Walt Whitman, Trinity Church, and Antebellum Reprint Culture

Chapter XIX of Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Autobiography (1852)— Walt Whitman’s recently rediscovered serialized novel—has been the focal point of virtually all attention given to the novel since its appearance in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in 2017. The chapter has been called a “magical moment,” a moment that foretells the coming of the Walt Whitman we know from the first edition of Leaves of Grass three years later.1 Indeed, there is much in the chapter that strikingly prefigures Leaves of Grass. The chapter details the visit of the novel’s protagonist, Jack Engle, to Trinity Churchyard in lower Manhattan. During his walk through the tombstones, Jack reflects on the dead beneath his feet and the living that he can hear on Broadway, just beyond the bounds of the shady, peaceful graveyard. He becomes enraptured in meditation about life, death, history, present, and country, and he even remarks on the “long, rank grass” growing above the graves. Yet, the chapter functions as more than a foreshadowing of the Whitman to come; it provides a glimpse into the influences of Whitman’s past as an editor, contributor, and consumer of newspapers. Though the chapter’s prefiguring of motifs and themes from Leaves of Grass has been central to previous readings, perhaps its most fascinating aspect is that it is distinctly unoriginal material, drawn from a decades-old newspaper literature trope that commonly featured a narrator experiencing an extended moment of romantic elevation while visiting Trinity Churchyard. Drawing and building upon an established tradition of graveyard poetry, the trope arose in the late 1820s, as other periodical texts about Trinity Churchyard simultaneously established the actual location as a site of America’s semi-mythologized national origins. The trope continued to develop throughout the Antebellum Period as a unique and popular vehicle, as we will see, for a nation grappling with its past, present, and future, and with unsettled questions of identity. This essay is organized in three sections, each with its own task. The first section, “Trinity Churchyard in American Culture, 1820-1855,” discusses the representation of Trinity Churchyard in the non-literary prose texts of American WWQR Vol. 37 Nos. 3/4 (Winter/Spring 2020)