A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

I

In 1870 American fiction ran in two currents: fiction of the Atlantic type, read by the cultivated few, and fiction of Bonner's New York Ledger type, read openly by the literate masses and surreptitiously by many others. There was also a very large class of readers that read no novels at all. Puritanism had frowned upon fiction, the church generally discountenanced it, and in many places prejudice ran deep. George Cary Eggleston in the biography of his brother has recorded his own experience:

It will scarcely be believed by many in the early years of the twentieth century, that as late as the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth, there still survived a bitter prejudice against novels as demoralizing literature, and that even short stories were looked upon with doubt and suspicion.... When The Hoosier Schoolmaster began to appear, a member of the publishing house was sorely troubled. He had been a bitter and vehement opponent of novels and novel reading. He had published articles of his own in denunciation of fiction and in rebuke of his friends in a great publishing house for putting forth literature of that character. He now began to suspect that The Hoosier Schoolmaster was in fact a novel, and he was shocked at the thought that it was appearing in a periodical published by himself.... When the story was about to appear in book form Edward wrote "A Novel" as a sub-title, and the publisher referred to was again in a state of nervous agitation. He could in no wise consent to proclaim himself as a publisher of novels. In view of the large advance orders for the book he was eager to publish the novel, but he could not reconcile himself to the open admission that it was a novel.[153]

While The Bread-Winners was running its anonymous course in the Century in 1884, its author, now known to have been John Hay, felt called upon to issue an explanatory note:

I am engaged in business in which my standing would be seriously compromised if it were known I had written a novel. I am sure that my practical efficiency is not lessened by this act, but I am equally sure that I could never recover from the injury it would occasion me if known among my own colleagues. For that positive reason, and for the negative one that I do not care for publicity, I resolved to keep the knowledge of my little venture in authorship restricted to as small a circle as possible. Only two persons besides myself know who wrote The Bread-Winners.

The final breaking down of this prejudice and the building up of the new clientele of readers that at length gave prose fiction its later enormous vogue is one of the most interesting phenomena of the period. The novel gained its present respectability as a literary form by what may be called an artifice. It came in disguised as moral instruction, as character-building studies of life, as historical narrative, as reform propaganda. Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had been read by thousands who had never opened a novel before, had begun the work. The Hoosier Schoolmaster was allowed to appear in the columns of Hearth and Home because it was a moral tale for children and because it was written by a minister whose motives no one could question. So with the works of the Rev. E. P. Roe, and the stories of Dr. J. G. Holland, who had gained an enormous following with his series of lay sermons published under the name of Timothy Titcomb.

Perhaps Dr. Holland, more than any other writer of the time, is responsible for this rehabilitation of the novel. He understood the common people. His own origin had been humble—the son of a mechanic of western Massachusetts, blessed with poverty, educated through his own efforts, enabled after a long struggle to take a medical diploma—educator, school teacher, superintendent of schools in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and finally, under Samuel Bowles, assistant editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, which, largely through his efforts, arose to national importance. He was forty when the Timothy Titcomb letters entered upon their enormous popularity—it is estimated that nearly half a million copies of the series were sold first and last; he was fifty when he established Scribner's Monthly and assumed its editorship.

Scribner's under his direction became for the new period what the Atlantic Monthly had been for the period before. He was a moralist, a plain man of the people, and he knew his clientele; he knew the average American reader that makes up the great democratic mass, the reader who had bought The Wide, Wide World, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Titcomb Letters. He gave them first of all a serial novel by the Rev. George MacDonald, and he printed at the close of the first volume of the Monthly a letter from a reader, sample of thousands which had filled his mail. Here is an extract:

I know of no writings better calculated than his [MacDonald's] to draw out what is noble and true in the reader, or call forth fine feelings and high resolves. They give impulse to life. We come away from reading one of his books stronger and better prepared for our life-work. Is not this the surest test of excellence in a book?

It was this purpose that inspired his own fiction, Arthur Bonnicastle, Nicholas Minturn, and the others, earnest, moral tales sprinkled freely with sentiment, wholesome, but not high in literary merit. No other man did so much to direct the period into the well-known channels which it took. His whole influence was democratic. He would publish literature for the people, and to him literature was a serious thing, the voice of life. The group of new authors which he gathered about him is comparable only with the group that James T. Fields gathered about himself in the earlier golden days of the Atlantic.