Carnival on the Page
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Carnival on the Page

Popular Print Media in Antebellum America

Isabelle Lehuu

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eBook - ePub

Carnival on the Page

Popular Print Media in Antebellum America

Isabelle Lehuu

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In the decades before the Civil War, American society witnessed the emergence of a new form of print culture, as penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, fashion magazines, and other ephemeral printed materials brought exuberance and theatricality to public culture and made the practice of reading more controversial. For a short yet pivotal period, argues Isabelle Lehuu, the world of print was turned upside down. Unlike the printed works of the eighteenth century, produced to educate and refine, the new media aimed to entertain a widening yet diversified public of men and women. As they gained popularity among American readers, these new print forms provoked fierce reactions from cultural arbiters who considered them transgressive. No longer the manly art of intellectual pursuit, reading took on new meaning; reading for pleasure became an act with the power to silently disrupt the social order. Neither just an epilogue to an earlier age of scarce books and genteel culture nor merely a prologue to the late nineteenth century and its mass culture and commercial literature, the antebellum era marked a significant passage in the history of books and reading in the United States, Lehuu argues. Originally published 2000. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

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CHAPTER 1
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The Elusive Reading Revolution
Gertrude was astonished; since the day when she had persisted in leaving his house, Mr. Graham had never asked her to read to him; but, obedient to the summons, she presented herself, and, taking the seat which Belle had vacated near the door, commenced with the ship-news, and, without asking any questions, turned to various items of intelligence, taking them in the order which she knew Mr. Graham preferred. … He remarked, “This seems like old times, doesn’t it, Gertrude?” Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter (1854)
When the young heroine of the 1854 best-seller The Lamplighter decided to take a teaching job and move out of the Graham household, she defied the patriarchal authority of her protector; her eventual return in the second half of the novel not only concludes her quest for independence but also validates the middle-class home and the ideology of domesticity. Such a turning point in the female bildungsroman is appropriately symbolized by the character’s reading behavior. Whereas more frivolous girls in the novel are scorned for their inability to find the leading article or for reading too fast, the educated and sincere Gertrude aptly performs a traditional role.
Maria Susanna Cummins’s narrative thus portrays a situation where reading aloud creates a bond between family members. By the same token, the gendered character of the newspaper—which is inscribed with political and commercial news, that is, matters of the male public sphere—is momentarily mitigated by the artifice of mixed company and a female voice. This might indicate that beyond the self-assertiveness and emancipation of female fictional characters, little had changed in the parlors of mid-nineteenth-century Americans. Scenes similar to the one in The Lamplighter could for a brief moment sustain the illusion that a return to old times and a well-ordered world of print was possible. Indeed, the practice of reading aloud continued to be an important female function well into the later part of the nineteenth century.1 Such portrayals, for which Thomas C. Leonard has coined the term “Parlor Fallacy,” exalted the newspaper as the medium of familial interaction, where one read and the others listened. Communal reading of the news in the family home may in fact have become a thing of the past by the middle of the nineteenth century, when self-absorbed readers, alone and silent, failed to interact with one another.2 Ironically, Cummins’s novel itself participated in the making of a much different reading habit, silent and solitary, within the intimacy of the reader’s own space. One instance of the solitary consumption of The Lamplighter appeared in the 1854 diary of Francis Bennett Jr., a young clerk in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who sat up and read in the novel late at night and even stayed at home from church on Sunday morning to finish reading the book.3
The historical context in which the new regime of print emerged thus supported the popular print media that fostered new reading practices while simultaneously allowing for enduring representations of traditional, collective reading. Within the longer narrative of American print culture, the pre-Civil War decades witnessed a passage of print upheaval. The coexistence, and sometimes contradiction, of old and new uses of print points to the in-betweenness of the period, a pivotal phase between, on the one hand, the early republic, when the “mediation of print” made a reader a citizen and vice versa, and, on the other hand, the late nineteenth century, when the “magazine revolution” made a reader a consumer and vice versa.4 The historical moment defined by the antebellum period constituted an important space for change and renewal in American culture. It permitted publishing innovations to rise and fall and witnessed a multifaceted inversion of the authority of the word. In effect, the silent revolution of typesetting involved something more complex than the simple eradication of tradition and the making of entirely new practices. Instead, the interdependence of opposite uses of print came to characterize the liminal zone of antebellum publishing and its ambivalence toward both the commercialization of letters and the democratization of reading.
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The story of what Frank Luther Mott has labeled the “Great Revolution in Publishing” is fairly familiar.5 By mid-century, one of its enthusiastic chroniclers was Samuel G. Goodrich, alias Peter Parley, author of children’s books and successful Boston publisher. Goodrich commented on the changing landscape of publishing in his 1856 autobiography, in which he praised the progress in print as an upward “march of civilization,” while emphasizing the lost “reverence” for books and newspapers—no longer scarce—and the new hastiness in the act of reading. His detailed account of the American world of print, what it used to be, and its transformation during the first half of the nineteenth century represents a prime source for the publishing history of the period. “The whole consumption of books in this country is probably not far from seventeen millions of dollars annually!” said Goodrich. “This, of course, leaves out the newspaper and periodical press, which circulates annually six millions of copies, and five hundred millions of separate numbers!”6 Some scholars believe that Goodrich’s estimates of book production even err on the conservative side, while his calculation of the relative increase of American literature, as compared with British literature, might have been too optimistic.
Yet the numbers are telling. It was in the antebellum era and not in the 1880s and the 1890s that the United States faced its first information explosion. Americans had the highest per capita newspaper circulation in the world. In New York City alone, the average per day circulation of dailies in 1850 was over 153,000 for a population of about 500,000; the London dailies circulated far fewer, only 63,000 for a population of 2.3 million. In contrast, it was the success of illustrated weekly magazines that characterized the English history of mass communications.7 The American democratization of reading prompted comments from many foreign visitors. The British traveler Alexander Mackay wrote that in the 1840s “all Americans read and write” and newspapers are well spread. Frances Trollope had made similar remarks in 1832, noting with her legendary prejudice the ubiquity of newspapers and periodical trash. According to Trollope, from the merchant to the servant, “they are all too actively employed to read, except at such broken moments as may suffice for a peep at a newspaper.” However, she also commented on Americans’ fondness for novels. Literacy rates remained relatively stable throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In the early 1850s Americas adult white literacy rate was 90 percent, while Britain’s adult literacy rate was about 60 percent.8
To be sure, the volume of the publishing explosion represents only a partial account of what happened in the pre-Civil War years, as Goodrich was well aware. His estimate of the publishing industry is also testimony to the emergence of new print media, mostly periodicals, that added qualitative changes to the sheer numbers of book production. Goodrich considered the period from 1830 to 1840 an “era of great and positive development,” the “era of Annuals,” the “era of the establishment of the Penny Press” (whether for good or ill), and also “the era in which monthly and semi-monthly Magazines began to live and thrive among us.” He noted a period of prosperity and expansion from 1840 to 1850, “marked by the production of numerous works richly illustrated by steel and wood engravings.” From 1850 to 1856, “pictorial-sheet literature [was] brought to a climax in every form, up to the blanket-folio.” In addition, this was “the millennial era of Spiritual Literature,” as well as “the climax of the Thrilling, Agonizing Literature,” mocked by some as “the new Sensation Book” and “a most Astounding Tale.”9
The concept of a publishing revolution thus indicates radical changes both in volume and in character. Cheap books and periodicals were flooding the country during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Whereas the eighteenth-century print culture had been the province of gentlemen and clergymen, new printed matter had now begun to appeal to the masses, men and women. In place of rare, expensive, and revered books, a multitude of news sheets, magazines, and inexpensive paperbacks were available in antebellum America. The once well-ordered and controlled world of print had exploded, catering to a multifaceted reading public. Because these popular periodicals might have provided ephemeral entertainment rather than sound knowledge, nineteenth-century Americans perceived the cultural turmoil of the 1830s and 1840s as a mixed blessing. Most of them applauded the widening public access to print, which benefited both men and women. Likewise, they welcomed the instructive and civilizing occupation of reading. Yet praise was not unanimous. Moral stewards and cultural spokesmen voiced fears that the sudden popularization of print endangered a more legitimate culture.
When the written word spread to the “million,” the age of Jackson featured something different from a “democratization of gentility.” The emerging vernacular print culture revealed an importation of new and older patterns of entertainment and popular beliefs into the printed word, rather than merely a cultural loss or “degentrifi-cation.”10 In other words, the transformation of the world of print reflected a process of popularization that had important cultural and social consequences. Although all classes of Americans might have shared the benefits of universal literacy and increasingly affordable reading matter, print itself acted as a catalyst in the antebellum cultural divide. The power of the word was double-edged and split the community of readers as the reading public widened. Behind the powerful rhetoric that boasted of a democratic participation in a unified print culture, nineteenth-century Americans used the printed word to draw distinctions of class and gender.
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Both textual representations of popular reading and contextual responses to those representations leave no doubt that a rupture took place in the history of American print culture during the antebellum period. Yet the question remains whether the essence of the change is best conveyed by the term “reading revolution,” for the old and the new were both featured in the mid-century culture. Publishing innovations did not cause the displacement of all former uses of print. Neither the outburst of printed material targeted at each audience nor the individualization of reading habits precluded readers’ acting out traditional roles as communal readers of a shared medium. In such a case, the idea of a revolution in reading might not be entirely suitable.
The German historian Rolf Engelsing first introduced the concept of a Leserevolution in his study of the reading habits of eigh-teenth-century Bremen bourgeois. Engelsing argued that a reading revolution took place at the end of the eighteenth century as a result of the new availability of books and periodicals. Bremen bourgeois were reading periodicals and newspapers “extensively” by 1800, whereas their countrymen had been reading the Bible, almanacs, and devotional works “intensively” until around 1750.11 Historians of the American book trade have borrowed the concept and linked the “reading revolution” to other revolutions such as the American Revolution, the industrial revolution, the market revolution, the transportation revolution, or the communication revolution.
To be sure, several scholars have challenged the notion of a definitive shift from intensive to extensive reading and have found evidence for the persistence of intensive reading practices in the period of print abundance.12 For instance, Cathy N. Davidson argues that reading novels such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple could provide “as much of an emotional or spiritual experience as did the earlier intensive reading of the Bible.” Davidson describes a reading revolution in the early republic that featured both a broadening reading public and a new literary genre. She suggests that the novel embodied a subversive ideology and provided the female reader with life experience and that “extensive” reading of numerous novels did not represent a passive form of consumption.13 Similarly, William J. Gilmore observes that both a communication revolution and a reading revolution occurred when print entered the rural world of the upper Connecticut River valley. Reading became a “necessity of life,” an essential vehicle of information, by the early part of the nineteenth century. In turn, the traditional web of community life was irremediably disrupted by the intrusion of print culture.14
Generally, however, while arguing that the nature of a reading revolution transcends the simple dichotomy of intensive and extensive, scholars of books and reading have accepted the idea of a “second” revolution of the book (the first refers to Gutenberg), which took place around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Historical studies have further shifted the emphasis from the quantitative aspects of the publishing boom to the context in which the multitude of books were received. Most notably, these studies point out the continued primacy of oral communication in an age of print abundance, particularly the undeniable success of the public lecture and the lyceum.15 Nonetheless, no one would deny that a radical change occurred, even though habits of intensive reading and oral communication persisted in the new era. In effect, the period of transformation between the 1780s and the 1850s has been treated either as an epilogue to the traditional print culture or a prelude to the subsequent mass culture.16 Variations of the so-called modernization theory have stressed a broad shift from scarcity to abundance, from collective to individual, from traditional to modern, from religious to secular, from intensive to extensive.17
But any emphasis on a world that has been lost and sacrificed on the altar of progress risks, first, minimizing the importance of the period of transition and, second, overlooking altogether the continuities with past uses of print and the construction of new sociabilities around the printed word. One objective of this book is...

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