Sensational by Kim Todd (chromebook ebook reader .txt) 📕

women’s pages (which still existed at many papers). Instead, interviews featured suffragists and women in unconventional careers, like cowboys. A “bicycle department” covered races and new designs. Ample, sprawling illustrations often showed men with their shirts off, including a large feature on modern athletes mimicking Greek statues of wrestlers. The journalistic purpose was unclear, though it was a fine display of muscles.

This era is supposed to be the beginning of the end of Pulitzer’s dream, as his paper was sucked into Hearst’s vortex of disrepute. But at least to this reader, the World of 1896, full of sea snakes, and X-rays, and arctic voyages, is enchanting. The world, as reflected in the pages of the World, seems rich and exciting. It is also beautiful. Illustrations had evolved since the coarse sketches that accompanied Bly’s asylum writing in 1887. In one article, wind pushes a hot-air balloon across the page. In another, a skyscraper stretches from top to bottom. Five baby lions, recently born at the zoo, huddle at the top of a third. Reproductions of sheet music and handwritten notes enliven the text. Other images bear the marks of the recent invention of the motion picture, with its rapid series of photos capturing second-by-second shifts in a hand or face. The narrow columns crammed with small type of less than a decade before were only a gray smear of memory.

As part of their efforts to build circulation in the face of the Journal’s competition, Brisbane and Jordan brought back Bly. Bly had become part of the paper’s mythology of itself. The edition commemorating the World’s ten-year anniversary with Pulitzer at the helm included illustrations of Bly in the asylum, exposing Edward Phelps’s corruption, going around the world—stories not just notable because of the subject matter but because they were written by Nellie Bly. They needed her, and she needed them.

Bold illustration in the World, February 16, 1896

“To the North Pole by Balloon,” World, February 16, 1896 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

Married life wasn’t all she might have imagined. Late one night, in an unseasonably warm November marked by dense fogs, Bly sensed someone tracking her movements. She’d tried to lose the tail at the Imperial Hotel, to no avail. Riding in a hansom cab at Thirty-Fourth near Broadway, she leaped out, confronted a police officer, and pointed to a vehicle across the street. “Officer, there is a man in that cab who has been following my cab about all day. . . . I want you to arrest him.” At the police station, the man, Henry Hanson, said he’d been hired by her husband.

“Oh, that is all I wanted to know,” Bly said.

Her husband, Robert Seaman, bailed out the private detective, who had been the manager of his Catskills property.

In court the next day, Bly told the judge that men had been following her for weeks, even rattling the doorknob of her private chamber in her house. Her jealous husband didn’t trust her. But since no one ever talked with her or touched her, the judge said there was nothing he could do. After court, in the lobby, Hanson approached Bly.

“If I have done anything wrong, I want to apologize. I did not try to break in your door and I never followed you before last night,” he said.

“You have followed me before and you know it,” Bly responded. “I see that I can get no redress from the court for this shameful piece of business, but I give you fair warning that it will not be tolerated by me any longer. If you continue in your despicable spying you will find that I will take the law into my own hands.”

Over the next few days, Seaman claimed to reporters that Bly no longer dined at the house and that he had just wanted to see where she was eating. Bly, in turn, said he’d refused to honor the pre-marital pact where he agreed to support her mother and sister. (Since the early days of the break with her stepfather, Bly had looked after her mother. Letters between them showed a close, protective relationship, with Bly urging her mother to buy warm winter clothes and take care of her own needs before anyone else’s: “Learn to think only of yourself. Selfishness is the only thing which gains in this world.” She still signed with her childhood nickname, “Pink.”) Both Bly and Seaman denied wanting a divorce, but things were not going well. Tensions weren’t eased by the revelation printed in the papers two weeks later: Seaman had paid a hefty settlement to a woman who claimed to be his common-law wife.

So, maybe to control her own finances, or maybe to splash something on the front page besides her marital troubles, Bly signed onto the World once again.

Her resulting coverage was all over the map, sometimes infused with the humor and spirit linked to the character of “Nellie Bly,” sometimes hampered by blinkers of money and a new social status. In late January, Bly covered the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington DC. After the high-profile defeat in New York, the suffrage movement was scrambling for purchase, celebrating smaller victories: Utah’s admission to the union with suffrage for women; four recently elected female members to the Board of Education in Lexington, Kentucky. But Bly’s take on the significance of the meeting was an odd one. Her keen observation skills didn’t fail her; she noted the lack of young women and the fact that there was only one Black delegate. Bly spent most of her space, though, running down the suffragists’ clothes, charting out-of-date styles and ill-fitting skirts she found “frightful,” dinging them for speaking with their hats on. “I really believe women will never be emancipated until they abolish the handkerchief from sight,” Bly wrote, brittle and cranky.

But then, she found her way back to the insightful questions and human connections that had always characterized her reporting. With her irreverence and instinct for the compelling detail, she set out to interview the