The American dime novel was the most widely read literature of the nineteenth century. The cheap fictions of George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Laura Jean Libbey, and scores of anonymous authors greatly outsold their high brow contemporaries, works by canonized writers like Henry James. Despite their enormous popularity, dime novels are no longer read and were dismissed by twentieth century critics as either trite escapist entertainment or regarded nostalgically as mere allegorical fairy tales. In Mechanic Accents, Michael Denning presents the first detailed study of the American dime novel phenomenon, bringing to bear an unrivalled knowledge of the primary material. The book explores both the social conditions which led to their popularity and the thematic conventions of the novels themselves, demonstrating that they are indeed worth studying. He declares that, "view[ing] these books that collectors prize through the culture of craftworkers, factory operatives, and laborers rescues them from a kind of patronizing and patriotic nostalgia, and situates them not in a pastoral golden age but in the class conflicts of the gilded age" (16). He concludes that their central function--representing the utopian longings of their working-class readerships--has previously been missed by critics.

The "mechanic accents" of the title offer a way to designate the dime novel in postbellum society as a form of production--the writers as mechanics working in a fiction factory--and as the embodiment of social consciousness--providing a voice for the mechanics themselves. The fiction factories did not sell the author (indeed the author was usually kept anonymous) but a character, in the form of a proletarian hero. In the book's second section, Denning gives a few examples of the dime novel hero, including the urban mechanic-detective, the virtuous "knight" of labor fighting the evil capitalists "lords" of the factory, and the modern version of Cinderella, the working girl. In each chapter, the author provides textual analysis from five or six representative cheap fictions to illustrate the nuanced and inflected voice of class struggle, the mechanic accents, in the novels. Denning's argument is most interesting and compelling when discussing the city mystery with its mechanic-detective urban hero.

Unlike the genteel detectives of high brow literature (Poe's Dupin and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes), the dime novel detective is a proletarian hero. Theoretically informed by Karl Marx and Marxist critics, especially Fredric Jameson, Denning proves that the dime detective is thoroughly class conscious. The mechanic-detective does not use the powers of deductions his genteel predecessors relied on; rather, he uses disguises to become anyone at anytime. A Marxist reading of the dime novel detective indicates that his power comes through his use of disguise; it allows him to traverse all social distinctions. One minute he can be a vagrant gathering information on the street, the next minute he is in a Park Avenue ballroom socializing with industry tycoons. Even if the typical ending reveals the detective to be a prince or a millionaire, we never forget that he is first a working man. After the revelation, he continues his dual class life, a wealthy man that is also a working man. The conventional happy ending of the detective story is characteristic of the cheap stories' need for a utopian conclusion and has unfairly stigmatized the dime novel as trite and escapist literature, thus critically irrelevant.

Denning fittingly ends his book with an ideological reevaluation of the happy ending of the dime novel. He cites Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch's arguments that the fairy tale is vital because it is traditionally the story of the working class. In nineteenth century genteel fiction, strikes were always lost; in the dime novel, strikes are always won. If a working woman dies tragically in a genteel novel, in a dime novel, she triumphs magically. The working class audience preferred the cheap stories because they found a voice in the dime novel that genteel fiction would not allow them. Denning concludes that, "these unhappy endings are surely not simply realistic depictions of a harsh world, but myths of a supposed necessity; and if the happy endings are escapes, they are escapes from the nightmares of bourgeois myths" (212). Authors like Henry James objected to the fairy tale endings of his popular counterparts, describing them as the banal "distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks" (213). The "distribution" that James disapproves of is, in dime novels, a redistribution--a rightful "expropriation of the expropriators" (213).