Abstract

Charles Dickens’s 1859 serial “Hunted Down” was the first work by Dickens initially published in the U.S. and later in the U.K. “Hunted Down” was published in Robert Edwin Bonner’s New York Ledger, the most popular U.S. story paper of the mid-nineteenth century. In this article, I examine the anglophone press’s sensationalization of “Hunted Down’s” publication and what this reveals about nineteenth-century print culture. “Hunted Down,” I argue, resists correlative cultural links between a publication’s monetary value and its intrinsic literary value, i.e., its quality, length, word count, originality, and creativity. Bonner’s publication of Dickens’s story was momentous in the anglophone press because it broke away from the nineteenth-century publishing norm of unauthorized reprints, generating a global conversation concerning the value of periodical fiction. In the cultural imagination of newspaper readers, “Hunted Down’s” resistance to print-culture norms became more important than the serial itself. Examining the anglophone press’s sensationalization of “Hunted Down’s” publication offers scholars a look at how the literary market place and international copyright law shaped literary taste and value in the mid-nineteenth century.

摘要

查尔斯·狄更斯（Charles Dickens）1859年的系列作品《垂死的猎物》（Hunted Down）是狄更斯的第一部作品，最初在美国发行，后来在英国出版，《垂死的猎物》在罗伯特·埃德温·邦纳的《纽约总帐》中出版，这是19世纪中叶最受欢迎的美国故事报纸。在本文中，我研究了英语媒体对“ Hunted Down's”出版物的轰动，以及这揭示了大约19世纪的印刷文化。我认为，“陷入困境”抵制了出版物的货币价值与其内在的文学价值（即质量，篇幅，字数，原创性和创造力）之间的相关文化联系。邦纳（Bonner）出版狄更斯的故事在英国媒体上颇为重要，因为它脱离了19世纪未经授权转载的出版规范，引起了关于定期小说的价值的全球性讨论。在报纸读者的文化想象中，“追捕者”对印刷文化规范的抵制比连续出版物本身更为重要。