"Promoting an Extensive Sale": The Production and Reception of The Lamplighter

Abstract

M ARIA Susanna Cummins's novel The Lamplighter (1854) is best remembered today as occasion for Nathaniel Hawthorne's infamous diatribe against women writers. America is now wholly given over to a dd mob of scribbling Hawthorne wrote to his publisher William D. Ticknor in 1855. What is of these editions of The Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse?' Several weeks later Hawthorne modified his position somewhat when he praised Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, but his original comment has been taken as a shorthand description of polarization between popular best sellers and highbrow literature originating in antebellum American literary market. Recent studies of this market have gone far in answering Hawthorne's question about mystery of these innumerable editions. The Lamplighter was a best seller, studies tell us, because it articulated so fully values of feminine selfsacrifice and maternal power inherent in middle-class domesticity. This cult of domesticity sanctioned reading, especially for women, as a productive way to fill one's leisure time: to read a female Bildungsroman such as The Lamplighter was to participate in an activity that combined entertainment with inculcation of virtue. For this reason, as Nina Baym puts it, the mysterious secret of those 'innumerable editions of The Lamp-