The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–1880 (review)

The third volume in the admirable Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland addresses a case that is the opposite of provincial. Scottish writers, editors, printers, and publishers played a disproportionately large role in the industrial and global takeoff of the British print market after 1800. In the first third of the nineteenth century an indigenous publishing boom, with distinctive innovations in (especially) periodicals and prose fiction, made Edinburgh a European center of literary production to rival London. The decline of Edinburgh’s separate, “national” eminence after the 1830s did not mark the demise of Scottish book production but rather its structural integration into the larger, by now decisively London-based imperial trade. While Scotland remained the center for industrial printing in Great Britain throughout the century, Scottish publishers were busy establishing themselves in London. This was not a new phenomenon: the leading eighteenth-century London booksellers—Miller, Strahan, and Cadell—were transplanted Scots (see Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book [2006]). The roll-call of major nineteenth-century houses founded by Scots includes Murray, Blackwood, Chambers, Smith-Elder, Macmillan, Nelson, Blackie, Black, and Collins: the publishers, in short, of many if not most of the leading Victorian authors and periodicals, from George Eliot and Charles Darwin to the Cornhill Magazine, as well as other major ventures such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Scottish firms—notably Nelson’s—were also foremost in exploiting the new imperial markets overseas.

Several contributors to the present volume challenge the received accounts of nineteenth-century literary history. Simon Eliot contends that the 1825–26 financial crash was only a “moderate crisis” for the industry (95), rather than a catastrophe that brought an end to the “Golden Age” of Edinburgh-based book production; statistical evidence for the trade at large corrects the conventional view, distorted by the high-profile ruin of Archibald Constable and Walter Scott. Eliot does, however, acknowledge that while output as a whole recovered quickly, certain genres suffered a drastic decline—notably “literature.” For literary history, then, 1825–26 remains a watershed, as Peter Garside confirms in his authoritative analysis of the rise of the Scottish literary market during the Romantic period. The post-Waterloo flowering of Scottish fiction around Scott was extinct by the mid-1830s. The case illuminates questions recently posed (by Franco Moretti, Leah Price, and others) about the relations between book history and the more traditional domain of literary history: it indicates, at least, that the impulse to fold one into the other should be resisted. Tracking, if not exaggerating, the boom-and-bust arc of a newly industrializing economy, the Scottish Romantic novel provides at once a symbolically condensed example and a statistical exception.

The boldest revisionist argument in the book is made by Cairns Craig, who offers a striking rebuttal of the conventional view that Scottish literature disappeared from the British scene after 1835. Craig traces the Victorian formation of a historical canon of Scottish writing that was woven into the core of the emergent history of English literature as a scholarly and academic discipline; he also insists on a broader scope of nineteenth-century “literature” that includes the natural and social sciences, where Scots such as James Clerk Maxwell, Alexander Bain, and J. G. Frazer continued to play a prominent part.

The volume contains a wealth of information on technical developments in papermaking, type founding, ink manufacture, printing, illustration, and binding, as well as business, financial and labour arrangements, distribution, literacy, domestic and international markets, and formats and genres. A description of the Fourdrinier papermaking machine clarifies Scott’s reference to “editions . . . wire-wove and hot-pressed” in the opening chapter of Waverley ([James Ballantyne and Co., 1814], 11). The book is generously and aptly illustrated: among other treats, we get to admire the portraits of a succession of major publishers wearing the robes of Lord Provost...