SOURCE: Mott, Frank Luther. “Literary Types and Judgments” and “Literary Phases of Postbellum Magazines.” In A History of American Magazines: 1850-1865, pp. 157-87; 223-74. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938.

[In the following excerpts, Mott evaluates the literature and literary criticism that appeared in American magazines from 1850 through the 1880s.]

LITERARY TYPES AND JUDGMENTS

“Next to that of Germany, the reading circle of the United States is the most extensive in the world,” asserted the editor of Putnam's Monthly in 1856. “There are more writers in France, and better writing in England, no doubt, than among ourselves; but these nations cannot compare with us in the number of intelligent readers.”¹Norton's Literary Gazette gave statistics showing the publication of about a thousand books in the United States in 1852, one-third of them reprints—a figure doubled by 1855 and quadrupled by 1862. Lower prices for good books had much to do with this increase. “Twenty-five years ago, books sufficient to constitute a respectable library demanded a sum which few were able to spare,” said Church's Bizarre in 1852. “Now a library adequate to the wants of even the professed littérateur may be had at a price within the means of all save the very poorest.”²

LITERARY CRITICISM

This increasing flood of new books emphasized the need for good literary criticism. “That we have no ‘organ’ of criticism is painfully apparent,” declared the Cosmopolitan Art Journal. “The monthlies painfully fail in their critical departments. … Their notices scarcely amount to anything else than good advertisements of their own or their friends' wares.”³ The Criterion joined the chorus: “An honest critical journal is viewed with apprehension by some few of the book trade. The facility with which puffs are procured, and the unblushing effrontery with which some of the newspaper press publish them are facts now well known.”⁴

Three obstacles to honest criticism were commonly cited: the activity of the friends of authors and publishers, improper pressure by the advertisers of books, and the incompetence of reviewers. Of these the first was oftenest mentioned: so far did puffery go that the editor of Putnam's was moved to quote one complainant's forceful declaration: “I proclaim to all the inhabitants of the land that they cannot trust what the periodicals say of new books!”⁵ The practice of anonymity lent itself naturally to puffery, for it was easy for a close friend of the author, or even the author himself, to write and publish several laudatory reviews without betraying his self-interest.⁶ As to the second obstacle to good criticism, the Publishers' Circular claimed that the sinning was not all done by the publishers: “‘Give us advertisements and we will give you good notices’ is a proposition every day made to publishers,” it declared.⁷ The action of Ticknor & Fields in withdrawing their advertising from the Boston Traveler following the publication of an unfavorable review of Hiawatha was widely commented upon.⁸

Yet there was some good reviewing. Putnam's, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Literary World did some really excellent work in that kind, as well as such short-lived periodicals as the Criterion, the Crayon, and To-Day. The more pretentious journals, such as the North American and the National Quarterly, occasionally had good critical articles in special fields. Griswold's International Monthly, despite some conspicuous failures, printed much sound criticism.

The Literary World,⁹ of New York, finished its career in 1853, under the editorship of Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, having won golden opinions but little gold coin. Derby's Literary Advertiser (1851-56), a Cincinnati semimonthly, was devoted largely to biographical sketches. Norton's Literary Advertiser was begun in New York by Charles B. Norton in 1851, changing its name the following year to Norton's Literary Gazette and Publishers' Circular. George W. Childs, of Philadelphia, bought it in 1855 and continued it as the American Publishers' Circular and Literary Gazette.¹⁰ Childs made R. Shelton Mackenzie editor. The Circular was mainly an advertising medium for the publishers, designed for circulation, among booksellers. Similar in purpose was O. F. Parsons' Monthly Trade Gazette (1855-72), of New York.

To-Day: A Boston Literary Journal was edited weekly by Charles Hale, a brother of Edward Everett Hale, through the twelve months of 1852. It published excellent book reviews, notes on music, the drama, and fine arts, and essays on literary and artistic topics—no small part of the whole being from the pen of the talented editor. Its criticisms, as Putnam's observed, were admirable—“unsparing, yet kind and judicious.”¹¹ The Criterion (1855-56), by Charles R. Rode, was a New York critical weekly of high class, publishing really careful reviews, with notes on art, drama, and science. It was modeled on the London Athenaeum. Rode said he lost ＄4,000 on it during its nine months, before it was finally merged with the Publishers' Circular. A second venture by C. B. Norton was called Norton's Literary Letter (1857-60).¹² It was chiefly bibliographical, and its subtitle describes its contents: “Comprising American papers of interest and a catalogue of rare and valuable books relative to America.” Bibliographies of books pertaining to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont were notable features. Somewhat similar was the Philobiblion (1861-63), also of New York, which described itself as “A Monthly Bibliographical Journal, containing critical notices of, and extracts from, rare, curious, and valuable old books.” Its editor was P. G. Philes, who had graduated from shoemaking into bookselling, and thence into criticism and editorship.

AMERICAN MAGAZINES ON ENGLISH LITERATURE

Much of the critical talent of American magazinists was expended on English works. Comment on Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, and Tennyson was especially prominent.

“No author was ever more popular in America than Dickens,” declared a writer in Putnam's.¹³ A decade of steady production of popular novels had dulled the memory of American Notes, with its injury to national pride. Knickerbocker thought the early fifties “the very hey-day of the renown of this great master.”¹⁴

Thackeray visited the United States on lecture tours in 1852-53 and 1854-55. He spoke to large audiences everywhere and was reported to have made ＄12,000 from his second excursion; but the Criterion reported that his lectures “have not apparently fulfilled public expectation.”¹⁵ Critics generally were very generous in their treatment of him, however. “There are but three English novelists,” declared J. F. Kirk dogmatically in the North American Review “—Fielding, Jane Austen, and Thackeray.”¹⁶ And even if audiences were sometimes disappointed in him, Thackeray seems to have made an excellent impression on those who met him personally. “A great, sweet, generous human heart,” was George William Curtis' verdict in Putnam's.¹⁷

Another visitor was G. P. R. James, who came on an official mission. He landed in New York on July 4, 1850, “amid discharges of artillery, the huzzas of assembled thousands, and such an imposing military display as is rarely seen in this country except on occasions of great moment and universal interest.”¹⁸ The “assembled thousands” were, of course, celebrating Independence Day. Comment on James ranged from the eulogistic to the severe.

Bulwer was generally more highly esteemed. An enthusiastic commentator in the National Democratic Quarterly declared that he “is certainly one of the most extraordinary men, and one who has exerted the widest influence in his writings, that has arisen in any age.”¹⁹

George Eliot, newest of the great English novelists, won encomiums. “The author of Adam Bede,” said a writer in Russell's Magazine in 1859, “continues to baffle the efforts of the curious to discover his name. Whoever he is, he has achieved a success which is seldom gained, and still more rarely deserved.”²⁰

Among English writers of nonfiction prose, Carlyle received more attention than any of his fellows; but the great reputation which he had enjoyed in the forties shrank perceptibly in the next decades.²¹ His Friedrich was less popular than the earlier works, and his tracts on slavery in America gave greatest offense in that part of the country where his “cult” had been most assiduously tended. “I accuse you,” wrote D. A. Wasson to Carlyle in the Atlantic, “of narrowness and pettiness of understanding in regard to America. … You are beginning to suffer from yourself. You are threatening to perish of too much Thomas Carlyle.”²² Even in the South, where his sympathy with slavery might be expected to win him friends, the magazines were unkind to him. John Esten Cooke, writing in the Southern Literary Messenger, calls his Latter-Day Pamphlets “purely monstrous.”²³

The death of Wordsworth called forth much comment upon his work. Thomas Chase, the classical scholar, predicted in the North American Review that “Future ages will confirm the decision upon which this age has nearly agreed, that Wordsworth is the greatest poet since Milton, and in some sense the father of a nobler and loftier school of poetry than any which had before appeared.”²⁴ The posthumous Prelude was “more generally read than any poem of equal length that has issued from the press in this age,”²⁵ said another commentator.

After Wordsworth's death Tennyson was repeatedly hailed as the foremost of living English poets, “the acknowledged master of an original and popular school,” “the leading poet of his generation,” “preëminently the poet of our age.”²⁶ Browning, on the other hand, is “little read, except by a circle of enthusiastic admirers; yet his fame and literary position are assured.”²⁷ In 1861 the death of Mrs. Browning, who was always popular in America, called forth much praise of her work: Putnam's said her name was “a household word in the best and most cultivated homes of the Old World and the New.”²⁸

Bailey's Festus was the subject of controversy literary and religious. “Blasphemous rant and fustian,”²⁹ declared Griswold's International Magazine; others were charmed by it. Writing after the smoke of battle had somewhat cleared, a Putnam critic said:

Everybody read Festus: some it gladdened and some it saddened, and not a few it maddened. … the poem in England and America ran through editions as numerous as the loves of its hero. … [Bailey was] like a comet in the irregularity of his orbit, and somewhat like a shooting star in the sudden subsiding of his glory.³⁰

FRENCH LITERATURE

Some progress was made during this period in American appreciation of current French literature: Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, and George Sand were the writers upon whom attention seemed mainly to be centered, though Sue, About, and de Kock received some comment.

The publication, in both the North and the South, of translations of Les Misérables distracted the American mind somewhat from civil war to sympathy with the poor in the person of Valjean. Contemporary estimates of the work ranged from the Continental Monthly's contemptuous “a mere sensation plot … a gross imitation of Eugene Sue,”³¹ to Charles Bohun's conclusion in De Bow's that “it is plainly stamped with the broad seal of genius.”³² The reception of the work in America was, on the whole, unfavorable; faults of bad reasoning, exaggeration, extravagance of style, confusion of materials, and lack of perspective were insisted upon.³³ The moral teaching was disapproved by E. P. Whipple in the Atlantic: “It will do infinitely more harm than good. The bigotries of virtue are better than the charities of vice.”³⁴

The death of Balzac in 1850 was the reason for the appearance of a few articles about the author of the Comédie Humaine. They were expository rather than critical. A writer in the Democratic Review, who called the subject of his sketch Henri de Balzac, said: “In England or America, he is far from being either generally read or appreciated. Few of his works have been translated.” But this commentator thinks him “the greatest of novelists.”³⁵ Motley had been far less cordial in the North American a few years before, refusing to recommend Balzac “for general circulation in this country.”³⁶

Dumas received some attention. His methods of composition furnished a subject for discussion; Winthrop Sargent called his works “literary impostures” in the North American.³⁷ John Esten Cooke named him “one of the most amusing writers of the present age” in the Southern Literary Messenger,³⁸ and Rufus Wilmot Griswold expressed the opinion in his International Monthly that “as a simple story writer,” Dumas was “perhaps deserving of the highest place in the temple of letters.”³⁹

No French author, however, was more discussed than George Sand. Perhaps the best articles about her were a two-part essay in Putnam's by George Ripley⁴⁰ and a general review of her work and life in the Atlantic Monthly by Julia Ward Howe. “The hands might be sinful,” admitted Mrs. Howe, “but the box they broke contained an exceeding precious ointment.”⁴¹

This preoccupation with morals was characteristic of American comment on French literature. “Most of the French novels are liable to grave censures,” thought the National Democratic Quarterly;⁴² and the Courant declared: “French literature is immoral; literature is the ‘expression of society,’ hence, French society is immoral. Is not this the general idea that we have in this country of French literature and French society? We think it is.”⁴³ Henry Ward Beecher wrote in the Independent: “No man can read the reform literature of France, at least not such as Sue, and Sand, issue, and not regret to the day of his death that he ever touched it.”⁴⁴

GERMAN LITERATURE

Articles about German literature in American magazines mounted to a peak about 1850, but fell off soon thereafter; and during the latter two-thirds of our period German writers were given comparatively scant attention.⁴⁵ This decline of interest was probably partly in the nature of a reaction against the unbounded enthusiasm of the forties;⁴⁶ it was due also to a dearth of exciting German writers and to the disappearance of certain American magazines which had been especially interested in the Germans.

Goethe and Richter were the most prominent of the older German writers discussed in the American magazines of the fifties and sixties, and Heine of the “Young Germany.” Lessing, Schiller, Rückert, Auerbach, and Ludwig got occasional attention. The National Quarterly Review published a series of careful and able articles on the German poets by its editor, E. I. Sears, in the latter years of our period. During their short lives the Dial, To-Day, the Criterion, the International Monthly, and the Continental Monthly gave considerable space to the German writers; and the Democratic Review and the Knickerbocker continued their interest of past years in things Teutonic.

George Fitzhugh, writing in De Bow's, noted the sudden rise and the “equally sudden eclipse and decadence” of German literature and was well content with that waning because he thought that German writings were “made up, in great measure, of the horrible, the cruel, the impossible, the unnatural, and the supernatural.”⁴⁷ Goethe continued to be the object of attacks on the ground of morality; one writer accused him of “undermining all that is honorable or holy among men.”⁴⁸ Yet the Southern Quarterly Review praised Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels, the object of these strictures, very highly.⁴⁹

The appearance of Leland's translation of Heine's Pictures of Travel in 1855 and the poet's death in the following year gave occasion for various articles about him. His skepticism and his errors of personal conduct were generally condemned,⁵⁰ but on the whole he fared well with the critics.

ESTIMATES OF AMERICAN WRITERS

There was rather more variation in the contemporary opinion of leading American writers as expressed in the magazines than in the accepted estimates of foreign authors, but in most cases a sentence or two may be culled from review or article to summarize more or less accurately the consensus of criticism.

Let us begin, then, with Irving, “the most favourite American author at home and abroad.”⁵¹ His life of Washington, published 1855-59, won almost universal praise.

Of Cooper, the International Monthly said in 1851:

As a novelist, take him all in all, he is entitled to precedence of every other now living. … The great critics assign him a place among the foremost of the illustrious authors of the age.

Balzac's praise in the Revue de Paris is adduced and awkwardly translated: “Who is there writing English among our contemporaries, if not of him, of whom it can be said that he is a genius of the first order?” Cooper's death a few months after the appearance of this article brought out some appreciative criticism of his work: quarrels and litigation were then forgotten.⁵²

Bryant was commonly considered the first of American poets. Griswold in his International called him “the greatest living poet who writes the English language”⁵³ in 1851; a writer in the New York Quarterly said “he rears his head preëminently over all competitors as the Bard of America”;⁵⁴ and the Southern Literary Messenger nominated him for “president of the literary republic.”⁵⁵ Poe, his career ended, was still a subject for controversy. Griswold reprinted his venomous attack on the unfortunate poet's memory in the International for October 1850. Halleck's position was high and assured. One critic names Halleck, Bryant, and Poe as the supreme artists in American poetry.⁵⁶ Bayard Taylor was highly esteemed by some critics—“the finest of our poetical rhetoricians,” wrote Griswold.⁵⁷ Nathaniel Parker Willis had clearly declined in popular esteem: perhaps what Vanity Fair called “his numerous and ingenious achievements in the elegant art of concealed puffery”⁵⁸ had something to do with the waning of his vogue.

Turning to New England, we find Emerson's reputation steadily growing.⁵⁹ “At last he has come out from the misty twilight of Transcendentalism into the clear light of common sense,” observed Delia M. Colton in the Continental Monthly.⁶⁰ Each of the three books Emerson published during this period was shown increasing favor by the critics; yet there was a constant undercurrent of objection from conservatives in theology and social theory.⁶¹ Emerson's friend Thoreau seems to have been regarded as an interesting oddity by most reviewers. A Knickerbocker writer discussed Walden under the caption “Town and Rural Humbugs” and, though he praised the book, classed Thoreau with Barnum.⁶² After the death of Thoreau, Emerson did justice to his memory in an admirable essay in the Atlantic; but Lowell, who had been kind to him in the Massachusetts Quarterly during his lifetime, was more severe in the North American after his death.⁶³

Hawthorne was called “the greatest living American writer born in the present century” by the International in 1850.⁶⁴ That left Irving and Cooper out of the comparison. It was in 1850 that The Scarlet Letter was published; and the International, which is always quotable because of its assured, if dogmatic, generalizations, declared that “The Scarlet Letter will challenge consideration in the name of Art, in the best audience which in any age receives Cervantes, Le Sage, or Scott.”⁶⁵

Longfellow did not fare as well as might have been expected in the fifties and sixties. A reviewer in the Southern Literary Messenger wrote that “He has been over-praised by his coworkers and his disciples. He has been as much underrated by unfriendly critics,”⁶⁶ and we are told that the poet was so much offended by this criticism that he asked to have the complimentary copy of the magazine which was being sent to him discontinued.⁶⁷ Later another writer in the same magazine made amends, however, by asserting that “It cannot be denied that Henry W. Longfellow is the first of our living American poets.”⁶⁸Hiawatha appeared in 1855 and brought no little adverse criticism upon the devoted head of the author; the old charge of imitativeness was given a new lease of life in the Criterion and other periodicals.⁶⁹

Lowell's activity just before 1850 had brought him strikingly before the public. After the Biglow Papers in 1848, “he leaped at once into the high tide of popularity,” said one reviewer; but the novel elements in his work made most critics cautious.⁷⁰ Whittier, like Lowell, was condemned for lending his art to propaganda (term yet in the womb of Muttersprache); yet Putnam's asserted that his “place is as determined and distinctive as that of any of our acknowledged poets. … Many of his abolition poems are superb specimens of poetic indignation.”⁷¹

Holmes was well liked. Francis Bowen in his North American called him “our old favorite … everybody's favorite,”⁷² and Vanity Fair declared, “If we were not Vanity Fair we would wish to be Dr. Holmes. From the earliest period of adolescence, his songs have been our delight.”⁷³

Whitman's Leaves of Grass was published in 1855. It was not widely reviewed in the magazines.⁷⁴ The practice of anonymity made it possible for the Democratic Review to print Whitman's own able apologia as a review of the volume,⁷⁵ and Edward Everett Hale wrote a singularly understanding notice of it for the North American Review.⁷⁶ The Criterion, on the other hand, which would not have reviewed it at all had not Emerson “unworthily recommended it,” declared that “it is impossible to imagine how any man's fancy could have conceived such a mass of stupid filth unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love,” and then decided to leave the matter to the officers of the law.⁷⁷ A far better review appeared in Putnam's: faults are pointed out sharply, and the poem is called “a mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism”; but the critic acknowledges “an original conception of nature, a manly brawn, and an epic directness” in the poem.⁷⁸ The Southern Literary Messenger blames “the pantheism of Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson,” which, it says, “pervades and pollutes the entire literature of the North,” for this “spasmodic idiocy of Walt Whitman.”⁷⁹

Herman Melville, whose Moby Dick was published in 1851, was treated kindly but firmly by the critics. He was told that “Typee and Omoo were remarkable for freshness and a certain artistic keeping,”⁸⁰ though it was not right to abuse the missionaries as he had done in the latter; but Moby Dick strained the patience of readers, and Pierre quite exhausted it. “He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble,” wrote Fitz-James O'Brien in Putnam's.⁸¹

Laudatory articles about William Gilmore Simms were not uncommon in the southern magazines. J. Q. Moore in De Bow's attested the “reverence, esteem and admiration” for both the character and the literary works of the dean of southern literature. The republication of his Revolutionary romances, which had “made his great reputation twenty years ago,” was the occasion for a survey of his work in the Southern Literary Messenger; the author is called “one of our most worthy citizens and distinguished ornaments” of the South. The leading article in the International Magazine, of New York, for April 1, 1852, is a highly commendatory essay on Simms.⁸²

H. H. Brownell, author of Lyrics of a Day, was hailed by the North American Review as the rival of the greatest war poets in literature: “His ‘River-Fight’ is the finest lyric of the kind since Drayton's ‘Battle of Agincourt.’”⁸³ Holmes declared in the Atlantic: “The Lyrics of a Day are too modestly named. Our literature cannot forget the masterpieces in this little volume in a day, a year, or an age.”⁸⁴ And yet it took only a decade to prove that Brownell had used a truer judgment in selecting his title than his critic had displayed in reviewing the volume.

Women were active in authorship in the fifties. “A most alarming avalanche of female authors has been pouring in upon us for the past three months,” declared Putnam's in the summer of 1854. “The success of Uncle Tom and Fanny Fern has been the cause, doubtless.”⁸⁵ Enough has been said in other places of the successes of Mrs. Stowe and Fanny Fern,⁸⁶ but some other “female authors” should be mentioned here. The International Miscellany declared that the poems of Alice Cary would “live among the contributions which this age offers to the permanent literary creation. Her younger sister, Phoebe Carey,⁸⁷ is also a woman of genius.”⁸⁸ But Putnam's, which had praised the Cary sisters in its early numbers, later reproved them for “haste and carelessness” and found their verses “unreal, imitative … a sweet and cloying echo of an old song.”⁸⁹ Mrs. Sigourney's reputation remained high with the average reader of verse. She died in 1865. Her poems, asserted the Western Literary Messenger,

are laid on a million of memory's shelves. Children in our infant schools lisp her mellow canzonets; older youths recite her poems for riper minds in our grammar schools and academies; mothers pore over her pages of prose for counsel, and the aged of either sex draw consolation from the inspirations of her sanctified muse in their declining years.⁹⁰

Maria G. Brooks, who had died shortly before the beginning of our period, was “admitted by masters of the literary art to have been the greatest poet of her sex who ever wrote in any language or in any age”—so we are told by a dealer in hyperboles in the International Monthly.⁹¹

MAGAZINE CRITICISM OF POPULAR NOVELS

Though The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick belong to the fifties, the best sellers of that decade were chiefly by women: Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Curse of Clifton (1853), Mary Jane Holmes's Tempest and Sunshine (1854), Maria S. Cummins' The Lamplighter (1856), Mrs. Maria J. McIntosh's Violet (1856), and Augusta Jane Evans' Beulah (1859). Forty thousand copies of The Lamplighter were sold in its first eight weeks.⁹² Of Miss Warner's books, Queechy and The Wide, Wide World, Mrs. Kirkland wrote in the North American: “We know not where, in any language, we shall find their graphic truth excelled.”⁹³Beulah was “the welcome companion of every fireside.”⁹⁴ It is not without reason that one of the historians of American literature speaks of “the feminine fifties.”⁹⁵

A few best sellers, however, were written by men—Donald G. Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor, T. S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar Room, and Richard B. Kimball's St. Leger. In the early sixties came Edmund Kirke's Among the Pines and Edward S. Ellis' Seth Jones. The latter was perhaps the most popular of the dime novels. But the women wrote dime novels, too; Mrs. Victor, Mrs. Stephens, and Mrs. Denison had best sellers in the Beadle lists.

Novels had become immensely popular. Most of the general magazines depended much upon serial fiction. The Harper periodicals, the eclectics, and the literary weeklies drew largely upon the British and French novelists. The Atlantic, the Continental, Putnam's, Russell's, and the Southern Literary Messenger relied upon the home product. Even the religious periodicals sometimes used serial stories; and a hot debate in all the panoply of theological polemics was waged in the Protestant Episcopal Quarterly over the question of the righteousness of the religious novel, one side arguing that “fiction is an agency that should not be given up exclusively to the use of the evil one,” and the other claiming that the religious novel is in itself “producing a very great evil.”⁹⁶Putnam's, in its later numbers, came to mistrust novel reading, which, “if systematically indulged in, and especially by girls,” it thought might “result in the acquirement of those ‘romantic notions’ and ‘false views of life’ so much deprecated by the parents and guardians of youth.”⁹⁷

But the flood of novels swept on. “The time is now at hand,” claimed a satirist in the Southern Literary Messenger, “when no gentleman or lady will be guilty of never having written a novel.”⁹⁸ William Swinton, the journalist, wrote as follows in Putnam's:

Do you wish to instruct, to convince, to please? Write a novel! Have you a system of religion or politics or manners or social life to inculcate? Write a novel! Would you have the “world” split its sides with laughter, or set all the damsels in the land abreaking their hearts? Write a novel! Would you lay bare the secret workings of your heart, or have you a friend to whom you would render that office? Write a novel! … Do you wish to create a sensation? Why, write a novel! And lastly, not least, but loftiest, would you make money? Then, in Pluto's and Mammon's names! write a novel!⁹⁹

SHORTER FICTION

Although the short story was as yet recognized by few as a distinctive literary type, it must be mentioned here because of the increasing dependence of magazines upon it.

The great stream of short fiction continued to be of the sentimental Godey type. Poe was dead, and Hawthorne had turned to the longer forms after 1851; neither seemed to have made much impress upon the American short story. There was a racy, genuine note in certain anecdote-stories that were coming out of the West and Southwest, as in those which the Spirit of the Times published from the pen of Thomas B. Thorpe, but most magazines would have recoiled in dismay from such rudeness.

The Atlantic Monthly, however, went counter to the general honeyed stickiness with its very first numbers. It published many of Rose Terry's forthright stories of New England life; it published Rebecca Harding Davis' grimly realistic “Life in the Iron Mills.” It enlisted Fitz-James O'Brien, Caroline Chesebrough, Harriett Prescott, and Edward Everett Hale. In short, it printed better stories than any other magazine in the country, and it relied upon them rather than on English serials. Its editor had written to his friend Briggs in 1853, “I do abhor sentimentality from the depth of my soul”;¹⁰⁰ and the stories he and his successor Fields selected for the magazine were, for the most part, of a realistic trend. To take one representative example, Miss E. P. Appleton's “A Half-Life and Half a Life,” in the number for February 1864, is a convincing and memorable picture of pioneer life on the Kentucky border. The characters are relentlessly described, the scenes of the story are as effectively real as they are simple, and even the narrator herself confesses to her plainness.

Melville, Simms, Curtis, Mitchell, Ludlow, and Trowbridge were among the short story writers of the times, and O'Brien was much admired; but most of the best as well as the worst work was done by women. “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,” wrote Hawthorne to Ticknor¹⁰¹—and the mob all wrote short stories.

THE MAGAZINES AND POETRY

If the feminine note was conspicuous in fiction, it was even more so in poetry. There “the Lilies and the Lizzies—the sighing swains and rhyming milkmaids”¹⁰² were busiest. “The poets all used to chime in with ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel,’” observed the Democratic Review; “then they caroled nothing but love ditties like Moore, then imitated Byron; and now they whimper like Tennyson.”¹⁰³ The banality of contemporary poetry worried the critics continually. “Dear Aunts, do put a little more metal in your poetry!” begged the Southern Literary Messenger of those poetesses of uncertain age who were responsible for much of the magazine verse:

When you write poetry, make an effort to say something. If you have nothing to say, do not write “Poetry.” No: knit stockings—knit stockings in all such cases. You must not be satisfied with inditing mere words of liquid sounds, or fashionable gracefulness of sentences. You must talk of things.¹⁰⁴

Aldrich's lachrymose masterpiece in infant-obituary verse, “Babie Bell,” was a great popular success in 1856. It was reprinted in thousands of periodicals and newspapers.¹⁰⁵ “You have come in good time, Walt Whitman!” aptly exclaimed Whitman himself in a review of his own work.¹⁰⁶

In the better magazines the war served to put some iron into current verse, though the popular war songs were oozy with sentiment. “Sing of the war and the times, O poets!” beseeched the editor of the Knickerbocker in 1861, “and spare us for a brief season those sweet Lines to —— and Stanzas to the Moon.”¹⁰⁷ The best offering of war poetry is to be found in the pages of the Atlantic, where Mrs. Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Emerson's “Voluntaries,” Whittier's “Barbara Frietchie,” Holmes's “Brother Jonathan to Sister Caroline,” Longfellow's “Killed at the Ford,” and Lowell's second series of “Biglow Papers” and “Commemoration Ode” were all published. The Independent was already gaining a reputation for good poetry, and such abolition papers as the Anti-Slavery Standard and the National Era published some excellent verse.

HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TRAVEL

The fifties were a great decade in historical writing. Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Hildreth were in full tide of production. “The American seems to have a peculiar genius in one department of art and one of literature,” observed a Putnam critic. “He is a good sculptor and a good historian.”¹⁰⁸ Apparently there was a popular demand for history, and when Macaulay's great work appeared, 200,000 volumes of it were sold in the United States in a few months.¹⁰⁹ Reviews gave hundreds of pages to discussion of contemporary historical works.

The first successful historical journal of general scope was the Historical Magazine,¹¹⁰ founded in Boston in 1857 by C. B. Richardson. It was moved to New York the next year, J. D. G. Shea soon becoming its editor. It was a monthly offshoot of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register,¹¹¹ the outstanding periodical of its class, which flourished throughout these years under the care of the antiquarian Samuel G. Drake. There were eight or ten local and state historical journals in addition to these of wider scope.¹¹²

Biography was also popular. The success of Harper's Monthly was owing in some measure to the long serial life of Napoleon by John S. C. Abbott, and biography was staple in other periodicals. The Portrait Monthly (1863-64) relied chiefly on woodcuts of Civil War generals accompanied by biographical sketches. Irving, Simms, Parton were busy biographers; and many other writers dipped into this field from time to time. In an article on “The Biographical Mania” in the Saturday Evening Gazette in 1857, we are plausibly assured that “the partiality of the reading community for biographies has been greatly increasing.”¹¹³

“Not many years ago a man could acquire quite a reputation by crossing the Atlantic,” observed a writer in Gleason's Pictorial in 1853; but “it does not set a man up very high to travel nowadays: everybody travels.”¹¹⁴ And nearly everybody wrote about what he had seen after he got home. There was scarcely a periodical which did not print travel sketches, review travel books, and describe foreign and domestic journeys. The pictorials had an advantage in this kind, for they could make their travel articles doubly attractive.

THE WAR OF THE DICTIONARIES

Another interesting phase of the bookishness of the sixties was the current discussion of the merits of two rival dictionaries. Some years before, the Southern Literary Messenger had adverted to the “increased attention” given to “the philosophy of language,” which it ascribed to the recent work of Archbishop Trench and named as “one of the most marked of the literary aspects of the times.”¹¹⁵ This was chiefly a scholarly interest; but upon the appearance of the quarto edition of Worcester's Dictionary in 1860, there set in a rivalry between Webster and Worcester in which nearly every literate person took sides. “The schoolmen have been much exercised of late by the dictionary war,” observed Vanity Fair. “‘A Webster! A Webster!’ and ‘Worcester to the rescue!’ have been the battle cries heard above the cannon of Napoleon III.”¹¹⁶ The Old Guard took the side of Worcester, violently, as was its character, and referred to Webster's Dictionary as “that immense monument of ignorance, folly and fraud!”¹¹⁷ But the Knickerbocker refused to become excited over the matter: “Worcester or Webster? Well, they are both stirring books; and if t'other dear charmer were away we could be perfectly happy with either.”¹¹⁸

HUMOR

Many periodicals had their humorous departments—some modeled upon Clark's “Table Talk” in the Knickerbocker, some imitating the “Editor's Drawer” in Harper's, and some mere “Joke Corners.” Many of the weeklies helped themselves to comic stories which went the rounds of the newspaper press; such tales were in demand. The Home Journal advertised in 1859 “fresh, spicy, amusing, original comic stories, which smack and relish of the wit, humor, raciness, brilliancy, and sparkle of the times.” The Spirit of the Times was famous for its humorous sketches.

A perusal of these departments and of the contemporary comic periodicals shows that the humor of the mid-century was of two chief kinds: (1) the frontier humor, and (2) the urban humor.

The first class frequently had a fresh raciness which gave it a value that the other more conventional kind did not possess. Frontier humor depended upon exaggeration, incongruity, and dialect for much of its effect. Mark Twain's very first efforts occur in our period; John Phoenix died in 1861; Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Bill Arp were at their best in the sixties. These writers commonly used all three of the elements mentioned—sometimes all together. Their wit was often rough, and their incongruities were frequently the result of a crude treatment of sacred matters; but their buffoonery often had real point, and they were sworn enemies of sham.

The second class—that of urban comedy—habitually used more worn materials. It is not difficult to list the standard jokes:

The fish story joke
The bedbug joke
The English fop (later dude) joke
The drunkard's return joke
          a. The lamp post joke
          b. The keyhole joke
The unwelcome suitor (or kick-in-the-pants) joke
The sleeping policeman joke
The roof cat joke
The black eye joke
The watered milk joke
The Biddy joke
The boarding-house (or hash) joke
The wedding night joke
The old maid joke
The bashful suitor joke
The boy-under-the-sofa joke
The beaten scholar joke
The newly rich joke
The dog-and-tramp joke
The love letter joke
The crinoline joke
The peddler joke

A few of these last have vanished from the later comics, but most of them bloom perennially. Scholars are no longer beaten; crinoline has passed, giving place to fashions just as useful to paragraphers; peddlers are less frequent, perhaps. The Biddy joke, which was derived from the stupidity of Irish emigrant girls employed as house servants, now masquerades as the new-maid joke. Momus had a series of articles on comic types in 1860—Bridget, the cockney, the boarding-house widow, and so on.

As a variant to any of the above forms, cacography might be used: it was frequent in our period. And parodies and burlesques were common. “The two poems that have been most parodied in this country,” said the International in 1851, have been “Woodman, Spare That Tree” and “The Raven.”¹¹⁹

Of the two-score comic periodicals begun during the period under consideration, only six outlived a second year. The best of the lot—Diogenes hys Lanterne and Vanity Fair—survived for eighteen months and three and a half years, respectively.

Only one of the six had lived over from the preceding period—the New York Picayune (1847-60). It had been founded by Dr. Richard B. Hutchings and Joseph Woodward in order to advertise Hutchings' Dyspepsia Bitters, and the jokes which had been inserted to carry the advertising proved more successful in curing dyspepsia than the bitters. So medicine yielded to comedy, the paper was enlarged, and that brilliant and eccentric journalist, Joseph A. Scoville, was employed as editor. But Scoville quarreled with the proprietors in 1852; and W. H. Levison, John Harrington, and John D. Vose became joint editors for a few years. After that, Frank Bellew, the artist, and Mortimer Thomson, the humorist, did the editorial work. Hutchings was ousted from the management in 1853, and Woodward, Levison, and Robert Gun were successive proprietors. There was much satire on local fads and types. Levison's burlesque Negro sermons by “Professor Julius Caesar Hannibal” became famous, and “The Diary of a Broadway Dandy” was a successful serial in the paper's first year. The woodcuts were few, but prominently displayed; the price was fifty cents a year.¹²⁰

Figaro! or Corbyn's Chronicle of Amusements (1850-51), though primarily a journal of the New York theater, must be placed among the comics because of the wit of its editor, Wardell Corbyn, and some of his contributors. Corbyn was soon joined in the editorship by J. W. S. Hows, dramatic critic of the Albion and a competent writer. A feature of Figaro! was its Lind-madness, for its five months of existence fell within the time of the visit of the Swedish Nightingale to America.

Of longer life was the New York Reveille (1851-54), a small folio with woodcuts, founded by two Englishmen, Charles and Barton, and later edited by Cornelius Matthews, of “Puffer Hopkins” fame. T. B. Gunn, formerly of the Picayune, did some of its later pictures.

The Carpet-Bag (1851-53), of Boston, described itself as “a literary journal published weekly for the amusement of its readers.” Its editors were S. W. Wilder and Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, the latter famous as the creator of Mrs. Partington and her interesting family; John T. Trowbridge was an assistant at one time, and Charles G. Halpine came to it from Barnum, whose secretary he had been for a few months. To the Carpet-Bag shop came also Charles F. Brown, who had not then acquired the final e on his name or thought of singing himself “Artemus Ward,” and got a job as a typesetter. He was “a sandy-haired, thin-featured youth [of seventeen], with a long nose and a pale complexion.”¹²¹ Putting the work of Shillaber, Trowbridge, Halpine, “John Phoenix,” “M. Quad,” and John G. Saxe into type, the boy was inspired to do some things of his own, which, Franklin-like, he got into the hands of the editor without disclosing his authorship of them; and he was delighted to see them appear in print over the pen name “Lieutenant Chubb.” The first known contribution of the sixteen-year-old Sam Clemens appeared in the Carpet-Bag May 1, 1852. Well printed on eight small folio pages, and sparsely illustrated by woodcuts, the paper sold for ＄2.00 a year. At the outset the Carpet-Bag had not tried “to be exclusively funny,” but, as its sub-title indicated, to be a light miscellany. The contributors it attracted, however, were funny men; their laughter was contagious, and they soon had the whole paper chuckling. “Our correspondents—jolly fellows—have had it their own way,” said an editorial in the first number of the second volume.¹²² Its satire, with a few exceptions, was mild, and its comedy was not so crude as that of many of its compeers.¹²³

Diogenes hys Lanterne (1852-53) was a New York weekly edited by John Brougham, the comic actor. George G. Foster and Thomas Dunn English, who had been editors of the older John-Donkey, were leading contributors. It was an offshoot of the New York Picayune, and Dr. Hutchings is said to have been the founder.¹²⁴ Frank Bellew, Thomas Butler Gunn, and George Woodward, all of the Picayune staff, became connected with the Lantern, as it was called on the cover, the first two as artists and the last as publisher. There was an unbacked cartoon, usually political and often clever, in each number. Thomas Powell, an Englishman who was said to have been the model, or one of the models, for Mr. Micawber, joined Brougham as editor in the fall of 1852. Fitz-James O'Brien and Charles Seymour were among the writers enlisted. With all this talent the paper should have succeeded; but Diogenes, as of old, was unpopular, and the paper perished after eighteen months. A story used to be told to the effect that soon after the Lantern was started Brougham and a companion were dining at a café when William E. Burton, a fellow actor who had once had a magazine of his own, entered and seated himself at their table. The friend asked Burton if he ever read the new comic and received the emphatic reply: “Never, except when I am drunk!” Brougham then rose and bowed, and replied, “Then thank God, we are always sure of one faithful reader!” But whatever Burton's opinion, the Lantern was a high-grade comic as long as its oil held out. “It was the best comic paper ever published in America,” declared one authority.¹²⁵

Another humorous sheet begun in New York in 1852 was Young Sam, edited through twelve weekly numbers by Thomas Powell, who later went to the Lantern. Henry C. Watson, the music critic, and George Arnold, the poet, were contributors; and Charles Rosenberg was the chief illustrator.

T. W. Strong also entered the field in 1852, with Yankee Notions, a paper which lived past the end of our period.¹²⁶ It was cheaply printed, and its wit was usually cheap also. It was copiously illustrated with rather crude woodcuts. The picture of an Irish servant displaying to the young man of the house a big turtle which he had hidden in her bed, with the declaration that she had at last caught the bug which had been disturbing her slumbers, may have produced uproarious laughter in the good old days. In 1853 Strong began a comic of somewhat higher grade called Young America, under the editorship of Charles Gayler, the playwright. Fitz-James O'Brien was among its contributors, and McLenan and Hoppin were the artists. In 1854 it was sued for libel by an offended druggist, and discontinued; but it was revived for several months in 1856 under the name Yankee Doodle; or, Young America.

Hint, edited and illustrated by William North in New York in 1854, was the first comic daily; it published six numbers at that frequency, then two as a weekly. It has been hinted that the paper died of overindulgence in puns.

Cozzens' Wine Press (1854-61), of New York, was a trade journal; but its editor, Frederick S. Cozzens, had such a gift of humor that his monthly should be listed with the comics. It had only eight octavo pages, and much of that space was given to lists of the wines, brandies, and “segars” offered for sale by Cozzens and by the Ohio Longworths; but the correspondence of “Lorenzo Pinchbeck,” the editor's “vinous anecdotes,” and the essays on related subjects enabled the little periodical to live up to its subtitle, “A Vinous, Vivacious Monthly.” The Wine Press cellar at No. 74 Warren Street was often the meeting place of the literary lights: Irving and Halleck liked to go there, and Gulian Verplanck, Gaylord Clark, and T. B. Thorp. It was Thorp who wrote some years later in Harper's: “There were rare gatherings in his [Cozzens'] cellar, where wit was expended that was as rich and mellow as his own ‘best brands.’”¹²⁷

When Joseph A. Scoville left the Picayune early in 1852, he started a weekly of his own in folio called the Pick. It gained a good circulation at once, but lasted only about two years. John McLenan was its chief artist, but it used many old New York Herald cuts. Dr. Hutchings became business manager in March 1853; but a few months later he inaugurated a new venture of his own—the New York Time-Piece, a four-page miscellany in folio with a few comic woodcuts. It had only a very brief existence.

The Comic World (1855) was a sixteen-page quarto published monthly by Leland, Clay & Company, of New York, and sold at first for only twenty-five cents a year. Nick Nax for All Creation (1856-75) was also of New York. Its publishers were M. A. Levison and J. C. Haney, the former being editor. It published twice as many pages as the Comic World and sold for ＄1.25 a year.

Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun (1858-96) was the longest-lived of the group. It was a well-printed monthly quarto of sixteen pages, carrying many woodcuts of humorous intent and often crude drawing, at a dollar a year. It usually had a large political cartoon on the front page and printed criticism of the theater and of art.¹²⁸

Vanity Fair¹²⁹ was probably the best of American comics before the Civil War. W. H. Stephens, C. D. Shanly, Artemus Ward, and Charles Godfrey Leland had editorial connections with it; and its good art and spicy comment on affairs made it always attractive.

The two years 1859 and 1860, with their lowering war clouds, saw no less than seven comic periodicals founded—of which Vanity Fair was the most important. Two other New Yorkers greatly exceeded it in longevity: the Comic Monthly, published 1859-81 by J. C. Haney at seventy-five cents a year, and later by Jesse Haney at somewhat higher prices; and the Phunny Phellow, issued 1859-76 by Okie, Dayton & Jones at sixty cents a year. Later, Ross & Tousey were distributors of Phunny Phellow, while Street & Smith appear to have owned it. To both these cheap papers Nast contributed drawings—to the former in 1860 and to the latter in 1866. Bellew and Beard were leading Comic Monthly artists. Phunny Phellow practically filled eight of its sixteen pages with woodcuts. It was a phree borrower of phoolery; consequently its jokes were not so bad as its cuts.

It was in 1860 that Momus had its brief career of one month as a daily and three months as a weekly. It was edited by an English-born bookseller named Addie and included comment upon politics and such events as the visit of the Japanese, the national conventions, the Heenan-Sayers fight, and the Prince of Wales's tour. It had a full-page political cartoon nearly every day, drawn chiefly by Frank Bellew and William North. The introductory poem, written but not signed by Charles T. Congdon, began:

I am Momus, god of Giggle—I am son of ancient Nox;
From Nox taking knocks, head-breaking still I give to modern blocks;
Over-grinning was my sinning—itching still the gods to hector;
Cachinnation my vocation—too much nonsense spoiled my nectar.(130)

The Southern Punch has been mentioned in another connection.¹³¹ A second comic of the Confederacy was the Bugle-Horn of Liberty, which published three monthly numbers in Griffin, Georgia, in the fall of 1863. “Bill Arp” was a contributor, and “Elihu Squiggs” wrote “Letters from the Army.” A cut of a half-naked Hindu was printed one month and labeled “Abraham Lincoln”; next month the same cut was used again with the name of Horace Greeley under it.

There were other brief and less significant experiments in comic journalism in our period, especially in the early fifties.¹³²

CHEAP AND NASTY

Cheap, and even vulgar, though some of these papers were, they were scarcely vicious. There were, however, undoubtedly some sub rosa periodicals designed for sly circulation in resorts of questionable character, but it is now impossible to learn much of them. Lambert A. Wilmer, in his attack upon the journalism of the day entitled Our Press Gang, speaks of those “typographical reptiles” and names the Cytherean Miscellany, the Alligator, and Paul Pry.¹³³ One also finds references to Thomas L. Nichols' Arena and George L. Woodridge's Libertine, which were suppressed and their editors punished. Flash also had a stormy career.

There was much railing against vicious literature, but most of it was directed against fiction dealing more or less realistically with phases of life of which the critics disapproved. The frequent condemnation of Sue, Sand, Hugo, and Balzac, as well as of deKock, has been noted; Ainsworth, Reade, and other English writers came in for some criticism of this kind. This was the period of Solon Richardson's Hot Corn and G. G. Foster's New York by Gas-Light, each of which made a succès du scandale with its morally pointed portrayal of New York street life. The clerical editor of the National Magazine, writing on “Satanic Literature” in 1853, said:

The extent of this nefarious literature … is seen wherever we travel, through the land. Agencies and depôts are organized for it everywhere. It is the most omnipresent product of the press except the newspapers.¹³⁴

The indictment was clearly too inclusive. A writer in Russell's Magazine inveighs against “cheap literature” in somewhat the same vein:

It lifts the floodgates of vice and pours its desolating waters upon the land … at all events, sentiments of the grossest materialism, pictures of the darkest scenes of life, are so dexterously inwrought into the body of some works as to … be like slow poison diffused through our daily bread, slowly but surely to work our death. And it is a great misfortune that works of this class are most eagerly sought by the unthinking masses. …¹³⁵

A National Quarterly critic is somewhat more definite:

“Sensation stories” are now all the rage. Nine out of every ten (nay, we may say ninety-nine out of every hundred) persons prefer the stories of Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., to the noble productions of Miss Muloch and George Elliott [sic]. The Hidden Hand and The Gunmaker of Moscow are far more universally read than John Halifax and The Mill on the Floss. Even the great Bulwer is voted a bore, while Emmerson Bennet is considered charming.¹³⁶

The police gazettes were not precisely in this category: they were crime reporters, but not until after the war were they especially devoted to sex crimes and to the exploitation of sex scandals. There were three of them—the National Police Gazette,¹³⁷ of New York; the California Police Gazette (1859-77), of San Francisco; and the Illustrated Police News (1860-1904), of Boston.

.....

LITERARY PHASES OF POSTBELLUM MAGAZINES

An analysis of the literary contents of the magazines of a given period does not necessarily indicate with any exactitude the more significant trends of literature for the years studied. What it does indicate is the trend of popular reading. But when we add to such an analysis an examination of the literary criticism contained in the magazines, we may arrive at some understanding of how literature was functioning on its various levels at the time.

SERIAL FICTION

“Fiction, to a very large extent, constitutes the reading of the masses,” remarked the Literary World in 1872, “and in whatever education they receive from books (outside of school books, of course) it is the instrument.”¹³⁸ The immense popularity of Dickens, Collins, George Eliot, Hugo, and other foreign novelists; the interest in Howells and James, and the less instructed but more general favor shown E. P. Roe and Mary Jane Holmes; the wide distribution of the dime novels of the Beadle, Street & Smith, and Munro houses; and the growing appreciation of the short story—all these contributed to place fiction higher than any other literary genre in the esteem of readers of periodicals.

Yet this class of reading did not occupy the overwhelming share of the magazine pages that fell to it later. True, it was dominant in most of the “family” weeklies and monthlies, but the more important general magazines were more conservative. One serial novel at a time was enough for most of the first-class magazines, though Harper's commonly drove a tandem, and it is possible to find issues of the Atlantic which contain installments of three serials. Two- and three-part stories were not uncommon, and two short stories in a number furnished the usual quota. But fiction filled more pages than any other type of writing; a study of the Galaxy's contents shows 37 per cent of its entire file given over to fiction, and it is safe to say that one-third was about the usual proportion.

England furnished most of the serials. This is not strange when one considers, first, the state of the copyright laws, and second, the prosperity of the English novel of the time. These are the English novelists whose work Harper's published serially before 1885: Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, George Eliot, Trollope, Collins, Lever, Reade, Miss Mulock, Black, Hardy, McCarthy, Anne Thackeray, and Blackmore. It is an array against which it would be hard to compete. American authors of serial fiction in Harper's were Henry James, Miss Woolson, E. P. Roe, and Julian Hawthorne. At the same time the Atlantic was publishing Nathaniel Hawthorne's posthumous Septimius Felton and novels by Holmes, Mrs. Stowe, Howells, James, Donald G. Mitchell, W. H. Bishop, Rebecca Harding Davis, William M. Baker, H. H. Boyesen, and Caroline Chesebrough. American novelists prominent in other magazines were J. G. Holland, J. W. DeForest, Bret Harte, Edward Everett Hale, Frances Hodgson Burnett, George W. Cable, and Marion Harland. Not one of these, unless we except Holland, with his Sevenoaks, and possibly Mrs. Burnett, enlisted the public interest very strongly. Eggleston's Hoosier Schoolmaster was printed serially in Hearth and Home, but attained its larger circulation in book form. Mark Twain did not publish his earlier novels in magazines. Roe's Barriers Burned Away was published more or less obscurely in the New York Evangelist, and others of his novels in the Christian Union, the Christian Advocate, and Hearth and Home. Many other American novelists with large and constant followings were not printed in the better magazines. Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes was found chiefly in the New York Weekly. Sylvanus Cobb wrote voluminously for the Ledger and a score of other low-priced weeklies, and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth stuck rather closely to the Ledger. Mrs. Ann S. Stephens wrote serial after serial for Peterson's, and T. S. Arthur and Virginia F. Townsend did likewise for Arthur's Home Magazine. Mrs. E. F. Ellett, Marion Harland, and Mrs. Metta V. Victor wrote chiefly for Godey's and Peterson's. Hundreds of other industrious fictionists did serials for the cheap weeklies.

But compare the American showing of serialists with that of England, and the contrast is evident. The editors frequently complained of the dearth of high-class narrative talent in America. Let us allow the Galaxy editor to state the case:

Our historians stand in the front rank; we have scholars and critics whose writings command the attention of Europe; essayists and humorists of equal reputation we do not lack. American sculptors have placed the genius of their country in the plastic arts upon a pedestal before the world, and in poetry our achievements have been at least respectable; but our novelists are few comparatively, and only two or three are well known beyond our own shores. … It is for this reason, far more than because of any considerations connected with the absence of an inter-national copyright law, that we read novels chiefly written by British authors. American publishers are ready enough to publish good novels by American writers. Editors of American magazines are anxious to publish them; they are particularly anxious to publish short tales and sketches by native authors. … The narrative faculty is notably lacking among us. Our public has no notion whatever of the poor quality of almost all the writing in this department submitted to American publishers and editors. The defect generally is not in style … but simply in that power of interesting the reader which is the all-important desideratum.¹³⁹

SHORT STORIES

It will be noted that our critic speaks especially of the lack of good short stories. It was a shortcoming which was noted also by Appleton's Journal in a paragraph that constitutes what was probably the ablest statement of the short story art between Poe's review of Twice-Told Tales in 1842 and Brander Matthews' “Philosophy of the Short-Story” of 1885. This succinct little article is the more remarkable because most critics did not think of the short story as an art form at all, but merely as a narrative too slight or unimportant to be worked out in a novel.

No doubt one of the most agreeable things in literature is a thoroughly good short story. At the same time it is one of the most difficult to obtain. We have few or no trained workers in this branch of composition. Our professional novelists rarely attempt the short story, and, when they do, are far from increasing their reputation thereby. Since the time of Poe there has been no one eminently successful in this branch—no one whose invention or art has been sufficient for great success. A good short story should have one fresh, central incident, two or three well conceived and sharply drawn characters, a certain symmetrical unity in construction, a deep significance in the catastrophe or climax—not necessarily a moral, as ordinarily understood, but as nothing should be purposeless, the short story should illustrate some defect or virtue in human character, or portray some special experience whereby the imagination of the reader may be gratified, his sympathies awakened, or his knowledge of the world increased. It is not easy to fix the limitations to the short story. Its construction is an art, far more so than is generally believed; it has its laws, and bears very nearly the same relation to the novel that the song does to poetry, which always properly possesses one definite idea thrown into a compact, symmetrical form. Writers of short stories cannot hope to attain success unless they make this form of composition a profound study; they must have brevity of expression, conception of character, keen feeling for unity and symmetry in art, and very dramatic perceptions. All these qualifications are necessary, but many of them can be acquired by study.¹⁴⁰

Matthews' article in Lippincott's, called “The Philosophy of the Short-Story,”¹⁴¹ insisted that “a Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation,” and by thus defining it he made a distinction between the “Short-story” and “the story which is merely short.” This point of view was to affect the short story profoundly for two or three decades. Matthews recognized the “very great importance to the American magazine” of this literary type and believed that American practitioners of it had been supreme for half a century.

The great fault of the short fiction of this period, as with the longer romances of Mrs. Southworth, Miss Holmes, and Company, was its sentimentality. It was false and unreal to an incredible degree. This had been common in American magazines ever since the closing decade of the eighteenth century, when such periodicals as the American Moral and Sentimental Magazine flourished;¹⁴² and in the lady's books and annuals sentimentality had found congenial habitat. In the period after the war, the sentimental short story was largely the product of women writing for women. It flourished in Harper's, but it emitted its cheap perfume everywhere. There was less of it in the Atlantic than anywhere else, perhaps. The stories of James and Cable, and of the Misses Terry and Woolson, published chiefly in the Atlantic, the Galaxy, and Scribner's, were the healthiest and soundest short fiction of the day; but their work was slight in extent beside that of the sentimentalists. “Our band of heart-wrenching female dealers in false fiction was never, we think, so numerous as now,” said the Nation in 1866.¹⁴³ An example of this kind of writing will be more effective than attempts at characterizing it. Here is the opening paragraph of a typical specimen:

In looking over some old papers the other day, I found, unexpectedly, this pile of yellow, worn sheets which now lies before me. The sight of them thrilled me with a strange, sharp pain, as if a lover, after a long succession of years had ebbed and flowed, should come all unawares upon the handful of dust that had once stood to him for all the world's beauty and sweetness; as he would turn, hastily, from marred cheek and faded curl, so I eagerly thrust these memorials of the past back into the dark where they had slept so long, and turned the lock. But not so easily could I turn the key upon memory; not so easily remand that forlorn ghost to the chambers of silence.¹⁴⁴

And so she is moved to tell the story, which is a sad, sad one. This example is taken from the Galaxy (which printed much fiction of a better class), but it is of the type that the Nation said “the Messrs. Harper might almost take out a patent for.” Dennett, in the Nation, never tired of poking fun at the magazine stories which “have the general truth of sentiment of a romance by the leading graduate of a young ladies' seminary.”¹⁴⁵ But there can be no doubt of the wide popularity of this “chocolate fudge fiction.” Bret Harte was able to win such a quick response not because of his local color alone, but also because of a sentimentalism which was in tune with the times. When the quartet of more sincere writers named above ventured on a realistic strain, they were severely criticized. “The rather clever ‘Story of a Masterpiece,’ which Mr. Henry James, Jr., is publishing in the Galaxy,” said the Round Table,

is likely to be ruined for most readers by the author's unaccountable insanity in making his heroine a round-shouldered fat girl with red hair … the round shoulders and the red hair we might forgive … but the fatness! Who can take any genuine interest in the fortunes of a fat girl?¹⁴⁶

The Atlantic Monthly did much to encourage more honest short stories.¹⁴⁷ In 1869 such a good critic as the magazine reviewer of the Printers' Circular thought that “short stories are assuming a much higher tone than the namby-pamby style once considered appropriate.”¹⁴⁸ Perhaps the work of Aldrich, Cable, James, and Harte helped him to that opinion. The short stories which made the great hits of the period were Mark Twain's “Jumping Frog,” published in the Saturday Press, November 18, 1865; Harte's “Luck of Roaring Camp” and “Outcasts of Poker Flat,” in the Overland Monthly for August 1868, and January 1869; Aldrich's “Marjorie Daw,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1873; and Frank R. Stockton's “The Lady or the Tiger?” in the Century for November 1882. Anent the extraordinary sensation created by “Marjorie Daw” and “Mlle. Olympe Zabriski,” the Atlantic Monthly, which had originally published both stories, remarked, in the course of a review of a volume containing them, that Aldrich had in them “almost created a new species in fiction,” namely, the surprise-ending short story.¹⁴⁹

An important incident of the magazine history of the late seventies and early eighties was the incursion of southern short stories.¹⁵⁰ George Egbert Craddock in the Atlantic, and Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, and Joel Chandler Harris in the Century were the outstanding writers of the movement.

MAGAZINE POETRY

When Justin McCarthy came from England to America in 1868, he decided that the new land was much more sentimental than the older one. As an illustration, he says, “I have often been struck by the fact that so much of its poetry of the late Civil War was so purely sentimental in character.”¹⁵¹ And this character extended to the poems of the postbellum period as well. Verses and sketches signed by “Sophie May,” “Jennie June,” “May Mather,” “Minnie Myrtle,” “Fannie Fern,” and such pretty names were common, and were appropriate to the writing. Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, in her reminiscences, says that N. P. Willis invented this trick of the alliterative name for the feminine writer in suggesting the name “Fanny Forrester” to Emily Chubbuck. “Who will read a poem signed Chubbuck?” he had asked.¹⁵² In Fitz-James O'Brien's amusing satire “Sister Anne,”¹⁵³ the heroine is advised to call her sketches “‘Dried Leaves,’ or some other vegetable title, and they will be sure to succeed.” She calls them “Lichens,” and signs herself “Matilda Moss,” and does succeed—in marrying her adviser.

It was not an important period in American poetry, though the mere quantity of production was remarkable. The North American Review declared that “there is no more striking mental phenomenon than the interest felt by the American people in poetry.”¹⁵⁴ The Atlantic was able to publish some notable poems from the decaying New England school, as well as the work of the Carys and Piatts, Stedman, Aldrich, Hayne, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, “H. H.,” Nora Perry, Lucy Larcom, Celia Thaxter, Bret Harte, and Joaquin Miller. All these except the older New Englanders wrote for various other magazines, and most of them rather copiously. What an army of forgotten poets! “Howard Glyndon,” and T. W. Parsons the dentist-poet, and Edgar Fawcett, and Mrs. Akers, and Anne M. Crane, and many, many others. Ella Wheeler, who made a sensation with her Poems of Passion in 1883 and added Wilcox to her name the next year, wrote and sold to periodicals from two to eight poems a day from the age of nineteen on.¹⁵⁵ “There never could have been a time when minor poetry was more plentiful,” exclaimed the editor of the Galaxy in 1870;¹⁵⁶ but a few years later he complained of the low grade of verse he received, though the quantity remained great.¹⁵⁷ Charles Astor Bristed wrote to him shortly after the Galaxy began: “If I were you I wouldn't make a point of verse. Most of that which is current nowadays is really worse than nothing. What rubbish is in the Atlantic, for instance!”¹⁵⁸ And somewhat later the Literary World was mourning:

How little good poetry is given to America in proportion to the number of purveyors of that art! Take the monthly magazines for a whole year, and you will hardly find two pieces that seem to call for a place in your scrapbook. … Why editors of magazines admit to their columns verses so thin and evanescent is a question that has no doubt perplexed many. We can account for this laxity in censorship only on the supposition that they accept poor ones because they cannot get good ones.¹⁵⁹

The poet Irwin Russell makes the same complaint in Scribner's. “A poem of the period,” he says, “or a periodical poem, is the thing that is altogether emotional, and is not intended to convey any idea in particular.”¹⁶⁰ But the best contemporary magazine pronouncement upon the poetry of the day is an article by that acute critic and brilliant essayist David A. Wasson, called “Modern Poetry” and published in the Galaxy in 1867. “The characteristic fault of modern poetry,” he says, is “its general want of significance. … It is a blowing of soap-bubbles. Doubtless Keats did much to bring into vogue this description of poetry.”¹⁶¹ And Whitman made essentially the same comment when he wrote in the North American Review in 1881 that he found “nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and objective enough.”¹⁶²

Of the more significant poets, Lowell was printed chiefly in the Atlantic, Whitman in the Critic and the Galaxy, and Lanier in the Independent, Lippincott's, and the Galaxy. The magazine that dared print Whitman had to be prepared to weather a gale of criticism. Several of the weeklies published much poetry, but few published more of it or better than the Independent. That journal, and most of the others at rare intervals, published the work of English as well as American poets. Harper's and Scribner's were particularly partial to rather long narrative and sentimental poems by authors like Mrs. Akers, of Maine, Benjamin F. Taylor, of Chicago, and later Will Carleton, of Michigan. The first number of Scribner's started off with an eighteen-page poem, unsigned, but written by Dr. Holland, the editor. Usually these pieces were copiously illustrated.

MAGAZINE ESSAYS

The familiar, or discursive, essay, belonging to the periodical by right of tradition from Spectator and Tatler days, was cultivated in the magazines of the postbellum period more than it was later.

A noteworthy fact in recent literature [observed a Galaxy writer in 1866] is the revival of the Essay. … Fraser, Blackwood, and the London weeklies set the example of concise, agreeable, colloquial papers on themes and traits of the day; and the Atlantic Monthly diversifies its pages with at least one thoughtful and suggestive article in each number on a topic of life, morals, or manners.¹⁶³

The “Contributors' Club” of the Atlantic was not inaugurated until 1877, but there had been no lack of essays by Higginson, Burroughs, Howells, Holmes, Hale, and others. George William Curtis in Harper's “Easy Chair,” Dr. Holland in Scribner's “Topics of the Times,” Grant White in the “Nebulae” and Charles Astor Bristed in the “Casual Cogitations” of the Galaxy, an unknown essayist in the “Monthly Gossip” of Lippincott's, “Harry Franco” in Putnam's “Table Talk,” Oliver Bunce in the “Editor's Table” of Appleton's Journal, and Edward Everett Hale in the “Examiner” of Old and New were genial writers in magazine departments where informal chat and brief social and literary essays found themselves at home.

LITERARY CRITICISM

Criticism of literature was a staple commodity in the higher-class magazines. To estimate the value of the contemporary criticism of a day long past is not a simple task. It is easy to pick out judgments which have been overruled in the court of time, without realizing that criticism was often competent.

Book reviewing was seriously and creditably done in several magazines, and the period was notable for the critical work of Lowell, Norton, James, Howells, Stedman, Garrison, Whipple, and Stoddard. The Critic, defending American literary commentators of 1881, declared that

Mr. Stedman, in his criticisms of English and American poets, Mr. Henry James, Jr., in his volume on the French poets and novelists, and, in their more elaborate and critical articles, Mr. Stoddard and Mr. Howells, compare favorably with the leading English critics.¹⁶⁴

Perhaps there was a more consistent excellence in the book reviews of the Nation, the Critic, the Dial, and the Atlantic than in those of other periodicals. Lord Bryce, speaking of Wendell P. Garrison, who had charge of the book reviewing for the Nation, said, “His standard of excellence was as high as that of the best literary journals of Europe.”¹⁶⁵ And Henry Holt declared, many years after the event, that “the early Nation unquestionably did more than all other influences to raise the standard of our literary criticism.”¹⁶⁶

The Nation itself thus diagnosed the defects of American criticism in its first number:

We are not well out of the childish age of promiscuous and often silly admiration. … The great mischief has always been that whenever our reviewers deviate from the usual and popular course of panegyric, they start from and end in personality, so that the public mind is almost sure to connect unfavorable criticism with personal animosity. Any review thus inspired is worth exactly its weight in Confederate paper.¹⁶⁷

The Round Table also had its say about “laudatory twaddle.” “The American critic,” it observed, “is deficient in a just and discriminating severity.”¹⁶⁸ The R. T. itself was not afraid to be severe, however just and discriminating it may have been. Editor Theodore Tilton, of the Independent, thought criticism the worst department of American writing, with the single exception of fiction.¹⁶⁹ Editor Holland, of Scribner's Monthly, joined the chorus of complaint with the query, “How many competent critics have we in America?” and the laconic reply, “Not many.” “It is probable,” he adds, “that incompetence, flippancy, arrogance, partisanship, ill-nature, and the pertinacious desire to attract attention will go on with their indecent work.”¹⁷⁰ In connection with these comments it may be noted that both Tilton and Holland were smarting authors. In short, it is quite evident, first, that literary criticism was then as now no better than it should be, and, second, that the postbellum period afforded no truce in the eternal war between author and critic.

CRITICISM, THE BOOK TRADE, AND PHILOLOGY

The only important journal between 1865 and 1880 which was devoted mainly to literary criticism was S. R. Crocker's Literary World,¹⁷¹ of Boston. After Crocker's mental collapse in 1877, the editorship was taken over by Edward Abbott. Louis Engel's New York Arcadian (1872-78) was a weekly review of literature, art, drama, and music; John Fraser was an editor, and H. C. Bunner became a leading contributor. In its later years especially the Arcadian was an unusually severe critic. Henry L. Hinton's Library Table (1875-79) was a weekly New Yorker devoted to news and reviews. In Chicago the Owl (1874-76) was a monthly devoted to literary criticism and comment and edited by the librarian and bibliographer, Dr. W. F. Poole; and the Literary Review¹⁷² (1879-80) was a journal devoted to the activities of the city's many literary clubs.

In 1880 two important critical journals were founded—one in Chicago and the other in New York. The Chicago Dial¹⁷³ was under the scholarly care of F. F. Browne, formerly editor of the Lakeside Monthly; and the New York Critic¹⁷⁴ was founded by Jeanette Gilder and her brother Joseph; their brother was Richard Watson Gilder, of the Century. Of the two journals, the Critic was the livelier; but both won high standing and lived to a fair age as such things go in magazinedom.

Sidney S. Rider's Book Notes for the Week¹⁷⁵ (1883-1916), of Providence, had an interesting individuality. Its subtitle lists its principal contents: “literary gossip, criticisms of books, and local history matters connected with Rhode Island.” But its editor was a freethinker and an independent judge of books, and he liked occasionally to flail away at the tariff or some other bête noire. A. P. T. Elder's Literary Life (1884-1903) was begun in Cleveland, but was moved to Chicago before its first year was out and edited for a time by Will M. Clemens. For a few months in 1886 Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, sister of the President, was editor at long range; but she disagreed with the owner,¹⁷⁶ and the monthly was suspended soon after. Its obituary was written by young Eugene Field in this wise:

For the information of our public we will say that the Atlantic Monthly is a magazine published in Boston, being to that intelligent and refined community what the Literary Life was to Chicago before a Fourth Ward constable achieved its downfall with a writ of replevin.¹⁷⁷

But it fell to rise again in 1899 for a few more years of publication.¹⁷⁸

There were several important booksellers' journals in the period. Frederick Leypoldt, a New York publisher turned bibliographer, founded the monthly Literary Bulletin in December 1868; this was the parent stem of two periodicals—the Publishers' Weekly,¹⁷⁹ which became the country's leading book trade journal; and Literary News (1875-1904), which was an attractive monthly, chiefly eclectic, designed for the general reader rather than for the trade.¹⁸⁰ The American News Company's organ, the American Booksellers' Guide (1869-75) was distributed free to the book and periodical trade; it was succeeded by the American Bookseller (1876-93), which the company sold at a dollar a year. The Western Bookseller (1868-70), of Chicago, was the Western News Company's organ; it was revived (1679-88) by J. Fred Waggoner, publisher of the Western Stationer.¹⁸¹ Joseph Sabin, bookseller and well-known bibliographer, edited the American Bibliopolist (1869-77) for his book trade; it attained distinction by its reprints from old books, its articles on various American libraries, and its news of auctions and lists of publications.¹⁸² John Wanamaker's book department published the excellent Book News Monthly (1882-1918) in Philadelphia.¹⁸³ The Bookmart¹⁸⁴ (1883-90) was a pleasant monthly issued in Pittsburgh to carry the advertising of dealers in old and rare books.

Some established publishing firms had distinctive house organs. Scribner's Book Buyer (1867-1918) grew to be much more than a periodical advertising its publishers' books. Its subtitle was “A Summary of American and Foreign Literature,” and its foreign correspondence was always a feature.¹⁸⁵ D. Lothrop & Company, Boston, published a Book Bulletin 1877-90, and Appleton's Literary Bulletin (1881-90) was an eight-page offering, containing news notes and clipped reviews, and furnished free to libraries.

The distinguished American Journal of Philology,¹⁸⁶ which was edited at Johns Hopkins for forty years by Professor Basil L. Gildersleeve, was of an entirely different class from the foregoing periodicals. The Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1884-current) did not become a regular quarterly until 1888.¹⁸⁷ William Rainey Harper's Hebraica¹⁸⁸ (1884-95) was published “in the interests of Semitic study.” Appleton Morgan's Shakespeariana¹⁸⁹ (1883-93) was sponsored by the New York Shakespeare Society.

OPINIONS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

Whatever may be said of the actual accomplishment of the group of leading New England writers in the two decades immediately following the Civil War, the position of these men in the public esteem was ineluctably fixed. A Nation reviewer might refer to New England transcendentalism as a “not very important affair”;¹⁹⁰ a leading writer for the North American Review might declare that the New England movement in thought, religion, and literature was “at the point of pause”;¹⁹¹ the book critics might want enthusiasm in their comment on Longfellow's translations or the leftovers from Emerson's table: but that select group which had won recognition in the forties, and which was the nucleus of the Atlantic's early staff of contributors, made up (at least in the years immediately following the war) an academy of immortals to which only New England-bred Bryant was admitted from among those who acknowledged other capitals than Boston. “Without doubt,” wrote Garrison, of the Nation, in 1866,

the four living American poets who fill the highest places are Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, and Lowell. Dr. Holmes, of course, has to be mentioned when talk is made of American poetic literature, and so have Mr. Bayard Taylor, Mr. Stoddard, Mr. Read, Mr. Stedman, and Mr. Aldrich. Whittier is in a class above these; [H. H.] Brownell is to be ranked above most of them; and there are [Forceythe] Willson and Howells, whose names, to be sure, are yet to be made, but who must not be omitted.¹⁹²

Willson died the next year, and Brownell a few years later, and Howells turned definitely to the novel; but otherwise this is clearly the canon—with New Englanders in the front rank, a few New Yorkers in a second grade, and Whitman and Southerners like Lanier and Hayne quite out of the picture.

But by the end of our period, in 1885, Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Taylor, Read, Simms, and Lanier were all gone; and the New York Critic had just conducted a plebiscite among its readers to find who were esteemed the greatest living American authors. The following were the fifteen ranked highest in order of the Critic readers' vote: Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Bancroft, Howells, Curtis, Aldrich, Harte, Stedman, White, Hale, Cable, James, Clemens, Warner. Whitman was in twentieth place.¹⁹³

Popular esteem for Emerson reached its highest point shortly after the war; it is attested in many magazines.¹⁹⁴ His physical and mental decline from about 1872 until his death ten years later, made it possible for his publishers to issue only collectanea from his pen, and these brought a crop of reviews which were kind rather than enthusiastic. Harper's Weekly stated the case well in 1880 when it said on the occasion of his seventy-seventh birthday that Emerson possessed “an affection and respect which few men have ever enjoyed. It is a feeling which has grown constantly for more than forty years, and it is deeper, stronger, and more universal than ever.”¹⁹⁵ After his death there was much of eulogy.

Dennett's characterization of Bryant's poetry in the Nation as “a chill wind which blows softly—not out of graveyards; it possesses hardly so much of human interest as that”¹⁹⁶ aroused a small storm of disapproval, for Bryant, too, sat in the seats of the mighty. Most of the articles about him were distinctly laudatory, though a writer in the International Review in 1874 lamented that he was too much forgotten.¹⁹⁷ Stedman appraised him in the Atlantic after his death in 1878.¹⁹⁸

Criticism of Longfellow came more and more to be premised by two considerations: his high position and the admission of a certain sentimentality both in the according of that position and in the poet's work. Howells reviewed some new tales of the Wayside Inn for the Atlantic: “Many and many maturer readers,” he said, “will be most tenderly entreated by them because they are so like Longfellow.”¹⁹⁹ But Longfellow's death, like that of Bryant several years earlier and Emerson's in the following month, brought out little but praise. “He was easily the first of American poets,” said Tourgée in Our Continent.²⁰⁰

Lowell's reputation grew steadily during the first decade after the war. His poems connected with the war, his editorship of the North American, and the publication of his critical essays combined to increase the estimate which was popularly made of his abilities. Garrison, commonly a stern critic, was an enthusiastic admirer of Lowell, whom he called at various times, in the Nation, “perhaps the best of living English critics,”²⁰¹ “all things considered, the first” of American poets,²⁰² and “one of the wittiest of men.”²⁰³ Professor William C. Wilkinson, writing in Scribner's Monthly about American literary reputations in 1872, declared:

Could a poll of the best instructed and most controlling editorial suffrages of the country be taken on the question, the well-nigh unanimous sentence would pronounce Mr. James Russell Lowell upon the whole, beyond controversy, if not the first, then certainly the second among living literary men.²⁰⁴

Lowell's absence from the country on diplomatic missions during the second half of our period, and his consequent abandonment of literary production in those years, removed him somewhat from the American literary consciousness; but the welcome accorded him on his return in 1885, signalized by a special Lowell number of the Literary World on June 27, made him again one of two or three leading literary figures in the country.

Holmes, like the other major New Englanders, had an assured standing; but his work after the war was not popular, and except for the reviews of his books of this period the magazines printed comparatively little about him. His friend Underwood pointed out in 1879 that “the Poet [at the Breakfast-Table] is still further removed than the Professor from the sympathy and appreciation of the general public.”²⁰⁵ Holmes was wounded by what he justly considered the “stinging phrases” of the reviewer of his The Guardian Angel in the Nation.²⁰⁶

Whittier was a poet beloved of many. The Atlantic greeted his Snow-Bound in 1866 with the prophetic words: “What Goldsmith's ‘Deserted Village’ has long been to Old England, Whittier's ‘Snow-Bound’ will always be to New England.”²⁰⁷ Stoddard wrote articles about him for Appleton's and Scribner's; and the reviewer of The King's Missive in the Dial ranks its author with “the most venerated poets of the age.”²⁰⁸

It was in the Atlantic that the poet John J. Piatt wrote in 1878: “Of the younger American poets … Mr. Stedman may fairly be held to rank among the very few foremost.”²⁰⁹ Stedman's critical writing, much of it published in Scribner's Monthly, came to attract rather more attention than his poetry. Although Aldrich had written some very popular poems in the fifties, and though he had published ten volumes of verse by 1881, it was as a short-story writer and essayist that he was chiefly known at the end of our period. Bayard Taylor's selection as the Centennial poet caused some comment upon his work; it was unfortunate that it became generally known that the choice was made only after Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, and Whittier had declined the honor. Taylor's death in 1878 called forth interesting memorial essays by Stedman, Stoddard, and Boyesen.²¹⁰

Whitman won some friends among the critics in the seventies, though attacks upon his work overshadowed the occasional friendliness.²¹¹Punchinello asserted that “Walt Whitman writes most of his poetry in the dissecting room of the Medical College, where he has a desk fitted up in close proximity to the operating table.”²¹² The Northern Monthly declared:

Mentally, he is of the brute brutish. He affects originality and despises grammar; he talks nonsense, and, strange to say, finds fools enough to declare it wisdom. His last published what-d'you-call-it he calls “A Carol for Harvest for 1867,” and we strongly suspect it was originally intended for an agricultural catalogue.²¹³

But the “Carol for Harvest” had received the distinction of publication in the Galaxy, and by 1877 the poet was rather elaborately defended in the Atlantic Monthly.²¹⁴ Nora Perry, herself a poet of a very different kind, had written an understanding article about him in Appleton's the year before. Even Dennett, who found him indecent, lacking “a pinch of so of brains,” and “generally non-existent” with respect to art, had a word of praise for him as “a preacher of democracy.”²¹⁵ The Critic was consistently kind to him in the eighties.²¹⁶

The magazines published little about Lanier before his death, and general notice of his work seems to have waited upon the publication of his collected poems in 1884. The outstanding article is the one by William Hayes Ward in the Century which was used in amended form as an introduction to the volume. This was criticized as too laudatory in the New Englander.²¹⁷

Parkman generally fared well with reviewers. Howells expressed his delight in The Conspiracy of Pontiac in the Atlantic; Julius H. Ward, writing in the International Review, said that Parkman's histories were “as nearly perfect as it is possible for such work to be”; Lowell praised him discriminatingly in the North American; and Edward G. Mason argued in the Dial that Parkman was “the first of American historians.”²¹⁸

F. Marion Crawford was much discussed in the early eighties and was generally praised for a certain freshness in his work. It was common to compare him with Thomas Hardy, the new English novelist of those years.²¹⁹

The irruption of the wild and woolly West into the gentle Longfellowship of the East created a painful situation,²²⁰ and many were the expressions of indignation which issued from retreats of men of letters. The Boston Literary World referred to “the coarse ribaldry of the dialect school.”²²¹ The Nation suggested that it might “soon be necessary for the reputable members of society to hire somebody to write poetry on their behalf, so that we need not give all our admiration to gamblers, prostitutes, profane swearers, drunkards, murderers, and suicides.”²²² The profusion of such picturesquely wicked characters in the work of Bret Harte and John Hay, and the sudden and immense popularity of those writers,²²³ serve to explain the Nation's distress. In the year of the publication of Hay's Pike County Ballads, an anonymous critic in the Galaxy began an article on “The Pike Poetry” by saying:

It is a significant and not altogether satisfactory symptom of public taste that the two most marked poetical successes of the last year have been achieved by writers who are not poets, and the recognition of them has been forced upon the public by a class of people who do not read poetry. We allude to Mr. Bret Harte and Mr. John Hay.²²⁴

“The Heathen Chinee” and “Little Breeches” had, according to this commentator “probably been printed a million times.” Of the former jeu d'esprit, Emily S. Forman wrote in Old and New:

This is the piece that has run through the papers like the cry of “fire” in a country village; it has furnished more neat phrases and apt quotations than any other poem of the century; almost every line of it has passed into the current coin of everyday talk.²²⁵

Harte's stories were scarcely less popular, and they were more generally approved by the critics. Even the Nation commended Harte's work with dialect in fiction, though regretting “the extravagant praise of him now current.”²²⁶ Perhaps Parke Godwin's comment in Putnam's was in the mind of the Nation's writer:

It is not enough to say of them [Harte's stories]: This is good work. Something fervid and emphatic is called for. We must say: This is the work of a man of genius. … We cannot understand how a man can read these stories and not believe in immortality and God.²²⁷

This is quite enough. We need only add that nearly everybody had something to say of Harte: “Few writers of modern times have been more discussed,” said Noah Brooks in Scribner's.²²⁸

And Mark Twain's star was rising. William Dean Howells, later a close friend of the humorist, but then not even properly acquainted with his name, which he gave as “Samuel S. Clements,” wrote, in a review of Innocents Abroad:

This book ought to secure him something better than the uncertain standing of a popular favorite. It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists California has given us; but we think he is, in an entirely different way from the others, quite worthy of the company of the best.²²⁹

After the publication of the Innocents—“a book which made a very remarkable sensation”—Mark Twain rose “on a floodtide of popularity,” said Appleton's;²³⁰ and by 1876 E. P. Whipple named him in Harper's “the most widely popular” of the better class of humorists.²³¹ Yet he had not, by the end of our period, gained anything like the wide acceptance that was to be his later.²³²

As to Joaquin Miller, the general American verdict upon his work may be left to a writer (probably Stoddard) in the Aldine: “Byron was a great poet, but Byron is dead. Mr. Miller is not a great poet, and his spurious Byronism will not live. We shall all see the end of Millerism.”²³³

“Gradually, but pretty surely, the whole varied field of American life is coming into view in American fiction,” wrote Howells, with apparent satisfaction, in 1872.²³⁴ He himself reviewed not only the works of the Far-Westerners, but those of DeForest, whom he believed in 1874 “really the only American novelist,”²³⁵ and of Eggleston, of whom he said in the same year, “No American story-teller has of late years had greater success, of a good kind.”²³⁶ The Manhattan declared somewhat later that Edgar Fawcett was “beyond all doubt the foremost writer of the American society novel”;²³⁷ this seems a fairly general opinion, though the repetitious Fawcett themes are said to have made R. H. Stoddard resort to the pun of exasperation: “Won't somebody please turn this Fawcett off?”

Of Howells himself, his fellow novelist Henry James said in the North American, “His art ripens and sweetens in the sun of success,” and called A Chance Acquaintance “a popular success.”²³⁸ This was doubtless a friendly exaggeration; the Nation was nearer the truth when it said in 1880: “He has always had too few admirers.”²³⁹ Howells returned the compliment in a pleasantly laudatory essay on James in the Century a few years later, but he did make the illuminating statement that editors had more or less forced James upon their readers and compelled them to like him.²⁴⁰ It was in this article that Howells made a remark that brought many English brickbats whizzing about his ears: he called fiction “a finer art today than it was with Dickens and Thackeray.”²⁴¹ But there was something to be said for that thesis. Howells and James stood for new ideals and practices in fiction. Said Julian Hawthorne in the Princeton Review in 1884: “Mr. James and Mr. Howells have done more than all the rest of us to make our literature respectable during the last ten years.”²⁴² James, though Fawcett thought him “the first of English-writing novelists,”²⁴³ was unpopular. His fellow novelists praised him, but the Great American Reader paid scant attention to him. The criticisms of James often concerned matters of national pride, as when a Galaxy reviewer insisted that though “Mr. Christopher Newman is certainly a fair representative of a certain sort,” he ought not to be set up “before the world as ‘The American;’”²⁴⁴ and Life suggested that James was “the original of Hale's Man Without a Country.”²⁴⁵ But Life, and some other critics as well, occasionally attacked James on the score of dullness and unintelligibility:

The mystic and imaginative James gives us the subjective impression which the impulse of a hypothetical being to inchoate action might or would contingently have produced upon its own and the popular mind; he tells us how people struck each other (that is, mentally, not literally), but he never tells us anything that people did.²⁴⁶

But Life lived to see James go much further in hypothetical inchoation than he had gone in 1883.

Finally, a few words may be spared the phenomenon of the cheaper literature. Appleton's Journal pointed out in 1870 what an “immense hold” certain writers ignored by the critics

have upon a vast multitude of readers. … There are American writers, such as Mr. Cobb, Mrs. Southworth, Mrs. Stephens, Miss Holmes, Miss Evans, who, if the statistics were given, would be found, we think, to have an immense constituency, outlying in all the small towns and rural districts, such as no English writer possesses here.²⁴⁷

Scott's Monthly in 1867 invoked the “verdict of posterity” to place Augusta Jane Evans “at the head of American female novelists.”²⁴⁸ It may be assumed that no representative of posterity was present to dispute that “verdict.” As a matter of fact, all the “American female novelists” of the period are practically forgotten except Mrs. Stowe, and she was scarcely to be considered by so ardent a champion of the South as Scott's. Of course, Miss Evans's work was by no means to be thought of as cheap in the sense of having a low aim. Of the more vicious class of novels Scott's also has something to say:

We are sadly in need of an Index Expurgatorious in this country at the present time. Well nigh every bookstall and news depot in the land is crowded with … Satanic literature. These volumes find a ready sale in all quarters, greatly to the detriment of private and public morals.²⁴⁹

The Aldine also speaks of “the flood of sensual and trashy literature.”²⁵⁰

BEST SELLERS

The study of best sellers is not necessarily related closely to a survey of literary criticism, and yet best sellers occasionally find places of importance in the history of literature. No periodical, however, gave adequate and consistent reports of the largest book sales until twenty-five years after the close of the war. The Literary World and the Dial were not interested in such phenomena, nor, in its earlier years, was the Critic. Even the Publishers' Weekly of those years affords but a poor guide to the investigator anxious to compile a list of best sellers. But there are here and there enlightening notes about sales and the popularity of certain books; and from 1880 on, the monthly readers' contests of the Literary News afford at least some insight into what more discriminating readers thought were the most important books currently published.

Holland's Kathrina (1867) was a poetical best seller, 100,000 copies of it having been demanded.²⁵¹ All of Holland's works, poetry and fiction, were popular, though the Publishers' Weekly's assertion that “there is probably no other living author whose works show so large an average circulation and sale” may be questioned.²⁵²

Gates Ajar (1868), by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, was widely read, though the author confessed some years later that it never quite reached, in America, a sale of 100,000. It had the symptoms of popularity, however: many household articles were named after it, and there were “Gates Ajar” cigars, patent medicines, collars, and tippets. Its author was the victim of the overzealous orthodox. “Heresy was her crime, and atrocity her name. She had outraged the church; she had blasphemed its sanctities.”²⁵³

In the same year came a book by another gentle New England spinster—Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott. As best sellers go, this got only a fair start, but it continued without abatement for a long time, stimulated by the appearance of Little Men, which was even more popular, in 1871.²⁵⁴

Innocents Abroad (1869) sold a quarter of a million copies in five years,²⁵⁵ a record probably exceeded then only by Uncle Tom's Cabin.²⁵⁶Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) were also in the best-seller class, with another boys' classic of the seventies, Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871). Two best selling juveniles came a little later—Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877) and Margaret Sidney's Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881). Josh Billings' Allminax sold about a hundred thousand in 1870-71.²⁵⁷

E. P. Roe's Barriers Burned Away (1872) had a phenomenal sale, and thereafter successive novels from the Reverend Mr. Roe's pen could be depended upon to be booksellers' leaders. Albion W. Tourgée's A Fool's Errand (1879) ran through edition after edition as fast as the presses could put them out,²⁵⁸ and Bricks without Straw the next year was “a second success only less remarkable” than the first.²⁵⁹

John Habberton's Helen's Babies shared leadership with Tom Sawyer in 1876 and “took immensely with the public.”²⁶⁰

Ben Hur was published in 1880, but it was not until two years later that it began to show signs of growing popularity.²⁶¹ Thereafter it went on and on to new heights until more than a decade later it set about establishing one of the great all-time records for book sales. It was the religious demand that made Ben Hur so popular. It may be pointed out in this connection that the new Revised Version of the Bible (1881-1885) was also a best seller. The Nation spoke of the “enormous sale of it—something wonderful even in this age of enormous sales.”²⁶²

Mary A. Sprague's An Earnest Trifler was a best seller of 1879,²⁶³ Emily Pratt McLean's Cape Cod Folks of 1881,²⁶⁴ F. Marion Crawford's Dr. Claudius²⁶⁵ and John Hay's Bread-Winners²⁶⁶ of 1883, and Henry F. Keenan's The Money-Makers of 1885.²⁶⁷

ATTITUDES TOWARD ENGLISH WRITERS

It must be remembered, however, that there were English and French best sellers in America which frequently outdistanced the native product. Nationalists might rant and professedly American periodicals might bar foreign genius; but the people of the United States loved their Dickens, Collins, Hugo, and Dumas, their Tennyson and Browning. Putnam's said in disgust in 1870 (the writer was probably Parke Godwin) that

all the foreign quarterlies are regularly reproduced … four of the principal monthly magazines resort to noted English authors for their main attractions; four of our foremost illustrated weeklies are little more than copies, as to their pictures, of the foreign illustrated weeklies; and two if not three of our daily journals are chiefly edited by men from abroad.²⁶⁸

In the same year Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in the Atlantic: “The highest aim of most of our literary journalism has thus far been to appear English, except where some diverging experimentalist has said, ‘Let us be German,’ or ‘Let us be French.’”²⁶⁹

Indignation doubtless magnified the evil, if it was an evil; but it is true that Americans looked much abroad for their literature. Or rather, many writers and their work were brought to Americans from abroad; for not only were the Harper publications, the Galaxy, the eclectics, and many other magazines faithful purveyors of English and French literature, but the authors themselves crossed the Atlantic to visit the Americans, lecture to them, and share their financial prosperity.

W. C. Brownell, writing on “English Lecturers in America” in 1875, was able to name the following for the decade just ending: Charles Dickens, Edmund Yates, George Macdonald, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley, Edward Jenkins (author of Jinx's Baby, an international best seller), Gerald Massey, Wilkie Collins, Charles Bradlaugh, Dr. Porteous, John Tyndall, and Richard A. Proctor.²⁷⁰ He might have added Justin McCarthy, who remained in this country three years and was an editorial contributor to the Galaxy; Goldwin Smith, who was a professor at Cornell 1868-71; Thomas Hughes, who came back ten years after his lecture tour to found a colony in Tennessee; and James Bryce, who received but scant attention.²⁷¹ Nor does the Brownell list include English actors in American theaters.²⁷² In the later seventies came more author-lecturers: Monckton Milnes, Thomas Huxley, William Black, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Robert Louis Stevenson. The early eighties saw some of the most heralded visits: those of Edward A. Freeman, George Augustus Sala, Archibald Forbes, Herbert Spencer, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold. The Current, a chronic Anglophobe, cried: “It is time to stop the opening of our purses, our houses, and our hearts to distinguished English tramps who come over here to rob us!”²⁷³

Of these the visits most discussed were those of Dickens, Tyndall, Spencer, Arnold, and Wilde. Though some could not forget the irritation produced by Dickens' first American tour, and insisted that he was “a vulgar snob,”²⁷⁴ others were more generous. The Galaxy insisted that this visit fixed an era. “We shall date from the time he came here to read, and he from the time he made pots of money in America,” it said.²⁷⁵ Tyndall's scientific lectures in New York were extraordinarily popular;²⁷⁶ and Spencer's visit, sponsored largely by Youmans' Popular Science Monthly, was a great national event. Matthew Arnold's criticisms of American life and culture while a visitor here offended many; Life said he had “incurred the displeasure of all Boston by his criticism of Mr. Emerson.”²⁷⁷ His visit was in general a great success, however.

But it took the seriocomic tour of Oscar Wilde in 1881-82 to elicit a record-breaking mass of comment. Wearing knicker-bockers, holding a lily in his hand, he lectured on aesthetics; and his appearances were, as the Chautauquan observed, “productive of much discussion concerning aesthetic principles.” The Chautauquan's own contribution to the discussion was that Wilde was “utterly wanting in the essentials of aesthetic culture.”²⁷⁸ The Critic noticed that people went to see Wilde “as they would go to a circus or a fair.”²⁷⁹ The periodicals were full of jokes about him; many of them did not know that the whole visit was a publicity stunt.²⁸⁰

But Wilde's visit was only a comic interlude; for many English writers the American critics had the highest esteem. When Dickens died in 1870, grief was the keynote of the articles. Donald G. Mitchell wrote in Hearth and Home:

If half the monarchs of Europe had been smitten down, there would not have been so great grief in the hearts of so many. He was so old a friend! He was so dear a friend! There is no living man who in the last thirty years has given such cheer and joy to so many millions as this great master, whose living touch in any future story we shall wait for and welcome no more.²⁸¹

“After Dickens there is no living novelist who enjoys a popularity which even approaches that of Wilkie Collins,” asserted the Round Table in 1869.²⁸² Certainly Collins, Reade, and Trollope were eagerly reprinted by competing periodicals. Reade's Griffith Gaunt and A Terrible Temptation were severely criticized on the score of immorality: Judge condemned the author as “prurient and incorrigible,”²⁸³ but the editor of the Galaxy thought him, with all his faults, “one of the most gifted and charming” of novelists.²⁸⁴ The prolific Trollope, reprinted on this side in some of the best magazines, was the subject of encomiastic comment after his death in 1882: “the name of no English writer is so honored by American readers,” said Harper's Weekly;²⁸⁵ and the Princeton Review praised him because “he could be a realist without ceasing to be pure.”²⁸⁶ Bulwer's star had declined,²⁸⁷ but that of George Eliot shone high in the galaxy of new writers. “We lovers of matchless Middlemarch are not going to tamely surrender its supremacy of fame to the pretensions of any Deronda,” said one good critic, “though, to say sooth, we must rally apace if we would make head against the reviewers.”²⁸⁸ Each successive novel added to George Eliot's reputation. Disraeli's return to fiction with Lothair made a real sensation in 1870. “Scarcely any work of fiction has received such wide-spread notice and such general commendation,” said Appleton's. “The articles written upon it in England and this country would already fill many volumes.”²⁸⁹ Stevenson won his first considerable hearing in America with Treasure Island, which the Literary World called “the most realistic English fiction of the year.”²⁹⁰ The Moths of Ouida, who “spies about genteel society in search of vice,” was said in 1883 to be the “chief rival” of Zola's Nana in the bookstalls;²⁹¹ and a contest among the readers of the Literary News in 1882 resulted in the naming of Ouida and Zola at the top of the list of “authors having the worst influence.”²⁹²

Among the English poets, Tennyson was laureate in America as in his native Albion; but controversy raged about Browning. In the early seventies, Stoddard, on the one hand, named Browning as the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare;²⁹³ on the other, Howells, in the Atlantic, insisted that to characterize The Red Cotton Night-Cap Country “the manure heap affords the proper imagery of ‘dung’ and ‘devil's dung.’ … The poem, if it is a poem, is as unhandsome as it is unwholesome; it is both bad art and bad taste.”²⁹⁴ But by 1883 the Manhattan was observing that “there is no doubt that Browning has a considerable following of disciples, especially in our country,”²⁹⁵ and indicated that the Browning club movement had begun. Swinburne was more roundly abused than Browning; there were many pages of attacks on his “immoral” verses. Punchinello—even he—pretended to decline a contribution from Swinburne because “the morals of our paper must be preserved.”²⁹⁶ Rossetti had many ardent admirers. Father Walsh, of the Catholic World, placed him “on a higher pedestal than Tennyson,” and his death in 1882 stirred his followers to renewed comment. Father Walsh thought that “next after Rossetti, if at all after, comes Morris.”²⁹⁷ And one of the remarkable phases of the criticism of the times is the incense so copiously burnt at Jean Ingelow's altar. “In thousands of American homes her gracious presence is recognized as that of a fondly cherished friend,” wrote a critic in the Aldine.²⁹⁸

Carlyle's attitude toward the Civil War in America, and his scornful parable, “Shooting Niagara,” infuriated many of his former friends. Walt Whitman, writing in the Galaxy, referred to “the comic-painful hullabaloo and vituperative cat-squalling” over Carlyle's criticisms of America.²⁹⁹ The Nation spoke of the Niagara article as “pure rigamarole, the nonsense of a foolish and conceited old man.”³⁰⁰ But Carlyle still had friends in America who resented attacks upon him.³⁰¹ John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall received much attention in American journals, Appleton's Journal and the Popular Science Monthly being the chief interpreters of their work. Arnold's visit increased an interest in his writings which was already considerable.

CONTINENTAL WRITERS

“There seems to be an increasing demand for translations of foreign books,” noted Appleton's, that busy observer, in 1869;³⁰² and the Galaxy a few years later spoke of the popularity of “the novelists of France, Germany, and even Russia.”³⁰³ Magazines generally reflected this interest by their reviews of European books and by the publication of translations. The International Review and the Literary World had French and German correspondents, and the Dial and Critic followed Continental literature with some care. The Galaxy and the Atlantic had departments devoted to French and German literature in the early seventies.

The work of “all the chief French novelists appears in translation within a few weeks after their publication in Paris,” wrote Brander Matthews in 1883.³⁰⁴ The general interest in Hugo, George Sand, Dumas, and Jules Verne, and the advent of Zola were the outstanding features of American interest in French literature in the period. “The popularity of Mme. Dudevant's writing is now at its zenith,” observed one critic in 1870,³⁰⁵ and her death in 1876 was the occasion for several evaluations. Hugo was now lauded, now excoriated; his references to American affairs in L'Année terrible caused some recriminations.³⁰⁶ There was a persistence of the belief in many quarters that French life and letters were corrupt.³⁰⁷Appleton's Journal ascribes France's defeat by Prussia to moral degeneracy induced in part by a “flashy” literature. “The ablest, most fertile, and most noxious of this class,” it declared, “is Alexandre Dumas, fils.”³⁰⁸ But French literature continued to gain in America: the Dial commented in 1880 upon “the rapidly increasing popularity which contemporary French fiction is gaining in this country.”³⁰⁹ Zola was in part responsible. He soon became a storm center: he was called “the genius of the muckrake” in the North American Review,³¹⁰ and the Critic declared after Pot-Bouille that he should be “henceforth a literary outlaw.”³¹¹ Even such a confirmed Gallican as Matthews rejected him.³¹²

What the Penn Monthly called “the growing interest in the German language and literature”³¹³ was frequently commented upon.

A good sign in our lighter literature [said the Galaxy in 1869] is the large number of translations from the German that have been made and published in this country of late. … These novels are a vast improvement on the French novels which have for a long time been thrown from our press. … We suppose the immense infusion of the German element into our population of late years has been the chief cause.³¹⁴

Bayard Taylor's translation of Faust, published in 1871, stimulated that interest in Goethe which is most notable in the Nation, the Critic, and the Atlantic Monthly.³¹⁵ Auerbach and Ludwig were the German novelists most frequently discussed. An important two-part article by E. V. Blake in the National Quarterly dealt with Spielhagen, Auerbach, and others.³¹⁶

Scandinavian literature also received some attention. The Literary World, citing the interest in Björnson, Hans Christian Andersen, and H. H. Boyesen, as well as that displayed in the work of the Russian Turgeniev, observes that “a favorable sign of the times in this country is the rapid extension of our acquaintance with the literatures of those nations of Europe of which we have hitherto had but small knowledge.”³¹⁷ The coming of Boyesen to the United States in 1869 and his contributions to the magazines doubtless did something to stimulate interest in Scandinavian life and letters.

The praise of Turgeniev's work by James, Howells, and others brought him to American attention. He was constantly cited by the realists; and Lathrop, writing in the Atlantic, thought his example “likely to have the most general and far-reaching influence,”³¹⁸ while Julian Hawthorne called his work “altogether the most important fact in the fiction of the last twelve years.”³¹⁹

Notes

1. Putnam's Monthly, VIII, 95 (July 1856).

2. Bizarre, I, 18 (April 17, 1852).

3. Cosmopolitan Art Journal, I, 77 (March 1857).

4. Criterion, I, 41 (November 17, 1855).

5. Putnam's Monthly, V, 440 (April 1855).

6. See Brander Matthews on this subject, New York Times Book Review, August 14, 1921, p. 2.

7. Publishers' Circular, December 1, 1855.

8. Criterion, I, 73 (December 1, 1855).

9. See Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850, pp. 766-768.

10. See Volume III, sketch 23, for the Publishers' Weekly.

11. Putnam's Monthly, I, 230 (February 1853).

12. The voluming is irregular: I (October 1857); II (1858); III, IV (1859); n.s., I, II (1860). At the beginning of the new series it was intended to be a quarterly.

13. Putnam's Monthly, VIII, 656 (December 1856). C. F. Briggs, editor of Putnam's, was not so enthusiastic. See II, 558 (November 1853). Compare article by G. F. Talbot, V, 263-272 (March 1855).

14. Knickerbocker, XXXIX, 421 (May 1852).

15. Criterion, I, 26 (November 10, 1855).

16. North American Review, LXXVII, 200 (July 1853).

17. Putnam's Monthly, I, 639 (June 1853).

18. International Weekly Miscellany, I, 71 (July 15, 1850).

19. National Democratic Quarterly Review, I, 159 (November 1859).

20. Russell's Magazine, V, 571 (September 1859).

21. See F. L. Mott, “Carlyle's American Public,” Philological Quarterly, IV, 245-264 (July 1925).

22. Atlantic Monthly, XII, 497 (October 1863).

23. Southern Literary Messenger, XVI, 330 (June 1850).

24. North American Review, LXXIII, 474 (October 1851).

25. International Miscellany, I, 196 (August 12, 1850). See also Annabelle Newton, Wordsworth in Early American Criticism (Chicago, 1928), and Norman Foerster's criticism of it in Studies in Philology, XXXVI, 85-95 (January 1929).

26. National Democratic Quarterly Review, I, 133 (November 1859); Presbyterian Quarterly Review, VI, 656 (March 1858).

27. Putnam's Monthly, VI, 655 (December 1855).

28. Ibid., VIII, 33 (January 1857). See also Southern Monthly, I, 75 (September 1861). The admiration of Alexander Smith in the latter is not representative.

29. International Magazine, II, 453 (March 1851).

30. Putnam's Monthly, VI, 660 (December 1855).

31. Continental Monthly, II, 479 (October 1862). This referred to the third volume, “Marius.”

32. De Bow's Review, After the War Series, II, 461 (November 1866).

33. See Mrs. C. R. Corson's article on Hugo in the New Englander, XXIII, 477 (July 1864).

34. Atlantic Monthly, X, 125 (July 1862).

35. Democratic Review, XXXII, 325 (April 1853). See also International Miscellany, I, 316 (October 1, 1850).

36. North American Review, LXV, 108 (July 1847).

37. Ibid., LXXVIII, 305-345 (April 1854).

38. Southern Literary Messenger, XXVII, 303 (October 1858).

39. International Monthly, IV, 125 (August 1851).

40. Putnam's Monthly, IX, 175, 598 (February, June 1857).

41. Atlantic Monthly, VIII, 514 (November 1861). Howard Mumford Jones's “American Comment on George Sand, 1837-48,” American Literature, III, 389 (January 1932), deals with the period immediately preceding the present study.

42. National Democratic Quarterly Review, I, 153 (November 1859).

43. Courant, I, 23 (May 19, 1859).

44. Independent, February 16, 1854.

45. Martin Henry Haertel, German Literature in American Magazines (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 263; Philology and Literature Series, Vol. IV, No. 2, pp. 265-452. Madison, 1908).

46. See Mott, op. cit., pp. 401-403.

47. De Bow's Review, XXIX, 288 (September 1860).

48. Southern Literary Messenger, XVII, 443 (July 1851).

49. Southern Quarterly Review, XX, 248 (July 1851).

50. See W. W. Hurlbut's article in the North American Review, LXIX, 216-249 (July 1849), and another in Putnam's Monthly, VIII, 517-526 (November 1856). The latter severely condemns Heine's character.

51. Southern Quarterly Review, Third Series, I, 36 (April 1856).

52. See International Monthly, III, 1 (April 1851) for quotation; also IV, 453 (November 1851); North American Review (Parkman), LXXIV, 147 (January 1852).

53. International Monthly, IV, 388 (December 1851).

54. New York Quarterly, III, 558 (January 1855).

55. Southern Literary Messenger, XV, 44 (January 1849).

56. International Monthly, III, 434 (July 1851).

57. Ibid., I, 485 (November 1850).

58. Vanity Fair, I, 203 (March 4, 1860).

59. See Nevius Ove Halvorson, “Growth of Emerson's Reputation up to the Time of His Death in 1882” (University of Iowa thesis, 1925), Chapters XII, XIII, and XIV.

60. Continental Monthly, I, 61 (January 1862).

61. See Noah Porter's review of Conduct of Life in the New Englander, XIX, 496-508 (April 1861); also Plantation, I, 13 (March 1860).

62. Knickerbocker, XLV, 236 (March 1855).

63. Emerson's essay was in the Atlantic Monthly, X, 239 (August 1862). Lowell's articles are found in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, III, 40 (December 1849); North American Review, CI, 597 (October 1865). Lowell was yet more severe in the essay in My Study Windows (1871).

64. International Miscellany, II, 22 (December 1850).

65. Ibid., III, 158 (May 1851).

66. Southern Literary Messenger, XV, 43 (January 1849).

67. B. B. Minor, The Southern Literary Messenger (New York, 1905), p. 166.

68. Southern Literary Messenger, XXIII, 388 (November 1856).

69. Criterion, I, 53 (November 24, 1855).

70. Continental Monthly, I, 179 (February 1862).

71. Putnam's Monthly, VIII, 26 (July 1856).

72. North American Review, LXVIII, 201 (January 1849).

73. Vanity Fair, IV, 256 (December 7, 1861).

74. See Marion Reta Speaks, “Contemporary American Criticism of Walt Whitman, 1855-92” (University of Iowa thesis, 1926). It may be noted that Whitman himself had a journal, 1851-52, but it was primarily a newspaper. It was called the Freeman and was published in Brooklyn.

75. Democratic Review, XXXVI, 205 (September 1855).

76. North American Review, LXXXII, 275 (January 1856).

77. Criterion, I, 24 (November 10, 1855).

78. Putnam's Monthly, VI, 321 (September 1855).

79. Southern Literary Messenger, XXI, 74 (July 1860).

80. International Miscellany, I, 472 (November 1850).

81. Putnam's Monthly, I, 164 (February 1853). See O. W. Riegel, “The Anatomy of Melville's Fame,” American Literature, III, 195 (May 1931); and William Braswell, “A Note on ‘The Anatomy of Melville's Fame,’” ibid., V, 360 (January 1934).

82. De Bow's Review, XXIX, 702 (December 1860); Southern Literary Messenger, XXVIII, 355 (May 1859); International Magazine, V, 432 (April 1, 1852), signed “P.”—perhaps Philip C. Pendleton.

83. North American Review, XCIX, 321 (July 1864).

84. Atlantic Monthly, XV, 591 (May 1865).

85. Putnam's Monthly, IV, 110 (July 1854).

86. See pp. 142-144 and 23.

87. The sisters spelled their name with an e in the early years of their authorship.

88. International Weekly Miscellany, I, 14 (July 1, 1850).

89. Putnam's Monthly, V, 328 (March 1855); VI, 48 (July 1855).

90. Western Literary Messenger, XIV, 190 (June 1850).

91. International Monthly, IV, 275 (September 1851).

92. Frederick Douglass' Paper, May 26, 1854 (advertisement of John P. Jewett & Company, publishers).

93. North American Review, LXXVI, 115 (January 1853).

94. Southern Literary Messenger, XXXI, 241 (October 1860).

95. F. L. Pattee, The New American Literature (New York, 1931), p. 381.

96. Protestant Episcopal Quarterly Review, III, 108 (January 1856); III, 538 (July 1856); V, 477 (October 1858).

97. Putnam's Monthly, X, 90 (July 1857); X, 384 (September 1857).

98. Southern Literary Messenger, XXVIII, 441 (June 1859).

99. Putnam's Monthly, IV, 396 (October 1854).

100. C. E. Norton, ed., Letters of James Russell Lowell (New York, 1894), I, 205.

101. Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Boston, 1913), p. 141.

102. Sartain's Monthly, VI, 99 (January 1850).

103. Democratic Review, XXXII, 528 (June 1853).

104. Southern Literary Messenger, XIX, 660 (November 1853).

105. See Ferris Greenslet, The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Boston, 1908), pp. 26-28. Evidence that the better magazines were conducted on a plane somewhat superior to the popular taste is afforded by Aldrich's statement that this poem was “declined by all the leading magazines in the country” before its publication in a newspaper (p. 28).

106. Democratic Review, XXXVI, 212 (September 1855).

107. Knickerbocker, LVIII, 470 (November 1861).

108. Putnam's Monthly, IX, 549 (May 1857).

109. Harper's Weekly, III, 803 (December 17, 1859).

110. The Historical Magazine, and Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities, History and Biography of America. Publication was suspended September-December 1871; April 1872-March 1873; April 1874-March 1875. Extra numbers March and December 1874, and January, March, and May 1875. Shea became publisher in 1864, and Henry B. Dawson (Morrisania, New York) in 1866. Editors: John W. Dean, 1857; George Folsom, 1858; J. D. G. Shea, 1859-65; Henry R. Stiles, 1866; Henry B. Dawson, 1866-75. The last number was for June 1875 (3d series, Vol. III, Extra Number V). Among contributors were Bancroft, Sparks, Force, Lossing, Schoolcraft, and Simms. The file contains a large amount of historical, biographical, and archaeological material not elsewhere available.

111. The New-England Historical and Genealogical Register and Antiquarian Journal. The latter part of the title was used on the cover from the beginning and on title pages 1869-73. Published quarterly in Boston from January 1847 “under the patronage of the New-England Historic-Genealogical Society.” There was a committee of guarantors until the fall of 1874, when financial responsibility was assumed by the Society. Editors: William Cogswell, 1847; Samuel G. Drake (with, for short periods, William T. Harris, N. B. Shurtleff, Joseph B. Felt, T. Farrar, and W. B. Trask), 1848-61; John W. Dean (with Trask, Elias Nason, and Charles Hudson for various numbers), 1862-64; William B. Trask, 1864-65; Elias Nason, 1866-67; Albert H. Hoyt, 1868-75; John W. Dean, 1876-1901; Henry E. Woods, 1901-07; Francis A. Foster, 1908-12; Henry E. Scott, 1913-current. Drake, the founder of the journal, was first secretary and then president of the Society. He was a bookseller and “had no superior in this country as an antiquary.” The Register was designed to publish (see Preface to Vol. I) biographies of persons who came to New England before 1700, genealogical tables, statistical and biographical accounts of officials, ancient documents and lists of names, descriptions of costumes, dwellings and utensils of the past, cemetery inscriptions, heraldic devices, and portraits. There are also records from family Bibles, interleaved almanacs, and private journals; old ballads, book reviews, etc. The indexes are elaborate (see Library of Congress cards). William Cullen Bryant wrote that the Register, “in a country like ours, where all of us are peers of the realm, is, for the New-England states, the Book of the Peerage.” (Cover, July 1873.) For a brief history of this journal see XXX, 184 (April 1876).

112. For a list compiled by Augustus H. Shearer, see Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1916 (Washington, 1919), I, 477. Of these, the journals of longest life were Annals of Iowa, begun in 1863 as Annals of the State Historical Society of Iowa; Essex Institute Historical Collections, begun in 1859 at Salem; and New Jersey Historical Society Proceedings, begun in 1845 at Newark. All three are quarterlies and still current. The Firelands Pioneer was published 1858-78 by the Firelands Historical Society at Norwalk, Ohio; it was revived in 1882 at Sandusky. Cist's Advertiser published much historical matter; see p. 114, footnote.

113. Saturday Evening Gazette, July 4, 1857, p. 4.

114. Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, IV, 333 (May 21, 1853). See also New-York Quarterly, II, 318 (July 1853) to the same effect.

115. Southern Literary Messenger, XXI, 24 (April 1855).

116. Vanity Fair, I, 210 (March 24, 1860).

117. Old Guard, VII, 876 (November 1869).

118. Knickerbocker, LX, 185 (August 1862).

119. International Monthly, IV, 24 (August 1851).

120. Hutchings sold his business to Woodward & Company after a few years, and when Woodward had to leave town because of domestic troubles, Levison and Thaddeus Glover became owners. Upon the death of Levison, Jesse Haney, who had been an assistant editor, conducted the paper for the widow until it was sold to Thomson. It was a small folio at first, but Thomson made it a quarto, in conformity to the comic paper tradition. See T. B. Connery, “American Comic Journalism,” Once a Week, XV, 10 (June 6, 1895).

121. John T. Trowbridge, My Own Story (Boston, 1903), p. 181.

122. Carpet-Bag, March 27, 1852.

123. George K. Snow and Silas W. Wilder were the original publishers. They were also publishers of the Boston Pathfinder and the Pathfinder Railway Guide. When their partnership was dissolved in September 1851, Wilder, Shillaber, and S. T. Pickard became editors and proprietors of the Carpet-Bag. They were joined by Silas D. Hancock in April 1852, and two months later Halpine bought Pickard's quarter-interest. There were two annual volumes—March 29, 1851-March 26, 1853. See Franklin J. Meine's excellent sketch of this paper in the Collector's Journal, II, 411 (October-December 1933).

124. See Scoville's comment in Pick, February 5, 1853, p. 4.

125. L. W. Kingman in the American Bibliopolist, VII, 264 (December 1875). See also T. B. Connery in Once a Week, XV, 11 (May 2, 1895); and William Murrell, History of American Graphic Humor (New York, 1933), pp. 181-182.

126. Ended in 1875. Strong was an engraver, and many woodcuts were used—sometimes as many as a hundred a month. John McLenan, Frank Bellew, and J. H. Howard were three of the artists employed. Strong claimed to have paid ＄20,000 to artists and engravers in the first year (see I, 380, December 1852). But the pictures were chiefly of the old-fashioned repulsive comic-valentine sort; Strong was a manufacturer of these valentine horrors, too. The monthly had a circulation of 15,000 at ＄1.25 a year at the end of its first year and twice that at the end of its second. It claimed the incredible figure of 150,000 in 1858. R. M. DeWitt took it over in June 1866, after which it deteriorated in paper, printing, and “art.” At its best it had “P. B. Doesticks” and “Petroleum V. Nasby” for contributors. It did much clipping from the newspapers, and it satirized public affairs often. Probably its frontier material was the best stuff it published. It had a music and theater department in the late fifties. It was originally founded on the satire of the Yankees, and its subtitle was “Whittlings from Jonathan's Jack-Knife.”

127. Harper's Monthly, XLVIII, 590 (March 1874).

128. In 1878 the name was shortened to Frank Leslie's Budget, and new numbering was adopted without greatly changing the character of the publication. It was later called Frank Leslie's Budget of Wit. Thomas Powell was editor in the years just after the close of the Civil War.

129. Treated more fully in sketch 29.

130. Momus, April 28, 1860, p. 2. See Charles T. Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist (Boston, 1880), p. 345.

131. See pp. 112-113.

132. Hombre (1851), a weekly quarto of San Francisco; Humbug's American Museum (1852), a New York satire on Barnum; Budget (1852-53), New York; City Budget (1853-54), possibly a continuation of the Budget; Bubble (1853), New York, pricked after two numbers; Everybody's Own (1853), Buffalo; O. K. (1853), New York; Curiosity Shop (1854), San Francisco; Quampeag Coyote (1855), Mokelumne Hill, Calaveras County, California; Shanghai (1855-56), Ellicott's Mills, Maryland; Wang Doodle (1858-59), Chicago, four monthly numbers; Comic Bouquet (1859), Philadelphia, a monthly with lithographed cover and mediocre contents by J. L. Magee; Innocent Weekly Owl (1860), New York; Jolly Joker (1862-77), a New York monthly, later semi-monthly; Merryman's Monthly (1863-77), a quarto by Jesse Haney and Company, illustrated by Frank Beard and others. See the informed but very inaccurate article on the American comics in Bookman, XXII, 81 (September 1905).

133. Lambert A. Wilmer, Our Press Gang (Philadelphia, 1859), p. 175. The Paul Pry referred to was not, of course, that of Mrs. Royall, which had been discontinued in 1836.

134. National Magazine, II, 25 (January 1853).

135. Russell's Magazine, I, 418 (August 1857).

136. National Quarterly Review, II, 33 (December 1860).

137. Treated more fully in sketch 9.

138. Literary World, III, 56 (September 1, 1872).

139. Galaxy, XIX, 288 (February 1875).

140. Appleton's Journal, I, 282 (May 29, 1869).

141. Lippincott's Magazine, XXXVI, 366 (October 1885). This is an elaboration of an article by Matthews called “The Short Story,” published the year before in the London Saturday Review.

142. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850, p. 43.

143. Nation, III, 347 (November 1, 1866).

144. Galaxy, VIII, 328 (September 1869).

145. Nation, III, 347 (November 1, 1866).

146. Round Table, VII, 54 (January 25, 1868).

147. See vol. II, p. 501.

148. Printers' Circular, IV, 297 (October 1869).

149. Atlantic Monthly, XXXII, 625 (November 1873). See also, in regard to this story, vol. II, pp. 507-08.

150. See pp. 48-49.

151. Galaxy, IX, 764 (June 1870).

152. Mary L. Wyman, Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (Lewiston, Maine, 1924), p. 103. Miss Chubbuck later became the wife of Adoniram Judson, the missionary.

153. Harper's Monthly, XII, 91 (December 1855).

154. North American Review, CII, 1 (January 1866).

155. Lippincott's Magazine, XXXVI, 539 (May 1886).

156. Galaxy, IX, 869 (June 1870).

157. Ibid., XXI, 435 (March 1876).

158. Letter in the possession of Mr. Willard Church, Montclair, New Jersey, date February 18 [1867].

159. Literary World, VI, 144 (March 1876).

160. Scribner's Monthly, XVI, 759 (September 1878).

161. Galaxy, III, 786 (April 1, 1867).

162. North American Review, CXXXII, 196 (February 1881).

163. Galaxy, I, 577 (August 1, 1866).

164. Critic, I, 164 (June 18, 1881).

165. Nation, CI, 41 (July 8, 1915).

166. Ibid., CI, 46 (July 8, 1915).

167. Ibid., I, 11 (July 6, 1865).

168. Round Table, II, 8 (June 18, 1864).

169. Independent, Vol. XVIII, April 26, 1866.

170. Scribner's Monthly, IX, 626 (March 1875).

171. Treated more fully in sketch 20.

172. It was called the Literary and Musical Review in 1880, and a music critic was added to its staff.

173. Treated more fully in sketch 33.

174. Treated more fully in sketch 35.

175. In spite of its name, this was a fortnightly. It was a four-page octavo at fifty cents a year. It was distinctly regional, and interested in local history, anti-Catholic, and opinionated.

176. See Herbert E. Fleming, Magazines of a Market-Metropolis (Chicago, 1906), p. 523.

177. Ibid., p. 524, quoted.

178. It was revived in New York as a weekly by the Montgomery Publishing Company, September 2, 1899. A year later it was taken over by the Abbey Press and made a monthly, becoming a good, lively, tart little magazine. A good feature was “The Worst Book of the Month.” Will M. Clemens was a constant contributor. Literary Life always made a specialty of short stories and of paragraphing.

179. Treated more fully in sketch 23.

180. For relationship to other Leypoldt periodicals, see p. 492. A New Series was begun with a number for January-February 1880, and most files begin with it. Literary News was sent to subscribers to the Literary Journal as a supplement to it for several years. It was a fragmentary little eclectic for book-buyers, crammed full of items. After 1887 it was copiously illustrated with pictures from current books.

181. See p. 135.

182. It was a monthly, 1869-72, and a bimonthly thereafter. It published a good question-and-answer department.

183. Talcott Williams had charge of the review department 1889-1908, but the magazine was chiefly eclectic until 1904. It began with the title of Book News: A Monthly Survey; it became Book News Monthly in 1906. It gradually built up in illustration, literary correspondence from Boston, New York, and Chicago, and in sketches of contemporary authors, all through the nineties. In 1906 it began home reading course outlines, colored reproductions of paintings, and numbers honoring individual authors. These latter, dealing with contemporary writers, were richly illustrated and valuable. Norma Bright Carson was editor for the last decade. A. H. Quinn, M. J. Moses, and Albert S. Henry were among the contributors.

184. It was mainly eclectic, with news notes and gossip of American and foreign writers; but its main business was its lists of old books for sale by various dealers. Albert R. Frey had a Shakespeare department in 1887, and Julian Hawthorne a book review department the following year.

185. Originally it was only a house organ, quoting a price of twenty-five cents a year but mainly distributed free. A New Series at fifty cents was begun in 1884, and the scope enlarged and the price soon raised again, this time to a dollar a year. In 1903 the name was changed to the Lamp. But in 1905 the periodical returned to its first name and to its original policy as a monthly announcement for Scribner's publications.

186. Treated more fully in sketch 32.

187. Vol. I, called Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America, covered the years 1884-85; Vols. II-III, called Transactions and Proceedings …, covered 1886 and 1887; Vol. IV, called Publications …, was divided into four numbers for 1888-89; thereafter the serial was a regular quarterly under the title Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, with a cover-title PMLA in recent years. It has had distinguished editorship: A. Marshall Elliott, founder of the M.L.A. and its first secretary, 1884-92; James W. Bright, 1893-1901; Charles H. Grandgent, 1902-11; William Guild Howard, 1912-19; Carleton Brown, 1920-32; Percy Waldron Long, 1932-current. It has been published by the Association, and has grown from fifty or sixty pages a number to three hundred pages or more. In the first three volumes there were some articles on pedagogy; since then it has been devoted to scholarship in the modern languages and literatures. An American bibliography in these fields has been published in each March number since 1921. PMLA has had many famous contributors: among the earlier names are those of Lowell, Kittredge, Gummere, Lounsbury, and Bright.

188. Its first three numbers were issued monthly; then it was changed to a quarterly and those numbers (March, April, and May 1884) were counted as Vol. I, No. 1, of the quarterly. In the last three volumes, numbers were doubled, making it really a semiannual. Except for Vols. III-VII, it was published in Chicago. Vols. III-IV were issued from New Haven, V from New York, and VI-VII from Hartford; the last four volumes were issued by the University of Chicago Press. It was continued by this Press as the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures with continuous numbering. Robert Francis Harper became editor in 1907 and J. M. P. Smith in 1915.

189. It contained much of the Bacon controversy in 1886-87, reports from Shakespeare clubs in Cambridge, Philadelphia, Omaha, Atlanta, Topeka, etc. F. G. Fleay, J. Parker Norris, W. J. Rolfe, and others contributed series and notes on editors of Shakespeare, portraits of him, and so on.

190. Nation, XXIII, 107 (August 17, 1876).

191. North American Review, CXXXIII, 276 (September 1881).

192. Nation, III, 386 (November 15, 1866).

193. Critic, IV, 169 (April 12, 1884).

194. See Nevius Ove Halvorson, “The Growth of Emerson's American Reputation” (University of Iowa thesis, 1925), Chapter XVII; and also Edward Everett Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends (Boston, 1898), p. 203.

195. Harper's Weekly, XXIV, 370 (June 12, 1880).

196. Nation, V, 459 (December 5, 1867).

197. International Review, I, 433 (July 1874), by Ray Palmer, D.D. See also Appleton's Journal, VI, 477 (October 28, 1871), by R. H. Stoddard; Scribner's Monthly, XVI, 479 (August 1878); New Englander, XXXIX, 614 (September 1880); Dial, I, 186 (January 1881).

198. Atlantic Monthly, XLII, 747 (December 1878).

199. Ibid., XXX, 112 (July 1872).

200. Our Continent, I, 179 (May 3, 1882). Whipple spoke of him as “probably the most popular of American poets” in Harper's Monthly, LII, 514 (March

201. Nation, X, 258 (April 21, 1870).

202. Ibid., III, 387 (November 15, 1866).

203. Ibid., XII, 129 (February 23, 1871).

204. Scribner's Monthly, VIII, 76 (May 1872).

205. Scribner's Monthly, XVIII, 127 (May 1879).

206. See John T. Morse, Jr., Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston, 1898), II, 223; Nation, V, 390 (November 14, 1867).

207. Atlantic Monthly, XVII, 383 (March 1866).

208. Appleton's Journal, V, 431 (April 15, 1871); Scribner's Monthly, XVIII, 569 (August 1879); Dial, I, 236 (March 1881).

209. Atlantic Monthly, XLI, 313 (March 1878).

210. Scribner's Monthly, XIX, 81, 266 (November, December 1879); Atlantic Monthly, XLIII, 242 (February 1879); Lippincott's Magazine, XXIV, 209 (August 1879).

211. Marian Reta Speaks, “Contemporary Criticism of Walt Whitman” (University of Iowa thesis, 1926), Chapter III.

212. Punchinello, I, 22 (April 9, 1870).

213. Northern Monthly, I, 598 (October 1867).

214. Atlantic Monthly, XLVI, 749 (December 1877).

215. Nation, VI, 8 (January 2, 1868).

216. See Portia Baker's “Walt Whitman's Relations with Some New York Magazines,” American Literature, VII, 274 (November 1935).

217. Century, XXVII, 816 (April 1884); New Englander, XLIV, 227 (March 1885); Critic, I, 289 (November 5, 1881); Dial, V, 244 (January 1885).

218. Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV, 602 (November 1874); International Review, III, 509 (July 1876); Dial, I, 149 (December 1880); North American Review, CI, 625 (October 1865).

219. Catholic World, XXXVIII, 781 (March 1884); Literary World, XIV, 6 (January 13, 1883) and XIV, 187 (June 16, 1883); Critic, III, 521 (December 22, 1883); Atlantic Monthly, LIII, 277 (February 1884).

220. See pp. 59-60.

221. Literary World, II, 56 (September 1871).

222. Nation, XII, 43 (January 19, 1871).

223. Appleton's Journal says that the poetry of Harte and Hay was “popular to an extent almost without example” (V, 294, March 11, 1871).

224. Galaxy, XII, 635 (November 1871).

225. Old and New, VI, 714 (December 1871).

226. Nation, XII, 43 (January 19, 1871).

227. Putnam's Magazine, n.s., VI, 109 (July 1870).

228. Scribner's Monthly, VI, 161 (June 1873).

229. Atlantic Monthly, XXIV, 766 (December 1869).

230. Appleton's Journal, XII, 17 (July 4, 1874).

231. Harper's Monthly, LII, 526 (March 1876).

232. See Maude Humphrey Palmer, “History of the Literary Reputation of Mark Twain in America” (University of Iowa thesis, 1925), pp. 7-21.

233. Aldine, VI, 10 (January 1872).

234. Atlantic Monthly, XXX, 487 (October 1872).

235. Ibid., XXXIV, 229 (August 1874).

236. Ibid., XXXIII, 745 (June 1874).

237. Manhattan, III, 287 (March 1884).

238. North American Review, CXX, 208, 214 (January 1875).

239. Nation, XXXI, 49 (July 15, 1880).

240. Century, III, 25 (November 1882).

241. It was an early skirmish in the war over realism. A collection of comments brought out may be found in the Literary News, n.s., IV, 137 (April 1883).

242. Princeton Review, 4th ser., XIII, 13 (January 1884).

243. Ibid., 4th ser., XIV, 86 (July 1884).

244. Galaxy, XXIV, 137 (July 1877).

245. Life, V, 32 (January 15, 1885).

246. Ibid., I, 16 (January 10, 1883).

247. Appleton's Journal, IV, 22 (July 2, 1870).

248. Scott's Monthly, III, 244 (March 1867). Adverse criticism of Miss Evans is, however, found in another southern magazine—De Bow's. There the reviewer speaks of her work as a “huge mass of erudition” and “a farrago of false sentiment and conceit.” (After-the-War Series, III, 268-273, March 1867.) But Miss Evans had imitators: see Appleton's Journal, I, 474 (July 10, 1869).

249. Scott's Monthly, III, 231 (March 1867).

250. Aldine, preface to Vol. IX, 1879.

251. See sketch of Holland in Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography.

252. Publishers' Weekly, V, 234 (February 28, 1874). For the “immense popularity” of Sevenoaks, see Annual American Cyclopaedia for 1876, p. 429.

253. McClure's Magazine, VI, 515 (May 1896).

254. See Ednah D. Cheney, Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1890), pp. 200, 261.

255. Appleton's Journal, XII, 17 (July 4, 1874).

256. See vol. II, pp. 142-44.

257. John S. Hart, A Manual of American Literature (Philadelphia, 1872), p. 446.

258. Advertisement, Dial, I, 63 (July 1880).

259. Critic, I, 51 (February 26, 1881).

260. Annual American Cyclopaedia for 1877, p. 454; ibid., for 1878, p. 440.

261. See Lew Wallace, An Autobiography (New York, 1906), II, 942.

262. Nation, XXXII, 401 (June 9, 1881).

263. Literary News, n.s., I, 7 (January-February 1880).

264. Literary World, XII, 496 (December 31, 1881).

265. Ibid., XIV, 464 (December 29, 1883).

266. Annual American Cyclopaedia for 1883, p. 450.

267. Ibid., for 1885, p. 530.

268. Putnam's Monthly, n.s., V, 609 (May 1870).

269. Atlantic Monthly, XXV, 57 (January 1870).

270. Galaxy, XX, 62-72 (July 1875).

271. See Century, XXIII, 780 (March 1882), where the editor contrasts the neglect of Bryce with the excitement over Wilde.

272. See pp. 204-05.

273. Current, I, 260 (April 12, 1884).

274. Northern Monthly, II, 251 (January 1868).

275. Galaxy, V, 255 (February 1868).

276. See p. 107.

277. Life, III, 30 (January 17, 1884).

278. Chautauquan, II, 373 (March 1882).

279. Critic, II, 13 (January 14, 1882).

280. See “Think of Faint Lilies” by Hubert H. Hoeltje, in the Palimpsest, XVIII, 177 (June 1937) for the origins of the tour.

281. Hearth and Home, II, 424 (June 25, 1870).

282. Citizen and Round Table, VI, 357 (November 13, 1869).

283. Judge, October 21, 1882, p. 3.

284. Galaxy, I, 559 (July 15, 1866).

285. Harper's Weekly, XXVI, 805 (December 16, 1882).

286. Princeton Review, 4th ser., XII, 28 (July 1883).

287. See Atlantic Monthly, XXXIII, 616 (May 1874).

288. Galaxy, XXII, 698 (November 1876). Charles Astor Bristed was the critic.

289. Appleton's Journal, IV, 22 (July 22, 1870).

290. Literary World, XV, 465 (December 27, 1884). The word realistic had not yet been corrupted by the controversialists. Here it means real-seeming, or vivid, as in Brownell's comment on the realism of romance in the Nation, XXXI, 49 (July 15, 1860).

291. North American Review, CXXXI, 83 (July 1880).

292. Literary News, n.s., III, 16 (January 1882).

293. Appleton's Journal, VI, 535 (November 11, 1871).

294. Atlantic Monthly, XXXII, 115 (July 1873).

295. Manhattan, I, 504 (June 1883).

296. Punchinello, I, 203 (June 25, 1870).

297. Catholic World, XXIII, 219-220 (May 1876).

298. Aldine, IV, 67 (April 1871). See also Galaxy, IV, 573 (September 1867).

299. Galaxy, IV, 926 (December 1867).

300. Nation, V, 194 (August 29, 1867).

301. See F. L. Mott, “Carlyle's American Reputation,” Philological Quarterly, IV, 261 (July 1925).

302. Appleton's Journal, I, 155 (May 1, 1869).

303. Galaxy, XXIV, 564 (October 1877).

304. Princeton Review, 4th ser., XII, 188 (September 1883).

305. Punchinello, I, 254 (July 16, 1870).

306. Atlantic Monthly, XXX, 370 (September 1872).

307. See vol. II, p. 164.

308. Appleton's Journal, VI, 162 (August 5, 1871).

309. Dial, I, 75 (August 1880).

310. North American Review, CXXXI, 79 (July 1880).

311. Critic, II, 141 (May 20, 1882).

312. Princeton Review, 4th ser., XII, 197 (September 1883). See also Herbert Edwards, “Zola and the American Critics,” American Literature, IV, 114 (June 1932).

313. Penn Monthly, II, 17 (January 1871). See, for detailed treatment of this subject, Martin Henry Haertel, German Literature in American Magazines, 1846 to 1880 (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 263, 1908).

314. Galaxy, VII, 773 (June 1869).

315. See J. P. von Grueningen, “Goethe in American Periodicals, 1860-1900,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, L, 1155 (December 1935).

316. National Quarterly Review, XXXV, 83, 284 (June, September 1877).

317. Literary World, III, 120 (January 1, 1873).

318. Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV, 323 (September 1874).

319. Princeton Review, 4th ser., XIII, 7 (January 1884).