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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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