Spreading the Word: The American Tract Society, The Dairyman's Daughter , and Mass Publishing

Abstract

Spreading the Word:The American Tract Society, The Dairyman's Daughter, and Mass Publishing* Cynthia S. Hamilton (bio) Legh Richmond (1772-1827) is not generally recognized today as an influential author, but he penned a widely read tract, The Dairyman's Daughter (1810-1811). This text achieved the status of a popular classic, moved countless readers toward religious conversion, and provided a model of effective narrative strategies for those seeking to reach a wide audience. Given its impact, Richmond's tract deserves greater attention than it has yet received. Certainly the narrative dynamics, as written by Richmond and edited by the American Tract Society (ATS), invite a detailed examination of the text in relation to the evangelical aim of reaching and converting a mass audience. More intriguingly, The Dairyman's Daughter provides a case study of attempts by the ATS to secure a mass readership for the tract, and to ensure a "correct" reading by its audience. The latter ambition foundered on the nature of the reader's involvement with the text. The novelistic character of the stylistic devices employed brought popularity, but prompted questions about the factual integrity of the tract as memoir. The ATS then directed attention beyond the text, toward the exemplary character of the tract's author, and toward artifacts that underwrote the text's factual status. This strategy merely exacerbated the "misuse" of the tract, for although it helped to authenticate the material, it pulled the reader away from what the ATS saw as a proper reading—to stimulate self-examination and spiritual growth. Instead, the text became a means of experiencing emotional excitement and sentimental gratification. The attention that was directed at the possessions of the dairyman's daughter (Elizabeth Wallbridge) and toward [End Page 25] the places of pilgrimage associated with her life threatened the very religious message that gave these places and possessions meaning. More worryingly for the ATS, the objects and locations threatened to become subjects of idolatry in themselves.1 Interestingly, the ATS directed its criticism toward those who refused to read the text correctly, rather than at the way the text was edited and abridged for popular consumption. This failure of insight is particularly striking given the ATS's sophisticated understanding of the requirements of mass publishing. This essay examines the dynamics that enabled the subversive readings that so disturbed the tract's defenders. It does so in relation to theories of the "New Rhetoric" then current, which, by setting out guidelines for balancing claims based on reason, sentiment, and authority, might have enabled a diagnosis of the sources and effects of imbalance even at that time. An Effective and Popular Tract The Dairyman's Daughter is arguably one of the most popular and influential—and neglected—works of the first half of the nineteenth century. Richmond's tract was abridged, stereotyped, and distributed in vast quantities by the ATS, both at home and—in translation—abroad. Zion's Herald claimed, in an 1836 article, that by 1828 four million copies of the tract were in circulation around the world.2 Samuel Whiting, an Englishman touring the United States in 1820, was astonished and gratified to find a worn copy in a log cabin in the Alabama wilderness.3 In 1836, the New England Institution for the Education of the Blind was paid to produce an edition with raised letters.4 By the end of the nineteenth century, it was said to have been published in over fifty languages, with many millions of copies sold.5 An article written for the New York Evangelist in 1901 called it the most popular tract in the English language during the first half of the nineteenth century.6 In addition to being distributed by tract societies, it was sold commercially. In 1823, an advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post suggested it as a suitable Christmas present for juveniles, characterizing it as "an authentic and interesting narrative."7 Nearly a quarter of a century later, D. Appleton released a new, and much touted, edition of The Dairyman's Daughter: An Authentic Narrative, just in time for the Christmas market in 1856, calling it "the most charming, instructive, and popular work of its kind...