The Art of Democracy. Jim Cullen

      SARA WILLIS PARTON, C. 1868

      Hall’s family was of little help—in fact, it was downright hostile. Since her mother’s death, Ruth’s father only reluctantly gave her a pittance and urged her to give up the children. Her in-laws, who had never liked her when their son was alive, now schemed to gain custody of the girls. And former friends avoided her. When she finally turned to writing for newspapers and sought help from her brother, a prominent editor, he told her she lacked talent and should “seek some unobtrusive employment.” Working women, it seemed, should be neither seen nor heard.

      Ruth Hall was a fictional character. But her creator—Sara Willis Parton, a.k.a. Fanny Fern—was not. In many important ways, Ruth Hall’s story was Fanny Fern’s story, and Fanny Fern’s story, one of the best known and most controversial of the mid-nineteenth century, opens a window on some of the less visible aspects of women’s lives in the Victorian era.

      The life of the future novelist and columnist began in relative privilege. Grata (soon changed to Sara) Payson was born in Portland, Maine, in 1811, the daughter of an anti-Federalist newspaper editor who relocated the family to Boston when Sara was a child. Given a nickname of “Sal Volatile,” she impressed her classmates at Catherine Beecher’s seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, and after graduating wrote pieces for the Youth’s Companion, a magazine founded by her father. In 1837, she married a well-to-do banker, and over the next seven years bore three daughters.

      Then things began to fall apart. Her mother, eldest daughter, and husband died between 1844 and 1846, leaving her with unsympathetic relatives and without a means of supporting herself and her two remaining children. She turned to teaching and sewing, but neither earned her enough to support her family, and she was forced to relinquish one daughter to her in-laws. In 1849, she reluctantly entered a marriage of convenience to a Boston widower, but when he enlisted his children to spy on her, she left him and moved to a hotel (he then left town to avoid supporting her, and subsequently divorced her for desertion).

      Widow, divorcee, and single mother, Sara was again left to her own resources, now more than ever a pariah to her relatives. In 1851, she turned to writing and succeeded in selling pieces to small Boston newspapers, adopting the pen name “Fanny Fern” (a joke on the florid style of women writers popular at the time). But when she asked one of her two brothers, poet Nathaniel P. Willis, editor of the New York Home Journal, to publish her work, he refused. Her brother’s assistant, James Parton, then printed them without her brothers knowledge. When Willis found out, he demanded Parton stop; Parton tried to persuade Willis of the worth of his sisters work, but when he failed, he resigned. Eleven years Fern’s junior, he became her third and final husband in 1856. She kept her pen name, however, and the two signed a prenuputial agreement to protect her assets for her children.

      Meanwhile, Fern had an easier time with her other brother, Richard Willis, editor of the New York Musical World and Times. Its publisher, Oliver Dyer, sought Fern’s services for his paper, unaware that she was related to his employee. Richard Willis was not as implacable as his brother, and cooperated when Dyer hired her to write a weekly piece on the issues of the day. As such, she became the first woman in the United States to work as a professional columnist.

      Fanny Fern’s columns, which covered a wide variety of topics, many of them personal, were pirated and reprinted in newspapers and magazines around the country; soon, she had a national reputation. Her writing had a humorous, ironic, and sometimes sarcastic edge that was considered unusual for a woman writer. In fact, there was speculation about whether she was a woman at all. While not generally considered a women’s rights activist, she consistently argued that women must seek to provide for themselves financially, develop their creative talents, and take, rather than ask for, the same rights men enjoyed in marriage. “You see, you had no ‘call,’ Mrs. Tom Cabin, to drop your babies and darning-needle to immortalize your name,” Fanny Fern wrote of Harriet Beecher Stowe amid the clamor surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Well, I hope your shoulders are broad enough and strong enough to bear all the abuse your presumption will call down upon you.”

      In 1853, an upstate New York publisher collected a series of Fern’s columns into a collection called Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, which became an instant bestseller. A second Fern Leaves appeared the next year, as well as a book for children, Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends. The three books together sold over 130,000 copies in the United States and almost 50,000 abroad, finally giving her financial security.

      Fern was now able to write Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time. The novel, based closely on the events of Fern’s life, appeared at the end of 1854. She assumed no one would know her true identity, but a former employer who saw himself unfavorably portrayed in the book let the cat out of the bag. This created an immediate sensation, and readers scooped up the novel, especially because of Fern’s portrayal of Hyacinth Ellet, a pretentious fop who was clearly modeled on her brother Nathaniel. While some revelled in the controversy, others were appalled, for revealing reasons: “If Fanny Fern were a man, a man who believed that the gratification of revenge were a proper occupation for one who has been abused, and that those who have injured us are fair game, Ruth Hall would be a natural and excusable book,” wrote a reviewer for the New York Times in December 1854. “But we confess that we cannot understand how a delicate, suffering woman can hunt down even her persecutors so remorselessly. We cannot think so highly of [such] an author’s womanly gentleness.”

      Yet it was also clear that whatever they may have thought about the writer and the publicity surrounding her, there were those who found Ruth Hall a compelling piece of work. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had little patience for the “d-d female scribblers” who were so popular in the 1850s, held the novel in high regard. “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,” he wrote his publisher. “Can you tell me anything about this Fanny Fern?” he concluded at the end of his letter. “If you meet her, I wish you would let her know how much I admire her.”

      Fern followed Ruth Hall with Rose Clark (1856), a novel loosely based on her second marriage. But her primary occupation remained that of newspaperwoman. In 1855, Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, the fabulously successful story paper, sought her services for a weekly column, offering the princely sum of $25 a week. When she declined, he doubled the figure. When she declined again, he raised his offer to $75. She finally agreed to do it for $100, making her the most highly paid newspaper writer of her time. She wrote the column without fail for the next sixteen years, a champion of everything from women’s suffrage to the poetry of Walt Whitman (though a financial dispute would poison her relationship with the poet). Her last piece appeared two days after her death in 1872.

      Fanny Fern was an American original. At a time that saw a celebration of the working man, she lived and described the travails of the working woman. At a time that embraced the myth of the happy family, she frankly depicted the power struggles and conflicts that lay at the heart of domestic life. And at a time of often rigid gender roles, she expanded the scope of what it was possible for women to do. “I cherish the hope,” she wrote in the preface to Ruth Hall, “that, somewhere in the land, it may fan into a flame, in some tried heart, the fading embers of hope, well-nigh extinguished by wintry fortune and summer friends.” In art as in life, Fanny Fern achieved that goal for many American women.

      While the appeal of dime fiction was broad, it seems to have been produced with an eye toward a white working-class clientele. The stories were typically written in a mode of artisan radicalism, whereby good-natured, diligent workers were preyed on by feckless, hypocritical, and exploitative owners. Good triumphs over evil, often either with the help of poor heroines who turn out to be wealthy heiresses or through the foiling of dastardly plots that are revealed in the nick of time. The class accents in dime novels invoked the ideological energy and moral outrage that animated reform literature: they claimed to perform a social mission even as they diverted and entertained.⁶¹

      One of the most interesting of the dime novelists