ABSTRACT
Along with the new politics of the common people came a new press; it is a matter of judgment as to which came first. In the 1830s the penny press emerged to seek a wider audience, which would read for information but also for amusement, for ideas, for a sense of the way the world was going, which might affect its destiny. The new popular press brought forth an amazing variety of newspaper talent—from William Leggett, an ardent reformer who helped give dimensions to Jacksonian democracy, to Edgar Allen Poe, whose “Balloon Hoax” briefly diverted New York readers in 1844, one year after the more celebrated “Moon Hoax” of Richard Adams Locke. Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America looked down on the popular journalists as half-educated, vulgar, and unprincipled adventurers, and Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit was no more complimentary of the popular press.
