London Publisher Research Articles

Lt. Col. Finch and Other Worthies in the New DNB

Lt. Col. Finch and Other Worthies in the New DNB Alan Bell (bio) For a century and more the old Dictionary of National Biography held the field of British biographical reference books. It had been published at quarterly intervals in sixty-three volumes between 1885 and 1900, under the editorship of Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. The DNB is an immense work, one of the greatest monuments of British scholarship in the nineteenth century, standing alongside the Oxford English Dictionary in many a library. It is all the more remarkable for having appeared not as the product of an academic press but under the commercial imprint of Smith, Elder & Co. It had been personally financed by the London publisher George Smith, who saw it as his gift to the nation, offered in return for the substantial profits he had made from a successful business. George Smith was a major figure in nineteenth-century publishing, with George Eliot, Thackeray, and the Brontës among his authors, and the then famous literary monthly, the Cornhill Magazine, was another valuable asset in his list. He also had business interests in railways (and in bottled mineral water) that enabled him to support scholarship on such a visionary scale. [End Page 275] After George Smith's death in 1901 the enterprise continued for a while in family hands, with some large additional volumes for the Edwardian period; but in 1917 the family interest in the publishing business came to an end, and Smith's widow presented the DNB to the University of Oxford. In making this gift, the publisher had hoped that the whole set could be kept up to date, but this was clearly impossible since its text was printed from stereotype plates. The best that could be done with it was for the Oxford University Press to maintain a stock that kept the title in print and every ten years produce a supplementary volume containing lives of the previous decade's crop of nationally prominent figures. The earlier additional volumes were generally uneven, with some of the entries reading more like obituary notices than historically focused brief lives. And the one-volume decennial format meant that the editors had to be overselective in their coverage, not taking sufficiently into account whole areas of national achievement—for example in business and commercial life. Meanwhile the "main work"—those volumes published in the nineteenth century—were increasingly showing their age. Their biographies of major early figures had been overtaken by a century of detailed scholarship, and for the Victorian age the longer articles, say those on Dickens or Gladstone or on Queen Victoria herself, had become of little use as critical accounts of their subjects. Later editors of the Supplements saw to it that the standards of the supplementary volumes were improved. They were a succession that included Sir Edgar Williams (1912–1995), whose academic career as a historian had been interrupted by war service in which he had been Montgomery's chief of intelligence in North Africa and then for D–Day. On returning to Oxford, Williams became part-time DNB editor in 1949. He saw three decennial volumes to press, eventually retiring in 1980. He was succeeded by Robert (Lord) Blake, the Oxford don, biographer of Disraeli, and a Conservative constitutional expert, who was in turn succeeded by Dr. Christine Nicholls, with long previous experience as an assistant editor. She is also a specialist in the history of British colonial administration. They and their sponsoring publishers knew the difficulty of replacing the original edition. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century the managing committee of the Oxford University Press had from time to time discussed the DNB problem—how to supplement, correct, extend, or even replace it; but the task always seemed overwhelmingly large. A volume of "Missing Persons" was produced in 1993, an odd but diverting mixture including some subjects (notable among them the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins) whose fame was almost entirely posthumous. But such piecemeal gap-filling could not meet the major need. Bolder steps were necessary, and wholesale replacement came more frequently under consideration. The sheer scale of the task was much alleviated by rapid developments in automated...

De‐authorising a biography: Suresh Roberts versus Gordimer

After authorising Ronald Suresh Roberts to write her biography and giving him access to her papers in order to do so, Nadine Gordimer changed her mind and withdrew the authorisation, apparently because he refused to make the changes for which she asked. The South African press made the most of this quarrel, and Gordimer was accused of refusing to allow Suresh Roberts the freedom of speech which she has always claimed for herself. Her de‐authorisation caused the London and New York publishers who had agreed to bring out the book to withdraw. When, more than a year later, the book appeared, Gordimer claimed that it contained further changes and breaches of confidence. It is in fact a biography in which the biographer's own opinions and interests are always preferred to those of his subject, and I am concerned to ask what role this biographer plays in the work and what is the effect of his strong and opinionated presence within it.

Blackwood's "Maga", Lockhart's "Peter's Letters", and the Politics of Publishing

Ms. 4004 OF THE BLACKWOOD PAPERS IN THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF Scotland includes a series of lengthy letters to William Blackwood from William Davies, partner in London publishing firm of Cadell and Davies. In April 1819 Cadell and Davies had become London publisher of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, notorious Maga, after that function had been abandoned by Baldwin, Cradock and Joy in July 1818, and then by a disgusted John Murray in March 1819. (1) Davies' letters are a chatty, detailed, sometimes day-to-day account of London literary life and strategies of London book-promotion--everything that Blackwood in Edinburgh should know to further their shared business ventures. Prominent among those ventures was forthcoming Letters to His Kinsfolk by Peter Morris, in which Cadell and Davies had accepted a half-share. Much may certainly be done, both at Edinburgh and London, to prepare public interest for these Letters, Davies believed, and he was pleased to inform his Edinburgh partner that two London newspapers already had begun to publish extracts from book. And success of Letters might, in turn, counteract rising criticism of Maga, another shared concern. Peter's Letters have a double duty to perform--one of which was to salve wounds of Archibald Constable, Wordsworth, Coleridge and other Britons on both sides of Tweed who had been bloodied by Magazine. We are, now and then, made to hear complaints of so many people being roughly, or even unjustly, handled in it and we do think it has somehow acquired a character for severity, which will require some time and pains to wipe away. Letters might be that solvent: ... you have sent out into world best pioneer in defence of your Magazine that could possibly have been managed, wrote Davies, switching metaphors; am full of hopes that, when 'Letters' are published, not only Mr Coleridge, but many others that I am thinking of, influenced by manner in which alleged objectionable points of [Mag.sup.e] are so handsomely admitted, will be much readier to join your standard than heretofore. It was essential for good of Maga, then, that Letters be promoted widely, in a campaign that would include a visit by Blackwood to London in month after Letters was published: Preparatory to actual publication, you will, of course, be prepared with a list of persons, both in Scotland and here, to whom it will be expedient to send book, as presents; and feeling as I do, how essentially Letters are calculated to benefit interests of your Magazine, I have hesitation in recommending that list of presents in England be a very numerous one--Amongst others, I would certainly advise a liberal distribution, tempered by prudence, amongst editors of newspapers--Mr Perry, Dr Stoddart.... (2) Davies' tactful hints of Maga's troubles could not have surprised William Blackwood. Since his magazine's inception in April 1817 (titled The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine for its first six numbers) Blackwood had watched its sales and enemies increase and its allies diminish. Henry Mackenzie, Patrick Fraser Tytler, and Dr. Thomas McCrie, men of some influence in Edinburgh, had refused to continue as contributors. (3) Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, Maga's first London publisher, had borne brunt of London's enmity against magazine, and then decided that their connection with Blackwood was no longer compatible with a just regard to our own interests. (4) John Murray had then become London publisher, only to lament the appearance of a Magazine which has involved everyone connected with it in alternate anxiety disgrace & misery. (5) After publication of Chaldee Manuscript--James Hogg's, John Wilson's and John Gibson Lockhart's apocalyptic parody--one John Graham Dalyell, member of Faculty of Advocates, had initiated legal proceedings against Blackwood, and Lockhart feared that Maga might be banned from Faculty of Advocates Library, a shameful loss of literary caste in Edinburgh. …

Modern Scotland, 1914-2000 (review)

Reviewed by: Modern Scotland, 1914-2000 Christopher Harvie Modern Scotland, 1914-2000. By Richard Finlay. Pp. 424. ISBN 1 86197 299 7. London: Profile Books, 2004. £20.00. Richard Finlay's book has one immediate advantage. It lacks a quote from Irvine Welsh on the front cover. Endorsement by Scotland's worst writer has disfigured Arthur Herman's rather plodding How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001) and disfigured in a much worse way James Buchan's excellent Capital of the Mind (2003): presumably a peril that any writer who has made it to a London publisher now stands in danger of. On the back cover, however, comes Tom Devine's 'The best single-volume history of twentieth-century Scotland I know'. Is your man, with a good conceit of himself, the right one to be doing the review? In fact, Devine is to a great extent right. While I can claim with some pride 'turning the accomplishment of many years into an hour-glass', of No Gods and Precious Few Heroes at precisely 55,000 words, Finlay has about 180,000 words to play with, and he makes good use of them. There is also a difference of approach: No Gods was broadly concerned to map out differences in employment, economy, social life and culture between Scotland and England, and the structures of its chapters tended to start with a statistical survey to establish Scots derivations from a British norm. It assumed that there was a central phase in twentieth-century Scotland, between 1920 and [End Page 374] 1964, where most of these factors were constants, followed by a more activist, less predictable phase which was still continuing when the first edition was published in 1981. By and large this worked, but, on re-reading, I find that it is sometimes rather deterrent in its factuality, and laconic about what it was like to experience such situations. Richard Finlay's approach is quite different: basically chronological, but with inserts in each chapter which cover institutions which underwent particular change in the period covered. Hence there is a concentration on education when covering the 1920s—the aftermath of the 1918 Education Act—on poor relief in the 1930s, and on the health service in the 1940s. Finlay has a sharp eye both for statistics and for telling statements from experts, policy-makers, reporters and victims. The longish quotes with which he peppers his narrative are very well chosen and will be a great boon to teachers and lecturers preparing seminar discussions. Finlay's book isn't perfect. Although oil is adequately treated, those other huge swan songs of the heavy industries, the Polaris and Trident projects, 1961 to the present, don't get in at all. Mind you, they don't get into my or Tom Devine's narratives either. It could do with three or four maps to locate the main changes of economy and society when expressed in spatial terms. There's also a need for a few key graphs, showing for instance the mounting production of energy, which has underwritten the expansion of the service sector, and the growth of physical mobility through motorisation. There are also more of what the Germans call Schönheitsfehler than there should be: 'Ian Hay' was the pseudonym of Ian Hay Beith not Ian Campbell Hay; the medieval Makar was William Dunbar, not Henry. But Richard Finlay can tackle these, I hope, in time for the paperback. One bugbear continues. Finlay, like Tom Devine, is impressionistic rather than scientific about industr y—not admittedly a happy stor y in twenti-eth-century Scotland. The problem is, I think, that economic history only reached us about 1930, neck and neck with the Slump. The post-Samuel Smiles generation who could have, for instance, mapped out the impact of capital export on domestic industrial investment just wasn't there. As a result, Finlay may lay too much stress on the left-wing argument of Tom Burns in The Real Rulers of Scotland (1938) that Scottish capitalism was distorted by a tightly-controlled oligarchy. The problem was in fact that most cross-directorships tended to be pretty low-powered accountancy posts, supervising companies...

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St. Clair

830 Reviews ('Luddein') remembers its rioting apprentices; its Smithfield martyrs; the summary execution it dealt the corrupt ministers of the all-too-visible Richard II. Northern ers recall Luddenden, a pocket of cultivation on the fringe of merciless moor; north Midlanders Lud Church, the rocky crevice associated with amassacre of Lollards, though (like the caves of Delphi) of farmore ancient mystery than they. One would not guess from Binfield's account how deeply Ludd pervaded and (see innumerable websites) still pervades the national consciousness. Binfield comments convincingly that 'Ludd seeks less to overthrow a government than to effect the repentance of the old one' (p. 3 I). A conclusion might have ventured the opinion that, given the pro foundly radical-conservative nature of English discourse, always both retrospective and prospective, the Luddites exemplify a long struggle, not to abolish or transcend human limitations, but to put them effectively towork for the common benefit. Hence the threatening, yet ethically rooted, nature of many of these documents. In the Romantic context, retrospective and prospective issues weave their own tragedy in Luddite writings: on the one hand they survive as record of the rich otherness of languages formed by class and locality; on the other they initiate the task set before working-class leaders: of out-arguing the governing class in its own language. To have conserved somany of them in one volume is a noble work. UNIVERSITYOF LANCASTER MALCOLMHARDMAN The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. By WILLIAM ST CLAIR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. xxix+765 pp. ?90. ISBN 0-52i-8ioo6-x. This is an astonishing book, or rather it is several books in one. First, William St Clair challenges the conventional notion that conceives literary history as a history of writing and of writers by recasting the history of the Romantic period as a history of reading and of readers. Instead of asking what books were written in the period, he asks what books were read, and the results are dramatic. Romanticism, it emerges, did not become an entrenched literary movement until the second half of the nineteenth century, because only then were the poets who came to be identified as Romantic published in editions cheap enough to be available to ordinary readers. Second, he offers a literary history inwhich the great engine of change is not individual genius but the laws governing intellectual property. The I774 decision by theHouse of Lords that declared illegal the perpetual copyright that publishers had previously claimed is presented as the single most important event in literary history, the decision that brought about the steep reduction in the price of books out of copyright that propelled the dramatic increase in the reading nation that marked the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Third, St Clair writes a polemical history inwhich the villains, assisted by successive governments which understood the political utility of keeping the mass of the population in ignorance, are the cartel of London publishers who sought tomaintain the price of new books at a level unrelated to the cost of their production. The heroes are the pirates, offshore like the Galignani brothers in Paris, or inland likeWilliam Benbow, who made modern literature available to those who could never have afforded the two guineas for which Longman sold Wordsworth's Excursion. By 1832 Queen Mab could be had for ninepence and a complete Don Juan for five shillings. By Igoo the power of the cartel had been so successfully challenged that an out-of-copyright nineteenth-century novel printed in double columns in one volume might be bought for sixpence. But for many St Clair's book will be most valued for the appendices inwhich he summarizes amass of data that has, until now, been available only piecemeal or not at all-information about the cost of production, the size of print runs, book prices, and sales figures, without which, as has become increasingly evident, an adequate literary history cannot be written. MLR, IOI.3, 2oo6 831 This is a quirky book. St Clair retains some of the mannerisms of the formidable scholars of the nineteenth century. A footnote indicates that the author can no longer recall in which of Scott's...

The death throes of the Licensing Act and the ‘funeral pomp’ of Queen Mary II, 1695

A few weeks before the Licensing Act finally lapsed in May 1695, the Court of Chivalry heard three cases relating to the publication of ‘unauthorised’ prints of the ‘funeral pomp’ of Mary II. In one of these, a leading London publisher of prints, John Overton, was ordered to deliver up the plates from which his print of the queen's lying in state had been made, along with all copies of the print, despite the fact that the Licensing Act did not apply to prints sold separately and the Court of Chivalry had in any case no jurisdiction to enforce press control. Brief records of the cases survive in the College of Arms. This paper sets out to explain and interpret these fragments against the background of the last days of pre-publication censorship in England. Press licensing is first examined with reference to the press coverage following the death of the queen.

The Cosmopolitan Midland

Regionalism has had its share of manifestos and champions over the last hundred and a half years, among the most famous being Hamlin Garland and his 1894 Crumbling Idols, in which he rails against the Eastern aristocrats who dominated the literary world of the 1890s. "All over America, in towns and cities," he writes, there are readers and writers who possess "a more intimate knowledge of American life than the aristocrat who prides himself on never having been farther west than Buffalo."2 They will be left behind, Garland predicts, when the literary capital of the country shifts from Boston and New York to Chicago in response to readers' desire for full knowledge of their national life. "From your library, or car-window, you look upon our life," Garland chides the Eastern elite, "that is the extent of your knowledge of our conditions" (133). But it is not just the East that is a villain; he also scorns the academy for its inability to understand the real life of the real people of the real country. Readers "must be approached on the side of life, and not by way of the academic" (10), he counsels, for "[w]hen life is the model and truth the criterion . . . the central academy has small power" (120). Even the Western writer can be "blinded by his instruction" (12), he warns, and if not, academic instruction will not at any rate help him achieve greatness: "universities produce few of the great leaders of American thought" (131). In the decades that followed, Garland's championing of regional culture and condemnation of the academy would be echoed by many, including the editors and contributors to the regional "little magazines" that began publishing in the 1910s through the 1930s—The Midland (1915–1933), Texas Review (1915–1924) which became Southwest Review (1924–) , The Frontier (1920–1939), The Fugitive [End Page 74] (1922–1925), Prairie Schooner (1927–) , New Mexico Quarterly Review (1931–1969), and The Southern Review (1935–) —all, ironically enough, based at universities. The Midland,the first and most important of these regional little magazines,was founded in 1915 by the then 21-year-old University of Iowa undergraduate John T. Frederick under the guidance and with the encouragement of his faculty mentor, Professor C.F. Ansley.3 These little magazines fostered a number of related regionalist movements, in literary-historical terms perhaps most importantly the Southern Agrarians, publishing regionalist pieces by regional and often regionalist authors, announcing themselves, as Garland had announced himself, the proper alternative to the hegemony of New York and Boston and the tyranny of the urban sensibility, and the authentic voice of the authentic Westerner, Southwesterner, Southerner, and Midwesterner. Frederick in particular has since been seen as an important literary regionalist and radical, one who "blazed the trail for Midwestern little-magazine editors," who fought to "counterbalance the eastern bias in publishing," and who set about to "correct the stereotyping of the Midwest" with "a new note of social realism."4 In his first editorial, on the first page of the new journal, Frederick articulated his justification for regionalist little magazines. It reads like an apologetic, tentative recapitulation of Garland's call to arms: Possibly the region between the mountains would gain in variety at least if it retained more of its makers of literature, music, pictures, and other expressions of civilization. And possibly civilization might be with us a somewhat swifter process if expression of its spirit were more frequent. Scotland is none the worse for Burns and Scott, none the worse that they did not move to London and interpret London themes for London publishers.5 Interestingly, every statement is qualified: possibly a gain, possibly somewhat swifter progress, or at least none the worse. In later issues Frederic would become slightly firmer, claiming that Midwestern writers, forced to deal with Eastern editors and publishers, tended to misrepresent their region: "A result has seemed to be a tendency to false emphasis, distortion...

In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (review)

Reviewed by: In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India Meenakshi Mukherjee Priya Joshi. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. xix + 363 pp. Combining methods of book history with literary insights, Priya Joshi has written an unusual account of India's encounter with English [End Page 506] novels in the nineteenth century, going on to suggest how that encounter shapes Indian novelists in the twentieth century. She has delved into publishers' records in England, as well as catalogues of libraries in India, to find out what was being exported and what was being consumed in the colony. Based on available facts and figures, she has drawn up charts that throw light on the reading habits of the early generations of English-educated Indians. On the basis of such data, she argues that although literary novelists like Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray were read, a much larger impact was made by popular writers like G. W. M. Reynolds, Marion Crawford, Marie Corelli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or Wilkie Collins, as demonstrated by the profusion of adaptations and imitations of these writers in the Indian languages. (Scott, in fact, seems to have been the only canonical writer to influence Indian writers of the time.) Joshi's speculations on the reasons for the appeal of these colorful and sensational novels in colonial India form an interesting section of the book. If this fiction served as "what Gramsci has called a psychic stimulant among its readers," Joshi wonders, how does one explain the consistency in response across class, profession, and location all over the country for well over half a century? These and other questions raised by her will hopefully be taken up by subsequent researchers for further exploration. Joshi's work is divided into two parts: "Consuming Fiction" and "Producing Fiction." The first draws substantially upon archival research pertaining to the starting of special colonial editions by London publishers in the mid-nineteenth century, the sale and dissemination of these books in India, and the nature of their reception as revealed by the circulation registers of libraries in India and the reviews of these books in Indian periodicals. The "book" is seen both as an object of trade as well as a site for cultural transaction. Joshi quotes a little-known reviewer in Madras Christian College Magazine who admitted to regularly skipping parts of these British novels because the details were too unfamiliar: "I hurry over graphic descriptions of scenes which to me are outlandish, inventories of articles of furniture which it will never fall to my lot even to dream of buying." This comment leads Joshi to reflect on the conditions that generate realism and those that favor counter-realism in narrative fiction. All this is meant to provide a background for the second half of the volume, which focuses on writing by Indians. Establishing cause-and-effect patterns is difficult in the field of cultural production, and the links between the two halves of the book are not always clear. But the four chapters in the second half dealing with Indian writers and texts—from colonial to postcolonial—can be read on their own terms. Many novelists are mentioned in passing, but the central focus is on four—Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838-1994), Krupa [End Page 507] Satthianathan (1862-94), Ahmed Ali (b.1910), and Salman Rushdie (b.1947). Chatterji is the only writer in this group who did not write in English (except for an early amateurish effort), and the available English translations of his Bangla novels are far from adequate, but Joshi uses him for examining the interface between two languages and more than two literary traditions in the early years of the novel in India. The other three writers span a century of Indian English writing, but have hardly ever been seen in a common frame. The choice of minority writers (Christian, woman, Muslim) is not dictated by political correctness, but because they provide convenient examples of the widening arc of the writer's concern—from an individual's growth within the family to the social documentation of a city, and finally to the political history of...

Transgression and Transcendence: Flatland as a Response to “A New Philosophy”

In 1874 the Rev. Dr. Edwin A. Abbott made final alterations to a manuscript that had occupied his attention for several years. Included with a packet of material sent to his London publisher was a ...

:Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England

English medical orthodoxy and its challengers London publishers and booksellers in the 17th-century medical marketplace Every Man His Own Doctor - medical publishers and booksellers in early modern England profit or principle? - religion, publishing and medicine A Way to Get Wealth - women, print and medicine location, location, location - bookshops in London and medical controversy medical advertising - publishing the propretary worth a thousand words - medical illustrations and their effect after the rose case - assessing the impact of print on medicine in early modern England.

Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940s

Aviation and the Aerial View:Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940s M. Christine Boyer (bio) Part One: The Aerial View Aviation and Equipment. A London publishing house, The Studio, Ltd, sent Le Corbusier a letter in January 1935, inquiring whether he would be interested in collaborating on a new series of books to be titled The New Vision. The promoters explained that each book in the series would be devoted to a unique event in industrial design, with specific attention paid to the designers, their aims, and the potential these designs held for social and human development. They would begin the series with a volume on the airplane. Le Corbusier was asked to write an introductory essay, supply captions for the images they had already collected, and offer a few suggestions for additional illustrations.1 Accepting the invitation, Le Corbusier in his reply, however, transformed the project: instead of the word "airplane" he preferred "aviation," by which he meant all the prodigious phenomena opening vast new horizons in space and influencing the future of "equipment" in the broadest sense of the word.2 Already in Precisions (1930) he had written, "I replace the word 'urbanism' by the term 'equipment.' I have already replaced the term 'furniture' by that of 'equipment.' Such stubbornness shows well that we are purely and simply claiming tools for work, for we do not want to die of hunger facing the embroidered flowerbeds of aesthetic urbanism" [143]. To his bag of equipment, Le Corbusier now adds "aviation," a tool of modern communication forging new modes of exchange and new links between nations.3 The material subsequently sent by the publishing house to Le Corbusier also met with lukewarm reception: he favored more lively documentation such as the view from an airplane as it flew over cities—vast open terrain, the sea, and the forests. And he wanted more picturesque treatment of the lives of aviators, their psychological and social attitudes including analysis of the great aerial routes being drawn between Europe and America, Africa, or Asia. The publishing house was unable to fulfill Le Corbusier's [End Page 93] expectations, reminding him that their focus was limited to "the airplane" and that they expected to receive all his material by May.4 What did Le Corbusier mean by "aviation" and the "epic of the air," a phrase he used in the preface of the subsequent book Aircraft (1935)? What new horizons did aviation open and how did this affect the perception of space and the process of reading the terrain as a two-dimensional map or a plan? And what did aviation have to do with "equipment"? Just the year before Le Corbusier had seen the Exposition de l'Aéronautique in Milan for which Mussolini offered the maxim: "Aviation is grand, small, or nothing at all, depending on whether public awareness of aviation is grand, small, or nothing at all."5 Le Corbusier, ever the great publicist, accepted the challenge to spread the meaning of "aviation" in the inclusive sense of the word entailing adventure and service, organization, and machinery. The rapid growth of aviation during the interwar period was mercurial, dramatically reshaping perception of the world and of space. There were daring flights of aviators challenging the breath of oceans and deserts, the heights of Everest, the length of Africa, the uncharted terrain of the North and South Poles. The airplane not only internationalized cartography; it was a tool for exploring and controlling the colonies. While aerial photography, which recorded in precise detail the realistic shape of landmasses, coastlines, seas, deserts, and mountains, perfected the process of mapmaking and enriched the documentary archive of the planet. Yet even more stunning, aviation continually shrunk the size of the globe after the initial KLM flight between Amsterdam and Jakarta took off in 1924. Then the time needed to navigate the 9000 miles was 55 days; within five years it had been reduced to a mere 12 days. A world map criss-crossed with national air routes came into view. In the 1930s civil airlines began to offer passenger and mail service between London and the Middle East, then on to India and...

Rewriting Political Commitment for an International Canon: Paul Bowles'sFor Bread Aloneas Translation of Mohamed Choukri'sAl-Khubz Al-Hafi

When Fredric Jameson called for decentering the Western canon through the inclusion of national allegories from the non-Western (Jameson 66), Aijaz Ahmad insisted that from the third world is by no means marginalized in the West. A proper critique of the academy, Ahmad argued, must examine the conditions by which numerous non-Western texts have been selectively admitted to form this Western canon of third literature (Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness 17). This process of admission, as Ahmad suggests, is governed by the interpretative paradigms that have dominated Anglo-American metropolitan academia in the aftermath of the late 1960s-namely, the interrelated cultural theories of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism-and by which non-Western literary works have been interpreted, evaluated, and, sometimes, granted the status of representative third world texts in Western academic curricula (In Theory 43-71). This study examines a concrete instance of what Ahmad describes as the appropriation of non-Western literary texts by theoretical paradigms operating as mechanisms of selective admission. Paul Bowles's English translation, For Bread Alone (1973), of Mohamed Choukri's Afro-Arab testimonial Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (1982) provides a unique case study in the interpretation of a non-Western text for a horizon of third The title, Al-Khubz Al-Hafi, translated literally from Arabic as barefooted bread, alludes to the Arabic idiom khubz haf, and means bare bread eaten by itself as a meal. A comparison of the Arabic and English versions shows that Bowles's translation suppresses Choukri's investment in a literate, rational, and modern nation, by presenting Al-Khubz Al-Hafi as a celebration of the oral, irrational, and primitive. The ideological trajectories of author and translator clash as the translation struggles to accommodate the original's passage into the realm of what is expected by English readers from a third world work of literature. Moments of ambiguity in the translation point to particular sites of contestation, namely, its treatment of literacy and sexuality. As translation theorist Andre Lefevre has suggested, it is all the processes of rewriting original texts-including translations, criticism, anthologies, book reviews, film adaptations, and even jacket quotes-that establish and maintain as a system (1). Bowles's translation, as Lefevre's theory suggests, operates as an interpretative apparatus that attempts to rewrite Choukri's original into a third world African text for a foreign, academic horizon of expectation. Choukri wrote his testimonial work, Al-Khubz Al-Hafi, or Bare Bread, in 1973 when, on behalf of a London publisher, the American expatriate

JOHN FAGE A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION

JOHN FAGE and I met first in Cambridge in 1948 as graduate students at Cambridge University, each researching on topics in the history of the colonial period in Africa. Thereafter our ways parted. He became the first full-time history teacher at the recently founded University College of the Gold Coast. I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where my initial duty was to investigate what could be recovered of the pre-colonial history of East Africa that might be brought within the scope of academic study. We met next in 1952, when a London publisher suggested that we might join in writing a History of Africa in two volumes designed for the academic market. Following this initiative, we spent a fortnight of that summer, together with our wives and children, at my house in Buckinghamshire to discuss the possibilities, and this proved to be the beginning of a close professional collaboration which was to last for more than thirty-five years.

William Reeves and late‐Victorian Radical Publishing: Unpacking the Bellamy Library

The Bellamy Library was a series of fictional and non-fictional books, on political topics of more or less pressing importance to the late-Victorian movement for social reform, which were reprinted, from 1890 until the early 1900s, by William Reeves, a radical London publisher. It centred on the American novelist Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), an enormously popular state-socialist utopia that Reeves had successfully pirated in 1889. The Library was an experiment in political education, which assisted the task of social reform by offering autodidact workers and lower-middle-class activists an affordable means of schooling themselves, either individually or collectively, in popular radical theory. This article pays close attention to the material conditions of the Bellamy Library's publication, to illuminate how it as consumed and read by the readership that it helped to identify and shape. After an introductory section which characterizes the culture of autodidacticism on the left at the end of the nineteenth century, it divides into three sections. The first outlines William Reeves's career as a publisher, and sketches his place in the diverse movement for radical reform. The second considers the production of the Bellamy Library, and the third looks at its particular mode of consumption. The focus of the article is a detailed discussion of Reeves's editions of Looking Backward, and in particular the cheap, sixpenny edition, which served as an intellectual toolbox for working-class readers keen to contribute to the radical reconstruction of society. The particular format in which Reeves reproduced Bellamy's novel, this article concludes, traces out the developing inter-relationship between publisher and radical reading public in the late-Victorian period.

:Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London

Part 1. Introduction: 1. Reflexions and mediations on three cities as sources and sites for achievement Patrick O'Brien Part II. Economic Growth and Demographic Change: 2. Economies of Agglomeration and the Golden Age of Antwerp Michael Limberger 3. Clusters of achievement: the economy of Amsterdam in its Golden Age Cle Lesger 4. The economy of London, 1660-1730 Peter Earle Part III. Architecture and Urban Space: 5. One of the largest cities in the low countries One of the best fortified in Europe Piet Lombaerde 6. The glorious city: monumentalism and public space in seventeenth century Amsterdam Marjeolin 't Hart 7. Architecture and urban space in London Judy Loach Part IV. Fine and Decorative Arts: 8. The fine and decorative arts in Antwerp's Golden Age Hans Vlieghe 9. The rise of Amsterdam as a cultural centre: the market for paintings, 1580-1680 Marten Jan Bok 10. Cultural production and import substitution: the fine and decorative arts in London, 1660-1730 David Ormrod Part V. Books and Publishing: 11. Antwerp: books, publishing and cultural production before 1585 Werner Waterschoot 12. Metropolis of print: the Amsterdam book trade in the seventeenth century Paul Hoftijzer 13. Printing, publishing and reading in London, 1660-1720 Adrian Johns Part VI. Scientific and Useful Knowledge: 14. Science for sale: the metropolitan stimulus for scientific achievements in sixteenth century Antwerp Geert Vanpaemel 15. Amsterdam as a centre of Dutch learning in the Dutch Golden Age Karel Davids 16. Philosophers in the counting-houses: commerce, coffee-houses and experiment in early modern London Larry Stewart.

Marking the Unmarked: An Epitaphic Preoccupation in Nineteenth-Century Australian Poetry

JUST OVER HALF CENTURY AFTER VICTORIA'S ACCESSION TO THE THRONE, London publisher issued an anthology that announced itself as inspired by in the Greater Britain under the Southern Cross and dedicated to the English of three continents. Running to nearly 600 pages, Douglas Sladen's anthology Century of Australian provides generous--not to say indiscriminate--sample of nineteenth-century antipodean verse, and has continued to be reference point nor only for historians of early Australian literary production but for poets as well. (1) As he explains in an introductory essay, the editor drew much of his selection from material sent directly to him in response to an open invitation published in weekly Australian and New Zealand newspapers. To his choices from those submissions he added some solicited items, large helping of his own utterly banal compositions, and an assortment of poems by earlier writers. anthology's limitations obvious enough; as H. M. Green remarks, it include s everything that Sladen thought worth dragging in on any conceivable ground and the few accomplished poems are submerged in sea of what is at best mediocre even by the standards of the day and place. Nevertheless it is acknowledged to have a definite historical importance, if only because it drew attention to the fact that Australian colonists were prolific producers of verse. (2) Themes of loss and lamentation pervade the volume. As general feature this hardly makes it distinctive among Victorian collections of poetry. But in Sladen's book the melancholy motifs often take specifically elegiac form, and tend to focus on particular memorials: even cursory reader can hardly fail to notice that burial places recur obsessively as topos. Given the intention to feature depictions of colonial life and scenery (p. 3), it seems remarkable that the locative traces of death and mourning so salient in the poems gathered here. term traces, however, should be understood in broad sense; for while in some cases there is an evocation of specified commemorative spots, as in Barron Field's sonnet about the first European burial in Australia, other poems mark an absence in that they hover around the imagery of unmarked graves, as in Adam Lindsay Gordon's The Sick Stockrider. Century of Australian contains many images of the (pp. 43, 94), the far-away (p. 266), the forsaken home and burial ground (p. 78). Who remembered where his dust was laid? (p. 378) is question that hangs over several of the dead. Often the place of interment is so isolated and nameless that the person who lies there is unidentifiable (I stand by the grave of this unknown one [p. 327]; No human foot or paw of brute / Halts now where the stranger sleeps [p. 266]). (3) There is plangent insistence on the utter remoteness of these resting places, as in the poem by Henry Parkes called The Mountain Grave (pp. 370-371): A lonely spot we chose for him--/ Along the lonely path that led / Our footsteps to his lonely bed, / His corse we bore, with eyes all dim. Indeed lonely unmarked grave is what dying speakers themselves represented as earnestly desiring in some of these poems. In this there is of course general similarity to some British poems of the period, such as Tennyson's Come Not, I am Dead or Christina Rossetti's Song with its well-known opening lines: When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me; I Plant thou no roses at my head,! Nor shady cypress tree), but the setting here is markedly Australian. In Adam Lindsay Gordon's The Sick Stockrider the title figure's last request is this: Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave, I With never stone or rail to fence my bed (p. 180). Gordon's poem was once enormously popular with campfire reciters, as Brian Elliott remarks, and could be claimed as proto-typical Australian ballad. …

London Publishing, 1640-1660: Crisis, Continuity, and Innovation

The period between 1640 and 1660, which experienced the English Civil Wars, the execution of the king, the establishment of a republican Commonwealth, its replacement by Cromwell's Protectorate, and, finally, the Restoration of Charles II, was one in which the printing press played a critical role, a role recognized by both contemporaries and later historians. Scholarly attention has tended to center on two kinds of publishing: the invention of the periodical and newspaper press and the extraordinary outpouring of heterodox ideas of all kinds in pamphlet form, both of which are extensively represented in the Thomason Collection. 1 However, the way in which they have been foregrounded has until recently obscured the importance of the trade's production of Royalist literary texts. As Lois Potter's Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (1989), Steven N. Zwicker's Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (1993), and James Loxley's Royalism and Poetry in the [End Page 1] English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (1997) have shown, these represented a sustained oppositional challenge to the Parliamentary victors. The role of the book trade, and more specifically the role of booksellers as publishers, is implicit in all these works, but it has been assumed rather than addressed directly. Lois Potter's opening chapter gives a general account of the press in these years, 2 and thereafter takes for granted the enabling function of the book trade. Since there is, as far as I know, no overall analysis of what the London trade was publishing in these years, 3 what follows is an attempt to give a broad outline of the trade's output in the 1640s and 1650s. This account brings together readily available examples, existing accounts of individual booksellers, publishing genres, or notable books, along with some less well-known cases. Importantly, it reaches well beyond the three most-studied genres: periodicals, heterodox pamphlets, and Royalist literature. This overview suggests that the two decades of successive political crisis offered the book trade new openings and possibilities that were quickly exploited. A necessary preliminary question is how far political upheavals affected the London book industry. While it is true that trade was disrupted by the Civil Wars and that the Stationers' monopoly was seriously threatened, 4 both the Company and the book trade survived the Interregnum. Parliament rapidly took measures to control the press: the Parliamentary ordinance of 14 June 1643 required all books and pamphlets to be licensed, followed by a further ordinance in 1647 and a Parliamentary act in 1649. In fact, the Company continued to function, copyholders continued to register books, tradesmen of opposed political and religious persuasions continued to publish, and there continued to be disputes over the rights to the ownership of copy, disputes that could go beyond the Stationers' jurisdiction and reach the attention of Parliament. 5 Many of the men trading in the 1640s were still at work in the 1660s, and some worked for both Cromwell and the Stuarts. Thomas Newcombe (fl. 1649-81), who was bitterly attacked as a printer for Parliament, 6 gained a one-sixth share in the King's Printing House in the Restoration and was the printer of the official Oxford and London Gazettes. Richard Royston (fl. 1629-86), imprisoned in 1645 for publishing anti-Parliamentary works and subsequently in frequent trouble with the Council of State, was granted the right to print Charles I's works at the Restoration and was elected Master of the Stationers' Company in 1673 and 1674. A clear sign of the overall continuity of the book trade and its control by the Company from the early 1640s is the publication of its staple products. Psalms carried on being printed throughout the period for the Stationers' Company, 7 as did schoolbooks and almanacs. 8 Bibles were, in the [End Page 2] troubled years of the Civil Wars, a dangerously large investment for the Company, but after a brief period in which this was taken...

Betrayal! The 1806 English Translation of Pinel’s Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale ou la manie

The translation of important work in science and medicine into the major vernacular languages became imperative when Latin went out of fashion some two hundred years ago. Unfortunately the choice of the translators remained haphazard and without standards as to their qualifications. The only English translation of Philippe Pinel's masterpiece, the Traité médico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale ou la manie, is a sad example of betrayal by its translator. The Traité appeared in Paris in 1800 and was issued in English in 1806 by the well-known London publishers Cadell and Davies. Why did they choose a young obstetrician from Sheffield, David Daniel Davis (1777-1841)? Fragmentary sources indicate that one Sayer Walker, M.D., who had known Pinel in Montpellier, acted as intermediary. This article investigates the flaws of the translation and the bias of the translator, with fatal consequences for the Anglo-American literature in the history of mental illness.

The C. L. R. James Institute and me

The C. L. R. James Institute was created in 1983. It is the only agency for which James formally authorized the use of his name. It is devoted to collecting, cataloguing and distributing the work of C. L. R. James. I have directed it through three stages. First was the myriad publishing, cultural and media projects in London of the mid-1980s, working closely with James' assistant, Anna Grimshaw, and his publisher, Margaret Busby. Next was what I call the Blackwell period (1987 to 1995), working as archivist and typesetter for a series of books edited by Anna Grimshaw. In the late 1990s the Institute has expanded its holdings into a broad range of subjects and attracted scholars from around the world, including scholars who are not focusing on James. It functions like a Special Collections Department of a research library, except that it is committed to public access. The catalogue of its uniquely comprehensive and detailed database will be published as The C. L. R. James Resource Guide by Cultural Correspondence in 1999. Its authors are myself and Ralph Dumain. The Institute is affiliated with the African Studies Centre of the University of Cambridge. It organizes a range of scholarly activities including a Fellowship programme, a colloquium series, a media series, and a variety of publishing endeavours.

HIV and AIDS in Africa by DOUGLAS WEBB. London, Pluto Press, and David Phillip Publishers and University Of Natal Press, South Africa, 1997. Pp. 258, Hb. £35.00 Pb. £13.99.

<b>HIV and AIDS in Africa</b> by D<scp>OUGLAS</scp> W<scp>EBB</scp>. London, Pluto Press, and David Phillip Publishers and University Of Natal Press, South Africa, 1997. Pp. 258, Hb. £35.00 Pb. £13.99.