on the real crudity and danger of frontier life; as a form of compensation for a sense of cultural insecurity; or as an assault on the niceties of respectable opinion. Whatever the case, the power and appeal of this imagery went far beyond the region of its origin (indeed, its spread depended on Eastern publishing houses). It could be seen in the horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the often bizarre images in some of Herman Melville’s work. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous depiction of the artist as a “transparent eyeball” was an adaptation of the imagery common to a Crockett almanac.55
Regional humor and storytelling were just two of the elements in the antebellum popular cultural matrix. A third was the blizzard of reform literature that blanketed the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. In one sense, reform had little impact on many forms of popular culture because much of it came from the emerging middle class and was directed at working people, as a kind of social control. Efforts to stop the consumption of alcohol (the first American “Just Say No” campaign was the temperance movement of the early nineteenth century), police public morals, and enforce religious piety were often aimed at the people who went to the theater or spent time sampling the amusements of the Bowery. At the same time, however, many reforms—antislavery and women’s rights, to name two examples—had at least some relevance to those outside the middle class, not least because in many cases the problems addressed by reformers were very real. For instance, one temperance group, the Washingtonians, were themselves reformed alcoholics, and one of the most popular plays of the period was William Henry Smith’s The Drunkard (1844), in which an upright man is lured into alcoholism and his family blackmailed by an evil lawyer. This motif would recur in T.S. Arthur’s Washingtonian-influenced novel Ten Nights in a Barroom (1854), which later became The Drunkard of the late nineteenth century (see Chapter 3).56
The wellspring of antebellum reform was a religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Like the First Great Awakening that surged through New England and the middle colonies in the 1730’s and 40’s, the Second Great Awakening was a powerful evangelical movement that stressed personal power and responsibility Central to any transformation. was the concept of perfectibility, whereby individuals could identify and destroy evil within themselves and thus collectively usher in a paradise on earth before, not after, the return of Christ. Rejecting the more formal and intellectual foundations of established religions, the key institution of the Awakening was the revival meeting, at which people gathered from far and wide to worship, as well as to interact in social and even commercial ways.57
Beginning in the South and West in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and especially affecting poor black and white communities, the Second Great Awakening fanned out across the country over the first half of the century. Along the way, it became diffused and secularized. Personal perfectibility increasingly moved into the realm of social perfectibility, and moral suasion gradually took on more aggressively political dimensions. The classic case in point is antislavery agitation, which moved from churches to secular organizations and eventually into the political parties. By the 1850s, the religious impulse remained strong, but it joined with a patchwork quilt of movements that ranged from bourgeois attempts to close working-class saloons to proto-socialist Utopian communities that emphasized communitarian values in work and even sex.58
Such increasingly political reform projects depended on proselytizers. Some were preachers, who in African-American communities adopted a dramatic style that would have an incalculable influence on future black culture, especially music. In the emerging middle class, there arose the institution of the lecture circuit, which created opportunities for former clerics like Emerson to make a living by giving speeches and catering to the mania for self-improvement among the upwardly mobile. A third form of transmission was written: small, cheap pamphlets that exploited the same possibilities tapped by newspapers in the Jacksonian era.
The most prolific publisher of such pamphlets—or, for that matter, any printed material at the time—was the American Tract Society. Tract publications were distributed by colporteurs, or missionary salesmen, and at commercial outlets. By the 1850s, the ATS had published over 500 tracts, and its smallest printing was 6,000 copies. The largest, “Quench Not the Spirit,” numbered almost 1 million. The ATS was only one of a number of tract publishers, and spiritually oriented material was only one component in a field that included conduct manuals, self-help books, and sociopolitical exposes.59
This rich world of printed matter provided the backdrop for the emergence of one of the most important popular cultural forms of the nineteenth century: the dime novel. Perhaps the best known were the Westerns that were published in the decades after the Civil War (see Chapter 3), but these cheaply made booklets, usually bound in yellow covers, first emerged in the 1840s. They represented only one of the forms this highly sensational fiction took. Another common vehicle was the story paper, which serialized novels before their publication in dime-novel format. The most famous story paper was the New York Ledger, which was founded by Robert Bonner, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who began as a printing apprentice and built a newspaper empire. In the early 1850s, he bought an old mercantile paper and transformed it by publishing fiction, verse, and moral essays. Bonner scored an editorial and publicity coup in 1855 when he persuaded Sara Willis Parton—a.k.a. Fanny Fern—to write a regular column for the Ledger (see below). At its peak, the paper had a circulation of 400,000, the largest of any periodical in the country.60
A CLOSER LOOK: The Art and Life of Fanny Fern
The boardinghouse was shopworn and oppressive, and Ruth Hall was faint with hunger. Ever since her husband had died the previous winter, leaving her with two daughters to raise, her financial straits had become increasingly desperate. There were no jobs for schoolteachers, sewing did not pay enough to support the children, and there were no other leads. Time and hope were running out.
SARA WILLIS PARTON, C. 1868
Hall’s family was of little help—in fact, it was downright hostile. Since her mother’s death, Ruth’s father only reluctantly gave her a pittance and urged her to give up the children. Her in-laws, who had never liked her when their son was alive, now schemed to gain custody of the girls. And former friends avoided her. When she finally turned to writing for newspapers and sought help from her brother, a prominent editor, he told her she lacked talent and should “seek some unobtrusive employment.” Working women, it seemed, should be neither seen nor heard.
Ruth Hall was a fictional character. But her creator—Sara Willis Parton, a.k.a. Fanny Fern—was not. In many important ways, Ruth Hall’s story was Fanny Fern’s story, and Fanny Fern’s story, one of the best known and most controversial of the mid-nineteenth century, opens a window on some of the less visible aspects of women’s lives in the Victorian era.
The life of the future novelist and columnist began in relative privilege. Grata (soon changed to Sara) Payson was born in Portland, Maine, in 1811, the daughter of an anti-Federalist newspaper editor who relocated the family to Boston when Sara was a child. Given a nickname of “Sal Volatile,” she impressed her classmates at Catherine Beecher’s seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, and after graduating wrote pieces for the Youth’s Companion, a magazine founded by her father. In 1837, she married a well-to-do banker, and over the next seven years bore three daughters.
Then things began to fall apart. Her mother, eldest daughter, and husband died between 1844 and 1846, leaving her with unsympathetic relatives and without a means of supporting herself and her two remaining children. She turned to teaching and sewing, but neither earned her enough to support her family, and she was forced to relinquish
