Masculine novels help to create the work patterns of modern society. As James Fenimore Cooper among others understood, printed literature erodes traditional economic structures (such as the apprenticeship system) by preserving and circulating information that was once hoarded by craftsmen and passed on selectively from older men, often fathers, to younger ones. In The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the legendary woodsman Natty Bumppo harangues against the "black marks" on the page for their power to undermine respect for the wisdom of age. Like mechanized production, male fictions render the father/master obsolete in that they teem with technological information and can double as how-to manuals. They construct the unconnected individuals they depict. Popular books of the era offer instruction in the secret of surviving the wilderness (Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods [1837]); the mysterious metropolis (Lippard, Poe's detective stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin, George Thompson's New-York Life [1849]); or at sea (Melville, Cooper's nautical novels, Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym [1837-38]). -51-
Nineteenth-century sentimental novels eschew the depiction of male labor but expatiate lovingly on the work carried out in the home. This emphasis divides sentimental fiction from the seduction tales popular a generation earlier, before the separation of spheres gave domestic life its feminized coloring. Neither Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794), the early Republic's best-selling novel, nor Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797), which did nearly as well, shows the heroine doing chores around the house. These were not activities eighteenth-century women saw as defining their nature. The bestsellers of the pre-Civil War era tell a different story, and the chapters in Uncle Tom's Cabin that memorialize Rachel Halliday's homemaking skills are exemplary of the change. In Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), the heroine Ellen Montgomery has to master her aversion to housework to prove her mastery over herself. But mostly what Ellen does is to read books and write. The activity of authorship is one commercial enterprise that, being performed in the middle-class home, turns up time and again in novels both by women and by men. Melville's Pierre Glendinning and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall meet on this terrain if nowhere else.
Of course the gendering of fictional subgenres always admitted of exceptions, just as the barrier between the home and the economic arena was never impermeable. Domestic fictions were composed by men and adventure narratives by women. Ann Stephens wrote the first volume published in the Beadle series of "dime novels," lurid tales of bloodshed that actually sold for as little as a nickel. And Hawthorne's books incorporate elements from both genres. The pages in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) describing Phoebe's facility at cooking, cleaning, and gardening rival anything in women's literature for sentimental effusion.
Rationalization of the book trade was fundamental to the novel's discursive preeminence. Publishers moved swiftly to take advantage of the changed environment — or rather, the category of the "publisher" in the modern sense came into existence as venturesome persons seized the opportunity for profits. In the eighteenth century, the writer had arranged the manufacturing of his or her works and paid the printer or bookseller a commission to distribute them. Over half the country's fiction had originated in relatively small communities like Poughkeepsie, New York, or Windsor, Vermont, and had come -52- from local printers who published notices and newspapers as well as books. By the 1850s, the proportion of local imprints had declined to under 10 percent. Centralization replaced dispersal as large and wellcapitalized firms arose in the rapidly growing northeastern cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Harper Bros., Putnam's, and other publisher-entrepreneurs specializing in books now monopolized the production of fiction. These concerns relieved authors of the risks of publication (while also reducing the author's share of the possible profits) and asserted total control over the business end of literature. They took charge of all commercial responsibilities, from buying paper and overseeing printing to merchandizing the finished product.
The new houses, backed by the financial resources to promote and disseminate their wares, inaugurated the mass marketing of written culture. They made literary works generally available and affordable and dispelled the aristocratic aura of books by turning out inexpensive series under the title of "libraries." Two classics of the American Renaissance appeared in Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books: Poe's Tales (1845), which sold for 50 cents, and a twovolume, paper-covered edition of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), priced at $1.00 the set. Fifty years earlier, when wages were far lower, American novels had sold for about twice as much. Advertising emerged as an integral part of the literary scene, an essential tool for informing far-flung consumers about the latest publication and stimulating interest in buying. Promotional campaigns included announcements in newspapers, excerpts and blurbs in magazines, posters in bookstores, lecture tours, and inflated reports of sales figures (on the reasonable assumption that people will want to read a book liked by other people). Brown had tried to generate publicity by sending a copy of Wieland to Thomas Jefferson with a covering letter asking the third President for a plug. (Jefferson ignored him.) Antebellum publishers eliminated the element of chance and routinized the practice of "puffing," or planting favorable reviews and notices by writers who were often in the publisher's employ.
Under the market regime, works by Americans shed their reputation as money losers. Publishers welcomed home-grown manuscripts because they knew that a successful book could sell more than enough copies to recoup the cost of royalties. The output of native -53- novels surged accordingly, as writers, publishers, and booksellers scrambled to keep pace with demand. One hundred twenty-eight fictions by Americans appeared in the 1820s, or forty more than in the first three decades of the nation's existence. The number tripled in the 1830s, and then jumped again in the 1840s to eight hundred — almost thirty times the yearly average of the early Republic. Buyers snapped up the most popular of these works in quantities that kept rising until the figures peaked in the forties and fifties. The Last of the Mohicans qualified as a best-seller in 1826 with 5750 copies in circulation. The Quaker City, in contrast, sold 60,000 copies in 1845 and 30,000 in each of the next five years; the total of over 200,000 made Lippard's exposé the best-selling American novel before Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's antislavery saga outdid that aggregate in the single year of 1852, and thereafter sales escalated; estimates of total copies purchased before the Civil War range as high as five million. While Stowe's figures were exceptional, other domestic novelists conquered the reading public too, with Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1855) logging sales of 55,000 and Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854) exceeding 40,000 within eight weeks.