SOURCE: Williams, Susan S. “‘Promoting an Extensive Sale’: The Production and Reception of The Lamplighter.” The New England Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 1996): 179-200.

In the following essay, Williams surveys the publishing history of The Lamplighter, and discusses John Jewett's strategies for advertising and promoting its various editions.

Maria Susanna Cummins's novel The Lamplighter (1854) is best remembered today as the occasion for Nathaniel Hawthorne's infamous diatribe against women writers. “America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women,” Hawthorne wrote to his publisher William D. Ticknor in 1855. “What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse?”¹ Several weeks later Hawthorne modified his position somewhat when he praised Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, but his original comment has been taken as a shorthand description of the polarization between “popular” best sellers and “highbrow” literature originating in the antebellum...