Victorian Publishing

Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

Reference tool for Rare Books Collection.

A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.

After a few unsuccessful relationships, Rebecca gives love another shot and meets a guy she thought she could trust. With the love booming and all the right words, Devonte has Rebecca head over heels for him. After months of being in love with a narcissistic man, the tables turn and Rebecca's life hangs in the balance. What will happen to them? Will Rebecca find her way and leave or stay in a life-threatening relationship?

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Threatened by the proliferation of cheap, mass-produced publications, the Religious Tract Society issued a series of publications on popular science during the 1840s. The books were intended to counter the developing notion that science and faith were mutually exclusive, and the Society's authors employed a full repertoire of evangelical techniques—low prices, simple language, carefully structured narratives—to convert their readers. The application of such techniques to popular science resulted in one of the most widely available sources of information on the sciences in the Victorian era. A fascinating study of the tenuous relationship between science and religion in evangelical publishing, Science and Salvation examines questions of practice and faith from a fresh perspective. Rather than highlighting works by expert men of science, Aileen Fyfe instead considers a group of relatively undistinguished authors who used thinly veiled Christian rhetoric to educate first, but to convert as well. This important volume is destined to become essential reading for historians of science, religion, and publishing alike.

"Poetry, Picture, and Popular Publishing demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian Illustrated gift book. Kooistra reveals how the gift book's visual/verbal form mediated "high" and popular art as well as book and periodical publication. A composite text produced by many makers, the poetic gift book was designed for domestic space and a female audience. With rigorous attention to the gift book's aesthetic and ideological features, Kooistra analyzes the contributions of poets, artists, engravers, publishers, and readers and shows how its material form moved poetry into popular culture. Drawing on archival and periodical research, she offers new readings of Eliza Cook, Adelaide Procter, and Jean Ingelow and shows the transatlantic reach of their verses. Boldly resituating Tennyson's works within the gift-book economy he dominated, Kooistra demonstrates how the conditions of corporate authorship shaped the production and reception of the laureate's verses at the peak of his popularity"--

Drawing on extensive archival research in both Britain and the United States, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press represents the first comprehensive study of the publication of instalment fiction in Victorian newspapers. Often overlooked, this phenomenon is shown to have exerted a crucial influence on the development of the fiction market in the last decades of the nineteenth century. A detailed description of the practice of syndication is followed by a wide-ranging discussion of its implications for readership, authorship, and fictional form.

This book offers a new history of the fairy tale, revealing the creative role of periodical publication in shaping this popular genre. Sumpter explores the fairy tale's reinvention for (and by) diverse readerships in unexpected contexts, including debates over evolution, colonialism, socialism, gender and sexuality and decadence.