Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading

By Donna Harrington-Lueker

The publishing phenomenon of summer reading, often focused on novels set in vacation destinations, started in the nineteenth century, as both print culture and tourist culture expanded in the United States. As an emerging middle class increasingly embraced summer leisure as a marker of social status, book publishers sought new market opportunities, authors discovered a growing readership, and more readers indulged in lighter fare.

Drawing on publishing records, book reviews, readers' diaries, and popular novels of the period, Donna Harrington-Lueker explores the beginning of summer reading and the backlash against it. Countering fears about the dangers of leisurely reading—especially for young women—publishers framed summer reading not as a disreputable habit but as a respectable pastime and welcome respite. Books for Idle Hours sheds new light on an ongoing seasonal publishing tradition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781613766316

Book preview

Books for Idle Hours

Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

Edited By

Greg Barnhisel

Robert A. Gross

Joan Shelley Rubin

Michael Winship

Copyright © 2019 by University of Massachusetts Press

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-61376-631-6

Cover design by Kristina Kachele Design, llc

Cover art by William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Idle Hours, ca. 1894, oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 35 1/2 in, No. 18032302. Courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harrington-Lueker, Donna, author.

Title: Books for idle hours : nineteenth-century publishing and the rise of summer reading / Donna Harrington-Lueker.

Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2019] | Series: Studies in print culture and the history of the book | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018019150 (print) | LCCN 2018043654 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613766309 (e-book) | ISBN 9781613766316 (e-book) | ISBN 9781625343826 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781625343833 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Books and reading—United States—History—19th century. | Publishers and publishing—United States—History—19th century. | Leisure—United States—History—19th century. | Tourism—United States—History—19th century. | Summer in literature. | Tourism in literature.

Classification: LCC Z1003.2 (ebook) | LCC Z1003.2 .H367 2019 (print) | DDC 028/.9097309034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019150

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

A portion of the introduction and chapter 2 ( ‘As Welcome and Grateful as the Girls in Muslin’: Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and the Marketing of Summer Reading) originally appeared in Nineteenth Century Studies 26 (2012): 219–44. The author is grateful to the editors of that journal for permission to reprint that material here.

In memory of my parents, Bill and Helen Harrington, who made all things possible

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

On Summer Books and Summer Reading

Chapter 1

Nineteenth-Century Travel, Tourism, and Summer Leisure

Chapter 2

As Welcome and Grateful as the Girls in Muslin: Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and the Marketing of Summer Reading

Chapter 3

Society and Saturnalia: The Cultural Work of the American Summer Novel

Chapter 4

Hurrying . . . Forward for the Summer Trade: William Dean Howells’s Dialogue with the Popular Summer Novel

Chapter 5

This Is Why I Do Not Board: The Role of Place and Space in Victorian Summer Reading

Chapter 6

Chautauqua Assemblies, Summer Schools, and Catholic Reading Circles: The Case for Serious Summer Reading

Epilogue

Changing Times, Persistent Practices

Appendix A

American Summer Novels, 1867–1915

Appendix B

The Summer Novels of William Dean Howells

Notes

Index

Preface

FOR AS LONG as I can remember, summer has been synonymous with reading. As a bookish teenager, I spent hours on a lumpy bunk bed at the lake with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha at hand. As an equally bookish adult, I have schlepped canvas tote bags filled with books to Bar Harbor and Cape Cod, each bag containing a carefully curated mix of titles put aside specifically for that brief summer escape. Grains of sand still fall out of my copy of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, and dabs of sunscreen still mark the pages of many a favorite murder mystery.

When a glossy brochure for The Best Summer Reading caught my attention in an airport bookstore on my way home from a print culture conference in Halifax, I found myself thinking about my own summer reading rituals and about the publishing industry that perhaps shaped and sustained them. That line of questioning sent me back to the nineteenth century, first to magazine advertisements for summer reading and later to letters, diaries, publishing archives, and an array of nineteenth-century popular novels set at summer resorts. This project, Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading, soon dominated my now-not-so-idle summers.

As with any project of this kind, my debts are many. John Quinn read countless versions of countless chapters, offering insight and direction along the way. His interest in the project never wavered, and his close reading of the text improved the manuscript immeasurably. Paula Krebs read, questioned, and advocated for the project over many a working summer; that she read the drafts of some chapters on the beach at Ocean City, New Jersey, is testimony to her work ethic and her friendship.

Margaret Svogun, Suzanne Varisco, and Catherine Zipf read early versions of various chapters, offering cogent critiques and considerable support; Claire Buck provided general good counsel on how to keep a book project on track. Bill Leeman, Tim Neary, and Bill Issel—historians, all—fielded questions about everything from the gold standard to African American summer schools, while David Richards generously pointed me in the direction of the library at the Poland Spring resort in Maine. Three of my former students—Elizabeth Bartek, Mary Van Akin, and Lauren Kane—shared their knowledge of today’s book industry, in which all three now work.

Over the course of my research I also benefited from the expertise of librarians and archivists at the American Antiquarian Society, the Rare Books and Special Collections Room at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, the John Hay Library at Brown University, the Boston Athenaeum, the Houghton and Widener libraries at Harvard University, and the Boston Public Library. Teri Blasko of the Saratoga Room of the Saratoga Springs Public Library reached out to me early in my research and guided me through that library’s collection on nineteenth-century resort life. My deepest thanks, though, go to the librarians, past and present, of the McKillop Library at Salve Regina University, especially Lori Barile, Kiki Butler, Dawn Emsellem, Joe Foley, Susan Hester, Cathy Rowe, and Olga Verbeek. Ingrid Levin has fielded a legion of arcane questions about nineteenth-century culture over the last few years, and Adam Salisbury has acquired a raft of equally arcane interlibrary loan materials for the project.

Thanks to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University for permission to quote from the Charles Scribner Archive. Several libraries and archives also provided illustrations for the book, including the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame, the American Antiquarian Society, the University of Rhode Island, Roger Williams University, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the John Hay Library at Brown University. I offer sincere thanks as well to the staff of the University of Massachusetts Press, which has taken wonderful care of this book. Brian Halley’s interest in the project survived a long period when life happened and research and writing did not; I’m grateful for his patience and professionalism. Rachael DeShano ushered the manuscript through production with care and good humor. The comments from the press’s anonymous readers opened up new avenues in my thinking about summer reading, especially with regard to the pleasures that summer novels might have afforded the unmarried woman reader. My own institution, Salve Regina University, provided me with the sabbatical that launched this project.

Finally, though, my deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Bill Lueker, proofreader, copyeditor, and voice of good reason, who shares my obsession with summer reading and who never asks whether I really need to bring all those books with me for a single week’s vacation.

Abbreviations

The following volumes are abbreviated in the text and notes:

ALL Arlo Bates, A Lad’s Love (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887).

AWWA Annie Ware Winsor Allen Papers, 1818–1979; incomplete summer diary, probably 1883, 1888, or 1894, MC 322, folder 6, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

DB William Dean Howells, Dr. Breen’s Practice (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881).

EP George Parsons Lathrop, An Echo of Passion, Atlantic Monthly, January–April 1882.

GU Growing Up in Boston’s Gilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872–1874, ed. Marlene Deahl Merrill (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

LDMC Letters and Diaries of Margaret Cabot Lee. Extracts Selected by Her Sisters, Marian C. Putnam and Amy. W. Cabot, with a Biographical Sketch by Her Husband Joseph Lee (privately printed, 1923).

LL Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells,2 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1928).

LLH William Dean Howells, The Landlord at Lion’s Head, illus. W. T. Smedley (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897).

OEC William Dean Howells, An Open-Eyed Conspiracy; An Idyl of Saratoga (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897).

PP [Louisa May Alcott], Pauline’s Passion and Punishment, in Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers, ed. Madeleine Stern (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995).

PT William Dean Howells, Private Theatricals, Atlantic Monthly, November 1875–May 1876.

RSL William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1885).

SL W. D. Howells: Selected Letters, ed. George Arms et al., 6 vols. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979–1986).

SS Marietta Holley, Samantha at Saratoga; or, Flirtin’ with Fashion (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1887).

SSP Saul Wright [pseud. of F. T. Wilson], Surf: A Summer Pilgrimage (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1881).

STO Edward Bellamy, Six to One; a Nantucket Idyl (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878).

TFA William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894).

TLB The Tracy Log Book 1855: A Month in Summer, Charles Tracy’s Diary on Mount Desert Island, ed. Anne Mazlish ([Bar Harbor, Maine]: Acadia Publishing Company, 1997).

TOH Testament of Happiness: Letters of Annie Oakes Huntington, ed. Nancy Byrd Turner (Portland, Maine: The Athoensen Press, 1947).

TP Charles Dudley Warner, Their Pilgrimage, Harper’s Monthly, April–November 1886.

TWJ William Dean Howells, Their Wedding Journey, ed. John K. Reeves (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968).

Books for Idle Hours

Introduction

On Summer Books and Summer Reading

WHETHER READ ON hotel verandas or in the shade of a leafy oak tree, novels were among the many temptations facing nineteenth-century vacationers—or so the Reverend T. De Witt Talmage warned at the start of the 1876 summer season. Almost everyone brought them along, the prominent Brooklyn preacher noted, some from libraries, some from railroad bookstalls, and still others from the boys who hawked paperbacks and sundry other items on railroad cars headed for places like Newport, Saratoga, Atlantic City, and Cape May. But whether bought or borrowed, Talmage insisted, such novels spelled danger to his congregation’s immortal souls. Do not let the frogs and the lice of a corrupt printing press jump and crawl into your Saratoga trunk or White Mountain valise, the pastor warned in a sermon reprinted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. "Would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck with lightning some day when you had in your hand one of these paper covered romances, the hero a Parisian roue—the heroine an unprincipled flirt—chapters in the book that you would not read to your children at the rate of a hundred dollars a line? For Talmage, such novels were literary poison, and that poison was readily available in the sweltering months of summer. In his words, I really believe there is more pestiferous trash read among the intelligent classes in July and August than in all the other ten months of the year."¹

Colorfully fierce in his indictment, Talmage was hardly alone in his concern. Throughout the nineteenth century, criticism of the novel in general and cheap paperback fiction in particular made for powerful cultural crosscurrents. As scholars Patrick Brantlinger, Dee Garrison, and others have shown, nineteenth-century critics, clerics, and cultural leaders often equated novel reading with physical and moral debasement.² Indeed, clerical essays on the subject bristle with threats of hellfire and damnation. In Popular Amusements (1870) the prolific Reverend J. T. Crane branded novel reading in general as one of the greatest vices of our age, arguing, among other things, that novels wasted time, injured the intellect, and incited the passions. In The God of This World; The Footprints of Satan (1875), the Reverend Hollis Read echoed Crane, counseling his readers to follow the advice of another prominent cleric and avoid all those miserable sensational . . . novels and illustrated papers which are so profusely scattered around on every side. The demand which exists for such garbage speaks badly for the moral sense and intellectual training of those who read them.³ Women were of particular concern. As Kate Flint shows in her history of the woman reader in Britain, nineteenth-century critics of women’s reading charged that novel reading, especially the reading of sensational fiction, left young women emotionally and sexually overstimulated, exacerbating a predisposition to hysteria and taking a toll on their health and well-being.⁴

But Talmage’s sermon singles out neither popular novels nor sensational fiction but summer reading—and therein lies the focus of this book. Today’s summer reading—those light summer novels stashed into beach bags or splayed open on chaise lounges, those musty paperback potboilers plucked from bookshelves in summer rental cottages on rainy days, those beach reads with covers sporting illustrations of colorfully striped umbrellas and canvas chairs—all have their roots squarely in the nineteenth century, when the rise of travel and tourism presented publishers with a new literary marketplace, cultural watchdogs with new reasons to fear light reading, and readers with newfound sources of pleasure, often packaged in lightweight paper covers.

Today, summer reading is a distinctive part not just of the literary marketplace, but of the summer experience itself. The signs are familiar. Even before Memorial Day, the unofficial start of the summer season, publishers begin touting summer reads that are sexy, hilarious, incandescent, fast-paced, witty, and satisfying, to cite only a few of the adjectives used in book advertisements marking the beginning of a recent summer season. In bookstores, page-turners and thrillers jockey for space on display tables alongside novels set at summer resorts and an assortment of backlist fiction and current bestsellers, all promoted as the best summer reads. By mid-June, novels from the reigning queens of summer reading—authors such as Elin Hilderbrand, Dorothea Benton Frank, Jane Green, Mary Kay Andrews, and others who use summer resorts as settings for their fiction—make their way onto the bestseller list and into the beach bags of their large and loyal female fan base. Throughout the summer, too, a steady succession of lists appear, offering guidance on what to read in the hot summer months ahead. O Magazine’s Our Biggest, Best Summer Reading List Ever, National Public Radio’s Cool Reads for Hot Days, the annual Summer Reading issue in the Sunday New York Times Book Review—these and other summer reading lists are more than signs of the arrival of a new season. Like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, they are part of a vast apparatus that shapes public taste, promotes new books, and, in an era still conflicted about leisure, works to position summer reading as a respectable indulgence and a welcome release.

Name nearly any of today’s summer reading practices—indulging in escapist beach-blanket reading, leaving a paperback potboiler behind at the hotel or cottage for the next visitor to read, vowing to tackle that weighty literary classic that has been on your bookshelf for years—and you can find these practices taking shape in the nineteenth century, when Americans flocked to railroad cars and steamboat lines to engage in the newfound practice of summer leisure and found a selection of light reading waiting for them at the depot and the dockside, the gift shop and the dry-goods store, even in the resort library.

The Making of a National Pastime

This book traces the cultural and commercial genesis of today’s summer reading in nineteenth-century print culture. It argues that between 1865 and the early 1900s, in the face of a dramatic rise in domestic travel and tourism, U.S. publishing houses sought ways to redefine the otherwise slow summer publishing season not simply with travel articles and guidebooks but also with light leisure-time reading that included a mix of escapist sensational fiction, risqué French novels, backlist titles of steady-sellers from established authors, and a new offering—the novel set specifically at the summer resort.

Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in fact, the concept of summer reading in general and the summer novel in particular emerges as both a sharply debated cultural practice and a widely used marketing strategy. Faced with fears about the psychological and moral dangers of mass-market fiction on the one hand and a burgeoning market for print products on the other, the period’s publishers and the press—daily newspapers, monthly magazines, and trade publications alike—increasingly began to frame summer reading not as a disreputable indulgence but as a respite from the increasing pressures and complexities of Victorian life. Indeed, asserting their role as cultural mediators and tastemakers, these publications positioned summer reading as a respectable pastime, especially among an emerging American middle class, and in doing so, they ushered in a unique and little-discussed episode in the histories of both the paperback book and summer leisure in America.

Evidence of the effort to capitalize on a summer marketplace appears across the period’s literary landscape. After the success of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-Bound in 1866—a volume that brought the poet national fame and a ready market for his work—Whittier’s publisher, James T. Fields, urged the poet to produce another volume quickly. Several months later, Whittier complied with The Tent on the Beach (1867), a poetic account of a tenting vacation that the poet had taken several years earlier with Fields and the poet Bayard Taylor. There, in the quiet of a seashore summer before the area acquired the trappings of a popular resort, the three men enjoyed a respite from the summer’s heat and basked in nature’s healing powers:

They rested there, escaped awhile

From cares that wear the life away,

To eat the lotus of the Nile

And drink the poppies of Cathay,—

To fling their loads of custom down,

Like drift-weed, on the sand-slopes brown,

And in the sea waves drown the restless pack

Of duties, claims, and needs that barked upon their track.⁵

Most of the poems in the volume had already appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the Independent, the prominent religious weekly. But with the addition of the narrative frame involving the summer camping trip, the volume’s marketing angle was obvious, at least to the poet. The poem ought to be out by the 1st of June, Whittier advised Fields in early January 1867, a week after submitting the long-delayed manuscript. It is a sea side idyll and is wanted then, if ever.⁶ It was also an immensely popular seaside idyll that sold twenty thousand copies in its first three months of publication and was credited with fueling the popularity of summer tenting vacations on beaches in the region.⁷

Publishers of the literary monthlies likewise began to experiment with the market potential of the summer season. In addition to poetry and reviews devoted to summer reading, the Atlantic, Harper’s Monthly, the Century, and others routinely published short stories set at summer resorts. Caleb’s Lark, for example, which appeared in the Atlantic in December 1868, recounts a wife’s efforts to restore her husband’s health by bringing him to Bar Harbor, and The Colonel’s Last Campaign, which ran in the Century in August 1892, tells of a father’s attempts to find suitable husbands for his two daughters at the popular Maine resort.⁸ Other resorts served as settings for summer fiction as well. In 1863, Harper’s Monthly ran Elizabeth Stoddard’s "Lemorne Versus Huell, the story of an impoverished young woman who visits the Newport summer colony with her wealthy aunt, and in 1877 the monthly featured Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Raspberry Island," a story in which two young women, unable to afford a summer vacation of their own, escape the city by contracting to pick raspberries on a lakeside island.⁹ In May 1887 Harper’s Monthly looked to the West—another site of tourism, travel, and leisure—with Alice Wellington Rollins’s The Three Tetons, which recounts a visit to Yellowstone National Park, and in August 1893 the San Francisco–based Overland Monthly published California writer Mary Willis Glascock’s Under the Pines. Set in a fishing camp on the Sacramento River, Glascock’s story opens on a decidedly self-conscious literary note: Mary Fenton was turning over the leaves of the latest summer novel in a listless fashion, as she sat on ‘The Tavern’ porch. The glory of an early June day was about her.¹⁰ The more politically minded Kate Field’s Washington likewise looked beyond the resorts of New England and the Northeast with Grace Ellery Channing’s short story A Tale of a Glacier, published in the newspaper’s July 1, 1891, issue. Rest, rest and solitude are what I crave, the story’s first-person narrator recounts as she leaves Port Townsend, Washington, for Alaska’s Muir Glacier. Surely if they are to be found anywhere on earth, it must be in Alaska in August. Tellingly, though, even a journey to Alaska required the proper reading material. As the narrator explains, she had carefully chosen her traveling dress and wraps, her picturesque hat and soft veil, for the trip. Chosen carefully as well was her copy of the poetry of Robert Browning to whom she was devoted; that copy hung in a bag at her waist—a companion on her summer travels.¹¹

The period’s popular serial fiction capitalized on the summer market as well. With its description of a bridal trip to Niagara Falls and beyond, William Dean Howells’s first novel, Their Wedding Journey (1872), began its run in the Atlantic in July 1871—the summer high holiday. Later in his career, the author’s dark masterpiece of literary naturalism, The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897), set in large part in a mountain boardinghouse and summer hotel, made a similar debut: its first installment appeared in Harper’s Weekly for July 4, 1896, and subsequent chapters ran throughout the summer alongside articles that reported on summer activities at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and other resorts.¹² Woolson’s first novel, Anne (1882), set on Mackinac Island in the period before the area became a fashionable resort, began its run in the December 1880 issue of Harper’s Monthly, with its opening chapters taking place at Christmastime.¹³ In the May installments of the novel, though, the setting shifts to Caryl’s, a rustic summer retreat for members of New York’s Knickerbocker society, and there the action stays until the September issue—the month when summer travelers and tourists typically returned home.

By the 1880s and 1890s, too, some of the period’s most popular authors had begun to feature summer settings in their novels. Laura Jean Libbey, the prolific and wildly successful author of paper-covered working-girl fiction, used summer settings for at least three of the novels she wrote for the cheap paperback publisher Norman Munro. The Flirtations of a Beauty; or, A Summer’s Romance at Newport (1890) opens in Newport during the summer season before the action moves to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where Libbey’s heroine—in the author’s typically frenetic approach to plot—is kidnapped by pirates and transported down the Connecticut River. Lyndall’s Temptation; or, Blinded by Love: A Story of Fashionable Life at Lenox (1892) takes place in part in the wealthy summer community of Lenox, Massachusetts, and a third novel, Only a Mechanic’s Daughter: A Charming Story of Love and Passion (1892), is set primarily in the fashionable world of the resort at Long Branch, New Jersey. At the other end of the literary spectrum, Howells—considered the dean of American letters by the 1890s—used resort settings throughout his career, from his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, to the posthumously published The Vacation of the Kelwyns (1920). Even Stephen Crane tried his hand at a novel with a summer setting. Pressed by his publisher for a follow-on work to The Red Badge of Courage—the novel that had made him an international literary celebrity—Crane turned his attentions to The Third Violet (1897), in which a financially struggling artist falls in love with a young New York socialite whom he meets at a summer hotel.¹⁴

Novelists whose names are unfamiliar to today’s readers but well known in the nineteenth century likewise exploited summer settings. The popular society novelist Constance Cary (Mrs. Burton) Harrison used the Mount Desert summer colony in Maine as the setting for her novel Bar Harbor Days (1887); the Hale siblings, Edward Everett and Lucretia Hale, explored Boston in the summertime in The New Harry and Lucy (1891); Brander Matthews set his novella The Royal Marine (1894) at Narragansett Pier in Rhode Island; and the prolific Edgar Fawcett set Tinkling Cymbals (1884) in Newport.

Blanche Willis Howard’s One Summer

To be sure, many summer novels had publishing lives as short as the season they celebrated. Some, though, captured the marketplace for decades. A longtime summer literary success—even a sensation—Blanche Willis Howard’s first novel, One Summer (1875), is a case in point. Set in a summer community along the Maine coast, Howard’s novel tells the story of the summer courtship of the spirited and independent Laura Leigh Doane and the patient (and much put-upon) Philip Ogden, the young man Laura coldly receives after an embarrassing misunderstanding when they first meet. Whenever the two encounter each other—at the fort where Laura sketches and reads, at a picnic on the shoreline, at the bedside of a sick boy they both have befriended—Ogden tries to make amends for his blunder and Laura coolly rebuffs him. To err is feminine, to forgive impossible, the young man ruefully laments, a perfect Shakespearian Benedict to Laura’s vivacious Beatrice. At the story’s end, though, after Laura spurns the young man’s attention and the couple part, the two young people meet again in Bar Harbor, where Laura at last admits her love for him and the two become engaged.¹⁵

Amiable and spirited, Howard’s novel met with both immediate success and long-standing favor. First published by James R. Osgood in 1875 as part of its Saunterer’s Series for summer reading, Howard’s

Reviews for Books for Idle Hours

[chris.wolak · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating read about reading in the 19th century.