London and the Making of Provincial Literature. Joseph Rezek

      London and the Transatlantic Book Trade

      British and American publishing were not separate affairs in the early nineteenth century. But how did they cohere? Recently completed multivolume histories of the book in Great Britain, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States, as well as a constellation of individual studies, have highlighted transatlantic connections by pointing to how printed texts circulated.¹ Readerly interest around the Atlantic fueled the importation of books and encouraged many publishers, in the absence of international copyright law, to issue unauthorized reprints of promising transatlantic titles.² Scholars interested in such circulation have for the most part considered it from one side of the Atlantic or the other, telling national stories with attention to their transatlantic valences. Borrowing from David Armitage, we might describe such an approach as “cis-Atlantic,” in which the historian “studies particular places as unique locations within an Atlantic world.”³ The organizational principle of the multivolume histories can fairly stand as representative of this practice. If historians are “all Atlanticists now,” as Armitage puts it,⁴ then those who study books are of the “cis-Atlantic” variety. There is a fundamental tension at the heart of the field: most studies present extended diachronic accounts of the development of the book trade within a national space, even as they emphasize the movement of individuals, objects, and practices that undermine the nation as a heuristic category. Instead of privileging one local context and attending to transatlantic circulation, this chapter begins with circulation itself and asks how it brings different contexts into dynamic interrelation. To do this, it is necessary to abandon the common nationalistic thrust of most book history narratives in favor of a consideration of the book trade as an interconnected system.

      I offer here a perspective on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attuned to the transnational movement of texts and to the geographically inflected cultural hierarchies that affected the meaning of such movement. Economic data, patterns of distribution, publication statistics, copyright law, and customary trade practices demonstrate London’s centrality. We move from the London marketplace out to the late eighteenth-century book trades in Ireland, Scotland, and North America and forward to significant changes that shaped provincial publishing after the turn of the nineteenth century. The 1801 Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland and the copyright law that immediately followed emerge as central events in the history of the transatlantic book trade. Throughout the period, and especially in the three decades after the Union, there was a tension between new, authorized, and copyrighted texts and an extremely active reprint industry that refracted London’s cultural authority without overcoming it. After a detailed look at the rise of provincial publishing in the early nineteenth century, the chapter telescopes briefly out to the mid-nineteenth century, when the growth and nationalization of the U.S. book trade and the increasing consolidation of Edinburgh-London partnerships led to a British-versus-American model of competition in transatlantic literary publishing.

      The subsequent chapter, a companion to this one, turns to the 1820s and offers an extended case study on Walter Scott to demonstrate the dynamism of the activity London catalyzed among booksellers in Edinburgh and Philadelphia. Scott’s Waverley novels were printed in Edinburgh but distributed mostly in London, where publishers from Philadelphia initially acquired them for reprinting. Mathew and Henry Carey became Scott’s most important American publishers by establishing a direct agreement with his Edinburgh publisher, Archibald Constable, for purchasing advance sheets. The transmission of what came to be called the “American Copy” of the Waverley novels was shaped by the power and pressures of the London marketplace for books. Understanding this requires close attention to the language of the book trade—in private correspondence, in periodicals, newspapers, advertisements, and (it turns out) in the Waverley novels themselves—acts of representation that are as much a part of book history as the more empirical evidence on which the discipline usually focuses.

      The Provincial Trade Before 1801

      London’s advantages were partly demographic. By 1800, the population of England was 8.6 million compared to 1.6 million in Scotland, a stark advantage despite higher literacy rates north of the border. In 1800, Ireland’s population stood at 5 million, but “the culture of the majority [was] still predominantly oral,” and comparatively few read English.⁵ The London trade also benefited from its proximity to the highest concentration of wealth and resources in the English-speaking world, which supported a marketplace of elite consumers who could afford the trade’s latest productions. In the second half of the eighteenth century, there was only a slight decline in the total proportion of English-language books printed in London, from 90 percent in 1750 to 77 percent in 1790, and England supported far more circulating libraries than other areas, roughly ten times more than Scotland in 1800.⁶ Trade monopolies and patterns of centralization worked to the advantage of London as well. Formal legal restrictions began in 1662 with a licensing act that restricted publication to members of the Stationer’s Company, and the Statute of Queen Anne (1710) strengthened London’s control over production by formalizing the rights of publishers even as it sought to limit them to a fourteen-year period (with the possibility of a fourteen-year extension). London booksellers embraced copyrights but pursued monopolistic trade practices to undermine limits to their duration, securing de facto perpetual copyright until the 1774 case Donaldson v. Becket. In that case, the House of Lords enforced legal limits and opened the market for the reprinting of old texts, as William St. Clair has emphasized, but this did not change the customary role of established London firms as originators of new and copyrighted books.⁷ Such commodities were distinguished from cheaper reprints and remained luxury items compared to more commonly printed material, including newspapers, broadsides, chapbooks, prayer books, grammars, school books, anthologies, and abridged editions of steady sellers.

      The commodification and specialization of the book trade compounded such distinctions as the rise of modern publishing increasingly shaped the market for new literary texts.⁸ Enterprising booksellers abandoned printing to focus on publishing itself as a “specialist, capital-intensive commercial endeavor,”⁹ investing in new authors and capturing certain sectors of the market through advertising campaigns in newspapers, circulars, and printed publication lists. Established London firms spent money on luxuries they highlighted in such advertisements, including new typefaces, high-quality paper, and expensive bindings. Publishers built and protected reputations through maintaining the high and showy material quality of their books. “The name of the publisher, like that of the author,” writes Richard Sher, “[took] on the role of a brand name, influencing perceptions of the ‘product’ and patterns of consumption in profound ways.”¹⁰ This reinforced a hierarchy of printed texts, from the hefty quarto volumes of new poetry associated with high-class metropolitan publishing to the cheaply printed ephemeral texts associated with less capitalized firms.

      Such dynamics were evident far from London because most readers in eighteenth-century Scotland, Ireland, and North America encountered literary texts as either London imports or reprints produced in cities like Edinburgh, Dublin, or Philadelphia. A 1793 catalogue from Edinburgh publisher William Creech suggests London’s overwhelming importance in Scotland, especially as the origin for new, expensive, and large-format books.¹¹ A discussion of “New Books” in The Scots Magazine in 1778 devoted eight pages to books published in London compared to only two pages for Edinburgh.¹² Most books published locally in Scotland were at this time produced with London partnerships that were necessary to finance some projects and to reach the marketplace in the south. “I could wish a London Bookseller engaged in the publication,” wrote James Beattie regarding his Essay on Truth in 1769, “because otherwise it would be impossible to make it circulate in England.”¹³ At times, the Edinburgh trade manufactured new editions that rivaled the format of expensive London books, but even so, that city’s share in total production was relatively low. Only about 12 percent of the works of the Scottish Enlightenment—by authors like Beattie, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and David Hume—were published solely in Edinburgh without a London partner.¹⁴ A customer perusing William Creech’s 1793 catalogue would also have noticed a large number of cheap Scottish reprints of texts that originated