London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850

295 Pages·2015·5.076 MB·English

by  Joseph Rezek

London and the Making
of Provincial Literature
MateriaL texts
Series Editors
roger Chartier Leah Price
Joseph Farrell Peter stallybrass
anthony Grafton Michael F. suarez, s.J.
London
and the Making
of Provincial Literature
aesthetics and
the transatlantic Book trade,
1800–1850
Joseph rezek
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

all rights reserved. except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United states of america on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
rezek, Joseph, author.
London and the making of provincial literature : aesthetics
and the transatlantic book trade, 1800–1850 / Joseph rezek.
pages cm.—(Material texts)
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBN 978-0-8122-4734-3 (alk. paper)
1. english fiction—19th century—History and criticism.
2. Book industries and trade—england—London—His-
tory—19th century. 3. Book industries and trade—United
states—History—19th century. 4. american fiction—
19th century—History and criticism. 5. irish fiction—19th
century— History and criticism. 6. scottish fiction—
19th century—History and criticism. 5. irish fiction—19th
century— History and criticism. 6. scottish fiction—19th
century—History and criticism. 7. english fiction—irish
authors—19th century—History and criticism. 8. english
fiction—scottish authors—19th century—History and
criticism. 9. National characteristics in literature.
10. Nationalism in literature. 11. Literature—aesthetics.
i. title. ii. series: Material texts.
Pr861.r482015
820.9'007—dc23 2015005986
To my enthusiastic parents,
Geoff and Jackie Rezek
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Contents
introduction 1
Chapter 1. London and the transatlantic Book trade 25
Chapter 2. Furious Booksellers and the “american Copy”
of the Waverley Novels 40
Chapter 3. the irish National tale and the aesthetics
of Union 62
Chapter 4. Washington irving’s transatlantic revisions 85
Chapter 5. the effects of Provinciality in Cooper and scott 113
Chapter 6. rivalry with england in the age of Nationalism 149
epilogue. The Scarlet Letter and the Decline of London 185
appendix. the London republication
of american Fiction, 1797–1832 199
Notes 207
Bibliography 251
index 273
acknowledgments 285
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Introduction
In 1800, a new kind of Irish literature arrived in London. Maria Edgeworth’s
Castle Rackrent, A Hibernian Tale was published by the storied firm of Joseph
Johnson, a “formidable figure” in the late eighteenth-century book trade and
publisher of famous radicals like Joseph Priestly, William Cowper, and Mary
Wollstonecraft.1 Castle Rackrent relates the decline of the landed Irish gentry
through the fictionalized edited narrative of an Irish family’s loyal servant,
Thady Quirk. The text provides some help for its intended audience; “for
the information of the ignorant English reader,” its “Preface” remarks, “a few
notes have been subjoined by the editor.”2 Late in 1798, Edgeworth sent the
completed manuscript to Johnson, but he thought Thady’s dialect narrative
could benefit from even further explanation than the footnotes provided. At
his instigation, she composed a copious “Glossary” defining “terms, and idi-
omatic phrases,” as a new “Advertisement” explains.3 The text’s transnational
address established a template that shaped the genre of the Irish national tale, a
term coined by Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), which stages the
marriage of an English traveler and a dispossessed Irish princess. The genre’s
wide-ranging influence—i t “set a tone” for a century of Irish fiction and was
of “formative importance for nineteenth-century realism”4— depended on its
publication in London, where, ironically, all Irish “national” tales received
their first editions.
In 1814, Scottish literature arrived in London like never before. That
summer, Longman & Co., at the time publisher of more new books than any
other firm in the city,5 issued a novel that told the story of the 1745 Jacobite
rebellion from the perspective of an ordinary English gentleman, Edward Wa-
verley. Walter Scott’s first foray into fiction, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since,
was jointly published by Longman and Archibald Constable, in Edinburgh,
where 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