One of the secrets of the Sun’s popularity in the years when it had no such news guidance as Bennett gave to the Herald, no such spirited editorials as Greeley put into the Tribune, no such political prestige as Raymond brought to the Times, was Moses S. Beach’s belief that his public wanted light fiction. The appetite created by Scott and increased by Dickens was keen in America. True, the penny Sun’s literary standards were not of Himalayan height. Hawthorne was too spiritual for its readers, Poe too brief. They wanted wads of adventure and dialogue, dour squires, swooning ladies, hellish villains, handsome heroes, and comic character folk. The young mechanic had to have something he could understand without knitting his brows. For him, “The Grocer’s Apprentice; a Tale of the Great Plague,” and “Dick Egan; or, the San Francisco Bandits,” written for the Sun by H. Warren Trowbridge.
In the days before the Civil War, wives snatched the Sun from husbands to read “Maggie Miller; or, Old Hagar’s Secret,” “written expressly for the Sun” by Mary J. Holmes, already famous through “Lena Rivers” and “Dora Deane.” Ephemeral? They are still reading “Lena Rivers” in North Crossing, Nebraska.
Horatio Alger, Jr., wrote several of his best tales for Mr. Beach, who printed them serially in the Sun and the Weekly Sun. To the New York youth of 1859, who dreamed not that in three years he would be clay on the slope at Fredericksburg, it was the middle of a perfect day to pick up the Sun, read a thrilling news story about Blondin cooking an omelet while crossing the Niagara gorge on a tight rope, and then, turning to the last page, to plunge into “The Discarded Son; or, the Cousin’s Plot,” by the author of “The Secret Drawer,” “The Cooper’s Ward,” “The Gipsy Nurse,” and “Madeline the Temptress”—for all these were written expressly for the Sun by young Mr. Alger. He was only twenty-five then, with the years ahead when, a Unitarian minister, he should see fiction material in the New York street-boy and write the epics of Ragged Dick and Tattered Tom.
What did the women readers of the Sun care about the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania or the wonderful trotting campaign of Flora Temple, when they could devour daily two columns of “Jessie Graham; or, Love and Pride”? The Sun might condense A. T. Stewart’s purchase of two city blocks into a paragraph, but there must be no short measure of “Gerald Vane’s Lost One,” by Walter Savage North.
When the religious folk held the reins of the Sun they tried to compromise by printing “Great Expectations” as a serial, but the wise Mr. Beach, on getting the paper back, quickly flung to his hungry readers “Hunted Down,” by Ann S. Stephens. Later in the war he catered to the martial spirit with “Running the Blockade,” by Captain Wheeler, United States army.
One column of foreign news, one of city paragraphs, one of editorial articles, one of jokes and miscellany, one of fiction, and nineteen of advertising—that was about the make-up of Beach’s Sun before the Civil War; that was the prescription which enabled the Sun to sell nearly sixty thousand copies in a city of eight hundred thousand people. It was a fairly well condensed paper. In February, 1857, when it printed one day two and a half columns about the mysterious murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell, the rich dentist of Bond Street, it broke its record for length in a police story.
It was in Moses S. Beach’s time that the Atlantic cable, second only to the telegraph proper as an aid to newspapers, was laid. On August 6, 1858, when Cyrus W. Field telegraphed to the Associated Press from Newfoundland that the ends of the cables had reached both shores of the sea, the Sun said that it was “the greatest triumph of the age.” Eleven days later the Sun contained this article:
We received last night and publish to-day what purports to be the message of Queen Victoria, congratulating the President of the United States on the successful completion of the Atlantic telegraph. We are assured that the message is genuine, and that it came through the Atlantic cable. It is not surprising, however, that the President, on receiving it, doubted its genuineness, as among the hundreds who crowded our office last evening the doubters largely preponderated.
The message, accepting it as the queen’s, is, in style and tone, utterly unworthy of the great event which it was designed to celebrate.
The message is so shabbily like royalty that we cannot believe it to be a fabrication.