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SENTIMENT AND MATERIALITY IN LATE VICTORIAN BOOK COLLECTING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

David C. Hanson
David C. Hanson*
Affiliation:
Southeastern Louisiana University
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Extract

In the first half of the twentieth century, analytic bibliographers in Britain turned their attention to the systematic study of the nineteenth-century book. Developing their subject, they felt compelled to distance themselves from the Victorian book collector, who touched off a “suspicion . . . deeply ingrained in the mind of scholars and librarians” (Sadleir, “Development” 147). A new generation of bibliographers – Michael Sadleir, John Carter, and Graham Pollard – acknowledged that Victorian collecting had laid the foundations for the bibliographic study of books by “modern” (i.e., nineteenth-century) writers, as opposed to incunabula, the traditional focus of British book collecting. The contribution was regarded as fundamentally flawed, however, owing to a “sentimental element” in Victorian collecting (Carter and Pollard 101).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 785 - 820
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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