Whitman Drunk

Abstract In November 1842, New Yorkers would have been able to buy, for twelve and a half cents each, or for eight dollars per hundred, an object that would be hard to classify today. It was called Franklin Evans; or, the Inebriate. Now it is encountered as a book, and is usually described as a novel. In 1842 it was a newspaper supplement-a special issue of the New World, unbound, printed on cheap paper, in newspaper columns. Any reader would have recognized it as a tract as well. The New World’s advertisements for it had begun, “Friends of Temperance, Ahoy!” (EPF 124). The first sentence makes no bones about these extranovelistic features: “The story I am going to tell you, reader, will be somewhat aside from the ordinary track of the novelist” (EPF 126). Those who read Franklin F:vans today, as a novel, often find it unsatisfactory; one reason for this is that the work addressed publics that were not simply novelistic publics. Newspaper subscribers and “Friends of Temperance” would have brought to the object the mass-mediated self understanding of the temperance movement. And that was a public in a new way. Temperance publications like Franklin Evans brought together two tendencies of the early national period: an ever more aggressive press, which had become strongly entrepreneurial; and a tradition of association that by the time of Tocqueville’s American tour could seem to be the defining feature of American culture.