Having been ill for several days, I found myself
quickly growing weary of television which led me to wonder, what did those
confined with illness do to amuse themselves? I’m sure they played their share
of checkers and chess, but games required two. I can’t imagine mothers, with
much work to do, would wish a second child confined to the sick bed. In my
imagination, dear Mother would have told the child to read.
Before the Civil War, literacy was at its highest
point. People devoured stories, magazine, newspapers, anything they could get
their hands on to enrich the small amount of time they had free. In the late 19th
and early 20th century, some of the most popular fiction stories
were found in what was known as dime novels or Penny dreadfuls. Granted, they
were not Oliver Twist, nor the Great Gatsby, but there were good sized novels of
mid length, around 100 or so pages, available to anyone by mass publication, and
didn’t take a long time to read.
1860 saw the publication of Beadle’s Dime Novels
publishing their first story as a feature in Ladies Companion Magazine entitled
Malaeska, the Indian Wife of a White
Hunter written by Ann S. Stephens. The piece sold over 65,000 copies. Demand
had been found! Now, they needed to fill it.
A variety of genre’s awaited readers young and old,
Westerns – Wild Bill, Jessie James, Billy the Kid often making the outlaw
heroic. It took Owen Wister’s The
Virginian to give westerns respectability. (By the way, my favorite) Railway stories, circus stories (who doesn’t
remember Toby Tyler) gold diggers, even Revolutionary heroes in Liberty Boys.
For those authors reading this, notice how many of these genres seem like
tropes in today’s writing. Lonely wives on ranches, cowboys, farmers, school
children, and travelers devoured the tales. By 1874, their popularity was such
that the covers no longer were plain yellow paper with woodcut artistry. Now,
they sported color illustrations and were published sometimes weekly.
They weren’t all salacious stories, for the most
part an underlying theme was that the hero must teach masculine ideals, they
avoided vice, they might love their horse more than the heroine and there was
certainly no hokie - pokie going on behind the bunkhouse. Villains, ah, villains,
always got their come-upance at the very end of the story.
The heyday for the dime novels spanned the years
1860 – 1915. They were replaced by pulp magazines and by 1926 the dime novel
has met its end.
Until next time…
Nan
Below are a few selected covers from an image search
Love the men and the title on the first.http://r.search.yahoo.com/john-adcock.blogspot.com
And the yellow a copy of the first story... Imagine in its day and time with the social morals it was quite a story. Malaska's image can be found on Wikipedia.
And I would be amiss if I didn't include a pony express cover. muraniapress.com
1 comment:
Great blog, Nan. I knew people liked to read then, but never realized to what an extent. Thanks for posting this.
Post a Comment