These days, most Americans live in cities, those humming beehives of culture and filth, where each person straddles a changing role between anonymity and responsibility as he goes about his day. In the 19th century, however, cities were new in the United States and peoples’ place in them was in flux. Anonymity was everything in these early cities—poor girls flocked to them to be sought-after courtesans, men cultivated fake names, people of modest means courted like they lived in a Bronte novel.
But sometimes all of the changing roles and huge amounts of freedom could turn more dangerous. The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cline Cohen tells the story of what happens when freedom and anonymity combine to more sinister ends.
In 1836, two poor New Yorkers, one a young prostitute named Helen Jewett and the other, her client, a young clerk and writer, Richard Robinson, took on roles greater and outside of who they really were. Jewett, a beautiful young maid who served in Maine and lost her virginity out of wedlock, moved to the big city to claim a new name and identity as a literate prostitute. Robinson, too, pretended to be courting Jewett in a proper New England code of propriety—he wrote her letters and brought her presents.
One night, though, their high-class courting turned violent when Robinson stabbed Jewett and then set her bed on fire. Robinson was eventually acquitted, however, and moved to Texas.
The Murder of Helen Jewett is, at its core, a mystery novel. Cline Cohen brings up new evidence and writes in a way that by the time readers finish the book, it is still a mystery if Robinson was really the culprit in this murder.
The book is also a surprisingly in-depth piece about the conditions and the surprising freedoms available in New York City in the early 19th century. New York police officers were an ungoverned group of volunteers during this time, so New Yorkers could file complaints, but more often than not, little was done about them. Journalism, too, did little to corral people and to reprimand their questionable ethics—sensationalist penny papers, the city’s only source of news, wrote stories to sell papers, not than to provide fact-based information.
As for men and women, many of the roles of New England, like courting etiquette, were still in place, but the large degree of anonymity in the city didn’t provide much infrastructure to enforce it. Men moved to New York City to learn a trade with a master teacher and lived in boarding houses without many ties to other people, including their families. If women became pregnant in New York City, unlike in New England, there was no close-knit town to socially pressure her beau to marry her. In New England, men were the only ones with a sexual appetite—they were the ones to ignite physical passion in women. In New York, however, prostitutes were already awakened and alive with sexual fervor.
Helen Jewett is a fascinating account of a murder that has enticed America for almost two centuries, but is an even better portrait of cultural attitudes and the freedom in anonymity in early 19th century New York.
Sources and further reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/cohen-jewett.html
http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Helen-Jewett-Patricia-Cline/dp/0679740759#reader_0679740759
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