The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (review)

William St. Clair's Reading Nation in the Romantic Period is the kind of book that few academics are able to write anymore: a massive compilation of material, based on years of archival work, that thoroughly transforms knowledge about a topic of widespread interest. Pressure from publishers to write shorter, cheaper books; pressure from administrators to measure worker productivity; and pressure from students to meet increased teaching and service expectations have made it a career risk to undertake the work that St. Clair has performed in this book. We are lucky indeed that St. Clair, a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge with a long, prestigious career in the British Treasury, has been able to tackle his subject without some of these constraints. In addition, he brings to the task a point of view quite different from that of the traditional literary scholar. He applies his considerable statistical and economic expertise to the history of reading, and uses it to illuminate better than anyone else what he calls "the political economy of reading." The entire second half of this substantial book presents a long compilation of tables and charts, listing such facts as prices, edition sizes, contents of anthologies, and relevant legislation. The book is never better than when St. Clair uses such material to demonstrate how "economic models, such as price and quantity, monopoly and competition, have been able to account for the behaviour of the printed- book industry, and therefore also the patterns of readerly access, during all the centuries when print was the paramount medium" (437).

As this quotation indicates, both noun phrases in the book's title are somewhat misleading. "The reading nation" may lead some to expect a more detailed treatment of reader response than St. Clair actually provides. His introductory chapter lays considerable stress on understanding the "mentalities" of actual readers, but his book quickly changes direction to emphasize instead the access that readers had to books. Rather than a history of readership, he offers a history of book publishing, buying, and accessibility: he traces how books were published, how much they cost, how and where readers could have obtained them. In addition, the "Romantic Period" may mislead readers into thinking that St. Clair is exclusively concerned with the early nineteenth century. On the contrary, he offers a comprehensive account of the British book industry from the introduction of print until the end of the nineteenth century, though he treats more briefly some of the transformations in publishing that occurred at the very end of the Victorian period. It would be a mistake to imagine that only the material directly about the Victorian period should be of interest to Victorianists. On the contrary, both the large historical narrative that St. Clair traces and what he calls the "commercial and political model" (449) of book history provide vital information for the study of Victorian literature and culture.

A standard model of reading history in Britain has assumed a gradual and progressive increase of literacy through the convergence of several factors, such as the rise in readership fostered by increased attention to education; the growth of the book trade; changes in the technology of printing that allowed for faster and cheaper book production; and the high valorization of literacy in a Protestant culture. St. Clair effectively demolishes this vague narrative by presenting abundant evidence for a far more convincing one, in which "we see long periods of stability punctuated by sharp changes of direction as a result of particular events" (436). While some of these turning points are technological, most of the critical ones turn out to be legal decisions, such as the abolition of perpetual copyright in 1774 or Lord Eldon's refusal of copyright to Don Juan (1819–24) and Queen Mab (1813). With an extraordinary accumulation of evidence, St. Clair is able to show the precise effects of legal decisions on the British book market, such as the remarkable explosion of...