Cornelius Mathews

Cornelius Mathews was born October 28, 1817, in Port Chester, New York, to Abijah Mathews and Catherine Van Cott. Attended Columbia College, graduated New York University in 1834; attended law school, passed the New York bar in 1837.

Best known for his crucial role in the formation of a literary group known as Young America in the late 1830s, with editor Evert Duyckinck and author William Gilmore Simms. At the time, American literature was generally regarded as necessarily inferior to the British, and American authors were encouraged to follow English models closely. This at least was the view espoused by the literary elite of New York, who tended to orbit the influential and conservative editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine, Lewis Gaylord Clark. Mathews vehemently disagreed, and called for a new literary style that would express a distinctly American identity, although this style was not to be a populist or demotic one. Their politics was limited to a call for international copyright law, to curb the wholesale piracy of American literature in England. Stylistically, Mathews favored an approach that emphasized the cosmopolitan sweep and diversity of American society, bolder and more philosophical than the sort of cozy humor associated with the Knickerbocker Magazine(although Mathews did not refuse to appear in its pages), but not as abstruse and Germanic as the Transcendentalist literature of Boston. Mathews’ panacaea was the emulation of Rabelais, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel, he believed, managed to advance philosophical penetration without etherializing its subject matter. For two years (1840-1842), Mathews and Duyckinck wrote for and co-edited Young America’s uneven journal, Arcturus, publishing also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russel Lowell. Edgar Allan Poe was, largely by default, part of Young America, even if he was unkind to Mathews’ work in his reviews; speaking of one of the longer poems in Graham’s Magazine for February, 1842, he wrote: “‘Wakondah’, then, from beginning to end, is trash.”

American literary historian Perry Miller, writing in The Raven and the Whale, suggested that Herman Melville, who was tangentially associated with Young America through his largely unproductive acquaintanceship with Duyckinck, was to some extent inspired by Mathews’ Behemoth to write Moby-Dick.

His novels included: The Motley Book (1838), Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders (1839), The Career of Puffer Hopkins (1842), Big Abel and the Little Manhattan (1845), and Moneypenny: or, The Heart of the World (1849). In addition to Wakondah: The Master of Life (1841), he published a collection Poems on Man in His Various Aspects Under the American Republic in 1843, a series of portraits of archetypes. Mathews also wrote a number of satirical plays, including Jacob Leisler (1848), The Politician (1840) – which was never produced, False Pretences; or, Both Sides of Good Society (1855). His most successful play was more serious in tone, and written in blank verse: Witchcraft, or the Martyrs of Salem (1846). Mathews’ last book was The Indian Fairy Book (1855), which was reprinted in 1877 under the new title: The Enchanted Moccasins; the contents of the book were drawn from Schoolcraft’s collections of Native American folklore.

Throughout the period of his principle literary activity, the 1840’s and 1850’s, Mathews contributed to and/or helped to edit all manner of American periodicals, including the New-Yorker, the Comic World, the New York Dramatic Mirror, the American Monthly Magazine, the New York Review, the New York Reveille, and a would-be rival to the Knickerbocker Magazine, the rapidly-moribund Yankee Doodle.

Cornelius Mathews died in New York city on March 25, 1889.