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by Rebecca Romney

  At the time of Dickens’s visit, America was at the tail end of a massive recession. Around 1834 the United States entered a boom economy, fueled largely by rising prices for land, cotton, and slaves. As bubbles are wont to do, this one burst, around the summer of 1836. With banks locking down on loans, and money shifting away from commercial centers in the East, America smacked into the Panic of 1837. Then “in 1839 panic set in again: a depression whose severity, according to one recent economic historian, ‘can most accurately be compared to that of 1929.’” The U.S. printing industry was hit particularly hard during these times.

  Historian James Barnes sets the scene: “Perhaps nothing in the nineteenth century so influenced the American book trade as the depression of 1837–1843 . . . New publishers sprang up only to disappear a few years later amidst the ranks of debtors and insolvents. Editors moved from one journal to another, seeking to stave off the inevitable. Prices for books and periodicals fell lower and lower.”

  Consider that, in the 1820s, books were priced in the two-dollar range. By the late 1830s those same books were selling for fifty cents—a staggering three-quarter price drop. How could the American publishing industry survive on such meager rations? Well, it did what most people are willing to do when they’re starving: steal.

  In the midst of this economic recession, publishers came up with the idea of printing books in newspaper form. “Weeklies” were huge folio sheets of printing paper that could “go through the post at newspaper rates instead of those for magazines [or books], and such large sheets could be cheaply printed, requiring no binding or stitching, and yet had more reading matter than most literary periodicals.”

  What kinds of materials could these publishers print cheaply in their weeklies? The stolen kinds, obviously. Brother Jonathan, based in Manhattan, was one of the first and largest of these weekly publications, and proudly boasted of “having first introduced into the cash newspapers the custom of reprinting [Dickens’s] novel[s] as they appeared in numbers.” These weeklies became a national phenomenon. Life in the publishing industry suddenly started looking up. U.S. printers had access to a constant stream of novels, paid no royalties to the authors, and delivered those novels to American readers in the absolute cheapest way possible.

  As far as publishers in the United States were concerned, wholesale pirated material was a win-win for everyone involved. Publishing houses started seeing profits again, American readers were given access to novels they couldn’t have afforded otherwise, and foreign authors were granted the greatest gift of all: love. “The community . . . owes us a debt of gratitude,” crowed the New World.

  Let’s be clear: Americans were the worst copyright offenders in the Western world. The theft of intellectual property that started out as a means to “jumpstart a new, more enlightened and democratic polity” had quickly become a pirated-version of Frankenstein’s monster—a Maggie Shelley’s Frankenstone, if you will. Dickens’s works were pirated so ubiquitously that you could find them on the back of railway timetables. This was an industry supported by more than two hundred thousand jobs, printing off three to four times as many books as Britain. Granting copyright protections to foreign authors would have been tantamount to economic hara-kiri. The very notion was patently absurd to U.S. publishers.

  There is some truth to the claim that Dickens’s popularity in the United States was greatly fanned by the cheap availability of his novels. If he continued asking for those “dollars and cents,” U.S. printers threatened, “it was to be subtracted from the earnings of publishers whose presses had purportedly made the writer famous enough to be received as America’s guest.”

  Yet the patriotism of those printers lasted only as long as it increased their profits. Homegrown American authors were hurt by these policies as well. Because domestic copyright had already been established, American authors had to be paid for their work (gasp). But why would a publisher bother with an inconvenience like that when he could just live off the fat of English bestsellers? Pirated works were so cheap that they were sold, according to Mark Twain, “at prices which make a package of water closet paper seem an ‘edition de luxe’ in comparison.” Books by American authors generally cost four times as much as pirated books. It’s as if books by English authors were being sold at used paperback prices, while American authors were sold exclusively at hardcover.

  A growing number of American authors added their voices to the fight for copyright. For instance, the American poet James Russell Lowell attempted to cast shame on cutthroat publishing practices with his matronly slogan, “Better than a cheap book, is a book honestly come by.” Ha ha ha, shut up, Lowell. Sincerely, the American printing industry.

  Now, if you’re thinking there should be more xenophobia in these nineteenth-century discussions, never fear: “The country is drugged from one end to the other with foreign literature which pays no tax,” complained Washington Irving. According to the American Copyright Club, British culture “sweeps the land, and puts at naught all petty distinctions of district and neighborhood, and settles down, at its leisure, into a dark, slimy, universal pond.” Competing with this flood of cheap, abundant, British literature was even described by inventor Samuel Morse as an ongoing “colonial bondage.”

  Publisher Roger Sherman put it succinctly when he antagonistically wrote, “[Copyright reform is] the clamor of two hundred authors against the interests of fifty-five millions of people.” It turned out that two side effects of the 1837 recession had revitalized the American publishing industry: giant, cheap weeklies and teeny, tiny violins for authors.

  After making a third attempt to address copyright reform at a New York banquet on February 18, Charles Dickens basically threw in the towel. This was the moment, during his first date with America, when he realized we were totally incompatible. “This is not the Republic I came to see,” he wrote. “This is not the Republic of my imagination.” Or in other words, You look totally different from your profile pic, America. It was obviously taken eight years ago and under noticeably better lighting.

  On America’s end, Dickens was quickly living up to the first four letters in his name. As his disappointment in us grew, so, too, did his criticisms—much of which came in the form of his travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation, published a few months after his return to England; and his next novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, which began serial publication three months after that. When Dickens first conceived this picaresque novel, it was not supposed to take a detour to America. But after returning home, Dickens had a few complaints fresh in his mind. Americans were not portrayed in a particularly favorable light.

  On a steamboat, “every gentleman on board appeared to have had a difference with his laundress, and to have left off washing himself in early youth,” Dickens wrote. Oh, Dickens: laundresses were for people with silk cravats and dickeys.

  Our favorite scene is the description of one American dinner where a bell summons feasters to the table:

  Three more gentlemen . . . came plunging wildly around the street corner; jostled each other on the steps; struggled for an instant; and rushed into the house in a confused heap of arms and legs . . . All the knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defense, as if a famine were expected to set in . . . The poultry . . . disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had had the use of its wings, and had flown in desperation down a human throat . . . Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful thing to see.

  And Dickens wrote that without ever setting foot in a Golden Corral, or the state of Texas. By the end of his fictional romp through the United States, Dickens’s protagonist Martin Chuzzlewit concluded that most Americans lack “that instinctive good breeding which admonishes one man not to offend and disgust another.”

  Before arriving in America, Dickens expected to move through our streets and boroughs as
a witty little observer, much as he had in London. In reality, though, he was constantly crushed by a throng of fans wherever he went. At one point, the riverboat carrying him and his wife docked in Cleveland for the night, and the next morning “a party of ‘gentlemen’” competed with each other to peer inside the cabin window “while [he] was washing and Kate lay in bed.”

  He received hundreds of requests for locks of his hair. One New York barber who serviced him turned around and immediately capitalized on this by offering his hair clippings for sale.

  “I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go . . . If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home, the house becomes, with callers, like a fair . . . I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won’t leave me alone. I get out at a station, and can’t drink a glass of water, without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow.”

  Perhaps some of those mouth gazers were looking to see if the ads in one newspaper were true. “His ‘rather yellow teeth,’ showed, said the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times . . . that he did not avail himself of ‘Teaberry Tooth Wash’ or ‘Hufeland’s Dentifrice,’ the virtues of which commodities were described elsewhere in the paper.” You know Americans love you when they break out the merch. Using Dickens’s early pen name, one New York grocer advertised “Boz Pork & Beans.” Nothing gets you in the mood for Oliver Twist like a can of gelatinous legumes and pork fat that only starving children would consider edible.

  At first, Dickens embraced this deluge of American attention. Then he tolerated it. Then he hated it. After a few weeks, our incessant rudeness came to represent all that ailed American society. The “mass of your countrymen,” Martin Chuzzlewit announced, “begin by stubbornly neglecting little social observances . . . acts of common, decent, natural, human politeness . . . From disregarding small obligations, [Americans] come in regular course to disregard great ones”—such as copyright reform, the plight of the poor, and the elephant in the room: slavery.

  Charles Dickens was supposed to be our great English ambassador of goodwill. At the time of his visit, tensions had been mounting between the United States and Britain over issues such as the Canada-Maine boundary, the Oregon boundary dispute (“Fifty-four Forty or Fight!”), and England’s search and seizure of American slave ships. (Britain had abolished slavery as an unlawful evil in 1833.) But Dickens was supposed to fix all that! He was supposed to show the world how awesome we really are! Instead, he wouldn’t shut up about copyright, and then called us all gluttons bereft of human politeness. He offended our capitalism just because we were stealing, and offended our national character just because we were rude.

  In a display of patience and generosity, we even invited him to tour a tobacco slave plantation in Virginia. That’s right, a premium tour of a slave plantation. For the foremost literary activist regarding society’s most abused classes. According to his biographer Michael Slater, “[Dickens] could hardly have failed to be struck by the incongruity of being toasted in a slave-owning community as a writer whose work makes us ‘feel for the humblest’ and ‘creates in all of us a sympathy for each other—a participation in the interests of our common humanity, which constitutes the great bond of equality.’” In disgust, Dickens canceled all future travel plans in the American South.

  During the last legs of his American journey, Dickens traveled as far into the frontier as St. Louis, Missouri, a place he found to be “intolerably conceited.” On his return, he stayed at Niagara Falls, whose majesty helped to dull his disappointment in this transatlantic trek. It was at the Falls that he “at last found that sublimity of nature he had been so ardently hoping to experience in America.” It was also here that he received an open letter addressed to the American people and signed by twelve of the most influential authors in Britain, as well as a separate letter by historian and satirist Thomas Carlyle. The letters strongly argued for an international copyright agreement between the two countries.

  Dickens forwarded these letters to newspapers in New York, Boston, and Washington, DC, and to J. P. Kennedy, a pro-copyright congressman from Maryland. The letters had little to no effect. Some contemporaries have looked at this move through a lens of perfidy because the letters were sent to various news outlets without Dickens explicitly stating that he’d requested that they be written. What appeared to be a spontaneous and collective protest from the British Isles had in fact been orchestrated by Charles Dickens.

  Perfidious or not, the letters were a feeble volley as Dickens retreated from the American press corps. By the end of his trip, the same newspapers that had welcomed him like royalty were calling him an “adventurer,” a “mercenary,” and a hypocrite—it bordered “on the ridiculous for [Dickens] to lecture Americans . . . about dollars, who is clearly convicted of a supreme love of them.” The “sacred wrath of the newspapers,” as Dickens put it, had won.

  Arriving back in London on June 29, 1842, Dickens took out his revenge in the most effective way possible—by using our craving for celebrity against us. American Notes lambasted the United States. Martin Chuzzlewit takes that unplanned detour to America just to denounce our gluttonous, boorish ways. And we bought it. In droves we consumed it. As much as he railed against America, Charles Dickens was still the most popular author in the English-speaking world. American Notes became a best seller in the United States; so did Martin Chuzzlewit. No matter what Dickens put in his tales, we had no choice but to eat it. It tasted too good to stop. Like an entire box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies, we cried and ate, and cried and ate some more.

  The newspapers that crucified Dickens’s character couldn’t help themselves from including even his most caustic stories within their pages. To do otherwise would have been to slit their wrists and spill so many moist dollars on the floor. “[Printers in America] were driven by popular demand and their own covetousness to go on stealing the very text they would have to denounce as slanderous in other parts of their . . . newspaper.” Dickens wouldn’t get financial recompense for his stories, but who can put a price tag on throwing shade at your haters, and knowing they have to print it on page one?

  AS THE awkward first date with America receded into painful memory, Dickens might have cast his eye across the pond to see what his copyright crusade ultimately accomplished. The answer would have been nothing.

  Wait, no: nothing would have been better than what actually resulted from Dickens’s American tour. Panicked by the torchlight being shone on their pecuniary piratical printing practices (say that five times fast), members of the book trade in Boston gathered at the Boston Museum on the night of April 26, 1842, for an emergency meeting.

  These pillars of the Boston printing community met to draft an official letter to Congress petitioning against any species of international copyright reform. Dickens was still making his way back to New York from the western frontier at the time, and even though he’d already lost the American copyright debate, Boston wanted to mount his head on the Old North Church.

  The American printers requested that any imported books face duties. And to make the situation for British authors infinitely more insulting, the Boston letter claimed that Americans must be free to adapt English works “to our own wants, our institutions, and our state of society.”

  Wow. Do not mess with printers. Dickens went from Americans stealing his work to having tariffs levied against his overseas book sales, to publishers changing his stories to better accommodate American “wants and institutions.” Incidentally, that’s something, according to Dickens, they’d already been doing. We’re not sure what changes were made, but we imagine they went something like this:

  American Oliver Twist—Fagin explains that his gang of pickpocketing children is entirely necessary to jump-start the local economy.

  American A Christmas Carol—The ghost of Marley appears to Ebenezer Scrooge and warns him to raise the minimum wage, but that it doesn’t actually need to be high enough
for the Cratchits to pay rent.

  American A Tale of Two Cities—This becomes a story about who has better pizza, New York or Chicago. Since it’s a work of fiction, Chicago wins.

  For the next fifty years, American printers were lawfully able to plunder the literary treasures of the world. Voices were raised from time to time, but economic incentives for piracy were just too powerful.

  In 1886, representatives from ten countries signed an international treaty at the Berne Convention, which granted automatic copyright protection to authors regardless of their country of origin. The United States sent observers to Berne but refused to become a signatory. Five years later, in 1891 (twenty-one years after Charles Dickens died), the U.S. Congress passed the Chace Act, which finally extended copyright to select countries (including Britain) as long as their work was “simultaneously published or ‘manufactured’ in the U.S.” America did eventually join the Berne Convention and extend copyright protections to everyone, but not until March 1, 1989. Yes, you read that right. From two years before the publication of A Christmas Carol to the authors of this book attending elementary school—that’s how long it took to pass comprehensive international copyright laws in America.

  If Dickens hadn’t already been depressed enough about the state of American piracy in the nineteenth century, he’d probably be more depressed if we could tell him that there are many “Americas” in the world today. China and India are basically us from 1842, when it comes to stolen books, movies, music, and video games. Dickens might even enjoy the irony that American cultural products are currently pirated at a higher rate than those of any other country in the world.