A Ben-Hur Centennial

The unparalleled influence of the novel Ben-Hur is presently undergoing intense scholarly scrutiny. Current scholarship now recognizes General Lew Wallace’s romantic novel not as simply a bestseller—in fact, one of the bestsellers of the nineteenth century—and the source for MGM’s highly decorated 1959 film with which most of us are quite familiar, but as the first example of a work of popular culture that earned record sales in a variety of popular consumer sectors and inspired the first burst of commercial synergy in the popular arts. After publication in 1880, Ben-Hur was aggressively marketed by Harper & Bros. for the next 33 years, and rights were sold to a variety of literary, dramatic, and motion picture enterprises. By the end of the nineteenth century Ben-Hur had already inspired the very successful licensed popular song “The Ben-Hur March” as well as the successful and properly licensed Clark & Cox “Ben-Hur in Tableaux and Pantomime,” several stereopticon “moving picture” shows, and Klaw & Erlanger’s massive Broadway production which played around the world for the next 21 years to some 20 million spectators and earned $10 million. In 1907, 1925, and 1959, filmmakers produced film versions of Ben-Hur, each of them being the costliest, longest, and most famous films of their eras. In 1913 Sears, Roebuck & Co. synergized with Harper to sell one million volumes of the novel—the largest single book transaction in the history of publishing to that date. From 1904 to 1915 the city of Pasadena celebrated New Year’s Day with not football but chariot races.

All the while, small and large businesses exploited this virtual brand name to produce “Ben Hur” [sic] Cigars, Tobacco, Flour, Shoes, Razor, Perfume, Bicycles, Mines, Motors, Tools, Construction, Mason Lodges, Shrines, Insurance, and, in 1916/1917 the Ben Hur automobile. With each new technology—player pianos, amberolas, Edison disks, motion pictures, animation, television, Beta, VHS, DVD, et al—Ben-Hur found new entrepreneurs and a new sector of the popular audience. And with each new artistic impetus—the novel (advertised, illustrated, repackaged, excerpted, mass marketed, translated into a dozen languages), the stage dramatizations, the films—different demographic sectors and new generations of consumers joined in. Just within the past 6 years the Christian Right movement in the United States has re-embraced Ben-Hur and produced two musical versions, a radio play, and an animated direct-to-video movie. As you are reading this, Robert Hossein is filling Paris’ Stade de France with several hundred thousand spectators to watch his recreation of the chariot race of Ben-Hur. In sum, there was no other popular artistic product before Ben-Hur that was able to become such a commercial success and inspire others in turn, and there were few similar products afterwards until the Star Wars phenomenon of the 1970s. But even now, Ben-Hur’s reach has been unsurpassed.

In addition, scholarly attention is finally being paid to the inspiration for Ben-Hur and the reasons for its early literary success. Victor Davis Hanson [Ripples of Battle] analyses Lew Wallace’s frustration after the Battle of Shiloh. Margaret Malamud looks more towards the late-nineteenth concepts of manifest destiny and American imperialism. Jon Solomon has investigated liberal Protestantism, Christian Darwinism, and contemporary interests in ethnology, Palestinian topography, and hero worship.

Several scholarly books, chapters, and journal articles about the reception of Ben-Hur are nearing completion or in press. This will be the 100^th anniversary of the first film adaptation of Ben-Hur, and it would befit CAMWS to offer a panel on this currently hot topic of investigation.