Free love The story of a great American scandal

First published in 1954, this droll and waggish chronicle of an American media frenzy from journalist Shaplen (The Lost Revolution) revels in the eccentricity of 19th-century elites. Tracking the consummation and public fallout of an 1860s extramarital affair between famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, wife of Theodore Tilton, one of Beecher's most ardent followers, Shaplen pokes sly fun at the trio and their upper-crust set through extensive excerpting of their saccharine letters to one another and reports on their outlandish behavior, all of which became public during a civil trial. Beecher, a serial philanderer, comes off as a charismatic seducer (instructing Elizabeth in his letters on how to keep their affair secret by referring to it as "nest-hiding"), while Elizabeth appears pitiable and lonely in light of her husband's strange aloofness (a bizarre man, Theodore was given to walking around his house at two in the morning moving picture frames). Shaplen's liberal quotations from the correspondence occasionally bog down the narrative in confessions and apologies; however, the book comes alive in the latter half with the entrance of Victoria Woodhull, a politically ambitious spiritualist who pushed the scandal into public view (she hoped that this evidence of men's fallibility would undercut the public's faith in male politicians). Shaplen's eye for detail creates a vision of sweaty, prurient absurdity in postbellum America. This enthralls. (Apr.)

A fascinating account by a "far-flung correspondent" follows every nuance of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery scandal of 1870. Initially serialized in the New Yorker, Shaplen's work was published in 1954. As Louis Menand notes in the preface to this edition, "this was a custom at [William] Shawn's New Yorker highly attractive to writers: they sold their work twice, first to the magazine, then to a publisher. And stylistically, the book is very much old-New-Yorker," the editors of which "believed in letting the facts speak for themselves." Shaplen delves intriguingly into the era of a swiftly changing, new-money, reform-minded New York City. Beecher, son of the fiery Presbyterian preacher Lyman Beecher and brother of author Harriet Beecher Stowe, had been the wildly successful reverend at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights for almost three decades when impassioned parishioner Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband, Theodore, that they had been having an affair. Theodore, the editor of the religious publication the Independent, also adored Beecher, and owed him his job. Furthermore, Lucy Maria, Independent owner Henry C. Bowen's wife, made a similar confession about Beecher to her husband on her deathbed in 1862. Both husbands tried to bury the scandals, but the entanglements of these relationships became so intense that each player would end up incriminated, through confessions and letters, so that the wider public was sure to catch wind of the scandal, as when "radical spiritualist" Victoria Woodhull got involved. Shaplen's account of Beecher and his "Gospel of Love" is a wonderfully spirited portrait of this "powerful symbol of the times." As he recounts, the ensuing trials highlighted "the contemporary debate over private versus public conduct, the function of the evangelical church, and the place of women in the expanding social scene." An utterly engaging historical excavation of a passion play both farcical and resounding. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.