of American texts revised for London republication, including Irving’s The Sketch Book and Cooper’s The Pioneers; Irving’s editorial work at the reprint journal The Analectic Magazine (1813–1815); angry marginalia American readers scribbled in London-printed travel narratives; and numerous trans-provincial borrowings and appropriations, including the celebration of the idea of “America” in radical Irish magazines and the American adoption of Walter Scott’s song “Hail to the Chief” as a nationalistic anthem during the War of 1812. The book concludes with an extended close reading of The Scarlet Letter (1850) as an allegory for changes in the structure of the transatlantic book trade at mid-century. I approach such evidence with various disciplinary tools and with different degrees of focus and attention, analytical decisions that vary from case to case. The language of booksellers’ correspondence is examined closely because rhetorical analysis reveals the dynamics of provincial publishing far better than an approach that considers such correspondence a mere repository of information. Irving’s and Cooper’s entirely forgotten process of what I will be calling transatlantic revision is meticulously recorded and analyzed not only because it profoundly suggests their provinciality but also because they incorporated thousands of substantive changes they made for London into subsequent editions—authorial decisions all but lost to history but which inform the scholarly texts and reprints we read today. Edgeworth, Owenson, Scott, Irving, and Cooper are my principal focus simply because in their time, they were the most influential literary figures from their respective nations, although their reputations have fared unequally since then. Scott looms particularly large, as he did in the nineteenth century, partly because after immersing myself in the print culture of the period, such an emphasis seemed unavoidable and partly because we need to view his works in a new light as the provincial literary experiments they were. And finally, in an era defined by epochal events like the French, American, and Haitian Revolutions, the expansion of slavery and the British Empire, and the Napoleonic Wars, lesser happenings like the War of 1812 and the 1801 Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland take center stage. Provincial literature arose from the edges of the literary field; minor historical events were its fuel and its fodder.
The Anglophone Literary Field
Irish, Scottish, and American literatures were “made” as material products of the book trade and cultural artifacts of the literary field.34 Consider Irving, whose transatlantic triumph is as familiar as any story in American literary history. Yet the publication history that established it—his initial difficulties with The Sketch Book, followed by his success with John Murray—was guided by the economic, material, and cultural conditions of a London-centered book trade that alone could establish his arrival on the literary stage. The Sketch Book has stood for two hundred years as a rejoinder to Sydney Smith’s contemporaneous jab in the Edinburgh Review: “In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book?”35 But the book, as an object, was not American at all. Printed in England and distributed in London with the financial backing and cultural sanction of Murray’s firm, the edition of The Sketch Book that reached the four corners of the globe may have been written by an American but it was a product of the London trade. The seven-part periodical printed in New York was never easily available in Britain, even though the texts of a few sketches were reprinted in journals there. In Britain, Murray’s heavily revised and transformed two-volume edition was sold. At this time of his career, Irving was ecstatic to find his works all dressed up as London imprints. “Murray is going to make me so fine in print I shall hardly know myself,”36 he wrote to a friend as plans were made after The Sketch Book for a new edition of The History of New York. Aware of the signals that “fine” craftsmanship emanates, Irving reveled in the increased prestige acquired through his association with Murray. The uneven dynamics of the book trade seeped into the deepest level of his authorial identity as print and its materiality became a metaphor for that identity. Through success in London, Irving experienced a bewildering transformation.
Bourdieu’s sociological account of literary production can be productively extended beyond the nation to incorporate struggles involving the uneven distribution of cultural capital across an entire linguistic field. The literary field in early nineteenth-century Britain did not put economic success in inverse relation to artistic success, as was the case in Bourdieu’s nineteenth-century France.37 This was true throughout the Anglophone world, where wide popularity reinforced an author’s rise to prominence. Bourdieu famously argued that literary and artistic value are produced through a series of relations in society, including economic relations, that determine the definition of literature and art among writers, artists, and those involved in production and reception. Bourdieu considers “not only the direct producers of the work in its materiality (artist, writer, etc.) but also the producers of the meaning and value of the work—critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such.”38 In the early nineteenth century, provincial authors appealed to metropolitan publishers and readers for the recognition and prestige that they, as producers of the meaning and value of literature, could bestow.
London was the center of the Anglophone literary field because it was the capital of the British Empire, but the literary field’s internal divisions cannot be easily mapped according to imperial politics. Those divisions were influenced both by the unstable Irish and Scottish unions of what Michael Hechter has called “internal colonialism” and by the culturally indeterminate disunion of U.S. independence.39 The United States had of course been politically autonomous since the Revolution, but deep and lasting material, economic, and linguistic ties ensured American cultural dependence for decades to come. In contrast, Scotland was more politically and institutionally embroiled with England than ever before—amalgamated into Great Britain since 1707, central to British nationalism since 1745, and throughout the nineteenth century an integral partner in imperial expansion. Yet in the early nineteenth century, Scotland retained a distinct cultural identity dating back to the Enlightenment and grounded in the provincial capitals of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Meanwhile, Ireland, a predominantly Catholic colony long excluded from Protestant Britain and the benefits of empire, was newly absorbed into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union in 1801, which dissolved Dublin’s independent Parliament and ended any hope of home rule.
In the literary field, these relationships were not isolated from one another—and not only because texts traveled across national boundaries. The Act of Union, often considered a limited affair of the British Isles, in fact had far-reaching consequences. The Union extended British copyright across the Irish Sea and shut down a Dublin book trade that, during the eighteenth century, had supplied much of North America with cheap unauthorized reprints. As the Dublin trade declined, booksellers in the United States fulfilled local demand by manufacturing their own reprints and in the process built a provincial publishing industry that confirmed the cultural dominance of London even as it grew significantly on its own.40 The controversy leading up to and following the Union also created an appetite in England for discourse about Ireland that paved the way for the Irish national tale to emerge.41 The result of this, I will argue, was that Edgeworth and Owenson theorized an ideal relationship to English readers that banished contentious political debates in favor of the purity of literary exchange. Such idealizations proved highly influential as provincial strategies for success; Walter Scott adapted them in the cross-cultural address of the Waverley novels, and Irving and Cooper, avid readers not only of Scott but also of Irish fiction, adapted them with an American twist.
The advantages of the London book trade were demographic, economic, and material. Its dominance, however, was inflected by the remarkably divergent histories of Irish, Scottish, and American bookselling, as Chapter 1 will demonstrate in detail. At the turn of the century, England’s population dwarfed Scotland’s by a factor of five, and low English-language literacy rates in Ireland, whose population in 1800 was over half that of England’s, kept its reading population comparatively small.42 The population of the United States almost equaled England’s by 1830, but the persistent preference for British reprints and a radical trade deficit in the importation of books—a ratio of twenty to one in the late 1820s—neutralized whatever effect the nation’s growing readership may have