ERC23.indd

There was no American literature in the nineteenth century. So said a chorus of British

and European critics of the new nation. “Literature the Americans have none – no native

literature . . . It is all imported,” the Rev. Sydney Smith pronounced in the Edinburgh

Review. In 1820, Smith famously insulted American pride: “In the four quarters of the

globe, who reads an American book?” Two decades later, Alexis de Tocqueville was

obliged to agree. During his 1830s’ tour of the United States, the liberal aristocrat

found much to admire about “democracy in America” but not its literary productions:

“The inhabitants of the United States have . . . at present, properly speaking, no litera-

ture.” What did exist was best hidden from foreign guests. “If the American nation be

judged of by its literature,” the English traveler Harriet Martineau concluded in 1837,

“it may be pronounced to have no mind at all.” That verdict persisted, even as the

United States was rising to world power. In 1888, the English critic Matthew Arnold

echoed Sydney Smith. For all their industrial success and national wealth, Americans

were lacking in civilization: “In literature they have as yet produced little that is

important.”

Many Americans unhappily agreed. With high hopes for the Revolution, aspiring

poets had anticipated a “rising glory” of the arts in a free republic. That expansive

vision soon faded. Far from heeding Noah Webster’s dictum that “America must be as

independent in literature as she is in politics,” most writers in the early republic took

their cues from the former mother country. America remained a cultural colony of the

Old World well into the nineteenth century. In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson summoned

the “American Scholar” to answer “the postponed expectation of the world.” “We have

listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” This call for literary independence

was but one in a litany of complaints about native mediocrity heard throughout the

century. American literature was deemed inferior either because it failed to realize

European models or because it tried too hard to imitate them.

Perhaps the critics were looking in the wrong place. In the eighteenth century, lit-

erature carried a distinctive meaning it no longer bears today. Samuel Johnson deﬁ ned

Building a National Literature:

The United States 1800–1890

Robert A. Gross

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316 Robert A. Gross

it in 1756 as “learning,” the acquisition of which required education in the Greek and

Roman classics. Learned men (and a few women) were the citizens of the republic of

letters, communicating freely across national borders to advance the “improvement” and

enlightenment of mankind. Every branch of knowledge invited their interest, from

“natural philosophy” (the progenitor of modern “science”) to history and politics to

languages, rhetoric, and belles lettres (encompassing essays, drama, poetry, and ﬁ ction).

When Noah Webster embarked on the linguistic inquiries that culminated in his

monumental American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), he appealed to “the

Friends of Literature in the United States” for ﬁ nancial aid. “Similar undertakings in

Great Britain have been supported by contributions,” he explained. Would not “the

lovers of learning” in America do the same “to enlarge the sphere of knowledge”?

Apparently not: Webster was in constant need of funds to carry on his scholarly project,

an experience shared by other literary men in his day and conﬁ rming the view that in

the absence of aristocratic patrons and well-endowed institutions, the Muses could not

thrive in the infant republic. In fact, Americans did establish diverse associations and

launch numerous journals to promote the progress of knowledge. Still, their reputation

was ﬁ xed, in Emerson’s words, as “a people too busy” with business ever “to give to

letters” more than token regard.

If “letters” did have a future in the new nation, that lay in the wider ﬁ eld opened

up over the nineteenth century, when “literature” ended its narrow alliance with elite

learning and admitted into its ranks the entire body of writing produced in a time or

place. In the age of Enlightenment, men of letters competed to contribute to the world’s

stock of knowledge. The agenda shifted with the currents of nationalism and democracy.

Now every Western nation claimed a distinctive character, given form in original works

of literature and art from the common life of its people. By this standard, Emerson

would identify the “English traits” of “strong common sense” and “mental materialism”

as characteristic of the nation that produced Chaucer and Shakespeare, Macaulay and

Dickens, while seeking the essence of American experience in the popular realm of “the

familiar” and “the low.” This quest for national distinctiveness has shaped literary

history ever since. Until recently, critics have told the story of American literature as

the long struggle to ﬁ nd an original, authentic voice for the unprecedented realities of

experience in the New World. Such a narrative is suggested by the very title of this

chapter, “Building a National Literature.” But book history alters the angle of vision.

It goes beyond the particular agendas that writers and historians attribute to books and

comprehends the wide array of interests and participants, the diversity of institutions,

and the host of cultural practices that were bound up in the world of print Americans

made, through their domestic engagements and their international entanglements, over

the nineteenth century. By these means and media, writers and readers carried on the

conversations among themselves and with the wider world that can appropriately be

called “American literature.”

The United States embarked on independence with a print culture that was at once

local and cosmopolitan but hardly national. America’s arrival on the world stage

was heralded in print, with the Declaration of Independence circulating in thirty

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The United States 1800–1890 317

newspapers and fourteen broadsides before it was even signed. The republic was depen-

dent on its constituent parts, the very news of its existence spread by a decentralized

network of printers among a loosely connected people. The success of the new nation

required better communications, and so the federal government that came into being

with the Constitution in 1789 set about promoting a greater sense of nationality.

Newspapers were central to that goal. “Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of

sentiments,” James Madison wrote in 1791, “as good roads, domestic commerce, a free

press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people . . . is

equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits, and is favorable to liberty.”

Under the fostering arm of government, the press enjoyed special privileges accorded

to no other genre of print. The Post Ofﬁ ce Act of 1792 allowed newspapers to circulate

through the mail at cheap rates, subsidized by high charges on personal letters; books

were banned from the mailbags. Editors could also exchange issues at no cost, and they

were free to reprint whatever they pleased. Government put few obstacles in their way.

Liberty of the press was guaranteed by state and federal constitutions, and following

the storm over the 1798 Sedition Act, ofﬁ cial efforts to regulate newspapers faded. In

contrast to Britain and France, the new republic eschewed the state powers customarily

employed to police opinion. In the Old World, heavy taxes on newspapers restricted

their circulation to an economic elite; in the United States, news was potentially acces-

sible to all. Subscriptions, to be sure, were costly – as much as ten dollars a year for a

daily, ﬁ ve for a weekly, the bill payable in advance – but copies were readily available

in coffee-houses and taverns, where it was common to see men sociably gathered, as

the poet Philip Freneau noticed, “to spit, smoke segars, drink apple whiskey, and read

the news.” Politicians encouraged the habit by providing a variety of subsidies – printing

contracts, ofﬁ cial advertising, and patronage jobs – to ensure the well-being of the press.

Thanks to all these measures, newspapers took on the character of public utilities, and

reading them became a conscientious act of citizenship. As early as 1800, the Portfolio

dubbed Americans “a nation of newspaper readers.”

Serving both public purpose and private interest, newspapers proliferated at a diz-

zying pace up and down the coast and deep into the Western frontier, faster even than

the burgeoning population of the new nation. Some 200 papers circulated in 1800; a

quarter-century later, that ﬁ gure had grown four-fold to 861, then swelled to 1,400 by

1840. Everywhere, except the rural South, where printers were seldom seen, the press

played an integral part in the conduct of business and politics. Like their eighteenth-

century predecessors, urban dailies supplied valuable commercial “intelligence” about

prices and markets far and near. They rightly called themselves “advertisers”; commonly,

half or more of these four-page sheets were given over to paid notices of goods and

services for sale.

The political columns of the press were no less devoted to salesmanship. At the dawn

of the republic, editors vowed to be “open to all parties but inﬂ uenced by none,” as the

Freeman’s Journal of Philadelphia declared in its masthead, while the ambitious entre-

preneur John Fenno hastened from Boston to New York with the dream of founding a

“gazette of the United States” as ofﬁ cial organ of the national establishment. But hardly

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318 Robert A. Gross

had the new government gone into operation than it split into competing factions,

centered around Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, that developed after 1800

into full-ﬂ edged partisan bodies contending for power in Washington and the states.

Each party cultivated its own network of newspapers to carry on the contest in print;

from editorial ofﬁ ces functioning as party headquarters ﬂ owed the ofﬁ cial messages

calculated to rally the faithful and win over the undecided. In election seasons, urban

advertisers and country gazettes made politics their main business, selling candidates

and platforms like any other product. Up to 1820, newspapers preferred to cloak their

partisanship in seemingly impartial language stressing the common good; in succeed-

ing decades, they took up the cudgels and waged the ﬁ ght for Democrats and Whigs,

Anti-Masons, Know-Nothings, and Republicans without inhibition. Editors, more often

politicians than printers, denounced their rivals as scurrilous skunks, dirty dishcloths,

and “lickspittle tools” and brawled with them in the streets. Epithets and opinions were

the stuff of the party press in campaign mode.

Where was the news in these papers? It consisted chieﬂ y of ofﬁ cial documents – the

annual message of the president, laws enacted by state legislatures, proceedings of

political conventions, trial records – along with extracts from the foreign press, prices

current, and accounts of ships arriving and departing. From the 1820s on, editors com-

peted ﬁ ercely to be the ﬁ rst to put such items into print, employing schooners, pony

expresses, even carrier pigeons to win the race. But independent reporting was lacking.

Journalists did show initiative by attending sessions of Congress and taking steno-

graphic notes on the debates. Unfortunately for contemporaries and historians interested

in what exactly was said, such transcripts were not what the public read. Politicians

were accorded the right to review the notes and “improve” them before speeches went

into print – a practice known as “speaking to Buncombe” whereby the people’s repre-

sentatives said one thing to their colleagues and another to their constituents. If national

“news” was bowdlerized in the press, events close to home could go missing entirely,

partly because everyone already knew them, but even more because such matters were

beside the point. Scattered across an extensive republic, local newspapers served to

connect readers to wider worlds beyond the community. They constituted a national

bulletin board, posting stories from all over the land. Noah Webster, an erstwhile editor

himself, was quick to discern the signiﬁ cance of this process. Newspapers, he observed

in the very ﬁ rst issue of his American Minerva in December 1793, were “common instru-

ments of social intercourse, by which the citizens of this vast Republic constantly dis-

course and debate with each other.”

The boundaries of American journalism expanded dramatically with the birth of the

penny press. In September 1833, a new era of mass communications dawned with the

inauguration of Benjamin Day’s New York Sun. This brash upstart adapted recent inno-

vations in the London press to American circumstances and challenged the business

model for an urban newspaper. It was soon followed by a host of imitators in New York

and beyond, most notably, James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald (1835) and Horace

Greeley’s New York Tribune (1841). Unlike the high-priced “mercantile advertisers”

aimed at New York’s political and business elite, the penny papers catered to the broad

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The United States 1800–1890 319

middle and working classes of the surging city. The papers were tiny: at 8

by 11

inches, the Sun easily folded into a man’s pocket, whereas its established rivals, three

times that size, were “blanket sheets.” They were cheap, a penny an issue (soon raised

to two cents) and available in single copies hawked by newsboys on the streets. They

were independent in politics and populist in style. And they promised to print “all

the news of the day.” This was an entirely new formula for commercial publishing.

With its handy format, low price, and appealing contents, the penny press gathered up

readers en masse and sold them to advertisers for huge proﬁ ts. The Herald’s daily cir-

culation climbed to 60,000 by the eve of the Civil War, an achievement made possible

by the introduction of steam-powered printing presses and machine-made paper.

Popular journalism was at once a cause and consequence of the industrial revolution.

In the hands of Bennett, a Scottish immigrant who had labored long and futilely in

the party press, the modern tabloid emerged in its quintessential form, capturing all

the “human interest” of the day: crime, violence, sex, high society, sports (boxing

matches, horse races, yachting regattas), Wall Street, show business, and celebrities. But

the Herald did not ignore politics, which Bennett pursued as aggressively as he sniffed

out scandal. Seizing on the invention of the telegraph, Herald correspondents broke the

news of American victories in the Mexican war and the discovery of gold in California;

the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo surfaced in the paper the same day

as the US Senate received the conﬁ dential document from President Polk. (Furious at

the leak, senators ordered the arrest of the Herald reporter and demanded to know his

source – to no effect; after a month, the deﬁ ant newsman was released.) The scoops and

sensations brought to public view in the popular press constituted a distinctive contri-

bution to American literature. In the pages of the penny papers unfolded the daily life

of a great metropolis with “a variety, a piquancy, a brilliancy, an originality,” according

to Bennett, “that will entirely outstrip the worn out races of Europe, who have been

degenerating for the last twenty generations.” Capturing the excitement, novelty, and

dangers of an ever-changing city, these heralds and tribunes of the people reﬂ ected

urban society to itself.

The popular appetite for news was insatiable. In 1869, the British journalist Edward

Dicey characterized the American as “a newspaper-reading animal.” A periodical existed

for virtually every breed of genus Americanus. Where the party and penny press targeted

readers in particular cities and towns, other enterprises identiﬁ ed groups with special-

ized interests and fashioned them into regional and national audiences. Vocational

publications abounded, with farmers getting the most attention and advice. No self-

respecting denomination of Christians was without its house organ. Temperance advo-

cates drank from the Fountain and enlisted in the Cold Water Army; health reformers

looked to the Sanitarium; abolitionists championed the cause of the slave in the Eman-

cipator and the Liberator. Starting with Freedom’s Journal in 1827, African Americans

fought not only for their own liberty but for the Rights of All (as the paper was renamed).

The Cherokee Nation advertised its progress in civilization in the bilingual Cherokee

Phoenix, and although that effort failed to stop forcible removal from Georgia, the paper,

true to its original name, was reborn in Oklahoma as the Cherokee Advocate. There were

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320 Robert A. Gross

“amulets,” “garlands,” “mirrors,” and “toilets” for ladies (and an Agitator for women’s

rights); “assistants” and “companions” for mothers; “friends” for orphans and youth.

Alas, “sporting papers” like the Flash and the Whip, modeled on English originals, led

young men astray with titillating tales of vice in the nation’s cities and detailed guides

on where to ﬁ nd it.

Those preferring the safer precincts of ﬁ ction could turn to the “story papers” that

ﬂ ourished in the mid-1840s, when canny businessmen took advantage of a loophole in

the postal laws and began churning out cheap editions of foreign novels in newspaper

format. In the spirit of James Gordon Bennett, the editors of Brother Jonathan and New

World in New York and Universal Yankee Nation in Boston (which claimed to be “the

largest paper in all creation”) won the hearts of “the Reading Million” and threatened

the interests of established publishers by snapping up the latest works of Charles

Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and other popular writers as soon as they arrived on

the transatlantic steamers and getting them into print well before they appeared as

books. “We are friends of the people,” boasted the New World, “and our motto is ‘The

greatest good to the greatest number.’ ” Though that practice was soon halted, news-

papers never stopped running ﬁ ction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ﬁ r s t

created a sensation in the anti-slavery weekly National Era, where it was serialized in

forty installments in 1851. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, launched by an English

engraver-turned-publisher in New York, played a prominent part in popularizing such

novelists as Wilkie Collins in the Civil War decades and after, while literary syndicates

marketed works by the leading American and British writers to newspapers all over

the country during the last two decades of the century. Thanks to the post ofﬁ ce, the

railroad, and the telegraph, the newspaper could chart diverse paths – local, regional,

national, or perhaps all at the same time – in the building of a literary marketplace.

In histories of American literature, book publishing usually holds pride of place and

with good reason. Books carried a cultural prestige lacking in periodicals. Whether

bound in leather or cloth, they were made to last, embodying “timeless” knowledge

across the generations; newspapers, by contrast, were typically as short-lived as the

information they contained. Ephemera comprised the bulk of items issued by colonial

printers: almanacs, broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets in political and religious debates,

primers, and spellers. For their books, Americans went to London, Edinburgh, and

Dublin in a habit that survived the Revolution. It was simply cheaper to import the

latest literature from Britain than to patronize the native press, and it signiﬁ ed a cos-

mopolitan desire to participate in the international republic of letters. For that situation

to change, entrepreneurs would have to ﬁ nd new ways of conducting the book business,

and consumers would have to alter their literary tastes.

In the early 1790s, the printer Mathew Carey, a radical Irish nationalist who had

ﬂ ed prosecution for sedition by the English authorities and set up shop in Philadelphia

with an endorsement from Benjamin Franklin, devised an ingenious route into publish-

ing. With the backing of well-heeled merchants, he ordered thousands of pounds worth

of books from several leading British booksellers, stocked a store on Market Street, and

turned the inventory to immediate proﬁ t. Carey’s ambitions went beyond the import

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The United States 1800–1890 321

trade. Instead of paying his suppliers, he pocketed the money and invested it in two

risky ventures, expensive reprints of William Guthrie’s New System of Geography (1786)

and Oliver Goldsmith’s An History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774), which had

gone through multiple editions in London and Dublin. Carey aimed to cover his costs

by signing up advance subscribers, some 1,200 in all, for Guthrie’s two volumes, which

were adapted for American readers by the Philadelphia astronomer David Rittenhouse

and Massachusetts geographer Jedidiah Morse. So ambitious was this design that Carey

was obliged to give up printing altogether and concentrate on marketing his wares – no

easy task, as it turned out, since the ready audience for the project in the Middle States

and New England was quickly tapped out and the newspaper advertisements Carey

placed brought in few others. Facing an imminent crisis of debt, Carey seized on the

expedient of hiring a footloose Anglican parson named Mason Locke Weems to peddle

his books wherever they could be sold. A born salesman, Weems traveled throughout

the Chesapeake, winning over the gentry with visions of “Worlds upon Worlds” about

“to burst upon their senses” from the pages of Guthrie. The sales pitch did more than

rescue Carey from ﬁ nancial ruin. It pointed up the opportunities and the obstacles in

publishing books for a people dispersed across the countryside of an extensive republic.

In the bid to bring books to readers, rather than wait for them to come into his store,

Carey learned a crucial lesson: picking titles was only part of a publisher’s task; market-

ing and selling them demanded equal attention.

Carey’s example was repeated by other printers-turned-publishers in the 1790s, not

all of whom obtained working capital by expropriating British creditors. The patriot

printer Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts, launched his publishing career with

a line of “toy” books for children, reprinted from London originals, and with substantial

quarto and folio editions of the Bible. However they entered the business, these entre-

preneurs built American publishing on the recycling of British and European books.

This specialty was made proﬁ table by the Copyright Act of 1790, which, in keeping

with the Constitution’s mandate to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,”

granted authors “the exclusive right to their Writings” for a limited term of fourteen

years (renewable, in the author’s lifetime, for another fourteen) – a provision modeled

on English precedent (the 1710 Statute of Anne, the ﬁ rst copyright law in the world).

There was a catch: only American citizens (and resident aliens) need apply. Foreigners

could claim neither protection against nor payment for unauthorized reprints of

their works by the likes of Carey and Thomas. In effect, the vast body of British and

European literature constituted a public domain free for the taking. Like squatters on

the frontier, booksellers seized the opportunity; from the 1790s on, the bestselling

books in London were being reprinted in the United States within one or two years.

The loose copyright laws fostered a “culture of reprinting” that made the American

reading public the largest and most up-to-date in the Western world. In Britain, where

the “intellectual property regime” tightened sharply in the early nineteenth century,

publishers exploited their legal monopoly over current titles and kept book prices high

and edition sizes low. As a result, the great works of the Romantic age, especially the

poetry and novels of Walter Scott, gained a wider audience across the Atlantic than in

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322 Robert A. Gross

their native land. With no legal obligations to foreign authors, American booksellers

saved on royalties, and they cut costs further by altering texts at will. In the course of

reprinting, “three-decker” English novels shrank to two volumes (and often two-in-one),

shorn of unnecessary verbiage. One Boston publisher had no apologies for condensing

Scott’s Waverley novels: “there is a great deal of rubbish – such as the long introduc-

tions &c.” Every branch of knowledge, from theology to biography to natural history,

suffered such cavalier treatment. In 1820, 70 percent of the titles issued in the United

States were pirated from overseas; three decades later, following a great expansion of

original American publishing, that ﬁ gure remained a substantial 43 percent. Even with

all those reprints in circulation, Americans had not lost their taste for imports. Serious

learning still carried an Old World lineage. Well into the nineteenth century, book

collectors, colleges, and library societies provided a sturdy market for British books,

which such businessmen as George Palmer Putnam serviced by setting up quarters in

London as agent for customers back home. In similar fashion, prosperous Americans

were accustomed to celebrate Christmas by presenting loved ones with fancy gift books

from England. Far from retreating before American books, the import trade boomed,

growing nearly tenfold over the middle decades of the century.

British models shaped virtually every aspect of American publishing during its for-

mative decades. Technology came from abroad, as did the craftsmen trained to use it.

What books and periodicals Americans did not import or reprint they imitated and

made their own. Many genres – the evangelical magazine, the gift book, the picturesque

“tour,” the illustrated weekly, even the Valentine writer – originated in the Old World,

then spread to the New, where they won large followings. In one crucial respect the

ﬂ edgling book trade departed from the norm. Unlike the highly concentrated business

of London and Paris, publishing developed as an infant industry in diverse cities and

towns, from Boston to Charleston on the coast and west to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

Decentralization was due both to the transportation barriers obstructing a national

market and to the economic opportunities afforded by the copyright laws. Anybody

could enter the ﬁ eld, issue a new title, or reprint an existing one by a foreign writer, so

long as he had the capital to hire printer and binder and the willingness to assume the

ﬁ nancial risk. But how to get books to potential readers beyond a locality? Publishers

combined forces to enlarge the geographical scope of bookselling, while regulating

regional and national competition. In emulation of an English practice known as “cour-

tesy of trade,” they devised a rule for reprinting: whoever ﬁ rst issued a foreign text was

its rightful owner, notwithstanding the absence of copyright. Under this compact, a

single reprint of an English work could circulate throughout the nation, free from

competing editions. Booksellers, like newspaper editors, would exchange publications

with one another, thereby increasing and diversifying their stock. Or they might join

together in co-publishing ventures and divide up the territory for sales. Other methods

of dissemination were to purvey books on commission, supply them at standard dis-

counts, establish branch stores, and send traveling salesmen into the countryside. These

cooperative arrangements rested upon a shared sense of identity and common interests.

Splitting off, like Carey, from printers and devoting themselves to publishing and

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The United States 1800–1890 323

selling books, the leading ﬁ gures in the book trade cultivated a collective image as

urban gentlemen, promoting the economy and culture of the republic. In reality, they

were following in the well-marked trail of English stationers, collaborating to uphold

prices, curb competition, and limit risks.

The pace of change was actually set outside the established book trade. From the

1820s to the 1850s, the leading agents of the “benevolent empire” – the American Bible

Society, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday School Union – produced

and distributed millions of pious pamphlets and books. Intent on propagating the word

and winning converts for Christ, these religious publishers employed stereotype plates

and steam-powered presses well in advance of their commercial counterparts. But deliv-

ering the divine message to needy souls proved a more difﬁ cult challenge. The benevo-

lent societies relied on a network of local auxiliaries to ﬁ nance and distribute their

publications, and therein lay the problem. Rich, respectable communities, abounding

in professed Christians, were quick to answer the call, while hardscrabble frontier settle-

ments went unserved. The prevailing localism of American life circumscribed the reach

of philanthropy. To overcome those limits, the national agencies enlisted an evangelical

army of divinity students and ministers willing to work for minimal pay and deployed

them to the dark corners of the land. Their mission was to be traveling salesmen for

the Lord, going from door to door handing out Bibles and tracts to starving souls at

whatever price, if any, they could afford. Employing these colporteurs brought addi-

tional complications: they had to be recruited, trained, supervised, paid, and held to

account. By the 1850s, the benevolent societies were operating as modern corporate

bureaucracies, their central headquarters overseeing a chain of regional ofﬁ ces that

directly employed scores of agents in the ﬁ eld. Ironically, they did so in order to combat

the immoral inﬂ uence of the literary marketplace, which supplied people with what

they wanted in this life, not what they needed for eternal salvation. Reversing that

equation, the tract and Bible societies reinforced older habits of reading. Inside the

peddlers’ packs were the steady sellers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century divinity

– Baxter’s Call, Alleine’s Alarm, Flavel’s To uchstone – along with newer evangelical titles

like The Dairyman’s Daughter, nearly all the products of English pens. In urgent matters

of the spirit, numerous Christians still found inspiration in the mother country.

The transformation of commercial publishing developed in tandem with the broader

economy. From the 1820s to the Panic of 1837, the United States experienced a long

wave of sustained growth, bringing unprecedented prosperity to a burgeoning middle

class and swelling demand for consumer goods, including books. The changes stirred

the book trade, whose ranks were still small and scattered in various cities, chieﬂ y

Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, but with outposts along the trade routes to the

West. Just as newspapers raced for the latest news from Europe, so booksellers hastened

to reprint the most popular works in London. Driving this enterprise was the craze for

the historical romances of Walter Scott, which gave a new respectability to reading

ﬁ ction. No longer could publishers afford to wait and see if a title sold well enough in

England to merit reprinting. With speed of the essence, booksellers paid to obtain

advance sheets from London – a compensation of sorts to the publishers and writers

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324 Robert A. Gross

being pirated. The “author of Waverley” and his imitators appeared in print as soon as

they arrived in harbor. Courtesy of trade dissolved. Publishers invaded each other’s

territory with rival editions of the same work, only to ﬁ nd themselves ultimately out-

ﬂ anked by the story papers, which nearly ruined the trade. There was no alternative

but to satisfy the demand. The key to success lay in publishing new books. Mathew

Carey, who had built his ﬁ rm on the solid foundation of reprints and the Bible (which

he kept in standing type and reissued as warranted), could not fathom why his son and

successor was expanding the list of publications so rapidly. “There is nothing on earth

worse than an old stock of books,” the son patiently explained. “Five-sixths of the whole

sales are of books manufactured within the year.” Even that was not enough to beat

the competition. Carey & Lea battled for dominance with the Harper Brothers for a

decade; ultimately, the Harpers won. In a striking pattern of concentration, Manhattan

emerged as the publishing capital of the nation, followed by Philadelphia, Boston, and

Cincinnati.

The new business model reorganized publishing along modern lines. With ﬂ exibility

and speed crucial to success in the competitive marketplace, the leading ﬁ rms embraced

technological innovation. Stereotyping, which preserved cast type on metal plates,

allowed for printing on demand; ﬁ rms could now reproduce works in smaller or larger

lots, in response to changing needs. Papermaking machines and steam presses lowered

costs, expanded output, and accelerated production. Even the centuries-old art of binding

was mechanized. Taken together, these inventions transformed the appearance of books.

Attractively packaged in cloth covers, illustrated with engravings, and neatly printed in

large editions, each year’s titles from companies like Boston’s Ticknor & Fields, the

industry leader in design, arrived, for the ﬁ rst time in book history, as uniform com-

modities on the market. It thus became easy to assign them ﬁ xed prices. Distribution

was regularized in turn. Older cooperative arrangements gave way to an impersonal

division of labor, as most publishers ceased to be old-style “booksellers.” Their special-

ized business was to organize the process of publication, bringing works into print at

their own expense and risk and then selling them wholesale to jobbers and retailers

nationwide. Thanks to the railroad, which extended steadily in the Northeast from the

1830s on and completed its transcontinental journey in 1869, a national book-trade

system gradually emerged. From grand ofﬁ ces in Manhattan and other publishing

centers issued an ever-expanding volume of books – some 1,350 in the year before the

Civil War – to be disseminated across the country by wholesale jobbers, traveling sales-

men, and retail shops. The independent bookstore was the hub of the system. In every

major city and town, shopping for books became a convenient, everyday experience.

Sarah Payson Willis Parton was a prominent beneﬁ ciary of these changes. Better

known by her pen name Fanny Fern, Parton achieved celebrity and riches as a newspaper

columnist and novelist after years of struggling as a single mother to support herself

and three young children. Born in 1811, she came of age with the press, witnessing in

her own family the changing practice of journalism and the opening of new opportuni-

ties for commercial writing. Her grandfather had edited a patriot newspaper in Boston

during the Revolutionary War; her father had enlisted in the ﬁ ght against federalism

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The United States 1800–1890 325

as editor of the Eastern Argus in Portland, Maine, before giving up politics for religion

and starting one of America’s earliest religious newspapers, the Boston Recorder; her older

brother, Nathaniel P. Willis, fashioned a literary career as an urbane poet and genteel

magazine editor. Yet, when ﬁ nancial disaster struck, the young mother, ﬁ rst widowed,

then divorced, was cast on her own resources, with no help from her literary kin. To

make ends meet, she tried teaching and sewing, then picked up the pen, submitting

articles in the early 1850s to several Boston family magazines (the Mother’s Assistant,

the Tr ue Flag, and the Olive Branch). For the sake of propriety, as well as to conceal her

identity from inquisitive relatives, she adopted the pseudonym Fanny Fern. But her

ambition burned bright, and it was rewarded by a shrewd publisher who collected her

periodical pieces and issued them as a book with the title Fern Leaves from Fanny’s

Portfolio. The volume was an instant success, selling 70,000 copies within a year. With

a satirical wit that gave bite to sentimental prose, Fanny Fern won a huge following for

her forthright pieces portraying the sufferings of poor children on New York’s streets

and the burdens of women in a patriarchal world. As a literary professional, she reveled

in her large sales and loyal fans. Her novel Ruth Hall (1854), a roman-à-clef about a

brave woman writer trying desperately to feed her children, culminates in a remarkable

ﬁ nancial reward: 100 shares of stock in a local bank, worth $100 each. For pouring

“her own heart’s history” onto the pages of a book, the author has unknowingly earned

a fortune of $10,000 – roughly what Parton herself had by then garnered in royalties

from her books. That was far more than Parton’s grandfather and father had ever gained

from political and religious newspapers.

The astonishing career of Fanny Fern is tribute to the forces behind the expansion

of the literary marketplace by the mid-nineteenth century: the rise of national periodi-

cals; the huge popularity of novels; the proﬁ tability of writing as a vocation, especially

for women; the appeal of celebrities in popular culture; and the collaboration of author

and publisher in creating and disseminating American literature. As much as anyone

writing in her time, Sarah Parton demonstrated just how valuable intellectual property

could be. Her ﬁ nancial coup was the product of the smart bargain she had made in

selling the copyright to her works in exchange for a share of the revenues their publica-

tion brought in – a royalty agreement that remains standard practice today. Right from

the start of the 1790 Copyright Act, Noah Webster had seen its economic uses, as had

such female writers as the historian Hannah Adams and the feminist Judith Sargent

Murray. So, too, had booksellers like Henry C. Carey, who was quick to buy the copy-

rights and ﬁ nance the publications of James Fenimore Cooper and Catherine Maria

Sedgwick in the 1820s and 1830s – investments that only gained in value after Congress

extended the copyright term in 1831 to twenty-eight years (with a possible renewal for

another fourteen). The complaints of literary nationalists notwithstanding, copyright

facilitated the making of American literary careers. Both native and foreign works could

come from the same presses.

It was not Fanny Fern, rooted in journalism and popular culture, whom the builders

of American literature had in mind during the late nineteenth century when they

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326 Robert A. Gross

established a canon of the nation’s major writers, but rather a coterie of New England

males: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow, and a few lesser poets. The elite roster owed its existence to

Boston publisher James T. Fields, who had the inspiration to market these authors, all

issued by his company and its successors, as a rare breed of artists creating superior

works of the imagination that truly deserved recognition as “literature.” Set apart from

ordinary books by their elegant format and gathered into standard editions and distin-

guished series, such masterpieces claimed the status of American “classics” on a par

with England’s best. “It is literature . . . that holds in precipitation the genius of the

country,” decreed Houghton Mifﬂ in editor Horace Scudder, “and the higher the form

of literature, the more consummate the expression of that spirit . . .” This canonizing

frame of mind, with its sacral view of art and its ranking of writers in a ﬁ nely graded

hierarchy, was well suited to the mood of the publishing establishment in the Gilded

Age. The heirs and successors to the leading family ﬁ rms – Appleton, Harper’s, Putnam,

Scribner’s – liked to downplay the commercial aspects of their trade. Publishing for

them was not so much a business as a profession with a high cultural mission. Happily,

philanthropy coincided with self-interest. Through national magazines (Atlantic, Harp-

er’s, Scribner’s, Century), major publishing houses served the cause of literature, while

promoting their authors and advertising themselves.

It would be a mistake to idealize the publishing world of the late nineteenth century.

Like any entrenched interest, industry insiders treated newcomers as interlopers. In the

1870s and 1880s, another wave of cheap ﬁ ction rose, with the appearance of George

Munro’s Seaside Library and similar series. Consisting of foreign novels reprinted in

magazine format, these books in disguise, like the earlier story papers, took advantage

of postal regulations and circulated as second-class mail. Mainstream ﬁ rms denounced

this violation of courtesy, which Munro scorned as “ ‘a right of possession’ based primar-

ily on the principle, or lack of principle, of ﬁ r s t g r a b .” Only with US ratiﬁ cation of

international copyright in 1891 were the reprinters driven out of business. Even so, the

establishment continued to face stiff competition from subscription publishers, who did

a handsome business selling Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant, and other popular writers

by advance order to the vast countryside. Despite their huge sales, such volumes, sneered

spokesmen for the regular trade, were “absolutely worthless,” with a “gaudy” appearance

belied by shoddy construction – “gorgeous binding, usually in very bad taste, thick but

cheap paper, outrageously poor wood-cuts, the largest type with the thickest leads.”

Only the ignorant, seduced by silver-tongued salesmen, would accept such “humbug.”

Clinging to a conservative vision of publishing as an elevated, gentlemanly affair, the

leading ﬁ rms stood apart from the expanding mass market cultivated by the purveyors

of cheap books and the entrepreneurs of popular journalism.

Elite and mass media together strengthened national perspectives in American life

at the expense of the local and the cosmopolitan. The process of change made for a

more uniform, standardized print culture. It eroded the position of country editors as

mediators between small towns and the wider world. It turned once-proud printers with

dreams of owning their own presses into a permanent industrial working class. It

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The United States 1800–1890 327

converted the civic organs of the early republic into sales bureaus for consumer culture.

And it gave vast license to the newspaper barons – Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph

Hearst – who built on the legacy of James Gordon Bennett and fashioned the “yellow

journalism” of the 1880s and 1890s. But national institutions of print also spread liter-

ary culture at home and abroad, winning grudging respect for American writers even

in London, where Fanny Fern was pirated not long after her US debut. Ultimately, the

advance of the publishing media enabled Americans to see themselves and the larger

world through native eyes. In that rise to literary independence, we can also discern an

ebbing of the cosmopolitanism that once was central to American print culture. In a

globalized world, where old habits of cultural nationalism clash with the urgent need

for international understanding, the making of American literature was not an unmixed

blessing.

References and Further Reading

Amory, Hugh and Hall, David D. (2000) A History

of the Book in America, vol. I: The Colonial Book

in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Baldasty, Gerald J. (1992) The Commercialization of

News in the Nineteenth Century. Madison: Univer-

sity of Wisconsin Press.

Barnhurst, Kevin G. and Nerone, John (2001)

The Form of News: A History. New York:

Guilford.

Brodhead, Richard H. (1986) The School of Haw-

thorne. New York: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Candy Gunther (2004) The Word in the

World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and

Reading in America, 1789–1880. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press.

Casper, Scott, Chaison, Joanne D., and Groves,

Jeffrey D. (eds.) (2002) Perspectives on American

Book History: Artifacts and Commentary. Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press.

—, Groves, Jeffrey D., Nissenbaum, Stephen W.,

et al. (forthcoming 2007) A History of the Book

in America, vol. III: The Industrial Book, 1840–

1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press.

Crouthamel, James L. (1989) Bennett’s New York

Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press. Syracuse:

Syracuse University Press.

Ellis, Joseph J. (1979) After the Revolution: Proﬁ les of

Early American Culture. New York: W. W.

Norton.

Greenspan, Ezra (2000) George Palmer Putnam: Rep-

resentative American Publisher. University Park:

Penn State University Press.

Gross, Robert A. and Kelley, Mary (forthcoming

2008) A History of the Book in America, vol. II:

An Extensive Republic: Books, Culture, and Society

in the New Nation, 1790–1840. Chapel Hill: Uni-

versity of North Carolina Press.

Henkin, David M. (1998) City Reading: Written

Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Johanningsmeier, Charles A. (1997) Fiction and the

American Literary Marketplace: The Role of News-

paper Syndicates in America, 1860–1900. New

York: Cambridge University Press.

John, Richard R. (1995) Spreading the News: The

American Postal System from Franklin to Morse.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kaser, David (1957) Messrs Carey & Lea of

Philadelphia: A Study in the History of the Book-

trade. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press.

Kelley, Mary (1985) Private Woman, Public Stage;

Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Leonard, Thomas C. (1986) Power of the Press: The

Birth of American Political Reporting. New York:

Oxford University Press.

— (1995) News for All: America’s Coming-of-age

with the Press. New York: Oxford University

Press.

ERC23.indd 327ERC23.indd 327 1/4/2007 5:32:25 PM1/4/2007 5:32:25 PM

328 Robert A. Gross

McGill, Meredith L. (2003) American Literature and

the Culture of Reprinting 1834–1853. Philadel-

phia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mott, Frank Luther (1962) American Journalism: A

History, 1690–1960, 3rd edn. New York:

Macmillan.

Nord, David Paul (2001) Communities of Journalism:

A History of American Newspapers and their Readers.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

— (2004) Faith in Fiction: Religious Publishing and

the Birth of Mass Media in America. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Pasley, Jeffrey L. (2001) “The Tyranny of Printers”:

Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic.

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Raven, James (2002) London Booksellers and American

Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community

and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811.

Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Schudson, Michael (1978) Discovering the News: A

Social History of American Newspapers. New York:

Basic.

Sheehan, Donald (1952) This Was Publishing: A

Chronicle of the Book Trade in the Gilded Age.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Starr, Paul (2004) The Creation of the Media: Political

Origins of Modern Communications. New York:

Basic.

Stewart, Donald Henderson (1969) The Opposition

Press of the Federalist Period. Albany: State Uni-

versity of New York Press.

Tebbel, John (1972–81) A History of Book Publishing

in the United States, 4 vols. New York: R. R.

Bowker.

Tucher, Andie (1994) Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty,

Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First

Mass Medium. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press.

Warner, Michael (1990) Letters of the Republic: Pub-

lication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-century

America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Winship, Michael (1995) American Literary Publish-

ing in the Mid-nineteenth Century: The Business of

Ticknor and Fields. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press.

Zboray, Ronald J. (1993) A Fictive People: Antebellum

Economic Development and the American Reading

Public. New York: Oxford University Press.

— and Zboray, Mary Saracino (2005) Literary

Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the

Mass Market Book. New York: Routledge.

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