At a climactic moment in the plot, Rogers unfurls the United States flag and drapes himself in it. Simultaneously boosting both the nationalistic cause and the paper's title, Averill insists that what has infiltrated and vanquished Mexico is the type of America, the democracy where the common man (the midshipman) is hero.
The other prominent formula was a sensationalized version of the domestic, sentimental novel, which sold so successfully at midcentury and which Jane Tompkins has read as an expression of the revival movement. Women's narratives in the story papers also told of female trials and fortitude in the face of sudden poverty, orphanhood, abusive guardians, and evil suitors, but their florid, feverish action was more 'high wrought,' in Nina Baym's term, than that of Susan B. Warner and Maria Cummins. The most lavishly touted author of this melodramatic genre was Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, who was published in the
Some of these melodramas were delivered, textually, by strong authorial voices that translated the commodity status of the literature into a highly metaphorical process of commodity exchange between authors and implied audiences. These authorial gestures seem a more characteristic dimension of male than female narratives; this difference may well be historically specific, in that the first identifiable voice was a male one that emerged from the patriarchal system of the publishing industry. Maturin Murray Ballou was one of the first entrepreneurs to take advantage of the new print technology, most successfully with
Buntline's voice was more politicized than Ballou's, because he carried into his fiction the perspectives of both publisher-editor (Judson produced his own story papers intermittently) and tribune of the people (at one time heading the Know-Nothing Party, he was a prominent participant in the Astor Place Riot of 1849). He also used the serialized format more aggressively, to respond to his critics and comment on his political and legal adventures beyond the pages of his fiction. Peter Buckley has elucidated the strategies by which Buntline carried the rhetoric of mass meetings from the streets of New York City into the story papers and back again, breaking the bounds of - 290- novelistic form to argue political, legal, commercial, and personal cases to his audience. This whole ongoing commentary was intertwined within stirring tales of the American Revolution — such as
The sum of these authorial, narrative, and publishing strategies is that story papers did much more than flood American society with cheap, sensational adventure stories. Their editorial and authorial rhetoric acknowledged the operation of the market on the contract between author and reader, and inscribed that contract into the nationalist history of America, implicating commercial practice just as much as martial pursuits into the democratic ethos of the new Republic. At the same time, their fictional narratives positioned American women and men in heroic roles. While the editorial apparatus communicated reassuring messages about the technology and scale of industrialization, it also mediated the sensational fiction in such a way that the adventures read not simply as dissociated escapism but as displaced allegories of American life. The effect was that story papers offered readers accommodation to the speed, change, and growth of modern America.
The popular form central to the post-Civil War period was the dime novel, which flourished from 1860 to about 1900. Dime novels were introduced by Beadle and Adams, who were soon joined by a host of imitators, the most successful being Frank Tousey, George Munro, Norman Munro, and Street and Smith (the last transferring from the story paper to the dime novel late, in 1889, but immediately becoming Beadle and Adams's main rival and surviving as pulp magazine publishers until 1950). Beadle shifted the emphasis in cheap publishing away from serials to uniformly packaged series: each consisted of complete, predominantly American novels presented as compact pamphlets priced at 10 cents or 5 cents, with illustrated covers, which became increasingly lurid and vividly colored through time. -291-
Pamphlet novels had been issued, irregularly, in the antebellum period, but usually in installments for 25 cents each. Beadle and Adams's major innovation was the marketing of their line: the portable format was an important selling point in an age of escalating rail travel; the recognizable, appealing format took effect with the onset of the newsstand as a major outlet for cheap fiction; and the very low price ('A DOLLAR BOOK FOR A DIME!!' as the publicity blared) opened up the market to readers of all income levels. The dime novel publishers also pared away most of the editorial paraphernalia characteristic of story papers; in time, they tapped the audience loyalty bred by serialization in the earlier format by organizing titles into 'libraries,' a device that also facilitated the frequent reprinting of novels. The results were massively successful; Beadle and Adams published 3158 separate titles and sold copies in the millions. In the words of W. H. Bishop, in 1879, dime novel literature was 'the greatest literary movement, in bulk, of the age, and worthy of very serious consideration for its character, the phenomenon of its existence cannot be overlooked.'
The authors of dime novels were implicated in the industrial processes more directly than their story-paper predecessors, primarily because dime novel publishers attempted to rationalize (and thereby deskill) writing as well as production, advertising, and distribution. At first, with Beadle and Adams, editors regimented authors' production mainly in terms of quantity, speed, length, and fixed payment rates, supplying only general instructions on content. With the advent of Street and Smith, however, the principle of systematization penetrated much more deeply into relationships among publisher, editor, author, and audience. They supervised their writers closely, taking over more and more authorial decisions, until, by 1896, Ormond Smith dictated character, plots, and scenes to the author who was ostensibly 'inventing' Frank Merriwell. Increasingly, too, all dime publishers shunted authors around from one house pseudonym to another; in the case of Street and Smith, multiply authored series under one trademark name came to be the rule.
Fitting writing to production-line techniques inevitably shaped both the public's and the writers' conception of authorship. From the statements that have survived, it is clear that many authors came to absorb the values of commercial publishing, willingly subscribing to -292- the conditions of labor in the fiction factories. William Wallace Cook, for example, who wrote for Street and Smith between 1893 and 1928, off and on, described authorship:
A writer is neither better nor worse than any other man who happens to be in trade. He is a manufacturer. After gathering his raw product, he puts it through the mill of his imagination, retorts from the mass the personal equation, refines it with a sufficient amount of common sense and runs it into bars — of bullion, let us say. If the product is good it passes at face value and becomes a medium of exchange.
Laura Jean Libbey, who won a massive readership through the Munroes' story papers, wrote plays in later life according to the method she had learned as a dime novelist. Eschewing outline or notes, she dictated two or three plays a week, 120 in eighteen months, then produced a list of 120 titles, to which she matched the plays as they came to hand. The more complex inscriptions of authorial accents in the fiction itself are part of the textual story told below.
