LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Dime Novels: New York
built 634 days ago
The Barber dime is named for its designer, Charles E. Barber, who was Chief Engraver of the U.S. Mint from 1879 to 1917. The design was shared with the quarter and half-dollar of the same period. Extensive internal politics surrounded the awarding of the design job, which had initially been opened to the public. A four-member committee (which included Barber), appointed by then-Mint Director James Kimball, accorded only two of more than 300 submissions an honorable mention. Kimball's successor, Edward O. Leech, decided to dispense with the committees and public design competitions and simply instructed Barber to develop a new design. It has been speculated that this is what Barber had wanted all along.[16][17]
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Alicia Newcome, in Frances Fuller Barritt's Border Law; or, The Land Claim is possibly the most timidly submissive woman of the dime-novel frontier. Daughter of a settler who jealously and cruelly guards her, Alicia is helplessly and mindlessly devoted to her father. When Newcome is falsely accused of murder, Alicia is cared for by the local constable and his wife. Her father bitterly accuses her of betrayal when she refuses to marry the French trader he has chosen for her. Her reaction to her father's scorn is similar to that of a beggar.
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Christian Gobrecht completed the design of this dime, whose obverse was used with every circulating silver U.S. coin of the period. Mint Director Robert Maskell Patterson requested a new coin design, to be reminiscent of the Britannia image found on coinage of the United Kingdom. Chief Engraver William Kneass drew the original sketches, but suffered a stroke and was too ill to finish them or to oversee preparation of the dies. The task then fell to Gobrecht, who was promoted to Second Engraver.[14]
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Eye-averting, next to being abducted or getting confined to asylums by crooked guardians, was the favorite pastime of dime novel heroines, excepting, of course, the tomboy types like Calamity Jane, Calamity Kate, Calamity Mary, etc. There is nothing new to the dime novel; it is almost as old as printing itself, and takes us back through the centuries to the chapbooks of old England and such titles as The Affecting History of Sally Williams, afterwards Tippling Sally. Shewing how she left her father’s house to follow an officer, who seduced her; and how she took to drinking …
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