This talk begins by asking why Richard Bentley, Herman Melville’s authorized London publisher, commissioned such an ornate binding for The Whale, or Moby Dick (1851), when he had lost money on Melville’s previous books and did not expect this one to be a bestseller. Situating the edition within Bentley’s wider publication of American books reveals that The Whale participated in a general trend of “handsome” British editions validating American authorship. However, The Whale’s binding was also an intervention into debates over international copyright, championing the rights of American authors in Britain in ways that echoed Melville’s own reflections on copyright, and resonating in the struggle for international copyright in the United States, in which American commentators upheld Bentley as a model of fair dealing. This battle over copyright in the US fed into larger debates about the structure and future of its literary trade, meaning that The Whale further spoke to concerns about the place of authorship in an emergent national print culture. This talk thus argues for greater attention to the work of British publishers and their material texts in the shaping of American literature and American authorship in the mid-nineteenth century.

Dr Katie McGettigan is Senior Lecturer in America Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book, Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text was published in 2017, and her work has also appeared in Journal of American Studies, American Literature and Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary Relations. She is currently finishing her second monograph, tentatively titled, The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature, 1830-1860, from which her talk is taken.