‘Literary Lions,’ a new exhibit at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, celebrates 250 years of Seacoast writers and publishers

“Don’t you feel when you’re closing the door that they’re having a conversation?” Dennis Robinson asks Rose Eppard. The pair of exhibit organizers are standing in the doorway of the Sawtelle Room at the Portsmouth Athenaeum during the private opening reception for “Literary Lions,” and though the space is dim and quiet, the personalities of the men and women depicted nearly pop out of the paintings and photographs lining the walls. Writers all, they insist on being heard. 

The exhibit features two dozen authors, editors, poets and publishers connected to both the Seacoast and the larger world of letters. The idea was to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the first press run in New Hampshire, when Daniel Fowle launched the New Hampshire Gazette in Portsmouth on Oct. 7, 1756.

“It started out almost like a party, the Gazette honoring itself for still being around, based on (current publisher) Steve Fowle’s theory that the New Hampshire Gazette is the nation’s oldest newspaper, a theory he will carry to the grave,” says Robinson, exhibit co-organizer and editor of SeacoastNH.com, a Web site devoted to local history and culture. “So rather than just focus on newspapers, we thought, let’s widen this to give it more public appeal.”

It became a party to which more than a hundred of Portsmouth’s literary figures were invited. The price of admission?

“You had to be connected with words, influential and dead,” Robinson says.

Portraits and numerous objects connected to the writers are on display, and a total of 120 local wordsmiths are featured in a massive 40-page catalog, printed in the style of the New Hampshire Gazette and available for free to visitors.

In glass display cases are children’s books by Anne Malloy, the original subscription list of the Portsmouth Journal, a Lotte Jacobi photograph of May Sarton and a bobblehead doll of Daniel Webster. Along the walls are nearly equal numbers of men and women who lived or worked on the Seacoast for varying periods of time from the 1720s until today. Among them are three of the first four editors of the Atlantic Monthly; one of the country’s first female preachers, who traveled alone to Israel five times in the early 1800s; and publishers who put some of America’s most beloved writers on the map.

Their portraits can be dour, but don’t judge a book by its cover.

“They in turn have become this interesting story. You might not read their works, but their life stories and why they wrote has become as interesting as what they wrote,” Robinson says.

Robinson himself has posted more than a thousand articles about local history on his Web site, Seacoastnh.com. Most of these he’s authored, although he’s also dedicated himself to posting histories by 18th-century newspaperman Charles Brewster online.

Like the local authors he often writes about, he mainly covers events that occur close to home, yet doesn’t ever seem to run out of material. And like them, he works alone at his desk. But he’s also instantly connected to the world through the latest evolution of information technology.

“The Internet creates this massive dialogue, this conversation you’re having every day with hundreds of people about this topic you’re interested in,” he says. “One day I was talking to the BBC and a curator from the Smithsonian. When I wrote about James T. Fields, a day later I got a letter from someone who is an expert on him. I wrote about John Paul Jones, and I got an e-mail from a guy in Madagascar who is underwater searching for one of his ships, and he’s writing from his submarine.”

It’s a world hardly imagined by Daniel Fowle. Outraged by his persecution, including time in jail in Boston for publishing a satirical pamphlet called “The Monster of Monsters,” he brought his enslaved assistant Primus and wife Lydia to Portsmouth and, on Oct. 7, 1756, printed the first issue of the New Hampshire Gazette, the state’s first newspaper. Now on view under glass at the Athenaeum, Fowle declares: “Upon the encouragement given by a number of subscribers, I now publish the first weekly Gazette for gentlemen who are friends to learning, religion and liberty.”

The Gazette was one of 20 newspapers being published in the colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. Filled with propaganda pieces, they are credited with turning the tide of public opinion from reconciliation with England to a fight for independence. It’s hard to imagine the power they weilded in a world without television, radio or the Internet.
“The newspaper was the sole source of information and cultural opinion,” observes Tom Hardiman, who works as keeper, or adminstrator, of the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

Their popularity only grew. Printing and papermaking technology advanced rapidly in the 1800s, allowing printers of newspapers and books to print in greater quantities, faster and more affordably than ever before. The 1880 census recorded 11,314 different papers in the United States. As influential as the Internet in their day, they gave people a voice and access to ideas that had never before been seen in history, giving rise by the end of the century to the almost universal literacy that we take for granted today.

Through his writing, Robinson made the acquaintance of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Celia Thaxter and Charles Brewster, the prolific early 18th-century editor of the Portsmouth Journal who was also researcher and author of hundreds of widely read literary “Rambles” about the town and its inhabitants. Living nearly his entire life within walking distance of Market Square, Brewster “is said to have walked the 2,000 feet between his office and home enough times to circle the globe, and always with the eyes of a man exploring uncharted territory,” Robinson writes in the catalog.

One who may have watched Brewster on his perambulations is James T. Fields, who as an adult recalled that his favorite reading spot during his Portsmouth boyhood was a window in the Portsmouth Athenaeum overlooking Market Square. As a partner in Boston’s Ticknor and Fields, one of the nation’s most distinguished and influential publishers, the boy who grew up in Portsmouth’s South End went on to publish and host in his home the likes of Dickens, Whittier, Aldrich, Lowell, Thorough, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Tennyson, Bret Harte, Bayard Taylor, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott, among others, many of whom were also guests of Celia Thaxter at her salon on the Isles of Shoals.

The Athenaeum where Fields read by the window was founded in 1817 and continues as a nonprofit membership library and museum. Its exhibit hall and library, filled floor to ceiling with darkened, leatherbound volumes, are above the Portsmouth bureau of Foster’s Daily Democrat, whose “copperhead” editor Joshua Lane Foster got a rough start in publishing. He once was driven out of his Daniel Street office when a drunken mob trashed his first newspaper, the anti-Civil War, pro-slavery The States and Union.

Tom Hardiman takes a quiet moment in the library during the opening reception for “Literary Lions.” He graduated from the University of New Hampshire as an English major, and worked for a time at Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, then the York Institute Museum in Saco, Maine, before taking his current position at the Athenaeum.

“Our mission is, among other things, to promote intellectual discourse and to present the history of Portsmouth and the Piscataqua,” Hardiman says. “That gives us the challenge to tell a historical story that might get people discussing the role of the media or the role of literature.”

This is the organization’s first exhibit focused on literature of the region.

“It’s been interesting, especially today (during the reception), to see how deeply involved people get with print. More than you’d expect. More than art. People come in and pick up the catalog and read it,” he says, gesturing toward the main room. “There are 10 people in chairs reading the catalog.”

Out his window every day, he can see New Hampshire Gazette owner and publisher Steve Fowle make his daily walk from his home office near Islington Street to the Post Office. It’s nearly the same daily walk Charles Brewster made.

“Steve coined the term ‘chickenhawk,’” Hardiman observes. The term describes those, particularly officials in the Bush administration, who take a hawkish military stance, but did not serve in the armed forces themselves when given the opportunity during their youth. The term has now become part of national parlance. “That had nothing to do with the paper. It was picked up on his Web site. The publisher of a local free newspaper had a national impact, but it was because of his Web presence.”

Steve Fowle is Daniel’s third cousin, five times removed. He’s put together a timeline of the 40 or so newspapers published in Portsmouth, of which there were often four to six published simultaneously.

The Gazette had been combined with the Portsmouth Herald in 1960 and was reinvigorated when Fowle, a writer and journalist by trade, claimed ownership of the unregistered trade name with $40 in 1989.

When the current exhibit began to take shape, he says, it was decided that his contribution, “as it were, would be to keep the paper going until then.”

Fowle’s personal collection includes a scrapbook of old Portsmouth Oracle newspaper items clipped and pasted by Charles Brewster, humorously titled “The Essence of Old Newspapers Extracted by Pindar Hayloft, Esq., Portsmouth, 1817.” Fowle’s collection does not include his ancestor’s printing press, which was last sighted at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

His biweekly publication takes some of its inspiration from years past, including local history articles, “old news” from bygone days, local news and calendar items, and a general tone of skepticism regarding the current administration, a trait he wishes were shared by other media outlets. By far the biggest draw for local readers and subscribers around the country is “The Fortnightly Rant,” which culls extensively from buzz on the Internet.

“The Gazette is a very small paper. We’ve got extremely limited means. I try to concentrate on publishing the stuff you’re not going to get hit with everywhere else you turn. I look for the odd thing that illuminates the stuff you hear everywhere else. I look for the missing parts … the obscure facts or generally ignored comments that at least to me start to make sense out of all this,” he says.

Interest in alternative media like the Gazette is growing, even in an era of declining circulation for daily papers.

In an article published on WashingtonPost.com on June 19 about the status of the newspaper industry, Patricia Sullivan reports that “daily newspapers lost 1.2 million readers in the six months that ended in March, down to 45.5 million. Online newspaper readership grew to 56 million.” As circulation declines, profits remain steady for now. “Newspapers are still among the most profitable corporations in America, with an average profit last year of 21 percent, Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine noted recently, almost twice what the average Fortune 500 corporation earns,” Sullivan writes.

Fowle believes that’s because modern, publicly owned corporate newspapers are ensnared in their own web of profits, fear and false standards of objectivity.

“Circulation is in decline but profits are just fine. If they decided that telling the truth meant more than making a profit, circulation would go through the roof, the presses would be running 24 hours a day and they still couldn’t keep up with the demand. People are starving for the truth, but they don’t bother reading newspapers because they know it’s not in there,” Fowle says.

The public shoulders responsibility as well, Fowle says.

“At some point, the reading public has to redevelop some vestigial ability of critical thinking. This commonly accepted myth that the American press is objective has led to a situation where a huge chunk of the public accepts what they see in newspapers and TV as the whole truth. Some of it’s true, but a lot of the time the most important thing in the news is what isn’t getting said.”

An enormous celebration marked the Gazette’s centennial in 1856. For several weeks before the event, it was highly discussed in local newspapers. The celebration featured a grand parade, speeches, banquets, even a regatta.

“All the 19th century folderol you could imagine,” observes Fowle. “We had that as something intimidating to consider. I think wisely we decided to do something smaller but dignified.”

The exhibit is a remarkable collaboration of volunteers and small museums. Richard Candee, a retired professor of American and New England studies, is author of several Portsmouth history books, serves on the exhibit committee of the Portsmouth Athenaeum and is vice president of the Portsmouth Historical Society. He wrote several of the entries in the catalog.

“Dennis and Steve came to me when we were building a new exhibit gallery at the Historical Society,” he says, recalling how he first became involved. “We said let’s just borrow the method of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty exhibit, of getting three or four organizations in Portsmouth to cooperate and pool our resources.”

With the help of others at the Portsmouth Historical Society, he gathered some of the examples of early printing and personal items in their gallery, files and collections. Items are on loan from Strawbery Banke, Whittier Museum, Old York Historical Society, the New Hampshire Historical Society and Historic New England, among others. “Wherever we could find them,” he says.

One of the stand-out pieces is a framed scroll-like record of the original subscribers to the Portsmouth Journal, taller than most visitors, loaned anonymously by a private collector. Also on exhibit are touching personal items, including a red hat worn by Portsmouth’s first poet laureate, Esther Buffler, who died in 2002, and May Sarton’s 1947 pocket calendar with her personal notations.

“I think the fun part was to involve so many individuals—so many who are themselves poets, writers, journalists—in writing up individuals who played interesting parts in Portsmouth’s literary tradition,” Candee says.

A team of about 20 researchers worked on the exhibit and profiles, led by Gazette business manager Rose Eppard, who is also chair of the exhibit committee at the Athenaeum. Though they narrowed down the featured writers fairly quickly, the two portraits that were hardest to acquire were of Joshua Lane Foster, founder of Foster’s Daily Democrat, and Fernando W. Hartford, a leading newspaper publisher who consolidated several rival papers under the umbrella of the Portsmouth Herald and served as mayor for seven terms near the turn of the 20th century.

“He was very well known, but tracking down a portrait for him was very difficult. Finding a portrait of Foster was very difficult. Finally the newspaper lent us a portrait of Foster. Then these two portraits appeared the weekend before we were to hang the exhibit,” Eppard says.

Marcia Jebb, a retired librarian from Cornell University, is a member of the Athenaeum who worked at the reference desk here when she first came to town. “I did help people with the research when they hit a wall. We used the library, directories, cemetery records,” she says. “If we had two years, we could have gone on. … It’s really just a beginning effort.”  

There will be 8,000 copies of the catalog printed on newsprint, and the Athenaeum is planning to print a copy of the catalog on archival paper as well. There’s also talk of publishing a book. Perhaps  the reason that a book springs to many readers’ minds is that the figures profiled in the catalog read like real characters, many of whom are intertwined in each others’ lives.

“It’s the interconnectedness of all the people, and how fascinatingly all of this gets recycled in their own lives. There’s a direct connection between what Dennis (Robinson) is doing now and what Brewster did and what (20th century Portsmouth Herald reporter, then editor) Ray Brighton did. It’s all very interesting,” Eppard says. “It just goes on. There are tendrils everywhere. A lot of them were people who hung out with Celia at the Isles of Shoals. Some of them published the others’ writing, like Fields published Thaxter. Then there’s a connection between Fields’ widow, Annie Fields, and Sarah Orne Jewett, with whom she lived in South Berwick after his death. And on and on and on,” Eppard says.

Robinson sees the connections, too.

“There’s also a weird sense that writers are people who can’t do anything else. Each of these people is twisted in some small way,” Robinson says. “I write 1,500 words on a bad day, seven days a week, decade after decade. Why do I think it’s the thing you have to do every day? I don’t think the exhibit answers that question, but why did Brewster get up and produce a newspaper every week for 50 years? Why does Steve do it? What do you think you’re doing? Changing people’s minds? Controlling their thoughts? Or do you just have this deep inner need to tell everyone what’s going on in the world? Not everyone has that need, but everyone in that room did.”

exhibit
The free exhibit runs through Oct. 28 at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, 9 Market Square, open Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, 1 to 4 p.m.

lecture series
To make reservations, contact the Athenaeum at 603-431-2538 or www.portsmouthathenaeum.org.
• Thursday, July 27, Michael Baenen presents “The Celebration Not Partisan: Portsmouth and the 1856 Centennial of Printing in New Hampshire,” 5:30 p.m., Rockingham Annex ballroom at The Library Restaurant, 401 State St., Portsmouth, 603-431-5202.
• Saturday, Aug. 12, Bill Hamilton, co-owner of Phineas Press, Hand Type and Printing, will give a gallery talk at 10 a.m. in the Athenaeum Reading Room, 9 Market Square.
• Thursday, Sept. 21, J. Dennis Robinson will present “Lively Boys! Lively Boys!” at 5:30 p.m. in the Rockingham Annex ballroom.
• Oct. 1-7, Jack Williams will demonstrate a replica of Daniel Fowle’s printing press, built from blueprints drawn by press experts at the Smithsonian Institute using a photograph of the original, Tyco Visitor Center, Strawbery Banke Museum. On Saturday, Oct 7, Neil Gustafson will present “Isaiah Thomas, Patriot Printer” on site. To learn more, call 603-433-1100.
• Thursday, Oct. 26, Vincent Golden, curator of newspapers at the American Antiquarian Society, will address “The Sorry State of Newspaper Survival,” 5:30 p.m., Rockingham Annex ballroom.

on stage
In August, Pontine Theatre will present their original production of “Brewster’s Rambles About Portsmouth,” along with several other works of original theater based on Portsmouth history, at West End Studio Theater, 959 Islington St., Portsmouth, 603-436-6660, www.pontine.org. Tickets are $20 and $16 and all performances begin at 8 p.m.
• “Brewster’s Rambles About Portsmouth,” Thursday, Aug. 10; Sunday, Aug. 13; Saturday, Aug. 19; and Friday, Aug. 25.
• “The Peace of Portsmouth,” Friday, Aug. 11; Thursday, Aug. 17; Sunday, Aug. 20; and Saturday, Aug. 26.
• “Celia Thaxter and The Isles of Shoals,” Saturday, Aug. 12; Friday, Aug. 18; and Thursday, Aug. 24.