| John Camden Hotten who published and possibly compiled A Dictionary of Modern
Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words (1859), which is attributed to ‘An Antiquary’ who
may well have been Hotten himself had a bad reputation as publisher: he may have
been a blackmailer, and he certainly seems to have exploited his authors. He
pirated Mark Twain and Bret Harte, but printed an expurgated edition of
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (edited by William Michael Rossetti), and rescued
Swinburne’poems and Ballads when the original publisher became too frightened
to go on. He is said to have died from eating too many pork chops. Swinburne,
ungratefully, remarked that his death was an argument against cannibalism. John Camden Hotten (1832-73) has had a very poor press from both his contemporaries and later historians. At best, his actions have been regarded as shady and, at worst, positively criminal. All the best stories concerning Hotten involve dubious deals, exploitation of writers, violent arguments, and even hints of blackmail. It may well be that most of the stories are true or, at least, true enough to justify the publisher’s Machiavellian image. It was certainly the case that less egregious publishers, who, nevertheless, were not always above the occasional dubious deal or mild piece of author exploitation would welcome an almost comic character whose excesses made their sharp practice seem blunt. At a time when British publishing was undergoing a period of rapid and sometimes painful transition, when new and pushy firms were beginning to hustle, it was comforting to have someone to remind authors that, however unhappy they were with their current publisher, there was always Hotten to confirm that things could be worse. In histories of the exploitation of contemporary texts unprotected by copyright, Hotten had always been a useful British counterweight to all those examples of unprincipled American reprinting. If the British cried, in accusation, “Dickens, Eliot, and Thackeray!” the Americans could retort, “Artemis Ward, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain!” all of whom, at one time or another, Hotten had liberated into the British market. Even Hotten’s death, like a Christmas cracker, could provide a joke and a moral. Swinburne--whose Poems and Ballads (1866) had been rescued and published by Hotten when its original publisher Moxon had got cold feet, commented, “When I heard that he [Hotten] had died of a surfeit of pork chops, I observed that this was a serious argument against my friend Richard Burton’s views on cannibalism as wholesome.” John Camden Hotten’s Forgery of the 1872 ‘Leaves of Grass’ (1873) From a first look, the 1873 British edition of ‘Leaves of Grass ’ appears to be identical to the 1872 American edition published in Washington, D. C., including the fact that the title page bears the date ‘1872’ and the publishing location ‘Washington, D. C.’ Remembering the constraints placed on the 1868 Poems by Walt Whitman which he also published, John Camden Hotten printed 500 copies of Leaves of Grass based on the 1872 American edition and posed as its distributor, rather than publisher, to avoid British censorship laws. Hotten’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the book. While an edition in the truest sense in that it was printed from original plates unique to that printing, the pirated British edition is taken word for word from the 1872 American edition. The forged identity of the book stumped textual scholars for a long time until they realized that the ornamental features and line breaks of the forged edition are inconsistent in places with the authentic 1872 American edition. The book was both a forgery and a piracy for which Whitman received no royalties, and it would be the only complete British edition of Leaves of Grass published in his lifetime. |
| John Hotten’s publishing company is now part of the Random House Group and many of his original manuscripts are said to be held by them and the Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History, Reading University. |