it was printed and from where 70 percent of its first edition were sent to London for distribution.6 Inspired partly by the Irish national tale, Scott used his eponymous hero as a literary device to guide English readers through the unfamiliar territory of Scotland and Scottish history. Scott aimed “to emulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth,” as he wrote, whose characters “have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbors of Ireland.”7 In so doing, he encapsulated the spirit of modern historical consciousness, offering to “world literature” a new genre, according to Georg Lukács, in which “extreme, opposing social forces can be brought into a human relationship with one another.”8 As a best-selling poet, an editor, and the business partner of his Edinburgh printer, the “great Scotch novelist,” as he was known at the time, approached London as the principal arena of his success.9
In 1820, American literature finally arrived in London. That July, John Murray introduced a new title to his readers: Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, a two-volume collection of literary pieces containing essays by an American traveling in England, sketches about Native Americans, and two romantic tales set in the Hudson River Valley, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” By this time, The Sketch Book had for over a year been appearing as a part publication in New York; Irving, then residing in England, was eager to find a British publisher. Murray himself initially demurred, and so Irving arranged for the first half of The Sketch Book to be issued at his own expense. As Irving continued to write sketches, the work’s future remained uncertain, but luckily he had some powerful friends. Walter Scott persuaded Murray to take a second look, and by spring of 1820, plans were in place for the publication of a handsome two-volume edition, the text of which Irving heavily revised and rearranged with the new format in mind.10 Buoyed by the prestige of Murray’s firm—publisher of Lord Byron, the Quarterly Review, the works of Thomas Moore, and some of Scott’s poems and novels—The Sketch Book launched Irving as “the first ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old.”11 The novels of James Fenimore Cooper appeared soon thereafter; in 1823, with the same publisher. This is what it meant for American literature to arrive in London; with John Murray, it arrived in style.
The most influential Irish, Scottish, and American fictions of the early nineteenth century were routed through the great metropolis of the English-speaking world. This book argues that the centripetal pull of London created a provincial literary formation that shaped the history of modern aesthetics. In seeking success in London, authors like Edgeworth, Owenson, Scott, Irving, and Cooper developed a range of literary strategies. To guide English readers through the unfamiliar territory of their fiction, they wrote authenticating prefaces, footnotes, and glossaries; to shore up their authority in the London-centered marketplace, they claimed exclusive local knowledge grounded in personal experience; to promote literary fellowship, they invested transnational marriage plots with allegories of cross-cultural communion; and to purify and exalt literary exchange, they revised texts for London republication and appealed to the special power of “literature” itself. These strategies coalesce around a paradox about artistic production: that literature both transcends nationality and indelibly expresses it. This seeming contradiction preoccupied many writers of the Romantic period who offered competing ideological claims for literature’s universality and its embodiment of a particular nation’s spirit. In this book, I trace a new genealogy of this paradox to the fiction of provincial authors who navigated a subordinate position within the London-centered marketplace for books. I argue, moreover, that the effects of such navigation helped define the distinctly modern idea that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society.
It was through success in London that Irish, Scottish, and American fiction were consecrated according to the logic of what scholars after Pierre Bourdieu have called the “literary field.”12 The city reigned as the cultural capital of the Anglophone Atlantic. Similarly to the way Paris operates in Pascale Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” but with significant differences, London in the early nineteenth century nurtured a highly concentrated literary scene no English-language author could ignore.13 Publication in the metropolis was compulsory for provincials seeking profit and legitimacy—at home and abroad—and some of them met that condition strategically, uneasily, and with great success. If, as Eric Hobsbawm has famously claimed, “the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without careful attention to the ‘invention of tradition,’” then the “invention” of Irish, Scottish, and American literatures must be located within the cross-cultural procedure of distinction only London could perform.14 These literatures were not born within the nation through an insular process of organic unfolding, nor did they develop as symptoms of nationally delimited historical contexts. They were made in the transatlantic marketplace through an uneven process of struggle and triumph. Many authors from Ireland, Scotland, and North America published in London before 1800, but Edgeworth, Owenson, Scott, Irving, and Cooper hailed from cultures newly understood as “national” and as such were the first to be understood as producing, through literary expression, specimens of national culture. Their success became synonymous with national literary emergence itself. Long understood as separate traditions with discrete histories of their own, Irish, Scottish, and American literatures in fact constituted a single, interconnected provincial literature tethered to London.
Provinciality was a relational status acquired through engaging with metropolitan culture or petitioning it for approval. Derived from provincia, Latin for a distant territory under Roman rule (provincia Britannia, for example), and entering Middle English as the term for a bishop’s diocese, the modern noun province indicates a region’s subordination to centralized power and authority, secular or ecclesiastical. The adjective provincial has always carried such connotations, but only by the turn of the eighteenth century did it become derogatory, a slur—and then specifically with regard to expressive behavior: manners, attire, and, above all, speech (OED).15 The word provincial, then, acquired negative connotations only as it came to describe modes of expression; it has always been an insult with particularly aesthetic implications. Feeling the sting of this, James Boswell tried to “improve” his Scottish accent while trolling around London. Assured by Samuel Johnson, however, that his “pronunciation was not offensive,” Boswell rather unconvincingly advised his “countrymen” that “a small intermixture of provincial peculiarities, may, perhaps, have an agreeable effect.”16 Such linguistic differences shaped the reception of provincials well into the nineteenth century. Francis Jeffrey remarked in a review of Waverley that the novel’s Scottish dialect would be “unintelligible to four-fifths of the reading population of the country,”17 and in new footnotes Cooper wrote for the revised London edition of The Last of the Mohicans (1831), he distanced himself from “provincial terms” voiced by his American characters.18 Irish, Scottish, and American authors carried the burden of provinciality as they hawked their wares in an imperial capital that fancied itself the new Rome.19
The making of provincial literature is best understood through attending to the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial literary centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia. These circuits of dissemination were improvised, frustrating, and unreliable, but they formed the condition of possibility for provincial literature to emerge. London’s dominance was felt as much by provincial readers and book trades professionals as it was by the authors whose metropolitan successes established them as national heroes. Booksellers reacted to and harnessed London’s economic power by making inroads into its marketplace, devising ways to circumvent that marketplace, and developing innovative techniques to reach provincial readers. Readers were beholden to a London book trade that supplied the vast majority of texts, imported or reprinted; some embraced metropolitan culture as a badge of sophistication, while others resented that culture’s influence and authority. Situated in the fraught position between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, provincial authors, publishers, and readers responded with anger, excitement, resignation, ingenuity, and a fascinating array of economic and aesthetic practices that defined an era in literary history.
