[In the following essay, Denning argues that dime novels constituted the primary reading material of the working class and that the books were specifically created by the middle class for workers.]

Who read these stories and what did they think of them? Though this question is now central to the study of popular culture, it remains a difficult and elusive one. In part, this is because of sketchy and uncertain evidence. Even when one can determine who the readers were, it is very difficult to determine how they interpreted their reading. But the difficulty also lies in the reluctance of cultural historians of the United States to use class categories to describe and analyze the reading public. As a result, they often end up with a simple dichotomy between the few and the many, the discriminating and the mass, the elite and the popular. However, the place of dime novels in American culture depends not only on the industrial character of their production but on the class character of their reading public. Thus, this chapter will attempt to characterize the readers of dime novels by exploring the relations between popular fiction and its working class audience.¹

The question of who read dime novels becomes two questions in the context of the relation between popular fiction and working class culture. One begins from the artifacts: who were the audience of dime novels, story papers, and cheap libraries? The other begins from the reading public: what did working class people read in the late nineteenth century? My argument is that these two questions converge: that the bulk of the audience of dime novels were workers—craftworkers, factory operatives, domestic servants, and domestic workers—and that the bulk of workers' reading was sensational fiction.

Recent accounts of the readers of dime novels by literary critics and cultural historians tend to be rather vague. In his book on dime novel westerns, Daryl Jones (1978, 14) writes only that ‘though dime novelists aimed their stories at a predominantly working-class audience, the appeal of the genre in fact pervaded the entire culture. Dime novels provided a source of entertainment and diversion for any individual of any social class who sought relief from the anxieties of the age.’ Mary Noel (1954, 290-291), on the other hand, sees the story paper audience as ‘middle class and American’. ‘Whether or not the lowest economic group read the story papers must remain in doubt’—and she doubts it. Nina Baym (1984, 47), in an examination of antebellum reviews of fiction, concludes that ‘in novel criticism, the audience seems to be divided into two groups, correlated loosely with presumed class membership. First, and more numerous, were ordinary or “mere” novel readers looking for pleasure and reading for story; second, there was a small group of cultivated, discreet, intelligent, educated, tasteful, thoughtful readers who wanted something more than, but not incompatible with (reviewers hoped), the tastes of the ordinary reader.’ But Baym misses a third group only occasionally mentioned in the reviews she cites: the readers of cheap literature. Far more adequate than either the nostalgic image of a single ‘American’ reading public or the split between the few and the many is the picture sketched by Henry Nash Smith (1978, 8-9). He invokes the terminology of ‘brows’, noting an important distinction between:

… the work of the new women novelists and yet another kind of fiction that proliferated during the 1840s—crude adventure stories represented by Tom Sawyer's favorite, The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood. A Thrilling Story of Buccaneer Times, by ‘Ned Buntline’ (E. Z. C. Judson), published in 1847. For want of a more elegant terminology I shall call the sentimental fiction of Warner and Cummins, together with the system of values embodied in it, ‘middlebrow’, and Ned Buntline's work ‘lowbrow’. In such a scheme, Hawthorne and Melville evidently must be categorized as ‘highbrow’. Although not enough evidence has been accumulated to support confident statements about the sizes of these segments of the mid-nineteenth century reading public, it appears that the total sales of lowbrow fiction were the largest—especially after the Beadle & Adams dime novels began to appear in 1860; but a few best-selling middlebrow titles far outstripped any individual lowbrow items in circulation.

But Smith argues that the relation between ‘brow levels’ and social and economic classes is obscure: ‘The notorious vagueness of class lines in the United States precludes any close linkage between brow levels and the actual social structure.’² A closer look at the nineteenth-century sources can make the relation between brows—a twentieth-century concept—and classes clearer.

Smith's picture of antebellum fiction readers is very similar to George Woodberry's survey of the fiction-reading public in 1891. Woodberry, a leading genteel literary critic, identified a three-tier public: the readers of ‘pure literature’, interested in the art of fiction proper; the readers of the popular success novels; and the readers of ‘the literature of the “Unknown Public”, addressing itself to thousands of readers, whose authors were quite unknown, their subjects and methods strange, and that was all “written for money”—“the whole complexion of the thing is of a different world”’ (Ickstadt 1979, 93). Woodberry echoes Edward Everett's (1860, 488) early comment that the story paper was the first attempt to reach the ‘Unknown Public’. Indeed the ‘Unknown Public’ was one of a variety of epithets contemporaries used for the dime novel audience: the ‘great people’, the ‘million’, the ‘submerged tenth’. The slogan of Beadle and Adams was ‘Books for the Million!’. In his defense of the dime novel, Frederick Whittaker (1884, 8) speaks of ‘the “great people” to whom the papers are constantly appealing. The readers of the dimes are farmers, mechanics, workwomen, drummers, boys in shops and factories, and a great many people who are so much appalled by the abuse of the daily press that they do not confess what they have been reading.’ Dime novelist Eugene Sawyer, on the other hand, maintained: ‘It is not, however, only the “submerged tenth” who reads cheap stories. I have been in bookshops and seen bankers and capitalists gravely paying their nickels for the same tales as their elevator boys read’ (Burgess 1902, 532). Despite Sawyer's somewhat self-justifying assertion, W. H. Bishop (1879, 389) expressed the nineteenth-century consensus when he wrote in the Atlantic that the story papers and cheap libraries were ‘written almost exclusively for the use of the lower classes of society.’

Nevertheless, more exact delineations of the audience are hard to find. The publishers themselves left little evidence more specific than Beadle's ‘books for the million’. A bookseller noted that ‘the people who buy the “libraries” are the people who take in the New York Ledger, … utterly unknown to bookstores.’³ In 1871, the New York Weekly explicitly linked publishing stories about women sewing machine operators with seeking them as an audience:

Every sewing machine girl in the United States should not only read Bertha Bascomb, the Sewing Machine Girl, but should make it her especial business to see that everybody else reads it. The story is designed to benefit the working girl, and therefore every working girl in our broad land should constitute herself an agent for its distribution. Everybody will be better for reading this great story; and we confidently look for an addition of at least one hundred thousand extra readers to swell our already unprecedented circulation (Noel 1954, 278).

Moreover, one can assume that some part of the audience was made up of immigrants and ethnics, particularly Irish and Germans, since publishers issued series like Ten Cent Irish Novels and George Munro's Die Deutsche Library. There were, however, no dime novels aimed at Blacks; and I have not found evidence of any Black readership.⁴ The audience clearly was predominantly young. W. H. Bishop (1879, 384) describes ‘the traffic on publication days’:

A middle-aged woman, with a shawl over her head and half a peck of potatoes in a basket, stops in for one; a shop-girl on her way home from work; a servant from one of the good houses in the side streets. … But with them, before them, and after them come boys. … The most ardent class of patron … are boys.

Nevertheless, except for the story papers and libraries explicitly aimed at boys and girls, this could not be called ‘children's literature’. When William Wallace Cook (1912, 35) began writing dime fiction, he was criticized by the editor for writing for too young an audience: ‘I hope you have not made the hero too juvenile, as this would be a serious fault. The stories in the Ten-Cent Library are not read by boys alone but usually by young men, and in no case should the hero be a kid.’ Thus the ‘people’, the ‘unknown public’, the ‘million’, the audience of dime novels and story papers seems to be predominantly young, ‘lowbrow’, and internally divided by gender. It includes, depending on one's rhetoric, the ‘producing classes’ or the ‘lower classes’, encompassing German and Irish immigrants and ethnics but excluding Blacks and Chinese immigrants and ethnics.

If we turn to the other question—what did nineteenth-century working-class people read?—a complementary picture emerges from recent studies of literacy and from the two basic types of contemporary accounts of workers' reading; those of observers and reformers of working-class life, and those of workers in autobiographies and memoirs.⁵ First, the success of the dime novel industry was in large part a result of the high levels of literacy among American workers. This was spurred not only by the availability of cheap reading matter but by the development of the ‘common school’ of universal primary education for whites in the years between 1830 and 1850. In their detailed examination of literacy in the nineteenth-century United States, Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens (1981, 51) find that there are three major reductions in illiteracy: ‘the first following a decade of intense social reform, including common school reform (1850-1859), the second (more modest) appearing in the decade following the Civil War, when a number of states enacted compulsory education laws (1870-1879), and the third appearing in the decade following the passage of compulsory school attendance laws in most states and their enforcement in some (1880-1889).’ Though the 1840 Census found that 97٪ of white adults over 21 in the Northeast, and 91٪ in the Northwest, were literate, this was based on a minimum standard of literacy. Soltow and Stevens, using a stricter standard and working from army enlistment files, find that ٪ 89٪ of northern artisans and 76٪ of northern farmers and laborers were literate in the period between 1830 and 1895 (52). ‘Farmers and laborers, who were the two groups exhibiting the highest rates of illiteracy between 1799 and 1829, underwent rapid declines [in rates of illiteracy] … by the end of the century’ (54). Indeed by 1870, just before the emergence of the cheap libraries, there were similar literacy rates among native-born and foreign-born men (though foreign-born women were substantially more illiterate than native-born women until 1890) (199). Together, common-school literacy and the fiction factory provided the conditions for written narratives to become a significant part of working-class amusement.

Indeed, one of the earliest observers of working-class reading, the Presbyterian minister James Alexander (1839, 66), who published two books about and for workers in 1838 and 1839, called attention to the new story papers:

The demand for this merely entertaining literature is evinced by the character of the large weekly newspapers, and low-priced magazines, which circulate most among operatives. I need not name these; our cities abound in them. The newspapers to which I allude are commonly issued on Saturday, and their immense sheet gives occupation to many a poor reader for the whole of Sunday. Now you will observe, that a large part of the outer form of these publications is frequently taken up with just that kind of reading which is fitted to make a sound mind sick, and a feeble mind crazy. Tales upon tales of love, of horror, of madness, and these often the effusions of the most unpractised and contemptible scribblers, who rejoice in this channel for venting their inanities, succeed one another week after week, and are the chief reading of persons whom I could name, for year after year.

Forty years later, the Unitarian minister Jonathan Baxter Harrison (1880, 167-171) noted in his ‘Study of a New England Factory Town’ that:

The young people of the mills generally read the story papers, published (most of them) in New York City, and devoted to interminably ‘continued’ narratives, of which there are always three or four in process of publication in each paper.

I will look later at Harrison's characterization of the stories and his assessment of their effects in what is perhaps the most extensive observer's account of working class reading. For now, we should note his account of the mill workers' reading of story papers, his sense that they were young people's reading, and his assumption that his middle class audience would be unaware of their content. He goes on to observe that ‘many hundreds of the older operatives, especially foreigners, of two or three nationalities, were reading a paper which is devoted to the liberation of the working-people of America. … This paper has a large circulation among operatives, miners and city mechanics, in nearly all parts of the country. … It always contains two or three serial stories by popular writers, which are designed to “float” the heavier articles devoted to the propagation of the doctrines of the agitators.’ Finally he discusses a local labor-reform newspaper. The term ‘newspaper’ implied a wide variety of reading matter in the nineteenth century, so when ‘newspapers’ are said to be the principal reading matter of workers (e.g. Harvey 1974, 107), this may describe papers that consisted mainly of sensational fiction.

A decade later, the Atlantic Monthly published another series of articles on working class life. Lillie B. Chace Wyman (1888-1889, 607-608), in her ‘Studies of Factory Life’, finds a reading room started by mill operatives and patronized by immigrant men. The reading material was mainly newspapers. The few books, she writes, ‘on examination, proved to be largely such as people are willing to give away, because they are of no interest to anybody.’

Another observer who notes newspaper reading is Emile Levasseur (1900, 393-435) of the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, who writes of the 1890s, ‘the workman reads the newspaper as everyone else does in America. … Daily papers cost 1 and 2 cents, weekly papers, 5 cents, as a rule. There is no doubt that the enormous development of the American newspaper in the last forty years has been due in part to the laboring classes.’ He bases his conclusions not only on observation but on the federal and state government investigations of workers' budgets which show a high proportion of families making some expenditure for newspapers and books: a recent study of these budgets shows that in 1889, in ten northeastern states, 89.5 percent of native American working-class families and 87 percent of Irish-born working-class families had significant expenditures for newspapers and books (Modell 1978, 214).

An illuminating account of women's reading is given by Jennie Croly, a middle class patron and supporter of young working women. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1883, she said, in response to a question about working girls' recreation:

In the first place, such girls do not care much about sitting down to read. If they have half a day of spare time they want to get out of doors, they want air … as for reading, they want something very different from what they have in their daily lives, and so they run to the story papers that contain flashy stories; that tell about the fine ladies and how many dresses they have, and that tell about the worst murders and the most exciting incidents that they can get. And I do not blame them for it. They are crazy for something that is outside of themselves, and which will make them forget the hard facts of their daily lives (U.S. Senate, Committee on Education and Labor, 2: 613-614).

Other observers also note story paper reading, usually in passing. An example from early in the period is the Englishman James D. Burn (1865, 34), who notes the wide circulation of the New York Ledger, a paper ‘solely occupied by light literature’, and, in criticizing the boarding-house life that marks American working-class life, says that it encourages women to ‘pass away the time by lounging over sensational literature’ (6-7). At the end of the nineteenth century, Walter Wyckoff (1898a, 179-180), in his experiment with life as a transient casual laborer, finds an Irish logger, on a rainy day, ‘reading a worn paper copy of one of the Duchess's novels, which is the only book that I have so far seen in camp.’ He notes that ‘most of the men here can read, but to not one of them is reading a resource.’

These accounts by observers of working-class reading need to be read skeptically, however, because all stand within a class conflict over the ‘reform’ of working-class reading, a conflict I will turn to in the next chapter [of Mechanic Accents]. Thus one will find advocates of reform stressing the sensational and immoral character of working-class reading, while defenders of the working class will often cite examples of independent ‘literary’ and ‘self-improving’ reading.

As we turn to workers' memoirs and autobiographies, similar qualifications apply. Most people, when recalling books that influenced them, will recall literary and political readings more often than sensational fiction, particularly given the general disdain in which it is held: as dime novelist Frederick Whittaker (1884, 8) wrote, dime novels were read by ‘a great many people who are so much appalled by the abuse of the daily press that they do not confess what they have been reading.’ Furthermore, cheap stories are part of the texture of everyday life; they are not events that the autobiographer will tend to narrate. Nevertheless, one does find some accounts of reading sensational fiction in workers' autobiographies.

Some of the earliest accounts of workers' reading are in some ways the most exceptional: those of the Lowell mill girls. Drawn from the New England countryside, they were formed within a genteel Congregationalist culture, and the paternalism of the boarding-house system reinforced this culture. They also preceded the development of mass cheap literature, so their reading was almost entirely within the genteel literary system. So the reading cited by Lucy Larcom and Harriet Robinson includes the English poets and essayists, the literary reviews like North American Review and Blackwood's, the new women's magazines like Godey's Ladies Book and Graham's Magazine, and the Christian newspapers: the source for this reading is the circulating library. Harriet Robinson (1898, 57) writes:

Novels were not very popular with us, as we inclined more to historical writings and to poetry. But such books as Charlotte Temple, Eliza Wharton, Maria Monk, The Arabian Nights, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Abellino, the Bravo of Venice, or The Castle of Otranto [this list includes popular Gothic and domestic novels], were sometimes taken from the circulating library, read with delight, and secretly lent from one young girl to another.

When she reflects on the mill girls of the present (1898), she writes that ‘public libraries are provided, and they have more leisure to read than the mill-girls of forty years ago. But they do not seem to know how to improve it. Their leisure only gives them the more time to be idle in; more time to waste in the streets, or in reading cheap novels and stories’ (122). Lucy Larcom has a somewhat less censorious attitude; after detailing at length her reading in the English poets, she writes: ‘And we were as fond of good story-books as any girls that live in these days of overflowing libraries.’ Nevertheless after saying that she ‘devoured a great many romances’, she adds, ‘there are so many books of fiction written nowadays, I do not see how the young people who try to read one tenth of them have any brains left for every-day use.’ She herself had at least one encounter with the new story papers when she tells of reading Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop in a Philadelphia weekly paper.⁶

The most detailed accounts for later in the century are found in the series of short life stories published in The Independent between 1902 and 1906, and in the autobiographies of Rose Cohen, Abraham Bisno, and Dorothy Richardson. The Independent, a reform magazine, published a series of life stories of ‘undistinguished Americans’ in order to ‘typify the life of the average worker in some particular vocation, and to make each story the genuine experience of a real person’ (Katzman and Tuttle 1982, xi). In these testimonies, some written and some the result of interviews, one finds several references to reading. Sadie Frowne, a Polish immigrant and New York garment worker in a sweatshop, says, ‘I can read quite well in English now and I look at the newspapers every day. I can read English books, too, sometimes. The last one that I read was A Mad Marriage by Charlotte Brame [an English novelist whose works were a staple of the story papers and romance libraries; the original ‘Bertha M. Clay’]. She’s a grand writer and makes things just like real to you. You feel as if you were the poor girl yourself going to get married to a rich duke’ (Katzman and Tuttle 1982, 56). A similar sentiment is expressed by a tailoress who does given-out work: ‘What chance I get I read something light, like The Fatal Wedding. It is one of the best things I’ve had yet. The Earl's Secret is another good one. … Sometimes I wonder how it would seem if I should have the luck that you read about in the novels—get rich all of a sudden and have your fine house and carriage as some of the girls have that I used to go with. I don’t know as I would feel much better’ (Stein and Taft 1971, 110).

Rose Cohen (1918), a Russian Jewish immigrant of the 1880s, tells of her early reading in her autobiography. It begins with her reading novels in Yiddish to her mother, novels that were rented from soda water stand keepers for five cents, never more than one a week: ‘Mother always listened reluctantly, as if she felt it were a weakness to be so interested. Sometimes she would rise suddenly during the most interesting part and go away into the dark kitchen. But soon I would catch her listening from the doorway. And I lived now in a wonderful world. One time I was a beautiful countess living unhappily in a palace, another time I was a beggar's daughter singing in the street’ (187-191). This account ends with her reading a Yiddish translation of David Copperfield. A later key moment is her first book read in English, a love story whose name she does not remember: ‘I felt so proud that I could read an English book that I carried it about with me in the street. I took it along to the shop. I became quite vain’ (249). This leads her to join the free library at the Educational Alliance, and to attempt, unsuccessfully at first, to read Shakespeare (252-254). But throughout her life story, changes in reading mark changes in life and sources of conflict: her father did not ‘take kindly’ to her reading, fearing that the reading of Gentile books would take her away from Judaism.

Abraham Bisno (1967, 49-50), a Russian Jewish immigrant and garment worker, gives an account of the place of cheap stories in his autobiography that is not dissimilar to that of Rose Cohen:

At fifteen [1881] I began to learn to read. Both in Jewish and in English. I learned English from signs and from advertisements I looked at during the slack period of the trade. Jewish I learned when there was no work and a man who peddled Jewish stories loaned them out weekly to me for five cents a week. He persuaded me to learn to read these stories because they were great romances. An agent of a Jewish newspaper got me to subscribe to a weekly paper. In those years I was very ignorant. I practically knew nothing of what was happening in the United States, and outside of my work and family experiences knew very little. The Jewish stories I read opened my eyes to new worlds. A man named Shomer wrote a great many Jewish romances copied from the French with a change only of names and habits from the French to the Jewish. He wrote a great many of them and I would read three or four a week, absorb their contents enthusiastically and eagerly.

The stories went like this: a poor girl, but very beautiful, fell in love with a rich young man, whose parents would not permit a marriage. Tragedy would follow. The boy would talk of suicide, the girl was miserable, until something happened where the girl was found to really be a heiress, the family smiled on her, they married and lived happily ever after. In a great many of them, there was an intriguing character who would cause either the boy or girl to distrust the other by false tale-bearing. He would be found out in his lies, and the differences were patched up again. Some tales of adventure and enterprise, but most of them about romantic love, the difficulties besetting the path of love, the difficulties ensuing, marriage, and everlasting happiness. But for me these were great finds. When there was no work I read them day and night and would tell about them to any who would listen.

Bisno's autobiography, which was never published during his life, is unusually frank and detailed in its depiction of everyday life; and his voracious reading of sensational fiction for its introduction to ‘new worlds’ is, I suggest, a typical experience. It is worth noting not only the physical resemblance between the dime novels and these Yiddish shundromanen of the 1880s, but the deep similarity of plots: the story Bisno recounts is very close to those written by Laura Jean Libbey. This similarity of plots, together with the absence of an international copyright agreement until 1891, made for a kind of ‘world literature’ as sensational novels were translated back and forth from English, French, German and Yiddish, translated not to be faithful to the ‘original’, but, as in the case of Shomer, to be adapted to local names, geography and customs. Moreover, that Bisno seems to have read more romances than tales of adventure or enterprise should make us realize that although cheap stories were clearly marked and marketed by the gender of the implied reader, this did not exclude significant cross-reading.

A somewhat different perspective emerges from Dorothy Richardson's The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl. Because Richardson, of whom little is known, had a middle-class background, the story that emerges is less one of the development of her own reading than of the confrontation in the paper box factory between her genteel reading culture and the sensational reading of her workmates. She is asked, ‘Don’t you never read no story-books?’; but her ‘confession of an omnivorous appetite for all sorts of story-books’ leads not to a point of contact but to the great gap in the sorts of stories they read. She is told the story of Little Rosebud's Lovers, a novel by Laura Jean Libbey that I will examine in chapter ten, and hears of the merits of the stories of Charlotte Brame, Charles Garvice, and Effie Adelaide Rowlands, all mainstays of the story papers and the cheap libraries. When she recounts her reading, ‘the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day classics that the school-boy and -girl are supposed to have read’ [Dickens, Little Women, Gulliver's Travels], her workmates have never heard of them. ‘They were equally ignorant of the existence of the conventional Sunday-school romance … and similar goody-goody writers for goody-goody girls; their only remarks being that their titles didn’t sound interesting’ (Richardson 1905, 75-86). Richardson concludes that:

The literary tastes of my workmates at the box-factory [are] typical of other factories and other workshops, and also of the department store. A certain downtown section of New York City is monopolized by the publishers and binders of ‘yellow-backs’, which are turned out in bales and cartloads daily. Girls fed on such mental trash are bound to have distorted and false views of everything (299-300).

Richardson's dramatic account of the gap between herself and her workmates is a striking example of the class character of a divided reading public.

There are also passing references to the reading of sensational fiction in the autobiographies of labor leaders. Terence Powderly (1940, 15) recalls ‘having read love stories in the old New York Ledger, and James J. Davis (1922, 75) writes of his siblings that ‘we were fluent readers, much better readers than our parents, but we had no books. We took the Youth's Companion, and it was the biggest thing in our lives. Every week we were at the postoffice when the Companion was due. We could hardly wait, we were so eager to see what happened next in the “continued” story.’ But the reading that figures in most autobiographies is, not surprisingly, either tokens of self-improvement and self-culture or signs of the development of political and labor consciousness.

These testimonies to the reading of sensational fiction illuminate not only the audience of dime novels but the circumstances under which the reading of popular fiction took place, the situation of reading. This can tell something of the place of cheap stories in working-class culture, and indeed give the critic and historian some idea of how they ought be read and interpreted now. There were three main sites of reading: at home, at work, and while traveling. If these seem to exhaust all the possibilities, let me note first some sites where sensational fiction does not seem to have been read (though proving the absence of something is clearly less certain than establishing its presence): at school where little fiction was read; at religious institutions (here we must recall the wide range and circulation of Sunday School fiction); at saloons where evidence of reading seems limited to commercial or political newspapers; and at other sites of cultural and leisure activities such as sporting events, theatrical productions, and holiday picnics and parades.

The rise of railroad and streetcar travel both for commuting to work and for leisure gave a new place and opportunity for light, entertaining reading. As the distance between residential neighborhoods and factory districts grew in the late nineteenth century, more time was spent commuting, and cheap reading matter accompanied the journey: at the end of the century, Emile Levasseur observed workers reading newspapers on the New York streetcars. J. S. Ogilvie, a New York publisher who often reprinted serials that had appeared in Street & Smith's New York Weekly, became, according to one historian of cheap book publishing, ‘the largest “purveyor” of “Railroad Literature” in the country’ in the 1880s with ten and fifteen cent novels (Shove 1937, 95). Frank Leslie also aimed his cheap books, particularly Frank Leslie's Home Library of Standard Works by the Most Celebrated Authors, at railway consumption: ‘Nearly every book bearing the Leslie imprint was in the class of cheap railroad literature and was handled by the American News Company. Through that company's system, and with the development of railroads throughout the country, cheap popular books could be retailed at newstands, station kiosks, and on the trains themselves, where train boys included books among the wares they offered. … Leslie was keenly alive to the need for appropriate reading matter for the masses of people enjoying train travel in the 1870s' (Stern 1980, 184-6).

Nevertheless, if one considers the European experience of railway reading, the evidence is not so clear-cut. If in Britain, as Tony Davies (1983, 49) has remarked, ‘the production of cheap fiction from the 1840s onward has two social destinations: the family home and the railway, corresponding perhaps to “respectable” and “disreputable” conceptions of the popular classes’, in the United States the home was the key social destination. ‘Railroad literature’ does not appear to be as developed a category in American publishing as in England and France; there are few dime novel series or cheap libraries that have the word in the title.⁷ Moreover Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1979, 69) has argued that ‘a glance at the offerings of the English and French railway bookstalls shows that the reading public is almost exclusively bourgeois. An English survey of 1851 shows that, in contrast to the supply of trashy mass literature in the regular bookstores, the railway bookstalls and lending libraries in London carry highly respectable nonfiction, fiction, travel guides, etc.’ It is still somewhat unclear whether, in the US, railway literature means cheap reprints of genteel and polite fiction for middle-class travellers or dime novels. However, the culture of the railroad is deeply inscribed in the dime novel, whether as the technical force that makes mass distribution possible, as the mode of transportation that encourages reading, or as the subject of innumerable novels themselves.

Most reading of sensational fiction, however, was probably done in the household. The story papers figure this in their titles, invoking the family as in Family Story Paper or the home and hearth as in the Fireside Companion. Their weekly publication schedules were aimed at Sunday reading, the only day off for workers, and one of the main reasons for the decline of the story papers toward the end of the century was the emergence of the Sunday newspaper. There seems to have been, in this period before broadcasting, much reading aloud in the family: the decline in reading aloud is one of the major changes in leisure habits that the Lynds found in comparing the 1920s to the 1890s. The story papers themselves encouraged reading aloud (Noel 1954, 292). And in a context where children often had a greater grasp of English than their parents, the account Rose Cohen gives of reading aloud to her mother while her mother worked in the home is probably not atypical.

The serialized narratives were probably read intermittently, with installments missed and less exciting narratives forgotten. In Germany, popular narratives—colporteur novels—were sold in installments door to door; thus Ronald Fullerton (1977) is able to show, by looking at sales figures, that relatively few novels were read in their entirety. Ironically, the historian who is often working from incomplete collections of the story papers may experience the stories in a way closer to that of the original readers than if the complete run were available. Fullerton also suggests that the popularity of serialized and installment novels was based not only on the price (indeed sometimes it was more expensive to buy all the installments of a novel than to buy the novel as a whole) but on the fact that story papers and pamphlet-sized novels were less intimidating in sheer size to someone with rudimentary reading skills than a full volume, let alone a three-volume novel.

Fiction reading was also part of the culture of the workplace. It was a way to relieve boredom; so one finds accounts of reading filling dead times, as when the original Beadle's dime novels found an audience among Civil War soldiers (Kaser 1984) or when William Wyckoff finds the logger reading a dime novel during a rainy day in a logging camp. Reading was a part of factory lunch breaks (see, for example, Lang 1948, 22). And it filled times of unemployment: Bisno says that he read ‘during the slack periods of the trade’ and ‘when there was no work’. But there was also reading on the job itself. Lucy Larcom (1889, 175-6) tells of how, despite regulations against books in the mill, she and others pasted clippings from the weekly papers at their work places. Herbert Gutman (1976, 36) points out that ‘Samuel Gompers recollected that New York City cigarmakers paid a fellow craftsman to read a newspaper to them while they worked.’ And James Alexander (1838, 225-226), an evangelical minister addressing the ‘American mechanic’ in the late 1830s, writes:

Reading aloud … besides being a useful accomplishment, is highly advantageous to the health, and is recommended by the best physicians, as a preservative of the lungs. All this may be gained without any self-denial, by the custom of reading the papers, or other entertaining publications, during the intervals of labour. This is an advantage possessed by mechanics whose operations are sedentary and indoors; and this, I suppose, will go far to account for the fact, that learned men have so frequently proceeded from the shops of tailors and shoemakers.

One can conclude from this that in certain trades the practice was fairly widespread.⁸

The place of dime novels in working-class culture can also be inferred from the place of dime novels in labor newspapers. The labor papers often carried serialized fiction that resembled dime novels in title and subject matter. In contrast to the burgeoning star system of the story papers where the names of Sylvanus Cobb, Ned Buntline, or E. D. E. N. Southworth sold thousands of copies, the stories in labor papers often appeared without an author's name; however, this may be because the stories were pirated. Indeed the New York Weekly once accused Patrick Ford's Irish World of stealing a poem and illustration from them, an offense compounded by Ford's characterization of them as ‘sensational’ and ‘trashy’ (New York Weekly 10 April 1876, 4). But often the labor papers promoted the cheap stories, as when the Labor Leader recommended a serial running in Norman Munro's Family Story Paper, or used them as promotions, as when the National Labor Tribune offered dime novels as a bonus for readers who brought in new subscribers.

The place given to sensational fiction in two labor newspapers, the Workingman's Advocate, a national weekly ‘devoted to the interests of the producing classes’, and the Labor Leader, a Boston weekly that was close to the Knights of Labor, indicates a complex range of responses by the organizers and leaders of working-class culture and politics to this new commercial cultural form. The two papers not only published dime fiction, particularly of the workingman hero genre, but also published critiques of dime novels and examples of an alternative, ‘serious’ working-class fiction.

Throughout the 1860s, each issue of the Workingman's Advocate would lead the left columns of the front page with a poem and a short tale. Occasionally these tales might be continued over a few issues but none were of novel length. They were not introduced in any way, and often were anonymous contributions. They were basically sketches, exemplary romantic or pathetic incidents. In late 1866, however, the Workingman's Advocate editorialized about ‘Cheap Literature’:

Every friend of progress and civilization insists upon reading matter being furnished to the people at the lowest possible price. It is by this means that agitation is continued and that knowledge is disseminated.

But there are certain dangers to be guarded against, which result from the very fact that reading matter can be furnished at such a low price. It has brought before the public an immense mass of stuff, which so far from being valuable is enervating and distorts the minds of all those who are in the habit of reading such books. Take for example the ten cent novel: is there anything in one of them that deserves to be remembered? Is there a single picture of human character there that will furnish rational entertainment or thought? Nothing of the kind. A startling picture on the title page is the most attractive feature about the concern and is what sells the book.

Then take the mass of weeklies and monthlies with their doleful stories, their fierce and bloody narratives, their low wit and comic pictures and, not unfrequently, their downright ribaldry; and consider to what extent these foul publications circulate and you will form some conception of the baleful influence which they exert upon the youth of the country, male and female.

We are far from advising against novel reading in the abstract, though certainly it may be carried to a dangerous extent. But we do say that the promiscuous reading of the yellow and the red-backed literature, which load the shelves of our bookstores, are not doing less in the work of ruin than the rum-shop or the house of ill-fame (‘Cheap Literature’ 1866, 2).

This condemnation of dime novels and story papers is in many ways not too far from those of the genteel critics I will look at in the next chapter. It does avoid the extremes of the genteel critics—that dime novels are meaningless opiates or are read literally and acted out—because it does not attack the readers of dimes, nor cheap reading generally, just the sensational stories themselves. Nevertheless, the cheap stories are doing the ‘work of ruin’, demoralizing the people and distorting their minds.⁹

However, this editorial was by no means the end of the issue for the Workingman's Advocate. Though I have not found any further explicit editorial statements on cheap literature, the shifts in the stories they themselves published is revealing. Soon after the editorial, they announced a series of stories to be published under the title ‘Tales of the Borders’ which would be a superior alternative to the yellow-back novels. However, a survey of the short tales published shows them to be neither particularly different from their earlier sketches nor from sensational fiction generally, and they were published without much ado, either in terms of introductory comments or bold headlining. This changed with the announcement of a labor story, Martin Foran's The Other Side, which was serialized with prominent attention between September 28, 1872 and March 29, 1873, much longer than any previous story. Foran wrote a lengthy preface (1872), published before the story itself began, which ‘explains the circumstances under which, and the objects for which’ this ‘Trades' Union story’ was written.

Foran, an organizer and leader of the International Cooper's Union, opens by asserting that ‘if the laboring class could be made a reading class, their social and political advancement and amelioration would be rapid and certain. … The men most to be feared by labor, are not its open and avowed enemies, but those of its own ranks, who do not, will not read.’ Thus for Foran, a central question for the workers movement becomes ‘how are we to make the toilers in our fields, workshops and factories, toilers in the vast realm of mind—readers as well as workers?’ One answer is to turn to the novel: ‘We have long noticed the popular taste among the masses high and low, for fiction—novel-reading. An inherent love for fiction seems implanted in the many, especially in those whose educational advantages were limited, or at least did not include a classical training, and in contemplating this patent fact, we were led to think that much of interest and benefit to labor could be conveyed to the popular mind through this medium.’ This explicit overall project for an alternative fiction from the point of view of the laboring classes is also sparked by Foran's immediate desire to respond to the popular anti-labor novel of Charles Reade, Put Yourself in His Place. Foran then apologizes for any shortcomings by admitting that he is ‘not … a novel-wright or story writer by trade’, and that The Other Side ‘was not written with the sole design of amusing and pleasing those who might read it. The design of the author was didactic and defensory’.

Foran's novel was serialized prominently over the next six months, but, precisely because he was a union leader not a ‘novel-wright’, it was a unique intervention. However, immediately after The Other Side was completed, another short novel was serialized: Reuben Dalton's Career; or, A Struggle for the Right. A Story for Workingmen (C). This was the first of a series of novels written for the Workingman's Advocate between 1873 and 1876 by Weldon Cobb Jr., a novel-wright by trade, indeed a prolific writer of dime novels for Beadle & Adams, Street & Smith, and the Chicago-based Nickel Library. Most of Cobb's serials for the Workingman's Advocate were not explicitly ‘stories for workingmen’, but were standard sensational fare: The Fatal Prescription, Under a Spell, and A Bold Game are some of the titles.¹⁰

The Labor Leader also regularly published serial fiction, alternating between stories reprinted from other sources and stories written ‘for the Leader’. In choosing reprints as in commissioning stories, the Leader favored romances of working-class life, particularly the workingman hero genre that I will examine in chapter nine. So they reprinted Charles Bellamy's The Breton Mills: A Romance of New England Life (BE) (with an advertisement that commended its portrayal of working-class life, despite its author's distaste for labor politics), and published the work of ‘Seyek’, their own pseudonymous dime novelist, which included Ella Inness, A Romance of the Big Lockout; or, How the Knight Won the Prize (Sa) and John Behman's Experience; or, A Chapter from the Life of a Union Carpenter (Sb). Indeed, Frank K. Foster, the editor of the Labor Leader and a leading figure in the International Typographical Union, the Knights of Labor, and the early American Federation of Labor, himself turned to fiction late in his career; in 1901 he published The Evolution of a Trade Unionist, an autobiography cast as a didactic novel.¹¹

So, if the cases of the Workingman's Advocate and the Labor Leader are at all representative, working-class intellectuals had an ambivalent attitude toward cheap stories. There was a deep suspicion of the commercial culture and of its popularity: as a Detroit Knight of Labor, testifying before the Senate committee investigating the relations between labor and capital, said, long hours made workers ‘incapable of doing anything requiring thought … They will read trashy novels, or go to a variety theater or a dance, but nothing beyond amusements’ (Fink 1983, 10). But there were also attempts to use it, both opportunistically, to sell newspapers, and politically, to encourage cheap stories from the workingman's point of view. The attempts to create an alternative fiction were rare and relatively unsuccessful, in part because the authors of this political fiction were not fiction writers by craft;¹² and, though some professional ‘novel-wrights’ were sympathetic to the workers movement and wrote cheap stories from ‘the other side’, most were still dependent on the factory-like production and standardization of the dime novel industry.

What then is the relation of dime novels to working-class culture? The evidence suggests that the bulk of the dime novel audience were young workers, often of Irish or German ethnicity, in the cities and mill towns of the North and West; and, that dime novels and story papers made up most of their reading matter. On the other hand, the dime novel was certainly not the self-creation of these craftworkers, factory operatives, laborers, and servants; it was a commercial product of a burgeoning industry employing relatively educated professionals—writers who also worked as journalists, teachers, or clerks. Nor were dime novels limited to working class readers; they were read by clerks, shopkeepers, local professionals, small farmers and their families. Should they, then, be seen as part of a wide and inclusive ‘middle-class culture’?

I think not; and a brief look at two central terms in the nineteenth-century rhetoric of class—‘producing classes’ and ‘middle class’—suggests why not. Neither term refers to a specific class in the nineteenth-century American class structure; rather, both invoke class alliances which had unstable rhetorical and actual existence. ‘Producing classes’ invoked the union of craftworkers, operatives and laborers with, in the phrase of the Knights of Labor, ‘the professional man, the clerk, and the shopkeeper’ (Couvares 1984, 74), as well as the small farmer. ‘Middle class’, on the other hand, invoked a common world shared by manufacturers, bankers, large merchants, and the professional, clerk, shopkeeper, and small farmer.

This distinction is important in understanding the dime novel's public. As a cultural form, dime novels were not part of the popular culture of the ‘middle class’. The magazines were the key literary form in that cultural universe; its metaphoric centers were the ‘self-made’ entrepreneur and the ‘domestic’ household. The dime novels were part of the popular culture of the ‘producing classes’, a plebian culture whose metaphoric centers of gravity were the ‘honest mechanic’ and the virtuous ‘working-girl’. Indeed, this is how they were seen in that ‘middle-class discourse and practice that sought to reform the culture and reading of the ‘lower classes’, to which I turn in the next chapter.

Notes

1. Since concepts of class are widely debated and have different meanings in different theoretical vocabularies, let me outline my use of the concepts drawn from the Marxist tradition. First, I follow Erik Olin Wright's (1985) discussion of class analysis, where he distinguishes between the analysis of class structure, ‘the structure of social relations into which individuals (or, in some cases, families) enter which determine their class interests’, and of class formation, ‘the formation of organized collectivities within that class structure on the basis of interests shaped by that class structure’ (9-10). ‘Classes,’ he argues, ‘have a structural existence which is irreducible to the kinds of collective organizations which develop historically (class formations), the class ideologies held by individuals and organizations (class consciousness) or the forms of conflict engaged in by individuals as class members or by class organizations (class struggle), and that such class structures impose basic constraints on these other elements in the concept of class’ (28).

   Second, one must also distinguish between at least two levels of abstraction in class analysis: the analysis of modes of production where classes are seen as ‘pure types of social relations of production, each embodying a distinctive mechanism of exploitation’ (10), and the analysis of specific social formations, where one rarely finds pure classes but rather fractions of classes, and alliances between classes as the result of specific historical combinations of distinct modes of production, uneven economic development, and the legacy of earlier class struggles. (On levels of abstraction in class analysis, see also Katznelson, 1981, chapter 8.) At the first, ‘higher’ level of abstraction, my study assumes that the United States between the 1840s and 1890s (particularly the north and mid west, the centers of dime novel production and reception) was fundamentally organized by the capitalist mode of production; its ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ classes were capitalists and workers; other classes were, in Wright's term, ‘contradictory class locations’, or, in Wolff and Resnick's (1982; 1986) term, ‘subsumed classes’. However, most of my study is pitched at the second, ‘lower’ level of abstraction. Here I draw particularly on the analysis of the transformation of American class structures in Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, 1982; on the histories of the working classes by the ‘new’ labor historians—Gutman, Montgomery, Couvares, Ewen, Fink, Kessler-Harris, Laurie, Levine, Peiss, Rosenzweig, Ross, and Wilentz, among others—which focus on the class fractions and class alliances among the popular or subaltern classes; and, for the history of the dominant classes, on the work of Batzell, Bledstein, Halttunen, Pessen, Wallace, Warner. On middle-class formation, see the excellent essay by Blumin, 1985. In general, by the working classes, I include craftworkers, factory operatives, common laborers, domestic servants, and their families; by the capitalist classes, I mean manufacturers, large merchants, bankers and financiers, the patrician elite and their families. The contradictory class locations include small shopkeepers, small professionals, master artisans and clerks: I will examine later their relation to the rhetoric of the ‘producing classes’ and the ‘middle classes’. David Montgomery's (1967, 29-30) interpretation of the 1870 census concludes that:

   Of the 12.9 million people in all occupations, only 1.1 million (8.6 per cent) can be listed as nonagricultural employers, corporate officials, and self-employed producers or professionals. Thus the business and professional elites, old and new, totaled less than one tenth of the nation's economically active population. … 67 per cent of the productively engaged Americans were dependent for a livelihood upon employment by others. Industrial manual workers, or what would now be called ‘blue collar labor’ … numbered just over 3.5 million souls, or 27.4 per cent of the gainfully employed.

   Agriculture accounted for 52.9 per cent of the gainfully employed: 24.2 per cent were farmers, planters and independent operators; 28.7 per cent were agricultural wage earners. Domestic servants made up 8 per cent of the gainfully employed; white collar workers—clerks and salespeople—3 per cent.

   My work is not a contribution to the history of ‘class structure’ in the United States, but rather to the history of ‘class formation’ in the United States. As Katznelson (1981, 207) writes, ‘Class society exists even where it is not signified; but how and why it is signified in particular ways in particular places and times is the study of class formation.’ In particular, my study is meant as a contribution to the history of ‘class consciousness’, or what I would prefer to call the rhetoric of class, the words, metaphors, and narratives by which people figure social cleavages. The ideological struggles to define social cleavages are determined by the existing class structure but they also play a part in the formation of class organizations and in class struggles. (Przeworski, 1985 and Therborn, 1980 are perhaps the best theoretical discussions of the ideological constitution of classes.)

2. The evidence of collectors and enthusiasts is even vaguer; they tend to stress the ‘respectable’ people who read dime novels and Albert Johannsen's list is characteristic: ‘bankers and bootblacks … lawyers and lawbreakers … working girls and girls of leisure, President Lincoln and President Wilson’ (Johannsen, 1950, 1:9). Edward Pearson, in his early book on dime novels, has a chapter devoted to readers' reminiscences; but the correspondents to whom he sent his questionnaire are largely established professionals: editors, librarians, professors. In the middle class homes of their childhood, dime novels were often prohibited and usually read by children on the sly; indeed this image has become part of the commonsense knowledge about dime novels.

3. Quoted in Shove, 1937, 19. This assessment raises the question of the readership of the New York Ledger, an issue worth considering. For anyone who wishes to argue for an overlapping rather than discontinuous reading public in nineteenth century America, the Ledger is a key journal. It attained the highest circulation of any magazine or story paper by reaching a cross-class, ‘popular’ audience with stories, poems, and articles by leading writers and intellectuals including Edward Everett, Henry Ward Beecher, George Bancroft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Fanny Fern. Thus, Mary Noel, focusing primarily on the Ledger, concludes that the story papers had a largely middle class audience. And, in her study of antebellum responses to fiction, Nina Baym (1984, 18) includes the Ledger in the same discursive universe as the major middle-class magazines, from Godey's to Harper's, Graham's to the Atlantic.

   This, I would argue, is misleading. Far from being a representative journal, the Ledger achieved its wide circulation by uniquely straddling the boundary between the two worlds of genteel and sensational culture. It was the most respectable story paper, the least respectable magazine. Indeed, when appealing to advertisers, it claimed to be the ‘leading high-class illustrated family weekly paper in America’ (N. W. Ayer & Sons American Newspaper Annual, 1892, 1403.) Its genteel contributors came to it not because they felt it was part of their culture but because Bonner paid so well. When Bonner convinced Edward Everett, the former president of Harvard, to write fifty-two weekly columns in 1858 and 1859 in return for a substantial contribution to the Mt. Vernon fund, which was preserving Washington's home (and with which Everett was involved), E. L. Godkin, then a correspondent for the London Daily News, summed up the response of the genteel culture, and marked the gap between it and the Ledger:

   The great topic of the quidnuncs for the last few days has been Edward Everett's extraordinary undertaking to write for the New York Ledger, a two-penny weekly magazine, circulating nearly three hundred thousand copies. … It is filled with tales of the ‘Demon Cabman’, the ‘Maiden's Revenge’, the ‘Tyrant's Vault’, and a great variety of ‘mysteries’ and ‘revelations’; and, in short, barring its general decency of language, belongs to as low and coarse an order of literature as any publication in the world. The proprietor [Robert Bonner] was four or five years ago a journeyman printer, but by lavish use of puffery in aid of this periodical has amassed a large fortune, a la Barnum. … To the astonishment of the whole Union the ex-ambassador, ex-secretary of state, ex-president of Harvard University, ex-editor of the ‘Greek Reader’, the scholar, the exquisite, the one aristocrat of the ‘universal Yankee nation’, has accepted the proposal. … If you knew the sensation which this incident has caused here amongst genteel people, you would hardly expect me to add a line to my letter after reciting it (Ogden, 1907, 1:179-180).

   On the other hand, though Everett (1860) himself accepted Bonner's proposal with ‘great misgivings’, he concludes his series of articles with a peroration of the Ledger, beginning with an awed account of visiting the story paper's production plant, remarking on its circulation of four hundred thousand, and concluding with an invocation of its readers:

   It has simply aimed to be an entertaining and instructive Family newspaper, designed, in the first instance, to meet the wants of what is called, in a very sensible and striking paper in Dickens' Household Words, … the ‘Unknown Public’. The New York ‘Ledger’ is the first attempt in this country, on a large scale, to address that public; and the brilliant success, which has attended it thus far, is a strong confirmation of the truth … that the time is coming when ‘the readers, who rank by millions, will be the readers who give the widest reputations, who return the richest rewards, and who will therefore command the services of the best writers of the time’ (488).

4. As noted above, William Wells Brown's Clotelle was published in dime novel format during the Civil War, part of Redpath's abolitionist attempt to reach Union soldiers. There is some evidence that one of Beadle's authors was Black (see entry for Philip S. Warne in Johannsen, 1950, 2:289), and Victoria Earle Matthews may have written for the story papers (see Penn, 1891, 375-6). However, most fiction by black writers was published in Black newspapers and journals; the Black Periodical Fiction Project, headed by Henry-Louis Gates, has not found a Black equivalent of dime novels. For a discussion of the relation between dime novel conventions and early Afro-American fiction, and of the Afro-American fiction reading public in the late nineteenth century, see Carby, 1987.

5. The history of readers and the reading public is very undeveloped for the United States; the unsatisfactory typology of the ‘brows’ dominates most literary and cultural history, and as Henry Nash Smith pointed out, this has not been adequately articulated with social class. Kaser, 1984 is one of the few studies of nineteenth century American reading, and it confirms the importance of dime novel reading by soldiers in the Civil War. However, accounts of the British, French, German, and Russian reading publics offer suggestive parallels. In England, one finds a similar explosion of cheap stories—the ‘penny dreadfuls’ and weekly newspapers—in the 1830s and 1840s. Richard Altick (1957, 83) argues that ‘it was principally from among skilled workers, small shopkeepers, clerks, and the better grade of domestic servants that the new mass audience for printed matter was recruited during the first half of the century.’ The staple of this cheap printed matter was sensational fiction, but it is important to note that this was a shift in reading matter. The first cheap reading matter for artisans was radical political journalism, and the desire to read was often connected to working class political activity and self-improvement. The fiction industry picked up a reading public after the failure and abandonment of political aspirations, particularly of Chartism (L. James, 1963, 25). By the end of the century, reading had spread throughout the working class. A recent examination of a U.S. Department of Labor study of British workers in 1889 and 1890 finds:

   almost all [families] had family members who were literate. At least 80 percent of those interviewed in every industry bought books and newspapers. These proportions apply to both laborers and the highly skilled in textiles, although in heavy industry the unskilled were less likely to read and spent smaller sums on books. … This extensive, but limited taste for reading is confirmed by Lady Bell's interviews of Middlesborough workers around 1900. Of 200 families she interviewed, only 15 percent did not care to read or had no reading member. Yet most chose just newspapers and light novels. … The literary world of most workers therefore mixed sports, crime, and general news with romantic or sensationalist fiction (Lees, 1979, 183).

   On the British reading public, see Altick, 1957; L. James, 1963; Leavis, 1932; Mitchell, 1981; Neuberg, 1977; Webb, 1955. On the French popular reading public in the early nineteenth century, see Allen 1981; 1983.

   German workers had similar reading tastes. The equivalent of the dime novel in Germany was the ‘colporteur novel’ of the 1870s and 1880s which was sold in installments and combined cheap prices with sensational fiction (Fullerton, 1977; 1979). See also Steinberg, 1976.

   Brooks, 1985 offers an excellent history of both the Russian reading public and sensational fiction, the ‘literature of the lubok’, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with suggestive cross-national comparisons.

   In the United States, the research that is closest to a history of the reading public is the sociological studies of reading in the library science of the 1920s to 1940s, work exemplified by that of Douglas Waples. (For a history and overview of this work see Karetzky, 1982; Steinberg, 1972; see also Waples and Tyler, 1931; Waples, Berelson and Bradshaw, 1940.) A small part of this work focused on factory workers (see Gray and Munroe, 1930, 81-91; Ormsbee, 1927, 75-95; Rasche, 1937) and, though the period studied is the 1920s, it is suggestive for our purposes. A number of conclusions were drawn from the surveys carried out. First of all, newspapers were by far the most common reading matter of young workers (all of the surveys were primarily focused on young adult workers), followed by fiction magazines, the ‘pulps’. Newspapers were read largely for sports, crime news and fashion, and the fiction magazines carried ‘sensational’ and ‘salacious’ stories. There was clear gender division in the reading of pulps, with the striking exception of True Story, Macfadden's innovative pulp of the 1920s which carried stories said to be true and written by readers; it was read by men and women alike. The gap between middle class reading and working class reading in the 1920s can be gauged by Hazel Grant Ormsbee's comment on finding that True Story was far and away the most read magazine by young working class women: ‘Even though it may be found on all the street corner news stands, and indeed at almost every stand where magazines are sold, its name is probably not even known to the many persons who are familiar with most of the magazines in the second class [i.e., the middlebrow magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal]’ (Ormsbee, 1927, 80). There was also a close connection between reading and the movies: movie magazines and the novels that movies were based on were both common reading. The conclusions of these studies are summed up by Gray and Munroe: ‘the quality of some of the material read is very good. On the other hand, there is a surprisingly large amount of reading of cheap, sensational material. … In fact, the need of elevating the reading interests and tastes of young workers presents a very grave problem’ (Gray and Munroe, 1930, 89). This desire to ‘reform’ workers' reading has roots in the era of the dime novel.

   A second general conclusion developed out of Douglas Waples' comparisons of people's expressed subject interest with their actual reading. He found that there was ‘almost no correlation between the workers' expressed reading interests and what they read in the newspapers and similarly little relation between these interests and their magazine reading.’ Waples concluded that the most important determinant of what is read is accessibility, particularly in the case of workers who read mainly newspapers (Karetzky, 1982, 99). This reading research of the 1920s and 1930s does offer some important insights and data, though it is marred by the condescension and moralism of the researchers and by the complete distrust of fiction in general and sensational fiction in particular. Another product of the 1920s sociological imagination, Helen and Robert Lynd's Middletown, is particularly interesting because, while confirming the general observations of the reading researchers for the 1920s, finding important cleavages in reading material by class and gender in Middletown, it compares workers' reading of the 1920s with that of the 1890s. The Lynds find three major changes: the general decline of the workers' self-improving reading culture that was manifested in the independent Workingmen's Library, which has disappeared by the 1920s; the increase in public library circulation which has replaced ‘buying of cheap paper-covered books in the nineties and the reading of books from the meager Sunday School libraries’; and the slackening of attentiveness to reading: ‘more things are skimmed today but there is less of the satisfaction of “a good evening of reading”. There appears to be considerably less reading aloud by the entire family’ (Lynd and Lynd, 1929, 229-242).

6. Larcom, 1889, 244, 105-106, 190. See for details, 99-106, 226-247. ‘Libraries’ here refers to the various series of cheap novels that appeared after the Lakeside Library of 1875.

7. Neither Beadle & Adams nor Street & Smith seem to have ever used the word ‘railroad’ or ‘railway’ in a series or story paper title, and the only instance mentioned in the histories of publishing, Shove, 1937 and Stern, 1980, is the American reprints of the English Routledge Railway Library.

8. Indeed there is a struggle over a similar sort of reading at the workplace by Cuban tobacco workers in the 1860s. As Ambrosio Fornet (1975) writes, ‘the proletariat found in Reading—in “the enthusiasm to hear things read”, as an editorial writer in El Siglo put it—the era's most democratic and effective form of cultural diffusion.’ It began in 1865 in the large tobacco factory of El Figaro, with each worker contributing time to make up for the working time lost by the reader. ‘From there,’ Fornet goes on, ‘readings sprang up in other workshops in Havana. … Wherever sedentary group work was carried out, the idea found supporters.’ Readings included newspapers, histories and novels. The first struggles over reading had to do with owners wanting to select and approve the material to be read, but the campaign against reading escalated and by May, 1866 the political governor issued a decree that prohibited ‘the distraction of workers in tobacco factories, workshops or any other establishment by the reading of books or periodicals, or by discussions unrelated to the work being carried out by these same workers'.

9. For an account of a similar reaction to commercial fiction by the German Social Democrats, see Trommler, 1983, 64-67.

10. Little is known of Weldon Cobb's life. I suspect that his serials written for the Workingman's Advocate preceded his success in the commercial story papers and cheap libraries; perhaps they brought him to the attention of the fiction entrepreneurs. For the biographical data that exists, see Johannsen, 1950, 2:56; and Johannsen, 1959, 43. Unfortunately, Johannsen has no record of Cobb's connection to the Workingman's Advocate.

11. I am indebted to Joseph DePlasco for calling my attention to Foster and to the fiction in the Labor Leader.

12. Another example of this kind of labor fiction is the novel of Knights of Labor organizer T. Fulton Gantt, Breaking the Chains, which was found and has been edited and republished by Mary Grimes, 1986.