BOOK OF THE DAY: Stephen Dixonreviews The Sun and the Moonby Matthew Goodman Basic Books 350pp, $26
IN AUGUST of 1835, New York, already home to a quarter of a million, sweltered. Immigrants, many of them Irish, arrived daily to be crammed into hovels. The rudimentary sanitation arrangements failed to cope, and privies backed up and overflowed into the streets, adding to the mess left by horses and the pigs that roamed freely to consume garbage that would otherwise have rotted where it lay.
It was a fitting birthplace, some might say, for what we now call tabloid journalism, or the presentation of entertainment as news and vice versa. And it was the setting for the first and still one of the greatest of all newspaper hoaxes, in which astonished - and, it must be said, astonishingly credulous - New Yorkers were led to believe that the moon was populated by unicorns, beavers that walked upright on their hind legs and four-foot-tall flying man-bats.
Involved peripherally in the hoax, as Matthew Goodman recounts so vividly, were a pushy young showman named PT Barnum and an aggrieved Edgar Allen Poe. The perpetrator of the magnificent deception was an itinerant English journalist named Richard Adams Locke.
The emergence of the penny press in the city in the 1830s to cater for a sensation-hungry public bored by the worthiness of existing daily newspapers led to fierce rivalry and turf wars among the numerous publications that sprang up, in which editors denounced each other with tremendous vigour. James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Morning Herald, was described by the editor of the New York Aurora(a 23-year-old Walt Whitman) as: "A reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes, and breathing mildew at everything fresh and fragrant; a midnight ghoul, preying on . . . filth."
Richard Adams Locke was editor of the Sun, a fledgling newspaper with a faltering circulation, and the author of a series of six articles that summer, purportedly based on the discoveries of a famous British astronomer who was the alleged possessor of a new type of telescope which had spotted the man-bats, beavers and unicorns disporting themselves happily on the shores of the moon's lakes. The man-bats were able to converse, wrote Locke, and the beavers lived in neat little houses.
At the time there was intense speculation about the possible existence of life on other planets, and the implications this might have for science and theology. Locke's fantastical descriptions of the moon's inhabitants caused a furore, and by the end of the series the Sunwas selling today's equivalent (given population differences) of a million copies daily. New York opinion was divided, but most readers accepted Locke's articles as factual reports. Barnum, just beginning to display human oddities in the city, was thought to have been his inspiration. Poe, fascinated by astronomy since boyhood, was convinced that the idea had been plagiarised from one of his stories.
But Locke was no Barnum. He was, as Goodman persuasively explains, an enigmatic and complex free-thinker. His methods may not have been exactly honourable, but he felt he was sending out an important message about life on Earth and the possibility that we are not alone in the universe. Strange as it may seem, the man who produced the most successful hoax in the history of American journalism never intended it to be a hoax as such, but a lesson.
Goodman's highly entertaining and evocative tale is rich in duelling editors, larger-than-life cancers, crooks, lustful clergymen, bewildered astronomers and famous writers, and his love for his native city is evident throughout. And that is perhaps the best thing about The Sun and the Moon: its portrait of the adolescence of New York, and the unquenchable spirit and breathtaking audacity that still characterise it.
• Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist