Abstract
This essay is about a new field of study that arose in Britain around 1800 which called itself the ‘history of books’—a bibliographical field that was soon to become entwined with, if not indistinguishable from, the more notorious and volatile Bibliomania of the Romantic age. This book history was, of course, not the same history of print that we associate today with the names of Robert Darnton, Elizabeth Eisenstein, or Roger Chartier, which is of much more recent origin and which remains, to judge by a recent special issue of PMLA, not fully at ease with what its editors call ‘the idea of literature’ or literary history.1 Advocates of a new book history in the early nineteenth century believed itwas literary history, and they construed that history as a wide array of codex histories—those of writing, printing, typography, bookmaking and binding, the formation of private libraries and public archives, as well as categories of modern knowledges and imaginative works. From 1797, when the word bibliographia first appeared in a British encyclopedia of arts and sciences, to 1814, when Thomas Hartwell Horne published the two-volume Introduction to the Study of Bibliography, such efforts amounted to a then-unprecedented effort to reveal to British readers what Jerome McGann, with reference to the digital, has called the ‘bibliographical codes’ of the printed word.2
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Notes
Leah Price, ‘Introduction: Reading Matter,’ The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature, special issue of PMLA, ed. Leah Price and Seth Lehrer (January 2006): 9–16. For valuable readings of this essay at various stages, I want to thank Thora Brylowe, Jerome McGann, and Leah Price.
Dibdin, ‘Preface’ to Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities; or the History of Printing in England, Scotland, and Ireland [1749] (London: William Miller, 1812) II: 3.
Dibdin, ‘Bibliographiana,’ The Director, no. 3 (January 1824): I: 84.
See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and his debate with Eisenstein in ‘How to Acknowledge a Revolution,’ American Historical Review 107 (2002): 106–25.
David McKitterick, ‘Bibliography, Bibliophily, and the Organization of Knowledge’ in The Foundations of Scholarship: Libraries and Collecting 1650–1750 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1992), p. 48;
Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Gustave Peignot, Dictionnaire raisonee bibliographie [1802], qu. in Luigi Balsamo, Bibliography: History of a Tradition (Berkeley: Bernard Rosenthal, 1990), p. 147.
Adam Clarke, A Bibliographical Dictionary: In All Departments of Literature (London: W. Baynes, 1802–6).
For recent work on literary lecturing, see Peter Manning, ‘Manufacturing the Romantic Image: Coleridge and Hazlitt Lecturing,’ in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture 1780–1840 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 227–45;
Gillian Russell, ‘Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing,’ in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 123–44; and my own ‘Transmission Failure: From the London Lecturing Empire to the Collected Coleridge,’ in Theoretical Issues in Literary History, ed. David Perkins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 77–95.
McKitterick, 58–61; Charles Lyell, ‘Scientific Institutions,’ Quarterly Review 34 (1826): 154–9.
Paul Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton, ‘Introduction’ to Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) p. 1.
For the following discussion, I have learned much from Robert Shaddy, ‘Grangerizing; ‘One of the Unfortunate Stages of Bibliomania,’’ The Book Collector 49 (2000): 536–46;
Marcia Pointon, ‘Illustrious Heads’ in Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993);
and Lucy Peltz, ‘The Extra-Illustration of London: The Gendered Spaces and Practices of Antiquarianism in the Late Eighteenth Century’ in Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1770–1850, eds. Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
On Hannah More’s version of modernizing Evangelicalism, see especially Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapter 2.
Joseph Lowenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 252.
For a relatively skeptical view of the claim to science from later advocate of the New Bibliography, see Thomas Tanselle, ‘Bibliography and Science,’ Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974): 55–89; and ‘Bibliographical History as a Field of Study’ 41 (1988): 33–58.
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© 2009 Jon Klancher
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Klancher, J. (2009). Wild Bibliography: The Rise and Fall of Book History in Nineteenth-Century Britain. In: Ferris, I., Keen, P. (eds) Bookish Histories. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244801_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244801_2
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