The first step in the creation of popular culture on these shores, however, was the establishment of printing presses. The future growth of this industry was important not only for reading materials, but also for products like sheet music, lithography, and photography, which would allow the unprecedented diffusion of artistic production across geographic, racial, and class lines. In general, the dissemination of these materials did not become widespread until well into the nineteenth century. I mention them here so that they can be kept in mind as I discuss the literary dimensions of popular culture.
The first printing press in the colonies was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638.5 Given the religious imperatives of radical Protestantism, where individual effort might at least signal future salvation, it is not surprising to learn that Cambridge-Boston was the publishing capital of the colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that New England’s literary output outstripped that of the mid-Atlantic states and the South. (Georgia was apparently the last state in the colonies to establish a press, in 1763, suggesting just how long it took for publishing to diffuse throughout the colonies.6)
Nor is it surprising to learn that one of the most popular works in the colonial era had a religious orientation. In 1640, the Cambridge press published a quarto, or sheets of paper cut four ways and bound into a booklet, of 148 pages. Originally called The Whole Book of Psalms—and later to be known as the Bay Psalm Book—the volume was a collection of translations from Hebrew to English with some commentary by Richard Mather (forefather of the famous New England family that included Increase and Cotton). The first printing of 1,700 copies sold out. Since there were only about 3,500 white families in northern New England at the time, many of whom disliked the pieties of the Puritans in Boston, it seems likely that many were sold abroad. Wherever they went, by the end of the eighteenth century there were fifty-one editions of the Bay Psalm Book available in New England and Great Britain. For these reasons, it seems plausible to call it the first American bestseller.7
Despite its creation in an urban setting, the role of immigration in dictating the need for it, and the use of modern technology for its production, however, there are two reasons why we might have reservations about calling early versions of the Bay Psalm Book popular culture. Both are class-related. First, books were very costly commodities in the colonies, widely available only to the wealthy. Second, they had little value to poor and working people who could not read, which included most non-white males (and maybe even the majority of white men as well) in the colonies before the Revolution.8
By 1750, the first of these issues had been partially overcome by journalism: almanacs, newspapers, and magazines. While religious life remained a powerful cultural force throughout the Western world in the seventeenth century—nowhere was this more true than in New England—an early demand for practical, secular knowledge was evident. In fact, the Cambridge press had published An Almanack for the Year 1639 before the Bay Psalm Book. Almanacs, which included data on the weather and other information of use to farmers, were peppered with jokes, sayings, and political opinions. The most famous of these was Poor Richard’s Almanack, published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin from 1733 to 1757. By the time he died in 1790, Franklin had completed a transformation from a poor boy in Boston to one of the most cosmopolitan men in the world, and the last edition of the almanac, which reflects his more genteel side, was published to widespread acclaim in France in 1776; it has decisively shaped popular perceptions of his persona ever since. The earlier editions, spiced with pungently colloquialized versions of dated epigrams (in the 1736 Almanac the English proverb “God restoreth health and the physician hath the thanks” became “God heals and the doctor takes the fee”), have a more democratic, class-conscious edge. Cheaper than most imported or domestically published books, Poor Richard sold 10,000 copies a year—or one copy for every one hundred people in the colonies—making it the most popular reading material other than the Bible. As one of Franklin’s more recent biographers notes, “Poor Richard had special flavor and was the foundation of a popular American culture.”9
One might expect newspaper publishing in the colonies to have preceded either books or almanacs, but in fact newspapers did not appear until a half-century later, leaving news-hungry colonists to rely on the English press or widely circulated personal correspondence. Besides the absence of an obvious market, the primary reason was political: printers could not risk the loss of property, or worse, should they publish material that offended local or English officials. The fate of the first newspaper is highly revealing in this regard. Published on September 25, 1690, Boston’s presumably monthly Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick was suppressed four days later by the colonial government, which issued a statement saying the paper did not have permission to operate. It was not until 1704 that the more cautious Boston Gazette became the first paper to survive more than one issue. Its price was sufficiently high that the famed Judge Samuel Sewall would give copies as gifts to the women he visited. Although newspapers were almost certainly passed around and read by those who could not afford subscriptions, it was not until the next century that it became possible to speak of a mass press that catered to working-class interests.10
Then there were magazines. An even more difficult proposition than newspapers, magazines were not indigenously produced until 1741, when Franklin published American Magazine and his rival Andrew Bradford launched A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Plantations of America, both in Philadelphia. A steady magazine industry did not take off until after the Revolution, and not until the mid-nineteenth century was there a flourishing periodical culture. Yet like newspapers, magazines reached far beyond urban elites. One study of New-York Magazine, a moderately sized monthly that counted George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay as readers, found that a significant percentage of the 370 subscribers in 1790 were shopkeepers and artisans—members of professions that had begun (or would soon begin) to experience proletarianization as a result of industrialization. Cartmen, laborers, and mariners also subscribed—a subscription cost $2.25 a year, at a time when the average workingman’s daily wage was $.50. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of wide readership concerns women, for while there were only seven who subscribed in their own names, there were numerous articles about or even specifically directed at women (such as “On the Choice of a Husband”), which indicated a wider readership.11
The most popular form of reading material for poor and working people was the chapbook. The term “chapbook” did not come into general use until the nineteenth century, and these small, inexpensive books—pamphlets, really—at first went by a variety of names: “small books,” “chapman’s books,” or “small histories.” They were usually between sixteen and thirty-two pages, and were illustrated with simple woodcuts. Most were imported from England, and since they didn’t go out of date, like almanacs, they were profitable for the publisher. Paper shortages made chapbooks difficult to manufacture in the colonies, although they were sometimes published on the backs of sheets recovered from pirated Spanish ships, or on paper made from old rags. Ironically, their very availability then makes them very rare today. They were so commonplace that few people bothered to preserve them, and so cheaply made that the vast majority were, in the words of one scholar, “read to pieces.” Most evidence of their popularity comes from accounting records, advertisements, and other retailers’ documents.12
The subjects of chapbooks ranged from religious instruction to light entertainment. The reputedly factual story of Dick Whittington, a poor English boy who moved from rags to riches in medieval London, was widely read in the colonies and was a forerunner of Horatio Alger tales. But