Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  After her four-part account of her trip, which ran each Sunday through the month of February, Nellie Bly’s byline stopped appearing in The World. “Miss Bly has a vacation from The World,” the paper informed its readers, “and these lectures have no connection with her journalistic work. The enterprise is her own, and The World echoes the wishes of thousands when it says it hopes she will make a fortune on the lecture platform.”

  NELLIE BLY’S TOUR began auspiciously, at the Union Square Theatre in New York, where J. M. Hill had booked her to lecture for three successive Sunday evenings. (This would not have been especially difficult for him to arrange, as he owned the theater.) The Union Square Theatre was widely considered to be one of the most beautiful in New York. From the entrance, a broad columned portico on Fourteenth Street, patrons passed through a brilliantly lit vestibule to the auditorium, which was painted white and ornamented throughout with gold fluting. Across the ceiling ran a series of frescoes depicting figures from Greek mythology; the proscenium arch had been painted maroon with gold at the bottom edge to simulate drapery. The auditorium held about twelve hundred seats in three steeply rising tiers, and on the evening of February 9 they were all filled with well-dressed New Yorkers. On the stage, furniture had been arranged in a typical drawing-room scene; it was the set for the other show currently playing at the theater, The County Fair, a comedy starring the popular female impersonator Neil Burgess as the spinster aunt Abigail Prue. At eight-thirty P.M., J. M. Hill himself walked onto the stage, coming down to the footlights to briefly address the audience. He was a handsome man in his middle years, his most distinguishing feature a pair of bushy sideburns; a few years earlier The New York Times had described him as resembling “a particularly good-looking curate.”

  “It is my pleasure and privilege, ladies and gentlemen,” said Hill, “to present to you this evening an American girl who has made the circuit of the globe alone, and she is here to tell you how the trip was made. It is her first appearance before an audience and she does not come as a trained speaker, so that whatever imperfections she may display, you will understand the cause. I feel quite sure, however, that you will extend to her a cordial welcome. Permit me to introduce Miss Nellie Bly.”

  From the center entrance of the drawing room Nellie Bly appeared and, to a great burst of applause, began to walk downstage. The stage was thirty-five feet deep and she was several seconds in crossing it. She had on the same blue broadcloth dress that she had worn on her trip around the world; on her left wrist was a silver bracelet, on her right a watch in a thick black band, and on her thumb her lucky gold ring. Her hair was cut into bangs at the front and braided in the back. She stepped down to the footlights and took a bow. After a moment the applause died down and the hall grew silent.

  “As Mr. Hill has said,” she began, “I am not a trained speaker. I am here simply to tell you of my journey around the world, and how I came to make it.” Those in the front rows might have noticed that her cheeks were slightly flushed, but her voice was even and steady; if she was feeling any nervousness her voice did not betray it. She continued, “Over a year ago I first got the idea. I went to a railroad office and got some timetables, and studied them before making the suggestion to the editor of The World. I had reached the conclusion that a journey around the earth could be made in less than eighty days. I was rather afraid to offer the idea at first, because I didn’t know how it would be received, but I did it finally, and said I thought the trip could be made in less time than it had been made by Phileas Fogg.” Bly explained that the editor of The World refused to send a woman, because of the number of trunks she would require. “ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘send your man, and I’ll start out at the same time and beat him.’ ” The audience laughed at this, which seemed to catch Bly somewhat by surprise, but she continued with even more firmness in her voice, and went on to tell the entire story of her trip, from the traveling dress that was made by William Ghormley in a single day (“I didn’t think that he could, but he did, and this is the dress I have on now”) to the crowds of thousands that had greeted her on her return. She spoke for ninety minutes, and as she did she shifted from one foot to the other, rarely standing perfectly still. Occasionally she would place her right hand, then both hands behind her, and often left them down at her sides; these were the gestures of an untrained elocutionist, and they seemed only to endear her further to the audience. She told about meeting Jules Verne, about her travel though foggy Italy on the India mail train. Describing her arrival in Brindisi, Bly said, “The people looked at me and when they heard that I was an American they laughed. That made me angry and I told the guard to tell them that the Italians in America were normally seen with a hand-organ. Then they stopped laughing.”

  As she narrated her travels farther east, the details seemed to have been conjured from an exotic Oriental tale: the snake charmers of Colombo and the dancing girls of Yokohama, the gambling halls of Port Said and the execution grounds of Canton. She told about how, near Singapore, a lazy Englishman had proposed to her and how she in turn had proposed to put him to work—a line that drew laughter and applause from the audience. “Not the least interesting part of the story,” noted a reporter from The World, “was the sturdy loyalty to the Stars and Stripes that Miss Bly displayed throughout the journey.” She would not, Bly said, permit anyone to make unjust reflections upon the United States without receiving prompt and firm retaliation from her. More than one reporter noted with approval that her lecture was shot through with constant assertions of American superiority: America, Nellie Bly liked to say, was “far ahead” of all other nations, a sentiment that she repeated over and over, in every talk and interview she gave.

  After an hour and a half Bly had taken her audience around the world and then delivered it back again to New York; when she finished speaking she received a triple ovation. Afterward J. M. Hill was pleased to announce that the evening’s receipts had totaled $1,362.75.

  IN FEBRUARY THE Dallas Morning News noted, “Since Nellie Bly, the journalist, decided to become Nellie Bly the lecturer some of the papers have opened a merciless fire upon her.” It was one thing for a young woman to go around the world, and apparently quite another for her to attempt to profit from it. There seemed also to be something distasteful in the notion of a woman presuming to speak, uninterrupted, for an entire evening. From Laramie, Wyoming, the Daily Boomerang announced to its readers: “Nellie Bly is going on the lecture platform. We had hoped that she was too sensible a young woman to do that.” The Knoxville Journal agreed: “It is to be hoped that Nellie Bly won’t lecture. The public has some rights.” Reporting the news of Bly’s contract with J. M. Hill, the Philadelphia Inquirer remarked, “This is sad, but the affair could have no other ending.” After Bly’s first lecture the Chicago Times had to resort to biblical allusions to find language strong enough for its disapproval: “The flesh-pots of Egypt in the shape of $1400 for a first appearance have proved too strong a temptation, and that young and interesting woman is now chasing after the American public with the same determination that she ran around the world. It is to be hoped that having definitely made up her mind to go after mere money she will find enough of it to justify her in her apostasy.”

  “She was engaged by a big newspaper to do a big piece of advertising, and she did her duty in a big, spacious sort of way,” observed the Chicago Journal, before adding sarcastically, “Miss Bly has been made famous, and may now settle down comfortably into the position of a leader, if not a savior, of society.”

  FROM NEW YORK, Nellie Bly traveled up to Rochester, and to Hartford and Boston; later would come lectures in Philadelphia and Harrisburg, and then Chicago and points west. She had gone around the world, and almost immediately had set out again around the country. She was staying in hotels, most of them very nice, but still not like home; often Bly stayed in her room, writing her book about the trip. While on tour she seemed always to read the articles about herself in the local papers. “Sometimes I am very unhap
py,” she admitted to a reporter, “because I have been misrepresented by some newspapers as a coarse, unrefined girl, who loves to stir up sensation. Some have poked great fun at me because I have gone on a tour, but I am only making my living. I am only a woman and when unkind things are said of me that the public read and comment upon it makes me unhappy.”

  She had always been careful to dress well and present herself as a modest, plainspoken American girl; now, for the first time, she seemed to have lost control of her image. She always claimed to be younger than she actually was; now some newspapers were overstating her age. Once Bly complained in print that she had been described as being anywhere “from 30 to 40, and no woman likes to be any older than she is.” Already by March some of the novelty seemed to have worn off her lecture tour. In Philadelphia, the Inquirer blamed poor advertising for her having been greeted by “anything but a full theatre.” In Chicago she had an audience of only a few hundred, far less than the theater’s capacity; one of the local papers, the Daily Inter Ocean, referred to the crowd as “small but appreciative.” For years, ever since she first became a reporter, Bly had thrived on the fast pace and constantly changing activity of her work—how one week she might be learning how to fence and the next investigating the claims of a faith healer. Now there was always the same blue dress (eventually it must have seemed less outfit than costume), the same ninety-minute lecture, crowds and venues that seemed to vary little from place to place. She told a reporter that while lecturing was much easier, it lacked the excitement of newspaper work, and when the tour was over she figured she would “return to the ranks.”

  Nellie Bly in 1890 (Illustration Credit 17.3)

  ON THE AFTERNOON of March 5, 1890, shortly before departing for her lecture in Philadelphia, Nellie Bly was walking with her mother on Broadway when a man—Bly described him as “coarse-featured” and “brutal-looking”—approached her and addressed her by name. Recognizing him as a private detective, Bly kept walking and refused to acknowledge his calls. In frustration the man grabbed Bly by the shoulder and tried to force a piece of paper down the neck of her coat, at which point she appealed to a nearby policeman for help.

  “That is Nellie Bly,” the detective is said to have shouted, “and I am ordered to arrest her.”

  The policeman allowed Bly to leave, and with her mother she hurried aboard a passing streetcar, shaken and angered by the experience. Later a reporter would write of the encounter with the private detective, “What he wanted Nellie does not know, but she thinks it is a plot to injure her in some way.”

  Though nothing more of this incident ever came to light, it seems clear that the detective, in forcing the piece of paper on Nellie Bly, was attempting to deliver a subpoena—and there was, at the time, a pending lawsuit in which Bly figured directly. In one of her most celebrated exposés for The World, Nellie Bly had posed as the wife of a drug manufacturer, who was hoping to kill an upcoming bill regulating patent medicines. In an Albany hotel room she sought to obtain the help of Edward Phelps, the so-called Lobby King of Albany, who assured her that for the right price he could have the bill killed in the Assembly. On a printed list of the members of the Affairs of Cities Committee he even put marks next to the ones on his payroll; a facsimile of that list was published in The World on April 1, 1888. One of the marked names was that of Daniel W. Tallmadge, an assemblyman from Brooklyn, who strongly objected to being implicated in the matter—he was, his attorney affirmed, “a gentleman who valued his high reputation more than he did his life”—and after the publication of Bly’s story he brought a libel suit against The World, estimating the damage to his reputation at $50,000. For nearly two years both sides filed a series of motions and countermotions, but in March of 1890 the case was finally ready to go to trial. Nellie Bly’s testimony, of course, would be critical to the defense’s case, and The World sent word to Bly asking her to come at once to Brooklyn. However, according to one published report, “Miss Bly made a response that she was under the management of Mr. Hill and was engaged in a lecture tour and therefore could not obey the summons. In this dilemma Manager Hill was appealed to and he sent for the young woman, requesting her to return to New York and thereupon she most emphatically declined to do anything of the kind.”

  The World’s attorneys requested a postponement of the trial, owing to their inability to subpoena their principal witness—while on tour she was beyond the jurisdiction of the court—but the judge refused to grant a further delay. At this point the defense team withdrew (“in no pleasant humor,” a reporter observed), and the Tallmadge libel suit was heard without The World’s offering a defense and with Daniel W. Tallmadge himself as the only witness. When the judge charged the jury he indicated that the article was “plainly libelous,” and after only five minutes’ deliberation the jury found for the plaintiff and assessed damages of $20,000. It was an enormous sum of money—equivalent to the combined annual salary, on average, of thirty-two female journalists.

  NELLIE BLY HERSELF never explained why she had refused to testify for The World. Others, though, were happy to provide a reason: as one newspaper report observed, “Enemies have been unkind enough to suggest that she had become afflicted with the disease whereby the head weighs much more than the rest of the body and which is popularly supposed to be incurable.”

  Bly did, however, reveal the bitterness that she felt toward the paper that had sponsored her trip. “The World never even said ‘thank you’ to me after my return,” she complained to fellow journalist Frank G. Carpenter in a letter written later that year, though they had “made thousands of dollars clear on their increased circulation during my absence and immediately after my return.” She continued, “From them I did not receive one cent and my salary had been a very low one. Mr. Pulitzer cabled his congratulations to me and begged me to accept the present he was sending from India. I accepted the congratulations but then never seen [sic] the present. A movement was started in the office to get a medal for me but I have it upon good authority that the medal was given as a prize in a telegrapher’s contest.” Even the lecture tour—from which the newspaper had demanded she return in order to testify in their libel suit—“came to me through no effort of The World.”

  On the face of it this stinginess would seem difficult to believe, as Joseph Pulitzer was famously generous toward his employees; indeed, after Bly’s first success with The World, her Blackwell’s Island exposé, Pulitzer had made it known that he had rewarded her with “a handsome check.” But Pulitzer was also an exceedingly rigorous and demanding employer, and he had always been haunted by the fear of libel suits—so much so that, according to Walt McDougall, “he nightly read most every paragraph in the paper” to examine it for potentially libelous material. When the new World Building opened in December of 1890, signs were hung around the city room that exhorted: “Accuracy! Terseness! Accuracy!” (“Accuracy,” a World editor recalled Pulitzer as saying, “is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.”) Something had caused Pulitzer to become suddenly parsimonious with his star reporter, and it certainly seems possible that it was the Tallmadge libel suit. So: Joseph Pulitzer, upset about a pending libel suit arising from Nellie Bly’s work, refused to give her a bonus on her return; Bly, bitter about not being rewarded for the profits she brought to The World, refused to testify on the paper’s behalf; and The World, deprived of her testimony, was ordered to pay out $20,000, thus confirming Pulitzer’s initial grievance. Nellie Bly, for her part, felt that she could not continue to work at a newspaper that had asked so much of her and given her so little in return. She wrote to Frank Carpenter, “I have a standing invitation from The World to go back but it is needless to add that in face of their shabby treatment of me I shall never do so.”

  IN THE WAKE OF her refusal to testify in the Tallmadge case, Bly had a falling-out with J. M. Hill—the details of the break are not known, but a theatrical promoter would certainly not want to incur the enmity of the city’s largest newspaper—and on May 4 the Phi
ladelphia Inquirer reported that “the lecture tour has been abandoned.”

  At least one news report twisted the facts of the Tallmadge libel case, the better to suit the emerging public image of the grasping woman. “Our famous Nellie Bly,” sneered the New Mexican newspaper of Santa Fe, “has brought a libel suit for $20,000 against the New York World. If she gains it she will be still more famous. A woman is never satisfied it seems.” Nellie Bly, observed the Cincinnati Commercial, “has discovered that a successful lecture tour in the United States is a far more difficult undertaking than a tour around the world in seventy-three days.” The Michigan Farmer noted, unkindly, “Nellie Bly is not a success as a lecturer. If she wishes to marry, however, this might be considered a recommendation.”

  AT THE END OF JULY, Bly’s book-length account of her trip, entitled Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, was published by the Pictorial Weeklies Company of New York. Not only was her name in the title, but her photograph appeared on the front cover as well, a head-and-shoulders portrait of her in ghillie cap and checked overcoat, gazing directly at the reader. The pride Bly took in the speed with which she had circled the globe was evident in the book’s final chapter, entitled simply “The Record.” It gave the actual itinerary of her trip compared to the one that had been published the day she left; the miles traveled from point to point and the hours spent in traveling and the hours delayed (she had, she calculated, spent 56 days, 12 hours, and 41 minutes in actual travel); her average rate of speed, both including and exclusive of stops; the names of all the steamships and railway lines on which she had traveled; and all the countries and bodies of water through which she had passed. Nellie Bly’s Book sold for fifty cents; within a month the first edition of ten thousand copies had sold out.