McKelvy 2009

William R. McKelvy. "'This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print': Making Literary History in the Age of Steam." Bookish Histories. Ed. Ina Ferris and Paul Keen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

• Sources for shift to steam:
  • P Gaskell, New Intro
  • D McKitterick, Print, Ms, and the Search for Order, 1450-1830
  • Raven, Business of Books
• 62 ...I want to make the case that conventional literary history has not yet come to terms in any great detail with the mechanized modes to which Gaskell initially drew attention.
• In the end, however, all of this [Raven, other people citing growth of print stats] just seems to confirm something sufficiently well-known: that the Victorians were remarkably successful in combining capital, labor, and machinery to make and distribute things faster and cheaper; and thus we arrive at a version of the truth that Gaskell has made so clear in the early seventies, that Western typography has two main periods -- the age of the hand-press and the age of the machine-press. Without dispensing with this valid but unwieldy generalization, the following essay attempts a more specific act of historical bibliography by describing the making of two books -- Robert Chambers's History of the English Language and Literature (1835) and its expanded sequel, the Cyclopaedia of English Literature (2 vols, 1842-4) -- that were decisively spawned by steam-powered machines. By calling attention to the innovative character of these two works in particular, I aim to demonstrate [63] how the general literary scholar does have good reason to understand the impact of mechanized printing precisely because this new mode of production enabled the first explicit consolidation of our dominant notion of literary history.
• 63 pre-Chambers English literary histories:
  • Warton, History of English Poetry (1774-81) (only includes up to Elizabethan)
  • Barbauld, Anna British Novelists 1810
  • Mudford, William British Novelists 1810-16
  • Scott, Walter (ed.) Ballantyne's Novelist's Library 1821-4
  • Roscoe, Thomas Novelist's Library 1831-3
• Chambers was the first single author to compose a narrative literary history that covered both verse and prose fiction during a long period that extended into the C19.