BOOKS.

AMERICAN LITERATURE—ITS HISTORY.*

WE have already mentioned Mr. Benjamin Moran's contributions towards a history of " American Literature " in Triibner's Guide : we now give a fuller account of this remarkable essay. Mr. Moran divides the history of American literature into four great periods. The first of these, called by him the " First Colonial Period," and dating from 1639 to 1700, is that of the dawn of literature, when the English settlers, having done their most necessary labour with sword, axe, and ploughshare, began to turn their attention to higher objects. In the year 1638, the Reverend Mr. Glover, a Nonconformist minister, having long felt the want of an easy method of disseminating his principles among the widely dispersed colonists, ordered a small press from England, and on this was printed, in January 1639, by Stephen Daye, a native of London, the Freeman's Oath, a small sheet ; the first ever issued in that country where now is heard the ceaseless click of tremendous steam printing machines, throwing off tens of thousands of copies in an hour. This Freeman's Oath, copies of which still exist, betrays great want of skill and practi- cal knowledge on the part of the printer ; for Stephen Daye, it seems, was not a very clever " hand at ease." Nor was he a very quick one ; for the second work which came forth from his press, and which is, in fact, the first book ever printed in the United States, the Bay Psalm Book, did not appear till 1640, a year afterwards. It was, however, eminently successful; having a large circulation in the New England settlements, and being reprinted in the mother-country in no less than seventeen editions, the last bearing date 1754. From this it appears to have enjoyed the public favour in England for fourteen years over a century. It is a very curious fact, indeed, that this first American book should have earned a more lasting popularity than any work since published in the United States ; for besides the English reprints already mentioned, it passed through twenty-two editions in Scotland, where it was for many years a standard authority, and

had altogether the since unheard-of success of more than seventy different editions.

The Bay Psalm Book was followed in rapid succession by many other publications, mostly of a religious nature. The first literature of America like the dawn of learning in all other coun- tries of which history has a record, showed itself in sermons, prayers, moral essays, and polemics ; many specimens of which indeed were composed, and circulated in written copies, nineteen years before Stephen Daye sat down to work at his frame, almost from the very moment when (in 1620) the Pil- grim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock. This first period of American literature might, therefore, aptly be called the religious period. What Mr. Moran calls the " Second Colonial Period," opened in the year 1700, and ended with the War of Indepen- dence. It might be described as the political period, for, the young nation having passed through its puritanical phase, its literary activity was shown in the investigation of social phe- nomena, and of those legal and historical principles on Which re- pose the foundation of the State. The most important writer of this period is Jonathan Edwards, one of the first of American authors who gave unequivocal evidence of great reasoning powers and originality of thought. Dugald Stewart justly describes him as one " who in logical acuteness and subtlety does not yield to any disputant bred in the Universities of Europe." Contempo- raneous with him were a number of more strictly political writers, who, investigating the principles of diplomacy and statecraft, composed some of the best historical works of the time ; and among the works of the period we reckon Cadwallader Colden's " History of the Five Nations" (of Indians) ; Thomas Prince's "History of New England" ; the famous Captain Church's "His- tory of King Philip's War" ; James Ralph's "History of Eng- land during the Reigns of William the Third and Queen Anne," and many more. The second Colonial Period ended with the era of the revolution, when the political movement, silently prepared for more than half a century, at last burst forth, carrying before it a new order of things. The next literary period, the third in chronological order, Mr. Moran calls the First American Period. The writings of the country now assumed a more de- cidedly national type ; and whereas formerly American authors had invariably looked for their models across the Atlantic, to the Pu- ritan literature of the Cromwell era, or to the elegance of the time of Queen Anne, they now began to search for subjects within their own reach, so as to become morally as well as politically in- dependent. Thomas Jefferson fitly inaugurates this period by a little book which he wrote while yet a young man, the " Sum- mary View of the Rights of British America" ; and by another, composed a few years after, the "Notes on Virginia." One of the most remarkable traits of this third period also is, that literature first became properly speaking a profession. Until the lat- ter years of the eighteenth century, no American had devoted himself exclusively to literature, as a means of living. The first man in the United States who did so was Charles Brockden Brown, a still well-known novelist, who began writing about the year 1793. Once defined, the class of professional writers in- creased very rapidly, and before the end of the third period, that is before 1820, many hundreds of well-educated, genial, and in- * Triibner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature. A Classed List of Books published in the United States of America during the last Forty Years. With Bibliographical Introduction, Notes, and Alphabetical Index. Compiled and edited by Nicholas TrUbner. Published by Trilbner and Co.

dustrious men had already taken up literature as their regular employment.

Mr. Moran's fourth literary division, the " Second American Period," embraces the interval from 1820 to the present time, and is necessarily the most voluminous of all, as the one in which the literature of the Great Western Continent became what it is at present. To follow the author in his minute amount of all that American writers have done during this period in the different branches of human knowledge, is however manifestly impossible for us, the mere nomenclature being vast enough to fill a mo- derately sized biographical cyclopfedia ; we must content ourselves with an extract of some statistical facts, which strikingly illus- trates the character of this last era, the era, we might call it, of universal literature- " In the infancy of American publishing 500 copies were a good edition. From 1827 to 1837, the ordinary sale of a successful book was from 1000 to 1500 copies ; whereas now 1500 of any book can be disposed of, and it is not uncommon to print 10,000. The sale of Irving's works is by hundreds of thousands.

" Small editions, in fact, are the exception ; and immense editions of good English works are quite common. There have been sold in the United States in five years, 80,000 volumes of the 8vo. edition of the lEfodern British Es- sayists; 80,000 volumes of Macaulay's Miscellanies, in 3 vols. ; 100,000 copies of Grace Aguillar's works in two years ; more than 50,000 of Murray's Encyclopedia of Geography; 10,000 of M'Culloch's Commercial Diction- ary; and 10,000 of A lexander Smith's Poems in a few months. The Ame- rican sale of Thaekeray's works is quadruple that of England ; Dickens' have sold by millions of volumes. Bleak Mouse alone sold to the amount of 250,000 copies in volumes, magazines, and newspapers. Bulwer's last work reached about two-thirds of that number, and more than 100,000 copies of Jane Eyre have been disposed of. "Mr. Goodrich, the venerable Peter Parley, in his recently published Re- collections of his life, gives some valuable facts respecting the growth of the publishing and bookselling business in the United States. He states the value and description of the books published in the country in 1820, to be as follows--

Dollars.

School 750,000 Classical 250,000 Theological 150,000 Law 200,000 Medical 150,000 All Others 1,000,000

2,500,000

"In 1830 this had increased to 3,500,000 dollars, the school-books alone being valued at 1,100,000; and in 1840, there was a further increase to 5,500.000 dollars, the school-books then standing at the value of 2,000,000. In 1850 the trade had more than doubled, the amounts beings as follows—

Dollars.

School .5,500,000 Classical 1,000,000 Theological 500,000 Law 700,000 Medical 400,000 All Others 9,900,000

12,500,000!

"He estimates the book-trade of 1856 at 16,000,000 dollars; and as his statement is curious, we print it. It is proper, however, to say that this is a low estimate. The Book Trade of Boston is here put down at too low a

Books published at Dollars New York City 6,000,000

Albany, Rochester, itc

600,000 Boston 2,500,000

New Haven, Hartford, Sze

400,000

Philadelphia

3,900,000 Cincinnati 1,300,000 Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukie 100,000 District of Columbia. by Government. 750,000 Baltimore, Charleston, &c. &c 750,000

16,000,000

"According to the same intelligent authority, the number of persons, in 1842, employed in book publishing, printing, bookbinding, type founding, engraving, plate-printing, and paper-making in the United States, was 418,048, and the amount of business annually done in all these callings was 28,348,912 dollars. 12,000,000 of volumes, 3,000,000 of numbers of maga- zines, and 300,000,000 of newspapers were produced annually, the entire capital invested in their production being 16,600,000 dollars, of which 4,000,000 were invested alone in books and magazines.

" It is proper to notice here the wonderful change in the relative propor- tions of British and American books published in the United States since 1820. Mr. Goodrich is an authority for the statement, and we take his word unhesitatingly. He says the consumption in 1820, of American works in the Union, was 30 per cent.; that of British books 70 per cent. In 1830 the consumption of American works was 40 per cent to 60 per cent of British works. In 1840 it was 55 per cent of American, to 45 per cent of British ; in 1850 it was 70 per cent of American to 30 per cent of British ; and in 1866, it was estimated, on reliable data, that the consumption of American books had increased to 80 per cent, while that of British books had decreased to 20 per cent ; or from 70 per cent of the entire consumption in 1820, to but 20 per cent in 1856.

After tracing the history of the different periods of literature in the production of books, Mr. Moran leads us to survey one of the most powerful instruments in calling forth a taste for litera- ture, the newspaper and periodical press. The first newspaper, or as it was then called, news-placard, was printed in Boston, in 1689, and the first regular publication appeared attho same town, in the autumn of the following year.Only one impression of it remains, in the State Paper-office at Whitehall, where it had been sent, after the Government had suppressed the paper, because it " came out contrary to law, and contained reflections of a very high nature." This suppression seems to have thrown a damper on the efforts of the originators ; for it was not until fourteen years after, in 1704, that another man, one John Campbell, a bookseller and postmaster of Boston, came forward with a new periodical publication. It was a weekly journal under the title of the " Boston News Letter," the publication of which was con- tinued until 1776, during a period of seventy-two years ; and its success called forth, in 1719, two other newspapers, the Boston sum. It was 5,500,000 in 1855. Gazette and the American Weekly Mercurie, the latter printed at Philadelphia. These three were the first successful newspapers established in America ; and there was not much increase in the number of such publications until 1754. In that year there were four weekly papers in New England, all published. at Boston, two in Pennsylvania, and two in New York ; but neither Connecticut nor even New Hampshire could boast of a journal. The news- paper as well as the book literature only began to show signs of real life in the third literary period, the time after the revolution. In 1776 there were only thirty-four newspapers in the whole of the United States, all of them weeklies ; but in 1801 they had in- creased to about 200, or more than five times the former number, and of these several were dailies. By the census of 1810 it ap- peared that the family of periodical publications had increased to 359 members, twenty-seven of them making their daily appear- ance. In the year 1828 they had increased to 852; in 1830 to 1000; in 1840 to 1631 ; and finally, in 1850, to the astonishing number of 2800, which united had an annual circulation of more than 426 millions of copies. What the increase has been since that period is not mentioned, the author stating that he has no re- liable data on the subject ; we may form, however, an opinion of the magnitude of the actual productions of the imerican press, when we learn that there are firms in New York and Boston who sometimes sell 100,000 papers each in a single day. It is esti- mated that there are now about 4000 newspapers in the United States.

With such facts, of which England and the English language, tia wAY as America may be proud, we may well exclaim with Mr.

Moran—

"In the four hundred years that Rome occupied Britain, she failed to leave a single evidence of it on the language of the people. But in the eighty-two pears of the existence of the United States, the Republic has in- fused her spirit into the English language and has extended that language over the greater part of the continent of North America, to say nothing of the remote Islands of the Pacific."

With respect to the execution of the essay we will only say that we have rarely seen so much information packed into so small a space ; and that the writer adds to the force of his wri- ting by singular modesty of statement and an unfailing taste.