Abstract
On October 19 1869, the front page of the New York Times was almost entirely devoted to a visitor from abroad who seemed an unlikely candidate for such attention: a French Carmelite monk called Father Hyacinthe. The interest generated by Hyacinthe’s arrival was enormous. A crowd gathered at the dock to greet him, then followed him to his hotel where, the Times reported, porters were kept busy running written requests for interviews up to his room. On October 21, Hyacinthe posed for the famous photographer Mathew Brady, and his portrait quickly became one of the most popular in Brady’s gallery. Many leading religious and literary figures shared this curiosity toward the French monk. Over the next two months Hyacinthe would meet with, amongst others, Harriet Beecher Stowe, famed ministers Henry Ward Beecher and the Reverend Leonard W. Bacon, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, historian Charles Francis Adams, and the Governor of Massachusetts, William Claflin. The publisher George P. Putnam took advantage of Hyacinthe’s fame to rush into print, with the Frenchman’s consent, a translation of his sermons and addresses. For the former Consul and American minister to France, John Bigelow, Hyacinthe’s reception in America was nothing less than sensational. “Every source of information,” Bigelow later wrote, “was ransacked for details of his life; his hotel was thronged; he was interviewed by reporters; he was deluged with invitations; shop windows and illustrated journals were radiant with his portrait.”1
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Notes
John Bigelow, “Father Hyacinthe and His Church,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art 15, no. 25 (January 1870): 96.
The letter appeared in full in, amongst others, the New York Times, New York Herald, Boston Advertiser, and Milwaukee Herald. For a review of Hyacinthe’s career, see Lucienne Portier, Christianisme, églises et religions. Le dossier Hyacinthe Loyson (Louvain-la-Neuve: Centre d’histoire des religions, 1982).
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© 2010 Timothy Verhoeven
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Verhoeven, T. (2010). Introduction: Father Hyacinthe in America. In: Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109124_1
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