The New York herald., 1922-07-23
CHRONICLE AND
COMMENT
By ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE.

cestry in Pierstown, Otsego County,
N. Y, September II, 1921. With
forebears who had dared the will
derness, he himself experienced the
wilderness at the age of IL, when
he was taken on an overland mi
grafton occupying many weeks to
Michigan Territory. Returning to
New York State, Erastus Beadle
worked on a farm and then as ap-
prentice to a miller. One day some
letters for labelling the bags of
grain were needed in the mill and
Erastus cut the letters from blocks
OF hardwood, just as the old block
letters had been made before the
days of Gutenberg. That turned his
mind to printing, and later, in
Cooperstown, he learned to be a
typesetter, printer and binder, and
with these abilities as his only
capital moved in 1847 to the village
of Buffalo. Five years later he had
printing shop of his own.
1T was in 1860 that in New York
he began his series of Dime
Novels" in orange covers. He en-
listed the assistance of the best
available writer's who possessed
knowledge of American pioneer life,
and intrusted the editorship of the
house to Orville ]. Victor. The
Bulletin speaks of Victor as "one of
the most remarkable figures in the
history of American literature" and
goes on to say: For thirty years
Victor personally studied, passed
upon and edited the thousands of
publications of the house of Beadle.
He insisted first of all that the
narratives must be true and
accurate portrayals in spirit of the
pioneer times and people with
which they dealt. They had to re-
veal wilderness life and struggle
as it was. =. These tales were
not history in the literal or text
book sense, since they often incor-
porated incidents for which there
was no authentic or contemporary
proof. But such material, il used,
had to be consistent with known
conditions of the period portrayed"
N the civil war the Dime Novel"
l played it's part. In the trenches
the soldiers absorbed the orange
covered books by the million. The
volumes were exchanged. passed
from hand to hand, read to tatters
and then thrown away. One book
of the series was Mrs. Victor's
"Maum Guinea" depicting negro
slavery. That book Henry Ward
Beecher took with him when Lin
coin sent him to England as a spe-
cial commissioner in an effort to
win support for the Union from the
British Cabinet. Beecher afterward
told Victor that 'Maum Guinea"
had been one of his most telling
shots and the Bulletin further in
forms us that "Maum Guinea" was
preferred by President Lincoln as
a portrayal of slavery over Harriet
Beecher Stoves Uncle Toms
Cabin" The war over, Beadle and
Victor turned their attention to
the far West, enlisting the aid OF
Western explorers, Indian fighters
and plainsmen, and Beadle himself
made a trip across the plains in
order to study at first hand the life
in those regions.
DUT all the tales of that period
- were not of the far West. the
Indian fighter and the plainsman.
One can turn to those stories for a
New York that is as remote from
the city of to-day as is the New
York depicted in. for example,
Porter's Allan Dale and Robert
lie Diable.' Strange and unfamiliar
corners of Manhattan Island a.e
recalled in the pages of those
Dime Novels; names almost for
gotten but occasionally brough. to
mind when some antiquarian writes