The Last Dickens

“Mr. Fields sends his sincerest regrets, Major,” Osgood said. “I am afraid he has been drawn away suddenly by the press of business.”

“Oh! Trying to stop one of your authors from drowning himself in the Frog Pond?”

Osgood gave his most gentlemanly laugh, though Harper did not. How could a man scowl at his own joke?

Harper was called the Major not to signify any service during the war but because of his battlefield style of command at his offices in New York. He scratched the line of his jaw under his wide mutton-chop running down his face. “Do you have authority here, James R. Osgood?”

“Major,” Osgood said with equanimity, “I am a partner of the firm now.”

“Well! Junior partner, yes,” he grumbled. “I must have read about it in Leypoldt's columns. And you are an honest man?”

“I am.”

“Good, Mr. Osgood! You did not hesitate in your answer; that means it is true.” Harper accepted the glass of brandy. He began to raise it to his lips, then paused and held it in a toast. “To we happy few, the publishers of the world! Individuals who kindly assist authors to obtain an immortality in which we do not ourselves participate.”

Osgood raised his glass without comment.

“Men in our line know me well for being direct,” Harper said, sacrificing his drink to a long gulp and putting the glass down, “and I am too old to change. So this is what I have come to say. Ticknor and Fields-I mean by that, of course, Fields and Osgood-this house cannot survive its present circumstances.”

Osgood waited for Harper to continue.

“Your magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, for all its merit, hardly turns a penny, does it? Now, take New York City.”

“What about it, Major?”

“Come! I like Boston, I do. Well, except for your priest-ridden Paddy camps, which are worse than ours in New York. But that can't be helped these days, we open our shores and soon we are corrupted. Still, I wander into the world of politics. We speak of the literary world. Writers by species are creatures more and more of the New York breed. We have the cheaper printing presses, the cheaper binders and the cheaper ideas at our fingertips. An author's fame will no longer last twenty-odd years in the fashion of your Mr. Longfellow-no, an author's name will survive one book, two perhaps, and then be replaced by something newer, bolder, bigger. You must produce quantity going ahead, Mr. Osgood.”

Osgood knew how the Harper family treated their authors at their Franklin Square building in New York, where an iron bust of Benjamin Franklin, through a shrewd squint, looked down judgmentally on all comers to their kingdom as though to suggest he was the last author worth any fuss. There was the anecdote known throughout the trade about Fitz-James O'Brien's marching outside the massive Harper building holding a sign, I AM ONE OF HARPERS’ AUTHORS. I AM STARVING, until the Harpers would agree to pay him what he was owed. There were, besides, tales of great satisfaction in the Harpers’ offices when they collected back the pitiable $145.83 that they had paid in advance to Mr. Melville for his queer sea tale, Moby-Dick, or The Whale.

To the Harper brothers, publishing was power. It was a power that had reached a crescendo in the 1840s when the eldest of the quartet, James Harper, became mayor of New York City as part of the anti-Catholic Native Party. James instituted what was known as Harper's Police, before dying in a bloody accident, when his carriage cracked and his horses dragged him bodily through Central Park. Fletcher, formerly their financial manager, had since ascended to the top of the publishing firm and earned the sobriquet of Major.

Osgood felt an urge to scream bubbling up, a rare and uncomfortable feeling. Osgood was the oldest of five siblings, and growing up it had always been left to him to be the sturdy, sensible one who would preserve order at any cost to his own personal feelings. Others could be permitted to give way to their emotions but not him. That was how he was known in youth in Maine, that was how he had made his stamp at their firm and on the trade at large. These same traits, his workmanship and steadiness, had attained his admission to college at only twelve years old-though his family waited until he was fourteen at the request of the Bowdoin administrators.

“We like our local authors very much,” Osgood assured his guest as calmly as he could. “You might say we believe our house works for our authors, rather than the other way around.”

“If you talk metaphysics, I can't follow you, Mr. Osgood.”

“I shall be happy to try to speak more plainly.”

“You can tell me, then, why Mr. Fields wished you to meet with me instead of him. Because,” he said without giving Osgood the chance to answer, “Fields knows he is in the after-dinner hour of life. You are the eager young man, you are the enfant terrible with a sharp eye and smart ideas, and can break with sleepy tradition.”

Harper went on with only a slight pause for breath: “Books are to be mere lumber in the future. Articles of trade, you see, Mr. Osgood! The bookstores already are filled with empty space, cigar boxes, Indian prints, toys. Toys! Before long there will be more toys than books in this country, and it will matter not who is the author of the new book any more than who is the manufacturer of a new paper doll. The publisher's name will be far more important than any author's and our job will be to mix the ink of a book together like the pharmacist's chemicals.

“Well, I come to you with a proposal: that Fields, Osgood and Company shutter its doors here in Boston, give up this dying hub, and move to New York-combining with us, under the Harper name, of course. Oh, we'd give you full swing for your own peculiar literary tastes. And you will forgo a slow demise of this great old house to be part of our publishing family. You will be to us as your own sons are to you-haven't you children, Mr. Osgood? Oh! You are a bachelor, I do recall. Childless Fields having been your prototype.”

Osgood nodded away the last aside. “Your idea is simply not in our authors’ interests, Major. We shall always see our books as wiser and better than objects, and I think I speak for Mr. Fields in saying we would rather continue in that light even if it means we do not last. I'm afraid you cannot ever de-Bostonize this house.”

Osgood decided to swiftly end the meeting using one of Fields's techniques. He passed his foot down on a pedal hidden under the desk and Daniel Sand came to alert Osgood of an “emergency” that would forestall any further conversation. But Harper stood and signed his understanding.

“You needn't bother with the performance,” Harper called out before the clerk had the chance to speak.

Daniel, acting out his urgent entrance, looked to Osgood with sad eyes. Osgood nodded permission to go.

Harper continued, a dark cloud passing over his face. “I know every trick, every plan, every purpose in this trade, Mr. Osgood, and I know it ten times better than my dear brother the mayor did, God bless the proud man. Come! The old methods will not save you from the truth I have delivered to you today.”

They eyed each other, taking stock.

Harper suddenly laughed, but a laugh that said the joke was his and his alone. “Well, it is true what they say, I suppose. Courtesy is courtesy but business is business.”

“Who says that, Major?”

“Me. And you shouldn't believe Mr. Fields and yourself are so different from us, Mr. Osgood, shielded from the world by sunshiny talk and your high ambitions. We've watched you. Remember, the angel may write, but “tis the devil that must print. You should have gone into the ministry if you wanted to remain a believer.”

“Major, I wish you good afternoon.” Osgood waited silently until Harper had no choice but to gather his belongings.

“Oh! By the by, the new mystery that Dickens is writing, I hear, shall be enthralling,” Harper said offhandedly to Osgood as he brushed the rainwater from his hat. “Chapman in London, they say, is paying a fortune to publish it. The Murder of Edward Drory?” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I believe he has decided to call it.” “Yes, yes, that is it! I am on the very tiptoe of expectation to see where Dickens, the Great Enchanter, will take us this time.”

DICKENS!-THAT STRANGE WORD, that name of names, the man-meant the world to the firm of Fields, Osgood & Co. The Major knew it, which is why his mention of the new novel was also a threat.

Fields had a few years earlier made two big propositions to the world's most popular novelist, Charles Dickens: first, that Dickens come to America on a grand reading tour, and second, that their firm be the author's exclusive publisher in America. From his estate in the English countryside, Dickens agreed to both terms, which prompted the loud grousing of all the other American publishers-especially the Harper brothers.

There was no international copyright agreement between the United States and England. This meant that any American publisher could publish any British book without permission of the author. There did exist what was