Selected American Reviews

Reviewer compliments The Wide, Wide World for standing out among the "now common class of religious novels"; offers an excerpt illustrating the novel's "agreeable style"; concludes with a complaint about the author's "diffuseness" (New York)

Reviewer acknowledges the book's good intentions; points negatively to its overt didacticism; makes fun of the author's overreliance on tears (New York)

Reviewer admires the novel's exemplary religious lessons; recommends the book to Christian families (Boston)

Reviewer appreciates The Wide, Wide World, especially as a book for children; mistakenly exposes the novel's Scottish authorship, e.g., the novel "appears as an American book, but it is utterly deficient in American spirit" (Philadelphia)

Reviewer praises The Wide, Wide World for its verisimilitude and its heroine's religious journey; appreciates the novel's ending (Washington, DC)

Reviewer of Warner's Queechy discusses the fame of its author and the literary success of The Wide, Wide World (New York, Boston)

Reviewer investigates the current state of the novel as compared with its eighteenth-century forebears; considers contemporary tendencies toward moral argumentation; expresses mixed feelings about the genre's evolution; discusses The Wide, Wide World, Queechy, and Dollars and Cents as positive examples of a new class of American novel, "having a character of their own--humane, religious, piquant, natural, national" (Boston)

Reviewer discusses the growth of literature for "juveniles" and its generic potential; praises Warner's contributions to the field (Richmond, VA)