Comic World
Throughout the period of his principle literary activity, the 1840s and 1850s, Mathews contributed to and/or helped to edit all manner of American periodicals, including the "New-Yorker", the "Comic World", the "New York Dramatic Mirror", the "American Monthly Magazine", the "New York Review", the "New York Reveille", and a would-be rival to the "Knickerbocker Magazine", the rapidly moribund "Yankee Doodle". In 1853, he published "A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New York City", a collection of essays, character sketches, and sketches on the scenery of New York. Although he wrote several satirical plays, his most successful play was "Witchcraft, or the Martyrs of Salem" (1846), which was more serious in tone and written in blank verse.