Robert Henry Newell
Robert Henry Newell, also known by his pseudonym Orpheus C. Kerr, was a 19th-century American journalist, humorist, and poet born in New York. He faced significant challenges early in life, including financial difficulties following his father's death, which prevented him from pursuing higher education. Newell began his career in journalism as an assistant editor for the New York Sunday Mercury in 1858, writing about social and political issues of the time. His most notable work came during the Civil War, where he created the character Orpheus C. Kerr, a flamboyant correspondent whose satirical commentary on the war gained him considerable popularity.
Newell's writings were compiled into several volumes, including *The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers*, reflecting on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Alongside his journalistic endeavors, he published poetry collections and attempted novels, although the latter did not receive much acclaim. His marriage to actress Adah Isaacs Menken ended in divorce, further complicating his personal life. Unfortunately, a degenerative eye condition led to a decline in his health and writing output, and by the time of his death in 1901, he had faded from public memory. Despite this, his contributions to humor and satire during a tumultuous period in American history remain noteworthy.
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Robert Henry Newell
Writer
- Born: December 13, 1836
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: July 1, 1901
- Place of death: Brooklyn, New York
Biography
Humorous journalist and sometime poet and novelist Robert Henry Newell was born in New York to Robert and Ann Newell; his father was an inventor and designer of various manufactured goods such as sewing machines. Although Newell was sent to private school as a young man, his father’s death and the resultant loss of family finances did not allow him to seek a college education.
After writing a series of freelance articles, he was hired as an assistant editor for the NewYork Sunday Mercury in 1858; in this role he commented on the current scene and also produced verse based on the social and political circumstances of his day. With the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, however, Newell found his calling. In the tradition of similar humorous writers of the day and age, he adapted a pseudonym and an outrageous persona named Orpheus C. Kerr, who presumably was a bombastic and high-flown Washington correspondent writing about the Civil War. Similar methods were followed by Charles F. Browne writing as Artemus Ward, and Samuel Clemens writing as Mark Twain, among others.
In 1862, Newell married the actress Adah Isaacs Menken; however, their relationship was not to last long. By 1865, she sued for divorce. During this period, Newell left the Sunday Mercury and wrote and edited for various other New York periodicals, including the New York Herald, who employed him as a war correspondent. In the years following the war, he worked for the New York World and eventually a weekly periodical, Hearth and Home.
As Kerr, Newell became extraordinarily popular, and the Kerr pieces on the Civil War and Reconstruction were collected and published in separate volumes as The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers in 1862, The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers: Second Series in 1863, The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers: Third Series in 1865, and finally Smoked Glass in1868. He also published two volumes of his satirical poetry in The Palace Beautiful, and Other Poems in 1865 and Versatilities in 1871. During this productive period, he published two novels that received very little notice: Avery Glibun in 1867 and a social satire, The Walking Doll: Or, the Asters and Disasters of Society, in 1872.
A degenerative medical condition that affected Newell’s sight caused him to retire in 1876 and dramatically reduced his writing output. He nonetheless worked on a novel intended to mock Darwinian theory, There Was Once a Man (1884), as well as an attempted ending to English novelist Charles Dickens’s incomplete The Mystery of Edwin Drood. As his health deteriorated, so did his productivity. By the time of his death in 1901, Newell was largely forgotten as a man of letters.