London and the Making of Provincial Literature. Joseph Rezek
American demand for Scott as he could. In investigating the supposed breach of Ballantyne’s printing office, he sent an inquiry to Hurst, Robinson, in a move that suggests he had not quite forgotten their claim on advance sheets. He soon received a satisfying reply, and the day after he wrote to Philadelphia, he wrote to Constable with an update on the matter. In this letter, Cadell gloated about the international demand for Scott’s novels, declared his own optimism about profit, and indicated his desire to circumvent the London trade:
I have today a letter from [Joseph] Robinson, very reasonable, about the American Copies—the fact is he must be so, as we are at this moment in correspondence with Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York on the same subject—R. alludes to arrangements for the Continent—I already stated to you that I have made a German arrangement—and I would suggest that whoever calls on R. should be referred to this, as we may get into confusion, and there is no occasion for any London commission on such matters—we are the managers and patrons of the books, have all the risks of Author and his connections and must make hay while the sun shines—I have no hesitation in saying if we manage these works with attention we will make £1000 extra on each.27
It is unclear how Cadell could imagine making £1,000 on the kind of novel he had hitherto sold for only about £75, even with the Continent as a potential foreign market. What is clear is both his commitment to selling Scott’s books in unprotected markets and his palpable desire to take London out of the equation. As for Constable, he was more concerned with problems closer to home, namely, at Ballantyne’s. “The waste, thieving, and destruction during the last 18 years has been enormous,” he wrote to Cadell, in an immediate reply that presumed the printer’s guilt. “It would almost be worth our while to pay a warehouseman to superintend our property in the printing office. A severe example ought to be made of some of them.”28 The transmission of the “American Copies” had always been handled with care, for fear they would be leaked to the press during a long, circuitous, and secret journey through the hands of various agents in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. Writing to Hurst, Robinson regarding The Monastery, for example, Cadell cautioned, “We send you with this under a sealed cover Vol 1st of the M[onastery], which you may wish to send across the Atlantic but the parcel must on no account be opened.”29 Transmitting sheets this way was a confidential business, containing equal parts profit and paranoia.
Furious Booksellers
Back in Philadelphia, as Carey waited for Constable to reply to his self-vindication, problems resulting from his arrangement with Wardle and Hurst, Robinson caused glaring errors in editions of the two latest novels, The Pirate and The Fortunes of Nigel, which Carey issued, respectively, in February and July 1822. Because of changes made in Edinburgh after the shipment of the “American Copy,” The Pirate was missing a chapter and Nigel a preface—discrepancies that infuriated booksellers all over the Eastern Seaboard. Carey distributed the missing chapter of The Pirate on its own, and he belatedly printed the preface to Nigel in the second volume.30 The ensuing outcry meant that Carey had to publicly explain embarrassing errors while he was appealing to the firm that had it in its power to prevent them. In late July, a sarcastic screed in the Boston Daily Advertiser complained about Carey’s editions, setting off a short dispute that illustrates just how uncourteous the reprint trade could be. The dispute brought the language of the book trade to the foreground, as the different parties argued about transatlantic reprinting and its effect on the integrity of texts.
The Boston complaint illustrates that, like Constable, its writer had heard his own rumors about Carey’s London connection:
[We] have had the misfortune to see a copy of the Philadelphia edition [of The Fortunes of Nigel], in which the whole introductory chapter is omitted. This Philadelphia edition is from the same press that also gave us the Pirate without a chapter…. These enterprising publishers are said to have an agent in England, who forwards them the new productions, in sheets, as they come from the press. When it is about time for the whole work to reach the hands of other American booksellers, the publishers of these Philadelphia editions, it seems, reprint what sheets they have received, more or less, and if a very characteristic introduction has not yet come to hand, or a chapter is wanting in the middle, why it only increases the interest of the story, and, in the course of the season, the missing sheets will arrive—be reprinted—and sent (wonderfully liberally) gratis, to those who have bought the book…. We should not be surprised if these Philadelphia editions should rival the renowned Irish pirated editions abroad.31
The Boston paper ridiculed Carey for unacceptable results and for his pretentious attempt to achieve insider status among English booksellers—just the kind of fool’s errand an “Irish” printer might pursue. In thus insulting Irish editions, the Boston paper invoked Mathew Carey’s well-known national origins and belittled reprinting as a practice despite the writer’s obvious desire that it prove effective. In this notice, authority resides in Britain, where the “whole work” was issued in complete and unadulterated form. Through fashioning excuses for the error in an ironic language of aesthetic pleasure (“it only increases the interest of the story”), the complaint located Carey’s highest offense in the destruction of the work’s unity. The “missing sheets” were the sign for the breakdown of the text as well as Carey’s commitment to its cultural value.
Henry 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