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83 four Panics, Gifts, and Faith in Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World [My] book is not out yet nor have I learnt the fate of my prize essay. . . . If I do not get said $50 prize, I do not know when A[nna] and S[usan], to say nothing of Aunt Fanny, are to get winter hats and cloaks, &c., &c. We do not know yet either in the least where we shall, if we live, spend the winter. But I thank God for such pleasant work, and means to work, as we enjoy. If we only have his blessing on our work, it will do. —Susan Warner, Journals, November 22, 1850 (1995, 330) Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift! . . . Oh, that “unspeakable gift!” —Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (1987, 276) Susan Warner thought about household matters out of necessity rather than love.“No novelist ever hated housework more,”writes Jane Weiss. “Warner is probably unique among domestic novelists in never having found anything good to say about housekeeping” (Warner 1995, 1–2). But after the 1837 panic, she needed to become a frugal housewife—and might well have consulted Lydia Maria Child’s American Frugal Housewife,which had been such a success that it was reprinted through 1850 (Sklar [1841] 1977,vi).Warner’s once well-to-do family had been badly stricken by the 1837 panic; her father had lost most of the family’s property.Instead of coming out as a wealthy eighteen-yearold debutante in New York City,Warner had to think about daily survival in an isolated house on Constitution Island. The family’s economic situation worsened after 1837, and by 1850, the Warners were in such straits that they lacked “necessities such as candles and sugar” (Warner 1995, 453). In order to survive, Susan Warner—as well as her sister Anna—became the breadwinners of the family.If Child,as Carolyn Karcher argues,descended from the lofty realms of poetry to churn out books for the market due to her financial straits, Warner wrote for the market from the get-go.Her first published piece,an essay entitled 84 Panic Fictions “How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism,”was written for no grander reason than to win the essay contest in Ladies Wreath: An Illustrated Annual for the prize money of $50 (Estes 2009,214).1 The Wide,Wide World was also written “out of financial need. [Susan Warner] and her sister dreamed of ‘making a quick fortune’ and avoiding ‘a lifetime of hard labor’” (Colson 2007, 295). George Haven Putnam, “son of Warner’s original publisher,” said that “Susan had always had literary ambitions . . .but it was the pressure for money that constituted the immediate incentive for the writing of ‘The Wide, Wide World’” (quoted in S. Williams 1990, 565). The ruin of the Warner family during the 1837 panic and the economic struggle for survival that ensued proved to be a decisive, life-altering trauma in Susan Warner’s life:2 it most likely prevented her from getting married, precipitated her religious conversion in 1844,3 and ultimately turned her into one of the first best-selling authors in the nineteenth century. Her first novel, The Wide, Wide World, is deeply marked, even haunted, by the 1837 panic and the hard times that followed for the Warners. In that sense, it resembles the “panic fiction” Mary Templin (2004) describes. In one of the few discussions of economics in Warner’s novel, Joyce Warren writes, “From the beginning of the novel, money is established as a central concern. . . .The germ of the novel, then,focuses on the question of how women’s lives were impacted by economic forces over which they had no control: the flux of the market, a man’s business failure,and the vagaries of the law courts”(Warren 2005,83).4 Typical for panic fiction authors,Warner uses her novel to imagine exchanges and communities that might rescue her characters,and especially her women characters,not only from poverty but also from the meaningless volatility of the market.Whether it is the consumptive Mrs.Montgomery or the frugal Aunt Fortune,Warner uses these figures to explore women’s economic realities and any possible alternatives to a volatile, capitalist market. Warner’s novel was published within a vibrant literary market of books for women,which had established itself and then grown from the time that Child had first captured it with her American Frugal Housewife. Suzanne...

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