Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays ed. by Isabel Rivers (review)

194 minds us that eighteenth-century British literature is mediated by the conditions of production and distribution and by authors , publishers, readers, and reviewers in complex relationships. Ultimately, such considerations question our notions of literature and of ‘‘high culture.’’ Deborah D. Rogers University of Maine Books and Their Readers in EighteenthCentury England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers. London and New York: Leicester, 2001. Pp. x ⫹ 294. $107.95. A sequel to the influential Books and their Readers (1982), this collection of essays reflects the revolution in therecent study of the book. In ‘‘The Book Trades,’’ James Raven argues that, even though the design of the printing press ‘‘remained almost unchanged,’’ an increase of publication occurred in London and the market towns, because of ‘‘advances in paper manufacture and type founding and design ’’ as well as new strategies for retailing books. Mr. Raven pays special attention to the economics of publishing, the risks involved, and the mechanics of assembling consortiums of publishers and booksellers to underwritepublishing. In perhaps the most original essay, ‘‘The English Bible and Its Readers inthe Eighteenth Century,’’ Scott Mandelbrote traces the elaborate politics involved in establishing and maintaining the King James Version as the Authorized Version of the Bible throughout the eighteenth century. The monopoly on printing the Authorized Version, held by the King’s printer and the two university presses,coincided with ‘‘political and doctrinal reasons for resisting attempts to rewrite the English Bible,’’including attempts on the part of Dissenters and anti-trinitarians to obtain amoreaccuratetranslation.Indeed ‘‘by the 1780s and 1790s . . . the pursuit of a new translation began to appear less like an undertaking that might favor the Church of England and more like a challenge to its reputation and authority.’’The Church of England clearly had an interest in maintaining the monopoly, but so did ‘‘British and American premillennialists, who, in addition to expecting the imminent return of Christ, formulated a view of the absolute and literal truth of scripture that later came to be known as fundamentalism .’’ Brian Young’s capsule survey, ‘‘Theological Books from The Naked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith,’’ details the controversial writings of ‘‘representative divines,’’most notably Daniel Waterland, William Warburton, Francis Blackburne, and Richard Watson. In ‘‘The History Market in EighteenthCentury England,’’ Karen O’Brien surveys the range of eighteenth-century historical writers whose ‘‘increasing popularity with consumers was also part of a more general transformation in the historical awareness of the English people .’’ Ms. Rivers explores a collateral interest in biography in ‘‘BiographicalDictionaries and Their Uses from Bayle to Chalmers.’’ These dictionaries are often a substitute for a library ‘‘both for lovers of learning who could not afford books, and for owners of books who did not have the time to consult them.’’ Ms. Rivers is largely concerned with three great biographical dictionaries constructed on the model first devised by Bayle: Thomas Birch’s A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical (1734–1741), Oldys’s Biographia Britannica (1747–1766),andthe uncompleted second edition of the Biographia Britannica (1778–1795), edited by Andrew Kippis, et al. She also covers the influence of Moreri’s Grand Dictionaire Historique (1674), translated anden- 195 larged by Jeremy Collier as The Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary (1701), as well as other dictionaries, culminating in Alexander Chalmers’s The General Biographical Dictionary (1812–1817). A similar desire to provide information in an encapsulated form is outlined in Antonia Forster’s ‘‘Review Journals and the Reading Public,’’ covering such publications as the Monthly Review and Critical Review, which offered a guide to books worth buying and provided both extracts of the books themselves and evaluative commentary. Particularly useful to Scriblerian readers , Marcus Walsh’s ‘‘Literary Scholarship and the Life of Editing’’ offers an introduction to historical, textual, and philological scholarship in the eighteenth century, including transformations in the process of editing that led to the dustup between Pope and Theobald and provided the background for the mock scholarship in The Dunciad Variorum. As Mr. Walsh points out, Pope’s Shakespeare was but one title in Tonson’s backlist of English classics for which contemporary ‘‘editors’’ had been selected. Mr. Walsh too follows the economics of literary editing and the creation of a...