Literature II: Reading and the Print Trade

Sources

Importing Literature. From the founding of the colonies until the nineteenth century the great majority of books that circulated in the colonies were printed in Britain. Although by the late eighteenth century there were printers in the major American cities as well as in many towns, local presses could not print works cheaply enough or in enough quantity to satisfy the demands of the American reading public. As advertisements in colonial newspapers demonstrate, the urban bookseller was the means through which Americans maintained their cultural identity as Britons, keeping up with the latest fashions and developments in all of the arts. Some of the most important philosophical developments of the Enlightenment had their largest influence in the colonies through advice books and novels—new genres of literature that continue to be staples in American bookstores. John Locke’s new educational psychology, organized around individual experience, and the Common Sense ideas about the moral sense both taught colonial readers to imagine a less coercive, more “liberal” ideal of childhood, in which trust of one’s own innate capacity for sympathy and reason was more important than obedience to external authority.

American Editions. When a colonial printer chose to publish an American edition of a British work, it had important consequences for the development of culture on this side of the Atlantic. Colonial printers developed the reading tastes of Americans, helping both to supply domestic demands for cultural enlightenment and stimulating the local production of writers and composers. Before the invention of modern forms of mechanical production, printing was a time-consuming and laborintensive process, and early America depended on the importation of costly materials such as type. It cost a great deal merely to print a book, and books were so expensive that most families would never own more than a few. For this reason printers were conservative in what they decided to publish: they could not afford to produce even one book that would not sell at least enough to cover the cost of printing. Most of what was published in colonial America were “safe” bets, such as bibles and versions of the psalms. Poor Richard’s Almanac, first published by Benjamin Franklin in 1732, was another popular kind of book and might sell as many as ten thousand copies a year. British advice books such as Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774) were also dependable best-sellers throughout the later eighteenth century, and its American editions, beginning in 1775, helped to shape a less religious, more cosmopolitan culture in America. Especially in the case of the novel, colonial editions of British works helped to create an entirely new literary taste in America. Although Americans did not write novels before the Revolution, they certainly read them.

The Novel in America. Many of the best-selling books of the Revolutionary era were editions of popular British novels printed in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston: Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1772), Laurence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1774), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1775), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1786), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1793) all sold more than twenty thousand copies. On both sides of the Atlantic, fiction in the eighteenth century was only accepted as a tool for education that demonstrated new psychological ideas. For this reason American editions of British novels were always adaptations, ranging from chapbook versions for children to adult versions that were abridged or even rewritten to emphasize particular themes. Robinson Crusoe, for example, appeared in 125 editions in the United States between 1775 and 1825, and none of them were faithful to the original British text, first published in 1719. American editions of Clarissa changed the novel’s title to emphasize a contemporary political message: “wherein the arts of a Designing Villain and the Rigours of Parental Authority conspired to complete the Ruin of a virtuous daughter.” Americans interpreted the novel as a political allegory about a martyred heroine leading a revolutionary cause. “The Ministry are Lovelace and the People are Clarissa,” John Adams later said, and the “artful villain will pursue the innocent lovely girl to her ruin and her death.” His comments suggest not only how pervasive the taste for particular British novels had become in the young nation but also the extent to which American printers subtly reshaped imported literature according to local circumstances and values. Their success in making novels about the seduction and ruin of young women look like “improving” means of moral and political education paved the way for the success in the later 1780s and 1790s of American novelists such as Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown, and in general helped to make the novel the most popular literary genre of the nineteenth century.

Sources

Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);

Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The Revolt Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982);

Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Bestsellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947).