One of Your Top Epes Sargents

In researching the Variety critic Chicot a few months ago, I stumbled across a detail that sent me down a rabbit hole. The Variety writer’s real name was Epes Sargent, and it turns out there was a long, long line of Massachusetts men by that name stretching all the way back to early colonial days. The most eminent of that line was the great-great grandson of the 17th century immigrant Epes Sargent. This Epes Sargent (1813-1880) was a 19th century literary figure, one of the so-called Knickerbocker Group that also included Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and others.

A graduate of Boston Latin and Harvard, Sargent cast a wide net with his writings: was a journalist, poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, children’s author, and writer on Spiritualism.

As a journalist he was Washington correspondent for the Boston Daily Atlas in the 1830s, where he covered such lions of the Senate as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. At various times he edited the Boston Daily Advertiser, The New York Mirror, The New World, and The Boston Evening Transcript. He also founded two short lived periodicals Sargent’s New Monthly Magazine (1842) and Sargent’s School Monthly (1858).

Sargent’s original stage plays included The Bride of Genoa and Velasco, both produced in 1837. He also edited the seven volume The Modern Standard Drama (1846), an anthology of the most commonly produced plays of the time. Other books include the poetry volumes The Light of the Lighthouse and Other Poems (1844), Songs of the Sea and Other Poems (1847) and Poems (1858); the novels Fleetwood, or the Stain of Birth (1845), Peculiar: A Tale of the Great Transition (1864), and The Woman Who Dared (1870). In the field of biography he published The Life and Services of Henry Clay (1848), books in the “Peter Parley” series for young people (under the supervision of Samuel and Charles Goodrich), and Harper’s Cyclopaedia of British and American Poets (1881). His The Standard Speaker and The Standard Reader were used as textbooks in schools.

Swept up by Spiritualism, Sargent also wrote Planchette, or the Despair of Science (1869), The Proof Palpable of Immortality (1875), and The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism (1880). He conducted seances in his home, and held talks and salons where the topic of life after death was discussed. Whether Sargent himself reached out to the living after his passage to the other side has not been recorded. Perhaps he was reincarnated as Chicot?