1
Ch. 2, Pretty Typewriters, Melodramatic Metropolis
“He capped off his speech with a melodramatic flourish.”
Or: “She concluded her argument with a melodramatic gesture.” We
may be uncertain about exactly what kind of flourish or gesture
our imaginary speakers have made (did he raise a clenched fist
in the air? did she thump hers on the table?), but we do
understand that it was exaggerated and sensational.
“Melodramatic” has come to mean little more than that in
everyday speech. It has lost a vital connection to the noun from
which it is derived, melodrama; most people today have never
seen or read one. Yet melodrama was the lingua franca of the
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage; it dominated the
theatrical world so completely that its conventions were
universally understood. We, instead, need to engage in an act of
historical reconstruction if we are to appreciate melodrama, as
well as some of the earliest novels and plays that, adopting
melodramatic forms, were written about pretty typewriters. Doing
so will enable us to understand a perverse paradox: melodrama
was the popular form that had to be overturned and rejected if
we were ever to have modern theater; yet it was a uniquely
modern form and for that reason well-suited to assay a uniquely
modern protagonist, the “pretty typewriter.”
Melodrama was the brainchild of the French author René
Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt (1773-1844). Combining several
2
pre-existing forms of popular spectacle with his own
considerable powers of invention, Pixerécourt devised a new kind
of work remarkable for expressive power and stark simplicity,
both epitomized by his play Coelina or the Child of Mystery
(1801). At its heart was a spare constellation of characters: it
pitted the forces of evil against the forces of good. Evil was
embodied by two character types, the villain and his accomplice,
while good was embodied by the innocent, persecuted woman and
her suitor, the male hero. These four character types were
typically supplemented by two more: a clownish or comic
character, one who made jokes or performed songs and dances with
only a tangential relationship to the main plot; and the
faithful friend, often a good old man or woman who exhibits
extraordinary loyalty to the persecuted woman. This
constellation of characters was then marshaled to perform
actions or experience events. To later eyes, the actions and
events are remarkable chiefly because they have no effect at all
on any of the characters. The villain remains villainous, and
the persecuted woman remains pure, virtuous, and innocent. At
most there is a modest drama of recognition that transpires.
Someone (the male hero, for example, or perhaps a neutral
character who stands for public opinion or authority) is misled,
through a devious deception concocted by the villain, into
thinking that the persecuted woman is unfaithful, untrue, or not
virtuous; but in the end this misrecognition always gives way to
3
recognition. Melodrama is odd. It has a great deal of action and
event, yet is not really a form of storytelling or narrative, if
by those terms we mean the recounting of a processive
transformation that transpires through time. Melodrama is the
antithesis of narrative. Characters do not change, grow, or
develop; they simply are. If there is any change or drama at
all, it is a drama of recognition; they are recognized for being
what they are: wicked villains are unmasked as wicked, while
virtuous heroines are hailed as virtuous. But “drama” is a term
normally thought to imply narrative, precisely the element
lacking in melodrama. Perhaps it would be better to think of
melodrama as a form of ritual, one restaged again and again.
Ritual entails spectacle, and spectacle implies the visual.
From its beginnings, melodrama contained a strong element of
visual spectacle. It emphasized visible legibility over literary
subtlety, and in many melodramas an act or even a scene
concludes with a tableau, as all the actors stand still and
silent in postures fraught with significance. This emphasis on
the visual over the literary led inevitably to a development
that many consider a crucial turning in the history of
melodrama, the creation of sensational melodrama, so called
because it emphasized sensational effects produced through
lavish spectacle and relying on the latest stage technologies.
The crucial figure here was the Irish playwright and actor, Dion
Boucicault (1820-1890) who, after achieving success in London,
4
lived and worked in New York from 1853 to 1860. It was in 1860
that he produced The Colleen Bawn, a melodrama about a
beautiful, fair-haired girl (in Irish, cailín bán or colleen
bawn) with a water-cave scene that set a new standard for
spectacle. When a hired thug attempts to murder the heroine Eile
by drowning her, audiences could see her body slowly sinking to
the bottom of the pool, their sight deceived by yards of light
blue gauze and a system or mirrors arranged below a trap door.
Then came the thrilling rescue.
Two last points needs to be made about Boucicault and the
history of melodrama. Three years before The Colleen Bawn, he
wrote and produced The Poor of New York (1857), a work that
culminates in a spectacular scene that features a three-storey
house being consumed by flames while the hero rushes in and
saves a vital document from destruction. In the early melodrama
of Pixerécourt, the villain was typically an aristocrat and the
setting often rural or rustic. But in The Poor of New York the
villain is a banker, Gideon Bloodgood, and the setting is the
modern city. Boucicault was responding to the tastes of
contemporary audiences, who now wanted contemporary works in
contemporary settings, not the more romantic locales of earlier
melodrama. In the United States, however, one final change in
melodrama occurred in the years after 1880, with the appearance
of a social divide that separated middle-class melodrama from
working-class or popular melodrama, sometimes called “ten-
5
twenty-thirty” melodrama because tickets for it cost ten,
twenty, or thirty cents. In ten-twenty-thirty melodrama, the
practices of sensational melodrama were pushed to new extremes:
sensational scenes occurred not just at the finale of the play,
but the end of every act. When popular culture took up the new
subject matter offered by that novel metropolitan figure, the
secretary, it did so via the conventions of ten-twenty-thirty
melodrama or contiguous forms strongly influenced by it.
One such form was the dime novel. Its origins went back to
1860, when the firm Beadle and Adams published Malaeska by Ann
Stephens, a tale that recounts the tribulations of the Indian
wife of a white hunter in colonial days. It proved an instant
success, and was soon followed by others that made up a series,
Beadle’s Dime Novels (whence the term, “dime novels”). Other
publishers followed suit, and by 1890 “there were about fourteen
firms in the field publishing ten-cent books.”1 It was in 1889
that Street & Smith chose to enter it. Active since 1855, it was
the publisher of a newspaper called the New York Weekly that was
devoted to serialized popular fiction, mixed with miscellaneous
entertainment and information, and reaching some 300,000
readers. The decision to publish dime novels was an effort to
maximize income: novels already serialized in the newspaper
could be recycled as independent books. The first two series,
the Log Cabin Library and the Nugget Library, proved highly
profitable, and in 1897 the firm launched the Eagle Library, a
6
series directly targeted at women and, to judge by the image
that graced the cover of every volume (fig. 1), especially
younger women. Estelle’s
Millionaire Lover; or, The
Prettiest Typewriter in New
York, published in serial form
in 1893, was now reprinted as
title “No. 27” in the Eagle
Library.2
Its cover and title-page
ascribe Estelle to one Julia
Edwards, a pseudonym adopted by
popular writer John Russell
Coryell (1851-1924) with
encouragement from Street & Smith, who feared his credibility
with male readers would be lost if it were discovered that he
wrote women’s stories. Previously a failed shipping broker, then
an author of juvenile stories in the early 1880s, Coryell
published his first serialized novel, The American Marquis; or,
A Detective for Vengeance, in 1885 in the New York Weekly.3 It
was only the beginning. Between 1885 and 1892 he churned out
fourteen novels, all but one serialized and then published as a
book by Street & Smith: eight under the name of detective Nick
Carter, including the first three in that celebrated series,
three under that of Julia Edwards, another under Geraldine
7
Fleming (a wholly fictitious author whose works were written by
various writers with Street & Smith), and two more under
Coryell’s own name.4 The man who once more donned the name of
Julia Edwards and turned to Estelle was a hardened veteran of
popular fiction.
Estelle is a melodramatic adventure story. Though written
nearly a century after Pixerécourt first devised melodrama’s
basic constellation of characters, it deploys the same pattern-with a crucial difference. Estelle, a secretary, is the
innocent, persecuted woman who is aligned with her suitor Harry
Harding to make up the forces of good. Arrayed against them are
the forces of evil, the villain and his accomplice, and yet it
is here that Estelle breaks new ground. The roles of villainand-accomplice are not fulfilled by two specific characters, but
by an endless succession of them. The first villain is Estelle’s
employer, the stockbroker Harrison Banks, who tries to seduce
then abduct Estelle in concert with an accomplice, his head
clerk Victor Dumont. But Victor eventually betrays and bests his
employer (chs. 1-12), and in effect is promoted from accomplice
to villain (chs. 12-24. A chance encounter brings him into
contact with Mrs. Moss, who incarnates utterly random and
malignant evil, and who willingly becomes his accomplice.
Together they set out to abduct Estelle: he in order to seduce
and/or rape her, she to observe this activity with relish.
When Victor falls off a cliff and is killed, the machinery
8
of villain-and-accomplice grinds to a halt and has to be
restarted. The new villain is Mabel Richards. She, like Estelle,
is in love with Harry Harding; but since Harry is utterly,
totally, maniacally faithful to Estelle, she is impelled by
jealous rage to seek Estelle’s annihilation. In short, she
replaces Victor Dumont. (Yes, a woman can also become a
villain.) And it goes without saying that she soon acquires an
accomplice. Just as Mabel is a frustrated rival of Estelle in
pursuit of Harry Harding, Wilfred Strong is a frustrated rival
of Harry Harding in pursuit of Estelle. A coincidence brings the
two together, and Wilfred becomes her accomplice. Out of two
frustrated love triangles, a new pairing of villain + accomplice
has been born:
Estelle Everett
Mabel Richardson
Wilfred Strong
Harry Harding
villain + accomplice
Harry Harding
Estelle Everett
When this new duo of villain and accomplice is frustrated in its
aim of annihilating Estelle, it is replaced by yet another.
Victor Dumont’s erstwhile accomplice, Mrs. Moss, now reappears
9
on the scene to pursue her malignant goal of ensuring that
Estelle is debauched; like Victor Dumont, she now receives a
promotion from mere accomplice to certified villain, and she
enlists a new accomplice, the depraved sensualist Mr. Marshall,
to assist her. But Estelle escapes from them and is finally
reunited with Harding. The novel comes to an end--of sorts. For
in principle, it is truly endless.
The simple pairing of villain-and-accomplice that
characterized earlier melodrama has become a machine that
produces endless pairings and substitutions:
Villain
Accomplice
Harrison Banks
Victor Dumont
Victor Dumont
Mrs. Moss
Mabel Richards
Wilfred Strong
Mrs. Moss
Mr. Marshall
In its very structure, in other words, the novel reproduces the
operation of that terminological mistake (the pretty typewriter)
which had conjoined a person and a machine that produces an
endless chain of texts, each substituted by another. It too
fuses a person (the character Estelle) with a machine (the novel
Estelle) that produces an endless chain of texts, or villainaccomplice pairings, each substituted by another. No wonder the
novel’s subtitle should underscore just that conflation, in the
10
superlative form: The Prettiest Typewriter in New York.
Estelle can be divided into two parts (chs. 1-24, and 2555), each with two pairings of villain and accomplice:
Part 1
Part 2
VILLAIN
VillaiVillain
Harrison Banks
ACCOMPLICE
VILLAIN
ACCOMPLICE
Victor Dumont
Mabel Richards
Wilfred Strong
Victor Dumont
Mrs. Moss
Mrs. Moss
Mr. Marshall
In plotting, this symmetrical arrangement of antagonists is
transformed into an escalating pattern of major events. In the
novel’s first part, Estelle is abducted twice by Victor Dumont,
once in New York when he acts alone, and once in Colorado
Springs when he acts in concert with Mrs. Moss. In its second,
instead, she is abducted four times (once a virtual abduction
when she is duped into marriage with Wilfred Strong; once by
Mabel Richards; once more by Mrs. Moss, now acting in concert
with Mr. Marshall; and yet again by Mabel Richards, this time
acting with Wilfred Strong). Her final abduction culminates in a
crescendo of violence: Mabel mistakenly murders her accomplice,
Wilfred, then is accidentally bespattered with the horrific
lotion that she was planning to use to disfigure Estelle’s face,
and at last, in a state of impotent fury, blows out her own
11
brains.
The final scene’s hyperbolic sensationalism should not
distract us from noticing the book’s essentially modular
construction. The characters form a sharply delimited
vocabulary, pairings of villain-and-accomplice, which is then
deployed by a narrative syntax equally limited: the pairs
repeatedly abduct and menace the heroine Estelle, threatening
her with rape (three times), unwanted marriage (once), or the
disfigurement of her face and drug-induced insanity (two times).
What follows is an escape effected by a benevolent stranger
(once), by Estelle herself (two times), or by her forever
faithful Harry Harding (three times, two in episodes that cap
off parts one and two). This limited repertoire of events is
matched by the uniformity of the settings where the
abductions/threats transpire. All are variants of a single,
confined space: the interior of a hack (or carriage for hire), a
remote cave, a small chapel, a hotel room so isolated that
noises from it cannot be heard, or two rooms shuttered and shut
away inside houses both situated in remote, country locations
(demotic versions of the gothic castle). And this uniformity in
the settings where Estelle is abducted casts a retrospective
glow over the twin incidents that occur at the novel’s
beginning, when Estelle is subjected to unwanted advances by
head clerk Victor Dumont and Harrison Banks, her employer. The
office has become another confined space, a site for verbal and
12
sexual torture. The settings are as constricted as the
constellation of characters and the repertoire of events and,
like them, are interchangeable cogs within an efficient machine
for producing the illusion of sensational narrative.
Edna the Pretty Typewriter, a novella by Grace Miller
White, was first published in 1907, or ten years after Estelle.5
It was based on a play of the same name, no longer extant,
ostensibly written by John Oliver, one of six pseudonyms adopted
by playwright Owen Davis (1874-1956), an author so prolific he
used multiple pseudonyms to avoid giving spectators the
impression that they were watching play after play by the same
man. Edna was one of fifty-eight he wrote for producer Albert
Herman Woods (1870-1951) during a five year period (1905-1910)
when the two men were bound by a contract: Davis could write
plays for no other producer, and Woods could produce plays by no
other author.6 Edna premiered on 26 August 1907, at the American
Theatre in New York, then began its relentless tour on the Stair
and Havlin circuit of theaters.7 From its foundation in 1900 by
Edward D. Stair (1859-1951), who owned numerous theaters in
Michigan, and John H. Havlin (1847?-1924), who owned theaters in
St. Louis and elsewhere, to its dissolution in 1915, Stair and
Havlin controlled more than 150 theaters and monopolized
American popular-priced, working-class melodrama.8 Contemporary
reviews document Edna’s appearance in Brooklyn, Boston,
Rochester (NY), Washington, D.C., Chicago, and elsewhere.9 Edna
13
was played by Edith Browning, about whom little is known, except
that she played the title role in Bertha the Sewing Machine Girl
the year before.10
The author who “novelized” Edna, Grace Miller White (18681957) was born in New York and attended the American School of
Dramatic Art. Between 1901 and 1907 she novelized fifty-three
different plays, about eight per year, all melodramas spanning a
wide range of types (westerns, women’s plays, etc.). Each was
typically 120 pages or 30,000 words in length, supplemented by a
dollop of advertisements trumpeting theatrical agencies, patent
medicines, and books such as Confessions of a Bell Boy,
Temptations of the Stage, or The Art of Kissing. After 1907
White went on to author novels on her own account, writing some
fourteen, of which the most celebrated was Tess of the Storm
Country, a melodramatic work that was twice turned into a
popular film (1914, 1922) starring Mary Pickford, “America’s
sweetheart” and silent cinema’s biggest female star.11
John Stuart Ogilvie (1843-1910), the publisher of Edna and
White’s other novelizations, had established his firm in 1868 at
29 Rose Street in New York, next door to 29-31 Rose Street where
Street & Smith (the publisher of Estelle) was located from 1869
on. The two shared more than a common address. Ogilvie went into
partnership with Frances Scott Street, the co-proprietor of
Street & Smith, though it was terminated three years later when
Street died. Yet it had yielded a series of paperbacks called
14
The People’s Library, cheap “railroad literature” or
“yellowbacks” meant to be sold by newsboys on trains for a few
cents. In 1886 Ogilvie entered a new partnership with his
brother George, but their acrimonious relationship resulted in a
split in 1902. Hoping to revive his fortunes, Ogilvie introduced
the Play Book Series, novels made from contemporary melodramas
and often drawn from the repertoire of the Al Woods Production
Company.12 Edna was no. 113 in the series, described on back
covers as presenting “popular novels written from plays.”
Tellingly, the
next book in the
series (no. 114)
re-described it as
presenting “novels
founded on popular
plays and moving
pictures.”13 The
change epitomized
a vast
transformation in
the media ecology
of popular
culture.
The cover of
15
Edna sends a subtle signal to a discerning reader. It depicts a
young man who observes a lavishly dressed young woman just as
she is about to step into an automobile, accompanied by an older
and obviously wealthy man, “Great heavens!” he exclaims, “My
sister Edna!” But a reader soon discovers, by page five, that
Edna is an only child and an orphan. The cover, in other words,
testifies to the work’s interest in producing sensational
effects, and its indifference to the logical-causal
connectedness of more realistic fiction.
The plot of Edna, the Pretty Typewriter (the novel) is
driven forward by the doings of two villains.14 The first is Kate
Burnett, an “adventuress” who, though married to a Mexican
desperado named Red Pete, goes along with his plan that she
marry Tom Boynton, a prospector in the Sierra Madre mountains
who is on the verge of striking it rich. When Tom does so,
however, he takes the precaution of assigning his wealth to his
daughter Edna, far away in New York and working for his cousin,
Clifford Marlow; and he entrusts the task of making these
arrangements to Dave Fairfax, “a young businessman” in the play,
an “engineer” (Edna, 38) in the novel. When Tom discovers Kate’s
infidelities with Red Pete, he slays his rival in a duel and
promptly writes a letter to Edna, repudiating Kate as his wife
and assigning her the grant to the mine. When he incautiously
shows this document to Kate, she blasts him dead. But before
Kate can recover the crucial document, Fairfax steps into the
16
scene and secures them for Edna. The rest of the novel, set in
New York city, consists of attempts to wrest control of the mine
from Edna, a series of four abductions. These are executed by
Kate in concert with Edna’s employer, ship-owner Clifford
Marlow, and are
repeatedly foiled by
Dave and Edna acting
together, with each
escape punctuated by
progressively greater
spectacle. Abducted to a
tenement house, Edna is
rescued by Dave and
leaps from the
building’s rooftop onto
a speeding elevated
train that is passing
below. (This scene was
used for a contemporary
poster, reproduced in
black-and-white in the
novel; the caption, like
the one on the novel’s cover, is careless with details: “her
employer’s office”!) Abducted and locked into a safe that will
suffocate her in twenty minutes, Edna is rescued when Dave blows
17
open the safe with nitroglycerin. Abducted yet again in an
automobile, she struggles with her assailants till Dave’s car
catches up with them and she can boldly leap from one speeding
car to another. (This scene appeared in a second poster, also
reproduced in black-and-white in the novel.) Finally, Edna is
captured one last time in the Coney Island dance hall of a
criminal helping Clifford Marlow and Kate Burnett; tied to a
chair, she can only watch helplessly as Marlow orders his head
clerk, Norton, to shoot her. But gripped by a fit of revulsion
or regret, Norton instead aims the gun at his boss. “With a
horrible laugh he sent a bullet through Marlow” (Edna, 121).
Edna, like Estelle, adopts a symmetrical constellation of
characters, though one much less florid. Kate and Clifford
Marlow become joint villains, receiving assistance from Marlow’s
18
head clerk and a hired gangster. These accomplices are counterbalanced by Moses Lotto and Mrs. McCune, the Jewish and Irish
comic figures who work in Edna’s office (clerk, scrub-woman) and
have hearts of gold.15 As in Estelle, action and event are
propelled by the regular rhythm of abduction and flight,
entrapment and escape, and the scene of the abduction is a
confined, enclosed space that is a variant of a Gothic chamber:
the tenement house, the safe, the speeding automobile (an
updated version of the hack where Estelle is first abducted),
and the back room in the dance hall. As in Estelle, this later
configuration of spaces casts a retrospective glow on the
earlier office scenes, where Edna too is subjected to the
unwanted attentions of her boss, turning the office into a scene
of torment. But whereas the confining spaces in Estelle are
predominantly set in remote, rural locations (four out of six),
in Edna they are located in the city. And it is Edna’s grasp of
the metropolis and its new technologies that enables her to save
herself on two occasions, when she leaps from the tenement
rooftop onto a passing elevated train or jumps from one speeding
automobile to another. Edna, in other words, is a character more
directly aligned with the city: its new technologies can pose
threats and dangers, but they can also be mastered and prove her
means of salvation.
Belle, the Typewriter Girl is a play in five acts that
dates from 1898, or roughly midway between Estelle (1893) and
19
Edna (1907).16 Between 1893 and 1904
its author, Bernard Francis Moore,
published twenty-two plays (including
Belle), and then after an interval of
six years a twenty-third. Six took up
Irish subject matter announced in
titles such as Captain Jack, or the
Irish Outlaw, an Original Irish Drama
(1894), and all but three of his
works were published by Walter H.
Baker, a firm active in Boston since
1892.17 From the recurrent subject
matter and his publisher’s location,
as well as his name, one infers that
Moore was born in Ireland or of
Irish-American descent and that he
belonged to that large Irish-American
community in Boston. Belle was
probably meant for performance by
local or community theatre groups.
For although it runs to five acts,
each has only one scene; further,
Acts 1 and 2 and again 3 and 5 share
the same setting, so that there are
Several times Victor Dumont,
encouraged by the softening she had
shown when she arrived in the
morning, endeavored to talk with her
in a confidential way, but each time
she repulsed him coldly.
His anger seemed to grow with his
repeated rebuffs, and at last he grasped
an opportunity when Mr. Banks was
out of the office, and he went boldly to
Estelle.
“Miss Everett,” he said, in a low
intense tone, “you treat me worse than
you do anybody else in the office. I
cannot understand it. What have I done
to deserve it?”
“I do not care to discuss it with
you,” she coldly answered.
The black eyes of the young man
snapped with passion.
“But you must,” he said. “I am not
like one of those other clerks out there,
to be put off with a cold look. I have
borne your resentment and coldness
long enough. I love you, Estelle, and I
must tell you so.”
“Sir!” she cried, rising haughtily, as
if she would check him.
But he was not to be checked.
“Oh, you cannot frighten me with a
look or a word,” he cried. “I tell you
that I love you, and I swear that I will
win you! Ah, Estelle, my dear one! my
beauty! why not yield your pride and
consent to return the passionate love I
bear you?”
Stop!” she cried, her breast heaving
with anger. “I will not listen to such
words from you. I believe you
unworthy any pure girl’s love, and to
me your words are an insult! Leave
me, or I will complain to Mr. Banks!”
His olive faced turned livid with
wrath and disappointment.
“Ah,” he sneered malevolently,
“you think you are safe in counting on
Mr. Banks. You prefer him because he
is rich. But I know you secretly laugh
at him, and you shall never be his.”
“Begone, sir!” she cried, a flood of
crimson dyeing her neck and cheeks.
“After this wanton insult, I forbid you
ever addressing me a word except on
business. If you dare to speak to me on
any other subject, I will complain to
Mr. Banks, Oh, shame on you!”
She pointed to the door, and he did
not dare to remain, though his dark
face was convulsed with passion.
Estelle’s Millionaire Lover;
or, The Prettiest Typewriter in
New York, 12-13
By John Russell Coryell,
under the pseudonym Julia
Edwards
20
really only three scenes for the
whole play. This economy of settings
is matched by the play’s casting:
there are only seven characters, one
of whom vanishes already in Act 1,
compared with the ten to eleven
typical of popular-priced
melodrama.18
John Randall, Belle’s father,
returns to Chicago a wealthy man
after having discovered a diamond
mine in Africa. He visits his old
friend Simon Morgan, a rich banker,
in order to deposit his diamonds in
safe-keeping; but a rumor about the
bank’s weakness starts a run on the
bank, and the ensuing panic proves
too much for Randall’s ailing heart:
he dies on the spot. Simon Morgan, in
concert with his head clerk Edward
Blake, seizes the dead man’s
diamonds, halts the panic, and is
restored to his position of
preeminence. Unbeknownst to Morgan
“Will you need me any more, sir?”
asked Estelle, growing restive under his
continued glance.
Mr. Banks smiled, and looked
around to ascertain if anyone in the outer
office was looking. . .
“Need you, Miss Everett?” repeated
Mr. Banks, in a soft tone of admiration and
passion. “It seems to me that I always need
you. Do you understand me, dear? I love
you, my sweet Estelle! my beautiful girl!
Have you not discovered it? Have you been
blind to the passion that devours me?”
He was too intent on what he was
saying to notice the look of horror and
indignation that filled her eyes.
As he spoke he approached nearer
to her, and was about to clasp her in his
arms, when she sprang from her seat and
held him away with one outstretched hand.
“Stop!” she cried; “do not dare to
touch me! You address such language to
me, and have a wife? You are a scoundrel! I
know it now! I shall never come to this
office again.”
Anger and indignation made her
fearless, and she repulsed him scornfully in
spite of the terrible look of rage that chased
the first expression of amazement from his
countenance.
“Do you comprehend what you are
doing?” he demanded, subduing his anger
for a moment. “I will give you all that heart
can ask. Diamonds, silks, horses--any and
everything.”
“Every word that you utter,” she
replied, with cutting scorn as she donned
her hat and sacque, “but betrays your utter
baseness.”
“Have a care, my proud beauty!” he
furiously cried.
She ignored his threatening remark,
and said, as she turned to face him at the
door:
“There is some money due me, and
perhaps one so lost to honor will refuse to
pay it. If your conscience urges you to
justice, you know my address.”
She turned as haughtily as an
empress, and swept from the office, her
beautiful face all aflame with indignation.
John Russell Coryell, as Julia Edwards,
Estelle’s Millionaire Lover, 14
21
and Blake, however, their actions have been observed by Abe, a
Hebrew peddler who, earlier, has briefly stopped by the bank
office ostensibly to offer a gold mine for sale. One year later
(Act 2), Randall’s impoverished daughter Belle is working as
Morgan’s secretary. He makes romantic advances to her and then,
when he discovers that his son Ralph is also interested in her,
fires her. Act 3, transpiring a week or so later, takes place in
the small rooming house run by Julia Randall, Belle’s mother.
One room has been taken by Edward Blake, the former head clerk
at Simon Morgan’s bank, who has returned from South America to
Chicago in order to blackmail him over his theft of John
Randall’s diamonds. Blake makes lewd advances to Belle and is
stopped from using violence against her only by the appearance
of her beau Ralph, and the mysterious Hebrew peddler, Abe. If
the play can be said to have a sensational act, it is Act 4,
which transpires in an “old mill building on Canal Street”
(Belle, 25) where Simon has arranged to meet first Edward Blake,
ostensibly to meet his blackmail demands, and then Belle, whom
he hopes to debauch. He drugs Blake and deposits his body in a
back room. Then, when Belle both refuses his marriage
proposition and scorns his threat of rape, he assaults her and
she passes out. He deposits her body in the same room with
Blake’s and sets the building ablaze. Only the timely arrival of
Abe, aided by Belle’s beau, Ralph, prevents the double murder:
the two bodies are carried out while flames engulf the old mill,
22
providing a modestly sensational ending. The fifth act returns
to the house of Belle’s mother, Julia. Simon Morgan informs her
that he has purchased the property she rents and she will be
evicted within an hour. But when he returns, he finds himself
suddenly trapped inside the house (note how this reverses those
earlier scenes in Acts 2 and 4 where he entraps Belle), with
various witnesses appearing who attest to his crimes; the Hebrew
peddler Abe, who has choreographed this judgment scene, is
revealed to be Julia’s missing brother (or Belle’s uncle) and a
government agent who now arrests him for forgery. Belle and
Ralph are free to marry, and, as Abe comments in the play’s
penultimate sentence, “The wicked will be punished, and the
virtuous rewarded!” (44). Unlike Estelle and Edna, then, Belle
is abducted only once, and the sensational element is restricted
to the blazing mill at the end of Act 4. The ending to the play
is a judgment scene, a convention so old that it appears in the
earliest melodramas produced just after the French Revolution.19
It is not only the characters in these works who form a
series of interchangeable parts, nor the limited repertoire of
actions and events (abduction and rescue, entrapment and
escape). The same is true of the stylized language spoken by the
characters or adopted by the narrators. When confronted with the
villain’s unwanted attentions, heroines spurn them with disdain.
23
Marlow went back to the secret room
and sat down, looking into the face
of the unfortunate Edna, which was
now bathed with tears.
The rope sank deeply into
the tender flesh, and the sweet mouth
had drooped at the corners.
“You will not be tortured
further,” said the villain, “if you will
be a good girl. It all depends upon
yourself, my sweet cousin. If you
will do as I wish, you will have me
for an everlasting friend.”
Kate was listening, and
Edna, in spite of her terror, could not
but notice the startling beauty of the
woman. She was the fiend incarnate
who had killed her father, or who
had been responsible for his death,
the girl did not know which. But
Edna thought as she sat watching
Kate that if she had seen this woman
under other circumstances she would
have placed complete confidence in
her, for surely there was much to
believe in. . .
She turned her gaze upon her
cousin, who was waiting for her to
speak.
“What do you wish me to
do?” asked she in a low tone.
“I will tell you,” said Kate
before Marlow could reply. “There is
but one way for you to get off with
your life. Before you leave this
room, you must become his wife!”
They both waited for her to
answer, but she kept silent.
“I think you must be mad. I
would rather die than marry you.”
She looked at Marlow as she
replied, her eyes blazing with anger.
Grace Miller White, Edna,
the Pretty Typewriter, 94-95
Estelle, after hearing out Harrison Banks,
“repulsed him scornfully,” or two
sentences later, “replied with cutting
scorn” (Estelle, 14). The villainous
banker in Belle even complains about this
treatment: “I told you in my office I
loved you! You refused me with scorn.” But
Belle only dispenses still more of it:
“Again, sir, I refuse your offer of
marriage with scorn!” (Belle, 34).
Equally stylized diction characterizes the
heroine’s reaction to the villain’s
improper advances. Edna, for example,
replies, “eyes blazing with anger.”
Estelle storms out of the office, “her
beautiful face all aflame with
indignation” (Estelle, 53) and, while
still on the same page, with “her eyes
flashing wrathfully” (Estelle, 53). Nor
are these similarities confined to common
metaphors (eyes “blazing” or “flashing,”
faces “aflame”); at times they turn into
almost identical phrasing evident, for
example, in the responses to unwanted
24
propositions. As Estelle tells Victor Dumont: “I will not
listen to such words from you” (Estelle, 13). Edna, a
decade later, says much the same to her boss, Clifford
Marlow: “I will not listen to words of love from a man such
as you” (Edna, 60).
Villains issue stylized warnings, such as this one
from Harrison Banks: “‘Have a care, my proud beauty!’” he
furiously cried” (Estelle, 14). Five years later Simon
Morgan adopts the same wording, almost verbatim: “Have a
care, girl! We are alone in this building” (Belle, 34). And
their warnings are often followed by stark antitheses: “‘Be
careful how you anger me!’ he said, threateningly, ‘you
shall either be mine or go to prison’” (Estelle, 53). Or in
the words of Simon Morgan to Belle: “Girl, you will either
leave this place as my wife or you will go forth a degraded
creature . . .” (Belle, 34).
Such stylized language is partly a result of the
stylized action. Threatened with unwanted advances at the
office, the heroine can either expel the intruder or leave
herself. When Estelle is approached by head clerk Victor Dumont,
she takes the first approach: “‘Begone, sir!’ she cried . . .
She pointed to the door, and he did not dare to remain . . .”
(Estelle, 13). Five years later, Belle adopts this same tactic
with head clerk Edward Blake, then rooming at her house: “Leave
the house, sir, and never enter this home again” (Belle, 29).
25
But when her boss insults Estelle, she
adopts the other tactic: “She turned
as haughty as an empress and swept
from the office . . .” (Estelle, 14).
Edna does so, too: “With this she went
out of the office, her head held high”
(Edna, 60).
The unwitting reader who turns
from Estelle to Belle or from Belle to
Edna may be forgiven for thinking that
she has been reading a single work
perhaps entitled Estebellena, or in
reverse order, Edbestelle.
Despite their shared
constellations of characters, common
plotting, and stylized language, these
three works differ from other
contemporary melodramas, such as
Theodore Kremer’s Bertha the Sewing
Machine Girl (1906) or Owen Davis’s
Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model
(1906). They fret over the theme of
trust, and do on two complementary
As he reached the hall, Dave heard the
sound of voices, and turning in the
direction whence the sound proceeded,
saw an open door at the end of the
hallway.
Walking on tiptoe, the young
engineer reached the doorway and looked
in. Marlow and Edna were the only
occupants. The shipowner was saying:
“You will marry me or die!”
“Not this time!” cried Dave,
rushing into the room. “Make your escape
by the roof, Edna!” he shouted to the girl,
who lost no time in obeying the command.
The two men grappled with each
other, but the struggle was short, for Dave
managed to free his right hand, and dealt
the shipowner a blow on the jaw which
sent him to the floor.
Not waiting to see the effect of his
blow, Dave darted into the hall and up the
stairs to the roof.
As Dave made his escape, the rest
of the band rushed into the room he had
just left in time to see Marlow struggling
to his feet.
Marlow shouted to them to follow
him, and led the way to the roof.
Edna was upon the roof, running
wildly about. She could find no place in
the dark to get out of the way of her
enemies.
“I’ve got you,” said a low voice,
and Marlow was close upon her.
Just then Dave shouted something,
and the girl understood.
She saw the means of escape, and
when the elevated train passed by, she
gave a spring like a deer and landed upon
the roof of the last car. She was thrown
down by the impact, but falling across the
raised portion of the roof on her hands and
knees, was soon enabled to assume a safe
position.
Grace Miller White, Edna, the Pretty Typewriter, 100-01
levels: diction and plot. From the
26
moment Estelle Everett meets Harry Harding, she entrusts herself
to him completely. As the two flee New York to escape Estelle’s
pursuers, Estelle makes this explicit: “‘My life is in your
keeping,’ she said, ‘and I trust you wholly.’”
Or as the
omniscient narrator notes a moment later: “Her trust in him was
absolute” (Estelle, 31). Estelle’s trust in Harry is so total,
so inexplicable if one considers how little time they have known
one another, that she dares not mention it to Mrs. Banks, who
offers her refuge and shelter:
She would not have dared to tell this stricken woman that
she had known Harry but for a few hours.
Then, indeed, Mrs. Banks would have scoffed at her
credulity in trusting so implicitly a man of whom she knew
so little. (Estelle, 61)
But the term “trust” also turns up at the critical moment when
Estelle, now renamed Jessie (don’t ask: it’s complicated), is
trapped in a remote cave and threatened with rape:
“You are in my power, and your own good sense must
tell you that you can be forced or drugged into
compliance.”
“I will put my trust in Heaven!” moaned Jessie.
(Estelle, 82)
27
Once again the narrator reiterates (three lines later): “But
crushed, stunned as she was, she had no thought of yielding. She
put her trust in Heaven . . .” (Estelle, 82). Even after Harry
learns that Estelle has just married Wilfred Strong, the two
reaffirm their trust despite this major setback:
“Do you believe I will be untrue to the promise I made
you on the cliff out there in the mountains?”
“No.”
“Then trust me completely, dear.” (Estelle, 140)
As the two lovers get ready to part, perhaps forever, they
repeat this ritual:
“You trust me, Harry?” she sobbed, her heart-strings
seeming nigh to breaking as she saw him move away from her.
“I trust you absolutely. Heaven bless you and keep
you!” (Estelle, 143)
These remarks index a ubiquitous concern with “trust,” and the
related terms “belief/believe” and “promise.” In a novel that
extends to just over 200 pages, these three terms alone occur
163 times (trust, 33 times; belief/believe, 65 times; promise,
65 times), or once for every 1.35 pages. And while they
28
sometimes appear in innocuous expressions, of the sort “I
believe it’s raining outside,” the overwhelming majority are
fraught with significance of the sort we have seen. To
understand that better, we must briefly consider that curious
term “trust,” both verb and noun.
One everyday (and reasonable) notion of trust defines it as
a form of weak inductive knowledge that enables us to make
inferences about predictability and future reliability. Our
local butcher, say, has a good reputation for quality meats, we
have purchased and sampled them a few times, and we believe or
trust that we will be able to do so again in the near future.
But when Estelle impetuously entrusts herself to Harry Harding,
or when she later conceals that from Mrs. Banks because she
“would have scoffed at her credulity in trusting so implicitly a
man of whom she knew so little” (Estelle, 61), it is selfevident that her trust is something of a different order,
something more than just a sturdy thread that has been spun of
inductive knowledge and reasonable inference.
The nature of that “something more” can be seen in a
comment on the concept of trust by the great sociologist of
modernity Georg Simmel, one that appears in his seminal work on
The Philosophy of Money (first published in 1900). When we
believe in something such as money, Simmel writes, it entails
“an assurance and lack of resistance in the surrender of the Ego
to this conception, which may rest upon particular reasons, but
29
is not explained by them.”20 Such trust, in other words, is a
form of “faith” that has a quasi-religious component. Or, to
borrow from Anthony Giddens’s reformulation of Simmel: our
“confidence vested in probable outcomes expresses a commitment
to something rather than just a cognitive understanding.”21
Estelle’s trust in Harry arises from more than cognitive
understanding; it bypasses inductive knowledge and reasonable
inference, and instead consists of faith in and commitment to
the abstract goodness that he incarnates. Likewise when Harry,
even after learning that she has just been married to Wilfred
Strong, tells her that “I trust you absolutely,” his statement
derives not from, but despite inductive knowledge or cognitive
understanding.
The same dynamics can be seen at work in those critical
moments when Estelle, entrapped by Victor, affirms that she will
put her “trust in Heaven!” (Estelle, 82), or when Harry trusts
“to fate to assist him” (Estelle, 210). Like readers assessing
the stories in which both are embedded, they can expect a
positive outcome, a happy ending, only if they bypass inductive
knowledge and reasonable inference, our everyday sense of trust
and confidence; their belief, instead, must consist of strong or
deeper trust, a faith in and a commitment to that abstract
goodness whose revelation is, at one and the same time, the
unfolding of the melodramatic plot and the disclosure of the
world to which it claims to be a counterpart.
30
Similar dynamics of trust are readily discernible in Belle,
written five years later. When her father turns up in the office
of the banker Simon Morgan with his South African diamonds, he
entrusts them to him on shared contextual grounds that invoke
inductive knowledge and inference: “Being raised together,” he
writes in letter to Simon just before he arrives, “I know I can
trust you” (Belle, 4), a point he soon reiterates in person: “I
know you are thoroughly honest, Simon, and that I can trust you”
(Belle, 10). But this everyday sort of trust, derived from
induction and inference, may be fundamentally inadequate for the
complexities of modernity--and already on the next page his
diamonds have been misappropriated. Instead it is that
different, that deeper sort of trust that the Hebrew peddler Abe
demands: “Shust trust in me and all vill then be vell,” he says.
To which Ralph, Belle’s beau, replies in a way that reinforces a
distinction between everyday trust and deep trust: “Blamed if I
won’t, old man. I don’t know much about you, but there seems to
be the ring of truth in all you say” (Belle, 31).
Ralph,
speaking here in Act 4, restages the kind of deep trust that
Belle immediately reposes in the mysterious Hebrew peddler
earlier, when he reveals to her the starling news, “your fader
did not return from South Africa as poor as he went” (Belle,
15). In response, Belle pointedly asks him for evidence:
Belle: And have you proof of what you say?
31
Abe (shaking his head slowly): I have noddings now.
Vhat broof I had, has been lost. (Belle, 16)
Belle believes and trusts him anyway. As she tells her mother
when she inquires about the assertions of “the strange Jew”: “I
am sure he knows perfectly well that father did not return to
America as poor as we all suppose” (Belle, 23). And rightly so,
despite the lack of evidence or grounds for inductive knowledge:
Abe will morph into a government agent who saves her life,
exposes Simon’s forgery and fraud, and (presumably) restores her
fortune. As they do in Estelle, the words “trust,”
“believe/belief,” and “promise” recur with startling frequency
in Belle: thirty-eight times in a work only forty-four pages in
length (nearly once per page).
Just as John Randall entrusts his diamonds to Simon Morgan
at the start of Belle, so Tom Boynton at the beginning of Edna
entrusts the transfer of funds from the gold mine to his
daughter to Dave Fairfax--but with a key difference. He scarcely
knows the young engineer. “You are a gentleman, and I know I can
trust you,” he explains (Edna, 33). Indeed, his decision is at
first glance so unfounded that he troubles to explain it again
after only a sentence: “From the very first day my eyes lighted
on you I said to myself, ‘there’s a man who can be trusted’”
(Edna, 33). Unlike John Randall, Boynton acts not on contextual
knowledge and inference (“being raised together”), but on a
32
quasi-religious faith, trust not in an individual but in the
systemic properties that he embodies. When Dave Fairfax, in
turn, reaches New York, he must introduce himself to Edna as a
stranger, yet secure her trust: “‘You and I are strangers,’ said
Dave Fairfax, addressing himself to Edna . . ., ‘but way down in
the mountains of Mexico I promised your father that I would be
your friend’” (Edna, 71). Edna’s trust in him, like Estelle’s in
Harry Harding, is instantaneous and complete. Yes, Dave goes on
to show her the letter addressed to her in her father’s own
hand; but her trust in him precedes it and is not explained by
it. As in Edna and Belle, the terms “trust,” “belief/believe,”
and “promise” are reiterated over and over: forty-four times in
a work that extends to a little over a hundred pages.
When Simmel comments on the “socio-pyschological quasireligious faith” within trust, he does so while pondering the
peculiar kind of trust that we vest in money. As Giddens
explicates Simmel’s thinking: “Anyone who uses monetary tokens
does so on the presumption that others, whom she or he never
meets, [also] honour their value. It is money as such which is
trusted, not only, or even primarily the persons with whom
particular transactions are carried out.”22 Much the same logic
can be applied to popular-priced melodrama of the sort that we
have been considering. Estelle, Belle, and Edna are, for all
practical purposes, completely interchangeable. Each is nestled
within a constellation of characters and a repertoire of events
33
and actions that are communicated in stylized idioms which,
allowing for modest variations, have an unmistakable family
resemblance. When Estelle announces that she will trust in
Heaven, or Harry that he will trust to fate, they announce a
faith like that which we place in money. Their faith is not
lodged in any particular coin, in my fate or our destiny, but in
the field of systemic relations that produce any fate, all
destinies. Nor is it lodged in any particular bearer of those
coins (Harry Harding, say, or Dave Fairfax, who are all
interchangeable anyway). Melodrama, at such moments, becomes the
currency of our imaginary transactions with modernity. And the
heroine of such popular melodramas becomes a strange figure: she
is modernity incarnate, a wholly new type of working woman at
ease with novel technology and at home amid high finance, and
simultaneously charged with restaging a performance of that
deep, “quasi-religious” or systemic trust requisite both to
melodrama and modernity, trust independent of immediacies of
context and inductive knowledge.
A strange irony attends the fate that soon engulfed
popular-priced, sensational melodrama on the stage. It died
almost overnight. The fundamental cause was economic, from both
the producer’s and the consumer’s viewpoint. For producers the
immediate cause was the success of Nellie the Beautiful Cloak
Model, an Owen Davis/Al Woods production from 1906; it set a new
34
standard for a so-called “big show” or “Super-Special,” a type
of work much more expensive to produce because of the greater
number of scenes and sensational effects. Everyone was soon
producing them, as Owen Davis later recalled, “and in three
years popular-priced melodrama was dead.”23 The additional
expenses cut profits to the bone. Already by 1910, the Stair and
Havlin circuit, where Edna had once trod the boards, was being
re-geared for popular-priced vaudeville.24 Al Woods, the producer
of Edna, chose instead to go upmarket, moving (as one
contemporary report put it) “into ‘the two dollar game,’ meaning
the production of plays of better literary quality and looser
morality.”25 By 1920 he was being dubbed “the purveyor in chief
of bedroom farces.”26 Owen Davis himself undertook a wholesale
rehab program, converting himself into a “serious” dramatist who
even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Grace Miller White, after two
more novellas for Ogilvie in 1907, left for good to become a
novelist in her own right. Ogilvie, instead, suffered a stroke
in 1907 and died in 1910; his son nursed the ailing firm for
nine more years before it finally collapsed.
The other side of the economic transaction was the
consumer’s. In June 1905, Harry Davis named his storefront
theater in Pittsburgh the Nickelodeon and began presenting
continuous programs of moving pictures. By 1910 there were some
10,000 nickelodeons in America. Frequented by immigrants and
white-collar women, they stole the very audience that had
35
thrilled to Edna, the Pretty Typewriter.27 Costing only five
cents, it was considerably less than the 25-cent matinee price
for Edna, far less than the 35 to 75 cents charged for evening
performances. And cinema was plainly alert to popular tastes for
the secretary as subject matter. Already in 1908 an anonymous
producer filmed Daisy, the Pretty Typewriter, while the
legendary Edwin S. Porter--once credited with creating narrative
cinema when he made Life of an American Fireman (1902-1903) and
The Great Train Robbery (1903)--directed Nellie, The Pretty
Typewriter, both lost. In late 1909 D. W. Griffith directed Her
Horrible Ordeal, a melodrama which recounted how the office
secretary is locked into a safe and nearly suffocated until
rescued at the last minute by her boss and his handsome son, her
beau. It lasted only 17 minutes, but its clever cross-cutting
was a harbinger of the devices that would be welded together to
form the feature film, or extended narrative, already a
discernible form by 1914 and fully codified by Griffth’s Birth
of a Nation in 1916.28 By then the dime novels and popular-priced
melodramas that had treated the “pretty typewriter” were long
forgotten. The pretty typewriter’s spell as muse of the
melodramatic metropolis had come to an end. Secretaries and
typists in the real world, instead, were now vastly increasing
in number, and the search for fictional forms to represent them
would turn elsewhere.
36
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory, or From Pulp Row to
Quality Street (New York: Random House, 1955), 74.
2. John Russell Coryell, under the pseudonym Julia Edwards,
Estelle’s Millionaire Lover; or, the Prettiest Type-Writer in
New York (New York: Street & Smith, 1893). The Eagle Library was
begun on 1 March, 1897, according to the American Women’s Dime
Novel Project (http://chnm.gmu/dimenovels/romance_series.html).
But we know that Estelle’s Millionaire Lover was already being
published in early 1893. A unique, folio-sized edition of the
work, covering only chapters one through eight, was issued by
the London publisher James Henderson and is preserved at the
British Library. The unique copy not only bears the printed
declaration that it was published on 13 January, 1893, but has
also been date-stamped by the British Library on the same day.
This edition was probably taken from the serialized version
appearing concurrently in the Street & Smith New York Weekly.
3. It appeared between 30 March and 15 June, 1885, assigned to
“Milton Quarterly,” though four years later the book version was
issued under Coryell’s name. Coryell’s early career and
publications are recounted by J. Randolph Cox, “A Syndicate of
Rascals: the Men Behind Nick Carter,” Dime Novel Roundup 63.1
(February 1994): 2-12.
4. The first three novels that launched Nick Carter and were
37
authored by Coryell were The Old Detective’s Pupil (1886), A
Wall Street Haul (1887), and Fighting Against Millions (18881889). After these, he produced another five Nick Carter novels,
all for Street & Smith: $5,000 Reward: or, The Missing Bride
(1890), A Woman’s Hand, or The Hardest Kind of case (1890), The
Piano Box Mystery (1892), Crime of a Countess (1892), and Titled
Counterfeiter (1892). During the years 1889-1890, his three
novels under the pseudonym of Julia Edwards were Prettiest of
All (1889), The Little Widow; or, The Fortune Hunter’s Doom
(1890) and Beautiful but Poor (1890) all for Street & Smith. In
addition, in 1891 he wrote Sadia the Rosebud under the name
Geraldine Fleming, the fictitious writer; and in 1892 he
published Diego Pinzon, a historical novel issued with Harper &
Brothers under his own name. It is also reported that Coryell
was the cousin of Ormond Smith, son of Francis Smith (the cofounder of Street & Smith), who joined the firm in 1883 (note
that Coryell’s first novel for the firm dates from 1884) and
then took over after his father’s death in 1887. The same source
reports that Coryell also wrote under the pseudonym Bertha Clay.
See Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory, or From Pulp Row to
Quality Street (New York: Random House, 1955), 61-63.
5. Grace Miller White, Edna, the Pretty Typewriter (New York: J.
S. Ogilvie, 1907); hereafter cited within the text as Edna,
followed by page numbers.
6. Davis explains his use of pseudonyms in his autobiography,
38
I’d Like to Do It Again (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931),
111; his contract with Woods, 83; see also Lewin Goff, “The Owen
Davis-Al Woods Melodrama Factory,” Educational Theatre Journal
11.3 (October 1959): 200-207.
7. New York Times, 25 August 1907, X4, col. 2; see also the
anonymous review, “Plans for ‘Other House,’” New York Times, 27
August 1907, 7, which notes that the play had been able to
“arouse the enthusiasm of a large audience at the American
Theatre last evening.”
8. On Stair and Havlin, see their entry in Don B. Wilmeth with
Tice L. Miller (eds.), The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre
(Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 364.
9. See Anonymous, “Reviews of New Plays: Edna, the Pretty
Typewriter,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 7 September 1907, 4;
Anonymous, “Amusement Notes,” Boston Globe, 19 September 1907,
2; Anonymous, “Offerings at Local Play Houses: Academy--‘Edna,
the Pretty Typewriter,’” Washington Post, 22 December 1907, X5;
Anonymous, “At the Theaters: Academy--‘Edna, the Pretty
Typewriter,’” Washington Post, 24 December 1907, 2; Burns
Mantle, “News of the Theaters: Edna, The Pretty Typewriter,”
Chicago Tribune, 16 January 1908, 8.
10. Two photos of Edith Browning appear in Edna, the Pretty
Typewriter, both on glossy stock: the first, located immediately
after the title-page, is captioned “Edith Browning as ‘Edna,’”;
the second, located between pages 32-33, shows Edith with eyes
39
bulging fearfully and is captioned, “No! This paper belongs to
me.” It refers to a scene near the end of the novel, when Edna
finally recovers the “paper” or grant to the mine which has been
stolen from her by the adventuress Kate Burnett (Edna, 111).
Other photographs of Edith Browning, held at the New York Public
library, can be viewed online at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org.
11. White’s early life is briefly catalogued in Who’s Who for
1922-1923. Her 53 novels for J. S. Ogilvie are catalogued at:
http://mysteryfile.com/blog/index.php?s=berch. Her novels from
1909 to 1930 are Tess of Ithaca (1909), Tess of the Storm
Country (1909), From the Valley of the Missing (1911), When
Tragedy Grins (1912), Rose o’ Paradise (1915), The Secret of the
Storm Country (1917), Judy of Rogues’ Harbor (1918), The Shadow
of the Sheltering Pines (1919), Storm Country Polly (1920), The
Marriage of Patricia Pepperday (1922), Wings to Dare (1925), The
Ghost of the Glen Gorge (1925), Susan of the Storm (1927), and
The Square Mark (1930).
12. Neal L. Edgar and David Dzwonkoski, “J. S. Ogilvie and
Company,” in Peter Dzwonkoski (ed.), American Literary
Publishing Houses, 1638-1899: Part 2, N-Z (Detroit: Thomson
Gale), 1986, 339-340.
13. Edna, back cover; Grace Miller White, Convict 999 (New York:
J. S. Ogilvie, 1907), back cover.
40
14. The play text has not been preserved, but contemporary
reviews and a scene-by-scene synopsis tell us that White
significantly expanded the first scene set in Mexico, probably
to provide more character motivation, and telescoped the
play’s final scenes, accelerating the work’s overall pace. She
also removed all the humorous songs performed by two minor
characters, a routine practice, effectively deleting the
variety show dimensions that were integral to their original
performance. Reviewers often noted them.
15. Owen Davis (see note 6), later observed that “the
comedian, either Jew, Irish or German,” was “the most
important member of the company in the old days and the one
who drew the largest salary. We might and, as a matter of
fact, we frequently did get away with a terrible leading man,
but the comedian had to be good” (104-105).
16. It should be noted that 1898 is the copyright date that is
given for the play on the book’s cover; the title-page,
however, states that the play was published as a book a full
decade later, in 1908: Belle, the Typewriter Girl (Boston:
Walter H. Baker, 1908). Unusually for a melodrama, the play
also takes pains to date the action in Act I to May, 1893
(Belle, 4). It may well be a topical allusion. The stock
market in New York collapsed on 3 May, 1893; and banks in
Chicago collapsed on 8 and 12 May, triggering the banking
panic of 1893: between May and August 503 banks closed their
doors, approximately 8 percent of all banks--the worst
41
financial crisis in American history, apart from the Great
Depression. The ensuing depression lasted until 1897. See
Elmus Wicker, Banking Panics of the Gilded Age (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 4, “The Banking Panic
of 1893,” 52-82.
17. Five other “Irish” titles by Moore include: The Haunted
Mill, or Carl O’Ragan’s Secret, an Irish Drama (1893), Erin Go
Bragh, or the Mountain Rebel, an Irish Drama (1896), Faugh-aballagh, or The Wearing of the Green, a Romantic Irish Play
(1899), and The Irish Rebel, a Romantic Play of the Days of
‘98 (1903). On the Walter H. Baker Company, see Theodora Mills
and Philip B. Dematteis, “Walter H. Baker Company,” in Peter
Dzwonkoski (ed.), American Literary Publishing Houses, 16381899: Part 1, A-M (Detroit: Thomson Gale), 1986, 35-36.
18. The roles of John Randall (who dies in Act 1) and Ralph
Morgan (who appears in Acts 2, 3, 4, and 5) could be played by
the same actor. For the number of characters in a typical,
popular-priced melodrama, and their types, see Owen Davis
(above, note 6), 101-105. It should be noted that much of the
play’s plot is a shortened adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s The
Poor of New York (1860).
19. “The final act of melodrama will frequently stage a trial
[or judgment] scene . . . in which the character of innocence
and virtue is publicly recognized through its signs, and
publicly celebrated and rewarded, while the villain is bodily
expelled from the social realm . . .” Peter Brooks,
42
“Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook,
Christine Gledhill, eds., Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen
(London: British Film Institute, 1994), 19.
20. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby
(third edtn.; London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 179.
21. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1992), 27.
22. Idem, 26.
23. Owen Davis (above, note 6), 91.
24. Anonymous, “”Stair and Havlin Trying at Popular PricedVaudelville,” Variety, 27 March, 1909: 1; cited by Ben Singer,
Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its
Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 165 and
317 n. 25.
25. Burns Mantle, “What’s What in Theater,” Green Book (June
1918): 114, cited by Singer, ibidem.
26. Walter Prichard Eaton, “The Latest Menace of the Movies,”
North American Review 212, no. 776 (July, 1920): 80-87, here
83.
27. Richard Abel, “Nickelodeon,” in Richard Abel, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London and New York: Routledge,
2005), 478-480, who cites the relevant book-length studies.
Owen Davis insisted that the audience for popular-priced
melodrama did not include secretaries or female clerical
workers: “In these days [i.e. 1905-1910] the young girls who
went to the popular-priced theaters were not themselves
43
employed to any extent as clerks or stenographers, and they
knew more about factory life and the experience of the day
laborer and less about the white collar workers than they know
today” (note 6, 102). For the contentious debates about the
audiences of early film, see Donald Cratton, “Audiences:
Research Issues and Projects,” and Lee Grievesen, “ Audiences:
Surveys and Debates,” in Richard Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Early Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2005),41-48.
28. The D. W. Griffith film, Her Terrible Ordeal, is preserved
in a copy at the Library of Congress. See Steven Higgins in
Paolo Cherchi Usai, ed., The Griffith Project, vol. 3 (London:
British Film Institute, 1999), 225-226.