Antebellum Authorship after Charvat

Abstract

In this wonderfully fine-grained study, Leon Jackson jettisons the categories of “professional” and “amateur” that have structured discussions of antebellum authorship since William Charvat’s influential book The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 was published posthumously in 1968. Charvat’s neat narrative, Jackson charges, is at once narrowly dualist (if you’re not a professional, you must be an amateur, and to be an amateur means you have failed to be a professional) and teleological, plotting the history of antebellum authorship as an ultimately victorious quest for professionalism. This developmental logic misses the point that amateurism “didn’t precede professionalism so much as it emerged in tandem with it . . . inasmuch as it helped define what professionalism was by reference to what it was not” [19]. Moreover, the terms hardly capture the multiple economies in which antebellum authors participated, and in their place Jackson brings to life a wide array of exchange practices, including gift giving, subscription, and literary competitions. Jackson is careful to specify what his book does and does not do. Although it is a study of literature, it is not a work of literary criticism; that is, although it is deeply analytical, it is not exactly interpretive. It is something closer to a historical anthropology of authorship, and as such, its idiom is thick description, rather than close reading. Jackson draws extensively on scholarship in the social sciences, especially the work of Karl Polanyi and other economic anthropologists, an approach that offers a richly textured picture of the literary activities of antebellum authors, editors, publishers, and readers. The focus of Jackson’s research, though, is on primary sources, and his archival work is truly breathtaking. He draws on reams of newspapers, diaries, business and personal correspondence, albums, letter-writing manuals, and publishers’ receipts, among other materials, and his research covers considerable geographic ground (North and South, although like most antebellum scholarship, it concentrates on the eastern seaboard). Yet this is not a haphazard collection of examples: they quite clearly and naturally demonstrate