Cornelius Mathews

Chanticleer Cornelius Mathews

Mathews was born on October 28, 1817, in Port Chester, New York to Abijah Mathews and Catherine Van Cott. He attended Columbia College, graduated New York University in 1834. He then attended law school and passed the New York bar in 1837. At the time, American literature was generally regarded as necessarily inferior to the British, and American authors were encouraged to follow English models closely. This at least was the view espoused by the literary elite of New York, who tended to orbit the influential and conservative editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine, Lewis Gaylord Clark. Mathews vehemently disagreed, and called for a new literary style that would express a distinctly American identity, although this style was not to be a populist or demotic one. Their politics was limited to a call for international copyright law, to curb the wholesale copyright infringement of American literature in England. Stylistically, Mathews favored an approach that emphasized the cosmopolitan sweep and diversity of American society, bolder and more philosophical than the sort of cozy humor associated with the Knickerbocker Magazine (although Mathews did not refuse to appear in its pages), but not as abstruse and Germanic as the Transcendentalist literature of Boston. Mathews' panacea was the emulation of Rabelais, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel, he believed, managed to advance philosophical penetration without etherializing its subject matter. For two years (1840-1842), Mathews and Duyckinck wrote for and co-edited Young America's uneven journal, Arcturus, publishing also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell.