{"id":192,"date":"2012-09-28T18:43:30","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T18:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/?p=192"},"modified":"2024-09-03T12:02:01","modified_gmt":"2024-09-03T11:02:01","slug":"hollywoods-grandmas-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/2012\/09\/28\/hollywoods-grandmas-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood’s Grandmas Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1855, Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger<\/em> (NYL) started serialising \u201cFanny Fern\u201d (Sara Payton Willis). He advertised that she was paid\u00a0 $100 per column so that readers could gauge the exact amount she got paid \u2013 and could value her writing accordingly. It was at this point that sales \u2013 and the profits – of the NYL rose to unprecedented heights. This sent a clear signal across the Atlantic that America, with whom a copyright agreement still did not exist, could now provide rich and proven fodder for the cheap periodical market. The result was that The Family Herald<\/em> pirated Fanny Fern\u2019s two serial novels from NYL in 1855-6\u00a0and other papers widely plagiarised and imitated her columns.<\/p>\n

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portrait of Southworth from Sarah J. Hale, ed. Woman\u2019s Record (1853), p. 794; also 1855 ed. from http:\/\/www.librarycompany.org\/ women\/portraits\/southworth.htm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The London Journal, The Family Herald<\/em>\u2019s main rival, didn\u2019t want to publish the same thing at the same time and so researched the American mass market. It discovered a tale called The Lost Heiress<\/em> that the Saturday Evening Post<\/em> had just published. The London Journal<\/em> started running it a month after Fanny Fern\u2019s novel had begun in The Family Herald<\/em>, having changed the title from The Lost Heiress <\/em>to The True and False Heiress<\/em>. It published the serial anonymously until its very last episode, when it revealed the author to be E.D.E.N. Southworth. The serial was apparently very successful.<\/p>\n

Back in America, this was noticed by Robert Bonner who invited Southworth to write exclusively<\/strong> for the New York Ledger<\/em>. She started her series of “<\/em>exclusive” novels for him in 1857 and became one of the most widely read and reprinted authors of the entire nineteenth century. This in turn caused the Ledger<\/em>\u2019s sales to rise ever higher and The London Journal<\/em> and other penny periodicals to print more of her stories.<\/p>\n

As for why I\u2019ve put 1883 as the terminus of my study you may think that\u2019s curious when copyright plays such an important part in my narrative and the US started regulating international copyright in 1891. But two of the authors I’m focussing on were dead by then \u2013 and there are reasons why Southworth appeared in the British mass market periodical much less after 1868. When in 1883\u00a0The London Journal<\/em> made the serious mistake of trying to serialise Zola and lost a large number of readers, they chose to rescue the situation by serialising a Harriet Lewis novel even though she had died 5 years previously. What the original of that novel is I haven\u2019t been able to establish. But I can say that as far as I been able to discover, it hadn\u2019t been published in Britain before and that her name was considered a remedy for the ills of declining circulation. It’s possible of course that she never wrote the London Journal <\/em>serial: they might have only added her famous name to it. Be that as it may, \u00a0what appear in Britain are only reprints of works by these three women. 1883 therefore marks a watershed insofar as works new to the market are concerned.<\/p>\n

The above is all background to the question I really want to address in these three blog posts which is whether the literary property of these American women was “pirated” – stolen morally (if even if such action was legal) \u2013 by the British periodicals.<\/p>\n

To answer the question is actually rather difficult, for it depends partly on the definition of the term \u201cpiracy\u201d and partly on information that is lacking. There is little doubt that Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> and Fanny Fern\u2019s writings were pirated in Britain in the same way that the French novels of Sue and Dumas had been in the 1840s. But the cases of the writers I\u2019m talking of present complications.<\/p>\n

While I only want to talk of the three novelists in The London Journal<\/em> I\u2019ve mentioned, May Agnes Fleming, EDEN Southworth and Harriet Lewis, they will provide varied examples of how American women writers were not simply melodramatic victims of wicked men in Europe. Rather I\u2019ve found that, unlike Isabel Archer in Henry James’s\u00a0Portrait of a Lady <\/em> they could actually benefit from and actively manipulate the system of transatlantic cultural exchange.<\/p>\n

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image from http:\/\/content.lib.sfu.ca\/cdm\/ singleitem\/collection\/ ceww\/id\/385\/rec\/18<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

First then, May Agnes Fleming. Her first two novels in The London Journal<\/em> were pirated in a quite straightforward sense, yet this surprisingly worked to her advantage. In 1868, Fleming had signed an exclusive contract with the Philadelphia fiction weekly Saturday Night<\/em>. The following year The London Journal<\/em> took from it a novel originally called The Heiress of Glengower<\/em>, renaming it The Sister\u2019s Crime<\/em> and publishing it anonymously. Several papers in America pirated it in return, unaware that it was already copyright in America. It was so popular that when it was legally stopped in the American papers, a \u201cbidding war\u201d for the author resulted. The outcome was victory for Fleming: she accepted the offer of the New York Weekly<\/em> which immediately tripled her income, later signed a contract that gave her 15% royalties on the sales of her novels in volume format, and, from 1872, made an arrangement to send The London Journal<\/em> advance sheets for \u00a312 per instalment. Altogether, this gave her $10,000 a year. She didn\u2019t do too badly out that initial piracy.<\/p>\n

E.D.E.N. Southworth\u2019s relation with The London Journal<\/em> was even more complicated. Her first three novels in the magazine were pretty certainly pirated and, like Mrs Stowe before her, she came to England to stop this \u2013 for residence in Britain gave copyright protection. However, in the year Southworth came, 1859, although she was under exclusive contract to Robert Bonner, she must have arranged to give advance sheets of her most famous novel, The Hidden Hand<\/em>, to the former owner of The London Journal<\/em>, George Stiff, as it appeared in another magazine of his,\u00a0The Guide<\/em>, only a week after it came out in the New York Ledger<\/em>. When Stiff rebought The London Journal<\/em> he continued his relationship with her. The next year, 1860, The London Journal <\/em>would\u00a0publish two more novels by Southworth again <\/em>only a week after their New York appearance. Hypocritically, in an open letter to readers of the Ledger<\/em> (10 March 1860)\u00a0Southworth had just complained about being plagiarised in Britain . In 1861, a novel of hers even appeared in London before<\/em> it came out in New York (Eudora<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Sailing ever closer to the wind, she wrote Captain Rock\u2019s Pet<\/em> especially for The London Journal<\/em>. After this, none of her novels appear in it for two years. Stiff had again sold The London Journal<\/em> and instead, some of her novels appear in his new magazine, the London Reader<\/em> anonymously<\/strong>. The next Southworth novel in The London Journal<\/em>, Sylvia<\/em> (1864), was probably pirated, as it is a version of Hickory Hall<\/em>, a serial that had appeared in the National<\/em> Era<\/em> in 1850. But such is impossible in the case of her next three novels in The London Journal<\/em>, Left Alone, The Manhater <\/em>and The Malediction<\/em>. These again all appear either a week before or a week after they are printed in the Ledger<\/em>. Southworth\u2019s last novel in The London Journal, The Double Life<\/em> (1869), is a version of another National Era<\/em> serial from twenty years previously, which may again suggest piracy. Perhaps Bonner prevented her from sending more advance sheets. Southworth wrote a particularly strong declaration of loyalty to him dated 12 January 1869, which may be read as finally accepting that she really was under exclusive contract to him. Perhaps it is because of this that The London Journal<\/em> turned to another and younger New York Ledger<\/em> staple, also under supposedly exclusive contract to Robert Bonner, Harriet Lewis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1855, Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger (NYL) started serialising \u201cFanny Fern\u201d (Sara Payton Willis). He advertised that she was paid\u00a0 $100 per column so that readers could gauge the exact amount she …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16],"tags":[33,38,39,64,103,105,107,113],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victorian-popular-literature","category-victorian-publishing","tag-copyright","tag-e-d-e-n-southworth","tag-economics","tag-may-agnes-fleming","tag-transatlantic","tag-victorian-literature","tag-victorian-popular-literature","tag-womens-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16069,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/16069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}