When Nellie Bly completed her famed around-the-world journey in 1890, the New York World hailed the intrepid journalist as “the best-known and most widely talked-of young woman on earth today.”
But had Bly not dropped out of college a decade before, no one would have ever heard of her. The fact is, Nellie Bly would not have existed.
Instead, she became what biographer Brooke Kroeger called “one of the most rousing characters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
Fame came to Bly only after a youth dogged by misfortune. Her father died when she was 6, leaving the Cochrans in dire financial straits. Bly’s mother remarried to an abusive alcoholic who terrorized the family. And her dreams of becoming a teacher were shattered when money in her trust fund mysteriously disappeared.
Setbacks of that nature might have staggered someone else. They didn’t deter Bly.
“If you have those kinds of bad experiences in your younger life, you can become a pessimist and say, ‘That’s it, I give up, whatever happens to me happens to me,’” said Pat Heilman, professor emeritus of journalism at IUP who created and taught a class that celebrated Bly’s achievements. “She took the other attitude, which was, ‘I’m gonna overcome all this.’”
Which Bly did, in spectacular fashion.
In September of 1879, Elizabeth — by then she was spelling her surname Cochrane — left her Apollo home for Indiana Normal School, eager to begin her studies. But her stay on campus was painfully brief, lasting little more than three months. The funding for her education had vanished, along with her dream of becoming a teacher.
The family later moved to a row house in Allegheny City — Pittsburgh’s North Side today, but then a separate municipality — where Nellie worked as a tutor, nanny and housekeeper. A pivotal point in her life occurred in 1885 when the Pittsburg (then spelled without the “h”) Dispatch published a letter from “Anxious Father,” who was troubled by what the future held for his five unmarried daughters, aged 18 to 26. Columnist Erasmus Wilson responded with a misogynistic screed about working women, calling them “a monstrosity” and insisting that “a woman’s sphere is defined and located by a single word — home.”
Cochrane, outraged by Wilson’s piece, crafted a passionate letter that grabbed the attention of editor George Madden. But rather than print her response, he asked her to write a rebuttal. Her first published article, headlined “The Girl Puzzle,” appeared on Jan. 25, 1885. Cochrane addressed the plight of poor women who struggled to find work and were often paid a pittance when they did.
“What is she to do?” Cochrane wrote. “Perhaps she had not the advantage of a good education, consequently cannot teach; or, providing she is capable, the girl that needs it not half as much, but has the influential friends, gets the preference.”
Madden, impressed, ultimately hired Cochrane as a staff writer. His first order of business was to assign her a pen name, a common practice for female reporters of the time. Inspiration struck when a copy boy strolled past whistling “Nelly Bly,” a popular tune by Pittsburgh-born songwriter Stephen Foster. Madden inadvertently misspelled the first name, so the fledgling reporter was known forever after as Nellie Bly.
Bly did just that, often at great personal risk.
In the years to come — first for the Dispatch, later for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World — she traveled to Mexico and wrote about government corruption, leaving only when threatened with arrest; posed as an indigent mother to expose a black market baby-selling ring; addressed gender inequality embedded in divorce laws; posed as a sweatshop worker to expose abysmal conditions faced by women; and, in a journalistic tour de force, feigned insanity to report on the deplorable conditions at Blackwell’s Island in New York City, home to the notorious Women’s Lunatic Asylum. Bly described her experience inside the asylum as “the ten longest days of my life.”
“She made her own way, really without help from anybody,” said Linda Champanier, a Bly descendant and authority on the family history.
“They were assigning her these little fluff pieces. She came up with things on her own, like being committed to Blackwell’s Island and her trip to Mexico. I think she was an amazing woman, tremendously strong in a very deep sense.”
Already a national figure, Bly earned international acclaim by racing a fictional character.
She had proposed to Pulitzer to make a circuit of the Earth in an attempt to beat the time of Phileas Fogg, the adventurous protagonist of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days.”
But Pulitzer gave Bly his blessing. She boarded the steamship Augusta Victoria in Hoboken, New Jersey, on Nov. 14, 1889, bound for England, her only baggage a leather satchel not much larger than a typical doctor’s bag. She captivated readers of the World with her reports on the customs, fashions, cuisine, homes and places of worship in the exotic lands she visited. Bly also wrote about the people she met, including Verne himself, who welcomed her to his residence in Amiens, France.
She also made stops in Italy, Egypt, Aden (now Yemen), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Japan before crossing the United States by train from west to east. Bly’s railroad car pulled into Jersey City, New Jersey, on Jan. 25, 1890. She had traveled 24,899 miles in 72 days, six hours and 11 minutes. The World boasted that she had “girdled the globe” in record time.
“The station was packed with thousands of people, and the moment I landed on the platform, one yell went up from them, and the cannons at the Battery and Fort Greene boomed out the news of my arrival,” Bly wrote. “I took off my cap and wanted to yell with the crowd, not because I had gone around the world in seventy-two days, but because I was home again.”
The adoring throng acknowledged the truth of the World’s claim: Their reporter was in fact the best-known and most talked-about female on the planet. And to think that, had the woman born Elizabeth Cochran not dropped out of school a decade before and abandoned her dream of a teaching career, no one would ever have heard of Nellie Bly.