[93] one hundred and seventy-five pages of unmixed tragedy for the benefit of the young and thoughtless. If you took the headlines of a modern “yellow journal” and bound them up in a volume of one hundred and seventy-five pages you could scarcely equal their horrors. Yet Mr. Joseph T. Buckingham, the leading Boston editor of that period, describes it as a book “over which thousands have sighed and wept and sighed again, and which had the most extensive sale of any work of the kind that had been published in this country, twenty-five thousand copies having been sold in a few years.” Mrs. Rawson's biographer, the Rev. Elias Nason, says of it that “editions almost innumerable have appeared of it, both in England and America.” Up to the time of Scott, he says, no fiction had compared to it in England, and he claims that even in America, up to the time at which his memoir was written (in 1870), a greater number of persons could be found who had read it than who had read any one of the Waverley novels. It was with her and her alone, that Cooper at the outset had to compete.
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[93] one hundred and seventy-five pages of unmixed tragedy for the benefit of the young and thoughtless. If you took the headlines of a modern “yellow journal” and bound them up in a volume of one hundred and seventy-five pages you could scarcely equal their horrors. Yet Mr. Joseph T. Buckingham, the leading Boston editor of that period, describes it as a book “over which thousands have sighed and wept and sighed again, and which had the most extensive sale of any work of the kind that had been published in this country, twenty-five thousand copies having been sold in a few years.” Mrs. Rawson's biographer, the Rev. Elias Nason, says of it that “editions almost innumerable have appeared of it, both in England and America.” Up to the time of Scott, he says, no fiction had compared to it in England, and he claims that even in America, up to the time at which his memoir was written (in 1870), a greater number of persons could be found who had read it than who had read any one of the Waverley novels. It was with her and her alone, that Cooper at the outset had to compete.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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