“The Ghost-Book” and the Gift Book: Editorial and Marketing Strategies in Eliza Leslie’s The Gift

This essay explores gift books as an antebellum periodical genre, focusing in particular on the ways their editorial and authorial practices engaged with marketing them as desirable objects and exquisite, sentimental gifts. Commonly marketed as Christmas and New Year presents, gift books often engaged in forms of “product placement,” ranging from unpretentious ads to fine metafictional narratives with a mise en abyme structure. One of the premises of this essay is that the metafictional dimension of some gift book genres invited singular, private readings that enriched and expanded rather than limited the reading experience. The argument is applied to the example of Eliza Leslie’s combined role of gift book author and editor. Although today Leslie is remembered mostly as the author of cookbooks and books on etiquette, in her lifetime, she was also famous as the author of fiction and as the editor of two gift books: The Violet and The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present. A reading of her short story “The Ghost-Book” (1839) will show how Leslie’s authorial and editorial strategies overlap within a single narrative as she advertises the gift book by introducing a humorous Gothic reverse image of gift book fiction and its proper readers and consumption.