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Not so much for what it said as for how it said it In the last decade, a new branch of scholarship has emerged in the expanding field of the history of American crime and criminality. This spate of new studies centers not upon crime trends, statistics, or policing, but upon a topic tangential to these mainstays of the social history of crime: particular acts of violence that so harrow their communities that they become sensations, attracting crowds to the courtroom and prompting publishers to expand newspaper coverage and to offer pamphlets and books on the subject. Such sensational murders, although regular occurrences in history, are nonetheless unusual events. Cases that elicit an outburst of public interest are by their nature out of the ordinary. Consequently, such cases will not reveal so much about what might be termed normal crime, the most common forms of crime that can be mapped with statistics and spoken of as trends (Briggs and Burke 193).
To readers interested primarily in these issues, this literature on sensational murders will seem a tangent to the real work of studying the history of crime. But this peculiar nature of sensational crime can be very illuminating in another way, telling us a great deal about society and its broader concerns. More than other histories of crime, these studies of sensational murders interrogate the popular interest as much as they investigate the crimes themselves. In that sense, they are histories less of crime than of communities coming to terms with violence, telling stories about it, and finding rationales to explain and learn from it. Such histories have the potential to capture a wide audience with their lurid and engrossing stories of detection and violence. In the process, historians can use these strong story lines as an opening for broader efforts in American social history, recreating moments in the past from a new and fresh perspective.
This is the lure of the sensational murder (Stevens 192). Its study offers at once to be scholarly, even at the cutting edge of social and cultural history, and to have mass appeal. A host of scholars publishing in the last decade have pursued this goal; much of their work has been of high caliber. This is a deceptively broad field, for involved in a single sensational murder case can be a number of potential themes of historical merit: mass culture, the press, law, policing, crime, race, class, and gender. In addition, the historians interrogating these cases have disparate goals, lured into the project by the wealth of rich and interesting materials collected in court documents, newspaper coverage, pamphlets, and on rarer occasions in private papers. Individual works therefore vary widely in emphasis and style, pushing different issues to the fore.
If quantification turned the field in a new direction a generation ago, now social and cultural historians are taking the many tools they have developed in recent years and turning them upon these sensationalized stories of murder. The number of high-quality studies on sensational crime in the 1990 s has been remarkable, becoming something of a sub-field of the social history of crime. This new direction in the examination of crime can be thought of as comprising two divergent types of analyses: the case study and the evaluation of historical trends in sensationalism over time. The murder case of Helen Jewett will be evaluated using the work of Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth Century New York. This exhaustive and fascinating book fulfills the potential of this genre of sensational murder case study and provides us with a useful point related to the topic of our discussion, namely, the statement quoted by Condboy: how far is the above statement reflected in the style of coverage of the 1836 Robinson-Jewett murder case. Helen Jewett was born Dorcas Doyen in Augusta, Maine, in 1813.
She was ruined at an early age and left town to live a fast life in Portland and Boston before settling in New York City in 1831, at the age of 18. Jewett spent the next five years as a prostitute working in a number of brothels in the rapidly-expanding city. Like many prostitutes in the era, Jewett had a number of clients, but her position could at times bleed over into a more committed relationship as a sort of kept mistress. She had a long-term relationship with one clerk in particular, Richard Robinson, between June, 1835, and her death in the Spring of 1836. Her lifestyle was surprisingly domestic.
In extant letters, Jewett and her clients downplay the economic / sexual exchange involved in their relationship in favor of the language of romance and mutual affection. She even sewed and mended the clothes of some men, playing the role of devoted girlfriend. On 10 April 1836, Helen Jewett's body was discovered in her bed, which was itself smoldering but not quite aflame. She had been killed by a hatchet blow to the head. Several convincing clues pointed to Robinson -- a cloak and hatchet found nearby, for instance, could be traced to him (although his defense team hotly debated the contention), as well as the fact that he had been seen going into her room that evening (also disputed). Robinson was put on trial for the murder and the jury acquitted him, much to the applause of other young men in the city.
The defense succeeded in putting the brothel on trial and discrediting much of the testimony against Robinson, in essence asking the jury to choose between the word of a clerk and that of prostitutes. For its part, the prosecution was singularly unimpressive, missing many opportunities to score points against Robinson. Like McConnell, Patricia Cline Cohen uses the narrative tension the detective story offers, moving from the discovery of the body to a history of Dorcas Doyen, to the newspaper coverage and finally to the trial and the storys culmination. If Cohen's structure is chronological, it is loosely so, allowing the author to expand upon a number of relevant sides of the case. The book, therefore, is about much more than the murder of a prostitute-it achieves a recreation not of a single trial, but of the world inhabited by Helen Jewett in 1830 s New York City. The richness of this recreation makes this study remarkable.
Along the way from murder to acquittal, Cohen connects this story to the many interrelated social and cultural currents that wash through Jewett's world. Jewett was a part of the massive rural migration into New York in this period of the citys fastest growth, and Cohen places her experience in this context of changing rural and urban realities. The murder occurred just at the moment when the penny press was born, and their coverage was unlike anything that came before. Cohen also explores the norms of the sex trade in New York, creating in the process a fascinating counter-narrative to the Cult of True Womanhood: a woman of spunk in charge of her own destiny and yet deploying the sentimental ideals of the day in her favor. The strong male subculture in the city provides yet another facet to this study and perhaps the only one that I wished were pursued still more thoroughly. Finally this era of romanticism saw the strong cultural trend toward the sentimental, as much in tales of true crime as in fiction.
In fact, Jewett tapped into this genre when she wove stories for her clients explaining her own fall from innocence to prostitution. Even her name speaks of this bent toward romance Helen is from Helen Mar (another name she used for herself), who was the heroine in a popular romance of the day. Each of these themes in the social and cultural history of antebellum America is held together by the concrete circumstances of Jewett's life and death. This is the most successful historical treatment of a sensational murder case study produced thus far, and it is one of the most striking books I have recently read in any field.
The research base for this project is impressive: not only court documents, newspaper stories, and census records for the actors in this drama, but also a host of letters involving the case, documents from Jewett's home in Augusta, Maine, as well as a record of the victims earlier court appearances and even an interview with Jewett published a few years before her murder. Cohen interprets this array of data with subtlety and patience, weaving it into a tapestry with far more detail than I would have thought possible for the life of an antebellum prostitute who died at the age of 22. In its thorough research, depth of context, and nuanced recreation of Helen Jewett's life, Cohen's book recalls Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale. The detail in The Murder of Helen Jewett is remarkable enough to both entrance and burden the reader. It ties together every conceivable source now available to the social historian, and all in an intimate portrait that brings New York City alive. Yet, the book would be more digestible if limned.
This is by far the longest work under consideration here, and at times the detail seems overwhelming, threatening to distract the reader from the storys more substantial meaning to the history of the period. For example, a chapter on the love letters exchanged between Robinson and Jewett is a fascinating look into their private life, but Cohen presents a massive amount of information here, including chunks of raw primary material. A bit more selectivity in this chapter-and in passages throughout the book -- might have strengthened the study by making it more approachable. The density of the minutiae here might scare off the impatient in her audience who will then miss the books many gems. At every stage, Cohen makes sensible assumptions about the sources she uses, and she carefully explains them to the reader. Readers might at first doubt the dependability of Jewett's letters that emerged years after the crime, but Cohen shows how she cautiously came to the conclusion that they were genuine.
When she introduces the questionable publication of Robinson's diary, she gives more than a page of arguments evaluating whether we should consider it authentic (282 - 283). Similarly, she evaluates various plausible candidates for Helen's first sexual partner in a notably even-handed manner (180 - 202). Perhaps more arguable (but fascinating) is her contention that Helen Jewett herself provided the origins of the romantic tales of her fall from grace. It seems just as credible that the men writing about her after her death desired (and created) a sentimental tale for their ravenous readers.
But why should we care about this one murder in antebellum New York? Cohen does a marvelous job of leading the reader through so many facets of city life, but it remains unclear just what contribution this vision of the antebellum experience yields to the broader study of the era. Choosing not to include a preface, introduction, or conclusion (or anything that acts like one), Cohen has crafted a portrait of Jewett's world rather than a treatise. It is so rich a portrait that Cohen avoids the pitfall of antiquarianism that snared McConnell's study of New Haven murders. More than that, The Murder of Helen Jewett yields an entirely fresh perspective on a range of issues important to our understanding of antebellum America. Still, many readers will long for a more overt assessment of the place of this material in the wider story of antebellum urban life.
By writing this as a rich narrative rather than an analysis, Cohen leaves to the reader the job of summing up precisely what it teaches us that we did not know before. Bibliography: Patricia Cline Cohen. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth Century. New York. Boston: 1998. Briggs and Burke.
The social history of the media. S hudson M. Discovering the news: a social history of American news papers. Stevens J. Sensationalism and the New York Press.
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