"The wizard harp of the North" and International Copyright

So it appears that posts on international copyright in the nineteenth century are like buses: you wait and wait and then two come along at once.

Backlog Studies

In which I find myself surprisingly beguiled by Charles Dudley Warner.

A Narrative of the Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw, The Well-Digger (1807)

Reading John Jeremiah Sullivan's wonderful Blood Horses recently, I was delighted to be introduced to the extraordinary misadventures of John Robert Shaw, Well-Digger, pictured above sans a few body parts. I was equally delighted to discover that his madcap 1807 autobiography is available in full here.

Walter Scott in The Gilded Age

Teaching Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age (1873) this week for the first time in a few years, I was interested to find early evidence of Twain's apparently profound and persistent dislike of Walter Scott (the kind of thing that would find much fuller and franker expression in, say, Life on the Mississippi (1883)).

American Scrapbook

This seems like a good place to start.