 | "The Dime Novel in American Life" |  |
I
ARE not more crimes perpetrated these days in the name of the dime novels than Madame Roland ever imagined were committed in the name of liberty? It looks that way. Nearly every sort of misdemeanor into which the fantastic element enters, from train robbery to house-burning, is laid to them.
But these offending books must be only base counterfeits of the originals of their name. When the average American of fifty years of age or upward hears about dime novels he thinks of Beadle's. They were the first and the best of their order. Although nearly all of them bubbled over with thrills, they were not of a character to provoke breaches of the peace. For a few years they had a great run, incited many imitations, all of a lower grade; and at length, after suffering a gradual deterioration in quality, dropped out under the competition. Many of Beadle's original novels deserved the social and financial conquests which they won.
What boy of the sixties can ever forget Beadle's novels! To the average youngster of that time the advent of each of those books seemed to be an event of world consequence. The day which gave him his first glimpse of each of them set itself apart forever from the roll of common days. How the boys swarmed into and through stores and news-stands to buy copies as they came hot from the press! And the fortunate ones who got there before the supply gave out — how triumphantly they carried them off to the rendezvous, where eager groups awaited their arrival! What silver-tongued orator of any age or land ever had such sympathetic and enthusiastic audiences as did the happy youths at those trysting-places, who were detailed to read those wild deeds of forest, prairie, and mountain!
And how those heroes and heroines and their allies, their enemies and their doings, cling to the memory across the gulf of years! The writer of this article has a far more vivid picture of some of the red and white paladins whom he met in Beadle's pages than he has of any of Red Cloud's, Spotted Tail's, or Black Kettle's fierce raiders, whom he saw at unpleasantly close range, or of the white warriors who alternately defeated them and were defeated by them, in the irruptions into Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Wyoming, in the later sixties and early seventies. through Beadle's hypnotic spell, —
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,But to be young was very heaven."
Soon after the middle of the nineteenth century the Beadles began selling ten cent books, each a complete work in its field. They comprised manuals of games of many kinds, family medicine, etiquette, letter-writing, dreams, cookery, prose and poetical quotations, and so on. Most of these attained such a sale that the publication of little books on American adventure suggested itself.
Irwin P. Beadle, his brother Erastus F. Beadle, and Robert Adams were the founders of the Beadle publications. Orville J. Victor was the editor. Beadle's dime novels, issued once in each month at first, but much oftener subsequently, made their appearance in 1860. Many Americans who were old enough to read at that time remember 1860 better from that circumstance than they do because it was the year of Lincoln's election and the secession of South Carolina.
These little books ranged from 25,000
Orville J. Victor organized victory for the house of Beadle. He selected some writers of ability and standing to contribute to his series. He discovered other writers who made reputations in higher fields of literature afterward. He invented a few writers who quickly "made good." Rules of possibility, morality, and action in the narrative were laid down by him, which all writers had to observe. Mr. Victor himself, who, at the age of eighty, is to-day not only alive but also mentally and physically alert, had done some good journalistic and literary work before the first of Beadle's novels was issued. He had edited two or three papers, was a leading contributor to Graham's Magazine, a well known periodical of the days just before the Civil War, and had written some short biographies of Paul Jones, Israel Putnam, and other American heroes.
A contributor to the North American Review, writing a little over forty years ago in that periodical, said this: —
"A young friend of ours was recently suffering from that most harassing of complaints, convalescence, of which the remedy consists in copious draughts of amusement, prescribed by the patient. Literature was imperatively called for, and administered in the shape of Sir Walter Scott's novels. These did very well for a day or two, when, the convalescence running into satiety of the most malignant type, a new remedy was demanded, and the clamor de profundis arose: 'I wish I had a dime novel.' The coveted medicament was obtained, and at once took vigorous hold of the system."
That was a typical boy of the sixties. There were millions like him, as well as many thousands of girls, back in the spacious times of Abraham Lincoln.
Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, published in the summer of 1860, was the first of Beadle's dime novels. Although forgotten long since, Mrs. Stephens was as well known to the literary world of that year as Edith Wharton or Mrs. Deland is to that of 1907, and she was much better known to the social world than is either of these writers.
Like many greater novelists of the olden day, — Scott, Cooper, and others, — Mrs. Stephens began her chapters with a poetical quotation; but she departed from most of her contemporaries and predecessors in rejecting the "happy ending." The time of the tale, the eighteenth century, saw a large part of the country east of the Alleghenies still in possession of the red man. After her father killed her white husband, Malaeska carried their child to her father-in-law Danforth in New York City a town which was more familiar with sights of the blanket Indian then than Tahlequah or Pawhuska is to-day), was prevented by Danforth from revealing her relationship, and went back alone to her tribe. Years afterward she returned, met her son just as he was about to be wedded, told him of his Indian blood, and in the general catastrophe he killed himself and she died.
The plot was crude, but there was action in it. Editor Victor always insisted on action in his stories. In Malaeska herself there was some vitality. A little of the aroma of the forest swept through the book's pages. Mrs. Stephens received $250 for the story; but the compensation for these tales usually ranged from $100 to $150.
Harry Cavendish's Privateer Cruise, Mrs. Metta V. Victor's Backwoods Bride, and Col. A. J. H. Duganne's Massasoit's Daughter were a few of the best known of the earlier Beadle's. Mrs. Victor was the wife of the editor of the series, and
Maum Guinea was a tale of slave life, and appeared in the early part of the Civil War. It was spirited and pathetic, and had a good deal of "local color;" its sales exceeded 100,000 copies, and it was translated into several languages. "It is as absorbing as Uncle Tom's Cabin," was the judgment which Lincoln was said to have passed on it. The New York Tribune, the New York Evening Post, and other prominent papers in that day of large deeds, when newspaper space was valuable, gave some space to Mrs. Victor's story.
One day in the fall of 1860 a bustling youth of twenty crossed from the wilds of New Jersey, entered the office at 141 William Street, New York, and laid a manuscript on the desk of Editor Victor. It was a great moment in the annals of the house of Beadle. The boy was Edward S. Ellis. The manuscript told the adventures of Seth Jones, or the Captive of the Frontier, the most successful novel which ever bore the Beadle imprint.
A few years later Dr. Ellis, who is alive to-day, graduated from the 10-cent into the $1.50 class of fiction writers, and he has also, in the past fifth of a century, written histories and educational works, some of which have been very popular. His juveniles, many of which have been translated into several languages, exceed in number the sixty-seven years of his life. His readers, diffused through America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the islands of the sea, won't allow him to stop. As a writer of Indian tales he easily holds the world's long-distance record.
"How de do? How de do? Ain't frightened, I hope. It's nobody but me, Seth Jones of New Hampshire."
As read to-day, these words, for thousands of Americans, will rouse recollections which will turn time's flight backward several decades. This salutation was Seth Jones's introduction to Alfred Haverland (and likewise to the reader of the story) at Haverland's clearing in the wilderness of Western New York near the close of the eighteenth century. They may also serve to recall, faintly at least, the woodcut picture on the cover of the book, of a stalwart bearded man garbed in fringed hunting shirt, fringed breeches, and coonskin cap, and armed with rifle, powder-horn, and knife. To-day, costume, armament, and picture would strike the observer as archaic; but on the scale of their time all were adequate.
Seth, who had been a scout among the Green Mountain boys under Ethan Allen in the war of the Revolution a few years earlier, and who was fully equipped in the tricks of the fighting frontiersman's trade, told Haverland that the Indians of the vicinity were about to go on the war-path again, and his warning was immediately verified by the capture of Haverland's sixteen-year-old daughter Ina, and by the burning of Haverland's house just as the latter and his wife had fled from it to seek refuge at a white settlement twenty miles away. Just at this moment Evarard Graham, a sweetheart of Ina, turned up, and, under Seth's leadership, joined in the cautious pursuit of the Indians and their captive. After some wonderful, though not inherently impossible, adventures, lasting several days, Ina was recovered, and she and her rescuers reached the settlement and safety.
About this time it was divulged that Seth Jones was a myth, that his real name was Eugene Morton, and that his uncouth garb and language were a mask which he assumed in searching the frontier for his affianced, Mary Haverland, sister of the backwoodsman in the tale, from whom he had become separated during the Revolutionary War. He discovered her soon after he met Alfred at the clearing; but he postponed revealing himself until the clouds rolled by. There was a double wedding — Ina
"Slumber, with the exception of the sentinels at the block house, fell upon the village. Perhaps the Indians had no wish to break in upon such a happy settlement, for they made no demonstration through the night. Sweetly and peacefully they all slept. Sweetly and peacefully they entered on life's duties on the morrow. And sweetly and peacefully these happy settlers ascended and went down the hillside of life."
Believing that this tale could be made a "best seller," the counting-room rose to the occasion with Napoleonic audacity. One morning the residents of most of the big towns of the United States found staring at them from gutters and dead walls the words, "Seth Jones," which were followed a week afterward by "Who's Seth Jones?" The book's appearance on the news-stands in immense stacks a few days later answered that query. This booming and the plaudits of its readers quickly exhausted several editions, and sent the sales ultimately up to more than 600,000 copies, in half a dozen languages.
The Civil War, which started about three quarters of a year after the advent of Beadle's novels, opened a new and vast market for them. In their leisure moments the soldiers craved cheap and exciting reading. Beadle bundled it like bales of hay and sent it to them in carloads. And, in their rate of increase, the carloads kept step with the expanding armies.
Mrs. Stephens, Col. Duganne, Mrs. Victor, Mrs. Mary A. Denison (who wrote Chip, the Cave Child, and a few other novels for this series) and Dr. Ellis, fairly represented the Beadle contributors when the corps was at its best estate. Of all the persons connected with these publications in their great days, only Ellis, Mrs. Denison, and Editor Victor are alive to-day.
Prosperity killed Beadle. He would have done better had he done worse. The streams of money which flowed to him made 141 William Street seem, to some envious persons, like a branch of Secretary Chase's United States Treasury. Rivals sprang up in New York, Boston, Chicago, and other places, who pandered to passions which Beadle shunned. These soon began to take away many of his patrons, and with the hope of regaining his ascendency he lowered the tone of his publications. It was vain. The days of his supremacy never returned.
The blow which hit Beadle first and hardest came from his own household. "Over there is a man," said Erastus F. Beadle, the head of the firm, one day, to one of his leading contributors, "who will be content with his routine work forever." He referred to George Munro, who was a bookkeeper for the house. The original partners had by that time been reduced in number by the withdrawal of Irwin P. Beadle, leaving in the concern Erastus F. Beadle and Robert Adams. Less than a year after Beadle passed this judgment, Munro stepped out, hunted up Irwin P. Beadle, and the two began publishing Munro's "Ten Cent Novels." That was in 1866. With the Munro competition began the decline and fall of the house of Beadle.
Munro's novels won a large patronage from the start, and in connection with these he drifted into other fields of publication, establishing the Fireside Companion in 1867, and beginning the "Seaside Library" in 1877. The latter contained the work of many foreign writers of ability. At the time of his death in 1896 Munro had amassed a fortune of ten million dollars.
Beadle's pocket-form publications were changed into the large folio page "Beadle's Dime Library" in 1876, and the name Beadle and Adams still figures on dime and half-dime publications issued by N. J. Ivers and Company, New York. But the glory of the house of Beadle vanished when the pocket-form tales passed on.
| "The Dime Novel in American Life" | |