CUMMINS, Maria Susanna

Born 9 April 1827, Salem, Massachusetts; died 1 October 1866, Dorchester, Massachusetts

Daughter of David and Mehitable Cave Cummins

Both of Maria Susanna Cummins' parents were descendants of prominent New England families. The Cummings family (the name was originally spelled with a "g") can trace their roots to Isaac Cummings, a Scottish immigrant who settled in Ipswich shortly before 1638. Cummins' father, a man of cultivated taste, made certain she received a classical education, and he encouraged his daughter's writing talents. After his death she lived quietly in Dorchester, devoting the rest of her life to her writing and to church work.

Cummins' first novel, The Lamplighter, was published in Boston in 1854 and shortly afterward in London. It was the most talked about novel of the year and an immediate bestseller. The average sale during the first two months after publication was 5000 copies a week; by the end of the first year it had sold 70,000 copies. Her second novel, Mabel Vaughan (1857), was not so popular, but in 1858 both novels were selected for publication by the Leipzig-based Tauchnitz Library of British and American Authors, an indication of her international fame.

Cummins' novels are filled with pious sentiments and moral formulae, typical of the genre, called "folk fiction" by some, which led to Hawthorne's comment in 1855 that "America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women…."Specifically he asked, "What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter?"

The success of Lamplighter is no mystery at all. Relying liberally on Dickens and the Bronté sisters, it tells the story of an abandoned and mistreated orphan, Gerty, befriended by a kindly old lamplighter (aptly named Trueman Flint) and then by a wealthy young blind woman, Emily Graham, who becomes her patron and teacher. The story recounts Gerty's transformation from a ragged, ignorant orphan into a self-reliant and virtuous young woman, "the image of female goodness and purity." By the novel's end Gerty has found her long-lost father (who turns out to be Emily Graham's stepbrother and former lover) and will marry her childhood sweetheart, now a successful businessman.

Cummins' second novel, Mabel Vaughan (1857), features a heroine who is not a poor orphan waif but who is nevertheless the victim of a series of calamities. Once a pampered child of fashion, she finds herself nearly penniless and charged with the care of two incorrigible nephews, a melancholic father, and an alcoholic brother. A great part of this novel is set in the West and the reader is introduced to some interesting pioneer characters as well as, in the city scenes, such stock characters as a dying orphan who exemplifies piety and submissiveness to God's will.

Both of these novels relied upon the bestselling formula of the sentimental-domestic novel for their appeal: the plots feature calamities, sudden reversals of fortune, long-lost relatives, and the reform of profligates; the central characters are young women who grow in strength and piety throughout the novel, enabling them to accomplish the gentle subjugation and reform of rogues, alcoholics, and conscienceless men.

El Fureidis (1860), Cummins's third novel, is a story of Palestine and Syria, and her fourth, Haunted Hearts (1864), is a rather pedestrian sentimental tale. Neither of these approached Lamplighter in popular appeal.

Bibliography:

Baym, N., Women's Fiction (1978). Hart, J. D., The Popular Book (1950). Kelley, M., Private Women, Public Stage (1984). Koch, D. A., introduction to Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter (1968). Mott, F. L., Golden Multitudes (1947).