New York by Gas-Light Essays

New York by Gas-Light Essays New York by Gas-Light Essay New York by Gas-Light Essay New York by Gas-Light and Awful Disclosures can be called a number of things, but â€Å"earnest reform tracts† is probably something that should be excluded from the list. New York by Gas-Light has one critical redeeming value: George Foster had a magnificent subject that had largely been unexploited by other journalists in his day: New York City.   New York had grown at an breakneck pace, becoming in just a few decades the first true American metropolis.   At the same time, Americans’ appetite to know about this strange, somewhat sordid place had also grown, and Foster was entirely willing to satisfy the public’s desire to know.   Reading through his fifteen sketches, one finds descriptions intended to arouse and perhaps to shock his readers, but there is no serious call to clean up the vice of the city. Consider a few examples: female prostitution is invariably the result of man’s individual villainy in seducing and betraying the pure being who trusts her destiny to his keeping – or of the monstrous crime of society which dooms its daughters to degradation, want and misery from which no virtuous effort of theirs can ever rescue them.   Let society heed this one simply truth, and apply a thorough and efficient remedy, by furnishing the means of comfortable and happy existence to women who would be virtuous and exclude from its presence all men who are guilty of seduction or libertinism, or who have trifled with the sacred affection of woman, in any form.   The nine-tenths of all crime and suffering will be at once abolished from the face of the earth.   But this is something to be prayed fro rather than hoped for. Indeed, given the prominence that Foster attained through his writing, one wonders how fervently he prayed that these conditions end.   Describing â€Å"Five Points,† he waxes eloquent: This is indeed a sad sight, an awful sight a sight to make the blood slowly congeal and the heart to grow fearful and cease its beatings.   Here, whence these streets diverge in dark and endless paths, whose steps take hold on hell here is the very type and physical semblance, in fact, of hell itself. Foster gives no suggestion that he want to remedy the vices he found in such places as Five Points.   Given the success that he enjoyed with New York by Gas-Light, it seems unlikely he did. New York by Gas-Light is not entirely accurate.   Foster took a number of journalistic liberties in his writing, but it can still be classified as non-fiction.   That cannot be said of Awful Disclosures, which was a calculated fraud.   Maria Monk was never a nun and was never in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery.   Monk had suffered a brain injury as a child, and she apparently could not differentiate between reality and elaborate fictions.   She collaborated with several vehemently anti-Catholic Protestant ministers, to produce a book that described the nunnery in Montreal as an elaborate prison in which nuns were held as slaves for priests. While there is the absence of explicit details about sex acts that might be expected for a piece of this period, there are many details of sadistic punishments meted out against nuns for the slightest resistance.   Infanticide is described in some detail, this being the supposed means of disposing of any accidental children born of the liaisons of the lascivious priests with their sexual servitors. (Monk, 99-101, 128)   Bondage and gagging are described as punishments. (Monk, 105-06, 114-15)   In a remarkably cold scene, she describes the murder of a nun and the dumping of her body into a lime pit. (Monk, 59-65) While Foster wrote New York by Gas-Light as a profit-making venture, the purpose for creating the elaborate hoax of Awful Disclosures is more devious.   The book was created as an attack on Catholicism.   In the 1830s, nativist Protestants felt themselves threatened by Catholicism.   To counter this, and following the literary success of Six Months in a Convent in 1832, Maria Monk’s backers created their pseudo-pornographic account of life in a Montreal nunnery.   The book has since been exposed as completely fictional.   An investigator who was enter the Hotel Dieu Nunnery reported that Maria Monk’s description of the arrangement of the rooms (Monk, 35-40) was hopelessly inaccurate. (Schultz, xv-xix)   As inquiries continued, it was discovered that Maria Monk had never been a nun, had apparently been confined for a considerable time to an asylum, and was a common prostitute rather than the victim of priestly sexual abuse.   Nevertheless, Awful Disclosures remained a remarkable bestseller for many years. (Schultz, xviii-xix)