Cathy Davidson

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Oxford: Oxford, 1986.

Davidson documents the rise of the novel in the US; its relation to women's writing and reading; and to some degree its relation to the history of publishing and distribution technology and economics. She's thorough and perceptive, and provides quite a useful background. The overall picture seems to be that of simultaneous and related rises in secular fiction, women's expression and reading, sequential reading, ease and speed of production and distribution.

I cherry-picked the following quotes from many I might have chosen:

On the beginnings of large-scale popularity for novels:

"Although Susanna Rowson's Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) -- later known as Charlotte Temple -- had sold nearly forty thousand copies by the first decade of the nineteenth century, many of the copies were from pirated editions that brought no recompense to either the author or her American publisher. That publisher's first edition, it might also be noted, ran to only one thousand copies. One of the countries morst prosperous and sagacious early printers, Mathew Carey simply had no basis for predicting the popularity of Rowson's book. In fact, a first printing of a late eithteenth-century AMerican novel typically ran somewhere between three hundred and fifteen hundred copies, so Carey's edition of Charlotte was relatively large by the standards of the itme. In contrast, by 1825 a press run of ten thousand copies for an American novel was not unheard of ; by 1830 the paperback novels or 'story papers' that were distributed as newspapers through the U.S. postal system were retularly run in edition sof thirty thosuand copies" (17).

Davidson gives this account of how to get published in the 1800's:

"An author was required to contact a printer and contract with him (rarely, her) to have a new book brought before the American public. The a\uthor's offical recompense would be whatever the printer agreed to pay for the rights to an edition of a certain number. Often the actual recompense was whatever the printer was finally able or willing to pay. The printer's recompense would come from the sale of those same volumes, so the printing shopo that was also a publishing establishment was usually a bookstore, too. . . . Since publishers were often small local businesses in a large land with a sparse and scattered population, it was difficult to gain a large audience for most books." (18).

She notes also the publishers' and printers' problems.

"How could a publisher gauge the demand (or lack of one) for a specific title? Would a book (especially a novel) offend censorious critics? Would it be lively enough for an increasingly secularized public? Those decisions were all the more crucial in that for most printers there was little margin for error" (19).

"It should come as no surprise that most early printers, like most authors, brought forth only one American novel during the course of a whole career" (19).

This suggests, among other things, that a publisher or printer generally had to make money in some other way, and that the odds were that printing or publishing happened at a net loss or with too little remuneration to be with the labor involved. One might infer that this is a major reason that we find few early minority or underclass authors (white women, as usual, forming a subclass that tries these definitions).

English curriculae generally ignore the economic basis of production and distribution of literature itself, yet Davidson palpably shows distinct correlations between form and circumstance.

A description of Printing methods:

"The early publishers who decided to print a particular volume generally did so in a cottage-industry fashion. His shop might have one or two indentured apprentices, often as young as six or seven years of age. The apprentices took care of such unpleasant chores as 'treading out the pelts,' literally stomping on sheep pelts that had soaked for several days in the slop pail, a first step in making the ink balls necessary to ink the type. Apprentices and the printer's children would help with the cleaning, would sort type, and when strong enough would actually operate the heavy presses. The work was hard. Several eighteenth-century accounts describe the usual build and gait of one who had long served at the press -- an enormously develped right arm, a limp from having used the right foot on the 'step' in order to make the 'pull,' and sometimes even distended or permanently dislocated shoulders. The work was also general. To supplement the income from the press the printer's wife might run the town post office out of the print shop; often she sold books (imported or exchanged from different booksellers as well as thoseprinted in th shop) and other goods -- everything form household items and her own handicrafts o theater or lotter tickets, stateionery, pens, ink , and fancy imported products" (19-20).

My first publisher, William Van Doren, worked for a time in the 1980's by silkscreening a poster-style broadside he called The Wallpaper. He developed the unusual production method himself as a pre-digital way to support extensive experimentation with graphical presentation of text, and did some remarkable things with it. He personally described to me changes in his back and arms that came from the repetitive movements of silkscreening.

Transportation and shipping troubles:

"Joseph Dennie, in a letter to Royall Tyler regarding the Walpole, New Hampshire publication of Tyler's The Algerine Captive, aptly summarizes the too-common consequence of the combined problems of local printing and precarious distriubtjion: 'Your novel has been examined by the few and paproved. It is however extremely difficult fo r the Bostonians t supply themselves with abook that slumbers in a stall at Walpole, supposed, by the latest and most accurate advertisements, to be situated 400 miles north of their meridian.

"Four hundred miles was as formidable distance. To travel by stagecoach from Boston to Walpole might take two weeks or longer. Nor was it an inexpensive trip. In 1800, a stagecoachjourney could cost as much as $1 for ten miles" (21).

Relations with booksellers -

"The imprint on the title page of the first edition of Charles Brockdon Bron's Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800) indicates the sway in which one Philadelphia printer sought to carry his books to the larlger market: ' Printed and published by H. Maxwsell and sold by Messr's. T. TDobson, R. Campbell, H. and P. Rice.

"What effect did the improved transportation systems and the expanding publisher's networks have on the shape of American fiction? Obviously, that is a difficult question to answer. But it is worth noting that nearly all of America's novels published prior to 1820 were first published in the North. There were exceptions, such as George Fowler's A flight to the moon: or the Vision of Randalthus (1813) and John Neal's Keep Cool (1817) both published in Baltmore; . . . . but these volumes were all issued after 1809, with only marginal success, and none enjoyed a second edition. To put he matter in its most general terms, the new American novels tended to do best where they could best be distributed" (22-23).

If the sales item under discussion were gym socks, I doubt anyone would imagine that something so elemental as distribution were not involved in their dissemination.

On Copyright:

"Until the passage of federal copyright laws, there could be no real profession of authorship. Publishing, too, requried some protection. If a printer needed, say, to sell half fo a first edition of a novel simply to recoup his costs, he could not afford to have another printer, impressed by the novel's sales, come forward with a competing -- and perhaps cheaper -- edition. Such a pirated edition deprived both the author and the publisher of the profits they would otherwise have received."

One wonders how this relates to Net-era publication. It certainly has not applied in the straightforward manner described here to music sales. They bombed briefly in the mid-1980's, in response to cassettes, but picked up within a very short period of time, the pause being apparently an industry-wide panic of professionals rather than anything else. Moreover, while one may feel some empathy for authors and first publishers being robbed of their profits, a pirated edition was at least distributed, and perhaps distributed more than it might have been otherwise. So the relation to dissemination of literature in general might not be quite as described here.

Looking altogether at Chapter 2, one must note that

1. The economic difficulties of authorship and booksales prohibited reading and sales

2. The lending libraries were a great boon not only to reading and literacy but to publishing as well,

3. The physical object of the book was a great amount of its value and a great part of the trouble in its production.

4. The value difference between a particularly dense book like Paradise Lost and a new novel would have been immense, and a worthy consideration in terms of purchase. One can read Milton over and over without exhausting its ideas -- something that would be hard to say for Harriet Beecher Stowe. This may be a major factor in the shift from long poems to novels in general. Novels make more sense if one's going to read the work once, consider that one has put enough work into the thing, and set it aside.

5. Economies of scale impeded American publishing because English and european markets were larger, and booksellers could profit more by jobbing britlit than US lit. This would have made the results of any other economic and logistical difficulties more critical.

6. these substantial limits must remain in place to varying extents in third world countries and among minority communities.

Economics and Censorship

A quote for George Bush I, after his recent comments about blogs:

"I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing [in Virginia], and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!

William Berkeley, Gov.
Virginia 1619
Cited p 38

Fiction and Morality

"The opinion of the world in regard to works of fancy has of late years undergone a wonderful change. It is no longer considered an offense against either religion, morality, or prudence to peruse a book bearing the name of a novel. . . . To us it appears as if it were but yesterday, that the grave, the serious, the religious, and the prudent, considered novel reading as an employment utterly beneath th dignity of the human mind . . . . In those days, it was almost as disreputable to be detected reading anovel, as to be found betting at a cock-fight, or a gaming table. Those who had sons would have supposed them forever incapacitated for any useful pursuit in life, if they exhibited an inclination for novel reading; and those who had daughters who exhibited such an inclination, would have considred them as totally unfitted for ever becoming good wives or mothers." (James Mchanry, 1824, cited page 38).

Production and Reading Styles

"Rolf Engelsing, one of the important practictioners of histoire du livre, has argued persuasively that by the end of hte eighteenth century in Germany (and, by extension, throughout the Western world), reading was no longer largely limited to the Bible and other basic religious books for most people. Not only was the number of books increasing apace with the increasing number of readers but, in addition, more readers read more books in the course of a lifetime. Engselsing also argues that this change in quantity also effected a change in the quality and nature of reading. Instead of reading the book 'intensively' (reading the Bible over and over again), books were read 'extensively.' one book regularly replacing another, to result in a proto-mass consumption of print. Engelsing sees the novel as both a primary contributing factor to this change and its chief benefact or. Engelsing's insight is crucial. The whole mentality of reading was changing by the end of the eighteenth century, at least in America, and, clearly, the Bible and Psalter no longer occupied the singular place they once had in the life fo the community of of the individual leader. This is not to say that religion had lost its importance. Rather, other books rivaled the Bible for reading time in early America. Just as clearly, and increased demand for different kinds of books called the novel into being" (72).

I should point out that traditional plotted novels work far better for this kind of reading. One reads through For Whom the Bell Tolls one time in comfort, whereas earlier narrative forms, say Paradise Lost, suggest re-reading. Important exceptions exist, but they're treated different socially. For instance, how many readers of the Ulysses or Finnegans Wake read it straight through and do not discuss it, say in a class? The academic community provides something rather like the old priesthood for these works.

NOTE: On page 95, Davidson has a picture of the title page of The Power of Sympathy, given as the first American novel. It's interesting that the font is obviously old-fashioned in the variation of the typeface, which 20th Century and even late 19th Century readers would find distracting. This suggests that simplified, regular typefaces evolved in part with the need to streamline the reading process for sequential reads, as in novels.

NOTE: It's interesting that the early novels should focus on matters "of seduction," as Davidson describes extensively. This would seem to fit the sequential structure of novels on several counts. What this amounts to in a more contemporary description would be gender roles -- an aspect of human society in which one makes little headway without undersanding of global contexts. How people romance has to do with how they will raise children; how they raise children depends on how economy shapes their lives and how they were raised, and so forth.

And Reproductive Politics

"The high fertility rate of the postrevolutionary period is striking, but what is even more striking is the precipitous fall in the rate during the next century. The fertility rate dclined by 23 percent before 1850, by 50 percent before 1900. Since no new technologies for preventing births (such as the recent [Davidson writes in 1986] birth control pill) were developed during those years and since prophylactics were certainly known in late eighteenth-century American (and used widely in other countries, notably France), this striking decline in birthrate reveals a massive change in American social attitudes even within a generation or two" (117).

For a history of prophylactics, see Sex and Destiny, by Germaine Greer.

Probably true even though CD seems to discount the issues of distribution and marketing of the devices; distribution could only have been impeded by the the social disruption attendent on revolution, particularly given the unsympathetic nature of the Christian institutions that were often the first to re-establish order in outlying areas.

This doesn't mean there was no change in attitude, however; I just wonder in what ways attitude interplayed with distribution.

"Amorphous psychosociological shifts such as an emerging ideal of affectional marriage (rather than patriarchal authority and wifely subordination), a relaxing of parental control over one's offspring (especially in the matter of choosing marriage partners), an increased substitution of affection or authority in the dealings between parents and children, and a new emphasis on the mother's responsibility for imparting to her children both knowledge and principles of virtue have all been traced to the last part of the eighteenth century. All such changes, it has been further argued, became still more institutitonalilzed in the next century through industrialization and the increasing gender specialization within the family. With the father cast as the primary wage earner and more and more employed away from the home, the mother, even if she also worked for wages, was deemed responsibile for childrearing and household management" (125).

The note to this, .on page 293, continues, "The historiographty of changing family patterns is controversial and the picture tends to look different depending on what factors one includes. Class, regional, and racial factors all influence the interpretation in different ways. Degler, Kerber, and Norton, for example, all tend to see a changing family pattern with more options for women by the end of the eighteenth century, although Kerber, perhaps, views the situation less optimiistically than the other historians. Lawrence Stone has charted a change in family structure in England during the eighteenth-century, especially an increase in affectional marriages and affectional modes of child-rearing. See his The family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800. (NYC: Harper & Row, 1977). A similar pattern is described in the US by Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Polgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1982.) Daniel B. Smith, Inside the Great House: PLanter Family Life in EIghteenth-Century Chesapeake SOciety (Ithaca: Cornell, 1980); . . . . For a brief overview of the different arguments, see Thomas Pl Slaughter, "Family Politics in Revolutionary America, American Quarterly, 36 (Fall 1984), 598-606.