Moonshine

I just finished a highly entertaining book:  The Sun and the Moon:  The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York, by Matthew Goodman (Basic Books, 2008). After such a long subtitle, a summary of the book seems hardly necessary.

The Sun and the Moon covers a much wider swath of territory than its title would suggest. The ostensible focus of the book is the New York Sun, its editor Richard Adams Locke, and the remarkable "Moon Hoax" he pulled off in 1835. Locke wrote a series of articles purportedly based on a paper in a Scottish scientific journal, about the amazing discoveries made by Sir John Herschel using a radical new type of telescope at the new observatory in Cape Town. Locke's articles described all manner of marvels on the Moon, including forests, mountains of amethyst, unicorns, and bat-winged humanoids. The series was a sensation, and for a few weeks in the fall of 1835, the Sun had the highest circulation of any newspaper in the world at the time.

But there's more to Goodman's book than Locke's hoax. He braids into it the early career of P.T. Barnum, who was vying for the attention of New Yorkers at the time with his exhibition of Joice Heth, a woman said to be 161 years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington. Another of Goodman's threads follows Edgar Allen Poe, who envied Locke's successful hoax and attempted one of his own a decade later with his "Balloon Hoax." He also describes the early days of mass-market journalism, in the days when editors occasionally settled disputed with fistfights, and when hoaxes and outright lies in the press were nearly as prevalent as they are today.

Finally, he paints a fascinating picture of New York itself in the Jacksonian era -- a city where pigs rooted in the streets, mobs occasionally burned the homes of abolitionists, and farm boys from Connecticut could become newspaper magnates. Boston and Philadelphia were the cultural capitals of the country in those days, and New York was its hard-charging, brawling boomtown.

There are some laugh-out-loud moments, particularly at the imaginative insults hurled between Locke and his arch-rival James Gordon Bennett, or at the sheer shamelessness of Barnum's humbugs. Recommended for anyone interested in history, science fiction, science, or good old-fashioned hoaxing.