A Companion to the History of the Book (57 page)

Many writers became celebrities: besides the best-known writers already quoted, one should mention the Russian novelist Turgenev and the Scottish writer Walter Scott (who inspired Balzac and was probably one of the most translated novelists at the beginning of the century), Goethe, Manzoni, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Sand, Dos-toevsky, Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Andersen, Mark Twain, Collodi, Eça de Queiros, Perez Galdos, Clarin, D’Annunzio, Hamsun, Thomas Hardy, Wilde, Zola, and Svevo. However, this incomplete and partial picture of the celebrities of the time largely conceals reality since apart from Scott and Dumas, Perez Galdos, Clarin, and Jules Verne, popular literature is missing. Yet a marked phenomenon of the time is the emergence of national novelists who, in a certain way, illustrate the capacity of the countries importing fiction to give birth to gifted male and female writers. Spain is probably the best example, for after naturalizing French novelists under the names of “Pablo Féval” or ‘Alejandro Dumas,” the country enthusiastically welcomed Benito Perez Galdos’s prose whose mission was to raise Spain’s reputation and to make it known in all Latin America (Botrel 1993). In Italy, the popular novelist Carolina Invernizio’s works fascinated Antonio Gramsci so much that he called her “a rabbit-like breeder of fictional worlds” when he mentioned her 123 novels published during her lifetime by Adriano Salani, one of the most expert professionals in mass-market literature and in the promotion of the large circulation press (Solari 1992).

Even Brazil fervently welcomed Eugène Sue’s, Paul Féval’s, and Alexandre Dumas’s serials and, at the end of the nineteenth century, all of Alexandre Dumas’s works whose influence on the young Jorge Amado is well known. In Mexico, the craze for historical novels after 1850 was the direct consequence of the translations of Scott and Dumas, even if plots generally took place in the New World. The backgrounds of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano’s and Rafael Delgado’s fiction owe a lot to the French realistic novel, notably to Balzac, who also inspired the Argentine novelist Lucio Vicente Lopez’s
Le Grand Village.
On the other hand, Julien Martel’s novel
ha Bourse
was strongly influenced by Zola’s
L’Argent.
Thus, the internationalization of the novel developed in almost all continents (though at a varying pace), and its success was due to the fact that this specific literary genre can be defined as “a general cognitive matrix” (Saint-Jacques 2001: 446), almost universal but not quite so, whose cross-media qualities allowed it to fill up the space of newspapers, periodicals, reviews, and books almost endlessly between 1800 and 1914. Largely represented at the first conference on literary and artistic property that took place in Paris in 1878, novelists were to encourage the development of the Berne Convention in respect of international copyrights in 1886, followed at the turn of the century by the birth of institutions like the Pen Club and the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as by the creation of the Goncourt and Pulitzer prizes. Showing solidarity to one another in spite of their competition in the race for celebrity, they were the first to benefit from the universal reform of education. If today, the German Karl May’s novels, inspired by the Far West, or Carolina Invernizio’s, Perez Galdos’s, Paul Féval’s and others’ are hardly read, one should not forget that these novelists reflected the craze for reading that developed throughout the world in the nineteenth century, spreading to all classes of society and transforming the most popular novelists of that period into some of the first celebrities.

References and Further Reading

Altick, Richard (1957)
The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800– 1900.
Chicago: University Chicago Press.

Barbier, Frédéric (1995)
LEmpire du livre.
Paris: Cerf.

Botrel, Jean-François (1988)
ha diffusion du livre en Espagne 1868–1914.
Madrid: Casa de Velasquez.

— (1993)
Libros, penser y lectura en la España del siglo XIX.
Madrid: Fundación German Sanchez Ruiperez.

—, Infantes, Victor, and Lopez, Francois (eds.) (2003)
Historia de la edición y de la lectura en España, 1472–1914.
Madrid: Fundación German Sanchez Ruiperez.

Cachin, Marie-Françoise (2002) “Rapports de lecture et autres archives de l’éditeur Macmil-lan.”
Cahiers Charles V,
32: 39–62.

Chabaud, Gilles, Cohen, Evelyne, Coquery, Natacha, et al. (eds.) (2000)
Les Guides imprimés du XVIe au XXe siècle: villes, paysages, voyages.
Paris: Belin.

Chartier, Roger (1995)
Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer.
Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.

Darnton, Robert (1985) “Rousseau und seine Leser.”
Zeitschrift fiir Litteraturwissenschaft und Linguistik,
57–8: 134.

Eisenstein, Elisabeth L. (1979)
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— (1983)
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A condensed version of
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.)

Febvre, Lucien and Martin, Henri-Jean (1958)
L’Apparition du livre.
Paris: Albin Michel.

Guilcher, Goulven (2000) “Naissance et développement du guide de voyage imprimé: du guide unique à la série, une stratégie de conquête des lecteurs.” In Gilles Chabaud, et al. (eds.),
Les
Guides imprimés du XVIe au XXe siècle: villes, paysages, voyages,
pp. 81–93- Paris: Belin.

Lee, Alan J. (1976)
The Origin of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914.
London: Croom Helm.

Lyons, Martyn (2003) “Le XIXe siècle et la naissance d’un nouveau public.” In Yves Noël Lelou-vier and Gilles Quinsat (eds.),
Le Monde des littératures.
Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis.

Mercier, Alain (2002)
Les trois révolutions du livre.
Paris: Imprimerie nationale.

Mollier, Jean-Yves (1988)
LArgent et les lettres: histoire du capitalisme d’édition, 1880–1920.
Paris: Fayard.

— (1993) “Le Manuel scolaire et la bibliothèque du people.”
Romantisme,
80: 79–95.

— (2004) “La naissance de la culture de masse en France et dans le monde.” In Greg Burgess (ed.),
Revolution, Nation and Memory: Papers from the George Rude Seminar in French History,
pp. 138– 63. Hobart: University of Tasmania.

Monaghan, Charles (1998)
The Murrays of Murray Hill.
New York: Urban History Press.

Olivero, Isabelle (1995)
Llnvention de la collection.
Paris: IMEC Editions.

Parfait, Claire (2000)
Les Editions américaines d’Uncle Tom’s Cabin, de Harriet Beecher Stove, de 1852 à 1999.
Paris: University Paris 7.

Sainte-Beuve, Augustin (1839) “De la littérature industrielle.”
Revue des Deux-mondes,
17.

Saint-Jacques, Denis (2001) “Le roman au-delà du livre et de la nation.” In Jacques Michon and Jean-Yves Mollier (eds.),
Les Mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000,
pp. 442–7. Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval.

Solari, Gabriela (1992) “La littérature à un sou, à deux sous, à trois sous: permanences et transformations de l’impression populaire en Italie à la fin du XIXe siècle.” In Dominique Julia (ed.),
Annuaire du département d’histoire et civilization,
pp. 59–88. Florence: Institut Universitaire Européen.

Thérenty, Marie-Eve and Vaillant, Alain (2003)
1836: L’An
I
de l’ère médiatique.
Paris: Nouveau Monde Edition.

Wilson, Charles (1985)
First with the News: The
History of W. H. Smith, 1792–1972.
London: Jonathan Cape.

Winship, Michael (1999) “The Greatest Book of its Kind: A Publishing History of
Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian
Society,
109: 318–24.

Wittmann, Reinhardt (1997) “Une révolution de la lecture à la fin du XVIIIe siècle.” In Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.),
Histoire de la
lecture dans le monde occidental,
pp. 331–64. Paris: Seuil.

23

Building a National Literature: The United States 1800–1890

Robert A. Gross

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 literature.” 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, literature carried a distinctive meaning it no longer bears today. Samuel Johnson defined 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 fiction). 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 financial 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 confirming 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 fixed, 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 field 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 find 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 newspapers and fourteen broadsides before it was even signed. The republic was dependent 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 Office 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, official 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 accessible to all. Subscriptions, to be sure, were costly – as much as ten dollars a year for a daily, five 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, official 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 dizzying 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 figure 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 influenced by none,” as the
Freeman’s Journal
of Philadelphia declared in its masthead, while the ambitious entrepreneur John Fenno hastened from Boston to New York with the dream of founding a “gazette of the United States” as official organ of the national establishment. But hardly 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-fledged 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 offices functioning as party headquarters flowed the official 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 succeeding decades, they took up the cudgels and waged the fight 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 chiefly of official 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 competed fiercely to be the first 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 stenographic 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 representatives 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 significance of this process. Newspapers, he observed in the very first issue of his
American Minerva
in December 1793, were “common instruments of social intercourse, by which the citizens of this vast Republic constantly discourse 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 innovations 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 middle and working classes of the surging city. The papers were tiny: at 8½ 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 profits. The
Herald’s
daily circulation 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 confidential 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 defiant newsman was released.) The scoops and sensations brought to public view in the popular press constituted a distinctive contribution 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 reflected urban society to itself.