a great ironist, and nowhere is this more evident than in the prefaces to the Waverley novels, where we meet editors, antiquarians, legal scholars, roaming storytellers, royal ancestors, and any number of characters like Jedediah Cleishbotham who serve as unreliable sources for the novels that follow. It is impossible, therefore, to take Jedediah entirely at his word, and at times the preface suggests a more complicated view of Paul Pattieson and a more generous take on reprinting. In employing Paul to edit the manuscripts, for example, Jedediah has angered the people of Gandercleuch, who consider it an inexcusable act of neglect; as his wife reports, the local gossips believe he “spends all his time in tippling strong drink with the keeper of the public house” and leaves “book-making, and a’ the rest o’t, to the care of his usher” (xxvii–xxviii). Indeed, when Jedediah first reveals he has discovered Count Robert and Castle Dangerous, he provides no good reason for ignoring them before he “threw the manuscripts into [his] drawer” (xvii). He is not careful in accounting for the texts, and after handing them over to Paul, he holds “a sincere confidence that all was going on well” (xxiii). Scott prepares us to observe him in the same mistake Cadell initially made with Carey and thus undermines his own apparent critique of transatlantic publication.
A suggestive passage offers an implicit reconsideration of the actual relationship between Carey’s and Constable’s firms that the preface misrepresents. Jedediah’s internal thoughts invoke the circumstances of Cadell’s negotiation with Carey:
I began to perceive that it would be no light matter … to break up a joint-stock adventure … which, if profitable to him, had at least promised to be no less so to me, established in years and learning and reputation so much his superior…. I resolved to proceed with becoming caution on the occasion, and not, by stating my causes of complaint too hastily in the outset, exasperate into a positive breach what might only prove some small misunderstanding, easily explained or apologized for, and which, like a leak in a new vessel, being once discovered and carefully stopped, renders the vessel but more sea-worthy than it was before. (xxxiv–xxxv)
The “joint-stock adventure,” in which Constable & Company provided sheets and Carey payment, was indeed “profitable” to Carey and “no less so” to Constable; Cadell certainly considered himself and his senior partner “established in years and learning and reputation so much [the] superior” of their Philadelphia colleagues; his initial “complaint,” with its combination of both reprimand and solicitation, labored to avoid a “positive breach”; the issue of the stolen sheets proved a “small misunderstanding, easily explained or apologized for”; and the “leak” Constable and Cadell supposedly discovered at their printers was indeed “carefully stopped” by the arrangement with Carey, which provided revenue that “render[ed]” his company “more sea-worthy than it was before.” The passage implicitly issues a more balanced view of transatlantic publication than that contained in Jedediah’s other remarks and casts his own confidence in Paul’s guilt in terms just as faulty and presumptuous as Cadell’s repeated and unfounded suspicions. The resonances suggest the preface as a whole is more generous with America than it seems.
The eventual fate of the manuscripts brings to an intriguing point Scott’s consideration of his American publishers, which in the end amounts to something of an homage. For a moment, Jedediah considers amending the text with “adequate corrections of [its] various inconsistencies,” but he decides, in an allusion to Scott’s own declining condition, that “the state of [his] health” would make such an exertion “imprudent” (xlii–xliii). So he lets the American edition stand for itself, and we, as readers, turn the page and begin Count Robert. Scott has cast his own novel as a transatlantic reprint derived from the American edition. He has used the story of transatlantic publication as a literary device to apologize for faults in his composition, as elaborate a performance of authorial humility as any in the history of romance. In having Jedediah attribute to reprinters the lack of judgment his readers would inevitably trace only to himself, Scott allies himself with American publishers, gleaning benefits from them in the literary realm just as his late publisher, Constable, gathered profits from them as a bookseller.
Scott’s last novel reached the London marketplace by way of Philadelphia, an unusual geography made possible by delays in its publication. The episode signals, more broadly, that change had come to the book trade. The relationship between Constable’s and Carey’s firms exemplifies the cooperative transatlantic practices that became more common as publishers on both sides of the Atlantic devised extralegal arrangements in order to profit from selling books not easily protected by copyright. The acquisition of advance sheets in the United States was analogous to the processes that that led to authorized London editions of American texts—like Murray’s edition of The Sketch Book and dozens of other books in the 1820s—all of which depended on courtesies of the trade and the careful timing of a work’s transmission to the printer. These cooperative practices defined transatlantic publishing in subsequent decades as the nature of the book trade’s connectedness changed from a system dominated by the dissemination of London texts out to provincial markets to a more mixed system in which dissemination occurred in multiple directions. The episode with Scott’s last preface is one small example of this: the reprinting of Philadelphia’s National Gazette in London suggests that American texts were traveling more than ever before as the U.S. book trade continued to grow. Throughout the early nineteenth century, London proved extremely persistent as the center of the transatlantic trade and of English-language culture more broadly, but between 1800 and the 1830s, a considerable amount of excitement animated the provincial book trades. The following three chapters show how these dynamics shaped the aesthetic practices of the most influential Irish, Scottish, and American authors of the period.
Chapter 3
The Irish National Tale and the Aesthetics of Union
In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Bennet doesn’t get to see the Lake District. “No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth,” Jane Austen writes, and when Mrs. Gardiner initially proposes a trip north, she is ecstatic: “‘My dear, dear aunt,’ she rapturously cried, ‘what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour.’”1 The proposal catches Elizabeth at a moment of disillusionment with the marriage market, which has produced only a series of disappointments. “What are men to rocks and mountains?” Elizabeth asks, when the Lakes are offered to her, and in anticipation, she banishes all “disappointment and spleen” (P, 190). When Mrs. Gardiner eventually shortens the trip to the much closer county of Derbyshire, this romanticism has vanished; while “excessively disappointed” at the change, Elizabeth is quickly “satisfied” and “all” is “right again” (P, 264). She later writes to Mrs. Gardiner of her engagement to Darcy and renounces her enthusiasm altogether: “I thank you, again and again, for not going to the Lakes. How could I be so silly as to wish it!” (P, 390). In the novel’s concluding pages Austen thus cures an already quite transformed Elizabeth of a final prejudice as she approaches married life. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice as a whole joins Elizabeth in a renunciation of her initial raptures. But what is objectionable about them? The novel provides two intertwined answers, one internal to the marriage plot and one that gestures far outside it. The cancellation of the trip to the Lakes in favor of Derbyshire paves the way for Elizabeth’s marriage with Darcy, since it makes for a different kind of tourism: of Pemberley itself, which teaches Elizabeth that some men are not worth sacrificing for “rocks and mountains.” The novel’s concluding sentence highlights the importance of the changed travel plans to the novel’s principal action: “Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved [the Gardiners]; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them” (P, 396). Over the course of the novel, Elizabeth’s initial “silly” visions of sublime nature deepen—as they
