Johnny Tremain on the Screen and the Page

Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain remains the foremost American novel on the Revolution, its coming-of-age story for the title character mirroring how the society around him moves toward independence.

In the next week some North End institutions will celebrate the cultural heritage of that book.

Friday, 12 September, 7 to 9:30 P.M.
A Revolutionary Movie Night
Christopher Columbus Park

Join the Paul Revere House and the Friends of Christopher Columbus Park for a free movie night in honor of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride. Come meet Paul Revere, enjoy 18th-century tunes on the Fife and Drum, and then watch an outdoor screening of Thomas Edison’s silent short movie “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” followed by the iconic Disney classic Johnny Tremain. Popcorn will be provided by Joe’s Waterfront; bring your own seating for the lawn.

Wednesday, 17 September, 7 to 8:30 P.M.
Book Chat: Johnny Tremain with Patrick O’Brien
On Zoom through Old North Illuminated

Written in 1943 by Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain is among the best-selling children’s books of the 20th century. Intended for middle schoolers, the novel’s protagonist is 14-year-old Johnny Tremain, an apprentice silversmith working in Boston in the 1770s. When Johnny’s dreams of becoming a silversmith are dashed by a tragic accident, he takes a new job as a horse-boy, riding for the patriotic newspaper the Boston Observer and as a messenger for the Sons of Liberty. Soon, Johnny is involved in the pivotal events of the American Revolution, from the Boston Tea Party to the first shots fired at Lexington, while he encounters historical figures like John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Dr. Joseph Warren. The book won the 1944 Newbery Medal and was adapted as a Disney film in 1957.

Patrick O’Brien, a history professor at the University of Tampa, will deliver a short presentation on the historical context surrounding the novel and then lead a discussion exploring themes from the book and what it means today as we approach America’s 250th anniversary. The discussion will be kind of like a virtual book club! This event is perfect for anyone who remembers reading Johnny Tremain as a child and for teachers and educators who would like to teach this novel with their students.

Register for this online discussion here while making a donation to Old North Illuminated for any amount. You’ll receive a Zoom link for the event.

Here are a couple of observations of my own. First, Johnny Tremain is certainly accessible to middle-school readers, and it won the Newbery Medal for best children’s book of the year. However, it was explicitly published as “A Novel for Old & Young.” That line has been dropped from the title page of more recent editions. [I have three copies of the book, in case you wonder.]

I don’t recall how it happened, but Johnny Tremain came up in my online talk for Old North Illuminated back in June. At the end of the novel the newly independent Johnny learns that his father was a Frenchman, and he experiences an emotional reconciliation with his departing Loyalist “cousin” even though her father cheated him. Symbolically, I observed, Forbes was bringing together American, French, and British—right in the middle of World War 2.

As for the movie, it’s definitely the “Disney version” of the novel. It made Johnny more admirable at the outset and his injury less long-lasting. It focused on rousing group politics and left out the deaths of some major characters. The movie also falls neatly into two halves because it was produced to be two episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney, though the studio did give it a cinema release. Folks can enjoy the movie for nostalgia, but shouldn’t miss out on the greater depth of the novel.

Here are more of my ramblings over the years on Johnny Tremain, the book (mostly) and the movie.

Anderson on Rebellion 1776 in Cambridge, 1 Apr.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s latest novel about the American Revolution is set in Boston: Rebellion 1776.

Anderson has won awards for her Seeds of America Trilogy (Chains, Forge, and Ashes), as well as her earlier novel Fever 1793 and the picture book Independent Dames: What You Never Knew about the Woman and Girls of the American Revolution.

She’s even better known for her contemporary novel Speak, which is frequently challenged in public schools and libraries because it addresses the problem of rape. She’s one of the handful of American authors who have won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children’s literature.

In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Anderson described the scope of this new book:

My book covers the traumatic effects of the Siege of Boston, the growing political divide within families and communities, and the frightening smallpox epidemic, which threatened everything. One reason I continue to write about this era is because I think we could do a better job depicting the state of the colonies at the start of the Revolution in recognizing that independence was not a done deal.

As a protagonist Anderson created a thirteen-year-old girl named Elsbeth Culpepper, orphaned but taking advantage of the chaos and need for labor in Boston after the British evacuation to keep herself away from the Overseers of the Poor.

Anderson’s long conversation with Horn Book editor Roger Sutton goes deep into her research and storytelling processes:

First I had to understand what the cultural, financial, and sociological constraints were then on a thirteen-year-old kitchen maid. But then came the chaos of the siege, then the changing of the armies, and then it took a while for Boston's government to get up and running again. That chaos opened the door for me and my character to break some rules, some constraints. And then as society gets its act back together, the walls and rules come back up again.

I recommend that interview for anyone writing historical fiction.

Anderson will be speaking and signing books at a ticketed event for Porter Square Books on Tuesday, 1 April. That will happen at the Marran Theater in Cambridge. Admission is $25 (which includes a signed book) or $10 (which doesn’t).

“Rebel Town” in Lenox through 18 Aug.

This week John Alan Segalla’s musical Rebel Town is being performed at the Duffin Theater in Lenox.

The ticket page says:

Rebel Town plunges you into the heart of Boston's political crisis in 1773. The story begins on the bustling wharfs, three days before the Boston Tea Party as Parliament’s Tea Act & the unlawful [sic] tax on tea ignites a firestorm of resistance led by charismatic Sam Adams, who rallies a town meeting to confront tyranny with three tea ships anchored in Boston Harbor.

Amidst the chaos, a 13-year-old apprentice Peter Slater Jr. dreams of joining the Sons of Liberty as carpenter William Grey and his comrades guard the ships, preventing customs officials from unloading the pernicious tea. With days to spare until the ships must be unloaded by law, the men and women of Boston make plans to deal with the tea in a manner that King George would never expect.

From lively gatherings and dance numbers at Liberty Tree to secretive schemes at the Bunches [sic] of Grapes Tavern, these passionate rebels—including John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Mercy Otis Warren—grapple with the weight of their defiance, knowing they risk being branded traitors or worse, being hanged for treason if caught. Daughters of Liberty including Sarah Grey, Abigail Slater and the women of the town play their own unique role in considering the consequences, their own rights, and aspirations for the future.

Segalla directed this production, as well as writing the whole show starting during the pandemic. It was supposed to be performed in May in the theater at Berkshire Community College, but those performances had to be canceled.

This week’s run through Sunday, 18 August, therefore appears to be the show’s debut. Naturally, Segalla hopes to bring Rebel Town to Boston.

Revolution’s Edge Returns to Old North

Old North Illuminated has brought back Revolution’s Edge, its thought-provoking play set inside the church on 18 Apr 1775.

Patrick Gabridge wrote this drama to be performed in Christ Church, Boston, about actual people in that congregation in 1775, using the historical record and some dramatic imagination. It’s directed by Alexandra Smith and produced by Jess Meyer for Plays in Place.

It looks like there’s a new cast this summer. The Rev. Mather Byles, Jr., a Loyalist at odds with most of his flock, is being played by Eric McGowan and Tim Hoover. Cato, the African man enslaved by Byles and the play’s narrative voice, is played by Stetson Marshall and Joshua Lee Robinson. Captain John Pulling, Jr., a church vestryman and Patriot activist, is played by Dustin Teuber and Kevin Paquette.

I wrote about the play last summer. The approaching Sestercentennial anniversary of the day it depicts makes it even more resonant.

Revolution’s Edge lasts about forty-five minutes. It will be performed four nights a week through 10 August. For more information, a video preview, and tickets, visit Old North Illuminated.

“Dill” Screenplay Reading in Old South, 19 Mar.

On Tuesday, 19 March, Revolutionary Spaces’s Old South Meeting House will host a live reading of a screenplay, performed by local actors and accompanied by music and sound effects.

The drama is called Dill, described as “inspired by real people and real events on the Cape Ann Shore in Massachusetts during a tumultuous time on the cusp of the American Revolutionary War.”

At the risk of spoilers, I’m guessing the central character, “an enslaved woman named Dill, short for Deliverance, who…finds herself in a love triangle between two men,” is based Deliverance Symonds. Abram English Brown wrote a chapter about Symonds in Beneath Old Hearth-Stones (1897).

After the reading, there will be a discussion of the screenplay’s historical context featuring these experts:

• Lise Breen, author of “Hidden City: Slavery and Gloucester’s Quadricentennial” in Gloucester Encounters: Essays on the Cultural History of the City 1623-2023 and coauthor of Objects of Myth and Memory: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
• Nerissa Williams Scott, producer of Dill and other films, C.E.O. and Lead Creative Producer of That Child Got Talent Entertainment (TCGT), and an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College in the Business of Creative Economy and Visual Media Art departments.
• Beth Bower, formerly staff archaeologist at the Museum of Afro American History and archaeological and historic resources program manager for the Central Artery project, now studying the 1750–1850 African American community in Salem.
• Jeanne Pickering, an independent scholar of slavery in eighteenth-century Essex County who maintains the research databases of NorthShoreSlavery.org.

The event announcement does not name the author of the screenplay.

This is a free event, but registration is requested. Doors will open at 6:30 P.M., with light refreshments available, and the performance is scheduled for 7:00.

Two Online Discussions of John Adams

Here are a couple of online events focusing on John Adams folks might be interested in.

On Thursday, 24 August, the hosts of the History Camp discussions will talk about Remembering John Adams: The Second President in History, Memory and Popular Culture with author Marianne Holdzkom.

The copy for the book says, “The second president is one-dimensional at times, and perhaps best known to the public as ‘obnoxious and disliked,’ but he is always fascinating.” That phrase comes from the musical 1776, which gives Adams the central role. It doesn’t come from any of Adams’s contemporaries writing about him. Indeed, the closest antecedents are in memories Adams himself wrote about how his political opponents viewed him, and he tended to puff up the severity of the opposition he faced.

According to reviews like this one, Holdzkom considers how Adams appears in his descendants’ writings, in more recent historians’ books, in the two big Broadway musicals and the H.B.O. miniseries, and even in Ezra Pound’s Eleven New Cantos.

This discussion will become available through the History Camp website and allied pages at 8:00 P.M.

On Tuesday, 29 August, the American Revolution Institute will share an online lecture by Prof. Jeanne E. Abrams of the University of Denver based on her book A View from Abroad: The Story of John Adams and Abigail Adams in Europe.

The Adamses spent a few years together in Europe in the 1780s during his diplomatic work. Abrams will discuss how in this time “the Adamses and their American contemporaries set about supplanting their British origins with a new American identity.”

That event is scheduled to take place from 6:30 to 8:30 P.M., leaving ample time for questions. Sign up through this page.

Peeking in on “Revolution’s Edge”

A month ago I noted the upcoming premiere of “Revolution’s Edge,” a play dramatizing the stresses affecting three men associated with Christ Church in the North End on 18 Apr 1775.

The three characters are the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Jr., planning to leave that church; his enslaved servant, Cato, worried about being removed from his family; and John Pulling, a merchant captain and vestryman who’s also interested in the movement of British soldiers. Byles is a Loyalist, Pulling a Patriot, and for Cato the lack of liberty cuts most deeply.

I attended that first performance at Old North and can recommend the show as a thoughtful exploration of how the Revolution’s big issues intersected with individual desires and needs. Performances run through 19 September.

WBUR’s report on the play included this passage:

Nathan Johnson, the actor who plays Cato, says it is one of the most important projects in which he’s been involved.

Johnson, who is Black, promised himself early in his acting career that he would never play an enslaved person. But the depiction of Cato, and the importance of the play’s message, made the role too compelling to pass up.

“I want everyone to see that we have all something to contribute to our history,” Johnson said. “I want everyone to see that it is not a matter of white and Black. It is a matter of America. It is a matter of progress. It is a matter of stakes, it is a matter of tension. And not just for Pulling and Byles, but for Cato as well.”

Cato is the least documented of the three characters. Playwright Patrick Gabridge had to gather vital records from Boston, Roxbury, and Nova Scotia, and then make an educated assumption that all those mentions of a man named Cato related to the same person.

To compound the challenge of building Cato’s character when none of his words survive, an enslaved man in a room with his owner wouldn’t have been able to speak his mind.

Gabridge turned that vacuum into an advantage by making Cato the character who addresses the audience, introducing the historic situation, the other characters, and his own unvoiced thoughts.

For folks who want to hear more, WBUR also ran an audio report.

The photo above of Johnson performing as Cato was taken by Evan Turissini, who plays Pulling, as he waited to enter.

When Phillis Met Benjamin

On 7 July 1773, nearly two hundred fifty years ago, Benjamin Franklin wrote to his relative Jonathan Williams, Sr., in Boston:

Upon your Recommendation I went to see the black Poetess and offer’d her any Services I could do her. Before I left the House, I understood her Master was there and had sent her to me but did not come into the Room himself, and I thought was not pleased with the Visit. I should perhaps have enquired first for him; but I had heard nothing of him. And I have heard nothing since of her.

The “black Poetess” was, of course, Phillis Wheatley, in London to finalize arrangements for the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Franklin Papers editors suggest that Nathaniel Wheatley kept away from the discussion because of the previous year’s Somerset v. Stewart case. Williams later apologized for having set up the meeting if the young man was going to behave that way. I think there could be any number of other reasons for his absence; we don’t have the Wheatleys’ side of this encounter.

Regardless of any awkwardness surrounding that event, Franklin’s letter shows that he and Wheatley did meet face to face. He came away with no reason to doubt what Bostonians reported about her intelligence and poetic skill.

Debbie Weiss wrote a play inspired by that event, “A Revolutionary Encounter in London.” It was an online presentation through the Massachusetts Historical Society a couple of years ago during the plague, and there are other videos online as well.

On Saturday, 1 July, the Lexington Historical Society will host a staged reading of “A Revolutionary Encounter in London,” directed by Weiss with Cathryn Phillipe portraying Phillis Wheatley and Josiah George as Benjamin Franklin. That presentation will start at 6:30 P.M. in the Lexington Depot. Tickets are $25, available here. Society members get a discount on tickets and can stay to talk with the actors and playwright-director over tea and desserts.

Weiss, Philippe, and George will next bring the show to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum on Thursday, 6 July, at 7:00 P.M. I think seats are included in the museum admission for that day.

Wheatley stayed in London for only about six weeks. Learning that Nathaniel’s mother Susannah Wheatley was ill, she left before her book was printed. The publisher shipped copies to Boston later in the year for her to sell.

Unfortunately, those books traveled on the Dartmouth, which also carried the first consignment of East India Company tea to reach Boston. Hence the Tea Party connection.

Franklin and the Monks of Medmenham

Over forty years ago I bought a paperback copy of Murder in the Hellfire Club by Donald Zochert. It was a historical murder mystery written in 1978 that featured Benjamin Franklin as the detective.

I never finished that book, but I suspect I’ve still got it. Somewhere.

I recalled that book after recent reading about the mid-1700s “Monks of Medmenham Abbey”—a group which, as discussed here, was dubbed a “Hellfire Club” by authors only in the next century. Franklin’s alleged connection to that organization struck me as a good case study of what we actually know.

Several books about this “Hellfire Club” claim that Franklin joined the group in 1757 or shortly afterward. He came to Britain that year and stayed until 1762. The Medmenham group had not yet fallen apart over political offices. Franklin knew lots of people, so a connection was at least possible.

But as for evidence of a link between Franklin and the Medmenham Monks? Well, there really isn’t any. One author, Geoffrey Ashe, acknowledged this in a backhanded way in his 1974 book, The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality:

By the later 1750s a change had set in. Some of the senior brethren were losing interest, and were being replaced by a fresh intake. To this phase, if to any, belongs the reputed membership of Benjamin Franklin. He sounds a surprising person to meet in this setting, but he was more anti-clerical, heavier in his drinking, and laxer in his sexual habits and outlook than American hagiography cares to admit. Dodington’s pamphleteer James Ralph was a former comrade of his and accompanied him on his first trip to England. Later in the life of Dashwood we encounter Franklin on close and admiring terms with him, and staying as his guest at West Wycombe. It was in 1757, however, that Franklin made his second visit to England, which lasted five years; the Dashwood connection could have begun then, and the story of his admission to Medmenham has not been refuted.

Look at all the hedging: “To this phase, if to any”; “reputed membership”; “could have begun”; and the crowning “has not been refuted.”

Of course, accurate history doesn’t rest on repeating statements that haven’t been refuted. It depends on citing evidence for the statements one makes.

I searched Franklin biographies for such evidence. His close friendship with Baron le Despencer, formerly the baronet Sir Francis Dashwood, in the 1770s is well documented by letters, Franklin’s autobiography, even a book they wrote together. Twenty years earlier Dashwood had been a founder of the Medmenham group. But did he make Franklin a member, or invite him to meetings?

The most that Phillips Russell could say in The True Benjamin Franklin (1926) is:

In Lord le Despencer Franklin found the kind of man which he most looked up to. His lordship was elegantly wicked, and so was possessed of a quality which Franklin admired with his whole heart. There can be little doubt that membership in the Hell Fire Club, though perhaps not accepted, would have enticed him irresistibly. We already know how he loved clubs and good company.

In sum, Russell had no evidence Despencer invited Franklin to his Medmenham club and no evidence that Franklin accepted, but wasn’t it fun to imagine?

And then in 1958 an author published a book about the Medmenham Monks with tantalizing hints that Franklin was indeed involved.

TOMORROW: The crucial breakthrough?

Watching April Morning with Experts

Since it’s Patriots’ Day season, I’m looking for appropriate content to share.

Just in time, this year brings us a video analysis of the 1988 television movie April Morning from Penn State Altoona history professor Jared Frederick and Minute Man National Historical Park ranger Jarrad Fuoss.

Howard Fast published April Morning in 1961, one of several novels set in the Revolution that he wrote over his long career. At the time Fast was coming out of the shadow of the H.U.A.C. blacklist, still leftist but having broken with Soviet Communism. Ideas of human rights show up a lot in the novel, though there’s some blur between eighteenth-century community rights and more modern ideas of individual rights.

The American Revolution is often presented as a national coming of age, and many novels about it are coming-of-age stories, April Morning among them. Structurally it’s interesting in that it takes place over about a day and a half, all in Lexington on 18–19 April 1775. Because of the young hero, straightforward narrative and writing style, and all-American backdrop, the novel has often been assigned in high school.

In 1988 the book was adapted for the Hallmark Hall of Fame series. Chad Lowe, then one of many handsome young actors vying for stardom, played the lead. Tommy Lee Jones provided weight as the hero’s father. Jones had won an Emmy for playing Gary Gilmore in 1983; he would make Lonesome Dove the next year and become a movie star with The Fugitive four years later. The supporting cast included Robert Urich and Rip Torn. (Trivia: Earlier in the decade Lowe had starred in a sitcom called Spencer while Urich starred in the detective show Spenser.)

Reel History is a YouTube channel that seeks to elevate the “reaction video” genre by adding informed historical commentary to movies set in the past. Or, as the creators’ website explains:

Jared often joined friends Andrew and Tracey Collins at their household for movie nights. Inevitably, historian Jared would initiate impromptu color commentary on historical films. One evening, Andrew declared, "Why don't we put a camera in front of you and start a YouTube channel?"

This discussion about April Morning is the first of a series within the series called “Reel History with a Ranger.” As a National Park Service veteran, Frederick is inviting people from the agency to analyze movies relevant to their sites. Fuoss brings both a lot of knowledge about the Battle of Lexington and Concord and a lot of experience explaining that history clearly to the public.

The resulting video is about an hour long, and only a little of that is the actual movie. Those scraps serve as pegs for Fuoss’s detailed description and analysis of the real battle, which is the real treat. You can watch the movie later if you still need to.

(Incidentally, this video could make American viewers feel their age. The commentators are named Jared and Jarrad. I can’t remember any classmate named Jared when I grew up, and indeed Social Security records show that it was rare for boys born in the same decade as me. But it was the 58th most popular male name in both the 1980s and 1990s before sharply declining in bell curve fashion. Thus, being in a room with two people named Jared is an experience familiar to one age cohort but not anyone older or younger.)

Naming Names

In my recent sampling of historical fiction set in the Revolutionary period, I see authors having difficulty giving their characters authentic names.

Sometimes they fall into the trap of using given names familiar to us today but not in use then, such as “Suzanne” instead of “Susanna.” But more often writers go the other way and choose names that resonate with so much quaint historicity that we rarely see them today, such as “Norbert” or “Tristram”—but people of Revolutionary times didn’t see those names, either.

The problem is that the most common given names in Revolutionary times are quite familiar. Daniel Scott Smith showed this in a study of Massachusetts’s 1771 tax lists, published in the William & Mary Quarterly in 1994.

Among men, the names most frequently found were: John, Samuel, Joseph, William, Jonathan, Thomas, James, Benjamin, Daniel, and David.

Among women, the top names were: Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, Abigail, Lydia, Ann (or Anne or Anna), Rebecca, Martha, and Ruth.

All of those names are familiar today and have been familiar for a long time, meaning they don’t evoke any particular era. We have to go down the list to #11 for men and #12 for women before finding names we rarely use now: Ebenezer and Mehetabel.

What’s more, common names were more common in 1771—meaning that more of the men and women you met had the same popular given names. About 46% of all taxpaying men had one of those top-ten names listed above.

Among women, there was even less diversity. Slightly over two-thirds of all female taxpayers in Massachusetts shared the ten given names above. If you’ve ever done genealogy in this period, it feels like half of all the women are named Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, or Abigail. Smith’s number-crunching showed that’s actually a slight understatement. The correct figure is 52.8%.

In contrast, in the decades since World War 2, and especially in the decades since 1980, American parents have chosen an increasingly wider range of names, Sam Weinger reported through Medium. Notably, female names are now far more diverse than male names.

In 2014, a FiveThirtyEight article stated, “almost 30 percent of Americans have a given name that appears in the top 100 list.” Back in 1771, 30% of Massachusetts male taxpayers had a given name appearing in the top 5 list, and 27% of women were named either Mary or Elizabeth.

Button Gwinnett as a MacGuffin

Carolyn Wells wrote more than eighty books during her career as one of the most popular American mystery novelists of the first half of the 1900s (as well as another eighty books in other genres).

In Murder in the Bookshop (1936), Wells’s MacGuffin is a small book signed by Button Gwinnett, delegate to the Second Continental Congress from Georgia.

Gwinnett was one of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence. He died less than a year later, on 19 May 1777, leaving behind a much sparser paper trail than his colleagues who didn’t engage in dueling.

In the nineteenth century, there was a craze for collecting historical autographs, which resulted in the mutilation of lots of letters and forms. Wealthy Americans competed to own a signature from each Declaration signer. Gwinnett was the rarest. As of 2016, only fifty-one examples of his signature were known to survive, with only ten of those in private hands.

It would thus make sense for a book signed by Gwinnett to be worth a lot of money, possibly even worth killing for. A character in Murder in the Bookshop describes the object of desire this way:

“It’s a small book, a pamphlet, but in fine condition. It is entitled Taxation Laws of Great Britain and U.S.A. Gwinnett was a student of Government and Politics and this was his book. He had not only autographed it on the fly-leaf but had signed it two other times and, moreover, had made annotations in his own hand on various pages. So you can grasp the importance of the book. Such finds do occur, but very seldom.”

My eyes perked up at that description, but not because I imagined the book as valuable. I knew that there were no ‘taxation laws of the U.S. of A.’ by the time Gwinnett died in 1777 or for many years afterward. The U.S. government didn’t become a legal entity until the adoption of the Articles of Confederation in 1781, and didn’t gain the power to levy taxes until after the new Constitution in 1789.

Thus, there couldn’t have been a copy of Taxation Laws of Great Britain and U.S.A. printed in time for Gwinnett to sign it. Was that a clue? Perhaps the detective would reveal this book was a fraud, and the finger of suspicion would swing toward the book dealer.

But as I read a little further, it became clear that all the characters in Murder in the Bookshop behave absurdly. No one comes across as a genuine, logical person.

Wells knew the world of book-collecting well—she amassed a top-notch collection of Walt Whitman material. She wanted to set a story in that milieu. But by this point in her writing career, she was putting out four mysteries a year, and it seems that she expected readers to value the right twists (secret lovers! second murder! kidnapping! masked genius!) more than logic.

“The Secret of the Faculty Wife” at Contingent

Contingent is an online history magazine. It explains: “Our writers are adjuncts, museum workers, independent scholars—all people who work outside the tenure-track professoriate.” Learn more here.

Recently the Contingent editors commissioned a series of articles about the intersection between history and mystery stories. The article launching that “History & Mystery” series today is “The Secret of the Faculty Wife,” my look at Lillian McCue, who in her early forties created a career as mystery author Lillian de la Torre.

I wrote about De la Torre’s whodunnit stories about Dr. Samuel Johnson earlier this fall. This short article looks at the situation from another angle: the choices of a faculty wife, restricted by sexism and the employment policies of the Depression from fulfilling her own intellectual potential.

That situation has been in my head more since finding an essay my mother wrote around 1970 when she was in a similar situation. Her graduate studies in English literature had stalled out as she had two children, now my brother and I were going off to school, and it wasn’t clear what she should do with her time. As it turned out, Mom earned a doctorate in chemistry and later a nursing license, becoming college faculty in both fields. She finished her work life as a piano technician and knitting consultant.

That’s not the same plight as contingent faculty members, who have too much teaching to do for too little pay and not much hope of advancing up the professorial ladder. But it’s close enough that I thought the story of Lillian McCue’s career would speak to this audience.

I’m looking forward to seeing how other writers approached the “History & Mystery” theme.

“Tea which fell into the shoes”

The 10 Nov 1821 issue of the Boston Daily Advertiser contained the fifth of a series of short essays headlined “Reminiscences.”

It told readers about the destruction of the East India Company tea in Boston harbor in December 1773, an event not yet dubbed the “Boston Tea Party.” The author wrote:

The destruction was effected by the disguised persons, and some young men who volunteered; one of the latter collected the tea which fell into the shoes of himself and companions, and put it in a phial and sealed it up;—which phial is now in his possession,—containing the same tea.

In 1835 an Independence Day orator identified the man who “preserved a vial full” of tea as Thomas Melvill, who had died three years before.

Twenty-one years later a literary chronicler stated that tea was “found in his shoes on returning from the vessel it was sealed up in a vial, although it was intended that not a particle should escape destruction!”

Back in 2018, I tracked that storied sample of tea to its present repository in Revolutionary Spaces’ Old State House museum.

As a historical artifact, that vial had some advantages over the tea reportedly collected on the Dorchester shore and being distributed to historical organizations by the Rev. Dr. Thaddeus Mason Harris before he died in 1842.

First of all, the Melvill leaves had an unbroken provenance leading back to the tea ships. Harris didn’t record who collected the tea in Dorchester or who gave it to him, but Melvill and his descendants presented a complete chain of custody.

Furthermore, Melvill’s tea came from a participant in the destruction of the cargo, not just someone who woke up the next morning and found wet tea leaves on a beach.

Of course, there was the matter of Melvill preserving tea that he was supposed to destroy. But he’d explained that—he “and companions” had brought home this tea inadvertently. That touch of irony made the story even more savory.

Now either lots of other men brought home tea in their shoes the same way, to be secretly preserved by their families until the late 1800s, or this story became an archetype that several other families duplicated.

For example, there’s a strong tradition that John Crane was part of the Tea Party, and he was certainly part of the right crowd. By 1893 the Bostonian Society was in possession of a:

Tea-caddy, with tea found in the pocket and boots of John Crane, one of the Boston Tea Party, when taken injured to his home, Dec. 16, 1773.

An old photograph of that tea-caddy appears above.

By that same year of 1893, the Essex Institute in Salem had received what a young St. Nicholas correspondent named Peggy described as:

two bottles of the tea that was thrown over board at the Boston tea-party,—it was found in the shoes of Lot Cheever after removing his disguise

The name of Lot Cheever is not otherwise linked to the Tea Party. Indeed, the only Lot Cheever I can find was born in Danvers in 1837. (Ezekiel Cheever was captain of the militia patrol that Bostonians appointed to keep the cargo from being landed on November 30.) Maybe Lot Cheever was the donor of this artifact, not the original creator.

The story of tea leaves coming home with a Tea Partier also appears in Robert Lawson’s novel Mr. Revere & I, in which Paul Revere’s mother shakes out his clothing to increase her supply of caffeine. That shows the appeal of this anecdote.

TOMORROW: Competing traditions.

Four Decades of “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector”

I’ve been discussing the historical background behind Lillian de la Torre’s mystery short story, “The Great Seal of England.”

In 1943 De la Torre was in her forties and known around Colorado Springs as Lillian McCue, wife of a Colorado College professor. Then she sold that story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

That launched De la Torre’s career as a writer. She was an Ellery Queen favorite for the next four decades. A couple of years after that first sale, she even visited Hollywood to consult on some movies. Eventually she served a year as president of the Mystery Writers of America.

With her “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” stories, Lillian De la Torre invented a new subgenre of whodunnits. Although Melville Davisson Post had written Uncle Abner mysteries set in the ante-bellum past starting in 1911, De le Torre innovated by basing her “detector” and the characters around him on actual historical figures, and crafting her plots around real events.

De la Torre’s first published book was a fictionalized analysis of what happened to Elizabeth Canning in 1753, called Elizabeth Is Missing. She wrote other books in this vein, such as The Heir of Douglas. Though these were originally published as fiction, De la Torre believed she had identified the correct solutions to those historical enigmas, and they’re now presented as “definitive accounts” of the underlying events. (Other authors would differ.)

For her stories about Dr. Johnson, De la Torre had the advantage of James Boswell’s extensive writings about the man. She produced an entertaining pastiche of Boswell’s voice, including not only his language and details but even dialogue structure.

To her credit, De la Torre also recognized the limitations of that narrative approach, as when Johnson’s other and closer biographer, Hester Thrale Piozzi, makes an appearance. “Boswell did not like Mrs. Thrale,” the author noted in an afterword; “he considered her his rival for ‘that great man.’” (Adam Gopnik wrote about Johnson and Thrale for the New Yorker.)

The stories jump around in time to take advantage of different events in George III’s realm. Some involve figures from the American Revolution, such as waxwork artist and spy Patience Wright and scientist and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Mike Grost noted that De la Torre wrote about thefts as often as murders.

In some ways, De la Torre’s stories show the biases of her own time. Dr. Johnson had a servant and heir named Francis Barber (shown above), who had been freed from slavery in Jamaica. De la Torre brought Barber onto the scene in her first published story, but gave him no more life than a piece of furniture. Not until “The Blackamoor Unchain’d” (1974) did he become a full character, and then only for one tale. These days I’m sure authors would see much more potential in Barber’s own life.

There were four collections of De la Torre’s “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” stories, and the Mysterious Press has reissued them in digital form:

• Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector (1946)
• The Detections of Dr Sam Johnson (1960)
• The Return of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector (1985)
• The Exploits of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector (1987)

As of this writing, they’re on sale at a discounted price on the major ebook platforms.

“The tantalizingly respectable reticence of contemporary chroniclers”

In addition to the theft of the Great Seal of Britain, discussed yesterday, the writer Lillian de la Torre took inspiration from two other details of the life of Baron Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor in 1784.

One was this fact, as De la Torre noted it at the start of her mystery story:

In August of that year, Lord Chancellor Thurlow very graciously intimated to the friends of Dr. [Samuel] Johnson that that learned philosopher might draw against him at need for as much as £600.

James Boswell mentioned that offer of credit in his Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. In an 1831 edition John Wilson Croker discussed it at more length, printing documents and his own acerbic commentary (“It is strange that Sir John Hawkins should have related… The editor cannot guess why Mr. Boswell did not print his own letter…”).

The circumstances were not actually that mysterious. In early 1784 Dr. Johnson, aged seventy-five, had a serious health crisis. His friends wanted him to take a trip to Italy to recover. Money was tight. Boswell and others hoped the government would increase the pension granted to Johnson for his work as a lexicographer and propagandist during the American war.

In July Boswell wrote to Thurlow, asking for that favor. Thurlow responded positively. In a conversation with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Lord Chancellor offered to personally loan Johnson the money, based on a mortgage against his future pension. Thurlow later said he was trying to get the lexicographer money quickly rather than wait through the uncertain pension process.

Dr. Johnson declined the offer when he learned about it. He never set out for Italy. He died on 13 December.

The other detail of Thurlow’s life that De La Torre used involved his household. The Lord Chancellor lived with a woman called “Mrs. Hervey” and had children by her, all illegitimate. This didn’t seem to affect his government career, social standing, or visits from his brother, an Anglican bishop. Thurlow did have to pass on one of his baronies to a nephew.

Because Thurlow’s children weren’t legitimate, it’s hard to find vital information about them. De la Torre wrote:

The tantalizingly respectable reticence of contemporary chroniclers about Thurlow’s irregular household has forced me to invent his daughters, known to me by name alone, out of whole cloth.

Her story’s characters include Catharine, aged eighteen, and Caroline, “not more than fifteen,” while a younger sister is off with her mother at Bath.

Genealogists have since nailed down when those daughters were born:

• Caroline in 1772.
• Catherine in 1776.
• Maria in 1781.

That accords with a picture George Romney painted of the two older girls around 1783, shown above courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

However, it doesn’t accord with De la Torre’s story, set in 1784. Her mystery depends on the two oldest girls being adolescent at the time of the Great Seal theft with Dr. Johnson still alive. Such is the challenge of writing historical fiction with imperfect historical sources.

Had De la Torre but known the actual ages of Thurlow’s daughters, she may never have imagined her debut story “The Great Seal of England” as she did. Or she might have proceeded with the same plot and added a note informing readers about how she’d shifted from strict historical accuracy, as she did in this very story in regard to the last hanging at Tyburn. Such is the freedom of writing historical fiction.

TOMORROW: De la Torre’s books.

Lillian de la Torre and “the ‘detector’ possibilities”

Lillian de la Torre Bueno (1902–1993) grew up in Manhattan reading mystery stories. After teaching in the New York schools for a few years, she earned master’s degrees from two Ivy League universities. At the age of thirty she appears to have put aside her own academic aspirations to marry a fellow graduate student, George McCue.

The McCues moved west to Colorado College, where George became a professor of English. Lillian took on the no-longer-current role of faculty wife. With no children to look after, she helped to found a local choir and joined an amateur theater company. Over time she taught some courses and helped other professors with their research—for example, she worked with Prof. Lewis Knapp on the life of Tobias Smollett, identifying some forged letters.

Around the time she turned forty, Lillian McCue embarked on a writing career that combined her interests in mystery stories and British history. She later told the scholar Douglas G. Greene that one early inspiration was John Dickson Carr’s book The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1931), a nonfiction account using the structure of Carr’s whodunnits. Another impetus was a conversation with one of her husband’s colleagues, Prof. Frank Krutzke, about “the ‘detector’ possibilities of Dr. Sam: Johnson.”

Lillian McCue had evidently noticed the parallel between the classic detective and sidekick/narrator model, as established by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. by James Boswell. Dr. Samuel Johnson was prodigiously smart, given to cutting remarks and paradoxical advice, and full of quirks, both physical and social. Boswell was an admirer, sometimes exasperated but always loyal, with an eye for detail and a strong prose style. (Boswell’s diaries also disclose enough of his own habits, such as womanizing, to make him more than a mere observer.)

McCue used portions of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides to fashion a tale in Boswell’s voice about Johnson detecting and foiling an exotic Scottish murderer. In 1943 she made her first sale to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, using the nom de plume Lillian de la Torre. This was a more successful story about “Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector,” titled “The Great Seal of England.” That story begins:

On the night of March 23, 1784, the Great Seal of England was stolen out of Lord Chancellor Thurlow’s house in Great Ormonde Street, and was never seen again.

And indeed that was an actual mystery of the eighteenth century.

TOMORROW: The fate of the great seal.

Knocking Down the Myths of Agent 355

Her Half of History is Lori Baker’s podcast about notable women in various times. Recently she’s been sharing episodes about women involved in espionage.

I like her take on the Culper Ring and whether those spies included a female agent, source, courier, or cover. You can glean her basic conclusion from the title of that episode: “Agent 355: Washington’s Mostly Mythical Spy.”

The historical record of espionage is always sparse, for obvious reasons. We know that Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge invented a code for his agents that used the number 355 for “lady” and the number 701 for “woman.”

We also know that Abraham Woodhull used the number 355 once, in a letter dated 15 Aug 1779. That dispatch referred to bringing a lady along on a trip into New York because the security was getting stricter.

As Baker says, per her transcript:

This brief mention is 100% of the solid, historical record on Agent 355. It is the only time she is ever mentioned. Everything else is either a speculation or an outright fabrication. And oh wow, does imagination run wild. . . .

Culper…wrote “355,” the code for lady. Much has been made of the fact that he did not write 701, the code for woman. . . . [Using 355] certainly meant she was either the wife or daughter of a gentleman. That is to say, she had some social standing.

Morton Pennypacker and more recently Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger have taken this linguistic nugget of truth and run miles with it. Agent 355 was, according to them a young coquette living in the height of New York society, attending parties with the cream of the British officers. She was also, according to them, a lover of Robert Townsend and later maybe even bore him a child.

Author Alexander Rose calls this an “utterly fantastical and fanciful tale” (Rose, 325), and he is absolutely right. He points out that the letter was written by Woodhull and he says a lady of my acquaintance, not Townsend’s acquaintance (Rose, 325).

Rose then goes on to inform the reader with absolute assurance that the lady in question was Anna Strong. Anna Strong was a Setauket neighbor of Woodhull’s…[who] may have been willing to pretend she was his wife. . . .

This theory seems far more plausible to me than the young New York coquette theory, but at the end of the day Rose does not offer any more proof than the others. Woodhull does not say that this happened. He certainly does not name Anna Strong, and surely she is not the only Long Island resident who could have posed as his wife, if anyone did.

Baker is also skeptical of the family lore about Anna Strong signaling Continental spies in Long Island Sound—and rightfully so, I think. I’ve never been able to figure out the practical logic of that tale, which Pennypacker published a century and half after the war without specifying a source.

Modern American culture thirsts for examples of women active in historical events. In the last century, the extremely sparse documentary tidbits about 355 have been spun out in all sorts of adventures: Agent 355, Turn: Washington’s Spies, The 355, Y: The Last Man. Those stories proudly present themselves as fiction. Most histories of the Culper Ring contain a large amount of fictional speculation as well.

(The picture above appears on Wikipedia’s page for Agent 355, which treats the competing claims too credulously. Its caption says it shows “Agent 355, as depicted in an 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly.” In fact, that magazine article was about Antonia Ford, who gathered information for Confederate commanders in the U.S. Civil War. The original caption, “General [J.E.B.] Stuart’s New Aid,” has been cropped out. Such is our interest in seeing Agent 355, if such a lady ever existed.)

A Dutch-English Graphic Novel about Slavery

I’ve written before about John Gabriel Stedman (1744–1797), a mercenary of British and Dutch parentage who volunteered to be an officer in the campaign to fight Maroons who had escaped from slavery in Surinam.

In 1796 Stedman published a memoir about that experience, which the publisher augmented with horrific illustrations by William Blake and other artists.

Stedman’s diary shows him to have been fairly active in exploiting enslaved people, especially on the sexual side, but also caustic about the institution. He carefully edited the memoir to be more acceptable on both counts to the British reading public at the time. Nonetheless, it became an important document for British abolitionists.

Among the people Stedman encountered as an officer was a recently kidnapped African boy named Quaco, loaned to him as a personal servant. The Dutch author Ineke Mok reconstructed that boy’s life for a graphic novel titled Quaco: My Life in Slavery.

Eric Heuvel drew the art for this comic using the “clear line” style that American readers probably know best from Hergé’s Tintin adventures. But here the adolescent crossing the globe after being enslaved. It feels incongruous to me at first, but Heuvel has reached a young international audience by exploring World War II in similar style.

Quaco: My Life in Slavery was published in Dutch in 2016. Recently the University of Sheffield’s School of Languages and Cultures made a collective student project out of translating the book and its teaching materials into English.

This article from Sheffield offers some sneak peeks of the project, and the book is offered for sale through this website. 

Spreading the Story of Benjamin Lay

Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) was one of the most unusual people in Britain’s early eighteenth-century American colonies.

Lay was only a little over four feet tall and hunchbacked, though fit enough to work as a sailor. He became a vegetarian and lived in caves. He owned hundreds of books, and he published scores of pamphlets, mostly jeremiads about social ills.

Born into an English Quaker family, Lay first encountered slavery on a large scale on Barbados. After that, he became a vocal abolitionist. At the time, the Society of Friends hadn’t yet adopted that position, much less Lay’s unwillingness to compromise on or shut up about it. 

After moving to Pennsylvania in 1731, Lay joined the Abington Friends Meeting, but that didn’t last. In 1737 he had Benjamin Franklin print his pamphlet All Slave Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. As the modern meeting says on its website:

Benjamin Lay was written out of membership at Abington Monthly Meeting on the thirtieth day, eleventh month, 1737 (which by the Quaker calendar, while the Julian calendar was in use, would have been January 30, 1738), because his zealous actions were considered disruptive.

It is now known that at least two of the Friends who led the discernment about writing Benjamin Lay out of membership in the Society of Friends were slave-owners and were likely targeted by Benjamin Lay’s anti-slavery activism. Benjamin Lay was disowned decades before Quakers were disowned for being slave-owners.

Abolitionists such as Dr. Benjamin Rush, Roberts Vaux, and Lydia Maria Child wrote biographies of Lay in the early 1800s. Many featured portraits ultimately derived from a painting, shown above, that Deborah Franklin commissioned from William Williams (1727-1791) as a gift for her husband. But when slavery was no longer a burning political issue, Benjamin Lay became obscure again.

During the Bicentennial, that portrait was spotted at an auction and recognized. It was restored for the National Portrait Gallery. Nonetheless, Lay remained a footnote, occasionally profiled in an article or short entry in a larger book.

In 2010 Alexander Lagos, Joseph Lagos, and Steve Walker made Benjamin Lay a character in their two-volume Sons of Liberty graphic novel, a superhero story set in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania. Frankly, I didn’t think it was a good comic, but an uncompromising abolitionist dwarf mentor fit right into the genre.

Seven years later, Marcus Rediker published the first modern scholarly biography of the man, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. He spoke at the Abington Friends Meeting, part of an effort coordinated with the organization to repudiate the disowning of 1737 and honor Lay for his egalitarianism. The meeting’s website details the results.

Rediker has now collaborated with David Lester and Paul Buhle to produce a graphic biography, Prophet Against Slavery, ensuring the memory of Benjamin Lay will continue to spread.