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At the risk of seeming to answer my own question, I've been following the advice of previous appends, and looking at some of the Internet Archive pdfs I had already downloaded.
Should have thought of this before, but sometimes forcing yourself to write down a problem so that other people might understand it helps to clarify it for yourself as well.
From a fairly quick look at scans of old (i.e. 19th century) books published by British publishers, it appears that at that time the 'double quote outside, punctuation inside' convention was observed by both English and US publishers. I shall have to look at this in more detail, but all of the Trollope novels I have downloaded, going back to 'The Macdermots of Ballycloran' published in 1847 are like this.
This appears to have changed in Britain, but not the USA, on or about the time of World War I.
There is an 1898 British edition of 'The Man of Property', the first volume of Galsworthy's 'Forsyte Saga' which has double quotes, etc. In 1922 Heinemann published a limited edition of the first 3 volumes of the Saga which has single quotes, punctuation inside etc.
The truth is probably even more complicated, and I shall have to look some more, but as a preliminary conclusion it appears that I don't have to contemplate major roadworks on most of the Trollope, James, etc novels I have contributed to the MobileRead library.
Strangely what I may have to do is contemplate changing the two Jane Austen novels I contributed back to double quotes, having carefully changed them to single quotes because I thought it more authentic!
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