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Literary piracy, and complaints about it, were rife in the United States and Great Britain throughout most of the nineteenth century, for there was no copyright agreement between the two countries until 1891. It is not clear what effect such piracy had on the development of American literature, but it is clear that writers and publishers on both sides of the Atlantic suffered commercially from their inability to protect literary property. Their loss is, however, the historian's gain, for the efforts made to compensate for the absence of an international copyright law help illuminate some of the bibliographic, commercial, and personal aspects of the profession of authorship in the nineteenth century. If authors looked on the international copyright situation as a flaw in the routines of their profession, historians can now look at the flaw to better understand the routines. The purpose of this paper is to detail some aspects of the profession of letters in the nineteenth century by describing the efforts of William Dean Howells and his Edinburgh publisher, David Douglas, to protect Howells' literary property in Great Britain.
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