The Profession of Authorship in America PDF
Preview The Profession of Authorship in America
TT sie tin ee’ ~ ” prs 13 lovriy FPA an eet % ttw Cote] > = 5 a Pe a en <e7 A ; ~ THE PROFESSION OF | oe Authorship IN AMERICA wn 1800-1870 ‘he : : r ee 2|OWILLIAM CHARVAT : |= > Ge ee | =) ST. JOHN FISHER COLLEGE The Profession of Authorship in America 1800—1870 The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms Series Jonathan Arac, Editor The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms A series of COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Jonathan Arac, Editor Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies Jonathan Arac Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading Jennifer Wicke Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India Gauri Viswanathan Left Politics and the Literary Profession Lennard J. Davis and M. Bella Mirabella, eds. The Vietnam War and American Culture John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg, eds. Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism, 1750-1990 Patrick Parrinder Radical Parody: American Culture and Critical Agency After Foucault Daniel T. O’Hara Lhe Profession of Authorship in America 1800-18 70 WILLIAM CHARVAT Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli bdiind COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK Columbia University Press Morningside Edition Columbia University Press New York Oxford Morningside Edition with new postscript to preface Copyright © 1992 Columbia University Press Copyright © 1968 Ohio State University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Charvat, William, 1905-1966. The profession of authorship in America, 1800-1870 / William Charvat. Daeecune Originally published: Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 1968. Includes index. ISBN 0-231-07076-4 (cloth) ISBN 0-231-07077-2 (pbk.) 1. American literature—1gth century—History and criticism. 2. Authorship—Economic aspects—United States—History—1gth century. 3. Authors and publishers—United States—History—91t h century. 4. Literature publishing—United States—History—1gth century. 5. Authors and readers—United States—History—91t h century. 6. Authors, American—rgth century—Economic conditions. 7c ne=US. Il, Untiles PS88.C47 1992 810.9'003—dc20 91-46532 CIP & Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America CRTSSR OOsRan Oec e uiT jy eyTP ) 2h eo) A # Contents Foreword Editorial Preface Postscript Acknowledgments Introduction The Beginnings of Professionalism The Conditions of Authorship in 1820 American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837 (1937) Cooper as Professional Author (1954) Poe: Journalism and the Theory of Poetry (1962) The Popularization of Poetry Longfellow 106 Longfellow’s Income from His Writings, 1842-1852 (1944) James T. Fields and the Beginnings of LO; Book Promotion (1954) 168 Melville’s Income (1943) 190 Melville 204 Melville and the Common Reader (1958) 262 Literary Economics and Literary History (1950) 283 The People’s Patronage (1948) 298 Checklist: The Publications of William Charvat 317 321 Index Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/professionofauthOO0Ochar_h3h2 + Foreword 5 N THE death of William Charvat not only did Ohio State University lose one of its great professors but rational scholar- ship lost one of its most vigorous proponents. For him objec- tive research was an end, or rather a means to an end, and not, as current doctrines of “appreciation” (dreadful word!) often assume, an obstacle to enjoyment. There are, I know, many in the academic world and too many outside it who think that literary studies are best carried on in an economic and social vacuum. They want nothing to do with the sale of books and the income of authors. Others assume that an interpretation of the march of mind takes on impurity if it stops to inquire how the ideas that influenced an age were made public to that age. Let us be fair. There is, I suppose, a kind of development from Homer to Herzog of technical skills in the treatment of character, the manipulation of story, the creation of atmosphere, and the transfer of sensibility from the writer to the work and from the work to the reader. In the later nineteenth century, moreover, when we were all evolutionists, studies of the evolution of genres went on without any reference to writer, printer, bookseller, or literary agent. So in our time, when a return to primitive, or primal, psychology is all the rage (can we so return?) , critics and scholars interpret literary work as if the author’s rational control of material were a form of hypocrisy to be stripped away in order to reveal hidden archetypal images, the mythopoetic energy of a submerged racial unconscious. Good histories of vill FOREWORD painting, of music, and of other arts have been written without the slightest reference to the economic support of artists and with a minimal amount of reference to the social context of the works of art produced. Nevertheless, if a Carl Jung may visit with impunity Circe’s island, lesser men might consider whether they, too, can bend the bow of Ulysses. Charvat’s philosophy was that whatever the ultimate interpre- tation of a work of art might prove to be, the first duty of scholar- ship was to ascertain the relevant facts. For him relevant facts were not only biography and technical bibliographical lore but also the patent truth that a literary work does not exist until it is made public—that is, somehow published. He argued, as I think rightly, that we cannot know the full stature of a literary artist, nor the nature of his repute, his vogue, and his influence, until we are as fully informed as historical evidence will permit of his struggles in the market of literary wares. Of Charvat’s great project for a definitive history of American publishing (in the sense of a definitive history of the tripartite author-publisher-reader relation), only fragments remain. But what fragments some of them are! A literary work in his view was not the original manuscript of a book, that mere object in space; it was what had happened when the manuscript was submitted to, and emerged from, the threefold tensions of public production: the judgment of the author in creating the work and submitting it for publication; the judgment of the publisher both of the aesthetic or philosophic importance of the manuscript and of its potential sales; and the judgment of the reading public, expressed in opinion and purchase, on the validity of the work as amusement, edification, or illumination. Literary history, he thought, even before the invention of movable type, is a three- fold story—the interplay of producer, distributor, and consumer. If these terms sound harshly in the ears of sensibility, I point out that even in classical Greece the three contending forces existed. Somebody had to pay for staging that noblest of human
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