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WHAT IS THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS? RECENT STUDIES IN AUTHORSHIP, PUBLISHING, AND READING IN MODERN BRITAIN AND NORTH AMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2008

LESLIE HOWSAM
LESLIE HOWSAM*
Affiliation:
University of Windsor (Canada)
*
Department of History, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, CanadaN9B 3P4lhowsam@uwindsor.ca
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Abstract

Historical and literary studies of the history of the book and of reading habits in modern Anglo-American history tend to approach their subject either from the perspective of readers and publishers or from that of authors. The former works constitute a nascent historiography, addressing the problem of how the material book was used to create and replicate culture; the latter studies are more concerned with how literary authors used texts to influence and negotiate culture. This article critically reviews the two bodies of scholarship and identifies the importance of copyright and reprinting; it comments on the value of transnational or other broad studies as opposed to specific investigations of a particular canonical text or local publishing/reading community.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 1089 - 1101
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Darnton, Robert, ‘What is the history of books?’, Dædalus, 111 (1982), pp. 65–83Google Scholar; reprinted with minor revisions in Darnton, The kiss of Lamourette: reflections in cultural history (New York, NY, 1990), pp. 107–35. For fuller discussions of various disciplinary approaches to the book in history see Leslie Howsam, Old books & new histories: an orientation to studies in book and print culture (Toronto, 2006); and ‘Book history unbound: transactions of the written word made public’, Canadian Journal of History, 38 (Apr. 2003), pp. 69–81.

2 For invaluable studies of the methodological infrastructure and an analysis of sources including the Nineteenth-century short title catalogue (NSTC) see Simon Eliot, Some patterns and trends in British publishing 1800–1919: occasional papers of the Bibliographical Society, 8 (London, 1994), and ‘Patterns and trends and the NSTC: some initial observations’, Publishing History, 42 (1997), pp. 79–104, and 43 (1998), pp. 71–112. See also Alexis Weedon, Victorian publishing: the economics of book production for a mass market, 1836–1916 (Aldershot, 2003). For the diversity of studies see SHARP-News and Book History the quarterly newsletter and the annual journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

3 D. F. McKenzie, Making meaning: ‘Printers of the mind’ and other essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Amherst, MA, 2002). The full quotation is from McKenzie's Bibliography and the sociology of texts (London, 1986; repr. 1999), p. 29: ‘By dealing with the facts of transmission and the material evidence of reception, [historical bibliography] can make discoveries as distinct from inventing meanings. In focussing on the primary object, the text as a recorded form, it defines our common point of departure for any historical or critical enterprise. By abandoning the notion of degressive bibliography [that is, of finding an abstract ideal version of a literary text] and recording all subsequent versions, bibliography, simply by its own comprehensive logic, its indiscriminate inclusiveness, testifies to the fact that new readers of course make new texts, and that their new meanings are a function of their new forms.’

4 For a brilliant exposition of what the author calls ‘literary replication’, in variant editions and multiple readings see James A. Secord, Victorian sensation: the extraordinary publication, reception and secret authorship of ‘Vestiges of the natural history of creation’ (Chicago, IL, 2000), p. 126.

5 Darnton, ‘What is the history of books?’ See also his ‘Histoire du livre geschichte des buchwesens: an agenda for comparative history’, Publishing History, 22 (1987), pp. 33–41.

6 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the sociology of texts: the Panizzi Lectures, 1985 (London, 1986). Reprinted in D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the sociology of texts (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 9–76. For a criticism of McKenzie's approach see Tanselle, G. T., ‘The work of D. F. McKenzie’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 98 (2004), pp. 511–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Roger Chartier, The order of books: readers, authors, and libraries in Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge and Stanford, CA, 1994), pp. viii, 10. Originally published 1992 as L'ordre des livres.

8 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault reader (London, 1986), pp. 107, 118–19.

9 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: thresholds of interpretation, trans Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge, 1997), p. xviii.

10 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (revised edn, London, 1991), pp. 24–36, 44–6.

11 John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, with the assistance of Maureen Bell, eds., The Cambridge history of the book in Britain, iv: 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002). The general editors of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain are D. F. McKenzie, D. J. McKitterick, and I. R. Willison. Hugh Amory and David Hall, eds., The history of the book in America, i: The colonial book in the Atlantic world (New York, NY, 2000). The History of the Book in America is sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society. Patricia L. Fleming and Yvan Lamonde, eds. A History of the book in Canada (3 vols., Toronto, 2004–7). For a valuable critical commentary on this collective enterprise, see Suarez SJ, Michael F., ‘Historiographical problems and possibilities in book history and national histories of the book’, Studies in Bibliography, 56 (2003–4), pp. 141–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 An Oxford companion to the book, ed. Michael F. Suarez, SJ, and Henry Woodhuysen is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2008. A companion to the history of the book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, was published by Blackwell in 2007.

13 David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, The book history reader (2nd edn, London, 2006), and An introduction to book history (London, 2005). See also Ann Hawkins, ed., Teaching bibliography, textual criticism and book history (London, 2006).

14 In Britain, the annual Book Trade History Conferences are published by Oak Knoll in the Publishing Pathways series. See also the ‘material cultures’ conferences sponsored by the Centre for the History of the Book in the University of Edinburgh. The international Society for the History of Authorship Reading and Publishing meets annually and also sponsors sessions at the Modern Languages Association and American Historical Association meetings among others.

15 A particularly successful example is James Raven, ed. Lost libraries: the destruction of great book collections since antiquity (London, 2004). Fifteen essays address the destruction of libraries in the ancient world, early modern and modern Europe, Tibet, and China as well as a comment on Truffault's film version of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451. The original conference was one of an occasional series sponsored by the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust. Another frequently cited CPBT volume is The practice and representation of reading in England, ed. J. Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge, 1996).

16 Darnton, ‘What is the history of books?’, p. 110.

17 For Dickens in the United States see McGill below. Franz J. Potter, The history of gothic publishing, 1800–1835: exhuming the trade (London, 2005). Potter's work ‘focuses on the explicit conflict between the Gothic canon and the trade, in order to understand the changing form of the Gothic in the early nineteenth century’ (p. xi) After a bibliographical analysis of the ‘trade context’ four case studies are presented, works by William Child Green, Sarah Wilkinson, Francis Lathom, and Mary Shelley.

18 Richard Altick, The English common reader: a social history of the mass reading public, 1800–1900 (London 1957). The unrevised new edition (Columbus, OH, 1998) has a preface by Jonathan Rose.

19 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe (2 vols., New York, NY, 1979). Abridged without documentation as The printing revolution in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1984). See also Sabrina A. Baron et al., eds., Agent of change: print culture studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. (Amherst, MA, 2007).

20 See n. 11 above. Histoire de l'édition française, ed. H. J. Martin et al. (4 vols., Paris, 1982–6).

21 Adrian Johns, The nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making (Chicago, IL, 1998), p. 2. See also Johns's debate with Eisenstein, ‘AHR forum: how revolutionary was the print revolution?’, American Historical Review, 107 (Feb. 2002), pp. 84–125.

22 Further important contributions are Kevin Sharpe, Reading revolutions: the politics of reading in early modern England (New Haven, CT, 2000) and arriving too late to be reviewed here James Raven, The business of books: booksellers and the English book trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT, 2007).

23 William St Clair, The reading nation in the romantic period (Cambridge, 2004), p. 42.

24 Ibid., p. 443.

25 Ibid., pp. 120–1, 122–39, 525–50.

26 H. J. Jackson, ‘Sales figures’, Times Literary Supplement, 23 July 2004, p. 3. Robert L. Patten called it ‘the most important book about early nineteenth-century print culture published so far in this century’ (‘Matters of material interest’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35 (2007), pp. 345–59, at p. 345). See also my own review of St Clair in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 100 (Mar. 2006), pp. 152–4.

27 Johns, Nature of the book, p. 30; Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment & the book: Scottish authors & their publishers in eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, & America (Chicago, IL, 2006), pp. 8, 10.

28 Sher, The Enlightenment & the book, pp. 23–4.

29 Ibid., p. 29.

30 David Armitage, ‘Three concepts of Atlantic history’, in D. Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 11–27. See also Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows, eds., Press, politics and the public sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2002). Barker and Burrows and their contributors focus on the newspaper press, and draw, as the title suggests, on Habermas's concept of a public sphere. They look at the relationship between newspapers and social change, and especially at the part played by the press during periods of political upheaval.

31 James Raven, London booksellers and American customers: transatlantic literary community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia, SC, 2002).

32 Meredith L. McGill, American literature and the culture of reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia, PA, 2003), pp. 1, 2.

33 Ibid., p. 276.

34 Sher, The Enlightenment & the book, pp. 10–11. He cites Leah Price, ‘Introduction: reading matter’, Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association, 121 (2006), pp. 9–16 at p. 12.

35 Clare Pettit, Patent inventions: intellectual property and the Victorian novel (Oxford, 2004), p. 2. See also Mark Rose, Authors and owners: the invention of copyright (Cambridge, MA, 1993).

36 Pettit, Patent inventions, p. 23.

37 Ruth Perry, Novel relations: the transformation of kinship in English literature and culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 1.

38 Pam Morris, Imagining inclusive society in nineteenth-century novels: the code of sincerity in the public sphere (Baltimore, MD, 2004).

39 Richard Dellamora, Friendship's bonds: democracy and the novel in Victorian England (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), pp. 23, 5.

40 Philip Waller, Writers, readers, and reputations: literary life in Britain, 1870–1918 (Oxford, 2006).

41 Christopher Hilliard, To exercise our talents: the democratization of writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006).