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Article Excerpt
WILLIAM ST CLAIR, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Pp. xxix + 765. 90 [pounds sterling]. $150.00.
This massive book is a daunting object for review. The author makes huge claims and buttresses them with an impressive array of quantitative evidence. Over the next half century many scholars will rely on this book, argue with it, and produce further evidence to support or challenge its conclusions. Only a very rash reviewer would undertake to guess how well the book will stand up under the detailed scrutiny it deserves. I am prepared to say without qualification, however, that The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period is one of the most important scholarly books I have ever read. It comprises twenty-two chapters occupying 451 pages of text, plus thirteen appendixes running to 271 pages of detailed documentation and nineteen pages of bibliography. The 3319 footnotes in microscopic print are legitimate testimony to the formidable nature of this enterprise. I need to emphasize that this study will be of major interest to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars, not just to those specializing in the period 1790 to 1832. Large portions of the book are about the two preceding centuries--and the author's conclusions have a great deal of relevance to present-day wrangles over intellectual property.
St Clair sets out the terms of his inquiry on page 1. As he says, for centuries almost everyone assumed that "reading helped to shape mentalities and to determine the fate of the nation." But, he asks, can that assumption be validated? In order to assess the effects of reading, St Clair declares, we need to understand how books got into print, what control was exercised over their publication, and what audiences they reached. Much has been published in the last century on "Book History" and the technical issues of printing, binding, paper, and so forth. Astonishingly little, however, has been done to investigate the economics of book publication and distribution. The learned and scholarly Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1557-1695, for example, has virtually nothing to say about cost of production or book prices. (1) John Brewer's The Pleasures of the Imagination and the collections on "consumption" that he coedited in the 1990s mention the grubby subject of money only en passant and with little attempt to assess the impact of economics on the dissemination of ideas. (2) St Clair's sharp criticism of bibliographic studies that neglect price, print runs, and readership "even when ... recoverable" is very much to the point (444). Part of the object of Book History should be to help us understand the effect of books, not just their material reality.
The Reading Nation is unabashedly quantitative. Its concerns are broadly conceptual, but its case rests on particular numeric evidence, not on fuzzy cultural theories. St Clair has written several acclaimed literary-cultural books, and he is now a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, but he spent most of his adult life as a senior official in the British Treasury. He knows about money, economic theory, and the real world--a perspective from which this book benefits immensely. Apropos of his conclusions about copyright and the impact of restrictions on anthologies and abridgements, for example, St Clair says, "In order to enable my conclusions to be tested, and I hope replicated, by future research, I have set out the evidence in detail in appendix 3" (66n). Only rarely in humanities research these days does one see this sort of concern for testing and replicating results. Yet if they cannot be tested and replicated, what are they good for? A book of this kind makes a claim to truth. In making such a claim, its author is accepting his argument's vulnerability to rebuttal and disproof--an admirable and uncommon position to adopt in literary study.
Numeric evidence is not as plentiful as we could wish, even when we get to the nineteenth century. As St Clair admits, "we lack information on costs, prices, print runs, and sales. We have no reliable...
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