SOURCE: Cowie, Alexander. “The Domestic Sentimentalists and Other Popular Writers.” The Rise of the American Novel, pp. 416-24. New York: American Book Company, 1951.

In the following excerpt, Cowie asserts that the controlling theme of The Lamplighter concerns the attainment of moral regeneration by means of humble submission to suffering.

Not so prolific or indeed so long-lived as many of her kind, Maria Susanna Cummins wrote one novel, The Lamplighter, which with The Wide, Wide World and St. Elmo, probably represents the chief elements of the domestic novel in its most comprehensive and popular form. Miss Cummins was born at Salem, Massachusetts, and attended Mrs. Charles Sedgwick's fashionable school at Lenox. She was only twenty when she began to write stories for The Atlantic Monthly and only twenty-seven when she astonished and delighted an enormous public with The Lamplighter (1854).¹ The book was published by John P. Jewett and Company...