Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[198]

XXIV

The test of the dime novel

no work of fiction ever published in London, the newspapers say, received so many advance orders as greeted a late story by Mr. Haggard. It is a curious illustration of the difference between the current literary tendencies of England and America, that in the mother-country alone are authors of this type taken seriously. The sale of their works is often larger here than in England, for the same reason which makes the combined circulation of daily newspapers so much larger; but they are no more considered as forming a part of literature than one would include in a ‘History of the Drama’ some sworn statement as to the number of tickets sold for a Christmas pantomime. When a certain Mr. Mansfield Tracy Walworth was murdered near New York, a few years ago, it came out incidentally that he had written a novel called ‘Warwick,’ of which seventy-five thousand copies had been