Background
Elizabeth Cochrane was born on May 5, 1867 at Cochran Mills, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, United States. She was the youngest of three children of Michael and Mary Jane Cochran.
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(Ten Days in a Madhouse is Nellie Bly’s (Elizabeth Jane Co...)
Ten Days in a Madhouse is Nellie Bly’s (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman) account of her ten days in a madhouse in New York in 1887. Bly, in an act of stunt journalism that wold make her famous, pretended to be mildly insane so she would be sent to an asylum to see first hand what one was like. To begin the process she goes to a rooming house and one night she stays up all night staring at the wall. The stare fest alerts her roommate and scares the homeowner and the next day she fixates on her lost trunk and insists on finding it. At the same time she continually talks about too many foreigners and never having worked, which both seem strange to the working class people she is rooming with. These three things are sufficient for her to land before a judge and eventually in the madhouse where she endures the arbitrary and vindictive rule of the nurses who are little better than street toughs. At the end of ten days a lawyer from her paper the World secures her release.
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Elizabeth Cochrane was born on May 5, 1867 at Cochran Mills, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, United States. She was the youngest of three children of Michael and Mary Jane Cochran.
Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman was educated at home until 1880 when she was sent to school at Indiana, Pennsylvania.
About 1881 Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman moved with her family to Pittsburgh, where she began her journalistic career. Having read in the Pittsburg Dispatch an article on "What Girls Are Good For, " she wrote an angry letter to the editor, who, though he declined to print it, was fascinated by her power of vehement expression. She joined the staff of the Dispatch, wrote a series of articles on the conditions of working girls in Pittsburgh, and later became society editor with charge of the drama and art departments.
Her pseudonym of Nellie Bly was given her by the managing editor, George A. Madden, who took the name from a popular song of Stephen Collins Foster. In 1887, accompanied by her mother, she spent several months in Mexico and produced a series of articles that were published in the Dispatch; they were later collected under the title of Six Months in Mexico (1888).
Returning from Mexico, she found Pittsburgh too limited a field for her abilities and went to New York, where she joined the staff of the World. On September 22, 1888, she was asked by the World to have herself committed to the insane ward at Blackwell's Island to investigate conditions there. She gained admittance and was declared insane by six doctors; after ten days her release was secured, and her reports resulted in an investigation by the grand jury, though hers was a less successful exposure than that of the Bloomingdale (New York) Asylum made by James Julius Chambers in 1872 for the New York Tribune.
In 1889 she published The Mystery of Central Park, an ephemeral story of little merit that had appeared in the World. In the fall of 1889 G. W. Turner conceived the idea of sending her around the world in less than the eighty days of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, the exploit for which she is best known. She began her famous tour from New York on November 14 and completed it the following January 25, having circled the world in seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes, with a stop at Amiens, France, to interview Jules Verne.
When her husband died in 1904 she took over the management of his properties, which included the Ironclad Manufacturing Co. , makers of enamelled iron ware, and the American Steel Barrel Co. The dishonesty and insubordination of employees, however, brought about protracted litigation from which she emerged successful but impoverished.
Once more she turned to newspaper work but her later career was uneventful. She was on the staff of the New York Journal when she died in New York City in 1922.
Elizabeth Seaman gained fame for her investigative reports of abusive conditions in the cities of Pittsburgh and New York. The resulting stories by Bly caused a sensation across the country, effected reforms at Blackwell's Island. Her work also included interviews with some of the most famous figures of the day, including Buffalo Bill and the wives of presidents Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield, and James K. Polk. She riveted the attention of the nation with a more light-hearted assignment, when she successfully imitated Jules Verne's fictional journey Around the World in Eighty Days in only 72 days. The publication of Nelly Bly's Book: Around the World in Seventy-two Days (1890) marked the height of her journalistic career.
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
(Ten Days in a Madhouse is Nellie Bly’s (Elizabeth Jane Co...)
Quotes from others about the person
Joaquin Miller said about her "Little Nell - a second Columbus. "
In 1895 Elizabeth Cochrane married Robert L. Seaman, an aged and wealthy Brooklyn manufacturer. He died in 1904.
