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Ah, to have been a reader two centuries ago, in a golden age of English literature. Or so we think. But the thrust of William St. Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period is quite different. St. Clair has done prodigious research to drive home his thesis that in this "golden age," books were largely inaccessible to ordinary people. Moreover, the real enemy of the common reader was the book trade. One bitter author from the early 19th century told the story of God endeavoring to find a London publisher for the Bible. The first one the Almighty approached "disliked the mangers and carpenters, wanted the characters to be made aristocratic, and asked for the story of King Herod and Salome to be expanded." The next one offered to print it on a vanity publishing basis.
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In the Romantic period, St. Clair explains, the English book trade was committed to positioning new literary texts on the costliest end of the spectrum, thus restricting sales to a tiny élite. A typical new book would have cost a maid six weeks' income. This strategy reached its zenith with William Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814). For the price of that book (48.5 shillings), a person could buy one hundred fat pigs. One man bought his own printing press and thereby set himself up in business for the same amount as this single volume of contemporary poetry!
Such an arrangement was no gift to authors, who, not surprisingly, generally wanted to reach a large audience. At such a price, Wordsworth's book did not sell out its first edition for fifteen years, thereby holding back a cheaper version that might have reached the reading nation. Not a single copy of Wordsworth's book was sold in his own home county of Cumberland. Even an aristocrat such as Lord Dudley felt he could not afford first editions. Publishers often destroyed copies that they could not sell at the list price rather than risk destabilizing the high-price atmosphere by discounting them.
The result of such machinations by the London book trade was that the canonical Romantic authors did not reach nearly as wide a public as we would suppose. And the price of their books wasn't the only barrier. Publishers were extremely conservative about what they accepted. Both Lord Byron and Jane Austen, for example, suffered rejection by publishers before they achieved fame. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was turned down by all the major firms. Still, she was a success compared to her husband, the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was reduced to vanity publishing.
Authors now enshrined in the Norton Anthology were undervalued by their contemporaries in other ways as well. As a national depository, Cambridge University Library was entitled to a copy of every book published. Nevertheless, it disdained to collect items deemed beneath its dignity, and thereby refused books by Austen, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth. In a lifetime of writing and lecturing on contemporary literature, William Hazlitt never found a reason to mention any of the novels of Jane Austen. In one of numerous delightful asides, St. Clair observes that under British law at that time a man could have been hung for stealing a copy of Wordsworth's The Excursion, "although there is no record of anyone taking the risk."
Occasionally the high-minded publishers' stranglehold on copyrights was broken. The courts declared that a copyright could not be enforced on immoral literature. This act of censure had the ironic effort of releasing these texts to the masses in endless cheap editions from downmarket publishers. While Shelley's mature work languished in overpriced volumes with minuscule print runs, his youthful indiscretion Queen Mab was by far his most read work. Byron's Don Juan became a wildfire bestseller in the same manner. This bifurcation was so stark that whole lives of Byron produced by the "respectable" publishers of the day "omit all mention of the fact that he had written the most widely read long poem of the century." (These risqué offerings prompted the poet laureate, Robert Southey, to pontificate that Byron and Shelley represented the "Satanic School of poetry." The devil, however, has an urbane wit: Byron prophesied that Southey's Joan of Arc, An Epic Poem would be read "when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but—not till then.")
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