Though it was the kind of creative reporting he loved, Pulitzer wasn’t enjoying the splash. He was strangely silent for reasons that soon became clear. One morning, a month after Bly’s first asylum piece, he went to the World’s offices to pore over the editorial page, to see that each phrase met his high standards for vividness and clarity. He’d been stressed for some time, weathering constant criticism of the World’s exposures. Insomnia plagued him. When he held up the sheets, as he told a friend later, “I was astonished to find that I could hardly see the writing, let alone read it.” A doctor ordered him to stay in a dark room for six weeks, and he did, but afterward, the prognosis was no better. The diagnosis was a ruptured blood vessel, then a detached retina. More rest was ordered. He was going blind.
Bly’s wasn’t the first undercover story, but it was inventive in all kinds of ways. In 1859, just before the Civil War, Mortimer Thomson of the abolitionist New-York Tribune posed as a buyer at an auction of more than four hundred enslaved men and women in Savannah, Georgia. Other abolitionist reporters went “blackbirding,” signing on as crew on slave ships to write about what they saw.
In a famous stunt for London’s new Pall Mall Gazette in 1866, writer James Greenwood slipped on an ill-fitting coat that closed with the help of a piece of twine and spent the night in the “casual” (or temporary resident) ward of Lambeth Workhouse. He described grim conditions, taking a bath in dirty water the color of “weak mutton broth,” sleeping on a straw mattress stained with blood. But it was less an exposé of the institution than of the people who ended up there. They were ugly, dirty, lazy, and used shocking language, according to Greenwood. And his conclusion that “I have avoided the detail of horrors infinitely more revolting than anything that appears in these papers,” implied the men were selling sex rather than just sharing bedding.
The Pall Mall Gazette continued undercover exposés with W. T. Stead’s four-part 1885 series, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” For this report on children being tricked into prostitution, drugged and kidnapped or sold outright by their parents, Stead used traditional techniques—interviewing a police officer, the owner of a brothel, and a former prostitute. But he also pretended to be a customer, requesting very young virgins, verified to have never had sex by a doctor, which the brothel owners repeatedly supplied. The age of consent at the time was thirteen, allowing many of these abuses, and his series helped get it raised to sixteen.
In the Pall Mall Gazette stories, as significant as they were, the women described were still powerless. At the time of Bly’s stunt, women who made the news were generally murder victims or those fallen from virtue. Front-page stories from weeks just before and after Bly’s asylum articles included “He Dug Her Grave, Shooting, Stabbing and Burying an Old Woman”; “Mrs. Robinson’s Fatal Leap: A Louisville Woman’s Suicide”; “She Ran Away from Home, Story of Niagara Girl Found Wandering in Boston Streets”; and “A Bride Choked with Gas.” And the reporters who wrote about the enigmatic waif in the courtroom tried to fit her into one of those boxes. Was she a pathetic innocent? Or had she been seduced and abandoned?
If Bly’s entry into journalism showed anything, it was that representation of women in newspapers altered women’s lives. She got her start protesting Quiet Observer’s thoughts about her sex’s natural abilities. Two years later, Bly wrote about a new kind of woman, one who took action, did good, was brave. And this heroine was battling institutions. Judges, police officers, medical experts—all had been wrong. The Bellevue doctors were convinced that Bly was hysterical, but her whole experience undermined their authority to make this diagnosis. After she passed a second round of tests, she wrote, “I began to have a smaller regard for the ability of doctors than I ever had before, and a greater one for myself. I felt sure now that no doctor could tell whether people were insane or not, so long as the case was not violent.”
Part of the asylum story’s appeal was this kind of audacity, but another lure was its style.
W. T. Stead embellished his sentences with ornate clauses and classical references. At the start of the “Maiden Tribute,” he wrote, “In ancient times, if we may believe the myths of Hellas, Athens, after a disastrous campaign, was compelled by her conqueror to send once every nine years a tribute to Crete of seven youths and seven maidens. The doomed fourteen, who were selected by lot amid the lamentations of the citizens, returned no more.” Then he quoted Ovid in Latin.
Here is Bly, in the first paragraph of her Blackwell’s exposé: “Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.’”
Bly shook free of the ruffles and hoop skirts of Victorian prose and made her sentences accessible to the less educated and to recent immigrants who might struggle with English—the specific readers Pulitzer coveted. While she advocated for serious reform, her writing was always a pleasure to read. She was funny. Up all night at the Temporary Home for Women, she spent hours watching the mice that landed on her quilt and crawled over her pillow and the cockroaches that struck her as unusually large and fast. “I believe I made some valuable studies in natural history,” she wrote. Bly included ample dialogue. She was also unabashedly vain, and the humor is partially at her own expense. After her hair dried in knots following an asylum bath, a nurse combed it out, braided it, and tied it with a red rag. “My curly bangs refused to stay back,” Bly wrote, “so that at least was left of my former glory.” Though Bly’s prose
