Arthur, Timothy Shay

1809–1885

Writer and Editor

Timothy Shay Arthur, perhaps the most prolific and popular writer of the nineteenth-century United States, published uncounted short pieces in magazines and more than two hundred novels and collections of short pieces. Remembered primarily for his temperance writings, including Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854), Arthur also contributed to nineteenth-century ideas about business success and middle-class manhood.

Arthur, born in New York's Hudson Valley, lived most of his life in Baltimore and Philadelphia. A learning disability [Page 36]may have limited his formal education. He completed an apprenticeship as either a tailor or watchmaker (historians are not sure which), but problems with his eyes kept him from practicing a trade. Instead, he taught himself bookkeeping and spent about three years as a financial clerk. He then turned to writing and editing, making these his lifelong professions.

Arthur's writing explored many topics, including mesmerism (an early form of hypnotism), women's rights, and the philosophy of the scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, but he focused primarily on the emerging urban middle-class world of commercial business and the self-made man. He addressed ideals of middle-class manhood directly and systematically in Advice to Young Men (1848), one of many such manuals published in the nineteenth century. It was very popular and was reprinted by different publishers for at least twenty years. In Advice, as in his fiction, Arthur encouraged men to adopt a specific ideology of manhood as a strategy for success in business and in life. Arthur advised them to be ambitious but to proceed cautiously; to work hard, but always morally; to aspire toward independent business ownership, but not go into debt; to learn to dance, but to refrain from alcohol and tobacco; and to form friendships, but avoid men who encouraged bad habits. He decried dueling and supported respect for parents and elders. Arthur stressed purposeful activity—he wrote in the story “Retiring from Business” (1843) that “no man can be unoccupied and happy” (Arthur 1843, 286)—and thus promoted a model of manliness suitable to an expanding commercial capitalism. But he also hearkened back to traditional republican models of manhood by reminding his readers that wealth and success should be pursued for the good of society as a whole, rather than for its own sake or out of mere self-interest.

In Advice and in his fiction, Arthur put forth—in conformity with prevailing middle-class Victorian gender constructs bolstered by his Swedenborgian beliefs—the idea that men are “in the province of the understanding” and women “in the province of the affections” (Arthur 1848, 112). He suggested that young men spend as much time as possible with their sisters and marry early, so that their understanding and reason could be leavened by the emotional truths and understandings he associated with femininity.

Arthur's popularity helped him spread his temperance beliefs, but he was less able to use his popularity to influence the emerging entrepreneurial model of middle-class manhood His exhortations and homilies undoubtedly affected individual young men, but in the larger society his vision of honorable merchants who eschewed debt and alcohol and contented themselves with an orderly and simple life in an unostentatious home remained an ideal that competed with—and ultimately lost to—a model of success that was ruthless, ambitious, and focused on material gains.

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