Brander Matthews' Re-visioning of Crane's Maggie

DEVIEWING Stephen Crane's Maggie, Hamlin Garland praised the novella as the most truthful and unhackneyed tale of the slums he had ever read, but he qualified his praise of Crane's compelling study in naturalism by contending that it only a fragment. It is typical only of the worst elements of the alley. The author should delineate the families living on the next street, who live lives of heroic purity and hopeless hardship.1 Garland's critique of Maggie will be familiar to most Crane scholars; less known, however, is the fact that two months before his review appeared, Garland, apparently intending to promote Maggie, had urged Crane to send a copy of the book to Brander Matthews. An influential literary critic and professor of drama at Columbia University, Matthews was an intimate friend of and was highly regarded by not only Garland but William Dean Howells and Mark Twain as well. During the war being waged in the United States at the time between the literary romanticists and realists, Matthews was a staunch ally of the latter; and he especially encouraged accurate fictional portraits of New York City life. Matthews himself published a number of what he termed snapshot sketches of New York in the early I89os, reprinting twelve of them in a volume titled Vignettes of Manhattan in I894. Thus Garland had good reason for suggesting that Crane send his novella to the professor. Crane took Garland's advice. In a letter dated 2I March I893

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