How the Dime Novel Created Women Readers and Writers
Fiction book sales have increased by over 22 percent in the past five years, and it’s commonly assumed that women are fueling the surge. They read more than men and prefer fiction to nonfiction. In fact, the great fiction boom has been led by romance novels. Women’s fiction has become a $24 billion dollar industry and the dismissive term “chick lit” has faded.
(The Secret of the 25 Chapters in Nancy Drew Books.)
This isn’t the first time, though, that women writers and readers have served as a cornerstone to the publishing industry. One striking precedent is 19th-century ladies’ dime novels. These and other highly successful commercial novels of the period by women authors helped publishers not only survive but evolve into today’s publishing industry.
By the mid-to-late 1800s, women writers in the US were on the rise. Books by women and for women began to take over the marketplace. Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves, published in 1853, was the first best-selling novel in the history of publishing, selling 75,000 copies. Harriet Beecher Stow’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold a staggering two million copies in its first five years. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne sold at most a few thousand copies of their books a year.
By 1872, due to the enormous popularity of certain women authors, some 75 percent of books were written by women. That’s a remarkable increase from almost no women authors at the beginning of the century—a change prompted by the rise of women readers, and largely because of the popularity of the dime novel.
What must it have been like to be a female author in that earlier time, especially in a literary setting such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city overrun with gentlemen of letters? Longfellow’s impressive mansion graces Brattle Street, and the ghosts of Henry James, Robert Frost, George Santayana, and W.E.B. Dubois still seem to roam the streets, not to mention Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne, who visited often from the surrounding towns. A handful of women writers, such as Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott, are placed by historians and readers in the same company—but what about the others?
Check out Virginia Pye’s The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann here:
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And what if, as a woman author, you wrote popular novels and dime store romances that aimed less for the intellect of your readers than the heart. Wouldn’t that put you at odds with the snobbish elite of such a high brow place? As I mulled over these questions, the protagonist of my novel The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann began to emerge.
Sleuthing for historical details about a woman author of romance and adventure tales in the 1890s, I hit the motherlode with the American Women’s Dime Novel Project, the work of historian Felicia Carr at George Mason University. I also discovered that Brandeis University has a treasure trove of dime novels that I could hold in my hands. These pamphlet-like publications have elaborate covers showing young women in distinctive hats or holding flowers, looking alluring and dangerous or wide-eyed and innocent. They have titles such as A Reckless Romance, A Fatal Past, A Dark Marriage Morn, or, perhaps most threatening of all, A Will of Her Own.
As the titles suggest, these flimsy “novels” (which we might today call long short stories or novellas) were criticized as lurid and trashy. In purple prose, the plots describe sensational romances or murder mysteries in which young women are led astray and even to their ultimate demise. The purpose of dime novels, besides helping the publishing industry expand from family run businesses to full-fledged companies, was to uphold the mores of their time.
Marriage is the primary, and often only, goal of their female protagonists. Wedding someone with wealth is a young lady’s highest achievement. Modesty and preserving oneself for a future husband are the means. Young women who go off the rails, lured into disreputable society by flashy young men, pay the price. The dangers of sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage are clearly illustrated and punished.
Despite these stern warnings disguised as fiction, the backs of dime novels reveal a different story. After the morality tales come the Letters of the Lovelorn, written by real women seeking advice about abusive relationships, harassing bosses, and unwanted pregnancies. Advertisements offer thinly veiled abortion services by doctors who can only be contacted via PO boxes because abortion was illegal. Potions and strange apparatuses also address an unnamed problem, though presumably everyone understood what they were for. The back pages of the popular fantasy tales of that era exposed the true story of women’s lives for what they really were.
The cost of books overall had come down since the mid-1800s, so that more working people could afford them. The readers of the dime novels and senders of the lovelorn letters were primarily working-class women. But dime novels for men were also wildly popular, especially among soldiers in the Civil War, because they were inexpensive and easy to carry.
The newest and most dedicated book buyers were the young women who migrated from the farms into the city starting in the late-1800s, becoming known as “New Women.” They worked in factories, sweatshops, as domestic help, and in white collar offices. They lived together in boarding houses. Their work was often dangerous when not drudgery and always required long hours. They saved their pennies to purchase dime novels, where they found escape in the tales of young women, like themselves, facing terrible challenges, albeit of a more fanciful variety. A renegade prince or evil aristocrat could help allay, or distract from, the pain and confusion of dealing with a rough boyfriend or disrespectful boss.
Dime novels flourished into the 20th century, even though middle-class moralists decried them as “degraded literature.” The most vocal objection came from Anthony Comstock, whose Society for the Suppression of Vice called them “vile books and papers [that] are branding-irons heated in the fires of hell, and used by Satan to sear the highest life of the soul.”
But as I read them, I thought of the many young women readers, new to a city and alone, who must have turned to these stories for solace. It seems unlikely that they actually believed the far-flung plots, but instead might have clung to them for company and courage. Much like soap operas or tella novellas, or certain lighter beach reads—the former “chick lit”—these stories entertained, diverted, and gave a sense of hope. They, quite reliably, offered happy endings, something not guaranteed in their own lives.
As silly and sentimental as dime novels might seem today, they brought joy to a vast number of new women readers, creating an astounding expansion of literacy in the US. They were also crucial in transforming publishing into the thriving industry of today.