Financial History 25th Anniversary Special Edition (104, Fall 2012) | Page 14
THE TICKER FROM THE COLLEC TION
Adventures on Wall Street: Finance and Industry
in American Dime Novels
By Franklin Sammons
and Sarah Buonacore
“Dime novel” is a catch-all term for late
19th century and early 20th century American popular fiction. Providing Americans
with a consistent output of popular fiction at a fixed, inexpensive price, these
weeklies are the antecedents of modern
day mass market paperbacks, comic books
and even television series. The term itself
is thought to have originated with the first
book in Beadle & Adam’s Beadle’s Dime
Novel series, Maleaska, the Indian Wife
of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens,
published in 1860. First printed in orange
wrapper papers, the early dime novels
focused on encounters between Native
Americans and backwoods settlers. By the
1890s, however, their themes broadened
and their covers transformed into one of
the defining characteristics of dime novels:
the dramatic, often lurid, colored cover
illustrations depicting a hero in action.
The Museum’s collection consists of
more than 80 dime novels with financial and industrial themes and includes
issues from Fame and Fortune Weekly,
Pluck and Luck, Work and Win, Secret
Service, New Nick Carter Weekly and Tip
Top Weekly. Many of these dime novels
chronicle the “rags to riches” journeys
of honest and hardworking boys who
often acquire their “fame and fortune” by
outwitting avaricious and unscrupulous
characters or by fighting against financial
corruption.
NOV 17
1999
Dime novels were aimed primarily at
urban, working class adolescents and were
distributed at newsstands and dry goods
stores. Their popularity both benefitted
from and reflected an American mass
culture developing at the turn of the 20th
century due to the expanded mechanization of printing, the increased efficiency
of railroad and canal shipping, and the
growing literacy of working class Americans. While the most popular dime novel
stories were those of adventures set in the
Wild West, the genre also included tales
of urban outlaws and self-made men, of
crime fighting detectives and even costume romances.
The physical nature of dime novels
made them easily disposable commodities, and they are now relatively rare.
Averaging 64 pages with typical dimensions that were pocket-sized, the novels were small and cheap, so the typical
reader did not save them. The books also
were made of pulp-wood paper, which
has a high acidity level and disintegrates
quickly. As a consequence, only a fraction
of the millions of issues printed by dime
novel publishers remain today.
The collection of financial and industrial themed dime novels affords researchers an opportunity to explore representations of Wall Street, finance and industry
in early 20th century American popular
culture. Scholars have plumbed the social
and cultural significance of dime novels
broadly, but very little — if any — attention has been given to dime novels with
For the first time, more than 1.5
billion shares change hands on the
Nasdaq in a single day, as the day’s
total volume hits 1.646 billion.
12 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2012 | www.MoAF.