The
English Author Should Feel That He Writes For The Widest Circle Of
Readers Ever Yet Obtained By The Literature Of Any Country.
He
provides not only for his own country and for the States, but for
the readers who are rising by millions in the British colonies.
Canada is supplied chiefly from the presses of Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia, but she is supplied with the works of the mother
country.
India, as I take it, gets all her books direct from
London, as do the West Indies. Whether or no the Australian
colonies have as yet learned to reprint our books I have never
learned, but I presume that they cannot do so as cheaply as they can
import them. London with us, and the three cities which I have
named on the other side of the Atlantic, are the places at which
this literature is manufactured; but the demand in the Western
hemisphere is becoming more brisk than that which the Old World
creates. There are, I have no doubt, more books printed in London
than in all America put together. A greater extent of letter-press
is put up in London than in the three publishing cities of the
States; but the number of copies issued by the American publishers
is so much greater than those which ours put forth that the greater
bulk of literature is with them. If this be so, the demand with
them is of course greater than it is with us.
I have spoken here of the privilege which an English author enjoys
by reason of the ever-widening circle of readers to whom he writes.
I should have said the writers of English literature, seeing that
the privilege is of course shared by the American writer. I profess
my belief that in the States an English author has an advantage over
one of that country merely in the fact of his being English, as a
French milliner has undoubtedly an advantage in her nationality, let
her merits or demerits as a milliner be what they may. I think that
English books are better liked because they are English. But I do
not know that there is any feeling with us either for or against an
author because he is American. I believe that Longfellow stands in
our judgment exactly where he would have stood had he been a tutor
at a college in Oxford instead of a Professor at Cambridge in
Massachusetts. Prescott is read among us as a historian without any
reference as to his nationality, and by many, as I take it, in
absolute ignorance of his nationality. Hawthorne, the novelist, is
quite as well known in England as he is in his own country. But I
do not know that to either of these three is awarded any favor or is
denied any justice because he is an American. Washington Irving
published many of his works in this country, receiving very large
sums for them from Mr. Murray, and I fancy that in dealing with his
publisher he found neither advantage nor disadvantage in his
nationality; that is, of course, advantage or disadvantage as
respected the light in which his works would be regarded.
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