THE FEMININE FIFTIES

by Fred LewisPattee 'BB. D. Appleton-Century Company,New York, 1940. p. 339. $3.00.

IT HAS INDEED been a great pleasure to read this scholarly and amusing book written by my distinguished old friend and teacher. More power to you, sir!

Dr. Pattee, though in his seventy-seventh year, has lost none of his forthrightness, his critical acumen, and his sense of humor, all of which are fused here to produce a lively and readable book. If there is anyone living in America who knows more about American literature than Professor Pattee I should be glad to know his name.

The "fervid, fevered, furious, fatuous, fertile, feeling, florid, furbelowed, fighting, funny" fifties are here dissected and judged most tolerantly and sagely with an insinuating kind of scholarship that comes only with mellowed learning.

The "fifties" produced such phenomena as Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Melville's MobyDick, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, Fern Leavesfrom Fanny's Portfolio (which sold 70,000 copies), Susan Warner's The Wide, WideWorld which became the first best seller in American fiction, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which in 1852 sold a million copies in England alone, Jenny Lind, the Atlantic Monthly, which first appeared in 1857, the American epic Hiawatha, the Fugitive Slave Bill of which Emerson wrote: "The filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God!", the American tours of Dickens and Thackeray, the Fox sisters, and Phoebe and Alice Cary.

As Dr. Pattee well says, "When an abuse reaches the emotions of the people it is doomed," and the fifties was an emotional period during which many abuses, including slavery, heard their death knell. Here is the period distilled in all its gaudy and amusing character. Read and admire!