SOURCE: "Brief Articles and Notes: The Sources of Stephen Crane's Maggie," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. XXXVIII, No. IV, October, 1959, pp. 497-502.

[In the following essay, Gullason identifies writers—among them Riis—who influenced Stephen Crane's novel Maggie.]

For over a half-century, Stephen Crane's Maggie (1893) has been linked with European naturalism, particularly with Zola's L'Assomoir.¹ A single recent critic, Marcus Cunliffe, admits that while one can draw parallels between Maggie and L'Assomoir the most obvious place to search for possible sources "is not Europe but America: not Zola's Paris but Crane's New York." He points to such things as the social consciousness of The Arena (to which Crane contributed two propagandistic tales, "The Men in the Strom," and "An Ominous Baby"); Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York; and Thomas DeWitt Talmage's sermons. With no definite proof that any of the above-mentioned are influences, Cunliffe concludes: "So, when young Crane writes with would-be savage candor of the slums, the preachers have been there before him. He cannot help borrowing some of their material."²

I suggest that much of Stephen Crane's materials for Maggie did come from two ne ver-mentioned sources: his father, the minister Jonathan Townley Crane; and the famed social reformer, Jacob Riis. Though he died in 1880 when Stephen was only eight, Jonathan Crane left behind a number of works, mostly theological, which his favorite son always cherished.³ As late as 1900 in England, young Crane kept a "shelf of books, for the most part the pious and theological works of various antecedent Stephen Cranes. He had been at some pains to gather together these alien products of his kin."⁴

There was more than enough in Jonathan Crane's writings to inspire his son to deal with the manifold problems presented in Maggie. In The Annual Sermon, for example, the minister reveals his awareness of the city slum and its effect on children:

And while in our great cities the missionary finds no difficulty in collecting crowds of children into his school, in the worst localities, the vilest dens of murder and pollution, the Church of God ought to be very slow to give up any child as hopeless and utterly beyond the reach of good.⁵

The theme of alcoholism in Maggie, also central to L'Assomoir, could have easily been suggested by Jonathan Crane's Arts of Intoxication (1870). In one place, the minister notes: "The great problem of the times is, "What shall be done to stay the ravages of intoxication?"⁶ In Chapter X of the book, he discusses the psychological effects of alcoholism on the individual: "When he is so far gone [in drinking] as to stammer in his speech and totter in his gait, and be helpless in mind and body, his sense of his wisdom, his strength, his greatness, and his goodness is at its highest point."⁷ In Chapter XI, he adds: "Anger, malice, revenge, every destructive passion rages, because the palsied mind feels only the evil impulse, and cares nothing for consequences."⁸

Jonathan Crane even deals with the hereditary effects of alcoholism. There is no reference to the word "heredity" in Maggie, yet Stephen Crane does show how Jimmie acquires the characteristics of his inebriate parents.⁹ The minister says of this aspect: "When one parent is an inebriate, the child is, in a certain degree, liable to inherit constitutional peculiarities which increase the danger of his becoming a prey to the same remorseless destroyer. Where both parents are intemperate, the danger is still greater."¹⁰ Further:

.. . the saddest fact of all is that his [the parent's] innocent children may inherit his scars, and feel the sharp teeth of the devourer. They may be born not only with the dangerous susceptibility of alcoholic influence, but with organizations perverted and depraved by the vice of the parent, so thatthey too have their paroxysms of morbid restlessness and undefinable longing, when no employment contents them, no pleasures already known to them attract, no healthful food or drink satisfies, but when the first casual taste of the intoxicant thrills them with insane rapture, and marks them for a mad career and a doom from which all human tenderness and pity toil in vain to save them."¹¹

Still other materials of his father's, as important as those on the slums and alcoholism, aided young Crane. In Popular Amusements (1870), Jonathan Crane probably suggested one of the key themes of his son's first novel: Maggie's romantic-realistic conflict. Though she is not a novel reader, Maggie attends a play and continually acts like the dreamy working girl, "the Countess of Moonshine," whom Jonathan Crane describes as follows:

But as things are, novel-readers spend many a precious hour in dreaming out clumsy little romances of their own, in which they themselves are the beautiful ladies and the gallant gentlemen who achieve impossibilities, suffer unutterable woe for a season, and at last anchor in a boundless ocean of connubial bliss. .. . In fact, the Cinderella of the old nursery story is the true type of thousands of our novel-readers. They live a sort of double life—one in their own proper persons, and in their real homes; the other as ideal lords and ladies in dream-land.¹²

His father's works, then, besides suggesting themes, characters, and psychology could have also given Stephen Crane enough incentive to do further research on city slum conditions. For on July 10, 1892, he was in New York studying his materials firsthand. He wrote a news report which hints at the Bowery dialect and at the crude first sketches of Maggie and Jimmie:

A sixteen-year-old girl without any hat and with a roll of half-finished vests under her arm crossed the front platform of the green car. As she stepped up on to the sidewalk a barber from a ten-cent shop said "Ah! there!" and she answered "smarty!" with withering scorn and went down a side street.... At the door he [a van driver] almost stepped on a small boy with a pitcher of beer so big that he had to set it down every half block.¹³

A second important influence on Stephen Crane's Maggie was Jacob Riis. The twenty-year-old Crane, as a shore correspondent at Asbury Park, heard Riis's lecture on July 24, 1892. He wrote:

The two thousands of summer visitors who have fled from the hot, stifling air of the cities to enjoy the cool sea breezes are not entirely forgetful of the unfortunates who have to stay in their crowded tenements. Jacob Riis, the author of How the Other Half Lives, gave an illustrated lecture on the same subject in the Beach Auditorium on Wednesday.¹⁴

Crane must have been impressed by Riis's comments from How the Other Half Lives (1891), for they met on other occasions. Hamlin Garland recalled one meeting: "On arrival at the cafe I found that he [Theodore Roosevelt] had three other guests, William Chanler (a big-game hunter), Jacob Riis, the social worker, and Stephen Crane."¹⁵ Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Anna Cowles on July 26, 1896: "I spent three nights in town, and the others out here; a Professor Smith, a friend of Bob's turned up, and dined with me—also Jacob Riis & Stephen Crane. . . . "¹⁶

It is known that Stephen Crane started writing Maggie in 1891 while a student at Syracuse University.¹⁷ No one knows how much of the novel had been completed at that time, nor how many revisions were made before it was published in 1893. There is a strong possibility that Crane got some valuable details, not only from Riis's lecture and later conversations with him, but also from his clinical study of the New York slums, How the Other Half Lives.

How the Other Half Lives and Maggie show striking parallels.¹⁸ Both contrast effectively the pathetic conditions of the slum folk and the world of the well-to-do. Both indicate that the complete disregard of the plight of the poor by the rich could lead to class war. In Riis's book, a pauper slashes his knifein the air as a feeble sign of protest against the rich; he "represented one solution of the problem of ignorant poverty versus ignorant wealth that has come down to us unsolved, the danger-cry of which we have lately heard in the shout that never should have been raised on American Soil—the shout of the "masses against the classes'—the solution of violence"(p. 264). In Maggie, Jimmie "maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men. To him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered faint hearts. . . . Above all things he despised obvious Christians and ciphers with the chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their buttonholes" (pp. 17-18).

Both books deal mainly with the youth of the slum world. Riis observes the gangs of hoodlums and their "stores of broken bricks." He adds: "The gang is the ripe fruit of tenement house growth. It was born there, endowed with a heritage of instinctive hostility to restraint by a generation that sacrificed home to freedom, or left its country for its country's good" (p. 218). The opening of Maggie has a gang war:

A very little boy [Jimmie] stood upon a heap of gravel for the honour of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row, who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him. His infantile countenance was livid with the fury of battle. His small body was writhing in the delivery of oaths (p. 3).

Both writers see in gang warfare an essential cowardice. Riis says: "From all this it might be inferred that the New York tough is a very fierce individual, of indomitable courage and naturally as blood-thirsty as a tiger. On the contrary he is an arrant coward" (p. 220). In Maggie, Jimmie's gang returns to war only when the enemy has retreated:

Then the Rum Alley contingent turned slowly in the direction of their home street. They began to give, each to each, distorted versions of the fight. Causes of retreat in particular cases were magnified. Blows dealt in the fight were enlarged to catapultian power, and stones thrown were alleged to have hurtled with infinite accuracy. Valour grew strong again, and the little boys began to brag with great spirit (p. 5).

Riis analyzes the evil forces that help to destroy the young children of the slums. He complains of youths who carry pitchers of beer to their elders: "I once followed a little boy, who shivered in bare feet on a cold November night so that he seemed in danger of smashing his pitcher [for carrying beer] on the icy pavement, into a Mulberry Street saloon . . . and forbade the barkeeper to serve the boy" (p. 215). In Maggie, Jimmie goes on a similar errand: "He passed into the side door of a saloon and went to the bar. Straining up on his toes he raised the pail and pennies as high as his arms would let him. He saw two hands thrust down to take them. Directly the same hands let down the filled pail, and he left" (p. 13).

To both writers, the young working girls are the greatest sufferers in the slums. Riis describes in detail the sweatshops of the shirt-makers where they labor. If one of these girls does not want to deprive herself of the real necessities of life (for her salary is too small), she "must in many instances resort to evil [prostitution]" (p. 234). Maggie also works in a collar-and-cuff factory (p. 21), and after having been rejected by her lover Pete, she turns to prostitution (p. 72). Still, Riis and Crane see clear evidences of untainted goodness amidst this degradation. Riis confesses that "it is not uncommon to find sweet and innocent girls, singularly untouched by the evil around them"; they are "like jewels in a swine's snout" (p. 161). Crane says virtually the same thing about the younger Maggie; he calls her a "flower in a mud-puddle" (p. 21).

Native American sources, such as these works by Jonathan Crane and Jacob Riis, served Stephen Crane well; they gave him his pessimistic bias as well as hints for characters, setting, themes, and psychology. He did not need further inspiration or other materials, like Zola's L'Assomoir.

NOTES

¹ For discussions of Zola's so-called influence on Maggie, see Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction (Upsala: American Institute, 1950), pp. 231-276; John Berryman, Stephen Crane (New York, 1950), p. 63; Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America (New York, 1941), pp. 85-86; and H. S. Canby et al., Literary History of the United States (New York, 1948), II, 1022. Yet Crane "disliked most of Zola's work"; see Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (New York, 1923), p. 147.

² "Stephen Crane and the American Background of Maggie," American Quarterly, VII (1955), 35-36, 43.

³ See Dictionary of American Biography, IV, 506.

⁴ Edmund Wilson, ed., The Shock of Recognition (New York, 1943), p. 671.

⁵The Annual Sermon (New York, 1858), p. 22.

⁶Arts of Intoxication (New York, 1870), p. 3.

⁷Ibid., p. 145.

⁸Ibid., p. 165. This sentence suggests the character of the drunken Swede in "The Blue Hotel."

⁹ Crane seemed to be interested only in environment and its effect on character. In an inscription on a copy of Maggie, he said: "It is inevitable that you [Dr. Lucius L. Button] will be greatly shocked by the book but continue, please, with all possible courage, to the end. For it tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless." (See Robert W. Stallman, ed., Stephen Crane: An Omnibus [New York, 1952], p. 594.) Yet his treatment of Jimmie suggests that Crane was also deeply interested in the question of heredity.

¹⁰Arts of Intoxication, p. 177.

¹¹Ibid., p. 184.

¹²Popular Amusements (New York, 1870), pp. 136-138. For references to Maggie's similar romantic yearnings, see Carl Van Doren, ed., Stephen Crane: Twenty Stories (New York, 1940), pp. 24, 36-37. All later references to Maggie are to this edition.

¹³ "Travels in New York," New York Tribune, July 10, 1892, p. 8. In the novel, Maggie works in a collar-and-cuff factory while Jimmie carries beer to one of the tenants.

¹⁴ "On The New Jersey Coast," New York Tribune, July 24, 1892, p. 22.

¹⁵Roadside Meetings (New York, 1931), p. 329.

¹⁶ Elting E. Morison et al., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), I, 550.

¹⁷ Stallman, pp. 5-7.

¹⁸ Crane may have gotten the name of Maggie's neighborhood, Rum Alley, from the title of Chapter XVIII in Riis's book, "The Reign of Rum." See How the Other Half Lives (New York, 1932), p. 215. All later references to Riis's book are to this edition.