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The Comic - Natural History of the Human Race (1851)

 The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (1851)



Henry L. Stephens, The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (Philadelphia: S. Robinson, 1851).


" Transmigration is held to be really marvelous", reports H. L. Stephens in The Comic Natural History of the Human Race. And while these "kaleideiscopical" experiences are typically attributed to "Hindoos, and other far-off outsiders", he sets out to prove that metempsychosis can happen closer to home in Philadelphia. Lampooning well-known regional and national personalities of the mid-nineteenth century, Stephens and the lithographer Max Rosenthal transformed them into exotic hybrid caricatures: forty human heads installed on bugs, fish, and bats.


Thomas Birch Florence, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, becomes The Florence Humming Bird (Trochilus politics). Thanks to its popular vocalizations, the bird favors "the stump" as an environment. Here the Comic Natural History's technique itself becomes a satire of Barnum, whose popularity was partially owed to his "Fee-jee Mermaid"-- a scam and monstrous cut-up of a baboon, orangutan, and piscine parts.


While many animals in this comic bestiary represent particular people, others appear to satirize broader nineteenth-century types. Prison Birds are typically caught by the Stool Pigeon, who is "a spy of the cops", eavesdropping at "ins and ups, downs and outs, churches, court houses, play homes, bad homes, jail homes, hot homes, beer houses, tube homes, & c. & c.".


The bird must be able to get on each specific "ordinary," know all the "stalls"-- depend on any "evade," all set for each "double," apt at a "spot," and "leary" at a "pull," "dubious" at a "blow," and unerring at a "pipe," "down upon a "plant," particular as to the "boodle," know a "Thimble" from a "Peter" or "dummy," and the "kicks clye" from the "pit," and take a "tip" when "all's right," not always "lagg," the Crossman or put him in "quay." Now a male to do all this must be "a bird.".

Among the most popular American comic illustrators of this duration, when the genre was still emerging, Stephens published this volume in parts prior to assembling the lithographs as the book featured above. Additional humorists might have been included with the text, as the index credits W. A. Stephens, Cornelius Matthews, Richard Vaux, and Thomas McKeon. Other supposed contributors were most likely H. L. Stephens himself, writing under pseudonyms such as "Ali Baba the Woodcutter". The entries signed "C." were the work of an actual ornithologist, John Cassin, who worked as Vice President of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and passed away from arsenic poisoning after mishandling corpses. He wrote to Spencer F. Baird, the Smithsonian Institute's first manager, in 1851 to advertise his comic undertaking: "Stephens and I are extremely busy getting up a lot of the greatest nonsense you ever saw.".


And there is, indeed, a great deal of nonsense. However, the images themselves make use of a familiar set of sensical conventions. Thinking of human heads on the bodies of animals has a long history: manticores and Zakariya al-Qazwini's thirteenth-century hybrids are simply a few of lots of precedents. Stephens' illustrations trust a type of correspondence between the qualities of individuals and their mirrors in the animal world-- hence utilizing a logic more detailed to what's at play in medieval bestiaries and antiquarian works of nature than the pure imagination displayed in, state, Edward Lear's nonsense botany. In contrast to these images, the Comic Natural History's prose is, sometimes, incredibly innovative and seemingly outside of an apparent tradition. Throughout an area on "The Little Dear", an elkish satyr using tear-drop earrings and a crucifix, for example, our storyteller gets lost in echolalia:.


My dear is apt to end up being an abstraction; or like lots of titles, duke, baron, and others, symbolizing absolutely nothing, or only something that has been. Changeable is the language ... The children are mamma's dears, the young girls are quite dears,-- and the women that are married are really clearly their husband's dears and those that are not wed are rather as distinctly their own dears, and all of us have actually discovered out,-- or if we have not, we will find out that many a thing in this world is by far too dear, and so---- Oh dear!-- we are rather exhausted-- that's all.

Stephens' comic natural history is no exception in the former regard. This brand-new kind of comic literature needs a new idiom, the kind used and referenced throughout the Comic Natural History. Accepting this unknown tongue, The Comic Natural History assisted establish an environment in which later on types of American political cartoons might flourish.


Listed below you can find a choice of the lithographs that appear in The Comic Natural History of the Human Race, courtesy of the Met.

 

THE BOOK WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON!



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