If a time traveler from the future showed up and told the world that by the year 2150 hardly anyone would recognize the name Harry Potter or James Bond, what would the reaction be? Widespread disbelief, probably, especially if that visitor from the future could converse easily about Doctor Who, Stephen King and Seinfeld. What, one would wonder, happened to Harry and James that they completely evaporated into the lost and forgotten lore of pop culture entertainment?
Nothing particularly special; these things happen. Quite frequently. During its heyday, Reveries of a Bachelor was read across America and the title instantly recognized even by those who had not read it. Some books and writers are simply of and for their time and do not transcend the vagaries of history’s march through ever changing tastes. The success of this volume over the course of the latter half of the 19th century has sometimes been compare to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That is almost certainly hyperbole as no sales figures available put its sales figures anywhere near that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling American book of the 1800’s. Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper and Marie Corelli consistently sold at a greater pace than Reveries of a Bachelor, but even so there is no denying it was an extremely popular text that gradually become a completely forgotten text. The real question is not why it is next to unknown today, but why it was so popular upon publication.
It is not a novel. Neither is it a work of history or biography. It is a book of fantasies. The narrator is, as the title suggests, a bachelor. And his reveries are fantasies of what life might be like were he to no longer be a bachelor and instead be a wife. Separated into four different parts with four different reveries, it is important to note that these are densely conceived fantasies. (In other words, they are not merely 19th century versions of a letter to the Penthouse Forum; sexuality can be found in the subtext, but it is nowhere to be seen in the context.) In an in-depth analysis of the book, writer Lisa Spiro identifies the controlling conceit of the narrative “detached intimacy” in which the reader is invited to become a participant in the fantasy they are reading while at the same time being pushed away from real emotional engagement. It is ultimately a sort of wish-fulfillment being practiced to read the fictional reveries of the bachelor’s imaginings of being married. In that sense, the book really is not all that far removed from those insanely unlikely Penthouse Forum sex fantasies. It is, in fact, the unlikelihood of such outlandish scenarios ever actually occurring that allows one to read erotic fantasies with a sense of detached intimacy.
That the book was popular before movies, television or radio and has been almost completely forgotten since the arrival of those media forms which also serve the purpose of wish-fulfillment at the cost of easily detaching intimacy should not be surprising. Sitting in a darkened theater and watching reveries play out in moving pictures makes it incredibly difficult to detach oneself from the fantasy, but it can certainly be done. More to the point, lacking access to a darkened movie theater or sitting in front of the TV or lying in bed listening to the radio, not just the next best thing, but the only alternative would be a book. And the fact that the reveries in this book were almost specifically targeted to readers looking for a safe harbor from the deadening weight of reality is perfectly encapsulated by the identity of one of the century’s biggest fans of the book.
Emily Dickinson, almost as famous for being a recluse as she is for being a poet, gushed over Reveries of a Bachelor in letters to friends. A woman quite notable for being the kind of reader likely to be alone at night curled up next to a raging fireplace and losing herself in the fantasies of the bachelor is almost so perfect an example of why the book was hot stuff in the 1850’s but virtually dead to the world a century a later that the story nearly seems made up. The letters prove otherwise, however.
