Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 (review)

Although the subtitle of this volume suggests that it encompasses two full centuries of book history, a cursory review of its table of contents quickly reveals its origins in an American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conference session. The book's twelve chapters are written primarily by eighteenth-century and Romantic scholars, and the content similarly is concentrated in the first half of the covered era. While only three articles are expressly concerned with the Victorian period, several others, however, offer valuable contextual and critical analyses that point forward in potentially productive ways. Linked—however tenuously—by a debt to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the literary field and its imperative to examine literary history as a complex of book history, cultural history, and literary studies, the essays in this volume invite us, in the editors' words, to think about literary production "as at once a materially embedded activity, caught up in a thick network of concrete material relations, and an intensely symbolic activity, engaged in the less easily defined pursuit of authority and legitimacy in a competitive artistic and professional (as well as commercial) arena" (8).

Of most immediate interest to Victorianists will be the contributions by William R. McKelvy, Deidre Lynch, and Leah Price. McKelvy's "'This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print': Making Literary History in the Age of Steam" concentrates on publisher Robert Chambers and his contributions to the definition of English literary studies. Based on a close examination of the contents and publishing history of Chambers's History of the English Language and Literature (1835) and his subsequent Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1842–44), McKelvy claims that Chambers "was the first single author to compose a narrative literary history that covered both verse and prose fiction during a long period that extended into the nineteenth century" (63). McKelvy notes the importance of Chambers's recognition that the novel was in fact the rising literary genre of the early nineteenth century, a recognition born of his close association with the works of Walter Scott. McKelvy also calls attention, however, to Chambers's innovations in publishing, particularly his embrace of steam-powered printing. Having established "the world's first industrialized information factory, one that produced a weekly periodical [Chambers's Edinburgh Journal] as part of an on-going process of production and reproduction" (71), Chambers was an essential player in the process of generating more—and less expensive—publications for Britain's burgeoning literary appetites.

Lynch's "Canons' Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use" is an illuminating examination of the evolution of the reading habit in the nineteenth century. Combining Samuel Johnson's and Leigh Hunt's notions of literature as "that which we are always re-reading and never reading for the first time" with Harold Bloom's "no-nonsense definition of the canonical text as simply the durable, complex text that demands re-reading" (89, 90), Lynch suggests we need to rethink our assumptions that the novel's growing popularity derived from its novelty. In an era in which the medical profession prescribed regularity of habit as crucial to health, reliability was an important value—even in literature. Lynch looks at the many accounts of (sometimes compulsive) re-reading of beloved texts, along with the prevalence of periodic and serial forms during the period, to argue that the novel's actual appeal may have been its predictability. "Might we connect the form's ascendancy to the public's willingness to ratify," she asks provocatively, "the proposition that, under ideal conditions, every reading might represent a resumption of an earlier, interrupted reading?" (101).

Price's "Getting the Reading Out of It: Paper Recycling in Mayhew's London" is one of the most enjoyable chapters in the volume. Starting with the question of why Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62) "so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned" (149), Price systematically...