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Susan Belasco
In the summer of 1840, an enterprising, 36‐year‐old woman named Elizabeth Peabody rented a townhouse at 13 West Street in the bustling publishing district of Boston. Over the next few months, she launched a remarkable set of start‐ups. In rooms on the ground floor of the building, she opened a shop specializing in imported books and periodicals, created a circulating library concentrating on international, foreign‐language books, and established a publishing business. Her father, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, appropriated a small corner in one of the rooms to sell homeopathic medicines for his medical practice. In another corner, artists could buy paints and art supplies. Upstairs, one room was devoted to her sister Mary’s morning school for young girls, and the rest of the rooms were used for living quarters for Peabody and other family members, including her parents and her sister Sophia, who set up a painting and sculpture studio in her bedroom. Peabody’s mother, Eliza, assisted all of the family members with their activities and also supervised occasional boarders. Although Peabody was an experienced teacher and writer as well as close friends with a number of prominent New England intellectuals such as Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronston Alcott, and the prominent Unitarian minister Dr. William Ellery Channing, she had no firsthand knowledge of managing a business and no experience in publishing books or periodicals. Moreover, she was a woman in the predominantly masculine world of publishing and bookselling. What she did have was vision, intelligence, and determination.
Peabody’s experiences reveal a great deal about the opportunities in the literary marketplace during the first half of the nineteenth century. The daughter of parents who valued education, Peabody began her teaching career at the age of 16 and became widely recognized as an educator, respected for her views and opinions. She was influenced by her friendship with Emerson, whom she met when, newly graduated from Harvard, he tutored her in Greek in 1822. She was also encouraged by the publication of her articles on religion and social principles in the Boston Observer and the Christian Register, as well as by her participation in the “Conversations” on a variety of intellectual issues of the day that Fuller was conducting in Boston. Peabody determined to broaden her own role in intellectual and cultural life and to take advantage of the new opportunities for women that were developing in the United States. In 1840, Peabody’s dreams of establishing a bookshop and a library where writers could meet for conversation and enjoy both European and American books and periodicals – and even to begin a publishing company – were not especially far‐fetched. The literary marketplace in the country was booming, and publication ventures undertaken by individuals were plentiful, especially in the burgeoning eastern seaboard cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. According to her biographer Megan Marshall, Peabody solved the problem of her lack of business knowledge by teaching herself bookkeeping in the space of a week (2005: 393). She solved other problems as she discovered them. With small loans of money offered by Channing and the father of former students, and with books loaned by Emerson and her cousin the publisher George Palmer Putnam, Peabody opened her bookstore in August and her library in October 1840.
From the beginning, Peabody’s new enterprise differed from other general bookshops and lending libraries in the Boston area. Primarily catering to the reform‐minded intellectuals, teachers, and Unitarian ministers known as the Transcendentalists, Peabody wished to create a center for conversation and discussion. Consequently, she hosted Fuller’s Conversations and the final meeting of the Transcendental Club. Her shop sold editions of Shakespeare’s plays, the poems of Wordsworth and Shelley, books in French and German, as well as some periodicals of special interest to her circle, such as The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal first published in July 1840 and edited first by Fuller and then by Emerson. At the time, most commercial circulating libraries tended to supply books for the general reader – especially novels written by popular British writers such as Sir Walter Scott and later Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Peabody’s library was mainly stocked with titles that her Transcendentalist friends wanted to read – English, French, German, and Italian works by philosophers, social reformers, and historians. For a fee of $5, members of the circulating library could borrow a limited number of books (Wilson 2005: 118–130). Peabody got her publishing business underway with Dr. Channing’s “Emancipation,” an antislavery pamphlet inspired by accounts of emancipation in the British West Indies. She then published several works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, including Grandfather’s Chair, a book for children; as well as two journals: The Dial from 1842 to 1843 and later the single issue of her own Aesthetic Papers (1849), which included the first publication of Henry Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” later entitled “Civil Disobedience.” Although Peabody earned a small income from her efforts, by the early 1850s her business was declining, not only because the always loosely organized Transcendentalists had begun to disperse, but also because Peabody had moved on in her own writing and teaching – she founded the first US kindergarten in 1860. Moreover, the literary marketplace in the United States in the 1850s was an increasingly sophisticated one with a rising class of professional authors and editors, extensive distribution systems, a multiplicity of publishing companies producing books and periodicals designed for specialized audiences, numerous shops to sell their products, and large libraries of many kinds. Indeed, by the time Peabody closed the doors on the shop and library at West Street – leaving her brother running the medicine business – times had changed dramatically. But in many ways the establishment of Peabody’s bookshop/library/publishing company demonstrated the remarkable transformation and volatility of the literary marketplace since 1820 and foreshadowed the developments in the years from 1840 through the end of the Civil War in 1865.
In 1820, the country was an unfinished project – with all of its various cultural, political, social, educational, and financial institutions in the optimistic early stages of development. The population of the young nation was 9 638 453, of which 1 538 022 were enslaved. Most of the population was concentrated along the eastern seaboard. But the westward expansion was already well underway, displacing Native Americans from their traditional homelands to distant, alien territories. The passage of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 regulating slavery in the country’s western territories gave fresh evidence that slavery and states’ rights would become the major issues of the antebellum period. And in 1820, James Monroe, the last of the original Founding Fathers – the group of men who led the Revolution against Great Britain and established the colonies as a nation – was reelected as President of the United States. The year also marked a time of surging nationalism and patriotic fervor for the new republic, as reflected in the founding of a new magazine, the Literary and Scientific Repository, which was developed during conversations at publisher John Wiley’s New York bookshop, a popular meeting place for aspiring writers. In the first issue, the editor reprinted the British critic and philosopher Sydney Smith’s scathing commentary on the state of American culture, in which he insultingly demanded: “Who reads an American book?” – a question for which there was not then a satisfactory answer ([Smith] 1820: 177). The same magazine published the works of a young and little‐known writer, James Fenimore Cooper; and the works of two other rising authors, Washington Irving and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, were reviewed in the Repository. Those three would soon become the first authors in the United States who could make a living from their writing. In 1820, many of the writers who became major voices of their day were children or teenagers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Lydia Maria Child, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, as well as two who were born into slavery, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. As adults, all of them would contribute to the creation of a distinctly American literature, which began to emerge during the period 1820–1865.
The development of American literature was closely related to the growth of periodicals, both magazines and newspapers, which were more popular with readers than books. Certainly, the most important venue for writers was in the pages of the periodicals, which varied widely in format, size, and frequency of publication. To twenty‐first‐century eyes, the early periodicals are dull‐looking and uninviting, with narrow rows of small print, little or no space between articles, and few, if any, illustrations or “embellishments,” as they were then called. Many early magazines were imitations of British journals with book reviews, articles, and some literary works, while newspapers made little pretense of impartiality and were often established to support a particular political party or social cause. In the beginning, the difference between newspapers and magazines was often difficult to determine, as formats and even size could be quite similar. In fact, early periodicals that called themselves newspapers often published news articles alongside literary works, especially poetry, and many American writers began their careers by publishing poems, stories, and serialized works of fiction in newspapers. Periodicals for all manner of audiences were founded – and often just as quickly failed – in large numbers. As James Hall, the editor of the short‐lived Illinois Monthly Magazine, proclaimed in 1831:
This is the golden age of periodicals. Nothing can be done without them. Sects and parties, benevolent societies, and ingenious individuals, all have their periodicals. Science and literature, religion and law, agriculture and the arts, resort alike to this mode of enlightening the public mind. Every man, and every party, that seeks to establish a new theory, or to break down an old one, commences operations, like a board of war, by founding a magazine. (1831: 302)
Initially, many of those who founded magazines in the United States were spurred by negative accounts of the country published by writers in British periodicals like Blackwood’s and the Edinburgh Review, as well as by those who published books about their American travels such as Frances Trollope and even Charles Dickens. A young John Greenleaf Whittier spoke indignantly for many when he wrote in the Philadelphia Album and Ladies Literary Gazette in 1829:
Until within a few years it has been the practice of British Journals and British Travellers to sneer at every production of our country, as if the term American were but another name for stupidity and ignorance. […] Our country is yet in her infancy, but, young as she is, her obligations to Britain have been amply redeemed, by the genius of her citizens. (1829: 354)
Whittier’s sentiments were widely shared, and the hundreds of editors who established and sustained new periodicals through the early decades of the nineteenth century echoed these ideas in their advertisements and in their inaugural issues. The historian Frank Luther Mott estimates that by 1825 there were more than one hundred magazines in circulation in the United States (1957, vol. 2: 4). Despite the sometimes volatile economy and periodic financial downturns in the following decades, there was a dramatic growth in the number of periodicals in the country. While most of these were short‐lived, there were exceptions; for example, the Saturday Evening Post, established in 1821, remains in publication today, although in a different format. By 1840, there were more than 1600 periodicals (magazines and newspapers) in circulation, a number that grew to more than 4000 in 1860, just before the Civil War (Groves 2007: 227). Daily newspapers had begun in 1783, and by 1833 there were approximately 1200 in circulation, of which about 65 were published on a daily basis (Mott 1941: 167). The most popular dailies were the “penny papers,” which began with the New York Sun in 1833. Such papers carried local and national news designed for the general reader and cost just a few cents a copy. Other newspapers such as the New‐York Tribune, established in 1841 by Horace Greeley, were more comprehensive in nature and also included literature – poetry as well as well as sketches and travel essays. In 1851, the New York Times began daily publication; within 10 weeks, it had a circulation of 20 000.
In contrast, book production in the United States lagged until the late 1840s. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, people read periodicals rather than books. As William Kirkland, a critic and reviewer for Godey’s Lady’s Book, the popular magazine for women, observed:
A large percentage of books published scarcely find a purchaser; numbers of those purchased are never read, and many that are read are read by one or two persons, while with periodicals the un‐read are the exception. One has but to look into circulating libraries, reading‐rooms and the like places, to see that an extensive class of readers finds time or inclination for little else. (1845: 271)
The next year, Margaret Fuller wrote that “the most important part of our literature, while the work of diffusion is still going on, lies in the journals, which monthly, weekly, daily, send their messages to every corner of this great land and form, at present, the only efficient instrument for the general education of the people” (1846: 137–138). It is little wonder that writers sought publication in the periodicals as a way of establishing a following.
The dramatic increase in the number of periodicals and later of books of all kinds was facilitated by various technological advances – from printing and paper production to improvements in domestic lighting and the accessibility of corrective eyeglasses. Significant changes in distribution and transportation systems also played a central role. Thomas Gilpin, a paper maker in Philadelphia, invented and patented a paper‐making machine in 1817 and set up the first plant to produce machine‐made paper in the United States. The following year a Philadelphia newspaper, Poulson’s Daily Advertiser, became the first to be printed on the new paper. The availability of cheap paper was a great spur to periodical production, as was the development and refinement of faster printing presses. In 1825 Richard Hoe, whose father was a printer in New York City, invented the Hoe cylinder press, which could produce 2000 four‐page papers per hour. By 1832, his company had developed a double cylinder press that could print both sides of a page at once and was steam powered rather than cranked by hand. That doubled the production to 4000 copies of a newspaper per hour. The development of stereotype printing in the early nineteenth century – the production of cast metal plates from the pages of type – allowed both periodicals and later books to be produced at high speeds and in larger press runs. Other technological developments in this period, especially those targeted at the rising middle class and the more affluent members of society, also spurred the development of the literary marketplace. While candles had provided domestic lighting for centuries, the development of lamps with fitted glass chimneys that burned whale and other oils significantly enhanced interior illumination. The invention of lamps that burned petroleum and coal gas provided even greater light, and the net result of these developments made it possible for people to read at night with greater comfort than they had enjoyed with candles. Equally important to the individual experience of reading were refinements to eyeglasses, which had existed in various forms for centuries. Corrective eyeglasses and even bifocals, which had been invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1784, became more widespread during the nineteenth century, enabling people who were far‐sighted to read more easily (Zboray 1993: 14–15). Although many men and women disliked the stigma of wearing eyeglasses, by the middle of the century images of people wearing them began to be commonplace – one of the few surviving portraits of Elizabeth Peabody’s sister Mary Peabody Mann shows her wearing small, wire‐rimmed glasses.
The distribution of printed materials also improved after the Revolutionary War. The Postal Act of 1794 permitted the distribution of magazines by mail; although the price of postage raised the cost of magazines, the majority of them were distributed through the post offices during the early part of the nineteenth century. A series of additional regulations lowered the postage prices for newspapers as well as magazines, which allowed for wider distribution and easier access to larger audiences. The Postal Act of 1845 further encouraged the development of local newspapers by providing free delivery for weekly newspapers within 30 miles of the place of publication. At the same time, transportation systems were undergoing extensive development. Begun in 1817 and completed in 1825, the Erie Canal created a 363‐mile link between Buffalo, on Lake Erie, and Albany, on the Hudson River, thus establishing a water route from New York City to the Great Lakes. In addition to opening a gateway to the West for settlers, the Canal was an economic engine for the Northeast, providing a major new trade route that made New York City the premier port in the United States. The construction of new canals across the Midwest and the Northeast, as well as the advent of regularly scheduled steamboats across the Great Lakes and on major rivers, provided opportunities for distribution far beyond what the founders of early periodicals could have imagined. The development of the railroads was even more crucial to the creation of stable distribution systems. Railroad companies began to form in the 1820s, and by 1840 there were 9000 miles of track connecting cities and towns across the country. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the number had grown to 30 000. Not only did the railroads provide a reliable system for transporting goods and mail, they also provided opportunities for travel. And then, as now, travelers wanted portable reading materials – for entertainment, diversion, and even for instruction.
The demand for those reading materials is indicative of the rise of literacy rates and the concomitant development of education throughout the nineteenth century. In 1800, literacy rates among white citizens in the United States, especially men, were generally much higher than in most of the countries of Western Europe. A substantial majority of white urban men could read and most could write basic English. Rural Americans fared less well, and enslaved men and women were kept illiterate by policy and by law in some southern states. Literacy rates for white women lagged behind those of white men, but as schools for girls and young women proliferated, especially in the Northeast, women made substantial gains. By 1846, Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, confidently exclaimed: “Women are, in our country, the readers” (1). Contributing to the rise in literacy was the growing number of schools, especially for white boys. In the early years of the nineteenth century, children were taught to read at home and in private schools, such as the one that Elizabeth Peabody’s sister Mary conducted at the house on West Street in Boston. Compulsory public elementary school education began in Massachusetts in 1852; other states slowly followed suit, though it was not until the passage of a law in Mississippi in 1918 that elementary education was finally required for all citizens in the United States. In the meantime, the numbers of circulating libraries increased dramatically as communities of all sizes established places where those who could afford it could subscribe and check out books and periodicals (Kaser 1980: 62). The numbers of bookshops and periodical depots also grew, and travelers could buy periodicals at rail stations or on the streets from the “newsboys,” who were everywhere hawking the papers. In his lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” Emerson observed that the periodical press had spawned a revolution:
For who are the readers and thinkers of 1854? Owing to the silent revolution which the newspaper has wrought, this class has come in this country to take in all classes. Look into the morning trains which, from every suburb, carry the business men into the city to their shops, counting‐rooms, work‐yards and warehouses. With them, enters the car the humble priest of politics, finance, philosophy, and religion in the shape of the newsboy. He unfolds his magical sheets, two pence a head his bread of knowledge costs, and instantly the entire rectangular assembly fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast. (1995: 74)
The periodical was ubiquitous and increasingly central to the daily life of most Americans.
In the early years of the nineteenth century most periodicals tended to be designed for a perceived general audience, despite the fact that the American audience was large, diverse, and living in a variety of population centers and regions. But the model for a general‐interest periodical had been successful throughout the eighteenth century, and numerous editors continued to follow it. For example, the Literary and Scientific Repository, founded in 1820, strongly imitated the look and feel of British magazines. Its editors printed reviews of current literary and scientific works, as well as articles on the state of American culture. The Knickerbocker, founded in 1833, was designed to promote and develop American literature. Like the Repository, the magazine published extensive reviews, but its far more successful history – it had about 5000 subscribers by 1837 and did not cease publication until 1865 – is doubtless due to the popularity of the authors that were published in the magazine, including Cooper, Irving, Hawthorne, James Kirke Paulding, Nathaniel P. Willis, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Sigourney, and John Greenleaf Whittier. But both the Repository and the Knickerbocker catered to a northeastern audience and could not really be said to represent the general interests of an expanding nation. Indeed, the general‐interest magazine was rapidly giving way to magazines designed to appeal to special interests and audiences. Such a strategy also contributed to the growth in the number of periodicals as readers eagerly read magazines devoted to all manner of topics, such as religion, agriculture, fashion and women’s interests, medicine and health, politics, and various regional concerns.
Among the most popular special‐interest periodicals in the early years were religious magazines and newspapers. Although several had been founded during the period after the Revolutionary War, there was an upsurge in their development in the early years of the century. The first religious newspaper, the Boston Recorder, was founded in 1816 by Nathaniel P. Willis, the father of Sara Payson Willis, who, writing as “Fanny Fern,” later became the first weekly newspaper columnist in the United States. Under Willis’s hands, the Recorder published articles about the Congregationalist churches, as well as news items, death notices, and the occasional poem. The most important and influential religious magazine was the Unitarian Christian Examiner, based on an earlier magazine founded by a group of theologians that included Elizabeth Peabody’s friend Dr. Channing, and then published under that title from 1824. The magazine published reviews on religion, and philosophy, as well as articles on science. Throughout the history of the magazine, which ceased publication in 1869, the editors also published reviews of literature, such as on the works of Emerson, as well as a strikingly negative review of the second edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published in 1856. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most religious denominations and many churches had their own magazines. These periodicals reflected the particular concerns of their readership and often included religious teachings in the guise of stories and sketches. Because of the educational nature of many of the articles in these periodicals, it is not surprising that periodicals for children developed almost directly from them. Soon after Willis devoted a section of the Recorder to children, in 1827 he began to publish the Youth’s Companion, a separate newspaper designed especially for children and with the purpose of providing religious instruction. The first magazine for children without an overtly religious purpose was edited by Lydia Maria Child, whose Juvenile Miscellany was published from 1826 to 1834. Read by dozens of aspiring writers, including Louisa May Alcott and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Miscellany published up‐and‐coming authors, such as Lydia Sigourney, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Sarah Josepha Hale, who later became the editor of the most popular women’s magazine of the century, Godey’s Lady’s Book.
Women’s magazines, designed to appeal to the surging numbers of white, middle‐class women who had leisure to read, became the largest growth area for periodicals. More than 45 periodicals directly targeted at women appeared between 1800 and 1830, and more than 65 more were founded from 1830 through the Civil War. Among the most popular of the early magazines for women was the New York based Ladies’ Companion (1834–1843), whose editor, William Snowden, announced in the first issue that it would be “devoted to general Literature in all its branches, embracing original and selected tales, sketches, poetry, the fine arts and fashions” (1834: 1). Snowden stayed firmly away from politics and controversy. Instead, he published travel writing, columns of “Advice to Young Ladies,” tips on flower arranging and other domestic occupations, and commentary on the importance of education for women. He also reprinted the works of British writers, such as the popular Letitia Elizabeth Landon. In the absence of international copyright laws, such pirating was commonplace because the editor did not have to pay for the works and simply reprinted them from British periodicals. Snowden, however, was determined to publish American writers, and he paid his contributors, which was not a standard practice in the early decades of the nineteenth century. He was soon printing works by Irving, Sigourney, and the popular southern writer William Gilmore Simms; and, toward the end of the magazine’s run, Snowden published Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” which was serialized from November 1842 through February 1843.
As popular as The Ladies’ Companion was, neither it nor other women’s magazines were a match for Godey’s Lady’s Book, which by all accounts was the most popular magazine of any kind before the Civil War. Founded in 1830 by Antoine Godey, a French immigrant, Godey’s at first focused on fashion and translations of articles from French magazines. In 1837, Godey merged his magazine with the Ladies’ Magazine, which was edited by Sarah Josepha Hale. He appointed Hale as the new editor (a position she held until 1877), and almost from the beginning Godey’s Lady’s Book was a huge success. By the early 1850s, it reportedly had a subscriber list of more than 70 000, and on the eve of the Civil War that number exceeded 150 000. Although Hale envisioned a largely female audience and took care to solicit work from women writers, she published tales and sketches by a variety of American writers, including Irving, Stowe, Sigourney, Poe, and Hawthorne, as well as poems by Emerson. Godey’s also became famous for its illustrations – fashions, sewing patterns, and images of homes and famous people. As Hale’s biographer Patricia Okker has noted, Hale played an important role in the professionalization of authorship in the United States (1995: 89). Eager to maintain what she viewed as essential middle‐class values for women, she published articles on fashion, advice on household economy, light sketches about domestic life, and sheet music of popular songs. At the same time, Hale strongly supported education for women and published frequent articles about what women needed to know and learn. Like Snowden before her, Hale avoided the controversial topics of women’s rights and antislavery; indeed, even during the Civil War the conflict was never once mentioned in the pages of the magazine. Godey’s did have competitors, especially when the illustrated Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine began publication in 1841. Never entirely directed to women, Graham’s published many writers who would become among the most important in nineteenth‐century American literature, notably Hawthorne and Poe, who served as editor for a time. Many of Poe’s finest short stories, such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” were published in Graham’s, as was his famous 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice‐Told Tales. Despite its popularity and its impressive array of writers, Graham’s encountered financial difficulties as well as frequent editorial blunders and changes that damaged the magazine, which ceased publication in 1858.
In the expanding nation, periodicals produced in the Northeast were increasingly unsatisfying to readers in the other regions of the country. In the South, where differences with the North over slavery were sharpening, there were calls for periodicals which would represent southern perspectives and interests. The most important was the Southern Literary Messenger, published from 1834 through 1864 in Richmond, Virginia. Its editor, T.W. White, wrote in the first issue that he intended the magazine to “stimulate the pride and genius of the south, and awaken from its long slumber the literary exertion of this portion of our country” (1834: 1). The most famous of the writers for the Messenger was Poe, who briefly served as its editor and contributed numerous reviews and more than 14 short stories to the magazine. Southern writers published in the magazine included William Gilmore Simms, the author of fiction as well as articles about southern history; and popular poets such as Henry Timrod. Other periodicals published in Charleston, Baltimore, and New Orleans had similar aims. Until the disruptions of the Civil War brought publication virtually to a standstill in the region, southern magazines found steady readers and offered new venues for emerging writers.
While the Midwest and far West were far less populous than the South in the early nineteenth century, editors were eager to attract audiences in those regions. Among the earliest ventures was the Western Monthly Review, established in 1827 in Cincinnati, Ohio, by Timothy Flint, a former minister from Massachusetts. In his “Editor’s Address” in the first issue, Flint declared his intention to provide a magazine of literature and culture directed especially to readers in the West, which he defined as west of the Allegheny mountains (1827: 10). Other periodicals with the same aim soon appeared, including the Illinois Monthly Magazine in 1830 and the Western Messenger in 1835. Established in Cincinnati by a group of Unitarians from New England, including Elizabeth Peabody’s friend James Freeman Clarke, the Western Messenger was designed to help spread Unitarianism, to promote literature, and to provide news of interest to those living in the West. Periodicals developed more slowly in the far West. Following the Gold Rush of 1849, several periodicals were established in San Francisco. The Pioneer, or California Monthly Magazine, established there in 1854, aimed to provide the residents of California with a magazine like the much‐admired Knickerbocker, but never gained a sustaining readership. In fact, all of these regional magazines were short‐lived; the distribution systems were not as well‐developed as they were in the Northeast, and other parts of the country would not see the development of sustained regional periodicals until after the Civil War.
In the decades before the war, numerous periodicals were established to address the interests and concerns of various racial and ethnic groups in the increasingly diverse country. The Spanish‐language press in the United States began in the in 1808 with El Misisipí, a newspaper published in Spanish and English in New Orleans. A variety of Spanish‐language periodicals were published throughout the Southwest and Florida in the nineteenth century, designed to provide information to local communities and also to preserve Spanish heritage and culture (Kanellos and Martell 2000: 5–6). There were also a large number of German‐language periodicals, most of them established by German immigrants. But at least one observant editor and publisher, Frank Leslie, saw an opportunity and began to publish his popular Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Paper in a German edition, from 1857 until it ceased publication in 1922 (Steinroetter 2008: 704).
The African American periodical press began in 1827 with Freedom’s Journal. Published in New York City, it was designed primarily for the 300 000 free black people living in the country before the Civil War (Foster 1999: 32–33). African American periodicals published in the city later included the Rights of All (1829), the Weekly Advocate (1837), and the Colored American (1837–1842). Farther west, Martin Delany’s Mystery was published in Pittsburgh from 1843 to 1847; and the Alienated American was published in Cleveland from 1852 to 1856. Frederick Douglass, the most influential African American author and editor of the nineteenth century, published the North Star (1847–1850), Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1850–1860), and Douglass’ Monthly (1858–1863). Eager to expand an audience for African American writers, Thomas Hamilton founded the Anglo‐African Magazine in 1859. Hamilton, a free black who had long experience as a journalist, served as the editor for the first monthly magazine devoted to the work of African American writers. He published poetry and essays by Frances E.W. Harper, as well as a partial serialization of Delany’s militant antislavery novel Blake; or, The Huts of America, whose title character is a fugitive slave who seeks to organize a transnational black revolution in Cuba and the American South. Hamilton also published articles of particular interest to African Americans, such as accounts of the history of Haiti and events such as the execution of John Brown. When he realized that he would not be able to sustain a readership for the magazine, Hamilton began instead to publish a newspaper, the Weekly Anglo‐African, which ran from 1859 to 1861. White editors and publishers also provided a voice for African Americans. There were as many as 50 newspapers before 1830 that were devoted all or in part to the antislavery cause (Mott 1957, vol. 1: 456), and in 1831 the radical abolitionist and reformer William Lloyd Garrison established the Liberator (1831–1865). Although the paper had a subscriber list of fewer than 3000, it exerted an important influence on developing antislavery sentiment in the nation. Established by David and Lydia Maria Child, the National Anti‐Slavery Standard (1840–1870) published, among other unconventional works, letters from the African American writer and activist Frances E.W. Harper. Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared as a serial from 1851 to 1852 in the pages of the National Era, an antislavery newspaper published in Washington, DC.
Native Americans also established periodicals in the early nineteenth century. The first periodical was the Cherokee Phoenix, a four‐page newspaper first published in New Echota, Georgia, on 21 February 1828. (Despite intermittent publication during the twentieth century, it continues to this day in both print and Internet formats.) Like the other Native American newspapers that followed, the Phoenix was a bilingual publication, printed in both English and Cherokee, using the alphabet earlier developed by Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith. Shaped by the Cherokee tribal government, the primary purpose of the paper was educational: to assist Indians in reading, writing, and learning English so that they might better cope with the encroaching white civilization. At the same time, the paper sought to resist the removal of the Cherokee and other tribes from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast, partly by displaying to white readers the level of literacy and other attainments that had been achieved by the so‐called Five Civilized Tribes.
Along with the expanding number and range of periodicals, book production showed a marked increase by the late 1840s. The publisher George Palmer Putnam (the cousin who loaned books to Elizabeth Peabody for her fledgling library in Boston) reported that only about 1200 books were published in the United States between 1830 and 1842. Nearly half of those were reprints of foreign works such as the titles that Peabody and others sold in their shops or offered in lending libraries, especially the popular novels of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. According to an Association of New York Publishers Report, in 1853 “there were some 733 works published in the United States; of which 278 were reprints of English works, 35 were translations of foreign authors, and 420 (a large preponderance) were original American works – thus showing an increase of about 800 per cent in less than twenty years” (quoted in Zboray 1989: 180). The same market forces that prompted the expansion of periodicals – the expanding population, growing literacy, technological advances, better distribution systems, and the development of successful business models for publishing companies – also fostered the growing number of books published in the United States. By the 1840s, the group of American writers who had grown up in the early nineteenth century had reached adulthood, and their work, much of it first published in the periodicals, was attracting attention. In 1845, for example, several writers who had earned their reputation in the periodicals published books that not only sold well but became a part of the literary renaissance that was gaining ground in the United States: Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and William Gilmore Simms’s The Wigwam and the Cabin. That year also saw the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which sold more than 11 000 copies in the first year. During the following decade, some of the most enduring works of American literature were published: Emerson’s Representative Men (1850), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville’s Moby‐Dick (1851), Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855).
With the exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, such canonical texts sold far fewer copies than many other works of the period. The success of some of the women writers was particularly noteworthy. The American Publisher’s Circular for August of 1858 noted the greatest successes in recent publishing, citing Uncle Tom’s Cabin as having sold 310 000 copies since its publication in 1852. Other notable titles included Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter, which had sold 90 000 copies since its publication in 1854; and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, which had sold 55 000 copies since its publication in 1855. Other bestsellers that had been published that year included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, which had sold 43 000; and The Life of P.T. Barnum, which had sold 45, 000 copies. But few books sold more than a few thousand copies, and some, like Melville’s Moby‐Dick and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, waited for decades to attract an audience. Many of the most popular books that were sold in the United States continued to be works by British authors, especially Dickens but also Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Moreover, as the literary marketplace became more sophisticated, publishers began to develop books for different audiences, just as the periodical marketplace had developed a variety of materials. Publishers distinguished among elite, well‐educated audiences as well as audiences who were more interested in the exciting reads offered by sensation fiction. In fact, before Uncle Tom’s Cabin the bestselling American novel was George Lippard’s lurid exposé of scandalous upper‐class life, The Quaker City: Or, the Monks of Monk‐Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (1845). Erastus and Irwin Beadle later developed another enormously popular genre, “dime novels,” short, paperbound books that sold for 10 cents. The first book in the series was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens. The novel, essentially a reprint of Stephens’s story that had been serialized in the Ladies’ Companion in February, March, and April 1839, sold more than 65 000 copies within a few months of its publication in 1860.
As the publication history of Malaeska demonstrates, periodicals and books continued to have a close, even symbiotic relationship. The three most important magazines founded during the decade before the war were Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1850), Putman’s Monthly Magazine (1853), and the Atlantic Monthly (1857). Harper’s was initially founded to serve Harper and Brothers publishers by issuing extracts and serializations of the firm’s books, the majority of which were by British authors. Capitalizing on the lack of international copyright laws, the Harper company become the major American printer of British novels, gaining enormous success by publishing novels as serials, including Dickens’s Bleak House, George Eliot’s Romola, and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes. The editors of Harper’s also published the works of American writers, including Melville and Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard. But in the early years the magazine emphasized British writers, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, who were broadly appealing to American audiences. In contrast, Putnam’s and the Atlantic Monthly sought to promote the work of American writers. Like Harper’s, Putnam’s was founded by a book publisher, George Palmer Putnam, who featured the work of both well‐known and rising American writers. While Stowe did not publish in Putnam’s, an article on the extraordinary popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in the first issue, which also included the first installment of “An Excursion to Canada” by the little‐known Henry Thoreau. Other writers featured in the pages of the magazine included Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, and especially Melville, who turned to writing short fiction following the critical and commercial failure of his novel Pierre (1852). His first story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street,” appeared in Putnam’s in 1853. Within a few years, however, the magazine was declining in sales, and it ceased publication in 1857. That year, the influential and long‐lived Atlantic Monthly was founded by Francis Underwood, a writer and editor who was also committed to the antislavery cause. He was joined by an impressive group of authors, including Emerson, Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, who became the first editor of the Atlantic. From the first, the magazine was intended to be a select journal, which would lead the American public to the best of literature, political thought, scientific developments, and advances in the arts. While the list of writers published in the early years included many of the famous founders, the magazine also published emerging writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Harriet Prescott. During the first two years, it reached a circulation of 30 000. But the social, political, and economic tensions that led to the Civil War were such that magazine circulations in general began to falter. Although the Atlantic Monthly continued, a long list of periodicals failed or suspended publication during the war years.
But the Civil War proved to be only a temporary setback for the American literary marketplace, which had been transformed during the period 1820 to the beginning of the conflict in 1861. The technological advances, the distribution systems, the growing, literate population, and the strong desire for a national literature combined to form a strong foundation for American literature. The number of periodicals and books that were published continued to rise until the war created shortages in paper as well as disruptions in production and transportation. But even during the four years of the conflict there was a shining success story. One of the major ways in which all citizens – both northerners and southerners – got their news about the progress of the Civil War was in the pages of a periodical, Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Founded in 1857, the same year as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Weekly was modeled on the successful London Illustrated News. Although not designed as a literary magazine and displaying little interest in fiction, Harper’s Weekly published reviews, essays, travel literature, agricultural notes, and information about new books. Most importantly, it was heavily illustrated. By 1861, the magazine had a circulation of 120 000; by many accounts, it was the most widely read periodical during the war (Mott 1957, vol. 2: 475). Pointed political cartoons by illustrator Thomas Nast, and images by a team of artists (including Winslow Homer) that provided pictures of the battlefields and the battles, as well as detailed accounts of the progress of the war, made the magazine a must‐read for a large audience. Beginning on 27 April 1861, the magazine began its coverage with a detailed account of the bombardment of Fort Sumter and a front‐page illustration of the swearing in of volunteers for the Union army in Washington, DC. Even today, historians regard Harper’s Weekly as a primary resource for information about the Civil War. Following the war, the literary marketplace regained its momentum and moved forward quickly. While small bookshops like Elizabeth Peabody’s could still manage with a loyal clientele, publishing and bookselling became major industries; and the writings of a long list of professional American writers were widely available in periodicals and books throughout the United States.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 19 (THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINT CULTURE, 1865–1914).