Digging into the dime novel collection: Tastes have definitely changed
New York Five Cent Library #150. From 1895, this edition sports a title that isn’t offensive, but definitely wouldn’t mean the same thing today. It took a while for this usage to go out of fashion--they were still making movies in the 1930’s with titles like “The Gay Divorcee.”
By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.
May 19, 2013
What did one read on the stagecoach or the train in the 1890s? Chances are it was a cheap, hastily written “novel,” the latest in a series of so-called dime or half-dime libraries. These lurid tales ranged from mysteries to historical fiction to proto-science fiction. Many were boys’ stories featuring Wild West themes or sports adventures. This “dime novel” format ruled popular fiction between 1860 and 1900 and it was in many ways the direct forebear of most of the popular literature formats that came later, specifically comic books, pulp magazines, and ultimately the popular paperback novel.
The dime novels peaked as nostalgia items in the 1940s and 1950s when collectors who remembered them from their youth in the late 19th Century formed clubs, traded scarce issues and drove up prices. Nowadays, only a few specialists even know what they are. Other than the early Beadle & Adams editions (the original dime novels of the 1860s), most of these were printed on cheap acidic paper and have crumbled away decades ago.
The Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature boasts 600 of these precious paper artifacts. Some are crumbling away, but many are very well preserved thanks to somebody’s grandpa who stapled them into manila folders for preservation. We have since liberated most of them from this primitive archival method and placed them in acid-free mylar sleeves. The trick is to keep them out of the sunlight so they don’t turn so black you can’t read them, and to keep them in a humid enough environment that they don’t turn brittle and crumble, but not so humid that they mold.
Our collection ranges from publication dates of 1860 to 1927, with most of our issues dating from the 1890s. The Frank Reade, Jr., series is highly prized by science fiction collectors as an example of proto-science-fiction in the Jules Verne tradition. Many of the issues of another story paper, Tip Top Weekly, feature early sports covers, including baseball, football, and basketball depictions from the 1890s and 1900s. However, while the cover art is fun, the stories are uniformly awful, hastily written, and of little literary value. This was a disposable literature, intended for the stagecoach or train ride and then for the rubbish heap.
In later posts, we can delve into the role of the dime novels in early American science fiction, and other interesting topics. But today, as we just begin to scratch the surface of the dime novel collection, it seems that there is one most important observation about this extinct literary medium: that is, the perspective the dime novels offer on 19th Century literature, and how different that is than the classics we are used to reading. The fact is that most of the American authors we still regularly read from the 19th Century — Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain — were all way ahead of their time and are not representative of their era.
The Five Cent Wide Awake Library #1151 from 1892 features the “boy” epithet for an African American person in its title. It doesn't get any better after the cover. Reading through this issue, it soon becomes clear that when the character isn’t being called “boy” he is being referred to as a “coon.” This dime novel cover is drawing on the 19th Century minstrel show depiction of black people, exaggerating the ears and the lips, and portraying the character made up in blackface to bring out those features. It is not generally remembered today, but blackface was not only used by white performers (like Al Jolson), but black performers themselves also sometimes used blackface.
Some people nowadays argue over whether “Huckleberry Finn” should be in the school library because Mark Twain used the N-word in that book. Case in point, this sanitized,edition released in 2011 that edited out the book’s incidences of crude racial language. But if they could read what the 19th Century public was really consuming on a daily basis in the form of dime novels, they would be horrified. They would soon forgive Mark Twain’s choice of words. To put it bluntly, there is nothing politically correct about 19th Century dime novels. All the Mexicans are “greasers,” all the African Americans are “darkies” or “coons.” Cover art depicts fearless pioneers thrusting their knives to the hilt in the bleeding chests of Indians. Cruelty to animals is commonplace. There is a reason beyond poor prose why this literature has been forgotten. These stories would simply not be tolerated today.
So why read the dime novels, if they are so hastily written and awful, and if they are so offensive to modern sensibilities? A few possible reasons:
The dime novels are historically important as the grandfather of most of the cheaply produced mass entertainment that was available since the dawn of the Industrial Age to the advent of television. The dime novels morphed into the pulp magazines (around the turn of the 20th Century), the comic books (in the 1930s), and paperback novels (starting in the late 30’s and achieving a Golden Age of their own in the 1940s and 1950s).
Log Cabin Library #397 from 1896 features a cover portraying not only cruelty to American Indians, but also cruelty to animals, in the service of a comic tale. Balloons showed up a lot in dime novel covers, along with a lot of other fantastic 19th Century Jules Verne-inspired conveyances. This was still more than a decade before the Wright Brothers.
In kind of a sick way, the dime novels are refreshing for their utter lack of political correctness. At the same time, they give us a glimpse into the Anglo-centric, insensitive thinking of their era. They were written at a time when the imperialism of the British Empire was still in full bloom and the hands of natives in the Belgian Congo were being chopped off by the basketful for bounties. Africans, Native Americans, and Australian aborigines were all fodder for the dime novel mill. If non-white ethnic characters appeared in the stories in guises other than attacking natives or marauding Indians, they were usually relegated to the roles of sidekicks and comic relief.
As literature, the dime novels provide a foil to the required reading lists we all remember from school. The weekly issues of the half-dime libraries are the television episodes of their era, not the art-house movies. The disposable prose of hacks, written for fractions of a penny per word, is a lot like the countless now-lost hours of live TV that existed between about 1939 and the mid-1950s. An ephemeral literature, but an important ancestor to what came later.