Book History and the Consumer

Abstract

1. S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual: A Lay Sermon, quoted in Paul Keen, ed., Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–1832 (Peterborough, Ontario, 2004), 19. 2. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, N.J., 1983), 48–49. 3. Percy Shelley, The Major Works (Oxford, 2003), 680. To be sure, there were those with opposing views: Anna Barbauld, who in her 1810 anthology British Novelists noted that while the “humble novel” might be “condemned by the grave, and despised by the fastidious, . . . their leaves are seldom found unopened” ( “On the Origin and Profess of Novel-Writing,” Selected Poetry and Prose of Anna Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Craft [Peterborough, Ontario, 2002], 407, 377); and Byron, who accepted that readers had the ultimate power to decide—at the end of Canto I of Don Juan, he told his readers that he would only write more, and thus they would only “meet again, if we should understand / Each other”: Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford, 2000), p. 143 (canto 1, stanza 222, lines 765–66). William St. Clair The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004. xxix + 765 pages isbn: 978-0-521-81006-7