The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume VI, 1830-1914 (review)

The publication of this volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain is a landmark event, not only due to the book's overall excellence but also because the Victorian era has been the subject of comparatively few synoptic works of book history. The nineteenth-century advent of the machines—for papermaking, printing, type founding, setting, and so on—tends to mark an end point for most historians of the book, with exceptions made for things like the Kelmscott Press that consciously hearken back to the artisanal and handmade. A recent exception can be found in A History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880 (2007), edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, an outstanding resource with plenty that is relevant to scholars of the era, but one whose national focus necessarily curtails its applicability to Victorian studies. Another valuable and relevant volume is the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800-1880 (2007), edited by Bill Bell; but, in a similar way, its emphasis on the Scottish aspects of the book trade prevents it from serving as a general guide (though it makes a valuable companion to the book under review). One might look to The History of the Book in the West: 1800-1914 (2010), edited by Stephen Colclough and Alexis Weedon, with its broader geographic and chronological scope; but because the essays it gathers have all been published previously in other contexts (in other words, it is more of a thematic collection than a guide), it does not have the strong coherence of coverage and design that one expects. So this Cambridge History volume fills a significant place in our field, complementing as it does the four other published books in the series covering the years from 1100 to 1830.

What it reveals is the amazing vitality, variety, and rapid changefulness of the book as an object of culture in the nineteenth century. Printing, publishing, and bookselling were absolutely transformed by industrialization, as were practices of print consumption. Indeed, virtually every one of the twenty chapters tells a story of profound growth and alterations of practice, from the "Changes in the Look of the Book" (David McKitterick), to illustrations (Michael Twyman), to serial publications (Graham Law and Robert Patten), to distribution channels (Colclough), to publishing modes, reading practices, and communities of various kinds. This variegated history demonstrates the profound interrelation of books with the politics, technology, commerce, and demographics of the era, whether involving copyright law, papermaking machines, taxation models, or literacy rates. And while the essays are the product of various hands, they speak to one another more directly than most handbooks of this kind, not least because of McKitterick's frequent and welcome presence in the volume, and perhaps particularly thanks to his magisterial seventy-page introduction, which should be required reading for all Victorianists. Taken together, the essays in the volume go a long way toward demolishing simple ideas about a unified period when it comes to the production and consumption of the printed word: almost all aspects of the book and its use were changing rapidly and continuously throughout the Victorian era. Indeed, one of the essays' great virtues is their consistent ability to sketch, in a relatively brief and precise manner, the rich and eventful histories they have to relate.

Another virtue of this Cambridge History for literary scholars is the way it manages to convey book history that is large scale and detailed while keeping literary publishing almost constantly on the table. General book histories often drift toward technological detail and cultural or ethnographic description of the print trade, wherein literary publishing occupies a small percentage of the overall business. In the Cambridge History, this tendency is resisted to welcome effect. A student of literature might turn first, for...