First published in 1850, "New York by Gas-Light" explores the seamy
side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of
prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and
murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the
sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum--the underground
story--of life in New York!" The author of this lively and
fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large
numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster,
reporter for Horace Greeley's influential "New York Tribune,"
social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his
daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the
characters of the urban "demi-monde" to produce a sensationalized
but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it
was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches
from two of Foster's other books, "New York by Gas-Light" will be
welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture,
literature, and journalism.
Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory
essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the
growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing
industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and
the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important
reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to
the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of
Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism
of Jacob Riis.
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