SOURCE: Williams, Susan S. “‘Promoting an Extensive Sale’: The Production and Reception of The Lamplighter.” The New England Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 1996): 179-200.

[In the following essay, Williams surveys the publishing history of The Lamplighter, and discusses John Jewett's strategies for advertising and promoting its various editions.]

Maria Susanna Cummins's novel The Lamplighter (1854) is best remembered today as the occasion for Nathaniel Hawthorne's infamous diatribe against women writers. “America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women,” Hawthorne wrote to his publisher William D. Ticknor in 1855. “What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse?”¹ Several weeks later Hawthorne modified his position somewhat when he praised Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, but his original comment has been taken as a shorthand description of the polarization between “popular” best sellers and “highbrow” literature originating in the antebellum American literary market.

Recent studies of this market have gone far in answering Hawthorne's question about the “mystery” of these “innumerable editions.” The Lamplighter was a best seller, the studies tell us, because it articulated so fully the values of feminine self-sacrifice and maternal power inherent in middle-class domesticity. This cult of domesticity sanctioned reading, especially for women, as a productive way to fill one's leisure time: to read a female Bildungsroman such as The Lamplighter was to participate in an activity that combined entertainment with the inculcation of virtue. For this reason, as Nina Baym puts it, “the mysterious secret of those ‘innumerable editions of The Lamplighter’ is nothing more or less than the joy of reading, the pleasure of the text.”²

If the mystery of The Lamplighter's appeal has to this extent been solved, however, the history of its “innumerable editions” has yet to be told. Those editions, and the ways in which they were packaged, promoted, and reviewed, also help account for the novel's popularity. The pleasures of the text encompass, in this case, the pleasures of the book itself. Soon after The Lamplighter was published in 1854, it became readily available in a variety of formats: children could enjoy a picture book with a heavily abridged plot; art lovers could admire sumptuously illustrated editions; and travelers throughout England and Europe could purchase inexpensive railroad editions. By issuing these various editions, Cummins's publishers, both in America and abroad, sought to extend her audience well beyond middle-class American women. At the same time, they promoted the book in such a way as to guarantee its success; packaging and promotion went hand in hand.

Although readers clearly responded to the domestic values at work in The Lamplighter (and perhaps also to the protagonist's growing sense of independence, which implicitly contests those values),³ they had first to want to read the book: a desire that we can understand more fully by tracing the history of the ways in which various editions were advertised, circulated, and received. Less important than The Lamplighter's exact sales figures, I want to argue, is the way in which those figures were used to drive consumer desire. At the same time, Cummins's publishers and reviewers worked to distinguish The Lamplighter as a particularly well-executed “romance,” a text that was aesthetically superior to the works of Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe, on the one hand, and to those of sensational writers on the other. The Lamplighter's status as a best seller, in other words, did not diminish its literary value in readers' eyes; instead, the novel's popularity and its perceived excellence worked together to promote the continued production of its “innumerable editions.”

I

It is a commonplace of American publishing history that The Lamplighter was one of the best selling books published in America in the 1850s.⁴ What we tend to forget, however, is that it was published by John P. Jewett, who had also issued the most famous best seller of the decade, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jewett established his firm in Boston in 1847 and was also a competitor of Hawthorne's publisher, Ticknor and Fields; in complaining to Ticknor about The Lamplighter's success, then, Hawthorne may also have been diplomatically questioning the comparably poor performance of his own chosen publisher.⁵

Having entered the business by publishing textbooks, Jewett did not take up fiction until 1851, when he published Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Sunny Side; or The Country Minister's Wife. Fiction proved to be quite profitable. In establishing a branch in Cleveland under the name Jewett, Proctor and Worthington, the entrepreneur positioned himself to distribute his books both to the East Coast and to the growing western market. In 1852, he acquired the rights to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which by the end of the year had sold 305,000 copies. Stowe, having turned down Jewett's offer of an equal share in the costs and profits, received only a 10 percent royalty.⁶ In 1854, Jewett signed a contract with Cummins to publish The Lamplighter on similar terms: he would retain exclusive rights to sell The Lamplighter until the expiration of its copyright (twenty-eight years), for which he paid Cummins a 10 percent royalty.⁷

The contract with Cummins stipulated not only that he would “keep the market constantly supplied” with her book but also that he would “use all reasonable efforts to promote an extensive sale.”⁸ As one of his contemporaries is said to have exclaimed, “‘Why, he is advertising books just as he would advertise dry goods or groceries!’”⁹ This commodification of literature was a new phenomenon in the 1850s, one that Jewett worked in large measure to engineer.

Even before The Lamplighter was published, Jewett aroused interest by predicting it to be another best seller. In his pre-publication notices, for instance, Jewett wrote that “as great curiosity has already been excited, a large demand will be created, and early orders from the principal houses in the trade are solicited, to govern us in the size of the first edition.” These initial advertisements made no mention of Cummins. The book was published anonymously, and Jewett was selling the book, not the author. “A GREAT BOOK COMING,” Jewett announced, noting that his company had “in press, and will publish about the First of March, a work of extraordinary power and ability, one which will rank among the very best productions of American or Foreign Genius.”¹⁰

Cummins was not alone, of course, in coming before the public cloaked in anonymity. Before 1840, almost 80 percent of all works of fiction (by men and women) were published either anonymously or pseudonymously, and although during the 1840s many writers dropped their masks, it was still a common practice in 1854.¹¹ Cummins's case, however, reminds us that the practice had a distinct promotional appeal: by not providing information about Cummins, Jewett aroused curiosity about her. As Cummins's friend Asabel Huntington wrote from Cummins's native Salem, the “great question in the literary circles of the city” has become “who is the author of ‘The Lamplighter’?”¹²

Cummins's authorship soon became something of an open secret, however; several Massachusetts papers reported the discovery, and editors from the Boston Evening Gazette, The American Union, and Waverly Magazine invited her to contribute a story.¹³ “The paradox of literary domesticity,” as Mary Kelley has put it, “was that secret writers were not so secret.”¹⁴ Still, the fiction of anonymity served a valuable function.

For Cummins to have actively planned her entrance to authorship would have mitigated the virtues of a book materializing seemingly ex nihilo. By obscuring (however thinly) the role of the author, the book could appear, in the words of one review, “modestly and unheralded, reminding us of ‘a violet by a mossy stone,’” and then take “its place among the crowd of publications that daily jostle each other for precedence before the critical tribunal.” Given its modest origins, it could be “singled out at once by all eyes that love the simply, unpretendingly, beautiful.”¹⁵

By displacing her authorial agency onto Jewett, Cummins could fulfill cultural expectations that only private, “veiled” ladies could take their place on the public stage (or in the marketplace), on the one hand, while on the other ensuring, in the words of her contract, that all “reasonable efforts” would be expended “to promote an extensive sale.”¹⁶ Jewett would elbow his way through the jostling “crowd of publications” so that The Lamplighter, a delicate “violet,” would not be trampled in the marketplace. Another contemporary review reported that The Lamplighter “came out, unheralded except by the publisher's advertisement, without the prestige of a name, without pretension of any sort, without a dedication or even a preface.”¹⁷ Although the review downplays the extent of Jewett's advertising, his success in maintaining the fiction that Cummins herself had no pretensions toward greatness clearly contributed to the novel's acceptability.

It is not entirely clear what motivated Cummins, at age twenty-seven, to write her first novel. Nineteenth-century accounts consistently point to her lack of literary ambition. “She was not aware of the gift she had in authorship,” wrote one newspaper columnist at the end of the century. “‘The Lamplighter’ was not even written with a view to publication. It was composed to entertain Miss Cummins' nieces, and was read to them in installments.” Searching for an explanation of the novel's phenomenal success, the writer hazards that “the prestige that Mr. Jewett had attained in ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’ doubtless aided it, and advertising's artful aid was fully called into requisition to promote its sale.”¹⁸ At our historical remove, however, we can speculate that Cummins may have had more than entertainment in mind when she began writing. She had attended a boarding school run by Catharine Maria Sedgwick's sister-in-law, and Sedgwick, author of A New-England Tale, may well have encouraged the young woman's literary pursuits. A contemporary newspaper account claimed that when Maria left school, Sedgwick told her father that “‘You must encourage Maria in composition; she has a remarkable talent for it.’”¹⁹

Clearly The Lamplighter was not simply a beautiful “violet” that happened to grow; rather, it sprang from and was nurtured by Cummins's education, ambition, and encouragement by others. The crucial point, however, is that Jewett, as well as Cummins's reviewers, worked to obscure her agency so that the text might appear to speak for itself. The Lamplighter was, as Jewett's pre-publication announcements put it, “a work of extraordinary power and ability.” The focus, at least initially, was on the work, a product of a vaguely defined “Genius,” not on the producer or the process of production.

II

Jewett initially provoked interest in The Lamplighter by predicting its success and asserting its superior “Genius”; after publication he maintained excitement at a pitch by headlining advertisements with sales updates. An announcement of “20,000 COPIES IN TWENTY DAYS!” on 1 April 1854 was succeeded by “40,000 COPIES IN EIGHT WEEKS!!” on 1 May, “the immense demand continuing without abatement.” By 16 October Jewett could boast the publication of 65,000 copies of “the most charming of American romances.”²⁰

Although capitalizing on the book's brisk sales, Jewett also carefully promoted The Lamplighter as a “quality” publication. To enhance the text's physical attractiveness, he bound it in cloth, with a picture of the lamplighter gold stamped on the spine. The Lamplighter was a cheaper production than Uncle Tom's Cabin, for which Jewett had gone to the expense of having six full-page wood engravings made and which he issued simultaneously in cloth, either plain or extra-gilt, and in paper wrappers. Perhaps because of growing financial difficulties, Jewett took a less ambitious approach with The Lamplighter, issuing the book in a binding that was more permanent than paper wrappers and less expensive than full-gilt. Whereas the cloth editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin were priced between ＄1.50 and ＄3.00, The Lamplighter sold for ＄.75.²¹

Even as he worked to make the material book a quality production, while still affordable, Jewett also emphasized the text's internal sophistication. Thus, an advertisement identifies The Lamplighter as “one of the most fascinating and elegantly written volumes ever issued from the American Press,” a volume that “stands out above and superior to all other emanations of the American and European Press, as the Great Book of the year 1854.”²² In order to support these claims, Jewett quoted reviews comparing The Lamplighter to other best sellers, reviews he had largely orchestrated in advance.²³ “It is quite equal, to say the least, to ‘Wide, Wide World,’” declared a review in The Evening Traveller.²⁴ “Its author,” claimed the Boston Daily Atlas, “has evidently a highly cultivated and refined as well as an original and imaginative mind, and writes with the ease, the classical correction of diction, and that choice selection of terms which indicate the good English scholar. In this respect, the ‘Lamplighter’ is much superior to ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’ whose inelegancies meet us at every turn.” The advertisement displaying this quotation also summons two additional reviewers who maintain that the story is as “deeply affecting as the best sketches of Dickens.”²⁵ In placing Cummins's novel alongside those of such worthies, Jewett targeted their extensive audience as a potential market for the work of his newest author.

After the initial sales period, Jewett sought to expand the market for the book by experimenting with alternative formats. In 1855, he marked the sale of 73,000 copies of the book by publishing an illustrated edition of the work with twelve engravings. This edition, which, at a price of ＄1.50, sold for twice as much as the first, exuded not only quality but also longevity. It was, as one review described it, “published on fine white paper, with clear type, and bound in the very finest style.” This quality, moreover, reflected that of the text itself: “it is a story of great merit, and the deep, benevolent, and moral tone it breathes inspires a kindred principle in the heart of the reader.”²⁶

In 1856, Jewett included a few of the engravings, such as a full-page illustration depicting Uncle True giving Gerty a kitten, in an affordable, paper-format children's book entitled The Lamplighter Picture Book, or the Story of Uncle True and Little Gerty, Written for the Little Folks. As appropriate for children, the story is abbreviated (it ends with the death of Trueman Flint), but Jewett remains alert to the opportunity such truncation provides. Presumably addressing parents, the picture book ends with an advertisement: “If the reader would learn more of Gerty's after life, he will find what he wishes in perusing ‘The Lamplighter,’ a most excellent book, which all should read; published by JOHN P. JEWETT AND CO., BOSTON.”²⁷

Besides its illustrations, the children's edition included poems that drew analogies between Gerty's story and the horrors of slavery. The reader pitying Gerty is encouraged to extend that compassion to Southern chattels:

Ye who weep o'er little Gerty,
Squalid, ragged, friendless, poor,
Weep the more for slaves now mourning,
Oft with tyrant's lashes sore.(28)

Similarly, the kitten that Uncle True gives Gerty becomes a metaphor for the fugitive slave, and the plaster cast of a bowing figure stands for “one in chains, with upraised hands.”²⁹

Jewett probably initiated the plan to recast one version of The Lamplighter as an abolitionist allegory. Although the Bibliography of American Literature attributes the verse condensation to Cummins (albeit with some reservations), she most likely would have written it at his direction.³⁰ Even before he published Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jewett had gained a reputation for publishing abolitionist tracts; Stowe's success made that reputation all the stronger. Furthermore, Jewett had already successfully produced Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a children's book that, like The Lamplighter Picture Book, combined poetic verse and illustrations with a heavily abridged plot. Its purpose was “to adapt Mrs. Stowe's touching narrative to the understanding of the youngest readers, and to foster in their hearts a generous sympathy to the wronged Negro race of America.”³¹ Living in Boston, Jewett would have been especially aware of the appeal of such sympathy; in the mid 1850s, Boston was a center of abolitionist reform, with offices of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and The Liberator all located close to the city's printers' row.³²The Lamplighter Picture Book catered to this abolitionist market by giving The Lamplighter a more explicitly political agenda than was present in its original version: an agenda that promoted its “extensive sale” not only to children, but also to their parents.

III

In promoting the sale of The Lamplighter, Jewett received abundant aid, some of it unsolicited. In March 1854, for instance, Boston's National Theater mounted a stage version of the novel written by John Durivage. The theater's manager, William Fleming, hoped to draw Cummins's readers into the theater; indeed, he cultivated her patronage by offering her a private box from which to view the play.³³ Hedging his bets, however, Fleming also sought to extend the audience for the play beyond those familiar with the novel. Thus advertisements for the event promised not only a “local, moral and instructive Drama” but also “beautiful scenes of the Common, Revere House, etc.” as well as an incongruous concluding “Farce of the Egyptian Prince.”

According to The Boston Evening Gazette, the play's attempts to appeal to so many audiences made it the stuff of parody. In order “to construct an effective drama from a novel possessing not the least dramatic effect,” Durivage added a number of plot twists. These included, among other things, an attempted robbery and murder on the Boston Common; a scene in which a physician stops in front of the Revere House to sing “The Old Folks at Home”; and a love scene in which a gentleman addresses the Frog Pond, “Farewell, thou mimic ocean, where oft in childhood I have sailed my mimic barque.”³⁴

Although the stage version of The Lamplighter was not a critical success, the book itself received almost universal praise. Like the puffed reviews Jewett specifically cited in his advertisements, literary critics emphasized the book's popularity, on the one hand, and its literary and moral distinctions on the other. The editors of Godey's Lady's Book noted that “we are pleased, but not astonished to see [that the copy we have received] is one of the ‘thirty fifth thousand’ that have already passed through the press.” At the same time, they proclaimed it “one of the best and purest of its class that has emanated from an American mind.”³⁵ Similarly, a reviewer in The Knickerbocker was “not at all surprised to learn that this work has met with extraordinary success, for it eminently deserves it. It is one of the most original and natural narratives we have encountered for many a year.” The novel was being read because it deserved to be read. “You will read it all—every word of it,” The Knickerbocker reviewer concluded, “and you will rise from its perusal with a purer and more elevated idea of human nature. ‘Run like a lamp-lighter’ to the first accessible book-store, and purchase the work. You will never regret it.”³⁶

The purity of the book not only elevated the minds of its readers but also rendered its author, in the words of a Southern review, “a public benefactor” who, according to “moderate calculation,” gratified “fifty thousand readers, and employed, in a most agreeable manner, over half a million of hours.” Cummins's benevolence is particularly effective because she exerts her influence quietly, during the hours of reading. How preferable her means are to those strident “countrywomen” who “are making themselves ridiculous by their efforts to induce legislatures to accord them positions and relations in the state, incompatible with the discharge of those duties, for the performance of which they were made what they are—women, and not men.” To write is to do “good in a more practical and practicable way.”³⁷

The rhetoric of such reviews reminds us that moral “purity,” formal “originality” and “naturalness,” civic duty, and “extraordinary” sales were not contradictory concepts in 1854. On the one hand, the book's excellence can be attributed to its sentimental values; the plot “elevates” its readers by giving them a model of virtuous behavior. The cultural work the novel performs is not, however, limited to moral inculcation. In pointing to the power of an “American mind” to produce an “original” and “natural” narrative, the reviews of The Lamplighter also endorse a standard of literary nationalism and aesthetic quality. To read the book becomes an act of public beneficence, a way of supporting work appropriate to women's private sphere. Together, all of these qualities—sentimental, national, and aesthetic—provide a rationale for buying the book. Its literary and moral values help support the market in which the book is produced.

In stressing the literary qualities of The Lamplighter, reviewers distinguished it from other forms of popular writing, especially overtly melodramatic or sensational works. Nina Baym's research on antebellum reviews indicates that “reviewers frequently placed the metropolitan novel, or novel of low life, at an extreme from the fashionable novel, or novel of high life, with the domestic novel occupying the normative middle ground.”³⁸The Lamplighter seems to have occupied this middle ground particularly well. “It is devoted to the delineation of scenes in lowly life, without aiming at melodramatic effect by high-colored pictures of depravity and crime,” wrote a reviewer in Harper's Monthly Magazine.³⁹ Another reviewer in The New York Tribune made the same discrimination. Although the title might make one “apt to class it among the works with which the press swarms in illustration of the lower strata of hyper-civilized society,” such a view “would fail to do justice to the real merits of the work.” Indeed, the author has dealt “with the materials at hand less with the view of enforcing a moral, than as the legitimate subjects of literary art.”⁴⁰

In praising its literary qualities—its stylistic polish, its “natural” plot, and its ability to moralize without being too melodramatic—reviews of The Lamplighter suggest that it demonstrated not just mass appeal but an original and distinct talent. In this light, Hawthorne's comment to Ticknor about The Lamplighter and “other books neither better nor worse” does not adequately address the initial reception of Cummins's book, for other critics pointedly compared it to many books both better and worse.

At the same time, though, Hawthorne was not alone in expressing anxiety about the proliferation of books. As The American Publishers' Circular and Literary Gazette put it in 1855:

A few years since, every new publication was transformed into a ‘sensation book’; and the nation seemed, for a time, in danger of becoming a land of novelists. … Book-making became contagious. One successful production—such as Uncle Tom, The Lamplighter, or Ida May—called into existence from ten to forty trashy and stupid imitations of it. They were all puffed, and, probably, all sold. But the public at length awoke; it discovered the deception. Then came the reaction. A great many books were published, but no system of puffery or advertising could induce men to buy them. The critics, too, gradually assumed a tone of caution. They found their opinions disrespected; they resolved to change their tactics; and although we are now, as it were, but in one period of transition, it is not difficult, we think, to behold the dawn of a more healthful and secure existence.⁴¹

It is important to note that this writer, like his fellow reviewers, discriminates between The Lamplighter, among the best of its kind, and “trashy” or “stupid” books, in this case its imitators. The commentator trusts the “public” (book-buying readers), to know the difference; armed with that knowledge, and the ability to see through the puffery of many reviews, readers can control the debate.

When The Lamplighter was published, this “period of transition” was just beginning, and Cummins's readers seem at least initially to have praised the book in terms similar to the reviewers'. Henry James, for instance, remembered The Lamplighter as a book “over which [he] fondly hung” as a child. At the same time, he did not classify it as a “truly grown-up” novel, reserving that title instead for works of “ranker actuality” and “impropriety.”⁴² In making such a distinction, he did not discriminate between popular and high art as much as between sentimental and sensational fiction, and sensational fiction is precisely what reviewers claimed The Lamplighter not to be.

Other readers wrote to Cummins (through Jewett) specifically to endorse the book's, and by extension the author's, virtuous propriety. “I have smiled and wept, over our story,” wrote one reader. “I have felt that it could come, only from a mind of the most exalted order—only from a heart, full of the best traits with which humanity is blessed.”⁴³ This reader's use of superlatives suggests a certain amount of discrimination: although he is writing with the admitted goal of obtaining Cummins's autograph, his reasons for appealing to her are based on the combination of her fine mind and heart. Readers frequently commended her on her high moral tone and evocation of character, a portrayal that inspired women to name their daughters after Gerty. One particularly persistent male admirer wrote at least two letters imploring Cummins to meet with him: “I long for further intercourse with such a spirit,” he wrote, “and cannot resist the acknowledgment, that you have made me an ardent friend and have caused me to think of you as if I had long known you.”⁴⁴ Jewett did his best to protect Cummins from such advances. “I [have] frequently been importuned by Gentlemen from various sections of the country, to give them an introduction to you,” he wrote, but “have positively refused all such applications, deeming it not only improper, but decidedly annoying.”⁴⁵

Such readers, like the fans of other women writers, prominent among them Susan Warner, assumed they were equivalent to the characters they created: to read the book was to become intimate with its author.⁴⁶ Although Jewett initially promoted the book, rather than its author, its reviewers quickly began to embrace the book and its author, even when her exact identity was still a matter of conjecture. The initial reception of The Lamplighter, then, must be seen as the product of two distinct, though related, literary institutions: first, Jewett's sales campaign, which used advertisements and various editions of the book to capture readers' interest; and, second, the response of reviewers, who focused not only on sales figures but also on the virtues of the book and its author. Together, Jewett and the reviewers successfully garnered the support of readers, who, through their purses and their letters, were gradually assuming a greater role in the production of fiction.

IV

Jewett's success at attracting buyers for The Lamplighter turned out to be a mixed blessing. In order to accommodate the demand for Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Lamplighter, he had to intensify his capital investment, which made him particularly vulnerable to the Panic of 1857.⁴⁷ He was forced to declare bankruptcy that year. He had just published Cummins's second novel, Mabel Vaughan, on the same terms as The Lamplighter; after the bankruptcy, he signed over his rights to Crosby, Nichols and Company. Cummins, in the meantime, continued to use Boston publishers. In 1860, she signed a contract with Ticknor and Fields to publish El Fureidis, and in 1864 she chose J. E. Tilton for her last novel, Haunted Hearts. Ticknor and Fields agreed to pay her “fifteen percent of the retail price” of all copies sold, while Tilton agreed to pay her thirty cents for every copy, up to a maximum sum of ＄5,000.⁴⁸

Sales of The Lamplighter extended well beyond the demise of Jewett's firm. A list of annual sales in The American Publisher's Circular of 15 June 1863, for example, lists The Lamplighter as having sold 93,000 copies, surpassed only by Uncle Tom's Cabin (with 310,000 copies) and Washington Irving's works (800,000).⁴⁹ Sales also continued well after Cummins's death in 1866; Houghton Mifflin issued reprints of the novel throughout the 1880s and 1890s, as did a number of other publishers in New York and Chicago.⁵⁰ Cummins's brother and literary executor, Thomas Kittredge Cummins, was still receiving royalties from the book at the end of the century. Financial statements sent to him by Houghton Mifflin indicate that in 1896, the company sold 120 copies of the novel (for a royalty of ＄12.00); in 1897, 71 copies (paying ＄7.10); and in 1898, 94 copies (paying ＄9.40).⁵¹ Indeed, as late as 1912, the New York publisher T. Y. Crowell issued The Lamplighter as part of his Astor Prose Series, and in 1915 Hurst and Company issued it as one of its Cambridge Classics. The New York Public Library ordered 250 copies of the Hurst edition; it was still a popular book.⁵²

Read in America throughout the nineteenth century, The Lamplighter continued to sell successfully in Britain and Europe as well. The legacy of its influence abroad is evident, for instance, in the “Nausicaa” episode of James Joyce's Ulysses. Gerty MacDowell, named after Cummins's Gerty Flint, explicitly alludes to Trueman Flint when the narrator reports her thinking, “Soon the lamplighter would be going his rounds … like she read in that book The Lamplighter by Miss Cummins, author of Mabel Vaughan and other tales.”⁵³

In nineteenth-century Britain, no less than thirteen different firms published The Lamplighter, some of them in multiple editions. Six separate editions appeared in 1854 alone, and subsequent editions appeared in 1856, 1862, 1864, 1867, 1875, 1888, 1889, and 1893. Most of the editions were produced by London publishers, although local publishers in Halifax and Ipswich also issued editions in 1862 and 1864.⁵⁴ The number and chronological range of the editions suggest that The Lamplighter would always have been readily available in Britain throughout the nineteenth century.

It is evident that British publishers were also adept at marketing The Lamplighter to a broad-based audience. The first British edition, published in April 1854, was a joint imprint of Clarke, Beeton and John Cassell. To create a demand for the title, Cassell issued it first in Penny Weekly Numbers. In the early 1850s, Cassell had begun to capture the growing working-class market for periodical literature. After launching magazines like The Working Man's Friend and The Popular Educator, he struck gold in 1853 with Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper. Under various titles, the magazine prospered until 1932 and was second only to the London Journal in being the most widely circulating magazine of the mid 1850s.⁵⁵ While building his magazine empire, Cassell began publishing serialized versions of popular fiction, including, in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Just as Jewett applied many of the marketing techniques he had learned from Uncle Tom to The Lamplighter, so too did Cassell; indeed, some copies of Cassell's reprint of The Lamplighter were bound with Uncle Tom's Cabin.

At the same time as Cassell was serializing The Lamplighter, George Routledge was promoting it as part of his Railway Library. The collection of titles, though slightly more upscale than the penny weeklies, was also geared toward a working-class audience. Books in the series generally cost a shilling or eighteen pence, as opposed to five or six shillings for a clothbound book. Routledge had started the Library in 1848, with James Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot as its first number. As soon as W. H. Smith began selling Routledge's books from his stand at London's Euston Station, they achieved a mass market: Smith placed a standing order for one thousand copies of each volume.⁵⁶ Later, Routledge distinguished his books by binding them in yellow enameled paper, decorated with color prints from wood blocks in black, blue, and red or in black, green, and red. Popularly called “Yellow Backs,” these books were easily visible to travelers hurrying through the station.⁵⁷

Routledge was especially eager to publish American authors in his Railway Library (Cooper's novels accounted for seven of the first ten volumes in the series) because the absence of Anglo-American copyright laws obviated the requirement of paying royalties; he also published British fiction whose copyright had expired. In 1854, the year The Lamplighter appeared, the House of Lords decided in Jeffreys v. Boosey to deny British copyright to foreign authors unless they were in residence in Britain when their work was published.⁵⁸ Thus, when Routledge published The Lamplighter as part of his Railway Library, he could do so with no fear of a court injunction or the inconvenience of sharing any profits with Cummins.

Routledge sold more than 100,000 copies of The Lamplighter in two months. Jewett had proudly advertised sales of 40,000 copies in eight weeks: The Lamplighter's fame as a best seller, such statistics remind us, was based as much, if not more, on its sales in England as in America. As had been the case in Boston, its success in London spawned a farcical stage version. In 1854, Cumberland's British Theatre series published William Seaman's adaptation, complete with an added tableau set in a California mining camp and a climactic appearance of “a flying figure with extended wings” who is “surrounded with a blaze of light.”⁵⁹ The play's farce often depends on anti-American humor; although The Lamplighter gained an international audience, it was still identified as an “American work.”

The popularity of The Lamplighter was not confined to Britain. It also attracted English readers on the Continent. In 1854 the German publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz published The Lamplighter as part of his Collection of British Authors series. Tauchnitz, who opened shop in 1837, had by the 1850s established a solid reputation for publishing cheap, reliable editions of American and British authors on the Continent. In an era before international copyright laws had been established, Tauchnitz obtained permission from his authors to reprint their works, an arrangement that pleased the authors and enabled him to mark his editions as properly sanctioned “copyright editions.”

Cummins welcomed his overtures. In August 1854, she wrote to Tauchnitz that she understood that his edition “will never interfere with the rights of my American publisher, as you pledge yourself not to sell American works to this country. This being the case, I cannot fail to give my cordial approbation to the plan, and beg to assure you that I feel myself much flattered by the admission to a place in your list.”⁶⁰ Her cordial relations with Tauchnitz continued throughout the rest of her life; in 1864, two years before her death, she wrote to him that “it is one of the pleasures attendant on the publications of my works that they successively bring me into correspondence with one to whom I am indebted for such uniform courtesy.”⁶¹

Ironically, given Hawthorne's infamous quote, The Lamplighter joined The Scarlet Letter in Tauchnitz's Collection, a series that in 1854 also published works by, among others, Susan Warner (The Wide, Wide World and Queechy), Dickens (Hard Times), and Thackeray (The Newcomes).⁶² The Tauchnitz firm continued to add to its Collection until 1939, eventually listing over 5,300 titles (including Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist) and selling over forty million copies.⁶³ It is difficult to know exactly how long The Lamplighter stayed in print, since Tauchnitz had the habit of continuing to list the original “copyright” date on the title pages of all subsequent editions. In 1901, however, an article on the Tauchnitz editions in the Pall Mall Magazine reported that The Lamplighter “continues to fascinate young readers—and certainly no one can be sorry for that.”⁶⁴

The popularity of the Tauchnitz, as well as the American and British editions of The Lamplighter, inspired a number of foreign-language editions of the novel: it was eventually translated into French, German, Danish, Italian, Dutch, and Czech. These editions were not always exact translations of the original, however. Dutch publishers, for instance, issued abridged editions targeted specifically for children. The abridged versions, while longer than Jewett's picture book for children, also focused primarily on Gerty's story, reducing character description and development in order to create an easily grasped, edifying tale.⁶⁵

All these “innumerable editions”—whether initially geared toward children, abolitionists, coffee tables, theatergoers, railroad travelers, or foreign readers—enabled The Lamplighter to perform and extend its cultural work. The forms in which the novel's sentimental plot was packaged and advertised were, in turn, themselves mediated by the critics and readers who received the book. The lack of international copyright laws meant that readers were ultimately as likely to be foreign as American, just as the variety of editions meant that they were as likely to be children as adults, and men as women. These readers, as Baym claims, undoubtedly found The Lamplighter to be a deeply pleasurable text. But their “joy” in reading was influenced not only by the novel's sentimental plot but also by the specific editions in which it was embodied. Only by examining these various editions, and the ways in which they were promoted and received, can we fully penetrate the “mystery” of the “innumerable editions” of The Lamplighter.

Notes

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Letters, 1853-1856, ed. Thomas Woodson et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), p. 304.

2. Nina Baym, introduction to Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. xxxi. See also James Wallace, “Hawthorne and the Scribbling Women Reconsidered,” American Literature 62 (June 1990): 201-22, and Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 18-20.

3. See Erica R. Bauermeister, “The Lamplighter, The Wide, Wide World, and Hope Leslie: Reconsidering the Recipes for Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels,” Legacy 8 (Spring 1991): 17-28.

4. Baym, intro. to The Lamplighter, p. xvi. See also Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 308.

5. This point was made by Nina Baym in her talk, “Again and Again, the Scribbling Women,” at the American Studies Association Convention, Boston, 6 November 1993.

6. For an overview of the Jewett Company, see Lynne P. Shackelford and Everett C. Wilkie, Jr., “John P. Jewett and Company,” American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638-1899 [Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 49], ed. Peter Dzwonkowski (Detroit: Gale Research Press, 1986), p. 226. For a specific analysis of Stowe's financial arrangements with Jewett, see Susan Geary, “Harriet Beecher Stowe, John P. Jewett, and Author-Publisher Relations in 1853,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1977, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), pp. 345-67.

7. Contract between John P. Jewett and Co. and Maria S. Cummins, 1 February 1854, in the Cummins Family Papers, folder 2, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. Quotations from this collection are by permission.

8. Contract between Jewett and Cummins.

9. Quoted in an unidentified clipping from a late-nineteenth-century Massachusetts newspaper, now in Cummins Papers, folder 3.

10. See, e.g., Norton's Literary Gazette, 15 February 1854, p. 87, and Bode's United States Review, April 1854, p. 3.

11. Susan Barrera Fay, “Identifying the Female Author: Anonymity and Pseudonymity in Early American Publishing,” Publishing History 34 (1993): 92-93.

12. A. Huntington to Cummins, 6 March 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 2.

13. See letters to Cummins from John H. Eastburn, 16 March 1854, F. B. Fitts, 14 March 1854, and William Roderick Lawrence, 13 November 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 2.

14. Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 128.

15. Clipping from Boston Trade Gazette, 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 3.

16. For further discussions of the public privacy of women writers, see Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage, pp. 111-37, and Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 48-68.

17. Review of The Lamplighter and The Barclays of Boston, clipping, probably from a Boston newspaper, 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 3.

18. “A Revived Novel,” unattributed newspaper column in an 1890s Boston paper (probably following Houghton Mifflin's re-issue of The Lamplighter in 1891), Cummins Papers, folder 3.

19. Unidentified newspaper clipping, Cummins Papers, folder 3. See also Baym's intro. to The Lamplighter, which suggests that Sedgwick would have taught Maria “that a woman did not need to be ashamed of being unmarried” and that writing was “a way of making a contribution to society” (p. xv).

20. Norton's Literary Gazette, 1 April 1854, p. 180, 1 May 1854, p. 236, and 16 October 1854, p. 538. Such figures are probably not reliable indicators of exact sales, but they do show the value of sales figures in encouraging further sales.

21. See John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 3 vols. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972), 1:428; Geary, “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” p. 351; Shackelford and Wilkie, “John P. Jewett,” p. 226; Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 38; Mott, Golden Multitudes, p. 125. I am grateful to Michael Winship for his suggestions about the difference between Jewett's editions of Cummins and Stowe.

22. Norton's Literary Gazette, 1 May 1854, p. 236, and 15 December 1854, p. 636.

23. On the practice of “puffing” reviews and its relation to promotional campaigns, see Susan Geary, “The Domestic Novel as a Commercial Commodity: Making a Best Seller in the 1850s,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 70 (1976): 365-93.

24. Advertisement in Norton's Literary Gazette, 15 February 1854, p. 87.

25. Advertisement in Norton's Literary Gazette, 1 April 1854, p. 180.

26. Hingham Journal, 15 December 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 3. As with the original edition, the illustrated Lamplighter was a more modest enterprise than the illustrated edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which featured 100 new illustrations by Hammatt Billings.

27. The Lamplighter Picture Book, by a Lady (Boston, 1856), p. 30.

28. The Lamplighter Picture Book, p. 3.

29. The Lamplighter Picture Book, p. 28.

30. Jacob Blanck, ed., The Bibliography of American Literature, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955-), 2:366.

31. Quoted by Stephen A. Hirsch, in “Uncle Tomitudes: The Popular Reaction to Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1978 (Boston: Twayne, 1979), p. 318.

32. On Boston as an abolitionist publishing center, see Eric Gardner, “‘This Attempt of Their Sister’: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig from Printer to Readers,” New England Quarterly 66 (June 1993): 228-33. Gardner's research suggests that most of the original readers of Our Nig were children under the age of twenty; like The Lamplighter Picture Book, its blend of religion and abolition appealed to a young audience.

33. C. Summer to Cummins, 25 March 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 2. There is no evidence as to whether Cummins accepted the invitation and attended the play.

34. “Theatrical Chronicle,” Boston Evening Gazette, 1 April 1854. This and an advertisement for the drama are in Cummins Papers, folder 3.

35. “Literary Notices,” Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, July 1854, p. 84.

36. “Literary Notices,” Knickerbocker, May 1854, pp. 509-10.

37. Review of The Lamplighter, clipping, probably from New Orleans Picuyne, c. 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 3.

38. Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 209. As Baym points out, however, this middle ground may not have been as far removed from the “low ground” as some critics supposed: “what might have united the readers and writers of domestic and high-wrought fiction was their deployment of an essentially similar plot, the story of female trials and triumph. The high-pitched agonies of a Southworth or Stephens heroine were intensifications of the quiet sufferings of a Cummins or Warner protagonist, a similarity the rhetorical differences may have obscured for reviewers” (p. 209).

39. “Literary Notices,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, April 1854, p. 714.

40. “New Publications,” New York Tribune, 28 March 1854, p. 6.

41. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, 1:224.

42. Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribner's, 1913), pp. 77-78. Adeline Tintner speculates that James may even have had Cummins's Gerty Flint in mind when he named the heroine of “Poor Richard” Gertrude Whittaker and the heroine of The Europeans Gertrude Wentworth. See The Pop World of Henry James (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 206.

43. Paul D. Swanwick to Cummins, 28 July 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 2.

44. William Williams to Cummins, 6 November 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 2.

45. John P. Jewett to Cummins, 13 December 1854, Cummins Papers, folder 2.

46. For an account of Susan Warner's interactions with her readers through fan mail, see my “Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship,” American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): 565-86.

47. Charles A. Madison, Irving to Irving: Author-Publisher Relations, 1800-1974 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974), pp. 27-28.

48. Contract between Maria S. Cummins and William D. Ticknor and Co., 20 March 1860, and contract between Maria S. Cummins and J. E. Tilton and Co., 22 March 1864 and 30 April 1864, Cummins Papers, folder 2.

49. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, 1:543.

50. The Bibliography of American Literature indicates that no new editions of The Lamplighter appeared after Jewett's bankruptcy, though The National Union Catalog indicates that Houghton Mifflin reprinted the novel in 1882, 1883, 1887, 1888, 1891, and 1894, along with New York publishers J. B. Alden (1888), W. L. Allison (1889), Butler Bros. (189[?]), T. Y. Crowell (189[?]), Grosset and Dunlap (1890[?]), F. M. Lupton (1898[?]), and Chicago publisher D. C. Cook (189[?]).

51. Statements of account from Houghton Mifflin to Thomas K. Cummins, 30 April 1896, 30 April 1897, 30 April 1898, Cummins Papers, folder 4.

52. Mott, Golden Multitudes, p. 125.

53. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1986), p. 298.

54. See The Bibliography of American Literature, 2:364.

55. British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1880 [Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 106], ed. Patricia J. Anderson and Jonathan Rose (Detroit: Gale Research Press, 1991), p. 73.

56. British Literary Publishing Houses, p. 262.

57. F. A. Mumby, The House of Routledge: 1834-1934 (London: Routledge, 1934), pp. 120-21.

58. James J. Barnes, Authors, Publishers and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 1815-1854 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. 172. American publishers, of course, also routinely pirated the works of British authors.

59. William Seaman, The Lamplighter, or, The Blind Girl and Little Gerty (London: T. H. Lacy, 1854), p. 72.

60. Quoted by William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, in Tauchnitz International Editions in English, 1841-1955: A Bibliographical History (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1988), p. 86.

61. Quoted by Tighe Hopkins, in “‘The Tauchnitz’ Edition: The Story of a Popular Publisher,” Pall Mall Magazine 25 (1901): 200.

62. See Todd and Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions, pp. 83-88.

63. See Todd and Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions, p. viii, and Karl H. Pressler, “The Tauchnitz Edition: Beginning and End of a Famous Series,” Publishing History 6 (1980): 63-78. Todd and Bowden list 5,372 titles in their bibliography, while Pressler lists 5,425 until 1955.

64. Hopkins, “‘The Tauchnitz’ Edition,” p. 200.

65. See Yvonne Wellink, “American Sentimental Bestsellers in Holland in the Nineteenth Century,” in Something Understood: Studies in Anglo-Dutch Literary Translation, ed. Bart Westerweel and Theo D'haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 276-80, 287. Wellink discusses translations of The Lamplighter published in 1878 and 1902 respectively.