The Dime Novel in Children's Literature (review)

Passionately despised by high moralists and eagerly consumed by the working class, denigrated from the pulpit at church on Sunday and slyly concealed behind algebra books in first period the next day, methodically collected by antiquarians and casually dismissed by critics and librarians, dime novels have always suffered a love-hate relationship with American society. They are now commonly regarded as a significant piece of late nineteenth-century American literary and cultural history, but their place in the canon of children's and young adult literature still seems precarious. How does one, for example, speak intelligently about the relationship between Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and California Joe; or, the Angel of the Wilderness, which were published in the same year? Different countries, different gender identities, different audiences, but both still "children's literature." Or maybe a bit closer to home, what about Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Edward Sylvester Ellis's Seth Jones, of New Hampshire; or, The Captives of the Frontier? The hero of the former novel is now a household name even though the latter novel sold half a million copies and was translated into six languages.

Vicki Anderson's new book The Dime Novel in Children's Literature attempts to situate this black sheep among its other siblings in the broad field of books for children. Anderson frames a detailed history of the dime novel with a series of short chapters on other forms of children's literature such as chapbooks, hornbooks, battledores, and story papers. Her work provides some helpful factual data on the dime novel and serves as a first step for additional work on the status of this still contentious and controversial subject matter.

As Anderson describes them, the dime novels were in essence the American version of the penny dreadfuls, "lurid stories" that had been inexpensively marketed in England, at least since the 1840s. The actual concept of mass publishing these short, catchy titles at a measly ten cents a piece is attributed to Irwin P. Beadle & Company, whose 1860 title Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter is popularly recognized as the first dime novel. Although Anderson confesses that "the dimes" is a term with no concise meaning, she proffers a qualified definition: "For the most part dime novels are known as the salmon-colored 25,000-to-30,000-word books which were issued once a month beginning around 1860 and ending just before 1880 . . . They included swift-moving thrillers, mainly about the American Revolution, the frontier period and the Civil War. First sold in 1860 for ten cents, the books featured such real-life adventurers as Buffalo Bill and Deadwood Dick and such fictional characters as Nick Carter" (62).

According to Anderson, between 1860 and 1897, the Beadle Company itself produced over 3,100 dime novels, and their success gave rise to a number of competing publishing firms. She identifies two main material causes for this success: a significant growth in literacy and developments in the printing press and paper-making machines that allowed publishers to produce an inexpensive alternative to the hard-bound classics. But on a broader scale, the dime novels were ideal fodder for a working-class population who were looking for escape: "Dime novels were the main source of entertainment for the common man," Anderson observes, "giving some excitement, romance and escape, both for the city people and the rural population—the city because of the boring jobs most of them had and the rural people because they were cut off from the activities of the city" (80).

The lightweight and small size (roughly five by eight inches) of the dime novel furnished one major attribute that was essential to its popularity and longevity: it could be easily concealed behind a school textbook or church hymnbook for undetected thrills on the sly. And concealment was a definite necessity, for, as Anderson makes clear, the dime novel roused an unprecedented amount of furor among moral conservatives. For example, Anthony...