 First edition title page | |
| Author | Maria Susanna Cummins |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | John P. Jewett and Company (United States) |
Publication date | March 1, 1854 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
The Lamplighter is a sentimental novel written by Maria Susanna Cummins and published in 1854, and a best-selling novel of its era.
A female Bildungsroman, The Lamplighter tells the story of Gertrude Flint, an abandoned and mistreated orphan rescued at the age of eight by Trueman Flint, a lamplighter, from her abusive guardian, Nan Grant. [1] Gertrude is lovingly raised and taught virtues and religious faith. She becomes a moralistic woman. In adulthood, she is rewarded for her long suffering with marriage to a childhood friend.
The Lamplighter was Cummins's first novel and was an immediate best-seller, selling 20,000 copies in twenty days. The work sold 40,000 in eight weeks, and within five months it had sold 65,000. At the time it was second in sales only to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin . It sold over 100,000 copies in Britain and was translated into multiple different languages.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of the novel in an 1855 letter to William Ticknor: "What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse?" In this same letter Hawthorne made his notorious remark, "America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women." (He had censored the word "damned.") His letter today is posited as the primary "claim to fame" of the novel. [2]
In 1950, James D. Hart (author of The Oxford Companion to American Literature) noted that The Lamplighter could provide insight into the American culture of its time:
If a student of taste wants to know the thoughts and feelings of the majority who lived during Franklin Pierce's administration [1853–57], he will find more positive value in Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter or T.S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room than he will in Thoreau's Walden [the first two being far more popular] – all books published in 1854.... Usually the book that is popular pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past. [3]
The character of Gerty MacDowell in James Joyce's Ulysses is based on the heroine of the novel, Gerty Flint, in a portion of Ulysses generally believed to be a parody of Cummins' writing style. [2] [4] The connection of Gerty with The Lamplighter has been recognised as long back as Stanley Sultan's book The Argument of Ulysses published in 1964.[ citation needed ]
The Lamplighter was widely read for close to a century; for example, in 1915, the New York Public Library ordered 250 copies of a new edition. [5]
The novel's success saw it quickly adapted for the stage. It was presented in numerous productions in the United States and England in the 1850s. It was also made into a silent film in 1921 with Shirley Mason playing the role of Gertie. [6]
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement." According to Declan Kiberd, "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking."
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1854.
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a work of historical fiction by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. As punishment, she must wear a scarlet letter 'A'. Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalism, sin and guilt.
Maria Susanna Cummins was an American novelist. She authored the widely popular novel The Lamplighter (1854).
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, was an American author of Southern literature and a supporter of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Her books were banned by the American Library Association in 1881. She was the first woman to earn US$100,000 through her writing.
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th and 19th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction beginning in the eighteenth century in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age.
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The London Jilt; Or, the Politick Whore is an English prose tale published anonymously in 1683, ostensibly relating the memoirs of a London courtesan. Part of the English tradition of the "Restoration rake," the book, once attributed to Alexander Oldys, achieved popularity in both England and the American Colonies.
John Punchard Jewett (1814–1884) was a Boston publisher, best known for first publishing Uncle Tom's Cabin in book form in 1852. Jewett was a brother of librarian Charles Coffin Jewett.
Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated is a collection of short stories by Solon Robinson about the life of the poor in New York City, and was a "runaway bestseller" when first published in the United States in early 1854. Along with songs and plays based on the book's stories, which were first published in the New York Tribune, Hot Corn enjoyed a brief frenzy of popularity.
The obscenity trial over the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses in The Little Review, an American literary magazine, occurred in 1921 and effectively banned publication of Joyce's novel in the United States. After The Little Review published the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses in the April 1920 issue of the magazine, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice instigated obscenity charges against Little Review editors Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap. The editors were found guilty under laws associated with the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it illegal to send materials deemed obscene through the U.S. Mail. Anderson and Heap incurred a $100 fine, and were forced to cease publishing Ulysses in The Little Review.
A lamplighter was an employee of a town who lit street lights.
The Romance of a Shop is an 1888 novel by Amy Levy. The novel centers on the Lorimer sisters, who decide to open their own photography business after the death of their father leaves them in poverty. The novel examines the opportunities and difficulties of urban life for the "New Woman" in the late nineteenth century, maintaining their right to independent opinion and the questioning of social norms.
Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainesay is an 1837 novel by American author Robert Montgomery Bird. Noted today for its savage depiction of Native Americans, it was Bird's most successful novel and a best-seller at the time of its release.
The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina is an 1835 historical novel by American writer William Gilmore Simms. It was a popular bestseller during its time and became Simms's best known novel.
Isaac Mitchell (1759-1812) was an American author and journalist, best known today as the author of the Gothic novel The Asylum, or Alonzo and Melissa.
Shakespeare and Company was an influential English-language bookstore in Paris founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919; Beach published James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses at the bookstore. The store closed in 1941.
The Lamplighter public domain audiobook at LibriVox