Alfred Trumble’s New York

by Claudia Keenan Copyright © 2025 All rights reserved by the author.

Mysteries of New York by Alfred Trumble.

I have done a great deal of traveling in my time—have climbed Mont Blanc; been carried by Persian slaves over Khivan deserts; have broiled in China, and frozen in Iceland; have loitered along the Boulevards in Paris, and walked down Fleet Street in London; have shot buffaloes on the Western plains, and seen bull-fights in Madrid; have skated on Russian ice, and slumbered in Havanese hammocks . . .[1]

The traveler, 26-year-old Alfred Trumble, had been the sole passenger on the schooner E. H. King, carrying logwood and coconuts from Jamaica to the Port of New York. It was a mild day at the end of January 1874.[2] A practiced adventurer, Trumble surveyed the harbor, scanned the skyline, descended the gangplank, and walked into the rising metropolis.

Trumble’s bags were heavy with books, paper for writing and drawing, tools for engraving, and a pertinent wardrobe: Whitmanesque garments and evening attire. Having reported from all corners of the globe, he surely brimmed with confidence about his prospects as a writer in New York City.  

To be mysterious in nineteenth-century America was an easy feat, yet less is known about Alfred Trumble than about most popular writers of his time. His birth in Virginia cannot be confirmed because Trumble was born in 1845 or 1847, before the state maintained vital records.

Once, Trumble alluded to “higher studies, leisure hours in the life school of a famous art academy of this country.”[3] He was very knowledgeable about religion, world history, agriculture, engineering, and the arts, but if he received any formal education, no record exists.

Nor are there drawings or photographs of Alfred Trumble, just two descriptions. “He is short in stature, with a fine, intellectual head on his shoulders,” one observer wrote. Another compared Trumble’s “poetical expression” to the actor Edwin Booth.”[4] In place of pictures, Trumble left behind millions of words, dozens of drawings, and an idiosyncratic New York story. 

The man who is largely forgotten today once wielded influence through two very different types of publications. On one hand, Trumble wrote explicit guides to the underbelly of the Gilded Age city and theater sketches that denigrated immigrants. He pulled back the curtain on religion, impostors, and servant girls. He hung around jamborees, cockfights, and con games. 

On the other hand, Trumble would become a reputable cultural critic for New York papers and magazines. Eventually, he established and edited a semi-monthly journal, The Collector, which was well-regarded by art dealers, collectors, and curators. He published it for eight years, a pretty good run in those days. In its pages, he dismissed Impressionism, “Human Magpies”—his cynical view of most art collectors—and Saint-Gaudens’ sculpture, Diana, atop the new Madison Square Garden. “Absurdly disproportional,” he proclaimed.[5]

“The Mysteries of New York”   

By 1885, Trumble’s byline was familiar to New Yorkers. He had hitched his wagon to the Richard K. Fox Publishing Company, whose prize jewel, the National Police Gazette, had been transformed into the nation’s leading sports journal by Fox, an Irish immigrant who took over the failing magazine in 1876.

Printed on pink paper, pictures of women cavorting through its pages, the National Police Gazette interspersed sports coverage—especially boxing—with gossip, scandal, and outrageous tales true and untrue. Indeed, while the newspaper publishers Hearst and Pulitzer are considered the pioneers of yellow journalism, Fox was a few years ahead of them.[6] 

Soon after purchasing the Gazette, Fox began publishing “sensational books.”[7] Samuel A. MacKeever, a New York journalist and Trumble’s friend, was Fox’s first hire. “The American Charles Dickens,” as the hyperbolic Fox described MacKeever, covered the city’s “most unsavory places,” writing up to ten columns weekly and a few books.[8] After MacKeever died in 1880, Trumble assumed the mantle.[9] 

Between 1880 and 1883, Fox published at least 24 books by Trumble. Each sold for 30 cents, available by mail order, with many tantalizing excerpts appearing in the Gazette. Trumble’s first book was A Slang Dictionary of New York, London and Paris: a collection of strange figures of speech, expressive terms and odd phrases used in the leading cities of the world, their origin, meaning, and application. It is attributed to “a well-known detective,” but Trumble’s authorship has been confirmed.[10]    

To establish himself as an authority on New York City’s lawlessness, Trumble claimed to be a private detective. How else would he know the innermost details of robberies and embezzlement?[11] In fact, during the 1870s and 1880s, true-crime stories became very popular, and police officers and department brass were official and unofficial sources.[12] It’s evident that Trumble did his own fieldwork; however, he often inserted himself into his books and articles.

While Trumble covered a range of subjects, fraud emerged as his favorite. Introducing Mysteries of New York, he wrote:

Under our guidance, the stranger may travel New York end to end, unimperiled by the dangers which the newcomer in the metropolis is exposed to. Its snares or pitfalls can have no peril for the stranger who recalls our warnings of them, nor need any of its pleasures be beyond his reach.[13]

“Sharpers,” “mashers,” “cat-meat men,” “cabbage cutters,” “fakirs,” “time peddlers,” “flash ministers,”—since the seventeenth century, all types of tricksters had preyed on visitors to the city as well as its residents. Guidebooks proliferated, warning the innocent. Their effectiveness was debatable, but they certainly burnished the city’s reputation for iniquity[14]

Meanwhile, Trumble found charlatans around every corner, and he seemed to know every corner in New York City. Here he writes about “bonus smugglers”:

One evening, the writer came upon a party of them in a beer saloon on Third Avenue near Twenty-third Street, which he learned was their favorite resort. He learned, furthermore, that they are a gregarious lot, working in pleasant amity, and meeting every night to discuss the swindle of the day . . . the sale of Havana cigarettes and foreign cordials, both of which have their origin in New York. [15]   

In Coney Island, he found “Sirens . . . not too diffident to devour ten-dollar dinners at the Manhattan [hotel restaurant], washed down with champagne by the quart, as you may find out if you have the mind, and never fail to give you a card with the wrong address when you part from her.”[16]

A close observer of skin games, especially the notorious Faro, Trumble noted that the old-time gambling houses, “a stone’s throw of Union Square and Madison Avenue,” had been replaced by clubs run by professional gamblers located on the parlor floors of fancy uptown homes.[17]

Trumble wrote feverishly for Fox: The New York Tombs, its History and Mysteries; Suicide’s Cranks; Or, Curiosities of Self-Murder; The Man-traps of New York, what they are and how they are worked by a celebrated detective; The Heathen Chinee, What He Looks Like and How He Lives, and more. The last title is grotesquely of its time, published the year that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and would not be Trumble’s sole venture into anti-immigrant slander.[18]

In 1883, Trumble wound down his work for Fox to focus on the cultural scene. In 1879, he had written a drama, Custer, which was produced in Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia.[19] Now, he wrote another play, Aunt Emily, published articles in the New York-based Decorator and Furnisher, The Theatre, American Art Illustrated, The Current, and The Curio, and in 1885 became editor of The Art Union.[20]

Within a few years, Trumble transformed himself into a cultural critic who stood out even in a city accustomed to quirky virtuosos. By 1886, he had insulted the brilliant young painter Kenyon Cox.[21] By 1887, he regularly held forth at a raucous table of artists, actors, and writers at the bohemian restaurant Riccadonna, on Union Square.[22] 

In 1888, an anonymous writer declared: “A curious genius is Alfred Trumble, conceded to be the cleverest journalist in New York and the one most cordially liked or disliked.”

Art critic, dramatic critic, editor, story-writer, feuilletonist, and chroniqueur, past master in all the arts of daily and weekly journalism, his noms de plume are legion, his facility and fertility beyond precedent. His stories, critiques, paragraphs, and out-of-town letters are full of style and savoir faire. Perhaps Mr. Trumble’s fame will ultimately rest on his art criticisms, for in that department he stands alone—the only brilliant all-around critic New York has ever had.[23]

One has to wonder if the author of such an acclamation was Trumble himself.

About the author: Claudia Keenan grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y. She is a historian of American education (PhD, New York University) and has taught at Emory & Henry College and the University of Virginia. She has published articles on such diverse topics as the history of American debate and the symbolization of the American First Lady, and reviews nonfiction books. She blogs about history at www.throughthehourglass.com.

^[1] Alfred Trumble, “A Railroad Jaunt in Costa Rica,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, November 1879, 533.

^[2]“Arrived,” New York Times, 27 January 1874, 8; Passenger List, District of New York, Port of New York, E.H. King, January 29, 1874, Ancestry.com.

^[3] “Alfred Trumble, “The Magpie’s Hoard,” The Curio, September 1887, 31.

^[4] Lewis Rosenthal, “The Critics at the Play,” The Theatre, January 24, 1887, 340; “Younger Editors of New York, A Few Points about the Most Noted of Them,” The [Savannah, GA] Morning News, August 9, 1887, 3.

^[5] Alfred Trumble, “The Magpie’s Hoard,” 30; “Notes for the New Year,” The Collector, January 1, 1892, 70. Diana now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Wing, Charles Engelhard Courtyard.

^[6] Liam Barry-Hayes, “Richard K. Fox,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/.

^[7] Alfred Trumble, The Mysteries of New York, a sequel to Glimpses of Gotham and New York By Day and Night, “Books that YOU should Read,” inner cover (Richard K, Fox, 1882).

^[8] Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. II (Belknap, 1938), 331.

^[9] “National Police Gazette History,” National Police Gazette, May 29, 1880, 3.

^[10] Alfred Trumble, A Slang Dictionary of New York, London and Paris: a collection of strange figures of speech, expressive terms and odd phrases used in the leading cities of the world, their origin, meaning, and application (Fox, 1880). One lexicographer states that Trumble lifted most of the book from The Vocabulum by New York City police chief George Matsell (1859). My own comparison shows overlap but not plagiarism.  

^[11] Christopher P. Wilson, “Rough Justice, Crime, Corruption, and Urban Governance” in Christine Bold, ed., The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture 1860-1920, Vol. 6, 565-568.

^[12] See, for example, Edward Crapsey, The Nether Side of New York; or, The Vice, Crime and Poverty of the Great Metropolis (New York, 1872) and George W. Walling, Recollections of a New York Chief of Police (New York, 1887).

¹³ Trumble, The Mysteries of New York, 8.

¹⁴ Among the best-known are The Secrets of the Great City by Edward Winslow Martin (1868), The Gentleman’s Companion (1870), and New York by Sunlight and Gaslight, a Work Descriptive of the Great American Metropolis by James D. McCabe, Jr. (1882).

¹⁵ Trumble, The Mysteries of New York, 62.

¹⁶ Alfred Trumble, Coney Island, How New York’s Gay Girls and Jolly Boys Enjoy Themselves by the Sea! (Fox, 1881).

¹⁷ Alfred Trumble, Faro Exposed or, the Gambler and His Prey, being a complete explanation of this famous game and how its skins are worked (Fox, 1882), 99.

¹⁸ Alfred Trumble, The Mott Street Poker Club: the secretary’s minutes (White & Allen, 1889), Jew Trouble at Manhattan Beach [a play written with George L. Stout], 1878.

¹⁹ “The Attractions at the Howard, Boston Globe, May 23, 1880, 10, quoting New York Telegram.

²⁰ “The Art Union,” Brooklyn Eagle, June 28, 1885, 2.

²¹ H. Wayne Morgan, ed. An Artist of the American Renaissance: the Letters of Kenyon Cox 1877-1882 (Ohio, 1995), 73.

²² “Where the Bohemians Eat,” The Journalist, November 5, 1887, 16.

²³ “General Gossip of Authors and Writers,” Current Literature, August 1888, 108.