Chapter 11 - Romanticism

Summary

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Romantic-era books by English authors were more plentiful and widely distributed in the United States than in England. The US Copyright Act of 1790, which excluded foreign authors from copyright protection in the United States, spawned an American industry that appropriated, reprinted, and sold European works on all subjects for a fraction of what they would cost overseas. As a result, reprinted works by Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, and the Shelleys flooded the book markets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and advances in stereotyping meant that cloned plates could be used to produce those same books for decades. The effect of these plentiful, cheap editions, according to William St. Clair, was not simply the continued popularity of English writing at a time when US authors were calling for a national literature but also the circulation of those works among more economically diverse readers than had ever been possible in England.¹