SOURCE: Charvat, William. “Author and Publisher.” In Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850, pp. 38-60. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959.

[In the following excerpt, Charvat explains the relationship between nineteenth-century American authors and the evolving publishing business.]

The first era of successful professional authorship in America began in the years 1819 to 1821 with the publication of Irving's Sketch Book and James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy. The twenty years that followed were notable for a tremendous expansion of the national economy. Except for minor recessions in the late twenties and in 1834 and 1837, which the book trade duly reflected,¹ it was, to use Irving's phrase, a time of “unexampled prosperity.” Equally unexampled in the history of the profession were Irving's income of ＄23,500 in the year 1829—all from books—and Cooper's average of ＄6,500 a year in the 1820's. No first-rate author of the brilliant fifties—the years of the American renaissance—came even close to such affluence. The reasons are many; for the major ones we must look into the book trade economy and the changes in it between 1820 and 1850.

On December 19, 1819, Mathew Carey of Philadelphia—publisher, bookseller, and chief jobber for the southern states, sent what was probably, in America, a record-breaking order for a purely literary work. It was for four hundred copies of the fifth number of The Sketch Book: “Send 150 by Swiftsure Stage and the remainder by Mercantile Line.” Number five was a slim pamphlet which sold for what was also probably a record-breaking price—seventy-five cents. The order was the climax of a controversy. It was sent to Ebenezer Irving in New York (Washington was in England) rather than to the printer because the Irvings had paid for the manufacture of The Sketch Book and therefore were in complete control of sales and discount policy. Orders for the first American classic had been coming in to Carey from bookstores throughout the South and Middle States, but he had been unwilling to fill them. A Philadelphia rival, Moses Thomas, had had a monopoly on all sales in the area, and Carey had had to pay him sixty-five and one-half cents (a discount of one-sixth) for a book which he himself had to sell to country booksellers for sixty cents. But because Thomas was close to insolvency, Carey had managed to break his monopoly by appealing to C. S. Van Winkle, the New York printer of the work, who interceded with Ebenezer. As a result, Carey was given the usual one-fourth discount, four-fifths of which he gave up on those copies which he sold to his retailers. It was a small profit for a wholesaler, but he had to supply the booksellers' demand, for many of them bought their entire stock of books from him.

Reconstructing the account from such correspondence as survives,² one finds that the score on Sketch Book No. 5 was somewhat as follows:

Printing	26[frac12] cents	35 per cent
Discount	18[frac34] cents	25 per cent
(Retailer 20٪ Wholesaler 5٪)
Profit (for Irving)	30 cents	40 per cent

The set of seven pamphlets which constituted the work cost the retail buyer ＄5.37[frac12]—an enormous price in America, where Scott's novels were selling for two dollars. In setting such high prices Irving was following British practice, and that he succeeded in it—just this once—is a not wholly comprehensible historical accident. There were protests (especially in thrifty New England) against the price of The Sketch Book and what was then considered its luxurious format, but an estimated five thousand American readers were willing to buy it, and Irving's profit for two years was, incredibly, over nine thousand dollars. But his publishing methods contained the seeds of their own destruction.

The economic history of The Sketch Book reveals all the elements of the early American writer's publishing problem: the retail price of books, the cost of manufacture, the discount to the trade, and the division of profit between author and publisher. The basic pattern, which seems to have been borrowed from England, allowed one-third of the retail price for manufacturing costs, one-third for trade discount, and one-third for profit, which theoretically was divided equally between author and publisher. (Note that the author's share of this profit was the equivalent of a sixteen and two-thirds per cent royalty.)

But, from the start, American facts upset the British formula. In the first place, British publishers kept competition under control through “courtesy of the trade” and other more coercive devices; kept retail prices high through collusion, even to the extent of destroying “remainders” rather than dumping them at low prices; had a closely predictable sale for every type of book; and, in general, enjoyed all the advantages of a geographically small and homogeneous market. As a result, they were able to keep retail prices at a high and stable level that was impossible in our primitive American conditions. By 1821, many new British novels (usually issued in three volumes) were selling for thirty-one and a half shillings, or about ＄7.30 in American money. The same novels sold for two dollars in American reprints. One can see why no American writer could hope to achieve Scott's income (for a period) of ten thousand pounds a year.

In the second place, in the early twenties American publishers were not accustomed to paying anything at all to native writers, nor did they, except on rare, and usually unfortunate occasions, print native literary works at their own risk. Hence, when Irving and Cooper found that they could produce literature of commercial value, they followed the established custom and financed their own works; and because they held the purse strings they decreed the discounts that were to be allowed. There was, of course, no obligation to divide profits equally with the so-called publisher, who simply acted as wholesale distributor. As a result, what we think of as the normal arrangement between author and publisher was often reversed: instead of being paid royalties by publishers, authors, in effect, paid publishers a royalty. The publisher got his pay either in the form of a commission which he charged for distributing the work, or from the difference between the whole discount he was allowed—say, one-third—and the smaller discount which he allowed the retailer.

But though the author could, under these conditions, make a profit of forty per cent or more, the system worked against him in some ways. When a publisher reprinted a foreign work at his own risk, he divided what would have been the author's profit with his retailers in the form of high discounts, which encouraged the retailers to push sales. But the small discount which the retailer received on a copyrighted native work was no inducement to salesmanship. Hence American books had a relatively smaller circulation than foreign ones partly because the retailer had smaller incentive to sell them. Even when the publishing economy became more mature, the retailer's natural prejudice against native works continued. As late as 1848, Ticknor & Fields wrote a Cincinnati dealer that their discount on a certain list was one-third—except for Longfellow's works, which discounted at twenty-five to twenty-eight per cent because “the copyright [we pay] is unusually high.” The same firm offered only twenty-five per cent on The Scarlet Letter.³

The difficulties of early American authorship are often attributed to American prejudice against American literature. But equally important was the lack of adequate risk capital in the publishing industry. Its members lived on such a narrow margin that not many had a life of more than a few years. Carey's was the only eighteenth century firm that lived on long into the nineteenth (its capital of a quarter of a million dollars in 1834 was uniquely high),⁴ and of those firms established before 1820, only the Harpers prospered beyond mid-century. The panic of 1837 was particularly disastrous, but even the slightest recession brought on a rash of bankruptcies, reorganizations, or assignments of assets. Few authors escaped losses in one or more of these failures.

This lack of capital resulted in a number of different arrangements by which the writer took the whole or some of the risk of publication, sometimes to his own advantage, sometimes to the advantage of the publisher. He took the entire risk when he paid the cost of manufacture, paid a commission to a distributor, and allowed the retailer to receive the work on consignment. This was the normal fate of the untried author, like Bryant with his early poems, and R. H. Dana, Sr., with The Idle Man (one of several attempts to emulate Irving's success with The Sketch Book).

A safer variation of this method was that of Irving and Cooper before they took their business to Carey. These two paid for manufacture, but sold whole editions to jobbers who took the risk of unsold copies.

Still better was the method adopted by Prescott and other historians in the thirties, and Longfellow and Lowell in the forties. Here the author paid only for the stereotype plates and retained ownership. Sometimes he leased them to a publisher for a stated period, but normally he was paid a relatively high royalty, at the time of issue, for each edition printed from his plates. The difference between the normal ten per cent and Longfellow's twenty per cent gave him a high return for his investment in plates, because his works were often reprinted.

Seemingly fair, but frequently pernicious, was the half-profits system. The publisher made no payments until his risk of manufacturing costs was covered, and he often yielded to the temptation of padding the actual costs of production, or added a commission charge for his services. This was the Harpers' favorite method with novelists in the 1830's,⁵ and Herman Melville was its victim for over thirty years. He owned the plates of his first book, Typee, but for all others he was on the half-profits system; and on Pierre, the publisher actually exempted the first 1190 copies from royalty. Moreover, Melville always borrowed in advance against a new book, and was charged interest for these advances, so that he was in debt to the Harpers for almost his entire career.⁶

At the other extreme was an arrangement which few authors but Irving and Cooper could make, and they only with the house of Carey. Carey purchased the right to publish their works for a term of years, for a stated sum; they took no risk and made no investment themselves, and were paid whether a work sold or not. Even in modern times there is no equivalent to this arrangement, except when really large advances are made against future royalties. In originating this system, Carey anticipated the later arrangement (which was carried over into the twentieth century) whereby established authors got contracts and payments for works before they were completed or even written.

This variety of ways of sharing or assuming the risks of publication resulted in professional fortunes that ranged from feast to famine, depending upon whether a writer had no capital, like Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, or enough to dictate terms to his publisher, like Cooper, Irving, Longfellow, and Prescott.

Many changes in publishing conditions took place between 1820 and 1850. At the time of The Sketch Book, relations between retailers, printers, publishers, and jobbers were extremely complex. Almost all publishers were retailers; many printers were also publishers and sometimes also retailers; all jobbers were retailers; no jobber could deal profitably in the books of all publishers; and no publisher could reach directly all markets in the country. Currency and credit were so unstable that the mere process of paying and getting paid was difficult. The result was a system of distribution so complicated that the publishers were almost as confused as the historian who tries to read their surviving records and correspondence. It is no wonder that when Richardson & Lord of Boston formed a partnership in 1820, their articles of agreement stated their intention of engaging in the “art, trade, and mystery of bookselling.”⁷

The basis of the system was a loose inter-city structure of tie-ins between particular booksellers. A large publisher had agreements with one or more firms in every other large city. These firms were called “correspondents” and acted as bankers, post office, retailers, co-publishers, and sometimes jobbers for their principals. The correspondent was a co-publisher when he co-operated in the issue of a book under the multiple-imprint system, whereby a firm split the risk on a book which it had contracted to distribute. Suppose, as in the case of Sketch Book No. 1, a first edition of two thousand copies was published simultaneously in four cities—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. The printer and quasi-publisher, C. S. Van Winkle of New York, arranged with his correspondents in the other three cities to take, say, five hundred copies each, at a twenty-five per cent discount, the names of all four firms appearing on the cover as a multiple-imprint. Each of the correspondents took charge of publicity for the work in his region. Probably no returns of unsold copies were allowed: the correspondents shared the risk with Van Winkle. But their risk was mitigated by their regional monopoly: no copy could be bought in New England, for example, except from the Boston correspondent, who split his discount with the retailers who bought from him.

If the work was a book rather than a pamphlet, the publishers usually sent sheets (or folded “gatherings”) to his correspondents, who had them bound up locally. This fact explains why so many first editions of the time survive in a number of different bindings. Somewhat later, it happened occasionally that a publisher ordered one or more extra sets of stereotype plates. He would sell a set of these to a bookseller, say in Cincinnati, who would print a new title page bearing his own imprint and that of the original publisher. This, again, was a way of dividing risk, for extra sets of plates, inexpensively cast from the same forms as the first set, were sold at a considerable profit, or were paid for by a charge for each copy printed therefrom.

The multiple imprint system was probably at its peak in 1820; certainly so far as literary works were concerned, it was on the decline from then on. By 1850, most publishers had enough capital to manufacture their books at their own risk; and distribution had so improved, with the spread of railroads, that many booksellers in the interior did their buying directly from publishers.

Necessary in its time, the multiple imprint system was doomed. Its vices were regional monopoly and an unprofitable division of discounts. A potential purchaser in Boston might know, through advertisements, that The Sketch Book was available in the correspondent's shop, but if he lived on the other side of the town he might not bother to make the trip. The Boston correspondent was willing to supply the work to, and split his discount with, a bookseller in Salem; but in Boston he was likely to prefer to monopolize the retail sale and keep the whole discount himself—if he was sure his whole stock would sell. This practice was fine for the correspondent, but bad for the purchaser—and for the author.

The same objections applied to the “exchange” system. Periodically, the publisher printed a list of his publications, sent it to his correspondents in other cities, and received their lists in return. Each ordered from the other as many books as he could use. No cash changed hands until the end of the year, when the books were balanced and the debtor paid the creditor. In 1822, Carey's correspondent in New York was Wiley & Halstead; in Boston, Wells & Lilly. Apparently (the facts are not entirely clear) in Philadelphia, some of Wiley's titles could be bought only at Carey's; and in New York, some of Carey's only at Wiley's. However, the larger publishers sold some books—especially the less popular or the more doubtful ones—to non-correspondents as well. These were either purchased outright on credit, or taken “on sale” or “commission,” the retailer returning unsold copies at the end of a stated period. About the latter, there was constant bickering because sometimes, for example, a Boston book, sent to Louisville on commission, was returned at the end of the year in shopworn condition, when the popularity of the work had passed.

For a period in the early twenties, New York and Philadelphia publishers competed through their correspondents for the first sales of new books in the smaller towns of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Carey complained bitterly about a clever co-operative move among New York booksellers to corner the small-town market for themselves. When one of the New York firms published a new and popular British novel, it divided up the whole edition among half-a-dozen of the booksellers of the city. All the firms then supplied the correspondents in Pennsylvania and other smaller towns before they sold in quantity to a large Philadelphia jobber like Carey. When Carey tried to buy a large quantity at a big discount, he was forced to take small lots from six New York firms at small discounts. “It is the case with almost every book published in New York for a considerable time,” he wrote Wiley & Halstead in 1820.⁸ The result was that he was squeezed from two directions: he could not get a discount large enough to make jobbing profitable, and he found some small towns supplied before he could get to them.

Such schemes were profitable for the New Yorkers, but they were not good for the trade. Even the allotment of territories to specific booksellers operated unfairly. Ebenezer Irving gave the Charleston rights to The Sketch Book to a bookseller named Mills, and refused Carey's order to ship a number of copies direct to his own correspondent in Charleston. Thus Carey, a legitimate jobber, with correspondents who depended on him, was unable to supply them with a popular work.

Obviously the methods of book distribution were inadequate; and certainly publishing did not mix well with jobbing and retailing. The most prosperous, stable, and long-lived publishing houses avoided the confusion. Carey gave up his retail business in 1830, and probably his jobbing for other publishers at the same time. One reason why his rich and powerful neighbor to the north, the house of Harper, became the oldest general publisher in America was that, from its founding in 1817, it restricted itself to printing and publishing.

Discounts were at the core of the American writer's problem. In 1820, in both England and America, the average discount to the trade was one-third, though the range was from twenty-five per cent to forty per cent—even fifty per cent, depending on quantity. These rates, however, applied only to books on which little or no royalty was paid. In the twenties, works for which American writers were paid rarely discounted for more than twenty-five per cent, many for less. In 1821-22, twenty-five per cent was the regular discount for Irving's Sketch Book, and Cooper's The Spy. Two documents from the beginning and end of the twenties show what this situation meant in the competition. On May 5, 1820, Moses Thomas wrote Carey, “I will take 50 [Scott's] Monastery at 40pc. and pay for them in Salmagundi [Paulding's second series] at 25pc. The terms on which I get the Sketch Book are such that I cannot include that.”⁹ (On the Sketch Book he offered only one-sixth.) In 1829, Carey printed a list of his prices to the trade: Scott's, Disraeli's, and Moore's works were discounted at from fifty per cent to sixty-six and two-thirds per cent. Cooper's oldest works were offered at fifty per cent, a later one at forty per cent, and two new ones at twenty-five per cent. In Boston the situation was even worse. A twenty per cent discount on American works was common, and in the early forties Emerson decreed discounts as small as ten per cent on some of his books.

In the years when Irving and Cooper showed that a literary profession in America was possible, the publishing industry was unprepared for it. The popularity of The Sketch Book and The Spy made the more alert firms lift their heads and sniff the wind for commercially desirable literary works. Venturesome small fry like Van Winkle, and Wiley & Halstead in New York, were literary-minded and popular with authors, but they lacked capital, and their business methods were often slovenly. Year after year, publishing firms went out of business, or formed new combinations and died again—unable to keep up with the bewildering changes in the American economy. In 1815, when Bradford & Inskeep, the Philadelphia publishers of The History of New York, went bankrupt, dragging Moses Thomas down with them, Irving wrote that Thomas was “not to be censured in the affair otherwise than for having conducted his business in the same diffuse, sprawling manner in which all our principal booksellers dash forward into difficulty. … These failures I am afraid will sensibly affect the interests of literature and deter all those from the exercise of the pen who would take it up as a means of profit.”¹⁰ Some publishers grew stronger as time went by, but twenty-four years later, Samuel Ward, reporting to Longfellow on the unreliability of Samuel Colman of New York, made a typical judgment: “The whole race of booksellers among us are a pack of inefficient felons. With little means and, if possible, less credit, they undertake what they fail to perform.”¹¹

It is no wonder, then, that in the early twenties our successful authors used publishers only as agents and directed the business of manufacture and distribution themselves in order to protect their profits. Perhaps it was fortunate for Cooper that when he approached Wiley concerning the publication of The Spy the latter could offer to serve only as middleman. In 1821, Cooper paid the bills for the first volume of The Spy directly to the printer, and, when the whole was published on December 21, Wiley instructed his correspondents that the author was not only the sole owner of the work but was dictating the discounts.¹²

How many copies of this famous first edition (it is now rarer than Poe's Tamerlane) were printed can only be guessed at. Two weeks after publication, six hundred had been sold, and these were going in lots of fifty and a hundred. The first edition was probably one thousand, the second fifteen hundred, and the third two thousand—a total of forty-five hundred. At an average profit of forty-five cents, or twenty-two and one-half per cent, Cooper's receipts for the three editions must have been over ＄2,000.¹³ The American novel as an economic fact and an important social institution now came into being. On the other hand, if Cooper had received one-half the profits of an equal sale in England, at a guinea a copy, he would have earned almost double the amount.

American authors must have been inspired by the success of The Spy, for the number of novels produced in this decade was more than triple that of the preceding. But the sale was not so good as it might have been, and the records of Carey & Lea show why. When Wiley wrote Carey about The Spy, the latter, long a sponsor of native writers, answered, “Send your book without delay.”¹⁴ When Carey had read the book, five days after publication, he wrote, “We will take 100 Spy on the terms proposed in order to do what we can to encourage American literature.¹⁵ But his orders for a total of seven hundred and fifty copies were accompanied by complaints. Buying the book in sheets, to be bound in Philadelphia, he found signatures missing. The term of credit was too short: he bought at three-to-four months and had to sell at six-to-twelve months. Above all, the discount was too small. At one-third it was more generous than the one-quarter Irving allowed, but a wholesaler like Carey had to give one-fifth to his retailers. In August, 1822, when Wiley was trying to negotiate with Carey for a large order for the third edition of The Spy and for the forthcoming Pioneers, Carey wrote him that, with his (Carey's) book monopoly in many small towns, he could easily sell two thousand copies of The Pioneers, but that with the discount so small on quantity orders he would make seven hundred and fifty do.¹⁶ He urged that Wiley sell whole editions at large discounts to two or three booksellers, each of whom would control a large retail territory without competition. This was Carey's scheme for meeting British literary competition on behalf of the American author and publisher, and it might have worked—for a while. Obviously, however, discounts that were too low to encourage either middlemen like Carey, or his country retailers, prevented the wide distribution that Cooper might have profited by. But Cooper took the short view. Announced at the height of The Spy's popularity, The Pioneers was sold out to retailers six months before publication, and on the day it appeared—February 1, 1823—3500 copies had been sold by seven participating New York booksellers before noon. The author saw no reason to increase the discount on a book so readily salable.

But by 1825, he had learned not to be his own publisher. The contract for Lionel Lincoln,¹⁷ which gave Wiley the right to print and publish ten thousand copies within one year, the author receiving five thousand dollars, marks a turning point. The document states that the publishers were to pay for all printings within fourteen days by promissory notes “which shall be obtained from the sale of said work. …” The publishers, therefore, were to pay the cost of manufacture, which they could do on credit, but Cooper was to receive his money only as fast as it was paid in by booksellers. The most interesting fact is that the arrangement called for a reduction in Cooper's profit to twenty-five per cent. The difference between this and the thirty-six per cent he apparently got for The Pilot was the amount he was willing to pay to get rid of the nuisance of managing and financing manufacture. But the difference was theoretical. If only six thousand copies were printed, Cooper's profit would still be five thousand dollars—at a rate of over forty per cent.

His next book and all others until 1844 were to be “published,” in every sense of the word, by the competent house of Carey. I have told the rest of that story elsewhere,¹⁸ but I shall repeat here what seems to me to be the essence of Cooper's professional rise and decline. His rise was directly related to the fact that for the first time a publisher was willing to take small profits for the sake of the prestige of an author's name. Until the mid-thirties, the Careys managed to give Cooper the equivalent of a royalty of up to forty-five per cent, break even themselves on a sale of five thousand, and make a profit of six per cent if they sold fifty-five hundred. His decline was directly geared to the reprint competition which drove down retail prices. In 1826, the Mohicans sold for two dollars, sales were 5750, Cooper's rate was forty-three per cent, and his returns were ＄5000. Sixteen years later, in 1842 when the bottom was dropping out of retail book prices, his Wing and Wing sold for fifty cents, sales were 12,500, his rate was twenty per cent, and his returns less than ＄1,200. Thus, though sales of the later book were more than twice that of the earlier, his returns were less than one-fourth.

Irving's decline was not quite as precipitous, because by 1829, the year Carey became his publisher, he had shifted to the field of history and biography, in which the reprint competition was less disastrous than in fiction. Between then and 1841, his income ranged from ＄7000 in productive years, to a steady ＄1150 a year when he was being paid only for leases on his old works. But his books were out of print from 1841 to 1848—and for the same reason that brought the Carey-Lea dynasty's distinguished literary publishing career to an end.

The new era began about 1848-50. Competition had killed off many of the reprinters; respectable publishers made agreements not to interfere with each other's reprint arrangements; and the regular reprinting of British novels in Harper's Monthly put the whole business on a new basis. Retail book prices rose to a level where some profit was possible. The extension of railroads into the interior opened up a truly national market for which publishers could produce in quantity, and enterprising firms began to accumulate the capital which enabled them to take over their proper functions from writers. The literary gains of the preceding era were consolidated, so to speak, when publishers like Putnam of New York issued collected editions of the works of established authors like Cooper and Irving (the latter had an annual income from Putnam of ＄8000); and Ticknor & Fields began to gather up the work of American poets in complete editions.

But above all, writers began to trust publishers to do the whole job of publishing for them and were thus relieved of the commercial busy-work which many of them detested. Publishing had finally become a profession in which every detail, from manufacturing to promotion and publicity, was managed by experts.

Yet, in making these gains, writers lost some of the independence which had been possible when they had more control over publishers. As publishers became stronger, and interpreted more accurately the public taste, they encouraged writers to cater to that taste, and to behave like producers of a commodity. Carey & Lea, the ablest of American publishers before 1850, and the shrewdest interpreters of the public, had exercised precisely such influence on Cooper, suggesting again and again that he write this or not write that. Usually he did as he pleased, but they (or the public they represented) tended to keep fiction inside the conventional bounds of the diverting romance, and to discourage experiment.

In the new era, such pressures on the writer gradually intensified. In particular, the demand for novels increased enormously, and when Harper's Monthly, begun in 1850, put serialization on a firm basis, the lure of double pay for two forms of publication drew into the field of the novel many writers who had little natural aptitude for it.

Hawthorne's career is a case in point. He had learned that short fiction was relatively unprofitable, and that collections of tales were commercially almost valueless. He had tried five times in twenty-five years to circumvent this fact by setting a group of tales in a framework which would make them resemble a novel, but publishers were not interested. The last of these attempts came in 1849, when he planned a collection called “Old Time Legends,” one of the legends being a novelette called The Scarlet Letter. James T. Fields changed the course of Hawthorne's whole career by persuading him to expand the novelette and publish it separately: it had a sale of six thousand in a year, and Hawthorne never wrote another short story.

For the rest of his life he was completely dependent on Ticknor & Fields. They were his bankers, his purchasing agents, and, unwittingly, his exploiters. They paid him top royalties, published everything he submitted, urged him to write more, and never drew up a contract or even a complete statement of sales. They were honest, and they had generous faith in a writer who, in spite of his reputation with critics, had never been really popular. But probably they contributed to his eventual crackup by encouraging him to overproduce.

On the sound business principle that an author's name is a commodity, and that the public forgets a commodity of which it is not constantly reminded, Fields always liked to have a new Hawthorne book ready to float before the wave of the previous book's sale had flattened out; and if no new work was ready, he had Hawthorne prepare a new edition of an old one. Thus, in his first three and a half years with the firm, he got out seven new books and two new editions—an average of one title every five months. The records show that Hawthorne's reward for all this was only ＄1500 a year—infinitely better than he had ever done before, but who could keep up such a pace? He took a consulship at Liverpool.

Yet he knew that he would have to go back to writing, and that the novel was the only literary form by which he could support himself professionally. How was a natural-born, short story writer to write novels in quantity? He had always worked in depth, not in breadth, through unity, not variety, through single tones rather than symphonic effects, through single, central incidents rather than through complex plots. These methods were appropriate to the tale, but difficult to sustain on a larger scale. Hawthorne himself did not believe that his characteristic unity of tone and singleness of purpose were an asset in the novel. Thus, he had argued for publishing The Scarlet Letter as part of a collection because, “Keeping so close to its point as the tale does, and diversified no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader's eye, it will weary very many people. … Is it safe, then,” he asked his publishers, “to stake the fate of the book entirely on this one chance? A hunter loads his gun with a bullett [sic] and several buckshot. … [Similarly] it was my purpose to conjoin one long story with several shorter ones, so that, failing to kill the public outright with my biggest and heaviest lump of lead [I might hit them] with some of the buckshot.”¹⁹

This “buckshot” theory of Hawthorne's was one of the reasons why he had tried for so many years to publish collections. And this was the reason why in the early fifties he had refused all offers for serialized novels. “In all my stories …” he wrote one editor, “there is one idea running through them like an iron rod.” If this idea were “dragged slowly before the reader” for weeks and months, he said, “it would become intolerably wearisome.” By contrast, he pointed out, the serial productions of Dickens and Thackeray “are distinguished by a great variety of scene and multiplicity of character, and the story is carried on through many threads of interest. …”²⁰

Yet his greatest problem as a novelist was not lack of variety but lack of talent for rendering the naturalistic detail which was needed for the kind of novel the public wanted—detail descriptive of houses, streets, cities, people, incidents. Finding it difficult to invent such detail, he had kept notebooks in which he recorded masses of dull details concerning people, places, incidents. These he had used sparingly in his tales, but as a novelist he was dependent on them. For each novel after The Scarlet Letter he drew more heavily on his notes: at least half of his last one, The Marble Faun, was guidebook detail lifted out of his Italian notebooks. In the Preface to his English travel book, Our Old Home, he said, “These and other sketches were intended for the side scenes and exterior adornment of a work of fiction”—a work which he never completed because he could not control the plot.

The causes of Hawthorne's premature death are not clear, but as surely as in the case of Scott Fitzgerald his art suffered a crackup which helped to kill him. Fields had been putting pressure on him for several years for a new novel, and had even gone so far as to announce the coming serialization of a new work. Hawthorne finally made him withdraw the announcement, saying, “… too great an effort [to finish this book] will be my death. … I should smother myself in mud of my own making.”²¹ His publisher attended his burial three months later. In a sense, the smothering mud was his own notebooks. Under the economic necessity of writing more novels than he had in him, he began to rely more and more on his notes, and seemed to be less and less able to build anything out of them. In his last phase, the notes dominated the writing: he was trying to create ideas and situations which would make the stored-up details in his notebooks usable. This, it seems to me, is one explanation of the tragic mess of unfinished novels which he left behind him when he died.

To blame his death on his well-meaning publisher or on the appetites of readers would be false and sentimental. Fiction, after all, is one of the most public of literary arts; and though the truly creative novelist always has the private vision of the poet, he must, if he wants to be professional, find a surface formula acceptable to that middle-brow culture to which our literary publishing has been attuned ever since it came to maturity in the middle of the last century. Hawthorne and Melville could find no such formula, and so went down to different kinds of defeat. It would be hard to deny that the discovery and accurate appraisal of the middle range of American public taste by such acute publishers as Carey, the Harpers, and Ticknor & Fields, were a mixed and dubious blessing.

Notes

1. Publisher-author correspondence shows that literary economics has been in close accord with the economy of the nation. The literary historian can make use of the charts on the business cycle from the eighteenth century to the present in Leonard P. Ayres, The Chief Cause of This and Other Depressions (Cleveland Trust Co., 1935).

2. My figures on Sketch Book sales and profits are conjectural because the records are not complete. These estimates are based on all available printed sources, as well as on a mass of scattered manuscript material, much of it in the Carey archive in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

3. Data from the MS, “Letter Books of Ticknor & Fields” (Harvard College Library). See also W. S. Tryon and William Charvat (eds.), The Cost Books of Ticknor and Fields and Their Predecessors, 1832-1858 (New York, 1949).

4. Carey & Lea to Cooper, Feb. 20, 1834 (MS, Yale University Library).

5. Harper and Brothers to J. P. Kennedy, Nov. 2, 1835: “We usually share profits … equally. We publish for Miss Sedgwick, for Messrs. Paulding, Simms, Slidell, etc., upon these terms.” (MS, Kennedy Papers, Peabody Institute Library).

6. Melville's royalty accountings from the Harpers are in the Harvard College Library.

7. Aug. 11, 1820 (MS, American Antiquarian Society).

8. Oct. 3, 1820 (MS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania).

9. May 5, 1820 (MS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania).

10. Jan. 17, 1815 (MS, New York Public Library).

11. Nov. 18, 1839. Maude Howe Elliott, Uncle Sam Ward and His Circle (New York, 1938), p. 256.

12. Dec. 24, 1821 (MS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania).

13. Figures compiled from various documents in Yale University Library and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

14. MS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

15. MS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

16. Aug. 6, 1822 (MS, Historical Society of Pennsylvania).

17. Nov., 1824 (MS, Yale University Library).

18. “Cooper as Professional Author,” James Fenimore Cooper, A Re-Appraisal (Cooperstown, N. Y.: The New York State Historical Association, 1950).

19. Jan. 20, 1850 (MS, Harvard College Library).

20. Printed in The Critic (Jan. 17, 1885).

21. Feb. 25, 1864 (MS, Huntington Library).