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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Cited by 15
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2010
Print publication year:
2009
Online ISBN:
9781139056069
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521810173
Subjects:
Literature, Printing and Publishing History, English Literature 1700-1830
Series:
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

This volume covers the history of printing and publishing from the lapse of government licensing of printed works in 1695 to the development of publishing as a specialist commercial undertaking and the industrialization of book production around 1830. During this period, literacy rose and the world of print became an integral part of everyday life, a phenomenon that had profound effects on politics and commerce, on literature and cultural identity, on education and the dissemination of practical knowledge. Written by a distinguished international team of experts, this study examines print culture from all angles: readers and authors, publishers and booksellers; books, newspapers and periodicals; social places and networks for reading; new genres (children's books, the novel); the growth of specialist markets; and British book exports, especially to the colonies. Interdisciplinary in its perspective, this book will be an important scholarly resource for many years to come.

Reviews

'This volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain is an impressive and valuable achievement: it not only surveys a vast range of material, but also presents a great deal of detailed new primary research.'

Rosemary Dixon - Queen Mary, University of London

'This volume provides essential reading for both expert and beginning scholar … wide-ranging, scholarly and frequently fascinating examination of print products embedded in their wider contexts …'

Stefanie Lethbridge Source: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

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Contents

Page 2 of 3

Contents
  • 22 - British commercial and financial journalism before 1800
    pp 448-465
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Beginning in the late 1530s, Europe experienced an explosion of business newspapers, but time has muffled the report. Before the end of the sixteenth century, commercial and financial newspapers were being published in more than half a dozen cities. At the turn of the eighteenth century, there were four basic types of commercial and financial newspaper published at London during the business week: the bills of entry; the commodity price current; the marine list; and the exchange rate current. This chapter sketches the history of each of them. These newspapers served a growing clientele that was anxious for the latest news, the 'freshest advices', about every aspect of the business world. They found paying customers for the news they printed both at home and abroad. They flourished and developed. Their success highlights how very important they were to the economy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Britain.
  • 23 - Distribution – the case of William Tayler
    pp 466-478
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter talks about William Tayler who was to be a key player in the information networks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning with the imprint of John Pendred's Vade mecum of 1785, it attempts to identify Tayler, look at possible antecedents, describe the scope of his activities, and explain the succession of the enterprise, placing it in a historical context. The earliest evidence so far found connecting Tayler with the Warwick Court address is in the land tax assessments where his name first appears in 1784 and continues there until his retirement in 1813. The authors have seen it given in the imprint and content of Pendred's book in 1785, but several later documents imply, or actually state, that 1786 was the year in which the Warwick Court business was established.
  • 24 - Periodicals and the trade, 1695–1780
    pp 479-497
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Periodicals of the latter half of the seventeenth century were usually characterized by two traits: first, their authors were generally not professional writers but amateurs who took up their pens for a cause; and, second, when the cause no longer proved of political, religious or social consequence, the periodical was discontinued. Politics and religion generated the most late seventeenth-century periodicals; scholarly and scientific interests prompted the next largest category. Whereas the seventeenth-century periodical had primarily been produced by amateurs, the eighteenth-century periodical was largely written and conducted by what would later be called the 'professional' writer. Samuel Johnson produced biographies and parliamentary reports for the Gentleman's Magazine in the late 1730s, later turning out the twice-weekly essay sheet the Rambler and contributing regular essays to the Adventurer and the Universal Chronicle. The modern magazine had its origin in periodicals comprising materials so various that the early eighteenth century referred to them as 'miscellanies'.
  • 25 - Periodicals and serial publications, 1780–1830
    pp 498-512
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The period between 1780 and 1830 might be characterized by an often unselfconscious and unresolved, even haphazard, dialogue between seriality, periodicity and the volume format, a dialogue that can, historically, be given shape through the wider growth and democratization of print culture in the period. Both Jon Klancher and Marilyn Butler, two of the most important cultural historians to have considered late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century periodicals, have developed sophisticated models for their history that suggest a complex dialogue between the construction of a precise implied readership for each magazine and a broader address to the 'general' or 'national' reader. This chapter emphasizes the central role both scholars give periodicals as agents of cultural change at this time. In short, women's magazines, like many other periodicals, abandoned the late eighteenth-century attempt to construct an egalitarian community of writers and readers and instead began to construct a role devoted to the ideological project of a newly proselytizing middle class.
  • 26 - Continental imports to Britain, 1695–1740
    pp 513-522
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A major distribution channel for imported books was the book sale. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Continent, and the Dutch Republic in particular, continued to send vast numbers of books, old and new, to the British Isles. This phenomenon can be partly explained by the long-lasting isolation of the British publishing industry with regard to mainland Europe, partly by the unique position of the United Provinces as the 'intellectual entrepot of Europe'. This situation changed slowly: the most important development during the second half of the century was the slow decline of the Dutch dominance of the British market for imported books to the benefit of French and German, and to a lesser degree Flemish and Italian, booksellers. As readers on the Continent were becoming increasingly interested in English-language British books, opportunities were finally created for a redress, however modest at first, of the long-standing imbalance in the Anglo-continental book trade.
  • 27 - The English book on the Continent
    pp 523-543
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Dutch book trade provided the major channel through which English books were distributed on the Continent in the early eighteenth century. In the second half of the century, the Dutch trade retained its leading position, but it appears to have gradually lost its key function as distributor of English books to the Continent. In the total corpus of continental translations, literary works constituted the central element. The literature of travel and geographical exploration was of great interest on the Continent not only were the reports of James Cook and other individual works translated, but large new collections of travel accounts were also compiled. In some fields such as classical and oriental studies, the intellectual exchanges between England and scholarly centres on the Continent were particularly intense. Many details of this traffic in ideas across the Channel are also of interest to the book historian.
  • 28 - The British book in North America
    pp 544-559
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Throughout the colonial period, most books read in America were British, as was to be expected in a mercantilist colonial system; however, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the London book trade paid little attention to the colonies. In the second half of the century the book trade awoke to the potential of the American market, just as it was slipping away. Some American publishers offered Canadian booksellers discounts of 30-40 per cent, which alleviated the burden of a 30 per cent duty. This made American reprints of British books competitive with British imports, at least in some regions, and it encouraged Canadians to buy American editions of American authors as well, notwithstanding frequent warnings from civil and religious authorities about their pernicious effects. The legal and economic barriers to book production in Canada before the 1820s were much stronger than they had been in the lower thirteen colonies before 1776.
  • 29 - The British book in India
    pp 560-576
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes the various purposes for which books were exported from Britain, the scale of that export trade, and the emergence of an embryonic infrastructure for book selling and distribution within India. Apart from the end products of the printing trade, Britain was also the essential source of manpower and materials for the fledgling book trade in India. Trained personnel began to reach India in the late eighteenth century specifically to man the presses of the expanding expatriate printing market in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. By the end of the eighteenth century, the professional elite of British society in India possessed private libraries of considerable size. The commercial importation of British books into India began with the captains and officers of East India men who were allowed to ship out freight-free a certain weight of speculative cargo according to rank.
  • 30 - Religious publishing
    pp 577-600
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Religious books and pamphlets of all kinds indisputably constituted the largest part of the publishing market in the period 1695 to 1830, just as they had since the invention of printing. They fell into three main categories, namely doctrinal books, controversial books and practical books. This chapter concentrates on aspects of the third and largest category, which contained a huge range of books of different size, length and price aimed at different audiences. The writers of such books were mostly clergy or ministers of different denominations, though there were some lay authors; their readers, depending on the kind of book and how it was distributed, were the clergy and large numbers of the laity. Divinity students, clergy and ministers of different denominations were in urgent need of guides to the mass of religious publications that poured from the presses and of commentaries to help them interpret the Bible.
  • 31 - The Bible trade
    pp 601-612
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The history of the office of the King's Printer in England is a complex one, reflected in the imprints of London Bibles. From 1743, when Cambridge resumed Bible printing, and more particularly from the late 1760s, when the Baskett interest at Oxford had come to an end and Eyre had become King's Printer, there was competition within England among the three privileged printers. From 1743 there was an uninterrupted flow of Bibles and prayer books from Cambridge. This chapter discusses three episodes in the history of Bible printing at Cambridge in the eighteenth century. The Oxford Bible press was the most active of the three privileged printers in England in the eighteenth century, though when members of the Baskett family were concurrently printers to the university and King's Printers there is the possibility that imprints do not reflect the true place of printing. The chapter explains three notable editions bearing Oxford imprints.
  • 32 - The publishing and distribution of religious books by voluntary associations: from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to the British and Foreign Bible Society
    pp 613-630
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) represents the best exemplar of a voluntary organization engaged in the distribution of religious literature for most of the eighteenth century. The changing nature of the SPCK was a feature of broader developments in voluntary religious activity within the British Isles. The most important of these was the growth of evangelical piety and its stress on lay involvement in philanthropy and the improvement of the lives of the poor. A narrow group of evangelicals was similarly prominent in the Church Missionary Society (CMS). By concentrating on overseas missions, especially in areas of recent colonial expansion, the CMS avoided the issue of competition with older societies such as the SPCK. Many of the sponsors of the CMS, however, were soon involved in another venture, the British and Foreign Bible Society. Its rapid success, moreover, helped to change the organization and structure of other voluntary societies during the early nineteenth century.
  • 33 - Book reviewing
    pp 631-648
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The establishment and rapid spread of general book reviewing in the second half of the eighteenth century clearly altered the balance of book publishing, introducing a new factor into the marketing and reading of books. In the Critical Review's striking phrase, reviewing 'inclosed what was once a common field', and, whether they liked or loathed it, fought it or exploited it, booksellers, authors and readers came to expect this further factor in the publishing relationship. Advertising and the sight of the physical volumes themselves were no longer necessarily the primary means of initial acquaintance with books. Before ever reading booksellers' advertisements in newspapers or books, before encountering title pages, prefaces and other physical aspects of books in shops or libraries, consumers might well already have seen, and sometimes paid for, the opinions of reviewers. Bookselling has never been the same.
  • 34 - Publishing contemporary English literature, 1695–1774
    pp 649-666
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The three score and ten years from the lapse of the Printing Acts to the Lords' decision in Donaldson v. Becket, 1695-1774, witnessed many developments that materially affected the production, distribution and reception of English literature in Britain. New productions of old plays, if they did reasonably well, often occasioned new editions. In the comic repertoire, for example, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Cibber, Farquhar and Steele were repeatedly staged and frequently reprinted. Sales of the dead, and successful living, authors subsidized the publication of new works: plays as well as poems and, later, prose fiction. During the Restoration and eighteenth century, play texts were most commonly reprints of whatever edition was close to hand. Few playwrights showed much concern for the texts of their published plays, most attended neither to the first edition, nor to the correction or revision of subsequent editions, Congreve being the most obvious and important exception.
  • 35 - British literature, 1774–1830
    pp 667-683
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the years 1774-1830 literature became increasingly subject to modes of marketing and consumption that helped consolidate its functions, whether for entertainment or instruction, within a domestic space. One material sign of this was the rise in production of smaller format books, namely more octavos and duodecimos, and fewer quartos, signalling portability and accessibility. Most famously, Wordsworth and Coleridge, both notorious in their deferring of print publication, consider the problem of how to discover the true reader among an amorphous mass readership how to circumvent the levelling properties of print and address the 'clerisy' of readers through the 'living' text. The distinction between writing and reading, with its attendant implications of authentic and inauthentic communication, can also surface as one of genre, with poetry occupying the high ground and the novel relegated to a lesser space shaped by the low expectations of its mass readership and the commodifying strictures of the print industry.
  • 36 - Scholarly editing: patristics, classical literature and Shakespeare
    pp 684-698
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter talks about the editing in Britain of patristic texts, classical texts and the writings of Shakespeare. The broader field of the editing of Greek and Latin classical texts similarly reflected cultural, academic and social issues, though in more complicated ways. Classical editing of course addressed itself to that audience which had access to knowledge of the learned languages, public- and grammar-school and university educated, primarily male. Major editorial work was carried on by gentleman scholars and by professional men. The editing of vernacular literary classics in the long eighteenth century shows a still more extensive and dramatic dissemination of reading, and development of professional institutions and practices and communities of scholarship. Shakespeare is the exemplary case: a native text, even by the beginning of the eighteenth century the great representative of a characteristically British literary genius, played with increasing frequency in the theatre, and the central ground of the exercises and battles of an emerging English literary scholarship.
  • 37 - The reprint trade
    pp 699-710
  • View abstract

    Summary

    To understand the dynamics of the reprint trade, this chapter first considers the issue of copyright and to review how booksellers in Ireland and Scotland took advantage of their distance from London to reprint the titles they wanted. Next, it discusses the cogent economic analysis put forward by members of the trade desperate for clarification of the often murky distinction between piracy and legitimate reprinting. The economic arguments of Home and Foulis were borne out by events in the second half of the long eighteenth century. An earlier mode of bookselling faded away as the accelerating commodification of print gave rise to modern publishing. This change coincided with the conceptual shift described by Trevor Ross: property, once viewed as an 'object of ownership and right', came to be regarded as the 'subject of production and exchange', its worth acquired through 'circulation within a dynamic market economy'.
  • 38 - Collecting and the antiquarian book trade
    pp 711-722
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A significant feature of eighteenth-century collecting is the rise of the scholar-collector, a phenomenon that coincides, not surprisingly, with the increasing interest in English genealogy and topography, antiquarianism, and the editing of earlier English literature, especially Shakespeare's works. By the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, antiquarian book collecting and bookselling had developed into stable, flourishing and mutually supportive interests. Indeed, the bookseller's business was largely supported by collectors, most of whom were clergymen, antiquaries and scholars, often with a particular fondness for Shakespeare. Between 1695 and 1835, the collecting of antiquarian books and manuscripts moved from the country estate to the scholar's study, then returned from the study to the country estate or elegant town house. In the earlier period, many of the collections ended up in institutions; in the middle and later periods, many, but not all, went back to the auction rooms or booksellers' shops.
  • 39 - The Stationers’ Company and the almanack trade
    pp 723-735
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By the 1650s, the Stationers' Company was attempting to stem the tide of piracy by buying counterfeit almanacks, and taking legal action against offending printers. Transgressors who belonged to the Company, many of whom printed for the English Stock, were summoned to appear before the Court. The Company continued to pounce on the sellers of unstamped almanacks, but, even by 1750, several formidable individuals had begun to infringe upon and challenge the principle of perpetual copyright. In 1834, when the Stationers pressed for a further increase in stamp duty, Parliament 'decided that the privilege was outmoded and had been ill-requited and abolished the tax altogether'. At the same time the Company was attacked for failing in its moral duty by pandering to the superstitious and sensation-loving lower orders rather than publishing educational and improving works.
  • 40 - Children’s books and school-books
    pp 736-749
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Of all the new markets for print that emerged between 1695 and 1833, the one for young readers was arguably among the most important to Great Britain's polite, commercial society. This chapter shows that during this period the proliferation of printed materials for children cannot be understood without analysing their production and reception. The survey of the children's books market in the early eighteenth century, though not definitive, does deflate the romantic notion that the appearance of John Newbery's Pretty little pocket-book in the early 1740s forever changed the history of children's reading. The Longman ledgers for the end of the period between 1695 and 1833 show that school-books such as those by Fenning and Lindley Murray continued to dominate children's book production, with the steady-selling titles reprinted as often as every few years in relatively large editions.
  • 41 - Music
    pp 750-761
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The dissemination history of music is shaped by a fundamental difference in comparison with the regular book trade, its authors and readers. Accurate quantification of the output of printed music during our period is impossible at present owing to inadequate bibliographical control, but one can be sure that whatever the level of supply, copies could be purchased only by persons with sufficient funds. Imprints, newspaper advertisements and publishers' catalogues were used by Humphries and Smith to augment the work of previous scholars and produce the standard list of music printers, publishers and engravers. The unique contribution of dissemination history lies in explaining what happens at the intersection of individuals, the copies of texts and the environments in which those copies are made and used. Understanding the complexities of these intersections requires gathering data not only on texts and those who issued them, but also on the individual buyers and users of those texts.
  • 42 - Maps, charts and atlases in Britain, 1690–1830
    pp 762-780
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The bulk of the map-seller's trade in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was concerned with the production of atlases, maps and charts of other countries and seas. On the home front, aside from urban mapping, estate surveys, and thematic mapping such as Milne's land-use map of the capital, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster (1800), it is arguable that the four most important genres of domestic map-publishing at this time were county maps, county atlases, road books and maps, and hydrographic charting. Original surveys for roads and county maps were rarely undertaken in the late seventeenth century. The years following the Restoration were marked by unsuccessful projects to produce new maps of the English counties. By 1830, private investment and enterprise in carrying out original survey work had resulted in the whole of England, and most of Scotland and Ireland, being covered in published mapping at the one-inch scale.
  • 43 - Enlarging the prospects of happiness: travel reading and travel writing
    pp 781-790
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter indicates who was composing or compiling travel writing, how much of it was produced, who was reading it, and how travel writers, publishers and readers shaped British culture between 1695 and 1830. In this period of significant transition, ideas about exactly what constituted travel writing offered creative possibilities for writers of both fact and fiction. The engagement of so many talented writers with the genre helped make travel writing acceptable to a wide range of readers. A number of influential commentators stressed the innocence of the travel account relative to other genres, especially the novel, and agreed that armchair travel could provide the benefits of travel, without the expense, discomforts or possible corruptions of leaving home. Travel writing, by repeatedly confirming readers' own practices or by allowing them to pride themselves on freedom from prejudice whenever they conceded to another country or culture any admirable qualities, endorsed Englishness as the norm.
  • 44 - Law books
    pp 791-806
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on the vocational literature produced mainly for and by common lawyers, together with books on or about the law marketed to a lay audience. Criminal biography and accounts of criminal trials almost certainly constituted the largest body of law-related literature circulating in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Law books were mostly written by lawyers, whose title page identification as such helped establish the authority and credibility of their books. Legal authorship, especially law reporting and treatise writing, was a recognized career option for younger barristers by the end of our period. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw massive increases in the volume of parliamentary transactions committed to print and major changes in the organization of that printing. While English law was increasingly shaped by parliamentary statute during the same period, the chapter presents a brief sketch of these complex developments.
  • 45 - Philosophical books
    pp 807-817
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Three names dominate the trade in philosophy books in the period 1695-1830: John Locke, David Hume and Dugald Stewart. Locke, Berkeley and Hume have, of course, earned the respect and attention of academic philosophers and general readers for well over two centuries now. As professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1785 to his retirement in 1810, Hume had a great effect on a generation of students that spread from Edinburgh to the Continent and North America and, hence, had a profound effect on the Scottish Enlightenment. His first book, published in 1792, Elements of the philosophy of the human mind, formed part of a three-volume set; a second volume appeared in 1814, and a third in 1827. Some may rightly believe that Stewart's influence adversely affected Britain's nineteenth-century philosophers, who, with the exception of John Stuart Mill, did not shine as luminously as those from the eighteenth century.
  • 46 - Scientific and medical books, 1695–1780
    pp 818-826
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Scientific and medical texts represented a small percentage of all titles published in eighteenth-century Britain. Yet, this literature contributed greatly to both the progress of the Enlightenment and the establishment of natural knowledge in British culture. The commercial histories of scientific and medical books share some common characteristics, but their cultural roles tended to be quite different. More often than not, medical books were written by medical practitioners and read by students preparing for medical careers. In contrast, writers of scientific books often earned their livings in occupations that typically had no direct relationship to the subject of their work, while their readers generally did no. anticipate using the knowledge gained from their study to earn money. At the high end of the market for scientific and medical works were those books published in large format with multiple illustrations.

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