The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

Abstract

The Scottish publishing house of William Blackwoood & Sons, founded in 1804, was a major force in 19th- and early 20th-century British literary history, publishing a diverse group of important authors - including George Eliot, John Galt, Thomas de Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, among others - in book form and in its monthly Blackwood's Magazine. In this title, David Finkelstein exposes the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse. He provides a general history of the firm, attending to family dynamics over several generations, their moulding of a particular political and national culture, the shaping of a Blackwood audience, and the multiple causes for the firm's decline in the decades before World War I.