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.
II
The period of moralizing fiction culminated with the work of the Rev. Edward Payson Roe, whose first novel, Barriers Burned Away (1872), with its background of the great Chicago fire, and its tense moral atmosphere which skilfully concealed its sensationalism and its plentiful sentiment, became enormously popular. When its author died in 1888 his publishers estimated that 1,400,000 copies of all his novels had been sold, not counting pirated editions in many foreign languages, and the sale of the books has been steady up to the present time.