University of Virginia Library

II

J. R. Sutherland's Philadelphia-based distribution strategy would have been an early and daring variation on a theme that some Toronto and Montréal publishers were about to take up with a vengeance. Within a few years of the appearance of Wit and Humor advertisements, American publishers and authors would be facing the rampant unauthorized Canadian publication of their domestically

copyrighted works. A brief exploration of this development, which involves not only Canadian publishers but London counterparts as well, can help place Wit and Humor in an historical context.

In an article appearing in the New York Sun in 1878 and reprinted in the Publishers' Weekly, George W. Carleton gave an account of the situation in the extremity of its development, which was characterized by the very low prices of mail-order Canadian books.

Mark Twain's authorized books were destined for routine copying by Toronto and Montréal publishers, who would apply ingenious and speedy methods of production and sale. The effect the appearance of these copies had on Mark Twain's temper is easy to imagine—his reaction was akin to the exasperation expressed by his one-time nemesis Carleton. From the title-page imprints of some of the surreptitious copies, an appearance is created that several Canadian editions were made of each of Mark Twain's works. Gordon Roper, pioneering scholar of Canadian literature, examined the apparently different copies and discovered that some were distinguished only by their title page imprints (and sometimes advertising pages). The diverse imprints indicated not the volume's publishers, but Toronto and Montréal news vendors, booksellers, and stationers. Further evidence led Roper to the conclusion that apparently various "editions" of some titles were the work of a single publisher—though not always the same company. These companies were usually controlled, Roper further disclosed, by one or more of a handful of publishers, whom he identified as Alexander Belford, George M. Rose, John Ross Robertson, and James B. Cook.11 Given the known profile of J. R. Sutherland, stationer and compiler of gazetteers, Wit and Humor could have followed the pattern that Roper discovered, with the distributor's

name appearing in the advertisements and presumably on the title page, partly or wholly shielding from view the name of the publisher.

Wit and Humor appeared at the dawn of an era in which American literary works were freely appropriated by Canadian publishers. American authors and publishers would struggle with the problem until 1891, when the United States finally enacted an international copyright law. At that time British and Canadian authors could at last be offered protections in America analogous to those which their American counterparts sought in the British dominions. Until then, however, the legal status of an author's work in the English-speaking world would remain insecure, and mercantile avenues for unauthorized publications remained open. By mid-century, American publishers had already made a tradition of the free appropriation of the literature of Britain; as America's literature matured, British publishers in their turn began to take notice. Some American authors were able to secure contracts with a British publisher, as did Irving, Cooper, and Melville with John Murray (father and son), but these agreements were supported not by the law but by the good word of the publisher and the respect he commanded from competitors. Neither Webb nor Mark Twain made such an arrangement for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and this book proved especially vulnerable. The authorized edition appeared a scant eight weeks after the death in Southampton of Charles Farrar Browne, known as Artemus Ward (b. 1834), the young comedian mourned by a British public whose enthusiasm for American vernacular speech and humor he had done much to excite. The commercial possibilities of a book by Artemus's friend Mark Twain were not lost on George Routledge, who made three editions of Jumping Frog between 1867 and 1872, nor on Routledge's shiftier rival John Camden Hotten, who added an edition of his own in 1870. Tens of thousands of copies of the four pirated editions were sold in the British isles in a few years' time—well over ten times the sales of the American edition.12

Though he received nothing from the Routledge and Hotten editions, Mark Twain acknowledged some years later that they contributed to his future success. At a time when he was scarcely known in the States, that is, they made him a popular author in England. He later recalled that the success of the Jumping Frog piracies led to a competitive "scramble"—presumably by the two rival houses—to secure his approval for authorized British editions of future books.13 Artemus

Ward, helped by his English lecture manager, Edward P. Hingston, made an agreement for authorized publication with Hotten in 1864 and seems to have been well served by him. Bret Harte's publisher, Carleton, had a ready-made arrangement with Sampson Low and Son in London, and so authorized publication of Harte's Condensed Novels was coordinated on both sides of the Atlantic (a move that did little to prevent unauthorized appropriation of this work and others by Harte). Later, as the American editions of Harte's works were handled by Fields, Osgood, then Osgood alone, and finally Houghton Mifflin, arrangements were made with Routledge and then Hotten's successor, Chatto and Windus, among others. Mark Twain too would prefer first Routledge and then Chatto and Windus after Hotten died in 1873. In an 1889 interview Andrew Chatto made it clear why the Americans were ill-disposed to Hotten but not to his successor.

American authors (and, intermittently, some publishers) long favored their nation's participation in an international agreement; decade after decade they advocated for this cause, but Washington did not alter its policy. The Round Table was particularly active in the cause. A thoughtful contribution to the discussion appeared in the issue of 16 December 1865; it was signed "C. L.," initials probably belonging to Charles Godfrey Leland, an author whose experience with piracy would be bracing. Leland was the creator of the popular "Hans Breitmann" ballads beginning in 1856. In 1868 he began to gather them in collections; his authorized American publisher was T. B. Peterson and Brothers and he consigned European rights to his friend Nicolas Trübner. The works were briskly pirated nonetheless in Canada, Australia, and also in England (by Hotten). While his own losses to unauthorized publication were still a few years in the future, Leland was able nonetheless to call attention to an essential fact about international copyright. Influence in Washington on the copyright question rested with "less than half a dozen publishers, who have acquired wealth by reprinting foreign books"; the influence of this group (which at times included the Harpers) was undiminished by the protests of America's greatest authors, including Washington Irving, who, C. L. reveals, had recently visited the capital and

there witnessed "the intrigues of certain northern publishers against the rights of the very men they pretend to assist. ..."15

The freedom from copyright restrictions asserted by American publishers in reprinting British books was one cause of the insecurity of authors' rights; another was Britain's policy of outlawing colonial publishing enterprises in its North American provinces. In mid-nineteenth-century America, the wants of the reading public were mainly satisfied with cheap unauthorized editions of British works. The popularity in America of the novels of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens was fostered and sustained to enormous proportions by these editions, a problem that Dickens publicly complained of early in his career, on his first visit to the New World. Because most American companies paid foreign authors little or nothing, their editions could be offered at prices that British publishers could not match. Anglophone Canadian readers were caught in a legal and economic vise, and starved for affordable books, especially in the years before and immediately after confederation (1867). Their booksellers were permitted to offer only the expensive English editions, which were made more expensive by high shipping costs. The importation of American reprints was prohibited and for a time Imperial agents vigilantly inspected bookseller-bound packages, destroying all contraband copies they found. Imperial law reserved the publishing business for the home country and forced on the colonies the status of a captive market. An astute observer reported that the scarcity of books in Canada inspired extraordinary remedial projects, including John Murray's 1840s series, the Home and Colonial Library.16 He added, however, that this set "contained none of the new and fresh books which the colonists wanted."

The observer was Samuel Edward Dawson (1833–1916), a Montréal publisher favored by American authors and well informed on the subject of copyright in the English-speaking world. The occasion for his observations was an 1882 lecture, published as Copyright in Books. It relates the history of copyright in England, America, and Canada as it operated through the nineteenth century, in the complex interactions of authors, publishers, and governments as they pursued their often competing interests. Dawson discusses the practical implications of the laws of the three governments during the decades of the 1860s and 1870s, and explains why American authors eventually found it almost impossible to prevent unauthorized publication of their works in Canada. By the Imperial Copyright Act of 1842, Imperial copyright was granted only to works that were published first within the British Isles—as opposed to British dominions, including the provinces that became Canada. A question lingered for some time as to whether authors needed also to be resident in Great Britain while their books were in press; a series of legal decisions, culminating in the final appeal in the case

of Sampson Low against Routledge (Routledge v. Low, 1868), endorsed the view that authors could secure Imperial copyright by residing "anywhere in the British dominions" while their works were in press in London.17 That is, a visit only to the nearest colony was needed: American authors could stay in Canada while their books were being published in London. As one result of this decision, Dawson entertained a stream of visits to his Montréal home by prominent authors from the United States seeking to fulfill the stipulation; they included Oliver Wendell Holmes and eventually Mark Twain. Holmes made his visit in 1867 for his book The Guardian Angel, and the copyright he thereupon secured was defended successfully in London in 1868.18

Wit and Humor was a portentous piracy: in appropriating the works of Mark Twain and Bret Harte even before the two authors had secured a national readership in their home country, the surreptitious volume set a precedent for the prodigious appropriations of the coming years. As Mark Twain's and Bret Harte's stars rose in the States, dozens of unauthorized editions of their works were produced in Canada. The copying began in earnest in 1870, with a ten-cent edition of Jumping Frog bearing the imprint of A. S. Irving, a Toronto news agent. It was a reprint of the Routledge edition of 1870; Gordon Roper has shown that the presswork for this volume was performed by the Daily Telegraph Printing House of Toronto, a company owned by John Ross Robertson and James B. Cook. The same year The Innocents Abroad also appeared with Irving's title-page imprint—as well as with the imprints of at least three other companies, including Dawson Brothers; Roper revealed that these were separate issues, all deriving from the same typesetting performed by the same printer responsible for the Irving Jumping Frog. As has already been mentioned, the Daily Telegraph Printing House is indirectly connected to J. R. Sutherland: Sutherland's partner, Henry N. McEvoy, is listed as working for this Robertson and Cook-owned company in 1869. The connection suggests (for now, no more than suggests) a possibility that Wit and Humor too was the work of this printing house.

Like Mark Twain, Bret Harte encountered vigorous appropriation of his works in North America and England. Condensed Novels was brazenly pirated in New York in 1867; its next unauthorized publication was in 1871, a prodigious year for Harte piracies. Hotten led the way with four Harte volumes: Sensation Novels, Condensed; That Heathen Chinee and Other Poems; East and West (a copy of Osgood's authorized East and West Poems); and Lothaw ... by Mr. Benjamins," a parody of Disraeli's novel Lothair that Harte made for the authorized Osgood edition of Condensed Novels. In Canada that year, the Canadian News and Publishing Company issued two volumes, Condensed Novels and Poems, while A. S. Irving brought out The Luck of Roaring Camp. The following year came more of the same,

with Ward, Lock and Tyler in London contesting Hotten for the role as the most prolific source of unauthorized Harte editions.19

Mark Twain visited Montréal in 1881, determined to put a stop to the busy Canadian presses, which had without his agreement reproduced all his books and even compiled unique anthologies of his writings. He made an especially vigorous effort to secure both Imperial and Canadian copyright for a new book, The Prince and the Pauper. Dawson, the publisher of the authorized Canadian edition of this work, explained that Mark Twain achieved his first object but failed in achieving the second, because of a change in Canadian law since the time when Holmes won his case. The Canadian Act of 1875 was carefully designed to support Canadian publishing and authorship and granted local copyright only to authors domiciled (as opposed to "residing") in Canada. Dawson's authorized Canadian edition did preclude other Canadian publishers from printing the work within Canada, but not from employing a printer across the border and importing the result (subject to payment of a duty of 12–1/2 percent). This gap in the intersecting laws was soon exploited. As with earlier works such as Tom Sawyer and A Tramp Abroad, and Harte's Gabriel Conway, a pirated edition of The Prince and the Pauper was issued in Toronto within weeks of the appearance of the first American edition. On the title page was the imprint of the Rose-Belford Publishing Company, a particularly active combination of two of the publishers identified by Gordon Roper; not to be denied, a third publisher, John Ross Robertson, soon followed with a fugitive edition of his own.20 Certain of Robertson's publications from the early 1880s well illustrate Mark Twain's failure to secure Canadian copyright: the publisher brought out many editions of the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain during this time, some of which he included in "Robertson's Cheap Series," at prices of thirty cents or less. These editions and others like them remained legally incontestable. In 1866 the Sutherland company (or Robertson and Cook's printing house) could not have been constrained from printing Wit and Humor in Canada, but sales in the United States might have been stopped by an injured copyright holder. No record of any action pertaining to the book has been discovered, however.