“Thus Did Restell Seal This Unfortunate Lady's Lips with a Lie”: George Washington Dixon's Polyanthos and the Seductive Abortion Narrative

Abstract

In the late 1830s, George Washington Dixon's Polyanthos substantially intervened in nascent anti-abortion rhetoric. Dixon adapted the conventions of seduction narratives to displace women's responsibility for their reproductive choices onto abortionist Madame Restell. In 1841, his “abortion narrative” migrated from the page to the courtroom when the prosecution successfully used it to convict Restell in the death of Anna Maria Purdy. Restell's conviction shows how the narrative appealed to white, middle-class men uncertain of their gender roles and class status in Jacksonian-era New York. It upheld dominant stories of women's nonsexual, maternal natures, while affirming males’ superior, protective role. The abortion narrative's influence throughout the 1840s suggests that the Polyanthos played a more important role in the history of the penny press than scholars have acknowledged.

Notes

Trial of Madame Restell, Alias Ann Lohman for Abortion and Causing the Death of Mrs. Purdy: Being a Full Account of All the Proceedings on the Trial, Together with the Suppressed Evidence and Editorial Remarks (New York: For Sale at the Book Stand in Wall St., Adjoining the Custom house; at the Cottage No. 312 Broadway, Next to Masonic Hall; at the news Office, Corner of Duane and Greenwich St.; Corner of Nassau and Beekman Sts., and Bowery News Office, 1841), 21, http: archive.org/details/101521473.nlm.nih.gov.

“Madame Restell,” Polyanthos (New York, NY), March 6, 1841. This project analyzes the issues of the Polyanthos recently made available through the New York Public Library's Digital Collection. The Collection is divided into two volumes: Volume 5, which features the January 17, 1841, through May 9, 1841, issues, can be found at http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/17a0b3e0-a888-0131-d1a1-58d385a7bbd0. Volume 6, which features the June 6 through July 1841 issues, can be found at http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/46720db0-a888-0131-c126-58d385a7bbd0.

“Address, Delivered by George Washington Dixon,” Polyanthos, June 26, 1841.

“Readers of the Polyanthos,” Polyanthos, February 20, 1841. This piece was intermittently reprinted in subsequent issues.

For discussions of Dixon and the Polyanthos see Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Hortowitz's The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 30–40 and 113–114; Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114–130; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-century America (New York: Knopf, 2002), 164–169, and Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-century New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 52–65.

The Polyanthos published on a more or less weekly basis between January 1841 and November 1841. This article's scope is necessarily limited due to the unavailability of the 1839 and 1840 issues, and to the fact that post–July 1841 issues are not available through the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

“Dear Ladies,” Polyanthos, July 1841.

Early criticism of Madame Restell, especially, used the language of seduction as critics blamed her “polluted and polluting,” “monstrous and destructive” advertisements as the source of women's desires to limit family size, and it was those accusations that first brought Restell to Dixon's attention. See Advocate of Moral Reform, May 1, 1841, quoted in Clifford Browder, Wickedest Woman in New York: Madame Restell, the Abortionist (New York: Archon, 1988), 38, and Samuel Jenks Smith, New York Sunday Morning News, July 7, 1839, quoted in Browder, Wickedest Woman, 17.

“Madame Restell's New Issues,” Morning Herald (New York, NY), November 2, 1839; Marilyn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 17. The Morning Herald was speaking specifically of Madame Restell's office.

See Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 47–55, for an overview of the press's positioning as protector of the public good.

Dennis, Licentious Gotham, 47.

For more detailed background on the factors influencing New York City's growth and its culture, see Edward Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially chapters 29 and 38.

Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960, 3rd ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1962), 220, 222, and 242–243; Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 11–13.

Literary Journal, June 6, 1835. See Mott, American Journalism, chapter 3; Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), chapter 1; and Schiller, Objectivity and the News, Chapter 2.

Cockrell, Demons, 98–101 and 104. Cockrell takes Dixon's journalism more seriously than other scholars, positioning it within the larger context of his stage career and the era's racial dynamics. His class-based reading of Dixon's pursuit of a middle-class audience has influenced my understanding of Dixon's career progression. See Demons, 103–104, and “Of Soundscapes and Blackface: From Fools to Foster,” in Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Stephen Johnson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 51–72, 62.

See Cockrell, Demons, 98–108, for more on the details of Dixon's newspaper ventures. Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz suggest that Dixon may not have authored many of the pieces for which he claimed credit; his co-editor Snelling later claimed to have been the writer (The Flash Press, 39). This has not been proven, and a notice published in most issues of the Polyanthos insisted that “G. W. Dixon, alone is responsible for every line that appears in the Polyanthos,” Polyanthos, February 27, 1841.

The description of Dixon's character originated in the New York Dispatch, was reprinted in the April 23, 1839 Boston Post, and is quoted in Cockrell, Demons, 120.

See Cockrell, Demons, 115–127, for a full analysis of Dixon's Polyanthos-related legal troubles and the sensation they caused. See also Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press, 39–40, for a briefer discussion. For more on Dixon's criminal record, see Cockrell, Demons, 104–111.

“Where He Is,” Maine Farmer, September 24, 1846.

Rosemarie Bank, Theater Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 160; Cockrell, Demons, 100. For additional insight into Zip Coon's cultural work, see Cockrell, Demons, 99–101, and Jason Richards, “Imitation Nation: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of African American Selfhood in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Novel 39, no. 2 (2006): 204–220, 208. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) for a more expansive discussion on the relationships between minstrelsy, the working class, and race.

David Anthony, Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 4. Edward J. Ballesein gives a cogent overview of this market in Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Anthony E. Rotundo's American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and Dana D. Nelson's National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) provide a larger view of white men's socioeconomic unease.

See Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-century New York (New York: Knopf, 1998); Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-century New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986); Barbara Mell Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992).

For a discussion of the material realities of poverty and prostitution, see Thomas Crist, “Babies in the Privy: Prostitution, Infanticide, and Abortion in New York City's Five Points District,” Historical Archaeology 39, no. 1 (2005): 19–46; Eric Homberger, Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), chapter 1; and Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 796–807.

Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, 8 and 50.

See Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers, 34–39 and 81–96, and Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 70–74.

See Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett, which provides an in-depth analysis of the cultural meaning of Jewett's murder and the press's response to it. David Anthony's examination of Bennett's coverage of the murder offers a fascinating view of one rising journalist's attempts to negotiate his own place in the evolving marketplace. See Paper Money Men, chapter 4.

George Foster, New York by Gas-light, and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 93.

Tucher, Froth and Scum, 67. My understanding of the relationship between female sexuality and the seduction narrative, as well as the social conditions that resulted in the fallen woman's reformulation, has been especially influenced by Karen J. Renner's excellent “Seduction, Prostitution, and the Control of Female Desire in Popular Antebellum Fiction,” Nineteenth-century Literature 65, no. 2 (2010): 166–191. It has also been influenced by the following: Tucher, Froth and Scum; Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers; Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett; Stansell, City of Women; Hobson, Uneasy Virtue; and Gilfoyle, City of Eros.

Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 356; Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 206.

Pamela Haag, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 10; Frank E. Fee Jr., “‘To Exalt the Profession’: Associations, Ethics, and Editors in the Early Republic,” American Journalism 31, no. 3 (2014): 336.

Schiller, Objectivity and the News, 55 and 71–72.

For discussions of the moral wars and an analysis of their economic and professional impact on newspapers and journalists, see Mott, American Journalism, 235–237. For Restell's imbrication in the moral wars, see Martin Olasky, “Advertising Abortion during the 1830s and 1840s: Madame Restell Builds a Business,” Journalism History 13, no. 2 (1986): 49–55, 50–51, and Browder, Wickedest Woman, 23–30.

Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press, 40.

A. Cheree Carlson, The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 113.

Browder's Wickedest Woman offers an in-depth analysis of the scope of Restell's business and career. See also Carlson, Crimes of Womanhood, chapter 6, and Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, chapter 5, for briefer analyses of Restell's business and its cultural contexts.

See John M. Riddle's Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) for a comprehensive history of contraception and women's support networks. Paul Starr and Deborah Kuhn McGregor discuss American midwifery and women's networks of support in The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 32 and 49–50 and From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 37, respectively. Browder and Horowitz consider Restell within broader medical contexts. While Browder questions the viability of Restell's products, in Wickedest Woman, 15–17, Horowitz believes they were effective, Rereading Sex, 200, a contention that Riddle's data supports. See Eve's Herbs, 236–237.

Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 14; Riddle, Eve's Herbs, 209–210.

Cockrell, Demons, 138.

Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 206. Karen Weingarten has recently persuasively argued that part of the backlash against Restell was because she “attempted to carve out an economic space where women could both thrive as entrepreneurs and free themselves from the economic constraints of unrestrained reproduction,” Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 107–117.

Homberger, Scenes from the Life, 94.

This client was Mary Applegate, who used Restell's lying-in services and later testified that “during her stay” Restell's house was “constantly thronged with females” of all socioeconomic backgrounds, “Madame Restell and Some of Her Dupes,” New York Medical and Surgical Reporter, reprinted in National Police Gazette (New York, NY), February 21, 1846.

Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 206.

These sentiments had already led to a successful effort to put midwives out of business. See McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine. Many scholars have explored the relationship between professionalizing medicine and the developing antiabortion movement. See, for example, Nathan Stormer, Articulating Life's Memory: US Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002); James R. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Janet Farrel Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

White men's growing opposition to abortion was informed by fears of population decline, as well as rampant nativism and racism. See Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay, “Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-century America,” American Sociological Review 69, no. 4 (2004): 498–518, and Stormer, Articulating Life's Memory, 23–33.

“Our Position,” Polyanthos, January 17, 1841.

“Inaugural Address of George Washington Dixon, Inspector of the Morals of Applicants for Office in New York,” Polyanthos, April 18, 1841.

“Caution,” Polyanthos, April 11, 1841; “List of Blackguards and Seducers,” Polyanthos, February 16, 1841.

“Cold-blooded Seduction,” Polyanthos, May 1, 1841; “Outrageous Seduction,” Polyanthos, January 17, 1841; “House of Ill Fame? Seduction? Intelligence Offices,” Polyanthos, March 6, 1841.

“Keep It before the People,” Polyanthos, February 16, 1841. Dixon addressed his claims that Restell's advertisements were obscene to the same man—District Attorney James R. Whiting—who had been responsible for his recent jail sentence for libel.

Ibid.

“Restell Caught at Last,” Polyanthos, March 20, 1841.

As Helen Lefkowtiz Horowitz phrases it, the prevailing view was that “the threat of pregnancy seemed to act as a chastity belt that birth control threatened to remove,” Rereading Sex, 200.

“Keep It before the People,” Polyanthos, February 16, 1841.

For information regarding Avery and Cornell, see David Richard Kasserman, Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), and Ian C. Pilarczyk, “The Terrible Haystack Murder: The Moral Paradox of Hypocrisy, Prudery and Piety in Antebellum America,” American Journal of Legal History 41, no. 1 (1997): 25–60, doi:10.2307/845470.

Kasserman, Fall River Outrage, 54. Madison Davidson A. Zonderman analyzes the abuses of power endemic to the Lowell Mills in Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chapter 3.

Examination of Dr. William Graves, before the Lowell Police Court, from Sept. 25 to Sept. 29, 1837, for the Murder of Mary Anne Wilson, of Greenfield, N.H. by Attempting to Produce an Abortion (Lowell, MA: The Court, 1837), Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, MA. Graves's abortifacients were referred to as “medicine” during the trial. The Examination offers the most thorough overview of Wilson's case. Linda Gordon's brief analysis contextualizes Wilson's difficult position as an unmarried pregnant woman in The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 27–28.

In this regard, Avery and Cornell were far more popular subjects for material than Graves and Wilson. Although details regarding the latter case were gory, they could not compete with sensationalism and drama of Cornell's murder and Avery's twenty-eight-day trial.

“Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841.

“Where He Is,” Maine Farmer (Augusta, ME), September 24, 1846; “Another of Matsell's Aids,” The Subterranean (New York, NY), August 29, 1846. See Cockrell, Demons, 118 and 135–137 for accounts of his connections to prostitutes.

“Acrostic on the Celebrated Abortionist,” Polyanthos, April 11, 1841.

“Coroner's Office—Melancholy Affair,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841. See also “Case of Maria Shaw,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841. “Coroner's Office—Melancholy Affair” first appeared under the same headline in the New York Herald on March 24, 1841, Fulton History, http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%2014/New%20York%20NY%20Herald/New%20York%20NY%20Herald%201841/New%20York%20NY%20Herald%201841%20-%200312.pdf.

Polyanthos, March 27, 1841. Although it is not within the purview of this article to explore, it is worth noting that Dixon's formulation of abortionists as seducers (or in this instance, “pimps”), frequently reveal a struggle to assimilate them into traditional sex and gender binaries. For example, elsewhere Dixon asserted that Madame Restell was “not…a woman” (“Costello, Bird, and Restell,” Polyanthos, April 11, 1841).

Karen Haltunnen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 73 and 173. Haltunnen briefly discusses publications relating to the death of Mary Anne Wilson and Eliza Sowers, discussed earlier, as an example of body-horror, 192–193.

“Restell Caught at Last,” Polyanthos, March 20, 1841.

“Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841. Dixon noted the lack of a material witness in his diatribe toward the District Attorney in “Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 6, 1841.

“I Only Lived to Sigh and Weep,” Polyanthos, April 3, 1841.

“Costello, Bird, and Restell,” Polyanthos, April 11, 1841.

“Death of Mrs. Purdy,” Polyanthos, May 1, 1841.

“I Only Lived to Sigh and Weep,” Polyanthos, April 3, 1841.

The first case involved German immigrant Anna Dahl (sometimes spelled Dall); the second involved a married woman named either Pamela or Amelia Palmer. Browder touches on Dahl's story in Wickedest Woman, 19–20. The depositions and related legal documents for both cases are located at the Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA. See Restell, Court Records, 1839–1878, Gift of Leo Hershkowtiz, 98-M127. Both are located in the file labeled “Dall Case.”

“Police: Arrest of Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841. This article is a thinly paraphrased adaptation of the New York Herald's March 24, 1841, story, “The Arrest of Madame Restell.”

“Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841.

Browder provides a clear timeline and description of Purdy's case in Wickedest Woman, 31–46, and Homberger offers a short description in Scenes from the Life, 98–99.

Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, 9. Srebnick is discussing the cultural concerns that Mary Rogers evoked. They apply equally to Purdy, who revealed this information in both depositions, which vary enough in detail to raise questions about their veracity. The depositions are available at the Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA. See Court Records, 1839–1878, Gift of Leo Hershkowtiz, 98-M127, file “Purdy Case, 1841.” The press did not discuss many of the details Purdy provided. As Browder observes, “probably few readers reflected that only one side of the story had been told, or pondered Mrs. Purdy's own responsibility,” Wickedest Woman, 36.

Browder, Wickedest Woman, 36.

This description was printed in “Madame Restell,” Evening Post, April 7, 1841, Fulton History, http://fultonhistory.com/newspaper%2010/New%20York%20NY%20Evening%20Post/New%20York%20NY%20Evening%20Post%201840%20Nov-Apr%201841%20Grayscale/New%20York%20NY%20Evening%20Post%201840%20Nov-Apr%201841%20Grayscale%20-%200529.pdf; it was reprinted in “Madame Restell,” Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, VA), April 9, 1841, and it appeared in “Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, April 11, 1841.

“Madame Restell,” Evening Post, April 7, 1841, Fulton History, http://fultonhistory.com/newspaper%2010/New%20York%20NY%20Evening%20Post/New%20York%20NY%20Evening%20Post%201840%20Nov-Apr%201841%20Grayscale/New%20York%20NY%20Evening%20Post%201840%20Nov-Apr%201841%20Grayscale%20-%200529.pdf; “Police: Arrest of Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841.

“Costello, Bird, and Restell,” Polyanthos, April 11, 1841.

Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 68.

“Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841.

“Death of Mrs. Purdy,” Mourning Courier and New-York Enquirer, April 30, 1841, Fulton History, http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%2018/New%20York%20NY%20Morning%20Courier/New%20York%20NY%20Morning%20Courier%201840-1841/New%20York%20NY%20Morning%20Courier%201840-1841%20-%200684.pdf; “Death of Mrs. Purdy,” New-York Tribune, April 30, 1841, Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030212/1841-04-30/ed-1/seq-2/.

Haag, Consent, 23.

Renner, “Seduction, Prostitution, and the Control of Female Desire,” 170.

“Keep It before the People,” Polyanthos, February 16, 1841; “Arrest of Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841. Dixon's references to Rebecca consistently mention her race; other newspapers treated her in the same way. See, for instance, “A Chapter on Mystery, Blood, and Murder,” Mourning Courier and New-York Enquirer, March 24, 1841, Fulton History, http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%2018/New%20York%20NY%20Morning%20Courier/New%20York%20NY%20Morning%20Courier%201840-1841/New%20York%20NY%20Morning%20Courier%201840-1841%20-%200551.pdf.

“Case of Maria Shaw,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841. Dixon was specifically speaking of the advertisement's power to tempt women to sexual sin.

New World (New York, NY), March 27, 1841; Police Spectator (New York, NY), March 24, 1841. The New-York Tribune made similar claims, “Death of Mrs. Purdy,” April 28, 1841, Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030212/1841-04-30/ed-1/seq-2/.

“Case of Madame Restell,” New-York Tribune, April 28, 1841.

Commercial Advertiser, March 24, 1841, quoted in Browder, Wickedest Woman, 36.

New World (New York, NY), March 27, 1841.

“Police: Arrest of Madame Restell,” Polyanthos, March 27, 1841.

“Our Own Affairs,” Polyanthos, June 26, 1841.

Steve Chibnall, Law-and-Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press (London: Tavestock, 1977), x.

In truth, it was “Keep It before the People,” which since the March 27, 1841, issue he had published under that self-congratulating headline.

Trial of Madame Restell, 19. As with the Polayanthos's coverage of the legal proceedings, much of what appears in the Trial is copied verbatim or paraphrased from other papers. See, for example, “Trial of Madame Restell,” New-York Tribune, July 15, 1841, Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030212/1841-07-15/ed-1/seq-2/, and “General Sessions,” New York Herald, July 15, 1841, Fulton History, http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%2014/New%20York%20NY%20Herald/New%20York%20NY%20Herald%201841/New%20York%20NY%20Herald%201841%20-%200847.pdf.

The occupations were identified using Longworth's American Almanack, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1840).

“Pay Day,” Polyanthos, April 11, 1841. See Ballesein, Navigating Failure, for context.

Trial of Madame Restell, 8. The Trial's description of Restell's attire is the same as that published in “General Sessions,” New York Herald, July 15, 1841, Fulton History, http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%2014/New%20York%20NY%20Herald/New%20York%20NY%20Herald%201841/New%20York%20NY%20Herald%201841%20-%200847.pdf.

Homberger, Scenes from the Life, 98.

Trial of Madame Restell, 20.

Ibid., 20–21.

Ibid., 21.

Laura Hanft Korobkin, Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-century Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 15.

“Foul Murder! Miss Mary C. Rogers—The Pretty Segar Girl,” Polyanthos, July 1841; “Restell Convicted! Justice Triumphant!” Polyanthos, July 1841.

Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, 32.

“General Sessions,” New York Herald, March 24, 1844.

John T. Parry and Andrea Hibbard, “Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine: The Case of Amelia Norman,” American Literature 78, no. 2 (2006): 325–355, 342. My understanding of the power of narrative in the courtroom has been influenced by the following: Parry and Hibbard, “Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine”; Korobkin, Criminal Conversations; Ferguson, The Trial in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Ralph Grunewald, “The Narrative of Innocence, or, Lost Stories,” Cordoza Studies in Law and Literature 25, no. 3 (2013): 377–389; and Martha Merrill Umphreys, “The Dialogics of Legal Meaning: Spectacular Trials, the Unwritten Law, and Narratives of Criminal Responsibility,” Law and Society Review 33, no. 2 (1999): 393–423.

Wonderful Trial of Caroline Lohman, Alias Restell: With Speeches of Counsel, Charge of Court, and Verdict of Jury (New York: Burgess Stringer, 1847), 35–36, https://archive.org/details/28421030R.nlm.nih.gov.

The New York State Supreme Court ruled Purdy's depositions invalid and overturned the case. See Browder, Wickedest Woman, 44–46. See Browder, chapter 4, and Carlson, Crimes of Womanhood, 122–128, for information on Restell's 1847 trial.

“General Sessions—Sunday—Trial of Madame Restell,” New York Evening Express, November 1, 1847; “General Sessions,” National Police Gazette, February 21, 1846.

The National Police Gazette reported on Dixon's career as an agitator in “Restell's Charnel House,” February 28, 1846. See Browder, Wickedest Woman, 64–66; Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press, 113–114; and Cockrell, Demons, 134–139, for information regarding Dixon's post-Polyanthos career. Browder discusses the Applegate case in Wickedest Woman, 57–68.

“George Washington Dixon in Limbo Again,” National Police Gazette, June 24, 1847.

Laurence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage (New York: Harper & Bros., 1890), 121–122.

Sari Edelstein, Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 3.