{"id":26592,"date":"2015-03-11T16:06:07","date_gmt":"2015-03-11T20:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/?p=26592"},"modified":"2015-03-11T16:28:40","modified_gmt":"2015-03-11T20:28:40","slug":"an-irish-journalist-in-the-queen-city-lafcadio-hearn-and-the-cincinnati-demi-monde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/2015\/03\/an-irish-journalist-in-the-queen-city-lafcadio-hearn-and-the-cincinnati-demi-monde\/","title":{"rendered":"An Irish Journalist in the Queen City: Lafcadio Hearn and the Cincinnati Demi-Monde"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kevin Grace<\/em><\/p>\n

From the Cincinnati winter of 1874, over 140 years ago:<\/p>\n

\u00a0It is in all times a rugged road to the Place of Nameless Graves \u2013 a road running over rolling ground, where vehicles rock from side to side like ships in a gale and groan in all their timbers. \u201cRattle his bones over the stones, He\u2019s only a pauper whom nobody owns.\u201d\u00a0 Hundreds of paupers\u2019 bones are rattled over that road every year: the Undertaker always sending out three or four at a time in a covered wagon, with frightfully stiff springs.\u00a0 And as the dismal vehicle rolls along the coffins rattle and bump one against the other fearfully from side to side, and bump horribly against the thinly-lined walls of those long and ghastly boxes.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Hearn\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This article, \u201cGolgotha, A Pilgrimage to Potter\u2019s Field\u201d, was written for the Cincinnati Enquirer<\/em> on November 29 that year by an odd, bulging- eyed Irishman by the name of Lafcadio Hearn.\u00a0 Hearn, who would chronicle the lowlifes, ghosts, and murderers of Cincinnati for several years before moving on to New Orleans, eventually settled in Japan where even today he is revered as a major literary figure.\u00a0 He made his journalistic mark in Cincinnati because he explored the alleys and tenements and riverside settlements that housed the city\u2019s worst and most colorful citizens.\u00a0 He explored the lives of criminals and addicts, of mediums and flim-flam men, and of those who dealt with the underbelly of Cincinnati society.\u00a0 And he did it by letting them tell their stories, by involving himself in his own reporting, by writing in the authentic dialect of the storytellers, and by thrilling his readers nearly every day with a world in which they seldom visited.<\/p>\n

Hearn had this to say about himself in Cincinnati,<\/p>\n

Now in those days there was a young man connected with the Daily Enquirer whose tastes were whimsically grotesque and arabesque.\u00a0 He was by nature a fervent admirer of extremes.\u00a0 He believed only in the Revoltingly Horrible or the Excruciatingly Beautiful.\u00a0 He worshipped the French school of sensation, and reveled in thrusting a reeking mixture of bones, blood and hair under peoples\u2019 noses at breakfast time.<\/em><\/p>\n

So how did this little Irishman wind up in Cincinnati?\u00a0 Christened as Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, he was born in 1850 in the Greek islands, specifically Lefkada, to Charles Bush Hearn of County Offaly, Ireland and a Greek woman, Rosa Kassimati.\u00a0 Hearn\u2019s father was a surgeon in the British army when Great Britain controlled those islands.\u00a0 Lafcadio\u2019s parents were married in the Greek Orthodox Church, and he was baptized into that faith as well.<\/p>\n

\"Lafcadio<\/a>The family\u2019s circumstances did not turn out well in the Greek islands and when his father was transferred to the British West Indies, he left his family behind.\u00a0 Hearn\u2019s mother managed to get to Ireland, but abandoned her son to the care of a paternal great aunt, Sarah Brenane.\u00a0 After 1857, Hearn never saw his parents again.\u00a0 In Ireland, he was afforded a classical education which was later carried on in France where he became fluent in French, and later his guardians enrolled him in school in England.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was in England that he lost the vision in his left eye at the age of 16 due to an accident, and as he suffered from severe myopia anyway, for the rest of his life Hearn turned his head so as to avoid people seeing his injured eye, instead letting them focus on his bulging right eye.<\/p>\n

By 1867, the Brenane fortune that supported him was dissipated and he found himself in London\u2019s East End, where he wandered the streets and visited libraries and museums.\u00a0 However, his great aunt\u2019s family managed to recover some of its money so a one-way ticket to New York was presented to the young Hearn and he was instructed to make his way to Cincinnati where a family benefactor might assist him in finding work.\u00a0 As he later said in a biographical piece, \u201cI was dropped moneyless on the pavement of an American city to begin life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"cincinnati-hearn\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At first Hearn lived in alleys and stables in Cincinnati and took on whatever work he could find.\u00a0 Eventually he found work with a local printer, Henry Watkin, who encouraged him to keep studying so Hearn made wide use of Watkin\u2019s personal library as well as Cincinnati\u2019s public library.\u00a0 By 1872 he landed a job with the Enquirer<\/em>, where he remained until 1875.<\/p>\n

At the time Hearn came to Cincinnati, there were about 20,000 Irish immigrants living in the city.\u00a0 In the decades since the city\u2019s founding in the late \"Hearn\"<\/a>18th<\/sup> century, Cincinnati\u2019s Irish population varied greatly, from the wealth and influence of families like the Gambles, the Sintons, and the Pogues, to the working-class families in Fulton and Mt. Adams, and, impoverished families along the river basin and slums.\u00a0 That was the perfect milieu for someone like Hearn, who had no particular loyalty to his ethnic brothers and sisters, but he did revel in the secrets and dark tales of everyone who was even below the hoi-polloi, not to mention the hoity-toity.\u00a0 Known as a sensationalistic journalist, Hearn relished the idea of giving upper-class readers of the daily newspaper a taste of the sordid lives they otherwise shunned every day.\u00a0 He lived for the lurid.<\/p>\n

Hearn\u2019s writing career blossomed in the Queen City, and in 1874 he met Henry Farny, who later gained fame for his Western paintings, and the two published a tabloid called Ye Giglampz<\/em>, a weekly that Hearn wrote and Farny illustrated.\u00a0 The publication, containing cultural happenings in Cincinnati and satirical commentary, lasted all of nine issues before folding, but it was published at a time when such tabloids were becoming mainstream in American cities.\u00a0 As another local example, Sam the Scaramouch <\/em>came along just a decade later in 1884-1885, and it too was short-lived. \u00a0\u00a0Satire sometimes makes enemies of readers and those who control credit and purse strings.<\/p>\n

In that same year of 1874, Hearn married Mattie Foley, who was African \"Hearn<\/a>American, and because of what the Enquirer <\/em>management termed his \u201cillegal marriage\u201d as well as having to fend off local clerical criticism of Hearn\u2019s writings, the newspaper fired him.\u00a0 Hearn immediately went to the rival Cincinnati<\/em>\u00a0Commercial,<\/em> where he worked until 1877.\u00a0 Hearn is credited for being one of the first American journalists to capture the essence of African American lives and to render their speech and song lyrics in a realistic way.<\/p>\n

By 1877 after writing more than 400 stories and essays for Cincinnati papers, Hearn grew weary of the city and with the Commercial\u2019<\/em>s blessing, he moved to New Orleans, from where he sent back dispatches to the Cincinnati paper as well as writing articles for Harper\u2019s Weekly<\/em> and the New Orleans Times Democrat<\/em>.\u00a0 He stayed in New Orleans for a decade and his writing career flowered as he published several books on proverbs, Creole life, and folklore, indulging his penchant for ghost stories and the macabre.\u00a0 In this regard, New Orleans was perfect for him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After spending a couple of years in the West Indies as a correspondent, Hearn \"Hearn<\/a>moved to Japan in 1890 where he lived for the remainder of his life.\u00a0 He died in 1904 at the age of 54.\u00a0 In Japan, Hearn became a teacher, married a Japanese woman (he and Foley were long divorced) and they had four children.\u00a0 His greatest literary achievement was rendering the unknown society of Japan to Western readers in a lucid and vibrant manner in several books on Japanese culture, especially folklore and fairy tales.\u00a0 He took the name Koizumi Yakumo, and his reputation as a storyteller in their lives endeared him to the Japanese.\u00a0 Since his death, there have been multiple anthologies of his works in Japan and there are monuments and a museum dedicated to him as well.\u00a0 Postage stamps are adorned with his image and there are many Lafcadio Hearn literary societies.\u00a0 Perhaps the only other writers that get such constant national dedication and attention are James Joyce or W.B. Yeats in Ireland.<\/p>\n

The two major repositories of Hearn material in the United States are at Tulane University and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.\u00a0 UC professor emeritus of journalism Jon Hughes is a noted Hearn scholar and has often written about him. \u00a0In 2006, through a local Japanese-American friendship organization called the Japan Research Center of Greater Cincinnati, Hughes and\u00a0Kinji Tanaka, Osaka businessman and longtime collector of Hearn articles, brought to the Archives & Rare Books Library 12 original issues of the Cincinnati Commercial\u00a0<\/em>and the\u00a0Cincinnati<\/em>\u00a0Enquirer<\/em>\u00a0that contained Hearn articles.<\/p>\n

\"Gift<\/a>

Japanese businessmen, Kinji Tanaka presents a rare newspaper featuring famed writer Lacadio Hearn to Archives and Rare Books at UC<\/p><\/div>\n

And interestingly enough, there is a recent birth of interest in Ireland on Hearn and his career.\u00a0 In 1988 the Irish ambassador to Japan, Sean Ronan, created a Lafcadio Hearn Library at the Irish embassy in Tokyo, and in 1997, a book oforiginal essays on Hearn and his works was published, Irish Writings on Lafadio Hearn: Writer, Journalist, and Teacher,<\/em> edited by Ronan. The essays vary from accounts by Hearn\u2019s Japanese grandson to a look at Hearn\u2019s Dublin relatives, \u00a0as well as a comparison of Hearn to other Irish writers, Hearn and Irish folklore, and recently discovered original source material.\u00a0 Former Irish president Mary Robinson wrote a tribute to Hearn as well.<\/p>\n

\"Kinji<\/a>

Kinji Tanaka, Japanese businessman and collector of Lafcadio Hearn articles.<\/p><\/div>\n

But back to this Irishman in Cincinnati: other writers had chronicled the local Irish such as Irish playwright Dion Boucicault and, of course, Englishman Charles Dickens.\u00a0 But it was Hearn who most fully explored Irish life here, in large measure because he was a resident rather than visiting literati like Dickens and Boucicault.\u00a0 Though he relished the idea of shocking his readers, the notion that his human subjects represented the most interesting aspects of Cincinnati society was very real to him, be they pickpockets, whores, grifters, body snatchers, singers and dancers, ghosts and ghouls, or even murderers.\u00a0 Hearn\u2019s masterpiece of Cincinnati macabre was his reporting on the Tanyard killing, a murder that Jon Hughes covers for his monograph, The Tanyard Murder: On the Case with Lafcadio Hearn <\/em>(University Press of America, 1982).\u00a0 This murder took place in November, 1874 in the neighborhood termed \u201cThe Shambles\u201d, that stretch of slaughterhouses along the Miami-Erie Canal near Central Avenue and Findlay Street.\u00a0 As Hearn described it, \u201cIt is a quarter where the senses of sight and hearing and smell are at once assailed with all the foulnesses of the charnel-house and the shambles.\u00a0 It is the center of all those trades which harden and brutalized the men who engage in them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Japanese<\/a><\/p>\n

After a fire at the Werk candle factory, a body was discovered across the street in the Freiberg Tannery.\u00a0 A German immigrant, Herman Schilling, had been murdered by Andreas Egner, his son Frederic Egner, and a third man, George Rufer.\u00a0 The elder Egner had become enraged because Schilling was dallying with his daughter, Julia Egner, fifteen years old and reputed to be of a constant compromised reputation.\u00a0 So Schilling was strangled, run through with a pitchfork, and thrown into the boiler of the tannery, in which his skull burst.\u00a0 But his teeth, as Hearn described them, remained \u201cghastly white.\u201d\u00a0 Hearn\u2019s reporting made the front page of the Enquirer<\/em> and continued for two weeks, causing a national sensation because of the grisly woodcuts that accompanied it.\u00a0 It was said that Schilling had been thrown into the fire while he was still alive.\u00a0 The perpetrators were caught, tried, and convicted.\u00a0 And as Hearn wrote,<\/p>\n

Certainly the dogs used not to howl so before last Saturday night.\u00a0 How they could have quieted while the hideous tragedy was being enacted, hearing the dull, skull-crushing blows, the death struggle: the shrieks for aid, the body dragged from the stable to the furnace, leaving its blood-trail behind, the strangely horrible crackling and spluttering and hissing within the furnace, is something very difficult to comprehend.<\/em><\/p>\n

With the Tanyard murder Hearn was in his element, at once thrilling and repelling his morning readers, and, forming his literary reputation in Cincinnati.<\/p>\n

To learn more about ARB\u2019s Hearn holdings, or other rare books in the collection, please email us at archives@ucmail.uc.edu<\/a>, call at 513.556.1959, find us on the web: http:\/\/www.libraries.uc.edu\/arb.html<\/a> or check us on Facebook at https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ArchivesRareBooksLibraryUniversityOfCincinnati<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kevin Grace From the Cincinnati winter of 1874, over 140 years ago: \u00a0It is in all times a rugged road to the Place of Nameless Graves \u2013 a road running over rolling ground, where vehicles rock from side to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,13],"tags":[53,722,67],"class_list":["post-26592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arb","category-uclibraries","tag-cincinnati-history","tag-irish-literature","tag-rare-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}