Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

he arranged a tour of the country. New York City's major newspapers, nervously anticipating his arrival, kept readers updated of the expected arrival time of the Great Poet, and they primed readers by reprinting his work in the papers.

In the meantime, Tupper, essentially traveling incognito and pacing about the decks on the voyage over, discovered a copy of Proverbial Philosophy in the ship's library; and after listening to fellow passengers murder its recitation, the poet revealed his identity.

His arrival in New York was a whirlwind of meetings with the great and the famous--dinner with the Astors, meetings with the mayor and the city's leading journalists, and personal introductions to nearly every major writer of the time. Amusingly, he did not care much for the one great Anglophile of the lot, James Fenimore Cooper, whom he found "a cold unpleasant mannered man, and in every way a great contrast to warmhearted Washington Irving."

Tupper was amused by the American obsession with the famous. Hit with constant requests for newspaper interviews (rare in Britain, except for political figures of actual importance), Tupper could open the morning papers in New York and find that "one's extorted opinions on all matter of topics--social, religious, and political--were published by tens of thousands in conflicting newspapers." Americans, too, had an odd fixation on autographs. These were a little more trying on his patience: "At a party my perhaps too exacting hostess put a large pack of blank cards into my hand, posted me to a corner table with pen and ink, and flatteringly requested an autograph for each of her 100 guests!"

Moving on to Philadelphia, home of his official publisher, he found his popularity even greater. Several times he encountered young women who, scissors in hand, were hoping to shear off one of his locks as a keepsake. He avoided any mishaps until, one particularly hot day, he wandered into a tiny barber's shop to get his hair cut. Passing by the next day, he found a MARTIN

TUPPER sign in the window, surrounded by gold lockets for sale. Each contained hairs hurriedly swept up from the floor after the author had left.

Tupper took a particular interest in America's reform institutions, and he visited youth houses, schools for the deaf and the blind, and lunatic asylums.

Upon his arrival, inmates would crowd around him--at an institute for the

blind, he wrote his children, "they flocked about me like bees to touch me."

On one such visit in Philadelphia, he discovered just how far his writing had penetrated into the soul of the hopeful and the hopeless alike: dropping in unannounced on the vast local lunatic asylum, he found his poem "Never Give Up!" posted on every single door. His name did not appear on the poem, though, and he asked the head doctor if he knew who the author was. The doctor didn't--he had simply clipped the anonymous verse one day from a newspaper.

--It is I, Tupper told him.

The doctor was amazed.

What happened next still astonished Tupper four decades later: "He asked if I would allow the patients to thank me; of course I complied, and soon was surrounded by kneeling and weeping and kissing folks, grateful at the good hope my verses had helped them to." In his old age, Tupper would pass over his meetings with mayors and tycoons fairly quickly in his reminiscences. But he remembered the insane asylum.

Back home, Tupper's popularity continued unabated through the 1850's, and he settled into the life of an author patriarch, presiding over a brood of artistic children who would stage amateur theatricals in the living room and miniature concerts in the parlor. Three of his ten children had died, a not uncommon ratio for that era. But one tragedy hit Tupper especially hard: the death of a daughter afflicted with spinal ailments at the age of two and half.

After her death, all he had of her was a marble statue of her sleeping, modeled in life and then sculpted after the child's death. In the midst of his great fame, there is something heartrending in the accounts of Tupper sitting alone with his little sculpture. And yet Tupper was, in many ways, an utterly optimistic soul. He would show the statue to visitors not out of morbidity, but to marvel at the beauty of the child that had once been his to love. He was a man of truly unaffected emotional simplicity.

Had he cared for the world's opinion, he'd have found his simplicity vulnerable to scorn. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was as reserved as Tupper was gregarious, penned a detailed and yet offhandedly devastating account of his visit to Tupper's house in his journal on April 2, 1856: I felt in an instant that Mr. Tupper was a good soul, but a fussy little man, of a kind that always takes one entirely aback. He is a small man, with wonderfully short legs, fat (at least very round), and walks with a kind of waddle, not so much from corpulence of body as from brevity of leg. His hair is curly, and of an iron-gray hue; his features are good, even handsome, and his complexion very red. A person for whom I immediately felt a kindness, and instinctively knew to be a bore ....

Tupper is really a good man, most domestic, most affectionate, most fussy; for it appeared as if he could hardly sit down, and even if he were sitting he still had the effect of bustling about. He has no dignity of character, no conception of what it is, nor perception of his deficiency .... He is the vainest little man of all little men, and his vanity continually effervesces out of him as naturally as ginger-beer froths. Yet it is the least incommodious vanity I ever witnessed; he does not insist upon your expressing admiration; he does not even seem to wish it, nor hardly to know or care whether you admire him or not. He is so entirely satisfied with himself that he takes the admiration of all the world for granted,--the recognition of his supreme merit being inevitable. I liked him, and laughed in my sleeve at him, and was utterly weary of him; for, certainly, he is the ass of asses ... if it were not irreverent, I should say that his Creator, when He made Tupper, intended to show how easily He could turn a gifted, upright, warm hearted, and

in many ways respectable person into a fool and laughing-stock even for persons much inferior to himself.

Years later, when Julian Hawthorne published his late father's journals, Tupper was deeply hurt by this account of what he had innocently imagined to be a pleasant visit. And yet Hawthorne, in his final lines at least, was absolutely correct in his judgment.

When you open a window upon your soul, idiots are prone to come along and throw rocks at it. And so Martin Tupper, whose very simplicity and sincerity in verse made him beloved by one generation, was soon to find himself the target for the next. It is hard to know exactly when the transformation from Great Poet to crashingly boring fogy occurred in the mind of the public. In Tupper's earlier days, his very youth in conquering the States was held by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table as something of a liability:

These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual green fruit of all places in the world. ... The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like unripe gooseberries,--get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a country which buys eighty thousand copies of the Proverbial Philosophy, while the author's admiring countrymen have been buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully ripe, when there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?

But by the 1860's, with the author entering his fifties, there were plenty of countrymen ready to pick up Tupper's now-overripe fruit and fling it right back at him. The children who had once received gift book editions of Tupper for their birthdays were heartily sick of the man.