Solitude
Ledger, and to the novels of Ouida, Mary J. Holmes and Mrs. Southworth—with a later smattering of Gautier, Shakespeare, Swinburne, and Byron.
All this is evident enough in the book itself, for the verses it contained were exactly the sort of sentimental rot that a Mary J. Holmes heroine would write; but most readers jumped to the conclusion that Miss Wheeler must herself have undergone the emotional experiences which she described, and her image as a Woman with a Past was then and there fixed permanently in the public mind.
The volume had started off with the immense advantage of a lot of advertising such as is now supplied by the Vice Society to certain fortunate books. McClurg, of Chicago, had declined to publish it on the ground that it was immoral; Miss Wheeler, quite outraged, told a friend in Milwaukee about it, and this friend in turn told one of the Milwaukee papers, which thereupon published a column article headed,
TOO LOUD FOR CHICAGO
The Scarlet City by the Lake Shocked by a Badger
Girl, whose Verses out-Swinburne Swinburne
and out-Whitman Whitman.
Another Chicago publisher, less fastidious than McClurg, at once saw the opportunity to
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