DIME NOVELS

DIME NOVELS, inexpensive, sensational fiction published roughly from 1840 to 1900, began as fiction supplements to newspapers, such as Park Benjamin's New World, that could distribute fiction cheaply under the post office's low newspaper rate. Selling for twelve and one-half cents, Benjamin's "shilling novelettes" declined soon after the post office began to apply the higher book rates to fiction supplements in 1843. In 1845 reduced "book rates" revived cheap fiction, which later claimed national as well as local audiences through the distributor American News Company (1864). The most successful publishers of inexpensive literature, Beadle and Adams, released weekly Beadle's Dime Novels beginning in 1860. Competitors included Thomas and Talbot's Ten Cent Novelettes (1863), George Munro's Ten Cent Novels (1864), and Robert DeWitt's Ten Cent Romances (1867). However, dime novels declined in the 1890s due to the panic of 1893; the development of slick, inexpensive magazines; and the copyright agreement of 1891, which curtailed pirating of European fiction. By 1900 the journal Bookman could proclaim confidently "the extinction of the dime novel."

Although widely remembered as male-oriented, frontier adventure tales, dime novels also included detective stories, thrilling accounts of urban life, and romances aimed at a female audience. Their authors—often newspaper journalists—worked swiftly under tight deadlines and creative limitations. Sometimes multiple authors used the same well-known pseudonym or popular character, both of which remained the intellectual property of the publisher. Nevertheless, publishers did pirate many stories from British papers, and authors themselves frequently derived their plots from current theater productions and news stories.

Young working men and women—both Yankee and ethnic—composed the bulk of dime-novel readership, and publishers aimed such series as Ten-Cent Irish Novels and Die Deutsche Library directly at ethnic audiences. Nationwide circulation and popular appeal mark the dime-novel market as a precursor of late-twentieth-century mass culture. Although condemned and even restricted in their day as "immoral" influences on impressionable youth, by the beginning of the twenty-first century dime novels were remembered nostalgically as wholesome and innocent entertainment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. New York: Verso, 1987.

Rae SikulaBielakowski

See alsoLiterature: Popular .

dime novels swift-moving, thrilling novels, mainly about the American Revolution, the frontier period, and the Civil War. The books were first sold in 1860 for 10 cents by the firm of Beadle and Adams. The earliest was Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860), by Anne Stephens, which is said to have sold 300,000 copies in the first year; similar novels sold by the thousands throughout the country and especially in the Civil War camps. Such men as Bruin Adams, Col. Mayne Reid, Col. Prentiss Ingraham, W. F. Cody, and Ned Buntline wrote of their own adventures. Among the most famous series were those about Deadwood Dick, by Edward L. Wheeler, and those about Nick Carter . After 1880, imitators entered the field with lurid stories that dealt in blood and thunder. Their popularity lasted until the 1890s, when they began to be replaced by pulp magazines, comic strips, and series of stories such as those about the Rover Boys and Frank Merriwell.

Bibliography: See E. Pearson, Dime Novels (1929); A. Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels (3 vol., 1962).

Dime Novel, popular name for cheap thrilling tales of history, romance, warfare, or any violent action, many of which were set in America during the Revolution, Civil War, or frontier period. They attained an immense popularity in the U.S. from the publication of Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter in 1860 by Ann Sophia Stephens to about 1895, at which time they began to be superseded by pulp magazines and such series as those concerning Frank Merriwell, the Rover Boys, and Tom Swift. Many of the novels, whose major publisher was Beadle and Adams of New York, cost only five cents. Although the development of plot closely followed conventional moral patterns, stern critics mistakenly called dime novels immoral. They probably fostered a nationalistic attitude, emphasizing as they did the democratic vigor and individualism of the American people. Among the most famous authors were E.Z.C. Judson, Prentiss Ingraham, Edward L. Wheeler, who created “Deadwood Dick,” and J.R. Coryell, who created “Nick Carter.”