See also 70 Penny Dreadfuls & Dime Novels on DVDrom (+ Gothic Novels)
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This Day in History: The very first "dime" novel was issued on this day in 1860, and it was called "Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter" which you can now download and read at https://archive.org/details/04278299.1604.emory.edu/page/n1/mode/2up. The dime novel was a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paper-bound editions. The term dime novel has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, referring to story papers, five and ten-cent weeklies, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes early pulp magazines. The English equivalents were called penny dreadfuls or shilling shockers. The German and French equivalents were called "Groschenromane" and "livraisons à dix centimes." Dime Novels were basically a cheap, popular novel, typically a melodramatic romance or adventure story.
The literacy rate increased around the time of the American Civil War, and Beadle's Dime Novels were immediately popular among young, working-class readers...so much so that they became some of the best selling books at the time. Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter sold 65000 copies in only a few months. Dime Novels probably did more than any other kind of book to turn lower and middle-class Americans into both book owners and book readers.
There were of course quite a few critics of dime novels back in the day, as is illustrated by this excerpt written in a library periodical:
"1) Dime novels should, of course, continue to be excluded from public libraries.
2) Boys should be discouraged from reading them.
3) This is not because they are immoral, but because they are poor art.
4) Boys found reading them should not be treated as if they had been detected in a crime, nor should the dime novel be burned or otherwise destroyed in public with a great show of moral indignation. Because if this be done the dime novel instantly becomes invested with the charm of the forbidden, and the boy will not rest until he gets another."
Once the popularity of the dime novel waned, they were replaced by the Comic. But even comics were targets of criticisms early on. An editorial in The Chicago Daily News in 1940 entitled “A National Disgrace,” said of the comic book: “Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed—a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems… Their crude blacks and reds spoil the child’s natural sense of color; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories.”
See also: A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls by GK Chesterton 1911
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