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In 1842—long before his self-reinvention as the Bard of America in Leaves of Grass—an aspiring author named Walter Whitman published a novel called Franklin Evans in a New York weekly called The New World. The editor of The New World, Park Benjamin, made his living by pirating English books, including Charles Dickens' American Notes, which he reprinted as "extras." Whitman's novel, however, was billed as an "Original Temperance Novel," and original it was—if, that is, one discounts the interpolated stories Whitman used to pad the narrative. His readers seem not to have minded, quickly buying (if Whitman's biographers are to be believed) some 20,000 copies.
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Franklin Evans is the story of an innocent country boy who travels to the city and succumbs to the Demon of Intemperance. Eventually, Franklin loses his wife, his employment, and his freedom (having fallen in with a gang of thieves). After his release from prison, he signs the Old Pledge, promising to abstain from distilled spirits, but not from wine. Alas, the Old Pledge proves to be insufficient after Franklin moves to Virginia, where his wine-drinking leads inevitably to a taste for strong liquor and an unfortunate marriage to a "creole" slave. When he realizes what he has done, he takes up with a wealthy widow from the North, whom his wife poisons out of jealousy before committing suicide. At long last, Franklin is moved to sign the New Pledge of total abstinence from alcohol.
In his old age, Whitman liked to joke about Franklin Evans. He told Horace Traubel that he had dashed off the novel for money "with the help of a bottle of port or what not." Another version had Whitman penning the novel in Tammany Hall with the help of gin cocktails from the nearby Pewter Mug. Such anecdotes, however, are not to be taken seriously. Evidently, Whitman preached (and practiced) the virtue of temperance throughout his life. As a journalist, he reported favorably on a number of Temperance events in New York City (notably the meetings and parades of the working-class Washingtonians, who were to the older American Temperance Society what the Methodists were to Episcopalianism). And he published a number of other Temperance tales, including an unfinished sequel to Franklin Evans called The Madman.
What is true is that Franklin Evans, with its slapdash construction, purple prose, and conventional moral, had no place in the myth Whitman had spun for himself with Leaves of Grass. It's easy to understand why he omitted the novel from his Complete Poems and Prose (1888). In fact, most of his readers had no access to the text of Franklin Evans until 1921, when it was republished by Emory Holloway, the first editor of Whitman's uncollected work, who subsequently prepared a trade edition of the novel for Random House (1929). Apart from Thomas Brasher's 1963 annotated edition in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, the only other printing of Franklin Evans was a 1967 college edition prepared by Jean Downey.
Until now, that is. Forty years after Downey's edition, Duke University Press is issuing a new paperback edition of Franklin Evans, edited by Christopher Castiglia of Loyola and Glenn Hendler of Notre Dame, who contribute a long, academic introduction to the volume. The first part of their introduction is historical, supplying interesting details regarding Whitman's early years, urban life in New York City, and the Temperance movement. The second part offers a close reading of the novel as a reflection of America's "incoherent ideologies" of class, gender, and race. To sweeten the deal, the editors have appended a pair of Whitman's other Temperance tales, the unfinished Madman and "The Child and the Profligate," along with an 1842 Temperance address by Whitman's future "Captain," Abraham Lincoln.
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