The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (review)

In this detailed study of the preeminent Victorian publishing house William Blackwood & Sons, David Finkelstein brings together more than ten years of research in the Blackwood archives at the National Library of Scotland. The result is refreshing. Freed from the hagiography that colored both Margaret Oliphant and Mary Porter's 1897–1898 study and Frank Tredrey's 1954 history of Blackwood's, Finkelstein draws from long-lost records to paint a clearer picture of "the manner in which social and cultural factors feed into the process of production, dissemination, and reception of individual works" (16). Although the book includes case studies of a number of important Blackwood's authors – among them John Hanning Speke, Charles Reade, and Margaret Oliphant – The House of Blackwood is concerned not so much with individual authors and their relationship with the firm, but with how those relationships illuminate "the firm's general underlying aesthetic and economic considerations of the literary marketplace" (13).

VPR readers will find much of interest and value here. Among the revelations are inventories of the firm taken after the deaths of the principals. These inventories provide snapshots of holdings and assets at various stages in the firm's rise to preeminence and during its gradual decline. The 1879 inventory, taken after the death of John Blackwood, is especially interesting, providing as it does "one of the most complete commercial and financial statements one is likely to encounter of any British publishing firm operating in the nineteenth century" – down to the number of pieces of wooden and metal type in the printing shop (2). The details about author contracts and fees, copyright valuations, and the relationship between the editorial offices and the printing offices are clearly delineated throughout the book, providing helpful insights into how the pragmatic, economic, technological back of the house interacted with the aesthetic, editorial front. VPR readers will also appreciate the updated sales figure information in the appendixes. (Tables present figures for the firm as a whole, for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and for Margaret Oliphant.)

Finkelstein affirms that the "engine that drove the Blackwood firm to profitability" from the 1860s on was George Eliot (34). As Eliot's relationship with her publisher is exhaustively documented elsewhere, Finkelstein restricts his analysis to Eliot's impact on Blackwood's bottom line. One of the more interesting facts that he records is that Eliot accounted for an astonishing 51.2 percent of Blackwood's profit in the decade after her death (1890–1899) – due primarily to reissues of her works. Unfortunately, Blackwood's then saw its profits collapse in the early twentieth century, when a combination of changing reader tastes and sheer over-saturation of the market evaporated the demand for Eliot's novels (36).

The other primary money-makers during Blackwood's heyday were the firm's flagship review, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Maga), and a surprisingly large backlist of "nonliterary" texts. Maga was the main force linking Blackwood's many authors, and Finkelstein describes how John Blackwood's savvy editorial leadership produced maximum returns for the authors who were featured in Maga while holding aloft "the twin banners of sound criticism and Tory politics" (96). Maga's peak sales and profitability came in the decade 1860 to 1870, when sales reached 763,299 and total profits exceeded £45,000. Finkelstein also analyzes Maga's substantial decrease in profitability in the 1880s, when Maga's position as the leader of High Tory opinion was challenged by the launch of the National Review. Under the editorship of Alfred Austin and William J. Courthope, the National Review poached both Maga's contributors and its readers (97–99).

The third pillar of Blackwood's success was its extensive – and largely unstudied – list of nonfiction titles, ranging from "Scottish hymnals series and General Public Statutes to textbooks and manuals on farming, zoology, geography, and metaphysics" (36–37). Chapter 3 offers a detailed look at one such book, John Hanning...