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

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Spurred by the reception of the Pinto letters, Briggs turned his reawakened creativity to the production of a new novel. In February, 1847, The Trippings of Tom Pepper began to appear serially in the New York Mirror, in columns adjoining the phenomenally popular Dombey and Son. It soon began to rival Dickens’ novel in the favor of New Yorkers, and was billed as a major attraction in the advertising of the daily Mirror and its weekly supplement. What kind of book was Briggs capable of writing eight years after the publication of Harry Franco?

In Tom Pepper, Briggs returned to the framework of his first novel. This time his young hero is not symbolically orphaned by his father's ineptitude, but is literally fatherless because of his illegitimate birth; his mother's remorse causes her early death, leaving Tom as alone and exempt from responsibility as an abandoned cub. For a while, he leads a carefree life on his native Cape Cod, but soon a longing to know if a world exists beyond his sandy beach compels him to conceal himself aboard a New York-bound packet, drifting in Buzzard's Bay. On shipboard, Tom falls under the influence of a kind merchant, Mr. Bassett, who hopes to educate “one soul to a life of truth and purity.” Bassett sees Tom as a perfect, [page 222:] unspoiled creature, and enjoins him to strict truth-telling drubbing his pursuit of a place in urban America. In return, the merchant promises his aid in searching for Tom's father.

However, as the result of Tom's inexpedient practice of honesty, he meets with harsh receptions from potential friends whose prosperity depends on self-interest or self-delusion. In his efforts to accommodate his commitment to honesty to the realities of social intercourse, Tom entangles himself in such deceptions that his name, like Pinto's, ironically becomes a synonym for liar.

Tom's search for his identity is not limited, as is Harry Franco's, to pursuit of a fortune and a wife, but is structured by his attempt to locate an erring father. For this reason, the book reminded some of its readers of Captain Marryatt's highly popular novel, Japhet in Search of a Father. Japhet, abandoned as an infant, devotes his youth to an impassioned search for his father; the quest leads him from poor but resourceful gypsies to prosperous Quakers, and ends, finally, among highly-placed English aristocrats. Although Briggs's plot does suggest similarity to Marryatt's novel, the comparison does not remain valid on the thematic level. Japhet's discovery of his father does not provide him with the solution to a moral predicament; it merely provides an adventure story with the happy ending anticipated from the start. For Tom, however, the discovery of his father symbolically resolves the novel's central issue of whether [page 223:] honesty can survive in urban America. The homely, plainspoken boarding house keeper, Mrs. Swayne, provides Briggs's answer; when Tom tells her of his promise to live by the truth, she replies, “Well, Master Thomas, such principles as them won’t do for this world, I am sure.”

Tom is finally relieved of the necessity of providing for “the way of the world,” by the discovery that he is the son of a wealthy, aristocratic English naval officer. His father's wealth and position enable the boy to preserve his honesty by withdrawing from active participation in the competitive American business world. Tom redeems his father's neglect by marrying a simple, poor, unpretentious girl, like his own mother, and retires to a country seat. When Harry Franco sought his place in American society, he found that he could retain integrity only when his inheritance of accidentally acquired wealth enabled him to leave the political and mercantile arena. Learning the same lesson, Tom Pepper finds that commitment to virtue is a sure method of courting worldly failure:

At this point, Briggs's “autobiographical fiction” touches the quick of its author's life. It is clear that his novels, especially Tom Pepper, attempt to express and thereby make bearable, the perplexity of his own self-knowledge and the source of his bitterness. Briggs knew himself as able, honest and humane, but whenever he tried to express his individual vision, as in the Broadway Journal, his attempt met with failure and ignominy. As he wrote to Lowell in the heat of the 1845 debate over the Journal's character: “I have been keeping faithful watch in the dark, and because you have not heard the repeat of my rifle, you think that I have been asleep .... It is very plain that to be heard in this world, a man must blow his own trumpet.”(2) Or, in other words, a man must make himself part of a power-based political or social group, so that he nay escape the fate of the “invisible man.” Briggs, who hung between the Whigs, the Democrats and the abolitionists, unwilling to “give up to a party what was meant for mankind,” and without the powerful protection of money, was misinterpreted, villified, and mostly ignored! When Mr. Bassett inquires of Tom, near the end of his educative adventures, what he requires to live honestly, the boy, far more acute than Harry Franco, replies “Money, money! I can do nothing without money. No one will believe the word of a pauper; there is an impression, I find, that truth must have a property basis.”(3) [page 225:] Like Harry Franco, then, if unlike hie creator, Tom Pepper is rescued from the dirty realities of earning a living and a reputation in America by an infusion of wealth that he did nothing to create.

The plot of Tom Pepper is even more rambling and disconnected than that of Harry Franco; in fact, the novel's appearance in serial form and the frequent disruption of publication as the Mirror and its supplement changed editorial hands, distorted its shape as a unified piece of fiction. When Briggs published the first volume at the end of 1847, the story broke off in the middle; the subsequent volume did not appear until three years later. Although the resolution of the novel is of major importance in understanding Briggs's work, the order of events that led to it is not. Briggs seems to have improvised the episodes under the pressure of serialization, and there is no discernible meaning in their arrangement. What is important ate the characters and incidents as they relate to the author's thematic interests.

Tom Pepper himself is an innocent and impressionable boy; he has been tutored in the arts of survival by nature, whose bounty is remarkable even on the barren New England seashore. The loss of his mother and Her family leaves him without a conventional home, but Tom knows how to live on berries and sea creatures. A shoeless and thoughtless boy, unencumbered by possessions, he does not feel lost or forgotten because birds, squirrels, and ground moles acknowledge [page 226:] his existence. Tom feels only contempt for genteel ladies who shudder at his irregular birth; he symbolizes this feeling by insisting on the use of his unpretentious name:

At the novel's start, then, the accent falls on being called. by the right name. “Tom Pepper” is given to the hero only provisionally; his behavior under that name will determine whether he is worthy of finding his father and his true patronymic.

Tom's independence and his pride are dealt blow after blow in the metropolis; he finds life in the city deracinating. As he flees from those his truth-telling offends and seeks his father, as he dons and removes each disguise, he discovers that the experience of urban poverty is a different matter from picking berries on Cape Cod:

It is this bedrock recognition that gives force to Tom's necessity to determine who he is; in the sea-side community of his youth, even a solitary walk caused a stir among the wild creatures; his footfall among dry leaves asserted his presence there, but the city swallows identity. Tom stands alone in the world, “without name or connection, like Adam when he woke into being.” In order to support his contention that the possession of money is the key to power in the city, Briggs introduces the character of Old Gil, note-shaver, usurer, church elder, and father of a large family of daughters. Gil, whose guiding principle is “never give something for nothing,” profits at the expense of those in extreme need. He and the respectable banker, Barton, who conspire in extortion, represent the corruption of the New [page 228:] York business world.

However, if Briggs had only given us caricatures of bankers and moneylenders in Tom Pepper, the novel would have remained only a more skillful rehash of Harry Franco. The book's first episode, for example, marks no great technical nor thematic advance over the Spliteer incident in Harry Franco. Tom, concealed on the New-York-bound packet, overhears a passenger telling the captain about a profligate friend who heard his mother's voice after her death. Touched by the tale, the boy sings a song his mother taught him, but honestly admits, “no mother's voice responded to mine.”(6) The child's soft voice frightens the captain and crew; in fear at the visitation of a spirit, the captain vows a subscription to a Bible Society. He requests that someone deliver up a prayer, and a conflict arises when only the black cook is able to do so; a Southerner among the passengers swears he prefers going to the bottom. While Tom descends in anticipation of being shot with a silver bullet, the captain, repenting of his sins, fall prostrate on the deck. The incident is typical of Briggs's humor. The boy, aloft under the stars, invoking his mother (an opportunity, as Briggs says in Harry Franco, of “dilating to the edge of endurance” on a sentimental subject), is brought into sharp collision with the low motives of worldly men among whom he has to live. Tom must come down from the masthead and somehow survive among men who have lost their [page 229:] innocence and replaced it with hypocrisy, self-deception, and superstition.

This satire of types would have been just as much at home in the earlier novel. However, Tom Pepper diverges from the pattern Briggs's earlier novels followed by not confining its caricature to types of confidence-men; while only one or two figures in the earlier books can be identified as contemporaries of the author, Tom Pepper satirizes the group of New Yorkers with whom Briggs worked during the 1840's. Briggs, taking his cue from the success of the Pinto letters, based his social comment on carefully observed details of literary, as well as business, life in New York, making the book a unique piece of American literary history.

While Tom is under the protection of Mr. Bassett, he is apprenticed to a lawyer, Jasper Ferocious, who is also the author of The Life, Adventures. Fortunes and Fooleries of Christopher Cockroach, Citizen. Encouraged to deceive by Ferocious, who wishes him to conceal his novel in a copy of Blackstone, and read it instead of the law, Tom admits truthfully that the volume put him to sleep; as a result, he is forced to flee the lawyer's wrath. In the course of his escape, Tom spends a night at a hotel, where he nudges a sleeper awake from nightmare. Having finally learned the impracticability of truth, he does not tell the grateful sufferer, Captain St. Hugh, his true history, but adopts [page 230:] a pseudonym. Affection develops between the two, and they live together as father and son, until Bassett locates the boy. Tom, too ashamed to confront his protectors as a liar, dashes off to lose himself in the city, failing to realize that Bassett and St. Hugh will discover him to be the latter's illegitimate son.

The meeting with Ferocious is the first indication!! that Briggs's title was a satiric reference to another popular work, Emily Chubbuck's Trippings in Authorland! When Ferocious asks Tom, “Do you read, Mr. Pepper, imaginative literature, the home article, or foreign trash in pink covers?” and spices his conversation with the phrases “I name no names,” and “a certain author,” some members of Briggs's audience knew that he was portraying the novelist and poet, Cornelius Mathews. The prophet of Young America, Mathews-Ferocious tells his admirer, Tibbings (Briggs's caricature of Evert Duyckinck), “What we want, Tibbings, is a pure, bold, original, strong, vigorous, indigenous, and native literature; something that has the better life of the country in it, fresh and racy.”(7) Briggs had earlier agreed with Mathews’ diagnosis; what caused him to treat Mathews so unmercifully now were elements of the Young American's styles his egotism, his verbosity, his posing, his heavy-handed attempt at an “American humor. Briggs clearly intended to have his revenge on those, [page 231:] like Mathews and his followers, who had destroyed the potential effectiveness of the Copyright Club; he sought to inflict a wound on Poe for the Broadway Journal fiasco and the “Literati” papers; he wanted to discredit Simms, who had derided the kind of American humor which Briggs devoted himself to cultivating. The instrument he designed to accomplish this task was the clever satiric presentation of a typical New York literary soiree.

The soiree takes place against the background of Old Gil's corruption; his eldest daughter, Lizzy, seems to be Briggs's satiric combination of Anne Charlotte Lynch and Elizabeth Frieze Ellet,(8) ladies who had been involved in a scandal concerning intimate correspondence with Poe. Lizzy Gil prepares to receive her guests by converting her father's parlor into a Bohemian hang-out. Tom, like Briggs in his first few New York years, an outsider in the literary world, is a guest at one of Lizzy's parties. He observes the conduct of the literati with amazement. Most of them choose to be identified in terms of their British counterparts, like Myrtle Pipps, the American G.P.R. James — recognizable to his fellow-writers and magazine fans as William Gilmore Simms. Among the guests are Fitch Greenwood and his wife, translators from the Swedish, who obviously represent William and Mary Howitt.(9)

Poe enters the parlor as Austin Wicks, celebrated critic [page 232:] and author of “metaphysical romances”; he is described physically after Poe's own manner in “The Literati”: “his forehead had an intellectual appearance, but in that part of it which phrenologists appropriate for the home of the moral sentiments it was quite flat.” Ferocious introduces Wicks to the company as a native American genius, a great critic, and is rewarded for his pains by having Wicks-Poe turn on him savagely; after a single glass of wine, Poe reviles the whole group.(10) Although he turns on the bombastic Mathews and the gossiping literati, an action Briggs would normally have applauded, Poe is treated more harshly than his actions warranted, Briggs had to satisfy his anger at Poe's implication in the “Literati” that he had been forced to give up a literary career to work for a lawyer. Briggs retells the scandalous episode of Mrs. Ellet's letters, and has Poe come to an even sadder end:

Despite his disclaimers to Lowell and Page of Poe's seriously damaging his interests, Briggs revealed in this slanderous account how deeply Poe's slashes had cut. Like most of the poet's contemporaries, Briggs was at first unable to [page 233:] dissociate his private hurt for his estimation of Poe's ability; his own self-esteem forced him to hit back. The provocation must have been extreme to cause a man as loving and generous as Briggs had shown himself to be in letters to Lowell and Page, to write such a harsh account of a fellow writer who was at the moment suffering from just the degree of desperate poverty that Briggs had so fully described.

In late February and early March of 1847, Briggs's account of Lizzy's soiree appeared on the front pages of the New York Mirror; the New York literati stood revealed through the eyes of innocent Tom, who knew nothing of their work, as ridiculous and debauched, the appropriately poisonous growth of a heartless, usurious urban society. Those who prepared Briggs's obituaries, thirty years later, remarked that he ceased writing novels because of the cataclysm the satirized literary community brought down on his head. There appears to be little justification for this remark. Tom Pepper was not widely reviewed;(11) the Whig, Charles Fenno Hoffman, critic for the Literary World, treated its satire of his political antagonists with restraint:

There is no evidence that Briggs ever felt conscience-striken about his condemnation of the literati, none of whom sued him or the Mirror, as Poe sued Fuller and Thomas Dunn English for the slanderous caricature of another Mirror serial.(13) Briggs regarded his own work as more than the nasty overflow of revengeful feelings; he seems to have thought of it as a useful daguerreotype. He held the literati up to themselves, in part so that they might cleanse themselves of the incubi of jealousy, posing and imitativeness.

Though the book's most memorable section is the one that contains the literary soiree, Briggs also aimed his satire at other favorite targets, among them Quakers and Transcendentalists. In one of his adventures, Tom is entrapped by a prostitute, robbed of his clothes, and forced to don the clothes of the woman who robbed him. Dressed in the flashy garments of a fallen woman, he is rescued from the clutches of a “libidinous butcher” by a Quaker who specializes in helping runaway slaves and prostitutes. Briggs, whose Nantucket background predisposed him to favor Quakers, contrasted the attitudes of the Goodwill family to those of Sophia Ruby, a Transcendentalist lover of the [page 235:] beautiful.

Mrs. Ruby had not been endowed with natural beauty, and so “felt herself bound to make up her natural deficiencies by all the means in her power, that she, as a part of the universe, might not produce a discord in the sublime harmony of beauty which pervaded it.”(14) She comes off as a silly, jabbering, meddlesome woman, whose excessive interest in the details of Tom's sexual encounters hints at perversion. Both she and the unadorned Quakers fail to understand the grief of an ignorant slave girl who weeps because she has lost the promise of a red shawl in gaining her freedom. Mrs. Ruby applauds the girl's love of the beautiful, and tells her of the enlargement of the circle of her Oversoul! Quaker Goodwill is scandalized at the girl's failure to appreciate her escape. Both views, Briggs shows, are inadequate; the slave girl is able to understand neither the promises nor the vocabulary of her protectors. In a later episode, when Tom is jailed at Bridewell, Mrs. Ruby brings him a porcelain sheep, so that he may have something uplifting to look at; Wilson Goodwill remarks that a dead, dressed sheep would have been more appreciated. Quakers are portrayed as sensible, human, forthright, and a bit more self-righteous than their unconcealed sensuality warrants; Transcendentalists are out of touch with reality and irresponsible. Briggs's satire on Transcendentalists is less [page 236:] stinging in this novel than it had been in The Haunted Merchant, probably because he intended his sharpest strokes for the New York literati. His choice of Margaret Fuller as representative of the Emersonian group is consistent, then, for she had just completed two years in New York as reviewer for Horace Greeley's Tribune. Considering his harsh treatment of Margaret Fuller in the Pinto letters, still appearing in the Mirror, the portrait in Tom Pepper is gentle possibly in responds to Lowell's criticism.

Other contemporaries of the author make their appearance in Tom Pepper, demonstrating that, more than any of Briggs's other fictional biographies, Tom Pepper represented a real synthesis of his experience. In the story of Tom, he presented his own search for a place in the literary world, and his own reasons for dissatisfaction with the figures whom he outlined. Now he moved on to characterize two men who were even closer to him than Poe, Simms, Duyckinck and Mathews.

Ardent, a Bohemian artist, is modeled on William Page; although the portraitist places Tom in a humiliating position, stripping him of his clothes to model for a portrait of Apollo, his talk is ample compensation. Tom “felt happy in having at last lighted upon an intelligent, candid man, one who could instruct me by his conversation without disgusting me with his insincerity or vulgarity.”(15) Briggs [page 237:] reserved his highest compliments for Page:

But even Ardent cannot be the model Tom is searching for; Mr. Bassett's objection is that it is dangerous to be a free-thinker. He criticizes Ardent's “looseness”: “By looseness, Mr. Bassett explained that he meant liberal, and by liberal he again explained that he meant unrestrained, and so he went on explaining what he meant until at last he grew embarrassed.”(16) Though Tom has gained enough experience to reprove Bassett for his prudish merchant's viewpoint, he recognizes that the artist's seemingly disorganized life is given structure by his genius, and is not subject to imitation.

A field in which Tom's talents might be better displayed is newspaper editing. Mr. Wilton, Briggs's characterization of Hiram Fuller, is the man who offers Tom a chance to combine love of truth with a profit-making occupation. Taken [page 238:] with the novelty of a newspaper without hyperbole, a newspaper devoted to truth-telling, Wilton allows Tom to write an issue of the Morning Luminary. The publication is, of course, a commercial disaster, and the first subscribers to cancel are, predictably, those upholders of public morality, Old Gil, and the minister, Dr. Dollarsworth. The venture teaches Tom and Wilton that the influence of the press is really the influence of subscribers. This is the hard lesson of journalism of which Briggs had told Lowell, and which the latter was never gully able to understand. Tom leaves Wilton, who writes his own foreign letters, just as Briggs himself was doing as Ferdinand Mendes Pinto, with a sense of regret. Wilton's honesty is understandably compromised by his need to keep his paper afloat; as he puts it, “You may depend upon it that you must give up your high-toned abstractions and come down to the level of common people if you expect to have common fare in this world.” However, the virtue required of Tom, if he is to be accepted as a St. Hugh, requires a more rigid independence.

The boy finally turns to his guide, Mr. Bassett, in anguish:

According to Briggs, then, an American hero cannot depend upon his own exertions; if he wants to lead a life of virtue in the city, a paradigm for the world, his truth-telling must be backed by untainted funds. Tom, having proven his worth, is finally recognized as the son of Captain St. Hugh, who appears at his bedside as he is recovering from a prostrating illness:

St. Hugh, then, is fit to be the father of an American; if Tom cannot inherit his ancestral English estates because of his illegitimate birth, he has a supreme consolation: “Here you may be rich, and an honored citizen of a great nation. You need not repine, my son,” says Captain St. Hugh, “at not being an Englishman, while you can boast that you are an American with an English father.” If, throughout Tom Pepper, Briggs has mingled autobiography with fiction, he is here burlesquing a dream. No Captain St. Hugh ever rescued him from the drudgery and corruption of the literary marketplace.

In the dedication preceding this autobiography of his persona, Briggs sought to explain to a “Matthew Trueman” [page 240:] his own solution to the problem of preserving integrity; he clearly pointed to the unique relationship his last novel bears to his own life. “Matthew Trueman” was the pseudonym employed by Lowell when he wrote a prose piece for the Broadway Journal, opposing slavery and annexation in terms too forceful for Briggs.(19) Thus the only literary figure of significance in Briggs's own life who is missing from the narrative, is introduced into this book — not as one of the compromisers or poseurs, or even as an admired figure like that of Page, but as the reader for whom the book was written. Briggs made the dedication a conciliatory gesture by addressing Lowell under the pseudonym of the rejected piece, demonstrating his deep regard for the poet in his role of honest, outspoken opponent of slavery.(20)

The “great moral lesson” that Briggs tells Matthew Truman he has illustrated in his book is not the surface lesson that truth-telling is the only path to happiness, but rather the underlying fact that ideals must be accommodated to social reality; this is the theme that Briggs reiterated in his letters to Lowell on political as well as literary matters. The dedication to Matthew Trueman, then, [page 241:] offers the novel as a further explanation of Briggs's point of view. Briggs seems to have been showing Lowell why he could only partially follow his hero's option of withdrawal from the corruption of American society. He had already written to Lowell that he was extremely dissatisfied with Tom Pepper as art;(21) he knew he had achieved only a few

well-sustained satiric vignettes. In Tom Pepper he had “capped absurdity on absurdity” more relentlessly than he had done on any other novel. However, the book still fell into clever but futile imitation of Dickens; it still lacked coherence as a work of art. Briggs knew better than any of his critics that he did not have the creative genius of Melville or Hawthorne. Attempting to earn a living among those whose self-deception and posing he detested, hoping to find a genuinely useful role in the nation's literary life, he chose a path closest to that of the editor, Wilton.

By the beginning of 1848, while he was still working on the concluding chapters of Tom Pepper. Briggs made his first tentative step toward editorial prominence, undertaking the literary editorship of Holden's Dollar Magazine. It began as a hack job, with Briggs writing captions for engravings and reviewing new books. However, the minor position soon succeeded in elevating him to a stature among magazinists that he had not held since his loss of the Broadway Journal. Holden's was founded by Charles [page 242:] Holden, a twenty-one-year-old friend of Alfred E. Beach, editor of the Sun, who sought to create a magazine to correspond to the penny newspapers. Although Holden's own writing was undistinguished (he often tried to imitate Briggs's wit), and he died at twenty-three on a trip to the California gold fields, he succeeded in originating a serious magazine which attracted wide circulation because of its low subscription rate.

Holden's did have its share of sentimental tales and lady poets, but Briggs made its review section as intelligent as that of the Broadway Journal.(22) He presented important reviews of Lowell, Melville, Hawthorne and Cooper; he never failed to bring the copyright question forward. His magazine presented a very useful series on American notables and clergymen. During the two-and-a-half years, until June, 1850, in which it remained an “aside employment” for Briggs, Holden's always called for pride in and support of an original American literature; during the same period, its circulation grew to 30, 000.

In one of his Holden's articles, Briggs outlined the qualifications an editor must possess to succeed: [page 243:]

If Briggs saw his own failure as a novelist, his “loose defects,” clearly,(24) he also saw his potentialities as a great editor. A review in the January 1850 Home Journal indicated that others also regarded him as a significant figure in the literary community; the critic wrote, “In wit he is the first; in a peculiar humor — so sharp in its points as to be commonly recognized only as wit — he has few equals; and in critical appreciation of the compositions of others, he is admirably fitted for the place of a literary editor.”(25)

Briggs had been thinking of the responsibilities and requirements of good editing for many years; in the summer of 1847, in a thoughtful editorial for the Mirror, he sloughed aside the factionalism that plagued the New York literary scene, and put away the caustic pen of Tom Pepper. In an “Editorial on Editors,” he called for more thoroughly and widely educated editors, writing, “the greatest abilities [page 244:] and accomplishments, the utmost candor and fairness, the most profound judgement and the most engaging address, would find no more useful, influential or admirable position than in the editorial management of an independent paper.”

In his founding and editing of Putnam's Magazine, Briggs would finally come to the apogee of a career too often marked by failure.

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