by Edward Ball
Ted’s job was to sell the better part of Europe (rich in thought) to the better part of America (in need of refinement).
There is no evidence about how he lived, but it’s likely he rented a room in a boardinghouse, of which there were thousands, the normal habitat for young people with little money. These three- or four-story townhouses held eight or ten young men (salesmen, office clerks), plus a handful of single women (servants, teachers), each tenant living in a single room (maximum, two) with a door that faced the stairs. It was a group of strangers who sat down together for breakfast and dinner—the board of “room and board”—shared the toilet on the stairs or in the backyard, went out to work in the morning, and came back to sleep at night. Polite greetings were expected on the landing.
The book-and-print trade used salesmen, and Ted would have spent much of his time making a pitch. To move books, he would have carried samples of the company’s merchandise and his list of upcoming titles, visiting libraries and stationers and the occasional book dealer. New York in 1850 had about five hundred libraries, ranging from the largest one, the Astor Public Library (120,000 volumes), to myriad little collections like that of the Leake and Watts Orphan House (540 books).3 Most libraries made good prospects for Ted’s reference material. To sell prints, he would have visited photography studios and art galleries, tried to persuade them to take a few prints and to put one in the window facing the street. The location of the company office helped these rounds, because the blocks around Dey Street made up the culture district of New York. The American Museum stood on Broadway and Ann Streets, two minutes from the salesman’s desk, and on either side of Broadway were music stores, dealers in art, stationers, and photographers.
It might have helped that he had an English manner and speech. In the mid-1800s, American literature and art looked like weak plants next to the British varieties, and the United States still leaned on England for its intellectual life. A few years earlier, Charles Dickens had come on his first American lecture tour, crisscrossing the country to perform excerpts from his fiction. Audiences had kept vigil for hours, and theater seats creaked from overload. New York art and book buyers thought Englishness of any kind to be nourishment, maybe even the accent of a small-town, twenty-year-old salesman.
In a typical day, Ted would have come to the office in the morning, talked up his sales calls, gathered his sample books and proof prints, and gone out. He packed his duffle, hit the pavement, and hoped for commissions. It is possible to imagine a solitary man who delivered bursts of promotional talk in the afternoon and retreated to his single room at night.
The bread and butter of the upscale publishing market was the book subscription. Like its later cousin, magazine subscriptions, the book subscription worked like a commodity future. Buyers put down cash to pay for books that would be published in six months or a year. In this way, publishers raised money to offset the risk of expensive print runs. In later years, when he became a photographer, Ted would use subscriptions to finance his own art, showing examples of his work to art buyers and soliciting deposits for series of photographs he had yet to shoot and print. As a bookseller for London Print & Publishing, Ted sold subscriptions that included plenty of detail. The customer chose a binding (cloth, half leather, or “full Morocco,” the showiest, all-leather volume) and arranged terms for paying the balance. Would there be any artwork to go with the order? Perhaps our lithograph of a Shanghai opium den, which our artist has depicted in full color?
Ted Muggeridge remembered, years later, that when he was new to America he used to travel for business. He remembered that he had gone to New Orleans and other places in the South. Travel might have taken him also to Boston, or to Philadelphia, or to Washington, D.C.—anyplace where he might find people with education and money, potential book buyers. His job was to find genteel people (and those trying to be genteel), people who might need prints on the wall and leather spines where friends sitting on the sofa might see them.
Brady’s Gallery of Daguerreotypes stood on Broadway near Fulton Street two blocks from Ted’s office in a building with a saloon on the ground floor and a model of a camera hanging on the front. Because photographer Mathew Brady did not practice shy marketing, over several years the camera mock-up grew until eventually it was eight feet high.
When Ted Muggeridge came to New York, a man called Silas Selleck worked as a camera operator at the Brady studio. Years later, Selleck testified that he had met Ted when they were in their early twenties. It’s possible that Ted picked up his first interest in photography from Selleck, who worked a five-minute walk from Ted’s desk.
Mathew Brady, Selleck’s boss and the owner of the studio, was a busy exponent of the daguerreotype. An artist in Paris named Louis Daguerre had devised the daguerreotype—the first photographic process to find commercial success and the one that launched machine-made imagery—and announced it in 1839. Five years later Mathew Brady, age twenty-three, opened his photography shop on Broadway. Daguerreotypes made good money, and Mathew Brady shot thousands of the flinty, palm-sized portraits. Early and eager with photography, he found prominent clients. The year before Ted arrived in New York, Brady persuaded Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun to sit for his camera, and in 1850 he published a book of lithographs made from his pictures, the Gallery of Illustrious Americans.4 When Ted came to America, Mathew Brady had a big presence in the book and art business, and his gallery would have been an obvious prospect for sales calls.
At Mathew Brady’s studio on lower Broadway in New York, a camera operator named Silas Selleck befriended Ted Muggeridge when both were in their early twenties. (Illustration Credit c14.1)
The volume of business at the Brady operation was such that the studio employed several camera operators, including twenty-three-year-old Silas Selleck. Selleck had been raised in Cold Spring, New York, a town on the Hudson River fifty miles north of Manhattan. He belonged to the photographers’ guild as well as the New York Daguerreian Association, and his social streak extended to politics. Selleck would join the Republican Party and remain active in it for decades. As a cameraman at Brady’s, Selleck would place a customer in a chair in the studio, a room with drawing room furniture and painted backdrops that depicted curtains or landscapes, fix the sitter’s head into a bracket that held it immobile, and make an exposure that averaged one minute, depending on sun from the skylight. Thanks and good-bye to that subject, hello to the next. Selleck’s job was one part artistry, two parts customer relations.
Photographers sold printed art as a sideline. Ted Muggeridge, looking for stores to carry his company’s lithographs, would have stopped at the Brady place. Perhaps Selleck sympathized with the slightly younger man—he was green, not an artist, and not American. Perhaps Selleck persuaded Mathew Brady to take some of Ted’s inventory. However it happened, the two became friends, and their friendship lasted for thirty years. To judge from their later relationship, which was documented, whereas these years are not, it might be expected that Selleck took Ted into the studio once or twice, or maybe many times. It might be that Selleck gave Ted a demonstration of the newfangled medium of photography, and that he put an idea in his head that you could make a living doing this. That you didn’t have to be a salesman, and you could make money instead as an artist who used chemicals and machines.
Ted Muggeridge made his sales calls, he spent time with Silas Selleck. They talked photography, books, and art. Maybe they talked money, women, and home. There is a good chance, from two clues, that they talked about California. From the moment Ted got off his immigrant ship, the Liverpool, and planted himself in a rented room, a mania for California, the newest state, twitched in New York City. And, as it happened, Silas Selleck was getting ready to move there.
As a bookseller, Ted had reason to read The Knickerbocker, a monthly journal of comment and the bellwether magazine of literary New York. The Knickerbocker’s editors in this period offered droll remarks on New York’s obsession with California. In a p
iece from 1850, the magazine complained that one of its readers in the far West was not sending back gold. (“Living in California, could he not have sent us some of the dust? A mere handful? What would it have been to him?”)5 The summer of the same year, editors remarked on the glut of books about the West (“Works on California are thickening upon the public”) and listed some titles. The publisher G. P. Putnam had just brought out El Dorado: Or, Adventures in the Path of Empire, Lea & Blanchard was selling Six Months in the Gold Mines, and a third publisher had an advice book, Notes on California: How to Get There and What to Do Afterwards.6
As Ted settled in New York, a lot of its residents had California on the mind as a place of easy money. Between the years 1851 and 1855, the New York Times ran 960 items that brought together the words “California” and “gold,” while the other three New York dailies, the Herald, the Tribune, and the Sun, filled their pages with much the same. America’s new land on the West Coast sprang a river of fantasy that washed over people east of the Mississippi.
If California had not happened, Ted might have stayed in New York, shouldering dictionaries. If Ted had not met the photographer Silas Selleck, he would not have imitated him. Selleck went west in 1852. He tried digging for gold in California in the Sierra slopes, in Placer County. He came up with nothing and went to San Francisco to do what he knew, to take photographs. His first storefront went up in a graveyard. In October 1853, the San Francisco Call reported that one Silas Selleck had “erected a small building at Yerba Buena Cemetery to take daguerreotypes.” Selleck ran an outdoor operation, taking photographs of the dead in their caskets before loved ones lowered them into the dirt.7
When Silas Selleck left New York for California, Ted Muggeridge followed; no one can say how, or when, but fall 1855 is likely. By way of the usual trip through Central America, San Francisco stood twice as far from New York as New York was from London: the move to California felt like Muggeridge’s second emigration in five years. If he traveled like most (including Leland Stanford), he probably went over the isthmus at Nicaragua, a five-week haul: from New York, a steamship down to the eastern shore of Nicaragua, a second steamer up the western coast to San Francisco.
In 1855, California had precious little civilization on the ground. From a century of Spanish occupation, a few dozen haciendas and missions hugged the coastline, the thin inheritance of the sword and cross. Except for Sacramento, San Francisco, and the mining districts, the interior and north belonged to native people. When Muggeridge arrived, raids on Indian villages were escalating into deportation and a necklace of open jails, the reservations.
San Francisco, six years old, counted thirty-five thousand people, 75 percent of them men. (The masculine tide had receded a bit from three years earlier, when men comprised 85 percent of the population.) The Gold Rush was ending, but the frontier remained. Earlier that year the city’s largest saloon and brothel, the Eldorado, shut its doors, perhaps to the frustration of the politicians at City Hall, which stood directly next door to it.
He reached San Francisco as one of thousands of new and always-being-replaced migrants, and made his first identity change. He became “E. J. Muggridge,” softening the guttural of his surname. He was twenty-five years old.8
San Francisco had a footprint of two square miles, and it faced east, away from the Pacific Ocean and toward the Bay. A panoramic photograph of the peninsula made in 1851 shows a mishmash of two-room cottages that look to be sliding into crannies, and hillsides with rutted and zigzagging streets. Newspapers recorded four earthquakes in 1855. The streets guttered with a drunk here, a gunman there, lost and precarious men that gave the city its main seasoning.
It was a strange choice of habitat for a bookseller. The literary culture of New York turned on its hundreds of libraries and lecture halls, whereas San Francisco had a single library. Its most popular press consisted of bulletins with the weekly gold figures, printed next to advertisements placed by Chinese madams. The city had no paved streets, and sidewalks consisted of six-foot planks laid on the dirt. For drinking water, houses took delivery from horse-drawn tanks that filled barrels kept in the kitchen. Whale oil or camphene lamps gave light at night. (Natural gas, new and fancy, was for the people back east.)
San Francisco in 1856 (Illustration Credit c14.2)
The main business strip, Montgomery Street, ran parallel to the waterfront, two blocks from the Bay. Muggridge took his first rental in a corner building at 113 Montgomery and in April 1856 put an ad in one of the newspapers, the Daily Evening Bulletin: “E. J. Muggridge has many fine books and works of art to sell.” He was looking for a few readers who wanted to rise above the general cultural neglect.9
Muggridge had grown up in an old town with a childhood slowed to the hydraulic rhythms of a thousand-year-old river settlement. For some reason he had decided to fling himself to the unmade edge of America, the most accelerated place in the hemisphere. Why would he live in this half-made society? Most came to California for the money: mining had launched a hot economy that turned into real estate speculation and fast trade. But selling encyclopedias and lithographs? Maybe it was the adventure. He had made the first leap to America, here was the second. Maybe it was alienation. He went as far from home as possible without sailing to Asia, landing in a place where no one knew him and where he could invent himself—beginning with a new name.
When Ted Muggeridge became E. J. Muggridge, he coined a self, which was a common thing in California. People went west to disappear, to throw off families, to escape criminal records. Switching identities turns out to have been easy in the West—a name change was the least of it—because California was a churning river of people passing through. No one seemed actually to live there. Only 5 percent of the names that appear in the state census of 1852 also appear in the one made in 1860. Nineteenth-century America already looked like a country of unstable regions, with people continually moving from one section to another, but California’s retention rate of one in twenty in less than a decade took the national prize.10
In such a place, Muggridge’s trunks full of sober reference books looked as useful as a silver tea set. And what was less promising for a bookseller than the reality that a third of the population did not use English? Twenty thousand Anglo-Americans shared the city with two thousand Mexicans, plus a big group of Europeans who spoke French or German, plus the biggest Asian settlement in North America, perhaps nine thousand Chinese immigrants (estimates vary). The phrase “China Town” appears for the first time in an 1853 newspaper item. (The neighborhood began at the intersection of Kearny and Sacramento Streets, two blocks from Muggridge’s rooms.) Another twenty thousand Chinese worked in the mineral mines of the Sierra foothills.
Few Chinese immigrants—who accounted for 30 percent of Californians—had chosen to come in the get-rich-quick way that others did. In southeast China, the Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty had pushed thousands of peasants off their land and launched an exodus from Guangdong province that ended in South America and California. Most Chinese in the United States were bond labor, debt slaves who had taken passage and housing and who worked off their peonage in three-year contracts, saving some money before going home. Five Chinese-run labor procurers, so-called district companies, controlled Asian California, and the indentured men worked at their bidding, as did the women, at least half of them enchained to brothels.
There was old-fashioned American slavery, too, in the gold country. Southerners had brought enslaved black people to dig for riches—no shame in that, in the 1850s—and the slaveholders climbed accordingly. California state senator Thomas J. Green, from Texas, made his slaves pan for ore on the Yuba River, took the profit, and went into politics.11
The ornaments of power made California look like a white man’s destination. The state constitution gave the vote to white men, and in 1855 the California Supreme Court held that Chinese, blacks, and Indians not only could not vote, they also could not testify in court, because “the law must, by
every sound rule of construction, exclude everyone who is not of white blood.”
Muggridge put down roots. He accepted the hierarchy in a lopsided society, which had a weak legitimate elite on the one hand and a criminal gentry on the other. The state’s economy, the legitimate domain, teetered on a sandhill of greed and speculation. The year Muggridge arrived, five of San Francisco’s banks failed, taking with them the resources of perhaps half the population. Levels of theft and violence, meanwhile, approached a state of nature imagined by Thomas Hobbes. In mid-November 1855, five minutes from Muggridge’s rooms, a gangster called Charles Cora killed a U.S. marshal, one William H. Richardson, in daylight and on the street. There was nothing unusual about this. The Alta California newspaper reported that there had been 560 killings in California in 1854. With a state population of 100,000, this amounts to about one hundred times the homicide rate of California during the early 2000s.12
With the regular bloodshed from fights and occasional duels for “honor,” Muggridge might have looked out of sync with local norms, especially when he placed his advertisements for books: