matter: over three-quarters of the books published in the United States before the 1820s were of English origin. The copyright law adopted by Congress in 1790 denied protection to these works in an ill-conceived attempt to aid native letters. The paradoxical result of the law was that American printers naturally preferred to pirate foreign novels than to gamble on American ones, whose authors would have to be compensated. The few American works of fiction that made it into print — barely ninety between 1789 and 1820, or an average of just three a year — stood little chance of posting a profit. Books were costly to produce and often priced beyond the means of ordinary readers. Publishing was localized and distribution hampered by the lack of adequate transportation. And Americans, according to contemporaries, faced too many pressing tasks to turn their attention to literature. Building a nation, settling the wilderness, and acquiring a competence all took priority over cultivating the arts. Nor was republican ideology, the dominant creed of the Revolutionary era, nurturant of fiction. Its subordination of personal interest to the community placed it at odds with the novel's focus on the appetitive subject. Brown's titles point to the dissonance: his six novels are named for individuals. He summed up the plight of the early fiction writer: 'Book- making…is the dullest of all trades, and the utmost that any American can look for, in his native country, is to be re-imbursed for his unavoidable expenses.'
Brown's words were prophetic in one respect: he spoke of literature not as a pastime but as a trade. Over the next fifty years, as the United States transformed itself into a market society, writing and publishing assumed the character of a business. The parallel development was anything but fortuitous: Adam Smith's economics har-48- bored the corrective to his own, and Brown's, negative assessment of the writer's plight. An agricultural people lacking a cultivated class of aristocrats could not have a thriving literary culture, nor the prospect of professional authorship, without an exponential increase in the 'wealth of the nation.' The War of 1812 set in motion an economic 'takeoff' that shifted into high gear in the 1840s and 1850s, the decades not just of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville but of Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner. Some changes — for example, the modernizing of production and distribution — were primarily material, but deeper structural affinities tied together the growth of commerce and industry and the maturation of the literary calling. Not only did the marketplace create the requisite conditions for art, it shaped the capacity for reception and determined, or rather produced, the novel's dominance of American literature. But the commercial order's power, though immense, was never total. The narrative of how the American novel became a commodity, of how we get from Brown's
Technological advances and unprecedented population growth laid the foundations for a national market for printed material. The mechanization of printing and improvements in papermaking and binding meant that books could be manufactured in greater volume and more cheaply than ever before. (Lippard, in his description of Monk Hall, singles out the recent technology of the stereotype, an inexpensive duplicate plate, introduced in 1813, that permitted multiple copies of a work to be printed simultaneously.) Canals, turnpikes, and railroads facilitated interchange between distant geographic regions and diminished the obstacles to distribution. The flood of immigrants and the high native birthrate combined to double population every twenty-five years and to ensure a huge potential audience for books. Thanks to the common school system, the United States at mid-century claimed the largest literate public in history, with about 90 percent of the adult whites able to read and write (the figure was slightly higher for males than for females).
Economic arrangements had an instrumental role in turning these once abstemious men and women into devourers of fiction. As the subsistence orientation of the past yielded to commercial and then -49- industrial production, Americans as a people grew more affluent and had more disposable income to spend on entertainment. The divorce between home and work brought about by the rise of offices and factories particularly favored the consumption of light literature (that is, novels as opposed to history, politics, or theology). Middle-class women, who had traditionally gravitated to fiction because of its attention to female concerns (as in the seduction and courtship novels of the eighteenth century), were no longer involved in household manufacture and enjoyed more free time in which to read. The domestic sphere became identified with relaxation and culture; libraries entered middle-class residences; and men of all classes began to bring home newspapers and periodicals, which regularly serialized works of fiction or published entire novels as low-priced supplements.
Changes in ideology and the organization of social life further contributed to the triumph of the novel. The entrenchment of market capitalism was accompanied by an altered perception of the relationship between the self and the community. Republicanism, with its privileging of the common good, yielded to liberalism, which elevates the particular person and maintains, in the version developed by Adam Smith, that the general welfare is enhanced by the pursuit of private interest. This inversion of priorities meshes with the novel's historic emphasis on the individual. The clarifying of boundaries between residence and outer world also lessened the sway of communalism. The public realm — magistrates, clergy, and the like — had once exercised authority over family matters. (Hawthorne fictionalizes this older habit of public supervision in
There are, however, many fictions that replicate the split between household and labor — or, to phrase it somewhat differently, that sort themselves along the gender lines beginning to prevail in the society as a whole. Antebellum literary culture bifurcates into the novel of female domesticity and the novel of masculine adventure and camaraderie. As long ago as 1923, in his
Masculine novels help to create the work patterns of modern society. As James Fenimore Cooper among others understood, printed literature erodes traditional economic structures (such as the apprenticeship system) by preserving and circulating information that was once hoarded by craftsmen and passed on selectively from older men, often fathers, to younger ones. In
Nineteenth-century sentimental novels eschew the depiction of male labor but expatiate lovingly on the work carried out in the home. This emphasis divides sentimental fiction from the seduction tales popular a generation earlier, before the separation of spheres gave domestic life its feminized coloring. Neither Rowson's
