The Edge of Possibility: Susan Warner and the World of Sunday School Fiction

SONDRA SMITH GATES The Edge of Possibility: Susan Warner and the World of Sunday School Fiction It's a story straight out of Victorian fiction. A fashionable teenager is plunged into poverty due to her father's business failures, turns to writing for solace and financial support, and on her first attempt produces the best-selling novel in the country. Skip ahead a decade, and the young woman still rises at four every morning to write with her sister, still produces best-selling novels—and still cannot afford winter clothes. To pay the bills she begins churning out children's books, working herself to exhaustion but barely making ends meet. "Aunty says I look as if I were working too hard," she writes in her journal, "—look delicate—I dare say. I have been working to the edge ofpossibility; and it is difficult and hazardous; one easily goes over the line." But she perseveres , writing prolifically until her death. Though critical acclaim and wealth are never again to be hers, she satisfies herselfwith the adoration of readers and family and the sense that she has fulfilled her calling in life. "God can give what he will," she determines, "—and if he pleases not, why, then it is well too .... I am content" (A. Warner 461-62, 459)· Susan Warner's career not only sounds like a Victorian novel, it in fact tells the story of American Victorian fiction—of the nineteenthcentury publishing industry and the authors and readers who sustained it. Religious books for children flooded the literary marketplace in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Publishers of books destined for Sunday schools often required authors to produce new titles quickly, relinquish their copyrights, and abide by narrow moral and literary stanArizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 4, Winter 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-16 10 2 Sonara Smith Gates dards designed to ensure that pupils, too, read and behave in carefully prescribed ways. Financial necessity drove many writers, like Warner, to accept this system of book production that exploited their talents and constrained their artistic abilities. Nevertheless, writers and readers of Sunday school fiction sometimes managed to work within the limitations ofthe genre to achieve goals at odds with those ofreligious leaders and publishers. For Warner, writing religious fiction for children fulfilled a sense of personal calling and employed her greatest literary skill, realistic descriptions of childhood. At the same time, she was able to use her marketability as an author to express tenets of the social gospel that contradicted both the religious beliefs of her publishers and the market principles that underpinned her own financial survival. Letters written by Warner's readers show that they, too, defied efforts to control their reading habits and behavior. In an industry most noted for the homogeneity of its middle-class, Protestant ideas, Warner's Sunday school books give us a glimpse into the diversity of individual responses that permeated the genre. America's tradition of individualism and its delight in mass commerce coexisted fretfully in the religious publication industry, as they did throughout the Victorian era. Evangelical Protestants had long embraced mass printing and distribution in their quest to win souls and encourage the weary faithful. Evangelical fervor in fact spurred the creation of the nation's printing industry, with organizations like the American Tract Society setting up its distribution routes, first incorporating technological innovations, and creating its markets—not merely meeting demand with supply, but creating demand for the texts religious publishers wished to supply.1 Religious book sales increased steadily throughout the century thanks to evangelicals' persistent belief that individual souls could be moved to conversion or repentance through the mass-produced texts that saturated the country (Tebbel 514, Reynolds 201). Karen Sanchez-Eppler has described a similar juxtaposition of individual emotion with public commerce in the images ofdead children produced in the era, which served "to articulate anxieties over the commodification of affect in an increasingly urbanized, industrialized , and impersonal America" ("Then When" 64). While producers and purchasers of Sunday school texts seemed undisturbed by their participation in mass commerce, evangelicals registered concerns about industrialization and urbanization through the social gospel movement, Sunday...