The Beadle Collection of Dime Novels. New York Public Library
issues of the song books also made an immediate hit, and were swiftly followed by a number of the miscellaneous hand-books shown in the present exhibition. Then, in the summer of 1860, came the first of the original “Dime Novels” in their orange covers. Success was assured from the start, and the publishing activities of Beadle and Company speedily grew to vast proportions.
Many of the best writers of the period, who possessed intimate knowledge of American pioneer life, were asked to put the conditions and events of earlier generations into attractive form. Among those whose help was thus enlisted were Judge Jared Hall, Francis Fuller Barritt, John Neal, Mayne Reid, Mrs. Victor, Colonel A. J. H. Duganne, Edward S. Ellis, William Eyster, Ann Stephens, Judge William Busteed, N. C. Iron, Herrick Johnstone, James L. Bowen, Mary Denison, John Warner, Charles Dunning Clark, and various others.
The little books they wrote were inspired by Erastus Beadle, and his influence is seen in the fact that every phase of pioneer life, and every historic event in which his own ancestors had taken part, is treated in the series of Beadle books. The editorship of the house was entrusted to Orville J. Victor, one of the most remarkable figures in the history of American literature. For thirty years, Victor personally studied, passed upon, and edited the thousands of publications of the House of Beadle. He insisted, first of all, that the narratives must be true and accurate portrayals, in spirit, of the pioneer times and people with which they dealt. They had to reveal wilderness life and struggle as it was, and depict the conditions amid which the pioneers did their work. These tales were not history in the literal or text-book sense, since they often incorporated incidents for which there was no authentic or contemporary proof. But such material, if used, had to be consistent with known conditions of the period portrayed.
Doubtless it was the mass-realization of these facts, on the part of the public, that brought about such recognition of the so-called “Dime Novels.” The people were absorbingly interested in the earlier life of the pioneers, and when it was presented to them in the form inspired by Beadle and directed by Victor, they—as the slang phrase now goes—“ate it up.” “Here at last”—they doubtless intuitively felt—“is the real thing, not set before us as a dull task to memorize, but as a vital picture to be studied and enjoyed, and from which we may learn.”
Then came the Civil War, and the soldiers literally absorbed the convenient little books by the million. The volumes were exchanged, passed from hand to hand, read to tatters, and then thrown away. Throughout the thirty or more years in which the Beadle books held ascendancy they were so cheap, and so common, that they were almost never saved. In that respect they suffered the fate of all common things. It is almost always the case that the commonest objects of one generation become the rarest objects of two generations afterward. Their very commonness is the quality that keeps them from being treasured by their original possessors. Hence they disappear. Beadle books, in their day, were as countless as the bison of the plains or the passenger pigeon of the air. Yet to-day only a few hundred bison are alive, and are carefully protected, while not one passenger pigeon is known to exist.
After the Civil War—to a much greater extent than before that struggle—Beadle and Victor turned their attention to the Far West and enlisted the aid of numerous western explorers, Indian fighters and plainsmen in portraying that part of the country. Erastus Beadle, himself, made a trip across the plains in order to study, at first hand, the life in those regions. Among those whose knowledge of the West was thus embodied in the Beadle books were Dr. Frank Powell, Captain “Bruin” Adams, Buffalo Bill, Major Sam Hall (known as Buckskin Sam), Major St. Vrain, Joseph Badger, Prentiss Ingraham, Captain Alfred Taylor, T. C. Harbaugh, Lieutenant Hazeltine, Captain Monstery, Captain Frederick Whittaker, Lieutenant J. H. Randolph, Major Henry B. Stoddard, Lieutenant Alfred Thorne, Captain Jack Crawford (the Poet Scout), Ensign Charles Dudley Warren, Dr. Carver, Henry Inman, Albert D. Richardson, Dr. J. H. Robinson, Lieutenant James Magoon, Professor William R. Eyster, Oll Coomes, Captain T. B. Shields, J. B. Omohundro (who was “Texas Jack”), and dozens of others whose years of personal knowledge and actual adventure were incorporated in their writings.
For a long time a considerable part of the reading public in the East looked upon these tales from the Far West as unadulterated fiction, entirely harmful in its effect. Uncounted armies of boys who lived between the Mississippi and the Atlantic were taken to the woodsheds by their fathers, and there subjected to severe physical and mental anguish as a result of the parental discovery that they were reading such “impossible trash.” But the intuition of the boys was a truer guide—in this matter at least—than the opinions of those parents who did not read the books, and it has finally come to be realized that the pictures of pioneer life in the Far West, as presented by the Beadle books, are substantially accurate portrayals of the strange era and characters therein depicted. As a matter of fact, the men and women who wrote those narratives for the House of Beadle succeeded much better in their task than hearsay chroniclers who also undertook it. The Beadle books present a more accurate and vivid picture of the appearance, manner, speech, habits and methods of the pioneer western characters than do the more formal historians. The reason for that circumstance lies in the fact that writers chosen by Beadle and Victor were ones who had lived the life of which they told, and were familiar with its fundamental, day-by-day qualities. That advantage enabled them to get closer to real conditions than the distant commentators and hearsay chroniclers whose methods of narration were in a considerable degree hampered by existing conventionalities of historical writing, whose viewpoint of western life had not been shaped by long or intimate contact with it. Much of the biographical material relating to famous western characters, which is embodied in various Beadle books, is not to be found elsewhere. And, since the lives of the men thus treated are an integral and essential part of western history, the importance now placed on such biographical and regional material is easily seen.
In the years when the little Beadle volumes were common, and at the height of their popularity, they were often denounced from the pulpit as pernicious and evil in their influence upon the men and boys who read them so avidly. But such condemnation was due to ignorance of their character. Of late years that judgment has been radically reversed. The present esteem in which they are held was in part stated by Charles Harvey, in an article on the subject published by him in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1907. Mr. Harvey said:
“Ethically they were uplifting. The hard drinkers, and the grotesquely profane and picturesquely depraved persons who take leading roles in many of the dime novels of recent times were inexorably shut out from their progenitors of Beadle’s days.
“These tales incited a love of reading among the youth of the country. … Many of the boys and girls who encountered Pontiac, Boone, the renegade Girty, Mad Anthony, Kenton, and Black Hawk in their pages were incited to find out something more about those characters and their times, and thus were introduced to much of the nation’s story and geography. Manliness and womanliness among the readers were cultivated by these little books, not by homilies, but by example. It can be truthfully said that the taste and tone of the life of the generation which grew up with these tales were improved by them. No age limit was set up among Beadle’s readers. Lincoln was one of them.”
When Lincoln sent Henry Ward Beecher to England as a Special Commissioner, in an effort to win support for the Union from the English Cabinet, it was Victor, editor of the House of Beadle, whose “Address to the English People” gave material aid to the President’s representative. After Beecher had returned he discussed these things with Victor, and said to him: “Your little book and Mrs. Victor’s novel [referring to ‘Maum Guinea’] were a telling series of shots in the right spot.”
It was Victor, also, who wrote the life of Lincoln included in the “Lives of Great Americans” series, and who, in his hastily composed memorial preface to that volume, summarized the dead President in a manner not excelled by any other writer of the period. Victor therein said: “Few men realized the magnitude of his task—it was too mighty for comprehension; few men were dispassionate enough to judge justly; few were wise enough to judge understandingly.”
Such was the man who, under the guidance of Erastus Beadle, chose and edited the pioneer literature which, for a generation, molded the thought and ambitions of America’s youth. That literature itself has almost disappeared, but its effects on the national life are everywhere