Abstract
Imperial networks enabled the movement of Australian books and authors to Britain and across the Empire, but the transatlantic book trade also enabled Australian books to travel to the United States and to participate in what was imagined as a shared Anglo-Saxon world. This essay explores Australian books and authors in the American publishing world of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, especially works in the transnational genres of frontier romance and South Sea tales. It examines the economic, legal and generic structures that both encouraged and constrained the movement of texts across colonial/national borders and the degree to which the trade was primarily a trade in commodities or an exchange of stories, identities and ideas.
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Notes
- 1.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Fontana, 1991); Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
- 2.
For an overview, see Carter ‘Transpacific or Transatlantic Traffic? Australian Books and American Publishers’, in Reading Across the Pacific: Australia-United States Intellectual Histories, eds. Robert Dixon and Nicholas Birns (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010), pp. 339–359.
- 3.
Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916 (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), p. 39.
- 4.
Craig Munro and John Curtain, ‘After the War’, in Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005, eds. Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006), p. 3.
- 5.
Elizabeth Webby, ‘Colonial Writers and Readers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 50.
- 6.
Katherine Bode, Reading By Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (London: Anthem, 2014), pp. 27–56.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 28.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 39, citing Toni Johnson-Woods, ‘Beyond Ephemera: The Australian Journal (1865–1962) as Fiction Publisher.’ (PhD diss., University of Queensland, 2000). p. 211.
- 9.
Paul Eggert, ‘Robbery Under Arms: The Colonial Market, Imperial Publishers, and the Demise of the Three-Decker Novel’, Book History, 6 (2003), pp. 127–146.
- 10.
Graeme Johanson, Colonial Editions in Australia, 1843–1972 (Wellington: Elibank Press, 2000). While colonial editions could mean greater sales for authors, they came at the cost of reduced standard royalty rates in comparison to those offered for the primary British edition.
- 11.
Bode, Reading By Numbers, p. 48; she points out that this investment did not continue into the twentieth century.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 13.
Richard Nile and David Walker, ‘The “Paternoster Row Machine” and the Australian Book Trade, 1890–1945’, in A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, eds. Martin Lyons and John Arnold (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), p. 7.
- 14.
Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (eds.), Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and see Michael Winship, ‘The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America, eds. Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 98–122.
- 15.
Macmillan, for example, had established a New York office in 1869 which became increasingly independent until incorporated as a separate company in 1896: Elizabeth James, ‘Letters from America: The Bretts and the Macmillan Company of New York’, in Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, ed. Elizabeth James (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), p. 176.
- 16.
James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 58.
- 17.
In the absence of legislation defining copyright protection for foreign books before the passing of the Chace Act in 1891, the pirate publishers or reprinters were not in fact acting illegally. Their publishing model nonetheless deliberately flouted the accepted practices of trade courtesy which had previously obtained.
- 18.
‘Among the Books of the Day’, review of E. W. Hornung, A Bride from the Bush, Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 February 1897.
- 19.
Richard Nile and David Walker, ‘Marketing the Literary Imagination: Production of Australian Literature, 1915–1965’, in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, ed. Laurie Hergenhan (Ringwood: Penguin, 1988), p. 286.
- 20.
Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia also played important roles but New York was already dominant by the 1870s.
- 21.
Related in the story ‘Le Premier Pas’, published in the first Raffles volume, The Amateur Cracksman published in England by Methuen and in the USA by Scribner’s in 1899.
- 22.
From ‘Among the Books of the Day’ (reference above), the phrase is quoted in publicity in Scribner’s edition of The Amateur Cracksman. ‘Literary Notes’, New York Daily Tribune, 27 December 1896.
- 23.
The idea of an Anglo-Saxon or white man’s world that extended beyond the British empire was a powerful notion, conceived broadly on the model of an empire but defined by racial affiliation. While the focus of this essay is on print networks rather than ideology, the ‘other empire’ of Anglo-Saxondom complicates our sense of the British imperial network as being all-containing. See Belich, Replenishing the Earth; Marilyn Lake, ‘On Being a White Man, Australia, Circa 1900’, in Cultural History in Australia, eds. Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003), pp. 98–112; Lyn Spillman, Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 62–69; Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
- 24.
Paul Giles, Antipodean America: Australia and the Constitution of US Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 211.
- 25.
‘America at the Jubilee’, New York Times, 24 June 1897.
- 26.
Edward E. Cornwall, ‘Are the Americans an Anglo-Saxon People?’, New York Times, 14 January 1900.
- 27.
Lake, ‘On Being a White Man’.
- 28.
Hutton, review of Catherine Martin, The Silent Sea, cited in Rosemary Foxton, ‘Introduction’, p. xxix. Foxton doubts Hutton had read the novel.
- 29.
‘Oversea Writers Capture England’, Salt Lake Tribune, 16 July 1911.
- 30.
James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 183.
- 31.
Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure, pp. 1–12; Keating, The Haunted Study, pp. 112–132, 340–366.
- 32.
Publication details of books and biographical details of authors mentioned in this essay have largely been derived from AustLit: www.austlit.edu.au.
- 33.
Lurline Stuart, ‘Introduction’, in Marcus Clarke, His Natural Life (Academy Editions of Australian Literature. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), pp. xxii, xlviii–li.
- 34.
Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States. Volume II. The Expansion of an Industry, 1865–1919 (New York: Bowker, 1975), p. 482.
- 35.
For the US, see Robert A. Gross, ‘Building a National Literature: The United States 1800–1890’ in A Companion to the History of the Book, eds. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 315–328; Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, pp. 482–508; James L. West, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 41–45, 149–150. For Great Britain, see Simon Eliot, ‘From Few and Expensive to Many and Cheap: The British Book Market 1800–1890’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, eds. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 291–302; and Jonathan Rose, ‘Modernity and Print I: Britain 1890–1970’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, eds. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 341–353.
- 36.
Jeffrey D. Groves, ‘Courtesy of the Trade’, in A History of the Book in America Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, eds. Scott E. Casper, et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 139–147. Clarke received this sum from Harper, the first he’d heard about their edition of his novel. He commented: ‘Why this curious sum I don’t know. I suppose it represents something in dollars – Harper’s conscience, perhaps!’ Stuart, ‘Introduction’, p. xlix.
- 37.
Stuart, ‘Introduction’, p. xxii.
- 38.
J. S. D. Mellick, Patrick Morgan and Paul Eggert, ‘Introduction’, in Henry Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (Academy Editions of Australian Literature. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996), pp. xxxvi–xlii, l–lxi.
- 39.
‘Henry Kingsley’s Novels’, New York Times, Book Review, 30 September 1899.
- 40.
‘What Readers Think,’ New York Times, Book Review, 29 July 1899.
- 41.
Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, pp. 485–486.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 489.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 346.
- 44.
‘Tasma’ was the pen-name of Jessie Couvreur, née Huybers, who had arrived in Tasmania from England aged four in 1852. She spent most of her writing life in England and Europe. See Patricia Clarke, Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994).
- 45.
Ibid., pp. 114–117. In November 1889, Trübner & Co. merged with Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. to form Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, publisher of the later editions.
- 46.
Reviews of Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill: ‘New Publications’, Daily Record-Union (Sacramento, CA), 17 August 1899; ‘Literary Notes’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 79:474 (November 1889), p. 4.
- 47.
Clarke, Tasma, p. 121. Original emphasis.
- 48.
The book is stamped with information about Hughes’s business including other products sold (Boschee’s German Syrup, Green’s August Flower).
- 49.
‘Book Reviews’, Valentine Democrat (Valentine, NE) 17 February 1898; ‘An Australian Story’, review of A Fiery Ordeal, by Tasma, New York Times, 12 March 1898.
- 50.
D. Appleton & Co., advertisement for Not Counting the Cost, by Tasma, New York Times, 17 August 1895.
- 51.
Dr Nikola first appeared in A Bid for Fortune or Dr Nikola’s Vendetta first published in the USA by Appleton in 1895.
- 52.
‘New Books’, review of Robbery Under Arms, by Rolf Boldrewood, New York Times, 8 July 1889.
- 53.
The Crooked Stick or Pollie’s Probation (1895) carries the New York company’s colophon: New York/Macmillan and Co./And London.
- 54.
Correspondence from the Macmillan Archive, British Library: Boldrewood to Frederick Macmillan, 20 July 1891; Macmillan to Boldrewood, 10 December 1891; Macmillan to Boldrewood, 5 May 1892 (55843/355); Boldrewood to Macmillan, 3 January 1894 (55444/1); Macmillan to Boldrewood, 12 February 1894 (55444/2); Boldrewood to Macmillan, 22 July 1895 (54939).
- 55.
‘Rolf Boldrewood Dead’, New York Times, 12 March 1915; ‘Australian Novelist, “Rolf Boldrewood,” Dead.’ Evening World (New York), 12 March 1915. Boldrewood was the pen-name of Thomas Alexander Browne, who arrived in Australia as a child and spent the rest of his life in Australia.
- 56.
D. Appleton & Co, advertisement for Nùlma: An Anglo-Australian Romance, by Rosa Praed, New York Times, 3 July 1897.
- 57.
D. Appleton & Co, advertisement for Outlaw and Lawmaker, by Rosa Praed, New York Daily Tribune, 30 June 1894.
- 58.
‘Literary Notes’, St Paul Daily Globe, 21 April 1895.
- 59.
F.M. Buckles & Co., advertisement for The Race of Life, by Guy Boothby, New York Sun, 19 May 1906.
- 60.
‘Current Literature’, review of The Race of Life, by Guy Boothby, Omaha Daily Bee, 11 July 1906.
- 61.
‘Literature’, San Francisco Morning Call, 1 February 1891.
- 62.
‘Books and Bookmakers’, review of Mrs. Tregaskiss, by Rosa Praed, San Francisco Call, 12 January 1896.
- 63.
‘Questions and Answers’, New York Times, 12 August 1899.
- 64.
‘New Novels: Love in the Antipodes and Elsewhere’, review of The Crooked Stick, by Rolf Boldrewood, New York Daily Tribune, 5 April 1896.
- 65.
‘New Books’, review of The Sealskin Coat, by Rolf Boldrewood, New York Sun, 21 November 1896.
- 66.
David Carter, ‘What America Also Read: Australian Historical Fiction in the American Marketplace, 1927–1948’, Antipodes, 29:2 (December 2015), pp. 349–369.
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Bode, Katherine, Reading By Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (London: Anthem, 2014).
Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Carter, David, ‘Transpacific or Transatlantic Traffic? Australian Books and American Publishers’, in Reading Across the Pacific: Australia-United States Intellectual Histories, eds. Robert Dixon and Nicholas Birns (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010), pp. 339–359.
———, ‘What America Also Read: Australian Historical Fiction in the American Marketplace, 1927–1948’, Antipodes, 29: 2 (December 2015), pp. 349–369.
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Carter, D. (2017). The Other Empire: Australian Books and American Publishers in the Late Nineteenth Century. In: Boehmer, E., Kunstmann, R., Mukhopadhyay, P., Rogers, A. (eds) The Global Histories of Books. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51334-8_3
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