The Devil, Capitalism, and Frank Norris: Defining the "Reading Field" for Sunday Newspaper Fiction, 1870-1910

The Sunday newspaper is a product of the times, a result of the demand of the age. Church-going has fallen away wonderfully. Business men and others incline to make the Sabbath a day of rest at home, and they require the newspaper as a part of their rest and recreation. . . . Clergymen inveigh against it and laymen cry amen, even though they read it before going to church. But the more the pulpit denounces the larger grows its circulation and the closer it fastens itself upon the affections of the family. Young as it is it has taken a firm hold upon the heart and consciences of the people. It has come to stay.¹

Most literary scholars, when they think of popular print forms of the late nineteenth century, envision dime novels, story papers, cheap paperback editions, and mass-market magazines such as McClure's, Cosmopolitan, and the Saturday Evening Post. As a result, numerous dissertations, articles, and books have been devoted to the history of these forms, and their authors have made a variety of arguments as to how such publication venues influenced the meanings readers made of the texts printed therein. Few realize, though, that despite the prodigious circulations of these media, the short stories and novels that appeared in their pages reached far fewer readers than did the fictions contained in Sunday newspapers of the period. From the 1870s on, Sunday editions of daily metropolitan newspapers grew rapidly in both number and size and became the chief weekly reading for millions of Americans. Readers were not alone in their love of Sunday newspapers: advertisers wholeheartedly embraced them, and newspaper publishers coveted the profits they generated. Not everyone, however, welcomed their advent. Led by a substantial number of clergy, many condemned Sunday editions as catalysts of intellectual dissipation, religious laxity, and the breakdown of the country's moral and social order. While the proper nature and role of newspapers in general were hotly debated issues during these years, Sunday editions were singled out as particularly problematic because they sought to attract women and children as readers and were intended to be read on the Christian Sabbath.

For those interested in the reception of fiction by readers in the late nineteenth century and the cultural work performed by literary works, the natural question to ask is: How did the omnipresent, often fierce debate regarding the Sunday Newspaper question influence readers' responses to the thousands of fictions that appeared in Sunday newspapers during this era? The short answer, I believe, is that this debate exerted a powerful influence over readers. To demonstrate this influence, I will examine only one fiction, a little-known short story by Frank Norris entitled "A Salvation Boom in Matabeleland," which first appeared in San Francisco's Wave magazine on 25 April 1896 but reached millions more readers through syndication in multiple newspapers across the country on Sunday, 12 November 1899.² Because of the specific contexts in which this story first appeared, most readers in 1899 would have interpreted it quite differently than most readers today would. The probable discrepancy between these readings, I believe, serves as an important reminder of how the projection of modern values and desires onto literary texts can very easily skew our understanding of the cultural work that literary texts performed, and that if one wishes to accurately gauge such cultural work, one must be sure to carefully document the specific circumstances of any text's publication and readership.

Unfortunately for scholars, there is little empirical evidence available of how readers actually read periodicals or the fictions within them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would certainly bolster my arguments here to have a number of first-hand accounts of periodical reading, specifically of newspapers. In recent years...