| As the turn to cheap fiction
libraries accelerated, other publishers began to introduce
romance libraries of their own. "From around the mid-1880s
the dime novel libraries became not only more numerous but
also more specialized, separating works out not only
broadly by genre but also narrowly by sub-genre," notes
media historian Graham Law. "'Clover', 'Heart',
'Primrose', 'Sweetheart', and 'Violet', were among the
epithets used to denote romance libraries aimed at female
readers." As their titles suggest, these were not
predominantly "sensation" libraries but sentimental ones,
and less likely to include working-girl narratives of the
type popularized by Libbey than stories of middle- and
upper-class romance. (Libbey's serials were typically
reprinted in more general circulation dime libraries, such
as George Munro's popular Seaside Library.) The
writer in whose work the specialized romance series
instead invested most heavily was Libbey's high-profile
predecessor, Charlotte M. Brame, the "prolific English
author of sentimental stories with a touch of sensation"
who began publishing in cheap London weeklies in the
1850s. Like other English authors before the passage of
the International Copyright Act of 1891, Brame, who wrote
"somewhere in the region of 130 novels during her
lifetime," had her work routinely pirated in the United
States, where it appeared first in the story papers and
then--"in a veritable tsunami of editions"--in the
dime libraries, under either her own name or initials, or
the misspelling "Charlotte M. Braeme" (an accident
introduced by Beadle and Adams in 1877), or the
designation "by the author of Dora Thorne" (one of
Brame's most popular novels), or a handful of manufactured
pseudonyms, the most famous of which was "Bertha M. Clay,"
a signature "which was also employed freely for stories of
similar character written by others" even long after Brame
died in 1884. William A. Gleason, 'Postbellum, Pre-Harlequin: American Romance Publishing in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century' in William A. Gleason, Eric M. Selinger, Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? (Ashgate, 2016) |
| J. Randolph Cox, Review in Dime Novel Round-Up (August
2012) |