Abstract
In the preface to A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), Philip Gaskell would justify the adjective in his title by pointing to his extended discussion of the mechanized modes of textual production that had transformed British print culture in the nineteenth-century. Noting how the previous authority on the topic—McKerrow’s An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927)—had only covered the era of the common hand-press, Gaskell described his work as the attempt ‘for the first time to give a general description of the printing practice of the machine-press period.’1 And yet, despite this theme of novelty, it is striking from today’s perspective to witness how Gaskell’s New Introduction can appear to mark the end of the line for a school of analytical bibliography aiming to produce modern editions that would recapture authorial intentions that had been deformed or obstructed in print shops of the past. Gaskell’s work, in other words, does not get a great deal of attention in accounts of the rise of the new book history that is traced to the 1980s. And Gaskell himself conceded that the remarkable learning he displayed might leave literary critics puzzled. Quoting Fredson Bowers, he aligns himself with the view that ‘the general scholar’ was mostly unable to apply the accumulating knowledge to the business of criticism.2
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Notes
Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), Preface, n. p.
In addition to James Secord’s Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
my thinking about Chambers is mostly indebted to the work of Sondra Cooney, ‘Publishers for the People: W. & R. Chambers: the Early Years, 1832–1850’ (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1970)
C. H. Layman, ed. Man of Letters: the Early Life and Love Letters of Robert Chambers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990)
and Robert J. Scholnick, “The Fiery Cross of Knowledge”: Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1832–1844,’ Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 32, no. 4 (1999), 324–58.
Robert Chambers, History of the English Language and Literature (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1835), p. v.
See, for example, R. M. Wiles’s Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), a work brought to my attention by Thomas Keymer.
See Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 44.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’ [1829], Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 64.
See William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, Sir Walter Scott: A Bibliographical History, 1796–1832 (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 1998), pp. 885–8;
and Jane Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987), pp. 47–8.
Robert Chambers, Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1832), p. 8.
Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: the Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 9.
Chambers, History, p. 269. For modern surveys of these series, see Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: a Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 2nd edn (Columbus: Ohio State U P, 1998), pp. 266–77, Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition, pp. 91–9, and Secord, Victorian Sensation, pp. 46–51.
[John Gibson Lockhart], ‘The Copyright Question,’ Quarterly Review 69 (Oct. 1841), p. 199.
Thomas Budd Shaw, Outlines of English Literature (London: J. Murray, 1849), p. iii.
William Spalding, The History ofEnglish Literature (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1853), p. 28.
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McKelvy, W.R. (2009). ‘This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print’: Making Literary History in the Age of Steam. 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_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244801_4
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