Publishing Tennyson in America

Cheshire, Jim

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-33815-0_4

Jim Cheshire²

181 Accesses

Abstract

Demand for Tennyson in America stimulated the publication of the 1842 Poems in England. The Boston publisher Ticknor and Fields enjoyed a stable and lucrative relationship with Tennyson from the early 1840s to the late 1860s. They paid him royalties and were protected by the ‘courtesy of the trade’ a voluntary agreement among American publishers. Ticknor and Fields published an early collected edition after sales of the 1842 Poems were slow. The Princess sold much faster. In America, the stereotyping process determined the collation of Tennyson’s poetry. Ticknor and Fields developed distinctive formats, first an influential brown cloth cover and then the famous ‘Blue and Gold’ edition, which was a great commercial success. These books successfully negotiated the boundary between ornament and taste and became synonymous with the poetic book in America.

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Notes

1.
Alfred Tennyson, The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon Jr. 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982–1990), I, p. 187 (Tennyson 1982–1990).
2.
Between 1834 and 1849 William D. Ticknor published books under his sole name. In 1849 the imprint became Ticknor, Reed and Fields, acknowledging J. T. Fields and John Reed Jr. as partners. From 1854 the imprint became Ticknor and Fields after Reed’s departure. This study has relied on the published transcripts of the Ticknor and Fields archive: Warren S. Tryon and William Charvat, The Cost Books of Ticknor and Fields and their Predecessors 1832–1858 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1949) (Tryon and Charvat 1949) for details on the imprints see p. xxiii. Another important source is: Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the mid Nineteenth Century the business of Ticknor and Fields (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) (Winship 1995).
3.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. xvii.
4.
William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat, ed. by Matthew J Bruccoli (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 1968), pp. 168–89 (Charvat 1968).
5.
Rita K. Gollin, Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. 19 (Gollin 2002); Emily Tennyson, Lady Tennyson’s Journal, ed. by James Hoge (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), p. 138 (Tennyson 1981); Letters of Tennyson, II, p. 235.
6.
Catherine Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 142 (Seville 1999).
7.
Seville, Literary Copyright Reform, pp. 142–3.
8.
Jeffrey D. Groves (2014) ‘Courtesy of the Trade’, in A History of the Book in America, ed. by David D. Hall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), III, pp. 139–48; see also Winship, American Literary Publishing, p. 139.
9.
Groves, ‘Courtesy of the Trade’, pp. 143–4.
10.
For the original letter, see Letters of Tennyson, II, p. 146.
11.
The importance of morality within American publishing has been examined in Michael J. Everton, The Grand Chorus of Complaint, Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) (Everton 2011).
12.
Charvat, Profession of Authorship, p. 171.
13.
Warren S. Tryon, Parnassus Corner a Life of James T. Fields, Publisher to the Victorians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 116 (Tryon 1963).
14.
Tryon, Parnassus Corner, p. 165. This is corroborated by Moxon’s later statements to Tennyson: TRC/LETTERS/7,933 shows that copies of Maud and other poems and In Memoriam were sent to America in 1856.
15.
John Olin Eidson, Tennyson in America his Reputation and Influence from 1827 to 1858 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1943) (Eidson 1943).
16.
Eidson, Tennyson in America, p. 6.
17.
‘Tennyson’s Poems’ Christian Examiner, 23 (January 1838), 305–27 (p. 305).
18.
Letters of Tennyson, I, p. 187n.
19.
Letters of Tennyson, I, p. 187.
20.
Letters of Tennyson, I, p. 188.
21.
Letters of Tennyson, I, p. 192.
22.
Evert A. Duyckink, ‘The Loiterer. The Poems of Tennyson’, Arcturus, 3 (1841–2), 235–8 (p. 235). The article also prints ‘The New Year’s Eve’ complete.
23.
Eidson, Tennyson in America, pp. 36–7.
24.
‘Ticknor’s Catalogue of Christmas and New Year’s Presents for 1842 (Boston: Ticknor, 1842).
25.
‘Ticknor’s Catalogue’, p. 12.
26.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, pp. 52–3.
27.
Historic exchange rates taken from http://measuringworth.com/exchangeglobal/ the precise exchange rate quoted for 1842 is 0.2085.
28.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, pp. 52–3, the production costs were 66c, the trade price $1.20 and the retail price $1.50.
29.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, pp. 52–3.
30.
Winship, American Literary Publishing, p. 137 (Winship 1995).
31.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 327. The first edition of Maud and other poems, comprised 3,000 copies retailing at 50c, producing $1500, at 10 per cent, $150. ‘Cost with Copt. 23c’ confirms this – cost with copyright was 5c more than the basic 18c production cost.
32.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 327.
33.
Tennyson was paid £20 for the first ‘Blue and Gold’ edition in April 1856, Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 363.
34.
If £100 equates to about $500 then a retail price of $1.25 would equate to a print run of 4,000.
35.
Letters of Tennyson, II, p. 428, 514.
36.
Robert L. Gale, A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion (Westport: Greenwood, 2003), p. 57.
37.
This edition was ordered in 1848 but the imprint was 1849, see Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 127 an extant example being TRC/W/4346.
38.
Tryon, Parnassus Corner, p. 91. Tryon contests Ticknor’s comments, interpreting the later stereotyping as a sign of success, while it is far more likely to have been the result of healthy sales of The Princess and In Memoriam.
39.
‘New Books and New Editions Published by Ticknor, Reed and Fields’ (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, October 1851), p. 2.
40.
The profit of the first edition of Poetical Works was $1.04 per copy, if the stereotyping costs for the second edition are included, the profit per copy drops to 79c but, otherwise, the profit margin for this edition stayed above $1, see Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, pp. 126–7, 175.
41.
The first stereotyped edition (Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 175) has 264 and 275 pages in volume 1 & 2 respectively, while the expanded edition has 280 and 293 pages.
42.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 327.
43.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 367.
44.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 327.
45.
Moxon’s editions had a separate page distinguishing between ‘POEMS (published 1830.)’, ‘POEMS (published 1832.)’ and ‘POEMS (published 1842.)’ Ticknor and Fields’ editions initially included the latter page between ‘Sonnet to J. M. K’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ but not the other two pages. The editions are not ‘an exact reproduction’ as suggested by Eidson, Tennyson in America, p. 153.
46.
‘New Books and New Editions Published by Ticknor and Fields’ (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, July 1855), p. 1.
47.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 240, 259, 278, 287. The retail prices are not listed for Tennyson’s volumes in the first volume of the ‘Cost Books’ but Ticknor’s price lists show that the retail price was $1.50.
48.
Jeffrey D Groves, ‘Judging Literary Books by Their Covers: House Styles, Ticknor and Fields, and Literary Production’ in Reading Books Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America ed. by M. Moylan and L. Stiles (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 75–100 (p. 83) (Groves 1996).
49.
Groves, ‘Judging Literary Books’, p. 81; Winship, American Literary Publishing, p. 123.
50.
Groves, ‘Judging Literary Books’, p. 77, Winship, American Literary Publishing, p. 123.
51.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, pp. xli–xlii.
52.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 80.
53.
An example is TRC/W/4345, the first edition and probably the copy given to Tennyson by Ticknor and Fields.
54.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, pp. 126–7.
55.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 116, 118.
56.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 165.
57.
‘New Books and New Editions Published by Ticknor, Reed and Fields’ (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, April 1853), p. 1.
58.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. xlvi.
59.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 223.
60.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, pp. 223.
61.
Winship, American Literary Publishing, p. 122.
62.
At the time of the eleventh edition of Poetical Works, 11,134 copies of the 1842 Poems had been printed in America, by July 1858 this figure was 30964.
63.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 471.
64.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 336.
65.
‘Boston’, The Round Table, 1.9 (13 February 1864), 140. Tryon and Charvat speculate that the ‘little English book’ may have been George Routledge’s 1850 edition of Whittier, see Cost Books, p. 362.
66.
Winship, American Literary Publishing, p. 111 shows that in 1856 Houghton & Co.’s jobs constituted 49.6 per cent of the firms printing costs.
67.
Groves, ‘Judging Literary Books’, p. 85.
68.
For the first edition the weight of paper was 28 lb per ream as opposed to 30 lb per ream, used for subsequent editions. The price for the paper remained constant at 15c per pound.
69.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 362. Winship, American Literary Publishing, p. 107 discusses the varieties and description of typefaces used by Ticknor and Fields.
70.
Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 360.
71.
The cost per copy for the ‘Blue and Gold’ edition was 26c, see Tryon and Charvat, Cost Books, p. 362.
72.
Tryon, Parnassus Corner, pp. 229–30 (Tryon and Charvat 1949).
73.
Groves, ‘Judging Literary Books’, pp. 84–5 (Groves 1996) cites this and other examples, see also Winship, American Literary Publishing, pp. 123–4.
74.
Groves, ‘Judging Literary Books’, pp. 86–8.
75.
Table 4.2 does not list the number of books sold but the number of copies of a given poem in print, for example one copy of the ‘Blue and Gold’ edition would add one copy to the totals for the 1842 Poems, The Princess, Maud and other Poems and In Memoriam.
76.
Warren S. Tryon, ‘Nationalism and International Copyright: Tennyson and Longfellow in America’, American Literature 24.3 (November 1952), 301–09 (p. 307) (Tryon 1952).
77.
Sarah Wadsworth, In the Company of Books Literature and its ‘Classes’ in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) p. 8, 174 (Wadsworth 2006).
78.
Tryon, ‘Nationalism and International Copyright’, p. 305.

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Cheshire, J. (2016). Publishing Tennyson in America. In: Tennyson and Mid-Victorian Publishing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-33815-0_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-33815-0_4
Published: 26 October 2016
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