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
