Reviewed by: Charles Dickens and His Publishersby Robert L. Patten Duane DeVries Robert L. Patten. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. 2nded. London and New York: Oxford UP, 2017. Pp. xxv + 441. $74.00; £55.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-880734-6 The original edition of Robert L. Patten's major study was published in 1978 and must by now have been consulted, quoted and praised by any number of Dickens scholars and scholars of British publishing and publishers. Reviewers almost unanimously had nothing but praise for the book. Phillip Collins, in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 34 (1979/80), 444–48, called it "the most substantial, accomplished, and illuminating work of Dickens scholarship for many years"; Angus Easson, in the Dickensian, 76 (1980), 165–66, found it "a valuable contribution to Dickens biography and to our understanding of the business methods and the kinds of pressure under which he exercised his art"; V. Bonham-Carter, Author, 90 (1979), 30–31, saw it as "authoritative and precisely documented," a "work of profound scholarship that must surely stand, with the Pilgrim edition of the Letters, as an essential guide and source of reference"; George J. Worth, Dickens Studies Newsletter, 12 (1981), 120–23, pointed out that Patten "has taken a wealth of applicable facts, many of them quite intractable, and blended them into a detailed, insightful, and informative account of how a novelist of genius interacted not only with a publishing profession but with a whole society in a period of rapid and often unsettling transition"; Karl Kroeber, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 19 (1979), 733–35, found it "indispensable for Dickens scholars"; Patten "makes it fun to read Dickens's unending success story–and his ceaseless search for ever more financial reward" and "provides a comprehensive record of the sales and profits of each work." I myself in volume 2 of my General Studies of Charles Dickens and His Writings and Collected Editions of His Works: An Annotated Bibliography(2010) summarized it as a "well-written, fascinating, authoritative, and fully scholarly account of Dickens's relationships with his publishers–principally John Macrone, Henry Colburn, Richard Bentley, Chapman and Hall, and Bradbury and Evans–and of his career as professional author and editor," adding that the "history of Dickens's relationships with his publishers is highly complex, often tangled and knotty, full of arguments and indignant [End Page 177]responses, and revelatory of how much of his life was devoted to practical and necessary business matters," but Patten "picks his way marvelously well through this jungle of information." I concluded that while "he chooses in his introduction to call this study 'provisional,' and anyone might hesitate to call it definitive, it is unlikely to be superseded, though it may indeed be supplemented in bits and pieces." And this is where the second edition of this valuable study comes in. It has a much handsomer appearance–it is slimmer–and the print seems somehow more readable. The text itself is identical to that of the original edition; it has not been updated, but the type size is slightly smaller, the pages slightly larger, the paper smoother and whiter, and the index has been revised to conform to the altered pagination. It is worth purchasing as a supplement to the first edition for its "Preface to the Second Edition," pp. vii-xvii, and an "Epilogue," pp. 259–95, both of which are as detailed and fact-loaded, as interesting and as useful as the original text. In the "Preface to the Second Edition," Patten tracks the lengthy process by which the book came into being. He begins with 1963, his year as a graduate student on a Fulbright scholarship in London seeking a dissertation subject, when he discovered the publishers' ledgers of Chapman and Hall and Bradbury and Evans in the Victorian and Albert Museum, a discovery that he described in the introduction to the original edition. He ends with the publication of his study in 1978. Though he went on to do his dissertation on "Plot in Charles Dickens's Early Novels, 1836–1841" (Princeton University, 1966), even then he was investigating the possibility of publication of what in his Preface he...
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Jun 1, 2019
Jill E Kelly 
Open Access