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Celebrating Nellie Bly on 19th-century
trade cards
This astounding journalist, born
Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman in 1865,
rocked the late Victorian and
early modern era in America with
her newspaper articles on
conditions in prisons, asylums for
the insane, prostitutes, and
chorus girls.
She posed as a lunatic and
prostitute, snatched purses and
went on stage to get her stories,
finally beating the fictional
Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's
novel Around
the World in Eighty Days
by doing it in 72, and returned
home in 1890 to screaming crowds
in New York City. (Continued
below the pictures.)
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The words read
NELLIE BLY BIDS FOGG GOOD-BYE.
"O Fogg,
good-bye," said Nellie Bly.
"It takes a
maiden to be spry,
To span the
space 'twixt thought and act,
And turn a
fiction to a fact."
These trade cards,
part of a series, probably
appeared during the media frenzy
around her world trip in 1890, a
competition with the fictional
Phineas Fogg from the novel Around the World
in Eighty Days. Look,
she's waving an American flag!
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The words read
NELLIE BLY, BYE AND BYE.
"O bye and bye," dreams Nellie
Bly,
"Along a strand of light I'll
hie;
And stars and gleams will follow
too,
But they must hustle if they
do."
("Hie" means "hurry.")
See the other
side of this card, where
the ad at the bottom of the card
is expanded.
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She started writing to and for
newspapers when she was 20, raced
around the world at 29, and
married a rich geezer a year
later, one week after meeting him.
By the way, trade cards were
cards - these are 3" x 5" (about 7
x 12 cm) - printed with often
colorful, sometimes funny
advertisements that customers
could pick up in stores, mainly in
the 19th century (here's another,
for another famous American
woman). People sometimes pasted
them into albums (see the paste damage
to the Bly card on the back
corners).
Does anyone
know who wrote the poetry?
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SEE Dr. Schenck's
medicines on the other side - Some other amazing women: Marie Stopes, Nellie Bly - See Cardui
patent medicine, Lydia Pinkham's Compound, Dr. Pierce's
medicine and Orange
Blossom
medicine.
© 1997 Harry
Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or
distribute work on this Web site in any
manner or medium without
written permission of the author. Please
report suspected violations to hfinley@mum.org
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