When Book History Neglects Bibliography: Trouble with the “Old Canon” in The Reading Nation

William St Clair outlined an appealing approach to the study of print culture recently in the Times Literary Supplement. Called “the political economy of reading,” it shaped his methodology (and provided the title of his last chapter) in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004). The basis of this approach—economic data relating to book production and prices, and evidence of readers’ access to various texts—is designed to enable historians to “perceive patterns and develop provisional models” on their way to “a fuller and more theoretical understanding of texts, books, reading and consequences.” The ultimate objective of a political economy of reading is to understand “why as societies, we have come to think the way we do.”¹

One attractive feature of this approach is that it embraces the whole spectrum of “the history of the book” as defined by St Clair. At the micro end, he praises a lecture by Robert Darnton in which close textual and contextual analysis of a single pamphlet revealed much about day-to-day experiences in Paris during the French Revolution. At the macro end, he surveys the larger issues addressed by book historians: When and why do books come into existence in the various forms they assume? How are they produced, sold, distributed, and read? What effect do they have on readers, and “on the mentalities of the wider society in which the books were read” (TLS 13)?

Putting his theory into practice, St Clair moves comfortably between the micro and macro levels in his own work. In the TLS he ranges from details of specific publications (formats, print runs, and prices for books by Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott) to wider observations on readers’ “mentalities” in Britain in the early nineteenth century. In The Reading Nation he delivers an enormous amount of data on the book trade, by means of which he reaches broad generalizations about literary production and reception. Sharp insights into the book trade abound, as do informative passages about readers and their experiences with books, especially their testimonials of passionate attachment to this or that series of imprints. That literary artifacts serve as objects of both physical and intellectual fascination is fully appreciated by St Clair, whose devotion to this field of study is underscored by dozens of footnotes in which various items (books, advertisements, ephemera, etc.) are attributed to “Ac,” the Author’s collection.

Thirteen densely factual appendices supply evidence to buttress his claims in The Reading Nation. Although he contemplated publishing them separately online, citing the greater “ease with which additions, corrections, and modifications can be incorporated” and the opportunity for electronic searches, he put them in the book so that readers who lacked computer access would not be left out. Still, St Clair conceived of the appendices as “the core of a growing research resource,” signaling that he “may decide to put the fuller information online later” (pp. 17–18). In this spirit he envisions a cooperative project for developing a political economy of reading, its first step being to amass the foundational data: “It would be a fairly simple task, with modern technology and many hands contributing, worldwide, to place alongside the plentiful information we already have about texts such scattered information as survives about production, prices, access and readerships, over time” (TLS 15). This desideratum parallels one aim of his book, which was “to provide the indispensable factual basis which enables the archival and printed record to be interrogated, patterns discerned, and turning points identified, and emerging conclusions offered and tested” (p. 16).

This laudable goal is not as simple a task as purported, however, to judge from mistakes that mar St Clair’s treatment of “the old canon” in The Reading Nation, his focus in Chapter 7 and Appendix 6. Manifold errors in these sections reveal a range of problems and demonstrate two corollaries to the principle that facts are essential for interrogating historical records and testing conclusions: (1) even seemingly trivial errors shunt one’s analysis off course, and turn one away from discerning true patterns or...