Chapter 1 Transatlantic books and literary culture

Richard B. Sher
On a visit to the London booksellers Edward and Charles Dilly in the mid-1770s, the Presbyterian clergyman John Ewing (1732–1802) of Philadelphia was accosted by Samuel Johnson for speaking sympathetically about the plight of the American colonists. When Johnson asked Ewing what he knew of the subject, the clergyman responded that he had lived in America his entire life. “Sir, what do you know in America,” Johnson is supposed to have replied. “You never read. You have no books there.”1 In this remarkable anecdote, Johnson dismissed Ewing’s firsthand experience of America in favor of book-learning, which he believed that Americans lacked not because they were unable or disinclined to pursue it, but because, on the eve of the War of Independence, they had no books to read.
Johnson’s assertion must have astonished not only Ewing but also the Dilly brothers, who were heavily involved with the American book trade.2 When Johnson was born in 1709 – seventy years after the first American printing press had been established at Cambridge, Massachusetts – books were indeed scarce in the British-American colonies. At that time, there were few printers and booksellers in America, and the numbers of paper-makers, bookbinders, newspapers, and colleges were each countable on the fingers of one hand. There were no magazines, engravers, or type founders, and no notable libraries besides the three college libraries at Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary – restricted to a privileged clientele – and some private libraries owned by a few clergymen and landowners. During the course of the eighteenth century, however, and especially during its second half, America was transformed into a provincial center of Anglophone print culture. By the time of Johnson’s confrontation with Ewing, British America contained dozens of booksellers, printers, and printing presses (including at least one press in each of the thirteen colonies), numerous newspapers and periodicals, and thousands of books, including many held in substantial libraries organized by diverse communities of readers.3 Although the American War temporarily interrupted these developments, the year of Johnson’s death, 1784, marked the beginning of an extraordinary postwar resurgence that would carry the literary culture of the new Republic far beyond its colonial roots.
The transformation of American book culture during the long eighteenth century was a thoroughly transatlantic phenomenon in at least five respects. In the first place, not only were the great majority of books and other reading matter imported from Europe, especially Britain and Ireland, but most of what was produced in America consisted of reprints of works originally published in Britain. Second, whether imported or reprinted in America, most eighteenth-century books were written by British authors, who were perceived to be the primary creators of modern literary culture throughout the Anglophone world. Third, throughout the colonial period, and in many cases well beyond it, the printing presses, type, and other manufactured materials used in the production of books also came to America mainly from the British Isles. Fourth, until the early nineteenth century, most of the leading figures in the early American book trade, including booksellers, printers, and engravers, were immigrants from Britain and Ireland. Finally, all kinds of communications concerning the people and things just mentioned also crossed the Atlantic, including book orders, bills of exchange, insurance documents, and correspondence about everything from prices and sales to content and criticism.
This transatlantic movement of bookmen, book-making technology, communications, and books and periodicals written – and usually produced – in Britain was slanted in a westward direction, from center (especially London) to periphery. As self-conscious provincials, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans were well aware that their participation in metropolitan literary culture could be expensive, uncertain, and a bit out of date. Everything hinged on sailing ships, which could take five or six weeks to make the westward crossing under ideal conditions but several months if prevailing westerly winds and currents were unfavorable, in addition to the journey from the port of entry to the final destination. Although relatively few trading ships perished en route, mail and goods did not always arrive as intended, because of damage, theft, and incompetence. Not only was insurance required against these dangers, but wise traders felt the need to take additional precautions, such as sending copies of important documents and correspondence on more than one ship. There were also customs duties to pay, as well as shipping charges by weight, which could be substantial for a commodity as heavy as bound books. Mercantilist legislation discouraged American manufacturing, and during the decade preceding the War of Independence, paper goods imported legally from Britain became particularly expensive as a result of the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts. All these charges, as well as profits taken by middlemen, were passed along to American consumers, who paid dearly for the privilege of keeping up with the latest literary fashions from London. Indeed, a colonial American consumer could expect to pay twice the British retail price for an imported book, and sometimes more than that.4 The fact that so many were willing to do so is testimony to the allure of British book culture.
Nevertheless, the familiar paradigm of a transatlantic flow of print culture from London to the Americas needs to be qualified in a number of ways. On the British side of the equation, we have come a long way from the influential but flawed Clive-Bailyn thesis, advanced in the mid-1950s, which held that Scotland occupied a place that was roughly equivalent to colonial America as one of “England’s cultural provinces.”5 The vast amount of work that has subsequently been done on the Scottish Enlightenment and its connections with America, along with scholarship on the book trade, has demonstrated that, by the second half of the eighteenth century, Scottish authors were playing a dominant role in many areas of literature and learning, including science and medicine, history, political economy, and philosophy, and an important role in other fields, including the novel. One might just as easily say, therefore, that England was a cultural province of Scotland in regard to a large swatch of book-learning. Scottish educational institutions and educators were also at least as influential in early America as English ones. In regard to the book trade, London’s centrality was unquestionable. But since the most innovative and important bookseller-publishers in the capital were emigrants from Scotland and the English provinces, London print culture was itself a broadly British product.6 Moreover, a substantial amount of new literature was published or co-published in Edinburgh, and works reprinted in Dublin (and to a lesser extent, Glasgow) were increasingly common. Booksellers in these cities sometimes carried on direct trade (both legally and illegally) with their counterparts in America, without the involvement of London.7 These circumstances complicate the notion, currently popular among scholars of the American book trade, that the decentralized geography of the American trade constitutes a fundamental contrast with the London-dominated trade in Britain. In short, Anglophone print culture that crossed the Atlantic in a westward direction did not always make a straight run from London – or England – to America.
Nor did it always move from east to west. From the earliest days of English settlements in New England, there were authors living in America who carried or sent their book manuscripts back to the Old World for printing and publication, after which their volumes went into general circulation and usually made their way back to America.8 Many of these volumes had American subject matter of one sort or another.9 Other works on more universal themes followed a similar path, such as religious works by eminent American divines who acquired international reputations, whether their books were originally published in Britain or America. Still other books were thoroughly British in origin but were revised for an American audience when reprinted in the New World, according to the principle that one commentator has dubbed “literary naturalization.”10 Above all, transatlantic communication about books was thoroughly interactive, as British, Irish, and American booksellers corresponded about which books to send across the ocean, in which formats, at what prices, on which ships, and then about what had gone right or wrong with the deliveries, how they were to be paid for, and what should happen in the next round of shipments. In these communication exchanges, Americans were not simply passive recipients. On the contrary, they had enormous leverage with their counterparts across the ocean because they controlled both access to the American market and the size and timing of payments – and even if payments were to be made at all.11
From the earliest days of British colonization, religion was the strongest cultural bond between Britain and America, and it manifested itself conspicuously in print. The unusually high literacy rates among British colonists in America, especially in New England, were closely tied to the high value placed on the ability of each individual to read the word of God. Bibles, psalters, hymn books, and similar works were the steady sellers of early America, imported in vast numbers from London and Edinburgh. Boston clergymen such as Increase Mather (1639–1723) and his son Cotton (1663–1728) became best-selling American authors during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and their works were published and read in Britain as well as America. “From a child almost I have loved the Mathers,” the Scottish Presbyterian minister Robert Wodrow (1679–1734) wrote to Cotton Mather in 1712. Wodrow was particularly taken by Mather’s 1702 book, Magnalia Christi Americana, or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Plantation in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698, which was part of a long line of works by early American authors that drew attention to the special place of the New World in the global narrative of Christian history.12 The Latin title and learned Latin quotations, the folio format, and the London imprint all signaled the book’s international stature.
Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) was a younger New England clergyman who also reversed the standard, westward flow of print culture. By his time, Boston booksellers were capable of occasionally producing larger books, and Edwards took full advantage of that circumstance. Beginning with Discourses on Various Important Subjects (1738), he penned and published in Boston a number of substantial religious works, including Some Thoughts concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1742), A Treatise concerning Religious Affections (1746), and The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758). Like-minded British readers and booksellers paid close attention. Edwards’s tribute to the New England revivals was reprinted in Edinburgh the following year, as western Scotland was experiencing a similar outbreak of revivalism. Edwards’s book on religious affections was reprinted in London in 1762 and in Edinburgh ten years later, in an edition co-published by the Dilly brothers. Edwards’s book on original sin was reprinted in London on more than one occasion, as well as in Glasgow and London.
The Scottish minister John Erskine (1721–1803), who broke into print with a youthful panegyric on the revivals in New England and Scotland, maintained a close, reciprocal connection with Edwards.13 On the one hand, Erskine sent hundreds of British evangelical books and pamphlets to Edwards and other American correspondents. On the other hand, Erskine arranged to print a number of Edwards’s unpublished manuscripts in Edinburgh. These included A History of the Work of Redemption (1774), an octavo of nearly 400 pages that Erskine edited from some of Edwards’s sermons into “a continued treatise,” as he put it in the signed advertisement prefixed to the book. In the preface, Edwards’s son observed that in this instance “the difficulty of getting any considerable work printed in this infant country hitherto,” especially a posthumous one, had been overcome by “a gentleman in the church of Scotland, who…engaged a bookseller to undertake the work, and also signified his desire that these following discourses in particular might be made public.” The Edinburgh bookseller to whom the younger Edwards referred was Erskine’s close collaborator in American evangelical publishing, William Gray. Their edition of Edwards’s book became a transatlantic best-seller of its kind, reprinted during the last quarter of the century in New York, Boston, and Worcester, Massachusetts, as well as several times in London and Edinburgh, where Margaret Gray continued her father’s work as an evangelical publisher.
In disseminating the writings of Edwards, his associate Thomas Prince (1687–1758), and other American evangelicals, Erskine collaborated with British churchmen from various denominations, such as the prominent Baptist clergyman John Ryland of Bristol (1753–1825). They formed parts of an interactive, transatlantic evangelical community whose best-known figure was Calvinist-Methodist firebrand George Whitefield (1714–70). His astonishing preaching career has generated much commentary – both pro and con – ever since his second visit to America in 1739–40 touched off evangelical hysteria throughout the colonies, but the importance of print in Whitefield’s evangelical campaigns has only recently begun to receive serious scholarly attention. In particular, a seminal study by Frank Lambert, published in 1994, demonstrated how the thousands of publications by and about Whitefield and his associates constituted a “print and preach strategy” that transformed printed sermons and related works into what one contemporary called “a vendible commodity.”14 Besides stirring up anticipation for his preaching by authorizing the publication of his sermons in vast numbers, Whitefield issued a journal of his activities in installments, edited the works of other evangelicals, and produced a steady stream of polemical pamphlets against his critics. He and his followers also used newspapers and magazines to publicize his appearances, grossly inflating crowd estimates on some occasions. By 1741 Whitefield had taken control of a London-based evangelical magazine called Weekly History (from 1743 titled Christian History or General Account of the Progress of the Gospel in England, Scotland, America as far as the Reverend Mr. Whitefield, his Fellow-Labourers and Assistants Are Concerned), and he soon began to publish, sell, and distribute his own works.
The multidenominational transatlantic evangelical print network that arose during the late 1730s and 1740s as a result of the labors of clergymen such as Whitefield, Edwards, Prince, Erskine, and Ryland is more significant for understanding transatlantic literary studies than it might at first seem. For one thing, literary historians who focus on poetry, novels, plays, and other forms of creative literature can all too easily neglect the formative role that evangelical literature played in establishing a transatlantic print culture that was dynamic and bi-directional. Many decades before James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott showed that an American novelist could capture a devoted reading audience in Britain and that a British novelist could set off pandemonium among American readers, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield were doing something similar in the religious sphere. The print culture of the Great Awakening established the precedent and the paradigm for transatlantic literary studies.
It is also very likely – though admittedly still speculative – that religious reading in America encouraged literary reading. In a highly literate society like eighteenth-century America, in which books were held in increasingly high esteem, reading moved steadily from a luxury to a “necessity of life,” even in rural communities.15 Poetry provides a particularly fertile ground in which to explore this transformation. Could the enormous popularity of psalters and hymn books in America have failed to stimulate greater interest in secular forms of poetry? And what role was played in this process by contemporary religious poetry such as the best-selling Gospel Sonnets or, Spiritual Songs by Rev. Ralph Erskine (1685–1752), one of the founders of the Scottish secession church? Originally published in Edinburgh in 1708 as a 24-page octavo titled The Believer’s Dowry, Erskine’s work reappeared in expanded form in 1720 as Gospel Canticles and was further expanded and retitled Gospel Sonnets in 1726. In the next decade it grew still larger, to nearly 300 duodecimo pages, and editions began to appear frequently in Edinburgh, London, and Glasgow, as well as occasionally in smaller towns such as Paisley, Kilmarnock, and Berwick. There were also a handful of American editions. In stanza after stanza of rhymed couplets, Erskine hammered away at the same evangelical theme: humans must renounce their attachment to good works (conceived as law or a “legal spirit”) and marry Christ instead (the gospel). As the century wore on, the great appeal of Gospel Sonnets to American audiences became evident not only from imports and reprints but also from two poems that were posthumously prefixed to almost all British and American editions of the work. The eighth edition, published in Edinburgh by William Gray in 1755, was the first to contain “Smoking Spiritualized,” in which Erskine compared the pleasures of that most American of practices, tobacco smoking, with the glory of the gospel.16 By contrast, a life of good works alone (law) is like an unlit pipe that gives no satisfaction
Till heav’nly fire
The heart inspire.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.
Even more tellingly, the eleventh edition of Gospel Sonnets, co-published by William Gray in 1762, contained the 28-line “A Poem, Dedicated to the Rev. Mr. Ralph Erskine, by a Lady in New England, upon reading his Gospel Sonnets,” which articulated the erotic implications of Erskine’s constant emphasis on gospel love and matrimony:
Mere moral preachers have no pow’r to charm,
Thy lines are such, my nobler passions warm;
There glorious truths have set my soul on fire,
And while I read, I’m love and pure desire.
Once roused and enjoyed, such poetic passions could easily lead to the appreciation of more accomplished, and more moralistic, versifiers such as Alexander Pope, whose poetical theodicy, An Essay on Man, warmed American hearts for “virtue.”17
Finally, we must consider the contribution of this evangelical movement to the development of the transatlantic book trade. James Green has observed that Whitefield and the Great Awakening “caused a spike in all the activities of the book trades in the middle colonies. Book importation, wholesale and retail bookselling, the reprinting of English books, the publishing of new books written by Americans – all increased.”18 When that spike was over, the American book trade receded to some degree, but it never again returned to the “age of scarcity” in books that Samuel Johnson regarded as a permanent feature of the American colonies. The firm of Benjamin Franklin makes Green’s point. Although Franklin himself was not a particularly religious man, he befriended Whitefield when the evangelical fervor he set off was at its height and obtained from him copies of his sermons and journal as well as permission to publish them. Franklin then produced more than two dozen short works by or about Whitefield as well as a two-volume edition of Whitefield’s early Journal (1739–40), a two-volume edition of Whitefield’s Sermons on Various Subjects (1740), Whitefield’s Five Sermons (1746), and (on Whitefield’s recommendation) the first American edition of Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets (1740).19 Franklin is known to have published only fifteen books of more than ten sheets (about 160 octavo pages) in his career, and eleven of them were religious works, including several volumes of hymns and religious poetry derived from the book of Psalms, especially by Isaac Watts. His only sizeable literary undertaking was an edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1742–43).20
It was not through printing and publishing, however, that Franklin’s firm made its greatest contribution to the growth of American print culture. In the mid-1740s Franklin hired as his foreman David Hall (1714–72), a Scottish journeyman printer who worked for, and was recommended by, Franklin’s friend William Strahan (1715–85), the London printer. Strahan and Hall had been apprentices together in Edinburgh, and Strahan, like Franklin, had befriended George Whitefield and printed his sermons in large numbers for strictly commercial reasons. By 1748 Franklin had retired from the printing trade, leaving Hall to mind the business as his partner and successor. Hall’s arrangement with Franklin provided little encouragement for American reprinting but a great deal of incentive for importing and bookselling, since he was free to keep all profits only in the latter areas of business. This circumstance, in addition to the trusting relationship between these two old friends, encouraged Strahan and Hall to carry on a transatlantic trade in books on an unprecedented scale over the quarter of a century from Franklin’s retirement until Hall’s death in 1772. An astonishing £30,000 worth of books and stationery moved from London to Philadelphia during that period.21
Although the business dealings of the Strahan-Hall relationship have received much attention from book historians, less notice has been taken of the consequences of Hall’s imports for the American reading public. Hall was in the habit of periodically advertising his books in the Philadelphia newspapers and printing broadside catalogues under titles such as Imported in the Last Vessels from Europe, and Sold by David Hall, at the New Printing-Office, in Market-street, Philadelphia, the Following Books, etc. In such titles, “etc.” refers not only to periodicals and other printed materials but also to a wide range of stationery and other accessories. I have consulted Hall’s surviving catalogues for 1754, 1760, 1761, 1763, 1767, 1768, and 1769. The catalogues from 1754, 1760, and 1761 were half as large as the later ones and arranged the entries mainly according to format, beginning with large, expensive folios and quartos, then moving to octavos and twelves (duodecimos) and “School Books.” From 1763 onwards, however, the arrangement was loosely by subject matter, and the range of stationery and accessories on offer grew significantly larger, including “the Reviews [meaning mainly the Monthly Review and Critical Review], and different sorts of Magazines,” copper-plate engravings, prints, paper hangings, and spectacles. Hall was then advertising his books to “Managers of Public Libraries, or others” who would receive a discount for purchasing in quantity – a clear allusion to wholesaling.
Of greatest interest is the content of the catalogues. Although Hall’s surviving letters to Strahan frequently provide instruction about what should and should not be sent to him – e.g., stop sending large expensive books and books in French, send only bound books, send more of these titles and fewer of those – the main responsibility for the selection of books fell to Strahan, who was ideally placed to perform this role, both geographically and within the trade. As a printer who was closely associated with Britain’s leading publisher, Andrew Millar, and who was actively engaged in purchasing copyright shares himself, and therefore able to trade stock with London booksellers, Strahan was able to supply the most up-to-date reading material.
Taking as an example Hall’s 1763 catalogue,22 we find there a remarkably broad and contemporary selection of books, catering to a wide range of tastes. Religious works are present, of course, including Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets, Watts’s works, and large numbers of standards (even a Life of Cotton Mather). But Whitefield and his evangelical network are scarcely present, and the list of religious books is placed on the second page of the catalogue, immediately after a selection of works of history, philosophy, poetry, and novels that is more than twice as large. One finds there an extensive supply of modern classics by the likes of Pope, Voltaire, Cervantes, Dryden, Addison, Hobbes, Puffendorf, More, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Thomson. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary and Rambler are present (in fact, John Ewing had used the presence in America of the latter work to placate Johnson during their encounter at the Dillys’). A number of large books published in London would enable Hall’s customers to read about their own land: Daniel Neal’s History of New-England (1747), William Smith’s History of the Province of New-York (1757), Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (3rd edn., 1755), and Le Page du Pratz’s brand-new History of Louisiana (1763). There are many other books that had been recently published in London, such as James Macpherson’s Ossianic epic Temora (1763; the earlier Fingal and Fragments of Antient Poetry also), Rousseau’s La nouvelle Heloise (1761), Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (2nd edn., 1761), the octavo fourth edition of William Robertson’s History of Scotland (1761), and David Hume’s History of Great-Britain (completed in 1762) – the last three being examples of books that Strahan could easily provide because he had printed them for Millar.
Hall’s 1763 catalogue also contains many recent legal, scientific, and medical works, as well as a large selection of Greek and Roman classics and a number of “entertaining and instructive books for children,” in addition to other educational materials for young people, such as Dodsley’s The Preceptor (either the third edition of 1758 or the fourth edition of 1763) and The Moral Miscellany (1758). But perhaps the most revealing aspect of the catalogue is its large supply of literary entertainment. Novels, travel books, miscellanies and compendiums of poems and essays, and other forms of popular reading abound. Women in particular have clearly moved into a prominent position among Hall’s American clientele. In addition to Richardson, Smollett, and Henry Fielding, we find all four of Sarah Fielding’s novels (David Simple, The Governess, Countess of Dellwyn, and Ophelia); John Hill’s The Conduct of a Married Life (1753); Eliza Haywood’s Epistles for the Ladies (1749–50), Female Spectator (probably the four-volume 1755 edition), and History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (3rd edn., 1762); Elle de Beaumont’s The History of a Young Lady of Distinction (probably the Noble brothers’ 1758 edition); Sarah Scott’s A Journey through Every Stage of Life (1754, 1757); Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington (3rd edn., 1748); Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752); Edward Ward’s Nuptial Dialogues and Debates (4th edn., 1759); Thomas Marriott’s Female Conduct (1759); Jemima and Louisa…By a Lady (1759); The Jilts: or, Female Fortune-Hunters (1756?); Young Lady’s and Miss’s Magazine – the list goes on and on. A separate section contains domestic advice books for women: “The British housewife; Philips’s lady’s handmaid; Smith’s complete housewife; Battam’s lady’s assistant; The lady’s companion; Harrison’s cookery; Glass’s servant’s directory; The young woman’s best companion; Eales’s receipts for pickling and preserving.” And in the section on accessories, Hall makes a point of noting that among the “neat pocketbooks” on sale are “some small, and very genteel, for the ladies.”
We have clearly moved very far from the heyday of the Great Awakening, when, as Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette for June 12, 1740, “No Books are in Request but those of Piety and Devotion.”23 Hall’s stock was remarkable both for its size and for the modernity of the polite works of literature and learning that it offered to the mid-eighteenth-century colonial American reading public. The availability and selection in 1763 were probably comparable to what was on offer at British bookshops outside of London and Edinburgh, with a time lag that could often be measured in only a few months rather than in years or decades. When one considers that Hall also imported books from other suppliers in Edinburgh and elsewhere, that his chief Philadelphia competitors, the Bradfords, were also importing the latest books from London (where their main supplier was Edward Dilly), and that other leading colonial booksellers, especially in Boston and New York, were also competing in this arena, the extent of the transformation begins to appear all the more impressive. Despite its physical separation from Britain, mid-eighteenth-century colonial America was an active participant in transatlantic print culture.
It became even more active after the American book trade began to practice reprinting on a large scale. Before the Revolution, there were glimmerings of this development, especially after the ambitious and multi-talented Scottish bookseller Robert Bell arrived in Philadelphia from Dublin in late 1767 or early 1768.24 Bell made his greatest impact by showing the American trade how to act like their counterparts in Ireland. In the “Address to the Subscribers” prefixed to the three-volume edition of William Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth that he published in Philadelphia in late 1770 and early 1771, Bell cited Ireland as the model for reprinting British books in America, not only because British copyright laws did not apply in either Ireland or America, but also because Irish reprinting of British books represented a cherished means of “freely disseminating knowledge” for the sake of cultivating literary taste.25 Although one leading commentator has branded Bell a “notorious pirate,” and another has claimed that Bell espoused “a program of piracy that would survive the Revolution and help shape the nation it produced,”26 such name-calling is misleading. Bell and other American reprinters of British books were pirates only in the sense of violating book-trade convention in Britain and Ireland, not in a legal sense.
Bell sometimes explicitly associated literary taste with sentimental literature, and he reprinted a number of British and European sentimental works after 1770 – especially near the end of, and just after, the War of Independence – including Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1770), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1782) and The Man of the World (1783), Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Emma Corbett (1783), and Goethe’s Sorrows and Sympathetic Attachments of Werter (1784).27 On other occasions, Bell emphasized the patriotic implications of American reprinting: the very act of reprinting books on American soil would create jobs and stimulate commercial activity. In one advertisement, prefixed to his Philadelphia edition of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1771), Bell argued that, whereas importing 10,000 copies of Blackstone would entail sending “very near ten thousand pounds across the great Atlantic ocean,” 1,000 sets “manufactured in America” would not only cost the purchasers less money but would also keep thousands of pounds in America “for our own manufacturers,” and ultimately “to circulate from neighbour to neighbour.”28
Besides more aggressive reprinting, increased importing of books from Dublin represents a second sense in which the American book trade was “Dublinized” during the last three decades of the eighteenth century. Bell himself imported books on a large scale,29 but it has never been determined whether he obtained most of his stock from London or from his old contacts in Dublin. During the American War the British government legalized American importing of Dublin reprints of British books; by the latter part of 1780 William Strahan was complaining to his associate in Edinburgh that, as a result of the Irish practice of “immediately reprinting in an inferior Size, and at a low Price, every new Book the Instant it is published here, which they are by a late Act of Parliament permitted to export to America,” London booksellers like him were becoming “totally deprived of the Sale of new Works in that extensive Continent and the West India Islands.”30 After independence, the American reprinting trade took a few years to recover, but the book-importing business blossomed, spurred on by competition among English, Scottish, and especially Irish exporters.
Hugh Gaine’s Catalogue of Books, Lately Imported from England, Ireland, and Scotland, and to Be Sold at His Book-store and Printing-office, at the Bible in Hanover-Square (1792) is revealing. Gaine (1726–1807) had emigrated to New York from Belfast in 1745 and had carved out a long career as a newspaper and book publisher, bookseller, and patent medicine merchant.31 Before and during the War of Independence (in which he had sided with the British), he had often advertised imported books. But those books came exclusively from England and did not compare in magnitude with his 1792 catalogue, which listed more than 500 books. The title of that catalogue shows the three-way competition that was taking place among exporters by this time. Although the catalogue does not identify places of publication, it does reveal the number of volumes of each work listed and, with the help of the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), that information is often sufficient to identify the edition on sale. The prevalence of Irish editions is remarkable. In the two-page section on novels, for example, nearly every identifiable edition is a Dublin imprint, many of which reduced the number of volumes – and therefore the price – by means of close printing, smaller formats, or abridgement. Examples include the following instances in which three-volume (or in one case, four-volume) London editions were reprinted in two volumes in Dublin in the same year as the original: Clara Reeve’s The School for Widows (1791), Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline (1788), Elizabeth Hervey’s Louisa: A Novel (1790), Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791), Marguerite Daubenton’s Zelia in the Desert (1789), and James White’s Adventures of John of Gaunt (1790 or 1791). In other instances, such as Popular Tales of the Germans (1791), Carpenter’s Daughter (1791 in London, 1792 in Dublin), and Pierre Perrin’s The Female Werter (1792), a two-volume London original was reduced to a one-volume Dublin reprint. Charlotte Smith’s Celestina: A Novel (1791), originally published in London in four volumes, was sold by Gaine in a three-volume Dublin edition. And so on. The speed of the process is noteworthy: Celestina was published in London in 1791, reprinted in Dublin almost immediately, and exported to America within a matter of months. Of course, Gaine also listed older titles, such as The History of Charles Wentworth, Esq. (1770), which Eve Bannet discusses in chap. 12 below; the three-volume London edition and the two-volume Dublin edition (also 1770) were the only eighteenth-century editions, and we know from the number of volumes in his catalogue entry that Gaine was selling the Dublin one. Even Pratt’s Emma Corbett (1780), which Robert Bell had reprinted in Philadelphia in three octavo volumes in 1783, was being sold by Gaine in a one-volume duodecimo edition that can be traced to Dublin (1790?).
Meanwhile, American reprinting was resurgent, in part because of the emigration to America, especially Philadelphia, of large numbers of Dublin reprinters escaping the political turmoil at home. The most important of them, Mathew Carey (1760–1839), arrived in 1784. That year also saw the arrival of two Scots who would join Carey among the major booksellers and publishers who made Philadelphia into the undisputed center of the American book trade: William Young (1755–1829) and Thomas Dobson (1750–1823). Soon Carey, Young, Dobson, and other Scottish and Irish immigrants, as well as a number of native publishers such as Isaiah Thomas (1749–1831) in Worcester, Massachusetts, were churning out reprints and other printed matter at a prodigious rate. During the 1790s the numbers of Philadelphia imprints actually surpassed those in Edinburgh and Dublin – even though book production in those cities was also increasing rapidly.
With importing and reprinting both reaching new heights, the 1790s constituted the golden age of transatlantic print culture. The book catalogue issued in New York by the Scottish immigrant bookseller Samuel Campbell (1765–1829) in 1794 shows the advantages of these developments for American consumers. Unusually, this catalogue displays the city of publication for each work listed, enabling us to see at a glance the transatlantic nature of the enterprise. Of sixty duodecimo works offered in the section “Novels, Tales, and Romances,” for example, roughly half (thirty-one) were imported (twenty London imprints, nine Dublin, and two Edinburgh), while the remainder were American productions (fifteen Philadelphia imprints, six Boston, four New York, and four from smaller towns, including Newbury-Port, Massachusetts, the source of a two-volume edition of the popular Emma Corbett that Campbell was selling).32 American booksellers and readers now had plenty of choices.
This state of affairs underwent a dramatic shift after 1801, when Ireland became part of the United Kingdom. With the Irish book trade suddenly subject to British copyright laws, the Dublin reprinting and exporting trade came crashing down. Without Dublin, British books exported to America became more expensive and less plentiful, and American reprinting and publishing gained further incentive for growth.33 The transformation is symbolized by the career of Patrick Byrne (c. 1740–1814), one of the most productive Dublin reprinters during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Both as a Roman Catholic and as a political reformer, Byrne was an outsider who struggled against oppression in his homeland. After two years in prison on charges of high treason, however, he finally gave up the struggle and in 1800 sailed for Philadelphia, where he continued to publish books for another thirteen years.34 Besides Byrne, there were a hundred other booksellers who trained in Ireland and then emigrated to join the American book trade between 1750 and 1820.35 These migrations marked the final stage in the Dublinization of the American book trade, but with two important differences from Dublin itself. First, American publishing would continue to expand, encountering periodic downturns but never receiving a cataclysmic blow as the Dublin reprint trade did at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Second, American publishing would develop beyond reprinting, to include new work by native authors, including some, such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, who would reverse the prevailing westerly flow and enjoy transatlantic fame.
NOTES
1 Quoted from Robert Patterson’s contemporary sketch of Ewing’s life in Lucy E. Lee Ewing, Dr. John Ewing and Some of His Noted Connections (Philadelphia: Press of Allen, Lane & Scott, 1924), p. 8. Although the date of the dinner at the Dilly brothers’ is not known, it must have occurred either in 1774 or else between Ewing’s return to London from Scotland in May 1775 and his departure for America that summer. It therefore could not have been any of several occasions when James Boswell recorded dining at the Dillys’ with Johnson during this period.
2 L. H. Butterfield, “The American Interests of the Firm of E. and C. Dilly, with Their Letters to Benjamin Rush, 1770–1795,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 45 (1951), 283–332. Charles Dilly had visited America himself in 1764.
3 Ross W. Beales and James N. Green, “Libraries and Their Users,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 399–404; James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 27–29; and the sources on the Library Company of Philadelphia (founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and his associates) at the library’s website, www.librarycompany.org/about/history.htm.
4 James Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century” and James N. Green, “English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” in Colonial Book, ed. Amory and Hall, pp. 183–98, 265.
6 Richard B. Sher, “Scottish Expatriate Publishers in London and Their Connections in Scotland,” in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. II: Enlightenment and Expansion 1707–1800, ed. Stephen Brown and Warren McDougall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
7 Warren McDougall, “Scottish Books for America in the Mid 18th Century,” in Spreading the Word: The Distribution Networks of Print 1550–1850, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester, MA: Oak Knoll Press, 1998), pp. 21–46.
8 Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
9 R. C. Simmons, British Imprints Relating to North America, 1621–1760: An Annotated Checklist (London: British Library, 1996); Russell L. Martin III, “North America and Transatlantic Book Culture to 1800,” in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), pp. 259–72.
10 Robert A. Gross, “Introduction: An Extensive Republic,” in An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 29.
11 On American payment and non-payment, see Raven, “Importation of Books.”
12 Alexander Murdoch, Scotland and America, c.1600–c.1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 129, including the quotation from Wodrow.
13 Jonathan Yeager, Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chaps. 7 and 8; David D. Hall, “Learned Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” in Colonial Book, ed. Amory and Hall, p. 415.
14 Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), quoting a 1740 pamphlet by Josiah Smith, p. 86. See also Susan O’Brien, “Eighteenth-Century Publishing Networks in the First Years of Transatlantic Evangelicalism,” in Evangelicalism, ed. Mark A. Noll, David Bebbington, and George Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 38–57, and Richard Owen Roberts, Whitefield in Print: A Bibliographic Record of Works by, for, and against George Whitefield (Wheaton, IL: R. O. Roberts, 1988).
15 William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).
16 Gray’s 1755 edition was also the first to extend all scripture references, which expanded the book to more than 350 duodecimo pages. See Notes & Queries, 4th ser. (March 20, 1869), 268–69.
18 Green, “English Books and Printing,” pp. 261–63.
19 Pennsylvania Gazette (Sept. 25, 1741), cited in James N. Green, “Benjamin Franklin as Publisher and Bookseller,” in Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, DE: University of Deleware Press, 1993), appendix A.
20 On Richardson and Franklin, see Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections, chap. 3.
21 Green, “English Books and Printing,” pp. 276–79; Robert D. Harlan, “David Hall’s Bookshop and Its British Sources of Supply,” in Books in America’s Past, ed. David Kaser (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1966), pp. 2–23; J. A. Cochrane, Dr. Johnson’s Printer: The Life of William Strahan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), chap. 6.
22 Evans 41386. Cf. the discussion of some of the novels in Hall’s 1756 catalogue in Edwin Wolf II, The Book Culture of a Colonial American City: Philadelphia Books, Bookmen, and Booksellers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 191–93.
23 Quoted in Green, “English Books and Printing,” p. 260.
24 Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 511–31.
25 William Robertson, The History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth (America [i.e., Philadelphia]: Printed for the Subscribers, 1771), as discussed in Richard B. Sher, “Charles V and the Book Trade: An Episode in Enlightenment Print Culture,” in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 184–92.
26 Green, “English Books and Printing,” p. 284; Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 185.
27 On Bell and sentimental literature, see Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), chap. 1, and Green, “English Books and Printing,” p. 288.
28 Reproduced in Sher, Enlightenment and the Book, p. 520.
29 See Robert B. Winans, A Descriptive Checklist of Book Catalogues Separately Printed in America, 1693–1800 (Worcester, MA: Oak Knoll Press, 1981).
30 Strahan to William Creech, Oct. 17, 1780, William Creech Letterbooks, Blair Oliphant of Ardblair Muniments (microfilm copy, National Archives of Scotland, RH4/26/3). Quoted by permission of the owner.
31 The Journals of Hugh Gaine, Printer, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 2 vols. (New York, 1902; reprint 1970).
32 Samuel Campbell’s Sale Catalogue of Books, for 1794 (New York, 1794), pp. 43–44.
33 That growth is discussed in James N. Green, “The Rise of Book Publishing,” in Extensive Republic, ed. Gross and Kelley, pp. 75–127, and Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
34 M. Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 73–75.
35 Richard Cargill Cole, Irish Booksellers and English Writers 1740–1800 (London: Mansell, 1986), pp. 182–90, 192.