Revision as of 11:56, 22 January 2018

William St. Clair. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.

Notes

• focus on 1-11, 14, 21, 22
• the concerns that are anterior to a history of reading practices

Ch 1

• 3 the major stakes of his argument: a reformulated history of literature based on reading Readers have never confined their reading to contemporary texts. Much of the reading that took place in the past, probably the majority, was of texts written or compiled long ago and far away. In both parade and parliament models [parade of EM --> Enlightenment --> Romantic, parliament of texts in a period debating and negotiating], newly written printed texts succeed their immediate predecessors, engage intellectually with them, and in some cases defeat or supercede them, and it can be convincingly shown that this happened in certain cases. As far as readers were concerned, however, chronological linearity was not the norm. Not all readers had access to all newly published texts...nor did they necessarily give equal attention to those texts which they did read.
• 15 methodology

ch 2

• 21 print runs of ~250-2000 copies per edition normal in early modern period and did not really change until mid c19
• 24 methodological problem: The number of titles or editions of which copies have survived, virtually the only measure of output in use by historians, turns out to be a poor indicator of book production. Nor can it be easily reconciled with the other indicators. Measured by the number of surviving titles, English book production betwee the mid 16th and late 17th century showed an exponential growth, but we know from the official records of the numbers of presses and of the recruitment of apprentices, that is from reliable measures of the physical capital and human resources employed, that the overall capacity of the industry changed little during the period.
• 22 medieval manuscript culture about more copies of the same works, whereas "The growth in books and reading brought about by the coming of print, by contrast, took the form of the production of more texts rather than Of more copies of existing texts."
  • this can tie to Febvre and Martin 1958
• 25 If we wish to write histories of the reading of texts, the archival record tells us, we need to know as much as we can about the prices and print runs of the books in which the texts were inscribed, information which is seldom to be found either in traditional literary history or in descriptive bibliography.
• 32 "tranching down": from C15-early C19, monopoly owners of texts set princes "to take the maximum rent from the topmost tranche of the market...and only when they had satisfied, 'exhausted', that market, did they move down the demand curve," often coinciding with smaller manufacturing format for reprinting
• 41 Intellectual property has existed for so long that it is difficult to imagine a world without it, but it is not intrinsic to authorship, books, or reading as such, but it too came into existence in response to a conjuncture of economic circumstances which came together in the late C15.
• 42 Any investigation into the effects of reading, these patterns suggest, needs therefore to address questions which are both long-run and structural, and chronologically, locally, and culturally specific.
• 42 the nest of methodological assumptions: "To help to understand and trace the possible effects of reading on mentalities [very Annales and Chartier], we need to trace historic reading. To trace readership, we need to trace access. To trace access, we need to trace price. To trace price, we need to trace intellectual property, and to trace intellectual property, we need to trace the changing relationship between the book industry and the state."

Ch 3

• 43 good def of intellectual property: "the owner of the property has the exclusive right to make copies of a text for sale, a monopoly respected by colleagues in the industry and guaranteed by the state." Infringing on it appropriates some potential income. Plagiarism appropriates the author's reputation rather than their income as such (tho there's overlap)
• 44-5 in order to maintain book prices at a level to allow for profit, printers needed the cooperation of other printers and of the state
  • gaps could and did emerge between the state's "wish to control texts" and the industry's "wish to record and police its private property rights" -- 2 separate regulatory systems
• 49 previously unnoticed effect of print coming to England: "simultaneously to invent and to privatize the intellectual property rights implicit in much of what is now called popular culture. "
  • 50 e.g. pre-Reformation Christmas carols like "The Holly and the Ivy" printed and intellectual property rights privatized in early decades of print
• 51-2 in c17 and early 18 property rights seem to have usually lapsed with the end of an edition: "Although an author could own a manuscript, and might complain of plagiarism if another copied his or her words, until 1710 no author could, under English law or customary practice, own a text"
  • the longue duree process of the conceptual separation between "book" and "text"
• 62 price control, which served buyers and readers well, the key to the alliance between the early modern Stationer's Company and the state: the "tight corporate cartel" of the print industry from early c17-eve of romantic period
  • this starts to break down after lapse of state licensing in 1695 (89)

Ch 4

• key chapter
• important point: the large number of Shakespeare and other quotations I've transcribed in Victorian novels is structurally undergirded by the intellectual property regime not only of the period but of changes he charts from 1600
• 66 developments c. 1600: clamp-down on printed anthologies, on abridgment, and development of "vested commercial interests in prolonging the reading of obsolete texts"
  • further divides reading nation by class and by the "degree of obsolescence of texts"
• 67 printed miscellanies 1557-1600 starting with Tottel's Miscellany carrying on Ms tradition of scribal publication, commonplace books of florilegia and sententiae
  • ties to Blair
• 67-8 sententiae for "all constituencies of readers, including children, the irreducible common atomic units of thought put in textual form" with massive literary and material afterlife
• 68 authorship as celebrating and continuing existing stock of ideas vs authorship as creating
• 70 by 1615 "it seems clear that a regime to control the anthologizing of more than a line or two from previously printed works was already fully in place"
  • De Grazia: enclosing a passage in quotation marks goes from being an indication of a common place to private property
  • ask JTK: has anyone been able to account for this shift since St Clair?
• 1600-1780 "only a handful of newly compiled printed collections of quotations of English lit"
  • huge cultural shift on romantic reading once perpetual intellectual property lifted in 1774
• 72 abridgments part of "tranching down" (see ch 2) e.g. ballad versions of literary works (incl Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus) pre-1600 but very rare c17-18
  • c18 royal licenses for encyclopedias to protect from infringement
• 74-5 clampdown on biblical anthologies, abridgements, adaptations
• 76 freedom of the intellectual property regime pre-1600 in part underwrites the vigor of the English Renaissance, but apparently seemed disorderly and unprofitable to the printing cartel
• 78-9 prolonging obsolete texts: since intellectual property conceived as like real property it was one thing to doctrinally renounce Pirgatory, but harder to compel owners of purgatory-related IP to stop printing it
• 79 result of this is "cultural lock-in" for lower tranches of book market: abridgemebts of old texts continued and "the printed literature available to a large constituency...was not much different from...200 years before" at beginning of romantic period (e.g., Robin Hood, Saint George)
  • impt because it pushes against the argument that the "rural mind was conservative" suddenly in 1600, but then less so in 1774

Ch 5

• key chapter
• 84 pushing on the Macaulay and Whiggish view that English literature flourished after state licensing lapsed in 1695: Narrative of "good English common sense" unsatisfactory, c18 penalties for texts that were deemed libelous still severe
  • though Macaulay was right that the state "largely withdrew from controls on the textual content of print"
• 86 definitely pushing on Altick 1957 acct of rise of education in c18: little evidence to back it up
  • c19 increase in literacy preceded compulsory state education for economic reasons: books were less expensive
• 87 a purely technological explanation also inadequate: "all of the books produced during the surge in book production in the late c18 were manufactured by traditional hand-craft methods largely unchanged since the c15. It was not until the 1820s and 1830s, a full generation and a half later, during which time the surge had continued, that we see significant mechanization of book production. The technological changes, the evidence suggests, came after the expansion of reading was already well under way, and were more a result than a cause."
  • what happened? 87-98
    • 1) steady expansion of printing capacity in London and provinces after 1695
    • 2) the increase in population and other infrastructure means that a modest increase in absolute terms of book production means a fall in real terms when "the market for books became more consolidated in the upper income groups"
      • impt gloss for Suarez 2009
    • 3) development of new IP regulatory/jurisprudential regime organized around the rights of the author (vs printer) crystallized in the 1710 Act: author of unpublished work has right of printing for 14 years after first pub -- ie, author has rights from composition
    • 4) intensive cartelization of publishing: apprenticeship regulation, etc. Price regulation above all was key
  • Consequences for reading 98-102
    • benefits increasingly shared with authors, not just publishers, printers, booksellers
      • Milton sold his manuscript and IP rights; Johnson, Smollett et al. made money
    • cartelized control allowed for "publication of impressive range of innovative texts" but disbenefited others the further down the socioeconomic tranches you go (e.g., Gibbon banned Decline from being made available in cheap periodical numbers)
      • l/u Wiles 1957 Serial Publication in England before 1750
    • materiality shift: bigger format, better paper, larger type, wider margins -- smaller formats less favored -- encouraged "slow velocities of circulation" and restricted access (somewhat compensated by growth in newspapers and periodicals)
    • resistance of technological innovation - stereotype tech dev in Netherlands in late C17

Ch 6

• 104 most cartels not long lasting but the English book cartel was from c18 until film and radio; both industrial structures and practices and the state-guaranteed monopoly in IP
  • however this only extended in England; in Ireland for ex there was a healthy production of pirated English texts
• 106-8 main competition from Scotland with v different regulatory system -- sets stage for regulatory change in 1774 that established that perpetual copyright was unlawful in England
• 111 this a decisive moment for "the while subsequent development of notions of IP, for the prices of books and of access to texts, for the progress of reading, and for the subsequent course of the national culture broadly defined."
• 113 printing legally unenforceable IPs continued for at least 40 years after 1774, notably editions of shakespeare
• 115 After 1774 a huge, previously suppressed, demand for reading was met by a huge surge in the supply of books, and was soon caught up in a virtuous cycle of growth. All the older printed texts first printed in England entered, or returned to, the public domain, available to be legally reprinted by anyone in GB for sale throughout the country at whatever price their publisher chose to set.
  • only the texts of official state religions were still monopolized but even there was some competition
• 116 material move toward larger editions but in smaller and cheaper formats
• 118 led to increase in book ownership, acts of reading, readership, and the size of the reading nation
• 121 1808 end of "brief copyright window" with increase from 14 to 28 years, eventually by 1842 author's lifetime plus 7 or 42 years from publication
  • good charts in Appendix 2 esp 486-7

Ch 7

• 122 after 1774 now the public domain was anything printed in England or Scotland before 1746 -- massive implications for the publishing and creation of a canon
• 123-4 Long tradition of selecting the best of literary history and of reprinting some select authors but canon formation started in Scotland where rules were more lax -- Johnson's The English Poets (1779) first London book industry establishment formal canon
• 128 interesting -- the C18 canon of English poets was stable and went from Chaucer to Cowper until the Romantics came out of copyright in 1870
  • therefore to Elfenbein's point below, the literary history most had access to for most of the C19 was mainly eighteenth century
  • the canon: Samuel Butler, Chaucer, Collins, Cowper, Dryden, Falconer, Gay, Goldsmith, Gray, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Spenser, Thomson, Young
    • no contemporaries of Shakespeare, no Marvell, no Herbert, no Donne, no women
  • 128 In this canonising process, literary historians, critics, and editors had played only a small part. The old canon of poetry owed its birth and its long life more to the vagaries of the intellectual property regime, than to any carefully considered judgment [and change happened with Romantics out of copyright rather than shift in taste]
• 130 lock in for prose fiction canon too, mainly c18 novels
• 131 in romantic period "English Classics" term used less for prose fiction and poetry than for didactic essays/stories from Addison and Steele'a Spectator, Johnson, etc.
• other popular reprints included conduct literature and c17 and c18 texts on religious and moral uplift: Bunyan, etc
• many prominent Enlightenment works were not reprinted as much because of "pretender copyright" and publisher self policing: old-canon publishers "offered a Counter-Enlightenment to readers who knew nothing of the Enlightenment."
• 133 perpetuation of self-censorship on part of publishers so that "the old canon offered a set of texts which was not only of the past but was ideologically selected from that past."
• 135 resurgence of anthologies one of the largest components of the reading explosion of the romantic period
• 137 school anthologies: "English literature entered the educational and imaginative space which had traditionally been occupied by the Bible.... For the many men and women who entered the reading nation as children in the romantic period and a generation later, these anthologies of old-canon English literature weee not only the first books they were asked to read and to admire, but were likely also to have been culturally the most formative," steeping children of post enlightenment industrialization in pre-Enlightenment rural religious culture of the C18

Ch 8

• 140 first attempt to reconstruct Shakespeare's readership based on archival information about prices and print runs
• 142 the text of the Sonnets was that of the de-homoeroticized 1640 edition throughout the C18 and once reprinted by Bell in 1774
• 146 folios would have been the main text circulating for the plays for a century from 1623, its expense ensuring only the top tranche of the market had access to it
  • secondhand quarto out of print playtexts would have gotten massively more expensive in this period too
• 147 wonderful phrase: for most readers the effect of F1 was to "immobilize [Shakespeare] indoors"
• Sh, more than any other author, exemplifies the growing association between notions of the author as individual genius and the increasingly textual nature of the intellectual property regime.
• 149 after 1774 Shakespeare became one of the most quoted in romantic era anthologies
• 154 In the high monopoly period The Tonson firm had a controlling interest in Sh plays up to about 65% of the market
• his overall point: shakespeare publication embodies the trends he is mapping generally

Ch 9

• 158 importance of periodical publication for starting careers in romantic period: Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge
• 159-60 again publisher self-censorship: Longman didn't want to imperil its main business in religious and school books by publishing Shelley's Laon and Cyntha or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
• 161 rhetoric of romanticism emphasized solitary genius but most authors (Even Byron) operated in the commercial system anyway
• 161-4 common types of contracts btwn authors and publishers
• 175 contra the "shift in public taste" from poetry to prose at the end of the romantic period espoused by Erickson 1996 et al. "When quantified, the apparent shift from verse to prose does not appear nearly so sharp as traditional parade models of literary history imply."
  • "The poetry of the romantic period was supply-pushed by authors and patrons. Novels were demand-led by book purchasers, by commercial borrowers, and by readers. Poetry was moving socially and materially downwards, reducing from 4o to 8o and then to 16mo. The novel was moving upwards from 16mo to 8o. Poetry publishing saw the expiry of the guild and early modern periods. The publishing of novels was a fully commercial enterprise."

Ch 10

• 177 romantic period printers were legally liable for a text's lawfulness, and they had final authority over spelling and punctuation
• 178 production of book materials: "the books of the romantic period were products of the pre-industrial age."
• 179 effect of writing, printing, proof-correcting happening simultaneously can be seen in disunity of some works e.g. Wollstonecraft's Vindication and some of Scott's Waverley novels post-Antiquary (1815)
• 182 the archival evidence indicates that literary works were socially created and not fixed at moment of composition: these are rhetorical back-formations
• 1810s stereotyping finally comes into London book production
  • once the plate was made it wasn't worth it to melt it for scrap, so conceivably there wasn't a reason to let a title go out of print --> implications for reading patterns
    • he argues stereotyping the most impactful development since moveable type for history of reading

==Ch 11==
* 186: advertising essential for selling but also highly taxed, so a costly component for a new book
* also essential were notices in literary reviews, primarily Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review (more conservative)
** their division of reviews into categories used by booksellers and library catalogues "helped to entrench the ways into which knowledge...was divided and presented"
*** cf Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences
*187-8 culture of self-serving puffery between reviews and publishers they were affiliated with
* the commercial aspect underpinning the topos describing a book as unsuitable for ladies: "At a time when many books bought individually were collectively read within the family, any books which the reviews declared unsuitable for ladies were commercially sunk"
** succès de scandale also rare: Shelley still sold poorly in spite of Southey's attacks
*189: important that he finds no correlation between "reviews, reputations, and sales...Although it has been the custom to treat published reviews as 'reception', they turn out to be a poor indicator both of commercial sales and of the reactions of readers."

• 192-3 romantic binding: "the books of the romantic period emitted an air of luxury, to the extent that 'hot pressed' became a term of derision"
• 194-5 who could buy books? For the large constituency of potential readers "buying a new book of poetry or a novel would be a high, in some cases prohibitive, slice of their weekly budget."
• 196 "In the Romantic Period the new books of the time were expensive luxuries which could be bought, if at all, only by the richest groups of society"
  • returning to the importance of the old canon and then the post-romantic innovations of Dickens et al.: "[in 1820] For six shillings you could buy an evening with Peacock's Headlong Hall or a month with Richardson's Clarissa" (204)
  • 198 tranching down was also slow
• 206-8 arguments for the extension of copyright in 1842 were premised on the idea that a long copyright period was "good for literature" but the evidence of the Romantic Period offers little to support that

Ch 22

• 437 The "political economy of reading" in his appendices: "Economic models, such as price and quanitity, monopoly and competition, have been able to account for the behaviour of the printed-book industry, and therefore also the patterns of readerly access, during all the centuries when print was the paramount medium"

Reviews

Lynch JBS Review

• 176 method "to chronicle the processes by which books reached readers he draws with unprecedented thoroughness on the ledgers of more than 50 publishing houses, in addition to several other archives"
• 177 "for most of the C18 access to books was even more difficult than it had been during print's first century" because the increase in production of titles and the increase in reading are not the same thing
  • contra (or at least more carefully situating) the teleological expansiveness of Suarez 2009 (moreso, other less rigorous book historical accounts, maybe Altick 1957, maybe not)

Howsam PBSA Review

• 153-4 methodological innovation: "The appendices represent a kind of inversion of bibliographical practice, in that the evidence...of the textual differentiation of new editions is subordinated to that of print runs, which is of paramount importance for the argument concerning readers' access to the texts."

Elfenbein Vic Studies

• 457 the gradual and progressive increase of literacy through [increased attention to education, growth of book trade, technological change, and valorization of literacy in Protestant culture]... is effectively demolishe[d] by St. Clair's model of "long periods of stability punctuated by sharp changes of direction as a result of particular events." While some of these turning points are technological, most of the critical ones turn out to be legal decisions [abolition of perpetual copyright in 1774, which resulted in explosion of anthologies, and the refusal of copyright to Don Juan and Queen Mab].
• St Clair and Rose 2001 show together that late-Vic and Edwardian working-class readers were eager for older works because they were finally affordable.
• ...The books to which most Victorian readers had access were not the books being written by their contemporaries.
• 457-8 In a way that Victorianists have hardly begun to register, Romanticism can be viewed as an incidental parenthesis barely separating Victorian readers from the overwhelming presence of eighteenth- century poems and novels.