The Wide, Wide World

First published in 1850 and exceeded in popularity then only by Uncle Tom's Cabin, this domestic epic narrates the seven-year pilgrimage of a girl sent out into the world at age ten by a dying mother and a careless father. Moved from relative to relative, Ellen Montgomery astonishes by remaining faithful to her mother's memory and to her Christian teachings. In assessing Warner's style in The Wide, Wide World, there are three main aspects which created Warner's particular writing style. The first aspect is the time in which the book was written. With Webster furthering the development of the American dialect when he published the first American dictionary in 1828, America was still gaining its own literary voice in 1850 when The Wide, Wide World was published.