Assignment 3

Michael Denning and John F. Kasson write in regards to the late 19th Century. While Kasson focuses primarily on statistical evidence to create his point, Denning’s chapters primarily focus on the influence of societal class and how it influences the way people access their stories. It seems that Kasson is not as focused on the importance of Dime Novels or Serial Stories, but the population statistics that he writes are certainly one of the reasons that Dime Novels and Serial Stories were successful. Denning brings up the point that depending on your social class and whether or not you had a family would influence your reading between Dime Novels and Serial Stories. Denning writes, “… employed the ideological rhetoric of the new public of mechanics, the republican articulation of ‘virtue’ against ‘corruption’ and ‘luxury’, of ‘equal rights’ and the ‘public good’ against ‘monopoly’, defending the Republic and the Revolution against a new ‘aristocracy’” (Denning 90). Dime Novels were a way to promote good behavior and to help the younger generation have access to reading, furthermore to learn what is socially just behavior. These stories strongly helped educated youth not to steal, not to act pompous, and most importantly what it means to act virtuously. Children would be able to become attached to a character and witness how he develops into a better individual. One of the reasons Dime Novels became so strong was because of the heavy urbanization going on in the four major growing cities in America; Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The Mid-19th Century was “the most rapid urbanization in American history” (Kasson 71). Kasson goes on to write, “The largest city in 1820, New York, swelled from a population of 125,000 in that year to 800,000 by 1860, over a million including Brooklyn” (Kasson 71). This large amount of urbanization allowed for Dime Novels and Serial Stories to take over the working-class’ person lives. Because these stories either cost a nickel or a dime, people could buy them at will, although inflation would have changed the price in today’s economy, it was still relatively accessible for the middle-class to read these virtuous stories. The Kasson quotation further proves the point that cities were the backdrop of many of the Dime Novels, because of the amount of people in cities that were reading these stories. It was not rural individuals reading these stories; it was the urban population that had access to them, so from a publishers perspective, “Why would you not make the setting in a place that people know?”

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/immgnts/

This link focuses on the immigration in the late 19th Century. I am unsure of the author, but I believe that there were multiple forms of input that helped create this source. It is relevant to our class because immigrants often flocked to cities which is where Dime Novels flourished.

Two Questions I have are: How many women read these Dime Novels? And, with a population where maybe half the youth were formally educated, how did the dialect help them to read what was written?