Re-mediators of Culture: Young America's Newsboys

This essay tackles the confluence of the rising penny-press industry with the cult of childhood innocence in antebellum US. Newsboys embodied this junction. Cherubic, rosy-dimpled children with a bundle of dailies under their... [ view full abstract ]

This essay tackles the confluence of the rising penny-press industry with the cult of childhood innocence in antebellum US. Newsboys embodied this junction. Cherubic, rosy-dimpled children with a bundle of dailies under their arm starred on popular paintings such as Henry Inman’s “News Boy” (1841) and Thomas Leclear’s “Buffalo Newsboy” (1853) as well as urban sketches by Lydia Maria Child, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman. Their incorruptible halo notwithstanding, these street urchins were tied to modernity in manifold ways: as pacesetters of a mechanized time punctuated by factory whistles and the availability of news throughout the day, as victims of slum poverty and destitute labor, and, more importantly, as propagators of macro-scale shifts involving social stratification, imperial warfare in Mexico, and filibustering in Central America.

Newsboys, I argue, remedied American culture by re-mediating it, inserting one specific media—the newspaper—in another: their sempiternally non-adult bodies. Young Americans—those nationalist journalists, artists, and politicians that bustled around New York City in the 1840s and 50s—fashioned newsboys as solace figures for a nation that had taken a decidedly imperial turn. Taking my cue from Karen Sánchez-Eppler, who has explored newsboys’ cultural work feeding middle-class and reformist fantasies of upward mobility, I analyze their representations in conjunction with the news they carried. Anchored in primeval candor while ushering in global modernity, newsboys’ strategic teleology has escaped the radar of childhood studies and print culture scholars, whom this essay puts in conversation.