The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (review)

This is a magisterial treatment describing the English (primarily) long durée and illustrating the way controls on publication, whether by government (various copyright regimes and concepts of intellectual property) or through marketplace decisions (prices, print runs, and so on) controlled and affected access to print. St Clair looks particularly at the political economy of reading as a complex system and seeks to reveal the way reading helped to shape mentalité: "we conceive of a culture as a complex developing system with many independent but interacting agents, including authors and readers, into which the writing, publication, and subsequent reading of a printed text were interventions. . ." (p. 6). Each of the twenty-two chapters offers an assimilated presentation of data available in the thirteen appendices, allowing for unusual transparency.

For folklorists and ethnomusicologists, the material throughout the book on ballad and broadside publication, their frequent circulation by chapmen, is of particular interest (see also Appendix 4: Intellectual property. Popular literature, England) and certainly interrogates orthodox definitions of the ballad. Chapmen were mostly literate and often used this job as an upwardly mobile occupation, as a means of leaving agriculture. They could, of course, carry only small, light items; and broadsides of all types—abbreviated versions of Shakespeare, the Bible, as well as the familiar broadside ballads—were not only easy to carry but were relatively inexpensive. And, of course, "the more common and less expensive a printed text was when it was produced, the greater its readership and the poorer its survival rate to the present day" (p. 28). This statement suggests that survival rates must be amplified by other resources such as the Stationer's Register, a form of government control, to acquire a more accurate view of materials published.

Whatever the text—poetry, fiction, sermon, or ballad—the text was the capital asset (to which the physical plant was added as an additional asset when printing was introduced). To make money, printers had to keep other publishers from printing the same work: they had then to acquire/own the copyright and they needed in turn government enforcement of that ownership. To print was, in fact, to own: ballad singers might sing or give a copy to a printer: he would pay them, thus acquiring ownership, and then license the new acquisition with the Stationer's Company. From 1624, there was a cartel of ballad publishers designated the Ballad Partners. What this means is that "much of what is now called popular culture" was privatized, creating problems for other ballad singers, and tended to valorize one particular version/text. The first to print owned the copyright, and initially that meant having a monopoly in perpetuity. The same books, pamphlets, ballads and broadsides were printed and reprinted for a period of two hundred years.

The center for ballad publication was Aldermary Churchyard, near the so-called Ballad Warehouse. While texts were reprinted over and over again, they were sometimes reprinted with different illustrations. Print runs were various: one to two thousand for chapbooks, two to four thousand for ballads. Extant catalogues give titles, but not full texts, for these materials which remained mainstream into the early nineteenth century. Bishop Percy himself got materials from the Warehouse. St Clair suggests that "what was recovered by the 'romantic revival' was not an oral and performative popular tradition stretching back into the mists of time, but a continuous privately owned print tradition that had never been interrupted" (p. 346); if he is correct, then many of the old verities of ballad scholarship will need revision. He goes on to suggest that this material was replaced in the nineteenth century by newly composed texts made available by a shift in copyright regime: the new materials often included morally improving, reformist literature, freely circulated by chapmen who were paid to spread the word.

Several shifts in intellectual property rights' regimes affected what could be published. At the end of the seventeenth century, authorial rights were first asserted, giving...