A Companion to the History of the Book (11 page)

While this approach is simple and effective, it is only suitable for a limited number of dates or where change occurs at clearly defined times between periods of relative stability. More complex situations are more problematic. (Gregory 2002)

Alternative approaches have been used to resolve this problem. The Great Britain Historical GIS has used a “date stamping” system where each feature has a date stamp attached which defines the time during which it was in existence, while Langran (1992) proposed a space–time composite approach which has been used by the Swedish National Topographic Database, the Belgian Quantitative Databank, and others. Both have their limitations.

Nonetheless, the advantages of GIS are sufficiently great that book historians have begun to engage with it. Pioneers in this field, the Canadian scholars Fiona Black, Bertrum MacDonald, and J. Malcolm Black proposed “A New Research Method for Book History: Geographical Information Systems” in 1998. They observed that both the Great Britain Historical Database and the Data Library and UK Borders project “are examples of large historical GIS projects that have begun to seek researchers in a wide variety of fields, who may have databases that could be linked to already available historical map information” (Black et al. 1998: 23). Looking for international collaboration, they sought to combine available information from Scottish customs records, shipping manifests, and other book-trade and demographic databases. Seven years later, research completed for the second volume of
The History of the Book in Canada
(
Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada
) permits analysis and comparison, by region and by town, of the ethnicity, religion, and specific occupation of book-trade members compared with the general population for the same region in the later nineteenth century (Lamonde et al. 2005). Currently, Malcolm Black and Fiona Black are developing an interactive site where researchers will be able to use map-based queries to investigate aspects of book-trade and library development for selected periods, and to combine the responses with transportation information and with rich demographic data about potential readerships.

The strong heritage of history and bibliography has exerted a guiding hand over the emergence of book history as a separate field. As Michael Schudson points out, this has created a vibrant and thriving discipline, but he also sounds a note of warning:

In no other area of communication history has there been such a systematic gathering of archival sources, piggybacking on the work of bibliographers and bibliophiles. In no other domain of communication history have the various workers in the field had enough common interaction to establish a critical community . . . For all these virtues the history of the book may become too successful as a “subdiscipline” of history proper and fail to exploit the bolder vision of communication history that comes from its more adventurous proponents in cultural and literary studies and anthropology. (Schudson 1991: 176 )

The variety of methods being used in book history is broadening as researchers from different backgrounds and with different questions enter this fertile field. Web-based projects, GIS software, and the social analysis of reading, book clubs, and print circulation take researchers beyond the confines of a strictly historical methodology. Nevertheless, new methods should always be sought for the insights they give. Sources are always imperfect, yet the appropriate use of quantitative methods can carry great persuasive power. They can confirm or question an impression and, employed well, can offer greater degrees of certainty than many other forms of historical analysis.

References and Further Reading

Alston, S. and Bowslaugh, J. (2004) “A Statistical Analysis of Early Canadian Imprints.” In P. L. Fleming, G. Gallichan, and Y. Lamonde (eds.),
The History of the Book in Canada
, vol. 1
: Beginnings to 1840
, pp. 88–93. Toronto: University of Tor onto Press.

Altick, R. (1963)
The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800– 1900.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Barnard, J. and McKenzie, D., with Bell, M. (2002)
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
, vol. 4:
1557–1695
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bell, M. and Barnard, J. (1992) “Provisional Count of STC Titles, 1475–1640.”
Publishing History
, 31: 47– 64 .

Black, A. (2000)
The Public Library in Britain 1914 –2000
. London: The British Library.

Black, F., MacDonald, B., and Black, J. M. (1998) “A New Research Method for Book History: Geographical Information Systems.”
Book History
, 1: 11–31.

Blagden, C. (1960)
The Stationers’ Company: A History 1403–1959
. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bookseller
(1995)
Book Publishing in Britain
. London: J. Whitaker and Sons.

Bowley, A. L. (1900)
Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carpenter, E. and McLuhan, M. (eds.) (1960)
Explorations in Communication: An Anthology
. New York: Beacon.

Darnton, R. (1979)
The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

— (2002) “Book Production in British India, 1850 –1900”.
Book History
, 5: 239–62.

Eliot, S. (1994)
Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800–1919
. Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society, 8. London: The Bibliographical Society.

— (2002) “Very Necessary but Not Quite Sufficient.”
Book History
, 5: 283–93.

— and Sutherland, J. (1988)
The Publishers’ Circular 1837– 1900: Guide to the Microfiche Edition
. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey.

Elvestad, Eiri and Blekesaune, Alrid (2006) “Newspaper Reading and Reading about Politics and Current Affairs in Europe: A Comparative Study.” Paper presented at the Conference on Media in the Enlarged Europe, University of Luton, May 5–6.

European Social Survey (2002) Available at
http://ess.nsd.uib.no/index.jsp
.

Feinstein, C. H. and Thomas, M. (2002)
Making History Count: A Primer in Quantitative Methods for Historians
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fleeman, J. D. (1975) “The Revenue of a Writer.” In R. W. Hunt, I. G. Philip, and R. J. Roberts (eds.),
Studies in The Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard
. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society.

Floud, R. (1973)
An Introduction to Quantitative Research Methods for Historians
. London: Methuen.

Galloway, F. (2005) “Trends in the South African Book Publishing Industry since the 1990s” (available at
www.nlsa.ac.za/bibliophilia8_ 2005/edgalloway.doc
).

Greaney, V. (1980) “Factors Related to Amount and Type of Leisure Time Reading.”
Reading Research Quarterly
, 15 (3): 337–57.

Gregory, I. (2002) “A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research” (available at hds.essex.ac.uk/g2gp/gis/index.asp).

Hamilton, A. (2005) “The Winners Decoded.”
Guardian
review section, January 1: 30–1.

Harris, M. (1975) “Newspaper Distribution during Queen Anne’s Reign: Charles Delafaye and the Secretary of State’s Office.” In R. W. Hunt, I. G. Philip, and R. J. Roberts (eds.),
Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard
. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society.

Hartley, J. (2001)
Reading Groups
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hellinga, L. and Trapp, J. B. (1999)
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
, vol. 3:
1400 – 1557
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Howe, E. and Waite, H. (1948)
The London Society of Compositors: A Centenary of History
. London: Cassell.

IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Directory of National
Union Catalogues
(available at
www.ifla.org/VI/2/duc/index.htm
).

Innis, H. A. (1950)
Empire and Communications
, ed. David Godfrey. Victoria,
BC
: Press Porcepic, 1986.

— (1951)
The Bias of Communication
, with an intro duction by Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964.

Kennedy, L., Ell, P. S., Crawford, E. M., and Clark-son, L. A. (1999).
Mapping the Great Irish Famine: A Survey of the Famine Decades
. Portland: Four Courts.

Lamonde, Y., Fleming, P. L., and Black, F. A. (eds.) (2005)
History of the Book in Canada
, vol. 2:
1840 –1918
. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (published in French as
Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada
, vol. 2:
1840 –1918
. Montreal: Presses de Université de Montréal).

Langran, G. (1992)
Time in Geographical Information Systems
. London: Taylor Francis.

Long, E. (2003)
Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McAleer, J. (1992)
Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914 –1950
. Oxford: Oxford Historical Monographs.

MacLaren, E. (2005) “
The Knights of the Cross
: Bibliographic Evidence of Copyright Law in Early Twentieth-century Canada .” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Halifax, July 14–17.

Mitchell, B. (1988)
British Historical Statistics
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Myers, R. (1990)
The Stationers’ Company Archive: An Account of the Records 1554–1984
. Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies.

— (2001)
The Stationers’ Company: A History of the Later Years 1800–2000.
London: The Worship ful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

O’Donnell, D., Henriksen, L. B., Sven, C., and Voelpel, S. C. (2006) “Intellectual Capital: Becoming Critical.”
Journal of Intellectual Capital
, special issue, vol. 7, no. 1.

Pack, R. A. (1965)
The Greek and Latin Literary Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt
, 2nd edn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Reading Experience Database (available at
www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED
).

Roberts, C. H. and Skeat, T. C. (1983)
The Birth of the Codex
. London: The British Academy/Oxford University Press.

Rose, J. (2001)
The Intellectual Life of the British orking Classes.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

St. Clair, W . (2004)
The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schudson, M. (1991) “Media Contexts: Historical Approaches to Media Studies.” In K. B. Jensen and N. W. Janowski (eds.),
A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research
, pp. 175–89. London. Routledge.

Sedo, D. (2003) “Readers and Reading Groups: An Online Survey of Face-to-face and Virtual Book Clubs”.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
, 9 (1): 66–90.

Tuchman, G. and Fortin, N. E. (1989)
Edging Women Out:Victorian Women Novelists, Publishers and Social Change
. London: Routledge.

Varry. D. (1997) “ Round about Rue Mercière: The People of the 18th-century Book Trade in Lyon” (available at
histoire.enssib.fr/5outils/livre_lyonnais/rue_merciere.xhtml#note2
).

— (1998) “Women in the 18th-century Lyons Book Trade” (available at
histoire.enssib.fr/5outils/livre_lyonnais/women18e.xhtml#note1
).

Weedon, A. (2003)
Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for the Mass Market 1836 –1916
. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Winship, M. (1995)
American Literary Publishing in the Mid-nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4

Readers: Books and Biography

Stephen Colclough

Some book historians are concerned to reveal what people actually read in the past, rather than what literary history suggests they should have read. By using the archival records of publishers, printers, and booksellers, it is possible to uncover vital information about print runs, prices, and purchasers and, through an accumulation of these data, to discover which books were most widely available. This work has already begun to alter the way in which we think about literary history. For example, William St. Clair’s (2004) study of the period 1790–1840 dispels many of the myths associated with textual production and reception during the Romantic period. The publisher John Murray, St. Clair notes, “seems habitually to have claimed to have sold more editions of works by Byron than his ledgers show were manufactured” (2004: 25). He also demolishes Byron’s oft-repeated claim that a bad review by Southey greatly encouraged sales of Shelley’s
Revolt of Islam
by looking at the record of the actual number of copies sold, which was few (2004: 189).

It is, perhaps, not all that surprising to discover that Shelley’s first audience was very small, but St. Clair’s investigation of book prices reveals that even the most popular new books produced during this period sold in relatively small numbers. This was because they were often staggeringly expensive. In 1812, a bound quarto copy of Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
cost “about half the weekly income of a gentleman” (St. Clair 2004: 195). Byron may have thought that he had become famous overnight, but only 500 copies of the first edition of this work were produced and it cost around £2 10s to buy. The size of Byron’s audience grew as cheaper editions of his work became available, and some pirated editions were very cheap, but the majority of books bought during the Romantic period were cheap reprints of earlier works. Often issued in series, they sold for as little as 1s 6d per volume. This meant that the work of out-of-copyright authors, such as Oliver Goldsmith and James Thomson, had a much wider audience than most of the major authors that we associate with this period (St. Clair 2004: 207).

This is a very important revisionist argument, and St. Clair, like other book historians, is keen to demonstrate how book history as a discipline can throw new light on the way in which Enlightenment thought was communicated. Throughout his work, he notes the way in which “the censorship of price” restricted access to texts, but he is also able to dispel the myth that Thomas Paine’s pamphlet
The Rights of Man
(1791) was one of the most widely available, and therefore most influential, texts of the 1790s simply because it was produced in a cheap edition. Paine’s rejoinder to Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790) wa s in itially published at the relatively cheap price of 3s 6d. There is some evidence to suggest that it was popular with middle-class reading clubs, but the government quickly suppressed a later 6d edition because it was worried about the pamphlet becoming available to working-class readers. Paine was convicted of seditious libel and a number of booksellers who continued to sell the pamphlet after the ban were imprisoned. Reading clubs removed the pamphlet from their stock, and by 1794 the book was no longer easy to obtain. As this account makes clear,
The Rights of Man
was less widely available than the
Reflections
, which after 1794 “was left triumphant in the field as the main political text of the time” (St. Clair 2004: 257). This is a brilliant reassessment of the cultural impact of a text, and of what was available to be read at a given moment, but it leaves the question of
how
these texts were interpreted almost completely unexplored.

As Robert Darnton has argued, “to pass from the
what
to the
how
of reading is an extremely difficult step” (Darnton 1984: 222). For most of us, reading is just one of our everyday activities, and because it is so comprehensible, so familiar, it is difficult to imagine that it has a history – that reading “now” is not the same as reading was “then.” Darnton’s own work on the history of reading in Enlightenment France often begins by defamiliarizing this everyday event. He asks his own reader to think about Ovid’s account of a love letter inscribed upon the body of a Roman slave, or the way in which the recitation of texts at a Balinese funeral is thought to ward away evil demons, in order to suggest that the reading practices of the late eighteenth century can appear similarly alien to a modern consciousness (Darnton 1984: 206; 1990: 154– 87). For example, he notes that during the 1780s French readers often commented upon the material quality of the books that they studied in order to suggest that “this typographical consciousness has disappeared now that books are mass produced for a mass audience” (Darnton 1984: 223).

Other scholars interested in the ways in which books were used and interpreted in the past have discovered similarly unfamiliar practices. For example, Michael Clanchy’s work on texts produced between 1066 and 1307 reveals a vast range of reading practices. “Medieval texts,” he argues “were designed to be read in a variety of ways – orally or silently, by one person or in a group – and at different levels of meaning, taking account of word and image and a variety of linguistic registers” (Clanchy 1993: 195). Even legal documents were embellished with seals and illustrations which needed interpretation. As this evidence suggests, medieval ideas about “literacy” were very different from our own. Readers such as Lady Eleanor De Quincy, for whom the Lambeth Apocalypse was produced, probably could not write, but their books demanded the ability to read in three languages (Latin, French, and English) and the skill of meditating upon the “book of imagery.” The Lambeth Apocalypse contains many illustrations which show that keeping a holy image in the mind’s eye was particularly important to medieval readers. As Clanchy argues, “the ultimate stage” for these readers “was contemplation, when the reader ‘saw with his heart,’ like St. John the author of the Apocalypse, the truth of hidden things.” This “non-utilitarian approach to reading is,” he concludes, “alien to modern western culture” (Clanchy 1993: 195).

Similarly, the books of the Renaissance scholar Gabriel Harvey reveal that he was paid to guide readers through classical texts in order that they might direct their reading toward political action. As Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton note, this discovery has important implications for the history of the book, as well as the history of reading: “If we use our own understanding of the salient features of the text of Livy (say) to identify the points of crucial importance to an Elizabethan reader we are very likely to miss or to confuse the methods and objects at which reading was directed” (Jardine and Grafton 1990: 30). Their work casts doubt upon the ability of descriptive bibliography to recover reading practices from a close study of typographical features or the protocols of reading embedded in texts. Our reading of Livy, they suggest, can never be the same as Harvey’s even if we study exactly the same text.

Of course, all reading takes place in context, and to return to the example from St. Clair, it is possible that a reader examining a copy of Burke’s
Reflections
borrowed from an ideologically conservative subscription library would have read the text in a recognizably conservative way. However, the history of reading needs to give at least some account of what it was possible to do with a text in any given period. As St. Clair’s work makes clear, institutions of reading (such as subscription libraries) helped to shape individual reading practices by encouraging the public discussion of texts. Several readers who were members of such institutions left records of their reading. The diaries of one such reader, Joseph Hunter (1783–1861), reveal that it was possible for a member of such an institution to interpret texts in ways that were fundamentally opposed to the rules that governed their reading community.

During the late 1790s, Hunter was a member of the Surrey Street Library in Shef-field, Yorkshire. Surrey Street was a subscription library owned by its members. Members were charged an annual fee of one guinea, and both they and the books that they ordered had to pass the scrutiny of the library committee to be admitted. As Hunter records, he made frequent trips to the library to borrow a wide range of texts, including novels and magazines. The
Analytical Review
was a particular favorite, and he made notes on its contents and read texts, such as Robinson’s
The Causes and Consequences of English Wars
(1798), reviewed in its pages. However, in the autumn of 1798 the committee decided to remove many of the texts associated with the contemporary radical movement from its shelves. As Hunter noted on October 31 , 1798: “ [I] brought the 2[n]d number of the Anti-Jacobin Review & Magazine, which is got into the Surry Street Library instead of the Analytical which they have turned out. It is a most virulent attack upon all the friends of liberty or
jacobins
, as they are pleased to stile them; it is ornamented with caricature prints” (Colclough 2000: 33).

Conservative writers viewed the
Analytical
as an important source of opposition to the war that Britain was fighting against France in the 1790s. James Gillray’s cartoon, “The New Morality,” which appeared in the inaugural issue of the
Anti-Jacobin
, depicts a number of texts (including Robinson’s
Causes
) spilling forth from a “cornucopia of ignorance” inscribed with the titles of three reviews, the
Analytical
, the
Monthly
, and the
Critical
. The library committee may well have excluded the
Analytical
because it wanted to disassociate itself from opposition to the war against France, but the effect on Hunter was to make him aware of his own position as a member of an audience that was under attack. He is referring to himself as one of “the friends of liberty” in this passage from the diary, and it is from this position that he completed an oppositional, or resisting, reading of the contents of the
Anti-Jacobin
.

As this example suggests, Hunter’s diaries provide an important account of both the range of his reading (which included everything from ephemera to novels) and of the variety of strategies that he used to make sense of texts. He even noted the presence of posters for political meetings in the streets and that he had seen men reading seditious periodicals at work (Colclough 2000: 44). Such autobiographical documents are an important source of information about how texts were used. They provide vital evidence about reading as an everyday practice (sometimes passive, sometimes, as in his reading of the
Anti-Jacobin
, resisting) that cannot be recovered from inert sources such as publishers’ records. Hunter’s diary records that he was exceptionally well read in contemporary texts, but he was also exposed to older texts which he borrowed from his guardian or bought second-hand.

Of course, it is possible to argue that most diarists are not “typical” or “common” readers. As a member of a library with an exclusive membership, Hunter certainly had much greater access to recently published texts than most of his contemporaries, but this does not mean that we should discount his evidence. Indeed, the concept of the “common” or typical reader has begun to appear increasingly anachronistic to scholars who are concerned with issues of difference and diversity. Hunter’s experience was obviously very different from the majority of readers who could not afford to join a subscription library, but it was also very different from other members of the same reading community. As Kate Flint has argued, evidence of what “individual women were actually reading” complicates our view of “the woman reader” of the nineteenth century by “challenging many of the generalizations advanced by contemporary commentators.” She goes on to suggest that such evidence “reminds us of the specificities of circumstance, the variables of parental occupation and family affluence, of urban and rural lives, of religious affiliations, enthusiastic relatives, and modes of education which militate against establishing neat patterns of generalization whether contemporaneous or retrospective” (Flint 1993: 187).

This argument suggests that the “typical” or “common reader,” like the “woman reader,” is something of a fantasy, and many historians of reading have begun to use the term “the historical reader” instead. This term takes into account the way in which the individual reader is situated within a personal history, of the kind referred to by Flint, as well as the broader historical contexts of gender, class, and race. As Margaret Beetham has argued, historians who use this term pay attention to both the materiality of the source being investigated and the “historical specificity of the reader as a complex subject” (2000: 94). No source simply offers an unmediated insight into reading practices, and Beetham’s own study of periodical readers pays attention to the way in which the genre or convention of the source (in this instance the newspaper correspondents’ column) helps to define the historical reader that is uncovered.

By examining autobiographical sources to reveal the experience of historical readers, such as Hunter, it should be possible to recover something of what Anthony Grafton has called “the obstinate, irreducible individualism” of the reader (Grafton 1997: 141). And if we are able to locate enough archival material, it may also be possible to suggest something about the range of reading practices available in a given period. Hunter’s account of willfully misreading the
Anti-Jacobin Review
, for example, suggests that he made sense of this text within the rules laid down by his own reading community. His reading was certainly “obstinate” and individual, but the quotidian experience of visiting the library to borrow books was one that he shared with many other readers during the 1790s.

What kind of archive material do we need to investigate in order to recover the historical reader? Much of the most compelling evidence for the history of reading recovered so far has come from studies of the ways in which readers annotated the books that they owned or borrowed. Indeed, it is possible to think of the history of reading as “a marginal enterprise,” but many historians remain skeptical about using marginalia to reconstruct reading practices (Grafton 1997). As H. J. Jackson has noted, these historians tend to question whether annotations give any useful insight into the “mental processes of reading”; “doubts focus on the privacy of the experience and the typicality of the surviving records” (Jackson 2001: 255). Anyone making notes on their reading in the margin is, of course, restrained by the amount of room available at the edge of the text, and may well be conscious that their marks are going to be interpreted by a later reader, but Jackson’s argument that annotations “stay about as close to the running mental discourse that accompanies reading as it is possible to be” (2001: 256) is convincing. As this study of marginalia also makes clear, however, the concern with “mental process” is something of a chimera. Annotations made during the Romantic period frequently reveal evidence of reading as a social process – they were indeed made with other readers in mind – and in order to work in this way they often reproduced typical patterns of reading. Ja ckson a rgues that Hester Piozzi’s an notations reveal that “she read both as a particular reader under special circumstances and as a typical reader of her time, governed and constrained by deep structures common to all” (2001: 257).