Anyone wishing to discuss the cultural position of dime novels in nineteenth-century America must first overcome a considerable dilemma -- the problem of generalization. How can one not generalize about the 'dime novel,' a synecdoche for all the story papers, pamphlet novels, and cheap libraries published between the 1840s and the 1890s? In the space of only five years, a small press could publish over four million novels, and a single novelist might write as much as the collected works of Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, it would seem impossible to say anything about this vast collection of cheap and sensational literature without falling back on dubious generalizations.

Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America is perhaps the best attempt yet to cope with this sizeable collection of popular literature. Suspicious of the same, tired notions circulated by scholars for the last sixty years, Denning sets out to answer two questions: 1) What can be learned about these popular narratives?; 2) what can be learned from them? What grows out of these questions is a lucid and revealing account of the relationship between dime fiction and the working class.

Denning convincingly argues that the bulk of dime novel readers were workers, not middle class boys as past studies suggest. He therefore reasons that the workers' "concerns and accents are inscribed in the cheap stories" (4), even when the fictions do not accurately reflect working class life. Within the tens of thousands of extant dime novels and serials, Denning suggests, we might discover the thoughts, feelings, and doings of the nineteenth-century, working class mechanic.

To prove his point, Denning shows us those dime fiction genres almost entirely ignored by past scholarship: mysteries of the city; detective stories; tales of tramps and outlaws; stories of working girls and labor organizers. These genres, rather than the better-known stories of pioneers and the Wild West, are -- for Denning -- at the heart of dime fiction culture. He claims that these fictions were "interpreted and not merely consumed" by the working class reader (69), and suggests that allegory was the primary means of doing so.

The immediate objection to this argument, of course, is that these narratives were not authored by the unknown craftworkers, factory operatives, mechanics, and domestic servants whose varied 'accents' Denning would have us detect. Rather, the dime novelists tended to be journalists or hack writers removed from the mines and factories that housed their readers. Yet Denning offers substantial evidence that these writers specifically wrote for a mechanic audience, and devotes a thirty page chapter to George Lippard, the premier American writer of the 'mysteries of the city.' Here Denning claims that Lippard and his colleagues "both depict and speak for...the mechanics of the city" (87), and his analysis of Lippard's The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime leaves little doubt that this is so. Time and again, Denning supports his argument by showing how Lippard's fiction and his personal life converged. In relation to his novels, he discusses both Lippard's founding of the Brotherhood of the Union, a secret society "dedicated to the cause of labor" (113), and his journalistic tendency to dig up real-life "miscarriages of justice" (89) within working class society.

When reading Mechanic Accents, I was impressed again and again by the ingenuity of Denning's research. Some of his most convincing evidence for the dime novel's place in working class culture is drawn from the short life histories of 'undistinguished Americans' published in the reform magazine The Independent. In these obscure testimonies, Denning finds the references to dime fiction reading that he needs to validate his claim for a mechanic audience (35). Similarly, his study of the autobiographies of immigrants, laborers, and factory girls produces valuable information about how the working class understood and interpreted sensational fiction (35-46). This is not to suggest that Denning neglects the more traditional avenues of research: aside from offering a bibliography of nearly twenty pages, he shows himself to be conversant with a wide selection of dime novels and cheap stories. He also makes frequent use of relevant secondary material, referencing writers and theorists as diverse as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Alan Trachtenberg, and Fredric Jameson.

Perhaps the best attribute of Denning's book is the clarity with which it is written. Although Denning consistently complicates rather than simplifies the issues at hand, his writing is lucid and his structure sound. Even when considering a topic as complex as the "the narrative of disguise" in dime novels, in which he discusses hermeneutic codes, Aristotelian 'recognition,' and the bourgeois cultural revolution in the span of a single paragraph (146), Denning never loses sight of his reader.

I wonder if Denning realizes that his may be the first intensive study of nineteenth-century cheap fiction not to depend on generalizations. By arguing that dime novels not only speak the accents of the American working class, but also reflect many (often conflicting) attitudes at once, he can admire the complexities of his subject without attempting to tame it. In fact, considering that his ideas seem so fertile, and the body of cheap fiction so large, I cannot help but suspect that someone will pick up where Mechanic Accents leaves off. When that happens, Denning may regret not pushing his ideas further; at two hundred and thirteen pages, his book does his topic justice, but certainly leaves the door open for a more exhaustive study.