As a boy, Erastus Beadle worked on a farm, and as apprentice to a
miller. It was while he was a miller’s apprentice that he laid the
foundation of his future career as a printer. Need arose in the
mill one day for some letters to be used in labeling the bags of
grain. Erastus cut the letters from blocks of hardwood, just as the
old block-letters had been made in the days before Gutenberg. He then
left the mill, and, with an alphabet of his home-made wooden type, he
traveled about the region stamping bags in various mills and similarly
marking lap robes, wagons, and other things. On reaching Cooperstown
he came to the attention of Elihu Phinney, the pioneer printer of that
town, who offered him work. In Phinney’s establishment Erastus learned
to be a type-setter, stereotyper, printer, and binder, and with these
abilities as his only capital he moved to the village of Buffalo in
1847. By 1852 he had a printing shop of his own, and in that year he
issued his first publication, entitled “The Youth’s Casket.” In 1856 he
began to issue the excellent magazine called “The Home Monthly” (shown
in the exhibition), and two years later he removed to New York City to
test his great idea.
This plan was to issue “Dime” publications, and possibly had its
immediate origin in the unusual success in Buffalo, of a “Dime Song
Book” in which he had assembled a number of the penny lyrics of the
period. These had been earlier issued in separate broadsides, by
various publishers.
The New York 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
still present.
* * * * *
In the exhibition are shown about sixty-eight different examples of
the famous “original yellow back” Dime Novels, which began to appear
in 1860. No less than seventeen of the first twenty-five titles
constituting this series are embraced in the collection. Number 8 is a
first edition copy of Edward Ellis’ celebrated “Seth Jones,” a story of
the New York Wilderness in 1785. More than 450,000 copies of this book
had been sold in America before 1865, and it had been translated into
seven foreign languages. Number 9, “The Slave Sculptor,” illustrates
the little known bibliographical fact that Beadle and Company issued
English editions of many of these books from 44 Paternoster Row,
London. The English editions were printed from the American stereotype
plates, with specially prepared title-pages. It was during the issuance
of the first few titles of the original Dime Novels that various
experiments were made by the publishers in the form and color of these
books. Numbers 10, 11 and 12 illustrate such changes. But the
appearance adopted in Number 11 was finally chosen, and thenceforth was
adhered to during the printing of over 300 books in the yellow-back
series. Among other titles included in this type is a copy of Mrs.
Victor’s “Maum Guinea,” which was preferred by President Lincoln,
as a portrayal of slavery, over Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Still other celebrated issues among the yellow-backs shown are Ellis’
“Riflemen of the Miami,” Frances Barritt’s “The Land Claim,” and Ann
Stephen’s “Story of the Oregon Trail.”
[Illustration: COVER IN THREE COLORS