ABSTRACT
Charles G. Leland (1824-1903), best known for his low-German “bummer” Hans Breitmann, had the most varied career of any Ameri can humorist, actively publishing for fifty years or more in comic di alect verse. His works included Hans Breitmann's Ballads (1868), Pidgeon English Sing-Song (1876), Songs o f the Sea and Lays o f the Land (1895), political polemics, and editorial columns. Leland also edited the New York Illustrated News (1853), Graham's Magazine (1856-1857), the New York Knickerbocker (1857-1859), Vanity Fair (1860), and the Continental Monthly (1860-1862). His aesthetic treatise Sunshine in Thought (1862) made one of the earliest serious arguments for literary realism as an optimistic component of the “steam-engine whirling realism” of the new industrial age. Leland published craft instruction books, folk tale collections, travel humor (The Egyptian Sketch-Book [1874]), burlesque philosophical disquisi tions (Meister Karl's Sketch-Book [1855]), and his own Memoirs (1903). In the field of linguistics he was credited with discovering the Shelta Gypsy dialect. The Hans Breitmann poems originated in a dia lect prose-poem Leland tossed offhandedly into a Graham's Magazine editorial column in May, 1857, over a decade before John Hay and Bret Harte began producing comic poems in Pike County dialect.
