Nellie Bly: A Career Shaped by Misfortune

In images publicizing her trip around the world, Nellie Bly always appeared in her famous travel outfit — a Scotch plaid Ulster coat and wool ghillie cap — with a leather gripsack in her hand.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

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 she not dropped out of college a decade before, no one would have ever heard of her. In fact, Nellie Bly would never have existed.

The woman born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who pioneered the concept of undercover investigative journalism under her nom de plume and was eulogized by New York Evening Journal editor Arthur Brisbane as “the best reporter in America” upon her death in 1922, might well have spent her years toiling in virtual anonymity had she received her teaching certificate from Indiana Normal School, now Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). Instead, she became what biographer Brooke Kroeger called, “one of the most rousing characters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

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Misfortune dogged Elizabeth Cochran in her formative years. When she was 6, her father died without a will, leaving the family in dire financial straits. Her mother then married an abusive alcoholic who terrorized the family. And Elizabeth’s dreams of becoming a teacher were shattered when money in her trust fund mysteriously disappeared.

Setbacks of that nature might have staggered someone else. “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, life is cruel,’ that kind of thing,” says Pat Heilman, professor emeritus of journalism at IUP who created and taught the course Women and the Press, which explored Nellie Bly’s achievements. “She took the other attitude, which was, ‘I’m gonna overcome all this.’”

Elizabeth Cochran was born on May 5, 1864, in Cochran’s Mills. Her father, Armstrong County judge Michael Cochran, operated a prosperous gristmill on the banks of Crooked Creek and owned the town’s general store. The family moved to Apollo in 1869 and settled into a sprawling two-and-a-half-story house on Terrace Avenue, along what was known as Mansion Row. But tragedy struck a year later when the head of the household suddenly passed away. Because Michael Cochran died intestate, the property was sold at public auction, leaving his widow, Mary Jane, and her five children scrambling to make ends meet.

“The judge’s oldest son by his first wife files a petition for the estate, and that meant everything had to be sold off and divided,” Heilman says. “Now under Pennsylvania law, because Mary Jane was not mentioned in a will — there was no will — the only thing she was entitled to was called a widow’s dower, and that was the annual interest off a third of the estate. She never gets the principal, only the interest.” The Cochrans were forced to vacate the mansion and take up residence in a modest home just around the corner, on North Sixth Street.

“They went from a 10,000-square-foot house and being very wealthy and prominent to being maybe not destitute but pretty close,” says Linda Champanier, a Bly descendant and authority on the family history who resides in Olive Bridge, New York. “They moved into a house that was significantly smaller. It was a dramatic change.” More hardship was to follow. In 1873 Bly’s mother married Civil War veteran John Jackson Ford, who was quick to anger, especially when intoxicated.

“She didn’t make a good choice,” Heilman says. “He had no money. He had debts. And he was a drunk. Other than that, it was a perfect match. There were some really wild things that went on. One time Mary Jane ran out of the house with the kids and went to a neighbor’s, and he nailed all the doors and windows shut. The man was bizarre.”

Ford was given to fits of rage — breaking furniture, flinging food at the dinner table, and in a few instances, brandishing a loaded pistol at Mary Jane. He eventually left town, and Mary Jane was granted a divorce in June 1879. That September, Elizabeth — by then she was spelling her surname Cochrane — left home for Indiana Normal School and moved into a fourth-floor dormitory room in John Sutton Hall, eager to begin her studies. But her stay on campus was painfully brief, lasting little more than three months.

At 21, frustrated with assignments to women’s pages at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Bly decided to travel to Mexico where she reported on the customs and conditions of the people there. Her stories were compiled in the 1888 book Six Months in Mexico.
Wikimedia Commons

“Colonel Samuel Jackson was her trustee — he was on the Board of Trustees at Indiana Normal School — so she goes to see him to ask if there was enough money in her trust to go to the Normal School,” Heilman says. “The teacher education curriculum was three years, $75 a term, something like that. So, he estimated the whole thing, with travel and other expenses, would be well over $400 for the whole program. But he assured her, ‘yes, you have plenty of money.’ She goes for one term and then he tells her, ‘oh, you don’t have any more money.’” The funding for her education had vanished, along with her dream of becoming a teacher.

“If you’re looking for what formed Nellie, she might have been influenced by all the things that happened when she was young,” Heilman says. “You can’t depend on men because they’ll die and not have made any provisions for you; or they’ll be drunk and abusive and you’re stuck as a woman; or your trust fund disappears, either through sloppy bookkeeping or possibly embezzlement. I think it made her say to herself, ‘I’m gonna make it on my own. I am not going to have to depend on any man for my survival.’”

A pivotal point in Elizabeth’s life occurred in 1885. Five years before, the Cochrans had moved to a row house in Allegheny City — Pittsburgh’s North Side today, but then a separate municipality. Mary Jane took in boarders and Elizabeth supplemented the family income by working as a tutor, nanny and housekeeper.

In January 1885, 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, who wrote as “The Quiet Observer,” responded with a misogynistic screed about working women, calling them “a monstrosity” and insisting that “a women’s sphere is defined and located by a single word — home.” He concluded his tirade with “there is no greater abnormity than a woman in breeches, unless it is a man in petticoats.”

Cochrane, outraged by Wilson’s piece, crafted a passionate letter that grabbed the attention of editor George Madden. But rather than print her letter, he instead asked her to write a rebuttal. Her first published article, headlined “The Girl Puzzle,” appeared on January 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.” She signed it “Orphan Girl.”

Madden, impressed, requested another story. Cochrane submitted a piece titled “Mad Marriages,” an exposé on divorce, a subject with which she was not unfamiliar. At 14, Cochrane testified in court about how her stepfather had terrified their family, especially her mother. “Ford has been generally drunk since they were married,” she told the judge. “When drunk, he is very cross and cross when sober.”

Madden ultimately hired Cochrane as a staff writer at $5 a week. His first order of business was to assign her a pen name, common practice for female reporters of that era. Inspiration struck when a copy boy strolled past whistling “Nelly Bly,” a popular tune by songwriter Stephen Foster. Madden inadvertently misspelled the first name, so the fledgling reporter was known forever after as Nellie Bly.

The new hire, however, chafed under the constraints of the day. Writing assignments for women generally consisted of reporting on fashion, society functions and flower shows. Bly yearned to tackle weightier issues, “to do something no girl has done before,” she noted. To blaze a trail, in effect.

A doctor examines a patient at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in this illustration from Ten Days in a Mad-House.
From Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House (New York: Norman L. Munro, 1887)

Bly did just that, often at great personal risk. In the years to come 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.

“She made her own way, really without help from anybody,” Champanier says. “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.”

Bly worked little more than two years at the Dispatch. Before departing, she left a note for Wilson, whose chauvinistic rant had ruffled her feathers and led to a newspaper job: “Dear Q.O.— I am off for New York. Look out for me. Bly.”

“It’s like she knew,” Heilman says. “I think what she was saying when she wrote ‘look out for me’ was, ‘I’m going places. You’re gonna hear about me.’”

Less than two years later she had become a sensation, her daring exploits chronicled in newspapers from coast to coast — Wilson’s included.

Bly had talked her way into an interview with Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the New York World, and proposed a story about the mistreatment of female patients at the Blackwell’s Island asylum. But rather than go there as a reporter, she suggested a bold approach: She would feign mental illness and go undercover as a patient.

The series of stories she wrote about the horrors of asylum life on Blackwell’s Island — what Bly termed a “human rat trap” — became the basis for her best-selling book Ten Days in a Mad-House.

Bly reported on the appalling conditions, barbaric practices, bug-infested food and sadistic nurses. Patients were beaten, starved and forced to sit silently for hours on end with nothing to distract them or fill up their time. “What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” she wrote.

Some patients were immigrants, locked up simply because they couldn’t speak English. Foreigner Louise Schanz, Bly wrote, was “confined most probably for life behind asylum bars, without even being told in her language the why and wherefore.”

Bly, who had dropped her insanity act upon arriving at Blackwell’s Island, was herself a victim of abuse. She described in detail one of the nurses’ favorite forms of torture: cold-water baths.

“Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head — ice-cold water, too — into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth,” Bly wrote. “I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane.”

Pulitzer soon arranged for her release. Bly called her Blackwell’s experience “the ten longest days of my life.”

Journalist Nellie Bly reached the pinnacle of fame with her 1889–90 trip around the world, completed in 72¼ days, faster than her inspiration for the venture, the fictional Phileas Fogg, protagonist of the 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days. Bly’s name and image appeared on miscellaneous merchandise and memorabilia such as this mass-produced board game by McLoughlin Bros. of New York.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (Gift of Amy Parker and David Lawler)

Her eyewitness accounts in the World, which were reprinted in newspapers all over the country, sparked outrage and spurred reforms. Funding increased, improvements were made, and some of the immigrants Bly had written about were set free. “There were significant changes because of her,” Champanier says. “I think of all the things that she did, that was the most transformative. It’s just stunning that she had the courage to do that.”

Bly’s audacious escapade landed her a full-time position at the World. Already a national figure, she gained international fame two years later by racing a fictional character. She had proposed to Pulitzer making 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 80 Days. “I approached my editor rather timidly on the subject,” she wrote. “I was afraid that he would think the idea too wild and visionary.”

But Pulitzer gave Bly his blessing. The World’s circulation would skyrocket as a result, readers eagerly awaiting her periodic dispatches from far-off locales.

Bly boarded the steamship Augusta Victoria in Hoboken, New Jersey, on November 11, 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, whom she visited during a detour to his residence in Amiens, France.

She also made stops in Italy, Egypt, Aden (now Yemen), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Japan before crossing the United States by train from west to east. Bly’s railroad car pulled into Jersey City, New Jersey, on January 25, 1890. She had traveled 24,899 miles in 72 days, 6 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 woman on the planet. And to think, had she been able to fulfill her dream of a teaching career, it’s likely there would never have been a Nellie Bly.

This triptych engraving, published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 8, 1890, depicts scenes at the completion of Nellie Bly’s trip around the world: center, a reception at Jersey City; top left, Nellie receiving the Globe-Girdler, a golden globe; and bottom right, the arrival in Philadelphia.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Further Reading

Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad-House. New York: Norman L. Munro, 1887. / —. Around the World in Seventy-Two Days. New York: Pictorial Weeklies, 1890. / Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. New York: Crown, 1994.

Bob Fulton resides in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and has written five books and hundreds of magazine articles, including “Let There Be Light: Football’s First Night Game,” which appeared in the Fall 2023 edition of Pennsylvania Heritage.