatial field is a fiction that sutures social and political divisions. Joan Ramon Resina underscores this illusionary perspective, when she observes that the panoramic view of the city, manifested in the flaneur's detachment from social concerns, "seduce[s]" the observer into a passive relationship to a "fetishized environment" by "inducing] voyeurism as the characteristically modern approach to the city" (Resina 8).

In order to analyze Fuller's demystification of urban spectacle and panorama, I follow the lead of Marxian and postmodern geographers, who argue that spatiality is not solely a visible plane of immediately perceivable phenomena, but also a terrain that includes spatial discontinuity, obstructed views, and invisibility. In Postmodern Geographies, Edward Soja argues that the conception of space only as "a collection of things" accessible through "sensory-based perception" obscures awareness of the ideological structures shaping social behavior, creating instead a "mystified spatiality, hidden from critical view under thick veils of illusion and ideology" (Soja 122 50). Maintaining the fiction that urban reality is a seamless plane of perceivable phenomena, critics who focus only on the visible spaces of the city submerge any awareness of society's "spatial differentiation" and social "fragmentation," fault-lines that sink beneath the homogenizing framework of a continuously unfolding urban perception (Soja 50, 70, 128). In Soja's view, this habit of mind dates back to Rene Descartes' conception of visible reality as an observable field, a res extensa, available to a detached observer (Soja 50, 61). In the model of Cartesian space, Soja argues, repressed social concerns become invisible, as exclusive focus on the visible world creates an "'illusion of opaqueness' that "reifies space, inducing a myopia that sees only a superficial materiality. [...]" (Soja 7). Constructing a "mystified spatiality," Soja argues, such spatial misrecognition "hides things from us," covering over the stress points and fractures of social conflict. Believing that one walks through an untroubled urban space of 'fixed' objects spread out before one's gaze, one fails to perceive suppressed zones of conflict. Sites of spatial trauma are passed over, as the devotion to visible surfaces reinforces the sense that the sites (and sights) of the city are part of a "collection of things" that have no real tie to forgotten events or invisible social causes (Soja 7, 122). This "hidden and insidious human geography," Soja contends, "[...] must become the target for a radical and postmodern politics of resistance" (Soja 63). The goal of such resistance --in the words of Andy Merrifield--is to see the political and social contradictions embedded in a space that is "colonized and commodified, bought and sold, created and tom down, used and abused, speculated on and fought over [...]" (Merrifield 173).

Reinforcing a sense of discontinuity and fracture, a number of historical factors confronted nineteenth-century New York writers with an urban environment whose complexity exceeded anything tackled to date in American literature. While the disastrous economic Panic of 1837 had consolidated the power of New York's financial institutions, it also destabilized the class structure of the city, creating a sense of vertigo and shifting ontological ground. At the same time, processes of industrialization and urban reform were transforming an urban landscape that required continually revised points of orientation. Simultaneously, swelling waves of European immigration effected striking demographic changes that tested the political values of middle-class urban dwellers. The continuing presence of the Five Points slum, combined with the emergence of an urban criminal class, necessitated the creation of new penal and reform institutions. As nineteenth-century New York was marked by growing economic, social, and political discontinuities, geographical and social divisions seemed to mirror each other. The fashionable sidewalks of Broadway contrasted with the cellars of Five Points slums; the open spaces of Gramercy Park, with the high walls of the Tombs (the City's jail). While the antebellum period as a whole has been remembered as a time of social reorientation and geographical transformation, these processes were accelerated in New York City, where cultural changes and literary responses occurred more rapidly.

With its population nearing 400,000, New York in the 1840s was four times larger than Boston and vastly more complex than the villages of Concord, Massachusetts, where Fuller lived during the summer of 1844, and Fishkill, New York, where she had spent October and November of that year completing Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In New York City, she found that men and women, whites and blacks existed in different (but partially overlapping) social spaces and experienced different tempos of citizenship. As we know from the reluctance of most women writers to enter the notorious Five Points neighborhood or to visit newly constructed prisons without chaperones, their spatial mobility and, hence, their "urban imaginaries" differed from those of male contemporaries. At the same time, many New York writers bore witness to the uneven and broken terrains in which many nineteenth-century urban dwellers existed. The poor, recent immigrants, and the institutionalized all inhabited urban spaces that were cut off from the fashionable thoroughfares and the upper-class neighborhoods springing up on what was at that time the northern border of Manhattan, still blocks south of what would become Central Park. As she confronted the discontinuous spaces of the modern metropolis, Margaret Fuller moved far beyond spectatorial observation--which objectified the persons and places visible in an urban panorama--to include aspects of urban experience that were discontinuous or invisible.

Fuller's daily life reinforced this sense of division. After moving to New York City, she joined the household of her employer, Horace Greeley. His home. Fuller recorded, was "completely in the country" and "two miles or more from the thickly settled parts of New York" (Fuller, Letters 3:250). Near the 49th Street stop on the Harlem omnibus route, Greeley's house at Turtle Bay was situated "on the edge of eight acres of woods" and overlooked the East River with Blackwell's Island and its new reform institutions "in full view before it." (3) But elsewhere in New York, Fuller experienced a view of the City that differed greatly from the vantage point of Greeley's country retreat. After riding "half an hour on the Harlem Railroad horse-drawn railcar," she reached Greeley's newspaper offices at the comer of Naussau and Ann streets near City Hall Park (Capper 194). Fuller's position as the book review editor and front-page columnist for Greeley's New-York Tribune was unique for an American woman and placed her at the forefront of the country's public intellectuals. Publishing with the byline of a *, Fuller became a well-known --indeed controversial--urban journalist. Leaving behind the pastoral retreat of Greeley's secluded home, she was introduced to a complex blend of urban ideologies and politics that provided her with "a far more various view of life than any I ever before was in" (Fuller, Letters 3:256, emphasis added). But as Fuller quickly discovered, much of the City's public life was not immediately visible. Instead, it had to be teased out of symptomatic moments of urban experience. Recording such moments in her Tribune essays, she frequently lingered over the vivid texts of New York life, uncovering the politics and assumptions hidden within them.

Fuller's position on Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune placed her at the center of progressive journalistic culture in America's leading city. Committed to social and political justice, Greeley's paper was a good fit, giving a focus to Fuller's emerging sympathies. Previously, Fuller had edited the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, which had no more than a thousand readers. By contrast, the Tribune provided an imposing platform. Founded in April 1842, Greeley's paper was "probably the most widely circulated journal in America," counting a circulation of roughly 50,000 for its weekly edition and perhaps twice as many actual readers (Burrows and Wallace 677). "I am truly interested in this great field which opens before me," Fuller wrote her brother Eugene in March 1845, "and it is pleasant to be sure of a chance at half a hundred thousand readers" (Fuller, Letters 4:56). Recording her varied impressions of the City in front-page reviews and essays from December 1844 until August 1846, Fuller began to "share and impel the general stream of thought" (Fuller, Letters 4:54). "I like being here," she wrote her friend Mary Rotch in January 1845, "[...] and I learn much" (Fuller, Letters 4:46). The excitement Fuller felt involved her new role in what she characterized as "the great work of popular education" (Fuller, Letters 4:39). One of the most powerful tools in this process, she discovered in New York, was the focusing of public attention through a new kind of journalism--one that brought the discernment of the literary critic to the social problems of the city. While the emerging metropolis posed new challenges, she maintained the fervent hope that these demands could be met by a group of dedicated individuals attuned to the circumstances of persons cast outside of the secure circle of middle-class respectability. Soon after her arrival in New York, Fuller had the opportunity to put her reform convictions into action. At Greeley's behest, she set out "to visit all the public institutions, of a remedial or benevolent kind" (Fuller, Letters 4:42). Accompanied by her friend William Henry Charming, a co-founder of the New York Prison Association, she had already met with the incarcerated women at Sing-Sing prison. Now, she traveled with him to visit the inmates in the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane and the institutionalized residents of Blackwell's Island. (4) In the process, Fuller began adapting her critical persona to the work of understanding social conditions in the City. The previous year, in the sixth chapter of Summer on the Lakes, she had critiqued the treatment of American Indians through what amounted to a sustained book review. In New York, her sense of herself as both a reviewer and cultural critic blended even further together.

Pioneering a new model of urban critique, Fuller interpreted the city the way she read the books she reviewed--as a multi-layered text that intersected with her unfolding consciousness. What resulted from this process was a complex literary awareness that connected the city's disparate spaces to passages from a wide variety of published sources. In her New York essays, streets and texts, urban institutions and books, illuminate each other, as different facets of a cultural geography that--like all geographies--is situated in the writer's and reader's minds. This double perspective is evident today in the coexistence of two different anthologies of Fuller's New York writing. On the one hand, Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson's Margaret Fuller, Critic provides a vivid portrait of Fuller the literary critic and reviewer. On the other, Catherine Mitchell's earlier collection, Margaret Fuller's New York Journalism, depicts a fervent reformer committed to social justice. (5) Fuller's literary contribution, these two anthologies force us to consider, was as both a critic and a reformer. As a critic, she attended concerts, analyzed art exhibitions, and reviewed contemporary literature. But as a reformer, she spent significant moments (including many holidays) with the institutionalized and degraded inhabitants of New York City. Positioning herself as a public intellectual, Fuller combined her interest in fine art with a commitment to social justice. In the process, she began exploring the ways in which the competing agendas of aesthetics and reform might connect with each other.

Focusing on the links between public awareness and social change, Fuller began adapting to urban life Transcendentalist models of individual self-reliance, which no longer worked smoothly in an environment whose forces could shape--and often deform--the individual. In place of the self-reliant individual tapping into and utilizing the unconscious energies of the Oversoul, she dramatized herself as the journalist whose public reflections brought to the surface unseen political energies located in the communal psyche of the body politic--what she termed "desire in the heart of the community." (6) Shifting from the illuminated individual to the enlightened populace, she positioned herself not as an exemplar of personal transformation but rather as a model of public awareness. In her first New York Tribune article, a December 1844 review of "Emerson's essays," Fuller extrapolated from her former mentor the political dimensions that would inform her new role as an urban journalist. The responsibility of the writer, she noted, is "to admonish the community [...] and arouse it to nobler energy." The writer of "genius" like Emerson, she continued, should be "the natural priest, the shepherd of the people" not just--as Emerson had positioned himself--"a representative of the claims of individual culture." (7) Instead of dedicating herself to the Emersonian ideal of personal development, Fuller in New York turned to the needs of others. "For every effort to limit vice, ignorance, and misery," Horace Greeley recollected in his autobiography, "she had a ready, eager ear, and a willing hand [...]" (Greeley 179).

This process of political investment-a commitment of both awareness and money--depended upon Fuller's keen understanding of what she termed "public attention": the field of communal interest generated through texts focusing shared concern onto specific cultural issues and problems. In order to understand the full impact of the term "attention," it is worthwhile considering Jonathan Crary's Suspensions of Perception, which demonstrates that numerous individuals in the nineteenth century discovered that attention was much more complicated and interesting than the naive realism many later readers have superimposed upon it. Writing in a period of great technological experimentation, artists, writers, and optical scientists began to explore the ways in which attention is marked by discontinuities, afterimages, and blindspots. Emerging visual technologies, notably the daguerreotype and stereoscope, changed the ways in which city dwellers viewed and wrote about their environment. Breaking the flow of urban experience by capturing isolated moments, daguerreotypes challenged viewers to look more deeply into pictured moments. Long exposure times (often over a minute) combined numerous instants of time into a single image that because of the accumulation of barely perceptible movements--took on 'three dimensional' qualities. More dramatically, the stereoscope showed viewers the ways in which multiple images were combined through the mechanics of binocular vision into a single 3D image. The possibility of multiple or double exposures created a range of ghostly effects that further extended the perceptual range of viewers. The widespread dissemination of new visual technologies transformed structures of urban attention, demonstrating that perception and consciousness are not seamless webs.

The daguerreotype was first introduced to New York City in 1839 and by 1843 was noticed in the press as a lucrative source of income. In 1844, the same year that Fuller moved to New York, Mathew Brady, the foremost practitioner of the new visual technology, opened his first daguerreotype studio on Broadway. By "opening [his] galleries to passersby," Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace observe, Brady helped to create a new "public art form" (688-89). Destabilizing and transforming previous modes of vision, Brady's daguerreotypes forced New Yorkers to rethink their relation to themselves and urban space. Confronting images of their likenesses literally frozen in time, the viewer perceived both the temporal discontinuity of experience and the gap between their present subjective awareness and the objective presence of their former selves. In similar fashion, Fuller's Tribune essays helped to transform the ways in which city dwellers viewed themselves and their environment. They doubled vision, lifting readers above the sights of the city, by supplementing the immediacy of experience with parallel planes of reflection.

In her March 1845 essay "Our City Charities," Fuller began to articulate her concept of "public attention" by focusing on the reform institutions on Blackwell's Island. Curious visitors--like Charles Dickens in 1842--had found New York's new benevolent institutions irresistible tourist attractions. But while Dickens' visit to Blackwell's Island brought him face-to-face with what he characterized as the "moping idiot," "the gibbering manic," and "the terrible crowd" (Dickens 104), Fuller critiqued the spectatorial assumptions that distanced such viewers from the incarcerated persons they encountered. Rather than reproducing an urban tourism that placed her readers in the position of being detached voyeurs visiting isolated enclaves of difference, she demanded that public attention and sympathy be focused upon individuals confined to institutions outside the boundaries of polite society. Challenging the detached gaze of observers interested solely in gawking at amusing spectacles of poverty and vice, she reflected that the residents of Blackwell's Island were most often subjected to what she terms "careless scrutiny" and "the gaze of the stranger." (8) As passing curiosities embodying the "urban picturesque," (9) the outcasts and failures of society were cut off from caring reflection that might consider the human expense of their wasted lives.

Opposing such neglect, Fuller observes near the opening of "Our City Charities" that: The pauper establishments that belong to a great city take the place of the skeleton at the banquets of old. They admonish us of stem realities. [...] They should be looked at by all, if only for their own sakes, that they may not sink listlessly into selfish ease, in a world so full of disease. They should be looked at by all who wish to enlighten themselves as to the means of aiding their fellow creatures in any way, public or private. (98)

The key phrase in this passage is "They should be looked at by all." Rather than allowing her readers to maintain an impressionistic sense of urban exiles located beyond their own realms, Fuller situates the city's outcasts within what she terms "public attention," a focused awareness that--she affirms--has started to awaken (102). Representing herself as a journalist embedded within the city's institutions, she models for her readers processes of compassionate witnessing that bring the poor and institutionalized into the perceptual field of middle-class urban consciousness. In the process, she breaks down barriers that relegated the disabled, insane, and criminalized to preserves cut off from the city's collective gaze. In contrast, "public attention"--as Fuller characterizes the term--involves the perception of "right principles" and the "heart of the community," a response that transcends the mere act of looking. Without such capacity to generalize from their perception, many people are "short-sighted" and look without really seeing (148). In contrast to this social myopia, Fuller constructs sustained acts of public attention that involve much more than the touristic desire for visual amusement, since they engage a critical response both to social surfaces and hidden causes.

In the city, Fuller's concept of "attention" shifted in important ways. Earlier in her career, she had represented attention as a personal response to persons or places. In Summer on the Lakes, for example, she fixes her "attention" on the "picturesque beauty" of a region (EMF 132), mentions places "where there was everything new to occupy the attention" (EMF 220), and notices a single man whose "attention was drawn aside by the gay glances of certain damsels" (EMF 223). (10) But by the end of 1844, she began to characterize attention as a shared communal response. In her "Preface" to Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she "solicits] a sincere and patient attention" from her readers. In a new passage discussing prostitution and the sexual double standard, she comments on how "attention has been awakened among men to the stains of celibacy" (324); and, later, she mentions the importance of "due attention" being paid to healthy dress (339). Fuller's New-York Tribune reviews and essays expand her understanding of "attention," which appears numerous times as both an aesthetic and a political category. Fuller writes of attention being claimed, arrested, awakened, called, dulled, turned, placed, bent, and enchanted." Attention, she shows us, must be mobilized, directed, and kept on task. As its light is concentrated, the field that attention illuminates can begin to stimulate a thoroughgoing response that combines intellectual discernment with moral, emotional, and imaginative judgment. Without this deepening of perception, the populace would remain entranced by the urban spectacle surrounding them, trapped in the illusion that this visual domain--stripped of its political dimensions--was the whole of 'reality.' Fuller's self-avowed role in this process of public attention, she affirmed, was to give her contemporaries "a decided object and clear light to fill the noble office of disinterested educators and guardians to their less fortunate fellows." (12) Expanding the public's awareness, Fuller shaped public attention by illuminating the blindspots that blocked sympathy and public care. It is striking that, in Fuller's theorizing, the antithesis of sympathetic public attention is "prejudice." In "St. Valentine's Day--Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane," for example, she argues that both "mania" and "the commonest forms of prejudice" reveal "a mind which does not see far enough to connect partial impressions." Both mental conditions, she explains, illustrate the way in which "attention" may be "distorted into some morbid direction." (13) In contrast, the achievement of "clear light" a clarity of public attention--necessitates the focusing of a balanced awareness that sidesteps the pitfalls of contention and blind prejudice, both of which lead to overinvestment in "partial" concerns at the expense of a more judicious evaluation of social conditions. Fuller had begun to consider the link between what she termed "sincere and patient attention" and clarity of vision in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the book she completed just before moving to New York City. In that treatise, she paired the awakening of "attention" with the "aspiration of soul, of energy of mind, seeking clearness and freedom." (14) "That which has been clearly conceived in the intelligence," she affirmed, "cannot fail sooner or later to be acted out." (15)

But at the same time that Fuller conceptualized the clarification of mental vision as the necessary precondition for social change, she insisted that public attention involved not only the eyes, but also the spirit, the heart, and the imagination. As a result, the deployment of sentiment and sympathy plays a key role in her shaping of public attention. Amplifying her theory of critical response, she defines the critical attention of the "great Critic" as a multi-faceted engagement with others. Such an individual, she observes in her 21 January 1845 review of James Russell Lowell's Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, is not merely the surveyor, but the interpreter of what other minds possess; he must have a standard of excellence, founded on prescience of what man is capable of; he must have, no less, a refined imagination and quick sympathies to enter into each work in its own kind, and examine it by its own law. (16)

Distinguishing the spectatorship of "the surveyor" from the judicious evaluation of "the interpreter," Fuller outlines a process of response that combines the intellect, emotions, and moral imagination. It is significant that she links together both intellectual discernment and judicious feeling to form her ideal of critical response. But Fuller did not solicit emotional response merely for its own sake. At times, in her Tribune articles, she attacked excesses of what she termed "sentimentalism and stale morality." (17) Opposed to this sheer emotionality, her concept of public attention involves the complex interconnection of thought with feeling.

Fuller had found such qualities in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In her January 1845 review of Browning's poetry, she observes that her writing is "wholly free" of "morbid sentimentalism. [...] Personal feeling is in its place; enlightened by Reason, ennobled by Imagination." (18) Connecting feeling to reason and imagination, Fuller does not reject sentimental writing outright (as some scholars have claimed), but rather adapts it to her critical and political agendas. Combining the intellectual discipline of Transcendentalist criticism with the emotional agendas of sentimentalist writing, Fuller constructs a hybrid discourse akin to the sentimental Transcendentalism of her friend Lydia Maria Child. In her 1843 Letters from New-York, Child had pursued the claims of both the soul and the heart. Women's special gift, she had asserted, is to combine "intellect" with "the warm light of the affections" a multi-faceted response that is needed in the face of the brutality, ideological inertia, and habituated social divisions of the city (Child 172, 152). Locating the seeds of reform in the character and informed responses of her readers, Child--like Fuller after her--paired the enlightened heart with the impassioned mind. Her literary task, as she defined it, was to move beyond the "mere panorama of passing scenes" by linking them to what she called "the poet's path" (Child 167). It is a similar combination of enlightened feeling and impassioned reason that enabled Fuller--in the wake of Child--to communicate the complexity of an environment that contained both fine art and prostitutes, both a thriving cultural scene and the ostracized urban poor. Fuller's deployment of sentiment became a key aspect of her linkage between public attention and political motivation, since the representation of "publicly displayed affect," as Glenn Hendler reminds us, creates a structure of shared feeling that cements political cohesion (Hendler 15, 10).

Given the dominant critical tendency to characterize Fuller as a Transcendentalist who gravitated toward socialism, it comes somewhat as a surprise to recognize that a powerful vein of sentiment runs through her New York essays. (19) As she wrote about the poor, the incarcerated, and the abandoned, Fuller adopted a sentimentalist moral tone that measured the response of the caring heart against the ideal of Christian love. What is unmistakable is the new vein of Christianized sentimentalism that interlaces Fuller's New-York Tribune articles. For example, she argues that social problems must be addressed by an "open heart" that can avoid "callousness." (20) Society, she affirms, should be directed by "the divine obligation of love and mutual aid between human beings." (21) The highest manifestation of this communal feeling, she asserts, is "the divine love of Jesus," a spirit of care that embodies "the miraculous power of Love [...] guided by a pure faith." (22) Benevolent reformers, she observes, are motivated by "a God of Love." (23) In place of the numerous allusions to classical mythology, present in Fuller's writing as late as the fall of 1844, her New York essays ground themselves in numerous Biblical passages. Fuller cites all four of the gospels, as well as a number of Old Testament books--a shift in orientation that reflects the Christian ethos of sentimental writing (and, perhaps, the direct influence of William Henry Channing's urban ministry). In this regard, Fuller's essay on "Prison Discipline" exemplifies her use of Christian sentiment. "There are symptoms that mankind at large begin to have some sympathy with the divine love of Jesus," she observes; "[...] Harsh bigots may sneer at this spirit of mercy as 'sickly sentimentality,' but the spark has been struck, and, nothing daunted, the fire glows, grows, rises, and begins to cast a light around." (24)

Probably the most vivid example of the ways in which Fuller's New York writing generates public attention by merging the agendas of literary criticism with sentimentalist social reform is found in her essay "Asylum for Discharged Female Convicts" (19 June 1845). This essay asks middle-class readers to attend to one of the most controversial sites of all--the half-way house for women discharged from prison, many of them former prostitutes, who were attempting to find the means to resist a "return to their former suffering and polluted life." (25) Overturning schematic social discourses that projected opposed images of "true women" and "fallen women," Fuller argues that all inhabitants of the city --the poor, the rich, men and women--have a responsibility toward its weakest and most vulnerable inhabitants. Hoping "to awaken the heart" of each reader "to a deep and active interest in this matter," she actively resists the ethos of middle-class respectability that led Nathaniel Parker Willis to turn away from the "outcasts" he encountered on Broadway or Charles Loring Brace to pen the following lines to his sister: "You can have no idea, Emma, what an immense vat of misery and crime and filth much of this great city is! I realize it more and more. Think of ten thousand children growing up almost sure to be prostitutes and rogues!" (26) In contrast to such moralistic rejection, Fuller compels her readers to attend to individuals that society was all too willing to exclude.

Near the end of her essay, Fuller models public attention for her readers by asking them to take their emotional response to literary texts as a model for sympathetic political vision. Referring to two contemporary novels, Mysteries of Paris and Violet Woodville, she asks her readers to consider: These pleading eyes, these angels in a stranger's form we meet or seem to meet as we pass through the thoroughfares of this great city. We do not know their names or homes. We cannot go to those still and sheltered homes and tell them the tales that would be sure to awaken the heart to a deep and active interest in this matter. But should these words meet their eyes, we would say, Have you entertained your leisure hours with the Mysteries of Paris or the pathetic story of Violet Woodville? [...] Do you want to link these fictions, which have made you weep, with facts around you where your pity might be of use? Go to the Penitentiary at Blackwell's Island. You may be repelled by seeing those who are in health, while at work together, keeping up one another's careless spirit and effrontery by bad association. But see them in the hospital where the worn features of the sick show the sad ruins of past loveliness, past gentleness. See in the eyes of the nurses the woman's spirit still, so kindly, so inspiring. See those little girls huddled in a corner, their neglected dress and hair contrasting with some ribbon of cherished finery held fast in a childish hand. Think what "sweet seventeen" was to you, and what it is to them, and see if you do not wish to aid in any enterprise that gives them a chance of better days. (27)

By the end of this passage, Fuller outlines a process of perception that is not urban spectatorship, but rather an attentiveness that measures human losses against the heart's moral register. In this text, she blends critical awareness with sentiment in order to motivate political action. Note, for example, the ways in which the verb "see" in the final sentence refers less to visual perception than to impassioned political commitment. Such sentiment is not immediately visible but, as Fuller shows her readers, must be diagnosed through its effects.

But if Fuller's New York essays take shared affect as an essential component of reform, they also reveal her ongoing commitment to a modified form of Transcendentalist idealism. The resulting literary blend, which I term "sentimental Transcendentalism," surpasses merely visual modes of representation by measuring the distance between visible urban realities and invisible standards of response. In contrast to the gaze of the tourist or flaneur looking at the city's sights, Fuller moves beyond the immediate scene, detaching her readers from the touristic perspective encouraged by many journalists and guidebooks. Instead, her writing creates a 'stereoscopic' overlay by pairing visible scenes with imagined analogues: whether literary allusions, imaginary vistas, or historical echoes. The resulting double exposure places Fuller's readers in two places at the same time--in the immediate, visible city and in a 'virtual city' available to the mind's eye. The real and the ideal, the visual and the imagined, resonate together in a vibrant, oscillating image that challenges readers to combine different viewpoints into a synthetic whole. Multiplying geographical planes in her essays, Fuller demands that her readers learn how to occupy and connect a variety of sites ranging from the concrete places in nineteenth-century New York to imagined literary realms and utopian images of places that might be actualized through the proper application of resources and political vision. Moments of immediate experience, rather than being visible "slices" of life (a view later popularized in the 1850s by George Foster), turn into emblems signifying underlying social conditions that Fuller imaginatively reconstructs, so that they can be perceived. (28) One of the most striking aspects of this "public attention" is its symbolic dimension, which gives depth to perceived objects. Rather than attending only to the sights before her in New York's charity institutions, Fuller measures the immediate scene against another, allegorical plane of being that reveals the underlying condition of the body politic.

Struggling against perceptual disorder and the dispersal of attention in the city, Fuller constructs "stereoscopic" moments of double vision that facilitate in-depth analysis of the changing urban scene. In Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text, Emily Hicks describes a similar textual effect, as she analyzes "the multidimensional perception" formed on the border where "two different sets of referential codes" overlap to create "holographic" images that present multiple perspectives simultaneously (Hicks xxiii, xxviii, xxix). Fuller scholars such as Christina Zwarg have highlighted a similar quality in Fuller's writing by discussing her literary practice as a form of "translation." But rather than reading the work of translation as a movement from one frame of reference to another, I want to expand Zwarg's insight that "Fuller's critical writings reveal an awareness of the complex overlay of ideological frames through which we are forced to read our lives." But while Zwarg goes on to assert that Fuller attempts "to make some conversation or translation between [different ideological frames] possible," I want to maintain the power of Zwarg's original term "overlay" by stressing the simultaneity of this process (Zwarg 197, emphasis added). Just as the translator, working bilingually, is able to keep two languages in play simultaneously, Fuller facilitates a political reading of urban experience by superimposing competing frames of reference into moments of cultural depth perception. This is less a lateral movement "between" than a process of deepening and heightening. Rather than pursuing the horizontal dimensions of literary dialogue or translation, she constructs a vertical axis of political perception--one that gives emotional, perceptual, and ideological depth to urban life.

Resisting the materialism and moral degradation that she saw around her, Fuller challenged her readers to transcend the details of daily urban experience by overlaying onto them images of imaginary or virtual cities. The resulting double exposure adds a resonance to images of contemporary life, since they vibrate in relation to portraits of other cities both ancient and modern, ranging from ancient Sodom and Rome to contemporary Paris and London. Shifting between different geographical frames of reference, Fuller thus forces her readers to evaluate their urban experience by measuring visible realities against imagined alternatives. For example, she provided an imaginary compass point of urban desperation in one review, when she quoted Thomas Hood's poem "The Bridge of Sighs"--which contains a vivid portrait of a homeless British woman who drowned herself while living in the midst of a populous city. (29) Fuller's intertextual reference defines a point of orientation that helped her readers respond to, but also move beyond, daily events. Instead of accepting the illusion that the visible city is the only world available to awareness, she creates an urban palimpsest that measures the 'real' against imagined scenes. In the process, Fuller's 'stereoscopic' overlay brings into focus an aspect of urban experience that is not immediately visible. Attending to the ideologies and cultural myths shaping perception, she moves her readers beyond visible street-life by showing them how unseen values shape mediated encounters that naive observers might be tempted to take at face value or overlook altogether. Like Child, Fuller creates for her readers a double vision that detaches them from exclusive allegiance to visible phenomena by pairing the daily sights of the urban panorama with other, imagined, planes of reality.

One of the most striking examples of the way Fuller doubles perspectives by pairing the immediate with the virtual is found in her utopian fantasy, "The Rich Man--An Ideal Sketch" (6 February 1846). At the opening of this essay, Fuller detaches herself from the perspective of the strolling flaneur by pairing the "sights" gleaned from her "walks through the city" with a "reverie" of a virtual city whose imaginary contours enable her to measure daily poverty and social injustice against an idealized image of social perfection. This "reverie," Fuller comments, was stimulated by "the woes, difficulties and dangers of our present social system"--"mighty problems" that can only be addressed through a process of "radical reform" (MFC 359). Her response to the schisms dividing New York is to create a vision of a businessman who "sees the interests of all mankind engaged with his, and [who] remembers them while he furthers his own" (MFC 360, emphasis added). Exhibiting a nobility of spirit, Fuller's imaginary businessman exhibits the extraordinary behavior of building a fine new home that he opens to anyone who shares his values, including the disabled and the poor. In contrast to the new urban elite insulating themselves in the fine homes of Fifth Avenue and Gramercy Park, he allows neither "wealth" nor "fashion" to be "a cause of exclusion more than of admission," since "All depend[s] upon the person" (MFC 365). Her ideal exemplar of wealth opens his home both to artists and to the poor, thus uniting in one geographical locale a site where fine art, high culture, and social justice might be perfectly blended. Combining "intellectual" with "moral" discernment, he lifts himself and his circle above the materialist plane of selfish acquisition. Although he appreciates fine art and loves "the Beautiful," he also can perceive the "sharp and care-worn faces, the joyless lives that throng his busy street." Combining the paired concerns of aesthetics and reform, he turns his house into a haven for artists, the poor, and even "suffering virtue" (MFC 360, 361, 360, 364). Sharing his wealth, he creates a home that becomes a source of public improvement, not an ostentatious monument troubling the vision of the disadvantaged and the poor.

But the final sentence of Fuller's urban reverie underscores the vast distance between her idealized vision of a virtual city and the urban realities surrounding her. '"Please ye give me a penny,' screamed a ragged, half-starved little street sweep, and the fancied cradle of the American Utopia receded or rather proceeded fifty years at least into the Future" (MFC 366). Creating a double vision, the sights and sounds of the modern city reverberate against her utopian fantasy and suggest the distance that must be covered to actualize it. Lifting her readers above the plane of immediate experience, Fuller demands that they measure the sights around them against imagined alternatives. The distance between the real and the ideal creates a potential--in the sense of an electrical gap--that she solicits her readers to bridge with the electrified arc of social awareness and action. While most of Fuller's essay operates on the plane of an imagined future, the conclusion punctures her reverie on the ideal deployment of wealth with the jarring sounds of New York's streets. But as the dream begins to recede, its afterimage lingers in the air, "producing a counterimage" of the city (Resina 4). At the same time, Fuller's doubled image is tinged by her example of street life--a "half-starved little street sweep," whose function at the end of Fuller's essay is to appeal to the heart's political sympathies. Unlike sensationalist New York writers (such as George Foster) who complacently contrasted the luxurious lifestyle of the rich to the degradation of the poor, Fuller at this moment pulls representatives of both sides into the same frame. The "rich man" and the "half-starved street sweep" both have a life in her text and both make a claim on the reader's attention and feelings.

While some genteel observers saw little connection between themselves and those who were beyond "charity and pity," Fuller took great pains to represent points of contact and exchange between opposed social classes. In "The Rich Man--An Ideal Sketch," for example, when she asserted that "sharp and care-worn faces" and "joyless lives [...] throng his busy street" (MFC 360), the verb "throng" is striking; for it suggests that rich and poor, privileged and destitute, coexist in the same urban environment. They are not temporally or spatially separated from each other. Similarly, in "Prevalent Idea that Politeness is too great a Luxury to be given to the Poor," Fuller dramatizes the encounter of members of different social classes. "A few days ago," her sketch opens, "a lady, crossing in one of the ferry boats that ply from this city, saw a young boy, poorly dressed, sitting with an infant in his arms on one of the benches. She observed that the child looked sickly and coughed." (30) But rather than exhibiting any kindliness toward the impoverished children she met, Fuller records, the lady began pestering them with rude questions. Chastising the lady for her rudeness toward the underprivileged, Fuller argues in her essay for an urban environment in which "A rich man is not [...] surprised to find himself in contact with a poor one." In such an imagined world, the wealthier classes would pass through the city "with an open eye and an open heart, ready to cheer the downcast, and enlighten the dull by words of comfort and looks of love" (MFC 129-30).

At the same time that Fuller's vision of New York moved beyond the flaneurial plane of impressionistic observation by including glimpses of imagined geographical locales, her representations of urban existence resisted the "sunshine-and-shadow tradition" that depicted upper and lower social classes inexorably separated by irremediable disparities of breeding and income. From her perspective, such a vision of opposed urban realms represented a form of ideological slumber, content to keep the status quo in place and to project onto society's extremes self-indulgent fantasies designed to amuse readers, not change their opinions. Fuller's urban writing, in contrast, attempted to mobilize sentiment and thus effect social change. Neither the visual impressionism of the flanuerial "street narrative" nor the stark disharmonies of the "sunshine-and-shadow tradition" meshed easily with the literary practice of an author who had dedicated herself to visionary modes of writing that attempted to harmonize opposing realms. ("Harmony" was a central concept in both "The Great Lawsuit" and Woman in the Nineteenth Century.) At the heart of Fuller's political vision was the conviction that stigmatized groups--recent Irish immigrants, the poor, the institutionalized--must be witnessed and incorporated into the body politic, not forgotten or isolated within the shadowy realm of an imagined urban underground.

Instead of relegating the poor to specific regions (like many of her contemporaries), she located them throughout the city, for example on its public conveyances and streets. In the process, Fuller attempted to bridge the gap between rich and poor, as well as the respectable and the criminalized, by suggesting avenues of communication and political sympathy between groups that many contemporaries saw as class enemies. Forging connections between different social classes, she resisted portraits of the city as the site of disconnected urban realms.

For many writers in the 1840s, the most pressing disconnection resulted from the swelling wave of immigrants who threatened to inundate the city with poverty, crime, and cultural difference. By 1835, 30,000 Irish a year were landing in New York; a decade later, the number had more than doubled (Burrows and Wallace 543, 736). For the upper-class businessman Philip Hone, this rising tide of immigration was the root of many of the city's social problems. The "squalid misery and hopeless destitution" of New York's poor, he observed, "has been hastened [...] by the constant stream of European paupers arriving upon the shores of this land of promise. [...] If we had none but our own poor to take care of, we should get along tolerably well" (Hone 785). Despite the emergence of various relief agencies, especially in the wake of the financial Panic of 1837, there seemed to be a widespread belief that the poor should work or starve; it was not society's role to encourage pauperism by coddling them. But if the masses of new immigrants represented a threatening increase of urban poverty to some social commentators, others saw the potential of the "new arrivals" who--in the words of Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, "would transform every aspect of life in the metropolis--its patterns of work, housing, religion, politics, and gender." By the late 1850s, "better than three-fourths" of New York's working class would be foreign-born (Burrows and Wallace 739).

Fuller strongly disagreed with literary contemporaries who saw a swelling immigrant population as a political and social threat. Again, we find that she emphasizes connection instead of separation, as she fuses into her double vision disparate groups and locales. In contrast to Philip Hone and others, she refused to represent recent immigrants as a problem to be contained but, rather, as a pool of human potential that might be "amalgamated" into the general population. Moving beyond impressionistic descriptions of new immigrants and the threat they posed, Fuller lifts her readers above the plane of visible phenomena by shifting to a visionary mode that imagines the demographic changes taking place in the body politic. Our thoughts anticipate with eager foresight," she reflected in her essay "Italy," the race that may grow up from this amalgamation of all races of the world which our situation induces. It was the pride and greatness of ancient nations to keep their blood unmixed, but it must be ours to be willing to mingle, to accept in a generous spirit what each clime and race has to offer us. (31)

Reflecting upon the "mighty sea of life" that "swells within our nation," Fuller argued that her "community" must manifest "a soul of goodness" and "wise aspiration" that might "assimilate" and transform the good and bad, the wholesome and unwholesome. Although Fuller recognized that Europe was pouring both "corruptions" and "riches" on "our shores," she also saw--in contrast to many of her contemporaries--that the pool of new immigrants might become a source of national strength (32) Even the much-despised and poverty-stricken Irish, she believed, represented "a valuable element" in the changing American populace. Manifesting "the faults of an oppressed race," they would change over time; thus, "we cannot forbear, notwithstanding all the temporary ills they aid in here, to give them all a welcome to our shores." (33) In contrast to the open hostility of many of her compatriots to the rapid increase of an Irish Catholic population in New York, she even recognized that "At present, the Catholic priesthood are the best friends of these poor people, and, if they do them harm, do them also great good." (34)

As Fuller asked her readers to attend to her civic dreams, she detached them from the plane of immediate experience by providing a diagnostic vocabulary to assess the social changes taking place in the body politic. From her perspective, the threat of moral "disease" and "corruption" resulted less from the violation of sexual norms (the obsession of many of her contemporaries) than from the expansion of a creeping selfishness and materialism, manifesting itself in greed, the mistreatment of women, scorn for the poor, and the complacent acceptance of slavery. "Our Nation," she complains in "1st January, 1846," "has indeed shown that the lust of gain is her ruling passion." (35) The cure for such "disease," she asserted in one of her book reviews, is "the dissemination" of "a thoroughly diffused intellectual life" and "a religious aim" throughout "the whole people." (36) In Fuller's civic mythology, this dissemination of public virtue might become a "salt" that would purify society and prevent moral "infection." (37) Fuller's concern with the moral purity of society put her at odds with conservative contemporaries who were deeply concerned over the political ambiguity of housing 'foreign' populations, cut off from the full rights of citizenship, within the country's borders. But public attention, for Fuller, involved much more than the documentation of such social conditions. It included as well a visionary model of a future society that would make room for individuals often excluded from consideration and sympathy. Imagining the nation, and especially New York, as a site of social amalgamation, she envisioned "a new and generous race--where the Italian meets the Dutch--the Swede the Jew." (38)

Such a model of social blending and cohesion stands at a measurable distance from the urban spectatorship often taken as the hallmark of nineteenth-century city writing. For Fuller does more than frame a picture of city sights, she also filters the urban landscape through the lens of political idealism. Without such utopian dreaming, profound social change rarely happens. The essential flaw of more realistic modes, Fuller's writing suggests, is that--in the absence of imagined alternatives--they document and reinforce the status quo, instead of preparing the foundation for a different reality. At their most ecstatic, Fuller's New York writings envision a world of perfect social attentiveness where readers are totally responsive to the patterns of public attention unfolded for them. Directed by ideals of social justice, an "audience"--she argues in her December 1844 essay "Thanksgiving"--can "show [...] a ready vibration to the touch of just and tender feeling." Such seeds, she reflects, can grow into "the promised tree [...] if tended in a pure spirit." (39) It is striking that, faced with the rapidly changing social conditions of mid-nineteenth-century New York, Fuller was able to perceive social "disease" and urban suffering as temporary obstacles. Surveying the urban landscape fifty years later, another Tribune writer, Jacob Riis, was overwhelmed by the almost uncontrollable "epidemic" of "moral contagion" in New York's tenements (Riis 60). It tells us much about the explosive demographic shifts of nineteenth-century New York that curable disease had become a raging epidemic by the end of the century. But it tells us much more about the optimism of antebellum urban writers that Margaret Fuller believed that, if one man--or one woman--could imagine a different, more just city, the public attention shaped by their writing could help make it appear.

University of Wisconsin--Madison

Notes

(1) Nord focuses on the "struggle" of women writers in the city "to escape the status of spectacle and become a spectator" (12). While I challenge the visually-based model of writing embedded in the terms "spectacle" and "spectator," the emphasis upon women writers' doubled position accords with my argument.

(2) Although American authors like Poe, in Brand's argument, transformed the flaneurial tradition (79ff), the flaneur's concern with urban spectatorship forms the methodological center of his study.

(3) Capper 194; Lydia Maria Child, letter 6 February 1845, cited in von Mehren 199.

(4) Fuller, Letters 4:46; Capper 206.

(5) Bean and Myerson, eds., Margaret Fuller, Critic, hereafter cited as MFC; Mitchell, ed., Margaret Fuller's New York Journalism, hereafter cited as MFJ.

(6) Fuller, "Our City Charities. Visit to Bellevue Alms House, to the Farm School, the Asylum for the Insane, and Penitentiary on Blackwell's Island," New-York Daily Tribune (hereafter cited as NYDT), 19 March 1845; MFC 98.

(7) Fuller, "Emerson's Essays," NYDT, 7 December 1844; MFC 2, emphasis added.

(8) Fuller, "Our City Charities," MFC 99.

(9) See Bramen, "The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americanization."

(10) Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele. All references to works in this collection will be cited parenthetically as EMF.

(11) Fuller, "Colonel McKenney's New Book upon the Indians," NYDT, 4 July 1846; "Consecration of Grace Church," 11 March 1846; "Books of Travel," 18 December 1845; "Mr. Fontana's Concert," 3 January 1846; "German Opera at Palmo's Opera House," 11 December 1845; "The Water Cure," 21 June 1845; "Thanksgiving," 12 December 1844; "Italy," 13 November 1845; [Review of J. Anthony King, Twenty-Four Years in the Argentine Republic], 5 June 1846.

(12) Fuller, "Asylum for Discharged Female Convicts," NYDT, 19 June 1845; MFC 135, emphasis added.

(13) Fuller, "St. Valentine's Day--Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane," NYDT, 22 February 1845; MFJ 80.

(14) Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, EMF 246, 324, 287, emphasis added.

(15) Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, EMF 254, emphasis added.

(16) Fuller, review of James Russell Lowell, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, NYDT, 21 January 1845; MFC 36, emphasis added.

(17) Fuller, "American Literature; Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future," Papers on Literature and Art, 2:122-43.

(18) Fuller, "Miss Barrett's Poems," NYDT, 4 January 1845; MFC 20.

(19) Bean and Myerson, "Introduction," MFC xxi.

(20) Fuller, "Prevalent Eye That Politeness Is Too Great a Luxury to Be Given to the Poor," NYDT, 31 May 1845, MFC 130; "The Poor Man--An Ideal Sketch," NYDT, 25 March 1846, MFC 377.

(21) Fuller, "Caroline," NYDT, 9 April 1846, MFJ 122.

(22) Fuller, "Prison Discipline," NYDT, 25 February 1846, MFJ 105; "St. Valentine's Day--Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane," NYDT, 22 February 1845, MFJ 81.

(23) Fuller, "Prison Discipline," MFJ 106.

(24) Fuller, "Prison Discipline" MFJ 105.

(25) Fuller, "Asylum for Discharged Female Convicts," NYDT, 19 June 1845; MFC 134.

(26) Willis, "Open-Air Musings in the City," 232; Charles Loring Brace, letter of October 1849, from The Life of Charles Loring Brace, chiefly told in his own letters', cited in Homberger, Scenes from the Life of a City, 13.

(27) Fuller, "Asylum," MFC 136, emphasis added.

(28) For a vivid example of Foster's view of the "slice" of life, see his New York in Slices.

(29) Fuller, review of The Waif: A Collection of Poems, ed. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, NYDT, 16 January 1845. Item C086 on the CDROM accompanying MFC and containing all of her Tribune articles written in New York.

(30) Fuller, "Prevalent Idea that Politeness is too great a Luxury to be given to the Poor," NYDT, 31 May 1845; MFC 128.

(31) Fuller, "Italy" [Alfieri], NYDT, 13 November 1845; MFC 253.

(32) Fuller, "French Novelists of the Day," NYDT, 1 February 1845; MFC 54-55.

(33) Fuller, "The Irish Character," NYDT, 28 June 1845; MFC 147-48.

(34) Fuller, "The Irish Character" [2], NYDT, 15 July 1845; MFC 157-58.

(35) Fuller, "1st January, 1846," NYDT, 1 January 1846; MFC 328.

(36) Fuller, review of Schoolcraft Jones, Ellen; or Forgive and Forget, NYDT, 10 January 1846; MFC 334.

(37) Fuller, "French Novelists," MFC 55.

(38) Fuller, "Deutsche Schnellpost," 25 January 1845. Item C091 on the CD-ROM accompanying MFC.

(39) Fuller, "Thanksgiving," MFC 12.

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