{"id":7141,"date":"2024-08-15T09:49:39","date_gmt":"2024-08-15T14:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/?p=7141"},"modified":"2025-06-10T14:58:53","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T19:58:53","slug":"a-bit-of-and-a-bite-at-the-boston-evening-transcript","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/blog\/a-bit-of-and-a-bite-at-the-boston-evening-transcript\/","title":{"rendered":"A bit of and a bite at \u201cThe Boston Evening Transcript\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The
From: T.S. Eliot, \u201cThe Boston Evening Transcript,\u201d Poetry<\/em> 7, no. 1 (October 1915): 21.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I like these first two lines from T.S. Eliot\u2019s poem, \u201cThe Boston Evening Transcript.\u201d I\u2019ve clipped them (sort of) from the issue of Poetry<\/em> magazine in which the poem first was published. Probably it\u2019s a little strange that I should like them, because I don\u2019t think he meant them to be lovely.<\/p>\n

Actually, before I dig into those first two lines, it might be useful to stop and, for at least a moment, consider the poem in its entirety<\/a> (an additional seven lines):<\/p>\n

The readers of the\u00a0Boston Evening Transcript<\/em>
\nSway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.<\/p>\n

When evening quickens faintly in the street,
\nWakening the appetites of life in some
\nAnd to others bringing the\u00a0Boston Evening Transcript<\/em>,
\nI mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
\nWearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
\nIf the street were time and he at the end of the street,
\nAnd I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the\u00a0Boston Evening Transcript<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe Boston Evening Transcript\u201d shows us Eliot in his early, satirist phase. But what is he satirizing? Many readers of this poem surely interpret it as a satire of newspaper readers in general. I myself did at first. How many people today have ever heard of the Boston Evening Transcript<\/em>? Eliot\u2019s poem is probably now better known than the newspaper itself, which ceased publication almost a century ago. Never famous to begin with, and having printed its final issue in 1941, the Boston Evening Transcript<\/em> here feels like a stand-in for all newspapers, and its readers for all newspaper readers, in part perhaps because consumers of mass media do tend to have a reputation for the kind of intellectual conformity that Eliot\u2019s wheat field simile (technically a simile within a metaphor) implies.<\/p>\n

A little knowledge, however, of American newspaper history in general, and of the Evening Transcript<\/em> in particular, reveals the satire to be targeted, almost personal (with a strong resemblance to a poem E.E. Cummings wrote several years later, \u201cThe Cambridge ladies who lived in furnished souls<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n

The first thing to know is that Eliot\u2019s childhood in St. Louis through his time in Boston (roughly 1888-1914) coincided with a fierce resurgence of newspapers that combined aggressive editorial policy and sensational presentation of the news. Sensationalism had gone into abeyance following the Civil War, but regained popularity in the 1890s.1<\/sup><\/strong> Evening newspapers in particular became known for sensationalism, which often descended into pandering, especially as circulation wars broke out, in city after city, between the largest papers. In general, the morning papers of most cities aspired to a higher-toned respectability, while the evening papers went all-in for news, style, and page-design capable of driving circulation to dizzying heights. One of the most famous evening papers was the New York\u00a0Evening World. <\/em>Even a quick glance at its page design, beside that of a well-known morning daily, reveals much about its different approach to journalism:<\/p>\n

\"The
The New York Times<\/em> and the New York Evening World<\/em> for Monday, November 6, 1905<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Note how the Evening World <\/em>makes liberal use of splashy banner headlines, a variety of display fonts (some of them quite unusual), and asymmetrical columns. The Times<\/em>, in contrast, sticks to a rigid (I\u2019m tempted to call it strait-laced), columnar layout, and uses display fonts both systematically and with restraint.<\/p>\n

The second thing to know is that these evening papers were especially popular with female readers: \u201cWomen, with more leisure in the afternoons, liked the later papers; and since the department stores aimed their advertising at women readers, the evening papers fattened on the announcements of the stores.\u201d2<\/sup><\/strong> Cousin Harriet, who makes her brief appearance at the poem\u2019s end, might easily be just such a reader.<\/p>\n

The third thing to know is that the Evening Transcript<\/em> prided itself on most definitely not being like other evening papers: the Transcript<\/em> was that rare thing, a highbrow daily published in the afternoon (so-called \u201cevening papers\u201d began issuing their earliest editions in the afternoon), and wore its low circulation numbers as a badge of honor, its handful of readers representing the city\u2019s intellectual elite (note, for example, the way in which the poem contrasts those ruled by the viscera, line 4, with those ruled by the mind, line 5). Of Boston\u2019s ten daily newspapers at this time, the Transcript<\/em> consistently reported, by far, the lowest circulation of all. It had a reputation for being \u201cstodgy\u201d and \u201csedate,\u201d making \u201cfew concessions to the moronic mentality of the enlarged reading public.\u201d The Transcript<\/em> instead regarded its readership as the enlightened few. In a fawning, quasi-official history of the paper (penned by one of its own journalists), Joseph Edgar Chamberlin wrote, \u201cThe Transcript <\/em>might fairly claim that from the start it was the leading arbiter of literary questions in Boston.\u201d3<\/sup><\/strong> Again, considering only the page design, the Transcript<\/em> more closely resembles the New York Times<\/em> than it does the Evening World<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"The
The Boston Evening Transcript<\/em> for Monday, November 6, 1905<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The typographic variety you probably notice in this example is actually a case of tradition (and therefore archly conservative) rather than novelty: by 1905 few newspapers still featured advertisements on their front pages.<\/p>\n

With this information in mind (about evening papers in general, and the Transcript<\/em> in particular) the poem begins to feel more and more like a very specifically sexist satire of women who cherish pretensions to culture and taste, rather like the complacent, self-anointed highbrows Eliot satirized in a more famous poem, the women who \u201ccome and go \/ Talking of Michelangelo,\u201d but who nevertheless fall back upon conventional opinion, with \u201ceyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,\u201d4<\/sup><\/strong> which would explain why, as the speaker prepares to greet Cousin Harriet, he bids farewell to the apparition of Rochefoucauld, a man who made his reputation in part by puncturing hollow pieties and received opinion. Cousin Harriet passively receives her copy of the Evening Transcript<\/em> from the hands of her nephew, and she\u2019ll passively receive her opinions from the pages of the newspaper: what to like and what to dislike, what to approve and what to disapprove. The triumph of staid, received opinion.<\/p>\n

That, in short, is the poem as a whole: a snobbish attack on a snobbish newspaper and its snobbish readers. What I really wanted to write about, however, were those wonderful opening lines, with which I began this post. Eliot was already living in England when he published the poem, but he had only been there a year or two. His usage of \u201ccorn\u201d is surely either pastoral poetic diction or British affectation, because American corn doesn\u2019t really sway in the wind, at least not in the manner I think he means here. He probably imagined something more like British corn (what Americans would call wheat):<\/p>\n

[Videorecording removed for accessibility. Recording showed a British cornfield with the corn blowing the wind.]<\/p>\n

Even if the paper\u2019s readers did have the same, or similar, responses to its articles\u2014like all those stems of wheat bending in response to the same wind\u2014do those responses, those experiences of reading, cease to be personal? Or is newspaper reading more like a pavane between the newspaper and its readers? Also, I happen to like the image of all these readers responding together to the newspaper\u2019s gentle sway. It evokes the gestalt of newspaper reading: not just the wholeness of the newspaper itself\u2014gathering as it does dozens and dozens of discrete stories\u2014but also the corporate body of newspaper readers, all reading the same paper at roughly the same time (evening, in this case) and roughly the same place (the city of Boston and its suburbs). The wind flows over the lithe corn, like the flow of time, and a newspaper is part of that flow, carrying its readers forward into the future, as on the crest of a wave, the news unfolding, figuratively and literally, day-by-day, on and on. Even researchers using a newspaper to plumb the past must surely feel this inexorable tug toward the future, every issue making us wonder, \u201cbut what will happen tomorrow?\u201d<\/p>\n

Notes<\/h2>\n

1<\/strong>.Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism<\/em> (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 322. Sensationalism included what became known as \u201cmuckraking\u201d and \u201cyellow journalism,\u201d but was also a more general trend.<\/p>\n

2<\/strong>. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960<\/em>, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 447.<\/p>\n

3<\/strong>. Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument<\/em> (New York: Macmillan Co., 1937), 9, 597; Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898<\/em> (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 187; Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, The Boston Transcript: A History of Its First Hundred Years<\/em> (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 322.<\/p>\n

4<\/strong>. T.S. Eliot, \u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,\u201d Poetry<\/em> 6, no. 3 (June 1915): 130-35.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like these first two lines from T.S. Eliot\u2019s poem, \u201cThe Boston Evening Transcript.\u201d I\u2019ve clipped them (sort of) from the issue of Poetry magazine in which the poem first was published. Probably it\u2019s a little strange that I should like them, because I don\u2019t think he meant them to be lovely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[58,183],"class_list":["post-7141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hpnl","tag-newspapers","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7141"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8265,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7141\/revisions\/8265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}