Times have changed. In the mid 1980s, when I wrote my biography of John Almon, a study of the reflexive effect of politics on eighteenth-century booksellers and the literature that they published, there was only a handful of books on eighteenth-century print culture, and online research in the area was practically nonexistent. The basic resources were Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1945– 1951), which ends at 1700, and H. R. Plomer and E. R. Dix’s Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers (1932), which covers 1726–1775. Electronic library catalogues were in their infancy; Elisabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980), Terry Belanger’s ‘‘Directory of the London Book Trade, 1766’’ (1977),William Todd’s Directory of Printers and Others in Allied Trades, London and Vicinity, 1800–1840 (1972), and the emerging online ESTC were as good as it got.
Fast forward some fifteen years: The history of the book has become a hot topic

Rogers, Deborah D.

English

University of Maine

The University of MaineDigitalCommons@UMaineEnglish Faculty Scholarship EnglishSpring 2004The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and theLiterary Marketplace in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland by George Justice (review)Deborah D. RogersUniversity of Maine - Main, DRogers@maine.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/eng_facpubPart of the English Language and Literature CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in English FacultyScholarship by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contactum.library.technical.services@maine.edu.Repository CitationRogers, Deborah D., "The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England byGeorge Justice (review)" (2004). English Faculty Scholarship. 23.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/eng_facpub/23192But this crediting is itself something ofa problem throughout the book: too muchrecapitulation of the well-known work ofthe last three decades. The author marksher territorial difference, but the differ-ences—as well as the markings—aresmall and tentative. Where the claimsloom larger, they have a tendency to fallinto erroneous distinctions. The differ-ences between ‘‘retirement’’ and ‘‘lei-sure’’and ‘‘idleness,’’for instance, arenotcomplicated either quickly or deeply. Thechapter on laborers does not quite seemto understand how class really operated:‘‘Many eighteenth-century writers whowere not by any means in favor of classequality were astonishingly willing to ac-knowledge that the poor worked so therich did not have to, that the poor had notonly to provide for their own needs, butalso to provide surplus to meet the needsand wants of their betters.’’ That was ex-actly the point: you work for me becauseGod made me better than you.The greatest strength of The Anxietiesof Idleness is its careful playing out ofthematic (rather than conceptual, rhetor-ical, or theoretical) issues and details. Butin the end it does not venture far beyondthe bounds of a terra already well-cog-nita.Cynthia Wall University of VirginiaGEORGE JUSTICE. The Manufacturers ofLiterature: Writing and the Literary Mar-ketplace in Eighteenth-Century England.Newark: Delaware, 2002. Pp. 281.$46.50.Times have changed. In the mid 1980s,when I wrote my biography of John Al-mon, a study of the reflexive effect of pol-itics on eighteenth-century booksellersand the literature that they published,there was only a handful of books oneighteenth-century print culture, and on-line research in the area was practicallynonexistent. The basic resources wereWing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1945–1951), which ends at 1700, and H. R.Plomer and E. R. Dix’s Dictionary ofPrinters and Booksellers (1932), whichcovers 1726–1775. Electronic librarycatalogues were in their infancy; Elisa-beth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press asan Agent of Change (1980), Terry Belan-ger’s ‘‘Directory of the London BookTrade, 1766’’ (1977), William Todd’s Di-rectory of Printers and Others in AlliedTrades, London and Vicinity, 1800–1840(1972), and the emerging online ESTCwere as good as it got.Fast forward some fifteen years: Thehistory of the book has become a hot top-ic. (Go figure!) The proliferation of newperiodicals, scholarly societies, and stud-ies includes the recent Books and TheirReaders in Eighteenth-Century England(2001), edited by Isabel Rivers, and TheBook History Reader (2002), edited byDavid Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery.In fact, Eighteenth-Century Fiction justpublished a special double issue on fic-tion and print culture. Interest can alsobe measured by new institutions devotedto the subject, such as The Centre forthe History of the Book (http: / /www.arts.ed.ac.uk/chb/ index.html) and bylarge-scale collaborative projects that in-clude: The London Book Trades 1775–1800 (http: / /www.devon.gov.uk/ library/ locstudy/bookhist / lonbktr.html), TheBritish Book Trade Index (http: / /www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/BBTIsources.htm), andnew online editions of works such asWing (www.shef.ac.uk/ library/cdfiles /wing.html).Not only have the Stationers’ Compa-ny apprentice registers been indexed to1931800, but biographical dictionaries ofbook trade personnel have been appear-ing. Much, of course, remains to be done.Interdisciplinary by nature in its em-phasis on society, the history of the bookfocuses on the material culture of the text,print technology, sociology, bibliogra-phy, production, distribution, and circu-lation. Not only is this field concernedwith literacy and reading practices, it alsoinvestigates relations among publishers,authors, and the reading public. It is justsuch issues that Mr. Justice addresses inThe Manufacturers of Literature, a wel-come addition to studies of eighteenth-century cultural production.Although Habermas’s notion of thepublic sphere has been much debated, Mr.Justice usefully extends the concept be-yond Habermas’s architectural spaces(with all their gendered implications). In-stead of a bourgeois ‘‘public sphere’’ ofrational debate, Mr. Justice argues for aneighteenth-century Britain where printwas the medium and literature was thepublic forum.Mr. Justice, who co-edits (with AlbertRivero) The Eighteenth-Century Novel,brings this literary perspective to bear onhis examination of authorship, publish-ing, and the reading public. Mr. Justiceexplores the relationship between thebook trade and the transformation ofeighteenth-century literature and its au-dience, and focuses on the effect of thematerial conditions of publishing and ofprofessional authorship on artistic pro-duction.He makes his argument through casestudies. Thus, The Spectator is examinedin terms of the relationship between thepublic sphere and literary tradition asprinted commodity. Pope’s Epistle to Ar-buthnot and Johnson’s Life of Savage areviewed in the context of the publishingindustry and the literary marketplace. Es-pecially interesting is Mr. Justice’s anal-ysis of the bookseller Dodsley’s wildlypopular Collection of Poems by SeveralHands, an anthology that helped to createthe ‘‘modern classic,’’ an oxymoron, forMr. Justice, to create ‘‘literary value.’’Mr. Justice illuminates FrancesBrooke’s Excursion and Burney’s Evel-ina, maintaining that both authors wrote‘‘second generation’’ novels that, despiteassertions to the contrary in their Pref-aces, attempted to succeed as commercialcommodities. In a culminating chapter onCamilla, he argues that Burney constructsa notion of modern authorship integralboth to the themes of her works and totheir reception and the material condi-tions of their production.Throughout, Mr. Justice deals with theeffect of developments in print technol-ogy on the transmission of literature andthe interaction of the marketplace and ofliterature. However, he avoids the nuts-and-bolts of the volatile book trade in fa-vor of cultural analysis and (excellent)close readings.Mr. Justice seems to pussyfoot aroundMarxism, flirting with the very econom-ic/ technological determinism he vows toavoid. For example, he criticizes thosewho ‘‘claim that they wish to avoid‘base’ / ‘superstructure’ models of Liter-ature but then go ahead and repeat theseterms implicitly.’’ In the very next breath,however, he does just that, insisting, ‘‘Lit-erature had an impact on the technologyof writing and conversely . . . technologyinfluenced and helped define Literature.’’But these are quibbles with what is, inthe end, an essential book, noteworthy forits beautiful close readings and brilliantinsights. Mr. Justice compellingly re-194minds us that eighteenth-century Britishliterature is mediated by the conditions ofproduction and distribution and by au-thors, publishers, readers, and reviewersin complex relationships. Ultimately,such considerations question our notionsof literature and of ‘‘high culture.’’Deborah D. Rogers University ofMaineBooks and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. IsabelRivers. London and New York: Leicester,2001. Pp. x  294. $107.95.A sequel to the influential Books andtheir Readers (1982), this collection ofessays reflects the revolution in the recentstudy of the book. In ‘‘The Book Trades,’’James Raven argues that, even though thedesign of the printing press ‘‘remainedalmost unchanged,’’ an increase of pub-lication occurred in London and the mar-ket towns, because of ‘‘advances in papermanufacture and type founding and de-sign’’ as well as new strategies for re-tailing books. Mr. Raven pays special at-tention to the economics of publishing,the risks involved, and the mechanics ofassembling consortiums of publishersand booksellers to underwrite publishing.In perhaps the most original essay,‘‘The English Bible and Its Readers in theEighteenth Century,’’ Scott Mandelbrotetraces the elaborate politics involved inestablishing and maintaining the KingJames Version as the Authorized Versionof the Bible throughout the eighteenthcentury. The monopoly on printing theAuthorized Version, held by the King’sprinter and the two university presses, co-incided with ‘‘political and doctrinal rea-sons for resisting attempts to rewrite theEnglish Bible,’’ including attempts on thepart of Dissenters and anti-trinitarians toobtain a more accurate translation. Indeed‘‘by the 1780s and 1790s . . . the pursuitof a new translation began to appear lesslike an undertaking that might favor theChurch of England and more like a chal-lenge to its reputation and authority.’’TheChurch of England clearly had an interestin maintaining the monopoly, but so did‘‘British and American premillennialists,who, in addition to expecting the immi-nent return of Christ, formulated a viewof the absolute and literal truth of scrip-ture that later came to be known as fun-damentalism.’’ Brian Young’s capsulesurvey, ‘‘Theological Books from TheNaked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith,’’ de-tails the controversial writings of ‘‘rep-resentative divines,’’most notably DanielWaterland, William Warburton, FrancisBlackburne, and Richard Watson.In ‘‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England,’’ Karen O’Brien sur-veys the range of eighteenth-centuryhistorical writers whose ‘‘increasingpopularity with consumers was also partof a more general transformation in thehistorical awareness of the English peo-ple.’’ Ms. Rivers explores a collateral in-terest in biography in ‘‘Biographical Dic-tionaries and Their Uses from Bayle toChalmers.’’ These dictionaries are oftena substitute for a library ‘‘both for loversof learning who could not afford books,and for owners of books who did not havethe time to consult them.’’ Ms. Rivers islargely concerned with three great bio-graphical dictionaries constructed on themodel first devised by Bayle: ThomasBirch’s A General Dictionary, Historicaland Critical (1734–1741), Oldys’s Bio-graphia Britannica (1747–1766), and theuncompleted second edition of the Bio-graphia Britannica (1778–1795), editedby Andrew Kippis, et al. She also coversthe influence of Moreri’s Grand Diction-aire Historique (1674), translated and en-

The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England by George Justice (review)

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The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England by George Justice (review)

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