• Birth in Port Chester and Early Education

• Columbia College and New York University

• Law Studies and Admission to the Bar

• The Literary Landscape of 1830s America

• Young America: A Literary Rebellion

• Arcturus and the Fight for American Identity

• The Call for International Copyright Law

• Emulation of Rabelais: Philosophy and the Grotesque

• Coining the Name Young America

• A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New York City

• Later Years and Literary Legacy

• Death in 1889

The history of American literature in the 19th century is often told as a story of the great figures Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman who created a distinctly American voice. But behind these towering figures were smaller groups of writers, editors, and critics who fought the battles that made the emergence of a national literature possible. Cornelius Mathews, a writer and editor from New York, was one of these figures. As a central member of the Young America movement, he argued that American literature should not be a pale imitation of English models, but should express a distinctly American identity. He edited journals, wrote essays, published books, and fought for international copyright law to protect American authors from British piracy. He was also a writer of idiosyncratic imagination, best remembered today for his peculiar belief that Adam and Eve were microbes. His career was a testament to the ambition and the eccentricity of the American literary scene in the decades before the Civil War.

Cornelius Mathews was born on October 28, 1817, in Port Chester, New York, a village in Westchester County. He was the son of Abijah Mathews and Catherine Van Cott. The Mathews family was part of the growing middle class of New York, and Cornelius was given the education that would prepare him for a career in law or letters. He attended Columbia College, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States, before graduating from New York University in 1834. His education was typical of the young men who would go on to shape American culture in the mid-19th century.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Mathews attended law school and was admitted to the New York bar in 1837. The law was a common path for aspiring writers in the 19th century, offering a profession that could support literary ambitions. Mathews practiced law for a time, but his true passion was literature. He was drawn to the world of letters, to the journals, magazines, and publishing houses that were the center of American cultural life.

The literary landscape of the 1830s was dominated by the belief that American literature was necessarily inferior to British literature. American authors were encouraged to follow English models closely, to imitate the styles and forms that had been perfected in London and Edinburgh. This view was espoused by the literary elite of New York, who tended to orbit the influential and conservative editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine, Lewis Gaylord Clark. The Knickerbocker was the leading literary magazine of its day, and its editor s opinions carried great weight.

Mathews vehemently disagreed with the notion that American literature should imitate English models. He called for a new literary style that would express a distinctly American identity. This style was not to be a populist or demotic one; Mathews was not advocating for a literature of the common man. Rather, he believed that American writers should embrace the cosmopolitan sweep and diversity of American society, that they should be bolder and more philosophical than the sort of cozy humor associated with the Knickerbocker Magazine.

Mathews s panacea was the emulation of François Rabelais, the 16th-century French writer whose Gargantua and Pantagruel was a work of grotesque humor, philosophical penetration, and encyclopedic learning. Rabelais, Mathews believed, managed to advance philosophical penetration without etherealizing its subject matter. He combined the intellectual with the bodily, the philosophical with the comic, the sublime with the grotesque. This was the model that Mathews proposed for American literature.

Mathews found allies in Evert Duyckinck, an editor and critic, and William Gilmore Simms, a novelist from South Carolina. Together, they formed the nucleus of a literary group that would become known as Young America. For two years, from 1840 to 1842, Mathews and Duyckinck wrote for and co-edited Young America s uneven journal, Arcturus. The journal was a platform for the ideas of the movement, and its pages included contributions from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. The association with these writers, who would become the leading figures of American literature, gave the Young America movement a legitimacy that it might not otherwise have had.

The politics of Young America were limited to a call for international copyright law. American literature was being pirated in England; British publishers reprinted American works without permission or payment, and American authors were denied the royalties that were their due. The lack of international copyright protection was a grievance that united American writers across regional and ideological divides. Mathews and his allies campaigned for a law that would protect American authors from this exploitation.

Mathews coined the name for the Young America movement in an 1845 speech. As he described the movement, Here, in New York, is the seat and strong-hold of this young power: but, all over the land, day by day, new men are emerging into activity, who partake of these desires, who scorn and despise the past pettiness of the country, and who are ready to sustain any movement toward a better and nobler condition. The speech was a declaration of literary independence, a call for American writers to reject the models of the past and to create a literature that reflected the vitality and diversity of the nation.

Throughout the period of his principal literary activity, the 1840s and 1850s, Mathews contributed to and helped to edit all manner of American periodicals. His name appeared in the New-Yorker, the Comic World, the New York Dramatic Mirror, the American Monthly Magazine, the New York Review, the New York Reveille, and a would-be rival to the Knickerbocker Magazine, the rapidly moribund Yankee Doodle. He was a ubiquitous presence in the literary journalism of his time, a man who seemed to be involved in every publication that mattered.

In 1853, Mathews published A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New York City, a collection of essays, character sketches, and sketches on the scenery of New York. The book was a portrait of the city that was Mathews s home, a city that was rapidly becoming the commercial and cultural capital of the United States. The essays captured the diversity of New York, the energy of its streets, the variety of its people, and the contradictions of its society.

Cornelius Mathews is best remembered today for a peculiar belief that has become a footnote in literary history. He believed that Adam and Eve were microbes. This notion, which seems bizarre to modern readers, was part of a larger philosophical project that sought to understand the origins of humanity through the lens of science and metaphysics. Mathews s interest in the microscopic and the cosmic, in the smallest and the largest scales of existence, was consistent with his Rabelaisian approach to literature a combination of the philosophical and the grotesque, the sublime and the absurd.

Mathews died on March 25, 1889, at the age of seventy-one. His death came at a time when American literature had achieved the independence that he had fought for. The great writers of the American Renaissance Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau had created a body of work that was distinctly American. Mathews had been a part of the movement that made that achievement possible, even if his own writing did not reach the heights of those he had championed.

The legacy of Cornelius Mathews is that of a literary activist, a man who used his energy, his editorial skills, and his writing to fight for a national literature. He was not a great novelist or poet, but he was a great advocate. His role in the Young America movement, his campaigns for international copyright, and his contributions to the journals of his time helped to create the conditions in which American literature could flourish.

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