Bestsellers in Nineteenth-Century America: An Anthology

Bestsellers in Nineteenth-Century America

Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series

The Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series incorporates a broad range of titles within the fields of literature and culture, comprising an excellent collection of interdisciplinary academic texts. The series aims to promote the most challenging and original work being undertaken in the field, and encourages an approach that fosters connections between areas including history, science, religion and literary theory. Our titles have earned an excellent reputation for the originality and rigour of their scholarship, and for our commitment to high-quality production.

Series Editor

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst – University of Oxford, UK

Editorial Board

Dinah Birch – University of Liverpool, UK

Kirstie Blair – University of Stirling, UK

Archie Burnett – Boston University, USA

Christopher Decker – University of Nevada, USA

Heather Glen – University of Cambridge, UK

Linda K. Hughes – Texas Christian University, USA

Simon J. James – Durham University, UK

Angela Leighton – University of Cambridge, UK

Jo McDonagh – King’s College London, UK

Michael O’Neill – Durham University, UK

Seamus Perry – University of Oxford, UK

Clare Pettitt – King’s College London, UK

Adrian Poole – University of Cambridge, UK

Jan-Melissa Schramm – University of Cambridge, UK

Bestsellers in Nineteenth-Century America An Anthology

Edited by

Paul C. Gutjahr

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2016

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2016 Paul C. Gutjahr editorial matter and selection

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-579-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-579-7 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Bob, Jim and David

and

Norman and Aletta (in memoriam)

extended, and treasured, family.

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

Aesop

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Thematic Connections

LIST OF FIGURES

Title page, Charlotte, A Tale of Truth

Portrait of George Washington, Frontispiece, The Life of Washington

Cover, To Mothers, Tract No. 175

Foldout map, front view of Hotel Dieu, from Awful Disclosures

Foldout map, interior view of Hotel Dieu, from Awful Disclosures

Symbolical head

Daniel Webster

Tristam Burgess

Hall

Alexander Campbell

Capt. Knight

Voltaire

Sidney Smith

Dempster

Phineas Stevens

Dr. Caldwell

William Cullen Bryant

Fanny Forrester

Washington

Grouping of organs

Human skull

Snake

Turtle

Tiger—side view

Hyena—side view

Hyena—back view

Bear—top view

Bear—back view

Sheep—top view

Rabbit—side view

Fox—side view

Ichneumon—side view

Ichneumon—back view

Cat—back view

Cat—side view

Lion—top view

Owl—top view

Hawk—top view

Hen—top view

Crow

Intelligent monkey

Intelligent monkey—side view

The orang-outang

African head

Indian chief

Bacon

Idiot

Washington Irving

A conceited simpleton

Jonathan Edwards

Emerson, an idiot

Title page, The Quaker City

Frontispiece, The Quaker City, 1876 edition

Frontispiece, Evangeline

Title page, Reveries of a Bachelor

Title page, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Eliza’s escape, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Title page, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Come, Father! Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

It’s Joe Morgan’s child! Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

There it is now! Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Huzza for the Rummies! Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Willie Hammond murdered, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

One long scream of horror, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Frank Slade! Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Cover, Malaeska

Title page, Ragged Dick

Frontispiece, Little Women

Frontispiece, The Gates Ajar

As the procession filed in, The Luck of Roaring Camp

Ben-Hur flour advertisement (1902)

Ben-Hur and Arrius, the rescue, act 2, scene 2, Ben-Hur

Frontispiece, The Hidden Hand

Cover, In His Steps

Virginia and Loreen, In His Steps

PREFACE

One of the wonders of printed material is its persuasive power. It can threaten, promise, cajole, and insinuate ideas of lasting influence. Such influence manifests itself in a number of ways, but perhaps one of the most obvious is found in the development of national mythologies. For example, consider the story of George Washington cutting down a cherry tree, a deed he then nobly confesses with the now-immortal words, I can’t tell a lie. It is a story that has become synonymous with George Washington, yet it was a fable created by Parson Weems in his tremendously popular biography of the first president.

True or not, such stories reveal a great deal about a culture’s thought and life. This volume gathers popular stories that tap into a wide range of nineteenth-century American self-perceptions, fears, dreams and longings. The nineteenth century is particularly important for such stories because it was a period when these tales increasingly reached their audience in printed forms, as the highly oral culture of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more print-bound culture. This change meant that ever-wider audiences could gain access to, and be influenced by, the same information. In the nineteenth century, the world of American citizens was increasingly formed, framed and fractured by the power of print.

Behind the growing print culture found in the nineteenth-century United States stood the fact that American publishing came of age in this century. Whereas printed material had been relatively scarce at the close of the eighteenth century, with most families owning perhaps a Bible and an almanac, by the time of the Civil War thousands of tracts, novels, self-help books, tour guides, magazines and newspapers were littering American parlors. Publishers at the turn of the nineteenth century rarely produced print runs over two thousand copies. By mid-century, American publishing had so radically changed that editions of 30,000, 75,000 or even 100,000 copies were common. The forty newspapers published during the American Revolution gave way by the 1860s to more than two thousand daily and weekly papers. By the end of the century, books and other forms of published material were reaching the remotest parts of the country as an evermore advanced transportation network, an increasingly efficient mail system and an army of some fifty thousand door-to-door book salesmen offered an unprecedented range of printed literature to American readers.

The amazing growth of America’s publishing enterprises did not happen in a vacuum. These enterprises grew proportionately with rising American literacy rates and multiplying motivations for the consumption of printed matter. As the century wore on, a number of factors propelled American reading habits, including the desire for economic gain, social distinction, political involvement and entertainment.

Reading offered people an opportunity for greater social mobility. Those who could read were better able to adapt to the changing employment market of the nineteenth century, in which literacy skills were increasingly prized for the better-paying, more-prestigious jobs. The massive numbers of self-help books and reform literature that circulated among Americans in the nineteenth century also helped people know how to think and act in ways that distinguished them as socially refined. Such social distinction could also be attained by studying the Greek and Roman classics, an oft-used marker of gentility and good social breeding.

Americans also read so that they might gain the information they needed to participate in their local and national governments. From an early age, Americans were taught that democracy demanded participation, and meaningful participation demanded accurate information. Thus the political interests of nineteenth-century readers helped fuel a tremendous rise in newspaper circulation and the appearance of a host of printed matter such as political biographies and verbatim reproductions of countless legislative speeches and debates.

And Americans read because it was fun. There was great pleasure to be found in learning new things and entering new worlds. The genres of history, travel and adventure enjoyed enormous popularity. The astounding appeal of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur can be attributed, at least in part, to the way in which this work incorporated all three of these genres. Reading also changed from a largely oral activity, in which a father might read aloud the Bible or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to his family, to a much more individualized practice. This change opened the door for readers to enjoy a wider, often more illicit, range of material. Once shunned as corrupting, reading novels became a central avenue toward entertainment before the end of the century.

The present collection was conceived with the desire to capture some of the excitement and diversity of the print culture that was so influential in nineteenth-century American thought and society. It gives a special emphasis to those works that sold astoundingly well when they first appeared. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick may be extremely well known and widely read today, but when it first appeared it sold so poorly that its publication almost bankrupted the author. In contrast to Moby-Dick, the works in this collection sold extremely well when they first appeared, attracting huge readerships and often inspiring other works, such as plays and sequels, which made them all the more popular. Two other factors influenced the choice of texts: a preference for depth over breadth, and an interest in presenting works standing in dialogue with one another. The rationale here is simple. Reading entire works and longer excerpts gives one a fuller appreciation of an author’s intellectual design and enables one to examine narrative arcs and developed lines of argument. Reading works speaking to—and against—other works recreates something of the dynamic of the vital cultural conversations taking place in this period. (The list on pages xvii–xix identifies some of the essential thematic intersections among the texts in this collection.)

This collection makes no claim to cover all, or even most, of the important facets of nineteenth-century popular literature. But it does open a modest window into the vast array of literature avidly produced and just as avidly consumed during this period. Through this window, it is hoped that readers will catch informative glimpses that will entice them into further explorations of the splendidly diverse and always amazing print culture that influenced every aspect of nineteenth-century American life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One incurs many debts in publishing a book, and in that spirit I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the many individuals who helped bring this book to completion. My editors at Anthem, Tej Sood and Brian Stone, were incredibly supportive and efficient in helping this work along. I also had an amazing editorial assistant in Richard Higgins, who did much of the heavy lifting in terms of making sure the text was formatted and proofread correctly. Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger was also of help in preparing the manuscript. And Christoph Irmscher, whose encyclopedic intellectual breadth keeps me ever in awe of him, was incredibly generous in helping me figure out this or that obscure reference—I owe many a footnote to Christoph’s expertise. I also wish to say that, although I had a great deal of help in preparing this book for publication, I alone am responsible for any errors that may appear in its pages.

I continue to owe much to friends such as Bob Brown and Alex Van Riesen, who just keep me sane in my life journey through their friendship and their ability to make me laugh. They constantly shine a bit of light into the dark corners of my own often overfull and overanxious life.

I have a family that continues to enable me to do the work I love. I thank my wife, Cathy, and my sons, Isaac and Jeremiah, for putting up with my absences—both physical and emotional—as I struggled to finish what became a rather mammoth undertaking. As always, my father, mother and sister, Karen, stand as the absolute gold standard of generosity and support. My family has always been there for me in countless ways as I negotiate the varied demands of my career.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my Uncle Norman and Aunt Aletta Cole and their sons, Bob, Jim and David. I have been immensely blessed to have both a wonderful immediate and a wonderful extended family. The Coles have always modeled for me a kind of reflexive, unselfish and often understated kindness that embodies Aesop’s famous moral that no act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. Whether it was Norman showing me magic tricks, Aletta sewing me my own special quilt, Bob letting me be his whist partner when I was hardly even old enough to fan the cards in my hand, Jim making me laugh or David taking me to movies, I have always benefitted in profound, and all-too-often unacknowledged, ways from their constant acts of kindness. I do not exaggerate when I say that the Coles have shown me great love over the years, and words fail me here as I wish to express my gratitude to them.

THEMATIC CONNECTIONS

Singleness and Marriage

Charlotte Temple

Awful Disclosures

The Quaker City

Evangeline

Reveries of a Bachelor

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Malaeska

Little Women

The Hidden Hand

In His Steps

Care and Education of the Young

Life of Washington

To Mothers

Murderers of Fathers, and Murderers of Mothers

Awful Disclosures

Treatise on Domestic Economy

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Malaeska

Ragged Dick

Little Women

The Gates Ajar

The Luck of Roaring Camp

The Hidden Hand

Ben-Hur

Proper Conduct

Life of Washington

The Forgiving African

Murderers of Fathers, and Murderers of Mothers

To Mothers

Novel Reading

Awful Disclosures

Treatise on Domestic Economy

Self-Instructor in Phrenology

The Quaker City

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Ragged Dick

Little Women

The Luck of Roaring Camp

The Gates Ajar

In His Steps

Temperance

Murderers of Fathers, and Murderers of Mothers

The Quaker City

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

The Hidden Hand

In His Steps

Slavery

The Forgiving African

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The Hidden Hand

Novel Reading

Novel Reading

Reveries of a Bachelor

Little Women

The Gates Ajar

In His Steps

Rural Life

Charlotte Temple

Evangeline

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Reveries of a Bachelor

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

The Hidden Hand

The South

Evangeline

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The Hidden Hand

Business

Treatise on Domestic Economy

The Quaker City

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Ragged Dick

Ben-Hur

In His Steps

Domesticity and Gender Roles

Charlotte Temple

Awful Disclosures

Treatise on Domestic Economy

To Mothers

The Quaker City

Evangeline

Reveries of a Bachelor

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

Malaeska

Ragged Dick

The Luck of Roaring Camp

Little Women

The Gates Ajar

Ben-Hur

The Hidden Hand

In His Steps

Masculinity

Life of Washington

Murderers of Fathers, and Murderers of Mothers

Awful Disclosures

Self-Instructor in Phrenology

The Quaker City

Reveries of a Bachelor

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

The Luck of Roaring Camp

Ben-Hur

Social Reform

Life of Washington

To Mothers

Murderers of Fathers, and Murderers of Mothers

Novel Reading

The Quaker City

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

John Jenkins

In His Steps

Religion

Life of Washington

To Mothers

Murderers of Fathers, and Murderers of Mothers

Novel Reading

Awful Disclosures

Treatise on Domestic Economy

Evangeline

The Quaker City

Reveries of a Bachelor

John Jenkins

The Luck of Roaring Camp

The Gates Ajar

Little Women

Ragged Dick

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Malaeska

Ben-Hur

In His Steps

Urban Life

Murderers of Fathers, and Murderers of Mothers

Awful Disclosures

The Quaker City

Malaeska

Ben-Hur

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

In His Steps

The West

Evangeline

Malaeska

The Gates Ajar

The Luck of Roaring Camp

In His Steps

Race

Self-Instructor in Phrenology

The Quaker City

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Malaeska