Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

The past year has seen the publication of several important volumes with reference to the study of nineteenth-century book history. I have to pass briefly over the magisterial two-volume Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), edited by Michael Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, only remarking on its encyclopedic coverage of names and subjects associated with the history of writing and printing in a global frame of reference. This is an indispensable resource that any scholar with an interest in book history will want to own. More directly focused on our chosen period and nation are The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume 6: 1830-1914, edited by David McKitterick; and The History of the Book in the West: 1800-1914, edited by Stephen Colclough and Alexis Weedon. Both of these are part of multi-volume serial histories, each volume comprised of essays on topics and themes related to the nineteenth century world of printing, publishing, and bookselling.

The McKitterick Cambridge History is of major significance, in that it presents twenty newly commissioned essays on the central themes of the era, with experts offering synoptic introductions to subjects such as illustration, serials, distribution, reading, and mass markets. In addition, McKitterick's seventy-plus page introduction is an invaluable guide to the Victorian period and the issues in the history of the book that it most urgently raises. Far from being a narrow disciplinary survey, this introduction proceeds under the sensible assumption that the history of the book is inseparable from a general understanding of the politics, technology, commerce, and demographics of the era. And indeed, the whole volume carries with it a welcome sense of the larger culture as it related to developments in the world of print. Accordingly, there are sections on children's books, religious publications, leisure books (such as those for cookery, sport, gardening, and travel), and scientific communications. Attention is also paid to book production and distribution in a global frame of reference, particularly in a chapter called "A Place in the World," wherein the reaches of the British empire are connected to the reach of the printed word. Scholars of Victorian poetry may find a smaller portion of the Cambridge History devoted to their particular subject than they would like, but the vibrant and rich chapters on authorship (by Patrick Leary and Andrew Nash), copyright (by Catherine Seville), literature (by Simon Eliot and Andrew Nash), and other subjects will be obviously relevant. McKitterick himself contributes several excellent essays, including an engaging one on "Second-hand and old books" in the period. The Cambridge History concludes with a call from William St. Clair for a more ambitious book history, in part renovated by current technologies and the empirical evidence they can help us obtain. This volume will surely inspire and enable more nuanced and sophisticated scholarship with reference to the Victorian and Edwardian book.

Colclough and Weedon's The History of the Book in the West: 1800-1914 is a somewhat miscellaneous but still valuable production, gathering and reprinting a range of twenty one previously-published essays on topics relevant to the nineteenth-century history of the book. Particularly interesting to Victorian literary scholars will be separate essays by Peter Shillingsburg and Kate Flint on Vanity Fair, and surveys of publication and printing practices in the period by Simon Eliot, Allan Dooley, and James Barnes. Also of note are pieces by George Landow, Angus Phillips, and Simone Murray under the heading, "The Digital Book." The volume offers itself as "a library of critical essays," each of them useful in its own way and also part of an emergent picture of the nineteenth-century history of the book.

In 2007, Herbert Tucker's Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse, 1790-1910 reopened the subject of the Victorian long poem in a major way. This past year has seen two studies that follow on its line of investigation: Monique R. Morgan's Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century Long Poem and Clinton Machann's Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading. Both studies focus on four long...