Tag Archives: history

Book Review: The Murder of Helen Jewett

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By crazy random happenstance, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately revolving around all of the biggest news of the 19th century. It’s all fascinating, really… the culture, the intrigue, the world-changing events and main attractions. And it’s truly remarkable how the biggest news of any previous era can be completely lost within a single generation. Now of course we’re accustomed to the 24-hour news cycle, and the way that the media conveniently forget yesterday’s shocking revelations in the face of today’s celebrity scandals. But in the 1840s, it probably defied belief for the people of America that anyone would ever forget the murder of Helen Jewett.

Of course, Helen was only one woman in a long line of sensationalized murder victims in American history, but her story exploded into the public consciousness — thanks to the rise of the penny press, the moral reform movements of the day, and the high-profile trial of her killer — in a way that hadn’t been seen before.

These days we’re accustomed to all the trappings of modern law enforcement. We all know a thing or two from watching CSI and we believe in the power of profiling, but in 1834, when Helen Jewett was murdered in a New York City brothel and her body set alight, nobody knew what a psychopath was, and they certainly didn’t have the knowledge of forensics to tie the killer to the crime. Still, the circumstantial evidence against the accused killer was strong, and the web of intrigue between them was compelling. And thanks to the high-profile nature of the crime and the public’s continued fascination, even after the jury had reached its verdict, author Patricia Cline Cohen had plenty of written history to draw from in the writing of The Murder of Helen Jewett. The result is a fascinating glimpse into an incident that might otherwise have been lost to the march of time.

Digging deep into every aspect of the crime and its coverage — from the social acceptability of prostitution to the weaknesses of the moral reformers to the history and characteristics that made Helen Jewett who she was — Cohen reveals a staggering amount of information not just about the crime, the victim, and the perpetrator, but also about the society that was equal parts enthralled and repulsed by the unfolding story. While a historical tale that goes into quite this amount of detail would usually run the risk of becoming mind-numbingly pedantic, Cohen’s narrative is engaging from the first word to the last, and the story that she relates is as enthralling now as it was to the public in Helen Jewett’s time.

Want to give it a read? I have a copy to give away! Mind you, I’m a lover of used books (and a devotee of paperbackswap.com) so this is not a shiny new copy, nor is it sponsored by anyone anywhere. I just like passing along books after I’ve read them. If you’d like a go at winning a free copy of The Murder of Helen Jewett, just leave a comment below  letting me know you’d like to read it, and I’ll choose a winner at random. Make sure you leave some form of contact information, like an email address or blog link, so I know how to get in touch with you!

An Interesting Idiom: “Coming Down the Pike”

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One of my favorite subjects is the origins of words and idioms. I really can’t get enough of it, and the more random the origin, the better. So I was delighted, while reading Beautiful Jim Key (review coming soon), to get an interesting little linguistic insight into the term “coming down the pike.”

It’s still a fairly common phrase (particularly among middle managers who like to say things like, “There are great things coming down the pike if we can keep blue-skying it and thinking outside the box”), and it’s relatively straightforward. Though here in the west you don’t hear much about “turnpikes” and “pike” isn’t really a common word for a roadway any longer, it’s generally understood that “coming down the pike” is pretty much the same thing as “coming down the road.” Though there are some interesting alternate interpretations if you look out there on the web, including “Pike’s Peak, driving down back in the day with only mechanical brakes.” (Uh, what?) My favorite alternate insane explanation is that it might have something to do with the way a decapitated head will slide down the pike upon which it is impaled as the head decays. (Uh, WHAT?)

James Scott's "On the Pike" two-step was inspired by the fair.

The most interesting explanation — but perhaps a flawed one — is the one I first saw in Beautiful Jim Key, though it pops up in other places as well. In 1904, the city of St. Louis held the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, one of the massive World’s Fairs that were so popular at the time. (Between Beautiful Jim Key and The Devil in the White City, I’m learning an awful lot about fairs lately.) Over 19.5 million people attended the exposition and strolled along one of the 1200-acre site’s major features, a massive pedestrian corridor known as “The Pike.” The Pike was a 90 foot wide, mile-long, brick-paved expanse bordered by over 50 extravagant attractions, with water slides, miniature railways, recreations of exotic foreign villages, an aviary, a 40,000-gallon deep-sea-diving tank, a wild west show, a trained animal circus, and much, much more. Because of the costs involved, it was known as “The Ten Million Dollar Pike,” and that was only one part of the exposition. Though the World’s Fairs would eventually die out — due in part to the constant delays and incredible cost overruns that dogged pretty much every fair ever, but also because of the rise of attractions like Disneyland — at the time they were just about the most incredible, mind-blowing thing you could imagine, like a cross between the world’s largest carnival and the world’s most awesome natural history museum. Supposedly visitors were so impressed by the whole affair, and the wide array of attractions on offer, that it was often said that “there is always something new coming down The Pike.”

Visitors on The Pike at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition

True fact? Perhaps not. According to The Word Detective, “coming down the pike” was first used in print in 1901, before the St. Louis World’s Fair.

As I said, “coming down the pike,” meaning in a figurative sense “appearing on the scene now or in the near future,” first appeared in print in 1901. The “pike” is, as you implied, simply short for “turnpike,” a road or highway where a toll is charged for passage. The “pike” in “turnpike” originally referred to the barrier (“pike” being a very old word for “spear”) which was raised or turned aside to allow the traveler to proceed once the fee had been paid. As turnpikes tended to be major roads, it was possible to see the approach of a traveler well in advance, and if someone new arrived in town, it was probable that he or she had “come down the pike” to get there.

(“Down the pike” is also an often-misspoken idiom, as you’ll often hear people say “down the pipe” instead. Tim Kowal has a really interesting blog about how, considering the new landscape of the way information and ideas travel, “down the pipe” may be the more accurate and appropriate expression in these modern times.)

Though The Word Detective and others are pretty insistent about the invention of the St. Louis story by travel agents and fanciful tour guides, at its root the phrase applies to both. The Pike in St. Louis was, after all, a roadway down which visitors traveled, coming down the pike… which may be the reason why The Pike was named The Pike in the first place. It all illustrates one of my favorite things about etymology and idioms (idiomology?): that the paths language takes from point A to point B — and the subjective truths about them — have a way of traveling a very convoluted path (down the pike, if you will) into the present.