Free The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman Page A

during his arraignment (“Amativeness, large; Philoprogenitiveness, moderately large; Destructiveness moderately full; Combativeness rather small,” etc.). There was no chance that Benjamin Day would miss out on the opportunity to bring the trial of Matthias the Prophet to his readers; unfortunately, the trial was being held in White Plains, well north of the city. Wisner was tied up with his daily police reports and Day, who was not a polished writer, didn’t think he could render the events of the trial in all their lurid glory. In the end, he decided that he would travel up to White Plains; if necessary he would cover the trial himself, but he would much prefer to find someone who could do it for him. All of the newspapers in town, even the staid mercantile papers, had been reporting on the case in the months leading up to the trial, but to Day’s mind the most colorful and lucidly written coverage had come from the writer for the Courier and Enquirer. Perhaps, he thought, he might offer the Courier’ s man a little money to write for the Sun on the side. The articles would all be unsigned anyway, and surely the paper’s editor, the redoubtable James Watson Webb, was not paying his reporter so well that he could afford to turn down extra money.
    Inside the crowded courtroom, Day asked a spectator to point out the reporter from the Courier and Enquirer. He was directed to a man of middling stature, with a prominent forehead, crossed eyes, and pockmarked cheeks. Day introduced himself as the editor of the Sun. Was he the reporter from the Courier?
    He was, the man replied. His name, he said, was Richard Adams Locke.
    At the time of the Matthias trial Richard Adams Locke had not yet grown the beard he wears in the only known image of him, a portrait made by the New York engraver Augustus Robin. The engraving is undated, but Locke is now a man deep into his middle years, and has turned out for the sitting in his finest dress. His silk bowtie shines in the light; his collar is starched and high, and a thin triangle of white shirt peeks out beneath a black vest and topcoat. His nose is Roman, strong and sharp and aquiline at the bridge; little half-moons of age and worry wax under his – 45 –
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    the sun and the moon
    The only known image of Richard Adams Locke, in an undated portrait made by the New York engraver Augustus Robin.
    (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
    eyes, which gaze sternly toward the horizon. The mouth is a thin, straight line. Locke’s hair is still dark, but has now receded behind a great broad brow, one much admired by Edgar Allan Poe. “The forehead is truly beautiful in its intellectuality,” Poe observed in his 1846 Literati of New York City essay about Locke. “I am acquainted with no person possessing so fine a forehead as Mr. Locke.” His beard is modest and well trimmed, not as luxuriant as the ones favored by some of his journalistic contemporaries, but even so Locke surely hoped it might hide some of the scarring that pitted his face, remnants of the smallpox he had suffered as a – 46 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 47
    The News of the City
    boy in England. Some scars are visible on the cheeks and forehead, but Augustus Robin has clearly downplayed them in his engraving; moreover, the artist has positioned his subject in three-quarter profile, to minimize the effect of a severe case of strabismus—another unfortunate vestige of smallpox—in which not just one but both of Locke’s eyes were permanently crossed.
    It is a handsome engraving, the sort that any customer would have wanted to leave to his descendants, and to posterity. Yet it does not capture the man that Richard Adams Locke actually was, and not simply because of the engraver’s generous attentions. The subject of this portrait is by all appearances a man of means, but at the time of his retirement at the age of sixty-one, having lived in New York for