SOURCE: Nissen, Axel. “Lord of Romance: Bret Harte's Later Career Reconsidered.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 29, no. 3 (spring 1997): 64-81.

[In the following excerpt, Nissen reevaluates the later stages of Harte's literary career.]

I see no limit to the future in art of a country which has already given us Emerson, that master of moods, and those two lords of romance, Poe and Bret Harte.

—Oscar Wilde to A. P. T. Elder, 1885

I

Nothing is more indicative of the condescending attitude taken by most biographers and critics toward the last quarter century of Bret Harte's writing career than the titles of the chapters dealing with these years. George R. Stewart entitles one of the later chapters of his biography “Grub Street De Luxe.” In the popular biography written by Richard O'Conner in 1966, two of the chapters dealing with Harte's years in England are headed “A New Resident in Grub Street” and “The Drudge of Lancaster Gate.” Even Patrick Morrow in his scholarly monograph from 1979 on Harte as a literary critic calls the chapter devoted to Harte's European years “A Passe [sic] Man of Letters.”¹

The most persistent misconceptions about Harte's later literary career are incarnated in the image of the drudge, someone who does hard uninteresting work for little money. In the chapter mentioned above, Stewart speaks of Harte as “the overworked factory-slave, wearily pushing the instrument of his servitude, a pen.” Margaret Duckett refers with uncharacteristic imprecision to Harte's “thirty years of drudgery.” Morrow perpetuates the myth by writing that “Harte lived out the rest of his days in a kind of velvet-lined prison” and referring to his “impoverished but genteel existence” in England.²

My argument is basically twofold: 1) That Bret Harte's later literary career must be considered on the basis of Victorian standards of success, and 2) that if we are unable to make informed aesthetic judgements about Harte's later works, his stories must first be placed in their proper generic and historical context. A closer examination of the actual material and historical circumstances of Harte's later life and writing will show that he by no stretch of fact or fancy can be termed a drudge, a resident of Grub Street or passé. The many new sources that have come to light since George Stewart wrote his biography in the late 1920s show that there is no factual basis for representing Harte's later literary career as a period of failure and frustration. …

In proposing that we consider Harte's later career on the basis of Victorian standards of success, that is in terms of fame, popularity and income, I differ from previous biographers and literary historians who have assessed Harte's later career on the basis of modern aesthetic criteria. These analysts of the work of Harte's last quarter-century make the same error. In an anachronistic move, they conclude that because Harte's later stories are no longer read and do not conform to the academy's ruling ideal of what makes a text interesting, Harte's later life becomes a story of declining powers, an ever decreasing readership and economic hardship. George Stewart, author of the only full-length scholarly biography of Harte to date, must carry the major responsibility for this ahistorical mixture of biography and criticism. He writes of Harte: “He was a Grub-Street hack. It was Grub Street de luxe, perhaps; it generously allowed him evening clothes, a club or two, and some amenities of life. But well as [A. P.] Watt [Harte's agent] might conceal the fact, Harte had no illusions; he knew himself the slave of his pen.”³ There is ample evidence that Harte thought himself the slave of his pen, but as my discussion will show, for nearly a quarter of a century he was in fact paid very much for writing very little. Stewart's biography is marred by too heavy a dependence on the point of view of its subject (particularly as expressed in Harte's letters to his wife in America). Stewart reasons along the lines that if Harte says he feels like a drudge, then he is in fact a drudge.

One need do no more than to read George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) or Nigel Cross's The Common Writer (1988)—a fictional and historical approach to the same literary landscape—to realize how arduous and unrewarding it could be to be a writer in the late nineteenth century. It is blatantly unhistorical, not to say a mockery of the men and women literally starving in garrets, to call Harte a drudge. To the minds of the thousands of writers trying to scrape together a meager living by the efforts of their pens, Bret Harte lived in a world about as far removed from Grub Street as Lapland is from Papua, New Guinea. It would be much closer to the truth to say that his later literary career was an unmitigated success: he was more popular than ever, his stories continued to be well received and the financial rewards of his writing were greater than they had ever been before.

II

In his widely circulated guide to aspiring authors, The Pen and the Book (1899), Walter Besant estimated that there were only sixty to seventy authors on both sides of the Atlantic “whose incomes reach the four figures” (that is, of course, in pounds).⁴ The census of 1891 showed 5,800 authors, editors and journalists resident in England and Wales alone and Besant estimated that when the part-timers were included the real number of people writing one thing or another was closer to twenty thousand.⁵ During his years abroad, Harte's income places him squarely in the select company of the four-digit earners. As the tables at the end of the essay indicate, during the twenty years when Harte was fully active as an author in England, he earned at least ＄175,000.⁶ This sum averages out to ＄8,750 or £1,750 a year. In England, a literary journalist was fortunate if he earned ＄1,500 a year during this period.⁷

In the spring of 1882, as he was about to embark on the twenty most productive and remunerative years of his literary career, Bret Harte wrote to his wife:

I am only too thankful to be able to still keep the ear of the public in my old way. For, in spite of all the envious sneers and wicked prophecies that follow me, I find I still hold my old audience and that the publishers are quite ready for me when I have anything ready for them. It is quite wonderful also what a large and growing audience I have all over the Continent; anything I write is instantly translated. I should be, indeed, content if it were not that play-writing is so vastly more profitable, and that, with all my popularity as a romancier, I fear I could not more than make a scanty living.⁸

Had he written the letter at the end of the year, his dire predictions about the “scanty living” of a popular romancer might have been somewhat different. He sold the short romance “Flip” for a total of ＄2,350 or ＄152/1000 words. In addition, he got ＄1,025 for the volume rights.⁹ Together with the two other romances of similar length he wrote in 1882, his total income from his literary labors that year was ＄6,210. At his regular rate of six hundred words per day, these three stories were the work of a little over two months.

The run of Harte's career during the twenty years from 1882 to 1902 was very smooth. In 1885, while he was busy writing his Spanish-Californian romance “Maruja,” Harte wrote to his wife that he did not know how long his popularity would last and he had to make the most of it.¹⁰ Yet by this time, he had found his niche in the literary marketplace and for the next dozen years the demand for his California romances would be remarkably steady. The spring of 1886 was the first time in six years in which he was working on a story which was not pre-sold and he was convinced that if he could hold out the buyers would eventually come to his terms.¹¹ He finally sold the story “Devil's Ford” to a newspaper syndicate for ＄1,850 or nearly ＄80/1000 words.¹²

During his first nine years in Europe, Harte published 23 stories of between 3,800 and 40,000 words. Then in 1887, he wrote the longest story of his later career, the 70,000-word “Crusade of the Excelsior.” This lengthy and involved romance inaugurated a ten-year period when he wrote more or less one romance of 45,000 words or more a year, in addition to briefer romances and short stories. His total output during the period 1887-97 was sixty-five stories, nearly half between five and fifteen thousand words. In 1888, he had some trouble obtaining his usual prices,¹³ so he wrote a little less than usual that year (about 60,000 words) and yet he still managed to earn more than ＄8,000 from the sale of three stories. Harte worked on resolutely until he experienced another slight slump in 1897. That year he wrote some poems and an essay and restricted his fiction-writing to seven short stories of between four and eleven thousand words. His income was undiminished, amounting to ＄10,000. “Alas!” he wrote to Anna, “it would not be strange if, after these years, people should not be quite as keen to buy or read Bret Harte's stuff as ten or twenty years ago!”¹⁴

1897, the year he published his last long romance “Three Partners,” marked a period of transition from writing romances to concentrating on the short story. If both public (and author) had tired of Bret Harte's romances, they were quite as keen to read his short stories as ten or twenty years before. Short stories—under 10,000 words and always published in one installment in magazines if not in newspapers—had become an increasingly dominant part of Harte's oeuvre from 1891 onward. From 1898 to 1902, due to increasing ill health which made the strain of more sustained efforts too great and a gradual decline in the popularity of the romance, he published practically no stories of more than 15,000 words. Instead, he published no less than forty-three short stories out of a total of fifty-two stories. To maintain the same level of income during the last four years of his long career, he increased the number of stories he wrote each year. While until 1890, he had published on average only three stories a year, afterwards he published an average of eight stories a year, reaching a peak with fifteen published stories in 1901. The average length of his stories declined steadily from 26,000 words in 1885, to 7,000 words in 1901.

III

At the close of 1885, Harte wrote to a German friend, Clara Schneider, that he was making more money than ever.¹⁵ He had written about 103,000 words that year, which was nearly four times as many as in 1884. At a rate of about 600 words per day, it still meant he was only writing 172 days out of the year. In 1886, the year he began “The Crusade of the Excelsior,” his total output was about 90,000 words and he claimed for the first time in his life to be writing nearly 1,000 words a day.¹⁶ That makes for only ninety days spent writing—three months of the year. In 1892, when Harte was working on the 50,000-word romance “Susy,” he complained to Clara Schneider that he was “chained to the oar” like a galley slave. Yet he wrote about 100,000 words in 1892, which averages out to five-and-a-half months work writing 600 words per day. We know from another letter to Clara Schneider that to Harte's way of thinking, spending six hours a day at work was excessive.¹⁷

Harte wrote one hundred and forty stories during his European years, that is two thirds of the two hundred and five stories he wrote during his life. In mass of wordage, he wrote in the vicinity of 1.75 million words between 1878 and his death, that is four-fifths of his total output. If we divide the number of words he wrote during each of the twenty fully active years he spent writing, we find that on average he wrote about 80,000 words a year. At a rate of 600 words per day, that means that in an average year Bret Harte was tied to his pen and paper only about four-and-a-half months of the year; if he wrote 1,000 words a day he could fill his quota in only eighty days, or two-and-a-half months. In comparison, Mark Twain averaged 1,800 words per day when he was living in London in 1897 and 1,400 words per day in Florence in 1904.¹⁸

Harte's stories were usually published on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously and in several European languages. Most of them were sold before he even put pen to paper and at the prices he named. For every word he wrote between 1878 and 1902, Harte could expect to earn eleven cents on average, or sixty-six dollars for the six hundred words he wrote on an average day. By 1895, as Harte's agent A. P. Watt wrote to the editor of Scribner's Magazine, his average rate for the serial rights to a story was ＄50/1000 words in England, ＄25/1000 words in the United States and ＄70/1000 words for both serial rights combined.¹⁹ This was at a time when the regular rate paid by the better American magazines was between half a cent and little over one cent per word, or five to 12 dollars per 1000 words. During the 1880s, one cent per word was standard even for highly valued contributors and two cents was rare. Harper's Weekly paid their regular contributors ＄10/1000 words; they paid Bret Harte ＄26/1000 words for “Maruja” (1885), ＄18/1000 words for “The Crusade of the Excelsior” (1887), ＄20/1000 words for “The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh” (1889) and ＄25/1000 words for “The Bell-Ringer of Angels (1893). Cosmopolitan wrote to Theodore Dreiser in 1898 that their rate was one cent per word, yet they paid Harte 2.4 cents per word for one of his last short stories, “Mr. MacGlowrie's Widow” (1902).²⁰

Bret Harte's short stories would ultimately be read all over the world. By 1873, they had been translated into German, French, Swedish and Danish. The first Italian translation appeared in 1877. In the late 1870s, six of his tales were translated into Serbian. His works were translated into Spanish in 1883. By the late 1870s many of his stories were being simultaneously translated and published in German periodicals, such as the Deutsche Rundschau and the Berlin edition of Puck. In addition, stories by Bret Harte would regularly appear in the Paris Figaro and the Vienna Neue Freie Presse and in newspapers as far away as India and Australia. Baron Tauchnitz continued to publish a “Continental edition” of most of Harte's works throughout the century, making a total of thirty-six Harte titles between 1874 and 1903 in his “Collection of British Authors.”²¹

Anyone desiring an exact measure of Harte's renown during his own lifetime can turn to an interesting article by Karl Erik Rosengren entitled “Time and Literary Fame” (1985). Using the “mentions technique,” in which he counts the number of mentions of authors' names in newspaper reviews over a certain period, Rosengren is able to uncover the “‘lexicon’ of authors and writers available to critics and reviewers.” This lexicon, according to Rosengren, is so central to the literary frame of reference that it “can be used as a proxy for the literary frame of reference.”²² What Rosengren found when he studied the cohort of writers born between 1825 and 1849 and their place in the frame of reference of the period 1876-92 was that Bret Harte was one of the twenty authors on a world basis with the highest rank on the scale, that is to say, with the most mentions. The only other American was Mark Twain. This discovery becomes even more revealing in relation to Harte's international renown when we take into account that Rosengren based his study on newspapers in Sweden(!).²³

With regard to his continuing popularity in America in the 1880s and ‘90s, we have the evidence of two polls from this period. On 12 April 1884, the Critic announced the result of a plebiscite held among its readers to determine who were the most esteemed living American authors. Bret Harte came in eighth place after Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, George Bancroft, Howells, George William Curtis, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His friend and foe Mark Twain came in fourteenth place. Fifteen years later, the magazine Literature held a poll among its readers to name the best candidates for an American Academy of Letters. Here Harte came in a joint seventh place with S. Weir Mitchell, after Howells, John Fiske, Twain, Aldrich, Frank Stockton and Henry James.²⁴

IV

It has been received opinion that Harte never wrote anything to compare with his short stories for the Overland Monthly. Despite Donald E. Glover's attempts to reassess Harte's later work,²⁵ there can be no question that from the point of view of originality and stylistic sophistication, Harte never equaled his stories of the late 1860s. But before we dismiss this large body of later texts as a set of inferior, diluted copies of the Overland tales, we need to realize that they represent a distinctive phase of Harte's career in which his goals were different from the period from 1868 to 1871, when he was editor of a literary magazine, when he was exclusively a short story writer, and when he was not yet world famous.

During the last quarter of a century of his long writing career, Harte became a leading exponent of one of the two major types of prose fiction in the late nineteenth century: the romance. Of the one hundred and forty stories Harte wrote in 1878-1902, about a third of the titles and two thirds of the words he wrote come under this generic rubric. Bret Harte was not a novelist and after Gabriel Conroy (1876) he never wrote another novel by Victorian standards. What he wrote were romances of varying lengths and short stories, often with shocking, grotesque, or humorous surprise-endings. He also sometimes combined the two genres, adding a strong dose of romance to his short stories, as in “The Chatelaine of Burnt Ridge” (1889), “An Episode of West Woodlands” (1893), and “The Indiscretion of Elsbeth” (1896).

The genre in defining opposition to the romance was the novel, both in the minds of late-Victorian authors and readers and in the generic system of a theorist such as Northrop Frye, who writes: “The essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. The romance does not attempt to create real people so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes.”²⁶ Other distinguishing features of the genre have been pointed out by Gillian Beer, who wrote: “The romance, however lofty its literary and moral qualities, is written primarily to entertain. … It absorbs the reader into experience which is otherwise unattainable. … It oversteps the limits by which life is normally bounded.” Beer writes further that the romance “is usually acutely fashionable, cast in the exact mould of an age's sensibility. Although it draws on basic human impulses, it often registers with extraordinary refinement the peculiar forms and vacillations of a period. As a result it is frequently as ephemeral as fashion and, though completely beguiling to its own time, unreadable to later generations.”²⁷

When we consider these characteristics of the romance, we begin to understand both why Harte's romances were so popular with his contemporaries and why they have found so little favor with modern readers, academic or otherwise. What we see as the shortcomings of Harte's later fiction turns out to be exactly those features that make his stories good romances: shallow, archetypal characterization; an emphasis on the entertainment value of the story; “a serene intermingling of the unexpected and the everyday” and “a complex and prolonged succession of incidents usually without a single climax”²⁸ The work of Frye and Beer also acts as a useful reminder of the futility of judging the romance by the standards of the realistic novel, as has so often been done in the criticism of Harte's works.

In addition to this generic perspective, an historical perspective will bring Harte's later writing career even more sharply into focus. In English Criticism of the Novel 1865-1900, Kenneth Graham gives us a thorough and illuminating account of the warfare between the new school of realism and the rival school of romance during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. “The challenge of the new realists in the early eighties,” Graham writes, “brought the romance quite dramatically into the foreground of the controversy, almost as a rediscovered genre.”²⁹

Among the more voluble voices ranged on the side of romance were Robert Louis Stevenson, the author and critic Andrew Lang, and Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines (1886). In 1882, Stevenson wrote an early manifesto on behalf of romance in the first issue of Longman's Magazine, which was to publish several of his own and Harte's romances. Stevenson wrote candidly that “It is one thing to write about the inn at Barford, or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a legend.”³⁰ To “make a country famous with a legend” was of course what Harte had done and would continue to do all his life. 1887, the year Harte published “The Crusade of the Excelsior,” became a “year of recognition for the new romance”³¹ with manifestos by George Saintsbury, Rider Haggard, and Andrew Lang. Lang published his essay “Realism and Romance” in the Contemporary Review and described the current debate as “the old dispute about the two sides of the shield”:

Fiction is a shield with two sides, the silver and the golden: the study of manners and of character, on one hand; on the other, the description of adventure, the delight of romantic narrative. Now, these two aspects blend with each other so subtly and so constantly, that it really seems the extreme of perversity to shout for nothing but romance on one side, or for nothing but analysis of character and motive on the other. Yet for such abstractions and divisions people are clamouring and quarrelling. On one side, we are told that accurate minute descriptions of life as it is lived, with all its most sordid forms carefully elaborated, is the essence of literature; on the other, we find people maintaining that analysis is ausgespielt (as Mr. Bret Harte's critical shoeblack says), and that the great heart of the people demands tales of swashing blows, of distressed maidens rescued, of “murders grim and great,” of magicians and princesses, and wanderings in fairy lands forlorn. Why should we not have all sorts, and why should the friends of one kind of diversion quarrel with the lovers of another kind?³²

Yet Lang concluded that “if there is to be no modus vivendi, if the battle between the crocodile of Realism and the catawampus of Romance is to be fought out to the bitter end—why, in that Ragnarôk, I am on the side of the catawampus.”³³

The revival of romance, according to Graham, was largely based on a yearning for escape from the harsh realities of Victorian life. “As I live,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in a letter, “I feel more and more that literature should be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it cannot be made beautiful and pious and heroic. We wish it to be a green place.”³⁴ Harte echoed this feeling from a reader's point of view in 1890, when he asked a friend to recommend something for him to read. “It must be amusing,” he wrote, “I am getting too old to find any pleasure in being made sad.”³⁵ But it was not just older readers and writers who found the romance a welcome refuge from the pressures of their quotidian existence. Hall Caine, author of The Manxman (1894) and various other popular romances, was only thirty-seven when he became the romancers' new standard-bearer through his essay for the Contemporary Review, “The New Watchwords of Fiction” (1890). In this “high-water mark of romance theory,” Caine pronounced that fact was “only an aid towards the display of passion”: “true concern must be with the mysteries of human nature in its highest development—that is, in the regions of heroism.”³⁶

Despite the reference in Lang's article to his “critical shoeblack,” Harte kept a low profile in the ongoing debate. With the exception of an appreciation of Longfellow and of Lowell on their deaths in 1882 and 1891 respectively, his critical faculty had been lying dormant more or less since his days as editor of the Overland Monthly. Then in 1897, he was induced to write an essay for Munsey's Magazine called “My Favorite Novelist and His Best Book.” In 1888 he had expressed his “private doubts as to the relevancy … of such information to literature”³⁷; nearly ten years later he may have felt it was time to stand up and be counted. His essay was a glowing appraisal of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, a book Harte had loved since he was a child. It is interesting that Harte chose for his defense of the romance the exact same book that Stevenson had chosen in his essay fifteen years before. In contrast, by 1897 the new romance was on the wane and Harte's defensive attitude becomes increasingly clear toward the end of his essay. After detailed analysis of the particular strengths and weaknesses of Dumas' book, Harte suddenly interjects in the final paragraph:

But “Monte Cristo” is romance, and, as I am told, of a very antiquated type. I am informed by writers (not readers) that this is all wrong; that the world wants to know itself in all its sordid, material aspects … that “the proper study of mankind is man” as he is, and not as he might be; and that it is very reprehensible to deceive him with fairy-tales, or to satisfy a longing that was in him when the first bard sang to him, or, in the gloom of his cave dwelling, when the first story-teller interested him in accounts of improbable beasts and men—with illustrations on bone.³⁸

Harte concludes:

But I venture to believe that when Jones comes home from the city and takes up a book, he does not greatly care to read a faithful chronicle of his own doings; nor has Mrs. Jones freshened herself for his coming by seeking a transcript of her own uneventful day in the pages of her favorite novel. But if they have been lifted temporarily out of their commonplace surroundings and limited horizon by some specious tale of heroism, endeavour, wrongs redressed, and faith rewarded, and are inclined to look a little more hopefully to Jones's chance of promotion, or to Mrs. Jones's aunt's prospective legacy—why blame them or their novelist?³⁹

It seems ironic that Harte published his defense of the genre in the year he abandoned the longer romance altogether. In the struggle between the romance and the realistic novel, it was of course the latter that emerged victorious. The voice of the future was heard in an essay entitled “The Decline of Romance” published in the Westminster Review in 1894, in which D. F. Hannigan wrote:

A marked feature of contemporary literature is the growing antipathy to the unreal, and the desire to depict life as it is, without illusion and without exaggeration. Romance is, so to speak, at its last gasp. The attempts made by certain writers to revive it are characterised by a kind of ghastly grotesqueness. … The day is gone by when the novelist can be regarded as a mere caterer for the amusement of sentimental old maids or indolent fogeys. We are sick of lying and cant and platitude. We want facts, not romantic dreams.⁴⁰

With an understanding of the polarization of taste in the 1880s and 1890s, it becomes easier to understand the contemporary critical response to Harte's writings. Reviews of Harte's books during his last two decades were largely positive, varying from the benign to the adulatory. In the London Academy's regular column “New Novels” for 18 July 1885, E. Purcell reviewed Harte's latest volume By Shore and Sedge: “We keep Mr. Bret Harte's book to the last, for true genius should not be confounded among Grub Street incompetence. We need say little about what everyone will read.” William Morton Payne of the Chicago Dial wrote of the same book, which contained “The Ship of '49,” “An Apostle of the Tules” and “Sarah Walker”: “These stories are further gleanings in the romantic field of western life which the author so assiduously cultivated, and whose resources seem to be still unlimited, for Mr. Harte does not repeat himself, although he writes so much upon the same general subject, and these stories are quite up to the level of his many earlier ones.” Payne, ever a staunch supporter of Harte's work, found it “a relief” in 1888 “to turn from the lay figures so ingeniously devised by Mr. Howells and other popular novelists, to the men and women of Mr. Harte's far West—far, but familiar to us through the mediation of his genial observation and description.” Eighteen years later, when Harte was dead, Payne wrote about his last collection of stories: “We could say nothing of these stories that has not been said many times before. They are like their countless predecessors, and yet their charm is unfailing, and they may be read with a zest from which the edge is hardly worn, however familiar we may be with the scores, if not hundreds, that have delighted us in earlier years.” The Times Literary Supplement made the comment on the seven stories contained in Trent's Trust and Other Stories (1903) that “One might almost range them in order of merit according to their brevity, for in these shorter tales Bret Harte knew exactly what to say, how to say it, and when to stop.” As in the 1870s, it is characteristic that his reviewers were most inclined to be munificent when Harte stayed within the “romantic field of western life.” When he attempted a different type of story in “The Indiscretion of Elsbeth” (1896), the London Athenaeum found him to be “a not very successful imitator of ‘Anthony Hope’” and added the comment that “in his stories of the wild West he is on ground where he has not been beaten.”⁴¹ Bret Harte became, in a sense, a victim of his own success. He became typecast, like some highly successful actors the audience only wants to see and believes in one role.

V

Though Harte initially published everything he wrote in periodicals of one kind or another, he continued to collect his stories and publish them in volume form at regular intervals. As the Dial noted in 1885: “When Mr. Bret Harte has completed three of his short stories, he puts them into a dainty little volume.”⁴² The number of stories in each volume would vary, but the regularity of their appearance did not. In August 1897, the trade journal The Book Buyer announced that a new novel by Bret Harte called Three Partners was about to appear. The announcement of a new book by Harte was familiar reading, they wrote, but less generally known was the fact “that his popularity, as manifested in sales, remains unbroken. For each new book that he writes there is the same sure demand as for the last.”⁴³ This statement is supported by the production ledgers of Chatto & Windus, the company that published most of Harte's books in England between 1878 and 1902. Though the ledgers give the number of books printed and not the exact number sold, they give us a good indication of how many books Harte was selling in England in the latter part of his career. The Heiress of Red Dog and Other Tales, the first volume published by Chatto & Windus, containing stories and poems written during the last years of the 1870s, sold 3,200 copies between its appearance in mid-March and 4 July 1879. By 8 August that year, the initial print run of 4,000 copies had been sold out and the publisher printed 2,000 more copies. The book was reprinted in 2,000 copies again in 1882 and in 1,500 copies exactly ten years later. Harte appears to have had a fifteen-percent royalty on the book and received a total of ＄365 for it.⁴⁴ His next book, The Twins of Table Mountain (1879), a thin volume containing only the title story, had an initial print run of 5,500 copies. This time Harte sold the English volume rights for a lump sum of ＄375, and that appears to be the way he continued to dispose of the volume rights to his books.⁴⁵ Despite the publishers' assertion that the book “is not selling nearly so well as we expected,”⁴⁶ they printed a further 3,000 copies of it only a month after its initial release. Jeff Briggs's Love Story (1880) was equally successful. Flip and Other Stories (1882) sold upward of 13,500 copies during its first year; Maruja (1885)—which was not very well received by the reviewers—nearly 6,000 copies. The figures for the remainder of Harte's works published by Chatto & Windus are as follows (further printings in the second column):⁴⁷

A Phyllis of the Sierras and A Drift from Redwood Camp	(1888)	6,000
A Ward of the Golden Gate	(1890)	8,000	4,000
A Waif of the Plains	(1890)	10,000	7,000
A Sappho of Green Springs and Other Tales	(1891)	6,000
Col. Starbottle's Client and Some Other People	(1892)	5,000
Sally Dows	(1893)	5,000
Susy	(1893)	5,000
A Protégée of Jack Hamlins and Other Stories	(1894)	5,000
The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories	(1894)	4,000
Clarence	(1895)	6,000
Three Partners	(1897)	4,000
Tales of Trail and Town	(1898)	3,000
Condensed Novels, Second Series	(1902)	5,000

As these numbers show, the sale of Harte's books in England was steady and high. Nigel Cross tells us that the print run of the average novel rarely exceeded 2,000 copies and more often than not it was set at 1,000 copies or less.⁴⁸ Walter Besant estimated that if a novel sold six hundred copies, it would in fact have paid its expenses with a small margin left over.⁴⁹

The sale of Harte's books both in England and America was clearly high enough to earn his publishers the required profit, but it seems fairly certain that none of his many later volumes gained the circulation of The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870). This is not to say that he was getting fewer readers. As a story-writer rather than a novelist, Harte's main readership was a magazine and newspaper readership. The public grew spectacularly toward the end of the century with an increase in literacy and leisure and a corresponding increase in the number of periodicals and their affordability. “Think!” Walter Besant exclaimed in 1899, “One-hundred-and-twenty millions of possible readers at the present day, against 50,000 in the year 1830—only sixty years ago!”⁵⁰

It is difficult to find an American writer during this period who reached more readers than Bret Harte. I have already indicated something of his international reputation. In America, where according to some witnesses he was “played out,” he probably reached more readers than ever with his story “The Indiscretion of Elsbeth” (1896) for the Ladies' Home Journal, which was one of four circulation leaders from 1890 and had reached a record 600,000 readers by 1891. Harte would reach between 250,000 and 300,000 readers with a story of the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1890s and close to half a million readers in 1902. More than half a million buyers could read his “How I Went to the Mines” in the Youth's Companion in 1899.⁵¹ By comparison, Harte's stories for the Atlantic in the early 1870s would have reached 35,000 readers at most.⁵² By contrast, each of the several stories Harte published in the New York World in 1891 had 375,000 potential readers.⁵³ In England, an issue of the Strand containing one of his stories might sell half a million copies.⁵⁴

In the size of his audience and the prices he could obtain for his stories, Bret Harte had come a long way since the late 1860s. For the 3,400 words of “Tennessee's Partner” he was paid ＄23 in 1869⁵⁵—a little over half a cent per word—and the story reached no more than a few thousand readers through the pages of the Overland Monthly.⁵⁶ Thirty-two years later, “The Adventures of John Longbowe,” a story of exactly the same length, would have brought in at least ＄210—more than six cents per word—and reached the more than 300,000 readers of Cosmopolitan.⁵⁷

Notes

1. George R. Stewart, Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931); Richard O'Connor, Bret Harte: A Biography (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1966); Patrick Morrow, Bret Harte: Literary Critic (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1979).

2. Stewart, p. 298; Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1964), p. 254; Morrow, pp. 109,120.

3. Stewart, p. 296.

4. Walter Besant, The Pen and the Book (London: Thomas Burleigh, 1899), p. 143.

5. Besant, p. 2.

6. That is not taking into account his consular salary from 1878 to 1885 (ca. ＄20,000) and income from his one produced play, Sue (1896/98). For the basis for this sum, see tables 1 and 2 and note 60. In present-day dollars this would be about ＄2,500,000.

7. Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 227.

8. Bret Harte, The Letters of Bret Harte, ed. Geoffrey Bret Harte (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926), p. 207.

9. Bret Harte's diary, “Things that happened, 1881-88,” entry for 2 May 1882, in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (henceforth cited as Diary).

10. Harte, Letters, p. 268.

11. Bradford A. Booth, “Unpublished Letters of Bret Harte,” American Literature, 16 (May 1994), 138.

12. Diary, entry for 18 April 1886.

13. Harte to Anna Harte, 7 October 1888, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

14. Ibid., 30 March 1897.

15. Harte to Clara Schneider, 6 January 1886, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

16. Harte, Letters, p. 313.

17. Harte to Clara Schneider, 20 December 1892 and 30 August 1894, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

18. Samuel L. Clemens, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 1490.

19. A. P. Watt to E. L. Burlingame, 31 May 1895, in the A. P. Watt Papers [microfilm], Alderman Library, University of Virginia (henceforth cited as APWP).

20. Information on regular magazine rates from Franklin Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), IV, 39-40. Information on prices paid Harte from Diary, entries for 12 May 1885 and 5 June 1887; letters of 20 November 1888 and 2 November 1893 in APWP. “Mr. MacGlowrie's Widow” was commissioned by McClure's syndicate, who sold it to Cosmopolitan. The syndicate paid Harte ＄25/1000 words at this time.

21. Many thanks to Professor Gary Scharnhorst for sharing the manuscript of his forthcoming Harte bibliography with me.

22. Karl Erik Rosengren, “Time and Literary Fame,” Poetics, 14 (1985), 159.

23. Rosengren, p. 165. Not surprisingly, Rosengren found that by the postwar period (1953-1976) Harte had all but disappeared from the Swedish literary frame of reference. Twain's rank remained high.

24. Critic poll results quoted in Mott, III, 238; Literature poll results quoted in “An American Academy,” Dial, 26 (1899), 359-60.

25. See Donald E. Glover, “The Later Literary Career of Bret Harte, 1880-1902”: (Doctoral dissertation, University of Virginia, 1966) and Glover, “A Reconsideration of Bret Harte's Later Work,” Western American Literature, 8 (1973), 143-51.

26. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 304.

27. Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 3, 12.

28. Beer, p. 10.

29. Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel 1865-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 19, 64.

30. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Gossip on Romance,” Longman's Magazine, 1 (1882-83), 73.

31. Graham, p. 66.

32. Andrew Lang, “Realism and Romance,” Contemporary Review, 52 (1887), 684-85.

33. Ibid., p. 693.

34. Graham, p. 66.

35. Harte, Letters, p. 358.

36. Graham, p. 68.

37. Harte to unknown recipient, 19 January 1888, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

38. Bret Harte, Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writings by Bret Harte, compiled by Charles Meeker Kozlay (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), p. 275.

39. Ibid.

40. D. F. Hannigan, “The Decline of Romance,” Westminster Review, 141 (1894), 33, 35.

41. E. Purcell, “New Novels,” Academy, 28 (1885), 40; William Morton Payne, “Recent Fiction,” Dial, 6 (1885), 124; Payne, “Recent Fiction,” Dial, 8 (1888), 269; Payne, “Recent Fiction,” Dial, 34 (1903), 372; “Trent's Trust,” Times Literary Supplement, 8 May 1903, p. 144; Athenaeum, 26 December 1896, p. 901.

42. William Morton Payne, “Recent Fiction,” Dial, 6 (1885), 124.

43. The Book Buyer, 15 (1897), 11.

44. Chatto & Windus to Harte, 4 July 1879, Chatto & Windus Papers, University of Reading Library.

45. Ibid., 11 July 1879.

46. Ibid., 3 October 1879.

47. All figures above and below on the numbers of copies printed are taken from Chatto & Windus's production ledgers, University of Reading Library.

48. Cross, p. 206.

49. Besant, p. 138.

50. Besant, p. 29.

51. Mott, American Magazines, IV, 16, 689-90.

52. Mott, American Magazines, II, 505.

53. Franklin Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years, 1690 to 1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 435.

54. British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 399.

55. “Overland Monthly Papers,” Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley.

56. Mott, American Magazines, III, 405.

57. Mott, American Magazines, IV, 484.