In the years when the little Beadle volumes were common, and at the height of their popularity, they were often denounced from the pulpit as pernicious and evil in their influence upon the men and boys who read them so avidly. But such condemnation was due to ignorance of their character. Of late years that judgment has been radically reversed. The present esteem in which they are held was in part stated by Charles Harvey, in an article on the subject published by him in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1907. Mr. Harvey said:
“Ethically they were uplifting. The hard drinkers, and the grotesquely profane and picturesquely depraved persons who take leading roles in many of the dime novels of recent times were inexorably shut out from their progenitors of Beadle’s days.
“These tales incited a love of reading among the youth of the country.... Many of the boys and girls who encountered Pontiac, Boone, the renegade Girty, Mad Anthony, Kenton, and Black Hawk in their pages were incited to find out something more about those characters and their times, and thus were introduced to much of the nation’s story and geography. Manliness and womanliness among the readers were cultivated by these little books, not by homilies, but by example. It can be truthfully said that the taste and tone of the life of the generation which grew up with these tales were improved by them. No age limit was set up among Beadle’s readers. Lincoln was one of them.”
When Lincoln sent Henry Ward Beecher to England as a Special Commissioner, in an effort to win support for the Union from the English Cabinet, it was Victor, editor of the House of Beadle, whose “Address to the English People” gave material aid to the President’s representative. After Beecher had returned he discussed these things with Victor, and said to him: “Your little book and Mrs. Victor’s novel [referring to ‘Maum Guinea’] were a telling series of shots in the right spot.”
It was Victor, also, who wrote the life of Lincoln included in the “Lives of Great Americans” series, and who, in his hastily composed memorial preface to that volume, summarized the dead President in a manner not excelled by any other writer of the period. Victor therein said: “Few men realized the magnitude of his task—it was too mighty for comprehension; few men were dispassionate enough to judge justly; few were wise enough to judge understandingly.”
Such was the man who, under the guidance of Erastus Beadle, chose and edited the pioneer literature which, for a generation, molded the thought and ambitions of America’s youth. That literature itself has almost disappeared, but its effects on the national life are everywhere still present.
In the exhibition are shown about sixty-eight different examples of the famous “original yellow back” Dime Novels, which began to appear in 1860. No less than seventeen of the first twenty-five titles constituting this series are embraced in the collection. Number 8 is a first edition copy of Edward Ellis’ celebrated “Seth Jones,” a story of the New York Wilderness in 1785. More than 450,000 copies of this book had been sold in America before 1865, and it had been translated into seven foreign languages. Number 9, “The Slave Sculptor,” illustrates the little known bibliographical fact that Beadle and Company issued English editions of many of these books from 44 Paternoster Row, London. The English editions were printed from the American stereotype plates, with specially prepared title-pages. It was during the issuance of the first few titles of the original Dime Novels that various experiments were made by the publishers in the form and color of these books. Numbers 10, 11 and 12 illustrate such changes. But the appearance adopted in Number 11 was finally chosen, and thenceforth was adhered to during the printing of over 300 books in the yellow-back series. Among other titles included in this type is a copy of Mrs. Victor’s “Maum Guinea,” which was preferred by President Lincoln, as a portrayal of slavery, over Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Still other celebrated issues among the yellow-backs shown are Ellis’ “Riflemen of the Miami,” Frances Barritt’s “The Land Claim,” and Ann Stephen’s “Story of the Oregon Trail.”
Cover in Three Colors
Type C