...I am a little disturbed by the announcement of a Quarterly article on R.E. It must be hostile—perhaps an attack in the old Quarterly fashion: well, if so I shall be in good company! But I don’t want to have to answer—I want to be free to think new thoughts and imagine fresh things.

When the Quarterly article appeared a few days later she found it courteous enough in tone, but its attitude of complacent superiority towards the whole critical process, which it described as “a phase of thought long ago lived through and practically dead,” stung her to action and made her feel that some reply—to this and Gladstone together—was now unavoidable. She owed it to her own position—not as a scholar, for she never claimed that title, but as an interpreter of scholars and their work to the modern public. But “If I do reply,” she wrote to her husband, “I shall make it as substantive and constructive as possible. All the attacking, destructive part is so distasteful to me. I can only go through with it as a necessary element in a whole which is not negative but positive.” But she could not be induced even by Mr. Knowles’s persuasions to make it a regular “reply” to Mr. Gladstone, whose name is not once mentioned throughout the article[14]; she threw her argument instead into dialogue form, so keeping the artistic ground which she had used in the novel, and replying to the Quarterly or to the G.O.M. rather by allusion than by direct argument. The article was very widely read and certainly carried her cause a stage further; it was felt that here was something that had come to stay, that must be reckoned with, and her skilful use of the admissions made in the Church Congress that year as to the date and authorship of certain books of the Old Testament filled her readers with a vague feeling that perhaps after all these things must be faced for the New Testament also.

Meanwhile in America the hubbub produced by Robert Elsmere had far exceeded anything that occurred on this side of the Atlantic. Those were the days before International Copyright, when any American publisher was free to issue the works of British authors without their consent and without payment, and when if an “authorized edition” was issued by some reputable firm which had paid the author for his rights, it could be undersold the next day by some adventurous “pirate.” Messrs. Macmillan had bought the American rights of Robert Elsmere for a small sum and had issued it at $1.50 in April, but as soon as it began to excite attention, and especially after the appearance of Gladstone’s article, the pirate firms rushed in and raged furiously with each other and with Macmillan’s to get the book out at the lowest possible price. One firm—Messrs. Lowell & Co.—which had sold tens of thousands of copies, magnanimously sent the author a cheque for £100, but this was the only payment which Mrs. Ward ever received for Robert Elsmere from an American publisher. Some of the incidents of the internecine war between the pirates themselves for control of the Robert Elsmere market are still worth recording. They were summed up in a well-informed article in the Manchester Guardian in March, 1889, entitled The “Book-Rats” of the United States:

‘In America the publisher’s lot is not a happy one. If he is honest, he pays his author, and upon the first assurance of success sees nine-tenths of his lawful profits swept away by the incursions of pirates. If he is dishonest, he does not pay his author, but in hot haste reprints in cheap and nasty material, with one object alone—to undersell the legitimate publisher. A host more follow suit with new reprints in still cheaper and nastier material, till, under the pretence of giving cheap literature to the million, the culminating point is reached in the man who sells at a quarter of cost price to drive his rivals out of the field. This is what happened the other day in Boston over the sale of Robert Elsmere, a book which has there achieved an unparalleled success, and abundantly illustrates the inequality of the present system of no copyright. In England between thirty and forty thousand copies have already been sold in the nine months since it was published, and the book is selling steadily at the rate of some 700 a week. In America the sale is estimated at 200,000 copies, of which 150,000 are in pirated editions. One honest pirate purges his conscience by the magnificent gift of £100, which is likely to be the first and last instalment of that ‘handsome competence which the American reading public,’ says a Rhode Island newspaper, ‘owes to Mrs. Ward.’ A hundred pounds, representing just one shilling and fourpence per hundred copies upon all the pirated editions! And the author must be thankful for such mercies; rights she has none over her own creation, which pervades the States from end to end, and is not only a library in itself, but has called into existence so much polemical literature that a leading New York paper gives solemn warning to contributors that for the future sermons on Robert Elsmere will only be published at the ordinary advertisement rates. A Buffalo advertisement cries, ‘Who has yet touched Robert Elsmere at ten cents?’ only to be taken down by Jordan Marsh and Co., the ‘Whiteleys’ of Boston, who offered the book at four cents. Twopence for a book which extends over 400 pages in close-printed octavo! The stroke told, almost too successfully for its contrivers. It is said that next day the shop doors were besieged by a crowd like the surging throng at the entrance to the Lyceum pit on a first night. A queue extended across the street. For three days the enterprising pirate had the field to himself; then he raised his price again; he had lost some ten cents on every copy, but he had crushed his rivals.”

The achievement of one still more enterprising firm, however, escaped the notice of this correspondent. The Balsam Fir Soap Co., being anxious to launch their new soap upon the market, made the following announcement:

TO THE PUBLIC

We beg to announce that we have purchased an edition of the Hyde Park Company’s Robert Elsmere, and also their edition of Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief—a criticism by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P.

These two books will be presented to each purchaser of a single cake of Balsam Fir Soap.

Respectfully,
The Maine Balsam Fir Co.