The Franklin Stereotype: the Spiritual-Secular Gospels of Four

THE FRANKLIN STEREOTYPE: THE SPIRITUAL-SECULAR GOSPELS OF FOUR

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN AUTHORS

A Dissertation

J.D. ISIP

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University-Commerce in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2015 THE FRANKLIN STEREOTYPE: THE SPIRITUAL-SECULAR GOSPELS OF FOUR

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN AUTHORS

A Dissertation

J.D. ISIP

Approved by:

Advisor: Karen Roggenkamp

Committee: Susan Louise Stewart Christopher Thomas Gonzalez Yvonne Villanueva-Russell

Head of Department: Hunter Hayes

Dean of the College: Salvatore Attardo

Dean of Graduate Studies: Arlene Horne

iii

Jomar Daniel Isip

ABSTRACT

THE FRANKLIN STEREOTYPE: THE SPIRITUAL-SECULAR GOSPELS OF FOUR NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN AUTHORS

J.D. Isip, PhD Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2015

Advisor: Karen Roggenkamp, PhD

The purpose of this study was to examine the spiritual-secular influences of Benjamin

Franklin and his Autobiography found in the selected novels of four nineteenth-century

American authors: Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, A Domestic Tale of the Present Time; Louisa May

Alcott’s Little Women and Work, A Story of Experience; Horatio Alger, Jr.’s Ragged Dick or,

Street Life in New York with Boot Blacks; and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Specifically, I examined three areas of influence: navigation of a print market demanding both secular and spiritual plotlines; creation of “secular saints” who borrow spiritual iconography for secular journeys and goals; and the dissemination of “secular gospels” or social change messages couched in religious language. These areas of influence form what I call the Franklin Stereotype.

I argue that these nineteenth-century authors take up Franklin’s stereotype in order to take advantage of a seemingly divided market. Like Franklin, these authors do not see a divide between the spiritual and the secular; they do not see a difference between the religious or the capitalist versions of the American Dream. They write to justify and reify this perspective.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There is honestly no way to get your acknowledgements right when you can hardly believe so many people put their lot in with you—perhaps against all better judgement. Who, for example, would have stuck with the over-eager grad student dead set on writing about

Christmas…then Happiness…then (disastrously and ill-advisedly) Post-Postmodernism? My

Advisor, Karen Roggenkamp, has been the Faithful on this road and a true mentor worth stereotyping. Susan Louise Stewart, as she is known to do, gave me the bug for children’s literature and the desire to try to say everything better. Christopher Gonzalez continues to challenge me to be a more careful and sympathetic scholar (and to write less “baroquely”).

Yvonne Villanueva-Russell made sure I did my capitalism homework and enthusiastically cheered me on. I could not have asked for a better dissertation committee.

I owe many thanks to several faculty members including Donna Dunbar-Odom who made sure I came to the school where she was sure I belonged; Hunter Hayes who is ever-kind, ever-wise, and always ready with a book and a story about Bruce Springsteen; and Sal Attardo who always put more faith in me than I ever felt like I deserved.

I have enjoyed the great love and comradery of two cohorts, one here at Texas A&M

University-Commerce and one at California State University, Fullerton. There are far too many folks to name individually, but I am better for knowing them. A few—Sean Ferrier-Watson,

Allyson Jones, Vince Liberato, and Erin Bullok—have become my family here in Texas. Indeed, their families also deserve a shout-out for the several holidays they have taken in this California immigrant: Robyn and Sandy, Dan and Jalinna, and Pamela, from the bottom of my heart, thanks. Finally, my family—Isips, Flynns, Merediths—I could not love you more.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EPIGRAPH ...... viii

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Secular Gospels: Fern, Alcott, Alger, and Twain ...... 1

The Franklin Stereotype: Secular Spirituality ...... 4

Components of the Stereotype ...... 7

Significance of the Study: A Religious Turn ...... 10

Organization of Dissertation Chapters ...... 14

Review of the Literature ...... 16

Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture ...... 17

Fern, Alcott, Alger, and Twain ...... 20

The Secular and the Spiritual ...... 25

Benjamin Franklin ...... 27

2. THE FRANKLIN STEREOTYPE ...... 33

Franklin and the Pilgrim’s Progress ...... 40

Conclusion ...... 49

3. THE GOSPEL OF PROGRESS ...... 52

The Gospel of Fanny Fern ...... 55

Ruth Hall, A Secular Saint ...... 62

The Gospel of Louisa May Alcott ...... 74

Christie Devon, A Secular Saint ...... 78

Josephine March, A Secular Saint ...... 87

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CHAPTER

The Secular Gospel and Children’s Books ...... 92

4. THE GOSPEL OF SALVATION ...... 96

The American Dream ...... 100

The Franklin Stereotype and the Boy Book ...... 103

The Gospel of Horatio Alger, Jr...... 106

Ragged Dick, A Secular Saint ...... 110

Capitalism and Christianity ...... 116

Alger’s Secular Gospel ...... 118

The Gospel of Mark Twain ...... 121

Huck Finn, A Secular Saint ...... 127

Jim, A Secular Saint ...... 130

Twain’s Secular Gospel ...... 132

5. EPILOGUE ...... 137

The American Adventure ...... 140

REFERENCES ...... 144

VITA ...... 155

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EPIGRAPH

The body of

B. Franklin, Printer;

(Like the cover of an old book,

Its contents worn out,

and stripped of its lettering and gilding)

Lies here, food for worms.

But the work shall not be lost:

For it will, (as he believed) appear once more,

In a new and more elegant edition,

Revised and corrected

By the Author.

Epitaph for Benjamin Franklin

By Benjamin Franklin, 1728*

*Long before his death on April 17, 1790

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Secular Gospels: Fern, Alcott, Alger, and Twain

This study provides a model for a historical narrative of the interplay between the spiritual, the secular, and the market in American literature using Benjamin Franklin as the touchstone figure, the stereotype. I focus on four novelists—Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott,

Horatio Alger, and Mark Twain—and their selected novels from the late nineteenth century to illustrate the appropriations, interpretations, and adaptations of what I call the Franklin

Stereotype, a combination story of a secular saint, message of a secular gospel, and navigation of a moral market. I argue that these nineteenth-century authors, like Franklin, consciously attempt to take advantage of two seemingly opposing markets, the secular and the spiritual. Following

Franklin, each author justifies the capitalist strain of their novel messages by infusing each with religious language and iconography—that is, each author assigns to these projects a secular gospel and a secular saint. For Fanny Fern and Louisa May Alcott, the secular saints are Ruth

Hall, Christie Devon, and Jo March, and the secular gospel is one of progress. Alger and Twain’s secular saints are Richard Hunter, or Ragged Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and Jim, the runaway slave. Alger and Twain’s secular gospel is one of salvation.

Over the past decade scholars of print culture and the history of the book have noted a

“religious turn” which questions long-held assumptions about the interplay of religion, secularity, market, and literature. One of these assumptions encompasses the “reigning theories of secularization” which present spirituality and secularity as binaries and opposing forces. “The story told of literary studies’ emergence as a discipline is a supersessionary tale, in which religion cedes authority to forms of truth and suasion no longer requiring its grounding,” Tracy

Fessenden argues, “To scholars of American literature, in particular, secularization in this teleological senses functions as both a story line and a professional credo” (185). Scholars and historians “have seen mounting critical attention” to this long accepted narrative; they “have sought to deal in more detailed and concrete ways with the process of ‘secularization,’ the practices of ‘the secular,’ and the political ethic of ‘secularism’” (Calhoun et al. 3). What many of the studies referenced in this dissertation call for is a reconsideration of the so-called progressive narrative of American literature and culture from the explicitly religious to the absolutely secular. This dissertation offers a more nuanced progression not from religion to secularity, but through a continually morphing secular-spiritual interplay. The microcosm of

American literary history considered is roughly the decades between 1850 and 1890, or the Age of Print. The conduit of this journey back through well-trod ground with “new eyes” is a figure who embodied and embodies this secular-spiritual duality: Benjamin Franklin.

For those who read Franklin as completely without religion, they quite miss his careful wording about the sort of faith he practiced and the make-up of his moral compass. He admits that regular church attendance and dogma did not suit him, but he had no doubts about “the

Existence of the Deity, that he made the World, and govern’d it by his Providence” and “that the most acceptable Service of God was the doing Good to Man” (BFA 77). Which, obviously, does not make Franklin quite as Christian as many would like, but also not quite as secular as many academics have long believed. In essence, Franklin the man and the character of his

Autobiography stands at a perplexing intersection where scholars have tended to turn either right or left. But in our redefining secularity as inclusive of religion—and perhaps even complimentary to religion—Franklin the conundrum becomes Franklin the key, the stereotype.

My methodology is mostly that taken by scholars of the history of the book with influences from research on religious experience, secularity, capitalism/market forces, and public discourse. Describing research into the history of the book, David Hall says, “What draws us onward is that glittering phrase, the history of the book as the history of culture and society. The promise of the history of the book1 is simply this, that it will not tolerate a simplistic or reductionist understanding of the relationship between culture and society” (34). By turning to an intersection of religion, secularity, and market, I hope to continue the original work of scholars in the history of the book and in the history of print culture, to point out “what have become comfortable blind spots and complacent assumptions of American literary studies” (Gordon

534). Forty years into the study of book history is (and should be) characterized by “a determination to read print culture in nuanced, frequently counterintuitive ways that destabilize certain ossified beliefs within American literary studies” (Gordon 534). One of those ossified beliefs has to do with our reading of religious influences separate and opposing secular influences, which naturally brings scholars in the history of the book to a religious turn; “if the religious turn in literary studies aims at a new, more critical relation to the secular, it also implies, without determining, a different relation to religion than the one that secularism rejects or supplies” (Fessenden 192). As Hall implies, the work of the history of the book is complication, but not complication for the sake of complication. Instead, we complicate to complete, to fill out the edges and once empty spaces. My analysis includes literature, religion, secularity, and market forces. In this final category, it is my hope to show “the way that religious

1 The history of the book, or what is commonly referred to as print culture, is the study of the textual ephemera (from books to advertisements to playbills and many things in between) of a time and place to better understand that culture. To give the history of the book an action word, it might be accurately described as historical and social layering.

4 experiences are mediated by markets and the way that markets and market practices enable religious activities and experiences” (Stievermann et al. 6).

The Franklin Stereotype: Secular Spirituality

For Benjamin Franklin, there was never a situation which could not be more easily resolved by compromise than by strict adherence to doctrine. Human-made doctrine and man was fallible. In Ecstatic Nation (2013), Brenda Wineapple claims that the United States “had been founded on compromise, and to compromise it was dedicated” (9). Franklin is ever-present in discussions of national character, capitalism, and variations on the American Dream. These social and scholarly conversations have also turned regularly to the influence of religion, especially in the works of Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Perry

Miller. If Franklin and religion are mentioned in the same breath, they are opposing polarities.

Franklin’s desire to emulate “both Jesus and Socrates” is too often accepted as a glib reminder of impossibility. Any historian can make a strong case that Franklin simply did not understand the concept of the impossible. Whether it was building a library, persuading the French, or wrangling contentious colonies, Franklin always had the same prescription: compromise.

Compromise was his lived religion. It is how he could reconcile both the secular and the spiritual trajectories of the nation into the singular plot of his Autobiography. And he wished very much for others to follow his lead.

“I know of no Character living nor many of them put together who has so much in his

Power as thyself,” Abel James wrote to Benjamin Franklin when he asked Franklin in 1782 to complete his Autobiography, “to promote a greater Spirit of Industry and early Attention to

Business, Frugality and Temperance with the American Youth” (NCE 69). Franklin included

James’s and Benjamin Vaughn’s (who made a similar request of Franklin) letters as a preface to

5 the continuation (“Part Two”) of his Autobiography. Where “Part One” of his famous work begins with the stated intent of merely recording events of Franklin’s life for his son, James’s and Vaughn’s letters allow Franklin to take a more instructive turn without seeming to do so out of conceit. After all, he is simply obliging the wishes of his admirers. Franklin begins the action of the second portion of the Autobiography in 1730 and turns it into a discourse on morality and virtue. Setting his readers up for what seems to be a traditional sermon on morality, Franklin begins, “It was about this time that I conceiv’d the bold and arduous Project of moral Perfection”

(NCE 78). He then enumerates his now-famous “virtues” (i.e., Temperance, Silence, Order, etc.) and his plan to do good always.2 After explaining that he “fell far short” of his original plan,

Franklin concludes, “I was by the Endeavour made a better and happier Man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it” (86). Franklin’s seeming admission of defeat turns out to be a proclamation of achievement. He follows up by suggesting that posterity look on his life’s accomplishments to ascertain the success of his project of moral perfection. Franklin even anticipates an imperfect interpretation, suggesting, “As those who aim at perfect Writing by imitating the engraved Copies, tho’ they never reach the wish’d for Excellence of those Copies, their Hand is mended by the Endeavour, and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible”

(NCE 86). James and Vaughn suggested Franklin was a model for the new nation; he responded by providing his audience with a truncated version of his never-realized book The Art of Virtue and an exhortation: “I hope therefore that some of my Descendants may follow the Example and reap the Benefit” (86). Franklin exudes a confidence in the moral shortcomings of man. It is man’s effort and aims which matter more than his ability to abide by a strict religious code.

2 Franklin’s twelve original virtues include: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, and Chastity. He included Humility after the suggestion from “a Quaker Friend” (NCE 79-80, 87; Weinberger 29-30)

But these are not the lessons most commonly gleaned from his Autobiography. Even though the entirety of “Part Two” is dedicated to moral self-fashioning, Franklin’s story is treated almost exclusively as the ur version of the American Dream, the “fall of man” toward capitalism and secularity. True, the Autobiography, for better or worse, deserves these attributions, but it is as much a text about religious life and spiritual orientation of the individual to the Creator and creation. It is a compromise between the spiritual and the secular. Wineapple reminds us that before the tarnish of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, compromise was not seen negatively, not seen as capitulation: “The discovery of a common ground, or the creation of one, on which men and women could meet and maneuver, compromise was art; it was statesmanship”

(10). Unfortunately, our narrative of religion in American literature has more often than not been characterized by the absence of compromise. Some literature is shoe-horned into the so-called religious tradition, seen as retrograde and rapidly losing influence. Some is held up as purely secular and “modern,” skipping past religious symbolism and spirituality as mere devices. “I know of no Character” better suited to providing a more enlightened perspective than our hundred dollar founding father.

Since I make continued reference to the secular, secularity, and secularization, these are terms worth explicitly defining for this study, though a singular definition will always be tenuous. Recent research into secularity has complicated these terms beyond the traditional definition of “that which is outside of religion.” José Casanova points out the near absence of critical analysis regarding theories of secularism and definitions of the secular. According to

Casanova, the secular was once seen as that which is left after religion, yet “in our modern secular age and in our modern secular world, the secular has come to encompass increasingly the whole of reality, in a sense replacing the religious” (Casanova 55). Where a religious worldview

7 once seemed not only logical but natural, Casanova suggests that we now see the secular as natural. We see it as natural as uncritically as we once saw with our religious perspective.

“Postulating the secular as the natural and universal substratum that emerges once the super- structural religious addition is lifted,” he argues, “theories of secularization, as well as secularist social science, have avoided the task of analyzing, studying, and explaining the secular, or the varieties of secular experience.” Casanova concludes, “as if it is only the religious, but not the secular, that is in need of interpretation and analytical explanation” (56). Though I acknowledge

Casanova and other researchers interested in secularity, I do not see enough consensus behind any more nuanced definitions of the secular. In the absence of a better option, references to the secular are in the traditional definition of that which is outside of the religious or the spiritual.

Components of the Stereotype

The Franklin Stereotype I refer to throughout this dissertation is composed of three components which I will describe in much more detail here:

 A secular saint

 A secular gospel

 A mastery of the moral market

I would also like to offer more detailed descriptions of those components which make up the Franklin Stereotype. A secular saint is the figure in each novel that professes or preaches the secular gospel of the author, usually the protagonist. Franklin’s tale of a poor youth who used his wit and words to “progress” morally and monetarily and find a sort of secular “salvation” in success seemed to suit the times of the 1850s through the 1880s, but Fern, Alcott, Alger, and

Twain, as I argue, adjust the secular saint and the secular gospel in significant ways. Each author appropriates the Franklin Stereotype, his gospel and his secular saint, while simultaneously

8 manipulating a “moral market” where such saints and the gospels of their authors would illustrate the strange elision of secular, spiritual, and market forces. The nineteenth-century

American print market, my focus in this study, provides a backdrop that challenges the types of easy narratives which place the secular and the spiritual on opposing sides. It is true that the market for non-religious stories expanded during the Age of Print, but it is also true that the audience for religious works continued to grow. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin reads like a sermon and she addresses herself to fellow Christians.

The moral market I examine in the following pages is informed by Sacvan Bercovitch,

Perry Miller, and Max Weber as much as it is influenced by the work of Jane Tompkins, David

Reynolds, and Nina Baym. A historical moment that saw the unprecedented rise of newspapers, serial and dime novels, religious tracts, door-to-door book sales, celebrity author events, specialized journals and magazines, religious revival, industrialization, abolition, war, and reconstruction is not only open to multiple interpretations, but demands multiplicity as the prerequisite toward any sort of accuracy. Scott Casper describes the nineteenth-century

American print market as, in part, an “ascendant book culture disseminated in the products of the national book trade system” which “came to embody a set of values that was centered on, though by no means limited to, the middling classes, at once explaining and manifesting what it meant to live in a bourgeois world” (4-5). I tweak this a bit to so that the market is still “explaining and manifesting” but its aims are higher, secular and spiritual. The moral market is an ecosystem where morality and profit are symbiotic. Moral lessons, spiritual influence, in the right measure could make a sale; too little and sales might come, but at the cost of reputation; too much, and sales would dry up.

If we assume that Franklin had initially conceived of the Autobiography being a model for all Americans (and there is much evidence in his writings to back this up), how does one decide who Franklin’s literary “descendants” are? 3 I have chosen case studies to represent a larger phenomenon. This is not a comprehensive quantitative study of, say, the number of occurrences of the Franklin Stereotype in nineteenth-century authorship. Instead, the four authors considered in this study all fit some initial criteria: 1) Each creates one or more characters who closely resemble Franklin’s “secular saint”; 2) As Franklin does in his Autobiography, each author “preaches” a secular gospel which implicates progress and salvation on a secular and spiritual level; and 3) Like Franklin, each author was financially and popularly successful by capitalizing on morality or manipulating the moral market. With these criteria in mind, I selected

Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, and Mark Twain.

While it is true that virtually every author writing in the nineteenth century had to be aware of and negotiate the tensions of morality and market, not all of them fit the Franklin

Stereotype as easily as those selected for this study. Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and

William Dean Howells, for example, were often less overtly didactic with their moral messages than Alger, Fern, Alcott, and Twain. On the other hand, the personal and professional correspondences of Lydia Maria Child and Henry David Thoreau show each author could be more concerned about their moral message than the marketability of their works. Franklin’s

Autobiography can certainly be tied to memoirs like Frederick Douglass’s “progress” being a slave to a free man. The Franklin Stereotype, as I have defined it in this study, might still be applied to a number of nineteenth-century authors, but those I have chosen show a close

3 They most likely would have considered this to mean middle-class, white men. Perhaps women considering Franklin’s writings as women. Certainly none of them would have considered African-Americans or Native Americans a part of this intended audience.

10 alignment in all regards to Franklin the person and publisher, his secular saint, and his pragmatic secular gospels. Presenting these authors as case studies is an invitation to other scholars to find and argue for those who might be more suited to the stereotype. Finally, my research is qualitative and suggestive of what I see as a singular trend in the vast network of the nineteenth- century moral market, namely the Franklin Stereotype. That trend adds nuance and color to our understanding of the market, the writers of that market, and the influences of the spiritual and the secular on both. It complicates their legacies as well as Franklin’s. This is not, then, a comprehensive examination of all data available. Rather, these case studies provide sufficient evidence in our field to theorize a trend like the Franklin Stereotype and a place such as the nineteenth-century moral market.

Significance of the Study: A Religious Turn

Taking on several varying fields of scholarly interest, this study is purposefully constructed to hint at an expansiveness of the current and future applications of the Franklin

Stereotype. However, some precision can be found in the questions which have led me to developing the stereotype and various other tools in this dissertation. Three key questions have guided my research: How did Franklin construct in print a “secular saint” which could promote both secularity and spiritualty? How is the Franklin Stereotype particularly suited to the print marketplace, “the moral market” of nineteenth-century America and especially to the selected novels of Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, and Mark Twain? Do these authors, their novels, and their “secular gospels” give evidence to the parallel influences of secular, spiritual, and market forces, and do these forces compete or work in tandem in these works?

Ultimately, this study of Franklin and these nineteenth-century authors can provide us a lens to see the ways the spiritual, the secular, and the market work together in the nineteenth-century and beyond.

Embracing an interdisciplinary approach to this dissertation, I am delving into various fields of study. Literary historians have long debated the development and rise in popularity of the American novel in the nineteenth century, christening the decades between the antebellum and the Gilded Age the “Age of Print.” These types of debates have produced the useful—if not totally accurate—binaries between domestic and public spheres, religiosity (particularly

Puritanism and Protestantism) and capitalism, jeremiads and secular patriotism, adolescent literature and mainstream adult literature, between memoir and fiction.

David Reynold’s study, Faith in Fiction (1981), for example, creates a progression from what he deems more theologically sound and rigorous religious fiction to more secular fiction with only a hint of religion in it. Reynold’s book roughly plots its course through American fiction from 1785 to 1850. “Religious changes during this period left an indelible mark on the quality of both popular and elite culture in America,” Reynolds says—the popular he would take up in much more detail in Beneath the American Renaissance (1988). “Intellectual doctrine gave way in many circles to a simpler affectionalism,” so the binary goes, or, “Calvinist constraint to evangelical persuasion, passive expectancy of divine grace to active preparation for it [i.e.,

“millennialism”].” Reynolds then makes a sweeping generalization of “the Baptist and Methodist churches.” He explains that “their mass-oriented approaches and theological simplifications, initiated an increase in American church membership that would continue its upward trend until the 1950s” (Faith in Fiction 2). If it is not entirely clear that Reynolds is being critical of the

American public’s ability to chew on doctrinally sound “meat” and must, thus, be fed the mild

12 milk of sentimental fiction, he ends his study claiming that, “Religious fiction was thus an exercise in wish fulfillment, in compensatory affirmation, and especially in the evasion of the kind of shattering self-scrutiny and intellectual inquiry which, if carried too far, threatened to bring one up on the side of doubt” (215).

I might have continued Reynolds’ narrative from Faith in Fiction, offering the authors here as “reacting” to this watered down doctrine. Instead, I want to take up a line of influence

Reynolds neglects. He sets up Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine as rationalists with different styles, Franklin the prudent and Paine the “direct and combative.” According to Reynolds,

Franklin’s rationalist approach deployed “amiable characters” to “advance a system of utilitarian morality and divine goodness that was aligned against New England theology.” He passes off what he calls the “Franklinian device” as a character who observes religious doctrine with “witty detachment” who eventually morphs into the “porno-gothic style” of writers like George Lippard

(170). The Franklin Stereotype complicates Franklin’s influence on pious fiction beyond the purely satirical. By reevaluating Fern and Twain, both of whom Reynolds briefly takes up, this project creates a more complex understanding of the march from religious fiction to secular from

Franklin forward. As Stievermann, Silliman, and Goff point out in their introduction to Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (2015), “there are simply a lot of plots and characters in the larger story of American religion and the marketplace that have not yet been covered or need to be re-examined” (2). My project offers insights into plots and characters that model after

Franklin’s Autobiography: secular gospels and secular saints.

Franklin’s impressive and expansive legacy continues to fascinate American readers at all levels. New biographies of the Founding Father appear on bestseller lists year after year, and he is the subject of a steady stream of scholarly and popular articles. Louisa May Alcott and Mark

Twain, likewise, persist in the American zeitgeist and dominate scholarship in children’s and young adult literature. This study provides a provocative focus on the secular gospels and secular saints, and the individual interpretations of the Franklin Stereotype by these literary and cultural giants who continue to hold the interest and admiration of scholars and the general reading public. By putting Franklin in conversation with Alcott and Twain, as well as Alger and Fern, I create several case studies to enhance our understanding of his influence on the “moral market” negotiations of these authors during the publishing boom of the nineteenth century. My examination of the secular gospels or moral projects of each nineteenth-century author complicates narratives where these authors, as well as Franklin himself, are portrayed as calculating opportunists only interested in capital gain. This study illuminates their own words in print, which demonstrate not only deep concern for their culture but their efforts to act as moral guide and moral corrective.

In part, this research is an attempt to correct the cultural legacy of a few of these authors and some of their fictional creations as merely manipulators and manipulations. If these authors exploit a market opportunity, I argue that they consciously attempt to justify their capital gains by making overt moral offerings to their public through their novels’ saints and gospels. Franklin and Alger, in particular, are often associated with a type of “mercenary Capitalism,” or an unbalanced focus on monetary gain at the cost of moral good. In other words, for some authors, writing was seen only as “business” rather than some contribution to the greater cultural good.

Susan S. Williams contends that “author-centered market studies frequently portray such

‘business’ as an adversarial force that distracted writers from their real work and constrained their choice of subject matter” (95). However, as I argue here, Franklin, Alger, and all of the authors included in this study continued to do their “real” work by capitalizing on a market

14 creating characters and messages that reflected the “virtues” of a growing market culture and a secular morality.

In addition, the successful print careers of each of the authors considered in this study, read in tandem with one another, provides a richer picture of the nineteenth-century print market, the moral market. The publishers and authors of that market, perhaps more than any era after it, struggled to maintain a balance between writing for a readership interested in both the secular and the spiritual. Fern, Alcott, Alger, and Twain, for various reasons, were particularly challenged in keeping this balance. Each of them appropriated the Franklin Stereotype in ways that helped them not only to negotiate the moral market, but also to capitalize on the tensions of that market.

Organization of Dissertation Chapters

In Chapter 2, “The Franklin Stereotype,” I detail the areas of influence and comparison applied in the following chapters, specifically Franklin’s secular saint and his secular gospel. I also provide some background on the structure Franklin copies for himself from John Bunyan’s

Pilgrim’s Progress. This chapter presents my argument for reading Franklin’s work as secular- spiritual.

Chapter 3, “The Gospel of Progress,” applies the Franklin Stereotype to Fanny Fern and, her first novel, Ruth Hall, and Louisa May Alcott, two of her novels, Work and Little Women. In addition, this chapter, to a lesser extent, continues conversations about women in the nineteenth- century print marketplace, the rise and role of children’s literature, and the uses and “cultural work” of the sentimental. In this chapter, I argue that Fern and Alcott justify the progress of women in nineteenth-century America as a natural and necessary result of capitalist and religious ideology. They borrow the language so often used as oppression as a rallying call.

Chapter 4, “The Gospel of Salvation,” places the authors Horatio Alger, Jr. and Mark

Twain under the Franklin Stereotype. The stereotype is, of course, applied to their novels,

Alger’s Ragged Dick and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This chapter also adds to continuing academic debates over the American Dream, self-help culture, and the aims of boy books. In this chapter, I argue that Alger’s and Twain’s attempts at articulating gospels of spiritual individualism have been misinterpreted as gospels of the American Dream. Instead of focusing on the spiritual journeys of the characters, we have too often looked to the secular— eager to condemn Alger’s capitalism and praise Twain’s wit; we have, I argue, missed the sincerity and pragmatism of their gospels.

Chapter 5 is an attempt to suggest further applications and considerations of the Franklin

Stereotype. It is also a call to continue the work of the religious turn in literary studies, particularly as it pertains to gaining a better understanding of the secular and the spiritual negotiated in the written word.

My goal in this study is not to rewrite our understanding of Franklin, his influence on the nineteenth-century print market, or the four authors examined. I aim, instead, to revisit assumptions about Franklin as a religious influence and as a dominant influence in fictions of the nineteenth-century not often associated with him; I interpret Franklin as a model for writers in a market trapped between the secular and the spiritual. The following chapters provide a fresh insight into discussions about the ways secular, spiritual, and market forces influence some of the most popular fictions of the nineteenth-century. The Franklin Stereotype, as it is presented here, only begins what I hope will be a more robust conversation about the ways secular forces of capitalism and market were elided with spiritual influences in nineteenth-century popular fictions reifying what would become the so-called American Dream. I hope that this study complicates

16 the ways that dream has been read as a progression from the spiritual to the secular. The Franklin

Stereotype should make clear that the lasting influence of the American Dream ideology is not only because it has origins in the spiritual, but because it is the spiritual as much as it is the secular. Progress and salvation are not only borrowed terms, but lived spiritual experiences. They are, of course, secular experiences, as well. The popular novels of these nineteenth-century

American authors provide saints and gospels that marry the idea of the secular and of the spiritual so well that it is nearly impossible to know where one ends and the other begins.

Review of the Literature

The scope of this project is ambitious, reaching into a variety of fields and sub-fields of literary research. The centrality of Benjamin Franklin and his Autobiography in this dissertation alone calls for the review of a seemingly endless array of theoretical and philosophical articles as well as dozens of biographies. Add to this the volumes of writings concerning American print culture in the nineteenth century, not to mention the biographies of the nineteenth-century authors examined in Chapters 3 and 4, especially Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, there is a lot of scholarly ground to cover. What follows is an overview of those resources which proved most helpful in my research for this dissertation. The purpose of this section, beyond crediting some ideas I develop in the study, is to provide context to the many conversations which inform the chapters that follow. I begin with the resources related to the print culture of nineteenth- century America and the area of literary and historical academic interest called “history of the book” to provide a backdrop to the timeframe and milieu of these authors who fall under the

Franklin Stereotype. I then move on to sources specific to Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott,

Horatio Alger, and Mark Twain. Since my discussion of each author is limited by the scope of my project, I hope that this section will provide a fuller picture of how each author and her or his

17 novels are being taken up by other researchers. Next, I provide context to the “secular-spiritual” conversation and “turn” referenced throughout the study. Finally, as a bridge to Chapter 2, I detail some of the most relevant sources related to Benjamin Franklin and his Autobiography.

Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture

The Franklin Stereotype represented a pragmatic approach for writers negotiating the moral market of the nineteenth century. I contextualize this market using many of the essays collected in A History of the Book in America, Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (2010) and Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840-

1880 (2007). In particular, Scott E. Casper and John Nerone’s discussions of the book trade industry and the concept of public sphere, as well as Susan Williams’s chapter about authorship in Volume 3, all provide background for the market negotiations detailed in this study. I have also used an earlier collection edited by Kenneth Price and Susan Belasco Smith, Periodical

Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (1995). Essays by Smith, Price, and Carolyn L.

Karcher regarding moral attitudes in the nineteenth-century print market helped me to better define the moral market presented here. Karcher, agreeing with Avery’s assessment of Franklin’s influence in the nineteenth century, says he was a “recurrent figure even in British classics of children’s literature.” Karcher goes on to say Franklin “personified the conjunction of the

Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism” (95). Like Franklin, Alger, Fern, Alcott, and Twain were able not only to navigate cultural debates but also manipulate those debates to increase their readership and turn a profit.

Jane Tompkins Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860

(1985), David S. Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance (1988), David D. Hall’s Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (1996), and Philip F. Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge:

The Rise of the American Novel (2013) each provide models for the structure of this study as well as inroads for my formulation of the Franklin Stereotype. The notion of a secular gospel attributed to each author in Chapters 4 and 5 goes back to Tompkins claim that novels once seen as mere entertainment are, in fact “doing a certain kind of cultural work within a specific historical situation” and we should “value them for that reason” (200). Where I disagree with

Tompkins is in her argument that these works do not attempt to achieve a “universal ideal of truth”; certainly they are products of their time, but Fern, Alcott, Alger, and Twain all wrote, to varying degrees, with posterity in mind. Specifically, as I argue, their secular gospels were moral prescriptions meant to change the course of history, not just their current age. Reynolds continues Tompkins’s project of broadening the canon of “essential” nineteenth-century

American texts, but he concludes that, “Although we should look diligently for lost luminaries, it is a mistake to simply dismiss the existing canon or pretend that it is an arbitrary grouping of works selected by biased critics” (565). This study specifically addresses Reynolds’ concern by both including a lost luminary like Alger and solidifying the status of established luminaries like

Franklin, Alcott, and Twain. At the end of Hall’s short collection of essays, he says that there are—at the time—mainly two types of literary historians: those interested in readers and those interested in “authorship and hermeneutics of interpretation.” He asks, “Can we hope that some day these critics will interest themselves in the social history of production and consumption, and, conversely, that social historians will acknowledge the power of texts?” (187). The work of

Philip Gura and Sarah Wadsworth seems to answer Hall’s call to action, and I hope that this study does as well. The Franklin Stereotype is meant to answer some of the “how” and “why” behind the production of secular saints and secular gospels.

Philip Gura’s book details the ways that “many American novelists made a conversation about the nation’s values the subject of their work.” Surprisingly, only Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall appears in the Gura’s work. Perhaps it is because Alcott, Alger, and Twain seem to line up with what Gura calls the “country’s deification of individualism.” If this is the reason for his not including Fanny Fern or Horatio Alger, he is not alone in reading both as complicit with the

“forces of political and cultural liberalism.” Yet, the authors Gura examines in his study he describes in ways that, as it will be clear, readily describe each author considered in this dissertation. I see my work as continuing Gura’s project while emphasizing the ways that the spiritual and the secular work in tandem rather than as opposing forces.

Sarah Wadsworth’s In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in

Nineteenth-Century America (2006) tells the story of the debate over class stratification in the growing print market of nineteenth-century America shaped by publishers, marketers, and authors who “conceived of the literary marketplace as structured in a particular way.”

Wadsworth says these literary insiders “constructed the reading public as an array of discrete readerships, or classes of readers” (10). Wadsworth discusses the appeal of a readership split into classes. American’s could demonstrate a certain gentility based on the books they were able to read or had amassed on their shelves. Book connoisseurs of the nineteenth-century were similar to today’s self-made “foodies” and “wine experts.” Wadsworth argues that literary insiders shaped the market out of necessity. She says, “The difficulty of connecting authors, readers, texts, and publishers preoccupied both producers and consumers of literature throughout the nineteenth-century” (193). Part of the intent of the bifurcation Wadsworth discusses is an attempt to make the onslaught of new reading material more manageable for readers/consumers.

Fern, Alcott, Alger, and Twain

Diana Chlebek’s “Money as Moral and Social Catalyst in Children’s Books of the

Nineteenth Century” (1986), though focused specifically on children’s books and authors, helps to situate the four nineteenth-century authors of this study and their fictional characters as key appropriators of the Franklin Stereotype in the nineteenth-century moral market. It was in the works written for younger audiences, Chlebek tells us, where “attitudes about money shifted dramatically, from a suspicious distrust of its corruptive influence to an idealistic assessment of its power for social good.” She goes on to say that this new attitude is “expressed in a wide range of literature, “from Alcott’s domestic novels” to “the Paeans to commercial ambition by Alger” to “the critiques of American materialism by Twain” (78). Certainly Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and

Alcott’s non-domestic Work fall in line with the new attitude Chlebek points out, including the

Paeans and critiques.

Susan Belasco’s Introduction to Ruth Hall (1997) suggests that Fanny Fern’s bestselling novel only draws on certain events in Fern’s life while leaving others. This was not in an attempt to gloss over the missing events (Fern’s life was public knowledge for the most part thanks to her stardom as the highest paid writer for the Ledger), but “to show, based on some painful personal experiences, the way in which the ‘domestic tale’ in its usual configuration could go significantly awry” (xxxvii). Fern’s Ruth Hall offers an interpretation of Franklin’s secular saint adjusted to suit Fern’s critique of women’s limited options outside of marriage and the larger moral project of suggesting the marketplace and jobs seen as “men’s work” (such as writing for newspapers) as perfectly acceptable and virtuous alternatives to marriage. Chapter 4 details the ways in which

Fern uses the Franklin Stereotype in creating Ruth Hall and in disseminating her own secular gospel of progress, her message about and influence on the role of women writers in the

21 nineteenth-century publishing industry. In the introduction to Capital Letters: Authorship in the

Antebellum Literary Market (2009), David Dowling synthesizes the feature of the nineteenth- century market, which separated idealists like Melville and Thoreau from those who were able to adjust to the capitalist shift in the literary market. “Authors struggled to reconcile their own professional demands with the fashionable antimaterialism in the dominant culture,” which,

Dowling says, “pitted sentiment and romantic poetry against capitalism” (2). Though Dowling’s study is mostly outside of the timeframe of this research, his chapter on Fanny Fern’s career provides context for Chapter 4.

Joyce Warren’s Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (1992) is not the most recent biographical work on Fern, but it is still the most often referenced in other articles and still the only biographical work that considers Fern alone. Fern takes center stage in Mary Kelley’s

Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (1984).

Kelley’s study of multiple women writers, their struggles and concerns, suggests Fern’s influence and popularity not only with her readers, but also with her peers. Karen A. Weyler’s

“Literary Labors and Intellectual Prostitution: Fanny Fern’s Defense of Working Women”

(2005) is an evaluation of Ruth Hall and Fern’s journalistic pieces as interventions on behalf of nineteenth century women laborers arguing against “woman as machine” in both market and domestic spaces (104-105). Ironically, Weyler points out, Fern’s “position as a middle-class woman likely limited her from re-figuring economic relationships in any more radical fashion than she does in her novel” (116). I tend to agree with Weyler’s perspective and expand on

Fern’s limitations by focusing on her need to emphasize Ruth’s moral choices, her quasi-

Christian values (especially since Fern takes on religious hypocrites), and the centrality of her children’s well-being in her efforts—all to placate and pander to a readership wary of the secular

22 pull of capitalism. Fern’s endorsement of the morality of capitalism and her negotiation of the nineteenth-century moral market are also taken up in Melissa J. Homestead’s “‘Every Body Sees the Theft’: Fanny Fern and Literary Proprietorship in Antebellum America” (2001) and Julie

Wilhelm’s “An Expenditure Saved Is an Expenditure Earned: Fanny Fern’s Humoring of the

Capitalist Ethos” (2012). The balance between money and morality in Ruth Hall specifically is the subject of Jennifer Harris’s “Marketplace Transactions and Sentimental Currencies in Fanny

Fern’s Ruth Hall” (2006).

Louisa May Alcott’s novels Little Women (1868-1869) and Work: A Story of Experience

(1872) both follow the pattern of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but the preoccupation of both heroines and Alcott herself with money, success, and publishing place these novels and Alcott under the Franklin Stereotype. Alcott, like Fern, creates fictional heroes who at once promote the moral good possible with industry and work while lamenting the preeminence of money in the emerging market culture. In the Introduction of Work (1994), Joy S. Kasson says, “For Louisa

Alcott, the path to financial security and the assurance of a continued middle-class life lay in her writing” (xxvi). As Kasson suggests, the anxieties about money as expressed by Alcott’s fictional characters’ reflect her own complex relationship with the nineteenth-century print market. Alcott’s emphasis on morality and struggle to justify her own ambition and reliance on capital are the subject of several studies including Stephanie Foote’s “Resentful Little Women:

Gender and Class Feeling in Louisa May Alcott (2005), “Unsexed by Labor: Middle-Class

Women and the Need to Work” (2008) by Lynn M. Alexander, Holly Blackford’s “Chasing

Amy: Mephistopheles, the Laurence Boy, and Louisa May Alcott’s Punishment of Female

Ambition” (2011), and “Honeybees and Discontented Workers: A Critique of Labor in Louisa

May Alcott” (2012) by Sarah T. Lahey.

Roberta Seelinger Trites’s Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel

(2007) is a comparative study of both the lives and works of Louisa May Alcott and Mark

Twain. It is expansive in scope as Trites covers every novel written by each author. Trites claims that the figure of the adolescent character (such as Jo March and Huck Finn) in Alcott and

Twain’s fiction served as “metaphors for reform” (xiv). The seventeen-year-old Franklin found in Part One of the Autobiography represents a similar metaphor, but the metaphor becomes overt moral lesson by Part Two. Trites claims a subtlety in the reform lessons of Alcott and Twain’s works for adolescent audiences, but, using the Franklin Stereotype, I argue that Alcott and Twain emphasized the moral instruction of their works in order to appeal to a wider audience.

Characters like Jo March and Huck Finn are not so much subversive reformers as they are secular saints, preaching a gospel of both societal and moral importance. In addition to Trites’s work, I look at several biographical works dedicated to Alcott and Twain individually to provide background on Alcott and Twain’s writing careers and innovations in the nineteenth-century moral market. The Alcott and Twain biographies consulted for this study include Harriet

Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (2009), Eve LaPlante’s Marmee

& Louisa (2012), Twain’s expansive The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volumes 1 and 2 (2010,

2013), and Louis J. Budd’s Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (1983).

“Huck Finn never trades in his tatters,” and “he follows the dictates of his own boy heart rather than the demands of a corrupt and corrupting society,” says Michael Patrick Hearn in his introduction to The Annotated Huckleberry Finn (xcvii). Likewise, the pre-Weems and Goodrich

Franklin calls himself “printer” in his fanciful epitaph and creates his own moral code by picking and choosing from religious and secular characters such as “Jesus and Socrates.” Twain’s version of the Franklin Stereotype also reminds us that Franklin, as both the writer and the

24 fictional secular saint, is self-effacing and able to find humor in complicated and delicate situations. In Chapter 5, I explore Twain’s interpretation of the Franklin Stereotype. I argue that

Twain’s manipulation of the stereotype hews closer a more realistic Franklin than the Franklin popularized at the start of the nineteenth century in the works of Weems and Goodrich. Several studies support my reading of Twain and his characters Huck and Jim including Laurel

Bollinger’s “Say it, Jim: The Morality of Connection in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

(2002), Stephanie Le Menager’s “Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain’s

Mississippi” (2004), Andrew Levy’s “The Boy Murderers: What Mark Twain and Huckleberry

Finn Really Teach” (2009) and his excellent book Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the

Era That Shaped His Masterpiece (2015), and Jocelyn Chadwick’s The Jim Dilemma (1998).

In the Preface to the Norton Critical Edition of Ragged Dick (2008), Hildegard Hoeller says Alger “had his finger on the pulse of America and was able to offer a version of its central myth, the American dream, that his readers could—for a long time—embrace” (ix). My study of

Horatio Alger and his Ragged Dick shows how each is a reinvention not only of the American dream, but of the American dream first imagined by Franklin. Gary Scharnhorst’s The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. (1985) is the only scholarly biography available about Horatio Alger, Jr. at this time. After nearly three decades, many of the assumptions and misconceptions about Alger’s life and work persist in scholarly articles, in spite of Scharnhorst’s research, which complicates the narratives that begin with Alger as pederast and end with him dying a lonely failure.

Michael Moon’s article, “‘The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes’: Pederasty,

Domesticity, and Capitalism” (1987) quotes from Scharnhorst but takes him out of context and makes lurid and unfounded implications about Alger’s key project, the Children’s Aid Society, and its founder, Charles Loring Brace. In “Pandering in the Public Sphere; Masculinity and the

Market in Horatio Alger” (1996), Glenn Hendler defines the public sphere as a space “neither domestic or commercial” (416), and he argues that Alger’s fictions offer “imaginary resolutions” to the contradictions of this sphere (417). Aaron Shaheen is also interested in negotiated space in

“Endless Frontiers and Emancipation from History: Horatio Alger’s Reconstruction of Place and

Time in Ragged Dick” (2005). Shaheen argues that “Ragged Dick uses the motif of the American frontier to channel notions of time and space toward a larger, albeit spurious, understanding of capitalist accumulation” (37). According to Shaheen, Alger’s vision of Gilded Age New York

“transform[s] urban blight into frontier prosperity” (37).

Like Hendler and Shaheen, I argue that Alger is negotiating a contradictory space, but the space I am investigating is between the secular and the spiritual. Lisa Fluet describes Ragged

Dick as “at once self-interestedly enterprising, and disinterestedly benevolent” in his

“interventions [with] the lives of those periodically in need around him” (110). Fluet’s “The

Unsocial ‘Purfessional’: Revisiting Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick” (2009) suggests that Alger’s character becomes more antisocial as he climbs up the social ladder, but I argue the opposite.

Dick, like Franklin in his Autobiography, continually becomes more outward-oriented as he transforms; Dick’s benevolence is purposefully “interested” as Alger overtly asks his adult- readers to become interested in the lives of street boys and orphans.

The Secular and the Spiritual

Sacvan Bercovich proposed a fusion of “the sacred and profane” in The American

Jeremiad (1978). “American writers have tended to see themselves as outcasts and isolates, prophets crying in the wilderness,” he argued. “So they have been, as a rule: American

Jeremiahs, simultaneously lamenting a declension and celebrating a national dream” (180).

Though I do not quote Bercovich extensively in this study, the Franklin Stereotype owes much to

26 his work in presenting a religious figurehead and a sustained narrative that reaches across generations of writers. Several American literature surveys have followed, including David S.

Reynolds’ Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (1981), and, more recently, Dawn Coleman’s Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel (2013) and Claudia

Stokes’ The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion

(2014). Stokes’ work, in particular, advances the ways we read religion in American literature by tracing the more subtle and far-reaching influences—not just Biblical allusions and homiletic structures, but the whole of sentimental literature and language. Often associated primarily with feminism, female writers, and the domestic sphere, Stokes recasts sentimental “modes that would have been recognizable [as religious] to contemporary readers of sentimental literature but that, because of the genre’s successes in concealing and institutionalizing those modes, have been invisible to successive generations of readers” (19). Similarly, I trace what has been accepted as market and secular to be, simultaneously, moral and spiritual.

Several works inform my definitions and applications of the secular, secularity, and secularism. Rethinking Secularism (2011), an essay collection edited by Craig Calhoun, Mark

Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, was a primary resource referenced many times in my research. José Casanova’s definitions are taken nearly verbatim from this collection.

Additionally, Michael W. Kaufmann’s “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies:

Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession” (2007) provided a clear overview of much of the work this dissertation builds upon. Kaufmann warns that a survey of the work already done reveals the difficulties of categorizing the “secular” and the “religious” as separate, equal, or even one-in-the-same. Instead, he suggests, “along with religion, the secular

27 was and continues to be a product of historical contingency and change.” “The overall aim,”

Kaufmann says, “is to reopen” the secularization narrative (609).

Benjamin Franklin

In his Autobiography, Franklin admits to “gratifying his own vanity” by providing his happy life as an example (Writings 10). Jerry Weinberger calls it “the Franklin revealed by

Franklin” (4). Weinberger, like many Franklin scholars, acknowledges a split between the

Benjamin Franklin of historical account and the Benjamin Franklin written into being by the

Founding Father himself. In Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral,

Religious, and Political Thought (2005), Weinberger concludes that the “real Franklin” is the

“philosophical Franklin” (288). Scholars and biographers have many other preferred names for the “real Franklin”: Claude-Anne Lopez has emphasizes Franklin’s romanticism and joie de vivre; James Campbell his pragmatism; and Sheila Skemp his conflicted loyalties and ultimate courage to choose a side in the Revolution. Charles L. Sanford asserts in “An American

Pilgrim’s Progress” (1954) that the fictional character Franklin creates of himself in his

Autobiography is a “secular saint” (a term I borrow for this study) suited to the changing moral values of the new Republic. Quoting Carl Becker, Sanford says Franklin substituted “the secular story with a happy ending with the Christian story with a happy ending” (307). Carla Mulford points out the importance of Franklin and his secular saint throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory”

(1999). Mulford calls the “figure of Franklin,” an amalgamation of his life, his works, and the myth surrounding him which served various groups, a “[safeguard] social and economic instability” from the beginnings of the Republic after his death in 1790 to Reconstruction of the nation after the Civil War (418).

J.A. Leo Lemay’s three volume The Life of Benjamin Franklin divides Franklin’s life into three eras: Volume 1, Journalist 1706-1730 (2006), Volume 2, Printer and Publisher 1730-1747

(2006), and Volume 3, Soldier, Scientist, and Politician (2009). As the titles imply, Lemay’s scholarly investigation of Franklin’s life is primarily a study of his life as a writer. Each volume concludes with Lemay’s evaluation of “where Franklin is” in his development. In Volume 1, for example, Lemay points to the good work of the Junto, Franklin’s many Courant essays where he

“tried to improve society,” Franklin’s reasoned understanding of “life’s moral complexity,” and his early iconoclasm as a religious skeptic (461). Lemay says, “As a young adult, Franklin was still making his full share of mistakes. But he was improving, studying ferociously, and always writing” (460, emphasis mine). Franklin’s moral project, seen in Lemay’s work, is a written project, and it continues into Volume 2, where Lemay details Franklin’s successes as a printer, publisher, and bookseller up to his retirement in 1748. Volume 3 follows Franklin into public life as a scientist and politician.

Douglas Anderson’s The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin (2012) is an attempt to create a biography of the fictional character Franklin creates of himself in the Autobiography, the character Sanford calls the “secular saint.” Anderson begins The Unfinished Life with a claim that “our collective story of Franklin’s life is not his story” (1). Anderson’s study of the

Autobiography offers an analysis of Franklin as a writer and a printer through the creation of his fictional self. Comparing Franklin’s developing character as a young man and the printing process, Anderson points out, “Franklin’s craft had taught him to appreciate the intricate and often frustrating relations between the process and the product, a double nature that the printer’s page conceals” (51). Anderson’s book focuses on the fictional Franklin; my own study considers several of Franklin’s fictional creations, comparing them to the fictional characters, the secular

29 saints, of Alger, Fern, Alcott, and Twain, and, ultimately, attempts to plot a cycle of morality and prosperity which constitutes the Franklin Stereotype.

Though there are dozens of well-written biographies of Franklin available, I have only included three, as they provide ample historical context for this research: Edmund S. Morgan’s

Benjamin Franklin (2002), Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and

Gordon S. Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004). Walter Isaacson’s biography is the one cited again and again in recent Franklin scholarship. An American Life follows a Franklin ever-conscious of his morality and virtues. Isaacson continually returns to

Franklin’s “Quaker friend” telling him to add a thirteenth virtue of “humility” and Cotton

Mather’s lesson to “stoop” rather than charge ahead arrogantly. Isaacson’s story is of a man who used his print and public life to benefit the common good. It is not an uncommon take on

Franklin, but it is certainly not the dominant narrative of those who fault him as the genesis of mercenary capitalism. My research supports the version of Franklin Isaacson creates and attempts to find an “Isaacson version” of Horatio Alger, Jr., Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, and

Mark Twain.

James Campbell’s “The Pragmatist in Franklin,” included in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin (2008), presents the “pragmatic philosophy” that Franklin deliberately developed over his lifetime. Campbell says that Franklin’s pragmatism does not seem like a philosophy because it is primarily concerned with a common good. Mimicking Franklin’s humor and irony, Campbell states, “Philosophy has too often become an inward-looking pursuit of the preconditions of the means to begin to prepare to attempt to understand. Similarly, the common good, when it appears as a value at all, is too often simply assumed to be connected to whatever philosophers are interested in exploring” (114). Where Campbell emphasizes pragmatism in

30 order to establish it as a philosophy attributable to Franklin, my own study looks at the ways in which Franklin’s pragmatism bridges the tensions of the nineteenth century’s “moral market” and provides a model emphasized in the works of Alger, Fern, Alcott, and Twain.

Todd N. Thompson’s article “Representative Nobodies: The Politics of Benjamin

Franklin’s Satiric Personae, 1722-1757” (2011) and Claude-Anne Lopez’s book My Life with

Benjamin Franklin (2000) round the Franklin scholarship considered here. Thompson challenges readings of Franklin’s satiric pseudonyms as completely separate entities from their creator.

Thompson argues, “The particular perspectives and traits that Franklin’s authorship gave to

Dogood, Saunders, and Plainman were important, if only because in their modesty, fallibility, and alienation from power, they came to represent a politically significant ‘nonauthority’ paradoxically capable of speaking powerfully to power” (450). Thompson details Franklin’s friendship with the popular Great Awakening preacher George Whitefield, suggesting that his admiration of Whitefield’s sway over an audience was something Franklin wanted to emulate through Poor Richard (469-470). Characterizing Franklin’s various public personae as hoaxes,

Claude-Anne Lopez claims that most of Franklins “hoaxes” “had benevolent purposes” (16).

Thompson tries to correct attempts to separate Franklin from his writings while Lopez tries to mend Franklin’s popular reputation by turning readers back to his writings. Lopez concludes her collection of essays with the lofty proclamation that Franklin believed that “given a chance, the human spirit would soar forever higher” (227). Thompson and Lopez hint at the Franklin

Stereotype—focusing on his writing, detailing his altruistic projects, deciphering his moral philosophy—but they do not turn solely to Franklin’s career as a writer, and none applies

Franklin’s model on possible literary descendants.

Nancy Glazener’s “Benjamin Franklin and the Limits of Secular Civil Society” (2008) provides an evaluation of Franklin’s secular morality which suggests it as a reinterpretation of the morality suggested by many religions rather than placing it outside of religious morality.

Glazener argues that the self-interest so often associated with Franklin is only a partial reading of him and of the Autobiography. “Franklin’s writings take self-interest for granted,” Glazner says,

“Emphasizing projects in which reciprocal and combinatory forms of self-interest can bring people together productively.” Reading Franklin’s secular morality as a pragmatic religious response to natural inclinations of man, she says, “The best we can do, as creatures of self- interest, seems to be to seek sociable versions of self-interest and to throw in a little altruism”

(225). If, as Glazner suggests, Franklin “throws in a little altruism” to deemphasize self-interest,

I argue that Alger, Fern, Alcott, and Twain throw on more and more altruism in attempts to completely erase (or at least fully justify) the self-interest of their characters and their selves.

Gillian Avery’s Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books 1621-1922 (1994) offers a comparison between the children’s literature tradition in America and the tradition in

England. She writes about both the print markets of Franklin (the mid and late eighteenth century) and of the nineteenth century authors of my study. Part of Avery’s book details the types of printed materials for children published in England and shipped over to the New World.

In this section, Avery also discusses the early influence of Franklin in eighteenth-century children’s books. According to Avery, the “political feeling and patriotic fervour were high” in the late eighteenth-century, so an interest in histories of American heroes was beginning to emerge in children’s literature” (52). It is in this market where Franklin’s writing and image begin to influence not only children’s literature but, as Mulford points out, most aspects of the

American print culture of the nineteenth century. Regarding Poor Richards Almanack, Avery

32 says Franklin’s pseudonym seemed to “have the common touch,” and, as she elucidates later about the distinctly American style of children’s literature, Poor Richard “seemed to speak to each individual, using images and analogies that the ordinary man immediately understood” (54).

The “figure of Franklin” is inculcated in nearly all literate Americans of the nineteenth century starting with their earliest books.

Chapter 2

THE FRANKLIN STEREOTYPE

Efforts to Christianize Franklin, as many of his defenders have, depends entirely

on how far the proponent will stretch the term “Christian.”

Roy Anker, Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture (136)

He is called the “First American.” Benjamin Franklin’s many accomplishments and the plethora of legends that surround those accomplishments have served as both inspiration and influence for generations of statesmen, scientists, writers, publishers, and “Americans” in the broadest definitions of that moniker. All of this might only surprise a resurrected Franklin in scope. He was quite conscious of posterity. He did his best to fashion a Benjamin Franklin who would not only be admired, but modeled after, Benjamin Franklin who would be recreated in several newer “editions.” His most concerted effort to this end was his writings which would eventually be known as the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a combination memoir, self- help guide, hero journey, and secular-spiritual tract, the Autobiography presents Franklin as not only “the perfect American” but a Founding Father whose benevolence could only be surpassed by George Washington. Like Paul writing to the emerging church, Franklin seems to say to the new nation: “I’m far from perfect, but I’m better than you. Follow me.” And Franklin has had

“followers” ever since.

To appreciate Benjamin Franklin’s influence as a writer one must appreciate his performance as an actor in his own work. Early in his Autobiography Franklin describes himself as being industrious and frugal in both reality and appearance. He talks about carting a wheelbarrow filled with paper through the streets, giving the locals the impression that he was a hard working young man. Some might read Franklin’s wheelbarrow as a sign of success. Indeed,

34 almost every aspect of Franklin’s life has been associated with wealth and success, in spite of his many non-monetary accomplishments. Trish Loughran warns, “Franklin’s wheelbarrow is not really a sign of anything in particular but just, cannily, a sign—one that Franklin elastically uses to create and promote an appearance, among his neighbors and customers, of integrity, frugality, industry, and success” (19). His memoir, though it has been extensively fact-checked and annotated by hordes of scholars like Leo Lemay, is also essentially a performance. Those who use the Autobiography “as the centerpiece for arguments about print’s general and diffuse centrality,” Loughran says, should understand that it is “as much a performance for us, his readers, as the historical wheelbarrow it signifies was a performance put on by Franklin for his neighbors” (19). However, it is the performative aspect of Franklin’s Autobiography which makes it such a wonderful model for the nineteenth-century authors examined here; Franklin’s

“writings often occupy more than one level, and the ideas that appear first, on the surface, are not always the most important. More than one reader, from his day to ours, has mistakenly believed a hoax to be true or an ironic aside to be literally meant” (Houston 20). More than one reader, from his day to ours, has mistakenly read him as wholly secular or, less often, wholly spiritual.

This is a study of five novels and four novelists of nineteenth-century America which, I posit, are all newer editions of Franklin and his Autobiography in the Age of Print: Antebellum celebrity columnist, Fanny Fern and her Ruth Hall, A Domestic Tale of the Present Time; Louisa

May Alcott and her most famous novel, Little Women, and the lesser-known, Work: A Story of

Experience; serial “boys’ book” novelist Horatio Alger, Jr. and his most successful work,

Ragged Dick, or Street Life in New York with Boot Blacks; and Mark Twain and the book considered by many his masterwork, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Each of these nineteenth- century authors, like Franklin, use religious tropes and language to create “secular saints” with

35 mass audience appeal and familiarity; preach a “secular gospel” that straddles the line of religious moral and social reform; and combine religious rhetoric with capitalist know-how to navigate (and conquer) a moral market. I call this the Franklin Stereotype.

The Franklin Stereotype is made up of the secular saint and the secular gospel found in his Autobiography, as well as his ability to navigate a secular-spiritual moral market. The

Autobiography grew out of Franklin’s familiarity with the “steady sellers” of his time,

All of them were concerned with religion as a mode of living and a mode of

dying. As they define it, the religious life encompassed four great crises or rites of

passage. The conversion process in all of its amplitude was the dominating event

in the steady sellers; many of them were specifically about the process, and each

assumed that it was fundamental. Other steady sellers focused on the imperative

for self-scrutiny when coming to the Lord’s Table to receive communion. Still

others dramatized the experience of “remarkable” afflictions. A final group taught

the art of dying well, of turning the terror of death into the joy of eternal life with

Christ. (66-67)

The exemplar text was one of Franklin’s favorite books, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I argue that the “secular saint” Benjamin Franklin created in his Autobiography was reinterpreted and reimagined by nineteenth-century authors, in much the same way Franklin himself adapted

Pilgrim’s Progress, in order to promote their own secular saints and gospels. In addition, I focus specifically on Franklin’s career as a financially savvy writer and cast it, like a stereotype, on the

“gospels” and marketing efforts of four nineteenth-century writers: Fanny Fern, Louisa May

Alcott, Horatio Alger, and Mark Twain.

Only Alger and Twain freely reference the influence of Franklin on their lives and writing, but all of these soon-to-be celebrated writers existed in a moment when Franklin permeated not only schoolhouses, but post offices, fire departments, government buildings, and, of course, all aspects of the print industry. An article Twain wrote for The Galaxy in 1870 humorously illustrates the way Franklin was used as “the Example” in nineteenth-century

America. After detailing many instances when Franklin was “thrown up on” him as the bar to be met, Twain insists that his intention is not to tarnish the Founding Father’s reputation. Rather, as

Twain puts it, “I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent calamitous idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great genius by working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night, instead of waiting till morning like a

Christian.” Twain’s feigned exasperation culminates in an accusation against fathers who think that “this programme, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father’s fool” (“The Late

Benjamin Franklin” 308). But Twain was far from “every father’s fool” and he—along with

Fern, Alger, and Alcott—would make a great nineteenth-century version of Franklin.

Franklin fully intended to be modeled after by posterity. Justifying the writing of his memoir, he opens up Part One of the Autobiography,

Having emerg’d from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to

a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having

gone so far thro’ Life with a considerable Share of Felicity, the conducting Means

I made use of, which, with the Blessing of God, so well succeeded, my Posterity

may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own Situations,

and therefore fit to be imitated. (BFA 9)

Not only does he make it clear that he wants to act as a model for future generations, but he also indicates the need to change up the model. He says that if he were offered the chance to do it all over again, he would “have no objection” to living the same life, “only asking the Advantage

Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first” (BFA 9). So many have taken up Franklin’s mantle in business, in politics, in science, and in publishing, that an exhaustive exploration of “second editions” is quite impossible. However, finding a strain of his influence in the flourishing print world of nineteenth-century America is a bit easier.

Charles L. Sanford asserts that Franklin’s Autobiography “is a great moral fable pursuing on a secular level the theme of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress” (306). This fable Franklin was a self-conscious reinterpretation of John Bunyan’s hero, Christian, from The Pilgrim’s

Progress (1678). The Benjamin Franklin of nineteenth-century American mythos was an amalgamation of the Franklin found in fragments of what we now call the Autobiography (only printed fully and accurately in 19814) and the Franklin constructed in accounts such as those produced in fanciful “biographies” by writers like Mason Locke Weems and Samuel Goodrich

(“Peter Parley”). Franklin, in popular nineteenth-century accounts, became a new type of

American “secular saint” who pursued both moral and monetary “progress,” as opposed to

Bunyan’s Christian, who primarily seeks moral salvation. In Behold the Child: American

Children and Their Books 1621-1922 (1994), Gillian Avery says Benjamin Franklin “was being invoked in much the same way as [Saint] Timothy had been by Puritan preachers—as the virtuous example that youth should perennially keep before them” (54). This is not surprising considering “the moral value attached to books in general, rather than to the religious texts

4 See NCE, Introduction xxiii, Note 8.

38 honored in Protestant tradition, was one of many signs that a reverence for culture was replacing an older religious sensibility” (Sicherman 287).

Franklin was not only a writer and a publisher, but he was also one of the best of his time and certainly the most famous printer and publisher up through the nineteenth century. It is perhaps less a wonder that Franklin should be stereotyped by the four authors considered in this dissertation than that Franklin would not be stereotyped by every author of the nineteenth century. This, of course, was not the case at all. Charles Robert Dixon’s dissertation, “All About the Benjamins: The Nineteenth Century Character Assassination of Benjamin Franklin” (2011), examines the writings of Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and

Frederick Douglass to “track the systematic shaping and ultimate character assassination of

Benjamin Franklin in the nineteenth and early twentieth century” (9). Dixon argues that present day ideas about Franklin being primarily concerned with capital over all else largely originated in the nineteenth-century writing of those who, as David Dowling puts it, ascribed to the

“fashionable antimaterialism in the dominant culture.” But, as Andrew Burstein points out, for every generation following the American Revolution, “Americans preserved of the past only what was useful to the present” (334). For Fern, Alcott, Alger, and Twain, the useful past included a model balance of the secular and of the spiritual.

Franklin’s approach to using his writings to enact public works seems to be an essential reason why his figure looms so prominently in the works of Fern, Alger, Alcott, and Twain—all of them championing one or more causes with their writings and their revenues. In 1747, for example, Franklin was so frustrated with the Pennsylvania government’s inability to form a militia that he “took matters into his own hands to convince private citizens to work collectively for the public good” (Smolenski 60). He published a pamphlet titled Plain Truth almost

39 immediately fostered support for the militia. Franklin had used his writings over the years to convince wealthier citizens to lend out their books forming the first public libraries in America.

Similarly, in February 1734, Franklin wrote an opinion piece in his Pennsylvania Gazette to encourage the support and formation of a fire department (Writings 239-242). Every one of these mostly altruistic acts (mostly since each would, to some degree, benefit Franklin as a fellow citizen) would have been well known to most middle-class American citizens in the nineteenth century, and certainly to Fern, Alger, Alcott, and Twain, who had grown up memorizing them out of primers and biographies like those by Weems and Goodrich.

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the “Age of Print” had been fully realized.

Newspapers, magazines, and full-scale independent booksellers had flourished in response to an increasingly literate population from the 1790s to the 1830s and 1840s. Many of the people involved in the print market took it upon the growing industry to “gather up the diverse people of a far-flung land and enlist them in a common life” (Gross 3). An essential part of this plan was to create a common history and a national mythology, and Franklin was a key figure in that mythology. Mason Locke Weems, famous for creating the myth of George Washington and the cherry tree, produced and distributed a series of stories about Franklin’s life starting in 1815. 5

Many other “fanciful” biographies followed, including Samuel Goodrich’s/“Peter Parley’s” The

Life of Benjamin Franklin (1832). “The body and life of Franklin was serving as the figural body of the nation,” Carla Mulford points out, “Where the qualities of the individual man and the accumulated merits demonstrated in his philosophical and scientific expertise became identifiable and emulable qualities that entered the discourse of the nationhood of ‘America’”

5 See James N. Green “The Rise of Book Publishing,” A History of the Book in America, Vol. 2, p. 86.

(423). Mulford goes on to say that even after the Civil War, “The civic healing power of the figure of Franklin became increasingly useful and apparent” (424).

What Mulford calls “the figure of Franklin” seemed to transform from the first half of the nineteenth century to the latter half. The growing print industry allowed for and even demanded a more diverse selection of stories. Franklin “biographies” were joined by Franklin-like and

Franklin-inspired fictions such as Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854) and Horatio Alger, Jr.’s

Ragged Dick (1868), with their versions of the “secular saint” and with the authors themselves seeming to emphasize the secular over the spiritual. The secular saint was again reinterpreted in the works of Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, authors attempting to negotiate new standards of morality and virtue and the demands of a print market hungry for material which justified those new standards. Scott E. Casper says the nineteenth-century print culture, in terms of capital, “constituted a modest segment of America’s industrial revolution.” Yet, Casper points out, “The books themselves played a disproportionately significant role in justifying and embedding a market culture in the lives, homes, and ideas of Americans” (4).

Franklin and the Pilgrim’s Progress

I wish well-meaning sensible Men would not lessen their Power of doing Good by

a Positive assuming Manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create

Opposition, and to defeat every one of those Purposes for which Speech was

given us, to wit, giving or receiving Information or Pleasure: For If you would

inform, a positive dogmatical Manner in advancing your Sentiments, may provoke

Contradiction and prevent a candid Attention.

Benjamin Franklin (22)

Pilgrim’s Progress at once gospelizes human experience and literalizes biblical

metaphor.

Kathleen M. Swaim, Pilgrim’s Progress, Puritan Progress (80)

Franklin took the structure of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to illustrate his own progress from tenth child (the “tithe”) of a working class family to one of the most popular men in his country and abroad. Describing Franklin’s interpretation of Bunyan, Cathy Davidson succinctly distils the major shifts to what she calls the “paradigm of progress” from The Pilgrim’s Progress to the Autobiography: “Young man makes good. Material good, it must be emphasized. In terms of republican iconography, the picaresque gives us Benjamin Franklin turning his two loaves of bread into a small fortune and then turning that success into narrative, into a celebrated and celebrating autobiography” (253). Franklin was writing about this journey with some hindsight; the first portion was composed in 1771 when he was seventy. Even without national independence under his belt at that point, Franklin had already become a well-loved celebrity.

His close association with the print market and with politics made him keenly aware of a need to fashion his own history or certainly others would do it. Fanny Fern, too, was writing Ruth Hall with an awareness of what she had already accomplished and her own need to preserve the version of her story that she wanted to be held as the gospel truth. Alan Houston describes how the Pilgrim’s Progress structure neatly serves Franklin:

The rhetorical framework of the Autobiography would have been familiar to

Franklin’s audience from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Christianity. A

man of promise and ability leads a life of dissipation; awakening to this fact, he is

disgusted with himself and resolves to change; through reflection and self-

observation, he struggles to purge himself of vice; over time, with the helping

hand of God, he moves ever closer to a life of purity and perfection. This

narrative, concerned with the fate of a single soul, was deeply personal. But it was

told for public purposes, and not simply that we might learn from the struggles

and mistakes of others. The self-created through self-discipline was an exemplary

self. It represented the qualities and characteristics of a life infused with God’s

grace, and it expressed God’s grace through benevolent action in the world. Good

works were an outward manifestation of inner piety. (38)

Franklin refers directly to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress twice in his

Autobiography. The first time, he is recalling the book as the first of several he would purchase and then sell back, emphasizing the monetary exchange over the moral lesson: "From a Child I was fond of Reading, and all the little Money that came into my Hands was ever laid out in

Books. Pleas’d with the Pilgrim’s Progress, my first Collection was of John Bunyan’s Works, in separate little Volumes. I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy…” (NCE 17, emphasis added). The second mention of Bunyan’s morality tale comes just after a description of Franklin saving a drowning drunk who asks him to dry the book for him: “It prov’d to be my old favorite

Author Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress in Dutch, finely printed on good Paper with copper Cuts, a

Dress better than I had ever seen it wear in its own Language” (NCE 26). The second account focuses on the quality of the publication rather than the writing. “Once one begins to tug on the thread provided by the opportune appearance of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Franklin’s little anecdote[s],” Douglas Anderson argues, “it quickly offers a number of unexpected hints on how to read the details and episodes that surround it” (22). Anderson’s The Unfinished Life of

Benjamin Franklin (2012) convincingly follows all of the narrative similarities between

Bunyan’s book and Franklin’s memoir, including their digressions (“digression is design”

Anderson says), their insistence on mixing forms, and their belief that their own curiosity over moral questions would be shared by their readers (22-25). Suffice it to say, traces of Bunyan,

Christian, Hopeful, and the entire structure of Pilgrim’s Progress in the Autobiography are not just coincidental.

Part One of the Autobiography follows a young Franklin on a journey of self-discovery and eventual “salvation” from the cursed city of Boston to the promised land of Philadelphia. In this story, Franklin establishes himself as the hero of a version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s

Progress where it is not the so much the soul at a crossroads, as the vocation of the man. This is perhaps the most popular portion of the memoir, the one almost always included in anthologies and read by schoolchildren. Franklin’s switch from spiritual journey to secular journey is so easily interpreted as a reflection of the switch from Puritan-thinking to Enlightenment-thinking.

Unfortunately, this narrative defangs some of the genius of Franklin. He relied on his readers to be familiar with Bunyan’s tale, thus assumed at least some—if not most—of his audience to be of a spiritual bent. Part One is not without its spiritual turns. In it, the reader finds out that

Franklin was meant to be a “tithe” and destined early for service to the church. Certainly we have the story of the “self-made man,” but we also have the story of turning one’s vocation into service and one’s nation into his church. Franklin shares his struggles, his moral “errata,” and his hard-won victories over temptations. In Part One he becomes a secular saint. His character does not transition from spiritual concerns to market concerns any more absolutely than the nation itself—in spite of the popularity of such a simplified history. Instead, the secular saint elides the spiritual and the “worldly.” Saint Franklin’s success as a newly established printer is both a market and a moral victory.

Franklin’s language about religion in Part One is sometimes confusing. For example, he claims to be a “thorough Deist,” but his experiences with other deists (some he himself helped to convert) convinces him “that this Doctrine tho’ it might be true, was not very useful” (BFA 55).

There was a use for a moral standard. If one didn’t believe in all of the precepts of a religion, those precepts could help to make men more civil. When Franklin arrives in Philadelphia, “the first House” he was in or slept in was a Quaker meeting house. He asks the advice of a young

Quaker “whose Countenance” he liked (BFA 29). The permissive nature of Quaker meetings obviously appealed to Franklin, offering a useful moral compass without dogma.

As if he anticipates the easy narrative of history that would follow, Franklin’s next writings for his memoir consist almost exclusively of a spiritual exegesis of the virtuous life. He considers the benefits of several spiritual teachings and he decides to take a little from every one, intent on becoming like “Jesus and Socrates.” (How can we possibly miss his juxtaposition of the religious and the secular?) Part Two acts as a self-help guide, but not as literally as Gretchen

Rubin’s 2009 bestseller The Happiness Project or any of the hundreds of other “programs” that have claimed Franklin as their inspiration. The entire point of Part Two seems to be the impossibility of complete virtue and the acceptance of living a life “as virtuous as possible.”

Franklin is forgiving of his readers because he is forgiving of himself. He is also writing an antidote to the heavy handed sermons of the religious and theses of the enlightened. Finally, Part

Two begins with two letters practically begging Franklin to see himself as a model for future generations. The relatively tight space of Part Two serves as not only self-help book, but a bildungsroman that marries the spiritual coming-of-age with the secular.

There is a merry sort of acceptance of imperfection when Franklin informs his reader, “It was about this time that I conceiv’d the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection”

(BFA 78). We get the sense that the project is failed out of the gate, but he uses the remainder of

Part Two to remind us of the good of setting out—regardless of the end result of the enterprise.

Here, I think, is where he fails to fit into the tidy limitations of being read as areligious or as subversively religious. Franklin does give us a prayer for the secular in this part of the

Autobiography, which in part requests that God, “Accept my kind Offices to thy Children, as the only Return in my Power for thy continual Favors to me” (BFA 83). But he goes out of his way to make sure that readers do not tie him to dogma—or make him dogma. He says, “my Scheme was not wholly without Religion” and “there was in it no Mark of any of the distinguishing

Tenets of any particular Sect. I purposely avoided them.” Franklin felt that his moral “scheme” might be “serviceable to People in all Religions,” or, we might add, people without any particular religious claim (BFA 86). Serving God, in Franklin’s estimation, was doing good for the largest swath of the population regardless of their affiliation. This, of course, was a scandalous belief system tolerated in Franklin only because of his celebrity and esteem. It certainly was not tolerated by all.

In Parts Three and Four, Franklin fleshes out several biographical lessons. Among them, the remarkable networking—and potential market—found in places of worship; the ability of a fine preacher like George Whitefield to get an audience to not only listen but act; and the profitability of doing public good. Again, all of these lessons have been too often interpreted as a sort of mercenary capitalism, but Franklin was generous and well-liked. He has much more in common with philanthropists like Bill Gates than with the big steel and big oil barons who have claimed to follow Franklin’s “rags to riches” tale. Franklin’s view was pragmatic. There was a market for moral advice, and he decided to tap into the sermon-market, the philosophy-market, and the biography-market. He continually thought of ways to improve on the way that people

46 lived their lives, and he created a dizzying list of improvements from bifocals to fire departments; if his benevolent efforts won him fans, readers, and clients, he never viewed the advantage as a conflict of interest. Franklin masterfully tells his progeny to accept spiritual grace for their imperfections and accept monetary compensation for the things they get particularly right.

Part Three begins with Franklin contemplating an entirely new religious sect and setting out a creed. He tells the reader that he was distracted from creating this new religion, but that he was able to offer instruction in virtue through Poor Richard’s Almanac (BFA 90-91). He says that most of this instruction, as we know, “inculcated Industry and Frugality, as the Means for procuring Wealth.” Far too many readings of Franklin seem to stop here and fail to recognize that he continues the thought that the wealth is useful in “securing Virtue, it being more difficult for a Man in Want to act always honestly” (BFA 91). Franklin adds his newspaper, the

Pennsylvania Gazette, as “another Means of communicating Instruction.” Here he offers possibly his most didactic lines in warning future generations of printers to avoid being involved in the “Malice of Individuals” by promoting animosity and false report. He outright calls his words a warning that printers “may be encouraged not to pollute their Presses and disgrace their

Profession by such infamous Practices.” Once again using himself as a model, he tells the reader to “see by my Example” that avoiding these pollutants “will not on the whole be injurious to” the interests of printers (BFA 93).

Franklin spends some time in Part Three enumerating the admirable qualities of George

Whitefield, the virtual voice of the first Great Awakening. Franklin saw in Whitefield the ability of one man to change the hearts of men “from being thoughtless or indifferent about Religion” to the whole world seeming to find religion. Franklin continues to recognize that Whitefield’s

“Eloquence had a wonderful Power over the Hearts and Purses of his Hearers.” Money is needed to do good—a point driven home by each of the writers in this dissertation—and Franklin, of course, finds those who can effect both “hearts and purses” to possess a power worth imitation.

To make his point ever clearer, Franklin walks his reader through the conversion of his own purse. He places his secular saint at one of Whitefield’s sermons: “[…] in the Course of which I perceived [Whitefield] intended to finish with a Collectin, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five Pistoles in Gold.” Having set the homiletic stage, Franklin proceeds by saying that he

“began to soften” as the sermon goes one. First he decides to give the copper, then the silver, and finally the gold, all thanks to Whitefield’s words and the influence of those words (BFA 100-

101).

Franklin finally laments Whitefield’s ever writing down his sermons and beliefs since these left him open to critics. He concludes,

I am of Opinion, if he had never written anything he would have left behind him a

much more numerous and important Sect. And his Reputation might in that case

have been still growing, even after his Death; as there being nothing of his

Writing on which to found a Censure; and give him a lower Character, his

Proselytes would be left at Liberty to feign for him as great a Variety of

Excellencies, as their enthusiastic Admiration might wish him to have possessed.

(BFA 103)

The irony could not be lost on Franklin, penning his own memoir. Then what does he mean? He seems aware of at least two points: One, writing down anything could offer “advantage to enemies.” Two, if, however, one’s “proselytes” are enthusiastic enough, any number of great

48 attributes could be assigned to a man whether or not they were intended. One’s image for posterity was always, thus, open to interpretation. Knowing this, it seemed worth the gamble to attempt to set the record straight—so long as your written rhetoric were as strong as your spoken word. Franklin always took more pride in his writing than his speaking, so this final bit allowed him to show his admiration for Whitefield while setting himself as a superior in writing.

Franklin’s overt nod to religious allegory does not seem to get the same sort of attention as what he writes about work and money in the Autobiography. This oversight might be traced back to Max Weber,6 who “derived Franklin’s economic ethos from a literal interpretation of fewer than seven hundred words. For reference, the Autobiography is approximately sixty-five thousand words long, while Franklin’s Papers is now in its thirty-ninth volume” (Houston 229).

Weber’s brand of “secular cultural criticism” is one which “often equates secularization with modernization and then attacks the evils of modernity: a diminished role for human will in an increasingly technological, capitalistic, imperialistic culture” (Kaufman 623). In other words,

Franklin cannot stand for spirituality and autonomy if he stands for capitalism. Weber isn’t completely off base about Franklin’s apparent cheerleading of virtues which would eventually be identified with capitalism, but he cannot seem to allow for Franklin’s religious influences to be sincere or for his writing to serve a greater good than capitalism. As “Weber sought to explain capitalism’s origins,” Alan Houston argues, “he resolutely focused on what he took to be the first instances of a constellation of ideas and practices that, once firmly established, were self- sustaining” However, Houston says, “Eighteenth-century North Americans were neither attempting to create capitalism from scratch nor were they already within its steely grasp.

6 Weber’s understanding of Franklin is much more complex than this quote from Houston illustrates. However, the fact that Weber’s version of the Autobiography was limited cannot be disputed considering the availability of the full text at the time of Weber’s writing.

Instead, they struggled for survival on the margins of the British Empire, itself already highly commercialized” (226-227). Ironically, that struggle was often represented in religious allegory.

Conclusion

The following chapters will detail the elements of the Franklin Stereotype found in the works of Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Jr., and Mark Twain. Those elements include:

 A secular saint: A figure after Franklin’s invention of himself in his Autobiography, a

figure who demonstrates to the reader a way to live between the secular and the

spiritual and put each in service of the other.

 A secular gospel: A social message following Franklin’s doctrine set forth to a young

nation, describing the sort of “self-help” that makes both the individual and the nation

better.

 A mastery of the moral market: Like Franklin, each author capitalizes on the

seemingly opposing forces of the secular and the spiritual by producing works that

marry the two.

This dissertation adds to a growing body of work within the study of print culture and the history of the book which focuses on reinterpretation of religious and secular influences on authors, markets, and the literature they produced. Jenny Franchot points out some reasoning behind what she sees as the sparseness of academic research regarding religion. “Alarm bells go off at the mention of belief in the public sphere. For many, the Inquisition or the Holocaust is always just around the corner, and, indeed, I’m among them,” Franchot admits. “We are all dangerously prone to force our beliefs upon others. But I also think that we, as Americanists, have allowed our fear at such a prospect to disable our scholarship.” Franchot made this claim

50 nearly twenty years ago, in face of what she saw as a then-conservative revolt in the public sphere that rarely found its way into the more liberal academic realm. She muses, “We have, in fact, produced very little work of interest on religion and American writing. We are rich in studies that foreground gender, race, and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity and class. But where is religion? Why so invisible?” (Franchot 834).

Jump to a 2014 special issue of American Literary History, in which John Lardas Modern says, “The intellectual buzz of the religious turn in literary studies is happening precisely at a moment when the subject of religion and literature no longer exists as a robust site of graduate training or institutional investment.” Modern goes on to say that, “this may not be a bad thing, necessarily, as the study of American religion and religion in general begins, at last, to require a deep-seated reflexivity about its categories and what they conjure. This development, of course, is due to the extrapolating interest in secularity and secularism” (195).

This “religious turn” situates current academic projects within a timeframe seen as the post-secular; most scholars point to the terrorists attacks of September 11th as the split, when even the most staunchly anti-religious could no longer pretend that religion did not continue to play a significant role in culture. This split necessarily presents scholars with a challenge to reevaluate our definitions of religion and secularity, our narrative of how the two interact, and our understandings of decades of scholarship that has essentially assumed the religious question was over. In addition, scholars interested in the nineteenth century print market continue to be interested in all sorts of influences on the market of the Age of Print. Using Benjamin Franklin as my secular-spiritual model, I develop the Franklin Stereotype as a tool to use in this and further research examining the ways in which the spiritual, the secular, and market forces coalesce.

For example, during the Age of Print, according to Dawn Coleman,

Nineteenth-century Protestants looked back on Reformation preachers… as

standard bearers and pointed proudly to many post-Reformation pulpit

luminaries… None, though, loomed as large in the cultural imagination as

Jonathan Edwards or the two transatlantic celebrity religious orators of the

eighteenth century, George Whitefield and John Wesley. Such illustrious

forebears meant that the nineteenth-century preacher, however humble and

unlettered, stood before believers as the representative of an esteemed sacred

tradition (8)

If writers could tap into this “sacred tradition” they would be able to evangelize the gospel of their choice and “exploit” a market for the good of that gospel.

Chapter 3

THE GOSPEL OF PROGRESS

The Mason Brothers, Fanny Fern’s publishers, had plotted out and executed an elaborate marketing campaign for the release of her novel, Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present

Time, in 1854.7 Newspaper advertisements heralded the arrival of a complete work of fiction by the famous columnist, emphasizing the fact that all of these potential readers had already acknowledged Fern’s talent. Of course they would buy her book. Fern and the Mason Brothers knew that the way Ruth Hall was introduced to the public would matter as much as (if not more than) the plot of the book itself. That plot is a thinly-veiled autobiographical story of Ruth’s rise to literary stardom and financial independence in spite of the cruelty and disdain of her own family and the efforts of self-interested publishers to pay her less than she deserved and bind her to their publications.

In the previous chapter, I defined the Franklin Stereotype and attempted to provide a setting—the print market of the nineteenth century, what I call the “moral market”—where the major actors, the authors examined in this study existed and adapted Franklin for their age. This chapter revolves around Fanny Fern and Louisa May Alcott, comparing the story told within their novels, Ruth Hall, Little Women, and Work, to Benjamin Franklin’s own autobiographical memoir. Fern’s and Alcott’s books are themselves versions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but they are more closely related to Franklin’s version, his stereotype.

In the Autobiography we see Franklin lift himself out of his pre-ordained lot. The system simply did not work for him, and he would improve upon it. There was no reason he should be less than his brother simply because he was born later. At the time, this was a “progressive”

7 See Joyce W. Warren Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (1992), p. 122-123.

53 perspective that questioned the long-held societal structure of birthright and standing carried over from English traditions. Franklin was a social rebel and he refashions that rebellion into progress throughout his Autobiography. Readers may have found fault with Franklin’s inability to accept his place in the social hierarchy, but his adaptation of Bunyan wins over sympathy. The challenge to societal norms is not rebellion so much as it is progress, a pilgrim’s progress. The movement is not only physical but ideological. In Bunyan’s story, the ideological progress is away from a sinful or worldly understanding to a heavenly, Christ-like understanding of “how things should be.” Franklin never feels the need to preach his message to his audience; rather, he lets the events unfold in such a way that will garner the most sympathy for his secular saint. By the time Franklin returns home in the narrative to make amends with his brother, the reader should believe his brother has to accept him. His brother’s anger and jealousy seem unjustified and Franklin is redeemed with every instance that he acknowledges his mistakes. Franklin’s gospel of progress is a challenge to tradition and a justification of the means by which one must progress in a system set against him. It is also tied to his own success and influence suggesting that progress—as he describes and defines it—was a necessary movement toward the quintessential American Dream of not only the individual but of the nation. Without progress, there would be no Franklin and without Franklin there would be no United States. Fern and

Alcott, very much products of the women’s movements of the mid- and late-nineteenth-century, use the gospel of progress to thwart the status quo. In fact, one might even read their nineteenth- century gospels as a sort of factionalism common at the time. According to Claudia Stokes

[W]hile sentimental writers were portraying tranquil scenes of private bedtime

prayer, the contemporary public sphere was suffused with belligerent religious

factionalism, which was staged in the pulpit, the street brawl, and the polling

place. For participants in this public discourse, the stakes of these religious

debates were very high: in addition to the insuperable question of the route by

which one could achieve salvation and divine favor, the very future of the United

States, and indeed of humanity itself, seemed to hang in the balance. In an era in

which the number of religious sects seemed to increase by the day, religious

denominations vied for supremacy by attacking the doctrines and practices of

their rivals. (4)

Fern and Alcott present readers with a new gospel and a new doctrine. Like Franklin, they create sympathetic secular saints who convincingly espouse their gospel by being entertaining, self-effacing, and likeable. And why shouldn’t they be? These saints, like

Franklin’s, were based on their own lives. Unlike Franklin’s saint, these were women.

Fern and Alcott, as I demonstrate in this chapter, reinterpret Franklin’s secular gospel of progress and his secular saint to a woman’s perspective in nineteenth-century America. They take on the role of women in both the domestic sphere and in the workplace and, specifically, in the booming print market. They describe social rebellion utilizing one of the most useful tools for women writers of the age, sentimentality, and, like Franklin, they borrow heavily from

Bunyan’s allegory to give their novels just enough religious flavor. Much as abolitionists had used the sentimental and spiritual language to justify “progress” in the ideology and abolition of slavery, Fern and Alcott were adapting this language for the progress of women. They were not alone, of course, in this sort of use of the sentimental, but what sets them apart is the way that they intertwine the use of sentimental, the spiritual, and the growing capitalist ideology of industrial “progress” to make the advances of women seem like a logical and necessary element of societal and national progress. And it works. Fern’s novel is a sensation and Alcott’s Little

Women, arguably, becomes the single most important American girl’s book for generations.

When Fern’s longtime editor at the New York Ledger, Robert Bonner, brought her onboard as the highest paid columnist of her time, he intended to make her the “great figure” and main

“attraction” of his paper (Kelley 6). Alcott’s own publisher, Thomas Niles, helped to cultivate her as a motherly figure and the “friend of children” following the smashing success of Little

Women. Here were two women writers creating rebellious characters and plots which were being celebrated as model citizens. Since Ruth Hall and Little Women were based on the authors’ lives, readers and critics rarely made a distinction between character and author. Had they been poorly received, this might have posed a problem for Fern and Alcott. Certainly there were dissenters.

Even Alcott’s seemingly tame, by today’s standards, girl book was admonished for

“despiritualizing” Bunyan’s allegory, reducing the Apollyon episode “to a conflict with an evil temper,” and various other heresies (LW 18). Alcott refused to change her use of spiritual imagery and Fern refused to take the bite out of her portrayals of family members. Yet both still stood out as models of a new sort of secular morality. They were progressive and their characters and plots elude pigeonholing as merely sentimental, overtly Christian, or thoroughly capitalist.

They found the right balance and made it their gospel. They had plenty of eager would-be followers in their readers.

The Gospel of Fanny Fern

No author—aside from perhaps Walt Whitman—seems to better embody the energies, economics, transformations, and contradictions of the Age of Print. Sara Payson Willis—later

Eldredge, briefly Farrington, and finally Parton—was best known to her readers by her pen name, Fanny Fern. She was the subject of local scandal thanks to her second husband spreading rumors about her fidelity, but she was able to recreate her image in her columns. Readers first

56 experienced Fern’s humorously biting voice in the early 1850s. Her first column, “The Model

Husband,” published in the Olive Branch, reads like a modern day stand-up routine about the foibles of men in the eyes of their wives. From 1852 to 1854, Fanny Fern articles became a staple of several newspapers, including the Olive Branch, True Flag, New York’s Musical World and Times, and the Saturday Evening Post. Fern’s popularity, in perspective, might be compared to a syndicated showing of The Oprah Winfrey Show or The Ellen DeGeneres Show over several smaller and at least one major network. It is no exaggeration to say that the general American reading public of the mid-nineteenth century (that is, the new middle class) at least knew the name “Fanny Fern.” Fern and her novel might have more in common with Franklin and his

Autobiography than any other nineteenth-century American writer. Jane Tompkins opens her now classic study Sensational Design: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (1985) by claiming, “Novels and stories should be studied not because they manage to escape the limitations of their particular time and place, but because they offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (xi). Franklin and Fern both do this for their ages and, specifically, for the print culture. Yet, Fanny Fern and Benjamin Franklin are rarely mentioned in the same breath.

Just as Franklin’s memoir gave him some literary control over his legacy, Ruth Hall reflects Fern’s intent to tell her own story on her own terms. As Mary Kelley put it in Private

Woman, Public Stage (1984), Fern’s novel can be seen as her “justification for her deviant female life writ large” (154). The secular saint of Franklin’s Autobiography is altered by Fern not only to justify her “deviant female life,” but to extend the conversation around American women’s lives during the nineteenth century. Louisa May Alcott takes up this change in her

57 novels Little Women and Work. Ruth Hall fictionalizes Fern’s own journey into the nascent realm of female columnists and celebrities of the nineteenth century. The tale begins in the domestic sphere dominated by unsympathetic and abusive family relations. It details the industry and perseverance of a protagonist determined to pull herself out of her present circumstances by her own writing and hard work. Fern’s novel celebrates Ruth’s victories through her newspaper opinion and advice columns, written largely at the expense of those who had used her so poorly.

Throughout the narrative of the novel, Ruth assures the reader that spite and revenge are not the primary motivations; of course, Fern is protesting her own innocence through Ruth.

In Franklin we see the life of a young printer, once indentured to his familial relation, who sets out to a new land to create a business of his own. It is the memoir of a famous man and the metaphor of an infant nation striking out into the New World free of the once beloved home.

Fern uses the familial relations metaphor in her own narrative, but switches from blood relation to marriage. At a time when the sentimental novel8 was still enormously popular in the United

States, Fern used the marriage metaphor to establish new manners between female writers and publishers. Simultaneously, the surface-level plot—echoing so many of her columns about husbands and marriage—was critical of the domestic responsibilities of husbands to wives.

David Reynolds counts Fern as one of several “creative women on the fringes of the suffrage movement who occasionally wrote political tracts on behalf of women but whose best works represented an effort to move beyond politics into the realm of art” (397). “While Ruth Hall did not resolve the difficulties of the woman writer,” Karen Weyler tells us, “Fern’s novel detailed the plight of the woman writer both affectively and effectively, helping Fern herself locate the

8 A popular genre for many nineteenth-century American writers, characterized by overly dramatic plots, idealic heroines, and scenes meant to tug on the emotions. The pathos-laden books were as popular as today’s harlequin romances and as derided by the most male writers and reviewers.

58 very sort of editorial relationship she desired while at the same time scourging those editors and publishers who would tread female writers in the same degrading fashion in which other female workers were too often treated” (116). I argue that, like Franklin’s Autobiography, Fern’s Ruth

Hall preaches a secular gospel through a secular saint. Her secular gospel of progress would allow for a critique of domestic and working conditions for women as well as offer readers an interesting sentimental plot packed with gossipy tidbits about her own “scandalous” life.

Ruth Hall, much like Franklin’s Autobiography, plays loose with conventional structures of narrative for the antebellum period. “To many critics,” David Reynolds points out in Beneath the American Renaissance, Fern “was faulty on both religious and stylistic grounds: one reviewer typically lambasted her ‘irreverence for things sacred’ and her use of ‘disjointed fragments’ instead of continuous narrative.” Reynolds goes on to say that, “We can understand such apparent flaws as products of an antebellum author brandishing her imaginative powers in an effort to subvert the stylistic rigidities of the past” (34). As a point of further comparison with

Franklin, Cathy Davidson argues that his memoir also broke with conventions of his age for very specific rhetorical purposes. Davidson says that the rhetorical practices of Franklin’s age were such that writers “weighed the worth of an audience and tailored their address accordingly”

(243). She goes on:

Consider in this context the first and second parts of Franklin’s autobiography. In

one, written for an illegitimate son, all “errata” stand out and Franklin is revealed

as a self-made and self-serving man. In the other, solicited by an admirer for the

express purpose of edifying America, Franklin emerges as a pious moralist,

almost a prig. (242)

I would agree with Reynolds and Davidson that both writers were very purposeful in their breaking with conventions, but they both do so with an advantage that many other authors did not have. Franklin and Fern had an established and admiring audience. Franklin through his almanac writings and other short works and Fern in her columns had tested out various authorial voices, toyed with narrative structures, and had repeated many of the dictums which would appear in their larger autobiographical work. Neither Franklin nor Fern necessarily needed the potential profits from either of their books, but they did feel they had to protect their images.

The patchwork quality to the chapters of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, somewhat randomly arranged, some completely unimportant to the plot, makes the novel seem more like stitched- together Ledger columns. The structure may not suit the convention of a novel, but it works well as a sustained sermon. Fern was borrowing the spiritual authority of the form through secularization, “a process we should understand as defined not by the rejection of religion, but by the fragmentation of religious beliefs and discourses and their redeployment within new, nonecclesiastical institutions and media,” such as the larger print industry and sentimental novels

(Coleman 21). If we were to analyze Fern’s structure in terms of homiletics, the art of preaching or sermonizing, we might see Ruth Hall's chapters as mini-sermons on the duties of families to their children, the responsibility of husbands to provide for their wives, etc., we can appreciate the novel’s structure as intentional. Gregory Jackson describes the “homiletic novel” as, in part,

“a kind of communal collective bargaining, allowing individuals to articulate the limits of moral and social concession, addressing through dialogue [with the reader], public praise and proscription what was acceptable, negotiable, or intolerable” (642). Fern, like an evangelist, continually breaks the fourth wall and makes her moral case with the reader. Indeed, we can even revisit Fern’s popular columns and understand a bit more of their draw to her many readers. Ruth

Hall, like Bunyan’s Christian, must find herself in situations not necessarily plot-driven because the “plot,” as it were, is the sermon rather than the story. This is jarring for a reader looking for a novel structure, but quite appealing to a reader familiar with the homilies presented not only on

Sundays but on several occasions during the regular week. Fern’s novel not only acknowledges the homiletic influences around her readers, but she relies on their lived religious experience to propel them through her seemingly random story structure. Jackson says, “the moral authority of the homiletic novel derive[s] not from the text’s conventional literary aesthetic but from its function as a moral script for spiritual performance” (643).

Alcott employs a similar episodic structure to the first half of Little Women and throughout the first half of Work. The experiences of the March sisters and of Christie Devon have a homiletic feel. There is a nice straight-forward “lesson of the chapter” concluding these scenes. Fern’s and Alcott’s lessons range from strictly moral (i.e., “do not give in to anger” and

“do not give in to selfishness”) to strictly financial (i.e. “don’t spend tomorrow’s money” and

“all that glisters is not gold”) and then the stuff that falls in between (i.e., “a woman should be paid the same as a man for her work” and “a woman deserves respect in the workplace”). Fern creates in Ruth Hall a saint she herself could never be. Ruth, for example, suffers fools and Fern never seemed to. Fern could include episodes of her own judgement while never taking away from Ruth’s innocence. One example is aimed at two-faced women of society. Fair weather friends literally get their just desserts from Fern. Two of Ruth’s friends pass by her new slum of a house and contemplate how she has fallen upon hard times. They reminisce about visiting Ruth in better days and being treated to dinner. They decide to move on, reasoning, “It is clearly none of our business to take her up, if her own people don’t do it. Come, go to La Temps’ with me, and get an ice.” Fern, never one to stop with one hot coal on the deserving head of her enemies,

61 has this invitation continue with a compliment: “What a love of a collar you have on; it is handsomer than mine, which I gave fifty dollars for, but what is fifty dollars, when one fancies a thing?” They are still moving away from their destitute friend’s house and Fern is not finished.

The frivolous young wife reasons, “If I didn’t make my husband’s money fly, his second wife would” (RH 100). Through her secular saint, the put-upon but humble Ruth, Fern could make a better case for her own moral authority while justifying her rebellion in her asides to the reader.

Ruth Hall is both angel and monster, to borrow Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s famous dichotomy. On the surface, and in almost every verbal exchange in the novel, Ruth maintains her composure. She is perfectly silent when faced with her cruel in-laws and insipid brother. But

Fern gives Ruth an emotional and intellectual freedom in her thought life. Ruth models adaptability. Rather than using Ruth as a lesson on acquiescence and humble acceptance of

God’s will, Fern gives Ruth agency by changing acquiescence to acting and acceptance to anticipation. Ruth is not waiting around for God to act; she is biding her time to strike. Her triumphs are heightened by her seeming grace and each of her enemies are vanquished with the utmost civility. Fern recognized the power a woman could glean from the condescending social mores of her time and she shares that power with her readers. Certainly the meek shall inherit the earth, and Fern is about making that inheritance more immediate. The most Christian thing a woman could do for her society is to use her quiet and determined force to alter its course.

The same incongruous elements of Fern’s novel which draw the ire of literary purists also make it hard for moralists to dismiss her work as a vulgar paean to mammon. The economic and gender-specific social shortcomings observed and experienced by Ruth Hall throughout the novel—and by Christie Devon and Jo March in Alcott’s novels— thanks in part to the homiletic structure, enmeshes the secular and the spiritual, so much so that when these female secular

62 saints are negotiating for a place in the marketplace alongside men, the negotiation is framed in the moral rather than the monetary. Franklin’s gospel of progress is put in service of women writers and women workers in general. Progress is the moral duty of every American, man or woman. For Fern, those who stand in the way of progress are not only retrograde, but sinners against God and nation.

Ruth Hall, A Secular Saint

Ruth Hall is a “rags to riches” narrative. It is a story where moral and social hypocrisy are roundly lampooned. Ruth’s letters to her newspaper readers and Fern’s appeals directly to the reader of the novel throughout the narrative prescribe new moral perspectives. In all of these ways, it is not hard to see the Franklin Stereotype in the novel. One moral perspective that dominates the novel is Fern’s judgement on those who stand in the way of Ruth’s progress toward independence and social acceptance. Nina Baym claims that, “At the height of her success [Fern] retained a weight of anger against all those who had failed to help her, and her novels contain the fiercest repudiation of kin and blood ties in women’s writing of the time”

(251). Fern’s vassal, Ruth’s anger, Baym goes on to say “is understood as a basic fact of the heroine’s emotional makeup” (252). In Franklin’s account, he is the brunt of most of the barbs with only a few characters—his brother, James, the printer, Keimer, and his drunken friend,

Collins—being shown in a less-than-flattering light. Even in these instances Franklin takes pains to explain that he understood their reasoning for mistreating him and, in sharp contrast to Fern, he lets the reader know that all is forgiven. Fern does not forgive; she condemns. Her indifferent family members are equated with scheming lawyers and pimps.

By adapting a well-known tale like Bunyan’s, with a saint at its center no less, Franklin and Fern would not only protect their images but they would tell a better story. Every bit of

63 errata, every incongruent element would not only be explained away, but be written as an inevitability. Like the challenges of any biblical figure, Ruth Hall and Franklin’s secular saint would falter but only to emerge as better for being able to overcome their fallen nature. Franklin could write about basically tricking patrons into thinking he was working through the night by keeping a lamp lit in his window, and Fern could write about playing editors against one another for a better paycheck, while simultaneously criticizing others in their industry for similar tactics.

Franklin did, of course, work through the night but it was because of his own mistake. Fern did, to some extent, have to play her editors against one another initially, but this became her default way of business throughout her publishing career. David Dowling goes further to say that Fern actually redefined the courtesies of the publishing market. Dowling claims, “Fern… transform[ed] business ethics in the literary marketplace through the management of [her] own career. Specifically, [she] engaged in forms of publicity and self-promotion that anticipated modern standards, rejecting inherited, outdated economic relationships and business practices”

(20). Weyler agrees, stating Fern “felt that, too often, women writers were simply laborers under increasingly capitalized publishing practices, a status that educated, genteel writers such as Fern bitterly resented; yet she understood this situation as part of a larger gender dynamic at work in

American culture” (103).

The bitterness Weyler points out in Fern can also be seen in Franklin’s progress story.

Though Franklin sets up Part One as a series of necessary events, there are moments when

Franklin reveals his feeling slighted by the systems of his own time. As the tenth child, for example, he had no right to expect much more than a job in labor. His father walks him around

Boston to observe several jobs requiring manual labor, but Franklin feels none are challenging to him intellectually. Franklin describes his options as careers which would have pushed him into

64 the shadows, never to bless the American public with his sage advice. Fern likens her options in the workforce to prostitution—a comparison nicely delineated in Weyler’s “Literary Labors and

Intellectual Prostitution: Fanny Fern’s Defense of Working Women” (2005). When Ruth looks about her neighborhood and finds what is obviously a brothel, Fern writes that Ruth “knew now how it could be, when every door of hope seemed shut, by those who make long prayers and wrap themselves in morality as with a garment, and cry with closed purses and averted faces”

(RH 112). It is the sort of indictment Fern would often include in her columns for the Ledger.

Doing good and “the right thing,” to Fern, seemed like such a simple choice. She had little patience for those who “wore morality” but failed to live it. “Ruth understands that the reasons a woman might turn to prostitution to support herself are vastly more complicated and depend not solely on economic reasons; rather, they also have an affective component—the desperation and desolation that poverty makes one feel,” argues Wyler. She continues, “Thus Ruth understands both intellectually and emotionally what by all rights should be shocking to a middle-class woman—how financial hardship and ‘the heart, craving sympathy, craving companionship, doubting both earth and heaven’ can drive a woman to prostitution” (Weyler 110).

Fern had three marriages, supported herself and her family on her income from writing, and was part of a growing group of nineteenth-century women vocal about the social inequalities between men and women, particularly in the work place. Mary Kelley’s use of the word

“deviant” is a very fitting description of Fern’s life at a time when women were still expected to exist exclusively in the domestic sphere. The limited opportunities for women to support themselves is a central theme of Ruth Hall. Fern quickly dispatches Ruth’s first husband, Harry

Hall, leaving her at the mercy of her sanctimonious and hypocritical in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Hall.

The Eldredges in Fern’s real life.

Unfortunately for those she saw as villains in her life, Fanny Fern had a wicked pen.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (who famously excused Fern from the “damned mob of scribbling women”) said of Fern, “The woman writes as if the Devil was in her; and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading” (qtd. by Reynolds 381).

Her contemporary critics and some scholars agree with Hawthorne’s assessment. They were particularly concerned about the damning images of her relations. For example, Mrs. Eldridge’s double, Mrs. Hall, is introduced staring out of her window at the carriage bringing her son and his new bride. She scoffs, “Now for one month to come, to say the least, I shall be perfectly sick with their billing and cooing”—which, alone, is a harmless enough caricature of “the mother in law.” But Mrs. Hall’s soliloquy continues, “I shouldn’t be surprised if Harry didn’t speak oftener than once a day.” Here Fern is calling out an incestual competitiveness of mother for son against his bride. Finally, to drive home her point, Mrs. Hall ends with words to eat later in the novel,

“Had he married a practical woman I wouldn’t have cared—somebody who looked as if God made her for something; but that little yellow-haired simpleton—umph!” (RH 10-11).

In one speech, we understand that Hall/Eldredge is mean, petty, creepily jealous, and, thanks to the “umph,” petulant and childish. When Ruth’s husband dies, Mrs. Hall observes the widow’s brother, Hyacinth (i.e., Nathaniel) leaving. Fern holds no punches:

Ruth’s brother, Hyacinth, leaves before the funeral, doctor,” said the old lady. “I

suppose you see through that. He intends to be off and out of the way, before the

time comes to decide where Ruth shall put her head, after Harry is buried; and

there’s her father, just like him; he has been as uneasy as an eel in a frying-pan,

ever since he came, and this morning he went off, without asking a question about

Harry’s affairs. I suppose he thinks it is our business, and he owning bank stick. I

tell you, doctor, that Ruth may go a-begging, for all the help she’ll get from her

folks. (RH 69)

In this scene we meet most of Fern’s pious targets in Ruth Hall: a negligent and foppish brother, a tight-fisted and cold father, and cruel, judgmental in-laws. Here we meet the failure of a family and the failure of an age. The practiced religion of nineteenth-century America was shifting. Where a widow was once the singular exemplar of those who must be cared for, an increasingly market-driven culture boils her down to dross. A widow like Ruth Hall is worthless because she cannot produce. The moral value in supporting her is replaced by the moral judgment of assuming she somehow brought her misery upon herself. Being a Christian, from

Fern’s perspective, was more about looking like one than acting like one. The funeral is a scene culled from the author’s own experiences. Ruth Hall is a scathing critique of nineteenth-century religious hypocrisy. Fanny Fern’s father once boasted of establishing the first faith-based newspaper of the nation, but refused to assist his daughter in her greatest time of need. Her brother was a well-established publisher who could have made an inroad for his sister. Instead, he ruthlessly shot down her initial literary efforts and all but ignored her poverty. Her in-laws from her first husband were sanctimonious and cruel.

Mrs. Hall, of course, is given plenty of other scenes to shine as one of the major villains in Fern’s plot—especially her warden-like interactions with Ruth’s daughter, angelic Katy.

However, the fury of Fern’s pen is aimed mostly at the men in her life and the men in the novel.

Chapter 23 presents a scene between the Halls, and their neighbor, Sally Jones. The Halls show no sympathy for Ruth after losing her first child, an incident Fern indicates to be largely due to the negligence of Dr. Hall. When they begin to blame Ruth for the child’s death and suggest their son needs another wife, Mrs. Jones excuses herself. Watching her leave, the doctor tells his wife,

“I shall tell Deacon Smith that I consider her a proper subject for church discipline; she’s what the Bible calls ‘a busy body in other men’s matters;’ a character which both you and I despise and abominate, Mis. Hall” (RH 52). Fern, of course, is shining a light on the “abominable” irony of his words. What is more, Fern cleverly illustrates the Halls’ willingness to manipulate their church with lies about Mrs. Jones and their unwillingness to remove the enormous planks in their own eyes. Mr. Hall is held responsible for Daisy. He’s a doctor, but refuses to come when Ruth calls for him, believing, “She’s always a-fussing with that child, and thinking if she sneezes, that she is going to die. It’s a wonder if I don’t die myself, routed out of a warm bed, without my wig, this time of night” (RH 44).

Mr. Ellet, stand-in for Fern’s father, is a tight-fisted heathen who “washes his hands” of his own child even though he lives in what the Halls consider luxury (RH 83-85). Trying to avoid taking any responsibility to care for his daughter or grandchildren, Mr. Ellet, attempts to persuade Ruth to give the children to the Halls. When Ruth refuses and points out that the Halls would teach the young girls to disrespect their mother, Mr. Ellet calls it a “trifle” and warns her she will never be able to care for herself much less her children. Ruth protests, claiming “Their

Father in Heaven” will provide. Mr. Ellet says, “Perversion of Scripture, perversion of

Scripture” and Fern adds that Ellet is “foiled with his own weapons” (RH 80). Fern sees the

“Scripture” as both a weapon to be feared and a weapon to be wielded. So many times in her narrative Fern simply, through Ruth, takes control of this weapon and turns it upon her enemies.

The Halls and the Ellets represent not only a referendum on greedy parents and in-laws, but also on those with the means to provide for the less fortunate who choose to make them beg, to humiliate, or to not help out at all, namely, publishers. “Male control of letters and newspapers especially irks Fern. Probably her most common images of casual-yet-galling patriarchal

68 privilege,” Claire Pettengill observes, “involve men withholding these two items from long- suffering women” (79).

Like Franklin, who had gained much of his knowledge of writing for newspapers and publishing after the absence of support from his father and brother, James, Fern entered the market with considerable advantages attained in spite of her own father and brother, who were both editors (Warren 91). And both become subjects of derision in her novel. Fern creates foppish and vacuous Hyacinth to satirize her real brother, N.P. Willis. “Hyacinth’s most egregious sin is certainly his failure to help Ruth,” Michael Everton says, adding, “But beyond that there is really little to differentiate Hyacinth from most of the novel’s other editors. He is just another literary businessman: one of the comfortably-fed gentleman’ (158) who spend their time gorging themselves in fine restaurants and dissembling profit motives beneath a carefully manicured public image” (154). He is an example of both a cold, unfeeling brother and a cold, unfeeling business. Fern concocts another scene to set up a comeuppance later in the novel when

Ruth receives a letter from Hyacinth dismissing her work: “I have looked over the pieces you sent me, Ruth. It is very evident that writing never can be your forte; you have no talent that way.

You may possibly be employed by some inferior newspaper, but be assured your articles never will be heard of out of your own provincial city” (RH 146-147). The letter is a scathing rebuke from a brother to a sister, but Fern makes use of the moment as a lesson about writers and publishers. Hyacinth, Dowling says, “is a prime example of the contradiction between his gentlemanly advice and his lack of familial ties.” Jennifer Harris details how, for the publishers and “industry men” who appear in the novel,

Fern casts as their most severe failing, a lack of affective attachments that would

lead them to feel sympathy for the plight of their female relation independent of

duty. While they do not recognize the affective value of sympathy, especially in

relation to one's family, the public, including those representatives of it they

encounter, obviously does, and accordingly judges them lacking as gentlemen.

Ruth Hall, who does value sympathetic relations, likewise learns through

experience to devalue any who do not. Her market encounters teach her to not

inflate the value of sentimental connections with those to whom she literally does

not owe anything, including the publishers who exploited her and her feminine

trust. Instead, sympathy replaces sentiment as the governing principle of her

relations with others. That she extends this newly pragmatic approach to her

family demonstrates the degree to which she realizes that to be truly effective,

bonds of sympathy must exhibit some degree of mutuality if they are to be

productive. In severing her non-productive sentimental bonds Ruth actually

preserves the sanctity of sentimentalism that others would decry or devalue. Her

possession of currency—financial, personal, and public—is, of course, what

liberates her to do so. This currency liberates her from not only financial

dependence but also dependence on other's opinions for her own self-worth. (354)

Fern’s scathing creation “challenges the genteel ideology that would mask or silence all references to a ‘vulgar’ marketplace. The ideal publisher and true gentleman in Fern’s schema can manage both a market and a ‘familial’ relationship with his writer. He not only craftily markets her work for significant profits, but he is kind, caring, gentle, and devoted like a family member” (Dowling 75). Ruth sees her publisher, Mr. Walter, as her true brother, just as Fern sees Bonner as her real familial relation—rather than Willis.

Dowling focuses on the ways Ruth Hall cautions publishers of their evaporating hold on authors. Dyer and Bonner, for instance, didn’t give a fig about the long-standing practice of trade courtesy, respecting a publisher’s exclusive right to an author and her work. Fern portrays Ruth’s early experiences with trade courtesy as a type of imprisonment and a prostitution. Setting

Ruth’s first publisher up as a sort of pimp, Fern has Mr. Lescom inform Ruth of the contents of a letter which says that if “Floy” (Ruth’s pen name) “is to be a contributor in the coming year,”

Lescom may “put [the letter writer] down as a subscriber.” Lescom emphasizes, “That’s good news to me, you see.” Fern’s critique is plain to see in Ruth’s “wondering if her articles were to be the means of swelling Mr. Lescom’s subscription list” and whether or not Ruth “ought not to profit by it as well” (RH 167). Eventually Ruth discontinues her writing for Lescom when she is offered a better rate by Mr. Walter. Mr. Walter is, of course, a dashing and gentlemanly contrast to Lescom, who stands in as “almost any other business man” (RH 168). Fern’s own career moves are mirrored in Ruth. Fern’s columns in the Olive Branch and True Flag had become so popular in less than a year that in the summer of 1852 Fern was asked by Oliver Dyer, who published the New York Musical World and Times, to write exclusively for his publication.

Fern’s publishers at the two other papers offered to raise her salary to keep her on their rosters and Dyer agreed to release her from the exclusive deal. The papers would battle for ownership of

“their Fanny” throughout 1853, all the while propelling Fern’s fame and her value (Warren 104-

105). Though it is true that changing the long-established business practices which privileged publishers with a sort of “first rights” to their authors, it is also true that the bidding wars for authors could propel them into the public’s purview; “[breaking] trade courtesy enriched authors and publishers alike with unprecedented windfall profits” (Dowling 69).

Ruth Hall chronicles the rise of a secular saint who, much like Franklin, not only finds success in journalism but revolutionizes the industry’s practices. Dowling says, “Fern capitalized on an industry in flux, extending the leading edge of literary business practices” (81). Noting

Fern’s significance as not only a game-changer but an exemplar of the nineteenth-century print market, Susan Belasco’s description of the Ruth Hall is strikingly similar to how one might describe the Autobiography, “Drawing on her own experiences, Fern described Ruth’s trials in gaining access to editors and selling her articles.” Echoing Harris, Belasco says that Fern

“portrayed a new breed of editors and publishers who helped Ruth to live by her pen. Fern’s model for this new breed was her own longtime publisher, Robert Bonner of the New York

Ledger, who practiced sound business principles, paid his contributors well, and developed advertising strategies that influenced later publishers” (265).

It is worth mentioning Belasco’s seemingly innocuous use of the phrase “sound business principles” since, as Dowling points out, Fern’s and Bonner’s business practices—for the time— would be seen as anything but “sound.” It was Fern and Bonner who helped to change our concept of what is sound in the publishing business in regard to an author/publisher relationship.

This relationship is played out in the novel between Ruth and Mr. Walter. “As openly aggressive bidding for her services escalated,” Dowling tells us, Fern’s “salary skyrocketed with each new job. This open bidding not only drove up her value in the market, but was used as an advertising tool itself, and maximized profits for both Fern and her entrepreneurial publishers, Oliver Dyer and Robert Bonner, who ‘stole’ her in succession from her previous employers” (68).

Throughout, mirroring so many episodes in the Autobiography, Fern’s Ruth Hall is not only telling the tale of the print industry, but proposing a new moral conception of the industry and the role of women writers. Fern’s picture of a woman writer was equal parts widow in distress

72 and hard-working industry person deserving of equal pay. Publishers, and society at large, had a moral obligation to advance a woman like Ruth Hall into a position that would provide her money to feed her family and free her from a new set of villains: family and employers.

The secular saint of Franklin’s Autobiography is altered by Fern to not only justify her “deviant female life,” but preach a gospel of progress for women, progress toward greater opportunity and agency.

Like so many of her contemporaries, Fern was contributing to the number of protofeminist pieces being written during the American Renaissance. Her novel, according to

Weyler, “argues for the re-ordering of social and economic relations. This new system about which Ruth fantasizes would de-sexualize the relationships between men and women, reconstituting male-female relationships from cold patriarchs and needy daughters (or cold, rapacious seducers and vulnerable women) to more equitable relationships of brothers and sisters—precisely the solution Fern imagined necessary to end prostitution” (115). Ruth Hall includes episodes which expose the plight of women who have to turn to prostitution—“as women negotiated the winds of exploitation in antebellum free-labor markets, the logic of the cash nexus made the sex trade tragically attractive,” women who have been wronged by family and society. Like Ruth,

[m]any had been married, with families, driven by the loss of a male provider to

seek quick profits in sexual commerce. Most of them served time in low-paid

female trades or domestic service… Middle-class moralists and reformers wrung

their hands at this epidemic of spoliation, but working women may have seen it as

a shrewd and sensible response to forces beyond their control. Heartless markets

and heartless men. (Larson 119-120)

One particularly poignant plotline that has little to do with the story of Ruth and much to do with

Fern’s gospel of progress involves Mrs. Leon, a woman who is sent to an asylum simply as a way for her husband to be rid of her. Mrs. Leon leaves a pathetic note, found after she has died, that reads, “I am not crazy, Ruth, no, no—but I shall be; the air of this place stifles me; I grow weaker—weaker. I cannot die here; for the love of heaven, dear Ruth, come and take me away”

(RH 141).

Chapter 60 of Ruth Hall reads like a Bible tract. Ruth and her daughter, Nettie, go to church. Ruth begins to bitterly envy the “unbroken” families filling up the pews. Then, the pastor speaks. “Sweet and clear fell upon Ruth’s troubled ear these blessed words,” Fern tells us,

“There remaineth, therefore, a rest for the people of God” (RH 156). Ruth is ready to believe in providence again. Fern, on the other hand, follows up this tract chapter with a scene once again showing Mr. Ellet’s hypocrisy—he hosts a country clergyman to a lavish dinner while his granddaughter asks for “more supper” in vain (RH 158-159). Here we get the struggle in Fern’s narrative for a morality that satisfies her purpose. She wants to allow for the grace of traditional religion, but her own experience continues to temper that allowance. In the end, Fern seems to concede her turn of fortune to heavenly intervention. After Ruth’s daughter, Katy, wonders if there is a God at all and why “he let her papa die, and why he did not help her mamma, who tried so hard to earn money to bring her home,” Fern writes, “Sleep on—dream on—little Katy. He who noteth the sparrow’s fall, hath given his angels charge to keep thee” (RH 179). This marks the end of Ruth’s story “before Mr. Walter,” before the savior figure arrives. The novel ends with Ruth “retrospective and anticipatory—standing as it were on the threshold of a new epoch in her changing existence” (RH 271). Hers, of course, is not the only existence in flux. Fern’s gospel of progress is taken up again by Alcott.

The Gospel of Louisa May Alcott

To the nineteenth-century American reading public, Fanny Fern and Louisa May Alcott were polar opposites. Fern was infamous for her several marriages and her sharp tongue. Alcott never married and never experienced much in the way of scandal like Fern. In fact, Alcott was— to her chagrin and advantage—virtually sainted by her fans after the publication of Little Women

(1868, 1869) as a sort of moral guide for all of America’s “little women” and “little men” (the subject of the sequel). Indeed, as Susan S. Williams points out,“when Louisa May Alcott was pictured addressing a crowd, in the frontispiece to Ednah D. Cheney’s Louisa May Alcott: The

Children’s Friend (1888),” the author was shown “reading to a throng of rather etherealized children, as if Jo March herself were reading to her boys” (115).

Though a rebelliousness peeks out from behind some of her more famous writings and is upfront in her journals and short works like “Transcendental Wild Oats,” it is muted by the sweetness associated with most of her heroines, from the March sisters, to Rose Campbell in

Eight Cousins (1875), to Christie Devon in Work: A Story of Experience (1873). Some scholars have dismissed her, much like Fern, because of her popularity, though she is a favorite subject in children’s and adolescent literary studies.

Others have recognized her as a protofeminist and credited her as an abolitionist. “Even when working within traditional boundaries of female roles,” Sarah Wadsworth says,

Alcott used her children’s stories as a platform from which to lobby for

improvements in girls’ education. Of Eight Cousins, for example, she argued:

“Young girls in America do not get a good education in various respects, even

though much is taught to them. They know nothing of health care, or of

housekeeping, and are presented into society too early. My story is intended to

encourage a better plan of child-rearing, and my heroine shows that such a plan is

feasible.” (60)

For those scholars who have reevaluated Alcott’s importance and influence in the nineteenth-century American print market, she has gained a new sort of notoriety as not only a feminist and abolitionist, but as the North American queen of scholarship in children’s literature.

Where readers probably dove into Ruth Hall for the juicy bits of gossip, they were not likely looking for it in Little Women or her more adult-oriented Work. Alcott not only provided a moral compass in her writing, but a moral compass was expected. It is why there was a minor scandal when it seemed Jo March would not be married off, regardless of how true this was to Alcott’s own life. Though readers expected moralizing in Alcott’s work, they did not—some might argue, they continue not to—expect revolutionary religious undertones, challenges to current day accepted philosophy, and moral ambiguity. Alcott is misread by readers and scholars alike as uncomplicated, preachy, and even antifeminist. David S. Reynolds registers Alcott’s influence on the nineteenth-century literary market as one of manipulation and marketeering. He says that,

“The fact that she could change modes so easily and once derogated Little Women as ‘moral pap’ need not shock us. For Alcott, as for Parton, the Conventional has become just another change of costume for the flexible popular writer who, like her heroine, always remained detached from the changing literary personae she donned in public” (408). In crediting Alcott as a latter day

Fern, able to change and adapt different modes of writing to appeal to a wider audience— obviously meant as a compliment—Reynolds voices one of the more enduring critiques of Alcott and every writer in this study: they are primarily motivated by the financial return. Alcott’s numerous biographers and her own letters are testament to the ever-presence of her monetary

76 concerns. However, these concerns do not necessarily preclude her ability or desire to imbue her work with philosophical and moral depth heavily influenced by scandalous ideas about progress.

Alcott wrote more than 200 individual works, among them contributions to various journals and newspapers, and some potboilers under “Anonymous” or pseudonyms like “A.M.

Barnard.” Her writing career spanned four decades. Unlike Fern, who scarcely benefitted from the literary reputations of her father and brother, Alcott’s early career was characterized by a seeming requisite acknowledgement that she was, first and foremost, “the daughter of Bronson

Alcott.” Until the American Renaissance was rewritten by scholars such as Tompkins, Baym,

Kelley, and Reynolds, Alcott continued to be a footnote to the more important Alcott, Bronson.

Yet, with the publication of her most famous novel, Little Women, she not only established herself as the most financially successful Alcott—and, I would argue, most “important”—she, like Fern, was one of the most recognizable literary celebrities of the Age of Print. Fans came to

Orchard House looking for “Jo March” after all, not the father who barely makes an appearance in Little Women.

Where Franklin’s Autobiography is quite easily mirrored in Ruth Hall, finding him in

Alcott’s novels takes a little more work, but not nearly as much as one might think. Fern’s novel is rife with capitalist and market enthusiasm. In contrast, not many readers of Little Women would instantly associate its plot and characters with industry and money. Little Women, of course, exists mostly as a means toward financial security for Alcott and her family. Sarah T.

Lahey, whose essay “Honeybees and Discontented Workers: A Critique of Labor in Louisa May

Alcott,” says, “As someone who labored almost incessantly in order to support her family, Alcott well understood the complex joys and unavoidable hardships of employment, not to mention the conflicting goals of financial need and personal fulfillment” (133-34). One of Alcott’s several

77 biographers, Harriet Reisen, describes in detail Alcott’s sacrifice of personal fulfilment in a scene that contrasts a visit to her older sister Anna (“Meg” in Little Women) and a one hundred dollar bill. After receiving her one hundred dollar payment for the story “Perilous Play,” Alcott writes in her journal an equation between her nephew, Johnny, and the children she writes about:

“I sell my children, and though they feed me, they don’t love me as [Anna’s] do” (qtd. by Reisen

211). Alcott isn’t quite as disappointed as one might think. Reisen finishes the episode by contrasting Alcott’s next move:

Yet “Happy Women,” a contribution to a column called “Advice to Young

Women” written for the New York Ledger [the very publication that had given

Fern the title of “highest paid columnist] soon after the visit, made Louisa’s case

for the single life. The editor had enclosed with his request [for another

contribution] a hundred dollar bill for inspiration. With the bill propped in front of

her, Louisa described “the busy, useful, independent spinsters” she knew—“for

liberty is a better husband than love to many of us” (211)

The replacement of publisher for brother seen in Fern is skipped over by Alcott as she simply replaces brother, father, husband—and children—with money. Further, reading the homiletic influences in Little Women and Work, lessons on money management and earning are interspersed with morals about feelings and relationships. A homiletic novel, Jackson says, presented “real-life scenarios that demanded narrative participation, insisted on moral volition, and asked readers to apply discursive enactments to their own lives through imaginative exercises for structuring everyday reality” (643). The participatory nature is built into Little

Women as a device of children’s writings, but may also be read as replicating a spiritual practice—a spiritual practice often associated with money. Money, for Alcott, was a liberator

78 and a means toward respectability and advancement. This perspective seems to define the age when “[p]eople might have alternatively or simultaneously seen religion and economics as partners and opponents, as threat and help, or as essential and irrelevant to each other, but they were never able to fully extricate one from the other” (Sievermann et al. 12).

The March girls may all deride affluence throughout their novels, but the entire family— through Jo’s writing and Amy’s marriage to “the Lawrence boy”—is financially well-off when all is said and done.

This sort of mercenary capitalist side of Alcott is not what most readers and even some scholars associate with her because of the overwhelming influence of Little Women on her legacy. However, a book like Work makes it very clear that Louisa May Alcott never had money, market, industry, and labor far from her mind. Those who have read Work, mostly scholars and academics looking for ways to reclaim and justify Alcott as a significant contributor to a golden age of American literature, come away disappointed. However, I argue, Work and Little Women both provide all of the dictums of a gospel of progress one might expect in works following the

Franklin Stereotype.

Christie Devon, A Secular Saint

Religion cannot be given or bought, but must grow as trees grow, needing frost

and snow, rain and wind to strengthen it before it is deep-rooted in the soul; that

God is in the hearts of all, and they that seek shall surely find him when they need

Him most .

Louisa May Alcott, Work 116

Though the book most often associated with Alcott’s success and popularity is Little

Women, the first installment of the novel (released the same year as Ragged Dick, 1868) sold

79 well but only marked the beginning of Alcott’s market dominance. Beverly Lyon Clark points out that, “Within a month of issuing Part I of Little Women, Roberts Brothers had printed three thousand copies” but within a month of issuing Part 2, they “needed seven thousand copies.”

Alcott’s subsequent novels, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) and Little Men (1871) outpaced Little

Women tenfold (Clark 104). However glittering her literary career might have seemed to someone like Horatio Alger, Alcott was ambivalent about the demands of the market she had married herself to. In 1861, she began a novel titled Success; by the time she returned to the manuscript a decade later, after experiencing “success” in her writing, she changed the title to simply Work (1873). Rather than detail a progress toward success, the new novel would illustrate a “series of lessons about the meaning and value of work as the path to an honorable place in the world” (Reisen 244-245). Significantly, Alcott’s transcendental flavor of Protestantism guides her progressive gospel in Work. If God himself requires no hierarchical structure for communion, it follows that societal structures which grant power, independence, and security should follow suit. Religion, the greatest commodity in Alcott’s narratives, was something that could not be

“bought or given” and, thus, did not belong to any particular set of people. As both an abolitionist and suffragist, Alcott’s equation is not likely to have been tossed off haphazardly.

Work reads like a very conventional nineteenth-century sentimental novel, but its core gospel is a complicated amalgam of religious revisionism, social critique, and the challenges for women wanting to progress spiritually and secularly. Like many sentimental nineteenth-century novels, as Jane Tompkins has shown us, Alcott’s had cultural work to do.

In the introduction to Sensational Designs, Tompkins claims “a novel’s impact on the culture at large depends not on its escape from the formulaic and derivative, but on its tapping into a storehouse of commonly held assumptions, reproducing what is already there in a typical

80 and familiar form.” According to Tompkins, “The text that becomes exceptional in the sense of reaching an exceptionally large audience does so not because of its departure from the ordinary and conventional, but through its embrace of what is most widely shared” (xvi). Her approach is to reinterpret the value or merit of a printed work based on the symbiotic relationship its content and author have with the culture that produces it. Tompkins says that our measure of a text’s worth is by how completely it “manages to account for the experiences of its readers” (185). She states, “It holds that the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman’s point of view” (124). It is a bold claim but one that certainly applies to Alcott’s Work and Little Women. Tompkins even seems to anticipate the rise, fall and revival of religion in literary studies when she argues that “twentieth century critics have taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with effectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority” (123). Tompkins’ list perfectly describes the make- up of the semi-autobiographical adventures of Christie Devon in Work.

Christie Devon is a purposeful descendant of Bunyan’s Christian. The novel’s secular saint, Christie, believes that she only has three options in her current life: enter into a loveless marriage, become a “sour spinster,” or “try to crush and curb her needs and aspirations till the struggle grew too hard, and then in a fit of despair end her life.” She decides that her only escape from these fates is “to break loose from this narrow life, go out into the world and see what she could do for herself” (Work 13). By acknowledging Bunyan’s influence upfront, Alcott prepares readers for a religious allegory. Unfortunately, however useful this was in the marketing for

Little Women, for Alcott’s Work it has resulted in some dismissal by readers and critics as adhering too strictly to religious moralizing. However, the preeminence of economic concerns

81 and lessons throughout Alcott’s novel owe much more to Franklin’s Autobiography than

Pilgrim’s Progress. Work does, of course, offer moral lessons—some Biblical—but, compared to Bunyan’s, these lessons are scandalously secular. “The structure of Alcott’s novel echoes her somewhat dualistic theme,” Lynn Alexander points out, “with the first half covering Christie’s trials as she experiments with a variety of jobs, and the second half focusing on her quest for a philosophical and spiritual purpose in life”; the gospel of progress is both secular and spiritual

(603). Alcott’s structure shows “the way that religious experiences are mediated by markets and the way that markets and market practices enable religious activities and experiences”

(Stievermann et al. 6). The novel is equal parts market critique and religious tract.

Christie, like Alcott, attempts a number of employments—seamstress, actress, governess, etc. We see some of these acted out to a degree in each of the March girls in Little Women; Meg as a governess, Jo as a companion to Aunt March. In Work the jobs lose the air of benevolent good for the family. Christie’s wages are only being made to support her, so there seems to be a lot less at stake. However, Alcott’s story also, dramatically, introduces suicide late in the narrative which helps to keep the reader invested in this pilgrim’s progress. Work, Sarah T.

Lahey says, “is a novel about finding the right kind of job, but it also questions on a deeper level the pervasive nineteenth-century belief that labor offered unmitigated benefits and rewards”

(147). Lahey argues that Alcott

distinguishes herself among contemporaries by addressing the need for labor

reform not only in cases of industrial oppression, but also in terms of skilled and

motivated workers—thereby exposing how moralistic ideologies propagated by

church and industrial leaders alike created a culture obsessed with work and

assured of the corrupting influence of leisure. (135)

The novel also questions the American belief in the spiritual goodness of work for work’s sake and the morality of an economy which divides the haves from the have nots, women from men.

Christie’s job as a governess provides for Alcott an opportunity to shine a light on the negative spiritual effects a woman might experience were she to simply choose “a good marriage.” As with Meg’s visit to “vanity fair,” Christie’s time as a governess for Charlotte

Saltonstall gives Alcott an opportunity to pass judgment on the rich. Christie observes that, as a mother, Mrs. Saltonstall loved her children “with the love of a shallow heart, and took such good care of their little bodies that there was none left for their little souls” (Work 53). Mrs.

Saltonstall’s brother, Philip Fletcher, occasions Alcott’s estimation of the fashionable ennui among rich young men—a figure similar to Fern’s Hyacinth Ellet. “He was rich, but while his money could hire a servant to supply each want, gratify each caprice, it could not buy a tender, faithful friend to serve for love, and ask no wages but his comfort.” Alcott, Fern, and, as we will see, Alger, tap into a strain of loneliness among young men that seems to become more and more the norm as they march toward the Gilded Age. Alcott adds to this description of Mr. Fletcher that he was aware of his lonely and miserable state “and felt the vain regret that inevitably comes to those who waste life and learn the value of good gifts by their loss” (Work 54).

Eventually Fletcher proposes to Christie, fully expecting her to jump at the chance to marry a wealthy man. When she declines, his pride rises up and he tells her what a “sacrifice” it would have been for him to marry someone below his station. “The sacrifice would not have been all yours, for it is what we are, not what we have, that makes one human being superior to another. I am as well-born as you in spite of my poverty,” Christie’s indignation must mirror some of Alcott’s own over suitors, who believed they were offering her a salvation from a life she surely must loath. The speech Christie gives is much more vicious than the famous proposal

83 scene between Jo and Laurie in Little Women. “What can you give me but money and position in return for the youth and freedom I should sacrifice in marrying you?” Christie continues, “Not love, for you count the cost of your bargain, as no true lover could, and you reproach me for deceit when in your heart you know you only cared for me because I can amuse and serve you.”

We might remember here the fate of Mrs. Leon in Ruth Hall as the result of wives who fail to

“amuse and serve.” The diatribe ends with a final blow, “I decline the honor you would do me, since it is so great in your eyes that you must remind me of it as you offer it” (Work 70). Like

Fern, Alcott challenges the idea of work as a mere pastime before getting married and she makes the proposal of marriage a cold business transaction, a deal with the devil.

Alcott’s secular saint continues to work, but when that work finally drives her to attempt suicide, the novel becomes a lot more religious. In Chapter Seven, Christie decides it is time for her to seek help from God. “She read many books, some wise, some vague, some full of superstition,” Alcott tells us, but they were all “unsatisfactory to one who wanted a living God.”

Like Franklin in Part Two of the Autobiography, Alcott’s secular saint “went to many churches, studied many creeds, and watched their fruits as well as she could; but still remained unsatisfied.

Some were cold and narrow, some seemed theatrical and superficial, some stern and terrible, none simple, sweet, and strong enough for humanity’s many needs” (Work 115). The chapter contains both Alcott’s famous line to “paddle her own boat” and Christie’s attempted suicide.

The suicide attempt dramatically changes the “paddle my own boat” quote that has found its way onto magnets and t-shirts as a proclamation from Alcott. To paddle one’s own boat, in a chapter devoted to “finding religion,” is clearly the absolute wrong path. The secular message about women in the work place fades to the background as Alcott employs the sermon. She had a very good reason to include this sort of message. In Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel,

Dawn Coleman says that fiction up through the mid-1800s was “still widely disparaged despite its popularity.” Alcott is writing a bit later, but her work is squarely aimed at a more traditional audience. In order to appeal and appease this audience, Coleman claims that, “novelists sought to assert the moral and religious authority of their work through an intense engagement with preaching. While resisting preaching through mockery, irony, and satire, they also envied it, identified with it, and appropriated it as a distinctive and authoritative mode of addressing audiences” (4). In Work, this appropriation takes place in the second half of the novel and is best represented by the aftermath of Christie’s attempt (some might say contemplation) of suicide and her short marriage to David—a husband who seems to only exist to set Christie back on the right path.

In Christie Devon and, in the next chapter, Richard Hunter, readers see the traditional figure of “luck and pluck.” But these saints hew very close to a looser type of Protestantism springing up in different sects during the late nineteenth-century. The core belief was about God

“meeting people where they are,” which is something the kind Mrs. Wilkins reminds Christie of after her suicide attempt. “What’s the Lord for,” Wilkins begins her detailing of the utility of

God and Faith, “ef he ain’t to hold on to in times of trouble. Faith aint wuth much ef it’s only lively in fair weather.” Wilkins’ speech reminds us of Franklin’s recognition of the “wuth” of religion in light of his amoral deist compatriots. Alcott ties up this valuation of faith with

“you’ve got to believe hearty and stan’ by the Lord through thick and thin, and he’ll stan’ by you as no one else begins to” (Work 136). Faith, for all of the secular saints, is a “faith of works” and, for Christie, that means that she has to “stan’ by the Lord through thick and thin.” From a completely secular point of view, this seems absolutely reasonable, if only as a practice of discipline.

Mrs. Wilkins eventually brings Christie to a church service. The preacher is Mr. Power

(not one of Alcott’s more subtle names). Christie is instantly “struck by the large proportion of young people in the place, of all classes, both sexes, and strongly contrasting faces.” Alcott adds,

“All sat at ease, rich and poor, black and white, young and old” emphasizing the great cultural divides that would continue to hinder religious and national growth in the decades ahead (Work

159). Mr. Power stands a stereotype of George Whitefield. Christie, echoing Franklin’s admiration and concern for Whitefield’s reputation, muses, “But I don’t wonder he is misunderstood, belied, and abused. He tells the truth so plainly, and lets in the light so clearly, that hypocrites and sinners must fear and hate him” (Work 162). Franklin does not go so far as to call Whitefield’s critics “hypocrites and sinners,” but we do get the sense that Franklin is exasperated over people who do not seem to “get it” morally. What the secular saints and their authors continue to do in these novels is give “word flesh” by offering some tangible evidence of providence. When Christie is converted, for instance, Alcott says, “For the first time in her life religion seemed a visible and vital thing; a power that she could grasp and feel, take into her life and make her daily bread.” As if she wants to make clear a distinction between this and transcendentalism, Alcott adds, “Not a vague, vast idea floating before her, now beautiful, now terrible, always undefined and far away” (Work 166).

The Quakers Franklin held in such high esteem appear again in Alcott’s story with Mrs.

Sterling. Alcott introduces David, Mrs. Sterling’s son, who we—like Christie—are to assume is a Quaker, as well. Turns out David is closer to Franklin, taking only the things he “likes” of the sect. David and Christie eventually marry, but Christie is initially put off because “he won’t be ambitious.” Mr. Power gives a mini-sermon reflecting the seeming double nature of Alcott’s own ambitions and message. The preacher tells Christie, “I know many a man who would be far

86 better employed in cherishing a sweet old woman [David’s “employment” at the moment], studying Plato, and doubling the beauty of a flower, than in selling principles for money, building up a cheap reputation that dies with him, or chasing pleasures that turn to ashes in his mouth” (Work 194-195). However, Alcott clears the point as Mr. Power continues his lesson.

“You are a hero-worshipper, my dear,” he tells Christie, “and if people don’t come up to the mark you are so disappointed that you fail to see the fine reality which remains when the pretty romance ends.” Part of this romantic view, as Alcott knew all too well from her father’s lack, was the absence of work. So Mr. Power ends by pointing to David’s willingness to work, saying,

“Saints walk about the world today as much as ever, but instead of haircloth and halos they now wear—.” Christie jumps in, describing David’s working outfit, “Broadcloth and wide-brimmed hats” (Work 196).

David explains his conversion: “Then I did what others do when all else fails to sustain them; I turned to God: not humbly, not devoutly or trustfully, but doubtfully, bitterly, and rebelliously; for I said in my despairing heart, ‘If there is a God, let Him help me, and I will believe.’ He did help me, and I kept my word” (Work 217). After David dies in battle—because, of course, he goes off to fight like a “good man”—Christie again contemplates the absence of

God and the seeming useless nature of religion. Then she thinks of David in heaven and her duty to believe for his and their child’s sake. Alcott writes, “Searching for religion, she found love: now seeking to follow love she found religion. The desire for it had never left her, and, while serving others, she was earning this reward.” Again, religion and work are tied together, and there is an economy of salvation. “When life seemed to lie in ashes,” Alcott continues, “from their midst, this slender spire of flame, purifying while it burned, rose trembling toward heaven;

87 showing her how great sacrifices turn to greater compensations” (Work 319). The toil and trouble in life, for Alcott, is not “rewarded” in heaven, but “paid back” as a “compensation.”

Josephine March, A Secular Saint

“Well, I was wild to do something for father,” replied Jo, as they gathered about

the table, for healthy young people can eat even in the midst of trouble. “I hate to

borrow as much as mother does, and I knew Aunt March would croak; she always

does, if you ask for a ninepence. Meg gave all her quarterly salary toward the rent,

and I only got some clothes with mine, so I felt wicked, and was bound to have

some money, if I sold the nose off my face to get it.”

Jo March, Little Women (226)

There is a lot of talk about “father” in Little Women, but the March family patriarch plays a very small role in the narrative. Alcott’s celebrated girls’ book, instead, follows the pilgrimages of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and their long-suffering mother, whom they call Marmee. But “father” as a concept, as someone to serve and anticipate in his absence, is ever present. Much has been written about Bronson Alcott’s positive and negative influences on

Louisa, but Little Women shows that what Alcott seemed always “wild to do” for Bronson and the rest of her family was “to have some money.” The transcendental disaster of Fruitlands, a short-lived commune headed by Alcott’s father and Charles Lane, perfectly illustrates the elder

Alcott’s inability to marry religion with market. Bronson, something of an anti-Franklin, dealt in ideals and he found a double in Lane. John Matteson says that the driving ideal of the community was to “abstain.” According to Matteson,

The core reform, at least for Charles Lane, lay not in doing, but rather in

refraining from doing. Americans as a people have always inclined toward action;

our response to a problem is far more likely to be “What should we do?” instead

of “What should we cease to do?” In advocating less rather than more, Lane and

Alcott sounded a note that seldom heard in public discourse in their own time, and

which is even less audible today. (128-129)

Little Women, another Alcott version of the gospel of progress, follows five women who only do.

Sarah Way Sherman makes the case in Sacramental Shopping that a key motivator for all of the sisters to work is the market: “With the possible exception of Beth, each of the four March sisters responds powerfully to the promises of wealth, material goods, and social status (defined in Jo’s case as literary celebrity).” Sherman concludes that “each is drawn by the ideologies of an emerging Gilded Age capitalism whose seductive appeal continually threatens to alienate them from the more wholesome pleasures of home and family” (17). Indeed, even the angelic and mostly sickly Beth is continually caring for an endless array of animals and incidentals. Almost every moralistic lesson about selflessness, shame, and anger experienced—and taught—by the

March sisters is paired with practical lesson about the nature of the capitalist market. Serving

God, the absent but benevolent father, requires work; if God in Little Women is Bronson Alcott,

Poor Richard hits the mark saying, “God helps them that help themselves.”

Josephine March, like Christie Devon and Ruth Hall, represents the spiritual and secular progress of nineteenth-century women, but she does so in a book written ostensibly for children.

The gospel of progress is built into a romantic German structure, the bildungsroman or “coming of age” story. Originally, “bildung meant something like the reformation of the self into the image of God, one of the central qualities inherent in this idea is progressive change in some form” (Sherman 17). Like other philosophical trends of the nineteenth century, the bildungsroman would extend beyond the spiritual; “evangelical conversion…reflects

89 microcosmically widespread cultural concerns about the nature of change as they surfaced not only in theological but also in the volatile scientific and political discourses from the mid- eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries” (Bennett 17). Alcott’s secular saint and priestess of the gospel of progress stands at the center of a novel which deftly weaves the forces of spirituality, secularity, and market into the sort of lived religion Alcott could stand behind: a pragmatic religion that emphasizes work and inherent value of money as a means toward holiness. “Jo

March—boyish, impetuous, high-spirited, and quick-tempered,” argues Sarah Wadsworth,

“represents a new kind of heroine in juvenile fiction, one who would resonate strongly with generations of female readers to come” (60). Wadsworth goes on to say that, “rather than representing an attenuation or diminishing of women’s fiction, the publication of Little Women and its sequels heralded a watershed in U.S. social history; girls had at last come into their own as a discrete, viable, cohesive component of the American literary enterprise” (67).

Roberta Seelinger Trites, commenting on the agendas and influences of both Alcott’s

Little Women and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which I touch upon in the following chapter), argues that “critics often focus on how these narratives have coming-of-age as a common theme” yet, according to Trites, “they also have in common either explicit or implicit ideologies that advocate some form of social reform.” She goes on to hint at the

“tradition” I am laying out in this study of the Franklin Stereotype; “Reform-oriented literature in the United States often relies on a youthful protagonist as the embodiment of an author’s idealism.” Though “not all of the literature about adolescence descends from Huck and Jo,”

Trites argues that “much of it that is idealistic and reformist belongs to traditions that have been influenced by the strain of romantic evangelism that permeates American literature” (161). Trites traces the lineage of what she calls the adolescent reform novel to Alcott and Twain, but I

90 believe the ideological bloodlines reach back to Franklin. Further, those ideologies do not tidily fit into categories of the spiritual or the secular. Little Women, especially, continues to be misread as an update to Bunyan and, thus, grounded in the purely spiritual concerns of the author.

Many times in Alcott’s novel, the spiritual is eclipsed by the pragmatic, the secular, and the monetary, all in the name of progress. For instance, when Jo starts to make a living off of her writing in New York, Alcott provides readers with a logical rationale:

She soon became interested in her work,--for her emaciated purse grew stout, and

the little hoard she was making to take Beth to the mountains next summer, grew

slowly but surely, as the weeks passed. One thing disturbed her satisfaction, and

that was that she did not tell them at home. She had a feeling that father and

mother would not approve,—and preferred to have her own way first, and beg

pardon afterward. (LW 440)

Jo has “her own way” throughout the novel and rarely suffers the indignities of Meg or the shame and disappointments of Amy. Jo’s major trials exemplify her adherence to the gospel of progress: burdening herself with the care of Beth, rejecting Laurie’s proposal, and missing out on the trip abroad with Aunt Carrol. This last trial may seem like Alcott admonishing herself for being too blunt. Marmee opens a letter from Aunt Carrol and Jo instantly believes she is off to

Paris. However, Marmee explains that their aunt has been very purposeful in choosing Amy,

“I’m afraid it is partly your own fault, dear. When aunt spoke to me the other day, she regretted your blunt manners and too independent spirit; and here she writes as if quoting something you said,--“I planned at first to ask Jo; but as ‘favors burden her,’ and she ‘hates French,’ I think I won’t venture to invite her” (LW 394).

The last line of Aunt Carrol’s letter offers Jo a small comfort. She writes, “Amy is more docile, will make a good companion for Flo, and receive gratefully any help the trip may give her.” Amy is made out to be an accoutrement. Jo does not get to go to Europe, but she gets to be human, an individual. She has her own way.

Yet, for the novel to be a true bildungsroman, Jo has to change. She must convert. Kelsey

Bennett says that “most often conversion in the nineteenth-century literary contexts has lost its original sense as a spiritual activity and has instead been transferred into a psychologically based phenomenon, one of many attributes contributing to the protagonist’s overall development” (18).

Alcott seems to strike the balance. By adapting Bunyan’s story on a secular level—that is, employing the Franklin Stereotype, creating a secular saint and preaching a secular gospel—

Alcott is able to “forge a vision of identity that acknowledges the self as embedded in a social, material world, but also maps a path toward personal grace and true happiness through the material world’s dangerous seductions” (Sherman 6). When Alcott, mostly to appease her readers, marries Jo off to Professor Bhaer, she presents the scene as a barter and exchange:

“Ah! thou gifest me such hope and courage, and I haf nothing to gif back

but a full heart and these empty hands,” cried the Professor, quite overcome.

Jo never, never would learn to be proper; for when he said that as they

stood upon the steps, she just put both hands into his, whispered tenderly, “Not

empty now”; and, stooping down, kissed her Friedrich under the umbrella. It was

dreadful, but she would have done it if the flock of draggle-tailed sparrows on the

hedge had been human beings,—for she was very far gone indeed, and quite

regardless of everything but her own happiness. Though it came in such a very

simple guise, that was the crowning moment of both their lives, when, turning

from the night, and storm, and loneliness, to the household light, and warmth, and

peace, waiting to receive them with a glad “Welcome home,” Jo led her lover in,

and shut the door. (LW 585)

Jo allows herself to love and she takes her place among her sisters, Meg and Amy, as the now

“married women.” But the sweet scene is one of progress and an insistence on the place of another late nineteenth-century philosophical development, the New Woman. Jo would lead, she would provide, and, until they are met again in Little Men, the reader has no expectation that

Bhaer is going to be the head of their household or even the main breadwinner.

Little Women and Work, especially, complicate the moral expectations of good Christian women. They illustrate the economic and social strains that weaken the resolve of even the most idealistic heroes and heroines. Fanny Fern and her Ruth Hall introduced readers to a version of the New Woman to admire, but not want to emulate; Alcott, playing off of assumptions of her moral fortitude, updates the New Woman in Jo and Christie by wrapping them in more layers of religious language and tradition. Alcott also adapts the Franklin Stereotype for children utilizing the bildungsroman. The children’s market would give authors like Alcott, Alger, and Twain and opportunity to disseminate their secular gospels to a more pliant audience.

The Secular Gospel and Children’s Books

Alcott’s most famous works may be classified as children’s literature, and her motivations market driven, but there is something more to her endurance with both young and adult readers. “Maybe,” Beverly Lyon Clark posited at the turn of the century, heralding the rise of scholarly interest in works written for children and young adults, “the profession can rethink the achievements of Louisa May Alcott, who in the twentieth century was dismissed for being an author of children’s literature, however quintessentially.” She adds, “Maybe it can also rethink

93 the achievements of Mark Twain, whose great American novel is also, importantly, a classic work for children” (76). The field of research into children’s and young adult literature has boomed in the decade following, and Clark crowned the two who would be seen—especially by

Trites—as the most important nineteenth-century American influences on the industry. As pointed out earlier in this chapter, Wadsworth goes further to say that Alcott’s novels for girls defined “both genre and audience” (46). She was not only culturally important, but culturally generative. However, as is so often the case, specialized interest in children’s literature, much like interest in specifically religious literature before it, has created more of a divide. Because nineteenth-century American texts for children are taken up so extensively by children’s literature scholars and included in children’s literature surveys, they have been more easily left out of the mainstream discussions of American literature. But Alcott, as well as Twain and Alger

(whom I take up in the following chapter), helped to shape the literary market, married the secular to the spiritual, and wrote a gospel which still resonates.

In the nineteenth-century print market, authors of “lower” class genres like adolescent literature and sentimental novels often utilized the reach and popularity of these genres to promote their particular social movements and to bring attention to their social concerns.

Wadsworth’s In the Company of Books tells the story of how the growing print market of nineteenth-century America was shaped by publishers, marketers, and authors who “conceived of the literary marketplace as structured in a particular way.” Wadsworth says these literary insiders “constructed the reading public as an array of discrete readerships, or classes of readers”

(10).

Little Women certainly wasn’t the first children’s book or story exclusively for girls, but it stepped far enough away from the overtly moralizing language of the genre to set itself apart.

Alcott’s publisher specifically asked her for a “girl book” because if Alcott could get it right, they could define a nebulous market. She delivered in spades.

Little Women and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, according to Trites, “are informed by the intellectual climate—specifically the nineteenth-century American obsession with religion—in which the two authors were writing” (54). Trites illustrates a convincing theological lineage shared between Alcott and Twain reaching back, unsurprisingly, to Jonathan

Edwards. She is quick to point out “neither Clemens nor Alcott could ever be described as being religious zealots interested in the conversions of sinners.” Instead, Alcott and Twain would adapt the language of romantic evangelism, “the specifically Protestant manifestation of conversion- based religions that developed in the aftermath of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening and that grew even more fervent during the nineteenth-century Second Great Awakening” (56).

Trites concludes:

These texts share a romantic faith in the ability of youth to improve the future.

The message to readers is, invariably, “with self-improvement, you can improve

the world.” Twenty-first-century critics take it as a given that novels for youth

often rely on adolescents’ growth and imply hope in the future. What we often fail

to recognize, however, is how frequently these texts create a parallel between the

individual’s need to grow and society’s need to improve itself. (144)

Rather than contrasting Alcott to Twain—so often the case, particularly in children’s literature surveys—Trites does her and Little Women the favor of leveling the influence with Twain and

Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, Little Women may be the most unacknowledged “great American novel” of the American Renaissance written by a woman. It is telling that in Philip Gura’s history of the American novel’s first century, Truth’s Ragged Edge (2013), Little Women gets no

95 mention and Alcott’s name is dropped in two instances of listing female authors. Gura’s is not the first or only history of the American novel to give short shrift to Alcott, but his emphasis on religious influence and moralizing should have led him directly to Little Women. Trites gives us an opportunity to reevaluate Alcott’s scope and intentions. And why shouldn’t we? Given

Alcott’s own self-awareness and derision of moralizing, Little Women and most of Alcott’s other novels should not be read with unquestioning acceptance of the surface-level moral lessons. Her tales of prodigals almost always acknowledge both the lost wanderer and the bitter one who stayed behind. The four March sisters provide the reader with several perspectives on economies, relationships, and religious experience. They have much in common with the saints of the next chapter, Ragged Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and Jim.

Louisa May Alcott and Fanny Fern may not be names scholars tend to associate with

Benjamin Franklin, but this chapter demonstrates the missed opportunity of putting these authors works in conversation with Franklin’s. The secular saint, the secular gospel, and the mastery over the moral market which make up the Franklin Stereotype can clearly be traced in Alcott and

Fern’s works discussed here. Indeed, I have no doubt Franklin may be found in several other works by these authors not discussed here.

Chapter 4

THE GOSPEL OF SALVATION

His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow

out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting

aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot.

Mark Twain, in The Galaxy (1870)9

A writer for boys should remember his responsibility and exert a wholesome

influence on his young readers. Honesty, industry, frugality, and a worthy

ambition he can preach through the medium of a story much more effectively than

a lecturer or a preacher.

Horatio Alger, Jr. in The Writer (1896)10

The previous chapter detailed the Franklin Stereotype in the works of Fanny Fern and

Louisa May Alcott, writers rarely compared with Franklin. This chapter follows the Franklin

Stereotype in two writers quite often associated with Franklin, Horatio Alger, Jr. and Mark

Twain. Rather than a gospel of progress as found in Fern and Alcott, Alger and Twain’s gospel is one of salvation.

Franklin lists three of his precepts in the opposite order of those Alger lists in his advice column in The Writer: frugality, industry, and sincerity. Alger’s list seems to come from rote memory. Like a catechism. How shall a man—or a boy—live his life? Honesty, industry, frugality…

A connection between Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and the boy books written by

Horatio Alger has been well-documented. Alger credited the Autobiography as an inspiration in

9 Autobiography (306). 10 Ragged Dick (126).

97 his life and in his writings. It is not surprising, then, that the association between authors has been taken on mostly face value. Alger’s famous rags-to-riches tales, like so many nineteenth- century inspirational stories, take their cue from Franklin. Rather, we might say that this narrative has been attributed to Franklin, but it goes much deeper. “From time to time, when the business cycle triggered a panic or a downturn in trade,” throughout the nineteenth-century, John

Lauritz Larson argues, “a chorus of voices rose to protest the destruction of traditions, the loss of brotherhood, the heartless triumph of naked greed.” Each of these are thoroughly investigated in

Franklin’s writings and almost always laid upon the nature of man as opposed to the nature of the government or the more nebulous “system.” The magic trick of Franklin’s, and later Alger’s, writings, Larson reminds us, really depended on the fickle nature of American protest and the cyclical nature of the market. Once a downturn ran its course, “prosperity generally rekindled people’s optimism, boosted their expectations, and buoyed the hope of so many (sometimes against available evidence) that every American stood to gain from the market revolution.”

Larson described the belief system that would lead to the Gilded Age in terms of a blind faith:

“Many Americans believed, at almost every step along the path through this wonderland of change, that progress energized their birthright of liberty, and that the benefits of freedom lay not in fighting what seemed inevitable, but in riding the tiger into a future they hoped would reward their acquiescence” (91).

A funny thing happens on the way to the Gilded Age. Franklin’s writings get filtered through what adults remember of their childhood readings of Alger. The Autobiography does profess a gospel of salvation, but it is not a steadfast belief in the “birthright” so many Americans held throughout the nineteenth century, and continue to hold. Instead, Franklin suggests

Americans practice discernment in their beliefs and always look for the “good” that serves both

98 the individual and society. “Franklin believed goodness itself was obvious or self-evident, but apparently in cases where sensible folk were not plentiful, he would leave nothing to chance, “

Roy Anker says. “If humankind did, indeed, not carry an inborn or innate goodness within, the individual was at least rational enough to assess logically personal interest”; for example, we might consider how Franklin promotes the library, fire department, and street cleaning in terms of self-interest. “If seen clearly and rationally,” Anker concludes, “self-interest would necessitate opting for the larger social good. Within the social vision, then, self-interest became crucial for the well-being of society as a whole” (117-118). Franklin’s logic seems fool-proof and is proved by his own accomplishments. However, it is quite easy to see how this logic has been perverted to preach a different sort of gospel. The new gospel of salvation emphasizes not only the power of an individual to change his or her circumstances, but also blames that individual for an inability to do so. The gospel of salvation, after this perversion, takes for granted the “fairness” of the system—something Franklin’s Autobiography, with its detailing of his lot as the tenth child and the story of his brother’s harsh treatment of him, begins flat out denying.

In Alger, the gospel of salvation—of saving one’s self from one’s circumstances—places the onus of change on the individual and almost wholly absolves societal and economic inequities. Ragged Dick and Alger’s other boy stories exist as a half-remembered teaching from cheap childhood books about Franklin. The very poor boys Alger was attempting to humanize are, ultimately, indicted for their inability to live up to his fictions. But from what we know about

Alger and his intentions, his discomfort with the growing divide between the very poor and the very wealthy, we have to concede that Ragged Dick and his other stories are as misunderstood or even misremembered as Franklin’s Autobiography was in the nineteenth century. In Alger’s stories, poor boys meet with well-intentioned businessmen and learn to navigate a seemingly

99 benevolent economic system which would bend to those who only put their best foot forward.

Where Franklin was writing for a broad audience and was still misunderstood, Alger was writing specifically to an imagined audience of young boys, and his message has been misunderstood by adults. No doubt, Alger writes down to his readers. His success stories are near-naked morality tales. It is not a surprise that most readers cannot get through them today—they lack nuance. Yet, in their time and for their audience, they helped to bolster already existing beliefs about the fairness of the American economy and the power of the individual over his or her future. Richard

Weiss says, “The cult of success must be understood in terms of its symbolic significance. What gives it force is its confirmation of the individual’s power over his destiny, rather than its promise of material goods” (231). What Franklin and Alger have in common, then, is their usefulness as symbols, regardless of their actual messages or gospels. Adding to this, Mark

Twain has been seen as the anti-Franklin, anti-Alger, and anti-salvation voice—one stoutly against finding morals and lessons.

However, I do not think the link between Franklin and Alger, or Franklin and Twain for that matter, is necessarily the straight-forward progression we have so readily accepted.

Franklin’s spiritual inspirations and influences carry through to Alger and Twain in unexplored ways. Franklin’s story of progress through moral forging and hard work, through Alger and

Twain, becomes a story about salvation of not only the individual, but of the nation. Philip Gura, echoing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., observes, “Even after the cataclysm of the Civil

War, the United States remained unique among countries in a schizophrenic emphasis on the individual and his feelings as well as on the commonwealth and one’s obligation to it” (280).

The story of the individual and of the nation, in Alger and Twain, is a story that becomes more heavily imbued with forces outside of the individual such as luck, the laws of the land, and, of

100 course, divine intervention. In Twain and especially in Alger, Benjamin Franklin’s stereotype is altered so dramatically by the Gilded Age that we have mistaken the copy for the original for nearly 150 years. Yet the stories that come out of Alger’s and Twain’s interpretations of Franklin have done more than mar (or polish) the original; they have profoundly influenced the American definitions of morality and salvation.

This chapter, as with the previous chapter, begins with a contextualization of Franklin’s influence on the market for these types of books, boy books. I turn then to Horatio Alger, Jr.’s

Ragged Dick as a representative reinterpretation of the stereotype typical of most of his hundreds of books, stories, and poems. Ragged Dick’s protagonist, Richard Hunter, is examined as a secular saint, and my interpretation of Alger’s secular gospel is finally spelled out. I follow the same pattern with Twain’s most famous novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, adding a reading of a second secular saint; in addition to the title character, I also look at Jim, the runaway slave at the center of Twain’s novel and, as I will argue, at the center of Twain’s secular gospel.

The American Dream

Before we revisit the nineteenth-century print market, it is worth stepping into our more recent past to see how Alger’s version of the Franklin Stereotype has endured as a prototype of the so-called American Dream. “Benjamin Franklin, and those of a more secular persuasion, justified success by a philosophy which owed little or nothing to divine sanction,” argues

Richard Huber. “Max Weber,” he says, “had assumed that by Franklin’s time the ‘religious basis’ of ‘Puritan worldly asceticism…had died away.’ But, in fact, throughout the history of the nineteenth century a religious as well as a secular basis for the character ethic was vigorously supported.” Huber concludes, “The overwhelming majority of success writers made their choice between one or the other of these philosophical positions” (22). Or, they chose not to choose.

101

In The American Myth of Success (1969), Richard Weiss attempted to pinpoint the reasons why Alger, “this timid writer of children’s stories,” would have such a lasting influence on the American psyche. Weiss says that readers who look back at Alger’s tales with nostalgia

“idealize the certainties of a past time” when success was achieved through hard work (48-49).

Americans, according to Weiss, accepted the fiction of the individual’s success and the implied fiction of the nation’s success. In his conclusion to Truth’s Ragged Edge, Gura argues, “That

Americans still debate precisely the relation of the individual to society does not imply that these writers failed to frame the debate properly or to argue their positions cogently, but that despite their searching criticism and moral correctives, the nation continues to believe in the virtue of democratic liberalism, even in view of its often destructive results” (280-281). Weiss and Gura seem truly perplexed that an entire nation—at least many of her readers—might be simultaneously taken in by such nonsense. That nonsense, of course, is similar to the doctrines of many forms of American Christianity springing out of the nineteenth century. Alger’s stories were not so drastically different from sermons looking back at simpler times.

This sense of nostalgia was a selling point for the novel in its own time. As Hildegard

Hoeller points out, “From the beginning, the novel captured something readers wanted to read”

(x). Weiss and many others may credit or blame Alger as an architect of the “myth” of the

American Dream, but Hoeller’s observation is telling. The American Dream, the idea that

“work,” both moral and physical, leads to prosperity is an idea older than Alger, older than

Franklin, and even older than Bunyan. It is the promise of a God to his “chosen people” to endure forty years in a wilderness, the harsh realities of a “new world,” and the increasingly mixed splendor and horrors of an industrial age. “Alger is not a representative of his time,”

102

Weiss concludes; he is, rather, “a nostalgic spokesman of a dying order. Of middle-class rural origins, he was always an alien in the industrially dominated society of his adulthood” (49).

Weiss’s tone is condescending, but typical of most readings of writers of children’s books until very recently. There was a sense that the writers themselves were stuck in a sort of childhood and that all of them, from Alcott to Alger and even to Twain, were similarly incapable of dealing with the realities of their “adulthoods.” What Weiss seems to miss is his own admission of Alger’s ability to manipulate a reading market. His nostalgic tone, like Alcott’s in

Little Women, is purposeful. The middle-class readers Alger was writing for knew very well the realities of the industrial and gilded ages. They were hungry for a reassuring message about the ultimate salvation of those who would wait a little longer. It is easy to dismiss our forebears of sentimentality or “blind faith,” but the continued success of the self-help industry and the prosperity gospel upturns any argument that America has moved past the American Dream or that the American public has accepted the fact that it is a myth. If the message in Alger, in

Twain, and in Franklin were merely secular, they might have endured but their elevated status, their near worship—particularly Twain’s Huck Finn—owe much to their spiritual underpinnings.

Indeed, as I have stated, it is the entwined secular and spiritual messages which resonate with readers.

The American Dream, the myth of success, the gospel of good works—all have lineages reaching back hundreds of years, back even to the Bible, but it is the version that comes by way of Franklin and filtered through Alger which most fascinates and disturbs historians, economists, and scholars. Twain attempts to parody the myth, only to refine it. He isn’t alone. Franklin and

Alger, not interchangeable but seen as such, are continually taken up by writers eager to say something more searching, more “true” about the American Dream. Yet, quoting Hoeller, I

103 think the fact that they are “ridiculed and parodied speaks to [their] enduring presence and to the ways in which [each] offered a central argument about American culture that [seems] again and again worthy of a response” (xi). A part of that culture central to this study is American religion, what we worship. The American Dream has more often than not been defined as either a capitalist fantasy with the almighty dollar at its moral center or a quasi-Christian promise to the illogical descendants of Israel. In other words, it is a “dream” defined by its derision. It is impossible to comprehend (for the nonbeliever) yet steadfastly held up by hordes of devout believers. Perhaps this endurance is not so much about the dollar-loving capitalists cast as the

“other” in so many studies of this phenomenon. Perhaps it is much simpler. Perhaps the story endures because it is a story about more than success. It is a story about salvation.

The Franklin Stereotype and the Boy Book

As detailed in Making American Boys (2004), the nineteenth-century boy book grew out of a tradition of looking at boys as a subject of study—what Kenneth Kidd terms “boyology.”

Before Alger and Twain were writing about fictional characters and plots, the boy book “usually took the form of advice literature” and the imagined readers were those rearing boys rather than the boys themselves (Kidd 26). It is not hard to see this sort of book, the antebellum book, as a closer cousin to Franklin’s Autobiography. Part Two in the Autobiography can read like straightforward advice if you skip past Franklin’s inclusion of his own moral growth, including his many mistakes and his usual acquiescence from ideology to practicality. Of course, these narrative elements were not important to the self-proclaimed boy experts, nor were they of particular interest to writers like Mason Locke Weems, Samuel Goodrich (Peter Parley), William

Adams (Oliver Optic), or Thomas Bailey Aldrich, author of the “foundational text” of the genre,

The Story of the Bad Boy (1869). Each of these authors, and at least a half a dozen others, could

104 be seen as progeny after Franklin in their own right, but their interpretations are far different from my interests in this study. However, I make mention of them because they provide the links between Franklin’s eighteenth-century allegory and the nineteenth-century fictions of Alger and

Twain. Weems, Goodrich, and the rest looked to the past, to Franklin and others, for instruction.

Whatever read like a prescription was taken as such and the surrounding matter was summed up neatly.

For example, in Goodrich’s The Life of Benjamin Franklin (1832), Franklin’s thirteen precepts set forth in Part Two are boiled down to eleven, leaving off humility and, unsurprisingly, chastity (14). The story behind the humility precept is one of the more self- reflective in Part Two, but Goodrich leaves it out because the precepts are placed only as an introduction to Franklin’s Poor Richard and The Way to Wealth. What is more, all of Franklin’s careful consideration in Part Two of similar rules found in a variety of religions and his references to scripture are never mentioned. Goodrich’s goals are clearly secular: Franklin wrote a few rules we should try to live by and, those rules would be fleshed out in Poor Richard’s

Almanac and in The Way to Wealth, which “was very much approved, copied into all the

American newspapers, reprinted in Great Britain, and translated into the French language,”

Goodrich tells his readers. He goes on to say, “Large numbers of it were, in this manner, distributed, and undoubtedly did a good deal of service” (15). Undoubtedly, indeed.

What Goodrich’s account—a typical version of Franklin’s Autobiography read by middle-class, white school children during the nineteenth century—gets absolutely wrong is the progression from Franklin’s precepts to Poor Richard’s Almanac and The Way to Wealth.

Franklin said that he thought the ideas he came up with in Part Two might be “serviceable to

People in all Religions.” He did intend to publish these ideas, mentioning that he “would not

105 have anything in it that should prejudice anyone of any Sect against it.” Further, Franklin tells his reader plainly, “I should have called my Book the ART of Virtue, because it would have shown the Means and Manner of obtaining Virtue” (BFA 86-87). The proverbial writings found in Poor

Richard, by Franklin’s own account, had much more to do with filling space than his prescription toward virtue. The text of The Way to Wealth, a collection of Poor Richard writings, is a far cry from what Franklin had in mind for the Art of Virtue. Most of it reads as the opposite of his intended project which would have “distinguish’d it from the mere Exhortation to be good, that does not instruct and indicate the Means.” Those types of books, books like The Way to

Wealth, as Franklin put it, are “like the Apostle’s Man of verbal Charity, who only, without showing to the Naked and the Hungry how or where they might get Clothes or Victuals, exhorted them to be fed and clothed” (87). The “verbal charity” is the message that stuck in nineteenth- century America. It is no wonder romantics like Emerson found the message wanting.

Goodrich’s interpretation and Emerson’s disapproval persist because the misreading of

Franklin persists. Gillian Avery’s history of American children’s books, Behold the Child

(1993), which details Franklin’s direct influence on the message of many children’s books through the early twentieth century, makes clear that the influence is one based on the author of

Poor Richard rather than the intended influence of Part Two in his Autobiography. Even by the later part of the eighteenth century, Avery says, “for many households Franklin had replaced the

Westminster Catechism as the child’s guide to a way of life” (56). A bastardized version of

Franklin’s lessons on virtue, tempered with tales of his own shortcomings, morphed into the moralizing boy books of the early nineteenth-century full of rules and very little else. Horatio

Alger, Jr. hoped to improve on the boy book by making it less boring and placing a vagabond in the starring role. Mark Twain wanted to turn the entire boy book concept on its head by

106 adamantly opposing any moral or code to be found in his story. Between the two of them, nineteenth-century America would be introduced to saints and gospels truer to Franklin than either supposed.

The Gospel of Horatio Alger, Jr.

Forty years ago the name Horatio Alger was synonymous with the American Dream.

Even if they had not read one of his tales about boot blacks and match boys, politicians, CEOs, and self-help gurus referenced Alger’s “boot strap” lessons and treated his stories of boys who went from “rags to riches” as real life successes rather than the fictional creations of a nineteenth-century writer challenging the moral decline of the Gilded Age. Alger’s novel,

Ragged Dick, was published the same year as Little Women and offers a stark contrast in the moral guides presented to nineteenth-century American girls and boys. Each of Alcott’s March girls, even the eldest Meg, are portrayed with lingering childishness and many of the predicaments are adolescent, some trivial. On the other hand, Richard Hunter, or “Dick” as he is referred to throughout most of the novel, is hardly childish, and his concerns are very much those of adults: food, shelter, employment.

Alger uses the same sentimental language as Fern and Alcott, but his hero is composed more of potential than pathos. Young boys are meant to read Ragged Dick as a model of reform.

Franklin, Fern, and Alcott similarly offer their own models of reform, but there is an acknowledgement of the social forces which work against moral reform. Franklin emphasizes his own pride, envy, and various errata. Fern and Alcott illustrate the limited resources and possibilities available to the poor and, especially, to women. For all of his concern and work for

New York’s “street urchins”—homeless and/or orphaned boys who made their living shining boots and performing various menial tasks for the well-heeled barons of the Gilded Age—Alger

107 is softly critical of the systems which create economic divides. Instead, he puts the onus on the individual to overcome an inherent laziness and make something of himself, to become respectable. It is no wonder Alger is not popular among scholars; his works seem the antithesis of our postmodern social sensibilities. However, when we consider Alger’s seminary training, his personal need for redemption to be a reality, and the homiletic structure of Ragged Dick, there is more reason to understand eminence of this fallen saint.

An inaccurate portrayal of Franklin has, astonishingly, survived the mountains of biographical and scholarly materials available detailing his life, beliefs, habits, and friendships.

Far less astonishing is the lasting mythos surrounding Horatio Alger, Jr. The first full-length

“biography” of Alger was a complete fabrication by Herbert Mayes. Subsequent scholars have focused attention on the probable reason why Alger left almost nothing behind: the accusations

(and his non-denial) of pedophilia. What little is known provides enough to make a case for how

Alger follows the Franklin Stereotype and to suggest logical inspirations for Alger’s most successful secular saint, and his singular secular gospel. Alger was trained to be and served as a

Unitarian pastor. After two years of service, he was charged with pederasty—and he didn’t deny the charges. Instead, he left town and avoided prosecution. Gary Scharnhorst details all of these events in some of the first pages of his biography of Alger, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr.

(1985). Scholars have shown far more sympathy for authors who have experienced similar scandals, such as Lewis Caroll, Oscar Wilde, and Paul Verlaine, than for Alger, but Scharnhorst places the scandal upfront in utmost sympathy. The chapter following this biographical interlude is titled “The Odds Against Him”—it is a clever acknowledgement that Scharnhorst and any

Alger biographer faces an uphill battle in winning over the reader to even a slightly positive view of Alger and of his work.

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I acknowledge that this is my battle as well, but Alger is far too important a figure in the nineteenth-century understanding of who Franklin was and what his message would become to leave out of this study. And I am sympathetic to Alger, who never stood before a jury of peers, never had his day in court. He was accused of not only pedophilia, but of homosexuality. He was no brash Oscar Wilde, but a slight and reposing figure. He ran for his life because he seriously thought he might lose it. As his early biographies have shown, when it comes to Horatio Alger, perception has continually been accepted as reality. What we can say with certainty is that Alger lost everything. He lost his job, his ministry, his home, and, most importantly, his self-respect.

Whether it was for committing the crime or for being foolish enough to find himself indefensible, Alger was deeply ashamed. He was looking for salvation.

Salvation came in the nineteenth-century print market and the American appetite for those nostalgic and reassuring stories about lost innocence found in boy books. Alger’s new ministry, as it were, would take root in the marketplace. It is no wonder that Alger’s tales have been both praised and derided as origins of a different sort of gospel, the prosperity gospel.

Though I don’t agree with this attribution, the elision of religion and market in Alger’s works should absolutely inform the way we talk about them. Jan Stievermann, Daniel Silliman, and

Philip Goff say that “by analyzing what has elsewhere been described as America’s ‘quest culture’ of ‘religious seekers’ within the conceptual framework of ‘markets,’” we can “make use of a variety of ideas, including supply and demand, consumers, and brands, and thus make religious practices legible by noting how they exhibit characteristics of market practices” (8). For

Alger, as for Fern and Alcott, redemption was manifest in financial success, in respectability.

Luckily, there was a demand for stories and other entertainments that explained away depressing inequity and perceived moral decline. There was a brand new market of young consumers. If you

109 were smart, you could brand yourself as the voice for those young readers and gain their allegiance. The truly business savvy would create a brand that appealed to both young readers and adults. Alger’s brand was redemption, monetary and moral.

Considering his own fall from grace, Alger had a very good reason for wanting to add a moral about redemption in those stories, and he soon found like minds in the New York reformers looking to clean up the mess of boot blacks and newsboys wandering the streets. He was soon involved with the Children’s Aid Society and joined the secular-spiritual minister and reformer Charles Loring Brace in reaching out to poor New York youth. Kenneth Kidd compares

Brace’s teachings to Alger’s, pointing out the progression of the nineteenth-century boy book:

[Brace’s story “Wolf-Reared Children”] reads much like the typical Horatio

Alger, Jr. novel, with its white-bread protagonist succeeding against all odds, with

a little help from male mentors. Brace’s success story is coterminous with Alger’s

fiction and helped standardize stories of lower-class boys trying to make good.

We might argue that Alger, unlike Brace, gave up on the farm and accepted city

life, but the continuities are still clear. Alger’s Ragged Dick, for instance, is feral

by his own admission; “I can’t read much more’n a pig” he tells his friend

Fosdick, “and my writin’ looks like hens’ tracks” (105); soon enough, however,

Ragged Dick becomes Richard Hunter, Esq. Like many of Alger’s titles, Ragged

Dick (1868) strikes me as an amalgam of the Bad Boy novel (which it predates,

actually) and Brace’s conversion story. (99)

These street urchins would be Alger’s muses and his new ministry. Unfortunately, the

Christian overtones of Alger’s new lease on life have been smeared by innuendo in academic circles, as if one’s sexuality is the one and only motivator in his life. Consider Michael Moon’s

110 observation that the language used to promote the Children’s Aid Society had “pederastic overtones.” Moon says of Brace’s admonition that these poor boys seek Christ, the “true friend,”

“Although the ‘friendship’ Brace is urging the street boys to accept here is ostensibly that of

Christ, one can readily see how closely congruent a rhetoric of seduction could be with discourses of middle-class philanthropy like his.” Moon compares this to “when the adult male avows his willingness to recognize and respond (in various institutionally meditated ways) to adolescent male desires for dependency on an older, more powerful man for affection and support” (210). He goes on to say that even if Brace wasn’t an actual pederast, “at least one man who associated himself” with Brace “is known to have seduced boys sexually”: Alger (210-211).

Moon’s argument lacks some nuance considering the scant evidence available about what actually happened. In Moon’s account, Alger was a “known” pedophile who wrote moralizing children’s novels; one can hardly fault Moon for articulating this apparent irony. Yet, the historical record of Alger’s “incident” is not as straight-forward as Moon presents it.

Ragged Dick, A Secular Saint

Each of the nineteenth-century books discussed here follow Franklin’s stereotype. The stereotype always consists of at least one secular saint. In Ragged Dick, that secular saint is

Richard Hunter, Esq.

The long-held belief of many early Americanists is that “the most popular novelists at the time were not always the most influential, and the work for which an author was best known was not necessarily the most significant in her oeuvre” (Gura xviii). Our collective acceptance of this truism, in spite of decades of work by scholars to recover the complexity of the print culture outside of the American Renaissance writers, need only be verified by a glance through the contents of most anthologies. There might be a mention of Fern and an excerpted chapter of

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Alcott, but Alger is completely absent. We continue to collectively imagine nineteenth-century

America as a place where the reading public was actively engaging the works of Emily

Dickinson (the majority of her works were not public), Walt Whitman (his sales were far from astonishing), and Ralph Waldo Emerson (well respected, but the reading public was not rushing out to acquire his essays). It is far more likely that more Americans were reading the works of

Fern, Alcott, Twain, and Alger.

Horatio Alger’s most famous boy book opens in typical fashion, with his secular saint,

Ragged Dick, meeting one of his benefactors, Mr. Greyson. Mr. Greyson realizes he does not have a sum of money smaller than twenty five cents, so he hands Dick the quarter and asks him to bring the change to his office. Dick says he will, and Greyson thinks for the reader, “I wonder whether the little scamp will prove honest” (RD 5). Today we read Alger’s tales with the confidence, if not contempt, that we know perfectly well what the outcome will be. However, the boy books of Alger’s time were more likely to see a character like Dick meet some horrible fate, giving the author an opportunity to moralize to the reader afterward. Only a few paragraphs later

Alger inserts just such a moral about smoking, stating, “No boy of fourteen can smoke without being affected injuriously. Men are frequently injured by smoking and boys always” (RD 6).

Either Alger, at this point, has not quite decided on Dick’s fate or he is purposely toying with the convention of the genre; the effect, either way, is that Ragged Dick, at least for its target audience, was not so easy to decipher as we tend to believe. There was something different about this effort from Alger that made young readers anticipate each new chapter of Dick’s adventure.

Dick’s next patron is Mr. Whitney, who has to leave his nephew Frank to walk about New York on his own. Dick conveniently hears the conversation between uncle and nephew and offers himself as a guide. Frank ends up becoming fast friends with Dick, and, as they are making their

112 way through town, Frank gets an opportunity to find out about the state of Dick’s soul. They see the Bible House, a publisher across from the Cooper Institute. This gives Alger his opportunity to sermonize a bit:

“Did you ever read the Bible?” asked Frank, who had some idea of the neglected

state of Dick’s education.

“No,” said Dick; “I’ve heard it’s a good book, but I never read one. I aint much on

readin.’” (RD 25)

Frank tells Dick that he’d like to “see you getting on” but warns that “there isn’t much chance of that” unless Dick can read and write. Alger conflates the moral good of learning the

Bible with the practical application of reading and writing to “get on.” Frank’s compassion for

Dick provides Alger plenty of opportunities to flesh out the moral code of the novel and of his secular saint. As their stroll through New York continues, Dick gives Frank the history of how he has survived on the street. Dick then muses, “I don’t see why rich folks should be so hard upon a poor boy that wants to make a livin.’” It is a question both Ruth Hall and Jo March take up in their own journeys—only they are poor women wanting to make a living. Frank replies, “There’s a great deal of meanness in the world, I’m afraid, Dick.” And here Alger makes his point when

Dick replies, “If everybody was like you and your uncle... there would be some chance for poor people” (RD 35). That is, if people could see past reputation and history.

When Dick finally returns Frank to Mr. Whitney, the uncle shares his “up from poverty” story, beginning with the advice that, “You know that in this free country poverty in early life is no bar to a man’s advancement” (RD 48). Mr. Whitney is talking about a poverty of character as much as he is talking about actual poverty. The entire story to this point has fluctuated between

Dick’s financial shortcomings and his morally questionable upbringing. Mr. Whitney turns out to

113 be a lot like Franklin, a man who made his name first as a printer and then as an inventor. And just like Franklin, Mr. Whitney suggests that the best good that can be done is to pay it forward.

When Dick initially refuses a five dollar bill because he hadn’t earned it, Mr. Whitney says, “I give it to you because I remember my own friendless youth. I hope it may be a service to you.

Sometime when you are a prosperous man, you can repay it in the form of aid to some poor boy, who is struggling upward as you are now” (RD 50). Here one can recognize that what is important to Alger is not Dick’s poverty but his salvation, his receiving of an undeserved gift.

The lesson is clear about giving the money forward, but it is just as clear about giving one’s friendship—a term scintillated by Michael Moon.

The chapter ends with Dick back out on the street, where a “feeling of loneliness came over him as he left the presence of Frank, for whom he had formed a strong attachment in the few hours he had known him” (RD 51). The emptiness here is spiritual, a longing for communion. Dick has so often been read as a capitalist cypher and a subverted homosexual (both readings having some merit to be sure) that Alger’s gospel has fallen to the background. Dick’s attachment to Frank is holy, he is more than a person, he is a “presence.” Alger, like Whitman, hints that this too “is the face of Christ.” This message is emphasized by Mr. Whitney’s speech that “you can repay it in the form of aid to some poor boy, who is struggling upward as you are now.” Finding undeserved salvation, paying that salvation forward, learning a new gospel to live by—these are elements of Alger’s tales scarcely noticed in scholarship largely preoccupied with taking down capitalism and psychoanalyzing an accused pedophile.

Inherent good is something that each of the secular saints possesses. It only needs to be tapped into, by way of religious intervention or good fortune or both. Dick, fourteen chapters later, finds Mr. Greyson’s office to return the fifteen cents from the first chapter. Mr. Greyson

114 does not recognize Dick because he has new clothes (thanks to the charity of Mr. Whitney).

Alger uses the scene to emphasize Dick’s “natural born” character:

“You’re an honest boy,” said Mr. Greyson. “Who taught you to be honest?

“Nobody,” said Dick. “But it’s mean to cheat and steal. I’ve always knowed that.”

“Then you’ve got ahead of some of our business men. Do you read the Bible?”

“No,” said Dick. “I’ve heard it’s a good book, but don’t know much about it.”

“You ought to go to some Sunday School. Would you be willing?”

“Yes,” said Dick, promptly. “I want to grow up ’spectable. But I don’t know

where to go.” (RD 63-64)

Alger repeats his line about hearing “it’s a good book,” and he again elides religion with respectability in society.

We don’t hear from Frank Whitney again until the end of the novel. In Chapter 24, Frank writes Dick his first letter, a long detailing of his daily life that ends with a plea that Dick

“always think of me, as your very true friend.” Alger emphasizes the importance of the statement and the letter in the next paragraph, “It is always pleasant to be remembered, and Dick had so few friends that it was more to him than to boys who are better provided. Mostly, Dick wants to see Frank again “to have Frank witness the improvement he had made in his studies and mode of life” (RD 105). Poverty, as it does so many times in the Bible, makes Dick better able to appreciate the gift of his friendship and of his salvation. Frank can be read as an almost-lover, but he can also be read as a Christ figure, someone Dick is eager to please and to prove himself worthy to.

The final adventure of the novel comes in almost as an afterthought. Dick and his tutor,

Fosdick, see a boy fall off of a ferryboat. The father, Mr. Rockwell, screams for someone to help

115 and offers a “ten thousand dollar” reward. Dick, does not hear him. But Dick is a secular saint, and “his determination was formed before he heard the liberal offer made by the boy’s father.

Indeed,” Alger continues, “I must do Dick the justice to say that, in the excitement of the moment, he did not hear it at all, nor would it have stimulated the alacrity with which he sprang to the rescue of the little boy” (RD 110). Dick’s inherent goodness is once again his finest attribute. It is as if Alger thought better to remind his readers that his secular saint was already saved before he stepped into fortune. And step into fortune is exactly what happens to Dick in the last chapter. Mr. Rockwell, of course, sends Dick new clothes and offers him a job. Dick’s transformation is completed when he claims to move from “Ragged Dick” to “Richard Hunter,

Esq.” (RD 115). We might conclude that Alger’s story ends on his most important point, that it is a progression from poverty to “respectability.” This may be true, but the poverty is a moral and spiritual poverty, an emptiness felt on the outskirts of a society which will not accept the former

“ragged” Dick. Dick, like Alger, like any saint, must wash himself clean of his past and take on a new name.

Ken Parille makes an astute observation about the religiously enacted “marriage to the market” that happens at the end of the novel by first using Ragged Dick to challenge one of Jane

Tompkins’s ideas about nineteenth-century novel plots. Tompkins argues, Parille tells us, “that a male success story will include the preservation of personality [as opposed to Tompkins primary concern of female “extinction” in similar plots], but this gendered binary breaks down when we look at the endings of popular boys’ novels” such as Ragged Dick (12). Dick abdicates the past and marries himself to his future.

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Capitalism and Christianity

Alger wrote dozens of boys’ novels, but Ragged Dick was his greatest accomplishment in both structure and sales. Which is not to say the story of Richard “Dick” Hunter is complicated or riveting by today’s standard, but “Alger’s novel tapped into an already existing market of books representing the ‘lures’ and ‘snares’ of the city to an American middle-class readership” preoccupied—as we have seen—with the moral decline of the nation and its youth (Hoeller xi).

Dick Hunter’s progress is both spiritual and economic. And, like Fern’s and Alcott’s novels, it elides the pilgrimage of the individual with the nation. Moving out of the social rung and name of “Ragged Dick,” Richard Hunter, Esq.’s journey “[reconceptualizes] the urban landscape as a new American frontier perpetually teeming with possibilities. For Alger, the city and the frontier exist dialectically. In fact, the two sites are not only mutually dependent, but almost one and the same” (Shaheen 21). New York takes the place of Franklin’s Philadelphia, and, to Alger, it is as full of possibility in spite of the extreme poverty, overall class divides, and harsh realities.

It is easy for us to dismiss Alger’s portrayal of New York as fanciful and blind, but it is the place where Alger was able to recreate himself. He went from a social pariah to a literary darling in two years. Narrowly escaping a life labeled as the town pervert, Alger was lauded for his good works. He was never as poor as Ragged Dick, but Alger was just as lucky. His financial well-being was secured by some amount of luck hitting the boy book market at just the right moment. Likewise, his spiritual well-being was redeemed in an opportunity for him to atone for his sins. Of course, the financial aspect has almost always been the focus of researchers.

Setting up Ragged Dick as a product perfectly suited to its time, Aaron Shaheen says, “It was during the postbellum era that America truly began to understand the intricacies and contradictions of capitalist progressions” (20). Shaheen contrasts the 1867 serialization of

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Ragged Dick with the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital; Alger’s novel, of course, “paints a more affirmative picture.” “In depicting Dick Hunter’s rise to respectability and economic self- sufficiency,” Shaheen argues, “the seamy side of capitalism—the frequent insurmountability of present hardship—is never given full voice. Instead, the novel operates on an ideological device, denying the reader a view of what might happen should capitalism not live up to its full potential” (21). That is, Alger’s story—taken as a capitalist fantasy—cannot contain failure.

However, the fact that the core salvation story is true to Alger’s own experience seems to be beside the point. Where Moon reads “pederast overtones,” Shaheen only sees “ideological device.”

Nevertheless, Shaheen’s point is well taken, and has been similarly stated by Alger’s critics over the decades following the publication of Ragged Dick and his similar novels. As much as Little Women has been glossed over as pure religious moralizing, Ragged Dick has been dismissed as pure capitalist cheerleading. But Alger’s training was in the seminary and his social concerns were exactly those derived from confronting the “intricacies and contradictions of capitalist progressions.” Alger’s prescribed solutions to economic struggle may seem wanting and empty from a Marxist reading, but they are grounded in Biblical teachings and the secular tenets of a rising middle-class, not to mention Alger’s own experiences in New York. Our backward looking glances which tend to elevate the struggles of the proletariat are too often blinded to the nineteenth-century American perspective of those who would do anything to shed that title.

It is exactly what was so enticing about the language of Charles Loring Brace “seducing” poor children out of poverty. Moving into what Shaheen calls “bourgeois respectability” was often equated with moving out of moral disrepute. This equation of the economic and the moral

118 is still with us which is why it is shocking that scholars are quick to judge Alger’s novel as purely capitalist. When one considers Dick’s over-reliance on luck rather than his skill or social mobility, Alger’s novel has much more to say of the invisible hand of God than the feasibility of the American Dream or capitalism in general. Shaheen acknowledges this aspect of luck, but brushes it off. “Luck contradicts the ethic of hard work, which is an essential component to any capitalist success story,” he acknowledges. “Yet I would argue that while Dick is undoubtedly lucky, Alger is perhaps trying to make a different point about capitalism. Like Dick, whose history is sketchy, capitalism also attempts to obfuscate or deny its own historicity” (Shaheen

25). A strictly Marxist reading of Ragged Dick must endure these sort of acrobatics—which say little more than “the luck aspect does not matter”—so that the argument can hold. However, without his luck Dick has no story and no salvation.

Alger’s Secular Gospel

In the same year Ruth Hall was released, the Newsboys’ Lodging House, a cheap “hotel” for newsboys and bootblacks in New York, opened in a loft of the New York Sun’s building. It was a joint effort by Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children’s Aid Society, and Sun editor, Moses Beach11. The plight of the young so-called “street Arabs” that frequented the establishment would inform Horatio Alger, Jr.’s series of stories appearing in the Student &

Schoolmate magazine starting in January 1867. Those stories would eventually become his most successful novel, Ragged Dick; or Street Life in New York with Boot Blacks. Fanny Fern’s story was about power through financial success and using that power to transform society. Ruth Hall is more of an “ideological device” promoting the good of capitalism than Alger’s story could ever hope to be. There is nothing is Ragged Dick detailing the inner workings of the capitalist

11 See Gary Scharnhorst The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. (1985), p. 77-78.

119 machine, nothing illustrating the cogs and works of market forces. All of this is front and center in the second half of Fern’s novel. But Horatio Alger continues to reign in the American imagination as the voice of capitalism. His gospel is not about money, or not primarily about money. His gospel is about salvation.

At one level, Alger’s target for the secular gospel is the most specific of the four authors of this study. He wanted to better the living conditions and moral characters of poor boys he met on New York streets. No doubt, like Alcott and Twain, he imagined his children’s books reaching a wider audience, but his mission was singular. Fern and Alcott mention many types of women, suffrage, working conditions, and abolition. Twain, too, covers a wide range of social concerns such as alcoholism, gambling, and, of course, slavery. But, at its heart, Ragged Dick only tells poor, young boys to clean up, be brave, and hope to find some respectability through benevolent forces. It is a far cry from Franklin’s desire to show readers the means toward virtue, but it is more about virtue than it is about wealth. Dick’s adventures bring him into communion with his moral betters. His vices are swept away with his efforts to push forward. No doubt this was central to Alger’s gospel, a message to repeat to himself: your past is forgotten and forgiven, you have been given a new lease on life. Seen as the promise of capitalism, the American Dream, it is a hollow tale full of lies. Taken as a variation on Christian salvation, a variation Gura might call “uniquely American,” it is much harder to judge especially in our more nuanced analysis of religion and religious influences in American literature.

Though I take Shaheen to task in this chapter, I agree with him when he says, “Ragged

Dick’s achievement is its ability to provide a different light in which to view the blighted metropolis of later nineteenth-century America” (26). That different light may be fanciful, but it is informed by Alger’s own spiritual journey. Ultimately, Alger believed in his gospel enough to

120 invest himself in the mission of the Children’s Aid Society. He even, unofficially, adopted a few of the street urchins who inspired his stories. It is difficult to read that, I imagine, without thinking of the charge of pedophilia. But the charge never came up again. Alger’s family was in no way powerful enough to put down the accusation indefinitely. Alger became a celebrity in his own time, but the pedophilia was never mentioned. Scharnhorst attributes this to Alger’s deflection and keeping to himself, but these methods hardly threw off sensational writers of the time. Louisa May Alcott could not get away from fans.

We do not have to absolve Alger, but we might have to (finally) admit that we just don’t know enough. What we know is Alger wrote many more chapters in his own story which told of his efforts to be worthy of his salvation. Those chapters have too often been abridged.

Scharnhorst hints at as much in his afterward to The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr.:

Modern opinions of Alger doubtless have been affected by the confusing mass

republication of his books early in [the 1900s]. Cheap editions of Alger’s novels

were issued by approximately forty publishers between his death in 1899 and

1920. However, many of the earliest novels which conclude as the hero grasps the

bottom rung on the ladder of respectability were rarely reprinted, and others were

silently abridged, often deleting as many as seven of the original chapters in

which the hero performs virtuous deeds for which he is later rewarded. (151)

The irony is that Alger follows Franklin even in death, even in the way he is boiled down and made to fit a preconceived idea about capitalism’s prophets. The “virtue” was strained out of

Franklin and Alger. “To consider Alger simply as an apologist for capitalism and the political right,” Scharnhorst concludes, “is to overlook his basic humanitarian impulse” (156). It is to

121 disregard the secular gospel of his life and of his most famous work: that salvation is real and worthy of passing on to those who have found themselves on the outskirts of respectable society.

Not nearly as perfect a stereotype as Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, Alger’s Ragged Dick is still a faithful descendant of Franklin’s model: a secular saint, a secular gospel, and a very clear manipulation of the moral market.

The Gospel of Mark Twain

From the artistic point of view, there is not a coarse nor vulgar suggestion from

the beginning to the end of the book. Whatever is coarse and crude is the life that

is pictured, and the picture is perfect.

Joel Chandler Harris in the Atlanta Constitution, May 6, 188512

Across the country, high school students are being handed dog-eared copies of

Twain’s book about a boy whose entire life revolved around dropping out from

schools, from churches, from society itself, and those students are being told to

look at the race issue?

Andrew Levy, “The Boy Murderers” (49-50)

If Alger and Alcott played to the moral attitudes of the age, if their secular saints were more subtle, their secular gospels more guarded, Twain was a return to the brashness of Fanny

Fern and the father figure, Franklin. Not that Twain was above it. Tom Sawyer improved upon the formula of Ragged Dick and The Gilded Age was as insightful and ultimately clumsy as

Alcott’s Work. However, the way Mark Twain manipulated the moral market for Huckleberry

Finn was both genius and luck. Twain’s boy book gospel shares its origins with the gospels

12 Quoted by Michael Patrick Hearn in AHF (xxxiv).

122 disseminated by the American Tract Society in that both began with door to door sales. Though

Twain submitted pieces of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to magazines, sales of the novels would primarily use subscription houses such as the American Publishing Company and, later, Twain’s own subscription service. “Subscription publishers,” Scott Casper says, “described themselves as a boon to authors and to readers beyond the reach of bookstores. They promised authors a richer return than the trade publishers’ standard 10 percent royalty” (221). Twain

“conceived of his readers less as patrons of the arts than as consumers.” According to

Wadsworth, “His willingness to pad his manuscripts and his various forays into humorous travel writing are only two of many examples that demonstrate his responsiveness to his target audience” (76). Yet, if Twain is only responding to a target audience—a “target” even

Wadsworth describes as fluctuating—how can we explain the polarizing views of his two most famous novels? Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn at once illustrate “Twain’s genius” and “his various alleged shortcomings, among them sentimentality, nostalgia, and immaturity” (Kidd 78).

Perhaps we misunderstand Twain’s gospel and his means of dissemination.

Subscription books, at least for a time, were the books of choice for the middling classes.

“Serious” authors and publishers scorned this market, but Twain saw an opportunity to appeal to a wider audience than those frequenting bookstores. What is more, the book sellers had scripts to point the various ways everyone in the house could benefit from reading Twain’s books. This is particularly helpful when the author is not sure if he wants his books to be strictly “boys’ books” or more mainstream adult literature. Subscription books also had the nostalgic feel of door to door Bible sales and preacher visits. Even if subscription sales seemed like Twain was reaching to lower classes and a base greed, he could easily convince himself that he was simply choosing the most democratic means of publication and, more importantly, his gospel would be heard by

123 the masses. That gospel, like Alger’s, is one of slavery and salvation, not necessarily about race per se.

It is not that the race issue of Huckleberry Finn is unimportant or nonexistent, but scholarly preoccupation with this aspect of the novel has overshadowed all other discussions of

Twain’s novel. Indeed, it is important in this study—but it is not central. Readers revere the novel for its multiple layers. Jocelyn Chawick remarks, “Whether we agree or disagree with the reality that Huck Finn is not a civil rights activist at the novel’s conclusion, he is not.” However,

Chadwick says Twain’s novel presents “an interesting and provocative number of conundrums— conundrums Twain renders through his characters and their experiences, but conundrums he adamantly refuses to untangle” (“Hero or Icon” 38). Not all of those conundrums are race related. One layer, one conundrum has to do with spiritual underpinnings of the novel.

Mark Twain’s religious perspective is as hard to pin down as Franklin’s, his critique and admiration of Christianity just as confusing; his “movement from a rather primitivistic form of

Protestant Christianity, through deism, and later into more scientific and psychological forms of belief roughly squares with the general movement of the culture at large” (Bush 292). Although, as I have shown, Fern, Alcott, and Alger are attempting to alter the doctrines of Christian morality, Twain hews closer to Franklin in his extra-Christian leanings. In many ways, the creation of, marketing for, and enduring success of Twain’s masterpiece, Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn, rely on the interplay of secular and spiritual forces in the moral market.

Intertextual references to biblical characters and teachings abound, but Twain gooses the moral bent through Huckleberry Finn’s blunt practicality and Jim’s superstition. He cautions the reader against finding a moral, but provides several. In Twain, religious belief and lived religion are both gorgeous and perverse.

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Twain sees utility in the practices of pamphleteers, the same way Franklin saw it in

George Whitefield’s magnetism. Huck’s moral dilemmas continually boil down to a misreading of doctrine and Jim’s supposed silly superstitions are often supported by science and/or spirituality. Huckleberry Finn has been examined from nearly as many angles as Franklin’s

Autobiography, so I am aware of the extreme humility which must go along with my suggesting another. Twain was writing in the milieu of the same sort Enlightenment-thinking Franklin faced. Each proposes a balance wherein the lived religion of the individual outweighs his or her doctrinal adherence, this in spite of many giddily anti-religious interpretations by scholars eager to label two literary giants as out-and-out atheists, or at least unconvinced deists.

Twain had originally envisioned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an “autobiography” of the character who first appeared in his first novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). This character, Huck, as Roberta Trites convincingly argues, is a conduit of Twain’s gospel, what

Trites calls a gospel of reform:

The religious contexts that influenced Clemens and Alcott to write about social

reform shared several elements. Although both authors were skeptical of

organized religion, both were influenced literarily and philosophically by some of

the major tenets of transcendentalism: respect for the role of the individual’s

consciousness in his or her relationship with the divine, respect for nature, and

respect for the child’s ability to have an independent relationship with God.

Moreover, both adhered to some basic reform principles that were two of the

major factors of the Civil War: a growing social belief in equality before the law

and a belief in the individual’s obligation to improve social conditions for other

people. Ultimately, both Clemens and Alcott subscribed to some subset of

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romantic evangelism that led them to create moral youths as protagonists who

were reformers. Huck Finn and Jo March are the two most enduring of the many

youthful protagonists who advance reform ideologies in Twain’s and Alcott’s

novels. Other examples include Tom Sawyer, Polly Milton, the prince and the

pauper, Rose Campbell, and Joan of Arc. (69)

Though Twain, like Alcott, was conscious of his audience’s moral tastes, he pushed the line of

“decency” in Huckleberry Finn in order to assert a critique of a readership preoccupied with the frivolous morality of bourgeois standards of gentility over the more pressing moral questions of not only race inequality but, as I argue, a spiritual laziness which allowed Americans to be fleeced over and over again by what Twain saw as misreadings and flat out lies culled from the

Bible. As such, it is not surprising that the Biblical allusions in Twain’s novel are plentiful.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with spiritual underpinnings, biblical references, and prayers. Even if Twain, as many have suggested, is being explicitly critical of religion and religious practice, spirituality and spiritual themes persist throughout the plot. The supposed satire becomes an integral key to our understanding of Twain’s “gospel.” Tom Quirk compares

Twain’s use of the Bible to Melville’s, pointing out that, “Unlike Melville, who to some seemed to trample upon Christian pieties in scandalous ways, Mark Twain could satirize Christian sentiment with evident impunity because of the sheer playfulness and good-natured fun he had in doing it” (44). No doubt Twain’s tone seems playful, but there is purpose, too. The first biblical story Huck mentions is when the Widow Douglas “learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers”

(AHF 10). Michael Patrick Hearn’s explication of this episode in The Annotated Huckleberry

Finn details the spiritual theme throughout the novel:

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This casual reference to Exodus 2:3-10 introduces a central theme to the novel:

Like Moses who freed the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, so too does Huck

Finn aid a Southern slave in his flight from his master. Both outlawed boys escape

by a river: Moses in an ark of bulrushes on the Nile, Huck by raft down the

Mississippi. (19)

Hearn points out the role Huck plays in Jim’s journey as merely “aid,” since Jim is already free—and, as we find out, might have been better off without Huck and certainly without Tom

Sawyer. But the Moses story is significant because Jim is not the only slave. The readers, the nation, the writer himself are all slaves to continued prejudice and disregard for inherent human value. Huck can’t be bothered to care when he finds out Moses is dead. Likewise, many readers—in Twain’s own time, not to mention contemporary readers—see slavery as something

“dead” and not worth fretting over.

We might look at the Moses scene through Quirk’s eyes. Throughout Huckleberry Finn, he suggests, “the author sometimes yields entirely to the voice and sensibility of its young narrator, and when that happens there is magic in the book.” This magic is also evident in

Franklin’s fond recollections and Alger’s boundless optimism. “When Twain is indigent or contemptuous,” Quirk says, “he speaks through other characters or works through sly subterfuge, having Huck describe events that may merely puzzle a boy who has no sense of humor, much less an appetite for satire, but that adult readers understand all too well” (46-47). Twain includes the story of Moses intentionally, winking at those readers in on the joke. The “joke,” though, as is often seen in Twain’s works, is a biting critique of the readers’ compliance, acquiescence, and/or blindness. Huck does not get it, Twain seems to say, but you certainly should. The story

127 of salvation found in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn absolutely involves the slave Jim, but not necessarily the way we have traditionally understood it.

Huck Finn, A Secular Saint

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my

life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the

paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened

so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And I went on thinking.

And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the

time…

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (343)

Huck, to the reader, is a specter of their former selves, the selves who “spake as a child” and acted in childish ways. He’s a likeable young adult, but we cringe at his actions and, later, his inactions. Like Tom Sawyer, he begins as the anti-Franklin bad boy, but Twain gives Huck what Tom is always lacking: a soul. Even better, Twain gives Huck what even Franklin could have used in his writings: a conscience. Twain gives him Jim. I see Jim as the real moral center of the tale, but Huck plays a significant role in representing the reader to his or herself. What appears as Huck’s naiveté, John Beckman argues, is really Twain deploying “the popular genres of the antebellum period as evidence of the culture’s pre-modern gullibility.” As we have seen in

Fern and Alcott, many have seen the same usage of the sentimental to critique not only antebellum thinking but Gilded Age thinking, as well. “Only rarely does Huck himself misread the fraud,” Beckman explains, “Rather, like the king and duke, he apprehends humbug with a professional familiarity that lifts him above the pre-modern fray. Unlike these con men, however,

128 he advocates an ethical pragmatism, if not a pure utilitarianism, that puts a premium on clarity amid a phenomenal carnival of fraudulence and stupidity” (39).

Another description of this “phenomenal carnival of fraudulence and stupidity” can be found in an earlier Twain novel co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age

(1873). Here, Twain writes a more straight-forward critique of the age and the title “famously summed up the Zeitgeist of the 1870s.” Wadsworth says that Twain’s “evocation of the spirit of the age” includes: “an age characterized as much by the proliferation of print (especially novels), the feminization of culture, and the cheapening of books (and, many would argue, of literature) as by the rise of corporate capitalism and political machines for which it is more generally known” (96). Twain blames the age on the “machines” as much as he does the reading public.

This theme is taken up again in Huckleberry Finn, and Huck reminds us that we should know better. But Twain does not use Huck to preach. Huck shows us how easy it is to give in to the darker parts of our nature. Andrew Levy makes the charming observation that even though

Twain was “instructed by all involved to never create a hero who lied, instead he spent years creating the most empathetic liar in American literary history” (“Huck” 80). We don’t only empathize with Huck lying, but we empathize with Huck’s impatience with the nuanced and complicated, his “premium on clarity,” and his overall emotional and intellectual compliance with the status quo—in spite of his outward rebellion. Jonathan Arac states that, “The moral lesson of Huckleberry Finn is not relativist or subversive but absolute.” He supports his point by quoting Perry Miller:

Hell in 1885 was still officially a reality. Even so, Mark Twain’s readers were not

offended; on the contrary loved Huck all the more… Mark Twain enlisted the

Protestant conscience on the side of the naïve Huckleberry Finn because that

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conscience was long since assured that slavery had been a sin. The most orthodox

of churchmen would smile benevolently over Huck’s crisis. All could rejoice in

this triumph of instinctive benevolence over the ancient formalities of a crude

society and a crude theology—and congratulate themselves upon their

sophistication (qtd. in Arac 34)

Arac and Miller see Huck’s empathetic appeal as something that would make a reader feel morally superior. I don’t think Twain was willing to let the reader off so easily. If, indeed, a reader feels more sophisticated than Huck, the reader must ask him or herself what they have done to remedy the moral shortcoming, the “sin” of slavery and, Twain’s more pressing concern, inequity and racism.

The quote from Miller points us to the most discussed passage in the novel, Huck’s decision to help Jim rather than turn him in in Chapter 31. Hearn sums up the importance of passage by comparing him to great civil rights leaders. “Huck realizes that there is indeed a morality than that of social approval; abolitionists called it ‘higher law.’ It was the same duty to one’s conscience which inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Hearn says. “If a law was unjust, then it was right to break it; one had the right to break it.” Hearn argues that at this point in the novel Huck has “grown greatly” and his decision leaves him no choice to turn back (344).

Arac, Miller, and Hearn join the many scholars who see Huck as the saint of the novel. This scene in particular seems to justify their estimation. I would contend that Twain makes Huck too likeable for readers to trust their empathy as “a good thing.” In truth, Huck is a continual nuisance and lethal danger to Jim. He may be the reader’s stand-in, but he is not a blameless stand-in and the severity of his moral crisis is not to make us feel benevolently superior but retrograde and guilty.

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Jim, A Secular Saint

“I rek’n I knows what I knows. En mine you, de real pint is down furder—it’s

down deeper. It lays in de way Sollermun was raised. You take a man dat’s got

on’y one er two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be wasteful o’ chillen? No, he ain’t;

he can’t ‘ford it. He know how to value ‘em. But you take a man dat’s got ‘bout

five million chillen runnin’ roun’ de house, en it’s diffunt. He as soon chop a chile

in two as a cat. Dey’s plenty mo’. A chile er two, mo’er less, warn’t no consekens

to Sollermun, dad fetch hum!”

Jim, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (140)

Jim sees himself as rich at the end of the novel, which puts him right in line with all of the other Secular Saints in this study. However, it is not Jim’s forty dollars from Tom which makes him rich, but it is his newfound respectability as a freeman. When Jim tells Huck that he was rich before and he was going to be rich again, using his own physical appearance as proof, he is describing his just place in God’s creation. All of the other Secular Saints can claim this.

Franklin hopes to explain away an errata here and there, but he never questions his inherent moral character. Ruth Hall, Jo March, Christie Devon, and Richard Hunter all struggle to become better versions of themselves, but none of them doubt that they are essentially good—“made in

His image” as it were. Only Jim—a slave, an African-American, a superstitious and “savage” believer—points to his flesh and claims a salvation based on his inherent, rather than earned, worth. When Jim explains the foolishness of Solomon famously threatening to slice a baby in two to prove the true mother, Huck thinks that Jim just does not understand. We are expected to laugh at Jim’s interpretation, but also to consider his reasoning.

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This is the genius of Jim throughout the novel. More than Huck, whom the reader immediately identifies with, Jim makes us feel uneasy. We might feel “convicted” every time we laugh at Jim because there is a rhyme to his reason, certainly more than Huck’s or Tom’s. Yet he puts his faith in hairballs and talks about witches. He does not get the Bible—the same one Huck couldn’t be concerned about once he found out Moses was dead. Chadwick’s take on the

Solomon argument is that “Jim is not trying to pass as a white intellectual, but he is striving for a type of verbal and critical equality. Jim gains equality not pretending to be something that he is not or speaking in ways that are unfamiliar.” Instead, Chadwick says, “he uses and relies on his own knowledge and mastery of the language as he commands it” (The Jim Dilemma 49). I would add that Jim’s confidence in his language coincides with the confidence he has in his belief system. That belief system is both pragmatic and secular, and as spiritual as all of the beliefs of the quasi-Christian secular saints.

Jim makes the reader question his or her own beliefs. He turns Solomon’s wisdom on its head and he does the same with the wisdom of the age. Laurel Bollinger recasts the troubling ending of the novel as a moral truth we can only see by truly reading Jim. “The failure of

Reconstruction suggests how fully Americans had bought into the assumption that moral gestures were enough; that declaring an end to slavery really was sufficient.” Of course,

Bollinger argues, “It wasn’t, any more than Jim’s freedom is a sufficient conclusion for the novel” (46).

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Twain’s Secular Gospel

“Shucks, it ain’t no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don’t seem to know

anything, somehow—perfect saphead.”

Jim, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (43)

Twain was “one with the men and women who had their labor and their land taken to help build America. And he was one with the men and women who had done the taking. It was no postmodern confusion: it was the game he intended. It’s not ambivalence if you can get away with it, and he could” (Levy, Huck 46). It was compromise. He was known to have paid the tuition of some black students at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and to make speaking appearances at black churches. He wrote a lot about the racial divides and inequities of not only

African Americans, but also of communities being colonized by the United States, such as

Filipinos. But in his appearances where mostly whites were in attendance, “his public face deflected both the anger and the complicity he felt about the larger history of racial inequality and violence [of the United States]. There was no question his national appeal would shrivel if many Americans knew what he said and wrote in private” (Levy, Huck 45). However,

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn continues to have its staunch defenders and steadfast detractors, not because it is the first or only instance of Twain being controversial, but, I think, because the secular gospel at its core may be where Twain is most sincere and even vulnerable. He suggests the nation itself is in need of salvation by “banishing” those who would try to find a moral. From the start, the satirical game has begun.

The secular gospel according to Twain, I am convinced, has at its center the runaway slave, Jim. The story of Huck Finn is a shadow compared to the character development, the bildungsroman of Jim—or, more accurately, the bildungsroman of a nation seen through the eyes

133 of an African American man. Twain continually shows the reader that the American landscape

Jim is escaping into is one filled with horrors for a black man. Jim escapes South because, to

Twain, it really does not matter. We are “seeing and never believing” the frightening reality of an

America run by divisive factions, self-interested swindlers, and mere boys—dangerously ignorant of the fragility of human life. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn haunts us because of Jim.

Twain, over and over again, asks us to “consider the slave,” continually portrayed as the least of

God’s creatures—yet provided for, in spite of the hellish forces surrounding him.

Jim is a slave who will ultimately receive salvation. The nation has often been compared to Huck Finn, “coming of age” in its own right after the bildungsroman, but perhaps it is more accurate to compare the nation to Jim. Always capable, always full grown and intelligent, but captive to a system, a government, an ideology still in its adolescence. In the end, Jim finds out he was free all along—but was he the one really in need of saving? Twain says that the story has no moral, but Jim seems to be the moral of the novel. Huck continually puts him in danger, but he sticks around. His “superstitions” are mostly aligned with common sense, but are dismissed out of hand. And he sticks around. He has every reason to get away from Huck, but he stays.

Twain makes it so that Huck needs Jim. The minute he comes into contact with Jim on the island, Huck is saved. Huck’s every interaction with Jim afterward, the moments so often called minstrel and racist by Twain’s critics, is what Jocelyn Chadwick calls “an utter condemnation through satire of bigotry” (Jim Dilemma 116). The adult and the savior of the journey is always

Jim, but Twain’s keen satire has us believing Huck is the one doing the saving.

We don’t often turn to Mark Twain for religious guidance, though he had quite a lot to say on the subject. He is remembered for joining, even leading, what Harold Bush calls the

“sustained attack against all religious claims” during the Gilded Age, an attack so common “it

134 can be said to be one of the most obvious features of the era.” It was an era when “the fervid evangelical Christianity of the antebellum period began to take new directions. It had to evolve, given the emergence of scientific and intellectual movements that scrutinized the Christian notions of humankind as made in the image of God and the Bible as the holy, infallible, and authentic Word of God.” Bush says that, at the same time, “educated Americans were being told that there was nothing particularly sacred or supernatural about either their Bible or their own species. These rapid changes resulted in what historian Paul Carter has called ‘the spiritual crisis of the Gilded Age’” (291-292). That spiritual crisis is a guiding force behind much of the plot of

Huckleberry Finn. Scholars, myself included, have honed in on Huck’s evolving religious understanding. Others have scrutinized the text for what is does and does not say about race. But

Twain’s secular gospel presents “the race question,” through Jim, as a question about “the

Christian notions of humankind” and “the Bible as the holy, infallible, and authentic Word of

God.” How, Twain seems to wonder, can we call ourselves “Christians” and claim the domain of the Bible in our lives when we treat human life—Jim—as an afterthought? Here is our brother, our co-conspirator, and support system, and we find ourselves continually apologizing for all of the hidden snakes.

The secular gospel is about both the social concerns of racial inequity and the larger implications of the souls of Americans, damned, by Twain’s estimation, to pay for the sins of our fathers. Michael Kaufman remarks, “Secular thought and discourse do not so much replace religious thought and discourse as they displace them to the private domain of personal experience, belief, and practice” (607). Twain, taking his cue from Stowe, Douglass, and Jacobs, creates in Jim a series of challenges to personal experience and belief. But Jim is not an ever- faithful Uncle Tom nor an unfiltered voice for abolition. Jim is not in the story to save Jim; he is

135 there to save Huck. He is there to save us. Twain is writing Jim long after the popularity of slave narratives by Douglass, Jacobs, and others. He sees that sympathy can only go so far. Huck’s revelation of Jim’s humanity only comes after he has also realized how much he has needed Jim.

In this sense, Huck’s choice to go to hell is as self-serving as it is altruistic. Letting Jim go back would be like losing a leg, perhaps both.

It is easy to feel like Twain’s gospel falls on deaf ears. Levy concludes that “every gesture that produces new relevancy in Huck Finn also produces the deflating conviction that history goes round” (Huck 195). Some readers still walk away from Huckleberry Finn convinced

Twain was a racist or, worse, feeling empowered to use “nigger” with abandon because Twain does.

Jim, trying to explain the genies to Huck, tells Huck to imagine himself as a genie. Huck is indignant about the particulars:

“Who makes them tear around so?”

“Why whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever rubs the

lamp or the ring, and they’ve got to do whatever he says. If he tells them to build

a palace forty miles long, out of di’monds, and fill it full of chewing gum, or

whatever you want, and fetch an emperor’s daughter from China for you to marry,

they’ve got to do it—and they’ve got to do it before sun-up next morning, too.

And more—they’ve got to waltz that palace around over the country wherever

you want it, you understand.”

“Well,” says I, “I think they are a pack of flatheads for not keeping the

palace themselves ‘stead of fooling them away like that. And what’s more—if I

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was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before I would drop my business

and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin lamp.” (AHF 42)

Jim’s genie story could be read as Twain talking about the nascent power, the “magic,” of the slave. Huck’s insistence that he would use that power to do his own bidding rather than serve some master could be a sendup of the entire institution. His inability to empathize with the predicament of the genies also reflects the blind assurance of “bootstrap mentality” permeating the Gilded Age. From a spiritual standpoint, the reverse is true. Jim’s talk about obeying a master, regardless of our own wishes, harkens back to following not the will of a slave master, but the Master of Men. Twain’s secular gospel has it both ways. Huck is absolutely right that a man need not bow to the whims of another man simply because he holds a lamp or a ring or a piece of paper. Jim is also right. Jim’s story, to Huck, “had all the marks of a Sunday school” because it implied the futility of man’s will faced with a more powerful force. Certainly history goes round, but there is hope. Jim is no Uncle Tom. He is not blindly faithful to Huck because he thinks him superior. He is faithful to Huck out of a spiritual duty to take care of this “perfect sap head.” Jim’s freedom and safety is never really up to Huck. Huck, on the other hand, could not have survived without Jim.

In Twain’s narrative, Jim is Huck’s salvation. Jim, the supposedly silly and superstitious, turns out being the spiritual strength of the novel and its gospel of salvation. Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn introduces readers to two more variations on the secular saint in Huck and

Jim; disseminates a gospel of salvation as its secular gospel; and capitalizes on the religious anxiety and market forces of the Gilded Age to take full advantage of the moral market of late nineteenth-century America. The book many consider Twain’s masterwork can be seen as a stereotype of Franklin’s Autobiography.

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Chapter 5

EPILOGUE

J.A. Leo Lemay, in the first volume of The Life of Benjamin Franklin, details an early incident in Franklin’s printing career which illustrates several of the facets which would be reflected over two hundred years later in the careers of Fern, Alcott, Alger, and Twain. When

Franklin was nineteen years old and living in London, he wrote and published a burlesque on the then-popular treatises “justifying the ways of god to men,” A Dissertation on Liberty and

Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725). Pragmatically, Franklin published the pamphlet anonymously to avoid possible jailing for printing a sacrilegious work.

Franklin was able to produce the pamphlet by making a deal with his then-boss, Samuel

Palmer; Lemay suggests that Franklin paid Palmer for the paper and ink with extra labor plus a small fee. That small fee would come, at least in part, from payments the nineteen-year-old had received for type-setting Wollaston’s piece (which was the focus of particular ire in Franklin’s

Dissertation). Within the Dissertation, Franklin’s satire allowed him to imply a deistic philosophy without actually arguing the merits of that philosophy as better than theistic philosophy. In other words, he could “try out” his ideas without risk of being proved wrong. He could also test the receptiveness of his readers. It seems that there was ultimately little interest, but Franklin’s note to Benjamin Vaughan, upon whom he continually counted to make their correspondences public knowledge, ensured that latter interest might be sparked in finding the final remaining copy (which Franklin had said he kept for the notes a friend wrote in the margins). For Franklin, the writer and printer, the debate over “the ways of God” provided an opportunity for him to exercise his intellect, challenge the beliefs of a reading public, play the role of one of his many personae, and even make some coin off of the opposing point of view.

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Rather than arguing a definite position from a deist point of view, he chose to satirize the works of theists like John Dryden. The idea came to Franklin as he was setting up the type for

William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated. The propositions set forth in Franklin’s dissertation ask pointed questions of deeply held beliefs, but the tone, again, is ironic. The “call to action” is not for the reader to change his or her beliefs, but to question why they hold those beliefs. Franklin wrote to Vaughan that he had printed one hundred pamphlets but, after distributing only a few, he decided to burn the rest. “Since at least seven copies of the

Dissertation survive,” Lemay remarks, “I doubt he really burned it. Indeed, for seven copies to have survived from one hundred is surprisingly good; it shows that the book was hardly read at the time” (Life of BF, V1 270-273). We must wonder, though, why Franklin even went to the effort. His Autobiography reveals a continual confrontation with religion and belief. His goal never seems to be strictly satire, but searching. In any case, he apparently did not feel the pursuit was void of merit. Why else would he preserve so many copies?

Surveying our own mountainous “copies” of books and essays and entire movements dedicated to religion and American literature, we may wonder why we go to the effort. Perhaps, as it was for Franklin, the desire to find “justifications for God” within our own intellectual realm, in our collected writings, is too tempting. Knowledge always has been. “This is a good thing indeed,” Modern proclaims:

For what the study of literature may conjure most vividly is a practiced reflexivity

that does not simply question the use of religion as an analytic category but does

so in such a way as to reconceive characterizations of historical actors, develop

new plotlines about those actors and their interactions with others who,

heretofore, have not been granted agentive capacity, and, finally, explore with

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more dexterity the perverse mechanics of the collective as it plays out at levels

both intimate and abstract. For at the intersection of American literatures and

American religions lies the possibility of reconceiving the object one studies and

reframing the stories one tells about it. This is not an invitation simply to add on

people, persons, things, and events to an already established story of American

religion. Instead, it is a call to supplement (perhaps to extinction) metaphors of

agentive belief and church history paradigms that have so dominated the field

with discursive analyses of the imagination. For in the end, literature enables the

scholar to assume a different kind of narrative responsibility in telling stories

about our ongoing and ever fragile experiments in being human. (192)

The study of the history of the book, eventually, will broaden its scope beyond the printed page. Perhaps we will adopt a more appropriate moniker such as text culture or the history of the text. In any case, these texts offer tantalizing possibilities for considering the religious, the secular, and the spiritual-secular. There are hundreds of unheard “gospels” and unrecognized “saints” populating the text world before and long after the nineteenth-century.

Franklin will continue to be a dominating influence on academic narratives of textual history.

Twain will probably not be far behind. However, I hope that Fern, Alcott, and even Alger can find their way into the new stories we begin to tell ourselves about ourselves and our text culture.

I hope that the religious, the secular, and the spaces in-between continue to stimulate the intellectual curiosity of colleagues who can add-to and reinterpret the spiritual journey described in our print and text traditions.

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The American Adventure

I grew convinc’d that Truth, Sincerity and Integrity in Dealings between Man and

Man, were of the utmost Importance to the Felicity of Life, and I form’d written

Resolutions, (which still remain in my Journal Book) to practice them ever while I

lived.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (55-56)

My favorite attraction at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center is a classic audio- animatronic-laden condensed history of the United States called The American Adventure. The hosts of the show are Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. Walking theme park visitors through

American history on a hot Florida afternoon is a hard enough task, so the show is just the sort of light, patriotic fluff sure to confirm the ire of many of my colleagues and most historians.

Yet, the image of Franklin and Twain spiriting us across American history, pointing out where we got it right and where we could have done better, is one that has stuck with me at many points while I was writing this dissertation. Only, of course, I would add Fern, Alcott, and possibly Alger to the mix. Each of them, as the Disney attraction suggests, had projects and goals which they hoped might reach into the distant future. They hoped to shape the character of generations. Such a consideration of posterity absolutely smacks of something more ephemeral than monetary or social successes. Their eye to the future, as I have attempted to show, created in them a desire to spread the good word of their ideas, hopes, and dreams. It moved them to speak a gospel situated between religious, market, and social forces. A secular gospel.

This study began with Brenda Wineapple’s Ecstatic Nation, so I turn to her again in the closing pages. Wineapple says that by the time Reconstruction was well underway, compromise was “outmoded rhetoric” which had been “tainted” (592). We can choose any current debate

141 from Sandra Bland to Caitlyn Jenner, or turn to old faithfuls like gun control and abortion, and verify that Wineapple is absolutely correct. Compromise often seems nonexistent, not only in the social and political realms, but in academia, in the halls of intellectual curiosity. We can slough off “ossified” stories for new ones, embrace the multiple posts-: post-postmodernism, post- nihilism, post-9/11, postsecular. Sarah Rivett suggests:

Given that our narrative of secularization has now been dismantled enough for

scholars to declare that we have entered a “postsecular” phase of criticism, it is

worth reflecting on what a postsecular literary history might look for and

exploring the critical methods that it demands. Postsecular theory appears to have

three interrelated components: we are no longer bound to a framework of

secularization; postmodernism’s critique of Enlightenment notions of privacy,

rationality, and objectivity has made it possible to move past the values that were

mobilized to dismiss religion, such that we no longer exist in such a staunchly

oppositional world; and the binary oppositions between reason and revelation,

matter and spirit, truth and belief no longer hold. In their place, postsecular

theorists aspire to more synchronic accounts of history and human experience.

(990)

The religious turn in studies of American print culture is an exciting realm of possibility.

We need not fear a retrograde return to New Critical and other more conservative approaches nor should we continue to separate out our discussions of class, gender, and racial tensions from our considerations of lived religion and secularity. Our study of religion and of secularity could not arrive at a more important juncture.

142

As American culture becomes one less and less defined by a single religion such as

Christianity, as our society continues to embrace multiple spiritual experiences as meaningful and authentic, and as our literatures continue to reflect the interplay of religion, secularity, and market forces, it is crucial that academics continue to take seriously the study of religion and secularity, components as immutable as class, gender, and race in the make-up of human experience. Perhaps, borrowing the lofty language of the Disney attraction, if we can find compromise between religion and secularity, we can begin—in a very small way—to reestablish the usefulness of compromise. Franklin never tired of it:

When attendees of the Constitutional Convention could not get past their

disagreements and ploys for particular provisions and interests, “Franklin moved

that the convention begin every morning with prayers.” He reasoned that the

“Father of Lights” might move them toward reconciliation. Without spiritual

guidance, “we shall be divided by our little partial local Interests, our Projects will

be confounded and we ourselves shall become a Reproach and a Byword down to

future Ages. And what is worse, Mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate

Instance, despair of establishing Government by human Wisdom, and leave it to

Chance, War and Conquest.” (qtd. in Houston 198)

“Our little partial local interests” so often blind us. The scope of our American Adventure is dictated by the individual. We read our literature and our world myopically. David Larson observed, “Franklin tests theories of virtue by examining their effects upon men’s lives because he values experience more than theory. He is more interested in men’s actions than in the beliefs that inspire them” (114). A religious turn in the study of American literature allows us, again, the privilege of considering both the actions of men—their writing, their marketing, their

143 messages—and, in turn, the beliefs that inspire them. A “religious turn” is as much about the direction of interest as it is about the direction of vision. It is time for us to “assume a different kind of narrative responsibility” that points our research and ourselves outward.

144

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VITA J.D. Isip received a Bachelor of Arts in English (2004) and a Master of Arts in English

(2010) from California State University, Fullerton, and entered the English doctoral program at

Texas A&M University-Commerce to focus on Early American Literature in 2011. He teaches courses in composition and literature at Collin County Community College, where he is also the

Campus Director of the Honors Institute and the English Discipline Lead for all three Collin

College campuses. He is the co-founder and editor of the online journal, Ishaan Literary Review, and has served as the editor for Dash Literary Journal and The Mayo Review. He has published several scholarly and creative works in print and online journals. He has published a composition textbook, This is Writing: A Conceptual Guide to College Composition (Fountainhead Press,

2015), and a poetry collection, Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). He is an active member and presenter at the conferences of the American Literature Association and the

Children’s Literature Association. J.D. Isip is a veteran of the United States Air Force and “made magic” for The Walt Disney Company for almost a decade.

Permanent address: Collin College, Spring Creek Campus 2800 E. Spring Creek Parkway Plano, TX 75074 Email: [email protected]