Lunar Fancies and Earthly Truths: The Moon Hoax of 1835 and the Penny Press

Abstract

This piece is an article based on the second chapter of my dissertation Embellishment, Fabrication, and Scandal: Hoaxing and the American Press. In it, I examine the most successful and sustained hoax in the history of journalism: a series of articles that convinced readers, editors, and even some scholars, that there was a civilization of bat-like hominids living on the moon's surface. In spite of a lack of public outrage, editorial discussions of the hoax raised a number of key definitional ideals about what news, as a commodity, should be. This was, I argue, one of the earliest professional discourses on news and one that prefigured a key problem that would loom large later in the century: attempting to balance, on the one hand, a desire for sensational and provoking stories, and on the other, present verifiable and truthful accounts of happenings in reality.

Notes

In subsequent reprints and collections of Poe's work, the title of this piece was changed to The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall. For the sake of consistency, the character will be referred to as Pfall.

For a recent example of a hoax operating under these circumstances, one need only think back to the Sokal Affair in 1996 in Social Text. The incident and its aftereffects marked, as Paul Guillory points out, by competing discourses within the academic fields of the humanities and sciences, as well in the popular media as it became a part of the “culture wars” (474-5).

By contrast, an outsider hoax is one which originates outside a specialized discourse community or field, which attracts significant media attention before being revealed as fraudulent. These hoaxes tend originate from the audience and are usually perpetuated on media institutions themselves.

All citations of the Moon Hoax articles are from the 1975 reprinting of The Moon Hoax; or, A Discovery That the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings, originally published in 1859. I have consulted the original articles in the Sun to determine original publication dates and article/serialization breaks. For ease of access and greater legibility, I have referenced this collected edition.