Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book, and: The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book, and: The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States Lynda Yankaskas (bio) Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book. By Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray. (New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xxix, 325. Cloth, $95.00; Paper, $32.95.) The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Angela G. Ray. (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005. Pp. 371. Cloth, $79.95; Paper $24.95.) For several decades now, historians of the book have created a large literature on the history of readers and reading, ranging from seminal studies of literacy to economic analyses of the book trade and considerations of reading as an element of rural social intercourse. Ronald Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray's Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book and Angela G. Ray's The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States consider two other means of entry into literary culture, shifting the spotlight from readers to writers (Zboray and Zboray) and to the culture of oral performance (Ray). Together, they suggest fruitful new avenues in the study of literary dissemination and print culture. [End Page 791] Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book is not so much a popular history of cheap popular books as it is an accessible history of the participation of a wide range of individuals in the literary marketplace during the three decades before the Civil War. The Zborays' theme is "the triumph of social responsibilities over impersonal market forces" (xiii) in the antebellum literary scene. In contrast to what they call a "triumphalist narrative" of professionalization and commercial success for a chosen few, the Zborays draw on some 930 "informants" (xxv) from a wide geographic and demographic range to explore the complex interplay of social relationships, amateur authorship, and movement in and out of the commercial publishing world. In particular, they focus on the ways that interpersonal connections—"social sense"—influenced the production, informal circulation, publication, and reception of a wide variety of writing. The book usefully begins with a discussion of the various reasons that antebellum Americans wrote for publication: to earn money, to advance ideas like abolitionism or religion, to establish authority, to memorialize the dead, to fulfill the request of an editor, or to help a friend or family member in the publishing business. To demonstrate the intersection of "literary dollars" and "social sense," the Zborays tell the stories of three authors who met with varying degrees of success in the commercial publishing world: Charlotte Forten (a protégée of John Greenleaf Whittier), whose literary career was held back by racism; Lucy Larcom (another Whittier mentee), who achieved modest commercial success; and John Townsend Trowbridge, whose novels drew on his own struggles with Boston publishers. All three case studies illustrate the authors' argument that the ties of family, friendship, and community that motivated writing in the first place also played a major role in determining commercial success—"literary dollars." The Zborays are as interested in the ways reception shaped "social authorship" as in its production, and the remainder of the book explores the interactions of readers and writers. First, they discuss the ways that reading about, hearing about, and seeing authors could turn them, for antebellum Americans, into "virtual friends or lovers" (98). When amateur authors read about professional authors, they did so as "fellow producers and inhabitants of a social world in which writers and readers mingled" (98). Of course, those professional authors wished to sell their work, and the challenge of doing so forms the theme of another chapter. It is here that the tension between "literary dollars" and "social sense" [End Page 792] is perhaps most fully developed. As the Zborays explain, both in bookstores and in more intimate meetings of publishers' agents and potential clients, "the business of buying and selling provided a backdrop for forging and maintaining relationships" (146). However, while "for agents the only good customer was a paying one . . . for...