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5 Teen Reading at the Turn of the Century (Part I) Horatio Alger Cheap Books and Their Readers Late nineteenth-century American society experienced a remarkable increase in the production and consumption of printed texts. The expansion of the industry that took place after the Civil War has been attributed to a steady increase in literacy rates, the growth of the public library system, and new printing technologies and methods of distribution that made reading materials of many forms available to Americans from all socioeconomic classes.1 Taking center stage in this expansion was the increase in “cheap books” made available to the public roughly between the 1870s and the enactment of the International Copyright Act in 1891. Such a “literary revolution,”as Madeleine Stern has termed it in her book on the subject, consisted of cheap reissues of English and French novels—which were unprotected by copyright laws—story papers, series books, and the dime novel, which Stern deems “perhaps the first uniquely American form of literature.”2 A natural connection has often been made between this “revolution”— in particular the dime novel—and children’s literature, especially in regard to juvenile literature and the early origins of the young adult novel. In her recent book The Dime Novel in Children’s Literature, for example, Vicki Anderson traces “the early writings [of children’s reading] as a background to what eventually became the dime novel and thereafter the basis of today’s paperback books,” placing the dime novel within a history that includes broadsides, chapbooks, penny dreadfuls, series books, story papers , comics, and pulp fiction. In her well-known history of juvenile literature , American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood, Gail Teen Reading: Horatio Alger 117 Schmunk Murray devotes a section to the dimes, which she claims had “profound implications on the public’s reception of such bad boy fiction as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and ensured that serial books would continue to entice young readers well into the twentieth century.” In their popular textbook Literature for Today’s Young Adults, Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen identify dime novels along with domestic novels as the two most popular types of novels that emerged for young adults in the nineteenth century.3 However, before we rush to make this connection between “cheap books” and adolescent readers, it’s important to consider that most of these books were not consumed exclusively or even predominantly by teens. In his detailed study of the dime novel, for example, Michael Denning specifically dismisses the argument that dime novels were children’s literature, suggesting that the bulk of the reading audience of this immensely popular material were “workers—craft workers, factory operatives , domestic servants, and domestic workers.”4 Indeed, there is little evidence to support the notion that the dime novels, newspapers, and magazines that comprised this “literary revolution” were in any profound way oriented toward or consumed by teens. This is perhaps best captured by a notice from the publisher in one of the first Beadle dime novels, which expresses the firm’s hope “to reach all classes, old and young, male and female , in a manner at once to captivate and to enliven.”5 Interestingly,even though there is no data to suggest that “cheap books” such as the dime novel were exclusively or even largely read by teens, the many negative reactions to them at the time are often predicated upon the serious threat they posed to (innocent) teen readers. Indeed, even though Denning makes a convincing argument about age not being a factor in the audience for the dime novel, in the section he devotes to the censorship of these controversial texts almost all of the references he cites use age as an argument for banning. At the center of all of these calls to censor is Anthony Comstock, who established the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which campaigned against immoral and obscene books and materials and lobbied for the enforcement of the 1873 “Comstock Law” prohibiting the mailing of such material. In his analysis, Denning includes an oft-quoted passage from Comstock’s 1882 book Traps for the Young, in which he has this to say about cheap books and their readers:“[T]he editor of the blood-and-thunder story papers, half-dime novels, and cheap stories of crime . . . [is] willingly or unwillingly, [among] Satan’s efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.” Comstock’s in- 118 Chapter 5 fluence was...

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