The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740-1830:

Ch. 1. Readers, Writers, Reviewers and the Professionalization of Literature

Barbara M. Benedict

  • Introductory overview (p. 3)
  • By mid 18th c.: great expansion of reading audience, across class and gender borders
  • People read for :
  • Entertainment
  • Profit
  • Moral improvement  reading became a “route for the development of the individual” (p. 3)
  • What people read: long prose genres (especially imaginative literature) became v. popular
  • Novels
  • Histories
  • Travel literature
  • Print boom: result of
  • Growing class of writers
  • New type of professional: literary critic
  • Another new kind of professionalism: systematization of entire process of making and selling books.
  • Printers
  • Publishers
  • Book-sellers
  • Writers
  • Readers
  • Critics
  • together they transformed literature in the 18th c.
  • New definition of ‘literature’ (p. 4)
  • 1755. S. Johnson in his Dictionary: ‘learning, skill in letters’
  • At end of century: ‘material product and profession’
  • OED (Oxford English Dictionary): ‘literary work or production; activity or profession of a man of letters’
  • 1813: (OED) ‘the body of writings produced in a particular country or period.
  • revolutionary idea of literature: reflects 4 key changes in literary culture
  • evolution of book trade  profit-seeking industry
  • transformation of writers from gentlemen dilettantes into professional authors
  • changes in readership (who is reading): expanded from small, traditional groups of leisured gentry and practical businessmen into a widespread national audience of both genders and al classes  readers understood themselves as participants in public culture
  • imaginative literature redefined: no longer a luxury of the wealthy and learned, now conceived fit for everyone.
  • Reading audience (p. 4)
  • Literacy rates
  • increasing (mid-century 40% of women, 60% of men could read and write). Literacy among all classes of professionals, merchants, farmers, trades people and skilled artisans; also servants and labourers, and women of all ranks
  • women and female concerns: new prominence in literary culture (p. 5)
  • as readers, writers, topics and targets in literature
  • periodicals (ex. Mirror 1779-80, anatomized feminine manners, education and expectations)
  • plays (ex. Sheridan’s The Rivals, 1775: satirizes adolescent maidens’ appetite for hot novels)
  • fiction: written by both men (some using female pen-names) and women
  • sentimental novels, serialized stories in monthly periodicals, gift books, poetical miscellanies and conduct books aimed at middle-class female readers
  • Printing (p. 5)
  • Booksellers: their effect on literary culture
  • Formed congers: coalitions of trading booksellers
  • Worked in competition with one another, but also in collaboration
  • Distribution in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and N. America
  • Became producers of literature (ordering works to be printed, telling authors what to produce)
  • Through congers, booksellers acquired new prominence and influence
  • Made literature the pre-eminent subject of sophisticated conversation, a fashionable commodity
  • Result of their skilful manipulation of the concept of a canon (a roster of renowned authors whose works exemplify the language and thought of the nation; by definition exclusive)
  • Notion of a selective list of exemplary authors in existence since Elizabethan times
  • Congers and enterprising booksellers make literary exclusivity a matter of novelty rather than time-tested worth (topicality, not timelessness)
  • The literary canon became a question of contemporary debate (p. 7)
  • Congers controlled prices, copyrights and distribution,
  • Congers helped establish niche markets (particular audiences attracted by specific kinds of literature)
  • Booksellers began to work closely with writers to find, even invent , new tastes and desires in the reading audience
  • booksellers defined culture without actually writing or printing anything themselves
  • They facilitated dissemination of literary works to the widest possible audience while preserving the aura of literature as a high-class commodity.
  • Second generation of readers (middle of 18th c.) (p. 8)
  • Readers becoming more experienced and discriminating
  • used to reading mostly novels become readers of poetry
  • Transformation of 18th c. poetry
  • From ephemeral entertainment to a touchstone of refinement
  • Previously (from Restoration to mid-18th c.): anthologies, miscellanies, compendia of verse,ephemeralworks,jokes and literary fragments
  • Considered a 2nd class form (collections mostly of previously existing works)
  • Turning point (watershed): Robert Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (6 volumes, 1748-1758)
  • Dodsley commissioned fashionable poets (ex., Edward Young, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray) to compose new pieces specifically for his collections along side works of renowned authors from the recent past (ex., Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift)
  • this anthology created a taste for proto-Romantic poetry
  • it also created an audience for it composed of culturallyambitious and fashionable gentry (in England, ‘gentry’ = class below the nobility)
  • Evolution of the book trade into a profit-making machine - into a big business – changed the way literature was quite literally produced: how it was conceived, written, printed, and sold.
  • Readership: shifting, increasingly opulent, urban classes, the colonialsabroad,and the country gentry and professions in the rural British Isles. (p. 9)
  • Subscriptions (a contract between selected readers, and an author and a publisher): another way of producing books
  • As the century drew to a close, the focus of literary publishing shifted from limited, fine editions towards the discovery or creation of works for a wide readership. (p.10)
  • Serial publications:
  • Quintessential 18th c. genre: Periodical
  • became one of the 18thc’s most prolific and influential forms
  • Topical, inclusive, shapeless, collaborative
  • Included different genres (from journalistic essays to poetry)
  • Fact, fiction, literature, gossip
  • ‘news’ redefined to include gossip, announcements and discussions of cultural events, reviews of books, play and entertainment, and extracts from literary works.
  • Authors, editors and contributors from the readership together conjure an atmosphere of intimate, sophisticated, fashionable conversation
  • Current information blended with imaginative fiction literature became indistinguishable from news.
  • Examples
  • Addison and Steele: Spectator (1711-12, 1714)
  • EdwardCave’s Gentleman’s Magazine(1731-1914)
  • GM made politics part of elite literary conversation
  • GM propelled the profession of literary critic into public culture
  • Critics and their reader became participants in national public culture
  • Monthly Review (1749-1844) (p. 11)
  • 1st non-specialist periodical devoted exclusively to reviewing
  • Competition between magazines (duelling periodicals)
  • Monthly Magazine (1796 --, radical)
  • Published by John Aiken (brother of Anna Laetitia Barbauld)
  • Included essays on European and oriental literature, science, politics, etc
  • Contributions from (ex.) William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, William Hazlitt (men identified with revolutionary liberalism)
  • New Monthly Magazine(1814-1884)
  • Concentrated on literary publishings, including works by respected poets like Wordsworth and Keats
  • Edinburgh Review (1802-1929) (p. 12)
  • Did not imitate inclusive disorderly format of the traditional journal (old favourites of classical, popular, and antiquarian works aimed at wide audience)
  • favoured academic writings, especially the Scottish specialities of science, philosophy and political economy
  • August 1817: published essay which derogatorily defined Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey “the LakeSchool”
  • By its deliberately elite approach, the ER constructed an elitist but culturally receptive version of ‘the world’
  • Quarterly Review (1809-1967)
  • Created by John Murray, publisher of Byron and Austen)
  • Conservative periodical that supported established hierarchies in church and state
  • Defended Romantic poets
  • ER and QRtransformed the periodical into an organ of elite and contentious literacy
  • The capacious melting-pot of periodicals had made them central to literary culture over the 18th c.

New Genres, new writers, new readers (12-13)

  • The fresh idea of literature as a national product that all readers could/should consume promoted a myriad of new printed forms (exs., newspapers, almanacs, jest books, broadside songs, recipe books; most significantly, long prose fiction, miscellanies of topical poems)
  • (Traditional genres: plays, histories, sermons and poetry)
  • Long prose fiction (novels) and miscellanies addressed needs of middle-class audiences without formal literary training but full of desire to read.
  • They welcomed topical matter like love stories and satires on recent events or political figures
  • New freedom of the marketplace of print
  • More people could rite, print, sell and read,and they could explore more topics
  • Released from the strict censorship of the Puritan regime at the Restoration of 1660, writers and booksellers could exploit newly licensed (or at least permissible) fields:
  • Exs., erotica, politics, science, scandal
  •  surge of new genres throughout the 18th c.
  • Exs., criminals’ confessions and imitations of these (ex. Moll Flanders), high-class scandals of adulterous noble-women in the poems and periodicals of the century’s last decades
  • Connection between English freedom and freedom to publish (pgs. 13-14)
  • See account of John Wilkes, his An Essay on Woman (1763), his arrest and liberation
  • Authorship: concept undergoing significant change (p. 14)
  • In Early Modern times: writers were typically amateurs writing (esp. poems and satires) for themselves and their friends; mostly men from gentry, educated in classical languages and literary traditions and the continent  they adapted and imitated classical genres (exs., epic, eclogue)
  • 17th and18th c: Bible appeared in vernacular; modern education taught dissenters different ways of thinking and writing; new kinds of people began to view themselves an authors (exs, tradesmen like Defoe and Richardson; women of all ranks like Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, etc)
  • Number of women authors expanded by c. 50% every decade beginning in the 1760s.
  • These new writers established new genres in poetry and prose, esp. the novel
  • As a chronicle of individual self-realization in the social world, the novel records the experience of new classes as they attained social power.
  • Copyright(the right to print copies of a work) (p. 14-15)
  • 18th c. authors had no authority over their own work
  • They received a set fee for their work
  • Pirates (publishers who printed copies of works whose copyright they did not own) multiplied
  • Most violations ignored because booksellers could rarely prove who had issued the pirated edition; they lacked the time or means to prosecute
  • Copyright Act:
  • fixed prices on imported editions of classic and works in modern languages
  • extended extant copyright restrictions to 21 years
  • Parliamentary and judicial debated raised questions about how copyright served the English principle of free trade and healthy competition; whether it really promoted public access to new knowledge
  • 1774. legal trial over copyright (Donaldson vs. Becket) (p. 16)
  • Monopolist congers accused of robbing public of access to learning
  • Booksellers lost entitlement to perpetual copyright  resulted in rush of anthologies and series reprinting elite and fashionable literature from Shakespeare onward.
  • Freedom to publish historical and popular works from the previous hundred years
  • Success of anthology format and nationalistic fervour of the mid-century  transformed literary culture birth of a native literary tradition!
  • Authorship becomes respectable profession and sign of (internal) class
  • Gradually, changes in copyright  recognition of rights of creation (and not only of reproduction)
  • New concept of author
  • Not as writing for pay, but as the creative shaping of social mores.
  • This development most conspicuous in Romantic verse
  • Elevates the sensibility of poet
  • Cf. Shelley’s identification of poets as unacknowledged legislators of the world
  • Novel also acquires new status
  • Cf. Austen’s defence of the novel as one “in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature” is “conveyed to the world in the best chosen language”
  • Both genres (poetry and novels) designed to promote readerly identification, moral growth, and sensibility
  • Both Romantic poetry and courtship novels embody a new respect for feeling and emotional expressiveness; they both operate in genres conventionally associated with gendered and class taste. (p. 17)
  • Access to materials(importance of libraries)
  • Coffee houses (stocked newspapers but not books; not frequented by women)
  • Subscription libraries: members decided what titles to buy  allowed like-minded people to share a segment of literary culture.
  • Circulating libraries
  • Their terms of operation influenced the development of the novel
  • Highest dues for right to borrow most recent books (topicality was a sign of fashion)
  • Charged by the volume, not by the title  encouraged rise of 3 volume novel
  • Plot-driven, suspense-studded and long
  • Refused to make elitist judgements; respected each individual’s taste equally

 erased hierarchies between genres and genders.

 gave young men and women unmonitored access to a huge range of works

 provided opportunities for self-improvement

 served as places for flirtation and class mixing

 this social freedom reflected the intellectual freedom promised by libraries

 libraries became notorious as symbols of the early feminist revolution (p. 19)

 libraries blames for the popularity of the transgressive novels they offered (stories of heroines falling in love, defying the older generation and following their feelings )

 spread and popularity of circulating libraries blamed for ‘intoxicating effects of novels on young women’ (before and after Fr. Revolution and the debates around it regarding gender hierarchies and roles)

 as booksellers increased their production of novels, including sequels and imitations, popular fiction propelled the erotic mode and female topics into mainstream, middle-class literature.

Writers, readers, critics, booksellers, and publishers were all transformed by the professionalization of the book trade in the period from 1740 to 1830. An entirely new way of conceiving of reading, writing, and bookselling made literature the agent of culture in the English-speaking world.

 elite literature for the aspiring middle-class (p. 20)

 comforting novels for the general public

 literary consumption became central to national identity and one of the prime sources for Britain’s moral justification for imperial expansion and colonization.

 reading became a sign of middle-class self-improvement

 literature became a class commodity

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