English Reading Habits Research Articles

Emerson's Early Impact on England: A Study in British Periodicals

The years 1840–50 were important ones in Anglo-American cultural and intellectual relations, for during this period American writers began to be widely read in England. Before that time books had been too expensive for almost everyone except the great readers or the greatly prosperous; in the 1840's, however, a combination of circumstances led to a revolution in English reading habits. Circulating libraries had been in operation in England for some years, but it was in 1842 that Mudie's began to make available for the first time literature of the world to all literate Englishmen. More important perhaps than the libraries were the cheap reprints which, at first, were sold mainly in the newly built and overflowing railway stations but which were later found in book stalls throughout the country. Commenting on Slater's shilling edition of Emerson's Orations, Lectures, and Addresses, The Critic wrote, for example, that “the work itself must be familiar by name to all our readers, but probably it has been out of the reach of many of them. It is not so now. The poorest may possess it.” That Emerson and many other American authors appeared in these cheap reprints was due, ironically enough, as much to defective international copyright laws as to a demand for their books. British publishers discovered that under certain conditions they could bring out the works of foreign writers without remuneration, and after 1839 they took full advantage of this knowledge. Emerson tried to outwit these pirates by sending the manuscripts of Essays, Second Series and of Poems to England prior to bringing the volumes out in America, and Carlyle used the Preface to the Second Essays to draw and quarter them. Emerson's precautions and Carlyle's strictures were of little avail: at about the same time that Poems came out, Orr and Company was issuing a pirated edition of Essays, Lectures, and Orations. Although evasion of copyright laws cannot be condoned on ethical grounds, it was fortuitous in one respect: the pirated editions were dirt cheap, and their wide sale along with legitimate reprints and the circulating library made accessible for the first time large quantities of American books to a wide British public. From 1840 to the end of the century, England read more books by American writers than by all of Europe combined and, fortunately for this study, all of the major works received critical appraisal in British periodicals.