Albert H. Jocelyn (engraver, original artist unknown), The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, 1853, published by D. Appleton, New York.
One of the staples of the holiday season is The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky’s ballet about the fever dreams to which children are prone on Christmas Eve. Now that I have kids of my own I realize that children have not gotten any less feverish since the story on which it was based was published in 1816. Now that I have kids of my own, I don’t get to do hallucinogens, but the fantastical short stories of the 19th century Prussian writer ETA Hoffmann are always with us.
Tchaikovsky’s ballet is only the most famous of the adaptations of Hoffmann’s short stories — his work had a huge influence across the century, with interpretations by Jacques Offenbach, Robert Schumann, Alexandre Dumas, another earlier ballet (Coppélia, with music by Léo Delibes, from 1870), Paul Hindemith, and a wake of admirers encompassing Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe. You just couldn’t escape Hoffmann in the mid-1800s — his meandering stories about turning into a salamander, falling in love with a robot, or losing your shadow, were everywhere. The musical interpretations are ubiquitous and immortal, and if American art seems to have done little to enshrine the legacy, you only have to pull on one loose thread, and like the eyes in The Sandman, suddenly you can’t stop seeing them.1
II. The Watchmaker’s Sons.
Hoffmann was a mixture of science and fantasy, a sort that was particularly admired by 19th century romantics. Prussia seemed to specialize in their export — Hoffmann’s contemporary, Alexander von Humboldt, came to world fame as an explorer and naturalist about the same time, two Prussians who were romantic about science. Hoffmann’s is a world where witches may put you into mason jar if you knock over their applecart, or you may realize that your true love is really a robot: technology and magic know no clear separation.
In New Haven in 1796, a watchmaker named Simeon Jocelin had a son2 named Nathaniel and another in 1799. After learning the family trade, the elder brother went to work for Samuel Morse, then still tinkering with portraiture and telegraphy. Local inventor Eli Whitney — he of the cotton gin and interchangeable gun parts — was also a friend and booster, and Whitney supported the elder Jocelyn brother’s new venture producing decorative pictures. Although Nathaniel would later become famous as a painter, his first studio was filled with presses and gears not pots of paint. Jocelyn joined with George Munger to produce popular prints of Munger’s 1813 watercolor of the Capitol burning during the War of 1812. Soon he’d go into business with his brother Simeon, doing all the things that engravers do: illustrate books, decorate clocks, and print bank notes.
III. A Broadly Popular Position.
Meanwhile, the brothers were growing increasingly concerned about an item in their humanist agenda: the cause of abolitionism. Both brothers were politically active on the issue, and as Simeon turned toward the pulpit to advocate against slavery, Nathaniel took it upon himself to paint the portraits of the leading figures of the movement. He painted William Lloyd Garrison in 1833 who quipped that “those who imagine that I am a monster, on seeing it will . . . deny its accuracy, seeing no horns about the head.” Six years later, the Mende captives aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad threw off their captors and sailed into New Haven harbor. The brother’s Jocelyn helped get Joseph Cinqué, the leader of the revolt, a lawyer; Nathaniel asked Cinqué to sit for him.
It’s hard to imagine Cinqué’s likeness being preserved so dramatically had he not arrived auspiciously at the doorstep of the profoundly sympathetic Jocelyn — but that’s partly the point. In this weird cauldron of religious fervor and technological innovation, a strange strand humanism was widespread. If it wasn’t Jocelyn’s engraving studio, it might have been someone else’s — watchmakers and bank-note designers were broadly in support of the Amistad.3 And whoever it was that shared this spiritual-scientific view of the world was also a fan of ETA Hoffmann.
Of course, monoglot American audience had to wait a few years before Hoffmann’s stories were available in English. By 1853, Jocelyn was mainly out of the pictures biz, while his brother Simeon had dedicated himself to the establishment of a college for African Americans. When Mrs. St. Simon produced a translation of The Nutcracker, the Jocelyn family had an early look at the galleys. Simeon’s son Albert Higley Jocelyn engraved the illustrations, and for a century this was America’s vision of sugarplum fairies: Tchaikovsky’s ballet wouldn’t come to the United States until 1944.
Dancing rats have been haunting children’s dreams ever since.
Happy holidays, and thanks for reading. Join us next week for an antarctic edition as temperatures in New York get chilly and we bid adieu to a brutal and bizarre year.
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Both Bladerunner and the Neil Gaiman Sandman owe a huge debt to ETA Hoffmann, of course!
The spelling changes every few years, don’t let it worry you any more than it did the Joscelyn family.
This phenomenon wasn’t limited to New England, and I’m rushing past Nathaniel Jocelyn’s adventures among friends in the antebellum South, but I also don’t want to overstate popularity of abolitionism in the North. Plenty of science-minded Yankees condoned slavery, of course, and Jocelyn rubbed elbows with them, too. Take his old boss, Samuel Morse, father of the telegram, who took time out of his busy schedule to convey his god’s views on the matter: “Slavery per se is not sin. It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom.” Fans of NYU’s Morse Academic Program, take note!