First, it's important to note that they should correctly be called "dime," not "dimestore" (as some fans do). The dime store (or five-and-ten) was the invention of F. W. Woolworth, who opened the first one in February, 1879. But the dime novel (which was never to be found in the stock of a "respectable" store like Woolworth's) had a long history reaching back well over a generation before that.

In a very real sense, the dime novel was the direct ancestor of today's popular genre paperback--the mystery, suspense, horror, science fiction, fantasy, romance, Western, or "men's adventure" (the Mack Bolan series, Richard Marcinko, the original Indiana Jones tales) novels which some readers feel compelled to apologize for reading, and to which many critics and teachers continue to give short shrift, although technically and otherwise they're likely to be the equal of anything "mainstream," and not a few address large themes. What critics totally ignore is that many of these books don't get published in "legitimate" hardcover (except for Book Club editions, often specialized clubs like the SFBC), and that they fill a niche and a need--just as the dime novel did.

The dimer as such had its heyday from about 1860 to 1915, but its real roots were in the late 1830's to early '40's, when technological advances in printing allowed the rapid and inexpensive dissemination of book matter for the first time. It was also at this point that immigration, temporarily stalled by the War of 1812 and its aftermath, swelled toward a flood tide, bringing to the US many people illiterate in the English language, who required simple, fast-moving reading matter.

[In the 1840's] Publishing had finished its striking change from a scattering of small local printing shops to a centralized industry with distribution facilities that covered the nation; it was concentrated mainly in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, with Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Charleston having a certain importance as well. It was possible to obtain books inexpensively, as such publishers as Harper's--the pace-setter whom others were quick to imitate--offered series of uniformly bound and cheaply priced volumes under such imprints as Harper's District School Library, Harper's Boys' and Girls' Library, Harper's Family Library (which ran up to 187 volumes), and Harper's Library of Select Novels (which eventually reached 615). The latter, inaugurated in 1842, was a line of paperbacks priced at twenty-five cents. The first twelve numbers took a loss, but it was a milestone in publishing nevertheless: quality books in cheap editions. Publishers catered to the more serious intellectual aspirations of a public untrained in foreign languages by bringing out an impressive range of translations of the writings of European philosophers, publicists, and men of letters. On a more popular level, cheaply priced books of useful information, travel, history, biography, and religion appeared. Encyclopedias and popular "books of knowledge," ponderous or of pocket size, enjoyed an ever-growing vogue.

In the previous decade three penny dailies, papers readable by the common people, had come into being in New York: the Sun, the Morning Herald, and the Evening Transcript. The former two found that to maintain their circulation in this Age of Barnum, it was necessary to feed their readers exciting stories of sex scandals, horse races, prizefights, murder, disaster, and depravity in general, together with crime reports (chiefly drunken brawls), theatrical and society news, the first Wall Street column, pictorial and telegraphic news, and what became known as "human interest" stories--tales, often poignant, of typical, unknown city dwellers like themselves…

Halfway between the newspaper and the magazine stood the "mammoth weekly," like Brother Jonathan and the New World, which contained whole novels, mostly English reprints, and sold for as little as twelve and a half cents a copy. These and the large quarto supplements to several newspapers were providing stiff competition for book publishers, if not particularly durable. In the following decade they would become the "story weekly," much smaller and better edited than its parent, though it still thrived on the public appetite for sentimental fiction. Boston's Universal Yankee Notion ultimately grew to "Double Double" size--sixteen pages of ten columns each. Also from Boston came Uncle Sam, whose contents were headed by the fiction of Joseph Holt Ingraham--Ingraham of the bloody story, the racy romance, and the insinuating situation, whose novels had a great sale during the decade beginning in 1838. By decade's end such papers were faced by competition from a rejuvenated Saturday Evening Post under the editorship of Henry Peterson. At the same time the story paper known as the New York Mercury, established in 1838 and destined to continue till 1870, contained many novels written by Dr. J.H. Robinson and "Ned Buntline," later prolific writers of dime novels.

Among the story papers were Street & Smith's New York Weekly and Frank Leslie's Stars and Stripes, but perhaps the monarch of them all was Robert Bonner's New York Ledger, formerly the Merchant's Ledger, a market sheet devoted to the dry-goods trade which he had acquired at a ridiculously low price. He changed the title, dropped the news, and admitted fiction. The greater reading public, his diligent research had shown him, was the middle-class element with homes and growing families--not the "highbrows" enamored of the Atlantic Monthly and Putnam's Magazine type of literature, but people who insisted on clean, moral reading, as long as it was interesting and thrilling and sweetened with sentimentalism eight lumps to the cup. Even church members would read fiction--including melodrama and Arabian Nights sensationalism--if they were assured that it had been rigidly deloused and pronounced strictly moral. Moreover, the American people dearly loved lions, royalty if possible, and if imported nobility was not to be had, current great popularities (the "celebrities" of a later age) would do--men and women in the newspaper headlines, great authors, preachers, statesmen. Bonner set out to provide them.-

His first exhibit was Mrs. Sigourney, "the literary lioness of America." She was to be, at a breathtaking price widely advertised, a regular contributor. Who would not read everything in a journal contributed to by Mrs. Sigourney, and let the children read it? Next came Fanny Fern, then Edward Everett's series of "The Mount Vernon Papers" (at a cost of $10,000, which Everett was to turn over to the Mount Vernon subscription fund), Bancroft, Bryant, Dickens, Alice Cary, Mrs. Stowe, Halleck, and others. Once he ran a series of papers by twelve college presidents, another time by twelve leading clergymen. He induced Greeley, Raymond, and Bennett, the ruling editors of New York newspaperdom, to write articles for him, advertised the fact with superlatives, and published all three in one issue. He paid Henry Ward Beecher $20,000 for the right to serialize his novel Norwood, and met the aghast reaction of the religious journals with glee: the more furious their attacks, the better the advertising for him. (And alongside it he printed Horace Greeley's autobiography in installments, Mrs. Southworth's romance The Hidden Hand, Leon Lewis's thrilling Kit Carson's Last Trail, Fanny Fern, and Sylvanus Cobb's effusions.) His paper, which appeared every Monday, soon boasted the remarkable circulation of half a million copies, at a subscription price of only three dollars a year. It admitted no advertising, yet it made Bonner a millionaire.

The Ledger never stooped to the sale of filth or traded in character assassination; its only objective was to entertain. It was a literary miscellany, a hodgepodge of fiction, fact, essay, comment, and verse designed to give some weekly spice to the lives of those laboring at dull, humdrum jobs--and it was found not only in the kitchens of the big brownstone houses springing up all over the city, but also in the drawing rooms of stately Fifth Avenue mansions. By the 1850's it had assumed its place as the most popular of the type, packed with serials and short stories, moral tales and syrupy ficton, homilies and inspirational doggerel, and the brisk, clever little essays and sketches of Fanny Fern. Bonner claimed a million readers (and since fairly reliable reports gave his circulation as 400,000 in 1860, he may have been right), and he gave them everything: poems by the top names of the day--Longfellow, Bryant, the Cary sisters; exclusive stories by Dickens; serials by Sylvanus Cobb, Fanny Fern, Mrs. Stowe, and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth; Henry Ward Beecher's Norwood in parts; a chess column by Paul Morphy, the world's champion player of the game; spiritual advice from ministers and hints on dress from fashion experts.

Perhaps the central magnet of the paper was Sylvanus Cobb, whose writing was, as his wife declared in her biography of him, "sensational in the best sense of the word, but never sensual." He blended with uncanny skill plot, mystery, sensationalism, sentimentality, romance with foreign background, and storytelling power that held the reader to the end of the tale. He turned out stories in a vast variety of settings: now a Gypsy story, now a story of the American Revolution, now a tale laid in the Apennines, now a religious tale of Roman days to key with some religious movement of the times. Each appeared in installments of approximately three chapters' length, each of which ended with an intense moment--what a later generation would call "a cliffhanger." "To be continued in our next." (Some of them were published under his own name, others under that of "Col. Walter Dunlap, author of Lorinda the Princess; or, The Sultan's Diadem.") He was--and Bonner made sure his readers knew it--a prominent churchman, a leading Mason, a patriot, at the head of many reform movements such as temperance. In his romances vice was always punished and virtue amply rewarded. The most religious and prudish of readers could plunge into the most melodramatic of his fictions--they bore such titles as The Gunmaker of Moscow, Karmel the Scout, The Mystic Bride, The Scourge of Sefton Dale, The Wild Knight, Orion the Goldbeater, The Smuggler of King's Cave, The Painter of Parma, The Brigands of Como, The Scourge of Damascus, and Alaric, or the Tyrant's Vault--and feel no twinge at all of conscience, for surely tales so pronouncedly moral, so uniform in their punishments of villains and vice, could do even young people no harm. And they were "grabbers." Even the intellectual Emerson admitted that "when once I had begun [one of them] I could not leave it unfinished."

…Pious folk distrusted the novel, but it had no real rival. For reading the American family wanted a book in which it could be absorbed for some time, one to hold it together as a harmonious intellectual unit for evenings on end after early supper. To be successful it had to stay within the imaginative bounds of the family, avoiding any subject or language which might be improper for the growing child to hear or Mother to read aloud. Fiction had the great advantage of neither flying off into the misty idealized world of poetry nor being hobbled to the dull reality of texts, and was therefore most satisfactory for this purpose. Women looked upon it as a medium for bringing culture to the family, a culture very nearly synonymous with morality: though the scene might be fanciful, the language speciously unnatural, the emotion heightened, still the novel that was liked was the one that was "improving," or at least moral. If it taught a lesson, for example that an honest man or woman will rise in station; if it brought one a greater appreciation of God's handiwork--nature; or if it somehow imbued one with the desire to live a purer, more purposeful life, it was particularly suitable to reading aloud in the family circle. And the novelists, responding, created a new kind of novel to fit the perceived need. Because women were the rulers of the home and home was where the novel was read, fiction came more and more to concern itself with women and their special world. It excluded business (husbands daily disappeared from fiction to enter some remote, uncharted world where they earned money), neglected politics (civic affairs and the structure of a democracy were seemingly impolite parlor topics), was ignorant of social movements (incoming immigrants and westward-moving pioneers were merely quaint characters used for contrast with the "normal" middle class), and viewed ethical or theological problems in only the simplest Sunday-school terms. It was in mid-century that women, first as readers and then as writers, took over the novel, bringing to it a simple subject matter that was essentially the life of the home, the way of the household. A severe structure or a complex plot was too much for most of these writers; instead, from the episodes of family life they spun stories with one or two simple themes--the womanly concepts that submission to God's will brings its own happiness or that virtuous deportment creates a happy home and a better social status. So pleasantly conservative a clergyman as W.B.O. Peabody acknowledged complaisantly in 1843 that novel-reading was "now the most common recreation in civilized lands," though some were shocked and worried over the situation.

For all that, fiction was not wholly the provenance of either females or American females. When critics spoke of fiction-reading in America they were referring mainly to the reading of novels produced abroad, for the greater part of the novels turned out by American presses were English, French, German, and--in the case of Frederika Bremer--Swedish. Two of the decade's three most popular novelists --Scott and Dickens--were British; their books, like all British novels, were long, but both wrote with such verve that the public wished for more chapters instead of fewer, and Scott especially profited from the fact that his works were historical (many people asserted that it was profitable to read about the past, even if the form was fictive) and that there was an enormous vogue for travel books, especially those with touches of sensationalism in them. Other popular foreign writers included Bulwer, Captain Marryat, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Moberly, Miss Pardoe, Paul deKock, and G.P.R. James. Because serial publication of their work was too slow, it quickly passed from the periodicals to the book houses: anxious to put prospective "best sellers" on the market as quickly as possible, publishers had their messengers waiting to meet the incoming European steam packets to board them before they were docked and receive the latest copies of the new English novels, then would rush them into type by working large forces of typesetters night and day. As early as 1822 the Harper Brothers had turned out a pirate volume of one of Walter Scott's novels (then not known to be his) in twenty-one hours. They would have their meals brought to them in their shop, and even sleep on the floor of the composing-room, in order to hasten the issue of a volume newly received from England and be first in the bookshops with it; within a single day they set up, printed, and bound in paper covers the most recent novel of Dickens, Thackeray, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Captain Frederick Marryat, Bulwer-Lytton, or any other popular British writer, who were as yet unprotected by international copyright, and within twenty-four hours would have them on the streets, damp from the presses, being cried by the newsboys: "Extry! Dickens' new novel! Only ten cents a copy!" (or perhaps a half-quarter), and everyone made a profit. And the purchaser of those eighty closely-printed quarto pages would forget the injury to his eyes in the saving to his pocketbook. New York was the leading center of the practise, but cities such as Boston and Philadelphia had "mammoth" omnibus papers that printed the same type of material. (The British had no brief for complaint, however: they pirated American authors as assiduously as Americans pirated theirs; indeed they were, on the whole, by far the worse offenders of the lack of copyright, often garbling American books and ignoring authorship. To take but one example, when Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in 1852, seventeen English publishers would hurry fully a million cheap copies of it into print without paying Mrs. Stowe a farthing; so what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.) Thanks to new promotional methods, these inexpensive books quickly became available to travellers on canals and railroads and to dwellers in remote byways. Far more profitable even than them was the sensational adventure story, precursor of the dime novels of a future day, frankly designed to appeal to the masses by exciting democratic prejudices, patriotic fervor, and sex interest sugar-coated by highly moral sentiments.

The great mass of American readers--most of them women--were much more interested in feeling than in thought. Even urban ones, with their infinitude of social contacts, knew maladjustments and discontent; while as for those on lonely borders or isolated farms, with telephone, radio, automobile, and rural postal delivery undreamed of, they were notably susceptible to melancholy and heartaches. They cried over novels like The Wide, Wide World because the stories renewed their own experiences of vanished dreams and personal loss. Tears gave relief to their lonely souls. It was said that women seemed to want to cry; that they unfolded a clean handkerchief when they opened a book... the imitators of Mrs. Radcliffe, who vulgarized her favorite "properties" of rambling and ruinous old castles, dark, desperate, and cadaverous villains, secret passages, vaults, trap doors, evidences of deeds of monstrous crimes, and sights and sounds of mysterious horror…Dickens was followed in part because of the strangeness of his material. He seemed to be presenting scenes and characters drawn from actuality, even though no eye had ever seen just such a background and just such characters. He had humor, too, and sympathy with the poor, and feeling (that ever-important criterion in the '50's), and he saw always what had never been noted before...

The '50's were ruled from end to end by feeling rather than thinking. The decade had opened with melodrama: the California gold rush; the horrific newspaper accounts of the murder done by the Harvard professor, Dr. Webster, who had carved up his victim and burned the pieces in the college furnace; the story of the shipwreck on Fire Island where Margaret Fuller, her husband Count Ossoli, and their infant son had perished. The laying of the Atlantic cable and its breaking again and still again in mid-ocean, then its completion with a national celebration, its use for a week or more, then a final break that silenced it for a decade; the completion of the Panama railroad in 1855, and in the same year the return of the rescue party from the Arctic regions with the lost Dr. Kane and all but three of his entire party; these were less shuddersome, but no less emotional…This was the era of Fitz-James O'Brien's tales, abounding in whimsical "wondersmiths," mesmerists, hunchbacks, fortune-tellers and alchemists living in shabby tenement-houses...

On December 15, 1855, there appeared the first number of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, which, with its graphic cuts--including huge double-page engravings--of murders, assassinations, prizefights and fires, was to dominate the field of illustrated journalism for nearly seventy-five years to come…

...the New York Weekly, which took that name as of March, 1858, having been known previously as the New York Weekly Dispatch. Its editors, the two "Francis S."'s, Street and Smith, offered to send it by mail for two dollars a year in advance, though they said they preferred not to do this unless there was "no other means of getting it"--by which they meant a "responsible News Agent," who ordinarily charged four cents a copy, more if his freight or postage was high. They survived the Panic because they knew what the masses wanted to read and gave it to them. Girls pursued (but never quite caught) by villains, poor boys who managed to overcome all obstacles to achieve wealth, the saccharine pathos of Fanny Fern, serials such as Edward Minturn's "Pearl of the Reef, or The Diver's Daughter" and Dr. J. H. Robinson's "One-Eyed Saul, or The Tory League of Seven," ghost stories, verses, gossip, "A Visit to the Trenton State Prison," articles headed "Evenings With a Retired Physician" and bearing such titles as "The Opium Eater," "The Victim of Mania-a-Poyu," "The Guillotine," "A Death and a Burial," "The Father's Curse: A Story of Retribution," and "The Blind Boy of the Insane Asylum"--these were the Weekly's staples. Later came Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay's tales of English lords and ladies and their realms of high society, detective fiction by Judson R.Taylor, adventure stories by Edward S. Ellis, cliffhangers by May Agnes Fleming (who wrote no less than twenty-six romantic serials for its pages), Mary Jane Holmes (who wrote twenty-seven), Mrs. Georgie Sheldon, and their ilk--and Ned Buntline's "Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men."

- --From A Thunder at Dawn, novel in progress, by Christine Jeffords

Such, then, was the stage upon which the dime novel was to appear. The 1840's saw the flowering of inexpensive novels especially tailored to the paperback market. Among the hundreds of ten-chapter romances that poured from the presses were Ellen Pickering's Kate Walsingham and Who Shall Be Heir?, Mary Howitt's Strive and Thrive and Hope On, Hope Ever, Mrs. Sherwood's Roxabel, Caroline Mordaunt, and The Drooping Lily, Charlotte Elizabeth's Backbiting, The Wrongs of Women, and Humility Before Honor, and such titles as Percy, or The Old Love and the New, The Henpecked Husband, Guilford, or Tried by His Peers, Belle Martin the Heiress, Riches Have Wings, The Amber Witch, or Mary Schweidler, Diving Nell, or The Doom of the Friendless, The Orange Girl of Venice, La Bonita Cigarera, or The Beautiful Cigar Vendor and its sequel Herman deRuyter, or The Mystery Unveiled, The Fatal Feud, or Passion and Piety, Ellen, or Forgive and Forget, For Each and For All, or Laetitia and Mary, The Great Secret, or How to Be Happy, Allen Lucas, or The Self-Made Man, The Diary of a Hackney Coachman, The Drunkard's Daughter, Nellie, the Ragpicker's Daughter, The Gambler, a Policeman's Story, and Hoboken.

As early as 1847, the cheap "yellow-backed" novel could be seen in the hands of many "well dressed and sensible looking ladies and gentlemen." With the discovery of gold in California, a whole new field opened up: it was difficult and expensive to get anything from the East to the West Coast (for a long time the principal medium of freight delivery was by clipper ship), and so lightweight "yellow-backed" reprints of popular literature were much in demand. (Paul deKock and Eugene Sue were among the most favored reading of the Argonauts, the general prejudice against "French novels"--many Americans believed that everything printed in the French language was automatically immoral--notwithstanding.)

Among the pioneers of the genre was the flamboyant Edward Zane Carroll Judson, better known as "Ned Buntline," who lived a life fully as thrilling as the heroes he wrote about. Born in Stamford, NY, 1823, Judson ran away to sea at an early age, served as a cabin boy, and by the age of fifteen was a midshipman in the Navy, having won a commission by heroism in a drowning in the East River. (He also published a skit in the Knickerbocker Magazine that year.) By the time he resigned four years later he had won a reputation as an inveterate duellist. He went on to serve in the Seminole Wars and travel to the Yellowstone in the Northwestern fur trade, contributed stories to the Knickerbocker, worked as a journalist in Cincinnati, and established in 1844 his own short-lived Ned Buntline's Magazine. He next went in with one Lucius A. Hine to edit the Western Literary Journal & Monthly Magazine; when failure seemed near he deserted, leaving Hine to pay the debts. In 1845 he was in Eddyville, Ky., where he captured two murderers single-handed and earned a $600 bounty for his trouble. Later that year, at twenty-two, he was writing sea stories and editing another "sensational" magazine, Ned Buntline's Own, out of Nashville. The following year he fought a duel with Robert Porterfield, the husband of his mistress, killed the man, was put on trial and fired upon in the very courtroom by his victim's brother, jumped out the window and was recaptured, and that night was lynched for murder by a mob but secretly cut down alive. The Grand Jury refused to return an indictment, and Judson made his way to New York City, where he resumed the magazine. In 1849 he led a mob in the Astor Place Riot against the English actor Macready, and was fined $250 and sent to jail on Blackwell's Island for a year. In 1852 he appeared in St. Louis as an organizer of the Know-Nothing Party (he was an inveterate anti-Catholic and invented the party's name), was indicted because of an election riot, and jumped bail. Four years later he bought an estate in the Adirondacks and settled in to the leisurely life of a country gentleman. During this decade he kept up the magazine, which by then had evolved into a weekly featuring stories of hunting and fishing, piracy on the high seas, and Wild West life. He served in Company K, First New York Mounted Rifles, as a sergeant (later broken to private), and was dishonorably discharged for drunkenness in 1864--though he afterward assumed the completely undeserved title of Colonel, and held it till his death, claiming to have been "Chief of Indian Scouts." In 1869 he met William F. Cody, then scouting for Maj. Frank North at Fort McPherson; he had planned to focus his intended novel on North, but North referred him to Cody, and Judson quickly realized the young (then 23) man's potential and dubbed him "Buffalo Bill". He was four times married, twice widowed, once divorced. In his short lifetime (he died in 1886), Judson wrote a total of over 400 action novels, including such titles as Navigator Ned; or, He Would be Captain, War Eagle, or Ossiniwa the Indian Brave, The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood (the first part of which any reader of Tom Sawyer (supposedly set during the 1840's) will recognize as a name assumed by Tom during his play with Huck Finn), Magdalena, the Beautiful Mexican Maid (1847), The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848), The Gals of New York (1848), Norwood, or Life on the Prairie (1849), Stella Delorme; or, The Comanche's Dream (1860), The Rattlesnake; or The Rebel Privateer (1863), Life in the Saddle; or The Cavalry Scout (1865), Quaker Saul: The Idiot Spy (1869), Red Ralph, the Ranger (1870), Buffalo Bill's First Trial; or, Will Cody, the Pony Express Rider (1888), and Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men (1869), which may be his best known. He also wrote a play, The Scouts of the Plains, which was churned out in four hours' time and first given in 1872, starring William F. Cody, whom Judson had somehow persuaded East for the purpose. This was Cody's first taste of "show business" and was probably instrumental in his later establishment of the first Wild West Show. Judson also knew such famous gunfighters as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp (for whom he reputedly created the extraordinarily long-barrelled "Buntline Special" six-shooter). He could sport more scars--including a bullet wound in his chest--than any man he met, and he had a whole supply of yarns to go with each one. He was a man of paradox who wrote hymns and delivered lectures on "Temperance" (which in that era meant, in practise, abstinence) and then got drunk afterward. He was a defendant in several trails, accused often of blackmail. He had an astounding knack for words, and once wrote a novel of more than 600 pages in 62 hours. His Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men was still being sold in 1928--almost 60 years later, when its author and subject had long since been gathered to their forefathers--which makes it, in terms of longevity, an authentic classic.