In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America

Prologue: Following the Reader

 Prologue Following the Reader The great public, in the first place, is made up of a vast number of little publics, very much as our Union is made up of States. —Henry James, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon” (1865) In the fall of 1865, Henry James Jr. finished reading the latest transatlantic sensation, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, and sat down in the third-floor bedroom of his family’s Beacon Hill home to sum up its dubious merits for the readers of the Nation. Although he was still years away from his first novel, James was already a shrewd analyst of literary trends. He studied the literary marketplace the way other men of his age and class studied the law, theology, medicine, trade: “Every book that he reviewed was a testing ground for his thought” (Novick 129). At twenty-three, James was already a professional littérateur, contributing pieces to nearly every issue of the weekly Nation and quarterly North American Review. (“The verb to contribute,” James later reminisced, “took on at once to my ears a weird beauty of its own, and I applied it during that early time with my best frequency and zeal” [Literary Criticism 1: 179]). For the young James,the question of audience was one of professional survival , and he tackled the puzzle of Braddon’s success with a determination borne of raw self-interest.The answer,deceptively simple,was also,as he must have understood, stubbornly recursive. In recognizing among the “great public” a “vast number of little publics,” James was able to “class” Braddon’s audience rather precisely, at least in theory: “It is that public which reads nothing but novels, and yet which reads neither George Eliot, George Sand, Thackeray, nor Hawthorne” (Literary Criticism 1: 744). In practical terms, however, his formulation left him no closer to claiming his own “little public,” let alone the “great public” he yearned to captivate. Like the novelist-in-training, the Nation in 1865 was in its nonage, and its staff also struggled with the sense that its words and ideas were pitched to an elusive audience existing quite apart from the cultural mainstream.In a letter to Charles Eliot Norton,Nation cofounder Frederick Law Olmsted prologue  wrote that he “regard[ed] The Nation as an experiment upon the ability of the public to recognize,appreciate and sustain a public journal which shall be free from certain qualities now common in the newspapers of the country and which it is evident are generally assumed by their proprietors to be necessary to their pecuniary success.”1 For Olmsted and other Nation supporters, the future of this upstart publication was of enormous consequence .Its success would call into question the low assessment of the reading public’s taste, which was supposedly both indulged and stimulated by the popular press. Its failure would only confirm that the newspapers had been right all along about the American populace; in this sense, the failure of the Nation would be a failure of the nation, indeed. The problem that Henry James faced as a high-toned writer with massmarket aspirations and that the Nation confronted as an organ of the intelligentsia in a market dominated by family papers and the penny press reflects a perpetual concern of authors, editors, and publishers—namely, how to get the right publications into the right hands. In 1865, however— and indeed, throughout the nineteenth century—the problem of matching readers and texts reverberated far beyond the confines of the publishing industry, radiating outward to affect all classes of readers as the nineteenth century defined them. As this book illustrates, specialized or audiencespecific marketing strategies, reading practices, and authorial and editorial approaches profoundly affected American culture in the nineteenth century; the literary practices deployed to respond to the nation’s myriad “little publics” had an impact that far exceeded the immediate and ostensible goal of selling books. Although the notion that the general reading public comprises many disparate audiences did not originate with the Nation’s review of Aurora Floyd, James’s formulation is noteworthy for its subtle linking of literary consumption, particularized readerships, and national identity. Perhaps James was inspired by the Union army’s ultimate victory a few months earlier; or perhaps he was prompted by the title of the new journal, the Nation, which came into being just as the defeated Confederacy was being absorbed back into the United States. In either event, James’s metaphoric comparison of the American reading public to the...