The Dime Novel in Children's Literature

Frequently identified as sensational literature filled with violent characters, intricately woven plots, changing identities and confusion between issues of right and wrong, many considered the Dime Novel guilty of sending serious and improper messages to the day's impressionable youth. Though read by many from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, these short, pocket-sized publications were severely criticized. This work looks at the authors, publishers, illustrators, and subject matter of the dime novel. Other types of children's literature, such as story papers, chapbooks, broadsides, serial books, pulp magazines, comic books and today's paperback books are discussed, as well. The author explores the ways in which these works reveal much about early American life and thought and how they reflect cultural nationalism through their ideological teachings in personal morality and ethics, humanitarian reform and political thought; a study of the dime novel's contribution to the genre of children's literature is thus provided.