Rare Book School
Preliminary Reading List

Printing, Publishing, and Consuming Texts in Britain, 1770-1919

Simon Eliot

Preliminary Advices

REQUIRED:

Primary

  1. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 1996.
  2. Brontė, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 1996.
  3. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 1997.
  4. E. M. Forster. Howard's End. Hammondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 2000.
  5. 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:

  1. Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination. London: Harper Collins, 1997.
    2. Particularly chapters 3 and 4.
  2. Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
    3. An often moving account of the life in Grub Street in the c19.
  3. Griest, Guinevere L. Mudie's Circulating Library & the Victorian Novel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.
    4. The standard work on the subject, though now rather long in the tooth.
  4. James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.
    5. A marvellous survey of c19 hack fiction.
  5. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.
    6. Usefully covers the period from 1875-1914.
  6. Reed, David. The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880-1960. London: The British Library, 1997.
    7. Dip into this one; in particular try chapters 3, 4 and 5.
  7. St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
    8. Again, one to dip into but a good example of economics applied, quite properly, to Book History.
  8. Seville, Catherine. Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
    9. Just try a tase of this, perhaps chapters 1 and 7.
  9. Sutherland, J. A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London: Athlone Press, 1976.
    10. A classic of its type; Sutherland writes well and often with wit.

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