Editors 19th century
Paul Allen is an American editor, historian, and poet.
He attended Brown University and later moved to Philadelphia, where he was editor of The Port Folio, The Gazette of the United States, and The Federal Republican. Success came to Allen in Baltimore, where he served as editor until his death at the Baltimore Morning Chronicle newspaper. Paul Allen also joined the Delphic Club, and his epic poem Noah (1821) was a success.
Matthew Henry Barker is a British writer, journalist and editor.
Barker is known by his pen name The old Sailor. As a young man he served in the Royal Navy and worked for the East India Company before commanding his own schooner and spending several months in captivity.
From 1825, Barker worked as an editor and author for several periodicals and wrote many fascinating accounts of the sea from his own rich experience. Many of these stories, popular at the time, were illustrated by the famous 19th-century artist George Cruikshank.
Charles Brockden Brown was an American writer, historian, and editor.
Brown took up literary endeavors early in life. In 1798, his first mystical and psychological novel, Wieland, was published. Brown also wrote the novels Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntley (1799), and Arthur Merwin (1799-1800).
Brown's works interweave fiction, history, fantasy, psychology, and liberal politics. Brown is considered the father of the American novel. His American-style Gothic novels pioneered and paved the way for two of the greatest early American writers, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Charles Brown also wrote a great deal of journalism on political, educational, and historical topics.
Solyman Brown was an American dentist, creator of the first U.S. National Dental Society and the first U.S. Dental Journal, as well as a poet and artist.
Brown received his bachelor's, master's, and doctor of medicine degrees from Yale University, and also worked as a minister. He wrote many articles explaining dental principles and regulations and became one of the editors of the American Journal and Library of Dental Sciences.
Essentially, in the 19th century, American dentistry was in a terrible state. And Solyman Brown, through all his activism, contributed to the enlightenment and establishment of dentistry in the United States as a true profession and science.
Brown also wrote poetry, articles and essays, and was constantly published in the periodical press. He gained fame and notoriety as a dental poet with his epic "Dentology, a poem on the diseases of the teeth and their proper remedies," which he wrote in 1833. And many more of his poems were devoted to dental diseases, their prevention and treatment. Soliyman Brown, in addition, was a painter and sculptor, painting portraits and creating furniture in wood.
William Cullen Bryant is an American poet, journalist, and editor-in-chief of the New York Post.
He began his education at Williams College, then studied law and worked as a lawyer, but a very different fate awaited him. In 1825, he moved to New York City and became co-editor of the New York Review. In 1827 he became editor of the New York Evening Post, and in 1829 he became its editor-in-chief and co-owner.
Bryant remained in this position until his death, for 50 years. He made the Post a voice for free trade, workers' rights, free speech, and abolition of the death penalty, and he was a founding member of the Republican Party.
Bryant wrote poetry from his early youth and announced himself by publishing a book of Poems (1821). His main theme was nature, and his best-known poems are "Thanatopsis" and "To a Waterfowl." In later years he devoted much time to translations and was an active patron of art and literature.
Sir James Crichton-Browne was a British and Scottish psychiatrist, neurologist, and MD.
James studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where his interest in psychiatry soon developed. After receiving his MD degree, he worked in hospitals in Derby, Devon and Newcastle. At the age of 26 he was appointed medical superintendent of the Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield and within nine years had transformed the hospital into a leading center for research and treatment.
Crichton-Browne initiated a scientific approach to the brain and its diseases. In 1871 he started the West Riding Asylum Medical Reports, which were published annually for six years. He was a pioneer in combating the common belief at the time that mental asylums could not produce original research and useful science. The persuasive scientist attracted many talented young people to collaborate in his research. Among them were David Ferrier (1843-1928) and Hughlings Jackson, who worked on cerebral localization and epilepsy. In 1878 they together founded what became the famous neurological journal Brain, the first journal devoted to what is now called neurobiology.
Crichton-Browne corresponded extensively with Charles Darwin, providing him with drawings and photographs for his book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Darwin valued his co-author so much that in 1883 he proposed that he be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Crichton-Browne was also active in the development of public health policy regarding mental health. He worked prolifically into old age, writing monographs and autobiographical material, but in recent years he became involved in the controversial science of eugenics.
Joseph Dennie was an American writer, journalist, and major literary figure of the early 19th century.
Dennie graduated from Harvard College, became a lawyer, but became active in writing. In 1801, he founded a periodical called The Port Folio, which became the most prominent literary weekly of its time in America. It was also the first important political and literary journal in the United States.
As founder of the Tuesday Club, Dennie was the center of Philadelphia's aristocratic literary circle in the early 19th century and for a time was the leading literary critic in the country. He ridiculed the simplistic and crude nature of Native Americans and opposed democratic innovations. He also encouraged talented young writers.
Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, born Sarah Josepha Buell, was an American writer, magazine editor, and civic activist.
Sarah Buell received a good home education and married David Hale in 1813, but, finding herself in financial difficulty after her husband's death, she turned to literary work in the 1820s. Her poems were published in local journals and in the collection The Genius of Oblivion (1823). Sarah also wrote several novels during her lifetime.
In 1828, she became editor of the new Boston edition of Ladies' Magazine (from 1834, American Ladies' Magazine). Hale herself wrote much of the wide variety of material for each issue-literary criticism, essays on American life, essays, and poetry, and she supported patriotic and humanitarian organizations, notably the Boston Ladies' Peace Society and the Sailors' Aid Society, which she founded in 1833. She was a lifelong advocate of women's education. During this period she also published Poems for Our Children (1830), containing her most famous work, Mary Had a Little Lamb.
In 1837, in Philadelphia, Hale became editor of Lady's Book, soon to be known as Godey's Lady's Book. During her years as editor, this publication became the most influential and circulating women's magazine published in the country at the time. Hale encouraged American writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other women writers published in the magazine.
Hale's major accomplishment was Woman's Record; or, Sketches of Distinguished Women, published in 1853, 1869, and 1876. For this project, she produced some 36 volumes describing biographies of women, emphasizing their influence in history on social organization and literature.
Sarah Hale is considered one of the main organizers of the Thanksgiving holiday, and she helped shape the worldview of women of her time.
James Hall was an American lawyer, judge, treasurer, and editor.
Hall studied law, fought in the War of 1812, served as a lawyer and circuit judge, newspaper and magazine editor, Illinois state treasurer, and banker in Cincinnati, Ohio. In addition, he was also a historical and fiction writer. In 1828, Hall compiled the first western literary yearbook, Western Souvenir, and edited the Illinois Monthly Magazine. James Hall wrote a travel book, Letters from the West (1828), a novel, The Head of the Harp (1833), and several volumes of short stories.
Hall also contributed to the three-volume History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836-1844). This book includes portraits of the chiefs of more than twenty Indian tribes, which were painted by noted artists of the day, with biographical sketches by Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas L. McKenney.
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, Southern writer and folklorist, abolitionist, and author of Uncle Remus's Tales.
Joel was a very inquisitive and witty child, reading a great deal. From the age of 13 he worked as a typesetter and then as a reporter for several newspapers; in 1876 he became deputy editor at Atlanta Construction, where he worked for 24 years. As a journalist, Harris was an active abolitionist, advocating for black rights and against slavery.
At Atlanta Construction, Harris began publishing his now-famous Uncle Remus stories, using folklore he had heard from black workers on the plantation. These tales made Joel Harris famous and earned him a firm place in the classics of American literature. The general outline of the series of stories was simple: Uncle Remus, a wise and good-natured old black man, tells stories about Brother Rabbit, Brother Fox and other animals to the plantation owner's young son - through his prism of worldview.
Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings was first published in book form in 1880, and others followed. Harris also wrote six children's books set on a Georgia plantation, several novels and novellas.
Bret Harte, born Francis Bret Harte, is an American poet and writer, one of the founders of the Western genre in literature.
From his youth, Bret worked in various professions in California, published a newspaper and a magazine, collaborating for a time with Mark Twain. He wrote several novels and many short stories about the Gold Rush era, of which the best known is the later trilogy "The Steppe Finder", "Susie" and "Clarence", set during the American Civil War.
In 1878 Harte began working at the consulate in Krefeld, Germany, and then in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1885 Harte settled in London and lived there until the end of his days, continuing to write short stories, parodies, and other works of enduring success.
Harte's works about Californian life became popular in Russia, thanks to N.G.Chernyshevsky, who was engaged in their translations from the early 1870s. Russian venerable writers M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and N.S. Leskov spoke very flatteringly of him. And in 1895 in St. Petersburg published a collection of works by Bret Harte in six volumes. Already in the USSR in 1977 the movie "Armed and Very Dangerous" was filmed based on his stories. Alexey Rybnikov's musical "Juno and Avos", the most popular for decades, is based on Bret Harte's ballad "Concepcion de Arguello".
Samuel Kettell was an American writer and editor.
He was an accomplished self-taught linguist and mastered fourteen languages. His humorous publications in the Boston Courier under pseudonyms attracted attention and in 1848 he became the permanent editor-in-chief of this newspaper.
Kettell's major work, however, was Samuel Griswold Goodrich's Samples of American Poetry with Critical and Biographical Notes, which was published in 1829. This comprehensive catalog is the first bibliography of early American poetry, and includes the works of nearly 200 poets before 1829.Kettell provided biographical sketches of each writer, from Cotton Mather to Francis Scott Key, Washington Irving, and Sarah Josepha Hale.
In addition, Kettell published A Personal Narrative of Columbus's First Voyage (1827) and Accounts of the Spanish Inquisition (1828).
Samuel Lorenzo Knapp is an American author and lawyer and politician.
Knapp graduated from Dartmouth College and eventually became a prominent lawyer, holding a Juris Doctor degree. He was a representative in the Massachusetts legislature from 1812 to 1816, and in 1814 joined the American Antiquarian Society.
In 1824 Knapp became editor of the Boston Gazette and also kept the Boston Monthly Journal. In 1826 he founded the National Republican Party, which collapsed two years later, and returned to practicing law in New York City. Knapp published various biographical studies as well as many public discourses on politics and society.
In 1818 his fiction Ali Bey (Excerpts from a Journal of Travels in North America, consisting of descriptions of Boston and its environs) was published. It is a sort of diary of a fictional Ottoman spy who travels in America disguised as a Frenchman.
Ardaseer Framjee Moos was a 19th-century Indian politician.
Ardaseer Framjee Moos was educated and later taught at Elphinstone Institute, and was the secretary of the Bombay Native Common Library from 1860 for more than two decades. An active participant in Parsi reform movements and Mumbai political life, he became treasurer of the Bombay Association in 1876. Moos prepared and published A Journal of Travels in India (1871), the illustrations in which are various views of the principal buildings of Lucknow, Agra, Dehli, and Calcutta. He also published dictionaries of English and Gujarati.
May Morris was an English artisan, embroidery designer, jeweller, socialist, and editor. She was the younger daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and designer William Morris and his wife and artists' model, Jane Morris (née Burden).
John Neal is an American writer, editor, and community activist.
Neal served for many years as editor of the Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette periodicals, publishing critical essays and always striving to promote American literature. While living in England in the 1820s, he wrote a long series of articles published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, essentially telling the story of American literature, which helped change the perception of American art in Britain.
Back in America, he used his popularity and influence to support young writers such as Poe and Whittier. In particular, it was Neale who put Edgar Allan Poe's very name in print and the very first words of encouragement to his work.
Neal's early recognition of Poe's genius was crucial to the budding talented writer's career. John Neel also wrote long adventure novels with complex plots, of which "Rachel Dyer" is considered the best, and "Bag Otter, Chief of the Oneida" and "David Whicher" are his best stories.
John Neal was also a very active social and political activist. In his literary work and lectures, he constantly addressed issues such as feminism and women's rights, slavery, the rights of free black Americans and American Indians, temperance, sports, and many others.
Robert Dale Owen was a British-born American social reformer and political activist, newspaper editor and writer.
The son of English reformer Robert Owen, Robert Dale Owen was imbued with socialist philosophy in the Scottish town of New Lanark, the elder Owen's model industrial community. In 1825, father and son emigrated to the United States, where they founded a successful socialist community in New Harmony, Indiana.
Robert Dale Owen edited the New Harmony Gazette, worked with reformer Fannie Wright, visited Europe, then edited the Free Enquirer newspaper. This newspaper was the center of radical free thought in New York City: it opposed evangelical religion, advocated more liberal divorce laws, a more equal distribution of wealth, and widespread industrial education.
Owen served three terms in the Indiana legislature, where he advocated public funds for public schools, and two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he introduced a bill to establish the Smithsonian Institution. For several years in the 1850s, Owen represented the United States as a diplomat in Naples and Italy. Upon his return in 1858, he became an outspoken supporter of emancipation. And at the outbreak of the American Civil War, in a letter to President Lincoln, he called for an end to slavery, a letter that Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase said greatly influenced the president.
In 1863, Owen chaired a committee to study the plight of the freedmen and wrote the book The Wrongness of Slavery. The town of Dale, Indiana, is named in Owen's honor.
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer and poet, editor and critic who created a form of classical detective fiction in an atmosphere of mystery and horror.
In prose, Allan Poe wrote mostly short stories. His novella The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) initiated the modern detective story, and his poem The Raven (1845) is among the most famous in American literature. Romanticism of the first third of the 19th century was shrouded in a fog of Satanism and the occult, which obviously influenced the work of Poe, whose personality was subtle, dualistic, and multifaceted.
Most of Poe's best works are permeated with horror and sorrow, but in life the poet was a pleasant conversationalist with a great sense of humor and a talented orator. All this, coupled with the genius of the writer-narrator provided him with a prominent place among the world-famous writers. Edgar Allan Poe revolutionized the horror genre. He was one of the first to bring deep, visceral, psychological horror into literature. In his stories, the true monster often turned out to be the capacity for evil that lurks within every human being.
Joseph Ritson was a British antiquarian, critic, writer and editor.
He had a law degree, but preferred to study literary works. Ritson scrupulously searched for factual and other errors in authors to then publish them in his critical materials.
However, Joseph Ritson became famous as an editor of collections of ballads about Robin Hood and old folk literature. In their design they far surpassed anything that had previously appeared in the literary world, distinguished by authorial erudition and accuracy. Ritson also published collections of children's poems.
Anne Royall, née Newport, was an American writer, newspaper editor and traveler, one of the first women journalists in the United States.
After the death of her husband William Royall in 1813, Anne was left destitute, but she did not despair and completely changed her life. She was about 50 years old when she set out to travel the country and describe what she saw. She visited Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Springfield, Hartford, Worcester, Boston, and New Haven. In each city, she asked respected citizens for interviews and subscriptions to her future books. She made detailed notes on each town's population, industry, physical description, local transportation, regional dialects, fashions, and the character of its inhabitants.
In all, Anne Royall wrote ten volumes of travel books. She was 57 years old when she published under a pseudonym her first book, The Traveler: Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States (1826), which provides a unique look at American life in the early nineteenth century. His first novel, The Tennessean, was published in 1827, followed by several others.
At the age of 62, in her home in Washington, D.C., Royall began publishing her own newspaper, Paul Pry (1831-1836) and then The Huntress (1836-1854). She exposed bribery and corruption and made many powerful enemies. Nevertheless, it is known that the intrepid journalist during her life met and talked with every man who occupied the presidential chair, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln.
François-Louis Schmied was a French painter, illustrator, wood engraver, printmaker, editor and Art Deco binder.
François-Louis studied wood engraving at the École des Arts industriels in Geneva and painting at the École des Beaux-Arts de Genève. A Swiss, Schmied settled and naturalized in France in 1895. In 1910, he was commissioned to engrave and print Paul Jouve's illustrations for Rudyard Kipling's The Life of the Jungle, which was not published until 1919. For this book, now considered a masterpiece, the master produced about 90 color illustrations. Thanks to the success of this publication, Schmied was able to expand his activity and hire a group of craftsmen to execute his most famous and innovative works.
François-Louis Schmied is considered one of the greatest Art Deco artists and became particularly famous for his beautiful rare books for bibliophiles. Schmied's unique books were very expensive to produce, which required a lot of time and effort, and were always printed in very limited editions, from 20 to 200 copies. During the Great Depression, Schmied's expensive projects could not withstand the competition: the master was forced to sell off almost all his assets and close his workshop and store, and around 1932 he left for Morocco, where he died.
François-Louis Schmied's works are not only aesthetically pleasing, but also express his desire to combine art and literature. The talented artist conveyed with passion and precision the essence of the Art Deco style contemporary to him. Today, Schmied's works, reissued as fine art reproductions, not only convey the aesthetics and precision inherent in each of his originals, but also add a new dimension to them. His son, Theo Schmied, took over François-Louis Schmied's workshop in 1924, reviving its former glory and revitalizing it over time.
Frederic Shoberl or Frederick Schoberl was a British journalist, editor, translator, writer and illustrator.
Along with publisher Henry Colburn, Schoberl was the creator and co-owner of the New Monthly Magazine, which began publication on February 1, 1814. He acted as editor for a time, publishing original articles and reviews. Frederick Schoberl worked closely with publisher Rudolf Ackerman (1764-1834) for a long time, editing his Vault of Art from March 1809 to December 1828. He also kept Ackerman's English yearbook, Nezabudka, from 1822 to 1834, and worked on many other publications.
In addition to his editorial work, Frederick Schoberl produced excellent illustrations, for example for the book The World in Miniature: Hindustan, which was published in London by Ackerman in the 1820s.
Julia Ward Howe is an American writer and poet, philosopher, abolitionist, and feminist.
Born into a well-to-do family and privately educated, Julia Ward married educator Samuel Gridley Howe and settled in Boston. She published her first collection of poems, Passionate Flowers, in 1854.Julia's early poems were praised by Hawthorne, Whittier, and Longfellow for their intellectual intensity. For a time Howe published the abolitionist newspaper Commonwealth with her husband. And in February 1862, The Atlantic Monthly published her poem "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which became the semi-official Civil War song of the Union Army, and Howe gained fame.
After the war, Howe began fighting for women's rights. In 1868, she was elected the first president of the New England Women's Suffrage Association. In 1868, she helped found the New England Woman's Club and became its president in 1871, the same year she became the first president of the American branch of the International Women's Peace Association. She was later active in the International Federation of Women's Clubs. Howe continued to write throughout her life, publishing travel books, poems, collections of essays, and biographies.
In 1870, she co-founded Woman's Journal and then served as its editor for 20 years. She traveled extensively until her advanced old age. In 1908, she became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
George Watterston is an American politician, author and journalist.
He graduated from the Charlotte Hall Military Academy with a law degree. But, apparently, he soon became so disappointed in the profession that he began to write poetry and prose, in which he portrayed lawyers in a very unsightly form. His first novel "The Lawyer, or The Man as he ought not to be" Watterston published in 1808. This poignant novel is ostensibly a confession of a corrupt lawyer and seducer in the spirit of Stephen Burroughs' Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs. Watterston's ironic take on the didactic novel straddles the line between Charles Brockden Brown's gothic thrillers and dark comedy. He also wrote the novel Glencarne or the Disappointments of Youth (1810), the play Child of Sentiment (1809), and the poem Scenes of Youth (1813), among others.
After the end of the War of 1812, President James Madison appointed Watterston as Librarian of Congress, the third person to hold the position and the first to be solely responsible for it. He held the position from 1815 to 1829.
In 1813, Watterston became editor of the Washington City Gazette. And after his dismissal from Congress, he became editor of the National Journal. He continued a productive literary and journalistic career until his death.
John Greenleaf Whittier was an American poet, essayist, and member of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Whittier devoted 30 years of his life to the fight against slavery. Only after the Civil War, already at a mature age, he was finally able to engage in his favorite pastime - poetry. Past his fascination with Burns, Whittier became an eloquent advocate of justice, tolerance, and liberal humanism. He has been called "America's finest religious poet" for the high spiritual and moral values he extolled, and many of his poems are still sung as church hymns.
Whittier also wrote about the region's past, about life in New England before industrialization. In late nineteenth-century America, Whittier was second only to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in popularity. His most famous poem, "Bound by Snow," was published in 1866. Whittier was also a longtime editor of the New England Weekly Review.
Samuel Woodworth was an American writer and poet, playwright and journalist.
After completing his apprenticeship as a printer, Woodworth traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, and worked for the Connecticut Herald newspaper. During the War of 1812, he edited a weekly newspaper called The War and others. He also wrote several successful operettas.
Samuel Woodworth was a popular poet in the 19th century and is remembered today as the author of the sentimental poem "The Old Oak Bucket".