Course Description
This survey of the history of the book and the book trade in Britain will study the changes in text production made possible by the Industrial Revolution; the emergence of the modern publisher and publishing system; the transformation of the ways in which texts were distributed; and the evidence we have for the ways in which printed and manuscript texts were consumed. A feature of this course will be the opportunity to revisit some great literary texts in the light of book history, and to see canonical literature as both shaping and being shaped by the economic and social culture of the book. Each day of the course will be devoted to a phase within the period (1770s-1810s, 1810s-1840s, 1840s-1870s, 1870s-1890s, 1890s-1919). Each phase will be studied through a selection of authors, of publishers, of books and periodicals; through an example of popular publishing; and through an example of a characteristic technology of the period. Each phase will also have a characteristic book price whose significance – to contemporary authors, publishers and readers – will be discussed. For example, in Day 3 (1840s-1870s) we shall study some of the works of Dickens and Tennyson as our authors, and look at the production of Bradbury & Evans and John Camden Hotten as publishers. Books studied will include the Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and we shall look at the Illustrated London News and Punch as our periodicals. Popular publishing will be represented by yellowback detective fiction. The critical technology we shall discuss will be stereotype. Finally, the significant book price chosen for this phase is two shillings, and the importance of the cheapening of books in Britain and its Empire will be illustrated by the growing use of this low price. Students will not be expected to have read the literary texts referred to, but the benefit they gain from the course is likely to increase if they have at least some acquaintance with the following writers, all of whom will be referred to within their book history context: Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, H. G. Wells and W. B. Yeats.Faculty
Simon Eliot
Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book in the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and Deputy Director of the Centre for …
Advance Reading List
Required Reading
Primary
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 1996.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 1996.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 1997.
Forster, E. M. Howard’s End. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 2000.
Gissing, George. New Grub Street. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 1976.
Secondary
There is no satisfactory single text that covers this period. The best general introduction is still, and this after nearly fifty years:
Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957; reprinted 1998.
Suggested Reading
Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination. London: Harper Collins, 1997. Particularly chapters 3 and 4.
Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. An often moving account of the life in Grub Street in the nineteenth century.
Griest, Guinevere L. Mudie’s Circulating Library & the Victorian Novel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. The standard work on the subject, though now rather long in the tooth.
James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. A marvelous survey of nineteenth-century hack fiction.
Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Usefully covers the period from 1875 to 1914.
Reed, David. The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880–1960. London: The British Library, 1997. Dip into this one; in particular try chapters 3, 4 and 5.
St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Again, one to dip into but a good example of economics applied, quite properly, to book history.
Seville, Catherine. Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Just try a taste of this, perhaps chapters 1 and 7.
Sutherland, J. A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London: Athlone Press, 1976. A classic of its type; Sutherland writes well and often with wit.
Course History
- 2006
Simon Eliot teaches this course, as “Printing, Publishing, and Consuming Texts in Britain, 1770–1919.”
- 2002
Simon Eliot teaches this course, as “Printing, Publishing, and Consuming Texts in Britain and Its Empire, 1770–1919.”
- 1991, 1994 & 1999
Michael Turner teaches a precursor course, “Publishing History, 1775–1850.”
- 1989
Michael Turner teaches a precursor course, “The Big Change: British Publishing History, 1780–1840.”