by Lyndsay Faye
New York City in the middle of the nineteenth century, already the undisputed center of the publishing world in America, gave birth to a new genre: nonfiction urban sensationalism told in alternately harrowing and uplifting accounts of life in the squalid streets of the Western world’s newest mega-metropolis. Unlike long-established capitals such as London or Paris, New York boasted only 60,515 residents, according to the United States census for the year 1800, a figure that would explode to half a million by 1850. Consequently, the city struggled wildly to keep up with its population, its poor, its infrastructure, its culture, and its social strictures, and urban sensationalist literature dramatized the sort of shocking occurrences that resulted from this upheaval. Often titling their works with variations on themes of gaslight and shadow, shade and sunshine, authors like city reporter George G. Foster thrilled readers who hailed from more pastoral landscapes, while at the same time attempting to illuminate the plight of the destitute Manhattanite. Mercy’s articles are based on these works.
George Washington Matsell published his flash dictionary, The Secret Language of Crime: Vocabulum, or, the Rogue’s Lexicon, in 1859. The necessity of writing such a book surprised even Matsell, who remarked dryly in his preface, “To become a lexicographer certainly never entered into my calculation, or even found a place in the castle-building of my younger days; and if a kind friend had suggested to me that I was destined to fill such a position in life, I would simply have regarded him as a fit subject for the care of the authorities.”
Matsell was a widely read, highly intelligent, and bluntly forceful character, much despised in working-class neighborhoods and yet an avid scholar of such social trends as gang warfare and child vagrancy. He suggested that, while to the police an understanding of the underworld’s slang was critical, the average citizen would also find his dictionary useful, as the ancient British criminal jargon known as thieves’ cant was quickly infiltrating Fifth Avenue society. The spread of flash talk to the general population would prove to be a permanent shift in the English language. When you say “so long” to your “pal” in parting, you are participating in a subversive cultural phenomenon dating back to 1530 and the Derbyshire scoundrels who first developed a secret language all their own.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In one sense, it requires many people to produce a book, and in another sense it requires only one, and I’m by no means referring to myself. If my husband, Gabriel, weren’t the sort of fellow who constantly told me I was in the right line of work when I was sure I should take up longshoring, and who told me to go to the library rather than telling me to get a real job, I would never have written The Gods of Gotham. Thank you, Gabriel, for making this book happen, and for being the person you are. And thank you to my family, who tenaciously repeated the absolutely mad encouraging phrases he kept spouting.
To Amy Einhorn and to her entire phenomenal staff at Amy Einhorn/Putnam, thank you for taking a manuscript and turning it into a far better book than I dreamed it could be. Amy, you’re a tireless advocate for powerful storytelling, and as passionate a reader as you are an editor, and I couldn’t be more grateful for your insights. Thank you for the enormous gift of helping me to bring these people into the world.
Erin Malone met Timothy Wilde when he existed in only six terribly overwritten chapters, and somehow still wanted to see him in print. And when there were twenty-seven terribly overwritten chapters, she fixed them. Erin is my Mickey Goldmill. Thank you for believing in this book. Thank you also to the rest of the brilliant minds at William Morris Endeavor, including but by no means limited to Cathryn Summerhayes, Tracy Fisher, and Amy Hasselbeck, for shocking me constantly with the level of your Awesome. To all my foreign publishers, thank you for caring about these characters, and for sharing them with other parts of the globe.
I owe a huge debt to the historians and scholars I relied upon so heavily to make this world as authentic as I could. Thank you to the New York Public Library and the New-York Historical Society for existing, and thank you to Tyler Anbinder, Edwin G. Burrows, Timothy Gilfoyle, Mike Wallace, and many others for immersing me in the history of the most fascinating city in the world. All remaining screw-ups are entirely on my head. Many of my major sources were original, so thank you to all the nineteenth-century diarists and journalists and pamphlet writers and speechmakers who left bread crumbs behind in the forest.
Thank you to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for teaching me what a hero story looks like, and to Jim LeMonds for teaching me how to write and self-edit them.
I have an invaluable network of friends whose love and support define generosity, and whom I’m terrified of naming individually lest I leave one out. But to all those who take care of me, to my early readers, Feaster guests, fellow artists and actors and sketch comics and photographers and musicians and barflys, to my Shakespeare in the Park groundlings, to all the Sherlockians and Markt Restaurant employees and BLT Steak veterans, to the people I share microbrews with and who are kind enough to eat my cooking, you helped make this happen. Thank you. I couldn’t be luckier.