Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Like many popular books of the time, Nellie Bly’s Book included advertisements at the front and back. Not surprisingly, it featured an advertisement for William Ghormley, the dressmaker who had so quickly produced Nellie Bly’s now-famous blue broadcloth dress, but less predictable were the ads for Pears’ Soap and for Bovinine, the “Fluid Food” made from raw beef extract that “creates new and vitalized blood faster than any other preparation” (only twelve ounces, it was asserted, contained the “strength” of ten pounds of meat). The advertisement for Cheque Bank Checks consisted solely of a facsimile of a letter sent by Nellie Bly to the Wall Street agents of the Cheque Bank Limited Company. “Gentlemen,” the letter began,

  In response to your inquiry, I will say, that I took the book of Cheque Bank checks with me on my tour round the world, and found them available as ready cash in every port that I visited. I assure you that they are a great convenience to travelers, and are only to be known and understood to be appreciated.

  The Eastman Company of Rochester, New York, included a full-page advertisement for its new “Kodak cameras,” handheld and loaded with film that the customer could mail in for processing. “You press the button,” the company promised, “we do the rest.” It could not have been coincidental that in the text of the book itself Bly had written:

  The only regret of my trip, and one that I can never cease to deplore, was that in my hasty departure I forgot to take a Kodak. On every ship and at every port I met others—and envied them—with Kodaks. They could photograph everything that pleased them; the light in those lands is excellent, and many were the pleasant mementos of their acquaintances and themselves they carried home on their plates. I met a German who was spending two years going around the world and he carried two Kodaks, a large and a small, and his collection of photographs was the most interesting I ever saw.

  In August 1890, Nellie Bly signed a three-year contract to write serial fiction for Norman L. Munro’s weekly magazine The New York Family Story Paper. Munro had made a fortune as a publisher of both books and magazines (the year before, he had collected Bly’s Mexico reportage into a book entitled Six Months in Mexico), most of it the sort of mass-market fare, thrillers and romances and detective stories, that was then called “dime novel fiction.” The New York Family Story Paper was the most popular and profitable of all his publications, advertised as having “the largest circulation of any family paper published in the world.” For her work Bly would receive a salary of $10,000 the first year and $15,000 for each of the next two years. This was an astonishing amount of money, more even than Julius Chambers earned as managing editor of The World; according to at least one newspaper report, the contract with Munro made Bly the highest-salaried woman in the United States.

  In making the offer, Norman L. Munro was obviously looking to trade on the Nellie Bly name, which he assumed would sell a lot of papers, and it is not hard to understand why Bly would have accepted it. She was continuing to support her mother as well as herself; and, unhappily, her older brother Charles had died earlier that year at the age of twenty-eight, and she may well have assumed some responsibility for the care of his widow and two young children. It is not known how much she was making from the sales of her book. By her own estimation she had earned about $9,500 from her lecture tour, a very good sum but perhaps not as large as she had anticipated. After her return from her around-the-world trip two real estate companies, seeking to capitalize on her fame, had each given her an undeveloped piece of property, one in Brooklyn and the other in the newly incorporated town of Iron City, Tennessee; together the two lots were said to be worth about $1,500. There is no evidence that Bly was paid anything at all by the advertisers who had used her image to sell their products. Most critically, she had left The World and now had no regular income. So it must have been a huge relief not to have to worry about money for the next three years; she had never forgotten how difficult life had been for her family when her father died and the money suddenly ran out.

  The problem, however, was that she had only ever written fiction once before, in her novel The Mystery of Central Park, published in the fall of 1889. Though it contained some vivid New York color—scenes set in the city morgue and in a paper-box factory made good use of Bly’s skills as a reporter—the novel as a whole was standard-issue melodramatic romance, the sort of story in which the heroine’s “brown eyes sparkled like the reflection of the sun in a still, dark pool” while the hero “brooded moodily.” Not surprisingly, The Mystery of Central Park had received scathing reviews and poor sales. The publisher seems to have envisioned it as the first in a series (the front cover touts “The ‘Nellie Bly’ Series”), but the public reception proved discouraging enough that no subsequent book ever appeared.

  Now she was being paid a great deal of money to write serial stories—a genre that required an injection of suspense at the end of each installment so that the reader will eagerly look forward to the next one—and she didn’t have any plot or characters for them. Over the years she had developed a close working relationship with Walt McDougall, The World’s staff illustrator; the two of them often went out on stories together so that McDougall could illustrate the scenes about which Bly wrote. (“She was sprightly, yet not frivolous,” he once said of Bly. “Not a deep mind but a warm and generous heart.”) Sometime after signing the contract with Norman Munro, Bly came to McDougall for help. She was, he could see, deeply distressed; she admitted to him that she didn’t know how to begin the story.

  “That’s perfectly easy,” McDougall recalled telling her. “You’ve merely to start off with a big thrill. Have your hero fall into a deep pit filled with big rattlesnakes, and go on to describe his terrors.”

  Bly considered this. She asked, “But how’ll I keep the snakes from biting him?”

  “He had a bottle in his hip pocket. It breaks, and the rattlers all keep their distance—but you don’t mention this until you’ve written three or four thousand words, at least.”

  “It sounds great. But how am I going to get him out?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Any old way. Of course the heroine—and to the reader, that means you—must get him out, but the real punch is in his terrible situation. You can get him out with an ordinary barn ladder, a well-rope, or even a hop pole, nobody will notice.”

  “Yes, well, after that?”

  “Keep on getting him, or her, into more just such holes, one in each chapter, until they get married or take out accident insurance, when, of course, the story must stop.”

  With that, McDougall said, Bly went off, and that was the last he ever heard about it.

  Of course, there was another kind of writing at which Nellie Bly genuinely excelled—but she could never go back to doing the undercover reportage that had launched her career in the first place. She was now too famous.

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1890, one American newspaper reported, Elizabeth Bisland was “in the very cream of the swim”; through her hosts Lord and Lady Broome, she had been given “entree to the best English society.” Bisland attended squash parties and balls and dinners (including one held in the very dining room on the walls of which James McNeill Whistler had painted his famous peacocks), and the Henley boat races, and a socialist meeting, and once a garden party given by the Prince of Wales. She visited artists’ studios and, less happily, endured tea parties in drawing rooms where the air was thick, in Bisland’s description, with “portentous platitudes,” the very solemn sort of affair that mischievously brought up in her “wild desires to whoop and smash china by way of restoring the equilibrium.” Going to see her host, Sir Frederick Broome, debate in the House of Lords, she was ushered to an upstairs gallery where women watched from behind grates; afterward, in Harper’s Bazaar, she wrote tartly, “I wonder if they fear we shall get into mischief that they cage us up like monkeys?”

  The Broomes also introduced Bisland into London’s literary society, where she met, among others, the philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer, the popular n
ovelist Rhoda Broughton, and Rudyard Kipling, who seemed as smitten with her as the men in New York had been. “I guess you’ll have enough men censer-swinging under your nose to prevent your waving the thurible too markedly under mine,” he wrote in a letter to her that summer. “All the same and until you go after something else new I am grateful.”

  At the close of the London season Bisland left the city for Oxford, where she took lodgings at 26 Holywell Street, a three-story stone house on a narrow medieval lane. Directly across the way was Rhoda Broughton’s house, where in the oak-ceilinged drawing room, with her two pugs and Yorkshire terrier sleeping in baskets by the fireplace, friends gathered for tea at four-thirty each afternoon. Broughton also hosted regular gatherings of Oxford’s Browning Society, where the guests occasionally included Robert Browning himself. It was the type of literary salon, full of warm hospitality and intelligent, animated conversation, to which Bisland had gravitated since her earliest days in New Orleans.

  While Bisland was living in Oxford, she collaborated with Rhoda Broughton on a short novel entitled A Widower Indeed. The story concerns Edward Lygon, a bursar from an Oxford college, who is grieving over the recent death of his wife; soon he meets the new lodger at his neighbor’s house on Holywell Street, a beautiful young woman from the American South with the unlikely name of Georgia Wrenn. She possesses, as the narrator describes it, “excellent health, pungent curiosity, and untrammeled freedom,” and, needless to say, over the course of the book Edward Lygon falls in love with her. Georgia Wrenn seems to have been modeled, at least in part, on Elizabeth Bisland herself, and the general feeling among literary critics was that Bisland’s main contribution to the writing of the novel was to provide character details about the young protagonist as well as the occasional odd bit of Southern dialect. (Wrenn once describes herself “slumping in and out of puddles in a kinsfolky way,” and elsewhere exclaims, “It makes you feel as if you might whip your weight in wild cats without trying.”) A Widower Indeed received decidedly mixed reviews: Godey’s Lady’s Book, for instance, said that “The book has much interest and force, so that, once having opened it, one does not know how to leave off reading it,” but The London Gentlewoman called it “a tedious and disappointing book” in which “neither author is at her best, or even her second best.” In New York, The Independent split the difference: “We note the peculiarities of Miss Broughton’s diction and the impress of her worst style all through the half unnatural, half commonplace composition. We are inclined to credit all the best pages to Miss Bisland.”

  One of the men who had been very taken with Elizabeth Bisland back in New York was a thirty-five-year-old attorney by the name of Charles Wetmore. Born in Ohio and raised in Michigan, Wetmore had graduated from Harvard Law School and recently taken a job in a Wall Street law firm. His entry in the book Prominent and Progressive Americans indicates that he had decided to move to “the great metropolis of the nation”—much like Bisland in leaving New Orleans—because that was where “the competition [was] keenest, the requirements for high success the most exacting, and the possibilities of achievement the most promising.” Wetmore was an avid outdoorsman, described by The New York Times as “an enthusiastic member of the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club”; he had a thick mustache that turned up dashingly at the ends and the smoldering dark eyes of a matinee idol. While Elizabeth Bisland was living in Oxford, Charles Wetmore came to visit her, and by the time he left the two were engaged. The following year Bisland returned to New York (she had now become editor of the women’s section of the Illustrated American), and on October 6, 1891, she married Wetmore in a church crowded with friends and relatives. That same year, Harper & Brothers published A Flying Trip Around the World, a collection of the articles Bisland had written about her trip for The Cosmopolitan. It was the first book for which she was the sole author, the first of many that she would go on to write.

  IN AUGUST 1890 Nellie Bly sent a poignant letter to her old friend Erasmus Wilson of the Pittsburg Dispatch. “My dear ‘Q. O.,’ ” she wrote,

  … since I’m in luck again I’m hunting up old friends who seemed to have forgotten me. I sent you a newspaper the other day containing a notice of the very good contract I have made with Mr. Munro. It allows me to do newspaper work. I had made up my mind never to work for a newspaper again but I can do serial stories for Mr. Munro and never go out of my own home. I am busy on one now entitled “New York by Night.” You know all the great English novelists began in this way, so I hope. The woman who wrote “Booths Baby” which has sold more than 500,000 copies and has been dramatized and played in every city in Europe & America has always written for such story papers. And then Mrs. Burnett wrote for The Ledger until she made a hit as a novelist, so I feel encouraged.… Why don’t you write to me occasionally? How do you like my book? I have sold over 10,000 copies.

  As Bly herself would later provide the inspiration for a younger generation of female journalists, so now she looked for encouragement to women who had come before her—women who had worked for story papers before achieving success as a novelist. That form of writing, though, seems always to have been a terrible struggle for her. No issues of The New York Family Story Paper survive from those years, but the literary press of the time made reference to only a single story by Bly appearing in Munro’s paper.

  By the fall of that year Nellie Bly had abandoned New York entirely. In November she moved with her mother to a farmhouse in the town of White Plains, some twenty-five miles north of the city; Mary Jane Cochrane had taken a five-year lease on the house, perhaps to escape the unpleasant talk that had been swirling around her daughter of late, and to provide her with the time and quiet in which to write. (Though in truth the house may not always have been very quiet: in a letter Bly said that she was living with “the cleverest parrot, the most wonderful monkey, and the wisest Skye terrier in the world,” but “not one is congenial and friendly with the other, and they live in a constant state of suspended hostilities which may break forth at any moment and obliterate my menagerie.”) Sometime in the fall Bly suffered an accident of some sort—she never indicated specifically what it was—and for a long time she was mostly confined to her bed, able to get around only on crutches. She tried her best to write while lying in bed, but she found it tiring and could never do it for very long. She was increasingly depressed. Her handwriting, which in her younger years had been breezy and full of flourishes, had become stiff and cramped, the lines heavy. Early the next year Bly would write to Erasmus Wilson again; the Pittsburgh Press Club was honoring him at their annual banquet, and they had not invited her to attend. Bly confided to him, “I think it was awfully shabby of them to leave me out but then—I suppose I can live with it.” Later in the letter she wrote, “I am glad, dear Q, that you always hope for the best. Life cannot be entirely cheerless while hope remains. It is a year since I have entertained such a feeling and, strange to say, I have not the least conception why I am, or should be, blue.”

  It had been a year, Bly told Wilson, since she last felt hopeful. She wrote that letter on January 26, 1891—a year and a day since she stepped down from the train in Jersey City at the end of her triumphal march. Exactly one year before, she had been sitting in that little New York apartment crowded with flowers sent by well-wishers, exhausted but happy, unable to sleep for the roar of the crowd still ringing in her ears.

  Over the course of the following year Nellie Bly had quit her newspaper in a dispute over money, been involved in a libel suit, fallen out with her manager and had her lecture tour cut short, endured the slights of newspaper editors, moved out of New York, become bedridden, and struggled to fulfill a lucrative magazine contract. She had ended up doing a kind of writing for which she had no natural talent and that could not have inspired her the way newspaper work once had. She was living in a lonely, isolated farmhouse, away from the city where she had gained her greatest success. Her romances with James Metcalfe (who had publicly poked fun at her) and Frank Ingram, howeve
r serious they might have been, had ended, and nothing else had taken their place. She was twenty-seven years old and still single; her professed goal had been to fall in love and marry a millionaire, but now that must have seemed an increasingly remote possibility. She had sold lots of copies of Nellie Bly’s Book, but it was the last book she would ever write.

  These days she felt, much of the time, listless and weary, and had trouble concentrating; she lay in bed and was gaining weight, and her doctor, she said, blamed it on her “blood.” In March 1891, Bly wrote to Erasmus Wilson that she had become “a victim of the most frightful depression that ever beset mortal. You can imagine how severe it is when I tell you that I have not done a stroke of work for four weeks.”

  How different she had felt when she started out from Hoboken on that gray November morning—frightened, of course, but confident as well, and, as always, hopeful. And she had done what she set out to do: she had gone around the world faster than anyone ever had before her. She had outraced Elizabeth Bisland; but now, looking back, it was not entirely clear which of them had won.

  EPILOGUE

  IN 1890, SHORTLY AFTER NELLIE BLY AND ELIZABETH BISLAND RETURNED home, the superintendent of the U.S. Census declared the American frontier officially closed. The railroad had knitted together the country from coast to coast; the Indian wars were all but over (the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the final military encounter between the United States and the Sioux, would take place in December of that year); since 1889 six western states had been admitted to the Union, leaving only Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona as the last remaining territories in the continental United States. Now, with a renewed sense of patriotism and national pride, the country began to turn its attention outward.