culture.
Such attacks led to an equally common response: that contrary to respectable opinion, popular culture was actually good for you. This approach goes back at least to the late seventeenth century, when the Puritan clergyman William Perkins specifically singled out Scoggins Jests, a collection of ballads and jokes, as dangerous to the moral health of his followers. Either anticipating such criticism or directly responding to it, bookseller John Usher included a foreword in the editions he sold in the 1680s, explaining that “there is nothing beside the goodnesse of God, that preserves the health so much as honest mirth.” When a 1761 production of Shakespeare’s Othello came to Rhode Island, the most tolerant of the New England colonies, the manager described it as “a moral dialogue, in five parts, depicting the evil effects of jealousy and other bad passions, and proving that happiness can only spring from the pursuit of virtue.”27 Such sentiments were used by those who sought to defend (or merely sell) novels, often accompanied by an insistence that the events about to be narrated were factual. The dedication page of Charles Brockden Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789, is typical in this regard. It reads as follows:
TO THE
YOUNG LADIES
OF
UNITED COLUMBIA
These VOLUMES
Intended to represent the specious CAUSES,
and to Explore the fatal CONSEQUENCES
OF
SEDUCTION;
to inspire the FEMALE MIND
With a principle of SELF COMPLACENCY
AND TO
Promote the economy of HUMAN LIFE
ARE INSCRIBED
With esteem and sincerity
by their
Friend and humble servant
THE AUTHOR
It is possible that many such attempts to uphold the practicality of popular culture in this way were sincere. And there can be little doubt that at least some people accepted these explanations. Yet, as many producers, purveyors, and consumers no doubt realized, suggestive songs, Shakespearian plays, and novels with the word “seduction “printed in bold-faced capital letters on their dedication pages simply could not be reduced to exercises in moral instruction. No one would bother with them if they were. Everyone would instead go to church and listen to what their betters had to say.
In this regard, novels and other forms of reading were not simply supplements to formal education; they were also alternatives to it. In part, this is because many girls and women did not have the opportunity to attend schools, or to do so to their satisfaction. And, as I have suggested, there may have been ideological motivations as well. Either way, the thirst for learning was evident. In her exhaustive study of novels in America before 1820, literary historian Cathy Davidson reports that she encountered a call for better female education in every single one. The emphasis was not institutional but personal: women should read to educate themselves. And the profusion of such self-help books as spellers, and the presence of books like Mary Wollstonecraft’s early feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) in 30 percent of libraries surveyed in one study, suggests that women were acting on this principle.28
The nascent fiction industry seems to have made a concerted effort to meet this demand. Davidson notes that much early fiction operated at a relatively unsophisticated linguistic level. Many books were shortened versions of longer, more complex works, using plainer language. Moreover, many included advertisements that were specifically directed toward women, children, or uneducated men.29 This is perhaps the clearest evidence of the diffusion of literature to a large number of people.
It may also be evidence of the growing sophistication of the early capitalist system. Yet here too there is evidence that suggests that it is simplistic to assume that mass culture is foisted on an uncritical populace. This is evident from Davidson’s imaginative effort to examine many copies of the same novel to see how individual readers personalized them with notes, doodling, and other marginalia. From such work, it became clear that even the most inexpensive editions of a book could have tremendous personal value. One reader, for example, decorated the cover of a novel in an edition so crude that the author’s name was spelled incorrectly. Inside she wrote poetry, and crossed out her maiden name and added a new one when she got married, suggesting that the book had become a prized keepsake. Conversely, the disgusted reader of another novel wrote that “a book more polluted with destruction and abominable sentiments cannot be put in the hands of anyone—shame to the age and country that produced it.”30
These novels attracted male readers as well. The inscriptions studied by Davidson indicate that men read seduction novels, while it seems likely that women, by the same token, read those that were directed at men.
A CLOSER LOOK: A Temple of the Imagination
Multiple allegiances—of sex, race, and ethnicity, among others—have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. So it seems appropriate that the first Great American Novel was written by a woman whose nationality has been open to question. That ambiguity—along with the author’s gender—has until recently led literary scholars to overlook both Susanna Rowson as the first major American fiction writer and her book Charlotte Temple as the first major American novel.
THE FICTIONAL CHARLOTTE TEMPLE
Rowson was born (as Susanna Haswell) in England in 1762 to a mother who died soon after her birth. Her father, an officer in the British navy, remarried and brought her to Massachusetts, where she enjoyed a happy and affluent childhood until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Though her father tried to remain neutral, political tensions made the Haswells’ situation untenable, and he was taken as a prisoner of war in 1776. The family’s property was confiscated, and the adolescent Susanna found herself tending to a makeshift home and trying to support her ill and depressed father (who was under house arrest) and stepmother. In 1778, the family was repatriated to England in a prisoner exchange. They began again in England, penniless, and dependent on Susanna’s skills as a teacher of wealthy women and a writer of verse for the theater.
In 1786, Susanna married William Rowson, an actor, musician, and sometime hardware merchant who was later described as a “deadbeat” by one of his relatives. The task of supporting the family—which eventually included two adopted children and her husband’s sister—fell to the young woman. (Her husband, however, assumed the rights to all her earnings under both British and U.S. law. Not that there was much involved: the prevailing wisdom was that, unlike men, women were not interested in money, and they were thus not paid very much.) Between 1786 and 1792, Susanna published a series of novels, including Charlotte: A Tale of Truth in 1791 (which, against prevailing custom, she authored in her own name). After her husband’s hardware business went bankrupt in 1792, the couple was recruited by a theater company in Philadelphia. Susanna became a U.S. citizen when her husband was naturalized in 1802.
Susanna Rowson might have been better known as an actress—or later, as the founder of a highly successful women’s academy—had it not been for Matthew Carey. Carey was an Irishman who had been imprisoned by the British for publishing an Irish nationalist newspaper.
