Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
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Bookish Histories Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700 1900 Edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen
Introduction, selection and editorial matter Ina Ferris & Paul Keen 2009 Individual chapters contributors 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-22231-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-30786-9 DOI 10.1057/9780230244801 ISBN 978-0-230-24480-1 (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Towards a Bookish Literary History 1 Ina Ferris and Paul Keen Part I: Reconfiguring Literary History 1 Wild Bibliography: The Rise and Fall of Book History in Nineteenth-Century Britain 19 Jon Klancher 2 Uncommon Animals : Making Virtue of Necessity in the Age of Authors 41 Paul Keen 3 This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print : Making Literary History in the Age of Steam 61 William R. McKelvy Part II: Books in the Everyday 4 Canons Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use 87 Deidre Lynch 5 Book-Love and the Remaking of Literary Culture in the Romantic Periodical 111 Ina Ferris 6 The Art of Sharing: Reading in the Romantic Miscellany 126 Andrew Piper 7 Getting the Reading Out of It: Paper Recycling in Mayhew s London 148 Leah Price Part III: Remapping the Literary Field 8 Reading Collections: The Literary Discourse of Eighteenth-Century Libraries 169 Barbara M. Benedict vii viii v
vi Contents 9 Imagining Hegel: Bookish Forms and the Romantic Synopticon 196 Michael Macovski 10 The Society of Agreeable and Worthy Companions : Bookishness and Manuscript Culture after 1750 213 Betty A. Schellenberg 11 The Practice and Poetics of Curlism: Print, Obscenity, and the Merryland Pamphlets in the Career of Edmund Curll 232 Thomas Keymer 12 Charlatanism and Resentment in London s Eighteenth-Century Literary Marketplace 253 Simon During Index 272
Acknowledgements This collection has a bookish history of its own. It began as a plan for a special session on Bibliomania at an American Society of Eighteenth- Century Studies conference in Montreal, which quickly became a double session as it attracted a growing number of people working on related topics. Almost every participant in this collection either gave a paper at that double session or was in the audience, but we finished the morning with a strong and widely shared sense that we were beginning a discussion rather than ending it. In the two years that followed we found different ways of continuing to share ideas and, inevitably, accumulated a growing list of debts. We are especially grateful to various people within our universities for funding different aspects of this process. At Carleton University, we would like to thank the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, the VP (Research), and the Department of English; at the University of Ottawa we would like to acknowledge the support of the Faculty of Arts. We have also been fortunate in our anonymous press reader whose valuable suggestions greatly facilitated the development of this volume. Our thanks to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reproduce material from Chapter 4 of Andrew Piper s Dreaming in Books (University of Chicago, 2009) and to the University of Minnesota Press for permission to use Leah Price s essay from Repetition, edited by Michael Moon (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). vii
Notes on Contributors Barbara M. Benedict is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English Literature at Trinity College. She has written on eighteenth-century book history, popular culture, and literature, and is the author of Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745 18000 (1994), Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Restoration and Eighteenth- Century Literary Anthologies (1996), and Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (2001). She has also edited Eighteenth-Century English Erotica, 1700 1800, vol. 4, Wilkes and the Late Eighteenth Century (2002), and, with Deidre LeFaye, Jane Austen s Northanger Abbey for Cambridge University Press (2006). She is working on the representation of the book in eighteenth-century literature and empiricism and literature. Simon During is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Foucault and Literature (1993), Patrick White (1996) and Modern Enchantments: the cultural power of secular magic (2002). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Culture s Interests: Literary Institutions in the Secular State. Ina Ferris is a Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include a critical edition of Charlotte Smith s The Old Manor House for the Pickering and Chatto Works of Charlotte Smith (2006), a special issue on Romantic Libraries for Romantic Circles Praxis (2004), The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (2002), and The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (1991). Paul Keen is Professor of English at Carleton University. He is the author of The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1999) and editor of The Radical Popular Press in Britain, 1817-1821 (Pickering and Chatto, 2003) and Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture (Broadview, 2004). Thomas Keymer is a Chancellor Jackman Professor at the University of Toronto and a Supernumerary Fellow of St. Anne s College, Oxford. His books include Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford, 2002); Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth- Century Britain and Ireland (with Peter Sabor; Cambridge, 2005); and the viii
Notes on Contributors ix Oxford World s Classics editions of Robinson Crusoe (2007) and Rasselas (2009). He is also an editor of Review of English Studies. Jon Klancher teaches Romantic and Victorian literature, the sociology of culture, and the history of print at Carnegie Mellon University. He has written widely on Romantic and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural history and the history of reading. Author of The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790 1832 (1987), he is currently completing a book, Transfiguring Arts & Sciences : Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age. He is also editor of the forthcoming Concise Companion to the Romantic Age from Wiley-Blackwell (2009). Deidre Lynch is a Chancellor Jackman Professor at the University of Toronto, where she teaches in the Department of English and in the Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture. She is the author of The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998) and the editor, most recently, of a new Norton Critical Edition of Mary Wollstonecraft s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2008). Her essay in this volume is derived from her current book project, which has the working title At Home in English: A Cultural History of the Love of Literature. Michael Macovski teaches Textual Theory, English Literature, and Book History at Georgetown University. He has published two books, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse and Dialogue and Critical Discourse: Language, Culture, Critical Theory, both from Oxford University Press. He is also the editor of Jane Eyre: A Cultural Edition, forthcoming from Longman, and has edited two special journal issues: Placing Romanticism: Sites, Borders, Forms, in European Romantic Review (with Sarah Zimmerman); and Romanticism and the Law, on the Romantic Circles website. William R. McKelvy is Associate Professor of English at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is the author of The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774 1880 (2007). Andrew Piper is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies and an associate member in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago UP, 2009) and the article, Rethinking the Print
x Notes on Contributors Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything, which appeared in the PMLA special issue devoted to The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. He is also the co-founder of the research group, Interacting with Print: Cultural Practices of Intermediality, 1700 1830, which is funded by the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture. Leah Price is Professor of English at Harvard. Her books include The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000) and Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (co-ed. 2005); she has also co-edited a special issue of PMLA on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature (2006) and written on old and new media for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. Her chapter in this volume is excerpted from Victorian Bibliophobia (Princeton University Press, 2010). Betty A. Schellenberg is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Her recent publications include Reconsidering the Bluestockings, co-edited with Nicole Pohl (2003) and The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2005). She is currently editing a volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson and writing a book on mid-eighteenth-century literary cultures and media.