Bill Hardwig
While the surrender of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee to the Union commander Ulysses S. Grant, at the Appomattox courthouse in Virginia on 9 April 1865, effectively brought to an end the destruction and loss of the Civil War, the decades that followed saw some of the most tumultuous changes in the nation’s history. From the rapid rise of immigrant populations to the remarkable breakthroughs in technology and science, from the vicissitudes of Reconstruction and post‐Reconstruction racial dynamics to the Industrial Revolution, the United States was a country in transition. Literary scholar Mary Papke characterizes the changes as altering the fundamental identity of the nation:
With the intense industrialization of the 1870s following the closing of the frontier and completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the national identity was effectively transfigured from that of a country peopled by self‐reliant farmers and shopkeepers to that of a monopolistic or oligopolistic capitalist state in which robber barons would boast of hiring one half of the working class to kill the other half.
(Papke 2011: 293)
Not surprisingly, these dramatic transitions influenced and were reflected within the nation’s literature as well. Even with all the social revolutions occurring throughout the nation, perhaps no development had a greater impact on the era’s literary production than the changing conditions of its dissemination. The increasing professionalization of authors and commercialization of the publishing environment, including periodicals, privileged the serialization and syndication of literature and gave rise to the bestseller phenomenon, including dime novels and children’s magazines. These developments would forever transform how we think about and consume American literature.
The unprecedented technological and commercial advances of postbellum America led to similarly unprecedented changes in the literary marketplace. The world of literature transitioned from a more traditional view of publishing ruled largely by systems of patronage and apprenticeship, where avuncular editors spoke in terms of the moral function of their publications, to a much more practical and progressive view of literary professionalization, where bottom lines, easily digested ideas, and bestselling plots were valued over literary style and heavy editorial direction (Wilson 1985: 54). In his famous 1893 essay “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” author, editor, and cultural commentator William Dean Howells summed up the tension between literary art and commercial imperatives: “At present business is the only human solidarity; we are all bound together with that chain, whatever interests and tastes and principles separate us, and I feel quite sure that in writing of the Man of Letters as a Man of Business, I shall attract far more readers than I should in writing of him as an Artist” (Howells 1902: 4). Aiding this growing sense of literature as a business transaction were laws designed to protect intellectual property, such as the international copyright law of 1891. As literature more fully began to be defined as property (material that can be owned and protected), the writing of literature was further removed from the romantic notion of unfettered inspiration and became a kind of labor (Wilson 1985: 74). This shift allowed the creation of literature to be profitable, at least for some, but also exposed it to the same market pressures and supervision as other forms of labor. From this perspective, writing wasn’t as different from working on a factory floor as many artists and publishers would have liked to believe.
This emphasis on commercial success affected all forms of media in which literature was distributed. Newspapers changed, as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer created mass urban tabloids, which took market share from more intimate and “moral” forms of journalism. The magazines evolved rapidly, as printing technology improved and the family‐run periodicals such as Harper’s, the Century, and the Atlantic Monthly met competition from publications aimed at the “mass market.” McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and the Lady’s Home Journal were enormous successes, and were part of what historians have called the “magazine revolution of 1893.” The sales for magazine monthlies skyrocketed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Book publishing too underwent radical restructuring, as editors began implementing a market‐driven bestseller system, rather than relying primarily on editorial taste and sensibility. The bestseller list was established in 1895 and quickly became a hallmark of successful publishing. After the Civil War, “an entire mass culture industry emerged” that treated literature much as it would any other commodity, leading to what one scholar sees as the emergence of the “literary celebrity” in the late nineteenth century (Wilson 1985: 2; Glass 2004: 21; Ohmann 1987: 139–141).
As the desire to find the next bestseller, and the next literary star, heightened in postbellum America, modern advertising and the marketing of literature grew as well. Not surprisingly, there was anxious debate about the effectiveness of standard advertising techniques when applied to literary texts. Was literature – editors, publishers, and pundits wondered – really dictated by the same marketing principles as soap and clothing? In his 1905 Atlantic Monthly article, “The Commercialization of Literature,” publisher Henry Holt spoke of the double‐edged sword of advertising in this era: “There are several things known about the advertising of books, – among them, that it must be paid for, whether it repays or not; that it can repay only through the books that would not be sold without it.” Holt felt that there were three classes of books: the first class that did not need advertising; the second class that could not be helped by it; and the third class that could: “Money can be profitably spent, then, only on class three.” Even so, Holt believed that at the turn of the century the more advertisement, “in proportion to sales, is now done for books than for any other merchandise; and that it is like poking the fire” (Holt 1905: 590–591). While some literary leaders, including Holt, felt that this commercialization, and its emphasis on sales and popular genres, such as the dime novel and adventure tales, threatened the quality of literary production, nobody could deny that these changes were attended by enormous US sales, making it possible for more people than ever to profit from the writing and dissemination of literature.
The new business model for literary production coincided with changing literary preferences as well, as the nation experienced a transition from romantic and sentimental literature focusing on heroic individualism and sublime nature to realist and naturalist texts that seemed to many contemporary readers to reckon more immediately with the industrialization and commercialization that was changing the face of the nation. Writers such as Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Edith Wharton paid new attention to commodity culture and the role that commercialization and mass culture played in the nation (Papke 2011: 300–304). One could easily argue that the aesthetic turn to realism and naturalism was spurred by precisely this engagement with the rising commercialization. We can say more assuredly that the era’s interest in Howellsian realism, which he understood as responding to demands by modern readership, revealed a new desire for literature that engaged the era’s most pressing issues. As Howells put it, “[Readers] require of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life, they require a sort of scientific decorum” (Howells 1967: 73). For Howells, readers were no longer looking for entertainment or a stylized tale of romantic imagination. Instead, they wanted the “truth” of modern society, both its “smiling aspects” and its harsher realities. While he occupies a more modest place in our current estimation of turn‐of‐the‐century intellectuals and authors, Howells was clearly the era’s most prominent arbiter of literary style and content, and his call for the “scientific” treatment of contemporary life was eagerly taken up by numerous writers. Howells was, as he is often called to this day, the dean of Progressive‐era letters. Even so, he was not without his critics. Most naturalists, for example, derided what Frank Norris in 1901 described as Howells’s “drama of the broken teacup, the tragedy of the walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner” (Norris 1985: 1166).
While aesthetic and political differences often spawned their disagreements with Howells’s literary and editorial decisions, naturalists shared his desire to bring a more contemporary scientific authority and realistic analysis to their fiction. In fact, from certain angles the distinction between literary realism and literary naturalism seems today to be insignificant, and their shared investment in modern intellectual and cultural developments unify much of their work. Howells and Norris, realist and naturalist, were both interested in exploring the effect that growing materialism, commercialism, technological advancement, and new models of economic growth had on American citizens. Proponents of both methodologies similarly felt that many of the era’s urgent realities were felt most acutely in the nation’s exploding cities, where the unimaginable wealth of skyscrapers and financiers rubbed shoulders with the poverty of the homeless and desperate.1 Whether it is Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods (1901), Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Mark Twain’s The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), or Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), literature of the era engaged the burgeoning commercialization and urbanization that had changed American society so fundamentally and so suddenly.
Even so, these changes were not entirely unexpected and certainly not without precedence. Technological developments in production had been affecting American publishing scenes since the time of Benjamin Franklin; and, as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s letters attest, the desire to earn profits and develop a sustainable income from the sale of writing did not suddenly come into vogue after the Civil War. What is perhaps different about the postbellum professionalization and commercialization of literature is the speed at which the changes took place. In his 1905 essay, Holt reflected the anxiety caused by such rapid change better than anyone else:
The literature of our mother tongue has been commercialized to an extent not dreamed of in any time of which I have knowledge; and […] within our generation our literature has fallen to a lower estate than it knew for generations before. The priest who entered the temple with bowed head and under the vow of poverty has been replaced by the man with a yacht and the motor‐car.
(Holt 1905: 600)
At the end of the Civil War, the total circulation of all monthly periodicals was 4 million. By 1890, it was 18 million, and it rose to 64 million by 1905 (Ohmann 1987: 139). This amazingly swift rise of sales reflected the commercialization of literature, to be sure; but it also opened doors for increasing numbers of new authors, including women and minority writers, as periodicals sought out fresh perspectives to fill their pages. Charles Chesnutt, for example, became the first African American author to be published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887. The first of a series of his dialect and “local color” stories later collected as The Conjure Woman (1899), “The Goophered Grapevine,” explored the cultural clash between a northern entrepreneur and a formerly enslaved resident living on an abandoned plantation in North Carolina. The popularity of local color stories also spurred the publication of women’s fiction in the nation’s periodicals. Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Alice Dunbar Nelson, just to name a few, all became established writers of local color writing. This explosion of interest in women’s writing about disparate regions across the nation has led some scholars to suggest that such regional literature was a distinctly female mode of writing in which “region becomes mobilized as a tool for critique of hierarchies based on gender as well as race, class, age, and economic resources” (Fetterley and Pryse 2003: 6). In both the example of Chesnutt and women’s regional writing, the texts frequently served as critique of rampant commercialization, even as their publishing of these stories in national periodicals depended upon it.
One publishing strategy that blossomed in this climate was the serialization of novels. Earlier in the century, this means of publishing novels was already popular, particularly in Victorian Britain, where perhaps the most prominent example was the sensation caused by the serialization of Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836). The trend did not really take off in the United States, though, until the final two decades of the nineteenth century. George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes was serialized in Scribner’s in 1879 before being published in novel form by Charles Scribner’s Sons a year later. In 1885 and 1886, Henry James saw his novels Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians serialized in prominent periodicals, the Atlantic Monthly and the Century respectively. Mary Noailles Murfree published a serialized novel about Appalachia, The Despot of Broomsedge Cove, in 12 consecutive issues of the Atlantic Monthly for the entire year of 1888. Before being published as a stand‐alone novel, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson appeared in a several‐month run in the Century (1893–1894). Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs appeared over four months in the Atlantic Monthly in 1896. Pauline Hopkins had three novels, Hagar’s Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood, published in serial form in the Colored American Magazine during 1901–1903. These serialized novels appeared in the magazine next to short stories (often by the same group of authors), poems, articles on technological developments, travel sketches of “exotic” places, and humorous sketches and cartoons, such as those found in the Century’s “Bric‐À‐Brac” section, which appeared at the end of each issue of the magazine.
In the increasingly competitive and lucrative periodical market, editors sought long‐term commitments from authors by agreeing to publish novels in this new format. Authors would often write these novels from month to month, section to section, with deadlines looming as the next issue and the periodical readership demanded new developments and installments of the novels, which often suspended the story the month prior with a dramatic plot twist. If contemporary television has mastered the suspenseful cliffhanger ending of an episode, this technique would not have appeared unfamiliar to readers of postbellum periodicals. Sometimes, the authors would smooth out the transitions before the novels appeared in book form; at other times, the text would remain essentially untouched from the serialized version, with the serial divisions typically becoming chapter breaks.
If the increased serialization of American novels represented a new marketing strategy for periodicals, it also allowed authors access to the newest technological developments in printing. Magazines such as Scribner’s and the Century, and later Cosmopolitan, were attractive to readers in part because of their stunning artwork. The technology that replicated this artwork evolved from woodcuts to photoengraving, allowing for cheaper, more reliable, and easier production of images, initiating in 1880 what is known as the “golden age” of periodical illustrations. In 1881, editor‐in‐chief of Scribner’s Josiah Gilbert Holland proclaimed, “I supposed that if anyone were asked what, more than anything else, had contributed to the success of the magazine, he would answer: Its superb engravings, and the era it introduced of improved illustrative art” (quoted in Freitag 2015: 17). The increased attention to and popularity of the growing use of sophisticated images also led to a new profession of periodical staff illustrator, such as Louis Loeb and E.W. Kemble, both of whom were under contract with US illustrated magazines during this revolutionary era of illustration.
One can see the merging of the technical, commercial, and cultural concerns of the periodical dissemination of literature through the case of the illustrations of Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. The publication history of the novel, and its movement from periodical serial to bound novel and the changing illustrations in these different versions of the text, engages some of the most sensitive aspects of race mixing and racial classification of the post‐Reconstruction United States. This novel is often labeled a miscegenation novel, because it deals so thoroughly with the fiction of US racial definition. The conundrum about how to depict in illustration the subtle visual nuances of “race mixing” turned out to reveal as much about the era’s racial attitudes as it did about Twain’s text. Twain’s novel describes with tremendous nuance and pointed irony the traditional racial definitions of the era, focusing on how his protagonist Roxy defied an easy categorization of race while US laws tried to place her within its framework:
From Roxy’s manner of speech, a stranger would have expected her to be black, but she was not. Only one sixteenth of her was black and that sixteenth did not show. […] To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such. Her child was thirty‐one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a Negro.
(Twain 1964: 29)
When this novel first appeared serially in the Century in 1893–1894, the magazine used staff illustrator Louis Loeb to provide images to accompany the text, along with a photograph of Mark Twain for the first installment (Sollors 2002: 70). As one might imagine from the description above, the novel presented quite a challenge for illustrators. If Loeb chose to depict Roxy as “white,” the viewer would have a difficult time placing her within the slave community, especially a viewer who had internalized the racial iconography of the era that depicted African Americans in stereotypical ways. Twain would probably have delighted in this illustrator “conundrum,” as it in some ways gets at the heart of the “fiction of law and custom” around which the novel was based. Loeb resolved this conundrum by illustrating Roxy as refined and elegant, often choosing to depict her in the dark of night, when racial identity would be harder to “see.”2
For the first US publication of the novel in 1894, the American Publishing Company included marginal images. The small size of these images, along with the limitations of printing technology, made the subtle rendering of skin color impossible. One critic explains, “Although the text treats racial identity as a deep ambiguity, this mode of illustration, because it makes shading impossible, forces the illustrator to depict a character as either as white as the page or as black as the ink” (Railton 1996). So, in this edition, the technological innovation of illustrating fiction proved unable to approach the nuance of Twain’s written descriptions. Indeed, in these images the “black” characters had virtually no facial characteristics, as their entire bodies were completely blackened. Such illustrations, however, fit well into the treatment of Roxy’s character, as she appeared “white” as her owners, and quite different from her “black” compatriots.
For the next edition of the novel, the American Publishing Company hired E.W. Kemble, who was already famous as the illustrator of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and for such visual minstrelsy as Kemble’s Coons (Sollors 2002: 74). Kemble has since been roundly criticized for creating caricatures of African Americans, relying on stereotypical “racial” characteristics and images, such as the turban‐wearing cook. While such images strike us as offensive today, there is no evidence of objections or complaints by the author or reviewers when the new edition of Puidd’nhead Wilson appeared in 1899. As this one example shows us, the technological innovation of illustrations that began in the periodicals and migrated into bound novels introduced new questions about the relationship between what audiences read in the text and viewed in the illustrations. As both Sollors and Railton suggest, one’s impressions of Twain’s Roxy, and his portrayal of racial customs more generally, might have very well depended on which of these versions one happened to read.
While Twain’s novel demonstrates the relationship between modes of printing fiction and changing notions of race, the periodicals’ larger interest in local color stories of marginalized Americans also allowed for a certain degree of democratization of literary production. The increased access to printing technology provided new avenues for the treatment of previously banished perspectives, and nowhere was this more evident than in the explosion of the African American publishing community. There had existed African American periodicals for several decades, most notably Frederick Douglass’s the North Star and the Anglo‐African Magazine; and black writers had been publishing in previously “white” publications since the late 1880s. But the turn of the century saw the inception of new publishing opportunities for African Americans: “Not only were their works appearing in such white periodicals as Harper’s Magazine, Bookman, Century Magazine, Literary Digest, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Critic, but the rise of [African‐American] journals provided them with alternative, often less restrictive forums for expression” (Yarborough 1988: xxviii). At front and center of this movement was the Colored American Magazine, which began publishing in May of 1900 and became the most notable black journal to tie its destiny to the burgeoning magazine industry of the era. Literary scholar Hazel Carby states, “The Colored American Magazine should be regarded as a product of the magazine ‘revolution’ that had been taking shape since the 1880s, when journals first began to establish a mass audience and large advertising business. In the 1890s, low prices, mass circulation, and advertising revenues became the cornerstones of the magazine industry” (Carby 1987: 123).
However, if in some ways the ambitious magazine sought to capitalize on the immense popularity of the era’s periodicals and adopt their business models, it also articulated a unique vision necessitated by the status of African Americans in US society. The Colored American Magazine sought to balance the desire to be a recognizably stylish magazine that would attract advertising dollars and subscribers, while also expressing what one scholar described as a “politically charged cultural agenda” that expressed a “commitment to the discovery and preservation of African American history” (Doreski 1996: 72). The first issue of the magazine in May 1900 proudly announced this commitment to African American culture: the magazine sought to “meet this want, and to offer the colored people of the United States, a medium through which they can demonstrate their ability and tastes” (“Editorial and Publishers Announcement” 60). The magazine also differed from its national counterparts in its desire to establish a cooperative publishing company, in which readers and contributors became members that helped sustain the new enterprise. As Carby points out, in 1900, due primarily to discriminatory segregationist policy, 45% of African Americans were illiterate and there were only 2500 black college graduates (Carby 1988: xxxiii). Clearly, the realities surrounding the Colored American Magazine necessitated a different vision and different financial realities for the periodical than many of its peer periodicals.
While the magazine ultimately struggled to gain its financial footing and was eventually purchased by Booker T. Washington in 1904, the political and aesthetic vision it initially offered presented a new direction in American periodicals. The magazine did not offer, perhaps, a strident political opposition to the era’s racism, as it also sought investment from white benefactors who would have balked at such criticism. But, neither did it shy away from the gruesome details of post‐Reconstruction racial dynamics. Indeed, the first issue of the magazine prominently reported the horrendous statistic that 1500 African Americans had been lynched since 1890 (Cordell 2006: 60). In addition to exploring the nation’s racist violence, the magazine also published numerous sketches of notable African American politicians, artists, and civil leaders. The series “Famous Negro Men” contained biographical essays on Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. “Famous Negro Women” focused on civil rights leaders such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, as well as groups, such as educators, artists, and the women’s club movement (Doreski 1996: 75–90).
Serving in an editorial capacity during the first four years of the magazine, Pauline Hopkins did much to shape the vision of the Colored American Magazine. In addition to her commitment to depicting African American history and nurturing black intellectual contributions, Hopkins was an artist and saw three of her own novels published serially in the magazine between 1901 and 1903. Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice; Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and the Southwest; and Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self nicely fit within the aesthetic and political philosophy of the magazine. These novels offered readers examples of black artistic production and astute political commentary that focused on racial ambiguity, white greed and violence against blacks, the legacy of slavery, pan‐Africanism, and countless other themes of special interest to the African American community that were often tightly managed or ignored in traditional periodicals.
Hopkins’s most famous novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), while not published serially in the Colored American Magazine, was published by the Colored Cooperative Publishing Company, the same firm that published the periodical. This novel, much like Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, uses the tropes of miscegenation and the ambiguity of the ancestral past to trouble the nation’s fiction of racial division and purity. Unlike Twain’s novel, however, Contending Forces also devotes significant attention to African American culture, focusing mainly on the routines of the black upper class, including their modes of domesticity, as well as on the need for social agitation and protest. One character reads like a fictional version of W.E.B. Du Bois. Other characters do not follow this call for action, however, leading one scholar to conclude, perhaps harshly, that Hopkins “never challenges the basic assumption that races can be ranked qualitatively” (Yarborough 1988: xxxvi). Other critics discern a more nuanced negotiation of the intersections of race, gender, and colonialism in the novel (Carby 1987: 140–144; Tate 1992: 160–166).
Without a doubt, new marketing models for novels and periodicals placed a definitive stamp on what we now know as the era’s literature. In addition to changing the methods of literary production and altering what was considered to qualify as literature, the increasing diversification of publishing opportunities also allowed new and different voices to emerge. It is possible also to consider the ways in which these publishing realities affected not just who and what was published, but how literature was written. If publishers sought more “accessible” literature that fit into the contemporary desire for realism, scholar Amy Kaplan has suggested that as the lines between literature and reality blurred, so did the generic lines between journalism and fiction:
As realism does, the newspaper represents a wide range of social classes, uniting them through the medium of the market rather than through mutual recognition of a community. The newspaper also resolves a source of tension for the realist: on the one hand it has a democratic leveling effect by equally including all strata of society as subject matter. On the other hand it reinforces and controls the threats of social differences through a fixed hierarchy of representation, as each class assumes a particular department and style – the working classes are criminalized in the crime story, for example, while the upper classes are glamorized on the society page.
(Kaplan 1988: 30)
One area where the explosions in newspaper circulation and popular fiction can be seen to merge is the American “story paper,” a genre that began in the 1830s, reached its height of popularity in the 1870s, and had all but disappeared by 1920.3 These papers were typically eight‐page weeklies that “resembled a newspaper in format while offering the kind of miscellany found in monthly literary magazines.” These cheaply produced literary newspapers contained stories, sermons, letters, advice, and humorous sketches. The fact that they were released weekly also created a market for “hack writers,” who adhered to a strict and demanding commercial publishing schedule and wrote for a less educated reading public. As a result, there emerged an emphasis on formulaic plots with less complex vocabulary and literary form. One critic in 1895 compared hack writers to “mill hands” (quoted in Thomsen 2002: 84–86). Presumably, both mill hands and hack writers relied more on manual than intellectual labor, and both developed an alienated relationship to their labor, one that broke the intimate relationship between individual artists and individual pieces of literature. The muse had little purchase in these forms of popular fiction.
Even as this type of literature was scorned by literary elites and marked as evil by moralists afraid of the corrupting influences of pulp fiction on impressionable minds, its influence on the era cannot be denied. In an 1879 article published in the Atlantic Monthly, Yale professor W.H. Bishop commented on the story paper phenomenon, describing it as “the greatest literary movement, in bulk, of the age, and worth of very serious consideration for itself. […] Disdained as it may be by the highly cultivated for its character, the phenomenon of its existence cannot be overlooked” (quoted in Thomsen 2002: 85).
We might ask whether the merging of the genres of newspaper journalism and literature allowed different forms of fiction to emerge. If so, the growing interest of pulp fiction may be a good place to begin this inquiry. In addition to the “hack” writing of story papers, the era saw a blossoming (or virus, depending on one’s perspective) of genre fiction – historical fiction, crime novels, detective fiction, adventure tales, and the dime novel Western all saw increased production and readership during the postbellum era. This increased interest in pulp fiction can be tied directly to the mechanized production perfected in the era. Indeed, the technological innovations in paper manufacturing, printing presses, and distribution (mainly through improved railways and distribution companies such as the American News Company) enabled the production and distribution of literary texts to move at a pace and for a price not previously possible (Johnson and Shurman 2002: xiii). Virginia Woolf once famously commented that the “cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions” (Woolf 1984: 277). Similarly, the cheapness of printing allowed genre writers to succeed in the postbellum era as never before.
While technology made pulp fiction affordable to produce and disseminate, the pressing concerns of modernity and modernism more generally also shaped the genre fiction of the era, including the influx of working‐class readers that favored dime novels and story papers. Whether it be detective fiction and its emphasis on crime‐ridden urban spaces or the race melodrama that confronted the era’s racial climate or the dime novel Western that was energized by the closing of the nation’s frontier in the 1880s and 1890s, pulp fiction engaged the changing world as much as it seemed to critics to be fleeing from it.
One of the most notable forms of pulp fiction to thrive during this time is children’s literature, and especially notable is the more gender‐specific boys’ fiction – juvenile adventure tales, fiction with a moral lesson, and “bad boy” stories were all immensely popular. Not surprisingly, this literary form was dictated by much of the same cultural imperatives as other popular fiction. It was enhanced by the cheapness of production that encouraged formulaic or genre texts by “hack” writers. It is also inseparable from the larger popularity of periodicals, as boys’ fiction began with early boys’ periodicals, such as American Boy’s Magazine, Boys’ Ledger, Frank Leslie’s Boys of America, Boys of New York.4 Later, an industry of boys’ novels began to emerge, and like their adult counterparts, these novels were often tied closely to the magazines and publishing companies that printed them.
The most famous of the nineteenth‐century boys’ fiction is probably Ragged Dick, by Horatio Alger. This novel, subtitled “Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks,” was published serially in the children’s magazine Student and Schoolmate in 1867 and as a full‐length novel in 1868. The novel was conceived as part of a series and became the first of six books in the popular “Ragged Dick” series. By applying the lessons of “hack writing” – a willingness to rely on convention, write in series, swap and borrow plots, and rehash familiar themes – Alger went on to write more than a hundred novels, the majority of which were boys’ fiction.
In many ways, one could read the first Ragged Dick as a hybrid of the most popular modes of boys’ fiction. When we first meet Dick, he is a “bad boy,” swindling and loafing on the streets of the Bowery in New York. The novel also has traces of an adventure tale, as Dick’s rise to success involves many hair‐raising turns, including a dangerous water rescue, and many suspenseful scenes. Finally, the novel has embedded within it a firm moral lesson for its boy readers: the value of a work ethic and a personal integrity that allows one to rise in American society. It also has a moral message for the adult community – that we must help young children who show the spark of determination to succeed. There is plenty of evidence that Alger envisioned the story in just such a moral light. Indeed, his preface of the first novel version concludes:
The author hopes that, while the volumes in this series may prove interesting as stories, they may also have the effect of enlisting the sympathies of his readers in behalf of the unfortunate children whose life is described, and of leading them to co‐operate with the praiseworthy efforts now [being made] by the Children’s Aid Society and other organizations to ameliorate their condition.
(Alger 1990: 1–2)
If Alger is perhaps rightly criticized for painting a too rosy picture of the value of an individual work ethic to the lives of impoverished children, he is not credited enough for his firm insistence that these children will not succeed without the generous assistance of wealthy citizens. Indeed, his focus on the plight of street children reflects a growing concern during the period, more powerfully revealed in later works like Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Jacob Riis’s exposé How the Other Half Lives (1890), which includes a chapter called “The Problem of Children” and a series of iconic images of homeless children such as the famous photograph “Street Arabs [that is, Urchins] in the Area of Mulberry Street,” then one of the worst slums in New York City.
Literature is often idealized as responding rationally and from a removed perspective to its era, as providing a guiding light of sensibility to help us make sense of a chaotic time. At times, perhaps it does serve this role. Much more commonly, however, literature is inextricably and messily bound to its subject matter in ways that the authors of this literature cannot even recognize. The postbellum marketplace demonstrated how vital developing modernity was to what was valued in literature, even when the literature seemed to be escaping this modernity in modes such as regional writing and pulp fiction. But the era also played a determining role in what was understood and characterized as literature. Even modern theories of medicine and psychiatry influenced the era’s literary climate. Dr. Weir Mitchell, the famous “nerve doctor” of the turn of the century, recommended a “rest cure” as a remedy for women’s neurasthenia, which he defined as a lack of nerve force, and a “West cure” for neurasthenic men. The rest cure, not surprisingly, suggested that women recover in domestic spaces. Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman captured the horrors of this treatment in her classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). Less well known is the fact that Mitchell urged Owen Wister, a young writer from Philadelphia, to take the “West cure” treatment in 1885. The treatment led eventually to the publishing of what many see as the first true Western novel, The Virginian (1902), which offered vigorous masculinity as a natural response to the enervating aspects of modern urban life (Will 1998). Even these medical diagnoses are indistinguishable from the era’s changing technology. The doctor who coined the term “neurasthenia,” Dr. George Miller Beard, saw a correlation between modern social organization and nervous illness. He also identified five aspects of nineteenth‐century modernization that caused neurasthenia: the periodical press, steam power, the telegraph, sciences, and the increased mental activity of women. So we might say that the very advances that enabled the explosion of literary authorship and distribution in postbellum America were seen as overstimulating and overtaxing human minds and nerves, leading to a sapping of American nervous strength.5
Scholars and students of American literature often think of the “high literary modernism” of the 1910s and 1920s – with its focus on fragmented sensibilities, stream‐of‐consciousness narration, and other kinds of formal experimentation – as the nation’s first attempt to come to grips with a truly modern, industrial, mechanized, and alienating world. However, while the literary texts of the postbellum era were often quite traditional formally, and at times were even formulaically so, their authors comprised the first generation of writers that was forced to come to terms with the mechanized and commercial world of late nineteenth‐century and twentieth‐century cultural production. If this revolutionary set of concerns surrounding postbellum writing did not produce what critics feel constitutes a truly “modern” literature, perhaps their modernist descendants have the efforts of the realists, the genre writers, the romanticists, naturalists, and local color writers to thank for this distinction.
In a later screen story loosely based on his novel A Cool Million (1934), a satire of the Horatio Alger myth, Nathanael West and his collaborator Boris Ingster ironically asserted that “Alger is to America what Homer was to the Greeks” (West 1997: 745). While this comment makes those looking for the Great American Novel either laugh with derision or cringe with discomfort, one must admit that at the very least the statement captured a major component of the postbellum era, in which business principles, technology, and commercialization shaped how literature was made and what literature was – from the ideas in the authors’ heads to the words they recorded to the paper on which their visions were printed to the railcars that shipped these words and these stories across the nation to eager readers.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 1 (THE TRANSFORMATION OF LITERARY PRODUCTION, 1820–1865).