Dime Novels, Buffalo Bill, and 19th-Century American Culture

The Dime Novel: Genre, History, and Cultural Reach

The dime novel carries a specific literary meaning, but the term has generally come to refer to several different late 19th- and early 20th-century popular American fictional forms: true dime novels (costing a dime), story papers, 5- and 10-cent weekly libraries, and early pulp magazines. The term was even used as late as the World War II era, when a relatively unsuccessful resurgence of pulp Western dime novels appeared. In spirit, however, dime novels are the precursor to contemporary comics, graphic novels, paperbacks, and even popular television and movies based on this genre. The modern usage of the term tends to mean a quickly written, plot-light potboiler — true crime, sensational action stories, and similar fare — and is not particularly well regarded in a literary sense (Cullen).

Right around 1860, "dime novel" was essentially a brand name. For fourteen years, Beadle's Dime Novels were a regularly published series of paper-covered booklets, appearing every two weeks or so for a total of 321 issues. Each was a work of fiction with a sensational and melodramatic plot, sold for ten cents — the equivalent of approximately $3.00 in today's money, which is still less expensive than a modern paperback or graphic novel (Dime Novels: Beadle's Dime Novels). What became important almost from the start was the manner in which these novels played a role in acculturation, information transference, and the transmission of social and cultural etiquette in the 19th and early 20th centuries. When we examine the titles and subjects of this genre, we find adventure stories, biographies, serial soap-opera-style narratives, Westerns, and novels that explained proper behavior — particularly for young women.

Three Cultural Functions of the Dime Novel

Acculturation. Many readers of dime novels were seeking to escape their lives of work and drudgery. This assumes, of course, a sufficiently literate population — but scholarship also points to the fact that many families gathered together to have at least one member read aloud from the latest installment. The novels may have been escapist, but they were products of modernity for several reasons. They were part of mass production and therefore tied to industrial technology. As the first mass-produced literature available to the general public, young adults often had only two choices: their school primer and the dime novel. Newspapers were not written for this reading level, so the dime novel became the vehicle through which publishers promoted the values they wished to disseminate (Cox; Denning).

Information Transference. Dime novels were filled with nostalgia and mythical stories of the past. Without access to libraries or mass media, the dime novel was often the primary means by which information was transferred to ordinary readers. The upper classes received information through other channels, but the dime novel provided retellings of historical and current events in a politically palatable form.

Social and Cultural Etiquette. Many of the messages embedded in the dime novel focused on Aesop-like fables in which right is unambiguously right and the distinction between good and bad is clear. Children obeyed their elders, work ethic predominated, and romantic love without overt sexuality was the norm. In many ways, both overt and covert messages conveyed industrial-capitalist values: work hard, save money, be part of a team. The dime novel thus commoditized culture by centering on the cultural production of wage labor, a capitalist economy, and a labor process that rationalizes and, in Michael Denning's phrase, deskills work (Cox; Denning).

The Western Dime Novel and the Myth of the Frontier

The idea of the West was both exciting and invigorating for Americans living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Vast lands were open and adventure seemed boundless. So compelling was the vision of the American West that Theodore Roosevelt declared, "More and more as the years go by this Republic will find its guidance in the thought and action of the West, because the conditions of development in the West have steadily tended to accentuate the peculiarly American characteristics of its people" (Roosevelt). The frontier remained accessible through the dime novel; adventures involving American Indians, gold mining, vast buffalo herds, and the railroad were enormously popular — much as space exploration adventures are today. This was the great unknown, and through a series of influential essays, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that while most of the West was at least mapped, the future of the United States would be decided there. Once the frontier became a historical relic, it was fair game to be reconstructed through nostalgia, fable, and fiction disguised as fact for the general public (Wright).

One of the most popular figures in American popular culture was the scout and frontiersman William "Buffalo Bill" Cody. In 1869, Ned Buntline fictionalized Cody's life in a work many credit with marking the beginning of the Western as a specific genre in American popular culture. Cody capitalized on this interest when he brought his Wild West Show east in 1883. The show featured a cast of 100 cowboys and Indians, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and a menagerie of wild animals. Its circus-like atmosphere brought entertainment and a hunger for the genre to the youth of the eastern seaboard well into the 20th century. In essence, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull — one of the show's featured guests — invented the Wild West and gave Americans a template from which to construct their historical understanding of the nation and the era (Bridger).

Conclusion

Cody's adventures would certainly continue throughout several other dime novels, but this retelling of his early years served as instruction for many youngsters of the era — a true American hero: unselfish, loved by all, dedicated to truth and justice. If we consider many of the television shows of the 1950s, the Buffalo Bill archetype is a clear precursor to the Lone Ranger, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and similar figures who carried these same values into the next century of American popular culture.