What was the third best-selling book in the antebellum US?
Upvote:2
According to James David Hart in The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste:
Sylvanus Cobb Jr. “was the most consistently read of all the period’s novelists and his Gunmakers of Moscow probably had an American public second only to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (99)
Cobb's books were action-packed pulp, and he was disdained by the educated classes.
Cobb aside, the other most popular authors were women who wrote educational, moralistic tales more in the vein of Harriet Beecher Stowe. These women were prolific, and so were among the bestselling authors of the period. I'll describe two plots below, because the fact that such starchy parables sold well is pretty interesting to me from a cultural perspective:
In 1853, Fanny Fern sold 70,000 copies of Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, while Maria Susanna Cummin’s The Lamplighter sold 40,000 copies in eight weeks.
A moralistic romance about an orphan girl befriend by the appropriately named lamplighter, Trueman Flint, and later taken into the home of a kindly woman accidently blinded in youth by a brother who then ran away in remorse . . . The main character were women---women who overcame all sorts of dilemma through Christian fortitude and faith that eventually establishes them securely in prosperous middle-class homes (93-94)
Published in 1850, by 1852 Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World was on its 14th edition and continued to sell well after that. It was about
a motherless girl who lives with a cruel aunt, is protected by a kindly farmer, learns what a really Christian home can be through her friendship with the local minister’s daughter, and, though only fourteen, is most affectionately regarded by the minister’s son, who is himself a divinity student (95)
As for Dickens, he was undoubtedly the most-read English author in America, although he had insulted Americans with American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit. Anyway, here's The Economist's estimates of Dickens' total sales (worldwide, I think), 1846-1870:
James David Hart estimates that Bleak House sold 250,000 copies in the U.S. during this period (62), and so it may be in the running for 4th most popular book.
Upvote:4
It is difficult to make exact estimates because reliable figures from different publishers making the same book are hard to come by, especially in the case of pirated editions, which were rampant at that time. The popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin has been somewhat exaggerated and there were many publications that compare to it. For example, if you include magazines, Harpers was gigantic, publishing 2 million volumes every year.
In 1853, over 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold, but the same year Phiney & Ivison sold over 500,000 copies of Sanders' Reading Books. Also, Dickens way outsold Uncle Tom's Cabin. Bleak House alone sold over 250,000 copies, just in its initial runs. Little Dorritt was even more popular and Great Expectations sold millions of copies. Hoyle was also very popular and probably outsold Uncle Tom's Cabin if you counted up all copies and pirated editions. Certain standard school texts like Smith's Geography which racked up 100,000 per year easily probably outsold Uncle Tom's Cabin if you counted all copies over the years.
Probably the number one book of all time from the period was Great Expectations (1861) which has probably sold more than 100 million copies total over the years.
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