Censorship, Puffing, "Piracy," Reprinting: British Decadence and Transatlantic Re-Mediations of Walter Pater, 1893-1910

This essay explores how and why American imprints featured prominently in the management of Walter Pater's journalism at the turn of the twentieth century, both during his lifetime and posthumously. A variety of players and issues are involved in this transatlantic publishing matrix: British and American serials and publishing firms, the author and his agents, "friends" and family, publishing conditions in the UK and US, and copyright. The publishing trajectory I trace begins with a set of nine reviews that were published anonymously in a British religious weekly newspaper in the 1880s and attributed to Pater only in the 1890s, after his death. It continues with the publication of two articles associated with Decadence in an American monthly in 1893 and concludes with the dual circulation of a privately printed posthumous collection of the anonymous reviews in 1896 and 1897 in the UK and the US respectively.¹ This trajectory involves the mediamorphosis of anonymous newspaper puff reviews into an attributed collection, Essays from the "Guardian," and the latter's re-mediation in quick succession from a "little book" to a handcrafted, augmented reprint before being issued in standard machined editions in the early twentieth century. Essays from the "Guardian" is a magnet for diverse publishing events that together transformed newspaper and magazine journalism into modernist global formats at the turn of the twentieth century. While the firm of Macmillan, publisher of all of Pater's work in volume form during his lifetime, was forced to stand back in the aftermath of the author's death, private press editions of Pater circulated in the UK and US in the late 1890s. Although only 100 copies of Essays from the "Guardian'" were published by Edmund Gosse in Britain for the author's friends to purchase in 1896, Thomas Mosher's 1897 collectable facsimile of Gosse's volume had a print run of over 400. Moreover, the American edition in this thread emerges as part of a larger American circulation of Pater's work during this period. More of Pater's articles and those of other British decadent writers appear in Mosher's little magazine, the Bibelot, and in numerous Mosher editions, an analysis of which will provide a coda to this account.

My larger argument here is that Mosher's reprints of Pater's writing sweep into more general visibility some significant events in the publication of decadent prose in this period that were shouldered by American rather than British media and publishers, as relatively cheap fine printing editions of British aesthetic and decadent writing circulated more broadly in the US than in the UK. British novelists initiate the nineties with complaints about censorship by publishers and circulating libraries, in contexts such as the New Review's symposium on "Candour in English Fiction" in January 1890.² It should come as no surprise that an alternative English language publishing industry in the United States was welcomed by some British authors, including Meredith, whose Modern Love was the first volume Mosher published in October 1891.³ If Mosher's list provoked complaints, especially from the UK Publishers' Association,⁴ it is no exaggeration to say that his editions of Pater, more than any others, locate Pater among aesthete and Decadent writers on his larger list, providing an unparalleled profile of Pater among them. First and perhaps most importantly, then, Mosher makes us regard Pater's work afresh. His practices as a publisher also, however, invite us to think more carefully about the transatlantic scene of English language publishing at the turn of the twentieth century, the constrictions on and reception of British Decadence in a transatlantic context, and the ways in which reprinting and remediation enable and enact the "subjugation" of journalism I have discussed elsewhere.⁵

I focus here on three transatlantic iterations of Pater's journalism. The first is the November 1893 issue of the American Harper's New Monthly Magazine, which uncharacteristically publicises British "decadent" writing, specifically Arthur Symons's article "The Decadent Movement in Literature," and "Apollo in Picardy," a "decadent" short story by Pater, one...