The ‘Illimitable Dominion’ of Charles Dickens: Transatlantic Print Culture and the Spring of 1842

This article explores Edgar Allan Poe’s May 1842 edition of Graham’s Monthly Magazine in the context of debates about international copyright circulating in the press at the time of Charles Dickens’s famous tour of the US. I offer a reading of Poe’s short story ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales that sees these texts as interventions in transatlantic debates at the forefront of the public imagination in the Spring of 1842. In particular, through an original close reading of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ I demonstrate how Poe subtly drew upon penny press exposes to inform the short story’s discussion of class, status and rights of access. I also suggest that the argument Poe made in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne about the importance of ‘invention, creation, imagination [and] originality’ to the ‘prose tale’ is usefully considered in the same context, as an American response to questions of authorship that were also raised by the popular hysteria surrounding Dickens.