Literary Piracy, Nationalism, and Women Readers in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1850-1855

During the early nineteenth century, most books sold in the United States were foreign imports or copies. At an 1834 book trade sale, for example, of the 114 fiction books printed in America, 95 were English reprints.¹ A reliance on British literature was facilitated by the lack of an international copyright law and what Laurel Brake has called "a vestigial, high cultural value attached to the ejected imperial power."² However, America's nascent publishing industry was also shaped by what Meredith McGill calls a "Jacksonian resistance to centralized development" that kept the nation's book production system dispersed.³ This decentralization compounded and reinforced the young nation's lack of a strong literary identity and led to its reliance on imports from Great Britain for literary sustenance. British novels easily filled the bill for this decentralized system of publishers who struggled to survive by printing what was well-known and had a ready audience of consumers. American magazines were no exception: they took the culture of reprinting even further by adapting a wide variety of British publications for their own purposes. Despite a growing sense of literary nationalism, McGill contends that reprinting was the cultural norm for most of the century and was even considered to be proof of an enlightened democracy because it produced affordable reading materials for the general public and avoided monopolistic publishing practices. In fact, opponents of an international copyright agreement defined the manufacturing and dissemination of texts as America's primary cultural role, not the creation of original literature.⁴

Harper's New Monthly Magazine is the quintessential example of a literary endeavor that sought to adapt British literature to the establishment of a healthy and egalitarian publishing empire in the United States.⁵ While Harper's mimicked the survival techniques used by many American publishing houses in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its preoccupation with creating a national literary identity out of "pirated" scraps of British periodicals signals a transition from national dependence on British culture to a more patriotic devotion to elevating the status of American literature during the 1850s.⁶ In this essay, I examine how Harper's repackaged and redeployed British literature for a nationalistic purpose, thereby participating in the nation's transformation from a culture of reprinting to a culture of authorial originality and nationality.⁷ Through what seems an unlikely appeal for a publication famous for its literary piracy, Harper's editors forged a patriotic message addressed primarily to women readers. While the magazine valued British novelists such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray over American writers, its focus on British authors was rhetorically constructed as nationalistic. The editors theorized that by providing the public with these examples of "excellent" high cultural texts, the magazine would raise the standards of American readers and, in turn, raise the quality of American literature. In this way, Harper's urged its women readers to nurture the next generation of native readers with the British literary models it provided so that they would eventually have the skills to both recognize and create a distinctly tasteful American literary culture.

In order to understand how Harper's was able to build a patriotic message despite its reputation for piracy, it is necessary to determine how it became the most successful magazine in America between 1850 and 1855.⁸ Published at the beginning of the American industrial age, Harper's was produced at one of the country's first steam-powered presses located at Harper and Brothers headquarters in New York. The magazine rose to prominence due, in part, to its effective use of technology to create some of the earliest electroplate images in the nation. The magazine's editorial staff also brought status to the endeavor. From 1850 to 1856...