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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Cited by 15
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2010
Print publication year:
2009
Online ISBN:
9781139056069
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521810173
Subjects:
Literature, Printing and Publishing History, English Literature 1700-1830
Series:
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

This volume covers the history of printing and publishing from the lapse of government licensing of printed works in 1695 to the development of publishing as a specialist commercial undertaking and the industrialization of book production around 1830. During this period, literacy rose and the world of print became an integral part of everyday life, a phenomenon that had profound effects on politics and commerce, on literature and cultural identity, on education and the dissemination of practical knowledge. Written by a distinguished international team of experts, this study examines print culture from all angles: readers and authors, publishers and booksellers; books, newspapers and periodicals; social places and networks for reading; new genres (children's books, the novel); the growth of specialist markets; and British book exports, especially to the colonies. Interdisciplinary in its perspective, this book will be an important scholarly resource for many years to come.

Reviews

'This volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain is an impressive and valuable achievement: it not only surveys a vast range of material, but also presents a great deal of detailed new primary research.'

Rosemary Dixon - Queen Mary, University of London

'This volume provides essential reading for both expert and beginning scholar … wide-ranging, scholarly and frequently fascinating examination of print products embedded in their wider contexts …'

Stefanie Lethbridge Source: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

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Contents

Page 3 of 3

Contents
  • 47 - Scientific and medical books, 1780–1830
    pp 827-833
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The book trade of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries underwent a massive expansion and diversification of its products. The changes in the sciences that took place in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain were intimately interconnected with the revolution that took place in print culture. The transformations in print culture were accompanied by a related transformation in the natural and medical sciences. The diversification of reading audiences served to foster both the specialization of scientific knowledge and its removal into technical periodicals. Yet, neither men of science themselves, nor the new entrepreneurial publishers, were blind to the market for an increasing range of scientific publications addressed to non-specialists, including popular periodicals, introductory works, systematic treatises, encyclopaedias and textbooks. It was in negotiating these changed conditions of communication that the new notions of the scientific expert and of 'popular science', so characteristic of nineteenth-century science, began to be developed.
  • 48 - ‘Radical publishing’
    pp 834-848
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter outlines radical publishing in terms of its form, content and economics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It focuses on radical publishing activity that shifted the boundaries of the book and print markets. The analysis has foregrounded authors and works which reached large audiences. Yet, it needs to be emphasized that the sheer range of authors who might be categorized as radicals is almost limitless, and takes in many of the leading lights of Romanticism. Radicalism as a publishing phenomenon was wonderfully open, and it is consequently appropriate to end on a note of speculation, rather than closure. The chapter shows how radicalism interacted with three vital growth areas in popular publishing, namely pornography, abolition and women's publishing. It is vital to understand that one explanation of the power and appeal of radical publishing lay in the ways in which it interfaced with a series of related revolutions in popular publishing.
  • 49 - Mining the archive: a guide to present and future book-historical research resources
    pp 849-859
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter talks about some of the resources primary in several senses for the conduct of book history, 1695-1830, and highlights some archival research projects that most need to be conducted. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge archives, a substantial cache of materials on printing, publishing, financing and distributing printed matter from 1698, are held in the Cambridge University Library. On loan to the same library are the archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), dating from 1804, which chiefly provide information on the translation, production and distribution of bibles and, hence, shed light on the BFBS's ongoing engagement with the book trades. Bibliography and book history are increasingly understood as mutually informing modes of historical inquiry. Both are undergoing a period of development that makes this an exciting time to be studying the book.

Page 3 of 3

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