London and the Making of Provincial Literature. Joseph Rezek

published first or only in London. William Carleton wrote in 1842 that “until within the last ten or twelve years an Irish author never thought of publishing in his own country, and the consequence was that our literary men followed the example of our great landlords; they became absentees, and drained the country of its intellectual wealth precisely as the others exhausted it of its rents.”³² Even authors like Maria Edgeworth, who lived in Ireland and decried absenteeism, published in London, where Archibald Constable purchased her work, as he informed her in 1823.³³ “[T]he numbers of novels actually published in Ireland were tiny,” writes Claire Connolly, and of the latter, most were co-published with London firms.³⁴ In the cases of James Gordon’s A New History of Ireland (1804) and William Parnell’s Maurice and Berghetta (1819), authorized Dublin editions were printed smaller than their London editions and resembled the cheap reprints of old.³⁵

      But the Act of Union and its Copyright Act should not be seen only in negative terms. The controversy over the Union served as what Ina Ferris has called an “incitement to intervention and discourse” about the question of Ireland that created a huge market for the kinds of answers published books could provide, including fiction.³⁶ This began with Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, published in 1800 amid the debate over Union, continued with her other works and the spectacular success of Sydney Owenson, and also included novels by John Banim, Charles Maturin, and the poetry and fiction of Thomas Moore. Back in Dublin, they kept track of this. In an 1807 article about Owenson, the Cyclopaedian Magazine described her ascent: “The first publication from the pen of this lady was a small volume of poems printed in Dublin,” and now “[h]er novels are eagerly purchased by the London booksellers, at the same price given to the most established writers of the age.”³⁷ In 1825, the Dublin and London Magazine facetiously announced the success of an author by referencing the reprinting of his work. “The author of ‘Tales of Irish Life’ has contributed two articles. They must be good; for nearly all the English papers, even the lofty Times, copied them.”³⁸ Between 1800 and 1830, over one hundred novels on Irish subjects or by Irish authors were published in London, a genre that “emerged as a recognizable commodity on the literary market,” and by the 1820s, an “Irish line of fiction begins to be defined” in the British periodical reviews.³⁹ In the decades that followed the Union, Irish writers took London by storm.

      Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the end of Irish reprinting left a gap in the market that American booksellers and publishers were happy to fill. This was increasingly apparent as the American reprint industry grew in the 1810s and 1820s. William Wakeman remarked in 1821 that previously to the Union, publishers in Dublin were “on the same footing as America … and every new book was reprinted here; but since the Copyright Act has been extended, that cannot now be done openly.”⁴⁰ Mathew Carey’s experiences as a printer in Ireland served him well as he became the leader in an industry whose wares included a hefty dose of new Irish literary texts published first in London. Edgeworth followed the American reprinting of her work, as one of her stories, “To-Morrow,” demonstrates. Published in Popular Tales (1805), the story illustrates the perils of procrastination through narrating the downfall of Basil Lowe, who puts “things off till to-morrow.”⁴¹ Having driven into the ground his father’s London bookshop, Basil travels to Philadelphia to try his hand at bookselling in the “new world.”⁴² Through the advice one character offers about Basil’s former profession, Edgeworth announces London’s centrality to the book trade through the refracted lens of the American scene:

      [B]ookmaking or bookselling, brings in but poor profit in this country. The sale for imported books is extensive; and our printers are doing something by subscription here, in Philadelphia, and in New York, they tell me. But London is the place for a good bookseller to thrive; and you come from London, where you tell me you were a bankrupt. I would not advise you to have any thing more to do with bookselling or bookmaking.⁴³

      Edgeworth’s mention of subscription alludes to the New York reprinting of Practical Education in 1801, an edition supported by many eminent subscribers, including John Adams, Joseph Dennie, Charles Willson Peale, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster.⁴⁴ Her description of the “poor profit” bookselling brings in Philadelphia describes more accurately the Dublin trade in the wake of the Union, but her character’s blunt and suggestive comment applies to the trade as a whole: “London is the place for a good bookseller to thrive.” This did not stop a number of Irish tradesmen from following her character’s trajectory across the Atlantic. Patrick Byrne, a radical Irish bookseller, fared well after he moved to Philadelphia in 1800, publishing hundreds of books, including treatises on the law and literary texts by George Colman, Hugh Blair, William Godwin, and Monk Lewis.⁴⁵ Frank Ferguson writes of emigrations like Byrne’s that they “bolster[ed] American publishing … to the detriment of the Irish trade.”⁴⁶ But if we consider Ireland and the United States as participating in a single, transatlantic book trade, the migratory effects of the Act of Union appear as a net gain.

      In the early nineteenth century, as Rosalind Remer has argued, book trades professionals in the United States transformed themselves from a group of unorganized printers and retail booksellers into leaders of a burgeoning, market-savvy publishing industry. Mathew Carey epitomized this shift as he abandoned his craft as a printer to focus exclusively on publishing and all the risks and strategy it required. This included selling a large stock of imported books and also issuing his own reprints of new London titles. The latter practice dominated publishing as a whole, since in the absence of copyright protection for British authors, reprinting was more profitable than financing new works by Americans. The busy and profitable reprint trade fostered cooperation between booksellers, laid the groundwork for distribution routes between regional markets, and transformed the book production into a “capitalistic and venture-oriented profession.”⁴⁷ Reprinting made sense not only because Americans wanted cheap editions of British texts but also because patriotically minded consumers were satisfied with books of American manufacture, regardless of the nationality of authors.⁴⁸ An 1818 Catalogue of Novels and Romances issued by Carey’s firm provides an image of the market in literary texts, featuring well over three hundred imprints from a diverse range of authors, including Edgeworth, Scott, Godwin, Jane Porter, Henry Fielding, Fanny Burney, Samuel Johnson, Charles Maturin, Amelia Opie, Tobias Smollett, Henry Mackenzie, Daniel Defoe, Anne Radcliffe, and Jane Austen.⁴⁹ While a few American authors are listed, including Hannah Webster Foster and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the vast majority are British reprints, some of which are advertised alongside the same text in its more expensive, imported London edition. The catalogue demonstrates the vibrancy of the book trade and its offerings, richly confirming James N. Green’s assessment of the period: “The rise of American publishing was one of the fruits of independence, but paradoxically the trade was built on a foundation of British books.”⁵⁰

      That foundation eventually enabled reprinters to invest in publishing American authors like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, as William Charvat argued long ago, but it would be wrong to assess early U.S. publishing only in relation to a narrative of national development.⁵¹ Scholars like Green have helpfully treated the period on its own terms, with a focus on the dynamics of transatlantic exchange and without shame about the book trade’s persistent provinciality, which was ensured by the demand for British reprints, the continuing authority of the London trade, and a huge trade deficit in the exchange of books between Britain and the United States—a ratio of twenty to one in 1828.⁵² In contrast to London’s centralized publishing industry, early U.S. book publishing was fractured and decentralized, and while there was trade across regional boundaries, there was no nationalized market for books that could act as a counterweight to London.⁵³ Nor could the apparent demographic advantages much affect this, even though the United States’ highly literate population increased rapidly, from 60 percent of England’s population in 1800 to almost equaling it by 1830.⁵⁴ In 1820, Boston publisher Samuel Goodrich estimated that about three-quarters of the books this growing population bought were of English origin.⁵⁵ The London-printed book retained its customary authority throughout the period, as Carey himself suggested in his 1834 autobiography. In seeking to defend himself from his old political enemy William Cobbett, Carey framed his disadvantage