Alaskan Range: Dangerous Literature
..."Light fiction" wasn't widely popular until the 1800s when literacy mushroomed just as the Industrial Revolution drove down printing costs. The first "dime novel," published in 1860, was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann Stephens....
Greg Hill turns the page to reveal fiction which was once deemed too racy.
Preparing pasta last night prompted the question: what makes virgin olive oil extra virgin? The answer virgin oil has "excellent taste" and 2% oleic acid, while extra virgin has "first-class taste" and only 1% oleic acid was nearby Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany, which I'd borrowed from the library. This delightful compilation reveals food facts like how to say "cheers!" around the world ("kampai!" in Japan, "ebiba!" in Greece, and "Hongera!" in Swahili), and the correct terms for carving various beasts (you "break" a deer, "rear" a goose, "disfigure" a peacock, "splat" a pike, etc.).
There's nothing in Schott's book about butter, the favored grease where olives can't grow. So when we wondered about the origin of the phrase "his bread and butter," I turned to another favorite reference source, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, who define it as "One's livelihood or basic means of subsistence." Brewer's is famous for leading researchers far afield, and soon I found myself reading about Mary Robinson, the "Maid of Buttermere."
Mary was "the beautiful and innocent daughter" of an innkeeper from England's Lake Buttermere. In 1802 she "was deceived into marrying John Hatfield, an unscrupulous imposter posing as the younger brother of the Earl of Hopetoun," but Hatfield "proved to be a much-married confidence trickster who had served numerous prison sentences." Hatfield was exposed by the poet Samuel Coleridge and hanged for forgery in 1803, and poor Mary became the subject of "numerous songs, ballads, and poems at the time."
Mary probably didn't care that "butter" comes from the ancient Greek word "boutyron," or that countless authors have used lurid stories like hers as their bread and butter in grinding out novels. Pulp or genre fiction is defined by Wikipedia as "an elastic term used to group works sharing similarities of character, theme, and setting such as mystery, romance, or horror that have been proven to appeal to particular groups of readers." Though often disparaged in comparison to "literary fiction," mysteries, science fiction, historical fiction and countless other genres and subgenres sometimes have outstanding literary merit, such as Patrick O'Brian's historical novels.
"Light fiction" wasn't widely popular until the 1800s when literacy mushroomed just as the Industrial Revolution drove down printing costs. The first "dime novel," published in 1860, was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann Stephens. In it, Native American princess Malaeska marries a white guy who adores her but is ashamed to introduce her to his friends and family. They have a son, a dispute arises between the Natives and the settlers, and Malaeska's father and husband kill each other. Her dying husband tells her to go to his parents so their son can be raised properly, and though the boy's raised as their white grandson, her in-laws force Malaeska to be their servant. Just before her son marries, she reveals she's his mom, he kills himself, and she dies of grief.
Such stories inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Little Women author Louisa May Alcott about "my many fears for my country in these days when so much seductive and dangerous literature is pushed forward" and how "the success of your domestic works has been to me most comforting." Little did she suspect that Alcott far preferred writing steamy potboilers. "I don't enjoy writing moral pap for the young," Alcott said, but "do it because it pays well."
Under the pen name A.M. Barnard, Alcott wrote about "drug addicts, cross-dressers, and killers." Her first such work, A Long Fatal Love Chase, was written in 1866 but deemed too racy by her publisher, who termed it "too long & too sensational!" She shortened it, toned it down, changed the title to Fair Rosamond, but it remained rejected. She set it aside, and the Fair Rosamond manuscript wound up in Harvard's Houghton Library. A private school headmaster in New Hampshire bought the unexpurgated manuscript from the Alcott heirs ("for less than $50,000") in 1994. He got $1.5 million for the publishing rights from Random House, but he gave 25 percent to the Alcott Family museum and the same to the Alcott heirs and his school.
They must have been delighted with that largesse, for as Louisa May noted, "Housekeeping ain't no joke."
