“Changed to suit the English market”: American Novelist E. D. E. N. Southworth in George Stiff’s London Penny Weeklies

Abstract:This essay examines the circulation of the works of American novelist E. D. E. N. Southworth in London penny weeklies owned by George Stiff from the mid-1850s through the mid-1860s, including his best-known periodical, the London Journal. While Stiff’s earliest circulation of Southworth’s fiction was not authorized, they soon reached an understanding, and Southworth moved to England, living there from 1859 to 1862 so that her works could be protected by both British and U.S. copyright. In Stiff’s penny weeklies, many of Southworth’s works, including her most famous novel, The Hidden Hand (1859), were revised to suit the taste of British audiences, including relocating plots set in the United States to Britain. While these adaptations have been characterized as piracies, they were not—although Southworth herself did not produce the adaptations, her cooperation made them possible. Stiff and Southworth’s collaboration illustrates how tricky it was to arrange transatlantic serialization of novels in the fast-paced world of cheap weekly periodicals. To trace the rise and fall of Southworth and Stiff’s collaboration, the essay draws on Southworth’s letters to Robert Bonner (who serialized her novels in the New York Ledger), advertisements and notices in both the US and British press, the chancery file of the British copyright lawsuit Southworth v. Taylor, and the texts of Southworth’s fiction as circulated on both sides of the Atlantic in several forms.