DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Lamplighter" by Maria S. Cummins. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Maria Susanna Cummins (1827-1866) was an American novelist, best known for her best-selling 1854 novel, The Lamplighter. The Lamplighter was Cummins first novel and it was only out-sold at the time by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. James D. Hart (author of The Oxford Companion to American Literature) noted that The Lamplighter could provide insight into the American culture of its time: "If a student of taste wants to know the thoughts and feelings of the majority who lived during Franklin Pierce's administration, he will find more positive value in Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter or T. S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room than he will in Thoreau's Walden - all books published in 1854." Cummin's heroine Gerty Flint inspired James Joyce's character Gerty McDowell in a portion of Ulysses generally believed to be a parody of Cummins' writing style.

The Lamplighter, one of the more popular books in the country when it was released in the mid-19th century, is the engaging story of a undisciplined and unloved girl who has her life transformed, by Providence, through the love of strangers, whose ties to her are greater than anyone initially suspects. "What especially distinguished 'The Lamplighter' from many fictions of its class was its strong flavor of didacticism, though, to be sure, such a flavor was shared by many of her contemporaries....In a memorial sermon, her pastor, Rev Nathaniel Hall of Dorchester, said: 'She received her success with a simple gladness, less that she was famous than that she might be useful; less than she had gained the public's applause than that she had touched to issues human and philanthropic the public's heart, and caused her poor 'Lamplighter' to be the means of illumining other and direr darkness than that of night.' Herein lies the success of this popular novelist of the middle fifties. She little cared for her book as a book, but as a conscious factor in the advance of the race she cared very much. She was an intense believer in the theory of help that it was each one's duty to accomplish during one's stay on earth. She wrote as a moral agent, therefore. Moreover, a wide reading awaited her." -The Christian Register But Gertrude drew back; the colour flushed her cheeks, and her eyes glistened as she fixed them upon his face, with an expression of astonishment and pride. The penetrating look of those dark eyes spoke volumes, and Mr. Bruce replied to their inquiring gaze in these words: "I hope you are not displeased at my frankness." "With your frankness," said Gertrude, calmly; "no, that is a thing that never displeases me. But what I have unconsciously done to inspire you with so much confidence, that, while you defend yourself for defying the wishes of your friends, you hardly give me a voice in the matter?"