Author Mathews Cornelius

pulist or demotic one. Their politics was limited to a call for international copyright law, to curb the wholesale piracy of American literature in England. Stylistically, Mathews favored an approach that emphasized the cosmopolitan sweep and diversity of American society, bolder and more philosophical than the sort of cozy humor associated with the Knickerbocker Magazine (although Mathews did not refuse to appear in its pages), but not as abstruse and Germanic as the Transcendentalist literature of Boston. Mathews’ panacea was the emulation of Rabelais, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel, he believed, managed to advance philosophical penetration without etherializing its subject matter. For two years (1840-1842), Mathews and Duyckinck wrote for and co-edited Young America’s uneven journal, Arcturus, publishing also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. Mathews coined the name for the Young America movement in an 1845 speech. As he described the movement, "Here, in New York, is the seat and strong-hold of this young power: but, all over the land, day by day, new men are emerging into activity, who partake of these desires, who scorn and espise the past pettiness of the country, and who are ready to sustain any movement toward a better and nobler condition".[2] Throughout the period of his principle literary activity, the 1840s and 1850s, Mathews contributed to and/or helped to edit all manner of American periodicals, including the New-Yorker, the Comic World, the New York Dramatic Mirror, the American Monthly Magazine, the New York Review, the New York Reveille, and a would-be rival to the Knickerbocker Magazine, the rapidly-moribund Yankee Doodle. In 1853, he published A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New York City, a collection of essays, character sketches, and sketches on the scenery of New York.[3] He also wrote several satirical plays) though his most successful play was Witchcraft, or the Martyrs of Salem (1846) which was more serious in tone and written in blank verse. Cornelius Mathews died in New York City in 1889. Reviewing Mathews's Wakondah in Graham's Magazine Edgar Allan Poe wrote that it had "no merit whatever; while its faults... are of that rampant class which if any schoolboy could be found so uninformed as to commit them, any schoolboy should remorselessly be flogged for committing."[4] Of Mathews's novel Puffer Hopkins, Poe called it "one of the most trashy novels that ever emanated from an American press".[5] Mathews was such a strong proponent of copyright law, he was considered a joke by some in the literary scene.[6] Critic and anthologist Rufus Wilmot Griswold included Mathews in his Prose Writers of America (1847) but criticized his vehement push for nationalist literature. "Mr. Mathews", Griswold said, "wrote very good English and very good sense until he was infected with the disease of building up a national literature."[7] Charles Frederick Briggs satirized Mathews in the novel Trippings of Tom Pepper, depicting him as a lawyer named Mr. Ferocious who frequently interrupts others to advocate literature which is "fresh, home-born" and free of foreign influence.[8] Margaret Fuller, however, supported his advocacy for a national literature[9] and said that Mathew's play Witchcraft was an example of "a true, genuine, invincible Americanism."[10] American literary historian Perry Miller, writing in The Raven and the Whale, suggested that Herman Melville was influenced by Mathew's Behemoth when writing Moby-Dick.[11] Melville invited Mathews to his home in 1850.[12] Novels Poetry Plays