Six chapters progress from booksellers to authors to readers, from the material production and sale of literary texts (Chapters 1 and 2); to the London-centric careers of provincial authors (Chapters 3, 4, and 5); to the vehement reactions of those who rejected England’s cultural authority (Chapter 6). The book ends with an epilogue that takes stock of the literary field from the mid-nineteenth century, by which time the balance of cultural power in the Anglophone world had begun to change. The project’s chronology derives from the publication dates of two texts that mark its outer limits: Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850).
Chapter 1 analyzes economic data, patterns of distribution, publication statistics, copyright law, customary trade practices, and discourse about the book trade to establish London’s centrality and mark significant changes in provincial publishing in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that the book trade can benefit from a perspective more radically attuned to transatlantic circulation than historians of the book have hitherto employed. Chapter 2 offers a case study on the publication of Walter Scott’s fiction to illustrate one benefit of such a perspective. Scott’s wildly popular Waverley novels were printed in Edinburgh but distributed mostly in London, where his Philadelphia publishers, Mathew and Henry Carey, acquired them for reprinting and sale in the United States. The Careys established an unprecedented agreement with Scott’s publisher, Archibald Constable, to purchase advance sheets of the novels before official publication. Using booksellers’ correspondence and printed texts, I tell a new story about this transatlantic arrangement to argue that the London marketplace affected the transmission of what came to be called the “American Copy” of the Waverley novels.
Chapter 3 reassesses the effect of the 1801 Act of Union on the major fiction of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, whose novels were the first to establish the representational modes of the aesthetics of provinciality. Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817), as well as Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), use formal devices like the marriage plot and travel narrative to project an ideal relation with English readers meant to ameliorate the political tensions that defined the relationship between Ireland and England. While Edgeworth defines cross-cultural literary exchange within the universalized moral codes of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Owenson embraces the more Romantic fantasy that literature inhabits its own sphere in society. The discourse of national character to which these authors turn both supports and undermines the ideal author-reader relationships their novels enact through narrative form. I argue that politically reductive readings tied to the Act of Union cannot explain aesthetic practices that became hugely influential for Scottish and American authors who also sought out English audiences but for whom the Union itself was not a pressing concern.
Chapter 4 has two major goals: to establish the material presence of American fiction in London and to assess the effects of provinciality on the career of Washington Irving, the first American author to succeed abroad. Most British reprints of American texts were unauthorized ventures pursued by London publishers without the consent of American authors. But Britain, unlike the United States, allowed Americans with the right connections to negotiate copyright protection, a fact that made possible Irving’s and Cooper’s process of transatlantic revision. I argue that Irving’s strategies of revision were shaped by his provinciality, formed initially by his work as an editor of The Analectic Magazine during the War of 1812 and compounded anew as he acquired John Murray as The Sketch Book’s London publisher. Irving’s work as editor during a time of war inspired an ideological conception of the purity of literary exchange, a commitment that entirely governs the aesthetics of The Sketch Book itself. As a provincial, Irving evacuates his authorial persona of nationalized political commitments even as he offers a number of “American” tales to the marketplace for consumption.
Cooper and Scott, so often paired together, are rarely paired as provincials, and yet as I argue in Chapter 5, an attention to the importance of London has the potential to revise our understanding of the cultural work of their fiction. Many readers of Cooper and Scott have argued that their historical novels embody the needs of their expanding imperial societies. This chapter posits the Anglophone literary field as an equally appropriate arena for these ostensibly nationalist writers and argues that the cross-cultural address embedded in their fiction, and particularly in The Pioneers and The Heart of Mid-Lothian, produces the fantasy of an autonomous literary sphere that minimizes national politics for the sake of unadulterated literary exchange. While Scott’s early Waverley novels take their cue from the Irish national tale and embed English readers with broad narrative allegories, Cooper’s early Leatherstocking Tales take their cue from Irving and betray an address to such readers through transatlantic revision. Cooper’s revisions to The Pioneers for Colburn and Bentley’s “Standard Novels” series transformed that novel’s marriage plot and its archetypical American hero, Natty Bummpo, into devices for Anglo-American camaraderie, and Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian allegorizes its relation to the London marketplace through Jeanie Deans’s pilgrimage from Edinburgh to London, climaxing as she arrives in London to appeal to the sympathies of Queen Caroline—a striking figure for the English reader.
Chapter 6 considers provinciality from the perspective of readers in Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who rejected London’s authority and channeled their resentment wholeheartedly into the service of a reactionary, anti-English nationalism. It begins with the volatile genre of metropolitan travel writing, in which English writers journey around the Atlantic world and publish their accounts back in London. These narratives infuriated many provincial readers who issued vehement objections in print and in marginalia they scribbled onto the offending books themselves. The chapter then considers two examples of the trans-provincial currents underpinning the nationalisms of Ireland and the United States. In Ireland, many harnessed the memory of America’s struggle for independence to define an Irish nationalism that vehemently rejected England. In the United States, meanwhile, nationalists adopted the anti-English rhetoric of Walter Scott’s poems to fuel their own defiance of England during the War of 1812. It was during the war that Americans adopted a song from Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (1810) as the official anthem of American presidents. Now referred to by its first words, “Hail to the Chief”—but never sung with its original words—this song was originally written as the imagined battle cry of a Highland chief who died fighting England.
The Epilogue assesses changes in the transatlantic book trade that resulted in the redistribution of cultural capital around the Anglophone Atlantic and the decline of London as the obvious point of reference for American writers. It does so through the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote his earliest stories in the age of Edgeworth, Owenson, Irving, Scott, and Cooper. I argue that The Scarlet Letter is a profound reflection on the obsolescence of those authors’ representational modes, one made possible by epochal changes in the conditions that originally produced them. At the end of the novel, Hester Prynne stays in New England to signal the legitimacy of a newly nationalized American marketplace that can accommodate its own ambitious fiction writers. The plot of The Scarlet Letter, as well as the relationship between “The Custom House” and the romance itself, reflects a newly organized literary field that no longer had a clearly authoritative audience to which writers turned for recognition.