SOURCE: “‘The Unknown Public’: Dime Novels and Working Class Readers,” in Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, Verso, 1987, pp. 27-46.

In the following essay, Denning argues that dime novels constituted the primary reading material of the working class and that the books were specifically created by the middle class for workers.

Who read these stories and what did they think of them? Though this question is now central to the study of popular culture, it remains a difficult and elusive one. In part, this is because of sketchy and uncertain evidence. Even when one can determine who the readers were, it is very difficult to determine how they interpreted their reading. But the difficulty also lies in the reluctance of cultural historians of the United States to use class categories to describe and analyze the reading public. As a result, they often end up with...