London Publisher Research Articles

Reviews and Resources:Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

This short book, less than 200 pages of text, is a delight. It's not clear for whom it is written. Falkowsky says it's an outreach beyond that of a textbook. I doubt if most of its contents aren't familiar in broad outline to most professional microbiologists, but I'm sure all of them would be rewarded by reading it. I was. It's sprinkled with intriguing historical vignettes: when he was 22, Darwin collected fossils with Adam Sedgwick in north Wales; Darwin took a copy of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology along with the King James Bible on the HMS Beagle; Robert Hooke learned Dutch to read Van Leeuwenhoek, and wonderful sentences like, “In 1859, the same year that Big Ben chimed for the first time and the London publisher John Murray and Sons sent the first edition of The Origin of Species to press, on the other side of the Atlantic an American train conductor, Edwin Drake, drilled the first major oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania.”

Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800. By James Raven.

<i>Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800</i>. By James Raven.

Print Beyond the Book

Print Beyond the Book Norbert Schürer James Raven, Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (London: The British Library, 2014). Pp. xvi+208208. $85.00. James Raven, Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (Wood-bridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2014). Pp. xiv+334. $29.95. It is a rare occasion when two books in the same field of study that perfectly complement each other are published at the same time, and it is even rarer when those two volumes are by the same author. Now, however, we have the good fortune of two such works by eminent book historian James Raven: Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England, which surveys the publishing industry in that period, and Bookscape, which examines more specifically the geography of the London publishing industry. [End Page 94] Publishing Business is perhaps a slightly awkward title, but there is a reason for that choice. Raven is not just interested in the publishing business itself—who was printing what, how, when, and why—but more importantly in how business in general was published: that is, what impact the print revolution of the long eighteenth century had on trade and business. As a matter of fact, this is one of the most important and interesting arguments of Publishing Business; in example after compelling example, Raven demonstrates how the economy was transformed by the use of print. This is connected to the book’s second significant argument: namely, that print must be understood in the widest sense. Most scholars, Raven maintains, focus on printed material in the form of books, newspapers, and pamphlets, but actually the vast majority took more ephemeral forms. These materials, also known as jobbing printing, are now often lost or not really recognized as print—and therefore hard to locate in archives—but their inclusion might change the way scholars understand even the businesses of worthies such as the Bowyers and the Strahans. This in turn leads to a third central argument of Publishing Business, which is that a recognition of jobbing printing will necessarily entail greater recognition for printers in the provinces, whose main business lay not in books, newspapers, or pamphlets but in more ephemeral material. After three chapters in which Raven sets the framework for his argument, the following six take the reader through detailed and convincing series of case studies. For instance, trade and government needed a variety of printed notices, including “vagrant passes and settlement examinations, blank printed forms for military enlistment, local returns of arms, warrants and musters, forms for monthly statistics of officers and inmates at orphan hospitals and other institutions, and a multitude of apprenticeship forms, including those for foundling hospitals” (76). The government furthermore used printed forms to service labor, collect tax and duties, administer wills, and run the lottery. In other words, government needed print to publicize itself, but was also forced to transform in the process of publication. Similarly, business could not have survived without printed ledgers (which revolutionized accounting practices), stock certificates, loan documents, insurance forms, standard policies, and banknotes—Raven asserts that “business blanks” made trade more trustworthy, supporting the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. Information necessary to conduct trade was also circulated in print: “first, reports or ‘currents’ of local economies, including general and specialized commodity price currents, foreign exchange rate currents, money currents and stock exchange currents; second, reports on overseas trade and shipping, including marine lists and general and specialized (‘small’) bills of entry; and third, combinations of two or more elements from both types of reports and published in the same newspaper” (149). Printed guides and manuals taught individuals how to use all the other printed material, and printed almanacs and pocketbooks helped them to organize their lives. Thus, Raven concludes, print created economic confidence and conformities of practice by demonstrating “knowledge, accuracy, efficiency, security, authority and . . . trust” (256). There was extensive debate regarding the role of print over the course of the eighteenth century—conducted, of course, in print. By the end of the century, print had created norms that were so pervasive that today it is sometimes difficult to see them as constructed. These norms can be considered part of social control and regimentation...

Books: Diseased, Douched &amp; Doctored. Thermal Springs, Spa Doctors and Rheumatic Diseases

Diseased, Douched & Doctored. Thermal Springs, Spa Doctors and Rheumatic Diseases Roger Rolls London Publishing Partnership, 2012 PB, 256pp, £19.99, 978-1-907994-04-3 After thriving since Roman times, ‘ In recent years the medical profession has largely forsaken its interest in spas. ’. Roger Rolls has given us a detailed, well-illustrated history of Bath, our best-known spa. On reading of the ebb and flow of novel ideas about how the waters might be therapeutic, it is natural to question why was belief …

Some Darker Sides of Digitization; or, Disappearing Data, Doubtful Descriptions, and Other Deformations of Print

In Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and Forms of Print (2009), Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, quoting Anne R. Kenney, write of the 'fast fires' of digital obsolescence (163). It is not only disappearing data that constitute a dark side of digitization, however. Its bleaker aspects are also represented in doubtful descriptions of works by booksellers on electronic catalogues and in deformed--and sometimes stolen--digitized editions of works originally published in printed forms. In this article I shall both explore these darker sides of digitization and suggest ways in which they might be mitigated. My four case studies derive from my experiences with Centre Editing Early Canadian Texts (CEECT), an enterprise that endured almost thirty years at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and with a collection of articles that I am assembling a volume on role played by London publisher named Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, then Richard Bentley, and then Richard Bentley and Son in shaping images of Great Britain's colonies through works that it issued from late 1820s to mid-1890s. CASE STUDY NO. 1: CEECT AND COMPUTERS In April 2013 issue of University Affairs, magazine that is published ten times a year by Association of and Colleges of Canada, and that is advertised on its website as Voice of Canada's Universities (http://www.aucc.ca), there is an article by Suzanne Bowness entitled Parsing Humanities: Everything You Wanted to Know about Digital Humanities. It begins with following reminiscence: If you're old enough to remember a time before Internet, cast your ears back to this sound: ... ding*ding*ding. That's right. That's irritating ... ring of an old-fashioned modem connecting your computer to Internet ... Now, imagine yourself back in era when that sound was a novelty, particularly in quiet halls of an English or history department, where loudest ambient noise up to that point may have been quiet swish of pages turning. Or perhaps a pencil scraping lightly at their margins. If you were that reader, hearing that ding first time, ... You might have heard birth of a new discipline called digital humanities. (Bowness 14) This article, as well as WordStar Was King, a chapter in Dennis Baron's A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and Digital Revolution (2009) that reviews dramatic changes in computer technologies in last half century, reminded me that CEECT too was a pioneer in this field. The reason is that from time steering committee started to meet in fall of 1979, concept of producing our texts by using computers moved quickly from a remote possibility to a definite reality. When we made this decision, however, there was no Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) that provided consistent and apparently universal ways to mark up text. Although we tried, there was no satisfactory way to digitize texts by scanning them into a computer. And notion of electronic editions, which has dominated so much recent literature about scholarly editing, had not been imagined. What we meant by editing by computer in late 1970s and early 1980s, in fact, had itself largely to be invented. Invent and acquire hardware, languages, and software, therefore, we did. In CEECT: Progress, Procedures, and Problems, example, an article published in Papers of Bibliographical Society of Canada in 1987, I explained that we used computer for thirty-two in course of preparing CEECT editions, and that we had seventy programs that were especially written to run these processes (Edwards 20). Because computer technology developed so quickly, we never did market our programs as office at Carleton concerned with such business matters once suggested. And as years went on, we abandoned our mainframe CP-6 and our WANGs personal computers and laptops, and we moved from backing up and storing data on magnetic tapes and various sizes of discs to transferring our files to USBs and to sending them over Internet to e-mail accounts and to various clouds in cyberspace. …

American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–57

This essay traces the publishing history of British reprints, both authorized and unauthorized, of American novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick as a case study of how copyright law and trade custom regulated the reprinting of American literary texts in the United Kingdom in roughly the first half of the nineteenth century. Sedgwick produced books regularly, changed her US and authorized London publishers multiple times, and although one European trip in 1839–40 played a crucial role in arranging two authorized publications, she negotiated the British market primarily from across the Atlantic, making her more typical than authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, whose transatlantic editions have received more attention. Focusing on the British reprinting of American literature through Sedgwick sheds light on changes over time, including the emergence of cheap reprints of American novels in the late 1830s and 1840s.

“New Zealand’s First Man of Letters?”: Rediscovering Redmond Frankton “Bim” Wallis

In mid-2002, four years before his death, new Zealand-born novelist, journalist, editor, and publisher Redmond Frankton Wallis,1 wrote to a friend, London publisher duncan Baird. Wallis told Baird of the surprising news that he had been approached by the national Library of new Zealand (Alexander turnbull Library), which was keen to include some of his personal papers in their manuscript collection.[. . .] to my (and a bit of a warm glow) the curator told me he wanted typescripts of all my unpublished works (there are around ten of those) together with my diaries and workbooks leading up to the publication of the first novel and a folder or two of selected letters. so, i shall be Archive, which while it may not be high in the order, must be close to a seraphim or perhaps a Cherubim. i can foresee a future thesis: An enquiry into the Causes of Failure Following early Literary promise: with particular Reference to the 20th Century Canterbury novelist Redmond Wallis. i have to say i am quite pleased at the possibility i may be to some academic's mill.2Wallis's astonishment at this approach may have been because he had spent very little time in his home country in the previous four decades, or perhaps, as he hinted, due to his insubstantial published output. Wallis had published one novel Point of Origin, in 1961, and two later novels-Starbloom (1989) and The Mills of Space (1989)-both of which were aimed at a young-adult science fiction readership. As Wallis indicated to Baird, however, the sum of his unpublished writing was considerably more substantial than this meager output suggests, as he had been active writer of fiction from the 1950s until his death in 2006.Wallis's ambition of becoming an Archive was fulfilled in late 2002 when he deposited material with the turnbull Library in line with the library's request.3 it is the material in that archive-diaries, literary notebooks, personal correspondence, a substantial amount of unpublished fiction, and a nine-page gossipy cv-that provides the basis for this paper, thereby fulfilling his second ambition of becoming grist to some academic's mill. the result, however, is not an enquiry into the causes of failure following early literary promise-that is another paper on Wallis waiting to be written. Rather, the purpose is to foreground the period of several years immediately after Wallis left new Zealand in 1960, and for much of which he lived on the Aegean island of Hydra. it was in this period that he embarked seriously on a writer's career and during which he became integral part of the celebrated international artist community that f lourished on the island at that time. Many of the persons and incidents related to this near-mythical colony have been recorded in various biographies and related accounts, but Wallis's participation has escaped notice or comment. Hitherto, anyone interested in Wallis has had to be satisfied with the 140 words provided by the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (Robinson 565-66), which makes no mention of his association with Hydra. it was, however, on Hydra that Wallis wrote Point of Origin, and it was this period that fuelled his desire to write what he would refer to as his Great new Zealand novel, based on the time he spent on this distant northern-hemisphere island. equally importantly, Wallis has left in the turnbull Library archives a tantalizing account of the day-to-day interaction of Hydra's expatriate artists and writers, including many of the personal dramas that played out amongst this notoriously volatile group.NEW ZEALANDRedmond Wallis, only child, was born in Christchurch on 1 september 1933. He came from a well-established new Zealand family, with his greatgrandfather the Reverend James Wallis having arrived in 1834. the young Bim enjoyed a secure, middle-class, and conservative upbringing, with his father having a long career with stock and station agent dalgety. …

American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–57

This essay traces the publishing history of British reprints, both authorized and unauthorized, of American novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick as a case study of how copyright law and trade custom regulated the reprinting of American literary texts in the United Kingdom in roughly the first half of the nineteenth century. Sedgwick produced books regularly, changed her US and authorized London publishers multiple times, and although one European trip in 1839–40 played a crucial role in arranging two authorized publications, she negotiated the British market primarily from across the Atlantic, making her more typical than authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, whose transatlantic editions have received more attention. Focusing on the British reprinting of American literature through Sedgwick sheds light on changes over time, including the emergence of cheap reprints of American novels in the late 1830s and 1840s.

Six Notebooks in Search of a Novel: A ‘First apercu’ of Beckett’s in Embryo

is the same Ticklepenny [said Ticklepenny], but God bless my soul quantum mutatus'Ab illa, said Murphy.Beckett, Murphy1First emerges. With what directness and concreteness the same totality may be achieved appears [...].Beckett, Intercessions, by Denis DevlinThe purchase - at auction, by the University of Reading - of the six manuscript notebooks (five softback, but the first one with stiffened covers) in which Samuel Beckett wrote his first published novel Murphy meant that, once archival issues of conservation and access had been resolved, for the first time since 1936 it would be possible to evaluate how relatively early work of Beckett's was made into publishable entity some eighteen months later, after George Routledge & Co had put an end to the book's fruitless trek through the commissioning editors' offices of more than dozen London publishing imprints. Would it be case, to adapt Winnie's words from Happy Days, of: To have always been what I am - and so changed from what I was? (Beckett 1978, 66). Surely, in some sense it would have to be ... yet how far would it be possible or necessary to distinguish the ur-text from its familiar sibling? It was all very well to feel, with Kant (and perhaps also with Winnie), that the 'rule' of omnis determinatio est negatio (every determination is negation)2 would ultimately have to apply. At the same time there remained the possibility that these notebooks might on investigation prove to be as bizarrely various as the six notebooks in which, between 1941 and 1945, Beckett had written Watt. It was easy to forget Neary, in the published text of Murphy (chapter 10), describing repudiation of the as a purely intellectual operation of unspeakable difficulty (Beckett 2009a, 138), given the multiple ironies arising almost every time Neary is given the opportunity of opening his mouth. Yet it has been known for some little while that Murphy and Watt do not greatly resemble one another, and that the gestation of Watt was unusually long, hampered by hiding from the Gestapo in Roussillon (1942-44), and by Beckett's uncertainty as to how best to proceed, which with Watt led to many changes in conception and composition that had quite simply not been foreseen when the enterprise began. Murphy is - was - horse of very different colour, and the writing of it, leaving aside some later tinkering and some corrections, was essentially over by June 1936, roughly ten months after it had been begun. The manuscript shows that, as regards the total number of days of actually writing it - as distinct from thinking about it, planning it, and the like - it had actually occupied Beckett for only about the equivalent of three full months. This was not something that could be accurately deduced from Beckett's letters to Thomas MacGreevy during the writing of the book, even though some evidence of intermittent composition and self-doubt was easily enough to be inferred from them.However, even if one confines oneself to the letters to MacGreevy relating to Murphy as reproduced in the first volume of Beckett's Letters, it is fairly obvious that, to adopt musical terms as kind of analogy, the tempo of writing runs, roughly speaking: overture and beginners, presto, presto, prestissimo, presto... And then? Rather agonisingly: lento, lento, adagio, andante, coda. With the notebooks to hand this musical analogy can be pursued more accurately or, to change the metaphor, painted by numbers:Over the first 80 or so days on which Beckett could have continued to write his novel, once having begun it, he did so on about 75 of them;over the first 120 days only roughly tenth or so (about 12 days) were 'wasted,' other activities intervening, or corrections being made, the days between 23 August and 5 September 1935;over the next 200 days more than half the time the notebooks stayed shut, although some of them may have been used to try out corrections on the predominantly blank versos, almost none of which are dated. …

Newes from Hell, Rome, and the Innes of Court: Images from the First Year of the English Civil Wars

By 1640, English society was in upheaval. Politically, Charles I had broken Parliamentary statutes by ruling alone for more than a decade, and many felt he violated the Church with his Catholic queen. As the political system crumbled, royal enforcement of press censorship broke down and London publishers produced a growing volume of anti-Catholic and pro-Parliamentary print. Meanwhile, pro-Royalist press flagged because the crown was resistant to its use. In 1642, the first year of the English Civil Wars, pro-Parliament publishers used the press to provoke anti-Royalist and anti-Catholic sentiment and to rally the citizenry to support the Parliament in its conflict with Charles I. An examination of images produced in 1642 reveals the turmoil of a divided country.

Review of *The Colonial Journals and the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture*, Rev. ed., by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver

The work under review deals with one of the many facets surrounding and supporting writers and their works: periodicals with literary content produced in the Australian colonies (later states) from 1821 to 1914. For much of this period, book publishing was undeveloped (usually a sideline of newspaper publication or bookselling) and periodicals constituted the staple local outlet for colonial writers. The majority of the pieces in four anthologies of genre fiction in the Australian colonial period previously produced by Gelder and Weaver from 2007 to 2011 (covering, respectively, gothic, crime, romance and adventure fiction) are sourced from collections brought out by London publishers. Only a handful are by local book publishers, which reflects this lack, at least until later in the century, with the establishment of the New South Wales Bookstall Company in 1879 and Angus & Robertson in 1888. That these anthologies also contain pieces from a small number of well-known magazines and newspapers points to the alternative local outlet for colonial literary creations but does not mirror the prevalence and importance of these periodicals. Their latest work does.

Diseased, Douched and Doctored: Thermal Springs, Spa Doctors and Rheumatic Diseases by Roger Rolls (review)

Reviewed by: Diseased, Douched and Doctored: Thermal Springs, Spa Doctors and Rheumatic Diseases by Roger Rolls Amanda E. Herbert Roger Rolls. Diseased, Douched and Doctored: Thermal Springs, Spa Doctors and Rheumatic Diseases. London: London Publishing Partnership, 2013. 244 pp. Ill. No price given. (978-1-907994-09-8). Scholars interested in the medical history of Bath Spa will learn much from Roger Rolls’s book Diseased, Douched and Doctored: Thermal Springs, Spa Doctors and Rheumatic Diseases. Rolls, a medical doctor as well as an author and amateur historian, provides a detailed examination of the medical uses of the thermal waters that have made Bath, a small city located in the west of England, a famous health resort. The book is structured around a portrait by William Hoare, Dr. Oliver and Mr. Peirce Examining Patients (1762), which depicts two men conducting physical examinations of three patients: a small child suffering from a skin disease, a man with palsy, and a woman who has rheumatism. The book commences with two chapters on the chemical properties of the waters, and describes their uses from the first century CE through to the present. For much of Bath’s history, medical practitioners believed its waters were impregnated with beneficial salts and minerals. But when nineteenth-century analyses revealed the waters to contain few, if any, of these substances, spa doctors shifted their treatments to include the use of static electricity, radio waves, and even radon. Rolls’s expertise as a medical doctor anchors these chapters, as he provides helpful information about modern understandings of the relative efficacy of these regimes. The book then returns to the Hoare portrait, with subsequent chapters on “Aches, Paints, and Rheumatism” (represented by the female patient), “The Palsy” and “The Gout” (after the male patient), and “Scabbes, Scurf and Lepers,” as well as “Children at the Spa” (for the youthful patient). The final two chapters, “Spa Doctors” and “Hospital [End Page 384] for the Nation,” honor the portrait’s subjects, Oliver and Peirce. In each of these remaining seven chapters, Rolls offers evidence of the diseases, injuries, and complaints that brought clients to the spa at Bath, and he explores the people and institutions devoted to easing or curing these maladies. The book’s strengths lie in its exemplary primary sources, and most notably its extensive use of rare seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and even twenty-first-century images. There are nearly one hundred figures in the book, painstakingly culled from archives, hospitals, and libraries across Britain. One of the most affecting images shows an unusual sampler made in the Bath General Hospital by a patient named Mary Wise. The sampler depicts the hospital itself, with its many empty windows and rather grim façade. Only one figure humanizes the building: the hospital porter, stitched into guard duty within a miniscule doorway (p. 208). Wise’s embroidery speaks to the tedium that surely characterized early nineteenth-century hospital stays, and also suggests that patients’ activities while in hospital were structured by complex sets of assumptions about gender, surveillance, and time management. But such engaging sources also serve to highlight the limitations of the work. This book is devoted to study of “the rationale behind spa therapy,” but the city of Bath was and is so much more than just a location for medical treatment (p. 1). Within Bath—and within many of Britain’s other popular hot spring cities, which go largely unexamined in the book—practitioners and patients mingled with politicians and priests, philosophers and natural scientists, dramatists and musicians. Spa cities were sites for the creation of many different kinds of discourses, experiments, and ideas: not just of medicine, but of literature, art, philosophy, and theology. The wonderfully rich sources examined by Rolls may not, on first glance, seem to reveal the private lives, personal experiences, and mental worlds of the people of Bath. But as recent works on the history of medicine have shown, these sorts of detailed cultural analyses are necessary if we are to gain a more complete understanding health and healing in the past.1 Rolls’s evocative evidence suggests that spa cities are very deserving of continued and comprehensive scholarly attention. [End Page...

What's the Use of Economics? Teaching the Dismal Science After the Crisis. Edited by Diane Coyle. London: London Publishing Partnership. 2012. Pp. xx, 197. $27.99, paper.

What's the Use of Economics? Teaching the Dismal Science After the Crisis. Edited by Diane Coyle. London: London Publishing Partnership. 2012. Pp. xx, 197. $27.99, paper.

John Carey and the American Dream

Dublin-born John Carey (1756–1829), most renowned for editing the official correspondence of George Washington, was also during his lifetime and for many decades later a respected classical scholar, experimental scientist, and a popular author of children’s fiction. As late as 1887, these achievements were sufficiently regarded to earn Carey a place in Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography. Indeed, he is still profiled—albeit scantily and inaccurately—in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, showing that his significance as a teacher, scholar, and translator has not been completely forgotten on the far side of the Irish Sea. By contrast, John Carey has been virtually erased from Irish cultural memory. Although his two younger brothers—William Paulet Carey (1759– 1839), a United Irishman, journalist, and art critic, and Mathew Carey (1760– 1839), the pamphleteer, political economist, and Philadelphia publisher—are included in the 2009 Dictionary of Irish Biography, no entry is provided for their older sibling. Mathew Carey’s cultural and political significance , in particular, has attracted considerable recent attention on both sides of the Atlantic; John Carey’s experiences in America and his subsequent subversive advocacy of the American dream in Learning Better than House and Land (1808), an apparently conservative, and resultantly acclaimed and popular, children’s story, have been largely ignored. Learning better than House and Land provides an early example of the type of displaced Irish setting associated with later, nineteenth-century writers, such as Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) and Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906). In common with these other Irish authors published by London publishers and writing primarily for an English readership, Carey disguised the setting of a story dealing with material relating to Ireland “by transforming it to an English environment.” This strategy proved astute, as Learning Better than House and Land was not only enthusiastically reviewed in the English press but also enjoyed considerable popular success. The later critical neglect of John Carey is due at least in part to the general

What is the Use of Economics? Teaching the Dismal Science after the Crisis Edited by DianeCoyle. London: The London Publishing Partnership (2012), 224 pp. ISBN: 978 1 90799 404 3 (pb); £14.99

Economic AffairsVolume 33, Issue 2 p. 279-282 Book review What is the Use of Economics? Teaching the Dismal Science after the Crisis Edited by Diane Coyle. London: The London Publishing Partnership (2012), 224 pp. ISBN: 978 1 90799 404 3 (pb); £14.99 Malcolm Rees, Malcolm Rees [email protected] University of BuckinghamSearch for more papers by this author Malcolm Rees, Malcolm Rees [email protected] University of BuckinghamSearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 June 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/ecaf.12022Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume33, Issue2June 2013Pages 279-282 RelatedInformation

Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell (review)

Reviewed by: Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell Traci Nagle (bio) Yule, Henry, and A. C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India, selected edition. Ed. Kate Teltscher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xlv + 570. $27.95, €14.99. ISBN 978-0-19-960113-4 Is there an author out there who does not wish, when sending off a completed manuscript, that his or her book will succeed enough to warrant a second edition? Henry Yule, a military engineer who had turned, in his retirement from British India, into a well-regarded editor and annotator of medieval travel narratives, harbored just such hope as he sent off the final bits of his long-gestated Hobson-Jobson manuscript (co-authored with the late Arthur Burnell) to his London publisher, John Murray, in early January 1886. In closing his preface, Yule wrote, “My first endeavor in preparing this work has been to make it accurate; my next to make it—even though a Glossary—interesting.” Should he have failed at that second goal, he continued, there would be “little to be hoped for from a second edition.” Although the glossary was generally well-received and accrued a number of glowing reviews in the year it was published, it was no blockbuster. When Yule died in 1889, the glossary was selling steadily but slowly, and it would take another eleven years for its initial British print run of one thousand copies to sell out (JMA, Ms. 42733, f. 62 et seq.). There is no evidence that John Murray was even contemplating a second edition (perhaps because Yule was dead in 1889) until the ethnographer and retired British Indian civil servant William Crooke proposed writing one in February 1900, after noticing in Murray’s catalogue that Hobson-Jobson had gone out of print. Murray accepted Crooke’s proposal and published Crooke’s edited second edition in 1903. Sales were steady but not stellar: a dozen years later, of the 1,500 copies of Crooke’s edition printed in 1903, more than 600 remained in Murray’s warehouse, and the book had not yet earned a profit (JMA, Ms. 42737, f. 11 et seq.). And yet, since the mid-1960s, a steady stream of reprint editions based on Crooke’s work has kept Hobson-Jobson on the market and on the minds of aficionados and nostalgists of British India, as well as historians, lexicographers, and other scholars. (The latest of [End Page 225] these reprints was published in 2013 by New Age Books, New Delhi.) A number of electronic versions of Crooke’s edition are also available online, including a version published by the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia project at the University of Chicago.1 Hobson-Jobson aimed to document and explain (not just define) the words that had been adopted into English from the many languages the British encountered in their vast Asian empire. Although its original subtitle advertises a focus on “Anglo-Indian” words, within it the adventurous reader can also find adoptions that entered English from Arabic, Persian, Afghan, Tibetan, Chinese, Burmese, Malay, and other languages, apparently without having made a stopover in India. In compiling evidence of each entry word’s use, Yule & Burnell drew on an astounding range of sources: from the travel narratives with which Yule was quite familiar as president of the Hakluyt Society, to government and legal documents; histories; newspapers and magazines; journals, memoirs and diaries; poetry and novels; dictionaries of all stripes; and books on sports and cookery, on plants, animals, and birds, on art, geology, and fairy tales. Their access to and knowledge of medieval travel narratives, combined with their polyglotism, unearthed for readers evidence not just of the first use of terms in English, but often very early mentions of these terms by other Europeans, such as ancient Greek references to Brahmins; Pliny’s Latin description of sugar, the etymology of which is traced to Sanskrit; the commentaries of the French navigator François Pyrard de Laval on the presence in the early 1600s of the Portuguese in India; and the reports of the Portuguese travelers Gaspar Correa and Garcia de...

The Sorry Tale of Contemporary Authorship: A Study of Scottish Authors

This paper gives a detailed overview of contemporary authorship in Scotland through the analysis of interviews with and a survey of Scottish authors. These results are compared to previous studies to highlight the changing nature of authorship over the years. Both the survey and interview results paint a pessimistic picture of authorship in the twenty-first century, with the majority of authors earning very little from their writing and depending on alternative avenues to improve their income. Additionally, Scottish authors are not benefiting from the numerous new platforms to exploit their work through, which could help to enhance their income. This is partly because many Scottish authors still have a traditional view of publishing and do not think about their work commercially, and partly because, in many cases, their rights are controlled by their publishers and not widely exploited. This survey also found that Scottish authors with London literary agents earned more income than their counterparts with Scottish agents; however, this was mainly because they were more likely to be published with London publishers. This shows that Scottish publishers are failing their authors by not fostering their rights efficiently and effectively: fostering these rights more effectively could help supplement authors’ income.

Dorothy Dudley's Forgotten Frontiers : Dreiser and the Land of the Free

Dorothy Dudley's Forgotten Frontiers:Dreiser and the Land of the Free Donald Pizer (bio) There are two significant reasons for undertaking a historical and critical examination of Dorothy Dudley's 1932 biography Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free. (The work is also frequently cited as Dreiser and the Land of the Free, the title of its 1946 reissue, and Dudley is occasionally cited as Dorothy Dudley Harvey, her married name.) The book is important as the first substantial biography of Dreiser, one undertaken with his cooperation and that of many of his friends and one containing as well much direct quotation from Dreiser on a wide variety of subjects. Since every Dreiser biographer since 1932 has mined Dudley's biography for material not available elsewhere,1 it behooves us to know more about her method in the work. In addition, the book is a valuable example of a distinctive moment in American literary biography. As its ironic subtitle suggests, Dudley was seeking not only to write an account of a writer's life but also to describe in detail the adversarial role of the culture in which that life functioned. As she noted in an aside at the close of the work, she was attempting "not merely a biography, but the analysis of the relationship of a remarkable figure to his country and his time" (463). And as in much 1920s literary biography following the explosive impact of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians in 1918, Dudley used biography both to indict the society in which her subject flourished and to have her own presence, both as prose stylist and as personality, play a major role in this effort. Since Forgotten Frontiers is the only work by Dudley to receive attention, little is known of her life beyond its bare outlines.2 She was born in 1884 in Chicago, where her father was a well-to-do physician and her family was socially prominent. She was graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1905, and for several years lived in Chicago and wrote poetry, some of which [End Page 193] was published in Poetry after its 1912 founding. In the fall of 1916, armed with an introduction by Edgar Lee Masters, she met Dreiser in New York. They corresponded and saw each other occasionally (both were living in the city), and in 1918 Dreiser enlisted her aid in revising some of the material he intended to include in Twelve Men. Since Dreiser began his relationship with Helen Richardson in 1919 and soon after moved with her to Los Angeles for three years, and since Dudley moved to Paris in 1925, their friendship lapsed until the late 1920s, when both were again in New York. In late 1928, Dudley proposed to Dreiser that she write his biography, and he agreed to support the effort by providing material and making himself accessible for interviews.3 The work went slowly, however, because of Dudley's difficulty—as Dreiser's first biographer—in acquiring information about him and because of Dreiser's many other interests. Not completed until the summer of 1931, the book was published in 1932 by Harrison Smith, the American branch of the London publisher Jonathan Cape. (Smith went bankrupt soon after publication, and though both Dreiser and Dudley sought to find another outlet, it was not until 1946, not long after Dreiser's death, that it was reissued by the Beechhurst Press of New York with a new preface by Dudley.) Dudley and Dreiser continued to correspond and to see each other occasionally for the remainder of his life. She spent many years in France, where she published several translations and wrote frequently about French art. She died in France in 1962. There is some question about whether Dreiser and Dudley were lovers during 1916-19.4 On the one hand, their relationship has the basic configuration of many of his affairs. She was an admirer of his writing, and (as their correspondence of the period reveals) they exchanged work-in-progress and compliments, he sometimes enlisting her aid in editing his manuscripts. On the other hand, Dudley had married the advertising executive Henry Blodgett Harvey before moving to...

Publishers, “Pirates,” and the Formation of Regency Authorship

The author's right to intellectual property is both historically conditioned and highly qualified by the interests of others. In common with most laws, those governing intellectual property necessarily entail balancing of competing rights, specifically the claim of publishers to fair return on their investment on the one hand and, on the other, the benefit to readers from open access to and enjoyment of printed materials. Furthermore, the right to intellectual property is not absolute. Its development is enmeshed with the history of print culture and the growing dissemination of books in Britain and abroad, and it was far from uncontested. Although London publishers were the first to lay claim to intellectual property rights, their exclusive control over printed matter was challenged by pirates, independent reprint publishers who acted to break monopoly that distorted the literary marketplace. Assertions of authors' rights came comparatively late in this process. An author's claim to ownership over the fruits of his or her labours began to be conceptualized only after the middle of the eighteenth century, and only in the first decades of the nineteenth century did authors attempt to implement it. Our modern conception of authorship was formed within the relationships among publishers, the changing literary marketplace, and Regency writers like Byron and Jane Austen. It was constructed at the intersection of socio-economic practices and artistic creativity. The Romantic construction of the author as autonomous genius has been called into question by study of the social and economic contexts in which the real of art was actually done. Jerome McGann long ago warned against accepting Romanticism's self-representations at face value and elsewhere draws attention to the distortions inherent in a Romantic conception of literary production (Critique 8). Pointing the way to a socialized concept of he argues that literary work of art is fundamentally social rather than personal, process that inevitably entails interchanges with other writers, with editors and publishers, and ultimately with readers and the institutions that support their activities (Critique 8, 44). McGann's views have strong kinship with D. F. McKenzie's reinscription of bibliography as sociology of texts, in which book is not merely an object but social product whose history must include both its making and use. (1) Authorship in the Romantic era was formed within these exchanges, and its genius in large measure was subject to material conditions. Any adequate understanding of authorship, then, must take into account the commercial environment in which it operates, because the circulation of texts occurs within literary economy governed by structures of law, financial interests, and social practice. Copyright vs. Authors For much of the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the firm of Jacob Tonson was one of the foremost publishers of literary texts in England. Asked which author had earned him the greatest profits, Tonson replied without hesitation, Milton. (2) But at the time authors seldom enjoyed the economic benefits of their work to the same extent that the booksellers did. Copyright began as legal device to protect the interests of those involved in the book trade and to provide printers and publishers with return on their capital investment. Authors sold their work to publisher, and it was the publisher who exercised copyright, which they regarded as their own property as recognized at common law. On that basis, publishers claimed the right in perpetuity to copy the works they had acquired, to make as many editions as they chose, and to sell off their copyright in work to the highest bidder. Samuel Johnson, who took close interest in the conditions under which books were produced, tells in detail how Milton contracted to sell Paradise Lost to Samuel Simmons for 20 [pounds sterling]. …

The Shifting Ground of Nature: Establishing an Organ of Scientific Communication in Britain, 1869–1900

INTRODUCTIONIn the early months of 1869, a British astronomer and government clerk named Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) began asking his friends and colleagues to write articles he could publish in a new weekly scientific periodical.1 The new publication was not, Lockyer emphasized, a specialized scientific journal. Although he was soliciting contributions from Britain's most famous men of science and intended to print abstracts of technical papers and reports from foreign scientific societies, the journal was not affiliated with any scientific society and the audience for the new magazine was not solely other men of science. Rather, the commercial London publishing house Macmillan & Company was printing Lockyer's weekly, and both Lockyer and the Macmillans hoped the new publication would be read by educated laymen of all trades. Most of the men of science Lockyer consulted about his undertaking had at best modest expectations for the new publication. Lockyer's acquaintance Joseph Hooker, an eminent botanist and the director of Kew Gardens, pessimistically responded to the project by telling Alexander Macmillan, By all means make public my good will to the Lockyer periodical . . . [but] the failure of scientific periodicals patronized by men of mark have been dismal. I do not see how a really scientific man can find time to conduct a periodical scientifically, or brains to go over the mass of trash.2Today, Lockyer's magazine, Nature, is still published, and most would call it an unparalleled success - although not the kind of success its editor had initially envisioned. Modern readers know Nature as perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, a publication that scientists from every country in the world read, and where many hope to publish their work. Nature was the journal where James Chadwick announced the discovery of the neutron, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch revealed their 'liquid drop' model of nuclear fission, and James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of DNA.3 But Nature's, significance is not limited to the famous papers published in its pages. Before Nature became an international indicator of scientific prestige, it rose to prominence as a site where British men of science negotiated the rules and boundaries of their community during a time when the identity of the 'man of science' was undergoing tremendous shifts in Great Britain. In the 1870s and 1880s, the generation of British men of science born after 1840 adopted Nature as a venue for publicizing their forthcoming papers and, most importantly, as their preferred forum for debating the maj or scientific questions of the day, shifting scientific discussions away from the general-interest literary periodicals their predecessors and mentors had used.Recently there has been a great deal of excellent scholarship on scientific periodi- cals and the periodical press more generally in Victorian England.4 Of particular note is the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project jointly organized by the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield, which catalogued and analysed representations of science, technology, and medicine in the general periodical press between 1800 and 1900 in Great Britain. However, the existing scholarship on scientific periodicals has tended to focus on serials with a general or 'popular' readership and few historians have examined scientific writing intended for an audience of scientists or considered the sub-structure of the world of specialist periodicals. Historians of science tend to read specialist journals as historical sources rather than as historical phenomena in their own right; we often take the existence of scientific journals for granted, rather than view them as objects whose existence requires explanation.As a result, less scholarly attention has been devoted to either the development of specialist journals in general or to the contents of particular journals.5 There has been some influential scholarship devoted to the study of modern scientific commu- nication, including studies of journal citation patterns,6 and some scholarly attention has been focused on changes in the language of the scientific article. …