Who Reads an American Book?

Cree LeFavour demonstrates that foreign reprints continued to dominate America s literary marketplace throughout the 1850s. In the absence of international copyright law to control reproduction, iconic novels including Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, and David Copperfield easily rivaled the popularity of notorious American bestsellers such as Uncle Tom''s Cabin and The Wide, Wide World. British reprints in the American market enjoyed a range of advantages over their domestic counterparts: lower reproduction costs, wider distribution channels, and potentially larger sales and profits to be gained through their reproduction. As LeFavour argues, the confluence of ever greater numbers of American and British novels competing in the marketplace during this decade created an unprecedented focus on books and novel reading. As she concludes, the significance of popular literary forms in the formation of an American cultural and intellectual life can hardly be grasped in the absence of British reprints they were a defining presence, one that forms both an explicit lament and a subtextual refrain throughout the literary and historical documents of the era.