London and the Making of Provincial Literature. Joseph Rezek

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1850), Harper’s Weekly (1856), and the Atlantic Monthly (1857)—some of which began paying for content in the 1840s.⁷⁹ It is also reflected in the unprecedented reception of two American novels in Britain, both published in unauthorized editions: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which sold an astonishing 1.5 million copies in Britain in its first year, making it “probably the greatest short-term sale of any book published in nineteenth-century England,”⁸⁰ and The Scarlet Letter (1850), an instant success, the publication of which Henry James called “a literary event of the first importance.”⁸¹ It was in the late 1840s, too, when Putnam issued Irving’s and Cooper’s works in elaborate revised, illustrated, and collected editions for national readerships. Although an equal relationship between Britain and the United States was still far into the future, it could at this point be perceived on the horizon.

      In these decades, the Edinburgh and London trades integrated more fully than ever before, thus approaching what we could call a thoroughly British publishing industry. As Bill Bell argues, this occurred at the level of manufacturing:

      By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become increasingly difficult to speak in terms of a separate Scottish book trade, not only because of the permeation of the London trade by Scots, but because printers and publishers throughout Britain were coming to compete for the same expanding market. Scottish firms would soon dominate large-scale printing in particular, providing vast quantities of sheets for Britain’s publishers until the middle of the twentieth century.⁸²

      Bell notes that British-ization can also be located at the level of author-publisher relations: “[T]his was a period in which English authors just as often found themselves at the behest of Scottish publishers.”⁸³ The most significant example of this was Blackwood’s, which opened a London satellite office in 1840 and became the publisher of English authors like Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope.⁸⁴ The same period witnessed the growth of an “indigenous Irish publishing industry” that further balanced the literary field in the British Isles.⁸⁵

      In the early nineteenth century, provincial booksellers navigated a dynamic transatlantic trade while enduring material and economic subservience to London. A few decades later, American and British publishers competed with each other in an increasingly binarized marketplace. When, precisely, full equalization between American and British publishing was achieved is beyond the scope of this study, but the establishment of an international copyright law in 1891 gestured toward an era of balance. In the twentieth century, New York City—buoyed by the kind of demographic and economic advantages London claimed two centuries earlier—eventually came to dominate the global English-language book trade, although to this day British and American publishers depend on each other for joint ventures. The twentieth-century shift from London to New York coincided with the rise of American global hegemony after World War II, when the British Empire began finally to wane. The interesting question remains, of course, of what status traditional publishing centers like London and New York will have as digital media continue to challenge and destabilize the geographies of literary production.⁸⁶

      Chapter 2

      Furious Booksellers and the “American Copy” of the Waverley Novels

      The London book trade appears most interesting from the perspective of provincial publishers who tried to reach its marketplace, both to acquire books and eventually to sell their own. London was the teeming hub of their trade, an intense stage of fierce competition, and a high-stakes arena for professional maneuvering, especially for the trade in new, copyrighted literary texts. Nowhere was this more evident than with Scott’s wildly popular novels, which tested the ingenuity of book trades professionals around the Anglophone Atlantic. The centripetal pull of the London marketplace catalyzed an important relationship in the early 1820s between Archibald Constable, Scott’s Edinburgh publisher, and Mathew Carey of Philadelphia, his most important publisher in the United States. As noted in the previous chapter, the Waverley novels were printed in Edinburgh, but the majority of them were sold in London, where they reached their largest and most lucrative audience. For Mathew Carey and his son and partner, Henry, the city remained the distribution center of most books American publishers wanted to reprint—even those, like Scott’s, that were issued first in Edinburgh.¹ The strategies Constable and his junior partner, Robert Cadell, pursued in dealing with London directly affected Carey’s ability to reprint Scott during the hectic years when the demand for the Waverley novels overwhelmed literary publishers in the United States.² Meanwhile, the Careys’ strategies as reprinters of Scott proved of concrete importance in Edinburgh as Constable and Cadell used them to their own advantage. The frenzy over Scott’s novels put Carey’s and Constable’s firms into a direct relationship that circumvented London and proved mutually beneficial; it was forged through an intense conflict over transatlantic circulation.

      Though marked by definite inequality—Scott belonged to Constable, after all, not Carey—the two provincial publishers became allies in the literary field. This alliance was in many ways exceptional, given Scott’s unmatched popularity, but it remains instructive for the way it highlights London’s importance in the book trade as a whole. “I am highly pleased with the communication respecting the Author of Waverley,” one of Scott’s London publishers, Joseph Robinson, wrote to Constable in 1825, about the latest novel, “and no doubt the work must be highly interesting to every individual in every corner of the Globe. However England is the great place for the sale of the Work to produce Profit for the Proprietors and therefore the mode of publication requires great Consideration.”³ In what follows, I provide a new story about such “mode[s] of publication,” both from the perspective of this conceited metropolitan and the provincial booksellers who worked so hard to get around him.

      Bringing Scott to market was a heated emotional drama with many acts: Constable’s attempts to reach English readers, the difficulties Mathew and Henry Carey faced in cornering the American market, the epistolary exchange that brought the younger partners Henry Carey and Robert Cadell together as associates, angry disputes in American newspapers over errors in Carey’s hastily produced Scott editions, and furious debates in Edinburgh and London over the transmission of the “American Copy” of the Waverley novels. The story concludes in 1831 when an anomalous episode involving the “American Copy” led Scott to represent the process of transatlantic reprinting in the extraordinary preface he wrote for his last novels, the fourth series of Tales of My Landlord.⁴ The actors in this drama were a writerly and bookish crew, and I argue throughout that the language of the book trade is as interesting as it was important—as an expressive form, a means of establishing credit in business negotiations, a performative rhetoric of the marketplace, and, for Scott, an inspiring discourse for fiction. Michael Everton has recently argued that the business of publishing in the nineteenth century involved intense negotiations over morality, character, and ethics.⁵ The negotiations over Scott’s “American Copy” confirm this view and suggest that the book trade can only be understood by analyzing the language used to constitute it. My account also demonstrates the importance of the extralegal arrangements that governed the trade and to which scholars like Everton, Robert Spoo, and Melissa Homestead have recently turned.⁶ Such informal codes, known as “courtesy of the trade,” were especially important in the transatlantic marketplace for books because there were no accepted legal frameworks to guide production. The story of Carey, Constable, and Scott epitomizes the way that improvisation and custom affected transatlantic publishing. It also suggests that the American demand for Scott was far more important to his publishers than scholars have ever realized.

      Early Trouble with the “American Copy”

      Throughout Walter Scott’s career, reckless capital investments soaked up the profits from his busy pen, as he underwrote his Edinburgh printer, James Ballantyne; encouraged costly publishing ventures; and built his vast medieval castle at Abbotsford. Such investments and entanglements made Scott, Constable, and Ballantyne vulnerable to the fluctuations of the market, factors that led to bankruptcy of the Waverley machine in 1826. Even at the