Newspapers and periodicals in San Francisco produced a “torrent” of print over the twenty years between the Gold Rush and the onset of economic depression in the early 1870s.Footnote ¹ This was a precarious print culture, provided for a city dependent on that most volatile of industries – metal mining. Periodical productions, typically short-lived, had little opportunity to create loyal readerships amongst a notoriously unstable, shifting population. Indeed, when one of the periodical writers of the era, Prentice Mulford, looked back on his experiences, he used the ephemerality of print to express the fleeting, impatient investment of migrants in the region: “Five years at most was to be given to rifling California of her treasures, and then that country was to be thrown aside like a used-up newspaper.”Footnote ² Where periodical copy was locally written, it was largely the work of temporary migrants to the region “falling back” on journalism as an alternative or a sideline to prospecting and speculation.Footnote ³

All this is well understood, and literary historians have taken pleasure in reconstructing a journalistic culture with fly-by-night publications and raffish editors and writers.Footnote ⁴ However, the critical response to the writing produced has tended to keep the two major national and international literary careers launched from San Francisco during this period firmly in the foreground. The extraordinary success of Bret Harte and Mark Twain during the 1860s has diminished, if not overwhelmed, the consideration given to the city's writing culture during this period, while their output has generated two poles of literary response to California. Kevin Starr's much-quoted accusation that Harte's writing fashioned a “comforting” “mythic history” to “prettify California” forms part of a tradition of finding authenticity in realist and documentary local and regional work. Twain, by contrast, is regarded as having produced the vigorous writing and reflected the unbuttoned masculine freedom of expression attributed to, and often celebrated in, 1860s San Francisco.Footnote ⁵ Apart from Harte and Twain, however, only the mass of private and unpublished nonliterary writing – what Michael Kowalewski has called “the true imaginative wealth” of the Gold Rush and its aftermath – has drawn attention to writing in the city.Footnote ⁶ The “torrent” of periodical print is accorded no special vitality or significance, and its regular writers are generally relegated to lists.

This lack of attention has been my starting point for exploring 1860s periodical writing in San Francisco. The city's literary periodicals constructed a distinctive world for journalists and readers to inhabit, and supported a string of spirited writers. Indeed, to read this material is to get some sense of those elements that made Harte and Twain so exciting to the national and international literary mainstream. Equally, though, this scene offers something more than a piquant addition to our knowledge of the kind of writing generated in mid-nineteenth-century California. San Francisco's 1860s periodicals make a response to urban industrialized culture that is at odds with some familiar summaries of the nineteenth-century periodical genre and its functions. They do not appear to operate, either as objects or in their contents, as “tokens of the well-ordered life,” to use Joan Shelley Rubin's terms, to “repel the rootlessness and isolation endemic in the modern urban scene.”Footnote ⁷ San Francisco was certainly becoming a “modern urban scene”: not only acting as a powerhouse of finance, machinery and people for metal strikes for the whole region, but also in the process of moving to centre stage in a global mining industry that operated as a fulcrum of technological innovation as well as of huge investment and wealth. Yet this position depended on the highly speculative and wholly unpredictable business of finding, funding and developing deposits of precious metals, a business that, in turn, relied on a diverse, largely male population prepared for constant movement. Economy and population were always vulnerable to the collapse of prospects and the exhaustion of metal deposits. So, for all that San Francisco was becoming more like other industrial cities, still it was not a place in which “the well-ordered life” could be a dominant aspiration. Literary periodicals in California had a particular task in creating imaginative communities for their readers.Footnote ⁸ The subsequent and sometimes spectacular national success of several of their journalists suggests that these periodicals' approach to such a challenge offered to late nineteenth-century readers a usable alternative to the comforts of routine and resolution described by Shelley Rubin.

The distinctiveness of Californian journalism was very evident to contemporary readers in the literary mainstream. Contemporary critics were usually talking about Harte when they described this material, but in doing so they used terms quite different from our own to describe even Harte's work. William Dean Howells talked, for instance, of work now judged as prettified in terms of “grotesqueness.” Even twenty years later, in the first and only study of periodical culture in the mining West, Ella Sterling Cummins wrote of Harte's “queer, foreshortened” representations of California.Footnote ⁹ This apparently distorted quality of Californian writing forms part of what I want to recover in considering the periodical scene generated in 1860s San Francisco. The writers I discuss here did not achieve the impact of Twain and Harte, though all published nationally as well as locally. Nonetheless, during the 1860s at least, their work engaged the world created by industrialism in California, and made its own sharp address to the routines of reading practice and the forms of popular and literary writing of the day. The quotation of my title – “Our present work will be all doors”Footnote ¹⁰ – suggests how these journalists imagined their environment, the way they functioned within it, and indeed the cultural work that they believed that they were performing for their readers. Ronald J. Zboray has discussed how, during the early nineteenth century, “the images of ‘windows’ and ‘doors’ were common in explaining the impact of print”: “The doors and windows could be closed and opened at will: the book or the newspaper could simply go unread.” The idea of writing that was “all doors” suggests how firmly these Californian writers rejected those conceptions of private space and leisured reading practices on which metaphors of doors and windows normally rested.Footnote ¹¹

San Francisco's literary periodicals have not enjoyed a reputation for sophisticated writing, certainly not until the arrival on the scene of the Overland Monthly in 1868, the first Californian magazine to look something like its eastern counterparts. On the whole they have been praised for their direct and democratic, scarcely mediated engagement with the masculine saloon communities of city and camp. In Franklin Walker's words, most periodicals were “earthy,” “informal” “friendly sheets.”Footnote ¹² Yet this was a calibrated print culture produced for readers no less diverse or demanding than was the case in other cities. San Francisco was, by all accounts, a reading city, and, as the work of historians such as David Goodman and Kenneth Owens has made clear, the incoming population of the 1850s from which readers, writers and editors was drawn was not usually uneducated. Gary F. Kurutz has described the early appearance of bookshops in San Francisco; Charles Shinn talks of nine booksellers even during the 1850s. Patrick Morrow writes about frequent poetry readings.Footnote ¹³ The city supported quite a crowd of literary periodicals, each with different engagements with the local. There was the Wide West, which filled its pages with material pirated from the national press, and the well-regarded but short-lived Pioneer (1854–55), which imitated eastern periodicals such as the Knickerbocker, using local material. There were journals like The Californian (1864–67), also short-lived, that conceived of a sophisticated audience with an interest in local and regional writing. There were also what one imagines were the unpretentious pleasures of such long-lost periodicals as the Wine, Women and Song Journal and Satan's Bassoon.Footnote ¹⁴

The literary weekly that I am focussing on here, the Golden Era (1852–81), was the most successful and long-lived local periodical by far. It was the Era that, from its first appearance, printed the most local writing, and which, during the 1860s, launched the careers of almost all of the key writers of the San Francisco scene. Under the editorship, from 1860, of Joseph Lawrence, it made a significant shift in its address to readers, moving away from imagining an audience of city and camp dwellers committed to the cultural products of mainstream Anglo-American culture. The first decade of the Era had given special prominence to the amateur writings of mining-camp inhabitants on subjects of home and family, particularly their poetry of sentiment.Footnote ¹⁵ By contrast, in Lawrence's Era, the pitch to the audience, across editorials, reviews and reports, squibs, jokes and travesties, promoted hostility to social and literary constraint within a local setting of relaxed homosociality and transient social relations. The context for writing created by Lawrence was indicative: his Era operated from San Francisco's newly constructed Lick House Hotel, and he ran a bar tab for contributors and visitors.

I do not want to imply that the Era was unique in its contents, in its approach to readers or in its writers. Other local weeklies – The Californian, for example – printed similar material by the same writers, though on better paper and larger sheets. Local newspapers, too, were full of the aggressive humour favoured by the Era. Nor was the Era wholly at odds with the popular weeklies of the American mainstream. It shared the listed scraps of news, the miscellanies, the jokes and the anecdotes of popular papers such as the Flag of Our Union or Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Like other local and national weeklies, it reprinted Anglo-American fiction. Indeed, the Era was especially identified with sensation fiction, ranging from the broadly appealing literary work of writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and such quasi-sensation novels as Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, to shorter shockers in the popular mode of dime novels. Above all, though, the Era was always especially emphatic in its address to a local readership to which it attributed particular attitudes, and it created a collectivity for its readers using similar, consonant elements rather than diverse ones. It is this position, as well as its popularity and longevity, which made it a key player within the periodical culture of San Francisco in the 1860s.

The collectivity that Lawrence successfully constructed for the Era's readers valorized a mode of behaviour that gave no attention to sustained social engagement. Noticeably, the magazine made precious little address to the domestic sphere, either as a subject (for celebration or even for satirical treatment), or as a setting in which the periodical might be enjoyed. And, although women undertook much of the routine work of the Era, they generally appeared in its locally written pages as objects of derision.Footnote ¹⁶ Instead, for those readers caught in the unpredictable economy of San Francisco and her industrial mining suburbs, Lawrence provided a cheering scene of individualized unrestraint, while, for the transient population, he produced a flattering version of rootlessness. The collective “rumpus” of the saloon or the street was a recurring and much relished theme, especially combined with reference to drinking alcohol, that contemporary locus of masculine freedom from control:

Lawrence printed advertisements, too, for cures for health problems caused by unregulated drinking and sexual activity. It must surely have been this positioning of the Era's writers and readers that Twain was referring to when he wrote to his family,

This emphasis on delineating masculine freedom was disassociated, however, from the masculine freedom of the wild western frontier of popular myth. Fighting and the use of guns in particular were roundly condemned, as in the following sarcastic encouragement to troublemakers to shoot each other to pieces so that more peaceable folks might take their place:

Prentice Mulford (1834–91), taken on at the Era by Lawrence in 1861, and sometimes cited as the third, alongside Harte and Twain, of a triumvirate of important writers in San Francisco during the 1860s, scored one of his great successes with an elaborate attack on gun violence, actual or imagined. In “Barney McBriar, the Shootist,” Mulford excoriated gunfighting in a pastiche of the “western” dime novel that stripped away the genre's most pleasurable effects. The “novel” begins with a succession of statements recalling the dime-novel western's already familiar clichés: the lone gunman, bristling with aggression, the description of his weapons, and then the local residents cowed by his threatening presence. This is rendered in chapters of twenty or so lines, each a succession of truncated sentences:

The experience of seeing everything we expect of such a story reduced to a column of newsprint is, of course, amusing, not least because Mulford is also reproducing exactly the laconic mode of expression attributed to wild-western outlaws, though he improvises too, occasionally experimenting in reporting the thoughts of his protagonist:

He plays, too, on the dashed-off prose of these novels, producing strings of aphorisms, quotations and well-used biblical references:

In the end, though, compression makes imaginative investment in the tale of the shootist impossible. What remains is a grim portrait of unrestrained violence:

The Era was not amused by the violent behaviour portrayed here by Mulford and it criticized the passivity of local institutions in dealing with it. However, if active violence, real or imagined, was off-limits, targets for aggressive feelings, particularly on the part of men, were inexhaustibly available. A central focus for hostility in the Era and elsewhere was the falsity inherent in all kinds of organized social activity. This was everywhere exemplified in the forms and rituals that these periodicals associated with women. Twain's much-anthologized travesties of magazine commentary, which simultaneously pour scorn on women and upon the writing that records their looks and behaviour, are examples of a regular feature of the Era: “Her head dress was composed of a graceful cataract of white Chantilly lace, surmounted by a few artificial worms, and butterflies and things, and a tasteful tarantula done in jet.” A similar joke on the deceit of women in dressing up appears in “Professor C. Clearquill's” “Bountiful Autumn,” where women are said to avail themselves of “potent beautifiers in the shape of rats, rouge, lily-white, false busts, and various other arrangements to preserve [their] charms.”Footnote ²² “Florence Fane” imagines worthless social convention exemplified by a ball in which women appear only as dresses:

The Era's predilection for making barbed jokes about women and their dress, and its broader discussion of deceiving convention, form a constant focus for intense aggression as well as demeaning the structures of social interaction.

Taunts directed at women and social ritual were not, however, as numerous as the jibes about the deceiving qualities and constraining conventions of mainstream literary production, highbrow and popular alike. In the anonymously written “All Out of Doors: A Mystery of San Francisco,” for example, a contemporary literary convention (the very stagey use of doors in melodrama) is a focus of ridicule: “Our attention has been arrested by the great use of doors in modern novels”:

There is a knockabout humour here that is characteristic of the Era, as is the incursion of wild behaviour into the upstairs–downstairs world of middle- and upper-class domestic life. The literary convention of using doors to create dramatic effect is amusingly satirized as Jacques is faced with ever more doors from which to choose.

The writer's point, however, extends beyond the joke about the constraints visited on Jacques, and the collapse of a well-recognized domestic scenario. He or she is keen to “open the doors” for the attack on conventional literary and social expression and to keep pushing them open, over and over again: “Our present work will be all doors, and will let everything out ever published.”Footnote ²⁴ The aspiration to freedom here and the critique of constraint are transformed into a literary project. By dismissing the forms of published nonsense, writers and their readers will be able to roam around a freer discursive space altogether.

The Era journalism of Dan De Quille (1829–98) explores some of the possibilities of this claimed freedom from literary formulas. De Quille is associated with Virginia City newspaper culture, but he began his career as a writer in earnest at the Era during 1861. Some of this first work adopted the single tactic of showing the writer trying to convey the chaotic energies of the everyday in language. His writing strives to evoke the moment of doing, as in this expostulation representing the angry rampage of the writer in search of a shirt with buttons: “Blast my buttons! – blast everybody's buttons! Curse the Chinese nation! The African race! Mrs. Gummidge and the laundresses far out in the hills! Curse everybody or anybody that washed, ironed and pretended to sew buttons on that shirt!”Footnote ²⁵ Looking at such scraps of writing, one is reminded of Lee Clark Mitchell's discussion of verbal “roughing it,” and of long-standing arguments about the influence on Californian writers of the performances of provincial incompetence by humorists such as Artemus Ward, as well as the strong echoes of the unrespectable humour of the southwestern regionalists.Footnote ²⁶ But “outbursts” like this suffused the world of experience that Lawrence's Golden Era projected: casual and ephemeral, masculine, unincorporated into literary form, imitating angry speech. They opened the periodical's pages up to the everyday trivia of bodily experience and its indignities, feelings doubtless regularly explored in informal encounters, but routinely driven to the margins of contemporary periodicals, or expunged altogether.

In “Washoe Rambles,” De Quille developed this expression of confused and unfocussed experience further by linking it with a broader commentary on the difficulty (on the reader's and the writer's part) of matching experience with writing in ways that produce readable prose. At the same time, De Quille is not much inclined to evoke a practice of reading as the sedentary activity of private leisure. Rather, there is a concertina effect here: sometimes the reader occupies the familiar position of seeming to share the author's point of view; at other times, the reader's experience is fused with the writer's; at still others, there is a decisive distancing between writer and reader. In the following passage, for example, he begins in the conventional mode:

Then, as De Quille relates his tumble down the slope, he brings his reader in on the act, as it were, abandoning continuous narrative as, now prey to the painful impression of his possessions on his bouncing body, he struggles to “speak”:

Next, as the reader's sense of correspondence with the body and experience of the narrator seems closest, De Quille begins to apostrophize colloquialisms, apparently drawing attention to the means whereby a sense of common experience may be promoted in narrative: there are “numerous thorny ‘yarbs’ in the vicinity to ‘scratch out both his eyes.’” Finally, as correspondence and distance jostle, he delivers a carefully constructed punch line pun on guns (Colt guns) that requires the reader to notice his dexterity while also prompting a squirming response to his laboured witticism: “The horse too came rolling after me, as though not satisfied with being a colt, he was determined to go the whole figure and become a revolver.”Footnote ²⁷ This writing is, in a sense, “all doors.” It scatters conventions of writing, and indeed conventions of reading too.

Not all popular or highbrow writing was “let out” in the same style, however. Lawrence filled great swathes of the Era with a range of sensation fictions, choosing not to offer the rich mix of historical romance, sentimental fictions and dialect humour (as well as sensation fiction) on offer in the popular national weeklies. His predilection for sensation makes sense. Nicholas Daly has described how the novels of writers such as Braddon “produced a sort of ‘training’ in modernity, acclimatizing people to the pace of industrial, urban life through homeopathic doses of shock and suspense.”Footnote ²⁸ On these grounds, sensation fictions might be said to be peculiarly suited to a Californian audience, prolonging, as they did, through many weeks of serialization, a “delirium of feverish interest” for readers collectively attuned to following, either in newspapers or through lighting out themselves, speculations, prospects, strikes and rushes.Footnote ²⁹

Of course, the international market for popular sensation fictions was flooded with writing about an adventuresome West: the Wild West of Indians and outlaws, and the exotic, sensuous scenes of the Hispanic and Mexican Southwest.Footnote ³⁰ Such fictions rested on Anglo-American assumptions about America's manifest destiny, Anglo-Saxon superiority, and the suitability of the West as a playground for nonnormative experience. Anglo-European and American migrants to San Francisco and California were rarely uneasy about such assumptions, and, if they were, their sentiments made little impact. But if the Era operated on the assumption that Anglo-Europeans were rightly dominant in the new state, it apparently found narratives of manifest destiny less compelling. So when we find De Quille writing about Piutes in “Washoe Rambles” we can observe how he draws attention away from the Piutes as a subject. Instead he “opens all the doors” on travel writing. He makes much of the trick of authenticating an account with “Piute” words transliterated into “English” words: hoggadi, we are told, is the Piute word for hungry. Later, however, hoggadi turns out to be a rendition of the English word, as the Piutes have heard it:

The “while it is in my mind” airiness here reminds the reader to ask about the usefulness of a narrator whose observations about Piutes have formed a recurring element in “Washoe Rambles.” It sends the reader back to an earlier point in the text. The word under discussion is “hungry,” but the reader is directed towards questions of how similar hoggadi sounds to “hungry,” or whether tseaihee seems a satisfactory, reliable or pronounceable alternative, even when it is broken down to “tse-a-ih-ee.” As the narrative “rambles” through another instalment, and the author “remembers” to tell us about an earlier mistake, the joke about travel writing and its feeble claims to authority seems to resonate more strongly than any point about how the Piutes, exhausted by an unsuccessful war with incoming Americans, are hungry and reduced to eating rats.

The writers' desire to break up and disperse the tropes and tactics of mainstream literary forms produced some very different strains of those forms. We have seen Mulford writing back to the dime-novel western in its own terms, and De Quille unravelling travel writing. In Frances Fuller Victor (1826–1902) we have an example of the rewriting of sensation. Fuller Victor was, unusually, already an experienced journalist and a resourceful producer of a range of writing when she arrived in California in 1863, settling there briefly before moving to Oregon. She and her sister, Meta, had been publishing poetry and dime-novel fiction in mid-western and national periodicals for more than fifteen years. Her first work in California was done for the Era, where she wrote as “Florence Fane” between 1863 and 1864, but at the end of the 1860s she published a series of short sensation fictions in the Overland Monthly, later collected in The New Penelope and Other Stories.Footnote ³²

The example of Fuller Victor is interesting because it offers us the opportunity to compare the writing of sensation fiction she published before and after her migration. Her Anizetta, the Guarjira, or The Creole of Cuba: A Romance of the West, published in 1848, conforms to the pattern of empire-building dime fiction described by Shelley Streeby in American Sensations.Footnote ³³ It revels in Cuban exoticism in a series of scenes of local colour and ceremonial. It uses the usual farrago of disguise and cross-dressing to bring “races” into excitingly intimate contact with one another, and to plot, again and again, the coordinates of their difference. The whole text is saturated with the intense feeling, sensuous excitement and volatile moods characteristic of such fictions.

The short stories Fuller Victor subsequently published in San Francisco are not the parodies of sensation that one might expect, given her successful sojourn at the Era as the sharply cynical “Florence Fane.” Rather, she releases sensation's transgressive feelings and behaviours out of a feminized domestic and social setting into the type of landscape that the Era created for its readers: a sketchily defined landscape thinly populated by transient figures that are difficult to place and therefore difficult to predict in terms of “character.” These stories open all the doors on their subjects' desires, but in such a setting those feelings generate none of the threatened social impact that normally plots such fictions. Nor are they readable as allegories of imperial desire, combining, as they do, random Chinese, Native and Anglo-American subjects moving within what is represented as a political and social vacuum. Unsurprisingly, these stories are bereft of decisive denouements as well. They are left without narrative closures.

In “Mr Ela's Story,” for example, Fuller Victor sets out a series of same-sex and heterosexual sexual encounters. The loosely and episodically constructed narrative of the mysterious and sexually ambiguous Mr Ela, itself filtered through the consciousness of the listening female narrator, consists of a history of troubling and unresolved relationships. Mr Ela begins with what has evidently been an unfulfilled longing for a wife:

Fuller Victor gives Mr Ela's conventional dreams of a wife in his homestead a sadistic twist as he describes the apparently erotic charge he experiences – “a shock of electricity” – as he prepares for his hoped-for wife's arrival with an aggressive action that seems to prefigure their sexual encounter: driving nails (for her dresses) into the walls. This wife does not materialize. Instead a succession of the same-sex relationships and gendered role confusions characteristic of sensation fiction are described: the first with a vulnerable young man, whom Mr Ela nurses, and then with a more abject masculine figure, another “patient.” These bonds prove intense, undefined and unresolved: suffused with distrust and aggression, as well as intimacy and care. When a possible female partner appears, she enters as a knight, on a great horse glittering with trappings, and mentions that she “could fancy … a week of reading, talking, riding, trout-fishing, and romancing.”Footnote ³⁵ The effect is of entering into a new landscape of intimacies, in the mode of the sensation story, but without the signposts to moral judgment or the machinery to enable the reader to plot that landscape.

The framing device, meanwhile, in which the sleepless, ailing female narrator is presented with Mr Ela, by her husband, in order to raise her spirits with a story, is more puzzling still. Her illness at the start is obscure, and it is unclear how Mr Ela's “story” – too disorganized to be fictional, too unlikely to be true – might help. That he constantly stops his narrative in order to ask if the narrator is feeling well enough to continue creates uncertainty as to what his function is: is he merely telling a story to stimulate the narrator, offering to adapt it according to her fitness for its shocks? And, if the narrator has indeed recovered by the end of the story, is it the vicarious pleasure of Mr Ela's strange adventures that has revived her, or has she enjoyed watching his evident discomfiture in relating them? Is the frame there to remind us of the storyteller's position, employed to revive discontented wives? Thus does Fuller Victor recall her Era contemporaries' cynicism about the works of fiction, their pleasure in loosening plots, and their construction of a society of passing strangers.

To conclude, then, I have argued that there was a distinctive, edgy periodical culture in San Francisco during the 1860s. The great local periodical of the decade, the Golden Era, created for its readers a collective experience based on the glancing encounters and relationships of the saloon and the street. Bursting with aggression, it made an assault on norms of social ritual and on conventions of representing social experience in writing. This journalism made claims about California's difference, and particular writers marketed their work nationally on these terms. San Francisco was indeed different, having as much in common with the instant mining cities of the period as it did with American cities with longer histories of industrialism and immigration. Yet if the tense, antagonistic periodical writing of 1860s San Francisco seemed quintessentially western to national and international readers, still the work of De Quille, Mulford and the rest took a different path to other contemporary discourses of the West: the dime novels, travel accounts and literature of manifest destiny. Their writing offered a response to the experience of the modern industrial city and a retort to the writing that filled the modern mainstream periodical, moving away from the escapism of the dime novel or the satisfactions of the spoof or indeed the shocks of sensation fiction. Their defining predilection for attack and their exasperation with form, literary and otherwise, produced a strain of writing that offered a new range of response to their local, national and international readers.