Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

and Cody Hennesy, to see if this type of analysis would yield any clues to the Girl Reporter’s identity. We took articles from eight female stunt reporters published in the late 1880s and early 1890s: Bly, Valesh, Jordan, Stackhouse (Nora Marks), Cusack (Nell Nelson), Banks, Black, and Elia Peattie (a writer for the Chicago Tribune whose husband, in a tantalizing detail, edited the Chicago Times; the couple moved to Omaha in late 1888). We also added in one male reporter—Allen Kelly, the San Francisco Examiner’s grizzly bear hunter—as a control. He did stunts, but couldn’t have been the young woman the doctors reported pleading in their offices.

The Burrows Delta method of stylometry takes the most frequently used words by one author and compares them to the most frequently used words by another author. (For example, for Author A, 5 percent of their text might use the word “horror”;* for Author B, the number might be only 2 percent.) Then it compares those percentages with the average use of “horror” in the pool of words contributed by all the authors. Another method, called the “imposter’s tool,” allows the results of this analysis to be mapped on a scale from 0 to 1, where 1 is a strong match. A comparison of known writing by J. K. Rowling to The Cuckoo’s Nest by “Robert Galbraith” (her pseudonym) earned a 1.

A analysis of text by our eight known authors versus the Girl Reporter’s articles using the Burrows Delta method with three variations indicated Nora Marks and Elizabeth Banks were the most likely Girl Reporter candidates. One variation gave Stackhouse a score of .94; another gave Banks a score of .63. Allen Kelly earned a score of 0, indicating that the methods could ferret out a clear pretender.

On the one hand, these results make sense. Marks was from out of state (Indiana), as the Girl Reporter claimed to be, and began her stunt reporting at the very moment the Girl Reporter came on the scene. She first appeared in the Chicago Tribune at the end of August, feigning to look for a job with an employment agency. She would have had to walk only a few blocks to end up at the Times office. Her tone, swinging between casual and formal, sometimes sounded like the Girl Reporter, with a fondness for throwing in a snatch of poetry or a religious phrase. She liked alliteration—one room was “dark, dingy, and dirty”—and addressing the subjects of her investigation directly—“O, Mrs. Carpenter and Mrs. Colby and diverse other keepers of intelligencers.” At one point, she speculated, as the Girl Reporter did, that she found herself slipping so deep into her role that she almost forgot her true identity. But the Girl Reporter specified that she wasn’t a working girl or a servant: “I would feel myself lost among them. I wouldn’t know what to say to interest them,” and Marks cheerfully stepped into a servant’s shoes, then later chatted with the jail urchins. Also, she had an in at the Tribune. Why would she jeopardize it by freelancing for a competitor?

Banks was also from a nearby state—Wisconsin—and in late 1888, like Marks, like the Girl Reporter, she was at the start of her career, penning society stories for the St. Paul Globe. Easy enough to take the train to Chicago for a few weeks. It might explain her disgust at the Girl Reporter’s abortion work years later as she reflected back on her younger self. Maybe she felt she’d been taken advantage of. She also loved literature, as the Girl Reporter did. At the same time, though, the Girl Reporter had a confidence, sometimes arrogance, that Banks lacked, even at her most famous; and the Girl Reporter loved to moralize, while Banks railed against do-gooders.

Ultimately, though, the stylometry results weren’t conclusive enough to say positively that any of these writers visited doctors on behalf of the Chicago Times.

So Florence Noble? Without her identity, her series is less like a novel and more like one of Jacob Riis’s photographs from How the Other Half Lives. For his flash photography, he would barge into a dark tenement room, wake the residents, sprinkle magnesium powder on a frying pan. The circumstances had to be just right: maybe a cub reporter foolishly brave; a newspaper with nothing to lose; an industry reinventing itself; a community of doctors and midwives willing to buck a recent law. Then open the shutter, touch flame to powder, and get a burst of illumination.

I returned to Chicago frequently as I was working on this project, searching along State Street in the rain for the location of the doctor’s offices the Girl Reporter visited, standing outside the rough-hewn stones of the hotel where Nellie Bly dined with her husband-to-be, looking up at the new sign declaring “Ida B. Wells Drive.” The archivist had told me my quest was a search for a “needle in a haystack.” What I found, though, was more like a gleaming pile of needles. The real discovery of my search for the Girl Reporter was how many courageous journalists there were in the decade after Nellie Bly’s first stunt. The eight we compared with her writing were not, by far, the only candidates. Every time I unscrolled the microfilm of a new publication, there was another. The handful I ended up writing about here was only the smallest beginning. They had all left traces, sometimes in bound volumes, sometimes in the mere suggestion of life’s rich possibility.

Chapter 20

1899–1922

A Collection of Endings

Nothing is so humiliating as to be forgotten, and when I think that if I had wavered in my purpose, a twentieth century office boy in turning over the dusty files might have exclaimed as he woke the night editor from his peaceful slumber, “And who was Caroline Lockhart?” Yes, to be gone and forever forgotten is indeed a terrible thing.

—Caroline Lockhart, Boston Post, 1895

VICTORIA EARLE MATTHEWS

In September 1899, a Sun reporter toured the White Rose Mission, the brainchild