Overview

This volume documents how the nineteenth-century British publishing industry responded to and helped shape changes in readership and reading markets in the period. Focusing on broad social, economic and cultural changes, it traces the impact of improvements in transport and communication networks, which dramatically affected the production, distribution and retail of books and periodicals, and the implementation of the Education Acts of 1870 and 1871 which forced publishers to direct their attention to new markets and adopt cheaper publishing formats. The growth of circulating libraries, the revolution in serial and part publication, and the spread of railway bookstalls are among the many topics addressed in this volume which concludes with a section that documents the new pressures of censorship that arose as educational reforms provoked anxieties over the spread of cheap ‘pernicious’ literature.

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Professor David Finkelstein (BA, PhD, FEA, FRHistS, FRSA) is a cultural historian who has published over 90 books, essays and refereed journal articles in areas related to nineteenth-century cultural history, print culture and media history, several of which have won awards. His most recent work includes Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the 850 page edited Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Current projects include a co-edited volume on the colonial periodical press, as well as work on print workplaces in Edwardian visual culture. Dr Andrew Nash (MA, MSc, PhD) is Reader in Book History and Deputy Director of the Institute of English Studies in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study where he directs the MA in the History of the Book and the London Rare Books School. In addition to monographs on Victorian literature and Scottish literature, he has edited or co-edited many works in the field of book and publishing history including The Culture of Collected Editions (2003), Literary Cultures and the Material Book (2007), New Directions in the History of the Novel (2014) and, most recently, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 7: the Twentieth Century and Beyond (2019). He is part of a new Leverhulme-funded research project on the early history of the Society of Authors (2020-24).

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