just about the money. Robinson was indignant:
I think you might in great fairness have continued to give us the [copy] for America at all events it should not have been sent to a London Booksr (3 times a Bankrupt). I confess I felt hurt some weeks ago when told in confidence by a particular friend that he had seen part of Q. D. in the hands of your Confidential Booksellers & Foreign agents…. I will not say all I feel on this head but I think if any Bookseller in London was to be trusted with these sheets it might have been the individual who has been trusted and confided in on many important matters both of business and personal interest.44
The “American Copy” had become a sign of intimacy between booksellers. This was because of the risk of sending the sheets, in vulnerable packages, through London—a metropolis teeming with eager printers and thousands of readers desperate for Scott’s novels. Perhaps Robinson, at that time an established London bookseller, can’t be blamed for reproaching Cadell’s trust in a bunch of Americans. Such scolding apparently was not enough, however. Robinson added a postscript to this letter threatening to complain to Scott himself, by way of Ballantyne. The comments were added quickly, later that night, and written crosswise on the page: “I feel so much hurt about the confidence you have given to Miller & refused to me that I return home this evening not fully decided as to the propriety of my writing or not to the authors agent [Ballantyne] to refer him to you to be informed who it is that violated his engagement. We are the sufferers but you are the sinners.”45 (See figure 1.) As was true of the earlier dispute between Carey and Cadell, a number of nonquantifiable values were at stake, including trust, confidence, and honor.
Robinson’s accusation predictably failed to defuse any tension among this emotional bunch. “Robinson has no right to assume the tone he does,” Cadell wrote to Constable: “what right has he to sulk.”46 Soon Robinson made good on his threat of writing to Ballantyne, and Cadell, writing to Constable, basically lost it:
I cannot but feel much incensed at Robinson’s conduct … now, I do say, that Robinson, our agent—without any share in the book—without having concern with the contracts—or the author, or the risk—or the advance—to have the impertinence to write to Ballantyne accusing us is not to be borne—I say it is a piece of high impudence & effrontery…. I cannot get over Robinson … all I can say is this[:] that I will not be able to submit to it. That we who have large advances—insurances—risks &c to make for the greatest living author are to be brow beaten by one London Commission agent—who only this week before had any right to the book at all—you will be assailed with noise and uproars.47
Figure 1. Joseph Robinson to Archibald Constable, May 3, 1823.
Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
Cadell’s fury was directed straight toward London, where Scott’s books were mostly sold, and where, as Robinson well knew, most of the money was. The fault with Quentin Durward lay, in the end, in an unexpected quarter—with a dramatist who had been given a copy to write a theatrical adaptation.48 As his booksellers raged and tattled, Scott himself kept his cool. “I think you are right to be satisfied with an apology,” he wrote to Constable, and—no doubt pleased with the offenders—he later added, “Do not be hard on them.”49
Scott and the Romance of Transatlantic Reprinting
Toward the end of Scott’s life, another scoop in the London press—this time actually traceable to the “American Copy”—brought the transatlantic book trade straight into the realm of fiction, in Scott’s last work, the fourth series of the Tales of My Landlord (1831), which contained both Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous. In a fascinating reversal of usual practice, the American reprint of this text appeared before the original. Delays in Edinburgh meant that Carey excerpted the first volume of Count Robert in his Philadelphia newspaper a full five months before the entire work was published in Britain. This gave the paper plenty of time to get across the Atlantic, and the excerpt, published in Philadelphia in July, was reprinted in a few London newspapers in August.50 In a headnote to the excerpt, the editors of the Athenaeum explained to readers the origins of the traveling text. Scott’s novels, they wrote, “are regularly transmitted across the Atlantic, and the American bookseller, less cautions or less particular than Mr. Cadell, has given the following very copious extract to the National Gazette, a literary Philadelphia paper, for a copy of which we are indebted to [a] friend.”51 Scott found humor in the situation, and when he wrote his preface to Count Robert a few months later, he made the transatlantic publication of his work its subject and subtext.
The novel’s fictionalization of the episode considers transatlantic reprinting in a number of registers. First, Scott openly ridicules American printers who went to press with early versions of novels that did not include his final corrections and additions. The “Introductory Address” is narrated by Jedediah Cleishbotham, of Gandercleuch, the fictional character who has edited and prepared the previous Tales of My Landlord—including Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), all of which derive from manuscripts written by Jedediah’s late antiquarian associate Peter Pattieson. Jedediah has recently found two additional manuscripts, Count Robert and Castle Dangerous, but leaves them aside until Peter’s surviving brother, Paul, shows up in Gandercleuch demanding them for his own use. Paul is a schemer and a rascal, and the manuscripts are in terrible shape, but Jedediah nevertheless employs him to prepare the texts and agrees to split the profits. At one point, Jedediah approaches Paul to complain about his progress, and the latter bursts out with this revelation: “Our hopeful scheme is entirely blown up. The tales, on publishing which we reckoned with so much confidence, have already been printed; they are abroad, over all America, and the British papers are clamorous.” Jedediah, astonished, asks “whether this American production embraces the alterations which you as well as I judged necessary, before the work could be fitted to meet the public eye,” and, receiving a negative answer, declares he would have never “remit[ted] these manuscripts to the press” unless “they were rendered fit for public perusal.”52 This exchange about the “American production” emphasizes Scott’s control over the texts as author. Jedediah’s complaint echoes those Carey faced at home from customers frustrated with faulty editions and, like those complaints, reinforces the superiority of authorized British publication over piratical American reprints.
Paul is not just a bringer of bad news, however; he is also a suspect. Jedediah accuses him of selling the manuscripts during an argument that resembles the initial dispute between Cadell and Carey over this same issue. Jedediah here is Cadell, and Paul is the falsely accused agent for Carey and also his defender: “I must of necessity suspect you to be the person who have [sic] supplied the foreign press with the copy which the printers have thus made an unscrupulous use of, without respect to the rights of the undeniable proprietors of the manuscripts” (xxxix). Paul responds by saying, “In the first place, these manuscripts … were never given to any one by me, and must have been sent to America either by yourself, or some one of the various gentleman to whom, I am well aware, you have afforded opportunities of perusing [them]” (xxxix–xl). Paul’s defense proves less effective than Carey’s, however, and Jedediah walks away absolutely convinced that he was “directly at the bottom of the Transatlantic publication, and had in one way or another found his own interest in that nefarious transaction” (xli–xlii). In reality, of course, the “Transatlantic publication” was authorized by the “proprietors of the manuscripts” in an arrangement of many years’ standing. This denial of the transatlantic arrangement, in addition to the repeated characterization of Paul in negative terms—“seedy,” “rusty,” “obstina[te],” “impuden[t],” “odious,” and “destitute of …
