“Life-like Delineations of Real Life”: Illustrating <i>Wilfred Montressor; Or, The Secret Order of the Seven</i>, a New York City Mystery of 1846

Abstract This article tracks how an 1846 serial, Wilfred Montressor; Or, The Secret Order of the Seven , and its illustrations, produced by and for members of the fraternal order of the Odd-Fellows, and its subsequent reprintings, including an 1855 edition by a German-language newspaper publisher in the United States, led to the creation of a hero with ties to both nativism and working-class solidarity. The serial’s author, Park Benjamin, had pioneered the pirating of British and European novels in the U. S. in his newspaper the New World . Benjamin adapted the city mystery genre for the New York Odd-Fellows’ newspaper, defending secret associations as necessary in a city where criminal and economic systems are ineffective if not corrupt. But Tompkins Matteson’s nearly 100 illustrations invited the youthful, Protestant, artisanal, and male subscribers to the weekly Golden Rule to project themselves into New York’s high and low life. Matteson’s illustrations of novel readers may have condemned their absorption in fantasy, but his pictures in the serial created seductive objects of desire that crossed ethnic and gender boundaries. Later, as a cheap novel, the illustrations and the text were both ordered more conventionally, while the fraternal image of manhood, one that attracted Germans and native-born, survived.