"The Gold of the Pen and the Steel of the Sword": The Unlikely and Fleeting Celebrity of Theodore Winthrop

Abstract

Early in Theodore Winthrop’s posthumously published novel Cecil Dreeme (1861), the youthful protagonist, Robert Byng, breaks into his neighbor’s apartment at the behest of a concerned friend. There, he finds the occupant, Cecil Dreeme, slouching lifeless in his armchair. As he contemplates the young man’s face, he laments, “Whoever has lived knows that timely death is the great prize of life; who can regret when a worthy soul wins it? But this untimely perishing of a brother-man, alone and helpless in the dark and cold, was pure waste and ruin.”1 As it turns out, Dreeme was merely malnourished and faint; with a warm fire, some food, and conversation, Byng invigorates him. Readers would not have missed the irony that Theodore Winthrop, shot and killed by a rebel soldier at the Battle of Big Bethel, suffered the untimely death his novel’s protagonist feared. Nor did Ticknor & Fields miss the opportunity to print the novel, even though others had rejected it before war erupted.2 Instead, the book that was never meant to be published went through ten imprints in its first sixteen months on the market. By February 1865, eighteen editions had been printed, bringing the total copies sold since fall 1861 to 10,500 copies. Its