The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  Not only was reading a tool for education and civic engagement in mid-nineteenth-century America, but, as the historian Louise Stevenson observed, it was also “crucial to social bonding. It entertained families and friends while supplying a common vocabulary and world of allusion and imagery.”29 These common cultural allusions were taken from cheap books and newspapers—and they helped build the cultural brain.

  “The raven hasn’t more joy in eating a stolen piece of meat, than the American has in reading the English book which he gets for nothing,” Charles Dickens observed—but one could hardly begrudge the Americans their glee.30 Copyright was a statutory right in the United States, nothing more, granted by law rather than accumulated custom. A nation that had no natural right to copyright had no moral restrictions against making use of an unprotected British work. Many argued that it was wrong to not exploit this bounty. In June 1842, in response to Senator Clay’s latest attempt at an international copyright bill, the Philadelphia law-book publishers T. & J. W. Johnson sent Congress a petition noting, “English authorship comes free as the vital air. . . . Shall we tax it, and thus interpose a barrier to the circulation of intellectual and moral light? Shall we build up a dam, to obstruct the flow of the rivers of knowledge?”31

  The answer from the infringed English authors, inevitably, was an indignant yes. In 1842, Dickens came to America at the behest of an adoring public that had come to love his jolly books, and, by extension, their presumably jolly author. Upon his arrival in Boston, the novelist was welcomed with grand civic festivities, including a skit performed by a prominent comedian in which a “Dickens” character looked benignly on the Americans’ copying practices, saying, “But pshaw! I must not quarrel with the ‘Trade,’ / In golden smiles more richly am I paid.”32

  Dickens’s real opinions on the topic could not have been more different, and he spent much of his tour of America chiding his hosts for their unmitigated thievery. In a letter to his friend John Forster, Dickens mocked the Americans’ vain presumption that their countrymen’s grins were worth more than any banknote. “The man’s read in America! The Americans like him! They are glad to see him when he comes here!” Dickens wrote, mimicking the elation and gratitude that American readers apparently expected a British author to feel upon learning that he was popular in the United States. “The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more would he have? Here’s reward enough for any man.”33 Not only did the Americans routinely cheat British authors out of their rightful earnings, they expected to be thanked for doing so.

  British writers took pains to characterize this unhappy custom in stark moral terms, directly equating the unauthorized copying of foreign literature with plunder on the high seas. Like maritime pirates, the authors argued, America’s pirate publishers thrived by hijacking others’ property for their own personal gain. The piracy metaphor assumed that an author has a natural right to the fruit of his intellectual labor, and that picking that fruit without the author’s consent was inherently wrong.

  As the 1840s began, these sentiments were routinely echoed by sympathetic American authors, who reiterated their counterparts’ arguments while adding some of their own. International copyright was not only the moral choice, the American authors said, but also the patriotic one, as it would improve the quality and quantity of homegrown books. Cheap-book culture vitiated creative ambition and effectively conceded domestic literary dominance to the British. American literature languished—and the lack of international copyright was the reason why.

  This, at least, was the refrain of the short-lived, Manhattan-based literary movement known as Young America. In the United States, a prominent Young American named Cornelius Mathews asserted in 1843, “An author is an anomaly; a needless excrescence of nature; a make-trouble and mar-plot, a mere impertinence.”34 In the absence of international copyright, publishers had “set up Notoriety as the great fashionable god, and thrown modest merits far into the shade,” Mathews grumbled. “A writer must solicit favor and be puffed by the mammoth press . . . his sermon or his lecture must be crammed down the public throat by a newspaper which has its circulation of forty thousand.”35 In order to find any success, Mathews claimed, domestic writers were forced to pander to the tastes of the masses, disgorging derivative stories and low potboilers instead of the more meritorious works that America’s aesthetes would have preferred to write and read. The absence of international copyright devalued literature both as a saleable commodity and as an artistic calling. A society that failed to exalt indigenous writers of literary fiction was no sort of society at all.

  Today, all that anyone remembers about Mathews was that he was almost universally disliked. In his delightful study of antebellum American literary personalities, The Raven and the Whale, Perry Miller wrote that Mathews “was rotund, wore small, steel-rimmed spectacles, bounced when he talked, walked the streets of New York with a strut that nothing could dismay, and delivered himself in an oracular fashion designed to drive all good fellows either to drink or to profanity.”36 A nonpracticing lawyer and writer of bad books, Mathews was utterly convinced of his own genius despite abundant evidence to the contrary, and he spent much of the 1840s singing his own praises in shrill, unmodulated tones. His other great passion was international copyright, a cause that he discredited by virtue of his association with it. Mathews was an outspoken aesthetic nationalist, convinced that international copyright was necessary for the flourishing of American literature, but his ceaseless moralizing on the topic only encouraged his audiences to lose interest in both culture and country.

  Mathews must have known that the international copyright omission was but one of many factors limiting America’s literary output in the 1840s and 1850s. For one thing, it is hard to grow a literary scene in a nation rent by sectional animus and perpetually verging on economic collapse; for another thing, patchwork distribution networks often limited literary success to the regional level. Yet many fiction writers did emerge during this period, if not in the numbers and in the manner that Mathews and his friends would have preferred. They debuted with short stories in magazines such as Graham’s, Godey’s, Harper’s, Putnam’s. After finding an audience in those outlets, they graduated to novels, which often proved less remunerative than their periodical work. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe: they all published their first works during the antebellum era.

  These are some of the midcentury American authors best remembered today. Plenty of others have been forgotten. While the naturalistic literature championed by Young America artfully depicted the rigors of the nation’s domestic and nautical frontiers, the residents of Strenuous America—the people actually living those hard lives—weren’t always interested in reliving their hardships in their meager hours of leisure. Sometimes they just wanted escapism. Enterprising writers and publishers could indeed find success in midcentury America, as long as they were willing to cater to public tastes rather than try to dictate them.

  Starting around 1860, the Beadle Co. began issuing the first dime novels: nationalistic adventure stories printed in series format on flimsy paper and sold for ten cents a copy. The publisher Frank Leslie built an empire of pulp on a series of illustrated newspapers that lured the public with striking visuals and sensational tales. In the words of publishing historian Madeleine B. Stern, there existed “an all but unlimited demand for entertaining and instructional reading matter in portable format at low prices.”37 And if New York aesthetes were unwilling to provide that reading matter, others would be happy to do so.

  Respect the author was the watchword of Young Americans and old Englishmen alike. But what did this motto mean? In a real sense, it meant the desire to tell the American reader what was best for him, to censor the type of material that made its way into his library. “I warn you, I warn you not to withhold this [international copyright] law,” Cornelius Mathews admonished his audience in an 1843 address at New York’s Society Libra
ry. “There are portents already in the sky” of the dark consequences that would inevitably result if international copyright failed to pass Congress.38 These consequences, to Mathews’s mind, were that Americans would continue to write and read bad books—or, expressed less charitably, that men like Mathews would be excluded from influencing popular tastes and defining the canon.

  But the very notion of a canon implies the sort of unity and stability that, at the time of Mathews’s international-copyright exertions, existed in neither the publishing trade nor the nation at large. As the 1860s approached and America came unmade, the question remained: Was America better served by laws and literature that advanced the cause of the common man, or those that served the interests of the elite? The answer would reveal itself in the decades following the Civil War, as the struggle for international copyright approached its endgame.

  * * *

  IN March of 1879, the American publisher George Haven Putnam took to the pages of Publishers’ Weekly with news of portents already in the sky, dark visions for the future of the trade. “Within the last year,” Putnam wrote, “certain ‘libraries’ and ‘series’ have sprung into existence, which present in cheaply-printed pamphlet form some of the best of recent English fiction.”39 These great books were being issued by bad actors: an aggressive new breed of pirate publishers who exploited the continued absence of international copyright to sell unauthorized reprints of British works at unsustainably low prices. These new firms, wrote Putnam, “are not prepared to respect the international arrangements or trade courtesies of the older houses.” Their actions spelled disaster for the industry at large.

  Few publishers cared as much and as loudly for the health of the industry as did George Haven Putnam, a self-consciously virtuous man in what he considered to be supremely venal times. Putnam was a dutiful son, having abandoned his own ambitions of a career in the natural sciences to work at his father’s publishing firm. He was a patriot, a Civil War veteran who had risen from private to brevet major and spent almost five months in Confederate prisons. An enthusiastic joiner, he was active in countless professional organizations and civic causes, as if impelled by honor and breeding to correct the errors of other people’s ways. If you read his autobiography, Memories of a Publisher, expecting insights into the late-nineteenth-century publishing business, you will be disappointed. If you’re looking for ponderous reflections on Putnam’s long stint as a member of New York City’s grand jury, you will be overjoyed.

  Putnam was a standard-bearer for a newly professionalized publishing trade, dominated by family-run East Coast firms with anglicized tastes and aristocratic ambitions. Their leaders were men like Putnam, public moralists and civic volunteers who considered themselves custodians of the commonweal; the sort of men who “led the van,” as Captain Marryat might have put it. They believed that the industry had a responsibility to issue good books, ones that would elevate their readers, ones that would reflect well on America. Though they were nominally in competition, the heads of these firms all understood that publishing was a pastime for gentlemen, an exercise in cultural virtue.

  In an effort to fill the international-copyright void, the major East Coast publishing houses had established an informal system wherein the first firm to arrange to reprint a foreign author’s work in America enjoyed exclusive rights to that author’s future output. Under this system, the relevant firm could compensate the foreign author without having to worry about being undercut by rival editions. The publishers called this arrangement “courtesy of the trade.” Others called it collusion.

  By artificially stabilizing book prices, trade courtesy served to dissuade publishers from passing their production savings on to the consumer. Like much else in America at the time, the book business was becoming more efficient. The invention of wood-pulp papermaking, along with a series of national financial panics, had driven the cost of paper to historic lows from 1870 onward. In 1866, fine book paper cost forty cents per pound;40 by 1871, it cost seventeen cents. Newsprint cost even less. As prices continued to fall over the ensuing years, production capacity simultaneously increased. As of 1867, the fastest American paper mills produced a hundred feet of paper per minute. Over the next thirty years, that rate quadrupled.41

  As went production, so went dissemination. Despite a series of national financial panics that intermittently halted its expansion, America’s railroad network inexorably diminished the nation’s frontier, with functional track miles more than tripling between 1850 and 1860.42 The rise of the railroads not only promoted personal mobility and industrial development, but further diffused print culture. As newsstands opened at railway stations across the country, the American News Company’s distribution network kept those stands supplied with disposable, often lurid reading material from the Frank Leslie school of publishing. Writing about a railroad journey she took in 1862, the novelist Louisa May Alcott described how the printed word was hawked in train cars as just another travelers’ commodity: “A shrill boy has pervaded the car ever since leaving Portland, shouting, ‘Papers, Corn, Books, Water, Lozenges, Sandwiches, Oranges.’ ”43

  The white-shoe East Coast publishers were not at first threatened by the rise of railroad literature: Frank Leslie’s audiences and George Haven Putnam’s were presumed to have little in common other than dimes and sentience. Cheap-book publishers were “more reinforcers of public tastes than creators of them,” as Lawrence Parke Murphy put it in Madeleine B. Stern’s valuable anthology on the topic; Putnam and his ilk always had higher ambitions.44 Not until yet another national financial panic in the 1870s prompted many cheap-book publishers to reembrace the republication of highbrow—and uncopyrightable—British literature did the orthodox publishers realize that they had underestimated their populist competitors.

  The entrepreneurial Canadian publisher John W. Lovell epitomized this new threat. Lovell was known as Book-a-Day Lovell for the extraordinary fecundity of his printing presses; at peak activity, Lovell printed an astounding seven million books per year.45 Lovell would identify British books that had already been acquired and popularized—often at significant expense—by the big publishers. Then, once a market had been made, Lovell would reprint the same work and sell it at a low price.

  Like the antebellum pirate publishers before them, Lovell and his peers claimed to be performing a public service in disseminating good, inexpensive literature to the unlettered American hinterlands. Their firms openly courted the working-class and impoverished reader. Their books were often shoddily made and astoundingly cheap: published in paperback, circulated by rail and mail. Their loyalties were to themselves and their customers rather than their industry colleagues. And they had no interest in respecting the customs of a club that existed to exclude them.

  Though Putnam and his peers cried foul at the cheap-book publishers’ disdain for trade courtesy, Lovell scoffed at their self-interested complaints, dismissing the entire conceit as a ploy by established firms to insulate themselves from competition. “I can say to the younger and smaller houses from my own experience, Go in heartily for the ‘courtesy of the trade’ and—starve,” he asserted in a letter to Publishers’ Weekly. “You will find everything is expected of you and very little given you. As for my part, I prefer to follow the examples that led to success in the past rather than the precepts now advocated to prevent others from attaining it.”46

  The decline of trade courtesy and the concurrent rise of cheap-book dealers such as Lovell corresponded with some broader transformations in American society after the Civil War. Rapid mechanization and industrialization meant that huge fortunes were being made, seemingly overnight, by businessmen exploiting new production technologies. At the same time, rapid urbanization had induced uneducated laborers to emigrate in large numbers to cities such as New York, much to the dismay of many existing residents who thought the city had become overburdened with “the rubbish, the driftwood, and, worst of all, the criminal groups looking for an easy living without labour,”
as Putnam rather uncharitably characterized these new arrivals.47 The influx of malleable immigrants and yokels hastened the rise of so-called machine politics—in which votes were delivered to chosen candidates with unfailing reliability—and the political boss, who supervised these effective electoral shenanigans.

  To contemporary moralists such as Putnam, the political machines were venal, corrupt entities that empowered the greedy and unqualified while excluding “the honest and intelligent portion of the community.”48 Putnam had a point. Political organizations such as William Tweed’s Tammany Hall machine are still synonymous with avarice and municipal corruption because they were, indeed, corrupt and avaricious.

  But the obverse of corruption is opportunity. And the political machines and political bosses offered disenfranchised immigrant groups opportunities that might have otherwise been withheld. In Machine Made, a recent reevaluation of the Tammany Hall era in New York City, Terry Golway argued that, under Tammany, “the right to vote became, in part, a means to an end rather than an exercise in civic virtue,” and that end was access to the sorts of opportunities that the Putnams of the world may have taken for granted—for instance, jobs that weren’t demeaning or dangerous, and patrons who would gladly assist their wards instead of comparing them to garbage.49

  The cheap-book trade resembled Tammany in paperback format. Much like the immigrants who led the Gilded Age political machines, publishers such as Book-a-Day Lovell often hailed from faraway regions and served constituencies with whom the elite were unfamiliar. They approached publishing not as a means of subsidizing and sustaining a specific class of literary workers, but as a means to an end: the expansion of opportunity both for themselves and for the undercapitalized American bibliophile.