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

Notes

205 Notes Prologue 1. Frederick Law Olmsted to Charles Eliot Norton, 20 Dec. 1865, bMS Am 1083.1(59), The Nation Papers. 2. Prospectus for the New York Nation, bMS Am 1083.2 (70), Godkin Family Correspondence. 3. These Whitman essays were “Democracy” (Galaxy, December 1867) and “Per­son­ alism” (May 1868). 4. In the eighteenth century, fiction accounted for only 9 percent of the titles appearing in a sample of booksellers’ catalogues (Reilly and Hall 399). Joseph Rosenblum estimates that “by 1850 new and old fiction comprised the majority of titles published” (n.p.). 5. Earlier studies that help lay the groundwork for examining the segmentation of the American literary marketplace include Richard Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters, Louise Lehuu’s Carnival on the Page, and Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow. 6. The segmentation of the market for books was preceded by the segmentation of the periodical market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines. In his compelling study of periodicals in England during the Romantic period,Jon P.Klancher argues that its “contradictory role—cementing the small audience while subdividing the larger public—made the periodical a singular but socially unstable institution for defining,individualizing,and expanding the audiences who inhabited the greater cultural landscape” (20). See also William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 185, for a discussion of the corresponding segmentation of the literary reviews in mid-nineteenth-century America; and R. Gordon Kelly, Children’s Periodicals in the United States, for an overview of the segmentation of the juvenile market. 7. I am indebted to Ken Carpenter for encouraging me to experiment with this idea in an early version of Chapter 6. 8. In adopting the phrase “cultural work,” I benefit from Jane Tompkins’s influential study, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. Rather than confining my analysis to the cultural work of particular titles, however, I am interested in uncovering the cultural work performed by physical books, as well as intangible texts, and, more broadly, in the cultural work performed by “the book” in nineteenth-century America. 9. Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase “symbolic power”refers to “diverse forms of capital which are not reducible to economic capital” (Field of Cultural Production 7). 10. See Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865,for an account of the role of print in stratifying American society along these divisions. 206 Part One 1. Most critics of children’s literature agree with Kimberley Reynolds, who asserts, “Children’s literature resists change at all levels” (98). Only recently, for example, has children’s literature acknowledged homosexuality, and books such as Daddy’s Roommate (1990) by Michael Willhoite and Heather Has Two Mommies (1991) by Leslea Newman are still frequently banned from public schools and libraries. In Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature (1990), Alison Lurie offers a dissenting view. 2. This is true of contemporary children’s literature, but it is also true historically. Examples include evangelical Protestantism and abolitionism in nineteenth-century juvenile literature; the “problem literature” of the 1960s and 1970s, which addressed issues such as divorce, poverty, and substance abuse; and multiculturalism and environmentalism in recent children’s books. 3. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of “juvenile” as a noun meaning “a book written for children” to 1849. 4. Like Scudder, many recent critics of juvenile literature, including MacLeod, Gillian Avery, and Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger, regard the nineteenth century as pivotal in the transformation of the social construction of childhood. Ellen Butler Donovan relates “a new narrative strategy,”exemplified by Alcott’s Little Women and Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy, to “a new awareness or understanding of children’s experience and a trust in the child reader’s abilities to interpret and judge” (143); Richard Butsch explains that “from the 1880s onward children assumed a new prominence in the middleclass family,which was restructured around child rearing”(7).For brief surveys of changing nineteenth-century attitudes toward children, see Heininger’s “Children, Childhood, and Change in America, 1820–1920”; Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic; and Gail Schmunk Murray, American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood. On the changing conceptions of adolescence, see Bakan; Demos; and Hunter. 5. Scudder repeatedly returns to this correspondence between the “discovery” of childhood and the development of literature written expressly for children...