Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller (review)

184 tween 1695 and 1774 seem convincing. Before the Copyright Act, copyright resided with members of the Stationers’ Company and was deemed to be perpetual . While the Act acknowledged the rights of the author for the first time, as far as the book trade itself was concerned the limitation for a number of years of copyright in ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘existing books’’ was the more important provision. In response, during what Mr. St Clair calls the ‘‘high monopoly’’ period from 1710 to 1774, booksellers not only continued to conduct business as if copyright was perpetual, but ‘‘operated almost as a single firm with a limited measure of internal competition,’’ as it ‘‘moved effortlessly from the price regulation of the guild period, in which price controls aimed to keep prices low, to price-fixing which aims to keep prices high.’’ Between 1710 and 1774, therefore, collusion between authors, booksellers, printers, and others involved in the book trade served to keep prices artificially high. ‘‘Only in the area of newspapers and periodicals,’’ argues Mr. St Clair, ‘‘do we see a compensating trend towards a widening of the reading nation.’’ In effect, this antedates by a century the trend detected by scholars such as Marilyn Butler for authors in the early nineteenth century to write for readers ‘‘drawn from a narrower band at the top of the social hierarchy ’’ and contradicts those who assert that the market responded to a widening of the readership in the eighteenth century by producing cheaper books in greater numbers. This happened only after the decision of the House of Lords in the case of Donaldson versus Becket that perpetual copyright was indeed unlawful—‘‘the most decisive event in the history of reading in England since the arrival of printing 300 years before’’—‘‘transferred, through lower prices, a huge quantum of purchasing power from book producer to book buyers.’’ The sharp increase in the numbers of titles, including novels, published in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century is confirmed by the ESTC. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period is a hugely informative and provocative attempt to offer a ‘‘quantitative or economic analysis of the effects of the changing intellectual property regime on texts, prices, access, and readerships ’’—an attempt those Appendices render more valuable still. J. A. Downie Goldsmiths College, University of London STEPHEN MILLER. Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. New Haven and London: Yale, 2006. Pp. xv ⫹ 336. $27.50; £15. Partly a history of conversation, partly an etiology, partly a polemic against modern subversions (talk radio, blogs on the internet, video games, ersatz TV interviews), and partly advocacy, Mr. Miller’s readable book revisits familiar territory. Rooted in human nature, conversation is everywhere people congregate , but Mr. Miller celebrates an art form which adds to pleasure, sociability, and civilized behavior. It is not chat, gossip, argument, prayer, oratory, pedagogy , or commercial transactions. As Johnson remarked, after dining with friends and asked by Boswell how it went: ‘‘No, Sir; we had talk enough, but no conversation; there was nothing discussed .’’ The concern for good conversation appears early in history in such texts as the biblical Job, Plato’s Symposium and 185 Cicero’s treatise On Duties. The Roman philosopher was the first to link conversation to civic harmony and tolerance, and provide a bulwark against violence and internecine conflict. Sparta was the ‘‘anti-conversation city-state’’; talkers were regarded as bad soldiers. Mr. Miller skips the Middle Ages for Castiglione and Erasmus, and later, the pantheon of the ‘‘conversible world’’ (David Hume’s phrase): Addison, Swift, Johnson , Boswell, Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Shaftesbury, Fielding , Gibbon, Franklin. For readers of the Scriblerian, his long chapter on the English eighteenth century is at the heart of his advocacy: it is in this period that coffeehouse culture, the emergence of clubs, the salon, politeness, the Enlightenment, and women’s education made conversation the supreme value of this society. The decline of religious zeal encouraged easygoing conversation , raillery, wit, skepticism, and rationality . Habermas’s theorizing about the new liberty in the public sphere is mentioned, but Mr. Miller scants postmodern theory. Lady Mary surprisingly commands more attention than such clubbable figures as Boswell and Sir Joshua...