London and the Making of Provincial Literature
MATERIAL TEXTS
Series Editors
| Roger Chartier | Leah Price |
| Joseph Farrell | Peter Stallybrass |
| Anthony Grafton | Michael F. Suarez, S.J. |
London
and the Making of Provincial Literature
Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850
Joseph Rezek
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rezek, Joseph, author.
London and the making of provincial literature : aesthetics and the transatlantic book trade, 1800–1850 / Joseph Rezek.
pages cm.—(Material texts)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4734-3 (alk. paper)
1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Book industries and trade—England—London—History—19th century. 3. Book industries and trade—United States—History—19th century. 4. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 5. Irish fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 6. Scottish fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 5. Irish fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 6. Scottish fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 7. English fiction—Irish authors—19th century—History and criticism. 8. English fiction—Scottish authors—19th century—History and criticism. 9. National characteristics in literature. 10. Nationalism in literature. 11. Literature—Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series: Material texts.
PR861.R482015
820.9'007—dc23
2015005986
To my enthusiastic parents, Geoff and Jackie Rezek
Contents
Chapter 1. London and the Transatlantic Book Trade
Chapter 2. Furious Booksellers and the “American Copy” of the Waverley Novels
Chapter 3. The Irish National Tale and the Aesthetics of Union
Chapter 4. Washington Irving’s Transatlantic Revisions
Chapter 5. The Effects of Provinciality in Cooper and Scott
Chapter 6. Rivalry with England in the Age of Nationalism
Epilogue. The Scarlet Letter and the Decline of London
Appendix. The London Republication of American Fiction, 1797–1832
Introduction
In 1800, a new kind of Irish literature arrived in London. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, A Hibernian Tale was published by the storied firm of Joseph Johnson, a “formidable figure” in the late eighteenth-century book trade and publisher of famous radicals like Joseph Priestly, William Cowper, and Mary Wollstonecraft.1 Castle Rackrent relates the decline of the landed Irish gentry through the fictionalized edited narrative of an Irish family’s loyal servant, Thady Quirk. The text provides some help for its intended audience; “for the information of the ignorant English reader,” its “Preface” remarks, “a few notes have been subjoined by the editor.”2 Late in 1798, Edgeworth sent the completed manuscript to Johnson, but he thought Thady’s dialect narrative could benefit from even further explanation than the footnotes provided. At his instigation, she composed a copious “Glossary” defining “terms, and idiomatic phrases,” as a new “Advertisement” explains.3 The text’s transnational address established a template that shaped the genre of the Irish national tale, a term coined by Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), which stages the marriage of an English traveler and a dispossessed Irish princess. The genre’s wide-ranging influence—it “set a tone” for a century of Irish fiction and was of “formative importance for nineteenth-century realism”4—depended on its publication in London, where, ironically, all Irish “national” tales received their first editions.
In 1814, Scottish literature arrived in London like never before. That summer, Longman & Co., at the time publisher of more new books than any other firm in the city,5 issued a novel that told the story of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion from the perspective of an ordinary English gentleman, Edward Waverley. Walter Scott’s first foray into fiction, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, was jointly published by Longman and Archibald Constable, in Edinburgh, where it was printed and from where 70 percent of its first edition were sent to London for distribution.6 Inspired partly by the Irish national tale, Scott used his eponymous hero as a literary device to guide English readers through the unfamiliar territory of Scotland and Scottish history. Scott aimed “to emulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth,” as he wrote, whose characters “have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbors of Ireland.”7 In so doing, he encapsulated the spirit of modern historical consciousness, offering to “world literature” a new genre, according to Georg Lukács, in which “extreme, opposing social forces can be brought into a human relationship with one another.”8 As a best-selling poet, an editor, and the business partner of his Edinburgh printer, the “great Scotch novelist,” as he was known at the time, approached