‘A Yankee Pocket Edition of Carlyle’? Emerson on the British Market

Abstract

This chapter provides an account of British editions of Emerson’s works published in the 1840s. Building on an analysis of publishers’ correspondence and contemporary advertisements, it emphasises the importance of Carlyle’s presence in these books (his prefaces to them as well as the centrality of his name on title pages and in contemporary reviews). Emerson’s books had been pirated in England since the late 1830s, but he began to benefit from this interest in his writing only when Carlyle’s London publisher James Fraser issued an authorised edition of Essays in 1841. Emerson sought to emancipate himself from Carlyle when he decided to sell his subsequent books through the firm of John Chapman, but he did not ultimately manage to solve the problem of unauthorised transatlantic reprinting. The chapter concludes with an account of Emerson’s efforts (aided by Chapman and Carlyle) to use mid-century international copyright legislation to rebuild the cultural and economic authority of literary authorship.