Lippard was not alone. The stereotypical image of the Victorian American is that of a comically uptight prude who cannot tolerate even a hint of sexuality. In fact, however, pornographic popular fiction was avidly consumed by dime-novel readers. (Of course, prudery and lechery can be seen as two sides of the same sexual coin, but at the very least, the prevailing view does not suggest the dynamic element of Victorian sexual tensions.) One of the most popular erotic writers was George Thompson, author of works with titillating titles like The Gay Girls of New York and Fanny Greeley: or, Confessions of a Free Love Sister (both 1853). In these novels, as in such other works as George Foster’s New York by Gaslight (1850) and Ned Buntline’s The G’hals of New York (1850), homosexuality, group sex, child pornography, and sadomasochism were vividly evoked or openly described. Much of this writing catered to male fantasies, although it should be noted that Thompson and Lippard also depicted women with strong sexual drives, which made their work more textured, even if such characters can also be seen as a form of male fantasy. Many of these writers defended their work on the grounds that they were reformers trying to root out moral corruption. But like the reformers from whom they borrowed their rhetoric and imagery—the most ardent Washingtonians were those most likely to lapse back into drinking—they protested too much.63
Cheap fiction was not solely for, by, or about men. One of the most prolific and beloved novelists of the mid-nineteenth century was E.D.E.N. South-worth, the so-called queen of American novelists, who overcame early poverty to become an enormously successful writer for Bonner’s Ledger. Southworth’s serialized novels, later published in book form, featured strong heroines who performed daring exploits, sometimes by disguising themselves as men. For instance, in The Hidden Hand (1859), Southworth’s most popular novel, her protagonist Capitola dons the garb of a newsboy to support herself and evade grasping men. How He Won Her (1868; originally serialized as Britomarte, or The Man-Hater), features a woman who cross-dresses as a Union soldier in order to fight alongside her lover in the Civil War and then rises through the ranks on the strength of her bravery under fire. Southworth’s protagonists often settled down to conventional marriages, but not before they provided both escapism and imaginative possibilities for male and female factory workers caught in the grip of increasingly grim industrial conditions. After the Civil War, these conditions themselves became the topics of dime-novel fiction.64
Southworth is an important figure in antebellum literary history because her audience overlapped with that of the so-called “sentimental novelists” (as they were then known), or “domestic novelists” or “literary domestics” (as they are now known), who occupied a prominent place on the cultural landscape. These writers had a largely middle-class orientation, but their writing affected the racial and gender dynamics of the period and therefore bear examination. To do so, however, it is necessary to place them in the context of the standard literary history of the period.
As noted at the end of Chapter 1, fiction in the United States was poised for takeoff in the early nineteenth century. New forms of production and distribution, a rapidly growing population, and a rising literacy rate created large new audiences for novels and new ways for authors to provide these novels.
It should be noted, however, that there was not necessarily a direct connection between a growing number of books and a growing number of readers; nor did a national print culture evolve in a straightforward way. In the Northeast, for example, the coming of the railroads brought about a centralization of the publishing industry, which increasingly focused on New York; but in the Midwest, where the literary infrastructure was less developed, publishing became decentralized. This meant, for instance, that a novel needed to sell far fewer copies in the less-literate South to have a major regional (or even national) impact than in the North. It also meant that a novel with a large number of Northern readers would be perceived as national even when it was regional.65
Nationally, British novelists remained popular throughout the century. Charles Dickens was probably the most widely read, but Sir Walter Scott’s medieval romances were embraced, especially among well-to-do Southern whites who fancied their plantations as latter-day Camelots. Indeed, Scott spawned a host of imitators dedicated to portraying the beneficence of the slave system, and in the process helped found the myth of the “happy darky” that would persist straight through to Gone with the Wind a century later. Mark Twain would later dub this tendency “Sir Walter’s Disease.”66
Beginning in about 1820, a growing number of writers were able to make a living from their art. One of the most important was Washington Irving. Irving began his career as a New York humorist, part of a circle of writers known as the “Knickerbocker Group,” a name that evoked the city’s Dutch origins. He became famous on the strength of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), a collection of essays and stories that included his classic tales “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The former, about a man who falls asleep for twenty years, and the latter, a Gothic horror story, were both based on German sources but evince characteristically American preoccupations with country bumpkins, the decline of the republic, and the supernatural. Together with Brown, Irving paved the way for Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, often cited as the first mystery writer, was also known for his horror tales and the supernatural: his long poem “The Raven” (1845) won him critical as well as commercial success. Poe was moody and probably mentally ill, and his melodramatic life and premature death made him something of a celebrity.67
The other writer who received much attention, in this period and ever since, was James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper first came to prominence with The Spy (1821), a novel about the American Revolution. But he was best known for what came to be called his “Leatherstocking” tales, a series of novels about an eighteenth-century frontiersman that included The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), and The Deerslayer (1841). Much of Cooper’s work focused on relations with Indians, especially Leatherstocking’s loyal sidekick Chingachgook, and were written in the tragic mode characteristic of such dramas as Metamora. However, his Indians were relatively textured: good and evil, resilient and vulnerable, they were handled with more sympathy than were the urban and poor whites whom he regarded with increasing condescension and contempt. Nominally a Democrat, by the end of his life Cooper was an avowed elitist.68
The most popular work about Native Americans, however, was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” a long epic poem that peddled the usual stereotypes. Longfellow was considered a literary giant in his time, although his stock has dropped sharply ever since. By and large, however, formal poetry was not a major form of popular culture for working people, although comic verse was a fixture of the performing arts. But Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn journalist and author of the temperance novel Franklin Evans (1842), synthesized a number of strands of antebellum vernacular language into Leaves of Grass (1855), one of the great artistic expressions of democratic sensibility in the nineteenth century. Leaves of Grass went through numerous revisions before the final edition of 1892, by which time Whitman had become an American icon.69
For most of the twentieth century, writers like Irving, Cooper, Longfellow, and Whitman (as well as Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, and a handful of others) were the focus of historians and critics of the literary culture of the nineteenth century. Dime novels were either ignored or treated as the dross these authors had struggled to rise above, rather than as an important source of rhetorical and thematic inspiration. And perhaps the most scorned were the women writers, even though they dominated the literary scene and wrote the most popular works. In 1855,