Authors: Matthew Goodman
the sun and the moon
David Carlisle, on his back to safety when he lost his balance and fell into the burning mass below. More than thirty buildings were destroyed, including the printing offices of thirteen newspapers. Among these was the building at 34 Ann Street, the third floor of which was occupied by the firm of Anderson & Smith, which printed both of the
Sun’
s penny-paper rivals, the
Transcript
and the
Morning Herald
.
The publishers of the
Transcript
were still at work when the fire broke out, and, seeing the glow rising from Fulton Street, they managed to rescue most of the newspaper’s supplies before the flames reached their building. They soon found new offices on Pearl Street near City Hall; it was only by chance that their new double-cylinder printing press (with a price tag of nearly three thousand dollars) had not yet been installed in their Ann Street offices.
James Gordon Bennett was not so fortunate. He lost everything in the fire: his books, types, papers, and printing press. Just as he was finally beginning to prove himself as an editor, showing the world the kind of newspaper he could produce, he was once again ruined. He had sunk all of his money (what little he had) into the
Morning Herald,
and after only three months of publication he had not recouped enough to replace what had been lost.
Those three months, however, had changed him forever. He could no longer imagine himself without the
Herald,
could no more abandon it than he could abandon his own life. The morning after the fire, Bennett stopped briefly at Ann Street to inspect the charred remains of his printing plant, and then, having ascertained the extent of the damage, he strode over to the
Sun’
s new office to place a classified ad—a typically bold pronouncement, but overly confident in its prediction of a quick return: A CARD—James Gordon Bennett begs leave to inform the public that the press, type and materials of the Herald establishment having been destroyed in the great fire on Wednesday morning in Ann Street, the publication of the Herald will be resumed in a few days, as soon as materials can be procured.
In that day’s edition the
Sun
published a full accounting of the fire, including the names of the dead and the circumstances in which they died, and a street-by-street inventory of the businesses that had been destroyed.
By the end of the week Richard Adams Locke was publicizing a charity
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Strange Attractions
campaign for the neediest of those thrown out of work by the fire, calling on the
Sun’
s readers to be “possessed of that milk of human kindness, which soothes, whilst it nourishes, the lips of the afflicted.” All over the city New Yorkers looking for the latest developments turned to the
Sun
(its circulation spiked in the aftermath of the fire) rather than the merchant papers, which had shown themselves inadequate to the journalistic demands of the new city. This New York was noisy and crowded and chaotic, haunted by disease, riven by ethnic conflict, and grievously divided over the central issue then facing the nation. No longer would currency conversion tables and outdated foreign news suffice. Like the man in the story by old New York’s favorite writer, Washington Irving, the merchant papers had been in a sleep of years, and while they slept everything around them had changed.
Now, in New York, the verities of the past were giving way as quickly as the wooden houses torn down to make room for modern structures of brick and stone. The surrounding countryside, little altered since the retreat of the glaciers, was everywhere being sold and built upon. The earth was in upheaval, the water polluted, the air a carrier of plague, fire a constant threat. Expanding ever northward, the city had grown too large to be traversed by foot. Now it was populated by strangers; a New Yorker could walk the streets all day and never see a familiar face.
Ships sailed into New York Harbor every day from all over the world, arriving in a city that was said to rival Babel in the number of tongues its inhabitants spoke—and, one might add, in the height of its buildings. To live there was to embrace the new and the exotic, and New Yorkers, prid-ing themselves on their sophistication, flocked to see all the latest attractions the city’s promoters supplied. Some, like Joice Heth, were human curiosities, but at least as often the natural world proved just as astonishing in its productions. Traveling menageries brought African creatures whose forms beggared the imagination, among the most remarkable being the giraffe (“cameleopard,” as it was often called), gnu (“horned horse”), and the orangutan (“wild man of the woods”). On display at Scudder’s American Museum was a sculpture of the Virgin Mary carved from a single elephant’s tusk; the tusk itself, taken from the greatest of all animals, was at least as spectacular as the sculpture. Scudder’s Grand Cosmorama included in one of its gaslit cases a view of an exploding volcano. There were technical marvels as well, such as the electrifying apparatus featured at Peale’s Museum; at night Peale’s presented Afong Moy, “the Chinese
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Lady,” whose performance reached its climax when she removed her shoes to expose her bound feet. Balloonists thrilled crowds with their daring, constantly modifying their crafts to attain ever greater heights and distances. The twin conquerors of the period—science and exploration—
had revealed to New Yorkers the very strangeness of the world, where the exotic merged with the commonplace, and nearly anything, it seemed, was possible.
On August 26, the
Sun
introduced its readers to the first of the remarkable discoveries that had recently been made on the moon.
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TH E M O O N
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c h a p t e r
8
Celestial Discoveries
In the summer of 1835 Richard Adams Locke was thirty-four years old, and at the height of his powers—editor of the most widely read newspaper in the city. As New York newspaper editors went, Locke cut a decidedly unimposing figure, being of slim build and middling stature (Edgar Allan Poe, who stood five foot eight, guessed Locke to be an inch shorter than himself), nowhere near as tall as James Gordon Bennett or James Watson Webb, and without Webb’s military bearing, or the literary glamour of the
Evening Post’
s William Cullen Bryant, or the aristocratic burnish of Mordecai Manuel Noah of the
Evening Star.
Still, he had a certain presence. In
The Literati of New York City
Poe observed that Locke’s eyes contained a “calm, clear
luminousness
”; there was “an air of distinction about his whole person,” as though he had carried with him to New York, along with the family’s five bags and bedding, some of the genteel manner of the world he had left behind.
Despite the often heated attacks Richard Adams Locke launched from his desk at the
Sun,
many of them directed against the city’s other newspapers, there are no recorded instances of his being involved in physical confrontations, a rarity among the high-strung New York editors of the time. (Even James Gordon Bennett, who was not known for his gracious-ness toward rivals, acknowledged that Locke was “very gentlemanly in his manners.”) In a world of furious self-promotion, he always avoided the spotlight, preferring to declaim from offstage, a consequence, perhaps, of the crossed eyes and scarred face that had marked him since childhood.
(“His face,” Poe did not fail to observe, “is strongly pitted by the smallpox.”) Though a newspaper editorship was among the most visible positions in the city, providing a useful stepping-stone for many editors in
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their postjournalistic careers, Richard Adams Locke never ran for public office, never parlayed his contacts into lucrative business opportunities, never wrote his memoirs or collected his writings for publication; indeed, nearly all of his best work was written anonymously—including, of course, the moon series that made him, for a time, famous.
The other leading editors in town were not just editors but publishers, owning a stake in the newspapers for which they worked, but at the
Sun
Benjamin Day had retained all equity, which left Locke to make ends meet on a newspaperman’s salary of twelve dollars a week. As a consequence he was always short of money, a condition that would plague him to the end of his life. It was one thing to be living on a shoestring as a young writer on London’s Grub Street, but by now he was into his middle age, and at the end of an evening, returning home from work, he would walk up Broadway, passing the gaslit mansions along the park—through the open windows he could look in on elegant drawing rooms, their chairs and sofas covered in European silk, on the walls bronzes and busts and cameos, and mirrors whose frames shone with ormolu—back to that apartment by the Public Yard where Esther and Adelaide awaited him.
The apartment was barely large enough for the three of them, and he and Esther were hoping for more children, perhaps even many more. (Two years later a son would arrive—another Richard Locke, the fifth consecu-tive generation to carry the name—followed by four more children in quick succession, the last one, Walter, born when Locke was forty-six years old.) Always, always there was the problem of money. Locke would agree with Shelley that luxury is the forerunner of barbarism; he had no use for the vast acreage his grandfather had owned or the outsize manor house, its ceilings buttressed by massive timbers and thick slabs of stone on the floors—but surely he might find a way to set his family’s finances aright.
It was inevitable that Locke’s thoughts would turn to his grandfather, the great man of the family, who had written numerous works of history and geography, from which he proudly claimed never to have earned even a sixpence—and did not have to, because he had made a fortune in land.
There it was, the eternal paradox: the rich man spends his days thinking about books, while the poor writer spends his days thinking about money.
Recently, of course, Richard Adams Locke had managed to earn a bit extra—the $150 Benjamin Day had paid him for his Matthias series. That money had gotten the family out from under the maddening din of
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Chatham Street; another such windfall might get them out of Manhattan entirely, maybe across the Narrows to Staten Island. Day had promised him still more if he could come up with another series that sold as briskly as the Matthias one had, and in idle moments, as he pursued his daily rounds, he considered possibilities.
For the past several years Locke’s reading had focused almost entirely on the natural sciences. Science was his true intellectual love, even more than literature or politics, and astronomy in particular had long held a special interest for him. When he was seventeen, shortly before he left East Brent for London, he had composed an epic poem entitled “The Universe Restored,” in six cantos of nearly a thousand lines each, that put forward his own theory of the ceaseless destruction and reproduction of the universe. Under his editorship the pages of the
Sun
often carried news of the latest astronomical developments. It might have seemed curious material to give the readers of the
Sun,
who were accustomed to news made much closer to home, but those were the journals he was reading and could draw upon for his items—and, in any case, almost everyone these days had at least a passing interest in astronomy, thanks in part to the imminent arrival of Halley’s Comet, an event awaited with excitement as well as a certain trepidation, for there was still a tendency to see comets as omens of disaster, portents of God’s wrath: an age-old imposition of religion onto science of the very sort that Richard Adams Locke had long found so objectionable.
The idea for his moon series came to him as he was leafing through an old volume of the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal,
the distinguished British quarterly of arts and sciences; he had been a regular reader of the
Journal
back in England, and had brought several copies with him aboard the
James Cropper.
He was perusing the premiere issue, published in 1826, when he came upon a brief article entitled “The Moon and its Inhabitants.” The article reported that the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers considered it “very probable” that the moon was inhabited by rational creatures, its surface covered by a vegetation very much like that of the earth’s; the astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen likewise maintained that he had recently discovered “great artificial works in the moon, erected by the Lunarians,” and was at present considering the possibility of communicating with the inhabitants of the moon—perhaps by means of an immense geometrical figure to be built on the plains of Siberia. That idea had met with the approval of “the great astronomer Gauss” (the
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mathematician and scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss), who believed that “a correspondence with the inhabitants of the moon could only be begun by means of such mathematical contemplations and ideas, which we and they must have in common.”
Locke had found this item near the back of the journal, as part of a survey of various disciplines under the heading “Scientific Intelligence.”
Toward the front was a longer article by the Scottish astronomer Thomas Dick about a new telescope he had invented, which he had dubbed the
“aërial reflector.” In the past decade Thomas Dick had risen from obscurity (he had until recently been a schoolteacher in Perth) to become one of the most widely read authors in the field of science. The book that had made him famous was called
The Christian Philosopher, or, The Connection of Science and Philosophy with Religion.
First published in 1823, it had gone through several editions since then, at least one of which (the one Richard Adams Locke had read) contained a statement of Dick’s beliefs about life on the moon. In an appendix called “On the means by which it may probably be ascertained whether the Moon be a habitable world,” he proposed that a vast number of astronomers be enlisted worldwide to maintain continuous observations of the moon’s surface; over time, he believed, these observations would reveal changes on the surface brought about by “the operations of intelligent agents,” a forest being cut down, for example, or a city being built on what had earlier been only an open plain. Even if the lunarians themselves were not seen, their presence could be inferred, just as a sailor passing an uncharted island concludes that it is inhabited after noting the presence of huts and cultivated fields. If such a plan were to be put into effect, he wrote, “there can be little doubt that direct proofs would be obtained that the Moon is a habitable world.”