Sizes and types of audience are notoriously difficult to establish, the more so in the case of historical publishers of ephemeral literature. Nevertheless, informed hypotheses are important, because we read this literature now partly through our construction of how it was received contemporaneously. Certain clues point to a large and diverse audience for dime novels, but with a majority of this readership belonging to the working class toward the end of the nineteenth century. Beadle and Adams themselves explicitly announced in 1860: 'it is hoped to reach all classes, old and young, male and female'; they advertised books in the nationally influential New York Tribune; and some of their publications were reviewed (favorably) in the highbrow North American Review. The Civil War produced a captive audience of soldiers, who were highly responsive to the sensational adventure that some publishers became adept at producing. Later, industrialization, urbanization, and economic calculations seem to have delivered the working classes as the main audience for cheap fiction. Frederick Whittaker specifically enumerated: 'The readers of the dimes are farmers, mechanics, workwomen, drummers, boys in shops and factories'; extrapolating from this and other evidence, Michael Denning has averred that 'the bulk of the audience of dime novels were workers — craftworkers, factory operatives, domestic servants and domestic workers.' At least once formulaic fan-293- tasies were adapted to quasi-realist urban settings, Street and Smith appeared to believe that they had a proletarian audience (and potential, unpaid sales force) reflecting their proletarian protagonists. The editorial apparatus of an 1871 New York Weekly reads, in part:
Every sewing machine girl in the United States should not only read Bertha Bascomb, the Sewing Machine Girl, but should make it her especial business to see that everybody else reads it. The story is designed to benefit the working girl, and therefore every working girl in our broad land should constitute herself an agent for its distribution.
Given that it was Francis Smith, coeditor, who had written Bertha Bascomb, this rhetoric can be read as not just addressing but actively constituting a working-class following. Retrospectively, commentators tended to style dime novels 'part of the youth of many of us' (this from an editorial in the New York Sun in 1900). In fact, however, it was only toward the end of Beadle and Adams's life and throughout Street and Smith's dime career that a specifically juvenile audience was targeted.
The characteristic dime novel narratives aimed at this shifting audience were action-packed melodramas that told, again, stories of nationalism and commerce. Several formulas are familiar from the story papers — tales of heroic, patriotic wars and of the frontier — but others developed in response to historical circumstances: the fictionalizing of outlaws, detectives, male factory operatives, and working girls, for example, was particular to the newer form, as it developed in the 1880s and 1890s. All of these fictions were quick to exploit the topical, from scientific and technological inventions to industrial strife to Teddy Roosevelt's triumphs in the Spanish-American War.
The formula most actively promoted by Beadle and Adams and their imitators in the early years was the Western. While there had been individual best-selling frontier romances — each of Cooper's Leatherstocking tales (1823-41) was a best-seller, as was Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay (1837) — the genre as a mass phenomenon took off with the advent of the dime novel. The historical context was clearly a factor: accompanying the human migrations from East to West before the Civil War and the cattle trails from West to East after was a vibrant, optimistic political rhetoric that characterized the Far West as site of -294- national, economic, and personal regeneration. Also bearing upon the response to the dime Western was the general shift in popular trends, as women's fiction waned and men's gained ascendancy, as Nina Baym and others have shown. Finally, the specific story of Beadle's first Westerns suggests that commercial calculations also had a bearing.
Beadle and Adams opened their publishing venture with a tale set on the early frontier: Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens, which was Number One of Beadle's Dime Novels in June 1860. It sold at least half a million copies, yet turned out to be an unusual dime novel. Its structure was untypical: though its melodrama was vivid, its plot entanglements and subplots and coincidences were considerably more restrained than in later dimes, and it ended tragically. The subject matter was handled equally unusually: Malaeska traces the fate of a Native American woman, who is left widowed by her white soldier-husband, robbed of their son by her aristocratic in-laws in New York City, forced to witness his suicide when his Indian heritage is revealed to him years later, and finally killed by her own grief on her boy's grave. That this is a distinctively female, as well as native, experience is suggested by the narrator's comment on Malaeska's self-sacrifice: 'It was her woman's destiny, not the more certain because of her savage origin. Civilization does not always reverse this mournful picture of womanly self-abnegation.' When Irwin Beadle chose this story, reprinting it from serialization in The Ladies' Companion of 1839, he seems to have made an astute commercial calculation, grafting an example of the provenly popular sentimental fiction onto a new format and new publicity that emphasized the frontier adventure more than the prominent religiosity.
Malaeska's failure to articulate the West in topically optimistic, patriarchal terms may well have doomed it in the long run as the forerunner of a genre of women's Westerns. More immediately, happenstance worked against its institution as a formulaic model. Later in 1860, Edward S. Ellis, a young schoolmaster, brought to Beadle and Adams a wilderness adventure with clear sales potential. Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier took plot, character, and setting from Fenimore Cooper. But Ellis transformed Cooper's Natty Bumppo — the backwoodsman isolated between two races — and -295- Bird's Nick — the schizophrenic Indian killer — into a backwoodsman who harmonizes savagery and civilization. Seth Jones is the avuncular, Indian-slaying hunter who, after saving various captives from the Mohawks, turns out, beneath his disguise, to be a young, aristocratic Easterner suited to marry the white heroine. Ellis produced a sunny, optimistic ending that erased the tension between East and West evident in Cooper's and Bird's divided endings: an important symbolic function in a time of national strife. Beadle mounted a massive advertising campaign for Seth Jones for several days before the novel's publication, running newspaper advertisements, billboards, and handbills with their tantalizing question 'Who is Seth Jones?' followed by lithographs of a coonskin-capped hunter declaring 'I am Seth Jones.' The response was even more massive than to Malaeska. Ellis was a new, twenty-year-old author willing to join the Beadle stable and turn out endless imitations of his model for the next thirty years, whereas by 1860 Ann Stephens was almost fifty years old, an established author and editor whose production was more wedded to middle-class magazines than to Beadle and Adams's dime novels (though she continued to write for them intermittently). For various reasons, from the historical to the commercial to the personal, Ellis's version of the frontier adventure, a version that appropriated the wilderness for the glorification of white men rescuing white women and killing Indians, held sway in the Beadle production line.
This model was also perpetrated by the dime authors who brought the Western into the modern era. Ned Buntline introduced Buffalo Bill as a Western hero — both in dime fiction and on the New York stage. Then Prentiss Ingraham hammered home the point that this violent plainsman could fill the romantic role because his gentlemanly demeanor and exotic appearance brought together the savage and the civilized. Edward Wheeler created the Western outlaw when he introduced Deadwood Dick, another Easterner, disguised this time in a black costume and mask, in Beadle's Half-Dime Library of 1877. In the twentieth century, partly in response to the strictures of the Postmaster General, dime publishers turned to moralistic adventure stories about clean-cut boys; the most popular Western version of this formula was Wild West Weekly, a series about a gang of boys in the West led again by a displaced Easterner, which Frank Tousey began in 1902. In 1904 Street and Smith produced a close imitation, Young-296- Rough Rider Weekly, which played on associations with Teddy Roosevelt and carried Western adventure into the modern age, with battles revolving around commerce, property, and sport, not the killing of Native Americans. The characteristic line that survived through these decades of ritualized adventure was the imperative to marry frontiersman and gentleman, or West and East.
In terms of publishers, writers, and fictional formulas, dime novels were a male-dominated genre. However, from the beginning, publishers were interested in catching women readers, too, and made efforts to develop a distinct women's formula. As well as beginning the dime novel with Ann Stephens, Beadle published a number of women authors. One steady contributor was Metta V. Victor: her work is interesting not only because she was
