Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine

American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893

Mark J. Noonan

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781612775081
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How a prominent magazine shaped nineteenth-century American literature and culture

During the 1870s, the organization and stewardship of American culture by the upper classes began to take hold on a mass scale, due in part to the founding of museums, municipal libraries, symphony halls, theaters, and public parks. In addition, periodicals such as Scribner's Magazine, Harper's Monthly Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly became major players in shaping the country's cultural ideals.

Founded in 1870, Scribner's Monthly: An Illustrated Magazine for the People, which became The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1881, offered its predominantly upper-middle-class readership historical and biographical essays, serialized novels, scientific and technological updates, and discussions of contemporary events and issues, such as woman suffrage, Chinese immigration, labor strikes, and "the Negro problem."

With a smooth narrative style, author Mark J. Noonan examines the worldview projected by Scribner's-Century editors and how those editors, as white male Protestants, sought to slant issues according to their own value system. Of particular interest is Noonan's exploration of the ways in which some periodical fiction disrupted the seemingly unified, genteel "voice" of the magazine by presenting regional dialects and inflections that appeared in stories outside the magazine's preferred purview. Noonan discusses the large role women writers had in advancing American fiction, addresses the changing character of the magazine as it shifted focus from regionalism to high literary realism, reviews how Edward King's ethnographic study The Great South, published alongside plantation myth fiction, helped create the post–Civil War South in the minds of Scribner's- Century's northern readership, and looks at how the magazine, by the mid-1890s, lost its dominance in the American cultural arena.

This fascinating book is a unique contribution to the emerging field of periodical studies and will pique the interest of literary and cultural historians and scholars.

PART I

The Holland Era, 1870–1881

Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland
(1819–1881)

GOD GIVE US MEN!

GOD, give us men! A time like this demands

Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;

Men whom the lust of office does not kill;

Men whom the spoils of office can not buy;

Men who possess opinions and a will;

Men who have honor; men who will not lie;

Men who can stand before a demagogue

And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!

Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog

In public duty, and in private thinking;

For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,

Their large professions and their little deeds,

Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,

Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps.

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1873)

Today, few recall the “Dr. Holland” who the New York Times called “one of the most celebrated writers which this country produced.”¹ The words of Josiah Gilbert Holland appealed to a wide array of Victorian Americans who avidly sought his counsel and reassuring analyses in an era of political and economic upheaval, changing social mores, and rapid advances in science and technology. In his fiction and journalism he consistently expounded a civil religion with an emphasis on “strong minds” (conviction and moral probity), “great hearts” (sympathy for fellow man), “true faith” (Christian piety), and “ready hands” (resourcefulness).

“God Give Us Men!” reveals the exhortatory style characteristic of so much of Holland’s writing. Written during the Grant administration, when political scandals proliferated, the poem calls out for men of character who would serve the public rather than look to their private needs. Believing that democracy needed its noble leaders lest “the rabble” tear apart the social fabric, the editor-poet urges putting high ideals into everyday political practice. In contrast to modern faith in personality as the key to success, Gilded Age reformers believed in “character, willpower, and manhood” as the means to self-improvement and, ultimately, a better, more just society.² In the 1870s there was no stronger advocate of this view than Holland.

Holland’s extended poem “Jeremy Train: His Drive,” which opened the inaugural issue of Scribner’s Monthly in 1870, also warns against moral transgression—this time in the private sphere. In this representative work, we learn that the eponymous hero has grown bored with his wife and now pines for a fellow farmer’s young wife, Maggie Mackay. At breakfast, Jeremy announces he must take leave to bargain for a heifer—when in fact it is Maggie that he plans on visiting and seducing. The Mackays, however, quickly see through Jeremy’s intentions and set a snare of their own for him. They ply him liberally with alcohol and then trick him into buying their cow at an exorbitant price. Humorously, the offended farmer also puts a harness on the cow to pull Jeremy’s wagon. Found by his wrecked vehicle the following morning, Jeremy is brought home and remains bedridden for weeks. But rather than ending unhappily, the poem concludes with a thoroughly reformed, and contented, husband:

It is Jeremy Train who sits down to his tea

In his wrappers and slippers, as pale as can be,

But the old man is happy, for, close at his side,

In her prettiest clothes, sits his pretty old bride,

With the light in her eye and the flush on her face,

And in all of her motions the exquisite grace

That enchanted his youth; and he pats her gray hair,

And exclaims: “What a lovely old woman you are!

Here’s a bargain between us: come! give me a kiss,

And I’ll give you a pledge in return. It is this:

I will never go hunting for heifers again

In the night when it threatens an easterly rain;

Never drive a strange beast in a stranger’s chair

But look well to my harness and stick to my mare.”

While exhibiting the quaint charm that typifies so much of Holland’s fiction, the poem also imparts a serious message. Americans, he gently yet firmly insists, need to be dutiful and sensible not just in the public realm of politics but in the home as well. In particular, they must revere the domestic sphere as sanctified space, discountenancing vices such as intemperance and extramarital affairs. As he reiterates in the essay “Character, and What Comes of It”—a distillation of his guiding principle—“Above all other things in the world, character has supreme value. A man can never be more than what his character—intellectual, moral, spiritual—makes him.”³ Never an authentic literary artist like those he and fellow editor Richard Watson Gilder showcased in Scribner’s Monthly and The Century, Holland, in his moralistic writings, nonetheless touched the heartstrings and minds of a substantial national audience.

To a large extent, Holland’s popular touch and republican principles stemmed from his upbringing in western Massachussetts. Born into severe poverty, as a young man he helped support his family by working in a textile mill, earning enough to eventually attend Berkshire Medical College. The medical profession, however, did not fully engage his interest, and he began contributing to Knickerbocker Magazine and other periodicals. In 1847 he quit the medical field altogether, pinning his hopes on a “new family newspaper” called the Bay State Weekly Courier. As sole proprietor and editor, Holland strove to “elevate the standard of literary taste” and to “tell the truth boldly and freely on all things which concerned Patriotism, Philanthropy, and Religion.” Though its openness to such a wide variety of topics was innovative for journalism at the time, the newspaper lasted only six months.⁴ Without employment, and now married to Elizabeth Chapin, Holland took the next jobs that were offered: a teaching post in Richmond, Virginia, and, subsequently, the superintendency of a public school in Vicksburg, Mississippi. It is during this time that he developed a strong sympathy for the South (a stance he would retain and use to his full advantage as editor of Scribner’s Monthly). With an eye for a larger field, he also began submitting his own literary work to northern newspapers, including “Plantation Sketches,” which he placed with an enthusiastic Samuel Bowles at the Springfield Republican.

In 1849 he moved back to New England to become Bowles’s assistant, a collaboration that increased the newspaper’s already formidable national reputation. For his part, Bowles was one of the era’s most influential and respected journalists, one who spoke out fervently on public issues of the day. Holland, in turn, wrote on domestic themes, like those found in “Jeremy Train.” As Edward Eggleston wrote in his obituary for Holland, “If Bowles made the Republican esteemed and feared in Massachusetts and the nation, Holland made it loved in ten thousand homes.”⁵ From Holland’s pulpit also came a series of moralistic essays entitled Timothy Titcomb’s Letters, which made quite a national stir when Scribner’s published them in book form in 1858. Even more successful, however, were his dramatic poems Bitter-Sweet (1858) and Katrina (1867), sales for which made him the best-known and best-paid poet in America.

In 1868, when Charles Scribner asked him to take over the domestic journal Hours at Home, Holland made a counteroffer. He suggested that, with his friend Roswell Smith, he would start a new magazine. Holland made his conditions clear:

First: I propose a change of name. . . .

Second: I propose to publish no sermons. . . .

Third: I propose by personal effort to rally around the magazine the best Christian writers of the country, to do this . . . by paying a good living price for work, and by making the magazine the delight of the people and the exponent of the best thinking and creating. . . .

Fourth: I propose to drop all that which may be called distinctively religious teaching. I do not propose to drop the discussion of, or allusion to, religious topics, but such discussion and mention shall be upon broad Christian ground, and as coming within the range—the legitimate range—of literature.

Fifth: To print it better, on better paper. While I would make it more popular in materials, I would make it more elegant in its externals. I would make it as handsome a magazine as America produces, and by the proper business management win the wide patronage that would make it pay.⁶

Scribner accepted Holland’s conditions and Scribner’s Monthly: A Magazine of the People was born. Accordingly, in 1870 Holland relocated from Springfield to New York City, a move reflecting America’s own general procession from rural to urban during this era. By the end of his eleven-year reign as editor, Holland had earned the right to be included “in any list of the half-dozen greatest American magazine editors.”⁷

“Money Did It”

Scribner’s Monthly and the Incorporation of Culture

Emily Dickinson to Dr. Josiah G. Holland:

“Doctor—How did you snare Howells?—Emily”

Dr. Holland’s reply:

“Emily—Case of Bribery—Money did it—Holland”

Scribner’s Monthly was founded during the “mania of magazine-starting” by three men from the newly emerged professional managerial class, each representing a particular area of expertise.¹ Charles Scribner offered extraordinary industry experience, brand-name recognition, and key contacts in the publishing world. Dr. Josiah G. Holland represented the literary end of the venture, with twenty-six-year-old Richard Watson Gilder, the future editor of The Century, his able assistant. And Roswell Smith, a lawyer by training and proprietor of coal-rich lands in Indiana, offered exceptional business acumen as well as deep pockets.

At first Scribner had been reluctant to take on Smith as a third party who would share in the magazine’s profits, but his impeccable business credentials and high ethical standards based on Christian principles convinced the publisher that the magnitude of the new magazine’s vision would command a “great success” that “we will be more likely to secure if we have an efficient business organization.” Scribner’s decision to employ Smith’s organizational talents and financial acuity was prescient. Running a successful business in the emerging industrial order of the post−Civil War era could no longer be accomplished by individuals on a “casual, freewheeling basis”; instead, historian Maury Klein notes, “the more specialized and complicated activities became, the more they required planning and coordination to operate efficiently. Improvisation, which Americans had elevated to an art form, still had its place, but not in a complex industrial system. Grudgingly, it gave way to systemization and integration.”²

Smith, it turned out, was a master of systematizing the operations of Scribner’s and planning its strategies. His introduction of prepaid postage and inexpensive, large-scale advertising, insistence on numerous illustrations, and willingness to spend huge sums of money for visionary projects such as Edward King’s “The Great South” quickly propelled Scribner’s Monthly into a dominant position in family magazine publishing.³ The successful strategies produced by the coordinated efforts of Holland, Scribner, and Smith strongly influenced how almost every mass distribution magazine publisher would come to do business by the turn of the century.⁴

Helping Scribner’s rise to dominate the field of periodical publishing was the fact that the magazine was a joint-stock venture, or corporation. Although the three primary shareholders were Smith, Holland, and Scribner, Scribner & Company made it seem like its readers were shareholders as well.⁵ At the end of its first decade, the magazine published an index to its published writings with a preface that reads like a Wall Street annual report.

We present, in this little volume, an exhaustive index to the first ten volumes of Scribner’s Monthly. It will add much to their value as works of reference, and transform them into a little library of fiction, travel, poetry, polemics, criticism, philosophy, and practical science, of which every item may be easily found.

There are very few who imagine the cost, in labor and money, of works which they secure for a comparatively trifling sum. We have paid for illustrations nearly one hundred thousand dollars; for literary contributions and editorial work, a very much larger sum. This statement will give some idea of what it costs to prepare a single number of the magazine for the printer. Thousands of dollars must be expended on each number before a work is placed in type. After this, the expense depends largely upon the number printed. We assure that we paid more than $125,000 to the printers of these ten volumes, and but little less than a quarter of a million dollars for paper. Consequently, they will realize, first, that publishing a magazine is no child’s play, and, secondly, that they obtain the results of a vast outlay of money and labor for a very small consideration.⁶

This preface to the index is revealing. From it we learn that behind Scribner’s success in winning readers as well as the works of famous writers is lots and lots of money. In almost every other sentence, the Scribner & Company founders emphasize the enormous cost of their venture and the relatively low cost of each issue to the reader-shareholder. Having spent nearly $100,000 on illustrations, well over $100,000 on contributions and editing work, $125,000 on printing costs, and $250,000 on paper, the publishers want their readers to know how much they care about their interests. Not just standard magazine fare, the reader is told, Scribner’s offers literature and images worth permanently preserving in a library. In return for its efforts and expenditures, the magazine quietly yet insistently asks only for continued support, implying that such would be the rational decision of any intelligent reader.

Taste—or, rather, tasteful articles, essays, and images—was precisely the commodity for sale in Scribner’s pages. By 1881 the connection between art and commerce was already tightly intertwined. Beginning with their inaugu...