2

The Book in the New Republic

The book is not an ideal object… it is a fabrication made of paper upon which thought symbols are printed. It does not contain thoughts; these must arise in the mind of the comprehending reader. It is a commodity produced for hard cash.

—An eighteenth-century German bookseller

Without him tyrants and humbugs in all countries would have their own way. He is a friend of intelligence and thought, a friend of liberty, of freedom, of law, indeed, the friend of every man who is a friend of order. Of all inventions, of all discoveries in science and art, of all the great results in the wonderful progress of mechanical energy and skill, the Printer is the only product of civilization necessary to the existence of free men.

—Charles Dickens (1850)

What is a book? Is it a commodity, like toothpaste, to be consumed by anyone who can be persuaded (the function of advertising) to buy one particular product instead of another? Or is a book a unique sign-system in which the reader necessarily participates as a producer of meanings, the locus of which is that one particular text? These two books—the book as manufactured artifact and the book as conveyor of meaning—are not the same, and during the course of this study I will discuss each in terms of the other. But I wish to begin more simply: with one book, the book as material fact and economic entity.

Privileging—or at least giving precedence—to that first book should not suggest that socioeconomic factors essentially determine the forms of literature. The process is more complex than that. The first American novelists, for example, were not totally discouraged by the fact that the economics of the early book trade distinctly discouraged American fiction. Furthermore, and as William Charvat some time ago observed, the model for the American book industry is not so much the diadic relationship of, in traditional capitalistic terms, the producer and the consumer, as a triadic interrelationship among the writer, the printer/publisher, and the reader. As Charvat argues: “The book trade is acted upon by both writer and reader, and in receiving their influence the book trade interprets and therefore transmutes it. Correspondingly, the writer and reader dictate to and are dictated to by the book trade.”¹

This complex intermediation of reader, writer, and printer/publisher/bookseller (the tradesmen of the profession) constituted, then as now, the American book industry. The Revolution, fostered by a native press perpetrating the ideology of independence, had encouraged New World printers to expand their trade.² Moreover, the suspension of trade with England during the war greatly encouraged local industry—both native printing and the manufacturing of paper, presses, ink, and type. With the resumption of peace and imports, a relatively large class of artisans, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs was already well established in the book trade and anxious both to protect and to extend what had been a recently flourishing business. Trade associations such as the Asylum Company of Journeymen Printers (1800) were formed, partly as professional organizations designed to assure the continuance of the apprentice system, but mostly to pressure Congress to enact protective tariffs for the American book trade.³ In one form or another, that trade was pursued until nearly every city, town, or village in the new Republic came into contact with the printer or his art—either through a local publisher (usually of a newspaper), a bookseller (who was often part of a larger book-distribution network), a general store (that carried staples of the book trade such as Bibles or almanacs), a literary agent (who annually or semiannually made his way through town), or at the very least an itinerant peddler (who hawked books along with other goods as he made his rural rounds).

By today’s standards, however, the book business in the early national period was strikingly small and localized, a situation that changed dramatically during the second quarter of the nineteenth century with the invention of mechanized printing, a technological advance in some ways as impressive and far-reaching as the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century.⁴ New methods of transporting books (better roads, shipping routes, and eventually the railway) also vastly altered the print industry during the later nineteenth century, as did increased urbanization. Largely centralized, this new printing industry produced massive quantities of inexpensive books that could be expeditiously distributed to a wide audience. But if the printers of the early national period looked forward to this brave new world of mass publishing, they were still partly grounded in a very different Colonial print world. The supplies of the trade (and especially type) had to be obtained from England; most books in America were imported rather than published at home; and only a limited number of books (chapbooks, almanacs, Bibles, and a few other steady sellers) were readily available to the populace at large. Although the Revolution had officially ended that world, almost half a century would elapse before American publishing would be consolidated into large dynastic houses and cheap books would become big business.

The American novel first appeared during the time when the domestic publishing industry enjoyed a new sense of vigor, nationalism, and professional pride (but not much capital) and when every printer faced the renewed (and debilitating) competition from foreign imports, especially British imports. So the novelist, like the printer of the early period, operated within a transitional book market. An earlier, essentially aristocratic, system (primarily European) had supported through patronage or subscription the works of a relatively limited group of writers. The rising middle class, with its increasingly voracious appetite for books, especially novels, portended a new mass patronage of books based not on a work’s appeal to the gentry but on its general popularity. The steadily increasing demand for books by the middle class prompted many writers to try to earn a living by their pen. But, as Martha Woodmansee has noted, in both late eighteenth-century Europe and America, none of “the requisite legal, economic, and political arrangements and institutions were yet in place to support the large number of writers who came forward.”⁵ The struggles of the book industry during the early national period and the struggles by native American novelists to establish their own genre mirror each other. In both cases, the spirit was willing, even if the economy was not.

The “average” printer of the early national period (surely a historical construct) who brought forth a novel, especially one by an unknown American writer, hoped that the volume might sell several hundred copies, enough to reimburse production costs and perhaps pay something over.⁶ But the author only rarely profited by these literary transactions. Although an author such as Noah Webster supported himself handsomely by writing in nonfictional forms, not until the 1820s did America produce a financially successful novelist. James Fenimore Cooper, after publishing The Spy in 1821, went on to become, during the course of that decade, the “American Sir Walter Scott” (a comparison he found odious), to sell as many as forty thousand volumes a year and to achieve an average income of some $6,500 annually from his fiction.⁷ Susanna Haswell Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster had published extensively before him, but neither of these best-selling novelists realized anything remotely resembling Cooper’s financial success, and both supported themselves throughout their lives in ways other than by writing fiction. For a variety of legal and social reasons, their sales did not translate into a commensurate income. Cooper, in contrast, was fortunate enough to begin his career right at the time when the book industry was undergoing the dramatic alternations that made his success possible and even, to a degree, predictable.⁸

Although Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791)—later known as Charlotte Temple—had sold nearly forty thousand copies by the first decade of the nineteenth century, many of the copies were from pirated editions that brought no recompense to either the author or her American publisher. That publisher’s first edition, it might also be noted, ran to only one thousand copies.⁹ One of the country’s most prosperous and sagacious early printers, Mathew Carey simply had no basis for predicting the popularity of Rowson’s book. In fact, a first printing of a late eighteenth century American novel typically ran somewhere between three hundred and fifteen hundred copies, so Carey’s edition of Charlotte was relatively large by the standards of the time. In contrast, by 1825 a press run of ten thousand copies for an American novel was not unheard of; by 1830 the paperback novels or “story papers” that were distributed as “newspapers” through the U.S. postal system were regularly run in editions of thirty thousand copies.¹⁰ Mass publishing had become possible—and profitable—in ways that Carey could only dream of. New copyright laws (to be discussed further in this chapter) also aided later writers. Thus Charles Brockden Brown could complain of pirated English books being sold at a fraction of the price of native products and swamping the American market; on the other hand, Cooper complained of his books being pirated by British companies and being sold in England, often in poorly printed, condensed, and retitled versions designed to appeal to the British reader.¹¹ In a real sense, the rapid development of American publishing, with the concomitant flourishing of the American novel, after the first quarter of the nineteenth century highlights the obstacles that confronted the earlier publishers and authors—cumbersome printing techniques and inefficient methods for distribution, no national or international copyright laws whereby an author’s or publisher’s rights could be protected, and a flood of competing European imprints on the American market.

Looking now in more detail at the methods of book production and distribution during the early national period, I would first emphasize that until well into the nineteenth century, printing, publishing, and marketing were usually three sides of the same business. An author was required to contact a printer and contract with him (rarely, her) to have a new book brought before the American public.¹² The author’s official recompense would be whatever the printer agreed to pay for the rights to an edition of a certain number. Often the actual recompense was whatever the printer was finally able or willing to pay. The printer’s recompense would come from the sale of those same volumes, so the printing shop that was also a publishing establishment was usually a bookstore, too. In this third establishment the printer also had to be his own entrepreneur. Through newspaper and magazine advertisements, through the vital exchange systems with booksellers in other areas, through literary agents, and through book subscriptions the printer sought to sell his product. Such industry was required. Since publishers were often small local businesses in a large land with a sparse and scattered population, it was difficult to gain a large audience for most books. But fiction especially was badly served by regional publication and limited availability. It is significant, in this regard, that until 1820 local printers (independent printers outside the major cities) still published over 50 percent of American fiction, even though fiction—unlike, say, newspapers or almanacs—was not really “local.” By midcentury, however, when the novel business was flourishing, only 8 percent of American fiction was still published by local, regional printers.¹³

The early publisher had to make difficult decisions during a time of uncertain and rapidly changing literary tastes. Consistent with the sectarian or revivalist religions and the volatile partisan politics that divided society, reading was split into different camps, too. There was a demand for such literary entertainment as captivity narratives, travel books, the new personalized histories and biographies (all ostensibly nonfiction), and especially for novels. There was also a vogue in self-improvement books, ranging from reading-and-writing manuals (including dictionaries, primers, readers, and penmanship books) to books on etiquette, fashion, or even hairstyles.¹⁴ Which works to publish and where to sell them? As publishers also knew, some old Colonial standbys, Bibles and other traditional religious works such as Pilgrim’s Progress, as well as occasional political pamphlets and almanacs, were often extraordinarily popular. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense reputedly sold one hundred fifty thousand copies and sparked a revolution.¹⁵ Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac sold ten thousand copies per year; Nathaniel Ames’s almanac sold sixty-five thousand copies annually. In one small town, Leominster, Massachusetts, for example, Elizabeth Carroll Reilly has determined that in 1772 Thomas Legate, a local storekeeper, purchased over twelve dozen almanacs—enough for three quarters of the town’s families.¹⁶ We might also note Noah Webster’s 1803 boast that his A Grammatical Institute of the English Language … Part I (1783), later retitled The American Spelling Book, had sold 3 million copies.¹⁷ Indeed, the Reverend Elijah R. Sabin, in the preface to his novel, The Life and Reflections of Charles Observator (1816), found it necessary “to obviate” the “common objection” that “there are already too many books in the world!”¹⁸

The problem for the printer, then, was not that there was no money to be made in books but in determining which books made money. The prodigious success of a few titles made the matter especially difficult. Why did Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797) sell so well? Even more curious was the appeal of the anonymous The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1794), a book that was reprinted in both cheap and relatively expensive editions in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Maryland. How could a publisher gauge the demand (or lack of one) for a specific title? Would a book (especially a novel) offend censorious critics? Would it be lively enough for an increasingly secularized public? Those decisions were all the more crucial in that for most printers there was little margin for error. Isaiah Thomas or Mathew Carey skillfully plumbed and primed the market, but printing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was not, in general, a remunerative profession. When Benjamin Franklin founded, for example, the Franklin Society in 1788, he did so in order to provide for aging, indigent printers or their orphaned progeny.¹⁹ As both the purpose and the bylaws of this benevolent organization attest, printers often left their survivors nothing but debts. Few publishing establishments maintained a stable business over an extended period of time. Partners, locations, and printing shops were often changed, and such changes were often designed to skirt insolvency or bankruptcy. In fact (and a telling fact it is), out of all the hundreds of Colonial and late-eighteenth-century American publishers, only one establishment—that of Mathew Carey—survived until well into the nineteenth century.²⁰

Operating with little capital and considerable overhead, these printers of the early national period knew that their business was precarious and that one major miscalculation could spell ruin. They consequently tended to be both hardheaded in committing themselves to some publishing venture and cautious in carrying it out. The market would be carefully assessed and so would the cost of the project, especially such negotiable terms as an author’s payment (or expenses, for the author was sometimes required to bear part or all of the cost of the printing). Sometimes a publisher might advertise a book in advance of publication to stake (according to the unwritten laws of the trade) his claim to a title or to see how much interest a particular title elicited from prospective readers.²¹ Many titles consequently exist today as ghost books, works that were never published at all.²² Faced with the uncertain prospects of a new project, a publisher might decide that it would be wiser to publish another edition of a known work by a known writer (European or American) instead of taking a chance on an untested book and author. Printers were particularly cautious with the early American novel. Socially and morally suspect, the form was also new and untried in its American guise. To cut costs, most novels not only were published in small editions but were themselves small. Early American novels were rarely longer than three hundred pages and sometimes shorter than a hundred pages. It should also come as no surprise that most early printers, like most authors, brought forth only one American novel during the course of a whole career.

The early publisher who decided to print a particular volume generally did so in a cottage-industry fashion. His shop might have one or two indentured apprentices, often as young as six or seven years of age. The apprentices took care of such unpleasant chores as “treading out the pelts,” literally stomping on sheep pelts that had soaked for several days in the slop pail, a first step in making the ink balls necessary to ink the type. Apprentices and the printer’s children, too, would help with cleaning, would sort type, and when strong enough would actually operate the heavy presses. The work was hard. Several eighteenth-century accounts describe the usual build and gait of one who had long served at the press—an enormously developed right arm, a limp from having used the right foot on the “step” in order to make the “pull,” and sometimes even distended or permanently dislocated shoulders.²³ The work was also general. To supplement the income from the press, the printer’s wife might run the town post office out of the print shop; often she sold books (those imported or exchanged from different booksellers as well as those printed in the shop) and other goods—everything from household items and her own handicrafts to theater or lottery tickets, stationery, pens, ink, and fancy imported products. The printer was responsible for everything else: keeping track of supplies (before 1800, many of these were imported; after 1800, they were typically manufactured in the shop itself), setting type, seeing books through the entire publication process, and overseeing the sale of the published run.

The printer’s main business, in short, was to turn the author’s manuscript into a salable commodity and then to sell it. Conducting that business, he assumed functions that would be later delegated to the authors themselves or to specialized editors. To start with, what we might term the printer’s artistic control usually began with his deciphering the original handwritten text, for rarely would he query the author about smudged, illegible words or problematic passages. The usual procedure was to insert any word or words that seemed to fit. In addition, the printer would silently “correct” (not always accurately) any mistakes in the author’s punctuation, spellings and usage.²⁴ Typically, the printer did the only proofreading, too, and did so as much from an artisan’s concern for his own craft as from any commitment to the integrity of the author’s text.²⁵ Even though printers often boasted of the accuracy of a text, it is clear, from surveying the hundreds of editions and “duplicate” copies of American novels published prior to 1820, that one area in which the individual printer fully exercised printerly prerogatives was in the physical layout of both the page and the book as a whole.²⁶ Especially important, in this context, was the selection of typefaces, since varying type sizes and different spacings between letters were regularly used for emphasis.²⁷ A fairly innocuous sentence could easily be given a more sensational cast by the strategic italicizing or capitalizing of words such as SEDUCTION or INCEST. Such printing devices naturally helped to sell books; such devices also testified that the book sold thereby was a product of both the writer’s and the printer’s art. Sometimes the advertisements for books even emphasized the printer’s art more than the writer’s, as in the ad of Isaiah Thomas, Jr., for Sukey Vickery’s Emily Hamilton (1803): “The work will be neatly printed on good paper and a fair type, in a 12mo. volume, and will make about 300 pages. The price to Subscribers will be 75 cents, neatly bound and lettered.”²⁸

Intermediating between author and audience, the printer played a crucial role in shaping early American culture. Printers determined what possible volumes would become available, in what number, at what price, and where and how they would be sold. As Bernard Bailyn observes, printers were “at once the handicraftsmen, entrepreneurs, and cultural leaders” who were “second in importance only to the clergy as leaders of opinion and public educators.”²⁹ The new American novel could not have been established had the printers of the time decided that Bibles, broadsides, and Fanny Burney or Robert Bage would sell better, and then devoted their efforts to that end. But the printers had their reasons, as businessmen and cultural leaders, for recognizing a possible market for a native literature, for fostering that market, for, in effect, attending as both midwife and godfather to the birth of a new American literary form.

A book’s trials, however, were by no means over once some printer looked upon it favorably and was persuaded to bring forth an edition. The volumes of that edition then had to be sold, which was always a difficult task in a large and sparsely settled country that lacked any effective means of generally distributing goods. Many printers were located in smaller cities and towns, and even those in the larger cities did not have access to a concentrated population comparable to England’s London. Whereas a million people lived in late eighteenth-century London, there were less than 45,000 in Philadelphia (then America’s largest city) and some 20,000 lived in Boston. According to the first American census of 1790, the combined population of America’s five largest cities was only 123,475, and the total population of the United States was 3,929,624.³⁰ It was not a demography that made for effective marketing. The population was widely scattered; the cities were relatively small; the local markets were quickly saturated. Matters were further complicated in that the one effective means of transporting large quantities of books was by sea, which meant that the coastal cities were readily supplied by volumes printed abroad. Besides, the mass of the growing population more and more lived beyond the older coastal cities and depended mostly on rudimentary roads, navigable waterways (including some early canals), and itinerant tradesmen for their commercial dealings with the larger world. In such circumscribed settings, many books circulated only locally, and writers in one area were often unaware of what their fellows in another were doing—if, indeed, they even knew of the existence of those fellows. Joseph Dennie, in a letter to Royall Tyler regarding the Walpole, New Hampshire, publication of Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, aptly summarizes the too-common consequence of the combined problems of local printing and precarious distribution: “Your novel has been examined by the few and approved. It is however extremely difficult for the Bostonians to supply themselves with a book that slumbers in a stall at Walpole, supposed, by the latest and most accurate advertisements, to be situated 400 miles north of their meridian.”³¹

Four hundred miles was a formidable distance. To travel by stagecoach from Boston to Walpole might take two weeks or longer. Nor was it an inexpensive trip. In 1800, a stagecoach journey could cost as much as $1 for ten miles.³² Such fares were more than the early book trade could bear. Both booksellers and books, along with the whole budding manufacturing economy of the early Republic, required more expeditious, efficient, and inexpensive methods of transportation. Obviously mindful of this general problem, Isaiah Thomas purchased shares in several of the new turnpikes of the turn of the century—the Worcester and Stafford Turnpike, the Sixteenth Massachusetts Turnpike, and the Templeton and Fitzwilliam turnpikes.³³ These new roads—sometimes toll roads, sometimes supported by local subscription—were being built in Connecticut and Massachusetts, in New York, New Jersey, and parts of Pennsylvania. At the same time, too, a complex system of canals connecting rivers and towns in the Northeast was also begun. Such important early canals as those in Massachusetts on the Connecticut River at South Hadley or at Turner’s Falls and, later, the Middlesex Canal at Lowell allowed goods to be moved in large quantities and at relatively low cost.

William Charvat has argued that Philadelphia and, later, New York began to replace Boston as the nation’s publishing capital precisely because these cities had, through newly available waterways, relatively easy access to the ever-growing western regions of the country, which increasingly constituted a major market for American imprints.³⁴ Philadelphia’s growing ascendancy dated, however, from the Revolutionary War era. Numerous printers had established themselves there during the war to print government pamphlets and tracts. Philadelphia was also the most important site for manufacturing presses, largely because one man, Adam Ramage, the new nation’s finest press builder, had settled in that city in 1790 and had been followed by others who wanted to learn—and to improve upon—his trade. Furthermore, Pennsylvania was also a center for paper making in America. There were over one hundred paper mills in the state by 1800 and just over two hundred by the time of the 1810 census.³⁵ Of course, problems of transportation applied as much to presses and paper as to the finished product, the printed book. And happily situated though he may have been—with the materials for his business close at hand, living in the largest city, and with easy access to an ever-larger market—the Philadelphia printer still had to sell his product to survive.

The imprint on the title page of the first edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) indicates the way in which one Philadelphia printer sought to carry his books to the larger market: “Printed and published by H. Maxwell… and sold by Messrs. T. Dobson, R. Campbell, H. and P. Rice, A. Dickins, and the principal booksellers in the neighbouring states.” Confronting a growing demand for books (both those published in America and those imported from abroad), printers established and elaborated an extensive network of booksellers. Volumes published by Mathew Carey in Philadelphia, for example, turned up in bookstores as far away as Boston and New Orleans, while Benjamin Franklin had contracted with such printers as Williams Parks and William Hunter to sell his books in the vast colony of Virginia.³⁶ Perhaps the most complex network in the new Republic was established by Isaiah Thomas. This marvel of makeshift practicality was comprised of loose trade agreements with scattered booksellers, agreements Thomas sustained when they seemed profitable but abandoned when they proved unprofitable or if a particular bookseller seemed unreliable or dishonest. These agreements did get books to the outlying markets, as is clear from an advertisement in the Farmer’s Weekly Museum of Walpole, New Hampshire, an ad that ran almost weekly from July 24 to October 1, 1798: “The following Books, with many others, just received from Worcester and Boston, may be had of Thomas and Thomas at the Walpole Bookstore as cheap as either of those places.” Included in the offer were three new American novels, The Algerine Captive, The American Bee, and The Female Review (all published the previous year) along with several popular British standbys—Pamela, Robinson Crusoe, and The Vicar of Wakefield—as well as schoolbooks, spelling books, dictionaries, and assorted supplies such as playing cards, ink, lead pencils, slate pencils, marbled paper, and blank books (bound unprinted books in which one could keep accounts or diaries). The advertisement concludes: “Orders from a distance, for books or newspapers, strictly adhered to. A liberal discount to country traders.” The discount to the country trader was a common way in which the early American printer brought others into his distributing network. These country traders, whether itinerants or general storekeepers, served the most rural population. They often obtained books not from booksellers but from large dry goods merchants in the major cities.³⁷ Their stock-in-trade was mostly established best-sellers, Bibles, hymnbooks, and almanacs. Thomas encouraged both groups to expand their literary offerings and to purchase their expanded stock directly from him.

What effect did the improved transportation systems and the expanding publisher’s networks have on the shape of American fiction? Obviously, that is a difficult question to answer. But it is worth noting that nearly all of America’s novels published prior to 1820 were first published in the North. There were exceptions, such as George Fowler’s A Flight to the Moon; or The Vision of Randalthus (1813) and John Neal’s Keep Cool (1817), both published in Baltimore; or (Adam Douglass’s) The Irish Emigrant (1817) published in Winchester, Virginia; or (Jesse Lynch Holman’s) The Prisoners of Niagara; or, Errors of Education (1810) published in Frankfort, Kentucky. But these volumes were all issued after 1809, with only marginal success, and none enjoyed a second edition. To put the matter in its most general terms, the new American novels tended to do best where they could best be distributed. As William J. Gilmore has argued, the vagaries of an imperfect distribution system governed both trade and society: “Economic growth and social differentiation of a township were, to a large extent, a function of geography and transportation networks. All levels of cultural participation … were partly dependent upon this same interrelationship of geography and transportation. All printed items traveled along the same roads and rivers as shoes and sheep, and were inhibited by the same mountains and mud.” Gilmore even finds that levels of elementary literacy “vary directly with the level of involvement in the market economy” as well as with access to print culture.³⁸ It is interesting to speculate in this connection on how different the structure of American literature might be had the South had better roads or a more active publishing industry or been more accessible to the major Northern publishing centers in the years after the Revolution. The American Renaissance well might have had a Southern drawl instead of a distinctly Yankee twang.³⁹

Hawkers also helped a cumbersome book distribution system to work. Essentially traveling salesmen, they supplied booksellers in little towns and villages or dealt directly with individual buyers who otherwise had no ready access to the book trade. In the tradition of chapmen—itinerants who had previously sold mostly chapbooks, penny histories, pamphlets, ballads, and inexpensive children’s books—the turn-of-the-century peddlers carried the latest literary products of the cities out into the hinterland. The increasing need for this service was perhaps most marked by the changing reputation of the hawker. The profession by the end of the eighteenth century had lost some of the stigma of Puritan and Colonial days when laws had been passed forbidding hawkers from selling their wares in Massachusetts and even forbidding “taverners, alehouse keepers, common victuallers and retailers” from “receiv[ing] or giv[ing] any entertainment to any hawker, peddler or petty chapman.”⁴⁰ These laws (primarily resulting from a suspicion of the printed word and a fear of the harm it might wreak upon the “unwary” rural population) were no longer enforced even before the Revolution, and the peddler with his horsedrawn wagon continued to ply his wares through rural postrevolutionary America, often selling the occasional novel along with his pots and pans, sometimes selling the occasional pot or pan along with his novels, Bibles, and other books. Occasionally, a charismatic peddler became almost a folk hero to the populace who awaited his arrival not only for books and goods, but also for news of events, fashions, and scandals in distant places. Correspondingly, the literary peddler became more sensitive to the book-buying needs and interests of the people.⁴¹

One obvious way to successful bookselling was taken by literary agents who concentrated on the larger and more accessible country towns and especially those such as Andover, Massachusetts, or Exeter, New Hampshire, that had some commitment to the values of education. But other agents were required to go beyond the main highways and byways. Long before Willy Loman, the outposts of New England tested many a salesman. In the farthest reaches of New England, in the territories of the Northwest ordinance, on the Eastern seaboard, and throughout the Deep South, selling books was difficult and often thankless work. John Tebbel discusses one agent whose meticulous accounts attest to an average sale of a book a day, the profit from which would barely cover the cost of the agent’s meals on the road. Nor was this unusual. James Gilreath has argued that most literary agents were forced to pursue their profession only seasonally and supplemented their income from book peddling through other trades such as farming, black-smithing, clockmaking, or cordwaining; many worked as literary agents only a short time before returning to more lucrative and less demanding occupations.⁴² Nevertheless, some agents still rose to the challenge posed by this difficult profession.

The most successful, the most popular, and certainly the most colorful of the early book peddlers was undoubtedly Mason Locke Weems. Parson Weems (as he was affectionately known) traveled extensively throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, selling Mathew Carey’s stock, including Weems’s own The Life of George Washington (1808), a steady seller in the first part of the nineteenth century. Timing his appearances to coincide with country fairs, elections, market days, or other local events, Weems would enter onto the scene crying out “Seduction! Revolution! Murder!” A literary Friar Tuck, boisterous and charismatic, Weems was also a shrewd master of the literary marketplace. As he traveled around the country selling books, he also constantly sounded out booksellers and individual readers as to their literary preferences and then shaped his own impressionistic biographies accordingly, thereby anticipating the contemporary movie or television practice of polling the prospective audience and then creating the desired product. In addition, Weems advertised future projects at the same time that he sold his present stock, thus eliminating some of the vagaries of distribution by getting a sense of audience demand even as he also effectively fostered that demand.⁴³ Weems profited extensively from both his writing and his selling. His own highly fictionalized biographies were immensely popular, and once he demonstrated his success as an agent, he was able to negotiate with Carey for a 25 percent straight commission instead of the usual 5 percent for which he had first worked.⁴⁴

Since Weems met the readers, talked with them, and knew their literary preferences as well as anyone in America, he regularly advised Carey on how best to conduct his business: “Let [the books] be of the gay and sprightly kind,” he counseled his employer. “Novels, decent plays, elegant Histories, etc. Let the Moral & Religious be as highly dulcified as possible.”⁴⁵ Weems especially advocated the publishing of fiction. Carey, of course, printed both European and American novels (including the best-selling Charlotte) and imported still other titles, so on this score there was no real difference between the two men. On a related topic, however, there was. In letter after letter, Weems argued that Carey’s books—especially the entertainments the public craved—were too expensive for the average rural buyer. Here Weems’s counsel was at odds with Carey’s costs—and with Weems’s, too, it might be added. The manufacturing and distribution expenses of the time simply did not allow for book prices that the public could generally afford—an impasse that would not be resolved for a few more decades. Later technological advances—such as horse- and steam-powered presses that replaced the old manually operated presses, the invention of rollers that accomplished in one motion the inking previously performed laboriously by hand, the invention of the Napier-Hoe cylinder press, and the production of machine-made paper—allowed the American publisher of the second quarter of the nineteenth century to print faster and cheaper than at any time previously in Western history and to produce thereby books that were genuinely affordable by the masses. But before that time, Weems had clearly sounded the direction in which publishing had to progress.

How much did turn-of-the-century books costs? The question is difficult to answer if we attempt to translate prices of the time into current figures. The whole structure of salaries and costs was different, and we cannot simply discount backward for two centuries of fluctuating inflation. A good estimate might be that a typical late eighteenth-century novel would have cost approximately three to four times more than an equivalent hardcover volume today (when measured against current wages and consumer indices).⁴⁶ But a more meaningful measure would be in terms of a late-eighteenth-century economy. In 1800, a carpenter in Massachusetts earned $1 per day, an unskilled laborer half that much. A pound of sugar cost $.13, a pair of leather shoes $.80, and cotton cloth $1 a yard.⁴⁷ A novel typically cost between $.75 and $1.50 (although one pirated edition of the popular The History of Constantius and Pulchera, paperbound and only 11 cm high, sold for only $.25).⁴⁸ A common day laborer in Massachusetts had to work two days to buy a copy of Wieland (1798). For the same amount, he could purchase a bushel of potatoes and a half bushel of corn. The cost of books was less clear for one class of people most likely to want to buy them—schoolteachers. Their wages fluctuated dramatically, depending on the wealth of the community as well as the qualifications, and sometimes the gender, of the teacher. For example, a “qualified woman teacher” in Connecticut could earn $.67 per week (board with local families being included in the salary), whereas “a man of culture and experience” might receive as much as $20 per month in addition to board in an affluent community.⁴⁹ Ethan Allen Greenwood, who would later become one of the prominent painters of his generation, earned $3 a month at his first teaching job in rural Massachusetts at the turn of the century, and then $14 a month at his second. From Greenwood’s comprehensive accounts, we also know what many of his expenses were. For $.37 he might have dinner at a local tavern or lodging at an inn for one night, while $.20 would cover the cost of a week’s washing. His firewood cost $2.75 a month (twice that much in severe weather), and a stagecoach ride in Connecticut from Suffield to Hartford cost $1.12. At the end of a typical month, there would be little left for luxuries such as a novel, and we know that Greenwood, an avid reader, mostly borrowed his books instead of buying them until well into his prosperous middle years.⁵⁰

The cost of books was high for anyone in the new Republic, but it was almost prohibitively so for rural citizens. One of the main complaints of the twelve hundred farmers who participated in Shays’s Rebellion of 1786–87 was that they simply did not have enough currency, a lack that plagued many rural citizens until well into the nineteenth century. The problem was sometimes partly alleviated by relying on “country pay,” a barter system among families, local businesses, and itinerant peddlers whereby farm produce and products of home industry were exchanged for manufactured goods.⁵¹ Sometimes books and other printed matter were part of this rural market-exchange system as is evident from an advertisement run in several issues of a struggling newspaper published in Springfield, Massachusetts: “Those gentlemen who engaged for their papers in grain are once more requested to make immediate payment, as the printers are in much want of that article.”⁵² But printers also needed paper and other supplies for which they could not always exchange the finished products of their art. Consider, in this context, another advertisement published on the end sheet of a turn-of-the-century novel: “PRINTING in all its GREAT VARIETY, performed on Reasonable Terms by I. Thomas, Jr. Worcester. Said Thomas keeps a large Variety of Books which he will sell very low for Cash.”⁵³ Cash was the preferred medium of exchange for all printers, either at the time of purchase or as soon afterward as possible. Credit was, however, widely extended, especially to farmers and planters, who often received an annual payment for crops and then paid (or did not pay) their bills accordingly. The account books of Mathew Carey in Philadelphia, Isaiah Thomas in Worcester, Massachusetts, and William Hunter in Williamsburg, Virginia, all reveal that buying books on time was commonplace and accounted for as much as 70 percent of annual sales.⁵⁴

Even if books could occasionally be purchased with chickens, salt pork, or a promissory note, they were not necessities, and, for many, late eighteenth-century America afforded few luxuries. As Samuel Griswold Goodrich (“Peter Parley”), a popular nineteenth-century writer, later recalled, writing of the small town in Connecticut in which he lived in 1790:

Money was scarce, wages being about fifty cents a day, though these were generally paid in meat, vegetables, and other articles of use—seldom in money.… Books and newspapers—which are now diffused even among the country towns so as to be in the hands of all, young and old—were then scarce, and were read respectfully, as if they were grave matters, demanding thought and attention.… Even the young approached a book with reverence, and a newspaper with awe. How the world has changed!⁵⁵

Books were expensive; they were difficult to sell; yet the publisher’s economic survival depended on sales. Sales in advance were the best sales of all in that they allowed for a more accurate calculation of possible profit. It is not surprising, then, that a subscription campaign sometimes arranged by a traveling agent such as Weems often preceded the sale (either by the printer or the agent) of the published volume and often determined whether that volume would be published. But subscription, too, had its drawbacks. Consumers were reluctant to pay in advance for a product that could not be examined in advance. Rural readers might well wonder if they would ever see the literary agent again after he had collected their deposits and departed, and they had little faith in the probity of printers they did not know. Would the publisher deliver what his agent had promised? Was his agent legitimate? What recourse had they if the purchased product was not produced or not delivered? Not even famous European authors could be assured of American subscription sales. Rousseau’s The Social Contract, published in Albany, New York, in 1797, secured only 207 subscribers; Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (which would become a “classic” in its imported, European editions) simply could not raise the three hundred subscribers necessary to make a 1787 American imprint feasible, and so an American edition was delayed until 1802.⁵⁶

When established authors such as Rousseau and Montesquieu could not attract subscribers for their major works, then why would an unknown American’s as yet unpublished novel do better? The printer’s aim was to cover, through subscription sales, the cost of issuing the volume, which for an edition of one thousand copies for a novel of the size of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, First Part, might run to some $500.⁵⁷ An American novel selling at, say, $1 per copy (the cost of the first volume of Arthur Mervyn) simply could not attract the necessary subscribers to repay its initial production costs. Isaiah Thomas, Jr., tried to raise subscriptions from the inhabitants of Worcester County, Massachusetts, for the first novel to be published in that area and promised to publish the names should three hundred people subscribe. The names were not printed with Emily Hamilton, presumably because the campaign was not successful, and the book was published on other terms. Moreover, when we do find subscription lists bound with early novels, there are always fewer than two hundred entries: in Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart (1795), some 140 names; in Herman Mann’s Female Review (1797), just under 200 names; in Samuel Relf’s Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment (1797), 146 entries; in the anonymous Humanity in Algiers (1801), approximately 150 names. The publisher could hardly expect a profit from any of these editions if the subscription list represented the likely market for his book. Again, there were strange vagaries in the early book trade, for some volumes did attract subscribers. A book by the feminist Judith Sargent Murray, The Gleaner (1798)—which includes the novella “Story of Margaretta”—drew 675 subscribers; Daniel Bryan’s The Mountain Muse: Comprising the Adventures of Daniel Boone (1813), a verse narrative, had a phenomenal 1,350 subscribers from Connecticut, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and—the most by far—Virginia. Obviously, given the right subject, the right circumstances, and the right promotion, a book could do extraordinarily well. The problem was to get all of those particulars right.

As I have shown, buying novels in quantity (either by subscription or after publication) was well beyond the means of common people at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet there is evidence that those of modest to low income increasingly read many books. Ethan Allen Greenwood read nearly a volume a day even during his poorest student days. But he largely borrowed these books by joining three libraries—a fraternity library, a social library, and a circulating library—and literally thousands of other readers (especially novel readers) did essentially the same. Book borrowing was singularly intertwined with not just the rapid growth of reading and readerships but with an increasing demand for novels. In the succinct formulation of Robert B. Winans: “The increase in the number of circulating libraries was largely the result of the increasing demand for novels; the general growth of the reading public was caused primarily by the novel.”⁵⁸

The circulating libraries were the least expensive to join and were most directly linked to the popularity of fiction. In general, however, the development of a library system made books available to more readers than ever before, and, conversely, the upsurge in the number of libraries indicates the increasing avidity of early American readers as well as the changing demography of advanced literacy skills. Jesse H. Shera, for example, has calculated that between 1731 (the founding of the first library in New England) and 1800, a total of 376 social libraries were founded in America, 266 of which were founded in the decade from 1791 to 1800.⁵⁹ By the end of the century, most larger cities had several libraries catering to different classes and different tastes; even small towns generally boasted at least one library. The libraries, in short, helped to solve a major problem of distribution in the early national period in that they made books both accessible and affordable to a rapidly growing and largely new class of readers.

Many of the early American libraries were founded with the same rationale (and for the same unprivileged group of potential readers) as the first one of 1731. Realizing there were far more books that he wanted to read than he could afford, a young printer, Benjamin Franklin, drew up a plan for a “public subscription library” and set out to find prospective subscribers: “So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia and the majority of us so poor that I was not able with great industry to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each and ten shillings per annum. With this little fund we began.… The library was open one day in the week for lending [books] to subscribers.… The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns and in other provinces.”⁶⁰ The demand for reading became more widespread, especially among women of all classes and workers of both sexes, and was soon reflected in the early fiction itself. In The Factory Girl (1814), the first novel of factory life in America, the heroine Mary Burham organizes the other workers to form a school and a library much on the Franklin model.⁶¹ Or we might briefly note the bylaws of the Union Harwinton Library, which was begun by seventeen residents of a small Connecticut village fifteen miles west of Hartford. The Harwinton subscribers leveled such fines as $.01 “for each blot or blur in any book in any part where there is no reading and of the size of three common letters” or $.02 “for tearing a leaf through the margin”; and the library’s treasurer carefully recorded each blot or tear in the group’s small but precious stock of books.⁶²

The social or subscription libraries were supplemented by two other kinds of public libraries, the institutional libraries and the circulating libraries. The differences between these three types frequently were blurred. In general, institutional libraries such as those at the men’s colleges were not accessible to the mass population, whereas social libraries typically charged shareholders an annual membership fee and normally also required the purchasing of shares (sometimes for as much as $20 a share). These latter libraries, such as the New York Society Library, consequently tended to serve the more affluent segments of society and to select their holdings accordingly. In contrast, the circulating library was a commercial library (typically owned by a bookseller) that stocked the most popular books of the day and rented them at terms affordable even by common laborers. Libraries such as the H. Caritat Library in New York, the Philadelphia Circulating Library, and the Circulating Library of W. Pelham of Massachusetts charged only $6 a year and frequently allowed subscribers to pay their subscriptions by the year, half-year, quarter, or even month—a concession to those who might not have much ready cash on hand. For a relatively small fee, a borrower was allowed, at the Philadelphia Library, “three single volumes, or the whole set of any work, which are not to be charged oftener than once in each day.”⁶³ The most intrepid reader on a modest income thus had access to an ample supply of books that could also be further circulated among friends and family members. There are numerous eighteenth-century accounts of the serving maid who read her mistress’s novels as she carried them home from the library or of one woman reading a novel aloud to others as they quilted or spun. The circle of readers, in other words, extended well beyond the list of a library’s subscribers.⁶⁴

It should be clear that the burgeoning library system allowed many readers to read more books than ever before, and we also know, from the holdings and the records of these libraries, that more and more of the books read were novels. This tendency, however, was resisted in some quarters. For example, the Concord (Massachusetts) Charitable Library Society (1795–1800) explicitly excluded all novels except the Reverend Jeremy Belknap’s The Foresters and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield from its holdings. So absolute was the proscription that when one woman patron brought her copy of The Coquette into the library, the librarian made a point of noting in the records that this book was privately owned and not part of the collection.⁶⁵ But such dedication to the antifiction cause was rare, and especially so with the circulating libraries that catered to the less affluent and had to anticipate the tastes of prospective borrowers in order to survive. Here fiction prevailed. Sometimes as much as 75 percent of a collection consisted of novels. The H. Caritat Library in New York, for example, offered approximately 1,450 titles under the heading “Romances, Novels, Adventures, & c.”⁶⁶ Of this same library, John Davis, an Englishman traveling through the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, humorously observed:

Its shelves could scarcely sustain the weight of Female Frailty, the Posthumous Daughter, and the Cavern of Woe; they required the aid of a carpenter to support the burden of the Cottage-on-the-Moor, the House of Tynian, and the Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; or they groaned under the multiplied editions of the Devil in Love, More Ghosts, and Rinaldo Rinaldini. Novels were called for by the young and old; from the tender virgin of thirteen, whose little heart went pit-a-pat at the approach of a beau; to the experienced matron of three score, who could not read without spectacles.⁶⁷

It might also be observed that the H. Caritat catalog of 1804 included a lengthy defense of both fiction and circulating libraries, clearly implying the connection between the two (although part of the defense itself is not so convincing): “The decrease of drunkenness in this country is, perhaps, owing to the introduction of circulating libraries, which may be considered as temples erected by literature to attract the votaries of Bacchus.”⁶⁸

As should be obvious, these early libraries were the single most important source of books (especially novels) for many new readers and thus served as a bridge between the restricted print world of the Colonial reader and the world of the mid-nineteenth-century reader for whom books were available virtually everywhere. Libraries cultivated the “fashion of reading,” Franklin observed, and consequently created the audience—the consumers—who were necessary to support the expensive technology of mechanized printing in the next century.⁶⁹ In the process of doing so, they also supported the more elementary printing industry of their own time. First and most obviously, the libraries themselves, in effect, pooled the limited money that individual patrons could spend on books and served as a significant market for publishers. Isaiah Thomas provides one example of the common practice of catering to institutional buyers: “New Supply of Books,” Thomas advertised in a newspaper circulated throughout Vermont and New Hampshire, “a Good Chance for Purchasers of Social and Private Libraries.”⁷⁰ Second, and psychologically speaking, the libraries also encouraged patrons to spend money, personally and privately, on books. Like reading, book buying can also become fashionable, a habit, and readers often wish not just to read books but to possess them, to have them to turn to in times of crisis or moments of joy, to reread, to annotate, to mark as their own, and to display (as the symbol of their own ideas, feelings, and status). In short, the vogue of book borrowing fostered the vogue of book buying. Finally, many booksellers recognized the advantages of libraries and immediately opened their own. The necessity of maintaining a large stock-in-trade was thereby turned at once from a publisher’s liability into a librarian’s asset. Books could be advertised as being available for buying or borrowing, and the products not sold could be rented out as a source of continuing income.

My discussion of the book in the early Republic has so far considered the printer/publisher, the literary agent, the proprietor of the lending libraries, and the reader (who increasingly could borrow what she or he could not afford to buy). One other crucial participant in the book trade is obviously missing—the author. That absence is not an oversight. The early national era antedated the Romantic period’s notions of the author as the prime creator of art and a concomitant critical privileging of the artist’s intentions.⁷¹ During the postrevolutionary period, a residual Puritan emphasis on relating “truth” or “history” still underscored the older notion that the writer merely formulated what everybody already knew. Such an appraisal did not encourage crediting the writer for any significant contribution to the business of publishing books. Consider, for example, this eighteenth-century definition of book:

Book, either numerous sheets of white paper that have been stitched together in such a way that they can be filled with writing; or, a highly useful and convenient instrument constructed of printed sheets variously bound in cardboard, paper, vellum, leather, etc. for presenting the truth to another in such a way that it can be conveniently read and recognized. Many people work on this ware before it is complete and becomes an actual book in this sense. The scholar and the writer, the papermaker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the book binder, sometimes even the gilder and the brass-worker, etc. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of manufacture.⁷²

Or not fed. As is obvious from this definition, the author was still conceived as a minor participant in the process of literary manufacture and one whose cash expenditures were also minor. There was no compelling economic reason to support his or her labors, and, like it or not, for most authors during the early national period, writing still was, in Rollo Silver’s phrase, a “vanity business.”⁷³

History has not been kind to the early American novelists. Relatively few manuscript collections exist of their works, and it is not always easy to determine what motivated them to write and against what obstacles. But what does survive confirms their subordinate place within the business of publishing. For example, the correspondence between Royall Tyler and his publisher, Joseph Nancrede, effectively illustrates these prejudices and practices at work. Despite the flattery that pervades Nancrede’s letters to the author, it is clear that, in business terms, he views Tyler’s contribution to the proposed project over which they contended as virtually negligible. Although he had promised to pay $250 for a “Cosmography” for children, as the publication date came closer, Nancrede informed Tyler that, instead, he would pay him only with two hundred copies of the book. Tyler responded that he would not accept less than a $200 cash payment, a demand Nancrede peremptorily refused in his letter of March 7, 1800: “You have a very exalted idea of the price of a manuscript, and a very diminutive one of the money of the Bookseller. If you expect that the labour—or, as you term it, the amusement of eight days—will yield you ‘absolutely’ two hundred dollars in cash, I ought to inform you that I cannot have anything to do with the undertaking.” Nancrede also attempted in the same letter to smooth over the situation by comparing Judge Tyler favorably with Johnson, Pope, Swift, Voltaire, and Rousseau. But the fact remains, the “Cosmography” was never published. As Tyler insisted: “If writing for the public is attended with no more profit, I had rather file legal process in my attorney’s office, and endeavor to explain unintelligible law to Green Mountain jurors; and when the cacoethes scribendi assails me, I will write sonnets to rustic loves, and tales for children; and look for my reward in the exhilarating smiles of partial friends round my own fireside.”⁷⁴

Fortune was not the anticipated end of literary endeavor. Neither, for many early American novelists, was fame. Of approximately sixty-five American novelists who published before 1820, less than a third were named on the title pages of their books; slightly over a third appeared either anonymously or pseudonymously but are known today (often because the veil of anonymity was only tenuously employed, with the author’s actual name revealed in the advertisements for the specific book or in a subsequent publication by the same individual—as was the case for Brockden Brown, Susanna Rowson, and Royall Tyler). The remaining authors (and the largest single group) were and remain anonymous.⁷⁵ Sometimes a title page was simply that, a listing of the title. Sometimes a title page also bore a rubric such as “By a Lady,” or “An American,” or “A Lady of Massachusetts” as the only emblem of the author’s hand. Whether this modesty was a vestigial holdover from the older genteel tradition of anonymous authorship, a gesture toward republicanism (the writer refusing to be identified as part of an intellectual elite), an act of self-protection (in view of the low status of fiction), or merely a matter of fashion is debatable. A unique letter, between Isaiah Thomas, Jr., and Sukey Vickery (whose identity as one of these early novelists was not revealed for nearly a century), indicates an intermingling of the motives for authorial anonymity with a clear (if genteelly underplayed) desire for copyright and profit. Thomas, who had already published Vickery’s poetry (under the pseudonym Fidelia), wrote to her to express interest in her unpublished novel, the existence of which an intermediary, a Mr. Greenwood, had called to his attention. Since Vickery’s response so tellingly expresses the ambivalence of early authorship, I quote it at length:

Sir,

Your very obliging letter entitles you to my sincere thanks. The flattering compliments you have bestowed on my trifling productions are greater, I am conscious, than they deserve. Had I known Mr. Greenwood would have mentioned my name as the authoress of the Novel I believe I never should have ventured to have had it thus exposed. It is, and ever has been, my wish to remain unknown.… On supposition the little work above alluded to ever should appear in print, I shall never consent to have my name or that of Fidelia appear to it. The novel is written in letters and founded principally on facts, some of which I have heard from persons with whom I am connected. I have been careful not to write any thing that could have a tendency to injure the mind of the young and inexperienced. I have written the whole of it at hours of leisure, and the greater part after the family had retired to rest. I am quite ignorant of the manner of disposing of copy rights, and a faint hope that I might possibly gain something by it induced me to mention it in confidence to Mr. Greenwood.

I will transcribe it as soon as possible for your perusal, should it be thought unfit for publication, I shall rest satisfied with the decision of your superior judgment, and repose sufficient confidence in your honor to believe my name will never be exposed as the occasion.…

Vickery’s novel was published, as agreed upon, anonymously. One of the most thorough analyses of the double standard written during the early national period, Emily Hamilton did not sell particularly well, certainly not well enough to answer its author’s “faint hope” to “gain something by it.” Sukey Vickery married the same year, mothered nine children in rapid succession, and then died at the age of forty-one, without ever appearing in print again.⁷⁶

A reluctance to be identified as an author does not enhance one’s chances of succeeding as a writer. A name identifies and gives shape to a career; it aims readers at a writer’s other works and encourages anticipation for more. The name could early even outweigh the work, as Cooper discovered when, in 1825, he tried—and failed—to sell Lionel Lincoln with complete anonymity. Yet the possible advantages of being known clearly did not counterbalance, for most writers, the known advantage of remaining anonymous. Furthermore, authorship, suspect for men, was even more so for women. The “lady” writer, especially, as Mrs. S.S.B.K. Wood asserts in her preface to Julia, and the Illuminated Baron (1800), had compelling reasons for desiring the anonymity that in this particular case could not be claimed:

When the following pages were committed to the press it was the wish and expectation of the Author to remain in oblivion. A variety of causes have postponed its appearance; and conjecture ever busy, and curiosity ever prying, have lifted up the veil of concealment, and many are acquainted with the name and situation which, shrouded in an happy mediocrity, it was hoped would have escaped the observation of the world. Baffled in this her favorite wish, she feels it a duty to apologize, with her very humble talents, for thus appearing in public. She very well knows, that writers of Romance are not highly estimated. She is likewise sensible that custom and nature, which have affixed the duties of women to very confined and very limited bounds, are by no means likely to patronize a female writer. She feels that her conduct needs excuse, and though the independence of her mind renders her unwilling to make one, yet necessity obliges her to it. She is so certain that so many will acknowledge the truth of her assertion, that she does not hesitate to declare, that not one social, or domestic duty, have ever been sacrificed or postponed by her pen.⁷⁷

Madam Wood (as she was sometimes known) was one of the most socially conservative of the sentimental novelists, yet her apologia for her art was typical of her times. Female authorship had to be genteelly defined as an avocation, not a “manly occupation,” as is clear in Wood’s preface to Ferdinand and Elmira (1804), which pointedly opposes “the ordinary day-labor of the common English Novelist, who works for a living similar to a Mechanic, … [with the American] Lady of refined sentiments and correct tastes, who writes for the amusement of herself, her Friends, and [last and presumably of least importance] the Public.”⁷⁸

We see, with Wood, the psychological pressures operating specifically upon the woman author. This daughter of a prominent judge apparently did not need the income from her novels to support her three children. But it is significant that she did not write during either of her marriages. Her four novels appeared well after the death of her first husband, her collection of tales after the death of her second. It would seem that female authorship was not fully consistent with matrimony, a conclusion supported by the numerous later nineteenth-century women authors who insisted that their real “profession” was dutiful wifehood and motherhood (note the ubiquitous Mrs. appended to many female names in the nineteenth-century popular fictional tradition) and that their writing (derogatorily referred to even by these writers as scribbling) was a mere avocation. Clearly this self-definition and public pose, along with the social conditions underlying it, does not encourage serious writing—even though many a nineteenth-century “amateur” scribbler outsold “professionals” such as Hawthorne or Melville by thousands and even tens of thousands of volumes.⁷⁹

The prospects for authorship and especially female authorship in the early national period were bleak. But it is also important to recognize that some writers succeeded against the odds. Two examples—Hannah Adams and Jeremy Belknap—might serve to show the ways in which certain writers came to understand the impediments to authorship and found ways to overcome them. Perhaps the largest obstacle involved the distribution of the published work. Even those authors whose sales were guaranteed in advance by subscription were sometimes still paid in books. Thus Hannah Adams received fifty copies of her Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects (1784), only to discover that she could not sell those volumes locally since the publisher’s well-advertised subscription drive had already preempted that market. To find purchasers for her book (and her books), Adams simply went farther afield than did her publisher. A shrewd woman, she learned from that first venture and, in 1791, when she put out a second expanded edition of her Compendium, she contracted for a larger run and for all the remaining copies of the book to be turned over to her once the publisher had sold enough to be reimbursed for his expenses. Since she had already discovered that she could advantageously market the work herself, she, in effect, hired the printer as a kind of subcontractor; once he was paid, all of the profit went not to him, the publisher, but to her, the author and entrepreneur.⁸⁰ Adams, incidentally, went on to become one of the most financially successful writers of the early national period. Yet even late in her life, the memory of various past injustices done her by different printers, publishers, and literary advisors still rankled, for she had learned, painfully, that “the penalties and discouragements attending authors in general fall upon women with double weight,” a state of affairs to which Adams’s Memoir gives ample testimony.⁸¹

The novelist Jeremy Belknap also profited from the lesson implicit in an early financial setback suffered when his allegorical novel The Foresters (1792) was first published. The contract gave all copyright privileges to his publisher, Thomas and Andrews of Boston, but also held Belknap responsible for part of their expenses. His final share of those expenses proved to be larger than the price he was originally promised for the novel. So for a later book, American Biography (1794–98), Belknap retained copyright privileges and carefully negotiated advantageous terms, as the second clause of his contract indicated: “The said Thomas and Andrews engages to print the said work at their own risque & expense and to find paper for the same; the paper & type to be to the satisfaction of the said Belknap.”⁸² Because the book proved popular (and it was its anticipated popularity that gave Belknap leverage in his negotiations with the publisher), the author’s profit was assured. Thus did numerous women and men of letters learn—the hard way—the realities of the business of literature and thus did a few of them gain some recompense from that knowledge.

Others found other ways to profit from their work or at least to increase their chances of profiting. Parson Weems would regularly promote his next book while selling his present one (his books, incidentally, were often another author’s work republished, slightly edited, under Weems’s own well-known name). Noah Webster gained publicity by donating, with much public fanfare, numerous copies of The American Spelling Book to a town’s local library, college, or boarding school. One commentator observes that sometimes Webster would hand out as many as three hundred volumes, an “equivalent in public credit to giving a million or so dollars today.”⁸³ The publicity worked. States as far away as Georgia ruled that the Webster speller would be used in all of their “seminaries of learning.”⁸⁴ Or Mrs. Rowson—an actress and singer as well as a novelist—frequently worked readings from Charlotte or subsequent novels into her public performances and after a stage performance would discuss her books with her audience.

Despite their best efforts, however, most authors of early fiction, including Charles Brockden Brown (often, erroneously, termed America’s “first professional novelist”), fell somewhere in between the strained dilettantism of Madam Wood, on the one hand, and the diligent professionalism of Susanna Haswell Rowson, on the other. Neither did their uncertain place derive just from the economic vagaries of their public profession or the degree of private commitment to their art. The work (public and private) was, as noted, socially suspect. Like Brown, many writers appended only their initials to their texts although their full identities were generally soon known and, once known, were seldom denied. Many also vacillated between the older aristocratic notion of the gentleman author and the republican notion of the novelist as a professional wage earner (analogous to—although perhaps not as respectable as—a carpenter or a blacksmith). For authors who preferred both a place on the higher social levels and some payment for their labors, the matter of self-definition was definitely complicated.

The career of Joel Barlow especially illustrates that last conflict. Barlow, the son of a Connecticut farmer, was early recognized as brilliant by a local minister who helped him to acquire a Yale education; throughout his life, he was torn between the low status suggested by his origins and the higher aspirations encouraged by his training. Although a republican in his politics, especially in his later years, Barlow cultivated the image of himself as the gentleman-writer and justified the need for copyright laws essentially on elitist principles. He worked almost as hard as Webster to promote copyright laws and to recognize art as a commodity. The would-be literary aristocrat consequently stands uncomfortably in the would-be literary marketplace. Writing to Elias Boudinot, president of the Continental Congress, to urge him to support passage of copyright laws, Barlow maintains that until such laws are passed, nothing stops the “mercenary” printer from exploiting the “Gentleman” author in order to bring cheap editions of works before the “Vulgar” audience. The letter begins: “As we have few Gentlemen of fortune sufficient to enable them to spend a whole life in study, or enduce others to do it by their patronage, it is more necessary, in this country than in any other, that the rights of authors be secured by law.” Barlow’s best evidence for his argument is the case of John Trumbull, who, with an unauthorized reprinting of his M’Fingal (1775), “suffers in his reputation by having his work appear under the disadvantages of typographical errors, a bad paper, a mean letter & an uncouth page, all which were necessary to the printer to catch the Vulgar by a low price.”⁸⁵ The matter to be redressed is not so much an economic offense as an aesthetic one. Laws are needed to protect “Gentlemen” and the country from all that is “Vulgar,” “mean,” “bad,” and “uncouth” and that comes into being through the tradesman appropriating the gentleman’s art. But despite his apparent unconcern with low economic considerations, Barlow’s argument is very much about the ownership of art.

Until the passage of federal copyright laws, there could be no real profession of authorship. Publishing, too, required some protection. If a printer needed, say, to sell half of a first edition of a novel simply to recoup his costs, he could not afford to have another printer, impressed by the novel’s sales, come forward with a competing—and perhaps cheaper—edition. Such a pirated edition deprived both the author and the publisher of the profits they would otherwise have received. Congress was initially reluctant to consider the book trade when it first passed laws regulating interstate and international commerce. Only through the combined efforts of writers, like Adams, Belknap, and Rowson, and the prodigious activities of Noah Webster (who traveled around the country selling his dictionary and simultaneously campaigning for passage of both state and federal copyright laws) were state governments prompted to enact legislation that protected the rights of individual authors and printers. By 1786, all the states had passed such laws, but they were of varying severity, vigor, and uncertain application. Finally, the Federal Copyright Act, enacted in 1790, granted authors copyright privileges over their own work for a fourteen-year period that could be extended by the author for a second fourteen years.⁸⁶

The new law at first, however, had surprisingly little effect. Although authors could, after 1790, legally claim as their own their published work, a comparatively small number actually did.⁸⁷ Silver notes, for example, that in Massachusetts between 1800 and 1809 fewer than one tenth of all published books were copyrighted.⁸⁸ To claim legally the text was to claim socially the trade, and writers continued to be reluctant to advance that second claim. Perhaps because pretensions to aristocratic standards obviously died hard, as Charvat dryly concludes, the anachronistic late eighteenth-century demand for literary aristocrats led almost inevitably to a nineteenth-century model: the starving artist.⁸⁹ Perhaps, too, relatively few works were copyrighted because there was relatively little reason to do so. Why go to the trouble if one knows one will make nothing from a volume? Here, too, works of fiction were a partial exception to the general rule, for most of the first editions of early American novels include a copyright statement (typically filed by the publisher).

The passage of the 1790 copyright law was one important step toward giving the individual author legal control over his or her own work. Congress was more reluctant to foster an indigenous book industry by instituting special tariffs on cheap imports or by punishing American pirates of foreign editions, even though early American newspapers are filled with advertisements, editorials, and letters designed to promote such legislation.⁹⁰ Much of this persuasive material represented what might almost be called a concerted lobbying effort by those employed in the American printing industry. The Franklin Typographical Association of New York, for example, argued in one representative letter that “amongst the great mass of Books imported, many are found of a low and trifling nature, tending to corrupt the morals of our citizens. Congress, by laying the solicited Duty, would enable the Professors of Art to select and print such compositions only as would be really advantageous.”⁹¹ As in Barlow’s letter advocating a copyright law, economic issues are entwined with aesthetic, nationalistic, and even moral considerations. It would be decades before such lobbying bore fruit. The tariff Act of 1789, in which Congress placed sliding taxes on various imported articles, did not even specifically mention books, which thereby became just another item of unspecified goods subject to an automatic 5 percent import tax. Alexander Hamilton’s subsequent 1791 proposal to pass a special 10 percent protective tariff on foreign books failed in Congress; only with the Tariff Act of 1816 were foreign titles specifically taxed and then with a scant 5 percent duty. Not until 1830 did Congress finally pass international copyright laws that made pirating of foreign imprints illegal by extending copyright protection to foreign authors.⁹²

It should be noted that the early American book trade’s demand for tariff protection was itself deeply ambivalent. The same printers who decried the preponderance of foreign titles frequently printed pirated American versions of those same European titles. Prior to 1830, many of the same early American newspapers and magazines that carried editorials petitioning Congress to protect the native book industry also regularly ran ads promising British books at cheaper prices than the British editions. Thus Isaiah Thomas advertises in 1789 that subscribers for his forthcoming edition of Dr. William Cullen’s Practice of Physick can buy the book, printed on good paper, of beautiful construction “page for page [from] the latest and best British edition, and at a savings of fifty percent.”⁹³

Whether or not they viewed themselves as laborers in the field of art, all the authors discussed in this study had to face the prospects of writing without any real remuneration. While some of the early American novelists could prefer to remain genteelly aloof from the mercantile aspects of the book trade and profit at least socially (if only in their own estimation) from the stand, no early American printer was allowed such luxury. The exigencies of economic survival brought these printers to publish pirated editions of English or Continental works that promised to sell well or to import them (if the book could be purchased more cheaply abroad than it could be printed at home, as was usually the case). In short, the early American printer faced obstacles enough and could little afford to support domestic authors as opposed to having foreign authors, especially British ones, support him. American writers were, consequently, almost priced out of the market even before they began to write.

The purely economic consideration of how much a specific title could make for its printer was not the only motivation for publishing a book. On the contrary, of all the various trade or mechanics’ associations in the new republic, the printers’ associations tended to be the most aware of what might be termed the nonmonetary value of their work. A projected volume might not offer any hope of profit but still be printed because it served social objectives that the printer considered worthy of supporting with his enterprise. Mathew Carey, for example, published several pamphlets on behalf of the striking shoemakers as well as the impoverished government seamstresses, and he did so to support his fellow laborers in their attempt to earn a living wage.⁹⁴ Or note the remarkable fact that even though libraries were, as I have shown, one important source of revenue for the early American printer, the Asylum Company of Journeymen Printers specifically exempted public libraries from the tariff duties they wished imposed upon all foreign books.⁹⁵ In short, the value of inculcating the habit of reading and an awareness of the value of new ideas—-many of which must necessarily come from abroad—overrode any immediate material gain that might accrue by discouraging libraries from buying foreign volumes. Although there is an element of self-interest in that stand, there is also a clear concern for the public good.

Alfred F. Young has coined the term “citizen consciousness” to describe the blending of professionalism and patriotism fostered by many of the mechanics’ organizations, a consciousness especially evident among the printers.⁹⁶ These early workers’ associations were uniquely qualified to temper their pride in the new Republic with an acute awareness that unless the nation fulfilled its promise of equality and opportunity, a revolution had been fought and won in vain. Consider the punning diction of a toast given by the Baltimore Typographical Society on Independence Day of 1805: “Employers and employed, the two great parties of the world.—May a constant reciprocity of good offices, bind fast the chords of mutual friendship, each bearing in mind this solemn truth, that all power founded on injustice is imposition.” Even more pointed is the eulogy delivered in 1809 for Justus Brown, a printer who died in penury (it was yet another function of the Baltimore Typographical Society to bury impoverished printers who would have otherwise been consigned to a pauper’s grave):

His excellent qualities and amiable manners had secured to him the friendship & esteem of every person who knew him. A humble Christian, a zealous patriot and a worthy citizen, had his fortunes been as prosperous as his virtues were numerous, he would not have remained a striking example of the fact, that even in our favored country, rigid honesty, warm benevolence, and unremitted industry, some times go without merited reward.⁹⁷

This theme, the relationship between virtue and economic reward in a republic (and that last phrase makes all the difference), also runs throughout many early American novels and is a plot device as commonplace as seduction. For many of those who wrote, published, sold, purchased, borrowed, or read the early American novel, the social, economic, racial, gender, and class inequities that remained within the Republic tarnished its potential glories. In an increasingly literate society, printers and writers had a unique means for helping to polish away that residual tarnish—or to attempt to forge the developing Republic into a better form.

The larger social concerns of the printers were of crucial importance to the genesis of the American novel. Through an alchemy of hope, patriotism, and professional pride, early American printers did publish some one hundred American novels before 1820, which, under the circumstances, constituted an impressive beginning for the new genre. In this beginning, we see a classic example of the ways in which art sometimes circumvents the economic facts that ostensibly determine it. In purely dollars-and-cents terms, there was no reason for anyone to write or, certainly, to publish a work of American fiction. Yet a patriot-printer, such as Isaiah Thomas, might have been only marginally concerned with financial considerations when he decided, in 1789, to publish and advertise the “First American Novel” just as George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the American nation. Dedicated to the “Young Ladies of United Columbia,” William Hill Brown’s novel speaks all the more eloquently of and to the nonmaterial values of art precisely because its own material value was so minimal. Also, as I will show in the following chapters, there can be a considerable discrepancy between the weak financial grounding of an art (specifically, the novel) and the great social/psychological potency attributed to it—both negative and positive. Be that as it may, an awareness of the economic obstacles to book production in the new Republic attests that the American novel ultimately succeeded in spite of the very economy in which it began.