The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman
Authors: Matthew Goodman
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heaps, warmed only by the closeness of their own bodies. Within a few years, when the newspapers that had now grown large and prosperous— at least in part on the boys’ labor—began to purchase expensive steam-powered printing presses for their underground press rooms, the boys slept on the gratings outside the newspaper offices, enveloping themselves in the steam rising up from the machines that ran through the night to print the papers they would sell on awakening. When they could they slept in the lobbies of the newspaper offices, though often they were rousted by printers who poured water on them as they slept, a technique that had proven effective in scattering rats.
Some of the boys died quickly, of exposure, and others slowly, of consumption. Like Bernard Flaherty, many of them had been born in Ireland and come to America as outcasts, and many had no parents, or had parents whose only communication was through curses and blows, and either they had been thrown out or they had left by choice, preferring to make the streets of the city their home. Some of them, by the time they began – 34 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 35
The News of the City
selling papers, no longer even remembered their own names, although this proved less an obstacle than might be imagined, as the boys mostly dispensed with their given names, replacing them with ones they bestowed on each other: Sniffey, Pickle-nose, Fat Jack, Professor, Carrots, Dodge-me-John, Tickle-me-foot, Lozenges, Blood-sucker, The Ghost. Few had much schooling, but now during the day they learned arithmetic (eventually Benjamin Day worked out an arrangement in which he charged them sixty-seven cents cash for a hundred papers, or seventy-five cents on credit), while at night they learned English drama, shouting “Hi-hi-hi!”
from the pits of the theaters, elbowing each other to stay awake, eating peanuts and then tossing the shells at the actors they didn’t like. In time they developed their own dialect and traditions and codes of conduct, the prevailing one being the code of the wild, under which smaller newsboys were regularly plundered by larger ones, the littlest of them—some as young as five years old—being as weak and vulnerable as the baby fish that gave them their nickname: small fry.
For generations, countless boys thus kept themselves alive, and some of them—those who were especially enterprising or especially charming or especially violent—even managed to become rich. Mark Maguire, famed as “The King of the Newsboys,” started out in life peddling the Sun, having only enough pennies to purchase two or three copies at a time. He built up his business little by little until eventually he started making deals with publishers to buy newspapers at a bulk discount and then subcon-tracted the selling to others, making a profit on each boy’s sales. By the time he was twenty-five (still nearly as short and chubby as he had been when he was a newsboy) he had a wife and children and lived in a large house and drove a fast horse, and was said to control the fortunes of no fewer than five hundred newsboys.
Up to this time the city’s newspaper editors had considered it ungentlemanly to seek out readers—a newspaper, after all, was not a molasses cake or a piece of fruit, to be hawked on the street by ragamuffins—and took pride in the fact that their readerships had been achieved without solicitation. But the success of the Sun, which by the end of the year was selling in the thousands, led the other daily papers to hire their own newsboys, transforming the newspaper business in the city, and the city itself. Newspapers had been forever removed from the cloister of plush drawing rooms and ornate countinghouses, and now could be found all over, in the wharves on the west side and the warehouses on the east, and – 35 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 36
the sun and the moon
the sounds of commerce that rose up each
Some of the boys died quickly, of exposure, and others slowly, of consumption. Like Bernard Flaherty, many of them had been born in Ireland and come to America as outcasts, and many had no parents, or had parents whose only communication was through curses and blows, and either they had been thrown out or they had left by choice, preferring to make the streets of the city their home. Some of them, by the time they began – 34 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 35
The News of the City
selling papers, no longer even remembered their own names, although this proved less an obstacle than might be imagined, as the boys mostly dispensed with their given names, replacing them with ones they bestowed on each other: Sniffey, Pickle-nose, Fat Jack, Professor, Carrots, Dodge-me-John, Tickle-me-foot, Lozenges, Blood-sucker, The Ghost. Few had much schooling, but now during the day they learned arithmetic (eventually Benjamin Day worked out an arrangement in which he charged them sixty-seven cents cash for a hundred papers, or seventy-five cents on credit), while at night they learned English drama, shouting “Hi-hi-hi!”
from the pits of the theaters, elbowing each other to stay awake, eating peanuts and then tossing the shells at the actors they didn’t like. In time they developed their own dialect and traditions and codes of conduct, the prevailing one being the code of the wild, under which smaller newsboys were regularly plundered by larger ones, the littlest of them—some as young as five years old—being as weak and vulnerable as the baby fish that gave them their nickname: small fry.
For generations, countless boys thus kept themselves alive, and some of them—those who were especially enterprising or especially charming or especially violent—even managed to become rich. Mark Maguire, famed as “The King of the Newsboys,” started out in life peddling the Sun, having only enough pennies to purchase two or three copies at a time. He built up his business little by little until eventually he started making deals with publishers to buy newspapers at a bulk discount and then subcon-tracted the selling to others, making a profit on each boy’s sales. By the time he was twenty-five (still nearly as short and chubby as he had been when he was a newsboy) he had a wife and children and lived in a large house and drove a fast horse, and was said to control the fortunes of no fewer than five hundred newsboys.
Up to this time the city’s newspaper editors had considered it ungentlemanly to seek out readers—a newspaper, after all, was not a molasses cake or a piece of fruit, to be hawked on the street by ragamuffins—and took pride in the fact that their readerships had been achieved without solicitation. But the success of the Sun, which by the end of the year was selling in the thousands, led the other daily papers to hire their own newsboys, transforming the newspaper business in the city, and the city itself. Newspapers had been forever removed from the cloister of plush drawing rooms and ornate countinghouses, and now could be found all over, in the wharves on the west side and the warehouses on the east, and – 35 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 36
the sun and the moon
the sounds of commerce that rose up each
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