Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [792]
Finally, there were the real workshops of commercial sex, brothels geared to male laborers. The female laborers here worked in unappealing conditions. The madams, entrepreneurs of sex, charged their girls—the appropriate term, as many of the whores were between ten and fifteen—weekly board and took half their income. Given their vested interest in productivity, the madams insisted on a high-volume, high-turnover strategy. On Saturday and Sunday nights lines formed outside the most successful houses. One Stakhanovite of sex serviced fifty-eight men in three hours. The more routine (but still strenuous) rate averaged between from seventy to a hundred encounters a week, at one to two dollars for ten to fifteen minutes in the sack.
OLD SLEUTH AND BUFFALO BILL
Sensational fiction was another working-class pleasure—quite different from the genteel fiction served up in Harper’s or Scribner’s—which New York publishers specialized in generating. The front counters of corner groceries sold story papers like Beadle and Adams’s Saturday Journal and George Munro’s Fireside Companion. Aimed at the
Inside John Allen’s Dance House on Water Street, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 8, 1868. Allen provided small rooms in the rear of the house for prostitition, each of which he equipped with a Bible. In 1868, he began allowing prominent evangelists to hold prayer meetings in his establishment, which soon lost its clientele and was converted into a revival hall. (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
entire family, they offered eight pages of illustrated adventure stories and domestic romances, usually three or four serialized episodes per issue. The installments were then collated and reprinted as pamphlet novels selling for a nickel or ten cents and packaged in “libraries.”
The form was pioneered by Erastus Beadle, a small New York City publisher of ten-cent song and etiquette books, who in 1860 began bringing out a weekly series of pamphlet novelettes known as Beadle’s Dime Novels. During the Civil War these handy, pocket-sized (four by six inches, a hundred pages) “yellow-backs” became enormously popular with young soldiers. Beadle published four million by 1865. Competitors sprang up immediately. George Munro, a clerk in the Beadle enterprise, started his own operation in 1863, and by the 1870s his firm had become one of the largest mass-fiction publishers in the country.
Dime novel entrepreneurs employed journalists, teachers, and clerks to hack out formulaic literary commodities. The intended audience was composed of skilled craftsmen, factory workers, and laborers, at times sorted out ethnically, as with the Ten Cent Irish Novels and George Munro’s Die Deutsche Library, though none addressed blacks. Many serials spoke to young female domestic servants, but the overwhelming targets were young men and boys.
The papers and booklets, heavily advertised, were distributed nationally by the monopolistic American News Company (formed in 1864) along the new trunk railway lines. But their premier audience, and often premier subject, lay in the city itself, especially in the case of crime thrillers. In this poe-initiated genre, a professional villain, often of “foreign” blood, was tracked down and jailed, murdered, or banished back to his “foreign” clime by a stern and paternal detective. The most famous, Old Sleuth, first appeared in the 1872 “Old Sleuth, the Detective; or, the Bay Ridge Mystery,” in George Munro’s New York Fireside Companion. The New York private eye (his card read “Sleuth, Detective”) was a spectacular success. Crime dimes—like Alger’s books—helped demystify the city. They showed, as the plot rolled along, how to secure a cheap room, open a bank account, go shopping, and avoid con men. They also provided a vicarious peek at upper-class exotica such as