AMERICAN POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY  Edited by Paul C. Gutjahr Oxford University Press ISBN #0195141407 **** 1220 pages

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 which 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. The highly oral culture of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more print-bound culture in the nineteenth century. 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 stands 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 2000 copies. By mid-century, American publishing had so radically changed that editions of 30,000, 75,000 even 100,000, copies were common. The forty newspaper published during the American Revolution gave way by the 1860s to over 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 ever more advanced transportation network and an army of some fifty thousand door-to-door book salesman offered an unprecedented range of printed goods to American readers. 

The amazing growth of America’s publishing enterprises did not happen in a vacuum. It grew in a reciprocal relationship 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 desires for economic gain, social distinction, political involvement and entertainment. 

Reading offered the opportunity of greater social mobility to the individual. Those able to read found themselves 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 quantities of self-help books and reform literature which 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 popularity of Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor 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 where 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, novel reading became a central avenue toward entertainment before the end of the century. 

This collection was conceived with the desire to capture some of the excitement and diversity of a print culture which was so influential in nineteenth-century American thought and culture. It makes available material, relatively inaccessible today, that was vital to the cultural and intellectual conversations found in this period. The authorship of the selections is primarily American, simply because space limitations forbade including a sampling of the huge array of foreign printed material avidly consumed by Americans. The popularity of the following selections lay not so much in the number of copies printed or sold - although publication data certainly constitutes one measure of public interest - as in its prominence in the cultural conversations of the day. Hence, the selection of texts was based on a desire to obtain the best mixture of material which circulated in notable numbers, but also captured some of the most commonly accepted, and thus influential, cultural and intellectual currents of their day. 

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 readers a fuller appreciation of an author’s intellectual design, and enables them 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. 

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 in this period. Through this window, it is hoped that readers will catch informative glimpses, which will entice them into further explorations of the splendidly diverse and always amazing print culture that influenced every aspect of American life.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

* = works presented in their entirety 

1. Mason Locke Weems 

A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits 
of General George Washington: (1800) 

I. Introduction 
II. Birth and Education 
III. George’s Father Dies 
XIII. Character of Washington 

*Hymen’s Recruiting-Sergeant (1805) 

2. American Tract Society 

*Tract #92 - “The Forgiving African” 
*Tract # 128 - “Poor Sarah” 
*Tract #175 - “To Mothers” 
*Tract #493 - “Beware of Bad Books” 
*Tract # 512 - “Murderers of Fathers and Mothers” 
*Tract #515 - “Novel-Reading” 

3. *The Pearl or Affection’s Gift, 1833

4. Maria Monk 

Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836) 

Preface 
I. Early Recollections 
II. Congregational Nunnery 
VI. Taking the Veil 
VIII. Description of Apartments 
XVII. Treatment of Young Infants 
XIX. The Priests of the District 
XX. More Visits 

5. Robert Montgomery Bird 

Sheppard Lee (1836) 

Book I 
Book VI 

6. Catharine Beecher 

Treatise on Domestic Economy: (1841) 

I. Peculiar Responsibilities of American Women 
XII. On Domestic Manners 
XIV. On Habits of System and Order 
XVI. On Economy of Time and Expenses 

7. George Lippard 

The Quaker City: or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845) 

Preface 
Book the First 

8. E.D.E.N. Southworth 

*“The Wife’s Victory” (1847) 
*“The Married Shrew; A Sequel to the ‘Wife’s Victory’” (1847) 

9. Oswald S. and Lorenzo N. Fowler 

The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology (1849) 

Section I 
Section II 

10. Donald Mitchell (Ik Marvel) 

*Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) 

11. George Aiken 

* “Play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, A Domestic Drama in Six Acts” (1852) 

12. Timothy Shay Arthur 

*Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854) 

13. *Six Species of Men (1866) 

14. Bret Harte 

*“John Jenkins or The Smoker Reformed by T. S. A-TH-R” (1867) 
*“Muck-A-Muck: A Modern Indian Tale After Cooper” (1867) 
*“The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868) 
*“Miggles” (1869) 
*“Plain Language from Truthful James” (The Heathen Chinee) (1870) 
*“Further Language fro Truthful James” (1870) 
*“The Latest Chinese Outrage” 

15. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 

*The Silent Partner (1871) 

16. *McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader, Revised (1879) 

17. Thomas C. Harbaugh 

*Plucky Phil, of the Mountain Trail (1881) 

18. Laura Jean Libbey 

*The Master Workman’s Oath (1892) 

19. Charles Sheldon 

In His Steps: “What Would Jesus Do?”: (1897) 

Chapter 1 
Chapter 2 
Chapter 3 
Chapter 4 
Chapter 5 
Chapter 6 

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Oxford University Press

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