Difference between revisions of "Patten 2018"

Latest revision as of 16:33, 1 September 2019

Robert L. Patten. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Pub. 1978. Second ed. 2018. OUP.

Ch 1

• opening claim: CD wrote for money. He had to.
  • 11: so did Thackeray, Eliot, and Trollope, for that matter
• 9 great quote from a CD speech about how the people have liberated authors from patronage
• 11 "it is a mistake to suppose that a man is better because he despises money. "— Trollope autobio
• 12 in 1833 John Payne Collier, the Shakespearean, tried to get CD a job on the Morning Chronicle
• 13 "...the history of his contracts is a history of agreements ever more favourable to D, giving him increasing authority over all aspects of the issuing of his books, and an ever greater share of the profits."
• 14 situating CD in history of authorship from C16 Stationers Company
• 15 before CD et al "those who have been the greatest in the practice of letters have rarely been those to whom Letters was their supporting profession." (AS Collins, The Profession of Letters, 8) possibly starting with Pope
• 16 Byron and Scott changed conception of authorship and business of publishing but probably not, as St Clair 2004 shows, of reading itself (as he argues via Collins here)

Ch 10

• 144 At the end of March [1847], the first number of the Cheap edition of Dickens's works went on sale. This project, first broached by B and E in 1843, and settled with C and H during D's Dec 1846 visit to London, once again anticipated a new development in publishing. Margaret Dalziel, referring to the Parlour and Railway Libraries, noted that 'in 1847 there began the first successful attempts at really cheap reprints of novels in volume form (as distinct from the novels published as serials in the early cheap periodicals, or in periodical parts)'. By issuing the Cheap edition in several different formats, D and his publishers tapped several different markets among 'the English people' to whom the series was dedicated, 'in whose approval, if the books be true in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false, they will very soon die.' The March Dombey carried a Prospectus, announcing that the edition would be published in weekly numbers at 1 1/2d., the price he had originally suggested for the Cricket journal, and in monthly parts, sewn in a wrapper, at 7d., beginning on Saturday, 27 March. Each number consisted of one sheet (sixteen pages) printed in double columns, the text running on from number to number without interruption. Even novels were run-on in the same monthly part: Pickwick sharing with Nickleby, Nickleby with the Shop, and so on. In effect, having experimented with two other kinds of serial publication, D now revised publication in fascicles: these so called 'numbers' and 'parts' bear no relation to the self-contained units in which his monthly numbers first appeared. The original intention was to issue the monthly part after the four weekly numbers, as had been done with the Clock, but after May 1847 this plan was altered, the monthly part coming out with the first number, rather than the last.
  • pertinent sources:
  • Dombey Prospectus, March 1847: http://contentdm.library.uvic.ca/cdm/ref/collection/pickwick/id/6044
    • Simon Nowell-Smith, "The 'Cheap Edition' of Dickens's Works," The Library (1967)
    • Dalziel, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago. 1957.
    • L.A. Kennethe, Dickensian xxxix (1943), 113