Text: Sidney P. Moss, “Chapter 01,” Poe's Literary Battles, 1963, pp. 3-37 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 3, unnumbered:]

From 1835 to 1849, the period that spans Poe's critical career, Poe was engaged in literary battles that involved such celebrities of the day as Theodore Sedgwick Fay, associate editor of the popular New York Mirror, Colonel William Leete Stone, co-owner and editor of the powerful New York Commercial Advertiser, Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the widely circulated Knickerbocker Magazine, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harvard professor and well-known poet. These battles had two related objectives, a fact that accounts for some of Poe's reviews being destructive and others constructive. First, he wanted to smash the power of the literary cliques intrenched in Boston and New York City that could make the reputations and fortunes of those authors, editors, and publishers with whom they were in league, and that could ruin those who were outside the pale or who threatened their interests. Second, he wanted to establish conditions favorable for authorship and attractive to men of creative power. To this end he insisted that books be literature, not merely literary wares. To this end he argued for critical and literary standards other than those associated with the market place. To this end [page 4:] he formulated principles of literary art. And to this end he sought to purify the taste of the reading public. One may have reservations about Poe's methods; one may want to take issue with some of his aesthetic principles; one may find it difficult to condone his lapses — his favoritism, his occasional poor literary taste, his desire for reputation, even if that amounted only to notoriety. But to fail to recognize that Poe was a literary reformer; that his battles were related campaigns in his total war on what he called “our general editorial course of corruption”; in short, to read Poe's criticism outside the context of his literary milieu is seriously to misread him. This may explain the embarassment [[embarrassment]], disdain, or confusion that some commentators on his criticism have expressed. It may also explain why other readers have interpreted Poe's actions principally in psychological terms, assigning his captiousness to inward sources such as spite and envy, and not to outward sources such as corrupt publishing and editorial practices.

To understand the issues involved and which, in fact, gave shape and coherence to Poe's critical career, it is necessary to sketch the economic-literary background that existed about the time that Poe took command of the Southern Literary Messenger, the first magazine he edited, and began to assault the literary cliques. The discussion will serve not only to remove the stigma of spite and envy that has become gratuitously attached to much of Poe's criticism; it will also make intelligible certain phenomena that are more often labeled than explained — mainly, the economic bases for literary sectionalism and for the so-called American Renaissance with its characteristic exploitation of the American past, the American landscape, and the American experience.

A national literature, defined merely as works written by Americans and published in America, was still a fairly novel idea as late as 1835, and one that was being trumpeted by native writers who wanted to assure themselves of a market for and an income from their writings.(1) Without this assurance, [page 5:] they contended, authors could not hope to survive and, instead of devoting their talents to risky literary ventures, would enter other professions in which remuneration was less uncertain, to the detriment of our national literature.(2) Poe himself might have abandoned literature as a profession had the chance been offered him. Despite a considerable if, in some quarters, notorious reputation, he sought a custom-house appointment in 1842, as Nathaniel Hawthorne earlier and Herman Melville later sought and gained such appointments, for, as he said, “Literature is at a sad discount. There is really nothing to be done in this way. Without an international copyright law, American authors may as well cut their throats.”(3)

American publishers, whatever deference they paid to the idea of a national literature, were far from sympathetic to it in practice. The copyright law then operative in the United States protected only works written by Americans, and firms that published such works were obliged, though by no means bound, to give their authors a nominal share of the profits, if any, or buy the copyright to those works outright either of which procedures threatened their potential gains. Being as a group far more interested in earning profits than in encouraging a national literature, publishers were reluctant to engage in such patently poor business practices. Thus, unless an American [page 6:] author was popular and the sale of his work assured, he was asked to underwrite the publication of his work, guaranteeing the publisher full compensation for all losses resulting from such publication, for which he usually received 10 per cent of the net profits, if profits accrued. When Poe, to touch upon one case, submitted his second work,(4) Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (Baltimore, 1829) to Carey, Lea, and Carey, that firm refused to publish the manuscript unless Poe furnished $100 to cover all possible loss — a sum that Poe was unable to raise at the time.(5) The way Poe finally managed to have his Poems (New York, 1831) published in a purported second edition by Elam Bliss was by subscription, raising seventy-five cents from each of his fellow cadets at West Point, for which, in gratitude, he dedicated the volume to them.

Poe had even worse luck in attempting to publish his first collection of short stories in 1836, since, apparently, he declined to pay for publication out of his own pocket. Carey and Lea rejected the collection, as did Harpers, despite James K. Paulding's intercession with that company,(6) and it was not until September 28, 1839 — when Poe had earned a wide reputation as a critic and magazine contributor — that Lea and Blanchard agreed to publish an edition of 750 copies of the two-volume Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, provided they keep all the profits and Poe only the copyright and a few copies. When Poe, later in the year, sought to get some money from the work by offering to sell the copyright to that firm, Lea and Blanchard refused, saying that they had no expectation of even [page 7:] regaining the capital they had invested in the book, let alone any hope of realizing a profit. Their final and humiliating comment was that, if they had to do it again, they would not undertake to publish the tales at all, and if Poe knew of someone who would take over the copies at cost, or even below cost, they would be happy to rid themselves of the edition.(7)

Though details concerning Poe's transactions with other publishers are disappointingly vague, it is certain that none of his publishers ever treated him generously. The year 1845 saw Poe's first satisfactory publishing venture, for he was then at the height of his fame: he was given a royalty of eight cents a copy for his Tales (New York, Wiley and Putnam). The work sold about 1,500 copies by October of that year, a figure that Poe flaunted in the Broadway Journal,(8) and fetched him at least $120.

Poe's was not an exceptional case. Nathaniel Hawthorne as a beginning author had to pay for the publication of Fanshawe (1828) himself. And even after he had earned an enviable reputation in the magazines, he was told by Samuel Goodrich, the publisher to whom he submitted his second work, the Twice-Told Tales (1837), that he had to put up $250 in cash as a guarantee against loss. Fortunately, Hawthorne had a prosperous friend in Horatio Bridge, a former classmate of his at Bowdoin College, and Bridge furnished the money, for which Hawthorne reimbursed him when the thousand-copy edition was sold.(9) And though Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) was Hawthorne's ninth published work, no more than 750 copies had been sold by 1848.(10)

This fairly standard practice of American publishers demanding [page 8:] protection against loss was by no means short-lived. In 1847 Henry David Thoreau reported that “Wiley & Putnam, Munroe, the Harpers, and Crosby & Nichols have all declined printing it [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849] with the least risk to themselves; but Wiley & Putnam will print it ... at my risk.”(11) Thoreau finally had a thousand-copy edition of the Week published at his own expense, 75 copies of which were given away, 219 sold, and 706 remaindered to him. Almost five years after the Week was printed, Thoreau made this wry observation in his journal under the date of November 28, 1853: “Settled with J. Munroe & Co. ... I have paid him directly out of pocket since the book was published two hundred and ninety dollars... This does not include postage on proofsheets, etc., etc. I have received from other quarters about fifteen dollars. This has been the pecuniary value of the book.”(12) Walden (1854), the only other book that Thoreau saw through the press, was published by Ticknor and Fields, and Thoreau received a royalty of fifteen cents a copy, which netted him more than a year later the sum of $51.60.(13) And in 1848 Poe advised a woman who sought his counsel about publishing her poems: “The Appletons will publish them, leaving you the eventual copyright, but binding you to supply all loss resulting from the publication: — and they will allow you ten per cent on all values effected after all expences are paid ... No publisher will make better terms with you than these — and even these will be more advantageous to you than printing on your own account.”(14)

The reason American publishers (most of whom doubled as booksellers) had no need to make concessions to American authors was that they did not need American manuscripts to feed their presses. They could and did reprint books published [page 9:] by non-Americans anywhere in the world because works by foreigners, barred from copyright in the United States, were free to them. Better still, such republication minimized risk because the salability of such works had been pretested abroad. Thus, unless a publisher wanted to scoop his competitors and thereby increase his sales,(15) or unless he wanted to give the public an authorized or author's edition, which promised to be free from mutilation and which, therefore, might sell better;(16) or unless he had scruples about piracy, as some few publishers had; unless, in short, he wanted to increase his profits or satisfy his conscience, he really had no reason to pay for manuscripts. What a literary agent for Harpers remarked about that company in 1843 was generally true for the entire publishing business in America: “Publishing for American authors forms but an inconsiderable part of their business. ...”(17)

The urge to be first on the American book market with pirated works led publishers to some fantastic practices, if one can credit the reports. An almost incredible story is told about Mathew Carey, one of the most successful publishers of his day, who stole a march on his piratical competitors by securing either uncorrected advance sheets or even galley proofs of Scott's manuscripts. He accomplished this feat, we are told, either by a secret transaction with Ballantyne, the printer for Archibald Constable, Scott's publisher; or by bribing one of Ballantyne's employees; or by planting one of his own agents in Ballantyne's office. As soon as Carey got these sheets, he [page 10:] farmed them out piecemeal to printing houses in Philadelphia, where his company was located, thereby managing to put a complete Scott novel in type in a matter of days and the book itself in the hands of waiting booksellers all over the country. Not only was he able to scoop all American reprinters in this way, but, we are told, he turned this trick for every Scott novel published from 1822 on. However unlikely, there is the possibility that in one or two instances at least Scott was published in America before he was published in England.(18) Though I have not collated American and English versions of Scott's novels, there is reason to believe that such versions differ, for Scott never revised his prose except on galley or page proof.(19)

If this instance seems too unusual, we do know that an American journalist was able to bribe a pressman in the employ of Bradbury and Evans, the printers of Dickens’ American Notes, and managed in this way to steal proof sheets of that work so that three or four publishers could hurriedly begin printing editions that “flooded the country at six cents a copy.”(20)

This is not to suggest that all American publishers engaged in such nefarious practices as this. In many instances, as has been stated, publishers were quite willing to buy sheets printed in England and publish them under their own firm, names; or, in other instances, to buy proof sheets or manuscripts from which to set their own editions.(21) The fact that at times American publishers were willing to clog their presses with works of obscure native authors which had little likelihood of selling was, if anything, to their credit. Nor is this [page 11:] intended to suggest that all American authors suffered financially from the national copyright law. Once an author was certain that his books would sell in quantity, he could turn the existing situation to his advantage. Washington Irving in 1836, for example, accepted $4,000 from Mathew Carey for the right, to publish five thousand copies of Astoria.(22) And William Hickling Prescott, instead of accepting Harpers’ offer to share half the net profits from the sale of his Conquest of Mexico (1843), preferred to sell the American copyright to that history to Harpers for $7,500.(23) Longfellow and Emerson were no less shrewd than Prescott in such business. After 1845 Longfellow, as well as Prescott, paid at times to have stereoplates to his own books manufactured so that he could sell publishers the printing rights to them. Though allowance must be made for his burgeoning reputation, Longfellow in this way was almost able to double his net royalty rate — from an average of roughly io to 18 per cent. And Emerson, once he was assured of the sales of his books, used still another method to increase his returns: he paid for the publication of his books himself so that he needed to give his publisher-bookseller only a commission for selling them.(24)

Yet even this sounds better than it actually was. As Poe observed on several occasions, American writers, if they wanted to exploit the American book market, had to establish an English reputation first, for if Americans “were induced to read at all the productions of our native writers, it was only after repeated assurances from England that such productions were not altogether contemptible.”(25) Alexis de Tocqueville also observed [page 12:] that before Americans “can make up their minds upon the merit of one of their authors, they generally wait till his fame has been ratified in England. ...”(26) Longfellow, to avoid the fate that awaited Hyperion (1839) — a net profit of $72.50 — sought to get the two-volume work noticed abroad. He wrote to George W. Greene, who was then in Italy, to do him a “very great favor; — namely by getting these books noticed in the foreign journals. ... You know what cursed sharps [sheep?] our countrymen are, and how they follow everything that comes from the other side of the sea.”(27) As for Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Poe said only what was true, that this work was usually cited in defense of the liberality of American publishers. But, he added with only slight exaggeration, if one inquired further he would discover that Prescott had been “engaged for many years at his work, and that he expended for the necessary books and other materials a large sum: — the compensation thus afforded him, amounting in the end to little more than any common scavenger might have earned in the same period, upon our highways!”(28) Moreover, Emerson, by paying the Boston publishers, Munroe and Company, a commission to sell his books, was forced to confine his sales to New England in order to assure himself of greater profit than if he had published in the regular way and enlarged his market — a dilemma that he himself recognized.(29)

Cooper in 1828 aptly described the situation existing between American authors and American publishers, a situation that with some few modifications was to prevail until the International Copyright Act of 1891: [page 13:]

To cite one or two statistics regarding the publication of American and foreign works: in 1834, 114 titles, grouped together as novels and tales, were published in the United States. Of this number, only 19 had been written by American authors; the remaining 95 had been published abroad first.(31) Having to compete with foreign writers whose works were available to American publishers and whose salability had been established, these few American authors were fortunate if they did not have to finance the publication of their books themselves. Cost, of course, was the major concern of publishers. They had to compete, not only among themselves, but in the 1840's with the so-called mammoth papers such as the New York Brother Jonathan and The New World which, without the binding and distribution problems of book publishers, could not only scoop book publishers by reprinting a new Dickens novel as an extra or supplement, but could sell the novel at a few cents a copy. Such republishing competition served to glut the market with foreign reprints and aggravate a situation already detrimental to the rise of a national literature.

In an effort to halt a situation that made professional authorship in America all but impossible, observers, either for selfish or altruistic reasons, made all sorts of appeals and charges. [page 14:] Mathew Carey, whose larcenous activities have been noted, charged with unconscious irony that the mammoth weeklies were responsible for preventing American authors from being published. He said that there was little hope for American writers so long as those papers continued to saturate the market with reprints of English novels.(32) William Tudor, editor of the North American Review from 1815 to 1817, laid the blame on the cupidity of the American public as well as on the avarice of American publishers who, together, “connive at this proscription of domestic talent ... since if the author receives any thing for his labours, American books must be dearer than foreign ones. ...”(33) Cooper contended that so long as America refused copyright to foreigners, so long would England continue to dominate America morally.(34) Poe, though he recognized the advantage of getting “more reading for less money,” was unhappy with what he considered the wholesale dishonesty and hypocrisy engendered by piracy and with the “democracy in general which permits its perpetration.” Moreover, he made the telling point that piracy injures “our national literature by repressing the efforts of our men of genius; for genius, as a general rule, is poor in worldly goods and cannot write for nothing!”(35) And English writers, dismayed that their popularity in America earned them nothing except what might be given to them by courtesy or charity, also opposed American piracy. A typical English opinion stated:

Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that the professional author, the author who lived exclusively on the income from his writings (and I am excluding here, of course, magazine and newspaper editors, as well as writers of theology, law, medicine, etc.), was a rarity in the United States. According to one authority, the first American who attempted to live on the earnings from his books failed the novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810).(37) In almost every case, an American author had to have another source of income in order to survive as a writer. Only when he was outstandingly successful and sure of the reception of his work was he able to live by his pen. Then he could go to England and get his work protected by British copyright or he could engage, either in person or through an agent, in negotiations with British publishers for that privilege. For the British copyright law, far more liberal than its American counterpart, provided for the protection of foreign works if they were first published in Great Britain or if their authors were residents of Great Britain at the time their books were published there. Typical of such arrangements was that made by Prescott with Richard Bentley, the London publisher. In negotiating for the British copyright to his History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (1837), his first significant publication, Prescott wrote to Bentley on May 5, 1837: “I have provided in the contract with the publishers who have purchased the edition here [the American Stationers’ Company in Boston, which bought the right to publish 1,250 copies of the book for $1,000, with the profits to be shared equally], that its publication shall not take place till some time in November [the book actually appeared in December], in order not to interfere with securing a copyright [page 16:] in England.”(38) Irving and Cooper had also learned this trick of securing their literary property in Great Britain and thereby enlarging their incomes — a fact that accounts in large part for their spending so much time abroad.(39) But such men were conspicuous exceptions. They were sure that their books would sell and certain that publishers on both sides of the Atlantic would profit from publishing them, even if they insisted upon high royalties or outright purchase of the copyright.

British publishers, of course, were not more scrupulous than their American brethren. They republished unprotected literary property from America whenever it seemed profitable to do so, although their choice of plunderable material was more limited. When Longfellow, for example, in 1835 asked a British publisher for £100 for the British rights to his Outre-Mer, the publisher retorted: “Why, in three weeks I can get it for nothing.” And in 1876 Longfellow wryly wrote a correspondent that he had a total of twenty-two publishers in England and Scotland, a number he underestimated according to his own record.(40) Some of Poe's stories, to adduce other instances of British piracy, appeared in Bentley's Miscellany with even his name omitted, and at least one of his books was pirated in England during his lifetime, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (London, 1841), not to mention other editions of that work that appeared there posthumously, or “The Gold-Bug” and similar stories that, brought out in paper wrappers, sold for a few pence.(41) And in 1848 Thoreau asked Emerson: “The newspapers say that they have printed a pirated edition of your Essays in England. Is it as bad as they say an undisguised unmitigated piracy?”(42) [page 17:]

Moreover, as a retaliatory measure and one designed to put. British publishers on an equal footing with American publishers, Parliament in 1838 revised the copyright law to prevent the works of a foreign author from being copyrighted in Great Britain unless the country to which he belonged gave copyright to British authors.(43) Needless to say, the occasional American author who had been able to support himself by virtue of the British book market began to suffer financial difficulties at this time. According to a contemporary report, the works of such writers as Irving and Cooper, who earlier had been able to protect their property, were now pirated by British publishers.(44) American authors could still try to make arrangements with British publishers to bring out authorized editions, but once their works were issued, they could be reprinted by any British publisher. Cooper's arrangement with Richard Bentley, then his English publisher, became so unsatisfactory by 1850 that he decided to give up the writing of novels, a form that, however famous it had made him, had become unprofitable.(45)

This is not to suggest that in 1838 the relations between British publishers and American authors were settled once and for all until the International Copyright Act of 1891 and the Copyright Code of 1909. Except for brief flurries of piracy in 1838-1839 and 1850,(46) American authors, when they could make arrangements with British publishers, received payment, in royalties or for the copyright, more or less in proportion to the commercial value of their work, in spite of their now unclear [page 18:] legal right to such payment, provided, of course, that their works were published in Great Britain prior to their American publication. About 1850, however, British publishers began to test the right of American authors even to such payment, and the question was finally settled against the Americans by the House of Lords in 1854. Charles Richard Weld, an English lawyer and celebrity-hunter, reported that during an evening spent with Prescott, the “conversation took a literary turn, principally in relation to the vexed question of copyright; and it so happened, while we were deep in argument, Mr. Prescott received letters from England, informing him that the decision of the House of Lords being adverse to a foreigner possessing copyright in England, his bargain with a London publisher for a new historical work, for which he was to have been paid 6000£, ... had become void.”(47) At all events, it can be said that generalizations based on British copyright law usually do not hold up. Statements must be based on particular and actual instances of American authors’ relations with British publishers.(48)

Against the economic-literary background that has been sketched here, one can begin to see a clear relationship between the national copyright law and the urge for American literary nationalism. Cooper, whose concern made him as vociferous as Poe on the subject of professional authorship, explained in his Notions of the Americans: “The literature of the United States has, indeed, too [sic] powerful obstacles to conquer before ... it can ever enter into the markets of its own country on terms of perfect equality with that of England.” The first obstacle, according to Cooper, was lack of pecuniary support of American authors. “The fact that an American publisher can get an English work without money, must ... have a tendency to repress a national literature. No man will pay a [page 19:] writer for an epic, a tragedy, a sonnet, a history, or a romance, when he can get a work of equal merit for nothing.”(49) The second obstacle to American literature which Cooper pointed out — and this statement was echoed and re-echoed by American authors from Irving to Hawthorne to Henry James(50) — was “poverty of materials”:

These two obstacles to fair competition between American and foreign authors were really two mutually inclusive problems, for if American writers were able to discover and exploit native materials instead of using materials common to English works, they would be able to offer their countrymen books the like of which could not be pirated from abroad and which would, as a consequence, make their works fare better on the open market. It certainly seems far from coincidence that in 1837 both Cooper (in Gleanings in Europe: England) and Emerson (in “The American Scholar”) should call for an intellectual declaration of independence, though both, of course, were anticipated by many others during the period, notably by William Ellery Channing in The Importance and Means of a National Literature (1830). Nor does it appear as mere accident that during the relatively short span usually labeled the American Romantic Period or, less usually, the American Renaissance (a term far more expressive of the American effort toward and ultimate achievement of a national literature and surely less suggestive of American imitation of foreign writers), Cooper — to cite a few of multitudinous instances — introduced [page 20:] into American fiction the Revolutionary War, the American Indian, the American prairie, and the American frontiersman; that Irving capitalized on frontier and Western materials; that Hawthorne exploited Puritan history, not to mention the Brook Farm experiment and the American consciousness in Europe; and that Whitman sought to sing America in what he regarded as a distinctly American idiom. Nor, again, can it be accounted mere happenstance that Cooper and Irving, once they showed the richness of American ore, should become the models for untold numbers of American imitators.(51)

Moreover, charges of imitation and plagiarism, the nastiest epithets that could be leveled against an American work, became the commonplace of American criticism. American magazine critics opposed American imitations of “effete and. bygone English schools,” which they came to regard as symptomatic of “ignominious vassalage in literature.” They insisted, to quote again from this typical American critical dictum, “on nationality and true Americanism in the book this country furnishes to itself and to the world. ... It need not (though it may) speak of the Revolution — nor Washington — nor the declaration of independence nor Plymouth Rock — nor Bunker Hill. ... And yet it may be instinct with the life of the country. ...”(52) And booksellers-publishers were also urging authors to treat American themes, according to various contemporary sources, including Poe. Poe argued for an originality stemming from vision rather than from materials, and therefore condemned the condition that made the weight of a foreign subject “more than enough to drag down into the very depths of critical damnation the finest writers owing nativity in the States. ...”(53) [page 21:]

Be this as it may (and one should recognize here the Hegelian contradiction that the very legal and economic forces that were stifling American literature were, at the same time, spasmodically becoming the forces that produced the American Renaissance), American publishing, exploiting both native and foreign writers, was emerging as Big Business by 1836.(54) In that year the number of American publications (reprinted and original) was about half the number issued in Great Britain, but the total number of copies printed was nearly equal in both countries and this at a time when the population in America (some 17 million in 1840) was considerably less than the population in Great Britain (26 million in 1841). Whatever the cause of such production — most likely a combination of more diffused literacy, cheaper book prices, and greater buying power this increasing output and circulation of books, not to mention magazines and newspapers, caused men to be appalled at their numbers and to wonder how they could all be read.

Yet, whether read or not, books were sold. Publishers, unlike modern ones, relied hardly at all upon advertisements for the sale of American works (and it is with the works of American authors that we are now concerned rather than with the reprinted works of British authors), even though they occasionally placed brief and matter-of-fact announcements of forthcoming titles in magazines and newspapers. Instead of depending upon such “advertising,” American publishers exploited a method that, evolving rather haphazardly, developed into a smooth-working system. This system depended upon the [page 22:] cliques that Poe, among others, continually denounced — a system that had become common in England since the eighteenth century and that was frequently condemned in British journals. The chief feature of this system was puffing, a process of publishing highly laudatory, essentially uncritical reviews in magazines and newspapers which favored books coming from the proper presses and written by the proper authors, generally those authors who contributed to the journals that publicized their works. Sometimes these reviews were written by friends, whether the editor, or an acquaintance of the author, or the author himself. On occasion these people — editors, friends, or the author — would wield concerted pressure to insure favorable press notices throughout the country.(55) Charles Frederick Briggs, a successful magazinist and novelist and at one time Poe's colleague on the Broadway Journal, knew whereof he spoke when he wrote in Holden's Dollar Magazine: “The art of puffing is the art of all arts at the present day, when nothing will sell which is not first puffed into notice.”(56) With this statement in mind, one can appreciate Cooper's boast that “without advertisement, puffing, or any of the ordinary movements of the trade,” The Prairie (1827) was successful.(57)

It is germane to an explanation of the other “movements of the trade” to point out what was clearly recognized at the time, that without ready access to American publishers, American authors were forced to write for the magazines — a fact that accounts in some measure for the great burgeoning of periodicals during the period,(58) as well as for the popularity of such literary forms — call them magazine forms as the short essay, the short story, and the short poem. Furthermore, it needs to be pointed out, American magazine editors treated American authors even more outrageously than did American publishers. Not [page 23:] only did these editors pirate material from foreign periodicals for republication in their own magazines, but they pilfered articles from American journals as well. Such piracy finally led George Rex Graham of Graham's Magazine and Louis A. Godey of Godey's Lady's Book in 1845 to copyright each number of their magazines — an act that incited editors and owners of newspapers and magazines, not to mention the publishers of “gift books,” almanacs, annuals, and other scissors-and-paste collections, to violent protest. The remark printed in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter on the occasion of Godey's taking out a copyright on the contents of his magazine — that it was a “narrowly selfish course” and that Godey “would rue it bitterly” — has been cited as typical of the general reaction.(59) A few editors, however, approved such a course, among them Poe. As owner and editor of the Broadway Journal, he commented in the columns of his magazine:

Later in that year, to indicate the license with which editors pirated from American magazines, Poe publicly charged the Chambersburg Times with making up the “whole of its first page from a single number of ‘The Broadway Journal.’ This,” Poe commented, “would be all very well, had it not forgotten [page 24:] to give us credit for our articles, contributed and editorial — and had it not forgotten not to make certain improvements in our compositions to suit its own fancy.”(62)

With foreign and native materials available to them, magazine editors felt slight compunction in paying little or nothing for original contributions, unless, of course, the author was a sure drawing card. For, as Nathaniel Willis, the most successful magazinist of his time and successive editor of the American Monthly Magazine, the New York Mirror, the Corsair (the very name indicative of its piratical policy) and the New York Home Journal, remarked in a letter, he would “take advantage ... of the privilege assured us by our piratical law of copyright. ... As to original American productions, we shall, as the publishers do, take what we can get for nothing, ... holding, as the publishers do, that while we can get Boz and Bulwer for a thank-ye or less, it is not pocket-wise to pay much for Halleck and Irving.”(63) And Poe, who as former editor of Graham's Magazine was in a position to know, observed that writers “whose articles are certainly equal to any thing of Cooper's that we have seen in Graham” were paid nothing by “that munificent publisher!”(64) As late as 1844 Poe wrote “A Chapter of Suggestions” for Godey's Lady's Book at the rate of fifty cents a page for ten pages, a recompense he regarded as quite satisfactory,(65) and indeed it was compared with the experience of less well-known writers such as Mary Nichols.(66)

It is, of course, incautious to generalize on authors’ pay [page 25:] from magazines. Even in dealing with particular authors one must be careful, for few magazines had a fixed rate (the dollar-a-page rate offered by the North American Review from 1825 to 1850 was quite exceptional), not to mention that the size of the page and type used varied from magazine to magazine. Moreover, some editors boasted about their liberal rates but were either dilatory in paying, or paid less than they advertised, or failed to pay at all. Finally, the reputation of a writer at given points in his career had much to do with the payment he could command from the magazines. Thus, an obscure writer might consider himself quite fortunate to be published at all, whereas Longfellow received $50 for a poem from Graham's and Cooper $1,000 (or $10 a page) for a biographical series.(67) But it must be noted that it was not until 1842 that Graham decided to pay such “high” rates — a policy that was instrumental in boosting magazine pay in America in that it forced competing magazines to follow suit. It is hardly digressive to point out here that Poe was responsible for Graham's action. With financial backing promised him by Graham, and himself as co-owner and editor, Poe had contemplated launching a magazine for which such distinguished writers as Bryant, Cooper, Irving, and Longfellow would be induced to write exclusively for an entire year by the offer of unprecedentedly liberal rates. Although Poe actually sent letters soliciting their contributions under such terms, the magazine, at least as Poe envisaged it, never materialized.(68) Graham, however, whose magazine Poe edited during this period (April, 1841 — May, 1842), applied Poe's principle to his own journal. This act not only gained Graham probably the largest magazine circulation of that time, but, as has been said, skyrocketed magazine pay in America, at least for those writers with reputation. The [page 26:] irony is that Poe could never command such pay for his own prose, not even from Graham (he was usually paid about $4 a page), and only rarely could he obtain $50 for a poem.

Poe in 1845 described the economic-literary situation as it affected magazines and magazine contributors. “The want of an International Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers [-publishers] in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews. ...” Magazines, in turn, Poe continued, suffer severe competition, not only from one another, but from piratical publishers who “furnish for eight dollars any four of the British periodicals for a year. ... It would not do,” Poe went on wryly, “to let our poor devil authors absolutely starve, while we grow fat ... on the good things of which we unblushingly pick the pocket of all Europe ... and hence we have Magazine publishers ... who, under certain conditions of good conduct, occasional puffs, and decent subserviency at all times, make it a point of conscience to encourage the poor devil author with a dollar or two, more or less as he behaves himself properly.” Poe added that such paltry payment is generally made only six months after publication.(69)

Despite the general pecuniary difficulties that beset magazines and magazine contributors prior to 1842 and that, as Poe's statement suggests, were hardly settled immediately by the Poe-Graham innovations, authors derived two distinct benefits from publication in magazines. First, they earned a popularity that helped them to get their books published and sold. Secondly, once their books were published, magazine editors, willing to maintain their good will, puffed their books and thus helped them to even greater sales than would otherwise have been possible. Publishers, editors, and authors, finding this system mutually advantageous, if not necessarily ideal, worked hand in hand to keep it functioning smoothly.

A single pertinent instance of how this system worked in practice will illustrate the point graphically. Harper and [page 27:] Brothers was one of the publishing houses that, as a contemporary charged, attempted to monopolize the most profitable part of the book business in America by laboring “with their coadjutors, the newspaper hirelings, to convince authors and the public in general that no book can be sold or can be worth buying unless it comes out under [its] auspices. ...”(70) For reasons best known to themselves, Harpers agreed to publish the entire three numbers of Longfellow's Outre-Mer, and not only to publish them in two volumes without demanding a guarantee against loss, but also to pay the author an advance on royalties.(71) Considering that the work was imitative of Irving's Sketch-Book and that two of the three numbers had only recently been presented to the public (in 1833 and 1834 respectively), this agreement was indeed strange, unless, of course, Harpers had assurance that the book would sell. They could derive some assurance from the fact that the first number issued by Hilliard, Gray and Co. (the publishers who acted as booksellers; the work was originally printed at Longfellow's own expense by Joseph Griffin) had elicited favorable press notices, but they could derive none from the fate of the second number. Published by Lilly, Wait & Company, that book had failed because the publishers had become so entangled in financial difficulties that their credit seriously impeded the distribution of the work.(72) But assurance enough could be had from Lewis Gaylord Clark, friend of Longfellow and editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine. Even while Outre-Mer was in production, he often consulted with Harpers about that work, as his letters to Longfellow testify.(73) And just before Harpers issued Outre-Mer in 1835, he and his friends, many of them fellow editors, began beating their editorial drums for it. Lewis Clark wrote Longfellow on May 9, [page 28:] 1835: “It will be signally popular, mark my words. I send you ... the Knickerbocker, containing a notice of it, and the American Monthly. ... The Courier, and American, and Commercial, and Evening Star will do you full and ample justice, as will the Penna Inquirer, Phila. Gazette, &c in Phila. On this subject, I ‘speak the things which I do know.’”(74) The advantage that accrued to Clark from such favors was that he secured Longfellow's contributions for a period of almost five years without feeling the need to recompense him for them.(75) Longfellow, for his part, did not seem unhappy with this arrangement, however often he dunned Clark for payment and however often Clark evaded the issue by reassuring him that he would pay him for the contributions when times became better(76) — even in 1839 when Clark was paying Irving a flat $2,000 a year for monthly contributions to the Knickerbocker.(77) Longfellow certainly did not stop sending contributions to Clark; and for 1834 at least there are extant letters which indicate that Longfellow took pains to puff the Knickerbocker at Clark's requests.(78) If no direct recompense could be had, there was sufficient recompense of an indirect and finally more lucrative kind. [page 29:]

If Clark had been a decisive factor in Harpers’ decision to republish Outre-Mer, it was not the last time by any means that he was to involve himself in Longfellow's literary affairs, nor, by any means, the last time that Longfellow permitted him to do so. Some time in November, 1835, the New Yorker announced a story contest for a prize of $100. Lewis Clark, appointed to serve as one of three judges, wrote to Longfellow at once, asking that he submit one of the tales he had seen, “The Wondrous Tale of a Little Man in Gosling Green.” Longfellow complied, submitting the story under the pseudonym of Charles F. Brown. The story was not awarded the full prize because, apparently, the other two judges disagreed with Clark's decision and preferred the story submitted by Eliza Leslie, a Philadelphia author and editor. The issue was resolved by dividing the hundred dollars — no trivial sum considering that Longfellow, with extra duties, was earning only 900 that year at Bowdoin College — between Leslie and Longfellow.(79)

Even as late as July 25, 1838 (1839?), Clark's twin brother, who was co-editor of the Knickerbocker as well as editor of the Philadelphia Gazette, extended Longfellow the services of the publicity review: “When you have a scrap ... let me know how to make it public — once out it wins its illustrious way. I wish to do you all the good I humbly can thus. ...”(80) And periodically we have evidence in the Knickerbocker itself of Clark's puffing of Longfellow's books, as well as of his poems and articles appearing in other magazines.

This system, as the crusaders against it noted, was not only immoral but actually militated against a national literature. [page 30:] For once a clique had established itself, it became more and more clannish and powerful, discriminating in favor of belongers and working against outsiders, in a kind of mutual protection league. This was bound to happen, however haphazardly, so long as writers, living in the same city and having similar literary interests and publishers, met, as they often did, socially and professionally at one another's homes and offices, and were concerned, if only for the sake of their livelihood, with. maintaining close relations for purposes of magazine publication, entrees to publishers, and the vitally needed puffs for their works. And since outsiders represented added competition in an already severely competitive market, it was economic folly to welcome them. For this reason a geographical bias developed that can properly be called sectional — a bias that was most pronounced in Boston and New York and against which Southern and Western magazines inveighed continually.

As a consequence of this sectionalism, magazine criticism was being vitiated by the predilections of the coteries. Earlier, literary works were judged by standards that, however rigid and objectionable they may appear today, at least tended to be impartial and resist revision by opportunistic groups.(81) Now, the reviews published by editors engaged in this traffic were, for the most part, superficial and, far worse, misleading, acclaiming or denouncing the work of an author in unqualified terms, depending upon whether the author was in favor with the clique. To entertain the notion of success, writers had first to come into the good graces of editors — a process that involved toadying and quackery, the current words of contempt for the truckling and charlatanry on the part of contributor to editor and editor to the public. Authors and editors who preferred to remain independent and self-respecting were, by and large, marked for failure. The occasional writer or editor who clashed with the cliques was practically doomed.

Another injustice of the system that literary reformers pointed out affected the unsuspecting public. Editors, in preparing [page 31:] for the reception of certain works, were degrading public taste by recommending, not the best works, but only the ones they favored, and almost always in immoderate and uncritical terms. The works of authors not so favored were either treated to what Poe called the “dreadful damnation of silent contempt” or were reviewed abusively, so that the reading public either did not know of the existence of such works or were introduced to them in the worst way. Thus, the most publicized book became, in effect, the book most worth read-ing — a trick still being turned by modern publishers.

Aware of the power of this system to make or break literary reputations, Poe became a scourge of cliques, cliquish practices, and clique-sponsored writers, though he himself at times played favorites. In reviewing the enlarged second edition of the Twice-Told Tales, for instance, Poe confessed that he had withheld praise from Hawthorne because he had mistakenly believed him to have “been thrust into his present position by one of the impudent cliques which beset our literature.”(82) Recognizing too that literary opinions were manufactured wholesale by the cliques, he argued that the popularity of a book was by no means the measure of its worth, else Newton's Principia — to use his example — would be inferior to Hoyle's Games.(83) The popularity of a book, he said in another article, is questionable in any case, since public opinion is manipulated by editors. “That the opinion of the press is not an honest opinion ... is never denied [privately] by the members of the press themselves. Individual presses, of course, are now and then honest, but I speak of the combined effect.” Favorable press notices, he explained, can be achieved by “influence, experience, or.. effrontery,” and are usually written by the author or “interested parties” and published by editors who have been courted by these quacks. “Now, men of genius will not resort to these manoeuvres, because genius involves in its very essence a scorn of chicanery; and thus for a time quacks always get the advantage of them, both in [page 32:] respect to pecuniary profit and what appears to be public esteem.”(84) In still another article, Poe pointed out the duty of the critic, to which, however, he was not unwaveringly faithful, despite his avowal: “It is ... the duty of all whom circumstances have led into criticism — it is, at least, a duty from which we individually shall never shrink — to uphold the true dignity of genius, to combat its degradation, to plead for the exercise of its power...”(85)

Though sometimes guilty of the practice himself, Poe also opposed the custom of anonymous reviewing, whether the reviewer lauded or lambasted a book, for, on the one hand, he argued, anonymity is a blind for easy adulation or, on the other, a concealment for attacks “most unfair — most despicable and cowardly.”(86) Moreover, Poe objected to the vague generalities of critics as well as to their ignorance of critical principles, though on occasion, hard-pressed for time or merely impatient, he would satisfy himself with an exhibition of the “blemishes” and “beauties” of a work in what was the standard critical manner. He not only urged a responsible analysis of text, but he himself became the first American critic to use it as a characteristic technique. In summing up one review, he said with justifiable pride: “In our account of all this matter we have had reference to the book — and to the book alone.”(87) Furthermore, and something that still takes courage, he refused to be awed by a reputation, whether Cooper's, Irving's, or Longfellow's. At his best he considered novels, poems, and stories, not novelists, poets, and story-writers. Poe also called for critical integrity, an integrity that could be achieved, he felt, only by independence from “home-dictation of the bookseller [-book publisher] coteries.”(88) For this reason he praised the so-called independent critics. He acclaimed such men as [page 33:] Park Benjamin who, he said, had “ability, activity, causticity, fearlessness, and independence,” although, he added, he was “too frequently biassed by personal feelings — feelings now of friendship and again of vindictiveness,” and Lambert A. Wilmer who, “as Editor of the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post ... has boldly and skilfully asserted the rights of independent criticism, speaking, in all instances — the truth.”(89) As for himself, though aware of the fate of those critics who clashed with the cliques, he was in his published criticism, with obvious lapses, as honest and plain-spoken as he could be. Moreover, as one would expect, he opposed sectionalism, even to the point of becoming sectional in his opposition, arguing that such writers as William Wallace of Kentucky, Edward C. Pinkney of Maryland, and William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina were “born too far South” to receive the recognition due them.(90) In a more aggressive statement he said: “The manner in which the cabal of the [Boston] ‘North American Review’ first write all our books and then review them, puts me in mind of the fable about the Lion and the Painter. It is high time that the literary South took its own interests into its own charge.”(91)

Poe himself on many occasions summed up the points that have here been drawn from a variety of his critical articles. Perhaps the most forceful of these summations appears in his review of Wilmer's Quacks of Helicon,(92) which, because of its cogency, is quoted here at length. Poe wrote that “we are glad to see this book ... because, in the universal corruption and rigmarole amid which we gasp for breath, it is really a pleasant thing to get even one accidental whiff of the unadulterated air of truth.” The Quacks of Helicon, he went on, “has many defects ... but it has also many remarkable merits — merits which it will be quite useless for those aggrieved by the satire — quite useless for any clique, or set of cliques, to attempt to frown down. ...” Poe then pointed out the faults of the poem, “although Mr. Wilmer is a personal friend of our own. ...” [page 34:]

Poe, of course, was not alone in this crusade. If anything distinguished him in this respect, it was not the originality of his allegations but his forcefulness, courage, and steadfastness in asserting them. Only a month after Poe first at tacked the New York clique a battle detailed in the next chapter Edward Sherman Gould (1805-1885), a free-lance New York writer and critic, delivered a lecture on “American Criticism on American Literature” in New York City, the points and even many of the phrases of which were strikingly like Poe's. In general, Gould observed that literary reviews were neither intelligent, discriminating, nor disinterested, and that public opinion in regard to the merit of authors was originated [page 36:] and controlled by the magazines rather than formed by impartial or aesthetic criteria. In particular, Gould inveighed against the practice of authors rather than publishers presenting copies of their books “with their compliments” to critics “as a sort of practical bribery” to elicit favorable reviews. He denounced reviews that were testimonials of friendship rather than evidences of critical acumen or even honesty. And he complained against authors and publishers who hired literary friends to prepare an assortment of articles about their books which they could submit to editors who, for reasons of laziness, indifference, or friendship, would publish them in their magazines. (Gould neglected to mention the even sharper practice engaged in by such writers as Whitman — that of anonymously inserting reviews of their own works in the periodicals.)(93)

What was needed to correct this state of affairs, Gould advised, was a sound and independent criticism — sound and independent in the sense that a critic would be competent in his craft and concerned with the book and not with the author or his affiliations.(94)

This, then, is the background of the literary battles which Poe fought, a familiarity with which, to paraphrase Poe, may induce in us some sympathy with the circumstances that impelled him in his criticism and thus with the objects for which he wrote, so that we shall not be too far misled in our judgment.(95) Awareness of this background — of the editorial and publishing practices that in Poe's time were finding a congenial atmosphere for growth and that could and still often do make an author successful out of all relation to his talents — will enable us to see Poe's critical career for what it essentially was — a fourteen-year attempt to extirpate practices injurious [page 37:] to American letters; a prolonged endeavor to get literary works judged by the canons of an honest and principled criticism; and a continual effort to develop and promulgate such canons.(96)

This is not to suggest that Poe is presented here as a literary hero hewn of a single honorable piece. Heroic and honorable he may have been at times, but in 1845-1846 he suffered a breakdown, and during that time and at subsequent intervals he was certainly not of a piece and surely not honorable, and no attempt is made to whitewash his character and make him appear at all times the crusader that for the greater part of his career he was. The shots, in short, are called as they are seen; and if Poe, in the periods mentioned, wielded his critical pen for personal retaliation, the damage he did, more to himself and his cause than to his enemies, is not ignored.(97)

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 4, continuing to the bottom of page 5:]

1. The most elaborate work on the subject of national literature is by Benjamin T. Spencer, Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign [page 5:] (Syracuse, 1957). At a booksellers’ dinner held in New York City on March 30, 1837, which was attended by some three hundred people, including such prominent editors as James Bennett and Lewis Gaylord Clark, such leading publishers as Mathew Carey and James Harper, and such celebrated authors as Washington Irving, James K. Paulding, and William Cullen Bryant (not to mention Poe), William L. Stone, “as the senior of the editorial corps of New York City,” had this to say: “A great deal has been said ... about the duty of encouraging native literature. ... It is but a few years since we began to think of having native authors.” (See the New York American, XIX, April 3, 1837, for a detailed report of this event.) And William Ellery Channing in The Importance and Means of a National Literature (London, 1830, p. 13) asked even earlier: “Do we possess, indeed, what may be called a national literature? ... We regret that the reply ... is so obvious. The few standard works which we have produced, and which promise to live, can hardly, by any courtesy, be denominated a national literature.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 5:]

2. In Notions of the Americans (Philadelphia, 1828), II, 108, for instance, James Fenimore Cooper asserted that “Talent is sure of too many avenues to wealth and honors, in America, to seek, unnecessarily, an unknown and hazardous path [of authorship].”

3. Letter to Frederick W. Thomas dated Aug. 27, 1842. See John Ward Ostrom, ed., The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), I, 210.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 6:]

4. Next to nothing is known about the circumstances of the publication of his first work, Tamerlane and Other Poems (Boston, 1827). Calvin F. S. Thomas, who was a job printer, not a publisher, may have agreed to print this work out of friendship for Poe (Poe and he were nearly the same age). On the other hand, Poe may have saved enough out of his army pittance to defray the cost of the estimated forty-copy edition. Thomas, of course, had no way of distributing the book. Even if he had, it is doubtful that anyone would have bought the poems “By a Bostonian.”

5. See Poe's letter to his guardian, John Allan, dated May 29, 1829 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 20). Poe regretfully recalled the manuscript on July 28, 1829 (ibid., p. 27), and submitted it to Hatch & Dunning, Baltimore publishers. Some time before November 18 Poe received $80 from John Allan (ibid., p. 34), a sum that may have gone to those publishers to guarantee them against loss.

6. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), pp. 250-251.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 7:]

7. George E. Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, 1885), pp. 116-117. When Poe broached that company again in 1841 to publish a new collection of his tales, he received a letter from Mathew Carey remarking that the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque had, as predicted, failed to earn expenses and that he was bound to reject the new manuscript. See Earl L. Bradsher, Mathew Carey, Editor, Author and Publisher: A Study in American Literary Development (New York, 1912), p. 92.

8. II (Oct. 4, 1845), 200.

9. Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven, Conn., 1948), p. 35.

10. George Haven Putnam, George Palmer Putnam: A Memoir (New York, 1912), p. 195.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 8:]

11. Letter to Emerson dated Nov. 14, 1847. See Walter Harding and Carl Bode, eds., The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York, 1958), p. 191.

12. Quoted by Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry David Thoreau (New York, 1948), AP. 98-99.

13. See the letter from Ticknor & Co. dated Sept. 29, 1855 (Harding and Bode, Thoreau's Correspondence, p. 387).

14. Letter to Anna Blackwell dated June 14, 1848 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, II, 370).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 9:]

15. See the letter from M. Carey & Sons dated Jan. 31, 1823, to John Miller, their English agent, which contains detailed instructions regarding the profit to be made in “scooping competitors” (Bradsher, Carey, p. 130).

16. The so-called authorized or author's edition was at times desired not only by American publishers but British ones as well. For example, Cooper's The Spy (1821) was brought out in England in an author's edition, even though a pirated version was already on the British market. See Henry Walcott Boynton, James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1931), p. 98. An anonymous American (generally thought to be Grenville A. Sackett) urged American publishers — and he might have admonished British ones too — that if they “will not prevent this cruel injustice, that makes a spoil of every literary work cast upon our shores, let them at least preserve them from wanton and undeserved mutilation.” Plea for Authors and the Rights of Literary Property (New York, 1838), p. 27.

17. John Lloyd Stephens’ letter to Prescott dated March 25, 1843. Roger Wolcott, ed., The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833-1847 (Boston, 1925), p. 19.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 10:]

18. The details of this story are reported by David A. Randall, “Waverley in America,” The Colophon, New Series, I (Summer, 1935), 35-55. Constable and Company did, in fact, accuse Carey & Son of the theft of one of Scott's novels, but the accusation was withdrawn when Mathew Carey insisted upon his innocence in the affair. See Bradsher, Carey, pp. 87, 130-131.

19. James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (Minneapolis, Minn., 1936), p. II n. 13, and John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (Boston, 19I0), 111, 421.

20. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York, 1952), I, 441.

21. Pure altruism on the part of at least one American publisher was not manifested until 1842, if we can believe Caroline Ticknor (Hawthorne and His Publisher, Boston, 1913, p. 3), when W. D. Ticknor began to pay English authors for the American publication of their works.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 11:]

22. Bradsher, Carey, p. 90.

23. See the letter dated March 25, 1843, from John Lloyd Stephens to Prescott (Wolcott, Prescott's Correspondence, p. 339). For a case study of one author's relations with his publishers, see C. Harvey Gardiner, Prescott and His Publishers (Carbondale, Ill., 1959).

24. The information regarding Longfellow and Emerson appears in William Charvat's article, “Longfellow's Income from His Writings, 1840-1852,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XXXVIII (First Quarter, 1944), 9-21.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 11, running to the bottom of page 12:]

25. Southern Literary Messenger, II (April, 1836), 326. See also the same volume of the Messenger (Dec., 1835), p. 57, and (Feb., 1836), p. 192, for similar statements. Urged by Thomas W. White, the proprietor of the Messenger, Edward Johnston, a New York writer, tried to interest Saunders and Otley, English [page 12:] publishers, in Poe's first collection of tales so that Poe could establish an English reputation, but nothing came of the attempt (Quinn, Poe, p. 251).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 12:]

26. Democracy in America (New York, 1843), II, 58.

27. Letter dated Oct. 1, 1839. Luther S. Livingston, A Bibliography of the First Editions in Book Form of the Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (New York, 1908), pp. 24-25.

28. Broadway Journal, II (Nov. 29,1845), 321.

29. George Edwin Mize, “The Contributions of Evert A. Duyckinck to the Cultural Development of Nineteenth Century America,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (New York University, 1954), pp. 68-69. William Charvat in Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia, 1959), p. 27, observed: “It is safe to say that Emerson's influence was restricted and delayed because he did all his publishing in Boston.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 13:]

30. Notions of the Americans, II, 107.

31. These statistics are taken from those given by William L. Stone at the booksellers’ dinner held in New York City (see n. 1 above). Needless to say, perhaps, the statements made here apply to literary works rather than to works dealing with education, theology, law, and the like, which managed to compete quite successfully with their British rivals.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 14:]

32. Carey's letter to William Gilmore Simms dated Dec. 16, 1841 (Bradsher, Carey, p. 93). Carey also noted: “We do not see much hope in the future of the American writer in light literature — as a matter of profit it might be abandoned.”

33. Letters on the Eastern States (New York, 1821), pp. 161-162. Tudor regarded “the publishing booksellers of the United States [as] ... the natural enemies of our authors; they whose intervention is a matter of necessity, either refuse it altogether, or offer it with reluctance and as a favour.”

34. James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1949), P. 54.

35. Godey's Lady's Book, XXXI (Sept., 1845), 12 I.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 15:]

36. Foreign Quarterly Review, XLIV (Jan., 1844), 324.

37. Robert E. Spiller (with passages by Alexander Cowie), “The Making of the Man of Letters” in Literary History of the United States (New York, 1948), I, 125.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 16:]

38. Wolcott, Prescott's Correspondence, p. 19.

39. Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 1935), I, 424 n. 149, and Grossman, Cooper, p. 49.

40. Clarence Gohdes, “Longfellow and His Authorized British Publishers,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, LV (Dec., 1940), 1165-1166.

41. Charles F. Heartman and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Hattiesburg, Miss., 1943), pp. 40, 114-115, 154-155.

42. Letter dated Feb. 23, 1848 (Harding and Bode, Thoreau's Correspondence, p.209).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 17:]

43. Thomas R. Lounsbury, James Fenimore Cooper (Boston, 1886), p. 261, and Henry A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis (Boston, 1885), p. 241.

44. New York Mirror, XVII (Oct. 12, 1839), 127.

45. Grossman, Cooper, p. 244.

46. The Mirror article referred to in note 44 above states that “No American Writer can hereafter hope to derive any emolument from the sale of his works in England.... This is all fair in the way of retaliation.” The New York Home Journal of Jan. 12, 1850, observed: “— Our friend Herman Melville is one of the first and most signal realizers of the recent [British] repudiation of copyright. As our readers probably know, it has been a rule among publishers abroad that an agreement of prior publication, between one of their number and an American author, should be as valid as the legal copyright of an English author. To Punish us for our wholesale thieving of English books, they have broken up this Protection, by mutual consent, and, now, an American author can no more sell a book in England than Dickens can sell one here — justly enough!”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 18:]

47. Traveller to America (London, 1855), p. 46.

48. According to the researches of Mr. Charles A. Toase, my London informant, and those of the librarian of the Board of Trade (the British government department concerned with copyright), any fluctuations at different dates can be attributed to court decisions as points of law were contested. Mr. Toase adds: “It is amazing how difficult this makes it to determine the legal position at any given time in respect to American works.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 19:]

49. II, 108.

50. Irving's explanation for the evident superiority of European literature over American literature is to be found in “The Author's Account of Himself” in The Sketch-Book; Hawthorne's explanation in his Preface to The Marble Faun; and James's explanation in his essay Hawthorne.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 20:]

51. For one study of the numerous imitations of Irving's trans-Mississippi materials, see Ruth Hudson, “A Literary ‘Area of Freedom’ Between Irving and Twain,” Western Humanities Review, XIII (Winter, 1959), 46-60. For a report on how one magazine became more and more partial to American themes, see Darwin Shrell, “Nationalism and Aesthetics in the North American Review: 1815-1850,” Studies in American Literature, No. 8 (1960), 11-21. According to a contemporary appraisal, a significant condition governing the success of an American work was a subject “thoroughly American” (Broadway Journal, II, Aug. 23, 1845, 109).

52. Broadway Journal, II (July 19, 1845), 27.

53. Graham's Magazine, XX (Jan., 1842), 68.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 21:]

54. Statistics show that in 1798 “persons and firms engaged in employing printers, publishers, and booksellers” had the following distribution in the three major publishing centers of the United States: Boston: 4I; New York: 56; Philadelphia: 88. During the period 1820-52, the publishing business emerged as a distinct and formidable enterprise, and something of the tremendous increase in publishing establishments may be gauged by comparing the following figures with the foregoing ones: Boston: 147; New York: 345; Philadelphia: 198. And these figures exclude bookbinders, retail booksellers, and printers who were not also publishers. In dollars, book production leaped from $2,500,000 in 1820 to $12,500,000 in 1850. See Helmut Lehmann-Haupt, Lawrence C. Wroth, and Rollo G. Silver, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States (New York, 1931), pp. 120-129. The statistics that follow in the text regarding number of titles and copies are drawn from Stone's remarks at the booksellers’ dinner (see n. 1 above).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 22:]

55. For a detailed study of one author's methods of promoting his books into the ranks of best-sellers, see Gardiner, Prescott, pp. 167-201.

56. II (July, 1848), 446. Briggs suggested, however, that a bad review was better than none at all.

57. Quoted by Robert E. Spiller and Philip C. Blackburn, James Fenimore Cooper: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York, 1934), pp. 222-223.

58. De Tocqueville, for instance, was impressed by the almost incredibly large number of magazines in the United States (Democracy in America, I, 199).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 23:]

59. Ruth E. Finney, The Lady of Godey's: Sarah Josepha Hale (Philadelphia, 1937), p. 48.

60. This was a consequence of editors’ sending out advance sheets of their magazines to other editors in order to obtain free press notices of their forthcoming issues, and explains, for instance, why Poe's “The Raven” appeared in the Mirror prior to its appearance in the Democratic Review, though the Democratic Review was the magazine that had accepted and paid for the poem.

61. I (April 26, 1845), 268.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 24:]

62. Broadway Journal, II (Sept. 13, 1845), 158.

63. Letter dated Dec. 24, 1838 (Beers, Willis, p. 240).

64. Broadway Journal, I (Feb. 22, 1845), 127.

65. See his letter to Sarah J. Hale dated May 31, 1844 (Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 255).

66. In her book Mary Lyndon, or Revelations of a Life: An Autobiography (New York, 1855), pp. 287-288, she wrote: “... I was hoping to receive some money for three stories which I had written for Godey's Lady's Book. ... The stories had been accepted, and in about a year after their acceptance had been published. I had written to Mr. Godey asking him to give me what he thought my stories were worth. He referred me to Mrs. Hale. I wrote to her, and told her that I needed the money, and asked her to give as much as the work was worth to one who needed all she earned. Mrs. Hale answered that the worth of matter for their ‘Book’ depended entirely on the fame of the writers. I had made no fame, and she therefore inclosed me fifteen dollars, which she assured me was the best they could do. But days elapsed before this money came. ...”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 25:]

67. See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (New York, 1930), I, 504-512. According to a writer in the Weekly Mirror, I (Oct. 19, 1844), 28, Graham and Godey paid $2 to $12 a page for prose and $5 to $50 per poem, which the writer regarded as “noble liberality” compared with the pay offered by other journals.

68. See Poe's letters to John P. Kennedy and Irving, both dated June 1, 1841, as well as his letters to Longfellow (June 22, 1841) and Fitz-Greene Halleck (June 24, 1841), in Ostrom, Poe's Letters, I, 161-170.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 26:]

69. Broadway Journal, I (Feb. 15, 1845), 103.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 27:]

70. L. A. Wilmer, The Quacks of Helicon: A Satire (Philadelphia, 1841), pp. 52-53.

71. Livingston, Longfellow Bibliography, p. 21.

72. Lawrance Thompson, Young Longfellow, 1807-1843 (New York, 1938), pp. 187-188, 382-383 n. 15.

73. See Clark's letters to Longfellow dated Sept. 2, 1834, and March 2 and May 9, 1835, in Leslie Dunlap, ed., The Letters of Willis Gaylord Clark and Lewis Gaylord Clark (New York, 1940), pp. 80, 86, 88.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 28:]

74. Ibid., p. 88.

75. Thompson (Longfellow, pp. 308, 476 n. 7) states that Longfellow never received a cent from the Knickerbocker for his poems until Nov., 1840 — almost five years after Outre-Mer appeared — when he received $15 for “The Village Blacksmith.”

76. See Dunlap, The Clark Letters, passim.

77. Williams, Irving, II, 95. Pierre M. Irving, a nephew of the author, tells us in his Life and Letters of Washington Irving (New York, 1867), III, 148, that Irving, like Longfellow, had trouble collecting what was due him (“returns were less prompt than he had anticipated”). Richard Henry Stoddard, a contributor to the Knickerbocker, reports rather exaggeratedly in his Recollections, Personal and Literary (New York, 1902) that there “was no money in the Knickerbocker Magazine, — certainly none for its contributors, — but its jaunty editor managed to live out of it” (p. 49).

78. There are many such references in Clark's letters to Longfellow. One, dated July 2, 1834, reads: “I thank you, heartily, for your kind intentions to say good words for us in the paper.” Another, dated Sept. 2, 1834, reads: “If you think it [the Knickerbocker for Sept.] will bear some laudatory remarks in the different Portland and Brunswick papers, it will do us much good, just now.” A third, dated Nov. 2, 1834, reads: “You will receive ... a few circulars by mail, which I wish you would enclose to, and circulate among your friends” (Dunlap, The Clark Letters, pp. 75, 80, 84).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 29:]

79. For details of this collusion, see James Taft Hatfield, “An Unknown Prose Tale by Longfellow,” American Literature, III (May, 1931), 136-148; Clark's letters to Longfellow dated Aug. 29, Nov. 2, and Dec. 10, 1834 (in Dunlap, The Clark Letters, pp. 79, 82, 85); and Thompson, Longfellow, p. 201. None of these investigators interpret the event as I have, although Thompson says there was collusion but calls it harmless. He also suggests that Longfellow contributed often to the Knickerbocker in appreciation of Clark's assistance in this affair. For further details concerning Longfellow and the Clark brothers, see chaps. iv and v of the present study.

80. Dunlap, The Clark Letters, p. 52.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 30:]

81. William Charvat in The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (Philadelphia, 1936), pp. 27-58, 164-205, discusses these critical standards.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 31:]

82. Graham's Magazine, XX (May, 1842), 299.

83. Ibid. (Feb., 1842), p. 324.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 32:]

84. See Poe's critique on Bryant, Godey's Lady's Book, XXXII (April, 1846), 182-186, and its sequel, “Author's Introduction” to the “Literati of New York City,” ibid. (May, 1846), pp. 194-195.

85. Graham's Magazine, XX (March, 1842), 186-187.

86. Ibid. (Jan., 1842), pp. 68-69, and Southern Literary Messenger, XV (May, 1849), 294.

87. Southern Literary Messenger, II (April, 1836), 336.

88. Graham's Magazine, XX (Jan., 1842), 68.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 33:]

89. Southern Literary Messenger, II (Feb., 1836), 192.

90. Ibid., XV (April and Sept., 1849), 220, 690.

91. Ibid., XV (April, 1849) 220.

92. Graham's Magazine, XIX (Aug., 1841), 90-93.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 36:]

93. Whitman owned to having inserted three puffing reviews of his Leaves of Grass in three periodicals. See Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New York, 1945), pp. 147, 171.

94. This lecture, delivered on Dec. 29, 1835, was published in the New York Mirror in two instalments, XIII (April 9 and 16, 1836), 321-322, 329-330. It was also published (together with a lecture by John H. Gourlie) by the Mercantile Library Association under the title Lectures Delivered before the Mercantile Association (New York, 1836), pp. 2-26.

95. The exact quotation appears as an epigraph to this chapter and was originally published in the Broadway Journal, II (Sept. 27, 1845), 177.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 37:]

96. Poe felt he had good grounds for his critical harshness and even his sarcasm. In Biographia Literaria (London, 1817), p. 203, his mentor had written: “Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the critic, with the criticized work before him, can make good, is the critic's right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to complain.”

97. In this study I ignore the political antagonism between the Locofocos (the radical Jacksonian Democrats such as Evert A. Duyckinck, Cornelius Mathews, and John Lewis O'Sullivan) and the conservative Democrats and Whigs (such as Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and Edwin Percy Whipple) — first, because the subject has been sufficiently discussed by John Stafford in The Literary Criticism of “Young America”: A Study in the Relationship of Politics and Literature, 1837-1850 (University of California English Studies 3, 1952) and, more recently, by Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York, 1956) second, and more important, because political considerations did not enter into Poe's critical judgments.