2 - The business of Victorian publishing

Summary

For most of the eighteenth century the novel’s physical form was highly variable: it might be published in one or two volumes, but it was equally likely to appear in three or more. Fanny Burney’s Camilla (1796) was published in five volumes, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) in six, Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1748) in seven, and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in nine volumes spread over eight years (1760–67). By the early nineteenth century things had started to stabilize, and the standard number of volumes for a first edition of a novel had settled down to three or four. Each volume was usually priced at five shillings or six shillings so a three-volume novel would normally retail at between fifteen shillings and eighteen shillings.

The author who changed all this was Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s influence on both poetry and prose in the early nineteenth century was immense. He may be little read now, but in his time and for a few decades afterwards his poems and novels were probably more widely distributed and consumed than the work of any other serious contemporary writer. At the height of the Romantic movement, many more people read Scott’s poetry than Wordsworth’s. In terms of copies printed and copies read, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley were negligible. Only Byron was sometimes able to rival Scott in terms of numbers of readers. It was later, during the Victorian period, that Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, acquired their belated and relative popularity. To a large extent this was due to the effects of copyright law that allowed publishers monopolistic control over pricing. Many publishers preferred selling fewer copies at a high price to the risks of the “stack ’em high and sell ’em cheap” approach. Commonly, it was only when works moved into the public domain that reprint publishers could move in and, as they were competing with one another, drastically reduce prices.