Satire vs Sentiment: Mark Twain, Bella Z. Spencer, and the Subscription Book Market

Abstract: This essay argues that Mark Twain has been overrepresented in scholarship on subscription bookselling, resulting in a corresponding failure to account for fiction's relationship to this popular nineteenth-century practice. Though Twain's The Gilded Age (1873) is often described as the first novel sold by subscription, I recover an earlier example: Tried and True (1866), a Civil War romance by Bella Zilfa Spencer. Reading the novel's mode of distribution as integral to its treatment of gender, race, and geography, I demonstrate the potential for literary study which gets lost somewhere between subscription bookselling's bad reputation and Mark Twain's good one.