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was. The fault with Quentin Durward lay, in the end, in an unexpected quarter—with a dramatist who had been given a copy to write a theatrical adaptation.⁴⁸ As his booksellers raged and tattled, Scott himself kept his cool. “I think you are right to be satisfied with an apology,” he wrote to Constable, and—no doubt pleased with the offenders—he later added, “Do not be hard on them.”⁴⁹

      Scott and the Romance of Transatlantic Reprinting

      Toward the end of Scott’s life, another scoop in the London press—this time actually traceable to the “American Copy”—brought the transatlantic book trade straight into the realm of fiction, in Scott’s last work, the fourth series of the Tales of My Landlord (1831), which contained both Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous. In a fascinating reversal of usual practice, the American reprint of this text appeared before the original. Delays in Edinburgh meant that Carey excerpted the first volume of Count Robert in his Philadelphia newspaper a full five months before the entire work was published in Britain. This gave the paper plenty of time to get across the Atlantic, and the excerpt, published in Philadelphia in July, was reprinted in a few London newspapers in August.⁵⁰ In a headnote to the excerpt, the editors of the Athenaeum explained to readers the origins of the traveling text. Scott’s novels, they wrote, “are regularly transmitted across the Atlantic, and the American bookseller, less cautions or less particular than Mr. Cadell, has given the following very copious extract to the National Gazette, a literary Philadelphia paper, for a copy of which we are indebted to [a] friend.”⁵¹ Scott found humor in the situation, and when he wrote his preface to Count Robert a few months later, he made the transatlantic publication of his work its subject and subtext.

      The novel’s fictionalization of the episode considers transatlantic reprinting in a number of registers. First, Scott openly ridicules American printers who went to press with early versions of novels that did not include his final corrections and additions. The “Introductory Address” is narrated by Jedediah Cleishbotham, of Gandercleuch, the fictional character who has edited and prepared the previous Tales of My Landlord—including Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), all of which derive from manuscripts written by Jedediah’s late antiquarian associate Peter Pattieson. Jedediah has recently found two additional manuscripts, Count Robert and Castle Dangerous, but leaves them aside until Peter’s surviving brother, Paul, shows up in Gandercleuch demanding them for his own use. Paul is a schemer and a rascal, and the manuscripts are in terrible shape, but Jedediah nevertheless employs him to prepare the texts and agrees to split the profits. At one point, Jedediah approaches Paul to complain about his progress, and the latter bursts out with this revelation: “Our hopeful scheme is entirely blown up. The tales, on publishing which we reckoned with so much confidence, have already been printed; they are abroad, over all America, and the British papers are clamorous.” Jedediah, astonished, asks “whether this American production embraces the alterations which you as well as I judged necessary, before the work could be fitted to meet the public eye,” and, receiving a negative answer, declares he would have never “remit[ted] these manuscripts to the press” unless “they were rendered fit for public perusal.”⁵² This exchange about the “American production” emphasizes Scott’s control over the texts as author. Jedediah’s complaint echoes those Carey faced at home from customers frustrated with faulty editions and, like those complaints, reinforces the superiority of authorized British publication over piratical American reprints.

      Paul is not just a bringer of bad news, however; he is also a suspect. Jedediah accuses him of selling the manuscripts during an argument that resembles the initial dispute between Cadell and Carey over this same issue. Jedediah here is Cadell, and Paul is the falsely accused agent for Carey and also his defender: “I must of necessity suspect you to be the person who have [sic] supplied the foreign press with the copy which the printers have thus made an unscrupulous use of, without respect to the rights of the undeniable proprietors of the manuscripts” (xxxix). Paul responds by saying, “In the first place, these manuscripts … were never given to any one by me, and must have been sent to America either by yourself, or some one of the various gentleman to whom, I am well aware, you have afforded opportunities of perusing [them]” (xxxix–xl). Paul’s defense proves less effective than Carey’s, however, and Jedediah walks away absolutely convinced that he was “directly at the bottom of the Transatlantic publication, and had in one way or another found his own interest in that nefarious transaction” (xli–xlii). In reality, of course, the “Transatlantic publication” was authorized by the “proprietors of the manuscripts” in an arrangement of many years’ standing. This denial of the transatlantic arrangement, in addition to the repeated characterization of Paul in negative terms—“seedy,” “rusty,” “obstina[te],” “impuden[t],” “odious,” and “destitute of … amiable qualities” (xviii, xix, xx, xxxvii, xlii, xix)—suggests that Scott is denigrating American publishers.

      But Scott is a great ironist, and nowhere is this more evident than in the prefaces to the Waverley novels, where we meet editors, antiquarians, legal scholars, roaming storytellers, royal ancestors, and any number of characters like Jedediah Cleishbotham who serve as unreliable sources for the novels that follow. It is impossible, therefore, to take Jedediah entirely at his word, and at times the preface suggests a more complicated view of Paul Pattieson and a more generous take on reprinting. In employing Paul to edit the manuscripts, for example, Jedediah has angered the people of Gandercleuch, who consider it an inexcusable act of neglect; as his wife reports, the local gossips believe he “spends all his time in tippling strong drink with the keeper of the public house” and leaves “book-making, and a’ the rest o’t, to the care of his usher” (xxvii–xxviii). Indeed, when Jedediah first reveals he has discovered Count Robert and Castle Dangerous, he provides no good reason for ignoring them before he “threw the manuscripts into [his] drawer” (xvii). He is not careful in accounting for the texts, and after handing them over to Paul, he holds “a sincere confidence that all was going on well” (xxiii). Scott prepares us to observe him in the same mistake Cadell initially made with Carey and thus undermines his own apparent critique of transatlantic publication.

      A suggestive passage offers an implicit reconsideration of the actual relationship between Carey’s and Constable’s firms that the preface misrepresents. Jedediah’s internal thoughts invoke the circumstances of Cadell’s negotiation with Carey:

      I began to perceive that it would be no light matter … to break up a joint-stock adventure … which, if profitable to him, had at least promised to be no less so to me, established in years and learning and reputation so much his superior…. I resolved to proceed with becoming caution on the occasion, and not, by stating my causes of complaint too hastily in the outset, exasperate into a positive breach what might only prove some small misunderstanding, easily explained or apologized for, and which, like a leak in a new vessel, being once discovered and carefully stopped, renders the vessel but more sea-worthy than it was before. (xxxiv–xxxv)

      The “joint-stock adventure,” in which Constable & Company provided sheets and Carey payment, was indeed “profitable” to Carey and “no less so” to Constable; Cadell certainly considered himself and his senior partner “established in years and learning and reputation so much [the] superior” of their Philadelphia colleagues; his initial “complaint,” with its combination of both reprimand and solicitation, labored to avoid a “positive breach”; the issue of the stolen sheets proved a “small misunderstanding, easily explained or apologized for”; and the “leak” Constable and Cadell supposedly discovered at their printers was indeed “carefully stopped” by the arrangement with Carey, which provided revenue that “render[ed]” his company “more sea-worthy than it was before.” The passage implicitly issues a more balanced view of transatlantic publication than that contained in Jedediah’s other remarks and casts his own confidence in Paul’s guilt in terms just as faulty and presumptuous as Cadell’s repeated and unfounded suspicions. The resonances suggest the preface as a whole is more generous with America than it seems.

      The eventual fate of the manuscripts brings to an intriguing point Scott’s consideration of his American publishers, which in the end amounts to something

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