In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America

Part Two: The Masses and the Classes

Part Two The Masses and the Classes 96 “Many people would think that what a bookseller—or indeed his clerk— knows about literature as literature, in contradistinction to its character as merchandise,would hardly be of much assistance to a person—that is,to an adult of course—in the selection of food for the mind.” —Laura Hawkins, in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (1873) In 1873, three years before the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and a decade before Huckleberry Finn,Mark Twain coauthored his first novel,The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day,with fellow “boy-book”author and later Harper’s New Monthly Magazine editor Charles Dudley Warner. The novel, whose title famously summed up the Zeitgeist of the 1870s, exposes the rampant materialism and political corruption of the period as it traces the rise and fall of the Hawkins family.The narrative is prodigious,encompassing sixty-three chapters (576 pages in the original edition) and a host of characters and subplots. Amid this imposing bulk and expansive scope, Clemens devoted an entire chapter to a tangential digression on bookselling , in which the refined, highly literate character Laura Hawkins swiftly rebukes a brash bookstore clerk (figure 4) who persistently plies her with The Pirate’s Doom; or, The Last of the Buccaneers, Gonderil the Vampire; or, The Dance of Death, and other disreputable “paper-covered” volumes. Although the chapter does not materially advance the novel’s plot, the scene contributes eloquently to the authors’ evocation of the spirit of the age: an age characterized as much by the proliferation of print (especially novels), the feminization of culture, and the cheapening of books (and, many would argue, of literature) as by the rise of corporate capitalism and political machines for which it is more generally known.1 Having managed to locate Taine’s Notes on England without assistance from the inept clerk (who confuses Hippolyte Taine with eccentric presidential hopeful George Francis Train) and having abandoned hope of securing a copy of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (which the clerk presumes to be a cookbook), Laura browses the shelves, “finding a delight in the inspection of the Hawthornes, the Longfellows , the Tennysons, and other favorites of her idle hours” (330). As she lingers over a copy of Howells’s Venetian Life, however, the slick young attendant interrupts her perusal of familiar passages to tout a paperbound figure 4. “The Bookstore Annoyance,” the ignorant shop clerk in The Gilded Age. Courtesy, University of Minnesota Libraries. 98 novel “by the author of ‘The Hooligans of Hackensack’”and “The Jokist’s Own Treasury; or, The Phunny Phellow’s Bosom Phriend.” In response, Laura reproachfully compares him to the “peanut boy” of the railway, who “always measures you with his eye, and hands you out a book of murders if you are fond of theology; or [Baptist evangelist Henry Allen] Tupper or a dictionary or [temperance crusader] T[imothy] S[hay] Arthur if you are fond of poetry; or he hands you a volume of distressing jokes or a copy of the American Miscellany if you particularly dislike that sort of literary fatty degeneration of the heart—just for the world like a pleasant-spoken wellmeaning gentleman in any bookstore” (333). The clash between Laura’s “highbrow” literary tastes and the clerk’s decidedly “lowbrow”penchant for sensation novels and joke books points up an absorbing preoccupation in late nineteenth-century America: a near obsession with the cultural status of books, reading, and various types of readers. In the mid-1870s a crowd of upstart publishers flooded the market with inordinately cheap texts, most of them unauthorized reprints of popular British novels, marketed to a newly accessible mass audience of readers who seemed to value entertainment over improvement and cheapness over durability (i.e., the gilded over the golden). As a result, many people no longer perceived the world of books as the exclusive province of the educated,the privileged,and the intellectually refined.It had expanded to embrace, in its entirety, the literate—a category nearly as diverse and as various as the nation itself.2 In the eyes of some, the expansion of publishing networks into nonelite markets was tantamount to the democratization of literature. For others, it signaled a degradation of literature and the end of “polite” publishing. Although people disagreed about the implications and...