Vanity Fair, Whitman, and the counter jumper

Abstract

The comic journal Vanity Fair (1859–63) derived much of its early success from the work of a small but talented group of artists and writers with active ties to New York’s Bohemian community. One of the journal’s earliest and most sustained targets was the much maligned figure of the counter jumper, a male sales clerk in a dry goods establishment and a new urban type. In the first six months of its existence, Vanity Fair produced nearly two dozen essays, poems, drawings, and cartoons satirizing the social, sexual, and economic vulnerabilities of the counter jumper. Within the complex web of associations that clustered around the stereotype of the counter jumper, Vanity Fair took particular aim at issues of identity, effeminacy, and social injustice. The journal’s verbal and visual thrusts knowingly targeted a figure whose marginalized position mirrored, in a surprising number of ways, the marginalized existence and often subversive behavior of members of their own Bohemian community. Through an artful combination of humor, condescension, and self-mockery, Vanity Fair marshaled a vigorous and wide-ranging campaign that ensnared in its web the writer Fitz-James O’Brien, author of several of the satires, and Walt Whitman, a comrade in arms within the city’s Bohemian community.