Literary Production and Reception

Abstract

In 1791, the successful London publisher James Lackington observed in his Memoirs that ‘the sale of books in general has increased prodigiously within the last twenty years’, estimating a four-fold growth since 1771 (extract 8.2). The expansion of the publishing industry and the growth of what Coleridge christened the ‘Reading Public’ were significant developments in the Romantic period. Lackington himself pointed to a number of changes in the demographics of reading and in the structures of publishing that stimulated these changes. Famously commenting that ‘all ranks and degrees now READ’, he argued that the rise in literacy was encouraging a shift among the lower classes from an oral culture of storytelling and the supernatural (of the sort described by Bourne and Brand in the previous section, see extract 7.1) to a literate culture of the printed book and the novels of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Samuel Richardson. Simultaneously, he suggested, the development of book-clubs and the growth of circulating libraries made books available to a much greater readership among the middle classes, especially women: ‘Circulating libraries have also greatly contributed towards the amusement and cultivation of the other sex; by far the greatest part of ladies have now a taste for books.’ Not all commentators were as positive about these developments as Lackington, many reviewers complaining of the sheer number of publications that were now produced. In 1788, for example, the Critical Review referred to a novel as ‘One of the buzzing insects which has received a temporary life from the warmth of a circulating library’.1KeywordsLiterary ProductionRomantic PeriodQuarterly ReviewWoman WriterReading PublicThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.