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Between 1820 and 1870 a new kind of culture was forming in America. For simplicity's sake, scholars often speak of the outcome of this transformation as the creation of America's literary marketplace—a gradual yet sweeping change that saw the printed matter of books, magazines, and newspapers displace local networks of oral communication and thereby become the nation's essential means of mass communication and its dominant source of cultural activity. It is true, as Cathy Davidson and others have demonstrated, that this new culture first began to take shape during the decades immediately following the American Revolution, when there were dramatic increases in levels of popular literacy and education, as well as in the sheer number of books available for circulation. Yet books and more widespread popular literacy, while necessary for the development of the mid-nineteenth-century American literary marketplace, were not sufficient causes for that development.

INNOVATIONS IN THE BOOK TRADE

In the early nineteenth century, technological innovations such as the cylinder rotary press, stereotyping, and electrotyping sped up the printing process by mechanizing operations that previously had been performed by hand, thereby allowing for the production of books at lower prices and in larger editions than ever before. In 1855 one prominent American publisher estimated that an average of fifty-two books had been published annually in the United States between 1830 and 1842. By contrast, in 1853, the year before Henry David Thoreau's (1817–1862) Walden appeared, 733 works had been printed—an increase of 800 percent in less than twenty years. The growth in numbers printed in first editions of mid-nineteenth-century books was greater still: initial press runs of 10,000 were not uncommon by the mid-century, and some first editions went as high as 100,000 copies.

Together with this dramatic increase in the overall supply of books, publishers began to market a variety of new kinds of books. Some designed volumes intended to add prestige to the mere possession of a book. The antebellum period was the heyday of richly bound ornamental books known as literary annuals (compendiums of excerpts taken from already published books of poetry and prose) and "gift books" (collections of various kinds of articles, fictional forms and poetry). Other publishers began the practice of printing individual books in series that were designed to popularize the latest literary products and scientific discoveries of the day. Among the most successful of these was the Family Library produced from 1830 on by J. & J. Harper, with titles that included biographies, histories, natural science books, and travel literature. The New York publishing house of Wiley and Putnam also made use of the series format in its efforts to promote an indigenous high literary culture. In 1845 under the editorship of Evert Duyckinck (1816–1878), it launched the Library of American Books, which was brought out in parallel with the Library of Choice Reading an already successful series of well-established English classics.

Ticknor and Fields, however, was the publisher that during the 1850s and 1860s brought Duyckinck's project to fruition and in the process became the first great publisher-patron of American authors. Under the leadership of James T. Fields (1817–1881), the Boston publishing house not only built a stronger list than Wiley and Putnam—by 1860 its writers included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Thoreau—it also pioneered new ways of marketing American literature. Fields began the practice of advertising beyond local markets. He also used a nationwide network of friendly ties with editors of newspapers and magazines in which he advertised his books to prompt favorable reviews, in some cases even publishing reviews he had written himself.

MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS

The historical emergence of the American literary marketplace during the mid-nineteenth century can also be traced by examining data on the growth of magazines and newspapers. The periodical press came into its own between 1820 and 1870. In 1825 there had been fewer than 125 American magazines; by 1870 there were somewhat more than 1,200. Most of these new periodicals appealed to local or special interests. The early decades of the nineteenth century were prolific in the founding of religious magazines and weekly newspapers, and as late as 1850 religious periodicals still outnumbered the new genre of popular literary magazines. None of them, however, ever managed to attain the national circulation and influence of their secular counterparts, which in time came to constitute an eclectic literary genre with contents that included fiction and verse, biographical and historical essays, and travel sketches and illustrations. By the end of the 1850s, leading monthlies such as Godey's Lady's Book (1830–1898), Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine (1842–1898), and Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1850–) all claimed to have more than 100,000 paid subscribers. The circulation of other more short-lived ventures such as Graham's Magazine (1841–1858), Putnam's Monthly Magazine (1853–1870), the United States Magazine and Democratic Review (1837–1859), and Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art (1847–1852) was also substantial, ranging from 20,000 to 70,000.

The commercial success of these new American literary magazines also served to raise the rates at which well-known writers were paid for their articles. During the 1840s Graham's and Godey's were the leaders in increasing payments for magazine writing, with rates ranging from four to twelve dollars a page for prose, and ten to fifty dollars a poem. Putnam's normal price of three dollars per page was probably the average among other general literary periodicals. Rates leveled off during the 1850s, but by the end of that decade the standard set by the Atlantic Monthly—six dollars a page—compared favorably to that of leading British literary magazines.

Perhaps most important and spectacular of all the developments that signaled the emergence of the literary marketplace, however, was the proliferation of daily and weekly newspapers, which quickly came to be seen as uniquely powerful American institutions. Emerson called newspapers the nation's "second breakfast." American newspapers almost tripled in number—from 1,200 to 3,000—during the 1840s and 1850s, and came to exist in far greater variety and numbers than in any European country at the time. With newspaper postage fixed by law at one cent per copy up to one hundred miles, and after 1845 free up to thirty miles, newspapers came to make up 90 percent of the mail while providing only one-ninth of postal revenues. Almost every American town of moderate size had a daily paper. Most large cities had several, and even remote frontier settlements issued their own weeklies. The majority of dailies had circulations of a few thousand, and the great mass of weeklies only a few hundred.

During the 1840s, however, a new generation of "penny press" newspapers based in northern cities acquired dramatic increases in circulation, which in turn gave them increasingly prominent roles in shaping cultural and political attitudes in their local communities. Horace Greeley's (1811–1872) New York Tribune remains the best known of these newspapers. Thanks to the success of a weekly edition designed for national circulation, it also established itself as America's largest and most influential newspaper. Yet the daily edition of Greeley's newspaper, which had a circulation of 77,000 at the end of 1860, had several powerful rivals in its ability to influence local opinion. In 1860 in New York, the Herald also claimed a circulation of 77,000, and the Sun 59,000; both the Boston Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer averaged 65,000 in 1862. Although such numbers hardly signaled that nineteenth-century newspapers were seen as reliable agents of public information, they do describe the most palpable change in the reading matter of ordinary Americans as the nation moved gradually from an era of scarcity to that of abundance.

As with books, the dramatic increase in the overall supply of magazines and newspapers brought with it a rich and diverse bill of fare that added to the glut of printed information. Some periodicals were themselves little more than books in disguise, providing anthologies of various kinds of articles and fiction. The absence of an international copyright law also allowed for the pirated reprinting of articles from leading British and French magazines, and periodicals such as Littell's Living Age (1844–1941) and The Eclectic Magazine (1844–1907) for several decades earned their livelihood from this practice. Notices and reviews of books were ubiquitous, and the steady growth in the size of magazines was attributable, in part, to efforts their editors made to keep track of what many perceived as an ongoing bibliographical deluge.

The vast majority of antebellum newspapers were mouthpieces of political parties, but when the electioneering season ended, they also provided an extraordinary variety of information. Together with reports on local, national, and international news, newspapers printed compilations of agricultural and commercial data and reports on recent developments in science. Their pages also included advertisements for new products and new business opportunities and at the same time provided the publicity that oiled the new national lecture system of the 1840s and 1850s. In fact, as Donald Scott has shown, newspapers helped to make lectures significant cultural events by printing advertisements about which speakers were lecturing where and when, as well as stories about particular lectures, and editorials proclaiming the importance of the lecture as a new cultural institution. Some key metropolitan newspapers, especially the New York Tribune and the Boston Herald, also played central roles in nationalizing the reputations of leading figures in the popular lecture circuit—a group that included Emerson and, from time to time, Thoreau.

FROM ORAL TO PRINT CULTURE

All this is now well known to specialists when they consider changes in the literary culture of nineteenth-century America. Yet the question of how this unprecedented abundance of print altered the working of that culture has been posed and approached in different ways. Literary historians usually argue that the most striking development during this period was an unprecedented growth in the production and consumption of novels. The numbers that appear to support this view are striking. During the 1820s, 128 American novels were published, a figure that was almost 40 more than had been published in the previous fifty years, and five times the number published during the previous decade—and yet more than double that number appeared in the 1830s; and the total more than doubled again in the 1840s, to nearly 800. In 1826 James Fenimore Cooper's (1789–1851) The Last of the Mohicans qualified as a best-seller with 5,750 copies in circulation. In contrast, between 1846 and 1851, George Lippard's (1822–1854) The Quaker City sold some 210,000 copies, making it the country's best-selling novel before the appearance of Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–1896) Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. In that year alone, the sales of Stowe's antislavery saga outdid Lippard's earlier aggregate figure, and estimates of total copies purchased before the Civil War range as high as 5 million. While no other antebellum novel even approached these figures, there were several others that enjoyed remarkable commercial success during the 1850s—particularly Fanny Fern's (Sara Payson Willis Parton, 1811–1872) Ruth Hall (1855), logging sales of 55,000, and Maria S. Cummins's (1827–1866) The Lamplighter (1854), surpassing 40,000 within eight weeks.

Regardless of whether America gained or suffered from this unprecedented growth of popular interest in fiction, it is important to observe that most scholars who concentrate their efforts on interpreting mid-nineteenth-century fiction appear to be guided by two closely related assumptions. The first is that the three decades prior to the Civil War should be seen as a time when a dramatic increase in the productive power of American publishing served to make book publishing into a major industry that catered to the demands of a new mass reading public. The other is that in this new setting, where the preferences of a mass readership supposedly came to govern the workings of the literary marketplace, all writers of poetry and prose now were compelled to come to terms with an altogether new culture in which literature had been reduced to the status of a commodity, and where success for writers now meant appealing to an anonymous, distant, and unknown audience. These assumptions have served to support the familiar view that during the middle decades of the nineteenth century the emergence of the literary marketplace served to open the split between "mass" and "high" culture.

A number of cultural historians have called this approach into question for various reasons and thereby laid the groundwork for somewhat different approaches. One group, led by Donald Scott, retains the view that print did indeed become the central force for change in antebellum culture, but he argues that the dynamics of America's emerging literary marketplace cannot be understood in isolation from forms of oral communication that continued to characterize the culture of both elite and ordinary Americans. Scott has shown that the spread of the popular lecture system was one of the most important by-products of the new world of print, since many of its prominent figures included editors, journalists, and writers. Not surprisingly, the most frequent topics of discussion within lyceums—biography, history, natural science, and travel—also mirrored those found in books, magazines, and newspapers. But the national lecture system was at the same time an institution that helped to sort out and assimilate the huge supply of facts and opinions created by a new culture of abundant print. And in this respect, Scott has argued persuasively, the lecture system itself, during its heyday—which included the years immediately following the Civil War—was perhaps America's first truly national cultural marketplace.

Other historians have followed Scott in stressing that oratory was as ubiquitous as print, although they speak of its practical implications in slightly different terms. Lawrence Levine has argued, for instance, that the frequent and prominent staging of Shakespeare's plays during the decades before the Civil War reveals the existence of a "shared public culture" in which the spoken word remained a central part of American life, and in which Shakespeare thus had little difficulty finding a central place. Equally important, the enormous popularity of Shakespeare's drama also brings into question the practice of seeing mid-nineteenth-century culture on a vertical plane that can be neatly divided into a hierarchy of inclusive adjectival categories such as "high," "low," "pop," "mass," "folk," and the like. The continuing use of such terms, Levine argues convincingly, only serves to obscure the dynamic complexity of American culture during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Richard Brown has shown that the cultural interests of America were large and diverse in ways that our standard literary histories have tended to underestimate. Yet where Levine sees the continuing existence of a "shared popular culture," Brown argues that in a society where both print and public speech were ubiquitous, a comprehensive culture became ever more remote and eventually no longer an ideal. By the start of the Civil War, he observes, America had gone from being a society in which public information had been scarce—and largely under the control of the learned and wealthy few—to one in which a new abundance of public information found its way to a diverse variety of consumers by way of specialized printing, public speech, and specialized information. Patterns of information diffusion that before the mid-nineteenth century had reinforced cultural cohesion now became the foundation of cultural fragmentation and diversity.

Perhaps most significant of all, the familiar view that improvements in the technology of publishing quickly served to put books within the physical and financial reach of ordinary Americans also is not holding up under close empirical investigation. There can be no question that the long-term trend was a steady increase in the number of book titles and especially of novels. Yet the numbers themselves, while suggesting that writing books for publication became increasingly common, do not support the view that, before the mid-1850s at the earliest, the reading habits of America's extraordinarily literate public ought to be understood primarily in terms of the books they bought. At the outset, the dramatic increase in the number of books available was not accompanied by a comparable increase in the velocity and extent of their circulation. Although subscription libraries and reading societies certainly grew in numbers, most Americans could not as yet afford to join them. Books also remained very diffi-cult to distribute for sale before 1850, when railroads first began to link up different regions of the country and provide northern publishing houses with access to the American interior. Before the mid-century, only the Bible—not surprisingly, the first book printed with stereotyped plates in America—was nationally distributed, thanks to the efforts of the American Bible Society's traveling agents and local auxiliaries.

Robert Gross has shown that the problems involved in creating a national marketplace for books were political as well as economic and geographic. While the Postal Act of 1790 allowed American newspapers to circulate throughout the country at cheap rates (with editors exchanging papers for free), it also banned books from mailbags. Beginning in July 1839 books did for a time move through the mail in great quantities, aided by enterprising papers such as Brother Jonathan (1839–1843) and New World (1839–1844), which seized upon a loophole in the postal laws to issue pirated reprintings of popular British novels in huge "story-paper" formats. But America's first paperback revolution not only turned out to be relatively short-lived—in April 1843 the Post Office changed its policy and began charging book postage on cheap reprints—it also did considerable economic damage to both American book publishers and writers at the time it occurred. The Post Office's new ruling eventually served to kill off the leading serial reprinters but not before a widespread competition in cheap reprints had led to price-cutting that glutted the market and severely reduced revenues of regular publishers who also had brought out cheap reprints of their own. In 1843 retail prices of books were driven so low that it became extremely difficult for publishers to make money off the sales of new books by American authors, and it was not until the late 1840s that prices again rose to levels where some profits were possible.

Dealing in books remained risky for yet another reason. For example, something of an Anglo-American market for books came into existence during the first half of the nineteenth century, with many leading American publishers then establishing their own agents in London. Yet here too distribution costs were often discouragingly expensive. Mail service was not only costly but also notoriously slow and unreliable. High exchange rates also meant that imported British books sometimes became too expensive for the American market, and freight and duty charges only added further to the cost of books. Perhaps most damaging of all, however, was the absence of an international copyright law. This not only made it difficult for publishers and writers to benefit financially from even modestly successful ventures, it made the practice of literary piracy commonplace on both sides of the Atlantic until the passage of the International Copyright Law in 1891.

Finally, Ronald J. Zboray has pieced together a somewhat different pattern of evidence to argue against the notion that books—with only a few well-known exceptions—ever became the object of mass consumption before the Civil War. Despite the glowing accounts of growth in production and readership provided by antebellum American publishers, the earliest innovations in nineteenth-century print technology served to create new markets for books whose lavish illustrations and elaborate bindings made them luxury items well beyond the reach of most Americans. Technological innovations and the expansion of the book market did cut the average price of hardcover books to between $0.75 and $1.25—which was roughly half the cost in the late eighteenth century. (The first editions of both sets of Emerson's Essays and of Thoreau's Walden were priced at $1.00.) However, as Zboray has pointed out, in an economic setting where skilled white male workers made only about a dollar a day, and white women workers usually only a quarter of that, the one-dollar price of most books represented a full one-sixth of a male's weekly wages and well over half of the woman's wages, equivalent today to anywhere between fifty and one hundred dollars. It also is worth noting here that most of the "story-papers" of the early 1840s appear to have stood out of the reach of ordinary Americans. Only a handful of these papers sold for as low as twelve-and-a-half cents; the most common price was fifty cents. Moreover, while it may be reasonable to consider these supplements as "mass-market" items in their own time, publishers could make a profit on a sale of five thousand copies, and even the most successful issues of the story-papers rarely sold more than thirty thousand.

Finally, and perhaps most important, those few books that could be bought cheaply by Americans during the 1840s and 1850s typically were novels by French and British authors, whose writings were as yet unprotected by an international copyright law, and whose popularity revealed America's continuing cultural dependency. By contrast, few American novels appeared in very inexpensive editions before the mid-1850s, and the continuing high prices for American-authored books suggests that technological innovations in printing had yet to bring American literature to the masses in book form.

AN OPEN AND PLURALISTIC CULTURE

All this scholarship has deepened our understanding of the workings of American culture between 1820 and 1870. Yet it also has made it difficult to find a straightforward historical generalization that captures all the diverse and sometimes contradictory developments that characterized American culture during these decades. In the end, then, it may be somewhat misleading to speak of the American literary marketplace. Research has not revealed the existence of a single literary marketplace in which professional writers for the first time came to confront a new mass audience of readers. Rather, an open and pluralistic culture emerged in which the new forms of print remained closely bound up with other more traditional forms of cultural activity and sought to gain attention of diverse audiences of individuals who still wanted to look and hear, as well as to read.

One should keep in mind, too, that other cultural entrepreneurs, operating out of the same urban centers where editors and publishers presided over the world of print, took advantage of new technologies and the general rise of personal wealth to expand the production and consumption of the fine arts, music, and theater. Joined with the huge amount and variety of fact and opinion available in print, this babble of voices that competed to instruct and entertain nineteenth-century Americans served to create what Donald Scott has described aptly as "a vast cultural bazaar" ("Print and the Public Lecture System," p. 292).

To say all this is not to ignore the fact that the evidence still points toward a fundamental transformation from an oral to a print culture. This transition must at the same time be described as a historical change that was still in the early stages of development in 1870, and in which the creation of mass culture remained only one among many possible outcomes. Viewed from this angle, it also seems fair to say that while the assertion that mid-nineteenth-century America was a nation of novel readers correctly describes the aspirations of novelists and their publishers, it does not serve as an accurate description of the dominant cultural activity that took place during this period. There was no one dominant activity.

See also Book Publishing; Gift Books and Annuals; Literacy; Periodicals; Publishers

Richard F. Teichgraeber III