Introduction: America and the ‘Way to the Devil’

Summary

‘By a special arrangement with me and my English Publishers’, ran a notice attached to the American edition of Dickens’s ‘The Holly-Tree’, ‘MESSRS. TICKNOR AND FIELDS, of Boston, have become the only authorized representatives in America of the whole series of my books’. Like the patented swoosh on a trainer, or the chef’s signature on a supermarket meal, this sentence offers a guarantee of authenticity in the face of a local mass of counterfeits. Writing a few decades before the arrival of international copyright law (with the Chace Act of 1891), Dickens was unable to launch a case against the American book pirates; instead, he penned a long series of essays, open letters and stories, tracing the moral cost of cultural inauthenticity. Upon visiting the New World for the first time in 1842, he had dismissed it as a ‘foul growth’ whose people don’t ‘care for poetry’, the roots of their malaise lying ‘deep in its licentious press’. By 1855, with the fictional landscape of ‘The Holly-Tree’, things grew darker still, the territory across the Atlantic yawning open as a pathway to hell. ‘I was not going that way to the Devil’, his narrator reminds us, ‘but by the American route’.