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Chapter 1

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 in London. Printers in Scotland had long side-stepped London monopolies by trading heavily in such reprints, some of which were officially out of copyright but still claimed as protected.¹⁵ Largely permitted to sell and distribute books in local and North American markets, the Scottish reprint industry eventually got in trouble when it encroached upon England, as was the case with Alexander Donaldson, whose reprint of James Thompson’s The Seasons was at issue in the 1774 case that bears his name and that of the poem’s London printer, Thomas Becket.

Ireland’s book trade operated similarly to Scotland’s even though in the eighteenth century, it remained outside of British copyright and avoided the legal battles of the Scottish trade. In Dublin, book buyers chose between new London editions and cheaper, perfectly legal reprints, sometimes sold side by side. “In Dublin—as elsewhere [in Ireland],” Mary Pollard writes, “the wealthy customer usually preferred the London edition to any other,” while reprints satisfied the lower end of the market and, like reprints from Scotland, were also heavily exported to North America.¹⁶ As in Scotland, authors from Ireland—including Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke—sought London publishers for prestige, profit, and convenience (if they lived there) and also because Dublin editions, unlike new editions published in Edinburgh, were not copyright protected in Britain.¹⁷ Some Dublin publishers established informal partnerships with London firms; George Faulkner, for example, published editions of Samuel Richardson by purchasing advance sheets of London texts so he could be the first to reprint them in Ireland.¹⁸ For the most part, however, elegant and expensive London imports competed for a reader’s attention with “reprints of London originals.”¹⁹ New literary works retained an especially strong association with London, since fiction and poetry were far less often reprinted than other kinds of texts.²⁰

In North America before and after the Revolution, the book trade was also defined by the sale of London imports and cheap reprints, although many of the latter were also imported from Ireland and Scotland. Benjamin Franklin and James Rivington were supplied with books by business associates in London, and the latter bragged in the 1760s that he was “the only London book-seller in America.”²¹ The materiality of London-printed books sent clear signals: “Large paper, large format, and large type all enjoyed a high social status,” Hugh Amory writes about the colonial period, “generated not only by the ‘louder,’ attention-grabbing volume of the text but also by the conspicuous waste of paper.”²² Such volumes contrasted to the cheap reprints from Ireland and Scotland and also to local reprints by colonials, including some who had been book trades professionals in Ireland, like Mathew Carey, or in Scotland, like Robert Bell. In the last decades of the century, the market for reprints in America was met mostly by imports from Ireland. The transatlantic dynamics of the American book trade changed little up through the 1790s; before and after the Revolution, for example, Thomas Jefferson preferred to read London texts in their Dublin editions because of their price and more manageable size.²³ Toward the end of the century, some important changes occurred, such as an increase in domestic reprinting, led by Carey; attempts to coordinate bookselling through trade sales; and an interest in new books of specifically American manufacture.²⁴ But a new federal copyright law in 1790 that granted U.S. residents and citizens rights to their texts did not much affect the general pattern of American bookselling.²⁵ The Gentleman’s Magazine corroborates this in a 1796 article about the U.S. trade; “serious books would only do as imported,” it writes, “as the people esteemed English-printed books much better than the productions of their own presses.”²⁶ Charles Brockden Brown felt this keenly, as he admitted in a letter to his brother about arranging transatlantic editions of his novels. “The salelibility [sic] of my works will much depend on their popularity in England, whither Caritat has carried a considerable number of Wieland, Ormond, and Mervyn.”²⁷ Up through the turn of the century, bookselling in North America was still characterized by the authority of the London trade, London imports, and the dissemination of London texts via cheap reprints.

The robust trade in reprints around the Anglophone Atlantic demonstrates the vibrancy of provincial publishing. But there was an important difference between two kinds of reprinting: the reprinting of old texts whose copyrights had expired and the reprinting of new texts (legally or illegally) from copyrighted London editions. The former practice was common everywhere following Donaldson v. Becket, including in London and England. Reprinting copyrighted texts, however, was largely the prerogative of provincial publishers. Before and after Donaldson, publishers in Scotland produced illegal reprints of in-copyright titles that undersold London editions, while Irish and American reprinters were not beholden to copyrights at all.²⁸ In all of these areas, original London editions were sometimes sold alongside unauthorized provincial reprints that echoed their originals. This produced a kind of double vision in Scotland, Ireland, and North America that did not characterize the marketplace in England. This double vision emphasized the provincial book trade’s distance from London as it reinforced that city’s traditional importance as the origin for new literary texts. In the provincial marketplace, a new and imported London edition signaled its high cultural status directly through its own materiality, while a local reprint alluded to such status through its text’s known metropolitan origin. Distance from London was reflected in a reprint not in the book’s physical journey to the hands of readers, as was the case with an import, but rather through the reprint’s invocation of such distance as an immanent feature of the object itself. While readers of a London import were aware of its distant material origins, readers of a reprint felt the absence of a book’s original London edition as a ghostly presence within it.

The Provincial Book Trade After 1801

Events surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century led to significant changes even as London’s overall dominance persisted. Scholarship has typically marked the Donaldson decision as the most significant turning point in this period because the explosion of reprinting after 1774 expanded the availability of old texts. From the perspective of the provincial book trade, however, which had always trafficked in such texts, a later date emerges as more significant: 1801, the year of the Act of Union, which absorbed Ireland into Great Britain to create the “United Kingdom” and was accompanied with a Copyright Act that for the first time extended British copyright across the Irish Sea. The effects of this new law reverberated around the Atlantic: it led to the collapse of the reprint trade in Ireland and drove Irish book trades professionals to London or to the United States to find work. It also led to the rise of reprinting in the United States, which fueled the growth of that nation’s book trade. Copyright in Ireland can be seen as the latest of three events in the history of intellectual property that attempted to regulate the relationships between the London trade and provincial publishers engaged mostly in reprinting. Donaldson was decided in favor of a Scottish reprinter who ignored customary London monopolies, and the 1790 U.S. law denied foreign authors copyright protection and sanctioned the wide reprinting of British texts. The U.S. federal copyright law has been described as “negligible” in its first decades, and the post-Union law has been cast mainly in a limited role for its impact on the Irish trade.²⁹ The reverberations of the events in Ireland and the United States—with one reprint trade shut down and the other sanctioned and on the rise—had more of an impact on the provincial book trade than did Donaldson, especially in the long term. By the 1820s, the U.S. reprint industry was able to invest capital in forging relationships with booksellers in Britain and also to produce their own books for the transatlantic marketplace. Meanwhile, the controversy over the Act of Union inspired a wave of Irish fiction that paved the way in London for the success of subsequent writers from Scotland and the United States who took such fiction as their model. By the 1820s and 1830s, provincial literature flooded the London marketplace and formed a recognizable sector of the market. The trajectories of the Irish, American, and Scottish trades diverged widely in the early nineteenth century, especially in regards to reprinting and the double vision it created, but they remained indelibly connected to London and, increasingly, to each other.

After the extension of British copyright, Irish reprinting and publishing was “almost annihilated,” as one observer put it, and in the ensuing decades, imports soared.³⁰ “There is no encouragement for literary exertion in the Irish metropolis,” wrote Robert Walsh in 1816, “the cautious Dublin bookseller will run no risk publishing an original work, however great its merit. It must appear in London, or not at all.”³¹ As in the eighteenth century, all major Irish authors 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 in a frustrated language of posterity: “All the abuse ever leveled at me by Cobbett is embalmed in ‘Cobbett’s works,’ published in London in the year 1801, in twelve volumes, and will be read when I am dead and gone.”⁵⁶

The book trade in early nineteenth-century Scotland might be less easily described as provincial. The unparalleled influence of the Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, which the Quarterly Review took as its model (founded in 1809, with an opposite political agenda); the success of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, founded in 1817; and the rise of Walter Scott as “by far the most popular author of the romantic period” are all signs of the preeminence of the Scottish book trade.⁵⁷ Sizing up these developments, Ian Duncan writes that “Scottish publications and genres dominated a globalizing English-language market and made Edinburgh a literary metropolis to rival London.”⁵⁸ At the heart of this were the publishers of the two major journals, Archibald Constable of the Edinburgh and William Blackwood of Blackwood’s. The former’s transformative role in the Edinburgh trade can be compared to Mathew Carey’s in Philadelphia. Constable’s innovations began with the Edinburgh, the first literary journal to pay authors handsomely for content; continued with new commitments to Scottish literature unseen in the eighteenth century, with Scott as his crowning achievement; and included strategies to reach a mass market for copyrighted books, including issuing Waverley novels in multiple formats at different prices.⁵⁹ The growth of the Scottish trade was grounded in its increased focus on local book production, the rise of its influential literary journals, and the development of an astonishing array of popular and respectable fiction, including works by Scott, Jane Porter, John Galt, James Hogg, Christian Johnstone, John Gibson Lockhart, Mary Brunton, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Susan Ferrier.

Yet inevitably, the Scottish book trade depended on its ties to England. “For while London had to be resisted, it could not be ignored,” writes Jane Millgate about the early nineteenth century. “Whatever the literary talents of Scottish authors or the energy and skill of Edinburgh booksellers, demographic realities dictated that the bulk of the market for British books was in England, accessible only through some form of alliance with the London trade.”⁶⁰ While the market share of Scottish booksellers increasingly included northern England, the London trade still dominated book production, by one estimate issuing about 85 percent of new titles a year in the mid-1820s.⁶¹ Blackwood’s organized its list of new publications according to city and, in the magazine’s first year, listed 870 titles from London compared with 151 from Edinburgh. Copublishing practices between Edinburgh and London firms were increasingly common, but while many publications listed Edinburgh and London publishers on title pages, including nearly all of Scott’s work, the Edinburgh, and even the London-based Quarterly, London firms retained financial superiority over their northern partners. Furthermore, it was Scottish publishers who aggressively sought the cooperation of well-known London firms, not the reverse.⁶² Longman’s financial stake in the Edinburgh enabled the journal to pay its contributors, and at the end of 1807, Constable sent 5,000 of 7,000 total copies of a single issue to London for distribution.⁶³ Scottish authors and publishers watched the London market closely, as William Blackwood informed his London publishing partner, Thomas Cadell, in a letter about Lockhart’s Adam Blair (1822). “Be so good as to write me every thing you hear as you have no idea how much an Author is interested in any London news with regard to his book.”⁶⁴ And finally, while Walter Scott was among the most valued authors of his London publishers—a list that included at times Longman, John Murray, and Hurst, Robinson—it was also true that he benefited enormously from his association with them.

In the post-1801 period, London’s importance registered differently around the Atlantic: in Ireland as the almost exclusive location for publishing, in the United States as the origin of texts for reprinting, in Scotland as the distribution center for books. But there it was, as readers of the Philadelphia-based Analectic Magazine would have been reminded in October 1813. “Miss Edgeworth had been in London,” reported the magazine, “enjoying a round of gratifying attentions from the polite and literary society of that metropolis. She had returned to Ireland, leaving a new work in the hands of the booksellers.”⁶⁵ In London, the publishing industry continued on its track of specialization and commodification as high prices remained the norm for new books, 31½ shillings for a triple-decker novel by 1821, more than two weeks’ salary for a law clerk or skilled craftsman.⁶⁶ By the end of the 1830s, all of the most prominent houses claimed Irish, Scottish, or American authors on their lists of texts as publisher or co-publisher, including Longman, Murray, Cadell, Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, Richard Phillips, Simpkin and Marshall, and Joseph Johnson’s successors.⁶⁷ Once an author’s reputation was established, these publishers paid quite well for provincial fiction. Henry Colburn gave Owenson £550 for the copyright to O’Donnel (1814) and £1,300 for The O’Brien’s and the O’Flaherty’s (1827);⁶⁸ Joseph Johnson’s firm paid Edgeworth £1,050 for Tales of Fashionable Life (1812), £2,100 for Patronage (1814), and £1,150 for Harrington and Ormond (1817);⁶⁹ John Murray paid Irving 1,000 and 1,500 guineas, respectively, for Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824);⁷⁰ John Murray offered to split the profits of The Pioneers (1823) with Cooper, who also received from Henry Colburn a modest but respectable £200 to £300 per novel in the late 1820s, £1,300 for two novels in 1830, and £50 each when he revised many of them in the 1830s.⁷¹ While it remains difficult to gauge the financial impact of London partnership on fees paid by Edinburgh publishers, such fees were indeed comparable, including Susan Ferrier’s £1,000 for The Inheritance (1824) and John Gibson Lockhart’s 1,000 guineas for Renigald Dalton (1823), both delivered by Blackwood.⁷² Walter Scott received the highest sums of all, mostly from Constable: £1,700 for Rob Roy (1817), £4,000 for Tales of My Landlord, Second Series (1818), £4,000 for Ivanhoe (1819), and £5,000, delivered directly from Longman in London, for both The Monastery (1820) and The Abbott (1820)⁷³

The success of provincial literature came in waves, first the Irish national tale, then the Waverley novels and other Scottish texts in the 1810s, then Irving’s and Cooper’s works and a barrage of Irish, Scottish, and American texts throughout the 1820s. By the early 1830s, collected editions of provincial literature appeared in quick succession. Robert Cadell led the way by reissuing the Waverley novels at monthly intervals for six shillings per volume. This edition, revised and newly annotated by Scott and known as the Magnum Opus, inspired other multivolume editions that were marketed as its companions. Colburn confidently reissued a number of his old titles, including Banim’s and Owenson’s, under the banner heading “Irish National Tales,” which promised to complement “the uniform collection of Sir Walter Scott’s admirable Tales.”⁷⁴ Baldwin and Cradock, by the 1830s proprietor of Edgeworth’s work, issued a collected and revised edition of “Miss Edgeworth’s Tales and Novels” “[t]o be published,” as they advertised, “in Monthly Volumes, of the Size and Price of the Waverley Novels.”⁷⁵ In 1831, Colburn and his partner and successor, Richard Bentley, announced their “Standard Novels” with the same strategy—“printed uniformly with the Waverley Novels”⁷⁶—and led the series with Cooper, by far its most frequently occurring author. In 1834, Bentley marketed Cooper’s novels on their own as a special subset; one advertisement listed The Bravo with the rest of his works, all revised and corrected especially for the Standard Novels, and included this blurb from the Quarterly: “The Spy, Pilot, Pioneers, &c. may be classed with Waverley.”⁷⁷ Provincial fiction was no longer breaking news; it was a staple of the book trade, and its success and viability was confirmed by this kind of repackaging in the 1830s.

By the 1850s, a parallel trend toward nationalization occurred in the United States and Great Britain that caused a binational model of literary competition to replace the center/periphery model that dominated earlier. There is broad scholarly consensus about the emergence roughly at mid-century of what Scott E. Casper has called the “national book trade system” in the United States, one enabled by improvements in transportation, communication, financial structures, and distribution.⁷⁸ This is partly reflected in the founding of a number of long-lasting periodicals that touted their national readership, including the Tribune (founded 1841), Godey’s Lady’s Book (a bit earlier, 1837), 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