Carey’s use of advance sheets proved more difficult to defend than the means he used to acquire them. His reply, printed in the National Gazette and reprinted in the Boston paper, included a defense of his father’s native land—“the same as Montgomery and Emmet,” but his excuses only confirmed the unreliability of his practice and, worse, tried to fashion his blatant commercial strategy as a public service. Volume 1 of The Pirate, he explained, “had the appearance of being complete,” but after examining “another English copy,” it was revealed “the author had added a chapter.” Regarding The Fortunes of Nigel, he said that they rushed to distribute its first volume “to guard against the edition, which … would be published in New York, immediately upon the receipt of the London copy,” but then he “found, upon receiving the remainder of the work, that there was an introduction,” and so he inserted it in volume 2. He attributed all this to “a desire to benefit the public,” to “enable us early to lay before them the most interesting of the English publications,” and he trumpeted “the pains we have taken and the expense we have incurred” to make this possible. Against all evidence to the contrary, but perhaps because of the Boston writer’s sarcasm, Carey implied the attack derived from envy about a London connection—as if it had done any good. “We trust it is not necessary to contend with an enemy who thus, without a name, shoots his poisoned arrows from his ambush, and would wound us even unto death for no other avowed reason than because we ‘have an Agent in England’ who forwards us ‘the new publications, in sheets, as they come from the press,’ to the end that we may as early as possible, gratify and inform our fellow countrymen.”32 Carey presumed his customers wanted to be up to speed with the literary scene in England. He tried to deflect the controversy by trading one temporality for another: the time pressure of the fierce reprint trade—where one day can make the difference—for a broader temporal context that bridged the Atlantic. The National Gazette reinforced this broader temporality in a note appended to Carey’s defense that also avoided the issue of the edition’s actual integrity: “What could be more absurd and unjust, than to arraign them for their exertions to supply the American public with the new productions of the British literati, as early almost as the readers of London are supplied.”33 The provinciality of the American literary field is reflected in this entire exchange not merely through the evident demand for British literature but more profoundly by the continual invocation of London and England as the center of literary commerce and the location that governed literary time.
Not long after this domestic controversy, Carey received a letter from Constable’s firm that must have been extremely welcome. His self-defense was a resounding success, at least in establishing the facts about the “stolen” sheets. Indeed, the idea of a thief in Ballantyne’s print shop was pure fiction, and all parties were soon exonerated. “[W]e have no doubt the fault is on this side of the water,” Robert Cadell conceded, on behalf of Constable, suggesting too that Carey’s reply was successful because of its combative style: “[We] assure you, after such a letter it would ill become us to testify any other feeling than respect for the writers of it. The tone of candour throughout cannot fail to draw forth these feelings—and we hope we may have from time to time the pleasure of your correspondence.”34 Even though flattery is standard on the occasion of an apology, in calling this “pleasure,” Cadell was clearly working hard to control the damage incurred by thus annoying his new associate. He may also have been motivated by a desire to vindicate his employer, Constable, whose authority Carey invoked in his earlier letter. “[O]ur Mr. Constable has been, from bad health unable to attend to business for 18 months past,” Cadell informed Carey, in perhaps a slight admission of his own guilt in mismanaging the situation.35 Indeed, only a few days earlier, Constable had written to Cadell with some bewilderment about their American connections: “I have many applications for copies to send abroad, of Peveril of the Peak, but being ignorant of the arrangements that have been made, am prevented from giving even a satisfactory answer.”36 America was clearly Cadell’s territory, not Constable’s, and he further sought to smooth things over by providing a document certifying Wardle’s purchase of the novels since Ivanhoe. Wardle traveled all the way to London to secure this confirmation, even though his services as a middleman were no longer required.37
Though it was relatively straightforward to resolve the dispute over courtesy and honor, the negotiation over pricing proved more difficult, since Cadell lost no time in claiming his firm’s advantage as proprietor. In this perhaps he was encouraged by two new offers from America to pay for advance sheets, which he received from Thomas Dobson and W. G. Gilley at the height of Carey’s problems with The Pirate and Nigel.38 In his defensive reply, Carey had labored to demonstrate the generosity of offering £55 per volume, but in London, John Miller was unable to secure less than £75, or £25 per volume, for the next novel, Peveril of the Peak (1823). “I could not make a better bargain with Constable & Co.,” Miller wrote; “they would not give way in the slightest degree.”39 Carey agreed to this, but Peveril, like the last novels, also proved difficult: Scott wrote an extra volume and Constable insisted on the increased price of £100. This made Carey furious but to no avail. “We think the demands of Messrs. Constable as improper as any we have known,” he wrote to Miller, but still had little choice: “we hope,” he continued, “that you have made some arrangements with them; as it would be in the highest degree vexatious to us to be delayed.”40 Though Carey desired that the novels be sent through Liverpool, subsequent novels were still sent through London, a task managed most often by Miller, acting as the Careys’ agent.41
The distribution of the next novel, Quentin Durward (1823), caused trouble on both sides of the Atlantic. Scott’s eleventh-hour addition of a postscript gave Carey the unwelcome task of defending himself yet again in the National Gazette, where he printed the extra text. On this occasion, Carey revealed his new, direct, and costly arrangement with Constable; confidently attributed any faults of his edition to its source, which, now identifiable, was beyond reproach; and emphasized, once again, that his service to the public resided not in shutting out his own competition but in narrowing the transatlantic time delay:
The American publishers of Quentin Durward have this day received advice from Edinburgh, that a small addition … has been made to the work subsequently to the dispatch of their copy. Having paid Messrs. Constable & Co. a large sum to have the volumes forwarded several days previous to their appearance in London, those gentlemen were pledged to furnish them complete; and their high standing in society warrants the belief that they had no idea of an addition…. Under their present arrangement with the publishers, nothing but so extraordinary a circumstance as the present, could have caused such an error. They hope it will be received as an apology for the omission, that the work was published here in twenty-two days after the day fixed for publication in England, and that no copy except their’s [sic] has yet been received in this country, nor will probably be received for eight or ten days, although published in this city a week since.42
In trumpeting their “present arrangement,” Carey insisted that his circumstances were more reliable than before, even though they still resulted in an incomplete edition. Once again, he trusted that ample compensation for the error lay in his publication of the novel more than a week earlier than would have been possible without the “large sum” he sacrificed for the occasion.
Back in Edinburgh, an episode also involving Quentin Durward demonstrated that great anxiety surrounded the “American Copy” and its transmission. In London, a magazine got its hands on an early copy of the novel and printed copious extracts before it was officially published. Constable and Cadell, furious at the scoop, assumed—wrongly, it turned out—that the “American Copy” was the source of the extracts and shot off a number of accusatory letters. Constable immediately blamed the Careys’ agent for the leak: “Miller’s conduct is most disgraceful,” he wrote to Cadell, “and I now say must be punished.”43 Meanwhile, in a tense correspondence with Cadell, Joseph Robinson, whose firm was formerly the trustee of the “American Copy,” saw fit to vent his feelings about the new arrangement between
