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Puffery and the “Death” of Literature in Late-Romantic Britain բ In 1822 one of America’s most outspoken nationalists, James Kirke Paulding, published A Sketch of Old England, by a New England Man. Conceived as a rejoinder to British travel narratives that routinely characterized the United States as backward and lawless, Paulding’s Sketch portrays England as a fallen titan whose industry, government, and culture are in shambles. Emblematic for Paulding of the Old Country’s demise is the moral decay of the literary book trade. Once the nation’s proudest cultural institution, literature, as Paulding saw it, has become merely another branch of British industrial manufactory, slavishly devoted to the bottom line and “overstocked with workmen.” “It is inconceivable,” his Yankee traveler sneers, “what a vast literary taste there is in England, that is to say, a taste for literary scandal, tittle tattle, reviewing, and magazining” (2:87). Of all the corrupt branches of Britain’s literary system, Paulding casts book reviewing as the blackest. Nine of ten reviews in British periodicals, he reports, “originate in personal, political, and religious antipathies or attachments” (2:88). That such shameless practices thrive in the Old Country is astonishing enough, but what most appalls Paulding’s narrator is that “they don’t mind these things here, where it is almost as common for an author to puff his own book in the magazines, as for a quack doctor to be his own trumpeter in the newspapers” (2:88). Given Paulding’s pronounced Anglophobia, it is obviously tempting to dismiss his report as little more than spirited jingoism; yet several of his allegations, specifically those concerning book reviewing in the mother country, are consonant with what many Britons themselves were saying during the Romantic period. In his introductory essay to the Watchman (1796), for instance, Samuel Taylor chapter 5 puffery and the “death” of literature in late-romantic britain 119 Coleridge lamented: “So many and so varying are the writers employed by the proprietary Booksellers, that it is hardly possible for an author, whose literary acquaintance is even moderately large, to publish a work which shall not be flattered in some one of the reviews by a personal friend, or calumniated by an enemy” (15). A year later the Telegraph published a list of forty-two authors, politicians , and socialites—including, most notably, Mary Robinson and William Beckford—who “pay to have themselves puffed in the Newspapers” (“List”). And in 1826 the pseudonymous author “One Master Trimmer” bluntly proclaimed, “Reviews . . . are nothing now but vehicles for puffing off trash books” (4). While several literary historians have studied the role of puffery in eighteenthcentury British culture (see Chapter 2), relatively little scholarly notice has been paidtoitsproliferationintheearlynineteenthcenturyandtoitswide-rangingcommercial and cultural consequences. At least part of this neglect can be attributed to the more generalized neglect of Romantic-era book reviewing. In recent decades, scholars such as Jon P. Klancher and Mark Parker have rigorously explored the cultural importance of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literary periodicals , and several others have provided detailed studies of individual journals like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review.1 Still, John O. Hayden’s The RomanticReviewers,1802–1824(1969)remainstheonlybook-lengthattempttoprovide a systematic overview of early-nineteenth-century reviewing practices. And, likemostless-comprehensivestudies,Hayden’sbookprovidesonlybriefglimpsesof the underworld of Romantic reviewing, generally adopting an apologetic stance toward the subject rather than “indulg[ing] in undue condescension” (3).2 Elsewhere in scholarly studies of High Romanticism one occasionally encounters references to isolated cases of insider reviewing, but even the most skeptical scholars often treat the average review article from this era as inherently objective, and few show an awareness of how deeply ingrained puffery had become in earlynineteenth -century literary culture.3 The aim of this chapter is to redress this gap in the scholarly record, offering both a general overview of the “age of puffery,” as the Westminster Review took to calling the era (“Puffing, and The Puffiad,” 441), and an analysis of puffery’s widereaching impact on literary production and consumption in the latter half of the Romantic Century. In effect, what follows serves as both a sequel to Chapter 2, which chronicled the mid- and late-eighteenth-century rise of puffery, and a companion piece to Chapters 3 and 4, which recounted the early-nineteenth-century book trade’s pioneering work in branding, bandwagon marketing, and visual advertising . At the same time, this chapter breaks from the preceding two in focusing less on new experiments in literary...

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