The Moon Hoax of 1835: A Mini-Essay

     In the sweltering summer of 1835, the penny press newspaper Sun sent New York City and, over the proceeding weeks, much of the United States into a wild frenzy. On the morning of August 21, the publication’s headlines detailed the fire at a brewery, the near collision of the navy frigate Constitution with a steamboat, and the story of a runaway who had stolen $300 from her father before fleeing town.[1] Lost amid the sensational stories was an article titled “Celestial Discoveries.” Written by a Scottish astronomer named Sir John Herschel, the text explained the bizarre sights he had witnessed while watching the moon from his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. In his account, he described how the moon was covered in teeming lakes, thundering waterfalls, and dense forests, which were populated by beavers that walked on their hind legs, unicorns, and four-foot-tall man-bats who constructed massive temples and fornicated in public.[2] The strange article, printed in the recesses of the paper, took the reading public by storm and subsequent publications from Herschel added fodder to readers’ insatiable interest. Newspapers throughout the nation – as well as in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy – republished the articles, an illustrated pamphlet collecting all of Herschel’s accounts sold twenty-thousand copies in the first week, and both P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe added their opinions on the matter, the former declaring it an intriguing hoax and the latter labeling it a juvenile rip-off of his short story “Hans Phaal – A Tale” published earlier that same year.[3] Despite Barnum and Poe’s claims, interest failed to wane and Sun was catapulted from an unknown publication to the most widely read newspaper in the world.[4] On September 16, though, everything came to an end as Richard Adams Locke, the editor of Sun, announced that there was no observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, no Sir John Herschel, and certainly no man-bat civilization on the moon. The entire story, he claimed, had been fabricated by him as piece of creative fiction for the newspaper and he was shocked that it had gained such a sensational following by a mass populace which believed it to be true.[5] The public’s reaction to Locke’s admission was mixed; however, as Matthew Goodman highlights, the Moon Hoax did more than just tarnish the reputation of Locke and Sun, it marked a revolution in journalism, shifting newspapers from a publication for the elite to a mass-market medium for the average person, and helped establish New York City as the leading metropolitan center of the United States.[6] 

Works Referenced

Goodman, Matthew. The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bates in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
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[1] Goodman, 2-3.
[2] Goodman, 11-12.
[3] Goodman, 12.
[4] Goodman, 12.
[5] Goodman, 264.
[6] Goodman, 12-13.