Charles Mackay and His "True and Impartial History" of the Mormons

BY LEONARD J. ARRINGTON

IN THE SPRING of 1851 Charles Mackay, a leading British poet, songwriter-historian, and journalist, compiled The Mormons: Or Latter-Day Saints. With Memoirs of the Life and Death of Joseph Smith, the cc American Mahomet." Beautifully illustrated with forty engravings, many of which have been endlessly reproduced in subsequent works, this first professedly "true and impartial history" of the Mormons was the fifth volume in the National Illustrated Library of Britain — a half-crown series that included Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson and The Book of English Songs. Published anonymously, The Mormons went through at least five editions in London (1st, 1851; 2nd and 3rd, 1852; 4th, 1856; 5th, 1857) and two in the United States (Auburn, New York, 1852, 1853). Slightly revised and abridged, it appeared in other editions under the names of other authors in France, Germany, and the United States. As the most widely reviewed book on the Mormons in nineteenth-century Britain, the book catapulted the Mormons into a topic of international conversation, introduced the religion to tens of thousands of readers, and provided some of the stimulus and subject matter for the writing and publication of a package of books with Mormon themes, including histories, tales of adventure, novels, and works of poetry and humor.

How did The Mormons happen to be written, and how did Dr. Mackay happen to write it? The first explanation goes back to September 1830, six months after the organization of what later became The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when Orson Pratt was converted to Mormonism. Upon meeting Joseph Smith a short time after his baptism at the age of nineteen, Pratt was called, by special revelation (now published as Sec. 34 of the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants) to preach the Gospel of Restored Christianity. Five years later, at the age of twenty-four, he was ordained an apostle and served as a missionary in New England, the Middle Atlantic States, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Canada, before going to the British Isles in 1840. There he published the sixteen-page pamphlet Remarkable Visions, which presented for the first time, in effective literary form, the story of Joseph Smith. This persuasive delineation of what would be referred to in the religious literature of today as "the Mormon myth" was to be quoted and requoted hundreds of times in books and journals in contemporary Europe and America. And it was from this pamphlet that Joseph Smith drew much of the wording for the statement that has served ever since as the "Articles of Faith" of the L.D.S. Church.

After a year of service in England and Scotland, Elder Pratt returned to participate in the building of Nauvoo, Illinois, and was one of the thousands of Mormon citizens who were driven from that city in 1846. The versatile apostle then became a frontiersman and crossed the Great Plains with the advance company of pioneers in 1847. He, with Erastus Snow, was the first of that body to enter the Great Salt Lake Valley. Returning the same year to church headquarters in Winter Quarters, Nebraska, Pratt was appointed president of all the branches of the church in the British Isles. Within two years of his return there (i.e., by 1851), this foremost nineteenth-century Mormon intellectual had built Mormon membership in Britain from 18,000 to 31,000 and had chartered and fitted out some twenty ships loaded with Saints whose destination was Utah. In addition to his energetic preaching in all leading population centers and his efficient administration of the branches, missionaries, and emigration offices, Pratt also edited The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star (Liverpool), increasing its circulation from 4,000 to 23,000. He also wrote more than a score of philosophic and literary pamphlets on Mormon faith and doctrine -— pamphlets which were circulated by the tens of thousands in contemporary Britain. The tract societies of the British Mormon Mission which Elder Pratt organized, wrote Edward Tullidge, were "not equalled in all Christendom for their thorough working and missionary results." Written with "subtlety and skill," Pratt's tracts gave Mormonism a status among British and European intellectuals which it has never since enjoyed. Suddenly, it would seem, every British journal found it necessary to notice the new American church and to publish accounts of its founding and to review its literature. The wholesale conversions, the large emigration, and the startling tracts and sermons created a need for an independent history which would outline the facts and assess the significance and truth of the Mormon story.

In the years preceding the entry of Mormon missionaries into England, the conditions which produced the Industrial Revolution led to an unprecedented build-up of population in London, Lancashire, Liverpool, and Birmingham. From 1800 to 1830 the population of London had risen from 865,000 to 1,500,000. By 1850 another million had been added. There was unhealthful overcrowding, loss of privacy and dignity, and wholesale starvation of soul, mind, and body. In London alone "there were said to arise every morning one hundred thousand persons, young and old, male and female, adults and infants, who knew not how to procure the sustenance of the day." Nevertheless, Victorian England was not insensitive to the social blight; there were countless suggestions for reform. In 1848, the same year that Pratt was appointed to head the British Mormon Mission and also the same year that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels issued The Communist Manifesto, W. Hepworth Dixon, a rising journalist and later editor of The Athenaeum, urged that British literary figures give more attention to the condition of the workingman. A year later Henry Mayhew, a poet, playwright, cofounder of Punch, and biographer-novelist-journalist, proposed to the proprietors of The Morning Chronicle the sponsorship of a comprehensive and definitive series of articles on "Labour and the Poor" in London and the British Isles generally. The inquiry would be costly — would be more vast than any ever attempted by a newspaper — but The Chronicle was eager to preserve its preeminent position in the face of mounting competition from The Times and Daily News and resolved to undertake it.

Under Mayhew's direction London's leading journalists were mobilized, and during the months and years which followed hundreds of articles appeared which described in exhaustive and informative detail the vast underworld of "the miserable, the degraded, and the virtuous poor" of Britain. By means of statistical surveys, sociological investigations, and dispassionate literary portraits, Mayhew plumbed to its depths "the dark ocean of poverty or semi-poverty" and examined the means, "ignoble and commendable, furtive and above-board," by which rag sellers, tinmen, prostitutes, costermongers, chimney blacks, and thieves scraped a precarious livelihood. It was, wrote Charles Mackay, "as if a mighty microscope were applied to the festers, social sores, and diseases of humanity; ... as if some unparalleled photographic apparatus was brought to portray fresh from life the very minds, rather than the bodies, of the people." Hundreds of articles and several books were the product of this enterprise, but perhaps its most influential result was the support it gave to Charles Dickens, a former Chronicle reporter, in the realistic re-creation of the lives of these cheerful but unfortunate people in such unforgettable social novels as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, which were written before the study, and Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend, which were written afterward.

Strangely enough, participation in these studies and investigations was the immediate factor which caused Charles Mackay to write TheMormons. The only son of George Mackay, a captain in the Royal Artillery, Charles was born in Perth, Scotland, in 1814. He was descended from the famous Mackay clan, who had been expelled by the Duke of Sutherland from their ancestral home in northern Scotland, and whohad since been forced by circumstances to "emigrate to the ends of the earth." With the death of his mother when he was still an infant, Charles demonstrated literary capacities at an early age. When a promised cadetship in India failed to materialize, he served for two years as secretary to an aged British iron manufacturer in France and Belgium, and at the age of eighteen went to England to seek a literary career. Impressed with his poetry, the publisher of The Morning Chronicle offered him an assistant editorship in 1835. After nine years of arduous activity (i.e., in 1844), Mackay resigned from The Chronicle to serve as editor of the Argus in Glasgow. He remained in Scotland for three years, during which he was awarded the Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Glasgow. He returned to London in 1847 and became associated with the newly founded Illustrated London News, and later became its editor. In addition to his editorial and reportorial duties in Scotland and England, Mackay wrote thirteen books before undertaking The Mormons. Eight of these were books of poetry and five were works in prose. The latter included histories of London and of the Thames, and a widely reprinted work (still available, both in hardcover and paperback) Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (3 vols., London, 1841). From his associations and participation in public affairs, it is clear that Dr. Mackay was a major journalist and literary figure in the British Isles — a person of influence and stature — although, to be sure, not in the same class with, let us say, Wordsworth and Tennyson.

In his literary autobiography Dr. Mackay, who had not visited the United States by this time, explained the circumstances which led him to write The Mormons. Henry Mayhew, he wrote, reserved to himself the study of the poor in London, and Mackay was asked "to enquire into the condition of the people in the two important towns of Liverpool and Birmingham." In Liverpool, from whence flowed the main stream of British emigration to America, Mackay wrote,

The three letters, totaling approximately 25,000 words, represented the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth letters in The Chronicle which dealt with "Labour and the Poor" in Liverpool. The first letter (July 29, 1850) set forth the founding of the Mormon church and its novel beliefs. The second (August 5, 1850) outlined the growth of the sect in the face of "vindictive" animosity and persecution. The third (August 12, 1850) described the last months of the Prophet Joseph Smith, the migration to the Salt Lake Valley, and the founding of the State of Deseret. The only "new" information conveyed by the articles was the inclusion of a statement prepared by the manager of a shipping line, which described the organization of Mormon emigration from Britain.

One of the reasons for the amazement which greeted the publication of these letters was Mackay's uncritical repetition of inflated figures on church membership and wealth. Mormonism, he asserted, had now become a major movement, with nearly 300,000 members; its emigration from Britain, which averaged 2,500 per year, was supported by a nest egg of three-and-a-half tons of California gold!

The expanded 326-page octavo volume which followed in 1851 has the patchwork quality of a compilation turned out by an editor insistent that both Mormons and anti-Mormons tell their stories in their own words. Since about nine-tenths of the book consists of quotations, strung together rather loosely with a tissue of commentary, it might have been more appropriately titled, The Mormons and Their History: A Book of Readings. All the quotations are acknowledged. Its principal difference from previous chronicles is that it incorporates in the same volume both the Mormon documents and the non-Mormon affidavits. Not a history in the sense of a synthesis narrative or interpretation, it served to illustrate the almost irreconcilable character of the evidence. 16 Mackay's objective, as he says in his "Preface," is to present "the history of Joseph Smith, a great impostor, or a great visionary, — perhaps both — but in either case one of the most remarkable persons who has appeared on the stage of the world in modern times." As with the three articles in The Chronicle which it incorporates, the single unique contribution of The Mormons is the four-page statement describing Mormon emigration procedures (pp. 250-54). The other contribution — and this we should neither ignore nor minimize — is Mackay's recognition that there were two sides to the Mormon story and that both deserved to be read in juxtaposition.

For the earlier period of Mormonism, Dr. Mackay weaves in quotations from the works of Joseph Smith, Orson Pratt, and official periodicals, on the Mormon side, with quotations found in the E. D. Howe Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, Ohio, 1834) and John C. Bennett's History of the Saints (Boston, 1842). Nearly all of Thomas L. Kane's lecture on The Mormons (Philadelphia, 1850) and some of the general epistles of the First Presidency of the church are reproduced for the later period of Mormon history, but there are sufficient comments and questions of a hostile nature to balance the favorable image which these project. Dr. Mackay was doubtful of the rumors of Mormon polygamy, which was not publicly confirmed by the time he wrote, and was impressed by the industry, frugality, and morality of the Saints. Although he equates Mormonism with fanaticism, and regards Joseph Smith as a conscious impostor in the early years, Mackay is cautiously complimentary of Mormon leadership and accomplishments in Nauvoo, during the Great Trek, and during the early years in the Salt Lake Valley. In appraising the significance of the Mormons, Mackay concluded:

The official Mormon reaction to the book was one of cautious delight at the gratuitous publicity. The book had obtained "great popularity with the upper circles," reported Franklin D. Richards, head of the British Mormon Mission, and the appearance of reviews of the book in "most of the leading Journals throughout the empire . . . caused the hearing of us to break forth on the right and left everywhere." But, on the other hand,

As President Richards indicated, The Mormons received excellent reviews in the leading journals of Britain. The Athenaeum, foremost literary weekly, devoted two columns to the book, calling it "the first attempt to tell in a connected way the story of the Mormons . . . curious and profitable reading." In a four-page review in his weekly, Household Words, Charles Dickens found it "a well drawn-up volume" which describes the most "strangely important" event in a century of sectarian history. To Dickens the book revealed the paradoxical character of Mormonism. On the one hand the religion engendered "immense practical industry"; on the other hand the faith was a "pitiable superstitious delusion." "What the Mormons do," he wrote, "seems to be excellent; what they say, is mostly nonsense." In a twenty-page review article of the Mackay book and other Mormon literature, the prestigious Westminster Review called The Mormons "a pleasing work," and concluded: "For our own part, we are glad to see any signs of a fresh religious life in America, or in Christendom, and welcome this sect to the company of the Methodists and Anabaptists, the Protestants and the Catholics, and wish them all God speed." Some ten years later, Sir Richard Burton summed up the meaning of the book quite accurately:

Across the Channel two of France's foremost interpreters of England and America used copious extracts from the book in writing extended histories and commentaries on the Mormons. One of these was Prosper Merimee, author of some of France's finest nouvelles including the story on which the opera Carmen was based, who wrote a fifty-six-page review in Le Moniteur Universel (March-April, 1853), which was later published as the lead article in hisMelanges Historiques et Litter aires (Paris, 1855). Merimee, who was mildly skeptical of all religions, found many things to admire in the Mormon story and felt the religious enthusiasm would gradually be tempered by the "practical sense" which was characteristic of Americans. He speculated that the Mormons might develop into a new society unique in history. The other review was by Alfred Maury, author of Croyances et Legendes de VAntiquite and other works, who concluded in an article in the September 1853 issue of Revue des deux mondes that the Mormons were faced with the choice of remaining a sect of a few thousand members with peculiar ways and beliefs, or developing into a nation-state of major proportions, wedged in between Mexico and the United States, with potentialities of major significance.

The French reception was so warm that Amedee Pichot, popular translator of the works of Scott, Shakespeare, and other English writers, translated and somewhat abbreviated The Mormons, added some comments of his own based on reading Stansbury and Gunnison, and issued a volume in the National Railroad Library series. The same tactic was followed in Germany where Theodor Olshausen, German statesman and publicist, published Geschichte der Mormonen oder Jungsten-Tages- Heilingen in Nordamerika (Gottingen, 1856), which relies heavily on the Mackay volume. Neither of these writers acknowledges his heavy debt to Charles Mackay.

In the United States where Mormonism did not have the exotic interest which appealed to Europeans, the reviews are not quite so friendly. In response to the articles in The Chronicle in which Dr. Mackay had said, "The growth of Mohammedanism, rapid as it was, is not to be compared with the rise and growth of Mormonism," the editor of The Eclectic Magazine, W. H. Bidwell, replied: "Mr. Mackay is somewhat mistaken." Whereas British and Continental writers had ascribed the rise of Mormonism to the ignorance and materialism of the American frontier, W. J. A. Bradford, in The Christian Examiner, attributed Mormonism's growth to the credulity, ignorance, and earnestness of the Englishmen who made up a large proportion of its converts. "It is certain that Mormonism has always attracted more attention abroad than it has received in our immediate community," he wrote. "In our neighborhood it has been regarded either as too shallow a cheat, or too monstrous a delusion, to deserve a deliberate treatment." The most favorable article was in Harper's, which reprinted no less than eighteen of the forty illustrations in The Mormons and emphasized the "indomitable perseverance and surprising energy" of the Mormons, and the "system, order, and political wisdom" that marked their movement. In Utah "a nation has been born." The Mormons constituted "the vital elements of a powerful mountain nation, in the heart of our continent, and in the direct pathway from the Atlantic to the Pacific States." As in France and Germany, there was also an "American translation" by that peripatetic writer of scissors-and-paste histories, Samuel Mosheim Schmucker. Using Mackay as a basis, and adding comments of his own based on Stansbury, Gunnison, and other writers, Schmucker published a fat work under the title The Religious, Social, and Political History of the Mormons, or Latter-day Saints . . ., edited with important additions by Samuel M. Smucker [sic] (New York, 1856, 1858, 1860, 1881 ).

One reason for the popularity of The Mormons was its anonymity; one might reproduce it in extenso without attribution. A more important factor was the art work. The high quality of the illustrations is demonstrated by the frequency with which they have been subsequently reproduced. The article in Harper's which reproduced eighteen of the illustrations seems to hold the record, although B. G. Ferris' Utah and the Mormons . . . (New York, 1854) used twelve of them, and "Maria Ward" (possibly Ferris' wife) used three in Female Life Among the Mormons . .. (New York, 1856). To mention only one recent use, the "Mormon History" issue of Dialogue used six illustrations from The Mormons? At least six of the sketches from which engravings were made were drawn by Frederick Piercy, who later became famous for his illustrations in Route From Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley,... (Liverpool, 1855). The youthful Piercy (only twenty-one in 1851) made the drawings of Orson Pratt and of the ceremonies of baptism and of confirmation from life, and was unquestionably the eminent Mormon artist to whom Dr. Mackay referred in his "Preface."

The fact that The Mormons was published annoymously has created difficult problems for librarians and bibliographers. Dr. Mackay's reasons for omitting his name as author seem obvious enough. He was not really an author but a compiler. To a man of his artistic reputation and sensitivity it would have seemed presumptuous to have issued the book under his own name. As librarians and bibliographers hunted for a name under which to list the book, they chanced upon the mention in the "Preface" that The Mormons was an outgrowth of Henry Mayhew's study of "Labour and the Poor." Many therefore listed Mayhew as the author, or apparent author, and in many great libraries, even today, the book is listed in this manner. Even the writer of Mayhew's biography in the Dictionary of National Biography incorrectly lists The Mormons as one of the many products of Mayhew's pen. Perhaps observing some contemporary confusion on this point, the publisher of the 1856 or fourth edition inserted on the title page the legend, "Edited by Charles Mackay." This only magnified the confusion as librarians predictably solved this problem of authorship by listing Mayhew as the author and adding the notation that Mackay had edited the fourth edition. The Library of Congress handles the book this way even today, and most other libraries have followed this pattern. The writer has observed in one distinguished library that different copies of the same work are listed and shelved twice — once under Mayhew, and once under Mackay. One may find a similar treatment in bibliographies. To take the most prestigious example, in his History of Utah, Bancroft lists the book four times, as follows:

Smith, the American Mahomet. London ( ).

In his footnotes, Bancroft sometimes lists Mackay, The Mormons, and sometimes Mayhew, The Mormons; and in some instances lists both, as well as the Pichot, Olshausen, and Schmucker volumes — all as authorities on a given point — not seeming to recognize (or not wishing to concede) that all devolve upon Mackay's book which, in turn, is a compilation of documents all but one of which were published previously.

While Dr. Mackay's The Mormons may be properly regarded as the first of its kind, its importance could easily be exaggerated. There followed in 1852 the publication of Gunnison's excellent history and geography which, though published under the same title as Mackay's book, seems to have been based primarily on his own observations and studies and is, in reality, a superior and more informative volume. Later works in the same vein, attempting as did Mackay to present a narrative and analysis which balanced the widely circulated anti-Mormon view with the Mormon position, included Stenhouse's Rocky Mountain Saints, William Alexander Linn's The Story of the Mormons . . . (New York, 1902), and, in our day, Ray B. West's Kingdom of the Saints . . . (New York, 1957). Charles Mackay set a praiseworthy pattern of structural impartiality. His was not an interpretative synthesis, as was, say Nels Anderson's Desert Saints (Chicago, 1942). Nor did it present the "facts" of Mormon society as these were determined by personal observation, as did Lieutenant Gunnison. Neither could Dr. Mackay refrain from occasionally presenting his own point of view, which was hardly objective. But at least he included the pro- and anti-Mormon views within the covers of one book and thus elevated the writing of Mormon history to a new plateau. Finally, by simply interesting himself in Mormonism he demonstrated that the topic was worthy of the attention of British and Continental intellectuals, and he thus opened up a new era in Mormon literature.

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