Transatlantic Connections

Publication in the United States was a potential goldmine largely untapped for British authors for much of the nineteenth century because they could not demand legal payment from publishers who pirated their works. The absence of international copyright legislation ensured a rich return for the American publishers, who had long taken advantage of free copy provided by British periodicals and books arriving in the United States from abroad. Such opportunism irritated Tennyson, who jealously guarded his publishing arrangements in England, but was powerless over income and product in America. Yet the situation worked in his favor, at least tangentially, because prolific and diverse publication in the United States made him a legendary figure that outreached his reputation in Britain: Tennyson became an American icon, as confirmed by Hamilton T. Mabie in a special memorial article reprinted in the Review of Reviews after Tennyson's death in 1892:

Tennyson has been more widely read in this country than in England, and the knowledge of his work is more widely diffused. It has percolated through all classes of society, and much of it has been for many years a possession of the common memory. The poet more than once recognized the fact that he had more admirers in America than in England, and he had more admirers because he had more readers. He was earlier recognized here, as were Carlyle and Browning. . . . His lyrics and shorter idyls have been a part of our school literature for several decades, and ‘The May Queen’ and other pieces of its class have been heard in every schoolhouse on the continent. ¹

Determining readership figures is, of course, impossible, but Mabie reveals a belief in American hero worship that depends on superlatives, and the notion that Tennyson's popularity can be gauged by the economic accessibility of his work to the masses appeals to American mythologies of democratic equality. Scholars often overlook the availability of his poetry in these formats and misjudge the implications of reprint culture. As Meredith McGill states, “Reprinted texts are a rich source of speculation about what kinds of literature were demanded by a democratic public, what counted as literature in this culture, and how high art might be reconfigured for middle-class and working-class audiences.” ² The sheer volume of reprints freely produced in newspapers, literary annuals, monthlies, weeklies, cheap papers, and other formats,represents an avalanche of Tennyson poetry, marketed to mass readerships of all economic levels, and the poet had very little control over how or where his works were published. Discussion about international copyright law in the United States indicated “a profound distrust of any measure that would consolidate the private ownership of texts,” ³ but McGill views the resistance to copyright law as an act of national purpose:

Reprint publishers frequently acknowledged nationalist aims, using foreign texts to refract an image of the nation as a whole that was seemingly impossible to produce by domestic means alone. Likewise, the culture of reprinting does not dispense with authors, but places authorship in complex and heightened forms of suspension.

(20-21) Editors of countless American periodicals marketed Tennyson's famous name and persona, making him more popular than their native American authors, whose volumes often cost more than Tennyson's. ⁴ Many American authors were editors (Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Fuller, Lowell, and Emerson all qualified as what Poe called “magazinists”); however, editors of periodicals also often became surrogate authors, as they reinvented Tennyson as an American possession by de-structuring and reassembling his poetry as fragments with new meanings subject to textual inscription by the periodical's contents, and then capitalizing on the iconic status they created in marketing tactics that increased the periodical's reputation and earnings. The poet was one of several nineteenth-century British authors lionized by Americans, but Tennyson was so popular that American authors “could not withstand the despotic power that Tennyson especially exercised over all who wrote in English,” according to Van Wyck Brooks. ⁵ The periodicals helped to create Tennyson's public persona by shaping his work to suit individual readerships, and reviewers created a romantic image of the poet as a reclusive, brilliant, and rough-spoken man hewn by a provincial English wilderness. Americans wanted to see Tennyson as a Romantic hero, who embraced a tormented solitude. While Tennyson was notoriously guarded about his privacy, he was not antisocial, and when at home at Farringford, he entertained a constant stream of guests. Nevertheless, the mythology became embedded with other codes of Tennyson iconography, as editorial manipulation and prolific publication of his texts made Tennyson a family treasure; as Susan Belasco Smith and Kenneth M. Price note, “The practice of reading for informal gatherings of family and friends—made books and especially periodicals a central source of entertainment in the home. The works of British and American fiction and poetry in the periodicals—those of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Stowe, Longfellow, Helen Hunt Jackson, and E. D. E. N. Southworth, to name only a few—were a staple ofsuch evenings.” ⁶ Clearly, Tennyson was in the mainstream of American social life, and book publishers who owned the periodicals depended upon the commodification of such celebrity in their periodicals to sell poetry volumes, as well as other books on their list, further popularizing the poet as an American icon.