Individuals >> Bristed, Charles Astor ( Carl Benson ) (1820-1874)

Essayist, Journalist, Novelist.

Charles Astor Bristed was born in New York City to Rev. John Bristed and Magdalen Astor, daughter of John Jacob Astor II. He was educated by tutors until age fifteen when he entered Yale College. After graduating in 1839, Bristed spent another year pursuing graduate work at Yale before transferring to Trinity College in Cambridge, England. He graduated in 1845 and then took time off to travel through Europe.

After returning to the United States Bristed began writing, occasionally using the pseudonym Carl Benson. As Benson, Bristed regularly contributed to Wilkes's Spirit of the Times. Algernon Tassin called Bristed "a writer for American magazines, who was what few New York writers of the period were, a cosmopolitan with a point of view limited neither to America nor to Broadway" (150). Bristed also published a number of standalone works, including Selections from Catullus, for School Use (1849), A Letter to the Hon. Horace Mann (1850), The Upper Ten Thousand: Sketches of American Society (1852), Five Years in an English University (1852), Pieces of a Broken-Down Critic (1858), Now is the Time to Settle It (1862), No Surrender (1863), The Cowards' Convention (1864), The Interference Theory of Government (1867), Anacreontics (1872), and On Some Exaggerations in Comparative Philology (1873).

Generally speaking, Bristed's writing "showed a trained mind and fastidious taste, but considerable self-consciousness. His desire for accuracy caused too great detail and timidity in drawing conclusions from facts" (Bowerman). Between writing projects Bristed found time to marry. He married Laura Brevoort in 1847 and, after her death in 1860, Grace Sedgwick in 1867. He spent most of his final years in Washington, D. C. "where he was known in literary circles as a scholar and to his friends as a hospitable but not indiscriminate host" (Bowerman).

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References & Biographical Resources

Bowerman, Sarah G. "Charles Astor Bristed." Dictionary of American Biography. Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC. [more about this work]

Bristed, Charles Astor. Now Is the Time to Settle It: Suggestions on the Present Crisis. New York: M. B. Brown, 1862. [more about this work]

Haynes, John Edward. Pseudonyms of Authors: Including Anonyms and Initialisms. New York, 1882. [more about this work]

This text identifies the following pseudonym: Carl Benson (21). [pages: 21]

Irving, Washington. Letter to Charles A. Bristed. 1848. [more about this work]

Leland, Charles Godfrey. Memoirs. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1893. [more about this work]

[pages: 109, 337]

Levin, Joanna Dale. American Bohemias, 1858-1912: A Literary and Cultural Geography. Ph.D Dissertation; Stanford University, 2001. 394 p. [more about this work]

Bristed was the grandson of the "quintessential self-made bourgeois" John Jacob Astor. Bristed tangentially acquainted with the Pfaffians. His translation (from a German ballad) called the "Three Gypsies" was included in the article "New Theory of Bohemians" that ran in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1861. Levin cites part of the verse:

"Three fold they showed me, as there they lay,
How those who take life in the true sense,
Fiddle it, smoke it, and sleep it away,
And trebly despise its nuisance."

Levin also cites the final stanza of "Three Gypsies":

"As I went on I had to look back,
Watching those curious creatures,
Watching their locks of hair, jet black,
and their merry dark-brown features" (17).

Levin notes that the poem "expresses the traits that Bohemians typically valued in the gypsy" (17). Bristed was also one of Murger's first American translators (17).

Levin mentions Bristed's "New Theory of Bohemianism" as a counter-argument to female Bohemianism: "Women are not fit Bohemians. They are flowers too delicate for the violent extremes of the Bohemian climate. Moreover, it is difficult for a woman, without some loss of delicacy, to be very unconventional, and that is just what a Bohemian is apt to be" (55). Levin claims that Bristed saw marriage as the means to "balance and contain" Bohemianism (55). [pages: 17,55,78,84]

Lukens, Henry Clay. "American Literary Comedians." Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Apr. 1890: 783-797. [more about this work]

[pages: 793]

Mitchell, Silas Weir. Papers of Silas Weir Mitchell. 1870-1911. [more about this work]

S., M. E. W. "Charles Astor Bristed." Galaxy. Apr. 1874: 545-547. [more about this work]

[pages: 545-547]

Tassin, Algernon. The Magazine in America. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1916. [more about this work]

White, Richard Grant. "Charles Astor Bristed." The Galaxy. Apr. 1874: 473. [more about this work]

[pages: 473]

Wilson, James Grant and John Fiske, eds. Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume I, Aaron-Crandall. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1888. [more about this work]

Writing about various topics, ranging from clasical literature to mundane observations, Bristed published under the nom de plume "Carl Benson." [pages: 379(ill.)]