SOURCE: “Judging Books by Their Covers: Format, the Implied Reader, and the ‘Degeneration’ of the Dime Novel,” in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 3, September, 1998, pp. 247-63.

In the essay below, Erickson argues that the transformation of the distribution and packaging of dime novels—rather than fundamental changes in the content of the stories—led to their decline.

[The Beadle publications] are without exception unobjectionable morally, whatever fault be found with their literary style and composition. They do not even obscurely pander to vice or excite the passions.

—William Everett, 1864 (qtd. in Nye 203)

The dreadful damage wrought to-day in every city, town, and village of these United States by the horrible and hideous stuff set weekly before the boys and girls of America by the villainous sheets which pander greedily and viciously to the natural taste of young readers for excitement, the irreparable wrong done by these...