ABSTRACT
Mortimer N. Thomson (1831-1875), known as “Q. K. Philander Doesticks” as he rose to fame in the middle 1850s, exemplified the ide alism of the New York Bohemians. In a series of comic sketches, com piled in D oesticks: What He Says (1855), Doesticks captured in bur lesque the social customs of the rising classes of the city. In Pluri-bustah: A Song That’s by No Author (1856) and Nothing to Say (1857), literary burlesques of Longfellow’s Hiawatha and William Allen But ler’s Nothing to Wear, he applied rhyme and contemporary language, with a dash of popular slang and political jargon, to point up contem porary topics of national greed, slavery, and the morality of wealth and mobocracy. Excerpts of Pluri-bus-tah (New York, 1856) are re printed here. As a reporter for the antislavery New York Tribune, Thomson disguised himself and attended one of the most notori ous slave auctions of the era. The Tribune published his account of it on March 9, 1859, and it was reprinted almost verbatim in the London Times. Later, it was republished as a tract, and the Atlantic Monthly praised it highly. The suggestion that it set the North aflame with its mixture of sarcasm and melodrama may well be true. The text given here was taken from the original Tribune article.
