Text: Bette Statsky Weidman, “Chapter Six,” Charles Frederick Briggs, dissertation, 1968 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 171:]

Although his letters to Lowell and Page bravely masked the pain Briggs felt at the loss of the Broadway Journal, he recovered slowly from his defeat. Late 1845 and 1846 was a time of retrenchment. Thrust out of the magazine which had represented a major investment of hope, money and effort, he wryly mocked himself as “no Prospero”; no opportunity seemed to present itself for regaining his lost eminence. He turned from one venture to another, looking for a focus for his energies.

Briggs's mood was expressed clearly in a long verse satire composed toward the end of 1845. In “A Caution to Sea Travellers,” he told of a Wall Street defaulter hounded to suicide by the harsh disapproval of his fellow steamer passengers. Among the puns and forced rhymes in Briggs's clumsy hexameters are four serious lines that reflected his personal suffering at the hands of the abolitionists:

Now that his reserve could so the Journal no good, Briggs was free to develop a closer connection with the abolitionists; moreover, he needed to prove actively that he was worthy of Lowell's respect. In December, 1845, he promised Sidney Howard Gay, editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, that he would review new books for the abolitionist paper. “It strikes me that ‘new books’ contain pegs enough to hang abolition sermons on,” he wrote, “and I would like to give an occasional stab at the enemy in this way, if you will permit me.”(2) Briggs demonstrated his catholicity, however, by also renewing his earlier connection with the Knickerbocker; even so, the pieces he printed in Clark's magazine during 1846 show that he belonged more and more with the literary and political radicals of his day.

Remembering the success of his urban adventure, “A Ride in an Omnibus,” Briggs projected a series called “City Articles” for the Knickerbocker. He explained in the first sketch that he intended to describe only products of city life, like alderman, mud, gas and taverns. The joking aside, Briggs maintained that “the world” itself, that authority to which all social questions are referred, that sphere in which wealth and power increase themselves to the neglect of unsaleable human values, is a creation [page 173:] of the prosperous, bustling city. Briggs planned to shape his sketches around landmarks like the “Grapes” Tavern, subject of the first piece, to demonstrate the moral failures that emerge in sharp relief among city scenes.

“City Articles I” appeared in the Knickerbocker for May, 1846, and simply introduced the series. That same month, Poe's first “literati” sketches, with the ungenerous portrait of Briggs, appeared in Godey's. ‘City Articles II” was evidently written while Briggs was still smarting from Poe's harsh words about him, for it contained a long diatribe against those that the world honors for “scrutinizing dunghills ... in pursuit of bugs,” while “we who venture into crypts and mansards in search of new varieties of our own species must be sneered at for our ... vulgar tastes.” Briggs defended the social themes of his own work, over the ratiocinative tales of Poe, by concluding: “For our own individual tastes we prefer the lowest order of men to the highest order of insects, and should never choose a bug for the hero of our story, even though it were a gold-bug.”(3)

The article, which went on to discuss the state of the theater, maintained the bitter tone of its opening remarks about Poe. Briggs wrote that because American [page 174:] theatergoers are improperly educated, they are unable to respond imaginatively to the presentation of nature on stage. Among those who patronized the Chatham theater, landmark of this sketch, were “heroic apprentices, the villains of the counter and the wits of the oyster cellar, Yankees, negroes, pedlars.” Ill-equipped to judge the merits of serious stage plays, they were presented only with shoddy sentiment. Because no one elevated their expectations, taught them to demand true representations of nature, the stage had become a frivolity and art lost its social function. For this failure, Briggs blamed the clergy, who, he claimed, profited by supporting war and slavery, but denounced the theater, though it is nowhere forbidden in the Bible. “They will serve as chaplains to an arsenal,” he wrote contemptuously, “but they cannot be hired to ask a blessing upon the theaters,” which served as cheap entertainment for politically helpless classes. In the pit of the Chatham, he envisioned young working men and women exposed to a truer, more compelling image of life, one that could help them to interpret their own experience. This Briggs regarded as a “missionary” activity deserving of the name. He asked the Knickerbocker's readers, “Are these youths of less account than Turcomans? Or is it essential to wear a turban to excite the sympathies of [page 175:] benevolent Christians?” Briggs's questioning grew too sharp for the prosperous, conventional readers of the Knickerbocker, when he asked them to search themselves: “Is everything pure and spotless in those costly pews?” It is not surprising, then, to find that Briggs's “City Articles” end abruptly. Their thrust indicates how his broad sympathies led him away from trifling subjects, even to the point of attacking the household gods of his host.

The Knickerbocker was not the only Whig magazine to receive work from Briggs during these months. In the American Whig Review for June, 1846, he published “Terrestrial Pleasures,” an article based on Swedenborg's revelation that there are four hundred and seventy-eight varieties of pleasure in the lower heavens. Briggs, who had read Swedenborg for comfort after the death of his infant son in 1844, respectfully, gently and almost yearningly made merry with the visionary's numerical exactitude; he confined himself, characteristically, to enumerating those pleasures that “can only be experienced in our bodily existence, which are of the earth, earthy.”(4) He had already described himself to Lowell as a “clod of earth,” a man who preferred to see the world as it is, not through “golden cobwebs” of romance. “Terrestrial Pleasures” distinguished the true pleasures of this earth from the false. [page 176:] As an example, he contrasted the city supper party, designed for show, to the truly pleasurable veal feast, a tradition of the “queer old town in which he was born.” The annual dinner, given by the wealthy families of Nantucket, was an opportunity for the display of finery, Briggs agreed, but it was not purchasable finery his fellow Islanders displayed; instead, they showed fine bodily proportions and generous, simple manners. As in the Knickerbocker “Gimcrack” written six years earlier, Briggs returned to memories of Nantucket when he sought to represent true value. If he chose to live on the fringe of the metropolis, it was in order to fulfill the vocation made explicit in “City Articles”: he hoped to modify the dehumanizing “way of the world” by being its exacting critic. Briggs had only periodic need to return to Nantucket, for he carried the island about with him, summoning memories of it at will. Last of the terrestrial pleasures, Briggs named “suffering the sweet delusion of faith” in Swedenborg's revelation that infants in heaven dwell in a “paradisaical garden.” That he closed the sketch with a wish to reach that imaginary heaven where his dead boy dwelt is typical of Briggs's weary mood in 1846.

Knowing Briggs's articulate distaste for proselytizing and his characterization of faith as a delusion, it is surprising to find him represented in an anthology called The Missionary Memorial, A Literary and Religious Souvenir, [page 177:] published during 1846. A religious gift book, its proceeds were meant to support the “crusade for the recovery of fallen humanity.” But the Memorial was more a literary than a religious work; it contained poems and sketches by writers of all persuasions — Lowell, Simms, Lydia Sigourney, Anna Mowatt, Rufus Griswold, and Poe, among others. Evidently there was room even for one able to find only hypocrisy and love of show among the organized churches. Briggs was represented by an autobiographical article called “The Winds.”

Dry branches, bleak hills, — this landscape held no terror for Briggs, but a severe beauty. His love for it explains his immediate response to the newly-published Wuthering Heights, with its wild terrain and desolate grandeur. Soft curves and green valleys held an appeal for Briggs's eye, but rocky earth, pine forests stunted by ceaseless salt spray, and roaring elemental nature drew the deeper response of kinship. [page 178:]

“The Winds” has the resonance of genuine autobiography, like another article Briggs wrote for the Knickerbocker in April of that same self-doubting year; in “Playing on One String,” he mused on his own position during the difficult year before his long-awaited child was born. Arguing that all men have an appointed use in the world, Briggs again rejected the role of reformer; he spoke to himself as much as to his readers when he wrote “One art is enough for one life. By doing one thing with constancy and affection, we inevitably do it well.... Let the author stick to his books ... the true way to discharge one's public duty is to see that one thing is well done. ‘Act well your part’ is superfluous advice; you will be sure to act your part well if it is your part. All the danger lies in attempting to act a part which belongs to another.”(6) In his magazine and newspaper work of 1846, Briggs sought to locate his role. The critic, William Alfred Jones, defined it for him in an article on American prose writers that appeared in the U. S. Democratic Review two months after “Playing on One String”; pointing with pride to a group of story-tellers engaged in writing on American themes, Jones commented, “[Briggs] is quite at home in a satirical tale, with his ingenuity, tact, keen observation and dry humor.”(7) Jones made it clear that,, as a working writer and professional [page 179:] editor, it was Briggs's role to put his unique honesty to the service of the fledgling American literature.

Briggs's steadiest employer during 1846 was the new editor of the New York Mirror, Hiram Fuller. Fuller, who had purchased the newspaper from its former owners, N.P. Willis and General Morris, had Whig sympathies, but supported the pro-war policy of Democratic President Polk that Briggs despised. However, he allowed his new contributor a good measure of freedom, in return for as many sketches and book reviews as Briggs could produce. He particularly urged Briggs to make the May 26 Mirror reply to Poe, and showed himself hospitable to any anti-Poe, anti-Margaret Fuller, pro-Lowell or Melville material Briggs had to offer. Briggs got along well personally with Fuller in spite of the fact that the latter pursued a typical, if less than moral, course in reprinting the pirated Dombey and Son as Dickens published it serially in England. Fuller, in his turn, allowed Briggs increasing political latitude in return for the publication of articles that would boost circulation. This is not to suggest that there was a formal understanding between them; it was, rather, a case of two men of the world accommodating themselves to each other, for the sake of their own best interests. Fuller was eager to increase the influence of his paper by so spicy a means as portraits of literati, and [page 180:] he recognized Briggs's gift for caricature. In the hospitable soil of the Mirror, this talent soon germinated into a work even cleverer and more sustained than The Adventures of Harry Franco.

Appropriately on July 4, 1846, an outspoken American named Ferdinand Mendes Pinto made his debut on the foreign correspondence pages of the Mirror. Under the heading “Pen and Ink Sketches,” Mr. Pinto, a self-styled celebrity, issued the first of his letters from London to his American compatriots. Briggs used as a pseudonym the name of a sixteenth-century Portuguese adventurer that Congreve made the proverbial epithet for liar.(8) He conceived the idea of a fictional foreign correspondence partly as a witty response to the letters of Margaret Fuller, then appearing in Horace Greeley's Tribune, and partly as a satire on Pencillings By the Way, the European letters of his old antagonist, Nathaniel Parker Willis.(9) He achieved both purposes in creating Pinto, an inveterately self-assured Yankee whose personality was modelled on both genteel, pretentious Willis and self-centered, oblivious Margaret Fuller.

Fictional correspondence has a long history as a vehicle for satire; in America, Freneau, Franklin and Irving were early practitioners. Moreover, Americans, [page 181:] fascinated by European manners and morals, demanded a constant diet of real correspondence from abroad. For example, in addition to its regular correspondents, and concurrently with Briggs's fictional letters, the Mirror copied a series of foreign letters from Dickens, who was travelling on the continent. As a glance at most of this material will show, there were endless possibilities for satire in the mode of communication itself. Briggs, who had a sharp eye for the ridiculous, must have noticed that some correspondents had motes in their eyes, and that their breathlessly imparted “news,” delivered by steamers that took weeks to cross the Atlantic, was often hopelessly outdated.

As early as the Broadway Journal of March 8, 1845, Briggs had presented letters purporting to be from a visiting Englishman in New York to his Liverpool cousin; in these letters New York architecture, and business and political practices were freely satirized. Briggs would soon give himself a fictional prototype in the character of Mr. Wilton (he appeared in Tom Pepper, well after the Pinto letters had started), who, as editor of the Morning Luminary, always wrote his own foreign letters. Later, during his editorship of Holden's. Briggs occasionally returned to this mode of satire.

When he came to prepare the Pinto letters, Briggs took less from fictional models available to him than he did [page 182:] from real correspondence. Briggs's Yankee substitutes dandyism for homespun and affects a great distaste for cornmeal. Pinto is a Yankee only in the sense that he is American; he has none of the characteristics of Seba Smith's down east Yankee, Jack Downing, or even Haliburton's Sam Slick in England, with those characters’ down-to-earth remedies and legendary abilities. Instead, Pinto resembles a different kind of native American, more peculiarly a product of the 1830's and 40's, when mercantile prosperity and urban growth turned some Americans away from the equalizing values of democracy and toward an attraction for genteel manners and the trappings of aristocracy. These were the years when nouveau riche merchants had their carriages decorated with heraldic emblems. The writer who represented these attitudes most clearly during Briggs's years in Nev; York was Nathaniel Parker Willis.

Willis, who was an editor of the New York Mirror with George P. Morris through 1845 (and thus the forerunner and rival of Fuller), had long venerated the English nobility. He was a celebrity-interviewer, a man who was titillated by his nearness to the worldly great; in the 1854 preface to a collection of his earlier letters from abroad, he wrote:

Of course, no viewpoint was less attractive than this to Briggs, for whom plain, unadorned Nantucketers were the wholesome standard of virtue. As early as 1843, in his correspondence with Lowell, Briggs had sneered at Willis’ idol, Count D’Orsay, Lady Blessington's son-in-law, who prescribed the proper aristocratic behavior of his day. Those characters in Briggs's novels, like Franco's father, who subordinate the understanding of man's true nature to cultivation of elegance and propriety, are shown to be ineffective. Ladies like Mrs. Tuck (The Haunted Merchant). who concern themselves with breeding and family, are malevolent. Although Willis’ vivacious letters from abroad were highly popular, Briggs found him a “shiny nothing,” a man without any substance.

In Pinto's distaste for cornmeal, he is what Briggs termed “Willisy”; he turns away from his Yankee background and aligns himself with the English aristocracy. His scorn for such common fare as cornmeal also has a deeper meaning. At the same time as Pinto was breakfasting and dining, a la Willis, with wealthy, talented and noble Britons, a starving English and Irish peasantry had forced repeal of the Corn Laws, that ancient ban on importing foreign grains [page 184:] into England. To the great distaste of the aristocracy, who were aware of no scarcities, the mother country became dependent on her former colony for sustenance. Pinto keeps hearing snatches of talk about famine in his travels, but when he innocently mentions potatoes in the hearing of Willis’ adored Lady Blessington, he is scourged for his grossness. The brilliance of Briggs's satire lay in his making Willis-Pinto an unwilling exponent of Briggs's old theme of the unjust distribution of wealth; he showed his versatility by adapting Willis’ subject and mannerisms to demonstrate the theme he had treated so differently in Working a Passage (hard hands and soft hands) and in Harry Franco (the experience of destitution and hunger in the midst of a prosperous city).

However, Pinto is not all Willis. He is jealous of his country's good name, defends its “institutions” zealously, and is quick to take offense at a slur. He seeks to put himself forward, while Willis was content to efface himself, quietly enjoying the glow radiated by countesses and dowagers. Pinto's self-importance is a characteristic Briggs borrowed from Margaret Fuller. The Tribune's critic had already raised Briggs's ire with her volume, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and her unfavorable comparison of Lowell's poetry to Cornelius Mathews’. Pinto, as he travels around Europe, often encounters his countrywoman; even when they do not meet, his letters burlesque Miss Fuller's [page 185:] communications. In his first letter, describing Pinto's encounter with “the celebrated Sir Lytton Edward Bulwer,” Briggs mocked Margaret Fuller's egotistical account of her meeting with George Sand. Just as George Sand had reportedly confessed great admiration for Margaret Fuller, Bulwer tells Pinto “he had read Pinto's letters in the Atlas, and esteemed it the most fortunate moment of his life when he first became acquainted with him.”(11) After presenting a great deal of trivial gossip about the men and women assembled at Bulwer's soiree, Pinto reports that he was approached by a gentleman: “giving my shoulder a most terrific slap, he said ‘O, my boy, how are you?’ Looking up, I discovered that it was the celebrated William Wordsworth. He wore a light blue — But the portman calls, and I must close.” It is so obvious to Pinto that he himself is the admired center of attraction that he fails to perceive any incongruity in presenting a detailed account of Sam Boger's turquoise ring, while cutting off an interview with Wordsworth. The measure of Briggs's success in imitating the tone of some foreign correspondence is the fact that some readers of Hiram Fuller's newspaper did not get the joke. Throughout the appearance of the Pinto letters, the newspaper's editor printed remarks of subscribers who were only half sure of the satire. The next Pinto letter, appearing a month and a half later, [page 186:] continued to string them along.(12)

The second Pinto letter made Briggs's purpose clear; “I find that your Mirror answers exactly the purpose which Burns sighed for,” the pompous correspondent wrote, “namely, it affords an opportunity for men to see themselves as others see them.”

Briggs had originally intended Pinto to be an Englishman; his conception of the character developed as he wrote. Prom the beginning, however, he was sure that the Mirror would only reflect what had already passed through the distorting glass of Pinto's personality. In ironic contradiction of his elaborate statement of purpose, Pinto himself is the one who is relentlessly reflected; he becomes the embodiment of American self-deception, hypocrisy and conceit. He is Briggs's real target. [page 187:]

In the third letter, Briggs continued his portrayal of the literati of England and America. Pinto presents his English writer-friends, who are curious to try the American dish, with a hominy and corn meal feast. The meal is prepared at the cottage of Mrs. S. C. Hall, at which are gathered man men and women. Symbolically, the American delicacies prove a thick, inedible mess, like, Briggs slyly implies, the hostess's ostentatiously exhibited and gorgeously bound copy of Mathews’ Puffer Hopkins.(14) Briggs also used the corn meal party for a slap at Poe; like the “City Article II,” it appeared in late summer, 1846. One of the guests as Mrs. Hall's cottage was the poet, R. H. Horne, whose Orion Poe had lavishly praised; Pinto reports, with ill-concealed glee, that Horne dismissed his American admirer as “a very good critic for a lady's magazine.”

By the fourth letter, Pinto, a guest at Brierly Hall, the estate of an English aristocrat, is denying the very nature of his correspondence: “I hate gossipers, and the recklessness of some of the letter-writers who have come on here from America, has very nearly closed the doors of every desirable house in Great Britain to American authors.”(15) Out of the goodness of his superior heart, he reports placing at Margaret Fuller's disposal letters of introduction to his aristocratic friends, “that she might not suffer from the indiscretions of her countrymen.” He then proceeds to [page 188:] gossip about Macaulay's fees for writing reviews in the Edinburgh Quarterly. Pinto makes one truly self-revealing remark in this letter; he admits that he has “never been infected with the lues Boswellianae, and was but an indifferent hand at retailing other people's sayings.” Briggs's artistry lies in having Pinto report his own responses and interpretations; he completely misunderstands half the remarks made to him.

One can easily picture Pinto at a banquet given by London bankers for the editors of the Times. Seated between the editor of the Examiner and Baron Rothschild, as usual the cynosure of all eyes, he reports that he greatly impressed both men. He falls into a discussion with the editor on slavery, annexation, and the Mexican War; when the Englishman claims that his country is profitting from America's follies (“You are spending a hundred millions to open a market for British manufactures in Mexico and California. You are educating the half civilized inhabitants of those countries, that they may read English books and newspapers.”), Pinto becomes indignant and mounts a tirade against the productions of English writers. Characteristically, however, he undercuts his praise of American writers by identifying them in terms of their slavish imitation of British models (“our American Scott and our American George Paul Rainsford James.”).

Although he poses as a democrat, Pinto is a pretentious snob. However, more than snobbery is indicated by his fifth letter, written ostensibly from the Red Lion Inn, [page 189:] Tamworth.(16) Here Pinto makes his first full-blown confession of American citizenship. Lady Peel, wife of the Prime Minister, at whose home he is a guest, had hung a famous Rubens in his room as a compliment. Pinto finds that it compares unfavorably to Page's paintings, and pales into insignificance beside the portrait of General Jackson and the Declaration of Independence, which Lady Peel had also thoughtfully provided. In the absence of his host, Pinto casually converses with another guest at the Prime Minister's residence:

Next day, after forcing himself to consume the inevitable hominy and slapjacks offered to an American visitor, Pinto is formally introduced to his new friend, who is none other than Alexander Dumas. Aghast at Peel's presumption in seating the descendent of an African slave at the same table with an American, Pinto sweeps out of the room. He denies [page 190:] Lady Peel's plea that he return, pronouncing his love for his country's “glorious institutions.” To the Mirror's readers, he reports, “I wished by my conduct to convince Europe and Sir Robert. Peel that our National feelings are not to be tampered with.”

In this letter, Briggs went beyond distaste for Willis’ stylishness or Margaret Fuller's overbearing qualities; he attacked the underlying confusion between theory and practice in American society. This is the importance of the Pinto correspondence. Without the harshness or didacticism of the abolitionists, or of Cooper's or Dickens’ attacks on American society, Briggs was unsparing in his revelation of those who disguise their hypocrisy behind a flag, and flaunt themselves as democrats. Pinto is more than the simple figure of burlesque that he seems to be when he indignantly stalks into the midst of a Scottish bog, after spread-eagling in support of slavery; if he does, at times, carry his devotion to American independence beyond the bounds of common courtesy, as when he threatens to bite the Pope's toe, he is at least loyal to his own vision. While we laugh at him, while we despise his self-deception, we sense pathos beneath his bravado.

Briggs treated three major topics in the Pinto letters: the Anglo-American literary scene; the preoccupations of self-interested European aristocrats; and American social institutions. But his greatest coup was in making Pinto a [page 191:] defender of his country's “peculiar institution.” This is the kind of discreet abolitionism Briggs would have liked Lowell to produce for the Broadway Journal. The method is to make the defender of slavery ridiculous by having him go so far that Southerners themselves would find him absurd. It is hard to imagine William Gilmore Simms insulting the British Prime Minister for seating him with so distinguished a man as Dumas, but it is the logical extension of his position.

Briggs's plan was to touch sharply on a subject, but not dwell upon it. He never destroyed the balance of his satire by making its target explicit. In his next letter, the sixth, Pinto takes up an invitation to the Duke of Argyle's castle, and Dumas dismissed, is discussing the literary scene. At Inverary, the party is joined by some unexpected guests — Margaret Fuller and her friends. Pinto is embarrassed by their gawking, and begs the Duke not to judge all Americans by some sightseers, reminding him that “all is not gold that glitters.”

Pinto is torn between mortification at Margaret Fuller's manner and pique at the Duke's casual dismissal of Americans. Miss Fuller, however, with sublime indifference, stares appreciatively at handsome highland servants, and launches into a criticism of Christopher North's work with that eminent critic himself. Without realizing that the Scotsman finds her ridiculous, Miss Fuller remarks to “crusty Christopher”:

The two “great” critics soon discover that they are in agreement primarily in their denigration of the American poet, Lowell. Pinto, unable to resist breaking into their conversation, reminds them that they are not the only critics who depreciate Lowell. “No,” he exclaimed, “there is one other person in the world who has spoken ill of that true poet; namely, the author of Puffer Hopkins, and a precious trio you are.” Thus Briggs linked Kit North,(18) who had been guilty of harshly underrating Keats, with Margaret Fuller and Cornelius Mathews, who repudiated Lowell. The colloquy breaks up in a wonderfully comic scene:

Although the letter is a compliment to Lowell, it is undoubtedly the one that the poet had in mind when he suggested to Briggs that, in publishing a collection of Pinto letters, he delete some of the more uncomplimentary references to Margaret Fuller.

Pinto's seventh letter describes his precipitous retreat from Inverary, caused by a set of circumstances similar to those that had occasioned his withdrawal from Tamworth. Informed that among his guests the Duke had received one of the Douglasses from America, Pinto believes the newcomer is a relative of the Duke; in keeping with his inveterate snobbery, he is determined to know his fellow American:

Making Pinto a defender of “exclusiveness and gentility,” [page 194:] Briggs turned the American democrat into a more vehement proponent of aristocracy than the British nobles. When Pinto marches out of Inverary in the middle of a dark, foggy night, he finds himself, appropriately, up to his middle in a bog. The spirit of Independence, which he invokes to aid him, leaves him still enveloped in mist and bewildered, but strong in self-righteousness.

By the eighth letter of the series, Briggs had hit his stride. Revealing himself to be an intimate friend of Robert Browning (there's no one he doesn’t know, excepting mulattoes), Pinto describes the poet's recent wedding, at which he was a guest. The inevitable Margaret Fuller also attended the wedding, where she made a speech employing her catchword “aloofishness”; Wordsworth also came, and whispered confidentially to Pinto that “he hoped Bob and Lizzy understood each other better than the world understood them.” The poets’ courtship is described wittily, and the slender wedding fare detailed with regret; the letter ends with Pinto's description of a simple incident:

Briggs's description of the miserable weather and the “mouldy old chapel” set a tome for the wedding not unlike that drizzling November of Melville's; Pinto wrote, “It was one of those dismal dripping November mornings, when all London is hid in a dense yellow fog, and sentries are posted to guard every convenient place for hanging one's self.” Margaret Fuller's oblivious transformation of a courtesy into an insult, completes the disaster for which yellow fog, literary jealousies, the haggish appearance of the bride, and a seed-cake and water repast have been ample preparation. Bancroft vows he’ll resign, and the company disperses with very un-wedding-like feelings. In this letter, like the one concerning Margaret Fuller and Kit North, Briggs showed how well he could invent an incident, yet make it perfectly typical of the men and women he is caricaturing.

In his ninth letter, Pinto decides to abandon the aristocracy and the literati for a walking tour among the English peasantry. His conversation with a wagoner, whose knowledge of his sovereign is limited to the fact that he sleeps in the Queen's Arms, soon drives Pinto back to his lordly friends.(21) Taking refuge from such coarseness in the pseudo-Gothic mansion of the Marquis of Westminister, he [page 196:] meets G. P. R. James, the author of “that prolific novel which has appeared under so many names.” Briggs designed the situation to mock William Gilmore Simms, whose views on American humor had long annoyed him.(22) Deliberately mixing up the titles of James's and Simms's work, Pinto reports that James complained that his American imitator copies him so faithfully that he even takes up the “trick of James's confounded amanuensis, who is a shocking mannerist.”(23) Moreover, Briggs included a sideswipe at Simms's New York allies, the Young Americans, Duyckinck and Mathews, whose magazine, Yankee Doodle, was then newly issued. When Yankee Doodle is criticized by James, Pinto, always ready with a face-saving gesture, pretends to be choking, “to hide his mortification and blushes at the sight of that dreadful affair.”

Pinto reports that no American literary productions have been well received by transatlantic critics; some English men of letters have been offended by personal slights, while others, like John Lockhart, simply despise everything American. Margaret fuller has done her part to alienate the British literati in the manner of the brash American tourists so well hated a century later, she negotiates to but Shakespeare's house and have it transported to Central Park. Loyal [page 197:] Shakespearians have resolved to follow the house across the sea in protest, but Pinto is sure that when they discover that its new owner intends to live in it, they will change their minds.(24)

Having described the obnoxious manners of his fellow American, Pinto hastens to assure his editor that he himself is a sought-after guest at the greatest homes in England, and only dances with unmarried daughters of earls. This particular detail was intended to remind knowledgeable readers of N. P. Willis, who took pride in the rank of his dancing partners. In addition, Willis always scrupulously reported the dress of his English hosts and hostesses. Pinto does not neglect this duty either, and ingenuously writes of the elaborate wardrobe of the Countess of Beggartown and the expensive lace nightcaps of the Duke of Starveborough; he even notes Victoria's generosity in sending 2500 pounds to the famine-wracked Irish, considering her responsibility to large numbers of impecunious German relatives!

In a succeeding letter, the thirteenth, Pinto elaborates this theme of the frivolous preoccupations of British high society. The ladies of Mayfair are all in tears, and Pinto is at a loss to discover the reason. “Has the cholera broken out among the lapdogs?” he asks himself? Or are they worried about the income from their Irish estates? But there are degrees of self-involvement that elude even the [page 198:] blunt Pinto; the jaded countesses are weeping because of the departure for America of Barnum's Tom Thumb!

After some other adventures, Pinto finds his self-esteem so injured by English acceptance of the escaped slave, Frederick Douglass,(25) that he flees to France in order to recover. In his first letter from Paris, dated May, 1847, he describes his final encounter on British soil with Douglass.(26) Predictably, Pinto tried to bribe the escaped slave into silence about American domestic institutions by promising him a good place as a valet.

But even in France, Pinto is harassed by insults to his country. There he cannot patronize the most fashionable place of amusement, the Theatre de Montpensier, because it was built by that descendent of a slave, Dumas. Briggs illustrates the quality of Pinto's morals by having him approvingly quote Captain Slidell Mackenzie of the ship Somers. Thus he links Mackenzie's violation of human and civil rights in the famous naval hangings without trial, with Pinto's hideous chastisement of Douglass. Pinto concludes his first outrageous letter from Paris by complaining of the variant spellings given his famous name by admiring Branch literati. His repetition of the name — Pinteau, Pintot, Pinteaux, Pinteux — is designed to remind the reader of the pun on which Briggs has been capitalizing; the Portuguese adventurer's very name identifies him as a liar: “Fernao, mentis? Minto!” [page 199:]

Pinto's adventures in Paris leave him just as discomfited as his London experiences did. His moral standards are offended by the extremes to which the impecunious French aristocrats go to acquire American fortunes. Pinto tells of a French association which furnishes impoverished noblemen with appropriate wardrobes and jewelry, and sends them to America to woo eligible heiresses. The brotherhood of French counts is systematic enough to “keep a register of all marriageable fortunes in three American cities,” and assigns its agent to a likely victim. Half of the fortune gained through the marriage and all of the furnished clothes and jewelry must be returned to the association by the successful suitor. The regard for titles exhibited by Americans has made their business particularly successful — especially since the group guards against love entering into the calculations by insuring that all of its Casanovas fall in love before leaving Paris. At the time of Pinto's description of the group, a particularly thrifty count was wooing one of three daughters of a rich tailor: “It is supposed that if he should be successful in that family, the other sisters might be brought over to Paris and taken by some of the members of the association here, which would save the expense of two outfits.” French regard for marriage as commodity convinces Pinto of their moral turpitude, eager as they are to honor him. He is [page 200:] driven to extremes of self-aggrandizement, and devotes the rest of his sixteenth letter to describing his clever retorts to the literati.(27)

The summer of 1847 went by without any further letters from the Mirror's special correspondent. When the letters resumed again in September, Hiram Fuller appended a note suggesting that several of Mr. Pinto's missives had never arrived in his New York office. He attributed this to censorship by a conservative European post-office; of course, he remarked, no American censor would detain them for their liberal views. Indeed they would not! Briggs, who had suffered editorial censorship, most notably in his piece on the Paixham affair, used the editorial rile to give his letters greater believability as well as to double their witty capital.

The September letter reveals that once again Pinto had been driven from the field by his sensitivity to criticism of his country's “Peculiar institution.”(28) In Paris, he could no longer endure the toleration of Dumas; after sending a rebuke to the Tuileries, Pinto, like his prototypical Yankee peddler, heads over the hills. This time his destination is Rome; armed with a letter to the Pope and a fierce determination not to abase himself by kissing his Holiness's toe, Pinto vanquishes a bandit in the Appenines, and arrives in Rome. He describes his [page 201:] encounter with the Pope:

Pinto goes on to read the Pope a lecture on nationalism in the arts; he dismisses the Vatican's art collection in favor of paintings produced in his own “green forest home.”

A month later Briggs published Pinto's second letter from Rome, in which he describes his dinner with Pius; in this letter, the last of Pinto's that can be uncovered in the incomplete files of the Mirror's two editions, the correspondence reaches a hilarious crescendo.(29) Briggs combines all of his themes, beginning with the insensitivity of the well-off for the poor. He accomplishes this in Pinto's expression of moral indignation at the roguery [page 202:] of a corrupt old Italian who impersonates saints for American painters. The Italian tells the scandalized Pinto, “How can I afford to be honest, when I get only ten cents an hour for sitting as a saint. If I got as good pay as the Padres do for acting the saint, I could afford to be as good as they are, and that would be nothing to boast of, Signor. I think I am a very good saint for the pay.”

Pinto throws up his hands at such corruption, and proceeds to his dinner with Pope Pius. There, faced with a repast of hard-boiled eggs and water, he tactlessly mentions that in his own country, “under our glorious institutions, freedom of speech and conscience were enjoyed by every member of the community, and there a man might be virtuously great without being in danger of eating poison with his food.” The Pope takes up the challenge, gently mentioning the destruction of a convent in Boston. Pinto blushes scarlet, but confesses that his motto, “right or wrong, my country,” does not allow him to admit the Pope's point. Moreover, he privately confesses that he himself sympathized with the convent burners. Pinto's rejoinder, that the Pope ought to give his people more freedom, brings forth Pius's assertion that his people are not yet ready for self-government. Pinto responds with the classic argument of the abolitionists: “Prepare a man for freedom by keeping him in bondage! Well, that is decidedly original ... , For my part, Pius, I think a man is prepared for freedom [page 203:] the moment that he has the capacity to desire it.” The Pope, in surprise, brings up the small matter of three million American slaves, forcing Pinto to mumble some patriotic poetry to bolster his determination. Pius, of course, reminds Pinto of his earlier argument when the American contends that the lazy, ignorant slaves are unprepared for freedom. Once more Pinto retreats from the debate; concluding that the Pope's mind has been poisoned by English abolitionists, he bids him a “haughty farewell, determined never again to darken the doors of such a humbug.” Pinto's anti-Catholicism is more gently mocked than his spread-eagle Americanism; Briggs himself had a disrelish for the authoritarian aspects of Catholicism, as well as for those of any other human institution. However, the Pope emerges from their debates with more success than does Pinto; he may share some of the American's views, but at least he refrains from cloaking them in democratic rhetoric.

While topical comedy dates more rapidly than any other literary form, most of the Pinto letters are fresh, amusing, and accessible to a modern reader with a minimal understanding of their background. Briggs had at last found his medium. Relieved of the necessity of stringing endless adventures into a tedious plot, he was also freed from the cliches of conventional hero and heroine, and the spectre of Dickens’ success. He was able to display his artistic tact and sense of pace in a series of episodes in which [page 204:] character, theme and plot are illuminated simultaneously. If his earlier novels lost some of their effectiveness by seeming contrived, the only contrivance in the Pinto letters, is the donee; Pinto's personality determines his adventures in an inescapable way. His aggressive attitudes toward European society are followed by a pattern of retreat to provincial “patriotism.” The issue is always the same, and has little to do with Willis’ social gossip or Margaret Fuller's literary and political reports. Pinto leaves London, Paris, and finally Rome, because of his strained loyalty to his nation's “peculiar institution.” Although his letters are filled with amusing satire of the literati and accurate observation of the inequalities of wealth, their primary effect, when read as a group, is as satirical comment on the irony of a so-called democrat defending aristocratic pretentions and the institution of slavery. Briggs regarded the Pinto letters with only temporary pleasure at his audacity, but Lowell saw their appeal for the abolitionists at once. “Some of them,” he wrote, “particularly those about Fred. Douglass and the one about Dumas, are too good to be lost.”(30) Lowell urged Brig :s to allow him to edit a volume of Pinto letters, emphasizing their witty anti-slavery elements, and leaving out more extreme references to Margaret Fuller, who was admired by Bostonians. Lowell correctly felt that such a volume would boost the cause of abolition. [page 205:]

Briggs particularly needed an interceder among the abolitionists in 1847; his relationship with the group underwent its first crisis since the demise of the Broadway Journal, Briggs had shown his eagerness to affiliate himself with Lowell's circle by reviewing new books regularly for the Anti-Slavery Standard; he often smoked cigars and chatted cordially with its editor, Sydney Howard Gay. With Elizabeth Neall Gay, the editor's wife, he was also on the friendliest terms; he sent Mrs. Gay a copy of his novel, The Trippings of Tom Pepper, advised Gay's sister on the quality of her verses, and consoled the family in time of loss.(31)

In the early summer of 1847, Briggs reviewed a volume called The Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, by the English author, William Howitt.(32) The Homes, handsomely designed as a gift book, infuriated Briggs. Howitt, like Ferdinand Pinto, made it his business to enter homes of poets in order to make capital out of their private affairs. Briggs's review began gently enough, with the admission that gossip about literati is always interesting, but its tone soon changed:

Further, he accused Howitt of opportunism; the author had abused Robert Southey for praising George IV, but never said a word of reproach to Christopher North (John Wilson), “the most base and brutal of all the servile pack who whined and licked the dust before that worthless monarch.” Evidently, Briggs remarked, Howitt appreciated the fact that Southey was a dead reviewer, while Kit North still wielded power in Blackwood's. As Briggs wrote, he seemed to become steadily angrier; when he reached Howitt's chapter on Swift, he castigated him bitterly:

In addition to other inconsistencies Briggs found in the work, he appended to his review the matter of William and Mary Howitt's treatment of Frederick Saunders, editor of the English paper, the People's Journal, to which the Howitts had contributed. Saunders had been driven to publicize his dealings with the Howitts in order to muster public opinion against their attempt to take control of his magazine. Briggs, sympathetic to the young editor, whose [page 207:] experience he compared to his own on the Broadway Journal. concluded his review by writing, “If Mr. Saunders did not, like Chatterton, commit suicide, it was not for lack of suicidal annoyances from Mr. and Mrs. Howitt.”

The review of Homes and Haunts brought the wrath of the abolitionist establishment down on Briggs's head. William and Mary Howitt were English Quakers, abolitionists, and good friends of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Deeply aggrieved, they complained angrily to the Bostonians that so harsh a review appeared in an abolitionist organ. Garrison and Phillips, in turn, expressed their extreme displeasure to Gay, who as editor of the Standard, was their colleague in New York. In a letter of September, 1847, to Gay, Briggs wrote regretfully of having occasioned the editor any embarrassment, remarking bitterly, “if the Howitt’ s [sic] should engage in slave dealings or anything of the sort, it would be in bad taste to say anything about it.”(33)

The matter did not simply drop there, since Garrison, who did not know Briggs and found him expendable, sought to mollify the Howitts by publicly imputing “personal malignity” to Briggs. Throughout the early months of 1848, Briggs continued to write to Gay about the matter; he requested an apology of Garrison, “or he will live to repent it, unless he slips his wind very suddenly.”(34) Moreover, Briggs had [page 208:] discovered that the partiality of Garrison and Phillips for the Howitts rested on favors that the latter performed: “As Garrison and Phillips appear to love gifts and biographies more than truth and justice, I do not despair of buying a reprieve from their hard words,” he wrote. A month later he confessed to Gay that he had once agreed that “Bostonians are the salt of the earth”; it was for this reason that he so deeply resented their “scurvy treatment” of him.(35)

The affair even reached the ears of Rufus Griswold, the chronicler of prose writers, who wrote an inquiry to Mrs. Howitt, Mary Howitt, aware of Griswold's power as a maker of reputations, sent her version of the story to the New Yorker. She claimed that the article by Briggs, whom she did not know, cost her sleepless nights and tears, that she had never expected an attack from her allies in the abolitionist movement. Moreover, she turned Briggs's honest, hard-hitting review into a matter of sordid conspiracy. Never having wronged Briggs, she could not conceive of his “wronging” her husband, and concluded that the “animus of that article proceeds from this country [England] — from the malicious bad people in the People's Journal, who are doing all they can to ruin us entirely, as the same parties have ruined many another.”(36) She went on to accuse a man [page 209:] named Dix, “a most unfortunate drunkard and thief,” of conspiracy with Saunders, and presumably Briggs, against her. After repeating accusations of Dix's criminality, she claimed that the affair was a “long story,” — as, indeed, it had become — and breaks off the subject, merely repeating that Briggs had no motive for his “attack.” It is no wonder that Briggs was angered by Garrison's special pleading; if the abolitionists could not accept honest and direct criticism, which dealt concretely and specifically with a written work, then they were as corrupt as those whose morals they castigated. The incident has further interest in its reflection of the crude and petty jealousies among the literati, jealousies that could even span the Atlantic.

Finally it fell to Lowell, who had been softened by Briggs's loss of the Broadway Journal, to put the matter in perspective. “For the very reason that G[arrison] has done an injustice to you, I would not have you do one to him, because I love you.”(37) Others helped to mend Briggs's fences with the abolitionists. Gay appealed to Richard D. Webb, who wrote, in turn, to Maria Weston Chapman:

It is certain that Gay or Webb, in attempting to soothe the abolitionists’ hierarchy, made Briggs seem more penitent that he really was. Surely, if he had seen the letter Webb wrote to Mrs. Chapman, he would have been infuriated by the truckling that was necessary to redeem his reputation.

As early as may, 1847, Briggs knew of the Saunders affair and was capable of being roused to anger by the mention of Mrs. Howitt's name. When Bayard Taylor called her “one of the sweetest and best minds” of the day, Briggs replied in the New York Mirror that she was “thoroughly base-minded and malignant.”(39) He aired the whole story of the Howitts’ attempt to control Saunders’ People's Journal, their extortion of repayment out of proportion to their earlier investment in the magazine, and their violation of a legal agreement with Saunders. Briggs drew some general conclusions from the fracas:

In the first part of this statement, Briggs raised a question that has always divided men of letters, most recently when the Bollingen Foundation awarded its prize to Ezra Pound. In allying himself with the viewpoint of those who, a century later, would have deprived Pound of the prize, Briggs involved himself in the distasteful matter of prescribing moral values, a position he himself derided in his Broadway Journal story, “A Commission of Lunacy.” He is, however, consistent with his frequently expressed scorn for the “art for art's sake” viewpoint. Briggs never considered paintings merely as design, or novels solely as harmonious arrangements of words. He always demanded truth to nature; though these terms were unexamined, and his philosophy was blurred by his failure to define them clearly, Briggs still called, in the Mirror statement, for only what was eminently fair; a public hearing of all the facts.

His connection of the Howitts with the injury done him by Poe, now exactly a year old, supports the impression that the Howitt affair, like the “literati of New York” incident, affected him in a deeply personal way. The whole [page 212:] matter reinforced Briggs's natural tendency to avoid allying himself with group of any kind. He expressed it this way to Lowell:

If the years 1846 and 1847 were ones of conflict and some bitter experience, they also brought two of the greatest satisfactions of Briggs's life. He was the recipient of a gift from Lowell that must have brought him a full measure of delight. Lowell, whom Briggs had repeatedly attempted to school in the tact of satire, produced A Fable for Critics, and after his friend had helped in its revision, made him a gift of the copyright, on December 31, 1847. “I wish you to understand,” Lowell wrote, “that 1 make you a New Year's gift, not of the [page 213:] manuscript, but of the thing itself. I wish you to get it printed (if you think the sale will warrant it) for your own benefit .... I don’t make you a pecuniary present, though I trust you would not hesitate to accept one of me if you needed it ... but I give you something which I have made myself and made on purpose for you.”(41)

Throughout late 1847 and early 1848, the friends were involved in making corrections and additions, overseeing proofs, and readying the volume for George Putnam's press. When the Fable finally appeared, in October 1848, it was well received, and soon went into a second edition, which carried a dedication to Briggs. If the royalties from the poem never materialized to the degree that Briggs could fulfill his dream of dividing them into three parts (one for Lowell, one for Page), the work itself, especially its witty mockery of Margaret Fuller and Cornelius Mathews, and its disavowal of reformers’ “isms,” was extremely gratifying to him. Especially after the major dispute concerning the Broadway Journal, and the minor friction about Page's place of residence, it was important to Briggs to know that the friendship he valued so highly was more secure than ever.

Even more fulfilling than the affirmation of Lowell's friendship was the birth of a daughter; after eleven years of marriage, Mrs. Briggs gave birth to Charlotte on December 20, 1847. The baby girl was an endless source of pleasure [page 214:] to her father, as this letter expressed:

Briggs's enjoyment and appreciation of children is evident throughout his correspondence; he wrote Page in Boston, during the early 1840's, that he missed romping with the artist's children, and he never overlooked an opportunity to send a gift to Blanche, and later Mabel Lowell. In the midst of an active literary life, Briggs closed his New Year's letter of December 31, 1848, to Lowell, with another tribute to Charlotte. It indicated that she fully redeemed her father's earlier loss:

With the long postponed fulfillment of his marriage, Briggs's morale seemed to receive a great boost. Unlike the aimlessness of early 1846, his life during the months just preceding Charlotte's birth were filled with work; in addition to the continuing success of the Pinto letters, he began to serialize a fourth novel, and seemed to have a [page 215:] hand in an endless number of publications as different from each other as the pro-Mexican War Mirror and the anti-annexation Anti-Slavery Standard. His letters of 1847 repeat that he is “so busily engaged at the moment that he cannot afford the time to write.”

He continued to interest himself in the American Art-Union, and particularly in the work of Page, read voluminously in periodical literature, and took time to forward the careers of younger writers. At the end of 1847, in preparation for Charlotte's birth, he left Staten Island for a rural section of Brooklyn:

The letters to Lowell are full of references to articles he had written, most of them published anonymously in the numerous magazines and reviews opened to Briggs. Among the recoverable and notable pieces of work Briggs did during this period were his notes to plans and drawings of [page 216:] the architect, William H. Ranlett, Called The Architect, A Series of Original Designs, the papers came out periodically during 1847-48, and were published in a volume in 1849.(45) Briggs told Lowell that he wrote the Architect papers only “for hire,” but his action in sending copies to Lowell, Duyckinck and Griswold, suggests that he took some pride in the work. While Ranlett, a respected architect, confined himself to drawing homes of varying pretensions and costs, Briggs started from the specific design to write essays that explore the relationship of men to their habitations. Briggs's interest in architecture dared back to the Knickerbocker “Gimcracks” of 1839; he had always taken every opportunity to mock poor imitations, designs in which form fails to follow function. In The Architect, one of his best essays is entitled “Cottages and Living Cottagely.” With an implied reference to the recent demise of Brook Farm, he wrote:

Briggs's devotion to simple cottage living doubtless had its origin in his early Nantucket home, to which his writing also recurred during 1847. Among his many contributions to the New York Mirror during 1846-1850 (he wrote, in an editorial capacity, for the daily Evening Mirror as well as for the paper's weekly edition), were two letters from Nantucket. Headed “Editorial Correspondence,” they described Briggs's return to Nantucket for a visit. He reflected, after sea-splashes had turned him into a “crustaceous animal,” or, as the skipper of his Vessel put it, “a pillow of salt,” that “The difference between New York and Nankin is not so great as between New York and New Bedford. In twelve hours I have gone to the antipodes.”(47) The major contrast is that Cape Codders do not prey on each other, but shape their living from the elements. In his second letter, Briggs concluded that his place of birth, “Taken altogether, in its origin, progress, prosperity; its sterility, wealth, intelligence, sand bars and surf ... is quite the most remarkable place in the world. Tadmor was a wonder, and Baalbac a puzzle, but Nantucket is a miracle.”(48) The honest, humane inhabitants had created their wealth through resourcefulness, daring and native wit. It is appropriate that in the year of his greatest success and fulfillment, Briggs should pay tribute to the [page 218:] “spot of earth” that was his point of origin; his periodic return to Nantucket, and his avowed admiration for his birthplace contrasted with the attitude of so many rootless “adopted” New Yorkers:

During 1847, Briggs defended two works by another of Nantucket's admirers, in the pages of the Mirror. He called the style of Melville's Typee “brilliant and captivating,” and supported its critique of missionaries. Briggs admitted that Typee and its companion volume, Omoo, were superior to all his nautical reading.(49) These were his first remarks on a writer whose work he would review and encourage in later years.

A careful reader can often discover Briggs's work in the Mirror as well as other publications of the period. He demonstrated a consistency of subject and metaphor that usually render him, however unsigned and pseudonymed, recognizable to the critic. The sketches of [page 219:] auctioneers in the Mirror can be identified as his,(50) as well as the descriptions of newspaper row,(51) and the remarks in favor of an anti-shirt-collar league. He probably wrote pro-copyright material and a good many reviews. In addition, he reported to Lowell that he had been asked to burlesque Dickens’ Christmas Carol for a Sunday magazine, and had turned out a tale for the Medalion with which he had been pleased.(52) In Godey's Lady's Book for February, 1847, his sketch, “Pictorial Passages from the Life of Theophilus Smudge,” appeared.

In March, 1847, Briggs responded to a letter from Rufus Griswold, the self-appointed historian. of American literary reputations; Griswold, in sending Briggs a copy of his Prose Writers of America, recognized his growing eminence in New York letters. Briggs politely offered to review the volume for “two or three papers” in which he wrote regularly, but remarked: “I shall be prevented the pleasure of saying anything ill-natured about it, as people would suspect me of being influenced by spite because my name is not included.”(53) He continued, in the ingenuous [page 220:] style he had mastered in Harry Franco, to state that he would have been astonished to find his name among the prose writers. The reader detects the bite in Briggs's becoming modesty; he offered to add two or three volumes of his own to Griswold's extensive collection of American books. Moreover, he suggested that Griswold made a serious mistake in omitting “prominent newspaper authors” from his collection. He justified his own activity in the newspaper world, from his earliest reviews in the New World to his current Mirror pieces, by noting that newspapers are the major reading material of Americans, and newspaper authors, the “real writers of the country who are at least the exponents of national thought if they are not directors of it.” The letter must have left Griswold with the sense of having received a courteous, if chilling, rebuke. The literary historian was evidently impressed, for in August, 1847, he suggested, as if to compensate for his earlier omission, making Briggs the subject of one of his Broadway Sketches.

It is no wonder that Briggs, in the long New Year's letter of December 31, 1848, a letter filled with literary opinions and news, reported wearily to Lowell that the previous months had been overfilled with employment. Although he characteristically depreciated the results, much of his energy during the preceding year had been devoted to the writing of his fourth novel. In this work, Briggs combined the cleverest features of Harry Franco and the Pinto letters; moreover, he brought his novel-writing career to an end in a burst of notoriety.

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