Cummins, Maria. The Lamplighter.

Boston: John P. Jewett, 1854. The novel concerns a child lost in infancy, who is rescued from a cruel woman by an old lamplighter, adopted by a blind woman, and then found by her wealthy father. The book sells 40,000 copies in the first month and 100,000 by the end of a year. Its success sparks a wave of new women writers and prompts Nathaniel Hawthorne to complain, “America is now wholly given over to a d____d mob of scribbling women.”